NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

April 15, 1999

Prairie Fare: Is It the Palette or the Palate?

You don't have to be a bon vivant dining at a three-star restaurant to enjoy a sensual smorgasbord. All of the five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch—can play a role in getting someone's mouth to water, even over something as bourgeois as fish sticks.

Transforming your cooking into craft—turning the insipid into the inspirational—takes practice. Some claim cooking is art, which implies natural skills, but even from that perch it's easy to see that cooking is not rocket science. What the talents of a good cook really boil down to are these: planning and presentation—equal parts air traffic controller and P.T. Barnum.

When you're planning meals, don't discount touch. I don't care how beautiful a plate of food appears, if a person's first bite is hard, mushy or simply lukewarm, so too will be his or her impression of your performance. Always make doubly sure that you're not over- or underestimating the cooking time of the entree or the side dishes you're making.

For flair, focus on color and shape. Make sure your meals feature a mix of reds, yellows and greens—all of which brighten the mood and stimulate the appetite. Do you think that garnishes are a waste of time? Sprigs of parsley can add as much distinction to plates of food as flowers do to the dinner table.

Remember the last time you had flowers on the table? I'm willing to bet that just for a moment your stresses of the day melted like butter in a hot pan.

If cooking is art, its beauty transcends vision. It's an art form people can also sniff and roll around on their tongues. The following recipe will treat you and your guests to color, aroma, flavor and texture, and treat you to sound, probably in that order. Sound? The compliments, of course.

Confetti
Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients:
1 cup white long rice (preferably basmati)
1 14.5-ounce can stewed tomatoes
1 teaspoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons dried oregano, crumbled
1 tablespoon dried basil, crumbled
1 15-ounce can black beans
2 cups frozen corn
1 cup salsa
1½ cups water

Procedure:
Place all ingredients into a Dutch oven. Bring mixture to a boil while stirring frequently. Reduce heat and cook covered for about 20 minutes, or until rice is tender and has absorbed almost all the liquid. Makes a colorful accompaniment when teamed with grilled chicken and steamed broccoli.

What's Your Take on This, Julie?

We eat with our eyes before we take our first bite. As you're painting your plate with your food choices, remember that color also provides cues to safety and nutrient content.

Most of us know that foods fuzzy with green or blue mold belong in the trash can. The exception is blue cheese, whose greenish-blue veins of mold impart its flavor and color. You should discard moldy cream cheese or other soft cheeses, but you can safely trim the mold off hard cheeses like Cheddar—just make sure you cut away about an inch of the surrounding cheese too.

Ground beef cooked to the "pink stage" is not safe to eat, but according to recent research, color alone can't reliably predict the safety of hamburgers. Prematurely brown burgers look done but haven't reached 160 F—the minimum temperature for killing the particular strain of E. coli bacteria responsible for many illnesses and deaths. That's a good reason to use a meat thermometer.

It's much safer to eat a medium-done steak or roast than a medium-done burger because in the grinding process any bacteria on the exterior becomes mixed throughout the ground product. On the nutrition side, (cooked) red meat is an excellent source of protein, iron, zinc and vitamin B-12.

Gold or orange foods like carrots, squash and sweet potatoes get their color from carotenoids, a family of pigments which can be converted to vitamin A by the body. Vitamin A is especially important for skin and eye health. Even green vegetables such as broccoli and spinach contain carotenoids, which are hidden by the green chlorophyll pigments they contain. These green vegetables have been linked with reducing risk of macular degeneration and cataracts, two of the leading causes of blindness. Yellow and orange citrus fruits are excellent sources of vitamin C.

Red plant foods are colored either by carotenoid pigments (specifically lycopenes) in the case of tomatoes or anthocyanin pigments in the case of strawberries, cranberries and raspberries. Anthocyanins also are responsible for the color of blueberries. Anthocyanins in cranberries and blueberries have been shown to reduce urinary tract infections. Eating plenty of lycopene-rich foods, especially processed foods like salsa, spaghetti sauce and even ketchup, may reduce risk of prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women.

A hearty serving of the eye-appealing Confetti (one-fourth of the recipe) contains about 400 calories, 1.5 grams of fat, 37 percent of the daily recommended iron, 33 percent of the daily recommended vitamin C and 15 percent of the daily recommended calcium. This recipe is a classic example of the use of complementary proteins in a meatless recipe; rice contains the amino acids (protein components) that the beans lack.

While you're beautifying your plate with a variety of foods, why stop with parsley as a garnish on special occasions? In fine restaurants, edible flowers like nasturtiums often are floated on soups or used as ingredients in salads. They're high in vitamin C, too.

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Sources: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136 and Julie Garden-Robinson (701) 231-7187

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