10 Non- Hate-Myself Eating Guidelines

I am not really one to be very disciplined  especially  when it comes to eating. ( I love eating!)  However, I do subconsciously follow some guidelines that help me enjoy my food and not leave me feeling regretful about my choices.

1. I shy away from excessively sweet treats. –  While I don’t abstain completely from all sweets, I have grown a liking to desserts that don’t need to be really sweet to be delicious.  I find the less sugar I consume, the more my sweet sensitivity increases, which makes everything sweeter.

2.  Reaching 80% of stomach capacity is considered “being full”.  Reaching 90%-100% is level “hate-myself”, which takes away from the satisfaction  of the meal.-This is hard at buffets, but if I want to try a lot of food I take a small amount of everything and go back for more of the favorites.

3. Healthy snacking  around the clock.- Every 2-3 hours  I am munching on something: hummus, halva, almonds, pistachios, protein bars, left over breakfast, the important thing is not to let myself go without food for a long period of time.

4.  No heavy eating after 6pm, no eating after 10pm.-  If I get too hungry before bed I drink herbal tea to fool my stomach. If that doesn’t work, I get something  light…maybe going to bed earlier helps.

5. Made-from-scratch/Homemade meal preference.-  I try to avoid processed foods with a lot of artificial  ingredients.  The more made-from-scratch the better.   I also steer towards non-chain restaurants.

6.  No Sodas!- I drink plenty water during the day.  Natural fruit juices are also great, but sodas, and sugary drinks don’t really appeal to me.

7.  Drinking 15-30 mins before meals or 1.5 hours after.-  I have grown used not having anything to drink  with my meals. Which draws me towards meals with sauces and dips. 

8. Healthy fats- I have a deep appreciation  for healthy fats.  I just love guacamole, olive oil, coconut oil, nuts & all of the creamy goodness of healthy fats.

9. Not a Meat Lover.- It’s true, I love an occasional burger, pastrami sanwich, or Philly  cheese steak, but if I don’t eat meat for a while I don’t really miss it too much.  I really enjoy Mediterranean and Indian food because they are so good at serving up hearty dishes where meat’s absence is hardly noticed.

10. Aim to enjoy not regret- I strive to eat foods that will leave me with a warm, comforting, satisfying glow, and not a belly full of regret.  I do occasionally go over board, but my lasting goal is truly enjoying the food I love.

Sara’s Frugality Tips: Learning to Live More Efficiently (Tips#11-20)

Tip#11- You would be surprised at how long well taken care of disposable really last.  Even though disposable products wouldn’t really be my first option in the first place.

Tip#12- Bring lunch to work.  If you work 5 days a week, and typically spend even $5 on lunch, you are still spending around $100 in just lunch.

Tip#13- Leftovers are money savers, but don’t just reheat them, revive them, create something new. Saving money can also be appetizing.

Tip#14- Only spend on your credit card the money you have available to you from other sources. Credit is not your money, so pay it all back as soon as possible.

Tip#15- The internet can provide us with countless more efficient alternatives. One of my favorites: Textbook purchases. Half.com, amazon.com, etc.

Tip#16- I really wanted to save money with textbooks, so I would buy the previous editions for a lot less.

Tip#17- Take care of your teeth, dentist bills are expensive.

Tip#18- Take care of yourself in general, medical bills are expensive.

Tip#19-FIFO (first in, first out) ideal way of managing grocery inventory at the house.

Tip#20- Recycling- good for environment, good for your piggy bank.

Eating Less Meat and The Inevitable Protein Intake Question

“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.” — Sir Paul McCartney

Being an animal lover, and  a general respecter of life,  it sickens me to see the reality of how we barbarically obtain the flesh of different animals for our consumption.  This awakens in me a strong desire to go vegetarian.  However, I have titled this: “Eating Less Meat…”, instead of eating NO meat, because I cannot promise that I will never ever touch any meat product again.  (Sometimes I am invited to family or friends’ homes, and they include meat products in what they cook.  I am not going to obessive-compulsively demand they cook vegetarian just for me, nor am I going to inquire about all the ingredients they have used.)  My desire, and drive is to lead a minimal to no meat lifestyle, and while I cannot ensure 100%  that I will never touch a meat product again, I will definitely do what I can to not purchase it for my home, or order it at a restaurant, etc.

Buying Little to No Meat For The Past Year: And Yes, I Cook For My Husband

Our original reason for buying less meat at the supermarket started out  about saving money.  A little over a year ago, meat prices where we currently lived were outrageous.  The cheapest meat was around $3.00lb, and I don’t even want to get into how a gallon of milk had shot up to $6.00 each.  Living on a $40 a week food budget, I didn’t want to sacrifice my eating out for these items at the grocery store.  What to do? What to do?  Simple, stop buying meat (and milk while I was at it).  So, as my father would think, if there is no meat how do you make a meal?   Well, luckily around the same time we also began following a diet brought to our attention by a well-known alternative medicine doctor in Puerto Rico.  He claimed that by eating potatoes, and carrots, these would supply the necessary nutrients the body needed, while helping the body lose weight, and heal itself.  I was concerned about my body healing itself, my husband was concerned about losing the weight.  We didn’t stick strictly to his diet, but we began eating meals composed of potatoes, carrots, beets, steamed vegetables, and brown rice.  My husband is an ex-carnivore, but he was very open to change, and it was great to see how he appreciated the new flavors, great post-meal feeling, and the health benefits that the new meals brought him.  (Side-note:  He lost 20-30 lbs during this time.)

Nutrition in a Potato

You are probably thinking: potatoes????, Aren’t they full of carbs?, How can you lose weight with that??? Are they full of carbs? Yes, complex carbs which take longer to burn in your system, providing a more steady flow of energy.  Think of sugars as firewood. You need them for energy, and your body burns it. Simple sugars or simple carbs, are like twigs they burn fast, and only last a short period of time.  You might get a burst of energy from them, but then you crash.  Complex carbohydrates are more like logs that burn low, and slow for hours providing a more steady flame.  No crash here.   Much like a grain of rice most of the nutrients are towards the outer part of the potato, with starch  in the middle. Most people eat the potato without the peel, and only the inner part of the rice grain, essentially, not enough nutrient- to- starch ratio. Then they assume potatoes make you obese.    To start off with, it’s all in the preparation, the glycemic index of a potato changes with the way you prepare it.  A baked potato has a higher index than a boiled one.  Also, we would boil our potatoes skins, and all, preserving the essential nutrients.  We would only top our potatoes with extra virgin olive oil.

Addressing The Protein Intake Question

As all people who dare to defy the consumption of meat, of course I get the protein intake question, but I have a few questions myself:

What is protein, and what does it do for our body? 

Protein’s  basic structure is a chain of amino acids used to repair, and maintain our body.  Imagine proteins, as building blocks for our body.  While the correct blend of amino acids create the right protein, T. COLIN CAMPBELL, PHD states “Animal proteins also have a higher concentration of sulphur-containing amino acids that get metabolized to acid-generating metabolites. As a result, a slightly lower physiological pH must be corrected and buffers like calcium are used to attenuate these adverse acid effects–to the disadvantage of the host.”  Meaning it takes your much-needed calcium to be useful, not to mention the strain added to your liver, kidneys, and cholesterol levels.

How much do we really need? 

According to  Paige Waehner in  Calculating Your Protein Needs “Most experts believe that most people get more than enough protein daily. In fact, some believe the average sedentary American eats about 50% more than the recommended daily amount, which ranges from 40-70 grams each day depending on your gender, age and situation.

If you’re an exerciser, however, your protein needs may increase since resistance training and endurance workouts can rapidly break down muscle protein. A position statement published by the ADA, DOC and ACSM recommends that endurance and strength-trained athletes have between 1.2 and 1.7 g/kg (0.5 – 0.8 grams per pound) of protein for the best performance and health.

What if you’re trying to build more muscle? Shouldn’t you eat even more protein? Not necessarily.  There’s evidence that bodybuilders, much like exercisers or athletes, do require more protein but that any more than double the RDA won’t necessarily help you build more muscle.  In one study, experts studied three groups of weight lifters:  A low protein group (0.86 g/kg), a moderate protein group (1.40 g/kg) and a high protein group (2.40 g/kg) and found that, “There were no effects of varying protein intake on indexes of lean body mass.”

In essence, the more you exercise, the greater your protein needs will be.  However, taking it too far, for example more than doubling your protein intake, won’t necessarily help you build more muscle.

                                      How to Calculate Your Protein Needs:

1. Weight in pounds divided by 2.2 = weight in kg             2. Weight in kg x 0.8-1.8 gm/kg = protein gm.

Use a lower number if you are in good health and are            sedentary (i.e., 0.8). Use a higher number (between 1 and 1.8) if you are under stress, are pregnant, are recovering from an illness, or if            you are involved in consistent and intense weight or endurance            training.

Example: 154 lb male who is a regular exerciser and lifts            weights             154 lbs/2.2 = 70kg             70kg x 1.5 = 105 gm protein/day.”

(All of this information is not mine, but comes from the same previously mentioned  article.)

What other sources can we get it from? 

Let’s start by looking at all the other items located in the “Meats/Protein” section of the Standard American Diet (SAD) pyramid.  Well, lookie there, apparently beans, eggs, and nuts are adequate substitutes, even according to that pyramid.  Believe it or not, even foods like potatoes have a certain amount of protein.  For everything else, you can get your amino acids from things like brewer’s yeast (which helped with my vitamin b12 levels, giving me more energy) to quinoa.    According to a vegan athlete I saw on the documentary “Vegucated” it’s about: “Quality over quality” when it comes to proteins.

So…What Do I Buy/Eat?

I make my spaghetti with mushrooms, I order a bean burrito instead of meat, I just generally steer towards non-meat products.  That has always come naturally to me, now I have more reason for it.

My Food Reviews on Foodiespr.com

It was an honor to be invited to be a food writer for foodiespr.com.  You can see my reviews in Spanish, and English on http://www.foodiespr.com/author/sara-dunphy/.  I write about food made in my area: the Northwest area of Puerto Rico.

What a Hamburger Should Be

I am just going to open with this:  I am not a meat lover.  That said, a few foods containing meats do attract my attention, and appetite from time to time.  You may have read my review of my much-loved pastrami sandwich.   As I stated, this is one of the foods that stop me from completely being a vegetarian, along with some other fabulous proteins.  Therefore, once a week or so, I indulge in one of these treats, sticking to mainly a vegetable diet the rest of the week. (I cannot deprive myself entirely!)  Now, on to the hamburger!

This might sound backwards, but I start with the bun.  When I first look at a hamburger, what attracts me the most is the bun.  The holder of the entire creation.  Yes, it may just be because us hypoglycemic people are just carb crazy, but if the bun is not right, the hamburger is ruined.  The shape is definitely important, but more than that, it has to be fresh.  So fresh, that when pulled apart, it has to stretch, not crumble. Bread flour is higher in gluten than other flours, giving it the elastic consistency.  Cakes are the opposite, they are meant to crumble, but breads and pizza dough are supposed to stretch, have elasticity.  I always check for that.  If the bread falls apart, it ruins the hamburger.  Also, I never used to notice it, but when the bun is toasted on the grill it makes a big difference.  You get that buttery yellow color on the otherwise pale bun, with the caramelized, crunchy sears from the grill. Amazing! Now, that is a new requirement for the hamburger buns.

Besides the bun, the most important component of the hamburger is the actual hamburger patty.  The meat has to be real meat first of all.  I hate those fake meats that contain some meat, and then meat fillers, and it all looks and tastes too synthetic for me.  While I am not a vegetarian, I do like to eat foods as close to natural as possible.  So, if I am going to eat a hamburger it is going to be real, and real good tasting.  Of course, it has to be seasoned adequately, not too much or too little, just right.  It cannot be too tough, or break apart soft.  It has to have the right texture, because I am very particular about texture.  Even if food tastes excellent, if the texture is not right, I won’t like it. The patty, which I always have to look at from all angles before eating, has to have the sear marks from the grill, not all of them, but I want to know it was cooked on the grill.  And, yes, I order my hamburgers well-done.  I do not order any meat less than well done, I have just always been like that since childhood.  It probably has something to do with the fact that my father loves rare meat, and that has always grossed me out.

About toppings, I am a vegetable lover, so pile on the lettuce, tomatoes, onions (red, preferably), and any other burger-worthy vegetables.  To me a burger looks more appetizing when it has more vegetables. I remember Guy Fieri talking about his meat to vegetable ratio, mine tips the scale in favor of veggies.  I love cheeseburgers, but mostly mushroom-swiss.  If it is american cheese, for me, it should be between two patties so it can melt really nice.  Yes, I have my requirements for cheese, like I do for ketchup.  Ketchup can only go on dark meats, or textured meats.  For me, ketchup does not belong on grilled chicken, breaded chicken maybe, but not smooth meats, it doesn’t go on lunchmeats either.  However, hamburgers are perfect for the application of ketchup.  Oh, and since I usually don’t drink anything with my meal, the foods I eat cannot be dry.  Hence the love of veggies, and ketchup, (mayo is accepted, but not required).

I have to say, the majority of the fast foods (at least the ones I have in my area) do not even come close to making hamburgers right.  I have only tasted my ideal hamburger once or twice, but I do not yet have a place to find them.  Most of the burgers I have tasted fail in at least one of my established criteria.  Thus, falling short of being the ideal burger.  Therefore, I will continue my search for that burger, and when I find it, I will definitely update this post.

 

> June 22, 2012- I think I found it:  It’s called Rock-A-Burger https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Rock-A-Burger/160678270714951

My Food To Do List

I still need to express in writing my view of the perfect pizza.

I am looking forward to making pasta dough, and gnocchi ravioli from scratch.

Sometimes, when I am about to fall asleep, my mind keeps running about food.  And all these ideas start appearing.

Emara’s Food

Emara’s Food

This is the album of some of our creations that we use to make.

Food Brings People Together

My childhood was spent mostly in restaurants.   The owners of the restaurants most likely regretted having announced: “2 Kids eat free with every Adult entrée”, when my family composed of exactly 2 adults and 4 kids would show up.  My father loved taking our family out to eat, but he wasn’t one to spend a dollar over what he absolutely had to, so he conveniently found all the restaurants where these offers existed.  Thus, at one point in my childhood I clearly remember the following weekly restaurant schedule: Mondays- Rex’s Chicken (similar to KFC), Wednesdays- Shoney’s (all you can eat salad bar), and Fridays- Pizette’s (Pizza Buffet).  Of course by that time I was probably already 8 years old, but my memories of eating out went even farther back.

Ever since I can remember, maybe since I was a tiny 3-year-old living in Tulsa, I remember going to the grand Harvest Buffet where the delights seemed endless, barely being able to look at the food on display, and getting help from total strangers to reach the food I wanted. I remember Po Folks, where Southern and Western foods were always being served.  We weren’t real fast food people, except for the occasional Taco Mayo were the tacos were amazingly only 30 cents!! My father preferred going to restaurants, it was the experience that would bring us together often, and I might say, united us as a family.

No, it was not the restaurant that magically would bring the family together, it was because it gave us all a chance to sit together and share before the food came.  My father felt very strongly about the family always eating together, even at home, he wanted us to all sit at the table and eat together.  I didn’t realize it then, but that was a key to our family unity.

Years later, when we moved to Puerto Rico, even though we were pretty bad off financially, my father would at least take us out to get fried chicken and fries for $1.50 a box, in his effort to continue keeping the family close.  Unfortunately, we were all, fast becoming teenagers, which meant our attitudes, and busier lives were drawing us apart, to the point where we would no longer have any meal at home together.  Everyone would eat when they could, on the couch, or preferably at a friend’s home, and the family times became almost exclusively at restaurants.

Dad found a pizza place where pizza was inexpensive and good, and would find any excuse to pile us all into the cramped, beat up, Ford Taurus to get there.  We also developed a fondness for certain fast foods like Burger King, but later our best-loved fast food spot was Wendy’s.  At one point in my teenage years, we would literally go to Wendy’s everyday.  Even when Mom would cook, we would eat early, and magically be hungry a few hours later, so we could head out to Wendy’s.  If we went out to a church activity or service, you could be 100% sure where we would end up after, no matter how late it was.  We ate out 5-7 times per week, mostly fast food, but at least once a week, we would go to a restaurant.

Dad always had an eye for finding good restaurants.  On one of his work outings, he spotted an Italian Trattoria named Cano’s.  We tried it and fell in love, in fact, my sisters’ fifteenth birthday party was celebrated there, and we stayed as loyal customers. Even, when my family left Puerto Rico after 9 years, my husband and I would continue going there every single week.  He shares my love for good food, so it easily became our favorite restaurant, uniting our tiny, new family composed of 2.

Never had the idea that food brought people together hit me so hard as when I saw my family actually come home for dinner, for the first time in a long time.  At that time, I wasn’t married yet, but my parents were living in the States already.  It was just one of my older sisters, my brother, and I at home.  The reality was there was no one appointed as the cook, all of us worked, so we kind of just fended for ourselves.  I would eat at my boyfriend’s house, where his parents would effortlessly cook up wonderful Puerto Rican cuisine.  Meanwhile, my sister and brother would go to Wendy’s for their daily bread.  Cooking at home was out of the question, the only one who knew how to cook was me, and I wasn’t about to assume that responsibility myself if no one else was going to cook either.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved to cook, and now even more, but at that point I wanted the responsibilities to be shared.  If I was going to cook for us, my sister would have to too.  In the midst of this time in our lives, we became good friends with a man who knew a great deal about cooking.  He would cook for all of us, and have the meal ready when we arrived from work.  The first day he cooked for us, I remember calling my brother to tell him to come home after work to eat.  That was the first time in years, my brother came home right after work just for a meal.  Setting the table that first day, knowing we were all going to sit together, and eat, for the first time in maybe years, made me realize the uniting power of food.

A New Found Favorite

Even though I have written about donuts and pastrami sandwiches, which don’t fit into the natural/healthy food category, I have a deep passion for natural and healthy foods. However, I could almost never find a place that served healthy food. Luckily, I happened upon such a place on a visit to a health food store.  The cafeteria sells foods approved in a certain alternative medicine doctor’s recommended mono-diet where there is a limited amount of foods that can be eaten, strictly vegetarian and the base of the meals are potatoes.  Besides all the awesome potato recipes they have come up with like potato “mofongo”, they introduced me to beets.  I had never really enjoyed beets before, but they serve up shredded beets in a salad which they top off with a delicious dressing.  What attracts me about the beets is the color, so intense, so beautiful, so invading of all the other foods it touches.  I had heard about beet sugar, but the beets do not taste sweet.  The taste and smell were a bit strange at first, but now that is exactly what opens my appetite.  This week, I headed to the supermarket and got myself some beets to add the my daily lunch salad… Yum!

My Favorite Pastrami Sandwich

This is the picture of a Pastrami sandwich gone wrong, read on to see how my favorite is so much different than this one!

I have never really been a meat-lover, I have always said I could be a vegetarian without too many regrets.  However, there have always been certain meats that I cannot imagine leaving: pepperoni, hamburger and most importantly pastrami.

Living in Puerto Rico, there is always a cafeteria or a sandwich shop serving up pastrami sandwiches.  I remember my brother being obsessed with pastrami sandwiches at one time, but my interest in them had not been sparked yet.  At that time the sandwich I would always order was what my friend called a “dairy sandwich” which consisted of only turkey, mayonnaise, and swiss cheese.  I never ordered lettuce or tomato on it because they would heat the sandwich up after the iceberg lettuce and tomato were inside the sandwich. This left the lettuce in the sandwich withered and not appetizing at all.

One time, my boyfriend was talking about how well he made pastrami sandwiches, he made me one which tasted excellent, but when he asked for my opinion I had to let him know that the pieces of pastrami were too big for my taste.  However, his method was good, he would heat up the pastrami with ketchup to make a nice glaze for the meat.  Most importantly, he would add the lettuce and tomato AFTER heating up the sandwich.

By and by, when pastrami was no longer so important in my life, and I had married my pastrami-sandwich making boyfriend, my father-in-law introduced us to “El Truco de Guin”.   I know, I had passed that little bar hundreds of times, but never had I imagined the wonders they were cooking up in that kitchen. “El Truco de Guin” literally means Guin’s Trick, his pastrami became famous because of this “trick”.  The first time I tasted the sandwich, I was hooked.

What was different with this sandwich?  First of all, when we talk about sandwiches here in Puerto Rico we are almost never  referring to sandwiches made on sliced bread.  No, the best sandwiches are made from “Pan Criollo” somewhat like french bread just softer, shorter and wider.  There are two kinds of this bread, one has a soft crust, and is sweeter, and the other is not so sweet and has a hard crust.  The soft crusted bread is perfect to just be eaten the way it is, but the bread used for the pastrami sandwich I am describing is definitely the hard crusted bread.  It has to be, because it needs to hold a staggering amount of pastrami and other ingredients with ease. It can’t fall apart easily, it cannot crumble, the crust needs to stand strong.  The bread can make or break a sandwich (or a hamburger, but that is another post).  I have tasted that same exact bread alone, and I am not a fan because it is too tough, but that is exactly what makes it perfect for this sandwich.

Secondly, we have the star of the show, the pastrami,  this is where Guin inserted the “trick”, but however he did it, it was wonderful.  What I love the most, is that the pastrami is cut in to little bit size strips which are cooked with onions, and possibly other secret ingredients.  To tell you the truth, they put so much pastrami, I take out the excess, freeze it, then warm it up another day to eat it on Rye bread. Hey, I am frugal, I get two sandwiches for the price of one.

As for the rest of the sandwich, the creator actually substituted the typical iceberg lettuce for finely shredded cabbage.  Using cabbage has so many advantages, first of all, it actually has a taste, it stays crunchy even with the heat of the pastrami and an added bonus for the sandwich seller, it takes a long time to go bad.   Additionally, there is no tomato in the sandwich, a smart move to avoid making this perfect sandwich soggy.  Finally, I know usually people put Russian dressing on a pastrami sandwich, and this sandwich is not very different, it has mayonnaise and ketchup.  I, personally, like to add some Dijon mustard to it, just because I am in to that.

In the end, if I am feeling up to the task I can usually finish a whole pastrami sandwich in one sitting.  However, I realized a long time ago that  overstuffing  myself actually takes away from the contentment of just having eaten something fantastic.  So, like the French, I try to stop eating as soon as the food doesn’t taste as awesome as it did when I took the bite.  Portion control is key, I find I can eat anything as long as it is not too much of it at once.  As for the pastrami sandwich portion, I usually eat only half at a time, sharing the other half with my husband or  saving it for later.  Oh, and believe me, it still tastes as good the next day.

Now I have to add a photo, what a perfect excuse to go pick one up.  : )

This isn’t even one of the better looking ones, but note the ratio of meat to cabbage, perfect! Also, the bread is holding the sandwich firm, even though it is in an upright position. Delicious beauty!