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The Cook

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I Do All the Cooking at Home

I Do All the Cooking at Home

At some point during the 1960s, I discovered that eating out at restaurants all the time was going to:

  1. Eat into my finances
  2. Deprive me of the fruits and vegetables I needed to survive and
  3. Make me tired of eating out all the time

I knew what good food was because I was raised on my Mom’s Hungarian home cooking, supplemented by my great grandmother Lidia’s special dishes. But I made the mistake of never learning from them, though I did help my Mom from time to time, mostly stirring the pot so the food would not burn.

My first experiments were pretty bad: They usually had too many spices (more or less randomly chosen) and relied excessively on rice and pasta as the carbohydrate base. Also I used way too much ground beef, for which I now substitute lean ground turkey.

When Martine came to live with me in the early 1990s, I also had to learn to cook to please her. This is not easy. Martine cannot eat spicy food, and there are too many ingredients that she flat-out doesn’t like. Also, as she suffers from recurring bouts of irritable bowel syndrome, I have to be able to turn on a dime and cook something especially bland at a moment’s notice. This week, for example, despite the heat and humidity, I made a pot of vegetable soup.

Tonight, I plan to cook Ree Drummond’s spaghetti with artichoke hearts and tomatoes. I like her recipes because they are well conceived, simple, and lavishly illustrated. Her cooking column is called “The Pioneer Woman.” I haven’t found a clinker yet in the lot.

Why do I do all the cooking? Well, for one thing, Martine is notably maladroit at cooking; and her mother prepared the most vile dishes I have ever eaten. (Her vegetables were greasy!) Secondly, I like to cook. It makes me feel good about myself. Every once in a while I experiment with a new recipe that I have to throw out, but essentially I have a fairly decent repertoire of healthy dishes that I can rely on to see us through.

I’ve cooked the spaghetti with artichoke hearts and tomatoes two or three times before with good results. I just have to make sure the tomatoes are chopped up fine because big pieces of tomato are one of Martine’s bête noires.

Juice Wondering …

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Are They Really As Healthy As People Think?

Are They Really As Healthy As People Think?

Omigosh, that photo caption is almost pure clickbait! The point I am trying to make is that fruit juices are one of those categories of foods that are almost universally thought to be good for you.

Except for one thing: They concentrate their one ingredient which is not so good for you, namely sugar, and throw out the fiber that your body needs far more. This goes back to that mantra of “quick energy” that used to be claimed for most sugary beverages going back to the 1960s.

To the youth of America, fiber is not only boring but decided unsexy. It seems to be associated exclusively with the old people’s bowel movements. Actually more important is that the fiber keeps the pancreas from being bombarded by an excess of sugar. According to Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, they act to form complex carbohydrates:

These carbohydrates have more complex chemical structures, with three or more sugars linked together (known as oligosaccharides and polysaccharides).  Many complex carbohydrate foods contain fiber, vitamins and minerals, and they take longer to digest – which means they have less of an immediate impact on blood sugar, causing it to rise more slowly.

At a time when a whole generation seems to be headed into the maws of Type II Diabetes, it’s probably a good idea to minimize the impact of sugar on one’s diet—regardless of the promise of “quick energy.” So drink water, coffee, or tea instead.

 

 

All-American Glop

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Burger Heaven, American Style

Burger Heaven, American Style

One of the advantages of my having a Hungarian upbringing is that it allows me to cast a critical eye on what most Americans would consider good eating. Take, for example, the hamburger. One starts with a plain piece of ground meat, chars it, and adds an inch or two of cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, onions (either raw or caramelized), mayonnaise, ketchup, mushrooms, and God knows what. The result is a concoction that will likely contribute more to staining your shirtfront than satisfying your hunger.

Hungarians prefer to season the meat itself rather than topping it off with a salad. My mother used to mince (not chop!) onions, garlic, and parsley and work it gently in with the ground beef (which itself could be mixed with bits of ground pork or veal). Take a look, for example, at this recipe for fasirt, a kind of Magyar fried hamburger. Whether fried or charbroiled, the Hungarian hamburger would usually be served between two pieces of rye bread, cheese optional. It had flavor. And if we wanted vegetables, they would be there on the plate, fresh from our garden, rather than piled high over the meat patty.

The same goes for meatballs. If you get matballs and spaghetti in an Italian-American restaurant, the meatballs will usually be plain meat. Our late landlady made her meatballs the Old Country way, buy adding seasonings to the meat before cooking it.

It’s a simple technique, perhaps a little time-consuming, but it tastes ever so much better than the plain unadorned ground meat.

 

 

Tropical Iced Tea? Gack!

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Not My Cup of Tea

Not My Cup of Tea

The following post is a reprint from my posting on Yahoo! 360 on June 28, 2007:

No one I know loves iced tea as much as I do, especially when the hot days follow one upon another. And I like fruit juices, though I prefer to eat fresh fruit with all the pulp and fibers included. But the one thing I will not abide is a mix of fruit juice with iced tea.

Los Angeles in particular is replacing regular iced tea with what is called “tropical iced tea,” consisting of tea mixed with essence of raspberry, passion fruit, kumquats, or turkey giblets. Today, I had lunch at the Noodle Planet in Westwood, where an excellent China Mist iced tea was typically on hand. But no more! The cute young waitress informed me that their China Mist was replaced by a “tropical” iced tea. She sidestepped with remarkable agility, I thought, as a three-meter flame roared out of my mouth and singed several adjoining tables.

I asked her, “How would you feel if I sprinkled some banana or coconut juice into your coffee? or if I spiked your Coca-Cola with essence of oregano and nopal cactus juice?”

The way I see it, there is a tendency to making everything tutti-frutti, whether soups, snacks, steaks, fish, beverages, or—where I do not generally object—desserts. If that is the main contribution of Southern California to haute cuisine, then I say, “Back to the basics!” Henceforth, I shall wear a brown turban and gather around me other iced tea fundamentalists. We shall strike terror into the hearts and pocketbooks of those who would adulterate tea.

Let’s face it, instead of fruit, the additives taste more like refined petrochemicals, at the same time killing the refreshing, slightly acidic taste of the tea itself.

In the end, I had to settle for water. At least, they haven’t gotten to that—yet!

NOTE: I make an exception for fresh slices of lemon, lime, and occasionally orange. This way, I can control the taste of the tea. No oil company or coal tar manufacturer is allowed to tinker with my tea!

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Tea

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Looks Good: I Think I’ll Have Three Cups

Looks Good: I Think I’ll Have Three Cups

All the blog posts in this series are based on Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him.

My own ABCs consist of places I have loved (Iceland, Patagonia, Quebec, Scotland), things I feared (Earthquakes), writers I have admired (Chesterton, Balzac, Proust, and Borges); locales associated with my past life (Cleveland and Dartmouth College), people who have influenced me (John F. Kennedy), foods I love (Olives), and things I love to do (Automobiles and Books). This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the weeks to come, you will see a number of postings under the heading “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. To see my other entries under this category, hit the tag below marked “ABCs”. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best. Today the letter is “T” for Tea.

Ever since I was a small child, I have preferred tea to coffee. I don’t even like the smell or even the look of coffee, let alone its taste. You won’t find me asking for a Venti anything at Starbuck’s. Barristas would have a difficult time making a living if they had to depend on people like me. What they do at their place of work, I could do more satisfactorily in my kitchen. And then, as my pot of tea cools, I have several additional glasses of iced tea.

While my favorite variety is Darjeeling, I will occasionally switch to Ceylon or Assam for variety. I also love green tea and several non Camellia sinensis local varieties, such as Té Manzanilla (chamomile) in Mexico or Yerba Mate in Argentina. People talk about herb teas as if tea is not an herb, but it is. I generally avoid more flowery teas, though a good Chinese jasmine is not bad on occasion.

While others spend many hundreds of dollars a year on coffee, my total expenditure on tea is considerably less than fifty dollars for far more tea than I can drink. A pound of loose tea leaves makes 240 cups of tea. By contrast, how many cups of coffee does a pound of beans make? Nowhere near, I’d wager.

Tonight, as I finish reading a book of Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić ’s essays, I will have a tall glass of unsweetened iced tea made of Ahmad of London’s loose Ceylon blend.

 

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Olives

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I Cannot Live Without This Oleaginous Fruit

I Cannot Live Without This Oleaginous Fruit

I was so very impressed by Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him. Because his origins were so far away (Lithuania and Poland) and so long ago (1920s and 1930s), there were relatively few entries that resonated personally with me. Except it was sad to see so many fascinating people who, unknown today, died during the war under unknown circumstances.

My own ABCs consist of places I have loved (Iceland), things I feared (Earthquakes), writers I have admired (Chesterton, Balzac, Proust, and Borges); things associated with my past life (Cleveland and Dartmouth College), people who have influenced me (John F. Kennedy), and things I love to do (Automobiles and Books). This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the months to come, you will see a number of postings under the heading “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. To see my other entries under this category, hit the tag below marked “ABCs”. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best. Today the letter is “O” for Olives.

In his Meditations the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.”

There is something ancient about the olive. It comes to us from the Biblical lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, from ancient Greece and Rome. If it were not for the fact that I live in California, which is known for its olives, I would probably have left it out of my diet altogether. Especially during the Dog Days of Summer, I find olives refreshing, such that I can make a meal out of olives and iced tea, and nothing else. It’s one of the few filling foods that are not contraindicated by my diabetes.

My favorite olives come from Cisneros Brothers in Hanford, California, particularly their Sicilian garlic-stuffed olives: big green fruits with a spicy garlic charge. When the days start getting warmer, I will either drive to Hanford or order a crate of them to see me through.

There are numerous health claims made for olives, about their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant qualities, and they may be true. Perhaps they cure cancer and powerfully increase male libido, but, truth to tell, I’d like them anyhow. I like them so much I even take an olive leaf nutritional supplement called oleuropein for good measure.

 

You Won’t Roue the Day …

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The Base for All Great Hungarian Soups

The Base for All Great Hungarian Soups

In response to a request from my friend Lynette, I’m going to tell you all about what makes for a great Hungarian soup—and probably most great vegetable and meat soups as well. The secret is rántás, the Magyar equivalent of roue. Let’s begin with the ingredients, with the amounts for a week’s worth of soup for two (Martine and I like home-made soups):

  • 1 oz unsalted butter
  • 1 oz olive oil (need not be virgin: I prefer olive oil that’s been around, if you know what I mean)
  • 3 tbsps white flour
  • 1/2 minced onion (minced means chopped up real tiny)
  • 1/2 bunch minced parsley (again: go to town with your knife here)
  • 2 tbsps real Hungarian Szegedi paprika (not Spanish paprika!)

Heat the butter and oil in a saucepan until it melts, stirring well. Give it a minute or two before adding the white flour. Stir until the flour turns brown. Add the onion and parsley and finally the paprika. When your rántás is done, scoop it into your soup toureen and start adding the other good stuff.

Note that the photo above is your rántás after the first three ingredients only. In time, you will adjust the ingredients to more accurately accord with your taste buds.

You can sometimes find good Hungarian paprika in supermarkets, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I get mine from Otto’s Hungarian Import Store in Burbank, and I prefer this variety, the Imported Szegedi Hungarian Paprika. When you get your paprika, keep it in the refrigerator: bugs love it too much.

 

Soup or Salad

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So You Think It’s Healthy, Huh?

So You Think It’s Healthy, Huh?

It was Canadian writer Douglas Coupland who wrote that “Salad bars are like a restaurant’s lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.”

We have taken it so much for granted that salads are the perfect food that we typically ignore a few basic facts. First of all, how many of you salad-eaters actually clean the veggies you use, especially the lettuces? And then, how many of you pour sugary, fatty glop over the salad in an effort to make it palatable?

When I was growing up in Cleveland, we never ate salads, except occasionally for a warm salad made with romaine lettuce and bacon—and even then I never cared for the stuff. We had our own vegetable garden out back, so we never lacked for vegetables, which we sometimes ate raw, as tomatoes; or canned, such as Hungarian yellow banana peppers; or cooked, as cabbage.

I think that Hungarians would much rather eat their veggies in a soup than in a salad. So yesterday, I prepared a Hungarian-style pea soup with carrots and potatoes. For that extra Vitamin B touch and some delicious background flavor, I blend Swiss chard and curly parsley with some of the stock and pour it into the tureen.

So go ahead and disconsolately pick at that dubious salad. I prefer good soup just about any time. In fact, only when the temperature soars into the 90s that I will occasionally eat a chopped salad at lunchtime with a light vinaigrette dressing. Otherwise, no way!

 

Don’t Toque to Me About Chefs!

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Making a $25.00 Tower of Exotic Foodstuffs

Making a $45.00 Tower of Exotic Foodstuffs

The problem with American restaurants is that there are too many chefs and not enough cooks. Ever since the Food Network went on the air, people started paying too much attention to people with large white toques who like to mess around with food, forming little towers of quinoa with raspberry sauce and maybe a small amount of meat or fish. The less the foods appear to go together, the more renown the chef is likely to earn for his or her daring.

It’s become an epidemic. The tutsi-fruitsie is king. The ice tea is contaminated with passion fruit or other petrochemical waste. Side dishes avoid the usual rice or potatoes and provide instead broccolini with mashed yeast and ground Murano glass and Galena lead pellets.

Whenever I see some Culinary Institute of America (CIA) chef wearing a towering white toque, I know I’m in for a pretentious soaking. On the other hand, when I see what Hungarians call a szakács or szakácsnő (cook, masculine or feminine gender respectively), I know I am likely to have an excellent meal. There must be no toque or other sartorial trimmings. I want a good, honest cook who knows how to prepare food. And no little towers!

As for the Food Network, I hope they switch over to running “Antiques Roadshow” or “Pawn Stars.” Or maybe they can talk about Kim Kardashian or some other celebrity twinkie. They certainly have not done anything to improve the quality of food in this country.

In Search of the Next Superfood

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Is It Chinese Goji Berries?

So Is It Now Chinese Goji Berries?

This is a kind of continuation of yesterday’s post about Clickbait. I get this picture that everything the news or the Internet says about health and nutrition is about 90% wrong. Every week, there’s a new cure for cancer; or a new superfood is discovered that is the holy grail to health, longevity, and a clear brain. It seems that, earlier this year, the superfood of choice was kale, at which I poked fun in a post last May. Before long, there were kale chips, kale jerky, kale pizza, and even 5,000 mg kale capsules suitable for horses.

As for myself, I don’t much care about this sterile quest. I’ve always believed that it is best to eat a varied diet rich in fruits and vegetables. There is no single food that I rely on to supply the majority of my nutritional needs. I have this friend whom I shall call Nelson, who discovers a new superfood every six months and tells me all about the benefits of eating lots of it. It has changed his life … until the next superfood comes along and takes its place.

There is a PBS channel in Orange County that Martine watches from time to time. A parade of health and nutrition gurus is paraded before the viewers with packaged books, DVDs, pills, and exercise programs. They will prevent cancer, keep your mind clear through your declining years, and make you look like twenty even when you’re on Medicare. I see the audiences who are lapping up every word these gurus say. These people want to be saved. They will send in their checks and get the package and perhaps follow the program for a week or two. In a couple months, you’ll see hem in another studio audience listening to a different guru with yet another program.

I am reminded of the Chinese search for the Pill of Immortality. It was a very powerful pill because, although it didn’t exist, it almost brought down one of the world’s great religions—Taoism. I’m waiting to see this pill on offer through a clickbait ad on the Internet.