A healthy tip

After weeks of nursing me back from hip surgery, Karen took a few days of rest and relaxation at a spa. She gained enough rest and muscle to haul back several crates of spa cookbooks, spices and groceries with which to sustain the spa’s “healthy eating” designs at home.

Fortunately I am a veteran of the healthy eating wars. The trick is to find ways to bring the two loci – healthy eating, and pleasure eating – closer together. Healthy eating eliminates most fat and salt and makes the food tasty with various combinations of spices and vials of powders with strange names. Pleasure eating is a wedge cut out of the edge of a Pittsburgh-style porterhouse, so that the bite includes both steak and a sizzling strip of fat.

Those are the extremes. Where is the middle ground? There has to be a middle ground, because healthy eating created solely with spices and powders tastes like spices and powders. And pleasure eating creates too stormy a climate of guilt, when one of you has brought home crates of cookbooks, produce, spices and powders.

Karen was fair about it. No declarations of “a new lifestyle,” when she had caught her breath enough to talk again. She simply asked me to participate, to join her in preparing and consuming healthy stuff, but I could still have a porkchop on the side.

It is working out pretty well, though every time I open the refrigerator door, a plastic container, or a plastic bag, or a plastic bottle, of healthy foodstuffs tumbles out and onto the kitchen floor. I think the logistics will settle down, once we are deeper into the routine, but the first week of a new eating lifestyle is pure hell on storage.

Our first shot was Chicken Fajitas. It is amazing what you can do to chicken’s reputation with a few healthy spices and powders. As it happened, the phone rang when I was halfway done; it was Tyler, my son, with a report from Baton Rouge (see previous blog), of the best seafood dinner he had ever had. The benefit to me was to see that the remaining half of my Chicken Fajitas had hardened (best word to use) onto my plate so that my fork and knife were useless without repeated floodings of hot water. It was not unreasonable of me to flush the material down the disposal.

The Fajitas had been made in a rush. Karen got home in the afternoon, and by the time we got her unloaded, it was too late to cook with contemplation. The next day was better, and the secret was one that I always use in pleasure eating. You have to scorch something: just a little. Usually it is some onion. Chop a third of a medium onion, put it in a pot with a teaspoon of olive oil (or even water), and let the onion start to brown, and create a brown glaze in the bottom of the pot. Stir in half a cup of coffee to “deglaze” the pot and create a browned-onion liquid.

Then continue cooking whatever it is that you are cooking. On the second night, it happened to be chicken again, braised-baked (special oven technique) for an hour and a half with onions, mushrooms and brown rice (I snuck in a tablespoon of white rice too, just for meanness.) Karen said it was the best chicken she had ever eaten, healthy or pleasure.

Three chicken breasts made eight servings. Five of them are still stacked in the freezer and we either have to finish it before I make the Snapper Vera Cruz, or go buy more freezer containers and another refrigerator. We are on our way.