Mary Dan Eades, M.D.

Friday’s Santa Barbara Newspress carried a front page article trumpeting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signing of legislation that phases out the use of trans fats in commercially-prepared (but not pre-packaged) food–i.e., in restaurant and cafeteria foods. (I would love to link to the full article, but the SBNP makes its online service available only to paid subscribers, which I find very short sighted, but there it is.) I applaud the move to drive partially hydrogenated vegetable oils into gas tanks where they belong. In my opinion, these Franken Fats have no place in human nutrition.

However, the author of the piece, Scott Steepleton, made a monumental error in fact checking. We’ve already written a letter to the editor pointing up the mistake; we’ll let you know if they print it.

Per Mr. Steepleton:

A small amount of trans fat is found naturally, primarily in some animal-based foods, according to the Food and Drug Administration. [No quibble so far.] But legislation such as Mr. Mensoza’s AB 97 [the bill banning the use of trans fats] is aimed at the manufactured variety, produced when hydrogen is added to, say, vegetable oil. That includes lard.”

Say what??

Since when did lard become a ‘manufactured’ fat, hydrogenated in a factory by adding hydrogen to vegetable oil? What utter nonsense.

Real lard is a naturally-hydrogenated, solid fat that requires no tampering in the factory to add anything to it. Lard is rendered pork fat. Most of its carbon bonding sites are happily filled with a full complement of hydrogens in their natural and normal cis position just as it comes from the hog.

Mr. Steepleton must be confusing lard with shortening or perhaps confusing real natural lard with the lard found in tubs on grocery shelves (as opposed to the refrigerator case, where it should be) that has had some manufacturer’s tinkering to make it even more shelf stable.

Unlike the natural solid fat, lard, vegetable shortening is a liquid oil until manufacturers tamper with its structure by heating it up under pressure and bubbling hydrogen gas into it (with a catalyst to make it all work faster) and force-feeding the carbon double bonds some hydrogen atoms that often latch on in a crossways or trans configuration.

A little bit of hydrogen added in the trans configuration increases shelf life of the oil and allows liquid vegetable oils and corn oil not to go rancid in large, clear containers exposed to light and heat on the store shelves. (This would also be the case, though to a much lesser degree, for the small amount of hydrogenation possible for shelf-stable lard.)

A lot of hydrogen added in the trans configuration solidifies the liquid oil, creating stick margarine or solid vegetable shortening, such as Crisco. These Franken Fats were created to replace the naturally solid fats, butter and lard, not for health reasons, but because the real McCoys were rationed in WWII.

I grew up in a household that saved every drop of bacon grease (or drippins, as we called it) and used it liberally in cooking to season greens, fry chicken or eggs, lighten pie crusts and more. To this day, there is always a coffee can containing bacon drippins in my refrigerator. Granted, it’s now an Illy espresso can, not a Maxwell House…Good to the last drop! can, proving only that though times change, they don’t change all that much.

In the years since WWII, which is all of my life so far, the Franken Fats have largely taken over the prepackaged commercial food market, since they have some attractive food manufacturing properties, the most important of which (I suspect) being that they are a whole lot cheaper.

Both lard and butter have been vilified (undeservedly) by the all-saturated-fats-are-evil crowd, but where butter has been labeled by them as dangerous for your health, lard has been cast as a mass-murdering serial killer. It’s utter, knee-jerk, nonsense. And nonsense, by the way, that led these bands of crusading think-they-know-it-all do-gooders (read: Committee for Science in the Public Interest and the PETA-backed Physicians for Responsible Medicine) to pressure the powers that be to remove beef tallow, lard, and butter from commercially prepared foods and replace them with ‘healthy’ partially hydrogenated vegetable fats in the first place. Yes, they all previously lobbied to switch to these self-same fats–these trans fats–that they’re now crusading to eliminate from commercial kitchens.

Time has proven that they were misguided then, but it has left them between the proverbial rock and the hard place. They can’t allow people to eat ‘dangerous artery clogging saturated fats’ and they can’t recommend their erstwhile darlings (now their demons) the partially-hydrogenated vegetable fats. About all that’s left to them is olive oil, onto which they’ve jumped with both feet as the savior of human hearts and health.

Let’s look for a moment beyond the inflammatory rhetoric and knee-jerk Kool-aid slurping surety that lard is bad and that all saturated fats, such as those found in lard, are bad and attempt to tease out the truth. What is lard?

Lard, contrary to its besmirched reputation, is a healthful fat with sterling culinary properties for high temperature cooking and baking and a darned good fatty acid profile.

(First a brief digression about nomenclature in fats. If you’re up on it, skip on down.)

Fats are made of fatty acids. Fatty acids are the carbon-hydrogen chains that latch on in groups of three to a glycerol backbone to make a triglyceride molecule, which are the basic molecules of which all fats are made. The length of the carbon chains and where, if any, double bonds (ie, missing hydrogen molecules) occur differentiate the fatty acids one from another. The more double bonds, the more unsaturated. One double bond gives you a monounsaturate, many double bonds gives you a polyunsaturate, no double bonds gives you a saturated fatty acid.

The main saturated fatty acids in edible oils are (from shortest to longest chains): capric, lauric, myristic, palmitic, and stearic acids. The main monounsaturate is oleic acid. The main polyunsaturates are linoleic and alpha-linolenic, with the difference between those two 18-carbon fatty acids simply where the first double bond occurs, which is at the number 6 carbon in linoleic (making it an omega-6 fat) and at the number 3 carbon in alpha-linolenic (making it an omega-3 fat). And of course there are the all-important highly unsaturated marine oils, EPA and DHA, which are 20 carbon chains in the omega-3 family as well.

Now let’s compare lard to that darling of the disciples of the Mediterranean diet: olive oil. Olive oil contains 71% oleic acid, that heart-healthy, monounsaturated fat that we’re supposed to get more of. Lard contains 44% oleic acid, which is more than sesame oil (41%) and double or nearly so the amount in corn oil (28%) walnut oil (28%), and flaxseed oil (21%), more than double the amount in cottonseed oil (19%) and sunflower oil (19%), and nearly triple that in grapeseed oil (15%) and safflower oil (13%). The oleic acid content of lard also exceeds that in beef tallow (43%), butterfat (29%), and human butterfat (ie the fat of breast milk at 35%).

Lard also contains a fair amount (14%) of the 18-carbon saturated fat, stearic acid, which has been shown in clinical testing to lower cholesterol. Important, of course, only if that’s actually a valid cardiovascular health parameter when it’s all said and done, which is looking more and more doubtful with each passing day. Certainly there are many who still think it so. Consumers spend an annual $14.8 billion on statins in an effort to lower cholesterol–a sad commentary, when stearic acid is a whole lot cheaper and safer.

Like olive oil, lard contains 10% of the omega-6 fatty acid linoleic acid, again, roughly the same as human butterfat (breast milk) at 9%.

Lard contains 2% myristic acid, a 14-carbon saturated fat that has been shown to have important immune enhancing properties. Human butterfat contains about 8% myristic acid, as a booster for the newly minted and incompetent infant immune system. Other animal milk fats also contain a fair amount. By comparison with the exception of cottonseed oil (1%) and the tropical oils, coconut oil (18%) and and palm kernal oil (16%) vegetable oils have zero.

The big bugaboo with lard, then, must come from the last component of its composition: palmitic acid a 16-carbon saturated fatty acid that is believed by some to be Beelzebub, Barlow, and the Bermuda Triangle all rolled into one. Lard contains 26% of the stuff and olive oil only 13%. Aha! There it is. The smoking gun! That must be what makes lard so bad and olive oil so good!

There’s one fly in that explanatory ointment, however: human butterfat contains 25% palmitic acid, just a silly 1% different from lard. Are we to believe that nature would have designed a food for human infants that contained too much?

So let’s now compare lard’s basic fatty acid composition to the real gold standard, the butterfat of human breast milk and see how it stacks up.

Saturated Monounsaturated Polyunsaturated
Breast Milk 48% 35% 10%
Lard 42% 44% 10%

Note: the numbers don’t add up to 100% because of rounding and other small constituents not listed in the fats and oils of common edible foods table. That said, however, even if all the unreported 7% of the composition of breast milk were monounsaturated fat and all unreported 4% of the lard were saturated fat, the composition of lard would still be less saturated and contain more monounsaturates than human breast milk.

Now tell me again why lard is bad for our health.

If you want to render your own lard, there’s a good piece about it on the Homesick Texan blog.

If you don’t want to go to the trouble to render your own, but love to use lard for panfrying and baking, I sussed out an organic source for lard online.

Springing for an organic source in lard (whether you buy naturally raised pork fat to render yourself or let someone else do the work for you) is important, since most pesticides, chemicals, fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, and other environmental pollutants will be soluble (and therefore stored) in the fat of the animal. Where edible fat is concerned, organic is definitely worth the expense.

So fear not and don’t be swayed by the misguided and misinformed. Eat more (natural, organic) lard!

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Thanks to the miracle that is the world wide web, our blogs reach people in all parts of the globe. Just the other day, for example, a reader from India wrote telling us that she had purchased our book Protein Power and was persuaded by it to commit to the diet to lose weight and improve her health. She loved the book, but wrote to point up what she felt was a glaring omission: no recipes in sync with her native Indian cuisine, particularly traditional Indian breakfast and lunch fare.

I had to admit that she had us there. While the book contains at least an entree recipe or two for dishes that derive from a wide array of ethnic cuisines (Tex-Mex, Korean, Finnish, Italian, Greek, and French) there aren’t any recipes specifically derivative of Indian cuisine.

I responded to her that there were a number of traditional Indian dishes that would work well, sans rice, for a low-carb lunch or dinner that are listed in the dining out section in Protein Power: tandoori chicken or lamb, chicken beef or lamb curry, chicken tikka or chicken masala, zukeni bhaghi (stewed zucchini and yellow squash) and saag paneer (creamy spinach) but that I had to admit that we were unfamiliar with traditional Indian breakfasts or other types of lunch fare. I offered that if she would send me a few recipes of her favorite traditional breakfast or lunch dishes, I would endeavor to adapt them for her. If and when she does, I will post them on the blog for all.

In the meantime, I decided to get started with what I currently could do and adapt a recipe for curry that caught my eye in a Healthy Plate column by Jim Romanoff that appeared recently in our local paper. While mine uses chicken, his used shrimp, which would work just fine, though you’d want to cut the cooking time down to a couple of minutes, cooking just until the shrimp were opaque and tender. Where his used cous cous, I built mine around our old low-carb friend, cauliflower.

Here it is, for all readers wanting/needing a little curry fix.

Curried Chicken and Veggie Cauli-Cauli
Makes 4 servings

Ingredients:

1 large head cauliflower, washed and trimmed
2 tablespoon olive oil (divided use)
2 tablespoons butter (divided use)
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped finely (divided use)
2 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 1 pound), diced to 1/2″ to 3/4″ cubes
1 cup chicken broth (divided use)
1/2 cup chopped scallions
1 cup broccoli, broken into small florets
1 small zucchini, diced
1 small red bell pepper, seeded and diced
2 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 teaspoon sea salt (divided use)
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (divided use)

1. Cut the raw cauliflower head in half and then each half into 1/2″ slices.
2. Place cauliflower slices into the food processor and pulse to chop evenly into small cous-cous sized bits. Set aside.
3. Put chicken pieces in a bowl and season with a little salt and pepper and 1 teaspoon of the curry powder. Toss to coat.
4. Heat 1 tablespoon oil and 1 tablespoon butter in a skillet large enough to hold the chicken. Add the garlic and saute until slightly limp. Add the chicken pieces and brown on all sides.
5. Add 1/2 cup of the chicken broth, stir to pick up the brown bits on the pan. Add the broccoli, zucchini and red bell pepper (not the scallions); cover and cook over medium low heat for another 5 or 6 minutes, until vegetables are tender. Turn heat off and hold, covered.
6. In another large skillet, heat the remaining olive oil and butter over medium heat. Add the remaining garlic and the scallions and saute for a few minutes until tender. Add the cauliflower, remaining salt, and pepper, stir to coat in the flavorful oil, then cook for another 3 or 4 minutes.
7. Meanwhile, return the chicken skillet to a low flame to heat the chicken through.
8. Add the remaining chicken broth to the cauliflower and continue to cook, uncovered, until cauliflower is tender and moisture is mostly gone.
9. When the cauliflower is ready, add the chicken and veggies and toss.
10. Serve with a glass of sugar free hot or iced chai.

Enjoy!

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Day after tomorrow, July 4, we Americans–most of us at least–will gather together in backyards and parks, on beaches and boardwalks, in small groups and giant crowds to celebrate our nation’s birthday with fireworks and music and, most of all, food.

We plan to do likewise. Although we’re headed back up to Tahoe in a few days, we’ll be in Santa Barbara for this 4th of July and I will be singing all the patriotic favorites with the Santa Barbara Choral Society and Santa Barbara Symphony at the annual Pops in the Park Independence Day celebration at the Sunken Garden of the county courthouse downtown.

When we’re in town for the 4th, Mike and our son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter usually join with one or two or three other families to enjoy a picnic on the green lawn of the Sunken Garden to watch the concert. (I join them afterward for the food and drink.) This year, I’ve been a little uninspired about what to pack for the picnic, having been too busy recently to really give it much thought. But that all changed this morning.

Today’s NY Times Dining Out section carried a front page article by one of my favorite chefs, Mark Bittman, with (literally) 101 tasty and inspired picnic suggestions that in his usual Minimalist way can be whipped up in under 20 minutes.

The list is divided into main groupings: Raw Veggies; Cooked Veggies; Bean, Rice and Grain Salads; Potato Salads and Egg Salads; Fruit; Meat and Poultry; Sandwiches; Cold Noodles; a category called ‘Also’, which includes such things as marinated cheeses, cheese balls, and dips; and Desserts.

Dozens of the interesting offerings will feel right at home in a low carb picnic basket just as they are. The entire meat and poultry section will work without a change (except not indulging in the occasionally recommended bread on the side).

But there are dozens more that with just a little tweak can also work. For instance, in the potato salad recipes, substitute diced, cooked celery root or steamed cauliflower florets for the potatoes or diced butternut squash for the sweet potatoes and you’ll drop the carbs way way down.

In the recipes that call for rice, bulgar, or cous cous, substitute steamed or sauteed finely chopped raw cauliflower (Just wash, trim, and slice the head in about 1/2″ slices and process in the food processor in pulses to a small ‘grain’ size, then steam in the microwave, covered, for a few minutes until tender or saute in olive oil and/or butter.) Chill for salads or use warm in wraps.

For the wraps use fresh butter lettuce leaves instead of flour tortillas or pita pockets. Or if a real tortilla would trip your trigger, substitute a low-carb version, available from several purveyors, such as Mission, La Tortilla Factory, or Tumaro’s Gourmet Tortillas, which even has a low-carb green onion tortilla wrap.

Try julienne of jicama as a dipper for guacamole, salsa, or other dips.

Substitute drained black soybeans for the kidney beans, black beans, or chick peas in some of the Bean, Rice, and Grain salads.

You can use cooked spaghetti squash (seasoned with some soy sauce and herbs) as a substitute for the soba noodles or vermicelli in the Cold Noodle category.

With just a bit of ingenuity and your low-carb imagination, while you might not make it to 101, you’ll find more than enough interesting and inspired dishes to make your July 4th picnic a world class feast!

As you enjoy the fireworks and feasting, please take a moment to remember (and give thanks to) the brave souls who have sacrificed to keep our freedoms safe since 1776.

Have a happy, healthy, safe July 4th!

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We were having a friend over for dinner a few weeks ago for a simple steak cookout. Usually I opt for ease on these occasions and roast squash or asparagus on the grill while I’m cooking the steaks. This night, however, I had a buzz on to have something a little different, something cheesy and comforting, something more starch like. And for some reason, my thoughts turned to cous cous.

Of course, I wasn’t going to actually have cous cous, since it’s just a granular form of pasta and way too carby a bang for the enjoyment buck in my estimation. Oh no, if I’m going to splurge carb grams on pasta, it will be in Italy and it will be Gnocchi con Quattro Formaggi, not cous cous. But, of course, this was in our back yard, not Italy (sigh) so I set about to get the sensation, the mouth feel, and the savory flavor I was seeking, but make it fit our low carb bill.

The resultant knock off was a knock out and I admit to having become quite addicted to it as a side dish. It works well along side pretty much grilled anything and might even make a passable base on which to put Osso Bucco in lieu of polenta or risotto. You can adjust the recipe to make more or less pretty painlessly. (I’ve made half a recipe with half a cauliflower for just the two of us several times.)

Since I used our old buddy cauliflower, I decided to call the basic prep cauli-cauli in homage to the cous cous that inspired it. Here it is:

Cauli Cauli with Artichoke and Lemon Pesto

1 medium head cauliflower, trimmed and washed
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 garlic clove, minced
1/2 recipe Artichoke and Lemon Pesto (below)
1/3 cup grated parmiggiano reggiano cheese

Artichoke and lemon pesto
1 can (approx 14 ounces) artichoke quarters in water
1 large lemon, for juice and zest
1 handful fresh flat leaf parsley
1 clove garlic
1/4 to 1/3 cup finely grated parmiggiano reggiano cheese
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
About 1/3 cup olive oil

To make the pesto, place all ingredients except olive oil in the food processor and blend to a smoothish consistency. Stream in the olive oil until you have a soft, but not loose, pesto. You’ll have enough for two batches of cauli cauli or you can use the extra to slather on tomato halves before broiling or put dress up grilled fish. Or if you eat a bit of bread, slather on slices of toasted baguette for a delicious bruschetta.

For the cauli cauli
1. Slice the cauliflower head in half, then into slices about 1/2 inch wide.
2. Place the cauliflower into the food processor and pulse to break it up, then process on high to finely chop it to grains about the size of cous cous.
3. Heat the olive oil and butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add the chopped garlic and saute until limp.
4. Add the processed cauliflower and stir to coat it with the butter and oil. Continue cooking, stirring often, for about 10 minutes, until the cauliflower is cooked. (You can prepare it to this point, then turn off the heat, cover, and hold it for a half hour or so if needed.)
5. When ready to serve, add 1/2 of the Artichoke and Lemon Pesto recipe and the 1/3 cup of parmiggiano reggiano cheese and mix thoroughly. Heat through over medium heat.
6. Serve immediately.

Enjoy!

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An op-ed piece appeared today in the NY Times that sheds a little more disturbing light on the plight of wild salmon. The article also points up the serious problem in farmed salmon of not only not being as rich in omega 3 fats, but of being tainted with the pesticide emamectin benzoate.

Just as feed lots breed disease in livestock, so aquatic feed lots (aquapens) breed disease in sea stock. One of the unforeseen consequences to fish farming in the open sea is that parasites that infest the feedlot can escape to infest the wild populations, further decimating them.

The collapse of the Pacific salmon runs this year and the ban on taking salmon from Pacific waters has left only the Alaskan runs to support the appetites of Americas salmon-hungry population. Consequently, fresh wild Alaskan salmon will be as pricey as caviar this summer.

The collapse of the wild salmon runs is a real problem that’s got to be addressed sooner rather than later or before long there won’t be wild salmon available at any price. So I join with Taras Grescoe in limiting my consumption of wild salmon in the hope that with a little TLC and tincture of time the wild runs in the Pacific can recover.

Halibut, anyone?

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Sorry to have been so remiss in my blogging duties, but as some of you know, amid trying to finish the book manuscript for our latest offering, I was also in the thick of things bringing to fruition the biggest production in our Choral Society’s 60 year history: a collaboration between Santa Barbara Choral Society and State Street Ballet in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, with World Premier choreography by William Soleau.

This weekend, at the fabulously restored Granada Theater, all the hard work paid off in two sold out houses (on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon) and standing ovations that shook the rafters for 7 curtain calls. Here’s a photo by David Bazemore of the the final O Fortuna scene from it:

And take a look at this fabulous costume on Victoria Luchinka in the roasting swan scene:

I think you can almost see me–or my face anyway–just under the swan’s wing on the front row, dressed in monk’s robes, in the dark. Tacit, of course, because it’s a tenor solo, which was ably performed by Beau Palmer (of Atlanta).

Click the You Tube link at the bottom of the post to hear Segei Ozawa conducting Blanzifor et Helena/O Fortuna (Granted, it’s not me and not my group; it’s another time, another place, and other chorus at another concert, but the music sounds just the same.)

It was a grand ending to all the many months of planning, studying, rehearsing, marketing, publicizing, and fund raising. It was, as one reviewer put it, simply magnificent!

From the stage, it was an amazing experience to do this choral piece with the ballet. Amazing and time consuming and with the project blessedly behind me, I hope I’ll be able to spend substantially more time at my blogging and correspondence desk and things will get back to normal…if I can just get the music out of my head.

Enjoy!

Segei Ozawa conducts Blanzifor et Helena/O Fortuna

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I use fresh mint quite often in cooking, for making minted vinegar for lamb chops, adding to salad dressings, throwing together a chopped herb coating for grilled or roasted chicken, fish, or meat. So I always have a pot of mint growing near my herb garden. I say near not in because mint is so rapacious, it will gobble up any herb garden it’s planted in.

Last summer, however, when we went to Europe for three weeks in the middle of the summer (not my favorite time to travel to Europe, but to sing in fabulous places, I’ll make an exception) I moved my large mint pot over into my kitchen herb garden to insure that it would be regularly watered while we were gone.

And then I forgot about it.

Within a few short months, the sneaky herb had escaped from its terra cotta prison and sent runners out in every direction. I have pulled them back, pruned them off, and it seems only to make the mint more determined. It’s like the minty version of the invasion of the barbarians upon Rome–it just keeps swarming forth.

My intent now is to try to extract the pot from the garden soil (which may prove difficult) and pull up its progeny. I have my doubts about whether even that will arrest its advance permanently. But, before I do, I’m going to strip all those runner shoots of their beautiful minty leaves and celebrate Saturday’s running of the Kentucky Derby by making about a jillion Mint Juleps.

Gotta do something with all that mint, right?

Now a regular Julep contains some sugar, in various recipes used to either muddle the mint leaves or to make a simple syrup to sweeten the bourbon. Most recipes call for a tablespoon of simple syrup, which would be equivalent to about a teaspoon and a half of sugar or 7 grams of carb. For a single alcoholic treat, that’s not too bad, but who wants a single Julep on a hot summer day? Loving the taste of a Julep, but not wanting the sugar load, about a year or two ago, I came up with low carb mint julep about which I blogged about previously.

That method makes a single handcrafted drink. Lovely to be sure, but with all this mint at hand, I may need to speed up the process. I figure my best option is to make a Sugar-Free Minted Simple Syrup to keep in the refrigerator. Much faster for making Juleps in batches for a large crowd or serial Juleps in rapid succession. It’s the method they use at the Kentucky Derby, so I’m given to understand, so it ought to be plenty Kentucky-kosher for me.

Sugar-Free Minted Simple Syrup
Makes…a lot

2 cups granular Splenda
2 cups water (try to use bottled water, so you don’t get a chlorine-y taste)
1 teaspoon ThickenThin not/Sugar
6 springs fresh mint, clean and dry

1. In a saucepan, combine the Splenda and water over medium low heat, stirring to dissolve.
2. Whisk in the ThickenThin not/Sugar and raise the heat to bring to a boil.
3. Remove from the heat and pour into a container with a tightly fitting lid. Add the mint sprigs, seal, and allow to steep at room temperature until cool enough to refrigerate.
4. Chill overnight and (if there’s any left) store in the refrigerator for up to a week.

To make a Julep with simple syrup:

1. Fill a Julep cup or old fashioned glass with crushed ice.
2. Add 1 tablespoon Sugar-Free Minted Simple Syrup, 2 ounces good bourbon and stir until condensation appears on the outside of the Julep cup to be sure the drink is icy cold. Add a splash of soda (if desired) and a garnish of fresh mint.

As to which bourbon to use, tastes vary. The Derby, I’m told, uses Early Times. Some people prefer Jack Daniels, Gentleman Jack, or one of the expensive single barrel varieties, such as Knob Creek or Blanton’s. In my youth, I’d always been partial to Southern Comfort, simply because it’s already sweet, but since my brain transplant happened 20-odd years ago vis a vis consuming quantities of sugar, I have tended toward the Wild Turkey (the 80 proof, not the 101, which I find just too raw.)

Recently, however, Mike stumbled upon an article by Eric Felton in his regular Saturday romp through the Wall Street Journal Weekend edition that made a fine case for the attributes of the relatively inexpensive Evan Williams black label aged sour mash for Juleps. Based on Mr. Felton’s review, we decided to give the Evan black a whirl. I have to agree that it makes a dandy Julep, just the right combination of flavors and it doesn’t break the bank to buy it in the quantities I’ll need to purge my garden of all this mint!

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Several years ago, Mike and I hosted a Protein Power cruise on Holland America Lines from Vancouver up the coast of Alaska to Glacier Bay. The trip offered some of the most spectacular scenery I’ve ever viewed: pristine skies, deeply forested land, clear waters teeming with marine life. Breathtaking beauty.

On one excursion, we helicoptered across the vast expanse of glacial ice to walk on the glaciers (as we sipped champagne and nibbled fudge–my kind of trek for sure). It was an unforgettable experience to stand on that frozen sheet and listen to the noisy snapping and popping the glacier makes and to look into the chasms with their unearthly aquamarine light and hear the roar of water beneath them.

On another excursion, we paddled sea kayaks up into the quite estuaries to where the salmon spawn. At the mouths of the streams, the fish were literally roiling the water with activity, leaping from the surface high enough that one could have easily landed inside the kayaks. Another truly amazing experience.

So it was with dismay that I read the article by Terence Chea in last weeks paper: Salmon Collapse may prompt fishing ban.

The situation is dire, as Mr. Chea writes:

…only about 90,000 adult chinook [king salmon] returned to the Central Valley last fall — the second lowest number on record and well below the number needed to maintain a healthy fishery. That number is projected to fall to a record low of 58,000 this year. By contrast, 775,000 adults were counted in the Sacramento River and its tributaries as recently as 2002.

“This stock got off-the-charts bad very suddenly,” said Donald McIsaac, the council’s executive director. “It’s a very, very severe situation.”

For those of us who love to eat salmon it’s a situation we should watch. For those who make their living fishing for salmon, it’s a nightmare. We can expect that salmon prices will rise, but it will be worth the effort if it means recovery of this natural resource.

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There’s a great little Irish Pub called Dargan’s where Mike and I love to drop in for a quick bite after a movie when we’re in Santa Barbara . It’s right downtown, stays open late, has a friendly staff, and good pub grub. They celebrate the 17th of every month at Dargan’s with half price specials on all the traditional Irish fare on their menu, consequently the place is jammed packed on those nights. But the monthly celebration is but a warm up to their annual March 17 celebration for St. Patrick’s Day. Then, it’s standing room only in the bar and not a table to be had.

This year, we will be at our home at Tahoe and so we’ll miss out on the Dargan’s festivities, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy a little Irish tradition to honor the day by eating (and drinking) Irish.

On the drinking Irish front, we’ll pop the top on a can of imported Strongbow dry cider. OK, technically it’s English, but at only about 0.75 gram of carb per ounce, it’s a pretty good carb bargain, compared to, say, a Guinness or even compared to other brands of hard cider, which can often be pretty sweet.

The most traditional of all Irish dishes is Colcannon, which is made, chiefly, with that most traditional of Irish vegetables, the potato, which presents a slight problem for anyone trying to follow a traditional low carb diet. The rest of what’s in it–kale, butter, cream, leeks and a little onion–is pretty low carb friendly.

Never one to let tradition stand in the way of…uh…tradition, I set about to bend Colcannon to my will and here’s the result:

Cauli Colcannon

1 large head cauliflower, washed, trimmed, and chopped coarsely
1 pound kale, washed thoroughly, and chopped coarsely
12 tablespoons butter, divided use
1/4 cup warm half and half cream
2 leeks, trimmed and finely chopped
1/2 cup sweet onions, finely chopped
1 tablespoon fresh flat leaf parsley, minced
Celtic Sea Salt and Freshly Ground pepper to taste
1 pound bacon, cooked crisp, drained

1. In a large stock pot, bring 1 gallon of water to a boil, add 1 tablespoon sea salt and the kale. Cook for 2 minutes, drain, and set aside.
2. Meanwhile, place the pieces of cauliflower and about 1 tablespoon of water into a microwave safe dish. Cover and cook on hi power for 6 minutes. Carefully remove the cover, stir, and microwave until quite tender, about another 3 minutes on hi power.
3. Melt 4 tablespoons of the butter in a microwave safe bowl.
4. Place the cauliflower into a food processor, add the melted butter, cream, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, and process until smooth. Set aside.
5. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a soup pot over medium heat. Saute the leeks and onions until tender. Add the kale, increase the heat to high, and saute another few minutes.
6. Add the cauliflower puree and bacon to the pot and mix all ingredients thoroughly.
7. Divide evenly among 6 shallow bowls. Make an indention in the center of the mound. Place 1 tablespoon of butter and a sprinkling of fresh parsley into the indentation. Serve with a side of grilled ‘bangers’, a roasted leg of lamb, or just on its own.

May the luck of the Irish be yours this year! Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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I love wine, an admission that should surprise none of my family or friends or the regular readers of this blog. I’m an oenophile, a lover of the grape, but I would consider myself the farthest thing removed from a wine snob. Sure I love a complex cab with lamb or beef, a big rip-snortin’ full-bodied zin with a juicy grilled steak, a buttery chard with lobster or scallops. And champagne, of course, to celebrate absolutely anything…or absolutely nothing. Champagne needs no excuse!

I love to find a bargain, a wine that I especially enjoy that is affordable enough for every day use. For instance, I’ve enjoyed many a $7 bottle of Rex Goliath (the 47 Pound Rooster) Central Coast pinot or cab over the years. And I enjoyed it every bit as much as a 1982 Bordeaux we babied in our cellar for nearly 20 years, a Cos d’Estornel that had lost a little of its former power, yet would currently sell for hundreds of dollars a bottle. If enjoyment is the goal, why not find a wine you really like that can enjoy a lot more often?

We’ve been lucky enough to taste some really fine wines over the years and for my part, I admit to enjoying them all. A ‘63 vintage port and the magnum of Montevetrano we drank with friends in Campania on our anniversary in 2005 come to mind. But Mike and I have also always loved the inexpensive, simple, local ‘jug’ wines always readily available in trattorias, osterias, tabernas, and small cafes throughout the Mediterranean that wine snobs would sniff at and discount as inferior. They may not cost much, but they’re delicious all the same.

So it was with interest that I read an article appeared today in our local paper by Frank Greve of MclClatchy Newservice, titled Study: Wine’s price tag contributes to pleasure.

The study, conducted by Hilke Plassmann and colleagues at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena used MRI scanners to sense changes in a couple of areas of the brain associated with taste and another associated with the pleasantness of a sensation while subjects imbibed tiny sips of various wines injected through a plastic tube into their mouths. Researchers told the subjects the purported price of the wine they were tasting and discovered that the pleasantness associated with a wine increases with price. Though the taste perception centers remained unchanged, the more a subject thought a wine cost, the more pleasant the perceived sensation–even when it was the exact same wine.

Granted, a great part of the wine experience comes from other sensory cues. The nose, the color, the chance to swirl the sip around in your mouth. A big cab just tastes better in a fine piece of stemware with the soft lights glinting off the curve of the crystal than it does in a Dixie cup or injected through a plastic tube while you’re in an MRI tunnel.

Still, I had to wonder if I’d been one of the subjects in this test, would I have arrived at the same perception that equates quality, or more correctly pleasantness of sensation, with price? Most of us–and I include myself in this group–like to think we simply like what we like, but research suggests the truth might be otherwise. This single study, at any rate, indicates that the human brain may be swayed more by the perceived value in dollars than ’sense’. Could it be that regardless of what our taste centers tell us, the more expensive we think a wine is, the better we enjoy it?

About the only way to find out would be to sacrifice ourselves for the good of science and assemble a group of friends to do a blind tasting (or seven) of various types of wine.

Here are the rules of the ‘in the interest of science’ wine tasting series that we could undertake to discover on our own if it’s price or taste that moves us.

1.) Stick to one grape variety at each tasting–cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir, syrrah, merlot, cabernet franc–to make it a fair fight, since the tastes can be so different. Once you’ve worked your way through the reds, start on the whites, then the champagnes, then the dessert wines. (I told you a wine tasting or seven, right?)

2.) Include wines of all different price points: a bottle of Two Buck Chuck or the aforementioned Rex Goliath, a couple of midrange $15 to $20 bottles, a bottle in the $35 to $45 range, and one really expensive one, such as an Opus One cab (the jaw-dropping cost of which everyone in the tasting could split.)

3.) With all labels obscured in like manner so no one knows what’s what and pencils and pads at hand to record your innermost thoughts, begin: swirl, sniff, sip, and savor.

4.) Now unblind the bottles and see how your taste correlates with price. You may find some wonderful bargain wines to love.

Now repeat the whole evening, but this time engage the services of a non-tasting assistant to help you and your guests test price perception versus pleasure.

1.) For this experiment, you’ll need two bottles of each wine represented. The non-participating assistant will wrap the wines and label them with only a price–one bottle of a pair with the real price and the other with a price at the opposite end of the scale. A $7 wine will be labeled $7 (the real price) and, say, $80 or $90. And an $85 wine will be labeled $85 and maybe $15.

2.) Again, with the swirl, sniff, sip, savor routine, rate the wines simply for enjoyment on a scale of 1 (wouldn’t feed it to my step mother’s dog) to 10 (nectar of the gods) and see if for the same wine price made any difference in your perception.

By the time you finish all these tastings, you’ll be quite pickled, but when you sober up, send me your findings and I’ll share them with the readers. It won’t be scientific, but it might be enlightening.

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