I started thinking of soup when I first started this whole “six ways” thing. I did a similar “single-serve” soup a couple weeks back, using broccoli slaw. This time I wanted to have a bit of noodle action – I keep a bit of multi-color rotini on hand just for times like this. I figured I would throw in some veges, let it all simmer and I’d be good to go.

I started with what in the cooking world is known as a mirepoix – a mix of carrot, celery and onion. After starting about 2 cups of the chicken broth simmering, I lightly sauteed the onion, then celery and shredded carrot. After tossing the diced up chicken and 1/2 cup of the noodles in to the broth I had an idea… I have a bunch of roasted buttercup squash that I cooked up over the weekend so I cook about a cup of it and pureed it with some of the chicken broth, then put it along with the other veges back in to the pot with the chicken.

Once it was almost heated up I seasoned it with a bit of salt, garlic powder and fresh ground pepper… once in the bowl I garnished with a bit of green onion.

I’m sure I probably read about doing something this somewhere before, pureeing the squash to make a creamy soup without all the cream and such – this wasn’t an original idea, but it was tasty.

I’m sure I’ll do something like this again and I’ll try to formalize a recipe for it to share, but in the mean time… do what I did and just play with it a bit.

It didn’t feel right calling this a chicken pot pie when I cooked mine in a pan. A sauce pan for part of it and a cast-iron skillet for the baking part. So yea. But whatever you want to call it, this turned out rather well I think.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of “pot pies”. I’m really just not a huge fan of pastry type crusts in general. So I have no idea where the urge to make this dish came from. But what I did know is that it wouldn’t be a traditional type. I’ve seen similar dishes where instead of a top crust, you use drop-biscuits or dumplings of some sort. But alas, I’m not a huge biscuit fan either.. and I’ve never made dumplings (which aren’t they just “boiled” biscuits anyways?) So what to do?

Well, I asked for ideas on Twitter… and someone suggested corn bread (which I do love), or the “cheesy pizza crust” I was talking about a couple weeks back. Ding! I think we have something there. It’s such an easy recipe too… 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, 1 egg, and a 3oz block of cream cheese. And I knew I had all the stuff on hand. So we had a topping. But then what about the filling?

I had the chicken, the reason for this whole idea in the first place. I always have a few certain vegetables on hand… carrots, frozen peas, onion. That would work. When getting out the carrot I found some sweet potato left over from another meal. I had some celery too but option to skip that for this dish. Another thing I keep on hand is a can or two of evaporated milk. I use this in place of cream in making sauces to get a bit more depth than just milk (especially since my milk is soy milk), without as much of the fat. Oh! There’s also a can of mushrooms. Yea, I know… they’re slimly lil suckers, I would never use them on a burger or to top a steak, but I keep a couple small cans on hand just for occasions like this where they go in to something and offer just a bit of that mushroomy flavor.

Like I said, I’ve never made this sort of dish before, but I know that it’s basically the chicken and veges in a thick cream sauce. So I started out by basing this on my stroganoff recipe, in particular using a roux as the thickener. I did a video of this for BTV about a year ago. I chopped up some onion and lightly cooked it before adding the butter and flour. I used a small can of evaporated milk and about 1/2 cup of the chicken broth I had from cooking up the chicken. The veges I added were a medium carrot and some sweet potato about the same size as the carrot that were shredded and about a cup of frozen peas. I shredded the carrot and potato instead of dicing because I figured they would cook faster that way. In hindsight, I had some roasted squash and beets in the fridge that I forgot about and would have loved to add some of those in there.

I had two of the chicken breasts left, both just over 7 ounces, so I chopped one of them up, leaving me with just enough chicken left for my last two meals in this experiment. Then after I got the veges in, it was still a bit thinner than I wanted, especially since I wasn’t going to use a bottom crust, so I mixed in 3 tablespoons of ground flaxseed. So this not only added some fiber and some omega 3s, the flaxseed sucks up moisture and helped thicken the whole thing up a bit more. I seasoned mine with liberal amounts of garlic powder and fresh ground black pepper and a few pinches of kosher salt.

I poured this in to my 9inch cast iron skillet and dropped spoonfuls of the “pizza crust” batter on top. I didn’t do the greatest job when it comes to even distribution, but you get the idea. The whole thing went in to a 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes, till the topping was lightly browned. Scroll back up to the top here to see what it looked like coming out of the oven. When I went to plate it, it held together very nicely. I don’t know if it was because of or in spite of the addition of the flax… but no matter the reason, it worked great.

It plated up wonderfully, I didn’t need a soup bowl to serve it in. The cheesy topping added a nice touch of sweetness overall… and it was very filling. I was figuring I’d get two servings out of this, but I think for a post-op, you’ll easily get three or four servings. I recently wrote a piece for my nutrition blog about being flexible in the kitchen, and this is a great example of that I think. It would be a great way to use some some left over vegetables. You could use various kinds of meats in here… season it to your own tastes, savory or spicy. And there’s many different ways you could top this, biscuits, corn bread, potato dumplings, etc.

So yea… it was a success. I got a dinner a lunch and an additional side dish out of this for me…. and I could see doing similar versions of this in the future. Also, you could easily double this and bake it in a larger pan.

and no… I’m not talking zombies here or anything… I said “feed”, not “eat”.

There was a recent study out of Chicago that is suggesting that low levels of B12 in older folks may be tied to decreased cognitive ability. Now this is an early study… and of course it’s full of caveats, but according to a story on UPI:

The study, published in the journal Neurology, found having high levels of four of five markers for vitamin B12 deficiency was associated with having lower scores on the cognitive tests and smaller total brain volume.

Study author Christine C. Tangney of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago also said;

“Our findings definitely deserve further examination,” Tangney said in a statement. “It’s too early to say whether increasing vitamin B12 levels in older people through diet or supplements could prevent these problems, but it is an interesting question to explore. Findings from a British trial with B vitamin supplementation are also supportive of these outcomes.”

Originally published November 29, 2009

So yea, I met with the dietitian on Tuesday, and after we talked about eating after surgery we got in to what I need to do before surgery to lose the pre-op weight. Basically, I’ve been put on a “Calorie Controlled Lifestyle” Here’s the explaination of just what that is from one of the flyers they gave me;

This calorie controlled lifestyle is a healthy diet used by many to lose weight or to control their diabetes. It is easy to follow and is appropriate for persons of all ages and stages of life. There is no need to count calories or to spend extra money on specialty foods. This diet is split into 6 food groups, and you are allowed a given number of servings in each group. This will help to ensure a balanced diet that will better support your body and its needs.

And the joyful part of this is I am supposed to limit myself to a whopping 1500 daily calorie level.

A Big Mac has 485 calories. Large fries 400, a regular Coke about 200. So a Number One Value Meal kills off about three-fourths of what I’m supposed to eat in a whole day.

To help you figure out what to eat, they break it down in to starches, meat/protien, vegetables, fruits, fats and milk, and I get 6 starch, 6 protien, 3 vegetables, 3 fruits, 4 fats and 2 milk.

It is almost hard to believe what actually qualifies as a portion…  Starches you hve 1 slice of bread, 1 pita bread, 1 tortilla, or 1/2 of an English muffin, hotdog or hamburger bun… wheat ones of course. Cereals there’s things like 3/4 cup of a dry unsweetened cereal, like Cheerios I suppose, or 1/4 cup of Grape Nuts (one of my usual eats… but in a much larger quantity). O, if I want popcorn… 6 cups, with no fat/butter of course. Or I can get by on 6 saltines or 4 Rye Crisps (which I don’t like). Some vegetables don’t count as vegetable but a starch; stuff like corn, squash, or baked beans.

Proteins… meat…. it’s pretty easy to figure out a portion. 1 oz – be it fish, chicken, beef, even duck or rabbit. A few other things count as proteins as well, one egg, 1 tablespoon of peanut butter, 1/4 cup cottage cheese and in general an ounce of cheese. Most dinners you do a 3 oz portion of meat… that’s going to be about the size of a deck of cards. It’s also about 1/4th the size of the steak I usually get at Outback.

Vegetables are pretty easy. Bout 1 cup of raw or 1/2 cup of cooked. Fruits range from a small apple to 1/2 a large banana, 17 grapes, or a kiwi. Then Fats are pretty easy, 1 teaspoon of your basic oils, butter, or a whole tablespoon of reduced-fat Miracle Whip, mayo, or a lite salad dressing. Some fats that you may not pick up automatically would be nuts.. 6 almonds or cashews, 10 peants,  2 tablespoons of avacado (which I don’t like) and olives.. 8 ripe or 10 green. Milks are also a given, 1 cup skim milk, yogurt, and cheese… which I think you can count as either a milk or a protien.

There are some things which are sort of “freebies”, stuff you can have that don’t count against any of the food portions – tho some have daily limits. Sugar-free syrup, ketchup, A-1, etc… you can have 1 tablespoon a day. Sugar-free drink mixes, herbal teas, fat-free broths. And cooking stuff; herbs and spices, vinegar, soy sauce, tabasco, hot sauce Worcestershire. Good news… need to be able to season stuff. Oh, dill pickles. That’s gonna help… Been using them as snacks. bout 10-20 calories in a whole pickle. Even though I’m not supposed to snack… I won’t make it far without something between meals. I know I won’t… not for awhile.

This is why the surgery is going to help. I didn’t stay under 1500 calories Wednesday, definately not yesterday, today I think I stayed under 2000, but still… it’s not going to fill me up… not long enough to make it to the next meal. Maybe after awhile I could get used to this… maybe. Maybe.

The surgery is the tool to help me get full and stay full on small amounts of food, limiting my calories, helping me lose weight. Pretty simple if you think about it.

I’m still not a fan of quiche, but I do love salads… and one heck of a manly dude seems to agree with me. John DeVore is a former editor at Maxim magazine and maxim.com and recently wrote a piece for CNN.com titled A ‘dude’ explains why salad is ‘man food’

Go check out his article and then come back here… I’ll wait.

Ok, so now that we’ve established that it’s ok for a dude to enjoy a salad, what about a WLS type dude?

For bandsters, it shouldn’t be a problem. But RNY types should always be cautious when trying something new… same for a bandster after a fresh fill. Eating out on a business lunch is probably not the time to be testing the waters with your first post-op salad.

But if you are ready to try and get some greens in your meals, here’s some tips on getting the most out of your salads.

First of all, don’t forget the protein. There are all sorts of proteins that go great on a salad, and putting them on a salad is a great way to use up that left over bit of chicken or steak from last nights dinner.

Yea, steak. I know a lot of folks have trouble with steak because what happens when you chew a bite of steak 30+ times? Trust me, it’s not a tasty thing. BUT, chew it with a bit of lettuce and it gives it just the right boost of flavor and moisture to make steak a good thing again.

Beans, nuts and seeds; from chick-peas (which still make me thing ‘gerbil brains’ every time I see them) to edamame, walnuts, pecans and pepitas – they all add their own distinct flavor to a salad along with proteins and other good stuff.

Shrimp, maybe some left over from that batch of broiled shrimp or some of those tiny salad ones you can get pretty darn cheap at the store. Seafood is a great source of protein, and it’s high moisture content always makes them easy eats.

Besides meats, there’s also hard-boiled eggs, and don’t forget the cheeses. They can add a burst of flavor and bump up the protein just a bit as well. Just keep the high fat or high sodium cheeses like blue cheese or feta to an occassional treat, not an every day staple.

Go dark. Iceberg lettuce is cheap, easy to get, adds a nice crunch, but it is sort of the bottom of the totem pole as far as leafy greens go. Try to go for the darker greens, Romaine and spinach for example.

Keep it Simple. I’ve always loved salads, and in my buffet days I would do a salad piled high with half-dozen or more different veggies and other things besides the lettuce. You start getting carried away with your post-op salad and you’ll either end up eating much more than you need to, or you won’t get a good balance of protein in.

Get Undressed. Skip the usual salad dressings and go for just a drizzle of a good red wine or balsamic vinegar and maybe just a touch of olive oil. Otherwise, dressings are easy to make from scratch, and you can get some good seasoning mixes to keep on hand (and they’re good for more than just salad dressing).

If you do go with store bought dressings, watch out for the low and no-fat ones. They make up for the missing flavor the fat adds by adding sugars. You may actually be better off getting the regular ones, but extend them a bit by mixing with a good vinegar. I admit, Western is one of my favorite dressings, but I don’t do it straight up. I mix it half and half with either cider or red wine vinegar.

Shake it up. When you pour a dressing over a salad, you invariably end up with a puddle of it on your plate when you’re done. You just plain end up adding much more than you need. So instead, try putting the greens and veggies in a contain with a lid, adding just a teaspoon or two of dressing per serving, close the lid and give it a good shake. Basically a tossed salad. You’ll be surprised at just how little dressing you really need. If you’re in a situation where you can’t “toss” your salad, get the dressing on the side and just dip your fork in the dressing before speaking a bite of salad. Do the empty fork first though, dipping the salad in the dressing will give you way too much dressing.

So yea, salads can be dude-worthy in a post-op life. And if you’re pre-op you can follow these same suggestions, but bulk up on the greens and veggies a bit more. As long as you keep the dressing under control, they’re a good way to help fill you up without adding a ton of calories.

photo credid: saladaday.org

Since I’ve been promoting quinoa on Twitter and such so much lately, people have been asking me for recipes using it… here’s a good one… turkey meatballs that have quinoa and veges in them, making them pretty much a complete meal all on their own.

This is tweeked from a recipe I got from someone in one of my support groups. And by the way, I fully admit they tasted a heck of a lot better than this picture looks. Trust me.

1 pound ground turkey (or beef if you really want)
3/4 cup cooked quinoa
1/4 cup finely chopped onions
1/4 cup grated carrots
1/4 cup grated zucchini (I actually used chayote squash)
2 tablespoons tomato sauce
1 tablespoons chopped garlic
1 tablespoon worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
1 egg

Preheat your oven to 500F, line a large baking sheet with foil then great with cooking spray; set aside. You could also use a broiler pan or some sort of rack that lets the meatballs cook while letting any fat drip away.

In a large bowl, mix together meat, quinoa, onions, carrots, zucchini/chayote, tomato sauce, garlic, worcestershire, seasonings and egg until well combined. If you have them (and you really should!), wear a pair of latex gloves. Keeps your hands from getting all goopy. And yes, that is a technical term. And no, it’s not really about keeping your hands clean, it’s really about keeping the food safe, even if you’ve washed your hands you should use protection!

Shape in to 12 meatballs and transfer to prepared baking sheet. Roast until cooked through and golden brown, about 20 minutes, turn over once about 15 minutes in so they brown evenly. These will be about raquet ball sized. You could do smaller ones and cut the cooking time down by about 5 minutes.

Oh yea, make sure your meat is cold before mixing this up or the meat gets hard to deal with. If it does get too bad, toss it in the fridge for 10-20 minutes before trying to portion out the meatballs.

Serving is 3 meatballs, you’ll get about 20g of protein, 10g carbs.

I had mine with a bit of doctored up tomato sauce. You can open a small can (8oz) of tomato sauce, use a couple tablespoons in the meatballs and then mix the rest with about a couple teaspoons each of dried parsley, oregano and garlic powder, and maybe a teaspoon of the dried thyme. Add in maybe a teaspoon of Splenda to cut some of the bitterness. Mix this up in a glass dish like a 1-cup measuring cup and microwave for about a minute to make a pretty decent sauce. I use this sauce when making my own pizzas too by the way.

I inventoried my chest freezer last week, and decided to pull out the chuck roast I had in there and cook that up. I turned to Good Eats for inspiration and cooked it the way Alton Brown showed in his A Chuck for Chuck episode (see videos at the end of this). I did cook mine in the crock pot instead of the oven, and it turned out wonderfully. See!

pot roast with a side of shredded carrots and squash with ziti currants

I’ve been nibbling on it for a few different meals, including a breakfast, over the last few days. I had about a quarter pound left, and decided I wanted to do something different. I put a question out there on Twitter and someone suggest pot roast. Great idea! except… a pastry crust, I’m not sure would be terribly WLS friendly, though I’m sure I could find a recipe out there that is. But… I wasn’t about to bother, cause I’ve never really liked pot-pie crusts anyways. But I still had plenty of “gravy” and I like veges, so I had to figure out something else to use for a crust.

Then I remembered I had some of the Shiritaki Tofu Noodles in my fridge… that just might work.

So what I did is drained and rinsed the noodles, then patted them dry with a paper towel. Beat up an egg in a small bowl and toss the noodles in, stirring to coat.  I’ve got these ceramic like bowls I liberated from the dorm cafeteria back in college that are just the right size for something like this. I sprayed them lightly with non-stick spray and put just over one-quarter of the noodles in the bottom of each bowl and popped them in my toaster oven set at 350 for about 10 minutes.

The idea here was to get the egg/noodles to set a bit, make a bottom crust layer.

While that was cooking, I shredded the roast beef… I had about a quarter pound of it… and put that in a bowl with about 1 cup of mixed veges and 1 cup of the gravy. Season with a bit of salt and pepper to taste and mix up well. The veges I used were frozen peas and corn, along with some fresh carrots that I diced up and nuked to cook a bit, then some of my farmer’s market green beans that I had frozen. I nuked those with the carrots and chopped in to bite size pieces as well. Use what ever you have on hand and like.

You can see how the egg/noodles cooked up a bit in the bowl on the left. I then spooned the meat mixture in to both bowls, topped with the rest of the noodles, and then for each bowl I took two crackers, crushed them up and and stirred in about a teaspoon of graded parmasean cheese before sprinkling over the top.

These got popped back in the 350 degree oven for about another 10-12 minutes, then I cranked the heat up to broil and let them sit in there about a minute more to brown the crumb topping.

This one may have toasted just a lil too much… but no sweat, just pick of any of the crumbs that are too well done.

I served this up with a small bit of salad. Lettuce was fresh from my neighbors garden and the Russian dressing I made.

It wasn’t exactly a pot pie… but it was pretty good. You could likely double this up pretty easy and cook in say an 8×8 pan or a small pie dish, just adjust the cooking time up a few minute for the larger container. Or try it in smaller ramekins, and reduce the time a little bit. And if you have ideas/suggestions for other ways I could have done a crust, leave me a comment so I can try it next time!

Oh yea, here’s the videos from the Good Eats episode.. Part 1 and Part 2

Celery is sort of a character actor of the vegetable world. Always playing the supporting-actor to other more well known items like peanut butter or cream cheese, cause by itself it really doesn’t pack a lot of flavor. But it is good for you… here’s what the folks over at NutritionData say about celery in summary;

The good: This food is low in Saturated Fat, and very low in Cholesterol. It is also a good source of Riboflavin, Vitamin B6, Pantothenic Acid, Calcium, Magnesium and Phosphorus, and a very good source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, Folate, Potassium and Manganese.

The bad: This food is high in Sodium, and a large portion of the calories in this food come from sugars.

Ok, sugars… a high portion of calories come from the natural sugars, but one serving is still only bout 2g of sugar, and does have 1g of protein. As part of a post-WLS diet, celery can be a decent source of not only fiber but also, and maybe more importantly, it adds CRUNCH!

Celery, because it’s so high in water is actually pretty easy to digest, except for one lil issue… fibers. No, not dietary fiber, there are natural fibers that run along the back of the celery, or the ribs. We’ve all come across them before, right? Pre-op they get caught in your teeth, post-op… well.. those fibers don’t chew well, and  why push it when it’s so easy to do something about? And that’s today’s quick-tip. (took me long enough to get there, didn’t it?)

When you’re gonna do something with celery, take a minute and strip the fibers from the ribs… it’s easy enough to do with a paring knife, just sort of catch the edge of the celery at one end and peel those lil suckers right back.

Once you get them started, they peel back pretty easy. You can also use a vegetable peeler, but I don’t drag it out just for something I can do just as easy with a knife. Do the same from both ends, and you’ll end up with a bird nest of them like this…

If you’re chopping the celery up in small chunks for going in a salad, you don’t really have to do this. The strings end up small enough to swallow easy enough, but if you’re doing sticks to stuff, give this a shot.

No… I’m not looking in the mirror again. Here… check this out.

That is celery root, or celeriac. It’s not the root from the usual celery we see in the store, the stalks from this are hollow and reed like, and sometimes used for a vegetable straw in drinks like bloody mary’s. Maybe that’s where the idea to put celery in them started?

Anyways… this root ball can be pealed and used in soups, stews, and for those looking to reduce carbs it can be cooked and mashed as a substitute for potatoes.

It seems, from my digging around, that this stuff is about 1/4 to 1/3 the carbs of a potato per serving, and lot less sugars… which was odd, cause to me this tasted sweeter than actual poatoes.

So next time you’re gettng a hankering for some mashed potatoes, hit the produce section and grab some celery root and give it a shot… I mixed mine up with a bit of Smart Balance margaine and milk, salt, pepper and garlic powder and really liked it… and will get it again…went great with the grilled pork I had for dinner.

I think next time I might even try baking some fries, or maybe cubing or shredding. I wonder if they would make for a low-carb hashed browns?

Stay tuned!