Weigh-in tomorrow. My journalism-school jacket is sooooo close to fitting. I had a thought about it... I actually can't remember whether it fit me closed back when I was wearing it before. That was more than 30 years ago. I actually think I used to wear it open all the time. So when it does fit me, that might actually be the first time in my life. My figure certainly looks almost teenaged to me.
Anyway, here's the recipe.
Rotini is a relatively-new product that’s come out from the ever-creative food designers at Ideal Protein. At Medi-Spa they have it in plain and tomato-basil varieties, so I chose the latter. I tried it in a pasta salad, which I didn’t like that much. It doesn’t quite have the texture of real pasta… gives a bit more of a bite back. “If only I could put it in a soup,” I thought. “Chicken-flavoured… Chicken Noodle… Tomato Basil…” But that would be double protein packets.
Not quite sure what I was going to combine the rotini with, I threw it in water to boil for 10 minutes as per the instructions, and it occurred to me as it was cooking that the water could be used as a soup base. Was there flavour in it, coming from the rotini? I tasted, and, sure enough.
Thus this recipe was born. It has a nice complexity and harmony, and leaves a pleasant burn on your tongue. Next time I’m going to it differently, probably making it more alliumy by using more garlic and onion salt. The rotini could be boiled in chicken stock for a more meaty flavour, too.
1 packet IP Tomato-Basil Rotini
Enough:
White mushrooms
Daikon
Cubanelle pepper
Zucchini
Green onions
Grape tomatoes
…to add up to 2 cups, diced fine-ish
1 tbsp minced garlic
3 tsp paprika
½ tsp poultry seasoning
½ tsp cumin
1 tsp Greek oregano
Sea salt and pepper to taste
Boil Rotini in about 2 cups of water for 10 minutes. Add daikon. In a hot frying pan, scorch zucchini, peppers, mushrooms, tomatoes and garlic. Cook other seasonings, except the salt, if you dare… otherwise just add them to the rotini and water, along with the fried veggies. Adjust flavours and serve.
--
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Sweet IP omelet crepes
Every power outage should have this good a result.
But there's some bad in it too... at least so far. The concept is a work in progress. I'll explain.
About a week ago, my power went out sometime during the night, and didn't come back on until well after breakfast time. I couldn't have my usual omelet as that requires cooking, and my stove is electric. Breakfast is one protein packet, as you Phase 1 experts know, and the only protein packets I use that don't require cooking are mixed drinks and soy puffs. The easiest thing to do was switch it up and chomp down the soy puff mix I usually have as my evening snack.
Before I go on... have I talked about my recipe for soy puff mix? What I've found is that I like the four sweet flavours of puffs almost equally, with a skew towards chocolate. (What can I say? I have two x chromosomes.) So what I started to do some months ago is buy the usual seven bags divided thus: four chocolate, one lemon, one apple-cinnamon and one peanut. I mix them all together on a cookie sheet and divide them into seven equal portions, which I then sock into ziploc bags. The result is a delicious, chocolate-dominated mix. (I do the carb count by averaging; it's about 12.5 grams.)
Sadly, the IP folks have discontinued the peanut flavour, so once I've gone through the three whole boxes of them I stocked up on in preparation for Peanutocalypse, I'll have to simplify the recipe. But it'll still be good. Since they'll go one packet per week I figure I should be well into Phase 4 by then anyway.
So I devoured my mixed puffs, the power came back on before we froze too much (it was 14 degrees C in my house at the lowest) and when evening snack time came around, the obvious thing to do was to eat an omelet. But my taste-buds, which (as you might have gathered) do their best to rule my life, were demanding what they habitually get at that hour: something sweet.
My mind harked back to my childhood, when my mother would cook us pancakes. Her idea of pancakes wasn't your typical North American thick foamy slabs swimming in maple syrup; they were crepes, really, thin, delicate and rollable. And we sweetened them not with syrup but with either jam, a lemon juice-sugar mixture or an orange juice-sugar mixture. Perhaps, thought I, I could do same with the IP Plain Omelet packet and low-C sweetening options?
Yes, it works. I experimented over the next few days.
First thing: you mix your omelet mixture more runny than IP instructions call for. Instead of using 100 ml of water, use about 175. Pour a thin layer of the mixture over either an oiled (with legal oils, of course) or no-stick pan surface that's already hot, medium to high-medium depending on how brown you like your crepes... a little scorched taste is nice. Now watch it like a hawk... don't walk away. IP omelet mix, remember, cooks faster than eggs. When the crepe is solid through--or not so solid, if you like it a little runny--roll it up in the pan and deposit it on the plate. On my best day I've managed to get four crepes out of one omelet packet.
Sweetenings I have tried:
- Walden Farms Chocolate Sauce - not quite sweet enough on a crepe, so I added Splenda to taste.
- mashed-up chocolate soy puffs. Also not sweet enough on a crepe, but more chocolatey then Walden Farms Chocolate Sauce. Also a cheat... if you can stand to take them out of your daily portion, that's fine.
- cinnamon "sugar" made with Splenda. First time I added way too much cinnamon... now I recommend 1 tsp cinnamon for every 5 packets of Splenda.
- cinnamon "sugar" made with Splenda and nutmeg. Yum!
- Splenda-lime juice mix. Make it thick enough to be a bit goopy.
- Splenda-lemon juice mix. This took me right back to childhood.
(Those who are in the know about Splenda will be spotting the problem here.)
Sweet enhancements I have yet to try:
- Walden Farms strawberry jam
- Walden Farms apple butter
...ooh, any of these would do, wouldn't they?
...or these!
But here we come to the problem. I guess the first sign of it should have been be that these sweet crepes became... almost an obsession. Like, the night before, I'd be thinking a fair amount about how good tomorrow's crepes would be. And I found myself with other cravings during the day. Danger, Will Robinson.........
Today, after close to a week of sweet crepes for breakfast and using a lot of Splenda (actually Compliments brand sucralose sweetener, purchased at my local Freshco), I thought, maybe before I write a blogpost crowing about this wonderful idea, I should research the carb content of Splenda. (I had thrown away the box and jarred all the packets.) So I hit Google, and found to my horror that each packet contains half to one gram of carbs, depending on who you believe.
It's not in the sucralose itself; that really is zero-zero-zero, as the body does not read it as sugar, letting it pass right through. It's in the fillers--maltodextrin and dextrose. Sucralose is so high-octane in sweetness that they have to dilute it with other stuff to make it practical to throw into a cup of coffee. So they do, and while it's still much less fattening than the equivalent sweetness in sugar, it's still half a gram to a gram worth of cheat per packet!
Alas... I am about to go for a weigh-in, and I think I'm going to be disappointed. I know that my journalism school jacket still does not fit.
But...! It appears there's a solution. You can order pure liquid sucralose--zero-zero-zero--online. Packing a mega-punch in sweetness--1 drop=1 tsp sugar--it's going to require care in recipe-developing. How I'm going to do the cinnamon "sugars," I'm not sure... maybe water, a drop or two of this stuff, and a sprinkling of cinnamon and sometimes nutmeg. I ordered the Sweetzfree "Travel Pouch" from here.
I will let you know how it goes, and, if I achieve sweet crepe perfection, how to do it.
UPDATE: Not that disappointed. I lost two pounds and 2 1/2 inches on the week anyway, putting me at 136, down 107. If my revised goal is 110 lbs., I am only three off, which may well happen next week.
--
But there's some bad in it too... at least so far. The concept is a work in progress. I'll explain.
About a week ago, my power went out sometime during the night, and didn't come back on until well after breakfast time. I couldn't have my usual omelet as that requires cooking, and my stove is electric. Breakfast is one protein packet, as you Phase 1 experts know, and the only protein packets I use that don't require cooking are mixed drinks and soy puffs. The easiest thing to do was switch it up and chomp down the soy puff mix I usually have as my evening snack.
Before I go on... have I talked about my recipe for soy puff mix? What I've found is that I like the four sweet flavours of puffs almost equally, with a skew towards chocolate. (What can I say? I have two x chromosomes.) So what I started to do some months ago is buy the usual seven bags divided thus: four chocolate, one lemon, one apple-cinnamon and one peanut. I mix them all together on a cookie sheet and divide them into seven equal portions, which I then sock into ziploc bags. The result is a delicious, chocolate-dominated mix. (I do the carb count by averaging; it's about 12.5 grams.)
Sadly, the IP folks have discontinued the peanut flavour, so once I've gone through the three whole boxes of them I stocked up on in preparation for Peanutocalypse, I'll have to simplify the recipe. But it'll still be good. Since they'll go one packet per week I figure I should be well into Phase 4 by then anyway.
So I devoured my mixed puffs, the power came back on before we froze too much (it was 14 degrees C in my house at the lowest) and when evening snack time came around, the obvious thing to do was to eat an omelet. But my taste-buds, which (as you might have gathered) do their best to rule my life, were demanding what they habitually get at that hour: something sweet.
My mind harked back to my childhood, when my mother would cook us pancakes. Her idea of pancakes wasn't your typical North American thick foamy slabs swimming in maple syrup; they were crepes, really, thin, delicate and rollable. And we sweetened them not with syrup but with either jam, a lemon juice-sugar mixture or an orange juice-sugar mixture. Perhaps, thought I, I could do same with the IP Plain Omelet packet and low-C sweetening options?
Yes, it works. I experimented over the next few days.
First thing: you mix your omelet mixture more runny than IP instructions call for. Instead of using 100 ml of water, use about 175. Pour a thin layer of the mixture over either an oiled (with legal oils, of course) or no-stick pan surface that's already hot, medium to high-medium depending on how brown you like your crepes... a little scorched taste is nice. Now watch it like a hawk... don't walk away. IP omelet mix, remember, cooks faster than eggs. When the crepe is solid through--or not so solid, if you like it a little runny--roll it up in the pan and deposit it on the plate. On my best day I've managed to get four crepes out of one omelet packet.
Sweetenings I have tried:
- Walden Farms Chocolate Sauce - not quite sweet enough on a crepe, so I added Splenda to taste.
- mashed-up chocolate soy puffs. Also not sweet enough on a crepe, but more chocolatey then Walden Farms Chocolate Sauce. Also a cheat... if you can stand to take them out of your daily portion, that's fine.
- cinnamon "sugar" made with Splenda. First time I added way too much cinnamon... now I recommend 1 tsp cinnamon for every 5 packets of Splenda.
- cinnamon "sugar" made with Splenda and nutmeg. Yum!
- Splenda-lime juice mix. Make it thick enough to be a bit goopy.
- Splenda-lemon juice mix. This took me right back to childhood.
(Those who are in the know about Splenda will be spotting the problem here.)
Sweet enhancements I have yet to try:
- Walden Farms strawberry jam
- Walden Farms apple butter
...ooh, any of these would do, wouldn't they?
...or these!
But here we come to the problem. I guess the first sign of it should have been be that these sweet crepes became... almost an obsession. Like, the night before, I'd be thinking a fair amount about how good tomorrow's crepes would be. And I found myself with other cravings during the day. Danger, Will Robinson.........
Today, after close to a week of sweet crepes for breakfast and using a lot of Splenda (actually Compliments brand sucralose sweetener, purchased at my local Freshco), I thought, maybe before I write a blogpost crowing about this wonderful idea, I should research the carb content of Splenda. (I had thrown away the box and jarred all the packets.) So I hit Google, and found to my horror that each packet contains half to one gram of carbs, depending on who you believe.
It's not in the sucralose itself; that really is zero-zero-zero, as the body does not read it as sugar, letting it pass right through. It's in the fillers--maltodextrin and dextrose. Sucralose is so high-octane in sweetness that they have to dilute it with other stuff to make it practical to throw into a cup of coffee. So they do, and while it's still much less fattening than the equivalent sweetness in sugar, it's still half a gram to a gram worth of cheat per packet!
Alas... I am about to go for a weigh-in, and I think I'm going to be disappointed. I know that my journalism school jacket still does not fit.
But...! It appears there's a solution. You can order pure liquid sucralose--zero-zero-zero--online. Packing a mega-punch in sweetness--1 drop=1 tsp sugar--it's going to require care in recipe-developing. How I'm going to do the cinnamon "sugars," I'm not sure... maybe water, a drop or two of this stuff, and a sprinkling of cinnamon and sometimes nutmeg. I ordered the Sweetzfree "Travel Pouch" from here.
I will let you know how it goes, and, if I achieve sweet crepe perfection, how to do it.
UPDATE: Not that disappointed. I lost two pounds and 2 1/2 inches on the week anyway, putting me at 136, down 107. If my revised goal is 110 lbs., I am only three off, which may well happen next week.
--
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Sugar Blues
As of Dec. 21, I hit my 100-lb. goal. Actually I weighed in at 141, which was 102
down.
I decided, as I expected, I wasn’t going to stop there, though. As I had told Jo-Ann at the outset, I knew I
might want to lose more than that, as I wasn’t sure what was possible, and she,
of course, answered, “Anything’s possible.”
I still had a bit of a paunch, saggy with loose skin, not a washboard
stomach yet. I felt, maybe another ten
pounds.
However, that would be after Christmas. I had planned from the start to do major
cheating over the holiday, with foods that I only eat once a year. If there’s any time that should be a major cheat-athon, Yuletide should be it. That’s
exactly what I did. Turkey… sage
stuffing… chestnut stuffing… gravy… trifle… patty shells… and my favourite
Christmas food of all time, shortbread cookies.
These cookies are my mother’s simple recipe from northern
England, and I cannot imagine a Christmas without them. In Ideal Protein terms, they aren’t so much
non-IP-compliant as anti-IP-compliant,
made of a delicious combination of pure fat to load into your digestive tract, and unadulterated
carbohydrates, both simple and complex, to stimulate your insulin into telling your body to store that pure
fat as pure fat. The recipe is:
[WARNING FOR READERS SKIMMING THE BLOG LOOKING FOR RECIPES: THIS IS NOT ONE OF MY DELICIOUSLY-IP-COMPLIANT ONE. WEAK-WILLED DIETERS, AVERT YOUR EYES.]
½ lb salted butter
½ lb. unsalted butter
¼ cup fruit sugar
¼ cup rice flour
4 cups all-purpose flour
In a big mixing bowl, cream butter, add sugar gradually, add
rice flour gradually, add all-purpose flour gradually. Consistency should be such that if you gently
knead it, it stays smooth rather than falling apart. Knead the dough until it’s warmed enough to
roll. Cut into cookies however you want
to do it (I use my mother’s old cookie-cutters, some of which are 60 years old)
and bake at 275 until slightly browned (20-25 minutes). You can dip them in chocolate for extra
decadence. I guess there’s a little
nutritional value in the butter.
So when Christmas Day came around, or even a little before,
I indulged. I stuffed myself with cheats. And the very first thing I started with, on
the morning of Christmas Eve, was as many shortbread cookies as I felt like,
which was about four or five.
And then an amazing thing happened.
Gradually this feeling came up, of being unpleasantly jazzed
up, agitated… not a bad mood such as nervousness or anger, but… a kind of
disturbing inner restlessness. And a
sense of having been slightly poisoned. Certainly
I was not feeling the happiness, contentment and overall “all-is-well” feeling
that I have come to think of as normal. What
the heck was this? The oddest thing
about it was that I knew it… it was
familiar, though it had never been so obvious.
I’d felt it many times before—after eating shortbread cookies, after
eating trifle—but had just never really been conscious of it, or thought of it
as abnormal. Now it felt really
abnormal. I didn’t like it.
I realized: I was really feeling a sugar high for the first
time in my life. After nine months
without sugar, I’d stopped being used to it.
When I thought about it more, I had some truly amazing
revelations. First of all was the
incredible possibility that I had been unknowingly causing myself a constant
underlying tension, so that I could never really feel “all is well,” by eating
sugar like this for my whole life. I quote me from Day 20, April 26, 2012:
Another fantastic thing that has happened since I started the diet, and, I think, because of the diet, at least in part: every now and then I get hit with the most positive, happy, everything-is-going-wonderfully mood. I feel inspired, expansive, free, capable... amazing. I can't say I've never had this before, as I have in recent years, but now it is more intense and much, much more frequent. In fact this morning, or maybe it was yesterday, I was in a funk, thinking about how my Google Analytics are sucking and how I'll never get a readership and so on, when I whined via IM for a bit with a dear reader/friend, and suddenly I just flipped over into that incredible positive. It was like a switch. I've never felt anything like it in my life.
I didn’t connect this with lowering my sugar intake. I thought it was because I was so happy to be
losing weight, or it was some mysterious metabolic effect of the diet.
Then I had another thought.
I was not a sweet tooth at all when I was a kid. When candy was being offered around, I always
turned it down, enough that I felt maybe there was something wrong with me,
since all the other kids liked it so much.
I would eat it only rarely. I remember thinking it would be too much in some way.
Now I thought: could this be because had I learned, so young
that it was earlier I can remember, that if I ate sweets I’d get this unpleasant
reaction?
Stimulants and I have never got along well. I never drink coffee, never did; I drink decaf tea. I had a friend who
swore by benzedrine, so I tried it once when I was younger and more open to
experimentation with drugs; the result was precisely the feeling I get just before I
write an exam, so needless to say I never did that again. I don’t need stimulants; my own mental energy
draws me out of bed, wide awake, usually sometime between 5 and 7 in the
morning, and keeps me going all day unless I have to nap because I haven’t
slept enough.
But sugar is a
stimulant… a subtle one compared to some of these others I’ve named, but still,
a stimulant. On Christmas Eve morning,
and then a couple of times later in the holiday when I did the same thing again
out of a combination of wanting to know for sure that’s really what it was, and
wanting to eat shortbread cookies the way I had every Christmas before, I
really had it driven home to me.
The upshot is, I’m swearing off sugar in large amounts. Even for Christmas. That’s it—I’m done. I don’t
like that feeling. It does not feel
healthy.
What I’m going to do is try making those cookies, that I
love down to my bones, with sucralose. I
will report on how it works out.
--
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