John Dory, Italian green wild asparagus and blood orange sauce

One of my favorite ways of creating tasty but healthy dishes is using fruit and vegetables as sauce. There are millions of ways to do this, depending mainly on the season.

Oranges are abundant at the moment, so I’ve been using a lot of orange juice to liven up dishes. It adds a burst of flavor, yet requires no cream or butter, thus making it low in calories and high in fiber.

The season is short for wild Italian asparagus, so take advantage of it in April and May.

RECIPE

Ingredients

Serves 3 or 4

Instructions

Preheat grill or broiler.

Place John Dory on a roasting tin or broiler pan, skin side up.

Wash asparagus. If ends are woody, cut off woody part.

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Recipe: prime rib steak, smashed russet potatoes and wild garlic leaves

Serves 2

Ingredients

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Recipe

This is another low-fat, high-fiber meal that fits perfectly in to any weight loss plan. All these ingredients are available in April.

4 to 6 scallops per person

Instructions

Preheat broiler or grill.

Wash, top and slice strawberries. Put into a medium-size saucepan. Cover with Balsamic vinegar, until vinegar is about 2.54 cm / 1 inch above strawberries. Add Szechwan pepper to taste.

Bring strawberries and Balsamic vinegar mixture to a boil, then turn heat down to medium, stirring from time to time. Cook until it forms a sauce of a syrupy consistency, with bits of strawberry in the “syrup”. This usually takes 15 to 20 minutes.

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Please, Mara des Bois, get thee here! Even though we still don’t have local strawberries in the Lake Geneva region, it’s almost impossible to resist the Spanish and French ones that are already available.

Photo courtesy of Sodapix.

Strawberries are extremely high in fiber as well as vitamins, so I try to use them in as many dishes as possible. You can also make low-fat or no-fat sauces and salads that are highly complimentary to a weight loss diet. And contrary to traditional wisdom, they can be used in both sweet and savory dishes.

Recipes

Strawberry and seed salad

For salads, put sliced strawberries into a vinaigrette made with Balsamic vinegar and marinate them for about 30 minutes. When ready to serve,  add mixed greens or mesclun and toss. You can also use baby spinach. (Both of these are in season right now.) Right before serving, add some mixed seeds (the kind you find in the supermarket in Switzerland), or you can mix your own favorite seeds: pumpkin, sesame, etc. Toss well and serve immediately.

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Recent tweets @RamblingEpicure and @SwissFoodies, 27 March 2010

Food and health

Fooducate New blog post: Americans Expect and Want Government Nutrition Advice.

GHChealth Study: Eating slowly can actually help you cut calories and eat less.

News for real foodies: recent tweets @RamblingEpicure and @SwissFoodies:

Food topics and trends 18 March 2010

SeattleTallPopp Waaa?!? Forget goat or cow milk cheese. NYC Chef Angerer makes breast milk cheese. Milk source? His wife! Recipe.

THE RAMBLING EPICURE How To Never Look Fat Again: Dressing Thinner. Time Magazine.

guardianfood Is molecular gastronomy dead? by @TimHayward

THE RAMBLING EPICURE Time Magazine: study says women who drink tend to be thinner. What’s all that about?

Now on Tablet Talk: Food writer & cultural historian Josh Ozersky lays out his burger purist’s manifesto.

Atlantic_Food Egg-less mayo: A travesty or treasure? Introducing milk mayo — the Portuguese take on the mother of all French sauces.

goodandbadfoods Meryl Streep: A veteran green activist.

Swiss Sérac cheese, a fresh cow’s milk cheese made with whey

Whey cheese is produced when the curds are separated from the whey to make cheese. Ricotta is also a whey cheese, but unlike Sérac, it is often made with sheep’s milk. As a result, you can use your local cheesemonger’s Sérac in most recipes that call for ricotta.

Photo courtesy of Fribourg Region tourist office.

Sérac is made in most regions of Switzerland, and each region has its own version. Some regions smoke it; others flavor it with herbs, spices or pepper.

Sérac cheese is soft and creamy in texture, so it is easy to spread it on bread to make a healthy sandwich or snack, but Sérac is not only a snack cheese. It can also be used to make healthy, quick meals, such as the recipe below. In the summertime, I often use it like mozzarella, with tomatoes and basil or other Italian-inspired recipes.

It is a great way of teaching your children to eat healthy snacks. Top it with fresh fruit to make a healthy, low-fat dessert, or use it for between-meal snacks on chunky whole-grain bread.

Since it is a fresh milk cheese, it does not keep, and should be eaten shortly after purchasing. Because it is made from fresh milk whey, it is also naturally low in fat. In Switzerland, it would have about a 3.8% fat content, the same as milk.

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I’ve been talking a lot about Mindful Eating lately. It’s a term that came to me out of the blue, and only weeks later did I realize that I picked up the word “mindful” in my many years of studying Buddhism and Hinduism. I studied these for so long that the vocabulary has become somewhat incorporated into my way of expressing myself and my subconscious. I am mindful; I live mindfully.

As a result, before publishing my own Mindful Eating Manifesto–a practical approach to my favorite subject of food–I only thought it fair to publish the somewhat more philosophical article by Buddhist thinker and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.

Traditional Buddhist and Hindu teachings urge us to be mindful about every act, at every moment, every day of our lives. The word “mindful” is not a trademark. It is a way of being. Mindfulness gives meaning to every action, and creates a sharper awareness and a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of all living things.

What does mindfulness have to do with the way I eat?

This may not seem to have anything to do with how you eat, but indeed it does. It’s the current food trend in the developed world, and I feel confident that it will spread at a rapid pace. Eating is not just about filling your belly.

Mindful Eating is about love and care from A to Z in the eating process, from the ingredients you buy, and how they were grown and processed, and whether you prepare them with TLC, to filling your belly and providing your body with the nutrients they need. To eat mindfully, you have to be aware of every step in the process, which by definition connects you, either directly or indirectly, with everyone involved: the butcher, the baker, the farmer, the fertilizer manufacturer, the seed seller, the cook, the chocolate maker (I do live in Switzerland, after all), etc.

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This week’s foodie overview

I spend a lot of time reading, researching and tweeting about food and restaurants these days, so I thought I’d jot down my tweets from the last few days. These are from both The Rambling Epicure and Swiss Foodies and should give you an overview of what’s going on in the foodie world this week, in Switzerland and around the world.

These tweets are often focused on Switzerland, but also include a lot of links to Swiss, French, German, British, American, Canadian and other research on food.

Sometimes I couldn’t resist writing about the snow and skiing conditions, because that determines how a lot of us in Switzerland plan our weekends, and therefore what restaurants we go to or what recipes we cook up. And of course occasionally, watches and wine . . . and this week, the Vancouver Winter Olympics and those cute wooly pigs you see in the photo.

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Creative ways to use vinegar in cooking, in place of fats

I’m a vinegar collector. I have orange vinegar, walnut vinegar, grapefruit vinegar, a long list of Balsamic vinegars of various origins and ages, and lots of other more common ones.

In Switzerland and France, there is such an impressive variety of artisanal vinegars (a well as oils) that it is easy to build up quite a collection and use it in creative ways to liven up winter vegetables, bland grilled meats, or salads. The beauty of it is that you can often use vinegar to add flavor, and thereby avoid the more traditional use of butter or meat bases, which contain fat. It is a good way to reduce fat in your general cooking habits.

Photo courtesy of FivePrime.

A tasty, good quality vinegar is an easy way to add flavor to an otherwise unappetizing vegetable or meat. After cooking meat or fish, I often deglaze the frying pan  with a nice vinegar, then pour the glaze over the beast in question, along with a drizzle of good quality olive oil. It makes for a much healthier sauce than cream or butter and adds flare to the dish.

With magret de canard, or duck breast, which can have quite a fatty taste, I pour off most of the fat, and then deglaze the drippings with Balsamic or sherry vinegar. Raspberry also works well with duck, and you can add a few crushed raspberries to the sauce as well. The vinegar helps cut the fatty film you often feel in your mouth after eating. Raspberry vinegar is also a perfect compliment to calves’ liver.

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