New Years Goals- In Search of more vegetables!

Canyon Lake TX

We have put the jacks down in the Hill Country of Texas for awhile. How long? Not sure, all depends on the weather. We had a couple days of rain and cold but today the sun is back out and it is warming up so we may stay a while longer or we may scoot further west. Taking this winter day by day.

I’ve been thinking for awhile about this blog and where I want to go. I want to continue to share with you recipes and our journey. The journey is not a static thing, no journey is so as we learn and go along we may take detours along the way and change up things as we feel the need. John is my researcher and really the driving force behind the scenes but for me it is all about implementation. Knowledge without action gets you nowhere fast. However I also know my shortcoming and realize I am often the Queen of Good Intentions and my follow thru has something to be desired, but I have resolved to be better.

One of my big goals, that I have to drag John along on, is vegetables. Neither of us grew up in a household that ate a lot of vegetables consequently they have never been on our favorites list or on our plates a lot until the last few years. We have made strides here but I think we have a long way to go. I want to get to the point where grabbing some veggies for a snack is normal and that veggies are on every lunch and dinner plate. One of the things that means is learning how to cook vegetables and prepare things that we like and look forward to. 

A couple years ago I found a recipe on Pinterest that was labeled “If you have never liked broccoli then you need to try it like this”. I don’t mind broccoli though it had never been my favorite but John really didn’t like raw or steamed broccoli. I asked if I tried this new recipe would he be willing to give it another taste test? Yup, he was on board. I tried to find the exact recipe so I could give it credit but I failed. I have changed it just a little to make a little simpler so here it is:

Roasted Broccoli:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees

Cut up broccoli into small bite-sized pieces as evenly sized as you can

Place on on parchement lined  baking pan (you want sides or the oil dribbles off the sides)

Drizzel with olive oil and toss to coat

Roast in oven for 20 to 25 minutes.

The edges may get a little brown but thats ok.

Remove from oven and drizzel with fresh lemon juice and sprinkle (I just grate it over it) parmesan cheese.

John’s reaction was “this is amazing” and now it has become one of our favorite recipes. It also opened my eyes to roasting all kinds of vegetables. I’ve roasted green beans, cauliflower, snap peas, potatoes and carrots. What is really great about this technique is  the veggies stay crisp, no more soggy veggies! 

I think now I need to try more and different vegetables and find fun recipes that fit into our eating plan (no fructose or seed oils) and give them a try. I have been using Pinterest with abandon and I’ll keep you posted on things we deem a success. 

I will end with that today but I have been experimenting with new bread recipies and I want to share that with you soon too. My blogging has always had its up and downs, so don’t be surprised if there are some long pauses but the Queen of Good Intentions is trying to become the Queen of Getting Follow Thru.  :)

Baking Bread

The Captain needs a break so as first mate, I will step up and do a little blogging. When you get into this life of no fructose and trying to eat as little processed food as possible some things can be a little challenging. One of those was finding bread made with either no sugar or just dextrose. It is actually a little scary to read the ingredient label of most breads on the shelves of our stores. Even this staple of life seems to be a chemistry experiment. I understand why, as they need to make it last but after I read the label It just doesn’t look that appetizing. Commercially we have found a few, mainly sourdough breads,that meet the criteria. Last summer we would splurge sometimes and buy Panera’s sourdough which is sugar free and if you go through the bakery department sometimes you will find some there too. For the most part though, I have decided to make our bread.

I actually got interested in making my own bread after reading a review of the book “Artesian Bread in 5 minutes a Day” by Jeffery Hertzberg MD and Zoe Francois. They have a method of making bread that is a little different but I gave it a try and we are very happy with the results. This won’t work for everyone as even though you only handle the bread for a couple minutes there is some rising time and baking time that you do have to be around for, so I think the 5 minutes a day part is a little misleading. It definitely would work for those that work at home, are at home mothers or like us are retired and are around a good portion of the day. 

I don’t feel it’s right to give you the recipe but I did link to the book. I will show you the steps and a little about the equipment involved.

First you need a food grade container with a lid. I use a 4 qt.food grade container,  the book calls for a 6 qt one. The 4 qt. seems big enough to me. The bread is actually mixed in this bucket and then left to rise for 2 hours. At that time it goes into the refrigerator with the lid on loosely. You can make a loaf from this after the 2 hours but it really does better if it has been left in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight. When you are ready to bake, pull off a piece of the dough and form a ball. No kneading is necessary and they explain in the book how to handle the dough. I place my loaf on a floured piece of parchment paper and cover with plastic wrap. It then needs to sit and raise for about 90 minutes.  After 90 minutes you preheat the oven with a pizza stone on the middle rack and the oven set at 450 degrees. Just before baking you will brush it with a little water and make a couple slits with a serrated knife in the top of the loaf. After the oven/ stone have pre-heated you slide the dough onto the pizza stone and in a broiler pan below it you add a cup of water that adds the element of steam to the baking. Bake the loaf on the parchment paper for 20 min then slide it off the paper directly onto the stone and bake for another 20 minutes. After all this, out comes a beautiful loaf of homemade bread. Delicious!

It seems like a lot of work but the mixing only takes about 10 minutes and getting it ready to bake less than 5 min. The rest is just waiting time. 

Like I said, this will work for some and maybe not for others of you. I love the process and the product so it is what I have chosen to do. I did consider a bread machine also but because I have the time this works for me. I think if I had kids at home and was working, the bread machine would be a good alternative. Then a little research to find a non-sugar recipe.

There are some challenges to living with out processed sugar and some of them take time. What I hope is to show you some of the ways I have found to deal with these changes. Even though I usually have the time I really don’t want to spend everyday cooking and baking so I am working on some future posts to how you how I get around some of that too.

Captain’s Log: More from the captain’s inbox

 

Our temporary fall home. Campbellsville KY

Many of you didn’t have any questions, but that’s never stopped the captain from answering them anyway:

So maybe I’ll give up sugar for a bit and see how it goes. Like after Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. Or next year.

It’s your life, but if you want to see lasting results you need to make some permanent changes. Sugared soft drinks are the largest contributor to added sugar in most people’s diet, so if that’s the case for you, start there. Use diet soft drinks if that helps, but after a couple of weeks you’ll want to quit using artificial sweeteners also. Without fructose containing sugars in your diet, you’ll find the artificial sweeteners will taste different, and not in a good way.  All for the good.

So if I give up foods with added sugar, I’ll lose weight. Right?

Maybe. Probably not quickly if you do. There is some good news here, however. Because fructose is metabolized by the liver as a toxin, the resulting calories don’t affect your appetite as calories from glucose and fats would. So calories from fructose are extra calories if you tend to keep eating as long as you’re  hungry, like most people. Once your appetite starts responding to all of the food you eat, you’ll have a much better chance of eating only as much as you need. For example, one of the hormones responsible for regulating your appetite is secreted by fat cells. The more fat you have the sooner you’ll feel full, so it should be easier to lose weight if you start out overweight. Theoretically.

So I don’t need to count calories, I just need to eat when I’m hungry?

Yep. Let your appetite tell you when to eat and how much to eat, as long as you limit the fructose in your diet to whole fruit (no fruit juice, no added sugar other than glucose).

What about exercise?

Gillespie (Sweet Poison, Big Fat Lies) makes the case that increasing your activity also increases your appetite, making it a wash for losing weight. There are health benefits to an active life, but if weight loss is your goal modifying your diet has a much bigger effect than increasing your activity. Your activity level drops as you gain weight because you gained weight. You didn’t gain weight because your activity level dropped. So if you feel like it , go for it, but don’t feel guilty if you don’t work out.

When can I go back to eating donuts?

Up to you but it’s not just obesity we’re talking about. Even skinny people can develop heart disease and type 2 diabetes, both of which have a direct link to excess fructose. There is some evidence that fructose is addictive (Janie sure thinks so, just from her experience) so there’s that too. You don’t have to wonder what will happen if you go back to eating foods with added sugar, you’ve already been there.

So how do I know if sugar has been added to a package food?

Easy. Just find the nutritional information, skip all of it, and read the list of ingredients right below it (the fine print). There isn’t any useful information in the nutritional information, including the amount of sugar, since we are only concerned with added sugar. Look for anything in the ingredients that looks like sugar, including sugar, cane sugar, fruit concentrate, honey, high fructose corn syrup, any other syrup... you get the idea. Dextrose is all glucose, so it’s acceptable. I think corn syrup is glucose also, but I still don’t like to see it as an ingredient.

Actually, this doesn’t sound so difficult. Just eliminate food with added sugar. And eat whole fruit instead of fruit juice. Anything else?

Sure. I haven’t even mentioned seed oils yet, because that’s another topic entirely. Maybe next time.

Cheers.

Captain's Log: The captain is in

The captain likes to take time time to answer questions, even if they're from imaginary readers. Here's a sample of my imaginary inbox:

If you're so smart, why are you so fat?

Good point. And the captain is glad you had to bring that up. What does a retired engineer and fake captain know about nutrition anyway? Well I'm glad you asked. I've been trained to think logically, but that doesn't mean I can't be fooled or that my education gives me some sort of advantage. It may even be a hindrance. My cousin sent me an interesting article from the Boston Globe on why facts are often ignored, especially by people who know they're right.  

If we don't question the things we know, how will we ever learn anything new? But back to your question. There is some information out there that seems to indicate that added sugar, specifically added fructose, contributes to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. I have a family history for all of these, and it's only been six months since I quit eating food with added sugar, so cut me some slack. After a lifetime of abuse, it's going to take some time.

So if sugar is so bad for you, why haven't I heard more about it?

Because you don't watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. Here's the show on sugar if you missed it: 

There are numerous other sources of information on this topic, but some of it gets a little confusing. There are articles on why high fructose corn syrup is no worse than any other sugar and I totally agree. It's not the source of the sugar that's the problem, it's the amount of fructose those sugars contain that's being added to you diet. HFCS doesn't contain any more fructose than ordinary table sugar (cane sugar).

If fructose is that bad for you, the government would be all over it.

It took almost a hundred years for the FDA to come out with warnings about tobacco, even though there was overwhelming evidence that it was bad for you much earlier than that. Big sugar is big business.

Well, I'm not going to quit eating donuts. I don't care what you say.

Spoken like a true addict. Listen to yourself. You're exhibiting symptoms of addiction and that's exactly what it is. That's why moderation may not be the best way to go here. Treat your addiction like an addiction and just quit. No cheat days. None of that stuff. See the John Oliver video.

Well the captain ran out of wine, so that's all for now. Cheers.

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.