Yummy Sunday

Steel cut oats and cappuccino for breakfast.

Homemade poutine for lunch.

Pot roast and roasted brussel sprouts for dinner tonight.

I'm eating good but Ryan hates me.

So. Damn. Hungry!

Sitting here looking at the Schwan's catalog while trying to lose weight in a house without snacks. It's like porn to a man with no hands!

Baking, and a recipe!

So far my weight loss plan to not eat any junk food I haven't made myself has led me to rediscover my deep fryer, as well as baking. I crave potato chips SO bad, yet I have none to eat. Tom bought me a mandoline, though, so I will have chips soon. I just hope I can keep them from becoming the burnt-tasting brown chips. Wish me luck, whenever I get around to making them. Today's experiment was chocolate biscotti. Here is the recipe I used, with a little secret baking information I have*:

Chocolate Biscotti

INGREDIENTS:

half cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 cup white sugar (splenda won't work; I tried it)
2 1/2 cups white flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 tablespoon baking powder


DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 375 and line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper.
2. In mixer (you can use a bowl but I used my mixer with the paddle attachment) blend oil, eggs, and sugar until well blended. Add cocoa powder until it resembles fudge sauce. Add baking powder, wait a few seconds, then add flour. Knead on floured surface until workable (it will be sticky and your hands will look like you strangled a chocolate statue) and then split into halves.
3. Roll each half into a log about 6 inches shorter than your cookie sheet and place in middle of parchment paper. Then fold the paper over the dough (like rolling sushi) and smash down, form each side in turns, to get a 3/4ish inch thick rectangular slab. (If my paper folding instructions don't make sense, don't worry. It's the thickness that counts.)
4. Bake for 15 minutes and then remove and place on racks to cool. When it's cool enough to handle, cut into 1 inch slabs and place slices on their sides back on cookie sheet and bake for 5 minutes, flip and bake on other side for 5 minutes. Let cool completely and they should be hard as a rock.
5. Now feel free to dip them in melted chocolate or whatever. I kept mine plain and gave them to the baby as teething cookies, but I plan to dunk them in coffee too. You can add nuts or chocolate chips or just about anything else with a burning point higher than 375 to them, too.




*Secret baking information is that as long as your recipe has a significant amount of sugar in it, you can make just about anything chocolate by replacing a quarter or so of the flour with cocoa powder. Chocolate angel food cake, chocolate sugar cookies, chocolate biscotti. Cocoa is just chocolate flour, if you have sugar to sweeten it. But don't tell anybody or they won't envy your secret recipes. shhhhhh!

Just to clarify

I think I've mentioned before my latest attempt to eat healthier and hopefully lose some weight. We are not going to buy snack food or junk food any more. We can eat all we want, as long as we make it (Wafernusse gifts notwithstanding). I am trying to get away from processed foods because I am just not good at knowing which unpronouncables are okay and which are toxic additives. But either way, processed foods are full of sugar, salt, and preservatives, so hopefully this is a healthy strategy.

I asked a friend how to make tortilla chips and the instructions were basically to cut up and fry tortillas, which is what I was expecting but I didn't know if she baked them or not, or if she salted them or anything (Alton Brown rubs them with lime juice). So I suppose a stickler could say that since I'm buying the tortillas that I'm still using processed foods, but then again if I bought flour I'd be using processed foods. My strategy isn't just to avoid processed snacks but also to make it harder to snack. I can't tell you how many times in the past week I've wanted potato chips. But I didn't want to make potato chips so I didn't have any to eat. See how that works? Yay for me. Now, I need to go to sleep so I can wake up and make nachos, and possibly buy a slicer to make potato chips with.

still hungry so still thinking about food

One hundred years ago we weren't a fat nation. We also weren't a nation of cake mixes, refrigerated pre-made cookie dough, and marshmallows in a bag. If you wanted a marshmallow, you had to make a marshmallow. I don't even know if you could do that 100 years ago. Was there gelatin, or is that only in the newer recipes. I don't know! But you couldn't just run down to the store and get potato chips and frozen hot wings and a self-rising pizza. I want to go back to that time, but in a health food Democrat way, not a Constitutionalist Republican way (a future rant, can you tell?). I want to live in a house without candy and cookies and junk food. I would love to live in a house where everything was homemade. I would wake up and make my own bread if Tom would buy me the ingredients. (Would he really buy a bag or more of flour every week?). I would love to do all I could to eliminate preservatives and artificial flavors if I could. It's not realistic to think I could do it all, but why not do as much as possible?
No, I will not eat potato chips! Not until I get a thin slicer, at least. And sour cream. mmmmmm, sour cream.

My Prison Diet

I have, as my readers know, a horrible case of gestational diabetes. I am allowed only nine servings of carboydrates a day. For those who don't know, one serving is between twelve and nineteen grams of carbs, ideally fifteen. So I basically can't eat shit all day, although I have to eat somethng every two hours. It breaks down like this:
Breakfast - 1 serving
Snack - 1 serving
Lunch - 2 servings
Snack - 1 serving
Dinner - 2 servings
Snack - 1 serving
Bedtime Snack - 1 serving

Now, this is a hard diet to live with since almost nothing has fifteen grams of carbs. For instance, one slice of bread is one serving, so I can't have a sandwich unless it's meal time. And although my obstetrician did send me to a dietitian, the problem was that she was a dietitian. She kept talking about protein and low-fat and organic food, things that had nothing to do with GD! I listened to her advice at first; I even spent the big bucks on the all natural organic peanut butter. Have you ever had all natural organic peanut butter? Same carbs as regular, but it's gritty and oily and tastes awful! So I quickly learned that I was on my own. However, in the last month I have managed to find some snacks that aren't half bad, and some that actually kick ass, that fit with my diet. I figured I would post them hear in case anyone else who reads this get put on a similar diet as I am. And keep in mind that if you're allowed more than one serving at a time, you can double up o the snacks. Yum!

• Sunbelt Golden Almond chewy granola bars. One bar (and not the tiny little ones either like those hard ones you get from your grandma)= 17 g carbs
• Blue Bunny Light No Sugar Added key lime pie yogurt cup. 1 cup = 11 g carbs
• The Skinny Cow Minis Frozen Fudge Bars. One bar (the same size as half of a twin pop popsicle)=10 g carbs!
• Edy's Fruit Bars No Sugar Added. One bar = 8 g carbs (I recommend having one fudge bar and one fruit bar, but then I'm pregnant in the summer too.)
• Quaker Granola Bites Chocolate Flavor 90 calorie packs. One pack (not too small but not huge)= 14 g carbs
• Hunt's Snack Pack Sugar Free chocolate pudding cups. One cup = 15 g carbs
• Breyers All Natural Pure Premium coffee ice cream. 1/2 cup = 15 g carbs
• Medallion Bite Size white corn tortilla chips. 24 chips = 15 g carbs (and salsa has no carbs so you can load up the chips!)
• Sara Lee 45 Calorie & Delightful Bread, 100% Whole Wheat With Honey. TWO slices = 18 g carbs. (Peanut butter and sugar free jelly make it a pretty filling snack. And an egg and some vanilla make for a great French toast breakfast.)

If you learn to bulk up your snacks with peanut butter, dips, and sugar-free jelly, you can stay reasonably full throughout the day and still keep your blood glucose numbers low. As for meal ides, that's been harder for me to come up with. But Tom's cooking tomorrow night so I'm thinking baked tilapia with lemon butter and Parmesan and some rice on the side. Yum. But damn, do I miss mac and cheese!