Ask the Food Fairy!

I’m getting married in October (!) and yesterday we started the process of registering for wedding presents. (fun!) Crate & Barrel was having a “party” for couples who wanted to register, which meant snacks (some demonstrating their gadgets, like waffles made in their waffle makers and fries made with a mandoline there) and extra help.

Not gluten-free waffles, sadly, but there were fine sausage patties. And cucumber water! I love that stuff.

There were folks from Shun pushing their knives and All-Clad pushing their pots. So we registered for a bunch of stuff, and came home to research some of the things we registered for – like, are Shun knives really better than Wusthof or whoever? (Internet says: the blades are awesome/depends what feels best in your hand/yes but they’re overpriced/I prefer brand X,Y,Z….)

All-Clad copper core versus Calphalon copper core was a harder question to resolve. Calphalon was already sort of off the list because they only had the copper pans as a set, and we don’t need all those pots and pans. But there was an All-Clad representative (or shill) there who was super-emphatic about how much better All-Clad was. She claimed that “because they are made in America,” each one is made from start to finish by one person. (Which would be better, but I don’t think it has a whole lot to do with them being made in America.) And that their copper core is thicker and that the All-Clad handles try to be heat-proof but aren’t, and… so on.

So, I asked the internet. And I got a freaking torrent of information. It seems to boil down to a couple of points:
* All-Clad copper cores are the only All-Clad pots that people like, and a lot of the time they talk about All-Clad copper pots being crap without specifying whether they mean the copper core ones or the ones that are just wrapped in copper.
* All-Clad has some great pots and Calphalon has some great pots, and both of them are way overpriced.
* You can get better pots with lesser-known names for cheaper, and you can get way way better pots for more expensive. (And sometimes even for cheaper.)
* It’s harder to register for pots from (what basically boils down to) companies with smaller advertising budgets because where do you find them?
* Sauteeing does not mean what I think it means.

A writer on eGullet, where most of my research drew me, was asked what the best pan would be to saute two chicken breasts and then deglaze a quick sauce, and wrote,

The first thing to understand is that we really don’t saute chicken breasts. If you refer back to my description of the saute pan, you will see that the French verb “sauter” means “to jump.” When we saute, we have a number of small items in a pan over high heat, and the pan is constantly agitated in order to jump the ingredients around and expose every side of the ingredients to the heat. The straight, relatively tall sides of the saute pan help to bounce food around back into the pan. You don’t really need to “toss” or “flip” the ingredients to saute either. All you need to do is simply shake the pan back and forth vigorously on the burner. My impression is that home cooks don’t tend to do all that much real sauteing.

Sauteing is, then, something you might do with chunks of chicken breast, but not with whole chicken breasts. Whole or flattened chicken breasts just sit there in the pan and fry. Fundamentally there is no reason you shouldn’t use a fry pan to do this. Among other things, it will be much easier to get a spatula under the food when it needs to be turned if it is in a fry pan. As for the pan sauce, if all you are going to be doing is deglazing with a little white wine and maybe swirling in a little butter there is no reason you couldn’t do this right in the fry pan. I’d recommend a nice heavy fry pan.

But, let’s take a slightly different approach and see how that changes the pan requirements. Let’s say we want to fry some chicken thighs until they are nice and brown together whith some small onions then add some white wine to the pan and quickly braise/steam the chicken until it is cooked through, at which point the solid ingredients will be removed and the liquid will be reduced and mounted with butter to form the sauce. In this case, a saute pan would be much better — even though you are not sauteing — because the higher sides and the lid make it a better environment for the quick braise and subsequent reduction part.

Fascinating, no? But what kicked me in the head here was that I have been evidently using “sauté” all wrong.

I always say – as any PeaceMeals customers may have noticed – “sauté.” Anytime you’re sticking food in a pan for hotness. Because I don’t think it’s as suave to say “Stick those potatoes in a pan with the onions, for hotness.” (I’m willing to entertain arguments that I am wrong about this.)

I didn’t even know what the difference was between a frying pan and a sauté pan! I would have guessed they were the same. I know omelette pans are different – at least I think they are.

Apparently, this is a sauté pan:

And this is a frying pan (or what may be more grammatically correct, “fry pan” – after all, we don’t say “sauteeing pan,” do we?):

What do I have, anyway? I know we have a (terrible, thin, overheating, non-stick) sauté pan, which I still find myself wanting to call a “frying pan.” And we have one black enamel actual frying pan and one aluminum actual frying pan. (Both of which are awesome, in case you were wondering.) And a scratched non-stick wok, which is irrelevant but nicely concludes the “pan-type-things” category.

The fry vs. saute question is fascinating to me because I think it goes back to “fear of fat.” I strongly suspect that the reason we overuse “sauté” in the United States is because we think we’re not supposed to “fry” things. “Frying” carries connotations of heavy, oily, FRIED food, which is supposed to be BAD because frying means FAT. Greasy greasy fat. Which, as we all (erroneously) know, leads straight to heart attacks and clinical obesity and probably grease-brain. (Like water on the brain. But with grease.)

Whereas “sauté” is French! Which means, even if it really translated to “a lump of cholesterol from inside a dead goose,” it’s not fat but “rich,” not heavy or oily but “light,” not bad but magically inherently healthy because of “the French paradox.” (The ultimate killer of the whole “fat is bad” thing, where everyone opens their eyes and says “Wait! How can people have such better health in France, where they eat foie gras and drink wine all day!” And I suppose access to health care has nothing at all to do with it….)

So one doesn’t say “fry those chicken breasts” – after all, they’re chicken breasts! You went out and got the least flavorful, least fatty, most easily overcooked part of the chicken just to avoid accidentally consuming any FAT! You’re not ALLOWED to fry it – it’s illegal in like 48 states!

Which is also what makes me struggle with the pan names. Because in my mind, I’d want a pan with deeper, straighter sides to fry something. Because I’d want more oil, more concentrated heat. I’d be frying it, hard-core, practically deep-frying. (Actually, the reason I think this is that when I was working to lower my cholesterol – partly a hereditary issue, partly affected by what was very nearly an all-cheese diet – one of the things I did was deep-fry everything in olive oil. Which worked beautifully, both on the food and my cholesterol.)

And if I were flipping things around, making them dance and fly across the pan, I’d go to one with wider, angled sides, to give them more space. (This is probably why my stovetop is such a mess. Too much food hurling itself out of the pan and across the stove.) Maybe if I can remember that the sauté pan has the tall sides, I can keep it a little cleaner in there – and explore some of the fast-moving, pan-shaking cooking styles.

I’ve talked here about the awesome multivitamins I take. But I haven’t shared much about what else I do to stay healthy. And at a time when nearly everyone seems to be getting better, getting sick, or fighting off yet another virus, what better Valentine’s gift could I offer you than the things I do to stay healthy nearly all the time?

That “nearly” is how I know this stuff works – because the times I get sick are the times when I slack off too much on the prevention end of things.

General Prevention

These are the suckers I just do in general to stay well. They are simple enough:

I take one of those stress support multivitamins a day. They are made to help when our bodies are under stress – and I think any kind of physical stress, whether it’s work or germs, creates some strain on the immune system.

The bottle says to take three, but I find that if I take three at once it just turns my pee fluorescent yellow – because my body can’t absorb or use that many B vitamins at a time – and I have yet to reach the pinnacle of self-care that involves being able to remember to take one vitamin pill three times a day. So one it is, by and large.

I also sleep. Sleep is the most important piece in wellness, at least in my experience. I know from experimenting with different times that the best time for my body to go to bed is 10:30 at night; I don’t always make it, but I’m getting there.

And I don’t eat sugar more than four times a day. This one takes some explaining, I think.

First of all, a nutritionist friend once told me that one gram of sugar depresses the immune system by 50% for five hours. So if I feel like I am getting sick, or if my fiancee is sick, I cut sucrose (table sugar) out entirely. I might still eat agave (which doesn’t cause blood sugar spikes, and is tasty stuff), or fructose (fruit sugars), but that’s it.

Why four times a day? Well, that’s sooort of related. I read a book once, by a dentist, whose name I entirely forget, about dental health for families. And the bit that stuck with me the most is that (he said) cavities are entirely preventable. And, specifically, that he’d found that if people only ate sugar – in any amount, even the tiniest bit – four times a day or fewer – considering 20 minutes or fewer as one time – then the bacteria that cause cavities don’t have enough to live on.

At the time, I was in high school, and had had many cavities all of a sudden over the past several years, and had a perfect horror of drilling and injections and dental stuff in general. So I immediately put that idea into practice.

I was horrified when I started reading ingredients and found that there was sugar in ketchup, sugar in mustard, sugar in sliced bread, sugar in mayonnaise, sugar in pickles… not in every single brand of these, but just casually thrown into so many foods that didn’t need it at all. Why put sugar into a sausage, especially when the next package of sausages on the shelf are just as tasty and don’t have any sugar at all?

And I haven’t had a cavity since. In fact, I went about five years without going to the dentist, and was given innumerable grim, dire warnings by the dentist I eventually went to about how many cavities I would have by the time five years had elapsed. I explained my strategy, (really great hippie-type toothpaste, sugar 4x a day or fewer), to her utter disinterest – until she finished her examination, pronounced me free and clear, and demanded, “WHAT did you say you do again?”

It’s funny because anyone who knows me will tell you that I eat a LOT of sugar. I love chocolate. In fact, after that last post, my fiancee and I have started factoring half a bar a day each of chocolate into our grocery budget. And yet, because I read ingredients and choose very carefully, I still eat sugar much, much less frequently than I did when I was a teenager. If you don’t check, and you eat a lot of processed foods (even ones as simple as mustard or salad dressing), you can end up eating sugar nearly constantly throughout your day.

Emergency Maneuvers

That’s what I do on the rare occasion that I am at risk of getting sick, or actually get sick somehow. Last spring, my fiancee and I were passing everything we got back and forth a couple of times, getting slammed with days of missed work and then extra work once we got back and then weakened immune systems and then sick again… not fun. Clearly something had to be done. This is what has worked to end that cycle, besides the general preventative work described above:

Kombucha. I like GT’s/Synergy (pick a brand name, you guys) organic kombucha because it doesn’t list sugar or caffeine in its ingredients as a lot of them do – and because it comes in a ton of really good flavors. Guava and “citrus” (lemon) are my current go-to flavors; there’s a guava bottle in my bag right now, and raspberry and citrus waiting for me at home.

Their site has better information about what kombucha is; my imperfect understanding is that it’s basically fermented tea (doesn’t that sound gross?) and that, as with the vitamins mentioned here, fermenting them doesn’t make them alcoholic but instead cultivates a ton of helpful bacteria (like yogurt!) and starts the digestive process for us to boot. So this stuff is very easy on the body going in, and does a lot to support the immune system – in part, since the digestive system is such a huge part of our immune process.

Also, it tastes nice. And the bottles are pretty.

The newest quiver in my arsenal (arrow in my quiver?) is this other stuff that New Chapter makes alongside the vitamins: Sinus and Respiratory.

Seriously, the people I have talked to at various Whole Foods stores couldn’t possibly have more great things to say about this company. I asked them once about mushrooms – you know, all those hippie bottles of reishi or shiitake or what-have-you, all boasting more about their magical immune-supporting disease-fighting properties than the last – and they said that New Chapter’s were the very best because they actually do really intense research, and disclose the research, and hold their products to a really high standard – whereas a lot of companies just look at other people’s research and go “Okay, so this mushroom is good for you!” and don’t stop to think about what processes or what lack of processing might factor into that.

I should reiterate at this point that I don’t own stock in them, or work for them, or get any kind of money or kickbacks or whatever for saying this stuff. I just love them, is all. Same goes for the kombucha, and any other products I talk about here. No paid endorsements.

Anyway, the other week Annie had some deathly flu bug, with the chills and the mucus and this is a food blog so I probably shouldn’t be grossing you out. And I was at Lakeshore Natural Foods getting these awesome cough drops that have brown rice syrup instead of sugar (and which I like to eat like candy anyway)….

Sadness, they don’t have pictures on their website. Well, look at the ingredients on just the mint ones:

“Eucalyptus leaf, Horehound herb, Hyssop herb, Licorice root, Mullein leaf, Peppermint leaf, Brown Rice syrup, Sage leaf, Slippery Elm bark and Thyme leaf.”

See how healthy that is? I get so tired of trying to find cough drops that aren’t like “Sugar, corn syrup, natural cherry flavoring.” At most stores, the best they have substitute honey – which is good for the throat, and has some natural antibiotic properties, but still has sucrose which is still the wrong kind of sugar.

Anyway – and I noticed that Sinus & Respiratory stuff. And it is powerful! I started taking it preventatively, and noticed a huge difference in the way my body felt – where it had felt run-down and struggling, the extra immune support made it feel strong and energized.

Oh and I forgot my favorite – EFT.

EFT is a form of acupressure you can do on yourself. There is a metric ton of information about it at emofree.com, but the easy version is that you can download a flyer I made with the basic acupressure points on it here, and when you feel a sore or scratchy throat coming on, or a headache, or whatever presages illness for you, you can rank the discomfort between 0-10 (where 10 is totally horrible) and gently tap each of those points about 7 times.

I like to go around the points twice, then stop, take a deep breath, and rank the problem again. And keep doing it until it goes down to 0. Often this is enough, for me, to pretty much knock a cold out before it really starts. (I actually prefer the “touch and breathe” method over the tapping – instead of tapping each point, I apply light pressure to it with my fingertips for as long as it takes to take one deep breath in and out. A lot of people find that to be more effective. But your mileage may vary.)

So let me summarize, because I know all my colorful commentary can make it hard to keep track!

Everyday wellness:
Sugar 4x/day, or fewer times
1+ dose of stress vitamins (and I strongly advocate for those particular ones because they are so good, and also because soooo many vitamin pills are nearly indigestible by our bodies)
Regular sleep and plenty of it

Emergency immune support:
No sugar (no sucrose, and for gods’ sake no nasty fake-sugar artificial alternatives EVER – which I’ll try to blog about in the near future)
Extra immune supporting vitamins – I like to take 3-9 a day
Kombucha (a bottle a day is enough for me)
Stress & Respiratory pills – one a day with a meal
EFT – on sore throats or any other symptoms you start to notice
And continue the above (with extra sleep if you like) until you are no longer at immediate risk of illness – I do it until I don’t feel run-down anymore, and/or until my partner has been non-infectious for a couple of days.

And, yes, washing hands frequently is good – but it’s important to learn when different diseases are contagious, as with a lot of them once someone has symptoms they are already non-contagious. So that person coughing and sneezing all over the boardroom or the bus is often no danger to you at all!

Oh, and one more fannish squee about New Chapter: every single thing they make is on sale through MID-JUNE (yes, four months) at Whole Foods and hopefully elsewhere. At Whole Foods they explained it was because New Chapter is the best-selling company in their field right now, and the sale is intended to keep it that way I guess – and hopefully to celebrate that too. So I imagine that they’re also on sale at other places, although Lakeshore Natural Foods hadn’t caught up with that when I was there.

With all the great customer questions I get, and all the fabulous tweets and blogs in the food world, I’m starting to realize how much I mistakenly assume is common knowledge about nutrition. Like: someone shared this BBC News article about how tuuurrrrible saturated fat is for you.

I expect better from the BBC! It struck me as very odd that the Beeb would try to get people to stay away from saturated fats by, for example, “treat[ing] chocolate as a treat rather than a snack to have every day.”

Even a serving of fairly overprocessed dark chocolate (Dove, which has more sugar than chocolate, and uses added milkfat for “smoothness”) only has 8 grams of saturated fat, and “some of this saturated fat is in the form of stearic acid“, which gets converted to monounsaturated fat in our livers and has no effect on cholesterol.

In fact, because of that conversion, only a third of the fat in most chocolate is saturated. The fats in chocolate are 1/3 oleic acid (monounsaturated like olive oil), 1/3 stearic acid, and 1/3 palmitic acid. So that overprocessed Dove bar only ends up with 4 grams of saturated fat in its 40 grams of chocolate.

More to the point, chocolate is an odd example to use because so many researchers have suggested eating a bar of dark chocolate each day weighing 1.6 ounces (more than 45 grams). Why? Not because they’re trying to kill us, but because it is one of the foods that is highest in antioxidants and flavonoids. They’ve found that eating it regularly increases blood flow to the heart, lowers levels of “bad” (LDL) cholesterol in the bloodstream, decreases blood clotting, discourages cholesterol deposits from forming in our arteries, fights cancer (!), lowers blood pressure, and may even improve blood sugar levels in the long run.

The above-linked site remarks that “A Dutch study conducted on 470 men over 15 years found that the men with the highest cocoa consumption were half as likely to die from cardiovascular disease as those who consumed the least amount of cocoa.” So… you could say that the BBC is actually trying to kill its readers by suggesting they avoid regular chocolate consumption!

One of the basic concepts that I have found very helpful in good nutrition is that fear of fat is a dreadful thing. In this case, it leads major news sources to give people misleading information, depriving them of foods that are actually good for them. It also leads to anorexic thinking – which is a post all its own, and which likewise leads people away from nutritious foods and into an awful land of “lite” and “lo-cal” food substitutes.

But it’s also plain ignorant. It is not saturated, polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, or any other similar category that is the problem. You know how we know that? Coconut butter.

You can buy fairly expensive little jars of coconut butter and palm butter, or coconut oil and palm oil – plain, raw, unrefined, organic, and any combination thereof. Why? Because, despite being absolutely saturated fats, they are great for you. (Oil, by the way, is oil, just as you’d think; butter, here, is not like “a stick of butter,” but like “apple butter” – it means the coconut or palm oil is mashed up with the rest of the seed for added flavor and nutrition.)

Palm oil up close

These tasty little marvels have as much amazing research emerging about their health properties as chocolate. They’re full of antioxidants, have anti-carcinogenic properties, helpful to the liver and the whole digestive system, help us absorb calcium and magnesium (so they also help prevent tooth disease and osteoporosis), and are also antifungal, antiviral, anti-inflammatory,and antibacterial in various ways. And on and on.

Making palm oil!

So if saturated fat is so bad, how can all of that be true? Apparently, it is because part of what matters isn’t how saturated or unsaturated it is – it’s the length of the chain of fatty acids. Coconut and palm oil are made up of medium-chain fatty acids; most fats are long-chain fatty acids. Short- and medium-chain fatty acids can just be absorbed like any other nutrient, but “long chain fatty acids are too large to be directly released into the tiny intestine capillaries. Instead they are absorbed into the fatty walls of the intestine villi and reassembled again into triglycerides. The triglycerides are coated with cholesterol and protein (protein coat) into a compound called a chylomicron.” In lay terms, the way we process them raises our cholesterol.

But wait! Aren’t some of those other fats good for you? What about olive oil? What about studies showing that all those super-oily nuts can reduce the risk of heart disease? And how can an oil be anti-viral anyway?

Well, it’s a lot more complicated than even long-chain this and short-chain that. There are different fatty acids in those chains; for example, it’s the lauric acid in coconut that is antimicrobial and antiviral. And those oils that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, like in nuts and fish? It’s the linolenic and the alpha-linolenic acids that are so important, because our bodies can’t produce them. And we use them for all kinds of stuff; they’re as momentous nutritionally as coconut oil and chocolate.

Then there is the issue of refining; the less refined an oil is, the more nutrients you get from the olives, or coconuts, or peanuts, or whatever it came from in the first place. So olive oil, especially unfiltered or extra-virgin cold-pressed, is a great source of vitamin E.

Glistening olive-oiled olives. So good!

Avoid saturated fats? Avoid foods that are “too high” in fat? Nonsense. The most important thing to remember when considering nutrition is not what we are afraid of, but what we need. When we approach our meals from “fear of fat,” with a list of ingredients to avoid foremost in our minds, we end up missing out on a ton of nutrients – and, often, serving ourselves a hearty dose of guilt and shame when we “cheat.” (And those doses of guilt and shame are far more toxic than those small amounts of fat or sugar or whatever else we are so afraid of.)

When we instead approach our meals with an eye for what foods taste best and are healthiest for us, we can put our needs and our wellness in front of our crazy ideas about body image or obesity or cholesterol. What we focus on is what grows; we can either focus on avoidance and fear and “shouldn’ts,” or on finding all the fantastic nutrients we can, feeding our minds along with our bodies.