Category Archives: Health/Nutrition

New Premium Organic and Humane-Certified Pastries & Food Gal Giveaway

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Mushroom-thyme savory scone from Pastry Smart.

For the past five years, Pastry Chef Mark Ainsworth has been crafting organic pastries, breads and cookies for a number of San Francisco Bay Area hotels and restaurants, including the Carneros Inn in Napa and the Lodge at Pebble Beach.

Now, you can enjoy his Pastry Smart products in your own home by picking them up at Mollie Stone’s, Real Food stores, Piazza’s and Shokolaat restaurant in Palo Alto, where he is the CFO.

Ainsworth was previously executive pastry chef at the Lodge at Pebble Beach and the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. His Pastry Smart company is thought to be the first pastry producer in the United States to be American Humane Certified. The company also works exclusively with organic dairy Clover-Stornetta Farms.

Recently, I had a chance to sample a variety of the baked goods, which are made in a commercial kitchen in San Mateo.

Just reheat these in the oven for a few minutes and you're good to go.

The retail line includes par-baked rolls that only need five minutes in a warm oven to enjoy at home. The challah slider rolls baked up crisp on the outside, tender on the inside, and buttery tasting, but not overly rich. They’d be great for dinner rolls for company or to stuff slices of ham into for Easter brunch. The multi-grain rolls had a nice nutty taste and a crunchy texture from the sesame and sunflower seeds that cover their exteriors. A package of six is about $6.99 each.

Lemon cookies that you'll never guess are vegan.

The cookies are fist-sized and perfectly round — like lunch-bag staples from childhood. My favorite — surprisingly — was the vegan lemon shortbread. Made with vegan shortening, the cookies are very crumbly with a delightful topping of crunchy, crystallized sugar. Take a bite and they just melt in your mouth.  I’m not even vegan, and I couldn’t stop eating these. A box of six cookies is $6.95.

Pastry Smart also makes three types of savory scones, which would be perfect for lunch or dinner with a salad and soup. The curry scone is full pungent cumin seeds, curry powder and paprika.  Like the curry one, the mushroom thyme scone has a fluffy, light crumb, but with a more herbal, earthy profile.

Each square-sized scone is perforated into fourths to divide it easily into four bite-size pieces. But most folks, I’m sure, will see it and think they’re meant to eat the entire square. Just realize, though, that the calorie count on the back of the package is 130 calories for a fourth of that scone in your hand, and not the entire thing.

Cheddar corn cake with the kick of jalapeno.

Same is true with the corn cakes — tender, cakey, corn bread squares that are about half an inch in height. The calorie count for these is 170 per quarter cake, though, few people are going to stop at just a quarter of one, especially when they come in flavors such as blueberry, and cheddar jalapeno.

Contest: One lucky Food Gal reader will win a sampler of Pastry Smart goodies, which includes rolls, cookies, corn cakes and scones. Entries, limited to those in the continental United States, will be accepted through midnight PST April 9. Winner will be announced April 11.

How to win?

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Three-Hour Polenta

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Heritage corn polenta, now available for sale at Oliveto Restaurant.

You might think I’m playing an April Fool’s joke on you when I tell you I spent three hours cooking polenta on the stovetop.

But I kid you not.

That was part of the careful cooking instructions I was given when Oliveto Restaurant in Oakland gave me  a sample bag of Floriani Red Flint Corn Polenta to try at home. The medium-course grind polenta is made from heritage red field corn that was originally developed in Northern Italy. It is whole-grain milled, meaning that the entire grain — including all the germ, bran and endosperm — is milled without separating any of those components out.

Because of that and because it’s a harder corn, it takes three  hours to cook.

I was ready to start lifting more weights at the gym for this polenta workout that awaited me. My husband half-jested that he was going to hire a legal day-laborer to help me.

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Oliveto Keeps On Going Strong

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Crudo of local halibut with shaved purple artichokes.

Twenty-five years is a very long time in restaurant years.

But that’s just how long Oliveto in Oakland has managed to not only survive, but to flourish.

A parade of talented chefs have manned the kitchen over the years, including Paul Bertolli (who went on to found his fabulous Fra’Mani salumi company in Berkeley), and most recently, Paul Canales, who was at Oliveto for the past five years.

In December 2010, Jonah Rhodehamel took over as head chef, after previous stints as sous chef at three San Francisco establishments:  La Folie, Zinnia, and Americano.

He’s already started putting his stamp on the rustic, Italian fare here. He started a new dry-aging program to age rib-eyes for three weeks to concentrate their beefy flavor.

Recently, I had a chance to try his menu as a guest of the restaurant.

Enter the doors, and to your right will be the cozy, more casual cafe. If you go up the stairs, you’ll find the warm, inviting restaurant with its bank of windows that overlook lively College Avenue.

My husband and I started with a crudo of local halibut ($13), clean and bright tasting, with the slight bitterness of puntarella chicory and shaved purple artichokes.

The prettiest salad ever.

Rhodehamel also sent out a roasted root vegetable salad ($11.50) that was as gorgeous as a still-life painting. This seemingly simple dish was spectacular, with the carrots, beets and turnips roasted in salt to concentrate their flavor and sugars, and render them tender-crisp. Even an avowed vegetable hater would have a hard time not eating every last bite.

Oliveto has long been known for its house-made pastas, now made with local flours, so we just had to indulge.

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Fun Custom Cereal Giveaway

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"Food Gal's Favorite'' -- my custom blended cereal mix.

Except for some crunchy granola scattered over my bowl of yogurt, I’m not the world’s biggest cereal eater.

But Me & Goji just might make me one.

The New Hampshire custom, artisanal cereal company lets you design your own blend of cereal. We’re not talking Rice Krispies mixed with Special K and Cocoa Puffs. Instead, you can choose from more than 60 all-natural ingredients, including 5-grain muesli, “samurai wheat” bite-sized shredded wheat cubes, barley flakes, acai powder, goji berries, chia seeds, pine nuts, dried strawberries and sesame seeds.

You can name your cereal and upload a photo to decorate the resealable, recyclable, heavy-duty tube it comes in.

The company was started a couple years ago by two active, sporty guys — Alexander Renzi and Adam Sirois — who graduated from Northwestern University, where they played soccer together and longed for healthier food options to recharge with.

Recently, they offered me a chance to design my own cereal on the house.

Your cereal arrives in a resealable, recyclable capsule.

The name I gave my cereal.

I blended a mix of the “flax and flaked” (a blend of corn flakes, amaranth seeds, flax seeds, and sesame seeds) with granola, whole almonds, walnuts, sesame seeds and mulberries. And I named it, “Food Gal’s Favorite.” But of course!

I love this cereal. It is crunchy, nutty, full of varied textures and a far cry from the almost candy-like cereals on store shelves. It tastes fresh, healthful and delightful.

According to the nutritional info on the back of the tube, my cereal mix weighs in at 161 calories per half cup (a lot less than most granolas I eat), with 7.5g total fat, 75mg potassium, 4.8g protein, 3.5g sugar, and 9 percent of the daily requirement of iron.

My mix would have cost $13.90, plus $3.99 for shipping and 99 cents for the tube, which contains about 10 cups of cereal.

There’s also a handy “recipe ID” number printed on the back of the tube, so if I want to re-order the same blend, I just enter that number on the Web site and it’s automatically added to my cart for check-out.

Contest: I’m thrilled to be able to give one lucky Food Gal reader a chance to try their own custom cereal blend for free.

Entries, limited to those in the continental United States, will be accepted through midnight PST March 26. Winner will be announced March 28.

How to win?

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Healthful Pizza, Ruth Reichl Visit, Chef Demo & More

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The Mexican pizza at ZPizza in San Francisco. (Photo courtesy of the restaurant)

Organic Wheat Flour Pizzas in San Francisco

Laguna Beach, Calif.-based ZPizza, which has more than 90 locations nationwide, now has a locale in San Francisco at 833 Mission St., Suite C (at Fourth Street).

The pizza dough is made from certified organic wheat flour, the sauces are prepared fresh daily, and the cheese is part-skim, rBGH-free mozzarella from grass-fed cows. Gluten-free crust and vegan cheese also are offered. Gourmet ingredients include cremini and shiitake mushrooms, as well as truffle oil and the African hot sauce known as pili pili. For delivery, the pizzas are ferried via bicycles to reduce carbon emissions. Gourmet salads, pastas and sandwiches round out the menu.

Pizza choices include the Thai, with peanut sauce, mozzarella, spicy chicken, cilantro, bean sprouts and serranos; the Mexican with housemade salsa, mozzarella, spicy lime chicken, green onions, avocado, sour cream and cilantro; and the Casablanca, with roasted garlic sauce, mozzarella, ricotta, mushrooms, artichoke hearts and parmesan. Pizzas are $10.95 for a small, $19.95 for a large, and $24.94 for an extra-large.

The one and only Ruth Reichl. (Photo by Fiona Aboud)

Ruth Reichl at Stanford University

Join former Gourmet magazine Editor-in-Chief Ruth Reichl at a free event at the Cubberley Auditorium on the Stanford University Campus in Palo Alto at 6 p.m. March 29.

Reichl, now an editor and author at Random House, will be speaking on “The Intersection of Food, Culture and History.”

A Different Look at Vanilla, Saffron and Chocolate

Sure, they taste good. But did you know all three of those ingredients are rife with politics?

Learn all about the intrigue in getting these three ingredients from harvest to plate at “Politics of the Plate — What’s Behind the Silky Sexiness of Vanilla, Saffron and Chocolate,” 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. March 16 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of San Francisco (Starr King room), 1187 Franklin St. at Geary Street.

Experts Patricia Rain (vanilla), Juan San Mames (saffron) and Mark Magers (chocolate) will be on the panel with moderator Janet Fletcher, a San Francisco Chronicle food writer.

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