2011-05-10-NO COOK Cooking!
Seminars@Hadley
NO COOK COOKING!
Presented by
Patti Jacobson
Linn Sorge
Goldie Tarr
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
Billy Brookshire
July 20, 2011
Dawn Turco
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. Today’s topic is called NO COOK Cooking! And I am Dawn Turco, Senior Vice President at The Hadley School for the Blind and I’m happy to be with you today. NO COOK Cooking! – The topic was actually selected at least four months ago. What perfect timing we had for much of the U.S. We are experiencing 90° and above 100° temps this week, so the last thing we want to do with the mercury rising is to go into a hot kitchen or to turn on the stove when you’re counteracting the air conditioning. So today’s topic is so very timely.
Now we’re not talking about passing addition to your microwave, peeling back that plastic and waiting for the beep. Nothing wrong with microwave cooking; we love it. But today we want to talk about what we can do with fresh food. The timing is perfect. The time of the year, with summer and the markets, we have access to potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, zucchinis, lot of fresh fruits like raspberries, cherries, melons, plums, peaches – not my favorite, but they’re still out there – as well as fresh herbs and lots of greens.
So the possibilities for no cook cooking are really endless. There’s a term that I’m going to introduce you to if you haven’t heard it. Perhaps you have, but it was new to me not too long ago – locavore – L-O-C-A-V-O-R-E, locavore. It has become so used a word that it was recently added to the newest edition of the Associated Press’ Bible, the AP Style Manual, the style book, and locavore is defined as “the preferred term for a person who strives to eat locally produced foods.” And with all the local market items that I was just listing, they certainly are available to us in our local farmers market.
So here’s the first tip and the resource will be on the Resource List that gets posted with this seminar, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture – the U.S.D.A. – has a website that you can go to and you can search for local farmer markets in your area and they allow you to filter the answers by your zip code; the distance from your house that you’re willing to go; if you’re looking for a preferred product.
It’s actually kind of fun to play with and I’ll tell you, it doesn’t list all the farmers markets because I went and I tested for my area and there were more in my immediate driving area than were listed, but it is a good source of some of those big ones in your area, so the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website and that link will be available through our Resource List.
That was a rather lengthy intro. Now I will introduce our panel which I’m thrilled to have the three ladies back with us, all of whom have been participants in our Seminars@Hadley. I’ll start with the Seminars@Hadley cooking crew from Hadley and those ladies are Linn Sorge and Patti Jacobson, both long-time instructors with us and the three of us are home cooks who love it. And as we learned more about each other, we have started doing these Seminars@Hadley in the area of cooking.
Joining our panel today is Goldie Tarr. Goldie has presented with us before as well. Goldie is a trained chef and joins us. Goldie has a website; it will be on our Resource List as well. It is www.lowvisionchef.com. All of us are visually impaired, so we hope to bring some tips that we find useful to the mix today. And having said that, the brief intro, let’s get started.
I listed a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables and we thought we’d start out today with some good habits and I am going to be turning the microphone over to Patti and Linn and they are going to give us some tips for washing fruits and vegetables. So let’s get started, ladies.
Patti Jacobson
Thank you, Dawn. It’s Patti and before I start talking about tips for washing fruits and vegetables, I want to invite any of you that haven’t taken any courses in the food series – that’s one of the courses I teach – to do that. And we actually have a course called Fruits and Vegetables, so you might enjoy taking that. But when you think about fruits and vegetables, you have to think about where they’ve been, where they’ve come from.
Fields covered with pesticides and herbicides and when they’re harvested, they’re handled by lots of pairs of hands and even in the stores they’re handled by a lot of people and they can have bacteria on them like wisteria and salmonella and e-coli and that can even be on organic fruits and vegetables, even though we think of them as being safer. We want to have a lot of fruits and vegetables in our diet, but we don’t want to have the insects and chemicals, so it’s important to really take care of the fruits and vegetables before we eat them.
The first tip is to keep your countertop, your refrigerator, your cookware and your knives very clean. One thing I like to use on my countertop are those Clorox Wipes. They’re just like wash and dry wipes. They come in a little round cylinder container and you pull one out, wipe the counter with it – it’s great and it takes away a lot of the germs.
Another tip is always wash your hands before preparing meals and handling fruits and vegetables. And this is going to be really essential when you think about recipes and ideas in the NO COOK Cooking! Seminar, because we are going to be handling things without cooking them. So that’s really important.
And then also keep fresh greens and fruits and vegetables away from uncooked meats so you can avoid any cross-contamination. Choose healthy-looking ripe fruits and vegetables. Avoid bruised or moldy or mushy fruits and vegetables and if you’re shopping with somebody and you don’t want to handle everything that you’re selecting, just tell them what to look for and they can help you choose what you might want to buy.
Also, wash fruits and vegetables just before preparing them or even then because they do have a protective coating on them and if you wash away that coating too quickly, or too soon, they will spoil more quickly. And also wash all pre-packaged fruits and vegetables like salads that might come in a plastic container or a plastic bag. Run that through the colander and wash that too. Okay, I think, Linn, you might have some more tips.
Linn Sorge
Yes, I hope I do. I want to reiterate Patti’s last comment just because it gets so tempting if you’re in a hurry and the big thing on the package says, “Prewashed; ready to eat. No need to wash.” But as Patti just said, you still don’t know and even as you open the package, how many hands have touched the package and even just somebody who picks it up and puts it back on the shelf. So make sure, even if it says prewashed, ready to eat, that you take that extra time and it keeps everybody safe.
Also, in that same idea, make sure you wash things that have peelings on them, even if you’re going to peel them because bacteria can be alive and well on things like cucumbers, orange rinds, apples – think if the pesticides, sad to say, that are in many of the orchards and you put that in your hand and then you say, “Well, I’m going to peel it; it’s okay.” But in peeling, stuff from the peel gets on the knife or the peeler and it’s also on your fingers. So even though you’re peeling an orange, it’s very handy to be able to wash that first and get it ready. But again, just before you’re going to do it, not a day or two earlier thinking, “I’ll save time now.”
Also if you’ve got a little tougher fruit, you can run them under warm water and rub them with a kind of vegetable scrubbing brush kind of thing – something like a potato or an apple if you do it lightly. But in my kitchen I have a designated veggie brush for that. Sometimes you’ll have a kind of scratchy pad and you’ll think, “Oh, I’ll use that on my pan that’s got a little burnt something on it.” I wouldn’t do that. I always just have a special little brush that’s designated just for vegetables.
Don’t use soaps or detergents, bleaches or anything like that. They do leave a residue on your produce. So even though you think, “Well, I’ll put a little soap on this; that’ll clean it up, and then I’ll rinse it off,” you can’t always guarantee that you’re going to get it off. Commercial sprays that you’re going to get like food and vegetable washes – it’s not worth the money, to be blunt, because it doesn’t do a whole lot differently than good old clean water, so don’t waste your money.
When you’re doing things like lettuce or cabbage, but especially lettuce in this time of year, make sure that you remove the outer leaves – those are the ones that get hit the very hardest with this kind of thing, or that people are tossing around. If you think what happens between the time that it’s in a garden and when it gets into your refrigerator, all the hands that touch it… Sometimes I will be with friends at a grocery store and I’ll hear a mother with a little fussy toddler and they’ll want a grape – and firstly they shouldn’t be doing that – but they pop a grape off one of these bunches that are just sitting there and let the youngster eat it. Think of all the hands that touched that grape, let alone the pesticides.
Now when you get to berries and other fruits like that, wash them carefully because they’re a little more fragile. But put them in a colander and let them drain well. Just walk away and do something for three or four minutes and that gives them even more time to drain and do things like that. Your things may look clean in the grocery store, but you can’t see or feel these chemicals. So it’s very important that, no matter what it is you’re doing, before you serve them to family, friends, guests, you need to wash them or rinse anything that is going to go on your table.
I found a book that I really – at first I thought, “Oh, who is going to want to read this?” I love Barbara Kingsolver and she does quite a few novels – I’m not saying every one of them is excellent, but I like many of hers – and lo and behold, I heard an interview on NRP one morning, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. And I thought, “Barbara Kingsolver?” And sure enough, it is a non-fiction account of how she and her husband and two daughters went back to an ancestral farm in the Appalachians and did an entire year using local foods, farmers markets, that kind of thing, and it’s just a very intriguing book.
It shows you what they ate, how they canned. There are all sorts of recipes and it was a best seller in 2007. You can get it, download it as a digital book from the Bard website – it’s DB64800 – and usually I am the avid promoter of getting all your books from Bard. But I read this commercially before Bard had it available and I loved it because it was read by the author, her husband and her oldest daughter. They swapped around during chapters – one would read one, then another would read another. And it was very interesting to hear their different writings and their perspectives on how things went along.
So if you’re looking for a good read that you can actually put on as an audio listen while you’re cleaning your fruits and vegetables, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a great one. And now I think it’s Goldie who’s going to tell us about herbs.
Dawn Turco
You are right, but I’m interjecting here first. Sorry, Goldie, we’ll be with you in a second. Thank you for that reference and let’s be sure and get that on our Resource List too, Linn. That sounds like a fabulous read, as you said. And I’ll have to tell you, just the other day, as I was about to slice into my first watermelon of the season, I caught myself with the knife thinking, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t wash the outside.” And that’s just such a good tip because I think a lot of us weren’t raised with that tip from our mothers. So thank you for that list of great tips and we will include those in the Resource List, folks.
Goldie is going to join us and Goldie has a garden out back. I’ve seen a picture and she has actually brought me some fresh grown herbs and I admit to having fear of herbs. And having always used the bottle sort, I have started to test myself and I know Goldie knows about them, so we have asked Goldie to talk to us and give us a word about some fresh herbs and what they can do to add to your recipes. So here you go, Goldie.
Goldie Tarr
Hi, Dawn. Hi, everybody. I’ll try to keep it short but there’s a lot to know about herbs, so I’m going to try to cover a lot. The herbs I use the most are the ones are the ones that grow the best for me. As Dawn said, I believe the word was locavore, so I’m going to go on and talk a little bit about fresh herbs and the fact that they add a special twist to any food, drink, sandwich, salad, dessert, main dish. Herbs can heal you, feed you, energize you, de-stress and they add a special relaxation at the end of the day when you’ve had a hard day.
For growing herbs, they make pretty house plants and they grow easily in a garden. Try a window garden in your kitchen if you want to grow herbs year-round. When using fresh herbs, pick them as closely as possible to when you’re going to use them. You just pick them; you wash them and use them. It’s as easy as that. If you have any left, you just store them in your refrigerator.
For drying herbs, always wash them, as the girls said, before you freeze them or before you dry them. Just take your herbs and you can hang them upside down by bunches. And large bunches - you can put them in the basement if you have a cool, dry basement, by the stems or you can lay them out in small amounts on a sheet pan and let them dry. You can even dry them at low temperatures in the oven.
Consider if you’re going to freeze them, first what you’re going to use them for when they thaw out. Say, for instance, if you’re going to use basil and you’re going to freeze basil, most of the time you use basil with oil, with an olive oil, so you might want to freeze that. Just take it, cut it up, get it ready for use and put it in a little ice cube tray and cover it with olive oil, stick it in the freezer.