Adding Flavor to Your Diet

The Sign Above My Local Giant Supermarket

GREAT ARTICLE IN THE TIMES about the author Peter Kaminsky shopping for items that advance his theory that you can eat well by focusing on healthy items that deliver maximum flavor.  Kaminsky has a new book driving folks to exercise portion control by eating only high-flavor foods including olives, cured meats, and other delicacies that normal folks would eschew during their diets.

Not that anyone asked my opinion, but the reason I’m so damned skinny (although when I drink I get a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig look in the abs area), is because I eat like Kaminsky now shops. Lots of high-flavor foods driven by vinegars, citrus, cured meats, herbs, spices, etc. They provide huge flavor and low-carbs/calories. I never thought about this. My diet just morphed as I got older. I would eat large portions of cheesey, crusty pizza and feel like hell afterwards. I’d consume enormous portions of white breads or rices or pastas which I’d grown up on and feel less than sated.

Cynthia and Proscuitto Butts

So I just started picking up the flavors that most appealed. I didn’t feel particularly in need of the entire bowl of Kellogg’s frosted flakes anymore. Powerfully flavor strawberries this spring have supplanted my Honeycrisp and Goldrush morning apples. Grainy, textured bread slices have replaced the blueberry muffin.

Dessert made of goat’s cheese and cognac’ed figs far surpasses any desire I once had for pumpkin pie. It’s an odd transition, but it’s one I made just by listening to my guts, not my growling stomach, but my insides. Oh, and my palette helped. Sugary cakes are a some-time treat, not a weekly need like they used to be.

The NYT article takes place more or less at EATALY, the “new” (opened in 2010) super emporium of Italian food in Manhattan.

“Eataly, an enormous and enormously crowded new Italian-food market and restaurant collection that opened recently off Madison Square Park: 50,000 square feet of restaurants and peninsular provisions, with a fishmonger and butcher (and vegetable butcher) and an espresso bar, a wine store, a cheese store, a cooking school, a kitchenware department and a great deal more.

It is giant and amazing, on its face, a circus maximus.”

Great advice from the Times about how to navigate the store:

Want to take the measure of Eataly without waiting in too many lines?

• Enter on Fifth Avenue and stop immediately at the Lavazza booth. Have an espresso to focus the mind.
• (Is it after dark? Have a grappa, too, for courage.)
• Forget about putting your name in for a table at a restaurant—get a baby-blue shopping basket and get to work. You’ll want dry pasta from Gragnano, near Naples. The paccheri — big tubes of durum wheat the color of gold — hold sauce well. Also, maybe prosciutto bread from the bakery and a few packets of pork sausages.
• Along the West 24th Street wall, you’ll see the Market area: sauces and condiments and oils. Get something to cover the pasta and the meat. (The Batali-brand cherry-tomato sauce isn’t bad.) Next: a ball of fresh mozzarella from the bar selling same on the far side of the room where everyone’s standing at tables with sliced sausages and wine.
• (Ignore them!) Go south toward West 23rd Street, to the vegetable butcher’s stand. Some basil will suffice, though you might see fruit for dessert if you haven’t already succumbed to caramel pralines from the chocolate station.
• Finally, cut across to the checkout, near housewares, for La Nostra Gazzosa lemon soda. Head home via the wine store next door: a nice dolcetto should match that pasta just fine.

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