Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Black bean & roasted corn salad

I first made this salad when we were going to a pot luck and I'd waited til the last minute...the very last minute, one minute shy of "Just pick up something from the deli on the way." To make it my way requires access to a Trader Joe's, which is where I got each of the...elements. I hesitate to call them ingredients, and I hesitate to call this a recipe. It's much too easy.

You need:

A large can of black beans, rinsed and drained

A bag of frozen roasted corn, thawed under hot water (if you aren't trying to make this in under five minutes, thaw it ahead of time. And yes, roasted makes a difference. Man, that's good corn.)

A big tub of the mild salsa, the one with the diced fresh tomato, drained of most of the liquid (I think it's "party size," and it's the one sold in the refrigerated section.)

Roasted red pepper salad dressing (Come to think of it: this did not come from Trader Joe's. The one I use is Seeds of Change)

Mix all the beans, corn, salsa, and a bit of the dressing together in a big bowl.

I was honestly amazed by how many compliments I got on this salad the first time I made it, so of course it is now my go-to salad for potlucks. It's also versatile:

With chips, it is a hearty salsa.

For vegetarians, it can be a main dish (corn and beans, complete protein).

For lunch, wrap it in a tortilla.

For breakfast, use it as an omelette filling.

When you're sick of eating it (it does make a rather large batch), it makes a good rat treat.

Appetizer Meatballs with disconcerting sauce

I'm not sure how the subject of meatballs came up at work, but in the course of a meatball discussion, one of my co-workers said "You'll never believe what my mother used as a sauce for cocktail meatballs!"

I said "Grape jelly and chili sauce."

Her jaw drapped. She was amazed that anyone had ever heard of such a thing. "How did you know?" she asked.

"Because that's how you make cocktail sauce for meatballs," I said.

Actually, when I found out that my grandmother's meatballs, the ones we devoured at every party, were coated with grape jelly and chili sauce, I was a bit, well, disconcerted, too. But you can't argue with success, and a Crockpot of these babies were always a success.

Here, straight from the church cookbook, is my grandmother's recipe:

Click if you need it bigger.

Three Sisters Stew

Last Thanksgiving my mom gave me (vegetarian sympathizer that I am) the task of bringing to dinner something hearty enough that my visiting vegetarian cousin would still get a main dish. (My cousin, incidentally, insisted that we didn't need to go to any trouble, she'd eat whatever was around that wasn't meat., but my mom, the equally insistent hostess, wanted to make sure she got some protein.)

I found this "tradition vegetarian Thanksgiving" Three Sisters Stew. Now, I don't know if this is traditionally what vegetarians eat on Thanksgiving, or if it is really a traditional recipe, but the "three sisters" part really is a Native American tradition. According to an Oneida Indian Nation page:

Modern day agriculturists know it as the genius of the Indians, who interplanted pole beans and squash with corn, using the strength of the sturdy corn stalks to support the twining beans and the shade of the spreading squash vines to trap moisture for the growing crop. Research has further revealed the additional benefits of this "companion planting.'' The bacterial colonies on the bean roots capture nitrogen from the air, some of which is released into the soil to nourish the high nitrogen needs of the corn. To Native Americans, however, the meaning of the Three Sisters runs deep into the physical and spiritual well-being of their people. Known as the "sustainers of life," the Iroquois consider corn, beans and squash to be special gifts from the Creator. The well-being of each crop is believed to be protected by one of the Three Sister Spirits. Many an Indian legend has been woven around the "Three Sisters" -sisters who would never be apart from one another- sisters who should be planted together, eaten together and celebrated together.

I found many variations of the stew online, and came up with this adaptation:

Three Sisters Stew

Cut a 2-pound butternut squash in half and remove seeds. Put the halves cut-side up in a baking dish, add a little water, cover with foil and back for 40 minutes at 350 degrees. Cool, remove skin, and dice.

In a large, heavy pot:

Saute 1 chopped onion and 1 teaspoon of jarred minced garlic in 1 tablespoon of olive oil.

Add 1/2 a red pepper, seeded and cut into thin strips.

Add squash.

Add:
1 (15 oz.) can of pinto beans, drained
1 (15 oz.) can of corn, drained*
1 (4 oz.) can of chopped green chilies
1 (15 oz.) can of diced tomatoes, undrained
1 cup of vegetable stock
2 teaspoons of oregano
1 teaspoon (and maybe more) of ground cumin

Simmer for a couple of hours, adding more cumin and salt and pepper to taste.

Just before serving, add two tablespoons of fresh cilantro. (I just held the cilantro over the pot and cut off little pieces of leaves with the kitchen shears.)

Like so many stews, this improved by sitting overnight and being reheated the next day.

*Better, if you can find it, is the equivalent amount of frozen roasted corn. Trader Joe's sells it, but I haven't seen it in other grocery store. I suppose if you are truly ambitious you can find actual fresh corn and roast it yourself, but if you are like that you probably clicked away from this page as soon as you saw the jarred garlic.

Not only did this pass with the vegetarian, but my dad and my brother-in-law (the two family members least understanding of the vegetarian concept) both liked it too...though not in place of the turkey.

And since Thanksgiving isn't Thanksgiving without leftovers, the leftover stew made a lovely enchilada filling.

Recipe roulette

Victor gave me a page number to try in one of my church cookbooks. It wasn't the "Aunt Millie's Tuna Surprise with Peanut Butter Sauce" anticipated by Ted, but the recipe, a chicken casserole, looked a touch bland.

It also looked a touch familiar...a similar recipe (with a few more flavor-enhancing ingredients, like onion and pepper) is in my first church cookbook. That one was submitted by one of my grandma's neighbors (Grandma gave me the cookbook), and I used to make it on occasion.

Since it's my game, I'm changing the rules. Instead of the version on page 99, I'm making this one: Hot Chicken (or Turkey) Casserole.

Actually, I lied. I changed the rules one more time, because I'm generally not eating meat. I'm making it with tuna fish instead. (This is one reason I'm not a vegetarian...I can kick cheeseburgers, but not tuna fish.)

Oh, and the original page 99 recipe was the one at the bottom of this page, minus the pimento.

Chocolate zucchini bread

Once again this year I pretty much lost my squash and cucumbers to the dreaded Diabrotica undecimpuctata howardi and and Acalymma vittatum: cucumber beetles, spotten and striped. At this point I'm guessing the bugs are overwintering in my yard, so switching pots and using new soil, not to mention the pyrethrins, ain't gonna help. Next year I'm going to move the whole garden to my parents' yard.

But back to this year...yesterday afternoon I decided to clear out the jungle of unproductive vines that had pretty much taken over my backyard, especially following that 24 feet of rain or whatever it was we got last week. The dog was starting to be afraid to go out at night. As I hacked away at the growth, I found one single zucchini vine that the beetles missed, and on it, two zucchini. One was normal-sized, and we had that with dinner. The other should have been picked some time ago, and it was bigger than my forearm:

Since the centers on overgrown squash tend to be kinda seedy and stringy, I figured I'd chop this up and just use the good part. I've also been craving chocolate (stay out of my way next week), so when I found this recipe for chocolate chip zucchini bread (scroll down, it's the second recipe of four) I knew I had a solution.

It looked a little healthier than most chocolate zucchini breads, what with the apple sauce, and I threw in a cup of chopped walnut too. I also went slightly light on the sugar, a good move. The bread came out nice and chocolatey and sufficiently moist.

One for today, one for tomorrow.

I love summer

Tonight's dinner:

Pasta with pesto from the basil in my back yard, zucchini from my mom's garden, and tomato from a local farm.

Even better, the farm has blue- and blackberries. The blackberries were so sweet they almost didn't make it home to be dessert.

(This might look familiar, as I found out when I tried to upload the picture and saw the "berryshortcake.jpg already exists" message. Same farm. Same idea. I do need a new tablecloth, though.)

Hungry yet? Head over to One Happy Dog Speaks for this week's...make that last week's...Carnival of Recipes.

Mock Hollandaise Sauce

Last week, Victor made Eggs Benedict with real hollandaise sauce. He is really picky about that sauce...everytime I order Eggs Benedict out, he tastes the sauce and haughtily proclaims it inferior (or sometimes something unprintable).

Me, I'm a lot less picky. We ate at one diner where they didn't even bother with hollandaise...the sauce was definitely cheese. He was appalled. I said "Mmmmm, cheese."

Now, it probably goes without saying that there's no way I'm making hollandaise sauce Victor's way...it goes against every fiber of my being to produce that many dirty dishes and take that much time and effort for a freakin' condiment. (Hell, I don't want to put that much effort into an entire dinner.)

I do recall that years ago I occasionally made a sauce that I found in my Better Homes and Garden* cookbook: Mock hollandaise.

(Which makes me think of "Once," said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, "I was a real Turtle.")

Anyway, I decided to try out the mock hollandaise on Victor...not expecting to fool him, more to see just how horrified he would be.

In a small saucepan, combine 1/4 cup dairy sour cream, 1/4 cup mayonnaise or salad dressing, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, and 1/2 teaspoon prepared mustard. Cook and stir over low heat until hot.

Tasting it with the memory of Victor's sauce still fresh, I had to admit...this one tastes like warm mayonnaise. I added a bit more mustard, then a dash of salt and white pepper. In the end it was a little paler and a little thicker than the real thing:

...but it wasn't half-bad. And it didn't mess up the kitchen.

Oh, and the chef's review? "Better than that [stuff] you've been getting in restaurants."

*Actually the 10th edition, which is the one I got when I got married. I do have the 12th, and also a 1965 printing of the "revised" original that belonged to my grandmother. Collecting the various editions of cookbook standards has become a very space-consuming hobby of mine.

Happy Father's Day/Phenomenally easy banana bread

The Father's Day menu was Dad's London broil.

We also picked up a couple of pints of fresh strawberries at a farm on the way home from the ride yesterday. Fresh strawberries would be a really good dessert for the London broil, but my dad doesn't eat strawberries...something about the time when he was a kid and ate a couple of pints all by himself, then broke out in huge hives.

After I got home yesterday I realized that two pints may have been a bit overdoing it. As it happened, though, I had a couple of overripe bananas from last week, so I chopped a bunch of the strawberries for inclusion into my phenomenally easy banana bread.

I know banana bread is a quick bread, and phenomenally simple to make. I still had to simplify it further, though, because that is how phenomenally lazy I am. I have it narrowed down to one measuring cup and five ingredients:

2 overly-ripe bananas
1 1/2 cups Bisquick
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup applesauce, pureed plum, or oil
2 eggs or 1/2 cup of egg substitute

(The trick with the one measuring cup is to only use the 1/4 cup. Of course, that means six scoops of Bisquick and three of sugar, but you only need to wash one thing. That makes it feel easier to me, anyway.)

In a large bowl, mash the bananas a bit with a fork.

Dump in everything else.

(You know those recipes where you sift dry ingredients in one bowl, and mix wet ingredients in another, a dirty yet a third bowl putting them together? I have no patience for such recipes.)

If your fork is substantial enough, you can even use that to mix everything together...why get a spoon dirty too?

Now, you can add cinnamon, or cloves, or nutmeg, or whatever spices you like, but I have found that it isn't necessary. The bread tastes like bananas without them. 'Tis a gift to be simple, y'know?

On the other hand, you can also add a handful of nuts, raisins, blueberries, chocolate chips, or (say you went a bit overboard at a farm at then end of strawberry season) chopped strawberries.

Pour into a greased loaf pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 55 minutes, or make muffins (about 15 minutes at 400 degrees.) Use the insert-toothpick method of testing for doneness...an under-baked banana bread makes a heckuva mess when inverted from a loaf pan. (Not that I'm admitting anything by saying that.)

I whipped up a batch of the muffins while I was waiting for the Bordelaise sauce to reduce, and now I have breakfast for the week.

Pea & Ranch Dressing Salad

I mentioned the other day that I was having an odd pea-ranch dressing craving. I gave into it with the first dish made in the new kitchen.

I really did consider just tossing peas with ranch dressing, but I wanted something a bit more substantial, so I expanded it into a pasta salad:

2 cups of pasta, cooked (I had switched from regular pasta to whole wheat for the various health benefits, but I admit that for some things, the wheat pasta just isn't right. My sister got me to try Barilla PLUS, which she got for my low-carb father...it tastes like regular pasta, but it's higher in fiber and protein, and it's enriched with omega-3 fatty acids. I am impressed. End of unsolicted commercial.)

Frozen peas, thawed (I used about half a bag. Since peas were half my craving, I went rather heavy on the peas.)

Two scallions, finely sliced

One large carrot, diced (to about the size of a pea)

Celery (chopped to about the size of a pea...you get the idea...and about the same amount of celery as carrot. I think it was two ribs.)

One smallish sweet pepper (diced, etc. I used yellow for the color contrast.)

Swiss cheese (diced, etc.)

Mix it all in a large bowl with enough ranch dressing to coat everything nicely.

Just as I was about to chill it, I realized I hadn't seasoned it at all. The first bottle I saw when I opened the new cabinet was Mrs. Dash, and I figured, what the hell, it's a blend...one stop shop. So I added several shakes of Mrs. Dash, stired it again, and chilled it for a few hours. Just before serving, I sprinkled it with sliced almonds.

We had it for dinner Sunday night (with garden burgers and sweet potato oven fries), I've been eating the leftovers for lunch this week, and I'm still pleased. And the pea & ranch dressing craving is sated.

If I were in a meat-eating mood, I'd add diced ham or bacon.

Mother's Day Burrito Brunch

Mother's Day brunch was a success. I had seen a recipe in the May Vegetarian Times for "breakfast burritos" from Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast, so I gave it a try. (I found a variation on the VT recipe here; scroll down toward the bottom of the page. Then scroll back up; all of these look very good. Bookmark!)

Here is how I made it:

Coarsely chop:
1 small onion
one red bell pepper
1/2 green bell pepper (using up leftovers)
about 6 oz. of while mushrooms (using up more leftovers)
and saute in olive oil.
Add 1 t of minced garlic (jarred...I think that's about 3 cloves fresh.)

Stir in
10 oz. box of frozen chopped spinach, thawed
2 T fresh dill
Hot sauce (I used about a teaspoon of Iguana Mean Green, which is a jalapeno base.)

Cover and cook until heated through.

Remove from heat and stir in 3/4 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese.

Spoon about 1/3 c of the mixture into 8" flour tortilla, roll tightly, and place in greased 9x13" baking dish. (I got seven tortillas in the dish. Six might have been better; I'll explain later.)

Whisk together:
4 eggs
2 c milk
1 T flour
1 t dry mustard

Pour over tortillas, cover dish with foil, refrigerate overnight.

Bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until eggs are set. Sprinkle with 1 c shredded cheese and bake 15 minutes more.

(Because I stuffed the pan with seven rolled tortillas, they stuck up over the egg. Next time I'll either leave it at six tortillas or increase the eggs and milk. It wasn't a problem, but I think the presentation would have been a bit nicer.)

Serve with salsa and guacamole. (The original recipe said sour cream, but why use sour cream when guacamole is available?)

Mom liked it, which was the important thing. And she also liked her present: tickets to see that Nats play the Marlins on June 4. (I heard a commercial that said moms like diamonds...)

Carnival of Recipes

The Carnival of Recipes is up at Technogypsy. Good food, pretty pictures (especially the Ukrainian Easter egg...those have always amazed me), and interesting stories about Russian Orthodox Lent and Easter.

Once again, you don't need to cook to enjoy the post!

When live gives you lemons avocados, make guacamole

The radio thing really did bum me out last night, but I had a happy discovery, too. There's a new Mexican restaurant near us, and they have fabulous guacamole. Incredible guacamole. I could have happily made the entire meal out of guacamole (using a spoon so as not to fill up on chips).

The rest of dinner was nice, too, but oh that guacamole.

Of course, it ought to be hard to make bad guacamole. Even if all you do is mash up some avocados, the result should be good, because avocados are the world's perfect food.

But I dunno, maybe you can make a bad guacamole, if you follow this recipe from a 1965 Better Homes & Gardens cookbook:

Combine 1 cup mashed ripe avocado (2 avocados), 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 tablespoon grated onion, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon chili powder.

Now if you stop right there, it sounds fine. Here's where it goes wrong:

Spread top with 1/3 cup of mayonnaise or salad dressing

Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!

(I have also seen recipes from old cookbooks with avocado and french dressing. I'm hoping "french dressing" was something besides that orange crap I'm imagining.)

It goes on to have you stir in the mayonnaise and add bacon, so I'm just stopping right here.

Interestingly, things were more civilized in 1930, when the Boston Cooking School recommended this for how to serve "Alligator Pears":

Cut in two, remove stones, and sprinkle with salt and lemon juice.

Happy birthday Twinkies

Seventy-five years of Twinkies.

I'm not a huge Twinkie fan, though I remember rolling on the floor over the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project back in the day. (I also used to watch a web cam of a coffee pot, what can I say. It was a novelty.)

I have also used Twinkies as an emergency substitute for those cup-shaped sponge cake things when strawberries were in season, but I see from the recipes on the Twinkie page that that's nothing. Check out the Twinkie sushi.

Last minute Easter dinner

I knew when I started seriously considering a kitchen renovation that I'd have some time with an inaccessible kitchen. I wasn't particularly worried. We have restaurants. Restaurants have coupons. It will only be a few days.

I talked to a kitchen planner on Friday, and he pointed out something that I hadn't considered...to make a Corian counter, you need to have the cabinets in place for the template, then you need to wait for the actual fabrication. So my time without counter, and sink, and dishwasher, will be more accurately measured in weeks, not days.

As it happens, my mom is re-doing her kitchen right now, though on a smaller scale and doing much more of the work herself. She mentioned to me Friday night that because she's packed up all her cooking stuff, she wasn't making Easter dinner.

Last week I was still in the recovery stage of that stomach flu, and I was following the doctor-recommended "low residue" diet. "Low residue" means "nothing I normally eat." Instead of whole grains, I was allowed white bread, pasta, and rice. Instead of fresh vegetables and salad I could eat soft canned vegetables and fruit cocktail. Thursday I looked at my plate...meatballs in gravy over egg noodles with canned peas and canned carrots...and said "Dinner, circa 1955." I was dying for real food.

Saturday night I declared myself healed and decided I could make Easter dinner, so I invited my parents and then went shopping. I had not thought this through. Easter is...whatever the grocery stores have displayed in abundance. I grabbed a ham, and recalled Victor's grandmother telling me years ago that the easiest way to cook a ham is to put it in a Crock Pot and pour a Pepsi over it. I added asparagus and carrots (fresh!) and cauliflower with cheese sauce (frozen, because I could only steam two vegetables at a time anyway.)

I love to dye eggs. When we were kids, we used to dye three or four dozen, then we'd dye napkins and whatever else we could get our hands on before mom threw the dye away. We made our dye with food coloring, not those crappy little dried pellets, and one of the color suggestions on the box of food coloring was "toast." I loved that color, although really it just looked like brown eggs. That in mind, and because I was getting a late start, I got some brown eggs and hard boiled them. A few cracked, so I made them them into deviled eggs.

My dad's still supposed to watch his sugar intake (pre-diabetic), so I got a box of Splenda brownie mix and made it with a can of black beans. (It sounds revolting, but it makes remarkably good brownies. Puree the beans in a blender, blend in the mix, pur it in a pan, and bake.)

My mom brought That Fruit Salad with Those Little Marshmallows and pinot noir. We also had a box of Peeps that somehow never got opened. Dinner, last-minute though it was, was a complete success, and I was able to get my parents to invite us over for dinner with them when I lose my kitchen sink.

TGIF

On the way to work today I had a burning compulsion to pull into the diner and spend the day there, drinking coffee and reading the paper, instead of going to the office. I should listen to my burning compulsions...at the office I ended up with a three week project due in two weeks. And I got this assignment during a lunchtime meeting, which impaired my reading of the Carnival of the Recipes #29.

So I've not followed all the links yet, but you know I just couldn't pass by lazy pierogi! I mean, what are the chances, lazy pierogi the same week I made lazy golabki? Soulmates, as Be points out. Wow.

The casserole princess rides again

Tonight's casserole is a take on one of my favorite appetizers, spinach-artichoke dip.

I guess I could just eat a boatload of spinach-artichoke dip for dinner, but somehow a casserole seems more respectable. (A bit dowdy, perhaps, but respectable.)

2 cups of pasta (I like a short, twisty kind), cooked and drained
1 onion and 1 clove of garlic, chopped and sauted
10 ounces (1 box) of frozen spinach, thawed and drained
14 ounces (1 can) of artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
10 ounces (1 tub) of Alfredo sauce (the refrigerated kind)
White cheese...Mozzarella , Parmesan, Reggiano, Monterey Jack...you get the idea

The easiest way to mix this is to toss the pasta through the sauce in a big bowl, put on gloves, and mix it up with your hands. Then layer the mixture in a baking or casserole dish with the cheeses of your choice, ending with a layer of cheese.

Bake until hot. Casserole recipes almost always say 350 degrees for 45 minutes, but since I usually make the actual casseroles a few days ahead refrigerate them, it's usually more like 375 for an hour.

Casserole Princess

My mom and my uncles used to call my grandmother "the casserole queen." I don't think they meant it entirely as a compliment. I, however, think casseroles are nearly the perfect food (the sandwich, of course, being the perfect food)...all your food groups...or what we used to consider the food groups...in one dish, and one you can make ahead and bake later.

I try to make one or two every weekend, because it makes work night dinners so much easier. I am nothing if not lazy.

And speaking of lazy...I really like golabki (Polish stuffed cabbage), but stuffing cabbage leaves is a pain. At least I think it's a pain; the hot cabbage leaves burn. You can probably guess where I'm going with this:

Golabki casserole (unstuffed cabbage...meat or vegetarian)

About 3/4 pound of ground beef or mushrooms (cremini, which I think are the same as "baby" portobellos)
Olive oil
One onion, chopped
One clove of garlic, minced
1 cup of cooked rice (I prefer brown rice)
1 can of condensed tomato soup
~1 teaspoon each of oregano and basil
~1/2 teaspoon thyme
Salt and pepper
Shredded cabbage (I use a bag of cole slaw mix...you need a bit less than a pound)

Brown and drain the ground beef, or, if you're doing the vegetarian version, chop up the mushrooms.

Saute the onion and garlic in olive oil until soft, then add the meat or mushrooms. (If you happen to have a nearly empty bottle of red wine sitting next to the stove, throw in a splash.) Cook until the mushrooms have softened. Mix in rice, seasonings, and soup.

Let that simmer while you spray a casserole or baking dish with cooking spray (makes cleanup easier), then put the cabbage in the dish. In a 9 x 9 baking dish, I fill it about 3/4 with cabbage. Pour the meat/mushroon/rice/soup mix on top, cover, and bake at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes.

Serve with pierogis.

Friday equals...

Carnival of the Recipes!

I remembered!

Ok, it was easier this week because Rocket Jones is my first blog stop of the day. Ted does a space theme, which reminds me that I loved grape Tang, I used to eat what I'm pretty sure were Space Sticks, and somewhere I have a package of chicken teriyaki from a space shuttle flight. (It's a condensed dried thing in plastic with a spot of velcro on the back.)

The carnival entries sound much better. Well, except for Victor's Soylent Green.

It's soup

Before Victor moved in, I wasn't big on soup. I pretty much only ate it if I was sick. Two of his soups changed my mind, a cream of broccoli with cheese and this minestrone:

Victor's Minestrone

Meatballs:
10 oz frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained
1 1/2 pounds ground beef
1/3 cup breadcrumbs
1 egg
Salt and pepper

Mix ingredients and form meatballs. Bake on a broiler pan (to let grease drain off) until cooked.

Soup:
1 onion, coarsely chopped
1 cup chopped carrot
1 cup chopped celery
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon basil
4 cans (14 1/2 oz each) beef broth
1 lb. can crushed tomatoes (drain)
1 lb. can kidney beans (drain)
1 cup elbow macaroni, cooked and drained
Olive oil

In a large pot, saute onion, celery, carrot, oregano, and basil in olive oil. Add beef broth, tomatoes, and beans; simmer for about an hour. Add macaroni. Garnish with shredded parmesan cheese if desired.

UPDATE to add: Doh! The meatballs. Put them in with the macaroni. You don't want to miss the meatballs; in fact, they are good by themselves, and they're a good way to sneak some spinach by vegetable-hating picky eaters.

As you can see, this is a good hearty soup. And it has pretty much been the basis for the soups I've made...lots of vegetables, beans, and pasta. As I've switched over from eating meat, I frequently make a vegetarian version. When I'm really busy, I cut every corner and dump everything in the Crock Pot:

A bag or two of frozen mixed vegetables
A big can of tomatoes with juice
A can or two of beans (usually red kidney and garbanzo)
Vegetable broth (preferrably the roasted vegetable, which has more flavor)
Several shakes of Italian or pizza seasoning (it came with the spice rack; might as well use it!)

About half and hour before eating, add

Soy crumbles or Trader Joe's meatless meatballs, if I have them (if I'm going to use fake meat I'll only use one can of beans)
Dried pasta (elbow macaroni, penne, farfalle, the little wagon-wheelish-looking ones)

Tonight I gave it a Mexican rather than Italian slant, using salsa instead of canned tomato, pinto instead of kidney beans, and roasted corn. I also left out the pasta. According to Victor, without the pasta it isn't minestrone. A quick Google search did not confirm this: one source (I failed to bookmark, so no citations) said that minestrone never contains meat, another said it contains vegetables and pasta or beans or rice. Another said that minestrone is synonymous with "a mix of things." Whatever...it's soup.

I didn't forget the super foods

I've been busy with crap at work (bad) and playing with my new toy (a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 with a gig of RAM and a 250 GB hard drive just begging to be filled up with digital pictures of waterfowl...good). I haven't forgotten the super food project, though. In fact, I picked up a copy of SuperFoods Rx, the book by ophthalmologist Steven Pratt that I think coined the "super food" phrase.

(I thought the fact that Pratt is an ophthalmologist was a little funny at first, but he actually makes the point that some effects of poor diet show up in the skin and eyes before somebody ends up with cancer or having a stroke.)

Anyway...good book. I saw several of the studies I was finding doing my literature searches cited, which made me feel good about my ability to navigate the National Library of Medicine. It was scholarly and scientific enough to convince me that the advice is sound, but it was also quite accessible. This is one (along with Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy and Nutrition for Women) that I'll lend to people who aren't as geeky as I, like my mom or my grandma.

Anyway, since Dr. Pratt wrote a perfectly good book, I'll not bother with full summaries of the rest of the foods...if you are dying to read about them and can't find a copy at the libray, e-mail me and I'll send you mine. But I will finish the list (from the SuperFoods Rx web page; with a few edits of my own)

• Beans – lower cholesterol, combat heat disease, stabilize blood sugar, reduce obesity, relieve hypertension and lessen the risk of cancer.
• Broccoli – boosts the immune system, lowers the incidence of cataracts, supports cardiovascular health, builds bones and fights birth defects.
• Oats – lower cholesterol, reduce the risk of coronary heart disease & Type II diabetes, high in fiber and protein.
• Oranges – support heart health and prevent cancer, stroke, diabetes and a host of chronic ailments.
• Pumpkin – helps lower the risk of various cancers (lung, colon, bladder, cervical, skin, and breast) and supplies nutrients necessary for healthy, youthful skin.
• Wild Salmon - lowers the risk of heart disease and cancer.
• Soy – helps prevent cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis, and helps relieve menopausal and menstrual symptoms.
• Spinach – decreases the chance of cardiovascular diseases, a host of cancers, age-related macular degeneration and cataracts.
• Tomatoes – lower the likelihood of cancer, raise the skin’s sun protection factor and seem to play a role in preventing cataracts and age-related macular degeneration.
• Turkey – a healthy protein source, extremely low in fat, and provides multiple nutrients which help build a strong immune system.
• Walnuts – reduce the risk of developing coronary heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
• Yogurt – promotes strong bones and a healthy heart, another health promoting protein source, a great source of calcium, probiotics promote GI health.

And I already covered tea and blueberries.

Really, the bottom line of the recommendations in SuperFoods Rx isn't that different from most of the other nutrition books I've read, or from the new USDA guidelines. The only reason I keep reading this stuff is that every few months, when I'm sick of cooking and backsliding into carryout, I need a kick in the pants.

But I'm not drinking that nasty tea.

Blueberries

When I was a kid, I wouldn't eat vegetables. My concerned mother asked the pediatrician what to do; he, unconcerned, told her to give me a multivitamin. That's what we learned about food then too...it was how you got your vitamins and minerals. (And carbohydrates made you fat. I laugh about that as a current [if fading now] fad, because I remember my mom using bread with slices as thin as paper when she was on diets in the '70's.)

I've come to terms with the fact that things I learned in school are no longer true, or at least not the whole truth.

Current research indicates that there's more to an orange than vitamin C, and that chewable cartoon characters probably aren't a reliable substitute for a good salad. Phytonutrients or phytochemicals in plants supply significant benefits. (The USDA has a good phytonutrient FAQ; I was going to write something, but why reinvent the wheel?)

So for this super food thing...what makes these foods super, as opposed to just healthy, is that they are particularly good sources of a compound or compounds that appear to have some specific benefits. From what I'm reading, this makes quite a bit of sense.

Take blueberries. They've been hailed as nutritional wonders for several years; I have a pamphlet from the North Carolina Blueberry Council (picked up at a highway rest stop in 2002) that says "This colorful treat deserves a blue ribbon for nutrition." But I prefer my nutritional information from more scientifically-based sources. The evidence suggests (and I'm being lazy today and working from a database I get through work, so I'm not citing a bunch of actual papers) that blueberries:

-prevent eye disease (macular degeneration, cataracts, glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy) and varicose veins.
-are possibily effective for treating hemorrhoids and reducing platelet aggregation.
-have animal or in vitro data supporting their use as an anti-inflammatory, in cancer, and to lower cholesterol.

Blueberries may also help keep you sharp as you get old, particularly if you are a rat. (I saw this in several studies, but just as an example: Reversals of Age-Related Declines in Neuronal Signal Transduction, Cognitive, and Motor Behavioral Deficits with Blueberry, Spinach, or Strawberry Dietary Supplementation).

Funny thing about keeping rats, you really can observe the changes as they age, because in a 2-3 year lifespan, it happens pretty fast. (One of the reasons they make good lab models, actually.) And I want these guys moving and thinking as long as possible. So...

...they get their blueberries.

Tea time

(I originally started with a disclaimer, but it got long, so I stuck it in the extended entry below.)

The first super food I'm looking at is actually a drink: tea.

(I can't stand tea. I wish I liked it. I like the ritual, the little pots, dunking the tea bags...but yuck. And I found out Down South that anyone who doesn't like "cold ice tea" is regarded with great suspicion.)

Tea is made from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant; steamed leaves are used for green tea and the leaves that are oxidized are black tea. I've seen it called the most widely used beverage in the world (although I suspect water ranks higher), and one of the things that has caught the interest of researchers is that areas of the world with high green tea consumption (like China and Japan) have lower rates of cancer than are seen in the west.

This brings us to some epidemiologic studies. For example (and I pulled these from a PubMed search):

Green tea consumption enhances survival of epithelial ovarian cancer.

Our study investigates whether tea consumption can enhance the survival of patients with epithelial ovarian cancer, a prospective cohort study was conducted in Hangzhou, China. ...

We conclude that increasing the consumption of green tea post-diagnosis may enhance epithelial ovarian cancer survival.

Zhang M, Lee AH, Binns CW, Xie X. (2004)

and from 1997:

Green tea consumption and the risk of pancreatic and colorectal cancers.

An inverse association with each cancer was observed with increasing amount of green tea consumption, with the strongest trends for rectal and pancreatic cancers. For men, compared with non-regular tea drinkers, ORs among those in the highest tea consumption category (> or = 300 g/month) were 0.82 for colon cancer, 0.72 for rectal cancer and 0.63 for pancreatic cancer, with p values for trend being 0.38, 0.04 and 0.04, respectively. For women, the respective ORs for the highest consumption category (> or = 200 g/month) were 0.67, 0.57 and 0.53, with the respective p values for trend being 0.07, 0.001 and 0.008. Our findings provide further evidence that green tea drinking may lower the risk of colorectal and pancreatic cancers.

Ji BT, Chow WH, Hsing AW, McLaughlin JK, Dai Q, Gao YT, Blot WJ, Fraumeni JF Jr.

and

Tea consumption and the reduced risk of colon cancer -- results from a national prospective cohort study.

This study examines the relationship between tea consumption and colon cancer risk in the US population. ...

This study suggests an inverse association between colon cancer risk and habitual tea consumption.

Su LJ, Arab L. (2002)

But you can also find

Tea consumption and risk of bladder and kidney cancers in a population-based case-control study.

This study offers only minimal support for an inverse association between tea consumption and bladder or kidney cancer risk.

Bianchi GD, Cerhan JR, Parker AS, Putnam SD, See WA, Lynch CF, Cantor KP. (2000)

and

Consumption of black tea and cancer risk: a prospective cohort study.

This investigation does not support the hypothesis that consumption of black tea protects against four of the major cancers in humans; a cancer-enhancing effect was not evident, either.

Goldbohm RA, Hertog MG, Brants HA, van Poppel G, van den Brandt PA. (1996)

So there you have it: tea may protect against cancer. Or not.

I work with chemists, so I know there's more to tea than tea. For example, there's this polyphenol in tea, epigallocatechin-3-gallate (called EGCG for short), that has been examined on its own, away from the "How many cups of tea did you drink a day when you were smoking cigarettes after you'd been diagnosed with cancer?" studies. Looking at people is great, but how about what goes on in vitro?

Treatment of epigallocatechin-3-gallate inhibits matrix metalloproteinases-2 and -9 via inhibition of activation of mitogen-activated protein kinases, c-jun and NF-kappaB in human prostate carcinoma DU-145 cells

The inhibition of MMP-2 and MMP-9 in DU145 cells by EGCG is mediated via inhibition of phosphorylation of ERK1/2 and p38 pathways, and inhibition of activation of transcription factors c-jun and NF-kappaB. EGCG may play a role in prevention of invasive metastatic processes of both androgen-dependent and -independent prostate carcinoma.

Vayalil PK, Katiyar SK (2004)

Okay, I'm not going to pretend that I actually know what that means. Here's my extemely basic version of the gist of it and similar studies:

You take cancer cells and stick them on a petri dish where they keep growing. If you add this chemical, EGCG, the cells stop growing. Ergo...maybe having lots of EGCG in your body stops cancer cells from getting out of hand and that's why people who drink lots of tea don't die of cancer.

(In between the studies of humans and the studies in glass there are animal studies...rats, mice, and hamsters either being fed tea or getting shots of EGCG. The results seem to be pretty much the same, so I won't quote any more here.)

There are actually a bunch of chemicals in tea (epigallocatechin, Pheophytins A and B, catechin, et al) that may affect the body. Some studies are looking at anti-inflammatory action that may be good for the cardiovascular system. Something in tea may kill bacteria that builds up in the mouth, so tea drinkers have fewer cavities.

So it looks like tea may actually be pretty good for you.

I'd drink it all the time...if it didn't taste so nasty.

Here's my "super food" post disclaimer (or why you shouldn't believe anything I say anyway.):

There are a lot of reasons why (to use the article I cited yesterday as an example) "Oleic acid, the main monounsaturated fatty acid of olive oil, suppresses Her-2/neu (erbB-2) expression and synergistically enhances the growth inhibitory effects of trastuzumab (HerceptinTM) in breast cancer cells with Her-2/neu oncogene amplification" becomes Olive oil 'is cancer key' when it hits the newspaper.

There is a risk that the scientific studies as presented in the popular press end up over-simplified, and with conclusions drawn that were never meant to be drawn. Reporters usually aren't scientitists, and often scientists aren't spectacular at dumbing things down enough for lay people. You can lose some subtle but significant nuance in the process. (Science communication was actually my area of study in school, but I'm certainly not great at it. All it really got me was an appreciation for how tricky it is.)

So when reading about the findings of health studies, one should not just leap at the diet fad of the month. One of the best guides to interpreting studies I've read is in Walter Willett's Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. I'd quote from it, but I can't find my copy. (Probably because I lent it to somebody...I've pressed this book on lots of people, because I think it is very good.)

Anyway...as I've started reading up on the super foods, I'm finding lots of specific studies cited, and I'll probably end up citing them too, especially when I can get my hands on the actual papers. Essentially I'm reading this stuff from two angles...I'm reliving my science reporter days, and I'm trying to decide what to have for lunch. But I am not trying to come across like an expert, nor am I telling anyone else what to eat, and I apologize in advance if I sound like I am.

Super foods

I am such a geek that I was excited about today's release of the new Dietary Guidelines. I was actually checking the site over and over all morning, hoping they'd be posted before the press conference...and if it weren't for our firewall, I'd have watched the press conference. That is pretty damn geeky.

And the thing is, I knew what the guidelines were going to say:

Consume a variety of nutrient-dense foods and beverages within and among the basic food groups while choosing foods that limit the intake of saturated and trans fats, cholesterol, added sugars, salt, and alcohol.

and

Engage in regular physical activity and reduce sedentary activities to promote health, psychological well-being, and a healthy body weight.

So I don't know why I was so excited. More interesting was the news that researchers have figured out that oleic acid is the component of olive oil that seems to protect against tumors. (You can read the entire journal article, in fact, to see how, if you understand things like "Oleic acid, the main monounsaturated fatty acid of olive oil, suppresses Her-2/neu (erbB-2) expression and synergistically enhances the growth inhibitory effects of trastuzumab (HerceptinTM) in breast cancer cells with Her-2/neu oncogene amplification." Which I don't. But I think it is very generous of the journals to allow free access to articles like this, which have very widespead public interest.)

Anyway, my basic understanding is that the oleic acid suppresses the activity of a gene that is associated with aggressive breast tumors. The fact that food is really just a collection of chemicals and that we are walking-around reactor vessels is, well, cool. (I said I was a geek!) And that chemical reaction thing leads me to think about so-called "super foods."

(Does anyone else remember a tv commercial with Homer Simpson explaining the "so-called sooooooper donut"?)

Anyway, over the last few months, I think every magazine I read has had an article on super foods, foods that are expected to have health benefits beyond their mere known nutrient composition.

And this is a really long set-up for a coming attraction...I'm going to look into this sooooooper food thing, because it will give me something to blog about (and maybe some dinners.)

And it's either that or more rat pictures.

Dad's London Broil

I'm not sure how we started this low-key New Year's Eve tradition, but not being the party types, Victor and I are headed over to my parents' for dinner and some Trivial Pursuit. We're making dinner, actually, a london broil that my dad loves.

Dad's London Broil and Bordelaise Sauce

First get your appropriate hunk of meat...I think I have top sirloin tonight; I know I have used flank steak in the past. Put the meat in a ziplock bag and marinate it overnight in cheap French salad dressing. Really, get a bottle of the generic orange stuff, the kind that is nothing but oil, high fructose corn syrup, and red dye #2.* The sugar will carmelize as the meat cooks, giving the outside a nice crispiness.

I can't take credit for knowing this. Victor picked it up in a restaurant where he worked. Speaking of Victor, this is a meat best cooked on the grill, so he'll be doing that tonight. Frankly, even if it is "unseasonably warm," 40 degrees is a temperature at which I cook inside.

For the sauce:

Finely chop a shallot (As fine as you can...the sucker I chopped today was stronger than an onion, and I couldn't see very well through the tears. I'm lucky I didn't finely chop my thumb.) and saute in a little olive oil. Oh, do this in a saucepan...it is a sauce, after all.

Add two cans of beef broth and about a can's worth of red wine. Victor reminded me last night, as we stood in the wine store, that your sauce is only as good as the wine you use. That may well be, but I'm not wasting a $20 bottle of wine in a sauce. I used a $5 burgundy.

Add a couple of bay leaves and a few sprigs of thyme.

Simmer until the liquid is reduced. This is the part I hate, because it requires patience. Stir and taste periodically, you want the liquid to be hearty and beefy, but with the wine flavor. I ended up adding another few spashes of wine, because a cheap burgundy is apparently not quite so robust...after a good half an hour the sauce still tasted like beef soup.

In the end, I think I reduced the liquid to about half.

To give yourself something to do while the liquid reduces, make a roux with butter (about 2 T) and flour. You can just set it aside if it's done well before the reduction, timing is, thankfully, not of the essence. If it were, of course, I would not be doing this.

When the liquid is finally reduced sufficiently, take out the bay leaves and what's left of the thyme (probably just woody stems) and stir in the roux. (I also removed the bigger hunks of shallot, because I did such a lousy job of fine chopping.)

Stir in 8 oz. of sliced mushrooms, and when they are warm, serve. Because my father is anti-mushroom, I made the sauce up through the roux point, and tonight I'll reheat his separately, adding the mushrooms to ours.

This actually makes a heck of a lot of sauce (4 cups before adding the mushrooms), but we are not an "artfully drizzle a fine line of sauce over the meat" family. We are a "Gimme another piece of bread so I can sop up this up" family.

This dinner is obviously not part of the detox plan. I gave up...getting back on the health food wagon will be a New Year's thing, like getting back to the gym. (The owner e-mailed me today; the 5:30 a.m. hours resume on Monday. They always say January is crowded at gyms, but not, I bet, at 5:30.)

*Yes, red dye #2 is the one that went of the market in 1976 (in the U.S., anyway.) And red dye #3 was pulled in I think the '80's. But that orange color doesn't come from nature, and I was just seeing if you were paying attention.

Speaking of paying attention, I wasn't, so I didn't get anything submitted this time. Others are more on the ball, though, and the Carnival of Recipes #20 is up today.

More on the Polish foods before I skip town

By the way, here's the paluszki:

And my sister posted the lyrics to "The Eight Polish Foods of Christmas."

I'm off work today (last use-it-or-lose-it vacation day of the year), and was hoping to get some web page work done between loads of laundry. Instead I have to go to Philadelphia. If it were my schedule, I'd already be on my way home from Philadelphia, but not everyone subscribes to me "get your ass out of bed and on the road" philosophy...

Oh well. At least I don't have to drive to Norfolk.

The Eight Polish Foods of Christmas*

My grandfather (who passed away a few years ago) was Polish, and this year my grandmother (who is Scots-Irish and claims that she never actually even liked kielbasa) requested a Polish dinner for the family Christmas celebration.

Besides kielbasa, which we would have had anyway (honestly, if for some reason we were having Chinese for a family dinner, we'd still have kielbasa), mom is making golabki (stuffed cabbage), my sister is bringing pierogies, and I'm making mizeria.

What that means is, I got off easy. Mizeria is just cucumbers in sour cream.

I also had to make the not-particularly-Polish key lime pie and some appetizers. Feeling a bit guilty about the mizeria, I decided to see if I could come up with something Polish that didn't involve herring.

I made some vegetable pates (recipes to follow if they go over ok, otherwise we'll just pretend that never happened) and a potato cracker with caraway seeds called paluszki:

3 sticks of butter, softened
2 medium potatoes, cooked and mashed (345 g)
450 grams flour (this was adapted from a Polish recipe, so the ingredients were given by weight, and metric at that. I have a scale, so I did actually weight stuff out. It was about 3 3/4 cups of flour)
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 egg, beaten
Caraway seeds (lots)

Preheat the oven to 425 (farenheit. I had to convert from centigrade, but I won't make you do the math.)

Put the butter and potato in a large bowl, then sift in the flour and salt. (Yeah, I object to sifting, but I didn't want to play too fast and loose with the recipe, since it's a new one.) Mix to a soft dough. I used my hands. This is a very un-Nic-like recipe, by the way.

Turn the dough out onto a "lightly-floured surface" and knead for a few seconds or until smooth. (The recipe said a few seconds...I'm guessing it could also mean "a few kneads." Here is where I got nervous that I was overworking the dough. I don't know what it means to overwork dough, but I'm pretty sure it's bad.)

Cover and chill for 30 minutes. Have a pivo. (Just seeing if you speak Polish, though I was talking about the dough in the first part.)

Roll the dough out on that "light-floured surface" again, and roll to about 8 mm thick. (I had some real quality control issues with my thickness, and for the most part mine were not that thick. I am used to rolling the chrusciki, which springs back on you and you're supposed to be able to read through.)

Cut the dough into strips. Again, I was thinking 1. chrusciki and 2. I'm serving these as crackers. After I was done and went back to the original recipe, I saw that the paluszki supposedly means "little fingers," and the strips are supposed to be about finger-sized. Oh well.

Put the strips on a well-oiled (lots and lots of Pam, in my case) baking sheet, brush with the beaten egg, and sprinkle with caraway seeds. Don't skimp on the seeds; that seems to be where most of the flavor comes from.

Bake until lightly browned, about 12 minutes...9 or 10 if you roll them out too thin, as I did. But that does get it finished faster!

Cool on a wire rack (and they cool faster if you make them too thin, too). The way I cut them, cracker-sized, this made about a 9x13 baking-pan full.

I tested a few of the uglier ones (ragged edges, too thin), and they are kinda tasty, if you like caraway. I'm hoping they will go well with the mushroom pate, and with my great-aunt's authentic Polish beet relish, which from what I understand involves jarred pickled beets and jarred horseradish. To which I say: Go, Prastryjenka ["great-aunt" in Polish, I think]! I knew I had to have inherited my cooking inclinations from somebody.

* The Eight Polish Foods of Christmas is actually a song on a Veggie Tales album; my niece and nephews find it hysterical. I can't find the lyrics, but it does address the fact that many many Polish foods involve meat.

Don't stop the carnival

Somehow I'd managed to miss the Carnival of Recipes phenomenon until just recently. At Victor's urging, I submitted beigli and chrusciki to Carnival # 18, and then I spent mucho time when I was home Wednesday going back through past Carnivals bookmarking things to try. And in this week there are one..two...three...a bunch...of recipes that sound really good, including some that may keep me from becoming a vegetarian. (Mmmmmm, steak and blue cheese, a combination I find hard to resist.)

That also reminded me, I meant to write down the soup I made the other day. Nothing fancy, and by "made," I of course mean "assembled." If I open more than one can, it counts as cooking, right?

Sweet potato & black bean soup:

Diced onion (I used about a half a large one, because by the time I got the first half diced, I was tearing up.)
A heaping teaspoon of jarred minced garlic

Saute the onion and garlic in olive oil in a pot big enough to hold soup.

Add a can of diced tomatoes with liquid, and a can of black beans with some of the liquid drained off the top (the bean liquid just looks unappetizing to me. It's too cloudy.)

Add one or two sweet potatoes, diced into 1/2 inch pieces. (I used two that were on the small side, but the ratio was a little too tilted toward the potato. One large potato would have been better, I think.)

Add roasted vegetable broth until potatoes are covered.

Season with chili powder and ground ginger. (Yeah. Here was my line of thinking...I won't claim it was "logic"...I have heard that ginger and garlic are good for head colds. Now I suspect that fresh ginger is what people mean, but I didn't have fresh ginger. I figured the ground kind couldn't hurt. Well, actually, it could have made the soup revolting, but then I'd have ordered a pizza. But it worked, using maybe six shakes of the chili powder and two of the ginger.)

Cover and simmer until the potatoes are tender.

It didn't help my head at all, but it was a fine dinner.

Record grandma's recipes for posterity

I can't even remember exactly how I got there, but I ran across a nifty site today: American Cookbook Project from the Smithsonian Institution's traveling exhibition Key Ingredients: America by Food.

I have a feeling it is just getting off the ground, because there are only 141 stories/recipes so far. That's what, the size of one of those little spiral-bound church cookbooks?

I love those cookbooks. I really love the ones that include a bit of personal or organizational lore, making them social history as well as food. And that's the aim of this project:

The American Cookbook Project is a forum for sharing food stories. People from across the country are invited to share their favorite recipes and memories associated with this dish. This is not simply an online cookbook but a collection of memories and recollections of great meals from the past.

Once I've talked to the family to make sure I have the history right, I may submit beigli and chrusciki. How else will any of us end up in the Smithsonian?

Although...this is one of the things I love about reading other peoples' family recipes, seeing how many things are really universal...I was browsing the Eastern European secition and found Yugoslavian pastries called Hrstule that look a lot like chrusciki.

Maybe I can still be first with beigli, or with that fruit salad with those little marshmallows.

Beigli and Chrusciki

Holiday re-runs are a tradition...It's a Wonderful Life. The Grinch. The movie with the kid and the Red Ryder BB gun.

I'm not trying to place myself among the classics, but a couple of last year's posts have been generating a fair number of hits and some e-mail lately, so I'm going to repost the recipes for beigli and chrusciki in the extended entry.

Now, most of my recipes are so simple that a child, or a monkey, or even a childish monkey could successfully make them. I gotta say: beigli and chrusciki do not fall into that category. Both doughs are tricky...you need to know how they feel, and adjust ingredients accordingly. Apparently it depends on the humidity and the temperature and how Jupiter has aligned with Mars and so on. I don't make the pastry; that falls to my mother and my sister. I'm more of a finisher...tying the chruscikis, rolling the beigli.

Interestingly, the requests for/memories of chrusciki outnumbers the e-mails about beigli by a wide margin. Which makes me wonder...do the Hungarian families do a better job of writing down recipes than the Polish families, so the great-grandchildren aren't turning to the internet to find them? Is chrusciki more of a Christmas tradition? Did I mangle the spelling of beigli?

(Speaking of beigli...I can't speak of it. I can't get the Hungarian pronunciation quite right. There's a woman at work from Hungary, and while she said they taste just like the ones she had back home, every time she says the word it sounds different from what I say. She is polite enough not to cringe when she hears me try to say it, though.)

Anyway, we'll be making these (in volume) in a couple weeks, but here are the recipes for the Google searchers:

Beigli

For the filling:

1 1/2 cups water
3 1/2 cups sugar
5 cups ground walnuts
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
grated rind of two small lemons

Boil water and sugar to form a syrup (about five minutes). Stir in nuts, spices, and lemon rind and allow to cool. (We generally do this the night before.)

Apricot preserves (about 18 ounces)
Raisins (about 1 pound)

For the dough:

6 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon salt
3 sticks butter
3 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 3/4 teaspoons yeast
1/2 cup milk, warmed

Also

Egg whites

Sift together flour, sugar, and salt. Cut in butter. Lightly beat eggs and mix in vanilla. Dissolve yeast in warm milk. Add egg mixture and yeast mixture and knead into soft dough. Cut into six equal pieces and let rest for 30 minutes. (Despite the yeast, the dough doesn't really rise, and it really is only supposed to rest half an hour, or so my great-aunt says.)

Roll dough as for a pie crust and spread lightly with apricot preserves. Spread a thin layer of the nut filling and sprinkle with raisins. Roll as for a jelly roll, tucking the ends under when complete. ("Lightly" and "thin" are, of course, relative. My nth cousin rolls her crust thicker and spreads the filling lighter; it looks nicer when it's cut but I like the taste of the filling better than the crust. And her crust still cracks.)

Brush with egg whites and pierce the dough several times with a fork or toothpick (or it will explode). Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, brushing with egg white a second time halfway through the baking.

Cool beigli on a rack. The crust often cracks; as the beigli cools gently push it back together. The filling will hold it together (the filling, when it comes out of the oven, is like molten lava,but stickier.). When cool, wrap in plastic wrap and foil and store in a refrigerator or freezer. This recipe makes six beigli.

Chrusciki

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks
3 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon grated lemon peel
1 1/2 teaspoons almond extract (or Amaretto)
5 tablespoons sour cream
1 quart of oil for frying
Powdered sugar

Sift together flour and salt. Beat eggs, sugar, lemon peel, and almond extract until thick. Add sour cream. Stir in flour and salt mixture. Knead until pliable.

Cover dough and let stand one hour.

Roll out dough (about one-third at a time) onto a floured work surface. Roll very thin ("so you can read through it," according to my grandfather). Cut into strips (about 1" by 3") and cut a slit in the center of each strip. Pass one end of the strip through the slit (it makes a bow tie-looking shape).

Heat the oil in a heavy pot to 370 degrees. Fry chrusciki three at a time, turning once, until light golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Sprinkle with powdered sugar while warm.

Sweet potatoes

There have been a few Thanksgivings I spent away from home, and the greatest disappointment eating somewhere besides my mom's has always been the sweet potatoes. Some are better than others (and those that involve marshmallows should not exist), but none are as good as my mother's.

Not that Mom can take credit; she merely uses a particularly good recipe, namely the one from the King's Arms Tavern in Williamsburg.

And I was able to find that same recipe online (saving me a trip downstairs to look it up in my copy of The Williamsburg Cookbook). The potatoes are on the second page...and by the way, the peanut soup and the ham relish are really good, too.

Thanksgiving Rehearsal

One of the nice things about living fifteen minutes (ok, twenty-five, with current traffic) from the house where I grew up is that the house is still occupied by my parents, and I never have to cook holiday dinners. I just show up at home in the late afternoon. Actually, that works pretty well with dinner any day of the year, but I try not to abuse it.

Anyway, this Thanksgiving dinner may be a big one (latest estimate was possibly 16 people) so I thought I should contribute something. Last year my healthy-crust pumpkin pie turned out well. This year my grandmother, who can't eat dairy, will be there, so I thought I'd try to tofu version of the pumpkin pie. That required a test run, though.

Also included among the possible guests are a few vegetarians. Since I've been moving toward that myself, I offered to bring Tofurky kielbasa (yes, the family always has kielbasa at holiday dinners, regardless of the rest of the menu. The Polish influence is strong. And yes, my grandfather might indeed be spinning in his grave at the idea of vegan kielbasa. And yes, I have had it, and while it isn't real kielbasa by a long shot, it isn't bad.) and a "traditional vegetarian Thanksgiving entree" called Three Sisters Stew.

The "three sisters" are corn, beans, and squash. Whether this is a real Native American term or a real traditional recipe I've no idea, but it sounded pretty good...but again, before offering this at a holiday table, I needed to do a test.

The recipe is all over the Internet, just Google "Three Sisters Stew." This was my adaptation:

Cut a 2-pound butternut squash in half and remove seeds. Put the halves cut-side up in a baking dish, add a little water, cover with foil and back for 40 minutes at 350 degrees. Cool, remove skin, and dice.

In a large, heavy pot:

Saute 1 chopped onion and 1 teaspoon of jarred minced garlic in 1 tablespoon of olive oil.

Add 1/2 a red pepper, seeded and cut into thin strips.

Add squash.

Add:
1 (15 oz.) can of pinto beans, drained
1 (15 oz.) can of corn, drained
1 (4 oz.) can of chopped green chilies
1 (15 oz.) can of diced tomatoes, undrained
1 cup of vegetable stock
2 teaspoons of oregano
1 teaspoon of ground cumin

Simmer for the length of the second half of a football game plus the post-game show.

Taste and add salt and pepper as needed. Just before serving, add two tablespoons of fresh cilantro. (I just held the cilantro over the pot and cut off little pieces of leaves with the kitchen shears.)

It was rather liquidy, so we ate it over brown rice. I think it could have used more cumin, and next time I may use frozen roasted corn instead of canned, to add a bit more flavor.

Overall, though, it passed the test, and I will take it for Thanksgiving.

Now the tofu pie...it was just the basic back-of-the-can pumpkin pie recipe, but using a package of silken tofu plus 1/3 cup of honey in place of the sweetened condensed milk. The consistancy was a little off, and the pumpkin/spice flavors were a little dilluted...if I try it again (depends on how Grandma feels about apple pie) I'll bump up the spices and honey a bit.

Now I need to start experimenting for Christmas.

Paprika crisis

Hungry Hungary in spice crisis

Hungary stopped sales of paprika last week after finding a batch contaminated with aflatoxin. This is a big deal in Hungary: they export 5 tons of it a year, restaurants are having to scrap about half their menu offerings, and individual Hungarians (who consume an average of more than a pound of paprika a year) are struggling to figure out what to make for dinner.

I'm well stocked, thankfully. And I've been considering an experiment to see if my great-grandmother's chicken paprikash recipe is adaptable to Quorn...

Vegetarian recipe - Falafel

I'n having falafel for lunch (and trying not to think of Bill O'Reilly). I didn't make it myself; I picked it up at the local organic grocery store. I also picked up a box of the falafel mix, but that's almost like cooking...you have to add hot water and actually form the patties, and that's too much like work for me this week.

But I was thinking about it, and maybe when I have some time and energy I'll give this recipe a try. Since it isn't my recipe (unlike the others I posted this month), I'm just going to link:

Baked Falafel Sandwichs from Weight Watchers Canada.

Vegetarian recipe - Bean-instead-of-hamburger goulash

When I was a kid we had "hamburger goulash" for dinner practically once a week. It was a stovetop casserole with ground beef, elbow macaroni, canned tomato, and some herbs. At some point I found out it was something my mom had learned to make in freshman home-ec. (I think I also found it in White Trash Cooking...a truly great cookbook, by the way. And you don't need to e-mail me about the fact that this isn't a goulash...I'm Hungarian. I know it isn't a goulash, but that's still the name.)

I always liked it, and found the basic idea adapted quite easily to a vegetarian version.

2 cups macaroni, cooked and drained
1 can of beans, drained
1 large can of tomatoes (crushed, or stewed tomato broken apart, or diced)
Seasoning

Mix everything together in a saucepan and cook until heated through.

What kind of beans? Depends on the seasoning...I use white or kidney beans with Italian-like seasoning, and kidney, black, or pinto beans with Mexican-type seasonings. The tomatoes with the added seasoning in the can (like basil, garlic & oregano, or cumin & jalapeno) make this ridiculously easy. Come to think of it, I probably shouldn't even admit to this one...it's like claiming to have a recipe for peanut butter & jelly.

I want pyramid-shaped grapes, myself

Berlin Man Wants End to Bendy Bananas

Fed up with the inconvenient curved shape of bananas, a Berlin resident has dreamt up a way to straighten this staple of the fruit bowl, even applying to have his banana-straightening method patented.

Vegetarian recipe - Spinach, bean, ricotta, polenta...aw, I admit it, I was cleaning out the fridge

This is a recipe-in-progress started by half a container of ricotta cheese left over from a lasagna I made last week. I didn't want to make another lasagna, so I started looking around the kitchen...I'd bought a tube of polenta without anything in particular in mind, and I always have beans and tomatoes. So...

I cut the polenta up into slices and put it in a baking dish. Then I sauteed a bag of baby spinch in some oil and garlic, and mixed it with the ricotta, a drained can of white beans, and a can of tomato with the sauce. I poured that over the polenta, sprinkled it with more cheese (mozzarella and parmesan) and baked.

The result was gloppy, but tasty. The polenta took on a really creamy texture; I might try it again flying or baking the polenta and just topping it with the glop. I could also have left out the sauce and just used the tomatoes.

Oh, and to bring home the point that this was a get-rid-of-leftover meal, I served it with toasted hot dog buns. Nothing but the finest at Chez Nic...

Vegetarian recipe - Alfredo casserole

Most Monday nights I volunteer at an organization that provides meals to people with HIV/AIDS and other serious illnesses. Funny thing about making food to serve 1,000...a lot of times you start by saying "Wow, this looks yummy" and end saying "I never want to see this again in my life."

A few weeks ago, I was putting the breadcrumb & cheese topping on tray after tray of this casserole, and even at the end I was saying "This really looks good." We were really busy that night, so I didn't want to bother the chef for the recipe, but the ingredients looked straightforward enough. Later in the week I put together something that looked about the same, and it did make for a nice comfort food dinner, plus it met my requirement of being obscenely easy.

Alfredo casserole

2 cups of penne pasta
1 large zucchini, diced
1 large tomato, seeded and diced
1 small can of corn, drained (or about 1 cup of corn kernels)
1 container of refrigerated Alfredo sauce (10 oz)
Italian seasoning
Bread crumbs
Shredded parmesan cheese

Cook and drain the pasta, then mix it up with the diced vegetables and Alfredo sauce. Season with Italian seasoning (being particularly lazy lately, I used the pre-blended mix of dried herbs, because having to open parsley and basil and oregano was just too much). Put the mixture in a 9" baking dish (or 2-quart casserole) that's been coated with cooking spray. Cover with a mixture of parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs. Bake until the top is browned and the inside is hot and bubbly (I think it was the usual 45 minutes at 350 degrees).

Vegetarian recipe - 4-bean chili

We're moving offices next week. Things are a bit...hectic. I'm a bit...stressed.

(I found out my new office is about 6 inches deeper than my old one. Someone said "What will you do with the extra space?" I answered "Pad the walls." I was not kidding.)

Anyway, I'm not above resorting to rerun posts to fill space, especially if I can make them fit the theme for the month. Here is the vegetarian version of my chili. This is actually a good recipe for a busy week...I'll get several meals out of it, and the prep time is minimal. Plus it seems so appropriate for the chill in the air in the mornings now.

Here goes:

Cook a chopped onion and two cloves of chopped garlic in olive oil. When the onion is soft, pour a few ounces of beer in the pan. (It doesn't matter what kind of beer, although I wouldn't use anything too sweet. I'd say a "full-bodied ale" would be best.)

Simmer the onions and garlic in the beer for a few minutes.

While that simmers, drain four cans of beans. I like a variety...black, kidney, navy, pinto. Dump the beans and a 28-ounce can of undrained tomatoes (crushed are good. If you use whole tomatoes, break them up.) into a Crock Pot, then add the onion, garlic, and beer.

Season to taste with Super Secret Chili Spice Mix and cook for a few hours (you know, like the length of the early football game plus the first half of the 4:00 game) on low.

Serve over spaghetti, topped with chopped raw onion, chopped fresh tomato, cheddar cheese, and maybe a little sour cream if you were too heavy-handed with the Super Secret Chili Spice. (That stuff sneaks up on ya.)

Leftovers make a good lunch wrapped in a tortilla, and very small amounts of leftovers can even be used up as an omlette filling. It's also good on a baked potato.

And the "super secret spice mix":

Equal parts salt, pepper, paprika, oregano, ground cumin, chili powder, and red pepper flakes.

You might be saying "Wait a second...isn't that just the ingredients in chili powder, plus the chili powder itself?"

Yeah, pretty much. But it works.

As for amounts, spiciness is so individual. I use about 4 tablespoons of the mix per batch of chili; I think Victor would prefer it hotter and I've had a few people tell me it was too spicy.

I will say (again) that the heat kinda sneaks up on you, so taste it twice and wait a second before deciding whether to dump more spices in. The first time I made it I had to brown an additional pound of meat (that was the non-veg version, obviously) and chop a second onion to get it back to where I could eat it.

Vegetarian recipe - Wild Rice & feta salad

I was talking to Victor from work today, and he asked if I'd posted another recipe. I said no, because it's not like I have my recipe cards at the office...except that made me remember that I do have one, and I posted it on my old blog. However, I'm not above repeats, especially on a busy day like today. So, from an earlier post:

I have a horrible mess of a junk drawer in my desk at work. I had to empty it out this morning in a search for staples (which I did not find...staples are the one office supply I never run out of, and yet, no staples.) In the process I found this recipe, which I made up a few years ago as a standard pot luck contribution. I guess it was good enough for someone to ask for my recipe, otherwise it would not have made its way to my kitchenless office.

The recipe is ...

1 cup uncooked wild rice (or mix of wild and brown rice)
1 cup diced celery
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup dried canberries (I use sweetened Craisins)
6 to 8 ouces feta cheese, crumbled
Vinaigrette salad dressing (I use an herb-y bottled vinaigrette)
Cook the rice and allow to cool. Mix the rice, celery, pecans, and cranberries, then enough vinaigrette to coat but not so much that the salad is swimming in oil. Mix in the crumbled feta shortly before serving. Can be served chilled or close to room temperature.

Meatless Monday

I'm not sure I have enough recipes (even lame ones) for the whole month, but in keep with the veg theme, I did run across the Meatless Monday campaign.

Sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, this is an effort to promote a healthier diet by convincing people to find alternatives to meat one day a week, since animal products are the greatest saturated fat source in American diets.

Meatless Monday is a pretty soft sell, and along the lines of what I've been finding personally...less meat, better health without much effort.

There's also a Meatout Mondays campaign by the Farm Animal Reform Movement. FARM's agenda is more animal welfare activism than health, but I'm not completely and totally unsympathetic. And I'll take recipes wherever I find them.

Vegetarian "recipe" - Pizza

This isn't a recipe, it's just some topping combinations we use on premade pizza crusts (like Boboli crusts, although I prefer the ones from Trader Joe's*). Even before Victor got his GERD diagnosis we'd been making the pizza without sauce (lazy, I tell ya)...just lightly cover the crust with olive oil (we use a refillable pump sprayer) then throw on the toppings. Three favorites:

-Spinach artichoke...like the dip. Saute fresh spinach or use frozen spinach that is thawed and drained; drain (and squeeze) the artichokes, layer on the pizza crust with a mixture of white cheeses (parmesan, mozzarella...I have even spread leftover ricotta on the crust before adding the vegetables). A little chopped red onion is good, too.

-Greekish...Tomato slices, kalamata olives, feta cheese, fresh oregano and mint.

-Onion, apples & blue cheese...remember that steak at The Shark that I go on about every summer? This topping is inspired by them. Saute a sliced onion and a chopped apple in olive oil or butter; add to the pizza with blue cheese.

Oh, and we've also used pita bread in place of the pizza crust...it's a little crisper and less chewy, but works just fine.

*When Trader Joe's opened in our neighborhood, that helped improve our diets, too. They have a lot of healthy and tasty convenience food (frozen meals, prepared salads and soups) and some gourmet sections for the foodies, like an excellent cheese department. They are smaller, cheaper, and somehow less obnoxious than Whole Foods, but have a much better selection of natural, organic, and otherwise "better" food than most supermarkets.

Vegetarian recipe - Spinach-feta pie

This was one of the first meatless dinners in our regular rotation.

10 oz. frozen spinach, thawed and drained
1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese (I don't measure the cheese anymore. You can't go wrong with more feta, imo)
4 medium green onions, sliced (I often don't include the green onions because I usually forget to buy them. I must have some subconscious thing against green onions, although I eat them when they're there. I have replaced the onions with chopped sweet pepper [originally to get rid of some leftovers], and it's not bad.)
1/2 cup Bisquick
2/3 cup milk
1/4 teaspoon each salt and pepper (for the pepper I use Hot Shot pepper blend)
2 eggs, or an equivalent amount of egg substitute

Grease a pie plate. Put in the spinach, cheese, and onion (or pepper, or not), kind of mixed up.
In a separate bowl (or a cocktail shaker-like thing), mix together the Bisquick, milk, eggs, and salt and pepper. Pour that mixture in the pie plate over everything else, then bake for 30-35 minutes at 400 degrees.
I like to serve this with green beans simmered in stewed tomatoes.

This is a real recipe originally from Bisquick (one of the Impossibly Easy pies.) Most of the things I'll be posting probably shouldn't be called recipes, they should be called assemby instructions...nothing I make will ever be mistaken for something out of Bon Appétit.

Vegetarian awareness

October 1 is World Vegetarian Day, and in fact, October is Vegetarian Awareness Month.

I'm not trying to convince anybody to become a vegetarian...that would take a heckuva lot of chutzpah, considering that I am not a vegetarian. I am, in the words of one friend, a "vegetarian sympathizer."

At one time, my dietary staple was cheeseburgers. I knew every fast food menu by heart, and could have distinguished between a Whopper and a Big Classic blindfolded. When McDonalds ran 2-fer specials on Quarter Pounders, I bought them in multiples and ate them for breakfast.

About ten years ago I was fitted for a bridesmaid dress and was pushing the outer limits of a size 16. I didn't really care about that, it just sticks in my head as a benchmark...1994, size 16. A few years after that, I started biking. I changed my diet a bit...more chicken and a bit less grease...and ended up a size 8. That wasn't a goal, it was just the size I ended up.

When I wasn't biking all the time, I started creeping back up toward a size 10. I didn't care so much about my actual size, but I couldn't afford a replacement wardrobe, so I started watching my diet a little better. A few years ago I made a concerted effort to stop thinking of meat as a main dish necessity. Since making that change, I actually dropped another size, though my exercise habits have been, frankly, minimal. I've been at size 6 now for two years. My cholesterol went from an acceptable 170-something to 140.

I'm not saying any of this to brag, just to show what can happen just by eating less meat. Now we have meat with dinner maybe twice a week, and most of the time when eating out I go with vegetarian options. The veg friend who calls me a sympathizer does so because I'm practically an activist at the office; I got sick of catered lunches where the only vegetarian options were salad and bread. Vegetarians deserve protein, too, and I've started politely suggesting that all office functions have something reasonable not just for vegetarians but vegans.

Sorry, I'm getting way too longwinded. Basic idea...less meat is healthy, and even somebody who ate cheeseburgers for breakfast can come to appreciate meatless meals. So, in honor of Vegetarian Awareness, I'll be posting some of our favorite vegetarian recipes (in that stream-of-conscience, lack-of-measurements way that I do recipes) and veg-related links throughout the month.

Oh, and I'm not eating them for breakfast (although there's no reason not to, so perhaps I'll start)...but my favorite burger now is the Amy's Organic All American.

Fusion

That's the latest in cusine, right? Fusion.

Or perhaps eating leftover takeout Chinese wrapped in a tortilla just means I need to get my ass to the grocery store.

Cole slaw

When desperate for an entry, post a recipe. I needed to type this up for someone anyway, so I shall share:

Cole slaw dressing

1/3 cup white vinegar
scant 1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon canola oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper (Hot Shot pepper blend is good)
1/4 teaspoon celery seed

Mix well. I am slackass lazy and buy the bags of preshredded cole slaw vegetables, then I throw the mixed dressing and shredded vegetables into a gallon ziplock bag and toss it that way. Serving from the bag isn't a particularly artful presentation, but it saves washing another bowl.

This is a tangy cole slaw rather than creamy. If you prefer your summer salads heavy on mayonaise/Miracle Whip, this is probably not for you.

Another food note: There were Snickers with Almond in the checkout at the pet store (of all odd places). It ain't the same as a Mars bar.

Is this true?

Is it true that you can't buy Mars bars anymore?

Somebody at work told me this. You can see how often I buy candy, because apparently this isn't a brand-new thing. It send me into a tailspin, though.

My friend also told me that what is called a Mars bar in Europe is really a Milky Way, and the Milky Way is a 3 Musketeers. And in the U.S., you can now get a Snickers with Almond, although it has caramel, which the old Mars didn't.

This all sounded like urban legend stuff to me, but a quick look at the brands on the Masterfoods Mars web page does show a distinct lack of link for the Mars Bar.

I need to do some investigating. The candy world is upside down, and I was too busy eating grapes to notice.

UPDATE: I checked the vending maching and the cafe next door. No Mars bars. I asked around...everyone seemed to know about this. A few people helpfully said "They have Snickers with Almonds now; it's the same thing." When I got home I checked my candy stash...one, count 'em, one Mars fun size bar left over from some past Halloween.

I said I don't eat much candy.

Super Size Me

Victor kinda suggests that I review Super Size Me. I wasn't going to because I thought he was going to, but it turns out he was so thrilled about finding a parking spot right in front of the theater that he doesn't even care about the movie.

Anyway. Yeah, we saw Super Size Me last night. I loved it, but of course, for me it was preaching to the choir. I'm already of the opinion that fast food is not healthy for children and other living things, but I thought Morgan Spurlock's 30-day McDonald's-only experiment was a fairly clever way to hammer the point home. (I mean, halfway through the month his doctor is telling him his liver is turning into pate! And his girlfriend mentions that his, well, performance is suffering. It is wonderfully telling.)

For the record: I still eat fast food. It's cheap, it's convenient, it's tasty...although as I eat more real food, good food, I'm realizing that there's tasty and then there's actual taste.

One of the criticisms I heard about the movie is that "no one would eat fast food every day." Well...when I was in high school, we had a Wendy's across the street, and I ate lunch there pretty much daily. In college, I usually had my breakfast from a fast-food outlet in the student union after my commute to campus. Lunch I usually had from a convenience store on the way to work. A lot of my classes were at night, so it wasn't unusual for dinner to be from the student union or vending machines. For four years, my diet wasn't too far off Spurlock's experimental one. I'm sure more people eat like this than would care to admit it.

Not long after Super Size Me won at Sundance, McDonald's announced that it was taking the super size items off the menu. I will give credit to the restaurant industry...fast food and fast casual...they respond. McDonald's has salads now. Ruby Tuesday's puts nutritional information on the menu. Movies like Super Size Me, books like Fast Food Nation, and lobbies like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, despite being sneered at as "food cops" and enemies of freedom, are getting through to some consumers. Those consumers put their money where their health is, and next thing you know, you can get apples and milk in a Happy Meal.

I don't have kids. I think God every day that I don't have kids. But my sister has three, and I see them often, and I get a glimpse of what it's like...it's easy for single yuppie liberal me to go to the organic market and the farm and the bakery to get my unprocessed healthy food. My sister is shopping with three kids under 6. They are doing it all at the mega corporate grocery store, and on each endcap of each aisle the kids are pointing to the junk food they saw advertised on tv. And it's easy for single yuppie liberal me to say "Don't let the kids watch television so they won't see the commercials," but most parents live in the real world. (Today's Baby Blues comic strip is a perfect illustration of this, but the link isn't working right now.)

And when I am in the grocery store, and it's 6:30 p.m. and I am stuck in a slow line behind a parent with an overtired and hungry child whining for Shrek Pop Tarts, single yuppie liberal me wants the @#$%^&* parent to buy the @#$%^&* kid the @#$%^&* crap to shut the kid the @#$% up. I can't condem the parents who give in to the pressure.

I actually have a lot more to say about points from the movie and from some of my own nutritional research of late, but I still have bills to pay before I go to bed and another long week ahead. So I'll wrap up quickly with this...

Victor and I were planning on catching the movie then going to dinner last night. We hadn't decided on a restaurant, but after leaving the theater Victor drove straight to the local, independent, vegetarian place.

Black & Blue

...berries.

We went to a local farm this morning (not quite around the corner, but as far as I'm concerned, very worth it for better fruit and vegetables [since my attempts at growing my own failed], plus I like to support family farms.) Two of the in-season fruits are blackberries and blueberries. I started eating them out of the carton in the car, and it took lots of willpower not to finish them on the way home.

I didn't quite eat them all, though, so after dinner (buffalo burgers, grilled corn, and a fresh tomato-cucumber salad) we had berry shortcake:

A simple thing of beauty.

Long Tall Carryout Coffee Cups (I Can Dance)

When I started working in my current office there was a 7-11 down the street. I liked having 7-11 there...I'd pop in for coffee in the morning, if I didn't have time to make lunch I could grab something there, and I once became an intern's hero by rescuing him from a very tedious job and going to get Slurpees in the afternoon. We also had a couple of sub shops and access to the cafeteria in the federal building across the street, and there was a Chinese restaurant that was only occasionally shut down by the health department.

A few years ago a developer bought up pretty much everything in the neighborhood except us, the federal building, and the iffy Chinese restaurant. Gone were the sub shops and 7-11. We lost access to the cafeteria because of security restrictions. We were in a snack food wasteland.

Today it changed. A cafe opened in the new office building next door. I went in for coffee...they had regular coffee, flavored coffee, coffee with syrup and coffee with frothy milk. They had frozen coffee. They had tea and chai and hot chocolate.

They had a cooler full of fruit juices from every fruit you can juice.

They had a salad bar with the actual fruit.

They had omlettes and eggs, bacon, ham, corned beef hash, and sausage in links and patties. They had pancakes, waffles, and french toast. They had potatoes O'Brien and hash brown patties. An Atkins disciple would flee at the variety of bagels, muffins, danish, and biscuits.

The menu board of sandwiches included at least four vegetarian options, including one with roasted vegetables with brie. They have club sandwiches with names. At lunch the breakfast bar becomes a hot food bar and the fruit bar changes over to salad. They had every flavor of soda and chips I've never seen.

I left with a huge plate of breakfast and Leo Sayer going through my head...

Of course I can dance
Of course I can dance
I'm sure I can dance
I'm sure I can dance...

POST-LUNCH UPDATE: I'm in sensory overload. They still had the fruit bar. Did I mention it had kiwi? And a salad bar...all the normal vegetables, and Waldorf salad, greek salad, ceasar salad, pasta salad, potato salad, tofu salad...the hot bar had meatloaf, London broil, lasagna, broccoli pie, asparagus, Chinese food, mashed potatoes...

Good thing I had to leave the office early to take the dog to the vet; I'd be way too tempted to return a third time for a mid-afternoon Smoothie.

Sweet potatoes

For a long time I ate sweet potatoes once a year, on Thanksgiving, and that was it. (No, not covered in marshmallows and syrup...that's revolting. I have an excellent sweet potato recipe with brown sugar and cinnamon...but I'm digressing. I'll revisit this in November.)

Anyway, in an effort to add more vegetables to our usual dinners, particularly vegetables of different colors (there's a scientific basis for this), I decided to start making sweet potatoes more often.

The easiest way to cook them is to just bake them. You can also boil and mash them (add a small splash of bourbon--I said small! Trust me on this one, you can overwhelm them with Jack Daniels, and that's not necessarily a good thing.) And the other night I decided to try sweet potato oven-baked "fries" (to go with our veggie burgers. Ten years ago if you told me I'd be eating like this, I'd have laughed so hard Jack Daniels would have been spraying out of my nose.)

They were actually even better than I'd hoped. I cut the potatoes into slices about the size of a steak fry...maybe 5mm thick...then tossed them in a plastic bag with olive oil to coat. Then I spread them on a cookie sheet and sprinkled them with paprika. I baked them at 400 degrees for about 25 minutes, flipping them over at about the 12-minute mark.

They weren't as crispy on the outside as white potatoes made this way (Victor pointed out that the difference in the starch content would cause that), but they had more flavor. And they did hold up to being dipped in ketchup.

Plus they have all that beta-caronteny goodness!

Diets

There are two studies in today's Annals of Internal Medicine related to low-carbohydrate diets. (There's also an editorial by Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health; I can't wait to read it, but it isn't online and I'm pretty far down the distribution list of the journals at work. Hopefully I'll report back on this in about six weeks.)

I recently read Atkins' books. I wanted to go to the source instead of just trashing low-carb as the fad of the moment. There were some laughable passages, particularly in the 1972 version, but not all of it seemed outrageous. I'm glad to see the diets being studied.

I should start playing the lottery so I can go back to school and become a nutritionist. I have a radical theory I'd like to test, a theory based on a tiny sample of three people. One, my dad, was slightly overweight with high triglycerides and low HDL and a strong family history of diabetes. The low-carb diet helped him. Another, my mom, was overweight with high blood pressure. Weight Watchers, with an emphasis on lower-fat foods and pretty strict portion control, and walking helped her.

Then there's me. My diet actually comes pretty close to the Mediterranean food pyramid and my weight has been stable for over a year. My cholesterol is 142. Except for my borderline blood pressure, which I'm sure is related more to stress, I was textbook healthy when we had our screenings at work a few months ago.

My radical theory: different people have sufficiently different metabolisms so that an optimal diet will not be the same for everyone, and finding the optimal diet requires experimentation and monitoring over a period of time to find a mix of acceptable foods (for sustainability) that result in acceptable health outcomes (weight, glucose, lipids).

This is a study for the Center for Thoughtful and Reasonable Analysis of All Available Data with Appropriate Advisories on the Limitations of Said Data for Informed and Responsible Individuals Who Are Willing to Make Decisions and Accept the Consequences.

Green beans through the ages

When we cleaned out her house after my grandmother died a few years ago I ended up with boxes of her old cookbooks. I was interested to note that some were earlier editions of cookbooks I had...Fannie Farmer, Better Homes & Gardens, Joy of Cooking...so I started going though to see how recipes had changed.

Not long after that I bought a reprint of the original Boston Cooking School, and in mentioning my growing collection to my other grandmother, she turned over her copy of Fannie Farmer to me, too. I now have a collection that goes from 1896 to 2002.

To show how things have changed a bit, here are the green (or string) bean recipes from each:

The original, 1896:

String beans that are obtainable in winter come from California; natives appear in market the last of June and continue until the last of September.

Remove strings, and snap or cut in one-inch pieces; wash, and cook in boiling water from one to three hours, adding salt the last hour of cooking. Drain, season with butter and salt.

My late grandmother's Boston Cooking School, 1930:

Select beans as nearly stringless as possible. Test by gently pulling off tip end. One pound serves four. Remove ends and strings, snap or cut in inch pieces. Wash, cook in boiling water 20 minutes to 1 hour, or until soft, adding salt when half done. Drain, season with butter and salt. If desired, cook with small piece of ham, bacon, or salt pork.

My other grandmother's 11th edition Fannie Farmer, 1959:

One pound serves four. Select beans that are crisp enough to snap when broken and are fresh-looking, with a bright, clear color.

Wash thoroughly. Cut off the ends. Cut with a sharp knife or scissors in 1-inch pieces. Or cut in very thin diagonal strips with a bean cutter; or cut lengthwise and then crosswise in thin pieces about 1 1/2 inches long.

Cook about 2 minutes in a pressure saucepan, or 15 to 20 minutes in a covered pan in boiling salted water 1/2 inch deep. Drain. Add salt and butter to taste. Sour cream is delicious in place of butter. Season with finely cut dill or chives, if you like.

And most recently, my 13th edition, 2002:

Green beans were once called string beans. Today they are stringless; just break off the ends as you wash them. Green beans, wax beans, and pole beans may all be cooked the same way, until just tender but crunchy. Try them fried whole in beer batter for a change sometimes.

Wash the beans and remove the ends and strings, if there are any. Leave them whole or cut into diagonal strips. Drop them into a large pot of boiling water and boil them gently until just done, allowing about 5 - 10 minutes, depending on the size and age of the beans. Taste one to see if it is done; it should still be very crunchy. Drain the beans and rinse them thoroughly in cold water to stop the cooking. Reheat them in lots of butter, salt, and pepper just before serving.

The major change has obviously been cooking time...at least it has gotten faster to make dinner in the last hundred years. Boil beans for three hours? Just how tough were 19th century vegetables?

Cinco de Mayo

"I join today with all Americans in celebrating Cinco de Mayo and the important contributions of Mexican-Americans to our nation," says Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-MD).

Wow, it's Cinco de Mayo. I may be off here, but it seems to me that Americans celebrating the triumph of the Mexican people over the French Army in the battle of Puebla in 1862 coincided completely with the discovery by Tex-Mex restaurants that it was a good way to lure people in and sell lots of Dos Equis and margaritas.

Completely coincidentally, tonight's dinner plan:

Chicken simmered in salsa
Pinto beans
Guacamole
Salad
Corn tortillas

Drat. I forgot the Dos Equis.

Attack of the Demon Snakehead Fish

In today's snakehead news:

In general, authorities sought to play down the threat posed by the fish, saying they were dangerous only to fish, not to people.

But Wintermoyer told a story that hinted otherwise.

He and his friend were debating what to do with the fish, which was lying on the ground inside the plastic bag. A park maintenance worker walked up, curious, and stuck his foot near the animal.

Suddenly, Wintermoyer said, the snakehead lunged.

"It put a pretty good tooth mark in his steel-toed boot," he said.

At least take a look at the picture. That is one seriously ugly mother...

If you happen to find yourself with an abundance of snakehead fish that aren't confiscated by your local department of natural resources, here are a few recipes:

Watercress Soup with Snakehead and Duck Gizzard

Steamed Snakehead Chaozhou Style

Fermented Snakehead Fish (with bacon!)

Once again (like with the cicadas), my darn food allergies prevent me from giving them a try, though.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme

And basil, oregano, chives, tomatoes (Better Boy and Roma), sweet peppers, hot pepper, zucchini, yellow squash, and cucumber.

That's what I bought and planted today. However, I am a notoriously bad gardener, so chances are these plants will dead by the first of June, and I'll be hitting the farmer's markets. (Last year it was so cool and rainy I had what was, for me, a bumper crop...one prolific Roma tomato plant.)

For the moment, though, I am excited and full of hope, imagining salads and fresh pizza toppings...

That fruit salad with those little marshmallows*

My mom made that fruit salad with those little marshmallows for Easter. I love that salad...it's such a sweet, gloopy mess, and to me it's an early harbinger of summer. And pure white-trash cooking, too. I collect those little spiral bound fundraiser cookbooks...those things churches and ladies auxillary groups do with collected recipes from their members...and Ambrosia (the real name for that fruit salad with those little marshmallows) is always in there at least once.

(So is a carrot thing called Copper Pennies. Has anybody ever had that?)

Anyway, an Ambrosia recipe...in case your grandmother and mother didn't make it for every family potluck from Easter to Thanksgiving:

Drain and dump into a mixing bowl:

A can of pineapple chunks
A can of fruit cocktail
A can of mandarin oranges
Personally, I like extra maraschino cherries. My mom still doesn't put them in for me, but one of my aunts always made hers that way.
A carton of sour cream or yogurt
Chopped nuts
Shredded coconut

Mix and chill. This is best served in a Tupperware bowl, either the vintage pale green plastic or one from the '70s earth-tone collection of harvest gold or burnt orange. Ok, maybe that's just for me.

Speaking of fruit salad and the 70's...

I have a very vivid memory of a family dinner party at the home of some friends of my parents. The wife was a Tupperware Lady, and had made a pistachio-pineapple salad in the Tupperware ring mold. I still remember her saying "It's a Watergate salad because the nuts look like bugs!"

Yeah, jokes about bugs and Watergate...seems like yesterday. Where does the time go?

Now you can eat bugs and nobody even thinks to make a Watergate joke. I'm serious about the bug eating. The Post reports that some people are actually looking forward to the emergence of the 17-year cicadas because they find them...crunchy.

John Zyla, an amateur naturalist in Ridge, in southern St. Mary's County, suggests laying a few dozen on a cookie sheet and baking them in a 350-degree oven for five minutes.

Then serve with toothpicks and a selection of condiments for dipping, ranging from sweet to savory: chocolate sauce, honey, melted cheese, ketchup, mustard.

Well, I do try to try new things. But sadly, I think I'll have to pass on cicadas. According to the article, "shrimp and lobsters, part of the same biological phylum that includes bugs, are essentially sea insects," and I am allergic to shrimp and lobster. Don't want to take any chances, after all. But let me know if you want to try it, maybe we can do a potluck. I'll bring that fruit salad with those little marshmallows.

* Two MASH references in a week!

2fer post: Quorn and McDonald's

I didn't used to like meat substitutes. I tried some soy burgers years ago and found them lacking, and since I wasn't giving up meat totally anyway, I didn't see a reason to substitute fake for the real thing. I ate bean chili and tacos, and vegetable sandwiches, and just left meat out of dishes where I didn't need it, like spaghetti sauce and pizza.

In attempting to expand the non-meat meal options, though, I started trying it again. I don't know if my tastes have changed or if the food technology has improved, but I have no trouble eating veggie or soy patties instead of hamburgers. I still prefer my chili with just beans, but I have found good seitan taco fillings. And I love Quorn*, a fermented mycofungus...which doesn't sound very appealing...but it tastes, well, remarkably like chicken. (It may also taste like beef, but I haven't tried the beefy-flavored stuff.)

I've made Quorn parmesan, buffalo Quorn sandwiches, and just eaten it plain.

Today a vegetarian friend was asking me if they made Quorn meatballs (yes; they are new) and I ended up on the Quorn UK web page. It's been availale in Europe a lot longer than it has here, and they have way more types available...sliced sandwich Quorn. Quorn Pâté. Tikka Masala Quorn with Pilau Rice. I am so jealous.

This is the one that really got me, though: McQuorn.

Ok, it's actually called "Quorn premire," a "succulent Quorn fillet topped with sweet chilli sauce, Hellmann's extra light mayonnaise, tomato and lettuce all in a foccacia bun."

Foccacia bun?

Hey. We don't have foccacia buns here. What else does McDonald's have for the Brits that we don't get?

Well, they have a grilled chicken caprese (grilled chicken breast, topped with basil sauce, a slice of cheese made with mozzarella, rocket, tomato and onion all in a tasty sun-dried tomato and olive bun), another chicken sandwich with sour cream and chive sauce and salsa, and a cheeseburger with Emmental.

This is sorta silly, I guess, but I got a real kick out of looking at the web page...so familiar, yet not quite. Which lead me to check out other McDonald's around the world...

In Australia, they have a Vege burger with a chickpea patty, and cheese and tomato sandwiches for breakfast.

In India (where I can't imagine hamburgers being terribly popular), they have a Paneer Salsa Wrap...and interestingly, a Chicken Mexican Wrap. One of the Happy Meals is a McAloo Tikki. They also keep the cooking areas for the vegetarian and meat products completely separate, which is cool.

Uruguay has the McHuevo, a burger with a poached egg.

In Italy they have an interesting-looking square sandwich and I think maybe shrimp, but I don't spreak a word of Italian so I don't know for sure.

Wow. And I was excited when they added that good Newman's Own dressing here in the US.

*Quorn footnote...some people, particularly those who are sensitive to mold, can have significant adverse reactions to Quorn. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has called for it to be banned, a move I disagree with (people are allergic to milk and peanuts, too, but you don't see a movement to ban their sales)...but I do think the potential hazards should be well communicated.

Peeps!

I have a love/hate relationship with Peeps. I love that they are a fun bit of Americana. I think they are cute as...well, little marshmallow chicks. What's cuter? I love the bizarre Peep subculture.

But as food...they are revolting.

As a joke, Victor enrolled me in the Peeps fan club. I proudly wear my Peeps t-shirt. But don't ask me to eat the nasty things.

Just Born has tried to expand Peeps to a year 'round thing, but of course Easter is still the prime Peep season. For your Peep viewing pleasure:

The official Peeps site
Scientific experiments on Peeps (Horrified? Then visit Ban Peeps Research!)
Peeps in Space
Lord of the Peeps

Some people have a little too much time on their hands, but at least they use that time creatively. Then there are those of us surfing the Peeps sites...

Oh, and from a few Easters ago...here's my Peep taking a little trip to the Lincoln Memorial.

Vice & Virtue

This was a fundraising weekend. On Saturday we went to a wine tasting that benefitted my niece's school. This was how the conversations kept going last week:

Other Person: Hey, Nic, what are you up to this weekend?
Me: I'm going to a wine tasting fundraiser at my niece's school.
OP (in a tone of confusion/shock/surprise): Wine? Isn't your niece in kindergarden?
Me: Catholic school.
OP (in a tone of comprehension): Oh, ok.

Hey, it beats a bake sale. It was a good wine tasting...they had more than a dozen distributors there, each pouring six or eight wines. And these were different labels, too, not Kendall-Jackson. I tried a lot I liked, but my favorite was an Australian called Twin Beaks...the Shiraz, of course, but I the Merlot was really good, too...and lucky me, this wine retails for nine bucks a bottle. They also had huge tables of hot hor'dorves, vegetables, awesome pesto and bruschetta, and chocolate; coffee from the local gourmet shop; and a raffle where my sister won a basket of cheeses. They poured the wine generously and I ate like a pig, so I know I got my money's worth, and the school gets another cut from the case of wine I bought. Hey, this is my niece...I want her using Crayolas, not those cheap knock-off crayones that are nothing but wax and toxic metals.

The only drawback to last night was the abbreviated sleep...we had to get up at 6 to go a the Columbia's Cure 5K. Originally we were going to try the 25K bike ride, but the prospect of riding hung over (which I wasn't, actually, just a little dried out), coupled with trouble my knees have been giving me lately, made us opt for walking instead.

It was a touch cool and windy (making me very happy I'd decided not to ride) but the route around the lake was very pleasant. Victor took a lot of pictures, especially at the starting line of the kids' race, which was a riot...all those serious little people with their game faces on. We finished up the morning with a stop at my sister's house to help her eat some of last night's brie, along with bread, apples, and pears. I ate so much cheese I forgot we had chocolate, too.

So...overindulging, raising money for kids, exercising, raising money for the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults, and more overindulging. It is good to lead a balanced life.

Slackass lazy spinach-mushroom non-enchiladas

Tonight was one of those clean-out-the-leftovers, throw-together-something dinners. I had corn tortillas, portobello mushrooms, and spinach. Enchiladas would have been the obvious choice for dinner, but I am too lazy to actually make enchiladas. (I have reached a level of lazy beyond slackass. The only thing lazier would have been having dinner delivered, and actually this might still have been lazier because I didn't have cash, and searching through my jacket pockets and under the sofa cushions for money would have been more effort.)

Anyway...I did chop an onion to start, (and I did it without losing blood. This may have been my first onion chop since the stitches.) and diced up the mushrooms. Then I threw them and the spinach into a pan with some olive oil and let the liquid cook down. I finally learned this lesson from lots of watery lasagnas: cook the spinach!

Then I constructed dinner just like a lasagna: layer of enchilada sauce, layer of tortilla, layer of vegetables, some cheese. Repeat until everything is used up. Bake until hot.

It was actually pretty good, although the picture I took looks straight out of the Gallery of Regrettable Food.

Uh oh. He's added new stuff. I'm being sucked into the Lileks zone...if I'm not back in a week, send a search party.

Pörkölt

Pörkölt is another of those old family recipes, this one from my dad's paternal Hungarian family, by way of my grandmother and mother (the men in dad's family were not particularly big on cooking.)

As near as I can tell, pörkölt just means "stew" or something equally generic, and from what I have gathered on the internet, every family has their own recipe using a wide variety of ingredients...just like everyone has their own version of that which we call chili.

This one is my pörkölt:

Brown about a pound of cubed beef in a large, heavy-bottomed pot with a good lid (or, if you want to do it the Crock-Pot way, in a frying pan. Or if you like washing dishes, go ahead and use the frying pan and you'll dirty a pot later.) Remove the meat and drain off some of the fat, unless you used very lean meat, in which case don't bother to drain it.

In the reserved fat, saute a chopped onion and a chopped green peppper until the vegetables are soft. (My mom and grandmother never used green pepper. I saw it in a recipe I found in a cookbook [pre-Internet, before I knew there were so many pörkölt variations] and thought 1. it must be more authentic that way and 2. it'd be healthier if I snuck in another vegetable. My grandfather was a notoriously picky eater; for all I know he's the one who got rid of peppers in our case.)

Add the beef back in and mix it up with the vegetables. If you want to do this in the Crock-Pot, here's where you transfer to the crock. (My mom always made this in her Le Creuset French oven, so when I left home a Le Creuset French oven was one of my first kitchen purchases...a tad pricy, but I have never regretted it. What I have been doing, and I just found this out about two weeks ago, is mispronouncing "Le Creuset" for my entire life. I am mortified. I should have known it...I don't speak French, but I know enough French words, and I should have realized there was a "zay" in there, not a "set"...and what's worse, my mom never corrected me. She thought it was funny. Is it any wonder I am how I am, with parents that cruel?)

Anyway, we were making dinner. Okay, you've mixed your browned beef cubes and your sauted onion and pepper back up in a big pot of some sort, right?

Now add paprika. Hungarian paprika, I hope it goes without saying, but the type of paprika is where I make another break from family tradition. My mom and grandmother used sweet; I like hot. I like to give the meat a nice thick coating of it...I think it works out to about 3 tablespoons...but this is definitely going to be a matter of personal taste. (I think from my experience I like my food three times more paprika-y than average Americans.)

Pour a can of tomato sauce over the paprika-covered meat and vegetables. I use a regular can (15 ounces?) because I prefer a thick sauce (and lots of it; the sauce is what this recipe is all about); my mom and grandmother used an 8-ounce can and added a little water (half a can or so, I think.)

Stir it up a little, then simmer over low heat for at least a couple of hours. If you are using a Crock-Pot, all day on low. (This is a perfect Crock-Pot dish, as a matter of fact. If you don't use the Crock-Pot, it's a good one to make a day or two ahead and just heat the night you're eating it.)

Check the sauce...add paprika if it's too bland. Add some tomato juice if you don't have enough sauce (or if you went too heavy on the paprika, I guess)...this is where the good lid helps keep your liquid in.

When I was a kid we had this with (on top of, actually) mashed potatoes. I'm not a big mashed potato fan, so I started serving it over egg noodles. Then I found (in a small town in southern Alabama, of all places) dried spätzle, which is how my great-grandmother served it. (Well, actually she made her spätzle. I hope she isn't spinning in her grave now at the thought of dried spätzle.)

Anyway, spätzle can be hard to come by...one of my local supermarkets stopped carrying it, and I was having my ex buy it for me in his neighborhood store, but now a different chain store near me has it again. Oddly enough it hasn't shown up in the yuppie grocery store...maybe it's too old Europe. If you've never heard of it, it's like little egg dumplings. It isn't your lowest-fat starchy side dish, though.

So there you have it...pörkölt and spätzle, dinner of umlauts.

Eating (and drinking) for a cause...

Mom and I had dinner at Agrodolce, a wonderful little restaurant out here in Suburbia. It's right in a strip mall with some chain family restaurants and big box stores, and it is exactly the kind of place that gets overlooked by people who hate the suburbs because suburbs are soulless, generic, lowest common denominator wastelands.

Agrodolce is packed every night of the week, by the way.

I had a garden salad with a roasted garlic-lemon vinaigrette, Pollo e Capacolla (chicken breast sauteed in a fontina cream sauce with broccoli and topped with capicolla over linguine pasta) and Hedges Columbia Valley Red.

(Yep, I drink red wine with chicken. Hell, I drink red wine with scrambled eggs and Twinkies. Not that I'd eat scrambled eggs and Twinkies together; that would be gross.)

Finished up with coffee and tiramisu, one of the few desserts I'll go out of my way to get.

I am a very happy girl right now.

A good excuse to eat with something other than moderation

Tomorrow, blow the diet. Forget all that gospel I usually preach about moderation and portion control. Yes, if you are in the DC area and are eating out in a restaurant participating in Dining Out for Life on March 11, order four appetizers and two desserts with dinner. It's for a good cause.

On Thursday restaurants in the area (check the list, Virginians and Marylanders, not everything is downtown) will contribute 25 to 100% of their revenue to Food and Friends, an organization that prepares, packages and delivers meals and groceries to people living with HIV/AIDS and other life-challenging illnesses throughout Washington, DC and 14 counties of Maryland and Virginia.

There's a reason I plug this, besides just that it's a good cause. It's a good cause near to my heart. I've volunteered at F&F for a few years now and I see the needs of the clients, the dedication of the staff, and the responsible way the organization uses their resources.

I also like an excuse to splurge on a giant dinner once in a while, although if this is like most years, I'll end up with a few lunches out of the doggie bags, too.

Oh, and if you are not in Washington...check out the Dining Out for Life page anyway. Scroll down to the bottom and notice that there's a select box with lots of cities listed...Baltimore, Indianapolis, LA, and more...that are also holding fundraisers. So wherever you are, eat up!

Hey, you got beans in my brownies...

There's a nutrition and fitness column and chat in the Washington Post called the Lean Plate Club. I read it regularly and have picked up a hint or two, and a few good recipe ideas.

The chat the last couple of weeks has had a lot of people raving about a lower-fat, higher-fiber brownie made with black beans. At first, I though that sounded revolting, but I'm actually starting to see the logic in it. Plus, it sounds so easy...puree a can of black beans, mix it with the box of brownie mix, and bake. I do love recipes that don't require measuring.

I haven't tried it yet (I'm not a huge brownie fan), but I am intrigued.

Along the same lines, I recently heard about adding pureed blueberries to ground meat for healthier, juicier hamburgers.

It sounds better than trying to make apple pies out of Ritz crackers, anyway.

Ah, a simple tuna sandwich

I didn't realize it 'til last night, but tuna is such a comfort food to me.

We had tuna salad sandwiches for dinner. I went to the salad bar after the gym to get celery and onion, and in the interest of adding more vegetables where ever I can, I added bell pepper and radishes to the mix too, so the salad had some good crunch. Then when I got home, I realized we were almost out of mayonaise, so I had to improvise with the dressing...a squirt of yellow mustard (which was all we had...how often do you run out of multiple condiments at once?) and some olive oil. I figured tuna gets packed in olive oil, right?

It worked well. It was moist enough, it tasted really good, and it calmed me down a bit after a sad visit to the vet.

I have bad reactions to a lot of fish (salmon, unfortunately, being the worst) but I can eat tuna. When I was a kid I ate it all the time...I'd actually take it right from the can and spoon it onto slices of cheese and eat it that way. When we had something for dinner I didn't like (like pork chops) I'd eat tuna instead. (The deal at my house was, if you didn't like what mom made, you didn't have to eat it, but you had to make your own dinner without getting in her way and you still had to eat with the family.) One of the few foods my dad made was tuna salad, which he served on toast with a pickle spear and a milkshake. One of the first "dinners" I cooked was the mock tuna casserole...a box of macaroni and cheese, a can of peas, and a can of tuna. I kept making that into adulthood; my ex-husband called it "chunky puke" but ate it anyway.

Victor makes me the Tom Servo special sometimes. You need to know your Mystery Science Theater to understand:

Mmmm, this tuna melt sammich
Really tastes quite nice.
[spoken] Ohh, I got sesame seeds in the bun.
Plus it comes with cole slaw n' a pickle,
And I must say it's reasonably priced.

I've gotten a little more fancy with my tuna lately, grilling real filets or making Fagioli Toscanelli con Tonno. But sometimes simple is best. I have the rest of the tuna salad with me for lunch today, and bread to toast for my sandwich. If I had a pickle, it would be perfect.

...but some food is better than others...

Victor needs comfort food tonight, and wants to try a restaurant called Cheeburger Cheeburger.

(I can't wait to see if they have No Coke, Pepsi and No Fries, Cheeeeps.)

Generally if I'm going to a chain restaurant I try to check out a menu and nutritional information on their web page before hand...informed consumer, common sense, like I've been saying.

So I checked out the Cheeburger Cheeburger menu, and...whoa nelly!

Our Famous Pounder - Actually a huge 20 ounces!* If you can actually finish this monster, we’ll take a picture of you and put it on the wall with the other Cheeburger Cheeburger “Wall of Famers”

But I give them credit...veggie burgers, portobello mushrooms, and salads. That's really all I want...a few healthier options amid the giant slabs of less healthy indulgences. And they have red wine.

Food is good!

I wish I'd made it to the Theobroma Cacao: Ancient Crop, Medicinal Plant, Surprising Future symposium that was in town this week. How cool is this...science, poetry, and chocolate tastings!

Because of the Valentine's Day tie-in, I guess, the story from the symposium seems to be Chocolate May Contain Health Benefits. It actually isn't a new discovery...scientists have been studying phenolic phytochemicals (components of cocoa, red wine, tea, coffee, fruit, vegetables, herbs...in other words, plant-based foods) for years. Evidence suggests that these micronutrients have cardioprotective benefits, and may have synergistic effects with each other as well as macronutrients like amino acids to optimize metabolic function.

Or as I prefer to think of it: food is good for you.

With my frequent rants about obesity I probably come across as a food cop type, and I'm not, not really. I love food. I don't believe there's any food that ought to be taken off the market. I even eat at McDonald's.

What I do think is that many people are...naive. They get bombarded with good information, bad information, and incomplete information, and maybe somebody heard the "Hey, chocolate is good for your heart" story on the top 40 radio station this morning and used it as an excuse to buy the King Size Snicker, which would be a poor application of that bit of incomplete information.

There's a good paper (Reductionism and the Narrowing Nutrition Perspective: Time for Reevaluation and Emphasis on Food Synergy) on the 5 a Day web page. (Who pays the bill: the produce industry.) It highlights the importance of an "increased emphasis on overall dietary pattern" rather than focusing on one particular component or food.

Something to consider when making lunch...not flavonoids, not carbs, not calories, but lunch.

You can't be completely lazy, you can't be completely dependent on restaurants, you can't believe every advertisement or book, but it is not that hard to eat a reasonable and healthy diet.

I think I've determined that I'd like to be a nutritionist when I grow up. These are the stories that get me fired up, that spur me into doing more research and compel me to write absudly long blog posts I doubt anyone reads. I want to deliver the message: food is good.

(Too bad I'm already grown up, and have become accustomed to the standard of living provided by a lower management job and an 8-hour day. I do toy with the idea of chucking it all, going back to school, finding part-time jobs that will meet the mortgage, and then entering the exciting world of making half my current salary as a nutritionist when I graduate. Then I think, maybe I should just keep blogging.)

Wild rice and feta salad

I have a horrible mess of a junk drawer in my desk at work. I had to empty it out this morning in a search for staples (which I did not find...staples are the one office supply I never run out of, and yet, no staples.) In the process I found this recipe, which I made up a few years ago as a standard pot luck contribution. I guess it was good enough for someone to ask for my recipe, otherwise it would not have made its way to my kitchenless office.

The recipe is ...

• 1 cup uncooked wild rice (or mix of wild and brown rice)
• 1 cup diced celery
• 1 cup chopped pecans
• 1 cup dried canberries (I use sweetened Craisins)
• 6 to 8 ouces feta cheese, crumbled
• Vinaigrette salad dressing (I use an herb-y bottled vinaigrette)

Cook the rice and allow to cool. Mix the rice, celery, pecans, and cranberries, then enough vinaigrette to coat but not so much that the salad is swimming in oil. Mix in the crumbled feta shortly before serving. Can be served chilled or close to room temperature.

White beans and pasta, and some observations on my writing style

I haven't posted a recipe in awhile. I really haven't been cooking a lot (so much for that resolution) but I got home early today (to beat the ice storm, which promises to make the commute treacherous) and (since I expect the gym will be closed) I think I'll go all out and make a real dinner.

What's the record for parenthetical comments in one sentence? I'm bad about that...and ellipses...because I'm typing as I think, and I'm too lazy to go back and edit.

Anyway: dinner. (I also frequently try to re-rail my train of thought by saying "anyway." Is this breezy and conversational, or annoying?)

This bean & pasta dish is very simple, and I like it because I can make it without looking up an actual recipe. In fact, I have no idea where the actual recipe came from originally.

Cook about two cups of ziti, penne, or other short, tubular pasta. (The twisty kind like rotini works, too. One of the things I like about this dish is the "use what you have around" aspect.)

Mix together
One can of white beans (Great Northern or Canellini)
One 28-ounce can of tomatoes (something chunkier than crushed...I usually use whole, and break the tomatoes up with my hands. Don't squirt tomato sauce all over yourself doing that.) Drain the tomatoes, but reserve the sauce in case the mixture looks too dry.
8 ounces of ricotta cheese (or cottage cheese)
About half of a red onion, chopped (or white, or yellow...use the whole thing if it's a small onion)
Spices like crushed red pepper, parsley, basil, oregano, thyme...pizza-like spices
The cooked pasta (drained, but you probably figured that out)

I find this is easiest to mix together with my hands (gloved, of course).

Spread the mixture in a baking or casserole dish (sprayed with Pam or something first, unless you like soaking dishes for three days before you can scrub them) and sprinkle the top with shredded mozzarella. (I've skipped the mozzarella since I cut back on cheese, it isn't critical.) Bake in the usual way (350 degrees for 45 minutes or so) until it's bubbly and the cheese is starting to brown and it looks like a casserole should look.

If you don't go crazy with the cheese this is pretty healthy, and I usually use wheat pasta to add even more fiber. I'm not a huge fan of wheat pasta by itself or with light sauce, but I think there's enough liquid and strong flavors in this that the gumminess and the flavor of wheat stuff fades to the background.

You can mix everything up the night before and bake the next day, if you are better organized than I am.

When is a Duh not a Duh?

Heather over at Angleweave has another diet-related post that has me saying "yes, but..."

This one concerns the portion-control research done by Brian Wansink at the University of Illinois. Dr. Wansink was a presenter at a recent FDA Obesity Working Group meeting, so having read his research presented there, I thought that the AP article Heather referenced was a little superficial.

I know a lot of people have a negative view of the "food police" types. Wansink isn't from the nutrition and public health arena, though...his degrees are in Business Administration, Journalism & Mass Communications, and Marketing...and his Food & Brand Lab focuses not on what people should be doing but on what they actually do.

And then the food police can use this information to beat people over the head with what they need to change. Personally I'm in favor of this, because (as I explained last time I got on my soapbox) this too-fat-too-inactive habit is getting expensive.

Anyway, back to Wansink's research. It is more than the Duh conclusion that people who eat too much get fat. For example, they studied how people perceived their portions of liquid in short, wide 22-ounce glasses and tall, slender 22-ounce glasses and found that "[p]eople given short wide glasses poured 76% more than those who had randomly been given tall slender glasses. They believed, however, that they had poured less."

Implications?

A wide range of people and institutions would like to better control a person’s consumption of a product. Those in the hospitality industry want to decrease costs (via serving size) without decreasing satisfaction. Those in public policy want to decrease waste. Those in health and dietetics fields want to decrease over-consumption. Those on restricted diets want to decrease calories, fat, or sugar intake. If short, wide glasses encourage people to pour more than tall glasses, the selection of glasses has an impact on costs as well as on calories.

Yet there are circumstances where there is a desire to stimulate an increased consumption of healthy beverages with the undernourished young and old. For instance, a parent may want to encourage their child to pour and drink more milk at home, and a dietician may want nursing home patients to consume more juice in the cafeteria. In these cases, short, wide glasses would encourage more consumption than the narrow six ounce glasses that are often provided.

Very few people are aware of everything they do and why they are doing it. Another of the lab's studies, Buying More: Why Numerical Signs Make You Overspend at the Grocery Store caused me to turn red...I've bought more cans of soup that I needed because they were "three for." Now that I have read this study, I'll be a little more aware of what I'm doing.

Making people aware of the issues like portion control is one thing, but Wansink's presentation to the FDA was interesting because he focused on the idea that the physical packaging (that's the red potato chip idea) might be an effective way to make people aware of what they are eating while they are eating it. In his testimony he said

So structural packaging barriers appear to decrease consumption. Okay, they can decrease consumption, and they might even be profitable. For instance, it might be possible to develop a healthy portion line of package and sort of price it appropriately.

The key is to make people aware of how much they're eating without decreasing their enjoyment in the food. As we know earlier, enjoying food and having it taste good is the number one thing people look for.

So the summary of packaging research is that we can't rely only on label information, because people appear to ignore it. Are there more effective ways it can be presented? Well, we're working on a few different ideas that we hope might be more effective.

We can't rely only on small portions, because people seem to overcompensate when they eat small portions. Well, are there other alternatives to just having small portions?

And the last thing is that structural changes in packaging hold promise. There are lot of other forums, and there may be situations where it does and doesn't work, and that would be the thing to look at next.

I'm a person who has both motivation and time, and I'd still appreciate having food packaged in a way that makes portion contol easier. In fact, I buy some things in less-economical ways (juice boxes, for example, and trail mix) to help make it a no-brainer. I think of people like my sister, who has a demanding job, a long commute, and three kids, and who relies a lot on convenience foods...it isn't that she lacks motivation, but any improvements in labeling and packaging that makes it easier for her to make healthier choices is a big help.

Speaking of labeling...the question of how to label packaged food, and whether to require labels (i.e., nutritional information) for restaurants, is a big one for the folks in public health and industry. I want more information, but I understand the information and how to put into context. A lot of people don't have that context, which I suspect was the point of the paragraph in the AP article:

Wansink and other researchers hope the results can help the federal government devise more user-friendly nutrition labels for packaged foods. For example, instead of stating that a handful of granola has 200 calories, the label instead could say the consumer would have to walk 2 miles to burn it off.

Another speaker at the FDA meeting was Susan Borra from the International Food Information Council, an industry-funded organization I mentioned in a previous post. She discussed the reasons for putting some context on nutrition labels:

[W]e talked about information needs, and consumers are feeling overwhelmed and bombarded with information. They actually told us, I think we know what we're supposed to do. I have information that I know I'm supposed to eat better. I know I'm supposed to get more physical activity. But I'm not doing it, so please help me get to that point. And it's things like motivation, helping them [get] the tools, the how-to's, versus just general information; and they said that they would hopefully then be able to do it in both terms of nutrition and physical activity. ...

So, in this need for consumer research, what are some of the questions that we need to look at? How do consumers, how do they actually really utilize calorie information on a food label? Do they understand this concept of energy balance or does energy balance understanding really help them in any way? Can calorie information on a food label, can it impact behavior? Will it help them improve their caloric intake? Are there ways to more effectively communicate calories in the context of single-serving, multi-serving packages that makes more sense for consumers? And then what messages about calorie and serving size would be truly motivational, not just informational, helping them to bridge the gap between what they know and what they're doing.

I don't argue with Heather just for the sake of arguing...actually, Heather is a rare Reasonable Person, and if everyone took care of themselves like she does, I'd be looking for another line of work. But she and I have different perspectives on a few things, and that's what caused me to go off at such length this morning.

The popular press is not the best place to get solid health information. It's a good way to steer you toward research, but take the conclusions presented in a popular press article with a big grain of salt. And when you read the actual research, check to see who paid the bills.

And finally, I guess it is my 2004 goal to try to get people to recognize that public health issues like obesity, smoking, and seat belts aren't just mere matters of free choice vs. big government intrusion, there are serious economic consequences of poor health.

Hoppin' John

There's a southern tradition about eating black-eyed peas on New year's Day to bring good luck for the year. I started making Hoppin' John a few years ago just to try it out...no superstition, I just thought it sounded like another good way to eat beans.

But I have had pretty decent luck since, come to think of it.

I don't have a recipe per se...I looked up Hoppin' John in some cookbooks and on the internet and went from there. It's a good New Year's Day dinner...it can use up some Christmas leftovers (if you happened to have ham for Christmas, say) and since you really just dump stuff in a pot, it doesn't require much thought or attention if you are a bit under the weather from the festivities New Year's Eve.

Here is how I make it:

Saute a chopped onion, sliced celery, and minced garlic in a large pot. Add black-eyed peas (I just use bag of frozen ones), diced ham, rice (I steam it in advance), and tomato (I use a can of crushed and a can of whole tomato with the juice, breaking the whole tomatoes up a bit). Season with salt, pepper (I use the Hot Shot pepper mix), parsley, thyme, and a couple of bay leaves. Simmer...if I'm making it in the morning to eat for dinner I use a Crock Pot, but today I'm going to a hockey game so I'm aiming to eat it during the Gator Bowl, hoping my good luck extends to the Terps, so I have it on the stovetop. Add some water if necessary...it shouldn't be soupy but it needs some liquid. Season further with Tabasco (or Crystal, or Frank's, or the hot sauce of your choice.).

Serve with corn bread and greens of some kind (collard, mustard, turnip)...greens are another good luck tradition, representing folding money or something. I don't like them and don't bother to eat 'em, which may explain why I'm still broke.

Best wishes for a healthy and happy 2004!

Key Lime Pie

Next up in the holiday parade of food is key lime pie. This is a favorite of my grandmother and my father, so I get bonus good offspring points, and it is so simple I don't mind making it.

The recipe is straight off the bottle of Nellie and Joe's Key Lime Juice. I've seen recipes calling for lime Jell-o, or regular lime juice, but I am suspicious of them...key limes don't taste like persian limes. Not that I'm a key lime expert, and the closest I have come to Key West is Sarasota.

Anyway, the recipe:

The filling:
14 ounces (1 can) of condensed milk
3 egg yolks
1/2 cup key lime juice

Combine the filling ingedients (I just use a wire wisk) and pour into a prepared graham cracker crust. (I suppose it is possible to make and bake your own graham cracker crust, but I certainly never have, so you won't find those instructions on my page.) Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes. Allow to cool, then chill. (I make it a day ahead to be sure it's sufficiently cool.)

For the topping, my grandmother used to make meringue, but that was only because she wanted to use the extra egg whites. I don't care for meringue, I'll eat the egg whites in an omlette, and I think Cool Whip is actually more traditional. I used to actually cover the top of the pie in Cool Whip, or get fancy piping Cool Whip around the edges and in the center, but I found out Dad isn't a Cool Whip fan and prefers his plain. Now I just throw a container of Cool Whip and a spoon out next to the pie and let people eat it how they want...see, this is a very low-effort dessert.

Beigli & Chruschiki, the Recipes

The nicest guy on the internet says he wants the recipes, so here goes:

Beigli

For the filling:

1 1/2 cups water
3 1/2 cups sugar
5 cups ground walnuts
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
grated rind of two small lemons

Boil water and sugar to form a syrup (about five minutes). Stir in nuts, spices, and lemon rind and allow to cool. (We generally do this the night before.)

Apricot preserves (about 18 ounces)
Raisins (about 1 pound)

For the dough:

6 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon salt
3 sticks butter
3 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
3 3/4 teaspoons yeast
1/2 cup milk, warmed

Also

Egg whites

Sift together flour, sugar, and salt. Cut in butter. Lightly beat eggs and mix in vanilla. Dissolve yeast in warm milk. Add egg mixture and yeast mixture and knead into soft dough. Cut into six equal pieces and let rest for 30 minutes. (Despite the yeast, the dough doesn't really rise, and it really is only supposed to rest half an hour, or so my great-aunt says.)

Roll dough as for a pie crust and spread lightly with apricot preserves. Spread a thin layer of the nut filling and sprinkle with raisins. Roll as for a jelly roll, tucking the ends under when complete. ("Lightly" and "thin" are, of course, relative. My nth cousin rolls her crust thicker and spreads the filling lighter; it looks nicer when it's cut but I like the taste of the filling better than the crust. And her crust still cracks.)

Brush with egg whites and pierce the dough several times with a fork or toothpick (or it will explode). Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, brushing with egg white a second time halfway through the baking.

Cool beigli on a rack. The crust often cracks; as the beigli cools gently push it back together. The filling will hold it together (the filling, when it comes out of the oven, is like molten lava,but stickier.). When cool, wrap in plastic wrap and foil and store in a refrigerator or freezer. This recipe makes six beigli.

Chrusciki

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks
3 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon grated lemon peel
1 1/2 teaspoons almond extract (or Amaretto)
5 tablespoons sour cream
1 quart of oil for frying
Powdered sugar

Sift together flour and salt. Beat eggs, sugar, lemon peel, and almond extract until thick. Add sour cream. Stir in flour and salt mixture. Knead until pliable.

Cover dough and let stand one hour.

Roll out dough (about one-third at a time) onto a floured work surface. Roll very thin ("so you can read through it," according to my grandfather). Cut into strips (about 1" by 3") and cut a slit in the center of each strip. Pass one end of the strip through the slit (it makes a bow tie-looking shape).

Heat the oil in a heavy pot to 370 degrees. Fry chrusciki three at a time, turning once, until light golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Sprinkle with powdered sugar while warm.

Beigli & Chrusciki

Sounds like an eastern European law firm.

Anyway, that's how I spent yesterday, making beigli (a Hungarian pastry filled with apricot, walnut, and raisin) and chrusciki (a Polish cookie made of fried dough covered in powdered sugar). These are the labor-intensive family holiday treats. I'm learning how to make them, and have been learning for the past few years...there's something of a learning curve, and when you only practice one out of every 365 days, that curve is a bit steep, especially for those of us who don't bake and don't grasp the subtleties of how dough feels. There's a lot of "feel" in these recipes.

My sister has the flu and couldn't help this year...the responsibility of carrying on these traditions is really in her hands, because she can bake. But I did an okay job:

Beigli

Chrusciki

In fact, I'm enjoying both right now with a cup of strong coffee, and I have to say that I did just fine.

(I'm not going to type up the recipes...what I have on paper barely matches what my mother told me to actually do...but if you want the recipes because you've actually heard of either one of them or something, drop me a note and I'll be happy to send them. In my life I have met maybe three people outside the family who knew of chruschiki and one who knew beigli. Even better...if you have ever made beigli and know how to keep the crust from cracking, please please please email me. That secret seems to be buried with my great-grandmother.)

Stuffed ham

Stuffed ham is a uniquely Maryland food. In fact, I think it is unique to Southern Maryland...I've never seen it up here in the central part of the state except in the hands of Southern Marylanders (as they passed it to me).

Geographical aside: Southern Maryland is not the Eastern Shore. I watched a Food Network show about the Oyster Festival in St. Mary's that would have been a fine show had the host not repeatedly misidentified their location. "Look at a map, you moron!" I kept yelling at the television.

Anyway, stuffed ham. I had it first at a wedding in Southern Maryland and it knocked my socks off. I like salty country ham, but this...ooooh, this is even better.

You take a country ham and cut slits in it, then stuff the slits with a mixture of chopped kale, cabbage, onion, red pepper, and probably every family has their own special spice mix. The ham needs to sit overnight and cook for awhile, so it isn't something you just whip up after coming home from work. I've never made it. Since I fell for it at that wedding years ago, I have just put the word out that I love stuffed ham, and stuffed ham has come my way.

My grandmother and great aunt used to go down to a church festival where they sold stuffed ham. Unfortunately some poor food handling caused a food poisoning outbreak in 1997, and I'm not sure the church still holds the supper. At any rate, my grandmother has passed away and my great aunt doesn't get around anymore.

After I lost that stuffed ham connection I met a young couple who live here but grew up in St. Mary's. When they go home for Easter they sneak back enough ham that I get a sandwich.

Reading the food section of the Post the other day a very small ad caught my eye: order stuffed ham for the holidays. Oooh, can I?

Stuffed hams are in the 12 to 14 pound range. That's a heckuva lot of ham for two people. But still...something to consider.

Then I recycled the damn paper and lost the phone number.

So I have spent the last hour or so on the internet. I found recipes, but no offers of stuffed ham for sale. Then as I waded through a Southern Maryland discussion board I found out...they sell stuffed ham in grocery store delis.

Wooo HOOOO!!! Time for a road trip with a cooler.

Creme de cacao truffles

Okay, my dislike of cooking (as opposed to my great love of food and eating) is well established. So when I do cook (or assemble) food, I try to do the easiest thing possible.

A few years ago I had to bring some treat to work for a party, and I found a recipe in one of those colorful little cookbooks they sell at the grocery store checkout. (You know those cookbooks...most of the ingredients are brand name products, and most of the recipes are designed to take like ten minutes to make. Just my speed.)

Since this recipe required no actual cooking beyond melting chocolate, I decided to give it a shot. It was for chocolate truffles, something I'd never tasted. I made a batch...a bit sloppy, because I am a slob, but not too hard. I didn't much care for the results, but I am not a huge chocolate fan.

I took them to work. The people who like chocolate seemed to like them okay, although a few of the connaisseurs were slightly appalled by how I'd made them.

That afternoon, one of the gentlemen in the office, an older chemist from eastern Europe, came to my desk and said, with his wonderful old world accent, "I understand you made those truffles." I said I had. He said "When I was young, my mother made truffles." Then he whispered, like he was afraid she might hear, "Yours are even better."

Well, I no longer cared what the confection connaisseurs thought, because never in my life has anyone suggested that I made anything better than his mother!

So I have made truffles every year since, and a box of them goes straight to Dr. Chemist. Here's the recipe I use:

Creme de cacao truffles

(Adapted from a Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese recipe)

3 cups of sifted powdered sugar [I sift this one, because when you've been told your truffles are better than someone's mother's, you don't want to mess it up!]
8 ounces of softened cream cheese
12 ounces of chocolate chips, melted
3 tablespoons of creme de cacao
Unsweetened powdered cocoa

Melt the chocolate chips over low heat. While the chocolate is melting, beat the cream cheese and powdered sugar with an electric mixer untill well blended. [I add the sugar about a cup at a time.] Add the chocolate and mix, then add the creme de cacao and mix. [This is a deviation from the original. I don't keep a lot of liqueurs around, and dividing the mix into thirds to make different flavors seemed too much like work, so instead of doing Amaretto, Grand Marnier, and Kahlua, I stuck with chocolate.] Chill the mixture for a few hours, then roll into small (about 1 inch) balls. Roll the balls lightly in powdered cocoa. [Deviation Number 2. The first year I did use coconut, chopped nuts, etc., but it was a pain, and Dr. Chemist seemed to like the plain cocoa ones best, so that's what I go with now.] Put each truffle in a small paper muffin tin liner [that's what I found at the grocery store; I think you can buy actual candy holder thingys somewhere] so they don't stick together. Keep in a refrigerator.

Here is the finished product:

And this is what it does to my kitchen. This year was sloppier than usual; I think I tried to mix before the cream cheese had sufficiently softened.

Oatmeal raisin cookies breakfast disks

Ted has got me thinking of oatmeal raisin cookies. They are my favorite cookie, although I don't make them often (I'm not much into baking; too much measuring and too many dishes to wash afterward. I've mentioned that I'm slackass lazy, right?)

I wasn't planning on making cookies at all this year. I'm making truffles for work (intending to do that tomorrow, in fact) and a key lime pie for the family party, and on Saturday my mom and sister and I will be doing the traditional family (Polish and Hungarian) stuff. But I don't need cookies, the people at work don't need cookies (the office has been hit with a food tsunami), and most of my family are on diets.

But I was looking at Ted's oatmeal raisin cookie recipe thinking...oatmeal is healthy. Raisins are healthy. Maybe I could call these breakfast?

Just for comparison, here's my recipe:

1/2 cup shortening or butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cup oatmeal
1 1/2 cup sifted flour [Yeah, right. I have never sifted the flour. This was my mother's recipe. She sifts.]
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup seedless raisins [Can you still get raisins with seeds?]

Cream shortening and sugar. Add eggs and oatmeal. Sift [Uh huh. Mix with a fork.] together dry ingredients and add alternately with milk. Add vanilla and raisins. Drop on lightly greased cookie sheet [I assume the original recipe said something like "drop by tablespoonfuls" and I was trying to fit the whole thing on one side of a 3 x 5 card]. Bake at 350 degrees for 12 minutes.

One of the first times I made these (as a kid) I used what were then brand new "no stick" baking sheets. I neglected to compensate for the dark no-stick coating and after 12 minutes the bottoms of the cookies were quite burned. That first batch went to the dog, who loved them...we finally got her trained to "shake" using the burned cookies.

Another thing I don't like about baking is having to get the ingredients right...it is chemistry, after all. (They don't allow me in the lab, have I ever mentioned that?) So I'm wondering if using wheat flour, which I happen to have, would screw this recipe up totally. And I have some buttermilk, but no regular milk...wonder what that would do.

If I have time tomorrow I might experiment. And if it doesn't work...I have never trained this dog to shake.

No leftovers

Well, there is still half a pie. The verdict was that the crust was good (kinda like an oatmeal cookie), but the filling was a bit blander than the usual recipe. That was my verdict, anyway; my mom thought the increased taste of the crust just made the pumpkin seem less powerful, my dad liked the whole thing. Then again, my dad's been on a low-carb diet (not Atkins silliness, but something his doctor has recommended because of high triglycerides and his family history of diabetes) and he's forgotten what sweet things taste like.

The pie is probably my least-favorite part of Thankgiving anyway. Turkey sandwiches are my favorite part. A dinner roll, a bit of turkey, creamed onion, broccoli, kielbasa, sauerkraut, and cranberry chutney...the rest of the family looks on in horror. I'm in heaven.

My mom tried to foil me this year with crescent rolls, which are much harder to use for a sandwich. I prevailed. I unrolled the roll. I made a wrap. Trendy and effective.

Anyway. I've pretty much wasted today, which I had off from work, so I need to get moving on Christmas plans if I'm going to be ready for that in less than four weeks. I realized last night that I can mark the transition from childhood to adulthood by the year my attitude went from "Yay! It's almost Christmas!" to "Oh sh[oo]t. It's almost Christmas!"

I will be relying heavily on Amazon, and I probably owe the UPS guy the best present of all.

Fire it up

I was chatting with my sister about Thanksgiving, and she told me, with some dread in her voice, that her brother-in-law is intending to fry a turkey this year.

I understand the dread. Her BIL's idea of cooking is making a peanut butter sandwich, and he usually makes a mess doing that. He's probably going to burn the house down. (Coincidentally enough, I just saw a tv news story about people doing just that, complete with dramatic film footage of charred rubble that was a deck.)

I first heard of frying turkey a few (ok, I just counted, it's been 12) years ago when I was living in the Deep South. My ex and I had gone to Dillards to buy a huge pot for making beer, and the clerk said "Y'all fixin' to fry a turkey?"

We exchanged confused glances...is there anything Southerns won't fry?

Then we smiled what we hoped were polite smiles and tried to pay for our stockpot and get out of there. Before we could, though, the helpful clerk made us a copy of her own deep-fried turkey recipe. She swore we'd love it.

Gotta admit I never tried it. Something about trying to lower a turkey into a vat of boiling oil using a wire coat hanger didn't appeal to my sense of safety, and that was before I became a safety professional. For that matter, deep-frying one of the healthier meats seemed a little wrong too, and that was before I was health conscious.

When I moved home I filed fried turkey away (along with boiled peanuts, mullet, and swamp cabbage) as foods I never expected to see again. But then like NASCAR the turkey frying phenomenon went national. (Apparently Martha Stewart is to blame...for the turkey, that is, not NASCAR.)

Now Target is selling turkey frying kits and the Underwriters Laboratories is considering them so dangerous they refused to certify a single one.

And I know of at least one guy who can't boil water that's going to be trying his hand at turkey frying, so if you're in the Baltimore area on Thursday you might want to look out for the fire trucks.

Greek to me

I love Greek food. There's a Greek carryout up the street that makes the best Chicken Souvlaki I've ever had. Victor had dinner there Wednesday night while I was at the game, so because I missed it I've been craving Greek food.

It's not necessarily authentic, but this Greek-ish salad is one of my summer staples:

Combine chopped cucumber, tomato, red onion, and olives (approximately equal amounts of the cucumber and tomato, slightly less onion and olive. Kalamata olives are best. Do make sure they are pitted.) Toss with a red wine vinaigrette (olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic, salt, pepper, oregano, and mint). Let it sit for a few hours, then sprinkle with crumbled feta cheese before serving.

That's the basic salad. If I'm eating it as a main dish I add chick peas, and maybe orzo. If I have one, I'll add chopped green or red pepper. Tonight we're having it with grilled chicken, but for lunch tomorrow I'll stuff the leftovers in a pita.

Sorry about the lack of amounts...since I wing it, I just keep making Victor taste the dressing until it is right. I'm sure he'll be glad to do the same for you.

Boat drinks*

I had to dig my heavy coat out yesterday. I'm not ready for winter. It's only November and I'm already indulging myself by browsing web pages from Ocean City, dreaming about summer vacation.

My second-favorite restaurant** in OC has a new web page, complete with a picture of one of my absolute favorite meals anywhere.

And recipes, God bless 'em. They even tease that they might add the recipe for the topping for the filet, oh please oh please oh please...

Speaking of food, Ted has some very practical Kitchen Tips today. He's right about the knives...cut yourself with a good sharp knife and you barely feel it, and and they can stitch your finger back on without leaving a scar!

To switch subjects wildly without a transition...cold weather has got me planning for the holidays. I'm thinking of making Christmas cards with rat pictures, but I understand that not everybody finds rats to be so cute and cuddly. So, if you got a card like this, would it freak you out?

That was a bit random. I'm a zombie...we've had some crazy wind the last couple of days, and it has scared the dog and she's needed to sleep with me, which means I'm getting no sleep. Well, I did nod off during the fourth quarter of the Terps game last night (sheer exhaustion; it was a good game), but I was jolted awake with a dream that I was trying to diagram football plays using the rats. They weren't cooperating.

Did I mention I'm a zombie?

*In that I gotta go where it's warm.

**I explained why the Shark is only my second-favorite restaurant in Ocean City in a blog back in August. I'd been home for less than a week and I was already missing the food.

Your tax dollars at work

Often the phrase "your tax dollars at work" preceeds some outrageous example of government waste or overspending on some frivilous esoteric program. I don't doubt that outrageous occurances exist, but I say "your tax dollars at work" without sarcasm, maybe because I've worked on so many federal contracts, maybe because I take advantage of what I think are some pretty cool things...

Like recipes. I don't like cooking but I do like recipes, and the National, Heart, Lung & Blood Institute has a new cookbook out.

I'm particularly looking forward to trying the pumpkin pie.

And the National Cancer Institute, as part of the "5 a Day" initiative, has some soup recipes that sound good, too...like turkey soup with sweet potatoes.

(Yeah, I'm ready for Thanksgiving.)

And if you're cooking for a big crowd and you miss the creamed chip beef you had back in the service, the Navy has a searchable recipe repository online. (Dunno about the other branches, but everybody knows that Navy food is better anyway.)

See...cool stuff!

I also love the IRS web page, but that's a topic for another day.

Comfort Food

Some days weeks you just need mom's meatloaf.

(Mom is a very good cook, but her meatloaf recipe is pure back o' the box. And it the only meatloaf I like. I won't order meatloaf in restaurants. Don't bother recommending using salsa instead of ketcup, or sending me the recipe for spinach-basil meatloaf. I'm sure they are awesome, but I am a one meatloaf girl.)

Oh, and that's not gravy, it's A-1 Sauce.

Recommended wine: Koala Blue Shiraz.

And since I'm on such a gourmet roll tonight, here's Sunday's SPAM and eggs.

A tale of two sandwiches

I was quite taken with the SPAM website I found last night. It got me thinking...I have never had SPAM. In college somebody gave me a tin of something called "potted meat food product," but I didn't eat that either. I did used to love Underwood Deviled Ham. And then rounding out the tinned meat lineup, there was canned corned beef.

There were two distinct corned beefs in my house growing up. My father loved a canned corned beef sandwich: toasted white bread, with yellow mustard on one slice and mayonaise on the other, sliced corned beef and pickles.

My mother would shudder when he ate it. Mom's corned beef came from the deli and only from the deli, served on rye bread with spicy mustard and swiss cheese.

I knew the origins of my mother's sandwich; my grandfather had grown up in Brooklyn. And my taste swung it that direction [Reubens, actually] , too, so I didn't give dad's sandwich much thought.

Then one day I was flipping through White Trash Cooking and did a doubletake. There on page 73: "Canned Corned Beef Sandwich." The recipe didn't call for yellow mustard, but it did offer the advice that it was "delicious with a Cocola!"

Suddenly dad's sandwich was no longer an abomination, is was as much a part of my culinary cultural heritage as mom's.

Super Secret Chili Spice Mix

This is for Susie, who noticed that my chili recipe was missing a little something...

Specifically, the spices.

Okay, the super secret mix:

Equal parts salt, pepper, paprika, oregano, ground cumin, chili powder, and red pepper flakes.

You might be saying "Wait a second...isn't that just the ingredients in chili powder, plus the chili powder itself?"

Yeah, pretty much. But it works.

As for amounts, spiciness is so individual. I use about 4 tablespoons of the mix per batch of chili; I think Victor would prefer it hotter and I've had a few people tell me it was too spicy.

I will say that the heat kinda sneaks up on you, so taste it twice and wait a second before deciding whether to dump more spices in. The first time I made it I had to brown an additional pound of meat and chop a second onion to get it back to where I could eat it.

I hope you like it. If you don't, blame Victor...he's the one who convinced me that the chili was good enough to share. Normally I am very shy about giving people recipes I made up, because I will feel guilty if they are underwhelmed.

Chili today, hot tamale

One thing I like about the cool weather coming in is the chance to make chili again. (I suppose I could make chili in the summer, but it doesn't feel right somehow.)

I've been fooling with a chili recipe for a few years now, and I finally have it how I like it...minimal work, maximum yield. Throw it in the crock pot and get at least three meals out of it.

It also works without meat as a vegetarian chili; that is actually the way I make it most often now.

Brown about a pound of ground meat...beef, turkey, pork, a mixture. Drain the meat and retain a small amount of the grease.

Or, if you want to go vegetarian, use a little olive oil in a frying pan.

Cook a chopped onion and two cloves of chopped garlic in the grease or olive oil. When the onion is soft, pour a few ounces of beer in the pan. Add the meat back in, if you're using meat.

It doesn't matter what kind of beer, although I wouldn't use anything too sweet. I'd say a "full-bodied ale" would be best.

Simmer the onions, garlic, and meat in the beer for a few minutes.

While that simmers, drain a can of kidney beans and a can of black beans. Dump the beans and a 28-ounce can of undrained tomatoes (crushed are good. If you use whole tomatoes, break them up.) into a heavy pot (or Crock-Pot), then add the onion, garlic, meat, and beer.

If you aren't using meat, drain and add another can or two of beans. I usually go for variety...maybe a can of pintos and a can of navy beans.

Season to taste with Super Secret Chili Spice Mix and cook over low heat (or on low in the crockpot) for an hour or more.

Serve over spaghetti, topped with chopped raw onion, chopped fresh tomato, cheddar cheese, and maybe a little sour cream if you were too heavy-handed with the Super Secret Chili Spice. (That stuff sneaks up on ya.)

Leftovers make a good lunch wrapped in a tortilla, and very small amounts of leftovers can even be used as an omlette filling.

Now the good news

Now, if I did work for the Center for Thoughtful and Reasonable Analysis of All Available Data with Appropriate Advisories on the Limitations of Said Data for Informed and Responsible Individuals Who Are Willing to Make Decisions and Accept the Consequences, I would be all over this research:

A study in this month's European Journal of Clinical Nutrition is reporting that it is unlikely that beer intake is associated with obesity.

The researchers stated in their objective that"[t]here is a common notion that beer drinkers are, on average, more 'obese' than either nondrinkers or drinkers of wine or spirits. This is reflected, for example, by the expression 'beer belly'."

After studying male and female beer drinkers and non-drinkers (no alcohol, that is) in the Czech Republic, the researchers found that men who drank beer and smoked did have a higher waist-to-hip ratio, but in nonsmoking men and in women the waist-to-hip ratio was not increased. In men the body mass index was not related to beer drinking, and in women, the beer drinkers actually had lower BMIs than the nondrinkers.

Forget the burrito, gimmie a beer.

Bean burritos (again)

I have a bean burrito addiction. (Actually, all Mexican food, but bean burritos in particular.) I heard on the news yesterday that the Center for Science in the Public Interest had evaluated the menus at Baja Fresh and Chipotle, two of the fast food places where I frequently indulge in my bean burrito fixes, and I had a pretty good idea that I'd be dismayed by the results.

I already knew the damage from Baja Fresh, because they have their nutrional information on their web page. I'm in Weight Watchers and I'd looked everything up to calculate the points. I have been frustrated that Chipotle didn't have the numbers available (I even e-mailed and asked). Now I know why...just the freakin' tortilla has 340 calories.

So the burrito I get, the vegetarian without sour cream or cheese, is still 980 calories and 36 grams of fat.

I did a quick Internet search to find the whole report and I stumbled across an interesting web page...kinda the anti-CSPI. It's called the Center for Consumer Freedom, which has representatives from the restaurant industry, food companies, and consumers. (I wonder who the consumers are.) Their press release response to the CSPI had me rolling, especially

"Once again, the killjoys at CSPI have made lemons out of lemonade," said Richard Berman, Executive Director of the Center for Consumer Freedom. "This ridiculous tirade against Mexican dining is a classic reminder that while most of us derive pleasure from food, CSPI exists only to whine about it. As usual, the group's latest so-called research is a complete rejection of common sense, and suggests that Americans are too stupid to make their own food choices."

Now, ok, CSPI gets quite bombastic in some of their publications (one of their regular features is called "Food Porn"), but at least they are getting the nutritional information out there. Since health information in the popular press seems to be of the "This Will Kill You" or the "This Will Cure You" variety, a certain hysteria is probably inevitable.

(When I was in journalism school I did a semester-long independent study with a scientific reporter. It is difficult to report on many scientific subjects without dumbing the material down too much or being too complex...and the average reader of the average daily paper or weekly magazine is looking for the "And this affects me how...?" angle. So I'm not saying that to bash "the press.")

Oh, and I do appreciate the information that CSPI gets out. I do want to know that a Chipotle tortilla is 340 calories. They irk me, though, when they go beyond informing and start calling for recalls of products, as they are with a meat substitute called Quorn. A lot of people are sensitive to Quorn and get a pretty bad reaction. I sympathize, because I have food sensitivities and I've experienced the adverse reaction in a public place thing, and that ain't cool at all. But I can tolerate Quorn. I like it. And while I think that every box should have a label warning people that a percentage of the population has a sensitivity or intolerence, and while I think that every product that includes it should be adequately labelled so that sensitive people can avoid it, darn it, I want to be able to buy it.

Switching tirades back to the Center for Consumer Freedom...I loved the comment about Americans being to stupid to make their own food choices. The CDC reports the prevalence of obesity among adults to be almost 20%, way up from the last ten years. Is their an adult left in the country who hasn't seen the data on the health consequences of obesity?

I can probably count on my hands the number of people in the country whose health actually concerns me. If everybody else wanted to eat three Big Macs a day I really don't care. I don't care if people smoke unfiltered Camels and shoot heroin either. Or if they ride motorcycles without helmets. My only objection to any of that is the economic cost I need to absorb when the consequences of their decisions catch up to them, but hey. I walk and hike in tax-supported public parks that the morbidly obese, hypertensive, diabetic, arthritic non-exerciser doesn't use. So maybe it evens out in the end.)

I had a point...oh yeah. Some people are downright stupid, but some of us are just busy. So the information necessary to exercise common sense needs to be available. It's on cigarettes, it's on alcohol, it can be on a burrito.

Personally I'd love to work for the Center for Thoughtful and Reasonable Analysis of All Available Data with Appropriate Advisories on the Limitations of Said Data for Informed and Responsible Individuals Who Are Willing to Make Decisions and Accept the Consequences.

But I'm not quitting my day job.

vino, vidi, vici

Victor and I went up to the Maryland Wine Festival today. It was a new experience for me; until I started drinking with Victor I was pretty much a beer person. I said I didn't drink wine because it gave me a headache (and it did. I drank plenty of bottles of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill when I was young, and I always had a headache the next day.)

Anyway, though I have always been a beer person, I am a lot more discriminating with my beer than I was with the Boone's Farm. During the microbrew boom in the early '90s my husband was a brewer (we are no longer married and he no longer makes beer, although the two are not connected) and I learned pretty much by osmosis how to characterize different beers. That turned me into a snob on the one hand, but on the other, guys seem impressed by a woman who orders (and actually drinks) porter.

But back to wine. A couple years ago I took Victor to an Italian restaurant for his birthday and he ordered a bottle of cabernet sauvignon (Beaulieu, I think). I'm not a big Peroni fan, so I joined him in the wine. No headache the next day.

I also started reading the wine column in the Wall Street Journal. (I get it from AvantGo on my PDA.) It struck me then that tasting wine was really no different than tasting beer...or coffee, for that matter...or black cherry Kool Aid. The Kool Aid is just a bit less complex.

I'm a big proponent of "Think globally, eat/drink locally." With beer, you actually want to drink it as fresh as possible (best beer I ever had came right out of the Brite tank at Dixie Brewing Co. in New Orleans...oh wait, I'm back to wine) but since wine ages, it can travel. Still, I like to support local farms and local businesses, so drinking Maryland has plenty of appeal.

There were twelve wineries at the festival this year. My favorites were Boordy , Elk Run, and Deep Creek, but I admit I relied too much on my memory as we went from tent to tent doing the tastings. When it came time to go back and buy bottles, I couldn't remember everything I'd had that I'd liked. Funny how that happened...

One I know I missed was a raspberry dessert wine. There was a reason for the Boone's Farm; I do like the sweet stuff.

Another funny thing happened at the wine festival: I saw one of the company VPs. Apparently he's a woodworker on the weekends, and he was set up there selling his work in the craft section. He told me that the power in my building is back on (we have four buildings) but two others are still out. Looks like I'm back at work on Monday.

That's fine. There's still a whole day left of this weekend, and I have a case of nice wine.

Sunday dinner

The less said about the Terps game, the better.

I was right about being sore from yesterday's little weight workout...I am feeling it most when I climb the stairs...but I did drag my lazy ass out of bed this morning for a walk with Victor and the dog. It wasn't much, just around the little neighborhood lake (Fifty minutes, but a fifty-minute beagle walk is a twenty-minute walk with thirty minutes of sniffing), but hey, two days in a row.

I wish I could report that it filled me with energy and a new sense of purpose. The dog was happy, at least.

Victor claims we are not yuppies, but our grocery shopping has become something of a trek. First, the farmer's market (or actual farm) for produce and fruit. Then the bakery for fresh 470-grain bread. Then Whole Foods for free-range grass-fed meat, goat milk gouda, and vegetarian tv dinners. Finally we hiit the "regular" grocery store for Diet Coke and toilet paper.

I suppose if we really were yuppies we'd kick the Diet Coke habit and go ahead and buy the organic unbleached toilet paper from Whole Foods. It's probably only $4 a roll.

I mock, but it is actually my preference to buy the local, organic, and as-close-to-natural as possible food. I don't hate chemicals and modern manufacturing processes, not at all. (I am addicted to Diet Coke. Thank you, Monsanto.) I work, in a way, in the chemical industy. To me, "organic" means "containing carbon."

But having seen the decline in health in my grandparents and now parents, and realizing I have no children to take of me when I'm old and feeble, I figure I better do what I can to stay healthy. And as I started switching over from...well, to be honest, crap...to real food, I realized that the less-processed, fresher food tastes a whole lot better.

My sensibilities probably did lie closer to the environmentalists and the ethical vegetarians than they did toward Big Chemical and McDonalds, but now I'm acting it, too.

Anyway, when I was a kid Sunday was our best meal of the week, and Victor and I have picked up the tradition. Tonight we grilled corn again (there are a lot of farms right around here that grow very sweet corn, and as far as I'm concerned that is one of the best parts of summer. There aren't many corn days left this year, and I'm making the most of them, dammit.)

So, corn again, and grilled chicken-apple sausage, cucumbers and sour cream, and kalamata olive bread. Oh, and a Magic Hat #9. (I'm a beer snob, too.)

And my leftovers at lunch tomorrow will be looking way better than that Lean Cusine or the Extra Value Meal #3.

What's the plural of burrito?

Burritos?

Burritoes?

I thought words ending in "o" took "es," but "burritos" looks better.

Whichever. I want one. I have been craving bean burritos lately. It's the weirdest thing...because eating one does not seem to satisfy the craving. Week before last I ate bean burritos for lunch or dinner five out of seven days. I oughta be sick of them.

I know a lot of people have the theory that if you crave a food, your body is needing something that food has...like if you need iron, you'll crave red meat. I have used that to justify steak or burgers, but I'm a bit suspicious...why crave beef but not spinach?

Hey, I think I might be anemic, and there's iron in beans!

OTOH, I eat a lot of beans, and I still "feel" anemic. (Ok, I don't feel anemic, you can't "feel" anemia. [I think I might be spelling that wrong, too.] I just feel like crap and I'm hoping it is anemia because then I can freaking fix it.)

Driving home from work this was my train of thought: "Turn left, there's a Taco Bell over there."

"Need anything at the bookstore? You can stop by Chipotle."

"They put a new Baja Fresh in that shopping center."

"Haven't been to the new Mexican place in a while. Don't want them to go out of business."

"I have tortillas at home! I can make a burrito!"

Mmmmmmmmmmm

It turned out well.

In addition, we had:

• New York Strip


• Grilled onion with balsamic vinegar and oregano


• Pita bread


• And for dessert, raspberry crisps and dark chocolate with a framboise lambic.
Posted by Nic at 07:13 PM | Comments (0)

Bisquick

I actually made dinner tonight. I'm not sure when the last time I cooked was...before vacation I was busy at work, then getting ready for vacation, so I ate out alot that month, then with no water and the pets at my parents', eating out this week seemed sensible too. But I realized that someday I had to cook again, for health and finance.

So tonight I made a salad of cucumber and tomatoes (the tomatoes on my plant finally got red!) tossed with balsamic vinaigrette and a spinach-feta pie.

Specifically, it was an Impossibly Easy Spinach-Feta Pie, with the Impossibly Easy part being, I would guess, a trademark of General Mills. Even if they didn't register it, anybody raised on suburban cooking and ads in womens' magazines from the grocery store checkout will recognize Impossibly Easy Whatever as a one-dish Bisquick-based dinner. You throw your main ingredients (spinach and feta, chicken and broccoli, tuna and peas) in a pie plate, add a mixture of Bisquick, milk and eggs, and after it bakes it is sorta like a quiche.

I love these things. The oddest one had a filling of kielbasa, sauerkraut, and swiss cheese, and you used beer instead of milk in the Bisquick mix (I think it might have been the Impossibly Easy Oktoberfest Pie), but it was pretty good.

Actually, I love Bisquick in general. I hate to cook, but I do like eating. I have a killer banana bread recipe that only needs five ingredients: banana, Bisquick, egg, sugar, and oil. I'm not big on baking because I hate measuring, and cleaning up the utensils. Forget any recipe that starts with two mixing bowls. I think I found a way to make the bread using only the 1/4 cup measure...if only I could mix it right in the loaf pan.

So I am so not Betty Crocker. My co-workers were quite surprised to hear about my Bisquick fetish. One made sarcastic comments about a Crock Pot. (Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do have one, but I pretty much only use it for chili. It isn't that I'm anti-Crock Pot, I'm just not organized enough to be assembling dinner before I go to work.) But apparently my friends were surprised to find me, a divorced Yuppie who buys organic tv dinners, in the Bisquick & Crock Pot demographic.

Then I really surprised 'em. You know those Betty Crocker coupons on General Mills' boxes? They say something like "22 Points. Save on Houswares and Gifts!" Then in tiny type it tells you to write to Betty Crocker for a Free Catalog!

My grandmother had them in a drawer in her kitchen, all separated by point value and neatly secured with rubber bands. When I ask people about them, usually they don't know what I'm talking about (younger people) or they think Betty Crocker coupons went the way of Green Stamps.

Uh-uh. I save them. Moreover, I sent for the catalog and I use them. My silverware? Betty Crocker. My plates? 75% off! Frying pan? Scissors? Had a double points coupon that time!

I am totally Betty Crocker.

Doooooonuts

I'm totally remiss...a blog about eating in Ocean City and I forgot to mention the best-named establishment: the Fractured Prune.

Actually it was Victor who wanted donuts, but they were good.

The 'Prune means something other that donuts to me, though. It used to be a little shop on 46th Street (right in front of where the Shark is now...the site now is a huge t-shirt shop) where you could get, besides donuts and coffee, everything you really needed at the beach: comic books, mayonaise in tiny jars, bait, a boogie board. Back in the old, old days, I used to walk down there every morning with my grandfather to get the newspaper.

My grandparents started us on the OC tradition. They rented the condo(s) and invited the kids...my mom and her four brothers, with the spouses and children...for the week. Those were good times, even the year it rained all week and the adults finished 23 cases of beer by Wednesday because they were cooped up in the apartment with seven (eight, maybe? It probably felt like 18) children. I think that was the year I learned how to play five-card draw. I think it was the year I learned the parts of speech by playing Mad Libs. ("An exclaimation shows surprise: Oh, how witty! Ah, how wise!" explained my grandmother. "Oh, shit!" supplied my uncle.)

I still remember the shock the year we came into town down Coastal Highway and the 'Prune was gone. I had an exclaimation or two then...

Dreaming of food

Well, I can't do much while the plumber is working, so I'll do some more beach blogging. Man, I wish I were still at the beach.

I gained four pounds, which is not bad considering how much I ate, and what I ate...

My favorite restaurant in Ocean City is Weitzel's, a family place on 51st Street. I referred to it earlier as "mom-n-pop," which it was in 1977 when I started eating there, but the mom-n-pop have retired and it is run by the next generation. We eat there, I dunno, almost once a day. Walking distance to Weitzel's is the main requirement for where we stay.

Weitzel's doesn't have a web page (it would be a bit out of character if they did) so I can't pull up the menu online and reflect on meals gone by...don't laugh. I do that, especially in, say, February, when I need a vacation. Anyway, I don't need a web page to remember Weitzel's, because I have been eating the same thing for 26 years. Fried chicken. Steak & cheese with onion rings. The "Big G" burger. Breakfast...eggs, or maybe an omelette, with fried potatoes and escalloped apples. (I don't eat either, but at Weitzel's you can get both scrapple and grits! It's where the scrapple-grits lines meet!) Maybe an ice cream sundae in the evening.

A few years ago I found a runner-up to Weitzel's (which will, no matter what, always be my favorite OC restaurant for sentimental reasons): the Shark on 46th Street. The reason: "An 8 oz. grilled tenderloin filet of Certified Angus beef topped with a walnut & bleu cheese blend & caramelized Granny Smith apples & sweet onions." Oh, man. Carmelized onion and blue cheese are two of my favorite things. Walnuts are good. Filet is good.

I'm now drooling like Homer all over my lap top.

This year (in an effort to find places without kids...not that I don't love my niece and nephews dearly, but sometimes it is nice to eat someplace without sippy cups and crayons) we went to The Hobbit. When I was a kid (past the sippy cups but not well into food beyond cheeseburgers and fries) I remember the Hobbit being advertised as "proper dress required." I never throught I'd want to dress up for dinner on vacation (although I think that "proper dress" thing is long gone), but looking at the menu I decided we needed to go there this year. I was really glad. I expected it to be good...they opened the same year I started going to OC annually, and any place that stays around that long can't suck. I wasn't disappointed. We ate in a room overlooking the bay, the courses came out at a civilized, relaxed pace, and the food was wonderful. I had tuna "topped with asparagus tips, hearts of palm, shiitake mushrooms, shallots, garlic and grape tomatoes in a a white wine, caper, lemon butter sauce."

(Pause to clean up drool.)

Ah, one funny thing. The first couple nights the family all ate together (i.e., with the kids), so we got dinner first from Weitzel's and then went to Dumser's, another family-style place that actually started as an ice cream stand in 1939. So again, it doesn't suck. Anyway, I was trying to eat vegetables when I could, to keep the weight gain to a minimum, and not just french fries and onion rings. Both nights I had green beans. I like green beans fine. At the Shark on Monday night, though, I was hoping for something different...but the vegetable of the day was green beans. So the night we went to the Hobbit I was pretty excited to see broccoli on peoples' plates. Then when our food came out...green beans. (Ah, well. Maryland farms grow 4462 acres of green beans, second only to corn in terms of vegetable farm land use, so I guess it makes sense. And that's a real statistic.)

Anyway, we also ate at Macky's on 54th Street. Their menu is heavily seafood I'm allergic to, and since the fresh vegetable was green beans, I went with salad and pasta. And all food is better when you get to eat it watching the sun set over the water.

Then there's the junk. The Boardwalk. This may account for 3.75 of my four pounds, frankly...I must have my Thrasher's fries (covered in vinegar) and a polish [sausage] with the works from Polock Johnny's. And what the hell, a funnel cake to share with the seagulls.

This is Victor's lunch...but substitute the polish for the corn dog and it'd be mine. (I didn't get a chance to take a picture of it; I had chili sauce on my fingers and the camera slipped.)

The plumber is still here. As soon as he leaves...I can be down there in, oh, four hours if the traffic is good...

Not sure about this

I kept seeing this billboard once we crossed the Bay Bridge.

I am allergic to crab, but before my allergies got so bad, I used to pop Benadryl and indulge in crab cakes once a year. My favorites were from a mom-n-pop place down here in Ocean City, where they were made by hand with huge lumps of crab, a bit of mayonaise to hold it together, and Old Bay for seasoning.

So I was naturally suspicious of a McCrab.

I remember trying a test-market version of McRib while travelling through Virginia one summer. It was vile.

Bal'mer Sun columnist Dan Rodricks noted that the crab cakes, which are being test marketed in Delmarva, are handmade in Easton. That's a good sign, though phrases like "microwave ready" and "less fish filler" aren't so good. Rodricks didn't try them because of his personal boycott of crab meat over the over-harvesting of Bay crabs, a view I can respect. His column didn't specifically say that McDonald's was using Maryland blue crab, though, and even though the production is in Easton, a fair amount of crab is actually imported into Maryland from the Gulf of Mexico.

Anyway, I'm on vacation, and a serious discussion of ecology is for another day. So, for that matter, is the McDonald's debate...they are bad, they are good, I am fundamentally opposed to so much of what they do, but I eat there probably once a week. On bad, busy weeks, it's even more. I feel dirty.

I'm also never going to be able to eat the stupid crab cake without having to go to the hospital, but for some reason I really want to know...is it any good?