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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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Sweet Potato Ice Cream

Posted on June 6, 2010 by DebbieN

Some time back I was bemoaning the lack of reasonably priced butternut squash at the height of the season in my local markets–I was clearly spoiled by last year’s bargains, or so I figured. So when I tried making pumpkin ravioli at home, I substituted yams, which were a lot more plentiful and much less expensive per pound.

But as it turns out, there’s more to the missing squash mystery than I realized. Just before Thanksgiving last year, Libby’s sent out a public warning that they were facing deep shortages due to heavy rains during harvest in central Illinois, where most of their pumpkins are grown. Heavy rains and soggy fields meant harvesters couldn’t get out every day to pick, and a lot of pumpkins mildewed on the vine and had to be plowed under. Oregon’s organic pumpkin growers, who had an unusually good crop, were able to  step in as an alternate source for buyers running short, but organic pumpkins are still only a few percent of the national consumption each year.

Following on a short crop in 2008, the Midwest is looking for a better harvest this fall, but right now the shortage is pretty noticeable on store shelves. A global produce outlook web site even posted a recent factoid that, at the moment, Libby’s remaining inventory of 100% packed pumpkin stands at something like six cans. Six.

According to the article, people have been bidding up to $30 a can on eBay for those extras you probably squirreled away in the corners of your pantry and never got around to making.

But it still doesn’t explain why winter squash was so scarce and expensive in California this past year–unless our supermarkets were importing all the way from Illinois as well. Hmmmph.

Where’s the Charlie Brown Theme Song when you really need it?

In any case, yams and sweet potatoes nearly the size of footballs have been pretty plentiful in Southern California, and cheap with it. There’s very little waste on a sweet potato–just the peel, usually (or buy organic, if you can find them, and scrub them well before cooking so you can eat the peel too).

So I’ve been finding a place in my refrigerator for them and microwaving them in a lidded pyrex bowl or casserole with a little water in the bottom for about 8-10 minutes (for a big one). Because I don’t like the prospect of nasty kitchen accidents, if I can’t cut into them easily right away I wait to split these monsters in halves or quarters about 6 minutes into the cooking time, when they may not be fully cooked yet but at least they no longer require an axe.

Sweet potatoes and yams substitute pretty well in standard pumpkin pie recipes, but you generally have to bake twice as long as for the canned pumpkin, which has had a lot of the water cooked out before it was packed. They also make  good fillings for large ravioli–pretty easy with wonton or gyoza wrappers, and microwaveable too.

But…it’s now June in Los Angeles, which means “June Gloom” overcast cool weather in the morning, burning off to the mid-90s by lunchtime. And my daughter looks at the huge quarters of yam cooling on the counter and says, suddenly, “I wish we could have pumpkin ice cream instead.” I think about it and decide I wish that too.

I have buttermilk, regular milk, sugar and a variety of pumpkin pie-type spices on hand. I don’t think I’ll need eggs because the sweet potato has so Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, frugality, kid food, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sweet Potato Ice Cream

The Cheap Vegetables–Snack Edition

Posted on May 13, 2010 by DebbieN

A food marketing study released findings a few days ago about the top 10 fastest growing snack food preferences for kids 2 to 17 years old. Yogurt came out as number one, then potato chips, then–very surprisingly to me–fresh fruit. The others down the rest of the list were a soggy but predictable mash of candy, chips, “donuts” [sic], and other junk foods, though I think cheese cubes were in there somewhere. If yogurt and fresh fruit are in the top three, though, the news must be good, right?

Um. Maybe. But both of them are sweet or sweetened (in the case of most flavored yogurts, very heavily sweetened compared with plain)–so they kind of fit in with the candy, donut, carb-carb-carb kinds of snacks in the rest of the list.

What’s missing from the top 10 list? Plain milk, pasta or beans, bread and jam, the simpler unpackaged, unprocessed, or unbranded stuff you could bring from home, are all missing. But most of those are hard to take to school, and none of them are crunchy, which is a big part of the pleasure of snack. Actually, few of the packaged snacks are crunchy any more either. It’s a sad state of affairs, but there is a simple way to restore the full joy of snacktime.

Because mostly what you don’t see on the marketing study list are vegetables. Raw, crunchy vegetables, low in calories, starches and sugars, fats and  sodium, are high in potassium and fiber and vitamins, easy to prepare (another chorus of “just wash and nosh”) and perfect for snack. A handful of red cabbage or a couple of carrot or celery sticks along with a piece of cheese or a few nuts will keep kids from hunger for a lot longer than the carb-laden snacks on that list, and they’re a lot less expensive–on your wallet or your kids’ waistline.

Parents at school complain all the time that vegetables are too expensive, too time-consuming, take too much preparation by hand, and are not convenient to deal with, and their kids “won’t eat them”. But I wonder if that’s true, because whenever I go at lunchtime, I see many of those same kids enjoying the vegetables that come out of the school garden. They aren’t whining and they don’t appear to be suffering, and nobody seems to be sneering at anyone else that their lunch has Brand A taco chips and all the other poor schlub’s mother packed was vegetables. They’re all waving broccoli or lettuce leaves around, holding them up for comparison, and using them as props for one or another comic performance before chomping into them with savage glee.

And I know an ordinary bunch of celery–even a head of cauliflower–is the same price or cheaper than an econo bag of Doritos. Even at the big brand supermarkets. Celery. Carrots. Red or green cabbage. Raw green beans or if you’ve got the extra cash, snow pea pods. Broccoli or cauliflower. Lettuce wedges. Tomatoes. Cucumber. Bell pepper. None of these are hideously expensive, all of them taste good raw, and all of them store well washed, dried gently, and kept in the fridge.

So what’s stopping the parents from packing vegetables as lunchbox fare? The fact that they have to wash them to get the dirt off? Get their hands wet doing it? Maybe peel some of the vegetables? Find a knife to cut them up with? Use them up within a week or so of buying them? I honestly don’t know, but a lot of the parents seem whinier than their kids. Maybe they should all learn to just wash and nosh.

It only takes a minute or two to deal with a full head of broccoli or cauliflower, or a bunch of celery, and it’ll last you several days’ worth of school and work snacks at a cost of under $2. The most prep required is for carrots, if you start with an actual bunch. Not that I’m advocating the prepacked “baby cut carrots” bags, which are more expensive, but if you really hate peeling and cutting up carrots, you could go this way and still do better than chips and snack packs and the like.

All I can tell you is, if the vegetables are fresh and crunchy, most kids will get into them as long as their friends are doing it too, and there’s no great way to overeat them (except maybe for carrots). And some vegetables are just plain fun–red cabbage in particular is handy for revealing secret invisible baking-soda messages, and if your kids eat it at recess they can compare purple tongues with their friends afterward.  Can’t do that with taco chips.

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, frugality, kid food, nutrition, shopping, top 10, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Cheap Vegetables–Snack Edition

Sorry, Starbucks, no doughnut

Posted on May 3, 2010 by DebbieN

On Sunday mornings, my daughter likes to drag her father out around the corner without me to the local Starbucks so he can buy himself coffee and get her some kind of small baked good that I’m not supposed to know about. Because I am, in fact, generally opposed to “doughnuts for breakfast” and both of them know it. It’s a ritual that had to be suspended for a while this spring, until we could figure out what kind of treat had how many grams of carbohydrate and how much of it she could eat and still eat something else more nutritious as the majority of breakfast.

Most of the pastries will never be what I consider top baking, but it’s not me who’s going to eat them. And my daughter wanted a doughnut, or part of a doughnut, if she could make it work out.

So–I went online to the Starbucks web site to try and hash out the vagaries of “petite” mini scones, mini doughnuts, coffee cake slices, and all the rest of it. Starbucks markets itself to the upscale, the midscale, and the would-be midscale of my town with all kinds of brochures about fair trade and global responsibility, and their web site is not much different. The do-right message is right up there with the latte of the week, and you’d expect the nutrition info to be present and helpful without the usual twisty chain-restaurant disguises and trickery.

Or would you? Starbucks got its tail caught several years ago when numerous commentators, among them its own employees, let the public know that some of the lattes and other mixed coffee drinks were topping out at over 700 calories per, with more fat than some burger chain offerings. Since then Starbucks has offered more health-conscious choices below the pastry case and taken a pro-active posture on nutrition and informing the customer and so on. But how do they really feel?

The nutrition info page falls under the “menus” navigation item at the top. OK. It’s readable, not a shrunken PDF file–good. You find a long scrolling list of each of the bakery items with calories, fat, carbs, and proteins. Doughnut, doughnut–old-fashioned glazed doughnut…440 calories, 21 grams of fat (10 saturated), 57 grams of carb…Ouch. Well, she could have half of one, I suppose, with a small bowl of oatmeal and some milk, and eat something better at lunch…but wait a minute. Where’s the sodium info?

All I could find about sodium was a little note about “healthy choices”, in which the Starbucks nutrition page asserts that such items have fewer than 10 grams of fat and fewer than 600 mg sodium. A stunner–that’s more than the classic 500-mg bowl of Campbell’s Tomato Soup that caused all the corporate protests against the NIH dietary salt guidelines in the 1980s. Who on earth would claim 600 mg sodium for a single snack or breakfast item was “healthy”–especially with the growing public and government concern over excessive salt in restaurant food?

And I still couldn’t find any specific sodium stats for doughnuts or mini scones or the other things my daughter was hoping for, much less an ingredients list. So I searched a variety of diet and nutrition web sites that catalog such things. The closest I could get to a current verified  standard nutrition label was from livestrong.com (accessed 5/3/10):

Starbucks Top Pot Old-Fashioned Glazed Doughnut

Serving Size: 1 Pastry (113g) Calories 480 Calories from Fat 210

  • Total Fat 23g 35%
  • Saturated Fat 9g 45%
  • Trans Fat 0g
  • Cholesterol 20mg 7%
  • Sodium 410mg 17%
  • Total Carbohydrate 64g 21%
  • Dietary Fiber 0.5g 2%
  • Sugars 39g
  • Protein 4g 8%
  • Vitamin A0%
  • Vitamin C 0%
  • Calcium 2%
  • Iron 10%

Est. Percent of Calories from: Fat 43.1% Carbs 53.3% Protein 3.3%

These stats are higher than what’s stated at the Starbucks page (see below). And the sodium in a single doughnut is pretty high. So’s the carb. So’s the fat. So’s the increase in size and calorie stats and so on from the glazed doughnuts they were offering in 2006, according to archived nutrition labels on a number of older diet web sites. Continue reading →

Filed under: Desserts, Eating out, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sorry, Starbucks, no doughnut

Matzah Brei–blintzes?

Posted on April 3, 2010 by DebbieN

Matzah Brei Blintzes

Thursday morning I broke down and decided to cook  breakfast for my daughter instead of leaving it at matzah, jam, yogurt and fruit. I’m not a big fan of matzah brei, a poor substitute for french toast in which the eggs never really seem to absorb very well and you’re left swallowing the hard corners of the matzah. Neither crisp nor soft, it always seems like a wrong turn to me.

On the other hand, I didn’t have any matzah meal in the house for pancakes (how much extra matzah product do you really need when you’re trying to eat less of it?) So I broke down and took a couple of sheets of the whole wheat matzah from the latest box and prepared to do battle.

I think I’ve mentioned once or twice that I hate waiting for water to boil. But a pyrex pie plate with half an inch of water in the bottom takes only 2 minutes to heat up fairly well in the microwave. And it has room for the matzah, which I broke up into halves. But whole wheat matzah doesn’t soak up all that well, even after several minutes in hot water. It’s the tougher bread of affliction. What now?

I fished out a dinner plate and covered the pie plate with it, stuck it all back in the microwave, and hit stun for another minute. To my surprise, it worked–really worked. The matzah didn’t fluff up or anything–but it was soft and pliable and even a bit elastic, something like just-cooked lasagne noodles. No hard corners. I drained off the hot water and poured on the egg-milk soak, which didn’t really soak in much even though the matzah was now soft. Sigh.

My daughter came around a corner, looked at me fishing one of these matzah halves out of the pie plate, and said, “I wish we could have blintzes” and I thought–well, these actually bend–could we? Why not?

Matzah brei blintz ready for frying

Matzah brei blintz, ready for frying

Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, Desserts, fruits, Grains, holiday cooking, kid food, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Matzah Brei–blintzes?

Getting Sensitive to Snacks

Posted on March 2, 2010 by DebbieN

In the past two weeks since my daughter returned to school as a newly diagnosed diabetic, we’ve started finding out just how many times a week students are presented with treat foods as extra snacks, even outside of what they bring from home. Happens at least twice a week. Why? They’re not in kindergarten.

I know I kind of “got into this” in my post two days ago about making hamantaschen lower in carbs. But my lingering amazement at the automatic and frequent food handouts in class, between snack and lunch even, got a boost this morning when I read the New York Times article by Tara Parker-Pope on the big rise in kids’ snacking over the past 30 years.

Barry Popkin, a nutrition researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill, and one of his students have just published an analysis of American kids’ snacking over the past 3o years. They compiled data from four national diet and health surveys and found that kids are now snacking an average of 3 times a day, mostly on cookies, chips, candy, sodas etc., not vegetables or whole fruits. They’re taking in more than a quarter of their daily energy, about 600 calories, from these low-nutrition processed foods. That’s 168 more calories on average than 30 years ago, and kids 2-6 seemed to be in even worse shape.

The percentage of kids who snacked at least once a day in 1977 was about 75%, but now it’s up to about 98%. About half the kids today snack 4 times or more per day. Some snack 10 times a day. What on earth?

This article in the NY Times “The Well” section was quickly followed by another in which Parker-Pope reviews countering arguments about the real harm a single cookie a day may or may not be doing. Studies cited a bit more vaguely than the Popkin study may suggest a lack of consistent benefit to insisting that everyone cut out a cookie a day to lose weight.

Will cutting out a cookie a day help if you’re eating other extras instead or not exercising? Maybe not–in fact, probably not. But I have to wonder why this hedging, wishy-washy kind of article followed so quickly on the heels of the report on the bigger study with hard numbers.  Does Parker-Pope’s second piece negate what Popkin and his student Carmen Pierna have reported on snacking trends? Not legitimately.

My daughter actually needs to eat a snack between meals these days. But she’s an exception, not only for needing it at age 9 but for eating a specific and limited snack with some nutrition to it in a timely, coordinated way rather than grabbing up unlimited treat foods without regard to the regular meal plan.

Automatic, constant, reason-free snacking–now not even limited to snack time!–is just not a necessity. It’s a habit that’s snowballed until it seems so normal people don’t even realize they’re doing it anymore or why it’s not a good idea.

All I can say is, it shouldn’t take having to be diabetic to notice the excess snack habit and steer clear. Is it time for the Great American Snack-Out?

Filed under: Eating out, Food Politics, history, kid food, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Getting Sensitive to Snacks

Low-Carb Hamantaschen Without Artificial Sweeteners

Posted on February 28, 2010 by DebbieN
Almond meal-based low-carb hamantaschen

The first batch didn't roll out so easily, but these coin-sized minis tasted pretty good. The next batch rolled out thinner and held together better for a larger cookie with a delicate crust.

Baked goods are a big part of Jewish holidays at this time of year. Purim, being celebrated this weekend, is the last big baking bash before Passover, and hamantaschen (named for the hat, ears or purse of Haman, the villain of the story of Esther) are the cookie of choice. But with a diabetic kid in the house, the usual prospect of baking them takes on a bitter edge.

Hamantaschen–in fact, most cookies–have enough grams of carbohydrate that just two medium-sized cookies contain about half of what she’s supposed to have in any given large meal, twice what’s recommended for a snack, and they don’t have enough fiber or protein to slow down the sugars and avoid a spike in blood glucose. In short, not high-quality nutrition (not that we expect cookies to be). A grownup would have trouble dealing with the prospect of leaving them alone when everyone else gets to have them, but a kid faced with Purim celebrations at school or synagogue is bound for a certain degree of heartbreak.

It’s made me rethink our whole attitude toward things like Girl Scout cookies (this is also the season for that), chips, M&Ms, in fact any casual snack food that gets handed out innocently at school (our current woe–apparently my daughter’s teacher does this kind of thing at least weekly). The snack habit–anytime, anywhere, any or no reason–has become so ingrained in daily life we hardly think about whether it’s appropriate or not. Certainly the handouts are happening more and more frequently in class than I remember when I was a kid–did teachers even hand out treats back then? Not in my elementary school. It’s especially hard for a kid to “just say no” (and we already know how well that advice works in other contexts) when everyone else is taking a cookie or some M&Ms as a reward for answering a question (can they even keep their minds on the subject)? And even worse when it’s the teacher handing them out, because the teacher’s supposed to know whether it’s ok to eat or not.

Maybe we shouldn’t be handing these things out so casually or so often? Because while most people can handle surprise extras like these, they’re probably not all that good for anyone to eat indiscriminately at just any time of day. If they’re spiking a diabetic kid’s blood sugar, you can be sure they’re doing the same thing to your kid’s blood sugar too, only his or her body is responding with extra insulin to cover it. We get to see the results directly every couple of hours with our daughter–complete with sudden attacks of giddiness or tears if things peak and crash too quickly. But the same kind of thing happens to some degree to a lot of kids who aren’t diabetic, and they probably get reprimanded for it. Probably happens to a lot of adults, too.

Still, it’s the holiday, and total deprivation from treats is not really my aim today. So I’ve been trying to figure out a revised recipe for hamantaschen with a more manageable carb count, and preferably one without artificial sweeteners since my kid is still a kid. And neither of us wants it to taste like chalk. Very important.

I start most years with Joan Nathan’s cookie-dough hamantaschen recipe from The Jewish Holiday Kitchen because it’s the best dough I’ve ever tasted for these, even though it’s pareve (non-dairy, non-meat) and doesn’t have butter or cream cheese or the like. It’s not too sweet or too dry, and it doesn’t look or taste chalky or pasty like some of the dead-white offerings at the Purim carnivals. It tastes like a pretty good cookie, and it works really well for rolling out.

Looking at the carb count breakdown for that recipe, at about 12-15 g each, it might not be so bad to do regular hamantaschen, but my daughter would need to eat one or at most two with something protein or fiber, and she’d need insulin for it, so she couldn’t just grab one in between the planned meals. Kind of a pain, no doubt about it.

I was hoping for something closer to carb-free so she could eat hers with impunity when everyone else is eating theirs. This year I scanned the web for low-carb hamantaschen recipes and found only one Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, history, kid food, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Low-Carb Hamantaschen Without Artificial Sweeteners

Measuring when you have to be right

Posted on February 26, 2010 by DebbieN

I’ve been cooking by hand for most of my adult life, and I cook by eye as well. This mostly comes out in the form of measuring by pouring things like baking soda or ginger into the palm of my hand rather than fishing around in the silverware drawer for a quarter-teaspoon or tablespoon. Too much fuss, I always thought, and it was a point of pride to be able to do without it.

It turns out a lot of people think measuring by hand is the mark of a chef: almost every one of the rising food stars who’ve broken into print insists in their “restaurant hints for home cooks” that you should measure salt “by feel” or the like while seasoning food in several stages during cooking.

But suddenly having to calculate in grams of carbohydrate per serving for my daughter has meant buying a new set of cup and spoon measures as well as an electronic food scale and really measuring, the official kind of measuring, instead of just eyeballing.

In making the comparison, I’ve discovered a number of unpleasant truths about the by-hand method. Most of which boil down to IT’S NOT ACCURATE. AT ALL. And I’m not talking a little 20 percent error here.

Try the following:

Cup your hand and pour a pre-measured level quarter-teaspoon of table salt into it. Go on and look hard, try to memorize how high it rises on your palm, what a quarter-teaspoon of salt looks like. Now dump it, wipe off your hand, Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, kid food, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Measuring when you have to be right

Rethinking everything

Posted on February 21, 2010 by DebbieN

I’ve been away from my desk, my notebooks, this blog for two weeks now. I never expected to be–it’s become a weekly adventure to seek out new topics in food, food politics, nutrition, and alternate methods for cooking real food faster. And then last week my daughter was diagnosed with Type I diabetes.

Diabetes is one hell of a verdict when you think your kid is just growing, and then just has a simple stomach virus, and it turns out to be neither of those things. It was also one of those strange fairytale paradoxes by which a cursed or poisoned feather turns out to save the princess in rags. She’d come home from school three weeks ago with what seemed like a routine stomach bug, but it wasn’t. Instead of a bit of fever, antsy impatience at having to rest and then bouncing back, she was cool, sleeping around the clock, drinking a lot even when she couldn’t stand to eat, and losing weight fast. Taking her back to the doctor the second week, we were thinking anemia, mono–afraid to think anything worse. Thank god our doctor threw in a glucose test along with the usual suspects. By afternoon he’d called and told us to get her down to the ER.

A night in the hospital is no picnic, even if all they’re doing to your kid is putting her on an i.v. and pricking her fingers with a lancet for testing once in a while. The second night is no fun either–everything the doctors have been telling you goes in one ear and slides right out the other as you wonder what your kid will ever be able to do normally again, and how much you’ll have to worry for her the rest of her life, and how you’re going to keep from laying those worries on her. And yet–at some point in the middle of the second night, unable to sleep much between nurse interruptions–I started to realize my daughter’s legs and arms and face were already filling back out, and in fact she had spent a good part of the second day sitting up reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for all she was worth, reading me her favorite bits in a silly voice  and cackling every once  in a while. More energy than I’d seen in three weeks. Whatever they’d done to lower her sugars and balance her electrolytes again was really working. She was reappearing before my eyes. I had no idea how to feel anymore except shocked, grateful and slightly absurd.

Furthermore, every time the orderly came by to pick up a menu or leave a meal, my daughter tucked into the food as though it had been catered by Daniel Boulud. (Of course, most of the meals featured meat, which she loves but I don’t make very often.) It is fairly humiliating to have your kid announce that the hospital meals are better than those at home…

Then she started talking about which kinds of potatoes she likes or doesn’t, whether and how soon she can have pizza, how will she ever be able to go to a birthday party and stand not having cake or candy or ice cream without having to figure out the carbs and the insulin beforehand, what about Valentine’s Day and on and on.  Somehow oatmeal raisin cookies became the benchmark of whether she was going to be able to eat like a person or not–and she hasn’t even had a taste for them in at least six months.

The shrinkage, the re-blossoming, and the total fixation on treats and sweets, all within a few days in a hospital bed–suddenly Charlie Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Desserts, Eating out, Grains, kid food, nutrition, Odd food, Pasta, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rethinking everything

Salt reduction vs. hypertension meds–which would you choose?

Posted on January 21, 2010 by DebbieN

One of the big complaints processed food companies, physicians in clinical practice, and the great gourmet media all have in common is that cutting back on salt would make food taste flat, and you as an individual wouldn’t necessarily get a big drop in your personal blood pressure from doing it. They argue that only “salt-sensitive” people have to worry about their intake, and anyway, a few points lower, they all say, isn’t really impressive enough to give up your 300-mg serving of sodium in a bowl of Kellogg’s raisin bran or 390 in a slice of La Brea sourdough. And don’t, for g-d’s sake, ask your favorite name brand celebrity chefs to stop salting early and often in each dish!

A big statistical modeling study in the New England Journal of Medicine this week knocks all this wishful thinking on the head, and does it very nicely. The study looked not at individual blood pressure drops but the health and cost benefit of dropping average salt intake by 3 grams a day over the entire U.S. population.

The researchers found that if everyone drops their salt intake back down, the benefits start to look like the ones from quitting smoking, cutting cholesterol and saturated fat, and losing weight to get to a normal BMI.

That’s because even when individual blood pressures drop by only a few points, they’re not going up (as they are today), and when a small average drop happens in a very large group, the big bell curve of disease shifts toward lower risk of consequences and later starts for developing heart disease and high blood pressure. After the first national cholesterol lowering guidelines were issued in the late 1960s, the nation’s heart disease and stroke risk dropped by about a third, and at least until obesity and blood pressure started to cause a back-reaction, the average age for a first heart attack went from 50 to 60 in men. That’s a huge kind of benefit.

The combined drop in heart disease and stroke deaths from cutting salt would be something like 200-400,000 people per year, a lot more than can be saved by simply putting everyone on blood pressure medications–the study made that comparison directly.

Altogether, a solid recommendation for dropping sodium levels in processed and restaurant foods, which make up about 80% of today’s sodium intake. And for not imitating processed food and chain restaurant thinking in your professional or home cooking, as Francis Lam seems to in his Salon.com commentary on the new NYC Department of Health initiative. And if there was any doubt that the Culinary Institute of America has been training Continue reading →

Filed under: breads, cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, kid food, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Salt reduction vs. hypertension meds–which would you choose?

Impatient for Orange Peels

Posted on December 11, 2009 by DebbieN

Microwave Candied Orange PeelTonight is the first night of Chanukah, or as the next generation spells it, Hanukkah, and instead of blogging about latkes, which I’m not making tonight, in favor of a congregational dinner (yay, no cooking, no dishes, no family kvetches), I decided to pick something else I like more. Like candied orange peel, which is outrageously expensive if you buy it at a candy store. Chocolate plus oranges is the flavor of Sabra liqueur, an Israeli elixir from the days of my childhood which I think is now out of production. Of course, so’s my childhood, or at least my first childhood…

But the standard recipe for candied orange peels goes something like: “Boil some water. Blanch the de-pithed orange peel strips from a couple of oranges for two minutes. Throw out the water and do it again. Then simmer the peels in 4 cups of sugar and 4 cups of water for an hour or two. Then drain them. Then toss them separately in a bowl with fresh, dry sugar to coat and spread them out on a cookie tray to dry for another couple of hours.”

In all, that’s about 4 or 5 hours. Oy! My inner second childhood is whining already.

Following up from my microwaved kumquat marmalade experiment, which worked beautifully, I decided I could probably do something similar to candy orange peels. The final result was not perfect-perfect by professional confectioners’ standards and I wouldn’t be surprised if Martha Stewart disapproved, but it looked okay to me, was done in 15 minutes from peeling oranges to dredging-and-drying, and the taste is not bad, not bad at all. Makes you wonder.

The oranges I picked were a bit bland and nonacidic, and tangerine or clementine would be a bit livelier if you can find organic ones, but this is what I had. And as I discovered, the flavor seems to improve as the peels sit after being dredged in sugar and dried. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Desserts, frugality, fruits, kid food, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Impatient for Orange Peels

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