We all know what we like when it comes to food, don’t we? I certainly know which flavors I enjoy on their own and in combination with others, and I DEFINITELY know what flavors I don’t enjoy (*cough* mushrooms *cough*). But I have to admit that sometimes I can get a little myopic. I want peanut butter with my chocolate or tomatoes with my basil because that’s what I’ve always done—that’s what most people (and recipes) do. But what if I could get out of my own head (or mouth?) and open the door to a whole new world of flavor combinations I might never dream of? And what if they were actually really good?
Well….there’s a book for that. I like to call it “the cookbook that’s not a cookbook.” I stumbled upon The Flavor Bible by Karen Page and Andrew Dornstein by reading another food blogger rave about it as essential to her recipe development. All I knew was that it was some kind of compendium of flavor pairings, but the idea intrigued me enough to order it. And when the book arrived, it turned out to be even more interesting—and way more thorough—than I expected.
This “cookbook that’s not a cookbook” contains no recipes, and is essentially a flavor reference book. Over the course of eight years, the authors surveyed dozens of head chefs at top restaurants throughout the country, asking them for their recommendations of flavor combinations. They then analyzed these recommendations and organized them into a sort of food thesaurus.
The book allows you to look up any food, ingredient, or cuisine in alphabetical order to see what flavors complement it. Listed in bolded all-caps with an asterisk are the top 1-2% of recommended flavor pairings; bolded capitals are flavor pairings the chefs considered highly recommended; bolded are frequently recommended; and non-bolded listings are flavors that at least one chef recommended. Included with many of the food items and cuisines are identifiers like Season, Botanical Relatives (like, who knew almonds and peaches are botanically related?), Tips & Techniques, Flavors to Avoid, and even fancy-schmancy descriptors of Function (i.e. warming or cooling), Weight (the ingredient’s relative density), and Volume (the ingredient’s flavor “loudness”).
While the flavor reference guide takes up most of the book, there are also two sections at the beginning that offer some philosophy on the nature of flavor itself–the first explaining that it is a sum-is-more-than-its-parts combination of taste, mouthfeel, aroma, and what the authors call “the X factor.” Which is NOT a reality TV show, but rather our emotional reaction to foods. The second section covers how to choose the best ideal food/ingredient/meal/cuisine for whatever moment in time you find yourself in. I’ll admit, it’s a little high-minded even for a foodie like me, with headings like “Understanding the Essence of the Moment.” So I mainly stick to the reference section.
The thing I love about this book is the same thing I love about a regular thesaurus. I think we all desire creativity and variety, whether in our language, our cooking, or any other area of life, but sometimes we get stuck and need something to boost us out of our own small thinking. The Flavor Bible is my go-to when it’s Sunday night before my week’s grocery shopping and the main ingredient I have left to throw together some kind of dinner is eggs…well, what goes with eggs? About 35 flavors, apparently, most of which I never would have thought of, and a couple of which I actually have on hand. Or if I want to make blueberry muffins for the millionth time, but want to mix it up a little (since this is, after all, the millionth time)–I haul out The Flavor Bible and realize that allspice or cloves could jazz up my recipe. Then I might get thinking about which other spices–or even herbs–could complement blueberries and end up going off the grid to make blueberry-thyme muffins.
I can definitely say that this book has expanded my horizons and led to increased creative expression when it comes to my cooking. I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to add some interest to their cooking–or anyone who sees potential for adventure even in their food.
Meal planning: love it or hate it, when you have a family that needs to eat, it’s one of those tasks presents itself week in and week out to get done. Like dishes or laundry, the perpetual motion machine of coming up with meals is not going away. From my Facebook feed, it seems to be a chore that weighs on a lot of people’s minds, especially when 5:00 pm rolls around, plans have fallen through, and the fridge is looking mighty empty of ideas. Sound familiar? If so, you’re in the right place.
In conjunction with the recipes and nutrition articles that are the standard fare here on A Love Letter to Food, I’m excited to announce that I am rolling out a new service on the blog: custommeal planning! As someone who is near completion of a degree in nutrition and licensure as a Dietetic Technician, Registered, I have significant experience in planning meals that are healthy, delicious, and simple to make. While you could of course plan meals from the variety of options in my recipe index, I am happy to say that as a part of the process of starting this new venture, I am offering a giveaway of a free week of custom meal planning services. Here’s the deal:
How to enter:
There are two ways to enter. 1.) Head on over to A Love Letter to Food’s Facebook page (be sure to like A Love Letter to Food on Facebook if you haven’t already!) and tell me in the comments one recipe you would like to try from A Love Letter to Food. OR 2.) Share A Love Letter to Food’s Facebook post about the giveaway.
What you’ll receive if you win:
Winners will receive:
A consultation with me (Sarah Garone) via email or Facebook messenger regarding preferences, allergies, number of people in your family, and health goals for one (1) week of planned dinners.
Based on this consultation, a custom spreadsheet of meal plans for seven (7) dinners, including recipes, ingredients, and shopping list.
How winners will be chosen:
Three (3) winners will be chosen at random from entries. Your first Facebook comment is considered one entry. Your share of A Love Letter to Food’s post about the giveaway is considered one entry. Contest closes Saturday, August 20th, 2016 at 11:59 P.M. MST. Winners will be announced Sunday, August 21st, 2016 on A Love Letter to Food’s Facebook page. I will also reply to comments and/or shares to notify winners.
Terms of the giveaway:
Must be 18 or older to enter. Must be a U.S. citizen. Up to two entries per person (1. Commenting about a recipe from A Love Letter to Food you would like to try, and 2. Sharing the Facebook post about the giveaway). To receive meal planning consultation, winner must be available by email, Facebook messenger, or phone sometime between Sunday, August 21st, 2016 and Sunday, August 28th, 2016. Spreadsheet will be delivered via email or Facebook messenger no later than Sunday, September 4th, 2016.
There’s something fascinating about extreme weight loss. Judging by the runaway success of The Biggest Loser and Extreme Weight Loss, not to mention our national obsession with anything and everything that promises shed pounds, I’d say a lot of get easily sucked in to the drama of The Incredible Shrinking Man or Woman. Maybe it’s curiosity about how someone could be the same person inside after such monumental external transformation. Maybe we just want to know what they look like with their clothes off. Maybe our brain can’t wrap itself around the idea of someone shrinking to half their original size. Author Shauna Reid’s weight loss memoir, The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl, chronicles her journey of doing exactly that–going from 350 pounds to 175 over seven years.
When I finished reading the introduction to The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl, I turned to my husband and said, “That’s got to be the best introduction to a book I’ve read in a long time”–and proceeded to read the whole thing out loud to him. Any book that opens with the line “I’ve got the biggest knickers in Australia” is probably going to be a winner, if you ask me. And it was. From the introduction on, Shauna Reid’s story proved humorous, heartwarming, and inspiring. I thought I’d share my thoughts on it here, in case any of my blog readers are also book readers.
I’ve read a lot on the subject of weight loss–memoirs, nutrition texts, even a book on the psychology unique to thin people. Here’s where The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl stands out. First of all, it’s hilarious, which I can’t say for the “Energy Balance” section of my Nutrition textbook (or the psychology book, for that matter). Reading it in bed at night, I was giggling to the point of tears, which I haven’t done since reading David Sedaris’ “Six to Eight Black Men” one slap-happy night way past my bedtime. Reid has a wonderful way of making light of her status as what she calls a “lardy lass,” and seems basically like the kind of friend you’d want to split a bottle of wine and a chocolate cake with…or, you know, a salad and some ice water. Still, Reid doesn’t shy away from the seriousness and perpetual struggle of prolonged weight loss. She acknowledges right from the start that her extreme overeating stemmed from an abusive family situation. Having read Andie Mitchell’s It Was Me All Along (another weight loss memoir), it was impossible not to draw comparisons between the two. Where Mitchell’s book was a heavy read that focused to the point of melancholy on family issues that drove her obesity, rather than the buoyancy and joy that came with getting healthy, Reid’s memoir gives a balance of both.
Besides the humor in the book, the other virtue of Reid’s story is that her weight loss happened the old-fashioned way: with portion control and exercise. There were no quick fixes or fancy fad diets, no plugs for any special program to bring dazzling weight loss. Just an admirable example of the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race type of loss that any dietitian will tell you is the most attainable and realistic. And ultimately, as Reid plugs away at the process, her weight loss becomes personal gain. In getting healthier, she begins to break out of the shell she had built to confine herself in a lackluster, going-nowhere life. It’s an interesting look at the underlying truth that, usually, excess weight is not just about the weight itself–it’s part of an emotional package deal that affects people’s entire lives. When she chooses to make positive change in her weight, Reid finds the rest of her life following suit.
Every year, I keep lists of all the books I read, and will usually go back and star the ones that were the best or that I would confidently recommend to friends. As soon as I wrote this one down, a star went immediately next to it. My only criticisms would be that, at over 400 pages, it does run a bit long, and it contains some foul language. All in all, though, it’s a funny, inspiring pageturner. If someone without an athletic trainer, dietitian, or personal chef can have the tools, the gumption, and the willpower go from morbid obesity to a healthy weight, what can that inspire me to do?
If you’ve never heard of a SNAP Challenge, you might logically be thinking it’s some kind of competition where folks get together to see who has the best snapping skills. (“Good thumb strength, adequate form. I give it a 9.2.”) At least, that’s what I probably would have thought a few weeks ago. As it turns out, though, a SNAP Challenge involves taking a week to live on the same amount of grocery money as someone on food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). For this summer’s community nutrition rotation of my dietetic internship, as a way to identify with the low-income population I am serving, I was assigned to participate in this challenge. This meant trying to eat only what $31 could buy for seven days. And whoa. It was tough. But as a result, I learned more than I ever expected, from the basic experience of how difficult it is to stretch such a limited food budget to philosophical meditations on food and personal well-being. So here goes a bit about my week and a run-down of my thoughts post-SNAP.
The picture at the very top of this post shows my week’s haul for $29.90, as this receipt reflects. Before the week started, I did some pre-planning to make sure I had enough ingredients for breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. (But holy crap, could I have bought any more carbs? Bread, tortillas, waffles, pasta, and brownies? After a week, you could break off a piece of me and it would crumble into flour. Looking back, I could have thought that through a little better. I also could have chosen some healthier items than chips and brownies. Caught red-handed!) There were some guidelines I established for myself, too, which an outside observer might call “all the ways Sarah cheated.” I figured that, to be realistic, unless you’re a refugee from another country, fleeing a domestic violence situation, or outright homeless, many people on SNAP benefits have some basic pantry items at their disposal. With this assumption, I allowed myself a few small extras, up to about a half cup. This included some vegetable oil, some flour, some butter, and a few spices. I also chose not to include my morning coffee in the budget, for the sake of my sanity and the safety of my children. Lastly, I decided that if someone offered me free food, I would take it, because if I’m on food stamps, you better believe I’m taking free meals.
I started on a Sunday at lunchtime and finished the following Sunday at breakfast, so as to do 21 meals. If you’re curious, here are the particulars of the meals I ended up eating:
SUNDAY
Lunch: What a way to start off my week–I got ragingly sick! In a way, I guess you could say it was good timing…because I didn’t even end up eating lunch on this day, thereby saving the food I would have eaten. Lucky me?
Dinner: Peanut butter on toast. (Still sick.)
MONDAY:
Breakfast: 2 toaster waffles with Greek yogurt and strawberries.
Lunch: Unexpectedly got a free lunch at my internship–score!
Dinner: Ate the lunch I had packed for work that day: an egg and cheese sandwich, potato chips, and grapes.
TUESDAY:
Breakfast: Bless me, SNAP Challenge, for I have sinned–I cheated already. (Minus 5,000 points!!) I foolishly made one of my favorite breakfasts for my family–peach almond baked oatmeal–and failed to resist the temptation. I did calculate, however, that the portion I ate cost 87 cents, so you can add that to my grocery bill of $29.90 and I still squeak in under the $31 mark.
Lunch: Peanut butter and jelly sandwich, chips, grapes.
Dinner: Chili and some cheese curds I got for free at a Dairy Council presentation that evening.
WEDNESDAY:
Breakfast: 2 waffles, Greek yogurt, strawberries.
Lunch: Leftover chili topped with cheese, grapes, brownie.
Dinner: Spaghetti with homemade tomato sauce using tomatoes and basil from our garden.
Thank goodness for our garden!
THURSDAY:
Breakfast: Toast with grape jelly.
Lunch: 2 open-faced egg sandwiches with cheese, strawberries, banana.
Dinner: I was literally about to dig in to my third bowl of chili in three days when my son piped up next to me, “I love chili! Can I trade with you?” Call it cheating if you will, but I said yes and ate his chicken, roasted potatoes, and carrots while he ate my chili.
FRIDAY:
Breakfast: Waffles with yogurt.
Lunch: Peanut butter and jelly sandwich, fruit, brownie.
Snack: Smoothie of Greek yogurt, banana, and strawberries.
Breakfast: Toast with cinnamon sugar (one of the extras I allowed myself–my guess is I used 25 cents’ worth).
Mid-morning: Cheated and had a tall Starbucks coffee.
Lunch: Leftover zucchini fritters and potatoes.
Dinner: A friend bought me dinner this evening–yep, I’ll take it!
SUNDAY:
Breakfast: Toast with grape jelly, eggs with cheese.
Here’s what was left at the end of the experiment. I didn’t use the tortillas at all (fed them to my kids instead) or the black beans and had portions of all these other items left. I’d guess I used all but about $6-7 worth of my original $31:
WHAT I LEARNED………..
1. PREPAREDNESS
As I reflect on the past week, I can’t help but think of an analogy from childbirth. When I had my first baby, I remember approaching labor and delivery thinking, “I’d like to do it naturally! Maybe I’ll just give it a try and see what happens!” HA. HA. Like every other woman who has ever said that, I was pretty much a GET ME THAT EPIDURAL NOOOOOOOWWWWW hot mess immediately after contractions started. By my third child, however, I realized that doing natural childbirth successfully requires lots of preparation. For months I meditated, made an ambient playlist, and established a headspace that allowed me to go drug-free for my daughter’s birth. A SNAP Challenge is a lot like that. If you go into it blindly, like, “Hey, I’ll just get creative! Maybe this’ll be fun!” it’s not gonna happen. To actually eat on $31 for a week takes extreme preparedness and forethought (if you don’t want to be eating THIS twice a day):
As an individual on SNAP, you also have to plan for things like fresh berries going bad faster than you can eat them, or how you’re going to use leftover odds and ends to make the most of your supply. Which leads me to…
2. STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
Having done this experiment on my own, I can guarantee you it would have been easier if I could have included my family in my meal planning. Grocery store items–well, cheap grocery store items–are not ideally suited for one-person meals for one week. There’s no way I was going to get through an entire container of grape jelly in a week, for example, but if I wanted it for PBJs, I had to buy the whole thing. Also, as someone who got married right out of college, I am at a loss as for how to cook for just myself. So that was tricky.
3. MONOTONY
Life on food stamps is undoubtedly monotonous. Chili several times in a week? Check. Peanut butter and jelly comin’ atcha again? Check. Variety costs money.
4. FOOD AS UTILITY
When it’s Saturday lunch of a food stamp week that started on Sunday, that meal is not about what you want to eat, it’s about what you have to eat. This experiment really put me in touch with the visceral sense of food as fuel, rather than food as pleasure. Only in the last century and a half or so have we become affluent enough and time-surplus-ed enough to cultivate our modern perception of food as a fun hobby. Cookbooks only began to gain popularity in the 1800s. Cause you couldn’t be a foodie caveman, you know? And you certainly couldn’t be a food blogger cavewoman. Rough lesson for a foodie like me, but an intriguing concept about the privilege we enjoy in our culture.
5. FOOD AS PERSONAL WELL-BEING
Food is an opportunity for choice–for most of us, at least three times a day. And choice gives us a feeling of freedom, and a feeling of freedom contributes to our sense of personal well-being. During my SNAP Challenge, I was shocked at how sorry for myself I felt looking at all the food my family got to eat without me, knowing it was off limits. I also came to realize that not permitting myself to eat out at all really affected my sense of personal comfort. Apparently, I get a lot out of my bi-weekly coffee shop runs. I found myself thinking things like, If I could only have one little coffee from Starbucks, I’d feel so much better. And once I cheated and did have a Starbucks coffee, that $2 indulgence meant so much to me.
All in all, I have to say I’m really glad my SNAP Challenge week is over. It was no walk in the park. I freely admit my upper middle class weenie-ness when it comes to eating on such a tight budget, and I absolutely have new-found respect for people who make it work. I would love to learn more about how to do so more healthily and help others do the same.
Easter has come and gone, and for us Catholics, Lent is over–bring on the alcohol! the sweets! the whatever you gave up that you have been longing for for six weeks! And bring on the HAM! I hope that however you observed Easter (if you observe Easter), it was a lovely celebration…
…and that it included a spectacularly large spiral-sliced ham like mine did. I was a little late to the ham-buying game this year, as I was stranded in Denver in the midst of a blizzard (more on that in a future post on the 2016 Nutrition and Health Conference) and didn’t get home until Good Friday. So when I went to the store to purchase a smallish ham for the six people who would be eating Easter dinner at our house, there were in fact no smallish hams to be found. All that was left were mountainous hunks of ham, like, half-a-pig-sized, fill-your-entire-cart-sized hams. I ended up hauling home the smallest ham I could find, which was the size of a human toddler (okay, it was just shy of ten pounds). Still, calculate out ten pounds of ham for six people and you get waaaay more than anyone should be eating at one sitting. So we are now sitting on several good-sized Ziploc bags of frozen ham. I am definitely not complaining. In my experience, bags of pre-cooked meat in the freezer are a total boon to meal planning, especially on the quick. There are so many meals that beg for pre-cooked meat to eliminate one step in the dinner prep process. Over the years of hosting holiday meals and having leftovers, I’ve tried to get creative and have found there are so many ways to incorporate cooked ham into lunches, dinners, breakfasts, and appetizers.
So if you, too, are harboring leftover ham, allow me to offer you ten delicious options for using it up!
1. Hawaiian Pizza
You know the drill: crust, marinara, mozzarella, pineapple, and ham. Easy peasy!
2. Ham Mac & Cheese
Mix 1 cup ham into your favorite mac and cheese recipe for a protein boost.
What a cool resource! I’d love just browsing through and letting myself be inspired.
Yes, exactly!