Category Archives: WIP

These posts were published before I developed my current format. In order to republish, each recipe or formulation needs to be reworked.

OMG Just picked up 8 pounds of tomatoes!

8 pounds do tomatoes | photo gourmet-metrics

10 enormous tomatoes | photo gourmet-metrics

I had planned to start putting down some preliminary thoughts on a controversial issue GMO and then my CSA box arrived with 8 pounds of tomatoes. OMG!

One weighty issue immediately replaced by another weighty issue. They were big ones 13 – 14 ounces / 370 grams each. We can’t eat that many tomatoes in one week so now what to do?

I’ve done canning in the past but it’s a hassle and I can’t even remember who my canning equipment got donated to. So I pulled out the iPad and went to work. Pulled up a Household USDA Food Facts Sheet on fresh tomatoes.

• Tomatoes should be stored in a cool, dry place. Do not store in a plastic bag. Store in a single layer, as stacking tomatoes may cause them to become mushy.

• Fresh tomatoes may be frozen whole, chopped, or sliced. Wash tomatoes and remove the stem, store in a tightly closed plastic bag, then freeze up to 8 month

That’s it. I’ll freeze them. Minimal labor, easy, quick, and I have some extra freezer space. All I need is some fresh basil, my trusty tomato knife, a good scrubbing brush, ziplock bags, and some discretionary time.

First step was to wash and scrub well. Remove the core and outside blemishes. Need to work quickly to preserve freshness. Each day they sit on the counter increases risk of further deterioration.

The whole process took me about 40 minutes. Two chopped tomatoes plus a handful of basil per bag. Push out the extra air, zip it up, weight it, and put it in freezer. I ended up with five bags 700 grams / 1.5 pounds each. Cheaper and better than a brick pack and did it myself.

Tomatoes come in with a vengeance this time of year, but those bags are going to look pretty good over the next couple of months. Do I need to count them as processed food? Yes, technically that’s exactly what they are. I’ll settle on minimally processed.

Now for that other weighty matter. Tomatoes got me to thinking about availability. With a seasonal crop that only comes in once per year, cooks need to make adjustments. During the winter when tomatoes are out of season here in the North East I fall back on hydroponic tomatoes usually from Canada. Then I got to wondering. Do you suppose anyone has ever tried to genetically modify a hydroponic tomato for increased flavor?

On Elizabeth David, measurement, culinary judgment.

French Provincial Cooking, Elizabeth David, Reprinted with revision 1970, page 124.

French Provincial Cooking, Elizabeth David, Reprinted with revision 1970, page 125.

I adore Elizabeth David. For so many reasons. Her attitude. Her wit. Her unshakable common sense. The way she writes about the food she loves. And I especially love her human approach to measurement.

Pictured above is a page from French Provincial Cooking. It’s the opening paragraph for the chapter on Weights and Measurement. Her words were a breath of fresh air to this American ear raised to measure with cups and spoons according to the rigid methodology of sifting, spooning, and leveling developed by Fanny Farmer and in her Boston School of Cooking Cookbook. I have paraphrased Elizabeth David’s text as follows:

The dangerous person in the kitchen is the one who goes rigidly by weigh, measurements, thermometers, and scales … The tradition of French cookery writers, with a few notable exceptions, is to give only rather vague directions as to quantities, oven temperatures and timing. American cookery writers are inclined to err in the other direction, specifying to the last drop and the ultimate grain the quantities so salt, sugar, powdered herbs, spices, and so on, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination or discretion of the cook … Seasonings and flavoring are surely a question of taste; they are the elements which give individual character to each person’s cookery. And then there is always a question of what happens to be available. One cook will trudge for miles to buy a sprig of thyme because the directions for the stew tell her to include ‘a bouquet of thyme, parsley, and bay leaf’. Another will cheerfully leave it out. A third will substitute some other herb, a fourth will abandon the whole project as being too much worry and trouble, a fifth will be careful always to have a small supply of at least common herbs and spices in her store cupboard. It is not for me or anyone else to say which one is acting correctly. It is a question of temperament …

The really good cooks I know seem to have one thing in common. They tend to ignore recipes. Well I don’t mean completely ignore, but the really good cooks I know are more likely to do things their own way and less likely to follow the measurements and ingredients with dogmatic precision.

More than once I have been asked by one of the not so good cooks I know to salvage a situation using my culinary instinct. Like the time my sister was preparing a crab dish. She was carefully measuring out the required 1/2 teaspoon salt, her hand slipped, and a lot of salt went in before she could steady the container. She was expecting company that night and panicked. So I just rinsed off the crab, did a second béchamel, and no one was any the wiser.

When I look at a recipe, I see a framework for creativity. And if I make a mistake, so what? That is called human error and it happens to the best of us. Maybe I have created a new masterpiece. Much to my surprise and delight I have discovered that as long as you don’t broadcast the mistake, most people sitting at the table never know the difference. Like the time I found the sour cream for the beef stroganoff still sitting on the counter after dinner.

I do expect some things from a recipe. A listing of ingredients. Basic proportions. A sensible set of guidelines to help me out along the way. I don’t care if the ingredients are listed in order of use. Or how they are listed although my preference is by weight in grams. What I do not expect is guaranteed success. That will depend more on my culinary judgment than on my ability to execute a series of steps in the right order.

Now the dietitian in me is beginning to speculate … What role would culinary judgment have to play in nutrition / healthy eating? Hummmmmmm … I will have to give that one some serious thought.

Can we eat healthy and high fat?

summer flounder | gourmet metrics

summer flounder | gourmet metrics

 

Wednesday is fish night and summer flounder is what I served for supper a couple weeks ago. The piece I picked out weighing about 2/3 pound (300 grams) so at $15 a pound, I paid about $10.

At my table small is beautiful, so a little bit of protein goes a long way. Just the two of us that night and we split the flounder. That piece pictured above was my half. Cooked and ready to serve let’s say about 4 ounces (120 grams) which by American standards is on the skimpy side. But taste wise and protein wise (15 grams) it’s enough for me.

Some of my more zealous colleagues look at flounder as a low calorie / low fat option because the fish is so lean. Not me. Now I love flounder or fluke as some call it because the flesh is so delicate and the taste so subtle, but even this eater has to admit that all by itself flounder tends to be on the bland side.

My way to cook flounder is to pan-fry in olive oil, season with salt, kiss with pepper, finish with whisper of unsalted butter, and serve with a twist of lemon. Delicious but not low fat.

For the rest of the plate, steamed local spinach and farro. Local fresh spinach has plenty of flavor and to my taste at least needs nothing else, not even salt. I added some farro for whole grain carbohydrate but I took the picture before putting it on the plate. We finished off with a salad of finely diced kohlrabi, red Boston lettuce, Napa cabbage, and a couple of hydro-tomatoes dressed with my vinaigrette. And local blueberries for dessert.

The calorie count ran around 650 per person. Not a big meal by American standards but more than enough for us. It was a work night and we prefer not to have a heavy meal before going to bed.

Sounds pretty healthy doesn’t it? Let’s take a look.

Protein. A modest portion. Bonus points for seafood.

Vegetables. 6 different kinds of vegetables, total of 2 cups. Bonus points for dark green.

Fruit. Blueberries, rich in Anthocyanins, 1/2 cup. Bonus points for whole fruit.

Whole Grain. Farro is a wheat (not gluten free) and one of my favorite ancient grains. Bonus points for whole grain.

Fatty Acid Ratio: excellent which means more olive oil and less butter.

Sodium. 780 mg for the meal and 33% DV.

And for added value the meal qualifies as sustainable and affordable. In New York, flounder is local and not currently overfished. And despite the high price per pound, a modest serving size makes the cost manageable.

But there is always that question from the back of the room. How about fat? No problem. I’m a nutrition nerd and I always have the numbers. The percentage is above the recommended cut off which puts my meal into the high fat range. Not a meal for someone who needs to adhere to a low fat regime or who believes only low fat meals are healthy.

And because regulatory compliance is cast in concrete leaving little flexibility for humans to exercise judgment, labeling my meal healthy would be illegal.

It’s what I call healthy versus healthy.

And that’s why, when it comes to my own table, I exercise culinary judgment.

“Judgment is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it.” The Death of Common Sense, Philip K. Howard, 1994

Does it matter where my garlic came from?

photo | gourmet metrics

 

That is one beautiful, robust clove of garlic pictured above. It came from a small local market where I do a lot of my shopping. It stored well down to the last piece, no shriveling or mold spots, and cooked up beautifully with all the rich umami flavor I expect from an honest clove.

The garlic was imported. The sign above said “IMPORTED GARLIC” but no information on the country of origin was included.

So I started looking around for someone to ask. The store is run by a bunch of guys who love the business I give them but do not always have time or inclination for all my questions.

Now I am not easy. I want to know everything about everything. That’s me. A real pain in the ass. So when I shop for food I am always attentive to managing a constant tension between my desire to know and someone else’s desire not to be bothered.

And my observation over the years is that guys who work in the food business usually do not appreciate curious ladies with questions, unless they work at Whole Foods. But I was not shopping Whole Foods that day.

My first try was the young man attending to scallions. His English was at best somewhat broken but he understood my question, just smiled when I asked if he knew where the garlic came from and he just said ” Nooooo … ”

One of the managers would probably would have known was elbow deep in piles of delivery papers so I decided not to interrupt.

Then I saw one of the principles, usually tolerant of my insatiable curiosity. As I approached he took a quick turn from my path into the refrigerator storage room. So I gave up, paid for my purchases, and left the store garlic in hand.

In the parking lot behind the store is a holding shed for produce to wait before it goes into the store for sale. I was parked near the holding shed so I put my bags in the car, went back to door to the shed, and looked in.

No one there. But I could see lots of boxes. I know the country of origin always appears on shipping crates or boxes. So I went in and started poking around and I found it!

Printed clearly on one of the boxes were these two words: GARLIC Argentina. No other indicators like organic or fair trade or nonGMO, but I had my country of origin.

But I got to thinking on the drive home, is it my right to know? Where do you draw the line between frivolous curiosity and legitimate need? Sometimes it is critically important. If there is a recall for example, where that cantaloupe or peach came from becomes critically important. Clearly a legitimate need.

And then there is that very long list of other nice to know things like fair trade or nonGMO or organic or heirloom. These labels are good marketing tools, but do they fall into the category of legitimate need?

Thinking through the issue on the drive home, I conceded that it’s not really my right to know unless it is a safety issue.

Developing a good relationship with your customers has encourage many vendors to make it their business to answer questions. That is why I have such good relations with many of the Whole Foods staff. But this particular store I shop at does not have that kind of business. It’s a family affair and run by people who have been in the produce for two generations. Twice a week they go to the Hunts Point distribution center and refresh the stock. I shop there because they are expert at buying produce. And for perks, they bring in blood oranges from Sicily in the winter and green figs from California in the late summer.

Besides there is more than one way to discover a country of origin. I had my answer and came home with a great garlic. So I have decided to cut them slack on this country of origin issue.

Okay three cheers for butter! But now what are we suppose to do?

My mother and I disagreed about a lot of things, but butter was right up there near the top of the list. She thought margarine was healthier and I thought butter tasted better. Kids never win these debates, but you know exactly what I did as soon as I grew up. That’s right, I used butter. OMG did I use butter!

Nothing like living and cooking in France to encourage a lavish use of butter and we were going through a pound a week easy. As all good things come to an end, so did my butter indulgence. My cooking horizons expanded. Olive oil moved into my pantry replacing butter as my fat of choice. And along the way, before I actually went back to study nutrition, I picked up one of those pivotal books in my culinary nutrition education.

The original Laurel’s Kitchen came out of the Berkeley counter culture vegetarian movement and was published 1976. My version, The New Lauren’s Kitchen was published about 10 years later and is still in print today, a testament to the book’s enduring value and our collective hunger for healthy eating.  Reduced fat was the nutritional byword at that time, but even back then we loved out butter and Laurel offered an ingenious solution.

As she put it in the preface for the Better-Butter recipe: “This is surely one of the most popular of all our recipes. It offers an easy spreading alternative to margarine, which can otherwise be the most highly processed — and salted — food in a natural foods kitchen. Better-Butter combines butter (for flavor) with the unsaturated fats of good-quality oil. The result is a spread that’s as low in saturated fat as margarine, but without hydrogenation, processing, and additives.”

Note that the comparison with margarine was made prior to the arrival of soft spreads.

The battle between butter versus margarine rages to this day.  Industrial production versus the real thing. Fresh, natural, organic butter churned from grass fed, pastured raised cows versus phytosterol enhanced, expeller expressed soft spread from nonGMO grown, mono-unsaturated canola oil.

Being older now and hopefully wiser, this dietitian still finds herself sitting right in the middle in the line of fire from both sides. There is evidence to support the argument that saturated fats should be minimized and replaced with polyunsaturated fats. And there is evidence to support the argument that saturated fats are actually not the most toxic natural substance known to mankind and their potential for harm has been overstated.

If butter is your thing, this dietitian says enjoy it but exercise moderation just in case. If soft spread is your thing, this dietitian says enjoy it and feel confident that the product has been engineered to eliminate those truly unhealthy hydrogenated fatty acids.

And for those of you looking for a third option, give better-butter a try. Half butter and half olive oil is a credible, good tasting alternative. The original recipe used volume measure, but being the nutrition nerd I am, my preference is to use the scale and do weight measurement. Both ways work.

Better-butter is a great tasting homemade do it yourself alternative.

And Laurel was right about one more thing. Even just out of the refrigerator, better-butter really is easy spreading. And that is the really cool part.

Healthy can be seen, touched, and tasted … sometimes.

photo | gourmet metrics

photo | gourmet metrics

 

These are red, fragile, stem ripened local, end of season strawberries. The picture of healthy. Ephemeral, perfect, delicious.

So how do I know they are healthy? The farmer I bought them from told me they were picked the day before I bought them. They looked good, felt good, and tasted good. But I will be honest, there was no label or organic certification or other guideline for confirmation. And even if there had been, these picture perfect strawberries might have carried some pesky microorganism so you better believe that I washed them before eating.

Strawberry season has come and gone here into Northeast, but looking at those berries in all their pristine beauty helped me put the final piece in place on an observation that has been troubling me since last summer about the same time of the year.

I was picking out vegetables from a farmer I like when an attractive, articulate, well educated young woman came up from behind and starting asking all kinds of questions about the vegetables and the strawberries

Now I am the last one to say don’t ask questions. I ask so many questions that some people don’t want to be bothered with me. A royal pain in the ass some would say.

No, her questions didn’t bother me.

What troubled me was her unwillingness to accept answers.

Now I liked this particular farmer for a couple of reasons. Besides strawberries, she always had excellent local peaches, seasonal tomatoes, and a consistently good spread of local greens. It was also a family affair. The lady in charge looked and talked like she had spend her whole life growing vegetables. She came across to me as credible, authentic, and wise. She knew how to store onions and could tell me that the reason some onions rotted from the inside out while other onions were really good keepers. “You have to pull them out and let them really dry out before moving to storage …” The onions I bought from her never rotted out before I used them either.

She sat in the back of her stand and left most of the customer dealings to her niece. So the articulate woman began her questioning with the niece.

The articulate woman wanted to know if the produce was certified organic. Her questions were pointed and intense and anxious. She knew just how to drill down. The niece answered as best she could but since the farm has not bothered to get certified the answers were not what the articulate woman was looking for.

Now I already knew this farm was not certified organic because I had asked the same questions myself. “We just don’t want to bother with the extra paperwork. Too much hassle. You’re going to have to trust us …”

That was good enough for me.

It was not however what the articulate woman wanted to hear. I could tell she might have been tempted by the way she looked at my selections laid out and waiting to be packed into my bags. “I am just really afraid of all that poison … ”

So she left to look elsewhere.

I looked at the niece and the niece looked back at me and that was that.

This exchange has been haunting me ever since. And what it really comes down to is trust. People can lie. Our senses can deceive. Labels can mislead. Certifications can be fictitious. But we still have to eat and we still have to make decisions.

So the exchange has played over and over again in my head for a year. I keep wanting to reassure that articulate young woman that yes it’s a food jungle out here and yes being skeptical is important, but sometimes it’s okay to go with your gut.

But she went away as quickly and she appeared and I never saw her again.

Eating more fish is healthy. Finding good fish is hard work.

photo | gourmet metrics

photo | gourmet metrics

 

Wouldn’t you call that a pretty good selection? Those shrimp on the left are wild caught as opposed to farmed and I think they come from North Carolina. Those little shellfish on the right are Little Neck Clams dug up from the Great South Bay of Long Island. I forgot to ask where the sea scallops came from, but they are “dry” and that means no one has dipped them in a solution of sodium tripolyphosphate to extend shelf life and increase weight.

What you are looking at in my photo is the protein I served for supper last Wednesday. I put together a seafood medley of steamed clams plus scallops and shrimp poached in garlic, white vermouth, and olive oil served over linguine. Absolutely delicious. Putting everything together is a challenge, but with practice I have gotten much faster at it. The really hard work is finding good fresh fish.

My first experience shopping for fish from the local market was in Garches, a suburb outside of Paris. That was the first time I realized that scallops live in shells at the bottom of the sea or bay where they grow. Each one of those scallops you see up there actually comes attached to a set of larger shells. The scallop is the muscle that holds the two shells together. I acquired quite a lot of shells that year. The men did the fishing, wives and daughters did the selling, and my French was good enough to establish myself as a serious customer. I learned how fresh fish smells and tastes. And what it looks like. And I experienced firsthand the value of relationship building.

It’s been a couple of years now that I have been cultivating my relationship with a fishmonger at the Long Beach Greenmarket and that is where I picked up my shrimp, scallops, and clams. He does a lot of his own fishing and reassured me he dug the clams himself. He makes fun of my curiosity but I know he appreciates my business and when all is said and done he answers my questions. More important, over the last couple of years that I have been cultivating the relationship, he has never sold me a bad piece of fish.

Trust is not something you can build with just any old person or any old supplier. Building a good relationship usually happens on a personal level, though a store like Whole Foods has built their business model cultivating trust on the corporate level.

Building trust is important with any person you buy from, but to my way of looking at the world it is especially important to establish trust with the person who sells you fish because there are so many issues out there. Mislabeling. Adulteration. Sustainability. Toxicity. And exactly how long ago was that fish was caught and exactly how has it been handled. I can count on one hand the places I have enough faith in to feel comfortable buying or eating fish.

So when I cook at home during the summer market season, Wednesday is fish day, Casey is my man, and the greenmarket in Long Beach is where I go for fish.

Look what I found in the farmer’s market!

snap peas, French breakfast radishes, carrots

snap peas, French breakfast radishes, carrots

Just in the Catskills for the weekend so not much time to cook. We usually go out for dinner before going back to the city, but there is always lunch. And I was in the mood for a surprise.

It’s early summer in the Hudson Valley and the growing season has begun. We picked up some cheddar cheese, crusty bread, and these radishes, carrots, and snap peas so small and tender you can eat them in the shell.

The little carrots needed a good scrubbing, but the radishes and peas were much easier to wash. I arranged them on a little plate with the red on the top, the orange on the bottom and the green in the middle. Really nice presentation.

Living in France introduced me to eating little radishes with butter and salt as an appetizer. My radishes from market were not that small and delicate, but tasted pretty good all the same. The carrots are actually mature despite their small size. The softest and most delicate of the lot were the little green snap peas.

You just never know what you are going to find at the farmers market.

A lot of folks would rather shop familiar settings. You know the predictable kind of layout where the choices are available all year round. Shopping these stores actually permits list making. People can decide what mood they are in, decide what they want to eat, write out the list, and now with technology punch it and have it all delivered to their door. As for me I love to be surprised.

The modern supermarket is truly a miraculous phenomenon. But surprises are something you will not find at a super market. What I really love about shopping these farmer’s markets is I can almost always find something I have never seen before. Like those dwarf carrots.

My idea of fun is arriving at the market with an open mind, wandering around and picking up what looks interesting, bringing it home, and then deciding how to put it all together.

Just like I did with my early summer medley of radish, carrot, and green snap pea. I love surprises.

Why don’t more people use fruit ripeners?

photo | gourmet metrics

photo | gourmet metrics

This is my fruit ripener. See that band of plastic there on the right side of the picture? That is the edge of the plastic bowl. After taking out what I need, I put the plastic cover back on.

Plenty of strategically placed ventilation holes for good circulation on both bowl and cover. My fruits are protected from outside contamination like dust. The cover also holds in beneficial gases for enhanced ripening. And I always put a paper towel in the bottom to absorb any excess moisture and to keep fruits from directly touching the plastic.

What you see in the bowl is a random selection for late June. Avocado and hydroponic tomatoes are available all year. But those nectarines are one of the first of the summer fruits. The ones in the bowl are from California.

After nectarines, I start buying local New York State for summer fruit. Apricots, peaches, all kinds of plums, and seasonal tomatoes. Moving into fall, there are numerous varieties of pears and kiwis. Winter is citrus, but those fruits are best kept in the refrigerator. Moving into spring of course the first tree fruits are cherries, but they too are keep better in the frig. Then we start again with nectarines. The fruit ripener gets year round use in my kitchen thought for non seasonal tomatoes and avocados.

The fruit ripener sits in a corner of my crowded workspace because of the important service it provides. I don’t forget about my fruits because I look at them everyday. Fruit ripens at its speed. The avocado is not ripe because I want to make a guacamole. It’s ripe when it is ready. But I can check things out every day. If one of my fruits starts to go bad, I pull it out, salvage what I can, and keep contamination from spreading.

So I say to myself, why don’t more people use fruit ripeners?

Maybe limited counter space?

Most kitchens nowadays are gigantic and full of all kinds of gadgets and tools. No something else must be going on. It’s my cramped New York City kitchen that has no counter space, but I can still find room.

Maybe folks don’t know how to prepare fruit? Or maybe they just don’t know fruit is a no work eating experience. That is a possibility.

But my gut says the real reason is that people don’t eat a lot of fruit.

And people who don’t eat a lot of fruit do not need a fruit ripener.

Fruit can be expensive. Actually very expensive. And if you don’t eat the fruit when it’s ready, one more chemistry experiment goes in the garbage can.

Habit may also be a contributing factor. I’m in the habit of having a piece after dinner every night. Not because I’m a dietitian, but because I like fruit. Most people I know given a choice of ice cream or a fresh ripe nectarine will opt for the ice cream. Not me, but I’m just weird that way.

Now being a dietitian, I wish more people would eat more fruit.

But also being an incorrigible optimist who likes to keep my focus on the positive side of the spectrum, I do see the bright side. The more good fruit out there, the more there is for me.

Do more words on the label make it healthy?

image

Don’t get me wrong. This veggie patty is a is fine product and with the addition of some avocado, tomato, a healthy amount of BBQ sauce, and two slices of robust whole grain bread, my lunch yesterday was very good.

But take a look at the package. Being the prototypical nutrition nerd, I read the whole package as I ate my lunch.

Gluten Free. Dairy Free. Soy Free. Made with organic vegetables, quinoa & walnuts. No GMOs.

Turning the box on its side, I found more. 0g Trans Fat. No added MSG. No Preservatives. Vegan. All this plus the now familiar Nutrition Facts and allergy disclaimers.

I finished up my lunch, was enjoying a slim can of Perrier, and I got to thinking. There is a lot of data on that package. I counted up 11 food related terms / product verifications and 12 ingredients.

There is no doubt in my mind that every statement on that package is honest and accurate. And since I had a little extra time yesterday, I went back and checked the items I added to enhance my lunch. Here is what I found.

The avocado comes from Mexico. Period. I always choose California when I have the option, but that’s only because I’m a native and believe in supporting your own. Mexican avocados taste just as good. The BBQ sauce is USDA organic. The tomatoes are hydroponic and imported from Canada. Fresh greenhouse vegetables / légumes de serre frais in environmentally friendly packing. No comparison with a heirloom seasonal summer tomato ripened on the vine but with the advantage of year round availability. My whole grain bread is doubly certified both USDA and Northeastern Organic Farming Association organic. And it’s local.

Note to self. Checking out labels takes a lot more time than preparing the sandwich. Add second note. It’s better for your health to cook than to check labels.

The last thing I checked was sodium. My rough estimate for the patty plus BBQ sauce plus bread is about 900mg. To my palate, it all tasted pretty good, but it might be on the high side for sodium sensitive people.

So is it all healthy? Of course it’s healthy for most people, but I could have told you that before checking all those labels. How can you go wrong with avocado and whole grains?