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So, we’ve all had this experience: You’ve had a long, tiring day running from the law, which has finally caught on to your counterfeit Mad Libb factory where you’re taking over the world one hilarious adjective at a time. You manage to lose the cops with a series of quick turns in a neighborhood and rush home to grab the $3 million you keep in the 30 Twister boxes under your bed - and make a quick dinner for the family. What do you do?
Well, first, you shove as much money as you can into the
Cooking from the pantry becomes a lot easier if you keep the pantry stocked with base foods like cornmeal, rice and pasta. Of course, we want this to be as healthy as possible, so try to use whole grains whenever possible: brown or wild rice, whole wheat pasta or, our new favorite, Barilla Plus which has a variety of grains and a ton of extra fiber and nutrients without being as off-putting as whole wheat pasta.
While I prefer fresh sauces and meats, we’re running from the law, people – keep some convenience items on hand. I usually have a jar or two of pasta sauce and some canned fish, sometimes clams, often wild Alaskan salmon, in the pantry at all times. (If you have a tendency towards queasiness, don’t read this part but for the rest of you: I buy the big cans of Alaskan salmon which is a whole filet, that is, the bones and skin are still in there. I peel off the skin but I crush the bones with my fingers – you’ll never notice the difference in texture or flavor but you will get a ton of added calcium. Just don’t let the kids see you do it.)
The trick to pantry cooking is keeping on hand those filling bases that you can alter to accommodate whatever fresh ingredients you have. For example, I love polenta – it’s easy to make, it’s versatile, and it’s got a decent amount of fiber. You can buy polenta in a tube in the produce section of your supermarket but it’s so easy to make, don’t bother (see recipes below) – besides, who knows what they put in that stuff to make it last. And don’t buy the box of cornmeal called “polenta” – course ground cornmeal works just as well and costs a fraction of the price.
Okay, so make your polenta. Now take whatever you have in the fridge and pantry and stick in on the polenta. For example, you could spread half the polenta into a baking dish, top it with taco meat and jack cheese, then spread the rest of the polenta on top. Stick the dish in the oven for a few minutes until everything is hot and the layers are glued together with melted cheese. Serve with taco toppings, like lettuce, tomato and avocado, on the side.
Or, make a polenta lasagna. Stir some chopped spinach into the hot polenta and pour the whole thing into a baking dish. Sauté whatever veggies you like in lasagna: bell pepper, mushrooms, onion, until tender-crisp. Spread a little pasta sauce on the polenta, top with veggies and sprinkle with your favorite cheese: parmesan, mozzarella or ricotta. Then bake until the cheese has lightly browned.
Or you can top polenta with any thick stew you happen to have in the freezer: chili, Brunswick stew, black bean soup. Or, marinate whatever veggies you have in balsamic vinaigrette while the grill heats, stir a little parmesan into the hot polenta, grill up the veggies and have a hearty vegetarian meal in no time.
If you’re worried about your kids eating it, do what one of the personal chefs who trained me does: cut veggies into shapes. He cut bell peppers with star cookie cutters and other veggies at funky angles to make them interesting.
The limit to the possibilities truly lies in your imagination. The same goes with pasta: keep a jar of sauce you like on hand and throw anything else you have around into it: sautéed veggies, that can of clams, soy sausage, whatever. If you’re nervous, make the same deal with your family that Rob and I have: I make whatever I want but if it just doesn’t taste good, we chuck it and order a pizza. I promise you, the more you try it, the less often you’ll be eating pizza.
After a hearty meal of polenta lasagna, your family is charged up and ready to go on the run!
If you have any questions you’d like addressed in Be Your Own Personal Chef, send them my way (ThoughtForFood@bellsouth.net) – if I don’t have an answer, I’d be glad to make look one up.
In my quest to follow Sherri Brooks
Vinton’s and Ann Clark Espuelas’s call to make “better choices more of the
time”, I took a trip out to the Piedmont Triad Farmers’ market, the big one on
Sandy Ridge Road. Normally, I prefer the
Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market for its intimacy and local produce (the
Piedmont Triad market has local produce, but I’ve run into more than one sales
person posing as a farmer). But once in
a while, I like to take a trip out to
In Vinton’s
and Espuelas’s book The Real Foods
Revival, they point out that the
Not that I’ve gone vegetarian. The good news conveyed by Vinton and Espuelas is that there are other options – this is where the Farmers’ Markets come in. At the Curb market, there are local farmers selling free-range, hormone-free, humanely-treated chicken, pork, eggs, milk (eating the byproducts of mistreated animals is no better than eating the animal itself) and sometimes even grass-fed beef; my husband and I have been enjoying their wares. Surprisingly, their prices are not so different that those of the supermarkets, though we have taken this as a cue to eat meatless meals more often.
Another
suggestion offered by the book was to diversify the meats we eat. Animals like ostrich and bison are not only
more likely to be raised in little farms by conscientious farmers, they’re much
more resistant to be penned in and mistreated; bison are notorious for busting
through fences. Moreover, humanely
treated animals are healthier animals, allowing them to be raised hormone- and
antibiotic-free. To sweeten the deal
even more, we have both bison and ostrich farms here in
So, as promised in my Real Foods Revival review, I bought a few pounds and got to cooking. I started off with a pound of ground ostrich which I put in a batch of my favorite chili from Cooking Light magazine with butternut squash and black olives. Though the original recipe called for beef, I had always made it with ground turkey for health reasons. The meaty flavor of the ostrich was pronounced but not at all gamey, giving the chili a rich flavor similar to beef. As an added bonus, the meat was so lean that I could skip the step of draining the meat on paper towels, during which I inevitably miss a drip of fat running down the outside of pot which then smokes when it hits the burner. As much as missed the smell of burning fat, I was pleased with the results so far.
I also bought an ostrich tenderloin to try out Ted’s Tandoori Ostrich. Though Ted is one of my favorite Queer Eye Guys (right up there with the other four), I thought the recipe was lack luster. Tandoori is an Indian dish where meat is marinated in a mixture of yogurt and seasonings, such as cumin, turmeric, garlic, paprika, chili powder, coriander and cardamom. When the meat is then grilled or roasted at a high temperature, the yogurt seals in the juices in an incredibly flavorful crust. I’m not sure if it was the recipe or the meat, but the marinade just didn’t seem to adhere to the tenderloin, making for a lackluster flavor. Still, the ostrich itself stayed juicy, despite its lack of fat, and the cilantro-garlic raita (yogurt sauce) made for a nice accompaniment.
Onto the bison! I also picked up a pound of ground bison. Half of it went into a small batch of kofta kabobs, a daring test where there’s not a lot to mask the meat. Kofta is a Middle Eastern dish usually made with ground lamb mixed with onion, egg and seasonings such as parsley, cinnamon, cumin, turmeric and allspice; it’s then formed into long sausage-like shapes around skewers and grilled. This is another dish where the spices make a cooling raita a nice touch. As with the ostrich, we found the meat flavorful but not at all gamey.
After that, the other half pound of bison was a no-brainer: I threw it into the tomato sauce for the hearty lasagna I always make when Fall rolls around and I’m ready for some comfort food. Between all of the layers of noodles, herbed tomato sauce and, of course, cheese, it could have been ground shoe leather and tasted great.
One final word of caution: beware of snake oil salesmen. The government definition of free-range is that the animals have access to the outside, but as Vinton and Espuelas point out, that doesn’t mean the animals are able to use that access. Their true-life example was the unfortunately common scenario where hundreds of chickens are crammed into an airplane hangar which is open at one end – do you think the chickens at the other end of the hangar ever see the light of day? That’s part of why I prefer to buy from local farms – you’re most often buying from the people who work the farm and they often have photos of their farm, with chickens running every which way.
There are a lot of definitions of healthy cooking and I’ll explore them in a later post, but for now let me say that while I don’t think low-fat is the end-all, be-all of healthy eating, I do think we Americans get more than our daily dose of fats, so when I say low-fat, what I really mean is an appropriate amounts of fats. That said, fats taste good (uhh…) so to please our palates, we need to replace fats with other flavors (of course, once you get used to healthier eating, the fatty stuff just isn’t that appealing any more – I treat myself to a Little Debbie cake whenever I give blood and inevitably regret it, but as we all know, food habits are hard to break!).
That said, one of my favorite flavor enhancers, after fresh herbs and coarsely ground black pepper, is fresh citrus which adds bright fresh flavor, be it the rind of a lime in Jamaican Banana Bread, fresh lemon juice in hummus or orange zest and juice in Chicken with an Orange Blackberry Sauce.
It’s true that you can buy bottles of juices and jars of zest, but with a couple of kitchen tools, extracting the fresh thing is almost as fast and the flavor is incomparable; do a side by side comparison and you will find bottled juice flat and boring and jarred zest bitter and woody.
First, to the zest, which contain the uber-flavorful fruit oils: if you’re using juice and zest in a recipe, always zest first. It will seem obvious once you do it, but I’m the kind of person who has to do everything the hard way before the obvious easy way occurs to me (just ask my family). On the other hand, if you only need juice for a recipe, save the spent citrus halves in a bag in the freezer to zest later (they zest beautifully frozen). Now, if you don’t already have one, run out to your favorite kitchen store and spend $12 on a microplane zester. For the uninitiated, this fabulous tool started its life as a wood rasp until the clever wife of a hardware store owner realized that it was the perfect tool to take the flavorful rind from an orange while leaving the bitter white pith beneath (sorry, pith, but no one likes you.). I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to extract the rind the old fashioned way with a paring knife but it’s excruciatingly slow and tedious; though I can happily spend hours making a meal, my patience for paring the zest off a lemon ends after a minute and a half, which is about a minute longer than it takes to zest an entire lemon with a microplane. You may have seen the beautiful chefs of the Food Network using this tool and they inevitably hold the tool over a bowl and move the fruit along the (very sharp – caution, caution!) rasps but I prefer to switch it around and hold the fruit stationary while moving the zester. I do it this way because 1) I don’t have to stop every two seconds to see where zest remains on the fruit and 2) I can watch the zest build up in the back of the zester thereby having a running tally of how close I am to the amount I need for the recipe. Try both ways and see what you like.
Onto the juice! Even if you didn’t know the name, you know the tool: whether hand held or in the middle of a juice-catching dish, a citrus reamer is used to extract every last drop of fresh juice from an orange, lemon or lime. You can just squeeze by hand, but a reamer will save time and extract more juice, and all for a couple of seconds of clean-up. A quick tip: wash your fruit under hot water and then roll it under the heel of your hand to loosen up the juice before cutting to get the very most from your fruit.
Well, that’s my citrus shpiel. Go grab your bag of lemons, your zester and your reamer and reinvigorate your favorite recipes. Go on, get outta here, you crazy kids!
Hummus
2 clove garlic; peeled (3 if you're a big garlic fan like me!)
15 oz chickpeas; drained, rinsed
1 teaspoon cumin
1/4 cup tahini (ground sesame seed paste, available in the "ethinic" food isle at most grocery stores)
3 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon kalamata olive brine (the juice in the jar)
With food processor running, drop garlic and chickpeas through the shoot and process until minced. Scrape sides and
add garlic and tahini. Pulse to combine.
Again with processor running, add remaining ingredients.
Scrape sides and process as needed until smooth.
Chill at least one hour to let flavors combine. Serve with toasted pita wedges, pan-fried zucchini, fresh veggies or on a sandwich with fresh or grilled veggies.
Makes about 1 1/2 cups