Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too: Eating to Be Sexy, Fit, and Fabulous! (23 page)

√ Food with Spirit

The rest of the recipes in this chapter are some of my favorite dishes that use wine and spirits. Consider these recipes as a guide for adding wine and spirits to your own dishes. I always use good wine rather than so-called cooking wines because the quality makes a difference.

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Sherry Vinaigrette

M a k e s a b o u t 2 1/2 c u p s

√Wine and other spirits add an interesting depth to salad dressings. Try this sherry vinaigrette on your next green salad. Use a good Spanish sherry, not a cheap cooking sherry, and you will really notice how it enhances the flavor.

1 cup sherry vinegar

1 teaspoon honey

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

1⁄2 cup light olive oil or olive–canola

1⁄4 cup dry Spanish sherry

oil blend

3⁄4 cup minced shallots

Salt and pepper to taste

1.
Combine the vinegars, sherry, shallots, and honey in a medium bowl.

2.
Whisk in the olive oil a little at a time. Season with salt and pepper. Serve immediately over crisp fresh greens.

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Braised Rabbit with Cracked Olives

S e r v e s 4

√Braises are dishes in which meat or poultry is cooked for a long time in liquid. They are the perfect opportunity for using wine because the wine gives the braise an added complexity, but the whole dish cooks for so long that all the alcohol cooks out. If you can’t find or don’t want to use rabbit, you can substitute a whole chicken instead. Both versions are delicious. Serve over linguine with Wilted Swiss Chard (page 194).

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 cup dry white wine

1 whole rabbit or 1 whole chicken, cut

2 cups rabbit or chicken stock or broth

into pieces

1 cup Mediterranean green olives in

Salt and pepper to taste

brine (preferably picholine),

Flour for dredging

smashed and pitted

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

4 sprigs fresh rosemary, leaves picked

1 medium onion, peeled and roughly

from the stems and chopped

chopped

One 28-ounce can whole peeled

2 stalks celery, trimmed and diced

tomatoes, crushed, with their juice

2 medium carrots, peeled and diced

(I like Muir Glen)

6 garlic cloves, peeled and slivered

2 bay leaves

4 tablespoons tomato puree

1.
Preheat the oven to 325°F. Heat a large ovenproof skillet with a cover over medium-high heat. Add 11⁄2 tablespoons olive oil to the skillet.

2.
Season the rabbit or chicken pieces with salt and pepper and lightly dredge them in flour. Sear the seasoned meat in the skillet until golden on all sides. Remove from the skillet and set aside.

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3.
Melt the butter in the skillet. Add the onions, celery, and carrots. Cook, stirring, until the vegetables are lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook 2–3 more minutes.

Add the tomato puree and stir. Cook 3 more minutes.

4.
Add the white wine and bring the whole mixture to a boil.

Lower the heat to medium and cook, stirring occasionally, until the liquid is reduced in volume by about half, about 15 minutes.

Add the stock, browned meat, olives and their brine, rosemary, tomatoes, and bay leaves.

5.
Bring the entire mixture back up to a boil, then lower the heat to medium to simmer. Cover the pan and place in the oven for 2 hours, or until the meat is fork-tender.

6.
Remove from the oven and take the meat out of the sauce.

Put it on a plate and set aside. Skim any fat off the sauce. Remove the bay leaves. Serve the meat on a platter over linguine with the sauce ladled on top.

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Tuna with Cabernet Whipped Potatoes

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√Wine and potatoes may seem like a strange combination, but this is one way to make your mashed potatoes taste really interesting. Serve with wilted greens tossed with a little red wine, or a fresh green salad dressed with the sherry vinaigrette from this chapter. These potatoes also complement fresh salmon steaks or fillets.

1 bottle (750 ml) Cabernet Sauvignon

1 pound Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled

wine

(or not) and boiled

1 teaspoon minced shallots

Salt to taste

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

4 tuna steaks, about

1 quart heavy cream

5 ounces each

1.
In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the wine, shallots, garlic, and freshly ground black pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the volume is reduced to about one-fourth the amount you started with, 30–40 minutes. Stir in the cream and cook, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens slightly, about 10 more minutes.

2.
Mash the potatoes by hand or put them through a foodmill.

Stir in the wine–cream mixture and season with salt and pepper.

3.
Heat a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the olive oil. Sear the tuna on both sides, leaving it medium-rare—about 3 minutes on each side. Remove from the pan and serve with the mashed potatoes.

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Camembert with Zinfandel Poached Pears

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√In traditional Mediterranean celebratory meals, salad, cheese, and dessert courses often follow the meat course. This dish combines them all. Loganberries are a raspberry-blackberry hybrid—

if you can’t find them, just substitute raspberry or blackberry puree. Make berry puree by processing about 2 cups of berries with a little bit of juice or water in a blender or food processor.

11⁄2 cups loganberry, raspberry, or

4 firm pears, preferably Comice or

blackberry puree (see directions

Bosc, peeled and cored

above)

1⁄2 pound mizuna (a lacy Japanese

1 cinnamon stick

green, or substitute other fresh

6 cloves

greens)

4 peppercorns

8 ounces Hudson Valley (or your

2 cups Zinfandel wine

favorite brand) Camembert, cut

2 cups water

into 4 wedges

1⁄2 cup sugar

1.
In a large saucepan, combine the berry puree, cinnamon stick, cloves, peppercorns, wine, water, and sugar. Bring to a boil over high heat. Add the pears and turn the heat down so that the liquid simmers.

2.
Poach the pears at a simmer until they are tender, about 40

minutes. Remove the pears from the saucepan and cut each one in half from stem to bottom. Keep simmering the sauce to reduce it slightly, about 15 minutes.

3.
Place a tuft of mizuna in the center of each of four plates.

Place two pear halves on the greens, then top the pears with a wedge of cheese. Drizzle with the wine sauce and serve immediately.

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Price’s Port Cherry Sauce

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√Price makes a delicious cherry sauce with ruby port. Use fresh cherries if you can get them in season, but frozen will work, too.

Try this over a small serving of gelato or ice cream, or stir it into yogurt or custard for a simple dessert.

1 cup ruby port

1 cup pitted cherries

1⁄2 cup sugar

1.
Combine the port and sugar in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, stirring until the sauce thickens, about 15

minutes.

2.
Add the cherries and continue cooking 5 more minutes (10

minutes if the cherries were frozen).

3.
Serve warm or at room temperature. Store in a glass jar in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

Cooking with wine is just as fun and interesting as drinking wine with dinner, so I hope you will try it. From appetizer to dessert, wine and spirits make food livelier and add an intrigu-ing depth of flavor. Plus, most or all of the alcohol cooks out when heated. I also hope you will learn how to drink wine in the Mediterranean spirit, if you like to drink it and your health allows for it. Remember the importance of portion control. Pour 4

ounces (1/2 cup) of wine into a glass and look at it. That’s all you need in a day. Sip it slowly, savor it with your food, and sink into the pleasure of the experience. Combined with delicious food, that little bit can make every night’s dinner a truly memorable experience.

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I

11

Take It or Leave It

O mangier questa minestra o saltar questa finestra!

Either eat this soup or jump out this window!

I have to say that I find some of the American attitudes toward food a little strange. Women in particular seem to have a love-hate relationship with food, and we are teaching this love-hate food fight to our daughters. We fear our food, thinking it will make us fat or unhealthy. But yet we feel addicted to food and eat way too much of it. And the food we often choose to overeat is
bad
food—processed, fatty, tasteless. Food filled with chemicals or sitting in layers of plastic on a shelf for months. Food made with fake fat, fake sugar, fake color. No wonder this food fails to satisfy or nurture our inner goddess!
C’est mauvais pour la
digestion!

This way of eating is entirely foreign in Mediterranean culture, where people cherish quality, taste, and the sensual experience of eating. Emotional eating isn’t Mediterranean, nor is bingeing. Sure, the food is so good that sometimes you want to eat a lot of it! But this happens within a broader, more balanced

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scheme. A day of luxuriously heavy eating is followed by a day of light, tasty food and walking a little more briskly. In Sicily or Rome, these brisk walks are called
passigata
.

The more-more-more concept seems to permeate American thinking, including attitudes about food. If one cookie is good, three are better. If one slice of pizza is good, three are better.

Eat the whole 4-pound steak and you get it for free! Buy it in bulk! Supersize it! I know this is all familiar rhetoric to you, whether you subscribe to the ideas or not. But there is also a trend turning away from this attitude. Even some fast-food restaurants have decided to stop offering a “super” version of their meals. As more studies suggest that lower calorie consumption is linked to longer life, people are taking a second look—more is not always better. It’s just more.

In its second season, according to an article published in the Australian
Herald Sun,
the luxury liner
Queen Mary 2
has already suffered the collapse of dozens of its seats, installed by a French company, due to the excessive weight of some passengers. The newspaper article specifically pins the seating collapses on

“obese American passengers.” While the French company, with typical French restraint, won’t specifically say that Americans were the cause, we can only imagine that these seats were designed with a typical European customer in mind. Do we really want to be the cause of disintegrating furniture because we can’t stop overeating?
Certainement pas!

It isn’t easy. Portion control is tough, and it can be even tougher to round up really good food conveniently. What do you do when faced with an all-American all-you-can-eat buffet for $10 or a tiny plate of high-quality food for $25? No, it isn’t easy. Yet, it is possible. It’s more habit than anything else, and breaking a habit is just breaking a habit; it’s not changing your whole personality.

The Italians have a saying:
Mangia poco ma bene
. (Eat little,
Take It or Leave It

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but eat well.) That is the single most important key to staying slim because you won’t overeat, but you won’t feel deprived, either. The Mediterranean diet offers you truly good food with relatively little effort, with such full flavor that small portions seem like plenty.

Over the years, I’ve come to some other conclusions about how to stay slim eating the Mediterranean way, and I’d like to share my top ten with you. Reorienting your thinking and your habits according to these ten Mediterranean-inspired ideas will help you to eat incredibly delicious food, really enjoy it, and stay or get slim because you are focusing on quality, not quantity.

Will it be easy? Sometimes. But not always. Old habits are hard to break, even when the new ones fill you with pleasure. But you know what they say . . .
Pour faire une omelette, il faut casser
des œufs!
(To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs!) Here’s how to direct your mind toward the Mediterranean:

1. Become a food snob.
It’s not that Mediterranean women are necessarily food snobs, but they know what quality is, and they don’t waste time or calories on anything but good food. What’s the point? I’m certainly not suggesting you turn your nose up at your friends, but that doesn’t mean you can’t turn your nose up at what they eat, especially if it is fast food, junk food, processed food, or poor-quality food with mediocre ingredients. Cultivat-ing your inner food snob can actually be fun if you approach it in a lighthearted way.
No voglio quello, ringraziamenti per offrire!
(I don’t want that, but thank you so much for the offer!)

2. Be picky.
Kids are often picky about what they eat, refusing to eat things with flavors or textures they don’t enjoy. The foods that American kids don’t like are often the healthy choices—