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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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Pistachio madness two ways

Posted on August 4, 2012 by DebbieN

(plus a handful of other frozen yogurt ideas)

Homemade pistachio frozen yogurt, very low carb

It’s over 90 degrees most of the day in Pasadena, and I’ve gotten tired of looking at the limited selection of Dreyer’s (Edy’s east of the Rockies), Breyers, Haagen Daz, and Private Selection flavors with my daughter. It’s starting to get tedious, and they’ve dropped many of the classics for the cheapest possible quality candy-plus-ersatz-vanilla (note: their real vanillas are better). The forgotten classics were better-tasting, less dependent on goo and sweetened brown wax parading as chocolate or (if salted) peanut butter.

No supermarket ice cream brand in the non-superpremium range today offers rum raisin or pistachio worth considering anymore. It’s easy enough to doctor your own version with storebought vanilla ice cream and the aforementioned rum and raisins, but pistachio?

Pistachio used to be a standard ice cream flavor, didn’t it? Maybe I’m just getting old? Naah. Even in the ’70s when I was a kid, most of the “pistachio” ice cream around was already fake. I want the real thing, not the artificially green, mostly-vanilla-with-a-tinge-of-synthetic-almond kind.

And I want it low-fat for me and my husband and low-carb for my daughter (and us too, why not?) And I want it to taste delicious despite all that. Tall order? Actually, it’s easier than you’d think.

David Lebovitz has a Sicilian pistachio paste-based gelato in The Perfect Scoop, and he blogged about it a couple of years ago as well. He made it sound delicious, but also expensive and hard to find the ingredients for. Not that I’m against a trip to Sicily, except in July when it’s about as searing as LA (been there, done that, got the sunburn and the Fellini moments combined with heat exhaustion).

About the same time, a local gelateria owner in my area took much the same position on the utter superiority of Sicilian pistachios versus California ones for an interview in the LA Times. Which is lovely if you have a good source of Sicilian pistachios or pistachio paste at a decent price, but what if you don’t?

Most of the home-brew pistachio ice cream recipes I’ve seen in magazines, blogs and cookbooks call for adding significant amounts of heavy cream. Or else they involve large amounts of sugar. Or both. Yes, those recipes will give ice cream-like results, but they’re completely offtrack for what I need.

In my universe, good taste on a hot day shouldn’t mean losing your svelte, your cool or your wallet.

The nuts themselves are okay–pistachios, like most nuts and seeds, are very low carb and though high in calories from total fat, most of that is unsaturated. If I can keep the rest of the ingredients low fat and low carb and the stuff still tastes good, I’ll have it. Right?

So okay. I’ve been playing around with California pistachios and–not gelato, that requires making an egg-based custard and blending it with flavorings. Done it once or twice, and it worked, but it’s more work than I want to do most days. Or it used to be. Nowadays I’ve got the microwave moxie to make custard without so much work, but it’s still not what I want today. I want easy.

Frozen yogurt made with real yogurt is too tart to work with anything much but fruit unless you mix in some milk–and then it’s icier and freezes harder.

However, this summer I’ve been playing around with fat-free Greek yogurt as the base for a couple of different ices in small quantities. Greek yogurt varies a bit in nutritional stats from brand to brand, and it’s expensive, which is why I took so long to try it out. But the cheapest all-real (no gelatin) stuff–Trader Joe’s O% fat plain version–while still twice as expensive as the regular plain nonfat yogurt ($5 vs. $2.50 a quart), has considerably less carb, maybe only 7 grams of carb per cup as opposed to 17 for regular. And it has about twice the protein–22 grams per cup. It’s a lot thicker and less acidic, so I’m assuming they drained out a lot of the carb in the whey. And it makes really easy frozen yogurts that taste like something and aren’t overwhelmingly tart.

Just mix in your flavoring of choice (preferably not too watery) with some sugar, and you can still-freeze it within an hour or two. If you think the tang needs to be tamed further, a little milk mixed in works okay and it stays thick enough to freeze fairly gracefully.

The texture is never going to be like ice cream, not entirely. It still mixes up pretty hard and a little icy if you still-freeze it, but once you’ve got it thawed out to the point where you can dig out a serving, it tastes good and changes to a creamy texture as you eat it, something like khulfi. Higher-fat yogurt would break the iciness up a bit but would defeat my purpose of lowering the saturated fat to something I can handle.

And the heavy fats and sugars mask any delicate flavorings. Think Italian gelato (the real kind you get on the street in Florence, not the overpriced stuff you get in pints in the supermarket here) and you know that a lighter base allows you things like rose or ricotta or apricot or kiwi, or hazelnut, or four different highly refined grades of chocolate. If you want to taste anything delicate in your ice cream, you have to get the fats and sugars down enough not to overwhelm it.

Not that I’m entirely subtle. My favorite icier-textured frogurt for when it’s broiling out is mint–Greek yogurt, a couple of drops of mint extract, if that’s strong enough without tasting like postage stamps, and a tablespoon or so of sugar. Divvy it up into 2-4 paper cups or popsicle makers (small is okay for this), freeze. On a searingly hot day it’s pretty good, intensely flavored and refreshing, and its popsicle-style texture is fine with me.

For something like coffee frogurt, I really do want a creamier texture if I can get it. I finally figured I should just brew a little bit of triple-strength coffee so I can mix just a few spoonfuls into a cup of Greek yogurt, maybe with a few spoonfuls of milk, and still get strong enough flavor.

A spoonful or two of alcohol-based flavorings like rum, amaretto, even just vanilla extract can soften the hard-freeze effect, since the alcohol freezing point is lower than that for water.

Or you can add something protein or starch to the mix–egg custards and cornstarch are the usual route for gelati and standard commercial ice cream, but silken tofu and nonfat powdered dry milk also work to break up the ice crystals. Greek yogurt is providing most of the protein here and little water, and the carb is a lot less than for the powdered dry milk.

The last thing on my list, and it sounds either weird or completely obvious, is to add a fat–but I want something unsaturated. Oil? Yuck (though I have seen some olive oil ice creams flavored with basil or the like). But what about nut butters? Those, don’t laugh too hard, work pretty well and give the frozen yogurt a richness that feels like ice cream, only without big saturated fats or modifiers or xanthan gum or corn syrup solids or whatever. Plus they’re interesting flavors.

Halvah: I started with my trusty jar of tehina–sesame paste. It’s got almost all its fat in polyunsaturated form. A tablespoon in a cup of Greek yogurt, plus a tablespoon of sugar, stir, freeze, dig out a chunk–not so hard! And the flavor–kind of like frozen halvah. Very rich, though. Maybe I could get away with less tehina or more yogurt?

Chocolate halvah: I tried a chocolate version–also not bad–by adding two tablespoons of cocoa powder and an additional spoonful of sugar to the tehina/yogurt mix. Pretty good, but the tehina taste was definitely still there alongside the chocolate. Like chocolate marble halvah. You have to be a fan.

Peanut butter? Probably more Americans would like it than the tehina version. Go easy on the peanut butter; a good-tasting mix I once made with half a cup got way, way way too rich very quickly once it was frozen. Stick with a tablespoon or so per cup of yogurt. I’d use natural peanuts-only peanut butter, preferably the crunchy one, for the purest taste, limit the sugar and add a pinch of salt.

But really. I started out wanting pistachio, and that’s where I’m still going with this. Because I ended up with two, count ’em TWO, really good, really different variations on pistachio, and both of them were really easy, really low in saturated fat, and REALLY low-carb. And actively delicious, which is definitely the point.

California pistachios may not be the Sicilian ideal, but they taste pretty good for what they are.  TJ’s sells 8 oz of roasted unsalted ones for about 5 bucks. Not exactly cheap. Still, the shelling’s been done, and for a pint of finished frogurt, you only need an ounce of pistachios. Will that be enough to taste like something? Oh, yes. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Diabetes, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pistachio madness two ways

New York big-soda ban, long overdue

Posted on June 6, 2012 by DebbieN

All the food behavioral experts on both coasts seem to be whining that New York City’s new ban on oversized sodas “won’t work”. Well, all the experts in New York and LA. Even Michelle Obama has backed off delicately from taking a position on it. Oy. People!

The Washington Post‘s columnists Ruth Marcus and Alexandra Petri have two different takes–one more serious but employing Yiddish to describe the psychology of the whole protest, the second, despite lack of Yiddish, funnier about people who insist on their right to drink a whole tubful of soda at a go. So I’m going to take the middle road–oh, screw it, I’m going to use Yiddish if I feel like it and still be hilarious despite my gravitas. Because it really is hilarious. If only it weren’t so sad.

Jon Stewart is quoted as kvetching that Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed ban is the only thing that can make him agree with conservatives. David Just, partner expert to Brian Wansink, says people “want” their big drinks and will surely just find a way to work around the restrictions.

Well, maybe a few will really want 20+ ounces of soda at a sitting badly enough to go back to the concession stands and wait in line three times to get 3 separate drinks of 8 ounces or so. Or juggle 3 small bottles back to wherever they’re drinking it all. But I’m betting most people won’t.

Why do people supposedly “want” such huge drinks in the first place? The oversized Big Gulp-style cups were a marketing ploy that started about 15-20 years ago at the burger franchises and the 7-Elevens. They were supposed to look like a huge bargain–for an extra however many cents, they’d double the amount of soda they gave you. What a deal! And the ploy worked–created a habit.

Most people don’t really need or even want that much soda, but as many of my coworkers–women especially–used to say, shrugging helplessly, “Well, I don’t really want this much, but this is the only size they sell.” And you really can’t split a 20-ounce with ice back at the office unless you have cups. Everyone will wonder whether you got tempted on the way back and started sipping from it. Eeeewww. You can’t save it in the fridge for later either because it goes flat pretty quickly.

The soda companies got the concessions for school cafeterias–why not brand the captive audience early–in exchange for money the schools have lost from their cities and states anytime those governments wanted to hand out tax relief to corporations–like soda bottling plants. A different version of “eat local”.

By now, people are so used to the soda bloat they’ve started to decide it’s their right to drink bigger than their stomachs–or bladders–can handle. And it is–you’re allowed to be stupid if you want to.  Only problem is, did the soda companies also offer to build more bathrooms to handle the outflow?

So I say Mayor Bloomberg, who’s in charge of the biggest city in America, is doing his city a huge favor by trying to get the soda industry’s claws back out of them. There’s no way the industry will scale back its sizes voluntarily, especially not if they can get experts like David Just to voice their incredible “the-consumer’s-the-one-who-wants-the-elephant-sized-drinks-we’re-just-providing-it-for-them” act.

When you get the big gulp-style Coke, how much of it are you really tasting? Maybe the first third of it? Maybe less. After that, are you drinking it while reading your computer screen? Driving? Watching tv or a movie? Would you really want someone to film–and then post on YouTube–footage of you slurping mindlessly throughout the day?

If you’re not paying attention to what you drink, is it worth drinking just because it’s there? Same for eating. And David Just and Brian Wansink–weren’t these the guys who did all that people-eat-30-percent-more-when-parked-in-front-of-a-tv-screen-than-at-the-table research? I do believe they were.

So getting back to a small Coke that you’ll actually pay enough attention to to taste? That might be worthwhile. Then you can think about what you’re tasting and decide if it’s good enough to keep drinking. Or whether, like me, you’d rather wait until next Passover, when Coke and other big soda manufacturers put out limited editions made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.

I haven’t been a big soda drinker for years, and I usually don’t miss it at all. It was astoundingly easy to give up, and my teeth have thanked me ever since. On the rare occasion when I have a little at a party, my preferred soda is and always was definitely root beer or ginger ale, not cola, and usually I can only take about half a glass–it’s all way too sweet, even with ice. So I’m not the right person to sympathize with habitual soda drinkers–I just can’t get into it, and diet is gross.

But having tasted the sugar version of both Coke and Pepsi, I can say the difference it makes to both versions is amazing–much cleaner flavor, and a little is enough to be happy with it.

Meanwhile, a better idea would be to drink water instead of the big-3 flavors and save your shekels for small niche sodas with better, realer, more interesting flavors as an occasional treat.

Case in point: a summer soda tasting event in Los Angeles to raise money to reopen exhibitions from the shuttered Southwest Museum in Highland Park. The Southwest museum had wonderful Native American collections–kachinas, headdresses, Bakelite jewelry of the 1930s, photos, and much more. It was taken over by the Autry Museum a couple of years ago, but has remained dormant since then with a lot of its collections in storage and out of the public eye. I was fortunate enough to have taken my husband and daughter there about 10 years ago, before it closed.

Galco’s Soda Pop Stop, an independent soda market run by curator John Nese in Highland Park, is hosting the soda tasting–his second–with something like 500 different small brands, including plenty of nostalgia brands (though no NeHi Grape–don’t know if they’re still around) and imports.

According to a profile of Nese in The Quarterly Magazine, Galco’s motto is “Freedom of Choice”, with flavors like coffee, bananas, spruce, cucumber, mint julep, and many others–check out their huge soda list, which includes ingredients, prices and bottle sizes! Amazing. Maybe that’s the kind of freedom soda fans should be going for. Amazingly enough, most of these flavors don’t come in 20-ounce monstrosities, or even in plastic.

If you’re in Los Angeles on July 22, check it out–tickets are only $12 in advance, $15 the day of the event, and you can get them at Galco’s on York Blvd. or through the Friends of the Southwest Museum web site.

Filed under: DASH Diet, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Politics, frugality, history, movies, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New York big-soda ban, long overdue

Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

Posted on February 29, 2012 by DebbieN

calzone

Calzone–one of my favorite Italian dishes–is extremely easy to make once you’ve got some basic pizza or bread dough risen and ready to shape. Flatten out individual rounds of dough, mix up a ricotta-based or roasted vegetable filling, fill and fold the dough over into half-moons, crimp the edges, brush with olive oil, and bake on a sheet in a hot oven until they’re puffed and golden. A satisfying but fairly light supper dish, especially if you have a good thick spicy tomato sauce to go with it and a salad on the side.

But even if you don’t, they’re a good consolation on a Sunday night for a kid with frustratingly advanced math homework the teacher didn’t quite prepare himself or the class for (11th-grade precalculus techniques popping up in a sheet of homework for 11-year-olds? The dangers of pulling your homework handouts from a math site on the internet. I keep reminding myself that he’s young yet). All I can say is, you know you’re in trouble when the heartburn is coming from the homework and not the food.

Grrrr. I’m almost over it. Anyway, here’s a much easier calculation trick that doesn’t require factorials…

The trick about making dinner from homemade dough is that the kid in question is diabetic and needs to know how many grams of carb she’s going to get in her calzone. Pizza, calzone, any kind of handmade entrée with dough plus noncarb ingredients, is tricky to calculate carbs for because you can’t easily tell by eye how much bread you’re getting in a serving. Check out any of the commercial pizza companies’ nutrition stats per slice–they’ll often state carbs as a range rather than a set value. How thick the dough is, how large the slice, etc, can really throw things off. Most people don’t need to know more precisely than “35-50 grams per slice”, but diabetics really do. Fifteen grams is a pretty big variation.

So how do you deal with it at home? If you’re making lasagne or stuffed shells or spanakopita, you can calculate the carb by counting the noodles or sheets of fillo dough you use and looking on the package nutrition label, then figuring a total carb count for the tray and dividing by the number of portions. A little tedious, but manageable.

Bread that’s already baked is also easy enough to calculate for–just weigh it out on a food scale in grams and figure 50 percent carb by weight. Most nonsweetened bread is pretty consistent, whatever density its texture. Weigh out a 70-gram piece of bread, and you’re usually looking at 35 grams of carb.

But for calzone or pizza you’re dealing with a bowl of wet dough to start, and once the dish is baked, it’s got lots of other stuff on or in it so you won’t be able to weigh it cooked and really know what carbs you’ve got. You need to test a portion of your raw dough, only raw dough is heavier than it will be once baked. Depending how wet the dough is, the proportion of carb could vary from a little less than half to a lot less.

Weighing a sample of raw dough to figure carbs after baking

Weighing a sample of raw dough to figure carbs after baking

The only thing to do is test a bit of dough by weighing it out raw, then reweighing it once it’s baked. Doing this in a conventional oven just for a single test ball of dough can be time-consuming unless you’re already heating it for the main event. Still, you want to get ahead with making the actual calzone so dinner will be sometime before midnight.

Enter the microwave. Yes, really. A nectarine-sized ball of dough, say 100 grams raw weight, will cook through lightly in 40-50 seconds in the microwave if you put it on a saucer and punch the “nuke” button. It’ll still be white and pale, but it’ll have risen fairly well to the size of a large dinner roll and won’t have gooey raw spots (you can check by breaking it open, just watch out for steam). Then just pop it in the toaster oven for about 5 minutes and it’s browned and baked through. When you reweigh it, you’ll know how much a 100-gram ball of your dough weighs cooked, and then figure 50 percent of that weight for carbs.

Aside: This nuke-and-toast scheme works pretty well for making a fast sandwich roll from a bowl of dough in the fridge. When I first came up with the idea, it was with great reluctance, because my only previous experience with microwaving bread had been the horrible, horrible mistake of Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, breads, cooking, Dairy, Diabetes, frugality, Microwave tricks, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

Whif? Whaf? The Wonka of breathable food faces FDA review

Posted on February 21, 2012 by DebbieN

It looks like a sleek, avant garde  lipstick or  a purse-sized cologne atomizer–one designed by Halston or Calvin Klein. Atomizer is the right word. Only these AeroShot canisters, which got their start at Harvard’s The Laboratory Art/Science project under David Edwards and became available in the US last fall, are packing “breathable caffeine” (plus a couple of B vitamins).

The previous model, aka “le Whif”, packs “breathable” chocolate powder. It was a moderate success in Paris, where Edwards’ Bauhaus-like other lab center (named Le Laboratoire) produced and promoted the experimental chocolate inhalers as an aesthetic experience at celebrity events, and in London, where its spinoff company Breathable Foods now holds court.

Where did this strange, possibly ludicrous idea come from, that it’s a better aesthetic experience to inhale a shpritz of caffeine (please note: flavorless though with a kick, and definitely a drug-I-have-worked-with-in-the-lab-because-it-blocks-G-protein-coupled-receptors) than drink a long, hot cup of intense coffee while reading this blog and contemplate the degree to which your barista still favors you by regarding the temperature and the decoration in the steamed milk foam served on top? Why is it better to puff a little chocolate-flavored powder on your tongue than eat actual chocolate? Somehow, I don’t think the “calorie-free” argument really plays into the decision very strongly, so what’s driving this?

Do we not still have taste buds? Do we not long to extend our coffee break as far from our cubicles as it will stretch? Do we really want our hearts to suddenly kick into overdrive after we have to get back to the office, just when we’re stuck behind the counter, attempting to explain that glitch in the irate customer’s bill? For that matter, do we really want to ingest B vitamins with our caffeine? Or figure out which recycling bin the little plastic aerosolizer goes in when it runs out? Will the aerosolized flavors or food components even still be interesting if we have a stuffy nose?

Do we want to miss out on the gustatory satisfaction of real food?

In the public demos for Le Whif, (according to Edwards’ book, anyway) the French surprisingly enough didn’t mind the fact that many of the chocolate inhalers didn’t work well, or that they started coughing whenever the chocolate powder went the wrong way. They didn’t mind being used as impromptu guinea pigs–or perhaps realize that they were–despite the fact that these products were being tested informally and some of them demonstrated the adverse health risks right away, and that just possibly breathing chocolate-flavored particulates into your lungs might not be all that smart, particularly if you have asthma.

These things obviously didn’t bother the French too much. The packaging was chic, the concept ultramodern, and the activation gestures analogous enough to lighting up a (now-forbidden) cigarette with one’s coffee at a sidewalk café table. And, so the company promised, it was a calorie-free chocolate experience.

Even more surprisingly, it didn’t really matter what kind or quality of chocolate was in the little gadgets, or how it actually tasted in comparison with ordinary solid chocolate. This was closer to participating in Modern Art, or at least in fashion’s idea of modern art. Like a visit to the now-closed El Bulli, which paired some dishes with a side beaker of aromatic vapor, only much less expensive, disposable, and with a simple popular flavor everyone understands. Molecular gastronomy for the common man. Or woman.

Americans of my generation–which also happens to be Edwards’–are a little less sure than the French about the chic value of shpritzing odd substances onto one’s tongue, much less as a high-class cultural or intellectual activity. Our references include tacky mouth spray breath fresheners (made fun of in numerous movies and tv shows over the decades), Bic lighters, Pez dispensers, and asthma inhalers. Kind of low on chic.

So Breathable Foods found the right marketing paradigm–“buzz”–for its target audience:  college students cramming at exam time, athletes who want that Continue reading →

Filed under: books, Desserts, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Politics, haute cuisine, Odd food, Oddities, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

ANDI Scores, Whole Foods, and diet scheme cha-ching

Posted on February 7, 2012 by DebbieN

If you’ve taken a walk through your local Whole Foods Market in the past year, you’ve probably seen a stand with purple and green information sheets listing foods in order of “ANDI Top 10 for Produce”, “ANDI Top 10 Super Foods” and so on. Coordinated recipe cards, a suggested shopping list, and an attractive-looking book round out the offering. And the produce and bulk bins sport matching ANDI score labels. It’s a whole system. But is it right, or just another fad?

What is the ANDI Score system, anyway, and who owns it?

ANDI stands for Eat Right America ™’s Aggregate Nutrient Density Index, a proprietary nutrients-per-calorie scoring system that rates for foods from kale to cooking oil and everything in between on a scale of 1 to 1000 points.

The ANDI scoring system started with Dr. Joel Fuhrman, the author of the diet book Eat to Live. On his home page, Fuhrman describes himself as a family physician and nutrition researcher.  His diet, which he calls “nutritarian” (and you can become a nutritarian too by signing up) is a highly prescriptive weight loss regimen that focuses on high-value vegetables and fruits and eliminates most meats, fats and carbohydrates. His evaluation of vegetables as high-scoring and processed foods, meats, starches and so on as low-scoring seems only common sense.

Fuhrman’s site claims hundreds of articles and interviews as well as numerous appearances as a nutrition expert on national TV. The site also prominently mentions his two US Nationals pairs figure skating wins back in the 1970s. Does he need to have that information on there if what he’s promoting is serious, science-based dietary advice? Altogether, the site has a very infomercial feel about it, with lots of testimonials from members who’ve lost over 75 pounds with before-and-after photos. Fuhrman himself looks very fit and tanned and taut-faced–maybe a little too much? Maybe it’s just the heavy pancake makeup that infomercial packagers are famous for plastering on their experts’ faces.

Eat to Live is a popular book. Fuhrman’s Kindle edition of Eat to Live is the #700-ranked download on Amazon.com. His web site has something on the order of 4000 subscribers, whose questionnaire responses he mines for some of his journal articles. According to one of the journal papers, his audience is about 65% female, 71% married, the largest proportion college-educated with household incomes over$100K.  (At this point, I thought, bingo, the perfect infomercial audience. This is clearly a commercial diet with legs. But wait, there’s more…)

Ahem! Enter Eat Right America, a company started by a businessman who became a fan of Dr. Fuhrman’s. The founder figured there must be a good way to automate the multi-nutrient density calculations for a wider variety of foods and developed a proprietary algorithm based on nutrient values in the USDA’s NAL database. What makes the ANDI algorithm attractive, the company says, is that they weight these calculations per calorie, not per serving. Finally, they claim, you’re getting the “right” comparison of nutrient density for the calories.

But a closer look at the the diet and menus offered on both the Eat Right America and Fuhrman web sites raises a few warning flags. Scan the ingredients list in the Eat Right America 3-day sample menu and you see frequent uses of high-priced fruits, vegetables and grains like quinoa (no surprise there about why Whole Foods might be happy with the shopping list) as well as some trendy and expensive ingredients that don’t sound all that nutritious. Dates? Avocado? Coconut?  Sun-dried tomatoes? Cashews–one of the lower-fiber and more expensive nuts, incidentally. Those are usually extras, snacks, not staples, even in a vegan diet.

More seriously, the menu designers seem to have a penchant for bottled carrot juice. They put 7 whole cups of it in a bean stew that feeds 10. Now, carrots, whole carrots, are fine raw or cooked into a stew. They have fiber and vitamin A and in whole form are relatively low-carb as well. But juice them, and you filter out the fiber. You concentrate the vitamin A and carotenoids about 3-4-fold, well beyond the RDA–risking vitamin A overdose–and you concentrate the sugars. What would ordinarily be a bean and vegetable soup with a reasonable amount of carb per serving–about 15 g per half cup or 30 g for a full cup–quickly rises, with the addition of a big 7-cup dose of carrot juice in the pot (NB also much more expensive than plain carrots) to 75 grams. That’s the amount of carb my diabetic daughter would figure for an entire holiday meal that includes a decent-sized slice of cake or pie.

Some of the Eat Right America recipe nutrition counts look like the ingredients as listed don’t quite account for them. The carb is high–occasionally the sodium doesn’t add up right either. And the overall protein is low. In the vegan versions on Fuhrman’s site, which prescribes a six-week starter regimen of a pound of vegetables a day, a pound of fruit, and a cup of beans, the protein is also incomplete or close to it. No grains, and no dairy or meat or fish. No tofu. Avocado and flax seed, two darlings of the vegan world, are recommended to supplement the caloric intake so you don’t lose too much weight (which I thought was the point, but maybe not for a whole six weeks at a time).

All these recommendations flow from the ANDI scores of the food and produce some logical puzzles. Somehow, you never see plain tofu or fish or cheese or yogurt. Apparently they don’t score as high as avocado. How is this possible? Isn’t avocado pulp high-fat and not too exciting as a vegetable?

So the next thing to check–is the ANDI food-rating method right? If you’re judging solely on the micronutrients list, which is what Eat Right America claims to be weighing into its ANDI scoring formula, no it isn’t. Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, DASH Diet, Diabetes, Food Politics, nutrition, shopping, top 10, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Paula Deen and the diet that bites you back

Posted on January 18, 2012 by DebbieN

This week’s “revelation” that Paula Deen, “the Butter Queen” is now a Type II diabetic was a surprise to nearly nobody. Deen, who revealed a harrowing backstory in her memoir of a bootstrapped career in catering, has enjoyed a surprising rise to fame on television. Two weeks ago, following in Emeril Lagasse’s footsteps, she appeared as Grand Marshal for the Rose Parade right here in Pasadena.

Of course, her otherwise ordinary “Southern Cooking” has been exaggerated out of all recognition with extra excess butter and sugar and mayonnaise, and so for years now cads like Anthony Bourdain have called her a scourge on the culinary scene (well, actually, he called her a lot worse than that, but he’s Anthony Bourdain. I’m paraphrasing politely, even though I kind of agree, at least foodwise).

With the revelation that she’s Type II, which everyone knows and fears due to their own increasing girth, Deen is bound to be the butt of predictable jokes this week and next, or until the next big Kardashian “revelation” that newspaper readers apparently care deeply about, or at least they do according to the reality TV networks footing the ad bills. (Even the New York Times has wasted column inches on this kind of drivel this year. Journalistic standards are dropping all over the place, I tell ya.)

But tell the truth, y’all: she ain’t the only one responsible. Not by a long shot. Read any “major” chef’s cookbooks and magazine offerings, other than perhaps those of Nobu, who deals mainly in raw seafood unadorned by carbs or noticeable layers of fat, and you’ll quickly realize that MOST of them exaggerate the salt, sugar and fat content of their dishes well beyond reason. Very few of them deal out plain vegetables on the plate. Very few deal out meats or fish without big sauces.

The other big, big feature stories on food in the New York Times this week:

1. Mark Bittman doing a quasi-deep bankruptcy commentary on Hostess that manages to recount his entire childhood consumption of Twinkies and co. in loving, fine-grained detail. He still attempts to sound self-righteous about it by the end because the ingredients include “ultra-processed flour”.

2. David Tanis of Chez Panisse, waxing lyrical about French lentils (du Puy or Die) as a salad with vinaigrette, hard-boiled eggs (so far, so good), some lettuce and….big fatty slabs of pork belly on top. Five or six of them per plate.

3. “The Miracle of Bo Ssam”–which turns out to be David Chang of Momofuku’s recipe for pork shoulder slathered in salt and brown sugar–twice–and cooked down for six hours in the oven. Caramelized barbecue. In fact, “crack” barbecue, to match Momofuku Milk Bar’s world-famous (to bloggers, anyway) “crack” pie made with most of the same ingredients.

Now people. With all of that going on, with Thomas Keller still boiling his vegetables in brine and poaching his lobster bits in butter, with the Culinary Institute of America instructing its naive young students to salt, salt some more, and salt yet again to achieve that perfect degree of salting in each dish (Coronaries ‘R’ Us), and with Congress sucking its collective thumb about local schools’ move this year to exclude french fries and pizza from the “vegetable” categories in their cafeterias—–

Does anyone really think that Paula Deen is NOT a woman of her time?

She’s nowhere near the worst–she’s just not as fashionable as all the tatted-up young bucks who get picked for Top Chef. She’s also not dishy, like Nigella Lawson, whose cookbooks, which started out about 10-15 years ago emphasizing lighter fare like Vietnamese salads with chiles, have also drifted drastically in the direction of high-calorie “indulgence” foods–some of them utter unmitigated goo-fests (avocado, mayo, roquefort? peanut butter, corn syrup, marshmallow fluff, chocolate bars? puff-pastry chicken pot pies-for-one?). Lawson makes the national news, at least in the UK, when she comes back out in public looking svelte again after puffing up too far past the point where male reviewers are still drooling. Will her next book of recipes slim down commensurately?

Unlike the more fashionable TV chefs on her network, Paula Deen is middle-aged and looks it. She’s fat, she’s gray though beautifully coiffed, she’s politely made up and decently dressed–no orange signature clogs–and she smiles. Maybe a little dippily, but if you didn’t know who she was, Continue reading →

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Artificial sweeteners–false promise for lower carb counts?

Posted on October 24, 2011 by DebbieN

Last Saturday night my family visited a couple from our congregation and had dinner in their sukkah. When we broached the question of what there would be for dinner so my daughter could get an idea of how much insulin to take, the husband announced that he too was diabetic–Type II, for several years. What followed was a bit of a culture clash.

I’m sure he meant to be encouraging as he declared that through a combination of self-discipline and exercise and not eating more than a very limited number of carbs per day (and they really were about half of what our daughter is supposed to eat) that his A1C tests were down in the normal range and he only had to test his blood sugar twice a week. Which of course is fine and nearly ideal for a Type II diabetic if it actually works.

I’m not entirely sure how my daughter took all of this, but he went on to dismiss another Type I diabetic we know as “paranoid and overdoing it” because she tests 6 or 7 times a day, which he assumed was unnecessary since he didn’t need to do that.

He had the shining confidence of someone for whom not much had ever gone awry and, having no idea how lucky he was, assumed it was down to his own skill rather than the fact that he had a working pancreas, wasn’t growing anymore, and wasn’t a girl. All big factors for blood glucose control. Clearly he’d never had a bad low with shakes from an overdose or hormonal surge, or a really sharp unexpected high from a shot that just didn’t get where it was supposed to go.

I was more tactful than I’ve ever been in my life when I pointed these things out. You wouldn’t have recognized me, I swear!

Oddest of all was his insistence that the real secret was his use of artificial sweetener, which let him enjoy all kinds of great desserts. I was puzzled–baked apples sprinkled with xylitol? Surely the apples themselves were pretty carby–as well as pretty sweet on their own. The carb difference between using artificial sweetener, a tablespoon–or even two–of table sugar for the pan, or just leaving the apples to bake without sweetener, would be pretty minimal per serving.

And indeed our host only took two wedges for himself.

The other dessert–and it did taste decent–was chocolate ice cream sweetened with xylitol. Given that the ice cream in question was a plain flavor from my usual brand, I was able to compare it with the ordinary version for carb with reasonable confidence.

It was plenty sweet–maybe sweeter than normal, for that matter. But for carbs?

There was no difference. 17 grams per 1/2 cup serving, xylitol or no.

Which brings up a sobering question: why use artificial sweeteners if they don’t lower the carb count significantly? Continue reading →

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Steppin’ Out (vicariously) with my Baby

Posted on October 4, 2011 by DebbieN
American Diabetes Association 2011 Step Out to Stop Diabetes 5K walk t-shirt

Got the t-shirt

On Sunday morning, my daughter and husband participated in the American Diabetes Association’s Step Out to Stop Diabetes 5K walk in Culver City, the part of LA where Sony keeps its studio headquarters. A friend at our synagogue who’s also Type I diabetic (and she’s an OB/gyn who works crazy MD numbers of hours and does night surgeries as needed) has been incredibly encouraging from the beginning, and she sent my daughter the walk info directly (now that my kid has her own email address and everything–I can’t keep up). And then my kid forwarded it to me. So modern I can’t stand it!

Culver City is on the way out to the Pacific Ocean, and used to be right on my commuter route whenever I was avoiding the 405 freeway (which was nearly every evening) home to Pasadena.  It’s a schlep, in other words. But my 11-year-old got herself up and out in time to get there with her dad, she walked with everyone, got the hat, got the teeshirt, got the gray cat face painted on her arm at the face-painting booth afterward, and I’m just generally proud of her. Also of my husband, who did the schlepping (and of course, he walked too).

Because I couldn’t go this time, I did the other half of the activity–the sponsoring bit. And this year, I’m happy to say, Team USC, made up of my friend’s coworkers, raised the most money of anyone on the LA walk.

If you’d like to join us after the fact, it’s not too late to make a general donation to the ADA, or to donate to a specific walk team in your region. Or to Team USC. Or to my friend’s ADA fundraising page, because without her we wouldn’t have thought of it, and my daughter would probably not yet be as proactive as she is in taking care of herself. When you’re a kid suddenly faced with giving yourself shots and doing fingersticks daily for the  rest of your life, it really helps to know someone encouraging who’s been through it since she was a kid, has been everywhere and done just about everything, and treats the routine as just a normal part of her day.

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Weighing in on kitchen scales

Posted on September 15, 2011 by DebbieN

Digital kitchen scale

Farhad Manjoo, better known for his columns on computer and phone technology, has now tackled kitchen tech for the New York Times in his  ode to the electronic kitchen scale.

And while I applaud the general idea that it’s a valuable tool–after all, we use ours daily–I’m both stunned and unsurprised at the same time at the limited perspective he shows [chorus, because he’s a boy]. For Manjoo, as for the food bloggers he quotes (J. Kenji Lopez-Alt of Serious Eats, Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen), using a kitchen scale is about cooking more precisely and with fewer measuring cups, spoons, bowls, etc. Which is fair enough, I suppose, if you’re really worried about whether you already cook well, or if you have ambitions for exactitude.

But why do most Americans who actually have a kitchen scale get one in the first place? The fact that our kitchen scale came with a “The Biggest Loser” sticker on it might give you a solid clue.

We got our scale because our daughter developed Type I diabetes at age nine. Although we started out with half- and third-cup measures for simple foods like beans or plain pasta, we really needed to be able to calculate how much carbohydrate was in more complex or variable-density foods like breads and baked goods so we could give her the right amount of insulin for them.

Our school office manager said she’d gotten one on doctor’s orders after suffering a stroke in her early 40s, and she swore by it to help her cut back significantly on carbs and get her portions right.

Health concerns, not haute cuisine, are the most urgent reason to learn to use a kitchen scale. Not that better-tasting food isn’t important, but learning how to eat more moderately by measuring and knowing what’s in a serving would help at least two-thirds of Americans back themselves down off the high-BMI, pre-diabetic ledge. Especially since an international diabetes conference just reported something like 350 million people worldwide now have diabetes, double the number from 20 years ago.

Digital scales seem to do the most good, for us at least, in preparing homemade pastries or complex dishes (such as quiches or filled pastas). Our other best use is weighing out complex high-carb foods like pastries and candies that we’ve bought elsewhere, since they can be so variable in density or sugar content.

Unfortunately, weighing out treats is usually a big eye-opener for us as well as our daughter. That blackberry pie my husband lugged home from a specialty bakery run is worth a meal and a half of carbs if you do the picture-perfect wedge. We’ve started to cut our pieces a little thinner not just so our daughter doesn’t feel shortchanged but so we don’t get slapped when we step on the big scales the next morning.

Along the way the scale has helped us learn carb fractions for different foods and figure portions for them so it’s easier to estimate when we eat out.

It’s not so tempting to eat a whole doughnut for Sunday breakfast from the surprisingly good and inexpensive bakery three blocks away when you discover that even the relatively modest sugar twist (a real doughnut utterly unlike Starbucks’) represents 60 grams of carb, worth a whole meal without even accounting for a glass of milk, and the jelly doughnut is something like double that. And once you’ve eaten it, you won’t really feel full. Dangerous goods. Better to split the doughnuts and eat something more substantive with them.

Bonus points for my daughter’s practical algebra skills here: she’s figured out how to calculate carb fractions based on the nutrition labels for her own custom blend of low-carb, high-fiber cereal and ultra-carby granola on regular mornings, and she’s pretty fast by now. The extra flourish on the calculator may make me roll my eyes (and yes, at a certain point I’m always thinking, “Just pour it, already!”) but she’s having fun showing off. Even though she’s done the measurements and calculations often enough to be able to eyeball the amounts in a cup if she wanted to.

Because of course, it can be taken too far…

After all, you can’t lug a kitchen scale to school with you in your backpack every day. Most diabetics of longer experience count by eyeballing and estimating when they eat out rather than agonizing over every gram. You can get a little too involved and dependent on the precision a scale offers and forget how to trust–and train–your innate abilities.

Which brings me back to Farhad Manjoo’s column. There’s nothing actively wrong with the way he’s using his scale, I suppose–except for his exuberance about pouring flour straight from the bag into the mixing bowl, then pouring sugar straight on top of that. If you overpour, you should be taking some back out, but then what? Discard the excess sugar now that it’s contaminated with flour? Ignore the contamination and scoop it back into the sugar sack? Take it from a former lab rat, you’d have done better in the waste-not sense as well as the food safety sense to weigh each separately into a paper cup or onto a plate and then pour it in the bowl.

But that’s for things that really benefit from weighing. Manjoo’s using the scale to figure the exact portion of coffee beans to use each day. One of his interviewees is using the scale to weigh out the exact amount of sugar for his iced tea. These things would do fine by eyeballing–or just using a spoon like a normal person.

Do you really need a kitchen scale to figure out how much grated cheese you want in your mac and cheese? Wouldn’t grating it until it looks and tastes good to you work at least as well?

These guys have lost their trust in their ability to eyeball or cook by feel as they check and recheck their precision on the digital scale. Couple that with the cachet of doing as the French do (that is, when they bother to weigh ingredients instead of cooking by instinct, which they’re inordinately proud of) and you have a new American tech obsession parading itself as competence chic.

It’s like checking your e-mail every 20 minutes. Or bringing your new iPhone to the dinner table and looking up instant info on the Web every time your wife brings up a topic to which neither of you knows the answer. (AHEM!!!) Not that I’ve ever met (or acknowledged meeting) any certain husbands who got that obsessive over their apps. Trust me, it does NOT make them more competent or enjoyable conversationalists…even if they do occasionally bring home some serious pie.

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Cannoli that won’t bust the carb count

Posted on July 20, 2011 by DebbieN

Cannoli paste my way

This is a story about frugality–of the serendipitous sort.

The other week my daughter was with me at the supermarket (sometimes a mistake, sometimes an inspiration), and asked if we could get a packet of sugar cones to go with a drum of Dreyer’s ice cream. This was a trade-off for forfeiting Baskin-Robbins, whose ice cream is consistently higher in fat and carb than Dreyer’s or Breyer’s.

(Shakespearean aside #1) The B-R nutrition brochure is worth a pretty serious look for calories, fat, carbs, the total picture. You can definitely eat a days’ worth of calories–upward of 1500–in a single sitting if you order one of the fancier items. Skip the soft serve and stick to the single cone, for sure.

Not that we never stop in for a cone, but we never knew what the sugar cones were worth carbwise so Abby was limited to a paper cup or a cake cone. And of course for the price of two modest single cones at B-R, you could buy a 1.5 qt. carton at the store and scoop about 10 servings out of it yourself.

In the supermarket, the box with the sugar cones says 10 grams for Keebler and 11 grams for the Ralph’s (Kroger-affiliated) store brand, which is on sale, and about 50 calories per cone. The sugar cones have surprisingly simple ingredient lists for a processed food–wheat, brown sugar, vegetable oil, oat fiber (Ralph’s version) and a bit of salt (though not much–20 mg/cone) and maybe a little caramel coloring and malt flavoring.

But of course the ice cream tends to run out a bit sooner than the cones. And then what? Here’s where the “frugality” comes into it again (okay, I’m sort of rolling my eyes too, but still.)

I had about half a quart of ricotta left over from manicotti (same idea as for the microwaved stuffed shells, only using a plastic baggie with a corner torn out to pipe the spinach and cheese filling into both sides of the parcooked pasta tubes–worked pretty well actually). And ricotta, even on sale, is kind of expensive if you just let half of it sit in the fridge until it goes bad because there isn’t quite enough for another batch of pasta and you don’t know what else to do with it.

So anyway, the availability of leftover ricotta (I’m too cheap to do it with a brand new carton) plus the leftover cones added up in my head the other night to “Hey! Impromptu cannoli! Right now! And I don’t even have to go back to the store!”

I should probably explain.

The first cannoli I ever had were also the best. The parents of one of my sister’s high school friends ran a tiny Italian deli and specialty shop way out near the airport of our town, and what can I say–it was worth the schlep. In addition to imported pastas and olives and pickled peppers and salami and so on, you could buy a tub of their own fresh cannoli paste and a box of carefully packed pastry tubes so you could assemble the cannoli yourself at home and not risk sogginess or breakage on the way.

The D’Elicios’ cannoli paste contained ricotta, of course, sugar, and something else that I finally pinned down as lemon (and possibly orange) rind. And it was heaven on a spoon. So good I asked my mom to bring a box of their cannoli instead of a birthday cake to my college dorm  for my 18th birthday.

How was I to know that would be the last of the really great cannoli for decades? Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, Desserts, Diabetes, frugality, kid food, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cannoli that won’t bust the carb count

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