How to Eat (69 page)

YOGURT

FROMAGE BLANC

PRETZEL STICKS

If you need to eat between meals, don’t allow yourself to feel you’ve failed or that you’ve given in or whatever it is that makes people inflate with self-reproach and then eat double. Instead, take a low-fat yogurt or fromage blanc from the fridge. The yogurt is about 70 calories for a 6-ounce cup, the fromage blanc, 60 calories for 4 ounces, and, small as these quantities are, they fill you up quite efficiently for a while. Of course it would be better in any number of ways to have an apple or an orange, but sometimes you need the gloop too. Reconcile yourself to this now, count it in, and then move on, sister. It’s all very well getting hungry when you’re at home, because you can be sure to find something suitable to eat. But it’s more difficult when you’re out. Pretzel sticks are 120 calories per ounce and low-fat with it. And because they’re so salty, they feel filling (strong tastes do that; see more on this below), plus they’re portable. If you had a huge drum of pretzel sticks in front of you, you’d find it difficult to stop eating after your 120 calories’ worth, so weigh and stick to a 1-ounce allotment. A bar of chocolate with about 230 calories, or a bag of chips at about 150, are not disasters, either. There are times when chocolate is what’s needed and it’s better to have just one bar, count it in, and adjust your eating for the rest of the day accordingly, than to brood obsessively on it, have grilled fish for dinner, and then go out, buy, and eat the entire contents of the all-night deli and live, self-flagellatingly, to regret it.

A diet that eliminated all fats would be extremely bad for you (and unpalatable). My point is to find balance, not to veer off into extremes. And to vary pace and plate, I often prefer a small portion of something high-fat bolstered by forests of green vegetables. One of my regular dinners when trying to lose weight is a supermarket-purchased package of macaroni and cheese. Now, I am not going to claim that this is a low-fat food, but there is not very much of it, and what there is is filling. When I’m too hungry or too tired to cook, I have one of those, with a whole package of ready-prepped lettuce and some other green vegetable with strong mustard on the side. Given that the macaroni is under 500 calories for a 12-ounce portion and I don’t count calories in vegetables, this is a trim little dinner all told. Anyway, I can’t reiterate too often the need for balance and variation. The thing to remember is to pile, next to almost anything you’re eating, a huge amount of soy-dressed or lemon-squeezed leafy or crunchy vegetables.

Much, as Byron wrote in
Don Juan
, depends on dinner. If I eat well at night, and not only eat well but make something of a ritual pleasure out of the meal, I don’t feel that edginess, that diet-deprivation thing, that boredom above all else, that can make it all intolerable. Dinner has to feel civilized, or life doesn’t feel civilized.

SALMON

First, stagger the food, so it feels as if you have a wonderful procession of things to eat, not a great mound of stuff on a plate. These quiet rituals—and the low-fat, health-store foods they involve—create a pleasantly virtuous and serene mood. A girlfriend and I refer meaningfully to such meals as temple food. And, as the Japanese know, it makes a difference. If I’ve decided to have a salmon steak, seared speckly brown and tangerine without, still Fanta-colored within, and some still-crunchy broccoli with soy and a few pinprick dots of sesame oil alongside, I might—to prolong my eating evening—make some grilled zucchini to eat before or drink a bowl of miso soup, and, afterward, peel and finely slice an orange and drizzle over with orange-flower water. This is to make me feel it’s something special that I’m eating.

ZUCCHINI

This is a regular supper-enhancer. Get in from work, put a griddle, corrugated side up, on the stove, and then slice a few zucchini down the length of them so that you have thin, long, butter-knife-shaped strips. Spritz the griddle with your water-and-oil spray, then cook the zucchini strips briefly on each side till they’re tigered brown. Remove, sprinkle with salt, chop over some herbs—parsley, mint, coriander, any one or all three—douse with lemon juice, and just eat.

PEPPERS

SEVILLE ORANGES

Another fatless and, in my book, calorieless picking-food is charred, peeled, and sliced peppers (see
page 86
for the method) over which you’ve sprinkled a drop or two of good balsamic vinegar, squirted a little orange juice, and sprinkled a little salt and more than a little chopped flat-leaf parsley. And this is transcendental in January when the Seville oranges are sometimes around. Their particular biting but fragrant sourness points up the oily sweetness of the skinned and softened peppers. Pomegranate juice (use an electric squeezer) is heavenly, too. (I like to keep this soused tangle of peppers on standby; leave to steep in the fridge and add grassy clumps of freshly chopped flat-leaf parsley whenever you eat it. This oil-free peperonata also happens to make a fabulous sandwich filling.)

LEMONS AND NUTMEG

TOMATOES

LEEKS AND ASPARAGUS

But this flavor-intensifying principle works all year round. Just use lemons. It’s not only broccoli whose sweetness is made the more vibrant with a squirt of lemon, but all greens. Nutmeg—with all of the above—works in a different but equally effective flavor-enhancing way. And any of the soys can be substituted for the lemon. Make a tomato salad, leafy with basil, dressed just with a few drops of good balsamic vinegar. Roasting vegetables also seems to make them taste more emphatically of themselves; leeks (see
page 319
and reduce the oil a little), or asparagus, or, indeed, more or less any vegetable can be cooked with a very little oil (if you use none at all, you’ll just have a wizened, limp mess) in a fiercely hot oven. To look at they’ll be muted, but the flavors will be kickstarted into vibrant life.

FENNEL

CAULIFLOWER AND CUMIN

The trick is not to become bored and therefore to use as varied a collection of vegetables as possible. Fennel can be sliced thinly and baked in a small amount of stock in a moderate oven for about 40 minutes, or eaten as a salad with lamb’s lettuce and lemon juice. Add an equal amount of white wine to salted water, bring to the boil, and add leeks cut into about 4-inch lengths and cook until tender. Cauliflower can be broken into florets, dusted with ground cumin, and baked in a very hot oven for about 20 minutes until it tastes sweet and charred and spiced; actually, I think this is the best way to eat cauliflower, diet or no diet.

VEGETABLES WITH GINGER AND GARLIC

ANCHOVIES

Chop any vegetable on hand and cook in a method that combines stir-frying with steaming; throw a small amount of stock in a wok and on a high heat add ginger, garlic, scallions, sugar-snaps, broccoli, fennel, carrots, and baby corn. But all this isn’t just to ring the changes with what might otherwise be thought of as standard diet food. The more strongly food tastes, the fuller it makes you. It’s the depth of the flavor that helps atone for the lack of fat. In the days when I was the hostage of a sandwich bar at lunchtimes, I’d have a low-fat cottage cheese sandwich—no butter—but with anchovies; the saltiness, the aggressive and indelicate invasiveness of those cheap and unsoaked tin-corroded fish made me feel, after it was finished, that something actually had been eaten, whereas a plain cottage cheese sandwich, even on whole-wheat, hardly has the force of personality to make itself felt. You’re not eating; you’re giving the mime performance of a person lunching on a sandwich.

That’s where Thai, especially, and other Southeast Asian cuisines come in; they draw on intense flavors, have a vivid culinary vocabulary, and fill you without supplying much in the way of fat. Italian food, it’s true, is also strong and direct and robustly flavored, but it uses more oil, and that oil, green, pungent, evocative, is not an optional extra. It’s an essential part of the food. And I know it’s supposed to be life-enhancing and healthy but it will still, all oils being equally fattening, make you put on weight. Not that all Italian food uses a lot of it, nor does olive oil have to go completely from your regime. You need only a little. If you add, at the end (rather than at the beginning) of cooking, one teaspoon, a few drops of it even, the glorious taste will come through, virtuous drabness will disappear, and flavors will be revitalized. I often, too, stir about a quarter of a teaspoon of garlic-infused oil into some lemon-squeezed spinach; sesame oil makes itself pungently felt in the most minute quantities.

My concern here is how you go about leading the low-fat life in your own kitchen, but there is one important piece of advice to be applied in the world beyond it. Never say diet. By that I don’t mean you should banish such a foul four-letter word in favor of the smug-speak term, Healthy Eating Plan, but simply that you should never talk about it. Not out loud. Not in public. In the first instance, talking about dieting is a big bore and, in the second, everyone will try, if only out of politeness, to talk you out of it. The third, crucial, element is pure vanity; if you tell people you need to lose weight they will notice that yes, maybe you do need to.

The fortunate truth is that no one is really interested in anyone else. If you don’t tell them you’re on a diet, they won’t even notice. You can eat as little as you want without drawing attention to it and therefore without inviting comment or sabotage, or allowing yourself to use the excuse of others to sabotage the diet yourself. If you want to diet, then you have to take the responsibility yourself, not draft everyone else into the diet police.

When you’re invited to dinner, don’t warn people of your diet or draw attention to it while you’re there. It’s so aggressive to do that, so self-centered, and so dispiriting. And you’ll just be a party-pooper. Once people know about the diet, they’ll feel that you can’t really enjoy yourself until you eat and drink to Rabelaisian excess. They’ll feel you’re being dried up and puritanical and drained of joie de vivre. But if you don’t make an issue of it, they won’t think of looking at your plate.

I find it very difficult to leave food, but if you really want to and can, then be the one to jump up and clear the plates so no one else sees. You have an easy excuse for not drinking; just say you’re driving. But, again, there is no need for anyone really to notice. Just let your glass be filled, but don’t drink it.

There may well be nobler spirits out there, but I find the assault on one’s vanity the hardest thing about dieting. It’s bad enough you need to lose weight, but drawing other people’s attention to it is quite intolerable. And it’s not just weight gain I don’t like people to notice—I can’t bear references to weight loss, either. Call me paranoid, but every time someone says “You’ve lost weight!” I hear “You were fat!”

There is a vexing circularity about the dieting business: it’s easiest to lose weight if you feel self-confident, but it is weight loss that makes you self-confident. But you can work the con trick on yourself. Just as Pascal believed that the act of going to church, of going through the motions of the faithful, led to faith, so if you act thin, you will get thin. “Eat like a thin person” is the best form of dietary advice. And behave like a thin person, too, which means don’t go on about being fat.

Most of the recipes that follow are for one; some are for two. I take the line that that’s how we tend to eat when trying to lose weight. Not everyone wants to get into the strict diet account-keeping needed for a calorie-counted diet, but you may follow the recipes below in the knowledge that all the food here is low-fat and programmed for diminution.

QUICK STUFF, OR SUGGESTIONS FOR ALMOST-THROWN-TOGETHER SUPPERS

STEAK

Although I subsist mostly on carbohydrates and vegetables when I’m trying to lose weight, I like red meat every now and then when I’m not eating so much; it’s filling, it makes me feel better (in France doctors can still prescribe steak and red wine for patients who are run down), and it seems an efficient use of restricted calories. Fillet is one of the leanest cuts and yields the right, slight, single-portion size (I aim for about 4 ounces to make room for other components, before or after), but if I’ve got a friend over, or just feel like a meaty blowout, I buy an 8-ounce, 3⁄4-inch-thick slab of rump, put it on the griddle, and cook till crusty without, tender and bloody within. Then I take it off the griddle, sprinkle with salt, and leave it to rest on a plate for 5–10 minutes.

Meanwhile, I slice some tomatoes and sprinkle them with salt and balsamic vinegar, or I wilt some spinach. I pour off the juices that have collected on the plate with the steak into a bowl, add some soy sauce or bottled (or make your own, see below) teriyaki sauce. Then I slice the meat in thin slices diagonally across, arrange them on the plate, pour over the bloodied soy, and thickly feather it all with freshly chopped, cave-breath, pungent coriander. If you want a more Italianate version, substitute lemon juice for the soy and arugula for the coriander. Either way, I like to eat this with hot English mustard on the side.

FISH

Salmon and tuna are the fish world’s equivalent of steak. They are oilier than those pallid, white-fleshed varieties, but they are denser, heavier, too, and more robust in flavor. If you can afford the best bass or sole, then just grill and eat it. Squirt with lemon, sprinkle with salt, and, if you’re not being unnecessarily, obsessively strict, dribble over the merest ¼ teaspoon of the most beautiful olive oil (the milder Ligurian for choice) to bring out the sweet, smoky depths of the fish.

POISSON AU POIVRE

Both tuna and salmon can be treated in the same way as steak, either plain broiled or grilled and dressed in soy and herb-sprinkled as above, or coated in crushed pepper and grilled or dry-fried in a nonstick pan to create a juicy piscine take on the bifteck bistro original, poisson au poivre.