Ideal Meals and Guilty Pleasures

The author admits she bends her own rules to eat out sometimes, and hasn't eliminated white sugar from her household. But for the most part, the foods she craves most are "real."

Question: What is your ideal
meal?





Nina Planck: 
Well
my real food luxury would be a raw milk butler.  He
would just bring raw dairy products including fresh raw
milk to our house.  Once a day
would be fine, every other day I could live with. But we go to some
time,
trouble and expense to get fresh raw milk in our household.  And then a real food meal: I just love
roast chicken and when I came off the vegetarian wagon I really, really
enjoyed
what they call in England the parson's nose.  It's
the chicken tail and it is just this fatty little
thing.  It's delicious.  So I
love a fresh green salad with high
quality greens that have been raised in real rich soil and have real
flavor.  We love good olive
oil.  I'm happy to spend money on
it.  Gosh, I love good blue cheese. 
I love homemade ice cream and I love to
make pannacotta with raw cream, which I haven't done for ages.  You can actually just use the little
bit of gelatin and it's a whole raw pannacotta.  I
call it pannacrutta. 
That recipe is on my Web site somewhere and I love a glass of
wine and I
love chocolate. So those are a few things.

Question: What foods are your
guilty
pleasures?





Nina Planck: 
My
guilty pleasure is to eat a big salad with nuts and cheese and meat day
after
day after day, and not to make chicken broth and not to find some good
roast
beef, so my guilty pleasure is sort of what I call "girl food" or
"single girl
food."  But there is a man at home and there are children at home and so
I can't
just feed them salads with blue cheese and walnuts day after day.  My industrial food guilty pleasure is
definitely white sugar.  We have
not eliminated white sugar from our household or our diet, but I always
prefer
whole, unadulterated sugar, so whole unrefined cane sugar or maple syrup
or
honey are definitely my sweeteners of choice, but the dark chocolate we
eat -- and
by dark I mean 70% or higher -- always contains a little bit of sugar,
preferably
organic, so I have not eliminated sugar from my diet and there are
dishes that
are just not improved by maple syrup. 
You know if you want a lemon meringue pie it just doesn't taste
right
sweetened with anything other than sugar and I love a little dessert.  I used to indulge in nonfat frozen
yogurt and also in the sort of imitation crab you get at salad bars, but
I now
realize that those are lowest form of reconstituted fishmeal and the
lowest
form of dairy, if in fact there is any dairy in it, so I just don't even
bother
now and I don't even miss those guilty pleasures

Question: Is it hard for you
to find
"real food" in restaurants?





Nina Planck: 
I
make some exceptions for eating out, although I don't really write them
down on
a note card, but while I would never ever buy farmed salmon and we have
beautiful wild Alaskan salmon in the freezer, in the cupboard all the
time I do
sometimes find myself eating farmed salmon at weddings or on airplanes,
that
sort of thing.  One of my pleasures
of the moment after our three young children are in bed is to walk down
the
street and for 20 minutes have a dozen oysters and one glass of
sparkling wine
at the local joint.  Oysters, by the
way, are great food for men and women who would like to be mothers and
fathers.