Food Spotlight: Quinoa

I have recently been introduced to the whole grain quinoa, pronounced keen-wah, not qwin-oh-ah, which I learned the hard way.

I asked for qwin-oh-ah at the grocery store. The store employee cocked her head to the side and gave me the same confused look my dog Snickers does when I ask her where her ball is. Staring at the Kroger employee I repeated my request, “Can you tell me where to find qwin-oh-ah?”

The employee’s befuddled look remained so I added, “It’s a grain. Supposed to be really healthy for you.”

“Oh,” she responded, recognition finally settling in. “It’s called keen-wah, by the way, and you can find it in the bulk bin area,” she added with a chuckle.

As a writer I like to think that I have a fairly decent command of the English language. Apparently not.

So, the correct pronunciation of quinoa is my early Christmas gift to you, to save you from embarrassment at the hands of a grocery store clerk.

You’re welcome.

What exactly is quinoa?

It looks like a grain, it’s cooked like rice, but it’s actually the seed of the Chenopodium quinoa plant which is related to beets, Swiss chard and spinach. Because of this close relation to green leafy vegetables it’s loaded with nutrients—manganese, magnesium, iron, copper and phosphorus.

But the real news is that quinoa is a complete protein, meaning it has all nine essential amino acids that make up a protein. This is fabulous news for vegetarians who are concerned about protein intake. Typically vegetarians need to ingest different types of protein throughout the day to ensure they get all the different amino acids they need. Quinoa supplies everything they need, so no food combining is necessary. The only other plant food with a complete protein profile is soybeans.

One cup of cooked quinoa supplies 8 grams of protein, that’s more protein than in an egg.

Quinoa also has a much lower glycemic index rating than other carbohydrates such as white rice or white potatoes. Making it a great substitute for those items.

So, you get the benefits of a whole grain, i.e. high fiber content, and the satiety of a protein. Win-win!

Where to find it?

I found it at Kroger in the bulk food area. You can also look for it in the aisle with other grain-like products, rice, cous cous etc.

How to prepare it?

While it could easily be an entrée, I typically serve it as a side dish. Think of it as a substitute for rice. And like rice, you should rinse it before you use it. Quinoa has a bitter-tasting substance on it called saponin, a natural plant chemical. Most of the saponin is removed before it hits your grocer’s shelf, but just to be sure, give it a good rinse under cold water. I put it in a fine mesh metal strainer and run it under cold water for several minutes.

Here’s my favorite weekday preparation of it. I made it the other night and served it along with some broiled mahi mahi. We started the meal with the butternut squash soup recipe from last week. Yum!

Quinoa pilaf with pine nuts 

And here’s a recipe that sounded interesting, but I haven’t tried it. It’s from the Cooking Quinoa website and apparently the author’s favorite quinoa recipe. She wrote an entire cookbook on quinoa so you’d think this one would be good.

Balsamic Quinoa Salad

Ingredients

• ½ cup balsamic vinegar
• ¼ – ½ cup best quality extra virgin olive oil (depending on if you are watching calories)
• 2 Tbls Dijon mustard
• 6 cloves of garlic, minced
• 2 shallots, minced
• Salt, pepper and cayenne pepper, to taste
• 1 ½ cups quinoa
• Bouillon cube
• 5 Sun Dried Tomatoes (Not in oil)
• 1 red pepper, chopped
• 4 oz blue cheese
• 1 can black beans

Instructions

·      Make dressing by combining vinegar, mustard, garlic, shallots and olive oil.  Season to taste.

·      Add quinoa and bouillon to three cups of boiling water.  Boil for 10 minutes.

·      Rinse quinoa with cool water and place in a fine mesh colander.  Boil more water and place quinoa and sun dried tomatoes in the colander over the water.  Cover with a kitchen towel and lid.  Steam for 10 minutes.  Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

·      Cook red pepper in a small skillet until tender.

·      Combine red pepper, blue cheese and black beans with quinoa. Add dressing and toss. 

Enjoy your qwin-oh-ah…I mean, keen-wah!

Butternut Squash Soup

Before moving to Richmond, Michael and I lived in Chicago. There are certainly things I don't miss about the Windy City—the hour-and-half commute to work, gray gloomy days that last for months, and of course, the bone chilling cold. But there are a lot of fabulous things about Chicago too—the world-class museums, the vibrancy of a big city, and most of all, the restaurants. Chicago is a great food town.

I worked in a downtown highrise not far from the Sears Tower and on the ground floor was a little Italian eatery where I ate almost daily. Partly because I didn't have to leave the building and believe me, in February when the wind is blowing and snow is swirling around the streets, not venturing outside was a huge benefit. Frankly, they could have served dog food and I would have eaten it for lunch. But they didn't. They had the most fabulous salads and sandwiches and my absolute favorite was their butternut squash soup. Creamy, rich, and with a hint of curry, oh my God, it was truly divine. I've been looking for a recipe to replicate that soup for the last 15 years. I've tried countless homemade recipes, sampled canned butternut squash soup and even tried the fancier boxed organic versions and nothing comes close. They all leave me disappointed.

Until now.

While the following recipe still doesn't quite replicate my Chicago favorite, it's the closest thing I've found. With the leaves turning and winter approaching, this is the perfect companion on a chilly autumn night. And it happens to be squash and pear season, so you can use the freshest ingredients available.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Butternut Squash and Pear Soup (from Dave Lieberman and Foodnetwork.com)

Ingredients

• 4 tablespoons butter
• 2 medium onions
• 1 medium butternut squash peeled, seeded and cut into 1-inch pieces
• 4 pears, peeled and chopped into 1-inch pieces
• 1 quart low sodium chicken stock, or enough to cover the squash and pears in a sauce pan
• 1 sprig rosemary
• Heavy cream
• Salt, freshly ground black pepper and granulated sugar

Directions

• In a 4-quart saucepan melt the butter over medium-high heat. Add the onions and sweat them for a few minutes.
• Add squash and pears and sweat those too.
• Pour in the stock, enough to cover the squash and pears.
• Add the sprig of rosemary and bring to a simmer.
• Cook until the squash is fork tender, about 15 to 18 minutes.
• Remove the rosemary.
• Puree the soup with an immersion blender. (If you don't have one, just puree it in batches in a regular blender.)
• Add a touch of cream and season to taste.

Yummy!

A Lesson from Snickers

Snickers playing dress-up with Janelle

My third-grader Janelle is studying animal behaviors in school. Quizzing her yesterday I asked, “What’s instinctual mean?”

“It’s like the Loggerhead sea turtle,” she said. “They’re born and they just know the right thing to do. They’re like, Aaaah, I got to get in the water! Get me to the ocean!”

Perhaps due to our daily drills on the peculiarities of animals I’ve starting paying attention to my dog Snickers’ behavior. And here’s something I noticed.

Every morning, after she jumps down from our bed (yes, we’re those kind of people), she immediately goes into full on yoga-dog mode. Her front legs straight, she pushes them forward while simultaneously dropping her chest to the floor and hiking her butt in the air. A perfect “down dog” posture. Now the name makes sense. (This reminds me of the time I realized why a ponytail was called a ponytail. Staring at a horse’s butt, it hit me, Hey, that’s exactly how my hair looks when I put it in a ponytail. Duh. Sometimes my stupidity surprises even me. But I digress.)

After her "down-dog" stretch, she goes into this one.
I call it "The Superman."

Snickers stretches instinctually. Every morning. I certainly didn’t teach her that. If I was going to train her to do something in the morning it’d be how to make a pot of coffee. She stretches on her own.

Observing her throughout the day I see that she stretches every time she’s been in the same position for a while. How about that. 

My lovely personal trainer from the In8 program, Will, is constantly reminding me to stretch. I leave every session with him calling after me, “Drink plenty of water and stretch, stretch, STRETCH!”

“Okay,” I call back knowing full well I’ll do none of it.

I don’t know why, but stretching just isn’t part of my day. But now, I’m thinking, Snickers might be on to something!

As we age our range of motion decreases and our muscles tighten, making every day activities more difficult. Stretching helps lengthen the muscles and improve flexibility and range of motion. Plus, it reduces the risk of injury to joints muscles and tendons and reduces muscle soreness and tension. And best of all, it feels good!

So this morning I stretched with Snickers and she rewarded my efforts with an energetic face-licking. And, taking another cue from my brilliant canine, I've been stetching after sitting at my desk for a decent length of time.

Snickers has succeeded in breaking through to me where my trainer has failed. What can I say? If Will had big brown eyes, velvety ears and looked at me as if I hung the moon, maybe I’d listen to him too.

Will—you reading this? That whole, worship-your-client look could be a new training technique for you. Just sayin’.

Here are a couple of Web sites that list some good stretches and have photos to guide you.

Basic Stretches

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/stretching/SM00043

More Advanced Stretches

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/stretchname.php

Happy Stretching! Love, Snickers

But, I don’t have time to exercise. Really.

This weekend I’m a single parent. Michael and Janelle, off on their biannual camping trip for the Indian Princess program, are ditching me for a cabin in the woods.

Better him than me, I say. I hate camping. Nothing is more miserable to me than waking up outside in freezing weather. If I lived in prehistoric times, I would have been the biggest diva cavewoman in the tribe. And most likely killed by my own clan for excessive whining. So I gladly wave and kiss them good-bye as I stay snuggly and warm in my 21^st century abode.

But that leaves all chauffeuring responsibilities to me this weekend and between the school dance, soccer, a bar mitzvah, a birthday party and field hockey tryouts, I’m not sure I can get it all in. Plus, somewhere in there I’m supposed to find time to exercise. When exactly is that supposed to happen? The only time I have free is between 10 pm and 6 am and I kind of plan on sleeping then.

My dilemma reminded me of a study I recently read about the amount of exercise that’s required to be healthy.

Federal guidelines suggest getting 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a week, and that’s still the goal. BUT, according to Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association (AHA), even small amounts of aerobic exercise help lower coronary heart disease risk.

Jacob Sattelmair, author of the AHA study said, "Even a little bit of activity makes a significant difference." And by a little bit, he means 10 to 15 minutes a day.

Thus while we still need to try and get our required 150 minutes in, on the weeks where life intervenes, doing something, even a small activity is still beneficial.

This is fabulous news. For some reason I tend to think of exercise as a one-hour gym experience and if my schedule doesn’t accommodate that kind of time, I don’t do it at all. And what this new study suggests is that even if you do a little exercise, you’re still impacting your health in a good way.

So, while I might struggle to carve out two hours of gym-time this weekend, I can squeeze in a quick walk with Snickers around the neighborhood and stroll around the soccer field while simultaneously watching Grant’s game. (Which I’m going to have to do to keep warm because the game is at 8 o’clock in the morning. Who makes up these schedules anyway? A polar bear?) 

Exercise isn’t an all-or-nothing concept. Every little bit does help.

EUI: Eating Under the Influence

I know what you’re thinking and no, I’m not talking about gorging on nachos and cheesy fries after consuming alcohol. I’m talking about eating under the influence of friends.

A recent study by researchers Nicholas Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of sociology at Harvard University and James Fowler, Ph.D., an associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, alleges that obesity is contagious. That’s right. These scientists are suggesting that you can catch it from your friends, just like you catch the flu.

Sound preposterous? Here’s their theory.

After analyzing data from 12,067 subjects over a 32-year time frame, the scientists found that friends, and friends of friends, had similar levels of obesity.

They proposed three theories for why this might happen:

• One is homophily—the tendency to choose friends like oneself. (The whole “birds of a feather flock together” idea.)
• The second explanation is, when people share the same environment they’re affected similarly.
• The third explanation is that obesity is contagious. Their rationale is that a person’s idea of an acceptable weight or portion size changes when he sees how big his friends are or how much they eat. Thus people alter their own behavior to match their friends.

Specifically, Christakis and Fowler said, “We find that a person’s chances of becoming obese increase by 57% if they have a friend who becomes obese, 40% if they have a sibling who becomes obese, and 37% if a spouse becomes obese.”

Additionally, they noted that, “Mutual friends more than triple the risk to each other. If one of the two [mutual friends] becomes obese, the chance for the other to follow suit goes up 171%.”

Taking their theory to an extreme, they’re suggesting that a small group of individuals started the whole obesity epidemic.

Well, you can imagine the firestorm of criticism that has come their way since the study’s publication. Behavioral scientists argued that their methodology was “flawed” and that you can’t draw those kind of conclusions based on mere observations of how people behave. And then the statisticians got involved, stating that it is mathematically impossible to separate the three explanations, they are too intertwined.

I’m no scholar, so I’ll let those smarter than me debate the study’s accuracy.

I don’t subscribe to their “obesity is contagious” theory. I believe we have more control over our personal behavior and I don’t think you can blame the obesity epidemic on the obese. There are a myriad of factors in our society that contribute to the problem. That seems like a lot of unnecessary finger pointing to me. But the study did make me think about the influence of friends and specifically when I tend to overindulge.

For me, certain environments, not people, are the issue. My trigger environment is a party. Being around friends and family having a good time, eating and drinking is a tempting situation for me. I want to join the fun, have one more glass of wine or indulge in some sinful sugary concoction if everyone else is doing it.

When I think about the question, “If your friends were all jumping off a cliff would you do it too?”

My answer is, “If there was a party at the bottom, you betcha!”

So how do you stop temptation from taking over? From letting these situations sabotage your weight goals?

I fall back on a couple of basic In8 principals:

1) Self-awareness. You have to know what environments and situations are difficult for you and have a plan to address them.

2) Eat every three to four hours. If I have a healthy snack I’m much less likely to overindulge, regardless of what’s in front of me or what environment I’m in.

3) Stay hydrated. Experts suggest that oftentimes we mistake hunger for thirst. If you stay hydrated you’re likely to eat less.

4) Write it down. Whenever I feel like I’m going off track I restart my food journal. There’s nothing like writing down exactly what you’re consuming to highlight your bad choices and get you back into healthier habits.

In the end we’re in control of our life. We choose every day what to focus on, what makes our priority list. And hanging out with friends is always high on the list for me. I just need to snack and drink some water before I go!

Carter Mountain Orchard

Last week I wrote about apple picking at Carter Mountain Orchard in Charlottesville. Since we had a three-day weekend and the weather was spectacular, we headed there on Sunday.

A word of warning: the crowd is insane. It's absolute chaos. If you're headed there on a weekend just relax and practice your meditative breathing as you sit in a long line of cars up the mountain road to the Apple Barn. It is worth it though. The scenery is wonderful and the apples are so delicious. We came home with Fuji, Golden Delicious and Stayman varieties and a gallon of yummy cider.

What a beautiful way to spend the afternoon. Check out the photos from our adventure below.

Apples ripe on the vine. I can't remember the variety.
My best guess is Stayman.

This is why I love this place. You have a beautiful view west
toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Arriving at the Apple Barn. I'm in pink, Amanda's in red,
Grant is in blue and Janelle's holding my hand.

Looking for some low hanging Golden Delicious apples.
There were none, unless you wanted the rotten ones
on the ground.

The elusive Golden Delicious. 

Without an apple picker (a long pole with a basket
on the end) this is the only way to get
some of the apples.

Food Spotlight: Apple

First, a moment of silence to honor Steve Jobs, the co-founder, visionary and technological whiz that created Apple Computer, who died yesterday.

Like many people, Apple products fill our house. I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro. I have Apple TV, an iPhone, iPod and all my kids have an iTouch. We are such fans of all-things-Apple that we have numerous older versions of iPods scattered around the house like dirty socks, stuffed in drawers, old gym bags and in between the cushions of the sofa. I love the products he created, I admire his vision and passion and am deeply saddened by his passing.

As a small tribute, I dedicate this blog to him. The topic of course, is the apple.

The end of summer marks the end of berry season—a sad moment indeed. But luckily, apple season is in full swing.

Apples have been around since, well, since Adam and Eve. Maybe it’s because of this history, this ancient reputation and familiarity that they fell out of favor. The media, always looking for splashy new headlines, has recently been espousing the attributes of more exotic fruits like pomegranate, acai berry and goji berry.

Sometimes old stuff is really just that, old and tired, like my stirrup pants and big hair. Those relics belong in the past never to be seen again. But sometimes, old stuff is a classic, like the little black dress and Chanel No. 5. The apple might not be fancy, but it’s a classic. One that has a plethora of health benefits deserving of its adage at keeping the doctor away.

A recent study found that eating apples lowers cholesterol levels, plaque and inflammation in artery walls. Another study published by Dianne A. Hyson, PhD, RD, a nutritionist and researcher at the University of California at Davis, states that “in addition to their cardiovascular benefits, there’s some evidence that apples help regulate blood sugar and control appetite, protect against cancer and safeguard the lungs.”

And they’re full of fiber, Vitamin C, potassium, calcium, iron, Vitamin A, thiamin, magnesium and phosphorus.

Huh. And here I thought they were just a simple, easy snack to throw in my kid’s lunchbox.

Since we’re in the heart of apple season might I suggest an outing this weekend? Apple picking. We love Carter Mountain Orchard outside Charlottesville. On a sunny day it’s absolutely beautiful and there’s something about gathering your own food, seeing how it’s grown and enjoying the outdoors that make this a fun, family activity.

Carter Mountain is Open Daily from 9:00 am — 6:00 pm. (Extended hours on Saturday and Sunday, 8:00 am – 7:00 pm). Click here for directions.

Golden Delicious, Jonagold, Fuji, Granny Smith, Stayman, York and Winesap varieties are ready now. (My favs are Golden Delicious, Jonagold and Fuji).

If you’re not quite sure what to do with all those apples, try making homemade applesauce. It’s really easy and if you select sweeter varieties you don’t need to add sugar. E.g., sweet apples are Red Delicious, Gala, Fuji, Winesap, McIntosh, Golden Delicious, Honeycrisp and Pink Lady. Use a mix of apple varieties for a really flavorful dish.

Here’s a quick and easy applesauce recipe.

Ingredients

•                1 teaspoon cinnamon

•                4 apples, cored, peeled and chopped

•                ½ teaspoon nutmeg

•                2 tablespoons water

Directions

Combine all ingredients in a saucepan and cook over medium heat until apples become very tender, about 30 minutes. Puree in a food processor or mash with a potato masher.

Enjoy!