Sunday in the Kitchen with Mark & Bruce: Brown Rice Paella
This hearty one-pot dish has enough style for entertaining, or for a week’s worth of fantastic meals.
Article By: Mark Scarbrough & Bruce Weinstein
Weekend CookingWeekday Eating
brown riceSunday in the Kitchen

Paella is not a fish dish. It’s a grain dish. It’s all about the rice that slowly softens in the heat, giving the dish its ballast and also thickening it, the starches slowly abraded into the sauce with all that stirring.
Valencia rice is the usual star. It’s highly prized in Spain — and difficult to come by in North America. So since we need to make a few adaptations, we’ve morphed the classic a bit further by using medium-grain brown rice, thereby turning this meal a bit healthier, with a better texture and some delicious nuttiness to complement the shrimp and sausage. Brown Arborio is a great option — and easy to find in larger supermarkets (or at almost any health-food store).

Paella should be made in a very wide, shallow, nearly flat pan over an open flame. Most of us don’t have wide, open flames — or such shallow pans! So we’ve adapted the recipe for North American kitchens: It's prepared stovetop in a large Dutch oven, then covered and finished in the oven. If you’ve got a cast-iron French casserole, even better. The point is to retain as much heat as possible.

But just because the pot’s going in the oven, you don’t get out of stirring. After all, Sunday is the day when you’ve got a little more time to cook. In our technique, you’ll stir the paella a bit on top of the stove, then let the oven’s ambient heat do much of the work in softening the rice and blending the flavors. The result is something like a cross between a risotto and a pilaf, a tad wetter than the standard paella, but savory and tasty, the perfect thing for a hearty Sunday-night meal.

We’ve got three recipes for the glorious leftovers, easy dishes to make during the week: paella cakes, crunchy and irresistible; paella stew, substantial and filling; and paella-stuffed peppers, a bit of elegance for a weeknight supper. All told, you’ll be in paella heaven this week. You might even want to invite some friends over — except then you won’t have leftovers for the other great meals later on.

About Brown Rice Paella
Before you start stirring the paella over the heat, pay special attention to the prep work: chopping the vegetables into similarly sized bits and browning the meat well to get the most flavor in every spoonful.

Ready to start cooking?

Sunday-night dinner
Paella
Serve it right out of the pot. As a side dish, make a simple salad with drained, canned mandarin-orange sections, drained and rinsed canned chickpeas, thinly sliced red onion, shaved radicchio and/or endive, and a sprinkling of sherry vinegar. Don’t forget a glass of red Rioja!
Tips, hints and suggestions
The pot needs to be pretty big — at least 6 quarts, maybe more. Wider pots are better than tall, thin ones because wider pots allow for more evaporation.
Saffron and smoked paprika are key flavoring ingredients. Don’t be tempted to substitute regular, mild paprika.
The broth with saffron should never boil — it will reduce by too much. However, it does need to be steamy when you add the rice.
The paella may still be a little soupy when it comes out of the oven. Rice grains absorb varying amounts of moisture, depending on how long they’ve sat on the store’s shelf, as well as the day’s humidity. Some extra liquid will be incorporated as the paella sits, covered, off the heat. But if there’s too much, set the pot over medium heat and stir for about 5 minutes to get more liquid into the rice.
A 14-ounce can of diced tomatoes is exactly 1 3/4 cups. A large fennel bulb, after trimming, will yield about 3 cups chopped; a large bell pepper, after coring and seeding, will yield about 2 cups.
Store leftover paella in a sealed container in the refrigerator for up to 4 days.

New Routine: Before You Leave the House, Make Sure You Have a
Healthy Snack with You
Meeting Topic:  Fend Off Food Pushers

Surviving the Cookie Swap

Surviving the Cookie Swap
Follow these smart strategies and you'll put more cookies in the tin than your tummy at the next cookie swap party.
Article By: Anita Sado

Every winter holiday season, folks pull out their favorite family cookie recipes, commandeer the kitchen for a day or two, and get baking. Dusted with a light coating of flour, they peer proudly at the trays of cookies and wonder just what to do with such a large quantity. Apart from the obvious.

Years ago some very savvy cookie connoisseurs came up with a great solution: Host cookie swap parties. Guests bring their homemade family favorites, decorated on platters or already in individual gift bags. When all the guests have arrived let the fun begin! Swapping and tasting, tasting and swapping. At the end of the event, each person goes home with a package of goodies.

It’s fun, frugal and delicious — but also a potential pitfall to someone who is trying to lose weight or maintain a loss. Yet not participating and feeling deprived can have the same result. So what to do?

The answer is simple and fun: Create your own personal cookie tin. Not just any old tin; one that you have designated and decorated for you, and you alone. Don’t just slap a sticky note on a recycled cracker box; decorate an empty tin for yourself just as you would if you were making it a gift for a loved one. Then fill it with the cookies you're most looking forward to eating this season.

Before the swap
Decide whom you'll give cookies to as a gift. Bring a stash of gift bags and/or boxes with pre-written labels and ribbon or tape to seal them.
Think: How many PointsPlus® values worth of cookes will you eat this season?Keep in mind, there will be other goodies that you'll want to use your PointsPlus values on over the next month or so. Got your number? Write it down.
At the swap
Put the "gift" cookies straight into their bags. All packaged up and pretty? Great, now seal them.
Select the cookies you plan to eat yourself.Be choosy! Add cookies to your own tin until you have reached the PointsPlus budget you set yourself. (You might need to pull out your Tracker to help calculate as you go.)
Grab a pen!List the cookies and their PointsPlus values, either on the bottom of your tin or a separate piece of paper. If necessary, run your fellow swappers’ recipes through the Recipe Builder.
During the month, enjoy the treats that are in your tin. Your cookie supply will dwindle over the weeks, but your motivation will thrive and you will not feel deprived. Now grab a Power Foods-approved glass of fat-free milk and enjoy your cookie swap booty!

treat trade

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The Lukewarm Truth About Hot Yoga
A recent study on the (literally) hot fitness craze reveals surprising findings.
Article By: Mary Elizabeth Hurn
Lady sweating
Hot yoga is a polarizing topic in the fitness world; people either love it, hate it or are scared to try it. But a recent study by the American Council on Exercise (ACE) shows that it’s not as physically taxing or dangerous as you might think. Which begs the question: Is all that sweating really worth it?
Hot yoga is typically done for 60 minutes in a room with a temperature ranging from 90° to 105°F. (This is not to be confused with Bikram yoga, which is always 90 minutes at 105°F.) The ACE study compared participants’ core temperature, heart rate and self-perceived exertion rate after a 60-minute yoga class in a 70°F room to those same rates after a class in a 92°F room. Here’s what they found:

Rumors of dangerous overheating have been greatly exaggerated. “For those that are presumably healthy, hydrated and listening to their bodies, hot yoga shouldn’t pose undue risk or harm,” says Dr. Cedric X. Bryant, Chief Science Officer for ACE. Average core temperature didn’t increase more in hot yoga than in “regular” yoga. The highest recorded core temperature of any participant was 102.4° — well below the critical zone of 104° in which fatigue and heat-related problems set in. Bryant does urge practitioners to be aware of the symptoms of heat-related illness: headache, cramps, nausea, dizziness or fatigue. “If you experience any of those, remove yourself, get some fluids and cool down,” he suggests.

Doing yoga in a hot room doesn’t necessarily result in a higher heart rate. Heart rate remained the same in both classes. “Looking at heart rate, participants weren't working any harder in the hot yoga class than in the regular yoga class,” says Dr. John P. Porcari, an author of the study and head of the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. “Normally if you go out and walk three miles per hour and then you do it again on a day that’s really hot, your heart rate will be higher. Because the heart rate was identical in this study, this tells me that somehow people must have down-regulated how hard they were pushing themselves in the heated environment.”

But all that sweating makes you think you’re working harder. “There’s a misconception that sweat rate directly correlates with how hard you’re working and how many calories you’re burning,” Bryant explains. “From their point of view, participants were working harder because hot yoga is perceived as more difficult. But the heart rate data made it clear that they weren’t working harder.”

Keep in mind this study did not address calories burned, although Bryant has a strong suspicion that there would be no significant difference in the caloric outputs between the two types of yoga.

Bottom line: If you enjoy hot yoga, keep doing it! But if you’re suffering through an overheated session under the delusion that you’re getting a better workout, consider this your permission to seek a cooler class. Overall, Bryant stresses that all types of exercise serve a purpose. “Don’t get hung up on how many calories you’ve burned. All types of yoga have benefits: increased balance, flexibility and muscular endurance, stress management and, yes, you’ll also burn some calories.”