Month: September 2014

When on a mission to eat healthier or lose weight, there’s one dietary staple everyone seems to turn to: the salad. While many dieters know to avoid creamy dressings and load up on darker, leafy greens, there’s one often-overlooked mistake that many people make when trying to eat lighter.

Georgeanne Brennan, the author of Salad of the Day, says overusing olive oil is a major calorie trap when prepping a salad, especially an otherwise healthy-sounding Mediterranean variant.

“Olive oil tastes so good that it’s tempting to use it in all of your ingredients — peppers roasted in olive oil, grape leaves [packed] in olive oil, olives cured in olive oil,” Brennan says in the above video from #OWNSHOW. “That’s your biggest trap.”

Instead of using so many oil-based products, Brennan offers a few key substitutions that can help make a salad much healthier without sacrificing flavor.

Instead of: Tuna packed in olive oil
Use: Water-packed tuna or garbanzo beans

Instead of: Oily roasted red peppers
Use: Crisp, fresh red peppers

Instead of: Kalamata olives preserved in oil
Use: Black olives

Brennan also suggests adding fresh tomatoes, string beans and cucumbers to the mix, topping it all off with a bit of feta cheese. “You don’t need to have a whole bunch [of cheese],” she says. “Just think in terms of moderate portions.”

Of course, Brennan isn’t about to leave out olive oil entirely. When it comes to dressing the salad, she opts for a smooth, controlled drizzle. “Now we’re using the olive oil, but we’ve decided how much to use,” she says. “It’s going to bring all the flavors together.”

Finish by seasoning the salad with Greek oregano — and apply liberally, Brennan says. “We’re making up for fat flavor with other kinds of flavors,” she explains. “Now you’re ready to serve!”

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We have all been Marcel Proust.

While munching on a madeleine cake dipped in tea, the French novelist famously recalled the experience of eating a similar snack as a child. He describes the sensation of being taken back to memories of his boyhood in France: “No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me,” he wrote in “In Search Of Lost Time.”

That “extraordinary thing” he refers to is the concept of nostalgia.

Eva Hill

We have all been Proust, except our madeleines are probably not madeleines. Instead, they may be Oreo cookies masterfully dipped into school-served milk cartons (you know, by opening the spout on all four of its corners in order to fit the cookie in). Or, our madeleines are the aroma of peanut butter, bread and foil. The scent leads to remembering the act of unwrapping crustless PB&Js from aluminum-foil packages, protectively assembled at home by careful moms and dads.

Eva Hill

Maybe it’s those times when you splatter marinara sauce on a crisp white shirt that you recall Wednesdays in the fifth grade, when the cafeteria served your favorite spaghetti. The speck of red makes your brain sink deeper: The instant you returned home from school, your mother, while laughing, had you strip off your clothes to toss in the wash. Despite her efforts, your white shirts were doomed for permanent stains. More likely than the splatter, though, it is the smell of the sauce that recalls this specific memory. Out of all five of our senses, smell is the most powerful in evoking nostalgia and linking us back to the past.

“The olfactory and taste systems have a rather immediate access to a key brain structure called the hippocampus, which is critical for memories,” Dr. Howard Eichenbaum, author of “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory” and a neuroscientist at Boston University, tells The Huffington Post. “The olfactory stimuli reproduces the context for which a lot of vivid, emotional detail are constructed in a memory — and can revoke them rather strongly.” In other words, our nose is our most substantial method of time travel.

Just a whiff of a Twinkie is enough to remind you, fondly, of your role as Mr. Bumble in the fourth grade play. Your teacher once used the treat to bribe the class to get through a single scene. Most of what we experience in tasting — nostalgia or not — comes from smell. Our sense of taste is very simple. As Eichenbaum puts it, we can really only taste five flavors. Everything else we experience when we eat comes through the olfactory system — our nose.

Eva Hill

The idea might be tough to wrap your head around. Dr. Rachel Herz, author of “The Scent of Desire” and a professor at Brown University, explains that without smell, we’d only be able to interpret a piece of steak as “salty.” Our sense of smell is was processes the intricacies of grill “flavors.”

Herz says that because of the way our smell system functions neurologically, “When you smell the thing that brings back the memory, your experience of the memory is much more emotionally involved.” The experience is far more intense than touching, seeing, hearing or tasting. Smelling isn’t the only pathway to evoking memories, but it’s the most immediate, Eichenbaum says. Proust’s madeleine memories were materialized by the cake’s aroma — and the process of interpreting that scent — moreso than its simple “sweet” taste. “You feel more brought back to that original time and place,” Herz said in an interview on “The Splendid Table.”

This transportive sensation tends to feel good — nostalgia is a positive experience. A 2012 study published in the journal Memory found that the act of being nostalgic can help people understand “the meaning of it all,” and boost mood while decreasing stress. “Thinking about cherished experiences from the past makes people feel good in the present,” Dr. Clay Routledge, a professor at North Dakota State University and one of the study’s conductors wrote in Scientific American. “By allowing people to revisit cherished life experiences, nostalgia boosts positive self-regard and promotes the feeling that life is full of meaning and purpose.”

Eva Hill

Proust deliberately tried to re-experience the confusing pleasure of nostalgia after his initial sense of it. He dipped his cookie 10 more times to feel that bliss. The fondness could be felt, but like incessantly pressing on a bruise to check if it still hurts, it sort of lost its magic. While there’s no formula for experiencing nostalgia through taste and smell, Eichenbaum suggests “preserving” something that evokes these near-surreal sensations. If, every day, you recreate and inhale those M&M cookies that were packed in your lunch as a Friday treat, they might lose their nostalgic charm. But if you revive the memory only on occasion, the cookie-induced nostalgia may have more staying power.

All illustrations by Eva Hill.

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From every state’s unofficial dessert to the fattiest foods in the U.S., state-by-state food rankings often leave much to be desired among those of us on nutrition-minded end of the eating spectrum. It’s about time we had state foods we could really be…

The best bars without TVs

You may think, hey, I know my oysters. There’s big ones, little ones, briny ones, sweet ones, West Coast, East Coast. I even know a few names — Wellfleet, Kumomoto, Bluepoint, and, um, did I say Wellfleet? And I know for sure they taste good with a big dollop of cocktail sauce on them.

That’s about where I was on the subject, at least. And that’s where Kevin Joseph comes in. He’s the mastermind behind New York Oyster Week, the annual bivalve extravaganza now in its third year. And he wants to teach people that, when it comes to oysters, “cocktail sauce is the enemy. My favorite thing to do with an oyster is put fresh-ground horseradish on it. Literally take the root, and just fuckin’ take a hand grater. To me it’s just so logical, like fresh ground pepper or fresh ground parmesan on your pasta.”

New York Oyster Week founder Kevin Joseph, in his element.

Joseph sees himself as “the Steve Jobs of oysters… People are like, ‘Why don’t you just get a fuckin’ bunch of Bluepoints [for Oyster Week]?’ Well, because that’s not the point. We’re trying to teach people the difference between a Bluepoint and a Kusshi and a Belon and a Kaipara from New Zealand, and whatever. OK, I get it, I’m a fuckin’ geek about these things, but people really like learning about it, because at the end of the day everybody likes to sit at a table with a bunch of important people, maybe clients, and order very intelligently the proper oyster. It makes them look good, it makes them look smart, they enjoy doing it, and get something good out of it. And one of the missions of Oyster Week is to help people learn that.”

The man has a point. I’ve been with folks who can scan book-length wine lists with authority, who demand to know the mineral content of the dirt from the farm where their ramps were grown, but when a waiter starts describing the oysters on that day’s menu, their eyes glaze over. And that shouldn’t be the case. Oysters are not only delicious, they’ve also got a rich history, especially in New York, which was one of the oyster capitals of the world well into the 19th century. Oysters, both cooked and raw, were scarfed up by millionaires and paupers alike — in fact, the oyster cart was, as Joseph puts it, “street food 1.0 in New York City.” Pollution and habitat destruction killed off a lot of New York’s native oysters. “I mean, Liberty Island & Ellis Island used to be called Big Oyster Island & Little Oyster Island. They were oyster reefs,” says Joseph, apparently with some incredulity that anyone would want to lose fresh local oysters just for the Statue of Liberty.

Oyster Week has something for everyone. For the hoity-toity set, there’s Merroir Et Terroir at the Monarch Room, a seafood and wine pairing dinner featuring six East Coast and six West Coast oysters, with food by Monarch Room chef Michael Citarella and wines by culinary celeb David Rosengarten. Joseph came up with the concept: “I want to go from the salt marsh to the open ocean. I want the first course to be shallow water [fish], then deeper and deeper and deeper. I don’t know that anyone’s done that before. But it’s a cool way to organize a menu.” The courses will appropriately be listed as “First Fathom” through “Fifth Fathom.”

For those craving a more casual vibe, there’s Oystoberfest. Along with oysters, it’ll feature craft beers from Bluepoint Brewing Co., plus pretzels, brats and all the other essentials for a traditional Oktoberfest. And in a nod to New York’s rich and sumptuous oyster tradition, there’s Empire Oyster, which features not only the best local oysters, but the best local chefs preparing them, and pairing them with the best made-in-NY beer, wine and booze. It’s perfect whether you’re a Noo Yawk snob or just a well-intentioned locavore.

There’s even something for vegetarians, if you want to buy into Joseph’s thinking. “Oysters reproduce very much like plants,” he says. “They reproduce externally. It’s almost like plants who send the seed out, or an agent, like a bee, goes from plant to plant. So oysters are probably the animal that’s most like a plant on the planet.”

Joseph has big goals for Oyster Week. A chunk of the proceeds from the fest will go to the Billion Oyster Project, whose goal is to repopulate the waters surrounding the city with the oysters that were here when the place was first discovered by the Dutch a few centuries back. Oysters not only clean the water (an adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day, according to Joseph), but they can also provide valuable wave mitigation for the shoreline, so Hurricane Sandy-type waves would be less destructive to the city. Unfortunately, the idea of edible oysters from New York harbors is still a ways off, since, says Joseph, “the amount of shit that goes into the water here would take a trillion oysters to filter, quite literally.”

Oyster Week is just a warm-up for year-round events bent on propagating what Joseph calls “The Oysterhood,” members of whom are referred to as Oysterfarians. “We created a brotherhood and a sisterhood of oyster growers, distributors, servers, shuckers and consumers,” Joseph explains. “You love oysters? You’re in the Oysterhood. I wanted to create a common denominator for all those people… It’s a fun and sexy and delicious 7th grade biology class.”

This time around, the “week” is actually closer to three weeks (it’s September 11-28, to be exact), but a daily excuse to slurp oysters for the rest of the month can hardly be considered a bad thing. Check out the full list of events here, and leave the cocktail sauce at home.

Seaweed is a nutritional superstar. It’s a great source of iodine and antioxidants, both important nutrients for regulating health. And, beyond its superfood status, the salty vegetable spruces up any old dish with its unique texture and powerful salty flavor.

You might love the taste of seaweed, but only enjoy it in your dishes when you dine out. The unusual-looking packages of dried plants may appear more intimidating than intriguing, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Once you get the lay of the land — or sea — you’ll be perfectly prepped to whip up your own seaweed-starred dishes at home.

Here’s the break down:

Nori

Nori is the flaky, green seaweed used as a wrap for sushi. It’s often used in miso soup and as a garnish on salads and fish. It usually comes toasted, sold in full sheets for sushi wrapping and snack-sized sheets to eat like chips.

Try nori at home. Get the Tuna Tartare With Nori Chips recipe by Blogging Over Thyme here.

Wakame

This little sea vegetable is the kind you’ll typically find in seaweed salad and some miso soups. It is subtly sweet in taste and can be very flavorful. Wakame is generally sold dried and, when rehydrated, is incredibly absorbent; it grows in volume when added to liquid.

Try wakame at home. Get the Sunomono recipe from by Just One Cookbook here.

Kombu

Kombu is commonly used as a main ingredient in a savory Japanese soup stock called dashi. It is also referred to as konbu, dashima or plain old kelp and is commonly sold dehydrated in thick, hard pieces.

Try kombu at home. Get the Shoyu Ramen With Roasted Pork Belly recipe from Citrus and Candy.

Dulse

Dulse, also called sea lettuce flakes, is a red sea vegetable grown on the Atlantic Coast. It’s commonly used in soups and stir-frys and eaten toasted as a crispy snack.

Try dulse at home. Get the Dulse Popcorn recipe from Veggie Wedgie here.

Arame

Arame might be the most distinct-looking seaweed of this bunch. It comes in dark brown string-like pieces and has a semi-sweet flavor. Like the others, arame is sold dehydrated and can be revived with liquid. It’s incredibly versatile: top in on salads or sautée it in stir-frys and rice dishes.

Try arame at home. Get the Arame And Edamame Salad recipe from The Healthy Foodie here.

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