Archive for March, 2009
I realize this is neither wintry nor particularly healthy.. but when I went to buy some eggs for my Seven-Minute Frosting yesterday, carrying nothing but a box of eggs home with me I couldn’t stop thinking about egg salad sandwiches. And so this morning I boiled some eggs – you know, just in case – and at dinnertime I couldn’t summon up the gumption to make anything but.
However. I didn’t have any celery or green onion, and my chives are currently lying dormant under snow and frozen-solid Lou poo. Rooting through my fridge I did come up with some fresh (sort of – revived in a glass of water like a teeny bouquet) basil, and… drumroll please… bacon.
Bacon and egg salad sandwiches! How have I never thought of this before?
So I chopped a few strips, cooked them and crumbled the chunky bits into my chopped hard-boiled eggs along with some low fat mayo, torn basil and lots of pepper. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to tell you how good it tasted. See where fridge cleaning can get you? Combinations like bacon and basil in egg salad that you might never have otherwise considered. On the downside: I may have ruined any other sort of egg salad for myself forever.
And I just ate the last of the chocolate cupcakes leftover from Book Club – which went well, I hope, despite an excited 3 year old boy who had to pee a lot and was not satisfied to sit and watch Wall-E after all – thanks to all who came, for making the drive and for being patient with W as he took your shoes off and bowled with apples. He won’t be there next time! It was so fantastic to meet you all face to face. I think next time there should be wine.
One Year Ago: Chocolate-Covered Hazelnuts
March 05 2009 | leftovers and sweet stuff | 24 Comments »
Dinner tonight: pita pizzas again I’m afraid, made this time with a Spolumbos Italian sausage (from the freezer) cooked up with a thinly sliced onion, some mushrooms I found in the back of the fridge (frozen on the inside, wrinkly on the outside) and some frozen spinach. These babies were load-ed. I’m sorry it isn’t very inspiring, but I am sticking to my no-shop agenda. I even managed to bake chocolate cupcakes for book club tomorrow using what I have in the cupboard. (I may, however, need to duck into the corner store for some eggs to make Seven Minute Frosting to go on top.)
But before I go – I want to introduce you to someone.
His name is Dr. Walter Willett. He’s a world-renowned Harvard-based researcher and chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health’s department of nutrition, and he has been working since the 70′s on the optimum diet. (By diet I mean way of eating in general, not a weight loss diet.)
When people ask me – how do I eat? Do I follow Canada’s Food Guide? (Short answer: No.) Do I follow any other sort of nutritional plan? Not really. It would be most accurate to say I follow food like Wimpy follows a hamburger, but if I had to give you one basic nutritional guideline to follow, this would be it.
Dr. Willett, along with the faculty in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, came up with this Healthy Eating Pyramid. Why another pyramid? Using a pyramid is just a way to make it easy for us to visualize what the structure of our diet should look like – rather than try to remember how many servings we need and what size those servings should be (which might then vary depending on our age, size and physical activity) we can remember that in general, our diet should be based on whole grains, fruits and vegetables, plant oils, nuts, legumes and seeds, then lesser amounts of lean protein from fish, poultry and eggs, modest dairy consumption and butter, red meat and simple carbs only occasionally. And it’s all science-based.
I won’t get into comparing Canada’s Food Guide, except to say that I ran a typical day’s worth of food through my nutritional analysis program and came up with well over 3000 calories. (And oh: 25% of the members of the Food Guide Advisory Committee are from Big Food.)
Dr. W was the first to make the distinction between healthy fats and unhealthy fats, and the fact that people on a low-fat diet often missed out on important nutrients. (Canada’s Food Guide doesn’t pay much attention to fats: “include a small amount – 2-3 Tbsp. – of unsaturated fat each day. This includes oil used for cooking, dressings, margarine and mayonnaise” – kind of hard to calculate tablespoons of fat when it’s in something. And while there is a mention of trans fat, the directive provided is “Limit trans fat”, this despite the fact that Health Canada’s own trans fat task force calls for the elimination of trans fat from our food supply. So shouldn’t it be “Avoid trans-fat”? And you might notice that pudding (!), chocolate milk and sweetened yogurt are all lumped in with 1% and even skim milk in the dairy group, as if they were equal choices.)
Dr. Willett is my kinda guy. If you’re interested in this nutrition stuff, poke around the Harvard School of Public Health website – The Nutrition Source – it really simplifies things, and nothing is skewed by companies who have a vested interest in selling their products. There’s even a page on weight control.
(And if you’re looking for extra reading credits, there’s an excellent story on Dr. W in the April 2007 issue of Cooking Light.)
Pyramid Illustration Copyright © 2008 Harvard University. For more information about The Healthy Eating Pyramid, please see The Nutrition Source, Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, http://www.thenutritionsource.org, and Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, by Walter C. Willett, M.D. and Patrick J. Skerrett (2005), Free Press/Simon & Schuster Inc.
March 03 2009 | leftovers and sweet stuff | 16 Comments »
I woke up this morning and decided to sleep in, as much as it is possible to sleep in with a three year old, having not had the chance to until this weekend and then having stayed out until well after midnight both nights (my own fault, I know). It got light out, and I dozed. W got up and hopped on the computer to play Green Eggs and Ham. I imagined it must be getting close to ten, the sun had been out for so long. When I finally sat up and located my glasses to view the clock, it was 7:45.
My first thought: yay – no more shooting dinnertime photos in the dark! And: come on, spring.
I’m touched, by the way, by all the concern over my hip. I was a little perplexed to be honest, because it wasn’t really all that bad, but then I realized I had added seriously to the end of my wipeout report, which likely led some of you to believe I had seriously injured myself, when in fact what I meant was along the lines of – you know you’re getting old when you start using phrases like “a sack of peas the size of a polar bear’s pilllow” and falling and hurting your hip. Like, seriously. So really it was more Valley Girl slang than reference to the intensity of my injury. In reality all I ended up with was a sore neck and a bruised right bum cheek – which should totally not have happened considering the amount of padding I have on said cheek.
(Mike, on the other hand, suffered a more severe injury last week: he has become addicted to my Grandma’s peanut brittle, and so learned to make it himself, and sustained a rather large napalm-like burn on the tender outside of his forearm as the stuff overflowed out of the pot when he added the baking soda. On the same day. We’re hoping this week won’t require as much ibuprofen.)
I have just finished up as many new photos as are going to get done for the re-release of Grazing (it goes to the printer on Friday – eeek!), and this was one of them. For dinner I added the rest of the can of coconut milk (not the healthiest ingredient, I know) and put the lot over rice. (And at around the same time, halved the jumbo IKEA cinnamon bun my well-intentioned mom brought over on the weekend, dipped it in milk and egg, and cooked it up like French toast. A less food-addicted person would have simply tossed it out.)
Curried Coconut Mango Chicken in Wonton Cups
Coconut milk is astonishingly high in fat and calories – light coconut milk is a much better choice, and if you want to boost the coconut flavor even further you can add a drop or two of coconut extract. These cups make great use of leftover roast chicken or turkey.
24 wonton wrappers (plus extra, if you have enough filling for more)
a drizzle of canola or olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 Tbsp. grated fresh ginger
2 cups chopped cooked chicken or turkey
1 Tbsp. curry paste (or to taste)
1/2 cup coconut milk (light or regular)
1/3 cup mango or peach chutney
Juice of 1/2 a lime (about a tablespoon)
Salt to taste
Chopped fresh cilantro (optional)
To make the wonton cups, press fresh wonton wrappers into mini muffin tins, pressing any folds firmly to the sides, and bake at 350°F for 5-10 minutes, until golden. Set aside to cool.
To make the filling, heat about a teaspoon of oil in a skillet and sauté the onion for about 5 minutes, or until soft. Add the garlic and ginger and cook for another minute. Add the chicken, curry paste, coconut milk, chutney, lime juice and salt. Cook, stirring often, until bubbly and thickened. Cool slightly or chill before spooning into wonton cups. Sprinkle with cilantro.
Makes 2 dozen cups.
Per cup: 69 calories, 1 g total fat (0.3 g saturated fat, 0.3 g monounsaturated fat, 0.3 g polyunsaturated fat), 7.1 g protein, 7.3 g carbohydrate, 16.8 mg cholesterol, 0.1 g fiber. 13% calories from fat
We are finally meeting for “Book Club” this week – on Wednesday night! For those of you who don’t know about Book Club, it really has nothing to do with books, but is all about getting together to swap notes and support each others’ weight loss efforts (and eat cupcakes, most likely, but the meeting room is at the top of a big flight of stairs, so that’s something) – if you are interested, email me and I’ll send the coordinates.
I myself am not as stellar an example as I have been since the beginning of January… upon wrapping our three week shoot and then starting to get up at 4:30 am to do traffic reports, I kind of collapsed in a heap of chocolate, bread and cheese. And let me tell you, I don’t feel any better for it. Or more relaxed, or energized. It’s funny how quickly you forget. (They say your body remembers – yes, mine remembers being over 300 pounds…) So tonight I’m going to attempt a reasonable number of hours in bed (last night was interrupted every 20 minutes or so by Lou very loudly barfing about 3 feet from my ear, then barking at whomever delivers the newspapers at 5am. It’s a good thing he’s cute. And oh – it’s his first birthday today) and then back to the gym and reasonable eating habits again tomorrow and we’ll see if we can’t swing this freighter back into the right direction.
Print Post
March 02 2009 | leftovers | 22 Comments »
« Prev
