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    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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Broccoli IS a conservative political bogeyman!

Posted on June 14, 2012 by DebbieN

This exposé from yesterday’s New York Times goes into the longish history of how conservatives started waving broccoli stalks at any issue they don’t like…

Just as I suspected when Justice Antonin Scalia started spouting broccoli-tinged party-line nonsense this March, the Republicans really DID originally decide to blame broccoli based on George Herbert Walker Bush’s stated hatred of an innocent green. Yeesh! You can’t make this stuff up. And I was really, really trying to!

Filed under: Eating out, Food Politics, history, nutrition, Oddities, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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

Hunan Tofu, spare the salt (spoil the child)

Posted on April 30, 2012 by DebbieN

tofu with broccoli

Last year my daughter kept hocking me that I never made enough meat. This year she’s going on twelve and decided, about a month before Passover, that she needed to be vegetarian because she has ambitions of becoming a veterinarian. Hard enough for anyone to deal with, but for a diabetic, it’s an added challenge, especially at Passover, which we got through with a lot of vegetables and a dispensation for tofu (though without soy sauce, which contains wheat) so she wouldn’t be stuck with only eggs and cheese and yogurt and nuts for protein. Next year, rice and beans are going back on the menu–I’m not stuck in Ashkenazi-think, and a lot of synagogues in the US are starting to reconsider the role of legumes, pulses and non-wheatlike grains at Passover. I’m all for it.

Still, we’re well past Passover now, and the issue today is tofu; see under: how to feed a vegetarian preteen some protein without overdosing her on sodium. One of our favorite Chinese restaurant dishes is tofu in black bean sauce, but no doubt about it, it’s loaded.

[Update Note, cue theme “Do the Math Yourself”: Check out the recent LA Times’ version of Hunan Tofu with Black Bean Sauce–looks wonderful, right? but the sodium stats at the bottom of the recipe are WAY off, even if Andrea Nguyen, the food writer, had been using low-sodium soy sauce. Perhaps the editors forgot to count the salt in the fermented black beans–which on its own is something like 850 mg per tablespoon, as far as I could find (it’s not listed in the USDA nutrient database). You really can’t rinse that kind of salt out, especially not if you’re using the rinse as a broth and adding it back into the dish. That plus 1/4 t. salt “or more” at 560 or so mg. and a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce–you’re looking at 750-1000 mg for each of 4 servings, or 1500-2000 each as “dinner for two”, or about an entire day’s worth of salt in a single dish–definitely not the 350 or so as stated in the article!]

Cooking at home is a lot cheaper in a number of ways (a 14-oz pack of firm tofu runs about $1.50 where we live), and we can figure out what to do about the sauce if we really want it. Invariably, the restaurant container is always swimming in sauce with a layer of oil on top, so I think just not doing that would be enough to improve the nutrition stats considerably.

Frying tofu at home won’t usually get you that crispy outside texture that you get in the Hunan tofu dishes from the restaurant–mostly, they’re shallow- or deep-frying the cubes or triangles in a lot more fat than you’d want to use at home for an ordinary dinner. A little less than that level of crispy is still okay by me. Getting any kind of brown on the outside would be a step up from the pale, flabby results I was used to achieving in the trusty nonstick pan.

So I started actually paying attention to the cookbooks I have on the shelf and to the techniques I invented for pan-browning things like salmon without salting the dickens out of them. I needed a (small amount of) sauce that tasted okay but wasn’t swamped with sodium. That means a little low-sodium soy sauce and a lot of ginger, garlic, maybe a bit of vinegar and sesame oil–and a surprise ingredient for browning and flavor depth: molasses.

Most syrups (agave included) run about 16 g. carb per tablespoon, a whisker more than a tablespoon of ordinary granulated sugar. Blackstrap molasses runs a bit less, at 11 g. per tablespoon. And it’s really thick, really strong-flavored, and really brownish-black. Also relatively inexpensive. Half a teaspoon will darken and thicken an ounce of sauce for frying tofu. It helps “stretch” the soy sauce–for looks as much as flavor and volume–without adding much sodium or carb to the dish. Even stranger (and better), molasses is a powerhouse source of potassium at 600 mg and iron at 20% of the RDA per tablespoon (not that we’re adding that much here, more like 1/6th tablespoon). The vinegar and sesame oil lend rich pungent flavor that doesn’t depend solely on the saltiness of the soy sauce, and ginger and garlic round out the combination.

So that’s the sauce. To get the tofu to brown in the frying pan, you have to get some of the extra water out of it first. There’s always the press-it-with-a-weighted-plate-on-top-for-30-minutes scheme, which always seems more of a pain than it’s worth. But I’m impatient.

There are two decent ways to press tofu other than the weighted plate setup. One requires thinking ahead (not my forte): slice the tofu and freeze the slices, then thaw them. The other–are you surprised yet?–is to slice and microwave the tofu on an open plate for a couple of minutes, say 4 minutes for a whole 14-oz. pad of firm tofu, or 2 minutes for half a pad. Then drain off the watery stuff that’s come out of the tofu (let it sit another few minutes and redrain), and pat the tofu dry.

To fry, heat a bit of olive or other vegetable oil in a nonstick pan. Brown some onion or scallion a few minutes. Make a frying sauce: 1-3 teaspoons of low-sodium soy sauce, depending on how much tofu you’re making, a minced clove of garlic, a teaspoon of fresh grated ginger, a few drops of sesame oil, a dash of vinegar and a pinch of brown sugar or better, a half-teaspoon of molasses. Hot pepper flakes or z’khug optional.

Pour the sauce into the hot pan and let bubble up a second or two. Then add the tofu cubes or triangles and toss a couple of times in the sauce. The sauce will be just enough to color the surfaces a little and get them started.  It’ll take another 5-10 minutes of stir-frying to get the tofu surfaces to brown nicely, but it does work. Serve atop microwaved broccoli and/or bok choy. Garnish at will with some chopped scallion, toasted almonds, fried mushrooms or slices of red bell pepper (or hot peppers and roasted peanuts for kung pao, if that’s your thing).

Sodium counts for this version:

If you figure the dish serves 3 people a decent meal-sized portion of protein, and the sodium is coming exclusively from the low-sodium soy sauce, a full tablespoon of soy sauce would be about 450-600 mg, so each serving is about 200 mg at the higher end. I don’t think I usually use quite that much for us, but even so it’s pretty reasonable. If you don’t mind doubling the sodium to about 400 mg per serving, you could make another dose of the frying sauce to drizzle the dish with at the last minute.

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, frugality, kid food, nutrition, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hunan Tofu, spare the salt (spoil the child)

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 »

Ferran Adrià for the rest of us?

Posted on January 21, 2012 by DebbieN

Library run–big display–white coffee table book with silverware on the cover–The Family Meal: Home Cooking with……Ferran Adrià?

I had to pick it up. I had to.

It’s not that I don’t believe the inventor of gelatinized “pearls” of just about any liquid from vinegar to champagne and mushroom soup can cook food that might actually satisfy in under 300 minicourses. Somebody’s got to make dinner, after all. Man cannot live on foams with three flavors, one of them sea urchin, alone.

The immediate impression was “wow!”—loads of clear, bright overhead step-by-step photos that actually replace standard written instructions. A few captions in balloons over the corners of the photos, but it all looks simple, doable, and good-tasting. You start to get a sense of elation, along the lines of, “Hey! This is real food—from El Bulli! I can handle it!” Short ingredient lists back up at the top—very pared down. And all recipes scaled—only a restaurant chef could manage this with ease—for four different levels of cooking—dinner for two, intimate dinner party for 6-8, something bigger for 20 or so, and banquet for 75. This could be pretty handy, you think.

But then I started to look through a little more carefully and wonder. You could, I suppose, prepare things the way he shows in the pictures—but the pans are sometimes an odd choice for home cooking. Big baking sheet set over the burners for browning garlic in oil—an awful lot of garlic simmering away there, actually. It looks right in the baking sheet, because that’s what he’s used to and you’re only seeing one corner of the pan in the photo. And I can see that setup in a restaurant quantity, but on my small stove? At the dinner-for-two-or-three level?

The sauces are good, basic—too basic, or just classic?—and you can make them in big enough batches to keep in the fridge or divvy up for the freezer so you don’t have to start from scratch each time. That’s pretty good cooking technique and commonsense. But then you peer down at the photos and see Adrià boiling his garlic cloves—twice, in changes of water—and also his basil Continue reading →

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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 →

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Magazines, Food Politics, Food TV, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Paula Deen and the diet that bites you back

There’s something wrong when a veggie burger is worse for you than cheesecake

Posted on January 14, 2012 by DebbieN

Recently spotted in the Los Angeles Times Food Section “Dear SOS”

Veggie burgers from North Peak

Dear SOS: My family and I just got back from a trip to Traverse City, Mich., where I had the absolute best veggie burger I’ve ever had. Is there any way you could coax North Peak Brewery Co. to give up its recipe for its Black Bean and Portobello Mushroom Burger?

Dear —–: This burger even had some non-vegetarians going for it. The restaurant also sometimes serves it with provolone cheese and sliced avocado along with a dab of basil pesto aioli on toasted ciabatta rolls.

Total time: 1½ hours, plus cooling time Servings: 8

The recipe starts out with a 9-ingredient pico de gallo homework item–let’s just agree it’s basically salsa, and it gets mixed into the beans and other stuff at midpoint in the cooking process–which is long. One and a half hours? Yikes. But then check out the rest of the ingredients for the veggie burger itself:
Veggie burgers and assembly
  • 4 cups cooked black beans, from about 2½ (15-ounce) cans (drained)
  • 1/4 cup honey
  • 1/4 cup molasses
  • 2 teaspoons salt, more to taste
  • 1 tablespoon cumin, more to taste
  • 1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon olive oil, plus more for sautéing the burgers
  • 1/2 cup finely diced onion
  • 9 ounces portobello mushrooms, cut into ¼-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
  • 1 cup pico de gallo
  • 3 cups panko bread crumbs
  • Semolina flour for dusting
  • Sliced cheese, if desired
  • Sliced toasted ciabatta rolls

And then — guess the nutrition stats?

Each burger (without cheese or garnishes): 604 calories; 21 grams protein; 103 grams carbohydrates; 11 grams fiber; 13 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 0 cholesterol; 16 grams sugar; 1,227 mg sodium.

Whoa. 604 calories for a single veggie burger. 103 grams of carbohydrate–more than a meal’s worth just by itself. Honey, molasses and panko turn what might have been a reasonable amount of carb from a serving of black beans into something that reminds me of the old sketch from Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion on NPR: “Here’s my secret. I just add sugar to the same tired dinner and wow! suddenly everyone loves it!” … or words to that effect.

No doubt the honey and molasses also go a long way toward disguising the fact that each burger contains more than 1200 milligrams of sodium. Where’s that coming from, anyway? the canned beans–400  mg or so per serving. The added salt–a quarter-teaspoon or about 560 per serving. Breadcrumbs–more salt. Add a ciabatta roll and cheese and you’d be above 1500 mg easily.

At this point, despite their long laundry list of ingredients, the MorningStar Griller’s Vegan burgers I used to eat are looking a little more decent nutritionally–about 300 calories apiece and 280 or so mg. sodium. So if they could do it, why couldn’t you?

In theory, at least, you could make veggie burgers a little less dangerous and cheesecake-like if you just skipped the added syrups and salt, and cut the large excess of frying oil for the mushrooms and other sundries by simply microwaving them to precook. That is, choose a sensible recipe instead of something ridiculous.

Oh yeah. But then it would just be, you know, veggie burgers. Not keeping-up-with-the-chain-restaurants versions with the pumped-up sugar-salt-and-fat formulas. I ask again, is there any hope?

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Eating out, nutrition, Revised recipes, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

LA County gets school lunch program wrong

Posted on December 29, 2011 by DebbieN

The LA Times recently reported that the public school cafeteria revamp the county worked so hard on for this year is a dead flop; kids are dumping whole trays of the healthier dishes they approved of in focus groups over the summer.

But there’s a catch: the dishes, which replace the concession-stand burgers-fries-pizza formula, were prepared well over the summer. The students say a lot of the stuff they’re being served now in the guise of “healthy” whole-grain salads and so on in the actual cafeterias is inedible: undercooked or burnt rice and other grains, undercooked meat, moldy bread, milk and other sealed cartons past their due dates, and so on. And when the students brought it to media attention, some of the cafeterias responded by removing the due dates.

The story was so eye-catching the New York Times picked it up last week to throw the issue to its own readers for comment. (Or you could say it regurgitated it–near the truth; the major newspapers seem to be following each other a little too closely these days. What is this, Reader’s Indigestion? what’s the nation coming to???)

The comments–well, as always for newspaper free-for-alls, they’re not generally on the ball. Most bashed the school board for being too liberal and trying to shove ethnic variety dishes like pad thai down the throats of poor kids trained on burgers and fries and pizzas. A lot of them were bemoaning the complete success of the fast food concessionaires in conditioning our kids not to like or even tolerate real food. A few–those who can read and think?– pointed out the spoiled or miscooked food problems mentioned in the LA Times but not in the NY Times digest version.

They all seem to have missed the most serious point, though: the school district may have retooled the menus, but they haven’t restored proper working kitchens to the school cafeterias. There’s no proper cooking facility behind that wall–certainly not for a thousand or so kids in each school. A lot of the new dishes are still being prepared offsite, just as the pizzas and burgers and fries were. Those prepared onsite are handled by staff used to doing nothing more complicated than heating up a bunch of frozen boxes from a concession company using minimal “kitchen” facilities.

The fault in the LA Unified School District healthy food menu plan lies partly in its complexity and partly in its execution. Upscale restaurant-style dishes might not be the best way to go for a first run at better food, and not just because they might repel students used to commercial stodge. They’re a bad starting choice because they’re more complex than the minimally experienced and underequipped cafeteria workers can handle on site, and the facilities that produce them clearly haven’t got their protocols down for “quinoa salads for 1000”.

The freshness factor is another problem. With “just reheat” trays of frozen pizzas, burgers and fries, no one has to think about sell-by dates. Heck, the sodium level is so high they probably don’t even need to freeze the meals. We’ve all seen the blog post where the woman let a Happy Meal sit on one of her shelves for an entire year…and nothing appeared to have changed in all that time. Real food with expiration dates? The school cafeterias are now out of their depth.

But by the same token, the schools shouldn’t have to throw in the towel so easily and go back to pizza, burgers and fries.

What would have been easier to get right–better balanced, and with better buy-in from the students–might have been “build your own” sandwich and/or salad bars.

You see the complicated versions  at any Whole Foods or Souplantation. But pick one theme per day–brown-bag sandwiches, Italian subs or hoagies, felafel and pita, soft tacos… Offer two or three nutritious and fairly familiar choices for protein fillings, one of them vegetarian. Two or three raw, fresh vegetables as accompaniment and a choice of sauces or toppings, and fairly simple bread. Then you’ve got the makings of something students can deal with and find appetizing as well as nutritious, but without a lot of complicated prep.

You don’t have to provide a zillion choices for lunch every day. You don’t have to salt or bread the dickens out of the fillings, and you don’t have to provide sweetened, oversalted sauces for them. Fewer ingredients and processes are better. Just make sure the food is fresh.

I wish to god the school cafeterias and the board members who debate what they serve would stop trying to imitate the  chain restaurants or the upscale restaurants–or indeed any restaurants. It’s lunch, not a field trip downtown to the California Science Center, where the brand-name burger chain running its concession stand/cafeteria sends the smell of frying grease wafting up to every one of the exhibits to make sure you know what you’re really supposed to be paying attention to.

Why don’t school cafeterias do regular sandwiches anymore?

 

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Politics, frugality, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , | Comments Off on LA County gets school lunch program wrong

Dressing (or not) for Dinner

Posted on October 21, 2011 by DebbieN

Los Angeles news outlets tend to go for mildly racy or otherwise sensationalized “human interest” tidbits, preferably ones in other cities, so they can get a double benefit from publishing trashily attractive stuff and tsking over it at the same time.

Restaurant nudity to be debated in San Francisco is a practically perfect example of such a nonstory. Frankly, in this teched-up age, the phone/iPad/wallet fannypack looks strikingly silly on someone with no other adornments but a hat. Surely nudists should be a little less materialistic? Surely such a fashion faux pas rules them out of being a big threat?

Everyone interviewed seems to be worried about whether nudists, who are allowed to roam the streets of SF legally, are going to observe decent etiquette in restaurants and put paper down on the seats first. I think they’ve got it wrong.

The real issue is not whether anyone leaves a few tushie germs on seats that haven’t been cleaned properly since the Kennedy administration anyway.

No, the real safety issue comes down to the Seinfeld Syndrome. Two words here: hot soup. Or hot coffee. Take your pick, it’s gonna be a field day for law firms.

Filed under: Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, Oddities, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dressing (or not) for Dinner

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.

Filed under: baking, cooking, Desserts, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Blogs, haute cuisine, nutrition, shopping | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Weighing in on kitchen scales

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