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3 Tips for Choosing Quality Produce in the Winter

Posted March 3, 2010 – 11:36 am in: Shopping

By Mary Ann Esposito,

Author of Ciao Italia Five-Ingredient Favorites: Quick and Delicious Recipes from an Italian Kitchen

Ah winter! Fun in the snow making snow angels with the kids, ice skating and snowshoeing. If only all that joy and satisfaction could be found at your local grocery store come January. And unless you live in warmer climes, most of us along with warding off colds, the flu, and grouchiness at the thought of a looming long winter, are at a loss as to what to buy and eat when the choices are almost as bleak as the weather.

Sure, lots of us will crave warmth reaching for cans of soup, full of sodium and other stuff too difficult to try and pronounce. We’ll scavenge the produce aisles in hopes of finding some lively looking salad greens from California and fruit from Florida, instead of some foreign country. We’ll console ourselves with grapefruit, navel oranges, apples and pears while dreaming of fresh local strawberries not due until June.

January, February and March can be tricky if you are picky about where your food comes from. Chilean plums, Mexican grapes, blueberries from Uruguay, anyone? Even in the winter months, it’s important to choose foods that are as local as possible.

Here are three suggestions for choosing foods that can sustain you from January until the first bunch of locally grown asparagus makes its lovely anticipated appearance in spring.

1) Dried beans such as garbanzo, kidney, split pea and pinto beans are readily found on grocer’s shelves. They can be turned into delicious, high fiber, high protein dishes that will power you through the cold. For instance, how about a hearty sausage, lentil and ditalini soup from my latest cookbook: Ciao Italia, Five Ingredient Favorites from an Italian Kitchen? Easy to make and you won’t believe how good just a five ingredient soup can be.

2) Winter squashes of every color and description are in my opinion, the workhorse vegetables of winter along with onions, Brussels sprouts, and mushrooms. Creamy and velvety squash soup is a favorite as is a rich risotto made with diced squash, and spaghetti squash does a great stand-in for spaghetti and meatballs. If you have some eggs, an onion and mushrooms, a tart is a nice change of pace as is a steaming bowl of onion soup with a blanket of melted cheese over the top.

3) Don’t overlook leafy Swiss chard, kale, carrots and beets. Swiss chard and kale can be steamed for use as a side dish, incorporated into crustless quiche or stuffed and baked. Combine cooked beets and carrots for a nice winter salad; add some feta cheese, and a handful of walnuts or pine nuts and you have a perky salad that can banish winter blues with one taste.

Yes, January can be a challenge on many levels but sacrificing good food does not have to be one of them if you think, choose wisely, and cook in season.

©2009 Mary Ann Esposito, author of Ciao Italia Five-Ingredient Favorites: Quick and Delicious Recipes from an Italian Kitchen

Author Bio

Mary Ann Esposito, author of Ciao Italia Five-Ingredient Favorites: Quick and Delicious Recipes from an Italian Kitchen, is the creator and host of the long-running PBS series Ciao Italia, celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2010. She is the author of eleven successful cookbooks, including Ciao Italia Slow and Easy and Ciao Italia Pronto! She lives in Durham, New Hampshire.

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Nutrition Label Lies & Loopholes: Serving Size Sleight of Hand

Posted February 19, 2010 – 11:43 am in: Nutrition

By Tom Venuto,
Author of The Body Fat Solution: Five Principles for Burning Fat, Building Lean Muscle, Ending Emotional Eating, and Maintaining Your Perfect Weight

For years, concerned consumers and watchdog organizations have been screaming that the U.S. labeling laws are full of loopholes and in need of serious revision. After years of talk, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says they’re planning to so something about it. But will it be enough?

There are many food labeling issues we could complain about, but one of the biggest problems (due to its direct relationship to the obesity crisis) is serving sizes.

I’m not just talking about supersizing. What’s worse is that the actual calories are being disguised with serving size sleight of hand.

Let me show you some examples:

Tostitos touch of lime. Calories per serving 150. Not too bad for tortilla chips eh? Not so fast. Check that serving size. 1 ounce. That’s 6 chips. There are 10 servings per container. That’s 1500 calories in the bag.

Most guys could knock off half that bag for a cool 750 calories. Ok, suppose you have some restraint and you only eat a third of the bag (20 chips). You still get 500 calories. But who stops at 6 chips?

Vitamin Water. While I could rant about how sugar water is being marketed as health food, I’ll stick with the serving size sleight for now.

The label says there are 50 calories per serving. Wow, only 50 calories! Plus they add all those vitamins. Must be good for you and perfect for dieters, right? Think again. Look at the serving size and servings per container: 8 oz per serving and 2.5 servings per container.

Excuse me, but is there ANY reason for making it 2.5 servings other than to disguise the actual calorie content?

When you see that the entire bottle is 20 ounces, you realize that it contains 125 calories, not 50. Although 20 ounces is a large bottle, I don’t know many guys who wouldn’t chug that whole thing.

Sobe Lifewater? Same trick in their 20 oz bottles.

Healthy Choice soup, country vegetable. They make these in convenient little microwavable containers with a plastic lid. Just heat and eat.

It says 90 calories and 480 mg of sodium per serving. Wow, less than a hundred calories. Wait a minute though. Turn the container around and you see the serving size is 1 cup and the servings per container says “about 2.”

Huh? It looks pretty obvious to me that this microwave-ready container was designed for one person to eat in one sitting, so why not just put 180 calories per container on the label (and 960 mg of sodium). I guess 90 calories and 480 mg sodium sounds . . . well . . . like a healthier choice!

Ben and Jerry’s chocolate fudge brownie ice cream. This infamously delicious ice cream with its own facebook fan page has 270 calories per serving.

We all know ice cream is loaded with calories and should only be an occasional treat, but 270 calories per serving, that’s not too terrible is it?

Look a little closer at the label. The serving size is ½ a cup. Who eats a half a cup of ice cream? In fact, who hasn’t polished off a whole pint by themselves? (The “comment confessional” is below if you’d like to answer that.)

According to Ben and Jerry, there are 4 servings in that one pint container. 270 calories times 4 servings = 1080 calories! That’s about half a days worth of calories for an average female.

I could go on and on — crackers, chocolate chip cookies, muffins, pasta, boxed cereals (who eats ¾ a cup of cereal?), etc. But I think you get the point.

What’s the solution to this mess? News reports in the last week say that the FDA may be cracking down. Count me among those who are pleased to hear this news. One of their ideas is to post nutritional information, including the calories, on the FRONT of the food labels.

The problem is, this move by itself could actually make matters worse. Suppose Tostitos started posting “150 calories per serving” right on the front of the bag. Most people would assume the chips were low in calories. Putting calorie info on the front of the label would help only if it clearly stated the amount of calories in the entire package or in a normal human-sized serving!

Ah, but the FDA says they’re on top of that too. They also want to standardize or re-define serving sizes. Sounds great, but there are critics who say that consumers would take it as approval to eat larger servings so the strategy would backfire.

Suppose for example, the government decides that no one eats ½ a cup of Ben and Jerry’s so they make the new serving size 1 cup, or half the pint-sized container. Now by law the label says 540 calories per serving instead of 270. Is that like getting official permission to eat twice as much?

I’m not against the FDA’s latest initiative, but what we really need is some honesty in labeling.

Food manufacturers should not be allowed to manipulate serving sizes in a way that would trick you into thinking there are fewer calories than there really are in a quantity that you’re likely to eat.

It would be nice to have calories for the entire package listed on the label at a glance. A new rating scale for caloric density would be cool too, if it could be easily interpreted. It would also be nice to have serving sizes chosen for quantities that are most likely to be commonly eaten. But standardization of serving sizes for all types of foods is difficult.

My friends from Europe tell me that food labels over there are listed in 100g portions, making comparisons easy. But when you consider how much each individual’s daily calorie needs can vary (easily 3-fold or more when you run the gamut from totally sedentary to elite athlete, not to mention male and female differences), standardization that applies to everyone may not be possible.

I think the recent laws such as requiring calories on restaurant menus are a positive move that will influence some people’s behavior. But no label changes by themselves will solve the obesity crisis. A real solution is going to have to include personal responsibility, nutrition education, self-discipline, hard work and lifestyle change.

Changes in the labeling laws won’t influence everybody because the people most likely to care about what labels say are those who have already made a commitment to change their lifestyles (and they’re least likely to eat processed and packaged foods — that have labels — in the first place). Actually, for those who care, all the info you need is already on the labels, you just have to do a little math and watch out for sneaky label tricks.

There’s one true solution to this portion distortion and label lies problem: Become CALORIE AWARE. Of course that includes educated label reading, but it goes much further. In my Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle system, here is how I define “calorie counting”:

1. Get a good calorie counter book, chart or electronic device/software and get to know the calorie counts of all the staple foods you eat on a daily basis. Look up the calorie values for foods you eat occasionally.

2. Always have a daily meal plan — on paper — with calories printed for each food, each meal and the day. Use that menu as a daily goal and target.

3. Educate yourself about average caloric needs for men and women and learn how to estimate your own calorie needs as closely as you can based on your activity, weight, body composition, height, gender and age.

4. Get a good kitchen food scale and use it. Keep counting calories and doing nutrition by the numbers until you are unconsciously competent and eating the right quantities to easily maintain your ideal weight becomes second nature.

Obviously, saying that calories are all there is to nutrition is like saying that putting is all there is to golf. Calorie quality and quantity are both important. However, it’s a mistake to ignore the calorie quantity side of the game. Serving sizes matter and even healthy foods get stored as fat if you eat too much.

You can play “blindfolded archery” by guessing your calories and food portions if you want to. Hey, you might get lucky and guess right. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend depending on luck — or the government — for something as important as your body and your health. I would recommend the personal responsibility, nutrition education, self-discipline, hard work and lifestyle change.
© 2010 Tom Venuto, author of The Body Fat Solution: Five Principles for Burning Fat, Building Lean Muscle, Ending Emotional Eating, and Maintaining Your Perfect Weight

Author Bio
Tom Venuto is a fat-loss expert, nutrition researcher, and natural, steroid-free bodybuilder. Since 1989, Venuto has been involved in virtually every aspect of the fitness and weight-loss industry — as a personal trainer, nutrition consultant, motivation coach, fitness model, health club manager, and bestselling author of the popular e-book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, as well as other digital programs such as MP3 teleseminars and weight-loss membership websites. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Visit the author’s website at: www.TheBodyFatSolution.com.

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Irish Apple Cake

Posted February 17, 2010 – 10:47 am in: Cakes, Dessert

Ingredients:

  • 4 tablespoons butter at room temperature
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 4 Granny Smith apples, cored, peeled and diced (2 cups)
  • 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour

Directions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease an 8-inch square cake pan well.
  2. In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
  3. Add the egg, apples, nuts, and vanilla and stir well.
  4. Sift in the dry ingredients and mix well.
  5. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake until the cake is lightly browned and a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean, about 45 minutes.
  6. Let the cake cook in the pan for 5 minutes, then unmold
  7. Serve warm or at room temperature with vanilla ice cream.
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10 Ingredients - 5 Meals

Posted June 18, 2009 – 3:38 pm in: How To

Here’s Mark Bittman on the Today show discussing stocking the pantry and making five dishes from 10 ingredients you should have on hand.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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Agnolotti with Ricotta and Spinach

Posted May 24, 2009 – 9:36 am in: Italian, Pasta

Ingredients:

  • 1 lb flour
  • 6 oz sweet cream butter
  • 8 eggs
  • salt, to taste
  • 15 oz ricotta cheese, as dry as possible
  • 2 oz spinach, trimmed and washed
  • 13 oz Parmesan cheese, grated
  • black pepper, to taste
  • nutmeg, to taste
  • 4 cups heavy cream
  • 4 oz mascarpone cheese
  • white pepper, to taste

Directions:

  1. The Dough - Combine the following ingredients: 1 pound bleached flour, 2 ounces sweet butter, 5 eggs, and 1 pinch salt. Work the dough long enough to allow the butter to be incorporated inside the dough. Wrap the dough in a towel and let it rest, for at least one hour, inside the refrigerator.
  2. The Filling - Steam the spinach and chop it very fine. In a bowl, beat together 2 eggs with 7 ounces freshly grated Parmesan cheese, 1 pinch each: salt, black pepper, and nutmeg. Add 15 ounces dry ricotta cheese and mix very well, but not too long. If you mix it too much, the mixture will become liquid.
  3. The Agnolotti - Roll out the dough in a thin layer and brush it with an egg wash (made from 1 egg). With the help of a teaspoon to make a “walnut” shape, place the spoon on the dough and cover it with another layer. Cut with a round pasta cutter 2 inches in diameter. Stuff the pasta with the filling and cook in boiling water until the agnolotti come to the surface of the boiling water.
  4. The Sauce - For the sauce, bring 1 quart heavy cream to a slow boil and add 4 ounces sweet butter, 6 ounces freshly grated Parmesan cheese, 4 ounces mascarpone cheese, 1 pinch of salt, 1 pinch of nutmeg, 2 pinches white pepper. Boil slowly for five minutes, constantly stirring with a wooden spoon.
  5. Serve agnolotti on warm plates with warm sauce.
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Ground Beef Stroganoff

Posted May 17, 2009 – 10:27 am in: 30-Minute Meals, Beef, Main Dish

Ingredients:

  • 1 lb. ground beef
  • 1/2 cup chopped onion
  • 1/2 cup drained mushrooms
  • 1-1/4 cups condensed Cream of Mushroom soup
  • 1/4 cup water, red wine or beef broth
  • 1/2 cup sour cream

Directions:

  1. In a fry pan, brown the ground beef and onion; drain well.
  2. Stir in mushrooms, soup and water.
  3. Cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes.
  4. Stir in sour cream; heat through, but do not boil.
  5. Serve over noodles or rice.
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Orange Rosemary Pork Chops

Posted May 10, 2009 – 9:27 pm in: Main Dish, Pork

Ingredients:

  • 4 boneless pork chops
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 shallot, peeled and minced
  • 1/3 cup beef broth
  • 1/3 cup orange juice

Directions:

  1. Season pork chops with rosemary, salt and pepper.
  2. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat.
  3. Add chops and cook until browned and cooked through, about 5  minutes per side.
  4. Remove to a serving platter and cover to keep warm.
  5. Add shallots to the pan; sauté until soft.
  6. Add broth and orange juice, scraping to remove any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Boil until liquid is reduced by half, about 3 minutes.
  7. Pour over chops and serve with more fresh Rosemary
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Osso Buco

Posted February 23, 2009 – 11:44 am in: Beef, Italian

Ingredients:

  • 4 slices veal hind shank, about 1″ to 1½” (2.5cm to 4cm) thick
  • 1 medium onion, chopped fine
  • ribs celery with leaves, chopped fine
  • 1 medium carrot, chopped fine
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 3 tbs. butter
  • 4 tbs. vegetable oil
  • 1 cup (240ml) dry white wine or white vermouth
  • 2 cups (about 480ml) meat broth
  • 3 tbs. tomato paste
  • 6 anchovy fillets, mashed
  • ½ tsp. dried thyme
  • 2-3 bay leaves
  • 2 strips lemon peel
  • kosher salt
  • fresh ground pepper
  • flour

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).
  2. Tie the shanks around the middle with kitchen twine; this will keep them from falling apart during cooking.
  3. Choose a heavy, covered roasting pan or Dutch oven which will just accommodate the veal shanks in one layer. Put the butter, 2 tablespoons of the oil, the onions, celery and carrots in the pan and sauté over medium heat until the vegetables have wilted, about 8 minutes.
  4. Add the garlic and lemon peel and sauté until they’re fragrant, about 2 minutes more. Remove from the heat.
  5. Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a skillet until it is near the smoking point. Lightly flour the veal shanks and slip them into the oil. Richly brown the shanks on both of the cut sides, then place them in the roasting pan on top of the vegetables.
  6. Place the wine in the skillet and boil until reduced by one-half, scraping up any brown residue. Pour this over the veal shanks.
  7. Heat the beef broth to a boil in the skillet, whisking in the tomato paste and anchovies.
  8. Add this to the veal shanks, along with the herbs, several grindings of pepper, and a large pinch of salt. The liquid should cover ¾ of the shanks. If not, add extra water.
  9. Bring the pot to a simmer, cover, and place in the oven. Cook for approximately 2 hours, turning and basting the shanks every ½ hour.
  10. If the cooking liquids have nearly evaporated, add hot water, about ½ cup at a time. The veal is done when it is fork tender and falling from the bone.
  11. Transfer the shanks to a platter, remove the strings, and cover to keep warm.
  12. If the sauce seems watery, place the dutch oven on the stove top over high heat and reduce the cooking liquid until the sauce has a thick, creamy consistency. Pour the sauce over the shanks and serve.
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Video: Sweet Holiday Gifts

Posted December 10, 2008 – 10:05 am in: Holiday Recipes

Friends and family will love receiving these homemade holiday treats.

Click this link to watch the video: Sweet Holiday Gifts

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Tips for potluck partygoers

Posted November 27, 2008 – 11:08 am in: Entertaining
An assortment of food dishes at a church potluck.

Image via Wikipedia

(NC)-With all the festivities that take place over the holiday season, it’s no wonder that time-starved hosts often opt for a casual potluck party. While this type of entertaining creates a great, relaxed vibe, it does mean that guests must do some legwork beyond deciding what to wear!

“What to make and how to get it there are guests’ top concerns when attending a potluck party,” says Jennifer Murphy, associate product manager for Pyrex. “With some pre-party planning and the right bakeware, you can ensure that your contribution is delicious and makes it safely to the party!”

Murphy offers these additional tips for potluck partygoers:

  • Ask the hosts what type of dish to bring so they can make certain that every type of dish - from appetizer to entrée to dessert - is offered at their party.
  • Shop for your contribution in advance so that you will have all the necessary ingredients on hand and can prepare your dish with time to spare.
  • To get your dish to the party safely, use a sturdy container like Pyrex Portables glass bakeware. This 9″ x 13″ baking dish comes with a BPA-free plastic cover, an insulated food carrier and a hot/cold pack.
  • Be sure to highlight ingredients in your dish, like nuts and shellfish, which may cause food allergies.
  • Consider creating recipe cards to place beside your dish - that way other guests can try your dish at home.
  • If you can bear to part with it, consider leaving your Pyrex Portables bakeware for the host - it will make a much-appreciated hostess gift.
  • For more information on Pyrex Portables, visit www.pyrex.com.

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