The new Girl Taking on the Mode: Oh Im spending Chrimas in Paradise....You?

The new Girl Taking on the Mode: Oh Im spending Chrimas in Paradise....You?: " Christmas and the holiday season are ..."

Why Fats are Essential to Health - Fatty Acids, Omega-3

Why Fats are Essential to Health - Fatty Acids, Omega-3

Bananas Foster Redux

It happened again. I saw a so-called diet recipe done over by a couple well-meaning home economists who obviously drank the Koolaid on the low fat road to Nirvana. So these women took a classic recipe for Bananas Foster which is simply a scoop of vanilla ice cream over a sauce made from bananas cooked in butter, brown sugar, and finished with a flourish of flaming rum and turned it into a horror made with some blue john custard made from non fat milk, egg whites and artificial eggs, enough white sugar to send you into sugar shock, then finished off with a sauce they devised in their infinite wisdom that substituted orange juice for rum. Orange juice! That liquid sugar delight guaranteed to send your blood sugar into the danger zone in about a second. Why do those ladies think orange juice is the drink of choice for diabetics whose blood sugar has dropped? To suggest to dieters that orange juice is better for them than lovely carbohydrate free triple distilled rum is beyond me. What were they thinking?

This is a perfect example of meddling with success that results in some dissatisfying excuse for a dessert that will leave you yearning for a Snickers bar within twenty minutes because its so loaded with sugar itself.

So what is the answer? Get back to basics. Start off with a scoop of sugar free ice cream, no more than 90 calories and 13 carb grams. Place that in a dessert bowl. Meanwhile, melt a tablespoon of real butter in a small skillet and add a half banana. Heat until it's limp and begging for mercy. Now you can do what you want. Add a teaspoon of brown sugar substitute, or a bit of sugar free buterscotch ice cream sauce. Let this melt together. Now the clincher is to add a shot of carb-free rum and set it alight, pour it over the ice cream and voila. A satisfying, dramatic dessert in under 20 carbohydrate grams, and bursting with satisfaction and flavor

You know you want it

OK. Tell the truth. When you stand in line at the grocery store and see The National Enquirer for sale aren't you tempted to buy it? I could hardly resist this week, when I saw the cover. Look at all those bare bellies? Where are the flat belly celebrities? And how did they get there? And so what?

Well what drew me to this cover was that picture of the woman with her face covered up and it said Guess Who? What I was thinking is, hmm, that looks kind of like me. Except her thighs are worse, but her tone is better. Of course, she is the same age as my daughter, so maybe I get 5 years off for good behavior, and some bit of credit for being old. But I don't know.

Women can't help comparing themselves to each other. So when I flipped the issue open - ok - i couldn't wait until I got home, I read the damn magazine in the parking lot, sipping my Starbucks. A little guilty pleasure. but you wanna know who that Babe is? It's Pierce Brosnan's wife. And it sez she weighed 130 when she met her hunka munka husband, but now eats what she wants and weighs 195. she's 5'8", just like me, and that's about how I gained weight, because my husband thought I looked just luscious.

But, OK. So time passes. blood pressure goes up. Blood Sugars go crazy. You gotta get a grip. You can't just indulge yourself forever. Well maybe you can, but only if you leave out the processed carbs that make your blood sugars spike and your blood pressure soar.

So, Pierce's wife. I've lost 30 pounds and you'll be happy when you do too. Honest you will. And if you fight fat with fat you won't even suffer.

So here's a great recipe I just discovered recently that works for me. My grocery store sells a container called "salad fixins" that is a blend of almond, dried cranberries, and pumpkin seeds. According to their nutritionals 1/4 cup has 14 carbs. So I put about 1/2 of that into the slaw and it was yummy. 7 carbs I can live with. This goes really well with ham. I bought one of those spiral sliced ham and I've eaten off it all week. Still good to me.

Napa Cabbage Slaw with Salad Fixins

makes 2 servings

4 cups shaved napa cabbage

1/4 cup "Salad Fixins" (dried cranberries, almonds, and pumpkin seeds)

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

few drops best quality balsamic vinegar

pinch salt

Mix it all up and divide between two plates. Add 2 to 4 oz. protein meat and Baby, that's lunch.













Napa Cabbage Slaw

Old Resolutions for the New Year

January is the traditional month for new diets. I get kind of amused reading this week's Time magazine which chose 3 of the new diet books to review. The first one disallows wine, salt, sugar and artificial sweetener. The second forbids carbonated drinks, coffee, gassy foods including cabbage. The third forbids dairy, white rice, and processed foods. And the last one forbids volume. Eat anything you want but just choose small portions.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here? Why does every new diet start off by telling you what you cannot eat?

People have had problems with excess weight ever since mankind began to grow food. The hunters and gatherers weren't fat. They spent a lot of time just searching for food and were grateful for what they could find. And the game and berries they found also spent time searching for nourishment and water and didn't store fat either.

But that was then. This is now. We are besotted with food, drink, choices, and chance. What on earth can we do?

Dr. John Salerno of the Salerno Center in New York city has taught me that I can really indulge myself, eat fabulous foods and lose weight. I have, to date, lost 31 pounds. My blood sugars are now normal. My cholesterol has gone down. And I have not suffered one day.

I propose that you can treat your self to luxury foods, pates, smoked salmon, steaks, ham, shrimp. You're beginning to see a pattern here, right? High fat, high protein foods. Why would a person do that? Won't it clog your arteries? Haven't I read all the materials from main stream medicine that tell you NOT to eat fat? Entire careers have been built on this premise. Am I not paying attention? Dr. Salerno has shown me the light.

I myself used to be on the masthead of Cooking Light Magazine which made a very successful venture teaching people to take fat out of foods. Of course the dark secret in the test kitchen was that the so-called portions they recommended were laughable. A cake with 15 servings? Sure it looked good on the cover of the magazine. Sure its nutritional numbers looked good. But everybody who worked on the recipe could joke that they'd eat 3 servings in a hurry. The whole notion was as flawed as Bernie Madoff's money making schemes.

Fat is good for you. Protein is good for you. I am not making this up.

Before South Beach, Before Atkins, there was a doctor in England named Richard Mackarness who wrote a book in the fifties called Eat Fat and Grow Slim. Now Dr. Mackarness was not basing his diet on some poppycock theory, but on solid science that went back as far as the nineteenth century when a mortician named William Banting, who was so fat he had to walk down the stairs backwards made a stunning discovery. with the help of a nineteenth century eye, ear, nose and throat doc, he figured out he could lose weight and eat all the fat he wanted to.

Be cause, mirable dictu, Banting discovered it wasn't fat that was his problem, but rather bread,sugar, beer, and potatoes.

Banting was a fashionable London mortician who actually made the coffin for the Duke of Wellington. Before he came upon his amazing discovery, he had tried a number of other remedies: Turkish baths, violent exercise, spa, drastic punishing diets, and what they called purgation which sounds so awful we don't even want to go there. I suppose its the equivalent of high colonics today which promise to drop 20 pounds in an hour. Ugh.

But eventually, he went to see this ear, nose and throat doctor named William Harvey who put him on a new diet. Within a year, he had lost all the weight he needed to and much to his astonishment, Dr. Harvey's diet was pleasant and not the least painful.

So this is how Banting became famous. He wrote his own little book which he called "Letter on Corpulence", published in 1864. He breakfasted on 4 or 5 ounces of beef, mutton, kidney, fish, bacon or cold meat. He had a little dry toast and a cup of tea. For lunch, he had 5 to 6 ounces of fish except salmon (See everybody has to leave something out...) pork, meat, poultry and game. Any vegetable except potatoes, a little toast, a glass or two of claret or sherry and some fruit. For tea, he had 2-3 ounces of fruit, more tea and another piece of dry toast. By dinner, he ate again 3-4 ounces of meat washed down with more claret. for a night cap he took a shot of gin, whiskey or brandy.

And following this generous regimen, he lost more than 100 pounds in a year. He was elated.

His diet was almost totally fatty meat, with some roughage and booze helped him regain his youthful shape.

Now perhaps the most significant caveat about this diet is that it is meant for people who tend to gain weight. Not for those who have picked up 10 pesky pounds.

But, in fact, after Dr. Salerno's Full Fat Fast, which lasts a couple weeks and jump starts your metabolism by restricting all carbs, you could easily go with the good mortician's diet and find yourself healthier, slimmer and sound for the coming year.

I am happy to report that I got through the holiday parties without gaining any weight. I didn't lose any but I didn't gain, and I pretty much stuck to Banting's suggestions. Yes, I did have bites of desserts often. I am addicted to sugar.

But now its the new year and for the first two weeks I'll stick to the full fat fast and know that I will not have to suffer, I will not have to shave off calories until I'm as mean as a snake. And I will continue with the weight loss plan that I started last year. I've lost 30 pounds and expect to lose 30 more.

Now, you'll have to excuse me. I'm going to stop and eat the third 2 ounce meal for the day. Smoked salmon from Mackenzie, Ltd.com and some capers and a squeeze of lemon. What's not to love about that kind of diet?

Why Diets Fail

How many times have you heard it? The so-and-so diet worked very well for me. I lost 20 pounds. But the minute I got off the diet, I gained back every pound plus 8 more.

The reason for this is both simple and hard. If you went back to your old way of eating, your body gave out a big sigh and said AHHH, then began to plump itself up again. A more complicated explanation involves the notion of your metabolism, your body type, and your habits.

I have to go back to the original statement I made, "It's not your fault you're fat." The food presented to Americans has changed drastically in the last thirty years. So have cooking and eating habits. In the first place, the market is flooded with processed foods which are loaded with sugars in all forms, salt, chemicals and often built on a base of tasteless, nutritionless white flour.

Flour and sugar are the end products of a long processing system which strips them of any nutritional value and leaves them as nothing more than simple carbohydrates. Now when you eat these processed foods, in their zillions of permutations, they often taste really good, but your body is not fooled. Within an hour, your blood sugar will rise, your hunger will scream, and you're body will be saying, help! Feed me.

And so, you are on a roller coaster of eating empty foods as deadly as that of the poor soul who is addicted to alcohol or drugs.

But, you say, my sister eats cakes and cookies all the time and she never gains a pound. OK. Here's the deal. Your sister has a different metabolism from you. Her body turns everything she eats to energy. Yours, the more conservative model, says you never know when the next famine is coming, better stock up.

Just think of it this way. If you and your sister were stuck in a row boat in the great Swamp and weren't found for weeks, you'd have a better chance of survival than she does, because you have all that lovely stored fat. But, since its not likely that you are going to get stuck without food, you're going to have to accept the fact that your body treats carbohydrates differently than those string beans we all know and (secretly) hate.

So the short answer is you'll have to change what you eat, and when you choose to alter your eating habits, you'd better choose a plan you can stick with, basically, for the rest of your life, because the old ways are, for you, the bad ways.

If you can accept that sugar and flour are basically POISON to you, then you can move on from there. This means no bread, no cake, no cookies, no pasta (except whole wheat), no rice, except brown, you get the idea. You just have to put these food categories out of your mind.

It may take you a while to get used to this idea. Take your time. It's your life at stake here and I know you'll come to the right decision.

We'll talk more about this tomorrow. Meanwhile, here's a great recipe to ease your acceptance. As you'll see, the Fight Fat With Fat program is not so much a diet as an enlightened way to eat.
I believe you'll come to love it. After all, you never have to count calories again, you never have to worry about portion size, you just have to eat until you are satisfied from a wide variety of whole, delicious foods. What's not to love?

Peppered Lamb Chops on a Bed of Bitter Greens with Walnuts and Cranberries

(adapted from Fight Fat with Fat, by Dr. John Salerno and Linda West Eckhardt)

You’ll get a spicy, crunchy crust on the outside of the chops that is just the first of the flavor hits you’ll get from this one dish dinner that yields all the satisfaction you can stand and still call it a diet: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour flavors, and hot besides. All rolled into one.

Makes 2 servings

8 ounces thick loin lamb chops (2 to 4 depending upon the size)

2 cloves garlic

1 teaspoon olive oil

½ teaspoon cracked black peppercorns

4 cups mixed bitter greens: washed, dried and torn escarole, chicory and/or radicchio

1 tablespoon chopped walnuts

1 tablespoon dried cranberries

Dressing:

1 tablespoon tarragon vinegar

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon finely chopped shallots

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon water

½ teaspoon kosher salt

½ teaspoon cracked black pepper

Preheat a large skillet over medium high heat, and then film it with oil. Meanwhile, make small incisions in the chops with a paring knife and insert slivers of garlic. Press in cracked peppercorns, then sauté, turning only once, about 3-5 minutes per side.

Place salad greens in a large bowl along with walnuts and dried cranberries. Whisk together dressing ingredients in a small bowl then toss with salad. Divide greens between two dinner plates. Top with sautéed chops and serve.

Try some Terrific Grass Fed Beef

Chicago Steakhouse Style Grass-fed Steak



The secret to mimicking a steakhouse style steak in the comfort of your own home is to heat your broiler 20 minutes before you put the steaks in. You want the oven really hot! Some people go as far as to broil the steaks over a rack that is placed over an aluminum tray filled with salt so that it catches the juices. With a grass-fed steak you want to broil it about 5 minutes on each side. But each broiler is different so do please use your personal discretion. Make sure to season the steaks with salt and pepper. I made herb butter with mine because I love the flavor of the charred steak with herbed butter!

Herb Butter: In bowl, blend 1/2 cup softened butter, 2 cloves finely chopped garlic and 2 Tbsp. finely thyme and parsley.

You can see how easy it is to do this high fat, high protein diet, when you see the luscious piece that came my way from a great website you should check out called Grass-Fed Party. These are the folks who are taking on the political problems in the mea inustry and we applaud them.

Order a great steak today. Your body will thank you.