food thrills for our times

Some people look for race car driving, roller coaster rides, or bungee jumping for thrills. I look to food for an adventure that stimulates and excites my senses.  I am simply curious how things taste in hopes it’ll be pleasant and delicious, novel and delectable, or perhaps foreign and unexpected.

Many traditional exotic foods are no longer acceptable fare because they’re animal based, their harvesting is unsustainable, or they are cruelly made, and we are starting to know better, think foie gras or shark fin soup.   Hence, we need to look to the plant world for new food excitement.  

Already, I have fallen in love with Chicken of the Woods, a foraged early summer tree mushroom with a surprising meaty texture that is very satisfying.  Puffball mushrooms pop up from one day to the next in meadows a bit later in the season.   Their creamy and dense texture is a surprise and a delight.  The big thick gooey tapioca pearls that have made bubble tea a worldwide phenomenon, are fun to catch through a thick straw while sipping the beverage.  Smooth and slightly sweetened cashew cream has been a delectable revelation to me, and then of course there is color.  Animal products just don’t cut it when it comes to aesthetic appeal.  But cut a watermelon radish open, and surprise!  While a sliced starfruit will put a smile on anyone’s face.

Watermelon Radish

All these sensations delight me, excite me, make me want to discover new tastes, textures, consistencies, combinations, and possibilities.  Let me know if you have made any thrilling vegetarian discoveries.

new beginnings

The same way I used to redefine myself when I moved from one country to another as a teenager and later a young woman,  spring cleaning used to be an annual house cleaning ritual to start afresh and signal a new beginning.  

Well, our bodies can use it too.  After a winter of heavy comfort foods, it is good to give the body a chance to reset.  At home, we have come to adopt my cookbook author and nutritionist friend Marika Blossfeldt’s spring and fall cleanses around the time of the equinoxes.  The well cooked root vegetable purées proposed for the spring cleanse ground the body, breakfasts consist of green smoothies, the lacto-fermented vegetables, so simple to make at home, bring beneficial probiotic bacteria to the gut to promote good digestion and boost the immune system, the lemon water before all meals rids the body of toxins, and the vegan and grain free core cleanse period allows the body to shift energy from digesting to healing, and “purging toxins and metabolic waste.”

After the cleanse your palate will be more awake, you’ll be more sensitive to sugar and salt, and your taste will be brighter.  Your head feels clearer after having eliminated all alcohol and caffeine for a few weeks, you may have shed a pound or two or three, and you will newly look forward to the lighter and fresher spring foods that are starting to appear at the markets.

A spring cleanse signals a new beginning to body and mind, something we can all use after a living through a pandemic year and a lonely winter, many of us cooped up working from home without much social interaction. Let’s start afresh with new hope and new health.

making magic tonight

How do you cook?  Mapping out, prepping and precooking on weekends and having a plan for what it’ll be on Tuesday or Thursday?  Shopping and cooking recipe specific, knowing you’ll eat eggplant parm sometime this coming week?  Buying what’s fresh and on sale without knowing what dishes will come of it?

My process is of the latter kind and I usually fly by the seat of my pants when it comes to making dinner, although I do keep a lot of basics, my meal building blocks, in pantry and freezer.  Whether it’s food coop or other bulk shopping, local CSA produce during the growing season, the magical Misfits Market box I customize according to our preferences, or spontaneous fill-in shopping when I stop by the supermarket for a few stray things, I always fill fridge, freezer and pantry with well priced and fresh building blocks, but no particular recipe in mind.  The only half-organized meal planning is removing fish or meat from the freezer ahead of time, or soaking and cooking beans and quinoa in bulk and freezing it in small portions to have on hand when inspiration strikes. 

Other than that dinner gets decided spontaneously based on what I find in the fridge, what’s perishable and needs to be used up, what ideas pop up (or not), and how late it is.  Around 6pm I’ll stick my head in the fridge to figure out what we’ll have for dinner.  If it’s early enough I might transform a pile of produce into several vegetable dishes in one night, creating enough leftovers to play with for dinners down the road.  For variety I work with international flavor combinations such as miso, dried mushrooms and tofu; coconut milk, curry, lime and cilantro; tomato and peanut butter; coconut oil, cumin, brown mustard seed, onions and garlic.  Can you guess the countries? Sometimes I’ll make individual quick “pizzas” on thin tortillas with leftover vegetables and other toppings (sundried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, whole egg, olives and capers, mushrooms, what have you) and whatever cheese I can find (feta, goat, other).  Friday nights we sometimes do no-dinner dinners, such as a cheese platter with dried or fresh fruit, some nuts, toasted tortilla or bread, and a glass of wine. Or perhaps a big nachos platter.  

As long as I have lots of meal building blocks the possibilities are endless. And always, always, always it’s quick, simple, flavorful and made from-scratch, using more plant based ingredients than animal protein.  If you think of cooking more like playing with ingredients and flavors it becomes a delicious game of “let’s explore what magic we can make tonight for dinner.”

dialing back

Fancy foods, those that are expensive because exotic or rare, and thus considered valuable, wouldn’t be that if we had access to them all the time and weren’t pricy or difficult to obtain.  Those foods still mostly fall under the animal protein category – caviar, oysters, foie gras, expensive meat cuts or types, lobster and what have you.

Besides meat, sugar and spices were also among foods during medieval and Renaissance times that could only be enjoyed by the upper classes.  Mincemeat pie is one such strange dish, originally a mixture of lamb, dried fruit and spices, from which we have since removed the lamb to make it more palatable to our modern taste.   In the not so distant past, we prepared Sunday roasts and ate little or no meat during the week because meat was expensive.

Besides the now accepted health considerations of eating too much animal protein and too little vegetables and fiber, what we can’t afford every day becomes special, while what we eat all the time becomes routine.  

January is a perfect month to dial my holiday indulgences back as a reboot and to shift what may have become too much of a routine.  Dial the alcohol back, dial the meat back, dial the sugar back, dial quantities back, dial the weight gain back. Last open bottle of wine will be consumed tonight as January will be dry for me.  I will reduce my portion sizes starting tomorrow in order to lose those pandemic pounds, at least some of them, and swap the meat for greens and vegetables. I also promised myself to go for more walks to dial my energy up a notch and clear the Christmas cobwebs from my mind.  

What about you?

tomato time!

This is it!  It’s here.  The time so many of us are waiting for all year long, the height of tomato season in the Northeast.  

For starters, tomato red is a spectacular color, my favorite.  I wear it with gusto on my lips and toe nails.  It’s splashy, it’s visible in the green foliage like red balls on a green Christmas tree, the red with a bit more yellow than blue, and a very warm hue.

A tomato that has ripened in the sun to the point where it plops into your hand at the slight touch of the vine, one that grew in mineral rich and moist soil, with an even and saturated red all around, has a deep, intense and mellowly sweet flavor.  Such a tomato bursts open when you sink your teeth into it, the seeds splashing onto your hand or shirt, the warm juice dripping down your chin.  These late summer tomatoes conjure up a few dishes that we only make during those few precious weeks, instead of attempting a pale version with glassy, lightly reddish, almost crunchy year round supermarket tomatoes that are picked green and spend too long on a truck and in a vegetable bin.  

family style bruschetta for sharing

Panzanella is such a summer dish, that simple Italian tomato salad with bread cubes which soak up the mix of tomato juices and dressing made of Balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, and torn basil leaves, an easy and satisfying summer lunch to be enjoyed on outdoors on a shady terrace.

Gazpacho is another ubiquitous summer treat, the raw and chilled Spanish blender soup that takes no time at all to make, a combination of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, salt, pepper, olive oil and some red wine vinegar.  The secret is in using enough salt, pepper, vinegar and the chilling which all bring the flavor out. In Spain it’s served with a few croutons on top, but better no croutons than croutons from a box.  Cube some good crusty sour dough bread, a few days old is fine, and toss it in a pan with some garlic and olive oil until crunchy.  Mmmmmmhhhh.

gently oven roasted cherry tomatoes

Back to Italy with Bruschetta, Panzanella in a different form.  Finely cubed tomatoes with salt, pepper, olive oil, a bit of vinegar, perhaps a bit of chopped basil, served on a crostini, a small piece of crusty and toasted country bread that you have rubbed with a garlic clove for that subtle hint, enjoyed in the late afternoon with a chilled glass of rosé. Heaven in a nutshell!

One more - jammy cherry tomatoes that are just starting to melt into the pan as they begin to disintegrate under the heat of the stove or in the oven, with nothing more than salt, pepper, olive oil, a bit of chopped garlic and a few sprigs of rosemary, conjuring up Tuscany in my mind.

Enjoy them now, these beautiful tomatoes, a few more weeks, before the long wait until next summer begins again and that perfect tomato taste fades in your memory. 

a better diet? - silver lining #4

From observing where the shelves at the supermarkets have been empty, people have been stocking up on ice cream, chips, dried and canned beans, rice and pasta, meat, and toilet paper of course. The produce sections are always fully stocked!  

Leafy greens, lots of vegetables, less meat, raw fresh salads, not much sugar and baked goods, has generally been a generic recipe for good health.  

The big message here is that what’s actually available is what’s healthiest to eat.  We have heard from up high that there is no disruption in the food distribution chain.  Relax and shop and eat your fill.  And maybe, just maybe, shift your eating habits to that which is not only available in abundance but also healthier, and which boosts your immune system.

Sorry, I can’t help you with the toilet paper.  No silver lining there if you’re out, although there is no shortage of water.  Perhaps we can save some trees in the long run.

Be well and stay healthy!

leave nature whole

Egg white omelets used to be quite the thing, and it was a blast from our cholesterol fearing past when a friend recently mentioned making one – here a link to an article that debunks some of the cholesterol misinformation and fears out there.  

In our scientific zeal we have been dissecting nature into its individual components, believing that we can isolate the “beneficial” or “good” parts and eliminate or diminish the “detrimental” or “bad” parts, with the intent to eat more “good” than “bad.”  That thinking has brought us man made fats (we can make your fat free of bad cholesterol), supplements (taking vitamin D pills instead of soaking up some sunshine, or resveratrol instead of drinking red wine), nutrient labels (“hopefully there are more ‘good’ than ‘bad’ nutrients in this food product”), and sugar-free drinks (beware of aspartame!).  It’s also brought us low fat and fat free products, with an emphasis on product. 

I’m not saying that all natural foods are equally good for all people.  After all, our digestive systems are individual and unique, and what’s beneficial for one may not be beneficial for somebody else.  Breeding and hybridization have of course always been ways to improve on nature too. But when we take that too far, such as with the modern wheat strains, our bodies rebel also.  

Products are seldomly better than nature, and there is nothing bad about eating the entire egg.   

the most important thing in life

Life has its ups and downs.  But my husband pointed out that we always ate well, even though we didn’t always buy organic or put wine on the weekday dinner table.  Now I mostly buy organic, enjoy a glass of wine with many weekday dinners, and my food knowledge and awareness have evolved in so many other ways that inform how I shop and cook.  Yet, I still make concessions.  My 2007 car is a bit banged up, most of my clothes come from  2nd hand stores (I actually hate mall shopping, find the selection more creative, and appreciate the idea of reuse), and my iphone 6s needs to be charged all the time because its battery is on its last leg, and you can’t replace it.  

It’s all about priorities and values.  Food is at the very top of my list.  It’s preventative healthcare and health insurance.  It’s quality of life and pleasure (stimulates your senses through color, aroma and smell).  It has to do with caring for our planet (less pesticides means more birds and bees, less poison in my body, and more minerals and nutrients in my food), and the farm workers (better for them if they don’t have to wade in sprayed soil).  Take a look at related posts, good food heals, cheap food kills, and what’s your food worth it to you.

Ponder your priorities.

fake meat or authentic veggies?

Since the Tofurky phenomenon for Thanksgiving and otherwise, a tofu based and turkey breast shaped hunk of meat substitute, I have had my gripes with food that emulates something other than what it is. Since Michael Pollan and our evolving food awareness I thought we had embraced “eating foods that our grandmothers would have recognized.”  

The whole thing about the Green Revolution of the 1950s has been to feed the masses cheaply.  From this effort also arose the manufacturing of food products, supposedly to save us time and promote convenience.   But feeding the corporate profit machine was its ultimate result, not our health.  

The newest thing is openly called fake meat, and every effort is being made to create the most authentic meat taste and look, bloody drips and all – see a huge article in Wednesday’s NYT food section.  After tofurky came the meat substitute Quorn, now there is fake meat, all made up of all sorts of ingredients, GMO and otherwise. In the end they are all manufactured foods, not something nature made. It’s not alive.  It’s made in a factory. It comes in a package with a long ingredient list, and it’s not more authentic than a TV dinner.

We may be smiling about TV dinners, but if, in this new age of authenticity, we’re looking for a health promoting diet we might want to get away from “product” and eat real food.

there's no catch

“There’s got to be a catch,” a recent food workshop attendee said.  We have come to mistrust goodness and can’t believe that you “can have your cake and eat it too,” meaning if food is delicious there’s got to be a catch.  

Coming from a religious perspective the idea may be that “good food” has to be sinful.  From a cultural perspective “good food” has been associated with sweet, fatty and “bad,” without qualifier. The underlying conclusion would then be that healthful food must be bland, boring, fatless, virtuous, depriving, and joyless.  What misunderstanding! 

Of course, the worst food can kill you, just like a gun can be used either to kill a person or simply for target shooting; just like chemical knowledge can be used either for warfare or simply to understand the Maillard reaction when searing a steak.  It’s never the food, or the gun, or the chemical knowledge that’s bad. It’s what we do with it that’s essential. 

When we use our knowledge in a life enhancing way, food heals, food connects people, food is delicious, food nourishes body and soul, food is an adventure, food is sensuous.  That’s the kind of food we want to make and eat.  When you learn how to make it both delicious and healthy, it becomes a win-win situation without reservation.  Is the Mediterranean Diet not considered one of the healthiest in the world?  It’s delicious!  Aren’t the Japanese with their sophisticated cuisine one of the longest living people in the world?  Their food is an adventure. 

Bon appétit!