Wendy’s recipe file: Zak’s birthday truffle stuffed chicken

My husband made me this delicious, yet simple dish for my birthday.  He made it using ingredients at hand; I was glad I’d made an impulse purchase of some delicious truffle cheese at Whole Foods the day before!  Ingredient amounts are approximate.

ZAK’S BIRTHDAY TRUFFLE STUFFED CHICKEN

1/4 lb mushrooms, sliced

4 oz truffle cheese

1 bunch lacinato kale, washed and chopped

1/2 cup green olives, sliced

1 medium onion, diced

2 T olive oil

2 large organic chicken breasts, split open

1)  Add the olive oil to a large saucepan.  Saute the onions under medium-low heat until they are caramelized (fragrant and lightly browned).  Add in the mushrooms and shredded kale and cook for another 2-3 minutes; stir in olives.  Remove from heat and combine with cheese.  Add salt and pepper to aste.

2) Stuff filling into the center of the chicken breast halves; close.  You do not need a complete seal, but neither do you want all the insides falling out.

3)  Place in a baking pan that has been lightly greased with olive oil.  Lightly salt and pepper the chicken.  Cook at 375 until chicken is done, approximately 1 hour.

 

it takes a village to make an intestine

In 2003 I had surgery to remove a benign growth on my liver, which left me with vague gastrointestinal distresses I won’t detail.  No help was forthcoming from Western medicine.  I couldn’t figure out anything I was allergic too.  So I started seeing a naturopath, Bernie, who, after “detoxifying” me with various herbs and homeopathic preparations, put me on a regimen of prebiotics and probiotics, which I take to this day.  The complaints cleared up.  So did the pimples on my skin, and my clogged sinuses.  Bernie’s philosophy is that the body is always being bombarded by potential toxins or irritants; his intent was not to zero in on a particular toxin and destroy it, but to build up the body so that it was less vulnerable to insult.

Mainstream medicine is finally catching up with this theory.  Dr. Bana Jabri, recently stated in Nature, a “dysregulated intestinal environment may be the underlying cause for food allergies”.  In her reserach, she’d located an immune factor in patients that was a trigger for celiac disease and other food allergies.  In other words, the allergic reaction was not provoked by the allergen itself (say, gluten) but by a change in the body’s REACTION to the allergen.  When retinoic acid, or Vitamin A, was added to the mix the inflammatory reaction was even stronger.  This explains a link between acne medications based on retinoic acid and the occurrence of celiac disease.  But it also underlines the complex, multifactored nature of the intestinal environment.

Metagenomics–the study of genetic material recovered directly from environmental samples–is leading to a long overdue revolution in how mainstream medicine views the gut.  In fact, humans are a minority in their own bodies.  For every human cell, there are at least 10 times as many bacterial cells living inside and outside of the body.  The collective genomes of these microbial worlds are known as the human microbiome.  “Everything we eat, the things we are exposed to, our lifestyles–all that changes our microbiome,” says Dr. Eugene Chang of the University of Chicago.  Researchers in China have identified human microbiome bacteria linked with obesity and fed them to mice.  Lo and behold, those mice–eating exactly the same calories and exercising the same amount as control mice–became obese!  So clearly, our microbiome controls not only allergies, but how we metabolize our food. There are indications of microbial links to diabetes, high blood pressure, even mood and mental clarity.

Given the reductionist bias of mainstream science (and perhaps pharmaceutical companies profit motives) the search is now underway to find THE microbes that directly influence these various ailments.  And clearly, as the Chinese research indicates, we have found some.  But clearly we are an extremely long way from finding them all, among the millions of bacteria that share our biome.  And we don’t know the outrageously complex ways they must interact.  We probably never will, any more than we will ever completely understand the intricacies of the trillions of neural connections in the human brain. Conclusive experimental proof of bacterial interactions may be a long time coming, and will need to be interpreted in a holistic context.  We are, at this time, not even sure how to frame that context.  Some might criticize Bernie’s approach:  how does he know which pre and probiotic supplements are the right ones?  The answer is, he doesn’t.  All he is doing is making an intelligent guess, given my medical history, ancestry, and diet.  But that guess is based on a couple thousand years of Chinese medicine, and my anecdotal report is that it works for me.

wendy’s recipe file: mighty easy beef bourgignon

I read an article the other day on all the wonderful products Food Inc. is coming up with for “busy twenty and thirtysomethings”, who, we are told, have gourmet tastes but no cooking skills with which to satisfy them. And of course, no time.  Cooking to them means “assembly”.  One of these products included a marinade and a dressing–that’s all folks, just the chemicals,  you supply the meat and the salad greens.  Another was a “beef bourgignon”  package–you supply the beef, and supposedly the product will be ready to eat within 35 minutes.  This is in contrast to made from scratch beef bourgignon, which, the corporate experts tell us, requires “at least 12 hours of cooking prep–reductions, stocks”.

Well, you could do that.  Or you could try my mighty easy beef bourgignon.  It goes like this:

1 lb stew beef

1 medium onion, chopped

1 cup mushrooms, sliced

2 T olive oil

1 cup beef broth (I like Imagine brand)

2 cups red wine

1 tsp dried  thyme

1 T flour

salt and pepper to taste

1)  Put the olive oil in a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven.  Warm for a minute over medium heat.  Add meat, sprinkling with flour and salt and pepper to taste.  Brown meat on all sides. Remove from pan and put in a bowl.

2)  In the same pan, saute the mushrooms and onions until soft and fragrant.  Remove and put in another bowl.

3)  Add the beef broth to the pan and stir, scraping up browned bits from the bottom of the pan.  Add the meat back, along with the red wine and thyme.  Turn the heat down to medium low and cover.

NOW POUR YOURSELF ANOTHER GLASS OF THE RED WINE AND SIT AND RELAX.  Or, if you prefer, make a salad to serve on the side.  This doesn’t require a “marinade and dressing” set.  Simply combine 2 parts decent quality olive oil with 1 part balsamic vinegar in a glass jar.  Add a teaspoon of Dijon mustard and a dash of salt. Pour a bag of prewashed greens into a salad bowl.  Now sit down again and finish your wine.

In my experience it takes a little longer than 35 minutes for beef stew meat to be tender, but if you cut it into small pieces, maybe you can hit that target.  A loaf of artisan bread (maybe an olive bread) would be a good accompaniment to the stew and salad.

4)  About 15 minutes before serving, add back the mushrooms and onion.  Add more beef broth if needed, and adjust the seasoning.  Toss the salad. (you won’t need all the dressing, save it for other salads later in the week).  Put out the bread.  Set the table.

And there you are. A yummy smelling kitchen.  A relaxing pre-dinner glass of wine.  A tasty, nutritious meal.  No corporate help needed.  No stocks or reductions either.

Here’s what those corporations don’t want you to know:  cooking–of the simple, wholesome, every day variety–just isn’t that hard.

first line against the black helicopters

I’ve been wondering why so many Americans feel the need to own military-grade weaponry to shoot a deer or protect themselves against an intruder.  The answer, apparently, is that they’ve got bigger things on their mind.  Penetrate below the surface, and they reveal that the primary reason they own these weapons is to protect themselves against the government.  Not against invasion by outside forces or (as referenced in the Second Amendment) colonial control, but against our government.  Our democratically-elected government.  So in the name of protecting freedom, the Second Amendment is currently being used to protect the right of people to engage in armed rebellion.  (isn’t that treason??  isn’t that internal terrorism?  I suppose it’s all a matter of definition.)

In this paranoid parallel universe, it’s only a matter of time before the liberal minions come after the angry white men to confiscate their guns and other precious possessions.  But in today’s newspaper this is what I see:  1) a terrorized five year old released after being held hostage by a neighborhood nut with a gun who stormed his school bus killing the driver 2) a best-selling author killed–at a target range–by a man who’d just been released from a mental hospital the past week and was raving about “pigs trying to steal his soul” and 3) an off-duty police officer with a history of mental instability and drug and alcohol abuse threatening to kill his wife and child until they were rescued in a shoot-out with the police.

Friday Oregon gun owners are planning to march on Salem to protect the right of Oregonians to carry military-style weapons in plain sight!!!!  They want people to get used to the idea!!!  I better not accidentally spill my coffee on one of these trigger-happy vigilantes, or butt in front of them in the supermarket line. Or, God forbid, dig in my purse for my reading glasses and have them think I’m reaching for a concealed weapon.  It might be safer to live in Afghanistan.

I’d like to think there’s room for compromise with these nuts.  But when I see people who regard the murder of twenty innocent first graders and six teachers as collateral damage in their war with the black helicopters, I find it difficult to believe we live in the same country, let alone have any hope of coexisting in it. 

wendy’s recipe file: artichokey artichoke dip

What is there to like about the Super Bowl?  Well, for one, it celebrates the end of the football season, and the not too distant coming of spring.  For another, it’s an excuse to sit around with friends and eat fattening snacks. This years snack theme was San Fransisco, in honor of the Forty-Niners.  One of my favorite Californian foods is artichokes, which I associate with visits to my brother in San Carlos.  This artichoke dip, developed by my husband Zak,  is almost healthy, though, with less fat than most, and a definite artichoke taste.  It tastes great served with Trader Joe’s lentil chips.

ARTICHOKEY ARTICHOKE DIP

approximately 20 oz good quality marinated artichoke hearts, drained

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/4 cup sour cream

1/4 cup full fat yogurt

juice of 1 lemon

salt and pepper to taste

1)  Combine all ingredients in the food processor and blend until smooth.  Pour into a casserole dish and bake at 350 approximately 20 minutes, or until lightly browned.

brave new cyberworld

I read an article in the Oregonian today about how computers are sucking up “midskill” jobs like secretaries, travel agents, and paralegals, and how driverless cars will soon take jobs away from everyone from garbage haulers to truckers to taxi drivers.  Extrapolating into the brave new cyberworld, they predict “75% unemployment”.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume this computerization of the world proceeds expeditiously.  I suspect it has a long way to go, in that Amazon’s “intelligent” algorithms tell me that because I ordered a knitting book for myself,  Goan trance music for another aspect of myself, and a murder mystery for my nephew, I might want to buy a murder mystery about a knitting needle wielding psychopath who haunts dance clubs.  But I digress.  Let’s assume.

Here’s a short list of occupations that can’t be replaced by computers:

1) raising children

2) caring for other vulnerable people in our community:  the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill

3) doctors and nurses

4) teachers (yeah, I know you can take online courses, and they might do a better job than your eighth grade math teacher, but generally speaking)

5) writers, artists, musicians, actors

6) cooking

7) farming

8) electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and other skilled trades

9)  scientific researchers

10) people who write the algorithms (if computers take over this task themselves, boy are we in science fiction trouble)

I’m sure I could come up with a longer list if I thought about it, but let’s assume for now we are looking forward to a future of a society of nurturers, artists, and computer programmers, where robots dispose of our garbage, chauffeur us around, handle mundane administrative tasks, and channel our aggression by conducting proxy robot wars.  It sounds pretty pleasant, but I am old enough to remember a time when inventions such as clothes dryers and electric can openers were supposed to usher in a new age of leisure.  “Whatever would be do with our spare time?”, wondered the pundits of the fifties and sixties. Little did they know how much of it we would spend playing Farmville, tracking our children via Google maps, or preserving pictures of our morning coffee for posterity.  I am sure even if this brave new cyberworld comes to pass, we will find new ways to waste our time and create stress.

 

don’t send no more candles whatever you do

Listening to the coverage of the tragedy in Connecticut, I am reminded of these lyrics off of Neil Young’s Prairie Wind album, written after 9/11:  “don’t send no more candles, no matter what you do.”

We don’t need candles.  We don’t need candlelight vigils.  We don’t need grief counselors and we don’t need the serenity to accept what we cannot change, because we can change this and we must change this if our civilization is to survive.

I tell what else we don’t need, and that is tighter security.  The Connecticut elementary school was tightly secured, as is my son’s school.  Any nut can shoot his way through a password protected glass door with a semiautomatic weapon.  Nor do we need more lockdown drills, as if a mass shooting was an unavoidable natural disaster like an earthquake.  We don’t need to teach our children to live in fear.

What we do need is severely restricted access to guns.  Yeah, I know “if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns”.  But none of these mass shooters have been outlaws. These are not robberies, or gang shootings, or drug deals gone wrong, but random acts of violence.  They are almost universally committed by young men, sometimes visibly troubled, sometimes not, without criminal records.  Any gun more powerful than a simple handgun or hunting rifle should be illegal.  Period.  Guns should be sold only in strictly controlled retail outlets, like the ones where we buy alcohol (vodka has never been used in a mass shooting, as far as I know).  Sales of guns, ammunition, or body armor on the internet, gun shows, or secondhand should be prohibited.  All prospective gun owners should undergo extensive background checks,  a psychological evaluation, and training in the use of the weapon.  They should be licensed and fingerprinted.  Only one gun should be allowed per adult person in the household.  These regulations will not totally prevent gun violence, but they will make it a hell of a lot less likely.

Secondly, we need to radically decrease the prevalence of realistic single shooter video games, such as “Call of Duty”.  These games feed the power fantasies of the testosterone-fueled loners who seem to commit these shootings.  They create the illusion that the people you shoot don’t bleed real blood, that they don’t have lives to live and families and friends that cherish them, that you can always turn off the game and start again.  We can’t outlaw these games without violating freedom of speech, but we can vote with our pocketbooks and not purchase them for our children.

Thirdly, and this is the hardest part, for which there is no easy answer: we need to get at the heart of what is wrong with these young men, and I don’t think that is usually a psychiatric diagnosis.  For not only are these killers not outlaws, they are rarely what we would commonly term psychotic.  They do not hear voices telling them to terrorize Christmas shoppers or shoot little children at point-blank range.  Rather, there seems a vacancy at their heart.  There are too many people living at the fringes of our society, and by that I mean a psychological fringe, not  a socioeconomic one, for again, many of these killers come from comfortably-off families, with little obvious pathology.  I wonder how many of them would develop these vacancies if they were totally integrated into a community, if they had roles and responsiblities, expectation, and accountability.  How many of them would reach this level of disturbance if their parents confronted them, if they intervened and did not let them sit in the basement playing video games and ordering ammunition off the internet?  If their neighbors could offer up more than the usual “He seemed quiet.  I saw him mow the lawn once.  I didn’t know his name.”

These shooters seem to kill themselves before society can render judgement upon them.  I wonder why, if they want to kill themselves so badly, why they feel the need to take other innocent lives along with them.  They are like suicide bombers, only lacking even that level of idealism, however warped.  They are cowards and narcissists.  They are evil.  We can stop their reign of terror and we must.

 

my love affair with magazines

We are moving after twenty years.  Fortunately it’s not much of a downsize, because I am not much of a downsizer. It’s not like I am a huge consumer and accumulator, but I don’t like to give away the things I have.  They carry stories with them, whether it be the lamp my husband I bought in an antique store in Chicago, or the glass bowl we got for our wedding (36 years ago) from my best friend’s mother, or the dress I wore to my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah 19 years ago, whether the elastic is shot or not.  Old clothes can be reworked into quilts.  Favorite books deserve to be reread and shared.  My granddaughter is now playing with wooden toys I bought 25 years ago.  Most things I have given away–save the occasional awful gift or clothing mistake–I now regret.

But I am trying to get ahold my magazine obsession.  I love magazines.  I subscribe to 14 of them, if I am counting correctly, and four college magazines come to our house whether I subscribe to them or not.  Three of them:  the New Yorker, the Economist, and Harpers–are incredibly dense.  While I read every day, the magazines inevitably accumulate in piles.  All over the house.  There’s a pile in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in my office, in my son’s room where I read after everyone else in the house is in bed.  That doesn’t look very good for showing a house, and I can’t see packing up and moving piles of magazines, where they will soon be joined by new installments.

So I’ve been trying to read through those piles, and giving myself license to do so and feel virtuous.  (I HAVE to read).  While my granddaughter plays with those wooden toys, I leaf through the food and craft magazines, plus the college stuff.  At night I read the New Yorkers and Harpers.  It’s quite the archaeological dig.  The other day I started reading an article in the Economist.   about “the election”, which referenced Lehman Brothers bankruptcy as new news. Then I noticed it referred to John McCain as the Republican candidate.  Yep, the pile went all the way back to 2008.

I’ve been learning all sorts of interesting things.  Yesterday I learned about an island named Sark, off the British coast, where the residents don’t drive cars or pay income taxes and supported themselves through a financial scam called the “Sark Lark”.  I read a heartbreaking story about a traumatized Marine vet who sought out the remaining members of an Iraqi civilian family he’d mistakenly shot, and a “so what else is new” article about a former lobbyist and Biden staff operative who now, disillusioned, is writing a book titled “why Wall Street always wins in the end”.  I read about a U of Oregon grad who is a musical prodigy and also the discoverer of hidden water channels on Mars.  I’ve read countless recipes for pork shoulder, farro, and pomengranate seed salads, and clipped the best of them.  It’s a slow process, but gradually the piles are shrinking.  My goal is to get all the way up to December 2012, and from there on in read all 16 magazines time-appropriately and never again read about the 2008 election after the 2012 one, or how to find the perfect summer fruit at Christmas time.  We shall see.

 

 

wendy’s recipe file: portuguese chicken

I’ve been in the process of reining in my out-of-control magazine collection (more on this to follow in my next post), which includes six food magazines per month.  I can’t just throw these away; I must clip all appealing recipes and file them in, yes, Wendy’s Recipe File.  This process is made easier by all the recipes that I’ve bookmarked to try each month, some of which I actually have and liked, some which I have and disliked, some I really want to try but haven’t gotten around to, and some I can’t figure out why I bookmarked in the first place.

This recipe, from the February 2011 Bon Appetit, was not only bookmarked, but marked “yummy”!

PORTUGUESE CHICKEN

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 T Hungarian sweet or hot paprika

1 3-4 pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces

2 T extra virgin olive oil

1 14 oz can diced tomatoes in juice (I like Muir Glen)

4 oz thinly sliced prosciutto, chopped

1 medium onion, diced

2 large roasted red peppers (you can use the jarred kind but if you cut them in half, remove the seeds, and roast them with a little olive oil in the oven at 450 until they’re starting to blacken, then let steam in a closed paper bag for ten minutes, then peel off the skin and cut them into strips they will taste so much better)

6 large garlic cloves, minced

4 large fresh Italian parsley sprigs

4 bay leaves

one-half cup dry white wine

one-half cup tawny Port

1 T Dijon mustard

1 T tomato paste

11/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1)  Preheat oven to 350.  Whisk 1 cup flour, paprika, salt and pepper in a large bowl.  Add chicken pieces to seasoned flour, 1 at a time, and turn to coat.  Heat oil in a heavy large skillet over medium-high heat.  Add chicken, skin side down, and saute until brown, about 5 minutes each side.  Transfer chicken to plate; reserve skillet.

2)  Arrange chicken in a single layer in a large ovenproof pan.  Top with tomatoes, prosciutto, onions, peppers, garlic, parsley, and bay leaves.

3)  Add wine and Port to reserved skillet.  Bring to boil, and deglaze the pan by scraping up browned bits.  Remove from heat.  Whisk in mustard and tomato paste.  Put back on heat and bring to a boil again.  Pour over the chicken.

4)  PUt chicken in the oven and braise until very tender, about 11/2 hours.  Using tongs, transfer chicken and toppings to platter.  Pour sauce into a separate server, removing parsley and bay leaves and adding more salt and pepper if desired.

 

what you want to be you are now becoming

David Brooks, my favorite conservative, has done it again.  In a post-election column he noted America’s changing mores re such issues as gay marriage, marijuana use, and elective childlessness.  I was expecting him to fall back on the standard “family values” line, but instead he acknowledged these changes as a reality, whether they would be his personal choices or not.  He said that instead of knocking these choices in particular, we should consider that in adult life choices of some kind do need to be made.  “You can’t go through your adult life with all your options open”.

That struck me as a very perceptive remark.  I see a world in which adolescence seems to be commonly extending into one’s thirties, and indeed I know some baby boomers in their sixties who don’t seem to have matured much beyond that point.  It’s great to hang on to the positive aspects of youth–enthusiasm, openness, optimism, idealism, energy, intensity–but after a time it’s good to let the more negative aspects–self-absorption, petulance, lack of focus, lack of responsibility and accountability or sense of consequence for one’s actions–go.  The Montessori educational system gives adolescents until the age of 24 to define their “life’s purpose”. After that, it’s time to get focused.

So maybe its best not to fret over the sex of the person you marry but instead realize that marriage is a committment and a partnership and not something to throw away at the first sign trouble.  Maybe its best not to fret over who decides to have children and who does not and remember that if you do decide to have children it WILL change your life.  Those children will be the center of your life and your primary responsibility for a very long time…forever really.  They will take you places you cannot anticipate and cannot control; they may shatter your comfort zone; they will expand your boundaries beyond your own little ego like nothing else.  (OK, I admit my bias, for me to say go through life without marriage and family is like saying let’s go through life without breathing.  But I’m not trying to legislate that choice…)  Maybe its best not to fret over what you call work (paid or unpaid) as long as whatever you do you give it your full heart and full attention while you are doing it.

Reinvention is fine, with caveats.  It’s wonderful to develop new abilities, enjoy new experiences, go down new directions no matter how old you are.  But that’s different that shedding old selves and taking on new ones like a chameleon.  That indicates you had no center to start with.

I’ve known too many people who wait interminably for the right time to commit to anything:  marriage, children, careers, whatever.  They think they have all the time in the world–those options always open–and don’t notice that the options are closing until its too late.   Once they hit forty or so, they get insular and bitter, and not nearly as fun as they used to be.  And I could very well be wrong, but when I look at lives like that they strike me as an amalgam of experiences, without any particular coherence or depth.  Seems to me that perpetual adolescents are like eighty-year-olds with face lifts:  curiously blank, and inevitably you see the giveaway wrinkles starting at the neck.