Tips from gaining health

It’s the second full week of 2010. By now, you may be ten or eleven days into a resolution diet. You’re probably feeling really good about your progress. Chances are you lost a little weight. There’s a possibility you noticed a physical change already. You might even be thinking (and justifiably so): “I am the greatest person alive! Besides Eddie Vedder, I mean.”

Sadly, this may also have crossed your mind: “If eat one more salad, I’m going to set my face on fire.”

Sweet baby Jane, I hear you. When I began to change my eating habits, salads made up a big chunk of my diet. Office lunches were never-ending parades of the Caesar varietals (with light dressing, natch), and I got real tired, real fast of baby spinach. Then, I learned to cook and life got exponentially better. (Exponentially! That’s a lot.)

Anyway, once I started puttering around the kitchen, I realized the following:


With a creative topping, you can turn five ounces of pedestrian grilled chicken into a succulent celebration, a flavoral fooferaw, or even a scrumptious shindig. (Or any other gratuitously alliterative party.) Think of the meat as your canvas, and the accompaniment as your pretty rainbow paint of rainbows.

Take Gail Simmons’ Tomato and Avocado Salsa from Food & Wine, for example. You can use it as a dip for chips or veggies, sure. (The Super Bowl’s coming up, after all.) But on plain poultry, it becomes something else entirely: a tasty, filling, healthy dinner. Like almost all salsas, the recipe is staggeringly easy to make and constitutes a solid serving of vegetables. For $1 and 100 extra calories, that ain’t too shabby.

This week, when you’re choking down another round of Romaine, stop. Grab an avocado and a few grape tomatoes, grill a slice of chicken, and treat yourself to Tomato and Avocado Salsa. It’ll make the next few months a lot easier to stomach.

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If you like this recipe, you might also dig:

• Guacamole-Bean Dip Mashup
• Mango Salsa
• Tomatillo Guacamole

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Tomato and Avocado Salsa
Serves 4.
Adapted from Food & Wine.

1 1/2 cups grape tomatoes, halved or quartered
1 Hass avocado, diced small
1/4 cup onion, chopped small
1/2 small jalapeno, seeded and minced
1/8 cup cilantro, chopped
1/8 cup fresh lime juice
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

1) In a medium bowl, gently combine all the ingredients. Salt and pepper to taste. Stir again to combine. Serve on meat, chicken, fish, chips, cheese, or … anything, really.

NOTE: If you’d like a less chunky salsa, chop the tomatoes and avocado even smaller.

Approximate Calories, Fat, Fiber, and Price Per Serving
4 servings: 100 calories, 7.4 g fat, 3.7 g fiber, $1.04

Calculations
1 1/2 cups grape tomatoes, halved or quartered: 45 calories, 0 g fat, 0.1 g fiber, $2.50
1 Hass avocado, diced small: 322 calories, 29.5 g fat, 13.5 g fiber, $0.99
1/4 cup onion, chopped small: 13 calories, 0 g fat, 0.6 g fiber, $0.08
1/2 small jalapeno, seeded and minced: 9 calories, 0 g fat, 0.3 g fiber, $0.05
1/8 cup cilantro, chopped: negligible calories and fat, 0.1 g fiber, $0.25
1/8 cup fresh lime juice: 10 calories, 0 g fat, 0.2 g fiber, $0.25
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper: negligible calories, fat, and fiber, $0.03
TOTAL: 399 calories, 29.5 g fat, 14.8 g fiber, $4.15
PER SERVING (TOTAL/4): 100 calories, 7.4 g fat, 3.7 g fiber, $1.04

Earlier this year, Casual Kitchen (my new favorite blog) posted a stupendous essay called How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking with Five Easy Questions. A phenomenal guide to recipe analysis, CK’s tips are invaluable whether you’re reading a cookbook, browsing the web, or picking through Grandma’s age-old dessert file. The post was so good, in fact, it inspired me to write a sequel of sorts – one focusing on simplifying online recipe searches.

See, combing the web for recipes can be a tricky venture. Between quasi-independent monsters (AllRecipes, Chow), corporate mega-sites (Cooking Light, Food Network) and neato personal blogs (The Wednesday Chef, A Good American Wife), there are literally millions of dishes to pick through. As taste is totally subjective, and reviews range from right-on to catastrophically misleading, there’s no easy way to discern the bad from the good.

Since I tend to take most of my food from the ‘net, I had to learn how to pick through the labyrinth quickly and efficiently. What follows, then, are a few self-spawned tricks to navigating the endless internet recipe abyss – guidelines to help you choose the cheapest, healthiest, er, good-est recipes ever. Hope they help. (And feel free to add more in the comments section!)

1) Be specific. Whether you’re googling a Coq au Vin or trying to pinpoint a butternut squash soup on AllRecipes, specificity is key to finding exactly what you want. Lots of the larger sites have some method of narrowing down the parameters of your hunt – an Ingredient Search, a Collection Search, or some way of marking off categories (Healthy, Course, etc.). If you’re starting big with Google or Yahoo, try to enter particular terms – the ingredient list, the preparation method, “light,” etc. The more specific you are, the more accurate the results will be.

2) Check the number of reviews. A recipe with 1,436 reviews and 1228 comments is infinitely less scary than one with two reviews and no comments. A large pool of reviewers means the dish has been around awhile, and it’s at least vaguely working. Helpful serving suggestions and/or useful substitutions are likely included within the comments. (This isnt to say, "Dont try new things," but rather, "If youre looking for a sure bet...")

3) Choose a recipe with a high rating. I find regular ol’ people (as opposed to high-falutin’ pro critics) are much more lenient on food. They’re just as likely to give five stars to a merely edible dish as they are to a meal that really knocks their socks off. So, when sampling from the AllRecipes, Epicurious, or Food Network sites, try not to use a recipe that has less than four stars / three forks. If you’re entertaining, make sure it has at least 4-1/2 (but it’s never a good idea to try a dish for the first time on guests, anyway).

4) Follow all Casual Kitchen’s advice. Once you find a tantalizing-looking recipe, read through it. Make sure you like and/or are willing to experiment with all the ingredients. Then, check to see if each one is readily available, either on hand or at the local store. After that, ensure you’re comfortable with both the prep time and the techniques employed. Finally, consider price and ease of big-batch cooking. If your potential meal hits all of these qualifications, it’s probably a winner.

5) Take suggestions to heart. If two-thirds of 254 reviewers think the sugar should be halved in a certain dish, go for it. Recipe writers can make mistakes sometimes, and reviewers are just the folks to correct them. But remember – majority rules. If Megdoodle from Monkeybutt, Kentucky likes quadruple the amount of red pepper in her chili, but 200 other commenters say the spice is just right, side with the 200.

6) Read/consider the available nutrition information. No one wants to serve their kids a lard casserole. When you’re scouting recipes, check to see if the calorie, fat, and fiber readings are included on the webpage. AllRecipes and Cooking Light do this consistently now, and you can occasionally find them on Epicurious and Food Network (with Ellie Krieger and Kathleen Daelemans, in particular). If dietary info isn’t available, try scanning the list for key words – “stick of butter,” “1/4 olive oil,” “fried,” etc. It’ll do your health better in the long run.

7) Stick with a chef you trust. If you’re a frequenter of the Food Network site or a big fan of Lidia Bastianich’s online collection, hang out with her cuisine for awhile. Make her classics. Work your way through her oeuvre. The same goes for personal blogs. I love and dream of emulating Orangette’s writing and cooking skill, and her food photos are absolutely to die for. Yet, I’ve tried a few dishes from her site (Butternut Squash Puree, Chickpea Salad, and Green Beans) and I don’t think our palates quite match up. On the flip side, Deb from Words to Eat By totally works for me. Her Amazon Cake, Pumpkin Bread, and alternate glaze for Baoot Contessa’s Turkey Meatloaf put me squarely in her culinary corner. The moral is: all in all, finding a cook you trust is worth his/her weight in meatballs. That said …

8) Maybe avoid Sandra Lee (and other cooks who use too many prepared ingredients in their recipes).  Um ... Kwanzaa Cake. Nuff said.

9) Link baby, link. Cooking bloggers, in particular, are excellent sources for … yep, finding other excellent cooking bloggers. Once you find a chef/site you like, scroll through their link list. Odds are, someone just as awesome lies at the other of that URL.

10) Bank recipes. Find a recipe you like, but don’t have the ingredients on hand right that very minute? Start a Word file. Over time, you’ll amass dozens of dishes that caught your eye at one time or another, and it’ll make for easier rummaging down the line.

Have more ideas or suggestions for simplifying online recipe searches? The (comment) lines are open! We’re waiting for your call advice!

(Photo courtesy of Flickr.)

Every now and then, we get a question from someone just learning to cook, asking which dishes we would suggest for beginners. My first answer is usually Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce, served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with fried egg on top and spam guacamole. Always edible and frequently divine, it’s tough to mess up, being a no-cook dish with four or five key ingredients. Plus, people love people who make guacamole. If the last census is to be believed, guac is responsible for 30% of all pregnancies, second only to playing Barry White albums on repeat.

But this post isn’t about guacamole. (Fooled you!) It’s about other stuff, starting with the rest of the easy recipe list. After guac, it goes like this: refried beans, eggs, salsa, banana ice cream, chili, soup, and finally, the reason we’re all here today, roasted potatoes.

Practically effortless and more reliable than even a good bra (trust me, guys), roasted potatoes are an all-natural alternative to frozen fries, tots, and various ephemera. The high temperature and longer cooking time produces soft and tender insides with a crisp outer skin, just like nature and the cavemen who invented fire intended. Children and non-children alike love roasted potatoes, and the spuds are suitable for, really, any kind of meal. Serve them for breakfast, second breakfast, brunch, lunch, dunch, dinner, or as a midnight snack, making sure you turn the oven off before you hop into bed with your bounty.

For everyday roasting, I dig red potatoes, though russets (Idaho) and Yukon golds are also quite nice. But reds - velvety with a skin that caramelizes ever-so-slightly - reds are a treat on par with good magazines at the dentist’s office, or your professor canceling a final because his kid got a carrot stuck up his nose. (Note: This actually happened.)

This recipe for Roasted Red Potatoes is about as basic as it gets. You can add some chili powder, cayenne, or minced herbs for effect (rosemary is suggested here), but there’s no real need unless you’re feeling inspired. Though I’ve never had any leftovers, I presume they’d hold up when reheated, and could provide an excellent base for home fries.

To sum: easy, tasty, versatile, healthy, and cheap (which: forgot to mention). Maybe they should be #1 on that Beginners list.

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If these look like you’d have a bunch, then complete your easy meal with:

• Chicken and Mushroom Marsala
• Golden Shredded Brussels Sprouts
• Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble

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Roasted Red Potatoes
Serves 4


2 pounds (about 4 medium) red potatoes, scrubbed
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 tablespoon minced fresh rosemary (optional)

1) Set rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 400°F. Line a baking sheet with tin foil and spray with cooking spray.

2) Cut potatoes in half lengthwise. Cut each half in lengthwise again. Cut each quarter into slices, from 1/2-inch to 3/4-inch in width.


3) In a medium bowl, combine potatoes, olive oil, salt, pepper, and rosemary if using. Stir thoroughly to combine. Pour on to baking sheet in a single layer, making sure to spread potatoes out so they roast and don’t steam.

4) Cook 20 minutes. Stir potatoes. Cook an additional 15-20 minutes, until sides are browned. Remove and serve hot.

Approximate Calories, Fat, Fiber, Protein, and Price Per Serving
223 calories, 7 g fat, 3.9 g fiber, 4.3 g protein, $0.54

Calculations
2 pounds (about 4 medium) red potatoes: 653 calories, 0.9 g fat, 15.4 g fiber, 17.1 g protein, $1.94
2 tablespoons olive oil: 239 calories, 27 g fat, 0 g fiber, 0 g protein, $0.21
1 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt: negligible calories, fat, fiber, and protein, $0.01
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper: negligible calories, fat, fiber, and protein, $0.01
TOTAL: 892 calories, 27.9 g fat, 15.4 g fiber, 17.1 g protein, $2.17
PER SERVING (TOTAL/4): 223 calories, 7 g fat, 3.9 g fiber, 4.3 g protein, $0.54