I don’t have great memories of the dried versions of the fruits either.  Prunes, as dried plums are strangely called (more on that later), were viewed by me as basically medicine suitable only for the old, the infirm, or the constipated.  As I was none of these things they served no purpose to me.  Dried apricots were a bit better but not much.  The dried apricots of my childhood bear little resemblance to the ones sold in the store today.  Back then the ingredient list for dried apricots was apricots… just apricots, cut in half and dried on someone’s Ronco food dehydrator.  They usually were a little bit sweet, a little bit brown, a little bit like… well let’s face it, rawhide.  As a brief aside… the current version of commercially available dried apricots are a bit scary too but for entirely different reasons.  I don’t know exactly what “medium chain triglycerides (from coconut and/or palm kernel), Sulfur Dioxide and/or Sodium Bisulfite and/or Potassium Sorbate” do but they sure make what used to be a fruit look a bit like a gummy treat and/or something else that nature never intended. With all that said those leather like dried apricots of my youth occasionally made it into a batch of trail mix (also not sold in stores back then) where they provided a tarter and chewier counterpoint to the nuts and chocolate.

All in all my memories of stone fruit as a kid are a bit…well ambivalent.  I didn’t hate them, and there were definitely foods that I HATED – but I didn’t love them either.  Yet for some reason, when I left my childhood home for good I completely forgot they even existed.  I can honestly say that between 1995 and 2010 I never once intentionally ate an apricot or a plum.  Again I bore them no malice; they were just like, well… romance novels or paper napkins for instance.  I walked by them every time I bought groceries but never really noticed them let alone purchased them.

So skip forward to the present, or at least the recent past.  When I finally decided to eat better… or at least healthier one of the first changes I made was to eat fresh fruit… a lot of fresh fruit.  Word on the street is that it’s good for you. The ONLY slight drawback to fruit is some of them are a bit high in calories.  If you are a petite woman this may cause you to watch your consumption a bit, but as a not petite not woman who needs at least 4000 calories a day to maintain my weight I can pretty much eat as much fruit as I want.  The healthfulness of eating fruit should not be news to you.  It’s one of those basic nutritional truths that everyone from your mother to your metaphorical big brother, the FDA, has told you. Face it if fruit is noticeably absent from your diet it isn’t because you haven’t heard that it should be….  now eat your vegetable too

But back to the fruit… with my new found frugivorous diet it quickly became necessary to widen the variety I was eating. Apples and bananas had served me well for many years but let’s face it they can get pretty boring pretty quick especially when you’re eating them four or five times a day.  I worked my way through the tropical fruits: papaya, mango, pineapple etcetera.  I sampled the citrus from kumquat to pomelo and everything in between.  Grapes, melons, berries, pears all became regular additions to my grocery basket and subsequently my belly.  Slowly I ate my way through the fruit section checking off foods I had forgotten one by one until I pretty much had tried all that the local grocers had to offer.

In this day and age we’ve sort of forgotten that foods, especially fruits and vegetables, have seasons.  Apples, formerly a fall treat, never vanish from the shelves.  Asparagus, the harbinger of spring, is now just as comfortable accompanying the Thanksgiving turkey.  Tomatoes, strawberries, even (formerly) exotic wonders like mangoes appear at all times in nearly every store in the U.S. of A.  They may all taste like cardboard but yearlong availability has clearly won out over quality.  So it was a pleasant surprise  when about mid-summer new things started to appear in the fruit section… strange things… things I literally had never seen – or at least noticed before.  Pluots… apriums… plumcots… apriplums what the heck are these things.  I’m bright enough that I wasn’t really stumped for all that long. It was obvious from their names and appearance that they were all at least marginally related to apricots and plums. The fact that they sat directly between the apricots and plums on the fruit display provided another clue to this mystery… see I told you I was bright.  What wasn’t clear to me was whether these new fruits were a happy accident of nature or part of some bigger conspiracy – an evil plot by evil big food companies involving geneticists and/or Dr. Frankenstein.  I was also at least vaguely curious as to what they taste liked.

Well unfortunately for the story, but fortunately for my belly, a quick trip to Google seems to reveal that there is little or no conspiracy – at least not an evil one… just a bunch of fruit growers trying to get a little more space on the shelves.   Plums and apricots along with cherries, almonds, peaches and many more are all members of the Prunus species and thus fairly easy to cross breed.  That also, incidentally, solves that whole “why is it called a prune?” question I had been asking. Plant a few orchards and move a few beehives and voila you have a new and never before seen fruit… repeat ad infinitum.  According to the Wikipedia, which is of course never wrong,  plumcots and apriplums are first generation hybrids of the original plum and apricot trees… one looks like a plum and tastes like an apricot and the other… well this should be obvious.  Pluots and apriums, on the other hand, are the fruit that results from trees grown directly from the seeds of plumcots and apriplums and their seeds will produce more pluots and apriums.  But what would happen if you cross pollinated an aprium tree and a pluot tree… would it revert back to the original plums and apricots or would you end up with a new fruit – an apripluotum if you will.  And what if you cross pollinated that with… now my head is beginning to hurt. Throw cherries and peaches into the mix and the possibilities grow logarithmically.. apricherriotmond any one.   Given the length of time it takes for a fruit tree to mature this is not an experiment that you can finish in a weekend or a decade so we will all have to wait patiently to see what is next.  But given infinite time and infinite bees there are an infinite number of new stone fruits to be grown and devoured.  It all makes me feel very, very small and insignificant.

So in the name of science I’ve eaten them all and I have to say that they are pretty good, even without the mayo or cobbler crust.   What do they taste like? Well… fruit- sort of like a plum… sort of like an apricot… but not exactly. I hope that clears everything up.   My recommendation: go buy one of every variety you can lay your hands on and eat them.   Hurry though because they won’t be here for long and in case you haven’t heard they’re good for you.

For those of you who want to read the article in its entirety here is the link http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/08/154568945/what-america-spends-on-groceries?sc=emaf . For those of you too busy making dinner, here is the really, really short summary.  We spend less of our money on groceries now than then and we buy more crappy processed food now than then.  A little bit surprising, at least to me, is that with only a few exceptions almost all categories of food are less expensive now than they were in 1982; meat, dairy, even potato chips are all cheaper.  Why you ask? The only answer offered by the article is “We’ve seen major restructuring in poultry, pork and beef industries that has allowed efficiencies and brought down the cost,” Sounds a little, forgive me, fishy to me.

That answer by itself seems incredibly simplistic.  The social changes as well as the corporate changes throughout the world have clearly influenced both the cost of what we eat but more importantly the quality of what we eat.  And the consequences of those changes are much more of a story than the raw data.   It doesn’t take a statistician to tell us that as a society we eat out more (MUCH MORE) than we did in 1982.  When I was growing up you didn’t choose what restaurant you went to on your birthday. If you were luck you might get to pick what mom made… if you were unlucky (or Oliver Twist) you would eat gruel.   According to the article we spend approximately 3% less on groceries than we did 30 years ago… I don’t have the statistics in front of me but I would venture a guess that spending on restaurants has gone up by a bit more than 3% in the same time.

I have to be a bit careful here as this is a food blog not a political blog but I will throw out a few thoughts that will probably tip my hand a bit anyway.  Nestle, the largest food company in the world, ranks 42^nd on the Fortune 500 list, ahead of Honda, Nissan, and Sony just to mention a few.  Wal-Mart is of course number one and Kroger (King Soopers, Albertsons, etc) comes in at a lowly 72.  What is perhaps most stunning is that in 2011 Nestle reported corporate profits of 32 BILLION DOLLARS, more than ANY other company in the world.  Let me say that again.  NESTLE FOOD CORPORATION MADE MORE MONEY THAN ANY CORPORATION IN THE WORLD.  Here’s the link.  Go see for yourself.  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2011/full_list/ .  Unless you own stock in Nestle that should probably bother you a bit.  It makes gas prices seem downright reasonable.

But how can that be you say?  How can prices be so far down and profits be so high.  If you ask me me (and by reading my blog you sort of have) the answer is simple.  You get what you pay for…  When you buy a book shelf from Wal-Mart the quality (or lack thereof) is pretty obvious.  What is not so obvious is that the quality of the vast majority of the food, not to mention the working conditions for those who produce it, is just as bad.   The proof however is there: in our waistlines, in our arteries, and in our children’s health.  Food made in factories should scare you.   Food grown on factory farms from genetically modified organisms should scare you.  Ingredients that didn’t exist 100 years ago should scare you.  Big hairy spiders do scare you and you almost never see them… think about what you ate just today.  BIG OIL, BIG PHARMA, have nothing on BIG FOOD… which if you think about it does make sense.  You can choose to not use, or at least reduce your use of, oil and pharmaceuticals, give up food, on the other hand, and the @#$% hits the fan.  While whale oil and snake oil have gone the way of the dinosaur, we eat and presumably will continue to eat  “essentially” the same foods we have eaten for the last 10,000 years.  Now that’s an investment with a future.

I wish I had a solution for the world, heck I wish I had a solution just for my family but I don’t.  Short of growing all of your own fruits, vegetables and grains and shooting enough game to live on, it is nearly impossible to be completely free of BIG FOOD.  Since the dawn of civilization it has always been the poorest citizens of a society who eat the worst and the least. In America today howerver, in an unprecedented and ironic  twist of fate, it is the poorest who are the most obese and it is not the lack of food but the food itself which is slowly killing them.  Eating well is expensive.  But the point of this blog has often been, and is again today, that life is about choices and what choice could be more important than what you choose to put in your body.  Cook from scratch, buy local and organic whenever you can, and support restaurants that do the same.  Start there. Of course another option would be to take all that money you are saving on groceries and put it you’re your Health Savings Account, because you are going to need it.
This blog has not been brought to you by Victoza or any other daily inject-able diabetes drug.  Nor is this blog affiliated with any of the companies mentioned above. Nor is it intended to treat any injury, condition, or disease.   Blah blah blah blah blah

While visiting my brother’s family last fall in Plano Texas I took a field trip to a local Asian supermarket with my sister in law, Rebecca, to stock up on some ingredient that can be hard find where I live.  Rebecca, a professional photographer, took some fantastic pictures for future use in this blog.  Some of which appear now.  After we finished our shopping we decided to have lunch in the area.    Now, I don’t want to generalize but I’m going to… the vast majority of Chinese restaurants in the US , again how to say this politely,… SUCK.  The food is bad and bad for you, the menus are identical, deep-fried everything with insipidly sweet sauce of a hue not actually found in nature.  Yes there are exceptions… but if you have eaten at ten Chinese restaurants in Colorado Springs I guarantee it applies to at least nine but probably ten of them… but we weren’t in Colorado Springs so what the heck.

To be a “good” Chinese restaurant in most places all that is required is that you serve Chinese food or perhaps I should say “food in the style of China.”  To be a “good” Chinese restaurant in a place with a huge Chinese community you need to be actually good… and this place was.   As we entered I began to look around at the clientele and the signage and I said to Rebecca “I think we might be out of our league here” And sure enough, I was right.  Problem one… Rebecca is a vegetarian and they were serving  Dim Sum.  Cart after cart of steaming dumplings were offered to us; all of which we declined, mostly because it was unclear as to their contents.  I would have loved to feast on random mystery dumplings but wanted to eat with Rebecca so we waited for menus to appear… and waited.  While I’m sure there were English speakers in the building they were neither pushing dim sum carts nor waiting on us… and hilarity ensued.  The menu was in both Chinese and English but resembled very much the one pictured here.  There was however a section pretty clearly labeled “vegetarian” and Rebecca picked a random dish from that section and using the “point and nod” method we both managed to place our orders… mine a random dish from the beef section. 

On to the next phase of our adventure… as I have since learned, in traditional Chinese restaurants, everything is served family style and presumed to be shared so dishes are brought when they are prepared  with no particular attention to the order or timing.  Not surprisingly, given Rebecca’s luck this day, mine arrived and hers did not…  After waiting about 10 minutes Rebecca insisted that I eat and I wasn’t about to say no.  It was delicious:  light, well balanced, and more importantly different… I couldn’t say exactly how but new flavors to my palette.  When I was almost finished, Rebecca’s dish appeared … beautiful: noodles, vegetables, and MEAT lots and lots of meat.  Rebecca is very sweet and polite and with more amusement than anger used the menu to indicate that this was not what she had ordered.  The waitress who was clearly more frustrated than we were grabbed the plate and stormed off.  A minute later the manager arrived and apologized sincerely, but communication was still a problem so once again the point and nod method was used and off he went to correct the problem.  No question he was trying, and less than five minutes later he returned personally presenting a brand new steaming plate of… exactly the same thing.  At this point the sun went down and we had to get a box so we could go home and make dinner… Good news I ate the take home and it was equally fantastic.  We both left with a smile… I had a great meal and we both enjoyed an entertaining, cross-cultural, shenanigan-filled afternoon.  Best we can figure the English words did not match the Chinese characters and as to the “Vegetarian” section well… almost.  Translating Chinese is an inexact science at best, especially when it comes to food.

Long story… but it was a long lunch… and there is a point… sort of.  Skip forward to this week:  I made a new friend who has traveled extensively in Asia and she was lamenting that Colorado Chinese restaurants don’t even serve a bad version of her favorite dish… Mala Tofu.  She even sent me a recipe:

 Ingrediants

• tofu 200 grams
• 50 grams of meat
• 50 grams of vegetable oil
• red pepper 1,
• 5 pepper
• ginger
• garlic
• diced green onion
• sesame oil
• the amount of MSG.

Procedure

Approach to take a small bowl, into the 25 grams of vegetable oil, salt amount, respectively, diced green onion, minced garlic, add a little broth to boiling water 2 / 3 bowl, stand-by and turned into juice.

Tofu cut into small boxes, into the boiling water for 5 minutes or so I fish out.

Wok set the fire, pour the oil until the oil temperature to Bacheng hot, pour the minced garlic, flavor burst immediately into the meat with a shovel zoned fry, meat color, then add pepper, red pepper Chao Chu flavor, and then against the good juice into the.

Pot-open, into the tofu, compaction, do not stir, use a slow Dunzhi soup decrease, with the shovel flip until the bean curd into a bubble, the leaching of starch in water, to leave the eyes of fire, holding wok Britain turn, tofu hang time syrup pan.

On pre-poured sesame oil, sprinkle MSG can be.

Ummmm….

Well since I couldn’t exactly follow that recipe… I did some research of my own and made up my own version.

 Chef Corey Recipe:

Stir-fry some chopped or ground pork in a little or lot of chili oil, when cooked add a LOT of crushed red pepper, some ginger and garlic and fermented broad bean paste, stir-fry for a few seconds, add some stock (any kind will do) a pound of tofu cut into one inch cubes and a bunch of green onions cut into 1 inch pieces.  Simmer for 15 minutes or so.  Thicken the sauce with cornstarch slurry and just before serving sprinkle with a generous dose of ground Sichuan peppercorns.  One note of caution be careful when adding the pork to the hot chili oil… if the pork is too wet and the oil is too hot it can vaporize and fill your kitchen with rather nasty smoke…  the commercial name for vaporized chili oil:  Pepper Spray.

Sichuan peppercorns are not hot they instead are a natural anesthetic and numb the mouth… eat enough and you could perform home dental surgery. This dish is also referred to Mapo Tofu which translates as Smallpox Grandma’s Tofu????  Note to Chinese: stick to manufacturing or hire better branding people that name is not ready foor the international market.  The combination of heat from the chilies and numbness from the peppercorns is uniquely Chinese and something I haven’t previously experimented with.  But I’m intrigued and can’t wait to continue my Chinese adventures.  This could in fact be my new favorite dish but beware it is unbelievably hot…

Well lets begin with eating locally grown food…which was, of course, the only way we ate for the vast majority of our existence on this planet.  In northern climates (before refrigeration) potatoes and cabbage were probably all that was left in the cellar come March.  Certainly no fresh fruit or green vegetables made it through the winter… perhaps some onions and other root vegetables but the local grocer didn’t sell Mexican mangos.  More likely than not, the human root cellar was almost empty as well.  No not the cellar where we store dried humans… the cellar where you store your energy for the winter…  your fat,or my fat, as the case may be.  When the food really started to get short in February our bodies began to slowly consume all that fat we packed on in the fall… perhaps on Thanksgiving.  Well of course not in Ireland, but trust me every high latitude culture pigs out in the fall.

This leads to the next question; how did the potato get to Ireland?  Potatoes are a New World food so pre-Columbian Europe had never experienced a French fry (or a marinara sauce, as tomatoes came from the Americas as well, but that’s another post).   It took quite a while for the potato to catch on but, by the end of the 18^th century it had become the staple crop of Ireland.  For a white vegetable it is very high in vitamins, “C” in particular which helps with the problem of “scurvy pirates”…arrrhhh. More importantly it yields many times the calories per acre of any other crop.  It is possible to survive on little more than potatoes and milk.  For how shall we say… cultural reasons there were quite a few more new mouths to feed in Ireland than in its wealthier neighbor/conqueror England and potatoes fit the bill.  It was potatoes success, in fact, that later led to tragedy.  Potatoes were so successful that most of Ireland stopped cultivating almost anything else and when the blight destroyed crops for several seasons in a row, millions starved.

Are they good for me or not?  Get to the point. Well… if you are starving or plan on starving anytime in the near future potatoes are without a question the crop of choice.  Potatoes are very high in starch, and the body loves to turn starch into sugar, and sugar into fat.  Glycemic index is  measure of how quickly sugar gets into the blood stream… steamed potatoes get a 65, a Mars bar 64, a baked potato 85.  Higher is not better.  I’m not a nutritionist and won’t get into the details but the short version is this: when there is more sugar in your blood than you need at any given time, the body turns it into fat to store it for the future.  And, since it is unlikely in this day and age that you will ever run out of food, you will never have to go into your cellar  (fat) for survival.  In the Garden of Eden as soon as you get even remotely hungry you eat a piece of fruit (no not that one) and problem solved.  In Ireland you eat as many potatoes as you can today because there might be none tomorrow.

But it is St Paddy’s and I am going to eat corned beef and cabbage. I’m just going to eat more corned beef and cabbage and less potatoes… way less potatoes.  And if you are blessed with a metabolism that allows you to eat whatever you want… it must be the luck of the Irish.   Here’s a link to a bunch of ways to cook this meal: http://www.cooks.com/rec/search/0,1-0,baked_corned_beef_brisket,FF.html My recipe: boil beef, add potatoes then carrots then cabbage.  Eat when all are done.

One final thought… potatoes only taste good with a healthy helping of fat.  And not healthy fats… no potato and avocado recipes; potatoes and olive oil… not so much.  Now saturated fats… bacon, butter, cheese, sour cream… that spud is loaded.

But it is almost the New Year… and I’ve been reflecting back on what a crazy, great year it has been for me… and how I got here.  The changes I made in how I ate, which led to changes in how I felt, which led to changes in how I treated other people, which led to this…  I can’t say that changing my diet was the first step on my path to happiness, but it was near the beginning.  Like many chefs, while I fed the public all sorts of fancy food,  I lived on beer, fast food, and  7-11 burritos . Oh yeah and I smoked.  My health and weight reflected it.  I quit smoking and decided I needed to lose some weight too… a daunting prospect for sure… one or the other maybe, but both?  Fast forward to now… done smoking: check, lose some weight: check at 60 pounds.

But I digress… I had a fantastic and ridiculously healthy dinner tonight and it was built around the legume that changed my life… thank you lentils.  Can the lentil change your life too?  Doubtful… but read on.  

Billions of dollars are spent in America every year on the business of losing weight.  Hundreds of books, hours of infomercials, dieticians, doctors, gurus, therapists, personal trainers AND chefs… the secret will only cost you a couple more dollars.  Here’s my secret… (don’t tell anyone).. eat better, not less, and work out more.  Less animal fats, more fiber, less simple starches, more whole grains, more meals, smaller meals, regular hard exercise… is any of this ringing a bell.  Seriously though it works… unlike all the crap that people spend all their money on.

LENTILS!!! I’m supposed to be writing about LENTILS.  OK three best things about lentils: 1.  Unlike other members of the dried legume family they don’t need to be soaked or cooked for hours so you can decide to have them whenever.  2.  One cup of lentils… 230 calories, one gram of fat, 18 grams of protein, and 16 grams of fiber http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/legumes-and-legume-products/4338/2  3. They don’t really taste like anything so will happily absorb any and all flavors that you add to them.   Seriously SIXTEEN grams of fiber per cup… 63% of your RDA… the grocery bag you bring it home in has less fiber.

So long story short: when I still worked at my last restaurant job and was really losing weight fast, I brought all my meals to work.  I usually brought more than I needed and I would share the leftovers with the other employees.  One dish, of many, was a super simple lentil salad: cold lentils, tomato, red onion, cucumber, basil, feta, and just another 30 second olive oil vinaigrette.  It was good… nothing special as I remember it, but in the land of ranch dressing he who cooks with Sherry vinegar is king.  It was that day that my friend Amy suggested I should teach a cooking class for the staff…. which I did… and great fun was had by all… and I tried to figure out how to turn this teaching thing into a career… which led me to the personal chef industry… which brings me back to now… and dinner. 

I started my New Year’s resolutions a little early this year… back to eating well and back to sharing my thoughts on how eating lentils can change your life.  A piece of seared salmon,  super simple lentil salad, sautéed spinach, (alliteration unintentional) and a olive bar meets food processor tapenade… most satisfying meal I’ve had in a while.  Here’s a recipe from Alice Waters the original and greatest back to basics chef:http://www.thedailygreen.com/healthy-eating/recipes/alice-waters-lentil-salad-44021308

Happy New Year’s everyone.  Eat well and live well this year.

In 1991 the entire Asian food section of The Andover (CT) market consisted of soy sauce and canned water chestnut… that’s it.  No one in the 06232 zip code had even heard of cilantro or tomatillos.  If I wanted to experiment with authentic Asian or Latin ingredients I was going out of town, maybe out of state.  Now when I’m in the mood for Thai Tacos I shop in aisle seven AND aisle nine at the local whole foods.   CRAZY…I know… seven and nine… it will never work…it can’t be done… or can it???

Thai Fish Tacos with Cilantro Pesto … that’s right I’m throwing in some Italian technique just to up the “FUSION FACTOR”.  Sounds difficult to make at home and any restaurant that would put it on the menu would charge you twenty bucks for tacos.   Nothing could be further from the truth… This is a complete and healthy meal made from scratch in less than 30 minutes with ingredients you could probably even find near Andover.  Don’t like fish just substitute chicken anywhere the word fish appears. 

The idea started last night at one of my interactive cooking parties, I made traditional Italian basil pesto: basil, evoo, garlic, parmesan, and (thanks to Warren) pine nuts…truly one of the great flavors of the world.  Someone asked what else they could do with it besides pasta or bruschetta, just brainstorming  I suggested  spreading a bit of pesto on a warm four tortilla, filling it with grilled garlic chicken, shredded romaine, fresh mozzarella, diced tomatoes, drizzle of balsamic reduction… one sexy chicken taco di Caprese.

Skip forward to tonight… after a very entertaining visit to a huge Asian market http://www.99ranch.com/ over the holiday weekend I am on an Asian kick at home (more on that field trip soon).  Pesto technique mixed with Thai inspired flavors stuffed into a taco presentation… dinner is served and fantastic.  For the pesto I put cilantro, garlic, ginger and peanuts into the food processor , pureed with just enough coconut milk to make a smooth “pesto” a shot of thai hot sauce, a squeeze of lime,  shot of fish sauce (soy works too.) That took about 3 minutes…  broiled some swordfish .  I had some left over roasted eggplant in the fridge, warmed that up.  Warm flower tortilla, fish, eggplant, spoon full of “pesto”, shredded cabbage, chopped peanuts, green onions, a little fresh basil… serve with lime wedges and more hot sauce .  Absolutely fantastic.  Next time sautéed onions and peppers instead of cabbage= Thai fajitas.  Just don’t call it fusion.

Thanks to my sister  in law Rebecca Bell Wilson for the fantastic food pictures. http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Rebecca-Bell-Wilson-Photography-and-Social-Media/275837500799 for the fantastic food pictures.  This one is completely unrelated to the topic but I just can’t help myself… he’s so damn cute.

Soups, stews, casseroles, etc… take about the same amount of time to cook regardless of whether you make six portions or 36 portions.   A little bit more time chopping and such… but use a food processor and bigger pots and it is pretty negligible.   Most of these dishes taste fine, if not better, as leftovers, but who wants to eat the same leftovers 36 times.

It starts with you and seven suckers…err… friends.  The pitch: “If you cook from scratch just once a week I will bring you homemade meals for the other six days.   What’s the catch? When you cook you have to cook a huge batch, enough for you and seven other families.    Cooking day is Sunday… After making your big old batch of whatever, sit down and enjoy you dinner.  After dinner, package up the leftovers into seven disposable plastic containers and bring them over to my house. On Monday I‘ll swing by your house and drop off six dinners worth of leftovers.   Just reheat something each night and I’ll see you next Sunday.”  So, if you haven’t figured it out yet… here’s the scam:  Sundays, seven suckers bring you seven suppers   (say that three times fast), 49 meals.  On Mondays you deliver all seven suckers six suppers (try that one too), 42 meals.  Where do the other seven meals go… IN YOUR BELLY.  Free homemade food forever… BRILLIANT!!! 

“BUT…”, you say, “I still have to drive around every Monday delivering food.”  Solution:  sell the system…  Tell each sucker that they too can eat for free SIX days a week.  All it will cost them to learn how is one meal a week delivered to your home.  Each of your seven suckers finds seven suckers of their own, and from their seven free meals they kick one back to you.  They drop that one meal off on Monday’s while doing their other deliveries.  You get seven free meals a week (while doing nothing). They get six free meals a week (for an hour or two of driving), and their friends…err… suckers still get 6 homemade meals if they spend only one day cooking.  EVERYONE wins… especially me… err…you…

Like any pyramid scheme… eventually the market will be saturated and the will be no new su… frie… FRUCKERS.  But by then you should have saved enough money to hire a personal chef for the rest of your life.  End of the day… eat well, eat free… FOREVER.   How’s that for today’s time saving tip of the day.

You’re probably wondering:  “why is Chef Corey just giving away this BRILLIANT plan?”  To find out send me five dollars.  I will send you:  that answer, ONE DOLLAR, and my patented system on how to make that ONE DOLLAR into ONE MILLION DOLLARS in GOLD

Mea culpa/ My bad

So this week I will post a healthy and hopefully time saving idea every night.  Starting with tonight

Bulgur wheat:  Mother Nature’s minute rice

Here are the “cut and pasted” directions from “their” website  “Use equal amounts of water or liquid and rice, bring liquid to a boil, add rice and let sit covered for 5 minutes or until liquid is absorbed. In just 5 minutes, you’ll have fluffy, delicious rice that is easy to prepare and healthy too.” 

So my first question is: what, exactly, do they mean by “or liquid”????” … any liquid??? motor oil, embalming fluid, mercury????  The offensive possibilities are endless…   My second is “and healthy”???   While minute rice isn’t in any way bad for you, and really doesn’t contain any weird ingredients; it’s a bit like eating sawdust, but with less fiber… and flavor.  How to cook Bulgur wheat??? Use the exact same recipe as minute rice, except, substitute broth for “or liquid” DO NOT USE MERCURY.  Nutritionally: more vitamins and FIVE GRAMS of fiber vs. one in minute rice.

My least favorite argument: “my kids won’t eat it”.  They will eat “mcgarbage” and they would probably try mercury, so break out the “when you grow up” defense and be the grownup.

On days that I am not getting paid to cook… I still cook, and write about cooking, and think about what I’ll cook tomorrow.   It keeps the creative side of mind busy and it keeps me on my feet and doing other chores.  I do some laundry, pay some bills, often I even set my lap top up on the counter and get this stuff done… all while I cook.  The longer dinner takes to make …the more stuff I get done, because when I finally sit down to eat; I’m pretty much done for the day.  How bassackwards is that?  More cooking = more time…at least for me.

I realize that this is exactly the opposite of how many, if not most, of you feel.   I should also disclose that I don’t have kids and I do work for myself, so my challenges are not your challenges.  I know many of you can’t wait until they build the” iStove”… work, network, and cook all at the same time, or perhaps the “Lazychef”… a recliner with a built in freezer and microwave.  Add paper plates and a Wii fit and you’ll never have to leave the living room again.   But if you are reading a personal chef’s blog I am probably not describing you…exactly.  So let’s just talk about those folks down the street… the ones who work 100 hours a week between them, whose kids do everything, who go the gym four times a week, but don’t have time for less important things… like eating.

What could possibly be more important than eating… maybe sleeping, but they probably don’t do enough of that either. If you have at least two kids try this experiment at home this week…  don’t let one of your kids get on the computer or phone for the whole week… no Facebook, no texting, no www.apersonablechef.com.  Now take another kid and don’t let him or her eat… Point proved. You can do this with your partner if you don’t have children.

Life’s not easy and we make difficult choices about how to use our time every day… but feeding your kids fast food so that they have time for Tae Kwan Do is probably a net sum loss in the bigger health picture.  It’s like using the elevator at the gym.  They will eventually forget all those kicks but diabetes is forever.   Is that extra hour at work worth eating out of a box… how many hours will it cost you in the long run?  Everyone’s life is different, but here’s how it works for me:  The more I cook the better I eat, the better I eat the better I feel, the better I feel the more I do, the more I do the less I weigh.  Cook more = weigh less… take that Slimfast. 

Your other options: hire a personal chef OR move into a neighborhood with a unmarried personal chef who is addicted to cooking.  Just ask my neighbors.  Leftover night has a very different spin around here.  And that’s what I had for dinner tonight…  left overs, and all I got done was this post…  I should have been cooking.

Sorry no recipe ideas tonight… Tomorrow I’m teaching a class at the CHEFs Catalog outlet store here in the Springs.  So if you want LOTS of recipe ideas all at the same time sign up and come hang out with me. http://www.chefscatalog.com/promotion.aspx?promoid=outletstore