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FOOD
FACTS & FINDS:
April
2003
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April Fool's Day and
Easter Eggs!
GO TO Recipes: Poisson
d'Avril
Orzo
Pasta with Bacon and Sun-Dried Tomatoes
GO TO Eggs
Rescue Pasta
GO TO April
Fool's Day Riddle
Happy
April! In honor of April Fool's Day (in French, Poisson
d'Avril -- "April Fish!"), this month's recipes begin
with a lovely April fish dish that has quickly become a staple in our
house.
Recipes
This fish is a
deliciously simple dinner. Pan frying makes many American hearts cringe,
but the garlic, rosemary, and extra virgin olive oil are reasons 1, 2, and
3 to let go of the old fears and just enjoy yourself. This recipe works
best with a light flaky filet such as Tilapia or Trout, which emerges
redolent of the warm essence of its garlic and rosemary. The balance
achieved in this recipe comes from the tangy sweet of orange zest, it’s
juice, and the reduced sherry for the sauce.
You’ll Need
(per person):
2
large garlic cloves, minced
2
Tbsp olive oil
1
tsp orange zest
½
tsp fresh rosemary, minced
1
tsp orange juice
Sprinkle
of salt
1
Tilapia filet
¼
cup dry sherry
Preheat oven to
175, and put in a plate large enough to hold fish. Heat large frying pan
over a medium-high flame. Add olive oil and, once it is wavy, add
rosemary, garlic, zest, and orange juice. Spread evenly in pan for only a
minute before adding the fish.
Don’t mess
with the fish too much while it’s cooking. Just watch for the opacity to
change as it cooks through – perhaps 2 minutes depending on the
thickness. Gently flip it over for another 2 minutes and remove to the
warm plate while you make the sauce.
For the sauce,
deglaze the pan with the sherry, making sure to clean the yummy bits off
the bottom. Let this bubble away until it becomes a thick and syrupy sauce
to die for. Serve this over the fish with the orzo pasta below and crisp
white wine.
Orzo
Pasta with Bacon and Sun-Dried Tomatoes
This
delicious pasta is definitely a comfort food, and the flavor is enriched
by a very simple trick of sautéing a few lardon into the olive oil.
Infuse this flavor throughout the pasta, balanced by the sun-dried
sweetness of the tomatoes, and you have a simple complement to any meal.
You’ll Need
(for 4 persons):
1
Tbsp olive oil
10
- 15 Lardon
(Lardon
are common in France, and simply consist of small bacon pieces -- perfect
for flavoring food. Simply take a normal pound of thick bacon and slice it
cross-ways with a serrated knife, making 1/2 inch strips.)
1/4
cup onion, diced
1/4
cup sun-dried tomatoes, coarsely chopped
1
cup orzo pasta
2
cups chicken stock
Salt
and fresh ground pepper to taste
Warm a medium
sauce pan with the oil and Lardon over a medium flame, until the bacon is
cooked to your liking. Sauté in the onions and tomatoes for a few minutes
until the onions have softened and absorbed all the oil they will. If the
pan is drying out, you will need to add a touch more olive oil or even a
touch of butter.
Raise the
temperature to medium-high and sizzle the pasta in the remaining oil,
turning over until completely covered. Tone down the flame to medium and
add 1/2 cup stock until absorbed. Don't stir too much, just make sure the
stock gets to the bottom of the pan to prevent sticking. As it begins to
dry out again, add another 1/2 cup to let it absorb into the softening
pasta. This will take about 20 minutes in all. (alternatively, you can put
all 2 cups in there at once, throw on a lid, and set the timer for 20
minutes!).
Once it has
absorbed all the liquid, taste for doneness and the amount of salt and
pepper you like.
*Play with your
food! Another great addition here is 1/2 cup of grated Parmesan cheese.
First we
feared the fats. Now it's the carbs. If I told you that the truth of any
set of extremes would be closer to the middle than the edges, you'd say,
"Of course it is."
The
same is true for the endless debates between low fat and low carb eating.
The low carb eaters will say that complex carbs from pasta and bread and
potatoes, for example, simply turn to sugar in your bloodstream and create
wide swings in your insulin levels. Eat these kinds of carbs, the thinking
goes, and you might as well eat a handful of sugar. It's the same thing.
This
creates the sense that these foods are actually terrible for you and
contribute to the onset of dreadful diseases like diabetes by flooding
your system with sugar, which over-stimulated insulin from the pancreas,
which can lead to insulin resistance and thus, diabetes. It's all bad at
that point.
But
a brilliant study out of Harvard recently showed that the insulin response
to complex carbohydrates like pasta, depends on more than just the
molecules! Surprised? The wide swings in insulin levels also depend on the
CONTEXT in which the pasta is eaten. If you balance your bread, potatoes,
or pasta with an amount of natural fat, fiber or -- you guessed it -- egg,
the insulin response to the very same carbohydrates is reduced.
In
other words, balance is key. Eggs moderate blood sugar levels -- even
after you've ingested the dreaded carbohydrates. So a little carbohydrate
with a little fat keeps you from falling over either edge: bread and thin
smear of butter, olive oil drizzled over pasta, and a few eggs as the base
for a subtly sweet custard.
Moderation
and balance, it seems, will save your life.
It is April Fool's Month, after
all! Below is the popular legend of April Fool's Day. But something's not
right, here. See if you can guess it.
April Fool's Day began from an
yearly error of 11 minutes and 14 seconds. This amount, compounded over
1500 years, caused the Calendar of Julius Caesar to lag behind the seasons
so badly that reform was demanded. Spring festivals were no longer
occurring in the spring!
Somehow this was a problem for the
Pope to solve, so many tried (Clement VI, Sixtus IV, and Leo X), but none
could agree on just how to account for the days of the year without having
spring drift slowly into summer.
It was finally in 1576 that Pope
Gregory XIII was presented with a new model, based on new astronomical
learning So, by late February of 1582, the order came down to do away with
the errors of Julius Caesar and his astronomers and replace them with the
more refined errors of Pope Gregory. Thus, the "Julian" Calendar
replaced by the "Gregorian."
What did this mean? First, they
had to fix the accumulating Julian error of 11 minutes and 14 seconds. So
the Pope subtracted 10 full days from October. The day after October 4th
was pronounced to actually be October 15th! In addition,
they added the leap year in February to keep this temporal slippage from
happening again.
Thank goodness the higher math of
the Gregorian Calendar never appeared on my SAT test! It goes as follows:
A year is a leap year if either (i)
it is divisible by 4 but not by 100 or (ii) it is divisible by 400. In
other words, a year which is divisible by 4 is a leap year unless it is
divisible by 100 but not by 400 (in which case it is not a leap year).
Thus the years 1600 and 2000 are leap years, but 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2100
are not.
But more importantly, many of the
former "New Year's" traditions throughout Europe had placed New
Year's Day in the spring, on April 1st. But with the new
calendar reform, the central authority felt it was better to lock each
tradition to a uniform calendar framework. Thus, New Years Day was moved
from April 1st to January 1st for everyone.
But France, at the time, was
locked in a series of brutal Religious Wars between Catholics and
Protestants (particularly the Huguenots). Despite even the combined effect
of a decree of King Charles IX and an edict from the Pope, some supported
it (mostly in Catholic Paris) while others simply would never comply with
the order.
So a segment of the populace
continued their traditional celebrations of New Years on April 1st.
Over time, however, the Gregorian Calendar was accepted by more and more
countries and the habits of the farmers and traditionalist were ridiculed
as hopelessly old fashioned. These people were treated as the first April
Fool's.
They suffered pranks, were invited
to costume parties that didn’t exist, and 
were encouraged to believe things that were patently ridiculous. This date
has evolved to become known in France as Poisson d’Avril, or "April
Fish." And the French children love it if they can draw a picture of
a fish and manage to tape it to your back. Then you become the April Fish!
ANSWER: Which part of the legend of April Fool's Day is off base?
Pretty much the whole thing! This popular story is everywhere you look,
like a well-entrenched urban legend, but suffers from a few fatal flaws.
Many common versions tell us that 1564 was the date King Charles IX
adopted the Gregorian calendar, but this innovation was not even proposed
by Luigi Giglio to Pope Gregory until 1576! In fact, Charles actually died
a full 8 years before the Pope ever changed the calendar.
New Year's Day was actually celebrated, only in parts of France, on
March 25 not April 1st. The confusion and warping of this story came
because the celebrations would last until April 1st. Somehow, this date
got mistaken as New Year's Day. Even at that, the date when New Year's was
shifted to January is murky at best and certainly doesn't square with the
timetable of the new Gregorian calendar.
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