EAT WHAT YOU LOVE
I’M GOING TO put the best thing I heard in all my interviews right out front: Eat the food you love.
One of the great pleasures in talking to chefs is hearing these pros go all swoony over the dishes, or the simple ingredients, that they adore. Ming Tsai thinks a late-night bowl of ramen is “freakin’ delicious.” When she lived in Paris as a young chef, Alex Guarnaschelli used to keep a quart of cream in her refrigerator and take a sip from it every so often, just because “I love the taste of French cream,” she tells me. Michelle Bernstein: “My mother’s carrot cake—one of the best things I’ve had in my life.” Marc Murphy: “Steak, sweetbreads, a little foie gras terrine . . .”
How can any of these foods stay in a person’s life and not cause those who partake to pack on the pounds? For one, there is a big difference between eating only what you love and eating whatever you like. Eating what you love means limiting yourself to only the foods you really, truly enjoy and not wasting time (or calories or fat grams or net carbs or whatever it makes you feel good to count) eating what you do not absolutely adore. Eating this way relies on the notion that if you get exactly what you want, you don’t need a lot of it. It is not as if Guarnaschelli was downing a glass of cream a day; just a sip was enough. More is not necessarily better.
Because they include the foods they love, chefs’ diets, even when restrained, remain a source of pleasure. An eating plan that is filled with food you love is one that’s pretty easy to stick to. Here, a few more philosophies to bring to the table.
Lesson 1: Smart chefs surround themselves with real food they love
“People don’t realize you can eat a lot of good food—but you can’t eat garbage food,” says Michael Psilakis, chef at the first Greek restaurant in America to earn a Michelin star. He achieved a major slim-down—the kind that reality shows with before-and-after photos are built on—by eating many of the things he loves. (He shares the details in Chapter 14.) So what does he mean by good food? For one, dishes made from high-quality, real ingredients that are minimally processed. But no less important: food that tastes good to him.
Rick Bayless, America’s dean of Mexican cuisine, shares that perspective: “My life is all about good food,” says Bayless, a fourth-generation restaurateur and chef for more than thirty years. Today Bayless is as slender as he was as a young man in Oklahoma City. One reason? “When you eat good food, it satisfies you and you don’t have to be gluttonous about it. I’d rather have one bite of a great dish than fifty bites of a mediocre dish,” he says.
If that seems an obvious point—who wouldn’t rather have great food than mediocre?—consider how often we settle for less than spectacular. For instance, what did you have for lunch yesterday? (Me: a spongy chicken banh mi from the sandwich shop next to my office; won’t get that again.) Think of all the times when you eat something so-so, because it was more convenient, or cheaper, or faster.
The solution is to replace the so-so with the great. But for you to do that, great food needs to be available. That means keeping the great food you love on hand in your kitchen, choosing restaurants that serve it, and even sometimes packing your own lunch in order to avoid the sad food often consumed at a desk. This took me ages to learn and I really fought it: Can a person who can barely decide what to have for breakfast really be expected to plan lunch at the same time?
It helps to think of the home kitchen a bit like a restaurant kitchen, not in terms of preparing fancy meals, but in terms of stocking the basics of your menu. “What I want to eat is the stuff that is going to keep me the size I am,” says Bayless. Me too. So that means that this week I’m probably going to eat at least one meal that includes salmon, another with some kind of canned bean—I’m terrible at remembering to soak dried beans ahead of time—a few that include some salad or spinach, and I’m going to want some Greek yogurt most mornings and I’ll be grumpy if there isn’t ripe fruit to go with it. In the extremely exclusive restaurant that is my apartment dining room, these are the usuals, and I need to keep a constant supply of the components that make up these meals (if yogurt and a banana qualifies as a meal). You know how you feel when you go to an actual restaurant and they have eighty-sixed your favorite dish? Don’t do that to yourself.
Bayless has made it easy: When he’s home in Chicago he eats from his own menus at Topolobampo or Frontera Grill or XOCO twice a day. “It’s how I keep track of what it’s like to be a guest,” he explains. But if he’s away, and good food isn’t readily available, Bayless won’t nosh on whatever junk is around. “My family laughs at me about this, but I’ll skip a meal if I don’t think there’s anything good enough to eat.”
Don’t suppose that Bayless is skipping a lot of meals. On the contrary, he makes a point of affording himself great eating opportunities, whether he’s going out, or on the job at the restaurant, or taping his PBS show. “I feel so blessed, because I’m around really good food all the time. People who don’t work around food are always thinking that because I’m surrounded by good food that I’m just going to gobble it, I’m going to eat it all of the time, because who can resist? But the more you’re around good food and appreciate it, the less you have to have to be satisfied.”
I got a crash course in implementing this philosophy at the place where I first meet Bayless—the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, a four-day charity event in Miami with scads of celebrity and local chefs outdoing one another. This isn’t an environment that lends itself to moderation. He is serving pulled-pork tacos, a nod to his parents’ barbecue restaurant and his own haute Mexican cuisine. They are one of several dozen barbecue dishes on offer at the festival’s famous “BubbleQ,” a barbecue with champagne. His taco is a perfect few bites. But also here are offerings from Bobby Flay and Jonathan Waxman and Elizabeth Karmel and Todd English, and the list goes on. Do I need to try all the barbecue? Of course not. I congratulate myself on showing restraint. Later, at another tasting party, I completely blow it at the dessert table. What can I say? It’s a process. Did I really love all those desserts I sampled? No, not really.
Lesson learned: If something doesn’t offer a lot of pleasure, I should not be eating it. Have I ever craved the taste of a protein bar? No, never. Have I ever wolfed down a greasy bag of movie popcorn and thought, “That was delicious—even better than the film”? No, not once. (Okay, possibly once, during the last hour of the interminable Tom Cruise sci-fi fake-out Vanilla Sky. But other than that, no.) Have I ever finished a boring restaurant meal because I was paying for it or, for that matter, because I wasn’t paying for it? Cut out food about which you are unenthusiastic, and you’ll save countless wasted calories.
Lesson 2: They never feel guilty about eating what they love
Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert tells me is he asked in interviews, “What is your guilty pleasure?” He’s flummoxed each time. “To me it is inconceivable to have guilt about eating,” says the Antibes-born chef. “I was educated from a young age to eat good food—good-quality ingredients, and in moderation. Feeling guilty about eating is an American idea. When you eat and you feel guilt, it’s not edifying; you’re just putting things in your stomach. Maybe that is why people are overweight?” he ventures.
If there are no “guilty pleasures,” does it then follow that there are no foods that you can never eat? Chefs would say there’s nothing that you should never eat. Deciding to ban a particular food, or group of foods, is not an easy option for chefs, who prefer to have the full spectrum of flavors and textures available to them. Furthermore, says Craft’s Tom Colicchio, “Diets don’t work when you tell people they can’t have something. You can eat anything; it’s about eating less. I’m eating fewer ‘white things’ but haven’t cut them out.” (White things = white bread, white sugar, white potatoes.)
Rather than put foods on the banned list, chefs enjoy them less frequently. In that previous sentence you may feel that the key phrase is “less frequently.” Fair enough. I would argue that equally significant is “enjoy them.” Once in a while, enjoy your favorites—really enjoy them, no guilt. A sampling of chefs and their once-in-a-while treats:
Blue Ginger’s Ming Tsai says, “I can go without sweets,” but he won’t give up fried foods. “I mean, come on—onion rings? French fries? Potato chips?”
“Sweets and bread are my downfall,” says Wolfgang Puck of Spago in Beverly Hills. “My favorite thing is coffee macarons. I tell our pastry chef, ‘Why don’t you make coffee macarons, for a cookie plate?’ Then she makes them, and I eat them. Then I tell her, ‘Why did you make coffee macarons? You know I eat them,’” he says, laughing.
“They used to call me the queen of foie gras, because I ordered more foie and used more foie than anybody in Miami,” says Sra. Martinez chef-owner Michelle Bernstein. “I would make it for someone, taste a little bit. Make some, taste some more. I still serve it sometimes, but now I’m eating it maybe once a year.” Indeed, she lived up to her old title for a food festival event, making hundreds of small portions of foie gras mousse with kumquat gelée, duck rillettes, and chicharon salad. That’s more like a once-in-a-decade concoction.
In addition to not denying themselves completely, smart chefs come up with coping rules so that they can happily enjoy their favorite foods mindfully, with some boundaries. Bread was often cited as a must-have, but with some caveats.
“If I eat bread at home, it’s special bread that someone made,” says Andrea Reusing of Chapel Hill’s Lantern restaurant. “My brothers and I always made fun of my mom when we wanted white bread and she’d say, ‘Empty calories! It’s just empty calories!’ But that’s the right approach: to never eat empty calories. Eating things that are nutritionally dense is good.”
Once in a while Rick Moonen, in Las Vegas, likes to treat himself to an In-N-Out burger, but says he can do without the bread. He orders the not-on-the-menu “protein wrap,” which is a burger with all the fixings tucked into iceberg lettuce leaves instead of a bun. “You have to know to ask for it,” he tells me furtively. “Wink-wink, say no more.”
Nancy Silverton made her name in the Los Angeles food scene with the La Brea Bakery; there’s no way she’s giving up bread. “I eat some bread every day. I don’t know when [low-carb diets] became such an obsession, but it was a few years after we opened the bakery,” recalls Silverton. “We thought we would feel some backlash. But what we found was that it really didn’t affect us—it almost helped us. Rather than people eliminating all carbohydrates from their diet, I think it made them choose more carefully. People requested more whole-grain than just white-flour bread. Rather than eating an inferior bread daily, they would eat it less frequently, but choose quality and better taste.”
Lesson 3: They are picky eaters
Donatella Arpaia is adamant about never finishing a blah dish—even if it is one she ordered herself. “If I don’t like something, or it is not exactly what I want, I won’t eat it,” says Arpaia, owner of Donatella in New York, as well as a cooking school grad who could have been a contender in the kitchen. “I just stop. I don’t care. I got over my thing about wasting food and leaving your plate half-full.”
I’m not advocating for wastefulness—few things offend me more, save for competitive eating contests. (Is that the way to honor our country on the Fourth of July? I think not.) But once the food reaches your plate, it does seem wise to eat only what is appealing and leave behind anything not that exciting. Don’t eat it out of obligation, or just because it’s there.
This was a practice Arpaia figured out over time. “Because I’m a woman, and I was younger than most people in this industry when I started, everyone was constantly dissecting my body. Every day I got a comment: ‘You look fat.’ ‘You look skinny.’ ‘You look much better now.’ You kidding me? And it was always fat old men saying this.”
She learned to tune out the comments, but still had her own reasons for wanting to watch how she eats. “I like clothes. How am I going to stay thin, but do what I do? I had to create rules for myself. When I was younger I would clean my plate, two portions full.” Or she would catch herself eating a dessert that didn’t really knock her socks off, just because it had been placed before her. “Now,” says Arpaia, “if I’m going to have chocolate, it’s going to be Payard, the best chocolate, and I’m going to enjoy it and eat a small portion of it instead of something inferior, like sugar-free cookies.”
It is a strong argument for a little snobbism, I think. Once I started thinking of myself as the kind of person who eats only the best chocolate, the great wall of candy bars at the grocery checkout became all but invisible to me. The vending machine just steps away from my office door? I no longer think of it as containing anything edible; it’s more like an art installation celebrating things I used to eat at four p.m., when I was desperate for sugar and salt.
Picky eating isn’t just for grown-ups. Raising your kid as a (polite, well-mannered) food snob is fun too. I knew that I didn’t want my son to eat only chicken fingers and buttered noodles from children’s menus, and so made an effort to introduce him to great food early. But just as important as getting him hooked on real food was teaching him what not to eat. At a young age, he was let in on a grown-up secret: “They need the clown and the toys in the meals because the food is so terrible,” I told him, “and why would you want to eat terrible food?” Which doesn’t mean he never gets French fries, just infrequently, and never from a clown. It’s a lot easier to learn good habits early than to have to unlearn them later.
Lesson 4: They know exactly what they want to eat
You might be able to say, in general, which foods you love. But what do you feel like eating right now? Chefs think about food a lot. It doesn’t mean they necessarily always eat what they are thinking about, but we should all be so in tune with our own desires. Says New York chef Alex Guarnaschelli, “You can’t not honor the love and temptation you feel toward food and stay true to yourself. You might be thinner, but you lose something.” Guarnaschelli was cautious when I approached her to find out how she eats. Although she achieved a sixty-pound post-baby weight loss, she still considers herself very much a work in progress. “It’s something I’m learning: the idea of staying true to what you want to eat and cook.”
When you deny yourself what you’re craving in favor of something you believe you’re supposed to eat, you’re left wanting. Better to get what you really want, and eat only that. Acclaimed pastry chef and chocolatier Jacques Torres knows what to eat to lose weight—he dropped thirty pounds while remaining on full-time Willy Wonka duty. What he also knows is that if what you really want some evening is a baguette and a round of vacherin, there is very little point in making yourself steamed fish and vegetables. Somehow, after your virtuous dinner, you will find a way to get bread and cheese, even if it requires digging like a gopher to the back wall of your refrigerator, only to locate the lowly substitute of a smear of cream cheese on the rump end of pumpernickel. (Yes, it is possible this is a scenario drawn from my own life; who needs to know?) So sometimes he will say to his wife, Hasty, a chocolatier with her own shop, “How about we have cheese for dinner?”
Can he do this every night? No, of course not. It would be irresponsible to let you believe you can eat cheese for dinner nightly and not put on weight. But by letting himself occasionally indulge in a bread, wine, and cheese dinner that looks like a Seurat picnic, he avoids looking like a Botero.
Rick Bayless’s Grilled Chicken Salad with Rustic Guacamole
This simple dish uses chilies, lime, and cilantro to transcend the dieter’s staple of salad and chicken. And it’s dead easy: You make a batch of the sauce, then use a third of it to marinate the chicken, a third of it to season the guacamole, and the final third to dress the salad. Remarkably, this repeated usage doesn’t taste like sameness, but like different notes in close harmony. While I am generally a proponent of forging ahead with a recipe even when you don’t have every last ingredient, I urge you not to leave off the sprinkling of aged cheese—those sorts of small additions add flavor and satisfaction.
serves 4
FOR THE DRESSING:
½ cup vegetable or olive oil, plus a little more for the onion
4 garlic cloves, peeled and cut in half lengthwise
Fresh hot green chilies to taste (Rick likes 2 serranos or 1 large jalapeño), stemmed and halved
½ cup fresh lime juice
¾ cup (loosely packed) roughly chopped cilantro
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
Salt to taste
FOR THE SALAD:
4 medium (about 1¼ pounds total) boneless, skinless chicken breast halves
1 medium white onion, cut into ½-inch slices
2 ripe avocados
Romaine hearts, sliced crosswise at ½-inch thick (about 8 cups)
About ⅓ cup grated Mexican queso añejo (or pecorino Romano or Parmesan)
1. Heat the oil in a small skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and chilies, and cook, stirring frequently, until the garlic is soft and lightly browned, about 1 to 2 minutes. Place the oil, garlic, and chilies into a blender or food processor. Add the lime juice, cilantro, and 1 scant teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon black pepper. Process until smooth. Pour ⅓ of the garlic mixture over the chicken breasts, spreading it evenly over all sides.
2. Heat a gas grill or grill pan over medium to medium-high (or start a charcoal fire and let it burn until the coals are medium-hot and covered with white ash). Lightly brush or spray the onion slices with oil; sprinkle both sides with salt. Lay the chicken and onion on the grill or grill pan. Cook until the chicken is just cooked through and the onion is well browned, 3 to 4 minutes on each side.
3. Chop the onion into small pieces and place into a small bowl. Pit and peel the avocados, scooping the flesh, and add to the bowl with the onion. Add another ⅓ of the garlic mixture, then coarsely mash everything together with an old-fashioned potato masher, large fork, or back of spoon. Taste and season with salt, usually about ½ teaspoon.
4. Place the sliced romaine into a large bowl. Drizzle on the remaining ⅓ of the garlic mixture and toss to combine. Divide between 4 dinner plates. Scoop a portion of the guacamole into the center of each plate. Cut each breast into cubes and arrange over the guacamole. Sprinkle each plate with the grated cheese. Serve.
Adapted from Mexican Everyday by Rick Bayless with Deann Groen Bayless. W. W. Norton and Company, 2005.
Wolfgang Puck’s Provençal Salmon with Tomato-basil Sauce
The sauce can be made a day ahead, so on a weeknight all you will have to do is broil the fish. A nonreactive bowl is one made from glass or stainless steel—not plastic, copper, or most other metals, which can react to the acid in foods like lemon or tomatoes. One more thing: Don’t freeze; fresh tomatoes don’t do well after being frozen and thawed.
serves 4
FOR THE SAUCE:
3 large ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and finely chopped
2 small shallots, minced
½ cup chopped fresh organic basil leaves
½ teaspoon lemon zest, finely grated, or more to taste
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
4 teaspoons sherry wine vinegar
2 teaspoons minced fresh chives
2 teaspoons minced fresh tarragon
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Cayenne pepper to taste
4 salmon fillets, about 6 ounces each, preferably wild-caught from Alaska
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
6 small sprigs fresh organic basil for garnish
1. Make the sauce several hours in advance or the night before. In a nonreactive mixing bowl stir together the tomatoes, shallots, basil, lemon zest, olive oil, vinegar, chives, and tarragon. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and a little cayenne. Cover the bowl and leave at room temperature to marinate for several hours or overnight in the refrigerator to allow the flavors to meld.
2. About ½ hour before serving time, preheat the oven to 400ºF. Cover a baking sheet with foil and lightly oil the foil. Brush the salmon fillets with olive oil, season them with salt and pepper, and arrange them on a baking sheet. Cook until the top is very lightly browned and the flesh is still slightly pink in the center, 7 to 8 minutes, depending on thickness of the fish. Meanwhile, taste the sauce and, if necessary, adjust the seasonings to taste.
3. Spoon a generous amount of the sauce onto the middle of each of 6 heated serving plates. Place the salmon fillets on top of the sauce. Top each fillet with a basil sprig. Serve immediately, passing any remaining sauce separately.
Adapted from Wolfgang Puck Makes It Easy by Wolfgang Puck. Rutledge Hill Press, 2004.
Alexandra Guarnaschelli’s Twitter Feed
One of my favorite digital-age pastimes is following chefs on Twitter.com. Fans use it to connect with celebrities, and I admit that I’ve used it to publically express my thanks for a recipe that worked well or to ask a cooking question and—voilà!—get an answer. By just observing throughout any given day, you can get 140-character glimpses into the food they are preparing, serving, eating, or daydreaming about.
In my opinion, the lyric poet of this extremely modern form is Alex Guarnaschelli, the executive chef of Butter restaurant and the Darby, a supper club, both in New York City. Alex is the daughter of a professor/therapist father (who used to make her meatballs) and a mother who is the noted editor of, among many, many other cookbooks, the 1997 edition of The Joy of Cooking, which, incidentally, was the first engagement gift I received. Perhaps that combination of genes somehow contributed to her perceptive and sensual writing about food, even on this new, strange, small scale. Here, a few of her musings:
27 Feb @guarnaschelli—Cannot stop thinking about a slice of warm, freshly baked onion bread with cream cheese (that melts ever so slightly), smoked salmon, lemon.
5 April @guarnaschelli—Have you ever dunked a french fry in ketchup and felt a small sizzle as the hot fry meets the super cold ketchup?
23 April @guarnaschelli—Roasted asparagus with shaved Parmesan, black pepper, lemon, and a poached egg. Egg oozes so elegantly.
10 May @guarnaschelli—Seriously browned pork sausage links w parsley, garlic, onions. Fried egg on top, toasted brioche w cinnamon, salted butter. Criminally good.
26 June @guarnaschelli—Roasted some apricots and raspberries and topped with a scoop of olive oil ice cream. Unreal.
“I have a love affair with food, for sure,” Alex tells me. “What I write on Twitter is true. People say, ‘This isn’t you.’ How could it not be me? At four a.m. I’m eating fried chicken in the fridge—that’s not me? Come on.”
What moves her to write a quick culinary mash note? “Sometimes it’s something I eat; sometimes it’s something I cook for someone else; sometimes it’s something I see that makes me want it,” says Alex. When I asked, she wouldn’t say which of her tweets were daydreams, and which documented what was actually on her plate. “I live in a neighborhood where there are a lot of different foods and I’ll walk by a place and say, ‘Ooh, I forgot about you!’ Food to me can be like old boyfriends: Sometimes they’re nicer to think about fleetingly.”