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Engaging stories of love, joy, comfort and friendship with proven scrumptious, healthy recipes, we celebrate LOVE as the secret ingredient for wonderful food!

Our Fat America and a Festive Balsamic Chicory Salad with Pomegranate Seeds, Parmesan and Toasted Walnuts

November 24, 2015 by Mary 7 Comments

Okay so here goes. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, since after all, this is a food and recipe blog. And, we are entering the heavy eating holiday season now. Two thirds of Americans are either obese or overweight. Two-thirds!!! That’s a very scary statistic. 

And then we have the current mantra running through society to be confident of who you are and celebrate your body no matter what shape it’s in. (think Dove commercials)

Well I think the pendulum has swung a bit too far. While certainly girls should not be starving themselves, trying to emulate high fashion models, many of whom are just naturally thin. Body shapes are what we are born with. For instance, no matter how much weight I would lose, I would still have big hips. But when people think it’s ok to be unhealthily overweight, we’ve got a problem.

And I was raised with five older brothers who told me that I was fat, ugly and would never have a date for the senior prom if I ate that Ding Dong Mom put in my lunch bag. They also told me that pregnant women had no doubt swallowed a watermelon seed so I had better be careful eating that stuff.

I think it’s amazing that our creator made us to be expandable, don’t you?

I mean, there’s no limit as to how much your cells will expand. The creator did not make us so that at some point of fatness, we’d just pop. Oh no, we can keep on eating. We have the choice, he left it up to us.

And another thing I find interesting is the way people dress today. It’s all visible with the stretch work-out clothes everyone wears at all hours of the day. I remember when I was growing up, really overweight people dressed to try to hide the excess. Remember mumu’s for women? Usually in a medium sized floral print. Sweet.

So with the interest in all food and the foodie/eating craze happening all over the country, we have the rise in popularity of food and cooking shows. This is great in terms of making it easily accessible to everyone as to “how to” cook and make various dishes. However, the most popular shows are featuring super fatty foods – dishes that have sausage meat with no draining of the fat, the popularity of pork belly, fried foods, heavy, rich desserts. This is what we’re telling people to eat!

I have had conversations with a Food Network producer and she said that putting healthy foods on shows or as recipes in their magazine just doesn’t sell.

But they are telling people the wrong thing!

This is one reason why I started this blog. To inspire people to cook at home and spread the word on how to make great tasting, clean and lean dishes that you and your family will love – and then you’ll feel great!!

A friend of mine from college days at Parsons, sent me this article on The Future of Medicine is Food. Hooray that the Tulane University School of Medicine is teaching their medical students the importance of your diet with regards to your health in disease prevention and cures. Finally!!

They said, “They expect to see a sea change to take place in the way doctors treat chronic illness—and the way insurance charges for it describing a future where doctors write recipes as prescriptions and insurance companies treat food as a reimbursable expense. (There is, of course, a strong economic argument in favor of a prevention-based approach to health.) They predict that care plans will eventually include menu planning, recipes and maybe even programming to get the ingredients delivered to patients.”

 Wouldn’t that be awesome?

 This is what we are trying to do with MARY’s secret ingredients, by providing new products to inspire your home cooking along with recipes on how to use them.

How many overweight or obese individuals suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels depression and lack of energy? If they would only lose weight, most likely all of it would go away. The lack of energy and depression creates a big vicious cycle.

Currently, many of them are eating fast food and/or heavily processed food, which makes you feel awful afterwards and tired. So then they eat more, thinking it will give them energy but the opposite continues to happen and they just continue on and on and then those subway steps get harder and harder to climb so you may as well eat some more and forget it, right?

Even eating out in better or fine restaurants all the time can take its toll. The restaurant’s job is to make you love the food. Adding in butter to finish a sauce is typical. And yes, it sure tastes great! The extra bread, butter and olive oil are surely all delicious but it all adds up. I really don’t like to eat out a lot. I want to know what I’m eating!

And then don’t get me started about the huge plates and portion sizes at restaurants like Chili’s or TGI Fridays. How did that happen? We had to go to one of those once, when no other restaurant was open after a funeral in Baltimore and honestly my meal was 3 meals! Their customers eat that whole plate plus start with a huge appetizer, most likely containing fried foods, bacon and/or chips.

Here’s a funny sidebar. At our home in the country, our kitchen appliances are very old, yet they all work great so I am not getting rid of them. Our fancy new ones in the city have all needed several repairs or had to be replaced within a span of just 8 years. Don’t buy Jenn-Air.

I digress but because our dishwasher is old, it would only hold plates that were 12” in diameter of less. Do you have any idea how long we searched stores to find smaller dinner plates that would fit in our dishwasher? A long time.

We are killing ourselves, not to mention ruining our environment with the demands of eating way too much meat. That’s a whole other article, discussing the impact our diets place on the environment and how we are creating the whole greenhouse effect with the number of cows we have on this earth.

So on that note, thank you for listening if you’ve read this far.

Chicory salad with pomegranate seeds -serving it up.Now let me turn you on to a delicious chicory salad. I’ve added pomegranate seeds to the original recipe adding beautiful color. I love the jewel-like quality these little seeds add and they make the salad appropriately festive for the holiday season!

TIP: The best way to remove pomegranate seeds is to cut the fruit in quarters or eighths if it is particularly large and then submerge it in a bowl of water. Then underwater, bend back the two points of your wedge and pull the seeds out. The membrane pieces will float to the top, making it easy for you to discard before straining the entire bowl. Doing this underwater prevents the luscious red juice from splashing all over you and staining your clothes.

Chicory salad with pomegranate seeds.

BALSAMIC CHICORY SALAD WITH POMEGRANITE SEEDS, PARMESAN AND TAOSTED WALNUTS – serves 3 – 4

1/8 cup honey
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup of toasted walnuts, coarsely chopped
1 medium or ½ large head of chicory, washed, spun dry and cut into 1½” pieces
1 shallot, very thinly sliced
½  tbs. grainy mustard
½  cup extra-virgin olive oil
Parmesan cheese shavings, for garnish
¾ cup pomegranate seeds

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Place walnuts in a baking dish and toast for 7 – 8 minutes. When you can just begin to smell them, remove from the oven and let cool on a cutting board. Coarsely chop and set aside.

Combine honey and balsamic vinegar together over medium-high heat in a small sauce pan, about 5 minutes, stirring constantly with a whisk. Do not let it boil. Pile chopped chicory and sliced shallots in a large salad bowl.  Whisk the grainy mustard into the balsamic-honey mixture, then whisk in the extra-virgin olive oil. Season the dressing with salt and pepper to taste and pour over greens and shallots. Toss. Toss in toasted chopped walnuts, garnish with shavings of Parmesan and pomegranate seeds. Serve immediately.

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Dinner, Salads, Sides, Vegetables Tagged With: American obesity, chicory

Chicory salad with walnuts and parmesan

October 11, 2013 by Mary Frances 32 Comments

A head of the most beautiful chicory.

Chicory. I grew up with the smell of baked root chicory brewing with coffee that my father got from his Southern business colleagues. It’s a New Orleans favorite and he traveled there often. My mother and father just loved it and I remember that very distinctive smell. I think it made Mom and Dad feel special and exotic. No one in our St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves had ever heard of it in those days. So just recently, on this past Father’s day, my son made a warm wilted green salad of chicory to go with his Beef Wellington he made for my husband. It was a riff on a recipe from Tyler Florence. Tyler wants you to use Swiss chard, radicchio or escarole. I liked my son’s choice of chicory much better. I loved that salad so much that I have tinkered with it and made this chicory salad with walnuts and parmesan mine.

Chicory is a bitter green but with the dressing of warm honey and balsamic vinegar, it combats the sharpness and just makes the whole thing interesting and a bit addictive. Then adding the chopped toasted walnuts along with a bite here and there with a sliver of Parmigiano Reggiano, and well, I think you have a little bit of heaven in your mouth.

At our upstate farmer’s market last week, they had the biggest, most beautiful head of chicory. I was smitten and grabbed it up and starting excitedly telling the farmer about my recipe and what I was going to do with it. Suddenly, I noticed that everyone around was listening and taking notes. The farmer was so happy to hear my recipe as he said that most folks just don’t know what to do with chicory. Poor misunderstood thing, it needs some new positioning as a favorite wilted salad green, as it is mine. Try this and you’ll fall in LOVE too!Chicory in a bowl with shallots.

WILTED CHICORY SALAD WITH WALNUTS AND PARMESAN – serves 3 – 4

1/8 cup honey
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup of toasted walnuts, coarsely chopped
1 medium or ½ large head of chicory, washed, spun dry and cut into 1½” pieces
1 shallot, very thinly sliced
½  tbs. grainy mustard
½  cup extra-virgin olive oil
Parmesan cheese shavings, for garnish

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Place walnuts in a baking dish and toast for 7 – 8 minutes. When you can just begin to smell them, remove from the oven and let cool on a cutting board. Coarsely chop and set aside.

Cook honey and balsamic together over medium-high heat in a small saute pan, about 5 minutes, stirring constantly with a whisk. Do not let it boil. Pile chopped chicory and sliced shallots in a large salad bowl.  Whisk the grainy mustard into the balsamic-honey dressing, then whisk in the extra-virgin olive oil. Season the dressing with salt and pepper to taste and pour over greens and shallots. Toss. Toss in toasted chopped walnuts, and garnish with shavings of Parmesan and serve immediately.

Enjoy!
Warm wilted chicory salad with chopped toasted walnuts and parmesan cheese with a honey balsamic dressing.

Now because these greens are so sturdy, the leftovers even held up for the next day. Of course they weren’t as good as when first made but they were still respectable. I do have one sister-in-law who loves a day old salad, all wilted and wet. I guess it’s an acquired taste?

 

 

Filed Under: Dinner, First Course, Lunch, Salads Tagged With: chicory, chicory salads, honey and balsamic vinegar dressing, parmesan slivers, toasted walnuts, warm salads, wilted salads

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Mary Frances

Mary Frances

Spread love through cooking.

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