While the universe of food bloggers readies its collective arsenal of chocolate dessert porn in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to take a fashion risk and pay homage to a red-colored, heart-loving delicacy that gets notably less airtime at this–or any–time of year: Borscht.

Now, if the word ‘Borscht’ conjures up romance-quashing images of hardscrabble nineteenth-century Eastern European peasantry for you, then I’d like to make the case for why this beautiful potage has just as much right to kick off your Valentine’s Day meal as the Red Velvet cupcake has to finish it off.

Of course, if you’ve never heard of Borscht, then I’m delighted to introduce you to this versatile and time-honored beet soup.  You may find it served hot or cold, vegetarian or meaty, Ukranian style or Russian style, clear and magenta or spiked with sour cream to produce an opaque, creamy pink color.  However it’s executed, you can be sure that every self-respecting Borscht-lover will claim that their grandmother’s version is undoubtedly the best.

Borscht is heart-y

Borscht is made with beets, and beets are loaded with nutrients that nourish your heart and support cardiovascular health. (It’s not a coincidence our grandparents lived so long despite their habit of spreading chicken fat (schmaltz) on bread and eating chopped liver by the gallon.)

For starters, beets are an excellent source of folate and a good source of blood-pressure-lowering potassium.  Diets rich in folate-rich foods have been associated with a decreased risk of heart disease in multiple large studies, though researchers are still trying to figure out why.  (Folic acid supplementation has not been shown to have the same effect.  Go figure.)   1 cup of boiled beets contains about 75 calories, 16g of carbohydrate (of which 3.5g are fiber), ~35% of the daily recommended intake of folate, and 15% of the daily value of potassium. (Canned beets lose about 30% of their folate compared to beets you boil yourself, but remain a very good source despite that).

Betacyanins are the purply red pigments that give beets their rich, gorgeous magenta color, and they happen to be powerful antioxidants.  While antioxidants are used throughout the body to help prevent cell damage that can give rise to mutations, animal studies suggest a possible benefit in colon cancer prevention in particular.

Betaine, another compound found naturally in beets, has anti-inflammatory properties. Studies have shown that people with diets rich in foods containing betaine had lower levels of inflammatory markers in their blood–like C-reactive protein and homocysteine–compared to be people with diets low in betaine-rich foods.  These inflammatory markers are associated with an increased risk of heart disease, so it seems that the lower the level, the better.

Borscht is hip

Veselka, the venerable and hip Ukranian diner in NYC’s East Village, features Ukranian Borscht as the very first item on its menu, and reportedly serves 5,000 gallons of it every year.  A photo of the restaurant’s famous borscht adorns the cover of its recently-published cookbook, whose pages feature not one but FOUR separate recipes for their intoxicating magenta brew, including their Famous Borscht, Cold Borscht, White Borscht and Christmas Borscht.  (You can get their famous Borscht recipe here, but vegetarians beware that their version calls for pork butt and beef stock.  Try their Christmas Borscht version for a meatless option, and see below for some cooking tips.)

Borscht is so hip that I suspect its only a matter of time until Bobby Flay challenges Veselka owner Tom Birchard to a Borscht Throwdown.

How to cook and enjoy Beets

While beets can absolutely be eaten raw (usually you’ll find them grated in a salad), you’ll most often encounter them roasted or boiled. Beets cooked from scratch are a thousand times more flavorful than canned beets, and have a much lovelier texture, so if you’ve tried the latter and were unimpressed, you might want to give them another try!  Cooking beets is a cinch, but can be a bit messy.  Here’s how it goes:

If you buy beets still attached to their greens, trim the greens off, leaving about an inch on top. Leaving some of the stem helps keep the healthful pigments from leeching out during cooking.  Save the trimmed portion!  Beet greens are super nutritious and you can chop them up and drop them into any ol’ soup… they’re sort of like swiss chard taste-wise…a bit bitter.)  Just soak them a few times in cold water to remove all of the dirt before cooking.  Wash them if you’re going to boil, but really give them a good scrub if you’re planning on roasting them.  DO NOT PEEL the beet before cooking, or they will bleed more of their nutritious colorful pigments… and make a giant mess.

Nothing says 'I love you' like a bouquet of boiled beets

To boil: Drop trimmed beets into boiling water.  Let them boil until they are soft enough to be pierced easily with a knife, anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, depending on size.

To roast: Rub clean beets with a little bit of oil (olive or grapeseed works well), wrap well in foil, and place on another foil-lined pan.  (The double-foil will make sure that the sugars from your roasting beet don’t drip onto the pan and burn).  Bake at 325 degrees for 40 minutes to an hour (depending on size).  Your beets are ready when they can be pierced easily with a knife.

To peel cooked beets: peel cooked beets while they are still warm (but cooled off enough to handle.)  Some people like to use gloves for this to avoid staining their hands.  My favorite way to peel a beet is by scraping the sides of the beet with a plain ol’ spoon while standing over the sink… the peel will slide right off and the mess will be contained.  I do it bare-handed ‘cuz that’s just how I roll.

One of my favorite ways to eat beets is cooked, in a composed salad, spiked with some sort of vinegary drizzle (a syrupy balsamic vinegar works great here) to cut the sweetness.  Beets pair beautifully with citrus fruits for a colorful, seasonal salad that injects some gorgeous color into your wintry food wardrobe. Try this classic (and easy) recipe for Beet, Citrus & Mint salad to take advantage of the amazing bounty of winter citrus available right now.

Beet Pee

Don’t be alarmed if, after eating a heaping serving of beets or borscht, your pee is tinted pink or reddish. It’s called “Beeturia” (I swear, I don’t make this stuff up), and it’s totally harmless.  Be forewarned that your number twos might also take on a bit of a rosy hue a day or so after you’ve gone on a beet bender…. once again, totally normal and totally harmless.  Consider it a post-Valentine’s Day treat for your colon.

Now, back to the Borscht

There are countless versions of Borscht.  Russian style tends to have more “stuff” in it: piles of cooked or pickled beets, cabbage and/or potatoes, making for a heartier soup.  Ukranian style tends to be brothier, but often features some meat or a mushroom dumpling or two floating around, which adds some heft. You can approximate the homemade dumpling effortlessly by tossing some store-bought mushroom tortellini or ravioli into your soup.  For a gluten-free version, look forDePuma’s (amazing) gluten-free Wild Mushroom Ravioli, or  Conte’s gluten-free Potato Onion Pierogis. Other common borscht accessories include lima beans, hard boiled eggs, meat, potatoes, or any combination thereof.  All borschts are generally garnished with dill and a dollop of sour cream, which can be swapped out for a fat-free plain, greek-style yogurt seamlessly if you’re looking to keep your borscht on the lighter side.

I made Veselka’s vegetarian Christmas Borscht (pictured to the left, recipe link above) and used the gluten-free Conte’s Pierogis instead of the (homemade, 2+ hour-prep time mushroom-onion dumplings) the recipe called for.  Considering my grandma used to serve store-bought Borscht from a jar, I figured she probably wouldn’t have disapproved of this little shortcut.  It was delicious, and the house smelled amazing while the beets were pickling on the stovetop and the aromatic vegetable broth was simmering.

A multi-culti V-day: Ukranian borscht with Polish pierogis (hidden) and Greek yogurt

However, in case you want to find your own Borscht beshert (that’s Yiddish for ’soul mate’) before committing to the recipe I used, here are some other attractive candidates for you to consider, both vegetarian and non:

Hot Beef Borscht: for the meat and potatoes man…and the woman who loves him.

Russian Borscht: vegetarian; served chilled, with hard boiled eggs.  To cool down after a passionate Valentine’s encounter, perchance?

Hot Borscht recipe styled after the version from the Russian Tea Room of old: A quicker version; uses store-bought beef broth and includes cabbage and tomato.  For nostalgic New York couples who can’t afford the new, $18-a-bowl version offered on the restaurant’s current menu.

Borscht with Beet Greens: for the frugalista and her coupon-clipping man, who love the idea of using every last bit of the beet…greens and all.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you and your Borscht of choice!

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Gigante beans: Some foods are OK to supersize

If you know not the creamy comfort that is biting into an enormous and aptly-named gigante bean, then it is my mission today to convince you to seek out this elusive packet of leguminous deliciousness.

I’ve gone on about my love for beans–and their nutritional virtues–in the past.  And while many folks profess to like beans well enough, too, they fail to see what inspires my unbridled passion for these little packets of complex-carbohydrate goodness.  After all, the American bean vocabulary tends to be pretty limited: we know garbanzos, kidneys, black beans and cannelinis.  Occasionally we dabble in pintos or black-eyed peas.  But unless it comes in a can, most of us can’t be bothered to expand our bean horizons.

If ever there was a bean to inspire a nation to abandon its lazybean tendencies, however, surely the Gigante (aka: Gigande, Yigante, Hija) must be it. Most popular in Greek cuisine (yes, the same clever people who brought us geometry and democracy have also retained this most delicious of beans in their collective leguminous repertoire), gigante beans boast a divine creamy texture and the ability to maintain their shape after all sorts of cooking.  I decided it was time to start making my own gigantes after the $9.99/lb Antipasto bar at Whole Foods lured me in one time too many with that ridiculously delicious Gigante Bean salad of theirs.  (What kind of person spends $18.98 on an impulse bean purchase?!)  Like all bean varieties, Gigantes are an excellent source of complex carbohydrate, protein, fiber, antioxidants and a good source of iron.

Buying Beans

My new favorite place to buy beans is Purcell Mountain Farms, an Idaho-based farm with an excellent online store.  In addition to having the most reasonable prices for my favorite hard-to-find Gigante beans and Beluga lentils, they offer a surprising variety of organic and heirloom bean varieties with romantic names and fashionable appearances.  If you’re bored to tears with your kidneys and pintos, surely an Eye of the Goat, Jackson Wonder or Mortgage Lifter bean will liven up your winter soups–and spirits–mighty fast.    And if you’ve eschewed standard beans for their dull, lackluster appearances, might I suggest the speckled Dapple Grey variety, or perhaps a melange of Orca, Jacob’s Cattle and Painted Pony beans to match the animal-print napkins at your next dinner party?  There are so many gorgeous, interesting, delicious historic bean varieties to try if you’re willing to venture beyond the supermarket aisles.  And by buying heirloom bean varieties, you’re doing your small part to support environmentally-sound practices that promote biodiversity.  Forget  blue ketchups and animal-shaped nuggets to entice your finnicky kids to eat; let them pick out their own mix of fashion-colored and patterned beans and see if that doesn’t get them engaged in the healthy eating process.

If you are a bean buff and are interested in learning more about the folklore behind the wide, wonderful world of beans–as well as how to prepare them–I strongly recommend Aliza Green’s essential cookbook, Beans, from which I learned, for example, that Gigante beans are a variety of so-called “runner beans” that were brought to America from Greece and Spain.

Cooking beans from scratch

While I resisted it for years, I have come to discover that cooking beans from dry isn’t nearly as annoying as I had thought it would be. If you have the foresight to plan ahead, tomorrow night’s dinner beans into a big bowl of water in a ratio of about 3 cups water per 1 cup beans before you go to bed is the easiest way to prep your beans for a faster cooking time the next day.  And if you’re as Type A as I am, the feeling of accomplishment that comes with multi-tasking overnight will lull you into a happy, albeit geeky, slumber.   This would be the regular soaking method.

The quick-soaking method takes about an hour to an hour and a half.  In this case, you’d put your beans in a large saucepan so that they’re covered with 2 inches of water.  Bring the water to a boil and simmer for 2 minutes.  Then, turn off the heat, cover the pan, and let your beans soak in the water for 60-90 minutes, until tender.  Drain the water and proceed with your recipe.

The #1 rule when cooking any dry bean is to avoid adding acid of any kind with the bean until it is already tender.  Don’t add any vinegar, wine, citrus juice, tomato product or anything else acidic to the cooking water until your beans are nice and soft; otherwise, the acid will prevent your beans from softening no matter how long you cook them.

Gigante Beans: Two Ways

Yigandes Plaki: Loosely translates to "Why, oh why, was I not born to a Greek grandmother?"

I am obsessed with this first recipe for Greek-style Baked Gigante Beans, (aka Yigandes Plaki) which was adapted from Nancy Harmon Jenkins’  The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook and posted on another food blog.  (Better they should have to deal with the copyright issues than me!)  While I’ll admit that it took forever and a half to make, don’t forget that I live in a freezing house and am all for any recipe that involves keeping the oven on for long periods of time.  (If you pre-soak your beans overnight, the first 40-50 minute bean simmering step can be cut in half.)  It strikes me that this recipe would be perfectly suited for a slow-cooker, but since I have yet to figure out how to use the slow-cooker I got for my wedding, I will defer to any ambitious crock-pot enthusiasts out there to adapt this recipe on our behalf and post their findings in the comments section.)  Since I didn’t have fresh herbs, I used a bunch of dry ones (including basil and oregano), which resulted in a final product that, in addition to being mouth-meltingly creamy, gave a similar flavor effect to lasagna…in the best possible way.  In fact, I would recommend serving it like you would lasagna; accompanied by a nice garlicky side dish of broccoli rabe or sauteed bitter greens to counteract the sweetness and bring some green to the plate.  It is absolutely delicious.  If your children don’t like this recipe, then send them back for a refund.

Another easy way to serve gigantes is as a room temperature bean salad appetizer.  Gigantes are commonly featured among the mezze in Greece, and a salad is a perfect way to pay homage to this civilized bean.  Mark Bittman offers an easy-to-follow formula for a Greek-style gigante bean salad in his modern kitchen staple, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

Of course, to replicate the Whole Foods Antipasto version that I’m so addicted to, here’s the closest recipe approximation I could come up with, reconstructed from the posted ingredient list on their salad bar signage:

Recipe: Tamara’s Whole Foods Gigante Bean Salad Knockoff

• Cook 1/2 lb of gigante beans per the cooking instructions above
• Roast 1 small red pepper and 1 small green pepper over open flame (your gas burner will do just fine).  Peel their skins off and slice peppers into super-thin strips.
• Mix cooked beans with 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar, 2 TBSP olive oil, 1 TBSP fresh chopped parsley, 1/2 cup (or more, to taste) or roasted pepper strips, 1-2 minced garlic cloves and salt to taste.
• Let salad marinate in fridge for several hours so flavors can blend.
• Serve at room temperature.

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I’ll admit that I do a fair amount of eavesdropping when exposed to public conversations about food.  I can’t help it.  It’s hard enough to resist taking a visual inventory of your shopping cart contents when you’re standing in front of me in line at the supermarket, so please cut me some slack.  Besides, if not for my auditory curiosity, I wouldn’t have come to learn just how highly the eating public seems to regard Agave Nectar.

This relative newcomer to the mainstream supermarket has earned itself a reputation as a low-glycemic sweetener that many believe to be safe for diabetics or healthier than sugar. Given these widespread perceptions, I thought it prudent to do a little bit of nutritional truth-seeking, to help my sweet-toothed readers understand what Agave Nectar really is: benefits and drawbacks alike.

What Agave Nectar is…and isn’t

Despite what the name might lead you to believe, Agave Nectar in its ready-to-use form doesn’t actually exist in nature.  In other words, you couldn’t just put a spigot in an agave plant and expect some sort of sweet, golden liquid to start pouring out of it like sap from a maple tree.  Whether it’s labeled “raw” or not, Agave Nectar is a man-made sweetener derived from Mexican agave plants that must undergo several processing steps to produce the end product.  The pulp is macerated to produce a juice that is filtered to varying degrees and then must be heated to break down the starch into its sugary components that make it taste sweet.  (It can also be enzymatically-treated to create the same effect.)  The less filtered the nectar, the darker it will be and the more minerals (like calcium, iron, potassium and magnesium) it will retain.

Because the agave plant’s natural starches are largely composed of long chains of fructose (a monosaccharide, or single unit sugar), the resulting syrup that is produced when this starch breaks down will also contain a relatively high degree of fructose.  Unlike other monosaccharides (namely, glucose/dextrose), fructose must first be metabolized by our liver to produce usable energy rather than being immediately absorbed into the bloodstream and available for use.  As a result, fructose does not raise blood sugar to the same extent that glucose does, and can thus be said to have a lower-glycemic effect.  This is why many people believe that Agave nectar is safer for diabetics than other sweeteners.

The first catch, however, is that you have no idea how much fructose is actually in that Agave nectar you bought. While available information would suggest that Agave nectar routinely contains 90% fructose, in fact some products have been shown to contain only 55%, and most commercially available products appear to fall in the 70-80% range.  (The ratio of fructose to glucose will vary by the species of agave plant used, the processing method and whether anything is added to the agave nectar.)  Just by way of comparison, plain old table sugar is about 50% fructose.  And High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is usually 55% , too.  Which means that some brands of Agave nectar may have no different an effect on your blood sugar than plain old white sugar or HFCS.  Unless you verify the amount of fructose or the glycemic index of the particular brand of Agave nectar you buy, you cannot assume that it’s any safer for diabetics than any other caloric sweetener. Not all products are 100% agave nectar, and some brands have been reported to mix in corn syrup (glucose) or other ingredients to their agave products.  I should also mention that there have been no clinical trials investigating the glycemic effect of Agave Nectar in subjects who actually have diabetes that I’m aware of, so I would emphasize that caution is key when your blood sugar control is at stake.

The second catch, of course, is that we rarely eat our sweeteners alone. The ACTUAL blood sugar effect of a food will depend on the rest of the meal eaten with that food.  Protein, fat and fiber all moderate the impact of carbohydrates on our blood sugar.  The amount we eat of a food will also impact its effect on our blood sugar, and a larger portion of a “low-glycemic food” could easily produce a higher spike in blood sugar than a smaller portion of a “medium glycemic food” like table sugar.  The only way to truly know how swapping out your current sweetener or adding agave nectar to a typical meal will affect your individual blood sugar is to actually test your blood sugar before and two hours after the meal.

Is Agave Nectar Low-GI?

Caveats aside, the glycemic index can still be a useful tool when comparing foods to one another. And so a little bit of poking around online

Glycemic index of Agave Nectars varies widely by brand

yielded the following Glycemic Index information on some leading Agave Nectar products from the manufacturer’s web sites. I have not independently verified any of these claims.  Note that to be considered “low glycemic,”  a product must produce an indexed blood sugar response of 55 or less when compared to a standard (pure glucose=100).  By way of comparison, table sugar–which, if you’ll recall, is half fructose– has a glycemic index that ranges from 58-65 (it varies depending on the source of the sugar), rendering it a “medium glycemic” product.

• Wholesome Sweeteners Organic Blue Agave: 75% fructose and 20% glucose.  Claims a glycemic index of 39 or less.
• Madhava: The manufacturer’s website claims that their product’s glycemic index “measures in the range of 32.”  (It strikes me that 32 isn’t so much a ‘range’ as a single data point, and I’d be interested to know whether the aforementioned range has a higher end…?)
• Nekulti agave nectar: claims a GI range of 34-38
• Volcanic Nectar Blue Agave: This is the only agave product I have come across that is verified by a 3rd party agency, the Glycemic Research Institute, to be a low-glycemic product.  It clocked in at a 27.
• Sweet Cactus Farms: GI of 19, as listed in the University of Sydney’s generally reliable GI Database.

As you can see, there is some pretty wide variation in the reported glycemic indeces of available products, but several options that appear to fit the low-glycemic bill nonetheless.

Is fructose even a good thing?

There is an irony about our collective embrace of Agave Nectar as we simultaneously demonize its metaphysical twin, High Fructose Corn Syrup.  Which is: the very characteristic of HFCS that leading critics argue to be responsible for its obesity-promoting qualities–namely, its fructose content– is precisely the characteristic that Agave-lovers are drawn to about Agave.  So which is it?  Is fructose evil and fat-promoting, or is it wholesome and health-promoting?

The answer is neither.  And both.

The scientific literature shows that people on experimental diets which are unnaturally high in fructose (from any source) have significantly increased levels of triglycerides (a risk factor for heart disease for which diabetics are especially susceptible) and increased production of fat in the liver (fatty liver).  (The experimental doses were usually 2-3x higher than the typical fructose intake in even a crappy American diet).  At lower doses, drinking fructose before a meal has been shown repeatedly to be associated with consuming more overall calories when compared to people who drink glucose (or a sweet, diet drink) instead.  (Our brains do not register fructose like they do glucose, so eating fructose doesn’t trigger the hormonal signals that tell us we’re satisfied in the same way that eating glucose does.)

In other words, a high fructose diet is not a good thing for anyone.  But fructose from any source in SMALL amounts--whether from table sugar, HFCS, fruit juice, Agave or honey– will not contribute significantly to an increase in fat accumulation in your liver or your blood, nor is it likely to be much better or worse than an alternative. A drizzle of honey on your yogurt, a sugar cube in your coffee once a day, a favorite salad dressing or ketchup that contains HFCS, some agave nectar on your pancakes… these are not things to sweat about in the context of a generally healthy diet.  And if you are diabetic, replacing table sugar, maple syrup or honey with a higher-fructose alternative (in small amounts) could possibly–but not definitely–help to moderate your blood sugar spikes.

But when it comes to drinking your sugar– whether that beverage of yours is sweetened with HFCS, 100% sugar, honey or Agave nectar– your brain is not going to register these calories in its internal calculus of whether it’s gotten enough energy to satisfy its needs, and you are not likely to compensate for those extra calories by eating less.  So drinking your sugar in any form is not a habit I’d recommend getting into, and none of these sweeteners are shown to be any better or worse than the others when it comes to sweetened beverages.

To Agave or not to Agave?

Buyer beware: Agave-sweetened products don't necessarily have less carbohydrate or fewer calories than conventionally-sweetened versions.

As you can see, I’m not quite convinced that Agave nectar is all that much healthier than sugar, HFCS or honey.  It has the same number of calories as these alternatives (16 per teaspoon) and it’s not necessarily going to produce lower blood sugars when consumed in the context of a typical diet.

Having said that, there are a few cases I can envision in which Agave could be a better alternative to other sweeteners.

1. As a honey replacement for vegans
2. As a sugar substitute in baking… IF you take advantage of agave’s sweeter taste to reduce the total amount of sugar in the recipe.

Guidelines for replacing sugar with agave vary from conservative to aggressive.  The more sugar you take out, of course, the healthier the end product will be, so I’d encourage pushing the envelope with your favorite recipes to see how they hold up to the swap-out.

The most conservative guidelines I’ve seen recommend a 25% reduction in sugar when using agave, or 3/4 cup agave nectar for each 1 cup of sugar that the recipe calls for.  When doing this, they also recommend removing 1/3 of the liquid in the recipe and reducing the oven temperature by 25 degrees.

Karina Allrich, the Gluten Free Goddess, however, takes it further.  She recommends to use 1/3 to 1/2 cup agave nectar for each 1 cup of sugar that a recipe calls for, and reducing the liquid by just 3 TBSP to compensate.  If this formula works for your recipes, you’ll save at least 72g of carbohydrate and 290 calories in the entire recipe.  That’s non-trivial.

Some food manufacturers are taking advantage of agave’s sweeter taste to reduce the total sugar and calories in their food products, but others are taking advantage of your unconditional love of agave to sell you expensive, agave-sweetened products that have no fewer calories and no less sugar than the original.  You should always read the label and compare.

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A sweet potato pie that comes in both naughty (with crust) or nice (sans crust) versions.

These frigid days, I find myself seeking out excuses to keep the oven on in the kitchen to help warm up the ground floor of our chilly little house. And thus was the idea born to bake a Sweet Potato Pie, which would entail baking the sweet potatoes for a blessed hour, and then baking the assembled pie for another glorious 60 minutes. If your home has better climate control than mine and you need a different excuse to bake yourself a pie, perhaps you can make it in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.  Admittedly, by all accounts, his favorite pie was actually pecan. But if he were still alive today, he’d be 81 years old and probably watching his sugar and fat intake. And being a reasonable man, surely he would have enjoyed a marginally less sinful, Vitamin A-rich wedge of Sweet Potato Pie just as much.

Having resolved to bake myself a pie, there was, of course, the matter of the crust. I’d suffered through enough of those godawful frozen gluten-free pie crusts from Thanksgiving. And I couldn’t bear the thought of playing around with a sticky rice-flour dough only to be disappointed. So I decided to experiment with my own version of a graham cracker crumb crust made with what I suspected would be a perfect substitute: Puffins cereal, pulsed through the food processor. I used the Honey Rice variety since it’s gluten-free, but the recipe below should work with your Puffin flavor of choice. If you are more virtuous than I was, however, and would prefer to go crust-free, feel free to bake this pie as a souffle-cake of sorts in a well-lubed springform pan. It will still be delicious, and leaving out the crust transforms this indulgent pie into a healthy, sensible dessert with almost half the calories and some very redeeming nutritional qualities (see below for the stats).

One last matter I’d like to clear up before the root vegetable police pounce on me about the whole sweet potato/yam issue. The bright orange root vegetables we tend to refer to as ‘yams’ in this country are almost always the so-called “soft” variety of sweet potato. (True yams, botanically speaking, come from Africa or the Caribbean, and are not related to sweet potatoes.  They are much starchier and lack the same levels of Vitamin A; see the description of Ñame from my previous post on Caribbean root vegetables to see the difference).   There are also “firm” sweet potatoes, which have a paler yellow flesh and bake up to be drier than the moist, soft, orangey soft sweet potato we call yams.  I used jewel yam sweet potatoes in this recipe–can you get over that gorgeous color?–to create the perfect soft, souffle-like filling.

Recipe: Tamara’s Sweet Potato Pie

Serves 8

For the (optional) crust:

1 and 2/3 cups of Puffin crumbs (will require about 3.5-4 cups of Puffins cereal pulsed in your food processor).  For gluten-free, use the Honey Rice or Multigrain Puffin cereal variety.

6 TBSP (organic) unsalted butter, melted

1/4 cup (organic) sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Blend all ingredients in a bowl until well-combined.  Dump mixture into a 9″ pie pan and press it with your hands to cover the bottom and sides of pan evenly.  Bake for 7-9 minutes until set.  Remove from oven and cool before filling.

For the Sweet Potato filling:

2 to 2 1/4 lbs. sweet potatoes (”yams”), scrubbed clean.

3 large eggs

3/4 cup (organic) light brown sugar

2 TBSP (organic) unsalted butter, melted

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

2 TBSP rum

1. Bake the sweet potatoes: pierce them with a fork several times, place on a baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour until nice and soft all the way through.
2. Split open the baked sweet potatoes and scoop out the orange flesh into a large mixing bowl.  (It should easily peel away from the skin).
3. Add the eggs, brown sugar, melted butter, nutmeg, cinnamon, salt and rum to the sweet potato flesh.  Mix all together using a large fork until ingredients well combined, but so that sweet potato flesh still remains somewhat textured and fibrous.  (Don’t beat it into a super-smooth filling… the somewhat lumpier texture is what makes a sweet potato pie so different than a silky pumpkin pie and gives it a characteristic heartiness.)
4. If you are using a crust, pour filling into crust.  If you are making a crustless souffle-custard-cake, pour mixture into a well-greased 9″ springform pan.
5. Bake for 60-75 minutes at 350 degrees.  The pie is ready when the filling is nice and firm and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.

Approximate nutrition information per serving (assumes 8 servings):

With Puffin crust: 390 calories, 62g carbohydrate (5 diabetic exchanges…which will certainly blow your entire meal’s budget) of which 4g are fiber, 5g protein, 14g fat, and >100% of the recommended daily intake of Vitamin A for adults

Without crust: 215 calories, 40g carbohydrate (3 diabetic exchanges) of which 3g are fiber, 4g protein, 5g fat and >100% of the recommended daily intake of Vitamin A for adults

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Introducing the Burgeriest (soy-free, gluten-free, vegan) homemade Veggie Burger

For some time, friends and readers have been asking me to share a recipe for a good, easy to make, homemade veggie burger.  And so my New Year’s Resolution this year was to make good on my promises to do so. (Besides, it’s a heck of a lot easier than losing weight.)

As it turns out, there’s a lot of dissatisfaction out there with the available options.  Most commercial offerings have gluten or soy; ingredients which many people avoid by choice or necessity.  And most recipes for homemade versions are incredibly time-consuming, multi-step ordeals; I still have nightmares about the 2-hour Shutter’s veggie burger project I took on two summers ago that involved cooking brown rice from scratch (45 minutes), cooking beets from scratch (1 hour), and mixing them with a laundry list of hard-to-find-GF-versions-of  pantry items* to produce a delicious but exhausting veggie burger.  Then there was that Martha Stewart Chickpea burger that tasted suspiciously similar to falafel.  (Tasty…but if I had wanted falafel, I would have just made falafel…).  I had all but given up on finding a tasty, easy homemade burgery veggie burger until the most recent article in a recent New York Times series on the safety (or lack thereof) of ground beef sold in America provided the second wind I needed to find a delicious, easy, healthful ground beefless recipe for my dear readers to make at home.

Resolved: Eat Less Red Meat in 2010

Even if you’re not a vegetarian, swapping out a beefy burger for a meatless one every so often will do you good– and help you make good on those New Year’s Resolutions to start eating more healthily.  In a landmark study of over 550,000 people aged 50-71 years (that’s crazy huge, by the way) by Sinha et al published in March, 2009 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers followed subjects for 10 years to determine how various dietary factors contributed to mortality. They controlled for all sorts of factors, including race, smoking, alcohol use, weight, exercise habits, vitamin use and multiple dietary habits.  And they found that men and women who ate more red meat were  31% and 36%, respectively, more likely to die for any reason during the 10 year period when compared to people to ate the least red meat. Cancer was the leading cause of mortality, followed by cardiovascular disease.  On average, the group with the lowest red meat consumption ate only about 1/3 of an ounce per 1,000 calories in their diet, compared with the highest meat consumption group, which ate about 2.5 oz red meat per 1,000 calories in their diet.  In other words, in a typical 2,000 calorie diet, the lowest-risk group ate less than 1 oz red meat per day on average (~4.5 oz per week), versus the highest risk group who ate about 5oz per day (~17 oz per week).  The results were statistically significant for trend, meaning that even reducing red meat consumption somewhat from the highest level (without going as low as the lowest-intake level) was still associated with a reduced risk of death.

The bottom line: swapping out one average beef burger a week with a meatless version brings you 3-6oz closer to the group whose dietary habits have been associated with the lowest risk of death within 10 years. And what better New Year’s Resolution than to live past New Year’s 2020?

The Best Homemade Veggie Burger Recipe

And so, after countless veggie burger experiments, spanning several years and multiple genres, I’m pleased to point you in the direction of Mollie Katzen’s Lentil-Walnut Burger. I know what you’re thinking when you hear “lentil-walnut.”  You’re thinking about long-

Two Lentil Walnut burgers on a (gluten-free) bun

haired tree huggers.  70’s style health food stores that smell like vitamins. Hemp, bean sprouts and Birkenstocks.   But do try to keep an open mind.  Mollie loves food, and she knows food.  As such, this burger tastes nothing of lentils or walnuts; it’s greater than the sum of its parts.  The batter has a similar texture and appearance to ground beef–it looks like a beef burger when cooking and when cooked.  Not in the creepy Boca Burger way, but in a ‘it definitely feels burgery rather than bean-pattyish’ way.   The burgers have that same savory, umami flavor profile of a beef burger–delivered by the cider vinegar and mushrooms?–rather than the more bean-and-vegetably flavor typical of a veggie burger.  And you can make the whole batter in the time it takes to cook lentils: 30 minutes flat.  (If I may offer a tip: mash the cooked lentils with your hands–squeeze ‘em real good until they’re totally mush.  It helps make a very coherent batter.) So give this tie-dyed, hippie burger a chance, will you?

To make Mollie’s recipe gluten-free you have several options instead of the bread crumbs/wheat germ/oats she calls for:

1. Use gluten free breadcrumbs, like Gillian’s, Hol-Grain, or Glutino
2. Use gluten-free oats, like Bob’s Red Mill
3. Use the Quinoa Flakes you have leftover from making my gluten-free Quatzoh Balls (of course this will make the recipe more hippie than it is already)
   
4. Make your own gluten-free breadcrumbs by toasting your favorite frozen gluten-free waffle and tossing it in a food processor (Click here for instructions from the clever gluten-free goddess who came up with this nifty idea

Approximate nutrition info per burger (assumes each recipe makes 6 burgers and you use 1 TBSP of oil to cook the burgers in a non-stick pan.  Excludes bun.):  250 calories, 29g carbohydrate–of which 10 huge grams are fiber (so, a net of 19g of carbohydrate–or one and a half diabetic exchanges), 11g protein, 12g (heart-healthy, unsaturated) fat, and 3.8mg iron (~20% of the daily value of 18mg).  Serve with ketchup and a slice of tomato to help absorb the iron from the beans and spinach.

** If I haven’t scared you away from the Shutter’s recipe and you’re up for the challenge, you can substitute Wheat-free Tamari sauce for the soy sauce.  Premier Japan makes a gluten-free Hoisin sauce.  And use any of the bread-crumb-replacement strategies listed above in place of the oat bran or wheat germ she calls for.  And for goodness sake, use canned beets instead of roasting your own fresh ones as I foolishly did and you can redeem that extra hour of your life to play Rhythm Kung Fu on the Wii Fit Plus you got for Christmas.

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