The Sad, Quiet Death of Campbell's Low-Sodium Soup

For those of you who missed it, several weeks ago Campbell's gave up and killed off their line of lower-salt soups.

Why? Because consumers hated them.

Unsurprisingly, there are quite a few food bloggers and public health pundits who are spinning this into yet another tale of corporate greed. Hey, Campbell's--just like every other food company--will do anything to increase their profits. Including killing off their own customers by adding salt back to their soup.

Maybe it's just me, but you'd think it would be understandable that a food company might stop trying to sell food that their customers clearly don't want to buy.

Here's the problem: when you use a paranoid lens like that to consider a situation like this, you also adopt a fundamentally disempowering view that corporations are too powerful for us. You adopt a view that these companies, with their enormous advertising and marketing budgets, can tell us what to buy. And it assumes that we consumers are powerless to resist all those billions of dollars in ads.

Of course there's a hilariously huge hole in the logic of that lens. If Campbell's (or any other food company's) marketing was really that powerful, they could easily convince us to buy low-sodium soup. And they could make us like it too! Such a powerful, greedy corporation would quickly persuade us mindless zombies that their low-salt soups were delicious. Right?

Hmmm. But yet they couldn't. People still hated them--and didn't buy 'em.

Which proves a somewhat inconvenient truth: that we consumers actually decided that these soups would be unsuccessful--by not purchasing them. As with every other decision about what corporations sell us, we choose everything on our store shelves by making the final decision to buy or not buy.

There's one more appalling logic error that comes flying out of the mouths of public health pundits whenever a major food company makes a seemingly anti-consumer decision like this. The flawed logic goes something like this: Yes, our culture has an obesity problem, a hypertension problem, and we are getting fatter and fatter as a nation as we effectively eat ourselves to death. And every public health pundit has an obligation to at least appear to care about these important and serious problems.

Well, there's no better way to appear to care about these issues than to appear on TV (or write in your blog or book) pointing out new examples of food companies greedily putting profits before the health of their customers. In other words, a pundit can easily say that Campbell's should sell soup with less salt, but they won't--because they only care about making money. Somehow, this message seems vaguely logical, and it gives the pundit's audience a tasty and easy-to-swallow message that goes down very easily.

Except that any company that insists on selling things its customers don't want to buy is gonna fail faster than Lehman Brothers. The bottom line, however, is that this anti-corporate, easy-to-swallow message is so easy to articulate, and it resonates so well with the average consumer, who wouldn't say it? Especially if doing so will burnish your reputation as the next Eliot Spitzer of food.

Uh, whoops. Wait. I meant the next Eliot Ness of food.

But here's the problem: that public health pundit is actually saying "Campbell's: stop selling foods that people like, and start selling what I think people should like. After all, I'm a food expert."

If this seems vaguely arrogant and condescending to you, good. Because it is.

To me, selling a hyperpalatable message like this--a message that encourages consumers to give away their power, and a message that appeals to consumers' emotions at the expense of their intelligence--is way more greedy and unethical than selling a can of salty soup.

Okay. There's another, better, solution--and CK readers already know it.

Let's face it, it's just as easy and far cheaper to make your own soup at home. Sure, with Campbell's you can easily get 1-2 servings of soup on the table in just 10-12 minutes. But take a look at any of the amazing soups available here at CK's recipe index. With a few incremental minutes of work, you can get three, four or even five times as many servings of a delicious, healthy, homemade soup or stew on your table, and enjoy leftovers for days afterward. You'll have healthier, better tasting food on the table for a fraction of the cost and time commitment.

And then you can control the sodium level in your food yourself, rather than letting some company control it for you.

Resources:
Campbell Adds Salt To Spur Soup Sales. Reuters
Campbell Soup Fights the Salt Wars. Food Politics
There are no good studies linking salt to hypertension. Scientific American
But wait! There's no doubt about the dangers of salt. NewScientist
Who's to Blame For Obesity? Marc Gunther


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Why Salt Sucks

I consider salt one of the most dangerous, addictive and unhealthy food additives out there.

Zillions of prepared and manufactured foods contain artery-bursting amounts of it. And salt appears prominently in the ingredients list of a frighteningly wide range of foods, from breakfast cereals to, believe it or not, Ben & Jerry's ice cream. (I'm totally serious about the Ben & Jerry's--take a look for yourself!)

And of course, in practically every dinner table in homes all around the world, a little shaker full of the stuff sits at the ready, so we can add still more salt to our food.

Sure, salt is an important nutrient--in small doses. We should be consuming it in daily quantities that are a fraction of what you'd get from a mere handful of Doritos. The truth is, a diet with generous servings of fruits, veggies and legumes will contain sufficient sodium for the average person. That means you don't need to add any extra salt to your food at all.

However, because salt is so overused in so much of our food, most of us have unknowingly adapted to consuming far too much of it.

Hyperpalatability
But first, let me ask a question to readers: Why do you think salt is overused in prepared and manufactured foods?

Sadly, one of the primary reasons is it makes you want to eat more.

Essentially, salty food begets a desire for more salty food. That salty kick from your very first Dorito simply makes you want another. And it's why food companies design their foods--even sweet foods like ice cream and cookies--with high salt levels. Adding extra salt is by far the easiest and cheapest way to make any food hyperpalatable.

And of course it's no coincidence that when you eat more, the food industry sells more. Please keep this in mind the next time you reach into your wallet to pay for that extra-large bag of overpriced, branded salty snacks.

Too Loud
But there's still more behind the overuse of this highly palatable seasoning. Because salt is such a "loud" spice, it drowns out other, more subtle tastes. And because it's so easy for the human brain and human palate to adapt to salty flavors, overly-salted food quickly conditions your palate away from being able to detect and enjoy these subtle flavors and tastes.

Thus, the more salt you consume, the more bland and tasteless regular food becomes. Unfortunately, most consumers end up completing the circle by biasing their diets and tastes towards still more salty foods as a result.

Believe it or not, there's some good news buried here in this post, and here it is: Sure, the human sense of taste quickly adapts to salt. But, thankfully, it can also just as easily adapt away from salt. So how do you resist the siren call of sodium chloride?

Shock Therapy
First, take a leap with me here, and try to go a full week without salt. That's right: one week. Seven days. It's not that long!

Take a break from salty snacks, and avoid any food that lists salt or sodium chloride prominently in its ingredients. Take a break from restaurant food, which is the primary source of some of the most oversalted, hyperpalatable food out there. And, obviously, remove your salt shaker from your dinner table and hide it somewhere.

For the first day or two you'll experience an interesting paradox: everything will taste like nothing! Be patient and don't lose heart. Within a few days, your palate will begin to de-accustom itself to sodium. It will return to how it used to be and how it should be: sensitive to subtlety and a wide range of tastes and flavors. You'll start to detect flavors and tones in food that weren't apparent to you before. For lack of a better phrase, you'll begin to hear the soft notes of your food once you remove the deafeningly loud taste of salt.

This process may take a while, and it might involve an adaptation period where food appears to taste comparatively bland, but believe me, this process is truly worth it.

Why? Because, regular, normal-tasting food is actually really good. And it's a sheer pleasure to enjoy eating without having to face down overly salted, hyperpalatable foods. You won't find it quite so difficult to fight off the urge to overeat, and you'll derive that much more pleasure from natural, healthy food.

Before you know it, you'll have developed a much more sensitive palate. Foods that once seemed boring will taste and feel more complex, more subtle and more interesting. And salt itself will finally become what it really is: a loud, excessive flavor that's massively overused in restaurants and throughout the food industry.

Readers, what's your take on salt? And have you ever gone on a salt fast?

Related Posts:
How Food Companies Hide Sugar in Plain Sight
Mindful Chewing: How To Cut Your Calorie Intake in Half--Without Feeling Hungry
How to Resist Temptation and Increase Your Power Over Food
Who Really Holds the Power in Our Food Industry?

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Why You Should Always Read Ingredient Labels

Now that I've shared my preposterously easy and highly authentic Black Beans and Rice recipe, let me share a story, the moral of which is this:

Always read ingredient labels. At least glance at them.

Long time Casual Kitchen readers will recall from elsewhere in this blog how I've encouraged you to make all recipes by the book at least once before attempting any recipe modifications. Well, this time, going “by the book" kind of backfired on us.

But because I usually try and follow my own rules, this meant blindly following the instructions on the label of a can of Goya black beans, which is where I originally found this delightful and simple recipe. So when the recipe called for "two packets Sazon Goya without Annatto," I obediently grabbed a box of Sazon Goya packets. I was already in the Spanish foods aisle anyway, and hey, I was only following orders.

Unfortunately, after Laura and I had finished dinner, we started to feel just a tad bit hypotonic. I take that back. It was more like we'd been hit by a rusty shipping container-full of sodium.

Laura picked up the box of Sazon Goya and started reading the ingredients:

INGREDIENTES:
Glutamato Monsodico
Sal
Ajo en Polvo...

(Whoops! Wrong side.)

INGREDIENTS:
Monsodium Glutamate
Salt
Garlic Powder
Onion Powder
Spices
Spice Extracts
Natural Color
Tricalcium Phosphate (anti-caking agent)

Now I understood why we felt so woozy. Not only does this spice mix contain a lot of salt (as the second ingredient listed), but it contains even more MSG--salt on steroids! And I'm still trying to figure out what tricalcium phosphate is, but in any case we weren't even trying to make cake.

Needless to say, we made our modifications for the next time, and this second-order spice mix was left out of the recipe.

Related Posts:
Fake Maple Syrup
Bad Vision: The Four Worst Diet Habits for Eye Health
How to Live Forever in Ten Easy Steps
How to Get More Mileage Out of Your Cookbooks

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Spicy Eggplant Ratatouille

Today I bring you a recipe for a spicy eggplant stew. It’s another imaginative and unusual dish adapted from Jay Solomon's Vegetarian Soup Cuisine. It is low in sodium, high in healthy vegetables and laughably cheap to make (the entire recipe can be made for around $8.00).

This is a brand new dish that we made for the first time last week, and it was a big hit in our home. It contains no added salt and it certainly doesn’t need it: the jalapenos add an extra kick to the dish, and the cumin, red wine and fresh parsley make it flavorful and exotic.

Best of all, this recipe is easy. In well under an hour you can put yet another healthy meal in front of your family without boring them to death with bland food.

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Spicy Eggplant Ratatouille
(slightly modified from Jay Solomon's Vegetarian Soup Cuisine)

4 Tablespoons olive oil or canola oil
1 onion, chopped
1 medium eggplant, diced
1 green or red bell pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
2 jalapenos or other hot chiles, seeded and minced
4 cups water or vegetable stock
1 14-ounce can stewed tomatoes
1/4 cup tomato paste (that's 4 Tablespoons)
1/4 cup dry red wine
2 Tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 teaspoon dried cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 15-ounce can red or pink beans

Heat oil in a large soup pot. Add onion, eggplant, bell pepper, garlic and chiles. Saute over medium heat for 10 minutes, stirring frequently.

Add water, stewed tomatoes, tomato paste, wine and seasonings (everything else but the can of beans). Bring to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add beans just a few minutes before the end. Let stand for 10 minutes and serve with optional whole grain bread.

Serves 6+
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Note: One very important warning if you use fresh jalapeno peppers--be careful what you touch after chopping these guys up! Don’t touch your eyes (or for God’s sake any other highly sensitive body parts) unless you’ve first carefully scrubbed your hands.

We will speak of this no more.

Invigorate Your Cooking with Fresh Herbs: Part 1

Today we’re going to start a two part series on the merits of using fresh herbs--like parsley, mint, cilantro, dill and chives--in your cooking.

By using these often overlooked and underappreciated ingredients, you can take your cuisine up several notches in sophistication, subtlety and healthfulness at a minimal extra cost. A large bunch of parsley costs roughly 99c in a typical grocery store, and most other herbs and greens are priced similarly.

For years I would pooh-pooh using herbs like these when I saw them called for in a recipe. If I saw a recipe that included fresh parsley for example, I’d either consider it an optional ingredient and leave it out, or I’d (shudder) use dried parsley from my spice rack.

Oh, the foolishness of youth!

The errors of my ways sprung from two serious flaws I had back then (yep, I only had two flaws). First, I was habituated to foods with high sodium content, so I had a desensitized palate that lacked the ability to appreciate these subtle-tasting herbs. Second, I foolishly considered buying fresh herbs wasteful. I'd end up using just a fraction of what I bought and let the rest go to waste. I'll address that issue later in Part 2.

Today, I will cover the use of these herbs in the context of improving the subtlety and quality of your cooking. We’ll talk about how the inclusion of simple and inexpensive herbs can make your food smell and taste surprisingly exotic, and we’ll talk about how our efforts over the years in reducing our sodium intake ultimately enabled these herbs to be powerful flavor-makers in our kitchen. Now, our cooking tastes better than ever to us, which of course makes it all the more fun to cook.

Free Yourself From the Chains of Salt!
Close readers of this blog know that using excessive salt is the worst form of cheating. Face it: it’s unhealthy (and for some people even dangerous) to consume too much sodium. Even more discouraging, a palate habituated to salt and salty foods simply cannot appreciate mild and subtle tastes.

Why did parsley taste like pointless nothingness to me years ago, such that I thought nothing of considering it an optional ingredient? Why does it seem like such a powerful and fragrant ingredient now? It all stems from our efforts to “stop cheating” and ruthlessly exclude salt from our diets.

What happened to us will happen to you: once the added salt wasn’t in our food drowning out everything else all the time, our palates gradually grew to recognize and appreciate subtler tastes. It’s analogous to being at a bar where the music is so loud that you can’t hear the voice of the cute girl (okay, or guy) you’re trying to pick up. Only after somebody turns down the music can you actually engage with the other person.

Food works in a similar way. Certain flavoring agents, like salt, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, etc., are simply too “loud.” Salt is of course widely overused in all sorts of prepared foods, and sadly we’ve often found salt audaciously overused in some of the most expensive restaurants in New York. Shameless.

Phew. Okay. Back to being subtle. One of the key purposes of this blog, above and beyond sharing cooking knowledge, advice and recipes, is to show that it can be fun and easy to cook healthy, interesting meals for you and your family. What's made cooking more fun for us in recent years is re-discovering ingredients like fresh herbs and greens that we can combine with other everyday ingredients in creative, and even exotic, ways. Get the salt out of your diet and watch how these herbs stimulate your palate.

Use fresh herbs. Look for recipes that call for them (I'll share several in Part 2). Think of what they'll add to the freshness, subtlety and flavor of any dish, for a mere 99c! That is a laughably cheap price to take the sophistication of your cooking up several notches. And if you succeed in breaking the salt habit, you'll not only enjoy food more, you’ll save a fortune down the road on high blood pressure meds.

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I’ll leave you with some pictures and brief advice on how to deal with fresh herbs by showing the prep work behind the fresh parsley we used in a dish we made the other weekend. It was another home run recipe from my new girlfriend Daisy which I’ll be posting shortly.

First, be sure to rinse these guys to death. Herbs tend to be grown in sandy soil, thus they can be pretty gritty. Nothing is worse than enthusiastically biting into a delicious mouthful of Fattoush and getting sand stuck in your teeth. I always aggressively slosh the greens around in a simple colander under a running faucet:

The next step is to de-stemify these guys (that’s a real word). Note that for some soups, especially the ones we often talk about in Jay Solomon's Vegetarian Soup Cuisine, you can speed up your prep time by skipping or being haphazard with this step.

That’s it! Easy to prepare. Check back soon for Part 2, where we’ll solve the waste issue once and for all, and share a variety of sample recipes where you can put these herbs to work.

Italian Sausage and Tortellini Soup

Now that the weather is getting cooler and the fall is unmistakably moving in, it's time to get back into some good hearty soup recipes. Today I'm going to share a personal favorite from our heavy rotation: Italian Sausage and Tortellini Soup.

This soup can be made from beginning to end in about an hour, and it will easily feed six or more.

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Italian Sausage and Tortellini Soup
(heavily modified from an old issue of Bon Appetit Magazine)

4 links sweet or hot Italian-style sausage, casings removed (see photos below)
1-2 onions, chopped
3-4 garlic cloves, pressed or finely chopped
6 cups water
3 beef bouillion cubes
3/4 lb chopped fresh tomatoes (we usually use plum tomatoes)
1 8-ounce can plain tomato sauce
1 large zucchini, cut into chunks
3-4 carrots, peeled and sliced
1 green bell pepper, chopped coarsely
1/2 cup dry red wine
1 Tblsp dried basil
1 Tblsp dried oregano
-----------------
8-16 ounces frozen cheese tortellini
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Remove casings from the sausages, then fry in a large pot with a little oil until cooked through, breaking up the sausages with a spatula as you fry them. Transfer sausage to a separate bowl and pour off most of the sausage fat left in the pot (leave ~1 Tbsp of fat or so).

[CK note: If you really want to go low fat, you can drain all the fat from the pot and strain the sausage under hot water, then add a Tablespoon or so of olive oil back to the pan before the next step.]

Saute onion and garlic on medium heat in the remaining sausage oil for ~5 minutes. Then, add back the sausage, and add all of the remaining ingredients except the tortellini and Parmesan cheese (water, bouillion cubes, tomatoes, tomato sauce, zucchini, carrots, green pepper, red wine, basil and oregano).

Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for ~40 minutes, until vegetables are tender.

Then add tortellini to the soup and simmer for another 8 minutes.

Serve in soup bowls, sprinkled generously with parmesan cheese.

Serves 6+ easily.


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A few notes:

1) A quick tutorial on removing casing of sausages (with apologies to vegetarian readers!). It's easiest to do this when the sausages are mostly thawed. And be prepared to get slightly messy hands.

First, work a knife under the sausage casing:

Then cut it along the length of the sausage as shown:

At this point you'll see how the casing will peel off relatively easily.


2) For some reason, the team here at Casual Kitchen has a consistent problem of forgetting the cheese tortellini. Either we forget to put tortellini on the grocery list so we leave the store without them, or we flake and forget to add them to the dish at the end. It's a non-catastrophic, yet still annoying, error that we've made enough times such that Laura wrote "don't forget!" on the ingredient list next to the tortellini. I thought I'd share this to let readers know that here at Casual Kitchen we flake out and forget things too.

3) You know my view on excess salt. In its original form, this dish called for five cups of water and five (five!) bouillion cubes. That's cheating. We've cut it down to three cubes in six cups of water and have found the dish tastes great this way, but you are welcome to try and take the cube count down further still if you like. Let me know how it comes out.

4) Finally, if you're interested in a more detailed photoset of the entire recipe making process, I've made it available on flickr for you. Enjoy!

Six Secrets to Save You from Cooking Burnout

You know the feeling: You have to cook dinner, but you sure as hell don't want to. Forget cooking with love. At best, you might obligatorily slap dinner on the table tonight.

Worse, all of your recipes seem tired and old. You're sick of all of 'em.

You're just not inspired in the kitchen.

This is cooking burnout. Everybody faces it from time to time. And yes, even at Casual Kitchen we can get really sick of cooking on occasion.

Fortunately, thanks to quite a few years in my 20s of living alone (thus the only person who was there to cook for me was… well, me), I picked up some trade secrets on the subject that I’m going to share with you today.

Read on, and never let cooking burnout bring you down again!

1) Try out a totally new cuisine…
It would be obvious to the point of worthlessness to suggest to my readers to “try some new recipes and you’ll be less burned out!” Martha Stewart might be able to get away with that, but not me.

The point here is that you are not even close to being in the mood to cook. Telling you to buck up and try some new recipes is like saying “turn that frown upside down” to a person on suicide watch. Less than helpful.

What I’m talking about is doing something much more radical. I’m talking about stretching your palate to experience types of food you’ve never tried before, or never even heard of before, and using those experiences to inspire you.

Have you ever tried Mongolian food? Or Korean? Afghani? How about Cuban food? Or Chino-Latino?

I’m sure foodie readers from major US or world cities could say “yes” (in a bored-sounding voice no less) to all of the above. But that misses the point. There has to be something (or even multiple somethings) you haven’t had before, and that’s what I want you to go out and try. Go to a restaurant that cooks a cuisine you’ve never eaten. Order something unusual as well as something ethnically typical from the menu. And while you’re eating, think about how you might cook something similar, or how it might influence your cooking.

Even if you live in a smaller city, you’ll be surprised by the diversity of food available to you. Take a good look at the restaurants section of your phonebook (I know, how deliciously quaint to use the yellow pages…) or ask any of your ethnic friends or colleagues to recommend a place. Take a quick look at the Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer for more suggestions on how to make the most of a restaurant eating experience. Finally, recall in the Ten Rules that, where possible, we want to patronize owner-operated restaurants rather than chains.

2) …And then teach yourself to cook it.
Once you’ve stretched your palate in somebody else's kitchen, let that experience inspire you to stretch your talents in your own.

How cool would it be to be able to say you can cook Cuban food or Afgani food? Go to your local bookstore or visit Bookmooch.com and find a cookbook and try it out. Again, I am not talking about making just moderately different foods. I want you to get started on a truly different cuisine that makes you stretch your mind. This is what makes cooking a voyage of discovery and a source of new experiences. And you’ll find that it’s the kind of thing that makes cooking fun again.

It was during a particularly bad period of cooking burnout in my life when I picked up Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen. I had to work through my share of cooking intimidation at first, because I needlessly assumed that Cajun and Creole food would be more difficult to make than it really was. But after several batches each of Shrimp Creole, Barbecued Shrimp, Hush Puppies and of course The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World, I've gotten pretty good at making this cuisine. Best of all, it cured a bad case of cooking burnout too.

3) Learn to cook something you’ve always dreamed of cooking.
Is there something you always dreamed of cooking but you never really got around to it? For my part, I've always dreamed of making baked bread. And I mean real baked bread, with yeast and everything. So I’ve already decided that the next time I get a case of cooking burnout, I’m going to use that as my excuse to learn how to bake bread.

And if you didn’t think I was obsessive before, you’ll think it now: For the case of cooking burnout I get after that, I’m going to learn how to cook real tamales. I already have the cookbook sitting on the shelf, ready to go.

Clearly, I must be a real tool to plan ahead for my next two cases of cooking burnout.

Seriously though, this suggestion gets to why we cook in the first place. Cooking is at its most fun when it’s a voyage of experience and discovery. What new foods do you really and truly dream of cooking? What do you want to learn how to do? What would be really cool to be able to cook? Even just asking yourself these questions might inspire you a little bit, but the true satisfaction comes from getting into the process of learning and developing new cooking skills.

4) Get a one-year subscription to Bon Appetit Magazine.
I know this suggestion might sound just a bit too metrosexual for some of the men out there, but indulge me. I learned this trick by pure luck back in 1994, when I got browbeaten by some telemarketer into buying a subscription.

But the unexpected benefit was that in that year, I had absolutely zero experiences of cooking burnout. Not one for the entire year. Each month, when the new issue came in the mail, it would flood my mind with a whole batch of new cooking ideas, cuisines and recipes. There were quick and easy recipes, long and involved ones, examples of different types of cuisine, etc. There were always several viable new things in there that would pass the five easy questions and that I would really want to make.

And the subscription turned out to be well worth the money, because I’m still using that single year’s worth of Bon Appetit today, some 13 years (now 14 years) later. Each issue had so many recipes and ideas that it will be years to come before I'll have worked through the inventory.

5) Improve Your Cooking Mechanics.
Get faster at cooking. Learn the five easy questions so you’ll be able to choose easy meals to make. Master prep work. Learn how to find recipes that scale well into double or triple batches. And learn to rely on a group of favorite, easy, heavy rotation meals.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll have seen some of this advice presented in Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking. In that post, however, I presented that advice in the context of how to cook when you don’t have the time. Here I’m repeating the advice because it’s even more valuable when you don’t want to spend the time cooking. I encourage you to take another quick look at some of those suggestions.

Let’s say you’re of a mind to obligatorily slap dinner on the table tonight. Wouldn’t life be a lot less painful if you had made a double batch of dinner the other day so that you could just reheat it again for tonight? There’s no better cure for cooking burnout than not having to cook at all. If you can cook any meal much faster or much more efficiently, or if you can scale up a meal and get 2x the food for 1.2x the work, then by definition it will be much less of a pain in the ass to get food on the table when you're just not in the mood.

Note that this isn’t so much a cure for cooking burnout, but more of a tool to minimize your suffering. The more efficiently you can get a meal together, the less you’ll suffer the process when you’re just not up for it. Think of it as a form of pain management.

6) Quit!
No, I don’t mean quit your job--although between you and me, I'm considering making a move myself to getting a job here. And I don’t mean for you to quit cooking forever either. What I am suggesting is that you take a break from cooking for a specific time. Say, one week. Or even two weeks.

For that one or two weeks, eat out or order takeout EVERY night. In fact, you can combine this with tip #1 and try out a few exotic restaurants while you’re at it.

If you are at all used to cooking for yourself, my guess is you’ll get pretty sick of restaurant food if you take this long a break from your own kitchen. You’ll probably start to feel overwhelmed with salt, excess fats and oils--and after several days you’ll probably start to feel loagy and weighed down.

When Laura and I go on vacation for a week we’ll usually treat ourselves to a complete break from cooking. But after five or six days of eating out exclusively, we usually really start to long for our own home-cooked food. Maybe we miss the familiarity of our own kitchen, or we miss being able to control exactly what goes into our own food. Or maybe it's just that creeping, heavy, loagy, I-feel-like-I-need-an-angioplasty feeling you get after eating out too many days in a row.

Regardless of the reasons, the result is the same: after only one week, no more cooking burnout. We can’t wait to get back to our own kitchen.

So instead of waiting until your next vacation, why not create a vacation from cooking the next time you feel cooking burnout coming on? You’ll certainly save on airfare. And best of all, you’ll cure your burnout.

Note that this isn’t exactly what I’d call financially responsible advice--readers of this blog know that cooking at home typically is laughably cheap compared to eating out. But if by using this tip you cure yourself from cooking burnout--and you get back to being happy to cook in your own kitchen--then in the long run this tip can be a big money-saver for you.

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Good luck! I can't promise that you’ll never get sick of cooking ever again. Heck, I still fall into a state of mild-to-moderate cooking burnout on occasion, and I’m the one supposedly giving all the great advice here. But the next time you feel a case of cooking burnout coming on, you should be able to use these secrets to master it, rather than have it master you.

Related Posts:
Using Salt = Cheating
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
Eight Tips to Make Cooking at Home Laughably Cheap

Related Links:
Tamales 101: A Beginner's Guide to Making Traditional Tamales*
Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen*
Bon Appetit Magazine

* Full Disclosure: if you purchase any of the items via the links provided, I receive a small affiliate fee. Thank you to my readers for all of your support!

How to Make a Great Seafood Stock

I know it's a lot easier when a recipe calls for "stock" to chuck in a couple of bouillion cubes and some water. Or worse, to purchase overpriced, ready-made stock from the store.

At the risk of sounding like Slave Galley Kitchen rather than Casual Kitchen, I cannot allow you to take this particular shortcut anymore. It is borderline unethical. Your cuisine will suffer for it, and you'll be ingesting excess salt. And for what--a little expedience?

The only time I'll guiltily indulge in expedient behavior like this is if I'm really, severely pressed for time and I need to crank out a dinner pronto. And even then I can't bring myself to buy ready-made stock. Instead, what I'll do is use one cube of bouillion per two cups of water for a milder, less salty substitute.

But when you do have some time, try making your own stock. Enjoy how it makes your dishes richer and tastier and yet adds no sodium whatsoever. Moreover, it's so easy to make a huge batch and freeze it up in ready-made containers that you'll never want to go back to the salt-laden pre-made stuff.

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Seafood Stock:

Put into a large stock pot:

2-3 onions, quartered, leave the papers/peelings on (yes, you read that right--leave 'em on)
Several cloves garlic, smashed or cut in half (again, leave the papers/peelings on)
2-3 whole celery sticks
Any vegetable trimmings or peelings from whatever recipe you are serving
All of the shrimp shells from the recipe you're using, or use a few shrimp cut into pieces, shells and all (can also substitute pieces of fish or other seafood, or even oyster sauce if you're desperate)

Fill stock pot with cold water, add more than enough water to cover the all the stock ingredients already in the pot.

Bring water to a boil on high heat, then turn heat to medium low, set lid slightly askew, and simmer for a minimum of four hours, but as much as eight hours if you have time.

After the stock has simmered, strain it into measured amounts and freeze for future use.

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Note that even though this is a stock recipe specifically for seafood, it can easily serve as a fundamental base for any kind of stock.

For vegetable stock, just leave out the seafood (duh). For beef or chicken stock, just toss in some tailings, skin, fat or bones from the meat you're using from your recipe. You can also brown any beef or chicken bones and meat in a non-stick skillet before adding it into the pot. Browning them this way will give the stock an even richer taste.

A few final observations:

1) First of all, I'll never forget the first time I tried to make stock this way. I was thinking, "seriously, you just hack the onions and garlic into a few pieces and toss 'em in the pot? You mean you just leave the peelings on?"

It seemed so.... so irreverent. But that's exactly the way to do it. Leaving the peelings and papers on actually adds to the flavor, and it saves you from having to do any prep work (who said there's no such thing as a free lunch?). Thus putting everything together literally takes two minutes.

2) Note that I don't add any spices or seasonings to the stock. No black pepper, no salt (obviously) and no cayenne pepper. The point here isn't to make something spicy or heavily flavorful. The recipe you'll use the stock in will contain its own spices. The stock is supposed to be a vehicle, nothing more.

3) This is one of the few times when you get to bend the rule to stay near the kitchen. Also, fortunately, this is a dish that scales well. Use your biggest pot and make as much stock as you feel you have room for in your freezer.

4) When I said using ready-made stock or bouillion was borderline unethical, I was just exaggerating for effect. Indulge me--I need to say things like this once in a while in order to stand out in blogland! So, if you've used ready-made stock or bouillion in the past, or if you choose to do it at some point in the future, you are not a bad person. Well, not that bad a person. :)

Stock on!

Paul Prudhomme's Barbecued Shrimp Recipe: The Most Glorious Meal So Far This Year

Today I’ll share with you the recipe for Paul Prudhomme’s Barbecued Shrimp. This was unquestionably the most glorious meal I’ve made so far this year.

It passed the five easy questions test with flying colors. It was quite easy to make, with prep time of only about 30 minutes. Best of all, we had an utterly magnificent experience eating it.

A couple of brief introductory comments: The brand of beer I happened to use in the recipe has already brewed up (sorry) a bit of an amusing controversy. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my rule for new recipes to do it one time by the book, so I saw no reason to start imposing my own beer snobbery without first having some context on how the recipe would come out. If anybody wants to do a side-by-side control test of the recipe using different types of beer, go for it. Let me know the results.

Finally, there also seems to be minor controversy on whether this is technically “barbecue” or not. Heck, there are no coals, no broiling, and no cooking over an open pit. Perhaps we can get some barbecue purists to weigh in on this one, but my guess is they won’t consider something cooked in a pan as barbecue.

But man, those are just semantics to me. The recipe was so amazing that Chef Paul could call it anything he wants! I’ll cut him some slack.
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Paul Prudhomme's Barbecued Shrimp
(Very slightly modified from Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen.*)

2 dozen medium-large raw shrimp with shells included (about 1 pound)

Seasoning mix:
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt (yes, we're bending the salt rule here because it's Paul Prudhomme)
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon rosemary leaves, crushed
1/8 teaspoon oregano

1/4 pound (1 stick) butter, plus 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, in all
1 to 2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup seafood stock or vegetable stock
1/4 cup beer at room temperature

1) Rinse the shrimp in cold water and drain well. Leave shells on.

2) In a small bowl, combine seasoning mix ingredients.

3) Combine one stick of the butter, the garlic, Worcestershire sauce and seasoning mix in a large skillet over high heat. When the butter is melted, add the shrimp.

4) Cook for 2 minutes, shaking the pan (do not stir), in a back and forth motion. Add the remaining 3 tablespoons butter and the stock, cook and shake pan for 2 more minutes. Add the beer and cook and shake the pan 1 minute longer. Remove from heat.

5) Serve immediately on a platter with a mound of white rice or seasoned rice in the center and the shrimp and sauce surrounding it.
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A few quick extra notes:

• Along with the rice, this dish made exactly enough food for two hungry people with enough left over for a lunch for Laura.
• If you want to double this recipe, the cookbook says you should do it in separate batches. Note therefore that this dish does not scale well.
• Don't ignore the specific instructions to shake the pan back and forth rather than stir (just think James Bond here). When you're working with melting butter, especially in a dish with a high ratio of butter to other ingredients, stirring can cause the oils in the butter to separate out, and it will make the sauce seem oily.

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A Wine Suggestion
I’ll admit up front that this isn’t really the kind of blog you should visit to find painstaking details on wine pairings (at least not until I quit my job and go to sommelier school…!), but this dish will go very well with a light semi-dry or semi-sweet white wine, which will balance the hot spicy flavors in the dish. A Riesling, for example, would be perfect. We knocked back most of a bottle of Seyval from the Hosmer Winery, which is in the Finger Lakes region of New York State (quite good and yet only $10 a bottle!).

Enjoy!

Related Posts:
The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World
Paul Prudhomme RULES
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
Paul Prudhomme's Cajun Meatloaf: A Meatloaf Recipe that would Burn June Cleaver's Tongue Off

* Full Disclosure: if you purchase this book using any of the links provided, I get paid a miniscule affiliate fee.

Using Salt = Cheating

You'll notice that very VERY few of the recipes I use and that I'll post on this blog contain any added salt. That's usually one of the first modifications that I'll make to any recipe. Cut out the salt. It's cheating.

That's right, using salt in a recipe is like cheating. I consider it an even worse sin than using pre-minced garlic from a jar.

The purpose of this post is to convince you to cut as much salt from your diet as you possibly can.

Masking Agents
Salt is really just a masking agent. It blinds your tastebuds. It covers up the real taste of your dish. It masks any subtleties of taste that your ingredients or your overall dish might have on their own. It's nothing more than a blunt instrument.

What's even more mortifying to me is how many restaurants cheat by using excess salt. And we're not talking TGI Friday's here either (who could blame them?--I go there for the flair myself). My wife and I have found this in a meaningful percentage of some of the really good restaurants in New York. Dishes taste like brine instead of food. It's as if the chef dumbs everything down for you, yet he still charges you $29.50 for a piece of fish.

There's also an amusing story I read years ago about how Campbell's attempted to make "low sodium" versions of all their soups...and they all tasted so bad that nobody bought them. Eventually Campbell's faced the music and realized they couldn't just put out briny soups--minus the brine--and expect people to like them. You can't get away with a lifetime of making industrial-style soup masked with salt and then just take the salt away.

Taste Things For Real
I remember when my parents made the switch to a lower-sodium diet after my father's blood pressure got up above normal. At first, it was Mrs. Dash in everything. They felt that food "needed" something. But the truth is that almost all foods have a surprising subtlety that salt only serves to cover up.

I recall distinctly making my Mom's split pea soup recipe one time years ago and deciding to leave out the salt. When I finished cooking it up and actually tasted it, I couldn't believe how bland and tasteless it seemed at first. I remember thinking to myself that if I was going to try it this way, I should at least get through to the bottom of one bowl before I furtively added back the salt.

But then I began to discover some subtleties in the dish. Huh--split peas actually had a taste! Not a strong taste mind you, but they actually did have a taste and it was pretty good! This may not strike you as an earthshaking event, but it was the catalyst that actually changed my cooking permanently to where I now never add salt to any dish.

Try actually tasting your food for real. You don't have to be a savant in the kitchen to do this. If you cook competently, use decent-quality ingredients and condition your palate away from salt, your cooking won't "need anything" at all.

Condition Your Palate Away From Salt
Will you have the same experience I had at first and think everything is so bland you can't stand it? Then try using some exta black pepper instead of salt. Or try a little cayenne pepper or chipotle pepper. Or just stick with it and try eating your food for a few weeks with no salt added (see this link on the concept of a 30-day trial to form new habits). You'll find that in a matter of days this will deepen and enrich your palate, and you won't be so conditioned to NEED salt added to everything. You'll find that you'll very quickly develop a surprising subtlety in how and what you taste. You'll actually start tasting things for real instead of tasting brine. And your food will taste better and healthier to you without salt acting as a masking agent.

Live Longer, and Save on Blood Pressure Meds!
Heck, you're likely going to have cut your salt intake down eventually anyway, since we're all going to get old someday (if we're lucky) and we'll need to watch our blood pressure. Instead, why not teach yourself now to enjoy your food for what it really is, and you'll get the side benefit on saving on blood pressure meds (uh, and erectile dysfunction too) down the road!

A final note: Most foods already contain more salt than you'd think. For example the split pea soup recipe below contains optional beef boullion cubes. Guess what those are made of? Uh huh. If you use canned vegetables, especially canned tomatoes or tomato sauces...yep, added salt. Most stores will offer low- or no sodium sauces or canned products. Consider using them. But at the very least, don't add extra salt to a dish that should taste good without masking agents.

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Try this recipe out for a simple, low-sodium soup:

Easy Split Pea Soup
1 lb dried green split peas (prefer Goya)
10 cups water
1-2 beef boullion cubes (optional; can also use 1-2 cups low-sodium vegetable stock, but then use only 8 or 9 cups water instead of 10 above)
3-4 medium carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped
2 medium onions, coarsely chopped
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
pieces of ham or chicken (optional)

Rinse peas, then add to water and bouillion (or stock) in a large pot. Bring to a boil, then simmer (covered) for 30-40 minutes, occasionally dipping off foam. Add all other ingredients and simmer for another 40 minutes or until peas are soft.