Slow Food Fast

Government nutritional estimates for “mixed dishes”–where do they come from?

Posted on September 29, 2012 by DebbieN

The federal “MyPlate” program has expanded its consumer information on dietary guidelines but some of it looks suspiciously old-hat and soft on nutritional crime, very much in keeping with the USDA’s traditional approach of pandering to the processed food industry. I stumbled across it while helping my daughter find school lunch nutrition information for her latest science project, which was to analyze her new public school’s lunch program.

Of course, my 7th grade daughter’s reaction to her first day in a real live public school cafeteria last month was shock. Because she’s diabetic and vegetarian, we agreed the best strategy for her would be to bring her standard lunch from home–PBJ on whole wheat with an apple. She had trouble the first day with the routine–shove through the cafeteria line, squeeze in at a table, shovel down food, run for the bell.

What did the other kids eat? I asked. “They ate crap,” she answered without so much as a pause. “Pizza and french fries, stuff they can eat in about five minutes while gossiping with their friends. They hardly even notice.”

Now–as I’ve said before–peanut butter and jam on whole wheat is not gourmet, but it’s fairly nutritious (beats Oscar Meyer bologna for protein, believe it or not) and with a small apple, it’s reasonably worthwhile and you can eat it fairly quickly–certainly within 15 minutes, if you can shove through the cafeteria line and find a seat. If you make friends, as my daughter quickly did, you can even find some time for gossiping and having fun. And it costs less than a dollar and takes less than 5 minutes to pack at home. The school lunch is $2.35, and yes they do offer apples and some sort of packaged salad stuff and skim milk, but as my daughter noticed, few of the kids actually eat those items. Maybe the milk–well, at least offering the fresher food is a start.

Still–“crap” is not that far off. Pizza AND fries? A tough act to follow with anything but gallbladder surgery at 40.

And as she looks at the school menus online for September–they declare that they follow the USDA school nutrition guidelines–we notice a lot of things that aren’t really sound thinking from a diabetic’s point of view. A lot of menus that don’t come close to matching the ChooseMyPlate.gov guidelines, which call for half the plate to be vegetables and fruits (in that descending order of quantity), a quarter of the plate protein, a quarter complex carbohydrate.

“There’s a lot more meat,” she says. “Actually, my friend had the chicken patty today and spat it out. She said it wasn’t chicken. My other friend said it was, it was just cafeteria chicken.” Sounds like some of her new friends have a better take on the school food than the government does. My bet–the chicken patty is like standard bologna, only about half is anything that actually came from a chicken–including fat and skin–and the rest is probably starchy and high-salt fillers.

So, speaking of food that really isn’t as good as it seems…

The ChooseMyPlate.gov brochure on “mixed foods”, which is what I promised up at the top, might be part of the same sad thing. Here’s the sample chart they offer for things like pizza, lasagne, double cheeseburgers, burritos…that are supposedly hard to judge on nutrition.

MixedDishes.pdf

Any takers on this one? My first impression is that the calorie counts are probably low–maybe as little as half–for a standard chain restaurant or frozen-entree serving of any of these items. Probably because a USDA recommended standardized “portion” for nutrition labeling purposes is very small compared with what people are actually eating and what companies are serving.

My second impression is–fruit servings? for pizza? who are they kidding, and why is this column even in here? Fruit is optional–it’s a carb. Nonstarchy vegetables with some actual vitamins and fiber are required eating. It’s pretty obvious from the table that the vegetables are pretty scant in this list of “mixed foods” too–mixed in this case seems to mean starches and fats plus some form of meat.

And what isn’t listed–the salt and fat and total carb. The fiber, vitamins and minerals. Most of this food is high in stuff that should be low, and low in stuff that should be high.

On second thought, maybe we should just read down this table for suggestions on what not to serve.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Politics, meat and poultry, nutrition, Pasta, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: carb counts, dietary sodium, MyPlate, nutrition labeling, school cafeterias, school lunch, USDA | Comments Off on Government nutritional estimates for “mixed dishes”–where do they come from?

Homemade Halvah

Posted on September 18, 2012 by DebbieN

A little trickier than it looks–this one is nearly right and tastes good, but it was stiffer and more crumbly than professional halvah once it cooled. Next time!

I first tasted halvah at the age of six while visiting my cousins, who lived in my town but had been to Israel the year before. One afternoon my aunt shaved off a very thin sliver from this mysterious loaf of sandy light-brown stuff and handed to me with the caution, “Only a little piece at a time. It’s very rich.” Which it was, but the feathery impossible texture melted on my tongue and I wanted more. When I got home from the visit, my father laughed when I asked him what my aunt had meant by “rich”–and explained that it meant “heavy”. That made no sense either–the tiny sliver was light and delicate. Then he said that once when he was twelve he’d eaten an entire pound of halvah in a single sitting and been extremely sorry afterward, because it sat in his stomach like a lead brick for hours…

I mention these things not just because they’re true of eating halvah, but they’re a good indication of the balance you need to achieve if you ever try making it.

Last year at Rosh Hashanah I made stuffed eggplants and onions with tamarind sauce from Poopa Dweck’s Aromas of Aleppo. I’ve enjoyed them enough to make the onions repeatedly over the past year, and I’ve also enjoyed the idea of making a new food for the New Year. Dweck’s book happens to have a halvah recipe, and the pictures look right, and the recipe looks really simple.

Well…the ingredients are incredibly simple–tehina, sugar, water, lemon juice, flavorings like a little vanilla, clove and cinnamon, maybe some pistachios or sliced almonds to mix in. The steps–boil sugar with a bit of water until it reaches 240°F on a candy thermometer. I don’t have one but she adds, helpfully, that it’s until the syrup coats the back of a spoon and is at the soft ball stage–shades of childhood reading through the Joy of Cooking‘s mysterious and dangerous section on candy recipes. Ahem! Boil the syrup and pour it hot over the tehina in the food processor, add the flavorings and blend. Take out the mass of halvah and press it into a pan to cool, then cut into cubes or slices and store at room temperature for a week or the refrigerator for up to 6 months…not that it will last that long.

Simple, right? So simple. I can probably microwave the syrup in about 2 minutes instead of simmering it for 20 on the stove, at least if I stir every 20-30 seconds and keep checking it…with the food processor handy, it’s like a 10-minute recipe if that! Simple.

The trouble with making halvah at home, as I discovered last week, three times, is that it’s not so simple. The first time I tried a proportionate miniature test version, with half a cup of tehina and about 3/8 cup of sugar, all measured and calculated down to the gram. The syrup cooked in a minute in the microwave and things were going really well…except the mixture seized up hard and crumbly the instant I mixed the syrup and tehina with a fork. And it was a bit too sweet and bland. Did something go wrong with the proportions? Did it need more of the oily tehina to make it flexible?

The second time I made it, the syrup was a little looser and the mixture turned a flat oily dark putty color and never really solidified past a thick paste. Nearly the same exact proportions, better taste (less bland, less cloying, more sesame). But I had made a soft sesame version of peanut butter fudge. You could slice it in squares, but it would sag like soft caramel.

So clearly it’s not that simple. I went to the web, thinking, of course someone will know what I’m doing wrong. And maybe someone does, but he or she is clearly not on the web expounding on the finer points of making halvah.

Oh, there are dissertations on halvah, but most of them are talking about the wide variety of desserts around the world that go by the same name–kinds that are based on wheat flour, carrots, sunflower seeds, and other main ingredients to mix with the syrup and pat into a pan.

Most of the (relatively few) tehina-based recipes are identical to Dweck’s, a pound of tehina, two cups of sugar, 1/3 cup of water, a teaspoon of lemon juice, a pinch of clove and cinnamon, maybe a spoonful of vanilla.

But the pictures show (and sometimes the rueful comments do too) that it’s not the ingredients at fault when the texture’s off. It’s the technique, which is usually missing from the recipe.

The videos I found on YouTube specifically for making tehina-based halvah didn’t really help. Iraqi halvah workers boiling syrup in an old–well, it kind of looks like a very worn-out steel bowl set over a trash can fire in an abandoned stairwell, and they’re stirring away with a wooden paddle before pouring in the tehina, which turns into curds that they then paddle and knead until they’re happy with it, but you can’t really see what it is that makes the difference.

Then there’s the Syrian halvah factory demonstration posted by Middle Eastern chef and cookbook author Anissa Helou–much cleaner, with an official halvah-kneading machine that Willy Wonka might have been proud of, pummeling the tehina/syrup mixture with what looks like a mechanical boxing glove on a stick, until it looks like hummus that’s Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, nuts | Tagged: Aromas of Aleppo, candymaking, halvah, halvah recipes, sesame candy, tehina | Comments Off on Homemade Halvah

Pistachio madness two ways

Posted on August 4, 2012 by DebbieN

(plus a handful of other frozen yogurt ideas)

It’s over 90 degrees most of the day in Pasadena, and I’ve gotten tired of looking at the limited selection of Dreyer’s (Edy’s east of the Rockies), Breyers, Haagen Daz, and Private Selection flavors with my daughter. It’s starting to get tedious, and they’ve dropped many of the classics for the cheapest possible quality candy-plus-ersatz-vanilla (note: their real vanillas are better). The forgotten classics were better-tasting, less dependent on goo and sweetened brown wax parading as chocolate or (if salted) peanut butter.

No supermarket ice cream brand in the non-superpremium range today offers rum raisin or pistachio worth considering anymore. It’s easy enough to doctor your own version with storebought vanilla ice cream and the aforementioned rum and raisins, but pistachio?

Pistachio used to be a standard ice cream flavor, didn’t it? Maybe I’m just getting old? Naah. Even in the ’70s when I was a kid, most of the “pistachio” ice cream around was already fake. I want the real thing, not the artificially green, mostly-vanilla-with-a-tinge-of-synthetic-almond kind.

And I want it low-fat for me and my husband and low-carb for my daughter (and us too, why not?) And I want it to taste delicious despite all that. Tall order? Actually, it’s easier than you’d think.

David Lebovitz has a Sicilian pistachio paste-based gelato in The Perfect Scoop, and he blogged about it a couple of years ago as well. He made it sound delicious, but also expensive and hard to find the ingredients for. Not that I’m against a trip to Sicily, except in July when it’s about as searing as LA (been there, done that, got the sunburn and the Fellini moments combined with heat exhaustion).

About the same time, a local gelateria owner in my area took much the same position on the utter superiority of Sicilian pistachios versus California ones for an interview in the LA Times. Which is lovely if you have a good source of Sicilian pistachios or pistachio paste at a decent price, but what if you don’t?

Most of the home-brew pistachio ice cream recipes I’ve seen in magazines, blogs and cookbooks call for adding significant amounts of heavy cream. Or else they involve large amounts of sugar. Or both. Yes, those recipes will give ice cream-like results, but they’re completely offtrack for what I need.

In my universe, good taste on a hot day shouldn’t mean losing your svelte, your cool or your wallet.

The nuts themselves are okay–pistachios, like most nuts and seeds, are very low carb and though high in calories from total fat, most of that is unsaturated. If I can keep the rest of the ingredients low fat and low carb and the stuff still tastes good, I’ll have it. Right?

So okay. I’ve been playing around with California pistachios and–not gelato, that requires making an egg-based custard and blending it with flavorings. Done it once or twice, and it worked, but it’s more work than I want to do most days. Or it used to be. Nowadays I’ve got the microwave moxie to make custard without so much work, but it’s still not what I want today. I want easy.

Frozen yogurt made with real yogurt is too tart to work with anything much but fruit unless you mix in some milk–and then it’s icier and freezes harder.

However, this summer I’ve been playing around with fat-free Greek yogurt as the base for a couple of different ices in small quantities. Greek yogurt varies a bit in nutritional stats from brand to brand, and it’s expensive, which is why I took so long to try it out. But the cheapest all-real (no gelatin) stuff–Trader Joe’s O% fat plain version–while still twice as expensive as the regular plain nonfat yogurt ($5 vs. $2.50 a quart), has considerably less carb, maybe only 7 grams of carb per cup as opposed to 17 for regular. And it has about twice the protein–22 grams per cup. It’s a lot thicker and less acidic, so I’m assuming they drained out a lot of the carb in the whey. And it makes really easy frozen yogurts that taste like something and aren’t overwhelmingly tart.

Just mix in your flavoring of choice (preferably not too watery) with some sugar, and you can still-freeze it within an hour or two. If you think the tang needs to be tamed further, a little milk mixed in works okay and it stays thick enough to freeze fairly gracefully.

The texture is never going to be like ice cream, not entirely. It still mixes up pretty hard and a little icy if you still-freeze it, but once you’ve got it thawed out to the point where you can dig out a serving, it tastes good and changes to a creamy texture as you eat it, something like khulfi. Higher-fat yogurt would break the iciness up a bit but would defeat my purpose of lowering the saturated fat to something I can handle.

And the heavy fats and sugars mask any delicate flavorings. Think Italian gelato (the real kind you get on the street in Florence, not the overpriced stuff you get in pints in the supermarket here) and you know that a lighter base allows you things like rose or ricotta or apricot or kiwi, or hazelnut, or four different highly refined grades of chocolate. If you want to taste anything delicate in your ice cream, you have to get the fats and sugars down enough not to overwhelm it.

Not that I’m entirely subtle. My favorite icier-textured frogurt for when it’s broiling out is mint–Greek yogurt, a couple of drops of mint extract, if that’s strong enough without tasting like postage stamps, and a tablespoon or so of sugar. Divvy it up into 2-4 paper cups or popsicle makers (small is okay for this), freeze. On a searingly hot day it’s pretty good, intensely flavored and refreshing, and its popsicle-style texture is fine with me.

For something like coffee frogurt, I really do want a creamier texture if I can get it. I finally figured I should just brew a little bit of triple-strength coffee so I can mix just a few spoonfuls into a cup of Greek yogurt, maybe with a few spoonfuls of milk, and still get strong enough flavor.

A spoonful or two of alcohol-based flavorings like rum, amaretto, even just vanilla extract can soften the hard-freeze effect, since the alcohol freezing point is lower than that for water.

Or you can add something protein or starch to the mix–egg custards and cornstarch are the usual route for gelati and standard commercial ice cream, but silken tofu and nonfat powdered dry milk also work to break up the ice crystals. Greek yogurt is providing most of the protein here and little water, and the carb is a lot less than for the powdered dry milk.

The last thing on my list, and it sounds either weird or completely obvious, is to add a fat–but I want something unsaturated. Oil? Yuck (though I have seen some olive oil ice creams flavored with basil or the like). But what about nut butters? Those, don’t laugh too hard, work pretty well and give the frozen yogurt a richness that feels like ice cream, only without big saturated fats or modifiers or xanthan gum or corn syrup solids or whatever. Plus they’re interesting flavors.

Halvah: I started with my trusty jar of tehina–sesame paste. It’s got almost all its fat in polyunsaturated form. A tablespoon in a cup of Greek yogurt, plus a tablespoon of sugar, stir, freeze, dig out a chunk–not so hard! And the flavor–kind of like frozen halvah. Very rich, though. Maybe I could get away with less tehina or more yogurt?

Chocolate halvah: I tried a chocolate version–also not bad–by adding two tablespoons of cocoa powder and an additional spoonful of sugar to the tehina/yogurt mix. Pretty good, but the tehina taste was definitely still there alongside the chocolate. Like chocolate marble halvah. You have to be a fan.

Peanut butter? Probably more Americans would like it than the tehina version. Go easy on the peanut butter; a good-tasting mix I once made with half a cup got way, way way too rich very quickly once it was frozen. Stick with a tablespoon or so per cup of yogurt. I’d use natural peanuts-only peanut butter, preferably the crunchy one, for the purest taste, limit the sugar and add a pinch of salt.

But really. I started out wanting pistachio, and that’s where I’m still going with this. Because I ended up with two, count ’em TWO, really good, really different variations on pistachio, and both of them were really easy, really low in saturated fat, and REALLY low-carb. And actively delicious, which is definitely the point.

California pistachios may not be the Sicilian ideal, but they taste pretty good for what they are. TJ’s sells 8 oz of roasted unsalted ones for about 5 bucks. Not exactly cheap. Still, the shelling’s been done, and for a pint of finished frogurt, you only need an ounce of pistachios. Will that be enough to taste like something? Oh, yes. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Diabetes, haute cuisine, Microwave tricks, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: California pistachios, cardamom, coffee frozen yogurt, diabetic desserts, frozen desserts, frozen yogurt, Greek yogurt, halvah frozen yogurt, ice cream, low-carb desserts, low-fat desserts, pistachio ice cream, pistachio khulfi, sorbets | Comments Off on Pistachio madness two ways

Montreal

Posted on July 19, 2012 by DebbieN

We are back from Montreal, a city which reportedly has more restaurants per capita than anywhere else in the world–does this include Paris? Most of the food we had was very good. Even the dreary-looking and overpriced breakfast bar in the convention center where my husband was attending the IEEE conference had excellent, crisp croissants and thick serious coffee to go with the boring-standard scrambled eggs and dry cereals. I never got a chance to try out the Montreal bagels because we found such good food within walking distance downtown.

The Vieux Port area of downtown has streets full of bistros and is lively to walk through, admiring the art galleries, tchotchke shops, accents (French with a distinctive Western Hemisphere twang) and people (a lot of younger women were sporting platform wedgies in improbable colors like Day-glo orange or pink, and almost all the natives were more fashion-conscious than we were).

On one of the piers we discovered the Centre du Science had a special exhibition of costumes, ship and creature models, and the original concept drawings from the Star Wars movies. We had to see it, even though it meant paying extra and wearing a rubber bracelet with an RFID chip in it so we could pick our species, planet, job description and personality traits as we walked through the stations with film clips illustrative of influences and stages of personal development. I mean, Luke’s upbringing contrasted with Anakin’s? Did I need to see the blame laid on Anakin’s mother’s permissive parenting style for Anakin’s tendency to be drawn to the Dark Side? Mothers get blamed for everything. As for the Dark Side, well, they get all the cool costumes–red leather, black leather, horns, masks, capes, shiny streamlined samurai helmets, wrestler belts with electronic gizmos built in…compare that with the monklike dun-colored burlap and linen outfits for Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon. Of COURSE Anakin would get with the Dark Side. Proof? Darth Vader ends up with the coolest costume of all…apart from that pesky touch of asthma.

On a brighter note, did you know Yoda was originally supposed to look something closer to a European-style elf or garden gnome? Glad they went Japanese.

Another pier–the entire pier–housed the blue and gold striped tents where Cirque du Soleil holds its home court performances nearly every afternoon.

But the weather was unusually hot, in the 90s, and so humid that we didn’t feel like eating much until sundown, when it was finally cool enough to venture out and explore all the sights within walking distance.

I was also under a time sentence–start statins as soon as I got home, test again in six weeks and see if they’re working. So I was doubly uncomfortable eating out all the time, thinking twice about eggs or butter or cheese in anything that was served, wondering if this was the last grapefruit I was going to be able to eat and maybe I’d better have only one small serving of that in the Indian restaurant we went to with our friends, because it was cooked with ghee (there were 25 Indian restaurants in town! crowed our friend’s 9-year-old daughter. She wanted to try them all.)

And why were the only vegetables in the other restaurants buttered (which I’ve never liked; my cholesterol-packin’ genes are more to blame than my actual diet and the doctor’s office pamphlets nearly always say to “cut down” to more saturated fat than I actually eat) or else a tiny salad? Just like the French. Just like the Americans.

And yet…the best place we ate–we went back twice that week–was a small undecorated restaurant in Chinatown around the corner from our hotel, which was across the street from the convention center. When we arrived from the airport at 11 pm, Restaurant Beijing was the only place still open for dinner, and we weren’t expecting much when the concierge recommended it. We trudged around the corner anyway, past the hotel’s dumpsters, around to rue Gauchetière, and took a peek through the window.

Plain cafeteria-style tables, brightly-lit but plain strip-mall sort of space, chalkboard specials on each wall, no decorations at all other than a few bamboo plants in the window, not even old-style kitsch, and…absolutely packed at that hour of the night. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, Eating out, haute cuisine, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Chinese food, Montreal restaurants, Restaurant Beijing, travel, vegetarian food | Comments Off on Montreal

Baking with “Inside the Jewish Bakery”

Posted on June 20, 2012 by DebbieN

A few weeks ago I reviewed Stanley Ginsberg and Norman Berg’s new book, “Inside the Jewish Bakery” for my local Jewish book festival committee by testing out the key recipe: bagels. Ginsberg and Berg give the inside scoop on what bakeries do and don’t do to make things work better than you usually can at home. Along the way–and the most interesting part for me–they give a huge helping of Jewish Bakery history. Not just nostalgia (“Weren’t those marble ryes worth wrestling over?”) but the fascinating cultural developments that gave rise to such things the Bagel Maker’s Union (local 338 [number corrected thanks to Stan Ginsberg]) in Brooklyn, and they’d break your legs if you tried to make nonunion bagels, at least through the 1960s.

Ginsberg’s the son of a baking family and Berg is a professional baker; between them they tell the story of Ashkenazi baking and the inside story of what it’s like to start work at 10 pm and head for home around 7 in the morning, all the while giving what turn out to be great technical baking notes.

And yet the recipes themselves are full of errors–and yes, this is the print edition we’re talking about, not an advance reader’s copy. The authors have a 6-page correction sheet (errata) up on the book’s web page, so if you’re going to get to it and try it out–and why not, if you’re ambitious about baking–check it out carefully against the recipe in the book, read everything over very carefully first, and then get to it in a way that won’t send you scurrying for specialty ingredients. NOTE: per Stan Ginsberg (see comments below) the 2nd edition’s recipes have been corrected so things should be easier.

If you can read between the lines and have some experience with bread under your belt, you’ll find the recipes do work (once corrected). My bagels came out very well, with that crunchy crust and dense, chewy bite all of us ex-New York types have missed for decades out here in California (actually, I’m posting this from Montreal, where the bagels are lighter and sweet? have to try, probably won’t love them).

I do have pictures to post (once I can get home and edit them down) of the bagels proofing slowly overnight in the fridge and one of the last remaining survivors–my daughter still had it in her bookbag when we came east this week. Ten days, obviously not still fresh, but not spoiled either. As tough as the dough it came from (which, again with the asides, is very tough compared with regular pizza or challah doughs, and you have to knead it by hand unless you have the dough hook of the century. If not, you’ll develop the right hook of the century.)

So here are my notes to the local Challah Club, which was interested in trying out some of the other recipes. Good luck and eat nice!

Notes for the Challah Club members up for a challenge:

1. Read all the instructions several times first and double-check the errata sheets. It’s 6 pages of corrections for the whole book and it’s up at the Inside the Jewish Bakery web site under a top menu link on the right (Errata). Hopefully we can get the second edition in soon.

The book web site also has lots of info, interviews, links to other related stuff.

Also check notes on special ingredients in the front for unfamiliar names–diastatic malt in the bagels and elsewhere is defined up front; it’s just malt. I think they get a little technical on flour grades–they’re tied in with an aggressively technical bakers web site/forum (NY Bakers, you don’t expect them to be laidback, do you? but most of it’s just futzing around with professional stuff). Chernushka seed is nigella seed–available here at the Armenian groceries. And then do whatever makes best common sense and doesn’t have a huge cash layout just for one loaf!

2. The recipes in this book are weighable on a food scale in grams, which is how I did the bagels (just this once, just to see if it needed me to be that nerdy). Some of the flours are technical grades beyond what you can easily get in the grocery store; you can mix flours to get the right consistency. For example, bread flour is 13% protein, but I added a teaspoon of vital wheat gluten to bring it up to the 14% protein specification for the bagels, and for something that really needed stretch, like rye, maybe, I would have added a little more. Don’t know that you really need to, but if you’re gonna be nerdy, a food scale and a calculator are handy tools.

3. If you go for the pastries, some have a mix of butter and shortening-plus-butter-flavoring. I’m not a shortening fan; I’m just not; I prefer butter or margarine. The laminated doughs add these things in stages, so read the errata pages and double-check the recipe instructions for how much fat to put into the pastry dough when. Gets confusing occasionally.

4. One thing that’s not in the corrections pages: watch the salt. You do not need as much as they throw in for the breads–not for flavor, not for texture. The bagels I made with only half the salt in the recipe because the original would have been 400-500 mg. of sodium per bagel, which is getting up into Campbell’s Tomato Soup territory (or half a South Beach Diet frozen microwaveable “lunch”). And they tasted fine without it and did most of the right things without me having to join the bagel-makers’ union.

Filed under: baking, books, breads, cooking, Desserts, history, holiday cooking | Tagged: bagel recipes, baking ingredients, Inside the Jewish Bakery, Jewish food, Jewish history, New York Bakers, Stanley Ginsberg | 2 Comments »

Broccoli IS a conservative political bogeyman!

Posted on June 14, 2012 by DebbieN

This exposé from yesterday’s New York Times goes into the longish history of how conservatives started waving broccoli stalks at any issue they don’t like…

Just as I suspected when Justice Antonin Scalia started spouting broccoli-tinged party-line nonsense this March, the Republicans really DID originally decide to blame broccoli based on George Herbert Walker Bush’s stated hatred of an innocent green. Yeesh! You can’t make this stuff up. And I was really, really trying to!

Filed under: Eating out, Food Politics, history, nutrition, Oddities, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Affordable Care Act, Antonin Scalia, broccoli, George Herbert Walker Bush, GOP, health care, Republican Party, Supreme Court, vegetables | 2 Comments »

New York big-soda ban, long overdue

Posted on June 6, 2012 by DebbieN

All the food behavioral experts on both coasts seem to be whining that New York City’s new ban on oversized sodas “won’t work”. Well, all the experts in New York and LA. Even Michelle Obama has backed off delicately from taking a position on it. Oy. People!

The Washington Post‘s columnists Ruth Marcus and Alexandra Petri have two different takes–one more serious but employing Yiddish to describe the psychology of the whole protest, the second, despite lack of Yiddish, funnier about people who insist on their right to drink a whole tubful of soda at a go. So I’m going to take the middle road–oh, screw it, I’m going to use Yiddish if I feel like it and still be hilarious despite my gravitas. Because it really is hilarious. If only it weren’t so sad.

Jon Stewart is quoted as kvetching that Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed ban is the only thing that can make him agree with conservatives. David Just, partner expert to Brian Wansink, says people “want” their big drinks and will surely just find a way to work around the restrictions.

Well, maybe a few will really want 20+ ounces of soda at a sitting badly enough to go back to the concession stands and wait in line three times to get 3 separate drinks of 8 ounces or so. Or juggle 3 small bottles back to wherever they’re drinking it all. But I’m betting most people won’t.

Why do people supposedly “want” such huge drinks in the first place? The oversized Big Gulp-style cups were a marketing ploy that started about 15-20 years ago at the burger franchises and the 7-Elevens. They were supposed to look like a huge bargain–for an extra however many cents, they’d double the amount of soda they gave you. What a deal! And the ploy worked–created a habit.

Most people don’t really need or even want that much soda, but as many of my coworkers–women especially–used to say, shrugging helplessly, “Well, I don’t really want this much, but this is the only size they sell.” And you really can’t split a 20-ounce with ice back at the office unless you have cups. Everyone will wonder whether you got tempted on the way back and started sipping from it. Eeeewww. You can’t save it in the fridge for later either because it goes flat pretty quickly.

The soda companies got the concessions for school cafeterias–why not brand the captive audience early–in exchange for money the schools have lost from their cities and states anytime those governments wanted to hand out tax relief to corporations–like soda bottling plants. A different version of “eat local”.

By now, people are so used to the soda bloat they’ve started to decide it’s their right to drink bigger than their stomachs–or bladders–can handle. And it is–you’re allowed to be stupid if you want to. Only problem is, did the soda companies also offer to build more bathrooms to handle the outflow?

So I say Mayor Bloomberg, who’s in charge of the biggest city in America, is doing his city a huge favor by trying to get the soda industry’s claws back out of them. There’s no way the industry will scale back its sizes voluntarily, especially not if they can get experts like David Just to voice their incredible “the-consumer’s-the-one-who-wants-the-elephant-sized-drinks-we’re-just-providing-it-for-them” act.

When you get the big gulp-style Coke, how much of it are you really tasting? Maybe the first third of it? Maybe less. After that, are you drinking it while reading your computer screen? Driving? Watching tv or a movie? Would you really want someone to film–and then post on YouTube–footage of you slurping mindlessly throughout the day?

If you’re not paying attention to what you drink, is it worth drinking just because it’s there? Same for eating. And David Just and Brian Wansink–weren’t these the guys who did all that people-eat-30-percent-more-when-parked-in-front-of-a-tv-screen-than-at-the-table research? I do believe they were.

So getting back to a small Coke that you’ll actually pay enough attention to to taste? That might be worthwhile. Then you can think about what you’re tasting and decide if it’s good enough to keep drinking. Or whether, like me, you’d rather wait until next Passover, when Coke and other big soda manufacturers put out limited editions made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup.

I haven’t been a big soda drinker for years, and I usually don’t miss it at all. It was astoundingly easy to give up, and my teeth have thanked me ever since. On the rare occasion when I have a little at a party, my preferred soda is and always was definitely root beer or ginger ale, not cola, and usually I can only take about half a glass–it’s all way too sweet, even with ice. So I’m not the right person to sympathize with habitual soda drinkers–I just can’t get into it, and diet is gross.

But having tasted the sugar version of both Coke and Pepsi, I can say the difference it makes to both versions is amazing–much cleaner flavor, and a little is enough to be happy with it.

Meanwhile, a better idea would be to drink water instead of the big-3 flavors and save your shekels for small niche sodas with better, realer, more interesting flavors as an occasional treat.

Case in point: a summer soda tasting event in Los Angeles to raise money to reopen exhibitions from the shuttered Southwest Museum in Highland Park. The Southwest museum had wonderful Native American collections–kachinas, headdresses, Bakelite jewelry of the 1930s, photos, and much more. It was taken over by the Autry Museum a couple of years ago, but has remained dormant since then with a lot of its collections in storage and out of the public eye. I was fortunate enough to have taken my husband and daughter there about 10 years ago, before it closed.

Galco’s Soda Pop Stop, an independent soda market run by curator John Nese in Highland Park, is hosting the soda tasting–his second–with something like 500 different small brands, including plenty of nostalgia brands (though no NeHi Grape–don’t know if they’re still around) and imports.

According to a profile of Nese in The Quarterly Magazine, Galco’s motto is “Freedom of Choice”, with flavors like coffee, bananas, spruce, cucumber, mint julep, and many others–check out their huge soda list, which includes ingredients, prices and bottle sizes! Amazing. Maybe that’s the kind of freedom soda fans should be going for. Amazingly enough, most of these flavors don’t come in 20-ounce monstrosities, or even in plastic.

If you’re in Los Angeles on July 22, check it out–tickets are only $12 in advance, $15 the day of the event, and you can get them at Galco’s on York Blvd. or through the Friends of the Southwest Museum web site.

Filed under: DASH Diet, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Politics, frugality, history, movies, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: Big Gulp, Coke, diabetes, Food Politics, Galco's Soda Pop Stop, Mayor Bloomberg, New York Soda Ban, nutrition, obesity, Pepsi, portion sizes, soda, vintage sodas | Comments Off on New York big-soda ban, long overdue

Eat the City, Read the Book

Posted on June 3, 2012 by DebbieN

I’ve just received an advance copy of Robin Shulman‘s forthcoming book, Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers and Brewers Who Built New York.

[Or at least that’s the title on the cover art–the copyright info page version of the book title squeezes in even more food trades–what, or rather who, the heck are “hungers”? People who “curate” aged hanger steaks?]

Shulman, a well-known reporter who has worked for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate and other venues, has covered hard-news beats from city politics and urban blight to Middle East diplomacy. In Eat the City, Shulman explores the neighborhoods of New York, where she lives, and from hundreds of interviews, she harvests seven key stories to tell in depth: Honey, Vegetables, Meat, Sugar, Beer, Fish and Wine.

Each chapter, rich and multilayered, cuts across decades of urban history, whether development or decay, recounts conflicts and unexpected cooperation between would-be urban farmers and the neighborhood factories or city agencies they deal with, and uncovers the not-so-obvious ways these individual entrepreneurs bring a sense of connection and vitality to the city.

So we meet a man who after returning not entirely whole from a stint in Iraq, got enthusiastic about beekeeping when it was still illegal. In 2010, he rallied New York’s clandestine beekeepers to convince the city to rescind its ban on rooftop hives, and started training hundreds of apprentices. The retired numbers runner who farms vacant lots in Harlem–something he started as a cover for his gambling operations in the ’60s and turned into one of the first urban community garden projects–is still going strong in his 70s, but he’s seen several of his neighborhoods fall silent over the decades as buildings crumbled and the city neglected the people. The Manhattan ad exec risks her health and her freedom sneaking into taped-off areas to fish striped bass from the East River–she’s not sure it’s safe to eat, but she’s as hooked as her catch, and often announces her triumphs on Facebook. And somewhere toward the end of the book is the true and presumably unvarnished story of Manischewitz, the first big brand of kosher wine in America (and actually, probably anywhere, since before the 20th century most people made their own kosher wine at home).

Eat the City is due out in July, and all I can say is get out there and reserve yourself a copy, or clamor at the cash register of your local bookstore to order you one. Because this is the best book I’ve read in quite a while on the history and present fortunes of small independent food growers in one of America’s largest urban landscapes.

Like Michael Pollan’s books, it has depth and thoughtful analysis of the meaning of food in modern life. Unlike Pollan, Shulman isn’t advocating a lifestyle choice, she’s giving you a window on individuals as they elbow their way into a crowded city to make room for themselves.

Food is the medium here, but the impulse is universal, and the result is a better understanding of both food entrepreneurs and the meaning of city life itself. If you want to know what’s really happening beyond the wide-eyed grow-your-own-tomatoes-in-Brooklyn blogs, just pick a chapter and start digging in.

Filed under: books, Dairy, fish, Food Politics, frugality, history, Odd food, Oddities, shopping, wine | Tagged: beekeepers, community gardens, Eat the City, entrepreneurship, food producers, Manischewitz, New York City, Robin Shulman, urban farmers | Comments Off on Eat the City, Read the Book

American Grown (Groan?)

Posted on May 27, 2012 by DebbieN

I have mixed feelings about Michelle Obama’s forthcoming book, American Grown, which the Barnes & Noble web site describes as:

Now, in her first-ever book, American Grown, Mrs. Obama invites you inside the White House Kitchen Garden and shares its inspiring story, from the first planting to the latest harvest… Learn about her struggles and her joys as lettuce, corn, tomatoes, collards and kale, sweet potatoes and rhubarb flourished in the freshly tilled soil. Get an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at every season of the garden’s growth… Try the unique recipes created by top White House chefs… [read about a community] garden that devotes its entire harvest to those less fortunate, and other stories of communities that are transforming the lives and health of their citizens. With American Grown, Mrs. Obama tells the story of the White House Kitchen Garden, celebrates the bounty of our nation, and reminds us all of what we can grow together.

The book is due out –well, now, really, the end of May. But I’ll tell the truth here: I hate this description and I’m sorry she wrote the book just from the blurb. Really, this is the best they could do? It’s so colorless. It sounds like a bland, give-the-wife-a-project kind of capitulation written by the official White House handlers.

What I find most disheartening about the beige, friendly-sounding jacket blurb is the “About the Author” section, in which Obama is described as the First Lady of the United States and a mother of two daughters, and that in 2010 she started the Let’s Move program. These are all good things, and she’s done a lot with the program. But nowhere does it mention her career–now on hold for at least four years–as a lawyer, and a good one.

In terms of public relations, Obama has conducted her Let’s Move program more successfully than Hillary Clinton, who was also a skilled and high-power attorney, handled a much-embattled health care expansion plan in her eight years as First Lady. Clinton is thorny and opinionated and direct, and is only now learning to keep her moves as Secretary of State quiet rather than telegraphing all her punches–but she’s achieving a lot. Obama is a lot smoother and more immediately likeable–something the rightwingers got wrong from the start–and she’s full of common sense, people sense, and I keep hoping for big wins from her.

Obama’s charismatic and not easily ruffled, and she’s a fashion icon–you could see the newspapers focusing on that since it’s so much easier and picturable than a career full of sitdown negotiations with House Republicans and stacks of paper and emails. But both women have been in the awkward position of First Lady, competent people sidelined for significant numbers of years by their husbands’ presidencies, hemmed in by the public expectation that they’ll shrink themselves into June Cleaver-like roles.

The Lady Bountiful bit is homey, patriotic, old-fashioned and charming. But it’s also hideously condescending and weird as hell that in this day and age it’s seen as acceptable to shove a professional out of work and relegate her to homemaking, even if it’s on such a grand scale. Home gardening is what you do on your day off, when you’re out of work or retired. Even if you enjoy it and are great at it, which I’m not. The fact that I got no tomatoes until January this year says a few things. If we had to depend on what I can grow successfully, we’d starve.

So what I say is, if you’re gonna go First Lady, go big. For the press release, why not do it more like the blockbuster movie radio voiceovers?

[pulsing dark synth strains, standard gravelly yet unctuous baritone voiceover]

“IN A WORLD…where everything has stopped growing except the American waistline…comes a heroine for our times. Once a high-power attorney, now down on her luck and forced to smile at hostile crowds who want her husband to say something–anything–definite about the economy, Michelle Obama IS… The First Lady.

[patriotic/threatening military march starts to swell with a roll of the tympani]

With NOTHING MORE than a trowel, a packet of seeds, a groundskeeping staff of at least twenty, a fully-trained yet cooperative head chef and a large, green lawn, Michelle Obama is TAKING ON …. Corporate America. You’d better HOPE …

[tympani going crazy à la “2001: A Space Odyssey”]

…she WINS.”

See you at the movies!

Filed under: books, cooking, Food Politics, history, movies, nutrition | Tagged: "American Grown", childhood nutrition, feminism, First Lady, Food Politics, fruits and vegetables, home gardening, homesteading, Let's Move, Michelle Obama, Sam Kass, school gardens, school nutrition, White House garden | Comments Off on American Grown (Groan?)

Coconut, minus the hype

Posted on May 25, 2012 by DebbieN

Palm and coconut oils have made a huge comeback in the last few years. Both are very high in saturated fats, which promote high blood cholesterol and heart disease, but the vegan community has embraced them as “natural” and they’re turning up in all kinds of baked goods and sweets these days at Whole Foods. Which also sells big mayo jars full of coconut butter. Looks like Crisco, scoops like Crisco, costs 10 times as much.

A lot of the newer vegan recipes and packaged foods are direct mimics of things that used to include lard, beef tallow and suet at the lower end of the classiness scale, or butter at the high end. My local Whole Foods’ pastry case features a lot of croissant and baklava variations these days, all now made with palm oil, as are many of the muffins. Starbucks’ “old-fashioned kettle” doughnuts feature palm oil in two places, both the dough and the icing.

Why are these fats getting so popular? Why all the wishful thinking that a plant source automatically makes them healthy to eat in quantity? Why are all the nutrition advice columnists in the major newspapers and health magazines suddenly “holistic coaches” who graduated college with psych majors and the like rather than board-licensed nutritionists and registered dieticians?

The truth of the matter is that your body doesn’t care so much whether a saturated fat came from lard, a coconut, or a chemical vat–regardless of the source, the fat molecules are shaped the same and your digestive and metabolic enzymes process them all the same way.

Palm and coconut oil? The hip vegan crowd, who consider themselves really indie, would be surprised to learn how thoroughly they’ve been manipulated by a very big industry. In the past 10 years, these oils have suddenly ramped up production wherever palm trees can be grown, mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia, where producers started by stripping the jungles to plant a single crop (though some of the main palm oil traders, like Lever–yes, the soap manufacturer–have made statements that they’re working to reverse some of the damage and buy only from those who “plant sustainably”). The other main centers of palm and coconut oil growers are Africa, India and Latin America.

Palm and coconut oils have taken off not because they’re vegan (outside of India, there just aren’t enough to support the industry boom) but because they’re such a cheap source of fat. Well, cheap everywhere but the Whole Foods shelves. They are indeed useful to the processed baked-goods industry for lending that heavy grease “satisfaction” factor to things that used to be made with butter, suet or lard. And they’re much less heavily regulated in the US by the agricultural inspectors because they don’t trigger all those livestock rules.

But should you be eating them? Buying jars of coco butter for your home cooking? Something tells me you’d be better off eating less of anything that requires cooking in heavy fats as opposed to regular polyunsaturated vegetable oil. And cutting down on all fats unless you’ve actually been diagnosed by an MD, not a holistic coach, as underweight.

Because even the unsaturated fats have a lot of calories. Rip Esselstyn’s “Fire Engine 2 Diet” specifically cut out all oils because the people he was training to eat better really needed to lose weight, and the bottom line is that the 120 calories in a tablespoon of ordinary unsaturated vegetable oil are still extras. There’s no real way around that. Not even if you’re vegan.

And wasn’t the point of nonstick pans supposed to be so you could cut down on cooking fats? (ok, it was really so the pans would be easier to wash, but why not take advantage while you’re at it?)

I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever use coconut itself in cooking–I’ve been a Mounds fan from way back, and please just don’t ask about those poufy huge coconut-sprinked, bright pink marshmallow things we used to clamor for as kids (“Snowballs”? I think it was a half-dome of marshmallow that sat on a cookie…almost as bad as Moon Pies.) These days I try to eat it sparingly, because it’s still fatty, and because most of my coconut exposure now takes place in the form of macaroons at Passover, when I’m already feeling like if I see another can or box of something packaged I’ll pass out.

But seriously–and more sophisticatedly–coconut itself is a worthwhile cooking ingredient in some savory dishes, and it has a subtle, penetrating flavor that means you don’t have to use a ton. You can also find good steam-defatted versions of shredded coconut that have about half the fat of regular, and look for partially decreamed canned coconut milk as well (I think Trader Joe’s sells it, maybe Whole Foods as well). Unfortunately, half the fat for coconut is still pretty fatty, but it’s an improvement.

Even a spoonful of unsweetened shreds can give a curry or aviyal (i.e., coconut-based “dry curry” class of dishes) a satisfying suggestion of richness without adding loads of fat. Maybe a gram or two per serving, and it can help even out jagged edges in the spicing.

To get the most flavor out of a small amount of coconut, I do one of two things. In the aviyal of cowpeas below, I toast a spoonful of dried shreds Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Food Politics, frugality, history, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: 66o Curries, aviyal, coco butter, coconut, coconut oil, cowpeas, curry, dal makhani, feta cheese, Indian cooking, low-fat cooking, microwave, palm oil, Raghavan Iyer, saturated fat, spices, vegan lifestyle | 2 Comments »

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Government nutritional estimates for “mixed dishes”–where do they come from?

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Pistachio madness two ways

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Baking with “Inside the Jewish Bakery”

Broccoli IS a conservative political bogeyman!

New York big-soda ban, long overdue

Eat the City, Read the Book

American Grown (Groan?)

Coconut, minus the hype

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