Slow Food Fast

Yeah, yeah, I know. Last month every newspaper and online health magazine was brimming with handy top-10 tips to avoid stuffing yourself into a coma when you got over the river and through the woods to your in-laws’. Did it work? Did you try any of them? Was it even possible with the food available? MMMmmmph.

And…now we’ve started on the next round of holiday parties. And yes, I’m well aware, after last week’s “let the fools have their tartar sauce” tax subversion bill, that the tenor of my questions could equally apply to trickle-down economics, neocon “efficient” remote war management in Iraq and Afghanistan, “I am not a crook,” “too big to fail,” “No Collusion,” “FAKE NEWS,” and other fantasy favorites.

I don’t want to add to the burden of public speculation on the kinds of people who could genuinely fall for those slogans or excuse them in the face of the visible harm they do to all of us (okay, MOST of us. 99.9 percent of us). I’ve met some of these true believers, a few are actually friends, and they are otherwise decent, but really, stubbornly naïve is the kindest thing I can say. Tunnel vision, perhaps.

But back to holiday food–an even more fraught social topic. Because the same stubborn naïveté applies.

The trouble with most of the dutifully published top-10s for navigating party fare is how incredibly vague and trivial they are. They don’t give you a plate plan diagram like the ones for DASH/MyPlate balanced meals and the Idaho Plate™-style recommendations for Type II diabetes management. They don’t help you set a reasonable goal number for carb grams for the total meal including desserts and appetizers, and they don’t help you estimate anything or give you some sample sizes to go by.

Instead, they put the burden on you (or your kid) to select and use the fictitious ideal of self-control (more accurately known as “winging it”) in an environment that, to put it mildly, probably won’t support it. Oh, dear. JUST like the tax boondoggle.

There is also a big, big missing ingredient for most of these party suggestions: vegetables of worth. People don’t cook as much as they used to, chain restaurants and drive-thrus don’t really serve them, and the big food mags have almost dropped them from any party spread that isn’t for summer.

If there aren’t greens on the table, how do you fill half your plate with them as recommended by doctors and CDEs and RDs everywhere? If there’s one green vegetable dish and it’s breaded, panko’ed, crusted, dressed, nutted, topped, creamed or cream sauced, gratinéed, gravied, stuffed, sweetened, pancetta’ed, buttered or cheesed (I know, some of that litany is starting to sound a little obscene, as it should) to within an inch of its life, is it still worthwhile counting it as a green? Or is it actually mostly yet another starch with cheese, cream, butter, breadcrumbs, bacon bits and so on?

If you need to cover up any dish that thoroughly, it should tell you something pretty important about the recipe:

It is not exactly a taste explosion.*

Sorry, I WAS trying to get away from the obvious political metaphor, but it looks like it’s going to stick. (*And my thanks to the much-mourned Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series–and more specifically another of his books, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, for that line).

In any case, to survive the holidays and look good doing it, you need a winter holiday table that works better and tastes fresher and is actually lighter than the usual stuff and won’t leave you wishing for a sleigh to schlep your stomach home in after the party.

You need vegetabalia, ungunked. Some actual greens (or purples) on the table to lighten the load and redress the balance.

Actually, vegetabalia has always been a key part of classic dinner parties and it would be a shame to forget it, especially when you’re in the heart of winter. I don’t think I actually have ten ideas here, because as you may have seen in my previous attempts at top-10 lists, I tend to go a little overboard. Let’s see.

One way to do it without too much shock is to make the starch dishes a little smaller and the greens platters a little bigger and more numerous, colored, varied and–this is actually important, at least for a party–pretty.

Another is to add a green salad worthy of a celebration–keep it simple, elegant, just a couple of key and colorful ingredients that go together, not like something you scooped out of your local chain restaurant salad bar. See the big box of salad post for some inexpensive and winter-worthy vegetable selections that are easy to prep and store in the fridge for showtime and won’t look like “rabbit food.”

The third is to provide appetizers that are bigger on vegetabalia, ones that get beyond celery sticks, baby-cut carrots and bottled ranch dressing and are actually appetizing.

…Of course, the key element for avoiding idiots who take one look and say, “Oh. Rabbit food.” is not to invite them in the first place. The second strategy is surprise (in a good way, that is, not as in “celery with marshmallow fluff!”)

Good-looking vegetable appetizers that won’t bore people aren’t necessarily more expensive, especially if you buy bulk vegetables and wash and cut them up yourself. And some can actually be easier to make, and make look impressive, than lining up all those crackers and cheese slices neatly on a circular tray (my bane, I just don’t have the hostess/catering gene). The bonus: if you’re the host, you won’t have a load of crackers and cheese sitting around the house the next day, and you might have some fresh noshing vegetables left over, ready to grab and go.

Here are a couple of more specific (forgotten?) ways to make vegetabalia rock, cold and hot.

Crudités (#4)

The “just wash and nosh” scheme for raw vegetables is pretty easy and can even be elegant for a raw vegetable tray. You don’t need fancy chef-school knife skills or fancy expensive knife sets to make the magic happen, either.

You don’t have to do a massive tray or a zillion different expensive designer raw vegetables–three or four types on a medium platter with some contrast and a good fresh dip make a nice party display. At between $1 and $5-6 (for heirloom, top-end stuff or for portobello mushrooms) per pound, most noshing vegetables are also cheaper than many chips-and-dips junk foods, designer breads, cheeses, sliced deli meats, and premade party platters of just about any kind.

Do get away from the tedious carrots-and-celery-sticks-and-ranch-dressing version, even if you are doing carrots and/or celery. Celery and carrots are still good, mind you, but you might want to grow them up a bit, cut them differently, add one or two less common dipping vegetables for variety and something fresher and more interesting than ranch dressing for a dip or spread.

Usually I’m against “fashion vegetables,” heirloom everything and bagged, prewashed/pretrimmed veg because of the price markup compared to bulk. But if you’ve got access to something a little extra in an unexpected color (purple is good, so is bright yellow), like purple cauliflower or multicolored peppers, you might want to go for it just once in limited amounts and mix them up with the regular vegetables.

And there are non-designer vegetables with enough mix of color and flavor to do the pretty at a slightly lower price point.

• Regular globe radishes are pretty bright and crunchy and eye-catching and peppery–lop off the thin root and most of the stem; wash them really well to get out any sand and keep them whole or slice them in half lengthwise. If you have a local farmer’s market that doesn’t slap on chichi markups in the price per pound, or you happen to see a bunch of longer or otherwise eye-catching radishes for about the same price in the produce section of your grocery store, go for it.
• Fancy variety pods like sugar snap peas and snow peas–even raw green beans–are a nice choice too. You can get bulk snap and snow peas for about $3/lb. at the Ralph’s/Kroger’s and fresh green beans are sometimes on sale between Thanksgiving and New Year’s for under $1/lb. but usually about $2/lb.
• Trader Joe’s sells 2-lb. bags of multicolored full-sized organic carrots for about $2 at this writing. White, deep purple with a gold core, bright yellow…pretty dramatic and they mix up nicely with the cheaper orange ones without being a lot more expensive.
• If you can get colored full-sized bell peppers, maybe get one or two, and choose colors other than green. Sliced lengthwise they go pretty far in brightening up a vegetable tray.

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Filed under: appetizers, DASH Diet, Dips, Eating out, holiday cooking, Vegetabalia | Tagged: food, healthy diet, holiday cooking, recipes, vegetarian | 2 Comments »