Posts Categorized: Expert Chef

Taste experience that doesn’t result in a new pant size experience

by in Expert Chef

Erin Dow

I am a sucker for dips. Nothing satisfies me more than something creamy and piquant spread on something texturally satisfying. A truly fundamental exercise in Cooking 101, dips and spreads teach us the value of combining simply prepared and minimally processed ingredients into exciting new taste experiences. Unfortunately, I’ve also learned over the years that when the go-to dip starts with cream cheese or sour cream, the new taste experience can result in a new pant size experience as well.

Hummus is a delicious and nutritious dip, but its ubiquity has made it a tad boring for me lately. So looking to my pantry and finding a few cans of black beans kicking around, I naturally started toying with a recipe for a Mexican-style dip: something creamy, crunchy, tangy, and most of all, healthy. The end result is a dip that is very guacamole-like. I guarantee if you like a good lime-y guac, you’ll love this. My goal with this recipe was to create something that I would feel proud to eat for a meal, and frankly, used as a quesadilla filling or as a stuffing for peppers in a raw vegan dish, I think it works. The more I toyed around with this spread, the more ideas I had for its use.

The key to this recipe is the balance of the flavor components within it. Carrots and bell pepper add vitamins and a sweetness that offsets the slightly bitter taste of the black beans. Avocado adds a creamy mouth-feel. The lime juice compensates for the lower sodium content, tricking your brain into thinking the dip is saltier than it is. The green onion, tomatoes, and cilantro brighten the dull (but creamy and super-nutritious) nature of the black beans. The secret ingredient in this recipe, believe it or not, is one measly teaspoon of honey, which brings everything together perfectly. You may try to convince yourself you don’t need to bother with it, but try it before and after, and you’ll be a believer, too!..

Taste experience that doesn’t result in a new pant size experience

Whole Food: The New Convenience Food

by in Expert Chef

Erin Dow

I’m fairly certain we can all agree that focusing our menus on the most pure, unrefined, and natural foods possible makes good sense. We all agree—at least in theory–that fresh fruits and vegetables, lean fish and meats, legumes, and grains provide our bodies with the easiest access to the nutrients we need and allow us to avoid the preservatives, trans-fats, and other undesirable elements of convenience foods. Eaten in reasonable portions, these foods help us to naturally maintain a healthy weight because they’re inherently balanced in terms of fat, fiber, sugars, and salt, and they’re filling to boot.

But in a world full of people living busy lives and balancing grocery budgets, this preferable model is very often perceived as near impossible to embrace because: 1) processed foods are often cheaper than their healthy counterparts; 2) our unfamiliarity with exciting whole food options breeds boredom with the status quo and a suspicion of new possibilities; and 3) there exists an assumption that non-convenience foods are neither convenient to make nor delicious to eat.

There exists a whole world of exciting, budget-friendly, and easy possibilities that I hope to highlight in my next few articles, and the recipe below highlights just how dynamic whole foods can be. Eschewed in favor of pasta or white rice, whole grains are very often overlooked as a convenient and neutral base for all sorts of interesting taste experiences. Quinoa, amaranth, millet, wheat berries, and barley are some of my favorites because they are texturally exciting, they’re low-cost, and they’re highly nutritious. When cooked, they can be combined when warm or cold with just about anything you like to create a main meal, a salad, or a side dish.

My wheat berry salad–adapted from Heidi Swanson’s recipe to accommodate the very specific dietary requirements of a catering client—balances the chewy texture of soft wheat berries with a bit of piquant feta cheese, healthy almonds, a very light citrus vinaigrette, and a ton of veggies.

If desired, this recipe can be served hot as a side dish. You can swap out the spinach orange, and tomatoes for black beans, lime, and peppers for a Mexican flair. The recipe is infinitely adaptable, as are all whole food recipes; because, when the starting point is the purest and most natural permutation of food, your imagination is your only limitation…

Whole Food: The New Convenience Food

Cooking for Anthony Bourdain

by in Expert Chef, Gourmet

Erin Dow

I’ve been tour catering for almost 14 years now, and it’s been a trip-literally and figuratively. We’ve been all over the country catering to the nutritional requirements, the dietary and religious restrictions, the emotional needs, and frankly, the sometimes wacky whims of the music industry elite. We do raw, vegan and vegetarian. We’ve done menus sensitive to Halal Haram, Kashrut, and even Rastafarianism. We’ve done macrobiotic in Boston in May and turned around, headed to the Everglades, and cooked whole goats in Budweiser with the Seminole Tribe. Our industry forces our hand; it necessitates that we be jacks of all trades AND masters of them all, because as I’m sure you can imagine our clients want what they want when they want it. Period.

We cook backstage for those people you buy tickets to see perform with their bands. If you’ve seen them on MTV, bought an album, listened to the radio, we’ve probably served them food. We’re cooks who like music. But we’re also cooks who like other cooks, and that’s why we were very excited to learn that chef and television food traveler Anthony Bourdain was scheduled to speak at a venue at which we are the house caterers.

Now, Anthony Bourdain is as much a rock star to me as is Mick Jagger or Bruce Springsteen. But unlike a music tour, Bourdain’s advance people provided no guidance for catering; rather, they only suggested that he “may or may not eat.” Well, okay. That left things kind of wide open, and not in a good way since this man has traveled and eaten around the world, chums around with the greatest chefs in the universe, and is himself a guest chef on “Top Chef.” This was a very new and very daunting twist on tour catering.

The solution came rather easily, though, as I contemplated what I would want to eat if I were visiting a locale. I knew he had just finished filming an episode of “No Reservations” in Maine, and I decided I would give him a taste of my interpretation of what Maine has to offer: local, seasonal, and healthful. I spent hours making Boudin Blanc, fine-textured white sausages from local pork, chicken, eggs, and onions from my own property, and served them with Raye’s mustard, blueberry preserves, and bread-and-butter pickles I had canned in the fall. I made a butternut squash and apple bisque with leeks and bacon, again local, finished with syrup from Aroostook County.

While he was eating with us in the kitchen, we talked about traveling, about what we do, about the finer and not-so-fine points of eating in Maine, and about our mutual dislike of certain unnamed Food Network personalities. I asked him one thing I had been dying to know, namely how he manages to not weigh 500 pounds when he’s constantly faced with the best the world has to offer. His answer? “Well, I’m not necessarily trying to maintain my girlish figure, but it’s pretty simple. No snacks. No sweets. Ever.” I laughed and replied, “Ah, so you’ve cracked the elusive nutrition code: moderation.” He agreed, remarking that his cycle of eating never stops, because even when he’s done filming his show and returns home, his chef friends swarm him. As Bourdain said, “They call me up, with their French accents, saying, ‘Come Toneee. Daniel haz prepared zum beautifool foods for us to enjoys togetter.’” So if his evening involves a little over-indulgence, lunch is light, and a slip-up—or a few—isn’t going to ruin everything. In fact, having reasonable portions of one’s favorite foods often satisfies one’s needs so effectively that those incidences of over-indulgence become fewer and more far-between. As Oscar Wilde famously mused, “Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

So what we can learn from the man who eats everything and still maintains his figure? Eat well, watch your intake, enjoy a little bit of everything all of the time, and balance will come naturally…

Cooking for Anthony Bourdain