Learning to cook

courtesy of FreeFoodPhotos.com

I thought this was a good topic to start with as it is necessary for eating the way we now eat. I grew up in a family where my mom was ill the last 10 to 15 years of her life. I was 21 when she died. My dad owned a Dairy Queen that had a full food line so I bet you can guess where we ate most of the time. I did learn a little bit about baking from my mom and how to put together a few casseroles (like every good Norwegian) but that sums up my cooking knowledge learned at home. I certainly don’t blame my mom and to be honest even if she had been healthy and lived I really don’t think I would have been interested or had the patience at that point in my life. I tried out a few cooking skills when I was single but until I was married I really didn’t cook much. 

courtesy of FreeFoodPhotos.com

 On to married life and life with kids. Like many people this is the first time I cooked a lot. John doesn’t like to cook so early on we made a deal: I would cook and he would do the dishes. We still have that deal and I love it! During this time I turned to cookbooks (it was pre-internet) and tried my hand at lots of things in them but really mainly casseroles and crock pot recipes and later things on the grill. I had a few things that the kids like but really I was not a very good cook. One of the things really lacking was vegetables. I was a very picky eater when I was young and it wasn’t until after college that I was willing to try them. I still think I have a ways to go with that but I do eat quite a few veggies now and have some recipes both John and I love.

So when did I actually learn to cook? About 2 years ago. As full time RVers, one of the things we do is work-camp which is basically volunteering time in exchange for our RV site. Sometimes these gigs pay but not this one. We were in Northern California near the little town of Winters. This is such a beautiful area and is still one of my favorite places we’ve stayed. Our commitment was for 4 months and usually we both work but to our surprise when we arrived, they didn’t need me but needed John for 24 hours. This campground is in a great area but sits next to the mountains/hills between it and Napa so there was no cell service, minimal wi-fi was provided by the park (enough for email) and there was zip for TV reception. We were, however, able on our site to get a dish signal. This is when I truly discovered the Food Network. I  also learned to knit when I was there so while John worked, I knitted and watched the Food Network. Now when I tell others that is where I learned to cook their response is usually about how they always make complicated dishes and use ingredients they can’t find. That is true some of the times but I found plenty that were accessible.  What I really gained were techniques that I was truly clueless about:

• How to cut up an onion, there was a much better way than I was doing.
• Knife skills in general and the best way to cut up a variety of fruits and veggies
• How to saute, braise, caramelize etc.
• Tools like the immersion blender, which is now one of my most used appliances.
• I never knew you needed to let meat rest after cooking, I always served it hot out of the oven.
• What a roux was and how to make it.
• Parchment paper, no one ever explained how to use this wonderful stuff!
• Roasting vegetables, now my favorite way to eat them.
• Differences in what oils you use and when ( however we limit the types of oils we use, check out Gillespie’s Big Fat lies for the reasons).
• How to blanch vegetables (like I said, I was clueless).

courtesy of FreeFoodPhotos.com

That’s just a sampling but I am so thankful for the time I had to learn these things because I was truly clueless. I am sure many of you have much more knowledge than I did and if you learned it from your mom make sure you thank her for it and give her a hug. (I would love to hug my mom again for any reason.)

The other thing northern California gave me was a love of good, fresh, organic produce. We were only 20 miles from Davis, where they have a year round permanent farmers’s market. We went about every other week and nothing will make you a vegetable lover like amazing produce. We still visit farmer’s markets every chance we get but we have not found a market that we have enjoyed more.

So if you feel like you don’t know how to cook and you have access to the Food Channel, I am hear to tell you to turn it on. Watch not just the recipe but the techniques and I am sure your cooking will improve. I’m going to end this here but  if you are planning on learning to eat better, learning to cook is a must. 

Welcome

Welcome to our new and developing blog about our food journey. We are full time RVers and if that interests you we also have a travel blog Flamingo On A Stick. We are both retired and all our life we have struggled with weight issues but otherwise have been remarkably healthy. However, as we age we know there will be more issues that arise. We both come from families with type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Over the years we have tried various diets and exercise with some success but in the end we always ended up where back where we started. Or worse. So our dilemma is about what can we do to stay healthy and how can we stick with it. One day John followed a link he found on reddit (his favorite internet site) to a couple books and a Youtube video.  This information impacted him greatly and he set about getting me to read and see the video too. My first reaction when he began telling me some of the information was “Oh no, here we go again, down the merry path of another fad”. However, after all my reading and watching what I felt was “Oh no, for most of my life I have been one big experiment for the food industry and they are winning!”

There are a lot of diets out there right now that touch on some of this such as the whole foods idea (which this is totally onboard with), the Paleo Diet which has some similarities and others. We are not endorsing any specific diet or any diet products. We will give links to some of the books and articles we’ve read and eventually I want to share with you some of the recipes I have found, always linking back to the source, and some recipes I have developed along the way. What we really want to stress is that you individually need to decide how you want to eat and live, this is just what we have decided to do and share. We don’t feel this is the magic bullet to health or even weight loss (in fact any weight loss we derive from this we expect to be very slow) as there are still lots of factors out there. This is very simply a blog to share what we’ve found and what we are doing. 

To start this off I am going to repost here, the post I put on other blog when this whole journey began. Whenever you see a Captain’s log that is John and I am hoping to get him to write on this blog a little more than he does on the other one. He can be very entertaining.

So here is the post “Whats for Lunch?” from Flamingo on a stick:

Captains's Log:

If I'm making lunch, it'll be something quick. Leftovers if we have any. Maybe peanut butter and saltines with string cheese and a beer. If there are any hard boiled eggs, those are always good. Mashed up with salt, pepper, hot sauce and olive oil and you have a fast, and really good, egg salad. Not too long ago, I would've just ripped open a power bar or a granola bar.

But then I read a book by David Gillespie called Sweet Poison. He's a lawyer in Australia who became interested in why so many of us were over weight, and why that trend is accelerating. Lawyers aren't trained in science or nutrition, but they know how to research a topic and build a case, and he proceeds to build a case against added sugar in our diets that is hard to refute. I was convinced, and I convinced Janie we should stop eating any foods with added sugar. No soft drinks, no power bars, no granola bars ... you get the idea. When you start reading labels, you end up eliminating most processed foods. We ignored the nutritional information on the label and went right to the list of ingredients. If sugar, sucrose, fructose, high fructose corn syrup, any other kind of syrup, fruit juice, fruit juice concentrate, agave, "natural sugars" or the like was there then it had sugar added. What all these sugars had in common was: they all contained fructose, a simple sugar found in fruit and (to some extent) vegetables. Our bodies can tolerate small amounts of fructose but it is essentially metabolized by the liver as a toxin. Glucose is the sugar we need, but it doesn't taste as sweet as fructose so most added sugar contains some fructose also. The exception is dextrose, or maltose, which is just another name for glucose. If dextrose is the only sugar in the list of ingredients, then that's good. Eat all you want. Maltose is the sugar used in brewing beer, so beer is good. But we already knew that. Of course fruit contains fructose also, but you can (and should) eat the whole fruit. Fruit juice, however, is not allowed because it concentrates the sugar (nobody will eat five apples in a single sitting but it's easy to toss down a small glass of apple juice containing the juice from those five apples).

So eliminating added sugar wasn't going to be easy, or convenient, but it was doable and necessary. There was also another gotcha: sugar is addictive. For some reason, your brain is wired for a positive pleasure response to sugar, another reason why the food industry loves adding it to whatever food they want you to buy and consume. Withdrawing from sugar is not unlike withdrawing from other addictive substances. We decided to just go cold turkey and get it over with. It took a couple of weeks, but I no longer miss my granola bars.

I love all the stuff I can still eat and drink. Although alcohol is another toxin metabolized by the liver, Mr. Gillespie maintains it is ultimately less harmful than fructose and does suppress your appetite as real food would (fructose doesn't affect your appetite because your body doesn't recognize it as food, so you still feel hungry). Excessive fructose in our diets has been shown to have a clear link to heart disease in many studies, unlike saturated fats and dietary cholesterol, which have never been shown to have any correlation to heart disease. Not one single study. But how is that possible? Everyone knows you should trim the fat from your steak, that you shouldn't even be eating steak, that skim milk is better for you than whole milk, that margarine is better for you than butter, that you should limit the number of high cholesterol eggs you eat. How could we have been so wrong for so long without any supporting evidence?

For that you would have to go back to the seven country study shortly after World War II that showed a strong correlation between the increase in the consumption of meat with a significant rise in diseases of the heart. The study was compiled by Ancel Keys of the University of Minnesota. After the war he had nutritional data from twenty two countries. Had he used all twenty two countries, he would have shown there was no correlation between eating meat and heart disease. So he selected seven countries, including the US, that showed both a rise in meat consumption and a rise in heart disease and concluded that meat and saturated fats were responsible. Had he included only the fifteen countries he eliminated, it would have shown a reverse correlation: the more meat consumed the lower the incidence of heart disease. But he was popular enough from his work during the war (he invented the K ration used by our troops) that he was able to persuade many people. It was enough for Procter and Gamble to promote their (new) Crisco shortening as a healthier alternative to saturated animal fats. Low fat became a new industry, and as fat came out, sugar went in because removing the fat meant removing the flavor and sugar helped replace that. It set up the perfect storm we have yet to recover from.

It's not my intent to convince you, just to say that I'm convinced and I would encourage you to do your own research. There is a free video on YouTube called: The Bitter Truth by Dr. Lustig that inspired much of this. Sweet Poison I've already mentioned, but there's another book by the same author I would also recommend: Big Fat Lies.  So have a beer with your bacon cheese burger and don't worry, your body will tell you when to stop.