*Or: Does this food blog make me look fat?
Last year, I wrote my triumphant "how I lost weight, and kept it off" post. I'm not as thin as I was at my lowest weight, but I've kept off 40 pounds for a long time.
In October, my workplace offered a health screening. I went, to see where I was at. The results were not good. I weighed 228 pounds, about 10 more than I did at the beginning of the year. Even worse, my blood pressure is up, and while my overall cholesterol is OK, my good cholesterol is low. This worried me; my blood pressure had been good ever since I went through my original weight loss. And I was surprised I weighed as much as I did. My weight had been stable at 220, plus or minus a few pounds, for quite a while. 228 was heavier than I wanted to be.
I decided to get back to how I lost weight in the first place:
- Track my calories, and reduce overall eating
- Eat more vegetables (relative to meat, dairy and starch)
- Eat lean meats and nonfat dairy
- Eat whole wheat rice, pasta and bread
Exercise isn't on the list. I've become a slug. I need to work on that, too. But I digress...
For a couple of weeks, maybe a month, I was a good boy. I tracked my calories, didn't go back for that third helping of chili, and stopped after a glass of wine with dinner. OK, maybe two glasses. According to my home scale, I weighed 222 to 224 pounds the whole time - no weight gain, no weight loss. Then I stopped paying attention again.
Now it's the New Year, and I wanted to write a follow up post about weight loss. And I was struggling with it. I couldn't get myself to sit down and write these words. I think I new what was coming. After stalling for a couple of days, I took a deep breath, readied the camera, and got on the scale.
Two hundred and thirty three pounds.
Gulp.
Since this time last year, I gained FIFTEEN POUNDS. According to my scale, which said I was 222 at the time of my health screening, I am up ten pounds since October!
As much as I try to avoid it, this really isn't a surprise. I know that my meals have been pretty light on vegetables, particularly when Diane has been taking evening classes. My three picky eaters just won't eat vegetables, so it seems like too much effort to make them. And I do go back for that third helping of chili, or spaghetti, or ribeye. And that glass of wine or two with dinner sometimes turns into "one more glass, just to finish the bottle".
And...I'm worried I gained weight because of this blog.
Oh, yeah, and a complete lack of self-discipline. I tend to forget that part.
I love writing recipes like rotisserie pork loin stuffed with cheese and capicola and grilled ribeye steaks with chipotle butter baste. And they're great to eat...in moderation. Those should be celebration meals, not something I cook weekly.
Or, even worse, a couple of times a week.
Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not going to stop writing those kind of recipes. Or cooking them. But I am going to try to cook, eat, and write healthier in the new year.
Time to get back on track. As of today, I'm counting my calories, watching my portion sizes, and making sure half of my plate is vegetables. I still get to celebrate (Fiesta!) once a week, but I have to be vigilant with my other meals.
Vigilant doesn't have to mean boring. Good food seems to help me lose weight. Mindless eating is all too easy. Good food helps me pay attention while I eat, and makes me more satisfied with smaller portions.
And, because mindless eating is so easy, it's time to go to my bag of tricks. If I'm going to slip up, and eat mindlessly, I want it to work for me. Smaller portions are key; using 9 inch dinner plates tricks my brain into thinking the portions are larger. Food with low calorie density helps; eating a lot of soup (or a big dinner salad, or a vegetable heavy stew, or bean heavy chili) fills me up while keeping the calories down. Finally, I need more meals where meat is a condiment, not the whole dish (like a stir fry where one pound of meat is bulked up with a bunch of vegetables).
I'm still trying to convince myself that brown rice and whole wheat pasta are as good as the regular versions. Whole wheat bread? Love it. Brown rice? OK, I can manage it, if I mix it with beans. Whole wheat pasta? Well, I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you.
What do you think? What are your New Year's resolutions? Any calorie reducing tricks you would like to share? Good ways to cook brown rice? Leave them in the comments section below.
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for Christmas. And I'm much less likely to shoot my eye out. But more likely to burn myself, so I guess that's a wash.
. Turkey skin doesn't add anything to the recipe. Or at least, not anything good. After the long, slow cooking the skin comes out flabby and chewy. All it does is add extra fat to the sauce, which I don't want anyhow.
brand is fine, but I like my fancy one from 
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for future lunches.
through the links on this site. (Like my 
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is the best pepper grinder around; it solves all those problems, and makes fresh ground pepper easy.
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model, which is 9 inches tall and holds almost one cup of peppercorns; the regular sized 
for freezing; see the picture at the top of the post.
, there is a Sunday dinner worthy recipe for roast pork loin simmered in a tomatillo salsa and white bean sauce. The flavors are a revelation; the meaty pork loin, spicy tomatillo salsa, and creamy white beans are a brilliant combination.
, out of loyalty to the original recipe.
, as recommended by 
, second from the left, is my favorite. It's sharp, light, and effortless to use. With a chef's knife, I want some weight, some heft, so the knife does the work. With a paring knife, that extra weight makes it feel heavy and slow. The Victorinox feels light and swift in my hand.
and this paring knife. Later on I would add their 
and 
. That's all you really need.
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and 
by Jamie Purviance. I am a complete convert to dry brines now, and I wanted to come up with a dry brine that uses the same flavor profile. I have most of the major ingredients from the Weber brine in my dry rub - salt, a little brown sugar, orange zest, ginger, garlic, and cloves. When combined with a chunk of smoking wood in the grill, you get layers of flavor in the bird - sweet, smoky and salty, with an interesting mix of fruit and spices. This is a turkey that doesn't need gravy to be edible.
is the bible of food science, I thought it would be foolish not to take his advice.
and rotisserie is 
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, the best handbook I've found for food writers (like me and this little blog). 
, and knows more about local, ethnic places all around Northeastern Ohio than anyone else I know.
. I started from the ideas in Alice's recipe, but streamlined it. Alice boils the chard until tender, toasts the bread crumbs in the oven, sautes an onion, adds the chard, then moves everything into a baking dish to brown in the oven. I cut this down to two pans, and two techniques - one pan for sauteing everything, then into the baking dish for browning in the oven.
for this )
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(Japanese bread crumbs - or make fresh bread crumbs with a food processor and a few slices of bread)
with water to clean it. I separate the stems from the leaves first, then I swish the stems in the water in the spinner to clean them. I slice the leaves, and put them into the water in the spinner. Then I use the spinner to rinse and dry the leaves.
would work fine as well.
, the Asian definition of fresh fish is much different from ours. Theirs is: was the fish alive when it entered the kitchen?
by Paul Greenberg is an entertaining, sobering, in-depth, and practical look at fish and sustainability.
recently, looking for ideas to expand my weeknight stir-fries. One technique that caught my eye was red cooking, braising meat for a long time in a Shaoxing wine, soy and caramelized sugar broth. The result of red cooking is tender meat with a reddish hue from the broth.
that are used for red cooking. And, I was looking for a weeknight dinner, not a weekend extravaganza. So, I turned to my trusty slow cooker. It seemed like a natural for red cooking - a long simmer at low heat is exactly what the slow cooker does best. My cooking instincts were good - red cooking chicken thighs in the slow cooker is a great idea. The chicken was fall off the bone tender, and flavored through with the sweet, sour and salty broth. The only problem was the aroma - it smells so good, but you have to wait six hours to eat!
and 
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, use that as your gravy boat.)
, using shortcuts and prepared ingredients and bagged, pre-cut vegetables to get the meal on the table as quickly as possible? Or are you Martha Stewart, as in 
, do it The Right Way, have a large garden so you can have fresh greens, raise your own chickens, and have dinner linens that match the seasons?
camp. I cooked elaborate meals on the weekends, got really deep into 
, or is it Jean-Georges Vongerichten's spectacular version? Rick Bayless from 
, or Rick Bayless from 
? And, does it all have to be one way or the other? Can I short-cut a few of the sides, and do the main dish in an elaborate fashion on a weekday? Can I make a hearty, homey stew that doesn't need a lot of fussing while my guests arrive for a dinner party?
, but you can also do this by transferring the squash to a blender, in batches, using a slotted spoon. Bring the pureed soup back to a simmer and cook, stirring often, until the soup is thickened, about another 20 minutes. (If you have a 
, now is the time to use it.) Stir in the brown sugar. Taste, and add salt, pepper, and balsamic vinegar as needed.
