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"

Make that "The Freshman Fifty": Taco Bell wins

It has been about two years now since Taco Bell marketers gave a name to that late-night college habit of binging on bad food: Fourthmeal.

Taco Bell even created an interactive Web site -- modeled on Second Life simulation games -- in order to make it even more real (surreal) for its clients. In it, a self-confessed "corporate shill" explains that young adults need "fuel" if "you're going to burn the midnight oil."

OK.

College students have been eating unhealthy foods at unholy hours for most of the past 60 years. But this is the first time any corporate peddler has tried to name it and attach it to interactive technology in an attempt to get college student money headed in their specific direction.

So has the strategy worked? Has the term "Fourthmeal" made it into the 16-25 lexicon?

Well, it made the Urban Dictionary, and the first reference to it doesn't mention the Taco Bell connection. That's effective (sneaky, disgusting, brilliant: you pick the adjective) marketing. The second entry supposes a connection with Taco Bell.

Several myspace profiles and other social-networking personal pages are registered to people with names that either are "Fourthmeal" or contain the coined name. Now, whether those all have been cleverly placed by Taco Bell ad folks (my guess: probably many of them) or whether most are people who really are silly enough to adopt a marketing strategy as an online persona (sadly, there are) requires more time to research than I have.

One columnist from the student newspaper at Wright State University in Ohio two weeks ago used "Fourthmeal" in a column as a general reference.

Finally, a simple Google blog search indicates that while the habit of eating at Taco Bell late at night may now have a formal name, the marketing strategy has yet to sink into the popular consciousness as a generic term.

In the end, I guess that means Taco Bell has won: "Fourthmeal" elicits visions of their food, not anybody else's.

And nutritionists weep.

Bourdain needs a break

OK, I gave him Greece, but Anthony Bourdain's uninspired prose and worn-out mien during last night's trek through Jamaica lead me to one conclusion: Tony's fourth season of "No Reservations" was overbooked.

Two months and seven episodes into the Travel Channel's most interesting show, and it's clear Bourdain's network is desperate to push its most noted personality beyond the point where he's able to remain a personality.

In Greece, Tony looked disinterested. In Jamaica, Tony looked flat-out tired. Dare I say a little old, too? Yep.

The show's lineup was a little too predictable: Tony goes to market; Tony eats local fave street food; Tony eats fish on the beach; Tony interviews local artist; Tony laments not being able to get stoned on camera; Tony stays up too late and drinks too much.

Been there, seen it, a few dozen times.

Further, Bourdain's scripts seem to have little of the insight that generally make him so engaging. He seems a little too enamored of his own word-smithing; thus, he doesn't let his subjects (whom we presume to be interesting) talk for themselves often enough.

Granted, Greece and Jamaica are just two of his episodes this year (Singapore, Berlin, Vacouver, New Orleans and London/Edinburgh were the other five), and the rest have been slightly better.

I'm sure Bourdain is just as clever, insightful and engaging as ever. In order to stay fresh, though, I just wish he'd take a vacation every once in a while.