Stick To Short List of Ingredients for Good Health

Wouldn’t it be great if all our food came straight from the community garden, local rancher, and our own kitchen?

I love carrots, tomatoes and cantaloupe right out of the garden and I rarely have the patience to let a loaf of fresh, homemade wheat bread cool before I cut off a chunk (especially if there are sunflower seeds inside!). From treating myelf to fresh feta cheese from the local dairy farm to buying local honey (many believe honey helps alleviate allergies), I love to haunt local CSAs and farmer’s markets.

But let’s get real.

Home cooking with local organic ingredients might be the healthiest way to eat, but few of us have the time or inclination to prepare three meals a day from scratch. Homemade bread is wonderful, but even with a bread maker machine, it is time consuming. Even grocery shopping can be labor intensive if you have to go to more than one store or market to find all of the in-season ingredients for more than a few dishes. Inevitably, given the fast paced, I-want-it-now society we live in, we need the convenience of grocery stores and prepared foods to feed our families. After all, one of the benefits of modernization is that we can follow our dreams and not always have to focus every moment on hunting and gathering. I’m grateful for some shortcuts after a long day, and I search them out at the market.

In most markets, the selection of prepared foods is overwhelming, and both the quality and nutritional value of similar foods vary widely. A rule of thumb is that if a food item is in any container other than its own nature-made rind or skin, I read the label. So if there is shrink-wrap, Styrofoam, a can, or a box, then there are probably additional ingredients and processing I want to know about. For example, pre-made flour tortillas could have between four and forty ingredients on the label, depending on where they are made. Some manufacturers use hydrogenated soybean oil, sodium metabisulfite, distilled monoglycerides… What is that anyway? (They are mostly preservatives and stabilizers, but those ingredients sure don’t sound like something I want to eat.)

So let’s eat real food.

Reading labels can be frustrating and takes a bit of extra time, so sometimes it is easier to look at the length of the ingredient list. If the list has more than a handful of ingredients, I just put it back on the shelf and keep moving. Remember to look in the refrigerated sections of the store since the products with fewer ingredients don’t contain as many preservatives and must often be chilled to remain fresh. Flour tortillas made simply from flour, salt, oil, and water (and sometimes a wonderful little squirt of lime) are often available with the cheese and deli items.

Using prepared foods that were made from simple, quality, pronounceable, and recognizable ingredients will make dinner preparation quick and healthy.

Until next time, eat well!

Parmesan Crisps Tweetcipe

I’ve cooked for several dinner parties this month, and interestingly, my clients all picked Caesar salad as their first course. In a 2010 Tweetcipe I shared my Caesar salad dressing. Now I’m going to share how I make Parmesan crisps to garnish my Caesars.

Parmesan Crisps

1 – 8 oz container of grated quality Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven at 400. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or a silpat.

Using a tablespoon, scoop a heaping mound of Parmesan onto the cookie sheet. Try to mound the cheese as high as possible. Repeat, spacing each mound at least 4 inches apart. You should be able to make at least 6 crisps per cookie sheet.

Optional: Lightly sprinkle the cheese with freshly cracked pepper, smoked paprika, herbs de Provence or your favorite dried herb or spice.

Bake on a middle rack for 8-10 minutes. They should cook until they are flat, but don’t let the crisps brown or they’ll taste burnt. Let the crisps cool completely before removing them with a spatula. Place a crisp on each salad before serving.

Easy Food Switches You Can Make for Your Health

In January, most of us start out with resolutions to eat better, make healthier choices, or simply to add more fruits and veggies to our diets. It doesn’t take very long for life to get in the way of our best intentions, does it?

Between vacations that tempt us to eat (and drink) too much to summer barbecues and get-togethers that tempt us with potato chips and fried chicken, it can be more difficult than ever to make healthy changes to our diets.

There are some quick and easy switch ups you can make to your meals and snacks to make them healthier, and because this time of year makes it easy to find a variety of fresh fruits and veggies, you can let your imagination run wild. Try switching from potato chips or Cheetos to carrots or celery with peanut butter. You can buy baby carrots and already-prepared celery sticks to make it as easy as opening the fridge.

Do you love starting your morning with something sweet to accompany your coffee? Apples with peanut (or almond) butter, a dash of cinnamon and a drizzle of honey is a lot healthier – and more satisfying – than your average toaster pastry. Because it will keep you full longer, you may even find that mid-morning donut a little less tempting! The occasional handful of chips or donut isn’t bad. The key is balance.

One of the easiest switches you can make for healthier eating is from canned vegetables to frozen ones. I’m talking about the plain, unadorned frozen vegetables – not the kind with a butter or cheese sauce that bumps up the calorie count! Fruits and vegetables start to slowly deteriorate after they are picked. Frozen fruits, vegetables, and even fish are frozen almost immediately after being caught, cut or picked. This process suspends the depletion of all the nutrition contained within the food, preserving those essential vitamins and minerals. The deterioration doesn’t stop in fruits and vegetables that are canned, and the nutrients are filtered out even further when the canned food is processed with high doses of salt and water. Plus, through the canning process, salt and water changes the taste and texture, which is much less noticeable in the frozen variety. While there is always an exception, most vegetables can freeze just fine and retain their nutritional value.

Don’t get me wrong — I prefer fresh produce over frozen any day, but I like to eat seasonally fresh foods. For instance, I don’t purchase fresh corn on the cob in January, because who knows where it was shipped from and how long it has been stored? If a recipe calls for a vegetable or fruit that is out of season, I like to use the frozen organic option.

Most folks seek quick, easy meals that, whether they know it or not, often run high in calories and low in nutrition. With moderation and some easy switches that won’t take up any more time to prepare, you can eat better for your health.

Until next time, eat well!

Easy Gazpacho Soup Tweetcipe

It’s time to make the most of the summer’s fresh vegetables! What I love about this recipe is that it is really simple to put together, requires no cooking, and I can clean out my refrigerator’s vegetable drawer. All of the vegetables just need to be roughly chopped.

Easy Gazpacho Soup

1 cup chopped red onions
1 cup chopped green bell pepper
1 cup chopped English cucumber, or use a regular cucumber, seeded
1 cup chopped and peeled tomatoes, or use store-bought diced tomatoes
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped garlic
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1/4 cup tomato paste
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
3 cups tomato juice, or use low-sodium V8
Sprig of thyme
Balsamic Glaze (optional)

Mix all the ingredients except the balsamic glaze together in a large bowl, cover, and let sit in the refrigerator overnight.

The next day, remove the thyme sprig and blend all the ingredients with a stick blender or in a food processor until the gazpacho is smooth. This amount will serve 6. For a smoother texture, strain the soup, and this amount will serve 4. Refrigerate the gazpacho until ready to serve.

To complete: Ladle the cold soup into bowls and squeeze dots of balsamic glaze over the top.

Getting Adventurous with Cooking Oils

For many home cooks, vegetable oil is normally the go-to cooking oil, but there are many different alternatives that I like to incorporate in my cooking that not only taste better, but are better for you. Cooking oils vary so it’s helpful to know some specific things about them. Because different kinds of oil have different smoking points, each will start losing some of their nutritional value and flavor at certain contrasting temperatures.

The smoke point is the temperature at which the oil begins to burn, but worse than that, it’s also the temperature where the oil begins to degenerate and throw off unhealthy free radicals. Although cooking above the smoke point doesn’t necessarily mean your food will burn, it is the point at which you should probably ditch the food and oil that is in the pan and start over.

Safflower oil and grapeseed oil are good to use because they have higher smoke points (great when you need to cook at a higher temperature) and they do not emit any particular flavor that will affect your recipe. When shopping for cooking oils, be sure to look for the refined versions as they will have higher smoke points than their unrefined siblings.

Lately I have been experimenting with coconut oil. While safflower oil and grapeseed oil are interchangeable, unrefined coconut oil adds a bit of flavor. You want to make sure you are thinking about the flavor the oil will add to avoid a weird mixture of tastes. While unrefined coconut oil might taste great in a fruity sautéed chicken salad, your chicken parmesan might take on a tropical flavor that you did not intend. Cooking with refined coconut oil not only gives you a higher smoke point, but the light coconut flavor is no longer discernable. You can fry with any of these three oils to have some flexibility in the kitchen. I do not cook with extra virgin olive oil because of its low smoke point. Instead, I reserve extra virgin olive oil to finish a dish (for instance, drizzling over a cooked homemade pizza) or to add to salad dressings and dips.

I always try to cook with the healthiest ingredients, and oil is no exception. Stick to the basics: naturally occurring fats in oils are processed much more easily by your body than the unnatural trans fatty acids (made by the hydrogenation process) that are mostly stored in the arteries. Doctors will tell you the healthiest oils contain mostly unsaturated fats, but do not let that scare you away from expanding your cooking techniques. Cooking in moderation with, say, coconut oil or butter, which are higher in saturated fat, can improve your dish’s flavor. I’m the first one to admit fat equals flavor! While I try to maintain a healthy diet, the key is moderation. Avoid ingredients that contain trans fatty acids, but the occasional indulgence in coconut oil or butter with their saturated fat is ok in my opinion. Get adventurous in the kitchen and try something other than vegetable oil. There are many healthier alternatives that are full of flavor.

Until next time, eat well!