FOOD ON THE FOOD

Grapefruit Fennel Salad

To celebrate me losing all of my dessert cookbook weight, let's have a salad!

I've been enjoying this grapefruit fennel salad for months now. It was inspired by a recipe in Amanda Cohen's cookbook, Dirt Candy. If you're unfamiliar with the NYC veggie-focused restaurant by the same name or its comic-book-themed cookbook spin-off, I suggest you seek out the latter the next time you're at the library or your local bookstore. It's an entertaining read as it illustrates, quite literally, the reality of opening a new restaurant, Cohen's stint on Iron Chef America, as well as cooking techniques for vegetables. As the author and heroine of this graphic novel, Cohen dons her chefly superpowers with wit and humility. The book is great fun, as is her blog. Check out this hilarious post on how her celery salad went over at the NYC Wine & Food Fest. If you find yourself defecting to her blog, I'll totally understand!

But back to the salad. Cohen's version includes candied grapefruit lollipops and grilled cheese croutons, which are no doubt delicious, but my version is a little more pared down (read: lazy). I've settled on this basic arrangement: mixed greens with thinly sliced fennel and red onion, segmented grapefruit, and crumbled feta. The salad benefits from having something fatty and salty in the mix, so if you forgo the cheese, fill the void with crumbled bacon, chopped almonds or pistachios, or cubed avocado with a sprinkling of sea salt. The dressing, which I make with anise seeds instead of fennel seeds, is mildly fruity and refreshing. It's the perfect pre-summer salad.

(It also reminds me a little bit of dessert!)

 

Grapefruit Fennel Salad     

Below are my suggestions, but use what you like in the proportions of your choosing. Just be sure to slice the vegetables very thinly. A tangle of radish sprouts would be a nice addition. The amounts below serve two grownups. Scale up as you wish.

Salad
1 to 2 cups mixed lettuce, spinach, and baby kale
1/2 fennel bulb, thinly sliced
1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced (only cut what you'll use)
1 red grapefruit
Crumbled feta, goat cheese, or queso fresco
Chopped salted almonds or pistachios (optional)

Anise Dressing
1 tablespoon finely grated grapefruit zest (from 1 grapefruit)
2 tablespoons grapefruit juice
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon anise seeds
1/4 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

For the salad, toss the lettuce, fennel, and onion in a bowl.

Finely grate the zest from the grapefruit and set it aside for the dressing. Cut the grapefruit in half and reserve one of the halves for the dressing. To segment the other half, place it cut-side-down and slice the peel off the grapefruit in swaths, following the contour of the fruit. Then turn it over and cut between the membranes to remove the juicy flesh in between. Set the grapefruit segments aside in a shallow bowl.

For the dressing, add the grapefruit zest, grapefruit juice from the reserved grapefruit half, lemon juice, anise seeds, and mustard to a blender. Blend on high, then reduce the speed to low and slowly stream in the oil until smooth and emulsified. Add salt and pepper to taste. (The dressing can be stored in a covered jar in the refrigerator for up to a week.)

Lightly dress the greens and veggies just before serving. Arrange the salad on plates with the grapefruit segments, cheese, and nuts if using. Serve additional dressing at the table.

Source: Adapted from Dirt Candy by Amanda Cohen, Ryan Dunlavey, and Grady Hendrix

Parsnip Soup and Righteous Clichés

I have a milestone birthday coming up this year, like many of my friends. And as much as I'll be glad to reach it, I'm also bummed out about this whole aging thing.

You know what I'm talking about. Back in high school, everything is poised to get better. The braces will be pried off soon. The glasses can be traded in for contact lenses, maybe even the kind that turn your muddy eyes a cool shade of aquamarine like a mood ring. You're finally easing up on all the Aqua Net (step away from the can of hairspray, Tammy). The ugly duckling becomes a swan and all that crap. Meanwhile, you're making a little cash throwing together sandwiches on the weekends and you feel real smart with that diploma in your hand.

The world is yours for the taking!

In high school, you can't wait for college. In college, you look forward to getting out of college because all this studying is putting a damper on your social life. Plus, you want a fun job with a decent paycheck. You want a mode of transportation besides your own two feet. Dates at fancy restaurants. A place to live that's not a dump. Vacations. Soon you have some stuff, and you like your stuff, but you want something more. You want love. You want a family of your own. Then you get a family of your own and, for the whole first year, you can't believe what a horrible mistake you've made. No more dates at fancy restaurants. Your place becomes a dump. Vacations take on an entirely new and unwelcome meaning. Sometimes you wish you'd just stayed home.

But then you learn to stop being so selfish all the time and things gets better. Your family becomes your whole life. Does anyone else have kids as awesome as yours? NO WAY! IMPOSSIBLE! And then you realize something. Your kids are halfway through their childhood already. They're going to spend the whole second half hating you. And then they're going to leave.

They say you get better with age, but in what way specifically? Nicer? I don't think so. If anything, I'm getting more crotchety and even less charitable behind the wheel of a car. Wiser? Uh-uh. By my calculations, I'm getting stupider by the day. I've always been a wee bit forgetful, but this is ridiculous. I left my coat somewhere last week. At the library? At Walgreens? Where? How did I not notice my coat was missing? True, it felt colder, but all that ran through my head was: That's New England for you. One minute you're toasty warm in your nice winter jacket and the next minute you're shivering by the parking meters fumbling for change while the icy wind sucker punches you in the spleen and there's no logical explanation for it whatsoever. (I still haven't found it, by the way. My coat. It's puffy and gray with a big hood.)

The other night I looked in the mirror and realized that it's all downhill from here. This is as smart/healthy/attractive as I will ever be for the whole rest of my life. And, I'll be honest, the bar didn't seem very high.

Is this what a midlife crisis looks like?

Spring Parsnip Soup     

This recipe is stupefyingly simple. I don't even use stock anymore, just water. It's silky and surprisingly sweet. Snip a few chives on top and you have something tasty and healthful to warm you up on a chilly spring day when your coat is nowhere to be found.

1 Tbsp. unsalted butter
1 medium onion, chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
3 cups water (or veggie stock)
1 pound parsnips, peeled, cored*, diced
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Sauté the chopped onion and celery for 4 to 5 minutes until soft and translucent. Don't let the vegetables brown. Add the garlic and sauté for 15 seconds until fragrant. Add the water or stock and the parsnips. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the parsnips are soft, 15 to 20 minutes. Let cool and purée in a blender or with a stick blender until perfectly smooth. Season with salt and pepper. Serves 2 or 3. The recipe can be doubled (just be sure to purée the soup in half-batches if using a blender).

*Some parsnips have a woody central core that runs from top to bottom. To remove it, I usually just slice the peeled sides right off the core, which is a slightly different color. (Then chop up the sides and discard the core.) But if you're not sure exactly where or how big the core is, you can also quarter the parsnip the long way. Then you can see it a lot better. Just trim along the interior edge of each quarter with a paring knife to remove it.

Scenes from South Beach, Week 2

What started out as smooth sailing during Week 1 of the South Beach Diet quickly turned stormy by Week 2. I found myself crabby and headachy and exhausted most of the time. The children noticed a steep increase in angry shushing as I wandered zombie-like around the house. Twice, I sat down and then immediately fell asleep.

I wasn't starving, mind you. I ate whenever I felt hungry. On paper, I was consuming plenty of calories, but the gym said otherwise. My half-hour of moderate cardio was hell. On the weight circuit, anything more than 10 reps was impossible. Normally I can do 15 no problem. But I figured it was all good. Without the easily accessible sugar coursing through my system, all my body had left to burn for fuel was stored fat and the fumes from my sugar-filled dreams. BURN, BABY, BURN!!!

But then I started to get light-headed around Day 11. It happened at the school library where I volunteer. I attributed my dizziness to the ungodly heat in the room. I had already stripped down as much as is appropriate in a public school setting, but still I found myself listing like a ship. I went home and took a vitamin. The next day, it happened again at the gym. That's when I decided to add fruit back into my diet. I mean, I'm trying to lessen my dependence on sugar, not starve my body of vital nutrients it quite obviously needs. It's pretty clear I would not do well in a Third World scenario.

Things didn't go completely off the rails until Day 13. It was Husband's company holiday party. We got all dressed up and drove to the World Trade Center in Boston's burgeoning Seaport District. I knew better than to think I would stick to any kind of strict regimen at an event like that, so I told myself as long as I agreed to stay away from dessert, I could have any pastry-wrapped hors d'oeuvre that came my way. And come they did. As did the flutes of Prosecco. Before long, I found myself seeking out a table filled with bread and various tempting spreads and somehow that became fair game. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

After cocktail hour, the curtains parted and a huge buffet opened up before us: salmon encased in puff pastry, beef tenderloin with mustard sauce, mashed potatoes, butternut squash ravioli, salad with roasted pears and blue cheese. My eyes were as big as dinner plates. I know what some of you are thinking: It was a buffet—how good could it be? My answer is: Who cares? By now, I was really enjoying myself with my dirty martini and my now-empty plate. I had a post-prandial glow that didn't diminish even as it slowly dawned on me that 95% of the people at the party were younger than me. By a lot. One such youth informed me that my elementary school had recently been torn down. Time marches on, I said, Oh, and are you going to eat that?

That's when I saw it. Someone carrying a plate of desserts. I could barely even find where they were hiding them with all of the black curtain partitions hanging everywhere. I batted around for a while, and finally tumbled out of the curtains into a long display of tiered silver trays filled with petits fours: tiny layer cakes enrobed in white chocolate, miniature pumpkin tarts, carrot cupcakes, pastel-colored macarons, and chocolate truffles. My dress exploded into shreds just looking at it.

I'm not going to tell you how many I ate. Okay, I ate nine. But about a half hour later, I was beset by such terrible stomach pains that we had to leave. On the car ride home, I had the gall to be perplexed by my condition. What could possibly have gone wrong, I thought? Well, Tammy, let's see. All you did was eat EVERYTHING you haven't eaten in two weeks in a three-hour period. I was incapacitated for several hours, but I slept it off and woke up the next day just fine.

I'm not proud of my behavior. Okay, I'm a little bit proud. (I mean ashamed. Very ashamed!) The good news is that despite my terrible fall from glory, I did manage to lose five pounds over that two-week period. The scale hasn't lied to me up to this point, so why would it start now? But what about the sugar cravings, which were the whole reason I tried this diet in the first place? Do I still want dessert? Of course I do. I always want dessert. I think it's written into my genetic code. The difference is that before the diet I craved dessert because I had it all the time, and now I crave it because I never have it. Surely there is a happy medium between always and never. Like…twice a week? I'll let you know when I close in on the sweet spot.

In the meantime, I celebrated the end of my diet a day early with a microscoop of kulfi ice cream from Toscanini's (cardamom + crushed nuts + sweet cream = heaven!). I may never get over the way their ice cream pulls like taffy when you take a spoonful. Love!!

Scenes from South Beach, Week 1

How did things go during my first week on the South Beach Diet? Not too bad, actually. Under Husband's watchful eye (and even under my own less watchful one), I didn't cheat once. It's true that when Husband offered to make the kids a batch of chocolate chip cookies over the weekend, I collapsed whimpering onto the floor. That maybe wasn't my proudest moment, but, hey, you've got to expect some crazy behavior during rehab. (To Husband's credit, he did not proceed with his wife-torturing scheme.)

I knew breakfast would be the hardest meal of the day, and indeed it is. I wake up famished and late for the bus every day, so breakfast has to be quick and substantial. Here's what I keep falling back on.

Breakfast:

• fried egg with salsa
• low-fat cottage cheese with lots of black pepper, glass of diluted V8
• fried egg over leftover garlicky greens
• bacon (yes, unlimited bacon is allowed. why do you think I agreed to this diet in the first place?)

Snacking is important. If you let yourself get too hungry, you're going to cave. Come three o'clock, I would kill for a Triscuit, so I just have to keep packing my maw with the good stuff like:

Snacks:

• cheese
• almonds, peanuts, walnuts, pistachios
• snap peas dipped in hummus
• pickles
• sunflower or pumpkin seeds
• marinated artichoke hearts
• more cheese

Lunch and dinner aren't too bad because you can just omit the carb and double up on veggies. My winter CSA keeps us well supplied in that regard.

Lunch:

• slice of turkey and cheese wrapped around a pickle x2
• green salad with chicken salad on top
• Peruvian beef and lentil soup with a side of 1/2 avocado sprinkled with salt
• green salad with flaked smoked mackerel, cheddar cheese, and chopped almonds on top

Dinner:

• roast chicken, turnip gratin, salad
• Husband's chili with cheddar chunks and salad
• roasted bluefish with mustard glaze and garlicky greens
• bratwurst and cabbage braise
• sausage, onions, and peppers (no roll)
• pulled pork and coleslaw (no roll)

I will admit that on pizza night last Friday, I was sorely tempted to cheat. That is, until Husband suggested that I peel off the cheese and pepperoni from atop the carb-filled pizza crust and just eat that. Which I did! Without a moment's hesitation! I'm not sure which is worse in the real world, eating a giant pile of Butterfingers on the sly or a giant pile of oily, congealed cheese and pepperoni peelings in plain view? I think it's a draw. But as far as this diet is concerned, I'm right on track!

No change on the scale, yet, but I feel lighter somehow. It's unclear if the sugar cravings are getting better or worse. I still want a Snickers bar real bad. Also, I can't tell if it's the absence of sugar or a factor of hunger, but everything tastes so much brighter and more intense to me. So that's a bonus! (Makes me think a Snickers bar would taste EVEN BETTER right now!)

So, in the absence of concrete evidence, let's call Week 1 a success! We'll see how Week 2 goes. (Spoiler: I already know how it's going and it's not good!)