Daikon

It's disappointing how few of the world's edible plants and animals make up most people's diets, so when the chance comes along to try something new, I usually take it. Although I've eaten daikon before, I never bought it or prepared it myself until now.

It's the long white sticks on my crudité platter shown in the photo, which I served with guacamole and hummus for dipping. Wikipedia has a photo of whole daikon, but mine wasn't as pretty as theirs. The greens had been removed, and the skin was rough-textured with some brownish coloration in areas. It looked a lot like a parsnip, or like a carrot if carrots were off-white. It was a bargain at $1.29 per pound, less than a dollar for a large daikon.

I peeled it and cut it into strips suitable for dipping. Daikon is sometimes known as daikon radish or Chinese radish, and I found the taste and texture very similar to a "regular" radish: crunchy, a bit watery, and providing a moderate sensation of heat on the tongue. My wife compared the flavor to celery; however, it lacks any stringiness.

Wikipedia says daikon is low in calories, and higher in vitamin C than regular radishes. I suspect the red skin of regular radishes harbors some antioxidants that aren't found in daikon, but I'm just guessing about that. Readers, please weigh in if you know. In any case, daikon is probably a more healthful choice than a lot of things I eat. It wasn't the most delicious thing I ever had, but I would try it again.

The strip mall trifecta

There are three desirable characteristics of food: good flavor, low cost and good nutrition. It's rare to find one dish that offers all of these.

My hopes for good eating were particularly low yesterday afternoon. I was on the road and didn't have a chance to get lunch until after 3:00. In an unfamiliar town and too hungry to be choosy, I pulled into a strip mall and perused the storefronts. I settled on Frank's Trattoria, which looked like any other pizza joint, with a counter, a few tables, and pizza by the slice. I assumed I'd wolf down a couple of pieces of pizza and be on my way.

But then I noticed a chalkboard on which a single lunch special was offered: grilled salmon with sautéed vegetables. Amazingly, this meal was priced at only $7.50. When the food arrived, the portion was huge, and it tasted great! Furthermore, it was loaded with sautéed fresh vegetables: broccoli, spinach, carrots, peppers, mushrooms onions and garlic. It wasn't greasy or particularly salty, just flavorful and satisfying.

So although it's unusual to find taste, affordability and healthful ingredients all together, sometimes good meals come from unexpected places. Three cheers for the strip mall trifecta!

Is Boston Market more healthful than other fast food chains?

I was away from home at dinnertime today, and although I'm not usually a fan of chain restaurants, I gave in to a craving for Boston Market. I don't think of Boston Market's food as healthful, but I always figured it was a bit less unhealthful than "traditional" fast food like McDonalds or KFC. After finishing a fatty, salty meal, though, I was wondering whether that's true. I decided to look up the nutrition facts for what I had just eaten.

Boston Market provides access to an online nutrition calculator, which is actually pretty slick. I entered my entrée (Rotisserie Chicken - Three Piece Dark, which automatically added cornbread to my meal and sides (Garlic Dill New Potatoes and Garlicky Lemon Spinach). The calculator generated this nutrition facts report:


The calorie count was actually less than I expected. I can certainly handle 760 calories at dinnertime, unless I've had an unusually large breakfast and lunch.

The fat and saturated fat numbers are pretty high, but (I'm embarrassed to say) no higher than some of the dinners I cook at home. The cholesterol, at 108% of daily value, is a bit alarming. The chicken accounts for 290mg of the cholesterol, about double what USDA's Food-A-Pedia estimates for a similar quantity of roasted dark-meat chicken.

It's no surprise that the meal included nearly a day's worth of sodium. The 15 grams of sugar did come as a surprise. The only thing that tasted slightly sweet was the cornbread, which turns out to contribute 13 of those 15 grams.

On the positive side, the nutrition facts significant amounts of vitamins and minerals, as well as 6 grams of fiber. These nutrients mostly came from the two side dishes. However, I'm skeptical whether the stated amounts of these nutrients really survived processing and cooking. Also, I noticed vitamin A palmitate in the ingredient list, so not all of the vitamin A is from the actual vegetables.

Speaking of the ingredients, I was going to count how many there are, but I actually found it too difficult. Many of them have lists of sub-ingredients, some of which overlap. Suffice it to say there were more than 20 ingredients in my meal, and they included such delights as modified cornstarch and mono and diglycerides. It's never a good sign when Google's spell-checker doesn't believe something you ate is a word.

One definite benefit of this dinner: between the Garlic Dill New Potatoes and the Garlicky Lemon Spinach, I won't have to worry about vampires tonight!

Bagged salad: good or evil? Readers, please comment.

I consider lettuce a Good Thing to Eat, nutritionally speaking. Not iceberg lettuce, of course, but varieties with a good supply of vitamin A and other nutrients. So I try to keep some in the fridge at all times. Since I don't want the inconvenience of washing and cutting lettuce to discourage me from making a salad, I often buy pre-washed, bagged salad from the supermarket. I have some misgivings about bagged salad, although I'm not sure why. Here are some of the pros and cons as I see them. I hope readers will weigh in.

Cost
This is a no-brainer in favor of head lettuce. At Shoprite, Whole Foods and A&P stores in suburban New Jersey and New York, bagged salad generally costs between $2.50 and $3.99 for a 5- to 10-ounce bag, or $5.99 to $6.99 for an 11- to 16-ounce clamshell. That works out to somewhere between $5.99 and $12.67 per pound. Not surprisingly, the nutritious, tasty varieties I prefer tend to be at the high end of the price-per-pound range. For comparison, today I bought two whole heads of lettuce, 0.91 pounds of red leaf at $1.79/lb. and 0.49 pounds of romaine at $1.29/lb. That's well over a pound of lettuce for a total of $2.36. Even after discarding the cores and a few outer leaves, it works out to about $2.00 per pound.

Convenience
In this category, bagged salad wins hands-down. Just open the bag and throw the lettuce in a bowl. Whole lettuce needs to be washed and cut. Today, I pre-washed my lettuce so I won't be discouraged from making a salad on another day when I have less time or motivation. I separated the leaves, swished them around in a bowl of cold water (two batches, each rinsed twice), and dried them in my salad spinner (two batches). The cleaned leaves went into a gallon-size zipper bag with a dry paper towel. The process took about 10 minutes. Although sometimes I cut the leaves into bite-size pieces before bagging, I didn't do that today, so I'll have to spend another few minutes on that task when I'm ready to make a salad. Not the end of the world, but I really don't relish spending 10 minutes once or twice a week processing lettuce.

Shelf life
This topic confuses me a bit. I always assumed that bagged salad goes bad faster than whole lettuce, even whole lettuce that has been washed and cut at home. And often it does, but not always. I've seen bagged salad become wilted and slimy within a day of opening, yet I've also seen it last for a week after opening, even beyond it's "best by" date. Whole lettuce that I've washed and cut generally stays fresh for a week. Interestingly, although it eventually loses its crispness and turns brown, it doesn't go bad in the same gross, slimy way the bagged salad does. I guess head lettuce is the winner in this category, but the results aren't entirely clear.

Quality and variety
One advantage of bagged salad is that you can get a mixture of many types of lettuce. Some of the spring mix products are a delightful blend of several kinds of baby lettuce, baby spinach and herbs. Some products are available with shredded carrots and cabbage mixed in. Bagged salad makes it easy to get a variety of high-nutrient, tasty greens in one package.

Vague qualms
So what worries me about bagged salad? I sometimes wonder if manufacturers are taking the lettuce that's about to go bad, trimming it, and packaging what's left as bagged salad. If it's true, is it a good thing or a bad thing? It's good if it prevents waste, but not so good if I'm getting a product that's past its peak of flavor and nutrition. Then there's the plastic packaging that ends up in the waste stream, or if we're lucky, gets recycled. And there's a nagging sense that I'm taking a shortcut instead of preparing fresh food from scratch. But is that wrong if it means I eat more and better lettuce?

What do you think?
I see both pros and cons to bagged salad. I don't know much about how it's grown, shipped and processed. And I don't know how it compares to head lettuce in terms of nutrition, pesticides, risk of contamination, or the conditions for farm and processing workers. I'd love to hear from readers.

Thanks for the hanger steak!

To the nice lady who took the wrong cart in Whole Foods:

I wasn't really paying attention when you approached me in the supermarket the other day. In fact, I had my head halfway inside the dairy case, looking for a good deal on yogurt. But I do recall you mentioned that you had accidentally taken someone else's cart, you thought it might have been mine, and you were wondering whether I now had yours. I also recall looking inside my cart, recognizing the contents, and saying I couldn't help you. Then another shopper mentioned he had heard something about a missing cart on the other side of the store, and you went off to investigate. I thought that was the end of the story.

It was two days later when I decided to grill the salmon burgers I had purchased. I pulled the package, wrapped in brown butcher paper, out of the fridge and was starting to tear it open when I noticed something odd on the label. Something about a hanger. Certainly nothing about salmon. Upon closer inspection, what I had was nearly one pound of hanger steak. I guess you had placed something in my cart after all, because I have never bought hanger steak in my life.

With the grill already heating and no backup plan for dinner, I decided to cook the steak. Although I have plenty of experience grilling steak and other foods, I was a little nervous, because I had heard that hanger steak can be chewy if not prepared properly. I've mostly had it as fajitas or in high-end restaurants, where it benefited from marination and the high heat of a professional kitchen. This being a last-minute dinner, I had no time to marinate, and my gas grill gets hot, but not that hot.

A few minutes of Internet research suggested that as long as I used the highest heat I could and cooked the meat to medium rare -- no more and no less -- all would be well. I also found some helpful instructions for removing the gristle that ran the length of the steak: simply cut the steak into two smaller ones.

So I preheated the grill and rubbed the meat with olive oil, salt, pepper and dried oregano. I threw the meat on the grill and left all three burners on high. After about five minutes, I turned the meat, turned the center burner off, and after a few minutes more, started checking with a meat thermometer. I was looking for a temperature of around 130 degrees, but after getting readings anywhere from 125 to over 140 in different areas, I pulled it off the grill rather than risk overcooking. I let it rest for about five minutes and then, following another online tip to promote tenderness, sliced it thinly against the grain.

Once I started slicing, I could see that I should have left it on the heat a few minutes longer. The thinnest parts were rare to medium rare, and the thickest parts were very rare. It was easy to salvage the situation by not leaving the thickest part unsliced and throwing it back on the grill for about three more minutes.

Success! The meat wasn't tough, it was very juicy, and the flavor was intense and delicious. I think I'll start buying this cut sometimes.

So thanks for the hanger steak. And I hope you like salmon burgers!