Dancing Spoon

Beautiful Eyes

Eating Beautiful

Beautiful Eyes

Fiona Barrett, Certified Holistic Health Counselor A.A.D.P

Ready for a beauty makeover? How about a little carotenoid, bioflavonoid, and antioxidant? No, no, not on, but in! This beauty makeover starts from the inside, through nutrition.

In this series of articles, I’ll explore with you ways of achieving beauty through foods we choose to eat: how we can feed our natural glow. We’ll discover how to gain natural beauty through balanced and careful eating for specific areas of our body.

The foods we eat nourish the cells of our body; our bones, skin, hair, and nails all have their own specific nutritional requirements. For instance, calcium, as is well known, helps keep our bones strong. By eating for beauty, we can supply our bodies with the nutrients, the vitamins, and the minerals for good health; the result is a natural beauty and radiance.

You Are What You Eat

As a child you were told to eat your carrots because they were good for your eyes. It’s true, they contain high amounts of carotene and that improves eyesight. You are what you eat and you can choose to improve your own beauty through food! In this first article I’ll focus on foods and nutrition for beautiful eyes.

For bright sparkling eyes increase your intake of whole foods rich in antioxidants, and phytochemical’s including carotenoids and bioflavonoids. Antioxidants include Vitamin C and Vitamin A, which protects the cells of the body from damage of oxidation caused by free radicals.

When you look someone in the eye and see beautiful eyes what do you see?

Clear Eyes
The whites of the eyes are clear without redness. Small broken blood vessels in the white of the eye cause the eye to redden. Strengthening the eye’s blood vessels and improving blood flow to the retina can help keep the red away. The antioxidant Vitamin C and the bioflavonoid anthocyanin help you do this.

Natural Color
The iris and pupils are full of their natural color. The eyes sparkle as the light reflects off bright eyes without shadow from puffiness or dark circles around the eyes. Eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, like dark leafy greens, that are cleansing for the body, promote circulation and prevent the inflammation to keep those dark circles away!

Help Keep Away Wrinkles
The wrinkles in the skin around our eyes are signs of oxidative damage. The antioxidants in Vitamin C and Vitamin A help protect the cells of the body from damage of oxidation caused by free radicals and so help keep away wrinkles around our eyes. Cataracts and macular degeneration are also signs of oxidative damage. 

These foods in particular will help you have healthier, beautiful eyes:

Blue and purple fruits rich in antioxidant and bioflavonoid complex called anthocyanin. These fruits help strengthen the blood vessels in your eyes. Try blackberries or blueberries. You can eat them raw and natural or, for a sweeter taste, sprinkle them with cinnamon. They are great in a smoothie or in plain yogurt.

Leafy green vegetables are a great source of Vitamin A and Vitamin C. These greens help keep away the wrinkles around your eyes. Leafy greens are the food most missing from the typical American diet. Spinach, arugula and kale are all a good addition to your diet. Chop leafy greens and add them to soups, stews, omelets, pizzas, or pastas. Try sautéing these greens with garlic in beauty enhancing olive oil.

Yellow and orange fruits and vegetables contain antioxidant Vitamin C and carotenoids, bioflavenoids and lutein. These nutrients are vital to growth and repair of healthy blood vessels at work in your eyes. Choose carrots, butternut squash or yellow beets. Roast a combination of these vegetables in olive oil and fresh herbs. Fresh carrot and beet juice make a great combination.

Foods as Beauty Treatments

Foods can also be used as body care treatments to help exfoliate, moisturize and care for your hair, skin and nails.

Cucumber slices: Place chilled cucumber slices onto closed eyes for 15 minutes. Cooling and refreshing: helps to keep skin around the eyes firm.

Grated cucumber or potato: Wrap in cheesecloth and press onto the eye area to minimize those dark circles around the eyes.

Recommended Reading

Gorgeous! The Sum of All Your Glorious Parts
by Jorj Morgan with Harry Moon MD and Mary Ellen Clark

A great resource of whole foods and nutrition to help you enhance your natural beauty: includes recipes and self-help techniques for all parts of the body. Combines food plans and home relaxation and spa ideas. Gorgeous: The Sum of All Your Glorious Parts

In Our Next Article
We will explore more about beauty through food for healthy hair!

Fiona Barrett is a certified Holistic Health Counselor trained at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York City. Accredited by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners. She creates unique nutrition and life style programs to help you personally discover what nourishes and feeds you to live an energized and passionate life! Fiona was born in England and now lives and practices in the greater Boston area.

For more information go to www.fionabarrett.com or contact Fiona at .

Do you have an Eating Beautiful question or comment? Comments for Fiona.

Gourmet Nation?

Beyond Above and

What Makes A Gourmet Nation, Gourmet?

I returned to the States after four very tasty years living in Paris, France. Having visited and traveled to France often, my (now former) wife and I moved there, in part, to be immersed in the French culture of food. Our apartment in the Septième Arrondissement, near the Eiffel Tower, was a blend of ex-pats like us (the American University of Paris is in the seventh), and a true Parisian quartier. Three blocks from our apartment was Rue Cler, one of the best food streets in Paris. The role of food in countries like France looms large. Seasons dictate menus. Regions pride themselves on their unique foods and the dishes prepared from those foods. Arguments can breakout over how to cook mushrooms. Foods, the market, cooking, eating, dining, are the heritage of the French.

And as an American living in the quarter, buying my food from the same shops weekly (daily sometimes), the butcher, the greengrocer, the cheese monger, felt a duty to elevate my understanding of how to eat in their country. It was a process.

This being France, I suspect that French children are introduced to the myriad of cheeses available to them in a very systematic manner. Some cheeses are more demanding than others and must be approached with some experience. One doesn’t leap from a Monterrey Jack to a Livarot overnight. My fromager (at La Fermette, a small family-owned cheese shop on Rue Cler) seemed to have a syllabus in his head when he began my cheese education. I would read or hear about a cheese and I would rush over to La Fermette to buy some.

Sometimes, however, I would come home with a very different cheese. For instance, I read about a cheese called Vacherin des Bauges and it sounded so great I had to try it. But when I went to my fromager to buy some, he smiled at me as if I were a pleasant, but not terribly bright, small child. He couldn’t sell it to me, because, as everyone else apparently knew, Vacherin des Bauge was out of season. (Being raised on pre-sliced-plastic-wrapped-cheese, how was I to know there were cheese seasons!)

On another occasion he refused to sell me a certain cheese because he felt I wasn’t ready for that particular cheese yet. When I insisted, he sold the cheese to me conditionally: if I didn’t like it I was to return it and he would refund my money! (And yes, he was right, I wasn’t quite ready for that particular cheese.)

If you’re a foodie, the joy of living in Europe is the depth of the food experience: the open air markets; a small town café serving house-made jambon persillé; following a hand lettered sign “Dégustation de vin” (wine tasting) up a dirt road to taste wine in the wine maker’s kitchen; eating ricotta cheese, made that morning, drizzled with lavender honey from local hives. And while it is true that you can find a poor meal in France, you can, more often than not, find amazing food almost anywhere. That little village café serves magret de canard because the villagers, who eat there regularly, are culturally educated to know and demand good food. They have hundreds of years of culinary experience to draw upon.

On an excursion to the south of France, to the small port town of Bandol, we found a dégustation of the local wine cooperative. We tasted the great rosés that Bandol is famous for, as well as the very interesting, but lesser known white wines of the area. The patron of the cooperative poured our wine. He was very animated talking about the wines, but when the conversation moved on to food the patron looked down and shook his head. He said he was distressed over the state of cuisine in France. He felt that the French were losing their passion for food and were embracing the American way of eating. MacDonald’s (the French call it MacDOE, with a long “o”) was too popular, families were not taking their meals together, and quality of the café, the bistro, and the national heritage of food was in decline. And yet, and this is what is so memorable to me, he felt that Americans were on the opposite tack. He held up his arms and made an “X” of them. He said that while the French cuisine was declining (he wiggled his right elbow), America’s cuisine was ascending (he wiggled his left hand).

The United States of Arugula 

David Kamp’s food lover’s guide to the our own culinary history, The United States of Arugula, How We Became a Gourmet Nation, is a fascinating study of the American culinary world since 1950’s. It is the back story of James Beard, Julia Child, the French invasion of the fifties, the evolution of food awareness, designer pizza, and farm-to-restaurant provisions. And it’s I book I recommend to any foodie who is interested in how we have arrived at this particular culinary moment in America. But Kamp never answers the question inherent in his title: Are We a Gourmet Nation?

Kamp rarely looks beneath that upper echelon of the culinary world. Most of the players he mentions you already know: Beard, Child, Emeril, Puck. He talks about the contributions of the big name restaurants. He talks about Whole Foods Market and Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee. He talks about the celebrity farmer’s markets.

But he never talks about you or me. We are the players that will make America a Gourmet Nation. It is we who are discovering the magic of the culinary world. The big cities, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and others, have long had outposts of culinary excellence, both in restaurants and markets, but those were isolated islands. Now, from the east coast to the west, and most importantly, everywhere in between, the passion of food and eating and cooking, the passion that the food-centric cultures know, is settling into our national soul.

Gourmet Nationhood is not like instant Nescafé: you can’t just add water. Perhaps you’re lucky enough to have a couple of good restaurants or cafes in your neighborhood. Maybe you’ve got a great food shop or artisan baker. But most of our American quartiers still are barren. Most of us don’t have the eating opportunities, or the depth of understanding of cuisine, that a Frenchman or an Italian has. We still have to learn those early steps of the process, just like my learning experience with cheese.

The good news is that Monsieur Bandol is correct. We are embracing good food, and embracing it passionately. Hence the Food Network. Hence the hundreds of available food magazines. Hence DancingSpoon.com. Gourmet Nationhood demands time, and learning, and tasting, and cooking, and sharing, and supporting your local bakers, and farmers and cheese makers, and weaving the world of food into our beings. (Whew!)

When one walks down the typical American city and can’t resist popping into that pastry shop for a regional treat, or grab a fresh baguette from the local baker, or stop every few steps to study the daily lunch menu hanging in the window of your neighborhood café, until our food shops are passionate about the meat, or vegetables, or spices that they sell you, until you are passionate about what you buy and cook and eat, we’re not there yet.

But you know what? I think our culinary education is proceeding just fine; no longer are we that small (culinary) child. We may not be a Gourmet Nation just yet, but I think we can become one.

– J. Michael Wheeler

Shopping list

 

 

The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation

What makes a Gourmet Nation, Gourmet? What do you think?

Spin It, Baby!

Tricks Tips and

 

Wilted, brown, and mushy. This describe your lettuce in a few days? Well here's a tip to keep your lettuce fresh and crispy for a long while (in lettuce-years anyway).

Do this as soon as you come home from the market with that great head of lettuce. (Right. How about just soon.)

But you gotta have a salad spinner!!!

1. Put your salad spinner in the sink and take off the top, but leave in the basket. Start filling the spinner's bowl with cold water. Cut off the bottom of the lettuce and place separated leaves into the spinner bowl. Don't overcrowd the bowl.

2. When the bowl fills with water, swish around the lettuce leaves a bit making sure they all are getting washed. Remove the basket with the leaves still in it.

3. Dump the water. Repeat these first steps until the water is clear and your lettuce is clean.
Then spin that baby. Rearrange the leaves and spin again.

4. Now, take out the lettuce leaves and spread them out on 3-4 paper towels (don't separate the towels). Do this with all the cleaned leaves.

5. Roll the towels tightly without smashing the lettuce. Put the roll into a large plastic bag, push out the air and fold to seal the bag. You can also wrap a large rubber band around the bag to keep it closed.  If you have a very large amount of lettuce repeat from step four with another bag and more paper towels.

Your lettuce will stay fresh for a long time.

Shopping List
OXO Large Salad Spinner

Gotta a favorite kitchen tip? Tell us.

  – J. Michael Wheeler

Bacchus and Me

Reading What We're

Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar

Jay Mcinerney

If you enjoy wine you probably talk about it and read about it, but if you’re tired of hearing (or using) phrases such as buttery on the nose, just a hint of vanilla, and with a finish reminiscent of quail roasting on mesquite then Jay McInerney (yeah, Big City, Bright Lights McInerney) is for you.

For instance on describing the Turley Cellars’ 1994 Hayne Vineyard Zinfandel: “The first sip of the ’94 is apt to shake and rattle you to your socks—like the first time your heard rock and roll really loud. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” comes to mind.”

Then “Marinelli’s ‘94 Jackass Hill Vineyard zinfandel is, on the other hand, more “Layla” or “Free Bird” than “Jumpin’ Jack.” Same grape, similar-vintage old vines—yet the style is completely different from Turely’s.”

While Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar is a bit heavy on Helen Turley worship, McInerney brings a knowledgeable and fresh insight to exploring wine. He helps us appreciate wine with a just a hint of rebellion and a finish of good old rock ‘n roll.

– J. Michael Wheeler

Shopping list

Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar

Who's your favorite wine author? Tell us.

Between Meals

Reading What We're

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris

A. J. Liebling

There are few writers who can make us want to pack our bags and jump on a plane just so we can lunch in Paris. Liebling is one of those writers. A contemporary of Hemingway in Paris, Liebling makes us wish for a time machine to go along with our plane ticket.

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris is Liebling’s look back at his early years in Paris where he began his education of eating that continued throughout his life. He never considered himself a gourmet but rather an “eater.” And this served him well. Liebling tells us “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.”

Liebling wrote for The New Yorker for almost four decades. His numerous essays on the press, the sweet science (boxing), history, restaurants, eating, and the culinary world, have been collected in numerous volumes.

And for we foodies, we are lucky he had a prodigious appetite.

This book should be on every foodie’s bookshelf.

– J. Michael Wheeler

Shopping list

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris

Who's your favorite food author? Tell us.

Bakin' Bacon

Tricks Tips and

Bacon tastes sooooooo good. It’s great with eggs in the morning of course, and crumbled in salads it adds a nice contrasting layer to the greens. Cooked bacon adds flavors to quiches, stews, and soups. (I just made a potato soup and the added bacon took it to a new level.)

But standing over the stove with those pork slices spitting up at me, feeling guilty about pouring the bacon fat down the drain, and scraping all those bits off the pan and soaking it and washing it had me thinking about the soy alternative again.

And then, that wacky pork lover himself, Alton Brown, showed me the light. Well, actually, he showed me the oven and the joys of bakin’ bacon.

In AltonBrownSpeak, here’s the hardware:

A sheet pan.
A wire rack for the sheet pan.
There is no number three.

Then:

Place the wire rack in the sheet pan.
Lay your bacon slices across the rack.
Put the sheet pan in a cold oven. (Just like frying bacon, starting out cold keeps the bacon from curling. And that’s a good thing.)
Turn your oven on to 400 degrees.
When your oven reaches temperature set your timer to 8 minutes.
After the timer goes off, check the bacon every one or two minutes until it’s as crisp as you want it.
Done.

Drain the bacon on paper towels. Then, and here’s the best part, (besides the eating part) remove the wire rack, wipe out the sheet pan with paper towels and throw the towels away. No more down-the-drain-guilt! The rest of the clean up is easy.

Need to cook more than one sheet pan of bacon? Use multiple sheet pans on multiple racks in your oven.

Shopping list
Alton Brown (his books, not him)
Sheet pans
Wire racks
Niman Ranch Bacon, try their Applewood Smoked Bacon
You don’t have a timer? I’ve got four in my kitchen and sometimes I’m using them all at the same time. The trick is to know when a particular beep beeps, is it for the beans, the bread or the bacon. Buy some timers.

What’s your favorite use of bacon? Tell us.

  – J. Michael Wheeler

Dub Spuds

Potatoes Good Ol'

 

I’ve rediscovered potatoes. I’m not sure why I turned away from potatoes, but maybe it was partly the no-carb thing, partly the potatoes on every plate in every restaurant I ate at, or maybe I just tired of the whole spud experience.

But, like remembering a former girlfriend, I found myself thinking only of the good aspects of my tuber relationship. Mostly I remembered that potatoes tasted good. So I bought some Yukons and cleaned them and boiled them; I buttered them, S&P’ed them, and ate them. And, in fact, they were good.

So good I made some more. This time I cut them in half to cook faster and threw some salt into the water. I was curious to see if the salt had affected the taste of the spuds. I thought it had. Then I dressed them with butter, olive oil, S&P, and parsley. And they were even tastier.

Okay, so if the salt affected the flavor of the potatoes, what else could I add?

The result: Dub Spuds

Yukon Golds are a great potato for Dub Spuds. Depending on size, half or quarter the them,  and pop them into a pot of cold water. Peel and smash a clove of garlic and throw it into the pot. Add S&P, a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, some fresh herbs like parsley, rosemary, or thyme. Boil about 15-20 minutes until done. Remove, drain, and dress with butter and/or olive oil, S&P, and more of the herbs if you wish.

Dub Spuds brought me back to the tuber world. I’m even nuking russets now! But that’s another story.

Shopping list

• Pots and Pans Here's a real deal!
• Colander
• Olive Oils
• Timers

What's your favorite potato recipe?  Tell us here.

  – J. Michael Wheeler