by Lisa Rosen on March 11, 2010
This, folks, is a very handy little item known as an immersion blender.
Now, if you already own an immersion blender, perhaps this one or this sleek one, you’re probably looking at that photo wondering what the heck that is. Well, it’s the world’s oldest immersion blender.
This was a wedding present, in early 1990 (yes, I know it’s old; I know they’ve improved dramatically. But this one works just fine, thankyouverymuch).
It’s basically a blender-type blade, but instead of being fixed in the bottom of a jar, it’s attached to the end of a wand, so I can put it in the food, instead of the other way around. I use it for pureeing things–soups, vegetables, fruits–but mostly soups.
If you don’t already have an immersion blender, you might ought to get one. I know it sounds like it has limited use, but if you ever make a pot of soup that needs to be blended (even just partially), this makes the task immeasurably easier. Have you ever tried to pour a pot of hot soup into a blender? Then you know what I mean.
A couple of months ago, Delaney and her friend Sam were cooking dinner for the four of us parents. They were making mango soup, which requires that trip to the blender. They did fine transporting the soup across the kitchen. They poured it in–no problem. They put the lid on the blender, and pressed the button.
Disaster.
The soup exploded out of the blender, all over them, all over the kitchen. Hot, sticky, ORANGE soup. Luckily neither of them were badly burned, but they learned an important lesson: don’t seal a blender full of hot liquid (don’t ask me to explain the physics; just . . . trust me).
The immersion blender would’ve enabled them to avoid the whole hot mess (they were in the other family’s kitchen, so I wasn’t there to warn them). With this handy gadget, you just hold the blade below the surface of the food, and press the button. Move it around in the pot, to get all the contents to move through the blade.
Voila–a beautiful puree. No fuss, no muss.
by Lisa Rosen on March 10, 2010
In celebration of the glorious weather that has finally shown up here in the last few days, I cranked up the grill last night for the first time in months. This was the result: a recipe from one of my most beautiful cookbooks: Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. The book is about the foods of Southeast Asia–specifically, the areas of Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos that are traversed by the Mekong River. It’s almost a coffee table book, almost a travelogue, but mostly a spectacularly photographed cookbook. I have all of their books, but this is one of my favorites (and the one I cook from most often, I think).
My version, though, is a far cry from authentic; it’s not even all that close to the recipe as Alford and Duguid interpret it. It’s the suburban-American-housewife-on-a-weeknight version. It’s still absolutely delicious, though.
The most significant change I make is the rice: the Thai version of this street food would apparently involve sticky rice, a Southeast Asian variety of rice that I lovelovelove, but that doesn’t lend itself to spur-of-the-moment dinners. Sticky rice is a short-grain rice (for comparison, Uncle Ben’s is a long grain, while what you probably know as sushi rice is a medium grain) that requires a 24-hour soak, followed by steaming in a bamboo rice steamer. Yes, I have such a steamer, and yes, it’s worth the effort for a special occasion, but on a Tuesday evening when Delaney has Girls on the Run and Toby has the 10th grade writing exam tomorrow? Not so much.
So instead I use a medium-grain Japanese rice (a variety that would ordinarily be used in sushi), and cook it in my rice cooker. It makes, by my lights, the perfect bowl of rice.
Also, the original recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of cilantro roots. Now, if you garden much, you know that cilantro actually grows pretty well here in NC at this time of year. So if you are on the ball enough to have a nice patch of cilantro, and you’re willing to sacrifice enough plants to get 3 tablespoons of roots, by all means–be authentic. I do not have such a patch, and I have never been able to find the roots for sale in our local Asian market. So I just use 3 tablespoons of cilantro instead, leaves and stems.
So here’s what you do.
Thai-ish Grilled Chicken
Serves 4, with rice
Rice for 4 people
Marinade:
3 T. cilantro
6 large cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
2 t. whole black peppercorns
a pinch of salt
1 large boneless, skinless chicken breast (about 1 pound), cut into about 8 chunks
1/2 cup rice vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
2 garlic cloves, pressed
1/4 t. salt
1 1/2 t. crushed red pepper (this amount makes a SPICY sauce–adjust according to your preference, but it’s supposed to be quite lip-tingling)
First, make the marinade: put all the ingredients in a mini food processor or blender (I use my spice grinder) and process to a smooth paste. Alternatively, you can use a mortar and pestle, but be prepared for it to take a good ten minutes.
Spread the marinade on the chicken chunks; you’ll have to use your fingers. Refrigerate for a couple of hours.
Next, start your rice (assuming you have a rice machine that will hold it until serving time; otherwise, start it in time to be hot for dinner).
While the rice is cooking and the chicken is marinating, make the sauce: pour the vinegar in a small saucepan; heat to boiling. Add the sugar and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. While the vinegar/sugar mixture is simmering, use a mortar and pestle or a small bowl and the back of a spoon to work the garlic (which you’ve already pressed or minced) and salt to a smooth paste; it will seem almost like a liquid. Stir in the crushed red pepper. When the vinegar mixture finishes simmering, add the garlic paste and stir. Leave to cool.
Heat up your grill to a high enough heat for cooking chicken. When it’s hot, put the marinade-coated chicken chunks on the heat, close the lid, and leave them alone until they’re done enough to not stick. Then turn them over, and again leave them until they stop sticking. Continue to cook until a piece of chicken looks done when you cut into it with a knife.
Serve a couple of chunks of chicken on a bed of rice with a good drizzle of sauce.
Two notes: if you examine that photo closely, you may see some tiny blue dots. They are garlic. Garlic sometimes turns blue when you put it in vinegar–don’t let it freak you out.
Also, Toby took that picture. Sorry about that.
by Lisa Rosen on March 9, 2010
Suddenly, miraculously, Spring woke up over the weekend, and we were treated to the most glorious weather we’ve had in months–sunshine, shirt-sleeve temps, and bird song. I resolved to spend as much of it outdoors as possible.
So we raked leaves. A lot of leaves. For hours.
By bedtime, we were all satisfactorily exhausted, and the backyard had shed its winter blanket. Now I can actually see my feet when I walk around out there, which is good–we only disturbed one snake on Saturday, but even one unseen and stepped-on is more than I care to experience.
The real beauty of the day, though, was the gratification of getting plenty of exercise without making any special effort. I didn’t have to carve out an hour to fit in a workout; I didn’t have to talk myself into getting started, or sticking with it to the end. The physical exertion was just a by-product of the work that I really wanted to get done.
Sometimes the word exercise takes on a life of its own–it looms over us, the most unpleasant, guilt-inducing part of the day, the thing we have to get through in order to enjoy the rest of the day. We bargain with ourselves, twist our schedules inside out, and sacrifice all manner of other priorities, just so we can spend the requisite number of minutes running to nowhere or lifting a pointless item up and down and up and down.
A study came out a couple of months ago that shows that sitting all day shortens life expectancy, even in people who “exercise” regularly; I wrote about it here. It bears repeating, I think: our bodies weren’t meant to sit for a living. We evolved to spend our days in vigorous, and essential, activity.
That intersection, between vigorous and essential, is useful to consider. I find that I have trouble convincing myself to exercise consistently if my only goal is an hour of sweating. If the activity has another purpose–any other purpose–I’m more likely to jump in enthusiastically. Functional exercise (exercise that happens more-or-less unintentionally as I go about my other chores for the day) is vastly more satisfying, and “easier” than the isolated, pointless hour-on-the-elliptical variety.
Raking leaves, shoveling snow, digging up a garden bed, riding a bicycle to the grocery store, walking to a doctor’s appointment–all these things get my heart rate up and work my muscles. Effortless exercise. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
by Lisa Rosen on March 8, 2010
I’ve noticed something recently: snacking is an art. Everyone I know seems to have a different way of doing it.
Lee’s snacking has two components. 1–He only snacks when he’s bored. He’s much better at resisting the siren call of the kitchen if he’s occupied. 2–He’s a grazer (this particular characteristic drives me up the wall). He walks through the kitchen periodically, grabbing a handful of whatever is available. Sometimes that’s a delicious baked good, but as often as not, it’s dry Cheerios. He then leaves a trail of whatever he grabbed all through the house.
My kids are activity-based snackers: some activities (television and movies being the primary one) require a snack. Toby will just grab a container of something and take it with him to the vegetating location; Delaney will prepare herself a lavish spread, including plate, napkin, silverware, and drink, and then sit in front of the television to eat it.
I’m more of a time-of-day snacker. I tend to eat a small snack around 4:30, hoping that it will prevent the hunger-induced meltdown at 5:30. I’m also a prepared snack person; if, for instance, I’m having cheese and crackers, I get out a specific number of crackers, line them up on a plate (and put the cracker box away), top each one with a little postage-stamp of cheese, then I sit down at the table and eat them very deliberately.
Some people (who are those people?) snack when they’re hungry. Some people view a snack as an opportunity for a treat, while others view it as a chance to get in more of whatever nutrient they need more of. Some are grazers, while others would rather sit down and eat a mini-meal. Some people don’t even notice when they’re snacking–they roam through the grocery store, trying all the samples, or they eat that bar-mix stuff by the handful, without even realizing they’re doing it. If food is available, it must need to be eaten, right?
Interestingly, the diet programs that I’m familiar with all incorporate snacking into their daily menu plans. The importance of not allowing yourself to get absolutely famished is widely recognized: if you get so hungry you could chew off your own arm, you’re much more likely to eat more than you need, and choose poorly, at your next meal. Moderate hunger is reasonable (and necessary, if you’re trying to lose weight); the feeling that you’re starving to death is not.
It seems to me that if you are going to the trouble to think carefully about what you put into your body at meal time, it would be a shame to abandon that good sense between meals.
What kind of snacker are you?
by Lisa Rosen on March 5, 2010
This is another one of those immensely useful basic protein dishes that you can plug into your menu rotation, in the category of “what else can I do with chicken cutlets?”
This is from Bluestein and Morrisey’s 99% Fat-Free Italian Cooking. I follow their instructions exactly*; I would make only one recommendation: choose a wine you’re willing to drink. Just so you know–that holds true any time you’re cooking with wine. If it doesn’t taste good in a glass, it probably won’t enhance your food (except for the crappy vermouth you buy in the grocery store; it seems to be okay in most things, in a vermouthy sort of way).
When I made it a few days ago, I served it with rice a green veggie and plain Japanese rice.** The wine and lemon juice make a little bit of a thin sauce, so if you don’t like your rice plain, like I do, drizzle some of that sauce over it. But it would also be delicious with mashed potatoes, or pasta, or polenta–whatever carby-grainy sort of side dish you happen to have lying around.
Chicken Piccata
Serves 4
1/4 cup flour
4 3-oz chicken cutlets
3 1/2 ounces shiitake mushrooms, cleaned, stemmed, and sliced
Olive oil cooking spray
salt to taste
1/2 cup dry white wine
2 T. freshly squeezed lemon juice
Put the flour onto a plate. Pat the chicken in the flour to coat very lightly all over.
Preheat a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add the mushrooms and cook until they begin to soften, 2 to 3 minutes. Push the mushrooms to one side of the pan with a wooden spoon. Spray each cutlet lightly on both sides with the pan spray and place them in the pan in a single layer. Cook until the edges are cooked and firm, 1 to 2 minutes. Turn the cutlets and allow them to cook through, about 2 minutes longer. Lightly salt the chicken, add the wine, and continue to cook until you can no longer smell the wine, about 2 minutes more. Stir in the lemon juice and remove from the heat.
This is approximately 174 calories per serving, with 0.74 g. of fat per serving.
*Except that I leave off the parsley garnish. For the record, most of the recipes I post call for a parsley garnish, but I never, ever use it, because I think parsley tastes like grass. If you like the flavor of grass, feel free to sprinkle it over your food as much as you want. It’s bound to be good for you, with all that green-ness.
**We’re eating a lot of plain rice these days, because I came home from the Asian market one day recently with a fifteen pound bag of Tamanishiki. It’s a short grain rice that’s often used to make sushi. I’m slightly in love with it. Yeah, I’m weird that way.
by Lisa Rosen on March 4, 2010
I was sitting out on deck 7, reading and writing and minding my own business, when Lee came out. He had lost the little silicone piece on the end of his earbud. I was really sorry to hear that (especially since I was going to need to use the earbuds during our nightly Skype check-in with Delaney). He hovered behind me, waiting. Finally I asked if he needed something else.
“I want you to help me look for it. You’re good at finding things.”
Ah. I packed up my book and computer, and we went looking. First we upturned the furniture in the Fyzz lounge, where he had been hanging out. Then we ransacked our cabin. Finally, while I was rummaging in the depths of the closet, Lee found the errant ear piece–under his pillow. Problem solved. I went back out to my lounge chair in the sun.
Half an hour or so later, re-appeared next to my chair. I looked up.
“Now we have a real problem.”
I stopped writing, mid-sentence, and waited.
“I think I’ve lost my wallet.”
“Do I need to come help you look?”
“Yes, please.”
I closed up my computer, and followed him up to our cabin. We thought it through, together–when he had last had it, where we were when he pulled it out of his pocket–mentally retracing our steps. We got to our room, and once again turned it upside down, looking. We took turns looking in the closet, under the bed, in the safe, in the far corners of all the drawers. We checked behind each other, even going so far as to use my booklight as a flashlight for peering into dark corners.
No wallet. We knew he’d had it when he paid the cab driver in Mexico. We knew he’d had it when we re-entered the port. That’s where the trail went cold. He must’ve dropped it. We listed the contents, double-checking each other, just to be sure, and he pulled out his computer and headed down to the internet cafe to get on Skype and start canceling things. I went back to my happy place on Deck 7.
When I went up to dress for dinner, he listed off the cards he’d canceled, and what we’d have to do to replace our driver’s licenses (yes, he was carrying mine for me). Luckily we had left our passports in the safe, so we didn’t have any real problem, just some minor inconvenience. I changed into a skirt, and was brushing my hair, when he pulled on his khakis. He’d hung them upside down in the closet, to keep them from wrinkling (we had packed light, and were re-wearing things). We must’ve missed the actual pocket part when we were looking for the wallet, because THERE IT WAS. In his pocket. What a relief–we haven’t started losing things (yet).
It got me thinking, though, about how we work as a team. We have different skills and abilities–we complement each other. One of us often a second set of eyes for the other, a fresh perspective. But sometimes, it’s not about the actual functionality. What matters most, sometimes, is the moral support. When you’re facing a crisis, or a missing earbud, having someone in your corner cheering you on can make all the difference in the world.
This was especially important back when we were first figuring out how to incorporate Lee’s heart disease into our lives–it was essential that we were both on the same team. I think this is true for everyone–a major lifestyle change (unless you’re a total hermit, living in a vacuum without human contact) is only possible when you have a support system. Weight loss, or nutrition overhaul, or smoking cessation or the building of fitness can all take years. Cholesterol management (or diabetes, or asthma/allergies, or a zillion other long-term conditions) is a lifelong proposition. YOU CAN’T DO IT BY YOURSELF. You need to let the people in your life support you. And if you live with someone who needs to make a lifestyle change, or who has a chronic condition, you need to talk to that person about how you can help.
Go team.
