Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It (3 page)

American-Italian Food

Calzone
(just looking at this triple-the-carbs-stuffed-with-cheese beast should tell you it was invented in America!)

Stromboli

Toasted Ravioli

Macaroni and Cheese

Muffaletta

Panini
(the buttery, gooey, fattening kind)

Frittata

Chicken/Veal Parmesan

Alfredo Sauce

Italian Bread
(big white loaves)

Caesar Salad

Italian and Creamy Italian Dressing

Pizza, Americanized

Italian Beef Sandwich

Spaghetti with Meatballs

Parmesan Cheese in a Can

Garlic Mythology

Most of us have heard about garlic’s power to keep vampires away, and many people in Europe used to hang braids of garlic outside their doors for protection. Priests even used to pass garlic out in church to help keep evil spirits away. (Maybe that’s what I need to pass out when we’re filming
The Real Housewives of New Jersey
! A garlic a day keeps the you-know-what-who-sleeps-with-married-men away?)

Fiber-licious

We all know you’re supposed to eat a fiber-rich diet. And tons of products, even fruity kids’ cereals, are now advertising how they’re all full of whole grains. So it seems like whole grains are where we should get most of our fiber, right?

I thought so, and so did a lot of my friends, until Caroline Manzo’s poor daughter Lauren went on the Cereal Diet. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but those grains, if you eat too much of them, can scratch the hell out of your insides (and the smell that’s released in the process . . . damn!).

Depending on only whole grains for fiber can actually end up hurting your digestive system, as the little seeds can stick in tiny holes in your intestines and stuff.

Looking for a softer, gentler source of fiber? Spinach and dark green salads are great, as well as crunchy vegetables like carrots, celery, and green beans. But the skins of softer veggies and fruits—the apple peel, the potato skin—are also super great. So your grandma was right: the “good stuff” really is in the peel!

I love-love-love my skinny jeans. And I know you do too. If I can teach you nothing else in this entire book except the insane importance of olive oil, you will be on your way to a healthier body and to getting in (or staying in) your skin-tight, ass-magic jeans forever. Yes, olive oil is that big of a miracle.

I’m not a doctor, but you can ask any one of them, and they’ll tell you about how adding olive oil to your diet helps keep your heart healthy, lowers cholesterol, helps fight cancer, keeps your brain and hormones working, and can help control your weight. Skinny Italian anyone? You need to use olive oil in your diet. Every single freakin’ day. If you can do nothing else, at least do this. Even if you can’t manage the Mediterranean lifestyle in any other way, even if you can’t live without a daily helping of fried chicken and chocolate cupcakes, if you use olive oil whenever possible in your cooking and baking, your body will reap the benefits. (But you do know that no matter what anyone tells you or sells you, if you eat fried chicken and cupcakes every single day, you might as well use your skinny jeans as a scarf . . . )

Growing up, we used olive oil for everything, and I still do. It’s so delicious, I don’t think I could live without it! Homer (the Greek poet, not the Simpson dad) called it “liquid gold.” But supposedly only half of the households in America have a bottle of olive oil in their kitchen. Well, together, we’re going to change that, right here, right now. I know it’s easy for me to say “just eat olive oil” because I’ve been eating it my whole life, but I’m also fabulous, and I want you to be fabulous, too. And olive oil, my friend, is one of the keys.

Fear of Fat

The word
fat
has become such a bad word in our culture that no matter what doctors and nutritionists say about adding a small amount (like 2 tablespoons a day) of healthy fat to your diet, I don’t think most people do. Fat just seems like the enemy. And it’s so confusing to figure out which fats are good and which are bad that it’s easier to just try and avoid them all. I get that. I never heard about trans fats when I was a kid, did you? And all of a sudden, everything is “trans fat free.” What the hell was it when I was ten, trans-fatastic?

My girlfriend Millie was over for lunch the other day, and I made us some salads. She freaked out when I poured olive oil on my lettuce because I was “eating pure fat.” (I used salt and pepper and a little vinegar too, of course.) She’s on this crazy weight-loss plan, so she actually had her own salad dressing
in her purse
. It was this calorie-free, fat-free crap. Seriously, it tasted like crap. I told her this, of course, but she said it didn’t bother her because it was healthy. How’s it healthy? I asked. She said because it didn’t have any calories or anything, so it “didn’t count.”

Here’s my question to her: how can something be nothing?

How could she actually be eating
something
—a bright orange liquid pretending to be salad dressing—and claim that it’s
nothing
? It’s not air. It’s something going into her body. And best I can figure, since it’s not a recognizable “food,” like something you could find in someone’s garden, and has no calories, it’s nothing but chemicals. Even though it says no calories and no fat, useless chemicals cannot be helping your body.

Even though we’ll eat crappy-tasting chemicals we can’t even pronounce to try and avoid fat, fat is not a flat-out bad thing. Your body
needs
fat, not just to cushion hard places and drive the boys crazy, but to run properly. Every single cell in your body needs fat to stay together. Your nerves need fat to fire off their little messages. Fat protects your internal organs. And your big, fat brain is 60 percent fat.

You’re born with fat, yes, but your whole life, your body needs to keep making new cells to replace old ones, so you need to keep giving it fat. The trick is to give it healthy fats. And olive oil is the healthiest, purest oil on the planet. You can live skinny—yes, you can fit into those skinny jeans!—and still enjoy fat. Trust me on that.

Comparing Cooking Oils:
Chemical Cocktail vs. Fruit Juice

Even though they’re not all made from vegetables, in cooking, “vegetable oil” generically refers to any oil you can eat or safely cook with that was somehow derived from a plant. So while the label might say “sunflower” or “canola” or “corn,” the recipe will just say “vegetable oil” or “cooking oil.” All of these oils are processed to the heavens, and don’t have any noticeable taste, so you can interchange them in any recipe.

Olive oil is different, though. First of all, olives are a fruit. They are pressed to squeeze out their juices, so olive oil is a fruit juice, or fruit oil, really. If you buy the right stuff (and don’t worry, I’ll help you), olive oil is nothing but pure juice from the olive. The lack of processing is one of the reasons olive oil is so healthy: it gets to keep all of its healthy components, like antioxidants.

The other oils, though, aren’t as lucky. Because they don’t come from a juicy fruit in the first place, getting oil out of them isn’t as easy as simple squeezing. Vegetable oils go through a bunch of processes that include adding chemicals to remove the color, the odor, and the taste. Lots of crazy chemicals. And in that process, the original plant is stripped of almost all of its nutritional goodness.

No matter what health benefits they are claiming on their packaging, no other oil is as pure or as healthy as olive oil. See an oil that’s labeled “cholesterol free”? That’s nice, but all vegetable oils are cholesterol free. See another oil labeled “light”? They must be referring to the color, because every single oil has the same 120 calories and 14 grams of fat per tablespoon, even olive oil. The big difference is olive oil is pure fruit full of nutrition and healthy fat your body needs, and vegetable oils are unhealthy, chemically treated nonsense.

Good Taste

I’ve heard many people complain about the strong taste of olive oil. First of all, be serious, olive oil is hardly the least tasty thing you’ve ever put in your mouth. But I guess compared to other oils it can seem intense, because other oils are processed to hell on purpose so they don’t taste like anything. The best olive oil is only squeezed, and only one time, so it does keep some of the olive’s original flavor. But that’s a good thing!

I get it that something like anchovies is an acquired taste, but you can find an olive oil that suits you right now, no problem, because olive oil isn’t just one taste. It’s not like a banana that pretty much tastes the same no matter where you get it. Olive oil is more like wine; there are tons of different tastes because there are so many different kinds of olives (more than a thousand varieties), and so many different things that go into making it: the taste of the olive, where the olive is grown, how it’s harvested, how it’s processed, the time of year, how good the maker is . . . you get the picture. With wine, there are some that you might think are too strong, and some you just love. Same with olive oil. Some taste fruity, some taste buttery, some taste spicy. There are endless options, and there’s no excuse for not finding one you like and using it!

While we’re talking about taste, just like wines and grapes, the fresher the olive, the better the olive oil. I’ll tell you how to find the best olive oil, but if you ever run across some that smells or tastes disgusting, you’ve got yourself some bad oil. There are lots of ways olive oil can taste, but it should never taste musty, rancid, like wood, like burnt caramel, like dirt, like nail polish remover, like stale milk, and funnily enough, like wine.

Remember, olive oil is used with foods, and not just tossed down like a shot. But the tastes you can expect from good olive oils are grassy, like a vegetable taste; nutty; citrusy like an orange or lemon; floral; spicy; buttery; even bitter is OK—but bitter like a grapefruit, not like a rotten peanut.

A Necessary Expense

I think another reason people aren’t using olive oil as much as they should is because of the higher price. A big old bottle of vegetable oil is two dollars, but a smaller bottle of olive oil is anywhere from five to twenty dollars. You have to remember, though, that you use vegetable oil by the cupful in recipes, and you’ll usually only use olive oil in tablespoons and teaspoons. A small bottle of olive oil will last you much longer than a bottle of vegetable oil, so it’s really not that much more expensive. And I’m pretty sure it’s cheaper than a triple bypass, so think of it as an investment in your health.

One way to save money on your olive oil purchases is to buy two different qualities. When you use it as a condiment, you want a really good-quality extra virgin since the olive oil is the most important flavor. But for cooking, you’ll be using the olive oil with other strong flavors like meats and vegetables, so you can use a less-expensive extra virgin olive oil. Keep the expensive oil in a fancy bottle on your counter (out of direct sunlight), and put the less-expensive bottle away in the pantry for cooking.