The Starch Solution

Dr. McDougall's latest book, The Starch Solution, is being released in May, 2012, and the web site for the book has just been activated. You can see some of the Star McDougallers' stories, see what foods you can eat that will help lead to weight loss and better health, but not much more.

And I really don't like how Prevention Magazine is marketing this - a free gift upon ordering, 4 payments of $6.75 each (It's only $17.81 on Amazon when pre-ordered), return at any time for a refund ("even 20 years from now," says the ad). All the links that appear to go to recipes all go to the order form. Sounds like a huckster instead of a serious promotion of an important book.

I already pre-ordered mine, but don't think I'll be reading anything Dr. McDougall has already written before or said in a free on-line lecture. I hope for his sake that Prevention really promotes this, including getting him appearances on the talk shows, and he doesn't blow it.

Curried Split Pea & Cauliflower Soup

This is another new-to-me soup, this one from Susan V's Fat Free Vegan Blog - Curried Split Pea & Cauliflower Soup. The recipe is at her blog.





This was the first time I used my pressure cooker in probably 3 years. In fact, last year when I went to use it I noticed the ring was tacky so had to order a new one from Amazon. Although the ring came within a week or so, I never put it on the pot but had it hanging around the house all this time. A few weeks ago I was going to make a different pressure cooker recipe and when I grabbed the lid realized I never put the ring in, but when I went to get it from where I thought I put it when cleaning for Christmas, it was gone. Those gremlins like to hide things in the house and sometimes it takes weeks before they reappear. I recruited both my guys to help look for it, but when none of us could find it I just ordered another one. They're supposed to be changed about every 18 months, anyway, according to the package, so when it turns up I'll use it for the next scheduled change.

So, the soup smells wonderful and has a nice spicy kick to it. I used less than one tablespoon of the curry because we don't like things *too* spicy around here. Yeah, I'm a spice wuss. So what? LOL  See how creamy that soup is? That's how great the peas fell apart after pressure cooking. Usually I use the immersion blender for pea soups but this one doesn't need it at all, and it's fun to see those tiny bits of carrots. Next time I'm already planning on defrosting the cauliflower first and chopping it up into smaller pieces. We don't like big chunks of stuff in our soups if we can help it. I had nice fat carrots so sliced them into quarters before chopping to keep the size down.

Susan, if you're reading messages here, thanks for a wonderful soup and thanks for getting me to use my pressure cooker again. I stopped using it when it got stored in an out-of-the-way area in this cluttered apartment. Now that things are arranged differently and I can easily get to more of my kitchen stuff, like the food processor and this pressure cooker, I plan on using it much more often. Heck, I may soon unpack the "new" Crockpot I bought almost a year ago and finally break that in, too! LOL

Vegan Pie in the Sky - 6 months later

Vegan Pie in the Sky is the third book in the dessert series by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. The book has been out since last September.

So why is the New York Daily News just getting around to reviewing it NOW??

McDougallers may want to avoid the review - the Boston Cream Pie recipe will surely be responsible for us going off the food plan! LOL

Jeff Novick's Fast Food - Burgers & Fries DVD

Ever since Jeff announced on the McDougall forums that he had 3 new videos in production I've been waiting for his next in the Fast Food series. Although I'm a little disappointed that it's NOT another video full of more one-pot meals as promised but the burgers one, instead, I'm still going to get it. 

The video is now available for pre-orders on VegSource, and here's the promotional video with the Nelson girls and their teen friends having a BBQ with Jeff as the burger chef:

Heart Healthy Pizza - For St. Patrick's Day!

I wish I had seen Mark's blog post sooner and we would have had pizza instead of Irish Stew this past Saturday!

Mark Sutton, a familiar name on the various fat free vegan mailing lists and forums, has written a cookbook dedicated to making pizza that's safe for us McDougallers and Nutritarians and Esselstynites and all the other people who follow a no added fat vegan lifestyle. The few sample recipes he posted on a few Yahoogroups Groups look amazing, and people who already own the book already and have tried the recipes have nothing but praise for him. Even Robin Robertson, author of over 20 cookbooks (many of which reside on my own book shelf) has written about this book on her own blog. Go on over and see for yourself the gorgeous photos of Mark's pies from the book!

After experimenting with those recipes, we're all gonna have to do a Mary's Mini to recuperate!

Thanks, Mark, for making tasty pizza available again.

Return to Cooking and Pressure Cooker Rant

Well, I'm always cooking, just trying new recipes again.

First, I signed up for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's web site, a "gift" from my husband. Plenty of stuff to read there, from newsletters to forums or recipes; a slew of lectures on mp3; the doctor himself commenting on various posts on a daily basis, not just when the mood hits and not just on important stuff he wants to argue against.

Anyway, one of the nice things I discovered over there is this thing called a microsalad, or confetti salad. You take a bunch of raw salad ingredients - leafy greens, green & yellow veggies, even fruit - and toss it all into a food processor and chop it up fine, so it looks like confetti. The reasoning behind doing this is that it makes the micronutrients easier to be absorbed into the body and because the overall bulk is reduced you can eat a lot more of these very low calorie dense foods. I always hated salads, no matter what leafy greens or raw veggies I put in there. Drowning them in creamy (high fat) salad dressings helped a bit, but I still choked them down, not because I liked them but because I had to.

I decided to try doing it the microsalad way and OMG! The flavors just POPPED! All these various types of lettuce and greens and just a bit of beets and onions and wow! It actually tasted a bit sweet! There will be no problem getting me to eat a salad before my main dish like Dr. McDougall suggests in the MWLP book! I've been doing this for a few days now and finally started moving off this plateau I've been on for a few YEARS, even while eating MWLP and reducing starches to almost nothing.

Another thing I've been doing is making soups, lots and lots of soups. It started with some of Mary McDougall's found on the McDougall Made Easy and McDougall Made Irresistible DVD's and now I have a whole new slew of recipes to try.

Today I decided to dust off my pressure cooker and make one that's new to me, Susan V's Curried Split Pea Soup with Cauliflower. I ran into a problem as soon as I grabbed my pressure cooker. I last used it over a year ago and had to stop when the silicone ring in the lid became tacky, a sign of deterioration. No problem - it seems they're supposed to be changed yearly and I hadn't done so since I bough the pot about 5 years ago. A quick order to Amazon and within a few weeks I had my new ring.

But I never put it in. It sat on a rocking chair for months while I made meals on the stovetop, oven and slow cooker. I even converted many pressure cooker recipes to stovetop. One day I needed the rocker the ring package was on and moved it, putting it in "a safe place" so when I needed it I would know where it is.

That's the last time I saw it.

I spent over an hour tearing the apartment apart trying to find it. I even had my son in on the chase, and usually he's great at finding things I misplaced, but it eluded even him. So I ordered a new one. At least this time I have Amazon Prime with its 2-day shipping policy so it'll be here Thursday. Good, because I have another pressure cooker meal planned for Friday.

As for that pea soup? It looks and smells delicious! I had a sip after putting in the curry and this is going to be a keeper! I have some whole wheat naan bread in the freezer that I'll defrost and serve a little microsalad before it and here's a complete meal.

I'll be back with more cooking adventures soon. Don't worry - I won't make anyone wait until next VeganMoFo this time.

It Ain't Over 'til the Fat Lady . . .

. . . smothers potatoes in a cheezy sauce!

My husband brought the flu home from work, and walking to the library in Saturday's snow didn't help matters any. I had to listen to both him and our son coughing, sneezing and sniffling all day and all night since Sunday. I had my flu shot, which is probably why I'm not joining in the mucus chorus. As lousy as he felt, because he doesn't have too many days off left for the year and he'll need them to finish closing up his aunt's house and the sale of it, he went into work. He said it was the people in work that gave it to HIM so he may as well just go.

Tonight for dinner I already planned on making this, one of his favorite meals. Actually, anything covered in cheese sauce is his favorite, be it potatoes, pasta, rice or pizza!

Officially, it's called Cheezy Taters, and it's not even a real recipe, just stuff tossed together in a bowl and covered with the Cheezy Sauce from Veganomicon. To McDougallize the sauce I saute the garlic in water and use 2 cups of broth made with Bryanna's broth powder (minus the salt and soy milk powder).

The dish itself is a casserole made from a bag of hash brown potatoes (the diced kind), a bag of frozen spinach, and a box of sliced mushrooms (I prefer Baby Bellas but plain white ones will do just fine). I'll probably toss some onions and lots of garlic in it tonight, too. Add a bit of liquid, like a cup or so of water or broth. If you're opening a quart box of broth for the sauce you may as well use some of the rest of the box here.

Mix it up in a big bowl, then plop it all in a big casserole dish (9" x 13" or similar), cover with parchment paper then foil if you don't have a glass lid like I do for my Corningware in that size, and bake for an hour or so at 350ºF. If you like the taters a bit crispy you can uncover it for about 15 minutes more until it browns to your liking.

Timing isn't exact in this dish - I've had it in the oven as long as 2 1/2 hours and as short as 30 minutes, but it was still a bit cool. The quickest way is to pop it into the microwave for 20 - 30 minutes if yours is big and powerful enough for the job. If want to do it slower, you can even stick it in a CrockPot on Low before heading out to work and come home 6 to 10 hours later to a hot meal.

While the casserole is cooking, make your Cheezy Sauce, and when the taters are done, pour the sauce over them and mix well.

There you go - a nice, easy and filling meal of comfort food for the ailing people in the family.

To add a bit more comfort to this comfort food dinner I'll also heat up my last box of Trader Joe's Organic Tomato and Roasted Red Pepper soup. Between the soup and that cheezy casserole hubby will be asleep before Jeopardy!

Another Veganomicon Recipe

Halloween. Ever since childhood this was one of my favorite holidays. I got to be someone else for the day and not my usual fat boring self. I could be a princess with curly golden hair and a sparkly dress with a waist, or I could be a lumberjack and wear my dad's flannel shirt and my corderoy after-school play pants (This was the 1950's, when girls had to wear dresses to school), or just be something mythical and out of this world. And the rewards at the end of the day were great - a giant bag full of the best junkfood around, mostly chocolates. Imagine how disappointed I was as an adult when my own son expressed a dislike of the holiday, a couple of years choosing to wear a t-shirt that said "This IS my Halloween costume!" instead of dressing up! And at the end of those days he gave me all his candy except for a few chosen pieces, because unlike his mom, he really doesn't like chocolate all that much and preferred the Smartees and candy corn. I frequently ask him to this day if he's sure he's my kid. As a reward for giving me all his candy, we had our own ritual of going candy shopping on November First, with him given a ten dollar bill and allowed to choose any candy he wanted, up to that amount. He chose wisely and that candy always lasted him until well into the new year. Tomorrow we'll continue that tradition even though he's in his late 20's.


Back in my S.A.D. days I would always make a beef stew for Halloween dinner, calling it Witch's Stew. When I started eating vegetarian I would make the same meal, just omitting the meat chunks. When I started McDougalling, things had to change, since the gravy I used wasn't exactly McDougall-friendly, and those that were didn't stand up to the length of time the stew would be simmering away in the slow-cooker. Imagine how happy I was when Vegenomicon came out, and included in it was this fantastic recipe for a great Halloween dish - Pumpkin Baked Ziti with Caramelized Onions and Sage Crumb Topping.


This is a nice, easy dish to put together, very flavorful, and can be easily McDougallized by using whole wheat pasta, cooking up the onions in a non-stick pan, using tofu ricotta instad of the cashew one, and omitting the topping and just shaking the spices from it mixed with some breadcrumbs on top of the pasta before baking. Not only is the margarine from the topping not McDougall-legal but my husband has this weird reaction to walnuts - every time he eats them he gets a gout-like pain in his big toe. Lab work says it's not gout, but the podiatrist said the pain sure sounds like it is.


I will probably also drop some of the canned pumpkin and a bit of spice into this morning's oatmeal. If I have the time and energy this afternoon I may even bake up a batch of pumpkin muffins from Mary McDougall's recipe, again omitting the walnuts.





I was hoping one of the stores around here would be selling Silk Pumpkin Spice nog, but once again it didn't arrive before Halloween. Last year none had the pumpkin OR the regular nog until after Christmas. Too late for the holiday season but just fine on a cold winter's afternoon.






I guess that concludes VeganMoFo 2011. I wish to thank all the people on the PPK Forums for making this another fruitful and enjoyable time. I haven't had the time to go visiting other blogs, but I do have the link to the blogroll right on this page so I can go back in the future to see what goodies I missed.


Let me leave you all with the best song I've ever heard:

Penultimate VeganMoFo Post

I'm trying to think of a way to end this month with a bang, but am having a hard time finding a topic.

~ ~ ~

I just edited out a very long and scathing post about weight loss, the official McDougall forums, and people with the same attitude I find on every weight loss forum, message board and mailing list, hell, "successful" weight losers I've met in real life (While they're still in their honeymoon phase, before they started to regain). If you've tried and failed at weight loss in the past or just know people who did manage to lose, you know what I'm talking about. That simple little phrase - "If *I* can do it, so can YOU!" I feel like drop kicking their asses from  here to eternity!

NO! Just because YOU did does NOT mean that I can. Do YOU have a 58 year history of weight cycling? Do YOU have hypothyroid disease and other auto-immune disorders? Do YOU have degenerative disc disease, arthritis and neuritis throughout your body? Do YOU have nutritional deficiencies and a heart condition caused by 5 decades of restrictive eating? Do YOU have the genes that I have? Well then don't tell me that if YOU did it I can too!



Let me just remind people about the McDougall groups on YahooGroups. There's the one geared towards weight loss, and another group for everyday people following the program for various reasons, usually for health or animal rights, but the group had voted to exclude all weight loss talk. When the Groups were active a few years ago, we had a very nice time there, sharing recipes, shopping or cooking tips, hints on how to sneak healthy food into a family's meal. In recent months, thanks to YahooGroups general idiocy and the rise of other social media sites, things have been slow. We can use some fresh blood, so why not come on over and visit? The Files sections of both groups have hundreds of recipes gathered from various cookbooks and web sites, as well as favorites posted by members.

~ ~ ~

So where am I going with this rambling post? I have no idea.

Where to PUT It All!!

This is my pantry closet. We call it "Irving."

Irving - October 2011

I forget when or even why we started to name our closets - I guess I read it in a children's book somewhere and someone else was naming their closets to distinguish one from another and we started doing it in this family back when our son was young (He's now almost 30 so you see we've been weird a long, long time.)

This closet is located in the "third bedroom," as it was described by the owner, when in actuality you can't even fit a twin sized bed in it. An army cot, maybe, but that's it. So it became my craft/sewing storage and computer room, and the closet became our food pantry, because we have so few cabinets in the kitchen. We can fit our dishes and storage containers and that's about it. Our pots and some things like the casserole dishes and ovenware are stored in the not-connected dishwasher. The previous owners disconnected it from the water supply about 20 years ago when they discovered the drainage in this apartment sucked and every time the dishwasher was used it flooded the kitchen. Instead of taking it out and putting another cabinet in there he left it so when the house was sold to the current owner he could say the apartments had dishwashers. The same deceit occurred when it came to "heat included" with the rent - this tiny room isn't connected to the radiator system but has an electric baseboard radiator installed that is on OUR electric account, not the one for the house in general that the owner pays for. We had it on the first month we moved in and our bill was over $300 for a balmy April. Our bill dropped almost $200 the next month when the heater was turned off completely and it's been off since. I'll wear a sweatshirt when it gets cold out here!

Back to the pantry closet.

In the photo you get the full frontal view, so to speak. The closet extends another foot or so in each direction, too, making it hard to get things in and out of those spaces, so I keep rarely replenished things there, like extra storage containers, plastic shoeboxes of supplies, like tape and tiny notebooks and greeting cards.

But the main areas - ugh!

One thing we McDougallers have plenty of are canned goods. We use lots of beans, and most of us seem to prefer the easy way out and use canned. We use lots of tomato products, again usually canned, although since Jeff's Fast Food video I've been using a lot of boxed Pomi tomatoes. I keep canned fruit on hand because fresh produce around here is lousy and it's easy enough to find water-packed fruit in cans and no-sugar added applesauce. Other things in my pantry include bottles sauces and dressings, boxes of non-dairy milk, containers of old-fashioned oatmeal (Plus the boxes of instant that my husband prefers). And I have to share this closet with some boxes of craft supplies, too.

It's a pain, trying to make sure the new stuff goes to the back, older stuff used first. It takes a long time to put groceries away each week because I have to unload a pile of cans to put the new things on the bottom and rotate the stock.

I've had enough!

I'm now researching those rotating can systems that I've read about in articles by survivalists and Latter Day Saints groups.  I envy people who have systems like this:



or this:



or even this:



But I think the best thing I can do right now is just get some can rotation systems. THIS SITE has a whole blog about it as well as a PDF file of plans you can use to make your own out of cardboard. Here it is in action:



This guy makes one using his own pattern, one that doesn't require glue and duct tape:



But I'm lazy, and not very adept with an Exacto blade and have the scars to prove it, so I'll probably wind up with a store-bought system. I like these, by CanOrganizer. But it's a one-size-fits-all kind of thing when it comes to the size of cans. Here's a guy with a whole closet-full of them:



It looks nicer than before, but I noticed some of the organizers on the lower shelf there were popping open on top.

I would love to have one of THESE but don't have the money or room for even the smaller ones.


What I will probably wind up with are a few of these Cansolidators. 2 of the Pantry Plus size will fit on that top shelf 



and one of the regular Pantry size on the middle shelf, putting the larger and non-canned items around it. This guy shows how they're put together and how much food one of the small 40-can units holds:



The price of these units will be worth it if it straightens up that mess. It might even save me money, as I won't be finding 5 (or more!) years outdated cans hiding in the corners any more. When I did some rearranging this past summer I found cans in there I moved with me when we moved into this place. I know that because they were dated 1999 and from the grocery store we used to go to when we lived in Florida! We've been back in Jersey since April 2000!

I have my husband convinced we need to do SOMETHING with poor old Irving. He does like the look of the Cansolidators but isn't too keen on the money. Maybe I'll have my son make up one of those customized cardboard ones to show him how it'll look. As I unpack all the aunt's stuff we moved over to this house we'll have plenty of empty cardboard boxes with no further purpose in their lives.