About Dr. Gourmet My name is Timothy Harlan and I am both a physician and a chef. This blog is a general collection of information and random ideas on eating great food and eating healthy.
You can find out more at the Dr. Gourmet web site. Eat well, eat healthy, enjoy life!
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Summer’s Coming!
This coming weekend is the unofficial start of summer here in the United States: Memorial Day Weekend. It’s often the start of grilling season, as well. Here are a few recipe ideas for your grill.
Barbecue Chicken
Barbecue sauce is a funny thing. Religion for some and with good reason. The complexities of making a good sauce are debated endlessly. This recipe relies heavily on the brown sugar and jam to create a caramelized glaze on whatever you decide to use it on.
Southwest Venison Cheeseburgers
Venison is lovely and very lean so it makes great burgers. This is a full quarter pound cheeseburger and only 313 calories and only 15 grams fat. You can make this with extra lean ground beef but it won’t have quite the lovely wild flavor. Ground lamb makes a good burger as well but ask the butcher to grind you some from the shoulder so that it is very lean.
Roasted Corn on the Cob
This recipe includes the pat of butter for your corn on the cob because it just wouldn’t be corn without it. Take the pat and enjoy it. This recipe works well both on the grill and in the oven. The grill will give the corn a lovely charcoal flavor.
Plain and Spicy Italian Quinoa Burgers
 We here at Dr. Gourmet resisted reviewing veggie burgers for a long time. That was not just because of their formerly well-deserved reputation for tasting awful, but also because their ingredient lists ran too far into the over-processed food territory.
The good news is that by far the veggie burgers we’ve reviewed have been good – and some great. Veggie Gourmet makes some good burgers that are firm and chewy, not crumbly like some veggie burgers can be. Sol Cuisine’s Original and Spicy Black Bean burgers are just as good as some turkey burgers we’ve reviewed. On the other hand, Hilary’s Eat Well burgers are the kind of veggie burgers that made us avoid reviewing them.
Hilary’s burgers are essentially flavored quinoa cakes, which is too bad, because I love quinoa. After that poor experience, I was prepared to find today’s offering just as bad: Qrunch Foods Quinoa Burgers.
Chinese Chicken Salad
This is the perfect complete summer salad (but you can serve it in the winter also). Light and filling, it has everything you want in a salad – fresh crunchy veggies, a sweet sour dressing, savory meat….
You can make everything ahead and assemble at the last minute. If you can’t find Udon noodles in your grocery use whole wheat linguine.
Chopped Salad with Wild Rice
This salad has it all. It was designed to use Mediterranean diet guidelines but with American ingredients. There’s great veggies, high fiber whole cereals (wild rice), great fats in the grapeseed oil, seeds and avocado and modest amount of cheese. At first glance it appears to have a lot of fat but the fats are (for the most part) good fats with grapeseed oil, pumpkin seeds and avocado adding over 8 grams of monounsaturated fat. The perfect summer salad.
Cajun Chicken and Rice Salad
I was so inspired by all of these ingredients. I found them at my local farmer’s market and they just came together into a wonderfully full-flavored salad.
I know from talking to my patients that people eat a lot of fast food, but I hadn’t realized that over 25% of adults in the United States eat fast food at least twice a week. Overall, fast food accounts for 15% of food consumed in the U.S. Even worse, children eat more fast food than they eat at school.
Wow. That’s a lot of junk.
Fast food restaurants have been implying for years that they’re improving the healthfulness of their foods, calling them “wholesome,” “fresh,” and “natural.” But does that really mean that they’re better for you than they used to be? Researchers at the University of Minnesota and Temple University made use of a fast food database maintained by the University of Minnesota to find out if foods at fast food restaurants had really gotten healthier in the last 14 years (Am J Prev Med 2013;44(6):589-594). Fast Food: Not Much Better »
Dear Dr. Gourmet,
Q: I am confused about cooking oil, such as olive oil, canola oil, corn oil, vegetable oil or other kinds of oil. Some said, olive oil is the best, but not good for high temperature cooking; canola oil is an industrial oil and not fit for human consumption… I usually cook at no higher than the boiling point. Compared to their function, would you please tell me which cooking oil is the best?
A: I love to cook with olive oil, but I use it for lower heat cooking as well as for making salad dressings and such. Oils begin to burn – and thus smoke – at a certain temperature. Even though you are cooking at lower temperatures it is easier to burn olive oil than other kinds. Higher heat cooking oil »
Q: You mention on your website that that you should use lower temps to cook with olive oil and grapeseed oil for higher temps. Where do you draw the line for temperatures?
A: “Smoke point” is the point at which, when heated, an oil will begin to smoke. One of the main factors is how many impurities there are in a particular oil. While the oil itself will burn, it is often the impurities that will burn before the oil. Here’s a list of the smoke points of various oils »
Q: I noted that in your information about which oils to use for cooking, you made no mention about coconut oil. I have read that coconut oil is much to be preferred when cooking because it is able to be heated to a much higher temperature than other oils.
Do you have a reason for excluding its use in such situations?
A: The smoke point of coconut oil is actually quite low by comparison to other oils. Unrefined coconut oil smokes in the range of 350° F. That’s about the same as butter or lard. A more refined coconut oil would have a higher smoke point (just above 400° F), but for very high temperature cooking I usually use grapeseed oil or extra light olive oil. Coconut oil »
Have a question? Send it to askdrgourmet@drgourmet.com and your question may be answered in this newsletter. Dr. Harlan regrets that due to time constraints, he can not answer all questions submitted. Your question may already have been answered in our Ask Dr. Gourmet archive.
Chef Tim Says….
 I had someone say recently how much they envied me being able to make up recipes. It’s funny because I don’t see creating a new dish as being all that hard, and thinking about it I realized that it isn’t difficult. The key is to think of it like learning a new language. I’ve used the same analogy when telling prospective medical students that organic chemistry isn’t all that hard when you realize that it’s simply learning the words (atoms) and the syntax (chemical reactions) of how those words combine. Not much different than learning how to do crossword puzzles or gardening. Learn the “language,” learn the skill.
Recipes are in many ways just the same.
Take a summer salad. Like stews, these make fantastic complete meals and are a great example of how you can create your own recipes by thinking about the building blocks and how to combine them. How to create your own salads »
Cajun Chicken and Rice Salad
I was so inspired by all of these ingredients. I found them at my local farmer’s market and they just came together into a wonderfully full-flavored salad.
Elaine’s Blog
Following the Just Tell Me What to Eat! Plan
 How do you solve problems? Avoiding and denying, or adapting and adjusting?
The way we solve problems, our cognitive processes, may predict how well we will maintain our weight loss. I’m given to self-examination, so you can expect me to analyze why I’m unwilling to gain back even one pound of the 15 I so carefully and methodically lost two years ago. An article which my good doctor shared with me provides some insight. In a study about the similarities and differences between weight loss maintainers and regainers, focus group participants revealed cognitive characteristics which either enabled them to maintain or regain. Are you a maintainer, or a regainer?
Bean & Cheese Burritos,
Regular vs. Light in Sodium Versions
 This review could have been short. Really short.
Because the Light in Sodium Bean & Cheese Burrito had the right instructions on it, and the Regular one did not. Reason enough to avoid purchasing the Regular version.
I picked them up kind of on a lark, really. In the past we’ve preferred to review the Light in Sodium versions of Amy’s products whenever we could because there’s just so much sodium in convenience foods in general. This time, the two products were on the same shelf in the grocery store, and I was a little surprised to see that even the Regular version was (still) low enough in sodium (at 580 milligrams) to meet our criteria of about 600 milligrams or less per serving. While we couldn’t actually do a blinded taste test (for various reasons), we could at least compare the two varieties and see if we would prefer one over the other. Bean & Cheese Burritos
Curried Creamed Cauliflower | Low Sodium Version
This is a rich, creamy side dish that goes well with roasted chicken, pork or fish. The curry flavor is very light with only 1/8 teaspoon of curry powder and if you want this more full bodied, add an extra 1/8 teaspoon or a touch of coriander or turmeric.
Roasted Pork Tenderloin with Balsamic Glaze
Making a balsamic glaze is about the easiest way to create a simple but very elegant meal. Concentrating the vinegar by reducing it intensifies its sweetness. While it is not as good as the much more expensive aged balsamic vinegar, you can have a similar sauce for your roasts or salads at a fraction of the cost.
Creamy Cauliflower Lentils | Low Sodium Version
The combination of the nutty lentils and creamy, sweet cauliflower makes for an all purpose side dish: both a great starch and a vegetable in one. This is a great accompaniment for roasted chicken, pork or beef.
You’ve probably noticed that it’s not a good idea to go grocery shopping when you’re hungry. It’s all too easy to end up buying a whole bunch of things you didn’t plan on buying just because it looked good and you were hungry.
Brain scans of people who have been fasting (i.e., are hungry) and are shown pictures of high calorie foods show higher levels of brain activity in those areas of the brain associated with reward. This isn’t the case with lower calorie foods, however. Brian Wansink and his colleagues at Cornell University noted this and wondered if shopping while hungry meant buying more food in general, or if people tended to buy higher calorie foods. They performed two studies, one in the lab and one in the field (JAMA Intern Med 2013;309(18)E1-E2). Grocery Shopping While Hungry »
Dear Dr. Gourmet,
Q: My Dr. Gourmet Diet meal plan does not include any snacks. Do you recommend building in morning and afternoon snacks?
A: The Dr. Gourmet Diet Plan software doesn’t have specific provisions for including snacks. I do think that snacks are an important part of your meal plan, however. On the Food Diary page we’ve included some instructions on how to make snacks part of your plan. Snacking on The Dr. Gourmet Diet Plan »
Q: Do you recommend against adding table salt while cooking and before eating?
Can we get all the required sodium from the vegetables that we eat? I have heard that the amount of sodium the body needs/uses is around 300mg per day. Is that correct?
A: I don’t recommend using added salt at the table. I am a big fan of measuring salt carefully when cooking recipes.
Here’s the minimum Recommended Daily Allowance of sodium for different age groups. Salt and vegetables »
Q: I know that high fructose corn syrup is bad for me. Now that I’m reading labels more carefully, I’m very surprised at how often it shows up in prepared foods, even as an additive in supposedly healthy whole-wheat bread. I love to bake, and occasionally a recipe calls for corn syrup. What’s the difference between the corn syrup in my pantry and the high fructose corn syrup found in so many commercial products? Is Karo syrup as bad for me as HFCS, and should I try to find a substitute?
A: Like you, I find high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in so many products and am often amazed at the number of foods that contain this ingredient. You’ll find it in processed foods in very high amounts, like soda and sweet drinks, baked goods and other processed foods. There is a lot of controversy about whether this ingredient is a worse for you than other sweeteners. More and more research is building a case that it is not all that great a choice for health reasons. That said, I do try to avoid most processed foods in general and certainly those that contain HCFS. Corn syrup vs. HFCS »
Have a question? Send it to askdrgourmet@drgourmet.com and your question may be answered in this newsletter. Dr. Harlan regrets that due to time constraints, he can not answer all questions submitted. Your question may already have been answered in our Ask Dr. Gourmet archive.
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