New Year's Food Resolutions

Launch yourself into dietary health

According to my oldest nephew, who runs the gym in a college town, the first two weeks of the New Year are total chaos at work. Hordes of us show up, resolved to be fit, irritating staff and regulars with our passing health whim. By mid-January we've given up and returned to our La-Z-Boys and cubicles, patting ourselves on the back that at least two weeks of exercise beats zero weeks. Maybe if we put that Rascal scooter on our Amazon Wish List...

Well, I'm here to encourage us non-exercisers (and if you are a regular exerciser, you can just feel extra smug while you read the rest of this post): exercising isn't the only way to improve your health. Diet is the other. And New Year's Diet Resolutions have a better shot of becoming habits.

Check out these possibilities and just pick one or two:

1. Dump one processed food product permanently. It could be cake mix or pancake mix, storebought cookies, instant oatmeal, protein bars, anything! If it's something you could make easily at home, try it. I would love love love to get my family off breakfast cereal, but they gag over anything porridge-like, and I gag over the thought of having to cook every morning.
   
2. If you can't afford organic dairy, at least go hormone-free. As Prevention put it in their article entitled "7 Foods That Should Never Pass Your Lips," growth hormones lead to "higher levels of a hormone called insulin-like growth factor in milk. In people, high levels of IGF-1 may contribute to breast, prostate, and colon cancers." Eeks! When it isn't Bellevue Farmers Market season, our family tries to stick to Organic Valley (pastured products) or at least Tillamook (hormone-free).
   
3. Pick the one food your family eats regularly and make sure it's the best you can afford. If it's salmon, stay away from the farmed stuff. If it's ground beef, go for grass-fed or switch to buffalo. Going with the farmers market options may cost you more in the short-run, but hey--you may get to avoid the Rascal scooter later, and that's a savings.
   
4. Eat vegetarian for one dinner a week. If you already do this, try two meals. This can defray the cost of Resolution #3. Our family regularly does breakfast burritos or lentil soup or homemade mac & cheese. If you must have some meat, it could just be some Skagit River Ranch bacon thrown in for flavor.
   
5. Stay away from soy. As I've noted in this blog, 90% of soybeans grown in America are genetically-modified to resist Round-Up. Processed soy has been linked to hormone issues in people and possibly to the rise in food allergies. This is a toughie to eliminate because the American soy surplus, like the corn surplus, motivates the food industry to find millions of uses for it. Other than the tried-and-true fermented soy products (tofu and soy sauce), we stay away.
   
6. Serve two healthy vegetables at dinner. Potatoes, corn and bagged-lettuce-salad covered in soybean-oil-based dressing don't count. In fact, you better add a third vegetable to the meal to make up for them.

If you have food resolutions for the New Year, feel free to share. My personal ones for 2011: (1) switch from canned tomatoes to boxed--per the abovementioned Prevention article; and (2) dump the seed oils (canola, safflower, etc.) for olive oil, butter, and Skagit bacon fat.

Happy New Year!

Carbs in the Doghouse

We interrupt my foray into Amishness with this breaking news from the L.A. Times: sugar and refined carbohydrates are doing us in. This is something many foodies and nutritionists have been rumbling about for some time. After all, as they have pointed out, in the thirty years since the world started plugging low-fat, low-fat, low-fat, rates of obesity and heart disease did not decline. Our treatment of heart disease improved, yes, but not the number of people who were still suffering from it.

Obediently, we laid off the real sour cream and butter and tried to limit red meat and cheese, replacing those items with pretzels and weird chemical spreads and nasty soy concoctions. Fake food.

Time for the pendulum to swing back. Maybe all those unsatisfying lowfat products will go away (they've been long gone in our household), but how to wean ourselves from the sugar and simple carbs? I wonder this as I consider the dozens of Christmas cookies I've produced and eaten this December. I might force the kids to join me and my husband in our yearly downer: Sugar-Free January. We've discovered that it really is easiest just to go cold turkey. I'm not too legalistic--there's still honey in the tea and jam on the toast and maple syrup on the waffles, but nothing where sugar is the centerpiece.

In the meantime, comfort yourself with Dr. Agatston's claim from the South Beach Diet--that a little bit of fat consumed with the evil carb both increases satiety on fewer calories and tempers the rapid spike in blood sugar. If you've got to have the sourdough toast, at least slather it in butter (God bless him for this).

If, like me, you'll never be a whole-wheat pasta gal, here are a couple recipes where minimizing the white flour improves the taste:

Pennsylvania Dutch Whole Wheat Bread (adapted from The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbook)
(Amish lightning might strike me, but I tried this in the bread machine. It came out lopsided but perfectly tasty. You might want to add a tsp or two of Wheat Gluten to lighten it somewhat.)
2 1/4 t yeast
1/4 c lukewarm water
1 c milk warmed up in the microwave
1T softened butter
2 T sugar
1/2 t salt
1 c white flour
2 generous cups whole wheat flour.

Dump everything in the bread machine, set on Whole Wheat cycle, and you're done! Slice when cooled and serve with lots of butter and some of Rome's delicious spreads from the Farmers Market.

Multi-Grain Waffles (adapted from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone)
2 c various flours (I use 1/4 c each white, whole wheat, rye, brown rice, barley, cornmeal, oat, and oat bran)
2 T ground flaxseed
1 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1/4 t salt

1/4 c butter (1/2 stick), melted
3 eggs
1 1/2 c milk (generous) (buttermilk also works, but it makes a thicker batter)
1 t vanilla

Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients. Cook in your favorite waffle iron. Makes about 6-7 Belgian waffles.

Do What with the Bacon Fat?

Dude--they can also cook

Big time score at the annual Christmas auction: The New Pennsylvania Dutch Cook Book (Harper & Row, New York). "New" as in 1958 new. The second I saw it lying there on the table, sans dust cover and with the name scratched out on the endpage, I knew it had to be mine. At any price. Even if I had to hover (which I did), and even if I had to hear my opponent-bidder's sob story about how her family hailed from Northampton County. Whatever, Lady. (Actually, I've promised to let her read the history bits in the cookbook after I've tried out some of the recipes.)

This baby is mine. And the reason I wanted it so desperately was because it's a real-food cookbook. Cooking before processed food took over the scene. You will not find, between its covers, any call for "one can cream of mushroom soup." Shortening has appeared--alas--but there's still plenty of bacon fat, lard and butter required. As for the canned tomato debate--organic or conventional? domestic or imported?--just be sure they're "home-canned" because that's what's listed. And if you're wondering where your faded copies of Schleck Boi ("Lickin' Good Pie") or Stuffed Pig's Maw or Boovashenkel II ("Boys' Legs II") got to, look no further.

The Pennsylvania Dutch were also a thrifty bunch, to judge from the sections and recipes headed "Poor Man's." Poor Man's Soups, Poor Man's Turkey, Poor Man's Dinner, Poor Man's Cake, Poor Man's Pie. Amusingly, Poor Man's Turkey calls for "1 4-pound beef flank with pocket," which just goes to show you which meat used to be cheaper before they bred the huge, sad turkeys with enormous breasts and messed-up balance. If vegetarianism or your pocketbook have put any sort of meat into the Rich Man's category, you might prefer Poor Man's Dinner I: a soup (any kind you have on hand) thickened with eggs, mashed potatoes and bread.

Author Ruth Hutchison claims that "a full-rounded Pennsylvania dinner is not to be taken lightly. This cookery was brought from overseas with certain continental embellishments that were soon lost to the exigencies of pioneer life and it was adapted to become farm food for hearty trencherman" (xvi). She advises that, "unless possessed of a redoubtable appetite," we would be better off trying only one PD recipe per meal.

I'm getting a brain blitz here: according to Newsweek, Amish romances are the hot new genre, almost to the point of market saturation. Maybe for all you wannabe-Amish blog readers, we should experiment with some of these recipes. My husband's not home tonight, which meant we were having Breakfast for Dinner, but now it's gonna be Amish Breakfast for Dinner. Yessir. I'm trying Flannel Cakes II. Stay tuned.

It's the Hap-Happiest Season of All

Welcome to the season of over-indulgence. Yesterday was the cookie exchange; this afternoon is another book signing at a cupcake store. Yikes. Lucky for me I discovered this Huffington Post article on foods you can eat to counteract overeating. I suspect the original title of "Chasers for the Three Boxes of Peppermint Jo-Jo's You Just Snarfed" was nixed as too accusatory...

Since a lot of our eating happens out-and-about in December, if you don't want to carry vials of the recommended orange juice or vinegar, then enjoy a glass of antioxidant-rich wine or follow the meal with some free-radical-minimizing fruit.

Speaking of sweet indulgences, the UrbanFarmJunkie is happy to report that our Market's own Autumn Martin of Hot Cakes won the Seattle Weekly Versus Challenge for Best Caramel Sauce! I knew there was a reason I would dip a spoon into that jar whenever I passed the fridge. In the off-season of the Bellevue Farmers Market, you can still enjoy Hot Cakes wares at the Ballard and U District markets.

If, however, you're one of the few people without a sweet tooth, the kind of person who sails through this season feeling increasingly smug, here's a line you can throw out at holiday parties: "Professor Jeya Henry of the Functional Foods Centre at Oxford Brooks University claims that 'the type of carbohydrates you consume is much more important than the type of fat you consume' when it comes to negative impact on your glycemic index." Then go back to eating off the cheese tray while your cohorts nibble their refined-flour cookies and cakes and peer gloomily into their diabetic futures. You may not make many friends, but the satisfaction will be immense.

Finally, as both a foodie and clutter-hater, I think food makes the best gifts. Not only thoughtful, tasty, and in good taste, but it leaves no trace behind! (Except for the "moment on the lips, lifetime on the hips" business.) No one will be riddled with guilt for throwing your present in the closet or Goodwill bag. No one will curse your name as they dig it out of the closet to hang on the wall before you come over. You will never experience the mortification of receiving it back from a forgetful re-gifter the following year. I myself have two cranberry loaves ready to go in the freezer, and I want to give some of these Martha Stewart food gift ideas a go. The drink mixes look fun! If you have a food gift idea to share, I'd love to hear it.