Recipe for Mock Mashed Potatoes With Cauliflower

It's hard to find anyone who doesn't adore mashed potatoes -- from toddlers eating their first real food to people on the far side of 80. Great with gravy or drenched in butter, salt, and pepper. Made more interesting with garlic, chives, sour cream and a variety of cheese additions. But ... yeah, this is not what you call health food.

Many adults are watching the carbs in what they eat daily, as well as the calories. Now, potatoes offer up some serious nutrition -- one medium red potato is an excellent source of vitamin C and potassium, along with fiber. But it adds about 165 calories and 37 carbs to your daily count. There's a healthier option, at least in the carbs and calories department.

Your guests will probably never guess that these rich and creamy "mashed potatoes" contain no potatoes. They are made from cauliflower -- great for low-carb diets. These are doubly good if you add bacon bits.

What You'll Need
1 head cauliflower, cut into florets (discard core and large stems)
1 14-ounce can chicken or vegetable broth or about 1 3/4 cups homemade
2 tablespoons butter
2 ounces cream cheese
2 tablespoons sour cream
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1/4 cup sliced green onions, white and green parts
1/2 cup (or more) crisply cooked bacon bits, if desired
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

How to Make It
Place the cauliflower florets in a large saucepan.
Add the chicken broth and bring to a boil.
Cover and simmer until very tender, about 12 minutes.
Drain thoroughly through a fine sieve and return to the pot over low heat.
Cook about 2 more minutes to dry out excess moisture, stirring constantly. (It's OK if they break apart.)
Pour the cauliflower into a food processor fitted with a metal blade.
Add the butter; cream cheese; sour cream; cheddar cheese; green onions; bacon bits, if desired; and salt and pepper.
Pulse to combine.
Reheat before serving.

Cauliflower Gets Points for Diets
Cauliflower is a wonder food for people who are watching carbohydrates and calories. A cup of boiled cauliflower contains only 27 calories (yes, you read that right) and about 5 carb grams, about 2 of which are fiber. Basically, you can just ignore the carbs. As a bonus, cauliflower is an excellent source of vitamin C, with a cup providing nearly the full daily requirement at 85 percent. 

So even though this mock mashed potatoes recipe does pile on calories via its (delicious) dairy ingredients, it still is extremely low in carbs and high in fiber. And that's a real guilt-reliever.

EU needs a modern food policy

Consumers should be nudged into a more climate-smart and healthy diet (Photo: Alex O'Neal)

Agriculture is back on the European agenda.

Decisions are needed on the future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which accounts for nearly 40 percent of the EU budget.

Last week agricultural ministers met in France to declare that the CAP should be more ambitious, although Brexit means a big net-contributor will leave. We agree and argue that the CAP should be broadened in scope to encompass the entire food chain.
There is little public support for the current level of subsidies for agriculture which benefit the rich and do not reach marginalised farmers. Agriculture is generally seen as damaging the environment and landscapes, while too little is done to improve animal welfare.

The food system of the future should be able to cope with the grand challenges of our society: global food and nutrition security and safety, climate change in relation to water and energy use, ecological impacts, a healthy diet for a lifelong healthy lifestyle, and inequality in farming and between the city and rural areas.

Diets have to become climate-smart

These challenges cannot only be solved by farmers, who are the weakest link in the food chain. The commitment and behavioural change of all the other players in the food chain is required, including the consumer who should be nudged into a more climate-smart and healthy diet.

Although retailers have become dominant, to the detriment of the input and food industries, we still do not pay the true cost of our food.

We need a public and political debate about the functions of the food chain and the willingness to support a transition towards sustainable modes of production.

Genetics

Solutions come from several major innovation areas, including genetics and digitalisation, that allow smart, energy and resource efficient production.

Agriculture and food chains will change dramatically in the years ahead as nutrition will become more personalized and agriculture more high tech, entering new urban spaces and factories.

At the same time the desire for local, artisanal agriculture grows in the middle classes, and it is yet unclear how this can be accommodated in the high tech food chains.

The debate about the future of the CAP should not be left to the agricultural community but be broadened; environmental and consumer NGOs must be involved on an equal footing with the industry and the farming community.

The new CAFP should govern the resilience of the whole food chain and stimulate the interaction between consumption and production, from farm to fork, from seed to meat, from grass to glass.

Brooklyn’s Food Gap

Sonia Patel, left, volunteers at Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger, one of the city’s most active food pantries.

Fall is typically accompanied by the opening of so many new restaurants in New York City that lists singling out the 20 or 30 most anticipated proliferate every September. Brooklyn, unsurprisingly, is home to a vast number of them, and so it is that the borough with its own epicurean abbreviation (NBC: New Brooklyn Cuisine) is witnessing the arrival of Parm Williamsburg, where the garlic bread is glamorized; Ichiran in Bushwick, where tonkotsu broth will soak the ramen; and Harvey, in a boutique hotel (also in Williamsburg), where the grains will be house-milled.

Brooklyn finds far more bleak distinction in a new report from the Food Bank for New York City, which reveals it not only to be the borough with the highest rate of what is known as “food insecurity” — 20 percent — but also the highest percentage increase in the rate of food insecurity from 2009 to 2014 — a time imagined to be one of economic recovery. Food insecurity, a federal measurement, means a household has limited or uncertain access to adequate food. While the figure declined 11.8 percent over that period in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough, it rose 8.7 percent in Brooklyn.

The crucial detail in the study involves the meal gap, which calculates the annual number of meals that a household can’t afford after benefits from state and federal nutritional assistance programs and free school lunches have been exhausted. In its research, the Food Bank found Brooklyn had the largest increase in the meal gap of any borough — one that grew by nearly 13 million meals in six years.

The news was not what Margarette Purvis, chief executive of the Food Bank, the primary supplier of food pantries around the city, was anticipating. “I stopped what I was doing and said, ‘Excuse me?’” she recalled. “When we think of Brooklyn we think of it as a foodie paradise; we think of the beautiful brownstones and we think of the high-rises. And the view from the high-rises is need.”

A map of the meal gap by community in Brooklyn provides perhaps one of the most striking illustrations yet of the connection between gentrification and poverty. Some of the neighborhoods with the highest rates of increased privation are those where the external impulse to transform and refurbish has been the most dramatic (Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens), and those where the displaced have then been exiled (Canarsie, East Flatbush, Brownsville, Ocean Hill), driving up rents, in a reverberative effect. With unemployment lower in Brooklyn than in the Bronx and no meaningful difference in the growth of food costs between the two boroughs, researchers found, housing cost was the primary cause of food sacrifice.

The Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger, one of the city’s most active food pantries, sits at the center of the storm, at the junction of Bed-Stuy, where the price of a single-family home has nearly tripled over the past decade and where rents have soared, and Brownsville and Ocean Hill, two of the poorest areas in the city. Founded in 1998 by Melony Samuels, a former insurance executive who imagined her mission might be temporary, the pantry was serving approximately 5,000 people a month in 2006 from its site on Fulton Street and serves three times as many today. (The organization’s mobile units reach another 15,000 around Brooklyn and the Bronx.)

Because the Campaign Against Hunger keeps detailed records of its clients, works intimately with them and assists in tax preparation as part of its self-assigned duties, it knows a lot about those who come to the facility. About 15 percent have some form of higher education — that trend has been swerving upward since the recession. Some of them teach in public schools or are otherwise employed by the city.

On a recent morning when I visited, the lines were long. One woman, Veronica Logrande, who comes regularly (clients are permitted to use the pantry once a month), lives with her husband and only child in a shelter. Their income, including all benefits, totals just under $700 a month, she told me. She had a hard time allowing herself to get walnuts when she saw them, which she liked to toast and drizzle with honey as a snack for her son, because she regarded them as an extravagance. The amount of food, tallied in dollars, that a client can take home depends upon the specifics of individual or familial need.

One relatively positive change over the past three years, Ms. Samuels said, is a shift in shopping patterns that now has those who visit coming early in the month, rather than later, after Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program dollars, which have been subject to cuts in recent years, run out. People will come in to get fish and chicken and then deploy their SNAP benefits more broadly and efficiently in the marketplace.

When you ask those in the business of emergency food service — with all the reflexive indignation that surfaces in you — why every bit of leftover farro with spring greens and burrata coming out of a restaurant in Boerum Hill isn’t getting Ubered to a food pantry a few miles away, they will look at you with a forlorn knowingness. The potential for contamination is still a problem that no one seems to have solved (does that Uber ride have adequate refrigeration?). And pantries typically don’t have the cooking facilities to make use of the leftover ingredients restaurants may be able, and are often very eager, to supply. At the same time, restaurants themselves have been more aggressive in combating the problem of food waste, repurposing beet greens, for instance, rather than throwing them away.

The Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger maintains vibrant urban farming spaces. One plot on the corner of Fulton Street and Saratoga Avenue grows kale, chard and other vegetables for the pantry, and herbs that the pantry sells to local restaurants — wealth redistribution of a kind. What the land doesn’t contain, though, is housing. All around it are blocks of relatively new, low-rise residential buildings that, though they are for low-income families, do little to maximize the number of homes that might be built.

Fresh produce is a wonderful thing that in the end can only take us so far.

The Tastiest and Worldliest Subscription Food Boxes

PHOTO: F. MARTIN RAMIN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, STYLING BY ANNE CARDENAS

What delivers a thrill quite like the one that comes with a mystery gift in the mail? Subscription boxes containing everything from cosmetics to dog toys to menswear capitalize on that frisson of surprise and discovery—plus the obvious convenience of trying something new without leaving the house. Lately we’ve seen a boomlet of boxes targeting adventurous eaters. These packages facilitate armchair travel via snacks, sweets and quick-assembly meals from around the world, often accompanied by stories and recipes. The best of the lot feature expert curation and tasty treats you won’t easily find stateside, even in your favorite gourmet shop. Sure beats smuggling them home in a suitcase.

Gastronomia della Grandma

The copiously stuffed Nonna Box captures the generous spirit of an Italian grandmother through its rustic recipes from genuine old-country nonnas (if you believe the marketing materials). Founder Guido Pedrelli, a native of Emilia Romagna, moved to San Francisco five years ago with his American wife. Homesickness for Italy, he says, inspired his subscription-box startup idea, launched in 2015.

Mr. Pedrelli hired an Italian food blogger to collect the recipes and grandmother bios that arrive with each regionally themed box. He has yet to feature his own nonna, who ran a trattoria near Bologna when he was growing up.

My Abruzzo box arrived stuffed with the building blocks of a three-course meal, along with recipes from Nonna Palmerina, a “naturally strong-willed” matriarch from the village of Ari. Making the most of the box took a bit of work—the contents are just the starting point.

Planet Eats

Try the World, a pioneer in international food subscription, was started by a pair of expat grad students— Kat Vorotova from Russia and David Foult from France—while they were studying at Columbia University. In early 2013 the company debuted with a Valentine’s Day “Paris Box” filled with imported French foods sourced from shops around campus. Today they do the importing themselves—more than 2 million items from more than a dozen countries last year—with help of a team that scours the globe, working with local trade commissions and tourist offices to discover new products.

Every month subscribers receive seven to eight packaged foods from a different country in a Tiffany-blue box. A Culture Guide features blurbs on each product and recipes from a local chef who helped curate the collection. The Paris Box, which remains in rotation in varying forms, arrived as my July subscription, with contents from across France selected by Paris chef Christophe Schmitt (of Michelin-starred Le Diane).

Vive Le Fress

The young French couple behind the year-old Bon Appetit Box—San Francisco transplants Zoe Capdevilla, 26, and Bertrand Corp, 27—are still in startup mode with a bare-bones staff of interns and only four basic boxes shipped out so far. While most subscription services offer choices only when it comes to size or frequency of delivery, Bon Appetit has you choose a French food box à la carte on their website along a breakfast, café or apéritif theme. Each one comes filled with a half-dozen small items sourced from outside importers. There are also mini versions of the various boxes available.

Ms. Capdevilla and Mr. Corp are the cheerful face of their brand, pictured on a welcome postcard (“Bonjour! Let’s start our journey to France.”) that arrives with each compact red-and-white box. My Provence Apéritif Box featured four jarred spreads (a few tapenades, an artichoke pesto) and three types of crackers.

Try On the Boot

Eattiamo, launched by three high school friends from Italy, debuted in June, dispatching its first big box of artisanal ingredients to American subscribers. The company promises a full meal for four people inside every box—with (almost) no need to purchase anything else. A full-time scout searches for unique products from up and down the boot, imported direct to the company’s New Jersey warehouse. The first themed box focused on Cinque Terre, the Mediterranean region where the founders grew up.

For the second box, which landed on my kitchen counter this summer, they enlisted a top chef, Enrico Crippa of three-Michelin-starred Piazza Duomo in Piedmont, to guest curate. (Mr. Crippa’s restaurant is owned by the Ceretto wine family, a major Eattiamo investor.)

This substantial box arrived stuffed with 6 pounds of good things to eat along with detailed instructions for turning it all into a meal. A glossy card offered an easy-to-follow recipe for transforming tomato juice from Portofino into an Italian Bloody Mary, an aperitivo served with the chef’s favorite black olives and sun-dried tomatoes.

How to eat for free on National I Love Food Day 2016

by Laura Woods, GOBankingRates

Sept. 9 is National I Love Food Day, so put on a pair of pants with an elastic waistband and spend the day gorging on anything and everything you desire.

As a foodie, your September is packed with deals for unofficial holidays requiring you to indulge in everything from Eat a Hoagie Day to International Bacon Day. But limiting yourself to certain foods can feel a bit restrictive.

Fortunately, anything goes on I Love Food Day, so plan your menu and start eating. Whether you prefer to cook at home or hit up your favorite restaurants, here are 34 discounts and freebies to help you enjoy a budget-friendly feast.

Restaurants and Dining Out Deals

Use these coupons to visit your favorite restaurants for breakfast, lunch and dinner on National I Love Food Day without overspending.

Bertucci’s: Take $5 off your purchase — excluding alcohol — with this printable coupon until Sept. 9.
Black Angus Steakhouse: Enjoy a free appetizer — up to a menu price of $12.50 — with this coupon when you purchase a lunch or dinner entrée until Sept. 19.
Bob Evans: Buy one dine-in breakfast entrée, get the second for 50 percent off with this coupon when you purchase two drinks until Sept. 10. Certain exclusions apply. Not valid on Sundays.
Brio Tuscan Grille: Enjoy a free appetizer up to a $13.95 value — excluding the Bruschetta Sampler — when you purchase a dine-in or carry out entrée and present this coupon until Sept. 18.
Carrabba’s Italian Grille: Save 15 percent on your dinner check at participating locations with this coupon until Oct. 23.
Denny’s: Take 20 percent off your entire check with this coupon at participating locations until Sept. 12.
Longhorn Steakhouse: Present this coupon to take $3 off two adult lunch entrees at participating locations until Sept. 12.
Olive Garden: Take $5 off your takeout order of $30 or more with code 5OFF30 until Oct. 15.
Outback Steakhouse: Take $5 off your check with this coupon when you purchase two adult dinner entrees or $2.50 off one dinner until Sept. 27.
Village Inn: Save $5 on two entrees and two beverages or $2.50 off one entrée and one beverage when you present this coupon until Sept. 16.

Pizza Delivery and Fast Food Deals

Sometimes you just need to grab a quick bite. From pizza delivery to drive-thru deals, here are the best discounts.

Boston Market: Save $3 off your order of $10 or more at participating Boston Market restaurants with this coupon until Sept. 12.
Carl’s Jr.: Present this coupon to save $1 off a Steak, Egg and Cheese Burrito Combo until Oct. 5 at participating locations.
Hardee’s: Save $1 off your Steak, Egg and Cheese Biscuit Combo at participating locations with this coupon until Oct. 5.
Kentucky Fried Chicken: Use this coupon to get a 10-Piece Bucket for $13.99 at participating KFCs until Oct. 9.
Long John Silver’s: Get any platter for $6.99 and other specials with these coupons until Sept. 25.
Papa John’s: Enter code PRESEASON at checkout to get two large three-topping pizza for $9.99 until Sept. 14 — some exclusions apply.
Pizza Hut: Get a large one-topping pizza for $5.99 at participating restaurants when you enter code 2222 at checkout until Sept. 30.
Romeo’s Pizza: Enjoy a large specialty pizza for $15 with promo code SMA3 until Sept. 14.
Smashburger: Buy one entree, get one free with this coupon at participating locations until Sept. 10.
Steak ‘n Shake: Present this coupon to get a free regular soft drink with the purchase of any regular-priced Sandwich ‘n Fries at participating locations until Oct. 23.
Wetzel’s Pretzels: Get free pizza sauce when you purchase the new Pizza Bitz with this coupon at participating locations until Oct. 17.

Grocery Store and Food Delivery Service Deals

If you prefer to dine at home on National Food Day, use these sales from grocery stores and food delivery services to stock your kitchen without paying full price.

Food Lion: Save 50 cents on one box of Original Cheerios cereal until Oct. 14 when you load this electronic offer to your Food Lion MVP Card.
Giant Eagle: Save $1 on two Stouffer’s French Bread Pizzas until Sept. 23 by adding the eOffer to your Giant Eagle card.
Hello Fresh: Use code SEP50HF to get $50 off your first two boxes until Sept. 30.
Kroger: Get a free goodnessknows snack square until Sept. 25 when you add the digital coupon to your Kroger card.
Publix: Get a free cup of Liberte Organic yogurt until Oct. 14 when you load the digital coupon to your Publix card.
Ralphs: Buy one HemisFares Extra Virgin Olive Oil D.O.P. Val di Mazara, get one HemisFares Pasta Sauce free until Sept. 24 when you load the digital coupon to your Ralphs card.
Schwan’s: Take 50 percent off your first order — maximum savings of $50 — and enjoy free delivery with code FIFTYOFF until Oct.31.
SendaMeal.com: Take 5 percent off your order until Sept. 30 with code EASY5.
Sprouts: Buy one bottle of Victoria’s Garden Grown Organic Dressing, get the second free until Sept. 30 when you load this online coupon to your Sprouts card.