Slow Food Fast

Maximum Flavor in a Minimal Broth

Posted on March 12, 2015 by DebbieN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– – –

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

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

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

– – –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purim: Poppyseed filling with a Persian-style twist

Posted on March 4, 2015 by DebbieN

Tonight is Purim, when we dress up in costume, make fun of dire villains and dull kings, cheer modest heroes and most of all praise a heroic woman, Esther, who risked everything to change the king’s addled mind and spare the Jews of the Persian empire.

In previous years, I’ve done the Hamantaschen thing–low carb, medium carb, all homemade, no pasty white horrors, praise of Joan Nathan’s basic recipe from her first cookbook…lots of non-Dayglo, non-candy fillings from figs, prunes, apricots, and so on…

Today I’m probably not going to get a chance to bake anything or even cook very much, because I decided to take a leaf out of Esther’s Megillah this year and read part of the fifth chapter, splitting it with my (much-wiser-than-Ahashverosh) husband. So about three days ago I decided I was going to go for it and learn the Purim cantillation (trope marks for chanting) system. Which takes more nerve than usual, because it’s tricky and somewhat deceptive, like the entire story. And it’s been almost two years, since my daughter’s bat mitzvah, since I’ve even chanted Torah. And, like I said, three days ago. Not brilliant.

Luckily there’s Youtube. And a number of synagogues post recordings by their hazzanim (cantors, male and female) for the cantillation marks and for the readings as a whole. Only there are so many versions for Purim! It’s a late holiday in our history, after a lot of us were living in the Persian empire, and the different melodies reflect our already dispersed community. One interesting version was by a Moroccan hazzan–his system actually had a couple of trope mark tunes that are nearly the same as ours for the regular weekly Torah and Haftarah readings. Maybe those are the oldest ones that everyone has more or less in common? Cool!

So–our daughter is chanting a few verses with her youth group for Chapter 7 tonight, and the director is bringing kosher Persian food from a restaurant on the West Side of LA, where the largest Iranian (and Iranian Jewish) community outside of Iran resides. I wish I were a kid tonight, for sure.

Still, in honor of the occasion and the roots, I did get around to making poppyseed filling for the hamantaschen I’ll make tomorrow.

I went to my local Armenian greengrocer yesterday morning for vegetables and picked up a new bag of poppyseeds, hoping they were fresh, really fresh enough to use. My previous latest bag in the freezer has puffed up suspiciously with air–suggests it’s no good and starting to release gases even though I didn’t open it before freezing, dammit.

I tasted the new poppyseeds raw–okay. But rancid sometimes only shows up when you toast them, so I poured a spoonful in a metal pan and swirled them around on the stove until the aroma came up. Then I test tasted those once they were cool enough. Still good, still lucky.

Poppyseed filling is quite an elaborate affair in my trusty 1984 spiralbound edition of Joan Nathan’s The Jewish Holiday Kitchen. Figs, apricot jam, brandy, egg whites? Oy. Ten or more ingredients. A production, and kind of expensive considering how many younger people don’t like poppyseed filling. Including my daughter, I’m sad to report (see below)…

But I do, which is the important thing, and my supermarket no longer carries those cans of Solo in the Jewish Foods section. So I decided it was fine to simplify. And while I was at it, to add a hidden Persian-style element or so for the occasion of Purim.

So this filling looks black…but holds the essence of early spring and orange blossom within it. And if anyone doubts that it’s completely effective in its ability to transform, at least temporarily, I should add that my daughter, who insisted she tells me every year she hates poppyseed filling with a hot hate, and that I never listen, took a tiny bite and looked surprised and pleased…at least for about five seconds, until the bitter toastiness of the poppyseeds came through like a bagel at rush hour, poor kid, and she pulled a Tom Hanks (from Big, the caviar scene). She even did the wiping-the-tongue-desperately-with-a-napkin bit. And no, I’m not sure I should be telling you this. Five seconds delay, though. From her, I’m gonna have to count that as a win. And it was pretty funny, another point to Purim.

Poppyseed Filling With a Persian Twist

6 oz (172 g; it was the size of bag they sold) very fresh poppyseeds
6 oz. sugar (again, 172 g, but anyway, the same amount as the poppyseeds)
1/4 c (60 ml) water
juice of a lemon
orange part of the rind of an (organic, washed) orange or tangerine (in this case), grated or if that’s too much of a pain, shredded with a knife and ground in a coffee grinder or food processor with an additional spoonful or so of sugar
pinch each of ground cloves and cardamom (if you have it)
very tiny shake or grinding or pinch of nutmeg
up to another 1/2 c. water (see instructions and PS note at the bottom)
1/2 t. vanilla
1 t. orange blossom water (yes, this was my idea of the Persian twist, and it’s good, though probably it should have been rosewater for authenticity–I just wasn’t ready for that)

Taste-test the poppyseeds raw, then toast a spoonful in a dry steel saucepan on the stovetop until you start to smell their aroma. Cool and taste-test again before using to make sure there’s no funky, off, or rancid flavor to them.

Then grind them a few pulses in a coffee grinder (in two batches) or in a food processor or blender.

In the steel saucepan, combine the sugar and water with a squeeze of lemon and let the sugar wet down all the way before turning on the burner to medium. Bring just to a slow simmer without stirring–the slurry should start to go clear as the sugar dissolves.

Add the ground poppyseeds and stir gently. It should be a thick dark-gray grainy mass. Keep the pot on a low heat so it bubbles gently but doesn’t spit for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally but not hard or you might cause the syrup to seize. As it cooks add the lemon juice, spices, grated orange or tangerine rind and stir in, then [see the PS below] test-taste–if the seeds are still kind of hard, add 1/4 c. water, let simmer with a lid partway on for a few minutes, stir and do it again here until the seeds soften a bit and the raw-poppy edge is off. Add the vanilla and just before taking it off the heat, stir in the orange blossom water. Take a tiny bit and let it cool enough to taste and adjust any flavorings, then take off the heat and pour into a container to cool to room temperature. It will thicken further, especially after you put it in the fridge.

B’te’avon, bon appétit, and Chag HaPurim Same’ach!

PS…AKA, next-day “Do-over,” kind of. Because I wouldn’t want anyone to try this, be happy for a few minutes, and then kind of hate the result when they took a second taste. If it needs a fix, it needs a fix, and I felt this did…

The next day I took it out of the fridge for a taste test before deciding if I really wanted to bake…it was pretty grainy and the top was crusted sugar. I stirred it and realized the seeds were pretty hard still and kind of bitter–not rancid, just really raw-poppyseed. Very strong. I think I didn’t have enough liquid in the recipe compared with Joan Nathan’s, even without all the jams and things. She had “juice of an orange” in there somewhere next to the juice of a lemon, and I’d assumed it was mostly for flavor, but probably the extra liquid helped cook the poppyseeds too (hence, the “up to another 1/2 c. water” bit I’ve just added to the ingredients list).

Never one to look away from a challenge (oh yeah? I hear someone muttering sarcastically in the background)…I decided to reheat the filling in the microwave with some extra water and a lid for a minute or so and see if that would induce the poppy seeds to absorb some of the water and soften up a bit. I stirred in about 1/4 c. of water, which immediately went cloudy-white, kept stirring, and the filling thinned almost to pancake batter consistency. Put a lid on and heated 2-3 minutes in the microwave, let sit a few minutes to absorb. It was better as well as thicker, and a little of the poppyseed bitter edge was out as well. So I did it again with another 1/4 c. water, heated 2 minutes or so, let it sit again and it thickened back up but the seeds were definitely softer and a little more brown than black (although I admit it’s pretty hard to tell).

In any case, I’d do this the first time around while it’s still cooking on the stovetop. Add the extra water in bits after you’ve added the poppyseeds and spices, and before adding vanilla or orange blossom water (so you don’t evaporate them off). Expect to cook it down from about pancake batter looseness until it becomes very thick, a grainy paste. Then taste a little and feel to see if the seeds have softened and mellowed in flavor–add more water and cook longer or else do the microwave thing instead if you’re impatient, but I think it might only take maybe as much as 15-20 minutes on the stove rather than the 5 minutes I’d expected.

Safety: The only thing about heating syrups in the microwave (this is basically a syrup with seeds) is that they can get very, very hot. So 1. keep an eye on it while it’s heating and be ready to stop the microwave if it starts to boil over (this didn’t, either time, but you just don’t know) and 2. don’t use a plastic microwave container because the mixture could melt or scar plastics. Proper microwaveable ceramic or old-style borosilicate pyrex is ok if you still have some from 20 years ago or can find it in Europe and tote it home. (NOTE: “new Pyrex” that clanks and is made outside the US is made of soda lime glass and is not very heat-stable–see right sidebar warning).

Filed under: baking, Desserts, history, kid food | Tagged: food, Hamantaschen, Jewish cooking, poppyseeds, Purim, recipes | Comments Off on Purim: Poppyseed filling with a Persian-style twist

Microwave Tricks: Rapid Red Cabbage

Posted on March 4, 2015 by DebbieN

When I was almost twelve, the year of All the President’s Men (go rent or borrow it from the library if you’ve never seen it), a classmate of mine came back from the weekend raving about a new restaurant his parents had taken him to.

Now, almost no one in my 7th grade math class, particularly not boys, either knew about or talked much about food above the pizza and burger level.

My friend’s family had spent the previous year in Italy–you could tell whenever he grumbled about real soccer with strategy vs. the weak substitute they were teaching us in PE that he was sorry they’d come back. Clearly it wasn’t the only thing he missed–this was the first “real” restaurant he’d been to in the US, and it was way out in the countryside.

The Bavarian Chef (which after 40 years is still open in Madison, VA, and now in Fredericksburg as well, I’m happy to see), had a menu like no other in the area: fondue, a magic word I’d never heard before and which my friend had trouble describing. One fondue with Emmenthal-type cheese for cubes of toasted bread, the other with a red sauce (tomato? redcurrant?) for spicy meatballs. Veal or maybe chicken Cordon Bleu (their current menu still has veal). The side dishes were distinctive as well, particularly the sweet and sour red cabbage…it was gourmet. European gourmet, the real kind, and possibly the first upscale restaurant in our part of Virginia.

In any case, my friend was enthusiastic enough about this place that (and I don’t remember this bit at all) I came home and said something to my parents, who were friends with his parents. The next thing you know, my folks schlepped me and my younger brother and sister out of town–half an hour’s drive and into the next county–to try it out for my birthday. And my friend was right about all of it.

The cheese fondue was a completely new experience and a lot of fun. So was a glowing magenta side dish of sweet-and-sour red cabbage–it would have been fun for the color alone. Although that has not held true for me and beets, so maybe I shouldn’t say so. But luckily it, unlike beets, was delicious. And so different from anything else I’d ever eaten that it impressed me even more than the chicken (or veal) with the ham and cheese in the middle, and I can’t remember anything at all about dessert.

Sweet and sour red cabbage, when you think about it, is completely contrary to American standard tastes, even those of 40 years ago when people still ate vegetables and cooked most dinners at home. If you had to describe it to someone at school–what would you even say? The ingredients–and the flavors–are pretty simple individually but surprising together: red cabbage, vinegar, sugar, cloves, salt, maybe black pepper. Maybe a bit of apple or onion in some versions. How could that go together? But it does, and I’ve loved it ever since.

And yet I never ever make it at home, because it takes up to 2 hours of simmering on the stovetop, depending on the recipe you have. The one time I made it, back in my 20s, when I was trying to recreate the experience, the whole apartment smelled really, really sulfurous. It reeked. Even though the cabbage did come out ok.

Too bad I didn’t even own a microwave until my mid-30s. But I’ve been rethinking it since last week, when I saw a picture of it in a Mario Batali cookbook from about 10 years ago. The combination of a German-style dish in an Italian cookbook reminded me of the whole prealgebra food debate and my friend’s unprecedented idea that good food was worth traveling for.

But you don’t have to travel far for this dish, and you certainly don’t have to spend 2-3 hours on it. There’s got to be a way, I decided (as usual). How hard could it be to microwave it?

Well, it worked almost perfectly, at least as a test case: Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, frugality, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks | Tagged: 5-minute recipes, food, German cooking, Mario Batali, recipes, restaurants | 1 Comment »

Media misread on the new USDA dietary guidelines

Posted on February 28, 2015 by DebbieN

The new USDA public nutrition guidelines are being updated again, as scheduled, and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s version now says some egg yolks are okay and to limit carbs and sugar instead. A variety of media commentators have jumped all over that, even though it’s not very different from what the guidelines have been emphasizing for years. Now, if anything, I would have hoped that most of the commentaries in the newspapers of record would be critical of the industry influence on the USDA’s nutrition guidelines for the general public each time, but no.

The most prominent commentators, notably Nina Teicholz, whose op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times really bothered me, are well-educated and should know how to “read a french fry” as it were. But instead of looking at the likely effect of loosened USDA dietary limitations on a public that has gone so seriously overboard on calorie-dense food, they’ve taken the opposite tack. Mostly to declare self-righteously that the new relaxation of standards really means all the previous recommendations to limit saturated fat and cholesterol were bunk and a waste of time based on “uncertain” and “weak” or even “junk” science.

Which is untrue. Epidemiologic research–large observation studies and surveys, like the NHANES diet and cardiovascular health survey series from the 1970s onward, and the big Framingham Heart Study of the 1950s onward, are not junk science. They do what clinical feeding trials can’t: they look for the contribution of individual dietary risk factors to chronic and complex-origin health conditions like heart disease and stroke across very large population groups. Both the processed food industry and people like Teicholz claim that clinical feeding trials are the only legitimate way to provide “proof” of cause and effect, but the cost of conducting them carefully long enough and with a big enough participant pool for meaningful results would bankrupt the nation halfway through.

Epidemiologic findings matter on the large public scale. Not every specific applies absolutely and equally to every single person, but that’s not what population-wide studies are for. The big studies, loose as they might seem compared with DNA fingerprinting and perfectly demonstrated cause-and-effect kinds of lab workups for individual cases, give best-bet recommendations for most people to reduce their risk.

Your genetics determine how well that works for you specifically, but most of us don’t have access to DNA testing on that level, and the “big six” lifestyle risk factors (high sat fat, high blood cholesterol and blood pressure, overweight, lack of exercise and smoking) are a lot easier to change and get some control over. After all, you can’t change your genetics much (and yes, my daughter is quite disgruntled that she can’t pick cooler parents. But tough. We couldn’t pick ours either).

So anyway, I know I’m unusually irritated with any news about USDA dietary guidelines–I used to work at NIH, and some of my colleagues had attempted to serve on the dietary guidelines committee and ended up completely frustrated at how “bought” the process became. The USDA has always had a conflict of interest when it comes to public health recommendations because its main mission is support of US agriculture, and public health always comes a distant second to big business. The committees have repeatedly subverted and weakened the scientific nutrition panelists’ best-finding recommendations by including food industry participants and weighting toward industry priorities in the consensus mix. There’s no great reason to expect the food industry isn’t still playing and winning the same game on the same committee this time around. [Update: the meat industry has just asked for an additional 75 day comment period].

But the main problem I see at this point is how poorly mainstream journalists and editors have handled the announced overhaul. None really seem to have dug into the comparison between current and previous issues of the guidelines, much less compared the USDA’s final takes with dietary guidelines from the DGAC, a combined group of more purely biomed/scientific research experts representing HHS (including NIH) and the FDA, or those of the major health advocacy organizations such as the American Heart Association.

And declaring that it’s now fine for anyone to eat all fats without limitation is nonsense and a misread. The USDA guidelines don’t say that–the DGAC draft guidelines certainly don’t say that. And if the USDA does attempt to drift in that direction for the final release, as some of the director’s announcements suggest, given the participation of Big Food and Big Agriculture hoping to sell the public more meat, eggs, and cheese, along with more profitable processed goods, would you necessarily believe them?

Is it really the fault of the scientists on the panels over the years, as Teicholz claims (“How did they get it so wrong?”), that the epidemiology findings they relied on for previous rounds of recommendations weren’t borne out by much smaller and less conclusive clinical studies?

Maybe the role of saturated fat is less apparent in a clinical study. I don’t doubt that. But as noted above, the statistical power of the comparatively short-term clinical trials for cardiovascular disease effects is bound to be a lot lower than in a long-term population-wide study, even if the controls are tighter. There are so many interfering factors–other dietary and lifestyle factors, and so many varieties of genetic risk factors within and among different population groups, genders, and age groups, that you need the big numbers and the large timescale to see effects above the noise. Meta-analysis of a lot of limited clinical studies with iffy results doesn’t make up for that. If anything, it compounds their individual uncertainties.

[And in fact it turns out that much of Teicholz’s assumption on that point is based on a very poorly conducted, much criticized meta-analysis of studies on saturated fat and cardiovascular disease published last spring. Most inclusive meta-analyses performed using standard stats analysis best practices actually show reductions of between 14 and 26% in CV events and deaths when subjects cut their saturated fat intake below 10% of calories and ate more vegetables instead of carbs, or else substituted polyunsaturated fats for them.]

Teicholz’s op-ed had carefully modulated but still overt indignation at the imperfect scientific basis behind previous recommendations to cut saturated fat and limit egg yolks and other high-cholesterol foods. What should be there and isn’t is the acknowledgement that when those recommendations were first announced to the public–by the AHA, the CDC and the USDA in the late 1960s, population trend studies over the next 10 years showed a stark drop in the rate of heart attacks–about a 30 percent drop. In other words, it worked. Big time.

And the broad peak of the population curve for a first heart attack shifted to the right by 10 years–that is, the average age for men went from about 50 to about 60, and for women from about 60 to 70. These were huge improvements in public health overall, and they were achieved partly because the public believed and paid attention, and partly because the nutrition and health experts hadn’t given up and abdicated responsibility in the face of industry pushback.

Clearly these results didn’t last; but is that the fault of the studies that identified saturated fat and cholesterol as things to reduce (note: not eliminate completely, just reduce)? The 1980s ushered in a long Republican-led era of unfettered, uncritical support of corporate priorities over public health, Reagan’s “ketchup is a vegetable” quip and the conversion of school lunches to chain restaurant concession contracts, a popular nose-thumbing at so-called “food police” health recommendations, the rise of high-fat-and-sugar-and-oversized-portion “comfort” and “indulgent” foods in restaurants and food magazines, and an entrenched anti-science bias in Congress that still haunts us today.

Not that much has changed from Reagan’s time in office–including the sad observable fact that most Americans for the past decade or so clearly aren’t paying serious attention to or even attempting to follow those modest earlier USDA recommendations, particularly the recommendations to eat more vegetables rather than more boxed, labeled namebrand processed foods, whether Big Macs or Ding Dongs or Froot Loops…

So few Americans today eat any vegetables at all compared with people of the same ages in the 1970s. As I’ve mentioned before, a shocking number of my friends, in their 40s and 50s already, do not cook at all. They have advanced degrees, if mostly in the humanities. They nervously repeat but don’t understand how to read between the lines of whatever diet and health claims are in the news, and they’ve come to think cooking is too hard. They have a lot of takeout menus on their iPhones.

There is just one more factor to mention here: the profit motive. Teicholz, a former contributor to NPR, Gourmet and Men’s Health, wrote that op-ed in part to promote her new book, The Big Fat Surprise, which claims that diets high in meat, butter, Continue reading →

Filed under: books, Diabetes, Food Politics, history, meat and poultry, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: AHA, cardiovascular disease, Nina Teicholz, public health, USDA dietary guidelines | Comments Off on Media misread on the new USDA dietary guidelines

Artichoke-olive spanakopita for a party crowd

Posted on January 2, 2015 by DebbieN

Artichoke and olive spanakopita tastes authentic even though it's completely nondairy. The party round is pretty quick to put together, too.

Artichoke and olive spanakopita tastes authentic, even though it’s completely nondairy by request–which makes it a good vegan choice too. And it’s easy to put together.

Last night we went to a big New Year’s Eve party–a rarity for us; we’re usually with family one coast or the other. Of course, getting to go to a party means rushing around the house a few hours ahead to find an outfit that fits, is clean, looks about right, doesn’t require very high heels or an engineering degree to figure out how to put it on. Luckily most of our friends are low-key that way.

The party was potluck–the hosts provided a couple of solid main dishes and we and the other guests brought the side dishes and accoutrements. A pretty good division of labor, I think. So I offered to bring spanakopita, which is pretty easy. Or at least, I figured out an easier way last week to get the spinach squeezed out than by doing three pounds of spinach handful by painful handful, and it was pretty good for the Chanukah party, so why not do it again?

But our hosts’ family, all five of them, have a cluster of serious food allergies–primarily eggs and dairy, but a couple of other odd ones like cinnamon as well, and not all of the allergies match up from person to person. It’s a testament to their bravery and sociability (which I admire and wish I had greater stores of) that they throw big parties and let other people bring food.

I decided to do spanakopita anyway and just leave out the dairy–butter isn’t a big deal if you have olive oil for the fillo leaves, and I don’t make it with eggs in the filling. So far, so good. But what should I substitute for the feta? Feta’s usually a big part of the show.

Tofu might have been easy, and it’s a protein source, but one of the kids can’t do soy, and it doesn’t really taste right. Nuts–don’t know. Nondairy cheese substitutes–I haven’t tasted these myself and they have so many ingredients plus loads of salt that it wasn’t worth chancing without consulting the family.

My best options to add to the spinach came down to:

1. Greek olives, pitted and chopped–right on the saltiness, but maybe odd-looking. No one else I know has ever paired up spinach filling with olives.

2. Cooked and drained mushrooms–I would do this, but my daughter confesses she doesn’t like them when I make spinach quiche. And she does like my spanakopita. So…

3. Marinated artichoke hearts–they have a little saltiness, but mostly lemon and garlic, which is just about right. And artichoke hearts pair pretty nicely with spinach and are a familiar enough combination that most people will probably be okay with them. You just have to remember to drain them well so they don’t make everything soggy.

I thought I’d go with the artichoke hearts alone, but after tasting the spinach and artichoke heart filling, adding more lemon and garlic (because you can never have enough) and herbs and scallions, I decided what the heck and threw in a handful of Alfonso olives I had in the fridge–12 big purple, winy olives, pitted and slivered, did not look weird after all and they gave just enough distinctive tang and salt for the big salad bowl worth of filling to satisfy without overpowering it.

I figure, when you try something new or off-beat with a substitution, you have to test-taste to know if it’s worth doing again or recommending to anyone else. Maybe no one will agree with you, or maybe they will, but if you don’t like the result to start with, you’ll feel bad serving it up. Or maybe you’re made of tougher stuff than I am and it depends on who you’re serving it to and what have they done for you lately?

So anyway, if you can’t have feta or other dairy, this is definitely a good way to go. The olives and marinated artichoke hearts are authentically Greek enough not to taste or feel like fakey or second-rate substitutions. The spanakopita ended up tasting pretty good, and got eaten up amid some serious competition.

Also, I’ve decided this is also a good time for a slideshow. For a while now I’ve been meaning to do a step-by-step post on setting up a round tray of spanakopita or baklava, because I think it’s simpler and quicker than a plain rectangular casserole, and it looks more impressive and party-ready too. So I took some pictures as I went along (note to self: wipe olive oil thumbprints off camera grip), Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, baking, holiday cooking, nutrition, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: cooking, dairy-free, Greek food, pareve, phyllo, vegan recipes | Comments Off on Artichoke-olive spanakopita for a party crowd

A salad in winter: counterintuitive comfort food

Posted on December 29, 2014 by DebbieN

If you skip the lettuce and choose more robust vegetables, you can make a big box of salad in minutes and keep it crisp several days in the fridge.

It’s gotten cold here. Ok, so no one else is pitying us; we had 80-plus degree weather only last week, but now there’s a very dry, sunny cold spell setting in, it’s in the 50s daytime, 40s at night, and Southern California doesn’t do insulation that well. Or ski jackets. Or wool.

On the upside, it’s been cold enough so that I can run the oven and bake–a rarity in Pasadena this year. [OK again: prepare for a couple of digressions from the main topic]

I made a big round spanakopita for a Chanukah party, quick pizzas for my daughter and her friends and calzones for me and my husband, rosemary and sesame bread, and rye bread–which is still in the attempt stage; I didn’t have a properly developed sour and wasn’t scrupulous about weighing out and getting the hydration and gluten ratios right and all that the first time around, and it collapsed in the oven…

I’m determined to get the sour and the rise textures right, so now I’m following the Inside the Jewish Bakery instructions more closely, having met and been impressed by one of the authors. It’s a matter of some urgency: my grandmothers are no longer alive to schlep good deli or bread out here on a visit, Trader Joe’s has broken ties with the really good bakery that made serious “pain miche” half-rounds that tasted like kornbroyt, none of the commercial rye breads in SoCal (or most of the country) are anything more than tanned white bread, and I’m desperate for the real thing–tough, chewy, tangy, caraway-laden, with a serious crust. Before my genes start going beige and I start deciding Bing Crosby was a really good singer.

[True unexpected fact here: a church choir director I know says that because of all the practice sessions, she and all her colleagues get serious carol fatigue by about two weeks before Christmas every year. I thought it was just me avoiding the mall, but no.]

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about comfort food, because winter cold brings on the desire for heavier dishes–stews, starches, cheeses, meat and potatoes, and more starches, and the winter holidays bring their own calorie-laden version of cheer to the table with abundant puff pastry, eggnog, latkes (potato pancakes), sufganiot (jelly doughnuts), cookies, fruitcake, and all the rest of it.

Not too many people think about salad as a comfort food this time of year. Potato salad, maybe.

And yet…it’s really not very comfortable to find you’ve gained five or ten pounds in a month when you didn’t mean to, and New Year’s is coming with an actual dress-up-like-a-grownup-with-a-life party invitation. If I’ve managed not to succumb to the excess so far this year, it’s only because I’ve been cautious-to-paranoid about eating latkes and sufganiot last week and even my typical penchant for cheese and dark chocolate (not together!) has me thinking twice. I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford to regain the weight I lost last year–even though it was “only” ten pounds, it was hard enough, and like many people, I could use another ten down before spring without having to work too hard.

So salad is what I have in mind at the moment. Yes, there will also be stew–this week, spicy vegetarian eggplant and chickpea stew, because I made a vat of it and stuck it in the fridge. Very hearty, filling, warming, and all that winter-holiday-recipe-talk, yet not very devastating diet-wise, and doesn’t make you feel like you need another nap pronto. Plus once it’s made, it’s really fast to reheat in the microwave. As I discovered yesterday, a mug (nuked less than 2 minutes and eaten on the run) can power me through a rushed non-cook evening–something I don’t do often or well–of ferrying my kid to the movies at the mall with her friends. During the very unpleasant after-Christmas sales season. What can I say–when put to the test, it was faster than fast food and twice as effective.

If only salad were like that [finally back on topic]. I’m not generally a cook-for-the-month kind of person, but it seems to me that if a restaurant salad bar can get away with making blah bulk salads that sit out for hours, surely I can do a bulk salad that looks and tastes lively and stores nicely for a couple of days in the fridge without going bad. Chop once, eat twice, right? Continue reading →

Filed under: DASH Diet, holiday cooking, nutrition, salads | Tagged: cooking, food, recipes, vegetables, weight loss | Comments Off on A salad in winter: counterintuitive comfort food

2000-calorie meals in pictures

Posted on December 23, 2014 by DebbieN

The New York Times has just posted a very clear picture-it chart of how people get to 2000 calories in a single meal, sometimes even a single dish, without realizing it when they eat out. Not just at Burger King, Denny’s or IHOP, either–some of the upscale chains’ ordinary dishes are just as devastating. If you’re having trouble figuring out your own diet, you might take a look and see What 2,000 Calories Looks Like.

One thing I like about the restaurant-by-restaurant feature is the breakdown of calories for each item in the meal, so you can see how you might do better while eating out.

One obvious takeaway–so to speak–is that fries, shakes, full dinner plates of pasta with cream sauce (or any sauce, really), and slices of cake as big as your head–topped with caramel goo!–are a bad deal for excess calories, lack of nutritional value, and are basically not really necessary.

The other obvious takeaway is that for things like sandwiches, burritos, burgers and similar protein-containing main dishes, you probably don’t want to be eating more than about 500 calories at lunch or maybe 600ish at dinner. Preferably 350-450, to give yourself some room for a salad or fruit. So the hoagies and double cheeseburgers at 900-1100 calories should really be split in two–maybe three. Share one with a friend unless you’re actually a linebacker in training. Or else get rid of the cheese, the excess meat, the bacon, the mayo-based sauces. Go back to a single burger with ketchup and mustard and a couple of pickle slices. And maybe you shouldn’t eat anything else with one of those but a plain apple or orange or some tomatoes or carrot sticks.

The other thing I like is the set of pictures at the bottom–whole days’ worth of decent food from home that are worth 2000 calories per day, and they look a whole lot better than what you get at the restaurants. For the same money or less, and with a microwave, maybe even in less time. A lot more vegetables and fruits, a decent amount of meat and fish and dairy, a lot less in the way of french fries, milkshakes, salad dressing, breadings, special sauces, burger buns and unlimited pasta.

Filed under: Eating out, Food Magazines, Food Politics, frugality, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: chain restaurants, fast food, nutrition labeling, obesity | Comments Off on 2000-calorie meals in pictures

OK, Fried PLUS Dairy for Chanukah

Posted on December 17, 2014 by DebbieN

Another good version from a previous fry-up: slices of panela browned with marinated artichoke hearts (bonus: a hit of garlic and lemon flavor from the artichoke marinade, plus the lemon juice increases the browning)

Well…I figured out something quick to fry for the first night of Chanukah: slices of panela cheese, a white rubbery fresh cheese that’s almost exactly like halloumi. Only it’s Mexican rather than Greek, so it’s a locally abundant variety (along with queso fresco) and about half the price per pound here in Pasadena.

I decided to do something a little different with it though. While the spoonful of olive oil was heating in the nonstick (very important) pan, I pressed the slices of panela into about a tablespoon mixture (not shown in above photograph; we ate these too quickly to take a picture of any worth) of pre-toasted sesame seeds, crumbled oregano, sumac, a pinch of ground caraway, and Aleppo pepper–essentially za’atar mix, only without added salt. It didn’t stick incredibly well to the cheese but I was able to press it in on both sides long enough to get it into the pan.

When I started frying the cheese, some of the whey immediately bubbled out into the oil, but although the slices softened up and started melting a little, they mostly kept their shape and I was able to flip them with a wide spatula to fry the other side. Halloumi firms up again as it cools–a little flatter, but pretty tasty, especially with the za’atar mix I improvised. I served it on top of our salad, but in restaurants it goes by itself, with its own bed of greens, maybe a bit of chopped tomato and onion, or with bread and olive oil. It’s only a few minutes of work for something unusual and delicious.

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, holiday cooking | Tagged: appetizers, Chanukah, halloumi, Jewish cooking, panela cheese | Comments Off on OK, Fried PLUS Dairy for Chanukah

Lightening up for Hanukkah (aka Chanukah)

Posted on December 16, 2014 by DebbieN

Tonight’s the first night of Chanukah, and not only haven’t I thought of presents, I haven’t thought of dinner. It’s also the night before my kid starts semester finals. So we’re probably going to do something fairly standard for supper and easy on the chef. As we have been all week, really (one of us–wonder whom?–got sick right after Thanksgiving and didn’t feel like getting fancy).

Typical Chanukah fare is known for two things: frying things in oil, like latkes (potato pancakes) and sufganiyot (filled jelly doughnuts), and cheese or sour cream-based dishes. Healthy, no? Once a year, whether you need it or not…

I know, the oil’s a symbol of a miracle and the cheese represents a key military victory, but–oy. Fried foods and rich cheese dishes are a good way to get indigestion. Also enough poundage to start a new battalion. So as they say it would take a miracle and some military strategy to figure out something that fits the bill, tastes like a treat, and doesn’t impose a full-on doughnuts-and-hash-browns diet.

One of those miracles, as I see it, is the invention of Teflon, as in nonstick frying pans. Just being able to use a spoonful of oil instead of half-an-inch for the latkes is a huge improvement.

The other (you’re not surprised) is the invention of the microwave oven. The military strategy comes into it when you combine the two methods to make something brown easily and quickly in a lot less oil than the usual recipe. I’ve managed to do that for fish (fry on both sides first to brown, then nuke between plates to cook the middle gently), onions and mushrooms for omelets (nuke first to wilt, then fry), green beans and broccoli (for Szechuan stir-fries), and larger vegetables like red squash, eggplant or peppers (slice and nuke to cook through, frying optional if you want it to look browned). Any of those things might happen tonight as the frying requirement portion of the meal.

As if being sick weren’t enough, though, last week my microwave died–or at least the control panel did. Two years after I bought it. Not a miracle–as I discovered by looking it up online, Panasonic’s inverter models have had more than a few complaints on this score.

A typical lifespan for a modern 1000+ watt magnetron should be about 2000 hours, or 6 years at about maybe 45 minutes or an hour a day max of microwaving at full power. My other microwaves in the past decade–Sharp, Samsung–have lasted about 3-4 years each, which is also pretty disappointing, but given how aggressively I used them, I wasn’t so surprised. Still, they gave me 3-4 years of high use each. Certainly not two. And it wasn’t clear that it was the magnetron in this case.

The price for a new microwave is just less than the price of repair, not to mention the time without a working microwave oven. So I did something I’m not happy with, because it seems wasteful to just throw out a microwave after two years, and bought a new one from Sears–Sharp, not Panasonic again. About 1.8 cubic feet inside, and 1100 W. And it’s huge on my shrimpy kitchen counter, but at least I can cook bigger items in it than I would have been able to with the dinky models Target had.

Here’s what I learned in a week without a microwave oven:

1. I get a little dysfunctional for a day or so.

2. I can make basmati rice a lot more easily than I thought by the conventional 20-minute method of rinse-rice, bring-to-boil, cover-and-simmer-on-low. It comes out fine, I just have to pay more attention and not walk away.

3. I can make a slab of salmon or other fish almost as well on the stovetop as with my standard “indoor grilling” method (brown on both sides with garlic etc., then stick it between two plates and nuke for 1-2 minutes to cook the middle gently). The nuking part I substituted for by covering the frying pan after browning both sides, and turning the heat down to low or just above low, and it came out really well. But it took 15-20 minutes extra for a pound of fish. If you have the time, it’s fine. But if you’ve got an emergency dinner for your kid and her project partner, and the mother’s picking the other kid up in only 45 minutes, a microwave would be so much nicer.

4. I hate, absolutely hate, heating milk for coffee on the stove. Or reheating coffee. Or reheating just about anything in a regular stainless steel pan. Not because heating it’s such a pain, but because scrubbing the pot afterward is.

5. You can’t reheat anything quickly on the stove without having to dirty a pan. Microwaving really does save on dishwashing, and it keeps things from scorching on the pans or plates you use.

6. It’s a good thing it’s winter here and cold (for LA, anyhow–60s daytime, 30s-40s nighttime) or I wouldn’t have been able to cope at all. I managed to cook a few things in the oven instead of the nonfunctional microwave last week, but it was a relief to be able to get back to microwaving. Just in time for Chanukah.

Here are a few links to my earlier Chanukah posts (with recipes or at least good-tasting ideas).

Not strictly for Chanukah but probably a good idea:

Ganache because chocolate is also clearly a Chanukah food
Spinach fritadas (a version with zucchini was listed in a post on Passover, but it works fine with spinach, and with flour instead of matzah meal if you want it for Chanukah)

Sometime this week I have designs on posting a chocolate devil’s food cake in the microwave, which I tried a couple of weeks ago, plus an attempt at sufganiyot, which I haven’t made since my kibbutz days.

Also rye bread–I made a dough Thursday just to try it and didn’t get a chance to bake it until Saturday evening because we had guests (the good part of this week). Because the dough was old it came out a little flatter than ideal, more like a heavy dark ciabatta, but it was crusty, covered in toasted sesame, and still slices and tastes pretty good after a few days. And it isn’t any harder to make than regular bread. I’ll try again with a younger dough, or maybe use a sourdough starter plus some extra yeast and flour, and see what happens.

In the meantime, Happy Chanukah! light the lights, sing the songs, dance around the table and don’t worry like this guy about dreidel being a too-simple game of tops that takes too long to finish. I mean, War and Spit (the card games, not actual war and spit) aren’t exactly for geniuses either, and kids like those.

Filed under: cooking, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks | 2 Comments »

What happens when you age champagne?

Posted on December 14, 2014 by DebbieN

A couple of weeks ago on a Friday evening, the week before our anniversary, my husband and I were scrambling to find a bottle of kosher wine in the house for the Shabbat blessings and coming up empty. We didn’t even have grape juice. I took one more look in the last-chance box and realized one of the bottles was kosher after all. It was a bottle of Yarden 2000 champagne I’d picked up on an after-Passover sale several years ago (our local Kroger affiliate supermarket has a not-quite-tuned-in approach toward Jewish holiday ordering; sometimes the matzah boxes arrive and disappear a week before Passover; sometimes they hang around for months, and sometimes they sell good wines at a fire-sale bargain because of the kosher label).

I’d saved that bottle for a special kosher-requiring occasion that never quite arrived. Vintage 2000–definitely the oldest bottle I’ve ever opened at home. As old as our daughter. Has it really been that long since 2000???

(OK, given the sorry yet predictable result of the mid-term elections, I have to say it hasn’t been long enough. But still.)

The bottle was QUITE dusty–almost a prerequisite for experimentation.

Neither my husband nor I are usually all that impressed with champagne–even the expensive mid-level ones, at $40-100 a bottle. Not that we’re usually in a position to sample those at home, but sometimes people splurge on them at Thanksgiving, New Year’s, etc., and we wonder why. They’re usually not as good as the cheaper Spanish cavas–if I had to buy champagne-style wine, I’d rather go with something like Freixenet, not to be cheap but because it’s closer to that bone-dry, yeasty, buttered-toast style I prefer to all the more acidic and flat-flavored mid-level champagnes out there. Taittinger and Moët et Chandon both come to mind as severe disappointments at the $45ish level. Their top-level champagnes might be quite different, but these just seem to be trading on the brand name and pricetag for the naive American market.

For that kind of money, I’d rather have a good, deeply-flavored still chardonnay than almost any of the usual fizzy lifting drinks, and you can get a pretty decent bottle of chard for under $20. Actually, most of the time I’d rather have a decent red.

And frankly nothing is as good as the (once-only) bottle of Dom Perignon my husband brought home 17 years ago, when we finally decided to get engaged after all those years of dodging family and friends, celebrating with some couples and outlasting others. After a lackluster and slightly glum Sunday afternoon discussion that ended with, “Well…okay,” we called each other at work the next morning and agreed we should probably do a little better than that. We were getting married, after all. Oy. We clearly needed some bolstering before we broke the news and faced the inevitable hocking from our families.

A really nutritious dinner consisting solely of Dom Perignon and a (smallish) box of Godiva truffles, each of which looked exactly like Miracle Max’s big chocolate pill from The Princess Bride, seemed to do the trick.

Of course, under the influence of the DP and chocolate, we decided we could do the parts of the wedding we liked (huppah, food, klezmer music, line dancing, ketubbah signing, friends and family, more food, more dancing) and just skip the stereotypical parts we found laughable, uncomfortable or downright detestable in other people’s weddings and wedding-themed tv ads (tux, white puffy dress, veil, speeches, first waltz, which neither of us knew how to do, tiered wedding cakes, arguing with either of our mothers over invitation fonts, color-coordination of any sort or description…)

We ended up having fun at our own wedding, which never really seems to be the primary goal somehow, we only decided where to go on our honeymoon the next morning while sitting around in our pjs, and I maintain that we’ve just kept getting weirder ever since.

Which brings us back to the Yarden 2000. To be fair, Yarden has been making some very decent kosher wines the last 10-20 years. But kosher or not, 14 years for any champagne below the DP level?

Champagne is supposed to be the only white wine that can age–maybe it’s all the trapped carbon dioxide fending off oxidation, but I’d never gotten close enough to try it out. The chemist in me has been waiting for another crack at mad scientist status for a couple of years now, so this was it. Plus it was getting after sunset already and we were hungry and there was no regular grape juice in the house.

Well…if we were daring enough risk our stomach linings and our eyesight by trying mead that had been sitting around for more than a year, we could probably risk a 14-year-old bottle of kosher champagne, once I got the major dust coat off it, anyhow. I found a deep enough pot to improvise an ice bucket but didn’t really have enough time or patience to chill the bottle well.

“Do you want a towel for the cork? It’s probably lost all its zuzz, you know,” my husband said.

Just in case it hadn’t, I opened the bottle carefully and with approved champagne-opening technique (the point-away-from-people-and-twist-the-bottle-gently-away-from-the-cork routine, not the find-the-Napoleonic-era-saber-up-in-the-attic version). The cork actually made a proper popping sound and the usual CO2 fumes rose up. It wasn’t dead after all! (“It was only mostly dead,” I hear you chime in. Stop digging around in that Godiva box already, willya? We already took the good ones.)

Then we poured it, and it foamed up–zuzz intact. So we made the blessing over the wine, and my husband very generously said he’d let me take the first sip. Which I did, but…

“You haven’t gone blind yet, have you?”

I glared at him. Or at what I thought was his general direction.

Continue reading →

Filed under: frugality, haute cuisine, Oddities, shopping, wine | Tagged: champagne, Dom Perignon, Freixenet, Iron Horse, kosher wine, Spanish cava, wine reviews, Yarden | Comments Off on What happens when you age champagne?

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Maximum Flavor in a Minimal Broth

Purim: Poppyseed filling with a Persian-style twist

Microwave Tricks: Rapid Red Cabbage

Media misread on the new USDA dietary guidelines

Artichoke-olive spanakopita for a party crowd

A salad in winter: counterintuitive comfort food

2000-calorie meals in pictures

OK, Fried PLUS Dairy for Chanukah

Lightening up for Hanukkah (aka Chanukah)

More things to fry in olive oil

Rugelach and the Chanukah Fairy

Challah

Impatient for Orange Peels

What happens when you age champagne?

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