Convenience ... or flavor?

This headline was the main one on the cover of the Washington Post food section this week. It referred to watermelon (seedless mild ones vs. intensely flavored seeded ones), but it occurred to me that it could be the standard by which to judge all our food choices. Dietitians have been advocating intentional eating (along with 30 minutes of exercise a day) as necessary to keep a healthy weight. To paraphrase Michael Pollan: Eat food, not too much, and enjoy it more.

Preparation is a key to the enjoyment. If you keep that in mind, you've won half the battle our culture is fighting against. We rush, rush to get more done, cutting every corner we can find. The food industry has responded to this, preparing and processing our food so we can get in our mouths quickly. Yet while we are cutting the time it takes to put together our dinners, the industry is cutting corners as well to make a profit.

Good chefs fight against processed foods. No wonder we love to eat out at a good restaurant. The food is spectacularly attractive and tastes great.

And that's why books by chefs sell well. We've eaten it, we want to fix it. Unfortunately, most of the recipes in a chef's cookbook involve intense preparation. And why not? That's what the minimum-wage minions in the kitchen do (besides the dishes... which add up to a substantial number for many of these recipes). And on top of that, some just don't translate well to the home kitchen. I knew from experience that adapting family recipes to feed a hundred or more people takes a lot of tweaking, especially with the spices. And what I learned testing cookbooks over the years is that many chefs find great cookbook writers and testers to produce their works, but others rush to press without adequately testing whether the recipes, even when followed to the letter, will turn out well for their readers.

Good recipes don't need a lot of ingredients to taste great, but the simpler the recipe, the better your ingredients need to be. If you don't enjoy food prep, start with recipes that call for five ingredients or less. Work up from there. Pay attention to how fresh the pepper is as you cut into it to dice it (a good tipoff is the condition of the stem; if the tip is black and shriveled, it's been off the vine for some time), how little flavor the pithy parts contribute (cut them out and throw them into the compost pile),  how a smaller dice exposes more of the surface to flavor the dish. Don't enjoy cutting onions? Goggles work well, but chilling the onion or putting a slice of bread in your mouth before taking out your knife sometimes works as well. Does that garlic that keeps jumping out from under your knife need to be minced? Position the side of your chef knife on top of the clove and give it a good whack with your free fist. Then mince the crushed garlic.

Embrace the prep. If you think of it as the essential element of getting better food into your body, you will value it as much as you value your time. It's when you don't value it that it becomes mere scut work. Cultivate sacredness in your daily meal preparation, and your meals - and your body - will rejoice.

Oats on the go

Oatmeal is good for you, whole-grain goodness in a bowl. But hot cereal isn't all that appealing until the temperatures go down. In the meantime, you can get the same benefit from energy bars that list oats as their primary ingredient, but at a dollar or more per bar, the costs can add up. And even if oats is listed first, are you really getting a full serving of the grain, or are the other ingredients cutting into that?

You can make your own at home, using the microwave. To form them, use a sheet of aluminum foil sprayed or brushed with olive oil, or if you have a silicon cookie sheet liner, use that to be even more green.

Lori K's energy bar

Ingredients
1/3 cup of oats (5-minute rolled oats work best)
2 tablespoons chopped peanuts, pecans or walnuts, or raisins or chopped dried fruits, or a combination of these
2 tablespoons honey
Salt to taste (optional)
1 tablespoon of powdered sugar

Instructions
Put the oats, nuts and/or fruit in a microwave-safe bowl. Drizzle with honey. Put in the microwave and cook for 1 minute. Take out and stir with a metal spoon (plastic will melt). Put back in the microwave for 20 seconds. (If you see smoke, remove immediately.) Turn out on a sheet of aluminum foil coated with olive oil, or a silicone cookie sheet liner; do not touch the mixture as it will burn your fingers. Let cool for a minute or two, then fold the sheet over the mixture, and compress it into a roll. Pretend like the mixture is tobacco and the sheet is rolling papers; you want the mixture to be nice and tight. Unroll, push in the ends, then fold the sheet over again and compress as tightly as possible. Cool, then unwrap. Sprinkle on the powdered sugar and roll to coat.

Makes one bar.

This bar is low fat and high in whole grains. If you want more of a protein bar, try this one.

Louie, Louie, crab Louis

If you order crab Louis and the waitress asks what kind of dressing you want on your salad, just walk out the door. Crab Louis has its dressing built into the dish. It is crabmeat. It is lettuce. But it's the dressing that makes it crab Louis.

Crab Louis
adapted from "Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz" by Howard Mitcham (Addison-Wesley, 1978, 180 pages)
Serves 4

Ingredients
1 large head (or 2 small) romaine lettuce
1 cup homemade mayonnaise
1/4 cup tomato sauce, or 2 tablespoons tomato paste
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tablespoon capers
1/4 teaspoon cayenne

1 pound fresh crabmeat, picked clean and squeezed dry

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Instructions
Wash the lettuce, remove the coarse ribs and shred. In a small bowl, mix the mayonnaise, tomato sauce or paste, lemon juice, capers and cayenne together. Add salt and pepper to taste. Blend in the lettuce and the crab, gently as not to break it up, until both are well coated. Serve in individual salad bowls.

Homemade mayonnaise

Ingredients
2 egg yolks
1/4 teaspoon Tabasco
1/2 teaspoon powdered mustard
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
White pepper to taste
16 ounces olive or canola oil

Instructions
Beat together the yolks and the seasoning ingredients. Add the oil, a drop at a time at first, then in a slow, steady stream. Keep beating until all the oil is absorbed. If it curdles, you have added the oil too quickly. Start over with a new bowl and an egg yolk. Beat the yolk, and add the curdled mixture to it slowly. The final mixture should be velvety, creamy and smooth, and it should have a full-bodied zest.

Jerry Brown takes the cake

In case you're not on Facebook, or not in the habit of looking at former (and future candidate for) California Gov. Jerry Brown's page, here's the recipe he posted for his mom's banana cake.

Bernice Brown’s Banana Cake
by Jerry Brown on Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 5:22pm

Cake
Ingredients:
½ cup butter
2 eggs
1 and ½ cups sugar
½ cup sour milk (1 teaspoon lemon or vinegar to make sour milk)
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3 ripe bananas, mashed (the riper, the better)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup chopped walnuts
Directions:
Cream butter and sugar. Add egg yolks. Add milk with baking soda. Mix.
Put baking powder in flour, mix in gently. Add vanilla, banana and nuts.
Fold in beaten egg whites last. Mix barely, don’t over beat.
Bake in 3 greased layer cake tins at 325-350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Icing:
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons butter
2 and ½ cups powdered sugar
1 egg (may be eliminated if concerned about using raw egg)
1 teaspoon vanilla
A little cream
Directions:
Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and mix. Add vanilla. Add cream until frosting is the right consistency to spread.
Make the cake the day before serving.

In praise of hostels

I'm out here on a lovely deck overlooking trees and a small meadow, enjoying my morning coffee as the sun slowly rises, twinkling through dew-kissed leaves. Bees lazily check out the rose-of-Sharon next to the deck, and move on, not finding any blossoms open yet. The chirps of insects and birds intertwine and the air is still cool.

As pleasant as the morning is, my thoughts return to last night's dinner: spinach-and-ricotta-stuffed ravioli and a large salad of heirloom tomatoes, fresh oregano and marjoram, avocado, and butter lettuce, dressed with red wine vinegar and sunflower oil seasoned with paprika, salt and pepper.

I wish I could recommend the restaurant where we dined so simply yet well, but it was no restaurant. We ate in.

And for me, that is the beauty of a hostel: So many options, for a reasonable price. That is why I became a life member of  HI-USA (formerly AYH) many years ago, although sometimes years pass between visits.

Some offer great chances to meet people from all over the world; some are in beautiful spots; some require you to spend early mornings doing chores.

The Harpers Ferry hostel is one of the better ones, with two "family" rooms (for $40 per night for members) with coded locks, a well-appointed kitchen that only lacks sharp knives, an herb garden and selection of dried herbs in the kitchen, and large bathroom/showers segregated by sex. They have lockers available for those in the dorm rooms. The hostel is on a flat area on a hillside, with plenty of parking and room for campers ($10 for adults, less for groups and youth) as well. It has picnic tables, grills and a fire ring for cooler evenings. A nice big supermarket (where we bought the frozen raviolis, lettuce and avocado) is a few miles away in the town of Brunswick. The hostel store keeps a supply of organic canned soups, top ramen, frozen pizzas and ice cream bars for sale; and there's a fridge with free food as well. This hostel also comes with another perk: Free make-your-own pancakes from 7-10 a.m., with raisins and chocolate chips to sprinkle in the batter, and plenty of syrup and soft margarine on the table.

During the summer, it stays open all day, a real convenience for Appalachian Trail hikers who can't time their arrival to precisely 4 p.m. The only chores required are to wash and put away your dishes, and to strip your bed and put the linens and towels in a hamper on your way out.

The guests were about evenly split between youth and older guests; only two, young women from Germany, were backpackers who stopped for a comfortable night with showers.

On the map above (click on it to see it at its full size), the hostel is just south of the junction of Keep Tryst and Sandy Hook Road; you can either drive to the Visitor Center and take a shuttle to the old town of Harpers Ferry (1 on the map) and other sites, or you can walk to the town via the C&O canal path, which has a pedestrian crossing into the town over the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers.

For more information on the hostel, click HERE. For more information on Harpers Ferry, click HERE.

Chili? Or just a tasty vegetable stew?

If you've never been to Terlingua, Texas, on the first weekend of November, you don't really know what chili is. Yes, you can buy (click on the book cover above) a copy of "A Bowl of Red," Frank X. Tolbert's bible on the legendary stew, and follow the directions, but to taste, all in one place, the chilies that have been judged the best of their respective communities, and to immerse yourself in the culture of the pod, is an experience not to be missed.

Started in 1967, the cookoff features a number of different chilies, but to be a Texas chili, the mixture must:

• Not contain beans
• Not contain anything that doesn't turn red or brown after four-plus hours of cooking.

I love a good bowl of red. But I don't eat that much red meat anymore, and when I do indulge in grass-fed beef from a local farmer, I prefer a nice steak.

So my chili these days is one that will have my Texas friends rolling their eyes. Just taste it, though, before passing judgment. It may not be what you call chili, but you'll have to admit it's a tasty vegetable stew (which is what Frank X. Tolbert reportedly called Dave Chassen's famed Beverly Hills chili, which  contained beans).

Vegetable Chili
Serves 8

Ingredients
1 medium eggplant
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1/2 cup olive oil
2 onions, chopped
6 cloves minced garlic
1 large red pepper, diced or one large jar diced pimientos
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes, drained, but reserve the liquid
1 15-ounce can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1 15-ounce can pinto beans, drained and rinsed
2 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon cumin
1 tablespoon oregano
1 tablespoon basil
1 teaspoon pepper
Salt to taste
1/2 bunch of chopped parsley
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Instructions
Cut eggplant into cubes and sprinkle with salt. After an hour, pat dry. Sauté in 1/4 cup of the olive oil until almost tender and set aside. Add remaining oil and sauté onions and garlic until softened. Add to eggplant. Put on low heat and add all but the last four ingredients. If cooking on the stove, leave uncovered and stir frequently for 30 minutes, then add the last four ingredients and cook for another 15 minutes. If using a crockpot, cover and cook for at least an hour; add the last four ingredients 15 minutes before serving.
Serve over brown rice. Offer shredded cheddar cheese, tiny-diced fresh jalapeños or hot sauce and sliced scallions as toppings, and serve with corn chips or cornbread.

Note: If eggplant is out of season, use a large can of black olives, chopped, and obit the kosher salt.

Bacon&eggs alternative

Big breakfasts aren't so big anymore. As much as I love eggs, I don't eat them every morning: one or two times a week, tops. But if you can't face another bowl of cereal, maybe it's time to get a little creative.

I made these potato bites from a large Yukon Gold potato that I had baked extra for a previous dinner, skinned and refrigerated. Once cool, these potatoes are firm and slice easily (white rose and red potatoes would work, too, but not russets). Low-fat cream cheese tastes fine on these. If you've never bought a bag of real bacon bits, you're missing out. They keep for a long time and have a lot less fat than bacon you cook yourself, then crumble.

Using smaller or fingerling potatoes, these would also make super appetizers.

Potato bites
Serves 1-2

Ingredients
1 large Yukon Gold potato, cooked, cooled and sliced into 1/4-inch rounds
2 ounces cream cheese
2 tablespoons bacon bits
Minced parsley (optional)

Instructions
Put cold potato slices on a paper-towel covered plate. Top each slice with a teaspoon of cream cheese, made into a little ball, then flattened. Sprinkle with bacon bits. Microwave for a minute or until hot. Sprinkle with minced parsley if desired. Serve.

Sorry I didn't get a good photo of this to post. We ate them too quickly!