Simple Meals/Rambling Post

Over on the McDougall forums, Star McDougaller "geo" recently linked to his old post from 2013 where he shows a photo on what he ate for lunch that one particlar day. 

Starches: a med baked potato and a sweet potatoLegumes: 1/2 cup of edamameGreen/yellow veggies: 12 oz frozen veggie mix (green beans, broccoli,sugar snap peas,onion,carrot,red pepper,celery,and mushroom), serving of corn, serving or 2 of collard greens, 2 servings of dice tomatoes. All cooked together with some Mrs Dash southwest chipotely spice blend and some sriracha hot sauce for flavor. (Thats about a pound and a half of veggies)Fruit: braeburn apple for dessertNote: there's no glass of anything to drink as the food itself contains more than enough water that I don't need anything else to wash it down with...
The potatoes were nuked for 10 mins. The veggies were cooked in a wok for 10 mins and the beans were nuked for 30 secs. So the whole meal took like 10 mins. to make and it was delicious! 

Most of the time, my meals are just as simple. Now and then I'll try a new recipe, and usually post them here when I do, but most of the time, my meals are as simple as his. For instance:

First meal. I got in the habit of eating "VFB" - Chef AJ's Veggies for Breakfast. A pound or more of frozen veggies that I pre-cooked on shopping day and portioned out into individual 3-cup Pyrex storage containers, so all I have to do is nuke one up an hour after taking my Synthroid. It's always a cruciferous veg, like cauliflower, broccoli, or Brussels sprouts. As Dr. Esselstyn advises, I "annoint it with a wee bit of balsamic vinegar" (Napa Valley Natural's Grand Reserve is my favorite and the only "fancy" balsamic vinegar I buy) over these when I eat them. Some days this is all I eat until lunch, especially if I had a really restless night's sleep and don't get out of bed until later or have no appetite to eat anything else. It's rare, but it does happen now and then.

Breakfast. Most days it's hot cereal. I take my 4-cup Pyrex measuring cup, put a cup of water, a half cup old-fashioned oats, slice up a banana, microwave it for 2 minutes, add a tablespoon of ground flax, let cool, then eat. Occasionally I'll make steel cut oats on the stove-top with the same oats, banana, then flax. Once in a while I pick up a bag of frozen blueberries and use those instead of bananas, but I really prefer bananas. And once in a blue moon, either when I feel like a change or don't have bananas, I'll make grits, using Quaker Old-Fashioned Grits, water, some chopped up sun-dried tomatoes, and a bit of nutritional yeast. When cooked, I add chia seeds instead of flax - they seem to go better with the grits.

Lunch. Unless I have leftovers from previous dinners that need to be used up, lunch is either rice or potatoes, pre-cooked and pre-measured into one cup storage containers once a week, heated up and served with a one pound bag of microwaved frozen veggies (mixed, with peas, corn, carrots, and green beans is my favorite) mixed with about a quarter of a bag of frozen greens or a cup of fresh greens like baby spinach and baby kale mix. Over this goes either a bit of plain balsamic vinegar, the Esselstyn 3-2-1 dressing (I use any old store-bought balsamic vinegar for this, nothing fancy or expensive), or the Esselstyn Sweet Fire Dressing (using half the amount of spices and syrup). (I used to always have a batch of some nutritional yeast based cheeze sauce on hand, but it got too addictive. One day I caught myself eating it out of the jar as a snack and figured that's it - no more!) If I'm in a real hurry, or plan on not being home for lunch, I'll just take some of those pre-cooked potatoes, cut them up into bite-sized pieces, sprinkle some Mrs. Dash or other no-salt seasonings on them, and dig in. I just had this twice this week when I took my husband to the opthalmologist one day, retina specialist the next when they feared he had yet another torn retina. Luckily it wasn't, just some other weird but benign thing that needed no treatment.

Dinner. Here's where I drive myself and my family crazy. All the above meals I've been making and eating for about 2 decades now, rarely wavering. But dinners? This is where I get creative, get overwhelmed, get frustrated, then start to get crazy. This is where I flit back and forth from one food plan to another - even though most of the meals could be used on ANY of the plant based gurus meal plans, they just come from one person's website/followers/books.

I would have a basic monthly menu for regular McDougall, including such meals as Bean and Corn Enchiladas, pasta meals, any of the many soups Mary and Heather McDougall have posted in the newsletters over the decades, or others stew or casserole type meals you can find in the Recipe Section of the McDougall website.

Jeff Novick SNAP recipes. I did these exclusively for about 2 years a while back.

MWLP recipes. Many of these are also in the regular McDougall menus, just minus those with pasta or sandwich type recipes.

Chef AJ's Ultimate Weight Loss chilis. Many are already posted in various videos on-line, all are now in her book, The Secrets to Ultimate Weight Loss. For the past few years, I used these recipes at least half of the times. Why? Because I can gather everything together any time during the day, set the Instant Pot, and forget them until it's time to serve dinner. The house is kept cool during the summer, and no last minute mad dash to get dinner ready, especially if my husband wants to do something together in the 90 minutes between the time he logs off his work computer and the time we all sit down to eat. Also, I usually have all the ingredients on hand, so I can have everything I need and not have to shop for weeks at a time - handy after a winter blizzard that buries our cars under a foot or more of snow and ice.

Super Simple. This the the one used the other half of the times. These are the meals similar to what "geo" makes - a starch, beans, and veggies. The beans are the main difference between this and those simple lunch meals. Since Dr. McDougall allows only 1 cup of beans per day (average), I save them for this meal. A few days of rice, beans and veggies, a day or 2 white potato (remember, more than 2 potatoes a week and my arthritis pains come back) with veggies and either the McDougall FF Golden Gravy or Jan Tz's Chickpea Gravy, sometimes pasta meals - with either a tomato based sauce, the other with a cheezy nutritional yeast sauce - with a ton of veggies and greens tossed in, sometimes beans (if not part of the nooch sauce already), one day a pot of Mary's Bean Stew, one day with sweet potatoes with greens, refried beans (usually made with the leftovers from that stew), and saurkraut. The order of these meals may change around, the number of times each starch is used may vary, but those are our basic meals for when we're tired, busy, it's hot out, it's cold out - you get the picture. For instance, lately it's been like this:
Saturday - Mashed Potatoes with Cauliflower and FF Golden Gravy
Sunday - Rice with Peas, Red Onions, and Garbanzo Beans and an Esselstyn Dressing
Monday - Mary's Bean Stew over Cornbread
Tuesday - Chunked Potatoes with Carrots and Garbanzo Gravy
Wednesday - Sweet Potatoes with Greens, Refried Beans, and Saurkraut
Thursday - Rice with Peas & Carrots and Garbanzo Beans with Teriyaki Sauce
Friday - Anything Goes - uses up any rice, potatoes or veggie leftovers, a McDougall soup or casserole, or a pot of pasta. Some weeks my son calls out for a pizza or Blimpie while hubby and I clear out the fridge and eat healthy.

By the way, the veggies are usually 3 pounds of frozen per meal for the three of us - or however much it takes to fill my 8 cup Pyrex measuring cup. Sometimes I can fit a fourth pound in there, sometimes, like with the peas and red onions, it's a little bit less. That's not counting whatever greens I may add in, too, either fresh or frozen.

Our son has recently told us he's getting tired of potatoes, that once a week is enough for him. That was fine with me, so starting this Saturday, the starchy menu might look more like this:
Saturday - Rice
Sunday - Potatoes 
Monday - Pasta (with tomato based sauce)
Tuesday - Rice 
Wednesday - Sweet Potatoes 
Thursday - Rice
Friday - Pasta (as Mac and Cheese)

With summer coming and our kitchen already in the upper 80's as soon as the sun comes up, this menu keeps the apartment cool. Potatoes get cooked in the microwave or Instant Pot, the rice in the rice cooker, pasta in a covered pot on the stove (Tinkyada pasta is only boiled for 2 minutes, then sits the rest of the cooking time with a lid on). The sauces can all be made without cooking right in the blender, including the chickpea gravy. The bean stew recipe has been perfected in the Instant Pot.

I may still make the occasional UWL chili or McDougall soup. I might toss a SNAP meal on instead of one of the above some day.

Snacks. To be honest, once dinner is done, it's only 2-3 hours until bedtime, so I don't eat anything after dinner. Once in a while in mid-afternoon I might feel like a little bit of something, and I'll grab one of those 1/2 cup containers of natural applesauce.

Off-Program Indulgences. Yes, I'm not perfect. Sometimes there's a food I just gotta have. Once in a while I just gotta have a taste of peanut butter. My son keeps a jar of Smuckers Natural PB around for his lunches, and when the "gotta have" strikes, I take my little Mickey Mouse spoon, grab a bit, close the jar back up, and slowly lick that creamy ambrosia, eyes rolling back in my head the entire time, and when it's gone, it's gone. I'm satisfied for a few more months. That's one indulgence that's allowed on the regular McDougall program, but since I still have a lot of weight to lose, shouldn't have, ever, but do. 
Another one that's in sort of a grey area is a LaraBar. I always keep a few on hand for those times I'm unexpectedly away from home hours after a meal time with no access to any food at all. Chef AJ is fond of saying "You're not gonna starve if you miss a meal." True, but she's never been subject to hypoglycemia like I have. I suffered with it for over 30 years, been taken to the ER by ambulance twice because of it. I may not die of starvation if I skip a meal, but the quality of my life sinks to the physically incapacitated level if I do sometimes. So I keep those bars handy, and sometimes I have one even if I haven't skipped a meal, if the meal was so miniscule it's just not going to hold me until the next. And yes, sometimes I eat one just because they taste so darn good and I just "gotta have" one. 
But I must confess that there is one indulgence that is not even a grey area, it's totally and completely off-plan, whether it's an Esselstyn, Fuhrman, AJ, or McDougall one. It's a food that I know is harmful to me because it contains not only fat and sugar, but wheat, a substance I know aggravates my auto-immune disease and causes joint pain, and not the healthier whole grain flour but fluffy white flour. Sometimes I just cannot resist and "gotta have" a Stop and Shop bakery fresh chocolate chip muffin. Not a crap pastry that comes in a plastic package from a mass market commercial bakery, not even a cake made fresh from any of our local bakeries. It has to be that one muffin that grocery store makes. There's just something about it that makes it worth the pain I will be in for a week afterwards. It just can't be explained. When it strikes, I just gotta have it or that's all I'll be thinking about for the end of time until I get one. I try to resist, but resistance is futile. I have gotten myself dressed and out of the house in the pouring rain to go get one, and I hate to drive in the rain. Luckily, this urge doesn't hit all that often. It hits once in the fall, usually during the birthday/anniversary season between mid October until mid November. I'll eat one, and that's it, sometimes for another year. I can get through from Thanksgiving through New Years without one non-compliant food, but my brain still wants that bit of cake during birthday season. 

So, that's that. Until some other mood strikes me and instead of my Super Simple menu I get a bug up my butt to make up a month of Engine 2 or Esselstyn Prevent & Reverse meals, or a month of McDougall soups, or a month of cold bean salads, or whatever food fad jumps into my diseased brain. 

Now imagine I make up multiple new menus each week, print them all out with fancy graphics and borders in flowing fonts, sometimes as many as 5 different ones, and you're told to choose one. That's what I do to my poor husband every week. He moans, sighs, looks at them in detail, and either says he can't pick just one, he loves every meal on every menu, or just goes "eenie, meanie, miney, mo" and hands me one without even looking. We go through this dance way too often, and most times I settle on either the UWL chilis or the Super Simple out of ennui or inertia. 

I would LOVE to make only meals from the Esselstyn Prevent & Reverse Heart Disease books, or the Engine 2/Engine 2 Seven Day Rescue books, or heck, any of the thousands of recipes from Mary McDougall. I'm lazy/tired/easily fatigued/in pain from my AI disease. Yes, I can make menus 'til the cows come home, as the saying goes, but then I also have to make the shopping list, do the actual shopping, then chopping, cooking and cleaning. It's so much easier to just toss some stuff - without needing a recipe - into the Instant Pot, microwave, rice cooker, and have a delicious, healthy meal on the table in less than a half hour without the need for a dozen or more ingredients and lots of meal prep. I keep telling my husband, if we win the lottery, one of the first things we're doing is hiring a chef. But although the meals may be more elaborate than what I make now, will they be any tastier than the simple fare we eat now? I doubt it. Still, I wouldn't mind finding out. :)