biking, cheffing, and fall vegetables

Fall is one of my favorite seasons – the yellows, the oranges, the deep reds…yes, it describes the changing leaves, but also the wonderful vegetables available at the farmers market. I’ve been biking around new york every weekend (and some weekdays), looking at trees, life, its just heaven and its a wonderful way to burn off all the great recipes I’ve been testing and tasting lately.

Just this week, I made a fabulous roasted acorn squash. These vegetables (fruit really, they have seeds!) are so delicious and sweet all you need to do is split them open, scoop out the seeds and sprinkle with a touch of cinammon. Want a little extra richness you could spritz on some olive oil or melted butter in a water mister or you could just use a spoon. Roast them for 45 minutes and the skin will get soft enough you can just cut into pieces and pop the whole thing in your mouth. The skin is still a bit too hard for you? Just eat around it.

Also at the end of summer, beginning of fall, we’ve got pumpkins, butternut squash and tons of green vegetables still around. I tend to focus more on autumn soups like butternut squash and bean soups such as creamy black bean and white bean. A touch of white truffle oil and its heaven in a bowl.

So get out there on your bike, your feet and walk, run or bike around to see all fall has to offer. You’ll be surprised with its splendor!

Like these recipes? Contact me for a cooking class in your home or to learn more about my professional personal chef programs available to you in New York City. My website is www.sobelwellness.com. I can also do long distance consultations about what to cook and buy at farmers markets as well as general chatting about your health.

Weekly cooking thoughts and recipes – notes from a private chef

I am a private chef. This means I cook meals for people with their input in their homes using groceries they have purchased. I tend to think of it as an iron chef competition but that everything is the secret ingredient. I suppose its more like an episode of chopped but without the puff pastry and gummy bears. I have unlimited amounts of time, instead of a half hour, although I do make one soup, two main dishes, three side dishes and one or two desserts in about 3.5 hours, so in a way, I do have some time constraints, plus that last hour is usually spent cleaning. I have never cleaned so well in my life as I do in my clients’ kitchens except when I operated my restaurant in the Atmananda yoga center on Lafayette street earlier this year. I was one with the mop.

This week, I made a cream of brocolli soup with red potaoes, a casserole of halibut and bay scallops, meatloaf with 90% grass fed beef from a small farm (Simply Grazin) in Skillman, NJ and an orange pepper from the farmers market along with vine ripened tomatoes from the market as well as local cippolini oniones, beet greens and spinach sauteed in a bit of olive oil, peas and mushrooms with those great cippolini onions and for dessert, my first ever successful tapioca coconut pudding with a pear crisp (two desserts). I need to start taking some photographs of my dishes.

My inspiration comes from several sources: the food network, eating out, dreaming, and simply going to the store, the market, the recesses of my mind and seeing what looks/feels good. I feel somewhat like Mozart writing a symphony and hearing the parts of each and every instrument and how they all fit together. I feel I do this in my head with flavors: lemon, mint, butter, sundried tomatoes…soy, ginger, onion and shallot, balsalmic vinegar, oil, shallot etc. I have ideas that sometimes work and sometimes don’t, but I experiment. I don’t ever cook with recipes because I can’t follow them. I’m too creative and passionate that I miss things and recreate while I am creating. I’ve tried to follow recipes and I miss steps, add things in different proportions. I’ve always found baking a challenge for that reason.

I need to start writing down my recipes, but I never know the correct proportions. I hardly ever use measuring cups or spoons. I use my hands a lot – pinching, sprinkling, dashing, mixing…I always infuse love into my food.

I’ll give you the recipe for the coconut milk vanilla pudding because it was easy and came out right:

Naturally sweetened coconut tapioca pudding

Ingredients:

3 cups coconut milk (I used lite)

1/4 cup tapioca

2 tablespoons turbinado sugar

2 tablespoons agave nectar

2 tablespoons vanilla extract (pure – from madagasgar or tahiti best) – a vanilla bean with bean specs removed would be better

Directions:

Heat tapioca in coconut milk until simmering. Turn heat to low and continue simmering 12-15 minutes, stirring often. When tapioca is really transparent, turn off heat, stir in sugar, agave and vanilla. Pour into dessert dishes and refrigerate at least 4 hours. To avoid skin, put a piece of saran wrap directly on surface.

Variation:

melt 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips in a double boiler and add liquid chocolate at the same time as vanilla or instead of vanilla for a chocolate pudding.

Garnish with fresh mint!

Julia Child’s Legacy and Chocolate torte – healthy in small doses

Hi my loyal readers!

I’ve been away for sometime, mostly because I’ve been writing for another blog on examiner.com.  http://www.examiner.com/x-10896-Manhattan-Healthy-Food-Examiner Inspired by the movie Julie and Julia I wanted to revive this blog and have something out in cyberspace that was purely my own. I’m cross posting my reaction to the movie and one of my favorite torte recipes.

Every day is a food experiment for me and I always test my recipes for changes in my energy and passion levels! In this post is an original recipe altered and changed many times from a recipe I learned while at the Institute for Culinary education. Like Julia I never finished cooking school, but I learned many wonderful things and have developed my own unique style. Julia has always been a great inspiration to me – from about the age of 11 when I watched Julia on PBS with my Aunt Ida and tried to make chicken breasts in butter and cream sauce on my own. How my mother let me do such things I will never know. By age 12 I was stir frying shrimp and by high school I was coming home for lunch with my friends and preparing “gourmet” meals for them. It all started with Julia.

Now of course, my interests have shifted toward the health value of food. But I will never sacrifice taste for health value. I believe they can be linked! Healthy food is always thought of as boring, plain and lacking butter. Perhaps, but what if it was just small amounts of truly delicious food with natural sugars and enough butter to fill you up. The truly two bite dessert. Jeff Goldblum apparently orders desserts, savors one truly decadent bite and sends it back. Not all of us have this kind of self control, but I was inspired enough by Julia Child to write this post. But first, I want to talk about the inspiration.

I am not a woman who cries often. Since Saturday night I have cried twice…from movies no less. The first: the time traveler’s wife. A story of love that overcame the test of time…literally and tonight from Julie and Julia, a story of love, sex, food and writing…and of course, success, money and everything else! But first came, the love, the sex…and of course the food…and the writing! Two stories that are ever so vivid, real, whole and round. Stories that rip through you to the very core and remind you why we live. Ah, to think, the power of a boeuf bourgonuine to transform the senses and the miracle of tricking your own husband who had just gotten a vasectomy into getting you pregnant by cheating with a younger version of your time traveling husband before he got the procedure done.
I am dreaming of cassoulet, duck steak and tarte tatin. The first time I had duck steak, which is some part of the duck (I’m going to go with the breast) without a drop of fat on it – just the meat – its simply seared and its nearly raw inside – but its so delicious I can’t even explain it! When I was at the Institute for Culinary education and also again at Tocqueville I concentrated on pastry, which was so strange considering I am by all means a food chef. I did excel at pastry and I do enjoy making desserts. I’ve made a few tarte tatins in my lifetime and even bought a special pot to make it in because you need to be able to make the apples on the stove, cover it with the pastry and then pop the thing in the oven. You need a pan that has an oven safe handle, which is hard to find these days. An ex-boyfriend once made eggs in the pan without using butter and to this day despite several cleanings and soakings there are still scrapes of egg in the pan. The pan lasted longer than that relationship! Damn though, I was very much in love with the pan. Will have to butter it up but good the next time I want to make a tart.
But the piece de resistance in my culinary abilities and one of my all time favorite desserts is a dark chocolate torte I learned to make in a French cooking class at ICE. The cake is made with grand Marnier and two sticks of butter. Julia would be proud. Somewhere I have the original recipe, but I’ve altered it over the years to make it completely my own.
Ingredients:
10 ounces of the darkest chocolate I can find (my favorite is Valhrona 85%)
4 eggs
2 tablespoons grand mariner
1/3 cup of agave nectar
Waxed parchment paper
8 inch round cake pan

Cut a round in parchment to line bottom and sides of cake pan. Set aside with a weight. Preheat oven to 350.
Whisk eggs together with grand mariner in a large bowl. Don’t beat, just whisk them with the liquer until it is combined and the eggs turn yellow. Chop chocolate into chunks on an angle with a chef’s knife. Gently melt it in a double boiler with a little bit of agave nectar (maybe 1/3 of a cup). When the chocolate has just melted, remove from heat and stir to make creamy. Add two sticks of butter. Cover and let the butter melt completely. When melted, remove cover and stir. While whisking, add the chocolate mixture in a stream (almost like you’d add oil to egg yolks to make mayonnaise) to the egg mixture and continue whisking lightly just until all the chocolate combines.
Remove weight from pan and pour in batter. Place cake pan in a larger pan filled with two inches of water so cake pan floats in other pan (bain maire).
Cook 40 minutes until top has set. Cool for 10 min or so and pop in refrigerator at least 12 hours. This piece is crucial!!! The next day, turn cake over onto a plate and unmold by removing parchment. Decorate cake with either powdered sugar or my favorite – sifted raw cacao powder (not Dutch processed cocoa, please!) and raspberries. Serve slices with real whipped cream that has not been ultra pasteurized (just regular pasteurized is fine, it whips better, usually comes in a glass bottle) if you can find it.

my vision for the world if money were no object

Someone asked me this question in an email a month ago and I just reread the email. I think its brilliant if I do say so myself and being the time of new years resolutions, here are mine for 2009…and it will happen!

If money were no object, I would want to prepare healthy food for people in their homes as a personal chef and also teach healthy cooking classes in people’s homes [for whatever they could pay] and lead classes as well as seminars on the health benefits of certain foods. I would maybe want a very
small cafe that I would hire a staff to cook at and I would design the menu.  I see myself more as a designer and a consultant. I’d love to consult to restaurants so that they use healthier ingredients -such as changing the oils, maybe that is something I should mention at BNI – does anyone here
know a restaurant owner or a caterer who needs a consultant to make their
menu or offerings healthier. Go from top down instead of individuals.

I’d love to transform entire organizations and corporate cafeterias as well as schools to only have healthy foods and make sure every airport had a healthy option for travelers.

I’d want to design some sort of healthy hot dog stand – like the dessert truck (http://www.desserttruck.com/) but with bowls of green vegetables and grains that were delicious, flavorful soups that were also healthy, an explosion of flavor – lots of ginger, garlic, tumeric, cilantro, lime, a bit of butter, coconut oil etc. Food that tasted GOOD but was also good for you…and get people excited about eating it because of how it is going to make them feel versus how they may feel now.

Eventually I’d like to be a partner (or two or six or 100) in a sit down restaurant like Alice Water’s Chez Panisse. A restaurant started by Alice and 100 of her closest friends. Who is with me. Let’s bring some Berkeley to New York City or at least to Long Island. I know just the place!

At the same time I’d want to design neighborhood healthy tours – to show people all the resources in their neighborhood to buy healthy foods and also the restaurants that have it. As well, even in a restaurant that is “not so healthy” there’s always a healthy option, but its a lot of pressure to go to a place and read a menu.  Its much easier to just know what to eat without looking at the menu. Something like – I’ll have whatever fresh fish is available, broiled with lemon and herbs, brown rice or wild rice if you have
it and any serving of steamed or lightly sauteed vegetables. For dessert – have the darkest, richest chocolate dessert and share it with 4 people, just don’t do it every day.

I know personally that for the past three months I have been neglecting my own diet and been so busy that I actually ate pizza a few weeks back. I am lactose and gluten intolerant and I ate pizza. I don’t know what I was thinking…but my body is so attuned to junky food that I actually have gotten sick again with my ADHD out of control. A few days of eating healthy again – eating only gluten free grains, no bread and as little cheese/dairy as possible (except last night) and no alcohol and I feel amazing…or at
least my digestion and my brain feel amazing.

One night in early December I made the following for dinner:
venison with coconut, peanut butter sauce with orange champagne vinegar (I just made it up, I don’t have a recipe, one day I will make it again and come up with a recipe to share with you all)
steamed asparagus, broccoli and cauliflower with a touch of herb butter
and quinoa/brown rice with mustard seed and a bit of curry
I had 3 squares of dark chocolate for dessert.

it was fantastic. not a drop of fat on the venison. the sauce was just the
right amount and mostly spices with a touch of coconut, stock and 1 tsp of
peanut butter for flavor, maybe I put an 1/4 of tsp of sesame oil in as well.

Last night I made grass fed lamb stew with sweet potatoes and carrots from the 4th street co-op.  The lamb was from whole foods…but I am starting to think that I want to get my meat from Dickson’s Farms which sells meat at Morningside Farmers Market. http://dicksonsfarmstand.com/ I am going to see if I can get some sort of account for the restaurant once I open it. There was some complicated recipe I didn’t have time for – so I modified it slightly slow cooking lamb with onions in water for 1 hour (boiling and slow cooking until the water evaporating and repeating this process) and then adding beef stock (2 1/2 cups) the rind of one blood orange, allspice and anise seeds (about 1 tsp each). I cooked the lamb for 1 hour and then added the carrots and sweet potatoes and some little blue potatoes at the end for 20 min – they got all soft and just incorporated into the stew. Best thing I ever tasted…delish!

These are the recipes I want to share with people and what I want to bring into their lives that healthy food is not boring and one doesn’t need to think of a diet as deprivation. Food should be good, strengthening, delicious but at the same time filling so that a smaller portion leaves you
just as satisfied. I had about 4 ounces of venison. Half the fat of a dry grilled chicken breast with a lot less of the cancer causing substances from the grilling time.

I am still struggling with how to work this into a 20 second elevator pitch.  If anyone has any suggestions I am open to them.  I just want anyone struggling with a food issue, intolerance or just simply wants to be healthier in 2009 to be excited about food and food that’s not only tasty but health supportive with all the great qualities that will keep me strong, lean, with high immunity and energy. This is the message I want to transmit.

I hope you are all having a great 2009 so far!

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!