DASH Diet | Slow Food Fast

Bok Choy Broth

Posted on December 18, 2010 by DebbieN

Bok choy-based hot and sour

Usually when I get home from traveling I’m in a state where I don’t really want to cook, but I want real food, and I’m sick of the bread-and-cheese-sticks-and-carrots-and-nuts we bring on the plane in self-defense. The other thing I really want right away is vegetabalia–restaurants, particularly hotel restaurants, seem reluctant to put any on the plate. Microwaved fresh vegetable soup is an easy and satisfying answer–15 minutes and you don’t have to go shopping for anything fancy.

It’s also the answer when it’s cold and rainy and everyone in the house has been down with the crud (aka “Losangelitis”). Today, I wanted something with greens in it like minestrone, but tasting more like hot and sour soup, to cut through the fog that had condensed in my head, and I did NOT want to work hard (also because of said mental/temporal fog). I had the basics for a vegetable broth–an onion, some celery stalks, a handful or so of “baby cut” carrots more usually reserved for my daughter’s school lunches. A fat clove of garlic. Half a bunch of bok choy that was still in decent shape from two days ago when I microwaved it as a side to stretch leftover Chinese takeout. And in the cupboard, miraculously, I still had three dried shiitake mushrooms in a plastic bag.

Bok choy is one of the Cheap Vegetables ™–usually below a dollar a pound, even in big-chain supermarkets. Not baby bok choy, which is cute and pretty and mild; stores charge three times as much for that. I like the full-grown, poetically dark-leaved, white-stalked bok choy, the kind sumi-e masters choose for their still lives.

Sometimes for a vegetable at dinner (as mentioned above) I just nuke a cleaned and trimmed head of bok choy whole for a couple of minutes in a longish lidded container with a little water in the bottom, cut it up and serve it as-is or drizzled with a little soy sauce and sesame oil. You don’t need anything else to dress it up (and of course, I have pretty low standards for presentation). Its fresh, radishy flavor mellows into something richer and more aromatic as it cooks down and produces its pale-green pot liquor. You don’t want to waste that; it’s a perfect addition to a vegetarian consommé, especially when you’re going light on salt or calories.

I sometimes even skip the onion-carrot-celery-garlic vegetable stock base and make a really simple broth by just microwaving the bok choy all by itself with water to cover–especially when my head and stomach aren’t cooperating with me or with anything else. But that’s a little on the purist side of things, when I’m feeling so miserable all I want is something hot, clean-tasting and fresh with no distractions. For better times, I want a real soup with a bit more richness and variety, and bok choy definitely plays well with others.

Back to the hot-and-sour scenario, for example:

Shiitake mushrooms are expensive fresh at your local Whole Foods, about $13/lb. But a package of 15 or so dried caps sells for $3.50 in the Asian or International Foods section of your local supermarket, and the dried mushrooms are so much better for infusing a broth with pungent richness. They’re easiest to soak up in a microwave–a few minutes rather than half an hour.

Between those and the carrot-onion-celery aromatics, plus of course garlic, you’re set. Especially if you have a little container of z’khug (hot pepper-garlic-cilantro paste) in the freezer and can saw off a chunk to spice up your soup. Toasted sesame oil, vinegar, and low-sodium soy sauce–all optional. Ginger? You could. Ginseng? According to a friend from a Cantonese family, only if your mother insists. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, high-speed soup, Microwave tricks, Vegetabalia | Tagged: bok choy, Chinese cooking, hot and sour soup, low-sodium cooking, microwave cooking, soups, vegetable broth, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Bok Choy Broth

Speeding up Eggplant Parmigiana

Posted on December 12, 2010 by DebbieN

On the last night of Hanukkah, I fried some more–but only a little this time.

When my daughter and I went vegetable shopping at my favorite corner grocery that day after school, we found a bin of eggplants on sale for 25 cents apiece. And they were pretty good, so I bought four of the firmest ones and we lugged them home.

The moment I spied the eggplants at the store, I was already thinking about eggplant parmigiana, or at least about involtini (cheese-filled eggplant rolls with tomato sauce), which comes to much the same thing. It’s mostly a geometrical difference at that point–rolled eggplant versus flat, crosswise rounds versus loopy lengthwise slices.

I’ve loved eggplant parmigiana since I was a kid and my parents would take us to a local Italian diner run by a friend of my mother’s. A different Italian diner, this one during my student days, served it either screamingly hot in a fresh-from-the-oven baking dish with so much incendiary mozzarella on top that you were guaranteed to scorch the roof of your mouth, or else sandwiched into a grinder roll with the best tomato sauce in the universe. I loved them both.

But there’s no denying the fact: the traditional parmigiana is one heavy kind of dinner. It’s designed to remind you (an hour or so after eating it, or perhaps again in the middle of the night) that suffering is all around us and wants us to share, so be humble and don’t forget the Tums.

Why is it so heavy? The eggplant, the tomato sauce, the garlic, even the cheese filling–all fine. I decided the main problems with eggplant parmigiana come down to two things: 1) frying the eggplant slices to cook them, because that takes a lot of time and a lot of oil, and 2) breading the eggplant with eggs and flour or breadcrumbs.

In the kibbutz kitchen where I worked after college, I did more than my share of slicing and breading eggplants and dipping them in eggs and redredging and frying, the whole works, enough for several hundred people (the other several hundred were smart enough not to eat them unless they happened to be hanging around the kitchen side room where the fryer was going and could snag a slice fresh off the cooling rack).

It’s more than ok to eat breaded eggplant hot off the press, as it were. Almost essential, in fact. But let the slices wait around at all, layer them with cheese and tomato sauce and bake for half an hour or so under foil, and what started out as fried eggplant, deliciously crunchy with a creamy texture inside, ends up shriveled and spongy or stringy between no-longer-crisp layers of bready gunk, and more than that, the frying oil is starting to make itself known again. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, frugality, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: eggplant parmigiana, grinders, hoagies, involtini, Italian food, low-carb recipes, microwave cooking, microwaved eggplant | 1 Comment »

More things to fry in olive oil

Posted on December 3, 2010 by DebbieN

Thanksgiving has barely ended and Hanukkah is already upon us–which means more food! This time with olive oil to commemorate the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem after a war in which the Assyrian Greeks trashed and piggified it in hopes that we’d be so abashed we’d immediately convert and become a convenient tribute-paying way station for their marches around the edge of the Mediterranean to Carthage.

I know the official story credits Judah Maccabee, but really, it happened like this:

The Assyrian Greeks thought we’d be too frightened to complain when they marched through Israel, taking what they wanted and getting their muddy footprints everywhere. They hadn’t yet heard of chutzpah. They also hadn’t reckoned with a little-known secret force: Jewish grandmothers. These bubbies could out-argue G-d. Weekly. And the lectures? …

“Carthage, schmarthage!” the grandma said. “Wipe your feet already, what are you, a Hannibal?”

Then she hefted a mighty frying pan at the intruders and that’s all she wrote.

So the real hero of this geschichte is clearly not Judah Maccabee, aka “The Hammer” — but Judith ha-Machvat, or “Judy with the Frying Pan Handy” — a woman who could really scare off the goniffs! And so in her memory, we fry up all kinds of goodies for Hanukkah and none of the calories stick to our hips at all. Really. It’s a miracle.

So…enough bubbe meises. Back to the present day.

Last night I made latkes without benefit of a food processor–after a slight kitchen drawer reorganization last spring, I forgot where I put the shredder disk. But for a smallish batch for the three of us–only two spuds and half an onion–it’s not so difficult to grate them by hand, as long as you use a fork to hold the stubs (of the potatoes, not your fingers, I hope) to avoid getting extra “proteins” in there…

The Obligatory Latkes (very basic, but tasty in a good way)–about 12 or so 2-3-inch latkes, enough for 3 people for supper, so scale up as needed

Carbs: 2 big potatoes weighed 480 g total on the food scale before peeling. An estimated 1/6th of the weight of nonsweet potatoes is carb–so about 80 g carb total for this recipe. A 4-latke serving would be about 20-25 g carb.

2 big russet potatoes, scrubbed, peeled, shredded on large holes of grater/food processor blade
1/2 medium onion, grated on fine holes into the same bowl OR chopped finely in the food processor BEFORE changing to the shredder blade and doing the potatoes on top of the onion
2 eggs
spoonful of olive oil
1-2 t. flour
pinch of salt
pinch of baking soda (which I completely forgot last night, so it’s optional)
olive or vegetable oil for frying

Grate the potatoes and onions by hand or food processor into a big bowl. The grated onions will help prevent discoloration in the potatoes. Take handfuls of the mixture and squeeze them nearly dry, and pour off most or all of the liquid that collected in the bottom of the bowl. Return the potatoes to the bowl, add the eggs, spoonful of olive oil, flour, salt and baking soda and stir until evenly mixed.

Heat several tablespoons of oil in a nonstick pan until shimmering and dollop soupspoonfuls of the latke mixture in, flattening them as they start to fry. Swirl the pan a little to get the oil touching each latke and maybe keep them from sticking to the pan. Wait until you see brown edges at the bottom of the latkes, then flip and fry the other side, swirling the oil a little or adding another spoonful in droplets where the pan seems to need it. You want these really brown and crisp on the outside, not pale yellow.

Drain on napkins or paper towels on a plate, and at the end, if no one’s snatched them as they cooked, you might want to reheat them all together in the pan or microwave them on the plate for half a minute on HIGH. Serve with applesauce and sour cream or labaneh or plain yogurt.

– – – – –

That’s the only recipe I’m giving here with set quantities–latkes are more like pancakes, everything below is like a stir-fry.

Non-Latke Options

Even with mechanical assistance in the form of a food processor, I’m a one-latke-night-per-year-is-enough kind of person. I want something other than potatoes if I’m going to be frying stuff in more than a spoonful or so of olive oil. Therefore I look for other maybe less starchy and more flavorful (one can always hope) things to fry:

Pre-nuked (microwaved) eggplant slices, fried in a couple of spoonfuls of olive oil after heating a little garlic and curry powder, maybe a dab of z’khug, for a few seconds first. Onion and red bell pepper are good in this mix too.

Marinated artichoke hearts, perhaps drained slightly and shaken in a plastic bag with a spoonful or so of flour or almond meal or chickpea flour and a little grated cheese and/or some oregano or thyme–no extra salt needed

Pre-nuked cauliflower, breaded as for the artichoke hearts

or–pre-nuked cauliflower, stirfried in a spoonful or so of olive oil with a dab of z’khug if you like things hot, with red bell peppers, onions, and another Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Food Blogs, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Vegetabalia | Tagged: artichoke hearts, butternut squash, Chicken Marbella, David Lebovitz, eggplant, fried bananas, frying, ful mudamas, halloumi, Hanukkah recipes, Jewish cooking, latkes, olive oil, Ottolenghi, panela cheese, prune sauces, spinach fritada, Yotam Ottolenghi | Comments Off on More things to fry in olive oil

No-Furkey!

Posted on November 23, 2010 by DebbieN

In the freezer case at Whole Foods this month you’ll find big boxes announcing Turtle Island’s Tofurky Feast, Field Roast’s Celebration Roast, and VegeUSA’s Vegan Whole Turkey –this last shaped and glazed brown like a large chicken, drumsticks and all. I’m not sure how I feel about this concept–I thought the idea of being vegetarian when you have enough money for a choice was not only not to eat meat, but not to want to be eating meat either.

Not that I’m against decent vegetarian meat substitutes for Thanksgiving or any other time of the year. As someone who’s kept kosher since my college years, and often in places where there was no kosher meat (or I didn’t have the budget for it), tofu or wheat gluten “mock chicken” have made eating in Chinese restaurants a lot more fun, and the good restaurants make their vegetarian dishes as serious and well-balanced as their meat dishes–sometimes better. But they generally don’t try to disguise them this far or process them this much.

Still, to each her own. But $42.99 for the big VegeUSA box at Whole Foods. The box states that it feeds 25 at 2.5 oz/serving, which is probably enough protein but only about half the volume most adults would expect. And it’s kind of expensive for something that looks very much like a well-browned rubber chicken. What’s in it? I scan the nutrition panel and don’t really notice anything but the sodium–everything else is low or moderate, especially for a holiday meal.

But the salt! 450 mg for the “turkey”–double it to 900 mg if 2.5 oz isn’t enough for you and you want seconds. 1400-plus mg for the stuffing–huh? a whole day’s worth of sodium for one serving of stuffing? Is it that bad for conventional stuffing mix as well? You’d do better to make your own from scratch.

At this point I didn’t even look at the gravy.

Tofurky isn’t much different–650 mg sodium per serving, including stuffing. Field Roast–in the same range too. They also sell separate tubs of frozen “giblet” gravy.

Of course (full disclosure here), I’ve never actually liked gravy, and I doubt it would really go well with anything tofu, not even tofu in a rubber chicken costume.

Why do I think you could do a better and probably a lot cheaper and more festive vegetarian Thanksgiving with some kind of authentic, fresh-made main dish? Because very clearly you could. Do you want it to taste good? Or do you just want it to look like an imitation turkey?

Of course, the main thing about these frozen concoctions, even the simple cylindrical “roasts”, is that they look like centerpiece dishes, and there’s really no knocking that desire to serve something impressive and festive and most of all, shareable at Thanksgiving. It’s important. Thanksgiving feasts demand a monument to plenty, and an inedible cornucopia with gourds and Indian corn doesn’t really cut it. Nor does a big pasta salad (although a timbale, as in Big Night…)

Surprisingly–sadly?–enough, very few vegetarian cookbooks, not even the big tomes like Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian or Veganomicon, really try for a vegetarian centerpiece dish that looks and feels like an important dish. Mollie Katzen’s title dish from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest is about the only intentionally designed centerpiece vegetarian dish I’ve ever seen. A very long time ago I actually was served this thing once at a friend’s house, with very sadly overcooked broccoli stalks stood upright in a flat casserole of brown rice. Oy, is all I can say. Not a moment of pride. Both Katzen’s and my friend’s cooking improved in later years.

None of the currently hot vegetarian cookbooks out there have an index listing for “Thanksgiving”–very telling. A lot of them have portions for 2 or 4 or just one person. Only vegetarian chili and pasta dishes are intended to serve a crowd of any size.

So vegetarian centerpiece dishes deserve some consideration. Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times blog “The Well” has been edging around this topic for a week or so, but I don’t feel she’s really gotten to the heart of the matter–neither has anyone else. Perhaps it’s because she’s not thinking like a vegetarian?

What makes a dish a centerpiece dish? Think about the turkey, then, or a whole salmon, or a rack of lamb or the like. It’s big. It’s unified–one big item before you cut into it for serving. It’s elegant and impressive. It’s sliceable. It’s savory enough to draw people into the dining room with a sigh of Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, DASH Diet, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, meat and poultry, nutrition, Odd food, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: bistilla, Field Roast, meat substitutes, stuffed cabbage, Tofurky, vegan turkey, vegetarian centerpiece dishes, vegetarian cooking, vegetarian Thanksgiving, VegeUSA, Wellington | Comments Off on No-Furkey!

Cranberry Sauce Without the Fuss

Posted on November 15, 2010 by DebbieN

I love homemade cranberry sauce, and not just at Thanksgiving. It makes a pretty good jam for breakfast and (should the need arise) a pretty good tisane for a congested sore throat if you heat a dollop in a mug of water and sip it hot, berries and all. Despite the fact that it’s tart, which you’d think would make your throat hurt more, the cranberries actually contain something soothing that will give you at least temporary relief when you’re in the throes of Los Angelitis and the Tylenol hasn’t kicked in yet (you can trust my expertise on this one, unfortunately). But hopefully you won’t need it for anything medicinal this winter and can just enjoy fresh-made cranberry sauce for its own sake.

A lot of people are convinced that just opening a can is the easiest and least scary way to go. They must have read the package directions and decided it was too much work to make the syrup first (very intimidating-sounding) or that adding the berries and letting them pop was likely to spatter the stove until it looks like a magenta Dalmatian.

But really, you can just microwave cranberry sauce and it works fine. Throw all the ingredients (berries, sugar, water) into a 3-cup pyrex bowl, slap a lid on partway, and nuke it for 5 minutes. That’s it. No preboiling. Don’t even bother mixing it. In five minutes, you’ve got standard fresh-made cranberry sauce in a bowl that can go straight to the fridge once it’s cool. And no saucepan or stove top to wash before your guests arrive.

You can dress it up with some orange peel or juice, or a pinch of clove and cinnamon. You could add a chopped, peeled granny smith apple or a well-scrubbed chopped organic seedless orange with the peel to the berries for cooking, or else stir in a spoonful of Cointreau or Triple Sec after the jam cools, and you’d have something a little more sophisticated, but the basic recipe is worth having as a first run.

And most helpfully, if you’re looking for something less sugared, you can cut the typical cup of sugar per 12-oz bag of cranberries in half and it’ll still gel decently. Or you can do it with no sugar at all, let all the berries pop and thicken up just in water, and sweeten it with your preferred artifice after it’s cooled. It won’t be completely carb-free per tablespoon or so even with no added sugar, but it’ll be pretty low.

Approximate carb counts (total and per tablespoon, counting 1 T as ~1/16th c.):

Cranberry-only version without apple or orange

With 1 cup of sugar: 242 g carb per 2.5-3 c. cranberry sauce or 5-6 g/T.
With 1/2 c. sugar: 142 g carb/recipe or ~3 g/T.
Artificially sweetened only: 42 g carb/recipe or ~1 g/T.

Cranberry sauce with apple or orange

With a good-sized apple or orange chopped in, figure 25 extra grams of carb per recipe or 0.5 gram extra carb per tablespoon.

Any way you go with it, though, homemade cranberry sauce has a good deal less carb per spoonful than other kinds of commercial jams, and probably a good deal less than the stuff in a can. It’s a lot better tasting too.

Microwave Cranberry Sauce

12-oz package fresh cranberries, washed well
1 c. water
1 c. sugar (standard Thanksgiving back-of-package recipe), 1/2 c. sugar (my version this week, which was plenty sweet enough for me), OR no sugar during cooking but artificial sweetener added afterward to taste

optional additions: chopped peeled apple, finely chopped whole scrubbed organic orange, pinch or so of powdered cloves and/or cinnamon, a little grated orange or lemon peel, or a spoonful of orange liqueur or brandy

Put the cranberries, sugar if using, water, and apple or orange if using in a 3-cup pyrex bowl, cover loosely with a microwaveable lid so steam can escape but it won’t spatter, and microwave on HIGH 5 minutes. (If you’ve added an apple or orange, you might need an extra minute to account for the extra fruit.) Keep an eye on it toward the end, but it probably won’t boil over.

The mixture should already be thickening to a sauce/jam consistency (it’ll thicken more as it cools), and most of the berries should be popped. Stir well and microwave a minute or so more with a vented lid if you want it thicker. Let cool to room temperature and, if using artificial sweetener, sweeten to taste. Other flavorings–you could add grated lemon or orange peel (sparingly) or clove or cinnamon before cooking, but save any alcohol-based flavorings for after the jam has cooked so they don’t just evaporate in the microwave.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Desserts, Diabetes, frugality, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments | Tagged: artificial sweeteners, carb counts, diabetes, low-carb cooking, microwave cranberry sauce, reduced-sugar cranberry sauce, Thanksgiving recipes | Comments Off on Cranberry Sauce Without the Fuss

Fastest Pie in Town

Posted on November 7, 2010 by DebbieN

On the energy downswing from a departed sleepover guest, my daughter suddenly declared she wanted pumpkin pie, we had two cans of it and I’d said I would make it soon and I still hadn’t, why wasn’t I making it, it wasn’t fair, she hadn’t had any all year and it was past October so it was in season. This last argument was just for good measure, given the pumpkin was in a can, but still, give her points for it–it’s a new crop after all those shortages.

With ears ringing, I said, but it’s already 5:30. “So? I can help!” You’ve been there, I’m sure.

Pumpkin pie is a slow-food-slow kind of dish–not much way around it. Even with a premade crust and a can of “pumpkin pie mix” rather than just packed steamed pumpkin, the filling needs 45 minutes to an hour to bake. Then it needs another hour or more to cool enough to eat. And if you’ve got a tiny kitchen and your kid is helping, the elbows factor is bound to add some time and confusion.

Also, normally, with a diabetic kid, you don’t just think, “Hey! Let’s make pie for dessert!” Especially since the filling calls for 3/4 cup of sugar per pie. But pumpkin pie, if it’s made from scratch and isn’t just a frozen ready-made version, is kind of reasonable on carbohydrates for a dessert–about 25 grams for 1/6 of an 8″ shallow pie, according to the ADA guidebook, or in our case, 35 grams for 1/8 of a standard 9.5″ deep-dish pie (calculated from the ingredients). And pumpkin may be a fruit and not a vegetable, but it’s still got a respectable serving of vitamin A and fiber. And I also like it, which helps.

Still, the time is a killer. But I had such a surprise success with spinach quiche in the microwave a while back that I started thinking. The standard filling for pumpkin pie is also based on a custard, more or less–a couple of eggs, a cup and a half of milk per deep dish pie. It’s half the eggs of a quiche, but it might well still work in a microwave. That part would take something like 5-7 minutes and leave enough time for the pie to cool while we got dinner together.

Actually, I’d wanted to try this for a while, and not with company in tow, just in case it flopped. The weather here was 97 degrees most of the week but dropped to the low 70s today and was promising an actual chill for evening. So doing the crust in the regular oven for 15 minutes or so wouldn’t actually make life miserable.

It was almost looking like a decent idea considering the fact that it was and still is totally nuts to make an entire pumpkin pie from scratch right before dinner (or at least everything from scratch short of hacking up a raw pumpkin and dealing with the seeds). So I decided to go for it, and I made my daughter deal with the filling while I made the crust and parbaked it. We just about managed not to step on each other or crowd into the same corner at the same time, but both parts went well. And then the real test came–time to nuke. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, cooking, DASH Diet, Desserts, Diabetes, fruits, holiday cooking, kid food, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: carbs in baked goods, Desserts, Libby's, microwave cooking, pumpkin pie, pumpkin shortage, Thanksgiving recipes, Type I diabetes, winter squash | Comments Off on Fastest Pie in Town

Portobello season–so good it’s a shame

Posted on September 23, 2010 by DebbieN

Giant portobello mushrooms ready to broil with herbs, garlic and mozzarella

My local supermarket surprised me this week with a half-price deal on giant portobello mushrooms–4 huge caps for $3, so of course I decided to get double that and just find odd spaces to tuck them all into the fridge. I love mushrooms but I haven’t bought them much in the past few years because they’ve gotten pricey and because my daughter didn’t start liking them until this year. Why make the kid the arbiter? No great reason, really, but it seems like a waste to make an expensive but not particularly nutritious treat as part of dinner and then have your kid turn her nose up at it. If I had to choose, broccoli or cauliflower or tomatoes were usually going to win out.

But this year my daughter’s finally old enough to appreciate mushrooms (and of course, so’s my husband). So when they came home for dinner after sunset at the end of Yom Kippur services, I took a pair of these hubcaps and threw together a quick appetizer–something I almost never bother with just for us, but I might be tempted to do it more often now, because it’s too simple to be so good.

Half a giant portobello cap should be a decent appetizer serving if you have to split, or serve a whole one per person as a side dish if you have enough. Smaller mushrooms would work too, but the big ones are meaty and impressive-looking. The grater gets a workout on this one unless you already have some pesto handy, but it’s still only about a minute’s worth of work.

Broiled Portobello Caps

2-3 giant (or any sized) portobello mushroom caps, stem end trimmed, rinsed lightly all over to get any dirt off without peeling the skin or losing any gills
clove of garlic (or more, if you need to scale up)
1/8 or so red or yellow onion
~1 t. butter
pinches of shredded fresh or crumbled dry Italian herbs–basil or thyme for preference, dill or marjoram or sage are ok too
~1 oz. mozzarella or baby swiss cheese
grating or pinch of nutmeg

EASY OPTION: the mushrooms plus pesto plus the cheese and nutmeg

Wash and trim the mushroom caps and place them gill-side up on foil-lined tray (toaster oven works for this if you have only 2-3 caps). If you have the stems and want to do something with them, trim a thin slice off the cut end and either broil them alongside or chop them with some of the onion, then fry or nuke the mixture half a minute and add it to the caps before the cheese.

In a small bowl or saucer grate the garlic and about a spoonful of onion on the fine holes of a grater. Grate a spoonful or so of butter on top, add the herbs and mash together. Smear some of the mixture (or the pesto, if you’re using that) on the gills of each mushroom cap, then grate the cheese over each and finally sprinkle or grate a little pinch of nutmeg on each one (don’t overdo this, but a little is really good). Broil in a toaster oven or bake in a regular oven at about 350 for 10-15 minutes or until the caps are cooked through and rendering liquid.

* * * * *

There’s one other incredibly quick and simple thing to do with a big portobello mushroom–it makes a surprisingly good microwave soup-for-one with nothing but the sliced-up mushroom nuked for a minute in a bowl or mug to catch the juices, then some milk added to it and heated again. A scraping of nutmeg and garlic is worthwhile, so’s a tiny crumble of sage or marjoram.

But the mushrooms and milk are flavorful enough on their own, too, especially when it’s just you and you’re in the mood for simplicity and have decided you’ve earned it. It’s been a week like that, so I can only hope the supermarket special is still on.

Filed under: appetizers, cooking, DASH Diet, high-speed soup, Vegetabalia | Tagged: appetizers, portobello mushrooms, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Portobello season–so good it’s a shame

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

Unappetizing: Nutrition “Awareness” on Top Chef

Posted on August 20, 2010 by DebbieN

Perhaps it’s a futile attempt to understand how restaurant chefs think about food and nutrition, but lately I’ve been watching the very warped “Top Chef” episodes for the last couple of seasons–easy to do online. I can’t help wondering not only at the contestants, all of whom seem to display basic ignorance of what used to be called the “Four Food Groups,” but at some of the judges who fault them on nutritional challenges.

In this season there have been two, the School Lunch Challenge and–not that the judges even thought about it as a nutritional challenge, which they should have–the Baby Food Challenge. In both, the judges seemed at least as lacking in nutritional knowledge as the contestants, and in some aspects even worse.

The School Lunch Challenge brought out scathing comments on the show and on a number of blogs, particularly when the bottom-ranked chef, who went home for her gaffe, attempted to make a banana pudding palatable by adding sugar. Tom Colicchio made a big deal of her adding two pounds of sugar to the pudding–which was to feed 50 students.

And admittedly it’s not great for nutrition, but it was hardly the disaster he and the other judges made out. If anyone had bothered to whip out a calculator and known how to use it for pounds-to-kilos conversions, they’d have discovered that the two pounds of sugar amounts to 0.91 kilos. Or 909 grams, to be a little more precise (which we shouldn’t, the chef was eyeballing what she added). Divide by 50 and you get 18 grams per serving or about 4 teaspoons–not all that surprising an amount of sweetener in any prepared dessert. Add that to the starch already present as thickener and the sugars from the milk and bananas and you probably have 30-40 grams of carb or thereabouts per half cup of pudding.

It would be a lot for someone diabetic, like my daughter, but not disastrous as long as she knew how much carb was in it, and it certainly wouldn’t be disastrous for most school kids if the rest of the meal was balanced with low-fat protein and vegetables and not too much other starch.

But actually, most of the lunch entries were pretty starchy. The fact that they didn’t all have as much noticeable added sugar is almost immaterial–starches break down into sugars. You have to count them all.

What really stood out was the pathetic nature of the criterion “to include a vegetable.” One that was most-praised–a slab of caramelized (talking of sugar) sweet potato under a chocolate sorbet as a dessert–was mostly a starch, though in its favor it had vitamin A and fiber. Another team served celery (no vitamins and very low fiber, despite the stringiness) with a peanut-butter mousse (why, oh lord, not just peanut butter? chef-think at work?) piped out directly onto the celery, supposedly so kids would eat it. No one liked the mousse because it looked Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Food Politics, Food TV, fruits, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: baby food, carb counting, childhood nutrition, childood obesity, cooking shows, diabetes, high blood pressure, low-salt diet, Padma Lakshmi, Sam Kass, school cafeterias, school gardens, school lunch, Tom Colicchio, Top Chef | Comments Off on Unappetizing: Nutrition “Awareness” on Top Chef

Veg-phobia II: Summer Edition

Posted on August 8, 2010 by DebbieN

My daughter is at camp for two weeks, the longest she’s been away from home, learning to deal with meals and insulin on her own (with the camp nurse’s help). After six months of calculating and eight weeks of giving herself shots, I know she’s ready to do it, and the nurse is ready, and her counselors are ready. And I overprepared and brought more supplies than she’ll need (my daughter has nicknamed this “Mom-anoia”).

I brought everything and a little bit more–including carrots and celery sticks and low-fat cheese sticks, and a loaf of whole wheat bread for activity carbs. I felt like I was turning into my grandmother, who used to bring shopping bags full of real bagels and corn rye on the plane with her from New York whenever she and Grandpa visited us in small-town Virginia.

But really. The nurse laughed at first when I asked a couple of weeks ago if the camp kitchen had vegetables as an option for campers who needed a non-junk snack (I’d looked at the sample menus online and they looked a bit Boy-Ar-Dee to me), but then she admitted the camp doesn’t really serve a lot of vegetables and suggested I bring them for her to store in the infirmary fridge. They don’t have anything whole wheat either. I think she stopped laughing and started sounding rueful about a third of the way through her reply. “We have fruit,” she said half-heartedly, knowing immediately that it wouldn’t really do for a diabetic.

The food at camp is a smack in the face with the wet rag of reality: this is how the rest of the country eats today. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a great camp in every other respect, with a long track record all over the Americas and people of my generation who still feel immensely grateful to have gone as kids. We were very fortunate to get a scholarship for it.

So what’s gone wrong with the food? It’s like school cafeteria food in the ’70s, but without the kale or the stewed tomatoes, the half-hearted iceberg lettuce salads or the lima beans. Take all that away and you have spaghetti, turkey burgers, the occasional chicken or tuna fish, grilled cheese, pizza, some form of potatoes or corn, and fruit. Some protein, a surprising amount of fat, hidden and otherwise, highish salt and a lot of starches on top of starches. It’s also “all you can eat.” But what are you really getting that’s worth seconds? No fiber. No vitamins. Few minerals. Nothing green. Per the Sylvia cartoons, “We feature all-white meals.”

Vegetables? Salad if you’re lucky. Broccoli? Nearly unheard of. Tomatoes? only occasionally. Red cabbage, carrots, celery or any other noshing vegetable of worth? Um, not this summer.

And it is summer. Best time of year for greens. This is when it’s all happening at the farmers’ markets all over the country, and your local newspaper is probably exhorting you to get out there and try it. And did I mention this is California, prime place for vegetabalia all year round?

How did this happen? To a well-educated, professional and middle-class part of the population, no less? The nurse tried to explain to me, “This is what they’re used to at home. The kitchen figures the kids won’t eat them.”

Disheartening in the extreme. But she’s right about the way families tend to eat these days. We saw it firsthand when some dear friends of ours came to visit Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Politics, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: camp food, carb counting, farmers' markets, fast food, fresh herbs, healthy kids, juvenile diabetes, vegetables | Comments Off on Veg-phobia II: Summer Edition

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New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

Unappetizing: Nutrition “Awareness” on Top Chef

Veg-phobia II: Summer Edition

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