Kitchen epiphany

If there is one thing I can´t stand it´s feeling deprived. So, scaling down ingredients is sometimes a bit scary for me because I worry it might harm the taste of the food.
Case in point: my beloved caprese salad with tomatoes, basil and mozzarella. I had, all these years, had the habit of drizzling on the olive oil and balsamico after arranging the other ingredients on a plate. And, all of the time, I ended up pouring about two or three tablespoons of oil minimum on each plate (as I found out when I weighed the amount I was wont to pour), thus turning what should have been a healthy meal into a caloric desaster.
Yesterday, I was determined not to use more than one tablespoon per person. If you imagine the surface of a caprese plate, most of it would remain untouched if you tried to drizzle that on. So, what I did was chop up the tomatoes, put them into a bowl, put the olive oil, pepper,salt and a bit of balsamico in, too, amd mix it through. I let that marinate while I cut and arranged the mozzarella, then drained it (discarding the liquid that had collected)  and put it between the pieces of cheese.  I had used a diminutive creamer, like they use in coffee shops for individual servings of cream for your coffee, that holds just twenty grams of oil (checked it on the scales), and I had taken just half to marinate the tomatoes in. What was left inside was just enough to give each leaf of basil (I put one on each piece of mozzarella) a tiny drop of oil, too.
Guess what- this version of  caprese was even more tasty than when I just slathered on the oil. At a fraction of the calories.
So, my kitchen epiphany for this weekend was the realization that pre-marinating my salads before arranging them allows me to reduce my oil consumption considerably. And, on a side note, finding out that that little stainless steel coffee creamer is a perfect measuring device for oil, apart allowing for much more precise application when I do drizzle some oil on something. Remember that the olive oil vendors want you to use more of their product, so the pouring spouts on the bottles aren´t designed to facilitate application by the drop, quite the contrary.

Which brings me to another unpleasant surprise I had this weekend. We have bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning, and I use a cast-iron pan for preparing it. Now, as that pan is used exclusively for the purpose, it is, by now, well-seasoned. I have a straight-edged steel spatula I use to take out the eggs and then clean the surface. Normally, there´s almost nothing that sticks to the pan.
I had, in a pinch, bought a different brand of bacon last week, and suddenly there was a sticky brownish  layer of something in the pan that was hard to remove and made the eggs stick, too.
The cause of this development could be found on the ingredient list of that pack of bacon. The third ingredient in line was- glucose. Sugar. The kind of bacon I usually buy does not have that on the ingredient list.
Now, that is one brand I´m not going to buy again. And a striking example of how the sugar industry is pushing their product down our throats.Nobody needs to be fed sugar when they believe they are eating bacon. This sugar did nothing, not even improve the taste. Just push up our carbohydrate consumption and mess up my beloved cast iron pan (if that´s what sugar does to something you fry, what does it do inside you?).
I´ve returned to the original sugarless version of bacon, and with a bit of scrubbing and re-seasoning my pan is back in working order. Still, I found it shocking that there seems to be literally no food group outside unprocessed raw ingredients where you do not have to watch out for hidden sugar.
Ingredient reading seems to be one thing I need to do regularly if I want to avoid sugar.


Julia