Policy Point Wednesday: Groceries in the Fast Lane

There are some innovative new programs out there, following Bacon's Mohammed and the Mountain  principle: if grocery stores won't come to the food desert, they work by finding innovative ways to bring the groceries without a market.

For instance, in Chicago, several CSAs have designated highway oases and other commuter-friendly locations as drop-off points.  CSAs, or community-supported agriculture, are a way of buying a share in a farmer's crops.  The seasonal produce share is boxed up by the farmer and delivered to the designated site, where the purchaser can pick it up on their way home from work.  While this doesn't necessarily directly address the food desert, it's a step in the right direction.

In Baltimore, an even more innovative program is in the works: library grocery delivery.  The City of Baltimore has partnered with a local grocery store chain to offer groceries at two public libraries: patrons order their groceries on a designated day, and return to pick up their order the next day.  Even better, patrons are able to use a variety of ways to pay, including SNAP dollars.  This win-win situation also encourages residents of food deserts to access the free educational opportunities in the library.  Patrons order their groceries online, and the City of Baltimore pays for the food to be delivered to the library.

Also in Chicago, Peapod, an online grocer, has launched the Healthy Families Project along with food desert researcher Mari Gallagher.  Peapod is using Ms. Gallagher's research to determine which block-level improvements would 1) most likely reduce diabetes, 2) positively impact the greatest number of children and 3) positively impact the greatest population overall.  Peapod will host a forum this spring to release its findings.

In Philadelphia, the Healthy Corner Store Initiative is working to change the product lines in small, independent grocers like bodegas.  They offer support and education to both grocers and patrons, with brochures available in schools to help kids make better choices on their way home, and with community supports to help educate small grocery owners on how to improve the profitability of offering fresh and healthy foods.  This holistic approach serves to stop the vicious cycle at both ends: no longer do grocers stop stocking healthy foods because they assume patrons don't want them, and patrons are educated to support their small grocer's efforts by purchasing the healthier options.

With many small, concerted efforts, the landscape of grocery purchasing is slowly changing.  There is not one single answer to the food desert problem, but many small changes that can improve the situation and the health of Americans over time.

Sundays with Sparky: Exploring a cookbook - Fanny At Chez Panisse

Not long ago, I was looking for something else entirely, when I stumbled upon a cookbook by Alice Waters. Not just any cookbook, though - a children's book, written in the voice of her then seven-year-old daughter, Fanny Singer.

I highly recommend Fanny at Chez Panisse: A Child's Restaurant Adventures to parents who want to educate their children about what they eat.  The book is a story all about food: where it comes from, how it's grown, how to eat it (with fingers!) and how to cook. Truthfully, at nine, Sparky considered himself a bit sophisticated for it, but we sat down and read together how Fanny grew up inside stock pots in the kitchen, learned to eat halibut baked in fig leaves and was solely responsible for raspberry inspection. The charming story was rescued from being twee (at least, for Sparky) by a full-color illustration of the famous fire at Chez Panisse. After the the story is a short illustrated cookbook.

So I sent Sparky off with the book and the mandate to find us something for lunch, but couldn't resist peeking over his shoulder...raita? no,...cornbread? NO,...quesadillas? OK, quesadillas...but look, there's a pasta with garlic and parsley...No? Ok...roast potatoes and garlic mayonnaise? Sigh, OK - what about calzones? Calzones! OK!

I had previously frozen a quadruple batch of Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day pizza dough, most of which had gone into pizza bites for snacks, so I pulled out the last batch and thawed it on the counter. When it had softened, I set Sparky to kneading the dough, which (I noted with not just a little pride,) he did beautifully without any direction.  Almost any pizza dough recipe - or purchased pizza dough will work here.

We then set two balls of dough aside to rest a bit as we assembled our other ingredients. Being as a calzone is kind of a kitchen-sink recipe, I took a lot of liberties: instead of the recipe's prosciutto (which never lasts long at our house,) I added Italian sausage; instead of fresh herbs, I added frozen pesto, instead of chives I used shallot, which Sparky chopped up after donning his cut-proof gloves (which now fit considerably better.) He "let" me mince the garlic, so he could recover from a case of onion tears, but not until after I showed him how to release the the garlic paper by giving the clove an "indian burn" between two fingers and thumbs.

Still, we happened to have a lovely knob of goat cheese as called for in the recipe, and we made do with string cheese for our mozzarella: after all, Sonoma and its garden-fresh foods are very far away. I think both Alice and Fanny would forgive us.

The filling ingredients were well blended, and the dough rolled out and carefully stretched by hand - we got a little help by draping it over a bowl to rest between rollings.

The ingredients were then summarily dumped slightly off-center on the oblong of dough, water applied to the edges, and the dough was folded over the filling. Sparky decided to crimp with a fork, and I went over the edges with an empanada fold, just to be safe. Then over the top with an egg and olive oil wash, and into a 450 degree oven for 20 minutes.
After working his fingers near to the bone, Sparky decided to pour himself a cold one (in this case, an Izze Blackberry soda I'd been saving) and dig in.

They came out spectacularly well: meaty and rich, with a nice tang from the goat cheese, bit of a burn from the garlic - for the first time, I think we turned out something restaurant-quality in my kitchen!

Policy Point Wednesday: Advertising and Obesity

I've said before, one of the real deficits in the food desert is education - but there is a deeper, more systemic problem than can be solved just  by pointing families towards healthy foods.  The consumer marketplace and the media play a role in food choices, and the negative effects of these forces can be seen at work in the food desert.

For instance, the American Academy of Pediatrics states that "children and adolescents view 40 000 ads per year on TV alone." The Academy estimates that half of these ads are for food, especially high-calorie snacks - healthy foods appear in commercials less than 3% of the time.  In The 30-Second Effect, scientists Dina Borzekowski and Thomas Robinson concluded that preschoolers who were shown an advertisement were significantly more likely to choose the advertised item, even if their exposure to the ad was very brief.  It's no wonder these campaigns are so effective in altering a child's behavior: the advertising world spends about $15 billion dollars on marketing to children, contrasted with about $1 billion in nutrition education spending.  Fast food and snack foods, the beneficiaries of many of these marketing dollars, are the foods that are both most available and most profitable in the food desert.

Agencies like Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the somewhat controversial Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Media Awareness Network have been working to address these issues, advocating for restrictions on commercials aimed at children, especially when it comes to unhealthy foods.  PBS Kids, a nearly commercial-free media environment, offers a terrific resource to teach children about advertising and how it works: Don't Buy It, Advertising Tricks, the FTC offers Admogo, and ThinkQuest offers a similar, if less appealing, site.  Unfortunately, all of these resources depend on parents who are willing to combat the tidal wave of advertising - a difficult proposition, since many low-income parents lack the education to understand the negative effects of marketing on their families. 

Again, education is the key - but education can't succeed unless we can find a way to shout down the billions of dollars worth of voices that depend on our bad habits for survival.

The Food Desert Project - Penne alle Vongole in Bianco

My mother-in-law has a series of cookbooks I covet - they're not fancy, they're all about preparing good meals at home in a humble kitchen.  Grant Achatz would not approve, but I often turn to these books for inspiration in this project, as back 40 years ago, nobody was ashamed to open a can as long as they could make a nutritious, good-tasting meal of it.  Much of my MIL's reputation as an excellent cook is due to books like these - in this case, my recipe was adapted from her Good Housekeeping - Menus for a Whole Year of Dinners, which shares a shelf with the beloved I Hate to Cook Book series along with staples like Joy of Cooking and a group of tomes from Southern Living.

This recipe has the additional advantage of being lightning-fast and made entirely from ingredients you can keep on your pantry shelf anytime.  It's a frequent quick, nutritious weeknight meal for our family - the recipe makes 4 lunchtime portions.  Nutrition Information.


2 tbsp dried minced onion
2 tbsp dried parsley
1 tsp dried basil
1/2 cup white wine (I used 3-buck Chuck, whatever you've got - but avoid "cooking wine" if you can)
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp EVOO (If you've been living under a rock, that's Extra-Virgin Olive Oil)
1 1/2 tsp jarred minced garlic
1/8 tsp granulated dried garlic
1/4 cup french fried onions
1 can minced clams with juice
1/4 cup finely minced canned roasted red pepper
1 tsp red pepper flakes


Place onions in a small bowl and cover with an equal amount of wine, refrigerate overnight. Treat parsley and basil the same way in a separate bowl.   If you're pressed for time, put each of these combinations in a microwave cup, heat for 30 seconds, and set aside for about a minute.

Heat butter and EVOO in skillet, add minced garlic.

Drain onions, reserving liquid, and saute with garlic until fragrant.

Add remaining ingredients, including soaking liquids, clam juice, and remaining wine.

Simmer on low heat for 10 minutes - while you're simmering, prepare your pasta.







Serve over cooked pasta.

 

Sundays with Sparky - Maki

When I asked Sparky what he wanted to cook next. "Sushi!!!" was the resounding reply. Now, Sparky will eat many kinds of sushi, his favorites being Ikura  (salmon roe) and Tamago (omelette) and Inari (stuffed bean curd skin) but what he of course meant in this case was making American-style maki, in particular a California Roll. Now, we'd made these together before, but of course I did all the prep work and Sparky helped assemble.

Cooking rice is tricky, and there's a lot of mise to set up for these, so I thought it would be a good lesson in prep work. I've tried a number of methods for cooking sushi rice on the stove, but settled on this recipe in Epicurious as my favorite; so I had Sparky begin by pouring 1 1/2 cups of sushi rice into a colander in the sink.

Then the rice was rinsed and stirred by hand until the water under the colander was no longer cloudy, and the wet rice was left in the colander for a half-hour TV break.   When Sparky's show was over, we poured the wet rice into a saucepan with 1 3/4 cups water and brought it to a boil.  After boiling for 2 minutes, it came off the heat and rested for 10 minutes.

During that time we prepped our mise-en-place:First, we halved our avocado by turning the avocado around the pit on the blade of the knife

- unfortunately, we immediately discovered it was a bit worse for wear and discarded it...

We went on to slice a cucumber in half (round object, first cut a flat surface) and then into long strips, and did the same with the radish and scallions. We cut Krab (surimi) sticks into quarters, and dug some masago (capelin or sweetfish roe - I really prefer tobiko, or flying fish roe if you can get it) out of the freezer.

Then we covered our rolling mat with plastic wrap, and topped it with a sheet of nori.  If you don't have a sushi rolling mat, we've discovered that a quart-size zipper-style freezer bag works quite well.  You can cut one to cover your rolling mat as well.

At this point, the rice was ready, so we dumped it into a cookie sheet to cool, and sprinkled it with seasoned japanese rice vinegar (awasezu,) fluffing with a rice paddle. I'm guessing we used a tablespoon or two of the vinegar.

We first decided to go old-school and do an inside-out California roll, so with well-wet hands, Sparky carefully squashed rice onto the nori sheet, leaving an empty inch on each end.

We then flipped the sheet over so the rice was on the bottom (easier when you have grown-up size hands, but not impossible) Then we placed the fillings near one end of the nori: Krab, radish, scallion, cucumber and mayo to replace the avocado.

The riceless nori end was then folded over the fillings, and the rolling began: you sort of tuck the roll and pull out the mat, squeezing the roll into a tight cylander as you go.

We then ended up with a beautiful tight rice roll, on which we spread tobikko with a butter knife, like it was jelly and cut in 8 slices

Next, we opted for the traditional nori-outside Maki. Same ingredients, similar process except we spread the rice a little thicker, then spread the tobikko on it. Then we topped the edge of the rice with our fillings, tucked the un-riced nori flap over them, and rolled it up. We got a nearly jumbo-sized Maki out of this one (commonly called Futomaki) but it also was beautiful.

 We capped the evening with an Argentine-style "chin-chin" toast with cucumber bottoms, and called it a day.

Policy Point Wednesday: How we measure Food Insecurity and Hunger

The Economic Research Service of the USDA plays a leading role in Federal research on food security—access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life—in U.S. households and communities.  It has set up the criterion for federal study of food needs across the United States of America.  In 2006, the ERS worked with the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies to study how we measure food insecurity and hunger.  This panel suggested some changes in the language used to describe food insecurity.

First of all, they decided the word "hunger" had too many connotations to be used in a scientific survey.  Hunger had previously been defined as "the uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food."  The phrase “very low food security” replaced “food insecurity with hunger,” because studies by the ERS focus on households and socio-economics, rather than an individual's phisiological condition.  So, while "hunger" is a word that is frequently used to describe neediness when it comes to food, "food insecurity" is the term more often used in US scientific studies.

As a result of this effort, the ERS created four specific definitions to divide the range of food security and insecurity:

1. High food security—Households had no problems, or anxiety about, consistently accessing adequate food.
2. Marginal food security—Households had problems at times, or anxiety about, accessing adequate food, but the quality, variety, and quantity of their food intake were not substantially reduced.
3. Low food security—Households reduced the quality, variety, and desirability of their diets, but the quantity of food intake and normal eating patterns were not substantially disrupted.
4. Very low food security—At times during the year, eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake reduced because the household lacked money and other resources for food.

In general, if you fall within the top two categories, you would be described as food secure, and in the bottom two, as food insecure.  Households reporting three or more conditions indicating food insecurity are classified as “food insecure.”  The survey begins with a general description of the household's relationship to food needs: "Which of these statements best describes the food eaten in your household in the last 12 months: —enough of the kinds of food (I/we) want to eat; (IF YES ABOVE ASK) —enough, but not always the kinds of food (I/we) want; —sometimes not enough to eat; or, —often not enough to eat?"  Later, another question asks if the household considers its meals to be appropriate “(I/we) couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for (you/your household) in the last 12 months?"  Interestingly, none of the questions address the respondents' knowledge of an appropriate diet, only their personal understanding of their household's relationship to food.

Several questions, however, posed what I found to be a better, more quantifiable measure based on economics rather than an assessment of comfort level:

• In the last 12 months, did you lose weight because there wasn't enough money for food?
• In the last 12 months, did (you/you or other adults in your household) ever not eat for a whole day because there wasn't enough money for food?  (IF YES ABOVE ASK) How often did this happen—almost every month, some months but not every month, or in only 1 or 2 months?
•  In the last 12 months, since (current month) of last year, did you ever cut the size of (your child's/any of the children's) meals because there wasn't enough money for food?
•  In the last 12 months, did (CHILD’S NAME/any of the children) ever skip meals because there wasn't enough money for food? (IF YES ABOVE ASK) How often did this happen—almost every month, some months but not every month, or in only 1 or 2 months? 
• In the last 12 months, did (your child/any of the children) ever not eat for a whole day because there wasn't enough money for food?

This measure of food insecurity drives most of our federally-funded food programs. While food insecurity as measured by the ERS is a real and definite problem, I believe the measure needs to take into account a household's ability to choose foods appropriately, and their level of understanding about diet, health, and food accessibility.  For instance, as measured by this survey, someone who happily eats only junk foods might describe themselves as food secure, despite living in a food desert where they have no access to foods with appropriate nutrition.  Our understanding of hunger should not be limited to people's level of comfort, but also their level of access to foods of adequate nutrition, and their ability to understand how their food choices affect their families.

The Food Desert Project - Moros Y Cristianos

My "famous" (thank you, Leah Zeldes!) Moros y Cristianos - or "Moors and Christians" is a Cuban-style rice dish that has variations all over the Caribbean - for instance, it's not dissimilar to the Haitian Diri ak Pwa, which is made with red beans and without cumin, or Puerto Rican Arroz con Habichuelas, which is often seasoned with ham or pork.

As I'm cooking this up, I sometimes imagine little rice-and-bean crusaders sitting peacefully down to dinner together.  The ingredients in this dish imply that I'm not too far off the mark:  for instance, domesticated rice was first found in China, then brought through India to the Middle East where the Moors brought it to Mediterranean Europe.  Spanish settlers brought rice to the colonies, including Cuba, where they found black beans (sometimes called turtle beans) spread throughout the Americas from Peru.  Even the seasonings of this dish are international:  cumin, bay leaves, and thyme also came to Spain via the Moors, while chili and bell peppers are of Central American origin.  Onions were first cultivated in Ancient Egypt, and traveled the same path as rice and spices.  This single dish is evidence that peoples of all beliefs, races, colors, and cultures sat down and ate together - and found that they liked their neighbor's food enough to bring it with them to new places.

Not only is this dish terrifically nutritious (we all need more beans in our diet, they're high-fiber, low-fat, and packed with protein and nutrients.) but it's dead-easy; the only catch is that you need to remember to soak your beans the night before.  I recommend the use of a crock-pot for this dish - then you can just dump the entire recipe in (after soaking your beans,) leave for the day, and come home, whip up some rice, and you're done.
Nutritional information

1 pound dry black beans
Water
4 bay leaves
2 tbsp ground cumin (edit: 1 tbsp whole and 2 tsp ground OR 1 tbsp ground)
2 tsp salt
1 tsp crushed curry powder
1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
1 tbsp dried onion flakes
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
2 large jars of roasted peppers (or 3 jars of pimientos) drained and chopped.

Soak the beans overnight in three times as much water as the volume of the beans (if you soak it in your cooking vessel, this will save you time later.) Add remaining ingredients except peppers to beans and water and simmer for 5 -6 hours. Add peppers and cook for another 1/2 hour.

There are two easy ways to handle the simmering: the easiest, and most energy-efficient, is to use a slow cooker.  Otherwise, I reccommend that you use an oven-safe casserole and braise your beans in a 250 degree oven until tender (check that they're kept at a bare simmer.)  However - I don't recommend leaving the house if you use the latter method.  This will go faster, especially if you bring the water to a boil before adding it to the beans - but it will still take at least two hours.

Taste, adding additional salt, pepper or cumin as desired. Serve over cooked plain white rice.

Sundays with Sparky - Breading and Deep Frying

Sparky's next request was for "popcorn shrimp, like the Place With The Alligator.  Now, he's had popcorn shrimp at other places, but clearly was looking for something specific, so I queried further: apparently he liked the large butterflied shrimp (Ron's uses medium to large shrimp, rather than the tiny ones usually used for kids) and the breading, which was "soft and bumpy."

Hmmm - this took a bit of reverse-engineering on my part, but a google image search of "popcorn shrimp" that looked right produced an  Emeril recipe (of all things) that I used as a starting place. (FWIW, Sparky liked the result, said they were "soft enough" but not really "bumpy enough" or "big and open enough" to be like Ron's - next time, I plan to add panko to the mix and will teach him to butterfly larger shrimp)

You may ask why, health minded as I am, I am teaching my child to deep fry.  While I don't advocate deep-frying for every day, or even every week, it can be done more healthfully that it often is at SuperSize Me outlets.  While we were generally following good frying technique, (well, except for the heat part, but that was my own oversight) this article is an excellent resource for how to do it right.

So, we set up our mise-en-place:

Yogurt (1/2 cup per lb)
Milk (1/2 cup per lb)
Garlic Powder (pinch)
Masa Harina (6 tbsp per lb)
Cornstarch (1/3 cup per lb)
Pepper (to taste)
Salt (to taste)
Trader Joe's Seafood Blend 1 lb bag (Calamari, Shrimp and Bay Scallops, excellent for this purpose, BTW)
Assorted raw veg (we had broccoli, green beans and green peppers)
Oil (about 2 inches deep in your casserole)

Cast-iron casserole (the high sides make this a lot less messy than a skillet)
Ziploc bag
Assorted large bowls or ziploc bags
Large plate
Cookie sheet covered in paper towels and a cooling rack
Spider (see below) or tongs

First, we make a buttermilk substitute for our drench (I rarely keep buttermilk, but always have plain yogurt on hand) equal parts of milk and yogurt to make 1 cup; we did one drench for the fish and one for the veg. To this we added several good grinds of pepper, a pinch of garlic powder, and a 1/2 tsp of salt per cup of drench.

We soaked our fish and veggies in the drench while we prepared our dredge: 1/3 cup of cornstarch and 6 tablespoons of Masa Harina, placed in a large ziploc bag. (This was enough to do the fish only, so we repeated twice for the large volume of veggies.)

And, working in small batches (IIRC, 4 batches for the pound of seafood) in the tradition of "I shooked and Mom cooked..."

We then removed each batch carefully with our fingers, trying to leave as much dredge in the bag as possible. The prepared food went on a plate next to the preheated cast-iron casserole, with the cookie sheet immediately on the other side.

And, deep frying being more danger than I'm willing to allow my child near, with Sparky watching, standing on a chair a couple yards out of range, into 375 degree oil it went in equally small batches (in all honesty, time constraints made me fry some of this up below temp - it came out fine, but the penalty for doing so was that the results were a bit greasy and not as browned as I'd have liked. The final batch was fried at the right temp, and it makes a big difference, although it was all good) I cooked it for two or three minutes, until it was browned, then fished the food out with a spider and set it on the rack to drain a bit over paper towels.

Sprinkle with salt, and serve immediately (these pics were taken immediately upon leaving the oil.) We made quick dipping sauces by using one part creamy salad dressing (Ranch and Caesar) to two parts plain yogurt (Lowfat Greek or strained yogurt is best for this; nice added protein and little added fat.)

 

Policy Point Wednesday Fresh vs. Preserved - what are the real issues?

Fresh foods are getting a lot of press lately, especially in the discussion of school lunch.  Of course, there are certain advantages fresh foods have when it comes to nutrition - but those advantages probably aren't the ones that immediately come to mind when you're strolling the produce aisle. 

Preserving food is an ancient art.  Most of us can easily imagine American frontiersmen filling their stomachs with foods like hardtack and pemmican, but preserving food goes back to pre-Colombian times:  meat and potatoes were dried and stored all over the Americas.  Ancient Egyptians dried and ate fruits like dates and figs, and still do, today.  In his excellent book, Cod, Mark Kurlansky discusses the profound impact preserving this fish had on the political development of both Europe and America.  Preserving food has allowed for survival during hard times throughout history.

I think of processed foods slightly differently, though one could argue that "processing" is an overly broad term.  Most people think of "processed foods" as foods that are preserved in a factory or manufacturing plant.  Many of the preserving techniques factories use today were discovered somewhat by accident over the course of the last three hundred years (fairly recently, in the scheme of things.)  The technique we know as canning was discovered on the early side of that curve by a candymaker working to keep Napoleon's army fed; he reasoned correctly that if foods could be kept airtight and then cooked, they would keep.  Frozen food was "discovered" by an arctic explorer who found that meats left in subzero temperatures tasted the same as fresh when cooked - he created a "Multiplate Quick Freeze Machine" that became the freezer we all know and love today (I have two.)  These leaps forward in food preservation technology allowed for a much improved quality of life for nearly everyone; out-of-season produce was made available to the masses instead of only the very rich who could afford food grown in greenhouses.

Flash forward to more recent times and processed foods start getting into trouble:  mass-marketing, mass-manufacturing and wildly extended shelf lives converge to produce cheap foods of minimal nutritional value that might possibly become edible antiques.  Food desert "fringe foods" are in this category - they contain preserving agents, many of which are quite ordinary: salt, fats, sugars, starches - but they contain little else.  They do, however, last nearly forever on a gas-station shelf; if a product doesn't sell, it has quite a long time to sit there waiting to be purchased.

On the flip side, the limited shelf-life of fresh meats and produce are a distinct disadvantage, even when you take economics out of the picture.  Fresh products need careful handling and their nutritional quality can degrade over a very short time.  Most produce varies in nutritional quality as it comes in and out of season.  One could also cite the danger of microbially contaminated fresh products as a disadvantage - although proper refrigeration, washing, and cooking makes this a minimal risk.  It can't be overlooked, though, that fresh foods are more likely to go to waste, and therefore their cost increases exponentially all the way down the production line to the farm.

So, are fresh foods better nutritionally?  Well, that's kind of a complicated question: a recent study by the University of Illinois showed that canned foods retain, and in some cases may even increase, the nutritional benefits of their fresh counterpart.  However, the study tends to gloss over the fact that many canned foods contain added salt or sugar - often more than a consumer would add to the corresponding fresh product.  The same holds true for frozen foods, that is, provided you are buying the vegetable, fruit, or meat on its own (canned meats, except fish, are NOT nutritionally similar to their frozen or fresh counterparts.) 

If fresh foods are more wasteful and don't provide better nutrition than preserved foods, what did I mean when I said fresh foods have certain advantages?  Well, it's much easier to build a healthy diet around them - fresh beans are fresh beans - nothing more, nothing less.   A can of boston baked beans, though...not so much like our fresh beans.  Unfortunately, many, many preserved foods are convenience foods, a conglomerate of individual foods, preservatives, tasty fats, salts, and sugars that are ready to eat right out of the can or bag.  Food in its raw state rarely has fatty, salty, or sugary surprises.  (Keep in mind sodium or fat can be added to fresh meat, sometimes disguised on the label with words like "broth," or "pre-brined," or "basted."  Additives can also be hidden by grinding meats - hamburger has more (cheaper) fat than whole-muscle beef.  It's a good idea to check labels either way, even if a food is minimally processed.)

Once we let food companies do our cooking for us, we take away the opportunity to manage our diet.  Food companies are in the business of making food that sells - food that's easier and tastier sells better - and food that's cheaper brings more profits.  Unfortunately, this translates into high sodium, high sugar, and high fat foods.  The nutrition label is your shield against fringe foods in the food desert.  Don't trust health claims on the front of a package - while they are required to follow truth in advertising laws, the information they provide might not be relevant in the context of your dietary needs.

So, to me, the answer to our dietary woes is not fresh food alone - though, if you aren't in the habit of reading labels, stick to fresh foods, since, well, a fresh raw beet isn't going to contain anything but beet.  To me, being somewhat thrifty -  the answer is to read the labels, buy foods as close as possible to their fresh counterparts - and to prepare them in my own kitchen.  My general rule of thumb: five ingredients or fewer - and double-check the salt, sugar and fat.  It's served me well throughout this project.

Sundays with Sparky - Vegetable-dyed, marbled eggs

One of the advantages to being a food-crazed household is that you're often doing two or three food-related things at the same time.  Today, Sparky was watching his new-found hero, Omar Cantu - mad scientist chef - on Discovery Channel while we waited for our homemade egg dyes to set, slightly-less-mad scientist style.

I'd seen a number of posts around the internet for making your own food-dyed eggs, and in our mac and cheese video, we'd discovered a couple of natural ways to dye our cheese sauce orange.  In the spirit of scientific discovery, I asked Sparky "so, maybe we should use things that stain - what kinds of foods stain your clothes?"  Instantly, he responded:  "Mustard!  Juice!  Beets!"  and off we went.  (I thought long and hard about making Kimchi-dyed eggs; I can't tell you how many shirts I've lost to red kimchi stains)  Just last month, Sparky almost lost a shirt to ballpark mustard, but I'd decided it was better to join it than beat it, and dyed the whole thing yellow with turmeric powder (the natural coloring agent in yellow mustard.)

We collected a number of ingredients from what we had around the kitchen, some that I'd read about and some we decided to experiment with: annatto, turmeric, onion skins, beets, purple cabbage, wasabi powder, and black raspberry puree (sadly, the wasabi powder was a bust; if you come up with a natural green dye, please let me know!) 

First, we prepped each ingredient, chopping or peeling or mixing as needed - Sparky had a lot of fun making the beets "bleed."  We measured how much water it would take to cover a couple eggs in a small container.  We poured the water into a pot, dumped in our coloring ingredient, and simmered it until the water was thoroughly colored, about 15 minutes.  Then we strained each color, poured it into containers, and placed it in the fridge to cool.

I asked Sparky how he thought we should boil the eggs, and he answered logically: "you put some water in a pot, bring it to a boil, and dump in your eggs!"  Of course, it was a trick question - although many people treat their eggs like pasta, I don't - partly to avoid cracking shells, and partly to avoid the dreaded green yolk, which occurs when an egg is overcooked.  We put cold eggs in a pot and covered them with cold water, then brought the water up to a boil.  Once it was at a rolling boil, we covered the pot, turned off the heat, and let it sit for 12 minutes - no more, no less.  After that, you pour off the boiling water and rinse the eggs with cold water until they are completely cooled.  Perfect hardboiled eggs, every time.

To marbelize the eggs, we selected a few and gently cracked them on the table all over until the shells resembled a really, really wrinkly old person ;-)  You really have to be aggressive: don't worry if there are large open gaps in the eggshell, that's what you want.  (This idea is based on Chinese Tea Eggs, which are flavored as well as colored, something to try next year) Then, after rinsing the unbroken eggs with vinegar to etch the shells, we dumped both the cracked eggs and the whole eggs into the containers and left them in the refrigerator overnight.

The colors were really surprising - the yellow egg is, of course, turmeric - but the lovely orange was onion skin, and the blue is purple cabbage!  Beets and raspberries made two shades of pinky-purple, and the annatto was a brownish-yellow.  We had varying degrees of success with the marbled eggs - the beet and cabbage did the best, but turmeric did pretty well as long as the cracks were large enough.  You could dye them two colors if you moved them from one bath to another, but an overnight soak for all the eggs and a post-soak scrubbing of the whole eggshells was crucial to the success of this venture.  Happy Spring!