The diet was a success yesterday: a LOT of work. But I can see where it’ll get less as I get used to the style of cooking. The unexpected success was the salad/cold veggie. That involves a big cucumber and three radishes and a bell pepper, sliced paper thin, tossed and allowed to marinate for 30 minutes in a dressing made of 1 tbs virgin olive oil and 1 TSP balsamic vinegar, with salt and pepper. The thinness of the veggies means they sop up the flavor in the dressing, and they’re crunchy and cold, contrasted with the meat dish. Serves 2.
The salty little stuffed mushrooms were a winner, too. Pop the stems out of a couple of mushrooms, and in a small skillet, add the diced stems, a spoonful of olive oil, salt, and a couple of spoonfuls of frozen spinach. Heat same. Put the mushroom caps in, stuff them with the mix, and keep them on Low Heat with a lid for a bit while you fix other things. They make a warm salty bite or two.
And the potato substitute: you won’t believe this one:—microwave half a cauliflower, add it and powdered buttermilk, salt, pepper, and a little water to a blender set on ‘mash’. It actually tastes mostly like mashed potatoes, and not enough like cauliflower to offend anybody who really hates cauliflower. Quite a transformation.
The dessert: lime ricotta cream is, for one person, half a cup of ricotta cheese, add a packet of Splenda, and half a teaspoon of vanilla, then 1/4-1/2 tsp of the zest (scraped skin) of a lime. Stir, place in cup, set in fridge all day. I put these into the freezer during dinner, and they came out very nice. A little granular, like a snowcone: ricotta is; but the predominant taste is lime and dairy.
Anyway, tonight is salmon baked on a bed of fresh dill, with another veggie salad, and maybe more ‘potato’. I haven’t checked. But I give the menu so you can see how this works—how it IS work, but gets easier once you know the drill.
The one thing I am treating myself to is a Cuisinart to do fine slicing. I had a nasty accident with a mandolin (sliding slicer) that I don’t want to repeat, and while my hand slicing is pretty good for mushrooms, it gets risky with something like a radish that needs to go paper-thin.
So that is on the agenda for today.
I had a really bad experience with my mandolin, but then it was my own fault. Needless to say, it took a long time (hours) to stop the bleeding from my fingertip. I just bought a cheap food processor, not a food chopper, but something that will hold up to me making my eggroll stuffings, and won’t clog up like my mini-chopper did.
I did enough damage to myself with a mandolin to justify buying fine and coarse slicing blades for my food processor, and haven’t looked back. Routine slicing and dicing I do by hand with very very good knives that get sharpened regularly, but anything fine or in bulk gets fed into the processor.
An exception was when I made a bulk load of chutney a week or so ago: the processor cut things too fine or pulverized them, so all the chopping was done by hand by my willing assistant (who has discovered that he actually enjoys cooking now that he has retired.)
Oh, yes, cauliflower as a potato substitute is fine – mashed are great, but it can also be used in place of rice once you find a good way to make it into small bits.
Yup, the cauliflower is a weightwatcher staple. It’s been around for years.
I used buttermilk powder with the cauliflower instead of milk powder, and I think that may have made it particularly good.
The greatest downside of veggies is storage. Most everything I’m allowed to have requires refrigeration, and they’re bulky; annnnd they have a fairly short shelf life. If I were really going green, I’d get head lettuce; but I buy it in bags. But other veggies, I buy the whole vegetable, and that includes broccoli, cauliflower, etc, because you can taste the bag on any sulfur-heavy vegetable. Tomatoes can’t be bruised by drawer-rummaging, so they have their spot.
We’re also going to need to get extra ricotta cheese, since that’s going to be a popular dessert. And then I need to get some things I wouldn’t have thought I’d need, like fresh herbs, for certain applications. Fresh dill with the salmon I understand. The garlic turned out to be a bust—not that great a recipe, and we prefer to cook beefsteak with Worcestershire sauce instead of all that fuss with marinating. We’ll see how good their chicken recipes are.
The Cuisinart won’t work nearly as well as the mandolin – it can’t slice thinly enough (I make a hungarian cucumber salad that uses the same principal). I recommend you purchase a Microplane Cut-Resistant Glove (tested and recommended by Cook’s Illustrated) – Amazon sells them for about US$15. That way you get the joys of the mandolin without the “whoops…arrgh!” 😉
Glad to hear of the possibilities of the new diet! Hope it continues to go well. 😀
Forewarned is forearmed! After hearing horror stories of mandolin slicing and dicing, I bought a KitchenAid mandolin with a prong thingy that goes into the food being sliced. I had my doubts upon actually viewing it, but I have to say *it REALLY works*. We have been using it for all manner of slicing with much happiness and no blood.
With food processors I think it depends on the blades and manufacturer. My mini processor slices are almost half the thickness of my big processor.
I also have a Mouli Mill with many different slicing and shredding blades. It comes in handy when doing just a few items. I have no idea if they are still made. However, I still think nothing beats properly sharpened carbon steel knives! 😉
BTW, don’t know if your recipes call for it, but ricotta can be smoothed out by giving it a few pulses in the food processor. Oh, and you know those long term veggie storage bags you see advertised on late night television? They work quite well. I buy them at Job Lot or the Dollar Store. 8)
Correction: The big KitchenAid slices thiner than the mini Cuisinart. Advantage of the mini is that it has a side shooter top which slices into a bowl….very handy when prepping salad for twenty. I don’t know if this option is still available as mine is over thirty years old.
Well, I was going to suggest a mandolin slicer, but I hear you: they terrify me, and I’m always incredibly careful when using mine (after having neatly sliced off a piece fingernail & fingertip).
I’ve seen the Iron Chefs use a Benriner slicer, but the iron chefs use the glove mentioned by Carson Gaspar (above). The little plastic thing that comes with the Benriner isn’t very useful whatsoever.
When we had a cuisinart, we never really used it for slicing, just because it 1) wouldn’t get things sliced thinly enough, and 2) it was a heck of a lot of cleanup for single dishes.
I went out and bought a Cuisinart, for which I paid more than I liked—the 9 cup one. BUT, having read that it doesn’t have thin slicing, which is what I need, I’m stuck with the mandolin. I then went up to Amazon, found one that has a pusher with a rail guide, that keeps your fingers away; AND I ordered one of the protective gloves that are recommended for using them. So hopefully I will be more careful this go-round; and I am saving half the price of the Cuisinart, which will go back to Lowe’s not even opened.
Thanks, all: you’re a fount of wisdom and experience.
I have a friend who refuses to eat cauliflower any other way!
I LOVE my Cuisinart. It came with a thick-slicing disk; I got the thin-slicing one later.
This diet has some delicious-sounding goodies. I continue to stand by my not-from-a-diet-book eating plan, but I do like the sound of some of those things.
Got the audiobook of Omnivore’s Dilemma and listened to it while making chain mail jewelry over the weekend. Very interesting book. Its spirit is now fabricated into two necklaces and a pair of earrings.
Evert Fresh Green Food Bags — look them up on Ebay. They really work, and can be re-used many times. Get small or medium for most items. Large will hold a whole sack of potatoes!
PSA: Lois Bujold will be at a book-signing for Cryoburn (more Miles!!!) in Spokane on Thursday, October 21, at Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 W. Main, from 7:00 to 9:00pm.
I have an old (late 1980s?) Cuisanart with 5 different slicing disks — one is very, very thin but you are limited by the size of the feeding tube. I have 2 shredding disks, 2 sizes for french fries, and a couple of other weird shapes. I haven’t used most of them in years! But your recipes are inspiring me – I want to try the thinly sliced vegetable salads. And I second the mashed cauliflower.
Alas, the one I bought (and am about to return) has only medium slicing available.
Really, re Lois? We should give her a shout out.
and I have finally successfully loaded a gravatar!!!..well, the cropping leaves something to be desired, but I think I’ll leave well enough alone for tonight.
Congrats!
I don’t know if the current incarnation of Cuisinart offers additional slicing disks – the pre-bankruptcy version tried to be an all purpose tool – I have a juicer attachment (it’s easier to juice a few by hand) and a whipping attachment (I pull out the trusty kitchen mixer rather than go through the difficult set up process). Most of the additions weren’t very useful in practice. The worst thing is that the current version can’t use the older model’s disks so I am babying the base as it ages.
It does puree cauliflower quite well, though.
Only an endless variety of sizes of machines, instead of one or two machines supported really well with spare discs, etc.
After having tried a food processor, a Mouli-rape (that’s rap-pe!) combo slicer and grater, a regular tower grater, and an industrial slicer when I worked at Taco Bell in college, none of them beat a surgically sharp knife and a wooden cutting board. I am particularly fond of my Japanese damascus steel paring knife, and my ceramic chef’s knife. As long as I remember to keep my fingertips curled back, I do pretty well in the wafer thin slicing department. Everything mechanized is too much of a pain in the tuckus to clean, and the graters are inconsistent.
I wish I were that good. I’m getting better. I can crack eggs one-handed, and manage an even cut on soft things like cucumber, but radishes are a challenge. I agree with you—if you’ve got meaningful culinary knife skills, a knife is enough.
While we’re talking about food I should mention a new OReilly book by Jeff Potter called _Cooking for Geeks_. I bought the PDF on sale for $10, and now (because cookbooks really don’t work on screen) I have to go buy a paper copy. It’s about the tools – carbon steel knives versus stainless steel knives, and the sharpening thereof, and the chemistry, and all kinds of neat stuff in between – interviews with chefs and such. Fascinating… Go to OReilly and check it out. $35 US or $44 CDN (grumble) maybe cheaper from Amazon?
What fun!
I confess to being a Hell’s Kitchen devotee…
Not sure where to put it, but just wanted to mention that I found out yesterday that there was a major physical phenomena (the same type as solar eclipses) happening in a few days : CJ and Lois McMaster Bujold will be in the same town in a few days :
From her blog, Lois will be at “Aunties Bookstore” (Spokane) from 7PM to 9PM n October the 21st …
This means that two out of three of my prefferred authors will be co-towned for a few hours ! A MASSIVE event 😉
My favorite new cookbook is Good Eats: The Early Years (ca. $30 at Costco). I’m an Alton Brown fan anyway, and enjoy the show, but the recipes are great too, with lots of chef-nerdy info included.
I must add that my horror story with my mandolin (from Pampered Chef) was that I didn’t use the food holder while slicing a potato. When I failed to note that my finger was almost touching the surface of the mandolin, I pushed it right across the blade. I certainly didn’t need a manicure from the mandolin, but that’s what I got. A previous accident while working in a sheet metal fabrication department of the factory took off a small portion of the tip of that same finger back in 1971, so really, it just took off more scar tissue.
I’ll still use the mandolin for bulk slicing of foods, and I will promise myself to use the food holder while slicing said foods.