The Vacation Food Dilemma

Ohdeedoh is featuring the sweetest little guide on how to make a "budget" vacation special, and I normally wouldn't think to share something like this, but this little gem of advice caught my eye:

Splurge on food. You might think a good way to save is to eat hotdogs and Fritos for the whole trip. Don't do that. You should come home from a vacation feeling physically better than when you left. If your kids are picky eaters, this is a great time to introduce new foods as part of the adventure. If your kids are pretty good eaters, then now is the time to push the envelope. At the cabin where we stayed last summer, a gourmet 4 course dinner was included with the lodging. Holy Walleye en Papillote, I told you it was heavenly. A year later and my kids still talk about the palate cleansing sorbet like it was magical elf food from Lord of the Rings. Plus, if you're doing dishes each night, what kind of vacation is that?

This is the line that hit me, and it's amazing to me that it's something I've never really considered before. "You should come home from a vacation feeling physically better than when you left." My mind is blown.

I'm still at the point in my venture into healthy eating that "vacation" for me also means a vacation from having to work hard to figure out fresh, low carb, balanced meals everywhere I go and a chance to go crazy and eat whatever the hell I want. And even though I sort of philosophically agree with the notion that "vacation calories don't count", I don't think I have ever come back from a vacation feeling physically better than when I left. I usually come home feeling in need of recovery.

So my question is this. What's the best way to negotiate that in-the-moment desire to eat something delicious-but-really-bad-for-you while on vacation with the knowledge that it will make you feel crappy, thus keeping you from truly enjoying the non-food aspects of your trip? While this question might sound like a no-brainer to people who don't care much about food, for me, the food wins out nine times out of ten. It's easier at home, but when I'm out enjoying myself, I still haven't shaken that feeling that sugary, starchy food in mass quantities is a crucial component of my good time. When I scrapbook my vacations, pictures of the food and of my friends and me eating usually take center stage. And scrapbooking healthy food does NOT excite me. I mean, if you replaced my fried cheese with a celery stick, would it look as cool?

A First Thyme for Everything

Pardon the pun, but I'm excited to share that today, for the first time in my life, I used a fresh herb in some food. And it just happened to be thyme!

Making it almost 30 years without ever using fresh herbs may sound completely insane to your average home-cook, but for some reason, these things have just somehow never been on my radar screen. Not only am I pretty new to preparing fresh food in general, but I don't remember ever seeing a fresh herb in my house growing up. Sure, I've seen them in the grocery store, but I've always just passed them by, knowing that if I bought them, they'd be doomed to rot away at the back of the fridge.

I'm glad to say that all that has changed due to the easy indoor herb garden I started just a few short weeks ago. I've never had a green thumb or known what to do with plants, but I am capable of pouring water on dehydrated, fertilized soil bricks and sprinkling seeds on top, so my fragrant little windowsill forest came out a success:




The fresh thyme I harvested today is currently hanging out in the Crock Pot along with some veggies waiting to become broccoli cheddar soup (adapted from a cauliflower soup recipe in Leanne Ely's Saving Dinner the Low Carb Way). Broccoli Cheddar Soup is one of my favorite menu items at Panera, but did you know that a 12oz. serving of the stuff has 24 carbs and contains wheat, processed cheese, and modified cornstarch?! Hopefully this homemade version will fill the void.

The Great Blog Revamp: Complete with New Author!

If you visit this site directly rather than view the posts in a reader, you may notice that there have been some changes around here, the most important of which is summed up by the new subtitle for this blog, which now reads:

two twentysomething best friends combat carbs in a delightfully sugary, starchy world

That's right, folks. With the addition of my extremely talented and bitingly witty best friend Katie (posting here as plumpdumpling), Unbreaded has officially become a two-author blog!

Not only will Katie's presence here be the ultimate antidote to my general blog-laziness, but I'm super excited for us to be able to offer our perspectives on struggling to eat healthfully in very different environments. You see, while I live in an Ohio suburban sprawl filled with a million fast food chains and Wal-Marts, retreating to the kitchen to try to keep my carb-consumption in check, Katie lives in the Big Apple, practically kitchenless and relying on restaurant food for nearly every meal. Together, we're the perfect example of how low carb isn't one-size-fits-all, and we hope this blog can become a great forum for discussion on how people can individualize low-carb/low-glycemic eating and make it work for them.

I'll let her introduce herself properly when she posts, but I am so pants-peeingly excited to share the news of her arrival here that I had to let the cat out of the bag. Welcome, Katie!

Not sure what to wear on the 4th?

I love that bacon holds the power to offend patriots and vegetarians at the same time:



Available today only at teefury.com.

Recipe Link: Homemade Peppermint Patties

How exciting is it that the Craft Magazine blog, which tends to showcase sugary sweets and vegan concoctions, recently featured a recipe for a totally low-carb friendly "high-fat, low-sugar version" of York Peppermint Patties?

YUM!
Emily at Joyful Abode writes:

One of my husband’s favorite candies is the York Peppermint Patty. This minty-chocolate treat might not be the most popular candy bar on the market, but it’s not that far of a stretch from his favorite ice cream, mint chocolate chip.

But take a look at this ingredient list:

sugar, corn syrup, semi- sweet chocolate (chocolate, sugar, cocoa, milk fat, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, PGPR, emulsifier, vanillian, artificial flavor), invert sugar, egg whites, and oil of peppermint

Gross, huh? I mean, lots of dieters LOVE York peppermint patties because they’re “OMG FAT FREE!” but with sugar in their ingredient list four times, they’re far from “good for you.” So I set out to make a much more nourishing, high-fat, low-sugar version.

Click through to check out her recipe, which includes Organic Coconut Chips (which I had never heard of but are sugar free and sound delicious). Low-carbers would be wise to omit the honey in the recipe, which Emily even admits wasn't necessary due to the sweetness of the chocolate.

Even if the "real thing" isn't as good for you, there's still no beating their old commercials:

"Cheese-y"? Really?

I've made something similar to this with actual tofu chunks, and I've had my fair share of shirataki, but this looks fantastic:

LOW-CARB SHIRATAKI-RONI & CHEESE-Y NOODLE BAKE
Two 8-oz packages of House Tofu Shirataki Noodles
1 large egg
½ cup ricotta cheese
1/4 cup sour cream
1 cup shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
1/4 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. white pepper
½ tsp. hot pepper sauce

TOPPING
1 Tbs butter, melted
½ cup shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
½ cup seasoned dried low-carb bread crumbs

Yields 4 servings
PREP TIME: 10-15 minutes
COOK TIME: 30 minutes

Preheat oven to 350°.

Prepare noodles according to package directions, below. Cut into 1-inch pieces.

Lightly beat egg in a bowl. Add remaining ingredients and the noodles (not topping ingredients). Stir well. Pour into a well sprayed or buttered 1 ½ quart baking dish.

In another bowl, blend topping ingredients together and sprinkle over noodle mixture.

Bake 25-30 minutes until set and the top is crisp. Serve as a side dish, light supper or breakfast item. Each serving contains 5g net carbs.

(Via Livin' La Vida Low Carb)

Shifty Eggs, and More Reasons to Eat Your Anti-Oxidants

Check out this article from Dr. Jonny Bowden: Scrambled Eggs at the Buffet? Not So Fast!

Apparently, once you break up the yolks in eggs and expose them to air, the otherwise-not-bad-for-you cholesterol starts to oxidize and turn into actually-bad-for-you cholesterol. And the longer the exposure to air, the worse they get.

Luckily, I eat my scrambled eggs as soon as they're cooked so that they're nice and hot, but this information sorta sucks, since scrambled is the only way I trust restaurants to get my eggs the way I like them. (And even then, I get sick of choking down eggs for breakfast. I was always a bacon and home fries only kinda girl.)

Merry Christmas, everyone! One more thing to worry about!

The Politics of Dieting

I realize that I don't blog here very much, and I think one of the reasons for this is that it is really, really hard to reconcile capital-"D"-Dieting with two things I truly believe in: feminism and fat acceptance. And, most of the time, I feel like it's really not worth all the effort it would take to try.

You see, when I read diet-related writing, I often find myself agreeing with a source's premises while disagreeing with its conclusions. Take this Gary Taubes article, for example. I think the research he refers to is crazy-fascinating. When he describes how diverse human bodies are in their calorie-burning/fat-storing abilities, I'm on the edge of my seat and wondering why society can't recognize that we aren't a bunch of predictable calories-in-calories-out machines. But he sort of loses me when he uses this information to prescribe a lower-carb diet for people who are more insulin-resistant in order to regulate blood sugar and prevent fat-storage. In other words, "if you're unlucky enough to be one of those people who easily stores fat, you are doomed to have to suck it up and ditch the bread and pasta." I guess I shouldn't be surprised by it, since it's Gary Taubes and that's what he's all about, but when you try to view the world from a social justice perspective, it just doesn't work.

When I am given information about how naturally different we all are, my brain doesn't translate that information into a belief that some people need to work harder in order to be like everyone else. Instead, I tend to think that there are deeply embedded problems with the ways in which we judge and punish people for not living up to societal ideas of what is and isn't "normal".

I find something SO wrong with our ridiculous cultural expectations: 1) that fat people need to make sacrifices of time, money, energy, and dietary satisfaction in order to become thinner, 2) that fat people must maintain for life whatever strict regimen they adopted to lose weight in order to keep it off, 3) that fat people are always able to lose weight in the first place if they just try hard enough, and 4) that all fat people even WANT to be thin.

I know that there will probably always be concern trolls who yell about how "fat is a health issue!" and "isn't it irresponsible to discourage people from trying to be thin?" I strongly encourage those people to visit here and to start thinking about the complexity of the issue of body size and shape. We are being completely unfair to people when we try to make judgments about someone's health by simply looking at her or his weight.

All that said, are you wondering why the hell I keep a blog about my own low-carb diet? Why do I "diet" in the first place? I often wonder about those same things myself. I think that for me, and for me alone, my personal reasons for doing it are pretty good, but it just bothers me that hardly anyone ever recognizes how completely political fat and dieting can be.

More on this later.

Great Gifts for Low-Carbers

Examiner Columnist Linda Duffy shares some great gift ideas for your favorite low-carb eaters. Skip the cookies, and bring on the meat! Can I just say that I would be ALL about a stocking full of Slim Jims?

Also, check out Jamie Van Eaton's lists of bacon-related gifts. The items on her list are great and all, but she fails to mention this kickass BACON WALLET that was given to me last year by my best friend, or the maple bacon lollipops I sent her in the mail. We have, however, discussed wearing those bacon tuxedos at my wedding.

It's Not That Easy

A couple of things about Oprah, because something about the way the low-carb blogging community is using her situation to promote their diets isn't sitting right with me.

I realize that by "coming out" with this story about her weight-gain, it can be said that she's opened herself up to a discussion about her body. But I see this magazine story as her attempt to respond to negative reactions and criticism she has likely received for her weight gain and not as an invitation for everyone to try and diagnose her "problems". I don't really need to drop links here, because it seems like pretty much everyone has weighed in on it, and they all have the same thing to say.

Like other low-carb bloggers, I feel for Oprah, but not because "She's just been on the wrong diets, and she would have it sooooo easy if she just cut out the carbs!", but because it's ridiculous to me that anyone is making this big of a deal out of 200 pounds. And, frankly, I'm not convinced by this implication that it's easy for everyone to be thin if they only cut down on carbs.

Why do we presume we have all the answers? Based on the weights/sizes/photos they choose to share, not a single low-carb diet blogger I have ever read has a body that is thin or perfect enough for the Hollywood standard set for people like Oprah.

And another thing. Low-carb bloggers who also happen to be doctors aren't her doctor, and it bothers me that, through speculation alone, these folks can presume to announce to their readers that Oprah surely suffers from insulin resistance, or she obviously has some sort of fetal whatchamacallit syndrome.

Just. Stop.