The Cleaner Plate Club

I recently tried to give my babysitter a big old honkin’ zucchini.

“Oh, no you don’t,” she said. “Too much zucchini these days. This is New England. I lock my trunk in summer, or people deposit bags of the stuff.”

You laugh, but tomorrow is actually National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night. Yes, that’s an official holiday.

Barbara Kingsolver knows all about that. In her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (it’s great, folks! You should get a copy), she describes zucchini season in her small farming town. After weeks of cooking with zucchini, handing bags of zucchini to every visitor, and even wondering if someone could make a car that runs on zucchini, she says:

One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of them hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight.“Wow,” we all said—“what a good idea!”Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won’t put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke.I don’t want to advertise the presence or absence of security measures in our neighborhood, except to say that in rural areas, generally speaking, people don’t lock their doors all that much….So the family was a bit surprised when I started double-checking the security of doors and gates any time we all were about to leave the premises.“Do I have to explain the obvious?” I asked impatiently. “Somebody might break in and put zucchini in our house.”

Kingsolver has a few disappearing zucchini recipes up her sleeve, including Disappearing Zucchini Orzo and Zucchini Chocolate Chip Cookies (which her daughter swears is indistinguishable from the non-zucchini type)

I also tried some zucchini recipes recently:

1. Tomatillo Zuke-a-mole

(looks like a soup here - picture it surrounded by chips or veggies for dipping).This is adapted from a recipe in Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini: the Essential Reference by Elizabeth Schneider. You can find the original recipe here. I made some variations, as I had some added ingredients (tomatillos from our CSA), and didn’t have any lemons.

Ingredients

2 medium-sized zucchini

8 tomatillos of various sizes, outer shell peeled, and sticky stuff washed off

12 cloves garlic (various sizes, separated, still in skins)

1 large onion (sweet varieties preferred, i.e. Vidalia, Walla Walla)

1 teaspoon coarse salt

2 tablespoons olive oil, plus 1/4 cup

A big handful of herbs - basil plus flat-leaf parsley

Juice of a lime

salt and pepper to taste

Directions: Preheat oven to 375. Slice zucchini in half, lengthwise. Dehusk tomatillos and wash. Separate garlic cloves but keep skins on. Quarter onion. Place vegetables in roasting pan and slather with the 2 tablespoons of olive oil and the teaspoon of salt. Roast until extremely tender, at least 1 hour and up to 90 minutes.

While vegetables are roasting, prepare herbs; pull leaves off stems and tear or chop coarsely. Let vegetables cool slightly and squeeze garlic from skins. Place all vegetables into blender and pulse. Add herbs. Puree until smooth and combined. Add lime juice and salt. Drizzle in remaining olive oil. Taste for seasonings and adjust accordingly.

Chill and serve with crackers, pita crisps, crudite or make as part of a sandwich. Makes about 1 quart.

Let it be said that Blair does NOT LIKE zucchini. But he does like chips, and is grateful for any excuse to dip into a bag of tortilla chips. “It’s not quite a regular guacamole,” he said, munching down. “But it’s pretty good.”

Merrie, in typical Merrie fashion, liked it on Day 1 (”Mmm. Mommy, that’s delicious!”), but by Day 2 was shugging it off (”I don’t like it, Mommy. Can I have a cookie?”).

Me? I liked it. I also felt virtuous to be able to do something different with my stacks of zucchini.

2. Vegetarian Summer Pasta (or, what to serve to a vegetarian family that just had a baby, are Omnivore’s Dilemma types, and have very politely let you know that they’ve grown weary of salads).

Nothing fancy here — you’ve probably made plenty of similar recipes in your own kitchen — but it was pretty tasty, if I do say so myself.

Ingredients:

1 onion

2-3 garlic cloves

1-2 zucchini or yellow squash

2 large ripe tomatoes, skins peeled, and chopped

Handful of fresh basil

A few pinches fresh oregano

Half a can of garbanzo beans, drained

Salt and pepper to taste

Box o’ pasta

A big ol’ thing of shredded hard cheese, like parmesan.

Saute onion and garlic in olive oil. Add fresh oregano. Then add chopped zucchini and sautee another couple of minutes. Add tomatoes (peeling is easy — just dunk briefly in boiling water, and the skins will come right off). Add beans. Sautee for another minute or so. At this point, it seemed sort of watery, so I mixed up a Tablespoon of flour with water, added, and sauteed again (more on thickening sauces here). Remove from heat, add salt and pepper to taste, add heaps of fresh basil and shredded cheese, and serve over cooked pasta.

It was pretty good, with enough for plenty of leftovers.

Now go rev up your getaway car, so you can sneak some zucchini onto your neighbor’s porch tomorrow.

I’ve heard plenty about this fella. But I haven’t yet shelled out the $35 for his cookbook.

Now? I’m gonna’. What sold me is Mark Bittman’s article, Summer Express: 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less, from today’s New York Times. After this, you’ll want to start throwing dollar bills at him, too. The man delivers. He’s actually provided 101 ideas for meals that can be prepared that quickly.

I’m looking through the list, thinking: Oh, my family might eat that! Oh, my, that looks easy!

Check out #4, for example:

Open a can of white beans and combine with olive oil, salt, small or chopped shrimp, minced garlic and thyme leaves in a pan. Cook, stirring, until the shrimp are done; garnish with more olive oil.

Or, if you happen to like sardines (which, by the way, have the “good-fish-trifecta”: they’re sustainable, low in contamination, and high in omega-3s), you might want to consider #17:

Soak couscous in boiling water to cover until tender; top with sardines, tomatoes, parsley, olive oil and black pepper.

He leaves things flexible, as with #41:

Raita to the rescue: Broil any fish. Serve with a sauce of drained yogurt mixed with chopped cucumber, minced onion and cayenne.

With tomato season on the way, you might want to give #88 a shot:

Cut the top off four big tomatoes; scoop out the interiors and mix them with toasted stale baguette or pita, olive oil, salt, pepper and herbs (basil, tarragon, and/or parsley). Stuff into tomatoes and serve with salad.

Some aren’t exactly meals — “Canned sardines packed in olive oil on Triscuits, with mustard and Tabasco” strikes me as a dinner-time stretch. But you know, even if we can use only some of those 101, I’m loving those, as well as the general idea:

Good food, made fast.

Mark, baby. Many thanks.

Marion Nestle’s great book, What to Eat, comes out in paperback next week.

If you like this blog — if you like what I tell you about your foods, about the stories behind your foods — then you will love this book. Because Marion explains so much about the foods in your grocery cart that it puts anything I do here to shame. The woman knows a lot. Not surprising, since she’s got so darned many credentials.

(Marion? Seriously. You may never have visited this site before, but still: I consider you an original and lifetime member of the Cleaner Plate Club. Stop on by and I’ll teach you the top-secret handshake).

The book is somewhere between a non-fiction good read and a reference book. You might pick it up to find the answer to a simple question (what’s an omega-3 egg and is it really worth the price?), and then find yourself reading well beyond that answer, simply because you’re learning just so darned much about how the food industry works.

Here’s a description of the book from her web site:

Consider that today’s supermarket is ground zero for the food industry, a place where the giants of agribusiness compete for your purchases with profits—not health or nutrition—in mind. This book takes you on a guided tour of the supermarket…along the way, it tells you just what you need to know about such matters as fresh and frozen, wild and farm-raised, organic and “natural,” and omega-3 and trans fats. It decodes food labels, nutrition and health claims, and portion sizes, and shows you how to balance decisions about food on the basis of freshness, taste, nutrition, and health, but also social and environmental issues and, of course, price.

I’ve got the hardback, and I reference it often.

Want to get a sense of where she’s coming from before you invest the $10.88? Here’s a Frontline interview with Marion. Here’s another good one from Salon. Does everyone love her? No way. Check out this review for a detractor’s perspective (from a guy who, amazingly, doesn’t believe that rates of obesity and overweight in America are skyrocketing. He must not have eyes, is my guess. Poor, sad fella’).

I noticed three problems with the book: (1) (not her fault) - the whole mercury-in-fish-not-so-bad-as-feared study came out after she wrote the book, and so her warnings against seafood might be a little dated; (2) an offhand comment mentions that there are antibiotic residues in milk from rBGH-treated cows (which I’m pretty sure from my reading isn’t true- update to understandably confused readers: the problem with antibiotics and rBGH is not that the antibiotics get directly into the milk— rather, that the cows get mastitis and are treated with antibiotics they might not otherwise need, thereby greatly increasing the risk of antibiotic-resistant pathogens); (3) she talks lots about saturated fats and omega 3s, but doesn’t give much attention to omega-6-to-omega-3 ratios in grass-fed vs. corn-fed livestock (do you all know about that? About how not all red meats are the same? Or might that be a subject for a future post?)

Those things aside, it’s a terrific guide to your supermarket, and it will help you eat smarter, and better, even if that poor, eyeless reviewer doesn’t agree.

(I don’t have an affilate Amazon deal, so I get no money from your ordering it, so you know I’m being downright honest when I recommend that you buy it).

Lookee here at Marion herself, guru of all things nutrition: (I wanted to put a picture of me reading her book, but they’ve changed to cover for the paperback edition, and I thought I’d just confuse you all).

So, reading your blogs, I’m noticing a consistent trend. Lots of you are thinking about weight. It makes sense — you’re here, you’re reading this, so you must be interested in eating better. But still, it always strikes me just how many of us are not only thinking about it, but feeling bad about it. Some of us stand in front of mirrors and look at our thighs. Some of us feel guilty about not getting to the gym enough. Some of us do regular weigh-ins. Some of us simply feel bad.

And it’s not just us bloggers; a good friend who lost weight told me recently that she’s now at a place where she thinks of food as the enemy. And that broke my heart a little, because I believe with an almost religious ferocity that food, the right food, can make our lives so much richer.

But it’s true, we live in a world where most of the food is the wrong food. In this world, 15,000 new food products are introduced every year, nearly all of them unhealthful. In this world, when you go to the grocery store, you pass literally miles of rows of soft drinks, empty snacks, candy, and highly processed, low-nutrition packaged foods. In this world, marketers with billion-dollar budgets hire the smartest minds in the world to figure out how to convince you to reach out and grab foods that you hadn’t planned to buy. In this world, the best food values are the ones that make us unhealthy. In this world, it is really, really hard to eat right.

Which is why I returned this week to a fantastic book I read in December, and which should be required reading for anyone who wants to eat even just a teeny weeny bit better: Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink. Wansink founded the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, where he puts real research into the hidden persuaders that convince us to buy, eat, and keep eating different kinds of foods. It’s Freakonomics for Food-Minded Folks; it’s a fun read, and it’s fascinating.

We all apparently make over 200 food decisions every day, most of them totally unconscious. Wansink sheds a little light on those decisions, which in itself makes for fun, pop-psych kind of reading (how much do people consume if they eat soup from a trick bowl that keeps refilling without the eater knowing? How many more multi-colored M&Ms do we eat, vs. M&Ms that are all one color? How much of what people taste depends on what we see or hear while eating?).

Best of all, Wansink lets us in on a secret: there is a “mindless margin” — the small but significant space between eating just a little less and just a little more, without noticing either way — that will either cause us to lose weight without thinking or to gain weight without thinking. And if we engineer our environment right, we can put ourselves on the lose-weight, or at least the don’t-gain-weight, side of the mindless margin. As he puts it, in a given day most people have no idea if they’ve consumed 100 calories less than normal or 100 calories more than normal…but the difference at a year’s end is 20 pounds.

It’s not a diet book, although he offers concrete ways you can ensure that the 200+ food decisions you make daily are more healthful ones. There’s plenty here for the dieter who can’t understand why, despite his best effort, the scale isn’t going down faster (or why it’s suddenly creeping back up again). There are also great insights for the home cook looking to make healthful foods “taste better” without added work, the restaurateur who wants to sell more food, or really anyone who wants to be more conscious about how, and why, he eats.

I am going to do a few posts with ideas from this book, but in the meantime, I highly recommend that you buy it. Yes, you could get it from the library, but this is one that you will probably want to return to occasionally, just as a refresher (it’s just as interesting the second time around for me).

In the meantime, you can read parts of the first chapter of the book, compliments of ABC News, here.

Go. Read. Be healthier…mindlessly.

Michael Pollan has blown my mind. I’ve been staying up late reading his fabulous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The book takes issues that might otherwise seem disparate — global warming, the obesity epidemic, animal welfare, disease, healthy economies, and sense of community — and shows not only how connected they are, but also how they all have a common solution. Pollan looks at four different meals that one can get in America, and traces the food back to its (literal) roots.

For me, the most fascinating part (so far, but I’m only about halfway through) has been about corn. Yes, corn. He starts with U.S. price supports for corn, and articulates how this policy brings consequences like antibiotic-resistant superbugs, nasty pathogens like e. coli 0157:7 (now present in the guts of 40% of feedlot cattle!), global warming, increased dependence on foreign oil, obesity, diabetes, ecological dead zones, and other unsavory things. Along the way, the book is chock-full of brilliant insights (what, really, is in a Chicken McNugget?).

As I read, I keep thinking that I want to create some kind of powerpoint presentation, a la Al Gore, and spread his word. And I actually may do that. In the meantime, I highly encourage you all to buy his book. Seriously. It is worth every penny. And if you don’t have the pennies, then order it from your local library. No, really.

This past Sunday, my hubby Blair was looking at the New York Times magazine online and mentioned that the top emailed article was one called Unhappy Meals - authored by Pollan. He offered to read me the introduction aloud, but then was himself so fascinated that he wound up reading me the entire article - all twelve web pages of it. I love when Blair reads aloud to me - it’s something he did often during our Peace Corps years (fellas, take note: there is nothing, really nothing, more romantic than reading out loud to your lady) - and to have him reading this guy who has so rapidly become my hero? Well, it was just about the best evening I could imagine.

The article looks at food science, and how it has mostly failed to improve our health. Pollan rejects the notion that food is the sum of its parts, suggesting that there is mystery and magic in a tomato (my example) that goes far beyond a simple formula of vitamin c + lycopene + fiber and so on. And that’s why the great bandwagons of food trends (low fat! no, wait…low carb! and how about those omega 3s??) cannot be sufficient to keep us healthy. I like the approach: part philosophy, part reverence for nature, part plain old good sense. Three great lessons from the Times article: (1) If a food makes a health claim on its label, be suspicious. It’s probably not healthy. (2) Don’t eat anything your great, great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (3) Eat more plants. I’ve filled up a shopping cart twice this week, and have tried to keep this in mind.

Anyhow, I do think I love Michael Pollan. He’s a bit of a hero for me now…perhaps even a bit of a crush. It would be wrong if it didn’t feel so right…