This Is What We’re Up Against

Folks, if I sound dogmatic on my pet subjects of diabetes, low-carb, healthy fats, etc, it’s because we’re up against shit like this:

http://www.dinewise.com/diabetic-breakfast/7-grain-waffle-yogurt-w-blue-berry-compote-df.html

For just $8.39 plus tax and delivery charge, you too can jumpstart your day by pouring 53 grams of fast acting carbohydrates into your bloodstream!  (Insulin and ambulance not included.)

Or, you could splurge on the most expensive eggs in the market, the ones with extra DHA, which cost around $3.50 a dozen in Boston.  Eat 3 of them fried in 10 cents worth of butter, and you’ve spent less than a dollar on breakfast.  (97 and a half cents, to be exact.)  Probably takes less time to prepare, too - frozen food takes quite some time  to heat up, even in the microwave - which is ironic because the waffle is supposed to be a convenience food.

I will remember this the next time someone complains to me that a low-carb diet is expensive.   And that waffle/yogurt combo has only 7 measly grams of protein.  For almost 9 clams you’d think they could throw in a turkey sausage or something …

(By the way, I had to really dig for that nutrition info.  See if you can find it yourself.)

Chicken Soup for the Migraineur’s Soul

No, no, that’s literal chicken soup - way better for the soul than any book full of platitudes.

Yesterday at work, like most days for the last 15 or 20 business days, was an exercise in stress and frustration. I need a different job. I was so frustrated I nearly reached for junk from the snack machine. Instead, I came home and made soup. My husband goes straight from work to class on Wednesdays, so on Wednesdays I want something simple and easy for dinner, and last night I wanted comfort food. The recipe below reflects what I had on hand, but chicken soup is forgiving, so vary at your convenience. Same with amounts - I give approximations below, but I didn’t measure anything.

I used homemade chicken stock, and other migraineurs might do well to avoid the canned stuff, too - it’s loaded with MSG and other glutamate-containing substances like hydrolyzed soy protein. For many soup recipes, I think that water can be substituted for stock, but in chicken soup the stock is the most important ingredient.

I can’t say this made me feel any better about work, but chicken soup has associations of love and sympathy and caretaking, even if the person doing the caretaking is oneself!

Chicken Soup for 1

(makes 1 bowl plus a second helping)

1 tablespoon healthy fat (olive oil, coconut oil, chicken or duck fat, butter, or bacon fat are all good - I used duck fat, since there’s still more than a cup of it left from Thanksgiving)
1 small shallot, chopped fine (about a tablespoon)
1 small carrot, diced (about 1/4 cup?)
1 stalk celery, diced
3 cups good quality chicken broth
1/4 cup dry sherry (el cheapo is fine - save the good stuff for sipping - but avoid cooking sherry, which has salt and god knows what else in it - I use the Taylor $5/bottle stuff)
1 small chunk rutabaga (or turnip), diced (about 1/4 cup?)
1 small chunk celery root, diced (1/4 cup?)
1 clove garlic, minced, pressed, or grated, as you choose
4 to 6 oz. diced leftover chicken
fresh thyme
chopped fresh parsley
herb salt (mine is made of salt, sage, rosemary, and garlic - it’s how I preserve my giant sage harvest every fall)

In a soup pot, sauté shallot, carrot, and celery for a few minutes until soft but not browned. Add stock, sherry, celery root, and rutabaga and bring to a boil; let simmer for a few minutes until the veggies are tender. Stir in chicken, garlic, thyme, and herb salt (or heck, just plain salt plus herbs) and bring back to a boil. Once it’s come to a boil, remove from heat. (The chicken is already cooked, and you don’t want to overcook it, just heat it up.) Ladle into a bowl and sprinkle with parsley.

Breaking News - So Much for the “Healthy” Asian Diet

Check out yesterday’s article on Regina Wilshire’s blog:

http://weightoftheevidence.blogspot.com/2007/11/higher-carb-higher-gi-and-high-gl.html

I hope the findings, that Chinese women who ate the most rice had the highest incidence of diabetes, will put another nail in the coffin of the Healthy Asian Diet hypothesis.  I also hope that this starts to quiet the natterings of those folks who keep dragging out The China Study to prove that eating a non-stop diet of grains is good.

By the way, check out the rest of Wilshire’s blog, too.  She’s a gem.

Would You Take Diet Advice From This Person?

Remember the pudgy dietician on WebMd who was recommending a non-stop stream of flour to combat GERD?  Well, look what I dug up:

http://www.webmd.com/video/healthy-refrigerator-fridge-makeover

I cringed at nearly every bit of advice she gave, and it sure doesn’t seem to be helping her manage a healthy weight, so why would anyone in their right mind do what she says?  So let me tell you how I choose my food:

• Dairy products.  Full-fat products from cows not treated with rBST.  (For me, this isn’t so much a health concern as a memory from my childhood when farmers were being paid to dump milk.  So why do we need cows to produce more?)  Products should have nothing but milk or cream, salt, enzymes, or live cultures (depending of course on the product).  Low-fat or fat-free products are almost always loaded with stabilizers, thickeners, and other junk with no nutritional value.  I do occasionally purchase low-fat buttermilk, since I have never seen full-fat buttermilk for sale in the United States.  (I might try making my own some day.)  I leave the sweetened yogurts on the shelf, and if I suddenly developed some demonic desire to eat pudding masquerading as yogurt, I would certainly skip the overpackaged ones that have trans-fat laden granola in a separate little compartment on top.  As for unsweetened yogurt, if I can’t find full-fat yogurt, I go without.
• Soy milk.  I never touch the stuff.  Silk brand, in particular, is loaded with sugar.  If you must drink it, I encourage you to look for unsweetened varieties.  (Good luck finding them, however.)
• Non-dairy creamer.  Ugh.  Why would I buy this stuff when I can get 42% butterfat heavy cream from a local Massachusetts farm at my neighborhood Whole Foods?
• Orange juice.  I don’t use orange juice or any other fruit juice; they are too high in carbohydrates and have no fiber to slow their absorption.  Even if you’re not on low-carb, you might consider dumping juice, which is junk food masquerading as health food.  If you can’t give up juice, skip the calcium-enriched varieties.  Calcium in the absence of magnesium,  vitamin D, boron, and a host of other nutrients is not beneficial and may be harmful.  Better yet, eat an orange.
• Mayonnaise.  Homemade with olive oil when time permits.  If I have to buy commercial mayo, I get full fat varieties.  I have some in the fridge right now.  This is a compromise, however; the oils used to make commercial mayo are full of omega-6 fatty acids, or, in the case of canola oil, have a distinct fishy smell.  (Wasn’t our dietician friend’s comment on “one tablespoon” nauseating?)
• Butter.  Forget the advice to “use a lot less.”  I use it liberally.  I always buy unsalted, since it is more versatile, and salt can be used to mask off flavors in butter.
• Fruits and vegetables.  Yes!
• Cheese.  I am an adventurous cheese-eater.  In my fridge right now is some Vermont artisan jack cheese, a little wheel of Wensleydale, a little bit of goat feta, a scrap of Parmesan, and some soft goat cheese.  At work I also have some brie.  At least once every couple of weeks I try out some cheese I’ve never tried before.
• Eggs.  Cage-free eggs with DHA.  I’m skeptical that the “grain-fed” eggs the dietician shows in the video are actually high in omega-3, since grains are deficient in this nutrient.  So where would the chickens actually get omega-3 in their diet?

Paying Off a Debt

Several weeks ago, after encouraging my HR department not to give a red cent to the American Diabetes Association until the ADA actually starts standing up for the interests of diabetics rather than those of food and drug companies, I made a promise.  My company was contributing $100 per participating employee to the ADA, and I told the HR department, as well as my blog readers, that I would contribute $100 of my own money to a charity of my choice.

I did not state this plainly, but I wanted the money to go to an organization that would help people consume nutritious, healthful diets.  I thought about this quite a bit, and I have decided that the money will go to Heifer International.  I make a contribution to Heifer every year, so this year I will add $100 to my usual amount.

If you are unfamiliar with Heifer, I encourage you to check out their website to learn more.  The basic principle is that Heifer donates culturally appropriate livestock to extremely needy families throughout the world.

Heifer International stands for a number of principles I admire - gender equity, sustainable development,  humane animal husbandry practices, and the notion that those who have been fortunate should pass their good fortune on.  These are the reasons I give them money every year.  But the reason I have chosen them for my extra $100 is that I believe that high quality animal protein and fat are a key to health.  Skeptics of the low-carb lifestyle often focus on two economic objections to high-protein, high-fat diets - they are expensive, and they are not sustainable.  I will have something detailed to say about both of these objections in the future; for now I will simply reply to the first objection that, just as ignorance is more costly than education, so too is ill health more costly than healthy food.  To the second objection, which is usually grounded in a single well-meaning but misguided book called Diet for a Small Planet, I freely admit that I agree that it is truly moronic to grow soybeans and corn to feed to cattle, especially if we rip up grassland to plant these crops.  However, grass grows well, without chemical inputs or much water, in soils that need to be irrigated and fertilized to produce food fit for humans.  And cows are geniuses, smarter than any human scientist, at turning grass, which is unfit for human consumption, into nourishing protein and fat, while leaving behind excellent organic fertilizers that help grow more grass.  Much of the earth is better suited to grazing than to growing crops.  Indeed, the authors of Nourishing Traditions estimate that three-quarters of the land in China is unsuited to raising crops, but a large portion of the same land is utterly suitable for grazing.

More to the point, though, if one is convinced, as I become convinced over the last five years, that animal protein is a vital component of the human diet, it seems to me beside the point that we can, theoretically, feed more people on soybeans than on beef.  We may keep the poor alive in the short term, but what are the long term consequences?  Do not the poor deserve the same healthy foods that the rich have access to?  Anything else is classism.

Incredible Reducing Plan for Ducks

I’ve come upon a miracle fat-loss plan - if you happen to be a duck.

Check out these chubby little guys before they went into the oven on Thanksgiving morning:

And note the difference after several hours of roasting on low heat.  The top guy has a waist, and you can see muscle definition in the drumsticks, too:

You can also see my gravy separator at the upper left.  I am not completely sure how much total fat the ducks shed.  Our host used some to fry potatoes, and I left her at least a cup for future cooking projects.  I also added a little to the cherry-Port sauce.  My husband and I still brought home well over 1 1/2 cups of delicious, mostly monounsaturated duck fat.  It’s liquid even at winter room temperatures, and it’s less solid than olive oil in the fridge.  (It looks opaque but moves around when you swirl the jar.)

The two classic uses for duck fat are frying potatoes and spreading on bread in place of butter, but I won’t be doing either of those.  We discovered Sunday morning that it’s really delicious for cooking omelettes, and mushrooms seem to be made for duck fat.  I’m thinking it could be used to braise cabbage, too.

How Low-Carb Improves Acid Reflux

Many, many people who have followed a low-carb lifestyle for a while report that their acid reflux clears up.  In the past, I found this a little perplexing, because people with acid reflux are commonly told that fatty foods aggravate the condition, and that they should eat bland (read: carby) foods.  (If you follow that link, by the way, all I can say is, look at that pudgy dietician and tell me if you would eat the lasagna with a flour-thickened white sauce that she’s recommending.).

So if fatty foods aggravate heartburn, acid reflux, and GERD, why do so many low-carbers experience such dramatic improvements?

Well, I have figured it out.  Low-carb makes your pants looser. 

This brilliant scientific discovery dawned on me Tuesday night, when, apparently out of nowhere, I experienced my first acid reflux burp in months.  Tuesday was the first day I tried wearing a smaller pair of jeans from the back of my closet.  (My old jeans are so loose they look, to quote one low-carb acquaintance of mine, like I’m wearing a poopy diaper.)  Unfortunately, the smaller jeans are still a bit too tight.  And anything tight around the midsection can aggravate GERD by squeezing acid back up into the esophagus.

Unfortunately for me, this means I need to go back to the poopy diaper jeans until I lose another inch or so around my middle.  The things I do for the sake of my health!

Happy Thanksgiving!

And Lordy, if you’re actually reading this on Thursday, for heaven’s sake, shut off your computer and go spend time with family or friends!

For our entree, we are having Crispy Roast Duck with a cherry-Port wine sauce that was originally intended for duck breasts.  The sauce hardly needs any tweaking to make it acceptable.  I am leaving out the cornstarch - a stock reduced that much, and enriched with that much nice cold butter, and with pectin from the cherries to boot, should be plenty thick.  (I’ll add a little xanthan gum if I change my mind about the thickness.)

It was a delight to find a sauce for duck that is naturally low in carbs.  It’s hard to find reliable info on Port, so I used the highest estimate I could find - 15 g per 4 oz.  That puts the sauce, minus cornstarch, at about 23 g for the whole batch, or a little over 5 g per serving.  The trick is NOT to eat excessive amounts of it!

Happy Thanksgiving to all - may the next year be full of blessings to be thankful for.

In Search Of: Coconut Milk

I am planning a small splurge for Thanksgiving.  I am not going all out, mind you.  I will have a sensible low-carb breakfast, and for the afternoon dinner, I will eat some of the bird (duck in our case, because our host’s 16-year-old daughter wanted something different, and I’m always delighted to have the opportunity to teach the younger generation how to roast a duck) and whatever LC-friendly sides are offered.  I know for a fact there will be a salad, and Brussels sprouts, and maybe something else.  But as I write this entry (Tuesday night for Wednesday morning publication), my husband is in the kitchen making a cheesecake from Fran McCullough’s wonderful The Good Fat Cookbook.  Not all the recipes in this book are low-carb, but they are all veritable riots of healthy fat, and we’ve never made anything from this book that wasn’t absolutely delightful.  (Try the cabbage braised in gin and butter, or the walnuts roasted with butter and oregano., both of which are low in carbs.)

As desserts go, cheesecake and custard are the ones I pick for an occasional splurge - they are mostly fat and protein with a bit of sugar added, and home cooks can usually reduce the sugar somewhat without compromising the quality (see footnote, ha ha).  So on Thanksgiving I’m having a piece of coconut milk-ginger-macadamia cheesecake made by my husband’s loving hands.  How can you go wrong with a combination of lauric acid, butterfat, and oleic acid, anyway?

The only problem was the coconut milk.  I volunteered to shop for the ingredients.  The first store I went to, a Trader Joe’s, had only light coconut milk, which ain’t worth the trouble of opening the can.  (I blame the likes of the Center for Science in the Public Interest for the fact that it’s hard to find a can of full fat coconut milk.)  After two additional stops at local grocery stores, I had found two additional brands of light coconut milk, and two full fat brands from somewhere in the Pacific that were treated with sodium metabisulfite.  It’s at times like these that I question my car-free lifestyle.  I’d been tromping around for an hour already, and no coconut milk.  I decided it was time to go home and make dinner.

Our neighborhood Shaw’s used to carry Grace brand coconut milk, which contains nothing but coconut and water.  But it suddenly disappeared from the shelves.  Shaw’s and Whole Foods both carry a number of brands of coconut milk that contain coconut, water, and guar gum.  I don’t object to guar gum; in fact, I use it in my own kitchen.  However, I find that it ruins the texture of coconut milk, and if I can find a product without it, I use it.  But sodium metabisulfite is right out.  I don’t know what it is, and I know that Grace makes a superior coconut milk that doesn’t include it, so clearly it doesn’t do anything for the milk.  So why risk consuming it?

On my way home, I began to wonder if I was going to have to purchase whole coconuts and learn to make my own coconut milk.  I don’t think that this is difficult, provided you can get the darn thing open, but it’s time consuming.  You have to crack the thing, drain out the coconut water, pry the meat off the shell, peel off the inner brown skin, and process the stuff in a blender full of hot water two or three times.  And, given my recent prolific blogging, it may be hard to believe, but did I mention I have a full-time job?

After dinner, my husband went to the nearby Whole Foods.  I expected that, at least, he would find coconut milks without sodium metaprotohypocatabidichloroflurosulfate (or whatever it is), but he actually found one without guar, too.  It’s called Blue Mountain Country, and it bears the legend, “For that true west indian taste.”  “Interesting,” I said.  “Grace, the other brand that doesn’t have guar, is from the Caribbean, too.”  But it turns out that, by “west indian,” they mean “west of India,” i.e., Sri Lanka.

FOOTNOTE:  the cheesecake is in the oven, and we just discovered that my husband misread “3/4 cup sugar” as “1/4 cup,” so this cheesecake is going to be even more of a carb bargain than we thought.  I’m sure I’ll love it, but I hope the other dinner guests do, too.  I think we won’t tell. 

What Do I Eat? 6

This one is for all my low-carb buddies out there who are vexed every time someone says Atkins is all about bacon, eggs, and steak.  Don’t get me wrong; I do my fair share to keep America’s hog farmers, ranchers, and egg producers in business.  But I also eat plenty of stuff like this:

This giant beauty is one of my favorites, a Greek salad made of thinly sliced red and green bell pepper, red onion, and cucumber atop mixed lettuces (tonight it was red leaf, green leaf, a teensy bit of Boston lettuce, and a handful of nice magnesium-rich dark green fresh parsley).  Add a few Greek olives and sprinkle with a good quality feta cheese - the best ones usually come in blocks, not those plastic tubs of pre-crumbled feta.  As a bonus, the blocks are cheaper than the tubs, and really how hard is it to crumble your own feta?  Sheesh.

I have a mandoline, and I love to use it to make this salad, because you can get the onion slices super thin.  This is important if you have one of those onions that is just plain mean.  For eating raw, we like our onions with a sweet disposition, but when you end up with an onion that had a bad childhood and a life full of disappointments and is, consequently, bitter and angry — the thinner, the better.  However, it’s certainly possible to make exquisitely thin slices with a sharp knife.

The little stainless steel bowl in the picture has a dressing made of three parts extra virgin olive oil, one part freshly squeezed lemon juice, a little garlic, and some fresh oregano.  It really was that color; the oil we are using now is a rich greenish gold color, and it makes the dressing this beautiful egg yolk yellow.

This was a great complement to a leftover pot roast that had been slow-cooked with tomatoes, onions, garlic, a bit of carrot, a bit of parsnip, one potato (for my husband), and some hot spices.