This month, a lot of people weigh more than they did in the fall at their last appointment.  The problem is so widespread that, especially in people who are working to lose, I make it a point to applaud their efforts even if they have simply maintained their weight at the same number over the last few months. That’s because December is probably the single time of year in which people are most likely to eat large amounts of sugar and white flour. 

Some folks don’t want to know what they weigh, so we make an agreement.  I get the number, and I don’t tell them what it is.  I remind them that I don’t really care about the number itself; I’m just looking for changes, up or down, from the last visit.  I really care a lot more about how their pants fit.  Are they looser, tighter, or the same?  That’s a lot more important to me. 

Why is December such a problem?  It has to do mainly with the amount of desserts.  What happens when you eat a lot of sugar or starch?  You use a lot more insulin.  What happens when you use a lot more insulin? You store fat more efficiently, and you lose the ability to tell when you are full.  Then you increase your food intake accordingly. 

In my experience, when a person first begins to eat a diet that requires less insulin to metabolize, it takes about three days for their appetite to modulate.  When you eat a diet that requires a lot of insulin, those high insulin levels coat the satiety centers in your brain and make it very hard to tell that you are full.  When you make changes like those in my “Four Recommendations,” you use less insulin.  On the third day, when your body finally realizes that it doesn’t need all the insulin that it’s making, your pancreas “downregulates” insulin production.  That’s how long it takes your body to begin to respond to the fact that it doesn’t need as much insulin. 

Less insulin translates into less hunger. Three days after you start eating an “insulin-conserving” diet, you wake up noticeably less hungry than you used to be. 

I tell patients not to worry, that the number will take care of itself as they get back on track making smart choices.  And it does.  So it’s okay to celebrate the holidays.  It’s okay to have a piece of wedding cake.  Or birthday cake.  It’s probably okay to have a slice of pie every weekend.  But you can’t have it every day.  Our insulin levels will manage fine if we ask them to spike only once in a while.  The problem comes when we eat foods that make them spike every day.  Because when your insulin levels are rising every day, they are no longer spiking.  Now they are just high. 

That’s why I say that what happens in December stays in December.  It’s not what we do once in a while that makes trouble for us.  It’s what we do all the time.  You can’t live in December and expect to remain healthy.  But you can visit it from time to time.

Last week I spent an hour watching Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of California at San Francisco, deliver a lecture on the role that sugar, particularly fructose, is playing in our obesity epidemic.  The lecture included a section on cholesterol.  The first thing I’m going to say about cholesterol is that we don’t understand it well enough.  And what we think we know, we don’t know, because what we don’t understand fills a much bigger vessel than what we do understand.

On my first day of medical school in the early 1990’s, the Dean of Students came in to address us.  He said that half of what we would learn over the next few years would turn out to be false.  The problem was that no one knew which half!  Here are some of the things I was taught in medical school that have turned out to be false:

            LDL cholesterol is the bad cholesterol.

            Eggs and butter increase your bad cholesterol.

            There is no reliable way to increase your good cholesterol (HDL).

            We don’t really know how triglycerides fit in, but they don’t seem to really matter anyway.

Let’s discuss these false statements one at a time.

LDL comes in two major types, 1) small and dense or 2) big and fluffy.  Small, dense LDL is the bad one.  Large, fluffy LDL is ok.  Small, dense LDL is highly atherogenic (causing plaque formation, atherosclerosis, heart disease).  It’s like sand.  It gets stuck everywhere and starts plaque formation.  It reminds me of the grain of sand that irritates an oyster, which responds by coating that sand particle with layers of nacre, the shiny, luminescent stuff that results in pearls.  Humans don’t get pearls.  We get heart attacks and strokes.

Then there are the big, fluffy LDL particles that float through the blood stream without attaching to the walls of the blood vessels.  While it’s true that eggs and butter raise your cholesterol, it’s not true that they increase your bad cholesterol.  Eggs and butter increase the big, fluffy LDL.  That’s good.  If you want to know what kind of LDL you have, you can ask your doctor to run a VAP panel instead of a standard lipid profile.  The VAP panel will show how much of your LDL is small and dense, and how much is large and fluffy.

HDL cholesterol is called the good cholesterol.  H for healthy.  The lower your HDL, the greater your risk of developing hardening of the arteries.  There are a number of important research studies that show low HDL to be a much more serious risk factor than high LDL (just the small, dense kind as you now know).  There are a number of reliable ways to increase your HDL.  All of them have one thing in common.  They improve your insulin sensitivity, so it works more efficiently and you end up needing and using less insulin.  I see very low HDL levels in several kinds of patients. They are usually people whose diets consist of large amounts of 1) fast food, 2) processed food, and/or 3) refined [stripped] grains, with very little produce.

How can you raise your HDL?  By decreasing the amount of fast and processed food you eat.  By getting more exercise (to improve your insulin sensitivity).  By eating foods that are rich in B vitamins.  B vitamins are found in abundance in whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and nutritional yeast.

What are triglycerides?  If HDL is the good cholesterol, and small, dense LDL is the bad cholesterol, then triglycerides are the ugly cholesterol.  The goal from a medical standpoint is to get the triglycerides below 150, but the truth is that the lower they are, the better.  Triglycerides are the chemical compound form in which we store fat.  Triglycerides look like a capital letter “E.”  They consist of a single vertical sugar backbone (the glycerol) with three horizontal tails (the fatty acids). The more starch you eat, the more glycerol molecules you make.  The more glycerol molecules you make, the more triglyceride you can create.  You cannot make triglyceride without glycerol, and glycerol comes straight from the sugar and starch that you eat.

Remember that the more sugar we eat, the more insulin we need to catch it.  The more insulin floating in our blood stream, the more triglycerides we make.  So high triglycerides are associated with a hyperinsulinemic state.  The higher the insulin levels, the higher the triglycerides.  I see high triglycerides in several kinds of patients.  They are generally people whose diets contain large amounts of 1) sweets and starches, 2) fast food, and/or 3) alcohol.  I can predict with a fair degree of accuracy whether a patient has an elevated triglyceride level by taking a quick glance at their waistline.  Remember that the high insulin state tends to cause fat deposition in the abdomen.  Another name for this condition is a “beer belly.”  Now you know why.  Beer is made from grain.  A great many people noticed the connection long before me.

Now, low HDL is bad, and high triglycerides are ugly, but the combination of low HDL and high triglycerides is downright scary.  This combination is highly associated with hyperinsulinemia and arteriosclerosis, hardening of the arteries.  Any time I see a patient with the combination of low HDL and high triglycerides, I send them for a glucose tolerance test.  I am not waiting around for them to develop the symptoms of diabetes.  I already know they are at very high risk. If there’s a problem, I want to know about it now.  They deserve to know what’s wrong, and they certainly deserve a chance to fix it before it becomes a much bigger problem than it already is.

I also know that the metabolic picture showing a combination of low HDL and high triglycerides is strongly associated with the small, dense LDL pattern.  These are not coincidental combinations.  They are a predictable consequence of eating refined, processed, fast foods.  And that means they are not so hard to fix.  So I’m not looking at each measurement in the lipid profile as an individual entity.  I’m looking at the overall pattern. And I’m not looking at the numbers as an end in themselves.  I am looking at the person who carries those numbers.

If you would like to learn more about cholesterol, sugar, and triglycerides, you can access Dr. Lustig’s first in a series of lectures at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM.  This is a complex topic, and it raises a great many more questions than it answers. So please feel free to post your questions, and give me the opportunity to try to answer them.  Do not worry that your questions are simple.  I can guarantee you that many people are wondering the same thing.  I may even have attended medical school with some of them.

This year I decided that it was time, once and for all, for me to learn to knit.  I took some knitting books out of the library and began to page through. One of the books said you should make your projects with the best yarn you can afford; the results will be better, and you’ll be more pleased with the finished product.  I liked that.  It’s exactly what I say about food. 

When you cook, the results are only going to be as good as the raw materials.  If you start with the best ingredients, even simple recipes are likely to be extraordinarily delicious and satisfying.  Buying the best you can afford is one way of being good to yourself.

Cook slowly.  Don’t hurry.  Use high-quality ingredients.  This past Friday afternoon, I measured 1 heaping cup of dry white navy beans into a deep casserole dish.  I added 1 large onion (chopped), 4 carrots (sliced in small rounds), 3 tablespoons of my son’s favorite hot sauce, 2 tablespoons of brown sugar, and 1 teaspoon of salt.  That’s all.  Then I added about 4 cups of water, enough to cover the beans and other ingredients by two or three inches.  I covered the bean pot, put it into a 250 degree oven, and turned it down to 200 degrees before I went to bed.  When we woke up Saturday morning, the aroma was amazing.  I lifted the lid to check, and saw that the top was drying out a little.  So I added more water, just enough to cover the beans, and then cooked them for a few more hours.  Their rich, nourishing, and satisfying flavor added a lot to our otherwise simple lunch.  There is something so unbelievably good about slow cooking.

It does not take more time to eat well, but it does take more planning.  This dish took 10 minutes to prepare, and 2 minutes to check while it cooked.  I had to prepare it 18 hours before serving it.  I had to remember to buy navy beans at the grocery store.  But I bought enough to make it twice.  Next time I think I’ll add a can of tomato sauce, and see how that turns out. 

Eating well is all about being kind to yourself, and that’s especially important to remember at this time of year.  Around the holidays, when expectations and stress levels go straight up, it’s even more important to make time for yourself.  Ask yourself what gives you joy?  How can you be kinder to yourself?  What do you love to do most?  What do you love to do, but only get around to doing rarely, when you’re on top of your game?  It’s different for everyone, but those are the things you must do.  Consider it a holiday gift to yourself.

A friend recently told me that she was stressed out about my four recommendations.  She knew that she had some pretty lousy eating habits, but she felt unable to deal with them all at the same time.  So I told her not to try to tackle all four recommendations all at once.  Just pick one.  Want my opinion?  In my opinion, the most important recommendation of all is the first.  Do your very best to eat a high protein breakfast. What’s the hardest part of eating a high-protein breakfast?  Believe it or not, it isn’t eating breakfast.  It’s remembering to buy what you need at the grocery store.  The hardest part of eating a high-protein breakfast is being prepared, so you have what you need when you need it. 

Which recommendation is next most important?  That depends on you.  If you look down the list of recommendations, which one jumps out?  Do you drink juice every morning?  Do you drink a can of soda/pop at lunch every day?  Or a liter or two of soda/pop every day (that’s what I would call a serious soda habit)?  How much margarine and coffee whitener are in your refrigerator?  Is your kitchen filled with all kinds of low-fat products?  You’ll know which recommendation is next most important.  It will be the next one that speaks to you. 

Now what?  Now be kind to yourself.  Don’t stop drinking soda.  Just stop drinking it for breakfast.  Or set a daily limit of one liter instead of two, or two cans instead of six.  Be honest with yourself about what you can manage. Then try. 

As you use up the “candy-cereals” in your house, slowly replace them with whole grains.  Spend an hour making a bucket of homemade trail mix, and dividing it up into individual servings using small plastic bags.  Store them, along with the leftover, unused nuts and seeds, in the refrigerator or freezer in glass jars to increase their shelf life.  When you use up the poptarts and cereal bars, now you’ll have some wonderful trail mix to eat instead.  Remember to buy the best quality nuts, seeds and dried fruit you can afford.  Hearty appetite!

Happy holidays, and best wishes to all of you for a happy and healthy new year. 

Dear Readers:

I’m getting all kinds of questions and comments from a variety of places these days.  Some people comment directly to the blog, but others write to LinkedIn, Facebook, or drsukol@teachmed.com.  Some are letters of encouragement, whereas others are better described as letters of discouragement, like the one from the British gentleman who dreads coming to the U.S. on business because he can’t find a decent meal made with real food.  Any takers for that?

I have collected a few of these letters for you — maybe you’ve had some of the same questions or thoughts. 

Happy Holidays!

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Dear Dr Sukol,

“Thank you for your reply. I have now read, with interest, all the posts on your website. I posted comments on a couple of them and also used the calorie counter website to look at the carbohydrate content of plain oats.

As I said in one of the comments, my doctor has advised me that I am borderline diabetic and need to take action, so I am looking for new ideas and will implement various changes. I downloaded your “4 Recommendations,” which is excellent, and will keep checking back for more useful tips.

Thank you for highlighting this information.”
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Dear Dr. Sukol,

“Thank you for your post on “Butter is Better.”  I am obese, having hit my all-time high of 287 pounds in September.  I had put on 22 pounds just in the first nine months of this year.  I have tried all sorts of diets: cabbage soup, Hay diet, Atkins, low-carb and numerous others, but none seemed to provide a lasting solution.

Nevertheless, I always disliked processed food and avoid junk food: I prefer to prepare from fresh ingredients, including plenty of fruit and vegetables, but the problem was always that I simply ate too much.  I still believe that butter is better and that so-called “healthy foods” merit closer inspection and a degree of skepticism.

I have lost the 22 pounds I gained earlier in the year, just in the past two months, by changing what I eat: grapefruit or pomelo for breakfast and lunch, with a small portion of meat and two veg for dinner.  Eggs for breakfast is one of my favourites, but I have cut it out, thinking that it would make me hungry and slow down my weight loss.  Maybe it’s time to re-think that idea?”

My reply?  Yes, definitely.

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“I have to say that the one thing I would dread most about living in the US is the food.  On my frequent visits there,  I am amazed just how unhealthy some of it is.  Even simple foods like bread are sweetened and it must be very difficult to avoid fatty, sugary,unhealthy foods.  In our office I see people drinking huge cups of Coca-Cola (or Pepsi/whatever brand) – literally more than a pint of it in one serving.  It is not surprising that the US has a major problem with obesity and no doubt us Brits are following your lead.  By P-, United Kingdom www.linkedin.com=”” miniprofile?vieweeid=”35450468&context=anet&view””>

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“Yes – I must say that the U.S. just loves processed food in all shapes and sizes. We’re a big society of convenience and laziness! There’s a lot to be said about making something with all natural ingredients not coming from a box. I’m no health nut, but within the last year I’ve given up all table sugar and soda (even diet soda) and it’s made a difference in how I feel in general.”

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Here is my response to someone asking for information about a link between diabetes and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS):

Dear P-,
There is actually quite a lot of evidence demonstrating a link between diabetes and the consumption of HFCS. Here’s an article from Diabetes Health, a reputable journal that publishes especially for informed diabetic patients. http://www.diabeteshealth.com/read/2009/03/10/6113/link-seen-between-high-fructose-corn-syrup-consumption-and-insulin-resistance/

And his response–

“I appreciate the feedback. I understand this subject is quite touchy, especially if commented on by folks with links to the processed food or corn growing industry, which can both be biased. It is nice to have impartial 3rd sources!”
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Dr.Sukol-

I was interested in this product called Chia Seeds. What’s your take on this product and if recommended, how would you use it?

E- S-

Dear E.S.,

I did some checking and learned that chia is an edible seed that is extremely rich in fiber and omega 3 fatty acids.  A native plant of southern Mexico, it is becoming more well known globally. Seeds are available online and in health food stores.  I have never eaten it, but my daughter has, and she was delighted by your question.

If you have ever eaten flax seed, chia has a number of similarities.  It has a nutlike flavor, and can be sprinkled (ground or whole) in yogurt, cereal or salads; eaten plain as a snack; or ground and mixed with flour when making muffins or other baked goods.  It would also make a great addition to homemade trail mix with dried fruit and nuts.

Chia can be stored for very long periods because it is so rich in antioxidants and, unlike flax, it does not need to be ground to make its nutrients available to the body. 

I think I’ll buy some and try it next time I’m at the health food store…

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Last summer we built a chicken coop, and this summer it became home to a few Hamburg chickens and Golden Buffs.  Hamburgs are known for their distinctive, dramatic, black-and-white pattern.  They weigh approximately 5 pounds each, and produce a breathtaking, ivory-colored egg.  Ours are 2 years old, and were delivered to Cleveland this past May from their previous home on my parents’ New Jersey farm.  The Golden Buffs, from a nearby farm in Middlefield, Ohio, are somewhat larger.  They lay a lovely brown egg.  At least that’s what I’ve read.  Just 6 months old, they are still pullets, so we are awaiting their first eggs any day now.

Every morning we go out to greet the girls with the previous day’s scraps from our kitchen bin.  “Feed the birds, tuppence a bag…”  In the summer, the girls raced to pick out strawberry tops first, followed by the soft, seeded centers from the cantaloupes.  Now they are gobbling up all the apple cores, leftover bits of bread crust, and greens.  Then they spend the rest of the day working on the banana peels, radish tops, and squash skins.  Not to mention the grass, bugs and worms.  I toss a handful of crushed oyster shell into one corner of the coop, add some fresh straw all around, and sprinkle some scratch corn for good measure.  They recognize me now, and no longer run for cover as I cross the grass toward the coop.  On the contrary, the bravest among them flap their wings madly and make a jump for the coffee can full of chicken feed that I carry in my hands. 

The girls have recognizably different personalities, and use them to great comic effect.  Dora is our most fearless hen.  She has a necklace of white feathers.  She and Nora complained very loudly to me one morning last week after having inadvertently spent the entire night outdoors in a rainstorm.  They reminded me of disgruntled tourists, soaked through to the skin.  I recently heard a story about a hen who used to take new visitors to see her coop, and pecked at the shoes of those who interrupted her during the tour.

No, they are not being raised for meat.  And no, you don’t need a rooster to get eggs.  You only need a rooster if you want fertilized eggs.  Which we don’t.  In contrast to quiet hens, roosters are very noisy and don’t make for friendly, neighborly relations.

So why am I raising chickens?  For the eggs!  One day late last spring, my daughter and I came back from the Chagrin Falls Farmers Market with a bunch of asparagus that had been picked only hours before.  I found a recipe for Hollandaise sauce, which I had never made before, and whisked together 3 separated egg yolks with 2 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice and 2 tablespoons of water.  [Fry the whites separately and feed them to the first lucky person who enters the kitchen. Or the dog.]  Then I placed the mixture in a double boiler and continued to whisk until the contents turned a smooth, glassy yellow.  It took a little bit more water than the recipe indicated, which made me wonder if our homegrown egg yolks are extra-dense.  I removed the double boiler from the heat and slowly added ½ cup melted butter, a little at a time, continuing to whisk gently, until all the butter was incorporated.  I added salt (1/2 t.) and pepper (1/4 t.), poured half the sauce over the steamed asparagus and shared it around.  Three of us ate it for lunch, and and our taste buds and bellies remained satisfied all afternoon until dinner.  We finished the rest of the hollandaise sauce the next morning on scrambled eggs. Liquid sunshine.

My dad has a very hard time with the fact that most national brands of of ketchup list high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as the first or second ingredient.  He is on a mission to get people to eat less HFCS without compromising their love for ketchup.  Recently, he asked if I would post an entry about this.  Here it is, Dad!

You can avoid HFCS by buying the costly organic ketchups, which are made with sugar.  But it doesn’t seem practical to recommend them with so many budgets being strained nowadays.  So I’ve decided to teach people how to make their own ketchup instead.  I hope that doesn’t make you groan.  I maintain that it does not take more time to eat healthy, but it does take more planning.  Here’s your first chance to see it in action by trying one or both of these two delicious recipes:

The first, called “Excellent Homemade Ketchup,” can be found at Hillbilly Housewife .  The website says this recipe contains 60 cents worth of ingredients.  Mix a 6-oz. can of tomato paste with 1/3 cup water, 2 tablespoons vinegar, ¼ teaspoon dry mustard, ¼ teaspoon cinnamon, ¼ teaspoon salt, 1 pinch cloves, 1 pinch allspice, 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper,and 1/3 cup brown sugar.  Transfer to a container and let cool.  Cover tightly and refrigerate, and use within 3 weeks. 

The second recipe comes from http://kissmyspatula.com/2009/05/31/homemade-ketchup/.   It uses whole tomatoes, a slightly different selection of spices, and a little more time and attention. Wrap 1 bay leaf, 1 stick cinnamon, ¼ teaspoon celery seeds, ¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes, and ¼ teaspoon whole allspice in a cheesecloth bundle(*).  Place bundle in a 4-quart saucepan with 2 pounds roughly chopped tomatoes, 1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt, ½ cup vinegar, 5 tablespoons brown sugar, 1 medium chopped onion, 1 smashed garlic clove, and 1 chopped anaheim chile.  Cook on medium high for 40 minutes, stirring frequently, until the onion and chile are very soft.  Then remove the spice bundle and purée the sauce in a blender until smooth. Strain the sauce through a mesh strainer and return to the saucepan.  Stir occasionally over medium heat until thickened, about 30 minutes. Add more salt, sugar, or vinegar to taste.  Transfer to a container and let cool.  Cover tightly and refrigerate, and use within 3 weeks.  (*)A cheesecloth bundle is just what it sounds like–spices folded up into a square of cheesecloth, and then knotted or tied up with string.

My dad also said to tell people to try mustard or vinegar on their french fries instead of ketchup.  I agree with him.  Golden mustard on french fries is truly delicious, but I will need to remind him that it would also be smart to cut down on the fries.  By the way, jars full of these ketchup recipes, wrapped with a bit of fabric and tied with a ribbon, make a delicious and appreciated gift for hosts and friends.  Attach a note to refrigerate the ketchup and use it within 3 weeks.

Also, as long as you are buying cheesecloth and spices, here is another idea for a homemade gift:  To make sachets of spices for mulling wine or cider, fill squares of cheesecloth with a 1/2-inch cinnamon stick, 1 star anise, 2 cardamom pods, 4 black peppercorns and 1/4 teaspoon of whole cloves.  Tie each sachet with kitchen twine and package in a clear jar or decorative box.  Drop one into 1-2 quarts of warming cider or red wine at least 1/2 hour before serving.  Hearty appetite!

Next week:  Scoop at the Coop, the ongoing adventures of raising nine hens in suburban Cleveland, Ohio…

Last year I read Fat, a celebration of flavor (a cookbook) written by Jennifer McLagan.  A few days later, I tried the sage butter sauce recipe with pasta:  Fry 30 fresh, whole sage leaves in ½ lb. butter on medium heat for about 10 minutes, just until the butter begins to brown and the leaves turn crispy.  Meanwhile, boil ­­­3/4 pound of pasta (I used fettucini) in salted water and drain when done.  Pour the sauce over the cooked, hot pasta and serve with a simple green salad and some fruit.  I added steamed beet greens to the pasta as well.  Dinner was heavenly.  The sage turned from a tangy, sharp, fuzzy herb into something much softer around the edges.  Its gentle, flavorful crunch, next to the chewy, slippery pasta, was unbelievably satisfying, and we ate nothing more that evening — no popcorn, no chocolate, no ice cream.   

One-half pound of butter?!  Absolutely, I tell my patients.  Fat is your friend.  Because we have been indoctrinated with the opposite message, I usually have to say it a few more times.  Fat is your friend.  One hundred years ago, before we had medications for diabetes, the ONLY treatment for diabetes was a high-fat diet.  Fat is dense with nutrients, vitamins, and, most of all, flavor.  Even a small portion is extraordinarily satisfying.  The low-fat, no-fat message is part of America’s diabetes and obesity problem.  We need fat, and we’ll get it wherever we can if we don’t get it where we ought to.  The “French paradox,” the observation that the French remain slender despite the large quantities of butter and cream in their diet, is only a paradox if you believe that fat is not your friend.  There is no paradox.  Fat is your friend.  Good fat, that is.

You already have a frame of reference for such a thing as good fats.  You have probably heard about the good fat in olive oil, dark chocolate, nuts, and fish.  Maybe avocados, too.  What do these fats have in common?  How is one to tell the difference between good fat and bad fat?  It’s easy — good fat is found in nature.  Good fats were here before us.  Butterfat is one of my favorites, and it’s a particularly nutritious food as well, in part because it contains an unusually diverse collection of fatty acids.  These fatty acids serve as building blocks for the ceaseless repairing and remodeling that happen inside us all our lives. 

Any way you slice it, margarine is not butter.  Most margarines are made from hydrogenated soybean oil.  The word margarine is related to the hebrew word for pearl, margalit.  Margarine comes out of the machine colored pearly gray.  My mother, born in 1936, remembers when “oleo” was sold with a tiny bead of red food coloring that she and her grandmother kneaded into the gray, waxy material to turn it a more palatable yellow color that was meant to resemble butter.  In those days, the dairy lobby was more powerful than the soybean lobby.  Now it’s the reverse.

Synthetic fat products like margarine, Crisco, hydrogenated fat, coffee whiteners, and refined oils are found not in nature but in machines.  They are food-like, but they are not food.  We may put them in our mouths, but they do not sustain us.  One way to identify products that are not really foods is by their names.  Instead of being called by names our great-ancestors would have recognized (like butter, broccoli, or peanuts), they have fanciful names with healthful, pseudo-scientific, old-fashioned, or playful connotations that are meant to evoke all kinds of feelings including, but not limited to, hunger.  Margarines constitute one category of products with these creative names.  Smart Balance (seesaw), Blue Bonnet (granny), Promise (not), Country Crock (pickles), Benecol (bene=good, col=cholesterol), and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (why not? we just told you) are not foods.  Your great-grandma would have told you the same.

It’s time to say a great big T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U! to all my readers.  This week, just 2 months after going on line, we logged our 1000th visit!  I truly appreciate your interest and feedback, and I’m very busy preparing essays to address your comments and questions.  Byron and Steve have asked for more ideas on what to eat and what to avoid for breakfast.  Lisa C has sent a request for information about the salt and sodium content in foods. 

What do you need to know? Just ask.  Post your comment and I’ll get back to you.  I also have stories to share about my plans for preparing the produce and other groceries that arrive in my kitchen every week.  Today I’m going to take a pause from talking about processed food and what not to eat, to talk about what to eat, and to share what I’ve learned about squash and pumpkins.

This past year I learned a lot of new things about food. I learned it would be a shame to waste the root of a parsley plant when it adds so much flavor to a pot of soup. I learned the hard way that it works like a bay leaf, which is to say that it needs to be removed before you serve the soup.  I learned to stir fry the leafy tops of beets, parsnips, and turnips with garlic and olive oil instead of tossing them into the compost.  And I learned that butternut squash has the longest storage life of any squash.  So there is no need to despair over the large number that have collected on my kitchen counter in recent weeks.  It turns out that’s exactly where they belong now. 

Squash and pumpkins need to “cure” (or harden) for a couple of weeks so that they keep better after being transferred to a cool place, like my perennially chilly laundry room.  In the wintertime, that’s the coldest spot inside my house, but other places, like entryways, unheated spare rooms, or attics, work equally well, not to mention sheds, porches, and a corner of the garage.  Root vegetables are extremely tolerant, so you can experiment and see what works best.  Unlike potatoes, carrots, turnips, cabbages, leeks, endive, and brussels sprouts, which store best at 30-40 F, squash and onions don’t really need serious cold storage. They can just be kept in any cool spot in the house. 

We’re all experts at cold food storage.  We call it “refrigeration.”  If you have the space, you can store all your pumpkins and squash in a refrigerator. But mine isn’t big enough to store all the produce I’ve carried home lately, so I’m spending the end of this year’s growing season learning about storage.  Here’s what I’ve learned: 

                  1) Never wash vegetables being readied for storage because it significantly shortens storage life.  So just brush off the excess dirt.

                  2) When you store produce in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, suck out as much air as possible from the bag before you close it. 

                  3) If the outer leaves of a cabbage in a plastic bag turn soft and gray, strip them off to find perfect leaves inside. 

                  4) If a white substance appears on carrots, peel it off. As long as the carrots are bright   orange underneath, they will be delicious.  Many root vegetables actually gain sweetness when stored, as starches convert to sugar. Just don’t let them freeze completely. 

A while ago I moved all the potatoes, white and sweet, to a dark place in a kitchen cabinet.  The dark prevents sprouting, and it also protects the skin of organic white potatoes from developing the green color that signifies the presence of a toxin.  I have noticed that the potatoes really do keep better in the dark.  One of these days, I’ll find a cabinet for the onions and garlic, too.

This week I thought I’d also include a recipe for a really fabulous Cream of Broccoli Soup.  This recipe is inspired by Julia Child and her Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which I’ve been reading this week.  The use of heavy cream to enrich the soup (and to offset the bite of the spicy jalapeno) reminds me of her.  Toss into a large soup pot with 2 tablespoons of very hot olive oil: 1 broccoli, 1/2 cauliflower, 1/2 jalapeno pepper (with seeds if you like the heat), 1 medium onion peeled, 3 garlic cloves peeled, and 1 apple (cored but not peeled).  Cut the large veggies into more manageable chunks first.  Fry for a few minutes until everything gets a slightly brown outer coloring.  Add 4 cups water or stock, and cook on medium for 40 minutes until everything is soft.  Add 1 teaspoon of salt.  Now scoop out the soft veggies into a conventional blender and spin until smooth before returning them to the liquid, or use an immersion blender right in the pot.  Stop here if you aren’t going to eat the soup right away.  When ready to eat, heat the soup almost but not quite to boiling, then gently stir 1/2 c. cream into the soup until it is incorporated.  Serve immediately with grated parmesan cheese to taste.  Truly sublime.