What Do I Eat? 3 and 4

What Do I Eat? 3 

I’ve never understood why pasta is supposed to be quick food.  Sure, once the water is boiling, pasta only takes a few minutes to cook, but have you ever noticed how long that huge pot of water takes to boil?  I can unwrap a couple of pork chops, sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and herbs, and have them into and out of the skillet before I can even get pasta into boiling water.  Sauté a few veggies on the side, or throw together a quick salad, and voilà, dinner in about 20 minutes.

Or even better – and this is what I did on Monday – get a small zucchini for each person and a vegetable peeler.  Shave the zucchini into very thin slices with the peeler.  Sauté in olive oil for 3 to 5 minutes, and top with pasta sauce, sausage, and some Parmesan cheese (migraineurs with sensitivity can skip the cheese).

This dish, by the way, is one of the reasons that I scoff when people who are sitting down to a big plate of pasta tell me that low-carb is unhealthy.  Look, I want to say, I am eating the same thing you are; I just replaced the nutritionally bereft, low-fiber, calorie-dense, bland white flour pasta in your meal with low-calorie, fiber rich vegetables bursting with flavor and nutrition.  How can this be a bad thing?

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What Do I Eat? 4

Jennette Fulda’s blog, Half of Me, has a regular feature called “Lick the Produce Section” where she reports on her experiments with new and different fruits and vegetables.  I’ve been a lifelong lover of vegetables – I am the person who introduced my family to broccoli in the 80s – so it’s unusual for me to come across a vegetable I haven’t heard of, eaten in as many different ways as possible, and in most cases, loved.  Therefore, when everyone else was teasing Jennette (aka the Pasta Queen or PQ) for eating boiled radishes, I was thinking, “Yum!”  I first tried them cooked several years ago in Deborah Madison’s wonderful Spring Vegetable Stew from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (one of the few vegetarian cookbooks I recommend to low-carbers).  Madison’s stew contains asparagus, turnips, radishes, scallions, and broccoli stems, seasoned with lots of butter and herbs, and everyone I’ve ever made it for begs me for the recipe.

Anyway, someone on PQ’s blog commented that radishes, especially Easter egg radishes, are wonderful fried like home fries, which intrigued me.  When I went to the farmer’s market yesterday and found Easter egg radishes the size of tennis balls, I knew what I had to do.  I also picked up this gorgeous, purplish black kale, and three tiny heads of cauliflower in white, purple, and orange (saved for another meal); and I stopped by the store for a steak, too.

At home, my husband cleaned the kale and some other greens that were kicking around in the fridge while I chopped a shallot and cut the radishes into big cubes, and sliced up some wild mushrooms we got from our CSA farmer.  (The guy I bought the radishes from had thrown in a freebie, a watermelon radish, white on the outside and fuschia on the inside.  Very pretty indeed.  I used that, too.)  I browned the radishes and half the shallot in lots of butter; sautéed the kale in olive oil; and cooked the mushroom and the remaining shallot in more butter.  The steak was almost a side dish at this point, the veggies looked so wonderful.

The radishes were amazing!  If you try this, the secrets are – make sure you use enough butter, and make sure the radishes get nice and brown.  And don’t skimp on the salt – the sharp flavor of the radish really mellows when you cook it, and your lovely little roots will need a pick-me-up.