By Larry Levine –
I had no idea how pain medication could mess with my concentration?
It was one of the first lessons I learned in the days after I came home from the hospital following quadruple coronary bypass surgery in July 2008. My sternum had been opened wide and wired back together. It was going to hurt for some time and, no matter how much I hate the feelings associated with the ingestion of any kind of drugs, pain meds were going to be a vital part of my life for the short term.
I tried reading the newspaper each morning but I kept falling off track in mid-paragraph. It would take me all day to get through the paper and then I couldn’t remember much of what I read. Novels just weren’t going to work.
Cookbooks were another thing. You can lose your place in a cookbook because of a drug induced lapse of concentration and you don’t have to go back very far to pick up the plot. Survival on a low fat, low cholesterol, low sodium diet was an obsession, so I asked Jennifer to stack several of my cookbooks on the table next to my easy chair. They were the ones I thought might hold the best recipes for healthful cooking.
How wrong was that? Even the books ostensibly devoted to low fat and low cholesterol cooking didn’t seem to care how much sodium went into my body. Serious adaptation would be needed before I tackled the recipes in these books. Fortunately, I never cooked with much salt even before the surgery, so the concept that herbs and spices could make up for whatever flavor might be lost because of the elimination of salt was not foreign to me.
I plodded along through the cookbooks and after about a week I had put paper clips on scores of pages with recipes I thought might be adaptable for use in my new diet. Without realizing what I was doing, I had been plotting the first meals I would cook once I could venture back into the kitchen.
That time came one week after I got home from the hospital – 13 days after the surgery. With our son Lloyd back in Sacramento, I was pretty much on my own. Jennifer would have to do the bending to get my pots and pans from the cupboards. But the cooking was up to me and I couldn’t have been more anxious. After the first night, with the broiled salmon and re-heated lentils, it was time to exercise my own chops.
And chops it was going to be – pork chops. Yes, pork chops. I had found a recipe in one of my cookbooks that would work to meet my dietary needs and sounded tasty. Thanks to Lloyd’s wise advice about my total diet not needing to be perfect at every meal, I was no longer afraid to eat meat. Here’s the recipe for the break out dinner I prepared that night as it evolved over several preparations during the first year after surgery.
PORK CHOPS AND APRICOTS
2 pork chops (about 6 to 8 ounces each)*
1 Tblsp extra virgin olive oil
½ medium onion, thinly sliced
1 yellow bell pepper, seeded and sliced
1 tsp medium hot curry powder
½ Tblsp flour
½ cup homemade no salt chicken broth
½ cup dried apricots cut in halves
1 Tblsp whole-grain or Dijon mustard
Black pepper to taste
Trim the fat from the edges of the pork chop. Heat the oil in a heavy pan at a medium setting.
Add the onions and yellow peppers to the pan and stir over medium heat for five minutes. Stir in the curry powder and flour. Add the broth, mustard and black pepper to taste. Simmer about 10 minutes. Push the onions and peppers to the side of the pan. Put the pork chops in the pan and cover them with the onions, peppers and the apricots. Cover and cook over medium heat until pork is just pink in the center – about 8 to 10 minutes.
Serves 2.
Serves well with roasted or steamed new potatoes.
* I have been finding pork chops from the loin of the pig to be short on fat and virtually devoid of flavor. My butcher suggested shoulder chops as a substitute.
Notice the absence of salt in this recipe. The original recipe included some salt, but in my altered version virtually all the sodium is in the apricots and mustard. We aren’t using much of either and if you’ve been good the rest of the day, there’s not enough sodium here to approach the maximum daily allowance for most people. The fat and cholesterol content also is very low. Remember, as Lloyd said, “It’s low fat, low cholesterol and low sodium, not no, no and no.”
I might have been willing to write off the fact that it was delicious to my prolonged absence from the kitchen. But I’ve prepared this dish many times since and it’s always delectable.
Under doctor’s orders, I had been taking the 20-minute walks in the neighborhood, with Jennifer by my side for emotional support, stability and security. But moving around the kitchen, however tentatively, was another form of exercise, far more satisfying than the walks around the one block of our cul de-sac three times a day.
I laughed and smiled my way through the preparation of this first meal – thrilled to be back in the kitchen and confident as I set out on this new journey. There were all those paper clips identifying recipes on pages in various cookbooks and I was anxious to try each and every one.
Next up, however, would be an invention of my own.
My friends Tracey Poirier and Samantha Stevens had brought me a get-well basket. One of the items in it was a can of no-salt-added black beans. Jennifer and I like black beans. Usually I start with dried beans and cook them from scratch. I never even thought to buy canned black beans before. But the words “no-salt-added” on the can attracted my interest. It was a way to cook dishes with black beans without having to spend all the hours it usually takes to prepare them. My horizon had been broadened. After I used the first can of beans, I went to the market in quest of more cans for my pantry and discovered cans of no-salt-added diced tomatoes. These things really are very low in sodium and absolutely acceptable in a low sodium diet even if you add a bit of salt on your own.
Weeks later, after I returned to work full time, I went to lunch with my staff. I was half way through a Chinese chicken salad (dressing on the side) and talking about some of the wonderful, tasty and healthy things I’d been cooking. I had all the passion that usually accompanies my conversations about food. I said something about how well one can eat while adhering to the mandate of low fat, low cholesterol and low sodium.
Tracey looked at me with a smile and said, “You should write a cookbook and you should call it But I Still Love to Eat.” So, I did and now you are reading it.
While Lloyd was with us he bought a container of a very tasty rice blend. He used some of it for a rice salad. So, I had beans; I had rice; I had inspiration. I asked Jennifer to run out to the market and buy a skinless, boneless chicken breast and here’s what I did with all of this.
TRACEY’S & SAMANTHA’S INSPIRATION
Black Beans and Rice with Chicken
2 large chicken thighs – skinless, fat trimmed, with the bone in*
1 Tblsp olive oil
1 tsp cumin
1 15-oz can of no-salt-added black beans (or prepare them yourself from dried beans)
¾ cup uncooked flavorful rice medley
1¼ cups water
¾ Tblsp Santa Fe spice mixture (see recipe below)
½ onion – diced coarsely
1 large tomato – diced, medium
Pre-heat the oven to 425 degrees. Coat the chicken with olive oil. Rub the cumin on both sides of the chicken. Put the chicken on a rack and bake for 20 minutes. Turn it after 10 minutes and shorten the remaining cooking time if you think it might get over done.
Heat the black beans in a sauce pan.
Put the water and the rice in a sauce pan, cover, bring to a boil, turn the heat down to medium-low, let simmer about 15 minutes until all water is gone, or according to package directions.
Stir the spice mixture into the beans. Mix the raw onion and rice into the beans.
To serve center the chicken on a plate, spoon the rice and beans mixture over the chicken and top with the diced tomato.
Serves 2
For the rice I like something called RiceSelect Royal Blend by Rice Tec Inc. It’s a mixture of Texmati White, Brown, Wild and Red Rice.
* I find the chicken cooks better and tastes better if you leave the bone in.
Santa Fe Spice Mix
I like to make enough to store in a glass or plastic container for future uses, just as we do with dried herbs and spices we buy in the market.
1 Tblsp ground cumin
2½ teasp coriander
2 teasp dried oregano
2½ teasp chili powder
1½ teasp granulated garlic
½ teasp black pepper
1 Tblsp sweet paprika
Once you’ve used this in a recipe, you can adjust the proportions to your own taste.
There you have it: recipes for meals that represent the first two steps in the journey back from the operating table to the dinner table.
How To Get Your Food Writing Off the Back Burner And Onto This Magazine Site.