Beans and legumes | Slow Food Fast

New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

Posted on August 22, 2010 by DebbieN

I’ve just uploaded a new page (see the top menu tabs) with a couple of tables of the most useful rules of thumb I’ve found for carb counting. Since my daughter became a Type I (insulin-dependent) diabetic back in February, we’ve both had to become pretty familiar with the amounts of carbohydrate in a given amount of different foods.

Although the American Dietetic Association’s “Choose Your Foods” carb count guide for diabetics is pretty helpful (and pretty inexpensive, about $3 per copy if you order from them direct on www.eatright.org), it’s written from the perspective of the eater, not the cook.

So (as the cook in the family) I’ve worked out the approximate ratios of carb grams per total weight of some common foods I serve routinely. Rice and beans are easy enough to remember. But when I want to know how much of a given potato my daughter can eat as one carb serving (15 g), it helps to be able to know that a regular potato is about 1/6th carbohydrate. Then all I have to do is weigh it on the food scale in grams and divide by 6.

The 2/3 carb ratio for moderately sweet baked goods like pie, scones, cookies and muffins is also pretty helpful if we’re home and can weigh a portion for my daughter. Sweets are one of the hardest things to guess right consistently by eye, even when you’ve made them yourself. If there’s a nutrition label, by all means go with it; if not, weighing a portion and figuring 2/3 has been a pretty good approximation so far.

Ice cream is its own thing–again, hard to figure. Dreyer’s 1/2-the-Fat is our standard home brand, and hovers around 15-18 grams per half-cup (small scoop). But Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors are all over the map–when you go in for a cone, you really need to ask them to look it up for whatever size scoop, then figure the cone separately. A junior scoop in a cake cone for pistachio almond turned out to be something like 25 grams, plus 4 grams for the cone. Almost double what a plain scoop would have been at home.

Over-the-top caramel-syrup-fudge-frosting types of confections are a little out of my league, closer to candy bars than cakes, and would probably be more like 80-90% carb by weight (or mass, if you’re being excessively metric about the properties of grams). I haven’t listed them because they’re so laden it’s hard to think of serving them very often, but I do have a basic rule-of-thumb candy list at the bottom of the carb counts page (saving the best for last) and a link to a much better, more comprehensive one so kids don’t have to feel completely shut out at Halloween or Valentine’s Day. Or birthdays.

I also have a short (for me) bit of hard-won advice on how to strategize with a (school-aged) diabetic kid before they have to face candy-prone situations where their friends are free to eat right away and they aren’t. Good for braces-wearers too…actually maybe we should all take the hint.

In any case, I hope you find this new page helpful whether you’ve got diabetics in the family or you just want to know what you’re eating.

Let me know what you think!

Filed under: baking, Beans and legumes, books, breads, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Diabetes, fruits, kid food, nutrition, Pasta | Tagged: carb counts, carb ratios, carbs in baked goods, carbs in candy, childhood nutrition, dietary guidelines, juvenile diabetes | Comments Off on New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

The Hummus Debate

Posted on July 29, 2010 by DebbieN

Hummus is a highly politicized food these days, a situation most eaters outside Lebanon, and at a guess, most inside as well, consider slightly ridiculous. “Owning” hummus has become a point of national pride for a few higher-ups in Lebanon, which has in the past year or two followed Greece’s feta-labeling strategy and tried to appropriate sole credit for authentic hummus. At its more light-hearted, this struggle for hummus supremacy takes the form of an annual stunt in which chefs produce a hummus bowl almost the size of an Olympic swimming pool (or at least an Olympic-sized wading pool) and the triumphal photo makes the international news. But those who really take the Lebanese official origin issue seriously and grimace whenever hummus is served somewhere else are, as far as I can see, only hurting themselves.

The trouble with demanding official status is that both feta and hummus long predate the borders of the countries trying to claim them. Both are simple enough to make and so consistent from batch to batch that they don’t really exhibit much in the way of “terroir” the way aged cheeses, wines, vinegars and so on might. Feta–equally good, equally real, equally part of the native fare–is made in a lot of places neighboring modern-day Greece. Places like Bulgaria, which don’t have as much political clout in either the EU or the Slow Food organizations, and which don’t get half the international tourism. Also places further away, notably Denmark and France, which still have reasonably large sheep’s milk production. Greece may actually have succeeded for the moment in the food labeling tug-of-war, but it’s made the country look somewhat silly and petulant, unwilling to face the fact that they’ve closed the barn door at least a century after the sheep got out. Will they profit from the exclusive labeling? doubtful–and it might have been better ambassadorship to claim credit for spreading feta’s popularity and offer more recipes and products made with it.

Much to the chagrin of whoever decided in the past couple of years that hummus should be exclusively Lebanese, this simple spread is made and eaten in lots of other countries. In Egypt, it’s made with a half-and-half mixture of favas and chickpeas. And Israel, which is probably the “other country” being targeted most directly by the Lebanese hummus campaign, has eaten, breathed, and slept a more or less chickpeas-only version of hummus as an essential food (along with felafel) for longer than the state has been independent.

Unlike the partisanry in Lebanon (not that Israel has no partisanry of its own), when it comes to food, everyone in Israel–Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Druse–gives credit with a certain degree of pride that hummus is Arab food, especially if they’ve made it themselves rather than trotting down to the corner grocery to buy the bland ready-made version from a vat in the deli at the back.

That’s because everyone likes to eat it. It’s also because being a good host is really important and something of a formal habit and a chance to show off just a little–actually, I think that’s still true all throughout the Middle East. Everyone expects friends and neighbors and friends-of-friends to drop by at a moment’s notice, without invitation, especially on the weekend. The least you can do is have a bag of roasted sunflower or pumpkin seeds and a pot of hideously sweet mint tea to bring out if they show up to schmooze after supper, but in the afternoon, better if you can bring out a platter of pita, vegetables, and a bowl of hummus.

Hummus is simple Arab fare at its best–humble, nutritious, appetizing, and (now that we have food processors) easy to make a lot of so you can bring out a wide platter of it for your guests and drizzle a little olive oil and some za’atar or sumac or cumin or paprika over it for the finishing touch–right before everyone tears pita and dips in. The ceremonial thing is what makes it good hosting and is part of the fun.

Here in the US, most people buy their hummus in little plastic containers at the supermarket–not elegant at all, and a lot of money for what you get. Kind of depressing, even. Look at the ingredient list and it’s as long and discouraging as any other processed food–that’s so it can be shipped nationally and stored for a week or two in case it doesn’t all sell out the first day. Look at the nutrition label and you see highish salt, lowish protein and fiber. It’s been fluffed out with canola oil to stretch the expensive ingredient, tehina (sesame paste), and there’s not so much in the way of chickpeas even though they’re supposed to be the base.

While I’m not so much against the fluffy smooth stuff (it tastes ok, if all you’re expecting is a spoonful or two of party dip), I prefer homemade because it’s denser and more nutritious, with more iron and protein from the chickpeas, something you could eat packed in half a pita for lunch and not be starving within an hour. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Dips, Food Politics, frugality, history, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: appetizers, chickpeas, hummus, Israeli food, Lebanese food, mezze, microwave cooking, Middle Eastern food | 1 Comment »

Prunes and Lentils III: The Lentil Variations

Posted on July 20, 2010 by DebbieN

Today’s (and last week’s, and the week before’s) topic is STILL the lentils-and-prunes challenge.

Before I get on a roll about lentils, I should mention that the first Prunes and Lentils post was my 101st post for this blog. I don’t know if we should celebrate, but why not. Woo-hoo! Good enough. Consider it celebrated.

It’s taken me a full two weeks to put up this post because this is where the rubber meets the road, or at least where the lentils meet the prunes. The moment of courage. And I don’t know whether it’s going to be great or whether people will go back to wondering why anyone ever let me in a kitchen. (That’s easy: because no one wanted to do the cooking themselves.)

Ordinary brownish-green lentils are kind of a workhorse ingredient in European, Mediterranean and Near East cooking (also in Indian and African cooking, though red lentils are better known). Unlike restaurant chain buffalo wings, lentils are actually rich in protein and iron, and they aren’t surreptitiously pumped up with sugar, salt and fat to entice you to overeat. The Center for Science in the Public Interest is not likely to sue, because a bag of lentils doesn’t come with a deceptive toy to con the kids. (See? we can be topical and up on the hot news of the moment even while discussing an arcane Slow Food subject like lentils).

And lentils are CHEAP–the whole point of starting this Prunes and Lentils challenge in the first place. Somehow even the big supermarkets that push shoppers to the middle aisles to buy boxes instead of actual food always carry dried store-brand lentils over near the bags of rice and split peas and kidney beans and such. It’s one of the few middle-aisle purchases that are worth it.

I don’t know if lentils have even kept up with inflation over the past 20 or 30 years, because they’re always something like $1-$1.25 for a one-pound bag. Same as when I was a student on a $20 a week food budget. And a pound makes 5-10 meals, not just one serving.

Actually, the recent agroeconomics of growing lentils in the US makes unexpectedly interesting behind-the-scenes reading for policy wonks like me. Lots of people are now clamoring for the US to change the crop subsidy laws to encourage more nutritious crops than corn, soy and wheat. Lentils are still a minor crop, but apparently the USDA introduced new marketing loans and other incentives for lentils, peas and chickpeas under the Farm Act revisions of 2002 and 2008, and exports for pulses have risen by about 45% in the last few years to India, Spain, the Philippines, and other major lentil and chickpea consumers. The rest are bought for animal feed and international food aid programs, especially those for sub-Saharan African nations.

That’s because lentils still fly under the radar here. The average annual consumption in the US is still just about a pound per person. Up from 0.8 pounds in 2008, so a 20 percent jump, but still. One pound per person in a year. If my continuation of the Prunes and Lentils Challenge posts has no other benefit to humankind, I would hope that it inspires you to buy and cook–and eat–at least one additional pound per year in a creative and satisfying way. Pass it on–Two pounds per year? At a cost of $2-3 total? We can but dream…

Of course, now that bean cuisine has become a point of pride for Meatless Mondays and other trends in eating green (if not eating local), lentils don’t just come dry in bags or bulk anymore–not glamorous enough, perhaps? If you’re upscale, you can get them precooked in little cans at your Whole Foods or steamed in vacuum packs at your Trader Joe’s, but those chic packages are much, much more expensive per meal and don’t taste as good. I frankly wouldn’t bother unless you’re on the road or camping or something and don’t have a kitchen at your disposal. Dried lentils don’t need a presoak to cook up within about half an hour even on the stove top, and they’re so easy to cook in a microwave (and avoid the watched-pot-never-boils problem) that the extra expense and time trying to find the precooked ones is usually not worth it. (And what about all that extra plastic and metal packaging? Be righteous–buy ’em dry.)

If you cook up a whole pound bag at once, you can use it throughout the week or (better, for a lot of people) freeze half of it with a bit of cooking liquid in a microwave container and save yourself some time the next time you want a batch. I keep thinking of that old “Cook Once, Eat Twice–That’s Italian!” lasagna ad (can’t remember if it was for noodles or sauce) from the 1970s. It’s a bit old-fashioned, but still a good idea for when you’re too tired to cook for real.

In this post, I’ve got 3 or 4 main “strategic” ideas for the prunes and lentils challenge, along with more recipes and variations than should really go in a single post (and THREE more prune accompaniments as well), so just roll your eyes, bear with me, and if you decide never to let me in your kitchen, I’ll understand (plus I’ll never have to do the dishes–win/win!).

So first things first–gotta cook that bag of lentils (and recycle the bag). This recipe is probably longer than the actual process but it contains valuable Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, DASH Diet, Food Politics, frugality, Microwave tricks, nutrition, sauces and condiments, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: A Fistful of Lentils, beans and pulses, Chicken Marbella, cigares, crop subsidies, Gregory Malouf, Italian food, Italian sausage, Lebanese food, lentils, Meatless Mondays, microwave cooking, Microwave tricks, prunes, rice, samosas, shawarma, stuffed cabbage, stuffed peppers, Turkish food, Turquoise, USDA, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Prunes and Lentils III: The Lentil Variations

Prunes and Lentils II: Prune Sauces for Savory Dishes

Posted on July 8, 2010 by DebbieN

Following on from Sunday’s post (have you recovered yet? Should I be selling Tums futures?) I should add that NOWHERE in Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s The Flavor Bible can a mention be found of prunes paired in any way, shape, or form with lentils. Don’t have the faintest why not. They do state that plain old green lentils have more flavor than red or brown. They also pair prunes with olives, mushrooms, gorgonzola and walnuts as well as sweet spices and red wine. Somewhere in that crossroads there’s got to be some confluence of flavor, but wherever it is, they haven’t considered it.

Others have, however–notably Nathan Lyon of the Discovery Channel, ABC’s “Beat the Chef” show in Australia from a few years back, Hello! magazine (OK, copying straight from the California Prune Board’s UK division–wait a minute, they HAVE a UK division?!–and borrowing its press photo)…Oh well.

The benefit to considering prune sauces is that you can serve them with a lentil dish if you’re ready for that or to lift a more familiar savory dish with meat, fish or poultry.

Pan-seared tuna steak with microwave prune and wine chutney

And yes, I said “lift”. Make of it what you will, but any one of the sauces below is better than whatever Hello! magazine has to offer, even if it were original.

Stéphane Reynaud’s Prune Sauce (excerpted for consideration from French Feasts, 2009)

This was designed to go with a simply pan-fried foie gras for six–probably 3-4 oz per person, which seems like a hefty kind of serving, even though I do like liver. But the sauce–why 18 prunes? 3 per person? and it seems a heavy load of spice for a small amount of wine. Also he has you rest the stuff overnight at room temperature before finishing it. Not sure why–to thicken up, probably, like Elizabeth David’s recipe for peach jam, which also sits out overnight after the first boil-up before resuming.

18 pitted prunes
1 c red wine
1 t ground cinnamon
1 t quatre-épices
2 star anise pods
2 T light brown sugar
2 1/2 T butter, chilled

Boil the prunes 5 min with the wine, spices and sugar, cover and leave O/N at RT. Remove the prunes and reduce the spiced wine to a syrupy sauce. Whisk in the butter, then return the prunes to the sauce.

Microwave Prune Chutney with Wine

My microwave version started out as Reynaud’s wine-based sauce and suddenly morphed, as I was grabbing things out of the fridge for it, with a half-remembered cranberry chutney recipe my mother-in-law served a number of years ago at Thanksgiving. This turns out to be a potent combination, aromatic and sharper, no doubt, than Reynaud’s sauce, with a definite suggestion of saltiness about it–but no actual salt. I don’t recommend eating it straight–too pungent for me, though it’s uncannily close to the relish my mother-in-law served and pretty decent with poultry and stuffing or rice and so on–but cooking 5 minutes or so extra in a saucepan over direct heat or with the food you’re saucing and some extra wine turns it into something pretty special. The whole cloves in particular (which you can take out before using the sauce) do something incredible for any meat or steaky fish you cook with this sauce. Like brisket but just…better, more sophisticated, elevated to the level of cuisine. In fact, put some of this prune sauce with cloves in your next brisket too.

Makes about 1 cup

½-1 c leftover dark red wine–syrah, aglianico, something inexpensive but rich
8-10 pitted prunes, quartered
grating of fresh ginger (1/4 t)
grating of 1/2 decent-sized clove garlic or 1 small clove
1/4 red onion, chopped
1-2 t. wine vinegar
sprig of thyme
pinch of fennel seed
4-5 whole cloves, loose if you can stand picking them out or else stuck through a scrap of onion

Toss the onions with the vinegar and let sit a few minutes while chopping the prunes into quarters–it cuts down on the bite. Mix the onions, prunes, and the rest of the ingredients except the cloves in a soup bowl with a microwaveable lid that can placed on with a gap for steam to escape. Poke the cloves into a larger scrap of onion and add that to the bowl so you can fish them back out easily after cooking. Microwave 1-2 minutes loosely covered on HIGH or until it’s boiling, let sit 5 minutes, stir, microwave again. The prunes will have taken up a lot of the liquid, the onions should be cooked through and garnet-colored, and the wine should be reduced and a bit syrupy.

. . . . .

From France to China, then:

One year I was determined to make a low-sodium substitute for fermented black bean sauce with roast salmon. I soaked some prunes in a little boiling water and mashed them to a paste, then dressed them up with garlic, ginger and a few other things. It turned out, to my surprise, like homemade hoisin–-dark, glossy, tart and aromatic, less sweet than the commercial stuff, a little smoky from the sesame oil and scallions, with the suggestion of salt Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, DASH Diet, Dips, fish, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: barbecue sauces, Beat the Chef, California Prune Board, frugality, hoisin, lentils, microwave cooking, Nathan Lyon, prune chutney, prune sauces, prunes, Stephane Reynaud, The Flavor Bible | Comments Off on Prunes and Lentils II: Prune Sauces for Savory Dishes

Prunes, Lentils, and “Cookin’ Cheap”

Posted on July 4, 2010 by DebbieN

When I was a kid, PBS, which had made a gourmet name for itself with The French Chef, decided that if one chef was good, six or seven had to be better. Suddenly the public and cable airwaves were bursting with the Frugal Gourmet, the Galloping Gourmet, Yan Can Cook, Cookin’ Cajun, various shows with Pierre Franey and Jacques Pépin, and one…ummm…less glamorous show called Cookin’ Cheap.

This was hosted by Larry Bly and Earl “Laban” Johnson, Jr. out of Roanoke, VA–-not too far from where I grew up–and featured two viewer-submitted recipes per episode, which the guys bravely cooked and sampled on the air. At the end of each show, just like Julia Child, they sat down at the table for the tasting… and decided whose recipe had come off worse.

Now, Cookin’ Cheap was not for tenderfoots–if you couldn’t handle ingredient lists that included whole sticks of margarine and self-rising flour, or bring yourself to shop in one of the ordinary supermarket chains that had never heard of organic anything (this was the South in the ’80s), you would have done better not to watch. But if down-home cooking delivered with a touch of schadenfreude was your thing, it was a great little show.

Unfortunately, my favorite early episode doesn’t seem to be available anywhere on the ‘net. But the clip above, the Cookin’ Cheap 2.0 (YouTube) version of about a third of Episode #609, will give you some idea. (see copyright disclaimer below…)

In my actual favorite episode, Bly and Johnson hit their personal limit with a recipe that had them both making faces and apologizing to the audience that “there’s cheap… and then there’s too cheap.”

The dish in question was “Lentils ‘n’ Prunes” (you can guess the entire ingredient list). And it was indeed cheap. Unfortunately lentils, though incredibly cheap and nutritious, cook up kind of gray, especially on a semi-rural public TV station with early-’80s (i.e., yellow-ocher) set lighting. Trust me when I say the addition of mashed prunes did nothing for them aesthetically or otherwise. How on earth could they have put this on the air?

Of course, these guys didn’t have to take the blame for the recipe, and it was great entertainment to see some of the strange things your neighbors might be cooking at home and writing in to the show about with high hopes of being selected. I understand the Food Network is now copying Bly and Johnson’s reality-cooking formula shamelessly for the fall lineup…

[Actually, I didn’t realize the show had such a good run, but it started locally in 1981 and only ended its nationally syndicated run in 2002. Johnson passed away a few years before the end, but he managed to publish the Cookin’ Cheap Cookbook in 1988. Bly kept the show going with Johnson’s friend and successor Doug Patterson and has since made a couple of rescued episodes available on DVD. And the show still has fans on YouTube and — surprisingly just this March–in the New York Times.

Disclaimer: YouTube removed the first clip I linked to for copyright violation–so my apologies to Bly; the intent in linking here isn’t to rip anyone off but to highlight a too-little-known show. Because the original Roanoke station managers were too shortsighted to save the episodes (they apparently trashed them!), Bly was only able to rescue a couple of episodes for the DVD, and I think some of the others posted at this point were recorded at home from TV.]

Ah, well. Times change, horizons broaden, and we aim to challenge our palates in a sophisticated world beat kind of way even with limited cash and ingredients. The wolf may be at the door, we may be on the rice and beans yet again to make up for unreimbursed conference travel, but we are determined to do it in style–that means Indian, Moroccan, Mediterranean–French? Well, at least by not mixing plain lentils and prunes together in a hideous gray mash.

…I’m not actually sure how the French feel about lentils with prunes, or what they’d do about it if you suggested it. But I have a huge bowl of cooked lentils to deal with from a 1-lb. bag at $1.29. And a 1-lb. bag of non-sorbate pitted prunes at $2.99. Less than $5 total. And a number of ideas about how to deal with each of them, separately or together. Enough ideas that I’m probably going to have to split this post so it doesn’t turn into War and Prunes.

This, I think, is going to become my How to Cook a Wolf Challenge, 21st Century Edition.

Because I have fantasies (not many, and relatively tame though entertaining) of the Iron Chef America and Top Chef hosts announcing, for the next quickfire competition, a challenge to find three or four good ways to combine lentils and prunes in dishes where they’re the main ingredients and for which the total bill for the tasting menu comes to something like $10, including spices (prorated as used…) Can’t you just see the contestants’ faces? Take a moment to enjoy their obvious panic. The restaurant industry hasn’t trained them for this.

But seriously. What was actually behind this Cookin’ Cheap dealbreaker, other than the obvious frugality factor plus the even more obvious digestive humor that follows prunes and lentils wherever they roam?

Is there any way on earth that prunes and lentils could really go together?

Well…yes, as a matter of fact. You don’t run across prune and lentil recipes everyday, but good-tasting and intriguing variations, or at least the components of them, exist in a number of respected cuisines around the globe. Even French. For very little more than it cost the Cookin’ Cheap guys, Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, DASH Diet, Dips, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, history, movies, Odd food, Oddities, Revised recipes, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: Cookin' Cheap, cooking shows, frugality, Iron Chef, Laban Johnson, Larry Bly, lentils, prunes, Top Chef, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Prunes, Lentils, and “Cookin’ Cheap”

Rethinking everything

Posted on February 21, 2010 by DebbieN

I’ve been away from my desk, my notebooks, this blog for two weeks now. I never expected to be–it’s become a weekly adventure to seek out new topics in food, food politics, nutrition, and alternate methods for cooking real food faster. And then last week my daughter was diagnosed with Type I diabetes.

Diabetes is one hell of a verdict when you think your kid is just growing, and then just has a simple stomach virus, and it turns out to be neither of those things. It was also one of those strange fairytale paradoxes by which a cursed or poisoned feather turns out to save the princess in rags. She’d come home from school three weeks ago with what seemed like a routine stomach bug, but it wasn’t. Instead of a bit of fever, antsy impatience at having to rest and then bouncing back, she was cool, sleeping around the clock, drinking a lot even when she couldn’t stand to eat, and losing weight fast. Taking her back to the doctor the second week, we were thinking anemia, mono–afraid to think anything worse. Thank god our doctor threw in a glucose test along with the usual suspects. By afternoon he’d called and told us to get her down to the ER.

A night in the hospital is no picnic, even if all they’re doing to your kid is putting her on an i.v. and pricking her fingers with a lancet for testing once in a while. The second night is no fun either–everything the doctors have been telling you goes in one ear and slides right out the other as you wonder what your kid will ever be able to do normally again, and how much you’ll have to worry for her the rest of her life, and how you’re going to keep from laying those worries on her. And yet–at some point in the middle of the second night, unable to sleep much between nurse interruptions–I started to realize my daughter’s legs and arms and face were already filling back out, and in fact she had spent a good part of the second day sitting up reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for all she was worth, reading me her favorite bits in a silly voice and cackling every once in a while. More energy than I’d seen in three weeks. Whatever they’d done to lower her sugars and balance her electrolytes again was really working. She was reappearing before my eyes. I had no idea how to feel anymore except shocked, grateful and slightly absurd.

Furthermore, every time the orderly came by to pick up a menu or leave a meal, my daughter tucked into the food as though it had been catered by Daniel Boulud. (Of course, most of the meals featured meat, which she loves but I don’t make very often.) It is fairly humiliating to have your kid announce that the hospital meals are better than those at home…

Then she started talking about which kinds of potatoes she likes or doesn’t, whether and how soon she can have pizza, how will she ever be able to go to a birthday party and stand not having cake or candy or ice cream without having to figure out the carbs and the insulin beforehand, what about Valentine’s Day and on and on. Somehow oatmeal raisin cookies became the benchmark of whether she was going to be able to eat like a person or not–and she hasn’t even had a taste for them in at least six months.

The shrinkage, the re-blossoming, and the total fixation on treats and sweets, all within a few days in a hospital bed–suddenly Charlie Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Desserts, Eating out, Grains, kid food, nutrition, Odd food, Pasta, Revised recipes | Tagged: artificial sweeteners, baking, carb counting, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, juvenile diabetes, NutraSweet, Roald Dahl, Splenda, sugar substitutes, Type I diabetes | Comments Off on Rethinking everything

Cutting the salt in Indian cuisine

Posted on December 23, 2009 by DebbieN

Last week I got a Chanukah package in the mail from my sister. In it was India with Passion: Modern Regional Home Food by Manju Malhi, a British food writer with a popular UK cooking show, Simply Indian, on home-style cooking. One of my sister’s food-savvy friends had tried out the recipes and raved about it.

Indian food is becoming more popular in America and non-Indians like me are finally getting to taste a broader variety of regional cuisines (though I’ve yet to get down to Artesia, the “Little India” section of west LA, and really dig in). But learning to cook these dishes at home is another matter.

Yamuna Devi, Maddhur Jaffrey, and Julie Sahni were the first major Indian cookbook authors in the U.S. But their classic books and most of the ones published since then don’t give you a way to make sense of the laundry lists of spices given for each recipe. They give a rote answer as to why Indian cooks don’t use the standard yellow jar of generic curry powder that the supermarkets stock, but there’s no serious discussion on the balance of flavorings and how to vary it within a meal for any one particular regional cuisine. And perhaps there really is no great way to explain it. You really have to read through the book and see how the spices and proportions change from one dish to another–something most Western readers aren’t used to noticing.

If I had my wish, I’d want general notes like “red lentil dal is better with twice as much cumin as coriander seed and a fair amount of both–we’re talking teaspoons to a tablespoon for 6 portions–but palak paneer should have much less of both–half-teaspoons– in equal amounts and include cardamom–preferably the black smoky kind–as the signature ingredient.” I want to know why you have onions cooked down to a paste in one dish but no garlic, and in another use fennel instead of cumin. What’s essential and what can I leave out if I don’t have it in the house? How can I vary the dish with the vegetables or beans that I have on hand at the moment and still have it come out tasting good? And what’s authentic and what’s modern?

A crop of recent cookbooks published in the US and UK attempt to deal with these problems a little more systematically–sometimes more for recent Indian emigrés and students than for the larger non-Indian community. Monica Bhide has simplified the spice lists in her recipes–sometimes to the point where you wonder if the food bears any resemblance to the original. Suvir Saran, lauded by Mark Bittman and the first Indian restaurant chef to join the American name-brand-chef pantheon, has also simplified ingredients lists and incorporated some American ingredients–like ketchup–with reasonable reasons (ketchup’s origins lie in British-controlled India of a century or so ago). And cooking teacher Raghavan Iyer has just come out this year with a big, bright paperback tome, 660 Curries, which logically ought to be more than you could or would want to cook in a couple of years.

One new trend is an attempt to make Indian food heart-healthier by cutting down on saturated fats, substituting unsaturated vegetable oil for ghee and tofu for paneer cheese. What they haven’t yet done, and probably should, is cut back the salt as well. (So should everybody else, of course.)

Nearly every Indian cookbook I’ve ever seen uses screamingly high salt–rarely less than a teaspoon for a dish that serves 4-6, often a tablespoon or even more. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, nutrition, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cookbooks, Indian food, Indian home cooking, Indian regional cuisine, Julie Sahni, low sodium, low-salt cooking, Maddhur Jaffrey, Manju Malhi, Raghavan Iyer, slow food, Suvir Saran, vegetarian recipes, Yamuna Devi | Comments Off on Cutting the salt in Indian cuisine

Lentil Stew with…Pineapple?

Posted on December 6, 2009 by DebbieN

Fresh pineapples are just coming on the market at a good price this week or so–$2 or $3 apiece. Meanwhile, tomatoes are…well, let’s say they’re not at their finest in December. So, some added incentive for trying something new.

Pineapple is the last thing that belongs in anything subtle or savory–or is it? Hawaiian pizza is practically a classic by now, despite the culinary clash of a pineapple-ham topping on the one hand and garlicky tomato sauce, mozzarella and oregano on the other. Of course, that (and all other glazed pineapple/pork product classics) seems more brash than subtle.

Given the usual culinary partners–ham, chicken, cottage cheese, spam and more spam–you’d think the rule for making pineapple work in something savory would be that the other main item has to be pretty salty to stand up to all that acidic tropical sweetness. But that’s not the only way to deal with it. Good thing too, since ham, ham, spam and ham are off my grocery list. (So’s spam.)

This curried lentil and vegetable stew, which I’ve based on a dish from my much-missed Lebanese former-restaurant-turned-lunch-spot, takes advantage of pineapple’s tang while mellowing out its jarring sweetness. It took me a couple of tries to achieve the taste I remembered from the restaurant, but I think this version works pretty well, even though it contains no salt at all.

Depending on the sweetness of your pineapple, you may need more or less to balance the flavors. The pineapple should be a subtle but surprising bite among the other vegetables and the rich lentil base. Don’t be afraid to tinker with the (rather loose) amounts of the various ingredients and taste as you go.

Curried Lentil Stew with Pineapple

3-4 c. fully cooked green/brown lentils or half a pound dry (see step 1)
1 T. curry powder
1/2 t. ground cumin
1/2 t. ground coriander seed if you have it
1/2 t. brown mustard seeds if you have them
2 medium onions, chopped
1-2 medium tomatoes if you have them
juice of a lemon–plus another half to adjust taste as needed
2 large or one really fat clove garlic, minced/mashed/grated
2-3 half-inch rounds of fresh unsweetened pineapple in smallish chunks
2-3 big carrots, peeled and chopped
2-3 stalks celery, chopped
a good glug of dry red wine, cheap but decent, about 1/4 c.
olive oil

1. To cook the lentils in case you haven’t, wash and pick over half a pound of green/brown lentils and put them in a big pyrex bowl (2.5 qt/l) with enough water to cover by 2 inches. Put a microwaveable lid or dinner plate on top and microwave on HIGH for 7-8 minutes. Let sit in the closed oven another 20-30 minutes to soak up, add more water if there’s less than an inch above the lentils, then microwave again for another 7-8 minutes. Wait another 10-15 minutes and test for doneness. The lentils should be soft.

2. Meanwhile, sauté one of the onions with the spices in a little olive oil for a few minutes, add the chopped tomato and half the garlic and cook a few minutes, adding a drizzle of water if it starts to dry out.

3. When the lentils are done, pour them in with some of the cooking water, stir up, heat, and add the lemon juice and the pineapple. Cook a few more minutes until it starts to thicken.

3. Put the cooked lentils back into the pyrex bowl, add the remaining vegetables and the rest of the garlic, a little water, maybe a little more lemon juice, the wine, and a drizzle of olive oil. Cover at least partway (maybe with a small gap to let alcohol from the wine boil off) and microwave 5 minutes more or until the vegetables are tender.

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, frugality, fruits, Vegetabalia | Tagged: curry, DASH Diet, frugal living, Lebanese food, lentil stew, low-salt cooking, pineapple, recipes, slow food, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Lentil Stew with…Pineapple?

Thanksgiving Vegetariots, or, How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Won’t Eat the Meat?

Posted on November 17, 2009 by DebbieN

Newspapers all over the country are sweating to include vegetarian main dishes in their annual Thanksgiving features. But they’re not doing all that well. This week the LA Times food section proudly listed a whole bunch of Thanksgiving vegetable side dishes as if to say, “See how much there is for you vegetarians to eat without your hostess making any changes just for your special status?” Only, as readers quickly pointed out, 1) none of the dishes contained any noticeable protein, 2) most of them were overloaded with butter and salt and 3) two of them contained chicken broth or pancetta. Someone had forgotten to re-edit them for a vegetarian audience.

I pick on my local paper because we’re talking Los Angeles, with great produce available all year round and a very large vegetarian population–and a lot of ethnic groups with significant roles for vegetarian dishes in their traditional cuisines. We have less excuse for this kind of simple ignorance than most cities.

But it isn’t simple ignorance. Running very close to the surface of most food publications’ features on vegetarian fare at the big showdown holidays is a distinct tone of hysteria. How can anyone not want to eat meat? Nothing tastes like turkey, and nothing sells like it either! We don’t know anything about vegetarian proteins! they panic. Do vegetarians eat Durkee Fried Onions or Empress Yams? Do they eat marshmallows? They don’t even like pancetta! What’s wrong with them?

These are home questions for newspapers and food mags, because you know the real survival question is, “How are we going to sell advertising for chickpeas and lentils, for chrissakes?” That probably goes double or more for food shows on tv. If they don’t advertise, they don’t stay on the air.

It’s not like tofu has a big marketing presence in the nation’s newspapers or brand recognition outside of local markets. There are only so many brushed-steel and cherrywood designer kitchens anyone is willing to buy in a down economy, especially once they discover how badly brushed steel shows fingerprints. And cooking mags don’t get a lot of help from PepsiCo and CocaCola, Ralston-Purina or the many cigarette and pharmaceutical companies.

What’s left? Bacon, turkey, and processed food companies featuring starches and microwaveable tv dinners. This might not be such a problem for food pubs if they’d found a way to keep their features a little more independent of their ad base. Bacon is showing up these days as suddenly gourmet in so many inappropriate dishes–ice cream? chocolate bars? popcorn?–precisely because it’s relatively inexpensive, widely available in supermarkets, and sold by a few recognizable national namebrand companies that still advertise reliably in a down market. Young food bloggers who go for it think it’s something new and daring, but you have to wonder whether they realize how hard the commercial food media are pushing it and why.

In any case, the November and December issues or episodes really need to push meat for all they’re worth because American bacon is basically the same everywhere and straight-up turkey isn’t all that popular the rest of the year, and the companies know it. Meanwhile, vegetarianism in all its variations, and with a growing political undercurrent, is gaining ground among younger Americans, or at least those not too obsessed with bacon. What to do?

Apparently the answer is, panic and get mad at the vegetarians for wanting non-meat dishes that are worth something, but try hard not to admit it in front of the camera. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Dairy, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, Grains, Vegetabalia | Tagged: dairy dishes, food ads, food magazines, Thanksgiving recipes, Top Chef, vegetarian cooking, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Thanksgiving Vegetariots, or, How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Won’t Eat the Meat?

Pack your own lunch

Posted on September 5, 2009 by DebbieN

It’s almost time to head back to school, and my daughter’s finally old enough to pack her own lunch. Not that she wasn’t actually old enough last year. But now she wants to.

When I was nine, I’d been making my own school lunches for at least a year, if only to save my sandwiches from my mother’s clutches and keep her from adding butter to the jam–something that did, and still does, make me absolutely nauseous. Emergency grossout prevention is the mother of lunch-making independence.

As many of my friends with same-age kids do, I worry that I haven’t been pushing my daughter hard enough toward independence by having her fix her own lunch. Is it too late to impart the mysteries of the toaster oven? But all is not lost–the other morning she figured out how to cut up her own apples (she has braces and our orthodontist “charges extra for stupidity-related bracket repairs”). She doesn’t appear to have lost any fingers. So we’re good to go!

Which is fortunate because lately I’ve been seeing a slew of new books on how to pack your kid’s lunch–they range from “here are all the vegan-friendly brand-names that look just like everyone else’s school lunch, only cooler” to Alice Waters insisting that the first step is growing your own school garden (which I’m actually in favor of, but not if it means waiting 6-8 weeks for your lunch to germinate).

Few of these fabulously sophisticated new books even consider the things I took to school every day as a kid–peanut butter and jelly, apple, carrots and celery. Or peanut butter and jelly, orange, carrots and celery. My mother was dull. My sister and I had no cool foods like Ho-Hos or Cheetos to distract us, and we usually ate at least some of the vegetables and the apple. Actually, so did most of the other kids in our school. It was that or suffer the cafeteria kale. And almost no one was fat. I’d like to point that out.

Hip mamas today (mostly those still in their 30s) look horrified at my daughter’s lunches because out there in hipland PBJ on whole wheat is so…so ’70s. It doesn’t contain any of the seventy-two essential nutritional supplement buzzwords (like selenium and phytoestrogens and antioxidant) they’re convinced all healthy food has to have (well, it’s true you have to have those things on the label to compete in the ads). And it has fat. And sugar!

But you know what? A decent peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat is a lot better deal nutritionally than most of the prepackaged, often self-righteously labeled, crap the hip kids bring to school these days. Much of it is along the lines of Kraft Foods’ “Lunchables”–a processed meat and cheese cracker kind of thing packed with some ersatz juice and faky side items like jello and candies (not even, as I check belatedly, a tiny tin of applesauce–and check out the Lunchables nutrition and ingredient stats!). But you know how popular these things are–because they’re a kit. Buy five boxes, throw one in your kid’s backpack each day. They stack neatly in the pantry.

Very few of these children ever bring a substantial serving of fresh vegetables or actual fruit–not even apples. Those require washing, peeling–maybe even cutting up. And sometimes the apples turn a little brown on the cut sides. Organic fair-trade labeling aside, any remotely fruit-like substances in the hip-kids’ lunch bags arrive in a rectangular cardboard box with a plastic overwrap, a plastic straw attached, and a sanitized-for-your-protection seal. No wonder they stare.

Anatomy of a PBJ:

Straight-up peanuts-only butter (no salt, no sugars, no mono- and diglycerides, no emulsifiers or BHT or “natural flavoring” or any of the rest of it) has about 16 grams of fat per 2 T (1 oz) serving. True. Absolutely true. But it’s not the same as the heart-stopping blubber you find on a piece of meat, so stop shrieking. Most of the oil in natural peanut butter is polyunsaturated (the “good fat” kind of fat). And it separates (because of the lack of fakery and emulsifiers) so you can pour off a good bit of it if you want to when you first open the jar.

Furthermore, the same peanuts-only peanut butter contains 8 g protein, 3 g fiber, almost no sodium, and about 210 mg potassium. And a little iron. It’s a pretty good deal for a kid’s lunch item at about 200 calories.

Two slices of whole wheat bread without too much sodium or garbage ingredients gives you another 200 calories–we’re up to 400, but only 3 g. saturated fat, another 3-7 g fiber, another 4-6 g protein, and with a little care preferably less than 400 mg sodium (all from the bread). Add a spoonful of all-fruit jam with 8 g sugar, at about 35 calories, and you have something that will get your kid through school without tears or big sugar highs and lows.

It doesn’t have big vitamin- and calcium-fortified labeling. It doesn’t have a label. It’s not supposed to do it all on its own. Your kid will eat about half, maybe the whole thing if he or she is growing fast or running around a lot that week. But he or she will get the vitamins and calcium from the other things in the lunchbox–some crunchy raw vegetables and an apple or orange and a thermos or carton of plain unsweetened milk. That’s it and that’s enough.

Do your kid a huge favor and leave out all the chips, chocolate, go-gurt (real milk-and-cultures yogurt is ok, not the fake tapioca- and gelatin-stretched stuff), cookies, jello, sorta-applesauce, and fluorescent boxes of juice. School is hard enough without sugar crashes or cavities, and they don’t need any of it to have a good day.

Oh yeah. And for crying out loud, please skip the sushi. Your kid does NOT need to be that hip in the school cafeteria. Or that sick, if the sushi doesn’t stay cold enough.

(Why yes, I live in Southern California. What gave it away?)

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, fruits, kid food, Vegetabalia | Tagged: brown bag lunches, childhood nutrition, fruits, healthy kids, kid food, Lunchables, nutrition, PBJ, peanut butter, school lunch, vegan, vegetables, vegetarian | Comments Off on Pack your own lunch

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New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

The Hummus Debate

Prunes and Lentils III: The Lentil Variations

Prunes and Lentils II: Prune Sauces for Savory Dishes

Prunes, Lentils, and “Cookin’ Cheap”

Rethinking everything

Cutting the salt in Indian cuisine

Lentil Stew with…Pineapple?

Thanksgiving Vegetariots, or, How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Won’t Eat the Meat?

Pack your own lunch

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