Rabbit Food for Lions
Grilled Romaine with Fig-Sherry Molasses

We hear “rabbit food” and think all that’s bad about dieting. Dull, lifeless, uninspiring. Not our thing — fitness and fine food should both enliven your experience of life, not deaden it. So the food Kevin and Russ cook, and the techniques and philosophy they share, turn standard rabbit food and make it fit for a lion. Read more about our cooking philosophy in the Second Helping Toolbox.

Today’s recipe for Grilled Romaine with Fig-Sherry Molasses is devilishly simple and wickedly clever, packing enough tricks to create countless deviations and new recipes for you in the fading summer months.

But at its core, this salad – itself a twist on a the classic salad of iceberg, tomato and onion wedges dunked blue cheese dressing, popularized by golfer Arnold Palmer – teaches the brilliance of using fat and sugar wisely. In a roundabout way this salad embraces the foods most health food tries to avoid, but selects ingredients that essentially handle portion control for you.

We paired the grilled salad and dressing with a small scattering of blue cheese. Health food? Hardly. But when cheese or fat is called for, it’s far easier to limit portions sensibly by using pungent, intense cheeses in the blue or parmesan family.

If you overdo it on blue cheese, the dish will suffer and so will your mouth. With practice, these cheeses serve as counterpoint and garnish, not something you pile on to the detriment of your dish or your waist.

That same principle applies to fruit fig in general and dried fig in particular. Last week we began to examine dried fruit and it’s various uses. This week we have another example for you: figs, cinnamon and dutch-processed cocoa for a brown sugar replacement.

Technically we’re taking liberties calling this dressing a “Molasses,” but its smoky-spicy-sweet notes can complement beef and pork easily, and provide a change of pace glazed unto chicken.

Once the sweetness of dried figs begin to break down into a sauce, they combined the the cocoa and cinnamon to create complex step up from the ordinary ingredients. And with zero added sugar, any sugar from the dried figs is used both sparingly and, again, wisely.

And then there’s the lettuce itself. Throughout the decade even breads and pizzas have become trendy grilling candidates. But in the health food realm, grilled salads are the way to go. Lightly charred, warm but still lending crunch, an oil head of romaine on the grill gives rather mundane greens subtle hints of smoke, flavor and texture.

They’re also quick – a few minutes is all you need to lightly tar the romaine’s tips and warm it through – making it an ideal quick side to grilled meat meal.

Here a few more idea on maximizing your flavor while balancing nutrition:

• Instead of the creamy pungent bit of blue cheese, crisp cubes of pancetta add additional crunch to a grilled salad. It’s also another method to avoid feeling deprived – instead of drenching a salad in bacon (or worse, fake bacon bits), opt for some finely diced Italian cured pork. As fat renders off the cubes, the meat itself crisps and serves as an additional garnish.

• Extra molasses can serve as a complement to meat, or even as a finishing sauce for a yogurt dessert – how’s that for versatility?

• Used sparingly and ingredients chosen for their potency helps ward off feelings of deprivation, while getting the most flavor out of the fat/sugar existing in a dish. That has countless variations but Blue Cheese, Parmesan, crisp Pancetta, toasted Pine nuts, Tahini are among the flavor-packed ingredients that work well in small amounts. See how you can include them into dishes to give them a sense of luxuriousness without feeling guilty for going overkill on a “splurge.” These are a simple way to bring little treats into your diet on occasion without the hurry-up-and-wait nature of most “splurge” foods. It’s a subtle “reward” if you think in those terms – without leaving you feeling like you’re going to have to start from scratch after a night of indulgence.

• Among flavor intensity, some other built-in portion control tips include pairing sauces with high protein and/or high fiber ingredients – the sauces improve flavor while the protein/fiber increases satiety (how full you feel)

• Changing the nature of your salads is an easy way to add variety: chopped, chiffonaded, leaves left whole (in the case of spinach of smaller greens such as bib or arugala), served in wedges, lettuce heads grilled. By diversifying how you treat your lettuce, your salads will keep you and your mouth interested in the results. This is also a qualify-of-life issue in the kitchen: if you’re grilling the entire meal, why not also grill the salad? While you’re chopping vegetables for a soup, why not chiffonade the spinach into thin ribbons? This is a key Rabbit Food for Lions trick: if you’re limiting which foods you’ll eat for health or weight reasons, expand the cooking techniques you use on your limited ingredient list to keep your food lively and engaging.

Kevin DeMarco is a personal trainer and personal chef in North Carolina. He and Russ Lane are on a mission to bring invigorating health food to home kitchens, and use cooking as a way to redefine self-defeating relationships with food. Read more about our cooking philosophy, and learn more about us at the Team Second Helping page.