Category: Food

A week or so ago, a friend forwarded me one of those Internet emails that everyone forwards all over the place. It was a recipe for a chocolate microwave cake, with very appealing photographs. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I had never heard of making cake in a microwave, but the recipe seemed highly reasonable. I improvised my own version. This is a chocolate cranberry cake.

My favorite cake is a chocolate applesauce cake in which applesauce is the only liquid ingredient. It’s a moist, substantial cake, the kind of cake I like, not an airy cake. I just happened to have some fresh cranberries in the fridge, so I thought, why not. As a confident cook, and because improvising is half the fun, I almost never use recipes. I brought the cranberries to a boil in a tiny amount of water, and stirred in some coconut oil, sugar, and cocoa. I tasted the batter at this point to adjust the sugar. I added a beaten egg, then whole wheat flour sifted with a bit of baking powder. I baked it in the microwave in a mixing bowl. The cake rose nicely and didn’t fall. It came out of the bowl clean. It tasted just as I hoped it would taste — tart, moist, and chocolatey. This is probably about as healthy as a cake can get.

These experimental fritters were a part of two separate quests — the quest for a hearty breakfast low in simple carbs, and the quest for traditional comfort foods that use sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes. Potato salad using sweet potatoes was totally agreeable. This morning I made fried potato cakes with sweet potatoes. As with the potato salad, make them exactly as you would make them with white potatoes. These have some chopped onion, egg for binder, and flaxseed meal as a stiffener.

A galette, traditional in Perpignan during L’Épiphanie.

From my friend in Perpignan, here’s another installment in the series “What they’re eating in the south of France.” Above: a breakfast/lunch baguette with cheese and salad, with coffee.

Basmati rice with lentils, corn, and scallops

Tiramisu ice cream

I think I found a use for those dry hummus mixes. They’re healthy, and they store well, and they make good earthquake or ice storm food for the cupboard, but they’re terrible hummus. Only fresh hummus is worthwhile. However, these mixes make a good binding for vegetable fritters. The fritter above is chopped broccoli, chopped cauliflower (both cooked until just tender) and chopped onions. The vegetables are bound with the instant hummus, and I added egg to make the fritters set from the heat of the frying pan. Fritters are real nice to have when you’ve just got to have something a bit crunchy and fried. These fritters are low carb, low glycemic, and cruciferous to boot. It shouldn’t be hard to make a vegan version if you can find a suitable substitute for the egg.

Continuing in the category of who’s eating what where, here’s another shot of what they’re eating on Maui, with another cat as bonus. This is Phatboi, who I suspect got fat off of something other than pineapples and limes.

Send me your who’s-eating-what-and-where photos! But please, mind the quality of your photography. Whatever your subject is, get up as close to it as possible and frame it nicely. Attend to your foreground and background. There’s a world of difference between a photograph and a snapshot. One is art. The other is, well, practice until you learn to make art with your camera.

Sweet potato salad. No guilt necessary.

My local grocery store in Walnut Cove has North Carolina sweet potatoes on sale for 29 cents a pound. I bought some last week and baked ’em and mashed ’em with cinnamon. They were so good I went back and bought a bunch more, wondering what to do with them. An idea for an experiment dawned on me: make some sweet potato salad and try it out on my mother and brother, who were coming up for lunch on Wednesday.

Why sweet potato salad? Part of my theory of eating is that, especially at a certain age, we all should eat like diabetics even if we’re not. It’s not surprising that white potatoes are a high-glycemic food, not good for diabetics. It is very surprising, though, that sweet potatoes are a low-glycemic food, good for diabetics. The North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission claims, with good evidence, that the sweet potato is the most nutritious of all vegetables. They’re rich with Vitamins A and E, lycopene and potassium.

Thus the sweet potato is an important staple in the winter for those who, no matter how far from the Mediterranean, want to follow the Mediterranean diet. In fact, says the Washington Post, a low-glycemic diet and the Mediterranean diet are pretty much the same thing.

Now is as good a time as any to try to summarize my theory of diet and health.

1. Read Michael Pollan.

2. Adapt the Mediterranean diet to your location and tastes.

3. Follow a low glycemic diet.

4. Eat in such a way that your blood pH is neutral (you’ll need to do some research on this).

5. Keep your body’s net level of inflammation low with the anti-inflammation diet (you’ll need to do some research on this). Your overall level of inflammation can be measured with the C reactive protein test. Some doctors seem to give this test routinely, but you may have to ask for it.

6. Manage your oil and fat intake and your omega-3 omega-6 balance such that your cholesterols stay at the vein-washing, rather than vein-clogging, levels. Flax seed oil is your friend.

7. Maintain a level of fitness such that your resting pulse is below 75 beats per minute.

8. Maintain a body mass index of 23 or lower.

This is not a quirky diet. It’s not an expensive diet. It’s not a limited diet. These principles are not whims; they’re all backed up by good research. It’s easy to Google for these terms and see why these principles are important. Steps 4 and 5 will make perfectly clear what foods are good for you and what foods are not good for you.

Now, about the sweet potato salad. Make it just the same as you would make regular potato salad, but use sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes. To cook the sweet potatoes, put them whole and unpeeled on a cookie sheet, and bake them at 350 degrees for about an hour. Take them out of the oven and let them cool down. When they’re cool enough to touch, pick the skin off and cut the potatoes into cubes. This is much easier than peeling and boiling the potatoes, and the nutrients don’t get washed away.

And here are some fruit shots emailed in from Maui, with a couple of cats for a bonus. Above, Mama Maya.

Gandalf the Gray

A friend in Perpignan sends an email with the subject “The slaughtering of a Pomelo” with three photographs.

“Remark,” she writes, “how great a part of the Pomelo constitutes skin and albedo,” sending me to the dictionary, because I’ve only encountered the term “albedo” in technical discussions of global warming. Note also that, in the south of France, especially when a fruit or vegetable is head-shaped, like a pumpkin or a cabbage, they speak of “slaughtering” it or “killing” it, as some of us do here.

I think I’ve seen pomelos in grocery stores in California, but I have not seen one in North Carolina. As for this poor pomelo that met its death in Perpignan, I believe it was imported from China.