I’ve never been a big fan of PETA’s “shock and awe” ad campaigns, but I thought they were, although sleazy, generally well-meaning and fairly benign. I’ve never been able to work up a good rage over their exploits.

That is, until this:

Oh, where to begin? Besides being horribly offensive and inexcusably crude, the ad is complete bunk. Eschewing meat will not make you to lose weight. A vegetarian diet can still be full of sugar and carbs, which are much worse for you than, say, lean chicken breast or grilled fish. A healthy diet is a healthy diet, meatless or otherwise.

You know what else doesn’t make people lose weight? Guilt trips. If shame were a successful dieting tactic, there would be no fat people on the planet.

The worst part of this ad, though, is the bad name it gives us reasonable vegetarians. The majority of us have little interest in evangelizing our diets or ridiculing meat-eaters, despite what PETA would have you believe. And focusing on the “vegetarian=skinny” argument takes the focus away from other, more important reasons to reduce or quit your consumption of meat. And they’re myriad–but weight loss isn’t one of them.

And now back to your regularly scheduled food blog.

I got to by accident. My organic delivery service (not nearly as expensive as it sounds) has a function called “surprise me.” For $2 extra per week, the grocery company sends me… something. Usually something I have no idea how to use. This week, it was figs.

I was utterly at a loss. They looked almost like garlic bulbs, except green and less lumpy. I tried opening one up to scrape out the seedy goodness inside but succeeded only in mangling the fruit beyond recognition. It was time to get serious.

I looked up fig recipes on various foodie sites, but seeing as how figs are about as enduring as snowflakes in Texas, they don’t seem to be too popular. Most of the recipes I did find involved jam/sauce/glaze made from figs rather than whole, figgy deliciousness. But I noticed several that incorporated some combination of goat cheese, basil and balsamic vinegar. So I improvised.

I wish I’d taken a photo of my creation, because these things looked hella strange. After I had cut each fig into a star-like shape, the opened bulbs were reminiscent of exotic, carniverous plants on some alien world. I topped each with a dollop of chevre, drizzled on some balsamic vinegar and stuck them in the oven for a while. When they came out, I sprinkled a little chopped basil on each fig.

The result? Heavenly. The sweetness of the figs, the tanginess of the cheese and the vinegar… there are no words. One might improve upon the combination by reducing the vinegar into a thicker syrup before drizzling to intensify the flavor and help it stick better. But the straight-from-the-bottle stuff works just fine.

If you’re lucky enough to be graced with fresh figs anytime soon, I highly recommend combining them in some way with chevre, balsamic vinegar and basil. Perhaps some sort of dipping situation might be the order of the day? Maybe a bread-type apparatus would be appropriate? Just be sure to use the damn things within a couple of days, or they’ll explode. It happened to my great aunt. True story.

In recent months I’ve been questioning the decision I made two years ago to abstain from land-dwelling animal flesh. Maybe I would be OK with meat, I thought, as long as it’s grass-fed, cage-free and humanely slaughtered.  But after an hour of animal cruelty footage, the sight of a happy pig on a non-industrial farm actually brought tears to my eyes. Yup, still vegetarian.

But the genius of Food, Inc. isn’t the cute-animal-sympathy factor (a strategy PETA frequently exploits, along with the “naked girls” school of persuasion). The movie’s real punch comes from its piercing look at the business of food production. A few gigantic companies control the majority of farms, slaughterhouses and processing plants. Their armies of lawyers and lobbyists ensure that the food giants not only get to do whatever they want–they get to do it behind closed doors.

Why are food companies so reluctant to show us how our food is made? Why do they bully their suppliers into keeping their mouths and chicken coops closed? Maybe because they’re afraid we won’t like what we see?

Go see Food, Inc. Even if you’ve never given a second thought to where your food comes from. Especially if you’ve never given a second thought to where your food comes from. It won’t try to guilt you into vegetarianism, I promise–all it will do is show you a side of the food industry you’ve probably never seen. You do eat, don’t you?

Plus, yeast? Seriously? Nuh uh. No way. Blech.

But then I discovered this recipe from The Pioneer Woman (technically it’s from her friend Pastor Ryan). It makes homemade pasta seem criminally simple. You just combine eggs and flour, mush it around for a bit, roll it out and cut it. What could go wrong?

I am nothing if not a culinary optimist.

Pastor Ryan’s easy-peasy instructions:

“Two eggs per one cup of flour. Make well in flour, crack in eggs, and slowly mix with hand. Knead by hand until dough becomes smooth and pliable, adding flour to the board as necessary. Let rest for a little while before rolling it out. I usually figure one egg per person to determine how much to make. Example: Two eggs and one cup of flour would make enough pasta dough for a dinner for two.”

So I dumped two cups of flour into a big bowl (I wanted to make enough to have leftovers) and made a little well in the middle of the pile, creating sort of a volcano-ey shape. Since I am constantly afraid of running into a bad egg, I couldn’t bring myself to crack the eggs right into the mixing bowl, so I cracked each one in a smaller bowl and scrambled it a bit before pouring into the mouth of the flour volcano.

Slowly mix with hand. That’s what the recipe says. So, with equal parts disgust and fascination, I swirled the eggs around a little in the flour. Not so bad. It was sticking to my hands a bit, but I figured that would stop once the rest of the flour got incorporated. Wrong. I was shortly thereafter wearing two sticky, beige gloves made of pasta dough that covered pretty much all of both hands. And left pretty much nothing in the bowl. I’d say maybe 25% of my time during this stage was spent actually kneading the dough–the rest was spent picking globs of pasta goo out of every crevice of my hands. I wish I could show you a picture of this horrifying scene, but my camera ran away screaming when it saw me coming.

At some point I decided I’d had enough and plopped what I could scrape off my hands onto a cutting board. This was after realizing I should have floured the board before coating my hands in edible superglue (I ended up opening the flour canister with my elbows and dumping a little onto the board–and a lot onto the counter). As soon as I got most of the goop off my hands, I generously sprinkled more flour on top of the dough. This helped create a barrier between my skin and the Dough That Ate Pittsburgh so I could actually do some kneading.

And knead I did! For a loooong time. After I washed my hands and talked my camera down from the ledge, I took this lovely shot:

Why does it look like a flesh-toned brain?

Mmmm. I know I’m hungry.

Next came the rolling. At which point I remembered my total lack of a rolling pin. Good thing there’s a mostly-empty wine bottle on hand! At least it gave me an excuse to chug that last bit.

I’m glad I don’t have a dead Italian grandmother, because if I did she would be rolling over in her grave at the sight of her granddaughter making pasta on a red plastic cutting board using a wine bottle for a rolling pin. Ineptly.

I ended up having to split the dough into fourths to get it thin enough, because my cutting board and counter space wouldn’t allow for anything bigger.

When it came time for cutting, I went with the recommended pizza cutter. (I may not have a rolling pin, but by god I’ve got a pizza cutter!)

Wine bottle, pizza cutter, plastic cutting board. An elegant tableau.

Like how each noodle is a different width than the ones next to it? Yeah, hand-eye coordination was never my thing.

Tapewormalicious!

I boiled a big pot of generously salted water and plopped in these bad boys. They stuck together at first, but during the boiling process they started to come apart. Next I chopped up some parsley and oregano and threw that in with the drained pasta. There may have been some olive oil involved as well.

NOW it almost looks like food.

After all that, the sauce was almost an afterthought. I used a jar of prepared pasta sauce and spiced it up with some sauteed onions and garlic, diced tomatoes, wine, red pepper flakes, various fresh herbs and a little sugar. It was DELICIOUS. Must have been the sugar.

This must be that "plating" thing I've heard so much about.

My stomach is rumbling at the memory of this stuff. The texture was so unlike dried pasta–it was soft and chewy and delightful. The Frankenstein marinara was a little runny, but the pasta was good at absorbing the excess moisture. Who’da thunk this started out as flavorless glue?

THE FINAL, SUPER-OFFICIAL VERDICT

Difficulty: not too bad, but labor-intensive
Ingredients: simple as… something really simple
Messiness factor: off the charts
Level of deliciousness: sonnet-worthy
Bragging rights: huge

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