Eat, drink and be healthy in 2010

A quick round-up of ideas for healthy eating and drinking, including fighting diabetes with small changes, more reasons to drink coffee, reasons to drink and not drink wine and an excuse for pregnant women to eat bacon.

‘Food Rules’ from someone who should know

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

Michael Pollan

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Michael Pollan has written definitive tomes on food and health—the health of those who eat it, those who produce it and the planet we live on. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is the best known, weighing in at nearly 500 pages.

His latest book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, is a lot slimmer, a pocket-sized 112 pages. But in its own way, it’s just as full of useful information. In it, Pollan lays out 64 rules to help us eat smarter, eat healthier. In a piece he wrote for Huffington Post, he tells how the list came about and gives us a small taste of the list. Here are a couple of samples:

#36 Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

Pollan recently appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He entertainingly but forcefully makes the point that the way we eat is responsible Continue reading “Eat, drink and be healthy in 2010” →

“My complements to the turkey”: Choosing the right wines for Thanksgiving

Puzzled by what wines to serve with your Thanksgiving dinner? Here’s some advice from people smarter than me on the topic.

Let me start by quoting Eric Asimov. “We all like what we like.” If you have certain wines you like, you might as well just enjoy them with your Thanksgiving dinner. Old so-called rules—”red with meat, white with fish and poultry”—are being reconsidered or abandoned altogether. In his New York Times wine column, The Pour, Asimov recently issued “A Plea for Calm.” In it, he calls for wine people not to get so wrapped up in certainties and rankings and absolutes. “The truth is that wine—good wine—refuses to conform to anybody’s need for certainty,” he says. “Good wines are alive. They change. They are not static, so a score today can be worthless tomorrow or next month or next year.”

That said, many of us could use a little guidance when it comes to pairing wine with what epicurious calls the “cacophony of holiday flavors.” Most wine writers agree that Thanksgiving is not the time to pull a vintage Bordeaux or Burgundy—or even a big chardonnay—from your cellar. More modest bottles Continue reading ““My complements to the turkey”: Choosing the right wines for Thanksgiving” →

Stop your wining: Fun, practical wine bottle stoppers for when you’ve had enough

cb-stoppers

Seems everywhere you turn these days, you read about the benefits of drinking a glass of wine or two a day. But assuming the standard four to six ounces per glass, how do you keep the other four to five glasses still in the bottle fresh once you’ve had your daily dose?

Back in college, assuming any wine was actually left in the bottle, we’d just try to jam the cork back in the bottle—assuming the “cork” wasn’t actually a screw cap. The only problem was that, once released from the bottle, the cork would often expand, making getting it back in the bottle neck an often futile [or at the very least, inelegant] exercise.

stuff_we_like_small Crate and Barrel offers some decidedly more stylish solutions. Continue reading “Stop your wining: Fun, practical wine bottle stoppers for when you’ve had enough” →

Five fresh reasons to check out my blogrolls

The Internet is filled with great information and just plain cool stuff. Here are five recent posts I found in my own back yard. Well, in the blogs and resources in my sidebars to the right. Take a look at these and explore others. Then share something cool you’ve found recently in the comments below.

1. Asparagus tips from Food Blogga

Susan over at San Diego-based Food Blogga writes that asparagus season in Southern California, which began in late February, is almost at an end. Excuse me a moment, Susan, while I call the wambulance. Just kidding, my friend, but since my neighborhood farmers market here in Chicago won’t even start until June, I have to admit to suffering from bouts of Southern California farmers market envy when I read you or Toni over at Daily Bread Journal.

What you’ll find in her May 10 Food Blogga post on asparagus—besides gorgeous photos like the one above and five delicious sounding recipes of her own and more by other bloggers—is boatloads of information on this wonderful, versatile vegetable. How to select it [including her views on the thin versus thick asparagus debate], how to store it, trim it and cook it—and why you should.

2. Closet Cooking does scallops with miso and maple syrup

The three ingredients in the name of the dish were all it took to rope me in. Scallops are always a great start—delicious, impressive and wonderfully easy to cook. The Japanese culinary mainstay miso [as Epicurious calls it] is infinitely versatile and beautifully subtle. Continue reading “Five fresh reasons to check out my blogrolls” →

Doing good by baking cookies, drinking wine

What if you could help the others by having friends over to decorate cookies—or by just cracking open a bottle of wine? Turns out you can! Here’s how:

Drop In & Decorate cookies for Mothers’ Day, May 1 – 10

If you’re even a semi-regular reader here, you’ve probably seen the colorful Drop In & Decorate logo in the sidebar. And in case you’ve ever wondered what it is, I’ll let founder Lydia Walshin tell you: “Drop In & Decorate is a simple concept: bake some cookies, invite friends or family [or neighbors, or co-workers] to stop in and help decorate, then donate your cookies to a local food pantry, emergency shelter, senior center, lunch program, or other community agency Continue reading “Doing good by baking cookies, drinking wine” →

Two Vines Chardonnay: A deliciously drinkable Washington white for about $8

Wine can be such an integral part of cooking and eating that I really feel I should write about it here more often. My excuse for not doing so is that, for all the wine we drink, I really feel I know very little about it. Beginning now, I’m going to try to get over myself and just occasionally tell you about wines we like.

Sometimes we find ourselves looking for big occasion wines—as a gift or to open for a special event. And when we do, we have some go-to favorites as well as the unfailing advice of certain wine stores in town. Much more often, though, we’re looking for modest bottles of wine we can open without thinking about it to have with dinner or as the evening winds down.

Two Vines Chardonnay, from Columbia Crest Winery in Washington state, is a light, crisp Chardonnay, not big and oaky. And while I like oaky Chardonnays, particularly with a big flavored meal, this wine’s lightness makes it perfect for pairing with fish or chicken or drinking on its own. From my first sip, I felt I was drinking something that performed beyond its price point. Continue reading “Two Vines Chardonnay: A deliciously drinkable Washington white for about $8” →

Champagne tastes on a cava budget: More bubbly bang for your buck

Stories of the invention of champagne are many and contradictory. Some credit a French Benedictine monk, Dom Pierre Pérignon, with discovering the method of trapping carbon dioxide bubbles in wine, the méthode champenoise, around the end of the 17th century. Others say that while he developed a number of advances in champagne production, it was actually invented by the English. Having traveled the length of the UK with my brother one summer without finding a single decent glass of wine [although in all fairness, the establishments we frequented would not be called posh by any stretch of the imagination], I find this rather hard to swallow.

Dom Pérignon is also credited [apparently falsely so] with announcing his discovery by saying, “Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!” [I think I’m going to go on believing he said it—it’s too good a story not to embrace it.]

Whoever invented sparkling wine, there is just something festive about it, an effervescence that elevates any moment into an event. No wonder it sees so much action during the holiday season. We drink it year ’round, with the flimsiest of excuses for an occasion. Continue reading “Champagne tastes on a cava budget: More bubbly bang for your buck” →

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” →