Content about Island Epicure

Tired out?  Brain fogged? Here’s what to eat when you’re feeling beat. Coffee and Danish are not the answer.  What the Danish people really eat for breakfast: Porridge made like their rye bread, thick and brown served up with butter or rich cream. At least that’s what my late husband’s Uncle Hans gave us for breakfast when we visited him. Of course, that’s was a few decades ago. I hope junk food has not replaced the healthy food we were served there.

You have probably heard or read of the Paleo or caveman diet. Heck, you may even already be on it. It’s theory is that we will thrive if we’ll eat as our remote ancestors did. Enough with all this GMO and Genetically Engineered food. Down with forbidding meat, or fats. Enough with all the sugar, MSG, and other chemical additives. Faugh to packaged foods. Cavemen were omnivorous. They were accustomed to fasts, forced by deep snows, earthquakes, broken bones, and other disasters to get by on whatever little edible stuff they could get their hands on.

In England, not celebrated for great cuisine, we were served a simple potato salad consisting of pieces of cooked potato and mayonnaise. In Germany, the potato “salad” arrived at our table piping hot and doused with bacon drippings and vinegar. In France, nothing so plebian as a potato salad ever appeared on a restaurant menu, nor is there a potato salad in either of my French cookbooks. The potato salad my mother used to make was Scandavian. (Her stepmother was Danish; her parents spoke no English. As a child of four, I thought they were still learning our language as was I.

A quiche presents an appealing appearance, aroma, and taste for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It’s equally delicious and nutritious served hot or cold. But when the weather turns hot and you don’t care to turn on your oven, you can forget the crust, and make an augmented Danish omelet instead. Omelets can vary as much as quiches. (By the way, real men do like quiche--and omelets.) One difference is that an omelet may or may or may not contain cheese, but I never met a quiche without it.

That is a question answered by the weather. Is it too hot to cook? We eat raw vegetable or fruit salads or bean salad accompanied by a plate of cold cuts and a sturdy whole grain bread, or a bean salad. Is it too cool not to cook? There we have more choices. We cook whatever we like or whatever the fridge or freezer yields.

Today’s column is inspired by Steve Silha’s request for more Greek recipes. Some of the best dishes we ever tasted were those we ate in small Greek restaurants, the kind with only three tables and the cook working at the back of the room or in her adjacent kitchen. There’s no menu posted or at table. The cook beckons you to come into her kitchen, look at the food she’s prepared and choose. It’s Greek home cooking as interpreted in Crete, and as I remember it from the winter of our year of Sabbatical.

The nettle plant is really your friend. It’s tasty and nutritious. When it stings you, it’s only trying to save its own life long enough to produce seeds and extend its genes through another nettle generation. So never strip a nettle patch completely. The nettle plants know that grazing animals, like us, regard it as an excellent, and free, vegetable. It’s stings ward off deer, but not us. We wear rubber gloves. Cloth gloves can be penetrated with the stingers.

“You don’t go to Greece for the cooking,” someone told us. We believed them and prepared to rent a house with a stove and do our own cooking that long ago sabbatical winter. We’d looked on the map and observed that Crete is on the same latitude as San Diego, so we left our woolies at home. Those were the days when it snowed on Vashon Island and one winter it had got down to 15 degrees in January. Having been in San Diego one January, we thought we’d be eating homegrown oranges in some Cretan back yard in our shorts. Were we ever surprised!

Diabetes seems to be edging into epidemic status. Native Americans and people with African ancestors are the most at risk, but none of us is immune to that disease. People in my family are susceptible to it.  My mother and her grandmother had it. (Her mother died young of tuberculosis, another disease that’s making a comeback.) One of my two sisters  and one of my two sons are diabetic and one of them is currently undergoing a series of eye surgeries related to the disease. One of my two daughters has been diagnosed with “pre-diabetes”.

Whenever we host a big family dinner, we cook much more food than the group can consume. There are leftovers for our house and for the batchelor/s at the gathering to take home. It’s best to put them in glass or ceramic containers, not plastic boxers. There’s no such thing as good plastic. They all leach toxins into the food, especially if said food is acidic. We save empty glass jars for that purpose. When refrigerating food we leave at least half an inch for the expansion that occurs as food chills.

Cooking the traditional centerpiece of a Thanksgiving meal is easy; the directions come with the bird. But what do you do with the leftover carcass? There’s a lot of good meat on it, well worth the time to cut off that meat and transform it into a big pot pie, or a casserole. The remaining not quite bare skeleton can be cut up so it will fit into a stockpot if it’s large, or cut up and put in a gallon-size freezer baggie, frozen and stored to make soup stock later.

Your Halloween pumpkin, if bought with future culinary uses in mind, can have a second life as Pumpkin Soup or Pumpkin Pie, or if there’s just a bit of pumpkin pulp leftover, you might create a Pumpkin Smoothie. If your Jack O’Lantern is not made from the edible variety of pumpkin, just skip the next three paragraphs and go straight to the recipe below, using canned pumpkin.