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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Greek Lamb Braised with Eggplant
 My mother’s favorite restaurant is a Turkish place in Mclean, Virginia, called Kazan. This is the place for lamb and they serve some of the leanest most flavorful cuts. The Kazan Lamb Special is fantastic. It is served with fresh yogurt and the most succulent eggplant you will ever eat. This is a version for you to cook at home.
You can use lamb leg for this recipe instead of the lamb shoulder, but it’s more expensive. If you do use lamb leg, be sure to cut away all of the tough tendons.
Fegato alla Toscana (Sage Seared Calves’ Liver)
 If you like liver, this is the recipe for you! If you don’t think that you like liver, this may also be the recipe for you. Many people think that they don’t like liver because it has been cooked to heck and gone but cooking this with a light hand and the savory herbs and rich sauce makes it luscious.
Mojo Pork Tenderloin
 This recipe has so many valuable techniques. The marinade tenderizes and adds flavor while keeping food juicy. Braising is key to moist juicy meats. While this recipe uses a tender cut to begin with, tougher cuts of meat turn out well when braised. Basting helps create a rich glaze and the marinade makes a rich tangy sauce by slow reduction. All perfect over mashed potatoes.
Five Spice Pork Stir Fry
 Five spice powder is one spice to keep on hand. While the word “spice” might make you think that this is going to make your dishes “spicy,” the flavor is aromatic and not hot. It can make any stir fry more elegant and is great when lightly sprinkled on chicken or fish prior to grilling.
A few months ago I shared a study that illustrated one way to get kids to eat more vegetables: hide the vegetables in other foods by adding pureed vegetables to foods like zucchini bread, pasta with tomato sauce, and chicken noodle casserole. Since small children tend to eat the same amount of food by weight, this helped reduce the number of calories the children ate as well as significantly increasing their vegetable intake. Even better, the children in the study actually liked the vegetable-enhanced foods!
If you have children, however, I’m sure you’re thinking that the idea of hiding vegetables in other foods is all very well, but strategies to help those kids eat more vegetables when they look like vegetables would be far more helpful. The good news is that researchers at The Pennsylvania State University have found at least one way to do just that (Am J Clin Nutr 2012; 95:335-41).
They noted that when children are presented with an entree portion that is twice the size of their usual portion of that entree, they tend to eat as much as 40% more of it. On the other hand, increasing the amounts of vegetables served with a meal does mean that children eat more of the vegetables, but that increase isn’t nearly as significant as with the entree. Would controlling the size of the entree encourage children to eat more of the side dishes presented with the entree? How to get pre-schoolers to eat more vegetables
Dear Dr. Gourmet,
 Q: I’ve been following a Weight Watchers type diet for 2 1/2 months now. I’m 44 yrs old, 5′4″ and weigh just over 150 lbs. In the past, as recently as last year, I have been able to go a month or two with a WW type diet and lose 5 lbs minimum. This time I have not been able to lose even 1/2 lb.
I have really been careful about sticking to eating well, but I feel at a real loss right now and don’t know what to do next. Any advice you can offer to help me lose weight would be appreciated. What would you advise as the next steps?
A: This is a great question. There’s some evidence that as we get older – into our 40s and 50s – that it can be more difficult to lose weight. Everyone is different, of course, and there’s been some research focusing on this but nothing conclusive as to the actual cause.
What we do know is that this requires more attention to calorie balance. The first thing to look at is your amount of exercise. Folks tend to be less and less active as they move toward their 50s. A lot of factors contribute to this – job, home, stress – quite simply, the time constraints of modern life. In a woman your height, burning an extra 200 calories per day is the difference between weight loss and maintaining stable weight. Losing Weight After 40
 Q: I am a 46 year old woman and was diagnosed with DCIS breast cancer in Dec. of 2007. I had a lumpectomy and a sentinal lymphectomy followed by 30 treatments of radiation. In May of 2008 I had an oovarectomy because of many complicated cysts on both ovaries. I had started taking Tamoxifen in March 2008 and was taken off of it by my oncologist in June 2008. She thought it wasn’t necessary because I am without estrogen producing ovaries now.
I have recently discovered edamame and love it! It has helped immensely with the hot flashes and night sweats I’ve been dealing with.
I was hoping you could elaborate on the effects of edamame on women in my situation. I understand it is good for young girls but what about a woman of 46 who was suddenly thrown into menopause?
A: What we know about soy and breast cancer has been a little difficult to interpret because most of the research offers us only indirect evidence. Ideally, research would be performed that would have women eat more soy products after being diagnosed with breast cancer and compare them with those without disease to see if there are higher or lower rates of recurrence. It’s unlikely that we’ll have that sort of information anytime soon.
It is the phytoestrogens in soy that appear to have anti-estrogenic properties. As such the belief that a diet high in soy might prevent breast cancer has some merit. It is those properties that appear to help some women with menopausal symptoms. Edamame and Menopause
 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. Daily Sodium Requirements
Have a question? Send it to askdrgourmet@drgourmet.com and your question may be answered in this column. Read more Ask Dr. Gourmet questions.
Dr. Tim Says….
 This week we’ll continue our series on what foods you should have in your refrigerator and pantry to more easily eat well and eat healthy.
This week I am going to continue with red meats. I will include such things as pork, liver and lamb in this section of the list.
We’ll start with liver. Of course this is everyone’s favorite so you are probably wondering about it. :-)
OK, I know that the odds are against liver being something that you care very much about, but there are those who do like liver a great deal. Because there’s a lot of cholesterol in liver, there’s a lot of confusion about whether you can eat it. What Should I Have in My Pantry? Other Red Meats
Featured Recipe
Five Spice Pork Stir Fry
Five spice powder is one spice to keep on hand. While the word “spice” might make you think that this is going to make your dishes “spicy,” the flavor is aromatic and not hot. It can make any stir fry more elegant and is great when lightly sprinkled on chicken or fish prior to grilling.
 These Cafe Steamers from Healthy Choice have not fared well here at Dr. Gourmet. The first one we tried, way back in 2007, was a Cajun Style Chicken & Shrimp that was truly awful. So bad, in fact, that we didn’t try that line again until last year, when we tested their Lemon Garlic Chicken and Shrimp and Grilled Vegetables Mediterranean. Both were vast improvements over the Cajun Style Chicken & Shrimp, but despite the ingredients being properly cooked (as they weren’t four years before), the meals suffered from unremarkable sauces – mostly bland or even metallic-tasting.
Hope springs eternal here at Dr. Gourmet, however, and today we have two more Cafe Steamers to test. These caught my eye because they bear the “Top Chef” logo from the cooking competition series on Bravo. I’ve enjoyed watching the show, so I was hoping that the chef contestants’ creativity would be translated into these frozen meals. Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers: Grilled Chicken Marinara and Grilled Chicken Pesto
Cajun Chicken Livers
 So you think you don’t like liver. You might be wrong. So many people have had liver that has been cooked until it is tough as shoe leather, and that brings out all the bitterness. This recipe is full of great flavor with onions, mushrooms and Cajun spice. It is quick and simple, tasty and great for you.
Brown Rice with Parsley
 There are so many varieties of brown rice on the market in America today. I have become very partial to brown jasmine rice. Whatever brown rice you choose, the touch of butter as flavoring along with the floweriness of the parsley makes this recipe a great accompaniment for almost any dish.
Thai Chicken Noodle Soup
 This Thai soup uses a few ingredients that may not be familiar to you. The first is fish sauce. Fish Sauce is an all purpose Asian flavoring used throughout Southeast Asia. A Vietnamese friend of mine said to me once, “we put it on everything.” It is essentially a concentration of anchovies and brings an umami flavor to dishes much like soy sauce does. Like soy sauce, it is very salty with a tablespoon having as much as 1,500 mg. Thai Kitchen brand is in most stores and contains about 700 mg of sodium per tablespoon, so it is a fair alternative, but use sparingly.
Most Thai dishes like this one are more authentic using shiitaki mushrooms but I like the thickly sliced crimini. They are meatier and give the soup more texture (and are about 1/3 the cost of shiitaki).
Lastly, I have been using a great brown rice noodle that is on the market now for all recipes that call for cellophane or rice noodles. It has a lot more fiber. The brand is Annie Chun’s.
In the busy world we live in, it can be tough to avoid eating out because it’s just so darn convenient. Unfortunately, restaurant portion sizes can be two, three or even four times standard portion sizes (or more), and you know what that means: eating too many calories, which in turn leads to weight gain. If you’ve been reading Dr. Gourmet for a while, you know that I feel that it’s important for people to cook and eat at home. It’s healthier, cheaper, and allows you to control exactly what and how much you’re eating. But I also recognize that sometimes things come up that prevent that best-case scenario, which is why in my book, Just Tell Me What to Eat!, in addition to the daily recipe I also recommend a frozen convenience meal or a meal from a restaurant chain for those times that you just can’t cook.
Researchers at the School of Nursing at The University of Texas wondered if those who ate out frequently could be helped to reduce the number of calories and amount of fat they ate when they did eat out. They devised a program they called “Mindful Restaurant Eating” and recruited 35 healthy, pre-menopausal women between the ages of 40 and 59 who ate out an average of more than 5 times per week. Reducing Weight Gain for Frequent Restaurant Eaters
Dr. Tim Says….
I have had a lot of interesting feedback from my patients about this blog and my experiences with change in diet. I was unsure whether to continue and one patient encouraged me saying that she felt the dialogue was about a lot of things other than just being gluten free – a new condition, change in diet, change in lifestyle.
She asked if I felt better and it was pretty amazing the transformation and below are the weeks that energy began to kick in.
So, with that encouragement, here is the next installment. Learning to Eat and Live Gluten-Free
Featured Recipe
Thai Chicken Noodle Soup
This Thai soup uses a few ingredients that may not be familiar to you. The first is fish sauce. Fish Sauce is an all purpose Asian flavoring used throughout Southeast Asia. A Vietnamese friend of mine said to me once, “we put it on everything.” It is essentially a concentration of anchovies and brings an umami flavor to dishes much like soy sauce does. Like soy sauce, it is very salty with a tablespoon having as much as 1,500 mg. Thai Kitchen brand is in most stores and contains about 700 mg of sodium per tablespoon, so it is a fair alternative, but use sparingly.
Most Thai dishes like this one are more authentic using shiitaki mushrooms but I like the thickly sliced crimini. They are meatier and give the soup more texture (and are about 1/3 the cost of shiitaki).
Lastly, I have been using a great brown rice noodle that is on the market now for all recipes that call for cellophane or rice noodles. It has a lot more fiber. The brand is Annie Chun’s.
Best Bets: Beef and Lamb
In keeping with our red meat theme for the week, here are your best beef and lamb options from the frozen food aisle.
 evol. Foods Bowls: Fire Grilled Steak
The steak has black beans and rice with bits of tender flavorful meat. There’s some fresh veggies with peppers and also some corn. Coming out of the microwave it smelled fantastic with a lovely redolent cilantro aroma. The flavors didn’t disappoint.
Weight Watchers Spaghetti with Meat Sauce
The meal comes packed in its little black plastic tray with the pasta on one end and the sauce on the other. Opening a vent in the plastic at the sauce end and cooking according to the instructions yields just what you would expect – spaghetti and sauce.
 Healthy Choice Italian Sausage Marinara
This is the same kind of Italian sausage you’d crumble over your pizza and it’s good stuff – just a little spicy and very savory. There’s quite a bit of it, too, in a bright, flavorful tomato sauce with a strong oregano component. Top this with a fair amount of mozzarella cheese and you have a real winner.
Saffron Road Lamb Saag
The body of the dish is a lightly spiced, creamy spinach sauce with the same great, tender chunks of lamb. At 300 calories and 4 grams of fiber this one is a keeper.
Beef Stroganoff
 Heating reduced-fat ingredients like reduced-fat sour creams and yogurt takes care because they can break down. Heat recipes gently and you will end up with one that is just as rich and creamy as the traditional. Use non-fat products later in the cooking so they are not overheated.
One Pot Lamb Curry
 This curry is super simple. Even though it takes about 90 minutes to cook, the prep time is only about 20 minutes and it’s a single pot. Perfect for a weeknight meal. Come home, prep, put it in to cook and go for a jog.
Cottage Pie
 Cottage Pie is essentially the same as Shepherd’s Pie. Cottage Pie is made with beef and Shepherd’s Pie with lamb (makes sense). This is English comfort food at its best: a delicious warm stew topped with mashed potatoes. What could be better?
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