Process Writing

Meredith Ashton

Process Writing

21 November 2016

Process Writing

            Writing about writing is an odd thing, but I endeavor to be candid in my analysis and response. My writing process differs depending on the type of assignment, but it always starts with a core idea, a glimpse of an intriguing thought that could one day possibly form a coherent paper. For reading responses, I searched for a particular quote that grabbed my attention, and for the personal essays I started with a memory or a scene  that I wanted to explore. From there, I created an outline to organize my thoughts into a structure for a paper. One might think that after the outline, I’m practically done with my piece. Alas, outlining is inevitably followed by rounds of scathing edits until the piece is done “enough,” or at least until the next time I look at it again.

            I generally dislike my writing when I go back and read it, even if it is only a few weeks later. What was once golden and gleaming fades into the realm of cliché or trivial. I do, however, enjoy the evolution and (hopeful) progression of my writing over time. For this reason, I liked having the blog as a virtual portfolio in which to review, revise, and reflect on the body of work that I produced during this seminar course. In reviewing my work over the quarter, the pieces that I like the most are those that I was most passionate in writing. These are also the pieces to which I feel the deepest personal connection. My writing is the strongest when I have a story to tell. The “Artisanal Delicacies” piece is pure summary compared to my reading response exploring the idea of authenticity in Disney World. This represents my mixed emotions about the reading responses: the pieces I wrote for a grade are mediocre, and the pieces I wrote for pleasure and personal exploration are more worthy of note.

            By this point in the process of writing my Process Writing piece on the process of my writing (I couldn’t resist), I’ve scrolled all the way down to my first few blog posts. I’m struck by the stark contrast between my first Memoir Draft and my final essay. The rough draft is just that—rough. It is raw scene attempting to tease out complex emotion. I love that my final Memoir piece has a clear message, an underlying current centered around the idea of “home” that’s carried throughout the work. The in-class workshops were immensely beneficial. Oftentimes I am so close to the piece that it’s hard to step back and decide which bits of emotion and personal truth I’d like to highlight and further explore.

            This is especially true in my personal essay on The Perfect Meal. My first draft that I brought to workshop had some excellent scenes and themes buried in a deluge of mundane details. The feedback from my peers and Professor was essential in deciding which areas to emphasize in my final draft. The workshop pushed me to confront the real substance of my piece, which centered around establishing a sense of “wholeness” or “community,” instead of getting lost in the breadth of my paper. The end result surprised me. Instead of focusing on the details of the process that went into the physical creation of my meal, my final draft discusses and reflects upon my true criteria for “perfection” that I discovered as I was writing the piece itself. I wouldn’t have pushed myself to this level of personal exploration without the guidance of the Food and Travel Writing Course. I look forward to continuing to write and revise and explore in my future writing-workshop classes. 

"Friendsgiving"

Meredith Ashton

The Perfect Meal Final

21 November 2016

“Friendsgiving”

My favorite day of the year is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. This is when we cook. Or, to be more precise, this is the day that my aunt and grandma arrive at our house early, armed with bagels and coffee, to begin the Thanksgiving preparations. I remember waking up early to the smell of my stepmom already starting on the stuffing. Bleary-eyed, I tie up my hair and stagger downstairs in my pajamas to help roll out the sticky dough for the pumpkin rolls. My dad is there to take pictures of my epic bedhead, which is now destined for Facebook publication. I peel bags of potatoes until my fingers ache and I’m ready to throw myself into the pot with the now-naked vegetables. My grandma stands next to me, dicing celery and onions in her floral collared shirt and pleated khakis, gossiping about the recent scandals in her bridge club (apparently Mary Jane has been taking lots of trips to the casino since her husband got sick). She chops by muscle memory, her eyes roaming everywhere aside from the sharp knife she expertly wields.  

The work is long and strenuous, but it’s worth it to sit down at the table surrounded by my family. My grandma taught me that the hours of peeling and boiling and chopping and beating have a meaning beyond the physical; the mouth-watering mashed potatoes are a way to demonstrate to your loved ones the depth of your affection. Knowing every intimate step in the process of creating a dish and then setting it down on the Thanksgiving table translates to I love you, we are family, and we share what we have been given.

Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday, and Thanksgiving dinner, the Perfect Meal. But when my parents got divorced, it was no longer a time that our entire family could come together at one table. It became a holiday of two dinners, of feeling filled with too much food and not enough connection. I remember driving away from my mom’s cinnamon-scented kitchen to be greeted by dad’s family with a flurry of hugs and “where have you been?” I push mashed potatoes around my plate, already full from the three course “lunch” I’d eaten an hour before and answer the same obligatory college questions I’d just heard from my mom’s family. Thanksgiving became a disjointed day severed in two. Thus, my current quest for the Perfect Meal necessitates a wholeness, a sense of cohesion and belonging that I’ve been lacking since my family’s separation. I want a feeling of togetherness instigated by my own act of love.

My initial premise for my Perfect Meal centered around preparing holiday comfort foods with and for my four housemates (Amelia, Emmy, Jake, & Julia). I wanted to prepare the meal in accordance with a vegetarian diet using mostly gluten-free ingredients (Jake is gluten-free). Julia, the only carnivore in the house, has grown significantly less skeptical of “vegetarian food” throughout the quarter, although she will occasionally venture to the cafeteria in search of “some real food.” My housemates and I selected the dishes from our favorite holiday foods to create a new tradition. “Perfect,” in this context, didn’t require professional culinary execution or presentation. Instead, I desired a cheery meal with my housemates; a way to express my love and gratitude.

The excellent thing about preparing Thanksgiving at home is that the ingredients magically appear in the cabinets. As we were now technically the “adults” of the house, we had to go to the store ourselves. Not that I minded all that much. There’s something very satisfying about crossing items off of a grocery list and seeing the colorful packages accumulate in the cart. Shopping, however, necessitates making at least a thousand choices. I began to question every aspect of my alleged food knowledge. Did I want the rotini or the elbow noodles? The generic Target brand or the name-brand Barilla? The family size or the economy pack? Whole grain or organic? I almost called my mother at least five times before giving in and selecting an inexpensive box with aesthetically-pleasing packaging. Between Target and the Natural Health Center (where I found all my local, organic, and pricey produce), the bill came out to be around $30 for my dish. Paying for things as an “adult” is not nearly as much fun, either.

“Friendsgiving” Menu:

Amelia’s Baked & Seasoned Brussels Sprouts (recipe credit: her mother)

Julia’s Garlic Smashed Potatoes (thanks, Google)

Jake’s Vegan Meatloaf (affectionately called “Eatloaf” by his grandparents)

            Tofu, Beef Substitute, Walnuts, Celery, Onions, & Seasoning

Baked Mac & Cheese (courtesy of my mother)

            Rotini noodles with multi-cheese sauce, baked with cracker crumbs

Emmy’s Chocolate, Caramel, and Candy Drizzled Apples (found on Facebook)

Back in our house kitchen, I was everywhere at once, determined to make up for the fact that we only had one oven by moving extra quickly. The box fan perched atop our fridge whirred incessantly, doing its best to blow cool air over our finicky smoke alarm. I combined the butter and the flour in a saucepan on the stovetop and added the milk in small portions, taking my mom’s direction to “whisk like mad” very literally for fear of burning the capricious sauce. Suddenly, smoke began to arise from the sauce and my nostrils caught the slight whiff of scalded milk. I turned down the heat and all seemed to be temporarily alright. I entered the “it’s all fine” stage of cooking, wherein I accepted that everything was going to go wrong, and it would all still be okay.

I began randomly chucking cheeses into the pot with abandon. Slices of Munster and Swiss and shredded Parmesan and extra sharp cheddar and American singles flew into the pot and melded into a light orange cream with a few turns of my whisk. My mom’s instruction to “throw in whatever cheese you have leftover in the fridge” gave me some peace of mind that I was, in fact, actually cooking and not just mutilating various cheeses. Granted, she also tastes the mixture before making an addition, but honestly it tasted the same to me before and after the second cup of extra sharp cheddar cheese, so I decided to simply go with “what felt right.” I learned that pasta sticks together after you cook it. This is inconvenient. After prying the cooked noodles apart with a spoon in a glass pan, I poured the finished sauce over the top, the cheese flowing out of the pot and onto the pasta in lovely waves of multi-shaded oranges.

“Mer, can you help me?” asked Jake as he rushed out the door, putting on his boots and coat at the same time. I gamely put his Eatloaf into the oven as he rushed off to Acapella practice.

I ceded control of the kitchen to Emmy, Amelia, and Julia, who all needed the counter space to begin preparing their own dishes. It was harder than I expected to step back and let them do the cooking. I loved the collaboration and teamwork and had every bit of faith in their cooking abilities. I just felt very attached to my Perfect Meal. Instead, I turned my attention to the table, delicately arranging the fake burgundy flowers and baby yellow-and-green gourds around my Forest Spruce candle centerpiece (I’ll admit that I felt grown-up purchasing a candle). Jake is not a fan of the gourds, what are apparently “a big hassle” to move off the table every time he wipes it down. Fortunately us girls outvoted him. I considered calling my mom to ask on which side of the plate the napkins are meant to be placed, but then I realized that no one else would actually notice either way.

We served the meal half an hour later than expected, as Amelia’s Brussels sprouts were very uncooperative about roasting. Jake, the only person in the house who can properly work our TV, put Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving on for a background to our meal, a cheerful little throwback. We ate in our comically sparse living room, which, after nearly ten weeks of us living in the house, is still in the theoretical stage of being decorated.

The table itself was so glorious that we grabbed our phones and snapped photos of the piles of mashed potatoes, gleaming glass dish of cracker-crumb-crusted mac and cheese, nicely-browned Eatloaf, leafy-green Brussels sprouts, and precarious stacks of candy-coated apples. For once, the lack of overhead lighting in our family room actually added to the ambiance, with only one small lamp and my candle to illuminate the feast. We took our seats with a sense of hushed reverence for what we had, against all the odds, created. I wanted to say grace, to verbalize the deep affection and regard I held for my housemates who doubled as my family here. I remember saying something mediocre and cliché. My words were dwarfed by the beauty of the meal before us: a shining pillar of what we could make together.

“This is a good way to sustain us for finals,” said Amelia as she took her first bite of mac and cheese. I couldn’t agree more. The Eatloaf was more like an “Eat-blob” in shape, the pasta should have been cooked longer, and the Brussels sprouts were under roasted. My mac and cheese, while a hit with my housemates, just didn’t taste as good as my mom’s.

More importantly, however, the meal in front of us was a beautiful reminder of our individual abilities, our support for one another, and of the homes to which we would be returning shortly. And so, did my Perfect Meal fulfill my childhood desire to celebrate Thanksgiving with one meal and one family? While I succeeded in creating a single meal, the very structure of my menu called for a representation of five unique families. I asked my housemates to bring a dish from their own holiday background, and together we created a new tradition drawn from each of our distinct family cultures. My definition of perfect, therefore, relies on creating wholeness from fragmentation--what I have done, or strived to do, from the very moment of my parent’s separation. Even now in college with my single familial unit, I’ve united my friends through sharing what makes each of us unique.

And so we lingered over our plates, munching through the caramel apple mountain as we watched Pilgrim Charlie Brown’s very racist interactions with Squanto after the Peanuts arrived on the Mayflower. I did all the dishes that night, singing very off-key Christmas carols as I washed the crumbs of my Perfect Meal off of our ceramic blue plates.

"Friendsgiving"

Meredith Ashton

The Perfect Meal Draft

14 November 2016

"Friendsgiving"

           

My favorite day of the year is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. This is when we cook. Or, to be more precise, this is the day that my aunt and grandma arrive at our house early, armed with bagels and coffee and extra heavy earthen serving pans, to begin the all-day affair that is Thanksgiving preparation. I remember waking up early to the smell of my stepmom already starting on the stuffing. Bleary-eyed, I tie up my hair and stagger downstairs in my pajamas to help roll out the notoriously sticky dough for the pumpkin rolls. My dad is there to take pictures of my doubtlessly epic bedhead, which is now destined for Facebook publication. I peel bags of potatoes until my fingers ache and I’m ready to throw myself into the pot with the now-naked vegetables. My grandma stands next to me, dicing celery and onions in her spotless floral collared shirt and pleated khakis, gossiping about the recent scandals in her bridge club (apparently Mary Jane has been taking lots of trips to the casino since her husband got sick). She chops by muscle memory, her eyes roaming everywhere aside from the sharp knife she expertly wields—occasionally using it to gesture in the air to emphasis a particular point.

The work is long and strenuous and you may have nightmares about peeling potatoes in your sleep, but it’s worth it when you sit down at the table surrounded by your family. My grandma taught me that the hours of peeling and boiling and chopping and beating have a meaning beyond the physical; the final product of mouth-watering mashed potatoes are a way to demonstrate to your loved ones the depth of your affection. Knowing every intimate step in the process of creating a dish and then setting it down on the Thanksgiving table translates to I love you, we are family, and we share what we have been given.

Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday, and Thanksgiving dinner, the Perfect Meal. But when my parents got divorced, it was no longer a time that our entire family could come together at one table. It became a holiday of two dinners, of feeling filled with too much food and not enough connection.  Thus, my current quest for the Perfect Meal necessitates a wholeness, a sense of cohesion and belonging that I’ve been lacking since my family’s separation. I want a feeling of togetherness instigated by my own act of love.

My initial premise for my Perfect Meal centered around preparing holiday comfort foods with and for my four housemates, who constitute my college family. We would prepare the meal in accordance with a vegetarian diet (three of us are vegetarians) using mostly gluten-free ingredients (Jake is gluten-free). The dishes would be selected from each of our favorite holiday dishes in an effort to create a new tradition of our own. “Perfect,” in this context, doesn’t require professional culinary execution or presentation or ambiance. Instead, I simply want a cheery meal with my housemates; a way to express my love and gratitude in a manner in which I’m familiar.

“Friendsgiving” Menu:

Amelia’s Baked & Seasoned Brussels Sprouts (recipe credit: her mother)

Julia’s Garlic Potatoes (thanks, Google)

Jake’s Vegan Meatloaf (affectionately called “Eatloaf” by his grandparents)

Baked Mac & Cheese (courtesy of my mother)

Emmy’s Chocolate, Caramel, and Candy Drizzled Apples (found on Facebook)

            I picked up my ingredients on my weekly Saturday shopping trip with my housemate, Emmy, to the Natural Health Center and Target. Sure, Target is hardly a store with a local, organic focus, but it’s far more affordable for buying staple ingredients. I was surprised by how much it cost to purchase the flour, milk, and various cheeses required for the mac and cheese recipe. I had to buy all the basic ingredients as we rarely bake anything in our house (and now I know why).

            I ambitiously set the time of our dinner at 6:30 Sunday night. It was only when I began assisting Jake with the Eatloaf around 4:30 that I realized a crucial fact: we have one oven. As three of the dishes required baking, this was quite the oversight on my part. My mom often says that “good cooking is all about timing.” Damn was she ever right. I decided to cook the Eatloaf while I prepared my mom’s famed mac and cheese recipe.

I made the roux in a saucepan on the stovetop by combining butter and flour. Then, I added the milk and cheeses while I whisked vigorously, taking my  mom’s direction to “whisk like mad” very literally for fear of burning the capricious sauce. There was a tense moment when I thought that the milk had scalded, but I turned down the heat and all seemed to be temporarily okay. It was then that I entered the “it’s all fine” stage of cooking, wherein I accepted that everything was going to go wrong, and it would all still be okay. I began randomly chucking cheeses into the pot with abandon. Slices of Munster and Swiss and shredded Parmesan and extra sharp cheddar and American singles melded into a light orange cream with a few turns of my whisk. My mom’s instruction to “throw in whatever cheese you have leftover in the fridge” gave me some peace of mind that I was, in fact, actually cooking and not just mutilating various cheeses. Granted, she also tastes the mixture before making an addition, but honestly it tasted the same to me before and after the second cup of extra sharp cheddar cheese, so I decided to simply go with “what felt right.” I learned that pasta sticks together after you cook it. This is inconvenient. After prying the cooked noodles apart with a spoon in a glass pan, I was able to pour the finished sauce over the top, the cheese flowing out of the pot and onto the pasta in lovely waves of multi-shaded oranges. I took the Eatloaf out of the oven, put in the pasta, and prayed.

I took extra care with the table, delicately arranging the fake burgundy flowers and baby yellow-and-green gourds around my Forest Spruce candle centerpiece (I’ll admit that I felt grown-up purchasing a candle). I considered calling my mom to ask on which side of the plate the napkins are meant to be placed, but then I realized that no one else would actually notice either way.

We served the meal closer to seven, as Amelia’s Brussels Sprouts were very uncooperative about roasting. When I finally carried the glass bowl bearing the semi-roasted sprouts into the living room, I realized that Jake had put on Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving for a background to our meal, a cheerful little throwback for all of us in the house.

The table itself was so glorious that we all took out our phones before the meal to snap photos of the piles of mashed potatoes, gleaming glass dish of cracker-crumb-crusted mac and cheese, nicely-browned Eatloaf, leafy-green Brussels sprouts, and precarious stacks of candy-coated apples. For once, the lack of overhead lighting in our family room actually added to the ambiance, with only one small lamp and my candle to illuminate the feast. We took our seats with a sense of hushed reverence for what we had, against all the odds, created. I’d meant to say grace, to verbalize the deep affection and regard I held for my housemates who doubled as my family here. I remember saying something mediocre and cliché, but not caring too much. My words were dwarfed by the beauty of the meal before us: a shining pillar of what we could make together.

“This is a good way to sustain us for tenth week,” said Amelia as she took her first bite of mac and cheese. I couldn’t agree more. The Eatloaf was more like an “Eatblob” in shape, the pasta should have been cooked longer, and the aforementioned Brussels sprouts were under roasted. But it could not have been more perfect. The meal in front of us was a beautiful reminder of our individual abilities, our support for one another, and of our own homes to which we would be returning shortly.

We lingered over our plates, happily munching through the caramel apple mountain as we watched Pilgrim Charlie Brown’s very racist interactions with Squanto after the Peanuts arrived on the Mayflower. I did all the dishes that night, singing very off-key Christmas carols as I washed the crumbs of my Perfect Meal off of our ceramic blue plates.

The Vegetarian's Dilemma

Meredith Ashton

Reading Response

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

7 November 2016

The Vegetarian’s Dilemma

            “This is what can happened when…you look. And what you see when you look is the cruelty—and the blindness to cruelty—required to produce eggs that can be sold for seventy-nine cents a dozen,” writes Michael Pollan (318). The third section of The Omnivore’s Dilemma delves into the controversial subject of the ethics behind eating animals. After extensive research and contemplation, Pollen decides that the decision to eat meat should be left up to the individual. However, in order to make an informed decision one must be fully conscious of the process behind the raising and eventual slaughter of one’s meal; a process that has been thoroughly obscured by the long chain of events from cow to hamburger in the industrial food system.

My mother reached a similar conclusion to Pollan during her college days. Unfortunately for her, however, Polyface Farms was not a road trip away. Thus her (and my) adventure of vegetarianism was born. I’ve abstained from meat for my entire life—it’s all I’ve ever known. Aside from the chicken McNugget I tried on a road trip with a friend’s family, the occasional hotdog I consumed as a child because my dad insisted that “it’s not real meat anyways,” and a dry bite of turkey one Thanksgiving, meat has never been a mainstay of my diet. Curiously, the smell of cooking meat is still delicious to me, but it makes me crave my own, veggie-friendly foods.

It’s interesting to me that I claim these vegetarian foods as “my own.” More accurately, of course, they belong to myself, the 7.3 million other vegetarians in the US, and really the rest of the human population on earth. Regardless, I still take pride in my diet. Growing up I was always the girl with the “weird” lunch. Instead of the ham & cheese sandwich on white I had avocado and black beans on whole-grain wheat. It was difficult to find a fast food joint where I could eat something other than French fries (which wasn’t too much of an issue in my eight-year-old mind), and staying for dinner at friend’s houses always required special accommodations so that “Meredith could have something to eat.” I can empathize with Pollan when he writes, “what troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, as odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience,” (314).

Over the years, however, I have come to view my diet as a point of connection, rather than one of disconnect. When I left my home for college, I was faced with a choice I had never before encountered: to eat meat or not to eat meat. My entire life I had justified my diet with the simple fact that “it’s the food my mom cooks.” Now cafeteria workers were happily grilling up burgers and pork and meat balls and meats I couldn’t even identify, displayed in gleaming metal containers for carnivorous college students.

At first I simply had no interest in trying the meat (and honestly I questioned the integrity of the cafeteria’s meat standards). Then, I started my own journey towards vegetarianism that followed Pollan’s in a pattern of research, discovery, and personal contemplation. In my first year seminar, I learned about food ways and sustainable eating and read The Omnivore’s Dilemma cover to cover. I realized that my vegetarian diet connected me not only to my mom’s cooking but also to the earth around me. I liked knowing from where my food was coming, without the possibility of the industrial meat industry’s interference. My journey of “looking” at my dietary decisions,  ironically, ended where it began, with my continued choice to pursue a plant-based diet. Now, however, it was my choice. My food. My own manner of conscious consumption.