Food of the Day: Black-Eyed Peas

The traditional lucky dish of the new year, black-eyed peas were introduced to the New World by Spaniards and slaves from West Africa. The legume's association with good luck likely comes from the Civil War era, when Union soldiers would sack Confederate towns of any supplies and food. Northerners didn't consider "field beans" valuable, so they didn't take them, and Southerners survived on the lucky beans.

If you're not one for Hoppin' John (mmm, ham hocks), try cooking your lucky beans the way the Vietnamese do: As a dessert.

In Vietnam, black-eyed peas are often part of a rice and coconut dish called Chu Dau Tran. Much more appealing than beans and fat to start of 2008!

Find a recipe for the dish in English here.

Happy New Year!

An Unrefined Life

Let's get one thing straight. I am not wild and woolly nor do I have an aversion to the finer things in life. You should see my shoe collection. Refined and plentiful, indeed.

Okay, now that we've got that out of the way, let me tell you that this year my goal is going unrefined.

As in unrefined foods.

Is it possible for someone living in middle America, surrounded by all the tidings of the high-fat, high-risk Standard American Diet (SAD) go a year of eating against the grain? Consuming unrefined, non-prepackaged foods, devoid of fillers, additives and all those other inorganic ingredients we all readily ingest without really thinking about it?

Whole grains, organic fruits and vegetables. What if those were the staples rather than the things we know are good for us but rarely eat? What if venturing to the center aisles of the grocery store were like stomping across the wilds of the moon?

We'd all be healthier and happier. Or at least that's the theory. It's something hard to prove because it's hard to sustain. No matter how healthy we claim our diets are, we can't get through life in the industrialized United States with creating an attachment to some processed, we-should-know better vice.

Can you go without it?

Can I?

Man, I hope so. But I must tell you, Diet Coke is my life line. I'm a journalist and it's nearly impossible to meet person in my profession who is without an addiction to some caffeinated product. Like finding a Yeti in Times Square. Possible, but impossible all the same. I've had my kicks where I've tried to eliminate the stuff, despite cans being popped open around me every few minutes, the refreshing fizz hitting the throat of the thirsty person next to me, behind me, or across the newsroom. I crave it, my tongue yearning for only the metallic syrupy taste, the sickly hit of aspartame, the carbonated particles rushing through my lips straight to my gut, burning the whole way down.

Too bad it's a can of chemicals.

Every beloved drop is artificial except for the water, and even that is pumped full of gas to become carbonated. Yum!

Yes, regrettably, to quit the SAD and go unrefined, my life juice in the sophisticated silver can has got to be history.

Is it possible to say good by to the vice of my dreams and the other trappings of today's toxic American diet? I'd like to think I'm a healthy eater, a good eater, but on closer examination, I'm about two steps to the left from a trip to McDonald's some days. And not just the Diet Coke days. My morning packets of oatmeal have about 10 ingredients after "oats" that are unpronounceable, despite being "healthy." I have a soft spot for Peanut M&Ms on Wednesdays at a TV night with my family. And my organic frozen pizza, despite the superior ingredients, taste, and bigger price tag, is still a prepackaged disc of unfreshness.

So, what's a girl to do? Give it her best shot.

For the next year, I'm going to try to avoid the pitfalls of the SAD, go as unprocessed, unrefined and, well, un-American as possible.

A little wacky and difficult in today's society? You bet. But it's also more practical than the 100-mile diet being touted today, and a whole lot less gimmicky and profit-driven than all those diet books out there, with all their given product-placed accompaniments.

It's common sense: Eat foods in their most natural state, avoid anything unfresh or loaded with chemicals. In a sense, eat what our grandparents were raised on.

True food.

Real. Unrefined. Fresh.

Follow my progress here, and try it if you can. Healthy loves company!

For the Love of Fruit Baskets

Being more health-minded than party-minded, when given the choice of a fruit basket or a spot at the company's holiday party, I picked the fruit. Yum! I thought, given the downturn of the economy and the funk hanging over newspapers in general, my basket would be a paltry four apples and a pear. Therefore, three days before basket drop day, I decided to purchase a giant box of tangerines, figuring that between the box and the basket, I could get myself through to my Christmas Day flight to Holiday Land.

But, it turns out, my newspaper isn't doing so bad. In fact, using the ginormous fruit basket as a guide, we should be buying our way to a Pulitzer sometime early next year.

12 huge oranges, 13 big apples (14 if you count the one I lost in the parking lot), 8 grapefruit the size of my dog's head.

About 40 pounds in all, covered with a few strands of plastic grass that fill children's Easter baskets. No filler, no foam, no guard rails (hence the lost apple). In fact, it was bigger than the photo shown above, because that's a photo taken after I'd already given away a few pieces of fruit.

I easily eat 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. But it's nearly impossible for one person to eat this sort of load (plus those sweet little tangerines) without it rotting in the fridge in the final days.

So, what to do? Who wants to gamble away such (free!) goodness. I don't want to miss out on all the vitamin C and fiber in this lot, but I'm on a tight deadline.

Fruit game plan time!

My plan is to juice and freeze any oranges and grapefruit that I have left the night before my trip.

Any straggler apples shall be cooked down to applesauce — just peel, core and cook down in a pot with a little water. Mash them or blend them until you get the right consistency and maybe add a bit of sugar if you wish. Ta-da: yummy applesauce that's better for us than what prebottled stuff at the store.

Arsenic with that Apple? The Pesticide Problem

Simply put, pesticides are poison. They are meant to kill things. And they're in your food.

The chemical beginnings of pesticides came after World War II when the United States and thousands of pounds of leftover arsenic and hydrogen cyanide. Not kidding. The stuff used to kill our enemies in World War II was modified to be applied to our food. Did they kill things? Yes, they were proven to kill humans, why not anything else? Luckily, eventually these chemicals were considered too toxic (YOU THINK?!) and abandoned.

But that's not to say the second generation of pesticides are any healthier. The second generation of pesticides were synthetic. The most popular of which was DDT. It first was discovered in 1939 by the Swiss chemist Paul Muller and was originally used to delouse soldiers during World War II. Later, it became so good at killing things and boosting crop yields that Muller was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize for its discovery.

In 1962, DDT lost its status as golden child of agriculture. That was the year Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, was published issuing grave warnings about the use of pesticides, including DDT. DDT was found to be accumulating in unintended places, like in water, soil and the fatty tissues of bids, fish and other wildlife. And repeated exposure has been shown to be toxic to mammals' reproductive, cellular and nervous systems. In 1972, the United States revoked the registration of DDT, meaning it could not be used on crops in this country. Less developed countries do still use DDT because of its cheapness and high effectiveness.

In the United States today, though we do not use DDT, we still use thousand of pounds of chemicals on our conventional produce to make it "better." And though there hasn't been another Silent Spring to begin a public outcry, that doesn't mean there aren't ill effects of the chemicals sprayed on our foods today.

I want you to meet Carlitos (that's him at the top of this post). Carlitos is a baby born to a family of farm workers in Florida. Carlitos has no arms, nor legs. He's like a little sack of flour with a head on top. He's a happy baby, smiles a lot, but he's not a starfish — he won't grow back his limbs. How did Carlitos end up this way? His parents suffered pesticide exposure in the fields in which they worked in Florida. For more about Carlitos, check out this great work by The Palm Beach Post.

Now, most people in the United States today won't get the level of pesticide exposure of Carlitos' parents. But that doesn't mean we should allow ourselves to be exposed to any level of them. You cannot fully rid yourself of pesticides in your food simply by washing it. Pesticides are sprayed on your fruits and vegetables with abandon from the earliest stages, meaning the produce has most likely absorbed chemicals you can't wash off.

This is why it's imperative to buy organic whenever possible. Organic produce in this country has grown by leaps and bounds and is available almost everywhere. Yes, it is more expensive than conventional produce. Yes, the apples and oranges may look smaller. This is because we're so used to the gigantic fruits and vegetables pesticides have allowed us in this country. Those smaller fruits and vegetables? They're what fruits and vegetables looked like for millions of years — up until the 1940s. If it's good enough for your ancestors, isn't it good enough for you?

Organics are gaining in popularity, but they aren't the norm and their numbers are just a small fraction of the conventional growers' numbers. That's why there's such a price difference. Until demand is high enough and there's enough production, the price of organics won't go down.

If you're on a budget and can't buy organic all the time, that doesn't mean you have resign yourself to the fact that for the sake of eating healthy fruits and vegetables, you have to poison yourself. There are ways to limit your exposure.

The first thing you can do is to buy organic anything that you or your kids eat a lot of. For example, the more bananas you eat, the more exposure you get, so it's important that if you eat a lot of bananas, to buy organic. Whatever it may be: corn, apples, broccoli, anything that you eat a lot of.

Next, you can focus on the foods that have the highest levels of pesticides and contaminants.

Fruits:

• Peaches
• Strawberries
• Raspberries
• Apples
• Grapes (and raisins)
• Nectarines
• Apricots
• Pears
• Cherries
• Lemons (especially if using the rind)
  
• Limes
• Bananas
• Kiwis
• Pineapple
• Cantaloupe
• Tomatoes

Vegetables:

• Potatoes
• Corn
• Celery
• Cucumbers
• Spinach
• Lettuce
• Peppers
• Squash
• Carrots
• Green Beans

Focus on those fruits and vegetables and you will already be limiting your exposure extensively. And we all want to be healthier and happier and chemical-free!

Food of the Day: Sweet Potato

Strangely, this winter delicacy was introduced from the new world before the plain, old potato. Columbus brought the sweet potato to Europe and called it batata. But when the plain, old potato was introduced to Europe and also called batata, the original batata was dubbed the sweet one. Makes sense.

Now, while it's tempting to grab about eight of those bright orange tubers with every visit to the store, it's actually best to buy just a few at a time. The sweet potato's high sugar content means they don't keep very well. If stored in a cool, dry place (not the fridge!), they can last one to two weeks. So buy just a couple at the store, there's nothing sadder than throwing out a sweet potato that has turned to a balloon of liquid (I know, I've done it a million times). Nothing sweet about that!

I love to have a sweet potato side at dinner. I spike it several times with a fork, after washing it of course, and stick it in the microwave for 6 to 8 minutes. The perfect, easy side that can be prepared while you work on the rest of the meal. And to me it doesn't need anything on it, though it has been shown beta-carotene is more easily absorbed as vitamin A if taken with a fat, so it's okay to butter that potato a bit if you wish.

Enjoy the season's best!

Watch the holiday ham!

As we sit down to holiday dinners this month, be careful of what lurks on the festive dinner table. Store-bought, honeyed hams can be loaded with dangerous preservatives called nitrates. Nitrates (also called nitrites) are used to set color in food.

And what do we get for eating something so beautifully preserved? A heaping helping of carcinogens!

Not kidding.

Nitrates, which are also commonly found in lunch meat, hot dogs, bacon, sausages and other processed meats, are banned in other countries, including a country famous for its meats, Germany, because they are proven to cause cancer.

So why does the FDA and the USDA allow nitrates in our meats despite it's carcinogenic tag? Your guess is as good as mine. But it simply isn't good to guess if there are nitrates in your meet. Read labels, avoid processed meats in general and ask questions — like, "Hey, holiday ham guy, is this processed with nitrates?" If he can't answer, pick up a frozen one that's labeled nitrate-free and save yourself the Russian roulette — and maybe a little cash, too.

For more on nitrates, head here.

P.S.: Nitrates also can be found in some beer, nonfat dry milk, tobacco and some rubber, including pacifiers and nipples, so be careful!

Food of the Day: Tangerine

First cultivated in China thousands of years ago, the tangerine is a boon to fruit lovers this time of year: small, abundant and easy to peel. They are a travel-anywhere type of food.

The are smaller, less acidic and contain less sugar than the ubiquitous winter orange. Not to mention there's a type of tangerine for any person, or personality. Honey, Dancy, Fairchild, Sunburst, Honey Murcott, Satsumas, Ortanique, Temple and my favorite, the Clementine. Not to mention the hybrid Tangelos, which include Minneloa, Orlando and Honeybell.

Whichever you choose, each little bulbous package is a good source of vitamin C, beta-carotene and folate, as well as some magnesium, potassium and vitamins B1, B2 and B3.

Worth a look with a critical eye

If you're reading this blog, you are probably trying to steer away from processed "food" and toward natural, unprocessed fuel. In a sense, that's the direction Nina Planck takes with her book, Real Food: What to Eat and Why.

Planck, who started the first farmer's market in London, talks about her childhood on a sort of Utopian farm, where the family produced most of its food and sold the rest. Planck talks about going out into the field and picking the exact vegetables she wanted as part of the family dinner. Wouldn't that be nice? But for most of us, that is an impossibility. Picking up veggies for dinner means staring down mounds of questionably fresh vegetables under the fluorescent lights of our local supermarkets. Let jealousy ensue.

And while Planck does a great job of preaching the values of fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables for all — even those of us miles away from the nearest farm — she gets a bit out there with her views on fattening traditional foods like butter, cream, whole milk and eggs. While worth reading if not just for a different point of view, her ideas on these foods fly in the face of conventional wisdom.

Planck, who doesn't have a degree in an medical or science field, says that because we've eaten these fattening foods for hundreds of years, it's okay to have them in abundance. She says it's GOOD for you to be heavy on the butter and cream. Your body wants these foods, it's the processed foods of today that are bad. Go for it, and have lots!

That's kind of like how in the 1990s, as fat-free foods became all the rage, it became okay to eat an entire box of Snackwells cookies. Remember that? Or when Atkins was the go-to diet and suddenly apples and carrots were the enemy.

I agree whole-heartily with Planck that the aisles and aisles of processed foods at our local stores are making us ill beyond belief. The diseases of modern America are decidedly food-related, for sure. And many doctors agree with that theory as well. I'm not about to throw away their opinions on high-fat traditional foods just because I like this woman's line on fruits and vegetables.

Moderation friends, even for these traditional foods. And if you take away anything from this book, it's that processed foods are poor, and natural foods are rich, real fuel — even if you have to harvest them under fluorescent lights.

Food of the Day: Pomegranate

Before Acaí was all the rage, the pomegranate was the new antioxidant wunderkind. Hey, but just because it was five minutes ago doesn't mean it's not still good for you. And, lucky us, they are abundant during the holiday season.

Native to what is present-day Iran, the pomegranate is one of just a handful of fruits mentioned in the Old Testament. They are known both as a symbol of fertility and as the namesake of the modern-day Spanish city of Granada and of the wartime staple, the hand grenade.

So, now that we know the history, what the heck do we do with them? It's obvious to anyone who has seen this beautiful, ruby red fruit in the produce aisle that you can't cut into it like an apple. Can't peel it like an orange. So, what is a neophyte fruit-monger to do?

A How-To from the fabulous, indispensable Field Guide to Produce:

1. Cut off the crown.
2. Gently scoop out some of the center white core with a spoon.
3. Score just through the outer rind, marking the fruit into quarters.
4. Place your thumb in the center of the core and gently pull apart the sections.
5. Peel away the white pith and discard.
6. Turn the skin inside out and pop out the seeds.
7. To separate the seeds from any remaining pith, place sections of pomegranate in a bowl of cold water and gently swish around, The white pieces should float to the top while the seeds sink.

I find eating the seeds raw is a yummy treat, as is running them through a juicer with a few yummy frozen cherries or the new It-Food, Acaí.

What your food can do for you

You are what you eat.

We've all heard that before and the phrase is usually accompanied with an image of a pudgy doughnut or a lean asparagus stalk. But there's more to that phrase than what you look like. Your insides are also what you eat. Your heart, lungs, tissues and cells are also what you eat.

What you eat can boost your energy, beautify your skin and hair, improve your digestion, fight aging and help us unwind on the worst of days.

Natalie Savona's book, Wonderfoods is a great place to start if you are interested in using food to improve your body from the inside out. In the book, Natalie, a journalist-turned-nutrition expert, does a fabulous job of explaining why certain natural foods are good for us and how to prepare them. Old standbys like bananas, almonds and tomatoes are in the book, but she also explains the virtues of more exotic produce, like dandelion, nettles and quinoa.

Don't be scared, be inspired.

Drop the fruit snacks! Pick up fruit.

This blog's message is unprocessed and pure — unlike all that crap that ends up in our bodies. It's message is natural.

Eat real food.

Apples, oranges, tangerines. Sweet potatoes, kale, corn. Grains, seeds, nuts.

It is possible to skip the preprocessed, packaged foods of the modern day and go back to the way it used to be — in the days before cheese "product" on crackers sufficed for a meal.

And we'll all be better for it.

And no, you don't have to grow dreads and wear Birkenstocks to be here, though if that's your thing, we love you anyway!