A chef and a cook: Therein lies the difference between Jamie and Sunny

As promised a quick review of the other two new Food Network cooking shows:

The Chef
Jamie Oliver, the artist formerly known as "The Naked Chef," has re-invented himself, not so much in how he prepares food, but in how he presents it.

Jamie first impressed viewers in 1998 when, at the age of 22, his "Naked Chef" show featured the spiky-haired urbanite zooming around London on his moped, securing fresh ingredients for simple (but not simplistic) flavorful dinners he'd prepare in his loft apartment kitchen and serve to his posh Gen X friends.

The pace of the show was quick, modern and uber-hip, and Oliver became a minor celebrity.

Today, after seven years in which he pursued a variety of activities -- most notably trying to rid Britain's public schools of processed foods -- Oliver's back as a laid-back Birkenstock-wearing country boy.

The new show is as sparsely produced as is Oliver's food, and that drives home the point. You see extreme close-ups of brightly colored food (and of Oliver's sausage-like fingers). You hear no music, only the chopping, popping, sizzling and splashing of food preparation.

The second episode of "Jamie at Home" featured asparagus, prepared in a variety of ways, redolent of the simple Mediterranean flavors and aromas he'd first presented in "The Naked Chef."

One scene finds Oliver sitting in his herb garden (herb pronounced with the full English "H" of course), pulling some chervil from a plant, adding it to a sizzling pan of olive oil, then frying up some fresh fish and asparagus. Yummy.

The only issue for American viewers is translating all the metric measurements (500 grams of this and 250 grams of that) into American units. (The series is produced by the BBC, and it debuted in Europe last year.)

At the end of the day, though, it's clear Oliver is a talented young chef whose basic theme -- simple, fresh and elegant foods can be prepared by anyone, anywhere -- is a timeless message that's as important today as it was 10 years ago.

The Cook
Oliver's training contrasts greatly with that of "Cooking for Real" host Sunny Anderson's training.

Anderson is an Air Force veteran who has run her own caterinig business and has served as food editor at Hip Hop Weekly magazine. She's not a chef, and she makes no claims to be one.

Unfortunately, the recipes she puts together on her show underscore that.

Her second episode, "Mexin' it Up," featured recipes that both echo and contradict Oliver's call for freshness. She forgets the importance of simplicity, however, in an attempt to create uniqueness.

For example, she creates an interesting (if not all that appetizing) version of huevos rancheros featuring all fresh ingredients. She bakes them in ramekins, but the end result isn't as appealing as she tells us it will be. Contrasting that is a batch of deep-fried churros that ends up being so time consuming and intensive that no home viewer is likely to take that much time and expend that much effort.

Where Oliver is a chef who also understands the challenges his non-chef viewers face daily, Anderson is a cook who works too hard to make up for that difference.

Still, Anderson's show in its infancy is better than anything Rachael Ray has done in her decades (or does it just seem that long) on television.

New Food Network shows: One good, one not

The Food Network added four new shows this month, hoping to fill some glaring holes in its programming schedule.

Three of the shows feature new talent, while the fourth is hosted by Jamie Oliver, formerly known as "The Naked Chef" -- a reference to his uncomplicated cooking style, not his state of undress.

Two of the shows feature African-American hosts, which is a real breakthrough in a genre and a network that have been the exclusive territory of white Americans and Europeans, with an occasional Australian thrown in.

The four shows and their hosts:

• "Cooking for Real" with Sunny Anderson
• "Jamie at Home" with Jamie Oliver
• "Down Home with the Neelys" with Pat and Gina Neely
• "Rescue Chef" with Danny Boome

I'll wait to write about "Cooking for Real" and "Jamie at Home" next week.

Of the two I watched last week, "Down Home with the Neelys" carries the most potential for survival.

While the show should probably be followed by a show hosted by Nathan Pritikin's ghost, the hosts genuine enthusiasm and the knowledge they have about their specialty (barbecue) makes it s fun show to watch. Yeah, the portions are huge, and the food is uber-fatty, but it sure looks tasty. If you don't know how to monitor your own food intake for balance and portion size, then this may not be your show.

The biggest question: how will the owners of a barbecue restaurant in Memphis come up with fresh show ideas through the course of this season and hopefully into a second?

"Rescue Chef" appears to be a warmed-over version of Tyler Florence's old "Food 911." Unfortunately, Florence's professional demeanor and pedagogic flare have been replaced by Boome's pretty-boy camera-mugging and hog-the-knife pedantry.

In short, get down-home with the Neelys (just cut the portions in half), and lower Boome on your list of television priorities.

You go, grill: KFC tests charred chicks

Signs of the Apocalypse continue to shower the land. And yesterday's news comes from one of the great grease purveyors in my lifetime, KFC. (I still think of it as Kentucky Fried Chicken, but I'm old.)

True to their former name, KFC has continued to fry just about everything on its menu, salad greens and pot pies notwithstanding. Yesterday, though, the company announced that it will test-market grilled chicken in six U.S. markets. Among the diverse set of markets is Colorado Springs.

Other test cities include noted fatties Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Diego and Oklahoma City, andfitness fanatical Austin.

(In the 2007 Men's Fitness magazine ranking of America's fattest and fittest cities, OKC was 15th fattest, Indianapolis was 16th, San Diego was a surprising 21st, and Jax was 23rd. On the other side, Colorado Springs was 3rd fittest, while Austin was 21st.)

Those cities will give KFC valuable feedback on its test menu items, most notably its marinated chicken, which will contain 60 to 180 calories and 3 to 9 fat grams per chicken piece. The regular fried chicken pieces look like this:

• Wing (130 calories, and 8 fat grams) and Extra Crispy Wing (170 and 11)
  
• Breast (360 and 21) and EC Breast (440 and 27)
  
• Leg (130 and 8) and EC Leg (160 and 10)
  
• Thigh (330 and 24) and EC Thigh (370 and 28)
• Large Popcorn Chicken (550 and 35)

Add a serving of mashed potatoes and gravy (140 and 5), some mac and cheese (180 and 8) and a biscuit (220 and 11) to an extra crispy breast, and you've just downed 980 calories and 51 fat grams, or about half a day's calories and an entire day's fat grams.

Don't be fooled into thinking a pot pie is a healthy choice, as it contains 770 calories and 40 fat grams.

However, if the grilled chicken test works, you will be able to go to a KFC and get a reasonably healthy meal:

• A grilled breast (180 calories and 9 fat grams)
• Green beans (50 and 1.5)
• A small corn on the cob (70 and 1.5)
• Baked Beans (220 and 1) and
• Water (0 and 0)

Together, that's 520 calories and 13 fat grams, and quite a bit of food.

Last year, KFC eliminated trans fats from all its food, and it claims to also be working to reduce sodium levels in its food. Further, KFC has an animal welfare policy that seems to address concerns regarding hormone levels in chicken.

Let's hope the test goes well for them.

Do the Crazy Ivan at Mad Greens

Southeast Fort Collins hit the healthy fast-food jackpot earlier this winter when Mad Greens opened a franchise in a strip mall at Timberline and Harmony (it's nestled between a Chipotle and a Floyd's Barber Shop).

It's a perfect location for the suburban set who still equates healthy eating with salads (God forbid anyone really learn to eat or cook with tofu, Brussels sprouts or parsnips -- OK, I'll do that next week) and salads only.

You've seen the bumper sticker: "Eat Beef: The West wasn't won on a salad." Thank you, North Dakota Beef Commission. There's more to vegetarian eating than leaves.

That written, Mad Greens does leaves right. And, in general, you're probably going to leave the store with a better and happier stomach than if you'd ordered to triple greasy gut-bomb from Burger Nova.

A thorough perusal of the Mad Greens nutrition charts for salads and dressings reveals some interesting information, and it underscores that any consumer needs to be aware of the combinations s/he orders.

As with any salad, health-conscious diners need to be careful the dressing isn't adding most of the calories. And even though a salad may look heavy, combined with a lighter dressing, the heaviest salad might actually be the most healthy.

For example, the Crazy Ivan carries the most calories (572) on the menu, as well as 34 fat grams and nearly 43 grams of carbs. But a quick look at Ivan's ingredients reveals a cornucopia of healthy fats, fibrous veggies and good protein. In fact, adding chicken to another salad still won't get you to the same level as Ivan's protein mark, and you'd have to pay more. Eliminate the croutons, and you get rid of a bunch of the carbs and calories without losing protein or fiber.

The Crazy Ivan (sans the croutons):

• Salad Greens
• Beets
• Pumpkin Seeds
• Goat Cheese

Absolutely nothing wrong with that, and by removing the croutons, you can add back in some of the calories by ordering it with one of the olive or canola oil vinaigrettes. I'd recommend Port wine, lemon curry or balsamic.

On the flip side, if you're ordering one of the low-calorie salads (fewer than 200 calories) you might risk not getting enough calories to fuel your afternoon. Adding chicken to the Custer, the Van Gogh, the Nobo Seagaru, the Da Vinci or the MAD Molly Brown seems almost essential for a normal-sized adult.

Among the dressings, the ginger soy has the healthiest nutritional profile, but its pungent flavors might not work with certain dressing ingredients.

Sunset and Fine: Magazine stews up winner

As a magazine, venerable old Sunset continues to wobble along as it sees many of its sister lifestyle magazines founder and falter.

Founded in 1898 as a mouthpiece publication for the Southern Pacific Railroad company, Sunset still seeks to promote the Western lifestyle, despite the vast differences in living in Hawaii compared to, say, Tensleep, Wyoming.

Part of the magazine's appeal, even as HGTV and hyper-active home remodelers continue to turn lifestyle media into advertisements for Lowe's and Home Depot, continues to be its recipe sections. And one of the February entries rates as the best beef stew I've ever made (though I made it as a bison stew).

"Smoky Beef Stew with Blue Cheese and Chives" still has a few weeks of cold and windy winter that it can warm before we start moving out to the grill.

The ingredients, as I've already parenthetically mentioned, are negotiable to an extent:

• Carrots and potatoes are traditional beef stew ingredients, and tough to argue with in this classic because you don't want super-pungent root veggies distracting your taste buds from the smoky richness of the wine-based broth;
• Chipotle powder is nice, but I used a guajillo powder along with the pimiento ahumado;
• For the wine, I started with the Big House Red, a central California red with just the right strength to complement, but not overpower, the smoky spices and the bison. Of course, I had to sample the Big House, so I finished the stew by softening the potatoes and carrots in a Holy Cow merlot from the Columbia River Valley in Washington. (We're finishing that bottle and the stew at a reasoned pace.);
• Smoked bacon, such as Nueske's, is essential;
• Bison is just as good as beef, especially if you up the fat content with either extra oil or an extra slice of bacon;
  
• Canola oil doesn't get in the way of the stew, as a more flavorful oil might; and
  
• Don't forget the blue cheese; though the stew's great without it, the cheese pushes it over the top.
  

You should not deviate, however, from the preparation method or utensils. Browning the meat in a Dutch oven indeed takes time, but the resulting brown crust at the bottom of the pan starts to loosen when you add the smoked bacon. The roux that results ratchets up the entire sauce. And cook everything the amount of time requested. Stew ingredients need to hang out with each other for awhile before they're ready to commit.

I loved it. My wife loved it. These readers of Sunset loved it.

If you have a few hours on a cold weekend day, you'll love making and eating it.

Fourthmeal redux: Triglyceride stacking

Good journalists always follow stories as new information surfaces come up, and good bloggers should be good journalists. Thus, this little nugget from The New York Times regarding the Taco Bell invention, "Fourthmeal."

Last week I wrote that Fourthmeal appears to be creeping into our popular lexicon, but that most young people still associate the term (if not the practice) with Taco Bell. Chalk one up for marketers.

But the argument has been made by Taco Bell executives and their hired marketing guns that Taco Bell wasn't necessarily promoting an extra meal, but that it was promoting a good place to eat if a person's final meal came late in the evening.

So some researchers decided to ask this key question:

If a person eats a normal amount of food, but just happens to eat some of it late in the evening (early in the morning), what difference does it make in that person's health?

The answer: Eating immediately before bed appears to be a bad idea.

According to Dr. Louis J. Aronne in this health feature from The New York Times, it has to do with triglyceride levels, metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance. In layperson's terms, if you eat before bedtime, the calories you consume will likely be stored as fat.

As with many medical conundra, though, there are others who argue total caloric intake is all that matters.

"It's a simple rule - it's calories in and calories out," Steven Aldana, a researcher at Brigham Young University, told the Lakeland (Fla.) Ledger last year. "But if you are having four full meals during the day, you are going be storing excess calories in the form of fat. It's just the law of physics. If your calorie content is too high, that's going to contribute to excessive weight, which is not something we need a whole lot more of in the United States."

Study supports supersized Spurlock

Do you remember a movie from a few years back called "Supersize Me"?

In it, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock -- by most measures a fit, lean man in his early 30s at the time -- subjected himself to an all-McDonald's diet for one month. During that month, if any McDonald's employee asked Spurlock if he wanted to "supersize" the meal, he would have to assent.

Spurlock, 32, stood 6-feet-2 and weighed 185 pounds when he began the experiment in February 2003. After his month-long grease orgy, he weighed 210 pounds and experienced a decreased libido and liver dysfunction. He wasn't able to get back to his healthy weight until the summer of 2004, when the film was released.

Of course, McDonald's fired back that Spurlock's experiment was unreasonable, that no one in his/her right mind would choose such an unhealthy diet. To their credit, the corporate burger peddlers responded by limiting supersized options and by providing more healthy menus choices.

But it turns out that fatty fast foods likely do cause liver damage, even if they're not consumed in the same quantities as Spurlock ate them.

Swedish researchers, led by an MD at the University Hospital at Linkoping, have released a report of their study in which they asked healthy medical students to adopt a modified Spurlock diet for four weeks:

• They ate two fast-food meals per day during that time
• They gained 5 to 15 percent of their body weight (Spurlock put on 14 percent)
• They adopted the same sedentary approach to (non)-exercise

Eleven of the 18 fast-food eaters developed signs of liver damage, as measured by increased levels of a particular enzyme.

A group of subjects who maintained healthy eating and exercise habits showed no signs of liver damage.




"Supersize Me"