Recipe: Super-Herb Chicken

Remember when I posted that recipe for compound butter not long ago? I mentioned that I tend to overbuy fresh herbs, thinking I’m going to go all culinary ninja in the kitchen and do all sorts of fantastic and impressive things with them. Once in a while that actually happens, but more often than not, the herbs sit around for a while waiting for me find something great to do with them, and before I finally do, they wilt, get soggy, and otherwise turn unusable. Well, shame on me — and not only because that’s a total waste of money, but even more so because those little green bunches pack a powerful nutritional wallop. Most of them carry more than their share of folate, vitamin K₁, vitamin C, carotenes, and iron. They’re also good for digestion—that sprig of parsley that you’ve always thought was just the chef’s way of making your plate look pretty? It’s actually a great palate cleanser and digestive aid.

Look at these. This recipe cannot possibly be bad!

Anyway, I posted the recipe for the butter first because I had saturated fat on the brain, but I had originally bought the herbs for the recipe I’m sharing today. I hesitate to even call it a “recipe,” since it involves little more than spreading herbs on a chicken breast and sticking it in the oven. But there are plenty of people in my life who think of cooking as this mystical, mysterious thing that they can’t possibly mess around with without detailed directions, so here goes.

Saturated Fat Vindicated: Confounders

It’s that day of the week again, y’all! (Sorry, all this talk about saturated fat and butter has me channeling Paula Deen and her southern accent.) It’s Tuesday, and you know what that means:  a new post that drops a couple more knowledge bombs on the war zone that is the last sixty years of official government and medical community recommendations about dietary fats. Last week I introduced you to a paper whose author—a PhD professor of chemistry and biochemistry—concluded that maybe, perhaps, the fear mongering about saturated fat has been misguided, and heart disease might be caused by things other than butter, bacon, red meat, cheese, and similar delicious morsels.

I promised I would devote a couple of Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday posts to dissecting the paper in more detail, so here goes.

Recipe: Compound Butter

So now that we’ve established that saturated fat is not the root of all evil (and, in fact, might be the root of all good), I thought it would be nice to post a recipe that celebrates the beauty of butter. Actually, it’s not so much a recipe as a guide, because even though there are “recipes” for different compound butters, my philosophy when it comes to things like this is, “Everything to taste.” This kind of cooking drives some people crazy, since it completely omits measuring. No exact number of teaspoons, grams, or ounces. But you know what they say: baking is a science; cooking is an art. Exact measurements are more important when it comes to baked goods rising, staying moist, or otherwise turning out the way they’re supposed to. To steal a line from a novel I sort of finished writing a few years ago, “A cook’s best tools are clean hands and a sense of adventure.” The sense of adventure comes in handy with recipes like this, where you just have to trust your eyes, your nose, and your taste buds.

Saturated Fat Vindicated! (...Yet Again!)

“This idea that the saturated fats are going to be bad for you never had any real validity.”

                                                -Dr. Glen Lawrence, Superhuman Radio Show, 5/22/2013

Y’know how I’m always saying wacky things that could get me excommunicated from mainstream NutritionLand, such as, saturated fats are good for you, cholesterol in our food doesn’t automatically lodge itself inside our arteries, and the newfangled, highly processed vegetable oils are far more damaging to our health than the good ol’, natural, chemically stable saturated fats? (You know…the ones found in such delicious things as butter, beef, cheese, coconut oil, and bacon?) Well, lookey lookey, Glen Lawrence, PhD, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Long Island University, agrees with me.

He published a paper last month titled Dietary Fats and Health: Dietary Recommendations in the Context of Scientific Evidence, in the journal Advances in Nutrition, and boy, am I glad he did! There was so much great stuff in the paper that I knew it would make a fantastic addition to my Fat Tuesday posts. (I know, you’ve all been on the edge of your seats waiting for me to resurrect this series, amiright?)

There’s a lot to digest here—no pun intended—so let’s get to it.

Book Review: Anatomy of an Illness

“A hospital is no place for a person who is seriously ill.”

You’ve got to be intrigued by a book with a line like that!

Or these:

 “Perhaps the hospital’s most serious failure was in the area of nutrition…No wonder the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health made the melancholy observation that a great failure of medical schools is that they pay so little attention to the science of nutrition.”

Sound like a good read? You don’t know the half of it.