This vinaigrette is also delicious as a topping for bruschetta or pizza. And you can let it cool to room temperature and use it as a dressing on cold dishes as well as salads.
Ingredients
1 pound farfalle
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, divided
2 shallots, peeled and finely chopped
4 cups cherry tomatoes
2 tablespoon red wine vinegar
Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
8 ounces fresh mozzarella, cut into small cubes
4 tablespoons fresh chives, chopped
Directions
Step 1
Cook the pasta as directed. While it’s cooking, heat a sauté pan over medium heat, and add two tablespoons of the olive oil. Add the shallots, and cook until softened, stirring frequently.
Step 2
Add in the cherry tomatoes, and cook until they blister, about 5 minutes, pressing down on them with a wooden spoon to release their juices and smash them a bit. Add the vinegar and the rest of the olive oil, and stir. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and remove from the heat.
Step 3
Drain the pasta, top with the mozzarella and the cherry tomatoes, and toss well. Garnish with the chives and serve.
4 tuna steaks, each 6 to 8 ounces and 1-inch thick
Directions
Step 1
Make the salmoriglio: Put the 1/2 cup olive oil in a small saucepan and warm over low heat. Whisk in the lemon juice and hot water. Stir in the garlic, parsley, oregano, capers if using, red pepper flakes, and salt and pepper to taste (go easy on the salt if you’re using capers). Keep warm.
Step 2
Set up your grill for direct grilling and preheat to medium-high (450ºF). Lightly brush the fish with olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Arrange on the grill grate, and grill until the fish is opaque and easily flakes when pressed with a fork—about 12 minutes, turning once with a spatula. (If you prefer your tuna on the rare side, cook the steaks for less time.)
Step 3
Transfer the tuna to a platter or plates, and drizzle with the salmoriglio. Serve the remaining sauce on the side.
Grilled Tuna Steaks with Salmoriglio Recipe, Spotlight on Parsley, How Accurate is Your Calorie-Counting App and Are You Wired for Shorter Sleep? ?
Got your grill primed and ready for the warmer months? Then I’ve got a zesty tuna recipe to start the season with a bang. My tuna primer will cue you into the differences in tuna varieties so you know what to keep an eye out for at the fish counter. If you like to track your meals on an app, you’ll be surprised at the results of a study on their accuracy. Plus, I’m sharing the latest research on how genes influence sleep patterns.
4 tuna steaks, each 6 to 8 ounces and 1-inch thick
Directions
Step 1
Make the salmoriglio: Put the 1/2 cup olive oil in a small saucepan and warm over low heat. Whisk in the lemon juice and hot water. Stir in the garlic, parsley, oregano, capers if using, red pepper flakes, and salt and pepper to taste (go easy on the salt if you’re using capers). Keep warm.
Step 2
Set up your grill for direct grilling and preheat to medium-high (450ºF). Lightly brush the fish with olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Arrange on the grill grate, and grill until the fish is opaque and easily flakes when pressed with a fork—about 12 minutes, turning once with a spatula. (If you prefer your tuna on the rare side, cook the steaks for less time.)
Step 3
Transfer the tuna to a platter or plates, and drizzle with the salmoriglio. Serve the remaining sauce on the side.
Yields 4 servings
Healthy Ingredient Spotlight
Reeling in the right tuna
According to the National Fisheries Institute, of all the varieties of tuna in the oceans, you’ll most likely find only five at fish stores and on menus:
Albacore is the tuna you know best packaged in cans or pouches. It has a mild flavor and white to light pink flesh.
Bigeye (ahi in Hawaii) is the favorite for sashimi and is also mild in flavor.
Bluefin, used almost exclusively for sushi, is the darkest, fattiest, and arguably the most expensive variety, with a taste that gets more pronounced as the fish reaches adulthood. Overfishing has made it a priority for conservation efforts.
Skipjack is the tuna type you’re now most likely to see in cans and pouches. Considered “light tuna,” it’s high in nutrients, including omega-3 fatty acids.
Yellowfin, sometimes sold as ahi, has pale pink flesh and is slightly more flavorful than albacore.
Healthy Kitchen Nugget
Flat or curly: picking parsley
Fresh parsley is a lot more than a plate garnish, especially when you choose flat-leaf, or Italian, parsley over its curly cousin. Flat-leaf parsley has a more herbal taste compared to the crunchy and bland grassy taste of the curly variety, due to different proportions of some of parsley’s natural compounds. Chopped or minced, flat-leaf parsley adds bright color as well as flavor to a dish—people who aren’t fans of cilantro can use it instead.
For Your Best Health
How accurate is your calorie-counting app?
That’s the question researchers from Northwestern and Benedictine Universities set out to answer. They compared nutrient data on the 50 most frequently eaten unprocessed or minimally processed foods from four commercial nutrition apps against a leading research-based food database, Nutrition Data System for Research (NDSR). They looked at calorie counts, macronutrients, total sugars, fiber, saturated fat, cholesterol, calcium, sodium, and more. Here’s what they found: “CalorieKing and Lose It! had mostly excellent agreement with NDSR for all investigated nutrients. Fitbit showed the widest variability in agreement with NDSR for most nutrients, which may reflect how well the app can accurately capture diet.” The study also found some flaws with MyFitnessPal, such as fiber accuracy and poor agreement with NDSR on calories in particular. The findings were published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Fitness Flash
Are you wired for shorter sleep?
According to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), some people have genes that allow them to thrive on just four to six hours of restorative sleep each night. What’s more, these elite sleepers also have psychological resilience and resistance to neurodegenerative conditions. Of course, not everyone is wired this way, but uncovering what enables some people to stay healthy despite getting little sleep can provide answers for those who need more and can’t seem to get it.
“There’s a dogma in the field that everyone needs eight hours of sleep, but our work to date confirms that the amount of sleep people need differs based on genetics,” says neurologist Louis Ptacek, MD, one of the senior authors of a study published iniScience on March 15, 2022. “Think of it as analogous to height; there’s no perfect amount of height, each person is different. We’ve shown that the case is similar for sleep.”
For more than a decade, Dr. Ptacek and Ying-Hui Fu, PhD, both of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, have studied people with Familial Natural Short Sleep (FNSS), the ability to function fully on four to six hours of sleep a night, which runs in families. To date, they’ve identified five of the genes that play a role in FNSS. These genes may help in the development of future drugs to ward off sleep disorders, protect against brain disorders, or slow down their progression.
“Sleep problems are common in all diseases of the brain,” says Dr. Fu. “This makes sense because sleep is a complex activity. Many parts of your brain have to work together for you to fall asleep and to wake up. When these parts of the brain are damaged, it makes it harder to sleep or get quality sleep.”
Their latest work tested Dr. Fu’s hypothesis that, for people with FNSS, elite sleep can be a shield against neurodegenerative disease rather than speed up its development as it seems to do in people who need closer to seven to nine hours and fail to get it. They bred mice that had both short-sleep genes and genes that predisposed them to Alzheimer’s and found that their brains developed much less of the hallmark signs linked to dementia.
Identifying more special sleep genes will take time, and the researchers liken their work to solving a jigsaw puzzle. “Every mutation we find is another piece,” says Dr. Ptacek. “Right now, we’re working on the edges and the corners, to get to that place where it’s easier to put the pieces together and where the picture really starts to emerge.”
“This work opens the door to a new understanding of how to delay and possibly prevent a lot of diseases,” says Dr. Fu. “Our goal really is to help everyone live healthier and longer through getting optimum sleep.”
Roast Chicken with Pumpkin Seed Pesto Recipe and Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) and Cancer Prevention
We know from a wealth of studies that the Mediterranean diet can help prevent various types of cancer, notably colon cancer, thanks to the abundant fiber in many of its foods. Equally exciting research now highlights the benefits of olive oil in particular in helping with cancer prevention, and it’s thanks to a very specific nutrient, oleocanthal.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) and Cancer Prevention
The Research: “Olive oil intake and cancer risk: A systematic review and meta-analysis,” PLoS One (2021).
“(-)-Oleocanthal and (-)-oleocanthal-rich olive oils induce lysosomal membrane permeabilization in cancer cells,” PLoS One (2019).
“(-)-Oleocanthal rapidly and selectively induces cancer cell death via lysosomal membrane permeabilization,” Molecular and Cellular Oncology (2015).
For the PLoS One review, done at the University of Athens in Greece, scientists analyzed 45 studies and found that the “highest olive oil consumption was associated with 31 percent lower likelihood of any cancer, breast, gastrointestinal, upper aerodigestive, and urinary tract cancer. Significant overall effects spanned both Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean participants.” They concluded:
“Olive oil consumption seems to exert beneficial actions in terms of cancer prevention.”
Studies done at Hunter College in collaboration with scientists from other New York area institutions help explain what might give extra virgin olive oil or EVOO, known for its anti-inflammatory properties, this cancer-fighting ability. For the Molecular and Cellular Oncology study, Hunter professor David A. Foster, PhD, and his coauthors, identified the role of oleocanthal (OC), a phenolic compound in EVOO, already credited for the health benefits linked to diets rich in EVOO. The team “investigated the effect of OC on human cancer cell lines in culture and found that OC induced cell death in all cancer cells examined as rapidly as 30 minutes.”
It turns out that oleocanthal damages cancer cells’ lysosomes, cell components that contain enzymes used to break down larger molecules like proteins. As explained in a news report from Hunter College, “The oleocanthal degrades the integrity of the lysosomal membrane, releasing the enzymes into the cells’ cytoplasm, which leads to cell death. Cancer cells often have larger and more numerous lysosomes, making them more vulnerable to oleocanthal than other cells.”
According to the scientists, different olive oils have different oleocanthal concentrations due to their origin, harvest time, and processing methods. For the 2019 PLoS One study, the researchers, including scientists from Weill Cornell Medicine, Rutgers University, and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, along with Hunter, tested a variety of olive oils to determine their respective concentrations of oleocanthal, ranging from very low to very high. The olive oils with high oleocanthal content completely killed cancer cells in a manner similar to purified oleocanthal. The olive oils with average oleocanthal content reduced their viability, but to a lesser extent. Those with no oleocanthal had no effect.
The researchers also tested oleocanthal’s effects by injecting it into mice engineered to develop pancreatic tumors. The oleocanthal injections extended the lives of the mice by an average of four weeks. If it were to have the same effect in humans, which is as yet unknown, that could translate to over 10 years.
“Whether oleocanthal can be used as a magic bullet to target cancer cells is not clear,” says Dr. Foster. “However, the data provided in this article validate studies indicating that extra virgin olive oils can prevent cancer.”
“Today, there are no brands of olive oil sold at grocery stores in the United States that mention ‘oleocanthal’ or other polyphenols on their label, and this might change as producers of olive oil catch up with the scientific research, and consumers become more savvy,” says Limor Goren, PhD, research associate at Hunter College and lead author of the 2019 study. She adds that consumers can also do their own taste test for oleocanthal: “Taste a small amount of an extra virgin olive oil; if there is a signature stinging sensation felt at the back of the throat, that is an indication of oleocanthal. It should feel peppery.”
This South American-inspired olive oil-rich pesto elevates simple roasted chicken and packs an herby punch.
Ingredients
1 3-1/2- to 4-pound chicken
2 tablespoons, separated, plus 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup hulled green pumpkin seeds (pepitas), unsalted
1/2 cup packed fresh cilantro leaves, rinsed and patted dry
1/2 cup packed fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves, rinsed and patted dry
2 large garlic cloves, peeled and coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons water, more as needed
1 tablespoon fresh lime, more to taste
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Directions
Step 1
Preheat your oven to 400°F. Place the chicken on a rack in a shallow roasting pan or rimmed baking sheet. Rub the chicken with 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Season the inside and outside generously with salt and pepper. Roast for 60 to 70 minutes or until the internal temperature in the thickest part of a thigh is 165°F. Let rest for 10 minutes before carving.
Step 2
While the chicken is roasting, prepare the pesto. Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil to a medium-hot skillet, and add the pumpkin seeds. Sauté until the seeds begin to pop, about 2 minutes, but don’t let them burn. Cool, and then transfer the seeds to the bowl of a food processor. Add the cilantro, parsley, garlic, water, lime juice, and cumin, and pulse several times. With the machine running, slowly add 1/3 cup olive oil until you get a purée. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and add more lime juice if needed. (If it’s too thick, add additional water, one tablespoon at a time.) Serve with the chicken. Refrigerate any leftover pesto to use as a dip.
