“How not to eat like an American”. That’s the subtitle for this post. My fellow Americans thrive on innovation, hyper palatability, and convenience. As for me, my interests are traditional, tasty, and I’m okay with the relentless daily grind of home cooked meals. And that takes me to the joys and pleasures of gremolata.
It’s an herb mixture of parsley, garlic, lemon zest. There are a gazillion variations but the key to success no matter which recipe you choose is to use the freshest best quality ingredients and to adjust proportions to taste. Gremolata is a perfect finish to the early green beans I just picked up at a local farmers market.
Ingredients for the dish pictured above are: green beans, cherry tomato, vegetable broth*, Gremolata (parsley, garlic, lemon zest), olive oil, Parmigiano, salt.
Fresh minimally processed ingredients are the key to the most flavorful freshly prepared meals. Local green beans are beginning to come in here in the Hudson Valley and those are the best green beans to used for the dish. They are sweet and tender and a joy to eat.
Commodity imports from California or Florida work well in the winter but can never match the delicate flavor of the early summer beans. Green beans will be coming in all summer, but It’s still too early for local tomatoes, so I use cherry tomatoes. To finish off, 100% California extra virgin olive oil, Italian imported Parmigiano, and gremolata.
Why you may ask spend so much money on an Italian import? Because our American Parmesan doesn’t taste the same. Like I said in the beginning, I don’t eat like an American. I spend more on food than the average American, but I economize in other areas like clothing, travel, and entertainment. So I figure that in the long it all evens out.
Besides spending more on the ingredient I like to cook with, there’s one more thing that sets me apart from my fellow Americans. I value the taste of freshly prepared and I’m okay with the NOVA food classification system, the classification system that is not based on nutrients.
I do check nutrients, but only after I’ve assembled the ingredients, prepared the meal, and verified it tastes good to me. Labels are useful because nutrients are important. But there’s is so much more to food than the Nutrition Facts Label can tell me.
I figure it’s an accomplishment however when one of my creations gets a pass. The label above is based on an FDA standard serving size. And the DV (Daily Value) is optimal as per FDA guidelines for both saturated fat and sodium. If my green beans with gremolata were a product I could label it “healthy”.
THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW
Did you notice the star after the vegetable broth* on the ingredient list? The star stands for squishy. And squishy means the product has aspects in common with both traditional processing (NOVA Group 3) and ultra-processing (NOVA Group 4). These “squishy” products can be classified as processed or UPF (ultra-processed) depending on who is doing the classification and how the criteria is interpreted.
I use a packaged vegetable broth for convenience. Making my own is an easy task but it’s an exceeding time consuming process. The broth I use can be classified as UPF because the product lists 12 ingredients, considerable more than the 5 ingredient cut off. This vegetable broth can also be classified as processed because no added flavors or other cosmetic additions are listed. That why it’s a squishy product.
A product that lists 12 ingredients and uses vegetable concentrates would probably not be on the shelf however if the food police moved in for a massive sweep.
