Pink Pickled Onions Tweetcipe

Every once in awhile, when I’m eating in a restaurant, I come across a dish that has pickled onions in it. The onions, whether in a salad or as a garnish, make the plate visually appealing and make my taste buds say “hello!”

I was cooking for a client a few months ago and a green salad was on the menu. I wanted to add something a little different to the salad and decided to make pickled onions for the first time. I don’t know why I waited so long – the recipe is incredibly simple, the onions keep in the refrigerator for a month or more, and it’s a great ingredient or garnish that adds pizzazz and hints of “gourmet” origins.

Pink Pickled Onions

8 ounces champagne vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
2 Serrano chilies, seeded and julienned
2 medium red onions, thinly sliced

In a small saucepan, bring the vinegar, sugar, and chilies to a boil. Stir until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat. Place the sliced onions in a glass container and pour the liquid over them. Stir. Place the container in an ice bath to cool. Serve chilled in salads and with meats. These are also great on sandwiches.

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!

Grilled Cheese Stuffed Jalapenos Tweetcipe

Jalapenos are often used to flavor other dishes such as salsa, cornbread and nachos. I’d like to show some respect to this rather unappreciated vegetable with a recipe that features the spicy green pepper. You may have tried a variation of this appetizer that sometimes goes by the name of Jalapenos Kisses, but homemade and grilled can’t be beat! Warning: these warm little appetizers are not for the tender-mouthed!

GRILLED CHEESE STUFFED JALAPENOS

Makes 40 stuffed jalapenos

20 large mild jalapenos, cut in half lengthwise and seeded (use gloves to protect your fingers)
1 – 8 oz package cream cheese
1 t milk
Pinch of salt
1 t powdered chipotle or chili powder
20 pieces of bacon, thin sliced and cut in half

Place 40 toothpicks in water to soak. Mix cream cheese, milk, salt and spice in a medium bowl until smooth.

Fill each jalapeno with some of the cream cheese mixture. Wrap each in a piece of bacon and secure with a toothpick.

Place jalapenos on a grill plate (a metal plate with holes in it) and grill over medium heat until peppers are roasted and bacon is cooked. Do not flip or turn. If the peppers are burning or the bacon fat is causing flare-ups, place a sheet of foil on the grill and move the jalapenos onto the foil until done. Serve immediately.

Eat the Rainbow

When you’re busy and on the run it’s tough to eat healthy, isn’t it? Trying to remember how many servings of this or that makes me feel like reaching for a bag of potato chips and calling it a day. But, eating healthy is something I do try to do, and one way to make it a little easier is to eat the rainbow – and sorry, I am not referring to Skittles!

“Eating the rainbow” is all about adding more color to your diet. The idea is that as long as those colors are fresh fruits and veggies, you’ll be able to eat healthier without putting a lot of thought or effort into worrying about servings per day. Filling in the rainbow might not be an easy task, but I try to get as close as possible every day (while avoiding those tempting rainbow Twizzlers).

To fulfill your “red” requirements, go for tomatoes and beets. Cooked tomatoes especially provide excellent nutritional value. Foods like carrots fulfill the orange requirement, as do, well, oranges. There are some food items that come in more than one color such as squash, which can be either yellow or orange. As far as I know there are no real differences in the nutritional value in the varied colors of the same vegetable, with the exception of red bell peppers. Setting aside the outrageous cost of red bell peppers for the moment, they contain as much as four times the Vitamins A and C than their green counterparts.

Green might not get special emphasis when you’re looking for a pot of gold, but it’s obviously the most important section of the food rainbow and one of the healthiest colors to add to your plate. You can’t go wrong with a half-green plate at dinner. I cook some sort of green leafy vegetable almost every day and all that I have noticed is that each green takes a different amount of cooking time. For most palettes, cooked greens just need a little water or vegetable broth added along with a dash of salt and pepper. But to vary your green experience I suggest adding ingredients like sliced pieces of garlic or shiitake mushroom for additional flavor.

When thinking about eating the rainbow, don’t limit yourself to the basics. There are a ton of tasty choices that will give you the balanced diet you are looking for and help improve your health. This list is only a start to the many options that are available to you in helping you achieve that balanced diet:

• Red: tomatoes, grapefruit, watermelon, guava, red bell pepper
• Green: spinach, collards, kale, broccoli, Swiss Chard, avocado, asparagus
• Orange: sweet potatoes, mangos, carrots, apricots, papaya
• Yellow: pineapple, yellow bell pepper, banana, squash
• Blue/Purple: blueberries, plums, eggplant, blackberries

While white isn’t technically a color in the rainbow, it’s a good idea to include garlic, chives, onions, scallions, and leeks, both for flavor and for the health benefits they offer.

It’s ok to mix things up and experiment with the different varieties of food that are out there. Do not limit yourself or your cooking to the items that first come to mind. Spinach and other low fat, nutrient-rich produce get a bad rap from the Tastebud Police, but there are many healthy foods out there that, with the right flavoring or recipe (like my Gazpacho Soup), can make your list of favorites.

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!

Grilled Eggplant Salad with Walnuts Tweetcipe

I find eggplant to be a pretty but bland tasting vegetable on its own. That’s probably why I don’t use it much in my cooking. However, this week I got the latest Food and Wine magazine in the mail and four eggplants in my CSA basket. I perused the magazine until I found a promising eggplant recipe and gave it a try last night. It was so good, I had to share it, though, as is my custom, I tweaked the recipe a bit. This works well as a side dish or, if you cut the veggies into smaller pieces, as a topping for flat bread or crostini.

Grilled Eggplant Salad with Walnuts
adapted from Food and Wine Magazine, serves 6

Two 1 lb eggplants, sliced lengthwise ½ inch thick
1 large jalapeno
grapeseed oil
¼ cup chopped cilantro
3 T white wine vinegar (I use champagne vinegar)
1 ½ t honey
1 garlic clove, minced
5 roma tomatoes, cut into ½ inch dice
1 small red onion, sliced in ¼ inch rings
2 T chopped toasted walnuts (I used pecans because I was out of walnuts)

Brush the eggplant slices, jalapeno and onion slices with grapeseed oil and season with salt. Grill vegetables over moderate heat and remove vegetables as they get a little charred – about 8-10 minutes total grilling time. Peel and seed jalapeno, then finely chop it. Dice the eggplant and quarter the onion rings.

In a large bowl combine the cilantro, vinegar, honey and garlic. Add all of the vegetables and gently toss. Add salt and cayenne pepper to taste. Garnish with nuts. Serve at room temperature.