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Recipes

New Diet/Exercise Scheme…works fast!

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Down only two pounds and already starting to feel much better. Old CardioDoc — the one who may have been a perfectly fine MD but who had a little personality problem (just talking to him was likely to bring on apoplexy…) — suggested the palpitations did not indicate a cardiac problem but were anxiety attacks. He said that if one would bestir oneself to get rid of the excess fat and exercise vigorously every day, one could bring the palps under control.

He was right then, and he appears to still be right. Over the past week I’ve managed to get rid of two of the 11 pounds of overweight and have combined daily one- to two-mile walks with some vigorous yardwork. Luckily, the yard has really gone to pot over the past year or two, so there will be lots of hacking and heaving to do over the next couple of weeks.

A-n-n-n-d…whatever it is does indeed seem to be getting better. Haven’t had a palp in days, and the average BP over the past 10 days has been 124/69. Not all that bad for a 71-year-old woman who favors rib-eye steaks, strong coffee, and bourbon.

🙂 {sigh} 🙂

There’s nothing like a fine spread of good food to improve your disposition. My god have I been eating!!!

Try this rendition of grilled fish, per serving:

• slab of fish (salmon, mahi, cod, whatEVER)
• canned or boxed Italian-style chopped tomatoes (the Pomì brand is especially good)
• a finely chopped garlic clove, or chopped little green onion
• a few leaves of fresh basil, chopped, or some dried herbs of your preference
• olive oil
• small amount of crumbled feta cheese

Preheat the grill. If you’re using one of those perforated grill pans, put it in there to preheat, too.

Rub the outside of the fish with a little olive oil.

Into a small microwavable bowl, place enough of the tomatoes to cover your serving(s) of fish. Stir in the garlic, onion (whichever you’re using, or both) plus the herbs and feta. Warm this gently in the microwave — no need to overdo it.

Grill the fish until it’s done to your preference. While you’re at it, you can put some veggies on the grill, too: I happen to like asparagus. Summer squash grills quickly and nicely, too: either way, toss them in a little olive oil to which you’ve added lemon juice, lime juice, or balsamic vinegar, to taste.

Place the fish and veggies on your favorite dinner plate and top the fish with the tomato concoction.

This is amazingly good. Serve it up with a salad: a handful of lettuce with whatever salady oddments you happen to have in the fridge, topped with a drizzle of olive oil and a drizzle of vinegar or lemon juice.

So much better than working…

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Try This Yummy Soup

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This is too, too good: cream of pepper soup. I dreamed the recipe up after this month’s Borderlands visit, whence (among other treasures) I staggered away with a whole cardboard box full of pretty little red, yellow, and orange sweet peppers.

PepperSoup Ridiculously delicious. It’s extremely tasty cold, too.

Happy Easter! And may you, too, beat GERD

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Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! It’s a new day in America. And everywhere else. Happy Easter to one and all.

Feeling particularly bright this morning because for the first time since last June’s miserable surgery, I woke up without a bellyache and without a lump in the throat. And though the 3 a.m. alarm clock went off as usual, it was not to wake me up to enjoy another wee-hours bout of heartburn. 🙂

To what do I attribute this miraculous turn of events? To a little help from my friends…

Not those friends, but their prescription cousins.

I’ve been gulping horsepills of omeprazole in double the OTC dose. That seemed not to be working, but apparently because I was knocking off them too soon.

As you know, I have a moral objection to being put on prescription drugs for the rest of my life, which of course is what every doctor you run into has in mind. So as soon as the symptoms would fade, I would fade off the omeprazole.

The other day, Young Dr. Kildare explained why this doesn’t work: The symptoms of gastric reflux stem from something like a burn to your esophagus, resulting from acid bubbling up where it’s not supposed to be. If you burned your hand, you could apply a topical treatment and it would feel better, but it wouldn’t be healed. You’d have to wait until it actually was healed to stop using the painkiller and before you could bang around again. Ditto, your innards.

He said you need to take prescription-strength omeprazole (or something like it) for about three months, even after the discomfort abates, and then, once you think the damage is healed, taper off it by going to the OTC pills for a week or two.

The new quacklet at the Mayo (oh, these young things! How can you have acquired an MD, gone through an internship and a residency, and look like you’re 19 years old???) agreed, although her time frame was shorter: eight weeks.

YDK has GERD himself, and also he’s not a kid (even though he looks mighty young to the aged eye), so I figure he’s probably the one to listen to. He having been around the block a time or two…

So I’ve been swallowing omeprazole religiously for about a week or ten days.

Then I discovered Zantac, OTC. This stuff, which in the past has done nothing for me, seems to work to beat back an acute attack, but only when used in combination with omeprazole. It dawned on me that if it worked during the day, it probably would work at three in the morning. So I put a pill and a glass of water by the bed, and night before last when I woke up with the familiar tingling/burning sensation that results from rolling over on my right side in my sleep, dropped the Zantac.

Took about 20 minutes to work, but it did work. And the next morning I wasn’t very sick. Somewhat so, but not to the usual extent.

I haven’t had a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, a glass of wine, a bourbon and water, a salad, a still-crisp vegetable, or so much as a whiff of chili pepper in weeks. So I can assure you, depriving yourself of the things you love doesn’t help. Neither do the various folks and quack remedies. No, swallowing organic apple cider vinegar does not help. Neither does ginger. Neither do Gaviscon, Rolaids, Mylanta, or Maalox.

In the nondrug department, only one thing seems to calm the symptoms of GERD: vanilla ice cream.

Yes. I don’t even LIKE ice cream, but I’ve been living on it for weeks.

The other day I reflected on the reason for this, ad it occurred to me it’s probably because ice cream is essentially a liquid. Effectively I’ve put myself on a liquid diet.

So I decided to branch out to other fluids.

Those soups that come in boxes all taste terrible to me: they taste like their cardboard containers. However, they’re less oversalted than the Campbell’s varieties. And no, I do not feel like making soup just now. Ugh. So I bought some chicken broth, some lamb broth, some mushroom soup, and some pumpkin soup. They all taste the same: cardboard. But they don’t seem to cause direct pain. Probably today I should go over to Trader’s on the way home from the churchly frenzy and pick up some chicken that I can make into real soup. Chicken à blanc…hold the onions. {sigh} Onion: that’s another beloved food item I haven’t had in weeks.

I’m wondering if a puréed lentil or bean soup might work…again, I can’t imagine how these would taste without onion. But WTF? It’s probably better than living on ice cream.

Yesterday I baked an Idaho potato. Served it up with some yogurt, figuring that would add some protein. A whole potato was too much to eat, but it seems to have worked to fill the belly without causing undue discomfort. Dined on this around 2:30 in the afternoon and wasn’t hungry till I got back from last night’s Great Vigil frenzy, along about 9:30 at night.

And this morning, trying to imagine what is essentially liquid and also edible, I recalled that my mother used to eat apple sauce when she didn’t feel well. I personally am not crazy about the apple sauce that comes in jars. However…quite a few apples are laying around the kitchen, waiting to spoil because I can’t eat them. Why not bake an apple?

That worked pretty well. I’m now not hungry and not in pain. Interesting.

So what am I gonna do this evening, when I have to go out for an Easter feast with friends? I certainly can’t eat any feasty foods. It’s going to look mighty funny when I ask for a bowl of soup for dinner. No clue how to cope with that. Guess I’ll have to play it as it lays.

How to Bake an Apple

You need:

• 1 apple, variety seems inconsequential
• butter
• brown sugar, turbinado sugar, or whatever sugar you have in the house
• cinnamon, if you have some
• pecans or walnuts, if desired
• hot water

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

With a paring knife, cut off the stem and a cone of apple around the it. Loosen the apple flesh by carefully slicing around the outside of the core. Take the handle of a metal spoon and scoop out the core and seeds.

Fill the hole with butter. Push in some pecans or walnuts, if you like. Top with sugar. Sprinkle a little cinnamon over it, if you wish.

Place the apple in a shallow baking dish. Pour in a little hot water, about a half-inch up the side of the pan.

Bake for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how soft you like your apple. If you like it a little firm, take it out of the oven after about a half-hour. If you want apple sauce, baking for an hour will do the trick.

Very tasty! A heckuva lot better than canned apple sauce!

Make Some Crackers

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So here I am at death’s door. I’ve caught the horrid cold that’s going around, quite a nasty one, we’re told. Today I’ve got such colorful laryngitis that I can barely croak out a sentence. The dogs and I have been loafing in bed all day…and it doesn’t seem to have helped much.

Along about noon, I was really hungry and wanted something to eat that didn’t entail a lot of cooking. Specifically: the other day I picked up a gorgeous piece of Camembert at Trader Joe’s. Wanted to eat that with some wine and side trimmngs. But I didn’t have any crackers, and I sure didn’t feel like waiting three or four hours for a loaf of bread to bake.

Depressed. Hungry…. Then I recalled that some years ago I made some crackers. Yeah: in the oven. They were easy, and the result was pretty tasty.

Thrashed around, found a recipe, and discovered that yes! They are easy. And they take all of 6 minutes to bake.

Why not? It sounded a lot better than driving through traffic, parking, tromping around a grocery store, standing in line, unparking, and driving through some more traffic.

Here’s the trick:

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Lay a sheet of aluminum foil or parchment on a large baking sheet; place the pan in the oven to heat.

Combine 1/2 cup water with 1/3 cup olive oil (or, if you prefer, melted butter) in a small bowl or measuring cup.

Place 1 1/2 cups flour in a larger bowl. Stir in 1 teaspoon baking powder and 3/4 teaspoon salt. Add a flavoring, if you like — I happen to have a rosemary plant in the yard, so minced up a few rosemary leaves, but I think you could add just about anything you please. Mix the dry ingredients together to blend well.

Make a well in the center and add the water & oil, a little at a time, stirring together to form a soft, scruffy dough. Flour a pastry board, toss the dough on it, and knead it briefly — three or four times, prob’ly. Divide the dough into several pieces (four to six, I’d say). Cover with a towel while you continue.

Reflour the pastry board, and dust a rolling pin with a little flour (if you don’t have a rolling pin, you can use a liter soda-pop bottle filled with soda or water). Place a piece of dough on the board and roll it out nice and thin. Remember, these are CRACKERS, not hamburger buns. You want them to come out crisp.

Cut the rolled dough into pieces, in the shape and sizes desired (doesn’t have to be fancy). If you wish, use a pastry brush to spread a thin layer of olive oil over the top. Sprinkle with a little coarse sea salt, if desired. Take a fork and poke the dough all over to give it a perforated effect.

Remove the hot pan from the oven. Sprinkle some cornmeal (if you have it) over the aluminum foil and lay the sliced dough pieces flat. Pop the pan into the oven, set the oven timer for six minutes, and voila! Roll out the rest of the dough blobs the same way, one at a time.

I had two pans going at once, one on each rack. Made about 20 or 25 crackers in all of maybe 20 minutes. It was simple, and the result was as fancy as anything you can get at Whole Foods!

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wooHOO! Cookbook on Its Way!

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Dark Kindle LoResThe new version of the weight-loss cookbook is on its way to publication in print and at Amazon! This afternoon I sent all 296 pages and the wrap-around cover over to the printer, and then set up Kindle to accept the final version of the .mobi file, which should appear within a day or so.

The latter still needs to have its table of contents updated — bizarrely, Kindle can’t read a table of contents that has been compiled in any Mac-compatible program. So every time I need to upload a bookoid that contains chapters, I first have to send it to Tina, who performs the 30-second task of updating the ToC on her PC.

The copy in the new, renamed edition is largely revamped. Its first incarnation, How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, was the first book I had ever uploaded to Amazon. And — wouldn’tcha know — it had the most complex formatting of any book I’ve posted there. In the fools-rush-in department, I took on footnotes, tables, lists, heads, subheads, sub-subheads, and even images without having a single clue to what I was doing.

Nor did I understand that Amazon’s online Kindle previewer is next to useless: what you see in that thing is decidedly not what you get. The result was a mess, but because I’d proofed in that online program, I didn’t know it was a mess.

Not until an angry reader posted a rant about the horrible formatting did I realize something was awry.

By then I’d figured out that you have to download a resident Kindle previewer onto your terminal — and, preferably, download your .mobi file into a Kindle reader or into an iPad, if you can figure out how. When I viewed the How I Lost file in the previewer installed on my Mac, I was horrified. No wonder that poor reader was flummoxed, frustrated, and infuriated!

At that point, though, I was maxed with other work — the plan to post eight to ten bookoids per month was absorbing 12 to 14 hours a day. Revamping the cookbook was not going to happen.

So I took it down from Amazon — unpublished it and forgot it.

Now that cutting the production schedule by 50 percent has allowed life to settle, I’ve returned to the cookbook. After posting more bookoids than I can count — some of which contain formatting challenges — I’ve learned what one needs to do to simplify a manuscript and get it to go online with relatively few glitches.

The manuscript has now been reformatted in a new template, its structure revamped and simplified, a great deal of extraneous detail cut. That made it look better. Then I went through and cut as much of the Bloggish as I could get rid of without rewriting from beginning to end.

Much of the original content had been copied and pasted from Funny. And y’know…blogging is not the same as writing. Blogging is more like a combination of texting and personal letter-writing. It has its own conventions, and its tone and style are casual to a fault.

In the book world, to a large fault. 😉

Language and style cleaned up, format reorganized, the book deserved a new title and new cover art.

Hence the new title: 30 pounds / Four Months.

This book would make a good Christmas present. It has about 120 recipes, some very old (even historic!) and some very 21st-century. The strategy it describes for losing weight really does work, and sticking to it isn’t at all onerous, once you see what works.

So watch this space! I’ll let you know when the electronic and the print versions are ready. If you’re interested in a print copy, let me know in the comments to this post and I’ll arrange to send one to you whenever I have them.

 

 

 

Scallops…Gluten-Free!

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🙂 Back on the diet means back to depriving myself of the Beloved Pasta, alas. This noon I wanted to finish off the last of the frozen scallops residing in the freezer, but because a workman was on his way I didn’t want to dirty up the kitchen or stink up the house with Eau de Fishie.

As I gazed into the depths of the freezer, it occurred to me that I could substitute spinach for the salad greens in the late, great, hopelessly dietetic Saint-Jacques à la Funny and come up with something that would at least give the illusion of more substance. Naturally, the preferred presentation would involve a mountain of spaghetti or noodles, but…well, some things are not to be.

And to keep the smell and the spattering butter out of the kitchen? Ah, there’s nothing like a propane grill.

Did you know you can cook in a pan atop a propane grill? You have to get used to the difference in heat intensity, which of course depends on the construction of your burners and their distance from the grills. But it’s a very easy conversion.

In fact, this whole meal was absurdly easy, and pretty darned good.

First: the spinach. Tear off a sheet of tinfoil and lay it flat upon the counter. Open the bag of frozen greens, if it’s not already open, and deposit as much as you please in the center of the tinfoil. Top with butter, cut into several small chunks. Sprinkle your flavoring du jour. Nutmeg is always nice on spinach. So is tarragon. Today I chose some powdered cumin.

P1030461Wrap the tinfoil tightly around the spinach, so it won’t leak.

Preheat the grill for a few minutes. Place the package of frozen spinach on the grill directly over a burner set on medium high heat.

Meanwhile, chop some garlic and a couple of tomatoes. Pour some wine. Defrost the scallops by letting them soak in some cold water. Drink some of the wine.

Go outside and flip the package of spinach over.

Come back inside. Remove the scallops from the water, spread them over a couple of paper towels, and dry well.

Place a chunk of butter in a small frying pan. Take the frying pan outdoors and place it on the grill. REMEMBER THAT YOU’LL NEED A HOT PAD TO TOUCH THE HANDLE!

Come back in. Drink some wine. Carry the chopped garlic outdoors and add it to the melting butter. Push the spinach package back off the very hottest part of the grill, so it will stay warm but not scorch while the scallops cook.

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When the butter starts to bubble, add the scallops to the frying pan. Stir. Add a pinch or two or three of dried tarragon, to taste.

Allow the scallops to cook through, without overcooking (this does not take long). If desired, add a little wine to the scallops about the time they appear to be done. If not desired, drink some more wine.

Bring the chopped tomatoes out and add them to the just-about-cooked scallops. Stir briefly.

P1030467While the tomatoes cook, bring the spinach inside. Unwrap it and place it on a plate.  Bring the pan inside and spread the scallops and tomatoes over the spinach. Top with some Parmesan.

Pour more wine and decamp to the table.

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