Eating Mediterranean, with Cajun spices

Recipes: Poorman's jambalaya, Corn muffins

Sometimes you hear people talk about a "Mediterranean diet", and how healthy it is. What is that anyway? First of all, it reflects a lifestyle practiced around the Mediterranean Sea, in areas of France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, and the countries of northern Africa, that represent some of the oldest places humans have historically made their homes.  The "diet", which just means a way of eating, involves primarily plant-based foods, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, and nuts, and a minimum of red meat. Fish and poultry, and especially fish, is eaten much more than red meat. Olive oil is used in place of butter, and herbs and spices, rather than salt, are used to flavor foods. Wine, and in particular red wine, is considered food, and accompanies meals in moderation. Meals are enjoyed with family and friends, and walking or riding bicycles is much more common than jumping in the car to go to the store, or to work. People are rarely overweight or bothered by the common diseases of abundance - high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer.

Sounds good, doesn't it? How can we shift our diet to be more like this? Here are five tips you can use to move your meals in this direction:
 

• Make sure each meal and snack includes colorful vegetables or fruit, raw or cooked
• Mix up your dinner routine by adding legumes like beans, peas or lentils at least some of the time
• Cook fish instead of red meat at least two nights a week
• Add walnuts, pecans, or sliced almonds to a salad or steamed vegetables
• Use extra virgin olive oil in place of butter or other oils for low-heat cooking and salads

Easy enough, but what does this have to do with Cajun cooking? We're making jambalaya today. Yum! The answer is "not much", except that Cajun food, which is French Acadian in origin, has Mediterranean roots. Not to mention that it's so delicious, it's worth a little digging to find those healthy roots and bring them out.

 

Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen, the bible of Cajun cooking, is one of the great cookbooks, with caveats. There's hardly a recipe in it that doesn't need to be altered in some way for either health or hotness reasons. One recipe starts with "One pound, plus 4 tablespoons, butter". Most of the dishes are so spicy I can't eat them, and I like hot. For these reasons, I've hesitated to recommend it to readers. On the other hand, every recipe I've ever made from this book has been absolutely delicious, once I've tamed the heat. Chef Paul's spice combinations are incredible, and each dish is "rounded" in taste in a way that is very satisfying. It truly is amazing comfort food.  

Poorman's Jambalaya

This recipe comes from Louisiana Kitchen, with quite a bit of alteration in the seasoning mix and a few changes in ingredients and cooking time. I'm guessing this is called Poorman's because it doesn't have a lot of meat and fish in it - "only" shrimps and sausages.You will love it, poor or not.

Seasoning Mix

• 2 small bay leaves
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
• a pinch of cayenne pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons butter and 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 6 ounces good chicken or pork sausage, uncooked, partially frozen (to make cutting easier) and sliced or diced
• 3/4 cup chopped onions
• 3/4 cup chopped celery
• 1 red or orange or yellow bell pepper, cored, seeded, and chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup raw basmati or jasmine rice
• 2 cups chicken broth
• 1 dozen medium shrimp, tails on if you wish

Thoroughly combine the seasoning mix ingredients in a small bowl and set aside.

In a large heavy skillet, or a medium heavy Dutch oven, melt the butter and heat the olive oil. Add the sausage and cook a few minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the onions, celery, bell pepper, seasoning mix, and garlic, mixing well. Cook until the vegetables are browned, 10 to 12 minutes, stirring occasionally and scraping the pan bottom well.

Stir in the rice and cook 5 minutes more, stirring and scraping. Add the broth, stirring. Bring the mixture to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer uncovered until the rice is tender, about 30 minutes. Stir occasionally toward the end of cooking time. Add the shrimps to the rice, cover, and cook for 1 more minute.

Remove bay leaves, and serve immediately.

Corn Muffins 

You don't really need corn muffins with the jambalaya - it's a complete meal in itself - but the muffins are certainly good with it. This is provided just in case your meal wouldn't be complete without bread. They are a little sweet, but not too much.

 

• 1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2/3 cup cornmeal
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 5 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup milk
• 4 1/2 Tbsp butter, melted
• 1 egg, beaten

Turn the oven on to 350 to preheat.

In a large bowl combine the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder and salt. Mix well with a fork. In a separate bowl, combine the milk, melted butter and egg - beat the egg into the milk/butter and add to the dry ingredients. Blend just until mixed...do not overbeat.

Spoon mixture into greased muffin cups - this recipe makes 9 muffins in my cast iron muffin pan (they are medium-large size). Bake at 350 about 45 minutes. If you use a smaller muffin pan, adjust the baking time and bake until golden brown.

When the muffins are done, remove them from the oven and take them out of the muffin pan right away.

The muffins freeze well, and are delicious for breakfast, warmed and served with honey.

The Payoff
The jambalaya is gluten-free. The muffins are not.

Jambalaya meets the criteria of the Mediterranean diet in several ways - it includes colorful vegetables (onion, celery, bell pepper, garlic), it includes fish (shrimp) and a minimum of meat, olive oil is substituted for some of the butter in the original recipe (you could substitute olive oil for all of the butter if you wish), spices and herbs are used to flavor it, and it is delicious with red wine.

Buon appetito!

 

 

 

Tips and tricks (or feed the piggybank too)

Recipes: Fresh fruit smoothies, Minestrone, Corn muffins

Don't you just hate it when you have to throw out food? It's so wasteful and unnecessary. When you're cooking for two, it happens pretty often that you can't eat a perishable food fast enough to use it all before it spoils. I've really put my freezer(s) to use to solve this problem. I'm lucky that I have a chest freezer as well as two refrigerator freezers, but even if you're dealing with just one normal refrigerator freezer, you can use these tricks.

Bacon

Take a pound of bacon for instance. Unless you're eating bacon and eggs every day (tut-tut, all that fat!), two people are probably not going to get through a pound of bacon before it goes bad in the refrigerator. And if you buy the half-pound package instead, it's going to cost a lot more. So here's what you can do: Open your pound of bacon when you get it home and take out two slices. Curl them into a circle and put them in a gallon freezer baggie. Then do that for the rest of the pound, separating it all into 2-slice portions and curling each one so it stays pretty much separate from the others. Then put the bag in the freezer. When you need bacon, you can easily separate out as many 2-slice portions as you need and either defrost them in the microwave, or, if you're using them for bacon flavor in a cooked recipe, chop them while frozen and use them as is.

Tomato Paste

Speaking of frozen, it just frosts me that most recipes call for a tablespoon or two of tomato paste, and yet the stuff comes in a 4 oz. can. Plus it spoils in a heartbeat even if you put it in a plastic container, but if you put it in the freezer, you can't get that one or two tablespoons of paste out when you need it because it's frozen solid. Drat. That, of course, is why the folks that invent these things put tomato paste in tubes. And what a surprise, it's a lot more expensive! Here's an easy way to use the tomato paste in the cheap little can, have it easily accessible, and still keep it fresh until it's gone: Once you've opened the can and used the tablespoon you need for your recipe, scrape all the paste left in the can into a quart freezer baggie. Leave a corner of the bag unsealed and carefully push all the air out before sealing completely. Then smash the paste in the bag until it's flat and about 1/4 inch thick. Put it in the freezer. When you need a tablespoon of tomato paste, it will be easy to break off a tablespoon-sized chunk.

Summer Fruit

This is definitely the time of year for fresh peaches, nectarines, and apricots plus all kinds of yummy berries. Wouldn't you love to have the taste of these delicious fresh fruits in the middle of winter too? Why not buy a case (usually 12) of peaches or a giant box of organic strawberries and freeze what you can't eat now before they get too ripe? Fruit is usually less expensive when you buy it in bulk rather than individually, although sure enough it all ripens at the same time. Here's how to keep it to use later: Slice the stone fruits and spread them out on a cookie sheet. Put it in the freezer and then slip the frozen slices into a gallon freezer baggie for storage. Or spread washed and stemmed strawberries or blackberries on the cookie sheet and then store them in a freezer baggie once they're frozen. Do the same for bananas that are getting too ripe - slice them and freeze them. Frozen fruit is great for smoothies all year long - you get the fabulous taste of the fruit when it was at its best, plus the cold of the frozen fruit chills the smoothie so you don't have to add ice and dilute the yummy-ness. Yay! Here's our recipe for fruit smoothies.

Fresh Fruit Smoothies (makes 2)

In a blender, combine:

• 12 ounces milk (1 1/2 cups). I use 1%, you can use whatever you like, including soy milk.
• A heaping 1/4 cup of protein powder. I use whey protein powder, which is sweetened with stevia. You can use another protein powder, like soy protein, and if it's not sweetened add a tablespoon of honey or agave.
• 2 tablespoons plain yogurt, or lemon flavored, or whatever you like
• Half a banana, cut in chunks. These can be frozen or not. If not, then at least one of the other fruits should be frozen as the smoothie tastes best when cold.
• 4 or 5 slices of another fruit, frozen or fresh, like peaches, apricots, nectarines, pineapple or a handful of frozen or fresh berries, like strawberries, blueberries, blackberries.

Blend until foamy. Pour and enjoy!

One last tip and this one is a time-saver rather than a money-saver. Who loves to chop onions? And yet so many recipes call for it. Here's the easiest way I've found.

Chopped Onions

Cut off the stem end of a whole onion (not the root end, which holds the onion together). Turn the onion over and cut it in half through the root. Strip the outer peel off both halves of the onion.

Take one half and put it cut side down on your cutting surface. The root end should be on your left if you're right-handed, and on your right if you're left-handed. Slice into the onion at intervals all the way around, cutting almost to the root. Then slice crosswise across the onion, and all the pieces will fall to the cutting surface already chopped. Discard the root piece, then do the same for the other half, and you have an entire chopped onion in no time flat. Magic!!

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. One more tip . . .

Parmesan Rinds

When a piece of Parmigiano-Reggiano is finished and you can't grate or shred any more cheese off it, do you throw it out? NO! You save it wrapped in the fridge to use in soup. Throw it in and let it cook in the soup - it adds so much flavor! Then just take it out before serving. Yum.

The next recipe uses chopped onion, like many do, so you can practice. It also uses a Parmesan rind. This delicious minestrone, "big soup" in Italian, is a combination of recipes and techniques from Alice Waters and Marcella Hazan. It can be either vegetarian or not, depending on whether you add the optional sausage. Either way, it makes a wonderful light summer dinner, especially if you can use fresh vegetables from your garden. Or from the farmers' market. Let's cook!

Minestrone

• 1 14 oz can cannellini (white kidney) beans, drained and rinsed
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
• 1/2 large onion, chopped
• 2 medium carrots, peeled and chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, peeled and coarsely chopped
• 2 medium red or yellow potatoes, cubed (you can leave the skins on)
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• Piece of Parmesan rind, about 2 inches
• A handful of green beans, washed, tipped, and cut into 1-inch lengths
• 3 or 4 ripe Roma tomatoes, cored and chopped
• A big handful of kale or spinach leaves, washed and cut in ribbons
• 2 medium sausages, mild or hot, parboiled and sliced (optional)

Heat the oil in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add the chopped onion and carrots and cook for 15 minutes.
Add the chopped garlic, the cubed potatoes, thyme, bay leaf, and salt and cook, stirring, for 5 more minutes.
Add 2 cups water and bring to a boil. When boiling, add the green beans and the Parmesan rind and cook for 5 minutes. Then add the tomatoes and the kale, if you're using that, and cook for 15 minutes more, stirring occasionally. Taste for salt and add a little if needed.
Add the beans and the cooked sausage, if using, along with the spinach, if you're using that instead of kale (spinach cooks much quicker than kale). Cook for 5 minutes. The minestrone should be thick, but if it's too thick, add a small amount of water.
Remove the bay leaf and the Parmesan rind. Serve in bowls with Corn Muffins (see below) and drizzle each bowl with a bit of extra virgin olive oil.

Corn Muffins

• 1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2/3 cup cornmeal
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 5 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup milk
• 4 1/2 Tbsp butter, melted
• 1 egg, beaten

Turn the oven on to 350 degrees F to preheat.

In a large bowl combine the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder and salt. Mix well with a fork. In a separate bowl, combine the milk, melted butter and egg - beat the egg into the milk/butter and add to the dry ingredients. Blend just until mixed...do not overbeat.

Spoon mixture into greased muffin cups. Bake at 350 about 45 minutes.

This recipe makes 9 muffins in my cast iron muffin pan (they are medium-large size). That's a lot of muffins for two people; however, they are delicious warmed up for breakfast, possibly with honey. They also freeze well in a freezer baggie, and then you can serve them by thawing them out for about an hour and heating them in a low oven.

If you use a muffin pan with smaller wells, adjust the baking time down a bit and bake until golden brown.