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    raw blueberry pie with microwaveable filling and graham cracker crust

    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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  • SlowFoodFast sometimes addresses general public health topics related to nutrition, heart disease, blood pressure, and diabetes. Because this is a blog with a personal point of view, my health and food politics entries often include my opinions on the trends I see, and I try to be as blatant as possible about that. None of these articles should be construed as specific medical advice for an individual case. I do try to keep to findings from well-vetted research sources and large, well-controlled studies, and I try not to sensationalize the science (though if they actually come up with a real cure for Type I diabetes in the next couple of years, I'm gonna be dancing in the streets with a hat that would put Carmen Miranda to shame. Consider yourself warned).

American Grown (Groan?)

Posted on May 27, 2012 by DebbieN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…she WINS.”

See you at the movies!

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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: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Unappetizing: Nutrition “Awareness” on Top Chef