On a sweltering Friday afternoon, as he does every week, Chicago internist Dr. John La Puma arrives at red-hot River North eatery Frontera Grill/Topolobampo.
He’s not there to join the crowds in and outside the restaurant sipping margaritas and scooping up guacamole. La Puma is heading for the kitchen.
There, he begins to pluck tiny stones from a tray of black beans destined for a quesadilla dish and pours them into a stock pot. As they simmer, he lightly toasts ancho peppers that will give Topolobampo’s pascal sauce its characteristic smoky, fruity flavor, which plays off the heat of arbol peppers and the earthiness of herbs and pumpkin seeds. Later, he works on the line, serving appetizers and soups until about midnight.
The job allows La Puma, an authority on medical ethics and managed health care, to cultivate another area of expertise: professional cooking.
“It’s a blast,” he says. But the 40-year old physician has more than fun on his mind as he browns garlic by the handful. Ultimately, he is there for his patients–his obese patients. The director of the Cooking, Healthy Eating and Fitness (CHEF) program at Alexian Brothers Medical Center in Elk Grove Village, La Puma sees the high-flavor cooking techniques he learns at the restaurant, owned and run by Rick Bayless and wife Deann Groen Bayless, as the ticket to long-term weight management.
La Puma’s evolution into a physician-chef began about five years ago. As the first doctor in the country to complete a fellowship in medical ethics and the author of several publications on the topic, he was often asked to advise hospitals on how to work with dying patients.
“Most of those patients were essentially the same ones I was seeing in the office,” he says–people with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, colon cancer and other conditions that are at least in part related to a high-fat, low-fiber diet. “Their diseases were simply more advanced, and it was too late to do anything except improve communication at the end of life.”
Motivated to help prevent such progression of disease, La Puma brushed up on research showing how a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, grains, beans and other legumes–one that uses meat primarily as a side dish or condiment–can help prevent a host of diseases. But he was disheartened by his patients’ unwillingness put this knowledge into practice.
That’s when he had another revelation: Eating should be one of life’s pleasures, and people shouldn’t eat food that doesn’t taste good. If La Puma wanted his patients to move plant foods to the center of their plates, he realized, these foods would have to be as appetizing as the steaks and filets that had long occupied that spot.
A new focus
CHEF participants learn to broaden their palate by opening their diet to an array of new, healthful foods.
“Very few programs tell obese people to eat, cook and shop more; we do. It’s just that they’re eating, cooking and shopping for different foods,” La Puma says. “It’s a very different message than, `Avoid Big Macs’ or `No more bacon,’ which any consumer already knows.”
La Puma began his culinary research at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago. He hooked up with Bayless after seeing him give a cooking demonstration at a food and wine festival. “I knew Rick valued flavor as much as anything,” he says, “and I thought he’d be the best one to learn from.”
He also admired Bayless’ commitment to sustainable, organic agriculture and other more global concepts than La Puma was focused on. “He understands the connection between land and farmer and restaurateur and customer in a unique way,” he says. “It’s a good model for how doctors should understand the relationship between food and medicine and patients.”
La Puma experimented with what he learned at the restaurant, searching for ways to cut the fat but not the flavor. Those he considered a success he shared with patients, but he knew they needed more than recipes scrawled out on his prescription pad to make major changes in their diet.
At an office Christmas party La Puma met exercise physiologist Terry Carman, and the idea for a comprehensive cooking and fitness education program gelled. He and Carman recruited registered dietitian Linda Braam and behavioral therapist Julie Griffis to round out the CHEF team.
La Puma begins the cooking component of the program with some basic skills–how to chop onions without shedding a tear, for example–that are frequently lost in a society increasingly reliant on processed foods. He urges them to cook in quantity as restaurants do and freeze portions to eat later, and stresses the importance of using the right tools. For example, one of the techniques he gleaned from Topolobampo is frying sauces to blunt the heat of peppers and develop other flavors. La Puma found that the fat used to coat the pot isn’t necessary if the pot is hot enough, but this requires a commercial-quality sauce pot. “If you do this with an ordinary pot at home, you’ll crinkle the bottom.”
Seasonal shopping
Another major part of CHEF is learning to shop for a variety of vegetables and how to buy them in season and at peak ripeness for maximum flavor. “We don’t have anybody eating tomatoes in January, because they taste like chalk,” La Puma says.
CHEF participant Patty Cortese, an after-school program director in Elk Grove Village, says “Dr. John” helped remove the blinders she wore in the produce aisle.
“I never realized how many vegetables there are that I didn’t know about,” Cortese said. “We’d stand there in the grocery store and he’d spout out `This is this type of vegetable, this is where and when it grows, there are three different kinds of it’–I was like, `Wow.’ “
Cortese, who lost 12 pounds, says she still cooks La Puma’s dishes–and not just for their health benefits. “We were stuck in a rut in our house,” she says. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me to make a root vegetable pizza.”
La Puma is gratified that to Cortese and others, the fact that these dishes contain very little meat is almost incidental.
“The whole idea is to be hit first by how good it tastes,” he says. “Eventually your palate changes so that you really want flavors that are bright and crisp and juicy and fresh instead of heavy and rich, which is what a whole Polish sausage feels like after a while.
“Our whole problem as a nation is that we have looked at celebration food as everyday food, and it adds up around the middle of our waists.”
La Puma knows this all too well. He enjoys showing CHEF participants a photo of himself on the cover of a medical magazine several years ago looking a little plump. Not long after, he began following his own advice.
“I lost 30 pounds,” he says, “and I’ve kept it off for more than five years.”
MEXICAN RED RICE
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 45 minutes
Yield: 8 servings
1 cup brown rice, unrinsed
2 cups prepared tomato salsa (such as roasted garlic)
2 teaspoons each: salt, crushed Mexican oregano
3 medium white onions, cut into 1-inch pieces
3 large green bell peppers, seeded, cut into 1-inch pieces
12 cloves garlic, halved1 can (13 3/4 ounces) vegetable or chicken broth
Salt, ground black pepper to taste
Garnish:
4 medium green onions, chopped
1/4 cup minced fresh flat-leaf parsley or cilantro
1. Toast rice over medium-high heat in large, heavy-bottomed skillet until deeply aromatic, lightly browned and popping regularly. Add salsa, salt and oregano; let simmer 1 minute. Top with onions, peppers and garlic. Add broth.
2. Reduce heat, cover and simmer 45 minutes. Remove from heat. If still slightly soupy, cover and let sit a few minutes until liquid is absorbed. Season with salt and pepper. Stir; let cool 15 minutes. Stir in green onions and parsley.
Variations: Add a chipotle, morita or other dried chili, or add 4 cups slivered cabbage, kale, Swiss chard or beet greens during last 10 minutes of cooking.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories …… 215 Fat …………. 4 g Cholesterol .. 1 mg
Sodium … 1,380 mg Carbohydrates .. 40 g Protein ……. 6 g
MIXED GREENS WITH BEETS, PECANS AND RASPBERRY DRESSING
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes
Yield: 8 servings
1 each, peeled and diced: large golden beet, large red beet
Salt, ground black pepper
2 large oranges
1 clove garlic, minced
2 green onions, minced
1/3 cup raspberry vinegar
1 teaspoon olive oil
3 cups of shredded mixed greens, such as arugula,
Belgian endive, curly endive, radicchio, red oak leaf or watercress
6 pecan halves, toasted, crushed
1. Heat oven to 450 degrees. Toss beets with salt and pepper; place on baking sheet lined with aluminum foil. Roast until cubes are slightly crisp, about 20 minutes. Remove; let cool.
2. Meanwhile, peel and finely chop 1 orange, retaining juice. Zest remaining orange, then juice it. Whisk together chopped orange, orange zest, orange juice, garlic, onions, vinegar and olive oil in separate bowl.
3. Place greens in salad bowl; add beets and dressing. Sprinkle with pecans. Toss and serve.
Nutrition information per serving:
Calories …… 85 Fat …………. 1 g Cholesterol .. 0 mg
Sodium …. 100 mg Carbohydrates .. 20 g Protein ……. 3 g
