Day 59 - Can it Core a Apple??

I'm a fan of pop culture; specifically the television sitcom genre. Even more so, I love obscure lines from some of these shows.

One line in particular, from one of my favorites, always comes to mind when I am in the the process of coring apples. It comes from the Honeymooners. Ralph and Norton of course have another big idea; this time it entails promoting a kitchen gadget on live TV. It's a funny skit of course, but the line I'm referring to stands out because of the grammatical error: "Can it core a apple?" I have never figured out whether or not:

the writers meant to write it incorrectly this way
or
this is how people spoke back then

So I'm about to make some baked apples for dessert and all I can hear in my head is this line while I start to core a apple. Take a look at the clip (about 4:00 minutes in if you're not a big fan). It still makes me laugh.

Just in case you're wondering about how I make baked apples (by far the simplest thing in the world to make), here's the recipe...

Ingredients
Apples, cored of course - almost any variety. I used a few organic Fuji that were sitting around longer than I would have liked.
Ground Cinnamon
Organic Blue Agave Nectar Sweetener
Plain Greek Yogurt

Place cored apples (do not peel) in an oven safe dish and cover with foil.
Place in preheated 450 degree oven for about 30 minutes or until apples are soft and tender
Uncover apples and pour the agave nectar over apples lightly (it's a very sweet sweetener) and sprinkle with cinnamon.
DO NOT RE-COVER and place back in oven until apples have darken a bit. Feel free to baste with drippings once a while.
They're done when you think they look good.
Cool just a bit if you like.
Serve by spooning a dollop of yogurt on top of apples. Pour pan juices over yogurt and eat!
YUM!

Day 57 - There are ALWAYS alternatives...really

My youngest teen offered to boil some eggs for me this morning. It's probably my favorite protein right now due to the fact that I have lost some of my desire to eat meat most days. I may have mentioned in an earlier post that my youngest also decided to change her eating habits and has adopted the life of a pescetarian. So this boiled egg ritual has become what we bond over for some strange reason (in addition to roasted veggies).

I declined her offer this morning because I was in the process of finishing off a peanut butter and jelly sandwich...yep that's right a good ole fashioned PB&J sammich! For some of you familiar with the food path/journey I'm taking, a red flag may register because typically, the traditional version of this all-time favorite classic is usually laden with ingredients that include unnecessary amounts of sugar, salt, preservatives and of course, flour, but here is my natural, wholesome, minimally processed version:

Peanut Butter - Freshly ground unsalted peanuts

Whole Foods 365 Apricot Spread

2 slices of toasted Ezekiel Bread (pictured above)

Very simple, very good-for-you and believe it or not, very delicious.

And speaking of delicious...I must make a confession. My palate has changed quite a bit and I realize that what is delicious to me now, is no longer delicious to the fans of my former food preparation practices and vices. I'll take time to address this at a later date as I ponder on it a bit more.

Day 55 - The MSG Conspiracy Fully Exposed

Disclaimer - I am not a scientist. I am however a pissed-off blogger.

Warning!- This post contains information that will either make you mad at the food industry OR mad at me for telling you the real deal. I prefer the former.

I remember being told when I was a kid, a very very long long time ago, that MSG was BAD. It was all over the news and the folks who made Accent were ripped to shreds and "branded" as the big bad wolf. We, the so-called educated consumers started yelling "YO! NO MSG Aight!!" over the counter at the corner Chinese spot and were ecstatic to see the higher end Chinese joint menus, tout the fact that they didn't use MSG.
Eventually we became a little lackadaisical and just assumed MSG disappeared off the face of the earth. We couldn't have been more wrong. Unfortunately, when I run around screaming "there's crap in everything we eat!", I couldn't be more disappointingly right.
The final frontier of my food selection challenges has been to really and truly decipher food labels. I have totally abandoned the more standardized nutritional information stats in lieu of the more important information...the freakin' ingredients! Common sense tells me, that it doesn't matter what the caloric, fat, fiber, et al grams list entails, if the ingredients list is 25+ items long for something as simple as tomato sauce.
I digress...back to the MSG conspiracy...
MSG is still around, but it's being dished out to us under the radar, in the form of ingredients that you would never in your life believe are remotely associated with it.
I'm not going to take up space here in my blog to hash over the extremely long list of aliases for MSG. Instead, I direct you to an extremely comprehensive website dedicated to the truth about MSG.
As a teaser, here is a short list of familiar products that contain MSG. Continue to indulge at your own risk...
Lawry's Seasoned Salt
Goya Sazon
Any type of sausage product
Soy Sauce
Lipton Onion Soup mix
Low Fat or Non-fat Milk (COME ON!!!! Are you kidding me??)
Any food with the term "Natural Flavors"

So basically the reality is that you should avoid leaving your house and if you absolutely must venture out, pack your bags with something you made yourself...GEESH! Oh yeah and don't eat at anyone else's house unless they're well versed on the MSG conspiracy..ok?

Day 50 - All Brown Rice is (are?) not Created Equal

Am I typically a patient person?? Well that depends on whether I'm in a hurry or not. Hahaaaaa!

The beauty in cooking with only whole foods is the time, love and care it takes to create a wonderful meal from scratch. The satisfaction I feel in knowing exactly what I'm consuming is also reassuring. However...there are those days when I get home and need to throw a meal together in a matter of minutes. Usually this would lead me to pull some prepared food concoction in my cupboard or freezer that's usually loaded with additives, sugars and a plethora (I love this word) of processed ingredients. Now I know better, and instead I turn the oven up really high to 400 or so, and start chopping up some fresh veggies that I'll coat with a bit of olive oil, kosher salt, and spices and throw the whole lot in for about 20 min. Maybe while those are roasting, I'll pop some fresh fish on a hot grill pan as well.

While starch is not always a necessity, I do crave brown rice every now and then, but while I'm cooking everything else, I spend most of this time hemmin' and hawin' about whether I even want the damned rice. By the time the veggies and fish are almost done, it's too late to get the rice going and unfortunately brown rice usually takes 45 minutes to cook...or so I thought.

Because of my new found mistrust of the food industry, I was initially skeptical of Success Boil-in-Bag Whole Grain Brown Rice which only takes 10 minutes to make. Ingredient: Precooked Parboiled Whole Grain Brown Rice (Long Grain)

The mere term "boil-in-bag" was frowned upon in my house as a kid. My mother being from Charleston SC, would NEVAH-EVAH, I mean under no circumstances known to mankind, buy a "boil-in-bag" rice product but then again, she also would never eat brown rice either. So I'm basically dishonoring my geechee ancestors and family on both fronts, just by endorsing this product anyway.

But here's what I found out. The nutritional benefit of this particular brand/process is actually a bit more favorable than regular brown rice...I still don't believe it. And by a "bit more favorable" I mean that it contains one more gram of fiber...that's it; nothing to get over-excited about of course. I suspect that this has something to do with the par-boiling process. I would like to care enough to delve deeper, but I'm afraid of what I'll discover. So for now ignorance is bliss.

Feel free however to dash my hopes!

Recipe of the Month - Roasted Eggplant Stew

My first major home cooked dish, after my DIY oven repair project...incident...OK accident, was this delicious ratatouille-esque dish that still has my mouth watering. I was inspired by a recent trip to this fabu market nearby called Corrado's that had some of the most amazing produce I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot). For this recipe, I used an eggplant that I think was a Japanese variety and I was so taken by its beauty that I just grabbed it!

Here's a picture of the gorgeous aubergine..
I only bought one (just ran to the fridge to make sure) and I am terribly sad about that. It was absolutely lovely and not bitter at all



Ingredients:
1 Eggplant (I'm sure any variety will do) cut in half length-wise
1/4 white onion chopped
3-4 cloves garlic chopped
1/4 teas dried oregano
1/2 small green hot pepper seeds removed

5 plum tomatoes chopped

kosher or sea salt to taste
squeeze of lemon
Cooked brown rice - made with vegetable stock, onions, garlic, thyme and a few drops of toasted sesame oil.
Goat Cheese as garnish (vegans can leave this out of course)

What to do:
Pre-heat oven to 425
Salt cut side of eggplant and place in oiled glass dish, flesh side down
Place in oven and roast until tender. Remove from oven and roughly chop into large pieces.

When eggplant is almost finished roasting, saute onions, garlic, peppers, and oregano until soft. Add tomatoes and chopped eggplant (juices and all).
Simmer until tomatoes are just cooked at bit.
Add salt and squeeze of lemon to taste.

Serve over the cooked brown rice and top with a small spoon of goat cheese (or plain non-fat yogurt).

OMG! This is a scrumptious dish! Please make this somebody and tell me how it turns out.

Day 39 - The Not-So-Last Temptation...

Ask anyone who's been on a diet about the honeymoon stage. It's the stage where you're sticking to the plan; you're in total and complete love with the plan. Your willpower is strong and you tend to make speeches about the merits of the plan and how well you're doing together.

I was on my honeymoon for an entire month, but now...the honeymoon is over. Now I'm married to the plan and although I know it's good for me in the long run, my eyes are starting to wander.

Last month, I resisted temptation(s) without much of a problem. I was able to handle the restaurant challenges and I could bypass my regular naughty haunts with ease, but recently I ran into a problem with a botched oven repair project of mine (long story) that left me with only my microwave as a cooking tool for almost two weeks. If I lived alone, maybe I could have survived on salad for dinner every night, but (here's where she blames it on the kids folks) I have the two teens that insisted on ordering take out every night for dinner.

When you start to slide even a tiny bit (in my case that meant eating things that I didn't personally prepare or wasn't entirely privy to the ingredients), the door to bigger temptations, opens just a bit wider. Through this door, just taunting me with their utter deliciousness were the following:

• Cheddar and Sour Cream Flavored Wise Ridgies Potato Chips
• IKEA Cinnamon Buns

I'll admit it. The chips were my fault. I bought them for my daughter's (you can always blame the kids) little gathering of friends coming over to work on a school project. I figured I'd be out of the house while they devoured all four bags and that upon my return, they'd all be gone (the chips and the company). When I did return however, there were three large bags left unopened on my kitchen counter. I should have sent the unopened bags home with the departing visitors but I had a mental block darnit! And I think I was a bit cocky; thinking that I wouldn't be tempted to eat them. That was yesterday...I want those chips! I want those chips so bad I could go in that kitchen right now and eat an entire bag all by myself. I'm dying here people!


Exposing myself to the IKEA cinnamon buns wasn't entirely my fault. I went shopping for a bookcase yesterday and my friends drove me to that God forsaken place. I should have had breakfast beforehand, but instead all I had was a banana; thinking that we would have brunch before we hit the stores. That plan was blown, but thank goodness one of my friends had an orange in her bag so I wasn't starving by the time we reached the IKEA restaurant that surprisingly had quite a few healthy whole food choices. There was no sign of those luscious cinnamon buns anywhere (oddly enough) and I almost thought I was going to escape the store without a hitch...until I left the checkout...OH GOD THE SMELL OF THE CINNAMON BUNS PEOPLE!!! It just hits you! KAPOW! My enabler...ooops I mean my friend, asked if I wanted to split one with her. I walked as if in a trance directly over to the food section and was just about to say yes. Then I stopped. I stopped and said "no." We all made a bee line for the door and left.


So you're probably wondering about my strategy for resisting temptation this time around. The strategy is simple, but remembering to use what I know is what makes it hard to execute. The strategy is to think about the ingredients; not the calories or fat grams or carbs, but just simply the ingredients. I knew right away that the cinnamon buns consisted of white flour, white sugar and yeast; right away three items I wanted to avoid. And silly me, I figured the chips were fried in corn, cottonseed or canola oil (ALL BAD!!), but little did I realize how long the ingredient list would actually pan out to be once I read it on the bag. Soooo, I just have to keep reminding myself about what's at stake here...good health and peace of mind. Eating whole, minimally processed foods will get me both as long as I continue to educate myself and stay alert. Avoidance is not the answer because it's not realistic. There is bad shit everywhere!


Just in case you're wondering about the complete ingredient lists for both of these temptations, click on the images below.
Note: I tried for the life of me to find the real bona fide ingredients list for the Ikea Cinnamon Buns, but I couldn't find them anywhere. I guess I should have bought them after all. All in the name of research of course. Instead I link to a Swedish recipe I found.