cooking | Slow Food Fast

Yogurt in the microwave

Posted on August 30, 2009 by DebbieN

Back in the early 1970s, when yogurt first started to become popular in the U.S. but wasn’t yet widely available in supermarkets, manufacturers like Salton started selling home yogurt machines that would run overnight with a temperature-controlled water bath and six or so individual-sized covered containers. Those machines are hard to find today but you don’t really need them to make your own yogurt.

You can make very good yogurt in the microwave without any special equipment, and it’s very easy. But although a few older, less fashionable shared recipe sources on the web still mention it, none of the current slow food mavens ever seem to go this route. I’m not sure why–microwaving works beautifully.

Traditional instructions have you heat up the milk to something under a boil and let it cool to just a little hotter than lukewarm–measured either by thermometer at about 118 degrees F, or by testing with a finger before you can stir in the yogurt. That takes a fair amount of time on the stove top, and you have to stand there and stir or risk scorching the bottom of the pan (which you have to scrub). It’s probably a half hour of preparation just to get it going. Then you have to insulate or keep it heating very slightly for 6-12 hours. The most common insulation schemes from the new-slow-food crowd involve all-night ovens kept at 100 degrees F, towels or blankets wrapped around the yogurt pot, hot water jugs surrounding multiple small yogurt pots in a beer chest, crockpots, and other hard-to-believe and hard-to-clean setups.

Just reading about it all–the jumble-sale setups, the 24-step “guides”, the incredible number of pots and things that need washing before, during and after–makes you want to run to the store and buy a tub of ready-made.

Microwaving is a much easier and dare I say better method. It requires a grand total of a microwave oven, a large pyrex bowl, a pyrex or ceramic pie or dinner plate, and a spoon. The milk heats in just a few minutes with no need for stirring and doesn’t scorch at all. Once you stir in the cultures, you let the yogurt sit covered in the microwave with the power off and the door shut. The oven’s a very good insulator, especially in combination with the pyrex bowl and lid. You already have it on your counter–no need to dig weird items out of closets or the garage. The yogurt stays warm for hours with no cockeyed, jury-rigged insulation schemes, and the washing up is, unsurprisingly, simple.

Unlike most microwaving, this is still a slow business–as in, overnight–because it’s the real thing. No matter how you set it up, it takes between 6 and 12 hours for a couple of quarts of warm-to-hot milk with a few spoonfuls of yogurt stirred in to sit and culture undisturbed in the microwave, minding their own business, before the new batch of yogurt is ready to eat.

So it’s not fast, per se, but it’s a perfect thing to set up after supper and revisit the next morning. When you open the microwave door at the end, you can jiggle the bowl gently and see that the milk has set as yogurt. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, Dips, Microwave tricks | Tagged: Dairy, home cheesemaking, labaneh, May Bsisu, microwave cooking, microwave yogurt, nonfat powdered dry milk, recipes, slow food, The Arab Table, yogurt, yogurt making | Comments Off on Yogurt in the microwave

Microwave Tricks: Indoor Grilling When the Heat’s On

Posted on August 23, 2009 by DebbieN

Pan-seared salmon, ready for the microwave

You almost never hear the words “microwave” and “slow food” in the same sentence unless someone’s casting the two as opposites with an easy sneer. The one and only time I’ve read anything about microwaving by a Real Restaurant Chef was Tony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential when he mentioned something about hitting a plate gone cold with some “Radar Love” before sending it out. He meant it as a dirty back kitchen secret.

Gourmet cookbooks (other than Barbara Kafka’s Microwave Gourmet, a scarily extensive tome from 1987) never call for microwaving anything more exciting than butter or chocolate chips, and none of the Food Network shows do either. It’s a shame. Can you see Giada De Laurentiis microwaving? Mario Batali? No–it would probably zap the studio camera or melt Mario’s clogs or something. And it would ruin the vicarious glamor of slow cooking. But it would be fun while it lasted, wouldn’t it?

Some things, let’s face it, don’t do incredibly well in a microwave–deep fat frying (Kafka claims you can in small quantity, but I’m scared of sloshing hot oil around a small box), birthday cakes (though Kafka has found a reasonable way to do cake layers and her recipes get good reviews), an entire raw turkey (stuffed or un-)…. And fish? That may be the trickiest of all, since fish goes from almost cooked to shoe leather in 20 seconds if you’re not careful, and it still won’t brown nicely.

For example, take the lowly, farm-raised salmon fillet. Now I know it’s not wild, I know it’s not King or Sockeye, it’s not elegantly 2″ thick–but it’s also not $17.99/lb and up. And it can still be pretty good, especially grilled.

Only it’s summer in L.A., and the last thing I want to do in my townhouse with a distinct lack of outdoor grilling facilities is heat up the house or cook the salmon long enough under a broiler for the edge fat to start sending acrid smoke up the stairway.

But combine the microwave’s ability to cook things through with a quick browning technique like pan-searing, and suddenly you have a strategy for some nice main dishes that taste better than they should in a lot less time, and don’t heat up the house. Incidentally Kafka mentioned this method in passing while discussing the fact that microwaves don’t brown food. She then proceeded to ignore it completely, don’t ask me why.

Most restaurant chefs insist they can’t get a good sear on anything with a nonstick pan, but that’s not entirely true (plus I hate washing dishes any more than I have to, and I’m really determined, so nonstick it is). I’m borrowing from Martin Yan on this one–it’s a technique I saw him do for a stir-fried shrimp recipe on PBS, sometime way, way back in the 1980s, and it works surprisingly well here. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Microwave tricks | Tagged: Anthony Bourdain, Barbara Kafka, indoor grilling, low sodium, low-salt cooking, Martin Yan, microwave cooking, Microwave Gourmet, pan grilling, salmon | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Indoor Grilling When the Heat’s On

Dolmas by microwave

Posted on August 7, 2009 by DebbieN

When we first moved to Pasadena 10 years ago, one of my favorite places for Sunday dinners out was Pita! Pita!, a family-run Lebanese restaurant in the “Old Town” section of the city. One of the reasons I loved it was the usual reason to love middle eastern food: the mostly vegetarian mezze were wonderful, and the main dishes were knockouts. Long-cooked lamb, roast chicken, fish grilled or under tehina sauce, vegetable stews with a surprising bite of pineapple in them. Even though I couldn’t eat the meat dishes, I could certainly appreciate them by smell. Everything was modestly priced and generous along with it.

The other reason I loved it was that the family that ran it had made their restaurant the kind of place families went for an old-country kind of Sunday dinner with all the uncles and aunts. Pita! Pita! was housed in one of a row of narrow spaces along Fair Oaks, converted from what I think was once a schoolhouse. The narrowness didn’t stop them from putting a couple of large old-fashioned dining room tables in with the smaller ones for couples. They treated their customers like family, you could sit and eat at a leisurely pace and converse, and we never came away anything less than happy. And certainly never hungry.

Which is why I still miss the place. The family ended up realizing they couldn’t make a go of it without charging astronomical prices or wearing themselves out and decided instead to run a smaller, cafeteria-style lunch spot with fewer and simpler dishes on the main business street. And I can’t blame them at all. The food they serve now–more mezze and fast grilled items–is still as good, but the long-cooked family-style dishes and the leisurely Sunday nights I’ll keep having to miss.

I grew up with hummus, tehina, felafel and tabbouleh, which are Israeli standards too and popular among Jews in the U.S. My mother made them from the dried mixes and cans of prepared tehina when they finally became available in our supermarket. In Israel I learned to make them from scratch, but one thing I didn’t know how to make was stuffed grape leaves or dolmas. My sister had married someone who did and on one weekend visit she showed me the ropes.

I love dolmas but they are not quick to make, not at all. We rolled a loooooottt of grape leaves that afternoon (her husband had bought the econo-jar at a local Arab market), and stuck them tight in a pot, plated down so they didn’t float and unwind, and boiled them with lemon and olive oil for more than an hour. They were wonderful but you would never want to do it on a regular basis!

In the spirit of “what can you cook in a microwave instead of the regular way,” I have gone back and made dolmas at home–in a microwave. It works! You can cook them in a few minutes rather than an hour-plus of boiling and having to top up the water so nothing scorches, and they come out beautifully.

Unfortunately, the microwave, miracle machine though it be, will not help at all with the rolling, which is the hard part. The best I can do is say that microwaving lets you do a few at a time if you feel like it–say, 10-20 dolmas, not 50-100. What you do with the rest of the grape leaves in the econojar is up to you.

Grape leaves come brined in rolls of 20 or so, either a single roll in a skinny jar (Krinos) or a big pickle-jar with four rolls (Cortas, other brands). When you buy them, inspect the rolls and make sure there are no little fluorescent green or yellow spots on them–you’ll know if you see them; capers also get this sometimes. I’m not sure if it’s harmful or not, but I stay away from it. I’d keep the other rolls in the brine in the fridge and make sure to use them up within a month, or else take the rolls and freeze them in ziplock sandwich bags with the air squeezed out–and use them within a couple of months so they don’t get freezer burn.

Dolmas in the Microwave

Roll of brined grape leaves ~ 20-30
1 c raw rice (not “minute rice” or parboiled) or bulgur (cracked wheat or tabbouleh grain, plain)
1 med/big ripe tomato
1/4 onion or 1-2 scallions
1 T dill (a few good sprigs fresh is best if you have fresh)
several sprigs or small handful fresh curly parsley
juice of 1/2 lemon
olive oil and the other half lemon for cooking

1. Partially or almost-completely cook the rice or tabbouleh in the microwave: put it in a pyrex bowl or microwaveable container, cover with ~1/2-3/4 inch of water, microwave covered on HIGH for ~2-2.5 minutes, let sit and absorb the water several minutes until nearly done, drain excess moisture.

2. While the grain is cooking, rinse off the roll of grape leaves and then soak them in a big Pyrex bowl to get rid of some of the salt. Change the water once. [Note: traditional recipes say soak the grape leaves an hour in cold water. Some others say pour boiling water over them and let them soak. If you want to split the difference in a microwaveable way, you could rinse them, put them in the Pyrex bowl with water to cover, nuke 2-3 minutes on HIGH and then change the water.]

3. Blend the tomato, onion or scallion, herbs and lemon juice in a food processor and mix with the drained rice or bulgur–include the tomato juice. Let cool enough to handle.

4. Stuff the grape leaves–this is the hard part. Take a stack of grape leaves and drain them on a plate. Cut off the stems carefully without tearing the leaves. Lay out one leaf vein-side up and stem end toward you. Put a spoonful of the filling–not more–on the leaf right above where the stem joint was. Roll the leaf over it–tightly but carefully so you don’t tear–and tuck the side leaves over it halfway through, then keep rolling away from you. Place each stuffed grape leaf, flap edge down, in a tight layer in a microwaveable container or dish.

5. When you’re done rolling (nothing says you have to do the whole thing in one go if you get sick of it after 10 or you just want 10, just put the leftover filling and the grape leaves in the fridge) pour a little water carefully over the layer of grape leaf rolls. Maybe a quarter-inch of water. Squeeze the other half lemon over the whole thing, and drizzle a little olive oil over it– maybe a couple of tablespoons worth. Cover the dish or container and microwave on high 2-3 minutes for 10, maybe 3-4 minutes for 20+. Check one for doneness–careful, it’ll be pretty hot–you want the leaves tender and the grain cooked through. Maybe go another minute if you need to.

Let them cool and chill in the fridge. Serve with tzatziki, raita, tehina, or other yogurt-based dip.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Grains, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: appetizers, dolmades, dolmas, Greek food, Israeli food, Lebanese food, mezze, microwave cooking, slow food, stuffed grape leaves | Comments Off on Dolmas by microwave

How to Eat Vegetables and Lose Weight and Save the Planet (Without Really Trying)

Posted on August 5, 2009 by DebbieN

One of my favorite stops at the New York Times online is Mark Bittman’s “The Minimalist” column, a series of 5-minute videos in which he demonstrates simple but pretty good cooking with clear and manageable directions and an easy close-up view of the pots and pans in action.

I’d say he takes a no-nonsense approach to cooking, but that would be misleading. He takes a full-nonsense, marble rye approach to the patter while doing some very basic common sense things like cutting up, mixing, and sauteing. And he features vegetables prominently.

Bittman, recently seen schmoozing around Spain in a top-down convertible,on PBS yet, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Stipe and occasionally Mario Batali and trying to look interested in the food (which somehow got upstaged, can’t imagine how), is the author of several big yellow cookbooks, notably How to Cook Everything in both meat-eater and vegetarian editions.

This year he’s come out with a new, slimmer volume called Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating* (and the asterisk leads to: *With More than 75 Recipes).

Unfortunately, we have to disregard the fact that Bittman’s title manages to evoke both Phil McGraw’s Self Matters and David Reuben, M.D.’s 1970s classic romp, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* … *But Were Afraid to Ask (or, more happily, Woody Allen’s movie send-up of same). This is a Serious Book. And like many Serious Books today (and anything at all with a “go green” theme), it’s a hybrid vehicle.

Between the asterisks on the cover sits a Granny Smith apple photoshopped with a map of the world and a red label, “Lose Weight, Heal the Planet.” The back blurb reads, “…the same lifestyle choice could help you lose weight, reduce your risk of many long-term or chronic diseases, save you real money, and help stop global warming…”

Food Matters is Bittman’s argument for getting the lard out and the greens in, for the sake of health, looks, and planet (quick, look holistic and place your hands reverently over your heart, if you can find it). The first half of the book is a set of essays reporting on the state of Big Food in the U.S., the state of obesity, the state of greenhouse gases and the global cost of raising a serving of beef as opposed to a serving of broccoli or tomatoes or whole grains.

Following Michael Pollan’s now-famous dictum “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” and citing him heavily, Bittman sets out to encourage readers to replace at least some of the earth-taxing meat and dairy in their daily eating with…plants. Which makes sense, of course.

The second half is a primer, with recipes, on how to eat more vegetation. Given that his pitch is geared at least partly to a male audience (he also writes a food column for Men’s Health, and the tone here is similar), you’d think his advice on the quickest route to getting vegetables into one’s diet would involve the least fuss: just wash and nosh. But no.

Bittman used to edit Cook’s magazine and the cookbooks he writes today do tend to feature recipes. It’s a common downfall, but what can you do? Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, Dips, Food Blogs, Food Politics, fruits, Grains, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cookbooks, cooking green, Food Blogs, Food Matters, global warming, greenhouse gases, Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, nutrition, obesity, overweight, plant-based diet, The Minimalist, vegetables | Comments Off on How to Eat Vegetables and Lose Weight and Save the Planet (Without Really Trying)

Rethinking the experience of ruin

Posted on August 3, 2009 by DebbieN

Julia Child, who belonged to my grandparents’ generation, describes day-to-day life in Paris right after World War II in a way American generations since have not experienced.

Actually, that’s not so true anymore–the 9/11 attacks and the prolonged political squabbling over a memorial, which Julie Powell describes tangentially in Julie & Julia, kept the rubble exposed to Manhattan’s downtown for years. Worse, if possible, the botched Bush Administration response to Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding counties even more permanently than the storms did.

But the U.S. is huge and even these events seem isolated from most Americans’ day-to-day reality.

Filed under: cooking, history | Comments Off on Rethinking the experience of ruin

Uneasy fusion: cooking, then and now

Posted on August 3, 2009 by DebbieN

I don’t know if I’m looking forward to this Friday’s release of the movie Julie & Julia or not. I’ve read both of the books it’s based on and liked them both, and I’ve been an avid fan of Julia Child as a person if not as a chef since I was four years old (this was 1968 or so) and the only one in my family to watch her show to see her cook rather than to laugh at her voice. Even then I recognized how sure-handed and direct she was. When she cooked, cooking was a skill, an honorable and challenging form of work. There was nothing domestic or dopey about it.

Julie Powell, in her recent blog-based book on taking Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a personal mission, rediscovered how serious Child was. As she found out the hard way, learning to cook as thoroughly as Child did is like learning to be a Zen master or a swordsmith. And yet it’s not beyond you to do, as long as you’re willing to do the hard work.

I also, oddly enough, read one of Nora Ephron’s early books, Crazy Salad–-this was back in the early 1970s, the days of the ERA and Billie Jean King–-from the far corner of my parents’ bookshelves, and unbeknownst to them. The essays in it, which skewered everything misogynistic in society from porn to politics (and memorably specified the difference between liberal and libertine) were particularly inspiring to a word-hungry 10-year-old looking toward feminism from the sidelines of childhood. The attitude, if not the material, seems to fit both of Ephron’s ambitious subjects in Julie & Julia, the movie.

I’m just not sure it all belongs in a movie, particularly not one that boils two gritty memoirs down into something of a chick flick, as this is being advertised. Or one with a movie star like Meryl Streep, whose undoubted talent is, as with most female movie stars, still forced to subordinate to her looks. Wig or no wig, when it’s her on the screen, you never completely forget you’re watching Meryl Streep. It’s not her fault, but I don’t know if I want to see her standing in for someone as vivid as the real Julia Child.

Amy Adams is almost certainly going to be cuter, younger and a lot simpler than the real Powell, who is currently working on a book about a 6-month stint she did learning the butcher’s trade in the wake of her first book’s success. Julie Powell is young but older-–we hope also somewhat wiser–-than when she started her blog. She can represent herself–-very interestingly, in a longish interview on Borders Media and elsewhere–-in contrast to the movie adaptation of her, which she seems not to mind.

Both Child’s book and Powell’s are now being reissued with covers showing scenes from the movie with pictures of Streep and Amy Adams as Child and Powell, rather than Child and Powell themselves. It’s what all the major publishers do when they ink a movie deal. I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but it seems fundamentally creepy for autobiographical works to supplant the author–the actual author–with an actor.

Beyond the chick-flick reservations, I wonder how the two memoirs are likely to mesh onscreen. My Life in France is ultimately a more important book than Julie & Julia. It’s centered less on food–-and “food porn”–-than on history, and less centered on self than on the outside world. And Child was eminent even before her cooking career in ways that Powell probably won’t get to be, if she’s lucky.

Julia Child, who belonged to my grandparents’ generation, describes day-to-day life in Paris right after World War II in a way American generations since have not experienced. It’s an unsentimental and un-chickish view of how things really were on the ground before Europe had a chance to rebuild. Child calls up a memory of ordinary people–not fashionable, not attractive, just neighborhood people–who simply got used to passing piles of rubble that only a year or so before had been familiar buildings, and she observes the grinding postwar poverty in the city that she, like us, probably grew up romanticizing in her mind. It’s a fascinating context in which to discover a love of good food and the tenacity to learn everything about it.

Child’s sometimes raw sense of humor and her frankness about the conditions of postwar Europe are backed by years of experience working in the intelligence service during the war. It’s something she doesn’t really discuss in the book, but which was detailed at some length in an earlier authorized biography, Appetite for Life, by Noel Riley Fitch. She and Paul met while working for the OSS in Ceylon, where she developed a complex, database-like filing system for cross-referencing intelligence reports. The couple were transferred, flown over the hump (the Himalayas), to Kunming, China, where they became part of a field intelligence team that advised against the U.S. hastening to take sides between Mao Tse Tung and Chiang Kai Shek, both of whom were essentially regional warlords. That advice was disregarded by the hawks advising Truman, and many OSS members, Paul among them, were later persecuted and blacklisted under McCarthyism as the new rival CIA sought to supplant and discredit them.

Child, whose more public masterwork remains on a lot of kitchen shelves but largely untested because it does call for actual work, was not a glamorous person like Streep has to be. She was a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-speak-your-mind kind of person, and looks were not the point. Read My Life in France and you’ll find a sharp and demanding intelligence, curiosity about everyone around her, frustration at ineptitude–her own or others’–a lively sense of humor, a bone-deep but realistic regard for her husband, and something else that just transcends the physical impression she made on television audiences in America.

I hope Streep can do it–has done it. I really hope I forget it’s her when I see the movie. I really hope Ephron has done it as well, and that the movie trailers that smell of chick flick cha-ching aren’t the best scenes. I want the movie to live up to both of the books, and I’m afraid of seeing too little of either.

Filed under: books, cooking, Food Blogs, history, movies | Tagged: 1950s, Amy Adams, Appetite for Life, feminism, food porn, French cooking, Julia Child, Julie & Julia, Julie Powell, McCarthyism, Meryl Streep, My Life in France, Nora Ephron, OSS, Paris, Paul Child, Postwar France, World War II | Comments Off on Uneasy fusion: cooking, then and now

“High Protein Bran Muffin”–A good idea gone bad?

Posted on July 28, 2009 by DebbieN

This is what’s wrong with American thinking today:

That muffins are healthy, or as in the example below, “healthful”
That bran muffins are really healthy and therefore can be eaten big
That such healthy muffins should be eaten as a source of protein.
That muffins this perfect can and perhaps even should be eaten as a substitute for meals.

Exhibit A, from a recent “Culinary SOS” recipe request column of the LA Times Food Section.

Dear SOS: Have you ever tasted the muffins at —–‘s Bakery? They are huge, delicious, healthful and so satisfying. There is a particular favorite of mine, a high protein muffin that, when eaten, makes one glow inside and feel healthy all day…
–Shirley

Dear Shirley: These generously sized muffins pack a medley of flavors and textures in every bite. A batch’ll go quickly — they make for a fun, quick breakfast or perfect snack.

Well. Can’t wait. Let’s take a look at the ingredients list as given in SOS.

High protein muffin
Total time: 45 minutes plus cooling time Makes 14 muffins

1 (12-ounce) can frozen apple or white grape fruit juice concentrate
2 1/4 cups wheat bran
1 cup (4 1/4 ounces) flour
3 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 1/4 cups buttermilk
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons canola oil
4 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup sesame seeds
1/2 cup shelled pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup flaxseeds
1/2 cup coconut
1 1/2 cups granola
2 cups raisins

I’ll skip the instructions–they’re involved and painful. All I’ll say is, the recipe involves boiling down Ingredient #1 (and wasn’t that a shock in a health muffin recipe) and still throwing some of it out.

Now the nutrition. I have to say I’m tempted to use the ingredient list as a small practical quiz to see if anyone can ballpark the calories, fat, carbs and sodium per serving from it. Anyone? Anyone? No? OK, then. Fasten your seatbelt. Or perhaps just your belt.

Each muffin: 515 calories; 11 grams protein; 54 grams carbohydrates; 9 grams fiber; 32 grams fat; 5 grams saturated fat; 62 mg. cholesterol; 742 mg. sodium.

Now wait a minute. 500+ calories? for a muffin? 700+ mg sodium? 32 g fat? For that much fat and salt you could eat a chunk of cheddar almost the size of a deck of cards. Straight.

Anyway, this is clearly one overloaded muffin, with tons of expensive extras. Heavy too–or why the 7 teaspoons of leavening for a single batch? And the irony is, after all that stuff, it still only delivers 11 g protein per muffin. You could get that with a large glass of skim milk.

But you know what’s really sad about this muffin recipe? It’s not alone. Even the classic Weight Watchers Cookbook recipe for bran muffins still weighs in at 300-plus calories per and 500-plus mg. sodium.

What gives? Should we simply not eat muffins? Can a bran muffin recipe ever be actually delicious AND low-fat, low-salt, moderate-carb, and perhaps, dare we dream it, less than 200 calories per, so you don’t feel stupid not having asked for something a little more actively delicious for the same calories–maybe a croissant or a slice of flourless chocolate cake instead? With, obviously, raspberry coulis?

How would you go about it? Maybe it would be better to go with something like the cake-style gingerbread recipe in the Silver Palate Cookbook–makes 12 servings with a lot less starch (1 2/3 c. flour), no nuts and seeds and extras, only one egg, only 1 1/4 t. baking soda, a bunch of gingerbread spices, 1/2 c. oil you can skip in favor of applesauce with no problems at all and a huge cut in calories, half a cup each of sugar and molasses or honey, some boiling water right before baking, and that’s pretty much it. You can even microwave it for about 5-7 minutes at half power instead of baking it conventionally.

Now granted, it’s not bran–but it could be at least whole wheat without ruining the aesthetic. It’s not 500 calories a square either–by my reckoning more like 120 in the applesauce version, and something like 150-200 mg sodium. And no one expects it to substitute in for a meal’s worth of fiber and protein, but with raisins and whole wheat flour, it would probably have 4-5 g fiber and you could always serve it with skim milk.

If you’ve convinced yourself that nothing but a “high-protein” muffin will do, and simply drinking some milk with it isn’t glamorous enough, throw in a packet of nonfat powdered dry milk. But really, unless it’s your only meal of the day, you don’t actually need the added protein. Muffins weren’t made to be steak.

Finally, why make huge muffins? Unless you want to end up looking like a Mack Truck, make decent medium-sized or cupcake-sized muffins, and if you’re still hungry afterward, eat an apple. And drink a glass of milk.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Grains, Revised recipes | Tagged: bakery, DASH Diet, hidden calories, hidden salt, muffins, recipe request, Silver Palate | Comments Off on “High Protein Bran Muffin”–A good idea gone bad?

Unbranded Cabbage Salads

Posted on July 18, 2009 by DebbieN

OK. Put my money where my mouth is–right. Red cabbage is a favorite vegetable for me because it’s cheap, substantial, cruciferous and crunchy, and it tastes good raw. Also, and this is key, you can do neat kitchen chemistry tricks with it, like use it for a pH indicator or to reveal secret invisible ink messages written in baking soda slurry. Amaze your friends! Baffle your enemies!

I like red cabbage as a salad vegetable–it’s bracingly radishy when mixed with sweeter lettuces, but sweet and crisp against romaine or arugula. I don’t shred it for a chopped salad–decent bite-sized pieces are more satisfying, crunch better, and stand up to all kinds of salad dressings. You can make it with the more usual tomatoes, but I like oranges because if there are leftovers, the next day, the juice from the red cabbage will have combined with the acidity from the oranges and turned them both a range of brilliant magentas–very cool.

Tie-Dyed Salad

Mix about equal quantities of:

Arugula or romaine
red cabbage, chopped in bite-sized pieces, ~1″ across
red or yellow (or green, your choice) bell pepper, in bite-sized pieces
orange (s), blood oranges or tangerines or etc. peeled, sliced crosswise, any seeds removed

Nice additions: Shred a few leaves of basil if you have it, chop or sliver a few Greek olives, toast some walnut pieces, crumble feta or goat cheese. Or gorgonzola.

Dress with any of these:

olive oil and red wine vinegar (few spoonfuls each), cracked black pepper–my usual weeknight preference
ordinary spicy brown mustard mixed half-and-half with plain yogurt
tehina (sesame) paste mixed 1:3 with plain yogurt
yogurt and/or buttermilk with minced garlic, chopped basil and dill, and a squeeze of lemon juice
yogurt and/or buttermilk with lemon juice and gorgonzola or bleu cheese crumbled in

Variation: In fall or winter, thin-sliced crisp pear or apple instead of oranges is very good, especially with goat cheese and the toasted walnuts, and with the mustard/yogurt dressing.

Slightly more dignified salad

Reasonably balanced mixture of:

red cabbage, chopped bite-sized
red or green leaf lettuce, washed and torn
good tomatoes sliced in wedges or chopped bite-sized
bell peppers chopped

Additions:

cucumber slices
chickpeas or kidney beans, or raw or lightly cooked green beans
scallion or a bit of diced or sliced red onion
any or all of: anchovies, optional, or capers, or olives, or marinated artichoke hearts, or flaked tuna, or hard boiled eggs cut in half

Filed under: cooking, Vegetabalia | Tagged: low-salt, salads | Comments Off on Unbranded Cabbage Salads

Brand Me! Or, How to Commercialize Cabbage

Posted on July 17, 2009 by DebbieN

Earlier this year I made a joke about the marketing campaign for fresh bulk vegetables, along the lines of “Red Cabbage. It’s What’s For Salad.” I was thinking how nice it would be if people could be motivated to buy ordinary fresh bulk vegetables–no brand names, no packages–every week as a matter of habit the way they did 30 years ago, instead of the way they now fill their carts with brightly colored boxes of processed stuff. I thought it would probably take a satirical approach like the Ad Council’s Got Milk? public service ad campaign.

Clearly I wasn’t thinking hard enough about the real issue driving the relentless replacement of food with boxes. As with the Internet, it’s branding. And not surprisingly, there’s an awful lot of spam out there (hints of The Viking Song in the background…and a word of caution: as with many Monty Python sketches, this one contains more than a few off-color lines and screeching in addition to the main ingredient.)

The packaged food industry is way ahead of me and has been for years. They’ve figured out how to put brand names on cabbage or broccoli or carrots so they can charge more for it–several times more per pound. And they’re doing enormously well with this ploy.

Ordinary shoppers — your neighbors, your co-workers, your mom, and you too, I bet— have in the past week or so bought a little packaged bag of pre-washed spinach, Euro Salad Mix, baby-cut carrots, or broccoli and cauliflower florets. To save time, you tell yourself. Because it’s more gourmet, perhaps. And you’re getting your vegetables in, you think. But it becomes a habit, and a needlessly expensive one.

This kind of thinking about vegetables is becoming dangerously ingrained among American shoppers. People think they’re eating healthy without the fuss, but then they complain how expensive vegetables are. And no wonder, if they shop like this.

Because the few vegetables you get in the precut packs in pristine plastic bags are less than a pound. 12 oz. is typical for broccoli and cauliflower florets, 5-6 oz. for pre-washed mixed lettuces. Prices are at least $2.00 per bag, and often on up to $3.50 or more. Yes, Virginia, that’s anything between $3 and $9/lb for the “convenience” of just opening a bag.

I bring this up here because packaged, pre-shredded cabbage, an 8-oz. bag no less, was listed, actually listed, as a key ingredient in a recent (and no I didn’t really mean to be picking on them again so soon) Bon Appetit feature recipe online. One for “Fishcakes and Coleslaw”. It was part of a slideshow series illustrating “gourmet cooking on a budget”, glossy photos with convincing price tags included–but this one recipe cost $14 for four servings!

Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Food Politics, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Ad Council, Bon Appetit, branding, food branding, food industry, food magazines, Food Stamp Challenge, frugal, Got Milk?, packaged foods, pre-cut vegetables, shopping, Spam, supermarkets, vegetables | Comments Off on Brand Me! Or, How to Commercialize Cabbage

“But it’s organic! But it’s vegetarian!”

Posted on July 14, 2009 by DebbieN

Vegetarian and organic foods are gaining popularity in supermarkets around the country–it’s been happening for at least a decade. Vegetarian- and organic-seeking customers assume they’re getting something closer to fresh if it’s labeled vegetarian or organic, and most of them also assume that vegetarian automatically means healthy. So, apparently, do nutrition researchers when they’re not really thinking hard enough.

The American Dietetic Association recently announced–again, updating from 1997–that vegetarian and vegan diets can be healthful at all stages of life from infancy onward and posted suggestions for getting started. Keyword here is “can”.

The idea of easing into a less-meat diet in stages by cooking familiar foods and familiar ingredients as far as possible is understandable. The Vegetarian Nutrition practice group of the ADA is trying to reach people they think are likely to panic at the suggestion of not eating meat. Unfortunately, the suggestions that top the list are mostly for processed meat substitutes, jarred pasta sauces, canned beans, boxed rice mixes and the like, rather than a dietary framework for eating fresh whole-ingredient vegetarian foods.

In the health section of the LA Times online, where I first read about the ADA’s statement last week, many reader comments objected to this approach primarily because the major brands of veggie hot dogs and hamburgers tend to have long, improbable ingredient lists and very high salt. After a casual tour of the sauces-soups-and-rice-mixes section at my local Whole Foods, it’s an objection I second even more strongly.

For several years now I’ve had reservations about the processed food industry’s tendency to throw salt at anything and everything. Vegetarian and organic food is supposed to be better. Fresher, better-tasting, realer, more nutritious, healthier, more responsible for the planet, the animal world, and the customer. In a word, BETTER.

Nice intentions aside, most of the vegetarian and organic products companies these days seem to be trying as hard as they can to keep up with or even surpass the meat-eating Joneses–the big-brand pantry staples from Stouffer’s, Swanson’s, Kraft Foods, Campbell’s, and so on. They’re still claiming the health and planet virtues of vegetarian and organic, but they’re actually processing the hell out of their foods, adding all kinds of laundry-list mystery ingredients, and salting them out of all reason. And health-and-planet-conscious consumers are flocking to them without bothering to look hard at the nutrition labels. How have we come to such a pass? Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Food Politics, Grains, high-speed soup, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: American Dietetic Association, convenience foods, meatless cooking, nutrition, nutrition labeling, organic foods, processed, processed food, vegetarian, vegetarian diet, Whole Foods | 4 Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Slow Food Fast

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

Yogurt in the microwave

Microwave Tricks: Indoor Grilling When the Heat’s On

Dolmas by microwave

How to Eat Vegetables and Lose Weight and Save the Planet (Without Really Trying)

Rethinking the experience of ruin

Uneasy fusion: cooking, then and now

“High Protein Bran Muffin”–A good idea gone bad?

Unbranded Cabbage Salads

Brand Me! Or, How to Commercialize Cabbage

“But it’s organic! But it’s vegetarian!”

About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

Blog Stats

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

What's cooking

Blog Stats