Espetadas Recipe, Spotlight on Red Wine Vinegar, Cooking with Skewers, The Importance of Breakfast and Getting Fit with Tai Chi

With grilling season in high gear, I love having a few recipes that are delicious yet not complicated. Kebabs are perfect because you can marinate the meat ahead of time, and the cubes cook up fast. The following marinade has a Mediterranean twist featuring two of Portugal’s signature ingredients, Madeira and red wine vinegar. Enjoy!

Espetadas

• Espetadas

  Popular in Portugal’s Madeira Island where its namesake wine is produced, these kebabs were traditionally skewered on branches of bay laurel, grilled over a wood fire, and accompanied by a round of local bread called bolo do caco. While you might not readily find bay laurel branches, you can serve this delicious grilled beef on the crusty bread of your choosing—slices can be rubbed with garlic, grilled for under a minute on each slide, and then brushed with extra virgin olive oil before serving.

  Ingredients

  • 1/3 cup red wine vinegar, best quality available
  • 3 tablespoons Madeira
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced
  • Coarse kosher or sea salt
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for serving
  • 2 dried bay leaves, crumbled
  • 2 pounds beef tenderloin or top sirloin
  • Rustic bread, grilled with olive oil, if desired, for serving

  Directions

  Step 1

  In a large nonreactive bowl, combine the vinegar, Madeira, garlic, and a teaspoon each of the salt and pepper. Whisk until the salt crystals dissolve, and then whisk in the 1/3 cup of olive oil. Stir in the dried bay leaves.

  Step 2

  Trim off any excess fat or silver skin from the meat and cut it into 2-inch cubes. Add the cubes to the marinade and stir gently to coat. Cover and refrigerate for 4 to 8 hours, stirring occasionally.

  Step 3

  When ready to cook, preheat a grill to medium-high heat. Brush and oil the grill grate. Drain the meat cubes and discard the marinade. For a good sear, pat the cubes dry with paper towels and then thread them onto 4 to 6 metal skewers. Season with more salt and pepper. Grill the meat 2 to 3 minutes per side for medium-rare, or until done to your liking. Transfer the skewers to a platter or plates. Drizzle with olive oil and let the meat rest for 2 to 3 minutes. Serve with the grilled bread, if desired.

  Yields 4 to 6 servings.

Healthy Ingredient Spotlight

Red Wine Vinegar: Be Choosy

If your only experience with red wine vinegar comes from commercial brands sold at your local supermarket, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. But a beautifully—and slowly—crafted red wine vinegar will have the variety of notes of a fine wine because it will have been made from fine grapes (look for details on the label).

There are many historical tales about forgotten barrels of wine that transformed over time into vinegar, but in the hands of today’s producers, nothing is left to chance. This ensures that the finished product is vibrant and fruity, a perfect match for extra virgin olive oil and other ingredients, whether you’re making a marinade or a vinaigrette. It takes more time to make this type of red wine vinegar, and it’s more expensive than mass-produced brands, but since it’s typically used in small amounts, a bottle will go a long way. One key clue: Look for an acidity level over 7% rather than the average 5%–6% of commercial varieties.

Your Olive Oil Hunter is on a quest to bring you the best vinegars from around the world, so stay tuned for important developments to come in future newsletters!

Healthy Kitchen Nugget

Get Skewered!

For serving fresh foods like cubes of fruit, long bamboo skewers make an elegant presentation and allow guests to grab a portion without dipping into a large fruit salad bowl. But even if you soak wood skewers first, they’re not my favorite option for grilling because they can easily burn. They can also break when you’re trying to push them through a piece of raw meat or a hard vegetable. I like reusable and sturdy stainless-steel skewers, at least 12″ in length and with a sharp point that easily pierces food chunks. There are many options with attractive and easy-to-grip handles so that, once cooled, guests can help themselves. Handles also make it easy for you to slide off the cooked food if you’re arranging it on a serving platter. Be sure to buy at least a dozen so you’ll have enough to skewer meat and veggies separately since their grilling times can vary.

For Your Best Health

Lost Nutrients From Skipping Breakfast ​

We know that breakfast fuels the body and brain for the day ahead, and skipping it can leave you feeling sluggish, but the problems may go deeper. According to an analysis of one-day food diaries kept by over 30,000 American adults, people who skip breakfast not only miss out on the nutrients associated with breakfast foods, but they also don’t make up for those losses later on.

“What we’re seeing is that if you don’t eat the foods that are commonly consumed at breakfast, you have a tendency not to eat them the rest of the day. So those common breakfast nutrients become a nutritional gap,” said Christopher A. Taylor, PhD, RDN, professor of medical dietetics and family medicine at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study. The biggest shortfalls were calcium and iron; vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, folate, and C; and fiber. To make matters worse, breakfast skippers were more likely to have a meal-sized snack to compensate for the missed breakfast, plus a larger lunch and dinner, all of which tended to be of a lower dietary quality.

If you’re too rushed in the morning or don’t wake up with an appetite, you may want to make the effort to eat foods in the dairy, fruit, and whole grain groups when you are ready to chow down.

Fitness Flash

Whittle Your Waist With Tai Chi ​

Tai chi is a popular mind-body discipline practiced the world over. It incorporates gentle movements, focused breathing, and meditation-like self-awareness. And it’s great for balance and flexibility. Now a study done by a team of researchers from the University of Hong Kong and UCLA has found that, practiced consistently, it may help reduce belly fat. Belly fat is often the most outward sign of metabolic syndrome, a group of diabetes and heart disease risk factors that also include high blood fats, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure. To make tai chi part of a comprehensive exercise plan, look for in-person or online classes at the Tai Chi Foundation.

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The Essential Dry-to-Wet Rub Recipe, Spotlight on Mustard, The Life of Spice, Another Reason to Ditch Crash Dieting and Creating Your Own Exercise “Cocktail”

What’s the #1 grilling essential? You might think it’s the charcoal or your favorite BBQ sauce, but extra virgin olive oil should be the go-to ingredient for every grill master. You probably know that for sauces and dressings, it’s a great way to emulsify all the other ingredients and create a rich texture, and that steak and vegetables in particular benefit from a drizzle just before serving. But olive oil is the first ingredient I reach for at the very start of my grilling process, when I’m putting together the marinade—it not only imparts its own wonderful flavor but also helps herbs and spices better penetrate the food. This week’s recipe, which builds on the great flavors of a dry rub, is the perfect illustration of olive oil’s versatility and magic—if there’s one go-to prep for chicken, pork, and beef before they hit the grill, this is it.

The Essential Dry-to-Wet Rub

• The Essential Dry-to-Wet Rub

  This special blend of sweet, salty, and spicy will infuse any type of grilled meat with a smoky, garlicky flavor. It’s especially great on any cut of pork.

  Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 1 tablespoon sea salt
  • 2 tablespoons cracked black pepper
  • 2 tablespoons pimentón (Spanish smoked paprika)
  • 1 tablespoon garlic powder
  • 1 tablespoon onion powder
  • 1 teaspoon dry yellow (ground) mustard
  • 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

  Directions

  Mix all the ingredients together. Pat your meat dry with paper towels and coat liberally with the mixture, using your fingers to press it in place. If you’re in a hurry, you can grill after 15 minutes, but letting the rub “cure” for 3 hours or longer in the fridge will intensify the flavors.

  Yields enough rub for up to 8 pounds of meat.

Healthy Ingredient Spotlight

Can You Cut the Mustard?

Brown or yellow, fine or whole grain, the mustards sitting in your fridge started with seeds from a mustard plant (by the way, mustard greens are great in salads or a stir fry). Just as there are several kinds of mustard in a jar, different varieties of seeds are available. If you had dry mustard in the house when you were growing up, it likely came in the distinctive yellow can with the Colman’s logo on it. These days, both seeds and ground powders are sold through spice stores and online.

Western cooking typically calls for the mild yellow mustard seeds, which you can buy whole and grind yourself as needed in a coffee bean grinder. Brown and black mustard seeds are other popular varieties with more pronounced tastes. They’re often used in spicy Indian and Asian recipes and to make whole-grain and coarse-style mustards. (Some people find the brown seeds more acrid and the black ones more potent yet sweeter when cooked.) Lightly toasting the seeds in a skillet, either dry or in a small amount of oil, really brings out their aroma.

Consider using whole mustard seeds when making a spice blend for pickling and trying your hand at homemade mustard. When grinding seeds fresh for mustard powder, reduce the amount called for in a recipe by a third to a half since freshly ground powder will be more intense than store-bought.

Healthy Kitchen Nugget

The Life of Spice

All spices start losing their flavor—albeit slowly—from the moment they’re harvested, but you can do a lot to preserve their taste once you get them home. Keep them in tightly sealed glass containers away from light, humidity, and heat—not above the cooktop. Choose a dark pantry shelf or a drawer away from the oven, and only buy the quantity you’ll use within 6 to 12 months.

For Your Best Health

Another Reason to Ditch Crash Dieting

A team of researchers has found yet another downside to very low-calorie diets: unwanted changes in the normal flora—including the good bacteria—of your digestive tract. “For the first time, we were able to show that a very low-calorie diet produces major changes in the composition of the gut microbiome and that these changes have an impact on energy balance,” said lead author Dr. Joachim Spranger, professor and medical director of the department of endocrinology and metabolic diseases at Charité Hospital in Berlin. Over 16 weeks, the team studied a group of older women. Some followed a medically supervised meal replacement diet with fewer than 800 calories a day, while the others simply maintained their weight. “We were able to observe how the bacteria adapted their metabolism in order to absorb more sugar molecules and, by doing so, make them unavailable to their human host,” said the study’s first author, Dr. Reiner Jumpertz-von Schwartzenberg, a researcher and clinician at Charité.

Even more worrisome was the finding that a very low-calorie diet appears to reduce the gut’s resistance to the dangerous bacterium C. difficile, in turn affecting the gut’s ability to absorb nutrients, all of which can go undetected. “What remains unclear is whether or to which extent this type of asymptomatic colonization by C. difficile might impair or potentially improve a person’s health. This has to be explored in larger studies,” said Dr. Spranger.

Fitness Flash

Create Your Own Exercise “Cocktail”

It might not be what we want to hear, but getting in the all-important 30 minutes of exercise a day may not be enough to give you maximum longevity. “For decades, we’ve been telling people that the way to stay healthy is to get at least 30 minutes of exercise 5 days a week,” said Keith Diaz, PhD, assistant professor of behavioral medicine and director of the exercise testing laboratory at the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. “But even if you’re one of the few adults who can stick to this advice, 30 minutes represents just 2% of your entire day. Is it really possible that our activity habits for just 2% of the day is all that matters when it comes to health?” The short answer appears to be not quite.

To find the best combination, or cocktail, of activity needed to prolong life, Dr. Diaz and fellow researchers analyzed the results of 6 different studies involving more than 130,000 participants wearing fitness monitors. They found that the benefits of 30-minute bouts of moderate-to-vigorous exercise depend on how you spend the rest of the day—the regimen can reduce the odds of an early death by up to 80% for those who sit for less than 7 hours, but it’s not enough for people who sit 11 to 12 hours daily. “In other words, it is not as simple as checking off that ‘exercise’ box on your to-do list,” said Dr. Diaz. “A healthy movement profile requires more than 30 minutes of daily exercise. Moving around and not remaining sedentary all day also matter.”

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to physical activity, but the researchers developed a base formula that you can use to find the right approach for you: Get in 3 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity or 12 minutes of light activity per hour of sitting. As an example, people who spend just a few minutes a day engaging in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity could still lower their risk of early death by 30% as long as they also spend 6 hours engaging in light physical activity like housework or casual walking. Said Dr. Diaz, “This is good news for people who may not have the time, ability, or desire to engage in formal exercise. They can get health benefits from a lot of light physical activity and just a little moderate-to-vigorous activity. Perhaps you’re a parent with young kids and you simply can’t get to the gym to exercise, but you can still have a healthy movement profile as long as you move around a lot throughout the day as you tend to your everyday activities.”

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