Sara Reistad-Long and Camille Noe Pagán. Photo: JP Pagán
Ask a woman about healthy eating, and the words "slab of steak" are not typically the first out of her mouth.
But that's exactly the sort of mindset being peddled at newly launched Svelte Gourmand, which promotes portion control over fat-free obsessiveness. "I'd rather eat less of a full-fat dessert than more of a low-fat one" are among the words penned on the site, which is written by seasoned health and lifestyle writers Sara Reistad-Long and Camille Noe Pagán.
The two friends started the site -- a mix of health and food news along with featured columnists like Slashfood's own wine pro Gretchen Roberts -- this month in the hopes of helping people live healthfully while enjoying the foods they love. "I think it's really difficult," Pagán says. "People often blame willpower, but ours is a culture that does not encourage people to do things in moderation. It was really important to us to not be like a Weight Watchers or Cooking Light. We wanted to be like nothing that is out there."
We caught up with Pagán to chat about her dislike of food "fanaticism," the evils of high-fructose corn syrup and how she not only has her steak, but eats it too. Who is the site geared toward? People who like food. We are speaking to a more general audience, male and female. People who read Gourmet, but might read Fitness, too. People who are really interested in food and their health.
In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
When my mother, who had been raised on kosher half-sour pickles, first tried bread-and-butters, she was immediately overwhelmed. For someone who was used to the tart flavor of Northeastern dills and half-sours, the Southern sweetness of the bread-and-butters were an absolute delight.
Through a combination of compliments and guile, she managed to get hold of our friend Millie's recipe. From that year on, we had a huge picklefest every summer, when we'd spend two or three days putting up bread-and-butter pickles.
While these are extremely sweet pickles, I have kept the recipe almost exactly the way my mom made it. This is partly due to the necessities of pickling, and partially due to a sense of tradition. Mostly, though, it's due to the fact that I regularly swap these pickles out for gherkins or sweet pickle relish.
Get the recipe for bread-and-butter pickles after the jump.
Mel Brooks once said, "A real bagel, you give it a name. You call it Larry or Murray because it's gonna be with you for a while." Truer words were never spoken: Even after one has managed to digest the chewy, monstrous carbo-bombs, bagels are notorious for sticking around your thighs -- or butt -- or wherever your body chooses to store its adipose flesh. With that in mind, I've cut back on bagels over the last few years, generally only bringing them out for very special occasions when I can justify a few extra carbs.
Indeed, in my family bagels and lox with cream cheese, capers and minced red onion are practically the official food of any celebration. Unfortunately, southwest Virginia, where I spent much of the last 20 years, is not noted for its highly developed bagel culture. Sure, the local grocery stores sold doughy rolls with holes in the middle, but calling them bagels is a pretty serious stretch.
While I'm not the biggest fan of Lender's bagels, I have to admit that they came through for me a few times. Sadly, they lack the thick, chewy skin that makes a real bagel such a ... lingering experience, but they have always been dense, tasty and reliably mediocre. Besides, from the mid-1990s on, I've been able to find them everywhere, which has proved very handy.
I tend to be pretty particular about my pizza. When I lived in Virginia, I plotted out most of my region based on the tastiest pizza, the best priced pizza, and a few other key pizza considerations. While New York is a daunting pizza town, I've spent much of the past few years figuring out the best pizza places, calibrating the difference between amazing pizza and that which is simply acceptable, and generally trying to figure out how to best enjoy one of my favorite foods.
While I prefer mom and pop pizza joints, I have occasionally been know to frequent chain pizzerias. Of the major pizza franchises, my favorite was always Pizza Hut; their flavors always struck me as particularly clean, and their ingredients always seemed quite fresh. However, when I removed high fructose corn syrup from my diet, I started being able to taste it in fast foods. One day, while eating a pizza, I detected its foul flavor in the sauce. A little research confirmed my suspicion: Pizza Hut was using the dreaded HFCS. In a moment, Pizza Hut joined the foully-sweet Papa John's and the blandly repulsive Domino's on my no-eat list. My "pizza island" got a little smaller, a little narrower, and a little sadder.
Recently, however, the chain has developed The Natural, a pizza that allegedly uses vine-ripened tomatoes and all-natural mozzarella, while eschewing artificial ingredients like HFCS, nitrates, nitrites, artificial colors, and preservatives. According to some sources, they are planning to extend this all-natural trend to the rest of their line.
It looks like I may have to revisit one of my old favorites!
When it comes to cranberry sauce, I've always been partial to the canned stuff. I like the shape that the can makes, and I like the simplicity of it - just crank it open and give it a couple of jiggles. However, this year, when I went to pick up the standard can, I happened to read the label and discovered that my beloved Ocean Spray is made with high fructose corn syrup. Despite those commercials that the corn refiners started running earlier in the fall, trying to convince the public that HFCS is just fine, I've been trying to avoid it. So back on the shelf went the can and I determined to make my own sauce, albeit as close in consistency to the canned version as possible.
I cooked down a bag of cranberries with some maple syrup, Meyer lemon juice and zest and some cherry cider (I would have used cranberry juice, but I didn't have any) until the berries were all popped and juicy. I then ran the whole mess through a food mill to smooth it out and get rid of the skins (I know that they are very healthy, but I wanted a can-like consistency and so they had to go). I toyed briefly with pulling out a mold (I have a few from my great-aunt) but decided that was overkill and just chilled it in a glass bowl so that you could see the bright redness.
The resulting cranberry sauce was pleasantly tangy, but with a discernable sweetness. It was still cloudier than the canned sauce and not quite as set, but I continue to be happy with the results. After a couple of days in the fridge, it's become like jam and I'm considering making more to can and give away as holiday gifts. More specific details, like measurements, after the jump.
If you're anything like me come October, you buy a big bag of Halloween candy, oh, three weeks before the actual holiday with the idea of "getting ahead"--only to have the entire bag mysteriously disappear, leaving you to explain to your significant other that it must have fallen into the cracks in the pantry. Or you're good, good, good until the day itself arrives, and ten minutes before the city's official trick-or-treating time starts, you're tearing over to the grocery to pick through the leftover bags because you've "accidentally" gorged on your own.
Or, (worst case scenario) you are really, really good until your kids have come home with their stash and collapsed into sugar comas in bed. And then you raid theirs and take out all the good stuff, and tell them the next day you went through the pile for "safety reasons."
This year, in order to distract myself from the actual candy, I decided to put together a little Halloween candy and wine-pairing guide. This way I'll have something to sip while I hand out candy and wait for my kids to come home with full buckets (insert evil grin here).
First off, I should probably admit that I'm a huge fan of Trader Joe's. Like many people, I go there every week or two; unlike many people, my pilgrimages involve two 45-minute subway rides and about a mile of walking with armloads of groceries. Even these struggles, however, are worth it, as the great TJs can usually be counted upon to serve up first-rate food at prices that are often half of what I pay in my neighborhood. Better yet, their heavy tendency toward organic (or at least HFCS-free) food has gained them my unending loyalty.
Every time I go to the store, I try to pick up one or two things that I haven't tried before. Recently, I tried out a few of their foil-packed Indian dishes, including their palak paneer. While the food was fresh, the seasoning seemed to be inspired by Campbell's, not Calcutta. They were bland, mainstream, and borderline unpalatable.
This was particularly disappointing, given the fairly high bar that I've set for Indian convenience foods. Years ago, when my wife and I were trying to cut back on our meal expenditures, we started bringing home Gits foil-packed convenience foods from our local international grocery store. The dishes weren't quite as good as the fresh-made food we could get at our local Indian restaurant or the dishes that we made from scratch, but they also retailed for under $2 per pack, which meant that we could eat three dishes and have leftovers for about $6. Moreover, they blew away pretty much any American convience food maker, both in terms of price and quality.
My mother was a soda fanatic; apart from the occasional bottle of tonic water or bitter lemon (in the summer, G&Ts were the rule, not the exception), carbonated beverages weren't allowed in our house. This meant, of course, that they became the forbidden fruit, something that my sisters and I craved with a single-minded intensity that was somewhat frightening. As we got older, however, we outgrew carbonated beverages and, once I learned about high fructose corn syrup, most sodas were scrubbed from my list permanently.
Even so, I sometimes get the desire for a cool, refreshing carbonated beverage. While the emergence of organic sodas has been great, they don't have very wide distribution and I sometimes find myself gasping at the cost. After all, when I'm paying two bucks for a soda, it's officially moved from being a refreshment into being a delicacy. Luckily, my neighborhood, which is largely Hispanic, offers a wide selection of reasonably-priced Latin American sodas, many of which are surprisingly free of artificial ingredients. Of these, my favorite is the Jarritos line.
Jarritos is a Mexican soft drink company that was established in 1950. Its sodas come in a variety of fruit flavors, including tamarind, lime, pineapple, strawberry, watermelon, and mandarin. They are sweetened with sugar, not high fructose corn syrup, and often use natural flavorings. While I don't advocate drinking them every day, Jarritos come in handy when the soda bug overcomes my healthier tendencies, and their low price (under $0.75 for a 16-ounce bottle) makes me feel a little better about my weakness. Also, to be honest, they make the perfect counterpoint to a spicy taco or a bowl of salsa and chips!
About three years ago, my wife and I decided to stop eating high fructose corn syrup. At the time, it seemed like a minor step; however, looking back, I realize that, in that one moment, I transformed from a regular consumer into an insane health freak. While cutting out any type of food is a major step, HFCS was particularly difficult. Unlike meat, cheese, peanuts, or any of the other easily-detectable foods that people cut out of their diets, HFCS lurks in literally thousands of foods. Within a few days of quitting, I found myself obsessively reading labels and cutting out dozens of other foods that I had always taken for granted. I suddenly became one of those people, the ones who read the ingredients on blister packs of preserves at the diner, then sigh and eat their toast with just butter.
I don't mean to make it look like cutting out HFCS has been nothing but misery. In the months following our decision, my wife and I lost a lot of weight, discovered tons of new foods, and ended up enjoying the opportunity to reconsider our diet. While I'm sure that cutting out HFCS isn't responsible for all the health benefits that we experienced at that time, it seems more than coincidental that my nasty headaches went away, we' started getting sick a lot less, and we stopped experiencing major energy crashes. Nowadays, I occasionally notice a stale taste in foods when I eat out, generally followed by extreme sleepiness about an hour later. While I haven't done a double-blind taste test, trial and error has convinced me that HFCS is the culprit.
Recently, the Corn Refiners Association announced that they are launching a $30 million advertising campaign that is aimed at convincing consumers that HFCS is a natural compound, fundamentally the same as honey. Of course, unlike honey, HFCS is the product of a complex, chemical-intensive refining process that takes place in an industrial setting, but why quibble? Strangely, the FDA has agreed with them. Unfortunately, rather than convince me that HFCS is all-natural, the FDA's stance has made me seriously question the integrity of the federal government when it comes to food purity.
Remember back in October when I posted about the independent movie, King Corn? The movie wasn't in wide release when we first mentioned it, and so a number of you expressed interest in seeing it, but weren't able to find a screening anywhere. It's gotten wider distribution over the last six months, but for those of you who haven't been able to find the time or place to see it, I've got partially good news for you. A twenty minute clip of the film is now available on AOL video site, which means that I can embed that chunk of the movie here, for your viewing pleasure.
We've known for years that sugar isn't good for us. It promotes tooth decay, provides quick highs and lows and offers nothing but empty, nutritionless calories that pack on the pounds. However, it appears that it is even worse than we previously thought. Researchers recently determined that refined sugar is actually more addictive than cocaine. In a recent study rats were given a choice between sugar water and cocaine, and 94% them chose sugar. Even the rats that had previously been addicted to cocaine switched to the sugar once it was a choice. No wonder it's so hard to give up that 3 pm pack of M&M's, it's more addictive than illegal drugs.
As you may know I am a spirits fanatic, especially gin, and a big fan of fine cocktails. I have been doing intense research in the areas of spirits and cocktails for quite awhile and examining the details of what takes a cocktail and elevates it to the realm of sublime.
Many cocktails have a plethora of ingredients, sadly they are dismal creations better suited to cleaning drains than sipping for enjoyment. For a good cocktail, usually less is more. Classically in a cocktail you have the main spirit or two, spirit or alcohol based modifiers to add their character, possibly a fruit component, a small but very important addition of something like bitters for complexity, and another modifier that brings down the strength of the drink. Usually this is melting ice/water, but in the case of highballs it is also soda, tonic, etc., and in some great cocktails it's topping off the drink with champagne.
Now that Spring has sprung and summer is just around the corner my thoughts go to the Gin and Tonic. I happen to really like G&T's. Since I was in my late teens and able to drink legally, this was the drink that I had more often by far than any other. (Actually it was my drink of choice from a much younger age, but times were different back then, and the legal drinking age of 18 was treated more like a suggestion, than a law.) The more I came to love my G&T, the more exacting I became about the ingredients and proportions in the drink. I came to think of it as a science and have made off the cuff speeches many a time while ordering my drink. I ask what types of gin they have available and what brand tonic water. Usually the choices are poor but lately that has been changing.
I was interviewed just a few days ago by the New York Post for a Sidebar on their Good Libations summer drinks feature on the state of gins and tonic waters available today. One thing I came back to again and again is that the brand and types of gin and tonic make a big difference in the final drink. All G&T's are not the same. In fact they can vary so greatly that at times one wonders if they are the same drink.
The words "all natural" on the packaging of Capri Sun juice drinks have prompted a Florida woman to file a lawsuit against Kraft Foods, Inc., the drink's producer, the Associated Press reported. Assisted by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Linda Rex of Boynton Beach, Fla., claims that the inclusion of high fructose corn syrup is what makes the drink in the little silver pouch less than "all natural." You might remember the CSPI from when they filed and then withdrew lawsuits against Kentucky Fried Chicken over trans-fat use last year, or for their similar actions against Starbucks. A recent press release from CSPI points out that the organization has also challenged 7UP's use of the word "natural." A statement from Kraft says that the "all natural" label was already on the way out and will soon be replaced with packaging that claims "no artificial colors, flavors or preservatives,'' the AP reported. CSPI's always-witty executive director Michael Jacobson, coiner of phrases such as "venti-sized health problems" and "Kentucky Fried coronary," said HCFS "would more accurately be called 'Fresh from the Factory.'"
Want to look back on some of the top news, trends and other food related goings-on of the last year? After a jam-packed year of posting, there are some topics that keep coming up again and again. From A to Z, here are our top picks from 2006:
Starting on January 1st, Jones Soda will be pushing its canned sodas to consumers instead of the bottled sodas that it is known for. They will continue to package the soda in bottles, but the switch to cans is intended to make the product more accessible as the company expands. Coinciding with that launch, Jones Soda has announced that they will be sweetening their sodas with pure cane sugar, rather than the high fructose corn syrup that they use now (the diet flavors are made with sucralose/Splenda). All of their canned sodas will use cane sugar and, by mid-2007, so will all of their bottled drinks.
Jones Soda says that the change is being made with consumer health in mind, even though nutritionists say that it is not any more harmful than other forms of sugar. The reality is that the switch is being made because shoppers are interested in anything that they think is good for their health. Neither sugar nor corn syrup is all that good for you, especially in large amounts, so claiming that it is healthier to drink the sugar-sweetened soda at the same time as they are trying to push sales seems to be a bit contradictory. That said, the taste is really the most important factor in soda selection and if the change improves the flavor of their sodas, which is already excellent (with a fewexceptions), then it sounds like a good one.
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My mother was a soda fanatic; apart from the occasional bottle of tonic water or bitter lemon (in the summer, G&Ts were the rule, not the exception), carbonated beverages weren't allowed in our house. This meant, of course, that they became the forbidden fruit, something that my sisters and I craved with a single-minded intensity that was somewhat frightening. As we got older, however, we outgrew carbonated beverages and, once I learned about high fructose corn syrup, most sodas were scrubbed from my list permanently.
As you may know I am a spirits fanatic, especially gin, and a big fan of fine cocktails. I have been doing intense research in the areas of spirits and cocktails for quite awhile and examining the details of what takes a cocktail and elevates it to the realm of sublime. 
The words "all natural" on the packaging of Capri Sun juice drinks have prompted a Florida woman to file a lawsuit against Kraft Foods, Inc., the drink's producer, the 
Starting on January 1st, Jones Soda will be pushing its canned sodas to consumers instead of the bottled sodas that it is known for. They will continue to package the soda in bottles, but the switch to cans is intended to make the product more accessible as the company expands. Coinciding with that launch, Jones Soda has announced that they will be sweetening their sodas 
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