Fish oil: Not snake oil, just honest good health

Omega-3 fatty acids are one of the essential building blocks of every cell in your body. And fish oil is rich in them. Here’s why you need omega-3 fatty acids and how to add them to your diet, with or without fish.

Every winter morning when I was a kid, my mother would force a soup spoonful of cod liver oil down me. It was ghastly stuff, tasting even worse than the name implies; I credit this dreaded daily ritual with putting me off eating fish for many, many years. But it turns out Mom was on to something.

Fish oil is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, one of the essential building blocks of all cells. And it seems that every day, we hear more news of the health benefits of these fatty acids, from improved brain function to decreased risk of heart attacks and strokes to alleviating depression. They help lower cholesterol and blood pressure, reduce inflammation and pain from arthritis and have even been shown to reduce the incidence and severity of a number of childhood disorders, including ADD, ADHD and dyslexia. Omega-3 fatty acids are also powerful cancer fighters, helping reduce the risk of colon, breast and prostate cancer. So how do you get these amazing nutrients?

The best and most delicious way to get your omega-3 fatty acids is with a diet rich in fish, particularly fatty fish like salmon, tuna, mackerel, lake trout, herring and sardines. At the end of this post, I’ll include a number of seafood recipes that have appeared here at Blue Kitchen.

But with increased warnings about mercury levels in fish, we’re told to limit our intake of certain kinds of seafood. And as a comparatively recent convert to eating fish, I know there are plenty of people who just don’t do fish. So here are a couple of other ideas for adding these vital nutrients to your diet. Continue reading “Fish oil: Not snake oil, just honest good health” →

Romantic name, delicious dessert: Frangipane Pear and Cherry Cake

Pears and tart cherries team up with almond-based frangipane in a flavorful Frangipane Pear and Cherry Cake that gets even better the second day. Recipe below.

A quick editorial note before we get started. This post marks Blue Kitchen’s second anniversary. Part of me feels like I’ve been at this much longer, but mostly I feel like I’m just getting warmed up.

Last week, I used Michigan tart cherries for a heart healthy Roast Pork Tenderloin with Tart Cherries. The week before, I turned to pears for dessert, with my Baked Pears with Currants and Walnuts. So this week, naturally enough, Marion cooks with tart cherries and pears. Marion?

Frangipane for me has always been one of the most romantic of food names, hinting at elegant sensibilities refined over centuries of experiment and attention. I thought it would be something one would eat while discussing Voltaire and BHL, leaning back in a soft chair and wearing pink brocade, lightly picking at your dessert from a gold-rimmed lacy plate, using an ornate handmade utensil—a frangipannière, perhaps.

So imagine my teenaged surprise to find out that frangipane is essentially almond paste, sugar and egg, period—blended together and then used to make some other thing [such as marzipan, my mother’s favorite medium for the tiny adorable fruits that bedecked her cakes]. Hmph.

So I never actually made anything with frangipane until the other day, when I was hunting around for ideas to use some of the tart dried cherries we got last weekend in Michigan. The ancestor of this recipe, which appeared in Bon Appétit a few years back, looked like a good place to start. That original is more austere—olive oil and milk are two of its leading elements. I am usually a bit leery of olive oil in a cake—it may be healthy, but if I’ve decided to have dessert, I’ve already made the choice to indulge, and I am willing to trade off certain things in favor of better taste. Also, the original called for self-rising flour, a product that makes me suspicious. But I liked the foundation—pears, dried cherries and, of course, the frangipane. Continue reading “Romantic name, delicious dessert: Frangipane Pear and Cherry Cake” →

Once again, anything is possible

I really try to keep politics out of Blue Kitchen. At first blush, this post may seem political in nature, but it’s not. It’s about something much bigger.

An extraordinary thing happened yesterday. Americans went to the polls and elected a black man as the next president of the United States. Just as amazingly, earlier in the campaign, it looked as if we were poised to elect our first woman president.

For far too long now, our national politics have been about what divides us as individuals, what makes us different, instead of what brings us together as a people, what we have in common. And if ever there was an opportunity for what divides us to define an election, this was it. Race and racism have a long, sad history in this country. In fact, racism has been called the wound that will not heal. The notion that a majority of us could move beyond that and actually elect a person of color required a cockeyed optimism in our fellow man, a huge leap of faith.

Once the selection of the two candidates was decided, race was the elephant in the room. The thing no one felt comfortable discussing, but that would not be denied. It was couched in terms of demographics, the Bradley effect and even the anti-Bradley effect. There was the expected fair share of hatred and bile, scary stories and incidents. But there were hopeful moments too, even if some were left-handed. Our daughter Claire told us of having breakfast in a pancake house in a traditionally white neighborhood in St. Louis and overhearing a boisterous conversation from a table of old, white-haired white ladies. They were complaining bitterly about being compelled to vote for Obama, but knowing that they must, because they believed in what he stood for. Like it or not, they were overcoming long held beliefs and, albeit reluctantly, fulfilling one of the dreams in Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

As you listened to people talking, watched people’s faces, felt the incredible energy the upcoming election was stirring, you could feel us turning our backs on Us vs. Them thinking and once again becoming “We the people.” A mix of things brought this about, I think. Yes, some extraordinarily difficult times have us heeding Benjamin Franklin’s admonition that “We must hang together, gentlemen… else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.” But just as much, it was the message of unity at the heart of Obama’s campaign: “We aren’t Red States. We aren’t Blue States. We are the United States.”

Whatever your politics, an important thing happened yesterday. We weren’t white Americans. We weren’t African-Americans. We were Americans. Once again, we became “We the people.” And for the first time in a very long time, I once again feel that America can do anything.

Heart healthy dried cherries liven up roast pork tenderloin

Dried tart cherries and rosemary add flavor—and health benefits—to roast pork tenderloin. Recipe below.

Talk about perfect timing. My friend Carolyn, who works in science communications, is always sending me interesting articles and links. Last Thursday morning, she sent me something about the health benefits of tart cherries. On Friday afternoon, Marion and I left for a weekend in Michigan, the largest producer of cherries in the United States. Before we’d even packed up the car for the trip, I knew I’d be seeking out dried red tart Michigan cherries at their source and cooking with them for this week’s post. Continue reading “Heart healthy dried cherries liven up roast pork tenderloin” →

This is your brain on rosemary and wine

While I’m on a health kick this week, I thought I’d revisit a story I first wrote at WTF? Random Food for Thought about health benefits of rosemary and red wine.

By now, anyone not living in a cave has heard some of the health benefits of moderate wine consumption, so let’s start with the rosemary. I’ve said in the past that it’s my favorite herb. Whether making Tuscan beans, an elegantly simple French dessert with rosemary and apricots or rosemary sage chops, rosemary imparts an unmistakable fragrance and flavor, a mix of lemon and pine.

Turns out it also imparts good stuff for your brain. According to an article in ScienceDaily, the carnosic acid [CA] in rosemary protects the brain from the free radicals that contribute to strokes, neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and the ill effects of normal aging on the brain.

A collaborative study by the Burnham Institute in California and Iwate University in Japan found that “CA activates a novel signaling pathway that protects brain cells from the ravages of free radicals” and, in fact, “becomes activated by the free radical damage itself.” Yet another reason to like rosemary.

If you drink to forget, you may be out of luck

A study by the University of Auckland and Ohio State University, published in the September 2007 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience and reported in Wine Spectator, suggests that moderate consumption of alcohol may improve memory. That’s actually any alcohol, not just red wine—but red wine has so many other health benefits going for it [see below], why not stick with it? Continue reading “This is your brain on rosemary and wine” →

You can keep your apples—baked pears make for a great seasonal dessert

Pears baked with currants, walnuts and cinnamon create a simple, luscious fall dessert. Recipe below.

I don’t know what it is with me and apples. They have so much going for them. Apples are sure signs of autumn, one of my favorite seasons. They come in a dazzling array of varieties, creating beautiful, bountiful displays in the produce department. They have a signature crunch when you bite into them too. That sound even inspired a brilliant advertising tagline: “Washington apples. They’re as good as you’ve heard.” How can you not like a fruit with that much going on?

I don’t know, but I don’t. I don’t like their vaunted tartness. I don’t care for the hardness that gives them that crunch. Add them to a fruit salad and they immediately take over. And call me un-American, but apple pie is one of my least favorites.

Give me pears instead. They’re another unmistakable sign of the season, with every bit as much a distinctive flavor as apples. They’re just about as varied too. In decent produce markets, you’re likely to find Bartlett, Anjou, Bosc, Comice and even Asian pears. Where they shine for me, compared to apples, is that the balance between tartness and sweetness is skewed more to the sweet end. And their soft flesh is less combative than that of apples, often delivering a run-down-your-chin juiciness.

So as a seasonal chill sets in, sending us looking for excuses to fire up the oven, I suddenly remembered some baked pears I’d made a couple of years ago, adapting a recipe from Bon Appétit. Luscious and satisfying and tasting of fall, they’re lighter than many desserts and relatively low in fat. A perfect, clean finish to an autumn dinner. Continue reading “You can keep your apples—baked pears make for a great seasonal dessert” →

Stuff we like: Totes, canvas and otherwise

Through the combined efforts of consumers and retailers, reusable tote bags are showing plastic bags the door. This is an update of a post I first wrote at WTF? Random Food for Thought.

Those awful plastic grocery bags are fading fast. On April 22 [Earth Day, get it?], the entire Whole Foods grocery chain went plastic bag-free. Grocery stores and general retailers alike are now selling reusable totes, usually for a buck or two, to encourage customers to just say no to plastic.

And China, not exactly a shining example of environmentalism, has banned plastic bags from the entire country. As of June 1, all stores, from the largest to the smallest, have gone bag-free. For the practical Chinese, it’s a matter of not wasting 37 million barrels of oil a year on bags. It was also a chance to polish their image for the Olympics. Whatever the reason, it’s good news for the planet.

The problems with plastic bags are many. First, they don’t biodegrade, as paper does. They photodegrade—which is to say that light causes them break up into tinier and tinier particles, but they never stop being plastic. According to a New York Times article [first brought to my attention by Kirsten over at Gezellig Girl], “Altogether, each year the country is estimated to use 86 billion bags, which end up blowing down city streets, or tangled in the stomachs of whales and sea turtles, or buried in landfills where, environmental organizations say, they persist for as long as 1,000 years.” And even if you recycle them, as more communities are now mandating, plastic degrades in quality with each recycling, so it’s not truly sustainable. Continue reading “Stuff we like: Totes, canvas and otherwise” →

Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty, hunger and coming to terms with meatloaf

Blue cheese and Italian sausage add depth and richness to this ketchup-free meatloaf. Recipe—and ways you can help fight hunger—below.

Today is Blog Action Day. Marc over at the always eclectic, always intriguing Creative Spark first alerted me to this international event in which bloggers were asked to write about poverty from the perspective of their individual blogs.

Writing about food as I do, poverty and hunger seemed like a natural subject to tackle: A staggering 800 million people around the world go to bed hungry every night, one of the most devastating effects of poverty. But then I remembered an article I read in the New York Times last year that led me down a more nuanced path. In “The Class-Consciousness Raiser,” Paul Tough profiles Ruby Payne, a woman who was raised middle class, married into poverty and then, through her husband’s work for the Chicago Board of Trade, found herself socializing with wealthy people. These wildly varied experiences taught her that each group has its own views of life, its own “hidden rules.”

Codifying these rules into a series of books and lectures, Ms. Payne has created a career for herself an educational consultant. She works with school boards, administrators and teachers who work with students living in poverty, helping them better understand their students. She also shows them how to help these students understand the “hidden rules” of the middle class and lift themselves out of poverty.

So what does this have to do with food? One passage in the article stuck with me, describing how each group thinks about food and discusses it: “The key question about food in poverty: Did you have enough? In the middle class: Did you like it? In wealth: Was it presented well?” As a food blogger, I concern myself primarily with the second and third questions, as we all do. The growing fascination with food in our culture has democratized presentation, making it something we all think about. Growing up, though, the first question mattered most in my house.

I never really thought of us as poor when I was growing up in St. Louis. We lived in a neighborhood surrounded by people just like us, after all, so I had no basis for comparison. Grown-ups worked hard, usually in low-paying, low-skilled jobs. Paychecks stretched for a whole week only if you were careful. That’s just how life was.

And food was respected. Not in the way chefs and food writers, myself included, talk about respecting food, preparing it simply with careful technique and a few perfect ingredients. It was respected in a much more elemental sense. For parents, making sure there was enough food on the table for your family was a matter of pride. And as a kid, you could take as much as you wanted, but if you put it on your plate, you ate it. Food mattered too much to be wasted.

I don’t mean to paint too grim a picture here. There were plenty of picnics and birthday cakes and heaping platters of fried chicken and laughter around the dinner table. There were occasional dinners out too. There was always enough food to eat, and we always had a roof over our heads. We weren’t desperately poor—we were really more working class, sliding in and out of being what is now called the working poor.

There were occasional desperate times, though. Once when my father was out of work, we ate biscuits and gravy three meals a day for a long stretch. You might think this would have put me off biscuits and gravy. Actually, though, I love them and still seek them out in restaurants—especially if we’re traveling in the South—even though I know they won’t live up to my childhood memories of this dish.

I can’t say the same for meatloaf. I know that for practically everyone but me, meatloaf is one of those ultimate comfort foods. For many, it evokes memories of childhood, family and home. Interestingly, for our Brooklyn friend Ronnie Ann, meatloaf conjures up the exotic. Her father was a butcher, so the family routinely dined on beautiful steaks and lamb chops, not ground meat. When she finally tasted meatloaf—in her high school cafeteria, no less—it was a revelation.

But for me growing up, meatloaf just tasted like poor food. Drier than the more honest [and more fun, especially to a kid] hamburger. It didn’t help that my mom dispensed with making bread crumbs and just tore up slices of white bread to mix in with the ground beef; with each little bite of unincorporated bread, you could taste the family food budget being stretched before payday. And I hold this same meatloaf personally responsible for my lifelong low opinion of ketchup. Especially as an ingredient in a recipe—it falls in that same “oh, never mind” category as margarine or miniature marshmallows, as far as I’m concerned. Continue reading “Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty, hunger and coming to terms with meatloaf” →

Chicago’s Field Museum presents a visual feast, “Food: A Cultural Journey”

Penny De Los Santos is an award-winning documentary photographer known for her sensitive and evocative food, travel and landscape photography. Based in Austin, Texas, she’s a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Saveur, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Time, Latina and Texas Monthly.

Recently, she spent a year traveling to 13 countries, photographing food and spending hours chatting with culinary teams—from chefs, to sauciers, to line cooks—as they shared stories of their cuisine. The result is a sumptuous journey through Mexico, Brazil, India and Europe, exploring how growing, gathering, preparing and enjoying food are rich expressions of culture and geography.

On this culinary odyssey, De Los Santos met Sweden’s Locavores—creators of the movement to eat locally, reduce the carbon footprint of food and support local growers. De Los Santos photographs everywhere—from dhabas [truck stops] in India, to all-male private dining clubs in Spain’s Basque region. Her photographs demonstrate that no matter the setting, true enjoyment of food is our most common thread.

The Field Museum in Chicago is hosting an evening with the photographer Tuesday, October 21, as part of their National Geographic Live! at The Field Museum series. The series features some of the world’s top photographers, scientists, explorers and adventurers on stage for an evening of animated conversation, multimedia presentations and audience participation. You can purchase tickets for this event online from The Field Museum.

“Food: A Cultural Journey”
Tuesday, October 21; 7:30pm
The Field Museum
James Simpson Theatre
1400 S. Lake Shore Drive
Chicago

Simple details, beautiful results: Seared salmon with mixed greens and miso vinaigrette

Thin slices of salmon cook quickly and slightly warm the mixed greens, green beans and snow pea pods tossed with a Japanese-based miso vinaigrette. Recipe below.

SOMETIMES A SINGLE DETAIL CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN A DISH. Recently when Marion and I had lunch at Lulu’s, an Asian-inspired restaurant in Evanston, she ordered a salmon salad that, as words on a menu, had done little for me. But when the dish arrived at our table, it was a whole different story. Instead of the expected chunks of cold salmon tossed with greens, there were thin slices of fillet, still warm from being quickly cooked, simply arranged on top of the salad. Continue reading “Simple details, beautiful results: Seared salmon with mixed greens and miso vinaigrette” →