Balance of Food

What's Tempting: Our nutrition and food podcasts

Hope you are enjoying the end of your summer eating. July 2015 was the hottest July in modern weather keeping history, yet some of us found ways to freeze in July.

A lot of North America got hit with drought, even places known for rain, such as Vancouver.

Otherwise, cooler conditions and plenty of rain produced rather good fruit and vegetable harvests.

As we head into the long holiday weekend, we have an alternative to reading about food and nutrition issues: podcasts.

We jumped on the podcast bandwagon a few years ago and put together some should-have-been award-winning podcasts.

The ideal workplace lunch. Eating holidays. Flavored milk in school lunches. The hidden cost of free food. 

Who could forget this classic title: "Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, and the politics of breastfeeding"?

Plus, you get to hear my soothing voice in the podcasts: Writer and narrator.

For some non-reading, check out our podcasts archive here. And we'll be back with some travel food columns later this month.

What's Tempting: A really good lobster roll

When you travel in the Maritimes in Canada, you want lobster. Fancier restaurants will be glad to serve you lobster in the shell with the accouterments for a nice hefty price.

What you really want is a lobster roll, where they do the work and you get the meat. Too often, a "lobster roll" is essentially a lobster salad sandwich, where the mayo is the star and you are picking out celery instead of picking up lobster.

You want a lobster roll where the lobster is the star.

The lobster roll usually consists of a split hot dog bun filled with lobster meat — lightly moistened ideally with butter but often with mayonnaise or sour cream and sometimes with celery in the mix.

The lobster salad sandwich defeats the purpose of eating lobster. If you can't find the lobster or taste the lobster, you're paying a lot for what you aren't getting.

Chicken salad. Tuna salad. The design of the salad is to hide the impact and taste of the protein. Tasting the tuna in a properly made tuna salad is virtually impossible. This is quite fine for chicken salad and tuna salad, but lobster is too rich and too nice to waste in a bed of mayonnaise.

You have to be careful where you get your lobster. A restaurant in the heart of Lunenberg, Nova Scotia serves a lobster salad sandwich on a hamburger bun. Places such as these count on tourists wanting lobster no matter how pathetic the presentation.

When I visited Halifax in 2009, I wanted desperately to try the McLobster, the McDonald's version of the lobster sandwich. In late August, McLobster was no longer in the restaurants. In late July 2015, the McDonald's did carry McLobster. And I could walk to a McDonald's and order a McLobster.

I put the word out on Twitter as to whether I should try the McLobster. No one responded to my cry. Just as well, since I wasn't leaning toward purchasing the sandwich. As we noted earlier, every review I've seen portrays the McLobster as a decent lobster salad sandwich. I wanted a lobster roll.

The "false advertising" that fast food burger photos normally incorporate would be somewhat helpful in the case of lobster rolls: give me a glimpse of what your lobster roll looks like and I'll know if I want it.

Finding the butter version is extremely rare in my travels. Perhaps that is more of a, ahem, Maine lobster roll.

Making your own lobster roll — the step we usually recommend at some point — is rather difficult. If you start with a live lobster and you have a place to cook the lobster, cooking the lobster is easier compared to getting the meat out of the lobster. Buying cooked lobster meat is a great option but harder to find, especially on vacation.

Tracking down the special bun much less finding a place to grill the bun is the most significant challenge. Not any hot dog bun will do.

Finding a good lobster roll

I did find a good lobster roll in Halifax, down at the Seaport Farmers Market. Lobster, lightly dressed, in a homemade bun, though not a classic bun.

Even lightly dressed, you could taste the lobster. The bun complemented the lobster very well. The place offered side salads in lieu of kettle chips, but the chips went well with the sandwich, and a pickle.

$13 tax included for a bad lobster roll is still a pretty good deal. And that was $13 Canadian, so U.S. visitors got at least 20% off with the exchange rate. You want a good lobster roll but you also don't want to pay too much for one.

You might think this is the end: you find a good lobster roll and the world is happy. There was one more quest, one more experiment. What if you could order a lobster roll — naked. The lobster roll, not you. What if you got just lobster and bun.

The place in the farmers market was willing to give me a lobster roll sans mayo, though the young woman apologized for using the same spoon. She asked me if I had an allergy or preference against mayo. I told her what she did was fine. Scientists might have found traces of mayo but my taste buds were clueless.

If you have a lobster roll with just lobster and access to a genie, you would wish for a dish of clarified butter. Lobster and clarified butter make for a very nice couple. So as wonderful as a lobster roll is without mayo or butter, the sandwich is a little dry. The sandwich was still a very good sandwich.

Trying to find a lobster roll sans mayo might be seen as extreme, same as the crab sandwich I ordered in the Sunday morning farmers market in downtown Baltimore in 2010. The difference with the crab sandwich is that I was able to get some Old Bay seasoning for the crab.

Ordering a dry — naked — sandwich allows me to get the true taste of seafood. Having grown up nowhere near an ocean, I've ordered too much fried seafood to wonder what it actually tastes like. It's nice to appreciate what the cooked seafood really tastes like.

Lobster rolls are supposed to spotlight lobster. The other players can play small parts, though the bun might be the supporting actor/actress in the play. Lobster is expensive for a reason. Hold out for a really good lobster roll.

photos credit: me

What's Tempting: Overcoming your own escargots

Escargots is a fancy (French) way of saying snails. You typically find escargots cooked in garlic butter that makes anything taste better.

The good news is that this isn't really about escargots but overcoming obstacles to trying new food.

There was this fancy restaurant when I was a child, and one of its specialties was escargots. My parents would eat them, but I figured at the time that I didn't need to eat snails.

You can lead a very productive life and never have escargots. Ever.

When I had a chance earlier this summer to have escargots at that same restaurant, I took advantage of the opportunity.

By this point, I certainly have eaten enough exotic animals and creatures that escargots weren't a big deal. So I was going to overcome the idea of eating snails.

Some people would be smart to try them by themselves in case something went wrong. I was not one of those people. I tried them in a fancy dinner with people I hadn't seen in awhile.

Escargots is not a cheap dish, even in a fancy restaurant in a small town. $12 for not much food and it wasn't even a hipster place.

The snails were in 6 holes on the dish. They weren't particularly pretty in appearance. If we were tasting with the eyes, we would have stopped quickly.

Getting them out of the dish was fun but not really why you eat. Food is about taste.

I popped the first one in my mouth. A bit chewy. Not much taste. But I could swallow them.

Eating snails is not that exciting. Not much taste or texture. But I ate them. I ate all of them. But snails aren't interesting to eat. This was the blandest creature I had eaten, and I've had very dry ostrich meat.

My fear as a small child is that snails would be icky to eat. As an adult, I was more likely to wonder why I paid $12 for this.

I didn't gag or feel sick or hate snails. But I sure didn't love them either.

If I were in the woods, and snails were all I had to eat, I would love them for their protein and sustenance. But snails in a more civilized setting don't pass the taste test.

Still the point of trying escargots — snails — was to overcome childhood feelings about trying uncertain foods. I'm about to embark on a travel adventure where I hope to try moose and possibly seal. They might taste fine or not, but I'm willing to be more adventurous.

Hopefully, your own version of escargots is a lot less expensive and a lot more interesting to eat. Give it a shot and even if you don't like that dish, you would know that for certain.

photo credit: c'est moi

What's Tempting: Snacking for dinner

We sleep for several hours before breakfast. Work forces us to be awake for lunch. Dinner? Yeah, we're usually tired.

Dinner works best if the meal is being cooked while you are at work, either with a slow cooker in motion all day or having a loving spouse or partner who has time to make dinner.

Sometimes, all we really want is to eat something, but society puts pressure on us to fix a "meal." Some days, we just want to snack our way out of dinner.

When we are tired, we tend to make poor eating decisions. Pick up something on the way home from work, call for a pizza and hope we are there when the pizza arrives, grab some leftover rice or pasta from the fridge and start chowing down.

Being tiredness lends itself to wanting more energy, which leads to wolfing down simple carbohydrates, which can deepen the problem and lose sight of the issue.

If you think of snacking as sitting on the sofa mindlessly eating whatever is in the bag in front of you, that isn't the kind of snacking in mind.

Smart snacking: taking the convenience of snacking with the nutrition of what dinner should be.

A handful of almonds, some dark chocolate, a modicum of carbohydrates (rice, pasta, cereal), cut up vegetables and fruit, and you can have a "meal" that feels more like a snack.

That bowl of (hopefully healthy) cereal and milk can work as part of the snacking meal. The cereal/milk duo with the cut up vegetables and fruit would definitely work.

We want quick, convenient, and hopefully healthy. Snacking … but for dinner.

Dinner Boards

Dawn Jackson Blatner is a registered dietitian and, for full disclosure, a friend of mine. Blatner has created "dinner boards" as a quick and healthy solution. Or as I like to think about the dinner boards: snacking meets Pinterest.

Dinner boards offer a 300-calorie combination of healthy food with a 100-calorie treat for a simple dinner solution with little planning and effort.

Here are Dawn's sample boards:

Asian

• ¾ cup in shell edamame
• 9 seaweed brown rice crackers
• 1 cup carrot sticks
• 2 tablespoons peanut sauce

Italian

• 1½ oz. mozzarella cheese
• 1 slice sprouted whole grain toast cubes w/garlic
• ¼ cup marinated artichokes
• 1 cup cherry tomatoes

Mediterranean

• 2 oz. (½ can) tuna in olive oil
• 1 cup cucumber slices
• 13 multi-seed crackers
• 5 large olives

Mexican

• ½ cup black bean salsa
• 12 corn tortilla chips
• 1 cup pepper slices
• ¼ cup guacamole

American

• ¼ cup hummus w/1 teaspoon hot sauce
• 1 cup broccoli
• 1½ cups popcorn
• 3 tablespoons peanuts

Each 300-calorie Dinner Board also comes with a 100-calorie treat: 5 oz. wine or 2 dark chocolate squares or 16 oz. kombucha. If your dinner ends up being all 3, well that's 300 calories but not a very nutritious snack.

Carbohydrates, protein, good fat, and veggies sparkle on her Dinner Boards. Mediterranean is the only board that gets meat of any kind, and then only 2 oz. of tuna.

400 calories is 20% of what we typically need for the day. If you can handle only 400 calories between the midday meal and bedtime, chances are you don't need much help with your diet.

That being said, making the transition would take some time. And to Blatner's credit, she lays out how much 300 calories really is, making it easier to see if 300-400 calories is enough.

Her boards don't include too much Vitamin C, though the pepper slices in the Mexican version come close. While the cherry tomatoes (Italian) are technically fruit, that key dietary element is missing from the dinner boards.

A cup of strawberries is just under 50 calories, so a cup of strawberries with a dark chocolate square fits the definition of a 100-calorie treat. Strawberries have antioxidants, fiber, fruit sugar, and Vitamin C.

Carbohydrates are obviously very light on the dinner boards. 9 seaweed brown rice crackers (Asian) are not to satisfy the carbohydrate standards of the typical American. Even though 1½ cups of popcorn (American) sounds like a lot, eating that little size of popcorn goes pretty quickly.

The Pinterest element appeals to those who visualize. In the era of calorie counting, we rarely see what 300 calories of food actually looks like.

On the surface, Dinner Boards are aimed at women. There certainly isn't anything wrong with a man eating one of these Dinner Boards, but stereotypically, this might be more difficult for men to achieve.

Takeaway

The Dinner Boards help you organize for when you might otherwise have a bowl of cereal and milk. If 300 calories isn't enough for you, use the idea as a springboard (pun intended) toward an idea of your own.

You can mix and match from the boards: you might want corn tortilla chips instead of seaweed brown rice crackers, though your new combo might be fewer or greater than 300 calories. If you aren't anal, you'll be fine.

The boards are also designed to help you think about portion control, so even if you pick another food, keep the portion size in the general neighborhood of what is on the board.

You can guesstimate the calories in your cereal and milk and see whatever else you can add in terms of veggies and fruit.

Non-starchy vegetables are generally low in calories. If you double the portion of carrot sticks (Asian), cucumber slices (Mediterranean), pepper slices (Mexican), or broccoli (American), you aren't adding that many more calories.

Don't be pulled in by convention if a snack is all you need to sustain you at 6 pm. Having healthy food at a quick pinch is cheaper and better than other "easier" temptations. Healthy snacking can be done in the time it takes to pick up carryout or heat a frozen pizza in a microwave oven.

photo credit: Dawn Jackson Blatner

What's Tempting: The time to make bone broth

Bone broth is one of the newest food crazes … in that this is how your grandmother used to do soup.

Soup in my childhood was opening a can and adding water. Sodium yes, but not much flavor.

That soup took opening a can, pouring the contents and a can of water into a pot. 3-4 minutes later and you had soup. Bone broth requires a lot more work than canned soup or even adding stock to vegetables, pasta, and meat.

I went to an event that featured bone broth to see if this was as good as advertised and whether bone broth would be worth making myself? Intricate dishes, while tempting, might be better outsourced than trying to make the bone broth yourself.

The primary issue is time. The creation of bone broth vs. stock is like comparing the time of a microwave vs. a dehydrator. Stock takes 45 minutes; bone broth 18 hours. That's not a misprint.

18 hours makes me think of Playtex bras and girdles that promised 18 hours of support. Maybe we should wear an 18-hour girdle to give us enough support to get through making a bone broth.

The 18 hours doesn't count accumulating the bones or specifically buying chicken necks. You can roast the bones for more flavor, but that is outside the 18 hours.

Our hosts had 2 different kinds of bone broth: Thai chicken and Caribbean spice. Both were delicious though I went back for multiple servings of the Thai chicken.

I also liked the idea that the bone broth was healthier for me than regular soup. It didn't taste overly salty, a criticism of canned soups, in part because there was enough flavor that salt wasn't required.

Other differences between bone broth and stock:

• Herbs are added very late in the process; our hosts said in the last 25 minutes.
• Bone broth has acid, such as apple cider vinegar and lemon juice, while stock does not.

One other difference is that bone broth is, well, jiggly. Maybe we need to bring in that 18-hour girdle.

Bone broth is jiggly thanks to gelatin produced by the breakdown of collagen. The collagen comes from using the bones.

Some of that 18 hours can be spent sleeping if you have a slow cooker. The more you cook the bone broth, the richer it will taste, so you do have leeway.

The bone broth advantages — glycine, proline, gelatin, amino acids — are spread across the spectrum so there are many reasons for choosing bone broth. For your humble narrator, making bone broth would ideally be timed just before getting the flu or a cold.

Before lumbering to find the slow cooker or chasing down chicken necks, you should definitely try bone broth, even if you pay hipster prices. Or find a nice grandmother who remembers when bone broth was soup.

Bone broth is not that expensive, given that the bones are inexpensive; your primary concern is finding a good source for bones.

If nothing else, you will end up with one of the best-tasting soups you ever had. Is bone broth 18-hours good? One taste and you'll know for yourself.

photos credit: me

Summer eating from the BalanceofFood.com archives

Summer unofficially starts whenever works lets out this afternoon. Summer brings temptations good and bad.

We wanted to help out with some of our best summer-related eating columns over the last 10 years.

Farmers markets are getting more prominent. They become easy pickings (pun intended). The temptation to eat less-than-healthy food also rings true as warmer weather finally arrives.

Hopefully, your own internal Balance of Food can handle a bit from both extremes. Enjoy!!

• Temptation of the Week: Thirsty in summer

• Podcast: Summertime indulgences, good and bad

• Summertime taste of sweet pickles comes only from sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup

• Summer is what you make it in eating better

• Simple summer sandwich: sensational

• Solving the temptations of summer, part 236

What's Tempting: Cooking for Mom on Mother's Day

Sunday is Mother's Day, a time to celebrate motherhood and mothers.

In most households, the mom is the person you see cook the most, the one from whom you try to copy when you start out as an adult. This person could also be your grandmother, also a mom.

Honoring your mother can involve cooking for her to return the favor. You can honor your mother by trying to cook one of her long-time recipes that gave you much love over the years.

To honor all moms, we included some of the best stories involving motherhood over the last decade at BalanceofFood.com. Some of those stories even talk about subjects other than breastfeeding.

• What's Tempting: Breastfeeding in church

• What's Tempting: Food education for nannies?

• Temptation of the Week: Hiding your vegetables

• NATO notebook: Tying food security to sovereignty

• Podcast: Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, and the politics of breastfeeding

• National Review's Kate O'Beirne can't fathom poverty, food deserts in her 'cereal and a banana' crack

• Breast milk is the ultimate natural food

• Honoring Mom, who usually makes the nutrition decisions

Happy Mother's Day!!

What's Tempting: Reducing soft drink calories

I can honestly say that Coca-Cola Life is the best-tasting reduced calorie soft drink I have ever tried in my life.

Boy that isn't saying much.

Coca-Cola Life is the newest variation: 8 oz. glass bottles with a light green hue on the label, a product made with cane sugar and Stevia.

This is no diet drink at 60 calories per 8-oz. glass bottle. However, Coca-Cola says this product has 35% fewer calories.

The new Coca-Cola product has been tried out in other countries: I knew about Argentina when the drink was first announced here. This is also a good sign since the world gets better Coca-Cola products than the United States or Canada.

This product has 2 major advantages that have nothing to do with the drink itself: a smaller 8 oz. size and a glass bottle.

The joy of drinking Mexican Coca-Cola is having a glass bottle. Often though, these days for me, 12 oz. is too much. Some days, 8 oz. is too much but the size is much more desirable.

You could see yourself taking a bottle of Coca-Cola Life for an outdoor picnic or barbecue.

For those who like the taste of Stevia, you won't run into the only major concern about Coca-Cola Life: the aftertaste.

Like our superlative at the top of the column, the aftertaste from Coca-Cola Life is the best-tasting aftertaste from any reduced calorie soft drink I have ever tried in my life.

The idea of having a reduced-calorie soft drink with no aftertaste is as likely as getting me to try Sweetos, a sweet version of Cheetos.

35-40 calories in a 2,000 calorie diet is not that significant, provided you only have 1 soft drink every so often.

If I take a 12 oz. bottle of Mexican Coca-Cola and I keep the same product intact but pour the contents into an 8 oz. bottle, I've reduced the calorie intake by 33%. No Stevia, no aftertaste.

We are seeing more efforts to go to small bottles, and that is a good sign, even if most of those small bottles contain high-fructose corn syrup.

The funny part is that on grocery store shelves, we are seeing mass amounts of smaller packages. Consumer health isn't the motivation. Take spaghetti sauce jars: they used to be 32 oz. of sauce. Companies needed to raise the price of sauce, but at 32 oz., customers would notice a price increase. So the strategy was to shrink the jar and not raise prices.

That 30 oz. jar of sauce costs the same, but you get less sauce.

The math would help consumers in smaller bottles of sugar-sweetened soft drinks, but what would companies get out of having smaller sizes?

Soft drink companies understand that having smaller sizes will encourage some consumers to have a soft drink more often if they can control the portion size. You can pour as little or as much spaghetti sauce from the jar and know the rest of the contents will be fine. Soft drinks come up short due to packaging limitations and the limited fizz of a carbonated drink.

A 12 oz. soft drink can could be more tempting if a) I was sharing the drink with someone or b) if I could drink 6-8 oz. instead of 12 oz. and save the rest.

We see the total calories on a 12 oz. soft drink can and could easily think, "That isn't so bad." Imagine if we had a 6 oz. or 8 oz. option with cane sugar, no Stevia or artificial sweeteners, in a glass bottle. That would be refreshing.

photo credit: me

What's Tempting: Eating real cheese

The Kraft Singles "endorsement" fiasco was particularly poignant last week since we were already researching Kraft Singles as a compare/contrast vs. Sargento 100% cheese.

Why eat "pasteurized prepared cheese product" (what Kraft Singles currently are) or "pasteurized process cheese food" (what Kraft Singles used to be) when you can eat real cheese?

Cheese is one of those foods that everyone says they love, but cheesy goodness doesn't always involve cheese. Nacho cheese sauce is considered cheese. Pasteurized process cheese food is legally considered cheese by the FDA because it contains 51% cheese.

The 51% standard reminds us of when Stephen Colbert took off on the Domino's school lunch pizza where the pizza crust only had to be 51% whole wheat.

Even when actual cheese is involved, the cheese is either reduced-fat or bland cheese, such as mozzarella.

"American exceptionalism" is real, but not when it comes to cheese.

• Kraft Singles nutrition 'endorsement' puts dietitians in bad light

Your childhood was likely filled with "singles," individually wrapped slices of what you were told was cheese. You were also told that the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny exists and that you weren't an accident.

Giving up that tradition can be difficult if you fall into nostalgia or still eat like a child. If you have children, you feel like you are giving them a part of your childhood by giving them Kraft Singles.

How about giving them real cheese?

We hear the stories: "You can't give kids real cheese because the flavor is too strong for them." "Cheese is high in fat so kids need to cut back."

Cheese has flavor because it has fat; this is a dairy product.

When I was a child, and my peers were loving the Singles, I was complaining that the blue cheese dressings were too mild. Even as an adult, I get a secret supply of blue cheese from a vendor at the farmers market that is extra old, extra strong. No labels — that is how secret this is — just goodness.

As we've learned from other food categories, the more flavor and fat you have, the less we need to eat to be satisfied. With good cheese, 2 oz. can be plenty. With nacho cheese sauce, you could dip with chips all day long and not feel full.

French kids eat more good cheese and are much less obese.

If you have children whose palates are not as sophisticated as mine, there are plenty of sufficiently bland tasting real cheeses. If cheddar is too much, go with Swiss. Need to go further to Blandsville? Monterey Jack and mozzarella will do.

Test your kids: give them a variety of cheeses and see which ones work. You can help them figure out their palates for cheese and possibly other foods based on the results.

Children need fat to grow. They are more sensitive to need flavor as a prerequisite in food. They don't have to eat cheese to grow up. But if cheese is an option, teach them to explore the many facets of the world of cheese. Just make sure that they get real cheese; your children (and adults too) deserve the best.

photo credit: Sargento

What's Tempting: Truly homemade yogurt

If you go all in for the adage "you are what you eat," would you also "eat what you are"?

Cecilia Westbrook, an MD/PhD student, put that to the test by making homemade yogurt using her own vaginal bacteria.

The key is lactobacillus, a bacteria commonly found in yogurt and a healthy vagina. Sounds like a new angle for Jamie Lee Curtis and her yogurt obsession.

Westbrook reportedly described the finished product as having a sour taste like "Indian yogurt" that went well with blueberries.

Vagina yogurt: strong enough for a man, but made from women.

Vaginal bacteria is a great way to make truly homemade yogurt, but using cow or goat milk doesn't click with yogurt from within a woman. To make a truly homemade yogurt, you could use breast milk if you want to make a yogurt from what women produce.

In a country where raw milk makes the mainstream world squeamish, you'll never see vagina yogurt in the stores, even without breast milk.

Still, imagine if vagina yogurt with breast milk was available in a grocery store and advertised on TV.

• It's a play on those classic mother-daughter ads where the daughter "isn't so fresh" and the mother could tell her how she needs to get clean enough to produce her own truly homemade yogurt.
• You could have a hippie-styled older woman who points out the natural goodness of vagina yogurt and breast milk. No artificial colors, flavors — nothing that a woman can't naturally produce herself.
• A young pregnant woman who only wants what is best for her baby. She plans to breastfeed her child, but for those times where she can't provide the breast milk, vagina yogurt with breast milk is the next best thing to being there.
• A sensitive man who loves his woman and wants to understand her better can feel closer with a serving of vagina yogurt with breast milk.

We've written about yogurt marketed to men. Yogurt has been traditionally marketed to women; can't get more in touch with women than to have a yogurt made from women.

Vagina yogurt with breast milk is organic, locally grown, locally sourced, and a truly natural food. Even if that sounds too appetizing, you've eaten worse and a lot less healthy.