March 3rd, 2010by Ed Bruske · Recipes
I'm melting!
Cheese omelet with balsamic-glazed beef heart
preparation time: 15 minutes
shopping: none
I got distracted and missed breakfast so I made breakfast for lunch.
I love beef heart, not only because it tastes very much like beef tenderloin–just a little chewier–but because it is such a bargain. It comes from the grassfed herd at our local dairy, which charges just $5 for a whole heart weighing nearly three pounds. I season pieces of the heart with salt and pepper and marinate them in balsamic vinegar while my iron skillet is getting hot. They take just a few minutes to cook in the hot pan.
The omelet is made with pastured eggs from the farmers market and stuffed with shavings from a wine-soaked cheese that came back from a catering job. To top it all off is the reduced sauce from some braised beef short ribs we made for that same catered dinner. Do I really need to say how good this was?
Tags: beef·eggs·lunch
March 2nd, 2010by Ed Bruske · Wellness
Watch that bun: Carbs are not your friend
It must have come as a surprise to many that a president as young and vigorous as Barack Obama could be experiencing cholesterol issues, as reported this week. But even more surprising is the misinformation being doled out by the people around him about the likely causes. “Too many burgers,” came the ready explanation. More likely, Mr. Obama’s beef isn’t with the meat he eats or even the fat in it, but with the cushy bun surrounding his burger and his apparent weakness for White House pies.
In his most recent physical exam, Obama’s cholesterol had spiked. His total cholesterol was up to 209, compared to 173 previously. HDL–or “good” cholesterol–had dropped slightly to 62. But LDL–or “bad” cholesterol–was up to 138. Borderline hich cholesterol starts at 200, with LDL considered unsafe above 130.
Most cholesterol doesn’t come from what we eat, but rather is manufactured by the body. Genetics play a huge role in whether a person’s cholesterol level is high or low. However, the body’s cholesterol function can be influenced by the foods we consume and medical research is accumulating more and more evidence that the culprit behind high cholesterol isn’t what we’ve been led to believe–meat and fat–but all the cheap, refined carbohydrates in the modern American diet: french fries, cakes, cookies, chips, beer, sodas.
[Read more →]
Tags: carbohydrates·cholesterol·fat·Obama
March 1st, 2010by Ed Bruske · garden
When compost calls, we spring into action
I do a lot of foraging for compost ingredients. But sometimes compost comes from unexpected places.
Our friend Timothy and her housemates had been making compost in a Rubbermaid trash can using all their kitchen scraps. When it came time for them to move, Timothy asked me if I wanted their compost-in-progress. Yesterday, while they were holding an indoor yard sale trying to unload all their other accumulated stuff, I drove over with my hand truck thinking we’d just hoist that trash can into the trunk of the car and haul it away.
Getting the can to the car was no trouble, although a trash barrel full of kitchen scraps can weigh quite a lot. But when we hoisted it up, we found that it didn’t exactly fit in the trunk of my Toyota Corolla. Fortunately, I found a stash of bungee cords under a jug of windshield wiper fluid and some grocery bags. These proved to be enough to secure the can tentatively in place while I gingerly drove it back home. I have to admit, the occasional speed bumps were a little scary.
Then picture me using all my weight to heave that can on the hand truck up a flight of steps and finally to our composting area. I have a three-bin system and always keep one bin empty for turning. I just tipped the can into the empty middle bin, knocked the pile down, then turned one of my own piles-in-progress into the middle bin to cover what Timothy had donated. In a few months, I figure, it will be ready to use in the garden.
At this point, there’s no heat happening in the compost I started last year. But it is swarming with earth worms. I hate to disturb them. But a composter has to do what a composter has to do. And can I just say, the sweet aroma of compost can mean only one thing: spring can’t be far beind.
Thanks, Timothy!
Tags: composting
February 28th, 2010by Ed Bruske · Recipes, kids
Teaching kids to make food from scratch
With refined flour, sugar and grape jelly, these pancakes wouldn’t appear at the top of my list of healthful foods I would wish for my daughter. But she made them herself, so I count this as a win. Anything that disabuses kids of processed factory foods is a good thing, in my book. Plus, this recipe does include protein-rich peanut butter. And making these pancakes from scratch means you know they’re not like the processed food currently being served in D.C. schools, with all the chemical additives and preservatives.
You could even make them a little healthier by replacing some of the refined flour with whole wheat.
[Read more →]
Tags: breakfast·pancakes
February 27th, 2010by Ed Bruske · garden
Collards thrive in the snow
Our lavender plant was completely flattened by two and a half feet of snow. The rosemary was splayed all over the ground as well. But the greens we planted last fall were unfazed and have bounced right back. Like these “Champion” collards, which received another dusting of snow last night.
I am always amazed how certain greens can survive the worst that winter delivers. Of course, if we had a green house, or if I’d bothered to erect a a plastic “tunnel” in the garden when I had a chance, we could be harvesting plenty of collards and kale and even salad straight through the coldest months. Even so, we’ll be eating our greens soon enough. I tasted some mizuna yesterday and it was powerful good. Brassica greens develop even more flavor after they’ve been “kissed” by frost.
If you planted greens in the fall and they were buried under the snow, just wait. Chances are they will revive and feed you into the spring.
Tags: greens·winter
February 26th, 2010by Ed Bruske · kids
How to keep lunch warm?
After I spent a week in the kitchen at my daughter’s elementary school and discovered just how bad the food was, daughter started taking her own lunch. It wasn’t just what I wrote about the food that convinced her. Around that same time, she reported to her pediatrician for an annual physical. The doctor told daughter, who has grown around the middle lately, that she was eating too many carbohydrates. And she was sympathetic: Her own kids had gained 10 pounds when they started eating at school.
So now daughter is taking her lunch to school, just as she was doing when she attended charter school before enrolling in our neighborhood public school. There’s just one problem. At the charter school, there was a microwave in the lunchroom. Daughter could heat her meals. In the local elementary school, there is no microwave. You either take what’s offered at the steam table, or you’re on your own.
I don’t remember eating a hot lunch when I was a kid. I always brown-bagged it. I must have eaten a sandwich every day for years, even through high school. But kids these days expect a hot meal and the absence of a microwave in the lunchroom was the reason that daughter started eating school food in the first place. How to get the food we make at home warm?
My wife went out and bought some thermal containers for daughter’s lunch box. But daughtercomplained that by the time lunch rolled around, the food packed in the morning had grown cold despite the thermal containers. Recently we stumbled into a solution when we simply couldn’t get our act together to prepare daughter’s lunch in time for her to leave for school in the morning. I promised to walk it the four blocks to school during the lunch break. The delay proved to be an inspiration: We heated the lunch at the last minute, packed it into the thermal containers and hoofed it over to daughter, who was waiting for the hand-off of her lunch box.
Since then, we’ve started delivering hot lunch by foot every day. We now have our established rendezvous point. Daughter waits for me to arrive. Lunch might be soup or spaghetti or tofu and edamame. Whatever, it’s been freshly heated and daughter can sit down to a warm meal. Meanwhile, I get eight blocks worth of aerobic walking (four blocks each way). And that’s in addition to walking daughter to school in the morning. (Mom fetches her in the afternoon.)
So daughter gets her hot meal, I get some extra exercise. Granted, this isn’t something every parent can do. We just happen to work at home. And although I kind of like this new routine, I have to wonder: isn’t there some way D.C. Public Schools could make microwaves available for kids who bring their own lunch?
Tags: school food
February 25th, 2010by Ed Bruske · food news
A bad rap for fat
A major new study has the mainstream media buzzing with news that saturated fat does not pose a significant risk for heart disease.
This is something we’ve known all along, and a finding that Gary Taubes published eight years ago in his monumental analysis of fat science, “Good Calories, Bad Calories.” Taubes found that the incessant rant against fat was more religion than science. But now medical researchers are coming forward with the view that suppressing the consumption of fat–an essential macro-nutrient, along with protein–has simply delivered consumers to the sugar and high-fructose corn syrup industries and helped create the environment for an explosion of obesity and metabolic disorders such as diabetes.
Fat is not only essential for health, but is highly satiating–much more so than the cheap carbohydrates that have become a hallmark of the American diet. A little fat can go a long way toward bringing appetite under control and actually reducing the craving for more calories. This is why federal policies that encourage low-fat milk injected with sugar in school meals ranks as one of the dumbest ideas yet perpetrated on American children.
Much more important than the amount of fat in the diet is the type of fat. Americans consume far too many Omega-6 fats from super-processed oils such as soybean, corn and cottonseed–all cheap forms of fat that benefit U.S. agribusiness but were completely unknown to humans until recently. We should all be consuming more mono-unsaturated fats from olive oil, nuts, avocados–and yes, even canola oil–as well as Omega-3 oils from oily fish and flax. As the latest news points out, even animal fats are a mix of saturated, mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated lipids.
For a detailed analysis of the latest study on fat, see the article posted by low-carb diet advocate Dr. Michael Eades on his blog. It’s long and detailed, but worth the time.
Tags: diabetes·fat·Gary Taubes·obesity
February 23rd, 2010by Ed Bruske · kids
Caution: Gardening in progress
When Alice Waters came to Washington last month she met with D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the schools’ new food service director, Jeffrey Mills, to talk about building a model school garden program in the District. Mills was already keen on the idea, so in very short order he asked Sarah Bernardi at Bancroft Elementary School to write up a proposal and send it to Waters’ office in Berkeley, California, to be vetted. All of this was done in a great rush in anticipation of public hearings on the “Healthy Schools” legislation pending before the D.C. Council. As it turned out, the hearings were postponed until March. But the proposal marches on.
A comment posted here yesterday, attached to an interview with Anthony Tata, the school system’s chief operating officer, apparently caused a stir because it questioned the experience level of those involved in drafting the model school garden proposal. First, Bancroft Elementary, having one of the most mature school gardening program in the city, along with Watkins Elementary on Capitol Hill, is a logical place to look for know-how. Second, since the ink isn’t even dry on this proposal, it does seem a bit premature to be holding it up for scrutiny.
In their follow-up comments, longtime Bancroft gardener Iris Rothman and Sarah Bernardi give plenty of assurance that the process for developing the model garden proposal is not only in very capable hands, but will be shared with everyone in the city who embraces the notion that food gardens–as envisioned in the “Healthy Schools” act–are an important piece of the solution to food illiteracy. What’s more, Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard team have enough expertise to put to rest any concerns there might be about the adequacy of this proposal.
Bernardi recently published here an impassioned essay about the need for full-time staff to oversee school gardens, rather than relying on volunteers and overburdened teachers. This evolving proposal apparently includes precisely that.
Now, perhaps we can tempt Iris and Sarah to catch us up on what’s happening with this project by way of a post of their own?
Tags: District of Columbia·school gardens
February 22nd, 2010by Ed Bruske · Tales, food news
- D.C. Schools COO, Anthony Tata
Anthony Tata, a former brigadier general and career Army officer in charge of procurement in Afghanistan, is the chief operating officer for D.C. Public Schools, second in rank to chancellor Michelle Rhee. Tata was a close reader of our recent series of articles on the food served in D.C. schools–Tales from a D.C. School Kitchen–which questioned the highly processed and frequently sugary fare being served to children on a daily basis. Tata told The Washington Post that he is considering other options besides the school system’s current food provider, Chartwells. You won’t find him disparaging Chartwells in this interview with The Slow Cook, except to say that school officials “are working with Chartwells to address concerns.” Tata does say he is looking for ways to include more local produce in school meals and is considering a switch from highly-sweetened flavored milk. And there’s a new director of school food services on the scene who is particularly keen on school gardens.
Question: First, some background. Can you tell us what the situation was like for food services in D.C. Public Schools in 2007 when Ms. Rhee took office as chancellor? How was food being prepared at that time?
Answer: The District ran all aspects of its food service operation “in house.” Secondary schools provided fresh cooked meals. However, elementary school meals were “pre-plated” and not cooked fresh on site. The meals were packaged off-site by a third party vendor and delivered to schools where they were heated at the school by school staff. The number one issue raised consistently by students was that the food did not taste good. As a result, students did not eat the meals, and many meals went to waste. In addition, DCPS consistently lost money (over $30 million in the three years before the Chancellor’s arrival) due to low participation rates and paying for wasted meals. Shortly after the Chancellor’s arrival, we began a pilot program to improve food quality at a handful of DCPS schools.
Question: What was your vision for food services after taking office, and why did Chancellor Rhee elect to outsource, or contract, the food provider role for D.C. Public Schools?
Answer: After careful analysis, DCPS determined it could improve the quality of food and reduce financial losses through contracting with an external company to manage food service operations. In addition, the decision to contract for food service was based upon the idea that a school district’s core competencies lay in teaching and learning, not in some of the business essentials such as food service. Given the millions of dollars the program was losing, DCPS studied the problem and determined that finding a proven food services company to execute the program would save money and improve food quality, as it does in many large school districts.
[Read more →]
Tags: District of Columbia·obesity·school food
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, one mile from the White House.
