Ten foods to lose weight by

One of the things that's helped me lose almost thirty pounds (and counting!) since starting my diet back at the beginning of January is having a small arsenal of "go-to" foods that I can eat when the urge to snack strikes. Some of them are what Weight Watchers would refer to as Zero Point foods - i.e., foods that don't count against my daily allowance of points for meals - but others are simply items that are low in fat or carbohydrates. Since I love food and would inevitably self-sabotage any attempt to stick to a diet based on austerity just on basic principle, it's important that whatever foods I do resort to as an alternative to, say, a box of Cheez-Its are sufficiently delicious in their own right.

After about two months of successful dieting, these are my Top 10 alternative snacks, in no particular order:

1. Giardineira. I'm a big fan of pickled anything, so when I'm hungry one of my favorite things to eat even when I'm not trying to lose weight is a nice helping of pickled garden vegetables. There's a Lebanese company called Chtaura that makes giardineira with baby eggplant and turnips as well as the standard accompaniment of cauliflower, carrots, and other veggies - whenever I see their stuff at the local supermarket, I snap it up.

1a. (Regular) Pickles. See #1. Sometimes a nice big crunchy kosher dill is just what the doctor ordered.

2. Pop Chips. These potato puff things are surprisingly low in all of the bad stuff, and the serving size is actually large enough that it doesn't feel like a cruel joke to eat them (unlike other salty snacks). Also, these just happen to go splendidly with...

3. Trader Joe's Red Pepper Spread. I love this stuff like crack. 'Nuff said!

4. Hummus. Any store-bought kind will do, although I will also make my own when I feel like breaking out the food processor. Instead of pita bread or chips, I like to dip them in...

5. Raw carrots. Not "baby carrots," mind you, but the real deal. I don't even peel them, for the full Bugs Bunny experience.

6. Raw celery. This is the salty yang to the sweet carrot's yin. Also good with hummus.

7. Sugar Snap Peas. A bowl of fresh sugar snap peas, raw and with a light sprinkling of salt is the perfect snack. Raw green beans are an acceptable substitute as well.

8. Clementines. Why are these things not in season all year round? By far these are my favorite "snack" fruit, and are the perfect 3pm pick-me-up at the office.

9. Cabot 75% Reduced Fat Cheddar. I've said it here before, and I'll say it again - I am very particular about my cheeses, especially cheddar, but somehow the Cabot Creamery managed to make a low-fat cheese which does not suck, which means I can have a reasonable amount of it and not feel I've train-wrecked my diet.

10. Hormel Turkey Pepperoni. Okay, despite all the rabbit food above I still do occasionally consume meat from time to time, and with a service size of 17 slices this stuff goes a long way at snacktime.

Honorary Mention: Smartfood, a.k.a. The Only Thing In The Library Vending Machine I Can Still Eat With A Clear Conscience.

So there you have it. This list definitely beats unflavored rice cakes, that's for sure!

While supplies last!

Inspired by the positive experience of other ebook writers, I've decided to enroll Confessions of a Gourmand, or How to Cook a Dragon in Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing Select program-- in return for offering my novel exclusively on Amazon for three months, I get to promote it as a free download for five days.

Confessions will be available for free at the Kindle store starting today until February 8th. Please give it a try! If you enjoy the book, I humbly ask that you tell a friend or leave a review on Amazon. Many thanks in advance...

(And thanks to Joey C. at Good Morning Gloucester for plugging the book!)

Cyclops, Gorgons, and Chocolate (oh, my!)

Chapter Twelve of Confessions of a Gourmand is now online!

Chapter Ten and other news

Totally forgot to mention that Chapter Ten of Confessions is now online!

I've also been talking with a friend who has entirely too much webhosting on his hands- he's offered me some virtual real estate for my fantasy writing so I'm likely to take him up on his offer when I've finished posting Confessions of a Gourmand in its entirety. More on that later, but I thought I'd share the exciting news with y'all.

More delicious fantasy

Chapter Eight of Confessions of a Gourmand is now online!

3 out of 5 ain't bad

Confessions of a Gourmand is now listed at Web Fiction Guide- if you've been following Confessions and would like to post a review, I encourage you to visit them and check out some excellent online fiction by other authors while you're there. Here's what one of the editors (who gave me 3 out of 5 stars) had to say about it:

"If you like descriptive narrative, full of cultural elements and a life’s story, it’s worth a look."

Woohoo!

More Confessions!

Chapter Five is now available online. I will post Chapter Six on Wednesday September 2nd, after I return from vacation- in the meantime, enjoy!

More food, folks, and fantasy

Chapter Four of Confessions of a Gourmand is now online!

The story continues

Chapter Two of Confessions of a Gourmand is now online. Enjoy!

The sandwich which must not be eaten*

I give you the Schmitter, a delicious if somewhat deadly combination of beef, cheese, and fried salami, and more cheese, available for the brave of heart and reckless of arteries at Citizens Bank Park (home of the Philadelphia Phillies).

* Okay, I ate it. And I'll eat it again, the next time I'm in Philly!

Shopping list

Okay, I know this is the Worst Lunch in the World™, but it's hard not to eat the wrong things when you're working on a Saturday in Harvard Square:

1. A Cadbury Dairy Milk Turkish chocolate bar, imported from the UK and sold here in Cambridge by Cardullo's. I guess it's supposed to be Turkish delight inside the chocolate, but in truth it's a little more gooey than the real thing, which actually works quite well with Cadbury's relatively soft chocolate. I haven't had one of these in a long time, but for a while I was quite hooked on them...

2. Margaret's Cracked Peppercorn and Spice Artisan Flatbread, also from Cardullo's. Basically these are giant thin crackers studded with chile pepper and other spices and sprinkled with sea salt. Delicious, but they make me wish I'd bought some cheese to go with it!

3. An iced Tiger Hill Nilgiri black tea, from Tealuxe (where else?). Okay, so this wasn't too bad for me at all, except perhaps in the wallet! While I love Tealuxe to death, quality tea doesn't come cheap, so I always think of my trips to their Harvard Square shop as a post-payday indulgence.

The Maine attraction

After several weeks of subsisting on ramen noodles and a Dunkin' Donuts gift card from my mother-in-law, my wife finally got her first paycheck from her new job, so we thought we'd celebrate by driving up the coast to Maine for our first visit in months. It takes about forty-five minutes for us to get to Kittery from Cape Ann if we take the Interstate, but on the way up we almost always opt for the scenic route instead: Route 1A through Ipswich, Rowley, Newburyport, Salisbury Beach, then Hampton Beach, Rye, and Portsmouth in New Hampshire before crossing the Piscataqua River into Vacationland.

Although there isn't really one dull stretch on this entire drive, the most spectacular portion of the route is between Hampton Beach and Portsmouth, where you follow pretty much the entire New Hampshire coastline as it alternates between rocky headlands and sandy coves (can you believe that there were actually people out there surfing this weekend?). And Saturday was a perfect day to take in the view, even if it was a little too chilly to make our customary stop at Odiorne State Park, the site of New Hampshire's first settlement.

It's hard to go to Kittery without hitting at least one outlet store, but our favorite place to go by far is not any of the factory outlets but the Kittery Trading Post, which seems to have undergone a new renovation and expansion every time we visit! An honest-to-goodness real trading post -- yes, they still take deer hides for trade! -- the store has even branched out onto the Internet as well with a brand spanking new virtual marketplace.

Afterwards we went to Bob's Clam Hut for some fried clams and lobster stew. The former is something we always get and always enjoy, as you just can't beat Maine clams, but the latter was a new menu item that we ordered on a lark. It was delicious! The stew was really more like a chowder -- creamy, thick, and packed with fresh lobster meat. Perfect comfort food and a welcome antidote to the belatedly-arrived New England winter...

We followed this feast with yet more culinary treats. First we stopped at Yummies Candy and Nuts, which boasts a display of over 10,000 pounds of candy in its store. Yes, you heard me right: TEN THOUSAND POUNDS! And the best part of this is that Yummies specializes both in hard-to-find and nostalgia candies, from Clark's teaberry gum to those awful yet irresistable candy cigarettes. My favorites are the gummy lobsters and the dark chocolate-covered pretzels, whereas my wife is sweet for the non-pareils and my daughter won't leave unless we've bought her yet another PEZ dispenser from the wall of choices adjacent to the checkout counter (no, that wasn't shrewd marketing on their part!).

Finally, before heading back south of the border we made our required pilgrimage to Food Mecca, aka the Stonewall Kitchen Company Store in York, where you can sample practically everything they sell in a jar and then some. While we never leave the place without another jar of Wild Maine Blueberry Jam, this time around we picked up some Apricot Ginger Jam as well, along with some Maple Chipotle Mustard and a jar of Mango Chutney which didn't survive the weekend.

All in all, a well-deserved albeit all too brief visit to my favorite State in the Union. I'm pushing for an overnight trip up to the Camden Hills in the Spring, but the real goal would be to spend an entire week Downeast this summer -- something we used to do every year until recently. Well, here's to hoping!

It's all about the taxonomy

Since I've noticed that I have more than enough foodie inspiration to justify a blog of its own, I give you Thai Chicken Milkshake. That way the Adsense bots will be slightly less confused when I decide to share my latest masterpiece from the The Jersey Exile Kitchen...

I'm goin' back to South Beach

Alert readers of the Jersey Exile will remember that the wife and I tried out the South Beach Diet in the Fall of 2005, and succeeded in losing over 100 pounds combined while doing so. Dr. Arthur Agatson's approach to the "low-carb" diet is to differentiate between complex and simple carbohydrates, with the result that if you follow the diet you don't count carbs so much as pay closer attention to quality of carbohydrate that you're putting into your body. Moreover, once you've managed to lose weight using South Beach, it's very difficult to put those pounds back on unless you somehow manage to convince yourself that eating an entire pound of pasta or loaf of bread in one sitting is a good idea.

After almost a year and a half after losing more than seventy pounds, the closest I've come to gaining so much as a fraction of it back was this past holiday season, when baked goods abounded both at home and at work and good sense took a vacation all its own. Even then I couldn't have put on more than five or ten pounds, but that was more than enough excuse to return to Phase One again starting with the New Year, not only to wipe out the Christmas gains but perhaps to lose a few more pounds past where my body had stabilized the last time I'd gone on the stricter phases of the diet.

Make no mistake about it, however -- the first two weeks of this diet sucks, as you are pretty much restricted to meats, dairy, and vegetables, with nuts and such insubstantialities as Cool Whip Free with unsweetened Hershey's cocoa powder for dessert (I call this particular concoction "Chocolate Sadness"). This time around seems a little less painful than the first time, though, when I literally wanted to throw myself either off a very tall bridge or into an extra-large vat of Cheez-It crackers. We're six days into Phase One, and already the holiday pounds are a thing of the past for the both of us. After this phase is over you can start re-incorporating such foods as fruits, whole grain foods, and even a little alcohol, although beer is always a no-no.

Since my mind is wallowing in the realm of forbidden foods, let me share my Top Five South Beach (Dis)approved Foods that I tend to crave during the long march from Day One to Day Fourteen of this diet:

1. Uno's Rattlesnake Pasta. There's no reason in the world this should be as good as it is, since everything else I order at Pizzeria Uno's tends to make me want to wish I'd eaten anything else. Maybe it's the liberal sprinkling of pickled jalapeno slices?

2. Mack and Manco's Pizza. A Jersey Shore classic. Just dough, sauce, and cheese, baked to perfection. Best when eaten when the cheese is still molten and can slide off your slice onto your "nice" white O.P. corduroy shorts, as happened time and time again when I was a kid at the Ocean City boardwalk with my family (and did they ever let me go back to our rental house to change my clothes once it happened? Not on your life! Thanks for another traumatic memory, Mom and Dad...).

3. Cheez-Its. Dear God, I think they must be sprinkled with crack as well as salt and MSG.

4. Any pretzel from Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Utz, Snyders, Tom Sturgis, or any of the smaller companies whose product don't make it out of Delaware Valley due to the insatiable hunger for pretzels among the local inhabitants (nowadays I like to refer to my home of South Jersey as "Land of Type II Diabetes", what with the insane pretzel consumption and the fondness for Southern-style sweet tea -- iced tea with no lemon and extra sugar, something I grew up as a baby in lieu of milk or Simulac).

5. Wild Maine Blueberry Jam, from Stonewall Kitchen. Okay, pretty much anything from Stonewall Kitchen, but this is bar none my favorite jam or jelly in the universe. The best part is that my daughter loves it too -- she'll eat it out of the jar with a spoon!

Okay, now I'm ravenous...

One less turkey gets the ax

Regular readers of this blog may recall that we do not cook a turkey on Thanksgiving Day, a fact that seems to cause much surprise and consternation in people when they find out. It's not that I have anything against the turkey per se, just that for whatever reason my family would normally cook a pork roast as the generic holiday meal when I was growing up so any allegiance to the bird was already weakened by the time I was able to cook for myself.

Several years ago when my wife was pregnant with Baby Exile we decided that the last thing that we wanted to do was hit the road to see either my family or hers, so instead we stayed home for our very first Thanksgiving together and have done so for every year since then, making it our first real holiday that we celebrate as a family ourselves. Perhaps to celebrate a brand new tradition I chose to make baked stuffed lobster instead of a turkey, and now I can't imagine having Thanksgiving dinner without it.

Last year we invited my best friend and his girlfriend over for the holiday meal -- we made the stuffed lobster, mussels steamed in coconut milk, and other appetizer-type things, and they bought a goose and a couple of pies. This year my friend roasted some game hens and his girlfriend brought not only a delicious apple pie but some sesame and soy brussel sprouts that even my wife ate (and she doesn't like anything green!).

I had a moment of panic when my wife informed me that there had been a run on live lobsters at all of the local seafood shops yesterday evening and that all she could get was fresh lobster meat. The shells and claws being an important part of both the preparation and the presentation, I scrambled to think of what I could do to keep the meal from looking like a glorified side dish when I remembered that my daughter had a sand mold in the shape of a lobster. A run through the dishwasher later and we were in business! I pressed the lobster stuffing mixture into the mold and turned out the miniature "lobsters" on a cookie sheet, baking them until golden brown and then serving them with claw meat that I had reserved for garnish.

Baby Exile was thoroughly amused by my using one of her beach toys as a kitchen implement. She also helped make the cornbread for the stuffing, the recipe for which we got from Cooking for Engineers, which is my favorite food website hands down.

Baked "Stuffed" Lobster

1 1/2 lb lobster meat, chopped into chunks (reserve claw meat)
1 pan cornbread, crumbled
1 link chorizo or other spicy pork sausage
4 ribs celery, chopped fine
2 medium white onions, chopped fine
2 Tb salted butter
Salt, pepper, and Frank's Red Hot to taste

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Chop sausage into fine chunks and brown in skillet. Remove sausage, add butter and saute celery and onion for 3-5 minutes or until onion becomes translucent and celery begins to soften. Combine sausage, celery, and onion with crumbled cornbread and lobster meat; add salt, pepper, and Red Hot to taste.

Press mixture into lobster-shaped sand mold and turn out onto greased cookie sheet. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until the tops are golden brown. Serve by adding a pat of butter to each "lobster" and garnishing with claw meat. Feeds 4 comfortably.

Happy Thanksgiving!