Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too: Eating to Be Sexy, Fit, and Fabulous! (13 page)

√Beans are another summer vegetable that can suddenly grow in abundance and leave you wondering what to do with them all.

Or maybe the bright, crisp beans at the farmers’ market are impossible to resist. Try this delicious recipe flavored with soffritto, an Italian mixture of onions, celery, and carrots gently sautéed in olive oil until soft.

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 sprig fresh rosemary

1⁄2 cup Soffritto (recipe follows)

11⁄2 pounds Romano or other fresh

2 teaspoons minced garlic

green beans, trimmed

2 teaspoons tomato puree

Salt and pepper to taste

2 whole peeled tomatoes in their juice,

crushed

1.
Heat the olive oil in a sauté pan over medium heat. Add the soffritto and cook, stirring, for 3 minutes.

2.
Add the garlic, tomato puree, and crushed tomatoes, stirring to combine. Add the rosemary sprig and beans, and toss to coat.

3.
Add just enough water to cover the beans, and simmer until they are tender, 30–45 minutes. Remove the rosemary sprig before serving.

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Soffritto

M a k e s a b o u t 5 c u p s

√This recipe makes more soffritto than you will need for the Romano bean recipe. Keep the soffritto in a glass jar in the refrigerator for up to one week. Mix it into roasted peppers with some fresh herbs for a delicious antipasto.

2 cups chopped red onions

1 cup chopped carrots or fennel

1 cup minced celery

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Combine all the ingredients in a sauté pan over medium heat.

Cook slowly for about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the mixture is the color of straw.

If these recipes have inspired you to use fresh vegetables, don’t stop here! Experiment with your own ideas. Tuck fresh steamed, sautéed, or roasted vegetables into omelets, sprinkle them on frittatas, roll them up in tortillas, pile them into sandwiches. Layer them, spice them, flavor them with herbs and citrus, put them into sauces, toss them into a stir-fry, or decorate your salad greens with them. Or just dip them, freshly picked, sun-ripe, and crisp, into a little bowl of olive oil.
Perfezione!

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u

6

Tapas Tastings:

C O L O R , M O R E F L AVO R , T E X T U R E , A RO M A

In the Mediterranean, food is an art form. Tapas, or the little dishes that keep women’s stomachs happy until dinner, are like little sculptures.
Tapas
is the Spanish word for an assortment of little snacks, each with its own color, texture, and aroma. Traditionally served with sherry, beer, sangria, Cava, Txocali, wine, or other afternoon cocktails, tapas have recently become popular in the United States as people discover the thrill of getting to taste many delicious dishes without stuffing themselves. Instead of entrées, tapas restaurants offer a wide selection of tapas with which you can construct a meal of any size or character.

The tapas concept is a powerful one for weight loss, but it requires reorienting your thinking about meals just a little. We are conditioned to wait for the main course. No matter how much we nibble and snack our way up to it, we still think we have to

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eat the whole steak or chicken breast or slab of lasagna. With tapas, the nibbling and snacking
is
the main course. You might get a tiny plate of greens topped with marinated vegetables, a dish of chilled shrimp drizzled with a rich peanut sauce, a tabbouleh pilaf, and a plate of three amazing cheeses with a few baguette slices. Small bites, big flavor. Who needs a main course? That sounds like a meal to me.

√ The Tapas Mentality

Adopting the tapas mentality can really help you when you are trying to plan meals or when you are simply rummaging through the refrigerator, looking for something to eat. Think: little tastes. It’s a simple concept, but what it means for a woman trying to get her body to a healthy place is just this:
little
tastes.

Take a few bites of this, a few bites of that. Notice each taste, move on to another, and when you’ve eaten a few good bites of a few good things, stop eating. You’ve had enough. You are supremely satisfied . . . as long as your brain isn’t telling your stomach that it is waiting for the main course. What main course? Why a main course? Little tastes are much more exciting, surprising, mysterious even.

Eating this way is truly and essentially Mediterranean, not just Spanish. The idea of indulging in little tastes to fortify midday hunger is popular in many Mediterranean cultures. In Italy, the antipasto is a mosaic of beautiful foods for midday or preceding a meal. In France, the hors d’oeuvre not only precedes a meal but is meant to prepare all the senses by being visually lovely as well as delicious. In the eastern Mediterranean—

Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa—the meze platter serves a similar purpose to tapas—simple, satisfying snacks that sometime stand in for a more formal meal.

Just think about the possibilities for you. You can move
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toward your ideal weight by indulging in little tastes of goat cheese, tangy ceviche, perfectly cooked mouthfuls of tender lamb, morsels of chicken tossed with juicy grapes and crunchy walnuts, a few spoonfuls of marinated white beans, a spicy tomato salsa on a piece of crispy bread, slices of Spanish sausage, roasted peppers stuffed with goat cheese and drizzled with olive oil—each little dish plays into the whole experience of taste and is a whole experience of its own, whispering of another land, of exotic cultures, but also of the passionate experience you have immediately as you taste.

IRENE’S STORY

Irene’s father comes from Spain, and Irene grew up in southern California in the restaurant business. Her father’s Spanish restaurant kept everyone in the family busy: cooking, hosting, waitressing, busing tables. The family always seemed to be eating, tasting, eating some more. Irene says that for Spaniards food means family, and that’s just what the family restaurant was to her: “Unlike Americans these days, Spaniards believe food is to be savored, to be mulled over, never rushed, and never eaten alone.”

In Spain and all around the Mediterranean, holidays, weekends, and special events are particularly centered around meals—lunch can often blend right into dinner. Irene remembers one holiday meal when the paella was done about 2:00 P.M.: “We ate, visited, ate, laughed, and talked and at about 5:00 P.M. the hat was being passed around for some money so someone could run to the store to buy fixings for dinner later that evening. But we never left the table and always had something to munch on before, during, and after the main meals.”

When the restaurant closed and Irene turned from waitressing to more academic pursuits, she gained weight. “I think it had to do with the lack of daily exercise. Waitressing really kept me on my feet!” When she moved away from home for graduate school, not only was her life more
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sedentary, but she was thousands of miles away from her family and the big lively dinners she had grown up with. Life in grad school was much different than life in the restaurant business. Irene had to struggle with the loss of many aspects of the Mediterranean way of life—an active lifestyle, close proximity to family, access to the wide variety of high-quality plant foods grown locally. She experienced the struggle with weight so common to American women who sit at computers all day and don’t have much time to eat well.

But Irene explains some things never fade from the consciousness of a woman raised in the Mediterranean spirit. “We always had balanced meals in my family: meat, vegetables, starches, and fruit for dessert. It was always good. Every so often we’d be treated to hot chocolate pudding over pieces of sourdough bread for breakfast. It tasted much better than it sounds! But this wasn’t every day. This was special.”

Irene still makes the food she eats special. Her new life as a professor at a small college in Virginia exists all the way across the continent from home, but some of her eating habits are still very close to home. No mediocre leftovers, no fast food—life is too short to eat anything of low quality! Even if she is the only one at the table, Irene cooks, sits down, and savors the experience. And when she cooks for her friends, everyone flocks to the table because her food is so memorable. Every little taste is an event, and in true Spanish style, Irene will raise her glass of Spanish tempranillo and make a toast:
Salud pesetas y amor y tiempo para gastarlas.

“Life, money, love, and the time to spend them.” The Mediterranean diet may not be able to provide you with money or love, but it can certainly give you more energy for living and quite possibly a few more years of life. Here is Irene’s family recipe, sent to us from her Spanish father, Frank Grau.

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Grau Family Paella Recipe

S e r v e s 6 t o 8

√You can substitute different kinds of seafood or vegetables for those in this recipe, such as scallops for the clams and mussels, or add more shrimp or lobster instead of using crab legs. Use what is fresh and in season. You will need a 16- to 18-inch paella pan set over two burners for this recipe, or you can use two large cast iron skillets, dividing the paella between them. Or cut this recipe in half to serve three or four people, and use a 10- or 12-inch skillet. To serve this paella in true Grau-family fashion, set the paella pan or skillet on the table to serve, and let everyone eat from the side closest to where they sit. “The rule is that you eat only your ‘slice,’ and you don’t pluck any seafood from anybody else’s section,” says Irene.

4 chicken legs

1 large tomato, cored and diced

11⁄2 pounds pork ribs or pork fillet

1 medium onion, peeled and diced

1⁄2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

4 garlic cloves, peeled and minced

1 tablespoon salt, plus additional to taste

2 cups long-grain rice

12 large shrimp, peeled and deveined

2 tablespoons paprika

8 mussels

6 cups water, fish stock, or chicken stock

1 small red bell pepper, cored, seeded,

1 pound king crab legs (precooked,

and cut into 3⁄4-inch strips

available at most seafood

1 small yellow bell pepper, cored,

counters)

seeded, and cut into 3⁄4-inch strips

4 littleneck clams (precooked,

1 small green bell pepper, cored, seeded,

available at most seafood counters)

and cut into 3⁄4-inch strips

Pinch of saffron

11⁄2 pounds green beans, trimmed

1.
Cut the chicken off the bone into chunks and cut the pork ribs into 3-inch lengths or the pork fillets into cubes.

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2.
Add the oil to the paella pan or skillets over medium heat, and add 1 tablespoon salt to the oil. When the oil is hot, add the chicken and pork, and cook until they just begin to brown, about 5 minutes.

3.
Add the shrimp and mussels. Remove the shrimp as they turn pink and the mussels as they open, setting aside. Discard any mussels that do not open. Continue frying the chicken and pork until it is fully browned.

4.
Add the bell peppers and green beans and cook for 2 minutes.

Add the tomatoes, onions, and garlic and cook for 2 more minutes. Mix in the rice and add the paprika. Let the paella cook for 2 minutes longer.

5.
Season the water or stock with the saffron and then add it to the pan. Distribute the rice evenly and then do not stir the rice again. Taste and season with more salt. Boil the paella until the stock is half absorbed.

6.
Remove the top shells from the mussels and discard them.

Discard any mussels that don’t look good. Garnish the paella with the shrimp, clams, mussels, and crab, arranging everything so it is evenly distributed over the paella. Simmer until the rice is fully cooked and has a crust on the bottom.

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√ A Different Style of Eating

Tapas are simple to make and a pleasure to experience. They are also practical when you only have time to grab a quick bite.

It might as well be a quick bite of something really fresh and good. Several small tapas dishes are usually a healthier, more varied, and less fat-laden option to a big restaurant meal. This is real food, not packaged snack food. This is snacking the Mediterranean way.

Fake food—I mean those patented substances

chemically flavored and mechanically bulked out

to kill the appetite and deceive the gut—is

unnatural, almost immoral, a bane to good

eating and good cooking.

—Julia Child, chef

Adjusting to a tapas style of eating makes a lot of sense.

American women don’t seem to have time to cook every day.

But we do have a tendency to eat too much of one thing. With tapas, antipasti, hors d’oeuvre, and meze-style recipes, you get quick and simple food as well as a satisfying variety that keeps you perfectly happy with smaller portions. These little tastes indulge all the senses because they are fun to make, pretty to be-hold, and a delicious melding of textures in the mouth. In her classic cookbook from the 1970s written while pregnant with her son Carlo Jr.,
In the Kitchen with Love
, Sophia Loren asserts that antipasti should be called “fun dishes” after the Italian word
sfizio,
which means “the urge to enjoy.” She goes on to write, “Anything
sfizioso
whets the appetite, makes the mouth water, and rouses the spirit of the
bon vivant
who lives in the heart of all Italians.”