Binder clips - not just for papers anymore

This isn’t mine – I found this one over at The Fork Left Behind.

I tried this recipe and followed it to the letter – which I don’t usually do. I salted the bird and let it sit in the fridge for 3 hours, then let it sit covered on the counter top cover for another hour. Did the garlic bit and sealed it up with office binder clips (I didn’t have toothpicks). This was as *awesome* as the author described.

My wife asked why I just didn’t buy one of the roast birds at the store – and then she tasted it. My daughters loved it as well, my older one saying: “I don’t usually like chicken, but I like this chicken.”

Do yourself a favor and try this recipe – it is going to become a go-to recipe for me, certainly.

Check it out. This recipe ruined the notion of a store-bought roast chicken forever.

• 5 oz. package of baby kale the wife bought on sale and I could imagine no one eating
• 5 strips of bacon leftover from some other experiment
• 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
• 1 small zucchini, grated
• 1/2 cup of Argentine parmesan cheese (similar in flavor to the authentic stuff but softer) – feel free to substitute here
• 6 eggs
• 1-7oz container Fage whole Fat plain Yogurt
• 4 tablespoons butter
• Salt and pepper
  

I’ve been trying to involve my daughter in cooking as I think it’s an important life-skill to be able to cook at least a little bit, and it’s also great father-daughter time together. She’s usually willing to help – as long as I chop the onions. She took the stove duty while I prepped the ingredients.

First the butter was melted, then the onions went in. As she was cooking these, I tackled the bacon. The recipe I riffed off said to microwave the bacon.

Microwave? I’ve never seen that done, at least successfully, but hey – she pulled it off – I’ll give it a try.

Thinking the stuff would splatter all over the inside of the microwave, I placed the bacon in a single layer on a dinner plate, covered the bacon with a paper towel and cooked for 6 minutes. It worked perfectly. The paper towel soaked up some of the bacon drippings, but not all of it – good – that’s going in the Quiche.

I then used a pair of kitchen scissors to cut the bacon it bits – WAY less messy than transferring them to some surface and chopping them, making every surface greasy.

In the meantime, the kid had thrown in the baby kale and it had cooked nicely. I tossed the bacon and the drippings in the pan and the kid cooked it a little more. She put in salt and pepper. The salt she estimated at about a teaspoon and a half – the pepper was fresh cracked – maybe 4 or 5 turns.

I also grabbed a small zucchini and using a box grater, grated it over the skillet, which took about a minute.

I then put the grated cheese in a deep bowl and put in the 6 eggs. My daughter and I poured the contents of the skillet into the bowl and mixed them together, then the result was poured into a well-greased 12″ circular baking dish and popped in the preheated 350 degree oven for 30 minutes.

So where’s the pictures? It came out beautiful and rose nicely, and I wish that I had the *chance* to take a picture but my family descended on in like a flock of hungry ravens, leaving only a 1/4 of the thing left. Even my younger daughter, who would choose to live on candy if she could negotiate it, enjoyed it.

I had my reservations about using the kale, but it’s flavor went well with the others – I most certainly would use it again.

With a little help like I had, the prep is low enough that this can be whipped together after work if you’re feeling energetic. I can see myself doing this as a routine with my daughter, and no one in the family apparently would object.

As to carbs, I can’t imagine each piece having more than 2 or 3 grams – and all of them the highest quality. This is a fine recipe to get into induction with.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

Last night I made this, it came out quite good, and I thought I would share.

This is yet another variation on what I’ve done before. It provides a meat and vegetable-filled dish similar to a chili or stew in consistency, and, covered in grated parmesan cheese, it not only awesome, but fills that hole left by foregoing both pasta and traditional pizza on a low carb diet.

This is more a technique than a hard and fast recipe. The basis of this for me is usually grass-fed ground beef. A pound of this, bought directly from the farmer, is expensive – $8.00/lb., but I also comes with a high degree of probability that the stuff is the real deal. The problem with food in general is that if you want ‘organic’, the good stuff looks pretty much like the cheap stuff, and fraud is an issue. Less so if you know the farmer himself – and see his kids at the market.

I don’t want to use this stuff in burgers – they’ll be gone in a flash, so I try to use the meat more as a flavoring.

Now for those of you who could care less about organic – the regular supermarket ground beef is just fine in this recipe.

The next part of the technique is to find the abandoned and forgotten food items – the can of whatever in the back of the cupboard, or the forgotten frozen veggies, or the middle-aged but still viable fresh veggie and give its brief existance some meaning as part of this dish.

The last part of the technique is a jar of pasta sauce. I have long searched for a pasta sauce that is low carb, organic, tasty, and cheap. The winner is Whole Foods 365 Brand Mushroom Marinara Sauce. While it has 6 grams of net carb per half cup, all of these carbs are from natural ingredients and not sugar – and since I’m on a low-carb and not a no-carb diet, I think that 3 grams of carbs from veggies and mushrooms per serving are fine – and I have also eaten this in the past during Atkins Induction and had not problem getting into or maintaining ketosis.

So – this particular time I ended up with as my ingredients:

• 2 lbs. grass-fed ground beef
• 1 jar Whole Foods 365 Organic Mushroom Marinara Sauce
• 1 can pitted olives
• 1 package of frozen asparagus
• 2 sweet onions, chopped into 1″ chunks
• 6 sun-dried tomatoes, packed dry, and cut into bits with kitchen scissors
• 2 teaspoons crushed garlic
• 4 fresh tomatoes, chopped into approx. 1″ chunks
• 1 tablespoon of butter
• oregano to taste
• cayenne pepper to taste (if desired)
• salt
• pepper
• Fresh parmesan cheese

The cooking is relatively straightforward. Melt the butter in a large skillet and place the meat in. I could have used 1 pound of beef and more veggies, but I had defrosted both and decided to make a meatier sauce. Cook the meat on high with a little salt and pepper added, breaking it up into bite-sized chunks. If you take the time to brown the meat for an extra flavor dimension, good for you – I didn’t – I just got it to the point where the bit-sized chunks were of a more or less uniform size and held together – I was in a rush as we were going shopping any minute.

Next went in the onions, which again, I tried to coat in the meat and butter flavors and cook a bit before adding more. Next up was the asparagus, which I microwaved to unfreeze. While it had a good flavor, it was wilted a bit having been frozen, and a bit stringy. As a sauce ingredient, it would be fine, but I did cut it crosswise at 1″ lengths to lessen the impact of any fibrous parts of the asparagus from ruining the dish.

The remainder of the seasonings and veggies went in then, and I let these cook together for maybe 7 minutes on high, stirring them to ensure nothing burned. This is when a nice fragrance began to come from the dish as the ingredients began to meld and cook.

The 7 or so minutes later, I poured in the jar of sauce, turned the heat to low, gave it a stir, and put the lid on. I let this simmer for an hour, with an occasional stir.

When done, I served it with large peels of parmesan cheese that I scraped off the block of cheese with a vegetable peeler. This parmesan cheese was a bit softer than the usual variety, so this worked out well and certainly grabbed the attention of the family – it apparently made for a nicer presentation, at least to them.

Alas, the kids, being anti-vegetable when it came to sauce ingredients, didn’t think much of it. To hell with them – I thought it came out great. This will get eaten, and I’ll make it again. It’s a great go-to recipe/technique.

While a little high in carbs, every carb in it is from high-quality vegetable sources – the kind you need, even on a low carb diet. And the past few days I have been going for Ketosis and showing a trace each morning – and after eating 2 bowls of this, I am still testing the same, so nothing wrong there.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

For the past month, I have been in an immersive course of Anthony Bourdain and his writing, as well as had the experience of cuisine of another country while on vacation. Not just as a tourist eating at the hotel restaurants, but more like a food anthropologist, spending a good portion of our time in the Caribbean in grocery stores, looking at what the locals eat, inspecting each aisle of the store, fumbling with packages in French, and trying to figure out what the hell was in them due to my not knowing the language.

And never, to my recollection, eating at a ‘touristy’ restaurant. It was either casual French-inspired dining, or simple local fare.

It has been illuminating, to say the least.

Looking back to what ‘food’ was in my formative years, my mom used to lament that she wished for the day her cooking would be replaced by a pill. That sorta sums it up.

It was the 60s, and Dow Chemical’s motto was ‘Better living through chemistry’. Astronauts and space were big things in the zeitgeist, and Tang was considered cool. While not a Tang family, I was particularly enamored of some chocolate-flavored stick of god-knows-what bearing the resemblance of a long but much softer Tootsie Roll. These were called ‘Space Food Sticks’, and – holy shit! – here’s the commercial that turned me into a fan:

Believe me, this might look pretty lame 40 years later, but slap a label on anything that related it to the space program then and you could have sold old socks by the truckload.

Going back to my Mom, food was typically a weekly routine of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and peas and pearl onions from a can on one day, pasta and meatballs with a home-made sauce and italian bread the next, then breaded chicken fried in a frying pan with more mashed potatoes and carrots. For variety their might be hamburgers and fries. Once yearly fare included an Easter ham, Thanksgiving turkey with stuffing made by buying bread and letting it go stale for a few days on the stairs, corned beef and cabbage with boiled potatoes for St Patrick’s day, mostly for my dad, who was half Irish, as well as the rare and exotic ‘helushki’, which was supposed to be some concoction with potatoes and cottage cheese that my dad would ask for every few years and my mother would bravely attempt to cook – and which I loathed.

Dessert was maybe Jello, or Entenmanns baked goods. Occasionally a cake made from a cake mix. Bread was Wonder Bread – ‘building strong bodies in 12 ways’ – at least that’s what the commercial said.

Sometimes on the weekend, my dad, who controlled the purse strings, might feel rich and decide to order a pizza (no toppings – I didn’t know pizza ever came with toppings until my later years) or Chinese takeout – always the same – chicken chow mein, egg rolls and egg-drop soup. I honestly did not know that until I was about 9 or 10 when my sister, old enough to buy and pay for her own Chinese takeout, brought something different home.

I could go on and continue to clearly establish that I was not brought up with the creds for a ‘food snob’, but I think you get the idea. As I morphed into early adulthood, the food patterns were set, and nothing changed.

Like a lot of Americans, I suffered from what at least one person called food neophobia – the fear of new foods. If it was a new cereal or candy bar, that’s a different story, but to eat snails? Oysters? Sushi? I did not see the need or reason for such exotica, and no sense of adventure that drew me to consume these things.

But, as it always does, love changes things.

I met my future wife, who grew up in a culture with very different foods. There was no way that I was going to charm her with my notions of cuisine. Instead, she charmed me with hers.

I ate things I would have thought I would only put in my mouth to win a substantial bet – and I liked them. When I started at this, I would frequently think: millions of people eat this and don’t die – this was how I needed to reason to myself in order to get through some of these meals.

The need to reason with myself like this quickly disappeared.

While still blissfully stupid about the details behind these meals, the cultures that created them, the spices and the cooking techniques that made them great, and what friggin fork or plate to use at the appropriate time, I was enjoying this adventure. As it required me only to sit and eat, it was perfect  for me.

I had slowly gone from someone with food neophobia to a person with food neophilia – a person who likes to try new foods, but these were occasional adventures only. I always came home to the comfort foods of my youth: frozen pizza, Eskimo pies, a bowl of pasta covered in grocery store sauce and topped with Kraft parmesan cheese.

I was still an idiot about food, just a slightly more experienced idiot. I enjoyed these new foods like a dog might – without comprehending anything about how or why or where – just shovel down the gullet until full.

And – as readers of this blog certainly know – I got fat, and kept getting fatter.

Then I started low carbing – Atkins – in 2003. I had to say goodbye to a lot of the comfort foods of my youth, and in order to not fail on Atkins, you have to be able to go beyond the stereotype of bacon, eggs and steak because few people are going to be able to live on that for a lifetime.

And here is where that prior experience with learning to try new foods really helped me out. In fact, it might explain why I succeeded (at this very moment 60 lbs. down from my high in 2003) and so many fail.

As a kid, I am sure that a sardine had never crossed the threshold of my home in the years I lived under my parent’s roof. Using my prior experience with trying new things, I’ve come to terms with sardines. I like ‘em. I like ‘em in a tomato sauce. Or mediterranean style – not as much as mashed potatoes smeared on a piece of buttered bread – but I like ‘em.

And I also find when I track what I eat against my weight loss, that the periods of times when I’m eating these little fishies are the times that I lose weight.

This blog is filled with experiments consisting of me trying a new food. Many of these are failures.

This brings me back to Anthony Bourdain, my current banishment of science from my weight loss ‘journey’, and a comment from a reader on a previous blog post that essentially says: It’s about the food.

Anthony Bourdain, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the man, was a chef at a French restaurant, an ex-heroin addict, an ex-cokehead, who wrote a book called ‘Kitchen Confidential‘, which was a memoir about his years as a chef, about food, and about the restaurant business. It became a New York Times bestseller. He has since turned the success of this book into at least 2 different TV shows (neither of which I’ve watched as I don’t watch TV) and at least three other books I know of.

I didn’t go looking for his book – it found me. Someone had the audio version and at the time, I had a long, long commute. I’d listen to anything as I’m not a fan of the radio in the first place, and my commute – situated dead smack in the middle of two prime radio markets, meant that if I were to try to listen to radio, the signals from each market compete with each other, one station dropping out while the other gained a temporary advantage due to terrain, weather conditions, God knows what, only to be replaced moments later by the other station again.

I had no interest in what a cook does, or what a chef does. I wasn’t a food snob.

But Anthony Bourdain is neither – at least in the traditional sense.

While I do not understand entirely what the fellow is talking about when he discusses French dishes, nor am I entirely clear on what a sous chef is, his unpretentious, authentic, and engaging prose made me want to find out more. And, to be perfectly honest, his drug-laced, profane, street-talk manner of presenting his views on fine food, by necessity, strip it of any pretense.

Anthony Bourdain is not better than you. He does not talk down to you. When he gets on a high horse, he calls himself on it and is the first to label himself  ’pretentious asshole’. I like that in a person.

This, as much as the fact that the man can tell a story, as well as his writing is so engaging, has made what might be called ‘gourmet foods’ or ‘fine dining’ – terms that sound prissy to me and conjure up images of lace cuffs on a man’s shirt - accessible to me now.

On my desk at the moment, cramping my left arm from typing this, I have his books, A Cook’s Tour and Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. I also have the audio version of Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.

Of the cookbook, there’s a sentence in the review that sums up the book – and Anthony Bourdain’s entire body of work:

Even though many of the dishes can be found in other cookbooks, what sets this one apart is Bourdain’s signature wise-ass attitude that pervades nearly every recipe, explanatory note and chapter introduction. Profanity adds frequent color. If Aunt Doris would blanche at pearl onions being called “little fuckers,” a cook who prefers boneless meat in Daube Provençal a “poor deluded bastard,” or a person nervous about making these recipes a “dipshit,” this book is not for her.

As I mentioned before, you don’t equate that sort of thing with the stereotype of the prissy French chef or the food snob, and it makes this world more accessible and interesting to me.

Now we come to my current banishment of science again. I am currently reading a history of dieting called ‘Never Satisified’ and while I have only partly read it, it’s apparent that a LOT of the ‘latest thinking’ on dieting is just recycled crap from the past.

And even worse: once we allowed nutritionists to dictate what we eat based on the latest notions of health, rather than listening to the people who know how food is supposed to be enjoyed, a lot of us were doomed to be fat.

And we Americans have been doing this for a long, long, long time.

I went on vacation and ate with only minimal thought about carbs. I avoided eating full portions of desserts, but would have a taste. I avoided any carbs not worth it, but did have the awesome mustard seed potato chips imported from France and unavailable in the US. I enjoyed picking up the baguettes, just taken from the oven, and walking the store eating half the loaf. I don’t know how we Americans can screw up a simple baguette, but they don’t taste like that here.

In 10 days, I gained a pound. Essentially, statistically: nothing.

Here’s why, I think. If the explanation sounds somewhat muddled, it’s because I’m still noodling through this.

Some of you might be familiar with Abraham Maslow. In an era where psychology was more philosophy and still influenced by Freud’s bullshit, Maslow was coming up with some interesting ideas. One famous one was his ‘heirarchy of needs’ – shown below:

You will notice where food is on this list, folks – at the bottom. In terms of our needs, food comes before family, health, property, friendship, self-esteem, and a bunch of others.

Food is also a true universal across time and culture. You might not understand another person, their religious views, their culture, or their time period, but we can all relate to a good meal, of good ingredients, shared with family and friends.

What we Americans have done – and are quickly exporting to every corner of the globe – is the notion that ‘food’ – and what we eat – should be left to the scientists. We have bought into this thinking. It is more likely that a food in a box with a label will make some claim about calories or vitamins than it will make a claim that it tastes good.

We eat for health, and yet we are more unhealthy than ever. We eat foods that claim to be low calorie and good for weight loss, and yet we are fatter than ever.

When I dined on vacation, I remember one night out at a restaurant. When the meal was brought to me, I recall how small the portions of the meat, the vegetable and the starch were compared to an American plate served at most resturants. In America, quantity IS quality.

The thing was – this meal was one of the most memorable meals of my life. The flavors of each meshed perfectly. Just a little of each – the starch, the vegetable, and the meat (I believe it was duck breast cooked rare), was perfection. We finished off the meal with a dessert that was a work of art: a ‘cigar’ made of chocolate. A sculpture made so beautiful and so authentic looking that it was almost a sin to eat it. It stood on a little stand, and even the ash was simulated from some sort of sugar concoction that was not just sugar, but some subtle, complex flavor.

This was shared by the table. Unlike in the US where dessert might be a massive ‘triple-chocolate-double-brownie overload’ with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, this was subtle, and this was also small.  The meal was paced – not too fast and not too slow – and it seemed more like a performance than a meal. It was a small place, run by 2 women, and I told one of the owners that exact thing. She smiled proudly – this person looked at what they were doing as a work of ephemeral art, and she was glad I had noticed.

I don’t recall being hungry after this.

This is how the French supposedly eat. Small portions of whatever the hell they want, but it is instinctively good for you – and good tasting, too. Other than a nasty tendency toward liver disease due perhaps to an excess of wine, their weight and their health is better than the Americans.

We now end up with a comment on my post about being tired of all the arguing about science. Which diet is better, which supplement is better, is low carb good or evil? Is vegan healthier? What about vitamin B12? This study is good, that study is shit, my diet doc can kick the ass of your diet doc, Etc., etc., etc.

One commenter left the following:

I too get a bit tired of the arguing myself. It can be great at times, but some of it really cheapens the whole movement, which I think is not just low carb, but creating a real food culture.

Damn straight.

What I am thinking is that we need to tell the nutritionists of all stripes to screw off. Instead of them looking at us like some caged animals who need to be kept healthy,  perhaps there need to be a new route to health, weight loss and wellness that doesn’t focus on calories, carbs, proteins and vitamins, but rather keeps them at hand, in the background as a handy general reference rather than some bible on how to eat – perhaps it’s chefs that should teach us how to eat and dietitians should work to fit their creations into our lives rather than having dietitions act like chefs, creating food without magic, that become merely fuel - soylent greeen become real – and stripping from us all the one common thread that unites all faiths, political persuasions, and cultures – the joy of food and eating.

We need to refrain from the American ‘Grand Slam’ breakfast, where quantity equals quantity, but we also need to avoid the food moralists and their cultish notions of science – as well as the ‘food scientists’, coming up with the next fake foods.

Food is a basic human need, and should also be a joy as well. It should be enough but not too much, it should be prepared from the best ingredients possible, it should be prepared with pride, and not eaten in a rush. And as Anthony Bourdain pointed out in Medium Raw, almost no one knows how to ‘cook’ anymore, except for the food snobs.

I think I need to cook more, and learn some techniques other than ‘throw everything into pot’. Simple basic cooking techniques might be the best way for a lot of us to learn to respect food, respect ourselves, enjoy what we eat, and lose weight at the same time.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

It’s just how we’re taught: got a problem? Buy something to fix it.

A lot of folks think that they can fix their crappy diet by popping vitamins and supplements. I for one. Until perhaps 6 months ago, I would take a handful of supplements, including:

1. a multivitamin without iron
2. COQ 10
3. Alpha-Lipoic Acid and Acetyl L-Carnitine
4. Magnesium
5. Fish Oil
6. Calcium+D
7. Vitamin E
8. Selenium
9. GarlicMax
10. Ginseng

At one point I was using old prescription medicine bottles, and due to the fact that some on the list needed to be taken in multiples, I sometimes could not fit all of a day’s supplements in a single bottle.

But then I stopped taken them completely. Here was my concern at the time: I had read a very good book by the name ‘Swindled’, which described the food adulteration problems in England in the 1800s and in the US later into the 1900s. I do not want to do the book discredit by giving it a review, but I’ll note just one example (out of dozens and dozens described in this wonderfully written history) that comes to mind.

In England in the 1800s, it was customary to cook pickles in copper pots because the copper gave them a bright green color, making them look a heckuva lot more yummy and the normal olive drab pickles.

You might have some copper pots at home yourself, they’re quite pretty, actually. I have a few myself.

You’ll notice that every last one of them is copper CLAD – meaning the copper is on the outside, and does not touch the food.

That’s because copper is poisonous. Really poisonous. From Wikipedia, in their usual overly technical prose for such things:

Acute symptoms of copper poisoning by ingestion include vomiting, hematemesis (vomiting of blood), hypotension (low blood pressure), melena (black “tarry” feces), coma, jaundice (yellowish pigmentation of the skin), and gastrointestinal distress.[2] Individuals with glucose-6-phosphate deficiency may be at increased risk of hematologic effects of copper.[2] Hemolytic anemia resulting from the treatment of burns with copper compounds is infrequent.[2]

Chronic (long-term exposure) effects of copper exposure can damage the liver and kidneys.[3]

People died eating these pickles. And it was only after public outcry that producers stopped boiling their pickles in copper pots and killing their patrons. Not because they necessarily felt some moral or ethical imperative, mind you – it was bad for business.

This all got me to thinking about these various powders and liquid gelcaps I was ingesting – what was actually in  these things? How can I be sure that the compound I am expecting, uncontaminated, is actually in there?

I can’t.

One thing I learned from ‘Swindled’ was that, the longer the distribution chain, from producer to consumer, the greater the likelihood that someone along the way, will, knowingly or unknowingly, adulterate the product you consume.

Supplements in the US are also unregulated. My understanding on how this works is that manufacturers are on the honor system about what is listed in the ingredients, and that’s that – until they get caught.

What sucks about this system is that I believe that the majority of supplement manufacturers are honestly and ethically trying to create the best damn product they can.

But it might not be them – it might be their supplier, or their supplier’s supplier.

Think about it. If you buy a multivitamin, look at all those ingredients.

Where do they all come from?

I thought about this for a long time…and decided that I’d try living without vitamins. I made a conscious effort to try to buy better quality food with the money saved in supplements and try to eat better instead. Buy organic. Buy local. Buy fresh.

I honestly feel about the same – maybe a little better, 6 month later. Certainly I weigh about 15 pounds less, though don’t jump to any conclusions about no vitamins = weight loss, because I am certainly not.

Then I came across this interesting article on msnbc.com, in which researchers found that people who took multivitamins were more likely to participate in risky behaviors, their conclusion being that the vitamins gave them a feeling of invulnerability. Patients in the study were given sugar pills and told they were taking supplements. These patients:

reported a greater sense of invulnerability and less of a desire to exercise. They also were more likely to consider engaging in casual sex, sunbathing and binge-drinking.

At the end of the study the two groups were told they could choose between a healthful meal and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Sure enough, more of those in the group who were told they’d taken a supplement said they’d prefer the buffet.

Here’s a link to another report on this from Scientific American, in case you’d like a more scholarly source.

I covered much the same ground in a previous post, but I thought the psychological study discussed above that I read after I wrote that one warranted another discussion on this topic.

So perhaps you might want to reconsider that New Year’s resolution about taking vitamins?

One of these ideas is the notion of food monotony I wrote about in January of 2010. I’ve come to disagree with a number of the items in this post – in particular, the notion of counting calories, which I find so onerous that I would rather be fat than do it daily. And I don’t think it really works.

The food monotony part, however, has been a direction I’ve gone, perhaps coming to it from that other angle I mentioned.

Part of what I’ve been doing is to work on a new type of tracking system for what I eat. It’s strange, but I have been doing it for a few months and I have been losing weight – not dramatic, but the trend is in the right direction and I am maintaining a lower weight consistently than I’ve been able to in the past 2 years.

The the strangeness of this tracking system is that I don’t track how much I eat – I only track what. If I eat 1 hot dog or 3, all I note for a given day is that I had 1 ‘hot dog as a food’ for the day. This seems to make me focus on ingredients more than quantities, and after a few months, identify what I really like that’s low carb – and what I need to be careful about.

It also shows me very clearly that I can lose weight on low carb and still eat cake, and cookies, and bread – I’m still trying to figure that one out, so please bear with me on that.

Another thing it has shown me are that there are certain foods that:

• Are high quality
• Easy
• Filling and do a very good job of controlling hunger
• I lose weight eating them
• Reasonably priced
• Availability – if I have to search high and low for the stuff, it’s just too high a price to pay
• Most important: I can eat them over and over without wanting to barf

I probably eat this stuff 5 days a week. I still don’t really eat breakfast still, so I usually end up having one of these at work sometime before noon. I mix in 3 drops of EZ-Sweetz (a zero-carb Splenda product) and most recently cinnamon (as an experiment – it’s purported to have the ability to increase insulin response). My understanding is that the cultures are good for you, the process that the cultures perform on the milk makes it more digestible, the carbs are not at an Atkins-level, but it doesn’t seem to bother me.

It being late summer in central New Jersey, tomatoes are in abundance, and we scored 25 lbs. of ripe tomatoes the size of ping-pong balls for $15.00 – $0.65 per lb. – a pretty good deal for locavore organic tomatoes.

The big problem is the committment that one makes. These guys have a lifespan of maybe 2 weeks? To use all these up before they get tossed means eating a pound of the things every single day for 2 weeks. I mentioned this to the wife as we considered buying the crate and she was game. Then everyone pretty much ignored the crate. I brought bags to work and munched on these things throughout the week. I also took the crate from its out-of-the-way location and placed it on the kitchen table (hint, hint), but someone just put it back. I needed to cook up some sausages I had bought last weekend, and because I needed to do something with the tomatoes they became the main ingredient. So here’s what we ended up with.

• 8 hot Italian sausages
• 30 or so of ping-pong ball-sized tomatoes, sliced in half
• 2 onions
• 2 green peppers
• garlic powder
• salt and pepper
• 4 tablespoons of olive oil
• 8 sun-dried tomatoes, cut in bits with kitchen scissors

I had come across this article in the New York Daily News about veggie burgers. Veggie burgers are looked upon by many as superior replacement for the much-maligned hamburger made from ground up cows. Leaving out the fact that cows are considered a stupid, but somewhat charming and endearing animal that no one wants to watch being ground up, veggie burgers are considered much healthier than the flesh of our barnyard friend and resident of children’s books. It is also supposed to be better for the environment: you picture fields of crops gently swaying in the breeze rather than the chaos of the feedlot and the horror of the slaughterhouse.

Most people don’t picture vats of hexane, a petrochemical byproduct found in gasoline, being used to extract the oil from the pesticide-laden GMO soy that makes up the main ingredient of your oh-so-low-fat veggie burger.

Yep – to make that veggie burger – or a lot of them, at least, you take the soybeans, crush them up, and soak them in this gasoline byproduct, which acts as a solvent and helps the manufacturer extract the oils from the beans and allow the consumer to feel proud of how little fat they are eating compared to those nasty, nasty burgers made from animals.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the toxicity of hexane – slightly redacted so you don’t nod off:

The long-term toxicity of n-hexane in humans is well known.[6] Extensive peripheral nervous system failure is known to occur in humans chronically exposed to levels of n-hexane ranging from 400 to 600 ppm, with occasional exposures up to 2,500 ppm. The initial symptoms are tingling and cramps in the arms and legs, followed by general muscular weakness. In severe cases, atrophy of the skeletal muscles is observed, along with a loss of coordination and problems of vision. Similar symptoms are observed in animal models. They are associated with a degeneration of the peripheral nervous system (and eventually the central nervous system), starting with the distal portions of the longer and wider nerve axons.

In 1994, n-hexane was included in the list of chemicals on the US Toxic Release Inventory (TRI).[8] In 2001, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued regulations on the control of emissions of hexane gas due to its potential carcinogenic properties and environmental concerns.[9]

Yum!

Anyway, it can’t be all that bad, right? Manufacturers must get all that stuff out. When the extraction is done, it must be completely removed, or evaporate…or something…right?

Again, from Wikipedia:

According to a report by the Cornucopia Institute, hexane is used to extract oil from grains as well as protein from soy, to such an extent that in 2007, grain processors were responsible for more than two-thirds of hexane emissions in the United States.[10] The report also pointed out that the hexane can persist in the final food product created; in a sample of processed soy, the oil contained 10 ppm, the meal 21 ppm and the grits 14 ppm hexane.[10] The adverse health effects seem specific to n-hexane; they are much reduced or absent for other isomers. Therefore, the food oil extraction industry, which relied heavily on hexane, has been considering switching to other solvents, including isohexane.[11][12][13]

If you would like to read the full report from the Cornucopia Institute on soy, it’s here. It’s well worth the read if you are curious about the health benefits of soy.

The issue is larger than just veggie burgers, though. It turns out that most cooking oils are also extracted from their seeds in a similar process, so unless you buy expensive cold expeller-pressed oils where the oil is squeezed out rather than extracted through solvents, your oil – soybean, canola, olive, corn, etc. – has had a little hexane bath.

And don’t think if you don’t use those oils, you aren’t exposed. After the oil is extracted, what remains (at least for corn and soybean) ends up in a myriad of ‘low fat’ products.

This leads me to a larger – much larger conclusion that I already knew, but didn’t really act upon – until now.

I do not trust government to protect me from unsafe food. Nor do I believe their guidelines for healthy eating.

But I am not a scientist. And I take everything I read with a grain of salt. People have agendas. People distort findings. The truth is impossibly hard to find in all the conflicting messages.

So I am proceeding on my own personal set of assumptions. I don’t know if they are right. I don’t know if I am wasting my time. I don’t really know if my low carb diet is going to kill me tomorrow – but it is my decision. If I am wrong, I only have myself to blame. Here they are:

• Become a hell of a lot fussier about what I eat. Even more so than I am already.  Yes, it makes me even more of a pain in the ass, which might be hard for some to imagine. So be it.
• Eat animal fat and protein from animals raised properly – from a real farm, not a corporate farm.
• Get all my carbs from veggies. No grains.
• Eat minimally-processed foods.
• Eat everything possible organic.
• Read every damn label. If any ingredient sounds like something from chemistry class – don’t buy it.
• If it comes in a box, has a glorious 4-color picture of what it’s supposed to look like when served – don’t buy it.
• If it comes in a box and is endorsed by the American Heart Association – don’t buy it.
• If it has the word ‘healthy’ anywhere on the box – don’t buy it.
• If it is considered a ‘convenience food’ – don’t buy it.

You learn something new every day.

These days, however, it seems what you learn is a bummer.

Next up on the bummer hit parade for me is ‘Meat Glue’.

Meat glue?

Let’s say you decide to follow a paleo diet, or primal, or low carb with an emphasis on minimally processed food. You go to the grocery store and pick up a nice boneless steak – or go to a fancy restaurant and order one. You say to yourself: “I’ll order it rare – why ruin a nice piece of meat by burning it to a crisp?”

Here’s a reason for well-done.

This video shows the clever trick that meat producers – at least the sleazy ones – do to take cuts of meat too small to sell and turn them into steaks you pay a lot more for.

In short, they use an  enzyme called transglutaminase to take small cuts of beef, pork, chicken or fish and glue them together. Sprinkle some on, and those itty-bitty bits of meat, after setting in the fridge, become a handsome steak.

Hey – wait a second – better living through chemistry – right? What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that you don’t know this. And because you don’t know this, you aren’t aware that all these little cuts of meat once had a lot more surface area where bacteria could land. Now this bacteria gets glued together on the inside surfaces of your glued meat, unlike a real steak, where the bacteria would only be on the outside.

So now you get your, ahem, ‘steak’ rare – and get yourself a mighty fine case of food poisoning.

Sigh…

What can you do?

Not much, unless you buy your meat from a local farm, which isn’t an option for a lot of us. Even if you ask, can you be sure the people selling you the meat are telling the truth – or even know  the truth?

This leaves only one recourse for meat-loving low-carb, paleo, and primal folks.

Memorize these three words.

Repeat after me: “Well-done, please.”

I think this video pokes fun at my own tendencies toward locavore and organic – perhaps you’ll enjoy it, too.

I love that the waitress has a dossier on the chicken!