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February 28, 2006
Fabulous Flageolet
In days of old, when knights were bold--or as Mike and I like to say, before we had our brain transplants and learned the ways of nutrition and the human metabolism--I was a great lover of beans of all types. I still am, though I don't eat them often anymore.
To be frank, I'm not sure I ever met a dried bean or pea I didn't like and it still makes my mouth water to remember sitting down to a big pot of my mother's white bean soup, with a skillet of buttered cornbread right out of the oven, some sliced ripe tomatoes, and a handful of green onions. Mmmm mmm mmm or as Alton Brown would say, that's good eats. My dad would have added an icy cold glass of buttermilk to the feast, whereas I'd probably have opted for a glass of iced tea...or in more recent times a perky little sauvignon blanc. But that was then.
Nowadays, I'd enjoy such a feast only for some very special occasion on which I'd decided to throw carb caution to the wind and indulge. But the older I get and the longer I stick to my low carb guns, the less attractive the morning-after consequences of a carb binge have become, so I don't do it often. But the love of beans lingers on.
Fortunately for me (and for you, too, if you're a low-carbing bean lover) there are a few beans out there that won't break the bank in effective (net) carbs and yet still serve up a spoonful of rich, beany comfort. Certainly among them are the black soybeans, about which we've written and thanks to which we've been able to create many lower carb imposter recipes for dishes in which beans figure prominently. Those of you who regularly watch our PBS tv show, Low Carb CookwoRx, will be familiar with their many uses; we continue to discover (and appreciate) their versatility. But even more delectable (and infinitely tastier to eat as is) are the tender, green, immature French kidney beans, called flageolet.
The nice thing about flageolet is that, owing to their immaturity, much of their carb is fiber. At least it's a nice attraction to a low-carb cook, because it means that the effective (net) carb of a serving of flageolet is listed at a bit under 5 grams per half cup. Compared to the approximately 15 grams per half cup for most other dried beans, they're a bona fide carb bargain. Especially considering that I'm not sure could content myself with a half cup of beans, if beans were what I were having for my supper; I'd want to eat at least a cup...maybe even a cup and a half. In "real" beans, that cup and a half would translate into 45 grams of usable carb!
Even in maintenance, that would be a slug for most of us not currently in training for Olympic gold in short track speed skating or giant slalom.
Which I, for one, am not.
For me, at least, a big steaming bowl of navy beans or pinto beans is not something I can feel as good about having regularly. So I thank the powers that be for flageolet.
Cooked fresh, just hulled from the pods, the delicate flavor and creamy texture have earned flageolet the title of 'caviar of beans' and the appelation is well deserved. But, unless you grow them yourself, it's tough (even at our excellent local farmers' market) to find them fresh. You can, however, find them canned.
Admittedly, I'm not normally a big proponent of canned vegetables in most instances--although I would prefer a good canned tomato to a mushy, grainy, tasteless off-season one and I do regularly use the canned black soybeans, having never ever spotted a fresh black soybean in any farmers' market or produce counter of any store anywhere I've ever been. (Listen up, food purveyors! There's a market here.)
So I say, it's better to have decent canned than poor quality fresh in the tomato department and better decent canned than can't-find-them-anywhere fresh in the case of the black soybeans...and the flageolet.
In answer to the burning question: No, they're not as good as the fresh variety, but they're pretty darn tasty. And pretty darn available! I've been able to regularly find them at both our local natural and whole food grocery store as well as at a small independent market near our house. If not shelved with the other varieties of canned beans, look for them in the specialty foods aisle; since they're a French import, they might find their way there. If you can't find them in your store, ask your store managers if they can get them. Chances are they can.
To serve them as a side dish, I usually drain them and to dress them up just a bit add a pat of butter and a dash of salt, pepper, garlic powder and onion powder into the pan as I warm them gently. And although I haven't done it yet, I suspect with some stock and a ham hock thrown in, they'd make a pretty decent bean soup. I'm going to give that a whirl before long.
If you love beans and have given up eating them (or at least given up eating them very often) in favor of getting control of your health and/or weight, look for flageolet. They're a bean that won't break your carb budget.
Posted by mdeades at 02:19 PM | Comments (3)
February 23, 2006
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
Today's paper brought with it an article by Barbara J. Avery of Cox News Service on how to host a Mardi Gras bash, even if you can't make it to the Big Easy for the festival. The piece includes, among other things, this advice:
A successful Mardi Gras party has six elements: the right mix of guests, Cajun or Creole food, appropriate music, libations, entertainment and decorations.
I would leave all but the food to your own imagination, but in the culinary department, her suggestions of spiced nuts, Cajun sausage and marinated salad would work great for the low-carb crowd in the mood for a little pre-lenten revelry. (Unfortunately, the pralines, red beans and rice, pecan pie, and beignets are another matter entirely.)
But what about some other types of Cajun or Creole delicacies? In a city famous for its food, there's bound to be something we, who watch our carbs, can sink our teeth into.
Our local paper ran the Avery piece next to an article by Tommy C. Simmons of the AP about making that quintessential dish of New Orleans (or Nawlins, as we say in the South) cuisine: Gumbo. Redolent of shrimp and andouille, smoke and spice, good gumbo is heavenly. Properly made, however, as attested to by the recipe that accompanied the piece, a gumbo to serve 10-12 people includes not only 5 or 6 cups of cooked rice, but a full cup of all-purpose flour in the roux of the gumbo itself. Ouch! Eat that much carb and it really will be Fat Tuesday...and Wednesday...and Thursday...
It was a hoot, for me, to turn to the continued-from-page-D1 extension of the article to find this headline:
Oil-free roux easier, more healthful
Saints preserve us! When will they ever learn? It's not the oil in the roux that made the citizens of the city of New Orleans traditionally among the heaviest in the nation. It was the flour they mixed with the oil! (And of course the sugar and the beans and the rice, but that's another blog.)
Now, the culinary geniuses in their infinite low-fat wisdom have gone and removed an ingredient that if it were a good fat might in fact be good for us and left in their "healthier" gumbo a cup of flour and 6 cups of rice--foods that will certainly wreck our metabolic balance. Undaunted, and with our bests interests surely in mind, Ms. Avery goes on to instruct us (via information she garnered from Louisiana chef and food photographer David Gallent) on how to make the oil-free roux by baking the flour for a prolonged period in the oven.
But the flavors that make gumbo so delicious come only partly from the caramelized floury roux and virtually not at all from the fluffy, but flavorless rice. And that got me to thinking about how we could make a delicious low-carb knock-off that would, to paraphrase a major yogurt chain, give us most of the pleasure and less of the guilt.
Here is the result. Enjoy it in health and prosperity and, this year, as we approach Mardi Gras, with rememberance of those good people along the Gulf, still in need of our thoughts, prayers, and help.
Les Bon Temps Gumbo
Serves 8
Protein per serving: 33.7 grams
Effective carbohydrate per serving: 14.4 grams
2 pounds unpeeled , large shrimp
1 pound andouille (or smoked) sausage
1 quart chicken broth
1 quart beef broth
2 tablespoons organic lard or coconut oil
1-2 tablespoons ThickenThin notStarch
2 small onions, diced
2 green bell peppers, diced
2 celery ribs, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 bay leaves, dried
2 teaspoons Creole seasoning
½ teaspoon thyme, dried and crushed
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon Tobasco sauce
4 green onions, chopped, white and green parts
4 cups cooked spaghetti squash
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon Creole seasoning
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1. Peel and devein shrimp; set aside, but reserve shells.
2. Place shells into a large soup pot or Dutch oven; pour in chicken and beef broth, bring to a boil, and simmer for 10 minutes, uncovered.
3. Strain broth through a wire-mesh strainer into a large bowl and set aside to keep warm; discard shells.
4. In a skillet, melt the lard or coconut oil over medium heat; add the diced onion, pepper, celery and cook, stirring often, until they begin to become limp. Add the garlic and continue cooking, stirring often, until the vegetables have begun to caramelize. Take your time; do not let them burn.
5. Cook sausage in the pot or Dutch oven over medium heat until browned evenly; remove and set aside.
6. To the accumulated oil in the pot, sprinkle in the ThickenThin notStarch, stirring with a whisk. Slowly drizzle in the warm broth, whisking constantly to achieve a smooth mixture.
7. Add the cooked vegetables to the broth; stir in all the seasonings and the bay leaves. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 30 to 45 minutes, stirring now and again.
8. Meanwhile chop the cooked spaghetti squash to the approximate size of long-grained rice.
9. Melt butter in the microwave or a small pan on the stove, whisk in the salt, pepper, and Creole seasoning. Pour over chopped squash and toss to combine. Set aside and keep warm.
10. Into the gumbo pot, add the shrimp, sausage, and green onions; bring back to a low boil and cook until shrimp turn pink.
11. Ladle a cup of gumbo into warmed bowls, place ½ cup seasoned squash in the center, and laissez les bon temps rouler!
Posted by mdeades at 01:27 PM | Comments (2)
February 22, 2006
Brain Food
We've recently alit after a 3 week road trip followed hard on the heels by an intense and rewarding (and quite humbling) long weekend of intellectual renewal and regeneration at Renaissance Weekend. I'm not sure I've ever seen so much intellectual and creative firepower amassed in one place. After the mind-numbing travel, it was more than a breath of fresh air; it was a gale and a feast for the brain and the spirit.
Interestingly, even before this cerebral feast, I had an experience while on the road that reminded me--in a very mundane way--how engaging in one sort of learning can impact thinking in a totally different area.
As long time readers of Mike's blog will know, I am privileged to sing with the Santa Barbara Choral Society, a group of about 100 voices whose mission is to study and present the choral music of great composers for the enjoyment of the community. Although I dutifully took piano lessons as a child, I am not a formally trained musician and so learning these often difficult pieces demands hours of study and practice outside Wednesday night choir practice. Toward that end, I began recording our rehearsals on a tiny digital voice recorder, so that I could re-do the rehearsal repeatedly.
At home, alone, I can sing along, almost as if I'm at the rehearsal again. On the road, that method won't fly--almost without exception, the person in the next hotel room or seat behind you on the plane doesn't want to hear you belting out the lines of the Durufle Requiem. But I can upload the voice tracks to the laptop and with earbuds, I can virtually rehearse, reading the music, silently mouthing the words, and singing along in my head. (I'm sure onlookers tsk-tsk sagely and assume I need to up my dose of anti-hallucinogenic medication.)
When we were on the plane (on one of many legs of this recent trip) I took advantage of the relative obscurity offered by a window seat and engaged in virtual rehearsals several times. On one occasion, however, just after completing a rehearsal, I put away the computer and got out a crossword puzzle I'd brought along to pass the time. What I noticed, doing the one immediately after the other, was a striking increase in my facility for working the puzzle. I almost couldn't write the answers down fast enough. It was as if some sort of gate had opened that permitted instantaneous access to the information storage files in my brain. Amazing.
We wrote about this phenomenon (popularized as the Mozart Effect
Although scientific research certainly supports the cross-over effect between music and learning, concentration, and memory, I hadn't witnessed a such a powerful demonstration of the phenomenon first hand. While the effect is probably stronger for actually practicing a musical form (learning to play an instrument and to read music) there is apparantly some effect even from listening to great music, which is how the effect was demonstrated in some of the studies of college students taking tests.
If you love to tackle puzzles or have a puzzling problem you need to solve, try it yourself and see what I mean. If you play an instrument (and that includes your own voice) practice learning a new or rusty piece, then immediately attempt a problem solving task--a crossword, a Sudoku puzzle, a brain teaser, or a problem at work or at home that's stumped you. If you don't play or sing, just listen to some really great music. Brahms, Beethoven, Haydn, Bach, or anything by Mozart are pretty universally easy to listen to, but it doesn't have to be classical masters; any beautifully, artfully constructed piece of music would work. You may be surprised by the ease with which you can do now it.
Music, apparantly, doesn't just have charms to soothe the savage breast, it also feeds the brain. And it's carb free!
Posted by mdeades at 09:33 AM | Comments (2)
February 16, 2006
Cal-See-Uhmmm
It never ceases to amaze me the boneheadedness of public health directives. The most recent case in point being the release of the Women's Health Initiative report showing that the low fat diet didn't do a blasted thing it was touted to do followed, as expected, in almost every story about it by someone from somewhere exhorting people to continue to follow the low fat diet longer and go lower.
Now comes the revelation, as reported by Gina Kolata in today's NY Times (registration required, but free) that the long standing exhortations by the public health powers that be for all women to chomp grams of calcium every day doesn't do squat in the great scheme of things to protect their bones or their colons. In the version of this piece picked up by our local paper, there was an boxed addendum tacked on urging women to continue to take their calcium (!!??) to preserve their bones. Go figger!
As we described in detail in both Protein Power
For years, the critics of low carb diets decried them as "deficient in calcium" and "bad for bones." Their theory was that because a diet high in meat is acidic, to buffer the acidity, the body would have to leech calcium from the bones and would thereby weaken them. And the first part of that is true: meat is acidic and must be buffered. But the buffering can be done by alkaline veggies or by alkaline waters. In our ancient ancestors, it was done by both.
The dirty little secret, the attic child of nutrition, the fact never revealed by the dectractors of meat eating, however, is that grain and cheese are also heavily acidic and require buffering and yet virtually every 'nutritional expert' will extoll the virtues of eating 6-11 servings of grain a day and caution against the consumption of too much meat.
No amount of calcium supplementation, with or without vitamin D, will overcome the disruption of the body's acid/base physiology brought about by a steady diet of nothing but meat, grain, and/or cheese--whether that means as the much-maligned cheese burger or as a big 'healthy' 'wholesome' bowl of mac and cheese.
If bone strength is what we're after, as we pointed out in the LifePlan, we'd do well to learn the lessons of history: eat a diet based on good quality meats, shellfish (including their little calcium rich bones,) plenty of good fats, plenty of balancing alkalinity from low starch greens, fruits, vegetables, and spring water with a good calcium to magnesium ratio and some alkalinity, and vitamin D from old Sol. We had it right millennia ago; how have we gone so far off the mark? Maybe, as the Chiffon ad Mike's been blogging about said...it's not nice to fool Mother Nature.
Posted by mdeades at 02:07 PM | Comments (1)
February 09, 2006
A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Wheels Go Round
This newsblurb from an article by Justin Martin in Fortune Small Business Magazine has the best idea I've heard all week: make ethanol from leftover candy or sugar. What a fabulous idea and a great way to free the country from both its skyrocketing obesity epidemic and its dependence on foreign oil. By golly, instead of eating them, if, a la Willie Nelson, we can turn corn and soybean oil into biodiesel and wheat and sugar into ethanol, then, as another Nelson once sang, what a wonderful world it would be.
Posted by mdeades at 10:21 PM | Comments (2)
Be Truly Sweet to your Sweetie
With Valentine's Day upon us and the newspapers and magazines swelling with recipes for chocolate treats to make for your sweetie or yourself, those of us who subscribe to the low carb philosophy may be seeing red. Flashing red lights, that is, warning us that we must either abandon our healthy regimen or deny ourselves these chocolaty pleasures. The problem, of course, with all traditionally made chocolate treats is not in the chocolate itself (which exhibits beneficial antioxidant properties,) but in the sugar that sweetens it to make it palatable to our modern taste buds.
The need to sweeten chocolate is contrary to the way it was originally consumed. The early Mayan people, who first harnessed the joys of chocolate, weren't the wimps we are and drank their magical chocolate concoction straight in all its bitter magnificence, often coupled with ground hot chili powder to give it even greater power. Served that way, chocolate would be purely healthy, but while I really enjoy dark bittersweet chocolate, I'm a bit of a bitter wimp myself and, healthy or not, I'm not sure I'm up to downing cups of it in its native state. Just typing the words makes my mouth pucker.
(To read more about the history of chocolate, click here.)
Apparantly , even the Aztecs (who called their drink xocotl, from which our word comes down to us) added a little vanilla and honey to soften the bitter bite.
Now, I have to say I do enjoy adding a dash of cayenne pepper to lightly (and artificially) sweetened thick hot chocolate; the peppery touch is an unexpected, but totally pleasant surprise alongside the slight sweetness that disguises the subtle dark chocolate bitterness beneath it. This combo is in the manner of the chocolate that Juliette Binoche stirred up for Johnny Depp (or at least that her character did for his) in the movie Chocolat
Whatever your Valentine's Day plans might be, to help you get into the Valentine spirit without abandoning your healthy eating goals, check out the recipes for sinfully rich chocolate delights on our www.lowcarbcookworx website. We devoted an entire episode of the series (Episode 26, Calling All Chocoholics) to the topic. You'll find recipes there for our healthy, silky, rich Parisian-style Hot Choc-co-late, creamy Decadent Espresso Chocolate Mousse, and a Flourless Chocolate Cake that's so profoundly chocolatey just a tiny slice will flip your chocolate switch to 'satisfied'. These recipes also appear in our PBS series' companion cookbook, The Low Carb CookwoRx Cookbook
So this Valentine's Day, be truly sweet to your sweetie (and yourself). Surprise him or her with chocolate, the healthy way.
Posted by mdeades at 10:33 AM | Comments (4)
February 03, 2006
The News of Low Carb's Demise Greatly Exaggerated
Mike and I had a meeting in Austin, Texas a couple of days ago and upon leaving early the next morning, stopped in to a Cracker Barrel Restaurant to grab some bacon and eggs for the road. My distant memories of stopping at Cracker Barrels on the way to visit our sons in colleges in Virginia and Tennessee, include a vast array of non-egg-and-bacon stuff on the menu--fluffy buttered biscuits and gravy, pancakes, French toast, waffles. Fearing the worst, I steeled myself against all those things that I wasn't going to order, but that I would, no doubt, have to witness be enticingly gobbled up at tables all around us. On that score, the restaurant was everything I feared and more. Everywhere I looked folks seemed to be scarfing down tasty-looking carb concoctions by the front-end-loader-full.
But a real surprise greeted us on the menu: an entire section of Low Carb Breakfast options! Eggs, any style, with sliced fresh tomatoes where the breakfast potatoes or biscuits and gravy would have sat and with thick slab bacon, hickory smoked patty sausage, or ham. If you wanted, you could do double meat or even step up to the plate for all three meat offerings. And they were delicious, just lightly scented of hickory.
It was fantastic. Quick, tasty, filling, inexpensive. Best of all, no need to modify anything, no special requests, no wasted toast left on the side--or worse yet eaten!
And their low carb fare extends to lunch and dinner, too. Seeing low carb in such a bastion of sugar and flour makes me more convinced than ever that the news of the death of low carb has, as Mark Twain once put it, been greatly exaggerated!
Posted by mreades at 08:52 AM | Comments (3)