Apr
27
I like to cook. I like watching reality cooking shows, too, the kind where amateur chefs learn to be professionals (though that is so not my ambition). Part of the reason I enjoy the shows is that they inspire me to creativity and to try new things.
Cooking is enjoyable for me because it turns something that must be done into a skilled pursuit which exercises my creative side – at least, the way I do it. Here’s what I’ve learned.
1. Start with the best ingredients
You can’t go very far wrong in cooking if you are starting with good ingredients: fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, lean protein and monounsaturated oils. And you can’t go very far wrong in life if you are starting with sound basics: willingness and ability to learn, hard work, perseverance and a desire to connect to other people positively. It’s like learning your scales if you want to play jazz. You can’t jam until you know the basics of how to play.
 photo credit: ragnagne
My go-to book for good ingredients, by the way, is George Mateljan’s The World’s Healthiest Foods, Essential Guide for the Healthiest Way of Eating . That’s an Amazon affiliate link, but I’d recommend it regardless. It’s about 700 pages of wonderful knowledge on over 100 foods, including scientific evidence on what is good about them, how to store and prepare them, and some quick and simple recipes – the author claims that all the recipes take less than 7 minutes. I’ve based several of my own recipes on ideas in this book, including my delicious healthy fruit and nut treat bar, which is consistently the most popular post on my blog.
2. Stand on the shoulders of giants
Sometimes on the cooking shows, you will see creative cooks whose specialty is combining unusual flavours together. Almost invariably, they are knocked out because they produce some ridiculous random combination like pork and peaches that was never going to work, “because if it works it’ll be amazing”. Well, yes, it would be.
Don’t be those people. I rarely follow someone else’s recipe exactly, but what I do do is look through recipe books and websites for recipes that use my planned main ingredients, and get a sense of what else is frequently combined with them. I then imagine what that would taste like and come up with my own combinations.
photo credit: FotoosVanRobin
If I’m learning to do something, I’m aiming eventually to do it my way, but I’m going to do that after I’ve learned what generally works. You don’t seriously think that nobody ever considered pork and peaches as a combination, do you? The reason that you don’t see it served as a classic dish is that the flavours just don’t work together that well. Someone tried it and discovered that – so you don’t have to. Pork and apples, on the other hand…
3. Season to taste
Sometimes, when I create a new recipe, it’s a success first time (though I’ll usually still try variations when I make it in the future). Sometimes, it’s OK, but it’s not quite right. The other week I made a venison and mushroom pie. The flavours of the herbs and the red wine and the onions and garlic that I used (following principles 1 and 2) were lovely, but they lacked a bit of oomph. I knew just what it needed – tomato. And indeed, when I opened a can of tomatoes and added them as a kind of sauce, the taste was, if I can say so, excellent.
The thing about creativity (or any new thing you do) is that your first attempt often isn’t amazingly wonderful. What the first attempt does is show the potential and suggest ways to improve. This is where your creative imagination comes into play – figuring out what would make a good thing even better.
Those, then, are my three principles. Start with good basics, learn from what classically works, then do something that’s new – as a learning experience, a data point towards producing something amazing.
I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions on how to apply these principles to things I’ve never thought of, by the way. That’s part of my learning too. (Oh, and some of my other recipes are here.)
Technorati Tags: cooking, creativity, recipes, life lessons
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Aug
24
A couple of months ago my wife and I went away for the weekend, and ate at a very nice restaurant. Following the principle of “eat as much salmon as you can afford”, I had the salmon, which was served on a bed of barley and lentils with (I think) beef stock.
It was very good, and very filling, and I though, “I could make that.” I work at a natural health centre above a health food shop, so when I was down there and spotted some barley, I bought a little bag and cooked it with some lentils and stock.
It tasted just as good and was just as filling as I remembered, and makes an excellent substitute for rice in a wide range of dishes. I’ve tried to like brown rice, but I just don’t, and white rice isn’t very nutritious.
photo credit: Meanest Indian
Barley and lentils, on the other hand, is nutritious, as you can see on nutritiondata.com, where I’ve loaded it up as a recipe. As is often the case when you combine a legume (such as lentils) with a grain (such as barley), it has a good balance of amino acids, with an amino acid score of 92. A score of 100 indicates a “complete” protein. I notice on the link to complementary foods, which would complete the balance, that salmon is featured. That chef knew a thing or two.
I haven’t actually made this with salmon at home, but I’ve made it with scallops and steamed baby broccoli, and with chicken curry with mixed vegetables. You could use it anywhere you’d use rice.
Besides the good protein, it’s also excellent for B vitamins: just 100g of the barley-lentil dish (leaving aside the stock for the moment) gives 21% of the daily value for thiamin, 9% of niacin, 14% of vitamin B6 and 30% of folate. It’s also full of minerals: 26% of the daily value for iron, 12% magnesium, 19% phosphorus, 10% potassium, 17% zinc, 38% copper, an enormous 45% of the daily value for manganese, and 12% for selenium. It has 31% of the daily value for dietary fibre, and no sodium, cholesterol or trans fats. It contains only 0.3g per 100g saturated fat.
And this stuff is cheap! A couple of cups of pearled barley, enough for almost two weeks of meals for one person, cost me $1.50 at an organic health food store (which is usually an expensive place to buy things). Lentils are cheap as dirt. Even using pre-prepared stock, I doubt it costs me $1 per meal.
When you add the stock in, it does add a bit of sodium and dilutes the percentages of B vitamins and minerals per 100g, but it enhances the flavour. (Don’t take that analysis too literally, as the recipe for the store-bought stock I use is almost certainly different from the one on Nutritiondata.) I’ve also tried making it with vegetable stock so that I’m prepared if I want to make it for vegetarian friends, and it works just as well. The particular batch I made was a little dry and crumbly with the vegetable stock, for some reason, so I add a little milk before I reheat it in the microwave.
Overall, an excellent recipe, and I’m glad I stumbled on it. For more on barley and lentils and their health benefits, follow the links to World’s Healthiest Foods (which points out that the pearled barley I’m using isn’t even the most nutritious form, and that barley contains plenty of tryptophan, the serotonin precursor I blogged about recently).
If you use whole barley, of course, it’s even better. I’ve added a recipe for whole barley and lentils. Nutritiondata.com only had “hulled” barley, and I’m not sure if what I’m using is hulled, but it may be. The protein score goes up to 112, and look at those B vitamins – the thiamin has gone to 38%, niacin to 15%, vitamin B6 18%, folate 28%, and riboflavin 11%. Just 100g of this stuff gives you 31% of your daily iron, 25% magnesium, 28% phosphorus, 15% potassium, 22% zinc, 45% copper, 85% of your daily manganese requirement, and 32% of your selenium. Compare that with 100g of white rice (change the selector at the top of the page to 100g) and you’ll see why I’m preferring my “barley dhal”. Plus, it tastes better.
Technorati Tags: recipe, barley, lentils, dhal, rice, stock, nutrition, B vitamins, dietary fibre, minerals
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May
23
I noticed in my logs today that someone came here searching for “energy cookie”. I hope that person subscribed, because here is the long-promised recipe:
Ingredients
2.5 cups oatmeal or rolled oats (oatmeal, if you can get it, is more energy-dense, because of how the oats are processed)
1 cup oat bran
1/2 cup sultanas (golden raisins)
1/4 cup walnuts
1 tsp cinnamon
1 egg
1/2 cup canola oil
3/4 cup water
Method
Place dry ingredients plus the egg in the bowl of a mixer or food processor.
Start mixing, and pour in the oil and water. Mix to an even consistency.
Turn out of the bowl onto a cookie sheet. Smooth with a spatula to about 5mm or 1/4 inch thick, and divide into squares – about 20 medium or 30 small.
Bake at 180C/350F for about 35 minutes. The tops should just be turning brown and the insides may still be a little moist; the sultanas should not be burnt.
You can halve the recipe (apart from the egg) and it still works well, though you should drop the cooking time to about 25 to 30 minutes. (I found that the larger batches weren’t keeping well in the damp Auckland winter.)
The reason it’s taken me so long to post this is that I’ve been trying to get the amount of water right. Too much, and the cookies don’t cook through; too little, and they end up dry and crumbly. Three-quarters of a cup seems about right, but if your climate is particularly dry you may need to increase it a little.
The idea behind these energy cookies is to create a snack which delivers maximum calories (to assist in my weight gain goal) while remaining nutritious and heart-healthy, and with a low glycemic load. Now, I’m not a food scientist, but I can read nutrition tables, and my method of coming up with the recipe consisted largely of looking for the big numbers in the energy column of the standard NZ nutrition reference tables, and then going for an oil which had lower amounts of saturated fat than my first two choices (sunflower oil and olive oil).
There was a bit more to it than that, of course. I knew I’d need a carbohydrate base, some kind of oil to hold it together, and something to give it a more interesting taste. That would be the sultanas – the cookie is surprisingly sweet given that there is no added sugar, though the cinnamon helps with that. The sugars are also fruit sugars (fructose), which taste sweeter than table sugar (sucrose) but impose a lower glycemic load – that is, they don’t spike your blood sugar as much.
Here’s the nutritional analysis on nutritiondata.com, based on the 26g size (that is, dividing the recipe into 30 cookies).
That’s delivering 82 calories, or just over 3 calories per gram. It’s low in sodium (I don’t add salt) and high in manganese; it also has a decent amount of vitamins E and K and some thiamin, and plenty of dietary fiber. It’s high in phosphorus, so you’ll want to make sure your intake of calcium is adequate to balance it – cookies and milk would be the ideal solution.
I have several friends who have issues with gluten, and while oats are theoretically among the “gluten grains” so it isn’t totally gluten-free, it is still a lot lower in gluten than a wheat-based recipe. Oats are also very cheap, as are most of the other ingredients.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with this recipe, which I eat once or twice a day as a snack. If you have a need for sustained energy from a small, healthy snack, or, like me, are trying to gain weight, it could be what you’re looking for.
Technorati Tags: recipe, energy cookie, energy biscuit, healthy recipe, healthy snack, weight gain, oats
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