A New Kind of Junk Food

Fast food, boxed food, fried food, 100% “sugar-food”, foods made with hydrogenated oils, chemically-laced foods, foods so far removed from actual food that they’re causing an epidemic of obesity. What to do? What to do? Why, cut out the Junk Food, and eat Real Food, of course.

But what is Real Food? All of the fish on our planet are potentially contaminated, many of our most basic crops are genetically modified then irradiated, livestock is injected with hormones and antibiotics, the majority of our crops are sprayed and fertilized with harsh chemicals and stripped of vitamins and minerals, our water is “fortified”, and now – we have to deal with unlabeled, cloned meat and milk. Even if we never eat conventional “junk food” the food we do eat could easily qualify as a new kind of junk food. Junk Food disguised as Real Food that is causing an epidemic of diseases this planet has never encountered before.

What to do, indeed! I can tell you that as a population, we are faced with some mighty overwhelming obstacles. I feel like I’m part of a giant science experiment that couldn’t possibly have a good outcome…even vegetarians have to think about the sources of the food they eat. When I look down the road to the end of my personal science experiment, I wonder how I could possibly remain healthy if everything I eat is modified to this unheard-of degree. And the problem gets bigger every day.

What we can do about this predicament is to vote with our pocketbooks. I know that sounds like the long way ‘round to this goal, but when we consume clean, organic food we get an immediate benefit to our own bodies, and we begin to detoxify and strengthen our cells, muscles, tissues and so forth. We also give an immediate benefit to the planet: as more people insist on Real Food, the effect is to detoxify depleted farmland. Farmland that has been overworked and soaked with chemicals is allowed to transition to healthy, certified organic farmland producing clean, nutrition-packed food the way our parents and grandparents enjoyed it. Real Food, if you will.

If you eat Real Food, you can enjoy more of those foods we’ve been conditioned to avoid. And a prime example (no pun intended) is organic meat. Grass-fed organic meat is higher in CLAs than any conventional meat. CLAs are the beef-protein version of the Omega-3s found in fatty fish such as salmon. Even non-grass-fed organic meat is preferable to conventional meat because it is fed with organic hay, grains and legumes and corn – not the genetically modified, pesticide saturated feed that factory cattle are fed. Let’s not even mention the steroids they’re injected with to produce more muscle, and the antibiotics that follow the steroids because of the problems the steroids produce, and now the cloning for who-knows-what-reason...

I will probably never give up meat altogether. I love comfort food, and on these winter weekends I love to braise organic short ribs for hours in the oven, or get the slow cooker out for a great soup idea. And I love the reassurance I feel that the food I’m eating is REAL. Let’s take the “guilt” out of “guilty pleasure” with a recipe that makes a Real winner of a weekend dinner:

ITALIAN PEPPER STEAK

This recipe is very, very freeform. You cannot mess it up, ingredient-wise. This is one of my many, many versions, but feel free to go to the comments section with your ideas, too.

2# Sirloin or Round Steak cut in strips

Flour to coat

1 med. Yellow Onion, chopped

6 cloves Garlic, chopped

Olive Oil

2 Green Peppers cut in strips

1 lg. can Whole Tomatoes and maybe a smaller one, too

2 Tb. Tomato Paste

½ C Dry Sherry, Red Wine or Water

Salt and Pepper

Pasta

First, chop up the onion and garlic and slice up the meat. In a stockpot, heat a little olive oil and drop in the onion and garlic. Reduce the heat to med. high and stir fairly constantly. You do not want the onions or garlic to brown. If they’re starting to brown, turn the heat down. (I sound like Johnnie Cochran). While that’s cooking, toss the meat strips in flour and shake off the excess.

When the veggies have a nice sheen, remove them from the pan, add a little more oil and drop in the meat. Stir that meat constantly or it will stick, stick, stick – and then burn. While that’s cooking, grind up the tomatoes in your blender. When the meat is evenly browned (about 7 min.) remove it from the pan and pour in the sherry. Stir the sherry and scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Let it reduce to “almost invisible”. Now, pour in the ground tomatoes, the meat and the onions and garlic. Bring the pot up to a low simmer, partially cover and stir it occasionally for about an hour.

While that’s going on, cut up the green peppers in strips. After the hour has gone by, heat up a pan to very high, put in some olive oil and drop in the peppers. Sprinkle lightly with salt. Constantly stir them and let them get a bit browned, but don’t go overboard or they’ll disintegrate in the sauce later. Then add the tomato paste and keep that stirring action going until the peppers are coated and the paste is beginning to cook.

I’d like to stop here and make a note about tomato paste. I use it frequently. A little cooked tomato paste will thicken and enrich any dish, and it doesn’t have to be a tomato dish. I use it for beef sauces, chicken sauces and even vegetable sauces. So, rather than open a can of tomato paste and use a Tb. or two just to throw the rest out, I buy it in tubes. It’s a little more expensive, but I use all of it, so the cost works out for me.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled recipe method:

Time to add the peppers to the sauce. Just pop them in and stir well. It’s also time to start the pasta water (now that I have a free burner. I don’t consider the little burners on my stove as burners, actually, but more like holding areas). I was considering making homemade spaetzle for this dish last night because I had a taste for gnocchi (figure that one out!), but I was feeling kinda lazy (or maybe kinda crazy!), so I opted for the factory-made kind. Any kind of pasta will work here, but I prefer egg-y noodles, myself.

Now. Taste the sauce. What does it need? Salt? Pepper? Basil? Oregano? Parsley? How do you like your gravy to taste? Adjust the seasonings to make yourself smile, cook and drain the pasta, and get ready to serve. At the end of the process I grated Pecorino Romano on top instead of Parmesan. Why? Because it’s made from sheep’s’ milk and it has a more complex flavor than Parm.

A note about the pictures. We got a new camera for Christmas, and I can see that I need to start standing on a ladder to take pictures for this blog. Either that, or get a little taller, somehow. They all came out a little blurry, but they all still look yummy – to me, at least.

Send me your recipes. I’ll make them and blog them. Otherwise, you’re stuck with mine. =)

Where's Rita?

Hello, and sorry for the long lag between posts. In the beginning of August I wound up in the hospital quite unexpectedly for a week! I’ve never been overnight in a hospital in my life – it was quite an experience. I’ve been recovering at home for a couple of weeks, but I managed to celebrate my daughter's wedding. Now I’m climbing up onto the TCF saddle again, even if just for the mornings for now.

So, What’s New????

Metz Fresh in California is recalling their bagged spinach because of a possible salmonella outbreak. Metz Fresh does not grow organically so you’re OK if you stick with organics.

The Green City Market in Chicago begins their “Eat Locally” challenge today. This is a really interesting concept and is causing mountains of chatter. For a look at what Chicagoans think about the idea, check out one of my favorite message boards: www.lthforum.com and go to the subject: "Other Culinary Chat” and then to “How to Eat Local”. This discussion centers around a few broad subjects..such as: “What Exactly does ‘Local’ Mean?” , “What about Chocolate,Coffee and Beer – Do I have to Give them Up?”, “What about Packaged Foods?” and many other daring questions. One writer offered these reasons to eat locally:

Locally grown produce is fresher.
Local food just plain tastes better.
Locally grown fruits and vegetables have longer to ripen.
Buying local food keeps us in touch with the seasons.
Buying locally grown food is fodder for a wonderful story.
Local food translates to more variety.

Locally grown produce is not always fresher. Farmers have to sell as much of their crop as possible and this means sometimes rotating older produce in with newer produce. I’d argue that local food tastes better if it’s grown in clean, healthy soil. Those strawberries in the grocery store that taste like wood are local to somebody – and they don’t taste any better at the source. I’m assuming the third point is referring to ripening on the vine. This statement is usually true.

Buying local food keeps us in touch with the seasons in whatever definition of ‘local’ we have adopted. Planting a garden will do a better job of it. I’m not sure what the ‘wonderful story’ is; but I’m all ears if someone will tell it. If local food translates to ‘more variety’ we would have been eating only locally since forever. Let’s be honest -- the whole idea of this challenge is to limit your variety and see if your idea to eat locally really can line up with your actions.

There are other issues that are not addressed: what if the food is sprayed with herbicides, pesticides and fungicides? Is ‘local’ still better then? How about if you don’t live near a big city like Chicago where you can shop at a farmers’ market? How much gasoline is OK to burn in pursuit of eating locally? And what do you do in the dead of winter? There is an underlying, unspoken message in the ‘eat locally’ movement, and that is: “If we all do this together, we can break the distribution network that moves food from one coast to the other.” This will probably never happen. Millions of people rely on, are employed by or own aspects of the distribution network. The sheer complexity of it cannot be addressed by an ‘eat local’ movement.

You may have noticed in the grocery store that you can now buy locally grown melons or zucchini. Since grocery stores were born they have been buying locally for in-season produce because their shipping costs are lower. Now, since the buzz words ‘locally grown’ are in vogue, they have begun labeling them as such.

The idea is to ‘look before you leap”, but people often adopt buzz words without really thinking about what they mean when they say them.

The REAL Stewards of the Earth -- an Opinion

Have you been watching the ABC World News Tonight’s 3-part series on organic food? It’s been two days of broadcasts so far, and I’m seeing the usual distortions, but nothing new. I went to the Broadcast Plus section of their website to look a little further into the subject and I found myself in an interesting conversation.

ABC provided a few links to 'find organic food in your area', so I checked them out. One of the links was to an “online community” which can put you in touch with organics in your area, so naturally, I tried to find Timber Creek. But we weren’t there. I emailed the webmaster (in California where this group is based) and told him about TCF. I asked him if he could include us in his database. But he said “NO”. His reason was that his organization only promotes family farms “that sell to their local communities and the businesses that support them.” (Interestingly, I could purchase organic and 'natural' foods from this website, and have it shipped across the country to me.)

So, I asked him: “How come I can buy organic food from you online (you’re in California and I’m in Illinois)? Isn’t that the same thing that TCF does?”

I’ll quote his answer directly:

“Our goals are:

#1: Family farms
#2: Buy Local
#3: Organic food

...in that order.

90% of the work we do is though our directory, where people find local sources of family-farm grown foods. We have a catalog where we sell products from family farms via mail order, which is how we support the project.”

Now, I didn’t write back to him, but I’m hearing this unusual argument a lot lately. The argument goes something like this:

“The most important thing we can do is to support the ‘little guys’ {farms} who are struggling to stay afloat. We all wish that we could just go down to the corner farm and buy our fruits and veggies, but since we can’t, we have to protect these guys as best we can, from being absorbed into the giant factory farms. And, locally grown food is better for you, anyway. If the food is Organic, well, that’s just a plus.”

Fair enough, I guess……but to me, that's exactly backwards:

If I’m spending my money at your farm to help keep your business afloat, don’t I have a say in what quality of food I’m buying from you? Yes, family farms have a unique struggle, and eating locally grown food is the ideal, but if your food could be slowly poisoning me and my family, why is helping your farm so important? The terms “locally grown” and “organic” are not mutually exclusive.

There are a lot of seemingly unsolvable issues in the organic world. Transportation over long distances seems counterproductive, yet if the farms in my area are only growing food with the full compliment of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, antibiotics, recombinant growth hormones, and such, I’m going to look elsewhere. Plenty of us don’t even know where the nearest farm would be – but many of us know better than to read the words “locally grown” without asking the far more important question: “is it clean?” All food is locally grown to someone – that doesn’t make it better for you.

The way I see it, there is nothing wrong with helping a farmer who lives somewhere other than my neighborhood, if he’s the one who will bring me the clean, organic food that I want. That organic farmer's success makes it easier for my neighbor the farmer to transition to organic, if that's what he wants to do. These far-flung farmers who, year after year, demonstrate their commitment to the future of the planet and my family’s health; help other farmers in the long run, too -- they're the real stewards of the earth. Not everyone cares about the quality of the food that they eat, but if you do, there is a farmer out there who is upholding the organic standards for YOU.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

... P.S. The lovely family farm in the picture above is the storefront of Roseland Organic Farms -- the USDA Certified Organic Farm in Niles, Michigan where we get our grassfed beef.