beets

I love beets. You can roast them. You can boil them. They are divine in a salad. I once went on a date with a guy who said there should be a dish called shishkabeet – beets on a stick. Instead we got bowl o beets. It was delish. I made roasted beets and potatoes last week at my cooking demo at williams sonoma. I am in love with the beet.

I think my love of beets came from growing up in a sort of Ukranian American family. Well, we think my maternal grandfather was from the Ukraine, no one is really sure. Also no one is sure why all female members of my family learned to make borscht, a beet soup that takes an entire day and at least five people to make, at a very young age and still make it to this day. Nor does anyone know how it became a food my family associates with passover and makes every year without fail to serve to 30 people. Even the kids eat it. This is bright magenta soup with meat in it and we serve it over mashed potatoes. No, its a mystery, but its damn good.

But beets are in season now. I have been getting them every week in my CSA delivery and they’ve been available at the farmers markets since June. They are so lovely looking and their greens actually taste quite good in a stir fry.

Tonight at my CSA party, there were three beet dishes. A roasted beet salad, a warm chopped beets with walnuts and herbs and a beet casserole with carrots, onions and sweet potatoes. MMM makes me want to make some beets tonight…and I have lots of them. I will be doing a beet dish in my class on Tuesday. http://healthythanksgiving.eventbrite.com

goji berries – get in the mood for love :)

I had two questions tonight for fun organic items that people don’t know much about. For any kind of female reproductive issue – I recommend Maca. It does wonders for hot flashes and regulating periods. But for all you guys out there, if you ever have that feeling where you just don’t want to give any more love to your wife, your partner or anyone else, try a goji berry. You can get them in a health food store or in chinatown for much cheaper than your average health food store or whole foods. Buy them in bulk at a health food store. I saw them for $3 a box in a random store in chinatown.

So what’s the deal with goji berries? They are organic, fun to eat and have large amounts of protein, essential fatty acids and they do wonders for enlivening passion – think natural viagra, without the side affects And you just thought oysters were an aphrodisiac, try a berry. Ladies, you will feel more in the mood as well.

amazing things are happening

So I scored some karma yoga time at a yoga studio that needs someone to run their cafe…so in exchange for making a few spreadsheets I am going to do it. My first day is tomorrow. I’ll be serving soup, sprouts and cabbage salad and see where things go. Feel free to stop by. Atmananda Yoga 324 Lafayette Street, 7th Floor. Come for a yoga class and stay for lunch. I’ll be serving from 12-4. This studio is also beautiful and a great place for a party. I am looking into it for a party to launch my non-profit in February. So many things a brewing and I have to run 4 miles in the park tomorrow to raise some money for AIDS. I really hope it stops raining.

Today I made butternut squash soup at Williams Sonoma on 59th Street between Park and Madison. I might be scoring some more gigs there and also across town on 59th Street. I am available for catering and private parties with a healthy themed menu. The studio is also available for parties. Its a loft space that is just fantastic for a party of 50 people or more. I am still trying to figure out what the capacity is – but I feel like it could easily accommodate 100 or maybe more. It might be a very interesting New Years Venue for a private party – health themed or not. I prefer to do healthy cooking – but I do it all. I’m a huge fan of chocolate mousse, but I know how to make it slightly better for you. It might be really fun to do a chocolate mousse tasting. Let me know if anyone is game for that and I’ll set it up: Regular Chocolate Mousse, Coconut Cream Chocolate Mousse and a Chocolate Mousse made with avocado instead of heavy cream and agave nectar for sweetener. I’ve just sampled it and you can’t realize its avocado unless they aren’t ripe…and then you will know. It pains me to have avocado outside of California though. They are just not the same. I haven’t tried the Florida avocado yet. They just seem too big and unless I am making food for a lot of people I am not sure what to do with them.

Will see what this cafe brings. Apparently I am going to need to take a few more cooking classes to expand my repetoire, although its a great foundation with French training, restaurant trailing and tons of classes at ICE. Although I find the best way to learn is by doing and watching. Tonight I watched Bob Blumer, a.k.a. the Surreal Chef make shrimp on the Barbie with a barbie doll. He also made some steak with chimichurri sauce (lots of sugar) and some other interesting looking things with avocado puree. It was tasty, I really wanted to stick around for the steak bites, but I needed to get home. I am still awake and I need to be in the park tomorrow AM to race and then get back to the yoga studio for lunch service. Someday I will get my expenses straight and write my business plan, but life is amazingly good for the moment.

Check out www.sobelwellness.com/events.html for upcoming events. There is a stress seminar that I am teaching at next Saturday. I will be posting the information soon as to how to sign up. I’m also teaching a cooking class on the 25th currently at the chill spa – but I might just move it to the studio where there is a full kitchen which would make things much easier. Going to see what can be done there. Sign up at http://healthythanksgiving.eventbrite.com. Its going to be a blast!

not quite ready for dark green kale

So, I have found out a few things about kale. This is a unique vegetable. First of all its a cruciferous vegetable in the cabbage family. Secondly, it comes in different varieties. Light green, cooks easily. Purple – kind of fun a bit more chewy and very dark leafy green – they chewiest of them all and I have to say, despite its nutritional powerhouse I am sure, my least favorite. I got some in my CSA delivery this week. I was really excited about it, but found it incredibly difficult to cook and difficult on my teeth. I’ve got some mild TMJ and a crown that’s acting up – but ever since the copious chewing required to get down the kale I’m not loving what’s going on in my mouth.

I love vegetables, green, purple and blue (I’ve seen blue potatoes and they are bright blue!), but the kale might be too much even for me. I love the purple kale in soups and stir fries, but I am going to stick to collards (I love them!) and swiss chard for my stir fries, as well as the other varieties of kale which are delicious.

I had some baby bok choi the other night…and it was marvelous. Perhaps I am just not ready for local organic kale. It seemed waxy. Was odd. A bit rubbery on cooking. Very strange indeed. Perhaps steaming would be better than saute. A question for the food network…but right now, they only seem interested in grilling questions, which I have many.

I will be creating a 20 second video to find out just how to make my favorite cuts of extremely lean meat: lamb loin (mmm, delish), venison, grass fed beef and bison absolutely delicious and cooked to a perfect pinky medium on a grill pan (or my friend the George Forman) in New York kitchens with no grills or functioning broilers.

who doesn’t want to be in love or more in love?

Let’s face it, we all want to be in love! And I want you to be in love. I also want you to experience health, happiness and get excited about eating vegetables! Just think if you were full of energy, had enough for the job, the kids, your spouse and yourself, you’d be happy, right? Maybe?

What if you had a place to go where the whole focus was on love? There was a place to check the kids at the door. The music was great, there were lots of wonderful, tasty but also health promoting nibbles and you had nowhere to be but here, appreciating your partner. No partner? What if we created a place where you could go be with your couple friends, but there was one rule, they had to bring a friend too. Maybe its you, but think, every couple invited is bringing their favorite single friend. There are 50 couples and 100 singles. This could be the place for you. Gay, straight, Black, White, Asian, South Asian, Jewish, Christian or Muslim (or any other faith). Here’s a place to celebrate love! Its happening. Coming soon to a party venue near you and I am going to organize it.

Are you in love with this idea as much as I am. Then I need your help. I want the world to celebrate love. I want everyone who is looking for love to find it. But I also want people to do it in a healthy way. This means eating delicious food that is also delicious for the soul and being somewhere that the celebration is focused on life and all its possibilities. I think I have the venue picked out for the first New York based party and it will take place in a few months. Stay tuned and keep the comments coming.

In the meantime, I am offering in home cooking classes for couples. Deepen your relationship while learning about wholesome health supportive food. We all have preconceived notions about what is healthy and we all think healthy food is boring, but it doesn’t have to be. And it doesn’t have to be difficult to make. Tonight in 2 minutes I made a stir fry of kale, quinoa and tofu with peanut butter, pear vinegar and soy sauce with a bit of ginger and garlic. Last night I had a spice rubbed lamb steak with sauteed mixed greens, broccoli and quinoa. That took me maybe 7 minutes to make b/c the lamb needed 3 minutes per side on the george forman. God, was that good! Classes are available now in your home as well as nutritional counseling. Learn more on my website www.sobelwellness.com.

Notes from the healthy snob…

So two snobby snob observations for this evening.  On my way home from taping life coaches tv (go to www.mnn.org and check it out. I was on tonight at 8pm) I saw a “smart” car…one of those electric golf cart like vehicles that is hardly a car. This smart car really was smart because it went to princeton. It had a princeton sticker in the rear window. I wondered if someone was just trying to be cute or really did go to Princeton. Nevertheless, it made me giggle on the way home.

On the train, I was reading in Harvard magazine (I know, snobby snob, I warned you) about Diabetes and all the facts I needed to back up the television appearance I just made. The summary of the article basically goes like this: While there is a genetic component to diabetes, the vast changes in our diets and the rate at which the disease has grown says that there is something far greater than changes in our DNA. Well said, Mr. Harvard Researcher. I’m so glad I went there and that they are finally catching up with things I’ve known all along. But, yay Harvard. They also had wonderful pictures of mice who had low levels of leptin due to genetic mutations. Just like when we eat too much sugar we become insulin resistant, we make insulin, but our cells can’t use it. Too much sugar and too much fat in our bodies can cause us to become leptin resistant, same thing, we produce too much leptin, as opposed to not enough and we grow fatter.

So just some interesting observations…and marvelous photos of really fat mice. http://harvardmagazine.com/web/extras/diabetes-a-looming-epidemic – doesn’t show the mice pictures though, I think those are only available in the magazine probably for another month until the new issue comes out.

Chicken Feet Soup

Ok, so, I’m not a new comer to chicken feet. I have a lot of Chinese friends. For a while back in the late 90′s, they used to take me to dim sum, probably once a week. Forced to eat “exotic food” such as jelly fish, blood sausage (kind of liked that, sorry to say, and the blood definitely didn’t come from a cow – a great testament to my formerly kosher tendancies), dumplings filled with all kinds of traif (unkosher) parts of shrimps, pig and chickens. I liked some of it – such as the banana leaf steamed sticky rice with chicken parts – and I do mean parts, but the one thing that always reviled me was the fried chicken feet. We would go in large groups of friends. There were always about 15 of my chinese and chinese-american friends and always one other fellow non-chinese person -usually another formerly kosher Jewish male friend of mine. He ate everything and I was always amazed. I was a bit more cautious. Granted in traditional Jewish Eastern European cooking there are some pretty similar items: stuffed derma, the chicken or turkey behind (a favorite of my mother and her cousin – I could never get this and why they would fight over it) and some other pretty gross items including the beef marrow from ukranian borscht made with meat. The chicken feet however, topped the scale as far as I was concerned. They look like human hands with fingers and there are my friends sucking between the toes and discarding some of the bones. Other ones just ate the whole foot, bones and all (and I’ve read this is the way to do it) deliciously enjoying every bite.

And yet, despised by this image, I was at the union square farmer’s market yesterday and looking for chicken to make a bone broth (or stock) to strengthen my own bones and warm me up for winter. Also, we’re doing soups in my next cooking class on November 11 (from 7pm-9pm at Chill Spa see http://healthythanksgiving.eventbrite.com for more details) so I wanted to experiment with soups.  When I went to my usualy chicken man (monger? dealer?) he said he had run out of chickens. Leave it to me to go to the market at 2pm and expect there to be chickens…anyway, he did have feet.  And he was going to throw them away. So I thought back to dim sum and I remembered the chicken feet. I remembered that bones are what make the soup and figured that 2 pounds of free chicken bones (who cared if they had toes!) would make great soup. I told him I would take them and off I went back to the west side to make the soup.  I found a recipe online that seemed simple enough:

Chicken Feet Soup

2 pounds of chicken feet

2 carrots chopped

2 onions chopped

1 bunch of sage, thyme, dill or something else green – I used oregano since I read in men’s health magazine about its cancer fighting power and it smelled great

water

Instructions:

Boil chicken feet in water for 5 minutes. Skim scum from top. Drain chicken bones and cut off claws (this was gross…but I did it) and any black parts in fat pad of foot. Clean well return to a clean pot. Add carrots, onion and herbs. Cover with water and simmer on low for four hours with cover loosely on (I left it open a bit). At around the fourth hour remove lid and turn heat up slightly cook 1-2 more hours until flavorful. Add salt/pepper to taste.

Makes about 1.5 quarts.

I felt like this recipe could have been jazzed up slightly perhaps by sauteing the onions, carrots and adding celery in some butter at first until they were soft and aromatic and then adding the chicken feet and getting them a little brown and then adding the water…next time maybe I will try that.

I had some soup/stock earlier today and it was very yummy. I am thinking of making some lentil soup with it later this week to test out the recipe.

Whole Grain Cookies

On the episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay that I went to see taped yesterday, I stood next to a woman in the studio audience discussing cookies.  I discussed with her that I was a specialist in making not only foods, but also desserts safe for diabetics but not using artificial sweeteners. She mentioned that she used whole grain flours instead of white flours when preparing cookies.

Being nearly gluten free and mostly wheat free myself I’ve experimented with quite a few cookie ideas. I pretty much gave up the idea of eating cookies or resolved to feeling like crap when I decided to have one. I discovered some interesting Kashi brand cookies – they are ok, but I think they still contain wheat. Dr. Cracker makes spelt crackers and I’ve seen spelt cookies which have not bothered me…but the other day I found an interesting cookie in the health food store. It is called “World of Grains”.  They have whole wheat which sort of stinks for the gluten free bunch – but they are also made with quinoa – great for diabetics and anyone else looking to increase whole grains in the diet. I absolutely adore quinoa and I am so glad its made its way into cookies. The World of Grains cookies really need to make a gluten free variety, but until they do, if you are diabetic, the blueberry ones have 8 grams of sugars (evaporated cane juice) in 6-8 cookies that come in a single serving pack. Multigrain only has 6 grams which is pretty good. They have 3 grams of fiber per serving which is good too.

I still prefer to bake my own. I like oatmeal cookies and I like to use almond flour with agave. I can’t say I’ve baked a lot of cookies in recent years – but with grain free chocolate chips, butter and almond flour one might be able to do something interesting. I’ve definitely done a great peach crisp with those ingredients and trust me, no one in my cooking class knew it wasn’t white flour and brown sugar. The pastured raw butter probably didn’t hurt