I Like Feeling Productive!

I feel so fortunate to be living in Northern California with farmers' markets close by, overflowing with fabulous local produce. I usually go to the Temescal Market on Sunday morning because I like the low-key atmosphere, the long lines for a personally brewed cup of organic coffee (I rarely stand in it but I like seeing it), and lots of parking since it's in the DMV lot. I arrive in my Prius and load up my reusable bags and trot over to my favorite vendors.

Spring is on the way and I can tell. Winter squashes are no longer the mainstay and artichokes, asparagus, and butter lettuces are in abundance. I am almost always seduced by the allure of fresh food at the market. I therefore overbuy. To avoid my husband's sarcastic comments, I then spend Sunday cooking "for the week." Today I listened to James Brown, Mariza, and Angelique Kidjo, and cut up beautiful blood oranges, red onion, and fennel (great with a little olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper to be eaten alone or mixed with baby lettuces). I then moved on to lovely red chard, starting with my standard approach: some minced garlic cooked for a couple of minutes in olive oil ready for the cleaned chard stripped from the chunky stem. I usually throw in a handful of raisins, some hot pepper flakes, salt, and pepper, and a hearty lemon squeeze. So delicious. And so simple.

On to an Aisan noodle dish--adapted from Everyday Cooking on PBS. My niece, Margot Olshan, is a regular chef so I watch every chance I can. I also go to her restaurant--Margot Cafe and Wine Bar in Stamford, CT-- every chance I can. Really delicious!! The noodle dish is so easy and good cold (I'm thinking lunch tomorrow): soba noodles for 7-8 minutes in boiling salted water, remove to a bowl, and use the same boiling water for 6-8 ounces of cut green beans for 7 minutes. Remove to the bowl. Add some diced silken tofu, a couple of minced green onions, and a quick sauce of 3 tablespoons of soy sauce, 2 tsp. of sesame oil, a pinch or so of sugar, and 2 tbsp fresh lime juice. If I have any fresh cilantro, I throw that in, too. Really great after a night in the fridge. Meanwhile, I've been cleaning and cutting cauliflower (the white, orange, and green "spacemen" types), turnips, carrots, sweet potatoes, brussel sprouts, red and orange beets. So easy. Mix with some olive oil, thyme, salt & pepper and roast in a hot oven for 45 minutes. Roasted veggies are good as a side dish, as a main dish, or in salads during the week.

In the middle of the afternoon, I took off for a charitable event--a tasting of fabulous desserts to raise money for Rubicon Programs, who've helped over 1000 people find jobs. My host is writing a novel, in fact two at once. I became depressed because I am not as disciplined and don't feel I've done anything significant lately. But I got back , hit the kitchen, and felt productive again. Forgot to mention the delicious curried cream of broccoli soup from Jane Brody's Good Food Cook Book, one of my faves.

Work. Yes. A good feeling. Yes. Ready for the week. Yes. Nutritious and tasty. Yes.

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Even though I had read Michael Pollan's lead-up article to this book in the New Yorker and his other books, I found this one a page turner--fun to read and truly informative.

Already oft-quoted, the first words of the book summarize his extensive research and beliefs about food: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." In other words, don't eat anything that has not traditionally been called food (recognizable by our grandmothers as food), which cuts out most processed concoctions in fast-food chains and much on grocery store shelves.

Eat plants because we need the complex interactions of the nutrients they contain. Pollan points out that there's no way to figure out which traces of what affect the whole nutritional value of what we need to eat. Singling out one vitamin, for example, and taking supplements of it is far, far inferior and may be quite deleterious to our health because we miss out on all the other interactions among minterals and vitamins in our food that we need to be healthy. Bottom-line: we just don't know enough yet so don't mess with the foods that have kept people healthy for centuries. I recognize this argument as one put forth by the scientists involved in the Washington Heights-Inwood-Columbia Aging project. After analyzing the diets of the participants, they concluded that those who had consumed a "Mediterranean Diet" (another way of saying "eat plants") had a dramatically lower risk of Alzheimer's. They hypothesized that one reason was because of the complex interactions of the many, many trace nutrients in plants

We've all been through the butter-margarine as engineered butter debate from the 50s on. And we finally now know that margarine is terrible for us, butter not so much (if we use it with a very light hand). There are many other examples of this kind of food engineering that moves beyond not making sense into really bad stuff.

I never really understood the arguments against genetically modified food until I read this book. I now realize that going for the most calories per acre cuts out the zillion varieties of fruits and vegetables that we have enjoyed--and all the complex mixture of nutients in that vast array. I now shop frequently at my local Farmers' Market and I have enjoyed the aesthetics and the taste of more variety. For example, have you seen those red and green cauliflowers sitting beside the omnipresent white ones? The green ones look like space helmets or part of an animation project. I'm discovering new tastes and new recipes and enjoying myself immensely in the process.

The "not too much" food is especially relevant to Americans who have a huge love of quantity. It's high time we copied the French on this one: quality trumps quantity every time.

I hope this book stays on the bestseller list forever. We all need to be aware of what we've done to our food supply and take steps to make meaningful and lasting changes.