Mark Bittman plans your summer menu for you

Regular readers of the Times will have encountered, from time to time, Mark Bittman's lovely and oh-so-practical 101 lists of easy things to cook.  These lists usually appear in summer, when it's too hot to plan complicated meals, and the produce is too fresh not to use.  Bittman's latest is 101 grilling ideas, a few of which are listed below:

4. Spice-rubbed carrots: Roll peeled carrots in cumin, salt, pepper and brown sugar. Char, then move them away from direct heat and cover the grill until carrots are tender.
21. Waldorf salad revisited, sort of: Grill cut apples until browned but not mushy; grill chunks of Napa or savoy cabbage, also left crisp; grill halved red onion. Chop or shred all together with blue cheese, walnuts and a little yogurt.
37. Moist grilled chicken breast? Yes: Pound chicken breast thin, top with chopped tomato, basil and Parmesan; roll and skewer and grill over not-high heat until just done.
50. Grilled tuna niçoise: Brush tuna with olive oil and grill; keep it rare. (You might grill some new potatoes while you’re at it.) Serve with more olive oil, lemon juice, cherry tomatoes, olives, grilled red onion and parsley. Green beans and hard-cooked eggs are optional. 
70. Grill halved new potatoes or fingerlings (microwave or parboil first for a few minutes to get a head start), red onions and scallions. Chop as necessary and toss with chopped celery, parsley, mustard and cider (or other) vinegar. I make this annually.
84. Actual grilled cheese: Use good bread, good cheese, tomato slices and maybe a little mustard; brush with melted butter or olive oil and grill with a weight on top. 

When I first read these little recipe-lets, I always swear to revisit them and try a few on those what-to-make-for-dinner nights.  However, I inevitably end up just leaving the tab open in my browser for a few weeks, then closing it, then forgetting about the whole affair.  To save you from a similar fate, I've gathered all of Bitman's 101 lists below (all that I could find, anyway) in one easy spot.  My recommendation is to make a Mark Bittman 101 game out of the whole thing.  You could print them out, cut them up (possibly sorted by category), eliminate the ones that don't appeal to you, and then toss them in a jar to be drawn out when you need a dinner idea.  You could do the same thing by simply bookmarking this page, then picking a number between 1 and 101 and making that recipe.  If it's a main, it's what to have for dinner; if it's a side dish or dessert, you can build a meal around it.  Or, if you often end up with leftover ingredients in the house that you don't know what to do with, you could copy-paste all the lists into a single word document, and then Control+F for the ingredient you need to use.  Voila!  The Mark Bittman recipe generator.

When restrictive eating becomes disordered eating

I am a believer in healthy eating.  Vegetarian, made-from-scratch, whole grain.  I read labels.  I like things that are "natural."  I munch veggies.  But at the same time, I'm more than happy to engage in the occasional totally non-healthy, non-wholesome meal because, even though it might not have the Recommended Daily Allowance of vitamins and minerals, it feeds some other part of me.  I'm also very skeptical of those that preach or adhere to healthy eating plans that really just translate into dissatisfaction with our natural body shapes.  Just as I'm wary of the potential for exercising for health reasons getting all blurred together with unrealistic appearance expectations and consequently self-hatred, I think there's all too fine a line between what we do for our health and what we do for the girl in the mirror when it comes to eating.

Moreover, even if someone is able to separate out the skinny-craving self (thanks to our society, this being lives in all of us) and really just pursue a restrictive diet for health reasons, I still believe this diet can become unbalanced in a way that is ultimately unhealthful.  What I mean by this, is that if someone is so firm in their adherence to a vegan, raw-food diet, for example, that they can't even have a taste of chocolate cake on their birthday, the negative mental effects (which in turn can affect physical health) might be more detrimental than the trans fats contained in that tiny cake sliver.  Now, this isn't to say we can't have rules.  I, for example, don't eat meat, and this is a hard-and-fast enough rule that I wouldn't try someone else's lamb tikka, no matter how much I wanted it.  But my question is, when do these rules start to harm more than they help?

Gena from Choosing Raw tackles this issue in a recent guest post at Whole Living.  She first discusses the eating disorder orthorexia nervosa, an obsession with healthy food, identified by Steven Bratman, a holistic physician who had suffered himself from a too-rigid diet (from Dr. Bratman's original piece):

New bill to ban 2% milk in schools. Is this really helping?

The NYTimes has a piece on the pending legislation to improve school nutrition.  A cornerstone of the suddenly not-so-exciting sounding bill?

For example, milk is the biggest single source of saturated fat on the lunch line. The bill would allow only skim milk to be offered, banning whole and 2 percent. And schools will be required to make sure children have water with their meals.

Call me crazy, but I don't think 2% milk is making our children fat.  In fact, I think there's probably no problem with children (who eat dairy) drinking 2% milk, since kids are active and growing and hence have high calorie requirements, and getting them from wholesome foods like milk will help them not need to get them elsewhere, like from the chips and soda they'll purchase on their way home from school (trust me). 

From the Fat Nutritionist:

...Little kids are metabolically active. Meaning, their energy requirements, per unit body mass, are huge. Meaning, they naturally seek out energy-dense foods — like concentrated sugars and fats. Meaning candy, cake, and ice cream.  Meaning, kids are perfectly normal for liking, even for obsessing a little, about these things.  The way to deal with it, in my opinion, is not to make it a big deal. It’s part of a stage they’re going through physically, as well as mentally.

So giving them plenty of calorie (but also nutrient) rich foods might help them make good choices about other calorie (but not nutrient) rich foods.  I've also heard that little kids should not be fed a low fat diet, because they need fat for brain development.  Moreover, I thought the weight loss community had moved on from its obsession with restricting fat and calories to the more reasonable recommendation of a varied diet of wholesome and nutritious foods.  Michelle Obama, I'm hoping you hear this: Yes our kids need better foods in schools, but can we please spare them the weight loss fads of the nineties?

Earlier: Jamie Oliver's food revolution is inspiring and maddening all at once

Jaime Oliver's Food Revolution is inspiring and maddening all at once

Jaime Oliver took on the British school food system, and won. He managed to get British schools serving healthier, fresher meals country-wide, and I'm sure the health of school children in the UK is better for it. However, it's telling that all of Oliver's efforts were scrupulously documented for hit TV series. On one hand, Oliver is the ultimate modern idealist: a David of nutrition against the Goliath agro-industrial food industry. On the other, he's the ultimate modern cynic: a natural performer who wants to create big social change, as long as the camera gets all of his best angles (in a scene at the end of yesterday's show, Oliver cries crocodile tears over the people of Huntington not understanding how much he cares. This Washington Post article sums it up: "[Oliver is] afflicted with the kind of warm-hearted caring that requires the constant presence of a TV crew."). If Oliver's new effort to put healthier food in US schools is successful, the latter won't seem so important. But if all that Oliver gets out of this is a season of good TV, I'll wonder whether there wasn't a better way to create change.