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Culinary Intelligence: The Art of Eating Healthy (and Really Well) - Hardcover

Kaminsky, Peter

 
9780307593375: Culinary Intelligence: The Art of Eating Healthy (and Really Well)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307593371 ISBN 13: 9780307593375
Verlag: KNOPF, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

For many of us the idea of healthy eating equals bland food, calorie counting, and general joylessness. Or we see the task of great cooking for ourselves as a complicated and expensive luxury beyond our means or ability. Now Peter Kaminsky—who has written cookbooks with four-star chefs (for example, Daniel Boulud) and no-star chefs (such as football legend John Madden)—shows us that anyone can learn to eat food that is absolutely delicious and doesn’t give you a permanently creeping waistline.
Just a couple years ago, Kaminsky found himself facing a tough choice: lose weight or suffer the consequences. For twenty years, he had been living the life of a hedonistic food and outdoors writer, an endless and luxurious feast. Predictably, obesity and the very real prospect of diabetes followed. Things had to change. But how could he manage to get healthy without giving up the things that made life so pleasurable? In Culinary Intelligence, Kaminsky tells how he lost thirty-five pounds and kept them off by thinking more—not less—about food, and he shows us how to eat in a healthy way without sacrificing the fun and pleasure in food.
Culinary Intelligence shows us how we can do this in everyday life: thinking before eating, choosing good ingredients, understanding how flavor works, and making the effort to cook. Kaminsky tells us what we need to give up (most fast food and all junk food) and what we can enjoy in moderation (dessert and booze), but he also shows us how to tantalize our tastebuds by maximizing flavor per calorie, and he makes delectably clear that if we eat delicious, flavorful foods, we’ll find ourselves satisfied with smaller portions while still enjoying one of life’s great pleasures.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Kaminsky wrote Underground Gourmet for New York magazine for four years, and his Outdoors column appeared in The New York Times for twenty years. He is a longtime contributor to Food & Wine, and the former managing editor of National Lampoon. His books include Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine, The Moon Pulled Up an Acre of Bass, The Elements of Taste (with Gray Kunz), Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way (with Francis Mallmann), Letters to a Young Chef (with Daniel Boulud), Celebrate! (with Sheila Lukins), and John Madden’s Ultimate Tailgating. He is a creator and executive producer of the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, on PBS.

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CHAPTER I    My Occupational Hazard

Some people are born with perfect pitch. I’m not one of them, but I have something akin to that when it comes to food. I was born with a taste in my mouth, in much the same way that a songwriter is born with a tune in his head. Taste and its kiss- ing cousin, aroma, affect me powerfully. When my downstairs neighbor browns onions, the sweet and sharp scents rise up through the stairwell of our Brooklyn brownstone, carrying with them memories of my grandmother’s brisket, my moth- er’s smothered chicken, or a street vendor’s sausage sandwiches at the Feast of San Gennaro.
In the DNA lottery, I inherited a very acute palate and an equally sensitive sniffer. Just a pinch of tarragon hits me like the blast of a steam room. A couple of drops of sesame oil focuses my attention the way the scent of a trembling pheasant agitates a bird dog. I’m not saying that I can tell you what kind of oak dropped the acorns that fed the pig who ended up on my plate as a slice of Spanish ham. But I could never confuse the flesh of such a noble hog with the bland waterlogged ham from a factory-raised pig.

This obsession with taste can be a little maddening to friends and family, especially when we go to a restaurant. If, for exam- ple, a waiter passes by with a plate of coq au vin, my head will snap around as I breathe in the seductive smells. At such times I’ll check out of the conversation, trying to determine exactly which herbs and spices are in a dish. It’s not that I need to be right. It’s a compulsive culinary crossword puzzle that I conduct with myself. I can’t help it.

This isn’t bragging. I’m stating a fact about myself that I only fully recognized when I was well into adulthood. Until then, I thought everyone was like me: assaulted all day long by fusil- lades of flavor and irresistible aromas. It took me a long time to realize that not everyone inhaled and ingested their way through life this way. In fact, only about 4 percent of the population has this, er, gift—and it explains why so many of us turn out to be chefs, restaurateurs, sommeliers, winemakers, restaurant critics, cookbook authors, and bloggers of the alliance of press and pan- try that I call the “foodoisie.” In a way, it’s their destiny for the same reason that tall men with impressive leaping skills become basketball players, smaller men with great eye-hand coordina- tion become golfers, socially awkward undergrads become Inter- net billionaires. For those of us who end up in the food world, to borrow a phrase from nouvelle-cuisine master Alain Senderens, “the table beckons.” Always.

For the first half of my life, I was not fully aware that I was a member of the foodoisie. True, I loved food—eating it and cooking it—but it was a hobby, not an occupational hazard. When writing about food became my occupation, the professional pursuit of pleasure put on pounds and screwed up my body chemistry. The choice was clear: mend my munching or fast-forward to Judgment Day. In terms of a healthy diet, I real- ized that although I ate wonderful rarefied food I was still a typical American in my eating habits, because, whether you are scarfing down scoops of Cherry Garcia with butterscotch sauce or dining on béarnaise-bathed filet mignon and butter-browned potatoes Anna, it all puts you on a glide path to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and all other so-called diseases of civilization. Maybe better to call them “illnesses of indulgence.”

This book is the result of my truly insatiable appetite for the pleasures of the table and my equally strong urge to survive. Rather than forgo health on the one hand, or hedonism on the other, I believe that the two can coexist quite happily.

The event that brought me into the full-time food world occurred on December 18, 1994. Two days before, my daughter Lucy and I caught a dozen blackfish off Coney Island. Before then, my résumé was as typically wide-ranging and inconsistent as any freelancer’s. I had been an itinerant humor writer, shuttling between magazines such as National Lampoon (where I was managing editor) and the life of a joke writer and producer of comedy television. It was a wacko, nerve-racking way to make a living, raise a family, and, on the first of most months, pay the mortgage. To balance out this unsettled existence, a generous act of fate guided me to the serene pastime of fishing. It took over my life, converted me into a hunting-and-fishing journalist, and eventually led to my own “Outdoors” column in the New York Times.

In 1994, I wrote a series of columns called “A Season on the Harbor.” Each month I reported on a different fishing excursion in New York City waters. It may come as a surprise to some, but the Big Apple has 578 miles of coastline once you stretch out all the curves and crannies. It is home at different times of the year to hundreds of millions of striped bass, bluefish, shad, weakfish, lobsters, oysters, clams, and mussels. Researching those columns was heaven to me: casting into acres of striped bass beating the waves to a froth off Runway 9 at JFK (where jets with low- ered landing gears came haircut close), or laying my rod across the gunwales of my boat to take in a fireworks display over the Statue of Liberty with no other soul in sight.
In early December, for the last piece in the series, Lucy and I went out for blackfish, a local quarry that looks like a mahimahi that has been mugged and left for dead. Looks notwithstand- ing, it is quite delicious. On a blustery but fishable day, we boarded a local pay-to-fish boat out of Sheepshead Bay, Brook- lyn. The regulars huddled inside the cabin, stowing their rods in the corner and settling into the more consequential business of penny-a-point pinochle. On deck, next to Lucy and me, an affable angler named Eddie Dols pulled in fish after fish. Eddie was generous with his knowledge and showed us how to detect a bite. He had spent his working years as the keeper of Olaf, the walrus at the Coney Island Aquarium. Lucy and I left the boat with two dozen blackfish fillets in our cooler.

The next day, I had scheduled my annual Christmas lunch with my college roommate, Vinnie Farrell, at ‘21’ Club in Man- hattan. The chef was Michael Lomonaco, who has since gone on to numerous television appearances and is in the history books as the guy who went to pick up his eyeglasses rather than taking the elevator to his restaurant in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. I knew Lomonaco as a fellow fisherman, with whom I had shared advice on tackle, lures, and general fishing lore.

I phoned him with a request.

“Hey, Mike, I caught a bunch of blackfish. If I bring them in, could you cook some for me and Vinnie? You can sell the rest.”

“No problem,” he answered, as I knew he would.

The next day found me waiting in the coat-check line at ‘21’ Club, with my little red Igloo cooler in hand and Frank Gifford and Ethel Kennedy just ahead of me. All in all, the ritziest coat- check line I’d ever been on.

“Did you bring your lunch?” Gifford asked in jest.

“As a matter of fact, I did.” With that we fell into conversation. I learned that Gifford had taken the occasional striper off Long Island Sound, near his Connecticut home.

Lomonaco invited me into the kitchen. This took place before images of the controlled chaos of restaurant kitchens had become a staple of television programming. True, I had flipped burgers in summer camp in the Poconos, and worked as a counterman at Cohen’s Famous Knishes in West Orange, New Jersey, but it was not until that day at...

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Verlag
KNOPF
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307593371
ISBN 13 
9780307593375
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
258
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Verantwortliche Person
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