Real Food

They say French women don't get fat.

That's not entirely true. However, walking down a street in Western Europe presents a person with fewer opportunities to observe obesity.

Now, just a quick reminder here, by objective standards, I am obese. Technically, in spite of the forty plus pounds I've already shed, I'm morbidly obese. This is not a dig a fat people.

But Mireille Guiliano is on to something. There is a huge difference between Europeans, and my observation is mostly Belgians and Britons, and Americans in the way they view "the table."

Don't get me wrong, I've watched Londoners deaden the taste of food with Dad's Sauce and Belgians do it with cigarettes. What really strikes me is that Americans seem to do it with the food itself.

eanja told me a story about a friend of hers who looked in eanja's cupboards and asked, "How can you cook? You have nothing but ingredients."

This seems to be the big problem. We're used to seeing the finished object and have no idea how it gets there. Pizza is an excellent example. I can understand how those, like me, who aren't terribly good at baking might think frozen is the way to go. But frankly, frozen and other prepared doughs are already available widely. Roll it out, add your own toppings -- a luxury Mama Celeste doesn't really allow -- and bake for the same length of time a frozen pizza would take. If you have baking abilities, you can make and freeze your own crust dough for use later.

I can throw together a pseudo-puttanesca sauce while the water is boiling for the pasta it's going to top. If I have the time, yes, the taste is richer if I slow cook the sauce for several hours. But the actual preparation time, is still only about ten minutes.

One of the most dramatic examples came from the gentleman I refer to as "my not-quite-evil ex." He loved my cooking, but thought it took too long to prepare a meal on a week night. So he challenged me to see who could have a hot meal on the table first. We didn't own a microwave, so this limited the contest, fairly, to stuff that could be cooked in an oven or on a stove top. Because it was impromptu, we were limited to things we had on hand.

He prepared a frozen pizza with frozen vegetables on top of it. While he preheated the oven, I opened a can of beef broth, poured it into a saucepan and added two more cans of water to it. I took out a frozen beef chop and sliced it thinly, then chopped a clove of garlic.

He put the pizza concoction in the oven. I started my risotto rice. Twenty minutes of stirring later I added some frozen spinach and the beef to the last cup of boiling water for a minute before adding it to the rice.

I beat his time by one minute. Now there's no question that his meal was easier, in that he could walk away, but mine was just as fast, more nutritious, and tasted better. Not to mention I recognize all the words on my ingredients list (Arborio rice, beef, beef broth, red wine, olive oil, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, parmesan cheese, spinach). I really don't want to know what goes into Mama Celeste's cheese substitute.

Savoring food is easier when the food is flavorful. That means cooking with ingredients rather than packaged foods.