Classic Cheese Sauce

A Miner's Daughter

Can I tell a story about my Mom?  Mom was born in the small mining town of Eureka.  Eureka was a good name for a mining town, but it’s pretty much a ghost town now.  Her daddy was a hard rock miner who left school—he had been a promising student—at the age of sixteen to go down into the mines.  He did this because his father, who had also been a miner, died and it fell on him to support the family.  Hard rock mining wasn’t healthy and in Eureka they mined lead.  As a result my Mom’s dad lived a short life—he died of pneumonia at the age of 32, having spent half his life in the darkness of the mines.  His name was Leland Whitehead and I carry his name—my middle name is Leland.

My Mom was just two when her daddy died.  Her mom did the best she could to support the family but times were hard and life was a struggle.  I think that struggle made Mom a strong woman because she’s in her 90s now, cooking, driving, and managing quite well, thank you.  Like her dad, Mom did well in school.  She skipped two grades, won the high school spelling bee as a 13-year old sophomore, and was runner-up in the county contest.  But she followed the pattern of her dad, going to work at the age of 16 to support the family.  She would have done well in college, but higher education just didn’t seem a possibility for a poor Depression kid.

Thinking about this week’s subject, the difficulty of finding healthy milk, brought to mind a story from Mom’s childhood.  There was an Aunt Kate who looked after Mom and her family.  Aunt Kate was like a second mom; they might not have survived the Depression without her.  The only problem, Mom later reminisced, was that when she did something wrong, she heard about it twice—first from her Mom, and then from Aunt Kate. 

Fortunately for them, Aunt Kate had a milk cow that grazed in an unused pasture behind their home.  So despite their poverty, they had the luxury of whole milk from pasture-fed cows—not pasteurized, not homogenized, not even reduced fat.  Mom has a wonderful memory of cream rising in pans of milk in the icebox (this was before refrigerators).  They would take a slice of homemade bread and lay it on the cream until it was well coated.  Then they would sprinkle some sugar on it for a delicious snack. 

But this was a critical inflection point, a rising and a falling, in the American dietary:  Sugar, once a luxury, had become so cheap even the poorest could afford it.  And real milk, available to ordinary folks for millennia, was about to disappear from most people’s pantry.  I wish I had a picture of Mom eating her sugary creamy bread to mark this historic turning point. 

Animal Protein Limit

What goes for milk also goes for dairy:  We’re learning how to buy healthier butter and cheese, but, like meat, we eat dairy products sparingly.  Our goal is to limit animal products to 1/3 of our protein intake, with the other 2/3 coming from plant sources.  We’ll return to this idea—a big change from the MAD—that we first talked about in the post, Protein 101.

In the post cited above—to meet our 1/3 animal protein target—we set a cheese limit of 4 oz. weekly.   (The beautiful wife gets more because she drinks so little milk.)  This caused us to rethink our use of cheese, which led to a new idea:  Though we like cheese as a snack, the best use of our cheese ration is to make vegetables more enjoyable.  The tastiest way to do this is with a cheese sauce—the recipe for this week.

Cheese Sauce Recipe

Leah D. Widtsoe, a formidable woman of the last century and coauthor of the 1937 book The Word of Wisdom: A Modern Interpretation, was a great proponent of whole grains.  But she found one use for refined flour—making sauces.  I usually use whole grains in cooking but in developing my sauce recipe I tried four versions:

1. Sauce made with refined flour, butter, and milk (called béchamel by the French).
2. Repeat #1 but with minced onion added.
3. Sauce made with whole wheat.
4. Sauce made with refined flour and homemade chicken stock (called veloute).

I found that the quickest way to thicken sauce is to use refined flour; whole wheat flour thickens very slowly. The beautiful wife also thought refined flour sauce tasted best, with or without onion.  “You could have added garlic,” she suggested.  In fact we found that all the flavors typically added to white sauce—nutmeg, powdered mustard, red pepper flakes, onion, and garlic—add interest if your palate wants a change.  But a simple sauce flavored with just salt and white pepper tastes really good.  We resolved to save the extra flavors for later, when we craved a new taste experience.

When I saw how much easier it was to make white sauce, or béchamel, with refined flour, I made the mental connection between its introduction and the rise of those rich sauces that characterize French cuisine.  French chefs are said to have a rule about sauce:  A good sauce can be eaten alone.  It’s true—our sauces were delicious. 

Mornay Sauce

For cheese sauce, you simply make a white sauce and stir in your favorite cheese, grated.  With a little practice you can prepare cheese sauce in under 10 minutes.  The French call it mornay sauce.  Ladle your cheese sauce over steamed Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, or almost any vegetable to improve the taste.  Or you can coat a mix of vegetables with the sauce and bake them in a casserole. 

We did this with a mixture of eggplant, yellow squash, onion, and tomato by first steaming the vegetables, then baking 20 minutes in a casserole au gratin.  I made the breadcrumb crust by mixing a cup of buttered toast crumbs with ½ cup grated Parmesan Reggiano cheese.  It's shown in the picture above with a kale salad.  This meal was delicious, totally healthy—we agreed it was good enough for our fancy friends.

We made our cheese sauce using Tillamook cheddar.  (Ratio: The usual mixture is ¼ cup of cheese to a cup of sauce, but you may want more if the cheese has a subtle flavor or you want to thicken the sauce.) If you’re feeling fancy try a mixture of Swiss Gruyere and Parmesan Reggiano. 

If you’re an experienced cook, you don’t need lessons on making mornay.  But a lot of people who want to eat better aren’t trained cooks, so it seemed important to include a cheese sauce in this year's 52 Breakthrough Recipe list.  Here's our recipe:

Ingredients:

• 3 T butter
• 3 rounded T flour
• 2 C whole milk
• ½ tsp salt (but consider the saltiness of the cheese)
• White pepper to taste
• ½ C cheddar cheese, grated

Directions:

1. Heat, but don’t boil, the milk in a medium saucepan.
2. While milk is heating, melt the butter in a small saucepan at medium heat.  When foaming subsides, stir in flour using a wooden spoon.  Let it cook about 1 minute until the paste turns a tan color and a nice aroma develops.  (The time depends on the temperature of the pan.)  If adding onion or garlic, this is a good time.  Chefs frown on onion salt or garlic salt; use the real thing.  Add garlic at the end as overcooking can turn it bitter.   
3. Add the heated milk, stirring with a whisk.  Add the salt and white pepper and any flavor favorites.  Cook about five minutes, whisking frequently, until sauce thickens.
4. Returning to the wooden spoon and lowering the heat, stir in the grated cheese until it’s almost melted and then remove pan from the heat.  Overcooking can make the cheese stringy and tough. 

This is a classic cheese sauce.  I really didn’t introduce anything novel so I can’t append my name to it.  That’s a shame; we’ll just call it Classic Cheese Sauce.

The Love in Your Food

The quick answer:  At the end of the day, if you want to be healthy, you have to cook (or be on good terms with a cook).  Cookin' is how the love gets into food.

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Little House on the Prairie

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), she of the Little House books about the homesteading era of her childhood, made a visit to her daughter in San Francisco in 1915.  Her daughter, I surmise, had a home with running water, a gas stove, and maybe even an electric toaster.  Laura is moved to exclaim: “Aladdin with his wonderful lamp had no more power than the modern woman in her kitchen . . .”

Yet this is the 20^th century irony, seen clearly now in history’s rearview mirror:  The more convenient kitchens became, the less they were used.  Once you start down the laborsaving pathway, there’s no logical stopping point.  The Industrial Revolution provided better kitchens, but it also provided an alternative to cooking—factory food.  Whether the factory was a flourmill in Minnesota, or a fast food restaurant down the street, we slowly lost control of how food was made.  Have you noticed how factory foods are more often addictive than healthy?  It makes a good business. 

Now in the 21^st century we have a new goal:  Use modern means to reinvent traditional home cooking.  It’s a new menu now, more about soups (including stews and chili dishes) salads, vegetables, and whole-grain breads.  It’s about fruits as our main sweet, and a little meat for flavor. 

A Food Hero

In the last post we introduced Barbara Reed, PhD, once Chief Probation Officer for Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.  Drawing on her own experience with ill-health, Dr. Reed theorized that criminal behavior came from bad thinking and wondered if poor nutrition wasn’t more the cause of crime, than any inherent evil in young people.  She started a program of testing young people entering probation, using tests that looked for hypoglycemia and lead exposure (both causes of bad decisions), but also assessed dietary habits.  Based on their findings, young delinquents were counseled on diet, exercise, and given needed treatment.

This was an unusual approach.  Concerns about crime in society have made harsher punishment a popular remedy but this hasn’t reduced recidivism.  The United States, the land of the free, has the highest percent of jailed people in the world.  Dr. Reed’s probationers were likely familiar with handcuffs but no one had taken them by the hand before and tried to understand the cause of their behavior.  The exceptional results of her innovative program made her famous.  While 2/3 of young criminals are typically back in jail within three years, only 11% of Dr. Reed’s kids got in trouble again. 

So I consider Dr. Barbara Reed Stitt—she later married nutrition author Paul Stitt—a nutrition hero.  And I love that her solution to crime was found in a kitchen, rather than a jail cell.

Staying Alive

In a prior post I told how my Mom—some years ago—remarked that her friends had all stopped cooking.  They had worked hard in the kitchen all their lives and as their husbands retired from work, they retired from their kitchens.  Now they ate out, or got some take out; they would warm food in the microwave but they didn’t cook.  It didn’t take too long to see the result.  Her friends and their husbands are all gone now, excepting one who has dementia.  Mom, in her 90s, is still chugging along, managing her home, driving her car, organizing old pictures into scrapbooks, and exercising when she can.  She’s cooking for one now, but she’s still cooking.

Saving Money           

It’s often claimed that it’s cheaper to buy factory food than to cook your own.  Don’t believe it.  You’ll always save by buying whole foods and cooking them yourself.  Fast food doesn’t save money—it just saves learning how to cook.  I’m not even sure that fast food saves time, once you consider the time spent driving to and fro and waiting in line.  And we haven’t counted the medical costs yet.

The Family Circle

Love is what glues a family together.  And when families get together, it’s most often around the dinner table.  While you’re sharing food, you share your lives.  This is where the daily happenings are observed and celebrated.  This is where traditions are born and preserved.  And it’s where day by day we polish the bonds that bring us together.

Think back to your childhood.  How many memorable moments happened around the family dinner table?  The family I grew up in swelled to ten children but we never gave up the smallish dinner table with built-in benches on two sides.  Dinnertime was the best part of the day.  That’s when the daily cares were set aside and the family was safely together again. 

The love within the family, I believe, begins with the love cooked into the daily meals.  Cooking is a form of caring.  Mom, or dad, busy in the kitchen, is a sign not only of something for dinner—it's assurance you’re a family. 

Cooking 101

This year the weekly posts include a menu and a recipe.  We’ll share 52 recipes that have this goal:  Rediscover the traditional diet of our ancestors using the best of the modern improvements.  For this reason we call them gateway recipes because they introduce us to the new dietary of Word of Wisdom living. 

Please comment:  Share what works best for you in home cooking.  What are your best new ideas for cooking?  How do you get your family to help with dinner?

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

Secrets of Stir-fry

Learning to Cook

There’s a phrase among doctors that goes, “See one, do one, teach one.”  It means that some things can be learned simply by observation, and that having done one you’re qualified to teach the procedure.  Doctors sometimes laugh when they hear this, likely because they’ve learned by sad experience that everything not’s that simple.  Like cooking.

Because I’m fascinated by the Asian use of meat—as a condiment rather than the main course—I wanted to include a stir-fry recipe in our evolving cookbook.  Stir-fry can also use less edible portions of plants, like the stalk.  Stir-fry is also a good way to use the produce loitering in your fridge.

Did I mention I’ve never cooked stir-fry?  I didn’t even like it.  But any recipe that is plant based, sparing of meat, quick to cook, and affordable, deserves a second look.  I started by Googling the term, “secrets of stir-fry.”  After that I compared stir-fry recipes.  Bottom line:  Stir-fry is bite-sized pieces of vegetables with a little meat, cooked quickly in a hot pan.  Period.  Oh, and eat it while it’s hot, before it gets soggy.

Secrets of Stir-fry

After a day of research and a half-day of cooking, here’s what I learned:

1. There are four steps:  a) prepare ingredients, b) cook meat and remove, c) cook vegetables, and d) add sauce and meat to vegetables and finish cooking.  Actually, if you like stir-fry over whole grain rice, you better start the rice first.
2. Need a wok?  No. A frying pan is actually easier to keep at the hot stir-fry temperatures.  The main advantage I see in the wok is the high sides keep your stovetop cleaner when the splattering starts.
3. Which meat?  Chicken is most used with stir-fry, but you can use anything for protein, including peanuts and cashews.  Actually, the nuts save the meat-cooking step.  The chicken is often marinated while the vegetables are being prepared; they say it keeps the meat from getting tough during frying.
4. Best oil?  Among the healthy oils (like peanut oil, coconut oil, olive oil, or organic canola oil) they all work.  I stir-fried four batches of chicken using the oils above and asked the beautiful (and discriminating) wife which she preferred.  They tasted all the same.  Don’t use butter—the pan’s too hot.
5. Which vegetables?  Whatever.  About everything works, including the aromatics (celery, carrot, onion) the cruciferous family (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, or cabbage), asparagus, bell peppers (any color), bok choy, or snap beans.  There’s a stir-fry secret here: cheap, less-desired plant stalks are made edible.  You can also add bean sprouts, water chestnuts or bamboo shoots.  One recipe even uses watermelon rind.  Limit yourself to four or so; cut vegetables into bite-size pieces but slice carrots thinly as they take longer to cook.  Put onions and hard veggies in to cook first, and add leafy vegetables like bok choy last.
6. How to season?  Most recipes start with a little soy sauce (though any Asian sauce will work) and may include ginger and/or garlic, plus something hot (red peppers, chile powder, or cayenne).  Green onions are also used.  You can make great stir-fry with these plus salt and black pepper.  Some recipes include cumin, coriander, and curry or just turmeric. 

Skip’s Chicken Pineapple Stir-fry

It takes a lot of nerve to put your name on a recipe that billions of people have cooked in thousands of ways—but I did.  Makes me smile.  This recipe is for four people:

Ingredients:

½ C chicken stock

2 T soy sauce

1 T red wine vinegar (or whatever you have)

1 T agave nectar (or some form of sugar)

1 T cornstarch (to thicken)

2  Boneless chicken breasts (about 1 lb.)

Peanut oil (or any healthy oil)

1 C white onion

1 C celery

½ C carrots, sliced thin

½ C bell pepper

½ C green onions

1-2 C pineapple (optional)

1 tsp garlic, grated

1 tsp fresh ginger, grated

½ tsp red pepper flakes (or any hot spice)

Salt and pepper to taste

Directions: 

1. Prepare the sauce by combining chicken stock, soy sauce, vinegar, agave nectar, and cornstarch.  Set aside.
2. Cut chicken breast into equal size cubes or strips, and marinate if desired.  A marinate can be made using soy sauce, vinegar, agave nectar and cornstarch in the quantities above, plus ¼ cup cooking oil.  Note: If chicken is not to be marinated, prepare the vegetables first.
3. Prepare the vegetables and pineapple by chopping into ½” to ¾” pieces, and slicing carrots.  Other vegetables can be substituted as needed.  When washing vegetables, dry them before cutting to reduce spattering when cooking. 
4. Heat a pan until a drop of water sizzles, then add 2 T cooking oil.  Caution:  Be sure water is gone before adding oil as it will cause spattering of hot oil. Continue heating until cooking oil shimmers.  Add meat and cook until browned on each side.  Remove meat but leave liquid in pan.
5. Add more cooking oil and heat until shimmering.  Add vegetables in sequence, beginning with onions and other hard vegetables and finishing with softer vegetables (which need less cooking).  Do not add pineapple.
6. While vegetables are cooking, add minced ginger and garlic, and red pepper flakes.  If these are used in powdered form, simply add to the sauce in step #1, but use a little less.
7. Add in order: the sauce from step #1, pineapple, and meat.  Stir to coat.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Cook until done al dente, you don’t want it mushy.  Remove and serve over rice, say the dinner prayer, and enjoy.

Please comment:  Share your best stir-fry recipe or tip.  Stir-fry is another good way to add vegetables to your diet.

In Praise of Spices

The quick answer:  Anyone can flavor food with sugar or salt, but artistry with spice combinations is the true measure of a cook. 

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Christmas Parties

We’re really “B” list people, the beautiful wife and I, but dear friends invited us to their “A” list Christmas dinner-party.  It was elegant, fun, and healthy.  The dinner menu included mushrooms stuffed with butternut squash, asparagus, green salad with wonderful fruits, and grilled salmon. After such a healthy meal, chocolate Bundt cake hardly seemed decadent. 

After dinner we shared favorite Christmas stories, some touching and a few hilarious.  Mine was from a college Christmas trip across Nevada, when my car broke down in the middle of the coldest night of the year, in a tiny depressed town, and being offered help by an old man that as far as I could tell was either homeless or very poor.  Though the man has long ago passed from this world, the memory of his kind generosity still lights my life.

On the hilarious side, one couple told of their first Christmas after getting married, also during college.  Because money was tight he had secretly gotten her a present.  In the way of young love, his wife had done the same.  On Christmas Eve, as a maneuver to retrieve the gift from his hiding place, he announced he would go downstairs, where the bathroom was located, to take a shower.  He got the water running, undressed, but before slipping into the shower, darted into the adjoining room to retrieve his hidden present.  At the worst moment, he heard his wife coming down the stairs.  She had decided to retrieve her present for him while he showered!  Trapped and unaware of her purpose, he slipped into a closet to hide until she returned upstairs.  Unfortunately, he chose the closet where she hid his present. 

I’ll spare you the rest of the story, but we laughed until we cried.  I think it a good segue into our next subject—spices.

Spices and Herbs

In our series of grocery store aisle visits, we now come to the spice aisle.  We lump spices and herbs together but there's a difference—herbs come from the leaves of plants, while spices are processed from the seed, fruit, skin, or root.  Spices are healthy ingredients, in part because they’re an alternate to just dumping sugar and salt on food.  The complexity of our seasonings is a measure of our (food) culture.  A command of spice combinations is one measure of a cook’s prowess.  There’s good information on the Internet for the curious cook; another good reference is The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs. 

Spices conjure up romantic images of ancient camel caravans and the adventures of Marco Polo.  Spices were the stimulus behind exploration of the New World, and the wars over the Spice Islands (known for nutmeg, cloves, and pepper; now part of Indonesia). 

The spice wars are over now.  Who won?  McCormick & Company—they’re the masters of the spice aisle in the local grocery.  Remember Schilling spices?  The brand’s gone, bought out by McCormick.  Lawry’s seasonings are there, but McCormick owns them too. 

Here’s an interesting fact about the spice aisle—the foods in the other aisles (think chips, crackers, soft drinks, margarine, etc.) have been processed into unhealthiness.  But spices remain remarkably unchanged—no other food group has survived so unchanged.  I find nothing artificial in the spice aisle.  Spices not only flavor our food, they’re considered healthy and are rich in antioxidants, which accounts for their long shelf life.

 

Spice Economics

Have you noticed the rising cost of spices?  With control of the spice aisle, McCormick has been able to steadily raise prices.  This presented a window for Trader Joes’s, which introduced their Spices of the World brand (shown in the photo below).  The local TJ’s offers twelve common spices in 4” tall bottles, usually priced at $1.99, a fraction of the cost in regular grocery stores. 

The best example is ground dill:  the local grocery charges the equivalent of $426/lb. (in 0.3 oz. bottles) while TJ’s sells the same product for $48/lb (0.5 oz. bottle).  No other food has such an outrageous store-to-store price difference.  Here are other comparisons:

• TJ’s rosemary is $42/lb. versus $104 for McCormick's version at our local grocery.
• TJ’s thyme is $34/lb. vs. $162.
• TJ’s oregano is $11/lb. vs. $97.
• TJ’s curry is $18/lb. vs. $67.
• TJ’s garlic powder is $12/lb. vs. $28.

Fair warning:  When I returned to my grocery to photograph the spice aisle all the spices were on sale.  There’s a strategy here that I see in other aisles:  Combine high prices with frequent sales, lest the native become restless.  I resent this manipulation—people aren’t dumb, they’ll figure this out, and see the grocery chain as predator rather than trusted purveyor.  You can see the same behavior with packaged breakfast cereals (where you pay dollars per pound for what is bought at pennies per pound), and other products.

Here’s a trivia question:  What’s the cheapest commonly used spice?  Garlic.

Shelf Life

This will make you laugh.  After studying the spice aisle I saw one difference between spices and other packaged foods in the store—spices don’t have shelf life data, there’s no expiration date.  Because they’re high in antioxidants, spices have a long shelf life, but it’s not forever. 

You can check the age of your McCormick spices this way:  Any spice showing Baltimore as the address (they’re now located in Hunt Valley, MD), is at least 20 years old!  No one keeps spices 20 years, right?  Wrong.  I checked the 64 spices in our drawer; we have a bunch of cans and bottles showing the Baltimore address. 

Spice Mixtures

One way to add value, or at least convenience, is to blend spices that go together and create a new product.  I didn’t realize it until now, but curry is an ancient example.  Curry is actually a mixture of turmeric, ginger, coriander and other spices.  Other examples:

• Herbs of Provence: thyme, rosemary, savory, basil, lavender, etc.
• Italian herb mix: marjoram, thyme, rosemary, savory, sage, oregano, basil
• McCormick’s Bon Appetit: salt, MSG, celery seed, and onion.
• Lawry’s Seasoned Salt:  salt, sugar, paprika, turmeric, onion, cornstarch, garlic, tricalcium phosphate (prevents clumping), etc.
• TJ’s 21 Seasoning Salute: onion, black pepper, celery seed, cayenne pepper, parsley, basil, marjoram, bay leaf, oregano, thyme, savory, rosemary, cumin, mustard, coriander, garlic, etc.
• Cajun’s Choice Creole Seasoning: salt, red, black, and white peppers, garlic, and other spices.

Excepting curry, these pre-mixed spices have limited use.  The beautiful wife, however, likes to use the Italian herb mix. 

Spices for Singles

I discovered a new convenience product, on the market since 2010:  McCormick’s Recipe Inspirations.  These are pre-measured spices, sold on a card with six separate pockets.  To cook, you simple open the card and dump the spices onto the food.  This is a product for less discriminating novices, rather than experienced cooks.   Typical blends:

• Rosemary Roasted Chicken: rosemary, garlic, paprika, and black pepper.
• Apple Sage Pork Chops: sage, garlic, thyme, allspice, and paprika.
• Caribbean grilled Steak: garlic, cumin, onion, oregano, and red pepper.

There’s a big need for products that enable the novice cook, or the single person, to make simple homemade meals.  Recipe Inspirations isn’t a healthy answer, in my view, as the current offering is based on meat dishes.  But isn’t there an opportunity for products that simplify cooking for one, that don't’t compromise the wholesomeness of the food?  They should have these criteria:  Based on whole foods, ease-to-use, and affordable.

Please comment:  Share your favorite spice combinations, or spice tricks from your kitchen.  Or tell about your favorite Christmas foods.

Saving Old Recipes

The quick answer:  Recipes are often family heirlooms, but those from the last century may require "healthing-up".

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1000 Words

I’ve renewed my intention to keep posts under 1000 words so can’t tell the whole story of our recent trip to Sacramento.  Except to say we attended the funeral of the beautiful wife’s namesake Aunt Clare; had dinner with my Mom who gave us some of her delicious Heavenly Hash (mixed berry jam) and prized Christmas fruitcake; and stopped at Elk Grove Walnut Co. for just-harvested walnuts at $5/lb., shelled.  (Yes you can get some, just Email: egwalnut@comcast.net.) 

But I did tell the walnut lady the lovely story of how Aunt Clare’s husband died after a 50-year marriage and how she rediscovered her first true love, whose wife had also died, and how through the years each had saved a portrait of the other, and how at 80 he swept her off her feet, again, so they could spend their last years holding hands in Hawaii.  Which simply proved that Robert Browning was right when he penned, 

Grow old along with me!  The best is yet to be,

 The last of life, for which the first was made . . . .

As I turned to leave, the walnut lady,  wiping a tear from her eye, thanked me for sharing the story. 

Nor can I tell how my Mom’s dad, a hard rock miner, died of pneumonia when she was just two, and how she and her widowed mom survived the Depression by the grace of God and the kindness of her Aunt Kate (she of Aunt Kate’s Chili Sauce), and how through the hard years Mom came to cherish the promise of Christmas future.  I can’t even tell the story of how at the moment she turned from girl to young woman, when she expected nothing for Christmas, her mother surprised her with a beautiful green gown that she later wore to the dance where she dazzled her husband-to-be.  Well, actually, that story has to be told—next week we’ll set food aside and tell a Christmas story.

Cooking and Flavor

By now you know I can’t resist a good story.  But the real subject of this post is how to improve old recipes.  On our drive to Sacramento I read Mark Bittman’s Ebook, Cooking Solves Everything: How Time in the Kitchen Can Save Your Health, Your Budget, and Even the Planet.  It’s short, meant to be read in one sitting, and echoes the argument we’ve made here:  If you want good health, cook!  I didn’t realize when I started this blog that home cooking would be the key to health.

Bittman, in his Ebook, shared his three favorite flavors for improving a dish:

1. A squeeze of lemon or lime juice.
2. Highlight with smoked paprika.  (Not the old stuff sitting in your spice drawer waiting for you to make deviled eggs, but Spanish paprika, also known as pimenton.)
3. Toss on whatever fresh herbs you have on hand, chopped.  (This works best, I think, if you have a herb garden, or at least some leftover parsley, cilantro, or thyme.)

Taking Stock

Bottom line:  It's best to make your own stock.  The picture (above) shows the evolution of stock.  Campbell's broth, mixed as directed, costs $3.34 per quart.  Swanson's Chicken broth is $3.39.  Maggi's chicken bouillon flakes are cheaper but the ingredient list starts with "salt, cornstarch, MSG, hydrogenated palm oil", etc.  Actually, all these imitations of old-fashioned chicken stock are high in sodium (salt) and artificial ingedients.  The tastiest, cheapest, and healthiest is our homemade chicken stock (shown in the pint Mason jar).

Saving Old Recipes

Have you looked through the recipes of a grandmother or great-aunt who has passed on?  If so you will notice that between the World Wars, food began to be modernized, i.e. made more convenient, or more factory-processed.  Food Inc. accelerated meal preparation, but didn't tell us they were also speeding up our aging process. 

Stock, as shown above, was replaced by high-salt, low-taste, factory substitutes.  Lard was replaced by Crisco, or hydrogenated vegetable oils.  And the amount of sugar in cakes and cookies approached the amount of flour, which was refined and bleached.  If you love those old recipes, here are some tips I’ve collected to "health" them up.  (Yes, "health" can also be a verb.)

1. Flour:  Use whole grain flours, or a mixture, in place of refined flours. 
2. Sugar:  Minimize the use of sugar; reduce sugar by ½, or at least by ¼.      
3. Broth:  If a recipe calls for store-bought chicken broth, Campbell’s, or chicken bouillon cubes—pull out your homemade chicken stock.  Last week I made three batches of Skip’s Potato Soup.  For the 3^rd batch I forgot to take my chicken stock out of the freezer so, because I was in a hurry, I used store-bought.  We could tell the difference—the soup was good but the flavor was diluted.
4. Fat:  Only use healthy fats.  Ignore the call for Crisco and substitute butter, or lard if you’re experienced.  Instead of refined vegetable oils, use butter, olive oil, coconut oil, or cold-pressed organic oils. 
5. Low-cal stuff:  Minimize low-calorie versions of food.  There are no studies—to my knowledge—showing any benefit from low-calorie food products.  The best way to reduce calories is to avoid refined foods in favor of whole foods.  Whole foods are full of fiber and fill you with way less calories.
6. Ditto for low-sodium products.  Less salt is better but some, especially if prescribed by your doc.  But the bigger issue for most if that salt is mainly found in processed foods.  Lowering the sodium doesn’t restore the lost nutrients.  Often low-sodium foods are higher in sugar.
7. Vegetables:  To increase your intake, puree your produce and add it to entrees, sauces, and soups.

Please comment, share your share your favorite healthy recipes, or your favorite healthy cookbooks.  In the next post we’ll tell how the Sunday roasted chicken got processed into those frozen chicken nuggets. 

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

The One Best Way

The quick answer:  To reform your diet, organize and simplify your kitchen.
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We stand at #48 of this year’s 52 Healthy Changes.  Taken together, they have the power to transform your diet, and your health, by reinventing how you eat.  Fair warning:  they can also complicate your life.  For example:

• Exercise:  We’ve asked you to get outside and exercise most days, to work up a sweat.  We even had the nerve to suggest you reconsider the laborsaving devices in your life.
• Refined flour:  We proposed that you replace the modern flour with freshly ground flour that is so full of nutrients it must be refrigerated.  We also suggested baking your own bread.
• Packaged cereals:  We’ve shown you how to make your own breakfast cereals, here and here, when it’s so easy (though costly) to just go to the store.
• Canned soup:  And we’ve noted that homemade stock is better than store-bought; a future post will include recipes for homemade soups.

There are two themes here:  First, cook more (some food processing now done in factories is best done at home).  Second, sweat more (exercise is good for you; it makes you stronger and healthier).  These things, good as they are, take time.  Rather than get crazy busy, it’s best to simplify our lives.  We suggest a process of not adding but of replacing bad stuff with good, and good stuff with better.  Simplification can also reduce the stress of life and bring us that elusive peace we all seek.

Cheaper by the Dozen

As a child, I loved the book, Cheaper by the Dozen.  Frank B. Gilbreth was the father and author, but he was also a leader in the emerging field of scientific management.  The goal was to discover the most efficient way to do every task—the one best way—so when Gilbreth took a shower, he used two bars of soap.  He was a creative guy who led the family on many fun adventures but there was a sad turn to all this rushing about—he died of a heart attack at the age of 55.    

From the shadows of Frank’s premature death a new star emerged—his wife Lillian, also a practitioner of scientific management.  Lillian maintained the Gilbreth’s consulting business while rearing the children and making her own contributions to scientific management.  She put her children through college (one died in childhood), traveled the world, and advised five US presidents on women’s issues.  A less known book was written about this early career mom, appropriately titled, Making Time. 

The Gilbreths made a big impression on me as a father (when the kids were small, I put them all in the tub at once), engineer, and novice cook.  For example, when we make freezer jam, I reduce waiting time by doing multiple batches at once.  The beautiful wife thinks this a little reckless and patiently does her batches one-at-a-time, with exactness unknown to me.  So in the kitchen, I look for that one best way, trying to improve my cooking skills.  Those are my credentials for the following discussion on simplification.

Simplification

We humans can’t keep from complicating our lives.  For many, self-worth is linked to owning whatever’s in fashion.  We live in a shopping culture and a whole nation—China—has grown its economy by cheaply manufacturing whatever we might next fancy.  Did you notice the elaborate Halloween costumes?  Or what those crazed shoppers were carrying out of Wal-Mart on Black Friday?  Acquisitiveness isn’t a new habit, rather a human trait exposed by the limitless productivity of the Industrial Revolution. 

The poet William Wordsworth spoke to this human frailty: 

“The world is too much with us; late and soon.
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”

Henry Thoreau, rejecting the materialism of his time, retreated to the woods about Walden Pond, seeking to discover the essence of life by removing all distractions.  He found new meaning in simplicity: 

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”

Concealed within the Healthy Changes is a thesis worthy of Wordsworth and Thoreau:  “Life can be made more healthful by using modern means to reinvent olden ways.”  This thesis allows us to reject the “getting and spending” but to embrace those few things that most enhance the quality of our lives.  If we can learn to do this, less really can be more.  So starting in the kitchen, here are ten steps to simplicity.

Ten Steps to Simplicity

Here are ten ways to simplify your life, all centered on healthy eating. 

#1.  Write a weekly dinner menu.  This is a major time saver and stress buster.  Save old menus by season in a binder for future years. 

#2.  Collect your favorite recipes.  It’s great that chefs, once hidden away in kitchens, have become celebrities, but we must resist the trend of complicating food.  Exotic 15-ingredient dishes may be fine for the chef but for the home cook, traditional dishes of six or so ingredients are practical, healthful, and delicious.  Let the family vote as you collect 24 favorite recipes of comfort foods.  If you use 2-3 each week, it will take several months to repeat.  Preparing a few dishes repeatedly is key to finding the one best way to cook.

#3.  Keep a weekly shopping list, as discussed here.  You’ll save the hassle and expense of multiple runs to the grocery store.

#4.  Make Sunday dinner special.  Plan your best meal for Sunday and have family and friends over from time to time.  Cook a roast, whether chicken, beef, pork, or lamb, and reserve a portion to flavor meals during the week.

#5.  When you cook family favorites, make a double portion and save one for a rainy day.  This is easier to do if your freezer is just ¾ full (see #9, below).  Soups are extra work but can be eaten for several meals. 

#6.  Relish leftovers (for smaller families; large families tend to eat everything in sight).  You don’t need to cook an original dish every night.  Get the family’s support to include leftovers in following meals.  Some dishes even taste better the next day.

#7.  Recognize that stuff accumulates.  It collects in your kitchen drawers, cupboards, and in your pantry. Periodically dump the kitchen drawers on the counter—save the simple tools you regularly use and toss everything you haven’t needed in the last year. 

#8.  Clear out the pantry.  We recently went through the pantry and threw everything away over the expiry date.  There was so much stuff it became a game to find the oldest item—the winner was ten years expired.  When the pantry’s too full, you don’t know what you have.

#9.  Manage your freezer.  Most of us toss stuff in until it’s full and forget what’s underneath.  This follows the FISH inventory rule (meaning, “First In, Stays Here”).  Adding a freezer in the garage may just expand the problem.  Here’s a better idea:  When you write your weekly menu, poke through the freezer for stuff you can use.  Set a goal to keep your freezer just ¾ full.  If you do this with your refrigerator also, you’ll save money via less spoilage.

#10.  Include frozen foods.  Frozen fruits and vegetables, unlike the produce in grocery stores, are harvested at their peak so you get extra vitamins while saving prep time.  In the next post, we’ll take a walk through the frozen food aisles of our grocery store, to sort out the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Please comment on your favorite ways to save time while cooking better food.  Share your shortcuts and clever simplifications.

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

Milk Products

The quick answer:  In this post we address four topics—organic milk, powdered milk, probiotics, and cheese.  Use cheese to make healthy foods that don’t taste that great, tasty.

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So Proud of You

Last night I told the beautiful wife, “I’m really proud of our [blog] readers; their comments on milk have been outstanding.  They really get it.”  The beautiful wife rejoined:  “You should tell them.”  So I just did.  Thank you.

What to drink?

Diet reform works best when good food drives out bad food—reform is hard if you just take things away.  In the last post, Healthy Change #45 suggested drinking milk sparingly, if at all, until less processed milk is again available.  If enough people reduce their milk intake, I believe traditional milk will become available to people who don’t own a cow and a pasture.

A reader from Hawaii said he milks his own cows and shares raw milk with his neighbors.  Sounds like a good life.  On the other hand, a reader who works in a government office warned there are frequent incidents of salmonella, E. coli, etc. from raw milk.  So we need to be vigilant.  But I wish some scholar would compile a list of confirmed illnesses due to raw milk products and compare that to the list of people becoming ill from modern processed milk.  That would be a revelation!

On the subject of drinks what does the average American drink?  Here’s a list, ranked by quantity:

1. Water
2. Sugar drinks (including diet drinks)
3. Coffee
4. Beer
5. Milk
6. Juices
7. Tea
8. Liquor

Now, if you follow the Healthy Changes of this blog, your list is much simpler:

1)   Water, lots of water, per Healthy Change #6,

2)   Pure fruit juice (nothing added except water to dilute),

3)   A tie, depending on your taste, between milk (the least-processed available) and herbal tea. 

Now that's a food reformation!  Did you notice we omitted sugary drinks, of which Healthy Change #1 allows one 12 oz. serving per week, or diet drinks (also weekly, per Healthy Change #31)?  A consequence of drinking just one soft drink per week is you lose the taste and may rarely consume them.    

Organic milk?

I promised a comment on organic milk.  You can get it in most stores at about twice the cost of regular milk—is it worth it?  You’ll remember from the last post we had a few issues with modern milk, including:

1. The practice of pasteurization and homogenization, which change the nature of milk.
2. Milking cows deep into the next pregnancy, which results in elevated levels of chemically potent bovine hormones.
3. Lack of natural pasture feeding (especially the spring grass, so rich in omega-3 essential fats and vitamins).

For milk to be certified organic, it must be produced free of “synthetic chemicals, hormones, or antibiotics.”   Unfortunately, organic milk doesn’t solve the above problems.  Lets look at them again:

1. Organic milk is still pasteurized and homogenized.  Worse, it’s typically “ultra-pasteurized”, which employs higher temperatures (200 degrees F, for at least 15 seconds) to achieve a longer shelf life.  Is this good for the consumer?  The pasteurization problem may have gotten worse.
2. The organic regulations don’t restrict milking during the cow's next pregnancy, so this problem isn’t solved.
3. Pasture feeding was not originally required for “organic” milk; there was simply a vague reference to pasture access.  In 2010 the USDA regulation was strengthened to require pasture feeding for the full length of the local grazing season, at least 120 days, with 30% of diet to be pasture grass (during the season).  So “organic” cows should get some pasture grass, though this rule seems hard to enforce.

The milk in our refrigerator today is “Horizon Organic”.  Good name—the logo has a leaping, happy cow with a bell around its neck.  Got to love that.  Using the dairy plant code on the carton, I found it was processed at the White Wave-Morningstar plant in Industry, CA.  (Anyone can check the source of their milk by going here and entering the code imprinted on the carton.  There should be two codes: one is the batch code, the other the dairy plant code.)

Checking Wikipedia, I learned that White Wave is owned by Dean Foods, the largest milk producer in the U.S., second only to Nestle globally.  A mega-corporation!  More informed now, I’m trying to think of a reason why I should pay twice the price for ultra-pasteurized organic milk!  From what I can see, the USDA organic rule made it possible to double the price of milk in exchange for minor quality improvements. 

This seems a bad example of how the close ties between mega-corporations and the USDA turn reform into a corporate bonanza.  The quest for traditional milk is still before us but I doubt it will come from a mega-corporation.

Powdered Milk

Powdered milk is a bigger issue than most realize because reduced fat milks (like skim or 2%) usually have powdered milk added to improve the consistency—the USDA doesn’t require this to be reported as an ingredient.  Powdered milk, or dry milk solids, is also added to processed foods.  So we should ask about the healthiness of powdered milk.  Milk is dried to a powder by pumping it through tiny orifices at pressure, into a column of heated air.  During the drying, cholesterol in the milk is oxidized (a possible cause of arterial plaque), milk proteins are denatured, and nitrates (possible carcinogens) are formed. 

Some warn of the dangers from powdered milk but I don’t find hard proof it isn’t safe to eat.  What’s surprising is the lack of sound research on long-term safety.  Like many food innovations, we use it based on short-term testing.  A generation ago, people saved money by using powdered milk in the kitchen, even mixing it with regular milk.  My parents did this when times were tough and I have done it also.  Not any more.  Until the subject is better researched, I’ll avoid powdered milk, though I do keep some around for emergency use.  It's better than starving.

Probiotics

Probiotics refers to the addition of live but healthful microorganisms to certain foods.  The name is interesting because it contrasts with antibiotics—pro referring to the use of beneficial bacteria.  Microbes commonly used include Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium (the latter must be good, it was originally found in the gut of breast-fed babies).  In antiquity, bacteria were used to preserve milk products—think of yogurt.  Some say the Biblical reference to “milk and honey” spoke to a recipe for yogurt—a way to preserve milk before refrigeration. 

In the last post, a reader living in Outer Mongolia noted that yogurt was a common food, eaten either wet or dried, and thought to be good for the teeth.  In folk medicine yogurt is used to treat stomach upsets, eczema in children, and urinary-tract or vaginal infections.  It may also be beneficial for irritable bowel syndrome.

There is occasional excitement for probiotic foods, perhaps by food companies looking for new products.  Unfortunately the benefits of a specific food are difficult to prove so foods are promoted without hard proof.  It may sound like I’m not a big fan of probiotics, which leads to a story:

A friend was diagnosed with bladder cancer.  His treatment consisted of quarterly visits to the urologist who inserted a scope up his urinary tract to check the bladder for new growths.  If new growths were found—about 50% of the time—a return visit was made to use a different scope to excise the growth.  There’s nothing fun about any of this.  He didn’t complain but I wondered how he could avoid counting the days until the next visit.

When a friend has an illness, though I’m not a doctor, I try to do a little research on the subject.  In this case I read about a Japanese fermented-milk drink called Yakult.  I had never heard of it but the maker claims it’s the world’s leading probiotic drink.  Anyway, there is some evidence that Yakult is helpful for bladder cancer, though this isn’t supported by rigorous science.  It’s a folk remedy.  I told my friend about this and he took immediate action—for nearly two years he has consumed a Yakult each day.  Result?  No new tumors growing in his bladder.  Even better, the doctor said exams could cut back to every six months.  Now this is just an anecdotal story, please don’t make more of it than that, but I’ve wondered if the doctor now suggests Yakult to other patients.

Cheese

Cheese is made from milk curdled with rennet, which comes from the stomach of the same species, be it cow, sheep, goat, or buffalo.  Aging, bacteria, and traditional flavors complete the process.  Cheese is mainly fat and protein—little lactose remains due to bacterial action—and can have a long shelf life, especially if rind covered.  Milk for cheeses that cure longer than 60 days is usually not pasteurized, nor homogenized.

In recent years the variety of cheeses in grocery stores has increased so much it’s hard to find the one you want.  (Why don’t they arrange them alphabetically?)   Cheese consumption has soared as milk intake has declined, so what about the healthfulness of cheese?  The Center for Science in the Public Interest claims cheese is our #1 source of saturated fat and recommends eating just 2 oz. per week.  We probably eat a little more, but it seems a reasonable guideline.  We do need more research on the merits of saturated fat.  It’s gotten such a bad name in the last generation that no one would think to give it to a baby, would they?  Yet mother’s breast milk is rich in fat and most of it is saturated.  Actually, if you eat meat sparingly, you won’t eat very much saturated fat (unless you like to gnaw on a cube of butter).

The bigger issue is what is on the plate with your cheese.  Most of the increased cheese intake is tied to the rise of pizza chains.  Pizza as made in Italy (thin crust, lots of tomato sauce and vegetables) can be a healthy meal.  Pizza in the US has become a form of fast food—I don’t see many that look healthy. 

Here’s a cheese rule:  Forget about pizza—the proper use of cheese is to make vegetables tasty.  I looked through Page and Doreneburg’s The Flavor Bible, which suggests the best flavors for cooking every kind of dish.  The vegetables that are good for us but seldom served, like cauliflower, squash, roots, and tubers, are all made delectable with a cheese sauce, whether it be Romano, Parmesan, Gruyere, Roquefort, or your basic cheddar.

Please comment on your use of cheese to improve the family diet.  (Sorry I wrote so much; this could have been two posts.)

Home Cooking

The quick answer:  After a steady decline in cooking skills, the pendulum is poised to swing the other way.

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We were in Sacramento this past weekend, in our usual gathering place—my Mom’s kitchen—eating bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches.  Mom adds cucumber and red onion, thinly sliced, to complete her sandwich.  She likes to cook, and did it for a family that grew to ten children.  Even with the help of daughters, that was a lot of cooking.  She’s a good cook.  A child of the Depression, she practices prudence and thanksgiving.

Some years back she observed with surprise that her friends had all stopped cooking.  They had raised their families and as their husbands retired from work, they resigned from cooking.  What was the result?  They’re all dead but one, who suffers from dementia.  Mom never stopped cooking and she’s still alive, in her 90s, doing everything she did before, though a bit slower. 

Staying Alive

Why do we cook?  We cook to stay alive. That's the first rule of cooking!

If a stranger does your cooking, nutrition gets lost.  The focus will inevitably be on cost.  If Food Inc. is involved, you can add addictive ingredients (the triage of vegetable oil, salt, and sugar, for example).  The great food companies understand the role of addictive ingredients in keeping customers.  Think of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola or PepsiCo.  

A few years ago I was part of a medical device start-up that developed an improved method of treating brain aneurysms.  The success of our venture allowed me to leave the stress of the work-a-day world.  What do I do now?  Whatever moves me, though there must be a purpose.  Because I wasn’t working I felt an obligation to help in the kitchen so I thought I would learn to cook. 

There are schools for teaching cooking to us late learners, I discovered.  The Culinary Institute of America (fondly known as the CIA and based in a former monastery in Hyde Park, New York), claims to be the worlds best, and had a nearby campus in California’s wine country, at St. Helena.  Le Cordon Bleu (the phrase means “blue ribbon”), founded over a century ago in Paris, France, but with branches around the world including San Francisco, also claims to be the best.  (We were living in the Bay Area then.)

Unfortunately for this post, before I could enroll I got caught up in writing the memoirs of my father-in-law, a project we finished before his death.  That moved me to write a book about the origins of my own family, trying to save in one book the biographies of ancestors who immigrated to America, beginning with the Mayflower.   I finished just before my own father’s death.  My next book was the history of the LDS Church in the Saddleback Valley where we currently live.  In all this I was moved to save the lessons, the wisdom, learned by these people.  I didn't see the connection then, but it was a necessary preparation for the next topic: nutrition.

In my quest to understand nutrition I began to buy and study books. This was an intense effort; within a year my nutrition library had passed 100 books.  I guess I was influenced by the now-silent voices I had studied because, at a visceral level, I believed food tradition was an important guide to figuring out how to eat and be well today.  Public interest in nutrition started in the ‘20s and ‘30s after the discovery of vitamins and (thanks to amazon.com) you can buy used versions of these early books.  I also followed the modern research.

Through all this, one question repeated:  “Could an ordinary person deduce the healthiest course through the food jungle of our industrial age?” My daughter suggested I start a public conversation with real people by writing a blog and offered her design skills.  As most readers know, we started last January, offering one Healthy Change each week.  As we begin the last quarter of the year, the fall season, our attention turns from nutrients and diseases to cooking.

Learning to Cook

I’m a curious cook, if not a good one.  The beautiful wife follows recipes carefully; I experiment.  With her advantage of experience, it’s not likely I’ll ever be as good a cook.  When she walks into the kitchen she intuitively sniffs the air and knows whether I’m overcooking something, or have the temperature too high.  Sometimes she just sighs.  But I do learn from my experimentation, though it’s not always edible.

Traditionally girls learned the domestic skills from mothers, as boys learned a trade from their fathers.  Life is more complicated now; mom may work and even if she doesn’t many demands compete for her time.  There’s been less focus on teaching cooking.  There’s also less need as you can simply heat convenience food (the Kraft blue box foods are a sad example), eat out, or carry home take-out.  Most grocery stores now include a deli.  For these and other influences, there’s been a historic decline in the cooking skill of the average person.  Funny thing, though cooking skills have declined, the number of (dusty) cookbooks in homes has increased. 

The times are changing and it promises to be a good thing.  Besides a growing interest in nutrition over the last decade, there’s a new interest in cooking skills.  On one level it’s a spectator sport (think of the chefs competing on the TV shows, making exotic 20-ingredient dishes), but practical cooking is getting more attention too.  The magazine Real Simple (life made easier) has a Take Back Dinnertime challenge where they visit struggling moms and teach basic cooking skills that fit the need.  Here are examples from the October issue:

1. A new wife is taught the basic kitchen tools, given a primer on seasonings, and shown how bone-in chicken can be roasted with vegetables for an affordable and nutritious meal.
2. A no-time-to-cook mom is taught to freeze meals in advance, shown dishes made with meatballs, and encouraged to put her children to work helping.
3. A mother of young children with a tiny kitchen learns how to organize her kitchen, dress up frozen vegetables, and appeal to her picky eaters.
4. A mom with teens who wants to kick the take-out habit learns how to make a weekly menu and shopping list.  She also gets tips on using a slow cooker to get a head start on meals.

I applaud Real Simple for this series.  By the way, in the October Martha Stewart Living there’s an excellent article on diet and bone health.  As you likely know, New York magazines, though sold nationally, tend to address the problems of New York people.  Still, though the menus and recipes are sometimes more fancy than practical, you can occasionally find good things. 

The popularity of book clubs among young, hip women of all ages is most interesting.  What if these clubs left fiction and focused on nutrition and cooking?  This would redefine the term “health club” from a subscription gym to a free forum on how to be well.  Each meeting could focus on a cooking skill, and a sample dish could be served, with dessert of course.  What do you think?

Healthy Change

This week we focus on how to improve cooking skills in the home.  As our culture influences the world, perhaps we can one day atone for exporting our fast food by fomenting healthy cooking.  There has been a steady decline in our gross national cooking knowledge in recent generations.  It’s time for the pendulum to swing the other way.

Please comment on what you are doing to advance home cooking, or tell of someone who helped you.  Or share your idea on how to spread the word.

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.