Posts by clandaddy

  Stir fry is the BEST! Best way to get my veggies. Best way to fill up w/o loss of flavor, and it's the best way to get me fed full and to feed my 2 growing boys w/o bankrupting us. Thanks for the tip.

  I have seen cauli as a mashed potato. I love cauli but, Yech!

-CD

  What about the honey?

  This from a strict omnivore who is curious.

-CD

  Milled flax seed in my morning oatmeal (but start off slowly and creep up to a couple of tablespoons) and in everything I bake. Works great in muffins. Really BAD in soups and stews. (Bad mouth feel)

  Apples when I *need* to chew on something. No nuts, no avocados, but I stir fry like mad. Lots of flavor, lots of veggies! Broccoli and cabbage and carrots. Even my kids will eat it when its buzzed up with some black bean sauce and LOTS of garlic and ginger.

  Try this.

Have everything ready before you turn on the heat. Keep everything moving in the pan as much as possible.

  Start the brown rice. 2 cups water: 1 cup rice. Bring to a boil and reduce to a simmer. Done when the water is absorbed. About 20 minutes or so. Right about when you will be done with the stir fry.

  Coarsely dice one onion, two stalks of broccoli, two carrots and one chicken breast.

  I use garlic and ginger puree and use them in about a 2:1 ratio. Have them ready. 1 Tbsp garlic: 1/2 Tbsp ginger. One Tbsp black bean and garlic sauce (see the ethnic/oriental section of your grocery)

  Soy bottle open and ready.

  Heat one Tbsp or less of olive oil, *NOT* extra virgin, in a non stick.

  Toss in the onions and cook until soft.

  Toss in the carrots. Cook until they *just* start to soften (they'll cook more as we go, but under is better than over).

  Throw in the garlic, ginger and black bean sauce.

  Throw in the broccoli and cook until it gets that lovely dark green, but not until it gets soft.

  Dump the veggies onto a plate.

  Throw in the chicken. Add a touch of oil, if needed.

  Toss until color changes, splash in some soy sauce. Toss until cooked through.

  Add the veggies back into the pan and toss. Replate and serve with 1/2 cup of brown rice. Share with a friend.

-CD

  I love tweaking muffin recipes, myself. Got my wife and kids eating hi fiber without them even knowing it!

  Some of what I do:

Replace milk with vanilla yogurt. Good for those of us who are lactose intolerant and adds protein.

Use applesauce, but add a bit more flour to the recipe, about half the sauce volume. I don't like soggy dense muffins.

Add dried fruit, blueberries, cranberries, etc. for the antioxidants, but I need to tweak up the baking powder when I'm adding dense ingredients to keep them from becoming bricks.

Use olive oil (*NOT* extra virgin) to replace oil and butter in recipes. You need *some* fats and oils in good muffins for mouth appeal, so you might as well get the benefits of olive oil. Only the Extra virgin adds a flavor and it's too expensive to use on muffins.

Add flax seed for fiber. Good for your heart and you'll never any change in either texture or flavor. I'm playing with recipes now and one of the things I think it does is result in a moister muffin, oddly enough.

Wheat germ in the recipe. Good for energy, changes nothing much and I can slip it into the oatmeal crumb topping fro both flavor and health.

Use squished brown bananas any place you would use an applesauce replacement. Sweetness, healthiness, flavor, and a chance to get your aggressions out. ;-) And no need to tweak the wet ingredients. I cut down on the sweeteners when I use brown bananas, the browner the better!

Good Luck all,

-CD

  Good on you!

  I'm seeing the same thing since I started working out regularly. Initial weight loss, (cool), followed by looser pants, and tighter muscles, but not a budge  from the d*mn scale. Lots more energy, tho, so I'm OK!

-CD

  I like to spend some cals on some *really* good scotch, but I love the Skinny White Bitch. Too funny!

  Just a quick note, though. Alcohol is a systemic depressant and it can slow down the progress of your weight loss. Speaking from personal experience.

  No worries, tho. If you're looking for a quick buzz, anything alcoholic with anything fizzy. The carbonation speeds up the uptake of alcohol. ;-)

-CD

  Ditto on the caloric increase. You're doing well, but don't get too uptight.

  For me, ground flax seed in my AM oatmeal does the trick. It's good for your fiber intake, with both soluble and insoluble fiber, and it's the main ingredient in some fiber based constipation remedies.

  Word to the wise, though. Sneak up on 2 Tbsp/day. It can shock your system and then you will be dealing with the opposite problem. ;-)

-CD

  Take a deep breath, my dear. You must learn faith in yourself. If you did it once, you can do it again.

  I know. Easy to say, but it really is so. When it seems like you can't go another day, then go another hour. If that seems to much to bear, take it one minute at a time.

  Breathe. Remind yourself that you have friends here to help and that you have already shown the remarkable capacity to do it.

  You spend a great deal of time catching yourself screwing up. It's a very common habit. Try the road less travelled: try catching yourself doing something right. Learn what many women have not learned to do. Learn that you deserve to pat yourself on the back for all that you have done and all that you are capable of doing.

-CD

  Don't know about the diet benefits, but I can tell you that I function better when I can get a cat nap in the afternoon, whether I'm short on sleep or not. Nothing extreme, literally just 5 or 10 minutes of drifting off makes all the difference in my afternoon attentiveness and stress.

-CD 

  Try PB2.

http://www.bellplantation.com/

  There's a thread here on CC+ about this already, but the gist of it is that its peanuts, pressed to remove *most* of the oil, ground and powdered to give you all  of the nutients, protien, etc., but w/o all of the cals that come from oil.

  You mix the powder with water and the reports are that its as good as the original, perhaps a bit thinner. But, if thinner is your goal...

   Have to order from Bell Plantation, because I haven't seen it anywhere commercially, but I'm looking forward to trying it, with an eye toward using it as backpacking food with my Scouts.

-CD 

  Just a touch off topic, but not far:

  Best intro to stir fry I have in my library was a book by Martin Yan of "Yan Can Cook" TV fame. The best advice from that book that got me off to a running start for stir fry is that the holy trinity of chinese cooking is garlic, ginger, and soy sauce. 

<>  I use garlic puree and ginger puree in my everyday stir fry in about 2:1 ratio and my kids, 8 and 12, can't get enough! With the exception of carrots, they'll eat anything that Dad whips up in the wok, even when Dad refuses to tel them which end of the animal it's from! A little soy at the end of the cooking, then some corn starch and water to gravy it up and yum, yum!

<>  You can branch out from there to 5 spice and curry and wierd things you can do soy sauce and sugar, but start simple, just a few ingredients. Prep everything before you turn on the flame, so you can concentrate on cooking time and chucking things in together at the right time, keep your ingredients down to 2-4 items to start and try to cut them/keep them to roughly the same size for consistent cooking time and decent service. If you try to wok together a bunch of things of different sizes, all the littel stuff will drift to the bottom under all of the big stuff and cook well before the biggies are started (like the time I added finely diced onion to my stir fry brocolli, ugh!) .

  If you're not *big* on garlic, keep the garlic *big*. The more finely diced the garlic is, the stronger and sharper the taste. Cloves crushed just enough to get the paper off will flavor a dish, whereas garlic puree is guaranteed to chase away office coworkers, mosquitoes, and all but the most amorous spouses. ;-)

  Sorry if I'm preaching to the converted. Have you been wokking for a while or just getting started?

-CD

  Oh yeah. A quick note on soy sauce. Avoid any soy sauce with the word hydrolysed in the ingredients. Not because I have any organic healthy food secret about it, but because of it's second rate fast food flavor. Good soy is brewed like good beer is brewed, by investing care and time, and the hydrolisis is the chemical shortcut to getting something 'like' soy sauce.

-CD (again) 

  The bananas are a *very* good idea. Your body uses potassium in many of the same muscular and cellular functions that it uses sodium, without man of the salt intake side effects. Additionally, the soluble fibers in the banana produces a slow release of the nutrients into your system by sloing down the passage of food through your gut.

  More variety is always good (add color to you diet) and you might consider a multi-vitamin. It may contain things that your body does not need today, but might be short on tomorrow.

  Sounds like you might be on the migraine spectrum if you have a vascular response to perfumes and strong smells. There have been suggestions that high dose B vitamins, in addition to helping your general energy level from your cells on up, can help your body better cope with BP and vascular changes. I've been downing a 'men's multi' for years now and have had very few occurences of headaches in general and alomost no migraine symptoms.

  Do you do other things that affect your bllod vessels, like caffeine in tea or coffee or smoking?

- CD

I have food induced allergies and fo

  Time to switch to decaf, dear.

  You need to *not* get stuck where so many here are stuck, namely the minute by minute fixated calorie watch. You need to think in longer spans of time than hours or days. Think of your average over a week.

  Why? Because, in addition to the fact that your body does not watch the clock and does not give a fig whether it has passed midnight, your body will be orking to eliminate yesterday's waste, today, lending your weigh ins a skewed reading. Additionally, your excercise can and will keep your metabolism revved up for hours after you are finished. 

  So, just to iron out the many cycles associated with weight loss, including the monthly cycle and its affects of water retention, etc., start looking at your weight on a weekly basis.

   Just my nickel. Keep the change.

-CD 

   Unless you are on medication or have some other issue that could account for the absence of a normal period, you may be in starvation mode. Your loss of period is *not* a good sign. 

-CD