• Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 241 other subscribers

  • Noshing on

    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.

  • Recent Posts

  • Contents

  • Archives

  • Now Reading

  • The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It

  • See also my Book Reviews

  • Copyright 2008-2024Slow Food Fast. All writing and images on this blog unless otherwise attributed or set in quotes are the sole property of Slow Food Fast. Please contact DebbieN via the comments form for permissions before reprinting or reproducing any of the material on this blog.

  • ADS AND AFFILIATE LINKS

  • I may post affiliate links to books and movies that I personally review and recommend. Currently I favor Alibris and Vroman's, our terrific and venerable (now past the century mark!) independent bookstore in Pasadena. Or go to your local library--and make sure to support them with actual donations, not just overdue fines (ahem!), because your state probably has cut their budget and hours. Again.

  • In keeping with the disclaimer below, I DO NOT endorse, profit from, or recommend any medications, health treatments, commercial diet plans, supplements or any other such products.

  • DISCLAIMER

  • SlowFoodFast sometimes addresses general public health topics related to nutrition, heart disease, blood pressure, and diabetes. Because this is a blog with a personal point of view, my health and food politics entries often include my opinions on the trends I see, and I try to be as blatant as possible about that. None of these articles should be construed as specific medical advice for an individual case. I do try to keep to findings from well-vetted research sources and large, well-controlled studies, and I try not to sensationalize the science (though if they actually come up with a real cure for Type I diabetes in the next couple of years, I'm gonna be dancing in the streets with a hat that would put Carmen Miranda to shame. Consider yourself warned).

Sleepover fare

Posted on June 29, 2015 by DebbieN

My daughter who loves vegetables and will often eat them ahead of whatever else is on the plate at supper suddenly became selfconscious yesterday about serving them to her friends at her birthday sleepover–no, no, no, Mom, none of my friends will eat them, and they probably don’t want fish, we want pizza. Not your pizza. Pizza from the good takeout place in Sierra Madre. And no anchovies this time.

We’ve known these girls since kindergarten–or earlier. They eat vegetables. But pizza it was. With some raw veggies for snack thrown in beforehand.

Our experience with the standard kid party fare is not very happy. Chips, soda, candy, popcorn–and that’s just the open bowls sitting around. Then pizza, cake, ice cream, possibly more candy.You’ve got to wonder what kind of parents actively choose such a menu–and the answer these days is, most people. All of these things are pretty addictive–everyone grabs for seconds without thinking.

Our daughter has been to a few of these parties and discovered the hard way that everything she knows how to do as a Type I diabetic flies out the window the instant she gets there. All her friends are grabbing handfuls of these very high-carb, mostly processed foods which we never get at home (except for ice cream), and the behavior is as addictive as the snacks. Even when she plans a strategy ahead of time with a goal for a limited reasonable maximum of carb grams and she calculates insulin for everything meticulously, she ends up pretty high hours later–as in, at 3 a.m., long after the insulin for the food has run its course.

It’s extremely hard to calculate carbs accurately enough with most processed snack foods at a party to avoid big glucose spikes later on. Even if you do everything right. There’s just something about junk foods–either you end up eating three meals’ worth of carbs in an hour of snacking without even feeling it because your friends are eating that way and it seems normal at the time, or these foods really digest a lot differently from standard things like bread or pasta. If it’s happening to our daughter, who can see the ugly results by getting a fingerstick three or four hours down the road, when she’s antsy and fractious and can’t sleep at 3 a.m., you know it’s also putting an extra burden on your kid who has a working pancreas.

So it might be a good idea to get fresh with the standard teen birthday party menu–if you’re doing pizza, skip the bags of chips and soda, add some veg and lighten up on dessert.

Salad was not achieved despite best intentions only because there was no room to get through to the kitchen where the vegetables of the week were lounging in the fridge. With the girls suddenly launching into “girl tawk” over pizza (a less appetizing combo would be difficult to imagine), and since we don’t have a separate den, our living room and dining room quickly became no-parent territory. My husband and I sidled up, grabbed some pizza and some carrot sticks and hid out in our bedroom so as not to intrude or have to hear any of it–win/win.

So given the awkwardness of getting past them and into the kitchen, vegetabalia last night was reduced to the bag of sugar snap peas and a bag of baby carrots we’d put out for a snack–not up to par, really, but it worked out fine. The girls ate them happily enough and didn’t notice the lack of or even seem to miss chips, cheetos, popcorn, potato chips, pretzels, goldfish etc. They were all too busy watching “Big Bang Theory” episodes and gossiping nonstop. It just goes to show you–the party is not in the bag [of chips, as per the tv ads], it’s in the participants.

I’d made a rather large and beautiful raw blueberry pie for dessert–chocolate cake after pizza just seems so wrong when it’s so hot out, and besides it’s summer with a vengeance. All indications (pretested and verified by my kid) were that both the crust and the filling were up to snuff. My daughter calculated for her best chances of being happy and more or less within range at her own party so she could have a piece with her friends, and she stopped worrying about the lack of junk food. I mean, pizza serves perfectly well as its own form of junk food–you don’t need any extra.

Plus you don’t want to be crunching too loudly when Sheldon and Leonard are going at it over whichever comic book hero’s superpower is the more mathematically sound.

 

 

 

Filed under: Eating out, kid food, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , | Comments Off on Sleepover fare

What not to put in your cake

Posted on June 24, 2015 by DebbieN

Marijuana use is being legalized–or sought out for legalization–in an increasing number of states, despite the federal government’s stance against it. The key argument in favor is a plea for the well-being of those whose terminal or debilitating illnesses–or the drug regimens for treating them–cause pain and nausea that respond better to marijuana than anything else on the market.

But who’s fooling whom? Along with the increase in legalization and dispensaries comes a host of new products to capitalize on the expanding market: candies, cakes and other sweets laced with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). You can’t tell me that’s exclusively, or even mostly, for medical use.

And–no surprise here–most of them are being mislabeled.

Marijuana is not a well-characterized, easily dosable drug. It’s a whole-plant or at least whole-leaf drug, with hundreds of chemical compounds in both the leaves and the smoke. Even THC, its primary active ingredient, appears difficult to measure and dose correctly given that its signal effect is a general distortion of sensory perception and mental function, not stimulation or blockage of a specific molecular receptor or other well-defined cellular target.

Given the vagueness of both dosing and effect, it’s not really a surprise that standardization and labeling are still inaccurate at best. Which is now a relevant issue: if you’re going to call marijuana a pharmaceutical in order to get it legalized, you’re going to have to treat it by the same standards and be able to quantify it. That could be a challenge–especially given the professionalism and laboratory expertise with which it’s typically handled.

The current attempts are not particularly encouraging, if a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association is any indicator. About 75 percent of the product labels are off; 15 percent or so underestimations and the rest overestimations of THC dose per serving.

Add to that the products themselves–pink and green-colored pound cakes (at least as shown in the article in The Scientist). Who but a stoner–or worse, a little kid who happened upon them–could find those appetizing, even without the added attraction?

And you can see the key problem here–it’s bad enough that people who take marijuana in any form are likely to get the munchies and be completely indiscriminate about what they eat while high. It’s a lot worse if the food available is also laced with yet more THC. Or if an adult buys a colorful cake product and leaves it where a kid can get at it.

And yes, I am being intentionally insulting about it. I’ve worked as a lab tech in pharmacology and natural products research labs and interviewed numerous experts in pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries as well as medical and forensic toxicologists. It’s time for the marijuana legalization proponents and industry to grow up, pull up their socks, and stop potschkying around. Or sampling their own wares.

If you’re serious about treating THC as a respectable therapeutic pharmaceutical, and not just a recreational drug accompanied by a wink and a sheepish laugh, then put up or shut up. Treat it as a proper drug and keep it in a recognizably unappetizing drug form–a plain pill would do–and make sure the dosing is precise and minimal. And that access is limited to patients who actually need it and that the effect is genuinely beneficial. That requires clinical trials.

We don’t put methotrexate or doxorubicin, two of the major chemotherapy drugs, in candies for cancer patients. We don’t put morphine or antibiotics in cake or leave them around casually on a kitchen counter. There’s a serious reason for that.

[Note: I’ve turned comments off for this post, not because I don’t usually welcome comments–and even arguments–but because the ones I’ve seen so far appear to be using the opportunity to recommend their preferred homebrew remedy–not really relevant to the question: “Do drugs belong in cake?”]

 

Filed under: Food Politics, Odd food, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , | Comments Off on What not to put in your cake

Chain-restaurant excess strikes again

Posted on June 5, 2015 by DebbieN

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has found itself swamped for choice in its 2015 Xtreme Eating “awards” list.

What’s the highest calorie chain-restaurant meal in America? (LA Times online, 6/3/15)

The entries are frightening–typically 1-2 days’ worth of calories, 3 days’ worth of saturated fat and sodium, huge oversized amounts of food. One steakhouse platter with so much hamburger meat–not even steak–seven burgers, each piece topped with cheese or at least cheez–it’s like eating several Double Whoppers at once. Ice cream float-type concoctions with no actual pie but pie crust pieces crumbled on them. They start at 32 ounces. Which is clearly the new 20 ounces if you actually read through the horrible meal descriptions, because another chain’s sweet tea is only offered in a 32 oz size as well. That’s a quart. For one person. There’s a 900-calorie margarita in there somewhere at 24 ounces.

I’m sure Michael Jacobson, CSPI’s president, never dreamed there’d be something fully twice as bad on any restaurant menu as fettucine Alfredo, which he termed “a heart attack on a plate” only what, 20 or so years ago?

What the hell is going on here?  The chains may be cutting down slightly on artificial colors and trans-fats and GMO ingredients, but they’re serving meals with an entire day’s worth of calories embedded in the endless parade of glop that is routinely slathered on otherwise reasonable-sounding main ingredients like chicken breast (note: a top offender for hidden sodium in the “healthy” chain offerings, especially on salads). “Special” sauces, breadings, cheese, frying oil, stuffings, dips, and less-announced coatings (the problem with the chicken) that add surprising amounts of sweet, salt and/or fat. Chipotle isn’t on CSPI’s wall of shame over this, but it’s just as true of them as of any of the others–their meals typically run 500-800 calories for a burrito without chips, guacamole or salsa (not to mention sour cream and added cheese), and the same number of milligrams of sodium.

The meal insults listed on CSPI’s site consist of huge portions that could more normally serve four people, not one. Dishes are never less than 3″ high and cover every square millimeter of the plate. Burgers are multiplied–if one or two are okay, six or seven must be even better. Vegetables have disappeared, of course.

Accessories double or triple the calorie, fat and sodium counts of the full “meal”: caesar salad, fries, biscuits, half-gallon drinks, whole quarts of ice-cream-related desserts. Why is this gargantuan approach even appealing?

They didn’t list Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors, but maybe they should have–a couple of years ago I took my daughter there for a post-diabetes-diagnosis ice cream cone so we could do something normal for summer, albeit with a shot of insulin (it was a new experience) and we got the entire brochure of offerings when we asked for the nutrition info. The single cone, no lightweight for any of the flavors at about 250-300 calories (double or triple what it would be for Dreyer’s/Edy’s half-the-fat, our standby) and 25-30 grams of carb (also double the D/E per serving), turned out to be a best bet. Some of the sundaes were getting to the 20 oz. range, with over 1500 calories and two days’ worth of carb and fat. The soft serves were actually the worst nutritionally, much higher in calories, carb and fat than they look for the volume you get–and especially given how plain the flavors always are.

Overall, the picture of chain food is not lookin’ good. It’s a nightmare of shameful, pointless stuntlike excess, the stuff parodied in Wall-E and Idiocracy among other movies from the past decade. Only as one of the CSPI judges remarked, it’s become the new normal, and much faster than the screenwriters imagined. Maybe we should all look at the before pictures of the participants on The Biggest Loser, as shown in all the accompanying guidebooks (see your local Friends of the Library bookstore) and ask ourselves if we really want to do that. Because that’s a lot of work.

Filed under: Diabetes, Eating out, Food Politics, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chain-restaurant excess strikes again

This always happens right before vacation…

Posted on June 4, 2015 by DebbieN

Finally, finally, we are going to the East Coast. We’ve had to put off seeing my mom and my sister (and assorted boys) twice since December due to incessant snow, none of which hit Los Angeles in the slightest. So as soon as school lets out, we’re packing for an ungodly wake-up call the next morning and getting out of SoCal for a bit more than a week. The cat gets a hotel/spa vacation without all the schlepping around between Bahston and New Yawk. We get the do-we-have-enough-clean-undies-to-make-it version.

So good, already. But as in many of my tangled big-event preparation schemes, I have a slight problem with the fridge:

Stuffed fridge right before traveling

The problem, part I…Note the tomatoes: 10+, excessively ripe, and the invisible 6 or so red peppers behind them. Not to mention the huge bag with 7-8 bunches of fresh herbs…

fridgedoor

Part II, the door…Note the huge bag of nectarines, lower left, the chiles just behind the mushrooms and two bags of apricots at right, just because…

AAAgh…just a little insane. Suffice it to say, it’s been an enthusiastic week or so vegetable-shopping-wise because the Fresno tomatoes are back in my local greengrocer’s, along with a lot of other produce, and I’ve gone overboard on a number of items, not least of which are lemon basil, mint, dill and tarragon (which I haven’t even decided if I like). The market beckons, the low prices for herbs and vegetables even more so, and the sun’s finally come out again after a month of gray days. And I’m a purple thumb as a gardener, so the greengrocer’s wares beckon even more strongly. How could I not want it all? But a little thought for the calendar might not have gone amiss.

So I’m in trouble again. We leave in 4 days. There are a maximum of three humans in the house (depends how we’re behaving at any given moment). Nobody but me really gets into gazpacho the way they should–though they will go with salads (the coarse-cut version of gazpacho). And it’s a sorry day when you have to threaten people with apricots and nectarines three meals a day. We should be reveling in the produce section, not roiling in it. If we were staying here, this would be an ideal scenario for the next week and a half, Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, frugality, fruits, salads, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , | Comments Off on This always happens right before vacation…