Staying crunchy in oil.

The busier I get, the more my standards erode.  Or maybe I just get better at seeing clearly what is important.  Or maybe sometimes I actually start to make more sense.

In a post from a couple of months ago, called "Staying crunchy," I wrote,

I was reflecting with Hannah the other day on how, as your family grows (and you as parents learn and grow with it), perspective and experience gradually clarifies your approach to how you live out your values.  Some ways of living, you get even more and more confident and sure you need to do as time goes on.   Some preferences, though, turn out to be more situationally dependent than you realize, and when you find yourself in a different situation, you may make different choices than you imagined you would.  Other times, a tension appears between two values and you must choose between them or somehow make the best balance you can.  

And then, of course, occasionally you turn out to have been simply wrong-headed about something.

At age 25, I was a fairly crunchy, "continuum-concept"-minded mother-to-be.  Four children and twelve years later, which of my crunchy practices have I stayed committed to?  Which have yielded to a less-crunchy (or perhaps differently-crunchy) lifestyle?

The post got a fair number of page views and inspired a couple of responses, notably from Jamie  (I am sure there was another one out there, but can't remember it — lmk if you did one).  

This morning I was thinking less about parenting practices and more about cooking and baking.  I love food and I love trying new recipes, but have had to cut back on my adventuresomeness these days. 

An aside — If you want to feel really fulfilled and useful and thoroughly enjoy the vocation of homemaker, it does help to enjoy cooking, to love food, to be interested in good nutrition, and to get excited about trying new things.  Most days I'm happy to reach the end of the day and to get a chance to spend time in my kitchen, chopping and stirring and tasting.    But sometimes it can be a double-edged sword, because kids usually go through a long period where they just don't appreciate all of that, and you realize that you have to find a way to keep it all interesting to you even as you make the same (nutritious, tasty) things over and over again because that is what will make your family thrive happily.

So anyway.  Standards.  For a very long time now, I have been extraordinarily firm about cooking oil.  I am not, you know, a low-saturated-fat person.  You might say that I drank the coconut-oil kool-aid.  For years now I have had the following oils in my kitchen and pantry:

• virgin raw coconut oil (I buy it by the five gallon bucket from here but OMG I swear it didn't cost $250 the last time I bought some AAACK! need to start saving now because my bucket is almost empty!)
• extra-virgin olive oil (I buy whatever's on sale, usually $19 for a 3-L can of Greek or Spanish stuff, from here when I am in Ohio.  Check out the website, you'll want to go to Fairfield, OH just for a trip)
• butter
• lard
• occasionally, home-rendered duck fat.  That reminds me, now that the holiday season is upon us I need to tell Mark to watch for ducks on sale.

No shortening (except a partial can that I think my mother-in-law might have bought to make cookies while she was here), no peanut or soybean or canola oil, definitely no margarine.  

But then last week I was craving Christy's gingerbread, and I decided to make it for afternoon snack for the day that the kids are all here for co-schooling — it's a pretty easy recipe.  Normally I melt coconut oil for the recipe, but for some reason that just sounded like too much trouble for a co-schooling day, so I told Mark to buy me some canola oil or something at the store.  

The gingerbread was lovely, and the oil method is easy.  There is no doubt about that.  

So for today, having half a bottle of oil left, I decided to try cake.  Now, you need to know that while I am happy to make muffins and to use my bread machine to make all manner of rolls and bread, I do not generally make cake except for a birthday. Many good cakes require a stand mixer (or a strong arm) because you have to cream butter and sugar together.

 But my experience with the gingerbread had emboldened me.  I googled "yellow cake vegetable oil" and found a one-bowl recipe, which I made (with 100% whole wheat) very quickly this morning — I made the whole cake from start to finish while my rolls were rising.  (We haven't eaten it yet, but since I topped it with chocolate ganache I'm not too worried that it will be unpopular).

Wow.  It's not that it's really all that much harder to make a cake with butter — but it does usually mean getting out the stand mixer, which I don't keep on my counter, and having to wash an extra bowl or two.  Apparently this slight change makes, for me, the difference between "Cake, who has time for that?" and  "Sure, why not bake a cake?" 

So I found myself contemplating… gasp… keeping highly refined liquid vegetable oil on hand in my kitchen.  

And I started to feel guilty.

And then I remembered that, if I do use the veg-oil method to make more cakes, I will mostly be making them for afternoon snacks.

Which are currently dominated by packaged cookies.

So.  Maybe it isn't so bad.  I think I will store the oil way back in the pantry, next to that old half can of my MIL's butter flavor Crisco, however.  So it does not forget its proper place.