Coconut, minus the hype

Palm and coconut oils have made a huge comeback in the last few years. But should you really be buying coco butter to cook with? It’s loaded with saturated fat. On the other hand, actual coconut, used sparingly for flavor, can be a sophisticated and not necessarily diet-busting addition to many dishes, particularly the aviyal “dry curries”. Here I try out coconut as part of an aviyal tailored to the unexpectedly smoky and bitter edge of cowpeas.

Raw Dough Carbs: Playing for Pizza, Calculating for Calzone

Pizza, calzone, any kind of handmade entrée with dough plus noncarb ingredients, is tricky to calculate carbs for because raw dough is so variable and the finished dish has lots of other things besides crust. You need to bake a portion of your raw dough and see how much weight it loses when fully cooked. Parbaking in the microwave can make this a lot faster.

Medieval in LA: Sweet Spinach Tart

The fact that sugar is added to this one is reminiscent of Elizabeth I’s infamous sweet tooth, but it also makes the normally savory spinach a dish more in keeping with the earlier recipe collections so favored by Renaissance Faire participants. So we adapted this sweet spinach tart with the spices from an earlier era.

Ice cream, enhanced

It’s been over 100 degrees here in Pasadena this week, so ice cream is practically a medical supply. I’ve been modifying my ice cream almost as long as I’ve been old enough to buy my own, for fun or out of boredom, but I’ve discovered not many other people mess around with the flavors they get at the store. You have to wonder why not, because most non-super premium ice cream in America is a little, or a lot, bland.

Microwave Tricks: Stripped-Down Chiles Rellenos

Normally I wouldn’t buy Anaheim chiles–they’re pretty mild, but still hotter than bell peppers–and they’re really better cooked. But when I saw them, all I could think about was stuffing them with feta and microwaving them for a quick pick-me-up side dish to go with mahi mahi and rice.

Cannoli that won’t bust the carb count

None of the non-D’Elicio’s cannoli in my life have ever managed to capture that light, fresh flavor or the crunch of a fresh untrammeled shell. Not even my own homemade ones, until now. They were all overloaded with powdered sugar, which makes them hell to calculate right for carbs. Somehow, when the cannoli let you down, you put up with it repeatedly, but if they overload your kid, you declare war and say, “I could do better than that!” Or I do. I’m trying to stop doing that every time, really I am.

Bravo to LAUSD

The Los Angeles public school district, one of the largest in the nation, had to vote its bigger contracts for things like milk early, so they made the announcement yesterday–plain milk only. Proponents of keeping the sugared chocolate and strawberry-flavored drinks argued that if they were pulled, most kids wouldn’t drink milk at all, but I think they have the appetite thing exactly backwards. They believe kids won’t eat what they don’t already like, but from what I’ve seen, kids develop their liking based on what they eat regularly. If the Los Angeles schools manage to do it right, they could make a big difference in a short time.

Microwave Tricks: Make-Ahead Stuffed Shells

Stuffed shells and other vegetarian pasta casseroles cook up quickly from scratch in a microwave and they reheat well the next day.

The Altered Cheese Project

Altering cheese sounds like the ultimate once-only DIY, grow-your-own, cure-your-own, grind-your-own foodie project. Weird and more work than it’s worth. But after last year’s successes turning boring American supermarket goat cheese into something more flavorful and interesting, I’ve been haunted by the thought that I’d only scratched the creative surface of cheap cheese transmogrification. Is it necessary? No, but it’s fun, and it gives you room to wonder why our cheese industry isn’t giving us more flavorful products to begin with. Particularly for the up-and-coming vegetarian-rennet cheeses.

New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

Although the American Dietetic Association’s “Choose Your Foods” carb count guide for diabetics is pretty helpful (and pretty inexpensive) it’s written from the perspective of the eater, not the cook. So as the cook in my family I’ve worked out the approximate ratios of carb grams per total weight of some common foods I serve routinely. Sometimes you want to know how much of a given potato your kid can eat for a single carb serving. Sometimes you want to know how much trouble you’re in for that blackberry pie. It’s all good.