EAT YOUR VEGETABLES
“THERE ARE PICTURES of me all over the Internet with a pig slung over my shoulder,” says Naomi Pomeroy, the self-taught chef-owner and sometime butcher of Portland’s Beast, a restaurant known for homey fare that she calls “refined French grandmother.” When the picture appeared in a magazine article in which Pomeroy jokingly described herself and her sous chef as “two young, attractive ladies taking down some hogs,” the backlash was immediate. “They slammed me for that, and for being a carnivore generally. What upset me is, I am one of the more vegan proponents out there. I don’t feel great when I eat that much meat; I’m happy to admit that.”
She can understand the confusion. “When you come to Beast you get the foie gras bonbon, and you get six decadent courses, a cheese course, a dessert course. But we don’t eat that at all,” says Pomeroy of herself and her almost all-female staff. “For lunch a couple of times a week I’ll make a big batch of quinoa, and we eat vegan.” In part this is because, she allows, “we all want to lose our ten or fifteen pounds.”
This chapter tackles two ideas: eating less meat, and eating more vegetables. One involves a commitment to eat fewer animal products—a good idea for all the health reasons I’m sure you’ve heard before: less risk of cancer and heart disease, and other benefits bound to make your life longer and generally more pleasant. The second involves not merely replacing meat with cheese pizza and sesame noodles, but actually filling your meals with vegetables. Happily, making vegetables taste good with little effort is something chefs know about.
Lesson 43: Smart chefs have given a no-meat diet a chance
Spending time as a vegetarian will inform how you eat as an omnivore; chefs who have done so appear more conscious and conscientious about how they eat and how they live away from the kitchen or dining table.
Pomeroy is one of several chefs who surprised me with a vegetarian past. She was meat-free for seven years, starting with her senior year in high school, when she was suddenly turned off by the sound of her mother cutting up a chicken. She went back only when she became a personal chef and needed to taste the meat she was cooking for clients. At her own restaurant, she makes thoughtful choices about meat that perhaps only a former vegetarian would. She knows the farmers and how the meat she buys is raised. And because Beast serves just a fixed menu, when she butchers a pig she can use all the parts, a more ecologically and ethically sound use of the animal than catering to à la carte diners who order only pork chops.
Tom Colicchio, who went on to open Craftsteak, among other restaurants, was also a young vegetarian: “For a year, when I was twenty-two or twenty-three,” he recalls. “I was in a restaurant and looked into a stockpot after the stock had been strained out of it, and it was just bones in there and it looked so disgusting. I said, ‘I can’t eat meat.’” That change led to others: He quit smoking, started running more. For that year, although he continued to work with meat, he didn’t eat it. “It wasn’t difficult; we’re around more vegetables than we are meat or fish.”
Gregory Gourdet, chef at Departure in Portland, Oregon, having been raised on a typically American omnivorous diet by his Haitian parents in Queens, went meat-free when he left home for school in Montana, having decided to become a wildlife biologist. In Missoula, his roommate “was a kid from Long Island who would cook all the time—that got me going.” Two things subsequently happened: “One, I realized I wasn’t as outdoorsy as I thought I was. Two, I realized I wanted to be a chef.” While in college, he says, “I thought about how I perceived meat, and I was vegetarian for all four years.” He eventually moved back to New York and, “as I segued into culinary school, I started eating fish and then I was full-on omnivore.”
During the years that he was coming up in Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Manhattan restaurants, “I lived the fast chef life—I had plenty of Kitchen Confidential moments,” he says, referring to the Anthony Bourdain bad-boy memoir. Gourdet and his pals “would cook all day, drink and stay out all night. We did lots of drugs and went to all the newest restaurants, bars, and clubs. Some nights we’d start off with croque monsieurs at Pastis. Maybe we’d be at Blue Ribbon getting the fried chicken and bone marrow or, if it was really, really late, at Cafeteria eating bacon blue cheese burgers and mac-and-four-cheese. Cigarettes too, of course. Needless to say I could only do this for so long before I realized something had to give. I jumped at the offer to move to California and do something different.”
Everything was different: He dedicated himself to improving his health. No more cigarettes or drugs. “Everyone in California works out—more so than in New York. I joined the gym and went health nut: I started cutting out red meat and dairy and I started running more. I lost twenty pounds.”
Today he says, “I don’t enjoy the taste of red meat, and I don’t miss cheese. I’ve been eating lighter foods for so long, whenever I eat something fried or creamy, I get the greasy mouthfeel. I don’t like it.” That said, he will cook you Asian-spiced pork belly at Departure, and he isn’t averse to tasting at work.
I understand that contradiction. I was a vegetarian for twenty years. A few weeks after I started covering chefs as a journalist, I went to a promotional wine luncheon at Per Se, where each course was carefully paired with the client’s wine. After some deliberation, I figured I’d just go with whatever was on the menu, whether fish, fowl, or fauna. It was Per Se, for goodness’ sake. I was glad I did. When I saw another writer ask for steamed vegetables in place of the duck, I realized how ridiculous I was going to look navigating the food world with this self-imposed limitation. The duck—and the wine—convinced me I had done the right thing.
Today I still eat meat sparingly, with the awareness of someone who has made a choice to do so, and I am picky to the point of obnoxious about finding out from whence the meat on my plate has come. It is possible, I believe, to have the heart of a vegetarian and the palate of an omnivore.
Although Gourdet is no longer a hard-core veggie, the influence of that period still resides in how he cooks and eats. He trains hard as a marathoner, and says, “Throughout my day I’ll have lean protein: eggs, chicken, turkey, nut and seed butters. I consume all the fruits and vegetables that I want—I don’t limit those by any means. I drink fruit juice and use almond milk for my cereal or smoothies.” Eating that way, he says, “I got extremely lean, and achieved a lot of fitness goals.”
Lesson 44: Mark Bittman’s vegan vampirism
If you’re deciding to eat fewer animal products—dairy and eggs included—it can be helpful to give yourself some rules, so you’re not dithering over every choice at every meal. Mark Bittman devised an easy strategy: He is vegan during daylight hours.
What The Joy of Cooking was to my childhood, Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything will be for my son’s. The big red book looms large in our kitchen. The first time I met Bittman was at a starry party for the launch of a public television series he appeared in, Spain . . . On the Road Again. Gwyneth Paltrow was there. Bono too. It was at the Spanish consulate in New York, and it was crowded and hot and people were pink-cheeked from the proximity to fame and possibly the prosecco. But even with all the A-listers in the room, I wanted to talk to Bittman about how he ate.
I caught up with him later at his office at The New York Times. He had lost a fair amount of weight, and was about to publish his book about “conscious eating,” Food Matters. In it he delivers a persuasive argument for eating less meat and more plants that includes benefits not only for your health, but also for your wallet and for the health of the planet. But here, I’m concerned only with how the shift to part-time vegetarianism affected Bittman’s waistline.
A few years back, when he was about thirty pounds overweight, Bittman ran into some health troubles: His cholesterol and blood sugar were high and he suffered from sleep apnea. Where a more conventional doctor might have put him on Lipitor or other drugs, Bittman’s doctor, whom he describes as an iconoclast, told him simply to give up eating any animal products—become a vegan.
“Did he know what you do for a living?” I ask. Besides writing cookbooks, for thirteen years Bittman developed recipes for his weekly “Minimalist” column in the Times.
“Of course, we’ve known each other for thirty years. He said, ‘You’re smart; figure something out.’”
Here’s what he came up with: From the time he woke until the time the sun went down he wouldn’t eat meat, dairy, eggs, sugar, pasta, or refined carbohydrates of any kind. At dinner, he would eat whatever he pleased, including any or all of the above. This might be a short leap for someone raised on grains and beans and tofu. But as a boy, Bittman was a New York street food gourmand. “I could eat seven hot dogs or four slices of pizza; I’m not exaggerating. Every chance I got I was out eating a knish or a corned beef sandwich.”
After a month of this ritual of daytime veganism, he had lost fifteen pounds, without exercising at all. (Bittman isn’t against exercise; at that point he had just had knee surgery. Eventually he returned to walking, biking, and then running.) “Fifteen pounds—pretty interesting,” he remembers thinking. “Then I had my blood work done, and all the numbers were where they should be. Pretty interesting. So I kept eating that way. I lost another fifteen pounds and the apnea went away. Now I’m quite sure if I ate the way I used to I’d gain twenty pounds immediately.”
Lesson 45: They see meat in the big picture—eating a lot is bad for not just you
When Nate Appleman resolved to lose weight, he found that sugar was easy to eliminate. Meat not so much. He describes himself as “a very meat person.” But well into his career, he decided to eat less of it—and to fill more of his plate with vegetables. “There’s no question that Americans consume more meat than they need,” says Appleman. “And it’s usually bad meat.” By “bad” he means raised poorly: in inhumane factory farms, full of antibiotics and growth hormones. His way of cutting back on the quantity of meat he consumes is to focus on the quality. If you eat only good meat—grass-fed, hormone- and antibiotic-free, sustainably and humanely raised—you are going to eat less automatically, because it just isn’t available at every restaurant you might frequent. “I’m wary of where I eat meat, and what kind of meat I’m eating,” says Appleman. “I don’t think it’s a weight thing. I don’t even know if it’s a health thing,” he says. “I think it’s more like a moral thing.”
Conversations with your server about meat sourcing may be awkward at first—I’ve gotten the long sigh from waiters as they trot back to the kitchen to ask whether the chicken is antibiotic-free—but worth it in determining whether you’re sitting down to a meal that should include meat.
Lesson 46: They invite vegetables home . . . and don’t let them exit through the garbage can
Confession: I’m excellent at buying produce; I’m somewhat less great at using what I’ve bought before it goes limp and brown. I am always overly ambitious at the market, and then horribly regretful when sacrificing bendable carrots to the kitchen trash bin or discovering a cucumber, white with fuzz, at the back of the fridge.
“I think that’s normal. You share that problem with millions of other people,” Marcus Samuelsson tells me when I admit my produce neglect to him. His suggestion: Learn a couple of recipes that halt the decline of fresh fruits and vegetables. Rather than temper my enthusiasm at the green market, he advises, “Buy more! Make jam. Make a ketchup with jalapeño or raspberries.” This is a twofold winner: You’ll save your tomatoes but also reward yourself with beautiful homemade condiments, the better to dress fast meals of quickly cooked grains, fish or chicken, and vegetables.
There are, however, plenty of times you don’t feel like sterilizing jars for jam. In fact, that describes most weeks in my house. As an alternative, I’ve become a fan of freezing fruit that I can tell isn’t going to make it to Tuesday. Slice up a peach at its peak of ripeness, arrange the wedges on a plate so they aren’t touching, and stick it in the freezer. When they’re frozen, put them in a Ziploc bag. When you dig them out during winter, you will thank your thoughtful summer self.
It’s also a good idea to add to your repertoire a few ways of coping with vegetables on the verge of being of interest only to historians. Alex Stratta opened my eyes to the pleasure of roasted lettuce. “If your romaine lettuce is starting to wilt, don’t throw it away; cut it in half, dress it with olive oil, garlic, a little salt, and roast it. I love roasted lettuces,” he says. Since trying that method, I’ve also taken to sautéing lettuce as if it were spinach, and each time I do I think back on the years when I believed that lettuce had to be crispy to be enjoyed. There is almost no vegetable that cannot become soup, along with an onion sautéed in some olive oil, and water or stock. Or when I have berries or fruit that appear to be going over to the dark side, I stew them quickly for a topping that enlivens oatmeal or pancakes or, when cooled, plain yogurt.
Even before you let produce get to the salvage point, it’s better just to use what you’ve got. You don’t need loads of recipes. Nate Appleman recalls a stew he made with his son by cleaning out the produce bin. “I just took all the vegetables that were in the fridge—I think there was some tomato, onions, which I sautéed, there was bok choy, carrots, and chickpeas. Then I made an egg-and-corn pancake—what else did I put in it?” He tries to remember. “Oh, sweet potato. It was sweet potato, egg, corn, and the greens from the bok choy.” Not a conventional combination, but he believes that “as long as you use good ingredients, and you know how to use salt, you can make something really tasty without even trying. I literally take all the vegetables at home, throw them together, cook them, season them—I’ve used cumin, just to spice it up a little—and that’s typically how dinner will go down.” Another night it was “cauliflower, onion, pepper, and tomatoes, just jumbled. We got some mozzarella from a local place over in the East Village. I put some sesame seeds on it, and then we had avocado toast. That was our dinner.”
That kind of improvisation is helped greatly by the CSA delivery Appleman gets regularly. A CSA (community supported agriculture) membership—sort of like a magazine subscription for local farm produce—is an easy way to get vegetables into your home, which, while it sounds obvious, is the first step to actually bringing them into your diet. “It’s a way for farmers to ‘clean their fridge,’” says Appleman. Andrea Reusing is a CSA member; so is Tom Colicchio. “We get a delivery of organic vegetables every week. So whatever shows up, I cook with,” says Colicchio. Think of it as your own personal Top Chef challenge: What will you do with all that zucchini? How about those yellow beets? (He has a suggestion, below.)
Lesson 47: They eat vegetables “nose to tail”
Using every bit of the animal is justly popular today: Meat is expensive, waste is appalling, and there are some interesting and traditional preparations for the parts most of us rarely consider. But what about produce?
Many chefs are proponents of “nose to tail” vegetable use. For a while, Thomas Keller’s California broccoli supplier was harvesting only the tops. “They were leaving the stems in the field, and I said, ‘I want to buy those from you.’ Because the stems, to me, are amazing,” says Keller. “Peeled and blanched, they are just great. Asparagus stems, same thing. Artichokes actually have a long stem,” he says, adding that they are usually removed, leaving only the globe for us to buy. When you can find the stems intact, “peel them down and you get that good center. And we do a lot with the ribs from the Swiss chard.” (The very night I was writing these words I peeked online at the evening’s menu at Per Se, which included a salad of caramelized sugar pie pumpkin, black winter truffle coulis, Cape Cod cranberries, Swiss chard ribs and pumpkin seed “aigre-doux.” Don’t the stems of chard leaves sound appealing in that lineup? (Aigre-doux is French for sweet-and-sour, by the way.) Says Keller: “We always try to use the entire vegetable.”
I’m sure I threw out a small forest of broccoli stems before I learned that, liberated from their outermost husk, the stalks taste like a whole other vegetable, with the snap of celery, and less of broccoli florets’ crucifer scent. Now I will use them in a stir-fry or chopped raw into salad. Scraps like the peelings, tops, and stems of vegetables are valued by chefs as a worthy addition to stock. And carrot tops—when I buy a bunch of carrots at the supermarket, I’m still asked whether I want the tops off. (As if removing a bouquet of carrot leaves is somehow going to make my load lighter on the walk home?) No, I don’t want the tops off. If they are fresh and vibrant, they are great sautéed like any other delicate green, or used in a pesto variation.
Lesson 48: Smart chefs don’t over-romanticize local and seasonal produce
What was interesting to me was that, while chefs are big fans of farmers’ markets, they aren’t all hung up on local and seasonal produce. Appleman remembers during his apprenticeship in Italy, “One of the guys I worked with, his family had a farm outside of the city and they ate that way. He said, ‘We just had celery for three weeks. That’s all we had. Braised celery, fried celery, celery salad.’”
Most of us crave more variety than that. In cold-weather climes, eating locally in winter is especially tough (you’d better love cabbage and potatoes). “I’m a big supporter of local, but the season is very short,” says Mark McEwan of Toronto. “We stay with it when we can, but you can’t eat squash the entire winter—that would get mundane. I’m not opposed to hothouse tomatoes from southern Ontario in the winter when they are organic.” So if you can get a wider and more compelling variety at your supermarket, go for it. Don’t let poor seasonal selection stop you from eating your vegetables.
Lesson 49: Smart chefs aren’t vegetarian vegetable purists
Finally, if the way to get the vegetables out of the drawer and onto your plate is to serve them seasoned with something from the dairy or butcher’s counter, a lot of chefs are completely with you on that. Scientists too: Several vitamins in vegetables are fat-soluble, and need that pairing to get absorbed. “A smoked turkey wing in collard greens makes them delicious,” observes Andrea Reusing. “That, and not being afraid of putting a little butter and salt on string beans—kids will always eat them that way. I will always eat them that way. That balance works.”
Tom Colicchio’s Raw Yellow Beet Sandwiches with Avocado, Grapefruit, and Radish Sprouts
makes 4 sandwiches
2 medium yellow beets, peeled and julienned
1 tablespoon plus a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil
Juice from half a lemon
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus extra for seasoning
Freshly ground black pepper
1 large grapefruit
1 ripe avocado, halved, pitted, peeled, and thinly sliced
8 slices Pullman bread, crusts removed
1 cup loosely packed radish sprouts
1. In a bowl, toss the beets in 1 tablespoon of the oil, lemon juice, 1 teaspoon of salt, and pepper to taste and set aside. Cut the grapefruit into supremes.*
2. Evenly layer the avocado slices on 4 slices of the bread. Drizzle some oil on the avocado and season with salt and pepper. Top with the grapefruit, yellow beets, and radish sprouts. Place the remaining 4 slices on top, cut into halves, and serve.
Adapted from ’wichcraft: Craft a Sandwich into a Meal—And a Meal into a Sandwich by Tom Colicchio with Sisha Ortúzar. Clarkson Potter, 2009.
* Making supremes of citrus sounds worrisome, but actually falls into the category of If I Can Do It, You Can Do It: Cut off the top (where the stem was) and bottom of a grapefruit or orange; then, with your knife following the curve of the fruit, cut off the peel and pith (the white layer) from the sides. Now, with the citrus segments exposed, cut each one away from the membrane so it slips out, holding its shape. If you’ve never done this before now, you should now recognize these pith-free segments from salads you’ve had in restaurants and should feel a deep sense of self-satisfaction at having duplicated them on your first try.
Mark Bittman’s More-vegetable-than-egg Frittata
In this dish the vegetables, which vary to your taste, are “dominant and delicious,” says Bittman, who recommends this frittata for brunch, dinner—anytime. Leave out the cheese for a lighter dish, or add a little chopped bacon, ham, or shrimp if you’re otherwise inclined.
serves 2 as a main dish or 4 as a side
2 tablespoons olive oil or butter
½ onion, sliced (optional)
Salt and ground black pepper
4 to 6 cups of any chopped or sliced raw or barely cooked vegetables
¼ cup fresh basil or parsley leaves, or 1 teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon or mint leaves, or any other herb
2 or 3 eggs
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (optional)
1. Put olive oil or butter in a skillet (preferably nonstick or well-seasoned cast iron) and turn heat to medium. When fat is hot, add onion, if using, and cook, sprinkling with salt and pepper, until it is soft, 3 to 5 minutes. Add vegetables, raise heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until they soften, from a couple of minutes for greens to 15 minutes for sliced potatoes. Adjust heat so vegetables brown a little without scorching. (With precooked vegetables, just add them to onions and stir before proceeding.)
2. When vegetables are nearly done, turn heat to low and add herbs. Cook, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are tender.
3. Meanwhile, beat eggs with some salt and pepper, along with cheese if you are using it. Pour over vegetables, distributing them evenly. Cook, undisturbed, until eggs are barely set, 10 minutes or so; run pan under broiler for a minute or two if top does not set. Cut into wedges and serve hot, warm, or at room temperature.
Adapted from Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating by Mark Bittman. Simon & Schuster, 2009.