August 30, 2005
Wrap It Up
Recently, our good friend and fellow author Loren Cordain (The Paleo Diet
Nothing could be simpler to cook than whole fish: simply salt and pepper the cavity, dot it with good butter, lay on slices of fresh lemon, and stuff the center with a large handful of fresh herbs and slap it on the grill. The taste is pure and divine, particularly when the fish comes fresh from the clean, crystal blue waters of Lake Tahoe. The only problem is that all the stuff you stuff into the cavity tends to fall out on the grill, unless you wrap the fish in heavy-duty foil (which we often do) and then you're really steaming, not grilling the fish and the flavor's different. Still delicious, but different. Sure, you can tie the fish with twine, but it tends to burn off during grilling and you're still left with your stuffing falling out.
The problem got easily solved for me when in the New York Times last week, I noticed a blurb about a cooking apparatus called Thefoodloop. It's a reusable, self-locking, wrapping cord that works on the same general principle as the plastic garbage bag locking strips. Unlike those strips, however, Thefoodloop is made of silicone and heat stable to 600 degrees. The link I've provided here will direct you to the product website which, unfortunately, doesn't sell on-line, yet. Instead, it lists an 800 number that will direct you to locations in your area where you can purchase it, Sur le Table, for instance. We think it's such a clever and useful idea that we're going to see if we can arrange to offer it through the shopping area of our own site (when it gets up and running soon) and then there will be an on-line source.
But this gadget is no one-trick pony. Beyond grilling fish, I could immediately think of about a bazillion ways to use this little gem and have my new set ready to go. Now all I need is another Lake Tahoe trout...or maybe a fresh Alaskan king salmon.
Posted by mdeades at 10:32 AM | Comments (1)
August 14, 2005
Prickly Pear: Every Rose Has A Thorn
Of all the edible wild foods that man has figured out how to exploit, one has to wonder about how hungry he must have been to tackle the prickly pear. (To be perfectly correct, I would speculate that woman probably tackled this one while man was out tackling the cave bear. It's a tough call who had the worse end of the provisioning stick. They both fight back.)
Prickly pear cacti (Optunia ficus indica) grow wild throughout the world in arid climates, providing a food source from their ruby red prickly fruits and their flat spiny paddles. We've enjoyed both in restaurants from Sicily to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, as well as in our own kitchens.
Prickly pear fruit on the plant come studded with fairly easy to see large spines and about a bazillion practically invisible no-see-um spicules that will happily embed themselves in your palm when you so much as touch them. They have to be picked with great care, most often by using a remarkable, high-tech picking device: a tin soup can nailed to a broom handle. With this ingenious apparatus, the picker can snap the fruit from the plant and plop it into a bucket without really touching it. When it comes time to prepare it, however, you need steel gloves--or at least impervious ones--and a good stiff bristled brush to scrub away all the prickles under running water.
Along the dusty roads of Mexico or Sicily, you'll often see vendors selling them from truckbeds or roadside stands--beware the spines on these and touch only with gloved hands. In our part of the world, you can find prickly pear fruit and paddles in farmer's markets or even the produce sections of some grocery stores--even here, I use paper towels to put them into a sack.
In Mexico the fruit are called las tunas, not to be confused with the fish of the same name, which in Spanish isn't tuna at all. In Italy, the name is fichi de India or Indian figs. In Sicily, in the local dialect the name comes out sounding like fig-a-DEENya. Their deep garnet flesh is faintly sweet, quite refreshing, and studded with firm edible seeds, sort of like those in pomegranates.
On a trip through Sicily with food friends, the fichi were plentiful and served often, cool, simply peeled and sliced on a plate as dessert. Mike went absolutely bananas over them and looked for them in every restaurant we entered. One evening, as the group of us marched through to our table, he found a large bowl of them sitting on a serving console. He picked one up, commented on it, and set it back onto the pile. It looked clean--its large spines were gone, anyway--but he immediately knew he'd made a terrible mistake. His thumb and index finger were riddled with invisible needles. He asked a waiter standing nearby--in some combination of pigeon-Italian and sign language--how to get them out. The answer was all sign language: the waiter put his thumb to his mouth and began to scrape with his teeth. Not the answer Mike was hoping for, but apparantly the only effective mode of removal. (If anyone knows of a better one, please do let us know!) He spent a good portion of that evening with his fingers in his mouth, working at the spines. Despite it, he enjoyed the fichi for dessert.
Prickly pear fruit are well-suited to a low carb diet, having only about 6 effective carb grams per medium-sized fruit (9.9 grams total carb with 3.7 grams fiber.) They're also a powerfully rich source of potassium, each one containing about 227 milligrams, about the same as a whole medium tomato and about half that in the famous potassium superstar, the banana, which has 450 mg, but also comes packaged with 24 grams of effective carb. You could eat 4 prickly pears and get double the potassium for that same 24 grams. Better yet, have a tomato with your salad and a prickly pear for dessert and save half the carbs!
Their rich, red color means they're a good source of antioxidant compounds, too--which would make sense, since their DNA has to be protected against the blistering damage they receive at the hands of the sun. A couple of interesting scientific articles indicate it has potent benefits incardiovascular diseaseprotector of the endothelium (the lining of the blood vessels), as a lipid-protecting antioxidant and may even have some anti-ulcer capabilities from the phenolic compounds it contains.
Alternative health sources claim that they're beneficial for lowering bad cholesterol, improving insulin sensitivity, and a improving a host of other maladies.I haven't been able to come up with any really good studies backing up those specific claims, but what I do know is that they're delicious, they're low carb, and eating them surely can't hurt you--if you handle them carefully!
Posted by mdeades at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2005
Low Carb Pizzas on the Grill
In the hot days of summer it's no fun to heat up the kitchen and so we find ourselves looking for dishes to make that are either cold or can be cooked on the grill. We've recently been indulging in pizzas on the grill. Say what? You read right. Pizza on the grill and low carb to boot. The key ingredient is a good low carb burrito- or wrap-sized tortilla. We've been using the Mission brand Carb conscious ones lately, but any good low-carb, flour tortilla should work.
1) Top a fresh tortilla with about two tablespoons of organic pizza sauce (or with pureed organic canned tomatoes with a bit of oregano, garlic, salt and pepper added) taking it almost to the edges.
2) Top that with about 1/3 cup shredded Italian blend cheese, again, organic if you can get it.
3) Follow that with whatever toppings you love. We have indulged in Pizza a la Salciccia (sausage pizza) and in Pizza Margherita (sliced fresh tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and fresh basil). If you go the raw meat route, pre-cook the sausage or hamburger in a skillet and crumble it onto the pizza. Easier and less generating of heat in the kitchen, just add pepperoni slices or Canadian bacon. You can also add fresh veggies--peppers, mushrooms, onion--to the pizza if you like.
4) Top the toppings with about 1/4 cup shredded part-skim mozzarella and a tablespoon or so of fresh chopped basil, if you've got it.
5) Put the assembled pizza on a gas or charcoal grill, over medium high heat, and cook covered for about 10 or so minutes until the cheese is melted and the pizza is warmed through. The tortilla should be crispy but not burned.
If you love a thin crust pizza, you will be in home-fired pizzeria heaven with this method. It's quick, it's easy, and it tastes divine! It doesn't heat up the kitchen on a hot summer evening and there's practically no clean up. Enjoy.
Posted by mdeades at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)
August 11, 2005
Sugar Alcoholics
Back in the good old days of low carb dieting,life was simpler. A prudent and sensible low carb diet consisted of real food--real beef, real chicken, real fish, real cheese, real butter, real cream, real olive oil, real nuts, real lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, strawberries, melon...you get the picture. That how it was, back before the tsunami of low carb convience foods flooded the marketplace and swamped the low carb ark. I have to say, we warned the manufacturers and retailers and others interested in the big business of low carb in a keynote speech at the Low Carb Biz Summit in Denver in January 2004 that just such a natural disaster would come to pass if everybody tried to climb onto the boat at once. But low carb was hot hot hot and nobody from the Mom and Pop's to the industry giants wanted to be left standing on the pier. (As an aside, what's currently referred to in the press as the demise of the low carb diet is really nothing more than the demise of the low carb craze in the food industry, with bankruptcies and sell-offs abounding. The diet, in its native real-food form, lives on and will continue to do so, because it works and it's healthy. As Mark Twain said: The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated! Indeed.)
One of the byproducts of the food manufacturing industy's keen interest in going low carb was the introduction of a swarm of new sugar alcohols into the food supply in ever increasing amounts. Where before there was mainly just sorbitol, found mainly in candies marketed to those with diabetes and xylitol, found in sugar-free chewing gums, suddenly product labels sported such ingredients as lactitol, maltitol, mannitol, erythritol, and others.
Instead of just a gram or two here and there from the occasional piece of candy or gum, people were becoming unwitting sugar alcoholics, getting huge doses of a multitude of them each day. Although each serving might not seem like much, they sneak up on you, what with 5 grams in a scoop of sugar-free ice cream, 7 in the sugar free pancake syrup, 18 or 20 in a gooey protein energy bar, and 15 or more in one purportedly "zero-net carb" brownie! (Trust me on that last one, it doesn't exist--not with the first ingredient being almond flour.) Just like cell phone minutes, the grams add up and the bill comes due, as a host of miserable side effects, ranging from bloating to diarrhea in many people and, depending on the sugar alcohol involved, unpredictable blood sugar surges in diabetics.
We get frequent letters from viewers and readers about the topic of sugar substitutes, particularly the sugar alcohols and exactly how they figure into a low carb plan. Whenever we give a speech or lecture, someone from the audience almost always asks such a question. A succinct and totally accurate answer is tough, unfortunately, to give, because all sugar alcohols are not created equal; they don't behave the same way with regard to their absorption, their ability to raise blood sugar or to spike insulin. Even the same sugar alcohol doesn't behave predictably identically from one person to the next.
Our sort of ballpark standard means of calculating their effective contribution to a low carb diet, crude at best, is to count as usable about one-third to one-half of the sugar alcohol grams in a recipe or food. For instance, say the nutritional label of a protein bar proclaims 20 total grams of carbohydrate, 5 of which are fiber, 3 of which are starch and 12 of which are sugar alcohols. The label will likely state--usually in a big red or yellow starburst--contains only 3 grams net carb! Really? Depending on which sugar alcohol(s) contributed those 12 grams, some portion of them will be absorbed to contribute calories at the very least and raise blood sugar in sensitive individuals at the very worst. And, of course, what's not absorbed contributes to the gastrointestinal symptoms that occur with some of them. It would be more correct (not to mention more prudent for people struggling to lose weight and for the diabetic population) to count at least 4 and possibly 6 of those sugar alcohol grams as having an effect, for a total of 7 or 9 net grams. Just doing that little bit of math may help keep your weight loss going or your blood sugar in better control.
For those who muse on sugar, sugar substitutes, and other sweet topics, a friend tipped me to a recent piece in the LA Times that I thought was an interesting and informative discourse on the topic. Maybe it will help to answer a few questions.
Posted by mdeades at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)
August 09, 2005
How Does Your Medicine Cabinet Grow?
The fields of lavender in the Santa Ynez valley (and one would presume in Provence and elsewhere throughout the world where the herb grows wild) are in full bloom. Bundles of fresh lavender perfume our local farmers' markets, in Santa Barbara and Santa Fe, where stalls sell everything lavender from oils, soaps, bath salts, sachets, and perfumes to lavender honey, cookies, and vinaigrettes.
Lavender, a flowering evergreen related to the mint family, has been prized for centuries not only for its clean and pleasing fragrance--the Romans bathed in lavender scented water and the name derives from the Latin lavare, meaning to wash--but for its many health benefits and healing properties as well. In traditional herbal medicine the volatile oil or aqueous infusion act when used topically as an astringent and antiseptic for minor abrasions and sunburn. Inhaling its aroma or drinking the infusion as a tissane or tea reportedly aids in relief of mild depression, nervousness, tension, anxiety, and is even said to promote calm and restful sleep. Preliminary studies suggest it may even have beneficial effects on cholesterol and blood sugar, although it's possible these effects could derive from stress reduction or just getting a calm and restful sleep.
Most of the scientific research generated on herbals and botanicals comes from Europe and the UK, where establishment belief in the efficacy of plant extracts is much more prevalent. I was able to unearth medical studies on a variety of topics, many of which were German or Korean and either not available as abstracts, or not available in English. (Since I'm not a reader of either of those languages, you will not find links to them here.) Its sedative qualities, especially, have been the subject of recent medical research aiming to prove or disprove the claims--and there are papers that speak to both biases on the topic. One study from the UK, seems to document the calming effects of inhaled aroma of lavender oil in a hospital setting in a group of aggressive and combative patients with dementia. Just think what it might do for those of us who are just a little out of sorts. My very unscientific two-cents says it smells great, so why not give it a try? As we have done in a variety of locales, grow yourself a pot or two of it or in a temperate climate, plant some, harvest the stalks, and treat yourself to a sheaf of it beside your bed.
The plant is hardy (attested to by the fact that even I can grow it) and once established is quite drought resistant and will make a lovely addition to your herb garden, for both smelling and cooking. Because most recipes use only a teaspoon or two of dried lavender flowers, even a small pot's worth will get you by for that purpose.
I found a few good tips on cooking with lavender in an archived article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, although except for the vinaigrette and herbs de provence, the recipes are not carb friendly. They're not even carb conscious, but they can be made that way, which task I will set myself over the next little bit and get back to you with my progress. For more extensive reading on growing and cooking with lavender I would recommend Robert Kourik's The Lavender Garden: Beautiful Varieties to Grow and Gather
Posted by mdeades at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)
Hug Your Way To Health
If stress reduction is on your to-do list, a new study by Dr. Karen Grewen and colleagues at the University of North Carolina suggests that you need to add a loving hug or two to your daily regimen. Doing so has been shown to enhance the release of one of the body's natural stress-fighting hormones, oxytocin. Please note that the substance in question is not oxycontin, the highly addictive and widely abused pain medication, but oxytocin. (Granted, the terms are so similar that one must wonder how the makers of the drug ever won approval to call their product by that name.)
The upshot of this interesting study is that we humans require regular doses of warm and loving contact--with a spouse, a significant other, a child, a friend, or even a pet. While our government in its infinite wisdom has mandated that we all consume multiple servings of bread and cereal grains each day, purportedly to keep us healthy (a position, the validity of which our readers and viewers will know we strongly take issue), it appears that they might better serve to keep us thin and our blood pressure under control by encouraging us to get 6 to 11 servings of warm affection, in the form of calorie-free hugs instead. I can see the add campaign now: A hug a day keeps the doctor away! Have you had your hugs today?
Posted by mdeades at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
August 07, 2005
Cascarones: An Egg-cellent Idea
We often get questions from readers or viewers wanting to know what to do with left over egg yolks or egg whites when they've used the one or the other for a recipe. There are plenty of options, but that's for another blog. Today I want to talk about what do to with left over egg shells--waste not, want not, my mother would have said. It's Fiesta Week in Santa Barbara, which means that the streets of the town are knee deep in multi-colored confetti from the breaking of thousands upon thousands of cascarones over the heads of unwitting family members, friends, and passersby.
The cascarones are empty egg shells, stuffed full of confetti, and decorated. Their origin dates back to the Italian Renaissence, but has been adopted in slightly altered form for celebrations ranging from Easter to Fiesta. Painted gold or silver and filled with glittery confetti they would even make a fun New Year's Eve tradition; go with blue and white and add a whole new dimension to Channukah. Filled with pastels they could work for a baby shower. Filled with birdseed for a wedding.
A few years back, I tried my hand at making them for our children and grandchildren for the family Easter egg hunt, and they were a huge hit. It takes a bit of preplanning, since you have to save egg shells (well rinsed, please) in advance to gather enough for the celebration, but it's easy and fun and something that the whole family can do together. And besides, it gives you something to do with all those egg shells--besides put them into the compost heap.
Posted by mdeades at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)
August 05, 2005
Yogurt di bufala: A Little Cup of Heaven
A couple of years back, Mike and I went with a group of food friends (restaurateurs, food writers, cookbook authors and editors) on a ten day jaunt through Campania, lead by the indomitable Faith Willinger, an American ex-pat and author of the best-selling Eating in Italy and Red, White, and Greens and one of the chef’s of PBS’s Cucina Amore (with its eponymous cookbook The Chef’s of Cucina Amore.) With Faith at the helm it’s a gut-lock cinch that the trip will be a total hedonistic pleasure, because she knows every culinary delight and fabulous restaurant from the knee to the tip of the toe of the boot of Italy.
On this particular trip, one stop took us to Vannulo, a water buffalo dairy near the ancient ruins at Paestum. Dairy doesn’t begin to do justice to the idyllic facility created by Antonio Palmieri and family. A more exact comparison would be to one of the beautiful chateau vineyards (Niebaum-Copola or Jordan, for instance) that you find in Napa: glorious, vine-covered, old, ochre buildings with red tiled roofs, clusters of Italian cypress spires set in here and there, sun-dappled gardens and stone porticos for al fresco dining and milking barns for the star boarders that are cleaner than my kitchen. The ladies (as the herd of pampered water buffalos, or bufala, are called) are hand fed organic, tender, fresh greens and even get a running water hoof bath and a shower as they parade across the barn’s entry to be milked.
Bufala milk is richer than cow’s milkâ€"higher not only in fat content, but in protein and calcium as well. The most famous use for it is in making mozzarella di bufala, which Vannulo turns out daily. We were able to watch the process as the casadors expertly turn fresh latte di bufala into snowy balls of the best mozzarella on the planet. Outside, the line of locals waiting to purchase the day’s production wraps around the building
In addition to their mozz, Vannulo also turns their bufala milk into freshly churned gelato and yogurtâ€"both so creamy they’re almost butteryâ€"which they sell from an old-fashioned gelateria, bedecked with poster-sized glamour shots of the individually-named cows. We feasted generously on all of it, even taking some yogurt with us for our breakfast the next day. When it was gone, we wistfully assumed we’d have to wait until our next trip to Italy to enjoy it again, since there’s hardly enough made to keep the line of locals happy, much less to export.
What a joy it was to recently discover that the fine art of bufala dairy farming has crossed the ocean and is thriving in upstate Vemont at Woodstock Dairy. There, in the dairy case at our local natural foods grocery, was bufala yogurt. We grabbed every container of the Plain, fearing it to be some sort of special promotion that we’d never see again. It was not; to our delight, it’s been there week after week. (FYI: It does come in a plethora of delicious-sounding flavors, but we don’t want the added sugars, so we always opt for Plain.) If it’s not in your market, ask your grocer to order it or go to the Woodstock Dairy website to order on-line. If you love yogurt, this is heaven in a cup.
Posted by mdeades at 02:27 PM | Comments (0)