The Everyday Foodie

I’m back on the healthy eating wagon and following Weight Watchers again. But, one of my key goals is to still enjoy great food and to learn some flavor-filled, low-fat cooking techniques along the way. To that end, I expect at least half of my posts for the next several months will have a healthy focus and for most of my posts I’ll include Weight Watchers point values because, well, I’m calculating them already and why horde information?

In the last couple of weeks I’ve discovered My Recipes is a great source for healthy cooking for a couple of reasons:

• Their database includes recipes from both Cooking Light and Health magazines. While I consistently have to up the spice levels on any recipe I use from either of these magazines, both do a good job of producing interesting, varied recipes that I can use as a platform.
• They include nutrition information for a large majority of their recipes. This helps me identify “point-friendly” recipes when I’m shopping for new recipe ideas, and makes calculating point values very easy. If a recipe doesn’t have nutrition information I can always use the recipe builder on the Weight Watcher’s site, but hey, why do the extra work if I don’t have to?

I’m also on the hunt for cook books, blogs, and other sources of point-friendly recipes, which I will share as I come across them. One of my current favorite cookbooks is Fresh: Healthy Cooking and Living from Lake Austin Spa Resort. Terry Conlan is one of my favorite cooking class instructors, and when I visit the Lake Austin Spa his food is just as much fun as the spa treatments (I wrote about one of my favorite dishes on Dishola). Some of the great lessons I’ve learned from him are:

• Love and use frequently high-taste, low calorie flavors like herbs, spices, and vinegars in place of a lot of fat to create flavor.
• Use fat wisely and only when necessary. I’m a big, big, big fan of olive oil, and can (and have) slathered it on everything. But, the sheer act of paying closer attention to how much I’m actually using has shown me how many unnecessary calories I’ve taken in without huge flavor benefit. I try to make sure now when I do use fat I use it for maximum flavor impact and not just because.
• Think outside the box. Make grilled pizza on low-fat pitas, mix noodles into a salad to get a carb fix but let the greens provide the bulk of the meal, and put more things in soup are just a few examples.

Here’s to happy and healthy eating!

Tonight I made a recipe from the Passionate Cook blog that I’ve wanted to try for a couple of weeks now – Grilled Scallops with Thyme Butter, Red Chili, and Parmesan. I’m a big fan of scallops and wanted a different kind of “turf” to go with our surf and turf dinner. I enjoyed this recipe for three reasons:

1. It was so very easy to make: Mix chili and thyme with butter, put it on top of the scallops, and bake them in the oven for a little than 10 minutes depending on size. You can make these more or less spicy by adjusting the amount of chili you put in. (Really, it is that easy.)
2. The presentation is beautiful and once again simple: Pile some baby arugula on a plate, place the scallops on top, and you’re done.
3. The recipe is healthy and easily made low-calorie: I reduced the butter to 2 Tbps. of butter for 1 lb of scallops (down from the 3.5 or so the recipe calls for) and the taste was still fantastic. In Weight Watchers land this recipe is 5 points with each serving including 5.5 oz. of scallops (2-4 depending on size) plus one cup of arugula.

In the Passionate Cook’s blog these were served as an appetizer, in which case you’d most likely only serve one unless the scallops are very small. They would also make a lovely addition to a small plates menu. And, as my dinner tonight showed, you can have them as a main course as well with additional veggies or light pasta for a healthy and flavor-packed meal.

I’m adding these to my easy entertaining repertoire because you buy the scallops cleaned and ready to go (be sure the butcher removes the little foot from the bottom) and you can pre-make the flavored butter. 10 minutes before you are ready to eat, top the scallops with butter and toss into the oven. Scallops count as an impressive dinner party food so your guests will be amazed and it’s up to you if you want to tell them how easy this dish was to prepare.

Risotto is my current comfort food of choice. It’s creamy, deeply flavorful, and just all around wonderful to eat. I also love it because the basic technique for risotto is a vehicle for many variations. Surprisingly, risotto is intimidating for some, most likely because it isn’t a dish you can exactly walk away from. Even so, with a little insight and practice, risotto can become part of any cook’s basic repertoire.

Champagne?

In honor of the New Year, I’m posting my Champagne Risotto recipe. You can easily substitute a white wine (lightly oaked please) in place of the Champagne, but I prefer Champagne because it gives the risotto a depth of flavor that isn’t overly heavy. If nothing else, it’s a good reason to open your favorite bottle of bubbly. You of course can use any sparkling wine, so don’t feel like you have to break out a bottle of Grand Cru for this recipe, but hey, if you happen to be serving such a thing with appetizers or dessert, why not put a bit in your risotto?

Recipe Details

• Difficulty: Easy if you’ve made risotto before, moderate if you haven’t. If this is your first risotto, be sure to read the Recipe for Success notes at the end of the post.
• Serves: 4 as a first course, 6-8 as a side dish
• Prep Time: 15 – 20 minutes
• Cook Time: 25 minutes

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I took a hands-on tamale making class four years ago, and every Christmas I’ve said “This year I’m going to make chocolate tamales”. And every year, well, I didn’t. While the desire to make tamales may not be surprising, the desire to make chocolate ones might be. Why chocolate you ask?

I was born and raised in El Paso, Tx, right on the borders of Mexico and New Mexico so Mexican food is as much a part of my culinary DNA as BBQ and Southern food goodness. When I was in my teens we started having enchiladas, tamales, and all of the fixins on Christmas Eve as many of our neighbors did, and I’ve continued that tradition with my own family. Every year my parents buy tamales from El Paso and bring them to Austin (because Austin tamales aren’t like El Paso tamales at all) and I make the rest of dinner. Even though I have access to some phenomenal tamales, and in general making tamales is a long process, I’ve always wanted to learn how to make them – just because. Enter chocolate tamales.

Although there are things I will do differently next time I make these (and there will definitely be a next time), the results were a hit with family and friends. Along the way I put into practice some important lessons I learned in class, and picked up some other tips as well that I hope will be useful to anyone else who plans to make tamales of any kind. I used recipes and techniques I learned from Jim Peyton, and I highly recommend his various cookbooks (see links to these at the bottom of the post)

Step 1: Soak the Corn Husks

Tamales around the world are wrapped in all kinds of things – from banana leaves to corn husks and more. Ultimately the tamale wrapping needs to be pliable but robust enough to hold up to steaming for at least 90 minutes and of course plentiful. Corn husks fit the bill and are one of the most common tamale wrappers you’ll see. The same markets (or online stores) that carry the corn flour you’ll need for the tamale masa (dough) will most likely carry dried corn husks specifically for making tamales. For the husks to get back to the pliability they have when they are still wrapping corn, you’ll need to soak them in water for at least an hour. To keep the husks submerged in the water while you soak them, put a plate on top of the pile of husks to weigh them down.

Step 2: Make the Masa

This recipe is a double-chocolate whammy, so it includes chocolate in the masa and in the filling. Chocolate tamales are a sweet tamale, so they start with a basic masa mix that uses water and butter in place of the chicken broth and lard you find in traditional savory masa recipes. (more…)

While we always have Mexican food on Christmas Eve (look for my chocolate dessert tamale recipe coming soon), Christmas dinner is whatever I darn well want it to be in any given year. I typically cycle through the old stand-bys: crown roast of pork, beef tenderloin, standing rib roasts, etc. This year, some time in early November, I decided early on that we were having lamb and I spent the ensuing seven weeks on the hunt for just the right lamb recipe. My goal was to find something easy enough to do that I could enjoy Christmas day with my family without spending hours in the kitchen and that would “feel” like Christmas.

Pomegranate is all the rage these days, and for some reason citrus and Christmas just go together for me, so when I came upon this Lamb Chops with Pomegranate Relish recipe on the Epicurious site, I knew I was on to something. The one big change I made to this recipe was to marinade two racks of lamb and roast them in the oven rather than marinating chops and cooking them individually. For the purposes of Christmas dinner racks of lamb are a little more impressive and I didn’t particularly want to grill on Christmas (shocking, I know, for a girl from Texas). Because I used whole racks and I knew they would take up more room in a bag for marinating, I doubled the marinade recipe. I also didn’t serve the relish with the lamb this year because, honestly, I didn’t feel like supreming oranges on Christmas. I expect I will serve this again as grilled chops in the spring and will definitely make the relish then as I expect the colors will be fantastic.

Tips and Tricks

This recipe is so easy it’s just plain silly, particularly given how impressive the final presentation is, and it’s very tasty. Some things to keep in mind when you make it: (more…)