For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

How to eat anything you want without gaining weight, why lard may be the new black and how some organic foods are poisoning you.

Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. I also share links on Twitter (@summertomato), Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Links of the week

• How Do You Not Weigh 500 Pounds? <<I’m a little late on this post but still think it’s worth putting at the top of the list. I love these tips for eating what you love and not gaining weight, and use them all myself. I had only one complaint that I left in the comments. (Amateur Gourmet)
• Who Killed Lard? <<Excellent story examining why lard went out of fashion (hint: it wasn’t for health reasons) and why it may be due for a comeback. (NPR)
• Organic Food Sweetener May Be a Hidden Source of Dietary Arsenic <<I’ve always been suspicious of how many “healthy” foods contain brown rice syrup. I guess they think arsenic is healthy, which means I’m calling BS of the week on all the organic processed foods that are really just expensive junk food in disguise. (ScienceDaily)
• Can you build up tolerance to delicious foods? <<If you want to love chocolate even more, try eating less of it. (Obesity Panacea)
• Is Fructose Being Blamed Unfairly for Obesity Epidemic? <<Sure we love to demonize high-fructose corn syrup, but fructose alone is not our biggest problem. (ScienceDaily)
• Is Sugar Fattening? <<And just in case you’re suspicious of the last article, here’s all the gory details of why sugar isn’t good but also may not be as bad as everyone says. (Whole Health Source)
• Health care professionals, Twitter, and the Abuse of Public Trust <<Do you believe health advice from people just because they have an MD? Would it surprise you to hear most doctors have less than 2 hours of nutrition training and no background in analyzing scientific data? (Weighty Matters)
• How Exercise Fuels the Brain <<A really cool mechanism was uncovered of how exercise actually improves cognitive ability. (New York Times)
• Moroccan Mint Roasted Vegetables Recipe <<I’m making this asap. Moroccan food is my fave. (101 Cookbooks)
• What Processed Food Looks Like during Digestion–of Course It’s Not Pretty [Video] <<How much ramen did you eat in college? (thanks for the link Sandra!) (Scientific American)

What inspired you this week?

Heirloom Bean Salad

This is a recipe that I rely on often, particularly when I’m short on time but don’t want to eat something unhealthy. As I’ve mentioned like a zillion times during my show, I think beans are one of the absolute best go-to foods when you want something tasty and satisfying.

Don’t worry, this is not one of those nasty 3 bean salads your well-meaning aunt brings to barbecues. When you start with good quality, dry beans they bring an amazingly creamy texture to a dish and are absolutely delicious. And if you prepare them properly by soaking them for a few hours beforehand, you also won’t get any of the digestive issues most of us associate with canned beans.

On that note, the title isn’t quite accurate. It assumes that, like me, you’ve spent a bit of time early in the week making a big batch of beans to add to the meals you make through Friday. That said, preparing the beans only takes 2-3 extra minutes of prep time, but there are a couple hours of waiting between the essential steps. If you use a pressure cooker it is even faster.

In a pinch, feel free to substitute lentils, which can be used similarly but cook up in only 20-30 minutes, depending on the size.

Today I made this recipe using only ingredients I already had in my fridge. I did this intentionally to show you how easy and versatile it is. But feel free to substitute any of the vegetables with ones you have or like better. It doesn’t matter which beans you use either, a simple black bean is also very lovely if you can’t find fancy heirloom beans.

This dish turns out different every time I make it, depending on what I have in the house, my mood and, of course, the season. In the summer, for example, I tend to use cucumber, French radish and a handful of arugula. Also feel free to experiment with different oils, vinegars, citrus, herbs, salts and spices (smoked paprika is a great addition).

I use this dish most often for a light lunch or substantial snack. It can be served warm or cold, or can be made into a full meal by adding a fried egg on top (or other protein) with a side of greens. This recipe is for a single serving, but it scales easily.

Heirloom Bean Salad With Winter Vegetables

Serves 1

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup cooked Rancho Gordo Pinquito beans
• 2 small carrots or 1 medium carrot, thinly sliced
• 1/4 cup sliced lo bok or daikon
• 1/2 green onion, finely chopped
• 2 tbsp freshly diced parsley
• 1 tbsp olive oil or nut oil
• 2 tsp rice or red wine vinegar
• salt
• pepper

If your beans aren’t already cooked, soak them overnight or at least 6 hours. Discard the soaking liquid, rinse several times then cook in beef, mushroom or vegetable stock until tender.

Place appropriate amount of beans in a bowl and add sliced vegetables, green onion and parsley. I tend to go heavy handed on the herbs because they add such a wonderful freshness, but feel free to experiment with the amount you like.

You’re welcome to mix the vinaigrette beforehand, but if you’re lazy like me feel free to just add oil and vinegar directly to the bowl, along with some salt and pepper and any other spices you choose.

Gently stir with a spoon, taking care not to damage the beans. Adjust salt and pepper and enjoy.

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Daikon Radish

Normally in San Francisco we lament our lack of summer. Despite being in California, this city is notorious for being buried under a 300 ft blanket of fog from June til August. But this year, winter is oddly lacking.

We’ve had some rainy days here and there, but they haven’t lasted long and have been interrupted with unapologetic bursts of sunshine. As you can imagine, this is affecting our crops.

Broccoli

Even though we’re only half way through February, winter produce has dwindled dramatically, and we’re already seeing spring vegetables like fava beans and green onions.

Spring Onions

I don’t know if this makes me happy or sad, but it is definitely odd. I mean, isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

February Tomatoes

But the nice part is walking through the market is a pleasure. The sun is out, but I haven’t seen the thick crowds we get in the summertime on those rare nice days.

Romanesco

Today I focused largely on green vegetables, but also brought home some seasonal goodies like mandarins and walnut oil.

Roasted Walnut Oil

I’m not sure what to make of the weather, but at least I’ll be eating well.

Today’s purchases (~$40):

• Assorted carrots (County Line Harvest)
• Baby fennel (County Line Harvest)
• Kabocha squash (County Line Harvest)
• Baby broccoli (Chue’s Farm)
• Lo bok (Chue’s Farm)
• Garlic (Chue’s Farm)
• Spring onions (Star Route Farms)
• Rosemary (Star Route Farms)
• Satsuma mandarins (Paradez Farms)
• Walnut oil (Glashoff Farms)

For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

This week McDonald’s comes up with a game changer, Dr. Oz proves once again that he’s a scumbag, and science gives us a few more reasons to eat fish.

Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. I also share links on Twitter (@summertomato), Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Links of the week

• OMG: McDonald’s Does the Right Thing <<I don’t often get to say nice things about McDonald’s, but I’m glad they gave me a reason to today by ending the use of gestation crates for pigs. (New York Times)
• You Can Gain Weight Eating Fruits and Vegetables <<I’m of the opinion that what you eat is more important than how much you eat, but let’s not forget that how much you eat is still important. (Dr. Weil)
• A Tale of Two Oz’s <<Thanks Yoni for calling BS of the week on the two-faced quack named Dr. Oz. I wonder how this guy sleeps at night. (Weighty Matters)
• How 1-Minute Intervals Can Improve Your Health <<Don’t like to workout a lot or can’t find the time? This is the solution for you. (New York Times)
• Overeating May Double Risk of Memory Loss <<Too many calories is bad for your health in many ways, including your memory as well, according to a new study. (ScienceDaily)
• A Mediterranean diet may promote brain health: study <<And for those calories you are eating, make sure there’s some fish and good veggies in there. (Los Angeles Times)
• The Egg and the Pressure Cooker <<I had no idea I could cook one of my favorite foods in my beloved pressure cooker. This is high on my to-do list this weekend. (Ruhlman)
• Dietary changes may slow retinitis pigmentosa: study <<Another reason to eat fish: “Someone adopting this dietary recommendation by age 35 could have 18 years of additional vision.” That’s impressive. (Los Angeles Times)
• Miso-Roasted Fish on Cedar Plank <<Great write up on my friend and the chef who changed my life with a meal, Arnold Wong. He also shares this delicious sounding recipe. (SF Gate)

What inspired you this week?

Photo by evelynishere

Food shopping can be intimidating, especially if cooking is new to you.

A common approach to this problem is to pick your recipes beforehand, make a list of what you need and then shop until everything from the list is in your basket. But being comfortable shopping without a list is a valuable skill worth adding to your healthstyle toolkit.

Lists can come in handy, especially when you’re planning a large meal or event where organization is essential. But at a farmers market, shopping lists aren’t nearly as useful.

You can never be 100% certain of what you’re going to find at the market each week. Sure there are things you can usually count on (I know I can find kale at my market year round), but having a long catalog of ingredients for a particular recipe is likely to be frustrating.

A shopping list you can’t fulfill will leave you scrambling, running around the market looking for absent ingredients or inferior substitutes. No fun. The last thing you want to do is turn the farmers market into a source of anxiety.

Still the best reason to avoid lists at the farmers market is that discovering new and interesting foods is what makes shopping there such a treat. It takes an open mind and curious eyes if you hope to find the next tree tomato.

So how do you free yourself from the shackles of shopping lists without ending up with a pile of random vegetables and no obvious meals?

When shopping at a farmers market, the best meal planning strategy combines both structure and flexibility. Start with an idea of what you want to accomplish, then let the season’s offerings nourish your spirit of adventure and round out your menus.

Meal Planning at the Farmers Market

Step 1. Quantify

Think about how many meals you want to get from your purchases (e.g. 4 dinners, 5 lunches), and be sure to have that many main course ideas (vegetables being the centerpiece) given that a few will probably repeat.

At this point it is okay to have one or two things in mind you know you want to make, but the rest of your meals should be inspired by wandering through the aisles and seeing what catches your eye.

Step 2. Visualize

As you discover which foods will be the focal points of your meals, start to think about how you might like them cooked (even if you don’t know how). Think about what other flavors usually taste good with what you’re buying–consider herbs (parsley, thyme, mint, cilantro, etc.), proteins (meats, fish, eggs, legumes) and side dishes.

If you can’t think of anything, try to remember how these foods have been served to you in a restaurant. If you still aren’t sure what other flavors would be a good choice, ask the vendor you are buying from. Farmers are usually pretty good at cooking the foods they grow.

Step 3. Consolidate

For all the different ideas you had for meals, think of those with common flavors. Look for similarities between the dishes and overlapping ingredients. For example, most dishes will need some kind of onion, garlic or both. The farmers market is also a great place to get herbs and spices.

Look around and see what is available, purchasing the ingredients that are the most versatile. Flavors that can be included in several different dishes also give you the flexibility to change up your meal plans in middle of the week if you are suddenly struck with inspiration.

Step 4. Collect

As your ideas solidify, be sure to collect all the elements you need. iPhone apps can be particularly helpful with this if you want to double check ingredient lists. Because most popular recipes are born from available seasonal ingredients, it is likely you will find everything you need while shopping at the farmers market. If not, you might need to pick up the rest of your ingredients at a regular grocery store–not the end of the world.

To make sure you don’t forget anything, think about each dish individually and deconstruct each of the elements in your mind. This will jog your memory if you forgot to grab a lemon or some garlic.

Step 5. Plan

It is good to have a rough idea of when you are going to eat each of the meals you visualized. Some vegetables hold up better than others over the course of a week in the refrigerator. Plan to eat the most delicate produce in the first day or two, and save the hearty kale and broccoli for later in the week. Here are some tips to keep produce fresh.

Conclusion

Creative shopping without lists takes some practice, but you don’t have to be a master chef or flavor expert to get it right. When cooking with delicious, seasonal ingredients you can’t go wrong with simplicity. Start with the basics and work your way up as you get more comfortable in the kitchen and at the market.

Do you use shopping lists?

Originally published January 20, 2010.

Tune in here at 6pm PST for a live chat with me about food, health and what I’ve been doing for the past month and a half.

To participate click the red “Join event” button and login with Twitter or your Vokle account. The show is now open and free to everyone, so no password is necessary.

I encourage you to call in with video questions, particularly if your question is nuanced and may involve a back and forth discussion. Please use headphones to call in however, or the feedback from the show is unbearable.

If I don’t get to your question or you’d like a more in depth follow up, you can Ask Me or subscribe to the Tomato Slice newsletter.

Click here to see past episodes or subscribe on iTunes (video podcast or audio only).

For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

There were more excellent stories than I could fit this week. Mindful eating hits the big leagues, Jack In The Box’s shake is made of fakin bacon and sugar is more helpful than low carb for weight loss? Won’t somebody please think of the children!

Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. I also share links on Twitter (@summertomato), Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Links of the week

• Mindful Eating as Food for Thought <<Mindful eating in the New York Times?! I think someone is finally listening!
• Bread a culprit in Americans eating too much salt <<Have high blood pressure? It might be bread’s fault. (Medline)
• Bacon milkshake contains no actual bacon <<Haha, thanks Grist for calling BS of the week on Jack In The Box’s fake bacon shake.
• New Diet: Top Off Breakfast With — Chocolate Cake? <<Interesting study suggests having a little something sweet in the morning is more effective than a low carb diet for long term weight loss. As counter intuitive as that sounds it is not entirely out of line with my personal experiences. (ScienceDaily)
• Smaller Plate Won’t Help Your Diet, Research Shows <<Honestly I think this study is flawed. They specifically asked the test subjects to eat until full. In the original studies it was a more natural environment and smaller plates resulted in less eating unconsciously, and both the small and large plate groups reported the same amount of fullness at the end. (Medline)
• The Hidden Health Hazards of Lettuce <<Though I don’t agree entirely with the logic here, I do think he’s right. “Fat isn’t bad, stupid is bad.” (Ruhlman)
• The Consumer: In New Diet Math, Subtracting Is Hard <<I might be the only one who thinks it’s funny that when Weight Watchers started equating fruits and vegetables people stopped losing weight. (New York Times)
• What a World Without Ridiculous Front of Package Health Claims Would Look Like <<It might look like food. Love this one. (Weighty Matters)
• Cream of Jerusalem Artichoke and Celeriac Soup <<Two of my favorite under-appreciated winter vegetables, together at last. (Jenn Cuisine)
• Push-ups: Michelle Obama v Ellen DeGeneres <<No matter how you feel about politics, this is badass.

What inspired you this week?

Photo by ssoosay

I don’t know the exact numbers, but something like a gazillion of you have asked me for a list of my favorite healthy food and science websites.

Back in the day I used to keep a running blogroll, but it took too much work to maintain and there are politics (and lots of email spam) involved in having a whole page of Summer Tomato dedicated to promoting other sites, so I decided to do away with it.

But questions keep coming from people wanting to know where I find all the stories for my Friday link love posts, my preferred alternative to a permanent blogroll. The unfortunate answer is that I subscribe to an extraordinary number of blogs (you’d probably cry if you saw what I go through every Thursday), and there are too many sites and I edit the list too often for it to be useful for most of you.

That said, I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t have my favorites.

Sadly one of those favorites, the news feed at Food52 (formerly Food News Journal), recently decided to hang up the towel and stopped sending out their daily food links. It was an amazing resource and I’m totally heartbroken. But as a result I’m also now looking for a few more excellent food and health news feeds to supplement my weekly reading, and I need your help.

Below I’ve shared my favorite sites and resources, in no particular order, that I rely on regularly for top-quality content. Though I subscribe to many more than are listed here (and I still get a lot of content from Twitter, Digg, etc.), these are the ones that consistently provide share-worthy content on the web and I would never post on Friday without flipping through them first. I respect these sites tremendously and am looking for more publications of this caliber to add to my collection.

If you think there’s anything I can’t live without, please leave it in the comments and I’ll check it out. Thanks in advance for your help!

Health & Science News

Science Daily – Health and Medicine

Medline

New York Times – Health

LA Times – Booster Shots

Health Blogs

Nutrition Over Easy – Monica Reinagel

Weighty Matters – Yoni Freedhoff

Whole Health Source – Stephan Guyenet

Raw Food SOS – Denise Minger

Dr. Weil’s Daily Blog – Andrew Weil

Mark’s Daily Apple – Mark Sisson

Green Blogs

Treehugger

Ecosalon

Food Safety & Politics

On Food – Mark Bittman

Food Politics – Marion Nestle

Marler Blog – Bill Marler

Grist – Food

Healthy Recipe Blogs

101 Cookbooks

Smitten Kitchen

David Lebovitz

Ruhlman

Simply Recipes

Ruth Reichl

Jenn Cuisine

Sprouted Kitchen

What are you reading?

For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one with sugar on the brain this week. The now infamous Dr. Lustig thinks the government should treat sugar like tobacco and alcohol, but Marion Nestle is not convinced. I also found an excellent article from the anti-grain crowd admitting rice might not be so bad for you after all. Rejoice!

Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. I also share links on Twitter (@summertomato), Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Links of the week

• Societal Control of Sugar Essential to Ease Public Health Burden <<Everyone in health is buzzing about this editorial by Dr. Lustig, something I’ve commented on before. Though I agree with his suggestion that sugar is dangerous in large doses, I agree with Marion Nestle (below) that regulation isn’t the answer in this case. (UCSF)
• Are sugars toxic? Should they be regulated? <<To keep this in perspective, Nestle is traditionally in favor of regulating the food industry to keep them honest. If she’s against this, that’s a good indication that it’s crossing the line. (Food Politics)
• The “Asian Paradox”: How Can Asians Eat So Much Rice and Not Gain Weight? <<Huge props to paleo blogger Mark Sisson for ‘fessing up that rice, in all its evil grain-ness, isn’t really bad for you. This is a great read. (Mark’s Daily Apple)
• Exercise as Housecleaning for the Body <<This is one of the most interesting theories I’ve ever read on why exercise is good for you. Biology geeks, don’t miss this one. (New York Times)
• ‘Just Label It’ Campaign Asks the FDA for GMO Labeling <<I don’t think GMO is innately bad (though some of them probably are), but I would definitely like to know when I’m eating GMO foods. How about you? (Treehugger)
• Eating Together? Simply a Matter of Adapting <<I’ve definitely noticed that who I’m eating with influences how fast I eat. Apparently I am influencing them as well, which is a good thing. (ScienceDaily)
• Eating fish tied to lower risk of colon polyps <<You already knew vegetables were good for your intestines. Apparently fish is as well. (Medline)
• CURRIED LENTILS AND SPINACH <<Lentils and spinach is one of my absolute favorite pairings. I love the sound of this warming winter dish. (Chez Us)
• French Cauliflower Soup with Bacon and Herb Garnish <<I bet you’ve never considered putting soup and salad in the same bowl. Check out this beautiful recipe for a heavily garnished cauliflower soup. Yum! (Savour Fare)

What inspired you this week?