Into the Woods

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.

OK, so cauliflower lacks color. But we don’t hold that against taters or chardonnay, do we?

Now that the fresh greens have died out and the garden is in winter mode, we’re back to the winter diet. One of the vegetables that even the country grocery stores have during the winter is cauliflower. Cauliflower is relatively cheap, probably because it keeps well, with a low spoilage rate for shipping and shelving. Cauliflower is nutritionally dense, with all the virtues and anti-cancer properties of its family, Brassicaceae. Here’s the Wikipedia article on cauliflower.

I eat a lot of cauliflower during the winter, but with this cauliflower, I sinned a bit and made a light cheese sauce. It would be tempting to use butter, but I used toasted sesame oil instead. The flavor of all the cabbages — cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts — is highly compatible with toasted sesame oil.

If you’re new to cauliflower, boil it until it’s just barely tender and mash it exactly as you would mash taters, with butter and hot milk.