Revised recipes | Slow Food Fast

Really? No, not really.

Posted on August 24, 2011 by DebbieN

Reason for dismay at the top level restaurants:

(LA Times Food Section) “Three top chefs create more healthful versions of favorite dishes”

They cut down a little on the calories–as in, substituted olive oil for butter, or ricotta for mascarpone, or even ground chicken for ground pork. But only one of them cut down significantly on the sodium–and even then it was 1000 mg for the dish, down from about 1400 mg. Give Daniel Mattern credit where it’s due, but it’s still a lot. Josiah Citrin’s dish, which started out about 650 mg, not horrible for restaurant food, actually went up in the modified version.

In Susan Feniger’s case (and she was far from succeeding or even trying hard on the sodium reduction), the sodium count was more than a day’s worth in one dish–from 2100 mg or more to 1800-plus. Choke. She did skip marinating the ground chicken, but the “mabo” sauce, which she didn’t change at all, contains three different kinds of soy sauce AND fermented black beans. Because you really need a sauce that salty in fine food?

Couldn’t she have done a different sauce, more savory or spicy but less salted? That’s the first thing I would have targeted. I probably would have used my low-sodium prune-based Asian barbecue sauce instead of the black bean sauce–it’s different, but good, and it’s similar enough in texture and flavor density to substitute well.

In fact, none of the chefs tried to go radically different–they were all too fixated on whether diners could tell the difference between the originals and the modified dishes. Well, if they’d changed anything worth changing, I’m sure the diners would have been able to taste the difference. The real question is, would it have been a good dish and would they have liked it? I think the chefs could certainly have gone after bigger, more ambitious changes and made the dishes satisfying–perhaps even better–without choking the diners on salt.

The bad part of the article came at the end. All three chefs just gave an arrogant little shrug when the results were revealed at the end of the test (showing that they hadn’t done all that well). They all said grandly that it doesn’t really matter, because as Josiah Citrin put it, their customers come “to be blown away” by the food.

And so, just like the fast food kings, they put the blame on the diners for not demanding better, saner nutritional standards. Beats workin’.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Politics, haute cuisine, nutrition, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments | Tagged: Daniel Mattern, fine dining, Josiah Citrin, low-sodium cooking, restaurant nutrition, Susan Feniger, three-star chefs | Comments Off on Really? No, not really.

Microwave tricks: Seitan without Simmering

Posted on August 23, 2011 by DebbieN

My sisters-in-law from Oakland were planning a visit to us this summer now that we actually have a house and can host them. It fell through, but the prospect got me thinking about vegan food and what we might serve them. They’re both good cooks, but they eat a lot of commercially-prepared vegan meat substitutes along with their own fresh vegetables and grains and baked goods.

I’m not great on packaged foods in general, and unfortunately, vegan proteins other than plain fresh tofu and dried beans look an awful lot like vegetarian versions of Oscar Meyer sliced bologna and turkey loaf to me. Not just the appearance, but the cost per serving (really high–something like 4-6 bucks for a chic little package that serves two, ostensibly) and the salt (also really high–600 mg and up per serving). And the ingredients lists are always long and kind of mysterious-sounding, either in a surprisingly chemical way or in a Japanese-ingredient-names-as-authenticity way. Not that I’m not working to figure out exactly what kombu and dulse and Job’s tears are. Two seaweeds and a resin? I think, anyway.

There’s also a lot of yeast extract in some of these processed vegan proteins–sounds like between that and the salt, what they really did was dump in Vegemite or Marmite. Bleagh (my husband’s sister is kind of an Anglophile, but that doesn’t excuse either version to me).

On the other hand, some of the vegan cookbooks out now have do-it-yourself recipes for seitan, and so do Ellen’s Kitchen and FatFree Vegan Kitchen.

Seitan is basically wheat gluten dough cooked in stock. If you do it yourself at home, it may take an hour to simmer but really isn’t very expensive compared with the commercially prepared versions. A 5-lb bag of flour at about $2-3 or a few ounces out of a 22-oz bag of vital wheat gluten (about $6-8, depending where you buy it, and worth it for getting 100% gluten out of the bag and not having to wash the starches out of the dough since it’s already done for you) produces something like a pound or two of seitan at a go. That’s enough for a larger meal, maybe even for that elusive home-made vegetarian centerpiece dish…

Why is this worth doing if you don’t eat vegan and aren’t actually having vegan guests in the house after all? (and now that I’ve schlepped the last of the moving boxes out of the living room, I’m really wondering).

I think back to my favorite Chinese restaurant back east, the Hunan Manor in Columbia, MD. Every time we fly back east we try to make a stop there.

One of the things that makes the Hunan Manor great is their willingness to experiment and invent. They serve a wide variety of vegetarian versions of standard banquet dishes using “vegetarian chicken”–basically seitan cut and fried as for meat. These dishes complement their masterful use of tofu with textures from nearly silken to deep-fried to pressed and diced for the vegetarian jao tse, which I’ve always thought looked better and probably tasted better than the pork-based meatball filling our nonkosher friends would get (though they raved about them, and I’ll take their word for it).

The last time we came east, the restaurant had added several new dishes using a different form of seitan with very finely layered rolls that were cut in bite sized pieces, coated and fried–a pretty close simulation for the layered flesh of chicken. It was really delicious in their orange “chicken” with perfectly cooked bright green broccoli. It was unexpectedly unsalty as well, so I don’t know whether they made it in-house or had bought the prepared seitan in an unflavored form.

Either way, the dish was a great argument for using seitan creatively, and I don’t think my sisters-in-law, competent cooks though they are, have eaten any seitan dishes that good using anything from a little Gardein package.

So I decided I’d like to try my hand at seitan at home and see if I can’t come up with something flavorful, chewy, satisfying and nutritious, without having it scream salt. After all, once you’ve got the finished loaf or pieces, you’re Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Food Blogs, frugality, Grains, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: FatFree Vegan Kitchen, Food Blogs, Gardein, low-sodium cooking, meat substitutes, microwave cooking, mock duck, seitan, vegan recipes, vegetarian protein, vegetarian recipes, vital wheat gluten, wheat meat | 4 Comments »

Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

Posted on August 1, 2011 by DebbieN

I know, Diana Kennedy (The Cuisines of Mexico, 1971, and onward) probably wouldn’t do it this way–or maybe she would, at home, for herself? Naaah. She’s still pretty particular. Eighty-seven years old, and doesn’t seem to have slowed down noticeably in her quest to rescue the disappearing dishes of Mexico. Her latest, Oaxaca al Gusto (2010) is a huge coffee table cookbook, beautiful and unfortunately for me, so full of rare Mexico-only ingredients, not to mention pork and lard, that I don’t know if there’s much I can really cook from it. I’m scouring it now for possibilities, but in the meantime…

Friday afternoon was vegetable-shopping day again, because we go through good tomatoes like a pack of sharks after a swimmer’s leg, and unfortunately our own backyard gardening adventure is turning out to be more like the $50 tomato kind of thing. To make up for packing our daughter out with my husband on his errands all afternoon instead of on mine (because I desperately needed some time off for bad behavior), I decided to do a little better than the usual dinner. Of course, they had a decent time, and so did I. Gotta do that more often.

So while they were gone I stopped at my greengrocer and bought a ton of ripe tomatoes that actually have flavor at 99 cents a pound (we have one left), a couple of eggplants for 65 cents apiece, some tart green plums, and these Anaheim chiles, which were beautiful and at $1.19 a pound, cheaper than the bell peppers this time. If you’re not completely clued into eating with the seasons, sometimes the pricetag gives a gentle hint of how the growers are thinking about any given vegetable that week.

Normally I wouldn’t buy Anaheim chiles–they’re pretty mild, but still hotter than bell peppers, which we usually eat raw, and the chiles are really better cooked. But when I saw them, all I could think about was stuffing them with feta for a quick pick-me-up side dish to go with mahi mahi and rice.

Some stuffed chiles are authentically made with Anaheims, I was encouraged to find (thumbing through one of my two, count ’em, two copies of Kennedy’s first book). But the ones that make good-looking cookbook photos are made with pasilla or poblano chiles–darker green, plumper to hold more stuffing, and with thinner walls. Also a little hotter, and often soaked up from their dried form. Baked in tomato broth or else stuffed with meat picadillo, coated in egg, baked, and dressed with a walnut/sour cream sauce (chiles en nogado) with pomegranate seeds sprinkled on top–a Moroccan-origin dish, maybe, with that egg cloak and the pomegranate seeds?

The other thing Kennedy specifies is to char, bag-steam and peel the peppers before using them, which makes the egg cling a lot better and probably makes them a bit more digestible. Very classic, but let’s face it, with all this stuff, including the sauces: I’m not that good, and I’m kind of impatient. What I really wanted for supper was quick stuffed peppers, gooey on the inside but not so messy outside– so as to avoid wearing it. (A girl’s gotta know her limitations. Maybe next time, if I can find an oilcloth bib my size?)

I’m not so interested in long baking in tomato broth or soaking fresh walnuts in milk for the moment–maybe sometime when I want to get the whole dish together, because I’m sure it’s delicious, especially if someone else is making it and heating up their own kitchen in July. But right now, time is ticking, it’s nearly supper, and Beauty and the Beast are about to show up in the driveway (my husband is beautiful for taking on the Beast, even if he grumbles while doing it.)

So I’m definitely not about to char and peel the peppers–what a pain, plus to me it makes them kind of slimy and slithery and not what I want to eat. Unlike Tom Colicchio, who consistently makes a fuss about it on Top Chef, I don’t mind the fact that pepper skins have a little bitter alkaloid edge to them. It’s part of what makes them peppers, and it helps them keep their crunch.

And, of course, I’ve had the experience of walking into someone’s house when they’d just been charring peppers on the gas burner, and it smelled an awful lot like dope. Not lovely, and not at all like them.

So anyway, these are not proper chiles rellenos by any normal standard. They just taste good, they’re not slimy, and they don’t take more than 15 minutes tops. My kind of dish.

In addition to the usual feta and mozzarella, I still had a few half ears of leftover corn on the cob from my daughter’s birthday party last weekend. They were still good, but there weren’t enough to share out for supper, unless–well, corn and peppers also go together (usually as a soup, but why not here too?)

Aside: That was surprisingly one of the easiest celebration dinners I have ever put together in my life — pan-grilled salmon fillets, tomato/basil salad, raw vegetables with bleu cheese dip, and microwaved corn on the cob. I was going to make a cheesecake but decided at the last to buy a Trader Joe’s frozen one for expedience and served it with strawberries and blueberries. It was surprisingly good, inexpensive, and quite moderate on carbs and calories for commercial cheesecake. Of course, because my daughter’s friends are all about 11-13 years old, at least one couldn’t eat the corn due to braces but didn’t know how to shuck the kernels off with a knife, one immediately declared she wasn’t into vegetables (I was mellow enough to shrug and say it was fine), and one couldn’t hack cheesecake so I scrounged her up an impromptu dessert of chocolate bar and cinnamon grahams because we had literally nothing else in the house dessertwise. Oy. And they all stayed up till 4 am, but at least they were quiet and sneaky about it. My goals for a good sleepover.

So anyway, I had made 6 or 7 ears of corn, broken in halves, and steamed them in the microwave in a big pyrex bowl for about 8 minutes. The leftovers were fine reheated during the week with a drizzle of water on a plate in the microwave for 30 seconds or so. But I still had a couple and decided to use the kernels for the chile stuffing, and they were delicious.

Stuffed Anaheim Chiles with Cheese (specific amounts given for 3 chiles, because that’s what I made for us Friday and again on Sunday with new corn, so this actually works out, but you can and should scale up, obviously, and I wish I had made enough to serve them a second time without starting all over.)

Anaheim chiles, 1 or 2 per person
corn kernels (1 ear or about 1 c. kernels made enough for 3 chiles, generously stuffed)
feta cheese, crumbled (1-2 oz)
low-fat mozzarella, chopped fine (1 oz/stick)
finely chopped onion (1/4 med yellow onion)
garlic clove(s), grated/minced/mashed (1 med clove)
za’atar (wild thyme), thyme, oregano or sage, chopped or crumbled in if dry (to taste; I used 1 t. or so chopped fresh za’atar–do what looks and tastes right for your quantities)

Wash the chiles, cut off the cap and remove the seed core as best possible without splitting the flesh (rinse with water to get out the seeds way down inside). It’s not really a disaster if the pepper splits–just wrap it around the stuffing and press it together, more or less, but it looks prettier and handles better if you keep the pepper whole.

Microwave the peppers on an open plate 3-4 minutes to start them cooking. Mix all the other ingredients together well with your hands–it’ll be pretty moist and crumbly, but you want the garlic and onion well distributed. Cool the chiles just enough to handle. Stuff the chiles with the mixture by hand, pressing it in with your thumbs as you go to make sure some filling reaches the tip end. Microwave again on HIGH on an open plate 3-4 minutes for 3 chiles, arranged with the tips toward the middle of the plate and the wide stem end toward the outside, or maybe 5-6 minutes for 6, or until the peppers are getting tender and the cheese has melted.

Don’t forget to wash your hands well with soap after handling the chiles–I find that even though the Anaheims are mild-tasting, my fingers still get a little of the classic burning sensation as an aftereffect when I handle them.

Filed under: appetizers, books, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, frugality, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Anaheim chiles, chiles rellenos, corn, Diana Kennedy, feta cheese, Mexican cooking, microwave cooking, stuffed peppers, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

Cannoli that won’t bust the carb count

Posted on July 20, 2011 by DebbieN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should probably explain.

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

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

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

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

Truth in restaurant menus, one way or another

Posted on June 22, 2011 by DebbieN

The LA Times has this to say about restaurant nutrition today–seems like restaurant chains are starting to wake up to the embarrassment of their menu offerings now that California, New York City, Philadelphia and a few other governments have made nutrition info mandatory. The FDA is slated to make restaurant nutrition labeling and disclosure apply across the nation sometime in the coming months–the proposed regulation was released for public comment in April and the comment period has been extended to July 5th, and the finalized regulation is supposed to take effect 6 months after publication.

So chains like Panera, Applebee’s, California Pizza Kitchen and IHOP are hustling to look a little less awful before the big wave hits.

About time, too: the other night my husband rented “Super Size Me” (we’re always more than a little behind the times) and I could only stand to watch about five minutes of it. Somehow, between putting the dishes away and getting a few of my own chores done, I managed to catch the movie’s key scenes–I see a glimpse of director Morgan Spurlock doing pushups and then getting his abdominal fat measured at the doctor’s with a caliper before launching the month of MacDonald’s. A minute or so later I see him eating the first of many supersized burger-and-fries meals while narrating the experience from the driver’s seat of his parked car. He’s burping and starting to sweat about a third of the way through. I was horrified–Spurlock is obviously suffering but he keeps pushing himself anyway (chorus: because he’s a boy). Back to the kitchen and my husband is laughing uncontrollably (chorus: because he’s also a boy). Suddenly the inevitable (and highly appropriate) happens–Spurlock excuses himself, opens the door just in time, and starts vomiting onto the pavement. I just left my husband to it at that point. I think he was starting to weep.

The next day, though, he gave me the upshot of what I’d missed. Despite the hilarity of it all, the outcome was pretty sobering–in about 3 weeks of the Mac-only diet, Spurlock has gained 24 pounds that will take him months to work back off with 4 pounds extra that just don’t want to come off at all, and his cholesterol has shot up from enviable (<180 mg/dL, I think) to borderline high. Do the MacDiet for more than a month–for a whole year, say–and you might be looking at the crossover from fit to overweight to actually obese. So, as much as I make fun of them, sometimes boys can pay attention once they get over the thrill of a good grossout.

But back to the restaurant menu scramble.

Some of the chains’ solutions look reasonable–offering half-sandwiches with a salad or soup, paring down the calories and fat in the salads and soups, for that matter, and–gee, how ever did they come up with this miracle answer?–taking some of the cheese (or “cheez”, depending on the caliber of restaurant) back off everything, or at least going to part-skim.

The half-sandwich thing is a bit of a cop-out, but given how big standard sandwich portions have gotten over the past twenty years, it’s definitely a step back from linebacker troughing.

On the other hand, some of the chains really aren’t working hard enough to make a real change. Personally, I hate any form of plopped scoops of straight grease added purposely as a garnish and I always have, so the move to lower-cal mayo doesn’t impress me, nor does the new-improved strategy of not dolloping whipped cream onto every dessert. Ditto the menu recommendation at IHOP that you don’t have to add pats of butter to your stack of pancakes if you don’t want to. (Whew! Finally!)

I know that in fact these are going to be important steps back to sanity for some people, but tell me the truth, here: does a 120-calorie tablespoon serving of fat make the real difference in an 1100-calorie supersized sandwich with a deep-fried filling and cheese on top? Or a stack of pancakes the size of your plate and the height of your head and loaded with enough gooey canned topping to frost a cake?

For chain restaurants, the real problem here is the serving size–they’ve been working way too hard to keep up with the Joneses because serving bigger is impressive, you can charge more, and it’s almost as cheap wholesale as a proper-sized serving. P.F. Chang’s pasta dishes also currently run something like 1100 calories a plate, and no wonder–each of the bowls holds enough pasta to feed three or four normal adults if they were eating at home and had a salad to go with it.

These restaurants are at least doing something in the right direction (or stopping doing everything in the wrong direction, anyway). But upscale restaurants don’t have the government pressure to change and they’re less likely to look–at first glance–as though they’re overfeeding you for the money. Tiny chic portions, right? Check again, because here’s the other kicker in the LA Times this morning:

Pizzeria Ortica’s budino di cioccolato

This one is actually in the Food section, a “Culinary SOS” request for a layered chocolate and caramel pudding. I’m only linking to the 2nd page of the recipe–so scroll down to the bottom and check out the nutrition on it. If the poor lady who requested the recipe has already seen it, she’s probably cringeing.

Each—that’s EACH–small, elegantly served glass of pudding Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, cooking, Desserts, Eating out, Food Politics, haute cuisine, nutrition, Revised recipes, unappetizing | Tagged: Alice Medrich, budino, chocolate caramel pudding, FDA nutrition labeling regulation, Morgan Spurlock, nutrition labeling, restaurant chains, Super Size Me | Comments Off on Truth in restaurant menus, one way or another

French Food with Jewish Roots (and vice versa)

Posted on June 10, 2011 by DebbieN

About…a month ago, already? Two? Oy! I decided my next serious food post was going to be a review of Joan Nathan’s current book, Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France (Alfred Knopf, 2010). And I’ve been looking through this book for much of that time, trying to figure out what to say first and what I’d want to cook from it that I haven’t tried before.

An initial read attracted me very much: Nathan, who worked as an aide to Teddy Kollek back in the 1970s, when he was still the gregarious and widely-admired–in fact the last widely admired and liked–mayor of Jerusalem, came back to the States as interested in people as in food, and has balanced the two focuses in most of her cookbooks ever since.

In this book, she starts out by visiting her French cousins and branches out to meet all sorts of people–deli owners, a gefilte fish maven, Holocaust survivors and one of the farm women who sheltered some of them during the war, the new wave of North African Jews from Morocco to Egypt who arrived in France after the mass expulsion from Arab countries in the 1950s; the Provençal Jews who trace their ancestry back to pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal, the Alsatian Jews whose dishes, despite coming from the heart of the original Ashkenazi community, are not as familiar as I would have expected.

Throughout the book she’s collected personal stories of all kinds, visiting home cooks, restaurant chefs, purveyors of spices and other specialty items that Jews initiated and led the European trade for–particularly chocolate and coffee. And she has dug up a few surprises as well.

Paul Bocuse, for example, is widely considered the grand old man of French haute cuisine, so much so that a major international competition is named for him. Nathan discovered that he keeps one stockroom Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, fish, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia, wine | Tagged: couscous, French Jewry, Jewish cooking, Jewish history, Joan Nathan, kugel, quiches, raito sauce | Comments Off on French Food with Jewish Roots (and vice versa)

Political Pancakes, or, Why is Borders flogging so much lard?

Posted on May 11, 2011 by DebbieN

Why Borders is not getting my business this week

I know–highly unappetizing. I don’t think even a full teaspoon of salt would help here. And I’m getting back to actual food as of today, I promise.

But I just had to “share” my inbox this morning before I get started. Borders has now closed its Pasadena store but keeps sending me these fabulous discounts in the pretty hope that I’ll schlep to Arcadia to check them out. What does it say when a huge business that’s trying to stay afloat after two decades of leading the field misses so blatantly in its one-to-one personalized marketing?

For that matter, what does it say (reading the tea leaves here) when Newt Gingrich looks like the most coherent and readable (and properly-dressed) selection? I mean, I was there–in 1995 I started working at NIH and promptly got caught in the federal furloughs when he lost his budget armtwisting attempt on Bill Clinton.

What does it say when the Gritch is allegedly trying to run for president and his soon-to-be-available tome is grouped with those of three other deeply discounted “authors” who have no actual public service background, just a penchant for loud titles and army drag (of various centuries)? Where the hell did Laura Ingraham get that hat? No wonder she’s not keeping up with Patt Morrison. And I thought French food was a no-no for today’s discerning ultraconservative trougher?

I do also wonder at the significance of Ann Coulter’s latest effort being discounted just that six percent more than everyone else’s…maybe it’s the fact that she’s jumped (appropriately) on the vampire-empire bandwagon? Too bad there are no handsome devils on the cover (almost guaranteed there are none inside either). I’m sure they’d sell like hotcakes. Maybe she’s included an actual recipe for hotcakes (with blood sauce or fava beans or something)?–You never know. Can she actually cook? Without fatback?

Given the deep and undoubtedly thorough marketing research Borders has done (by sending me of all people this fabulous selection of deals), I’m sure they’ve already figured out which way the wind is blowing. I can smell it from here.

In honor of this great selection, I’ve decided to pull out the stops and dig into the older of my cookbooks for an appropriate response.

Semi-Patriotic Pancakes–No Lard AND No Blood (well, at least no added salt)!

Makes about 16 3-4″ diameter pancakes, enough for 3-4 people

about 1 c. bread flour, whole wheat flour, matzah cake meal, buckwheat flour, or any mix of these as desired (to preserve our individual freedoms. Put that gun down, Jeb! We’re talking first amendment, not second!) Generally if you’re using buckwheat or whole wheat, it’s better to go half-and-half with regular flour so the pancakes aren’t too heavy or grainy
2 large eggs, separated–I usually toss one of the yolks but keep both whites
dollop of plain milk-and-cultures-only yogurt (for that Mediterranean touch)
milk or buttermilk (depending how sour you are, and if you use buttermilk skip the yogurt)–about a cup, but might be more to make the batter consistency come out right
1 T sugar (any color, even green if that’s all you’ve got and can stomach the results)
1 capful vanilla extract AND/OR a shake or two of cinnamon (keep it small)
oil or butter –1 T for the batter, the rest for frying

Optional mix-ins: blueberries or raspberries (fresh are good, but if you have frozen ones leave them frozen to add when you fry the pancakes; otherwise make a sauce of defrosted ones to serve at the table instead), chopped peeled apples, pecans, chocolate chips, etc. etc. NO: liver, fava beans, or blood-anything!

1. In a large bowl mix the the flour, sugar, flavoring(s), egg yolks, the tablespoon of oil or butter, the dollop of yogurt if using, and enough milk or buttermilk to make a thick but just-pourable batter. If you’ve got chopped apples, nuts or chocolate chips, you can mix them in now.

2. In a second bowl beat the egg whites to reasonably stiff peaks, then fold them gently into the batter to lighten it. Start frying as soon as you’ve got this done.

3. Fry 3-4″ dollops (about 2-3T each) of the batter in a large (preferably nonstick) frying pan over medium to medium-high heat. If you’re adding berries, add a few to each pancake as soon as you’ve spooned the batter into the pan, and let the pancake batter rise around and over the berries a bit before flipping to the other side. You’ll know to start flipping the pancakes when you see the bottom edge start to look solid and a ring of small bubbles appears just above it–but I sometimes go a little longer to make sure because the leavening is egg whites-only, which makes a pretty delicate batter. You don’t want the pancakes to collapse completely.

4. “Stick a fork in ’em, they’re done.”–The late, great governor of Texas, Ann Richards, July 15, 1992, in an interview with David Letterman about the Republicans’ chances, and quoted on page 61 of my swiss-dot cookbook… Incidentally, she was wearing an outfit that puts any of Ann Coulter’s to shame–she had her very, very white hair up in a classic Texas beehive and she was wearing a hot pink miniskirt that she actually had the legs for. I miss her still.

Filed under: books, breakfast, cooking, fruits, Grains, history, Oddities, Revised recipes, unappetizing | Tagged: Ann Coulter, Ann Richards, Borders Books, breakfast, Glenn Beck, lard-free, Laura Ingraham, low-sodium cooking, Newt Gingrich, pancakes, Patt Morrison, politics | 4 Comments »

Chickpea Crepes: Protein Inside-Out

Posted on March 2, 2011 by DebbieN

Ever since Thanksgiving I’ve been thinking about the challenge of coming up with a proper vegetarian centerpiece for major celebrations–one with a single, unified dish cut up to share, something with protein, not just vegetables or grains, something with great complex flavor and no artificial ingredients.

This is apparently a tall order. For months now I’ve scoured vegetarian and vegan cookbooks in hopes of some serious suggestions and come up nearly blank. Perhaps it’s because most vegetarian cooking in America is based on southeast Asian vegetarian cuisines, which don’t emphasize centerpiece or “main” dishes as much as assortments of several smaller ones, none of which necessarily take the lead. Or because a lot of the nondairy, non-egg vegetarian cooking consists of beans, rice, tofu, seitan and vegetables–not a bad thing, but not usually pretty or convincing as a centerpiece and occasionally incomplete on protein or complex flavor (there’s an awful lot of salt or soy sauce in some of these cookbooks). The few centerpiece dishes with a meatloaf-style filling wrapped in puff pastry or phyllo or potatoes seem to include premade seitan (high in salt) and/or things like mushrooms or eggplant or spinach and nuts with a fair amount of starch for binder, which means you’re repeating starches between the filling and the wrapper and not providing much protein.

One solution might be to put the protein, or at least some of it, in the wrapper itself, so the filling can be flavorful vegetables and so on but not have to come up to the concentrated protein level of meat.

Chickpea flour crêpes are one such possibility, and they’re very easy to make. A bit stronger in flavor than ones made with wheat flour, they hold together well in the frying pan and come out thin, springy and wrappable without the need for eggs. They also take well to a Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, books, cooking, DASH Diet, Grains, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, nutrition, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: besan, chickpeas, crepes, vegan recipes, vegetarian cooking, vegetarian protein | Comments Off on Chickpea Crepes: Protein Inside-Out

Not Stone Soup

Posted on February 11, 2011 by DebbieN

Stone Soup Foodworks of Ottawa, which also uses the slogan "Slow Food. Fast"--what can you do?

If you’ve come to Slow Food Fast looking for the little green Ottawa soup truck, I have bad news and good–I’m not them. (Don’t know whether that’s good or bad, but I’m in Los Angeles, so it’d be a bit of a schlep.)

The good news is that I have found the link to Stone Soup Foodworks for the lost and hungry Canadians among you and it looks pretty good. Like David Ansel of The Soup Peddler in Austin, Texas, Stone Soup’s Jacqueline Jolliffe is getting on a roll with “soupscriptions” as well as on-the-spot takeout soups, salads, etc. made of real ingredients, mostly local and organic.

Why soup? Because soup made from real ingredients, not packets and cans, is more than most people want to tackle at home, I think. Good soup, as both Ansel and Jolliffe say, takes time to develop. And especially in winter, a cup of real soup at lunch helps you push aside the irritations of the day for awhile.

Both Ansel and Jolliffe are doing something entirely different from what I do here on Slow Food Fast–they cook complex and difficult soups in large batches and sell them to subscribing and loyal customers who only have to pay for takeout by the cup or heat up a delivered quart of soup to have something good. That’s their idea of “slow food, fast.”

My idea of slow food fast is to cook a week’s worth, say perhaps 8-10 servings’ worth, of decent, inexpensive, from-scratch vegetable or bean soup in as little time as possible, preferably in less than 20 minutes all told, with as much help as a microwave oven can reasonably give (which turns out to be a surprising amount, so why not) and without relying on salt to build flavor. And I want it to taste good.

Mostly, I want you to be able to do that yourself at home without feeling like it’s too much work or time and too many steps to cook and eat fresh real food–particularly fresh, inexpensive bulk vegetables–on a regular basis.

If you like to cook slow (say, on the weekend), you can do the artisanal thing at the stovetop for an hour or two. But if you want to get done in a hurry without having to babysit your pots and pans, microwaving is a pretty good, mostly safe, and comparatively very energy-efficient way to go, if you play to its strengths. You can let the flavors develop overnight in the refrigerator (and they generally will) instead of cooking and cooking and cooking just to get to the point where the vegetables are cooked through and then cooking some more to get the flavors to meld.

Case in point: Jolliffe makes a Thai butternut squash soup for Stone Soup Foodworks that looks delicious on the newsroom interview–but she has to cook her onion base down for 40 minutes, and either roasts the butternut squash for an hour in a conventional oven or–this is what she did on camera–buys sacks of precooked and puréed organic winter squash from a local farm. Granted you can do that–in the US, we’d probably just open a can of packed pumpkin, which you can now get organic fairly cheaply in most places, especially after last year’s shortages at Libby’s.

butternut squash ready to microwave

I guess the decision rests on her storage accommodations for the soup truck. But if she were to use a microwave, she could cook a fresh butternut squash–a big one–in about 10-12 minutes and then decide whether to purée or chunk the flesh for her soups, maybe pan-roast Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, frugality, haute cuisine, high-speed soup, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, soup, Vegetabalia | Tagged: butternut squash, David Ansel, food trucks, Jacqueline Jolliffe, microwave cooking, slow food, Slow Food Fast, Soup Peddler, soups, Stone Soup Foodworks | Comments Off on Not Stone Soup

Microwave Tricks: Melts and other Hot Sandwiches

Posted on January 27, 2011 by DebbieN

Microwaving the cheese and eggplant while the bread is toasting makes homemade panini a lot quicker--though not necessarily neater

Last year for his birthday my Italophile in-laws gave my husband the ultimate kitchen gadget. Because they loved theirs so much, they gave him…a panini press. I gawked. My husband is almost famous for not cooking. At all.

In more than 20 years of life together, I’ve rarely seen him make an actual sandwich for himself–does shmear on a bagel half count? I’m sure he believes in his heart that he still remembers how to flip one piece of bread on top of the other and seal the deal, but I’ve yet to see evidence of an attempt. Even without grilling.

Somehow I don’t in my heart of hearts believe this panini press is going to be removed from the box and used. Not by my husband, and not by me. It’s not that we’ve never been to Italy or eaten actual panini (we have, on both counts). It’s not that we hate panini or toasted sandwiches in general (we actually like them quite a bit).

It’s that the free-standing real, authentic, Michael Chiarello-approved-and-branded panini press weighs even more than the professional-grade waffle iron my in-laws gave us 10 years ago (and which we’ve used a total of 10 times since, because it’s such a pain to clean). The panini press also takes 3-4 times as long to preheat before you actually get to make the panini. Somehow a grilled cheese sandwich of whatever nationality just shouldn’t take 45 minutes to make. Which it did, when my in-laws, with all the innocent gadget-happy enthusiasm of Toad and his motorcar in Wind in the Willows, brought theirs out to demonstrate.

As a cheese-and-toast fanatic of some standing, I have a few very specific criteria for my grilled cheese sandwiches, grinders, melts, etc., etc.:

1. They have to be substantial and taste good–classic or adventurous, they have to be worth eating. That means the bread, the cheese, and any other fillings under consideration.

2. The toasted bread must be crisp. It must not crush, mush, squash, crumble or absorb tons of cheese grease. It must stand up to the fillings.

3. The cheese must have body and flavor even when melted–it shouldn’t run away, sink into the bread, turn into a pile of salty but otherwise flavorless grease, swamp everything else on the plate, or become a rubber eraser.

4. The whole sandwich must not take longer than about 7 minutes to put together and toast.

Normally you’d say panini fit the bill for an ideal toasted cheese sandwich, and I’d agree–if I were eating out and didn’t have to put up with preheating the grill. If you’re running a corner grill in a touristy Italian city, you’ve got a hot press at the ready and you’re turning out panini by the score for large crowds of passersby, an individual panino probably doesn’t take more than 5-10 minutes. At home, though, all you want is your d–n sandwich. You don’t want to heat an expensive and cluttersome gadget 45 whole minutes just to get there.

You’d also say that the standard white-bread-and-Velveeta fried cheez sandwich was out of the running. You’d be right there as well. No exceptions or passes.

However, in my kitchen, with its limited counterspace and my dislike of extra washing-up, waiting, or fussing, I sometimes get impatient even with the toaster oven classics of good bread, good cheese, and foil underneath to catch the drips.

A quesadilla is obviously no trouble in the toaster oven. Practically designed for it. Neither, really, is a simple sandwich-bread-and-cheddar grilled cheese. But for anything more complicated, or any thicker, more substantial filling, sometimes melting the cheese is the longest part of waiting, and in the meantime you’ve either pretoasted the bread so it stays crisp (in which case it burns around the edges waiting for the cheese to melt) or else you didn’t pretoast the bread and it remains too soft underneath the cheese (and maybe absorbs some of the grease while it’s doing that). Sometimes the other filling ingredients–tomatoes or tomato sauce, mushrooms, lentils, artichoke hearts, etc.–make the bread soggy while you’re trying to melt the cheese on top. Sometimes they don’t cook all the way through.

Here, surprisingly, the microwave comes to my rescue, particularly with fillings that aren’t just cheese but rather cheese melted onto vegetables or sauce or lentils or tuna or some combination. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cheese, hummus, lentils, microwave cooking, microwaved eggplant, panini, sandwiches, toaster oven recipes, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Melts and other Hot Sandwiches

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Slow Food Fast

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

Really? No, not really.

Microwave tricks: Seitan without Simmering

Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

Cannoli that won’t bust the carb count

Truth in restaurant menus, one way or another

French Food with Jewish Roots (and vice versa)

Political Pancakes, or, Why is Borders flogging so much lard?

Chickpea Crepes: Protein Inside-Out

Not Stone Soup

Microwave Tricks: Melts and other Hot Sandwiches

About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

Blog Stats

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

What's cooking

Blog Stats