GMOs and Why You Should Live On Only Popcorn (stove top popcorn)

I’m doing my best to understand Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) foods and determine whether they are safe to eat.  It is difficult to do, since the companies that produce GMO seeds assure us of their absolute 100% safety and the anti-GMO groups are hysterical about their danger.  I tend not to trust folks like Monsanto, Dow or Hooker Chemical based on their past history of deceit to protect profits.  The anti group likely has a valid point, but they are unusually bad at expressing it.  I often dismiss them, because they really don’t know how to present their argument in a cogent way, instead relying on fear and uncontrolled emotion to make their case.  For example, you just can’t scream “GMOS CAUSE CANCER” on a discussion board and fail to present any evidence showing how.  Similarly, you shouldn’t smear me with “YOU HATE THE PLANET” if you do not know my opinions, for certain and for sure, because actually I sort of like this planet and either way, it’s the only one we have.

We are stuck in a quandary.  The data from producers asserts that we should eat up all their GMO, trademarked foods.  We’ll live a long and happy and healthy and holy (since this is the American way) life.  On the other side, if you do a little digging, avoiding the crazies who troll the interwebs, you will find some pretty scary stuff about GMOs.  So, what is a person who wants to do the right thing for themselves and their family to do?  My best take on this is to avoid GMOs until the verdict is in. 

What does that mean?  You could do worse than follow the Fresh Fun Foods mantra of “When I die, I want to decompose.”  At the Farrell house we’ve been living this way for a long time.  Years back, when I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I took a diabetes education class at the local hospital.  It was enlightening, because I realized I didn’t need to know how many fats and carbs were in a Bigg Mack, since I literally hadn’t been in a McEvil for 25 years.  Most of the presenter’s recommendations did not apply to me or our family, you see we don’t buy any processed food, there’s little junk food around the house and we don’t drink soda, sticking almost exclusively to water, beer, cidre or wine.  I have never had a Hot Pocket.  Why would I buy DiGiorno when Vinny’s is just down the block?  

Since GMOs turn up in processed foods, almost all corn in the USA is GMO, the best way to avoid GMO until the research and legislation shakes out is to quit buying the frozen prepared stuff and cook for yourself.  That’s where I come in.  Cooking is a wonderful family activity.  You’ll need to shop and chop.  Kids should be taught to value fresh foods and need to learn the best way to prepare what they buy from local producers.  Why not buy good, healthy food and prepare it yourself, rather than let someone make it for you in a factory.

If you want to completely avoid GMO, there is only one way that you can and that would be to go on a popcorn diet.  If you only eat popcorn, you will avoid all GMO, since popcorn comes from a type of corn that has never been modified, at least for the moment.  Now, there has to be a couple of qualifications here.  A popcorn diet may not give you all the vitamins and nutrients necessary to live.  That’s a big downside.  Also, you will have to learn to cook popcorn on a stove, because as we have learned, microwave ovens are rotten and so is that sickly yellow “butter flavored” stuff they jam in the package.  While the corn in microwave popcorn is ok, everything else around it wants to kill you.  

You’ll need a heavy pot with a tight-fitting lid, unless you want popcorn all over your stove.  Don’t use enamel lined pots like Le Creuset.  They don’t hold up to the heat.  Use peanut or salad oil.  Olive oil might sound good, but it does not hold the high temperature that you need and will burn, contributing an acrid flavor.  Popping up just a couple of kernels lets you know when the oil is hot enough to pop the remainder of the corn quickly, without burning.  Butter added early will burn and should go in at the last minute, preserving its sweetness.  Yes, once again, technique matters, even with popcorn.

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Popcorn  (serves 4)

1 c. popcorn

1 tbs. peanut or salad oil

1 tbs. unsalted butter

1 tsp salt

pinch black pepper

In a heavy pot with a tight fitting lid, heat the oil and three kernels of popcorn on a high heat.  When those kernels pop, reduce the heat to medium and add the remaining popcorn to the pot.  It should cover the bottom in 1 layer.  More is not better.  Cover the pot and shake it back and forth while still on the heat to coat the kernels with the oil.

After a minute you will hear the corn begin to pop.  Resist the urge to look in the pot.  Shake it a couple of times.  After less than 5 minutes the popping will cease.  Give it another shake.  If there is no more popping, carefully remove the cover avoiding the burp of steam, add the butter, salt and pepper.  Recover the pot and allow it to rest one minute so that the butter melts.  Stir to mix in the butter and seasonings, turn the popcorn out into a large bowl and start fighting with the kids so you can get the chef’s share.

*If you want to play around with flavored popcorn, try adding a shake of paprika or chili powder with the butter.  Some garlic, finely chopped, could also work.  How about a squeeze of lemon and chopped fresh oregano?   If you want to get really crazy, skip the butter and season the popcorn with olive oil, garlic, finely chopped basil and diced sun dried tomatoes. 

Make Pasta, But Do It Right (spaghetti with fennel and Italian sausage)

Pasta is easy.  It really is however there are a few unbreakable rules.  The first is that you have to understand the noodle that you are using.  Generally, pasta has a neutral, pleasant grain flavor.  The flavors derived from carrot, spinach or squid ink are also understated.  Those ingredients are mostly there to contribute orange, green or black color.  I’ve never been a big fan of multicolor pasta, although there was a chef in Lambertville who served white and black angel hair with his zebra chops.  That seemed to be more of a laugh than a culinary breakthrough.

Shape matters.  Those ridges on your penne will hold the sauce.  That’s why rigatoni should be baked with sauce and messy cheeses (always plural), because it is smooth on the outside and will not sauce well.  Size is also important.  You should match the size of the flavoring ingredients with the size of the pasta.  That’s why bowties, farfalle, makes such great salad when combined with celery, red onion, pepperoncini, provolone and big hunks of salami.

Since it is such a simple thing to prepare, if it is not done correctly, the dish will be a complete disaster.  It’s rare that I will cop out and tell you to follow the manufacturer’s advice, but with pasta, their cooking directions are usually right on.  Again, you won’t hear me recommending avoidance of store brands often.  Name brand pasta, in my experience at least, tends to cook up more evenly and taste better than store brand.  It also only costs a quarter more, so this might not be a place to count pennies.

Pasta’s greatest contribution to a dish, much like tofu, is that it has a subtle, delicate taste and will soak up the flavors of whatever it is paired with.  That’s why tomato sauce and any of the cream sauces work so well with noodles.  Additionally, something simple like olive oil, garlic and basil, all strong flavors, elevate pasta to greatness.  I lived on that in college.

Today’s recipe is designed to show off a few things.  Pasta that is hot when combined with the sauce will soak it up more readily that cold noodles.  You’ll be making the sauce as the pasta boils.  Don’t worry.  It is a simple process.  We’ll also play with flavor, doing a spin on Carbonara, the classic egg yolk, onion, garlic and bacon sauce by instead using a whole egg, fennel, garlic and Italian sausage.  Using the same technique, while making a few substitutions creates a new dish that I hope you’ll like.

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Spaghetti with Fennel and Italian Sausage (serves 4 as an appetizer, 2 as a main course)

½ pound spaghetti

4 oz. Italian sausage, hot or sweet

2 eggs

1 c. fresh fennel, thinly sliced

1 c. heavy cream

½ c. Locatelli or Parmesean cheese, grate your own*

1 clove garlic, chopped

salt and black pepper

Following the directions on the package, boil a large pot of salted water and cook the spaghetti al dente, so that is cooked through, but still firm.  Begin making the sauce when the spaghetti goes in the pot.

Remove the sausage from its casing and brown it on a high heat in a large sauté pan.  Drain 2/3 of the grease from the pan.  Break the egg into the pan.  Scramble it, add the garlic and fennel.  Sauté these aromatics until the fennel has wilted.  Pour in the cream and 2/3 of the grated cheese.  Reduce the sauce by half.

By this time, the spaghetti will be properly cooked.  Drain it, then immediately add it to the sauce.  Stir it together, blending the sauce and the spaghetti.  Plate immediately, topping with the remainder of the grated cheese.

*Yes, grate you own.  Read the packaging on the pregrated stuff.  Unless you think that eating “powdered cellulose,” sawdust, is a good thing, you should take the 30 seconds it’ll take to grate up some cheese.

A Cold Day In Ol' Mexico (Pork Chili meat, winter salsa)

With this cold weather hitting the East Coast hard, we need to think of the kind of food that will warm the soul and warm the family that is out doing the difficult work that needs doing.   I hate it that it is still dark out when the dog wakes you up, expecting you to get outta bed and take him for a walk.  Rufus will not sleep in, although he does spend most of the day crashed out on the couch, the floor, the bed…

Breakfast recently has been a simple dish of yogurt and some walnuts or dried fruit.  The fruit comes from the bins at Giant.  Cheap and since they do such a big business, the stuff is always fresh.  I tend not to buy foods stored in the bottom row, since I once saw a little kid sample a mango slice and put it back after a bite, apparently not liking the flavor.  Even the best children are pretty gross most of the time, ours included.

Lunch has been leftovers.  I’ll make “clean out the fridge” pasta or soup made with chicken stock and leftover bits of vegetables, potatoes, ends of ham or chicken, maybe some noodles, all thickened up with the ends of bread going stale.  The noodles are easy.  I’ll just sauté some stuff in olive oil that’s hanging around, some bacon, shrimp, onions, zucchini, garlic, for example, then mix in whatever pasta didn’t get eaten last night.  Grate some good cheese over top.  This is actually a pretty popular dish at our house and probably why I never bother to cook less than the full box of noodles.  If it doesn’t get eaten that night, by noon the next day it’ll be gone.        

Evenings are less hectic now that the kids have all graduated high school and we don’t have to play taxi for football, soccer and all sorts of music lessons.  We tend to take our time and decompress around the stove, catching up on each other’s day and getting ready for the evening round of church meetings, clubs, a night of jazz or a movie.  I don’t want to sound like we lead a whirlwind life.  Just as often the night is spent vegging out on the couch watching the Walking Dead.  So, for a casual night, after a busy day, you might want to go for something tasty, but easy to prepare.

I am so happy that there are numerous Mexican groceries in our area.  It is easy to bang out a dinner of beans and rice with tacos and salsa if you can run into a place that stocks authentic Mexican foods.  Skip the El Paso brand stuff you see in the mega markets.  Go to a place like Alexa’s Mexican Market in Lansdale, right near the train station, or El Changarro in Norristown.  Both places have owners who are eager to help you get what you need to make an interesting meal.  Today, I’m presenting a recipe for crock pot chili pork and a red salsa that you can make in winter when the only tomatoes available come in cans.  You’ll be able to prepare both of these ahead of time.  The pork is prefect for tacos or rolling up with beans and cheese in burritos.  The salsa is good in the fridge for a couple of days, although it never lasts at our place and is great with eggs and a bit of the pork in breakfast tacos.

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Chili Pork

3# pork shoulder, a butt roast is best

1 cup onions, diced

3 dried guajillo chilies, seeded and chopped (or ancho, New Mexico, pasilla)

3 tbs. chili powder

1 tbs, cumin powder

4 cloves of garlic

2 bay leaves

salt and black pepper

Turn your crock pot on high.  Chop the meat into 1 inch chunks.  

Put the onions, garlic and bay leaf in the bottom of the crock pot.   

Add the chilies.

Layer the meat on top of the aromatics. 

Season with chili powder, cumin powder, salt and black pepper.  Do not add water.  The pork will be too soupy for tacos and burritos.

Cover the crock pot and allow it to cook on high for about 2 hours, until the meat begins to break down and grease begins to rise to the top.  Resist the urge to stir the pork.  Reduce the heat to low and allow it to cook for at least 3 more hours.

At the end of 5 hours total cooking time, skim the fat that has risen to the top.  Hardcore folks would save the fat to fry up eggs in the next day and while that would taste damn fine, and while I am a thrifty cook, my yoga teacher would freak if she heard of such behavior.  Better to just throw it out.

Break up the pork with a spoon or potato masher.  Keep hot until you are ready to serve it in tacos, with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, radishes and salsa or rolled up in a bean burrito with cheese.

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Winter Salsa

1 28 oz. can of petite diced tomatoes

½ cup white or red onions, diced

½ cup scallions, sliced

½ cup green pepper, diced

½ cup fresh cilantro, chopped

2 tbs. canned chipotle chile in adobo sauce

2 tbs. red wine vinegar

3 tbs. olive oil

salt and pepper, to your taste

Combine all ingredients in a large mixing bowl.  Remove 1/3 of the salsa.  Puree it finely to thicken the sauce.  Return it to the mixing bowl.  Refrigerate it for at least an hour before serving.

I'm a Teddy Bear! (puree of broccoli soup)

I’m told that I can be cranky.  I’m doing my best to moderate that, anger isn’t my “go to” anymore.   Seriously, in the past, I was one of those chefs that threw things, rolls, pots, sauté pans, rolls, even knives.  The little paring knives get the point across to the waiters, because with a little practice, you can stick them in the wall, right beside their head as they are gabbing instead of running “this %#@& venison to table eight!” I will admit to have been less than pleasant at times. 

But that’s all in the past.  I’m cuddly now.  I like kittens and flowers and puffy clouds.  I decorate with posters of puppies.  Yeah, my heart rate is no longer like that of a hummingbird and my gastric juices are not swirling like Hell Gate.  Life is good, really good, at least until I start looking at recipe web sites.  It’s good to keep up with the competition.  I like to see what the other folks are doing.  It also sets me on edge.

As a professional chef, I read cookbooks like literature.  Honestly, as I page through a cookbook, I know what the food is going to taste like.  Think that’s odd, well I know a bunch of musicians and they can look over sheet music and hear the whole thing, preformed, complete down to every nuance.  My recipe channeling is the same thing.  It is also a curse because, as I read I have the acrid taste of scorched onions or the combination of kiwi and shrimp in my mouth.  I know that the author never made the dish and that the result of following their advice will be horrid.  Some posters just don’t know what they are doing.  That’s OK, they’re not pros, but they are published authors so they should at least test out what they recommend.

One sin that has become so common is the reposting of someone else’s work.  This bugs me.  I’m asking for a little honesty here.  If you wrote the recipe, take credit for it.  Brag!  You have done something spectacular.  If not, tagging something like “Recipe adapted from Simply Recipes” on the bottom of the page doesn’t cover it.  (”adapted” means that they changed the font)  Even the most distracted middle school teacher would bust you for plagiarism if you tried that in the real world, so why is it cool online?

The other thing that works me up is that everyone uses chicken stock in every recipe they can, without thinking about what the final flavor is going to be.  Wouldn’t it be better to make broccoli soup with vegetable stock or water and let the green stuff shine.  Why mask those good ingredients with a reduced stock.  The reason may be the fault of poorly trained commercial chefs who feel that soup base or bullion, that salty, fatty evil substance that substitutes for stock, is included in most commercial recipes, from soup to Waldorf Salad (really, I’ve seen it).  Some chefs see it as a given, necessary to boost the “flavor profile.” 

I want to encourage you to think at the stove.  That’s why today’s recipe is, like the previous recipe for creamy salad dressing, is a chart.  You’ll get a basic recipe for broccoli soup and then a bunch of ways to vary it.  This way, you will have the technique under your belt and won’t freak out if there is no broccoli in the market that day, you’ll just hum along the aisles and grab up something to replace what you originally came for.  You’ll be able to make parsnip soup in the winter and tomato soup when it’s hot out.  While the ingredients may change, the technique will always be there in your back pocket. 

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Puree of Broccoli Soup to serve six

1 bunch broccoli, about 3 cups chopped

1 ½ cups white potato, peeled and diced

1 cup onion, diced

2 tsp. butter

6 cups water or vegetable stock

salt and pepper

Roughly chop the tops of the broccoli.  Deeply peel away the tough outer skin of the broccoli stems.  Chop the peeled stems into ½ inch pieces.

In a heavy bottomed stockpot, over a low heat, melt the butter then sauté the onions until transparent, about 5 minutes.  Season with salt and pepper.  Add the broccoli and potatoes, continue to sauté the onions, potatoes and broccoli until the broccoli has wilted.

Pour in the water or vegetable stock, increase the heat and bring the soup to a boil.  Lower the heat, simmer for one hour, skimming occasionally to remove any proteins that rise to the top.

Puree the soup with a minipimer or pass it through a food mill.  Bring the soup back to a serving temperature, adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper and add an enrichment or serve as is.

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Use the following chart to make a soup of your own.  The process is easy.  Use the Broccoli Soup recipe above as your guide, then choose an ingredient from the chart below to vary the master recipe.  For example, you can make a great soup by substituting 3 cups of chopped spinach for the broccoli.  Additionally, you could make a butternut squash soup with rice as a starch to thicken it.  If you would add ½ cup of heavy cream to your squash soup, that would be a special thing.  If you want to get a little crazy, use 2 vegetables, say 1 ½ cup tomatoes and 1 ½ cup red peppers and thicken it with white beans.  Got it?  Use your head.  Play, have fun with your food.

Vegetable	Starch	Enrichment
carrot	rice,  ¾ cup uncooked	butter, 3 tbs.
spinach onion tomato red peppers celery sweet potato mushrooms parsnips asparagus salsify butternut squash pumpkin yam	ditalini, ¾ cup uncooked pastina, ½ cup uncooked bread, 2 cups diced red or white beans, 1 cup             cooked lentils, 1 cup uncooked	heavy cream, ½ cup whole milk, 1 cup yogurt, 1 cup buttermilk, 1 cup pesto, 3 tbs.