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Rising Expectations for Rosh Hashanah

Posted on September 12, 2010 by DebbieN

Just a quick word to say L’Shanah Tova U’metuka! May you have a good and sweet New Year!

Here’s what my daughter and I baked the afternoon before the start of Rosh Hashanah. You can find the basic recipe here.

Crown challah for Rosh Hashanah

It’s the first time I’ve baked bread since my daughter became diabetic in February, but by now, six months along, we both feel like we have the approximate carb counts down well enough. I tend not to make my challah very sweet anyway, but this year I also left out the raisins, which are about a gram of carb each, to make things a little easier until we were sure we knew how to figure portions. It still came out pretty and tasted good.

Without raisins, we figure, a baked piece of challah is like most other bread, about 50% carb by weight in grams, and it seems to work. Using a simple ratio like this is a lot easier (when we’re home and have a scale handy, anyway) than worrying about exactly how many cups or grams of flour I put in the dough and calculating exact portion carbs–something I still tend to do for desserts and treat foods like berry scones since they’re so variable. Or as our endocrinologist said, “Everyone guesses wrong for birthday cake.” Next time, we’ll try it with raisins and see how it goes.

One thing we like to do with the extra dough–I make sure there is some–is to let my daughter make challah birds. Usually we shape these by making a small 6-inch rope of spare challah dough and tying it into an overhand knot. You can press a raisin into one of the ends for an eye, and the other end becomes the tail, which you can leave alone, stretch out a bit, or score with a knife tip for “feathers”. This year, my daughter went free-form so the rolls came out looking more like bollilos, but she liked them, which is the important thing.

Mine: A lot of people make spiral challahs for Rosh Hashanah with a single thick rope curled around in a turban shape. Tunisians and some other North African and Mizrahi Jews shape the top end into a hand shape. I like to braid my round challahs into a crown, though I admit they’re not always the most even at the joined end. They still seem to even out as they rise to the occasion.

Braided crown challah rising in the oven for Rosh Hashanah

Challah dough is so easy to put together (2 minutes by food processor, plus cleaning, or 5-7 minutes by hand and letting it rise right in the mixing bowl) that if you get the dough ready in the morning and have a couple of hours in the afternoon free for braiding (10-15 minutes unless you’re having too much fun), the second rise (40ish) and baking (another 40ish), it’s a lot of fun and less expensive than store-bought, and more individual too.

B’te’avon! (bon appétit!)

Filed under: baking, breads, cooking, Diabetes, frugality, holiday cooking, kid food, nutrition | Tagged: baking, bread, challah, diabetes, Rosh Hashanah | Comments Off on Rising Expectations for Rosh Hashanah

Roden, with Reservations

Posted on September 7, 2010 by DebbieN

This week, after reading through Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food (Alfred Knopf, 2000) I decided it was so good I wanted to go ahead and buy a copy for myself. Another cookbook? These days I start my searches at the library rather than the bookstore, not only to save money but to save space for the ones I really want to use a lot.

Claudia Roden, "The New Book of Middle Eastern Food" at Amazon.com

Claudia Roden, "The New Book of Middle Eastern Food", Alfred Knopf, 2000

The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden (Alfred Knopf, 2000)

Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food was a big hit in 2000, a major revision and expansion of her first cookbook from 1968. She included new instructions for food processors and quicker and lower-fat cooking methods, and reintroduced the original authentic spices and other specialty ingredients for many dishes where she’d had to list Western substitutes 30 years earlier.

So why review it again? Ten years later, I find myself doing a thing I almost never do: reading the introduction. It’s an amazing piece of writing, and a full chapter in length. Roden combines scholarship and a look back at the history of the Middle East–politically and gastronomically–with personal notes about her Jewish family’s life in pre-revolutionary Cairo and their eventual exile to Europe. She also looks back at the younger, exuberantly naïve 20-something self who sought out authentic recipes for the original edition from relatives, restaurant chefs, farmers’ market vendors, street hawkers and private cooks of all kinds. In honor of her younger spirit, she decides to leave some of the earlier, more emotional writing in the revised edition rather than smoothing it all out.

But as a mature scholar, she delves into cooking techniques for the major classes of Arab, Turkish, Persian and North African food, the medieval sources of dishes that haven’t changed very much in centuries, and the trade routes and Crusader voyages that brought so much of Middle Eastern cooking back to Europe to be integrated into what we think of today as French.

The book itself is beautiful, with good photos but not that distracting excess of tabloid-sized food-glam that dominates today’s coffee table cookbooks. This is a working cookbook, sized right for the kitchen counter, with emphasis on the recipes.

Even though the basics are familiar by now, Roden includes enticing variations I haven’t run across elsewhere, and she makes them accessible and reader-friendly. While authentic technique and ingredients matter to her, Roden focuses on what counts most about these dishes to the people who make and eat them, and on the social experience of hosting guests and eating happily.

The recipes are generally simple, without huge laundry lists of ingredients or elaborate descriptions of technique. Roden groups similar recipes like fillo appetizers or eggplant salads from different countries so you can see how each has migrated, and for dishes with a wide following (fava purée, grilled meat skewers) she provides regional and national variations on flavorings or dressings at the end of each recipe, where they’re most useful. Roden’s writing really comes through here as she explains the differences in a way that makes me want to run, not walk, to my fridge and then to my greengrocer so I can try out something new.

Folk tales, poems and memories of her childhood in Egypt appear between recipes and three insert sections of color photos are supplemented with black-and-white drawings for specific techniques such as folding fillo triangles. Even though I’ve done more than my share of folding fillo and may not be the right person to judge, I think in comparison with what I’ve seen elsewhere the drawings in Roden’s book manage to look very doable and kind of adventurous rather than intimidating for someone new to these techniques. My only complaint, really, is that she doesn’t use a microwave for any of it.

So I was looking forward to seeing the same generosity of spirit and depth of connection in her encyclopedic-rated The Book of Jewish Food, which came out in 1996, four years earlier. Rosh Hashanah is nearly upon us (Wednesday evening already) and I was eager to see what she had made of her ambition to cover Jewish food styles world-wide.

Roden was born into a wealthy Syrian Jewish merchant family in Cairo. They had servants, cooks, and cordial relations with local shopkeepers, spoke French and Italian in preference to Arabic, were “modern” (secular and didn’t keep kosher) and enjoyed a broad and lavish culinary repertoire. It did not all suddenly come to an end when Nasser threw the Jews out of Egypt in the 1950s–the family maintained its ties to other Egyptian and ex-Ottoman Jewish exiles in Paris and London, and they seemed to thrive.

Eventually, Roden shocked her family by marrying an Ashkenazi Jew, because her well-heeled family had always considered Ashkenazim beneath contempt–provincial, downtrodden, poor, too religious, pathetically lousy cooks, with women who were too loose or who–gasp–worked, and otherwise socially inferior. And that’s where things start to unravel in this book. Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, history | Tagged: Claudia Roden, Jewish cookbooks, Middle Eastern food, Moroccan cooking, Sephardic recipes | Comments Off on Roden, with Reservations

Lightening Up Apple and Almond Cake

Posted on September 5, 2010 by DebbieN

Since Nigella Lawson’s Feast came out a few years ago, her “Damp Apple and Almond Cake” has been praised by food bloggers, morning tv show hosts, and just about everyone else who’s tried making it.

Most of her dessert recipes are not for the health-conscious. In the past 10 years, most of her food has become if anything a lot heavier and gooeyer and richer, migrating from Thai and Vietnamese summer salads with sharp clean flavors to avocado AND bleu cheese AND sour cream WITH taco chips, or chocolate bar AND non-natural peanut butter AND whipping cream AND caramel as an ice cream sauce. Or chicken pot pie WITH a lot of bacon in it and no vegetables AND a store-bought puff pastry top (a whole sheet goes for a mere two servings). I can’t think how far she’ll take things next.

But the “Damp Apple and Almond Cake”–despite the less appetizing connotation of “damp” in American speech (I think “moist” would probably be the equivalent word over here, or at least I hope so. It would at least conjure up fewer images of seeping rot under the stairwell)……….. okay, where was I with all the parentheses? Oh yeah.

What people have to say about this recipe is that it works as written, and it’s really good. No mean thing these days.

So okay. I have almond meal, I have apples, I have a fresh lemon, and I have some decent vanilla for a change (the Kroger stuff I bought for my daughter’s birthday cake back in mid-summer was shamefully weak). And I have eggs. That’s basically what you need to make this cake.

But it’s blazingly, disgustingly hot, 100+ Fahrenheit, yet again in Pasadena. And–AND–I look at the original recipe (serves 10-12) and realize that while the almond meal is a good move–much, much lower carb than flour–the recipe requires 8 eggs. Eight. E-I-G-H-T. Which puts it in the European spongecake class of baking. My grandmother made a similar thing, only with flour and chocolate chips, and probably 12 eggs, for a huge wheel of a cake.

And the directions call for simmering the apples down to a thick applesauce, then cooling and blending in the food processor with a huge, heavy amount of almond meal and a fairly high amount of sugar and all the eggs, and it’s a “dense” cake. No wonder.

Three and a quarter cups of almond meal. Dense. And almond meal tends to require a little less sugar than flour-based cakes to register sweetness–maybe that could be cut down too?

Those eggs–do you need all the yolks? Do you need all eight eggs for that matter? And while you’re at it, why not take advantage of what eggs do best, since it’s a European-style cake with no other leavening. Separate them and whip the whites to fold into the batter.

So here was what I came up with on a hot September pre-Rosh Hashanah afternoon.

Lightened-Up Apple Almond Cake

3 fairly big Granny Smith apples, peeled and sliced or chopped (~23-25g carb each or ~75)
2 c. almond meal (see Trader Joe’s for a decent-priced 1-lb bag at about $4) (20 g carb/cup or 40)
2 T. flour or matzah cake meal (~10 g carb)
1 c. sugar (200 g carb)
3 yolks
4 egg whites
1 t. vanilla
juice of a lemon
1-2 oz. orange juice (optional) (~3-5 g carb)
grated rind of half a lemon
grating of nutmeg

Put the apple slices or chunks on a microwaveable dinner plate and microwave on HIGH 3 minutes.
Blend the almond meal and sugar in a food processor until very fine (whiz several seconds, good enough)
Add the yolks, apples, flour or matzah meal, lemon juice and rind, vanilla, orange juice and nutmeg and blend well.
Whip the egg whites separately in another bowl large enough to pour in the batter from the food processor. When the whites are stiff (can be done easily enough by hand in only a minute or so with a big balloon whisk, just tip up the bowl and hold it at a slight angle in your other hand, or else use your method of choice), start pouring the batter into them a little at a time and folding with the whisk. I know this is backward from the usual method but it works out ok and saves a third bowl…
Pour into a deep-sided microwaveable casserole or a deep dish pyrex pie plate (chancy, may spill over a bit).
Set a microwaveable soupbowl upside down in the middle of the microwave turntable. Center the casserole or pie plate on top, and microwave uncovered 7 minutes on 70% (for an 1150ishW oven). Stop if it seems to be overflowing and wait a minute before continuing. When it stops rising and settles back in the plate, you might cover with a dinner plate and microwave another minute or so on HIGH until you’re convinced it’s cooked all the way down to the bottom.

Cool and slice–the total carb count is about 325 for the recipe, so 1/16th should be about 20 grams, 1/10th, if you can eat that much, is 33 grams, etc. It’s light, soft, substantial and rich-tasting, and 1/16th slice was pretty good tonight for all the testers at my table. And it only took 4 eggs and a cup and a quarter less almond meal. And about half the sugar of Nigella’s recipe but all the apples.

Lightened-up microwave version of Nigella Lawson's "Damp Apple and Almond Cake"

Not a looker in the microwaved version here, which doesn't brown the top, and I didn't decorate with slivered almonds or lemon slices, but the flavor's so intense and tangy that the 1/16th wedges here were perfect for a quick light dessert.

Verdict—Really, really good, and when I do it again maybe I’ll have cool enough weather to try out the oven so it’ll brown as well (about 25 minutes). I would probably go for a deep-sided casserole or even a soufflé dish. Then I could top it with slivered almonds as in Lawson’s version, and perhaps capture a little more of the rise from the egg whites without it collapsing down afterward.

In a regular oven it’s best to oil the pan and dust it with a little almond meal, but I didn’t have to for the microwave–probably for the same reasons it doesn’t brown on top, it also doesn’t cause a lot of sticking on the bottom.

Another change I might make next time would be to add just a couple of drops of almond extract–not enough to overpower the lemon and apples, just enough to play up the almond meal. This time around when I reached for the little bottle I discovered it was bone dry–hence the nutmeg, which actually worked out quite well.

But all in all, and despite the fact that it LOOKS like a typical Passover choke cake, it really isn’t. It’s very moist and even this way the flavor was wonderful and satisfying. So b’te’avon (bon appétit in Hebrew) and kudos to Nigella Lawson, and maybe this will encourage you (and her) to lighten up a little.

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, Diabetes, Food Blogs, Food TV, holiday cooking, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes | Tagged: almond torte, almonds, damp apple and almond cake, Desserts, low cholesterol desserts, low-carb desserts, microwaving cakes, Nigella Lawson, Passover recipes, Rosh Hashanah | Comments Off on Lightening Up Apple and Almond Cake

Green Eggs and Salm(onella)

Posted on August 24, 2010 by DebbieN

I’m sure that’s not an original title. Bad puns abound. We’re in a situation where the FDA’s longstanding voluntary compliance approach to industrial food production safety has gone incredibly, visibly awry. Mostly because it sorely lacks the funds and the boots-on-the-ground manpower to enforce the regs in person. Also mostly because for a full 10 years, the few attempts made by the FDA to put some teeth into the safety regs for the egg industry were quashed from above. Those years, which ended this summer, were mostly Bush years. It’s probably not a coincidence.

380 million eggs recalled and counting in the past week. That’s a lot of eggs–it’s a lot of chickens too. Possibly some that you yourself bought, if you live anywhere west of the Mississippi River. From companies in Iowa that had a long record of not following standard egg-handling safety practices to prevent the spread of salmonella. They preferred to pay the occasional penalty or fine instead.

If you’re not thrilled with the way this was handled or the fact that it could have been prevented pretty easily, what can you do?

Check the FDA voluntary recall list for the commercial names and serial numbers. If your eggs are on the list, return them to the store. If not, cook your eggs fully anyway. Just because yours weren’t on this week’s list doesn’t mean they’re definitely clean.

Then call or email (or if you want to be especially annoying, fax a copy of the Dr. Seuss bookcover–you know which one) your local Congressional representative or senator to ~~express your disgust~~ demand more enforcement authority and more money for the FDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service.

But that’s not enough. In the past 10 years, the FDA has grown used to doing less. It’s just been a month since Congress passed legislation giving it new rights–but will the FDA use them without a strong push? Ask your congressional representatives to mandate an FDA report on how it’s strengthening its food safety oversight and enforcement under the new laws. A yearly report to Congress might be as much as the agency can handle at the moment, but a twice-yearly report would push them to apply their new oversight powers a little sooner and more vigorously.

Aug. 25–And demand hen vaccination against salmonella as a national requirement for operating any kind of poultry business.

Filed under: cooking, Food Politics, unappetizing | Tagged: egg recall, FDA, Food Politics, food safety, Green Eggs and Ham, salmonella | Comments Off on Green Eggs and Salm(onella)

New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

Posted on August 22, 2010 by DebbieN

I’ve just uploaded a new page (see the top menu tabs) with a couple of tables of the most useful rules of thumb I’ve found for carb counting. Since my daughter became a Type I (insulin-dependent) diabetic back in February, we’ve both had to become pretty familiar with the amounts of carbohydrate in a given amount of different foods.

Although the American Dietetic Association’s “Choose Your Foods” carb count guide for diabetics is pretty helpful (and pretty inexpensive, about $3 per copy if you order from them direct on www.eatright.org), it’s written from the perspective of the eater, not the cook.

So (as the cook in the family) I’ve worked out the approximate ratios of carb grams per total weight of some common foods I serve routinely. Rice and beans are easy enough to remember. But when I want to know how much of a given potato my daughter can eat as one carb serving (15 g), it helps to be able to know that a regular potato is about 1/6th carbohydrate. Then all I have to do is weigh it on the food scale in grams and divide by 6.

The 2/3 carb ratio for moderately sweet baked goods like pie, scones, cookies and muffins is also pretty helpful if we’re home and can weigh a portion for my daughter. Sweets are one of the hardest things to guess right consistently by eye, even when you’ve made them yourself. If there’s a nutrition label, by all means go with it; if not, weighing a portion and figuring 2/3 has been a pretty good approximation so far.

Ice cream is its own thing–again, hard to figure. Dreyer’s 1/2-the-Fat is our standard home brand, and hovers around 15-18 grams per half-cup (small scoop). But Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors are all over the map–when you go in for a cone, you really need to ask them to look it up for whatever size scoop, then figure the cone separately. A junior scoop in a cake cone for pistachio almond turned out to be something like 25 grams, plus 4 grams for the cone. Almost double what a plain scoop would have been at home.

Over-the-top caramel-syrup-fudge-frosting types of confections are a little out of my league, closer to candy bars than cakes, and would probably be more like 80-90% carb by weight (or mass, if you’re being excessively metric about the properties of grams). I haven’t listed them because they’re so laden it’s hard to think of serving them very often, but I do have a basic rule-of-thumb candy list at the bottom of the carb counts page (saving the best for last) and a link to a much better, more comprehensive one so kids don’t have to feel completely shut out at Halloween or Valentine’s Day. Or birthdays.

I also have a short (for me) bit of hard-won advice on how to strategize with a (school-aged) diabetic kid before they have to face candy-prone situations where their friends are free to eat right away and they aren’t. Good for braces-wearers too…actually maybe we should all take the hint.

In any case, I hope you find this new page helpful whether you’ve got diabetics in the family or you just want to know what you’re eating.

Let me know what you think!

Filed under: baking, Beans and legumes, books, breads, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, Desserts, Diabetes, fruits, kid food, nutrition, Pasta | Tagged: carb counts, carb ratios, carbs in baked goods, carbs in candy, childhood nutrition, dietary guidelines, juvenile diabetes | Comments Off on New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

Unappetizing: Nutrition “Awareness” on Top Chef

Posted on August 20, 2010 by DebbieN

Perhaps it’s a futile attempt to understand how restaurant chefs think about food and nutrition, but lately I’ve been watching the very warped “Top Chef” episodes for the last couple of seasons–easy to do online. I can’t help wondering not only at the contestants, all of whom seem to display basic ignorance of what used to be called the “Four Food Groups,” but at some of the judges who fault them on nutritional challenges.

In this season there have been two, the School Lunch Challenge and–not that the judges even thought about it as a nutritional challenge, which they should have–the Baby Food Challenge. In both, the judges seemed at least as lacking in nutritional knowledge as the contestants, and in some aspects even worse.

The School Lunch Challenge brought out scathing comments on the show and on a number of blogs, particularly when the bottom-ranked chef, who went home for her gaffe, attempted to make a banana pudding palatable by adding sugar. Tom Colicchio made a big deal of her adding two pounds of sugar to the pudding–which was to feed 50 students.

And admittedly it’s not great for nutrition, but it was hardly the disaster he and the other judges made out. If anyone had bothered to whip out a calculator and known how to use it for pounds-to-kilos conversions, they’d have discovered that the two pounds of sugar amounts to 0.91 kilos. Or 909 grams, to be a little more precise (which we shouldn’t, the chef was eyeballing what she added). Divide by 50 and you get 18 grams per serving or about 4 teaspoons–not all that surprising an amount of sweetener in any prepared dessert. Add that to the starch already present as thickener and the sugars from the milk and bananas and you probably have 30-40 grams of carb or thereabouts per half cup of pudding.

It would be a lot for someone diabetic, like my daughter, but not disastrous as long as she knew how much carb was in it, and it certainly wouldn’t be disastrous for most school kids if the rest of the meal was balanced with low-fat protein and vegetables and not too much other starch.

But actually, most of the lunch entries were pretty starchy. The fact that they didn’t all have as much noticeable added sugar is almost immaterial–starches break down into sugars. You have to count them all.

What really stood out was the pathetic nature of the criterion “to include a vegetable.” One that was most-praised–a slab of caramelized (talking of sugar) sweet potato under a chocolate sorbet as a dessert–was mostly a starch, though in its favor it had vitamin A and fiber. Another team served celery (no vitamins and very low fiber, despite the stringiness) with a peanut-butter mousse (why, oh lord, not just peanut butter? chef-think at work?) piped out directly onto the celery, supposedly so kids would eat it. No one liked the mousse because it looked Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Food Politics, Food TV, fruits, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: baby food, carb counting, childhood nutrition, childood obesity, cooking shows, diabetes, high blood pressure, low-salt diet, Padma Lakshmi, Sam Kass, school cafeterias, school gardens, school lunch, Tom Colicchio, Top Chef | Comments Off on Unappetizing: Nutrition “Awareness” on Top Chef

Why All the Mealy Peaches?

Posted on August 11, 2010 by DebbieN

A lot of recent visitors to this site have come in desperate need of ways to redeem the disappointing peaches that are all you can find in the supermarkets these days. Even in peach season. The best I can tell them is that you can microwave the fruit with a little sugar and lemon juice to bring back some of the flavor, but of course it’ll be cooked, not raw. For a couple of suggestions on how to do it and what to use it for, see my original post.

I decided to take this topic up again because the idea of microwave peach jam as your only option is probably not what most of you were hoping for. Me either, frankly. I want great, aromatic, incredibly juicy height-of-season peaches, and I want to be able to eat them with no further ado. Cooking them runs a distant second as far as I’m concerned (though the jam and compote weren’t bad, to tell you the truth–and I just made another batch in about 5 minutes yesterday with some much better peaches from my father-in-law’s backyard trees).

But back to the more usual reality for a moment:

I really don’t think you can get a crummy, mealy unripenable peach to be juicy and fabulous and still raw by nuking it–though I might be wrong; I haven’t tried the lower-power settings or “defrost” yet, and I haven’t tried a shorter time than 3-5 minutes. If you’re determined to try one of these, at least take the poisonous pit out first–you really don’t want to risk infusing the flesh (the peach’s or your own!) with cyanide.

But all that begs the real question–

Why all these @#$*Q#R&*@F….etc. etc…. mealy peaches at the height of summer in the first place?

OK, I know that’s not a dignified way to phrase it, but it calms me down without actually specifying swear words for a situation that clearly deserves it. (And I do have some decent enough swear words beginning with “R” and “F”, but “Q” is going to be a challenge. I’ll have to work on it–get out the Scrabble Cussword Dictionary; it’s probably going to be something in Latin.)

The reason I get so upset about this is I remember looking forward to peaches every summer as a kid–you couldn’t get them in winter (for that matter, it’s debatable that what you get in winter now actually qualifies as peaches). They were so good, so reliably good when they did arrive that my mother once assured my younger brother, who was little enough at the time to worry about the fuzzy peel, that they tasted “like heaven”. She was right. You wouldn’t hear angels or anything insipid like that when you bit into one. You’d get a stream of juice down your chin and flavor so intense you wanted to take it somewhere private to eat so you wouldn’t embarrass yourself.

But things have changed. My post on microwaving unripenable peaches came out last summer, when I bought what turned out to be mealy peaches so many times in a row I started wondering if it was just me or were the peaches really a lot worse than I remembered in childhood. Maybe it was just a one-year blip, a bad crop, some kind of exception in the history of peach-harvesting.

Turns out, probably not. Crummy peaches are back in stock this year–judging from the visitors’ log, my experience, pretty much everyone’s. Even here in California where they do grow peaches.

So blithely scouting the web for answers I come up with two possibles:

Either all the good peaches are being shipped overseas for astronomical prices and our supermarkets are buying the good-looking but deceptive dregs and we’re allowing it by not returning the unacceptable goods and demanding refunds

All the big supermarket chains are buying imported peaches from South America and the combination of long distance storage requirements and import quarantine protocols is ruining the peaches’ ability to ripen.

Of the two, I think the idea that all our domestic peach growers are sending their entire stock of acceptably good produce overseas is unlikely. We do export some fruit but the countries that were likeliest to buy from us ten years ago (Japan and Russia come to mind) have fallen on harder times and there’s more competition from sources that are geographically closer.

On the other hand, there’s a good bit of evidence to suggest the supermarket chains have been cheaping out by importing most of their summer fruit from Argentina and Chile even when it’s summer here–and winter down there. The stores have gotten used to importing all kinds of stone fruits from Chile when it’s winter here, and they may have decided to issue longer term contracts with their distributors. It’s probably cheaper than domestic fruit even after transportation and quarantine.

And that brings us to the main find: Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Food Politics, frugality, fruits, Microwave tricks, Oddities, sauces and condiments, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: buying local, consumer complaints, cooking, farmers' markets, frugality, grocery stores, HTFA, imported fruit, mealy peaches, microwaving peaches, produce quarantines, supermarkets, unripened fruit | Comments Off on Why All the Mealy Peaches?

Veg-phobia II: Summer Edition

Posted on August 8, 2010 by DebbieN

My daughter is at camp for two weeks, the longest she’s been away from home, learning to deal with meals and insulin on her own (with the camp nurse’s help). After six months of calculating and eight weeks of giving herself shots, I know she’s ready to do it, and the nurse is ready, and her counselors are ready. And I overprepared and brought more supplies than she’ll need (my daughter has nicknamed this “Mom-anoia”).

I brought everything and a little bit more–including carrots and celery sticks and low-fat cheese sticks, and a loaf of whole wheat bread for activity carbs. I felt like I was turning into my grandmother, who used to bring shopping bags full of real bagels and corn rye on the plane with her from New York whenever she and Grandpa visited us in small-town Virginia.

But really. The nurse laughed at first when I asked a couple of weeks ago if the camp kitchen had vegetables as an option for campers who needed a non-junk snack (I’d looked at the sample menus online and they looked a bit Boy-Ar-Dee to me), but then she admitted the camp doesn’t really serve a lot of vegetables and suggested I bring them for her to store in the infirmary fridge. They don’t have anything whole wheat either. I think she stopped laughing and started sounding rueful about a third of the way through her reply. “We have fruit,” she said half-heartedly, knowing immediately that it wouldn’t really do for a diabetic.

The food at camp is a smack in the face with the wet rag of reality: this is how the rest of the country eats today. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a great camp in every other respect, with a long track record all over the Americas and people of my generation who still feel immensely grateful to have gone as kids. We were very fortunate to get a scholarship for it.

So what’s gone wrong with the food? It’s like school cafeteria food in the ’70s, but without the kale or the stewed tomatoes, the half-hearted iceberg lettuce salads or the lima beans. Take all that away and you have spaghetti, turkey burgers, the occasional chicken or tuna fish, grilled cheese, pizza, some form of potatoes or corn, and fruit. Some protein, a surprising amount of fat, hidden and otherwise, highish salt and a lot of starches on top of starches. It’s also “all you can eat.” But what are you really getting that’s worth seconds? No fiber. No vitamins. Few minerals. Nothing green. Per the Sylvia cartoons, “We feature all-white meals.”

Vegetables? Salad if you’re lucky. Broccoli? Nearly unheard of. Tomatoes? only occasionally. Red cabbage, carrots, celery or any other noshing vegetable of worth? Um, not this summer.

And it is summer. Best time of year for greens. This is when it’s all happening at the farmers’ markets all over the country, and your local newspaper is probably exhorting you to get out there and try it. And did I mention this is California, prime place for vegetabalia all year round?

How did this happen? To a well-educated, professional and middle-class part of the population, no less? The nurse tried to explain to me, “This is what they’re used to at home. The kitchen figures the kids won’t eat them.”

Disheartening in the extreme. But she’s right about the way families tend to eat these days. We saw it firsthand when some dear friends of ours came to visit Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Politics, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: camp food, carb counting, farmers' markets, fast food, fresh herbs, healthy kids, juvenile diabetes, vegetables | Comments Off on Veg-phobia II: Summer Edition

Is Extra-Virgin Just a Fancy Label?

Posted on August 2, 2010 by DebbieN

The UC-Davis Olive Center has just released a report of its chemical and sensory tests on 10 California and 14 imported brands of supposedly “extra-virgin” olive oil. It concluded that many of the nationally available brands don’t meet the International Olive Council’s or the USDA’s quality standards for extra-virgin status.

The research team also reported that some newer chemical markers of fat oxidation being used in Germany and Australia matched sensory measures of low quality (fusty or rancid smell and taste) better than the standard IOC methods. It was a result almost guaranteed to raise hackles abroad.

The researchers compared the accepted IOC/USDA tests for oxidation and breakdown products with sensory panel evaluations (smell/taste/look/texture) and with a couple of new chemical assays from Germany’s and Australia’s government food quality labs. They had an Australian lab accredited for IOC tests conduct some of their assays.

Nine of the 10 California olive oils were evaluated as authentic extra-virgin oils by the sensory panels and had corresponding assay stats to confirm it.

Almost 70% or about 10 of the 14 international brands, most at least nominally Italian, failed the sensory panel evaluation and had some assay stats outside the acceptable limits for extra-virgin olive oil. Major brands that were deemed lower than extra-virgin quality in at least 2 of 3 sensory panel tests included:

Bertolli, Filippo Berio, Carapelli, Pompeiian, Colavita, Mezzetta, Mazola, Rachael Ray, Newman’s Own Organics, Safeway Select, and Whole Foods’ 365 house brand.

Surprisingly enough, Star and Kirkland Organics fared pretty well. No word yet on Trader Joe’s “Trader Giotto” olive oil–at those prices, though, I’m not holding my breath.

The producers of brands exposed by the report, along with the IOC itself, which was created by the UN in 1959 and is based in Spain, protested the research team’s methodology. Mostly they claimed that too few samples were tested to get statistically significant results, and that IOC tests find only 1% of more than 200 brands they test each year fall below extra-virgin standards. But the brands tested represent most of the common offerings for olive oil in American supermarkets, and results were reported separately for samples of each brand acquired in several cities apiece.

I don’t think, at least on a cursory glance, that the test parameters set for the study or the interpretation of assay results have been skewed purposely to favor Californian olive oils over Italian ones. Results for both were mixed and the researchers reported variations in results within the same brand–for example, some olive oils showed lowered quality in the Sacramento sample but not the San Francisco or Los Angeles ones.

What the researchers at UC-Davis found was not so much evidence of tampering (adulteration with cheaper oils like canola, though there might have been tampering with lower-grade olive oil), but rather higher than acceptable fat oxidation and rancidity due to aging, light exposure, poor (high-temperature) storage and shipping conditions, and possibly poor quality olives to start with.

What I would object to if I were going to find fault is that the study was funded by several members of California’s olive oil industry. Certainly if this were a clinical trial for a new drug instead of a food quality study, the fact that two of the study sponsors are also the producers of brands being studied would make me look twice at favorable results.

Where I think the study favors California olive oils over Italian ones is in the purchasing itself. It should be no great surprise if the imports on American shelves have been sitting there longer and were shipped under more damaging conditions and at higher cost than the California olive oils. It would also be no great surprise if many of them tested in better condition in the European labs before export than at UC-Davis’ labs months (or even longer) after they’d arrived in the US.

If the researchers had express-shipped pre-import samples of this year’s production from Europe to their labs at UC-Davis and their partners in Australia, and tested those results against similarly fresh California oils, the results might have been more to the IOC’s liking–or perhaps not. EU labeling rules allow Italy to claim that olive oil was produced there even if the olives or olive oil lots were acquired from other countries such as Tunisia or Morocco. I’m not knocking North African olives except to observe that they’re probably a lot cheaper than those grown in Italy. But even if they’re of equal quality, each delay in pressing or processing a harvest–not to mention repeat exposure to heat and light during shipping and warehousing from country to country–contributes to the breakdown of olive oil’s flavor components.

However, even if all the olive oil was pristine when tested in its country of origin, such a scrupulous comparison wouldn’t have reflected the real experience of California shoppers trying to get decent olive oil without having to drive out to an olive producer’s farm. Unfortunately, the California olive oils are not widely available in Los Angeles supermarkets (the researchers were stuck with Sacramento and San Fran for those) and most are not really being produced on a large enough scale to become national brands either. The imports are. If most of those really are losing quality through shipping and warehousing, should we be paying extra-virgin prices for them? Or should the companies ship and store them more carefully–and for less time?

Filed under: cooking, Food Politics, haute cuisine, sauces and condiments, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: Bertolli, California olive oil producers, Carapelli, Colavita, extra-virgin olive oil, Filippo Berio, food quality testing, International Olive Council, Kirkland Organics, Mazola, Mezzetta, Newman's Own, Pompeiian, Rachael Ray, Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, Safeway Select, Star olive oil, UC-Davis, USDA, Whole Foods 365 | 1 Comment »

The Hummus Debate

Posted on July 29, 2010 by DebbieN

Hummus is a highly politicized food these days, a situation most eaters outside Lebanon, and at a guess, most inside as well, consider slightly ridiculous. “Owning” hummus has become a point of national pride for a few higher-ups in Lebanon, which has in the past year or two followed Greece’s feta-labeling strategy and tried to appropriate sole credit for authentic hummus. At its more light-hearted, this struggle for hummus supremacy takes the form of an annual stunt in which chefs produce a hummus bowl almost the size of an Olympic swimming pool (or at least an Olympic-sized wading pool) and the triumphal photo makes the international news. But those who really take the Lebanese official origin issue seriously and grimace whenever hummus is served somewhere else are, as far as I can see, only hurting themselves.

The trouble with demanding official status is that both feta and hummus long predate the borders of the countries trying to claim them. Both are simple enough to make and so consistent from batch to batch that they don’t really exhibit much in the way of “terroir” the way aged cheeses, wines, vinegars and so on might. Feta–equally good, equally real, equally part of the native fare–is made in a lot of places neighboring modern-day Greece. Places like Bulgaria, which don’t have as much political clout in either the EU or the Slow Food organizations, and which don’t get half the international tourism. Also places further away, notably Denmark and France, which still have reasonably large sheep’s milk production. Greece may actually have succeeded for the moment in the food labeling tug-of-war, but it’s made the country look somewhat silly and petulant, unwilling to face the fact that they’ve closed the barn door at least a century after the sheep got out. Will they profit from the exclusive labeling? doubtful–and it might have been better ambassadorship to claim credit for spreading feta’s popularity and offer more recipes and products made with it.

Much to the chagrin of whoever decided in the past couple of years that hummus should be exclusively Lebanese, this simple spread is made and eaten in lots of other countries. In Egypt, it’s made with a half-and-half mixture of favas and chickpeas. And Israel, which is probably the “other country” being targeted most directly by the Lebanese hummus campaign, has eaten, breathed, and slept a more or less chickpeas-only version of hummus as an essential food (along with felafel) for longer than the state has been independent.

Unlike the partisanry in Lebanon (not that Israel has no partisanry of its own), when it comes to food, everyone in Israel–Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Druse–gives credit with a certain degree of pride that hummus is Arab food, especially if they’ve made it themselves rather than trotting down to the corner grocery to buy the bland ready-made version from a vat in the deli at the back.

That’s because everyone likes to eat it. It’s also because being a good host is really important and something of a formal habit and a chance to show off just a little–actually, I think that’s still true all throughout the Middle East. Everyone expects friends and neighbors and friends-of-friends to drop by at a moment’s notice, without invitation, especially on the weekend. The least you can do is have a bag of roasted sunflower or pumpkin seeds and a pot of hideously sweet mint tea to bring out if they show up to schmooze after supper, but in the afternoon, better if you can bring out a platter of pita, vegetables, and a bowl of hummus.

Hummus is simple Arab fare at its best–humble, nutritious, appetizing, and (now that we have food processors) easy to make a lot of so you can bring out a wide platter of it for your guests and drizzle a little olive oil and some za’atar or sumac or cumin or paprika over it for the finishing touch–right before everyone tears pita and dips in. The ceremonial thing is what makes it good hosting and is part of the fun.

Here in the US, most people buy their hummus in little plastic containers at the supermarket–not elegant at all, and a lot of money for what you get. Kind of depressing, even. Look at the ingredient list and it’s as long and discouraging as any other processed food–that’s so it can be shipped nationally and stored for a week or two in case it doesn’t all sell out the first day. Look at the nutrition label and you see highish salt, lowish protein and fiber. It’s been fluffed out with canola oil to stretch the expensive ingredient, tehina (sesame paste), and there’s not so much in the way of chickpeas even though they’re supposed to be the base.

While I’m not so much against the fluffy smooth stuff (it tastes ok, if all you’re expecting is a spoonful or two of party dip), I prefer homemade because it’s denser and more nutritious, with more iron and protein from the chickpeas, something you could eat packed in half a pita for lunch and not be starving within an hour. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Dips, Food Politics, frugality, history, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: appetizers, chickpeas, hummus, Israeli food, Lebanese food, mezze, microwave cooking, Middle Eastern food | 1 Comment »

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