Support for Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

You may have seen Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution - a new show where the celebrity chef takes on America's "Unhealthiest City." Turns out that this is more than just a TV show. The British Celebrity Chef is compiling a poll to be sent to President Obama to show that Americans want healthier food, both at home and in their schools. Here's the link to sign his petition, or even donate to the campaign if you'd like to:

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Petition

And for those of you practicing evidence-based medici...er... support, here's an article from a British News site outlining Jamie's success in his homeland, specifically boosting grades and decreasing abseteeism in the schools he worked with.

Jamie Oliver's school dinners shown to have improved academic results

Next article is actually going to be a recipe for something markedly less healthy than Mr. Oliver is suggesting.

Tony's Food 101: Basic Technique for Leafy Greens

Maybe you belong to a community supported agriculture (CSA) farm, and just got a bushell of big, tough green leaves. Maybe your next door neighbor is an organic gardening enthusiast with a little too much yield this season. Maybe you read the latest Jamie Oliver book, went out and bought 5 heads of Italian Black Kale and you have no idea what to do with the remaining three or four. There is a simple answer to each of these questions, and it's right on the other side of a pot of boiling water.

Yup. Boil 'em... just not for British amounts of time. Quickly boiling any leafy green vegetable is an easy and healthy way to serve this particular class of food. Now, I'm not disregarding some tried and true recipes involving leafy greens - I am a New Englander, after all (just like this guy). Some of them aren't necessarily the fastest.... and some of them involve large amounts of salted animal fats. The best part about this way of cooking leafy greens is that the actual cooking process is fast and doesn't leave much time for the nutrients these bad boys contain to leech into the water they're cooked in. It also leaves (bu-dum-shinnnng) alot of flavor behind, too.

Flash-boiled greens

• One head of leafy greens for every two people you want to serve. Swiss chard, mustard greens, beet tops, non-baby spinach, kale, dinosaur kale, or any others are perfectly acceptable. Being largely a purist, I leave collard greens and cabbage to the professionals. Wash them well, as sometimes they're a little too farm fresh.
• Good, pungent extra-virgin olive oil. You're not cooking it, per se, so haul out the first-press, unfiltered Italian import you've been keeping in a cool, dark place for just such an occasion.
• A pinch of salt. You don't really need more than this. Don't salt the water either. I don't think I need to go on that tangent again, after the recent national media frenzy.
• Fresh ground black pepper, to taste.
• Either one of three things - A lemon, a pinch of nutmeg, or a whole garlic clove. More on this later.

Fill a stock pot or kettle with water and bring it to a boil (keeping it covered really does make it go faster). Make sure it's at a full, rolling boil. Put the water on as the very very first step of making dinner. As it's heating up, do all the other stuff you need to do, the water will take a little while.

If you picked garlic from the above list, find whatever bowl you're going to serve your greens in. Cut your garlic clove in half and rub the inside of the bowl with the cut half of the garlic. This will scent the greens, but not make you the least popular person at work the next day.

Dunk your leaves in and give them a swirl with a pair of tongs. Watch them closely. They will start to become limp, you don't want them too soft. When they're cooked to a tenderness you happen to like (I tend on the undercooked side out of personal preference), tong them out of the pot and into a collander. Shake them a few times to drain some of the excess water. Put them in a bowl (again, if you picked garlic, into your pre-garlic'd bowl). Toss them with a drizzle of olive oil, a pinch of salt, black pepper and either a squeeze of fresh lemon or some nutmeg. The nutmeg works especially well with spinach.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Vol 1: Bread

Wait!

Don't throw out that week old (maybe two-week old...) half loaf of artisan whole grain organic spelt flour rosemary peasant bread you bought at Whole Foods for $12.65. Just because it's hard enough to be used as an ad hoc construction tool doesn't mean it's not still good.... for something. And by no means should you feed it to geese, pigeons, sparrows or any other variety of hollow-boned pest.

Okay, so what should you do with it? The answer is simple: croutons. You know those crunchy bits of bread you put on salads, right? Well, send the people from Pepperidge Farm packing. Why spend an extra few bucks on a bag of those oily cardbord cubes when you've already spent it on bread you're about to chuck? The only thing standing between old bread and croutons is your oven. Bread also lasts almost indefinitely in crouton form.

The best part of croutons-from-scratch is that you can choose what ever flavors you want. You're not limited to "extra garlic" or "zesty italian." And this choice of flavor is in addition to what ever stale bread you decide to use as a base. Living (mostly) alone, I usually can't go through a loaf of bread before it gets stale, so I do this alot. I've tried a wide variety of herbs, spices, herb-and-spice mixtures*, and a variety of oils against a backdrop of any kind of bread you can imagine. It's next to impossible to screw this up. So, let's get started. Too use a more food-snob-approved term:

House-made Croutons

• What ever old, stale bread you have lying around. Just make sure it's not moldy. Mold may improve some cheeses, but it tends to ruin your croutons (and gross out your friends/family). Good, crusty breads you buy in unsliced loaves work best, but you can do this with odds and ends of the sliced stuff, too. Cut it into cubes of what ever size you want. Mine tend to be on the bigger size.
• Enough olive oil to just coat the bread.
• Salt, black pepper, and what ever other flavorings you want to use. I've had alot of success with dried Herbs de Provence. I've also recently used truffle oil, and that batch came out amazing. Garlic, chili pepper.... really what ever you want is fine.

Figure 35.q - Everything old is new again" - Peter Allen

Preheat your oven to the universal temperature - Bake 350. Toss the bread cubes with enough oil oil to lightly coat them and with any seasonings you want to use. Spread out in a single layer on a cookie sheet. You can put down a layer of foil first, if you're lazy like I am, but I understand it sort of spoils the whole "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" theme. Bake the little bastards until you can smell what ever flavorings you've used emanating from your oven. A half-hour is generally safe for big cubes, 20 minutes for smaller ones. Take them out, let them cool. They will harden into perfect, crunchy little bites. Store them in an airtight container in a cabinet or shelf and use whenever you have a salad. Or soup. Or any other use you could think of for a crouton.

Figure 36.z - Airtight.

Until next week, loyal readers.

*If you happen to be near the place featured in the link - try their Cajun seasoning. It's one of the best I've tried.

Tony's Food 101: Girlfriend's House Jambalaya

Okay, so after sort of a long hiatus, Overeducated and Well Fed is back in business, and we're starting back off with a super-easy dish that's both healthy and cooks up in a single pot, making cleanup fast too (hence why I made it at my girlfriend's house).

Thinking about jambalaya conjures images of New Orleans, Mardi Gras and lots of capsaicin - the stuff that makes chilis so hot. While those things are all true, jambalaya shouldn't be relegated to the category of mystery and exotica by non-Southerners. Once you break down the components, it's actually a really accessible technique for making flavorful one-pot meals. You basically have meat, vegetables and rice. They are all cooked in a particular order and way, making jambalaya more of a technique than any single dish. Today's jambalaya looks more complicated that it actually needs to be, and that's by choice.

So that I could a) impress my girlfriend (and maybe her roommates too) and b) so that I could illustrate exactly variety jambalaya is capable of, today's version has chicken, andouille sausage and shrimp. Feel free to use one of these, any two of these, or all three of these, depending on what you have on hand. Likewise, don't confine yourself to the vegetables I used either. You don't even have to use the tomato if you don't want to! Apparently, in New Orleans, Creole (or Red) Jambalaya contains tomato while Cajun (or Brown) doesn't. Any deep southerners among the readership may feel free to validate or dispute this, by the way. I even messed with the seasonings, not having any pre-made Creole or Cajun seasonings on hand over at the girl's place. I'll include instructions for both in the recipe below, because what I used came out pretty tasty!

One definite Do Not is using a pre-made jambalaya mix. Pretty much all seasoned rice or pasta box mixes are loaded with salt, which is associated with high blood pressure and therefore vascular disease (e.g. heart attacks and stroke). Making this stuff yourself is easy, and you can control the amount of salt, fat (and all the other tasty bad-for-you) things that go into it. Make stuff from scratch and live to cook another day.

Girlfriend's House Jambalaya

• One large onion, diced.
• Two cloves of garlic, finely chopped.
• One or two large carrots, diced.
• One each red and green bell peppers, again, diced. By the way, when I say "diced" I mean cut into about 1/4 square in flat pieces. Here are more detailed instruction for those who want them.
• Two boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into bit-sized cubes.
• 1/2 lb andouille sausage, cut on a bias to make oblong or ellipse-shaped slices. I like Trader Joe's andouille chicken sausage, and the smokiness of it helped me get around not having any cajun/creole seasoning to use.
• One pound of frozen, cooked, tail-off shrimp. Any size is fine. Thaw them according to package directions prior to use. Actually, if you use the super huge ones, you may want to think about using two pounds so that they're a little more populous on your plate. You can also substitue crayfish (if you've been to Ikea lately) or langostine tails.
• One large can of diced tomatoes. The fire-roasted type are good in this dish, but avoid them if you're already using andouille sausage -and- cajun seasoning with a smoky flavor built in. Do not drain. Again, the tomatoes are all-together optional.
• One regular can of red kidney beans, drained and rinsed.
• A tablespoon or two of Cajun or Creole seasoning, to taste, and two big pinches of salt. Alternatively, you could do like I did an use the same amount of a salt-containing all-purpose seasoning mix that you like (I like Jane's Krazy Mixed Up seasonings), along with a dash of cayenne pepper and two of chili powder.
• One cup of low salt chicken stock/broth - use your own if you've made it!
• Two big handfuls (about one cup) of white or brown long-grain rice.

Add all of the veggies and a glug of olive oil to a shallow pot with a cover and sweat over medium heat - until the onions are just translucent.

Figure 8.a - I sweat vegetables.

Okay. Now turn the heat up to medium-high add in the chicken and sausage and let them brown for a while, stir it up occasionally. Add in your seasonings at this point. Once they are all brown and tastied-up, add in the kidney beans and tomatoes, then the stock, shrimp and rice. Bring the whole thing to a boil, then turn the heat down to low, cover and let it cook 20 minutes if using white rice, 40 if using brown.

The basic skeleton of the technique is 1) half-cook veggies, 2) add meat and half-cook, 3) add miscellaneous ingredients, stock, rice and simmer until rice is done.) See, you didn't believe me, but wasn't that easy?

Figure 8.b - The usual suspects.

Figure 8.c - The finished product.

Today's pictures are complements of my girlfriend, and her camera that's way better than mine.

Next week, we're going green... and no, I don't mean broccoli rabe.

Tony's Food 201: The Whole Chicken and it's After Effects

We're upping the course difficulty here in the New Year. Today, we're going to taken on an entire chicken.

Figure 10.p - Per my girlfriend, we apparently have a bright future of chicken-raising ahead of us. Our six future-chickens' names are (as decided by a committee made up of me, my girlfriend, my college friends, and a good deal of home-made pumpkin vodka): Henrietta, Gertrude, Nugget, Minerva, Galadriel and Cluck-cluck. (http://www.windsorfamilyfarm.com/)

Okay, I lied. Cooking a whole chicken isn't really all that difficult. I usually just throw it in an oven and call it roasting. What to do with it afterwards is where things get complex. It basically breaks down into two broad categories: meat and other. What to do with the meat is easy, you eat it. Plain chicken can get mind-numbingly boring, so we'll address that two ways: how to get piles of flavor into the chicken pre-roasting, and interesting things to do with all that bird. Turns out, what to do with the "other" category is pretty easy too, and we'll get to that in this article as well.

Whole Roast Chicken

• One whole "roaster" chicken, these are generally larger than the fryers. Remove the packaging, pull the packet of miscellaneous parts out of the cavity, rinse the whole thing in side and out
• Two whole lemons, cut longitudinally into long wedges
• 8-10 cloves of garlic, smashed with the flat side of a knife and your hand.
• What ever herbs you feel like using. I generally switch it up based on season - sage and rosemary in the cold months; thyme and bay leaves in the warmer months. Chili peppers would be a good match with the lemons and the bay.
• A bag of fingerling potatoes
• Two white or yellow onions cut into quarters.
• Salt and pepper.

After the chicken is all rinsed, pat the entire inside and outside with sea salt and coarse ground black pepper. Stuff the cavity full of lemon wedges, garlic cloves and herbs, but leave a few of each aside. Make some cuts into the skin on the breast side of the chicken and stuff herbs and garlic cloves in there as well. Make a couple more cuts in the skin on the folds of the wings, and put a lemon wedge in each fold, under the skin, as well as any garlic and herbs you can fit in there. A certain obese celebrity chef and enemy of public health does something similar, but rather than using herbs, she crams lumps of butter under the skin. Tie the legs together over the opening of the cavity with twine. I generally put mine in a shallow pyrex casserole dish, but feel free to put it on a roasting rack over a roasting pan. It will be dryer, you may need to baste it. Arrange the potatoes and onions around the chicken. Bake for about 2 hours depending on the size of the bird in question, and how long the package tells you to roast it.

Okay. So now you've had a meal with some delicious lemony, herby, garlicky chicken and sides. Now you have a pile of lemony, herby, garlicky white and dark meat, and a pile of bones, cartilage, skin and fat. Oh, and that packet of miscellaneous parts you pulled out at the get-go. The meat you can just eat as is, until of course you get bored with it like I usually do. The rest of the creature is the problem. This is where home-made chicken stock comes in.

Taking Stock of the Situation. (no, not that Situation).

Basically, take everything that you roasted that's not chicken meat, onions, potatoes and lemons and throw it into your biggest pot. Throw the lemons out, they will make your stock bitter. Add in whatever roasted herbs and garlic you recover from the pan. You can add new onions and maybe even carrots and celery if you like, but it's not necessary. There should already be salt and pepper inside the cavity and on the skin. Cover it to about 2-3 inches above the mess with cold water and let it simmer on the stove for 3-4 hours. Do not boil it, this will make it extraordinarly cloudy. When you're done, strain it and put it into what ever containers you have on hand. Mine mostly goes into old Cool-Whip containers and then into the freezer. You can use it in soups, to flavor rice, really anything.

Doing Something Different with What You've Got

Okay, there are only so many times a person can eat plain roast chicken. Yes, even if you've gussy-ied it up with various and sundry aromatic plants. So what to do with all your new-found poultry wealth? I usually end up making some sort of salad from the meat for sandwiches for my lunch. One of my favorites is a Provencal version, which includes the chicken (obviously) chopped fine with a knife for food processor, mayonaisse, a couple spoons of olive tapenade, cherry or grape tomatoes cut into sub-bite-sized pieces, and any other vegetables I have lying around: carrots, celery, red onion all work nicely, all chopped just as fine as the chicken. It makes a mean sandwich to bring for lunch, all the other flavors mask how sick of the chicken you are, and gives you some lean protein and raw veggies in your diet. Sure beats some of the alternatives out there.

So you have the assignment for the week, as well as a couple homework projects to keep you busy in the kitchen as well. See you all back here next week for one last thing to do with your left over chicken.

Winter Break

Hi Readers,

Things are getting hectic with the holidays and my on-call schedule has revved up for these last two weeks of December. See you back here in 2010.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year!

Tony

Tony's Mom's Food 101: Roasted Red Peppers

So according to my tag line, I'm an Italian Boy. This is both by heritage (100%, by the way) and by the old adage "You are what you eat." I grew up eating Italian, because that's what my mom knew how to make, because that's what her mom knew how to make, ad infinitum. I was also fortunate enough to have a grandfather who, in his retirement, kept a huge vegetable garden. Every spring, summer and fall were filled with fresh produce grown only one town over from my home. Locavores, eat your hearts out. Therefore, I am a product of my parents and so is my minor obsession with food, as well as my innate ability to cook American-Italian food (Figure 12.p).

Fresh produce only lasts so long, though. What did we do with bushels of peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes and squash? A good deal of it was given away, especially towards the end of each season. The tomatoes were stewed and canned in the traditional style, and then made in to red gravy (what people of non-Italian descent would refer to as red sauce, spaghetti sauce, tomato sauce, marinara, or pizza sauce). My mom's red gravy is a jealously guarded secret, which of course will never be published on this website. What I will write about is what we used to do with the red peppers: roast them (and subsequently freeze them - more on that later). She has actually shared this recipe publicly a couple of times, once given to me to give to a college friend who was compiling a dorm hall based cook book, and once to my parents' local paper, a picture of my mom holding the finished product included. Needless to say, I won't be "off-ed" or "whacked" or any other stereotypical Italo-American slang term for "assassinated" for sharing this recipe - I'm just sharing it with more people than before.

Figure 12.p - My parents. Me taking a picture of them taking pictures of each other = meta-irony. Not really.

I know what you're thinking, you can just buy roasted red peppers in a jar in the grocery store. I tried that once, and I almost threw the jar out because they tasted like crap compared to the peppers I'm used to. Comparing these home made roasted reds to the grocery store jars is like saying you're going to serve Spam with cloves in it on Christmas. It would work if the people you were serving it to had only ever eaten Spam and had no clue what a real roasted and glazed ham tastes like. Spam and roasted red peppers from the jar are a proverbial slap in the face to people who know what the real thing is like. So, without further hesitation, here is my mom's recipe for home made roasted red peppers.

Roasted Red Peppers

• 8 red bell peppers - preferably grown by your own grandfather like mine are, but that's not mandatory.
• 1/3 cup of water.
• olive oil - you're using it raw here, so haul out the good stuff. Extra-virgin only. Cold-pressed highly suggested, unfiltered preferred.
• one clove of garlic, minced.

Wash your peppers, cut them in half length-wise, remove the green core and every single seed. Place them in a roasting pan or a deeper-sided cookie sheet face down in a single layer, coat the bottom of the pan with the water. Move your oven rack to the second-from-the-top position and set the oven to broil. Broil for about 20 minutes, until the skins are totally black. Remove the peppers from the pan and place them in a large mixing bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a clean dish towel. This will make them steam (since they're still hot) and will cause the burnt, black skin to peel away from the lightly caramelized flesh. Let them do this for one hour. Peel the skins off and throw them away. Cut your newly skinned peppers lengthwise into long strips.

At this point, you have one of two options. Either dress them with olive oil and garlic, place them in the fridge and allow the flavors to marinate for a while, or freeze them and bring containers to your adult son who is too lazy to do this whole process himself as often as you do. They freeze and thaw just fine (Figure 12.q) . Either you or your adult son can use them however you would presumably have used the awful ones from the jar - in antipastos, on pizzas, or tossed with pasta. The best way to eat them is on a sandwich made with crusty Italian bread and a slice of Provolone cheese.

Figure 12.q - Un-dressed roasted peppers in their natural habitat. This specimen is post-thaw.

Until next week!