Clare's Cooking Blog

This one has been an absolute family favorite.  It has seasonal variations, and the most favorite is the summer version, with fresh blueberries and/or peaches or nectarines.  But the fall and winter versions have their fans too - and I myself am a devoted fan of the winter version, which features sour cherries ….

The basic recipe comes from a cookbook given to me by my late mother-in-law, Mildred Reich, the ELEGANT BUT EASY COOKBOOK, by Marian Fox Burros and Lois Levine. It was first published in 1984, and that’s the edition I have, but there’s a newer version as well, which I haven’t checked out.

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Having gotten this off the ground, I’m being assailed by doubts and second thoughts.

First, at a superficial level, how do you keep entries organized enough that visitors can find what they are looking for?  I’m already worried that I didn’t follow up on the Montignac primer with Montignac recipes …. I’m just going to keep plugging away, and get technical help when I can on that one.  Sam’s coming up next week.  That should be time enough.

Second, and more seriously, there are lots of food blogs out there.  It’s enough to throw you back into all the questions about your own worth, and value added, and raise once again all those insecurities you thought you had finally, after decades, perhaps just left behind.  So two resolutions: the first being to visit other people’s food blogs, which I have to confess I’ve not done, and the second being to keep in mind that mine is for family and friends, that for the most part I’m going to be following their suggestions for what I should add, and that for the most part they’ve already enjoyed the recipes they’re asking for!

And third, a sudden ethical crisis - my recipes are other people’s recipes, adapted sometimes, sometimes not at all.  A new resolve, then, to make sure to say where I found them.

OK -This is, for most people, a summer recipe, but not if you are on an island in Maine and the fishermen are still bringing in lobster in December.  And yes, it’s true, risotto is NOT a low-glycemic food - the rice is short grain and sticky and relatively high on the index, but not all of us eat low-glycemic all the time …

LOBSTER RISOTTO

Every risotto has four components: the ‘condimenti’ or ‘filling’; the ‘brodo’ or broth, the ‘soffrito’ or flavoring for the rice, and the ‘riso’ – you guessed it, rice!  When you cook, you sauté the soffrito, add the rice and turn it until the rice is coated with the oil in the soffrito, then add the broth, in stages, allowing the rice to absorb it, and finally, when the rice is ready to eat, add the condimenti and stir.  Then you serve immediately.

What this means is that you could use this recipe as the basis for ANY risotto – you’d just decide on a different ‘condimenti’ and choose a broth that would ‘match’ it – chicken, or beef, or vegetable, or whatever ….

For a lobster risotto, you are using lobster as the main ingredient in the condimenti, but also using the lobster shells and legs and extras as the basis for your broth.  So the process starts with cooking the lobster….

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This is a favorite fall recipe of mine.  Click on the link below to see it!

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THE MONTIGNAC METHOD:

AN APPROACH TO HEALTHY EATING AND WEIGHT LOSS

A primer first developed by Clare Dalton in 2004, most recently updated in 2007

THE “MONTIGNAC” THEORY

At the heart of the Montignac theory is the idea that an important factor in weight gain is your glucose regulation mechanism: the mechanism by which your body manages the sugar you put into your blood, and copes with excess sugar.  Sugar is “excess” when it is more than your body needs to function.  The sugar is there because you have eaten not just sugars, or  “sweets,” but also too many carbohydrates with a high sugar content. The technical description for these foods is that they have a high glycemic index.

How does this work?  The sugar in your blood triggers the pancreas to produce the hormone insulin. The primary task of insulin is to assist that sugar to make its way into your cells to provide them with energy.  Without insulin your cells would starve.  But insulin affects your metabolism in other ways as well, and high levels of insulin promote weight gain.  They result in more of the fat in your blood being stored rather than burned.  They inhibit the breakdown and release of stored fat from fat cells.  They encourage the conversion of carbohydrates to fat for storage.

Diabetes is what someone suffers from when the pancreas doesn’t produce the necessary insulin to keep blood sugar levels down.  In Type 1 diabetes, which shows up early in life, the pancreas simply lacks the capacity to produce insulin.  People with Type 1 diabetes generally inject insulin on a daily basis, and control their diets so that the relationship between insulin and sugar in their blood remains stable.

In Type 2 diabetes, which until recently was called ‘adult onset’ diabetes, but is unfortunately beginning to show up in overweight children as well, things are a bit more complicated.  In this condition – which is strongly associated with obesity – it seems that first your cells become resistant to insulin, so that even though your pancreas is producing it, the cells don’t recognize its presence.  For a while the pancreas tries to compensate by producing more and more insulin, but once the pancreas has been overworked in this way for a while, it may simply go on strike, and stop producing insulin altogether.  Although Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes both result in excess sugar in the blood, the relatively good news about Type 2 diabetes is that it can, while your pancreas still has the capacity to produce insulin, be controlled by attention to diet.

Our late twentieth-century diet, with all its high glycemic index foods, is resulting not just in much more obesity, but also in much more adult onset diabetes than was true earlier in the century.  The Montignac method, along with other eating plans based on attention to the glycemic index, is therefore not just a way to lose weight, but also a sensible eating style for those with, or at risk for, adult onset diabetes.

So how to lose weight, and give your pancreas a fighting chance?  Keep those blood sugar levels down.  How?  By staying away from high glycemic index foods, and putting together meals that are never going to raise your blood sugar level to the point that you are storing rather than burning fat, or converting sugar to fat for storage.  Montignac recommends staying almost entirely with foods with an index of 35 or less while you are trying to lose weight, and eating mostly foods with an index of 50 or less when you are just sustaining your weight.  Later on I’ll tell you where to go to for lists of foods with their glycemic indices.

Even since I’ve begun learning about all of this, the thinking has changed a little.  The glycemic load (GL) is a relatively new way to assess the impact of carbohydrate consumption that takes the glycemic index into account, but gives a fuller picture than does glycemic index alone. A GI value tells you only how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar. It doesn’t tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food. You need to know both things fully to understand a food’s effect on blood sugar. That is where glycemic load comes in. The carbohydrate in watermelon, for example, has a high GI. But there isn’t a lot of it, so watermelon’s glycemic load is relatively low. A GL of 20 or more is high, a GL of 11 to 19 inclusive is medium, and a GL of 10 or less is low.  But all low GI foods have a low GL, so I’m not going to belabor the GL issue here.  If you’re desperate to have a particular high GI food, check out its GL, and see if you can get away with it!  I say a little more about this later on.

Other theories you can now let go of

If you decide to give this theory a decent test, there are other theories about eating, and weight gain, that you can give up.  You’ll want to, in fact, because if you try to hedge your bets by adhering to all the theories at once, eating will stop being fun.  Whereas the beauty of the Montignac theory is that you can eat wonderfully well, and still abide by the rules.

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Back in the late 1980s was when I first began typing out my favorite recipes to share with friends and family.  Very specifically, it was when Beth, who had been the family’s dearest babysitter, decided to leave us, and requested a collection of favorite family recipes as a goodbye gift.  So I typed them up for her, and pasted them into a little book with a spiral binding.  And then of course I had them on file, and in my own little book with a spiral binding, which over the years got more and more spattered and floured, and ultimately the glue gave out and the pages began to fall apart ….

Then in the summer of 2000 I got inspired to start cooking by the “Montignac method” - which was essentially low glycemic index cooking before low glycemic index cooking was scientifically validated, and long before it became popular in the U.S.  It was also low glycemic index cooking with French flair, and without sacrificing such essentials as duck fat, dark chocolate or red wine.  When it worked, pretty dramatically, for me, people noticed, and I started sharing the Montignac method, and theory, and recipes both French and not, with friends and family.

I’ve gone on with the typing up, and the sharing, in a haphazard way, ever since.  But now (son) Sam has confessed that he can’t mostly find the recipes I’ve sent his way. He and Elaine are new homeowners, house poor, interested in eating healthy food, and interested in helping me do my sharing again in a more contemporary medium.  This blog is the result.

The blog will be partly history - I’m going to upload my Montignac primer, for example, as well as many of my old favorites, whether they’re low or high on the glycemic index scale - and partly new explorations.  One recent much-loved addition to my kitchen is a Vitamix super blender, which not only makes nutritious AND delicious morning smoothies (at least 2 of those 9 servings of fruit and veg we’re supposed to fit into every day), but will also grind grains to flour, so that I can experiment with whole grain breads - something I haven’t done since the first days of the Tassahara Bread Book back in the 1970s.  That might not happen until the summer of 2010 - so consider this a preview of coming attractions.