Hippocrates (460 -377 BC) said our food should be our medicine and our medicine should be our food.
This photo is of the vending machine in the family/guest waiting room on the ambulatory surgery floor of a major New York City hospital.
Wouldn’t Hippocrates be horrified?
Americans tend to like sweet stuff and most of us eat more of it than we should.
Although we’re warned to be conscious of the amount of sugar we eat, that doesn’t mean never eat anything sweet. Of course, some people choose not to, but if you do – eat the good stuff – like real maple syrup.
Maple trees are tapped in early Spring for the sap used to make syrup. The sap is a clear, watery liquid which is boiled down to concentrate it into syrup.
Native Indians in the US and Canada were probably the first producers of maple products. They would make gashes in the trees, collect the sap, let it partially freeze to enrich it, then reduce it by heating, sometimes by dropping heated stones into the collected sap.
This year’s harsh winter created great conditions for an incredible maple syrup season. The below freezing nights and above freezing days were ideal and nearly doubled production at some sugar shacks, especially for light grades of syrup.
The syrup color generally depends on the time of the season the sap is collected. Lighter syrup tastes cleaner and more sugary and usually results from colder temperatures earlier in the season. Dark syrup has a different sugar content, a taste that lingers in your mouth, and usually comes from sap collected later in the season.
According to the Stamford Museum and Nature Center (CT):
The sticky stuff, often called pancake syrup, that you likely find in your local diner and in the Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth’s bottles on your supermarket shelves is not considered “real” maple syrup. That’s because it’s not made from maple sap but rather from a mixture of corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and a chemical soup of colorings, flavors, and preservatives.
Real maple syrup is graded. In the US (Canada has different grading) the grading is:
After a long – very long – and very harsh winter, it’s finally Spring. It even feels as though my house wants to take a deep breath of fresh air. We’ve been shut up indoors for so long – and so have our homes – gracefully taking in all of our cold germs, cooking odors, pet smells, deicing salt and mud, and every other remnant of our cloistered winter existence.
The whole idea of Spring cleaning – the annual cleaning of your house from top to bottom in the first warm days of the year — is supported by many cultures. For example, for the past 3,500 years, observant Jews have done a thorough “spring cleaning” of their homes before the Passover holiday begins. It is traditional In Greece and other Orthodox countries to do the same before or during the first week of Lent – which is also called Clean Week.
In the spirit of greening and cleaning here are some environmentally sensitive suggestions to green and clean your kitchen whether you cook at home or feast on take-out. You eat well, so why not treat your kitchen and the environment well, too!
So many petroleum based cleaning products can cause potentially serious health and environmental issues. Why not use natural, inexpensive, and safe wonder cleaners like white vinegar, lemon, salt, and baking soda?
I use white vinegar in water all of the time to clean my kitchen counter tops, stove, and even my tile floor. It cleans beautifully, is nontoxic, and smells like vinegar — not some nostril assaulting chemical mixture. Although some suggest using equal parts of water and white vinegar, I’m not so precise. I pour some vinegar and water in a spray bottle and keep it under my sink to use when I need it. Actually, vinegar and fresh lemon juice often serve the same purpose — but lemon has a citrusy scent that some people prefer.
For tougher stains, try making an all-purpose, non-toxic, stain-busting paste out of a mixture of vinegar and baking soda mixed with a little water. Baking soda, even on its own, is a great food-safe, odorless, and mildly abrasive green cleaning product and can be used just about everywhere (although not on waxed or easily scratched surfaces).
It’s great for cleaning up spills in the oven, on the stove-top, and for cleaning pots and pans when you forget to stir and let something burn the bottom of the pot. For oven spills, make a paste of baking soda and water, let it sit on the on the spill overnight, and scrub in the morning.
If you get to a spill – either in the oven or on the stove – right away, cover it with salt, let it sit for a few minutes, then wipe. The salt will absorb the liquid and is really good for absorbing grease and oil. Use salt to clean your coffee pot – just add 2 to 3 tablespoons to the pot and bring it to a boil.
You can also clean metal with a mixture of salt and lemon juice. My Uncle Charlie taught me this. Greeks make a New Year’s cake with a coin hidden in it. To clean the coin, Uncle Charlie would let it sit in a mixture of salt and lemon juice then rinse it and wipe it dry – something I do to this day. Aside from random coins, try it on your pots, pans, and appliances.
Something really good to know is if a colored liquid, like red wine, spills on your carpet, dab up what you can with paper towels or a clean cloth and then cover the spill with salt. When it dries, vacuum it up. A friend taught me this when someone spilled red wine on my brand new light colored carpet. She calmly assured me that her Dad was in the carpet business and to go get the salt and dump it on the spill. Trust me, this works!
Amazingly, a dishwasher uses half the energy, one-sixth the water, and less soap than if you wash dishes by hand. A report from the California Energy Commission says that you use, on average, 37% less water with a dishwasher than if you did dishes by hand under a continuous stream of water. But, if you fill one sink or basin with water to wash dishes and another to rinse rather than letting the water run, you’ll use half the water of a regular dishwasher.
And, one more plug for vinegar: using vinegar in the rinse cup of your dishwasher is an economical and environmentally friendly alternative to other kinds of rinse aids.
I thought I knew a lot about efficient cooking, but some of this info surprised me. It seems that my family is throwing more bucks at the electric company than we might have to. In the spirit of the greening up – yea, it’s Spring – here’s some great tips for more efficient cooking.
The easiest and most effective way to save money is to use energy-efficient cooking methods. Here’s how:
The Stove:
The Oven:
The Microwave:
The Pressure Cooker:
For more about “green cleaning” check out my latest Eat Out, Eat Well newsletter article at:
In girth that is. The chef’s weight loss is frequently motivated by a health scare – although sometimes just by vanity or wanting to be more mobile and agile in the kitchen — many star chefs have devised their own plans for losing weight.
Fortunately, for them, they have knowledge and their skill in the kitchen at their disposal to make food more flavorful, perhaps downright delicious, while cutting back on the use of sugar, fat, and salt.
According to an article in The Daily News, what they do is:
Whatever routine a chef follows, they all seem to have become aware of portion sizes. They’ve learned about calories and the overabundance of sugar, fat, and salt in many recipes. And, they move more. They do not deprive themselves. They may restrict the amount of food that they eat – but they are eating whole food with good flavor and they’re making room for the occasional, not daily, indulgence.
Art Smith cautions that dessert is a treat. As he says, “If you have dessert every day, then it’s no longer a treat.”
Try following their strategies when you’re cooking at home – or even when ordering in a restaurant.
If we could just get more chefs to offer smaller portions of delicious and healthy whole foods in their restaurants and food companies to do the same with their prepared products it would be a whole lot easier to lose and/or maintain weight and to be mindful of portion size.