Ombailamos

what IS that?!

That, my friends, is delicious nutritious stock made from a smoked-turkey carcass and herbs.  Why does it look like Jello?  Because it was simmered for over 8 hours, which extracted most of the collagen from the bones.  Collagen is good for you.  And when a collagen-rich stock chills, it gels.

The suspicious-looking layer on top is fat.  Which is also good for you, and which retains incredible amounts of flavor.  The portion that was scooped out of this container formed the base for a vegetable chowder, easy and satisfying.

competence, routine, and home management

My longer-term readers might be wondering when I am going to get back to talking about fitness, dancing etc.  I expect I will eventually.  Right now, there is so much dancing stuff going on that just doing it is sufficiently tiring ... I don't want to also write about it!  We'll see how it goes after Nationals.

What I'm keeping my brain occupied with these days is Management.  Just as I recently realized that I've gotten past the digging-out phase of decluttering and into the refinement phase, I've recently realized that there are certain home tasks that have, through sufficient practice, become competencies. 

These are things that I no longer have to remind myself to do (or how to do them).  Things like ... making the bed.  Keeping the bathroom decently clean.  Keeping the dining-room table and other surfaces in the "public" areas clear.  Cooking dinner.  The simple, repetitive, routine practice of doing the task has conveyed a core competency.

Decluttering has, of course, helped a lot here.  When you have a defined place for everything, it is a lot easier to keep everything in its place. 

I used to have to look stuff up before I could cook it.  This is something every cook has to go through, and from 2008-2010 when I was just beginning to learn "how to kitchen," I had research to do, or recipes to consult, for almost every preparation.  Now I have a core set of preparations that I simply know how to do.  It's such a time-saver! 

And I know what I need to keep in the pantry so that I can throw one of these things together without either advance notice, or a stop at the grocery store.  When I use something up, it goes on the list, and the next time I shop I fill the order.  No annoying surprises when I feel like making chili; the stuff is already on hand.

It's kind of funny to me that I didn't previously grasp that the processes involved in a fitness regime - or in learning to dance for that matter - are the same processes involved in home management.  First you have to get some vocabulary, then you learn the grammar, and then you can put together sentences. 

You assemble the tools and learn how to use them ... and you only have to do that once.

buy it if you see it

And, of course, if you like beer.  I wish I'd gotten more of it when I saw it, because Alas! Ours is all gone, and BevMo had no mo' when last I inquired.  I like it, by the way, for the smoothness and not just for the association with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

pork shoulder roast

Slow cooker, how I love thee. 

Does it really count as a "recipe" if you never write down what you do? I THINK NOT.  Hence, all the variations on my rummage-through-the-refrigerator and throw-random-things-in-the-Crock-Pot cooking style.  

This time, what I had was:

• a 4-lb pork shoulder blade roast (so glad I got two of these!!) from the wonderful supermarket in West Hollywood, and
• a butternut squash from my produce box.  Also,
• half a dozen medium carrots (also from the produce box); 
• half a dozen fat cloves of garlic;
• a pineapple snack cup;
• a half-cup of water (but beer probably would have been really good); and
• a large spoonful of sambal oelek (red chili sauce) from the Thai place, which always delivers more than we need.

Being my kitchen, this also involved the following spices: ginger; allspice; turmeric; curry; cumin; and coriander.  And two packets of soy sauce. 

I had to get this one assembled and heated through before leaving the house at 8 a.m., so I broke down the butternut squash and chopped the carrots and peeled the garlic the night before, and just put them in the fridge in a Tupperware.  The pork was unpackaged and coated with the sambal oelek and pineapple early the day before.

As usual, after packing everything into the slow cooker I heated it through on HIGH for an hour before turning it down to LOW and leaving it for ...ten hours. 

When I got home, not only was it falling-off-the-bone tender, but the bone had rendered a substantial amount of gelatin, which I LOVE - it gives the broth body, and the meat succulence, and it's really good for your joints.

Wish I had bought all of those roasts!  They were on sale for $1.99/lb.  Next time I see them, I will be filling up the freezer for sure.

On the second day, the veggies in this pot roast had mostly dissolved, so I reheated with a freezer package of peas & diced carrots, and added a hefty spoonful of this spicy ginger teriyaki sauce I discovered, and a dash of extra cayenne.  GOOD EATS. 

A note on cooking with pig: it is not at all easy to find "clean" pork - organic or grassfed - and the industrial pig farm is a very filthy thing.  Industrial pork has a 60% likelihood of bearing some kind of pathogen, so it needs to be very thoroughly cooked. 

Hence, simmering in a slow cooker for multiple hours (and adding plentiful spices) is probably the best way to use this low-cost protein.

bit by bit ... bite by bite

NO QUICK FIXES

"You’re not going to get in shape in an hour. It’s going to take eight, 12, 16 weeks to get in shape," says Walter Thompson, a professor in the department of kinesiology and health at Georgia State University. "If you haven’t been doing this for 10, 20, 40, 50 years, you’re not going to cure that in an hour session."

This is at the heart of Americans' struggle with fitness and health, I think. We look at where we are now and imagine where we want to be in a month or six months or a year, and we forget that the sum total of our life experience is reflected in our present physical state. 

In order to turn back the clock, we have to heal our injuries, cut out the indulgences of our adulthood, and restore the activities of our youth. And of course, if our entire life has been inactive, we have to learn entirely new ways of being in order to make our later years healthier.

It's rarely the case that a single big nutrition or activity change will "cure" all our physical ills. Going vegetarian, for example, or taking up running may have health benefits but probably won't, in and of themselves, take care of all of a person's physical issues.

IN THE NEWS

It's unavoidable that news and entertainment media tend to focus on visible health issues.  Of those, of course, the most visible is obesity. There is still some serious information missing from the essentially trivial coverage of this particular issue.  Some interesting obesity research: 

• Having bacterial overgrowth in the digestive tract can, apparently, contribute to weight gain by interfering with the body's appetite signaling process, as well as the ability of the digestive tract to actually transfer nutrients into the bloodstream. 
• Eating too much processed, packed-in-plastic, or pesticide-laden food can, apparently, contribute to weight gain by interfering with the body's natural hormones. 
• Certain medications can, apparently, contribute to weight gain by disrupting appetite, mood, nutrient absorption, kidney function, and much else.

I'm bothered by all that these news stories leave out.

The main thing that they leave out is the big picture of the studies they cite. The three factors listed above, for example, may be very well substantiated, but as reported they leave unanswered a serious question: do these things contribute to weight gain in the absence of increased calorie consumption? If so ... how?

Because I just don't believe you can gain weight (fat or muscle or bone, real tissue weight) if your calorie intake is not greater than your calorie burn. Cells don't multiply without energy. 

You may retain water - which can look like excess tissue - but that's almost always transitory, unless it's caused by a chronic condition and/or a semi-permanent regime of certain medications.

No matter how much bacterial crud you have in your colon, no matter how big a proportion of your food is packaged crap, no matter what meds you're on, if you don't eat more calories than it takes to sustain your living tissue, you won't gain weight. 

You may not be healthy, and you almost certainly won't feel very good, but you won't gain weight. Nearly every top nutritionist quoted in the world news agrees on this, but somehow these people are never asked to quote for the articles finding obesity factors besides overeating. 

The factors listed above are found to contribute to weight gain.  I am betting the way they do this is by altering metabolism so that the body uses calories differently.  It may not be that a person needs to eat less in the presence of these factors ... but it is highly likely that a person will need to eat differently.

WHAT MIGHT HELP

If you are seeking a solution to your weight gain, by all means consult a doctor to:

• Find out if you have intestinal bacterial overgrowth. If you do, find out what natural - meaning sustainable - ways of treating it are open to you. They might try to sell you a lot of antibiotics, but for many people it may be as simple as eating more fiber, more fermented foods, more unsugared yogurt.
• Find out if you have high blood levels of BPA (Bisphenol-A), which leaches from plastic food packaging and disrupts the endocrine system. If you do, get the plastic out of your house - or at least out of your microwave and away from your beverages.
• Find out if the medications you take are known to disrupt appetite or mood, or to otherwise contribute to weight gain, and find out if there's something else you can do or take to address your conditions. 
  • Just as one example: antidepressants are famously associated with weight gain.  But physical activity is strongly associated with relief of depression.  So switching from a pill to a daily walk may be a possibility worth exploring.

I believe the best nutrition to be that which is closest to nature, or to what the average person could produce given the time and skill. That means foods that come wrapped in plastic, or foods containing ingredients created in labs, are not on my preferred list.

Start small. Use up the chips/crackers/cookies in the house, and don't buy any more. If you want snack foods, learn how to make them at home from real ingredients. But if fitness and health are serious concerns of yours, learning to live without snacks is an even better solution. 

Stop buying beverages packaged in plastic. There is no beverage packaged in plastic that is essential to life.  Get your milk in a paper carton.

And don't heat up dinner in a plastic container - I don't care if it says "microwave safe." All that means is the container won't melt. This is why we have Pyrex.

It's not going to happen in a day, and that's okay. Let it take as long as it takes. It's okay to make one little change, get used to it, and then make one more little change.  Sometimes an accretion of small changes of habit can lead to long-term success where drastic "rapid" attempts have failed.

Take your time. Love your body. It's the only one you've got.

kitchen therapy

Mr. P and I have been sick now (both of us) for a solid week.  For me, it's been twelve days.  I am annoyed.  It's just a rhinovirus, but anything that interferes with A) my sleep B) my exercise routines pisses me off.  We (I) also haven't felt up to dance practice for the duration.  Fortunately, we don't have any imminent performances or competitions.

What does one do, when one feels like crap but must nonetheless function?  Well, I medicate. I juggle doses of antihistamine, cough suppressant, expectorant, decongestant.  Very few commercial preparations contain all four, and it's probably not a great idea to take all four together anyway, so I stagger the doses and drink a lot of water.  Apologies to the fish downstream who are getting the residue of all this.

I also resort to more-than-usual administration of hot drinks and spicy foods.  I made chili last weekend and a curried pig pot roast early in the week.  Tomorrow I'll be making pumpkin gingerbread.  We'll have red cabbage with onion and apple alongside spicy teriyaki duck for dinner.

It's been relatively chilly outside at night- which means by the time I get home - the past two weeks.  So cranking up the cooktop or the oven has been an attractive proposition, in the sense that the apartment is cold when I get there.  I expect to stay in all day tomorrow after running out to the grocery store for baking supplies.

Advice for the unwell: 

• Drink lots of water. 
• Eat citrus.
• Add extra spices to your food. 
• If you feel tired, REST. 
• If you have a to-do list, ignore anything that's not absolutely essential to the function of your home or work life. 
• If you have to go to work, medicate sensibly and wash, wash, wash your hands.
• Go to bed on time, or early if you possibly can.
• Stretch.  Body fluids are your internal clean-up crew.  Keep them moving.

cabbage stroganoff

Cool weather always means more cooking, or at least less bitching while cooking and more willingness to think about cooking.  I love fall/winter.  I mean ... I have to cook all year, but it is a lot less of a trial when I am not overheated.  ANYWAY.  This dish has become a bit of a standby and I've probably covered some variation of it before, but here is the newest, most improved version.  Recommended for cold winter nights.

CABBAGE STROGANOFF

Ingredients, step 1: 1/2 large head of cabbage; 1 whole large onion; 6-8 cloves of garlic.

Preparation: Clean, peel, and chop the veg into forkable bits (slice the garlic).  Decant into large skillet, sauté pan, or family-sized risotto pan.  Drizzle with at least 2 tablespoons of olive oil and sauté over medium heat, stirring frequently, until wilted. Cover to speed up the process.  Add a splash of sherry if it starts to get sticky.

Ingredients, step 2: 1 pound ground bison (or ground meat of choice); 8 oz sliced fresh mushrooms.

Next process: shove the veg to the sides of the pan; tip the ground meat into the pan, break up, and cook till lightly browned.  Then dump the mushrooms in on top of it, stir it all up, and continue cooking until the mushrooms are lightly browned.

Season with: white pepper, dry mustard, coriander, parsley, and paprika.  I do not measure.  It was probably a half-teaspoon of each except the parsley, we're looking at more like a full teaspoon there.

Ingredients and process, step 3: half cup crumbled bleu cheese and 1 cup shredded parmesan; stir into hot mixture until melted.  Then add 1 cup sour cream and stir to combine.  Add heavy cream as needed to attain the level of sauciness you desire.

Serve with strong red wine, or champagne. 

Dietary notes: Clearly this is not a low-fat, low-calorie dish.  It is very high in nutritional quality, however - much more so than stroganoff made with egg noodles - and has the added benefit of being composed in a single pan. 

SUGGESTED for a lower-calorie version: replace the sour cream and cheese with nonfat plain Greek yogurt. If you go this way, you will probably also want to add some more Worcestershire or some other salt conveyance - but my recommendation would be to add that as needed, at the table, and not to the main dish.

Time required?  I'm guessing forty minutes start to finish, and it does require attention.  Not so much that you can't deal with the day's mail, however.

what's in the kitchen

A recurring theme in the blogosphere is the subject of healthy eating, and why it's so hard for "poor people" to eat well. Many of the arguments have to do with access to good food at a reasonable price. Others complain of minimal education about nutrition and food preparation. And yet others deal with the difficulty of preparing food in a poor person's living space.

The first argument has undisputed merit. There are areas of Los Angeles that have six+ liquor stores per square mile and no grocery stores. There are areas where the closest thing to a grocery store is a 7-11 or a Rite-Aid. Getting your hands on fresh vegetables and fruit if you live in these areas means you have to get up and go.

But you know, most of the inhabitants of these areas do get up and go. They are workers. They're not staying at home watching TV all day. Many of the households in these areas have more than two working adults per household and they don't have the kind of jobs you can do at home. 

So each of those adults has to leave the neighborhood for work, and they can - and do: I've seen 'em - pick up food and take it on the bus home with them. So, if you want to buy actual food, you don't have to have a supermarket a block away from you.

The second argument, about poor education as to nutrition and food prep, also has merit. My problem with this one is a systemic one. We have a system of public education and our public schools pretty much all have kitchens, because kids are there all day and need to eat. 

So I would think a really glaringly obvious way to address the nutrition/food prep education question is to put the kids in the school kitchen and, you know, teach them how to cook. If you're already paying food prep employees, the students are there, the equipment is there ... hello? Kids love to know stuff. They like to have skills. They like to contribute. Get 'em in the kitchen.

I find the last argument particularly irritating, because I myself have lived in marginal housing at various times and I managed to cook a meal here and there that was composed of more than tater tots and ketchup. But again, there's some merit. There are, unfortunately, states and cities in which landlords are not required to provide much more than four walls, a floor, and a roof. 

However, in most places, a landlord also has to provide running water and electricity. He may not have to give you any appliances, but take a look at this:

• Whirlpool 14.4 cubic foot refrigerator with freezer: $409
• Presto 16" electric skillet with lid: $40
• Sanyo .7 cubic foot microwave oven: $65

There you go. That's all you really, really need to store food and prepare it. In fact, you could get by without the microwave. But with all three, you have basic food storage and appliances for just $514. (These prices, by the way, are all from Amazon as of 2010 - but could be matched on the ground pretty easily, and I doubt you'd be hard-pressed to find comparable prices now.  Why Amazon?  Because they DELIVER.)

But say you have a little more of a budget than that. The next three tools I'd choose, if I were starting from nothing:

• Avanti Bake & Broil toaster oven with 2-disk burner: $105
• Hamilton Beach 6-quart slow cooker: $27
• Lynns Saturn 2-quart saucepan with lid: $20

There you go; for another $152, you can cook pretty much anything except a Thanksgiving turkey. Of course, you still need some tools, and you don't really want to eat with your hands:

• Rachael Ray 6-piece nylon scrapers & servers set: $30
• Living Plus 6-piece cooking spoons set: $18
• Living Plus 6-piece kitchen tools set: $25
• Rada cook's utility knife: $7
• Rada serrated slicer: $6
• Oneida flatware, 20-pc service for 4: $40
• Corelle tableware, 16-pc service for 4: $30

All that for just $156! You now have a fully-equipped kitchen, including appliances that you can take with you when you get movin' on up, for $822. It's less than $70 a month to save that much in a year. $18 a week. For food independence. And these are tools that last, not stuff you'd need to replace constantly.

I think there is an idea, perhaps inflated by the class of people who can sit around bloviating on blogs through the haze of their post-graduate degrees (yes, I know this includes me), that equipping a kitchen is this gigantic, prohibitively expensive undertaking. 

Y'all, that's because we watch HGTV, get the Williams-Sonoma catalog, and want the stainless-steel Sub-Zero and the pot filler and the custom cabinets.  You don't need any cabinets to have a kitchen.

All you need is what you need. Teach your children well. If there's one thing I'm on board with, it's educational reform. But if for some moronic reason we can't actually give our kids kitchen skills anymore (even in my dirt-poor middle school, there was a Home Ec class or two), we can at least show them a breakdown like this and give them a copy of Eat This, Not That.

Everyone should be able to go out into America knowing that all you need to get by is a floor, four walls, a roof, running water, and electricity. You don't "need" a TV or, for that matter, a bed, a couch, or a table and chairs. If you've got the wherewithal to feed yourself you can save a ton of money, be more responsible with and for your health, and build skills that last a lifetime.

Save a little money. Put it in the bank and when you're going out on your own - whether it's after high school, after college, after a breakup - set yourself up not with toys, but with the tools to live a better life.

winter, holidays, etc.: side dishes

Anyone who knows me will not be surprised to hear that I have a sweet tooth.  I've gotten a little more sophisticated over the years; I can't eat more than one marshmallow Peep or a handful of candy corn at a time.  Now I like my sugar as a part of something more complex, something bitter (dark chocolate), acidic (balsamic vinegar), or spicy (red chili).

For the past few years, I've been "hosting" Thanksgiving pretty regularly, due to some family circumstances that made our apartment a good place for a getaway.  In keeping with my affection for all things sweet, I've made a couple of things to go along with our Greenberg's smoked turkey, and here they are.

Onion, thyme, and feta tart

This is adapted from a recipe I found in a magazine or catalog, wish I could give credit for the unadulterated original,  but this is version 2.0.

To start with, you'll need refrigerated pie crust, baking parchment, and a flat baking sheet.  (Or, you know, make your own pie crust, if you're more ambitious than me.)  In addition, you'll need a big and fairly deep saute pan.  I use our risotto pan. 

What goes into it: 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 tbsp of butter, heated just to bubble stage on medium-low.  Then add 2 large (big, softball-sized) sweet onions, thinly sliced.  (Do slice them before you start heating the oil.)  Increase heat to medium-high and cook, stirring frequently, till onions are soft and lightly caramelized.  Then stir in 1 tbsp thyme, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1 teaspoon black pepper. 

Set aside while preparing the pie crust - just roll out flat on parchment on baking sheet.  Spread a thin layer of fig paste or apple butter on the crust.  Then evenly sprinkle with 1 cup of crumbled traditional feta cheese (gorgonzola also works).  Spoon the onion mixture evenly onto the crust to within one inch of the edge, fold the pie crust edges over 1 inch, and slide into a preheated 375 degree oven.  Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, slice like pizza, and serve warm.

p.s. you can prepare the onions well in advance, they can be completely cooled but shouldn't be refrigerated prior to assembly.

Apple-cranberry pie

This is where you use the other pie crust in the package!  I'm so lazy.  Warm it, flatten it, and put it in a pie plate.

Wash and drain a whole package of fresh cranberries.  Chop, throw in a bowl, and stir in a half-cup of sugar; let macerate while you dice two big, beautiful Rome apples.  Toss the apples in another bowl and stir with a sprinkle of lemon juice, a couple of tablespoons of sugar (I prefer "raw"), and spices to taste.  In my case that's a lavish quantity of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, and probably ginger. 

Pour the apples into the pastry-lined pie plate.  Then carefully add cranberries - by hand will work best - you will need to pile them in and pat them down.  It's gonna be a high pie.  Once the fruit is situated, top (if you want) with walnut streusel: 1 c. ground walnuts, a quarter-cup melted butter, a half-cup brown sugar, and 2 tbsp flour, mixed to crumb stage. 

Slide the pie into a preheated 475 degree oven and bake for 20 minutes.  Then reduce heat to 375, place a sheet of foil loosely over the pie, and bake another 25 minutes.  Oh, and use an oven liner because this will bubble over.

This is a tart 'n' tangy pie but I suggest trying it as written (when I made it, I didn't actually even chop and macerate the cranberries; they went in naked and then I sprinkled on a couple more tablespoons of sugar).  If you want it just a smidge sweeter, a little honey or maple syrup over the top should do the trick.  Or, you know, ice cream. Enjoy!

stretching the food budget

This is not primarily a cooking blog but I referred to reducing costs of some basic preparations in last week's "food & money" post and I wanted to expand on that.  Because that's how I roll. 

The simplest way to add nutrition and lower the cost of a meal is ... add vegetables. 

Very serious about this.  Some of the most nutritious vegetables are among the least expensive.  Carrots, beets, and other root vegetables are chock-full of fiber, not to mention vitamins that are much more accessible to the body than anything out of a jar. 

They are very satiating as well - they fill you up.  They keep a long time - a long time - and they all cook at roughly the same rate as long as you cut pieces of roughly the same volume. You can do a giant load of roots in the slow cooker for almost no labor, and have veggie sides all week.

Peppers are delicious, but they have a very high water content and often a high sugar content as well, which means when cooked you don't get much volume of food - so they're not as satisfying as roots - and the calories you do get are mostly sugar.  Just as celery is a great transfer device for cheese and peanut butter, I recommend bell peppers as a crunchy, beautiful, tasty, and nutritionally favorable option to potato chips or crackers for the transport of (e.g.) hummus or dips. 

A bell pepper does not actually cost more than a bag of chips, and once you have eaten a bell pepper with hummus you are going to be satisfied, because you've just had some food. 

Unlike eating a bag of chips, which just leaves you feeling kind of greasy, not to mention thirsty.  You won't be thirsty eating a bell pepper, because hey - it's full of water!  So you won't be tempted to reach for a soda or a beer.  Win.

I am not a big greens eater, and here's the reason:  as good as they indisputably are, nutrition-wise, you do not get a lot of food for your money; they are lamentably subject to contamination; they're often quite a lot of work to get clean; not everyone likes them raw, and some of them can't even be eaten raw; and it's not all that easy, in my opinion, to make them taste sufficiently good that the average person is going to use them instead of, say, rice or potatoes.

I am a lazy cook and I don't want to spend more than 45 minutes, total, in my kitchen on a weeknight.  Greens are excluded from my produce boxes because they take too long.  I'll give anyone else the same pass.  I get my greens at restaurants, or in the form of frozen spinach - great, by the way, to add to red sauce or pizza or chowder or chili.

Last week I outlined two pot roast preparations that used only two vegetables apiece (carrots and onion) and came out to roughly $3.15 (average) per serving.   You can feed a lot more people for almost no more money per serving, just by adding two more pounds of root vegetables to the slow cooker. 

If someone is serious about trying to eat well on a budget, my sincere #1 piece of advice is to buy a big slow cooker and fill it with at least equivalent weights of meat and vegetables. 

In other words, if you want to feed a family of four twice in a week, use a 3.5-lb roast and 3.5 to 4 lbs of vegetables.  Plan accordingly and get the bigger cooker.  It's a bargain.

My #2 piece of advice is to embrace cabbage.  Cabbage is something I've come to love because I've learned how to make it delicious.  It takes a tiny bit of getting used to, because you are used to eating starch. 

The sensory receptors love starch.  They know, you see, that metabolically it's the same as sugar, and that they are about to get a sugar rush thanks to that pasta you are forking in. 

Sensory receptors are all about instant gratification, and they will mess with your head.

Cabbage has resistance, because it has fiber; it has an actual flavor, because it is a live product.  It plays well with onions and fennel, and it is superb with almost all cheeses, that I've tried at least (probably not with brie or camembert, but those are made for schmearing on bread).  I have found cabbage a completely satisfactory substitute for spaghetti (with red sauce), fettucine (with cream and cheese sauce), or egg noodles (as in beef stroganoff). 

A head of cabbage costs roughly the same as a box of noodles.  Add onions or fennel as you sauté the cabbage, and increase the volume of your dish - therefore feeding more people - for negligible additional cost. 

That's enough on that.  If you are interested, I have a lot more similar bloviation in the "In the Kitchen" archive.  And for more serious food writing from someone who is a better cook than I am, visit Dan at http://casualkitchen.blogspot.com/.  Eat on!