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I made Taco Soup over the rainy weekend, a recipe I copied down at Weight Watcher’s last week. It’s basically pinto beans, hominy, canned tomatoes with chiles and a packet of taco seasoning.The leader said the entire recipe was 63 WW points value. It looked to me like it would yield 5.5 quarts, thus 11 2-cup servings would be 5 points each. She said it was 8 servings, so a serving would be 8 points. (I had to leave out one can of beans and 2 cups of water due to the size of my crockpot, about 3.5 quarts.) I thought it would be easy to do the math and get to the truth. I looked up 90% lean ground beef for the three numbers Weight Watcher’s uses. Product Calories Fiber Fat Points 90% lean ground beef pound 798 0 45 21 My first problem is my WW slide rule for points values does not go up to 45 grams of fat, or even to half that. Dividing the calories and fat into thirds, I arrived at the numbers above. When a recipe calls for a pound of ground beef, I use one bag of recipe crumbles, 12 oz. I don’t know what the equivalent of a pound is, but a pound of ground beef might cook down to about the same size as 3/4 pound of crumbles, because the crumbles will have less shrinkage due to fat separation. Has anyone conducted an skillet beside skillet comparison? Here are the Morningstar Farm Recipe Crumbles compared with 12 ounces of 90% lean ground beef: Product Calories Fiber Fat Points Crumbles 12 oz. 480 18 15 10 Beef 12 oz. 599 0 34 14 It’s easy to see the recipe crumbles save points two ways: they have far fewer calories and they have more fiber. Using the Weight Watcher’s points value calculation, one cannot count more than 4 grams of fiber per serving. The points in the chart above recognize the four-gram limit. However, no one is going to eat 12 ounces of burger crumbles or 96 ounces of taco soup! I’m at a loss to calculate either the whole pot of soup points or the points in one serving. Conclusion: In a spicy dish like chili or taco soup, your omnivorous friends are unlikely to miss real ground beef, especially the 90% lean variety. The crumbles will make the dish less greasy, and a solid white film will not form over the refrigerated leftovers. (The film would be solidified saturated fat from meat.) Save yourself huge calories by enjoying MSF Recipe Crumbles, in the freezer aisle near Boca Burgers. *Weight Watcher’s, Points Value, Morningstar Farms, yada yada, are all trademarks of their respective companies.

Oatmeal is good for you. Check out oatmeal’s nutritional stats. It can help lower cholesterol. It has soluble fiber – good for irritable bowel syndrome and related disorders. It’s warm. It feels nourishing while it is being nourishing. Why don’t we eat it more often? Because we think it’s too much trouble! I’ve experimented with instant oatmeal, both brand name and generic. As well as whole rolled oats, steel cut oats and quick oats. As far as I’ve been able to determine, they all have the same nutritional value. (If you have different information, please cite your sources below.) Oats are not separated or degermed when processed. They are just cut or rolled, or cut and rolled. Nothing is removed except the inedible husk. So rather than spending three-times the cost of oats for instant oatmeal, follow my recipe below. Place on paper plate in microwave oven. Heat for two minutes (four presses of the express button!). The paper plate will catch overflow as well as help you remove your cereal without being burned. (If there was overflow, use a larger bowl or less water next time.) For creamier oatmeal, add more water. For dryer oatmeal, add less water. Once you’ve visualized these measurements, you can pour oats into your bowl, hold the bowl under the filtered water tap, and pop it into the microwave without measuring. I find adding toasted, slivered almonds balances the flavors, offsetting the need for sweetener. Slice a banana onto it, add some berries, stir lightly and enjoy. Occasionally, I add almond milk to thin it out and cool it down for my ravenous appetite. Bon appetit. NOTE: Clean your bowl before placing it into the dishwasher. A brush may be necessary. Starches are not usually released during regular automatic dishwashing cycles. Cereals are particularly sticky.

I’ve blogged about stir fry a lot. The truth is, my “stir fry” has little in common with stir fry except for similar ingredients and a bent toward healthfulness. Is it because I don’t have a wok (or a place to store one) or because I can’t stir fast enough? How does one make a meal in 1-2 teaspoons of olive oil? Please, tell me! I like raw vegetables. I like cooked vegetables. I’m less fond of raw vegetables that are just a little bit cooked. Here’s what I have been doing. Heating the oil in a skillet (love using the stainless steel omelet pan — perfect for one), then adding chopped onion and pressed garlic. Turn on the teakettle to heat water. When the oil is about gone, I splash boiling water into the pan, cover and continue slicing and dicing. As the cooking progresses and ingredients are added to the dish, I keep adding boiling water as needed. I realized while talking with friend Sonja last night, I’m steaming my veggies. She doesn’t add oil till the cooking is complete – a process I heard encouraged by Dr. Anita Balodis, holistic family practitioner, Chicago area. Oil heated above a certain temperature turns on you, causing inflammation (#1 cause of illness and incapacitation) and potentially death, depending on the heat and kind of oil. [You don’t hear of people dying from the carcinogens on barbecue and French fries, but that doesn’t prove that isn’t what debilitated them.] Sugar peas are great added right toward the end, because they take only a couple minutes to be perfect. I’m still enjoying 5 spice powder, used a red pepper olive oil today. Crushed red pepper is a nice addition. While I’m proud of the adventures I’ve taken into new foods, I’ve traveled less far afield in seasonings. I fear growing tired of the ones I favor, then being back to blahsville. I’d like some suggestions, please.

I’ve blogged about several new foods or new ways to prepare them. Now that I have a bit more experience, I’ll report on several. 5 SPICE POWDER I made some. I bought some. I like what I made better. Pal Richard said, “Yes, because it’s so much fresher.” Not sure that was the case with mine, because several of the ingredients from my spice rack were far from fresh. But the two don’t have the same ingredients either. The purchased one also contains ginger, licorice root and white pepper. Though I didn’t use Szechuan peppercorns in mine, nor did I measure everything carefully, mine has a distinct peppercorn punch to it, which I love. The purchased one smells like it belongs on sweet food…almost like a pumpkin spice. ANAHEIM CHILE People have asked about my chile. I cut about an inch and a half from the tip to put in stir fry. I removed as much of the rib membrane as possible, because I read online that that’s where most of the heat is carried, besides in the seeds. It added a nice punch to the veggies. Yesterday I cut a similar-length piece. Turns out, an inch and a half from a wider part of the pepper makes a serving of veggies hotter!  This will become a regularly-used food. RED CABBAGE In response to my ode to Napa cabbage, Virginia shared how she uses red cabbage. She gave us her very fresh-sounding salad recipe. She inspired me to buy a red cabbage and add a thin slice to salad and stir fry. My current diet manifests my passion for eating as much color, and deep color, as I can squeeze in. Thank you Virginia! SUNCHOKES Jerusalem artichokes are also a food I associate with Virginia. She may have introduced them to me. Using them as water chestnuts in yesterday’s stir fry didn’t go as well as expected. I received a business call part way through cooking lunch. I piled cabbage in the skillet on top of the harder veggies which I’d already sauteed, put a lid on and set it off the heat while I finished the call. Twenty minutes later, I remembered the sunchokes. I quietly sliced one and stirred it into my almost limp mixture. By the time my call was over, my lunch was very limp – except for the sunchoke slices, which were as crisp as when I sliced them. I’ll try this again!

I was introduced to this homely vegetable when I lived near Chattanooga, on the Tennessee-Georgia border. Since I’d eaten raw potatoes when playing house as a schoolgirl, the taste and texture were somewhat familiar. However, the carbohydrate in what is now commonly called sunchokes (see reasons above) is not starch, but rather inulin. Inulin is converted in the digestive tract to fructose rather than glucose, so it can be tolerated by diabetics from a sugar perspective. (Some people say it gives them gas. How much are they eating at $3.50 a pound?) I was delighted to find them at the Farmer’s Market Sunday. Here in Northern Arizona they are a winter vegetable, sweeter after the first frost. The vendor explained I could cut off any eye and plant it, like a potato. I thought that would be a wonderful addition to my elevated herb garden and flower pots (since Javelina thrive on roots and dig up many plants just to taste whether or not they’ll like its root). However, after checking it out on the Internet, I see this is not a good option for me. They grow to six feet in height, producing wonderful yellow, daisy-like flowers. Fine, but not for elevated gardens and flower pots. At ground level, they would not survive the Javelina, and my philosophy is the collared peccary were here first. Were it possible to plant enough for them and me, I would. Sunchokes are most likely to be found in the northern 2/3 of the United States, and toward the East. North Carolina seems to be a particularly fertile plain for them. They can be cooked, like potatoes. I like them raw. Since they taste a bit like water chestnuts (sweeter, and even crisper than a potato), I will add a few slices to my next stir fry. I haven’t tried them in salad. I relish fruits and vegetables in their simplest, closest to nature state. Thus I’m inclined when I have a small bit of something utterly munchable to wash it and eat it from my hand, raw. Sunchokes make a delightful snack, without the need for salt or dips. image from WikiCommons

I discussed the movie King Corn it with my 14 year old nephew. He’s the king of soft drinks, icees, candy and fast food. I quoted a line from the film that when you eat at McDonald’s, “everything on your plate has corn in it.” Jason’s penchant is to name things to prove any adult declaration wrong until the adult collapses from exhaustion! In the film, the most common meal was mentioned: burger, fries and soda. The hamburger came from a corn-fed cow. French fries are crisped in corn oil. The soft drink is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). After naming 10 other things one can eat at McDonald’s and saying “oh” as I explained the corn connection, he came up with coffee. Good one! But if you put milk or cream in it, you’re back to the corn-fed cow. I haven’t been in a McDonald’s for years, except to use their impeccably clean and always easy-to-find restrooms. But the McDonald’s Menu is available online. I read it to find items unrelated to corn. These items have not been verified; they’re just my best guess as corn-free. Nothing from column 1. Column 2: the first non-corn item we come to is the salt packet. Still in column 2, there are three salads without meat (chickens are also corn-fed). Were these to be eaten without salad dressing, they might be corn-free. (Most salad dressings and sauces contain HFCS. Some Newman’s varieties are HFCS free, and Mickey D’s does carry Newman’s. Fast Food Facts claims McDonald’s barbecue and sweet n’ sour sauces are also HFCS-free.) Possibly corn free: Corn free: I’m not talking about edible corn, like corn on the cob from your local market. Yesterday’s blog was about industrial corn. The makers of King Corn tried to get all corn out of their diets for a month. It was too hard. But trying it for a week would certainly make us all more aware, wouldn’t it?

Have you seen the documentary King Corn? I heard about it yesterday, so downloaded it from iTunes for $2.99 for the day’s rental. “Corn-fed beef” sounds wholesome, doesn’t it? Are you aware the corn they are fed is inedible? If it’s industrial corn, as raised in Iowa, it’s a product not designed or grown for human food. It is grown for yield, because the U.S. government pays farmers per bushel. Farmers don’t grow the corn for the money they make selling it. They grow it for the subsidies. When this program came to be in 1973, uses had to be found for the excess corn–mountains and mountains of it you’ll see in the film. About a third of it goes to ethanol production. The rest goes into the American diet, into thousands of processes and food additives. I cannot speak for all corn, because I’ve seen only one film on it. This is about the corn grown in the town they farmed in. The documentary was made because two recent college grads learned they were among the first generation in history who would not live as long as their parents. They sought to find out why. Hair analysis showed they were 25% corn, so they threw themselves into learning about corn. They became farmers. They talked to executives and professors and Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture during the Nixon administration. It was Butz who masterminded subsidies for production rather than for not planting more than could be used. The subsidies created such excess, people had to find uses for the corn or be buried under it! A huge percentage of corn production goes to livestock feed: beef, pork, chicken. Did you know cows cannot live past six months old on the corn diet they are fed? They have to be given low-dose antibiotics to keep them well till they are slaughtered. Ranchers count days cattle are on a corn diet…and in pens because they gain weight faster when they can’t move. Duh! Eating these animals is one way we ourselves become corn-fed. The other is high fructose corn syrup (HFSC), an additive for most sodas and fruit juices. It’s sweeter than sugar, so less can be used, plus it’s cheaper to produce. Why shouldn’t it be? It was never a food! See how hard you have to look to find a salad dressing, catsup, mayonnaise, candy or cookie, or any low-fat manufactured food, that doesn’t have HFCS or some other derivative of industrial corn. The Accidental Hedonist is building a comprehensive list of foods containing HFCS. I’m horrified to see pediatric cough syrup on the list. I’ll write a fuller indictment of HFCS and why it should not be in our diets – at all – in the future. Meanwhile, just from the meat perespective, if the animals fed corn cannot survive on it, what makes you think you and your children can? ACTION STEP Write your legislative representatives. Also write to eating better champion Michelle Obama. Address her like this: Dear First Lady. Mail it to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington DC 20500. I heard a line in the film that I intend to use in my letters: “We subsidize Happy Meals but not healthy meals.” (OK, that should be healthful, but it’s not quite as catchy.) Ask your representative, and the president as well, to make changes to the Farm Bill so that nutritionally dense foods, not corn that’s causing epidemic diabetes, get subsidies, or no subsidies at all. Farmers say they’ll grow what we want to eat. Eat naturally, eat locally, and if you eat meat, buy grass fed. You’ll pay more for the steak, but less for your healthcare!

I tried Lucerne’s “Best of the Egg” product. I’m not a big fan of eggs, either for taste or for safety. If I must eat them, I prefer them from organic, free range hens and thoroughly cooked. (I boil eggs for 20 minutes, here at 4300 feet elevation.) Thus my first experience with fat free eggs was a little disappointing: they taste like eggs and they didn’t cook completely dry. I didn’t want to brown parts in order to get the entire mass dry. But they’re pasteurized, right? Yesterday my family asked me to fix Sunday breakfast. That means more elaborate than oatmeal, often involving eggs. The only eggs in the house were the remaining two packs from the Best of the Egg purchase. I decided on a Mexican omelet. After shaking the egg product (egg whites with seasonings, stabilizers, vitamins and minerals), I poured both packages into a medium-hot 7-inch cast iron skillet holding a scant two teaspoons of light-tasting olive oil and half a pat of butter. To this I added salt and pepper, onion powder, finely snipped green onion, and shavings of the flowery part of a bud of broccoli. As the egg mixture cooked on the bottom, with a metal spatula I scraped it toward first one side, then another, allowing the liquid parts to flow around for their turn to be cooked solid. I did not “scramble” or break apart the egg, but pushed it together to cook as a mass. While that cooked on medium heat, I shaved bits of pepper-jack cheese and sharp cheddar cheese (couldn’t find my grater). The plan was to get a cheesy indulgence with as little cheese as possible. When the egg was almost done, I sprinkled on the cheese shavings, covered with a glass lid and set it off the heat for a couple minutes, returning it to the heat to finish the melting. I served what truly looked like an omelet on hot plates, and topped it with a stripe of salsa, and dollops of guacamole and fat free Greek yogurt. It was very well received. Here’s the best part: each serving of about two eggs had only 60 egg calories, a Weight Watcher’s point value of 1 instead of the 5 two whole eggs would carry. The cheese, less than one-half ounce per serving, added about a point (around 50 calories). A generous 2 Tablespoons of guacamole could stack on 90 calories – another Weight Watcher’s point. Salsa and fat free Greek yogurt, which we use anyplace we would otherwise use sour cream (including in Stroganoff) add yum value and nutrition without adding points. All tolled, each delicious omelet was five points and around 250 calories. That’s something I could do again. And it didn’t taste too much like eggs!

Yesterday I ventured further into the pepper kingdom.I eat bell peppers all the time, both raw and cooked. I’ve occasionally purchased a tiny banana pepper or two. I called the produce manager over to explain to me which hot peppers were which so I could choose one. I notice peppers come in two categories: sweet and hot. There isn’t a category for mild. I think the pepper I selected is an Anaheim chile pepper. (The word chile makes it sound hotter, too, doesn’t it?) I was proud of my modest one-pepper purchase. An adventure. I admit it isn’t the Iditarod, but in my pursuit of better nutrition, my quest for phytonutrients, I’m trying new foods. It’s risky. I aspire to testing out something new each week. It may not be a food I’ve never eaten before; it may be a new way of preparing it. Like the almonds I just munched, toasted with a sprinkling of Ume Plum Vinegar–delicious! No need for added salt or oil. Tell me about your food adventures. Do you have a goal or method for trying new foods? Or do you always eat the same 15 or 20 things? What was the last new thing you tried? Any fruits or vegetables in your taste experiments?

I’m not a huge fan of the phrase weight loss, because I bought into the concept, that subconsciously, things that have been lost need to be found. I believe I picked up that idea from the author of Thin Within, Judy Wardell (Judy Halliday now, or before?). I prefer the idea of “releasing energy.” Everything is energy. Matter and energy can go back and forth, just like water and ice cubes. You can melt the ice and have water (energy, in this analogy), and you can freeze the water to again have ice (solid matter…or is it?). You can also turn ice into steam. Interesting! I’ll admit I have recently released 82.6 pounds of unusable, burdensome energy that is now free in the world to perform good needs and spread kindness, compassion and courtesy to one another. I wish this were the first time I needed to address an eating compulsion. It is not. But I won’t try to explain it, excuse it, or even examine it. Today, I am merely celebrating a transition to a new, healthier phase of my life. I eat vegetables as though they might disappear tomorrow, and if I don’t eat vitamin K and E and A and C now, how will I be the fit, energetic, helpful, vital person I choose to be? Me, June 13 2008, the morning after I joined Weight Watchers I apologize that the images aren’t identical in dress and pose. One cannot wear a size 2X top at 147 pounds without looking like she’s on the way to bed! (Don’t you hate those befores and afters where they get a full beauty makeover in the after but look like @#$% in the before?) The photo I’m showing as after was actually taken five months ago, but since I own all the cameras in the family, no one ever takes pictures of me (well, I do, but there’s quite a bit of set up involved in self-photography.) I’ve released about 10 pounds since then. OK, I acknowledge the person in the photo to the right looks confident and relaxed…and a little bit daring: bring it on! The gal above is trying hard to look fun and involved in life, but is hiding behind fat and gobs of eating because of dissatisfactory circumstances which she chose to forget over food. (The necklace is the same.) One reason people look better in all their after pictures is they feel better about themselves. Their friends and casual acquaintances tell them how terrific they look (some urge: “but don’t lose any more”). Cute, inexpensive clothes are made for smaller sizes, at least in women’s. To get large-size stylish clothing, one has to step up to some specialty shops. At the Weight Watchers meeting tonight, people confirmed a common benefit of reaching their goal weight is they look younger. A late-80s-year-old writing mentor of mine told my partner she’d better take good care of me and keep me close or someone would surely snatch me up because I’ve become so attractive. She swears I could pass for 20 years younger. I’m not sure about that, but in many more natural and less flattering photos than top left, I’m sure I looked 20 or more years older! I was reluctant to join Weight Watchers. I’m not much of a joiner. I sit on the end of the row in any sort of meeting so I can make a hasty escape. I’m an independent thinker. Weight Watchers seemed so mainstream. It has worked for me. Now a lifetime member, I will continue to go to the meetings until I believe my eating disorder is cured. It may never be cured. But tonight I’m happy and thankful and grateful and about to eat spaghetti! Yay! What’s your story? Me, Aug. 9, 2009, five months before reaching the Weight Watcher’s highest weight limit for my height: their Lifetime Member requirement.