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Little Green Footballs

Posted on May 26, 2013 by DebbieN

…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

Two or three weeks ago I got a frantic email from the assistant at my daughter’s Hebrew school: could I lead a cooking session for the 8th graders for an hour that Sunday?

Teens and preteens are not my specialty–I have a friend who’s really terrific with them; she’s an 8th grade and high school teacher and would rather deal with kids than write. I’m the other way around, and my own kid’s turning 13 very soon. Very soon.

Suffice it to say, my answer probably should have been, “Who me? Are you off your nut? Cook with preteens in only an hour?”

And then I thought–but wait. Fillo. It’s inexpensive (a big plus), it’s easy enough to fold, it’s almost (if you squint) kind of a craft. Like origami. Make some tasty and quick fillings for it (though no nuts–schools have gotten annoyingly leary of anything with nuts. How are you supposed to teach baklava? Eh? Eh???) and let the kids go to town, a couple of sheets of fillo apiece in the synagogue kitchen. An hour should do it, and it’s a cool, sophisticated food to know how to make–very different from the standard summer camp challah with blue or green food coloring.

So…I bought a couple of packets of fillo (about $2.69 for a roll of 20-24 sheets), a couple of pounds of loose-frozen spinach, an onion, some garlic, a bottle of olive oil and another bottle of canola oil (for the sweet fillings), a packet of dried apricots, a packet of dried figs, some farmer cheese (mistake, doesn’t taste that good; stick with ricotta) and some feta. And some dill and scallions I had at home. Also a lemon or two. I left the fillo in the fridge overnight to thaw slowly the way you’re supposed to, and not the way I usually do (i.e., take the thing out of the wrapper and let it sit an hour on the counter and then wonder why it cracks when I rush to unroll it).

I made the fillings the Sunday morning in a microwaver’s frenzy of immense efficiency:

Nuke a stick of unsalted butter in a bowl, pour it into a snaplock container.
Thaw the spinach on a plate–4 minutes on HIGH. Take it out.
Dump the dried apricots in a bowl with water to cover and a saucer on top–3 minutes. Meanwhile, start squeezing the spinach dry, and I mean dry, in handfuls over the sink. Nothing worse than soggy spanakopita. Except maybe soggy pizza.
Take the apricots out, put in the bowl of figs with the stems cut off, some water and a lid, 3 minutes for them.
Blend the apricots with a little sugar and water and lemon juice to make a thick paste. Get it out of the food processor and pack it in a disposable container with a lid.
Do the same thing for the figs, only no sugar necessary.
Rinse out the food processor, stick the scallions, wild thyme, fresh dill and basil in and chop them fine, drop in the spinach, a fat clove of minced garlic, and the feta. Pack that too.
Grab all the bags with the goods and don’t forget the oils and the butter and the fillings and the extra feta and farmer’s cheese just in case there’s time to make some cheese-only filling there and somebody wants it. …

I hustled, I got to the synagogue kitchen on time, I set up stations around a stainless steel work table–foil sheets at each place, paper bowls with a dab of melted butter and a pour of oil, plastic baggies to go over everyone’s hands instead of pastry brushes, the carefully unrolled fillo under plastic wrap. The oven–on. The fillings–ready to rock. And then I waited. And waited.

An hour really would have been enough time for that class. But none of the kids showed up for the first 20 minutes because it was also the day the photographers were herding all the classes out into the basketball court area for graduation photos. So when they finally straggled in, all eight–and surprisingly, three of them were boys–I made them wash their hands and then set them to work.

The first thing I did was hand out individual sheets of fillo and pointed out that they were nearly as thin and tearable as tissue paper. They were all surprised when they saw it. None of the kids, who’d been cooking all year and who had attended a lot of bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, had seen fillo “in the raw”.

I got them started on spanakopita triangles–also known sometimes as bulemas (Greek root found here; you’ve heard of bulimia, right? Didn’t mention that connection, of course. You would never want to get into that with a batch of preteens. Don’t get too disturbed, though. The rough translation as used in Hebrew is “appetizers” or “things to gobble”. Of course, in Israel “bulmus” is also what they call anything like the American after-Thanksgiving shoppers’ frenzy or otherwise a run on the stock market…so much for appetites gone hog wild…)

I naturally thought fillo triangles would be a cinch for the boys especially–you do it the same way you fold a paper football and try not to get caught in class. Only with a little more butter and olive oil involved, and hopefully no punting in the kitchen, because I wasn’t gonna clean it up for them when the spanakopita went flying.

Here came the second generational surprise, though: none of the kids, not even the boys, had any idea how to fold a basic paper football! They’d never done it. Paper airplane? I asked desperately. Continue reading →

Filed under: appetizers, baking, cooking, Desserts, frugality, fruits, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, kid food, Microwave tricks | Tagged: appetizers, apricots, bulemas, cooking with kids, Desserts, feta cheese, figs, fillo, Greek food, Jewish cooking, mezze, phyllo, spanakopita | Comments Off on Little Green Footballs

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 »

Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

Posted on February 29, 2012 by DebbieN

Calzone–one of my favorite Italian dishes–is extremely easy to make once you’ve got some basic pizza or bread dough risen and ready to shape. Flatten out individual rounds of dough, mix up a ricotta-based or roasted vegetable filling, fill and fold the dough over into half-moons, crimp the edges, brush with olive oil, and bake on a sheet in a hot oven until they’re puffed and golden. A satisfying but fairly light supper dish, especially if you have a good thick spicy tomato sauce to go with it and a salad on the side.

But even if you don’t, they’re a good consolation on a Sunday night for a kid with frustratingly advanced math homework the teacher didn’t quite prepare himself or the class for (11th-grade precalculus techniques popping up in a sheet of homework for 11-year-olds? The dangers of pulling your homework handouts from a math site on the internet. I keep reminding myself that he’s young yet). All I can say is, you know you’re in trouble when the heartburn is coming from the homework and not the food.

Grrrr. I’m almost over it. Anyway, here’s a much easier calculation trick that doesn’t require factorials…

The trick about making dinner from homemade dough is that the kid in question is diabetic and needs to know how many grams of carb she’s going to get in her calzone. Pizza, calzone, any kind of handmade entrée with dough plus noncarb ingredients, is tricky to calculate carbs for because you can’t easily tell by eye how much bread you’re getting in a serving. Check out any of the commercial pizza companies’ nutrition stats per slice–they’ll often state carbs as a range rather than a set value. How thick the dough is, how large the slice, etc, can really throw things off. Most people don’t need to know more precisely than “35-50 grams per slice”, but diabetics really do. Fifteen grams is a pretty big variation.

So how do you deal with it at home? If you’re making lasagne or stuffed shells or spanakopita, you can calculate the carb by counting the noodles or sheets of fillo dough you use and looking on the package nutrition label, then figuring a total carb count for the tray and dividing by the number of portions. A little tedious, but manageable.

Bread that’s already baked is also easy enough to calculate for–just weigh it out on a food scale in grams and figure 50 percent carb by weight. Most nonsweetened bread is pretty consistent, whatever density its texture. Weigh out a 70-gram piece of bread, and you’re usually looking at 35 grams of carb.

But for calzone or pizza you’re dealing with a bowl of wet dough to start, and once the dish is baked, it’s got lots of other stuff on or in it so you won’t be able to weigh it cooked and really know what carbs you’ve got. You need to test a portion of your raw dough, only raw dough is heavier than it will be once baked. Depending how wet the dough is, the proportion of carb could vary from a little less than half to a lot less.

Weighing a sample of raw dough to figure carbs after baking

The only thing to do is test a bit of dough by weighing it out raw, then reweighing it once it’s baked. Doing this in a conventional oven just for a single test ball of dough can be time-consuming unless you’re already heating it for the main event. Still, you want to get ahead with making the actual calzone so dinner will be sometime before midnight.

Enter the microwave. Yes, really. A nectarine-sized ball of dough, say 100 grams raw weight, will cook through lightly in 40-50 seconds in the microwave if you put it on a saucer and punch the “nuke” button. It’ll still be white and pale, but it’ll have risen fairly well to the size of a large dinner roll and won’t have gooey raw spots (you can check by breaking it open, just watch out for steam). Then just pop it in the toaster oven for about 5 minutes and it’s browned and baked through. When you reweigh it, you’ll know how much a 100-gram ball of your dough weighs cooked, and then figure 50 percent of that weight for carbs.

Aside: This nuke-and-toast scheme works pretty well for making a fast sandwich roll from a bowl of dough in the fridge. When I first came up with the idea, it was with great reluctance, because my only previous experience with microwaving bread had been the horrible, horrible mistake of Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, breads, cooking, Dairy, Diabetes, frugality, Microwave tricks, nutrition | Tagged: bread, bread dough, calzone, carb counting, cheese, diabetes, diabetic recipes, digital food scales, feta cheese, home baking, homemade pizza, Italian food, nutrition, ricotta, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

Posted on August 1, 2011 by DebbieN

I know, Diana Kennedy (The Cuisines of Mexico, 1971, and onward) probably wouldn’t do it this way–or maybe she would, at home, for herself? Naaah. She’s still pretty particular. Eighty-seven years old, and doesn’t seem to have slowed down noticeably in her quest to rescue the disappearing dishes of Mexico. Her latest, Oaxaca al Gusto (2010) is a huge coffee table cookbook, beautiful and unfortunately for me, so full of rare Mexico-only ingredients, not to mention pork and lard, that I don’t know if there’s much I can really cook from it. I’m scouring it now for possibilities, but in the meantime…

Friday afternoon was vegetable-shopping day again, because we go through good tomatoes like a pack of sharks after a swimmer’s leg, and unfortunately our own backyard gardening adventure is turning out to be more like the $50 tomato kind of thing. To make up for packing our daughter out with my husband on his errands all afternoon instead of on mine (because I desperately needed some time off for bad behavior), I decided to do a little better than the usual dinner. Of course, they had a decent time, and so did I. Gotta do that more often.

So while they were gone I stopped at my greengrocer and bought a ton of ripe tomatoes that actually have flavor at 99 cents a pound (we have one left), a couple of eggplants for 65 cents apiece, some tart green plums, and these Anaheim chiles, which were beautiful and at $1.19 a pound, cheaper than the bell peppers this time. If you’re not completely clued into eating with the seasons, sometimes the pricetag gives a gentle hint of how the growers are thinking about any given vegetable that week.

Normally I wouldn’t buy Anaheim chiles–they’re pretty mild, but still hotter than bell peppers, which we usually eat raw, and the chiles are really better cooked. But when I saw them, all I could think about was stuffing them with feta for a quick pick-me-up side dish to go with mahi mahi and rice.

Some stuffed chiles are authentically made with Anaheims, I was encouraged to find (thumbing through one of my two, count ’em, two copies of Kennedy’s first book). But the ones that make good-looking cookbook photos are made with pasilla or poblano chiles–darker green, plumper to hold more stuffing, and with thinner walls. Also a little hotter, and often soaked up from their dried form. Baked in tomato broth or else stuffed with meat picadillo, coated in egg, baked, and dressed with a walnut/sour cream sauce (chiles en nogado) with pomegranate seeds sprinkled on top–a Moroccan-origin dish, maybe, with that egg cloak and the pomegranate seeds?

The other thing Kennedy specifies is to char, bag-steam and peel the peppers before using them, which makes the egg cling a lot better and probably makes them a bit more digestible. Very classic, but let’s face it, with all this stuff, including the sauces: I’m not that good, and I’m kind of impatient. What I really wanted for supper was quick stuffed peppers, gooey on the inside but not so messy outside– so as to avoid wearing it. (A girl’s gotta know her limitations. Maybe next time, if I can find an oilcloth bib my size?)

I’m not so interested in long baking in tomato broth or soaking fresh walnuts in milk for the moment–maybe sometime when I want to get the whole dish together, because I’m sure it’s delicious, especially if someone else is making it and heating up their own kitchen in July. But right now, time is ticking, it’s nearly supper, and Beauty and the Beast are about to show up in the driveway (my husband is beautiful for taking on the Beast, even if he grumbles while doing it.)

So I’m definitely not about to char and peel the peppers–what a pain, plus to me it makes them kind of slimy and slithery and not what I want to eat. Unlike Tom Colicchio, who consistently makes a fuss about it on Top Chef, I don’t mind the fact that pepper skins have a little bitter alkaloid edge to them. It’s part of what makes them peppers, and it helps them keep their crunch.

And, of course, I’ve had the experience of walking into someone’s house when they’d just been charring peppers on the gas burner, and it smelled an awful lot like dope. Not lovely, and not at all like them.

So anyway, these are not proper chiles rellenos by any normal standard. They just taste good, they’re not slimy, and they don’t take more than 15 minutes tops. My kind of dish.

In addition to the usual feta and mozzarella, I still had a few half ears of leftover corn on the cob from my daughter’s birthday party last weekend. They were still good, but there weren’t enough to share out for supper, unless–well, corn and peppers also go together (usually as a soup, but why not here too?)

Aside: That was surprisingly one of the easiest celebration dinners I have ever put together in my life — pan-grilled salmon fillets, tomato/basil salad, raw vegetables with bleu cheese dip, and microwaved corn on the cob. I was going to make a cheesecake but decided at the last to buy a Trader Joe’s frozen one for expedience and served it with strawberries and blueberries. It was surprisingly good, inexpensive, and quite moderate on carbs and calories for commercial cheesecake. Of course, because my daughter’s friends are all about 11-13 years old, at least one couldn’t eat the corn due to braces but didn’t know how to shuck the kernels off with a knife, one immediately declared she wasn’t into vegetables (I was mellow enough to shrug and say it was fine), and one couldn’t hack cheesecake so I scrounged her up an impromptu dessert of chocolate bar and cinnamon grahams because we had literally nothing else in the house dessertwise. Oy. And they all stayed up till 4 am, but at least they were quiet and sneaky about it. My goals for a good sleepover.

So anyway, I had made 6 or 7 ears of corn, broken in halves, and steamed them in the microwave in a big pyrex bowl for about 8 minutes. The leftovers were fine reheated during the week with a drizzle of water on a plate in the microwave for 30 seconds or so. But I still had a couple and decided to use the kernels for the chile stuffing, and they were delicious.

Stuffed Anaheim Chiles with Cheese (specific amounts given for 3 chiles, because that’s what I made for us Friday and again on Sunday with new corn, so this actually works out, but you can and should scale up, obviously, and I wish I had made enough to serve them a second time without starting all over.)

Anaheim chiles, 1 or 2 per person
corn kernels (1 ear or about 1 c. kernels made enough for 3 chiles, generously stuffed)
feta cheese, crumbled (1-2 oz)
low-fat mozzarella, chopped fine (1 oz/stick)
finely chopped onion (1/4 med yellow onion)
garlic clove(s), grated/minced/mashed (1 med clove)
za’atar (wild thyme), thyme, oregano or sage, chopped or crumbled in if dry (to taste; I used 1 t. or so chopped fresh za’atar–do what looks and tastes right for your quantities)

Wash the chiles, cut off the cap and remove the seed core as best possible without splitting the flesh (rinse with water to get out the seeds way down inside). It’s not really a disaster if the pepper splits–just wrap it around the stuffing and press it together, more or less, but it looks prettier and handles better if you keep the pepper whole.

Microwave the peppers on an open plate 3-4 minutes to start them cooking. Mix all the other ingredients together well with your hands–it’ll be pretty moist and crumbly, but you want the garlic and onion well distributed. Cool the chiles just enough to handle. Stuff the chiles with the mixture by hand, pressing it in with your thumbs as you go to make sure some filling reaches the tip end. Microwave again on HIGH on an open plate 3-4 minutes for 3 chiles, arranged with the tips toward the middle of the plate and the wide stem end toward the outside, or maybe 5-6 minutes for 6, or until the peppers are getting tender and the cheese has melted.

Don’t forget to wash your hands well with soap after handling the chiles–I find that even though the Anaheims are mild-tasting, my fingers still get a little of the classic burning sensation as an aftereffect when I handle them.

Filed under: appetizers, books, cooking, Dairy, DASH Diet, frugality, Microwave tricks, Revised recipes, Vegetabalia | Tagged: Anaheim chiles, chiles rellenos, corn, Diana Kennedy, feta cheese, Mexican cooking, microwave cooking, stuffed peppers, vegetarian recipes | Comments Off on Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

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Little Green Footballs

…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

Coconut, minus the hype

Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

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Slow Food Fast

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

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Recent Posts

Contents

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Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

Little Green Footballs

…and Other Lessons from the Fillo Stratum

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Coconut, minus the hype

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Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

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Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

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About Slow Food Fast

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Pyrex Warning

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