Slow Food Fast

French Food with Jewish Roots (and vice versa)

Posted on June 10, 2011 by DebbieN

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’s dissing the lentil?

Posted on June 4, 2011 by DebbieN

One more point on reactions to the new USDA MyPlate icon, this from foodnavigator.com:

Whether the new food icon was an ‘economic plate’ however, remained to be seen, said Drewnowski. “It’s great that dietary guidelines say we should eat fresh , minimally processed fruits and vegetables, fresh fish and lean meat, but these cost money. Are we asking low income people to adopt a high income diet?

“It’s easy for people to say that people on low incomes should boil up a big lentil and vegetable soup and make it last all week, but who wants to do that?”

Actually, I would. Because it’s really cheap and easy, and you can do it in a microwave, or at least partly. Also because most people used to make some kind of lentil or bean soup on a weekly basis, and in Los Angeles, particularly among the Latino and Armenian communities, a lot of families still do, and do it well. Here are three of my earlier posts, including the first of the infamous “War and Prunes” trilogy (I got a little carried away last summer. What can I say?)

Red Lentil Dal
Lentil Stew with…Pineapple?
Prunes, Lentils, and “Cookin’ Cheap”

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, frugality, Microwave tricks, nutrition, shopping, soup | Tagged: food policy, FoodNavigator.com, lentil soup, MyPlate, social justice, vegetarian protein choices | Comments Off on Who’s dissing the lentil?

The new MyPlate icon–fantastic or plastic?

Posted on June 4, 2011 by DebbieN

Everyone in the food press seems to be weighing in on the new replacement for the much-cursed USDA Food Pyramid in all (both?) its glorious confusion and obfuscation of real nutritional goals that might have (and should have) undermined the beef, corn, pork, corn, sugar, corn, and soy industries if they’d ever been presented honestly.

So where does that leave us? With ears of fresh corn that are more than 50 cents apiece in Los Angeles supermarkets, and the new…

Already, the USDA’s MyPlate web site is in a certain amount of branding trouble (and of course, that’s what counts most in America): the Texas DMV had already bagged “MyPlates.com” for its vanity license plate division (highly unappetizing), and Livestrong.com already has its own well-established “MyPlate” food calculator and fan base. And those items come up first on Google searches. As in, the whole first page or more. The government site ranks way down the list and had to water down the impact of its original name choice with “choose” just to get a URL. Can it elbow out the competition just by bolding the “MyPlate” part?

What really counts are the food and nutrition opinion maker comments, though. And a lot of those are detracting in a nitpicking way that I think kind of misses the point.

The first thing they all have to say is that the plate looks dumbed down. Forgive me, but wasn’t the Food Pyramid’s unreadable and unusable design a large part of the problem? The MyPlate icon is simpler and more direct, and it names real food groups, not “Big Mac” or, on the haute side of things, any of Ferran Adrià’s foams. No wonder foodies and populists alike are wondering what it has to do with them.

A small sampling of the main arguments:

MyPlate: The Food Pyramid for dummies? (LA Times): Dr. Andrew Weil and others discuss what’s still wrong with the new icon. Weil says “fruits” could still include fruit juice, which is usually a useless sugar bomb in comparison with whole fruit, and he worries that the protein section, which comes with a guideline to eat 8 oz. of fish per week, might encourage unthinking people to increase their mercury intake since swordfish is on the guideline menu, as are some of the generally overfished popular species of fish. Weil’s not wrong about the fruit juice vs. actual fruit, but his hand-wringing about fish is really geared for well-off readers who can afford to eat much of it. All the fishes he names are Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Magazines, Food Politics, frugality, history, kid food, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: chooseMyPlate.gov, David Cassidy, fast food, Food Pyramid, Four Food Groups, fresh produce, Livestrong, Marion Nestle, Michelle Obama, MyPlate, nutrition, processed food, public health, supermarkets, USDA, vegetables | Comments Off on The new MyPlate icon–fantastic or plastic?

All Those Magazine Microwave Tips

Posted on June 2, 2011 by DebbieN

I’m STILL working on a review of Joan Nathan’s Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France. Reason–so far the stories are more engaging and attention-getting than the food itself. So deciding what I think about the food takes a reread and some comparative checking.

For now, I’ll note very briefly that Nathan actually recommends microwaving in several recipes. This is a big step forward in the top-tier cookbook world, even though Nathan’s few mentions are still pretty brief and simple uses for the microwave. They’re still commonsense, so I give her credit for not eschewing them.

But it brings up a sore point for me. A lot of food writers are starting to incorporate microwave tips in their publishing repertoires, but some of them don’t really know how to use a microwave for much or else they don’t do the important legwork and test out their suggestions under varying conditions so that readers won’t get burned.

Case in point: Melissa Clark in a recent article for Real Simple, 14 Who-Knew? Uses for Your Microwave. Clark’s article is an unfortunate object lesson on the need for caution, maybe even a bit of actual research and critical thinking on the bounty of quickie microwave tips the food and homemaker magazines love to dish up.

The “uses” in Clark’s list include sterilizing sponges and plastic cutting boards, juicing lemons, toasting nuts and coconut, heating up beauty products like gel masks and leg wax…

Not only are most of these nonfood uses unoriginal–did she just scour the ‘Net or did she try them out?–but some of them are actively dangerous, to say nothing of unappetizing. Some gel mask manufacturers even put a warning in their instructions not to microwave the mask by itself but rather in a bowl of water–you could end up overheating it and scalding your face. One reader commented that she’d tried the sponge-sterilizing trick and ended up with a houseful of black smoke and a ruined microwave. Very expensive and maybe even harmful, even without the risk of a house fire. Sponges and plastics give off volatiles when heated–do you want to breathe them? do you want to have them coating the inside of your microwave and then washing off into your food the next time you heat up a cup of coffee?

And do you really want to eat ANYTHING from your microwave after something like dirty sponges or a plastic cutting board has been heated up in it? To me it would be like eating off a table where someone’s just left their dirty socks.

SOOOO–Here are a few general (hard-earned, experience-based) notes on not abusing your microwave by following such tips unthinkingly. Because there will always be more articles like Clark’s than the kind I’d hoped for.

1. Don’t microwave nonfood items to clean them (or really, for any other nonfood reason…) At all. Your microwave is not a dishwasher, washing machine, or autoclave (and I have very unpleasant memories of the bio department autoclave and its smell when I was still a lab tech–wouldn’t exactly call it clean even if it did lyse the bacterial cell cultures…) The chemistry of microwaving is different from straight-up heating in an oven and may do something unpredictable or harmful if there’s no water present to absorb the energy, or occasionally even if there is. Think BPAs in plastic–there are loads of Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Food Magazines, frugality, Microwave tricks, Oddities | Tagged: Carol Bowen, cookbooks, Julie Sahni, Melissa Clark, microwave cooking, microwave tips, Pat Baird, Real Simple, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on All Those Magazine Microwave Tips

They don’t learn, do they?

Posted on May 31, 2011 by DebbieN

The Washington Post reports this fabulous new piece of House Republican budget thinking:

Food safety advocates decry FDA cuts

Didn’t we have a half-billion-egg recall just last summer? And peanut butter contamination? And the spinach, and the tomatoes? And, from the Chinese pharmaceutical and foodstuffs contingent, melamine in quite a number of items, including pet food and infant formula, to fake a high protein level?

Didn’t everybody in the House get up on their hind legs and demand more FDA field inspections, more accountability, more food safety? And now the House majority are cutting the FDA proposed budget from a modest raise proposed by the White House to less than the FDA received for this year’s operations?

Filed under: Food Politics, frugality, history, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: eggs, FDA cuts, food recalls, food safety, melamine, peanut paste, salmonella | Comments Off on They don’t learn, do they?

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

Posted on May 11, 2011 by DebbieN

Why Borders is not getting my business this week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questionable sodium study, even more questionable comments

Posted on May 4, 2011 by DebbieN

A new European study that purportedly shows low-sodium diets to be ineffective in preventing high blood pressure, and even more unlikely, that they increase the risk of death from heart attack or stroke, is being published in the May 4 issue of JAMA, and predictably it’s already excited a variety of comments in Gina Kolata’s current New York Times article from the CDC and from…Dr. Michael Alderman.

Predictably, because the CDC researchers think too few people were studied for too short a time with unreliable methods (24-hour urine collection to measure sodium intake indirectly, after the fact as it were.)

Alderman’s reaction was also predictable: he’s still insisting that only a nation-wide feeding study sort of clinical trial that follows its subjects until they die is sufficient to prove a true link between sodium intake and cardiovascular disease. Something so expensive and unwieldy it couldn’t be completed even if it were started, and we’d still be waiting around 30 years later wondering if salt had anything to do with heart attacks or strokes. Very convenient for the processed food industry, but pretty useless for public health. And also conveniently, Gina Kolata found more than one expert to say so.

What she didn’t find, but could have, is that a number of large-scale feeding studies have already been done and shown that eating a balanced lower-sodium diet helps reduce blood pressure and prevent blood pressure increases. DASH-Sodium is one of them. And no one had to wait until the study subjects died to figure it out.

Filed under: DASH Diet, Food Politics, nutrition | Tagged: cardiovascular disease, CDC, DASH Diet, DASH-Sodium, Gina Kolata, high blood pressure, hypertension, low-salt diet, Michael Alderman, sodium research | Comments Off on Questionable sodium study, even more questionable comments

Excuses, excuses

Posted on April 14, 2011 by DebbieN

Sorry everyone, I’ve been out of it for 3 weeks this time, due to:

1. Moving (last week)

2. Illness (started with tonsils, ended with a swollen ear from cellulitis, a strep infection of the skin when you get too rundown), right the day of the move. You go in expecting them to hand you a packet of smelly antibiotic capsules and they take one look at your red ear and the redness is starting to march across your cheek hour by hour like Attila the Hun invading Europe, only redder, and instead they sweep you up on a gurney in the ER and hook you up to an iv with the big-guns antibiotics pronto and tell you you’re lucky it hasn’t reached your eye yet and you’re in the observation unit for the night. Verdict: get more sleep and don’t send your kid into the mountains for two retreats (one regional, one school) in one week right before you move.

3. Moving some more–the movers took only about 3/4 of our stuff the first time around because my husband didn’t have what it took to pack it all himself and he didn’t call them to move the date or ask for extra help when I ended up in hospital. I was flat on my back with an iv in my hand and a phone bleating my husband’s panic at being stuck with it all himself and what should he do with the…I was actually GLAD not to be on the scene. But he took me there the minute I got home so I could see how bad it was and calm him down. Usually it’s the other way around–he’s the calm one in the family. Mostly. So a week later some of the movers came back on their own to finish for pickup work. Still ended up less than we were expecting to pay.

4. Garage full of boxes–where are my daughter’s dress clothes? where’s the other piece of the vacuum cleaner? whose pots are those and are they milk or meat?

5. Cleaning out whatever passes for our old townhouse is like Hercules mucking out the stables of the gigantic horses. Only with fewer shovels and more muck. But we’ll do it to get what we can of our old deposit back. Don’t ask about the local, woman-owned maid service we tried (twice!) to engage for this work and whose owner blew it not once but twice. We tried. Next! Molly Maids.

6. It’s still Pesach come Monday night. Advantage: new kitchen is tiny and unsettled, so we don’t have that much hametz to get rid of. And we’re paying someone else to clean the fridge at the old place. (but I still did a preliminary scrub yesterday because it would be too cruel, and too expensive, for the maid service to have to face that fridge without help).

7. Freedom? No, it’s not just another word for nothing left to lose. It’s the taste of matzah and parsley and horseradish and haroset after I’m finally done with the antibiotics and can stand to eat anything more exciting than toast and eggs. Even though that’s mostly what matzah balls are made of, I’m really, really looking forward to it.

Up next, as soon as I can actually read my way through it, Joan Nathan’s newest book, “Quiches, Kugels and Couscous” about looking for the Jewish foodways of France and the Jewish roots still discernible in French food today. I’m kind of excited about it because Nathan is a friendly as well as intrepid explorer in the world of food and culture, and she finds ways to visit people in their homes and see what they really cook and eat. So the food may not be highbrow but the stories are looking good so far.

Have a great weekend if I don’t post before then and Chag Pesach Sameach!

Filed under: cooking, Oddities, unappetizing | Tagged: Joan Nathan, Passover | Comments Off on Excuses, excuses

A Closer look at Einstein Bros. Bagels

Posted on March 24, 2011 by DebbieN

A few weeks ago I bought a challah from Einstein Bros. Bagels, which had taken over from the Noah’s in my town sometime last fall. Noah’s had supplied my daughter’s school on Fridays and their challah was pretty good for store-bought–this tasted the same. I hadn’t been in the store since the takeover so I didn’t really know what to expect, but other than the name change outside, it looked the same and had more or less the same offerings as ever.

I’m not sure what prompted me to go online and look for their nutrition information sheet, but I wanted an idea of what was in the challah, so I looked. I couldn’t find it on the Einstein Bros. site, but there was a pointer to the Noah’s web site–still up after the takeover, apparently, and that had the challah listed. What I found for the challah itself wasn’t incredibly shocking or anything, ingredients more or less kosher, not too bad on any of the nutritional factors. In fact, it’s probably one of the best bets at our former Noah’s, although you have to order a couple days ahead for Friday morning pickup.

On the other hand, the bagels and other menu items really stood out for sodium–most were over 500 mg per bagel, and some of the “gourmet” varieties of bagels were in the 700-900 range, even without lox. A few sandwiches soared as high as 3500 mg sodium (more than a day’s worth even for today’s average intake, and about two days’ worth according to the CDC and AHA guidelines)–just for a sandwich. Anything with chicken on it was astronomical as well–above 1600. Which sounded like Denny’s or Chili’s to me.

I started to wonder just who designed the food and how “designed” it was. Were we talking mostly bagel joint, or were we talking fast food with a highly engineered, set-in-stone formulation? If I wanted to contact them to ask about lowering the sodium in their dishes, was there a real person I could talk to?

The Einstein’s web site doesn’t have a lot on it other than Flash bells and whistles–the site is extremely corporate as far as information goes. The only thing I found that seemed worth noting here is the management team, and even that–maybe it was the Flash, or maybe there was some programming in the web site, but after three management biographies it failed to load any others. I had to shut my browser, clear my cache, and try again.

What I found surprised me (I’m kind of naïve, I know it). Even with all the evidence to the contrary–my sister once did a comprehensive marketing survey of west coast bagelries and concluded none of them had the real, crackle-crusted thing, it was all just ring-shaped white bread–I still harbor a faint hope that if it’s a bagel shop, it must be Jewish. Especially since the founder of Noah’s is, and Einstein Bros.–well, what would you conclude? But you would be wrong. Continue reading →

Filed under: breads, DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Politics, nutrition | Tagged: bagels, challah, CSPI, David Kessler, deli, dietary guidelines, Einstein Bros., fast food chains, Jewish cooking, National Salt Reduction Initiative, Noah's, nutrition labeling, sodium intake | Comments Off on A Closer look at Einstein Bros. Bagels

Microwave Tricks: Make-Ahead Stuffed Shells

Posted on March 13, 2011 by DebbieN

Stuffed shells (shown here with plastic wrap for the fridge) cook up really quickly and easily in a microwave

This was the second try at a quick supper while juggling too many other things at once. The first half box of pasta shells I cooked in the microwave as I usually do but they ended up staying in the water much too long while I was busy elsewhere (lecturing my kid about waltzing out of the house without letting us know–Oy! I thought we had this down by now, but 10 is 10, with a lot of eye-rolling and forgetfulness and sudden impatience for all the ordinary rules).

When I returned to the kitchen, the bowl of shells had long since cooked, softened, soaked and turned to pasty shell-shaped mush–too far gone to rescue. Bleagghhh…I threw them out and started over. Luckily, a microwave cuts the time it costs to boil the water for a new batch, and I’d already made the stuffing and had some tomato sauce ready. This time, I decided to pay attention, and it came out fine.

If you have fewer distractions or better time sense than I do so you can catch your pasta before it falls apart, you can put together a number of good filled pasta casseroles like this one all (or at least mostly) by using your microwave, and they might take less than half an hour from start to finish. Two other examples–the very similar spinach lasagne I make with eggroll wrappers (same spinach/ricotta/feta filling, same microwave marinara but don’t cook the eggroll wrappers before layering them, and use two wrappers at a time, since they’re so thin), or even butternut squash or sweet potato ravioli with wonton or gyoza wrappers and a mozzarella-based cheese sauce. Once the shells are cooked al dente (still a little chewy, but not hard), the dish goes together in about 5 minutes and cooks just to heat it through.

Stuffed Shells in the Microwave

1/2 lb or so dried large pasta shells for stuffing (about 20 shells or 1/2 box)
1 recipe Microwave Marinara or about 1 c. of your preferred tomato sauce
pinches of fennel seed, dried or fresh thyme or oregano, and/or hot pepper flakes
shredded mozzarella for topping (optional)

Filling:

2 c. low-fat or skim ricotta
2 oz. or so crumbled feta
1/2 lb defrosted/cooked spinach
1/4 onion
1 fat clove garlic, grated, minced or mashed
a few leaves shredded basil and/or thyme or marjoram
pinch or grating of nutmeg
6-8 microwave-marinated artichoke hearts, optional

Put the shells in a big pyrex mixing bowl (2.5 qt or liter), fill with water to about 2 inches above the shells, cover with a microwaveable plate and microwave on HIGH about 9 minutes, or until the water is bubbling but not boiling over. Leave the shells in the microwave another 5 minutes to absorb and check for doneness–you may need another 2 minutes or so. When they’re just cooked through but still firm, drain them gently so they don’t tear apart.

In the bottom of a microwaveable casserole (in my case, a pyrex deep dish pie plate), spoon about 1/4 c. tomato sauce and spread it around. Sprinkle on the fennel seed, oregano and/or hot pepper flakes if using, or just mix them into the sauce before you start.

Mix all the filling ingredients together by hand. Stuff each shell with a soup spoonful of the filling and set it in the casserole–you can fit about 20 stuffed shells into a deep dish pie plate, maybe more if you pack them tighter than I did. Carefully spoon the rest of the sauce between the shells and if it seems too dry on top or your shells are parcooked and kind of stiff, drizzle a few spoonfuls of water, maybe 1/4 c. total, on the sauce but not on the shells themselves. If you’re using mozzarella to top the shells, sprinkle it on now and add a pinch of oregano if you like it. Cover the casserole with a microwaveable plate or lid and microwave 7-8 minutes on HIGH or until heated through. The cheese should be melted on top and the shells should be tender.

You can reheat the casserole the next day very easily–check to see if it feels dried out at all, and drizzle in a tiny amount of water (spoonful or so) if it does, then cover with a microwaveable plate and heat for 5 minutes on HIGH.

DIABETIC/CARB COUNT NOTES:

Barilla says their shells are 37 grams of carbohydrate per 5 shells, or about 7 grams apiece. Ricotta has about 3-4 g. carb per 1/4 c. serving (about 2-3 shells’ worth), so for 5 shells maybe 5-7 g. carb. If you use my microwave marinara, it has just tomatoes and a bit of onion, none of the commercial added sugars or starch thickeners, so negligible carb count per serving.

Total: about 45 g. per 5 shells, or about 8-9 g/shell.

Filed under: cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, frugality, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Pasta, Vegetabalia | Tagged: carb counts, marinara, microwave cooking, Pasta, stuffed shells, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Make-Ahead Stuffed Shells

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French Food with Jewish Roots (and vice versa)

The new MyPlate icon–fantastic or plastic?

All Those Magazine Microwave Tips

They don’t learn, do they?

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

Questionable sodium study, even more questionable comments

Excuses, excuses

A Closer look at Einstein Bros. Bagels

Microwave Tricks: Make-Ahead Stuffed Shells

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