FENNEL
CAULIFLOWER AND CUMIN
The trick is not to become bored and therefore to use as varied a collection of vegetables as possible. Fennel can be sliced thinly and baked in a small amount of stock in a moderate oven for about 40 minutes, or eaten as a salad with lamb’s lettuce and lemon juice. Add an equal amount of white wine to salted water, bring to the boil, and add leeks cut into about 4-inch lengths and cook until tender. Cauliflower can be broken into florets, dusted with ground cumin, and baked in a very hot oven for about 20 minutes until it tastes sweet and charred and spiced; actually, I think this is the best way to eat cauliflower, diet or no diet.
VEGETABLES WITH GINGER AND GARLIC
ANCHOVIES
Chop any vegetable on hand and cook in a method that combines stir-frying with steaming; throw a small amount of stock in a wok and on a high heat add ginger, garlic, scallions, sugar-snaps, broccoli, fennel, carrots, and baby corn. But all this isn’t just to ring the changes with what might otherwise be thought of as standard diet food. The more strongly food tastes, the fuller it makes you. It’s the depth of the flavor that helps atone for the lack of fat. In the days when I was the hostage of a sandwich bar at lunchtimes, I’d have a low-fat cottage cheese sandwich—no butter—but with anchovies; the saltiness, the aggressive and indelicate invasiveness of those cheap and unsoaked tin-corroded fish made me feel, after it was finished, that something actually had been eaten, whereas a plain cottage cheese sandwich, even on whole-wheat, hardly has the force of personality to make itself felt. You’re not eating; you’re giving the mime performance of a person lunching on a sandwich.
That’s where Thai, especially, and other Southeast Asian cuisines come in; they draw on intense flavors, have a vivid culinary vocabulary, and fill you without supplying much in the way of fat. Italian food, it’s true, is also strong and direct and robustly flavored, but it uses more oil, and that oil, green, pungent, evocative, is not an optional extra. It’s an essential part of the food. And I know it’s supposed to be life-enhancing and healthy but it will still, all oils being equally fattening, make you put on weight. Not that all Italian food uses a lot of it, nor does olive oil have to go completely from your regime. You need only a little. If you add, at the end (rather than at the beginning) of cooking, one teaspoon, a few drops of it even, the glorious taste will come through, virtuous drabness will disappear, and flavors will be revitalized. I often, too, stir about a quarter of a teaspoon of garlic-infused oil into some lemon-squeezed spinach; sesame oil makes itself pungently felt in the most minute quantities.
My concern here is how you go about leading the low-fat life in your own kitchen, but there is one important piece of advice to be applied in the world beyond it. Never say diet. By that I don’t mean you should banish such a foul four-letter word in favor of the smug-speak term, Healthy Eating Plan, but simply that you should never talk about it. Not out loud. Not in public. In the first instance, talking about dieting is a big bore and, in the second, everyone will try, if only out of politeness, to talk you out of it. The third, crucial, element is pure vanity; if you tell people you need to lose weight they will notice that yes, maybe you do need to.
The fortunate truth is that no one is really interested in anyone else. If you don’t tell them you’re on a diet, they won’t even notice. You can eat as little as you want without drawing attention to it and therefore without inviting comment or sabotage, or allowing yourself to use the excuse of others to sabotage the diet yourself. If you want to diet, then you have to take the responsibility yourself, not draft everyone else into the diet police.
When you’re invited to dinner, don’t warn people of your diet or draw attention to it while you’re there. It’s so aggressive to do that, so self-centered, and so dispiriting. And you’ll just be a party-pooper. Once people know about the diet, they’ll feel that you can’t really enjoy yourself until you eat and drink to Rabelaisian excess. They’ll feel you’re being dried up and puritanical and drained of joie de vivre. But if you don’t make an issue of it, they won’t think of looking at your plate.
I find it very difficult to leave food, but if you really want to and can, then be the one to jump up and clear the plates so no one else sees. You have an easy excuse for not drinking; just say you’re driving. But, again, there is no need for anyone really to notice. Just let your glass be filled, but don’t drink it.
There may well be nobler spirits out there, but I find the assault on one’s vanity the hardest thing about dieting. It’s bad enough you need to lose weight, but drawing other people’s attention to it is quite intolerable. And it’s not just weight gain I don’t like people to notice—I can’t bear references to weight loss, either. Call me paranoid, but every time someone says “You’ve lost weight!” I hear “You were fat!”
There is a vexing circularity about the dieting business: it’s easiest to lose weight if you feel self-confident, but it is weight loss that makes you self-confident. But you can work the con trick on yourself. Just as Pascal believed that the act of going to church, of going through the motions of the faithful, led to faith, so if you act thin, you will get thin. “Eat like a thin person” is the best form of dietary advice. And behave like a thin person, too, which means don’t go on about being fat.
Most of the recipes that follow are for one; some are for two. I take the line that that’s how we tend to eat when trying to lose weight. Not everyone wants to get into the strict diet account-keeping needed for a calorie-counted diet, but you may follow the recipes below in the knowledge that all the food here is low-fat and programmed for diminution.
QUICK STUFF, OR SUGGESTIONS FOR ALMOST-THROWN-TOGETHER SUPPERS
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STEAK
Although I subsist mostly on carbohydrates and vegetables when I’m trying to lose weight, I like red meat every now and then when I’m not eating so much; it’s filling, it makes me feel better (in France doctors can still prescribe steak and red wine for patients who are run down), and it seems an efficient use of restricted calories. Fillet is one of the leanest cuts and yields the right, slight, single-portion size (I aim for about 4 ounces to make room for other components, before or after), but if I’ve got a friend over, or just feel like a meaty blowout, I buy an 8-ounce, 3⁄4-inch-thick slab of rump, put it on the griddle, and cook till crusty without, tender and bloody within. Then I take it off the griddle, sprinkle with salt, and leave it to rest on a plate for 5–10 minutes.
Meanwhile, I slice some tomatoes and sprinkle them with salt and balsamic vinegar, or I wilt some spinach. I pour off the juices that have collected on the plate with the steak into a bowl, add some soy sauce or bottled (or make your own, see below) teriyaki sauce. Then I slice the meat in thin slices diagonally across, arrange them on the plate, pour over the bloodied soy, and thickly feather it all with freshly chopped, cave-breath, pungent coriander. If you want a more Italianate version, substitute lemon juice for the soy and arugula for the coriander. Either way, I like to eat this with hot English mustard on the side.
FISH
Salmon and tuna are the fish world’s equivalent of steak. They are oilier than those pallid, white-fleshed varieties, but they are denser, heavier, too, and more robust in flavor. If you can afford the best bass or sole, then just grill and eat it. Squirt with lemon, sprinkle with salt, and, if you’re not being unnecessarily, obsessively strict, dribble over the merest ¼ teaspoon of the most beautiful olive oil (the milder Ligurian for choice) to bring out the sweet, smoky depths of the fish.
POISSON AU POIVRE
Both tuna and salmon can be treated in the same way as steak, either plain broiled or grilled and dressed in soy and herb-sprinkled as above, or coated in crushed pepper and grilled or dry-fried in a nonstick pan to create a juicy piscine take on the bifteck bistro original, poisson au poivre.
TATAKI OF TUNA
At its most basic, tataki of tuna is just a small, thick, fleshy piece of tuna, about 8 ounces, cut from the tail, sea
red on all sides on a smooth griddle or heavy frying pan, and left rare within. It is then left to cool, dunked in ice water, dried well, and sliced very thinly (see, for interest and comparison, though not for low-fat consumption necessarily, the carpaccio on page 138). Slice some scallions into 1½-inch lengths and cut these in half lengthways, too. Arrange on a plate. Then cut the tuna into very thin slices diagonally across. You will see the outline of the brown-crusted exterior, the ruby fleshiness within. You can dress the tuna with ½ tablespoon lime juice mixed with a pinch of sugar and 1 tablespoonful soy sauce and/or serve a piercingly hot dipping sauce of wasabi powder mixed to a thin paste with soy. And if you want to intensify the contrast between the fish steak’s soft, sweet interior and seared, almost bitter, crust, then dredge the tuna in some wasabi powder, too, before grilling it. Sprinkle with coriander and eat with a cucumber salad made by cutting a decent chunk of a cucumber in half, scraping out the seeds, and then cutting the two halves finely so that you have a mound of jadelike, glassy half-moons.
SUGAR-SPICED SALMON WITH CHINESE HOT MUSTARD
From a quirky American book called Pacifica Blue Plates by Neil Stuart, I picked up a way of cooking salmon that has contrast and impact. The title—Sugar-Spiced Salmon with Chinese Hot Mustard—takes almost longer to write than the recipe does to cook. I’ve adapted the original idea (leaving out the stipulated ¼ teaspoon cocoa), but the result, the almost uncooked Day-Glo interior, the crisp, dull bronze but sharp-spiced seared casing around, provides the satisfactions of the original. For an 8-ounce juicy, thick salmon fillet (cut from the top end of the fish), mix ¼ teaspoon each ground ginger, cinnamon, cumin, cayenne, sugar, salt, and (Colman’s) mustard powder. Heat a griddle (smooth side up) or a nonstick pan and, when hot, thickly dredge the fish in the spice mixture and cook for 2–3 minutes per side, or until seared and bronze without, still rare and coral-fleshed within. Remove and let stand while you make the purportedly Chinese hot mustard sauce, just by mixing a teaspoon and a half each of sugar and mustard powder with 1 teaspoon of warm water. I like this with barely cooked sugar-snaps. And the hot, sweet mustard sauce will jumpstart even the dullest piece of plain grilled farmed salmon. If you can find or afford wild salmon, let nothing interfere; save some lemon or the merest ghost of some freshly chopped tarragon.
RICE
Rice and broccoli, doused in ordinary soy sauce or citrus-seasoned soy or sukiyaki sauce, is a quick bowl-to-mouth supper. Basmati rice takes about 10 minutes, though if you keep some frozen in bags, you can nuke a portion in the microwave as soon as you walk in through the door in the evening. (I’m not mad about microwaved broccoli, though.) Sometimes a little bowlful of rice eaten immediately can stop you eating everything in the fridge later. In my more temple-food moods, I go in for brown rice, but it takes ages to cook and sometimes feels like a virtuous rather than a pleasurable choice. Where brown rice really works is in a salad; let the rice get cold, keep it in the fridge, and then you can make a quick supper by adding soy (by itself or with dashi and mirin added), chopped scallions, sugar-snaps, mint, and coriander.
A LITTLE SOMETHING ON TOAST
Less exotically, you should never forget the filling and comforting properties of baked beans or poached eggs on toast. As long as you get whatever’s covering the toast on top of it the minute the toast pops out of the toaster, the lack of butter won’t be a lastingly significant loss.
SMALL BIRDS
A 1-pound poussin is about 400 calories, skin and all—about half that if you can eat it without the skin. I prefer to double my caloric intake by eating it burnished and crisp-skinned; it feels like so much more of a treat. I often cook a couple of these when a girlfriend comes for supper; with it you can make any salad or vegetable you like. I like the lemony, herb-dense, grated beets on page 391.
I also love grouse, partridge, and quail, admittedly not everyday items. Eating the whole of something makes you feel less deprived. Roast grouse plain, which is no hardship either in terms of cooking or eating, and almost braise partridge by cooking it in the oven in a little puddle of stock and chopped vegetables. Shred the cooked meat and stir it into some carrot, onion, and garlic-studded lentils. See also the recipe for lacquered quail, page 389.
TEMPLE FOOD
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Not all the recipes that follow are time-consuming, but I feel they come more into the category of thought-about cooking than the let’s-just-throw-this-into-the-pan mode of food preparation.
AROMATIC CHILI BEEF NOODLE SOUP
This satisfies just about every principle of low-fat cookery, as far as I’m concerned—it’s filling, fragrant, resonant with flavor, and beautiful to look at; it feels like a treat. And there’s a lot of it. Defatted real stock is best, but you can use good bouillon cubes or instant dashi. You can do almost whatever you want to this recipe: cut the steak into strips before marinating it rather than leaving it whole; use duck breast (fat removed and meat sliced before cooking) or venison (sliced after) instead of beef; use any vegetables; use any sort of noodle. See also the recipe for Sunday Night Chicken Noodle (page 145), only use ½ teaspoon of oil when you stir-fry the chicken shreds.
I often make this for my supper using thin slices of pork that have been first dunked, then roasted, in a barbecuey marinade. The recipe for these is on page 399. For this soup variation I use pork bouillon cubes bought from the Thai shop and use bok choy or choy sum or other leafy, cabbagy greens—watercress is nice, too.
2 ounces dried egg noodles
FOR THE STOCK
2 cups beef stock (see headnote)
½-inch piece fresh ginger
1 dried red chili
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 garlic clove, crushed with the flat of a knife
FOR THE BEEF
2 teaspoons soy sauce
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½-inch piece fresh ginger, chopped or put through a garlic press
1 garlic clove, minced
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon chili sauce
4 ounces sirloin steak
2 ounce sugar-snap peas, cut into 2–3 pieces each
2 ounces (small bunch) bok choy, chopped
2 tablespoons chopped Thai basil or coriander
Cook the noodles as directed on the package, drain, rinse in cold water, and drain again. Reserve.
Bring the stock with its allocated aromatics to the boil, then leave to simmer, covered, while you get on with the beef.
In a bowl combine the beef seasonings and then put the beef in. Wipe the bowl with the beef to cover one of its sides with the chili-cinnamon mixture, then turn the beef over to marinate. Leave for 30 minutes. As you put the beef aside, turn the heat off under the stock, but leave the pan with the lid on to let the flavorings infuse the liquid.
Sear the steak on both sides in a hot, nonstick pan. Cook for 2 minutes more on each side on slightly lower heat, then remove the steak to a board to rest a second while you get on with warming the aromatic soup and noodles.
You can either strain the stock into a new saucepan or leave the bits in to be fished out as you eat. Do whichever you prefer, but bring the stock back to boiling point, cook the sugar-snaps and bok choy in it for a minute or so, and put in the cold noodles to heat. After another minute, or when the noodles are hot, add the Thai basil, if using, and pour into a bowl. Slice the steak into thin slices on the diagonal and lay on top and sprinkle with the coriander, if using. Eat with a spoon and soy sauce.
Serves 1.
MUSHROOM UDON SOUP
This is very plain, very calming—the sort of supper I might make myself to get back on track if I’ve gone out and had duck confit with mashed potatoes for lunch.
Dashi is Japanese stock (what brodo is to the Italians) and, although you can make it yourself, I advise buying dashi-no-moto, which is the dashi equivalent of stock cubes. I buy mine in a liquid version, which you mix in the ratio of 1 teaspoon of dashi-no-moto to 1 cup water. If you have problems
finding the instant dashi liquid, see page 462 for a source.
8 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in 1¼ cups hot water for 10 minutes to soften
few drops soy sauce
1 teaspoon liquid instant dashi, plus more, if desired
2 ounces dried udon noodles
few drops sesame oil (optional)
2 tablespoons chopped parsley or coriander
Strain the mushroom water into a saucepan and add the soy sauce and instant dashi. Remove the stalks from the mushrooms, squeeze the caps a little to release excess water, and add the caps to the pan. Bring to a boil and add the noodles. When cooked, pour into a bowl and sprinkle over the merest drop or two of sesame oil, if using, more dashi to taste, and the parsley or coriander.
Serves 1.
The following recipe has almost the same ingredients, but is very different in character: more bolstering, stronger-flavored, and generally just more solid.
BRAISED DRIED SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS WITH SOBA NOODLES
Like the recipe above, once you’ve got yourself organized, this is a good pantry standby. The braised mushrooms come via the Japanese Vegetarian Cookbook by Patricia Richfield; I add them to a capacious plateful of cooked and soy-tossed buckwheat soba noodles. The graininess of the buckwheat is just the right foil to the dense-flavored and salty shiitake.
8 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in 1¼ cups hot water for 30 minutes to soften
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoon sake
How to Eat Page 50