All the Ingredients

Greek Yogurt--What's for Breakfast

I was standing in the dairy section at grocery store the other day, and was astounded by how much space is now devoted to yogurt. There's full-fat, light, and non-fat, plus yogurt with an entire day's worth of fiber added. There is yogurt with added probiotics that will cure all intestinal ails. (Isn't that ALL yogurt?) My small-town local grocery store has  just started carrying a yogurt made locally with milk from happy, grass-fed cows. I was excited to try it. At over a dollar a little tub, it's more than twice the price of its competitors, but it comes in natural fruit flavors like strawberry, peach, and blueberry.

I can't eat the other, oddly-flavored yogurts that are all the rage now. If I want something that tastes like a slice of key lime pie, I want an actual slice of pie--not a synthetically sweetened and flavored tub of yogurt that is reminiscent of a bad slice of key lime pie that I had on vacation in Texas once. If I want cherry cheesecake, then I am going to spring for a real, full-fat slice of New York cheesecake with cherries on top, not a carton of yogurt with a weird faux cherry taste. And all of these probiotic, fiber-laced yogurts are sweetened with chemicals that leave a bad aftertaste in my mouth.

I excitedly bought three little tubs of the local yogurt, made by a dairy that also is selling it's antibiotic-free, organic milk in glass bottles. It was awful. The yogurt had a lumpy texture that was just short of being cottage cheese. Even after I stirred the fruit puree up from the bottom, it didn't get any smoother. And although it should have tasted creamy, it was acidic. I couldn't eat them, so my husband eventually finished them all. (My husband has earned his place in heaven, I think, because he cheerfully finishes off the food that the children--and occasionally his wife--buy, eat once, and then won't finish. And the man will try almost anything I cook, and enjoys leftovers.)

Then I came across Greek yogurt. My favorite is Oikos Organic Greek Yogurt made by Stonyfield. It is sweet and creamy and sweetened with real sugar. And it's fat free with 22 grams of protein per cup. I buy the 16 oz tubs of vanilla at $3.31 a carton at the JumboMart and stir in my own Vietnamese cinnamon for zip. It is delicious--smooth and creamy with no unpleasant aftertaste. It's more expensive than the other yogurts at about .83 a serving, but it's worth it. It also comes in individual tubs flavored with honey or blueberries. I have never tried those because I am an add-your-own-fruit kinda girl.

For my favorite breakfast, I slice up one small banana and top it with 3/4 of a cup of strawberries, and about 1/4 cup each of blueberries and blackberries. (Raspberries would work well too.) Then I top that with 1/2 a cup of the Greek yogurt with cinnamon, and a 1/4 cup of whatever crunchy granola is currently in the house. If I am taking breakfast to go, I put the fruit and yogurt in one container and take the granola in a smaller one; then when I get to work, I add the granola so it's still crunchy. If I don't have time to sit down to breakfast, I add a small tub of plain Greek yogurt to a cup of frozen mixed berries in the blender. With a little pomegranate juice and almond milk, I have a great fruit smoothie to drink in the car. Both of these breakfasts will carry me through till lunchtime.

So the next time you are staring at the yogurt display trying to choose between mango chiffon cake or tiramisu, try the Greek yogurt!

Ode to Gourmet Magazine

When I was ten years old, I had to write a Social Studies Report on Germany. Something about the Black Forest perhaps. I was the fourth child in the family, and our set of encyclopedias--Funk and Wagnalls--had been purchased by my parents before I was born. Their entries were brief and boring, and there were no pictures. It was late the night before the report was due, and I complained about my lack of resource material.

My mother said, "I just read an article in a magazine about Germany. I'll get it for you." She brought me an issue of Gourmet.

"This is a cooking magazine, " I said.

"Yes, but read the article. It will make you want to go to Germany." The article was a travel piece with food commentary thrown in, and it helped me finish my report in time. When, as a  junior in high school, I was preparing to go on a tour of Europe with members of my class (and several spoil-sport nuns), instead of buying me a tour book, my mother painstakingly went through her back issues of Gourmet, and pulled issues with articles about the countries I would be visiting.

Unfortunately, on this packaged tour we had few opportunities to eat unplanned meals, but I was prepared enough to go into local bakeries in Italy for their version of pizza, and I had been warned that Viennese pastries often aren't as sweet as you think they ought to be by the way they look.

My mother read Gourmet all of my life, and each issue was stacked carefully in the back hall closet. My mother scribbled on the pages of recipes she had tried, marked recipes she wanted to try with scraps of paper sticking out of the top, and eventually just started writing on the covers. I don't know what happened to all those magazines when my parents' house was finally cleaned out. I know one of my brothers wanted them.

I only have one issue of my mother's--August 1985--that was on the bedside table in the guestroom when my husband and I got back from our honeymoon. On an article entitled: "Jellied Consomme: A Reminiscence" she had written and underlined: "Please Read." My  mother could never teach me to appreciate consomme or aspic, and this article didn't do it either. However, there was also an article on peaches in the issue, and I swiped the magazine to take home with me. I made the recipe for Amaretto Peach Ice Cream as soon as I had bought our first ice cream maker (electric!) at the hardware store. I starred the recipe and still remember how wonderful it tasted.

I don't remember an essay in that issue, "Nursery Food," by Laurie Colwin, but I read it and decided to try her novels. I loved them all, but loved her two collections of food essays the best. She was the first food writer I read. That is one of the things that has always set Gourmet apart, and that kept me subscribing even in the days when I couldn't afford it--there were great writers tucked into those pages!

When David Foster Wallace died last year, booksellers where I work talked about their favorite books of his. One of them asked me if I had read any of his books. No, I answered, but I had read his piece in Gourmet, "Consider the Lobster," about the aesthetics and morality of cooking lobsters, and had been quite impressed with it. When his collections of essays by the same name had come out, I had  flipped through it, disappointed to discover that essay was the only one about food!

My last issue of Gourmet arrived in the mail today, with its card offering me, a loyal subscriber, the chance to give the magazine to others for Christmas. It pictures the December issue that will never arrive, and I am sad. The December issue with its outrageous cookie recipes was always my favorite of the year. Every Christmas I make chocolate hazelnut biscotti for friends and family. But first I have to look through my many years of Gourmet to find the pink note that sticks up from the cover, marking the issue that the recipe is in.

I know enough about the trends in publishing these days to understand why Conde Nast is abandoning Gourmet. We get our recipes from so many places these days. But I wish they had let us go out with the holiday issue. With a few more cookie recipes to tide us over the long, Gourmetless winter.