more time for lunch

"Madame," the waiter in the small town of Amboise in France said to me with a serious face, "I cannot serve you if you don't have enough time for lunch." My daughter and I were on a breath taking whirlwind group tour through France and Spain and we had a 2:30 château visit scheduled. We had just breezed into town from Chartres. It was 1:45 when we sat down in the little sidewalk café, and I had just told the waiter that we had 45 minutes for lunch - not a lot. Well, the French like to take their time with meals, and rightfully so, have their wine, linger, chat - especially on the week-end. And here I came to tell the waiter to rush, on a Saturday of all days. It went very much against his grain as well as mine. I hate to rush meals. As a matter of fact, I hate to rush, period. Life doesn't get much better than a lazy summer lunch in a small French town in a small restaurant, choosing whatever house specialty is on the blackboard that day - a delicious tuna tartar one day, this time a big salad with roasted pork belly and local goat cheese, another time grilled squid and vegetables and an octopus salad, a glass of wine from the area, watching the people passing by, listening to the birds, and enjoying the fantastic weather.

Life is better when it's slow.

live foods/dead foods

sprouts

I am currently researching live foods - and dead foods in juxtaposition. A lot of what you find at your local supermarket is dead food. Why such a horrendous name? Because food that's been manufactured (funny way to talk about food, no?) in a factory (yep, that's where breakfast cereal comes from, or processed cheese, or bottled dressing) has no life energy. Dead food is basically any food that comes in a carton and is sold in the center aisles of your supermarket. Food advocates have long recommended to shop the perimeter of your supermarket in order to eat better, where produce, fish and meat, bread and dairy are sold - although even supermarket meat (and fish), and supermarket dairy and breads are adulterated (which is a whole other chapter). So what are live foods? Food is created through a transformational process of sunlight into energy, photosynthesis. A raw green plant grown above ground is just about as live a food as you can get, as its relationship with the sun is so direct.  So, salad in other words, leafy greens and anything raw, hence the recent craze over the Raw Food Movement. A tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, or Cheez Whizz, or Funny Frosting in a tub is just about as far away from sunlight energy as you can possibly get - zero, zilch, nada life energy, empty calories, no minerals and vitamins for sure. The further removed from sunlight a food is, the less life energy it has. Meat is two steps removed from sunlight because the animal eats grass, which in turn grew with the help of sunlight. Meat from predators is yet further removed from sun energy, which may well be the reason why humans don't usually eat it (there are some exceptions with some indigenous tribes, as far as I know).  Lion steak anyone?

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Some of the alivest (is this a word?) food is sprouts, and leafy greens for example have more direct life energy than say root vegetables. Have you ever thought about the fact that some of the largest animals on this planet are plant eaters? Elephants, rhinos, cattle, hippos, dinosaurs (the largest of them all) are all greens eaters, whether grass or leaves.  Wheatgrass and barley grass juice are some of the most healing potions you can ingest.  Take a look at what you currently eat and consider adding more greens and more raw foods to your diet.  It will increase  your energy level.

the color of life

I find the color Green very soothing. It seems restful to my eyes. I love when vibrant green begins to mix into the drab gray browns of winter and slowly takes over by the end of May. I can look at an expanse of thick juicy green grass for ever and feel peaceful. Walking in the woods I enjoy staring at the dense green tree canopy.            "Green, the result of photosynthesis, which creates all of our food, is the color of life," says Petra Fromme of AZSU. The NY Times reported in a recent article on the color green that blue and green are the world's favorite colors. Our vision is optimized for green, says Bevil Conway of Wellesley College.

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Not only our mind, but our body, too, thrives on greens, whether in the form of leafy green vegetables, that miracle healer wheat grass juice (2oz of it provides as many nutrients as 5lbs of raw vegetables - wow!), that other super healer chlorella algae, and various other mineral rich sea vegetables.

As Popeye already said.....

grass fed is best

I used to think that the most important improvement to our dairy consumption was to buy organic milk, butter and cheese, what with the grow hormones and antibiotics they feed the poor cows these days (and that make it into our body and into the groundwater). But I have had to adjust my thinking. Buying organic butter, and cheese and milk, only assures that the cows were fed an organic (grain - gulp) diet (which is unhealthy for the poor animals and makes them sick).  That meat from grass fed cows (their natural diet) is healthier for us than from grain fed or grain finished cows has gradually trickled into mainstream awareness (less fat, more healthy Omega-3, higher in various other micronutrients).

But the same is also of course true for milk, cheese and butter from grass fed cows - much higher levels of vitamin K2 and Omega-3 fatty acids, which actually promote heart health (yes, eat more of it!).   Studies have shown that countries where cows are mostly grass fed (Ireland, Australia) have much lower levels of heart disease!

Organic butter really does not buy you much, butter from grass fed cows does.

no snack packs

Not sure why so many parents are at a loss for healthy snacks to give their kids for school, or when they return home in the afternoon (or for themselves for that matter). There is no need for a snack to come in a little packet. There is no need for a snack to be something ready made from the supermarket. There is no need for a snack to be full of sugar, salt and a whole bunch of unpronounceable ingredients. A snack can very well be something so easy and natural even your child can put it together in minutes and consider herself a mini chef. Case in point - apple sauce. I cook it in big batches and freeze it in glass jars. My daughter devours it. It is one of the easiest things to make and one of her favorite snacks. I also put it in her lunchbox in a little plastic container, and should you have leftovers (not in my house) you can serve it over hot cereal, and it is delicious on a piece of hot buttered toast. Teach your kids to make it: simply cut up lots of apples, a whole big pot full so it's worth your while, remove cores but leave the skin on (!), add lots and lots of cinnamon and a few tablespoons of water (just so the apples don't burn until they begin to sweat), put on low heat, simmer until soft, purée in a food processor - yum.

Case in point - vegetables with dip. I recently got a big bag full of snap peas from our food coop. They were sweet and crunchy, great to munch on like that, and they easily last several weeks in the fridge. We ate them with a dip made with Greek yogurt, paprika, salt, and caraway seeds, and also with homemade hummus (other case in point).

Snacks don't get much easier and healthier than that. Also look back on an earlier snack related post - there's no food - with more ideas.

celebrating the beauty of food

In case you hadn't guessed it yet, I love food. Food is so important in my life that I also decorate the house with it. Not all over, of course (no apple basket in the bedroom or kiwi display in the bathroom). I mean in the living/dining/kitchen area, where we are inspired to eat it or cook with it (and won't forget about it).When I return with lots and lots and lots of produce from our once-a-month food coop delivery, or from a trip to Trader Joe's to get my organic in-between-deliveries fruit, I pile it up on bowls and platters and display it on countertops and tables. I play with the colors of the produce and match, complement or juxtapose it with the colors of the vessels.  The yellow leopard bowl goes well with the yellow of the bananas and the muted green avocados; I like the linear cardboard container the brownish-reddish kumato tomatoes lie in like peas in a pod just the way it is; and I picked the silver bowl this week for apples and kiwis next to the silver candle holders.  

Especially now, towards the end of winter, when we are beginning to crave color, but are still a month away from the spring bulb flowers, produce colors look gorgeous.  Don't hide it in the fridge, play with it, display it, celebrate and enjoy it.

tasting soil and climate

As our culture becomes increasingly interested, sophisticated and educated in all things food, you may stumble upon the word terroir on this side of the Atlantic. It is a typically French term connected to that country's deep and intense food culture.  The idea behind fast food is the exact opposite of what terroir expresses. Fast food companies want to assure you of the exact same hamburger or French fries taste regardless of whether you buy it in Beijing, Moscow, Los Angeles or Buenos Aires - worldwide uniformity of taste.  Terroir, on the contrary, celebrates the unique combination of local soil and climate conditions in a particular area, and how they influence the foods grown there.

Terroir is perhaps easiest to understand in connection with wine because we know from experience that the same grape type, say a Chardonnay, grown in different geographical places will yield very different tasting wines. That is the reason why the French don't label their wines by grape type, as we do here, but by provenance, such as Château Lafite or Saint-Aubain, Domaine Sylvain Langoureau, which, of course, requires a vastly larger knowledge base.

Beyond wine we have come to be aware of terroir influence on food as it relates to chocolate (Trader Joe's offers a chocolate passport that features small chocolate samples from eight different cocoa bean growing countries in the world), honey (depends on the type of flower nectar collected), and single-malt whiskeys (depends a lot on the local water). But terroir also comes out in the taste of meat. The Spanish Jamón Ibérico, for example, is prized for its particular taste that comes from the black pigs' natural diet of grass, herbs and acorns, specific to that region in southern Spain. Locally, I have bought organic chickens from two different farmers. Both taste and texture of the meat, and even the shape of the chickens, were vastly different, even though the two farms are not even twenty miles apart.

Coffee connaisseurs always say that water can make or break a good cup of coffee.  City water usually has added chlorine and often fluoride, which alter the taste of the water, while local well water tastes different from one well to the next, depending on its particular mineral content.  Local food is so much more complex and exciting! Happy tasting!

relish your eggs, yolk and all

         Egg whites sans yolk became the virtuous thing to eat in recent years because of the misguided cholesterol scare (I recently wrote about the fat myth). I find egg whites by themselves bland and love my yolks. Rather, I live for the yolk and eat the white just because it happens to come with it, although egg whites do have their place in chocolate mousse and meringues. The deep yellow oozy yolk, warm and runny, is just soooo delicious (see a post on my soft spot for soft boiled eggs). Egg yolks were vilified by a culture that was quick to believe one-sided and misinterpreted scientific tests, and valued scientifically engineered food products over what nature made. The food industry saw a quick profit in our fear of cholesterol (take a look at information from the Weston Price Foundation on the misguided cholesterol myth). Hence those egg white omelets, and egg products like desiccated egg white powder, substitute egg mix, and liquid egg whites in a carton.

         Not only are eggs one of the healthiest foods on earth, they are also a brain food, provide one of the highest levels of protein, and are an excellent source of vitamin D (eat more of them in the wintertime when you don't get out into the sun as much) and minerals. The much bigger problem is the low quality of eggs coming from industrialized mass egg productions and the egg products made from them. Do eat eggs, but buy them from a local farmer who lets the chickens roam and eat grubs (see a blog post on that as well).  If you want to save food $ consider cutting back drastically on your meat consumption and getting more of your protein from the best quality eggs you can find.

In the end, we are better off looking at the causes of cardio-vascular and heart disease from an emotional perspective, which merits a blog post in itself, rather than making cholesterol the culprit.  So - have your eggs and eat them too!

making mayonnaise

Deep living to me also means making more food from scratch instead of buying the store bought version. Leading a busy life (and we all do) often becomes an excuse for reaching for convenience, but some things are just so easy and quick to make that there isn't much of an excuse, and the quality of taste and ingredients is so far superior. Mayonnaise is one of those things that takes only minutes to make - literally! My mayonnaise has exactly four ingredients: one large egg(if your egg is small use a little less oil, otherwise your mayonnaise becomes runny), 300ml oil (olive oil if you like a stronger taste, or grapeseed oil for a more neutral mayonnaise, or a combination), juice of one lemon, and a heaping tablespoon of Dijon mustard, which provides enough salt, so no additional salt needed.  In comparison, Hellman's has nine ingredients and uses soy oil (GMO for sure), vinegar instead of lemon, sugar (sugar in mayonnaise???) and salt, besides preservatives and "natural flavors."

Here is the 5-minute process for a bowl of the yummiest homemade mayonnaise. And if you remember ahead of time, do take the egg and mustard out of the fridge beforehand so all ingredients are at room temperature. Put the (big) egg, the mustard, the lemon juice and about a tablespoon of the oil in a food processor and let run for a minute or so. Next, drip 50ml of the oil really really slowly into the food processor while it is running - my almost-30-year-old Cuisinart has a drip top especially made for making mayonnaise so you can let the machine do the dribbling while you do something else. Finally, add the other 250ml of oil in a thin steady stream to the running machine. Ready! Five minutes tops!

We Europeans like mayonnaise on our French fries (so much better than ketchup, at least that's what we think) and with cold lobster or crab (no drawn butter, please). But it's also delicious on a sandwich with leftover chicken or turkey, or with other cold leftover meat. And one of my secret snack vices, when I need a quick pick-me-up and I do happen to have a bowl of mayonnaise in the fridge, is to take a cracker (or two, or three) or a piece of bread (toasted is better) and dunk it into this onctuous sauce. Soooooo good! Once you make it you'll never go back to store bought.

less (food) waste

We are not always aware of the abundance we live in, and grateful and thankful for it. As a result we create a lot of waste, personally and as a culture. This is the first of several blog posts on becoming more aware of the abundance that surrounds us and at the same time reducing waste in different area of our lives. Why waste reduction? When we respect something, when we are truly appreciative of it, then we handle it with a certain reverence and wouldn't carelessly throw it away. That goes for food as it does for other things in life. Sometimes one of my kids will come home and put their school sandwich back in the fridge. Now what? I have repackaged them the next day but often end up eating them myself so they don't go to waste. When my son was much much younger he threw out a perfectly good (wrapped) sandwich he did not care for. I was so incensed that I made him take it out and eat it - he still talks about it.

With a bit more reverence for all the food we have (just today it struck me at the supermarket how much food we have access to so easily, what abundance!) let's try to reduce food waste, the first of the wastes I will be addressing. One rule is to be a good leftover processor - eat them, freeze them, or cook them up with something new, but don't let them go bad. I save leftover bread pieces in the freezer until I have enough to make a sweet or savory breakfast strata. My mom makes a "tapas" meal every so often with all the little frozen leftover dishes. If you do buy produce in bulk, like I do, process those vegetables you can't eat right away by blanching and freezing them as meal building blocks for later use, or cooking them up in a soup or stew to be frozen. If food does go bad in your fridge reduce how much you buy or space your supermarket trips further apart. And how about going through your fridge once a week and either making a meal from all the leftovers right then or freezing what you can't use immediately?

We have so much, let's be grateful for it.