frugality | Slow Food Fast

Nectarine Sorbet, Light on the Sugar

Posted on June 28, 2016 by DebbieN

Last summer when I had too many nectarines all at once, and they were starting to go soft in the fridge, I sliced them up and froze them as-is to dig out and gnaw on whenever the temperature got over 100 or so–which it did, often. I did admit it wasn’t a recipe, as such, and that if you really wanted, it might be worth blending them up for a granita or sorbet. But it was too hot to bother, and I didn’t care how silly it looked to stand around with the freezer door open just to grab a wedge and chill myself a bit.

This summer, luckily, I have the same problem–not the nectarines from the big Ralph’s/Kroger supermarket, those are still hard as rocks and have almost no scent most of the time. But the Armenian greengrocers get all the overgrown, just-about-overripe, bee-bitten and split-pit nectarines and peaches, the ones that aren’t perfect, hard and shiny, and that have an insane-making aroma when you pass by.

I always have to grab as many as I can, which is about eight or ten at a time, and hope I can hide them in the fridge just long enough to snag one for myself before my teenager decides they all belong to her and what are we looking at her like that for? Grrr…

Well–I hid them from myself as well this time, buried them under a couple of bags of fresh herbs for a couple of days, and when I relocated them, about seven of them were getting just to the point where I had to do something or else. So I cut them in wedges and froze them, of course. It was a lot–about a quart of cut-up fruit. And after testing out a couple of wedges, I thought, well, what if I try the sorbet thing with the rest of them after all?

The only problem with sorbet is that it usually contains a lot more sugar syrup than I think it needs if the fruit is properly ripe. Three-quarters of a cup of sugar (150 grams) for a quart–sometimes just a pint–of sorbet is like drinking whole cups of Concord grape juice. Very spiky for a diabetic kid–or prediabetic adult. With the carb content of whatever fruit you use, it can add up to 35-45 grams of carb per serving. A whole large nectarine by itself has about 25 grams of carb, and at least it’s got fiber.

And the toothaching standard of American commercial dessert sweetness blankets the taste of fresh fruit until it’s not really fresh anymore. It might as well be canned. This is acceptable–just–for blackberries and raspberries, which are pretty sour if you don’t add sugar, and which keep a lot of their flavor cooked, but absolutely horrible for nectarines and peaches.

If you can get nectarines or peaches that actually taste like they came off a tree and not out of a warehouse, you do not want to cook all the wildness and tart freshness out of them (apricots–go for it; they actually improve sometimes with baking). Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Desserts, frugality, fruits, Revised recipes | Tagged: food, low-sugar desserts, nectarines, recipes, sorbets | Comments Off on Nectarine Sorbet, Light on the Sugar

Hot Air

Posted on June 24, 2016 by DebbieN

The last two or three months of school seems to be getting more and more fraught every year–for parents, certainly. I’ve just woken up to the fact that I’ve been offline for something like three months now–March! yeesh! Not because I had nothing new to say about food, exactly, but because I had three or four competing ideas and no time to figure out pictures for the posts. And as everybody knows, if you didn’t take a picture of it, it practically didn’t happen. Just like all those tourists who used go to the Grand Canyon and (back in the day of actual film) had to wait for their pictures to be developed to see what it looked like…

And now that school’s out, it’s hot. 107 degrees twice this week in Pasadena, smoke in the air from the San Gabriel fire not too far away, and no desire to cook, walk during the day, or listen to anything resembling hot air.

Because the recent spate of presidential campaigning has become poised to take away almost any American’s appetite for a while. Just read a newspaper online and look at the prominent photos and bombastic quotations and examples of rank cowardice.

I mean, yeah, I voted in the California primary two weeks ago, and I even researched all the local judges and assemblypeople for my district this time, hoping to make something count or at least not to commit any hideous mistakes.

Contrary to what you might think, reading the candidates’ own statements will actually give you a feel for what kind of people they are, whether they give a flying leap about their prospective constituents and whether they know how to tie their own shoes. Reading through about fifteen last-minute write-in candidate statements for various assembly-and-county-supervisor-type posts was pretty entertaining, actually–most of the hopefuls (you could guess which parties) stated their qualifications as “I believe in God.” Seriously. Sum total.

Nationalistic and bigoted fervor seem to be going around, though. To wit, “Brexit”, which actually won the vote today. Not that I don’t understand Britain’s–and everyone else’s–frustration with the EU administration, but the vote results and the resulting–utterly predictable–mess announced this morning are really disheartening.

Some are calling it a shot in the dark; to me it looks like a solid a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-why-don’t-you move. It’ll take at least two years to execute, cost an immediate fortune in lost business and one-downmanship, and probably cost a lot more time, money and headache than previously suspected to resolve with the EU countries. Let’s face it; if Trump (king of the gold-tone hot air vent) thinks that it’s a great idea, you know you’ve gone wrong somewhere. Scotland, where his fabled floundering golf courses are located, went solidly for “remain,” by the way…

So is it any wonder I feel like taking a major break from my computer, my kitchen, and possibly your kitchen as well? If only to soothe your eyeballs and your rapidly developing ulcer, for which I apologize profoundly. Oy.

Now that that’s over, I guess I have no more excuses. What was I going to post all this time, anyway?

Harking back to early April, it looks like I made a couple of tries at something about microwaveable side dishes for Passover seders. Yes, it’s now too late to care where I hid the afikoman, but I maintain that the ability to microwave greens like asparagus or broccoli to perfection in a couple of minutes at the drop of a hat can save a meal–Passover or not–and some heat in the kitchen. If you’re vegetarian or leaning toward it, some of the not-chicken microwaveable soups can also be kind of handy and quick to nuke and store in those big snaplock containers in the fridge and free up your stove.

I didn’t go so far as to try any microwave matzah balls. No idea whether that would be a great idea or a terrible one, I was too not-chicken to try it. What can I say–be relieved. Be very relieved.

However, a crustless Israeli-style spinach and feta casserole, basically a quiche but more rustic in texture, was a hit both conventionally baked and browned for a Saturday congregation lunch during Passover and later for us at home via the quickie microwave method (minus the crust, so you don’t need the oven at all). It’s less glamorous-looking, more get-it-on-the-table-and-don’t-heat-up-the-house.

Unfortunately for the spinach and feta thing, it turns out there are a gazillion of these posts all over the web, especially on low-carber fitness sites. Which takes away some of the charm of posting about it. But it’s still a good and very simple dish.

Israeli Spinach and Feta Crustless Quiche

Per casserole dish:

6 eggs
1 c. milk (skim is fine)
1 lb. thawed and squeezed-out frozen spinach
1 lg clove garlic, minced/mashed/grated
2-3 chopped scallions
handful of chopped dill or 1-2 T dried
6-8 oz. crumbled feta

Toss the spinach, herbs and feta lightly in the casserole dish so there are visible clumps of cheese (i.e., don’t blend it too fine), mix the eggs and milk together and pour them over. Optional–grate or sprinkle a pinch of nutmeg on top. Either bake about 35-45 minutes at 350F, which makes it all pretty, puffed and browned on top, or (as I see it, the better option for Pasadena weather), just nuke it covered in a microwaveable stoneware casserole for about 7-8 minutes until puffed and cooked through to keep your kitchen from sweltering.

…Are we sensing a theme here? I hope so–because yes, it’s actually been 107 degrees this week in Pasadena. I’m not that good at keeping my cool or not cooking at all (don’t ask about the sourdough I “rescued” by baking around midnight with all the doors and windows open when the temperature dropped below 90…) But I’m trying hard not to cook.

When it’s this hot, dinner becomes a pastiche of sort-of-niçoise salads with beans or canned tuna added, maybe some cold hard-boiled or medium-boiled eggs. I’m also not above making a dinner of wedges of leftover cauliflower omelet reheated (or not) in the microwave, and either tomato-cucumber salad or some sliced tomatoes with vinegar, olive oil, maybe basil flowers from the struggling plant outside.

The big box of grab-and-go salad vegetables is still looking like a good strategy too–veg that doesn’t wilt in an instant is as valuable in summer as in winter. As is shredded Greek cabbage salad. Cold raw or microwave-blanched green beans, romano beans, cauliflower or broccoli with mustard dressing, Italian-type vinaigrette, or a yogurt-based dip is also a relief.

Here are a few other hot weather ideas dragged from the depths of my blank-book cookbooks, which I now realize I’ve been keeping more than half my life.

Cold marinated tofu

Tofu is actually pretty handy to have in hot weather–either nuked with vegetables instead of stir-frying if you can stand to eat it hot, or else sliced cold and marinated for ~ half an hour with jao tze dipping sauce ingredients poured over it. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Dairy, Dips, frugality, fruits, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, salads | Tagged: food, hot-weather cooking, recipes | Comments Off on Hot Air

Faster Roasted Tomato Soup

Posted on March 7, 2016 by DebbieN

Yeah, I know, it’s early March, the winds and rain and snow and tornadoes are still doing their thing around much of the country and here in Pasadena the chill has set in…sort of, to about 75 degrees or so daytime. With actual rain last night.

And it’s tax season.

So what we really need is something to brighten the last dregs of winter. I was thinking tomato soup, myself.

Why was I thinking it? Because so many food articles in the past couple of weeks have mentioned slow-roasted tomatoes, charred tomatoes, and so on to improve the obviously lacking flavor of winter tomatoes and avoid using canned ones. One chef got flamed for suggesting in the New York Times food section that “local” is not the sane way to go with produce that simply isn’t producing in winter in the northeast, and that canned tomatoes are not the worst idea in the world after all. Shame! Shame!

Actually, I agree with her–and not just because I’m the original purple thumb when it comes to gardening. In a surreal reversal of my hideously lacking garden skills, I actually have three–count ’em, three–grape tomato plants in bloom and producing the occasional tomato-let as we speak. I even have basil and rosemary and mint and thyme that I haven’t killed through inattention and forgetting to water. But really, even so, there’s no way I’d set myself up as a homesteader on those flimsy credentials. We’d starve.

Tomatoes are one of those things–either you’ve got the Fresno specials (or something local and preferably from your own garden so you can brag) in the summer and they’re divine with nothing but a bit of olive oil and vinegar, or even just plain, or else it’s winter and you’ve got blah tomatoes that are kind of orange and grainy. Or you’ve got canned tomatoes, preferably no-salt Romas. Frankly, there’s nothing wrong with that in winter. Or any other time you’re making microwave marinara.

However…If your supermarket tomatoes will consent to ripen on a counter near a window for a couple of days, you might be able to eke out some actual tomato flavor from them. They may still not be fantastic, and one or two may start to develop soft spots, but it’s still worth doing anyway. Keep turning them gently every day to minimize the risk of spoilage and use them. They should at least redden.

And as mentioned above in the numerous food section articles, you can do the slow-roast-on-parchment-in-the-oven thing to them and they’ll be a bit more flavorful for sauces and tomato soup. But it takes about 45 minutes to an hour. And I’m impatient.

So today I rescued a couple of aging Roma tomatoes from my countertop and decided to try pan-roasting them, as in frying pan. Would they take on a char? Would they taste better? Would they make soup worth eating?

Bear in mind this is an experiment more than a proper recipe with specific quantities, but yes, it worked, and it only took about 10 minutes from start to finish. Maybe the flavor’s not as glorious as if I’d oven-roasted them for an hour, but the lack of waiting makes it reasonably good, and the garlic makes up for the rest of it. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, frugality, high-speed soup, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food, recipes, soups, tomatoes | Comments Off on Faster Roasted Tomato Soup

Emergency Éclairs 2.0, Even More Microwaved

Posted on February 18, 2016 by DebbieN

All the components of an éclair are at least partly microwaveable, flavorful and pretty forgiving. Even if you have to serve them upside down.

Here we go again, because it’s been Valentine’s Day this past weekend and I have pretty loose time standards for such things…I did actually make these before dinner on the 14th, so it counts. Not that you really need VDay as an excuse.

Éclairs are a lot simpler than they look in the pastry shops, and a lot cheaper than you’d think to make at home–in fact, cheaper than almost any American-style dessert in terms of calories, sugar, fat, salt… A surprisingly small amount of ordinary pantry staple ingredients goes a very long way and makes a bigger show than if you tried making brownies.

If you have a microwave, they can also be a lot quicker than most cookbook recipe specs, even though there are three separate parts to prepare and assemble–the filling, the shell, and the chocolate topping–rather than the usual American one-bowl dump-mix-and-bake scheme.

Éclairs don’t hit you over the head with sweet–they rely on the contrast of textures and flavors between the mostly unsweet pastry shell, the delicately sweet pastry cream, and the deep chocolate (or other flavor, but it has to be an actual flavor to be good, not the typical flavorless, oversweetened canned cake frosting) topping.

Éclairs have also become something of a canvas for artistic expression in Parisian bakeries; David Lebovitz has some great photos of ones with reproductions of paintings screened onto the tops, woodland scenes in colored icing and fondant and flavored marshmallows, fruit fantasias, and I don’t know what else, not to mention the fillings. They’re gorgeous to look at in the glass pastry cases but you couldn’t walk down the street, find a park bench, and just eat them with your fingers. You’d end up wearing them.

So the classic chocolate-topped, pastry cream-filled éclairs are still my favorite, partly because you can’t find them in most of the bakeries here.

Baking the dough is the one part you can’t really do in the microwave, more’s the pity (although you can do it in the toaster oven for a small batch). But otherwise, I can say it was worth it and–although I needed to step on a scale Monday morning to be certain–not that devastating dietwise…or even diabetes-wise. But, as with rugelach, you probably shouldn’t do this too often. Holidays and sharing are a pretty good idea. Leftovers are not. Limit the dietary badness.

Unromantic morning-after nutrition stat check: At the medium-small size I made, they weigh in at about 22 grams of carbohydrate, 160 calories, 6 grams of fat (mostly saturated, from the butter and chocolate plus egg yolks) and maybe 40-50 mg max of sodium apiece. Verdict: Not too shabby for a French dessert. Could be worse and often is. Stick to one apiece, plus some fruit, and eat it with a light supper that includes a green salad and you should be reasonably fine. Also svelte, happy, and able to sing «Non…je ne régrette rien…» the next morning. But please don’t. Not before coffee.

Even if you eat two at a time after supper because you’re not sure how long you can store the extras in the fridge so they don’t go all soggy the next day, it shouldn’t hit you like a ton of lead…well, not too much like a ton of lead. At least they weren’t full sized; they were pretty filling. Afterward, when we were lying in a daze on the couch recovering, my husband suggested just freezing any extras next time. He had a point.

About halving a recipe

I was in a hurry and couldn’t find the lower-saturated-fat recipe I’d used successfully for “Emergency éclairs 1.0” so I went with the recipes for choux paste shells and pastry cream in the “basics” back section of the white Silver Palate Cookbook. The dough and pastry cream worked fine in the microwave, as I think almost any standard recipes would.

Since there are only myself, my husband and our daughter here for dinner and eligible for éclairs (plus the cat, who is miffed that we didn’t count her), I cut both recipes in half–I repeat, limit the dietary badness…

The pastry cream was fine, but I hadn’t read all the instructions for the choux pastry, or I’d have known that the 3rd egg was for a completely unnecessary egg yolk glaze. When I halved the recipe I used an extra egg white as the “half egg,” and when the puffs puffed, they left nothing behind, no base, just a hollow, once I peeled them off the foil. The result was still fine for us but a little awkward for presentation–I had to sit them upside down like boats to fill them, and then cover the filling with the ganache. So definitely go back to the right proportions for the choux recipe (repeated below).

The ganache…is always very chocolate, very microwaveable, very forgiving of awkwardness and therefore perfection itself. It covers a lot of sins and makes you feel much better about them.

Mostly Microwaveable Éclairs

This is half-recipes all the way: it makes 6-7 half-size éclairs, 3″ rather than the standard 6″ monsters at the bakery. We each had two after supper and were completely stuffed.

Timing: If you’re doing the whole thing in one go, start by preheating the (regular) oven to 400 F, then make the pastry cream, which is really fast, and chill and stick it in the fridge, then do the choux paste, because as soon as you make that you need to dollop it out and bake it right away. If you use the microwave for the pastry cream, and you should, the choux will be ready to go just about when the oven beeps. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, cooking, Desserts, frugality, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes | Tagged: baking, Desserts, food, French food, recipes | 3 Comments »

Green Beans Get Serious

Posted on December 31, 2015 by DebbieN

If you’ve gone to the supermarket the last couple of weeks, and seen huge haystacks of green beans on sale for under a dollar a pound, you might be wondering to yourself how much green bean casserole can any one family take? Pretty bad that Thanksgiving only has one sanctioned green bean recipe, and that no one can think of anything better to do with them over the holidays.

Not that I’m against plain and simple green beans, as long as they’re actually still green. Fresh, lightly steamed or microwaved or stir-fried, not boiled to death. Although frankly, I often prefer them raw and fresh as something to just wash and nosh, like carrot sticks or celery.

Even frozen green beans are fine if you treat them gently and cook them a bit less than you would fresh ones–the freezing and thawing break down all vegetables slightly, and you don’t want them to go to mush or turn brown.

Just not the dank, slimy brown horrors that emerged from a can every once in a while when I was a kid, and which my mother insisted, against all reason, had once been something living. Canned green beans are the zombies of the green bean world.

But with a bounty of cheap greens in winter, what to do with them is a pretty good question, and one that begs a three-minute solution, especially when most green vegetables are getting harder to come by. You want to stock up but you don’t want to be eating the same old, same old for a month.

My best solution for a quick green bean dish–other than the grab-and-go raw snack vegetable business above–is of course to wash and trim the tough ends from a bunch of green beans (I usually grab about a pound at a time). Stick them in a covered container or between two microwaveable stoneware or Corelle dinner plates with a drizzle of water (anything from a couple of tablespoons up to about a quarter-inch in depth) .

Three minutes on HIGH should cook a pound of rinsed and trimmed green beans to that crisp-tender ideal where they’re still green and just cooked but still have a bit of bite to them. Basically like blanched or steamed, but without the big stockpot of boiling water (which I hate to wait for and which seems a waste), the strainer, or the ice water bath (another wasted bowl).

And you can do it right before dinner as a last-minute thought, just enough for that meal so they stay green. Drain and serve them ASAP for best results. Don’t give ’em a chance to go brown.

If you want to keep them green for later, microwave them a little less, maybe 1.5-2.5 minutes per pound, just until they begin to turn jewel green, rinse them under a cold tap as soon as they’re done, drain and chill. Do not add anything acidic to them until just before you serve them so they don’t turn olive-brown.

Yes, it’s pretty plain–which is handy if you want it versatile. You can serve them hot with a mustard garlic vinaigrette or other salad-type dressing to dip into or drizzle over them. Or the richer (but not saturated-fat) sauces, tehina with lemon and garlic (and either water or plain yogurt), or Asian peanut sauce with chile, garlic and ginger are also good.

If you want something a little fancier-looking and vaguely French (we’re going for “day in Monet’s Garden,” not “tacky tourist café with haricots verts side dish that turns out to be nothing more than buttered overcooked green beans”) you can arrange the green beans in a covered stoneware platter or bowl, with thinly sliced onions and a bit of thyme and minced garlic strewn around to get a fairly nice-looking and savory microwave-to-table kind of dish that still only takes a few minutes to throw together and zap to perfection.

Slice some mushrooms over the green beans or nestle mushroom Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, salads, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food, green beans, microwave cooking, recipes | Comments Off on Green Beans Get Serious

Frozen sliced nectarines

Posted on August 5, 2015 by DebbieN

This, forgive me, was the least bad of a selection of really lame post title attempts to figure out what the heck to call this–starting with “peach pops,” which is not just awful but misleading. And kitschy. “Peach pops” implies that you’ve blended some artificially flavored peach iced tea mix with some horrid oversweetened commercial sludge parading as yogurt and frozen it in a pool partyesque popsicle mold–each pop with its own color wand– and posed the result on a slab of watermelon or something. Kind of a Woman’s Day, Family Circle, Real Simple, etc., cover shot.

Anyone who knows me or has ever looked at the photos on this blog realizes I’m not naturally good at cute food, to say nothing of garnishes. Occasionally I try, but I’m definitely not neat. Worse, when it’s hot I’m [even more] cranky and self-righteous about looks not being everything. And even when it’s not broiling out I really detest all the condescending pinkness and tealness attendant on women’s homemaker magazine covers.

So this is not about peach pops. It’s about frozen sliced nectarines–real ones, even. And nothing but.

I’m all too aware that many readers are still suffering blah, spongy peaches this summer, and I still don’t have any good answers for you, other than the ones I came up with when I wrote the original post about it: pick only peaches that have a good smell and are not rock-hard when you buy them, try ripening them in a window for a couple of days, maybe in a paper bag, and if that doesn’t work, cut up the parts that are semi-okay and microwave them with some sugar and lemon juice and be willing to eat them cooked.

Here in Southern California, for a wonder, our US-grown peaches and nectarines are finally pretty decent. And decadent when fully ripe. Improbable as it would have seemed to me a few years ago, when I couldn’t get decent peaches or nectarines for love or money, I now have the opposite problem–too many all at once. It’s a problem I can happily deal with.

Freezing slices of nectarine, as the very uninspiring but at least unkitschy title implies, is probably too simple an idea to even consider a recipe. (See the photo above if you doubt me–this is not a glamorous-looking or stylish item as shown.) Granted, frozen bananas are pretty simple and they count as a recipe, especially if you stick a popsicle stick in them and cover them in chocolate. And then roll them in crushed roasted peanuts. Or coconut. Or pretzel dust. Or crushed peppermints. Or whatever.

But nectarines 1. don’t go with chocolate (per Alice Medrich in Bittersweet, and I agree) and 2. don’t have the classic shape for a popsicle-ish dessert the way bananas do. The best you can do if you’re eating nectarines frozen is probably to turn them into some kind of sorbet or granita, which might look prettier but defeats the purpose of not fussing because it’s too hot outside.

So they won’t win James Beard awards, they won’t make the cover of your favorite foodie magazine. There’s no garnish unless you’re the garnish type, they don’t require a fancy blender or freezing mold (although you could…) and you don’t have to stick a popsicle stick or toothpick or anything into the slices–unless you want to. They just taste good. Is that enough justification for a food blog post? Not sure anymore. But I hope so.

It started in June, right before we were about to go east for a week and I had way too much produce in the fridge. I ended up throwing a lot of stuff in the freezer in microwave containers or ziplock bags and hoping for the best–bunches of herbs, a pound or so of blueberries, some lemons. And several nectarines, which I washed and sliced up first.

I’d never frozen fruit by itself before, and unfortunately at some point in my ambitious youth I had read how to do it properly, Continue reading →

Filed under: DASH Diet, Desserts, frugality, fruits | Tagged: cooking, food, frozen desserts, fruit recipes | Comments Off on Frozen sliced nectarines

Frittata on the Rebound

Posted on July 14, 2015 by DebbieN

Dr. Lustig’s “Teaching Breakfast” clinical teaching program for families with obese or diabetic children posed a question for me that I didn’t get a chance to test out until this morning. If something with balanced protein and vegetables–say, an omelet–is a better choice than most breakfast cereal, or poptarts, or doughnuts, or whatever most kids are eating before they go to school, how do you get that to be affordable and quick to prepare on a schoolday?

The easiest way to do eggs for several people at a time without overdoing the cholesterol is probably to do a big omelet or scramble and take out some of the yolks. But you might not have time to do it at the optimal time for the gourmet–that is, right before you’re going to eat it. Not if you’re heading your kid(s) out the door with the daily litany to grab socks, shoes, homework and lunches and not to worry about what color lipstick (or hairstyle, or comic book, depending on age and taste) because you’re going to be late and come on, already.

We didn’t have this problem in my childhood; you either got out to the bus stop on time by yourself or you walked to school in disgrace, because my mother was not going to make our breakfast or lunch (for which we were immensely grateful), or do any big rescues for “emergencies” based on footdragging. And staying home was not an option we wanted to explore. My sister and I could count on the other one telling on us, not to mention the prospect of running into Mom if she came home early or picked up a phone call from the school attendance clerk. Motivation is everything…

But grownups have these dilemmas too. Who wants to be messing about with a frying pan and washing up when you’re trying to get to work? So many of my daughter’s teachers last year could be spotted out in the parking lot of the school right before the first bell, standing by their cars and bolting down an egg mcmuffin-type thing from a fast food drive-through (drive-thru? hate that commercial spelling) with a cup of coffee in the other hand. Quick, seemingly nutritious, but actually horribly high-salt-and-fat-and-calorie-for-what-it-is, and quite expensive too. Not a good daily habit. If you can do eggs and coffee from scratch at home, you’re bound to do them better and a lot cheaper. You could probably save up for a new tablet or pair of theater tickets within weeks, and you might even lose a bit of weight.

So eggs. A frittata has a lot more vegetation in it than a classic French-style omelet, and it’s more sturdy–look at the very solid, nearly stiff Spanish potato-filled version; always served at room temperature in cubes or wedge slices, almost as some kind of potato kugel.

Well, okay, you don’t want a potato frittata if you’re trying to get the nutrition up to snuff without tons of calories or grams of carb. You want some lighter but substantial vegetables so you don’t end up feeling like you swallowed a lead balloon for the rest of the day.

But the good news is that you don’t have to cook and serve it right on the spot. You can do it ahead and stick it in the fridge. If you do it the night before, you can cut it into wedges and microwave one on a plate for 15-30 seconds and you’re ready to go. Or, of course, you can serve it cold–kind of like the classic cold pizza for breakfast, only better balanced. And most frittatas go well with salsa.

I am not a fan of the kind of isn’t-it-rustic-Italian-or-Provençal glossy magazine frittata instructions that call for frying first and then running under a broiler or what have you. That takes time and heats up the house ( bad in Los Angeles) and probably calls for expensive stovetop-to-oven-friendly cookware, which is usually not [sorry, forgot the “not” when I first posted this] nonstick. A lot of excess fuss for an effect you can perfectly well achieve in an ordinary nonstick frying pan in a couple of minutes on the stovetop, which is how most people who make frittatas at home “authentically” in tiny Italian or Provençal kitchens actually make them. Unless you’re doing a fancy brunch service for 20 diners at a time, in which case it might actually be quicker to do a baked eggs thing in a big casserole and skip the frying. But then I’d hope you were getting paid through the nose for that. Little chance of collecting caterer’s fees at home.

As for the vegetables, cauliflower and zucchini are both very good low-carb, low-calorie stand-ins for potato, and they’re pretty inexpensive and easy to prepare, especially if you have a microwave so you can parcook them on a plate for a minute or so before adding them to the frying pan. That gives you a chance to soften them through quickly and at the same time drain off some of the liquid–they’ll fry faster and won’t make the frittata soggy.

Cauliflower has more fiber, vitamin C and calcium than zucchini, and it’s a bit firmer as well. Zucchini is milder and easier for kids (or adults) who aren’t yet used to eating a variety of vegetables. A frittata like this is also the ideal way to use up that scary-big overgrown zucchini your enthusiastic gardening neighbor gifted you with. Or that someone anonymous parked on your doorstep in the middle of the night.

…It is getting to be the season for that sort of reverse larceny, now that I think about it. Someday I feel it would be right to invent a spring-loaded, siren-enhanced trap for stealth zucchini donors. Something involving on-the-spot forced acceptance of a large cafeteria-style green or orange jello mold with canned fruit cocktail floating in it, faded-pink “cherries” and all, as the price of escape… Or maybe I’ve just been watching too much “Big Bang Theory” with my daughter this weekend and have started to channel my inner Sheldon. And really, I don’t mind stealth zucchini nearly as much as gifted Meyer lemons.

Okay. Back to the frittata–after all, if you already know how to make a basic omelet, this post is mostly just for entertainment, a mere vehicle for shocking photos of various vegetables that have been foisted off on us by well-meaning friends. It’s enough to make you feel like Wallace & Grommit in “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”:

Monster zucchini. This is a dinner plate and steak knife we’re talking about here. And only half the zucchini. The other half of which I’m sure is still stalking the neighborhood in the wee hours of the night.

Breaking down a zucchini (well, how would YOU go about it? I didn’t have a wooden stake or silver bullet or anything) for a monster omelet.

Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Diabetes, frugality, kid food, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: breakfast, childhood obesity, diabetes, eggs, food, omelet, recipes, vegetable recipes, zucchini | Comments Off on Frittata on the Rebound

This always happens right before vacation…

Posted on June 4, 2015 by DebbieN

Finally, finally, we are going to the East Coast. We’ve had to put off seeing my mom and my sister (and assorted boys) twice since December due to incessant snow, none of which hit Los Angeles in the slightest. So as soon as school lets out, we’re packing for an ungodly wake-up call the next morning and getting out of SoCal for a bit more than a week. The cat gets a hotel/spa vacation without all the schlepping around between Bahston and New Yawk. We get the do-we-have-enough-clean-undies-to-make-it version.

So good, already. But as in many of my tangled big-event preparation schemes, I have a slight problem with the fridge:

The problem, part I…Note the tomatoes: 10+, excessively ripe, and the invisible 6 or so red peppers behind them. Not to mention the huge bag with 7-8 bunches of fresh herbs…

Part II, the door…Note the huge bag of nectarines, lower left, the chiles just behind the mushrooms and two bags of apricots at right, just because…

AAAgh…just a little insane. Suffice it to say, it’s been an enthusiastic week or so vegetable-shopping-wise because the Fresno tomatoes are back in my local greengrocer’s, along with a lot of other produce, and I’ve gone overboard on a number of items, not least of which are lemon basil, mint, dill and tarragon (which I haven’t even decided if I like). The market beckons, the low prices for herbs and vegetables even more so, and the sun’s finally come out again after a month of gray days. And I’m a purple thumb as a gardener, so the greengrocer’s wares beckon even more strongly. How could I not want it all? But a little thought for the calendar might not have gone amiss.

So I’m in trouble again. We leave in 4 days. There are a maximum of three humans in the house (depends how we’re behaving at any given moment). Nobody but me really gets into gazpacho the way they should–though they will go with salads (the coarse-cut version of gazpacho). And it’s a sorry day when you have to threaten people with apricots and nectarines three meals a day. We should be reveling in the produce section, not roiling in it. If we were staying here, this would be an ideal scenario for the next week and a half, Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, frugality, fruits, salads, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food, fresh herbs, nectarines, recipes, salads, vegetables | Comments Off on This always happens right before vacation…

Parsley Doesn’t Count

Posted on May 23, 2015 by DebbieN

It’s nearly June, the big northeast snowfest that lasted into April is pretty much over, and all the May and June issues of the big food magazines are showing…almost no fresh vegetables on the covers. Or inside. Oh, you do see some green–but it’s garnish. Flat-leaf parsley, a little cilantro, a sprig of basil maybe, chopped or torn over the cover dish to make it pretty. But very few actual vegetables–take a little walk with me down the newsstand for a sec.

All magazine cover thumbnails shown have been lifted shamelessly–they’re not mine, they’re the property of their respective publishers–and pasted together here solely for parody value and critical review of the food literature.

Saveur? Fried chicken. Seriously. Cooking Light? Hotdog special–one with a slice of pickle and tomato, another with avocado, to represent Vietnamese and Mexican, respectively. Whoo-don’t you feel like a world traveler now. Food and Wine? Burgers by Bobby Flay. Bon Appétit? Another burger. Food Network? They don’t even pretend. Ice cream cone. With whipped cream and a cherry on top. On a cone.

The women’s mags are leaning toward desserts: Martha Stewart–cake. Southern Living, Allrecipes–pie. Better Homes & Gardens and BHG Diabetic Living both feature watermelon and ice cream or sorbet assortments. All of it very pink.

But even EatingWell and Vegetarian Times aren’t doing all that much vegetabalia on their green-looking covers. EW has a vegetable serving platter with a nice looking bunch of raw green beans and tomatoes at the bottom, but more than half of the platter is canned beans or dip. Not that I’m against those, but they really aren’t fresh veg. VT has a grilled veg and quinoa salad platter that looks wholesome enough, but if you zoom in for a closer look you realize it’s not mostly veg either. If you took a quarter of it for yourself, you’d only get 3 or 4 thin slices of pepper and zucchini on your plate along with the grain. Most of the green you see in the picture is a token sprinkling of arugula and basil sprigs strewn over the top–a strategy that’s being used and abused in the less veg-forward pubs to make steak or pork loin or mac ‘n’ cheese look like they have something fresh and healthy about them.

Lucky Peach and Cook’s Illustrated both go for graphics rather than photos. LP has a cartoony poster graphic of garden lushness for “The Plant Issue”–do they really have vegetabalia inside? Cook’s Illustrated has a pastel of radishes.

It’s as though they all decided to try to look summery without including actual bulk greens–the signature of summer (well, other than watermelon). I’ve complained about this before, I know, but back then I was talking about friends who don’t cook much and are somewhat veg-phobic, not about upscale food media. For years the food glam world has been touting local sourcing, farmers’ markets, heirloom this and that, Provençal and Spanish and Italian and Middle Eastern cuisines, which are full of vegetables one way and another. But they really are no longer practicing what they preach. They’ve shrunk their focus down to the meager American fast food paradigm while pretending otherwise. And charging you between 4 and 10 dollars an issue.

But vegetables are so easy to ruin, you say. The green ones turn brownish olive if you hold them too long after cooking. If you’re going to hang around a whole hour waiting for the photographer to get the right shot, you’re going to have to cook a couple of batches in a row. Strewing a couple of sprigs of cilantro or parsley over something is so much easier!

The other reason we’re not seeing vegetables on the magazine covers: editorial production lag. Monthly magazines typically take anything from 2-6 months to produce from start to finish, so they work ahead. The May and June issues probably went to press two months ago, when it had barely stopped snowing in the northeast (per my mother and sister). Summer vegetables are not bountiful in March and April under those conditions–at least not in New York and Boston. But the editors could have put together something decent and thematic for the covers if they wanted to–I’m pretty sure I could have sent them a likely looking CARE package from my local greengrocer’s if they’d only asked and were willing to foot the overnight shipping.

A weekly haul from my greengrocer's comes in under $30 even with coffee, spices and special items.

Eat your heart out, foodie magazines! Time to gloat. A typical weekly haul from my greengrocer comes in at under $30 even with a pound of coffee or tehina or yogurt (not shown, obviously), bagged spices, dried beans, and specials on fruit or nuts. When the tomatoes are better I stagger out the door with 5-10 lbs. at a time, but on the other hand the snow peas were a serious bargain this time around.

There are plenty of good vegetables around. Fresno tomatoes are back in my Armenian grocery (for which, oh! be joyful), we have green and romano beans, we have lettuces and purslane and bunches of fresh basil and dill and mint and za’atar (and yes, parsley, Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Food Magazines, frugality, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: celebrity chefs, food, food magazines, Food Politics, frugality, nutrition, vegetables | 4 Comments »

Maximum Flavor in a Minimal Broth

Posted on March 12, 2015 by DebbieN

My kid had the flu just in time for President’s Day (and both Friday and Monday off from school). How does this happen in a place where it actually hit 90 degrees one day??? How annoying! But her classmates had been catching it right and left all through January and coming back to school still iffy. She and I had both gotten the flu shot a couple of months before, achy arms and all. The prevention rate this year isn’t all that good; only about 23%. And people have naturally been grumbling if or when they catch the flu anyway.

But I’m still pro-vaccine, and here’s why: The minute she woke up with fever, I called and got an appointment with her pediatrician for that morning, no being palmed off on the advice nurse (or the muzak they put you on while waiting half an hour). When you’ve got a diabetic kid with flu, you take a deep breath, channel your Brooklyn-raised mother and elbow your way through to get seen before the kid has a chance to develop nausea and vomiting, which makes it trickier to manage food, insulin and so on safely. I mean, we’ve done it, it’s doable, and we’ll probably have to do it again at some point, but it’s a total pain.

Luckily for me, the pediatrician is also from Brooklyn and doesn’t take offense. She and the nurses had been run off their feet, and yet she was glad we got our act together early enough for Tamiflu to do some good, because the poor kid just ahead of us at the clinic was wobbling and actually fainted just as he got into the exam room. Five days his family waited and he had serious fluid in his lungs. So I stopped feeling selfish and stupid for bringing my kid in when she was mostly okay except for a fever. And I hope the other kid’s better by now.

So I wanted to pass this on: the doctor told us the best-bet recommendation is still to get a flu shot. Why? Because even though you might still catch flu, the severe hospital-level cases this year with pneumonia and worse, at least in Southern California, are turning out to be almost all unvaccinated patients. That’s a result you might not have expected. You need that insider perspective to see there’s a more serious benefit hidden behind the obvious numbers. And the serious cases are pretty bad. So if you haven’t gotten a flu shot yet, go get one now.

And my kid did indeed get better by the time school started up again, and my husband and I managed not to catch the flu from her, which was good, because with a snarky bored teen home on a 4-day weekend, the last thing either of us needed was to catch it from her just when she was finally back at school.

But we needed soup in a big way. And with a sick kid in the house I had less time to go shopping. I imagine (because we had the fluke 90-degree day, I have to imagine it or else talk to my poor mom in Boston) that people caught in the big snows back east also have these problems of limited shopping mobility, patience and scant last-ditch vegetabalia in the house. What did we have left that was soup-worthy?

Well…there’s always the can of tomato paste for nearly instant cream-of-tomato, which my daughter likes when she’s sick. The real cream-of-tomato, made with actual tomatoes, is more voluptuous but takes 45 minutes on the stove and involves baking soda to tame the acidity before you add cream, plus the use of a stick blender which I aspire to but don’t yet own. Tomato paste doesn’t have much acidity to start with, so you could just skip the baking soda and heat with milk instead of water if you wanted to. We generally leave milk and cream out and add a dash of vinegar to restore some semblance of tomato flavor.

– – –

Tomato Soup in the Microwave (AKA, “bonus” recipe for what it’s worth)

1/2 can tomato paste (no recipe EVER specifies a whole can, as far as I can tell…must be some kind of culinary superstition, much like “the Scottish play”…so just scoop the rest into a ziplock baggie, squeeze the air out, and throw it in the freezer for next time…)
1-2 c. water (enough to bring it up to the thickness you like best for soup)
small splash of vinegar, any kind
small clove of garlic, minced, mashed or grated
pinch of cumin or thyme, optional
salt to taste after cooking
splash of milk or half-and-half, if you like it

In a microwaveable bowl, use a whisk or fork to mix the water gradually into the tomato paste until it reaches the thick-but-not-too-thick consistency you prefer for cream-of-tomato soup. Add the garlic, vinegar, and cumin or thyme, cover the bowl lightly and microwave 2-3 minutes or until heated through. If you want to add a little milk or half-and-half afterward, you probably could, just don’t add it and then heat or it’ll curdle from the vinegar (or leave the vinegar out to start with if you want it bland).

– – –

But down to business with the “not-chicken” vegetable broth. I’ve already gone about as far as I can go with bok choy and shiitake broth, up to and including hot-and-sour soup. Plus we didn’t actually have any bok choy left. Feh.

So the usual carrot-onion-celery not-chicken broth should have been next…but no celery either. Double feh. And no fresh dill–dry we had, but you know fresh makes a world of improvement. So it wasn’t looking all that good in the clear soup department this week. And I needed some for me, even though I only had a head cold and a bad temper and a sassy, feverish bored teen at home watching cartoons.

(BTW: if you luck out with a fresh bunch of dill that’s too big to use up quickly, wash the rest well, twist off the stem ends, stuff the dill into a ziplock sandwich bag with the air squeezed out and freeze it–it’ll stay good for a couple of months minimum, and you can just quickly crumble a frozen bit into whatever dish you want, then toss the bag back in the freezer. Or in Boston, just leave it out on the porch and rediscover it sometime in April.)

Normally I’d say onion and carrots alone aren’t enough for a soup; you have to have something else in there or when you add garlic it’ll just be about the garlic. Which is fine for me, of course, because my motto still seems to be, “If there’s no garlic, is it really food?”

True, the Italians have acqua pazza (“crazy water”), which is basically garlic broth. I think both Spain and France have similar offerings. But normal people might want something a little more complex or at least balanced.

My usual MO for vegetable soup and bok choy broth is just to microwave the base vegetables to wilt them and then bring them up with a bit of water, add garlic, herbs, and any other appropriate flavorings, and heat again. Pretty basic, and very quick–5 minutes, maybe 10 for a couple of quarts that will last me a week. But with such a limited vegetable base as onion and carrot, I was going to need something more.

So I scrounged again in the fridge. Carrots and a red onion…and a clove of garlic. A sprig of thyme–well. A little leftover white wine. Yes. OK.

It would all be kind of blah and pale, though, if I just dumped it in a bowl with some water and hit the nuke button. When you have so few main ingredients and they’re both boring when simply boiled or nuked, you have to strategize a little to get the best out of them quickly. Continue reading →

Filed under: frugality, Microwave tricks, soup, Vegetabalia, wine | Tagged: flu shot, food, microwave cooking, recipes, soup, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Maximum Flavor in a Minimal Broth

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Nectarine Sorbet, Light on the Sugar

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Emergency Éclairs 2.0, Even More Microwaved

Green Beans Get Serious

Frozen sliced nectarines

Frittata on the Rebound

This always happens right before vacation…

Parsley Doesn’t Count

Maximum Flavor in a Minimal Broth

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