My Food Priorities

Recently I have been giving a lot of thought to what my blog really is, and how far I will really go to eliminate processed foods. Check out this very cool family in North Carolina who is eating nothing but whole unprocessed foods for 100 days. Very Cool! But I have been pondering the finer points of the experiment as it relates to me, how processed is too processed, and are there certain foods that I should not eat regardless of the circumstances? Then one step further, are there foods that I would not allow my child to have at all, even outside the home? They are not easy questions.

Last week I caved. Work was crazy last week. Intense meetings all week ended in some very good work done by all. But I was concentrating on my job, not food. In a frosty plexiglass container beautiful red and silver cans of Coke and Diet Coke bobbed gently in ice water. Although catering was a healthy mix of salad and roasted veggies and a variety of sandwiches, I couldn't help myself. I grabbed a Diet Coke. I just wanted it. I figured that the Diet Coke would be better than regular Coke, but why? High Fructose Corn Syrup is no great ingredient, it is processed and high in calories. But was I really choosing aspartame, a non food chemical, over a processed food? Huh? Where is the logic in that?

Needless to say I was very conflicted over the decision and had some considerable internal dialogue about it. When I sat down with my lunch and Diet Coke a dear friend and colleague, who happens to have subscribed to the email service of The Table of Promise, innocently said 'Oh I am surprised to see you drink that.' Now dear friend-I know you will read this, no offense taken, you really would have to work overtime to offend me. But the statement did give me pause.

I have been at other functions where family or friends have apologized about the food being fattening or not organic. So I thought about my food priorities so I could set the record straight. I don't want people thinking I am offended! BTW-Michael Pollan has already committed most of these rules to print in Food Rules. But the below is a list of MY top priorities after 3 months of living this way. By the way, these are listed in order of importance, not every food has to conform to all rules.

First, I think food should be real food. What do I mean? Food should not contain chemicals or preservatives, additives or chemicals. Food should be straightforward and simple and as close to it's whole state as possible. I also think that if it is not possible to make a certain product in your own kitchen or if you cannot buy the ingredients without a chemistry degree or some kind of wholesale business licence, then it doesn't belong in my body. I am happy to let others cook for me, but you gotta do it my way. That means Cheetos and American Cheese are out. Same goes for anything with chemicals, nitrates, non-natural preservatives. Bye bye Diet Coke. You were a good friend for many years, but, it's me not you.

Second, food should be healthful. I love a good pie and I go though a stick of butter a week cooking for my family (and about a liter of olive oil a month), but I eat a lot more raw veggies and lean grass fed meats than some of the more fattening stuff I sometimes blog about. The reason I am able to eat stuff like cheese grits and cherry pie and salmon covered in cream is because I usually consume nothing but oatmeal or yogurt, nuts, raw veggies and some chicken before dinnertime. The amount of veggies and fruit I eat in a typical day is way larger than any other food group.

Third, food should be local. I think it is important that we support our local community. I am way more interested in buying a product from a local source that may or may not be organic rather than finding one that is certified organic but trucked in from California. I am not dissing on anything from Cali, but I live about 3000 miles away from there. (I actually have some serious California envy, I wish I lived closer, but I will save my California food affair for when I am in closer proximity) So it makes more sense that I would eat stuff local to me.

Lastly, food should be organic. I do actually believe this. But it is the least important in my food priorities. 'Organic' as a term has become so commonplace these days that many people believe that it is synonymous with 'healthful'. The only thing the term organic refers to is how the product was raised. It cannot be genetically modified, it cannot be sprayed with pesticides or fertilizers and for processed foods it cannot contain certain unapproved additives and preservatives. I have looked it up-check out what the USDA says about it.

For my food priorities, there are all kinds of 'grayish foods', like salad greens that are neither local nor organic, or strawberries that are local but not organic. Or locally made breads. What about organic American Cheese? Most foods do not conform to all my rules, but it meets a few. Sometimes we don't have a choice at all. I eat the catering at work when it is served to me because that is what is offered, but I'll choose the most healthful offerings (most of the time). My grocery store has many organic choices, but not everything is available to me at all times due to seasonality or limited availability. I actually kind of like not being able to get anytime I want. It makes it special. I like to eat organic and local, but if I cannot, I am going to eat food, like real fresh food such as meat and veggies and fruits and whole grains.

So I use the above rules to decide what the buy. If the organic local tomatoes look like they are on their last legs, I will sometimes opt for the local non-organic ones and other times I will buy a different vegetable altogether. I try to shop seasonally without too many recipes in mind. But it is all about balance. The more I think about this the more I realize that it is hard to put into words that EVERYONE will understand. Perhaps it is more art than science.

Tomorrow, what is just totally off the menu?

CSA Week 9

What a night.

First let me apologize about the post. I had to write this on my blackberry because DH decided to go out and enjoy adult company tonight taking with him the computer and the camera. I attempted to take pictures with my crummy blackberry, so if you see pictures then you can crown me queen of the handheld. And if not, well I will try to back track tomorrow.

After a massive day at work I leave the office only to realize that I forgot about the CSA. I have no bags, I forgot to call the babysitter, and I had to run an errand on the way home. The trains are all running 15 minutes late because 'of an earlier incident'. So needless to say I walked in the door 30 minutes late. Thankfully our amazing-superhero-babysitter was well into dinner. Which was a huge help because Thing 1 has been sick and earlier today he threw up on the floor. And he spilled Pediasure all over our coffee table, so everything smells like vanilla ice cream. There were crushed cherrios all over the place and stickers covering our living room lamp. Oh and Thing 1 also hid the screw top to our lamp's shade and now can't remember where he hid it, so now the lamp shade is bobbing in the breeze from the air conditioner. *Sigh* Life with children.

From the CSA today we got another midsummer haul. We got 2 onions, one fennel bulb, one bunch of celery, one bunch of basil, one bunch of chard, 2 huge handfuls of green beans, 3 stalks of broccoli, one bunch of baby lettuces, 2 beefsteak tomatoes, 5 roma tomatoes, 10 yellow cherry tomatoes, 2 patty pan squash, one bunch of carrots and 20 peaches. And I am still trying to polish off the peaches I bought over the weekend. I guess it's time for preserves!

What the hell am I gonna do with all these vegetables? I am thinking curry with the chard and some carrots and a can of beans I have-but what else! What are you doing with your stuff? Help Help!! Please comment! Don't leave me hanging in dead internet space!!

CSA Dinner: Ratatouille Over Polenta Cakes

My quest to try new recipes with our CSA veggies continues...

Tonight's dinner? Ratatouille Over Polenta Cakes. Ratatouille had to have been created by the rural cook who was inundated with vegetable in the summertime. It has a flavor more specific than the "open access" vegetable soup where the ingredients can change, but it uses so many different veggies that it still clears out the fridge just as well.

I found a recipe online that require endless chopping and two pots and bowls, one set for frying the veg and another for sauteing them together. That was not going to work for me. I can change any recipe to get it down to a one pot meal. Here is what I did:

Ratatouille Over Polenta Cakes
First I made the polenta, 1 1/2 cups of polenta gently boiled with 3 cups of water, a 1/2 cup of cream and a couple of good pinches of salt on the stove top. When the polenta was thick but not quite cooked (it took about 20 minutes total after it came to a boil), I added a quarter cup of grated Parmesan cheese. When the mix was completely cooked I poured it into a baking dish and evened it out like you would cake batter and let it set.
For the Ratatouille, in a dutch oven saute one diced onion, two cloves of minced garlic, 2 medium diced zucchinis and 3 diced baby purple eggplants with the skins on in about a quarter cup of olive oil (it was about equal parts zucchini and eggplant in case you are wondering). I added a good pinch of salt and pepper here. Saute for about 10 minutes or until things start to get soft. Then add one bay leaf and some minced parsley. Also add two medium diced tomatoes with the skins removed. I bet a 32 ounce can of peeled tomatoes would do the job too. Continue to cook with the tomato for another 15-20 minutes with the pot's lid on. It is ready when the eggplant starts to break down and the mix begins to come together as one instead of alot of separate parts.
To make the cakes, cut the set polenta into squares and reheat in the oven. I tried to fry them in olive oil but it was a comical mix of mushy oil soaked polenta and a pan that will be sitting in the sink for 2 days. So, don't try that at your house. Spoon the ratatouille over the cakes and garnish with more Parmesan cheese.

Whoa, keeper. It might look at little like gray mush, but don't judge a book by it's cover.

This is a nice one too because it is vegetarian and easily made vegan by omitting the cream and cheese. I did have to buy the eggplants and the garlic at the farmer's market so I suppose it was not a TOTAL CSA dinner, but, hey who's counting! Enjoy!

The Table of Promise featured on Mamapedia Voices

I am so excited to say that today I am featured on Mamapedia's Voices. Voices is a part of Mamapedia's larger parenting site devoted to bloggers. Please read my entry (which can be found nowhere else) at their website, www.mamapedia.com/voices/do-you-make-separate-meals-for-your-kids

Enjoy!

What is Granulated Garlic?

I have been meaning to research this topic for several weeks. But I was nervous. What if I turned up something negative? How would I do without my precious pungent powder?

I have always had GG in my cupboard. But before Thing 1 and 2 came along I didn't use it that much. I was previously a garlic snob. I chopped or mashed fresh garlic for everything I cooked at home. But after the first Thing came on board I had a hard time with it. Imagine me on 4 hours of sleep with a 6 week old nestled in a bouncy seat on the threshold of our 50 square foot Manhattan galley kitchen trying to recapture some of my former kitchen glory. Thing 1 would be screaming his little head off and what was I doing? Fiddling with a sticky mess of garlic and an enormous knife. When I finally felt the stress of needing to pick him up and cuddle him or nurse him, I had these sticky stinky hands, and then fumbling with my shirt and boobs? Yuk. That's enough to traumatize your baby into never eating garlic.

I had to totally relearn how to cook when I had children. I no longer had time to noodle over the noodles. I needed a way to get everything into a pot and get back to being a mommy. I think that's why I turned to processed food to begin with, because I had a fussy baby and I needed to eat. I didn't know how to quickly prep something and walk away to let it do it's thing. But granulated garlic solved at least one problem. In many recipes it has become my go to spice rather than dirtying up a cutting board, chef's knife and my hands. But what is it? GG is precisely the kind of mysterious food that we all too readily accept. It is not like there is a granulated garlic plant out there where farmers are harvesting little glass jars with shaker tops.

Granulated Garlic (not to be confused with Garlic Powder or Garlic Salt) is dried ground garlic. You might have already guessed that-but you can never assume anything these days!! Garlic is most plentiful in California in the summertime. Fresh Garlic does keep for a several months in cool cellars and probably the conventional garlic you buy in February at the grocery store was grown in California the previous summer. But, GG is a good way of preserving garlic for future use. Garlic has a lot of antibacterial and antimicrobial properties, but just like any plant, these benefits diminish with additional processing and length of time from harvest. So don't fool yourself, GG is not the best way to profit from the health benefits of garlic. But if it is taste in a pinch you are after, you might just have found a soulmate.

Garlic is first harvested and the paper removed. The cloves are then chopped, dried and ground. Some GG and Garlic Powders (garlic powder is simply GG that has been further ground into a powder that is as fine as flour, Garlic Salt is table salt with ground garlic added) have stabilizers and anticaking agents in them so that they will pour better. It is important to seek out a brand that does not include them. I purchase Fairway's store brand. But an amazing store in Evanston, IL is The Spice House. They will ship anything and they have a great house made GG (among hundreds of unbelievable dried spices and herbs and spice blends). I used to have family that lived down the street from their Evanston location. I was so sad when they moved out of Evanston, but they do ship.

GG takes about 20-30 minutes to fully rehydrate and realize it's flavor. So when I use it in a recipe I will add it and allow it time to bloom. I like to add GG to meatballs, but I let the meat rest before I cook them. It is the same with dressings and sauces.

I was so thrilled that my granulated garlic is simple and straight forward. Some folks may feel that the drying and grinding constitutes too much processing to be considered a whole food, and I get it, they are probably right. But once again for me it is about cost/ benefit. If my brand does not contain any funny additives and my source is a trusted purveyor, I say Granulated Garlic gets the green light. Whew! I was sweating this one.

The To Do List: Big Brand Name Oat Circles

There is a sunny yellow box inside the homes of countless families' kitchens. There is a single product that is ubiquitous among children of all ages. There is a cereal so friendly it ranks high on the list of 'first foods' for babies without teeth all over the United States.

My brother ate so many of these oat circles growing up that I could hardly stand the smell of them by age 9. When I was a child, sugar cereal was a treat not to be eaten at breakfast. If it was really bad or had marshmallows in it, we could choose to buy it instead of another treat, but it could not be eaten for breakfast. It had to be for an afternoon snack. But we could get non-sugar cereals, and it seemed a popular choice was often the oat circles in the yellow box. But I really didn't like them. So I ate toast or something else.

Then after my kids were born this cereal was everywhere. Now all of a sudden it seemed like it was a household staple. The kids loved them, they made little mess when they feed themselves (Except when you step on them after they have fallen to the floor. I swear half of the dust in my vacuum is cereal dust sucked out of the area rug.), and they were healthy enough to feed to a 7 month old right? What was in it? OATS!! Right? Isn't it oats? I know it doesn't look like oatmeal, but that shouldn't matter.

Then after two years of feeding these brand name oat circles to my kids, I finally picked up the box. This is what it said:

Ingredients: Whole Grain Oats (includes the oat bran), Modified Corn Starch, Sugar, Salt, Tripotassium Phopsphate, Oat Fiber, Wheat Starch. Vitamin E (mixed tocopherols) Added to Preserve Freshness.

There is also a long list of added vitamins and minerals. Aaaaahhhh, enrichment. This enrichment is no different than the flour enrichment I discussed last week.

Now to be fair, this large manufactuerer of brand name cereals puts out alot more dubious products laden with sugar and marketed directly at children. Like I said, my own mother was exasperated by our constant pleas for sugar cereal when my brother and I were children. She put limits on what and how much she would buy and how much we were allowed to eat. This one particular brand of oat circle cereal is not the biggest threat to health out there. It probably does more harm than good when compared to all the highly processed foods heavy with salt and sugar that are so commonplace these days. But still, the long ingredient list surprised me, and one can hardly put it in the whole foods category. So what is all that stuff?

Modified Corn Starch: This additive is a starch derivitive. It is just like a starchy corn flour that the processor adds acids and other chemicals to break down the starches until it becomes almost like a powdered geletin (except it is not animal based geletin at all, it is plant starch based). It's purpose is to act as a thickener or stablizer. I am not a cereal maker, but I would guess it is what helps to keep all that ground up whole wheat oat flour together.

Tripotassium Phosphate: This is a water soluable ionic salt (huh?). It is also used in the food industry as a stabilizer and emulsifier. Oh, and it can be used as a fertilizer (a fertilizer with no nitrogen, but hey when you are eating fertilizer who is counting).

Oat Fiber: Just the germ and bran of the Oat Groat.

Wheat Starch: Exactly like Modified Corn Starch only made from the wheat plant.

Tocopherols: I learned something new recently. I always knew that when you see the word tocopherol you knew they were refering to Vitamin E. Well apparently there are 8 different kinds (read 8 different molecular structures) of vitamin E. Four of these kinds are classified as tocopherols. Beyond that, I guess I just wasn't paying close enough attention in my 11th grade chemistry class. The info is all there, but alot of the true chemistry stuff I just don't get.

By the way--I have been slacking on the bibliography feature of late. All information for today's post came from Wikidepia.org

So what does all this mean? Upon diving deeper, these oat circles probably do more good than harm as I said. They are mostly oats and they are WHOLE oats, which is way better than eating sausage breakfast sandwiches and pop tarts. But, they do contain salt and sugar and the highly processed starches and stabilizers leaving me wanting something better for my family. I love oatmeal the way it is. I was never looking for a shelf stable version of the thing I love. I gave my kids these oat circles because I am like everyone else out there, I never questioned them.

So I have switched to New Morning Oatios. This brand is organic, lists their ingredients online (try looking for the big guys, their nutritional page is empty) and the nutritional profile is largely the same as the big guys. There is slightly more sugar (2g vs 1g--which is almost nothing anyway) but in New Morning's product sugar is not listed as an ingredient which makes me feel better. And they taste more real to me, more grainy like a whole grain product should.

Apricots in Rose Wine

Most of the CSA fruits we get we eat raw and whole because we do a lot of that around here. But the apricots we got last week were a little sour even though they were perfectly ripe and soft. Thing 1 ate one the night I brought them home and made a funny scrunched up face that we all laughed at.

But what to do? I don't really like baking pies mid week, I have enough to do to make a decent dinner every night. But I wanted to do something, because I was the only one eating these things raw.

I have become a little obsessed with rose wine this summer. I love white in the summer, but I like to try new flavors. Rose is a big trend in New York right now with a lot of stores dedicating a display to them (including my Vines on Pine). But there aren't any yucky sickly sweet White Zins here. The roses I have been drinking have been delicate dry blends of sauvingnon blanc and grenache among others. The wine is mostly dry white, but the bit of red gives it some depth of flavor. It is really different but lovely. And the blush color is downright sexy, pink but ever so slightly orange like a sunset on a summer day with no humidity. Let's face it, most trends pass over me so I am kind of psyched to be among the ranks of those doing something considered cool before it becomes commonplace. I had never had Pinot Noir before I saw Sideways, for example. I cannot be counted on to be in the know.

Anyway-back to the apricots. I decided to boil them in wine and sugar as a topping to ice cream. There was so much juice that I had to boil the shape out of them to get the syrupy consistency I was looking for. If I had it to do over, I would boil down the wine and sugar into a syrupy first and then add the apricots so that I didn't have to kill them. Then they would retain their shape.

This was unexpectedly good. Very simple, but it had a very sophisticated flavor. A lovely and fitting end to a grilled meal of shrimp, striped bass and zucchinis.