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    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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Stolen!

Posted on July 31, 2011 by DebbieN
Toucan-beaked finjanim (coffee pots) from the Ethnographic and Folklore Museum in Akko, Israel

Brass finjanim (coffee pots) and tin plates from the pioneer days in Israel. Exhibition at the Ethnographic and Folklore Museum, Akko, Israel

Can’t decide whether I’m more heartbroken or flattered–maybe just surprised?

The Wall Street Journal 

a) has a food section (who knew?)

b) which is currently featuring a 4-part series of recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi.  (I’m actually in favor, and hoping for his book Plenty for my birthday–my husband  floated the suggestion a few weeks ago and I was really flabbergasted that he’d even heard of Ottolenghi. Must have been listening to  something on NPR.) Why is Ottolenghi favoring the WSJ, though, of all food column venues?

c) Said series is calling itself “Slow Food Fast” — the goniffs; can I charge them for it? wouldn’t you? — but it probably shouldn’t.

I’m not just saying that for my own sake (though that’s a big part of it, don’t get me wrong. I’m–the heck with neutrality–too annoyed to be giving a link to this).

Ottolenghi’s recipes aren’t really either slow-slow (stews, beans from scratch, etc.) or incredibly fast (microwave)–a lot are lightly fried or grilled, with a sharp mix of flavors, a lot of herbs, middle Eastern sauces and a tossed salad of some kind on the side. Soft-boiled eggs in a salad, corn latkes with a salad, pan-grilled mackerel on a pita with pistachio pesto and Greek yogurt (bet he’d rather have labaneh but can’t find it in New York or London)–etc.

Which makes them good eating, Israeli and Arab style. But not really slow food done fast.

Most Israeli cooking that’s still Israeli (and not nouveau-Italian, complete with oversized bowls of pasta and seven different cappuccino/macchiato/etc. kinds of coffee drinks) falls into three categories.

The old-fashioned stuff is long-cooked roasts or stews for meats and poultry, maybe stuffed vegetables or an eggplant or spinach casserole or couscous or pilaf. Traditional Romanian, Hungarian, and Moroccan restaurants and some home chefs (usually older women) serve these sorts of long-cooked dishes, but there’s no real shortcut for them.

Israeli street food (not western, engineered “fast food” like McD’s) mostly appears at lunch counters and road stops that specialize, but again the ingredients are real. Felafel, shawarma (even though they’re mostly using a mixture of turkey and beef instead of lamb these days), lahmajoun (ground-meat pizzas). Or else burekas, trays and trays of puff-like flake pastry layered with cheese or eggplant or potato or mushroom filling, and you stop in for lunch and have a huge slab of one with maybe a bit of salad on the side and some tea. All of these take some preparation–the fast part is you walking up to the counter and getting takeout.

In between these extremes are cafés that serve individually-cooked dishes–more informal than casseroles and stews, less casual and more varied than street food. Grilled or fried vegetables (peppers, onions, eggplants, tomatoes, zucchini, pumpkin? potatoes?–more eggplant) and beans, grilled fish or chicken, hummus and baba ghanouj, assortments of cooked salads,with a fresh salad and dishes of olives, turnip and eggplant pickles. A lot of olive oil and garlic and lemon and cumin, yogurt, vegetables, and water-flour-yeast-salt kinds of flatbreads. Street food stand sauces like tehina, salat turqui, harissa, and hilbe (sour yellow fenugreek sauce, kind of mustardy) are still part of it, but so are vinaigrettes and more complex flavorings, and a lot of fresh herbs make an appearance.

This is Ottolenghi’s kind of cooking, and I love it, but it’s neither slow food nor slow food done faster. It’s rustic, village-style food, even though he’s dressed up his version for London diners. At its best you feel like you could walk into the restaurant and fit in fine whether dressed for a theater evening or still dusty from hiking with a water bottle still hanging off your backpack. As though if you walked to the back you wouldn’t be that surprised to see the chefs squatting down over a little pine fire in the courtyard, grilling the food Bedouin-style,  on the back of a broad, battered skillet or skewered on a long thin stick.

They’re not really doing that in Tel Aviv or Haifa, of course, but desert camp cooking is still a key part of the local food lore. People still grill things like chicken hearts and livers outside on little pine fires in their courtyards at home with great pride. Or char eggplants and peppers directly on the gas stove–sort of smelly but undeniably authentic. They point out  za’atar, hyssop and other forageable herbs on wilderness hikes; they know how to make a quick camper’s flatbread of flour and water and a few sprigs of foraged maluakh (a salty plant found in the Negev) over the back of a frying pan. And they know how to brew botz — Turkish coffee–with a flourish.

It’s a part of Israeli life I fervently hope won’t disappear with all the new software companies and car dealerships and cappuccino joints that have popped up over the last couple of decades.

As for the use of my blog’s name, I’m thinking I should take the attitude Monty Python did one time when Margaret Thatcher made free with their Dead Parrot Sketch in a political speech for the Eastbourne by-elections: they announced that given the results of the elections, they thought it not only served her right, but that she had suffered adequately and publicly from her folly that they could save themselves the barristers’ fees for a lawsuit.

Me? I’m waiting til Tuesday. Somewhere else in the WSJ online was an editorial actually praising John Boehner’s plan for the debt ceiling. Feh.

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Dips, Eating out, Food Magazines, haute cuisine, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Cannoli that won’t bust the carb count

Posted on July 20, 2011 by DebbieN

Cannoli paste my way

This is a story about frugality–of the serendipitous sort.

The other week my daughter was with me at the supermarket (sometimes a mistake, sometimes an inspiration), and asked if we could get a packet of sugar cones to go with a drum of Dreyer’s ice cream. This was a trade-off for forfeiting Baskin-Robbins, whose ice cream is consistently higher in fat and carb than Dreyer’s or Breyer’s.

(Shakespearean aside #1) The B-R nutrition brochure is worth a pretty serious look for calories, fat, carbs, the total picture. You can definitely eat a days’ worth of calories–upward of 1500–in a single sitting if you order one of the fancier items. Skip the soft serve and stick to the single cone, for sure.

Not that we never stop in for a cone, but we never knew what the sugar cones were worth carbwise so Abby was limited to a paper cup or a cake cone. And of course for the price of two modest single cones at B-R, you could buy a 1.5 qt. carton at the store and scoop about 10 servings out of it yourself.

In the supermarket, the box with the sugar cones says 10 grams for Keebler and 11 grams for the Ralph’s (Kroger-affiliated) store brand, which is on sale, and about 50 calories per cone. The sugar cones have surprisingly simple ingredient lists for a processed food–wheat, brown sugar, vegetable oil, oat fiber (Ralph’s version) and a bit of salt (though not much–20 mg/cone) and maybe a little caramel coloring and malt flavoring.

But of course the ice cream tends to run out a bit sooner than the cones. And then what? Here’s where the “frugality” comes into it again (okay, I’m sort of rolling my eyes too, but still.)

I had about half a quart of ricotta left over from manicotti (same idea as for the microwaved stuffed shells, only using a plastic baggie with a corner torn out to pipe the spinach and cheese filling into both sides of the parcooked pasta tubes–worked pretty well actually). And ricotta, even on sale, is kind of expensive if you just let half of it sit in the fridge until it goes bad because there isn’t quite enough for another batch of pasta and you don’t know what else to do with it.

So anyway, the availability of leftover ricotta (I’m too cheap to do it with a brand new carton) plus the leftover cones added up in my head the other night to “Hey! Impromptu cannoli! Right now! And I don’t even have to go back to the store!”

I should probably explain.

The first cannoli I ever had were also the best. The parents of one of my sister’s high school friends ran a tiny Italian deli and specialty shop way out near the airport of our town, and what can I say–it was worth the schlep. In addition to imported pastas and olives and pickled peppers and salami and so on, you could buy a tub of their own fresh cannoli paste and a box of carefully packed pastry tubes so you could assemble the cannoli yourself at home and not risk sogginess or breakage on the way.

The D’Elicios’ cannoli paste contained ricotta, of course, sugar, and something else that I finally pinned down as lemon (and possibly orange) rind. And it was heaven on a spoon. So good I asked my mom to bring a box of their cannoli instead of a birthday cake to my college dorm  for my 18th birthday.

How was I to know that would be the last of the really great cannoli for decades? Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, Desserts, Diabetes, frugality, kid food, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cannoli that won’t bust the carb count

Who the federal spending cuts are hurting: Food pantries

Posted on July 20, 2011 by DebbieN

The LA Times reported today on Southern California’s food pantries.  Demand in Los Angeles and Orange County has gone up 70 percent since 2008. Between LA and OC, the food banks are reaching more than half a million people. The LA Regional Food Bank alone is serving something like 1.25 million pounds of food a week. They’ve received increased contributions in that time from the USDA and FEMA, quite a change from the shameful 50 percent cuts the USDA made to food bank aid in the mid-2000s during the Bush administration, but that’s being considered emergency funds, not standard support. Ripe for cutting the moment Obama decides to try and look flexible with the Republican House leaders once again.

And thanks to the repeated budget cuts to domestic federal spending while military spending and bank bailouts continue to be preserved, even that emergency aid is now down considerably from last fall. But the demand isn’t.

The shortfall has to be made up in private contributions. But a lot of the shortfall is just that–shortfall.

Filed under: Food Politics, frugality, history, shopping | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Who the federal spending cuts are hurting: Food pantries

Too big to fail? Too good to pay taxes?

Posted on July 18, 2011 by DebbieN

Source: Library of Congress

Every so often I review books and movies on Slow Food Fast, but as of yesterday, I’ve dropped my affiliate links to Amazon.com. In the past few weeks they’ve decided to fight tooth and nail not to pay sales tax like everybody else and support the states where they sell. First they cut off any Californians who had joined their affiliate seller program, which is annoying and kind of insulting. Not that I’d been getting anything much out of it, but I’ve also been a customer for years.

They’re even lobbying right now to add a ballot measure reversing California sales tax law for internet businesses. Their excuse is that they’ve built their empire on a tiny profit margin and paying sales tax will ruin the penny-seller pyramid. At the same time, they seem to believe they’ve got favored trading status and that any minor threat to their current model can be countered by threatening to withdraw their hiring. Forget that.

I live in a state that’s bent over backwards to court big business and internet retailers, given them all kinds of tax incentives and concessions for years so they wouldn’t move to Nevada or Delaware, and as a result has been absolutely gutted budgetwise. California takes in about a quarter of the nation’s new immigrants each year, has higher unemployment figures than most of the country, LA County alone has more than 300,000 women and toddlers enrolled in the not-very-generous WIC program,  and basic services are being cut right and left to meet the state’s budget deficit. The poor–and that’s starting to include more of the middle class here too–are paying for Amazon.com’s free ride.

And yet Californians represent one of Amazon.com’s biggest markets.

Even the (now former) California affiliates are thinking Amazon should be ponying up like the rest of us. If you sell here, you should be paying sales tax here.

And our sales taxes have finally gone down recently. For years they were up to 9.75 percent. Two days ago I bought a pair of jeans and was shocked–8.75 percent. Apparently that’s dropping further into the 7 percent range for online purchases.

But Amazon’s looking to sue, as they did (and lost at trial) in New York.

Where can you get the books I recommend on this site? Alibris pays sales tax in California, and I’d recommend them.

Or, if you’re in Southern California, head to Vroman’s in Pasadena. Not only is Vroman’s a century-old independent bookstore, both branches are well stocked for hip, academic and traditional booklovers. And the staff are personable, they do lots of readings events, have a huge cooking section, and do online orders if you need something special. The bigger branch on Oak Knoll has a nice café as well.

Filed under: books, Food Politics, movies, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Too big to fail? Too good to pay taxes?

Microwave Tricks: Roast Eggplant Salad

Posted on July 17, 2011 by DebbieN
Roast Eggplant, Onion and Pepper Salad

Ready for the microwave

 

This is what I made this afternoon for a potluck (before I realized the hostess meant for us to bring our own suppers to her pool party). Yes it’s easy–barring the onion crying session…I’ve included the recipe way back about 2 years ago in the first eggplant post I ever did, but it’s worth a recap:

Microwaved Roast Eggplant Salad

Slice one or two large firm eggplants into rounds, sit them in a pyrex dish, stuff slivers of bell pepper and onion between them, pour a little olive oil over the whole thing, and nuke 10-12 minutes on high. Then if that doesn’t look roasted (it won’t, but sometimes I just transfer everything to a plastic bag once it’s cool, mash a clove of garlic and toss it in, and stick it in the fridge overnight to marinate), preheat the oven to 350 F. Chop a fat clove or two of garlic and mix with another few tablespoons of oil, rub the mixture onto the eggplant, and put the pan in the hot oven for half an hour. Let it cool and serve it on sandwiches, with hummus or cheese, as an antipasto, etc.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Microwave tricks, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Roast Eggplant Salad

Big Food mobilizes against child marketing guidelines

Posted on July 10, 2011 by DebbieN

This Washington Post article isn’t the absolute clearest–looks like it was written as a last-minute rush piece, actually, but it’s worth getting to the end.

The basic idea is that in 2009 Congress demanded the CDC, FDA, USDA and FTC come up with a coherent set of voluntary nutrition guidelines for what the food industry can market directly to kids.

I’m not a big fan of voluntary nutrition or safety compliance guidelines for the food industry–mostly because industry players generally feel free to ignore or toy with them and then claim some kind of advertising advantage they haven’t earned. Voluntary guidelines also come with all kinds of soft landings and easy outs, and the proposed guidelines here are no great exception.

But in any case, now the four agencies have done it, and the food and restaurant industry is doing the predictable–throwing big lobbying bucks into a disinformation campaign-slash-tantrum.

How big? The campaign manager won’t say, but the preliminary guidelines report that US food industry marketing to kids 2-17 years old is currently something over $1 billion in three key categories (breakfast foods, restaurant chain food, and snacks).

So it probably won’t surprise you that companies like General Mills, Kellogg, and Pepsico have teamed up with ad-carrying media partners like Viacom (read: Nickelodeon) and Time Warner to try and quash the voluntary industry guidelines. Figure on the campaign to be spending in the mid-millions or more. They’d rather “salt and burn” instead of “cut the salt and learn.” And what a waste.

What will probably surprise you is just who this coalition–calling itself the “Sensible Food Policy Coalition”–?!!–hired to handle the campaign: Anita Dunn, a former Obama communications director whose husband, Robert Bauer, is  still White House counsel. Not a really lovely mashup, there.

Why she’s taking on the food industry campaign so they can keep protecting their ability to market garbage to the young and vulnerable is one question. Why the FDA and FTC, which have the power to decide what nutritional and medical claims, among other criteria, are valid and can be used in advertisements to adults, let alone kids and teens, are bothering with a voluntary measure instead of doing a proposed regulation to limit such marketing to youth is another.

In both cases, the answer is almost certainly money. The food and media industries have it, the federal agencies don’t.

[As it turns out, the FDA and FTC don’t have power to restrict Big Fo0d’s marketing to the under-17 crowd after all. They lost that specific ability in 1981–start of the Reagan administration… Reagan’s “ketchup is a vegetable” declaration was the beginning for drastically lowered nutritional standards and branded fast food concession contracts for public school lunches.]

So the right question under these circumstances is, where do you want to put YOUR money? How about this, if the federal agencies can’t get a decent result and the lobbies are buying off everyone else:

Boycott the Boxes. Hit ’em where it hurts.

Box 1–TV: If you have kids, limit their access to TV, and teach them to turn off the sound during the ads. Do it yourself. Treat the ads like the silly nuisance they are from the minute your kids are old enough to watch. Tell your kids the truth: most of the products advertised on kids’ shows are too shoddy–and overpriced–to market to grownups. The companies make them bright and loud and cheesy because they think kids can be fooled easier (your kids should be beautifully insulted at that if they’re about six or seven years old).  Go with PBS and videos you approve rather than commercial TV as much as you can.

Box 2–Packaged stuff parading as food: Skip almost everything that comes in a cardboard box or a plastic overwrap, or in a can. You can do this. You’ll save an awful lot of money by buying store brands only and cutting out the most pernicious items–sugared and high-salt packaged breakfast cereals, bags of starchy snack extras, and sodas, at least on an everyday basis. Save sodas and chips for parties, not for school lunch or part of dinner.

You’d do even better to go with fresh vegetables and whole fruits for most snacks and make a good habit for relatively cheap. They taste pretty good, don’t take long to fix, last at least a week in the fridge, and your kids won’t get sick overeating them.

There’s a reason the Pringle’s slogan is the very smug  “Betcha can’t eat just one.” No one says that about carrots or broccoli, or even about apples. Ever eaten too many of those in one sitting? Didn’t think so. Vegetables and whole fruits keep you satisfied longer, don’t hyperstimulate your appetite for snacks, and they don’t put on pounds that take a long time to work back off. They don’t promote cavities, either. Even nonsweet junk foods do–all that processed starchy stuff sticks to your molars like glue.

Filed under: breakfast, Eating out, Food Politics, Food TV, kid food, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Big Food mobilizes against child marketing guidelines

Acai, African mangoes, and the ‘tiny belly’ con

Posted on July 7, 2011 by DebbieN

The Washington Post:  ‘tiny belly’ online ad part of scheme, government says

Acai berry distributors have been under scrutiny from the FTC since the spring, but the “tiny belly” and “1 weird old tip” ads that flood the margins of your online newspaper are part of an elaborate scheme to sell you fake diets based on acai, African mangoes, hCG (placenta extract), and other snake oil.

According to the FTC, though, the true objective may be something else–the “free samples” require you to register your credit card.

Google and the other main ad server claim they’re weeding out bad ads, but this one is so prominent on so many sites you just have to wonder what kind of cut they’re getting from it. Because the same damn wiggling abdomen cartoon is everywhere, used over and over, it should be a snap to eliminate.

File this under: unappetizing.

Filed under: Food Magazines, Food Politics, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

On the inevitable hot dog eating contests

Posted on July 5, 2011 by DebbieN

I did something at my in-laws’ Fourth of July cookout that I haven’t done in years: I ate a hot dog. So did my husband. I think my daughter ate two and a half hot dogs (actually, I think she ate more and gave us a story, but her grandfather maintains that someone else may have gotten the extras in the pack). Given how crappy hot dogs generally are, you may be wondering why we did this: because my in-laws made the effort to buy kosher ones for us, and because Hebrew National hot dogs don’t have much in the way of carb, and my daughter is fairly crazy about them (because we don’t cook enough meat for her tastes at home).

What hot dogs, kosher or otherwise, do have–and this is why I have to put in a huge caveat–is sodium. And saturated fat. A regular H-N hot dog has about 490 mg sodium. A knockwurst (which we decided against; the flavor’s not really very different, it’s just bigger) has 810 mg. Plus more calories and saturated fat, though the regular’s no great bargain–as much fat as protein, easily.

I have to admit they taste a lot better grilled outdoors on an actual grill than they do indoors in a grease-laden cafeteria service pan, especially since you can dress them up significantly with sharp mustard, crusty French rolls instead of whitebread buns, and sauerkraut and browned onions instead of the usual insipid cafeteria ketchup. So I can go with the “once a year, enjoy, and just eat a little more carefully the rest of the week” argument.

However. Hot dog eating contests are just wrong. Sixty-two or however many hot dogs appear in the “ain’t it amazing?” recordbreaking stories section of your local newspaper the next morning? Enough hot dogs for 30 people or so? That’s not enjoyment, that’s not even tasting the food–tasting slows one down, and possibly triggers the dire appetite signal to retreat or suffer an immediate reversal of fortune after just a few hot dogs. Even for teenage contestants.

For the non-contestants among us (such as my daughter), I say, two hot dogs is probably the outer limit of sanity in one day–so just figure you’ll eat the other sixty another time. Two is about half your recommended daily max for sodium intake and about the max for saturated fat. And it’s not really delivering much in the way of protein. What’s true of bologna is just about as true for hot dogs–they’re made of meat, but they don’t add up nutritionally to actual meat (about 6 or 7 grams of protein per dog), and they sure have a lot of downsides without delivering the really distinctive flavors and variety of, say, gourmet specialty sausages.

There aren’t a lot of kosher specialty sausages made widely available in the US at this point. Actually, according to my father-in-law, there aren’t enough true (pork) and high-quality bratwurst distributors either anymore, and the owner of the one available to them, who happens to operate in my mother-in-law’s native state of Wisconsin, has openly supported political causes and candidates that are thoroughly repugnant to them.

I suspect that leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth on the Fourth of July.

 

Filed under: cooking, Food Politics, holiday cooking, meat and poultry, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , | Comments Off on On the inevitable hot dog eating contests

“The Trip”: supposedly about the food?

Posted on July 4, 2011 by DebbieN

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon have paired up again in a new movie called The Trip  and I actually got to see it in an actual movie theater Thursday! First time I’ve been in a theater since Ratatouille came out. (Hadn’t realized that was going to be a foodie movie; at the time I just wondered why they didn’t make good movies like that for grownups anymore.)

I was going to see The Trip anyway because I’d seen Tristram Shandy several years ago on disk and got bitten by Coogan and Brydon’s backstage banter. I was looking forward to seeing how the pair,  who had played exaggerated versions of themselves in the first movie, were planning to stretch their dueling Robert deNiro and Al Pacino impressions from the end credits of Tristram Shandy–by far the best shtick in the whole thing–to a two-hour buddy road trip format.

And The Trip was also supposed to be about food–specifically, the current state of northern England’s upscale eateries (now apparently as haute as anywhere on the continent) and the shockingly savage and comical food reviewing traditions of British news media.

So I dragged my husband with me to the matinee and promptly started disregarding the “please, no talking during the film” signs. What fun is it to sit there not giggling horribly as Coogan and Brydon get on the road north to Yorkshire, or saying nothing to my mate as they try to correct each other’s Michael Caine impressions and improve on them in increasingly loud voices while being served all manner of square food on long rectangular plates lapped with flavored foams à la Adrià? With the inevitable scallops for starters, and a number of historical interludes–a sleep in one of Coleridge’s beds, visiting the church ruins in a town where Ian McKellan did not actually grow up, but it’s got the same name, so it counts?

The truth is, of course, that The Trip is much less about food (despite several spliced-in foodie snippets of what’s going on in the kitchens and pans where tasting menus are being prepared) than about love, loss, what’s left to look forward to in one’s encroaching middle-40s, and how to impress girls with your Michael Caine (or Al Pacino) impressions at a 3-star restaurant in the Yorkshire dales or the Lake District.

Of course, the sixth or seventh rendition of Michael Caine (interspersed with Pacino and friends) starts to wear even on our intrepid actors-almost-playing-themselves as they grapple with the hearts they refuse to admit are pinned to their sleeves. It turns out there’s a solid reason for this: Continue reading →

Filed under: Eating out, Food TV, haute cuisine, movies, Odd food | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on “The Trip”: supposedly about the food?