Nutrition, Day Two

"Cooking something delicious is really much more satisfactory than painting pictures or making pottery. At least for most of us. Food has the tact to disappear, leaving room and opportunity for masterpieces to come. The mistakes don't hang on the wall or on shelves to reproach you forever. It follows from this that the kitchen should be thought of as the center of the house. It needs above all space for talking, playing, bringing up children, sewing, having a meal, reading sitting and thinking...It's in this kind of place that good food has flourished. It's from this secure retreat that the exploration of man's curious relationship with food, beyond the point of nourishment, can start." -Jane Grigson Good Things

Thursday was our second day of nutritional cooking, along with another lecture on nutrition from the ever-entertaining Chef Tim. Yesterday he told us a story of when he decided to try out the Atkins diet, and just ate straight protein for two months, no sugar, no carbs, nothing but protein. Then one Sunday he started having a craving for Belgian waffles and maple syrup...he tried to fight it off throughout the day, but finally, later that night he gave into his craving and after wolfing down a few bites, passed out very hard. So hard that when he woke up, he realized, after confronting a small pile of mess left from his dog and several concerned messages on his answering machine, that he had fallen asleep for 36 hours and it was now Tuesday night. Some people might call that a coma. We all thought it was pretty funny. So even though nutrition is not the most exciting topic, Chef Tim makes it exciting by interspersing as many hilarious, yet still relevant, stories as he can.

For our second nutrition day, we made a tapas-style plate of three dishes: roasted spaghetti squash with tomatoes and capers, falafel and a watercress, fennel and grapefruit salad. During the falafel demo, Chef Jeff called on the class's trusty Turk, Umut to describe to us the history of falafel and the proper way to prepare it. Slightly offensive, but entertaining nonetheless. After preparing our three recipes, we had another long lunch break, then a second lecture on nutrition in the afternoon from Chef Tim, this time focusing on lipids, or fats. I've always been interested in nutrition and try to eat as healthily as I can, and it was interesting to hear the real nutritionist's perspective on fats because our perspective on it in America is so jaded through what we hear from marketing companies and advertisements.

One thing I learned is that the reason the Mediterranean diet and the Okinawa diets are so healthful and cause those people to live up until they're 100 years old with relatively no cancer is because of the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids that they consume. In the Mediterranean diet, the ratio is 2:3 and in the Okinawa diet, it's about 2:1. Guess what ours is in America? 1:20. The huge Omega 6 number comes from all of the corn that we eat in America, in our processed foods and through what we feed our chickens and beef. Gross. Also why I try to buy as much food as I can from the farmer's market because I know where it comes from and what it's been grown in or fed. Michael Pollan summed up nutrition pretty well in these three concise sentences in his article Unhappy Meals: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." The basics of nutrition come down to the fact that you will most likely remain healthy if you stay away from as much processed food as you can, eat a diet of mostly plants and try not to eat anything that makes any sort of health claim (Low Cholesterol, Heart-Healthy, Low-fat, etc). That low cholesterol butter substitute? There is no cholesterol in food, cholesterol is produced by our own bodies, so how can a marketer claim that I Can't Believe It's Not Butter is low in cholesterol when it isn't supposed to have any at all? If you want to read more about America and it's food supply issues, definitely read The Omnivore's Dilemma if you haven't already. Or if you would rather sit on the couch than use your brain, you can also watch Food, Inc. and it will have the same kind of I-never-want-to-eat-meat-ever-again effect on you. At least it did for me. (I even highlighted the links to Amazon, so now you have no excuse not to read it/watch it)

This weekend, in honor of my brother coming home from college and my grandparents coming to visit, I decided to try making pasta for the first time. It's sort of been a tradition that whenever Nani and Baba (my grandparents) come into town or we go up to their house, that we have spaghetti with meat sauce. So instead of doing the typical thing we always do, I decided to "take it to the next level" (I hate that saying so, excuse me for saying it) and make a traditional Italian Bolognese sauce and homemade pasta. I got both the recipes from a combination of Barbara Lynch's cookbook Stir and Lidia Bastianich's cookbook, as well as lots of advice from my fellow culinary classmates on how to make pasta. I made the bolognese with ground lamb, pork sausage, beef and veal and let it simmer for about 5 hours yesterday. It was super flavorful and was delicious with the fresh pasta. The pasta wasn't as tricky as I thought it would be, although I did have to knead the dough until my arms were about to fall off. I made two different batches using the same recipe, but they both came out differently. One of the dough balls was a little wetter than the other one and came together very well when I kneaded it, so I thought it would be the better of the two, but it ended up being too wet and after I cooked it, it was a little too gummy and wet. Here is a picture of the pretty dough ball that did not end up as well as I would have liked:



And here is a picture of my first batch of cut pasta after going through the pasta roller:


For desert, I made a chocolate raspberry layer cake, which was also very yummy. I got the recipe from Epicurious.com and I believe it was printed in Bon Appetit a few years ago. But I changed the recipe a little bit by adding a layer of chocolate mousse. I cooked two separate cakes, cut them in half, and filled one layer with a mixture of raspberry preserves and fresh raspberries, the next layer with chocolate mousse, and then another layer of the raspberry mixture. I topped the whole thing with a layer of chocolate ganache (a mixture of melted chocolate and whipped cream) and piped some chocolate mousse around the outside. The cake recipe ended up being perfect, it was really moist and chocolatey. If you are in the mood for a chocolate cake, I would highly recommend making this recipe. I used Scharffen Berger chocolate with a higher cacao count (70%) than the recipe recommended, but the darker the chocolate the better, in my opinion.


During the frosting process, a majority of the kitchen, my outfit and the cake stand got chocolate on it. But that's just a risk you'll have to take. Time for me to go roast a few chickens for dinner and read the NY Times Magazine, which is so conveniently focused on food this weekend :)

Happy Sunday,
Elise