A couple weeks ago I offered to lend a hand in a friend's tomato sauce canning experiments. I brought over my canning supplies, and we met at the local farmers market. He picked up a 50lb box of tomatoes and other ingredients for his recipes, while I shopped for Dave and I's weekly veggies and picked up some crazy delicious pork shoulder (With which I made ciccioli - a spicy pork rillette that is definitely a no-no after the surgery. Farewell ciccioli!). When we got back to my friend's place, he revealed that he'd never actually made his famous sauce with fresh tomatoes before - always from a can - and he'd bought regular old beefsteak tomatoes - which any Italian mama will tell you are not the right kind for saucing. (Stick with plums, romas, and san marzanos which have a higher flesh to seed/liquid ratio). He also had not inspected the tomatoes for quality - and at least 30% of them were woefully unripe. As a result - my friend's sauce came out almost unrecognizable. A pot of stewed tomatoes very unlike his usual delicious marinara.
Ingredients (and quality ingredients) are key to making food taste good. I've noticed in a lot of diet/bypass food blogs and recipe books - people start to focus on gimmicky tricks like using processed cheese because it has less calories than a real cheese. While that may be true, processed psuedo-cheese contains synthetic chemical preservatives and contributes nothing to your body beyond a pile of sodium and a smidgen of added calcium. With our tiny pouches, we need to make sure that we're putting in good stuff not just filling in space with "low calorie" stuff. Just to clarify, I'm not advocating eating fatty foods or high calorie foods, I'm saying that if you have the choice - go for quality.
Protein is a major concern for our new eating habits, so here's a couple protein packed ingredients that I'm going to be focusing on in my recipes.
Local Free Range Eggs & Chickens: Beyond the environmental and ethical reasons to eat local and organic (which I can write about ad nauseum so I'll refrain here), there is substantial evidence that pasture raised (aka free range) eggs are packed with more nutritional goodness than the factory farm eggs on most supermarket shelves.
"Eggs from hens raised on pasture show 4 to 6 times as much vitamin D as typical supermarket eggs." Not only that but they contain "• 1⁄3 less cholesterol• 1⁄4 less saturated fat• 2⁄3 more vitamin A• 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids• 3 times more vitamin E• 7 times more beta carotene *
This is because free range chickens are allowed to forage for insects aka delicious low fat protein snacks and have wider range of dietary options than grain fed factory chickens. Not only that, but they taste better. They eat better, they taste better, and they're better for our pouches.
But SBB, local free range eggs are $7 a dozen at my supermarket, and the regular ones are just $3!! So 7$ for 12 healthy perfect lunches? When your stomach was big 7$ for a dozen eggs might have seemed too much, but now those 12 eggs are 12 entire meals. Add one of these cheapo japanese egg molds, and you've got a super cute lunch for less than $0.60.
Wild Caught Salmon - total superfood! The Omega 3's and fatty acids in salmon make your hair shine and your skin soft, but it's super easy to fall into the farmed salmon trap. I found this infographic on prevention.com a while ago, and it sums up all the points I wanted to make even better than I can!
*Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/eggs-zl0z0703zswa.aspx#ixzz3Ab8BnWP2
Great information, thanks for sharing....I knew wild salmon was better but was not sure of the specifics.
ReplyDeleteThe nutritional stuff is a big difference! But wild salmon is also a great choice ethically too. Farmed salmon is raised in these giant nets, the fish are so tightly packed together in the nets that they have malformed fins and tails (I've seen them first-hand in restaurant kitchens - it's astonishing). Not to mention the pollution that these fish farms create - dumping loads of chemicals and antibiotics right into the water along with their food. :( Wild Salmon for the WIN.
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