• 1 lb. grass-fed beef
• 2 yellow onions
• 12 oz. chopped tomatoes
• 1 pound frozen chopped kale
• 8 teaspoons Trader Joe’s Taco Seasoning
• 4 tablespoons butter

In a large pan I melted the butter while I haphazardly chopped the onions – it was too early for finesse. I threw the onions in and let them cook on high while I cleaned up the mess from the onions. Cleanup is part of every project, I tell my daughter, ad nauseam, and she can complete the phrase, along with a roll of her eyes, almost before I start saying it.

Parents are so lame.

Anyway, digression aside, I then threw in the beef and broke it up and let that cook until it had formed into nice-sized beef bits and had browned here and there. The addition of the butter inhibits the browning a bit because of the volume of liquid, but I just loves me my butter.

Next went in the chopped tomatoes, then the kale. I stirred these in until the kale had warmed and softened in the heat, then added the taco seasoning. I originally tried 4 teaspoons, but it wasn’t enough, so I bumped it to 8.

A few good stirs to get the seasoning infused throughout the dish, and I set the flame to low and let it simmer for 20 minutes.

The problem with lunch at work is that, like people in hospitals or on airplanes, you are in a sense, a captive audience. You gotta eat what you got in front of you. There’s no fridge stocked with goodies in case you change your mind about what you brought in the morning.

I hadn’t tasted what I made, except to adjust the seasoning, so I wasn’t sure if this was going to be something really enjoyable, or just another experiment that I never tried again.

My verdict was: Damn! This is pretty good. Kale is supposed to be good for you precisely because of its strong, bitter flavor. That makes kale a bit of a challenge for people new to the vegetable. This dish, with the taco seasonings blending with the kale, brought out all the positive flavors of the kale and mellowed the bitterness.

For those of you trying to get in or stay in ketosis as I am at the present, this didn’t cause any issues – consider this ‘Induction -Friendly’.

This one’s a keeper – I’ll have to do it again.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

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

• 1 large head of cauliflower
• 2 whole bunches of scallions – yes – bunches
• salt
• 4 cups of water
• pepper
• 1 cup heavy cream

In a deep cooking pot, place the chopped scallions and the chopped up cauliflower head in 4 cups of water and bring to a boil, then simmer for a half hour.

Next, get out the handy immersion blender. A quick digression: while food processors are great, unless you’re a TV chef that has some poor intern to do your dishes for you, they are a pain in the ass to clean. You can find yourself using it for 2 minutes and cleaning it for 10. The immersion blender tackles a lot of the things a food processor is used for and cleaning is a breeze – I couldn’t live without my immersion blender. Just don’t clean it while it’s plugged in!

Be patient while you blend, fishing out all the little florets that missed the blades. It will turn a nice shade of light green. If you ignored my instructions to do this in a deep pot and did it in a shallow pot, be prepared to clean scallion-encrusted cauliflower goo off your walls and stove.

Next, with the heat off, stir in the cream.

Now it’s a matter of tasting. Depending on your feelings about salt, you might want a lot or a little. I ended up putting in way more than I expected, but the outcome was awesome – it brought out the flavor without overpowering it. I also added pepper.

I let that combo simmer a bit more, just to warm the cream – not too long, maybe 5 minutes.

Nothing but cream and healthy carbs here. No reason I can see why this wouldn’t be induction-friendly.

The reviews were generally positive. Given my crock pot chicken curry debacle, perhaps expectations aren’t high right now. The primary complaints were that it needing more varied seasoning – my older daughter added some additional spices to hers. That’s a philosophical issue, as one could argue I was trying to bring out the flavors of the ingedients and not tart them up with a spectrum of other flavor notes.

On another criticism I must agree: it was a bit too watery. It wasn’t bad, mind you – we just like thicker soups. I will try this again and probably add 3 cups of water rather than 4.

I could also see myself adding other flavor and texture notes in the future. Perhaps some clams and diced turnips to make a faux clam chowder? Maybe some bacon?

Sounds good to me.

I can also report that on the day after, the leftover soup has mostly disappeared, a good indication to me that the stuff I made is good.

I’ll have to try this one again

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

This was inspired by a green chicken curry meal with coconut milk I had on vacation which was very good. I ordered it because it was something I would never order – I just wanted to try something different, and it was a wonderful mix of spicy and cool with citrus notes.

I wanted to try to come up with something using curry spices reminiscent of that vacation meal.

Silly me.

The ingredients were as follows:

• 10 chicken thighs
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1 tablespoon Taste of Thai Red Curry Paste
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon pepper
• 1 small onion, diced
• 1 medium eggplant, chopped into chunks, skin left on

This was all put in a large crockpot set to high for 4 hours.

Ominously, as the hours passed and the food began to give off a cooking fragrance, it was not a good fragrance. At hour 3 I gave it a stir. It didn’t look that good, either.

At hour 4 I had some of the broth. The taste had all these off-notes, like a person playing the piano just fine in some spots, but mashing the keyboard with his fists in others.

In times like this there’s nothing left to do but start pouring on the spices. First more salt. A dash of soy sauce. Another taste. Better. The salt brought out more of the good flavors, but these off notes were still there. And it didn’t smell good.

I tried adding a few tablespoons of lime juice, which brightened the flavor considerably. It was again still better, but it hadn’t graduated to good.

My wife came in and tried some. “What was this supposed to be?” She asked. Not a good question to hear about a new recipe…so it wasn’t just me. I told her that it was an experiment.

“You didn’t follow a recipe?”

“No.”

“If you don’t follow a recipe, you’ll waste food.”

“Not true.” I said. “I’ve come up with a number of things that were pretty good.”

She snorted in mock incredulity. I did not try to defend myself further as the fragrance of the abomination I’d created filled the room and it would be hard to defend it with past remembered meals.

“Maybe the fresh cilantro would help. I got it for the dish.” I said. She tried some and said: “try it now.”

“Is it better?”

“You tell me.”

I gave it a taste and it was much improved. It had graduated to ‘edible’. She had some with rice and seemed to enjoy it – but then again she was hungry and it was the only prepared food around. (Not exactly true. The kid tried making muffins, but something went awry and the batter was viscous and climbed the mixer beaters like the thing in the movie ‘The Blob’ – and didn’t rise in the oven. Two failed recipes in one day.)

Despite it’s improvement, there was still a lingering aftertaste reminiscent of the smell. It was not pleasant. I had to wash my hands twice to get it off, and it still lingered in my mouth the next day.

I think it’s safe to say when you have a meal that makes you want to brush your teeth and wash your hands afterwards, you have failed.

Oh, well.

After a project failure of any type, if you are going to learn anything from it, doing a post-mortem on the project is important. Here’s what I think.

1. Although there are crock pot coconut milk red curry chicken recipes on the Internet if you search Google, that doesn’t mean that the crock pot is suitable for the dish. I think the crock pot is NOT the place to try this.
2. Part of the reason why I think is the off-note in the dish was the coconut milk. Now, I like coconut milk, and sweetened a bit, have drunk the stuff straight, but I think the long cooking time damaged it, and ruined the dish.
3. Curry and coconut milk are not part of my rudimentary cooking repertoire. An entire cuisine isn’t somehow replicated by a ham-fisted attempt to combine two primary ingredients and somehow expect I would be magically transported to Southeast Asia when I tasted the result. I need to FOLLOW DIRECTIONS on this one. At least at the beginning.

I still have a some of the red curry paste and coconut milk. I think I’ll take a different tack next time:

• If you go to A Taste of Thai website, there are a number of recipes and even videos. The fact that there are ‘videos’, in retrospect, should have clued me in that there might be an element of ‘challenge’ to use their ingredients to their best effect, and maybe I need to watch some.
• Wiser now, I can whip up the curry sauce in a separate saucepan and try pouring on to the meal – perhaps a better way to stat with ingredients I am unfamiliar with.

As to what will happen with this dish, it will probably crowd the fridge, a reminder of my failure for a week or so, then unceremoniously tossed in the trash.

Even if I had a dog, I’d hesitate feeding it to the poor beast – it might enter the territory of animal cruelty to do so.

© 2012, LowCarbConfidential.com

This is one of my go-to recipes since conjuring it up in October, 2011. I’ve made it no less than a half-dozen times.

Now, however, I have made a resolution for the year to ditch artificial sweeteners, and have done well – but this recipe, I think, does need some sweet.

A reader recommended stevia, which I had heard of, but had heard some worrisome studies had come out about possible health effects. ‘Natural’ does not always mean safe, after all. I did a bit of research, however, and found this was based on some early, flawed studies – and I wasn’t going to be using a LOT of the stuff – the only thing I can think of at present I’d use it in is the pumpkin muffins.

I’ve modified the recipe here and there – here’s the most recent version:

• 6 eggs
• 1 cup coconut flour
• 1 can pumpkin
• 40 drops Whole Foods Stevia extract
• 2 tablespoons cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons nutmeg
• 1 7oz. tub of Fage plain yogurt (not low-fat)
• 1 cup cranberries

I put this in a 350 degree oven for 40 minutes – the tops are slightly browned by that time. This makes about 14 of these things shown in the picture above.

Honestly, this last batch could have used even more sweetness. 40 drops of stevia was replacing 10-12 drops of EZ-Sweetz, and it isn’t enough to balance the tartness of the cranberries. Next time I’m going to add more stevia

The addition of the yogurt makes them less dry – the biggest complaint from the family, but these things can’t be compared to a traditional muffin which rises and becomes light and fluffy. These are dense little balls (I use an ice cream scoop to put them on the baking tray) that you can space as close together as you like because they won’t rise – there’s nothing in them that can be prompted to rise – and they are dense enough to use to defend oneself if attacked.

On the other hand, they are filling, and keep me satisfied for hours.

Are these a crowd-pleaser? Nope. Even sweeter, a palate used to a lot of sweets won’t find these alluring. This might be one of those recipes better for people with less of a sweet tooth, that like tartness. Honestly, I had to acquire a taste for the cranberries tartness. Family won’t go near ‘em.

These are good warm with butter on them. Me – I eat them as breakfast usually, or if I need a cake substitute.

© 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

Other times, it goes straight to the trash – or it gets hidden in the fridge until it becomes a health hazard and can be thrown away without guilt – or at least not as much.

I bought a cabbage – mainly because it is a cheap and nutritious vegetable  - without having a clue as to what to do with it. A search of the Internet led me to this recipe.

Of course, I never follow a recipe exactly. So here’s what I did:

• 1/2 large head of cabbage, sliced with the mandoline
• 2 boxes of diced tomatoes – 26 oz. each
• 1 cup diced onions
• 1-1/2 cups julienned summer squash
• 1 cup water

• 1 lb ground beef
• 3 cups diced onion
• 3 cups of yellow squash finely julienned in a mandoline
• salt
• pepper
• 1-2 tablespoons of paprika
• 3 eggs