sauces and condiments | Slow Food Fast

Testing salt reduction on a really large scale

Posted on October 17, 2014 by DebbieN

Microwaved platter of low-sodium tofu with snow peas

This tofu dish with snow peas and shiitake mushrooms uses low-sodium dipping sauce ingredients as its base rather than soy sauce or oyster sauce. It’s also microwaveable from start to finish and takes about 10 minutes total.

If you have a big enough–and motivated–study population, even modest reductions in daily sodium intake can make a big difference in preventing strokes and heart attacks. Last month, cardiovascular researchers from Beijing and Sydney announced a new 5-year diet trial in Science to do just that (see the general overview article, “China tries to kick its salt habit”).

China’s northern rural poor eat an estimated 12 grams of salt a day on average, considerably more than Americans’ 9 grams a day (which is still over the top) and more than twice the WHO’s recommended 5 grams or less. An estimated 54%, more than half, of Chinese adults over 45 have high blood pressure these days, and the Chinese government is taking practical steps to provide antihypertensive medications and shift the tide back–but that’s an awful lot of prescriptions.

Given the cost of antihypertensive drugs for such a huge population, and the cost of dealing with side effects and consequences of untreated or undertreated high blood pressure, prevention seems the better way to go. The researchers project that reducing the national average by even 1 gram of salt a day would save 125,000 lives a year in China. So they’ve recruited 21,000 villagers so far in China and Tibet, and plan to provide test groups with nutrition counseling plus a lower-sodium salt substitute for cooking, then compare their sodium intakes and rates of heart attack and stroke with those for a control group.

Most Chinese still do their own cooking at home, especially outside the big cities. If lowering the sodium content of the salt they use works, it has the potential to get an awful lot of people off daily hypertension medication and reverse a major health threat. But will people do it if they’re not in the trial, or once it ends? Will it catch on? And is it the right answer in the long run?

Salt substitutes, with potassium chloride replacing some of the usual sodium chloride, have been tried by heart patients in the US since the 1970s or so. They’re a little more expensive than table salt or kosher flake salt, at least in the US, but they’re not all that expensive. But they’ve never really caught on here with most consumers.

Similarly, a few decades ago, a big public health campaign in Japan to reduce the high rate of stroke led to the introduction of low-sodium soy sauces, with about half the sodium content per tablespoon of traditional ones.

Not much market research is available on how many people have been buying low-sodium vs. regular soy sauce in Japan since its introduction. From the few current market reports I could find–one of them an executive report from Kikkoman–it looks like low-sodium is still a smaller if steady fraction of their business in Japan, and that it’s more popular in Europe and the US than at home.

It’s important to have a low-sodium line for reasons of corporate responsibility and even prestige, but there was no mention of its percentage of total domestic or worldwide sales. Traditional soy sauces, which can range from 14-18% sodium concentration w/v, are still apparently preferred for taste, and the Kikkoman executives attribute much of their expected taste appeal to salt rather than the other flavors in each one’s profile.

That’s kind of discouraging to me. The Japanese are known for more refined and sensitive palates on average than Americans, and their range of soy sauces and tamaris for specific food combinations is much broader and more sophisticated. The higher-quality low-sodium soy sauces are produced by ion filtration to get sodium out rather than simply diluting them with water, so most of the flavor that’s actually flavor remains. I would have hoped the key flavor signature of each match was the actual flavor of the brewed soy sauces, not the saltiness.

It’s likely, though, that the Japanese are just as susceptible as the rest of the world to the sodium tolerance phenomenon–the more sodium you eat habitually each day, the more you expect and consider normal in your food, and you almost stop even noticing it as a separate flavor.

The overall Chinese market for soy sauce is currently estimated at $20 billion and grew about 23.4 percent over the past 5 years, mostly due to population growth. The stakes are pretty high for China, but the government has tighter control of its salt and soy sauce producers than other countries do, and the will to make a broad change seems to be present, at least at a government level, and if the new study is anything to go by, among ordinary villagers as well. So maybe this time it will catch on once the study’s over.

But obviously, if you’re starting out at a 12-gram-a-day salt habit, the best way to reduce sodium in home-cooked food would be to cut back hard on salt and salted items altogether. That takes time, practice, awareness and deciding that it’s worth going through that first couple of weeks until your palate readjusts to a lower-sodium diet (which it will, but it takes a couple of weeks and a little patience).

Can cutting the salt be done with Chinese food? Not American souped-up chain restaurant caricatures of Chinese dishes, which are hideously over-the-top and greasy as well, but actual home cooking? I’ve done low-sodium Continue reading →

Filed under: DASH Diet, frugality, nutrition, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, shopping, soup, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, low-sodium Chinese recipes, low-sodium cooking, salt substitutes, sodium research, soy sauce | 5 Comments »

Microwave tricks: 5-Minute Plum Jam for Fall

Posted on October 6, 2014 by DebbieN

These Italian prunes are some of the fresher, better-looking specimens from my greengrocer’s bin this week. But overripe plums work fine too.

Italian blue or prune plums are probably the last round of plums to appear at my local greengrocers for the year (well, until they start getting in carboys of plums and peaches from Chile). Prune plums aren’t much to look at–well, okay, they have a graceful enough elongated shape, but cut into one and you won’t be terribly impressed–the peel is thick and slightly bitter, the flesh is yellow-brownish, not very juicy, and a bit stickier and less brilliantly flavored than the red and black plums of summer, to say nothing of the gorgeous green and mottled dinosaur and Santa Rosa plums we can get here in LA. Many of the fresh prunes end up overripe and still untaken at the end of the day.

Which, I’ve discovered this week, is actually quite a shame. Because if you buy them early and firm, while there’s still a tint of reddish purple about them, they’re closer to regular plums–crisper, juicier and livelier tasting raw. Still not the ideal eating plum, but not bad.

And if you take the ones that are fully ripe and disappointing and bland and not too pretty, cut them up and microwave them, suddenly everything transforms. Italian prune plums make a gorgeous, rose-red, vibrantly flavored low-sugar jam. A lot like cranberry sauce in both color and flavor, but somehow a little mellower, with the bitter edge off, and a hint of spicy perfumed depth.

Five minutes in the microwave, and everything changes.

Many stone fruits react this way to heat–sometimes sugar too, but mostly it’s the heat. Even very bland, mushy pale apricots seem to bloom into vibrant flavor and acidity when baked or simmered, and sour cherries go from slightly bitter and dull raw to world-famous classic pie filling with a strong almond aroma. I’ve rescued bland, spongy supermarket nectarines and peaches by microwaving them into fruit spreads with real flavor, but obviously good fruit makes even better jams and compotes. It’s just that when the fruit is good raw, I’d usually rather eat it raw, because the season is short.

The prune plums I bought this past week don’t provoke that dilemma of choice; they’re definitely better turned into a quick fruit spread, and maybe I’ll freeze a second batch for later. These plums would also make a great pie filling, like the zwetchgenkuchen that Joan Nathan first published as a traditional German Jewish dessert for Rosh Hashanah in The Jewish Holiday Kitchen. Baked conventionally, the quartered prune plums would probably hold their shape somewhat in the crust and look beautiful.

In the microwave, the plums quickly break down to a bubbling mass and gradually take on color from the peel–at first, bronze with a hint of pink, and after a minute or two the color spreads and deepens to cranberry red (as does the flavor). Sugar just to taste, a tiny squeeze of lemon, and a pinch each of clove and ginger balance out the tartness, and after a day in the fridge, the jam has mellowed and integrated beautifully.

The accents of brandy, cinnamon, nutmeg and lemon peel in Nathan’s recipe make me want to run back to the store and try it this instant, but after a week of baking challah for the high holidays and prospects for 100 degree temperatures yet again, I’m not sure today’s the day. Maybe for Sukkot, which starts later this week.

But the combination of plums with aromatic spices is right on, and if you’re adventurous you could always take this fruit spread one step further and add a small spoonful of brandy, a few shakes of cinnamon and an even tinier hint of nutmeg, even a little grated lemon peel. The simple version below is good on toast, delicious with Greek yogurt and plenty complex enough for me before or after the second cup of coffee.

However, the full-on dressed-up version would probably be a wonderful accent for goat cheese tartlets or a baked brie if you were doing swanky appetizers for a dinner party. I’d test-taste a small batch of the jam first just to make sure it wasn’t too rich with the brandy and nutmeg, because a little goes a long way, but otherwise, let ‘er rip. The plum-jam-with-cheese appetizers would also be an unexpectedly good accompaniment to mead, sherry or other apéritifs for fall.

5-Minute Microwave Plum Fruit Spread (makes about a cup)

5-6 ripe Italian blue or prune plums (or any other plums), washed, pitted and cut up
2-3 T sugar (or more to taste–I like mine less sweet, more fruit)
squeeze of lemon juice
pinch of cloves (maybe 1/8 t, probably a little less)
pinch of powdered ginger (a little less than 1/8 t)

Put all ingredients in a microwaveable ceramic bowl big enough to hold them with a couple of inches to spare, because the plum mixture will bubble up as it cooks. Remember to handle the edges of the bowl with a towel or oven mitt or something (folded paper sandwich bags also work okay in a pinch) because this will heat long enough for the bowl itself to get hot.

Microwave 1-2 minutes on HIGH (I have an 1100 W oven, so adjust times to whatever works for you if yours is older and lower power). The plums should be starting to break down and just starting to color pinkish. Stir the mixture and microwave another minute or so, stir again. If it’s not cooked as much as you think it should be, microwave another minute or so but be prepared to hit the stop button if you see it start to boil over. If it’s fully colored and broken down to a fruit spread, take a small spoonful, let it cool, and taste carefully. It will probably taste a lot like not-very-sweetened cranberry sauce. If it’s not sweet enough for you, add a little more sugar to taste, and maybe another squeeze of lemon, then let it cool all the way covered and refrigerate. It will thicken a little further and mellow overnight and taste more like plums, especially with the clove and ginger notes.

You can, obviously, also boil the ingredients a few minutes in a saucepan on the stovetop if you prefer. If you want it completely smooth, cool it and put it through a food mill or food processor.

This isn’t canned, so store it in the fridge for up to a week or freeze it for later. When you thaw it, taste it again–you might need to add another squeeze of lemon and/or reheat in the microwave just a minute or so to refresh it.

Filed under: appetizers, breakfast, Desserts, frugality, fruits, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments, shopping | Tagged: breakfast, jams and preserves, Jewish cooking, low-carb cooking, microwave recipes, plums | 3 Comments »

Stuffed cabbage in the microwave

Posted on September 23, 2014 by DebbieN

I was originally going to call this post “Nappa 9-1-1” because it’s about salvaging a cabbage quickly and semi-artfully from the back of my fridge, but realized how bad that would be once I read the recent earthquake damage assessments up in the real city of Napa from the 6.0 earthquake a couple of weeks ago. Things are still kind of rough up there. The Napa Valley Vintners association have donated an impressive amount–$10M–and have instructions on how to donate to the local community disaster relief fund. You can find a number of local funds to donate to online at norcalwine.com.

I love bringing home a bag (or more) of produce from my local greengrocer each week–especially in the summer, when Fresno tomatoes are in and brilliant red, green beans are green and snappy, apricots and plums and pluots are spilling ripely out of the bins at under a dollar a pound, and herbs like purple basil and tarragon and mint and za’atar are 75 cents a bunch. You can’t help but feel like you’re going to be a great cook that day, just by cutting up a few vegetables and sprinkling on some oil and vinegar and strewing herbs (and feta or Alfonso olives) on top.

I always mean to use up all my vegetables before they start showing their age, but occasionally I get caught with something unintended at the back of the fridge. This week it was a Nappa cabbage, which is longer and less sulfurous (when lightly cooked) than the more traditional green and Savoy cabbages. A little closer to bok choy. So I peeled back the rusted layers, hoping that some of the inner leaves could be salvaged, at least, and I got fairly lucky.

But what to do with them? Chop and eat raw as a salad? Always an option. But I’d bought the cabbage in the first place to try out a quick microwave version of stuffed cabbage that would fulfill a couple of challenges I’d posed myself:

1. Vegetarian (not a big beef fan, personally)–I’m using the lentil/rice stuffing I developed for stuffed eggplants and onions three years ago (has it already been that long???), because I actually made stuffed onions again last week and had some leftover stuffing in the fridge.

2. Microwaveable in a few minutes (to combat cooked cabbage stench and do it as more fresh-tasting than long-cooked)

3. Non-stinky, and not drowning in cloying sweet-and-sour tomato sauce (my two overwhelming childhood objections to holishkes)

4. Bridges the cultural/culinary gap between European and Syrian Jewish versions of stuffed cabbage by spicing the filling AND adding garlic and onions. It can be done, and should. And yet, I’m not stewing it to death (actually, that means overturning both Euro and Syrian traditional cooking methods in equal measures).

5. Fulfills the Prunes and Lentils Challenge, or at least hints at what’s possible, since today I had (gasp) no prunes left and had to resort to leftover tamarind sauce from the aforementioned batch of stuffed onions… close enough for folk music.

Stuffed cabbage rolls, as I’ve noted before, are popular throughout at least eastern Europe and Syria. Most versions contain meat–beef for Jews, beef or lamb for Arabs, some mixture of pork and beef for European Christians. But I’ve also seen some really beautiful-looking vegetarian ones in Nur Ilkin’s The Turkish Cookbook, and those were stuffed–of all things–with whole cooked chestnuts.

Cabbage lends itself to enveloping stuffings almost as well as grape leaves, and it’s easier to work with, cheaper, and (big bonus) unbrined.

In addition to meat or lentil fillings, you could try something like curry-spiced or Mexican-style beans and/or vegetables, a mu shu or samosa filling, whole cooked grains like brown rice or bulgur with or without dried cranberries or raisins and sunflower seeds or chopped nuts, maybe even fish (though I’m shying away from Joan Nathan’s recommendation for wrapping up gefilte fish and giving them the stuffed cabbage treatment). Perhaps for fish I’d want smoked (fake or real) whitefish salad. Or sausage–real or vegetarian, smoky and spicy.

It seems to me for sauces you could go well beyond sweet-and-sour traditional: a garlicky tomato sauce, a mustard vinaigrette, a smoky salsa with or without tamarind sauce, a chili-paste or z’khug-laden soy/molasses/vinegar/sesame oil dipping sauce with ginger and scallions, a polished herb and wine-type tomato sauce with prunes or mushrooms and onions, even (maybe definitely?) Korean or Thai peanut dipping sauce, especially if you stuffed your Nappa cabbage leaves with a combination of pressed tofu and/or omelet strips, spinach leaves, maybe some sprouts and shiitake mushrooms.

Whatever version you do, this can either be a quick path to dinner (use the big leaves and more filling per leaf) or to a platter of appetizers (using the small inner leaves).

Microwaving doesn’t develop every possible flavor (in the case of cabbage, I’m childish enough to say that’s a good thing), but it’s a quick way to play around with a classic at least on a trial basis. You could always do the huge foil-covered pan in the oven thing if you decide to scale up and go old-school.

Stuffed Vegetarian Cabbage Rolls

1 head Nappa cabbage, washed and with the core cut out
1 lb (2 cups, more or less) of (in this case) allspice/cinnamon-spiced lentil hashu (made w/cooked rice or bulgur, not uncooked) OR peppery lentil mititei-style sausage filling (substituting 1/3 c. cooked rice for the wheat gluten), or your choice of savory/spicy filling, preferably one that includes some garlic….
1/2 c. sauce–in this case, 1/4 c. tamarind sauce plus a tablespoon of chipotle salsa and a few tablespoons of water. OR–just tamarind sauce, or just smoky salsa, or tamarind with a bit of tomato paste and a spoonful of sugar, or peanut dipping sauce, or dim sum dipping sauce, or Asian-type prune sauce, or prune and wine sauce with some tomato paste mixed in. Or mustard/garlic vinaigrette (as a dipping sauce, not necessarily to cook with)…YEESH! too many choices…

Microwaved cabbage leaves, ready for rolling

1. Separate the cabbage leaves, put in a microwave container, drizzle on a quarter-inch of water and put on a lid. Microwave 2-3 minutes until the leaves are just tender enough to roll without snapping the center.

Start the cabbage roll with the filling at the stem end

2. Drain the leaves and lay them out on a plate for stuffing and rolling. Put a tablespoon of fairly stiff filling an inch or so from the stem end of the leaf and pack it into a little sausage shape. Roll the stem end over the filling gently but as tightly as you can manage, then tuck the side frills of the leaf over the ends and continue rolling toward the top of the leaf. Place seam-side down in a microwave container or casserole. Roll up all the leaves and pack them into the container fairly tightly.

3. If the filling is completely cooked already (the rice in the lentil stuffing is not raw or par-cooked), just drizzle a bit of your sauce of choice over the stuffed cabbage rolls, maybe with a tiny drizzle of water in the bottom of the container. Put a lid on and microwave another 2-3 minutes or until just cooked through and steaming hot. If the flavor is still too raw or radishy for you, obviously you can cook it further, going a minute or so at a time, until it smells and tastes right to you.

Drain and serve with a little more sauce on the side.

Filed under: appetizers, Beans and legumes, DASH Diet, frugality, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Jewish cooking, lentils, microwave recipes, stuffed cabbage, tamarind sauce, vegetarian cooking | 1 Comment »

Breaking the Rules: Fish with Red Wine

Posted on July 15, 2014 by DebbieN

tilapia fillets Veracruz-style, with smoky salsa, onions, garlic, alfonso olives, red wine and fresh za'atar or "wild thyme"

One way to cook fish well using red wine

Wine is something I drink mostly for taste, not volume–I can’t really hack a lot of alcohol at once, blame my ancestors–but I do like wine tastings, even though I have to limit myself to about three small sips per glass if I don’t want to wobble out the winery door. Focusing on the flavors in a wine, and comparing several side by side, sharpens your palate and makes you think very specifically about what you’re experiencing. It’s rewarding even for someone with my drinking limits.

I also like to cook with wine, maybe more often than I like to drink much of it. Decent wine has such a complex combination of flavors that when you figure out how to do it well, cooking with wine can make even rapidly cooked dishes come off like serious Slow Food.

We hear a lot about long-cooking stews and coq au vin and so on, but many simpler and less time-consuming dishes benefit from smaller amounts of wine. Adding a couple of spoonfuls of dry white wine to mustard vinaigrette tempers the sourness, the garlic and the mustard sharpness a little and gives the sauce a quiet depth. And if my experiment with giant favas marinated in rosé and rosemary was any indication, we should be thinking about wine a lot more often and a lot more creatively as a cooking ingredient.

So I’ve been on the lookout lately for clear and simple techniques for cooking with wine without wasting it, and for doing it in less than a three-hour stew, because to me that’s slow-food-slow in large crowd-feeding quantities, to be attempted a maximum of once a year. I want better, more sophisticated-tasting food fast, using at most half a cup to a cup of wine, not a whole bottle, and preferably without huge cleanup.

But these days, when so much of the cookbook aisle in your local independent bookstore is taken over by Food Network Channel collateral, cooking with wine is almost a lost art. Most of the popular TV chefs aren’t even doing it anymore. Everyone’s gone sorta-Asian (but without Martin Yan’s shaoxing wine-wielding expertise or sense of humor) or sorta-Middle Eastern or bacon-filled-Tex/Mex or wishful-thinking-Indian-or-Moroccan wannabe (if I hear the words “ras el hanout” mispronounced one more time by any TV chef, anywhere…)

Most of those cuisines don’t include wine as a regular ingredient because of religious restrictions against alcohol, which I fully respect, or, in the Tex/Mex case, because wine doesn’t go with football (the true religion of Texas, although if you see the documentary Somm, you might be surprised at how many American master sommeliers and exam candidates are former football players.)

The new vegan and vegetarian cookbooks don’t consider wine at all, as far as I can tell, even though there are plenty of vegan-approved wines and organic wines touted throughout Whole Foods (and even a few at Trader Joe’s). And a number of seitan and bean or lentil dishes (and certainly Roman-style lentil soup) would probably do all the better for a tinge of red, white, or rosé, either in the sauce or as a marinade ingredient.

Even the French- and Italian-trained chefs don’t use wine on TV very much, and if they do they don’t really explain it–why they chose that particular type of wine, how much to use and why, how to get the best flavor out of it in the dish, what else you could make using the same technique. Or else they’re kind of wasteful about it, using a whole bottle of wine for a single dish. Most people cooking for themselves would balk at that. Should balk at that.

It bothers me that I don’t actually see a lot of solid advice about cooking with wine, or at least not specific techniques that make sense in a home kitchen with a standard family budget.

Where am I going to get this advice? Not from the churn-a-minute Food Network chefs, clearly. Not from Harold McGee, either. To my great surprise, he devotes a total of about three paragraphs to “cooking with alcohol” in his food science books. The most interesting thing he says, other than to make sure and boil out the alcohol (duh) is that tannins will concentrate unpleasantly if you boil down a tannic red wine, but adding a protein to pick them up will tame them.

But since most of my uses for wine so far are to do with fish, I guess I’m already doing that…

As you might expect from some of my odd microwave-centric ideas, I tend to cook fish with wine in ways that probably seem unorthodox to anyone professional. For one thing, I cook several kinds of fish with red wine (sound of Francophile traditionalists screaming, then fainting in shock). Continue reading →

Filed under: DASH Diet, fish, Food Blogs, Food Magazines, Food TV, haute cuisine, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, wine | Tagged: cooking, fish recipes, wine | Comments Off on Breaking the Rules: Fish with Red Wine

Breakfast without Matzah Overload

Posted on April 15, 2014 by DebbieN

Last night we were very much in the spirit of Pesach–a total rush job at home, to the point where I realized I was supposed to have a boiled egg somewhere on the seder plate just as it was getting pretty far past sundown. Organization isn’t always our strong suit, especially on school nights. Last year I posted my Bart Simpson-style Passover Chalkboard Litany of kvetches and survival tips. This year: how to deal with matzah when they won’t sell you anything less than enough for 70 people for $2.99–such a deal! (well, okay, it is). You could feed nearly the whole Sanhedrin (because in our family, everyone argues about everything and I’m sure my 13-year-old is ready for law school as we speak. Good thing I can’t afford it yet!)

As with any style of food, too much of a good thing is still too much. I think I learn that the hard way every Passover. How to eat mostly vegetables and lean proteins and fresh fruit and yogurt…and not just sit there eating matzah like it’s going out of style? There’s more than enough matzah to go around–even in gefilte fish, especially in gefilte fish, which I’ve lost my taste for over the years since discovering how to cook regular fresh fish well, aka “not-gefilte” (though I still buy a jar for my noncooking husband for lunches during the week.)

I don’t do matzah kugel, sweet or mushroom (a waste of mushrooms in my jaundiced opinion). I’m not a huge fan of matzah brei (exception: matzah brei “blintzes”), matzah lasagne, mina de espinaca, or any of the other matzah-plus-egg-heavy adaptations of regular food. Although I have seen one attractive-enough looking picture of a mina de espinaca, I’d still do it without the matzah sheets…

I try hard these days not to make matzah balls either, though this year I might make an exception–once–for my poor daughter who never gets any because she’s vegetarian and the “not-chicken” soup at Shabbaton this March didn’t have any flavor and there were no matzah balls in it like there were in the yes-chicken soup. Oy! Maybe it’ll be a weekend project to figure out a good from-scratch version–we have school and taxes this week. A lot of school and taxes.

My mother, who is famous for not cooking more than necessary, taught me how to make pretty-good fresh-tasting haroset Russian Jewish style (’cause that’s what we were). Apples, walnuts (though almond flakes are also just fine with me), cinnamon, sweet wine or grape juice, maybe or maybe not honey, chopped coarsely so it stays crunchy. But I’ve been to a couple of community seders out here in Pasadena where the haroset was mashed down like baby food and to add insult, had matzah meal in it. I know, matzah bits probably started out as a less expensive alternative to nuts, and I can’t blame anyone for that in their own homes. A professional caterer is quite another story. There’s really no excuse in California, where nuts are pretty plentiful (both the human and the arborial kind).

Well, anyway. Second seder is tonight, but what about the rest of the week–after taxes, as it were? Passover brings on a lot of nutritional challenges if you eat dairy or vegetarian. How not to eat too many eggs in a single week? How to stay away from the canned coconut macaroons and other assorted “Kosher for Passover” horror sweets my husband brings home because he thinks that the kashrut labeling makes up for the “nutrition” labeling (which really oughtta say, “WHAT nutrition?! This is pure sugar and potato starch, buddy! And palm oil! And artificial colors and flavors! Almost as good as Froot Loops!”) I’m pretty sure I’ve already mentioned this, but it’s because he’s a boy, and there’s nothing much to do about it except shudder, put the box of “goodies” in some inaccessible place on a low shelf, preferably behind the broccoli, which is merely green and mysterious or better yet, okra (which he fears more than taxes, and that’s saying something).

Note it down: ALL the packaged cake and cookie substitutes are a bad deal for anyone diabetic or even marginally thinking about becoming diabetic–very, very spiky, and almost never worth it. Also guaranteed to induce repetitive eating and the false sensation that you’re “starving” about three seconds after you eat them. And in the last 20 years, they’ve been faked-up further–even the kichel, a dry, stiff, barely-sweet puff halfway between an empty creampuff shell and a biscotti, has had artificial flavorings added recently–why bother?

Do we really even need such matzah-filled “delights”? Nowhere is this poverty of product more evident than in the kosher-for-Passover cake “mixes” (for which I always hear Julia Sweeney’s line “Where are yer mixes, hon?” from God said, Ha!). Last year’s example, which I’m not letting happen again: the Manischewitz Blueberry Pancake mix box my husband proudly brought home one day “on sale! it was 99 cents!” And naïvely suggested I could make for breakfast–this upon seeing that I’d just finished making cheese blintzes from scratch with real ingredients, and real raspberries. Don’t squint at me like that–he’s still breathing. I just decided his sudden brainfreeze in the wife department had been caused by jetlag, and contented myself with reading the ingredient box back to him.

The man is not a cook and is pretty happy not to be. Still, he does like to eat. And read. Somehow it never occurred to him to read in service of eating by checking what’s actually on and in that pancake mix box. It had 20 ingredients, no nutrition, and no blueberries. “Blueberry bits” contained–are you ready?–food coloring, sugar, artificial flavor, and sodium alginate. So suddenly you can’t tell the difference between berries and blue goo?

I had to go into extra innings with the cauliflower and broccoli and eggplant and asparagus and tomato/artichoke heart salads just to overcome the unusually high crap factor, even though I didn’t use the mix. Just reading it was enough to require emergency grapefruit. I was too ashamed to donate it to a food pantry, either.

So….real is definitely the best way to go with food for the week. Breakfasts can be tricky–matzah and jam, matzah and cream cheese, matzah and almond butter…it gets pretty tired pretty quick. And on the other hand, blintzes are for weekends only and frankly? I’m still annoyed about that pancake mix incident a year later! Nu…

Three relatively low-crap, moderately-low matzah alternative breakfasts that are (most important!) low-labor for those post-Seder mornings when you are Done and Off Duty to your nearest and dearest (except for coffee):

1. Matzah-nola, what it sounds like, ingredients straight from the cupboard or freezer. There is actually a product out commercially this year called “Matzahnola”; my version I invented a year or two ago out of desperation against the nutrition-free Passover version of Cheerios my husband brought home, but I didn’t think it was that good a name–who knew? Anyway, I’m not bitter (though the fresh-grated horseradish is still stinging my sinuses from last night).

2. The old-style Israeli breakfast, not the modern endless hotel breakfast buffets–more like the kibbutz specials where you’re expected to get out there and weed a cotton field right afterward. Which I have actually done in my less cynical youth.

3. The bonus “I can haz CAKE?” breakfast, a favorite of fridge-scrounging champions everywhere Continue reading →

Filed under: Desserts, Diabetes, fish, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments | Tagged: baking, breakfast, diabetic desserts, low-carb cooking, matzah, Passover | Comments Off on Breakfast without Matzah Overload

Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Posted on March 6, 2014 by DebbieN

Round spare spanakopita just for us after the big kiddush

Round spare pinwheel-style spanakopita just for us at home. The big ones for the brunch had three pounds of spinach apiece (and were cut in small diamonds), but they still went together pretty fast–except for squeezing all that spinach dry…

This weekend I did it again–I made the kiddush, or in common speech a lunch buffet, for my congregation’s Saturday morning service. My husband kind of volunteered us for this week and because he doesn’t cook, most or all of the cooking, shopping, chopping and schlepping landed on my shoulders.

Last time he volunteered us, it was for our anniversary, and I was ready to skip ahead to the divorce until I got over it, because it’s a lot of work to cook for 60 or so people who like to eat. And kibbitz. Especially when the 60 suddenly turns into 80-plus and having to use the synagogue kitchen with the more complicated and confusing rules on only a week’s notice. As they did this time…..

Soooo….a two-day hell of shopping and then marathon cooking-and-juggling in my little galley kitchen. The microwave got a serious workout. So did the food processor and the oven. Sometimes all at once. And it was raining hard for three days, so bringing things over to the synagogue kitchen as I went got a little tricky. I triple-wrapped the chocolate cake and stuck it in a USPS Priority Mail box so it wouldn’t get left out in the rain. Same idea for the spanakopita trays.

A few hints about cooking big and real for a synagogue brunch, learned the hard way by moi and passed on for your edification and safety (and sanity):

1. You can buy a 6-lb can of chickpeas for massive half-gallon batches of hummus (Mid-East brand, maybe Goya as well). Cost? about $5. But–as I found out, and I’m glad no one was filming the process–industrial-sized can equals industrial-strength steel. A dinky hand-operated can opener is no match for such an item. I got just far enough to be able to pry open a kind of spout but there were tears and long-fluent-repetitive-all-throughout-the-house swearing sessions involved.

Still….

2. If you have a good corner greengrocer, you can buy quantities of eggplant for cheap–eleven or twelve eggplants made for a large tray of roast eggplant and onion slices (with garlic slivers and za’atar sprigs and olive oil) plus a large vat of baba ghanouj. Only the five eggplants I nuked for the baba ghanouj didn’t feel like cooperating fully when it was time to peel them. Might have been easier to peel first, then nuke, since it was all going into the food processor eventually. Next time…

3. Whole smoked whitefish for whitefish salad comes two ways–cold-smoked or hot-smoked. What’s the difference? I asked the counter guy at my favorite Armenian grocery. “Cold-smoked is a little less hard,” he said. So I bought it, thinking he meant the hot-smoked was tough as shoeleather and twice as chewy. I was wrong. Cold-smoked actually means the fish is smoked raw, like lox, only a little drier and tougher. But you don’t necessarily want to put it in whitefish salad that way. Man, it still had the scales on too. I couldn’t get it off the bones for love or money, and there were a lot of bones.

However, the microwave came to the rescue. I cut the fish in half and Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, baking, Beans and legumes, breads, breakfast, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Dips, fish, frugality, Grains, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: baba ghanouj, buffet cooking, chocolate ganache, dolmas, fillo dough, hummus, Jewish cooking, Jewish deli, kiddush, microwave cooking, smoked whitefish, spanakopita, stuffed grape leaves | Comments Off on Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Sour grapes, aging grapes

Posted on July 26, 2013 by DebbieN

Well, we never said they were Paul Masson, but really:

According to the LA Times last week, a large Australian winemaker is ditching $35 million worth of their Napa-produced Beringer wines that have passed their “sell-by” date but haven’t been sold and distributed yet. Apparently they’re the exception on the US market, but it’s still pretty disconcerting to think of all that table wine going to smash.

Beringer is drinkable enough but supposedly doesn’t age like better-made wines, according to the parent company. I don’t see why not, unless it isn’t really wine–is that what they’re claiming? Can’t be. So in reality, it probably has enough tannins to age at least a little if you leave it alone in a decently cool dark corner unopened for 3 or 4 years. At least the cabernets and merlots, I would think. Might show a little improvement, if given a chance.

But the company is probably looking at the bottom line–they ain’t movin’, so why should we pay storage for another 3 years, because the supermarket chains won’t buy it that they’ve become better wines deserving of a higher price? And at the million-bottle level, I can see that argument. I can. Storage is expensive. And they can claim a business loss.

For home consumers, though, I’d say it’s worth taking a chance. One of the most interesting wine-tasting experiences I’ve ever had was the opening of 20-year-old bottles of California wines a friend had inherited from her late father. He’d been one of those early nuts–an enthusiast in Northern California in the 1960s and 1970s, when local winemaking was still in its infancy and not all that well thought of. Whenever he tasted something better than screwtop, he bought a case or so, opened up one or two bottles and put the others up to age in a part of the basement that had been dug into the side of a hill. The wines were okay to start with, maybe a bit better than that, and the makers became better known and better at their craft over time. But what started out as vin ordinaire did, after 5, 10, 15 years, transmogrify into something much more graceful, sophisticated, and interesting in a number of cases.

Those wines have no match in the supermarket selection of 2- and 3-year-old bottles. So as an ordinary down-at-the-heels consumer without a fat trust fund, you probably can’t get anything like them without aging your own. Just because the wineries insist their wines are sold ready-to-drink-now doesn’t mean they have no further potential or that aging is a thing of the past. It just means the bigger companies don’t see much profit in it. But of course the small wineries up and down California always keep a few “library wines” for their customers to try–that’s how they end up selling a $15 or $20 bottle’s older cousin for $50, $150 or even more.

What for those of us living in apartments or lacking cooled hillside cave basements of worth? I’ve always been more ready than the average cook to play with my food and eat my mistakes as long as they don’t risk rampant botulism or salmonella. So this might seem tacky or harebrained: I’m not advocating those Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, frugality, sauces and condiments, wine | Tagged: aging wine, Beringer, homemade vinegar, wine | 3 Comments »

Pinned for Purim!

Posted on February 25, 2013 by DebbieN

Thanks to Yael Shuval for choosing my Low-Carb Hamantaschen for her board at Pinterest.com.

Three years ago I developed almond-meal based hamantaschen for my daughter, who had been diagnosed with Type I diabetes only a couple of weeks earlier and needed something that was low enough in carb that (at the time, anyway) she could actually have one or two when all the other kids were having theirs and without having to get an extra shot of insulin.

Almond meal has only about one-fourth as much carbohydrate per cup as wheat flour, so it seemed like a good substitute. To our surprise, although the dough was a little finicky to work with, the hamantaschen came out tasting pretty good, and they were indeed pretty low carb, about 4-5 grams per mini-hamantaschen. Granted, they were also pretty small, but it was a symbolic triumph in the first few weeks and made us all feel like being diabetic wasn’t going to be the end of having fun.

Now that my daughter is on an insulin pump, getting an extra shot is no big deal, though in our experience the pitfall is that it’s now just a little too easy, especially for a preteen, to “eat anything you want, at any time, without thinking about it, as long as you program the insulin for it” which is one of the less responsible marketing messages in Medtronic’s brochure for teenagers (note: the pump itself is pretty good, but it still doesn’t mean you don’t have to be careful about what you’re eating). Those sour gummy heart candies the teacher handed out for snack earlier this week and left on my daughter’s desk, for instance….well, candy never seems like as much food as it really is, and I think my daughter gained a valuable lesson when she added up what she’d really eaten…she wouldn’t be the first one.

It’s always good to have a general plan in place for holiday eating so you don’t overdo the treats or eat an entire meal’s worth of carb in just a few cookies or candies or whatever…what can I say, we’re working on it.

Still. In the last year or two I’ve mostly gone back to making standard hamantaschen based on Joan Nathan’s classic cookie-dough recipe, which I like a lot and which looks and tastes much, much better than the dry, pasty-white horrors at the annual Purim carnival.

What I like about the standard flour-based recipe, other than that it tastes and looks good and is easy to work with, is that I can roll the dough out very thin and get crisp, delicate hamantaschen that are a decent cookie size but still hold together nicely and are not extravagantly carb-laden, particularly if the fillings are reasonable and you don’t eat ten at a time (the big challenge). They’re not as low-carb as the almond meal ones, but they still work out okay–about 7 grams apiece for a 1.5-2″ cookie. They taste good even made with pareve (nondairy) margarine instead of butter.

The LA-area idea of hamantaschen usually involves M&Ms, colored sprinkles, anything completely artificial. I bet gummy sour hearts (this afternoon’s culprit) would be a huge hit too. I don’t think they’ve heard of either prune or poppyseed out here in at least a generation.

Traditional fruit or nut fillings are a much more decent bet for carb, and they taste better (and look nicer too, because I’m not 6 years old and don’t insist on rainbow colors anymore). They’re also easy to make from scratch in a microwave or on the stove top so that you can decide how much sugar to put in them. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, books, cooking, Dairy, Desserts, Diabetes, Food Blogs, fruits, holiday cooking, kid food, Microwave tricks, sauces and condiments | Tagged: baking, cookie recipes, diabetes, Hamantaschen, Jewish cookbooks, Joan Nathan, L.V. Anderson, low-carb desserts, low-carb hamantaschen, poppyseed, prunes | Comments Off on Pinned for Purim!

The heady scent of new-crop oranges

Posted on May 1, 2012 by DebbieN

I’ve posted on making impromptu microwaved marmalade before. It works beautifully–5 minutes total!–with sliced kumquats, but I haven’t had as much success with standard navel orange peel–until now. This week my local Trader Joe’s had big bags of organic oranges and when I brought one home I discovered something I’ve never come across before.

It must be the new crop, I think. I don’t have a great sense of smell out here in Los Angeles, but even I can tell something’s really different about these oranges. Southern California is specialty-citrus country, with five or six varieties of tangerines parading through the grocery stores and farmers’ markets all winter long, and beautiful, strange “Buddha’s hand” citrons appearing in December. With all that going on, not to mention the blood oranges and pomelos (which I actually don’t like) and cara caras and key limes and ugli fruit (sumo tangerines, huge and bumpy) and so on and so on, you’d think that ordinary navel oranges would come bottom of the exotica scale. Even if they are organic.

The flesh of these oranges was pretty good but not really remarkable–I actually like them a little tangier and more acidic. But the peel! In addition to the usual bitter-aromatic orange peel scent, the oranges all smelled strongly of orange blossom, even after washing them twice. I didn’t know oranges could smell like orange blossom. The peel even tasted like orange blossom water.

So of course I decided I had to take advantage of this oddity by trying the old microwave marmalade trick and making candied orange peel with them.

Like rose water, orange blossom water or essence often seems to me as though it would be better suited to cosmetics than food flavoring. A little is exotic and mysteriously elegant; a little too much, which could be the difference of a couple of drops, can be distinctly soapy. The essence is sold in tiny opaque blue French bottles in upscale markets like Whole Foods for several dollars apiece, but it’s also sold in 12-oz bottles for 2-3 bucks at my local Armenian grocery, presumably because most of the customers use it so much more often in all kinds of fillo or almond- or pistachio-based desserts.

But here I was with orange-blossom-scented oranges, the native article, organic no less. If they were awful as candied peel or marmalade, at least the microwave method meant I wasn’t going to be wasting tons of time or effort, and only a little sugar. So I washed two oranges well, took the outside layer of the peel off with a sharp knife and sliced it into thin shreds.

I find that skinning the navel oranges with a sharp knife and taking only a little of the white pith with the peel is better than peeling first with my fingers and then shredding the whole peel with tons of pith attached–somehow they cook through better in the microwave method, absorb the syrup better, and gel a bit better as marmalade.

So anyway–I poured a bit of water on the shreds in a soup bowl, covered the bowl with a saucer and microwaved a minute. The water I poured off was greenish yellow and smelled like orange blossom–tasted like it too. But the peel still smelled like it as well, so not all was lost. I covered the shreds with about 1/3 c. or so granulated sugar, drizzled on a little water to wet it down and squeezed half a lemon over it all. Covered the bowl with a saucer and microwaved about 4-5 minutes. Very heady scent and beautiful flavor, and somehow not soapy, thank goodness. Might have the lemon juice to thank for that, actually.

The shreds sat in their syrup in a covered container most of the day (for me it was forgetting all about it for a couple of hours while letting it cool, but I’ve discovered that it’s also standard marmalade-making practice that helps the syrup gel; who knew?)

The bonus question, of course, is how does it go with chocolate? (that should almost always be my bonus question)

Answer: knockout with dark chocolate. Also very good on toast as marmalade. Something to savor, and the syrup, if I don’t finish it along with the shreds, might go to flavor some almond-paste fillo fingers later this week. Because with something this good, it just seems right to be decadent in small, appreciative doses.

What good is a recipe for this marmalade, though, if you can’t stumble on orange-blossom-scented oranges of your own? I suspect it’s kind of an accidental find, but the fact that orange blossom tastes so good with actual orange peel means that you could make candied orange peel or marmalade and add a drop or two–no more!–of orange blossom to the peel and syrup once they’re already cooked. Don’t forget the lemon juice or a small shake of citric acid (sour salt) to help the preserves last in the fridge. I think the bit of acidity definitely cuts the possibility of soapiness.

On a fresher, lower-carb/lower-cal note, a light (LIGHT!) sprinkling of orange blossom water goes very well on orange slices you intend to use on green salads. One I sometimes make for parties: sprinkle cross-wise slices of several oranges with a tiny bit of orange blossom water. Let them sit a few minutes, then arrange the orange slices on a bed of oil-and-vinegar-dressed romaine and other greens on a large platter, and distribute thinly sliced red onion, red bell pepper, basil and Greek pitted olives over it all.

Filed under: cooking, Desserts, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, Odd food, sauces and condiments | Tagged: candied orange peel, citrus, Desserts, fruit recipes, marmalade, microwave jam, navel oranges, orange blossom water | Comments Off on The heady scent of new-crop oranges

Hunan Tofu, spare the salt (spoil the child)

Posted on April 30, 2012 by DebbieN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sodium counts for this version:

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

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, frugality, kid food, nutrition, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Chinese food, DASH Diet, low-sodium diet, low-sodium soy sauce, microwave cooking, tofu, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Hunan Tofu, spare the salt (spoil the child)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Slow Food Fast

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

Testing salt reduction on a really large scale

Microwave tricks: 5-Minute Plum Jam for Fall

Stuffed cabbage in the microwave

Breaking the Rules: Fish with Red Wine

Breakfast without Matzah Overload

Post-Kiddush: our leftovers are better than yours

Sour grapes, aging grapes

The heady scent of new-crop oranges

Hunan Tofu, spare the salt (spoil the child)

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