Tasty AND Nutritious!

Even with my recent cardiac problem of Takotsubo Syndrome

I'll still be participating in VeganMoFo in October and besides making everything McDougall safe I'll be giving a little tweak here and there to make them lowest in salt. I guess I'll be digging out the Rice Diet books to find the lowest levels of sodium processed products, like canned tomatoes and beans.

But right now, I'm supposed to be taking it easy, so if my husband catches me on the computer I'm dead, so I'll be back soon.

I Couldn't Resist

Even squirrels enjoy Nava Atlas' recipe for Pasta Twists with Cauliflower and Spinach.

VeganMoFo 2009 Coming Soon

Instead of November, VeganMoFo

is going to be in October this year. Isa made the proclamation on the PPK this week about it HERE.

And this link will take you to the blogs that participated last year.

At least until I get lab work drawn in 2 weeks I'm sticking to strict McDougall again. Still no weight loss, my joint pain hasn't improved, my fatigue and brain fog are as bad as ever, but at least the lack of dairy the past few weeks has improved my sleep because I'm snoring less.

Here's a few of the meals I'm making this week:

Sweet Morocan Stew


Marla's photo - my husband dived in before I could take a picture of mine last night. I served ours over rice, as I can't stand the smell of couscous.


Picadillo Pie


Photo by Marla. Hopefully I could get a shot before my husband grabs the serving spoon when I make this tomorrow.


Italian Garbanzo Stew

I would have sworn I had a pic of this from when I made it in the past. Oh, well. I'll have to try to get one this week. I have the new camera so I may as well use it for food porn.


Irish Vegetable Stew



Again, Marla's shot from the recipe's page.


After months of S.A.D. foods, my family hasn't been too happy about this change back to healthy vegan meals. My husband got used to tuna casserole, chicken, even the occasional kielbasa meal again; my son started missing his meatloaf, hamburgers and mac and cheese instantly, so he refuses to eat the veg foods and makes his own meals. And I have to agree with them.

The food is tasty, and probably the healthiest in the world, but even after eating until my stomach was full I just wasn't satisfied and was still, well, HUNGRY, and so was my husband. For instance, the Moroccan stew recipe should feed about 4 to 6 people, as written. I doubled the veggies and served loads of brown rice (my husband took about 3 cups of rice with his first serving, about 2 with his second, I had a total of three cups) and the only leftovers we have fit into a small container, about 2 cups of the stew and 1 cup of rice. We both had salads before the meal, and immediately after finishing my husband grabbed a package of fig newton bars and ate a whole sleeve, he was still hungry. I grabbed a banana maybe an hour later when I couldn't stand the hunger pains any more.

Last week we ate low fat veg, but most of the meals were pasta-based. This week I'm aiming for all MWLP legal meals, but I don't think we're going to last if we're as hungry after the meal as we were before it. Tonight's the Irish stew, and I'll double the cabbage and carrots. Knowing my husband, I'll have to pop on a loaf of bread to go with it, so I'll decide later whether it's going to be a loaf of whole wheat or a traditional Irish Soda bread, as Marla suggests. Hopefully that will keep him satisfied enough to forgo the cookies, at least for a few hours.

And hopefully after another week or 2 our tastebuds will change again so all this food will be as satisfying as they are tasty and healthy.

Already moved

OK, I already moved the veg recipe pages to the Tripod account that already had my McDougall recipe pages - the regular McDougall Plan and the Maximum Weight Loss Plan.

Argh!!

I just found out that Yahoo is closing GeoCities, their web page service. Many of the recipes I linked to in this blog were on GeoCities pages. When the service stops and the pages disappear this summer, if you click on any of those old links you'll get a "page not found" type of error message. Sorry.

So now the hunt begins for another web site service. Tripod still exists, but I wasn't too happy with them and moved a lot of my stuff off of there and onto other GeoCities pages. I was told there are others out there but they're smaller and even less trustworthy than Tripod, so I may not have a choice.

I remember reading a few years ago that Google was starting up a GooglePages to compete with GeoCities but never looked into it. I guess now's the time.

Not Much Happening

I guess you can surmise by the lack of posts that I haven't been trying any new recipes for a while. My husband and son preferred to stay in the rut and eat a lot of pasta meals and a lot of our old faithfuls. We even slipped away from strict McDougalling for a while as I tried another food plan at my doctor's suggestion to jump-start weight loss (Didn't work - I gained 10 pounds instead of losing any. I told him that I was eating low cal, low fat vegan and that 1600 calories would be too much for me, especially if I eat S.A.D. and add fats back in my diet!). My son even gained weight because the meals I made for him and my husband were a bit heavier than they were used to, and because of that he felt sluggish most days and cut back on his exercise.

But now we're back. The kid and I are exercising again and the whole family is (mostly) back on McDougall. The kid and my husband are still enjoying their non-McDougall night time snacks, a habit I could never break them out of, but at least all our meals are back to being McD-friendly.

One of the places I discovered while off McDougall eating is Clara Cannucciari and her Great Depression recipes videos on YouTube. Poorman's Meal is a favorite of this family, as long as I skip the olive oil and use vegan sausage, seitan or TVP instead of meat-based hot dogs. If my son isn't partaking of the meal I just use a can of beans. Peas and Pasta is fine as-is, again, ignoring the oil. After watching Clara I attempted to get our own elderly relative (age 90) to open up about who cooking and life was like during the Depression in her own family, but her mind keeps drifting and all I got out of her were some confused ramblings about a job her mother had back in the 1960's instead of her own life in the 1930's. Each week I prod her a bit more, hoping the clouds will lift and the gate to her mind will reopen for a bit.

I made 2 tubes of seitan using the recipe from the Post Punk Kitchen web site (minus the oil, of course) but roasting it according to the directions in Susan Voisin's pepperoni recipe, which was based on Joanne Stepaniak's recipe in the Vegan Vittles book. I really need to get myself a toaster oven before summer sets in so I can continue to make this and not heat the entire apartment up. My husband makes sandwiches of this for work every day, and I also chop some slice sup to add to salads, casseroles and soups. It's a staple I never do without and try keep a roll or 2, plain and flavored, in the freezer at all times.

I've also been trying out some baking recipes. My husband wanted something different so I found these Maple Oat Muffins from the Vegan Sweet Tooth blog. Let me tell you, "sweet" is definitely the word for these! Next time I'm omitting all the brown sugar and reducing the syrup to about a quarter cup instead of 3/4. I had a hard time even getting these out of my mini-muffin pans, and in the past nothing ever stuck, and I've done a lot of fat-free, whole grain baking in recent years. I think I'll be sticking to the Esselstyn Best Banana Bread from now on. I've made that in both muffin (regular, mini- AND Texas-sized) and loaf shapes and it's always a hit in this house.

Next week we're already committed to eating a few off-plan meals, thanks to the holiday and relatives, but after that we should be back to (near) total compliance to the McDougall program again..

Yecch!

The seitan sucks. I kept it at a simmer - Isa and the PPK gals taught me that - but this thing looked like a steaming pile of grey brains in that cheesecloth. There was no cohesion - the whole thing was crumbly, and I remember reading somewhere that this happened to others, who compared it to under-cooked ground beef. Yep, that's about it.

I thought maybe I can wrap it up in foil and toss it into the oven, maybe that would do something to it, but before I could do that I tasted some of the crumbly pieces. Yecch! It tasted nothing like corned beef at all. I chucked the whole mess into the garbage. I'm really disappointed and now kicking myself for not picking up a hunk or real corned beef to cook, one of the few meat meals we eat all year.

I hope my husband won't be too disappointed. If he is, he can always call Blimpie. Our local franchise (Blimpie Base #2, IIRC. #1 is in Hoboken, about 10 miles away) makes corned beef sandwiches every year on Saint Patrick's Day. Of course, there are also about a dozen mom-and-pop delis between our house and Blimpie, but they don't deliver like the Blimpie Base does.

All those spices, wasted. I finished up the caraway seeds and only have a bout a teaspoon of the fennel seeds left. My hand is sore from crushing them in the mortar and pestle I've had since my nursing school days back in the 1970's. My sink was so greasy I had to take a Brillo to it, and the bowls and utensils needed a good scrub with grease-cutting Dawn to get them clean again. That'll teach me from veering away form tried and true recipes. That stew just better taste good or I'm really screwed as far as today's dinner goes.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

This Irish gal is making a traditional Irish dinner today.

For starters, I'm making a stew loosely based on this recipe from the old McDougall recipe forum on VegSource. Very loosely. In fact, all that recipe did was put the idea of adding cans of tomatoes into the stew. My stew is about 6 Yukon Gold potatoes (peeled and chopped), a small head of cabbage (chopped), 6 carrots (peeled and chopped), 2 onions (chopped), 2 cans of plum tomatoes (broken into pieces), a few cloves of chopped garlic, and about a quart of veggie broth. Just plop it all together in the biggest pot you have (I had to spread it over over 2 pots - Yikes!) and let it simmer all day so the house smells fantastic and the concoction cooks down to this melt-in-your mouth Irish stew.

Every stew needs its bread, and I'm making a plain loaf of whole wheat with some instant potato flakes tossed in for flavor.

And to go with the stew and bread, corned beef seitan from the recipe by Brian McCarthy found here on Everyday Dish. I've been meaning to make this since I first saw the recipe a year or so ago on that site but never got around to it. This year, it's now sitting in my biggest pot simmering away. This is why my stew had to get split over my next 2 smaller pots. I really have to get myself a nice big soup pot.

For the past week I've been playing all my Irish/celtic music CD's and even watched Feet of Flames twice to get myself in the holiday mood. Man, I love how Michael Flatley dances, but that man has an ego the size of all Ireland! LOL

Luscious Lemon Cake

So many people on the McDougall forums are talking about the Luscious Lemon Cake by Anne Esselstyn that I just have to make it myself today. If I can get my camera to work I'll take a photo of it before my husband devours it.

I need to do this. Ever since October I've been drifting too far away from the McDougall program, mostly because my husband would bring home all kinds of cakes, donuts and pastries from the bakery on his way home Fridays after work. I know he has a very stressful job, and in this economy everyone is on pins and needles, expecting to be laid off with no notice, but this stress eating has got to stop. If it can't be stopped, at least I can make it a bit healthier. He also had started requesting lots of meat-based dishes instead of the low-fat vegan ones we'd been eating, and I was only too happy to oblige.

But lately our health has been suffering. My sinuses have been so bad I can't breathe out my nose at all. My arthritis has been so painful it keeps me awake at night. My husband started complaining that the gouty arthritis in his feet was acting up again. And I won't even tell you how bad things have been on the scale lately. :(

Over the weekend I cleaned out freezer out of all non-McDougall foods, and in doing so discovered half an Esselstyn banana bread and a log of Susan V's Seitan Pepperoni. We ate all the banana bread, and that prompted the need to make more healthy munchies. Also, my husband realized that I'm not the only one getting all kinds of sinus trouble from the dairy we've been eating lately and is looking forward to returning to slabs of spicy seitan in his sandwiches again. I'll be making up another 2 batches to keep in the freezer today, too.

It's so good to be returning to McDougall eating! And now that my husband is getting back on track with me he'll stop sabotaging my efforts like he's been doing recently. In the three days we've been off dairy and fatty SAD foods again my sinuses are starting to clean and our arthritis pains have lessened. My husband feels so good he told me that he's going to join me in cheese-free pizzas from now on, and I felt so much better while doing this morning's exercises. I really hope I remember this when I start sliding off the plan again. If only I could find a good tasting seitan kielbasy recipe.