Skip's Apple-Bread Pudding

A New Food Culture

In response to reader demand, we made a goal to publish 52 recipes to support the 52 Healthy Changes.  Because the recipes support the new food culture—the transformation from factory food-like stuff to natural foods—we call them breakthrough recipes.  The breakthrough recipes aren't new—they're just healthier versions of traditional dishes.  They maximize natural ingredients and minimize refined stuff, like sugar.  Here are the recipes by category:

• Breakfast, 4
• Drinks, 1 (Green Smoothie)
• Breads, 4
• Salads, 5
• Dips, 2
• Fish, 2
• Meat, 3
• Soups, stews, and legume dishes, 10 (The best value in dining.)
• Vegetables, 9 (This is the critical issue—eating more vegetables.)
• Grain, 1 (Skip’s Chicken Rice Pilaf)
• Casseroles, 3
• Desserts, 4 (We look for flavors that depend on natural ingredients rather than sugar.)
• Miscellaneous, 4

Sometimes I’m surprised by how hard it is to improve a recipe, even though it’s based on a traditional food, so I fall behind.  I work hard on this but may need to borrow a few favorite recipes from readers to complete the year.  This week’s recipe goes with Healthy Change 27: Enjoy your candy a piece at a time; never bring a bag or box into the home. 

Bread Pudding

Las Brisas is a popular seaside restaurant in Laguna Beach and they serve a great buffet brunch.  I always finish with their bread pudding, a dish my Mom used to make, which includes a sweet sauce.  I like it but I have to admit it’s pretty sugary.  So my challenge here is a healthy bread pudding—meaning it doesn’t rely on sugar for flavor and has whole ingredients.

Bread pudding is a traditional recipe, so I looked in my Fanny Farmer 1896 Cook Book.  Sure enough Ms Farmer had a recipe and it used only 1/3 cup of sugar, though the Vanilla Sauce added ½ cup. 

To make a bread pudding from natural ingredients instead of refined sugar I included fruit—apples and raisins.  Apples and raisins also go with the spices common to bread puddings—vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  I added walnuts because I'm a Californian; if I lived in Georgia I'd use pecans.

Because bread pudding is custard, it’s sometimes cooked immersed in water to avoid over heating the eggs.  Fanny Farmer used a “slow” oven.  It seemed simpler to follow Ms. Farmer, so I set my oven at 275 F.

The result of my experiments was an easy-to-make healthy pudding. There’s no sugary sauce but I do like it with a little vanilla ice cream, Greek yogurt, cream, or whipped cream.  The beautiful wife liked the result—she prefers it with a dollop of Greek yogurt, seen below—but thought the pudding tasted more like an apple pie, so we called it Apple-Bread Pudding.

Skip’s Apple-Bread Pudding

Ingredients: (Feeds 8)

• 3-4 slices of whole wheat bread (bread can be stale, but not moldy)
• 2 apples, peeled and sliced or diced
• 1 C chopped walnuts
• 1 C raisins
• 2 C milk
• 2+4 T butter
• 4-6 eggs (for more of a custard texture, increase the eggs)
• Optional: ½ C brown sugar or turbinado
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 rounded tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp fresh nutmeg
• ½ tsp salt (or less if butter is salted)

Directions:  (Preparation: 30 minutes.  Baking time: 50-60 minutes.)

1. Turn oven on to 275 F.  Warm milk in a saucepan just enough to melt butter.
2. Peel apples, remove core, and thinly slice or chop.  In a warm frying pan, sauté apples in 2 T butter about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, to soften and caramelize.
3. While apples are cooking, break bread into crumbs and mix with raisins and nuts in a 2-qt. baking dish.  Stir sautéed apples into baking dish.
4. Prepare custard mix by melting 3 T butter in warmed milk and beat in eggs, adding optional sugar, and spices. (Note: I forgot to add the sugar once and nobody noticed, though we all had a little Greek yogurt or ice cream with the pudding, so I made the sugar optional.)
5. Pour custard mix over bread mixture in baking dish; press crumbs down as needed to moisten. 
6. Bake in a warm oven (275 F), 50-60 minutes, until top layer is nicely done but not dry.

Comments:  Do you have a favorite dessert that isn’t too sweet and uses natural ingredients, like fruit?  Please share it.

A Family Heritage

The quick answer:  If you cook, your healthy recipes are a family heritage worthy of preservation.

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A World Heritage

The UN has a list of world heritage sites precious to our civilization—like Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Egypt, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the site of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.  The list now includes an intangible asset: the Mediterranean diet.  Scientists claim this diet protects against the chronic diseases that plague our country.

The Mediterranean diet is defined as “olive oil, grains, fruits and vegetables . . . a moderate proportion of meat, fish, and dairy products, and plenty of condiments and spices.”  Sound familiar?  Because the diet is an intangible it requires definition.  You could write a book, but the real definition, I submit, is found in menus and recipes. 

Cooking in New York

Our talented daughter (you can visit her blog here—and also see an old picture of the beautiful wife) told a funny cooking story the other day, from her years in New York City.  Here’s the story: 

Two young professionals, tired of eating take-out every night, thought it would be healthier to have home cooked food.  Pretty smart guys, you’re likely thinking.  But they were super busy starting their careers, too busy to cook, so they hired a professional to prepare their meals during the day while they worked.  It cost a lot, but each day they came home to a refrigerator of healthy home cooked food, left by the cook.  They thought it a tasty and creative solution.

One weekend they wandered into a nearby health store and found an array of prepared foods much cheaper than what they had been paying for.  The food looked good; there was just one problem.  On closer inspection, they recognized it as the dishes they had been getting from their “personal cook.”  The cook had got the food at the deli, put it in their refrigerator, and pocketed the savings.  Welcome to New York boys!

Cooking In Your Kitchen

As you know, the 52 Healthy Changes cover 13 topics, visited and revisited each quarter of the year.  For the 11^th, 24^th, 37^th, and 50^th week the subject is cooking.  Healthy Change #11 said: “Put love in your food with home cooking.”  It’s a simple phrase, but it repudiates the main food thrust of the last century—to save labor.  “Put” is a verb and implies effort.  Cooking, as enjoyable as it can be, is work.  When the pressure is on, it’s hard work.  The switch from saving labor to investing the family food with love has profound implications and is essential to good nutrition.   

Today we’ll talk about your personal recipe collection.  In 13 weeks we’ll discuss the limits of factory food processing.  How to you tell when food processing turns from good (as in churning butter) to bad (hydrogenating refined soybean oil into margarine)?  Finally, in week #50 we’ll review how to health-up favorite but less-nutritious recipes. 

In addition, during the year we offer 52 Breakthrough Recipes, one each week (except this week, as we’re traveling to Midway).  We use the term “breakthrough” because though they’re familiar dishes, they represent a new food culture.  We call this new culture Word of Wisdom Living and you can have the recipes for free.  You don’t get that in New York City.

Make A Recipe Journal

The place you save recipes—be it a metal box of 3”x5” cards, a plastic binder, or a file on your computer—needs upgrading from time to time.  I keep my recipes on the computer with hard copies, torn and stained from use, in our menu binder.   The beautiful wife has a notebook with plastic compartments for each menu, a past Christmas or Mother’s Day gift.  She refers to it often but it’s so stuffed with recipes clipped out of magazines and newspapers it’s hard to use. 

Value your recipes as a priceless part of your heritage and give them a proper storage.  My Dad passed away a few years ago.  He made wonderful whole wheat bread but after he was gone we realized he cooked without a recipe.  It’s sad, but the recipe is lost to our family.  When I wrote a family history for my parents’ family, I made sure to include a couple of cherished recipes, like Aunt Kate’s Chili Sauce.

Please comment:  Organize your family recipes and arrange to preserve them.  Share your method of saving recipes, even if you just stuff them in your favorite cookbook.

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.

A Recipe for Muesli

Loving the Swiss

As you’ve likely heard, the beautiful wife is half-Swiss.  The tricky part for me is to figure out just which parts are Swiss.  For example, she’s on the petite side, as the Swiss often are, so give that a check.  On the other hand, while she loves the mountains she doesn’t like to climb them, so that’s a mix.  One thing is uniquely Swiss—she defends her views without getting into wars.   She also loves chocolate, so her mouth must be Swiss.  But now that I think about it, I’ve never heard her yodel.

What brought Switzerland to mind was a blog comment several months ago from Julie, a girl we knew in her youth, now living in Zurich, Switzerland.  (Look here for a typical dinner menu.) I went back and reread her impressions about the Swiss, world leaders in longevity:

“I was blown away how health conscious the Swiss are . . . fast food is almost nonexistent . . . sugar just isn’t a staple in their diet . . . desserts aren’t even sweetened.  They eat little meat . . . and meat is outrageously expensive (boneless chicken @ $15/lb).”

Bircher Muesli

Well, their approach to health is just one more reason I find the Swiss endearing.  Which, because I was looking for a recipe with grains, brings us to their breakfast cereal, muesli.  Muesli is an uncooked mixture of oats, fruits, nuts, and seeds.  Dr. Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867-1939), a Swiss nutrition reformer a century ago, invented muesli for patients in his health clinic. 

Dr. Bircher-Benner lived before science had much to say about nutrition, which saved him a lot of confusion.  But he observed the hardy vitality of those who lived in the Alps and ate traditional foods, including dairy foods, rye and oats, wild berries, summer vegetables, with occasional meat.  The native diet led him to invent Bircher muesli.  He also convinced his followers to eschew meat and white breads in favor of fresh vegetables, fruit, nuts, preferably uncooked. 

I found this original recipe for Bircher muesli:

Ingredients:

• 1 T rolled oats, soaked in 2–3 T water, or apple juice
• 1 T lemon juice
• 1 T  cream
• 1 apple, preferably a sour variety, finely grated
• 1 T ground hazelnuts

Directions:

Soak oats in water or apple juice for 2-8 hours.  Before breakfast, combine lemon juice and cream.  Stir in oats, grated apple, and top hazelnuts. 

A Muesli Recipe

I also found a box of imported Familia Swiss Muesli at the local health food store.  It was a little expensive by the box; however, because it’s dense, it’s cheaper per ounce than many packaged cereals.  I liked the taste but it violated our more-fiber-than-sugar rule (14 gm sugar; 4 gm fiber), so I wanted my own recipe. 

Traditional recipes often include rye flakes (a grain common to Switzerland’s difficult terrain) with the oats.  I decided to stick with oats plus flax seeds, to add some omega-3 fat.  (If you soak overnight, the flax seed is soft enough to eat whole, but you can also grind fresh at the time of use.)  Likewise, older Swiss recipes use hazelnuts but I substituted chopped almonds, more common here and rich in vitamin E.  Many add vanilla and a dash of cinnamon.  Fruit typically includes apples and currants in season or dried fruits in winter. 

Because the juice of local fruits is often used with Swiss muesli instead of milk, we tried four forms of liquid, all soaked overnight in the refrigerator.  Test #1 used water, the most common method for oatmeal; #2 used milk, #3 had apple juice, and #4 followed the Bircher recipe of cream with lemon juice, a sort of yogurt.  Before breakfast we added grated apples, raisins and dried mango pieces, and sliced almonds. 

Everyone makes their oatmeal with water but the beautiful wife preferred #2 and #3; #4 was too tart.  I liked them all but I especially liked how muesli is another way to avoid the cost (as well as the sugar and chemical additives) of packaged cereals. 

Skip’s Swiss Muesli (feeds 2 adults)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 C rolled oats
• 2 T flax seed
• 1 C water, milk, or natural juice
• 1 apple, grated
• ¼ C fresh berries, or 2 T raisins or dried fruit
• 3 T chopped almonds, walnuts or pecans
• 1 T coconut flakes (optional)
• Dash of vanilla (1/8 tsp)
• A shake of cinnamon

Directions: 

1. Soak oats and flaxseed with liquid; use the refrigerator if milk.
2. In the morning add grated apple, berries or chopped fruit, nuts, optional coconut, and spices.
3. Voila—you’ve got a healthy breakfast full of whole grain, fruits, and nuts, with lots of natural fiber and no added sugar.  Stir, add milk, cream, or juice, and serve.

The End of Packaged Cereal

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) was the American equivalent of Dr. Bircher-Benner.  A century ago they were comrades-at-arms in the opening battles of the nutrition reformation.  Kellogg partnered with his brother Will to invent a healthier breakfast cereal, but they broke up over a critical nutrition issue—whether to improve sales by adding sugar.  John left the business and Will’s company became the sugary breakfast behemoth of our day—the Kellogg Company. 

Did I say behemoth?  I should have said dinosaur.  With the Breakfast Compote, our first recipe, and Skip’s Swiss Muesli we now have two healthy options for starting your day.  There are still a few cereals that meet our health rule—more-fiber-than-sugar—but 95% of the packaged cereals are a toxic use of grains and will go the way of the dinosaur in the food reformation.

This morning I read an article on PBS about rampant tooth decay in the villages of El Salvador.  The native foods I remember from living there have been replaced, it turns out, by Food Inc’s products.  They’re drinking soda instead of water, and eating packaged candy and chips instead of mom's tortillas with frijoles.  We’ll come back to this question in a future post—how did the Swiss discover healthy foods while the Salvadorians lost their food traditions?  Forget about the wars that rage—the loss of food traditions is the tragedy of our time.

Please comment:  Share your favorite healthy breakfast.

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.

Sweet Potato Casserole Recipe

Old recipe books can reveal how our dietary went awry in the 20^th century.  Take the New Delineator Recipes, printed in 1930, for example.  The book includes 24 dinner menus, typically a meat dish served with potatoes and two vegetables.  In 10 of the 24 recipes a salad replaces one of the vegetables.  Twenty of the menus include potatoes; two include sweet potatoes.  One big change from the ‘30s to now is that we eat more salads and a lot less of meat and potatoes.  The potatoes we eat now are more often sweet potatoes, rich in carotene and less glycemic.

Most sweet potato casserole recipes are a sugar disaster.  A healthier sweet potato casserole recipe seemed a simple goal.  I’d simply use the natural sweetness of fruit to reduce the sugar, and substitute pecans for the usual marshmallow topping.  That was two weeks and a dozen batches ago—it wasn’t that easy.  It turns out that when you reduce the sweetness, the flavor become more important.  The beautiful wife confesses to a sweet tooth, so finding a flavor that worked with less sugar required a few experiments.

Traditional flavors for sweet potatoes, according to The Flavor Bible, include pecans, cinnamon, butter, nutmeg, and maple.  Apples and pineapple, as well as raisins, dates, and cranberries—each a natural way to sweeten—are also noted.  Many recipes include orange juice, but for us the orange juice seemed to turn bitter during cooking and the low sugar content made this noticeable. 

So here’s our best effort—it’s the lowest sugar casserole we’ve seen but the natural fruit and flavors give it a great taste.  Most recipes include eggs; this one doesn't.  It goes well with some leftover ham, chicken, or salmon, plus a green salad.

Skip’s Sweet Potato Casserole  (Serves 5-6)

Ingredients:

3-4 medium-large sweet potatoes (about 2½ lb.)

3 apples, green or whatever

8 oz. crushed pineapple, canned or fresh

¼ C butter (1/2 cube), softened

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp salt

¼ tsp maple extract

Dash of fresh nutmeg

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¼ C butter (1/2 cube), softened

¼ C sugar, turbinado or dark brown

1 to 1½ C pecans, roughly chopped

Directions:

1. Fill a pot ½ full of hot water (enough to cover sweet potatoes and apples) and bring to a boil.  While water is heating wash, peel, and quarter the sweet potatoes and apples.   Put the sweet potatoes into the boiling water first and add the apples 10-12 minutes later.  Total cooking time is around 20 minutes; the apples and sweet potatoes should be soft enough to mash, but not mushy.
2. While the pot is boiling, prepare the sauce and the topping.  For the sauce, combine melted butter with the seasonings.  For the topping, cream the butter and sugar, then stir in the pecans.   This is a good time to turn on the oven, 350 F.   (Note: I prefer turbinado, a form of raw sugar, to the store-bought brown sugar because the latter is often just white sugar with a little molasses sprayed on, but either is acceptable.  Maple syrup likely works but it’s a little pricey.)
3. When the sweet potatoes and apples are ready, drain and mash with a potato masher, adding the pineapple.  (Note:  We tried this with both canned crushed pineapple, and with a pineapple we had sliced and saved in the fridge.  Pineapple is a good source of natural sweetness, especially if fully ripe, or brown.  If it’s a little green, you can bring out the sweetness by cooking it a few minutes in a frying pan until slightly browned.)
4. Stir in the sauce.  Pour mixture into a 2 qt. casserole.  Sprinkle with pecan topping.  Bake about 20 minutes until pecans are browned. 

Time:  With a little experience, allow 30 minutes to prepare this dish, excluding the oven time.  You can prepare the salad and supervise the table setting while it bakes.

Skip's Macaroni and Cheese Recipe

A Commoner’s Dish

It’s true we’re blessed to live by the sea but our humble hovel, it should be known, is in the low-rent district I refer to as Tortilla Flats.  The people who live right by the ocean are more special—this recipe isn’t for them, I don’t think they eat macaroni and cheese for dinner. 

This morning the beautiful wife, returned from her walk with big news:  “The queen of Norway is a guest at that house on the bluff”.  It’s wise, I’ve learned, to double-check the things you hear but still, Queen Sonja of Norway is a sort of Cinderella.  I looked her up and saw she didn’t come from a royal family—she was a commoner.  The prince and heir-to-the-throne fell crazy in love with Sonja and threatened to abdicate if he couldn’t marry his way-too-common true love.  Don't know if a glass slipper was involved but he got his way.

Well, I told the beautiful wife, considering that Queen Sonja grew up a commoner, I bet she likes macaroni and cheese.  I’m going to take a casserole dish of my recipe right down for their dinner. 

Healthy Macaroni and Cheese

It’s a shocking display of hubris but I do put my name on traditional recipes, as you know.  It makes me laugh, but I only do it if my recipe is healthier than the original version.  Here’s how I healthed-up (a new word) this traditional recipe:

1. Whole grain pasta
2. Whole grain bread in the topping (meets the fiber>sugar rule)
3. Whole milk rather than the reduced fat products so popular in recent years.
4. Added a vegetable—yellow squash below, but cauliflower or whatever’s in the ‘fridge will do nicely.  (Use beets and make it pink for your daughter’s birthday.)

I also used cheese you’re likely to have in your home—good old Tillamook, preferably sharp or extra sharp.  Monterey Jack or Colby cheeses are also good, and affordable.  French Gruyere, Parmigiano-Reggiano, or Pecorino Romano are extra-special but unless you’re a cheese snob (nothing wrong with that and healthier than oenology) you likely avoid these pricier products that don’t even come in the 2-1/2 pound brick.

Skip’s Macaroni ‘n Cheese

Making a white sauce is the only skill you need for this recipe, but if this isn’t an expertise you’ve learned yet, it’s a good time to start.  This recipe serves 4; but it’s easy to double as macaroni usually comes in a 1 lb. box.

This is what I call an algorithm recipe because can be varied to suit whatever’s in your pantry. You can use any pasta, whatever cheese you prefer, and almost any vegetable.  Ham is an option for a change of flavor but a few slices of cooked bacon work also.  Enjoy.

Ingredients:

• ½ lb. whole-wheat macaroni, cooked per package instruction
• 1-2 C yellow squash (butternut or banana squash), grated
• 2+2 T butter
• 2 T flour
• 2 C milk, heated
• 1 tsp salt
• ½ tsp freshly ground pepper
• ½ tsp dry mustard powder
• ¼ tsp red pepper flakes (or cayenne)
• 1 T minced onion
• 2 C grated sharp or extra-sharp Tillamok cheese (4-8 oz, depending how much you squish the cheese after grating).   Feel free to include those odd cheeses that collect in the refrigerator; Swiss Gruyere or Monterey Jack are often used.
• Optional: ¾ C chopped ham (4 oz slice)
• 2 slices whole-wheat bread, toasted and crumbed
• 2 T butter
• ½ C finely grated Parmesan cheese

Directions:

1. Boil water and cook macaroni per package instructions.  Drain and set aside.  Add yellow squash or other vegetable to the hot macaroni to pre-cook.
2. During step #1:  Measure and warm milk; grate squash and cheese.  Prepare breadcrumbs by chopping or pulsing bread in food processor to about 1/8” size (or use Panko crumbs), then toss in 2 T heated butter.
3. Make sauce by cooking 2 T butter in warm pan until foaming subsides.  Add flour and cook, 1-2 minutes, stirring steadily, until flour turns a tan color.  Turn up heat and whisk in milk stirring steadily until milk comes to a boil and thickens.  (This step takes up to 10 minutes but it’s a good time to consider the dinner table conversation topic.  Pre-heating the milk saves time.  For a creamier dish add ½ C more milk.)
4. Reduce heat and add salt, pepper, mustard, onion and red pepper flakes (or cayenne).  Add cheese, stirring until melted.  Stir in squash, macaroni, and optional ham.
5. Transfer to 9” x 9” baking pan or 2 qt baking dish.  Cover with Parmesan then the buttered breadcrumbs.  Bake at 350 F, 20-30 min. until topping browns.  Serve warm.  (Serves 4)

Recipe #16: Split Pea Soup with Hambone

A Blog Defined by the Readers

This recipe was originally included in the prior post, now retitled, French Kids Eat Everything.  The post was a little long so I asked the readers what information shouldn't have been includled.  The beautiful wife suggested that I was shamelessly digging for compliments. She knows me quite well. 

Readers who commented spoke in one voice:  It was all great, nothing should be removed.  Made my day.  But they added a suggestion:  Divide such posts in two: an introductory post followed by the recipe in a following post.  This way, recipes could easily be bookmarked for later reference without having to dig through a lot of text.  It's a good example of how readers shape this blog, continuously improving it. 

A reader who is expecting suggested a post on nutrition during pregnancy.  This is a critical topic, certainly worthy of our attention.  But it's a complex topic, a minefield, really.  I'll take a look at the available research and see what can be done.  Here's this week's recipe:

Recipe:  Split Pea Soup with Ham Bone

Along with the 52 Healthy Changes, Word of Wisdom Living also shares 52 Breakthrough Recipes.  Breakthrough Recipes rediscover traditional cooking based on whole foods, especially vegetables.  They’re about healthy food that’s affordable and enjoyable to eat.  Breakthrough dishes use basic ingredients found in most homes; you won’t have to go searching for truffle sauce with our recipes.  This is the stuff your great-grandmother cooked—but better!

Did you save the bone from your Easter ham?  Got a couple of ham hocks in the freezer?  Here’s a traditional dish good for several meals that offers flavor without resorting to sugar.  We started with the Cooks Illustrated recipe, which follows the traditional ingredients for legume soups but took too long.  Split pea soups are a thrifty dish for using left over ham bones.  We cooked this twice, once with a ham bone from the freezer, the second time using cooked ham hock/shoulder from the store.  Now it’s one of our favorites. 

Note:  Because the amount of bone will vary, we wrote the recipe per pound of bone:  A typical hambone with some meat weighs 3 lb; you can buy ham hocks by the pound. 

Ingredients:

1# ham bone with a little meat attached, or a ham hock/shoulder

4-6 cups water, or enough to cover ham bone

1-2 bay leaves

1 cup split peas, rinsed

½ tsp thyme, dried

1 T EVOO

1 medium onion, chopped

1 carrot, chopped

1 celery stalk, chopped

1 T butter

1 garlic clove, minced (optional, except with the beautiful wife)

1 new potato, cubed

1/2 tsp salt (but taste first as the ham contains salt)

1/2 tsp pepper, freshly ground

1/4 tsp red pepper flakes

Tabasco sauce (optional)

Directions:

1.  Place the bones with meat in a suitable pot with water and bay leaves.  Bring to boil and simmer 2-1/2 hours.  Basically, in this step you're making stock.

2.  Remove the bone from the pot and set aside to cool.  Add split peas and thyme to pot and return to boil; simmer 45 minutes until peas are soft.  (Items #3 & 4 below can be done in this time.)

3.  Add EVOO to hot frying pan and saute carrots, celery, and onion about 10 minutes until soft and moisture is evaporated.  Near the end clear a little space and add butter and optional garlic, then stir into the vegetable mixture.

4.  Remove the meat from the cooled bones and chop into small pieces. 

5.  Add the vegetable mixture, cubed potatoes, and meat to the pot of spit peas.  Check salt and pepper to taste.  Simmer 20 minutes.  Add optional Tobasco sauce to taste, if needed, and serve after cooling.  Note:  A green salad can be prepared during this step, and served with bread.

Note:  Not counting the 2-1/2 hours of step #1, this meal can be prepared in a little over an hour.  The first step can also be done more slowly using a Crockpot.  Cook it on a day when you have extra time and you’ll have enough leftovers for several more meals.  A 3# ham bone made enough for two dinners and a lunch for two people, plus we froze a quart for later.

Omega-3 Carrot Cake

The Fats of Life

One step in America’s return to healthful living is to see dietary fat as good.  Natural fats were so excoriated in the last half-century that any processed food with a “low-fat” claim was considered healthful.  This is crazy, but a society learns slowly, and changes food behavior even more slowly; it can take a generation for each step.  There is one shining light exception:  the readers of Word of Wisdom Living.  If you actively apply the 52 Healthy Changes according to your needs; you can change in a year.  In food culture, that’s like turning on a dime.

Omega-3 fats are mainly found in green plants; omega-6 fats are found in the seeds.  When people lived on the food at hand, they got lots of omega-3 in the spring and summer and more omega-6 in the fall and winter.  In fact, foods rich in omega-3, like greens, have a short shelf life.  Most omega-6 seeds can last for years if properly stored.  Because processed foods need a long shelf-life, omega-3 fats were removed from the American diet.

The 1000-Mile Cornfield

I had a wonderful adventure a few years ago with our first son.  He and his wife had finished law school and were moving to Washington, D.C.  They loaded their possessions into a big truck with a trailer attached for their car, and the son and I made the cross-country drive.  The length of the truck with trailer made turning around hard so we tried to avoid dead ends.  Once, in a small town in Tennessee, just about bedtime, we got stuck in a narrowing street.  The people may have thought that we were moving into their neighborhood because everyone came out to help.  Dads were making suggestions, excited kids were running around our big noisy truck, and dogs were barking.  The solution required waking up a lady to move her car out of the way.  I learned something about extraordinary kindness of people on that trip.  We also learned what’s between Colorado and, say, Tennessee:  corn.  We drove through a thousand miles of non-stop corn. 

Now I can see the 1000 miles of corn as a metaphor for the rise of omega-6 and decline of omega-3 in the American diet.  Corn products are high in omega-6; the leaves, which are made into animal feed, contain omega-3.  Here are some consequences, from animal studies:

• Scientists at Wake Forest found that eating more omega-6 fat increases the build up of plaque in coronary arteries, while omega-3 reduces plaque accumulation.
• Researchers at the Bassett Research Institute found it easy to grow cancer tumors when animals were fed an omega-6 diet (from corn oil) but almost impossible with omega-3 rich fish oil. 
• In Australia studies show that omega-3 speeds up the metabolic rate, the speed at which we burn calories, while omega-6 slows it down.  Want to be more active and burn off that extra fat?  Eat more greens and less of the processed seeds. 

Heart Disease

Susan Allport wrote a great book with a descriptive title:  The Queen of Fats:  Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them.  If you want to understand the essential fats better, get this book.  The key discoveries about omega-3 fats are so recent many of the scientists are still alive, including Dr. Ralph Holman, now in his 90s. 

Allport tells about a man in Dr. Holman’s lab who was dying of heart disease.  The man had a prior coronary artery replacement surgery but his arteries were now so clogged with plaque that another was needed.  Unfortunately he wasn’t healthy enough to attempt the surgery.  Holman suggested a diet high in omega-3 fats, in addition to the customary medical care and begin to bring by his homemade flaxseed cakes.  The patient made a remarkable recovery and lived another 20 years. 

Now this was just one person and you can’t draw too big a conclusion from an anecdotal experience.  But if I were suffering from heart disease, I’d discuss my omega-6/-3 status with a qualified doctor and give serious attention to his, or her, recommendations.  Ms. Allport offers recipes that include more omega-3 here.  And Dr. Holman inspired me that we should have a healthy cake on our recipe list.

Dr. Holman's Flaxseed Cake

I looked over Dr. Holman’s Flaxseed Cake recipe with the idea to improve it.  This brought to mind a recent article in Cooks Illustrated on carrot cake.  I considered ingredients rich in omega-3 fats: eggs, fresh walnuts, flaxseed, Canola oil, and butter which though mostly saturated fat, has a healthful ratio of omega-6/-3.  I also reviewed online recipes.  Most carrot cake recipes call for pecans but we choose walnuts for their omega-3 content.  We used the best available oil—Spectrum’s expeller pressed, Organic High Heat Canola Oil; it’s a bit more costly but less than EVOO, so seemed a good omega-3 value.  Organic means non-GMO. 

Some carrot cake recipes include crushed pineapple and others add raisins.  In our tests these ingredients improved the flavor and reduced the need for sugar.  We used 1½ cups of sugar instead of the typical 2 cups; we also reduced the amount of frosting by half.  Our first batches had a nasty aftertaste that we traced to stale nutmeg and cloves.  Suggestion:  Check your spices for bitter aftertaste before using.  Because our spices weren’t that old (a year or so) I’m starting to think grinding nutmeg and cloves fresh is the way to go.  We’re probably like most people; it takes several years to use even a small container of these spices. 

Skip’s Omega-3 Carrot Cake

Cake Ingredients:

  1 cup whole-wheat flour, fresh ground (we have a hand grinder, good exercise)

  1 cup flaxseed meal, fresh ground (we use a Cuisineart spice and nut grinder, a bargain at $40)

  1½ cup sugar, either browns or turbinado

  1½ tsp cinnamon (or 2 tsp if you don’t have fresh ground cloves and nutmeg)

  ¼ tsp nutmeg, ground

  ¼ tsp cloves, ground

  2 tsp baking soda

  1 tsp baking powder

  ½ tsp salt

  1 cup cold-pressed organic canola oil

  3 or 4 eggs (we prefer omega enhanced eggs)

  1 tsp vanilla

  3 cup carrots, grated (about 4 carrots)

  8 oz crushed pineapple (with natural juice)

  1 cup raisins

  1 ½ cup walnuts, chopped (more is OK with me)

Frosting Ingredients (this is half the normal recipe)

  4 oz cream cheese, softened

  ¼ cup butter, softened

  ½ tsp vanilla

  2 cups powdered sugar, sifted (unsifted made small lumps)

Directions:

Mix dry and wet ingredients and combine.  Pour into 9” x 13” prepared pan.  Bake at 350 F about 30        minutes, until done. When cooled, apply frosting. Pretty simple.  This cake is so moist and tasty you can even eat it without frosting. 

Please comment:  How to you add omega-3 fats to your diet.  Have a favorite healthy dessert?  Please share it. 

Healthy Change Scorecard, Vitamin D Survey; Egg Recipes

Grade Your Progress

Last week we finished the 1^st quarter of 2012 with a review of the 13 themes that we rotate through each quarter.  You've likely adopted some of the Healthy Changes for eating smarter, looking better, and living longer.  But change doesn't come easy so how are you doing?

We inserted a scorecard in the post To Live More Fully, as an afterthought so some may have missed it.  You can print a PDF copy by clicking on “report card” in the post.  Or just click here. Please grade yourself and report your grade as a comment below.  You can score up to 65 points for the quarter (13 Healthy Changes, 5 points maximum each).

There’s a prize:  We’ll give a copy of Mike Pollan’s In Defense of Food, to the comment with the highest score.  If you get behind this, we’ll repeat the scorecard and prize each quarter, and give a grand prize (to be announced) at the end of the year.  (Maximum score for a year is 260 points.)

Vitamin D Level Report

Last week we asked you to comment if you had even been tested for vitamin D (a really good idea), and what the result was.  From people I've spoken with, I think less than one person in five, on average, has been tested. You readers, however, are not average.  Here's what you said:

• Of the 25 who responded, 9 had never been tested and 16 had. 
• Of the 16 tested, the average initial serum vitamin D level for those not taking any vitamin D was 17.7 ng/mL That's a scary low number.
• What’s a good target?  There are various definitions for vitamin D deficiency, but all agree that a number below 20 is too low.  Most tests set 30 as the minimum healthy range; 50 is the target for some doctors.  You can take your pick, but I’m thinking that 30 is a good winter minimum for me, and 50 a good summer target. 

There are three ways to get vitamin D:  1) diet, 2) sunshine, and 3) pills.  It makes sense to eat a healthy diet, and get a sensible amount of sunshine.  If you live in the northern latitudes your doctor will likely recommend pill supplements in the winter.  Of source a two week stay on a sunny beach is a nice alternative, but a tanning booth could work too.

One reader maintained a healthy level of 41 with normal sunshine.  Another achieved 69 with 10 minutes noon sunshine per day.  The local dermatologist thought 15 minutes of midday sunshine with skin exposed, most days of the week, a good program. 

The champ for managing vitamin D lived near the Canadian border, was age 77, and maintained a level of 50 ng/mL with 4500 IU by pill in the summer, and 6500 in the winter. 

This is just a horseback estimate and everyone’s different, but looking over the data for the people who responded, it seems you can add about 10 ng/mL to your serum vitamin D level for each daily 1000 IU you take. (What other blog gives you such a useful rule-of-thumb?)

Recipe of the Week

Because the Healthy Change is to eat eggs, I looked for a recipe with eggs.   I’d been reading Tamar Adlar’s primer on cooking, An Everlasting Meal.  Adlar talks about real basics, like boiling water.  She’s a big fan of homemade mayonnaise (hereafter, simply mayo).

By coincidence, I had recently spent an hour in a supermarket studying the labels on all the mayo products.  This is a scary exercise.  I had two main concerns:  First, the mayos mostly use refined oils—mainly soybean but more lately canola—and I’ve just not seen anything that speaks for the healthiness of refined oils; they’re suspect to me.  Second, all the mayo is in flexible plastic containers now and because mayo is full of fat, I worry about the extraction of chemicals from the plastic into the fat.  Until there’s longterm information available, I’m uncomfortable with any fat-based product sold in such containers.

So I’ve been trying recipes for homemade mayo.  The ingredients are pretty simple:  oil, egg yolk, lemon juice (or vinegar), mustard, and salt.  Maybe a little pepper, white pepper if you don’t want black specks.  Most recipes use olive oil, but I didn't like the taste when I tried it.  I got the best result using a 50:50 mix of extra light olive oil and cold-pressed sesame seed oil.

Not everyone will choose to make their own mayo.  There's an interesting book, Make Bread, Buy Butter, by Jennifer Reese that discusses the issue of what to make yourself vs. what to buy. What did she say about homemade mayo?  If you have the energy, make your own mayo; if you're feeling tired, buy it.  Whatever you choose, try it once to see how you like this healthier version.  I read in Nourishing Traditions that adding whey will extend the life from 1 to 4 weeks, but I haven't found whey in any store yet.

Sticking my neck out, I used some of my mayo to make an egg sandwich for the beautiful wife.  She said it "was to die for."  Made me smile.  So we’re going to be eating more egg sandwiches.  Today, the Saturday before Easter Sunday, our family gathered for the traditional neighborhood Easter egg hunt.  Here are the recipes for our luncheon afterwards, Egg Salad Sandwich, made with Skip’s Homemade Mayo: 

Skip’s Homemade Mayo

Ingredients:

  1 large egg

  1 yolk of large egg

  ½ t salt

  2 tsp Dijon mustard

  2 T fresh lemon juice

  ½ cup extra light olive oil

  ½ cup cold-pressed sesame seed oil

Directions:

1. Measure all ingredients except the oil into a bowl and mix well, about 30 seconds. 
2. While continuously whisking or mixing, add the oil slowly, drop by drop.  All recipes agree on the importance of slowly adding the oil to start.  When about 1/3 of the oil has been added the rest can be added faster, in a steady stream, but not dumped in.
3. Adjust seasonings to taste.  Place mayo in a labeled, dated container and refrigerate.

Notes: 

• Homemade mayo is different from store mayo:  First, it has healthy oils.  Second, it isn’t white but a buttery color, more like the mustard and egg yolk.  Third, it won’t be as thick, though it will thicken after refrigeration. 
• Because of the risk of salmonella, use clean, refrigerated eggs, free of cracks. 
• Most recipes use the yolk of one egg but Sally Fallon, in Nourishing Traditions, suggests one whole egg plus the yolk of a 2^nd egg.  I think eggs are healthy so follow Fallon’s precedent.
• When I made mayo with all EVOO, it had too strong an olive oil taste for me.  Using extra light olive oil helped, and using ½ sesame seed oil was better.  Sunflower oil or almost any other healthy oil could be substituted if you don’t have sesame seed oil.
• The lemon provides flavor as well as acid.  Some recipes use vinegar, or a combination of lemon juice and vinegar.  So if you don’t have a lemon handy, try your favorite vinegar.
• I made this recipe two ways: hand whisking as some purists suggest (tiring, but good exercise), and mixing with an electric beater, on slow.  I didn’t see a difference.  A food processor should be fine also.
• Refrigerate the mayo when done.  Recipes suggest a shelf life 3-7 days so don’t make more than you’ll use in that time.  Sally Fallon, in Nourishing Traditions, extends the life of her mayo to 3-4 weeks by adding whey. If I can find some whey I'll try it and report back.
• Note the simplicity of the ratios:  1 yolk, 1 cup oil, ½ of a lemon, juiced.  The mustard and salt are for flavor so add to your taste.  Some add white pepper (black works, but it shows). 

Egg Salad Sandwich

Ingredients:

  2 eggs, hard-boiled, chopped

  1 stalk celery, washed and chopped

  1 green onion, washed and chopped

  2 T Skip’s Homemade Mayo

  2 T pickle relish (optional)

  Salt and pepper, to taste

  Whole wheat bread (homemade would be nice)

  Lettuce leaves, preferably dark green

Directions:  No one needs directions to assemble this tasty and healthy sandwich.  I hard-boil the eggs for 12 minutes.  The recipe makes 2 sandwiches, so you won’t have to eat alone. 

Please comment:  Use the scorecard noted above to grade your 1^st quarter progress at living the Word of Wisdom Living Healthy Changes.  Share your results with any benefits you've gained as a comment below. 

More Vitamin D

Vitamin D Survey

We’re asking all readers to answer two questions in the comment section below:

1)   Have you ever been tested for vitamin D, yes or no.

2)   If so, can you share the test result (in ng/mL, the usual form).

Thank you very much; we’ll share the result in the next post.

Health and Quilting

The beautiful wife wishes my Word of Wisdom Living posts were shorter, perhaps 600 words.  I try, but the last post on vitamin D, a critical health topic, ran 1220 words.  And I didn’t even cover all the important points, like how to optimize vitamin D from sunshine.  So here are a few more words about the vitamin that’s more like a hormone, and is sometimes called the immunity steroid.  For more on the benefits of vitamin D, see this article by Dr. Jack Kruse, a neurosurgeon.

Before we get too passionate about vitamin D, please remember one thing:  WOWL seeks a balanced view of nutrition and health; we try to stay above the fads that come and go.  It helps to think of your health as a quilt comprising 52 patches, which we address with our weekly Healthy Changes.  Most people act on perhaps a half-dozen or so health topic, dominated by those most recently in the news.   A PhD nutritionist might be aware of a thousand, or so, an impossibility for the average person.  We attempt to increase your vision and practice to cover 52—a boost that just might save the life of someone you care for.

The Seasonal Cycle

Vitamin D and omega-3 fats work together in the body.  (We'll talk about omega-3 fats in two weeks.)  Both are essential to brain function, for example.  So it shouldn’t surprise they have harmony in Nature.  The green plants of spring and early summer deliver the most omega-3 fats, just as the sun restores our vitamin D by shining brighter and longer. 

The pattern of spring is reversed in the fall.  The fall harvest—more brown than green—is low in omega-3 and high in omega-6, which seems to prepare us for winter.  Vitamin D levels decline also—as the sun drops low in the sky and the days grow shorter, we produce less D.  There's likely a good reason for these seasonal variations but until more is known, it seems wise to keep vitamin D within the optimum range.

Best Sources of Vitamin D

Studies suggest Americans have too little vitamin D and this is getting worse.  Two big reasons are 1) we've been taught (by weathermen, the clowns of TV) that sunshine is bad, and 2) the modern American diet (MAD) may be making things worse.  For example, the MAD is low in omega-3 fats and excessive in omega-6.  There's evidence this combination inhibits the body's ability to produce vitamin D, even if you get enough sunshine.  If you get plenty of sun but have low serum vitamin D, take a look at your diet.

There are other reasons for low vitamin D production:  If you're older things just slow down (but you do have more time to sit in the sun).  If you're overweight or obese your vitamin D supply can be trapped in permanent fat tissue and unavailable. (Fat cells are the winter storage depot for vitamin D.)  A darker complexion is rich in melatonin, which protects the body from the sun, but slows down vitamin D production.  And there are always the genetic differences. 

What is the best way to increase your vitamin D?  Dr. John A. McDougall, an advocate of disease prevention through diet and lifestyle, gives his opinion in this article.  Basically, he favors 1) regular sensible sun, if possible, 2) the safe use of tanning booths in winter, and 3), as the last resort, vitamin D pills.  There are also dietary sources of vitamin D that shouldn't be overlooked.

Dietary Vitamin D

As you move away from the equator, people get less vitamin D producing sunshine.  But the consumption of meat increases and animal (as well as human) fat is a storehouse for vitamin D.  So you get some D from animal fat (as well as the organ meats).  Then there’s your internal supply:  If the fat you add in the fall actually disappears in the winter, you’re releasing some vitamin D. 

Cold-water fish are another source of vitamin D, in addition to omega-3 fats.  Wild salmon have a lot of D, 600-1000 IU per serving; farmed salmon contain about 1/4^th as much.  Herring, sardines, tuna and shrimp also contain vitamin D, as well as omega-3 fats. If you’re eating fancy, oysters and caviar are a good D source.  Remember the tradition about eating fish in the months with an ‘r’?  Isn’t it nice that these are the months with the least sunshine? 

The sun-starved folks in New England traditionally ate a lot of cod.  Cod liver oil is uniquely rich in both omega-3 and vitamin D.  (Cod liver oil has 1300 IU of D in just 1 tbsp.)  Nature does provide.

Eggs contain vitamin D also, about 20-37 IU.  Some breakfast cereals have been fortified with vitamin D (40-140 IU per serving): milk contains 100 IU of D, added by irradiation.  Though these are synthetic forms of D, you can get 300 IU or so with a hearty breakfast.  Mushrooms contain D and this is increased if you place them in the sun for a few hours.

This Week’s Recipe

In the 52 Breakthrough Recipes we plan to post this year, we’ve included five salads.  THe Healthy Change implied a recipe with vitamin D so the beautiful wife suggested a Classic Seafood Salad recipe, which we included in this week’s menu.  Here’s our recipe:

Classic Seafood Salad

Ingredients (feeds 4):

• 8-12 oz. of cooked shrimp
• 4 cups dark greens, washed
• 4 green onions, chopped
• 4 eggs, hard-boiled and quartered
• 2 medium tomatoes, cut into sections
• 1 avocado, sliced

Directions:

1)   This is too easy but always a treat; it can be the only dish if accompanied with bread.  We ate it this week with cheese quesadilla.  Simply arrange the ingredients on a salad plate, artfully.  You can add about any produce you have on hand.  This salad works with almost any seafood; canned tuna is easy on the budget, but we also buy crab when the price is right.

2)   Serve the dressing at the table.  The beautiful wife makes a 1000 Island dressing by combining our homemade chili sauce with ketchup and mayonnaise. 

Please Comment:  Per the request at the top of the page, please tell if you’ve been tested for vitamin D (yes or no), and share the test result, if you don’t mind.