Category: Food

Compromising with carbs

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Chapati bread, four parts whole wheat to one part soy flour

We’ve known it for years, but a major new study has confirmed the evidence that carbs will make you fat, and fats won’t hurt you. Below is a link to the New York Times story about this study:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/health/low-carb-vs-low-fat-diet.html

In my own experience with dieting, I certainly have found this to be true. I am five feet 10. I have never weighed more than 165 pounds, but 165 pounds is way overweight for me. I’m an ectomorph with slender bones. My ideal weight as a younger man was about 148, with some muscle-mass maintained in a gym. Without any gym-maintained muscle mass, my ideal weight is closer to 145 or even a few pounds lower. I judge my ideal weight as the weight at which I look trim and at which my waist is a sensible 32 inches.

Just over a year ago, I had gotten close to 165 pounds, partly because I had expended a lot of effort in learning to make decent sourdough bread. Bread is my downfall. It is my favorite food. I was a picky eater as a child, and without bread I probably would have dried up and blown away.

But here’s the problem: How can we keep bread in our lives but keep carbs down?

Lately I have been experimenting with flat breads. Oven-baked breads, whether risen with yeast or with a sourdough culture, just won’t rise if the dough is heavy. It’s difficult to make good bread even with 100 percent whole wheat, because it’s too heavy. But flat breads are a whole different thing. Flat breads don’t require a bubbly dough. Rather, the dough is rolled thin before it’s baked so that the steam during baking causes the bread to balloon up with one big steam bubble in the middle. The bread sinks as it cools, but it’s very tender. Indian chapati bread is the classic version of this. It’s baked not in an oven, but on a griddle or in a skillet.

It’s very, very easy to make delicious chapati bread from 100 percent whole wheat flour. But it’s also possible to mix in low-carb flours such as soy flour and still end up with great-tasting, tender bread. I’ve been able to make good chapati bread with two parts whole wheat flour to one part soy flour.

However, if you’re not experienced with chapati bread, I’d recommend finding a recipe on the Internet and figuring out the technique. Once you understand how to roll the dough to the right thickness and get it to puff up in a hot skillet, you’re ready to try lower-carb versions.

I’d recommend starting with a ratio of about 5 parts organic whole wheat flour to 1 part soy flour. If the results are good, then try a ratio of 4-1, then 3-1, and then even 2-1. Notice how the soy flour changes the texture of bread. It’s up to you to find the ideal ratio.

The addition of soy flour to whole wheat flour not only increases the protein and lowers the carbs, it also reduces the glycemic index of the bread.

For a year now, I have been able to keep my weight below 147 pounds. To lose weight, I have to ruthlessly cut out carbs. But maintaining a good weight is much easier. It’s all about figuring out what your own limits are with carbs. It’s also about watching the scales and adjusting your weight when you’re only two pounds over, rather than 20. I hope I never have to lose 20 pounds again.

Peanut butter: a cream substitute

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Several times recently I’ve written about quick pasta dishes based on garden vegetables and a sauce made of cream heated in a skillet until it thickens. There’s also a vegan and no-cholesterol alternative: peanut butter sauce.

To make the peanut butter sauce, gradually add water to peanut butter in a bowl, and stir it in. When you’ve stirred enough and added enough water, it will make a creamy sauce. Make your peanut butter sauce fairly thick if you’re using watery vegetables like tomatoes. Heat the sauce in the skillet with the other stuff.

Cashews or walnuts will add a nice crunch. Peanuts, remember, are legumes, not nuts. So the mixture of nut and legume rounds out the amino acids for maximum protein. I always use organic whole wheat pasta. The combination of grain, legume, and nuts is the vegan ideal for maximizing the protein from vegan sources.

Peanuts and tomatoes also are very good friends. Try thickening a fresh tomato soup with some peanut sauce, for example.

The garden is still cranking out vast quantities of tomatoes, though they soon will fade, along with summer.

More garden pasta

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It’s spooky how much tomatoes like cream. This is linguini with fresh tomatoes in a creamy parmesan sauce.

Flash-sautée the tomatoes in a hot skillet (but not hot enough to smoke). Cook the tomatoes for only one to two minutes, just until they’re hot. Put them in a bowl and set them aside. Add some butter to the same skillet. Add cream, salt, pepper, and about a teaspoon of vinegar. Boil gently and stir with a whisk until the sauce thickens. Add grated parmesan and stir with the whisk until the parmesan is melted into the sauce. Add the cooked pasta and the tomatoes and toss it in the skillet until the pasta is covered with the sauce.

I did not peel the tomatoes. The skins curl up when the tomatoes are heated. I skinned the tomatoes at the table, as though I was peeling shrimp.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do with all the tomatoes. I ought be in the garden right now picking yet more more of them instead of sitting here in front of the computer.

Next surplus: tomatoes

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For the new gardener, just getting things to grow is a triumph. But an art of gardening that must take a lifetime to refine is stretching out the seasons. That is, not only does one want the earliest possible fresh food in the spring and the latest possible fresh food in the fall, one also wants to stretch out (say) the tomato season for as long as possible, instead of having all the tomatoes come ripe at once.

If the object is canning and freezing, then having everything come ripe at once is not a big deal. But, for a kitchen garden, it’s a different matter.

The abbey tries to stick to old-fashioned ways when the garden is in. If it’s not in the garden, you don’t eat it. And if it’s in the garden, you eat it. In the spring, if the garden is going well, I pretty much stop buying produce except for things like garlic and bananas. In the early spring, we ate so much lettuce that it’s a wonder our hair didn’t turn green. By the time the squash crush arrived, the lettuce was gone. The tomatoes came a couple of weeks behind the squash. Soon there will be corn, though I’ll have to fight the raccoons for it, and the raccoons will almost certainly win.

I had pasta two nights in a row. Tonight’s linguini was made with fresh tomatoes. There’s a lot more where that came from. Maybe the tomatoes will turn my hair red.

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Squash again (and again, and again … )

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A couple of days ago, I sent a friend home with about eight pounds of squash and other garden vegetables (which he thoughtfully picked for himself in the brutal heat). He has been reporting on his use of the squash, and he made a great observation. That was that onions in his squash casserole was a kind of cliché. His squash casserole was very good, he said, but the onions reminded him of all the bad, runny squash he’s ever had.

I thought that was a brilliant insight. The trick is to look for different, unexpected flavors to go with squash. I’m still thinking about that, but while thinking about it I used tarragon.

A standard sauce at the abbey is what I call faux Bérnaise sauce. True Bérnaise, of course, is made with Hollandaise. I am very much out of practice with Hollandaise, and it’s a peck of trouble. Faux Bérnaise is much easier. I use it often for salmon. It’s astounding over mashed potatoes.

If possible, use a skillet that was just used to cook something else, so that there is some glaze and flavor in the pan. Deglaze the skillet with a little vinegar or lemon juice. Add some butter. When the butter is melted, add some cream. Stir it with a whisk and boil it gently until it thickens into a proper sauce. Add salt and pepper and a pinch of tarragon.

The squash in this dish I cooked according to the quick-sear method described in a post a few days ago. Stir the linguini, the squash, and the sauce together at the last second, just before serving.

I confess that I always have heavy cream in the refrigerator. Both Ken and I had our cholesterol checked a few months ago and it was excellent, so the heavy cream is not a problem if you otherwise eat sensibly.

First tomato sandwich of 2014

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One of holiest of white trash sacraments is the first tomato sandwich of the season. Around here, that means that certain nasty foods are temporarily allowed into the house. For this year’s bread, I chose Merita Old-Fashioned, just because it had a better squeeze on the store shelf than Bunny. The chips, as always, are Wise chips. Wise once made a New York Times top-10 list of best regional potato chips. Mayonnaise on both sides of the bread. Milk would be a proper accompaniment, but this year I had Coke from a commemorative bottle, over ice.

The remaining bread will go to the chickens. I hope it doesn’t hurt them. I’ll finish the chips.

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Squash: make it a sin

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Squash is coming out my ears. I couldn’t bear another bit of it without turning it into something sinful. Solution: pizza.

The sauce is a pesto sauce made from garden basil. The squash is masquerading as pepperoni. It didn’t fool me. There is — no joke — half a cup of garlic in the pesto sauce. At the abbey, garlic is a vegetable, not a seasoning. The crust is homemade, though I have to admit that I have never learnt the knack of making a truly sophisticated pizza crust. I need to study up on that.

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Making the most of squash

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The abbey garden is cranking out squash faster than the abbey kitchen can handle it. Squash has been on the menu almost every day. Squash can be one of the most boring vegetables in the world, so preparing it is a big challenge.

Everyone’s favorite squash dish, of course, is sliced squash dipped in batter and fried. That’s a great treat, but it’s a bit too high carb and high fat to have too often. Not to mention that it makes a big mess in the kitchen. The healthiest way I know to make good squash is to sear it in a skillet. Done poorly, the squash becomes hopelessly watery. However, if done carefully, the squash can be very appealing. It won’t turn to mush, and browning it adds a lot of flavor.

Use a hot skillet with a little oil. Olive oil can’t take higher heat, so I use sesame oil, sunflower oil, or even grapeseed oil. Salt makes vegetables release their water, so I don’t salt squash while it’s being cooked.

You want the pan to be not quite hot enough to smoke, but hot enough that the squash will brown in only a few minutes. Any water released by the squash (which won’t be much if you give it just a few minutes of high heat) will dry up in the pan.

To make up for the lack of salt, serve the squash with some sort of salty sauce. One of the abbey’s favorite sauces is what I call “cucumber sauce.” That’s a chilled sauce made of about 3/4 sour cream and 1/4 mayonnaise, seasoned with salt and pepper.