Marge & Dad: A Love Story from Wright's Gourmet

 

Mrs. Wright was the woman who ran the deli in South Tampa where everyone knew you got the best sandwiches. She was tough, like the soup nazi, you braved her shop to savor the flavors found in the delicious combination of mayo-mustard slathered on sandwiches piled high with Roast Beef or Turkey. She would throw the menu at you if you asked the question, "Whats on it?", or some other stupid question about the food.

 Once, she waited and eyeballed me and I could tell something rude was coming my way. I dared to stand my ground and said something defiant right back at her like, "I'm not ready"...or something slightly rude. Mrs. Wright actually seemed to respect insubordination, because she eyed me on that day with a hint of  new-found grudging respect. That was my Fathers secret in dealing with "Marge", as only he got away with calling her.

He took guff from no-one and Marge loved that. That was their bond.

 She would keep his sandwiches cold in the fridge, and cut them in quarters just the way he liked. To understand my Dad’s non-gourmet but slightly neurotic food obsessions, you must understand his passions about people. He had such idiosyncrasies that it seemed many were out to “get” him if he didn’t see things going his way.

For example, once I sat with him at a charity trade show booth. For lunch, he had his prized Wright’s sandwiches ready to go. I heard this passionate exclamation, “Those bastards! I couldn’t imagine what calamity had occurred, but I should have known. I said, “Dad! What is it?”

“They didn’t cut my sandwich into quarters.”…That was that.

He was not a gourmand, but his peculiarities extended to the ritual of sandwich rites of passage. There was a “wet” sandwich, which consisted of a turkey salad with mayonnaise. The “dry” sandwich was the plain turkey slices on the same bread. So “wet” and “dry” combined for the perfect palette of gastronomic delight in Dad’s world.

Marge understood my Dad. She “got” him whereas there were many who just couldn’t fathom him. She was one of a kind as was my old man. They were simpatico on the sandwich front and they spoke the same language. It was the language of love for the minutiae of food. That was the secret bond they shared.

 

 

That Dirty Little Secret Called Maintenance...

Weight Watchers Lifetime Members Keychain

 *The stats are out there. In 1960, the average woman weighed about 130 pounds. And the man in the Insurance Actuaries weighed about 180. Now the average woman weighs 160 pounds. Is she really that much taller?

 Some women are very tall. But most of us are simply fatter. Women have become much larger, and so have the men. We are a nation of obese people.  So what are we going to do about it? We can all take a page from Oprah’s book, and join Weight Watchers.

 I’m not being facetious. I actually did, about five years ago. And it worked, too. You gain lots of remarkable knowledge if you simply stick to the plan. But the mystery of it all is not found in the loss of the weight.

 It’s found in this ugly little term that gains very few supporters. It’s called Maintenance. Maintaining weight loss is not a glamorous business. You use a scale and measuring cups, and what my father liked to call “Won’t Power.” Meaning that by sheer force of will, you won’t return to the habits of mindless eating that led to the inevitable weight gain from the time you left college till the day you suddenly turned fifty and realized you were about twenty or thirty pounds overweight.

 The pounds pile on mysteriously through the years. And in middle age, suddenly we want to regain our youthful figures with diets that claim you can lose all that weight in thirty days. It’s an illusion. Or it’s just delusional thinking, because nothing like that happens overnight. In my case, it took me about a year to lose the weight I wanted to lose.

 But the trick is that it is only the beginning. You have to learn to keep the weight off. You have to adopt a dieter’s mindset. That doesn’t mean that you can’t indulge in a dessert, or deprive yourself of a favorite food. It means you have to pay the piper.

 When you do overindulge, you have to work it off the next day. You have to cut back, and learn to eat mindfully. Never again can you simply “let yourself go” unless you are prepared to train to run marathons. And even then, discipline is required to fuel your body with energy, and not empty calories.

 That is the dirty little secret of success for all long-term losers. You must learn the habits of mindful eating. And then you have to continue to work every day to maintain your goals. This dirty little secret was revealed recently in a diet book I read. The bottom line proved that each and every day of our lives, we are dieting. For good and for bad, we eat to our goal weights.

 Life intrudes. We go on vacation, we go out to dinner, and we celebrate the good times with our friends by consuming good food and drink. And sometimes we eat to mask pain and sorrow and grief and all other emotions. These are all taken into account while we are losing the weight. When we maintain, we are expected to maintain it all…. And I confess, that hasn’t always been easy for me.

 I’m sure there are others who feel the way I do. Exercise helps, but it can only go so far.  When you reach your goal weight, you are expected to become a “Lifetime Member” who maintains, and if you slip off the wagon, you are again a Weight Watcher who has slid. But to be a member of the group that has maintained, and maintained and is ready to maintain some more…

 
It’s not as glamorous nor as fun as the dieters group. There is no magic bullet to weight loss.  Sometimes going back to the group does help you to connect. But the most important times are those monthly weigh-ins where you can see the tangible results of your accomplishment. It is simply a small slip of paper given to those of us who maintain our goal weight. And you record it in a book from month to month, and from year to year.

Long live the lifetime members who are out there every day struggling to maintain and to be heard. We are all accountable to each other, but we know what counts the most-becoming accountable to yourself. In the end, that’s the only way to survive the battle of maintenance.

 

The GF Writers Cooking Journal Magazine: Best Picks

 
 
 
Hope all of our GF Readers had a Happy Thanksgiving! I’m still working to pull together the GF Writers Cookbook. And meanwhile, the magazine, The GF Writers Cooking Journal, is thriving online, with our loyal followers checking out the site regularly.

This month, the GF Best Picks are all found in The GF Writers Cooking Journal Magazine:

·          Vegetable Dishes: Carrots and Parsnips

·          Asparagus Risotto

·          Eating for Longevity

·          Potato Gratin

·          Lemon Sweet potato with meringue topping

December always brings some of the best recipes of the year to try during the holidays. Stay tuned for the best recipes we find to share along with our readers top picks! -MLJ

 

How Lazy People Cook Gluten-Free: Support your Local Health Food Store

 

 

GF Diets will not allow those of us who are not fond of spending lots of time in the kitchen from completely escaping the KP duties, but there are some ways to make life a lot easier. There is a famous book written by Peg Bracken in the sixties called the “I Hate to Cook Book”. She was actually a good cook, but she was an even better writer and I’m sure that was one reason she didn’t want to spend hours upon end making complicated recipes

To qualify that statement, not everyone who doesn’t like to cook is lazy. There are lots of reasons that people don’t like to cook. One recent poll suggested that people don’t like to mess up their kitchens. Come on! We can do better than that! The reason (I freely admit) is not that I don’t like to cook, but that I don’t like to spend time in the kitchen prepping and then cleaning up after cooking. Maybe I’m just lazy, but I don’t know how to spin it any other way. Cooking is easy if you have someone prep the food and clean the kitchen for you. Otherwise, it’s labor intense.

If you don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen, no one is blaming you. There are a lot of people that are right there with you. However, if you eat gluten-free, you are forced to cook some meals for yourself. Not only that, but you have to commit to a new lifestyle. Meaning you must continue throughout your life to prepare some dishes for yourself, or your children that have been diagnosed GF.

It’s not a fad if you have been diagnosed celiac. Or if, like myself, you have suffered for years with IBD and painful stomach cramps after eating. That will spur you on and keep you focused on your new lifestyle.

But there’s so much more out there now for the newly-diagnosed GF eater than there was twenty years ago when I was first diagnosed GF. Back then, restaurants and super-markets didn’t carry anything I could use. Health food stores were, and still are, the best places to go to buy your basic GF supplies.

Whole Foods is great for many people. I don’t like the place, although I have friends who rave about the beautiful stores and products and finds that they get at Whole Foods.  Although Whole Foods is handy, it’s expensive and the one that is close to where I live is the last choice I would make to shop for GF foods.

I like to support the local and smaller health food stores in my area. The local foods are just as good and sometimes better.  They are usually more expensive at all health food stores, but the large chain doesn’t always carry everything you need. But as I said, that’s a personal choice, and if you have a beautiful Whole Foods close to where you live, by all means, make use of it.

In particular, go to the Health Food Deli section, where you will find a variety of choices that you cannot find in most restaurants and supermarkets. The sandwiches are often made with GF breads, there are non-dairy options, there are vegan options, and the food is not made with heavy amounts of salt and fat, which is often the case with deli and restaurant choices.

You must always ask questions, but in the health food store, they are welcome and ready with the answers. This is where you will find some super-healthy looking people, those with young children or vegans that really question what is going into their bodies, and fellow GF dieters, who know and frequent health food deli’s. Make a point to find out where your closest local health food store is, and even if you do go to the supermarket or large chain retailers, make a point at least once a month to stop in and to support your local health food store. It’s usually the best place to get your questions answered and to find a variety of choices that aren’t always available when you shop at the chains.

 

Scenes we'd Like to see on Cooking Shows

One of the funniest things I saw in recent memory was an episode where Emeril was cooking with the late, great Julia Child, the queen of all Television chefs. They were making a soufflé, and Emeril, as I recall, had a slight variation on the classic theme. In the end, the soufflé didn’t quite come out as perfect as Julia would have liked, and she commented on that fact.

It made me think of what it would be like to see one of my super experimental Gluten Free dishes on some cooking show. Instead of ooh’s and ah’s, there may be a wide eyed look with the classic puckered lips that preclude someone wanting to spit the substance out into the nearest napkin or receptacle.

 

These are the types of dishes that I’ve had to experiment with through the years as I’ve tried to perfect the GLuten free version of any number of dishes. Some of the tried and true variations start with the classic Cream of Mushroom soup, which is off limits for those of us who follow the GF lifestyle.

 

So what do we do? There are some fool-proof, never-fail variations on a theme that will work well with any chicken casserole or dish that calls for the Cream of Mushroom soup base. The white sauce is probably the best for a base sauce-a “Mother” sauce-for Gluten-Free Cooks.

 Here’s your basic white sauce: I use a Vita-Mix blender. Any good blender should do the trick.

 

1 1/3 cups Lowfat milk-soy milk

¼ cup all purpose flour-GF

¼ cup Light butter

½ tsp salt-opt

 

*Place ingredient in blender (Vita-Mix) in order listed above. Secure the lid and start speed on low (1 on VM). Quickly increase the speed to High and blend for about 5 minutes. For Cheese Sauce :May add ½ to ¾ cup of good low-fat cheese or cheese substitute.

Why I am sick of hearing about new cookbooks

I confess that I am sick to death of cookbooks. I see nothing but cookbooks when I enter a bookstore or turn on the television. It seems like every day somebody famous or semi-famous has a new cookbook. Actresses, politicians, writers & TV chefs are all pushing their latest cookbook. The funny thing is, almost every one of them has some kind of a "hook". The skinny jeans, the white trash, the French way, the American way, and now, of course, the gluten-free way to eat.


And they all seem to be selling the reader (that’s you) this idea that if you buy this particular cookbook, you will automatically become famous and skinny and funny and witty and all that jazz. Well, we all know that’s a bunch of hokum. But still, there’s a reason for all these different cookbooks. They are not only selling their way of cooking, but they're also selling a window into their different outlook. “Look at me and the way I cook and ….the glow of your being will outshine every star” (Or some variation on that theme).

 

To my way of thinking, there must be others out there like myself. Not a grand cook, or a famous celebrity, but an ordinary person who suddenly discovered that unless you are willing to make some pretty major changes in the way you eat and the way you think about food, then you are never going to feel really good in this lifetime.

So here am I. And I am writing….a cookbook!? But this is not just any ordinary cookbook. This is a chronicle of a journey that I embarked upon almost 20 odd years ago. It was a time in my life I will never forget. I still remember the day I found out I could no longer eat wheat.

 

 

The nutritionist had sent out my lab work and the results were incredible to me. I had to learn to live without bread, without mustard, without shrimp and without dairy products. I remember sitting in a restaurant and wondering if life as I knew it was over. And, in a way, it was. The old way of eating had to die and I had to become a "born-again" kind of convert to gluten free living.

 

 

So what did that mean? It meant that the breads that I loved were taboo. The salad dressing I loved had mustard in it. I couldn’t eat that either. I had to start scouring the health food stores to find products that were not always available on the shelves. I had to read labels on almost all of the foods I purchased, especially canned and processed foods. I had to learn how to cook from scratch! I didn’t know how to cook with or without wheat really… So this was a revelation.

 

And 20 years later, I’m still on the journey of discovery. What a remarkably expanded world of Gluten Free Cooking and Gluten Free Products has opened up in the past decade! It’s really gratifying to see. And though I grouse at times about my universally acknowledged shortcomings regarding cooking, I’ve decided to write and blog about this journey in the upcoming “Gluten-free Writers Cookbook”  It’s a journal of cooking and it started with my determination, almost 20 years ago, to cut wheat out of my diet and start living again. And though it hasn’t always been easy, I’ve never regretted the decision and I’ve never looked back.

 

 Some upcoming posts will discuss some of my GF discoveries. Next time, I’m going to look at sauces and starters. We’ve talked in the past about the basic white sauce. This is one everyone should master! But wait…there’s more! There’s a great barbeque sauce and my fool-proof hollandaise. Stay tuned, friends…



3 Tried and True Substitutes for Cream of Mushroom soup in a can

After reading and writing about the ubiquitous Cream of Mushroom soup, here’s the bottom line.

Mushroom soup is delicious, and you don’t need the soup in a can to make a good soup. Here are three tried and true substitutes for the famous Campbell’s concoction.

 

One more thing. A basic white sauce will stand in every time. It’s the baseline sauce for the good life-if you can master it, then substitute it, you can live without the Campbell’s soup in any recipe.

 

 This is a recipe for Homemade Southern Living Soup. It’s much richer than the mock version, but the mock one is also pretty good as a stand alone recipe.

NUMBER ONE: Recipe for Homemade Sthrn Living Soup: Much richer than the Mock version, but the mock one is pretty good as a stand alone dish. If you have company coming or don’t particularly care about the calorie count, this is delicious.

 1 can of  Cream of Mushroom = 1 ¼ cup of this:

 Homemade:

 

½ cup butter-divided

3 8 oz packages fresh mushrooms chopped

1/3 cup all purpose flour

2 cups whipping cream

1 8oz package cream cheese

2 1 oz container homestyle chicken stock (Knorr was used to test)

 Directions: Melt 3 Tbsp butter in a Dutch oven over medium heat; add the mushrooms and saute 10 minutes or until liquid evaporates. Transfer to a bowl

 

2. Reduce heat to medium. Melt remaining 5 tbsp butter in Dutch oven. Whisk in flour until smooth; whisk 1 more minute. Gradually whisk in cream and other ingredients.

 

3. Cook, whisking constantly 2 minutes or until melted and smooth. Remove from heat, stir in reserved mushrooms. Serve or cool. Freezes well; thaw and heat and serve.

 

 

 
NUMBER 2:  Here’s your basic white sauce. If you master this, you won’t care about the Campbell’s soup can anymore. *I use a Vita-Mix blender. My older one leaked, but still worked fine if you didn’t mind a small amount of seepage. But I bought a second-hand Vita-Mix blender recently, and it is wonderful! Any good blender should do the trick.

The white Sauce: 1 1/3 cups Lowfat milk-soy milk

¼ cup all purpose flour-GF

¼ cup Light butter

½ tsp salt-opt

 

*Place ingredient in blender (Vita-Mix) in order listed above. Secure the lid and start speed on low (1 on VM). Quickly increase the speed to High and blend for about 5 minutes. For Cheese Sauce:May add ½ to ¾ cup of good low-fat cheese.

NUMBER 3: MLJ’s Mock Cream of Mushroom soup-This is the best recipe I’ve found for a stand- alone soup. If I was going to make a dish using a substitute for the Campbell’s soup, I’d use the white sauce. But if you want a simple yet hearty mushroom soup, this one fits the bill. As always with good recipes, there’s some secret ingredient that makes it stand apart. In this recipe, the secret is… add a touch of Angostura bitters at the end.

Mock Cream of Mushroom soup:

1 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced

½ to ¾ cup onion, chopped fine

¼ cup + 2 tbsp of butter light

¼ cup GF Flour

3 cups chicken broth

1 cup soy milk/1/2 cup half and half or cream*

1 tsp salt (opt)

¼ tsp white pepper

½ cup dry sherry

¼ tsp Angostura bitters

 Saute mushrooms and onion in butter in a saucepan on low for 10 minutes or until mixture is tender. Add the flour, stirring until smooth. Cook 1 minute, stir constantly. Gradually add the broth; cook on medium heat, stir constantly, until mix is thickened and bubbling.

Reduce heat to low; stir in remaining ingredients. Cook until heated through, stir frequently. Serve.

Yield: 1 ½ quarts

 **I use a mix of soy milk, but you can use organic cream or half and half to make it, depending on your allergy level.