Beets and Carrots

Now that you’re addicted to beet greens, what can you do with the round magenta roots that come with them?

I like to serve them with carrots. Both are sweet and earthy, and their colors - purple and orange - go great together.

Roasting brings out the sweetness in both these roots. In fact, if someone in your family thinks they don’t like beets, try serving them roasted. Many people prefer the texture over pickled or boiled.

Roast beets will last a few days in a covered container in the fridge, ready to be diced and tossed cold in a salad. They add color to a rice dish, and an earthy dimension to a vegetable medley. You can also heat them in a skillet with a little melted butter or olive oil for an instant side dish.

Once you’ve tasted roasted beets, you’ll love them as much as beet greens.

Roasted Beets and Carrots
3 medium beets (about 1 1/4 lbs with greens)
1 1/4 lbs carrots
1 tbsp olive oil (or a little less)

Trim greens from beets, leaving 1 inch stems attached. (Save greens for wilted greens.

Scrub the beets well, put them in a covered casserole, and roast at 425° until tender, about 1 hour depending on the size of the beets.

Scrub the carrots and cut into 3/4 inch slices. Toss in a shallow pan with olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Remove beets from oven. Roast carrots until tender, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, let the beets cool, then trim off the stems and slip off the peel. Cut each beet into 6 wedges.

Toss the beets and carrots together and roast another 10-15 minutes until beets are hot and carrots are very tender.

Serves 2-3.

Rice farming

I read an article in the New York Times magazine yesterday about a Louisiana rice farmer who converted 15 years ago to growing organic brown rice.

If you want to read an uplifting story about a farmer taking an earth-friendly approach to growing food, click here to read it.

In the days of non-organic farming, Kurt Unkel's land had no life in it. "It got to where you could plow 100 acres and you wouldn't find one earthworm," he told the New York Times. Now his ground is full of worms again.

You don't need to buy his Cajun rice. You can find organic brown rice at your local independent health food store, and you can cook it in your rice cooker or on the stove just like white rice (1 cup rice to 2 cups water - it will take longer than white rice).

There are many thousands of farmers working to provide you with healthy food. Support them with your food dollars.

Pesticide pollution

Fifteen midwestern towns and cities are suing a weedkiller manufacturer over drinking water contamination.

The weedkiller, Atrazine, is a hormone-disruptor. Studies show that it can turn male frogs into females.

It has been banned in Europe, but about 80 million pounds are used in the U.S. each year, mainly in cornfields, according to a report on Democracy Now.

The lawsuit was filed by towns and cities in the cornbelt states of Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and Iowa. They are concerned that the run-off from the cornfields will have harmful long-term effects on residents.

Last week I posted a list of fruit and vegetables that Environmental Working Group has found to be safe to consume even if not organic. These items might be safe to eat, but they are not good for the earth.

Eating organic is not just about keeping our bodies healthy. It’s also about keeping our communities healthy. The chemical pesticides and fertilizers used on non-organic crops get into the groundwater. They move through the ecosystem, doing damage like distorting the sexual characteristics of wildlife, or killing honeybees and other beneficial insects.

I wonder what long-term effect they have on the farmworkers who apply the chemicals and then harvest the produce. (Don't forget, we've only been using chemical fertilizers and pesticides since chemical weapons were banned after World War I. The weapons manufacturers needed to find other uses for their poisons, so chemical warfare in the vegetable patch began.)

This is another reason I eat organic. I don’t want to be responsible for any of these chemicals harming people or the earth.

Spring Cleaning

Spring is here, and with it the urge to open the windows and clean out the dust of winter.

You might be feeling the urge to spring clean your insides as well. There are many cleanses at the health food store.

Or you could eat dessert.

A simple bowl of yogurt drizzled with honey makes a great dessert and nourishes the good bacteria in your intestines so they can spring clean too.

For the health benefits, use live, plain, organic yogurt and raw honey.

All yogurt is made with live cultures, but most is then heat processed which destroys the beneficial cultures. Look for one with “contains active yogurt cultures” on the label. I use Trader Joe's European-style plain yogurt.

The fruit in flavored yogurt breaks down the cultures before you can eat them. Also, a 6-oz container of fruit yogurt has the equivalent of 7 tsp of sugar.

(If you like fruit with your yogurt, add it just before eating.)

All dairy products naturally contain hormones. The non-organic kinds contain the extra hormones pumped into cows to increase milk production. Most supermarkets now carry organic dairy products. Ignore the price. Think of the health benefits.

For this recipe / cleanse, you want a yogurt the consistency of pudding. If it’s too runny, put it in a coffee filter or cheesecloth-lined strainer over a bowl so the excess whey drains out. This might take an hour. You can eat it right away or store it in a covered container in the fridge.

Honey is a great source of nutrients (including flavanoids involved in cancer prevention and antioxidants that lower cholesterol), but most are destroyed by heat processing. I buy raw honey from Martinez Apiaries at the Hollywood Farmers Market. Your health food store (and maybe your supermarket) will stock raw honey. (Don't feed honey to children under the age of one.)

Honey does not have to be organic. (Can you believe I wrote that?) Bees are killed by pesticides, so they don’t bring chemicals back to the hive.

Adding raw honey to yogurt enhances the growth, activity and viability of the good bacteria in the yogurt, multiplying the benefits as well as enhancing the taste.

Spring Cleaning Dessert
thick plain live organic yogurt
raw honey

Drizzle honey over yogurt. Eat with a spoon.

Yum.

Safe Produce

Living green and eating organic is trendy, but I've been doing it for twenty years. It's the most life-supporting thing I can do (for me, the farm workers and the earth) and it's not easy. There are the logistics of buying and cooking organic produce while maintaining a busy schedule. I can do it because I've had a lot of practice, I live near the Hollywood Farmers Market, and my husband supports me in this endeavor.

For those of you with more finicky eaters in your families, here is the Environmental Working Group's 2009 Shoppers Guide to Pesticides, a concise look at the foods to avoid and those that are safe to eat. (Visit their site to download an iphone app of this list.)

They update the list annually based on mainstream agricultural practices.

Although it is always better to eat fresh fruit and vegetables rather than packaged foods, the following contain larger traces of pesticide residue than are considered safe. Avoid them in any form unless organic.

Eat only if organic:
apples
bell peppers
carrots
celery
cherries
grapes (imported)
kale
lettuce
nectarines
peaches
pears
strawberries


The following are considered by the Environmental Working Group to be safe to eat if non-organic. They have minimal to no pesticide residue. (Some of these surprise me.)

Okay to eat non-organic:
asparagus
avocados
broccoli
cabbage
eggplant
kiwi
mango
onions
papaya
pineapple
sweet corn
sweet peas
sweet potatoes
tomatoes
watermelon


(Source: Environmental Working Group)

Remember, eat food, not too much, mostly plants; and support local organic farmers whenever possible.

Stacks of Recipes

Larry returned from the Los Angeles Central Library the other day with an eclectic mix of cookbooks for me to peruse: two books from wine country and one from Australia, a guide to eating seasonally in New England, and a book of fire-hot recipes by a Harley-riding vegetarian.

You never know what you will find at your local library. Wandering the stacks, browsing titles, flipping pages -- it stretches the imagination and opens an array of possibilities. And you can borrow the books for free. Libraries are a true civic treasure.

(I became an even bigger fan of libraries post 9/11 when librarians stood up for our privacy in the face of the Patriot Act. All those “meek librarian” cliches had to be discarded then.)

When I lived in Montreal, I walked to the Fraser-Hickson Library on Sunday afternoons, strolling past the old Portuguese men playing bocha in the park in summer, clambering over snowbanks in winter.

Now I walk to the Pasadena Central Library on my lunch hour. It's a beautiful building from the 1920s. Carved into the stone above the front steps is a quote by California poet Mary Davies "Be made whole by books as by great spaces and the stars."

While its cookbook selection is not as extensive as that of the LA Central Library (which has 39,000 books on food and drink), it has kept me entertained and inspired for years.

There are the hippie granola books from the 70s, the ostentatious picture books of the 80s, and the growing commitment to organic and local in the 90s.

I relish the diversity as I haul them home to browse through in the corners of my day. (My Aunt Colleen and I are the only people I know who read cookbooks in bed.) I imagine what a recipe would taste like, or when I could serve it. I’ll try a couple of the recipes, noting the ones I like. When the three weeks are up, I drop them back at the library. No commitment. No expense.

This afternoon I’m going to try a recipe for whole wheat bran muffins with a little cayenne pepper added. That will surprise Larry when he comes home and asks me what's cooking.

Bean Basics

Do you have bags of beans lurking in your cupboards? It’s time to take the plunge and cook them. It’s okay if they’re old. Archaeologists have successfully sprouted beans found in the pyramids. Older beans are still live, they just take longer to cook.

Start by sorting the beans, discarding any small stones. Rinse them and put them in a pot with water to cover by two inches. The beans could expand to three times their volume as they cook, so use a large pot.

While the water is coming to a boil, throw in a chopped onion and carrot, a couple of cloves of garlic, a few sprigs of fresh parsley (or thyme or rosemary), and a bay leaf. These additions are optional but flavorful. You’ll be discarding them when the beans are cooked.

Leave the pot simmering on the stove while you go about your day. Check it every hour or so, adding boiling water from the kettle as needed to keep the beans covered. I have beans from last year’s harvest that cook in under two hours. Older beans can take six hours or more.

To tell if they’re cooked, fish one out and bite it. If you are going to use the beans in a salad, they should be slightly firm (although never crunchy). For a stew they can be softer. If you’re going to purée them for a bean loaf or hummus, they should mash between your tongue and the roof of your mouth.

Once the beans are cooked, drain them and discard the vegetables and herbs. You now have the basis for many wonderful meals.

Larry and I take bean salads to work most days (along with a green salad, it’s a nutritious lunch). After draining the beans, I toss them in vinegar, season them with salt and pepper, and leave them on the counter to cool. I then toss them with a vinaigrette and add chopped vegetables for crunch. Bean salad will last at least five days in the fridge, depending on the vegetables you add.

Or leave them plain, tossed with a little dressing so they don’t dry out. They’ll last a week in the fridge, easy to add to green salads or stir into cooked greens.

You can also store cooked beans in the freezer for up to six months, ready to use in soups and stews.

Celebrating St. Patrick's Day

As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, I’m reminiscing about the trip Larry and I made to Ireland last June. We visited a stone-age dolman in The Burren and an ancient stone circle in a farmer’s field near Killarney. We picnicked with puffins on Skellig Michael off the Ring of Kerry, and adopted a sheep in Moll’s Gap (he’s a feisty black lamb named Stephen Colbert). We listened to traditional music in pubs from Galway to Dublin, where we arrived for Bloomsday, the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses took place.

It was a magical ten days, not least because of the fresh, local food: apples in Galway, strawberries in County Kerry, homemade bread at Iskeroon near Caherdaniel, and cheese from the cows and sheep we saw grazing in the meadows. We topped it off with a fancy meal at Fallon & Byrne in Dublin.

(To get a sense of the new Irish cuisine, visit Cafe Paradiso, the restaurant run by Denis Cotter, whose cookbook is one of my favorites.)

The potato is no longer the staple of Irish cooking. I only ate them twice, and that was as potato soup in pubs.

So I thought of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with homemade bread and Dubliner cheese from Trader Joe’s.

But the pull of potatoes is too strong for this lass six generations out of Ireland -- I’ll be making potato soup with greens instead.

This recipe is adapted from one in The New Laurel’s Kitchen cookbook. When I first made it years ago, I scrawled in the margin “best use of kale ever.” I’ll use kohlrabi greens; any green will do.

I have two cherimoyas ripening on the kitchen counter. If they’re ready in time, I will make them into creme brulée for dessert. The eggs will up the protein content of the meal, and the locally-grown organic cherimoyas will be a nod to the locally-based and innovative Irish cuisine.

Kale-Potato Soup
2 leeks, white part and a little green, slice lengthwise and clean thoroughly before chopping
1 tbsp butter
1 clove garlic, peeled
4 potatoes (about 3/4 lb), peeled and diced
1 bunch kale, stemmed and chopped
5 cups hot water or stock
salt and pepper to taste

Sauté leeks gently in butter until soft. Add garlic about halfway through, and mash with a fork when soft. Add the potatoes and 2 cups water or stock. Simmer, covered, until very soft. Meanwhile, steam the greens. Purée half the potatoes with the remaining 3 cups water or stock. Return to pan along with the greens. Season to taste. If the soup is too thick, add extra water. Makes about 6 cups.

Food Inc.

Saturday morning, Joy and I watched one of our neighbor’s …er… let’s say ‘free range’ hens lay an egg on top of a garden shed we look down on from our kitchen window.

In the evening, we watched a Montreal Canadiens hockey game, which is part of my penance for moving her from Canada to the U.S. for marital purposes. Joy often retires early on Saturday, especially if her team has won. After she goes to bed, I watch action-adventure movies that she can't stomach. She can’t watch violence of any kind… hmm, check that… she can’t watch violence that doesn’t take place on frozen water.

So this night I watched a Netflixed- documentary called “Food, Inc.” All joking aside, I knew there was no way Joy could watch the sections involving slaughterhouses and meat packing. I've read “Fast Food Nation” and Michael Pollan and knew what to expect, and I still found this film disturbing.

The scenes of the factory chicken farms, in which chickens don’t even see daylight, stood in contrast to our neighbor’s wacky hen who laid her egg in the open air.

But what really affected me about the documentary were the scenes about Monsanto and how their high-powered attorneys and strong-armed investigators harassed and intimidated a 75 year-old seed cleaner named Moe Parr. Moe had one of the last remaining seed cleaning machines that allowed farmers to save and re-plant seeds from their own crops - a practice as old as farming itself.

The extent to which Monsanto has wielded wealth, power and influence in the highest branches of our government (and worse) Supreme Court just sickened me. To my surprise, I found myself crying by the end of the film. It wasn’t so much out of sadness, but out of sheer outrage and frustration at how money and power can lead to such devastation of our planet’s eco-system.

This documentary is important. It may not make you cry, but it’s guaranteed to enrage you. It will also support everything that my wife has been saying in this blog. You can’t fight Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland by yourself, but you can vote with your food purchases, and you can educate yourself, and you can add one more voice of opposition to the insanity and destructiveness of our corporately-run food supply system.

Screw them, I say. Let us continue to lay eggs and plant seeds and place the laws of nature above the laws of man.

Washing Greens

Sometimes it just feels like too much work to wash a lettuce. That’s why pre-packaged washed mixed greens and lettuces fly off the shelves at the supermarkets. They’re not bad for you, but they are expensive for what you get.

Larry and I take salads to work most days, and, believe me, I don’t enjoy washing lettuce at 6 a.m.

I also don’t enjoy over-paying for food. And I find those bags of mixed greens get slimy more quickly than I expect.

My solution is to buy lettuce and pre-wash it myself.

I separate the leaves, wash them well in a sink of cold water, and spin them in the salad spinner. I wrap a bunch of leaves in a paper towel and put them in a plastic bag which I then fasten with a clothespin and put in the crisper drawer of the fridge. Don’t cram it in or the leaves will bruise and wilt.

Greens last more than a week this way, and when I’m ready to make a salad or cook some wilted greens, I just pull what I need out of the bag.

This works with spinach, chard, pretty much all greens. I wouldn’t try to keep the delicate ones for a full week, but you should be able to prepare 4-5 days worth of greens at once (get the family to help), and thus make preparing meals much easier.

The Taste of Food

I went to the Staples Center last week to cheer the Montreal Canadiens to victory over the Los Angeles Kings.

Larry got the tickets for Valentine's Day, and they were premier seats on a tier with higher-quality food than the average arena fare.

I ordered a veggie burger. It came on a whole wheat bun. I was impressed until I tasted it.

It was sweet. As in sugary. I have never eaten such a sweet veggie burger in my life. The fries were very salty. Thank goodness for the bitter Sam Adams to balance out the flavors.

Of course, sweet and salty are what I should have expected. Most of the food served to the public riffs on those two flavors. It’s why I eat at home - more diversity of taste.

In the world of cooking there are four primary tastes: sweet, salty, bitter and sour. And a fifth taste described as umami. It’s difficult to define, a savory flavor that gives dry-aged steak, lobster, shiitake mushrooms, soy sauce, parmesan or gruyere that certain something. Dishes that are balanced with an umami component seem to have an extra dimension of flavor.

The veggie burger and fries at the Staples Center did not have umami.

Salt and sugar are the flavors people crave. And in America, the volume is turned way up on what we enjoy: rock music at hockey games, salt in the fries, probably sugar in the soda but I managed to avoid that. We not only supersize the portions, we supersize the taste.

Sweet is a natural human addiction. Breast milk, our first food, is sweet. Herballist Susun Weed says that the plants that nourish us and that we should eat more of taste sweet, whereas the medicinal plants that we should eat less of taste bitter. Of course, sweet greens are different in intensity to the sweet taste that the flavor wizards have created for us in this era of chemical food.

I read an article in The New Yorker (Nov. 23, 2009) about the people who create flavorings for processed foods. They sounded like lovely people, but they were chemically obsessed. They stood in a Riverside, CA, citrus grove and tried to determine which of their laboratory chemicals would replicate the smell of the fresh fruit.

Why not just eat the fresh fruit? The answer is that the food manufacturers make more money selling us chemical-derived food than real food.

And as long as we are addicted to salty and sweet, we will continue to fill their coffers.

Simple Salad Dressings

Larry and I enjoyed the first lettuce from our garden on Sunday, tossed with Stilton and walnuts, dressed with red wine vinegar and olive oil.

It was simple. It was great.

I encourage you to discard the commercial salad dressings in your fridge (read the ingredients - not food) and instead make your own with pantry staples.

Commercial salad dressings are made to travel and store well, so they contain emulsifiers, preservatives and unhealthy oils. If you are using non-fat or low-fat salad dressing, check out the sugar content. Sugar almost always replaces fat in prepared foods.

Many nutrients are better absorbed with fat, so instead of avoiding oils, choose healthy ones. Any shelf-stable vegetable oil is bad for you. It is hydrogenated, meaning the fat molecule is hooked to a hydrogen molecule to keep it from going rancid. Unfortunately, this means the fat molecule cannot attach to a protein molecule in your body to create new cells. It just sits inertly on your hips. (These oils can also contain those dreaded trans-fats.) Don’t put hydrogenated vegetable oils in your mouth.

Buy cold-pressed organic oils at the health food store. Refrigerate them after opening. You can use nut oils and seed oils in your salad dressing. You can also use olive oil, which is naturally shelf-stable and has no trans-fats. Just remember it solidifies in the fridge, so your salad dressing will too. Give it ten minutes or so to warm up at room temperature before using.

I use organic canola oil, formerly known as rapeseed (you can see why they changed the name - a lot is grown in Canada, hence can-ola). Only get canola that is organically grown, otherwise it’s probably genetically modified.

The basic formula for salad dressing is one part vinegar to three parts oil. Vary the oils and vinegar depending on your mood, alter the proportion depending on your taste (and the seasonings you use).

The recipes below will last for weeks in a jar in the fridge. Delegate a family member to be the dressing chef. Anyone who can pour, measure and shake can do it.

Vinaigrette
1/4 tsp dry mustard
1/8 tsp black pepper
3/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
3/4 cup olive oil or canola oil

Combine the spices and vinegar in a jar and shake well. Add oil and shake until well combined. Makes about 1 cup.

Honey Balsamic Dressing
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tsp whole grain mustard
2 tsp honey
10 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Stir mustard and honey into vinegar until dissolved. Whisk in oil. Season to taste. Makes about 3/4 cup. This is a mild dressing that almost everyone enjoys. Add more vinegar if you want more bite.


Lemon Rosemary Dressing
1 sprig rosemary
1 small clove garlic
lemon rind 1” x 1/2”
3/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup lemon juice

Shake together. Store in fridge for up to a week. Makes about 1 cup. This is also good over steamed vegetables or in a bean salad.

What’s a guy got to do to get a pizza around here?

Welcome to the first sporadic guest blog from the husband. I’m not a vegetarian, and even after years of marriage, I’m still intimidated by many of the bizarre and protuberant plants that muscled their way into our refrigerator and forced my beer to migrate to the basement.

My mother worked in a factory when she cooked for our family in the 1960s. This was in Pennsylvania, where we were surrounded by farms and fruit stands, but all our meals came from cans. As a kid, I identified with the Leave it to Beaver episode in which June and Ward demanded that The Beaver eat Brussels sprouts. He balked, and hid them in his shirt pocket instead.

My childhood had an unlimited supply of Coke, and weekly deliveries of potato chips and pretzels from the Charles Chips delivery van. If you think I’m exaggerating, Google “Charles Chips Home Delivery.” Ah, those were the days.

When I first dated Joy, she lived in exotic Montreal and served me dinners of “Roasted Root Vegetables” on cold snowy nights. More turnips, dear? Yes, please! (Secretly, I contemplated employing Beaver’s shirt pocket tactic.)

Lucky for us, Joy also drank beer– mostly when watching hockey games. And even though she didn’t eat junk food, I noticed that she didn’t judge me if I did. Although she didn’t eat meat, she never objected when I did.

Through the years, I’ve learned to tame the food cravings. My brain whispers to me that I’m quite fond of sugar, salt, carbohydrates, and cheese. I still succumb to temptation, and also pay the piper on the bathroom scales. But as the quality of my diet increases, I see more room for a middle ground.

But Joy’s blog comes from years of taking the nutritional high road. I’m amazed at the variety of vegetarian recipes that she has tackled, and I’ve learned that they’re based on some basic kitchen practices. It all seems so simple when you see it on a daily basis, but I also see the work and dedication that goes into this lifestyle.

I still have my own cupboard filled with carbs and sweets and pizza delivery menus. They’re my “break glass in case of emergency” menus. I find, however, that I use them less and less these days , because I’m finally starting to put the Brussels sprouts in my mouth instead of my pocket.

Asparagus for breakfast

One of my favorite breakfasts in the spring is asparagus topped with a fried egg.

I trim the bottoms off the asparagus, wash it well, and then cook it in a small amount of water in a covered pan, just until tender.

I fry the egg in butter.

Then I put the asparagus on a plate, squirt a little lemon juice, put the egg on top, salt, pepper and a little grated parmesan.

Good for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

I Love Greens

There was a great selection of greens at the Hollywood Farmers Market this week.

Yes there was lettuce and mesclun, but when I say greens, I mean the kind you cook.

There was black kale, purple kale and green kale, mustard greens, collard greens, arugula, green chard and rainbow chard, three kinds of spinach. There were the greens that come attached to roots: turnip greens, beet greens, kohlrabi greens.

Greens are nutritional powerhouses, and they are easy to cook and serve to even the finickiest eaters - they’re the most raved-about dish when I have friends over.

How healthy are they? There is less cancer in countries where more greens are eaten. People who eat them regularly have almost half the risk of macular degeneration. They help regulate blood pressure, and are a good source of calcium (one cup cooked collard greens contains half the RDA of calcium, one cup turnip or dandelion greens contains more calcium than a half cup skim milk) as well as other essential nutrients.

To release these beneficial compounds, greens must be cooked with some healthy fat. Historically this has been bacon. I choose olive oil.

When you’re starting to experiment with greens, use chard as a base because it’s sweet and breaks down easily. Then add a bunch of something new. If you buy greens with roots attached, cut them off and store them separately.

Wash two bunches of greens well and chop them coarsely. Sauté an onion in olive oil. When it’s soft and fragrant, add a little chopped garlic and maybe a sprinkle of dried chile flakes. Stir well and then add the greens, with water drops still clinging to them. The greens will reduce as they cook. (Larry and I can eat two bunches at a sitting.) Cover with a lid and let cook over medium-low heat. Check in a few minutes, stir well. They’re done when they’re the consistency you like. I like them soft and dark green. Taste them and add salt and pepper and maybe a splash of balsamic vinegar.

Serve them hot or at room temperature. They’re a good side dish with any meal. They’re great with potatoes, or with a fried egg on top. Or stir them into cooked rice or pasta. (They make a great risotto.) Serve them on bruschetta topped with some shaved parmesan. The possibilities are endless.