Mouthing Off

In the upcoming October issue, F&W's Well-Being editor Kristin Donnelly presents amazing meals that are only 600 calories—with wine. Until then, she reveals a few ways to sabotage a healthy lifestyle.

1. Go Beige. A wardrobe of neutrals? Fine. But a diet full of them? Not so much. The color in fruits and vegetables is often linked to different micronutrients, all of which have disease-fighting health benefits. Orange foods, for instance, have alpha carotene, which protects against cancer, and the more well-known beta carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A. Not to mention that fruits and vegetables are loaded with fiber (which helps you feel full) and are often low in calories.

2. Eat bland, cardboard-like food. Too often, “diet” is associated with food that tastes bad. If you eat unappetizing food, you'll feel deprived and end up eating too much. Skip anything “lite” that comes in a bag or a box. Instead, treat fresh vegetables as you would a gorgeous cut of meat: Season well and cook only as much as needed. Serve vegetables, with sauce, as your centerpiece, and that beautiful cut of meat as the side dish.

3. Fear fat. Eating fat doesn’t necessarily make you fat. Unless medically recommended, the low-fat diet largely went out with the 1990s. That’s not to say that eating a diet of sausage, grilled cheese and doughnuts will help you lose weight (Plus, they’re all beige. See Step 1.) But fat—whether it’s olive oil or even butter or lard—is necessary for absorbing nutrients, and it supports the immune system. It’s also sustaining: Yes, a gram of fat has twice the calories of a gram of protein or carbohydrates, but fat helps you feel fuller longer, so you eat less. So pass the (teaspoon of) butter, please.

4. Inhale your food. Warning: Eating too much too fast can result in a protruding belly (also referred to as a “food baby” in the movie Juno). In many parts of the world, dining is a leisurely event, which actually has health benefits: When people eat slowly, they tend to savor food more and eat less. Plus, there’s that old health-magazine nugget: Your stomach takes 20 minutes to tell your brain it’s full.

5. Drink to get drunk. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) now officially recognizes that people who drink moderately (one drink per day for women, and yes, boo, two for men) are often healthier and live longer. Binge drinking, however, is not only unhealthy, it’s fattening. At around 200 calories each, multiple gin and tonics add up, so does wine. And then there’s the aftermath: Pizza with a side of fries starts sounding like a brilliant idea.

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As the high season for restaurant openings returns this fall, there will be a whirlwind of unfamiliar dining options hungry for business. Pork belly and meatballs will fly, but keep alert and you can avoid the most tragic meals. Here's when to back away.

1. There’s more than one cocktail ending in “-tini.” If you reach for the cocktail list and a fruit, candy or emotion is fused with that suffix in place of a gin or vodka martini, then things are looking bleak. The appletini is a serious offender, but plumtinis and passiontinis are also indicative of cocktail abuse.

2. The server tells you to “save room for dessert.” There are several red-flag phrases that misguided servers repeat. “Are you still enjoying that?” feels a bit presumptuous if there’s still food on the plate, no? Being told that “everything is so good” without asking, or as menus are put down, is also off-putting.

3. Molten chocolate cake. Or chocolate lava cake. Or liquid chocolate cake. Unless you’re at a restaurant by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who created the ubiquitous chocolate surprise, this now identity-free dessert undermines a restaurant’s culinary focus. Apathetic Italian, Asian, American and every other kind of restaurants serve it because oozing chocolate sells. If a small restaurant can’t handle a thoughtful pastry program, awesome gelato or ice cream and a few cookies are enough.

4. There’s a chill in the air, but people are dressed to sweat. This isn’t always obvious, because you might be occupied with admiring people who aren’t wearing a lot of clothes, or who are swaying to music that makes you want to dance. Chances are that no one here came to dine—and even the chef knows that. If you’re concerned with food, look around to see if anyone is eating. We didn’t think so.

5. You’ve been ushered in off the street. It’s unlikely that one restaurant on a touristy strip will be any different from the others just because an animated host told you how great it is. A similar phenomenon occurs with online deals: Ryan Sutton, a Bloomberg critic and the blogger behind The Bad Deal, compared buying these deals to ordering products from infomercials. If someone who you don’t know, whose opinions you aren’t familiar with, and who has a 100-percent bias is trying to convince you to eat at a particular restaurant, you might want to do a little more research before committing to a meal.

Related: How to Screw Up a Wine Pairing
5 Ways to Ruin a Cake

Here, Baked co-owner Matt Lewis explains how you can do wrong by his number-one passion in our new blog series called What Not to Do.

This is my relationship with cake: Cake is kind of my obsession, and I probably eat too much of it. I much prefer cake to cupcakes (the frosting/sponge/filling ratio is more to my liking), and I prefer cake for breakfast as opposed to a post-dinner sugar binge (cake goes extremely well with that first hit of coffee). I will eat almost any type of cake—but I really like dark-chocolate versions. As much as I want to love every cake, though, it's not always easy. Sometimes we do things to cake that we normally wouldn't do to things we love. Here, five ways to ruin a cake:

1. Put toilet-paper rolls in it. The disturbing trend of treating cake as a Michael's craft experiment is kind of gross and completely unappetizing. Do people actually eat cakes filled with chicken wire? Would the food world rise up if this trend started hitting other foodstuffs (i.e., salmon molded into the shape of your favorite cat, or pork chops twisted into a Prada purse)? Leave cake alone.

2. Experiment with food coloring. Perhaps I worry too much, but I think ingesting a cake that is neon red is not good for you—and I really do think some food colorings/gels add a slightly weird chemical-ish taste to cakes and icings (especially in large quantities). I love some of the natural brands, like India Tree, and I really appreciate the lighter shades that less food coloring imparts—they just seem more eatable.

3. Fetishize frosting. Bad cake cannot be covered up, and good cake should not get lost in mounds of frosting. Frosting should complement a cake, not overpower it in sweetness or in weight. By the way, icing shots are gross (think of salsa shots). Let's not encourage this trend.

4. Bake it to clean out the pantry. This goes for almost any recipe. Make sure you use fresh ingredients—baking soda and baking powder lose their potency over time, and old spices are ineffective and will impart an "off" taste. Also, if you are making a chocolate cake, make sure to start with a really good chocolate, since it is the star of the show.

5. Roast it. Most ovens are off by a few degrees at best, and wildly inaccurate at worst. Buy a cheapo oven thermometer to gauge your true oven temperature and adjust accordingly. Oven temperature is key to good baking. Overly hot ovens can cause cakes to be crispy on the outside and goopy on the inside, while your cake might not rise properly in a cooler oven.

Matt Lewis is the co-owner (with Renato Poliafito) of Baked in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He doesn't eat enough leafy greens. Oh, and he co-wrote two cookbooks: Baked: New Frontiers in Baking and Baked Explorations. He is currently very behind on his third book, due out in October 2012.

Related: Malt-Ball Cake Recipe by Baked
More Wonderful Cake Recipes

In the August issue, executive wine editor Ray Isle names the best summer value wines. Here, he explains how you can do wrong by those fantastic bottles in a new series called What Not to Do.

1. Artichokes.
Artichokes hate wine. They grow on their little stalks thinking, "I hate wine. Ooh, I hate it. I'm gonna grow here for a while, then I'm gonna go mess up some wine." The reason they do that is that artichokes have a compound called cynarin in them that basically makes wine taste awful. If you're dead set on eating artichokes and drinking wine with them, the best option is a light-bodied, unoaked white wine like a Grüner Veltliner from Austria. But you'd be best off with beer: a nice brown ale ought to work just fine.

2. Serve your wine too warm (if it's red) or too cold (if it's white).
Warm red wine tastes alcoholic and flabby. Serve reds a little below room temperature and they're not only more pleasant to drink, but they taste better with food (throw them in the fridge for 30 minutes before you pour them). Icy cold whites don't taste like anything, so pull them out of the fridge a few minutes before serving.

3. Try to make two stars share the table.
This doesn't work in Hollywood, and it doesn't work at your house, either. If you have a truly extraordinary wine to pour, serve it with a simple dish. If you're spending 15 hours trying to re-create one of Thomas Keller's intricate recipes from The French Laundry Cookbook, pour something good—but not equally spectacular.

4. Serve oily fish with tannic red wine.
Fish oils react harshly with tannins, so don't, for instance, serve mackerel with Cabernet—unless you like the taste you get from licking a roll of pennies. With oily fish, skip the reds entirely and go white. Any of the crisp, minerally seaside wines: Albarino from Spain, Vermentino from Italy, Sauvignon Blanc from Chile's Pacific coast. All of those are good options.

5. Overthink the whole thing.
Really. This is the biggest way to screw up a wine pairing, not because the wine and food will taste bad together, but because you'll turn yourself into a neurotic mess who makes Woody Allen seem like a Zen buddhist. Most wines can happily live alongside most foods, in a kind of neutral you-go-your-way-and-I'll-go-mine state. Just stay away from those artichokes.

Related: Top 10 Buzz Words to Up Your Wine Cred