Here's something that's been bothering me for a while.

[conuly]

I know that you're not supposed to boil certain vegetables because they lose some of their vitamins to the water. You're supposed to steam them or cook them in some other way instead.

I often try to get rid of spare vegetables by adding them to something else. Carrots, for example - the nieces don't consistently like carrots (that is, when one does the other doesn't), but they're cheap and we always have them, so I'm always grating them up finely and adding them where they're relatively inconspicuous. This helps bulk out the meal slightly, makes it a little more nutritious, and I get to move some carrots out of the fridge! (You'd think I'd learn and stop buying carrots, but then I see a few pounds of them for a dollar in the dubious produce section, and even old carrots keep. The siren call of carrots cannot be resisted...!)

Now, I've recently started making spinach rice. It's a good way to use up spinach (you buy it, but it doesn't get used that fast!), and it's yummy. You cook the rice same way as always, but when it's almost done you toss spinach leaves and butter (or margarine) on top and let it cook a bit longer. And in the process, I discovered that if you add very finely grated carrots to the rice BEFORE you cook it, and stir it in, the rice turns a pretty orange color, but that's about all. I love it!

Except... do the vitamins go away or not? I know that some of them disappear into the water when boiled, but then the water gets absorbed by the rice, so...? Are the vitamins gone now, or are they part of the rice, or what? (My knowledge of nutrition is somewhat limited, admittedly.)

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

The advice not to boil vegetables is based on the idea that you're going to throw the cooking water away. If you're using the water in soup, there's no loss of vitamins.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

This is one of our rationales for drinking what Gabriel calls pot liquor. The vitamins in the water should be absorbed by the rice.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

The vitamins are still in there; actually even more than if you'd steamed them, because, as you noted, the water's all gone into the rice. Now, of course, some vitamins do deteriorate from heat, but on the other hand, carrots are a pretty tough, fibrous food, and it's easier for the body to extract nutrients from cooked foods, so probably the honors are close in the raw vs. cooked debate.

So, excellent way to sneak carrots into your girlies' diet! Only thing is, sheesh, don't use margarine (http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=margarine+hazards&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=8e8f35a77978fbf6); that stuff is so bad for you that if you're going to cook with it, you might as well just go to McDonald's instead. Real butter, or real lard, or real coconut or olive oil, are all fine. Butter mixed half and half with coconut oil works exceptionally well as a cooking-butter substitute.

[conuly]

Earth's Best margarine is what we try for, or else goat butter. Remember - no cow's milk for them!

But I do think "you might as well go to McDonald's instead" is a teensy bit of an exaggeration.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of bitter where it comes to margarine. My mother used it all her life - my father preferred butter, so we had that too, but she ate margarine, and always cooked with Crisco, and had a triple bypass, and then needed more heart surgery, but couldn't have it because her arteries were hardened like old cheese and would have crumbled apart in bits if messed with. As a result, she lived the last 15 years of her life with a ticking time bomb in her chest, before it finally did blow.

Therefore, no, I don't think it's an exaggeration; not when the Harvard Medical School study found that margarine increased the chance of heart disease by 53%. There's some trans-fat-free kinds now, I know, but the 'traditional' margarine is a harmful non-food.

Goat butter must be hard to find in the city - it's not so easy to find even out here where a lot of people have goats, because it's not so easy to make; the cream in goats' milk doesn't naturally separate out the way cows' milk does. I've heard it can be separated by pouring fresh milk into large shallow pans in the fridge, letting it sit overnight, then carefully spooning off the cream, but I haven't seen it done, nor ever tasted goat butter. Is it much the same as cow butter, or noticeably different?

[conuly]

Actually, I think it may be easier to find in the city - we have enough people here that it's worth it for a few supermarkets to stock it. Even if only 1% of us want it, 1% of 10 million is more than 25% of 100,000.

And it's not that hard at all. I know of one store that stocks it, it's easy for me to get to, and I like going out that way anyway because it's next to a bookstore :)

The trouble is that it's expensive. It costs as much for half a pound of goat butter as it does for a pound of the other kind, and butter (costly though it is) at least goes on sale sometimes!

Regardless, we don't use much of either. Unless I'm baking cookies or something, I'll use, at an absolute maximum, two tablespoons of whichever-it-is in a day - one on oatmeal in the morning and another on rice (IF I make rice that way instead of making it with a bit of oil and bouillon!) And that's divided up between all of us - 2 - 4 people eating oatmeal (depending on whether my grandmother and I have it or not) and 4 - 6 people eating the rice. But I don't use much because I either have traditional margarine, which is cheap but contains whey (so, uh, kinda missing the point there - it's less of a problem than butter outright, but not that great) or I have the Earth's Best margarine or goat butter, which don't react badly with the nieces at all but which cost twice as much. (Well, EB costs as much as regular butter, but regular butter tastes better. At the price, I'd rather get the real thing.)

So yeah, I really don't think the maximum of two teaspoons (two tablespoons divided by 3 people, more or less) a few days a week (if that!) is such a huge risk. I'm definitely not going to sit up worrying about it.

As far as how goat butter tastes, it varies. If it's been sitting around, it tastes a little like goat :)

Otherwise, it tastes like butter, which is pretty much what I want in my buttery substance!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

IIRC, part of the problem is long exposure to heat. If you boil the veggies, they will spend a lot of time in hot water, which will not so much "wash out" the vitamins but rather tear up their chemical structure. (This is less likely to occur in steaming or stir-frying because while the heat is even more intense, the exposure time is a lot shorter.)
So no, they will not become part of the rice - not all of them, anyway. They'll have decomposed.

But shouldn't you also be abe to get that orange colour by adding finely grated carrots towards the end of the cooking? It's a pretty intense colourant after all.

[conuly]

But shouldn't you also be abe to get that orange colour by adding finely grated carrots towards the end of the cooking? It's a pretty intense colourant after all.

No, it doesn't seem to work that way. Instead of melting into the rice, you just get grated carrots mixed with rice. Which is fine, it tastes the same and the girls eat it the same, but it's definitely detectable to the untrained eye.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok. I suppose you'd have to turn the carrots into juice in order to get the nice colour then. But as long as the nieces eat it, all's well, I guess ;)

[blackhanddpants.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that the nutrient content of vegetables also decreases with storage -- a fresh vegetable one week later is less nutritious than that same vegetable the day you bought it. So if you're keeping your carrots a long time, it may not really matter.

[conuly]

Well, they're not limp and icky. But by the time I buy them they've usually been carefully packaged up and sold half price.