Tag Archives: food

Be a Food Adventurer

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If I were being really specific, I’d call this dish “Sauteed Sweet Potato with Shallots, Chile Cobanero and Lime.” Because there’s a story there.

In Guatemala last week, as with our previous trip with Common Hope in 2012, Christopher and I went in curious about the stumbling blocks to better nutrition. One would think in a third world country the answer would end abruptly with “lack of money.” But it doesn’t. It turns out two other boulders loom just as large: 1) not knowing how to cook unfamiliar foods and 2) fear no one will like said foods.

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Sound familiar?

I am so intrigued that the same roadblocks exist in developing countries as  here in the land of more-than-plenty. And I have a story (yes, it has to do with chile Cobanero) that shows it’s possible to leapfrog past those roadblocks once you know what it takes to do it.

One of the things I did last week was to teach a cooking class to a dozen kiddos in the Common Hope youth group. Several of them had told the organizer that they were considering cooking as a profession, so I thought I’d teach them about flavor building–first how to sear and saute, then how to add flavor to steamed foods with things like citrus zest, flavored oils and whatnot.

Oh … and did I mention the whole class was about vegetables?

More than a few shoulders drooped when the kids saw green beans instead of brownies, but they were attentive and respectful from the get go. I started out by sauteeing cubed quizquil (pronounced ‘whiskEEL’)–which tastes to me like a cross between a sweet potato and a zucchini–in hot oil with shallots until it got nice and caramelized. Then I tossed it with lime juice and cilantro and was about to shake on a bit of local chile powder (props to you if you guessed it was called chile Cobanero) when I caught a look of utter disgust on the kids’ faces. I halted mid-shake.

“Are you telling me you don’t like chile Cobanero?” I asked. A dozen little heads nodded sheepishly.

I put the jar down and thought for a second. “Alright,” I said, “then I’m just going to have to make you food adventurers.”

They perked up.

“Where do adventurers go?” I asked. “Do they go only to places they know?”

Heads shook and someone piped up, “No, they go new places they’ve never been before.”

“Aha. Exactly. And that’s what I’m going to ask you to do.”

So I divided the quizquil between two plates while I explained that I would only put chile powder on one of them. Then it was up to them, as food adventurers, to take a bite of each and decide which one they liked. I wasn’t asking them to like the chile Cobanero, I was only asking them to try the chile Cobanero … they were food adventurers, after all.

You’ve probably guessed by now that I wouldn’t be telling you this story if it didn’t have a (very) positive outcome. Not only did those kids polish off that plate with the chile powder, they then insisted I sprinkle it on the other plate … and on everything else they cooked themselves that afternoon.

As I hugged each kiddo farewell, I could smell the woodsmoke that infused hair and clothes and knew they were going home to a very different kitchen than the one we were standing in. Yet they were leaving with a new understanding of themselves and a wider view of what was possible; I’m not kidding when I say joy literally sparkled in their eyes.

The whole experience left me pondering how often we allow road blocks to remain in our lives–no matter what circumstances we’re living in–simply because we don’t give ourselves permission to be curious and humble … the two absolute essentials for “adventuring” into places yet unknown.

Let Your Food Make You Laugh

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Can we all agree that “fusilli” is a fun word to say? I know that may seem off-topic, but it’s not. Really.

I wrote last week about about the real meaning of comfort food in that food is so much more than just what we eat, and you all confirmed the notion big time with your answers to the State of the Kitchen Survey. Over three-quarters of you said you defined “being nourished” as “eating in a way that makes me feel healthy and energized.”

That ain’t no diet, folks. That’s a way of being. It’s a feeling that permeates beyond our physical cells into our souls.

So how does all that apply to Fusilli with Artichokes and Swiss Chard? Because one of the best ways to bring that healthy and energized spirit into your eating is to bring light and laughter into your kitchen. This dish not only has all the Nourishing components for your body–whole grain pasta, lots of leafy greens and seasonal goodies, a touch of goat cheese to amp up the creaminess factor–it’ll have fun with you if you let it.

Here’s an experiment.

1. Get everything ready to make this dish and take note of how you’re feeling–if you’re preoccupied about something at work, feeling rushed because of an evening activity, what have you.

2. Now look at your kid–or at yourself in the mirror–while holding a piece of dried pasta and say the word “fusilli” 10 times fast. Just try not to smile or laugh. I dare you.

3. Now … check in and see if your mindset has lightened or changed, and how that shift affects the rest of your dinner.

Did you notice a shift? Share your experience in a comment below.

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines: What’s ahead from the government?

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You may not turn to the government as your best source for nutrition advice, but the upcoming Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 will influence what you eat in one way or another. These are the “official” recommendations, and they’re updated every five years. They shape everything from food labeling to public food programs, including school lunches.

The USDA and Department of Health and Human Services, which issue the guidelines jointly, appointed an advisory committee of top researchers in fields of nutrition, medicine, and food safety and technology to evaluate the latest scientific evidence and submit their recommendations in June. Now the USDA and HHS are considering the committee’s proposals, along with public comments (from public-health advocates to food-commodity special interests), and will release the final guidelines later this year.

As with past Dietary Guidelines, this report’s recommendations are aimed at turning our nation’s tide of obesity. Too many Americans are overweight or obese yet “undernourished in several key nutrients,” the committee notes.

What struck me, as I culled through the 700-page report, was how familiar their suggestions are, in that many of their recommendations reflect NOURISH Evolution’s four pillars.

Sound Nutrition: A plant-based diet

Since they were first published in 1980, every version of the dietary guidelines has advised Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables. But the latest recommendations take it a step further, advocating a “total-diet approach” emphasizing plant foods: “Shift food intake patterns to a more plant-based diet that emphasizes vegetables, cooked dry beans and peas, fruits, whole grains, nuts and seeds.”

They also call for us to eat more seafood and fat-free and low-fat milk and milk products, while consuming lean meats, poultry and eggs in moderation.

It’ll be interesting to see how that recommendation is interpreted in the final 2010 guidelines released later this year. Lobbies, like the National Cattleman’s Beef Association and the National Chicken Council, exert tremendous influence on the USDA and may take a dim view of a government guideline for a plant-based diet.

Eco-Bites: Choose environmentally sustainable food

The committee also calls for increased “environmentally sustainable production of vegetables, fruits, and fiber-rich whole grains.”

However, it stops short of recommending organic agriculture as that sustainable solution, saying that the evidence is too limited to declare organically cultivated produce and grains nutritionally superior to conventional. They also conclude that conventional fare is safe, since it meets the Environmental Protection Agency’s standards. (On an encouraging note, however, the USDA appears to be boosting its support of organic and local farming.)

The report also recommends increasing sustainable aquaculture in order to meet the recommendation to eat two (4-ounce) servings of seafood per week. But it doesn’t delve into what constitutes responsible aquaculture, either from a health or environmental perspective. The genetically engineered salmon which is under consideration for approval by the FDA next week will prove an interesting in-the-trenches benchmark on how they’re really defining “sustainable” aquaculture.

While we’d like to see the recommended guidelines call for organic agriculture and responsible aquaculture in more specific terms, the fact that they even touch on these topics is remarkable.

Mindful Meals: Eat attentively

The committee acknowledges that there’s a huge disconnect between what experts, including the government, advise people to eat and what they really eat. “Americans must become mindful, or ‘conscious,’ eaters, that is, attentively choosing what and how much they eat,” the report notes.

We couldn’t agree more–if you don’t pay attention to what you eat, all the great nutrition advice in the world means nothing. But we’re curious how this will play out in the final guidelines, since mindful eating is an intangible, though crucial, part of the equation and the Dietary Guidelines tend to favor concrete advice.

Kitchen Tips: Learn to cook

It’s no surprise that the report scolds Americans for eating too much food away from home, noting that portion sizes have ballooned over the years as we eat out more often. Meals away from home are a big reason why an astonishing 35% of the American diet is now made up of solid (saturated) fats and added sugars–aka “SoFAS” in the report.

To remedy that, the proposed recommendations urge Americans to return to the kitchen to “improve nutrition literacy and cooking skills, including safe food handling skills, and empower and motivate the population, especially families with children, to prepare and consume healthy foods at home.”

They also call for nutrition, cooking and food safety to be incorporated into school curricula from preschool on.

We’re intrigued to see how this recommendation is interpreted in the final guidelines. Will they recommend a certain number of meals per week prepared from scratch at home? How do mindful eating and home cooking fit onto a pyramid? Or will they dispense with the Food Guide Pyramid–which was first introduced in 1995 and evolved into the confusing color-coded, personalized MyPyramid in 2005–in favor of a simpler, whole-food diet?

If they do latter, it will indeed look familiar … it would look a lot like the NOURISH Evolution approach.

Nourishing Hero: Paul Greenberg

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This is the first in our Nourishing Heroes series, in which we feature the individuals and organizations who inspire us. These heroes exemplify our philosophy that food should nourish body, soul and planet. They’re dedicated to bringing all of us fare that’s healthy, safe, sustainable and delicious. Do you know a Nourishing Hero we should feature on NOURISH Evolution? Let us know who inspires you!

All book signings–especially those about food–should be at restaurants. I think so, after meeting author Paul Greenberg when he came to Ammo in Los Angeles to promote his new book Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (The Penguin Press). It was an ideal setting for readers to meet him, have some books signed and dine on a special menu highlighting sustainably farmed seafood.

“There are a lot of people out there who are confused about fish, both wild and farmed,” Greenberg noted. “Fifty years ago, everything was wild. Now, about half of what we eat is farmed.”

He pointed to plunging numbers of Atlantic bluefin tuna and noted “Atlantic salmon are commercially extinct”–meaning the salmon still ply Atlantic waters, but not in large enough numbers to make them worth catching.

For Greenberg, an avid lifelong angler, it’s all about catching fish. But in 2000, while fishing in the waters off his native Connecticut, he discovered that the mackerel and codfish that were so plentiful in his youth had virtually vanished. He then set off on a sojourn, fishing from Maine to the Carolinas. Everywhere, the story was the same: Fish were smaller and fewer, and fishing seasons where shorter.  Greenberg also visited fish markets wherever he went, only to find that local, wild catch had given way to a nearly uniform selection of salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna–the four fish of his book’s title.

It’s no surprise that Greenberg, a frequent New York Times Magazine contributor and former W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow, wanted some answers. He embarked on a global odyssey to understand the story behind these fish. Along the way, he visited a native salmon fishery in Alaska and a sea bass farm in Greece. He went cod-fishing off New England and diving in Hawaii to observe an innovative tuna aquaculture operation. His book is filled with larger-than-life characters, both those who passionately advocate preserving wild fish and those who are just as committed to aquaculture.

Ultimately, Greenberg supports sustainably managed wild fisheries and environmentally sensitive fish farming. What’s needed, he contends, are global efforts to preserve wild fish (including reducing the world’s fishing fleets and protecting the bottom of the marine food chain). At the same time, responsible aquaculture must be developed to satisfy our growing appetite for seafood. That means choosing fish that don’t require lots of feed, don’t threaten the wild population and can thrive in aquaculture environments.

Our menu that night–oysters, mussels, clams, Arctic char and barramundi–was as a tasty example of what farmed fish could be, Greenberg observed. The bivalves filter their food from the water and “don’t require any feed whatsoever.”

Finfish like Arctic char and barramundi are “great for aquaculture because it mimics their wild setting,” Greenberg explained.

In the wild, Arctic char congregate in large numbers to spend their dormant winters in tundra lakes under a thick layer of ice. In their native Australia, barramundi gather in stagnant billabongs. Both types of fish are accustomed to high-density living, which makes them disease-resistant so they can thrive in ecologically sound recirculating tanks. As a bonus, they have relatively low feed requirements.

Interestingly, they’re also relatively new to many American diners. But as fish like these start turning up on restaurant menus and at supermarket seafood counters, we can begin to re-diversify our seafood palate beyond the big four.

In the meantime, Greenberg’s motto works for me: “Wild forever, farmed when necessary.”

Meet our other Nourishing Heroes:

Think of Food as Food

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Several years ago I was interviewing the highly-respected Greek nutrition scientist Dr. Antonia Trichopoulou. She had studied thousands of Greeks over a span of several decades in order to understand the nutritional effects of a Mediterranean diet (defined by an abundance of healthy oils, whole grains, vegetables and legumes) on long-term health. “So just how healthy is olive oil?” I asked, eager to codify the benefits of each food group for the article I was writing.

food as food“Olive oil is an essential part of what makes the Mediterranean diet healthy,” she answered. But as I scribbled notes and scanned studies, she continued on. “If we look at one nutrient at a time, though, we miss the way they interact. It’s a cocktail of everything that makes this type of diet so good.”

As I tried to deconstruct food into its building blocks, Dr. Trichopoulou kept bringing them back into context, talking about how tasty greens are when sautéed in olive oil with garlic and a squeeze of lemon, or how Greeks like to snack on simmered beans. “It’s much more effective to look at the health of your whole lifestyle rather than individual foods.”

That interview changed the way I thought of healthy eating. Yet amid the constant barrage of diet and nutrition advice here in America I sometimes find myself slipping back into that old reductive view of food. Avocados and olive oil cease to be really tasty things and instead turn into “good sources of monounsaturated fats” (with a tinge of guilt because, well, they’re fats). Tomatoes morph from luscious little orbs into things that are “packed with lycopene,” and whole grain bread goes from being a textural marvel to being “heart healthy.”

While it’s important to understand the impact that certain food groups and nutrients have on our bodies–and we have and will continue looking at them from several different angles on –what Dr. Trichopoulou taught me is that it’s even more important to carry that information back up to 35,000 feet and remember that, ultimately, if your plate is full of things that didn’t come out of a box or container it’s probably a healthy meal.

Most important of all, though, is to remember to think of food as food.

Healthy Made Convenient

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By Alison Ashton

After Hurricane Katrina rolled through the Gulf States five years ago, a friend headed to his family’s home in south Mississippi to clean up the damage. While he was there, the military came by, distributing MRE (meals ready to eat) like they were edible Mardi Gras beads. My friend accepted some and passed them along to his wife, who was my coworker. She brought them to work, where several of us gathered in the communal kitchen to sample some guv’ment fare. It was OK–and probably very welcomed by thousands of overwhelmed souls busy setting up house in FEMA trailers. When time and resources are tight, your definition of “good” broadens” considerably.

At NOURISH Evolution, we advocate cooking from scratch with fresh, whole, seasonal foods. But we also live in the real world, where long days can make getting healthy food on the table for dinner challenging. We’ve offered cook-ahead strategies to stock the freezer, shared speedy recipes that come together faster than ordering a pizza, and suggested equipment like pressure cookers that make quick work of cooking beans and grains.

Sometimes even those are a stretch, though, and it helps to have some of the work done for you. Lately, I’ve notice a wider range of steamed, shelf-stable, refrigerated or frozen legumes, grains, and vegetables that make healthy cooking convenient.

healthy-convenience-postLegumes. I’ve become a fan of vacuum-packed, steamed, ready-to-eat black-eyed peas, lentils, and various kinds of beans distributed nationwide by Melissa’s (I’ve also found refrigerated and shelf-stable varieties at Trader Joe’s). They typically have less sodium than their canned counterparts (rinsing canned beans washes away only about a third of the sodium) and much nicer texture. These steamed legumes are firm and hold their shape.

Whole grains. We’ve sung the praises of Village Harvest’s line of frozen, cooked grains, including quinoa, brown rice, and wild rice. These have terrific texture, and you can pour out what you need and put the rest back in the freezer. (I’ve used the quinoa to speed up preparation of Curry Quinoa Cakes.) Trader Joe’s also has its own label of frozen cooked grains, as well as shelf-stable versions.

Veggies. While I prefer using fresh beets with a big bouquet of greens still attached to make something like Mama Kourtesi’s Beet and Green Salad, there are hectic evenings when I appreciate the convenience of peeled and steamed baby beets that I can add to a salad or slice over pizza. Items like steamed, sliced carrots also are a fast way to add color–and nutrition–to salads and side dishes.

Products like these make it a lot faster to eat healthily on crazy days, but there are some caveats. You’ll pay a premium for the convenience. For instance, a 20-ounce bag of frozen cooked brown rice is $5, which would buy you a 32-ounce bag of uncooked rice (uncooked rice from the bulk bins costs even less). And while many of these items have little or no added salt, others may have more. If salt’s a concern, check the sodium tally on the Nutrition Facts label.

This Mississippi “Caviar” isn’t quite an MRE, but with the help of some ready-to-eat components, it’s close. And it tastes a heck of a lot better, trust me.

alison-thumbA longtime editor, writer, and recipe developer, Alison Ashton is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef and the Editorial Director for NOURISH Evolution. She has worked as a features editor for a national wire service and as senior food editor for a top food magazine. Her work has appeared in Cooking Light, Vegetarian Times, and Natural Health as well as on her blog, Eat Cheap, Eat Well, Eat Up.

Stretch Your Food Budget: Use Everything

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“Profits are measured in pennies,” one of my culinary school instructors often repeated to remind us of the importance of maximizing our use of ingredients. Smart chefs–those who want to stay in business–do this all the time and now, thanks to a stagnant economy, it’s a practice budget-conscious cooks are bringing home.

stretch-your-food-budgetHere are a few suggestions to help you make the most of what you already have for inexpensive, healthy meals.

Make stock. This is a prime example of stretching your investment, especially if you’re spending a bit more on organic, heritage food. You can make stock from almost anything–vegetables, bones, shrimp or lobster shells. Vegetable stock is the easiest; you can use the trimmings for anything from aromatics (onions, leeks, and the like) to tough mushroom stems (try those in our Mushroom Stock). Avoid cruciferous veggies or dark leafy greens, which impart bitter taste. To make different stocks, use our Most Versatile Chicken Stock recipe as a guideline and substitute the main ingredient. The biggest difference is how long you simmer the stock: 30-45 minutes for vegetable or fish stock, three to four hours for chicken, and six to eight hours for beef. Of course, you can use other varieties of poultry (turkey or duck, for example) or meat bones (lamb, perhaps), but these have distinctive flavors that make their stock a bit less versatile.

Think whole. Although the trimmings from fruits and vegetables are a fine addition to the compost heap or (in the case of veggies) stock, using the entire thing will add new flavors and textures to your cooking. Beets and beet greens are a good example. The sweet beets are delicious boiled, roasted or steamed, while the greens are a delightful quick-cooking alternative to spinach. Try Mama Kourtesi’s Beet and Green Salad and you’ll be sold on this concept. You can use fennel in a similar way, using the bulb, along with the pretty fronds as a garnish (save the stalk for stock).

Even animal products can be utilized this way. Poultry is one of the few items home cooks can buy whole, and it’s likely to come with giblets (heart, liver, gizzard, and neck), especially if you purchase heritage birds. Use these (except for the liver) to flavor stock, soup or gravy; the liver can go toward pate, like our Chicken Liver Pate. You can freeze the raw giblets for up to four months. Of course, you’ll want to save the carcass to make stock.

Smart leftovers. Thrifty cooks pride themselves on recycling leftovers in entirely new dishes. Day-old bread hanging around? Make it into breadcrumbs or, even better, bread pudding. Turn extra cooked rice into fried rice or rice fritters (try rice in place of quinoa in our Curry Quinoa Cakes).

Keep the fat. Home cooks tend to discard the fat rendered while cooking some dishes—like Revelationary Duck Confit. But that fat is full of flavor and worth saving (on the open market, duck fat will run you about a dollar an ounce). Use a tablespoon of duck fat in lieu of olive oil for a special spin on sautéed potatoes, or a touch of pork fat to crisp up leftover carnitas.

Those are just a few ways I’ve been making better use of ingredients lately. Now it’s your turn. What are your strategies? Share here.

Alison Ashton thumbnail

A longtime editor, writer, and recipe developer, Alison Ashton is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef and the Editorial Director for NOURISH Evolution. She has worked as a features editor for a national wire service and as senior food editor for a top food magazine. Her work has appeared in Cooking Light, Vegetarian Times, and Natural Health.


Distinguish Between Farmer and Food Producer

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As I was a writing a piece about food policy (nothing like trying to wrap-up agricultural policy in 500 words when the Farm Bill itself is 1,770 pages), a clear distinction stood out between a “farmer” and a “food producer.”

farmer vs. food producer

To me, and I think to many of us, “farmers” are those who work the land. They’re the ones who get dirt under their fingernails and whose eyes light up when conversation turns to compost. But while that may be the portrait for the people growing your food, it isn’t necessarily the portrait of the people who own America’s farmland or who are producing your food.

Let’s start out with some basics. First, nearly half of the country—over 1 billion acres—is farmland. Yet only 4% of the owners own nearly 50% of that farmland. And according to data from the USDA, there is a very high correlation between sales volume and how directly involved the owner/operators are with the actual land. Take, for instance, small-scale family farms (which make up 90% of the number of farms in the US). Their owners do 70% of the labor themselves. Bump up to a very large-scale family farm or a non-family farm and the number drops to only 19%.

This means that as farms grow into bigger and bigger businesses, the ones who own and operate them are more likely to be managers and marketers and accountants and less likely to be actual farmers. In other words, they move along the continuum from “farmer” to “food producer.”

This week, if you’re curious, Google the company behind the label on your produce or packages and see if you can find dirt under their fingernails.

 

Teach Our Children Well

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When I say I’m a food writer, people often impose a gourmet status onto me that’s just not so. Sure, I can whip up a stellar chichi meal, but nowadays that happens about twice a year. The rest of the time I still enjoy cooking, but it’s a simple affair. I’ve spent a good deal of my career, in fact, trying to bridge the perceptual chasm between how America defines “gourmet” (people who love food) and “normal” (people who think people who love food are “gourmet”).

teach-our-children-well{My daughter, Noemi, triumphant with the one and only bunch of carrots we reaped from our garden this year}

Which is why I’ve been so delighted to see Michelle Obama digging in the kitchen garden with middle-schoolers and teenagers rather than with Eric Ripert and Thomas Keller. The strategy Obama is using, says Jane Black in her recent Washington Post article, is to link “the personal to the political by gardening, cooking and eating with students.” Note that Obama isn’t trying to impart to the children that they, too, can become Top Chefs if they learn to cook. Nor that arugula is only for the elite. Exactly the opposite, in fact. As Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA, puts it in the article, Obama and her team are “normalizing something that should be normal.”

It may sound simplistic, but it’s working for Obama. By getting kids to interact with their food—shucking corn, cleaning lettuce—the first lady is transforming something that was loathesome (vegetables, blech!) into something cool. I’ve seen this scenario play out firsthand with our daughter, Noemi. People balk when they hear she loves figs, for instance, thinking we’re raising her to be a food snob. But it really has little to do with us. When she peeks under our tree’s broad leaves every day to see if any figs have ripened, how can she not adore them? To her, they’re not some exotic fruit, but a playmate in an ongoing game of hide and seek.

The principal is simple: when you engage food in its raw state it changes the way you think about it, whether you’re 3 or 30 or a 103.

I agree with Obama and her team that the earlier we get children interested in their food—how it grows, what it tastes like, how it makes them feel, how good it is to sit down and share a meal—the more likely they are to remain engaged throughout their lifetime. I also agree that the first step to dealing with all the complex issues surrounding food policy (which we’ll be addressing little by little here on ) is simply to care about the food we’re eating, not from the perspective of a gourmet chef, but the perspective of a human being.

Don’t miss, though, that by her very actions Michelle Obama is also sending a secondary message that bears voicing. Sure, children are our future . . . but we’re their role models today.

Practice Pleasure

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When I lived in Paris, I never saw a French woman sneak into a patisserie or assume a guilty hunch over their dessert. Yet it’s true that the French are a lighter lot than we Americans. Entire books have been written pondering this paradox, but today I want to focus on one key aspect: pleasure. The French know how to enjoy their food and this week, with the celebration of Bastille Day, is a great time for us to do so too.

Learning how to enjoy our food is about more than just happy thoughts. One initial study showed that tuning in to our food can lessen the likelihood of binge eating and reduce feelings of anxiety and depression. Another study of brain activity revealed that the anticipation of eating is what triggers a pleasure response in obese people, rather than the actual food itself. The message in both of these findings? When we learn to take pleasure from each and every bite, it will help us break harmful eating patterns and establish healthier ones.

Not sure how? Try these five steps:

Step 1: Recognize that no food is off-limits. Do you see French women skipping over fruit tarts in favor of something “lighter?” Low-fat Oreos probably aren’t going to bring you as much pleasure as a slice of chocolate cake will.

Step 2: Wait to eat until you’re hungry; wait to eat a treat until you really crave it.

Step 3: Eat slowly and pay attention with as many of your senses as you can while you gauge how much pleasure you’re getting from each bite.

Step 4: When you realize that the flavor has dulled or that you’re not really thinking about the food in front of you anymore but about a pile of clothes you need to take to the dry cleaners, or an e-mail you need to send, or what you’re going to make for tomorrow’s dinner, stop. Put your fork down and push the plate away.

Step 5: Notice how you feel and note how many bites you’ve actually taken–probably less than ten. There. You’ve proven to yourself that you can enjoy your favorite foods without feeling guilty or compromising your weight or health.

This week, practice these steps. Soon you’ll be oh-so-Francais by enjoying food . . . without overindulging.

Happy Quatorze Juillet!