Doctor Yaya

Life's a Beach

These are stressful times indeed, and anything you can do to soothe the anxiety, lower your blood pressure and relax those clenched muscles is good. A vacation is even better. A beach may be best of all, according to one recent study at Seattle University, which found that just the sound of waves on a beach dropped blood pressure in older adults more than a lilting Mozart andante.

Visiting a place you’ve never been before can be exhilarating and enriching. But sometimes what you really need is the comfort of the familiar: a place you return to again and again for its relaxing rituals and lack of surprises. For my sister and her family, that place is beachside on Sanibel Island. She and her husband have been going there every February for more than 20 years. I go when I can and have come to love it for the same reasons they do: It’s a total stress-buster.

I met up with them and my niece last week at the Fort Myers Airport. The first part of the vacation ritual after arriving involves stocking up for the week ahead: a stop at the fish market for pristine yellowtail grouper, succulent shrimp, and shiny black-and-peach-colored stone crab claws. Next is Sun Harvest for the sweetest fresh squeezed orange juice and puckery key lime pie in the world. My sister has all the menus planned. Gotta have an orange-vanilla swirl ice cream cone for the road—those retro-childhood Dreamsicle flavors help set the mood.

When you drive over the causeway, high above the sparkling turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico, you can feel the stress start to let go. And when you arrive on the island and walk down to the powdery white sands at sunset, sandpipers skitter along, terns stand at attention along the water’s edge with their tufts of black feathers standing up on their heads like punk rockers, and pelicans glide and dive among the tide pools. You can feel your heart rate drop and the tightness begin to let go.

Shadows are long and the beach is tranquil at sunset

Depending on the wind in their topknots, the terns
look like balding men or punk rockers

Early morning shelling expeditions are another cherished ritual on Sanibel. It’s one of the best spots in North America, thanks to its unusual west-to-east direction. The women on the island wake up before sunrise and head out to the tide pools near the lighthouse in search of rare junonia, alphabet cone, eye and olive shells. Every morning the beach exhibits a different personality: one day crisp, clear and breezy with the full moon setting just as the sun rises; another morning sultry and thick with fog and the smell of low-tide decay, the gulls in a squawking, squealing feeding frenzy. One morning we see dozens of starfish and find a rare lacey murex; another morning the beach is inexplicably littered with jellyfish and there’s not a good shell in sight. The beach is always the same yet somehow, always different. That’s as much surprise as you get on Sanibel.

 
The stress lets go and joy replaces it!

The other rituals of life on the island aren’t very complicated: they include sampling the local restaurants for fried grouper sandwiches and coconut shrimp; shopping for sterling silver seashell charms and jeweled flip-flops; and sitting by the pool and reading a book. Plus firing up the grill, playing cards, and maybe watching a movie. I was ecstatic to have the chance to fully unwind and bask with my family in the familiar beauty and comfort of this lovely place again this year.

Precious time with my niece, Page, before she heads off to college in the fall

Tough economic times can help remind us of what is really important: It’s not the big house, the prestigious job and all the stuff we accumulate. It’s about precious time with loved ones, health, nature’s beauty and bounty—and maybe a little key lime pie for dessert.

It's Rancid!

The peanut butter-salmonella debacle gets worse and worse: at least 500 sick and eight dead from products leading back to a plant in Georgia with a history of problems and corruption. The place hadn’t had an FDA inspection in eight years, for one thing.

Food safety in this country is outrageously overlooked and underfunded, for both imported and domestically produced foods. Overhauling this aspect of the FDA is just one of the many serious problems the new administration has to face.

Apart from the obvious aspects of this case, however, another flaw in the way we produce food and eat in this country was revealed: the myth of infinite shelf life. Turns out that tainted peanut butter was produced two years ago. No wonder it's been so hard to track.

I admit I have, upon occasion, been desperate enough to eat one of those packages of strangely neon-colored crackers and peanut butter from a motel vending machine. But I regret it because they always taste spoiled—even though the “freshness date” conveniently stamped on the package is months away. OK, so rancidity is not fatal. It doesn’t mean the oils are tainted with harmful bacteria. But peanut butter does not stay fresh forever, and it points out how many products we eat are miles and months away from the fresh, whole foods from which they were processed, extruded, preserved and packed in plastic.

My Rancid Rant

Foods that taste rancid are my pet peeve. I have a sensitive and pretty well-educated palate from years of wine tastings and traveling as a wine and food writer. Foods containing natural polyunsaturated oils taste great when they’re fresh, but they easily get rancid, especially when exposed to heat. And I seem to find rancid foods everywhere. For example, every time I give them a sniff, the oils in my kitchen cabinet seem to have gone over the edge. That’s why I keep my expensive extra-virgin in the fridge and warm it up when I need it. Other recent examples:

• NUTS. Recently I bought a little plastic bag of Starbucks roasted almonds at the checkout counter. I popped a few in my mouth and bit down. Unbelievably rancid—and stuck in my teeth to boot. Checked the expiration date, thinking it must have been months past, but no: It said September 2009. Unbelievable! Oils in nuts, especially when roasted, easily go bad. I’ve also opened cans of Planter’s pricey almond-cashew-macadamia mix dated a year or two in advance that tasted rancid. One thing that helps is to keep nuts in the fridge or freezer—as long as they're fresh to begin with.

• MICROWAVE POPCORN. Recently I bought a box of 365 brand microwave popcorn from Whole Foods, thinking maybe it would taste better than the grocery store brands full of diacetyl. But I could smell it as soon as I opened the box: mega-rancid. Sure, enough, it was dated fresh till sometime in 2010.

• POTATO CHIPS. You can tell when the oil they were fried in had gone rancid, even though the package offers months of shelf life. Seems most common in those “kettle-fried” styles.

• OLIVES. This category is the worst. I adore really fresh kalamata olives, but finding one that isn’t rancid is like searching for the Holy Grail. I’m appalled to see so many specialty food shops displaying “olive bars” with big bowls of many varieties sitting at room temperature, not even in their brine, day after day after day. They’re almost always rancid.

I never buy an olive without smelling it first. At Whole Foods, it’s about 50-50; half the time, the olives are rancid—even the ones in the refrigerated containers. I’ve taken them to the manager at some stores, only to be told: “That’s how they’re supposed to taste.” Uh, wrong. Believe me, I know the difference. These guys have probably never tasted a fresh olive!

Same with restaurants. I can’t tell you how many Spanish tapas bars I’ve sat down at only to be greeted with the sickly sweet gangrenous smell of rancid olives (for which they charge five bucks). And when I order olive rolls or olive bread? Olive pizza? Nine times out of ten, those little guys are off, too.

I have found one place here in Manhattan I can count on: Ceriello Fine Foods in the Grand Central Market. These guys know from fresh. Their olives, in small jars filled with brine and kept cool, are pristine.They’ll slice you some silky prosciutto, too.

Brownies Cause a Stir

Update: I heard from many of you after my blog on beany brownies appeared. Some were appalled (my French foodie friends) and some were intrigued. Several asked if you could purée the beans first for better texture.  So I tried that this morning.

This time I used a 13-ounce box of 365 Organic Chocolate Brownie Mix from Whole Foods. I drained and rinsed a can of black beans and put them in the food processor with a bit of water. They did not purée to a completely smooth paste but did break up more than just mixing them into the batter.

I added the beans to the mix, plus two eggs, blended with a hand mixer briefly just till ingredients were moistened, then baked as usual. It is an extra step to purée the beans, and you have to wash all those processor parts. But the brownies turned out great.

This mix has some organic semisweet chocolate chips in it, which oozed out appetizingly as I cut a warm brownie. The chips disguise the beany texture and would fool any kid (or adult), in my opinion. They taste decadent. And they’re low-fat, high-fiber and surprisingly satisfying.