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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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Food as Barometer

Posted on October 7, 2009 by DebbieN

The past week has seen a number of shock waves go through the food world.

Gourmet magazine’s announced closing yesterday is the latest and the one with the best PR. Gourmet‘s editor, Ruth Reichl, has turned what was once the flagship publication of foodie-ism into something more like Vogue for food–high-gloss, decorator restaurant food (the focus of her previous career) with recipes that ranged from routine to fanciful, from decadent but enticing to over-the-top, impractical, even wasteful and ridiculous, particularly in the last couple of years. A few memorable examples of the latter–lamb cooked with a stewing sauce that included something like a cup of whole coffee beans in an ingredient list some 20 or so items long, a chicken liver paté with a ton of added butter to simulate foie gras when that dish was outlawed in Chicago, and a chocolate and sesame butter tart with so many elaborate steps and so much extra fat in each layer–with nearly obvious clashes of flavor–you could practically choke.

Reichl, whose memoirs I have nonetheless enjoyed a great deal, seems to have been in on the official food world’s migration to recipe titles–and restaurant menu listings–so long they owe more to Proust, or perhaps Balzac, than to James Beard. Then again, Proust called madeleines madeleines, not “little ridged pure butter genoise microcakes with microplaned lime rind, baked in the shape of elongated shallow clamshells”. Goodness knows what today’s foodie superstar chefs would come up with for a title.

And yet Gourmet, with its glossy ads for show kitchens and olive oils and edible vacations in exotic locales, has tried to broaden readers’ ideas and ideals on occasion, and that’s Reichl’s influence too. If the cover one month showed coveted seating at a prestigious Paris restaurant, the tablecloth and glassware sternly hushed in preparation for the pre-theater crowd, or the cliffside view of an Italian trattoria table with a glass bowl in the foreground brimming voluptuously with prawns, greens, oysters and a coral-hued or purplish octopus, other issues sent staff into the mountainous inner reaches of China to report on the poverty and generosity of villagers there.

It’s hard to imagine how Reichl and her staff pictured reconciling the ultra-affluent with the world-conscious, and perhaps their attempts failed to convince either luxe advertisers or Condé Nast this year in particular. But I can see how Gourmet‘s underlying spirit of foodie-ism has led to the explosion of adventurous, hands-on food blogs of a younger working generation as they discover both real food and the desire to learn to cook it.

But Gourmet isn’t the most important food barometer, particularly because it represents a shrinking target audience at the top of the food chain, as it were. Rumbles farther down the scale have been quieter but with any luck perhaps one hopeful sign will be more lasting and more influential.

Last Thursday, the L.A. Times reported that the federal WIC  (Women, Infants and Children) food supplement program will now allow participants to spend their vouchers on fresh produce and whole grains. The allowance isn’t really big– $6/month per eligible child, $8 per pregnant woman or mother of a child under 5, and $10 per nursing mother, or about $14/month on average for a typical family, but it’s a start.

More promising is that the changes would push stores that want to accept WIC vouchers to stock fresh produce and whole grains. That might put at least modest quantities of decent foods within reach in lots of inner city neighborhoods, and it means farmers’ markets can also start qualifying to accept vouchers.

In the Los Angeles area and Orange County, the WIC program is especially important–out of more than 12 million people, something like 316,000 low-income people are enrolled in WIC. More than 8 million people are enrolled nationwide at a cost of slightly under $7 billion per year, with vouchers of about $60 total per family per month. Less than $1000 per family per year even counting the administrative costs of the program. It makes the Food Stamp program seem generous by comparison.

The new shift toward allowing fruits, vegetables, and whole grains under WIC isn’t adding anything to the total Congress allots–the cost for these vouchers has been taken from some of the dairy and juice allowance. But local WIC officers are still grateful and think it’ll make a big difference to their clients, some of whose children have never tasted fresh broccoli.

It’s a far cry from the fuss over the blight on homegrown heirloom tomatoes in the northeastern states this summer.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, frugality, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Food as Barometer

Spaghetti Squash Too Many Ways

Posted on September 30, 2009 by DebbieN
Just half of a microwaved spaghetti squash makes 5 or 6 cups

Just half of a microwaved spaghetti squash makes 5 or 6 cups!

This week my local Trader Joe’s had crates of beautiful–and hefty–spaghetti and butternut squash for less than $2 apiece–on the order of 30 to 50 cents/lb. So of course I got two of each and wobbled out of the store unsure which bag was pulling me down further. And then came the task of cooking them.

One spaghetti squash–a good-sized 5-6 lb. beast–will feed a lot more people than you’d think. It’s got some serious advantages over standard pasta: more fiber, no sodium, some vitamin A and potassium, perhaps fewer calories and carbohydrates per ounce. And it’s incredibly versatile. And you can cook it in the microwave in about 10 minutes rather than spend an hour baking it and heating up the house.

But there’s one big disadvantage–if you cook the whole thing, you have to eat the whole thing. Cooked spaghetti squash doesn’t hold up in the freezer–the strings go flat and shrivelly. And reheating too long can make it wilt as well. So can very acidic dressings.

So the choices are (for a small, moderately but only moderately tolerant family unit):

  • Cook half at a time and store the other half raw and wrapped in the fridge for a few days
  • Cook both halves, use one right away, and store the other half in the fridge for a few days, either wrapped in its shell or else scooped out into a container  (recommended)
  • Give the other half to a friend–but not too good a friend…
  • Cook it all and make it for a big potluck. Maybe people will think it’s innovative and exotic…depends on what you do with it (I don’t so much recommend marinara for this if you’re looking to impress–maybe a peanut-curry sauce or an Alfredo-style sauce with lemon peel, or something involving oyster mushrooms)
  • Cook it all and serve it a couple of different ways over the course of the week
  • Make a couple of the variations ones that taste good cold and eat the leftovers for lunch (recommended)

One important tip (learned the hard way):

The strands grow crosswise inside the spaghetti squash, not lengthwise. If you cut the squash in half the way you would a watermelon, you’ll be cutting the strands into shorter bits–not what you want. Cut the spaghetti squash in half across the middle of the SHORT side, NOT from the stem to the flower end.

If you have kids, let them count the seeds in each half of the squash–it’s a good lesson in plant survival strategies. My daughter and I counted about 80-90 seeds per half and decided to wash, dry and save them for her school’s garden. At this rate, they’ll have spaghetti squash for several years. Note of caution: out of 10 that we thought had been lost down the sink but actually got caught in the drainer, a full 9 germinated, so be careful what you wish for… even commercially grown, these things are very, very determined. But we’re not ready to name any of them “Audrey II”–yet. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Spaghetti Squash Too Many Ways

Honeycake for a Sweet New Year

Posted on September 18, 2009 by DebbieN

Rosh Hashanah starts this evening and we need a honeycake–it’s traditional, plus I like it. Right. But traditional recipes call for boiling the honey with strong coffee (which takes a while), cooling it (which takes even longer), triple-sifting flour and baking soda and sugar and spices of various kinds, and then alternating between adding dry stuff and the honey-coffee mixture to some beaten eggs and oil. This is much more of a pain than it sounds in so few words. Picture wax paper and bowls all over the counter and the kitchen table, and a huge stack of stuff to clean afterward. All for one or two loaves of what’s essentially a rich gingerbread.

One year I got smart–I think it was the year I bought both Silver Palate cookbooks and found their gingerbread recipe, which is incredibly simple and calls for molasses–surely it would work with honey? And it does.

Then I took things a step farther–having made a bunch of box-mix cakes in the era when Duncan Hines started recommending applesauce instead of oil for a lower-calorie cake, I knew that worked pretty well, and it does here too.

Then I really got weird and microwaved the cake–you can, and it works, but my daughter and her friend are doing it this afternoon as a project (I’m tarping the entire dining table and floor) so this year I’m sticking with tradition. Even though the temperatures are back up in the low 90s. Continue reading →

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Microwave tricks–When the peach doesn’t ripen

Posted on September 16, 2009 by DebbieN

What if you’re stuck with supermarket peaches or nectarines that looked good, were on an incredible discount, smelled like they had potential if you left them out on a counter for a couple of days, and then when you did, they somehow never really ripened? Just turned mushy or the texture of a pale yellow sponge inside, with a lackluster taste to match, and developed an ugly, gelatinous brown layer near the pit? And to make it worse, you’d enthusiastically bought five or more?

Spongy peaches in need of rescue

Spongy peaches in need of rescue

I’ve discovered–the hard way–that all is not lost. As long as they’re only blah, not actually mildewed or spoiled, even failed peaches like these can be rescued and put to work.

Sugaring before microwaving p

Sugaring lightly before microwaving

Sugaring fruit and letting it stand is an age-old trick for bringing out fuller flavor–strawberries are the classic, but it works for peaches and nectarines too. It wasn’t enough on its own to make the peaches edible raw, but I figured if I nuked them the flavor might come up in the cooking, and the texture might be fixed too. So I tried it a couple of ways, one just the peaches on their own, and two other versions mixed with other more flavorful fruit.

[update ~ 2017: I have tweaked the raw peach method here]

Microwave Peach (or Nectarine) Compote or Jam

The first thing to do is wash the peaches well and cut as much usable flesh off the pit as possible. Take a small sliver and taste it–if it’s just bland or spongy but still has at least a tinge of fruit flavor, you can use it.

Chop up the peaches and put them in a pyrex bowl. Leave the skins on–this is where at least some of the flavor is going to come from. Sprinkle on a few spoonfuls of sugar and squeeze some lemon juice over them. Cover the bowl with a plate and microwave on high for a few minutes (3-4 min in a ~1100W oven). When you uncover the bowl, the fragrance should start coming up and the pieces will have turned translucent and produced a bit of pinkish-bronze juice. You can taste and see if that’s good enough for you, or cook another minute or so, perhaps with a sprinkle of cinnamon (very good) and/or a thin slice of fresh ginger. Maybe a star anise pod or a couple of cloves if you’re doing this as a compote and feeling really food glam that day, but I didn’t try these myself, so I can’t vouch for them. Cool, chill, and serve with yogurt or ice cream.

For jam, mash the peaches with a fork before the final minute in the microwave. Once it’s cooled, the mixture will thicken and the cinnamon and/or ginger will play off the peach flavor for a good chunky jam.

Microwave peach compote

Microwave peach compote

Mixed-Fruit Compote or Jam

The second compote/jam strategy calls for mixing the fresh peach or nectarine chunks with another fruit before microwaving. I have two  suggestions here that turned out reasonably successful–one is a handful of chopped dried apricots that have soaked up for about 1/2 hour in boiling water or orange juice, and the second choice, a bit odd perhaps, is sliced strawberries mixed in with the peach chunks.

In both cases I went extremely easy on sugar compared to what’s called for in traditional jam-making.  I wasn’t making a lot, it was going straight into the fridge and I was going to use it quickly. Plus I’d pretty much always rather eat a jam that’s more fruit and less sticky stuff. I know, I know, technically that makes it a “fruit spread” rather than proper jam, but do I care?

For the mixed jam with dried/soaked apricots, I microwaved a handful–15 or so–chopped apricots in water to cover for 2 minutes and let stand covered for half an hour, then put them in the food processor with large raw peach chunks — in my case, the peach was oversized, like a softball, so maybe two normal tennis-ball-sized ones would be about right–and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and pulsed them just enough to blend fairly well without losing all the texture. Then I squeezed lemon juice on the mixture and poured it back into the pyrex bowl to microwave a few minutes as above. I poured the hot mixture into a very clean hot 1-lb jam jar and screwed down the lid–the lid did suck in as it cooled, but I wasn’t counting on that so I kept it in the fridge and ate it over the next week or so.

Another peach I cut up and microwaved straight with some strawberry slices mixed in because they were the last ones in the pint. Again I don’t think I added more than a tablespoonful or two of sugar and a squeeze of lemon, but what happened was the strawberries, instead of going slimy, gave the warm compote a baked comfort-food kind of taste that I hadn’t expected and looked nicer as well. I’d been thinking cooked strawberries would look as bad as they do in strawberry jam, but they didn’t, and without too much sugar (or corn syrup, in the commercial jams I hate) they kept some of their bright flavor too.

None of these ideas is as satisfying as biting into a perfectly ripe, exceedingly juicy peach (or nectarine) at the height of summer, but all of them are pretty good in their own right, they don’t take long, and they’re handy saves for fruit that turns out to be less than you expected.

Filed under: cooking, frugality, fruits, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Microwave tricks–When the peach doesn’t ripen

Canteloupe Ice or, I Conquer my Fridge

Posted on September 15, 2009 by DebbieN

canteloupe-3

Don’t exactly know what to call this–it’s something between a sorbet and a granita, and it’s got only three ingredients–an extremely ripe canteloupe (no spoilage though) that had been sitting in my fridge for more than a week, the juice of a fairly large lime, and roughly chopped leaves from a sprig of rosemary. I scrubbed the canteloupe before cutting into it (old lab habits and new salmonella warnings combined, I guess), seeded it and puréed the flesh with the lime juice and rosemary in my food processor until it seemed pretty well smooth, then packed it into a 2-quart microwave container with a lid and still-froze it. I guess if I thawed it enough to break it back into chunks, I could regrind it finer in the food processor–I’ve done it with other still-frozen ices, but this time I didn’t bother. It did need thawing in the microwave to be able to scoop it out for serving–about 2 minutes on defrost.

That’s it. So it’s roughly 97 percent canteloupe with about 2 percent juice of a lime and 1 percent or less chopped fresh rosemary leaves. Can I say it’s made with 100% real fruit, then? No fake fruit involved (unless it was a franken-canteloupe–is that the northern equivalent to the chupacabras? It’s the right color for a new halloween monster, anyway)

And may I register a complaint about the interloper spelling that seems to have taken over since my youth–cantaloupe isn’t the same. It just isn’t.

But the canteloupe ice is nothing to complain about. Ginger would certainly also be good in place of the rosemary. Next year, maybe.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Desserts, fruits | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Canteloupe Ice or, I Conquer my Fridge

A Bowl of Dough in a Book

Posted on September 14, 2009 by DebbieN

For anyone who’s read my previous post, A Bowl of Dough in the Fridge, a quick recommendation:

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François, is gaining a big following among people who’ve tried out the recipes. This bread book, developed by an avid home baker and a professional pastry chef, uses the same basic strategy I do, but they’ve worked out quite a number of variations on a couple of master recipes, and they’ve come out with a general formula that works pretty well.

They have a basic white boule with a crunchy crust–something to shape a variety of classic ways, French through Italian, with or without olives or olive oil. They have several whole wheat and pumpernickel and rye versions with a thinner shiny crackled crust. They have challah AND brioche, and they have classic bagels AND Montreal sweet bagels. And they have chocolate babka. And they have demonstration photos and tips at the right points in the recipes to be helpful.

Among the differences between their basic white boule recipe and my typical  dough are much more yeast for the amount of flour and water–they use a packet and a half for 6 cups of flour and 3 of water–and a lot more salt as well–a tablespoon and a half. The initial rise is faster–about 2 hours instead of 5 or so–but I’m not sure what the true effect of the salt is other than taste and reflexive habit–François is CIA-trained, and that school tends to emphasize salt, judging from the chefs who’ve graduated from there and gotten into print.

The other factor that’s different is they don’t call for kneading at all–once you’ve stirred the flour into the liquids and everything’s more or less uniform, that part’s done. Rise and chill.

That’s solid enough for the chewy hard-crusted no-knead bread style of bread, but will it work for challah, which usually calls for extensive kneading to develop the classic long feathery crumb? Inquiring minds want to know.

So I’m going to try their white boule and their challah (though here I’ll cut the salt back for my own taste) and let you know how it goes. I’m looking forward especially to see if the challah crumb can really be achieved without the 10-minute knead and multiple rises.

Filed under: books, breads, cooking, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Bowl of Dough in a Book

Fruit + Herbs = ?

Posted on September 11, 2009 by DebbieN

Along the lines of my taste experiments in the last post, I wanted to share a couple of fruit-and-herb combinations I’ve come up with over the years. I hesitate to call them recipes, but they’re good, fast, and unusual. They make refreshing side dishes, especially for a light meal, because they’re not too sweet and they play the sweetness and sometimes tartness of the fruit against something woody, green, spicy or aromatic.

Food glam mags show a host of grilled peaches and nectarines, ditto salsas, and sometimes include thyme and fresh black pepper and sage and other herbs.

I should also mention I just finished drooling my way through David Tanis’s A Platter of Figs, which has a lot of very simple, good-looking fruit desserts and accompaniments (including roasted fresh figs with thyme). I didn’t lick any of the pictures (it was a library book, after all) but it’s really the recipe instructions that appeal to me–simple and informal, with interesting and helpful notes on what seem to be missing steps in other chefs’ cookbooks. My favorite example: steam or parcook fennel bulb slices before you grill them. Makes perfect sense and explains why so many upscale restaurants serve grilled fennel that’s tough and stringy and hard to get through without landing it on your blouse.

But to get to the point–fruit+herbs=intrigue.

So why not? Here are a few of mine.

Mango with Fresh Basil

I hate to say it, but that’s about it. Seriously.

I cut a large mango in half, run a paring knife CAREFULLY as close as possible to one side of the big flat hairy pit (yes you will feel cheated unless you buy at a good price in a Latino market), take the cut half of the mango and score the flesh into a tic-tac-toe pattern, and flip the peel inside-out to pop out the cubes (slicing close to the peel). I try my best with the other half, the half with the pit stuck to it–mostly it works. Sometimes I count to make sure I still have ten fingers afterward… Combine the cubes with torn or julienned fresh basil leaves and serve with grilled white fish or the like and a green salad with vinaigrette. Purple basil looks dramatic, and you can dress this up a bit more with a few dice of red onion and a squeeze of lime juice but you don’t have to.

Canteloupe with Rosemary

Canteloupe is cheap and nutritious and complex, but usually too funky and tropical for me to eat straight up. I always want lime juice or something. Even as a grownup, more’s the pity. One night I was wondering if there were anything that would possibly make me like canteloupe better–I had a canteloupe with best intentions lingering unused in my fridge as I got less and less enthusiastic about it–and something about rosemary clicked in my head. Mint and lime juice are the classics, but I like rosemary because it’s piney and aromatic without being bitter, and something about it undercuts the unctuousness of the canteloupe and makes it taste fresher to me. You wouldn’t believe how triumphant I was when I found out this actually worked. So I ground the whole thing up (well, minus the peel) and squeezed in some lime juice and froze it for a sorbet. Also good.

Prunes or Dried Figs with Anise or Fennel Seed

I tend to eat a few of these out of hand as a snack with a little of the anise or fennel sprinkled over the top for contrast, but I’ve also chopped dried figs with a couple of chopped dried apricots, microwaved them in a little bit of water to soften to a chunky paste, then mixed in a sprinkle of anise and maybe a bit of cinnamon and used it to fill filo pastry cigares. A similar idea…

Prune Log with Pistachios and Cardamom

There’s also a very nice Moroccan-Jewish High Holiday sweet–good for this time of year–that’s a lot like the fancy pressed date/walnut or fig/Marcona almond wheels from Spain–a small wedge from the Whole Foods cheese counter can run you $5 or more, but they’re delicious  sliced very thin. Anyway, this one’s a prune log with pistachios, and it’s a little more complex than the others but easy enough to make.

Simmer about a pound of pitted prunes in a little water or orange juice (you can nuke a few minutes if you prefer) and process to a very thick paste. Mix in freshly toasted pistachios and either aniseed or a good grinding of cardamom (the seeds inside, not the pods) or both, perhaps. Pack tight onto a length of plastic wrap and roll into a log, cool, and roll to coat in toasted sesame seeds. When cool and firm, slice the log very thin into rounds (it’ll be like pistachio-studded fruit leather, but a bit softer) and served on a doily-covered brass tray along with dried apricots stuffed with marzipan or walnuts and other delicacies. Mint tea, lots of it, goes with. B’te’avon! (good appetite!)

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The Meaning of “Tasty”

Posted on September 10, 2009 by DebbieN

One very strange description crops up in nearly every expert’s take on processed food and the way it’s overtaken fresh and whole foods in the American diet. Everyone from food industry veteran Hank Cardello (see the Stuffed book review) to NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle in What to Eat talks about fast food and junk food as “tasty”. David Kessler goes even further: in The End of Overeating, he adds “irresistible,” which he says is the problem he faced most of his life.

Moreover, “tasty” has become the important word in processed food advertising. Driving home from the post office today I even saw it on a billboard for Vitaminwater10, with the tagline:  “10 CALORIES. 4 NEW FLAVORS. TASTIER THAN EVER.”

Tasty. It’s the word of champions, the key, the adword to beat.

And for the life of me, I’m not sure why. Because the words I would have chosen for most of it include stodgy, greasy, cardboardy, screamingly salty, day-glo ™ orange, and “a lot like airplane food, only on the ground.” Am I the only one?

But “tasty”–specifically that word–is clearly the accepted description, even among these food experts, and that points to a host of disturbing assumptions. Either they mean they find processed food tasty or they mean they think everyone else finds it tasty and irresistible–even if there’s something better to eat. That’s kind of defeatist, isn’t it? If everyone “knows” fast food is tastier than fresh produce, what hope is there for mainstream Americans to eat healthier than they do today?

What do they actually mean by “tasty” in the case of processed food? They don’t mean fresh, as in fresh produce. They don’t mean tangy, as in yogurt or a tangerine, or sharp as in horseradish or cheddar. Certainly not aromatic, like dill or fennel or rosemary or sage. Or rich and funky and thought-provoking, like aged camembert or shiitakes or asparagus or toasted sesame oil. And they don’t mean complex and savory and surprising, as in a palak paneer punctuated by smoky black cardamom pods, Armenian string cheese with nigella seed, or a long-cooked carbonnade or daube of beef with some cloves thrown in on a whim.

They can’t possibly, honestly, mean “these fresh hazelnuts are so sweet you’ll plotz” or “one bite and you’d better take this nectarine somewhere private.”

Most of the food experts who’ve posited that processed food is “tasty” in their books and articles are older than I am by about 10 years, old enough to remember eating late-July nectarines that devastatingly fragrant, backyard tomatoes earthily ripe and pungent, foods utterly unlike what’s available even in the produce section of most chain supermarkets today.

So I can’t help thinking that their casual use of the word “tasty” reflects and even perpetuates the hopelessly tattered, stunted and inexperienced taste imagination of the masses of people who don’t cook for themselves anymore and have given over completely to packaged food, with its excesses of salt and its bland, stale cardboardy background flavor. The ugly assumption they’ve bought into is that people who eat mostly processed food can’t change, won’t change, and most importantly, wouldn’t like fresh food if they tasted it.

Can the surge of food blogs with their encouragement to try something new, visit local farmers’ markets, maybe even take a share in a community garden plot, change this trend? I hope so, even though I know the open air markets are not often very available in poor neighborhoods and they tend to be as expensive as supermarkets. But when they are made available in urban areas, all kinds of people from the neighborhood suddenly come flocking to them, Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, fruits, kid food, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Meaning of “Tasty”

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: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pack your own lunch

Microwave Tricks: Poached Eggs, No Explosions

Posted on August 30, 2009 by DebbieN

Microwave-poached eggs

Astonished. I should be elated, but I’m just–is flabbergasted too strong a word? In June, chef Wylie Dufresne of New York’s WD-50 did the unthinkable and moved his latest microwave oven out to the dining room for some elegant tableside egg poaching. Only it took him 29 minutes. With some sort of fancy tinfoil shield.

Now really. I can see it’s time to step in, because 29 minutes in a microwave is like three years in a regular oven. 29 minutes to poach an egg by any other method than LA sidewalk  (ours are reaching the 200-degree mark) is plain ridiculous. No matter how fabulous the chef. I’m tempted to send him the starter booklet that came with my Sharp Carousel.

Poaching eggs in a microwave doesn’t have to be such a production. You can do it in 2 or 3 minutes for a pair or even 4 soft-cooked eggs that look and taste nice. Not rubbery. Not chewy. Not raw. And not exploded. You don’t need any specially designed microware. You don’t need any toothpicks. Or vinegar. You don’t need anything other than a microwaveable soup bowl–the relatively rounded bottom is much better than the flat bottom of a mug for even heating and preventing explosions or boilover–and a microwaveable lid or saucer. You have those at home. I know you do.

Every food site from Chocolate & Zucchini to What’s Cooking America insists you need to prick the egg yolks with a fork or toothpick before nuking to prevent explosions, but that’s not actually so. All those recipes say to crack the eggs into cold water and then microwave it all at once. I’m not 100% sure, but I think that may be the key problem.

I’ve used the following method for years with no explosions and without the eggs turning to hockey pucks:

Poached Eggs in the Microwave

1. Heat a half-full soup bowl of water to a near-boil first–about 1.5 minutes on HIGH. Then crack in the eggs, let them sit a minute covered so the whites begin to film over, and then nuke again covered for 1 minute.

2. Take a big soup spoon, scoop under each egg and flip it gently in the water–the underside may appear near-raw even while the top is cooked, but once flipped it will quickly set in contact with the hot water, and you can finish by nuking 10-15 seconds more with the lid on and/or letting it sit covered for 20-30 seconds or so.

3. When the eggs are set the way you prefer, either scoop them gently out of the bowl or carefully drain the bowl with the lid and some potholders (be careful not to let the eggs slip out!) A little burgundy-and-mushroom reduction or mustard dressing (optional), a little mesclun, some toasted rosemary bread and you’ve got yourself a classy bistro dish. Bon appétit!

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