Adventures great and small.

I have had no great epiphanies over the past week or even new discoveries except that adventurers can be great and small. We cooked tortilla pizza and everybody had a good time eating them prior to a birthday movie. Then there was the the workout with three devil woman who wore me out. (Don’t let their appearances fool you as all are devil women who can tire me out and beat me.)

Of course they are all young and thank God healthy so I am lucky to be able to engage in and keep up with their idea of fun. The adventuresome Miss Ana making the pizza above was also one of the devil woman who ran me into the ground. I brought new jogging shoes and my son in law helped choose an appropriate winter jogging outfit that warmed both my body and soul. Yes shopping with him was a real adventure and I even purchased a hat that I would not  have selected without his help.

Of course no birthday would be complete without a shopping spree at Toys R Us. In January, the little one could have all she could carry and this time, the larger one would get a total of 42 dollars which was related to a very poor math grade so she graciously accepted less than she would have gotten with better grades.

Of course, Cait came along to supervise, guide and to teach her cousins to engage in deviant behavior at every opportunity. She reminds them constantly in a joking way to stop acting like children and stop having fun but all they do is giggle and laugh at her. By the way Cait is a 22 year old Chemical Engineer enjoying family fun.

Earlier in the day, we all went to a farmers market and skipped through the area. It was funny. On one side of the market, we got a round of applause from the merchants and on the other, we were told to stop fooling around and grow up. I suppose all of the merchants thought that there responses were appropriate on both sides of the market. We actually brought a bunch of stuff and didn’t bump into anything or anybody while skipping. I believe we purchased everything on the side where we were appreciated.

Joking aide at 245 pounds which is where I started loosing weight, I could not have done much this weekend other than be a couch potato and beg one of the healthier family members to run and get me a beer.  I’m still overweight and wear a heart beat monitor and consulted my doctor before I started working out.  He is an excellent role model, my age better shape and good control of his health who loves the great outdoors.  When I said this all at a family gathering, my sister asked about the heart rate monitor. Her daughter was explaining about optimum performance levels at various heart rates. I said it was far simpler.

Put the thing on and work really hard until it hits 150 beats per minute and then you are allowed to quit.  The only problem with my method is that every time you work out, you have to exercise a little longer and harder before it hits 150 and you get to quit.

I have decided to split my blog in two parts with different goals.  In Coffeepotcooking.wordpress.com, I will stick with recipes and methods in making meals for one.  In Too Young to be Old, I will report on family adventures both great and small.

Six Minutes to Gut Luggage & Vegan Pizza

To a foodie, there are two classes of edibles; food and gut luggage. Food are those meals which are a well executed balance of ingredients that are healthy and nutritious. Gut luggage is stuff that you shove down your throat and you carry around until your next meal and you don’t worry about the balance of vitamins, minerals and complex proteins needed to sustain life without brain damage. Now one characteristic of gut luggage is that old saying “quick and easy to make.”

I went out to lunch yesterday and hadn’t prepared or thought about dinner because I knew I was going to lunch and thought I would be full. The only thing that appealed to me at all was a low calorie vegetarian Greek salad which I ate and was pretty good. The problem was when I reached home at 7 pm I was hungry.

Because of my new improved eating habits, there was no leftovers and nothing ready to be cooked. The six minute solution was to take a medium potato and nuke it on high for three minutes. Then I put 3 (1.5 oz) meat balls on the plate with a dab of tomato sauce on top and nuked everything for three more minutes. Since I didn’t have any low fat sour cream around that was white in color, I made do with smothering the potato with salt and pepper and putting a generous amount of butter on the nuked baked potato.

Of course this is the antithesis of coffee pot cooking where you plan the meal, the portions and the balance when you are not hungry and let it slow cook until you are ready to eat it. The biggest problem about the meal above, is that it is instantly reproducible. If I were still hungry in 7 minutes, after inhaling the first plate of food, I could do it again in six more minutes.

Obviously it is not the coffeepot cooking that is making me lose weight. It is the total change in eating habits which has me avoiding six minute gut luggage as a source of nourishment.

Some of my meals might seem close to six minute wonders like the Italian sandwiches. However, to find blackened pimento, I had to go to 4 stores and to find the Gorgonzola, three. These attractive sandwiches are a pain in the rear to find the real ingredients so you don’t get the urge to do that often and you still have to plan ahead, whereas there are always frozen meatballs in the house and potatoes because to be cost effective you have to buy the five pound bag.

I classify my tortilla pizza as food, along with the original recipe because of the fine ingredients and the attractive presentation. When you take the time to make a pretty meal, it takes more than six minutes and when you use the finest ingredients, your smaller portions will leave you well satisfied.

One of the problems with being a vegan is the apparent lack of understanding of the complex demands for nutriments by the human body. The body needs complex proteins and while I have restricted my meat input to about 5 oz when I’m meal planning and coffeepot cooking, I don’t eat meat everyday because I like a variety of fresh vegetables which can be delightfully combined into a variety of vegetarian meals and even vegan meals.

I cant understand why anybody would subject themselves to gut luggage like the following just to call themselves a vegan and be able to look a cow in the eye without shame. Perhaps the reason they want to look a cow in the eye is because there minds are protein deficient and they are operating at a very low mental capacity.

I pulled the following recipe from the net and swear that I would not even feed it to my vegan dog if I either had a dog or there was a breed of dog that would voluntary be a vegan without an abusive owner who is starving the animal into submission.

Vegan Pizza

Ingredients:

1 cup vegan pizza sauce (gene modified tomatoes are probably not vegan)

12 oz tofu (Tofu is not a naturally occurring food but was invented in a biochemical process about the time of Christ. It is produced by soaking, grinding, boiling and straining soybeans and adding various salts to the remaining milk.)

4 garlic cloves (to ward off meat eating vampires)

¼ teaspoon of onion powder

¼ Tsp red pepper flakes

1 tablespoon nutritional yeast (which “is grown on mixtures of beet and sugar cane molasses. After it is grown and the fermentation process is complete, the yeast is harvested, washed, pasteurized, and dried at a high temperature.” and the fermented sugar turned into vegan rum.)

Put all of the above into a blender and “blend until its an even weird orange color. Pour sauce stuff over” acceptable vegan bread and “microwave until sauce bubbles and you can see it harden a little.”

The bold words are all quoted from the original recipe.

I still have enough brain cells left not to waste time either looking a cow in the eye or eating anything that is made from “sauce stuff” with a “weird orange color” that is microwaved until “you can see it harden a little.”

This is the worst form of gut luggage:Garbage served with a sanctimonious message.

Black Eyed Peas and Turkey Ham

 My Best Friend, Chino died far to young. He love to cook, share his food with friends and wash it all down with beer. He hated to take his blood pressure medicine so he skipped it. He loved to cook so he did and ate it. He died at 44.

 I tried that tough love garbage for about 3 months and said that I wouldn’t talk to him until he lost 50 pounds. The only loss was mine as avoided me for about 3 months and I went back to him and accepted him for the loving person he was and just the way he was.

 When my wife went to be with our daughter for a troublesome pregnancy for 6 weeks Chino and I went everyday for a swim and a beer at Princess Beach which happened to be a gay resort at the time. When Dolores got back, she joined the party as she also loved Chino and joined the fun. One bartender was so confused that she finally asked, “If Chino and I were a couple, who was Dolores?”

 The answer was simple. We all loved each other and Dolores and I were husband and wife in the traditional sense and Chino was our dear friend.

After suffering my loss of Chino and Dolores, I have been thinking of the old times and the ironies of out friendship. Chino loved to cook what I call universal poor people food and Dolores never grew up that way. So when Chino cooked black eyed peas and ham hocks, he just knew I would love it and brought a plate to work for me and some other friends while leaving out Dolores because he knew it was not her type of food.

Dolores would never dream of eating tong, kidneys, gizzards, ham hocks, bull foot, pig ears, snout, feet, jowls, tail or neck, let alone the heart or rocky mountain oysters of any animal. She was throughly disgusted when her mother found out I liked brains and sweetbreads and cooked them for me. Dolores eventually accepted that chicken feet would build a chicken stock more than one made from backs and necks alone. But insisted I cut off the toe nails before cooking the feet and strain out every bone leaving only the pure chicken broth when I was done.

 Now Chino was a make do own-way type of cook. He would conceive of a meal he would like and then make do with the ingredients in his kitchen so no matter how many times he made a meal, it never was exactly the same. It wasn’t that he was secretive about his recipes, he would just add whatever he thought the pot needed and whatever he had available substituting one spice or herb for another because he had run out of what ever he used the time before.

 Some staples he never ran out of so you knew he always had fresh parsley, celery, rosemary, thyme which he could get from his garden and Sazon, Adobo, onions, garlic, rice, dried beans and canned Spanish salsa (the soothe kind). All he had to do was find a small piece of meat and he could whip up a meal for a dozen from the supplies in the larder.

 One of my favorites was black eyed peas and ham hocks. However,  before I set about cooking dried beans and a salty ham hock in my coffee pot all day and miss the proper sauce flavor, I decided to do a proof of concept using canned beans and turkey ham. It really turned out very good and I served it over a bead of rice. I am now ready to try the more complex and probably unhealthier version using dried beans and hammocks. As long as I keep losing weigh, I am not going to torture myself into eating bean sprout bread and tofu although I am really tempted to try a vegan pizza to see if I can make it taste close to real food. But forget that for now.

Black Eyed Peas and Turkey Ham

Ingredients:

Tablespoon olive oil

chooped up onion

2 cloves minced garlic

bay leaf

thin slice scotch bonnet pepper

½ tsp thyme

½ tsp paprika

¼ pound turkey ham

1 small can (10 oz) black eye peas with broth.

1 can chicken broth

10 oz can Spanish salsa (the soothe kind)

In the morning, put the oil, onions, garlic, spices,, herbs and turkey and put it on the hot plate of the coffee pot. Let cook while showering – 20 minutes and stir when you get back. Add the can of black eyed peas and broth and let cook all day. Prior to serving add the can of tomato sauce and let warm up. Serve over rice. 

I managed to capture the sauce flavor of Chino’s black eyed peas and ham hocks so I was ready to try the real deal.

Snorkeling at the Palms!

Chuck and Joyce own the Palms Hotel, and lucky for me he his formal education was in Biology.  He has a great love of the sea and took my son and I and another guest  snorkeling in front of the Hotel. He has been doing these guided tours for the past three years as much as 3 times a day so he knows his part of the sea like the back of his hand. Actually he probably knows it better as I doubt he spends 3 -5 hours a day looking at the back of his hand.

He has been trying to get me to go out and while I try to stay physically fit at what ever my weight is, I also recognize my limitations and regardless of my weight wont stress my body in a marathon or triathlon.  Now below 235 which I have been for a while, I am in good enough shape to spend an hour or so snorkeling in reasonable conditions.  Unbelievable as it seems I didn’t go until Tuesday because it’s been too cold. Talk about spoiled, the air temperature was around 85 and the sea about 75. Now it is warmer with the air about 88 and the sea at 77 or so.  (When the temperature gets above 90 which is thank God rare, we all complain it’s too hot. )

My day at sea was a little rough but we started calmly.  We were in shallow water and as Chuck became comfortable with our skill levels, we progressed into more dangerous waters where there was a rip tide that was trying to push you into the surf and breakers coming over the reef at the 3-5 foot level which were sort of trying to drown me.

It was a very compatible group and when the sea was too murky and treacherous I split off to return to shore.  I am not sure if the group followed shortly there after because they were worried about me drowning as I bumped against the coral from the wave action and the rip tide   or if they too gave up because there really isn’t much to see when the sea is murky.  Since all of the group were gentleman, I guess I will never know unless my son starts ragging me.

Fortunately, I rarely have a panic attack when snorkeling so it was no great mental stressor and as the picture below shows only a slight physical one.  If I had stayed with the group, I wouldn’t have had the problems as Chuck knows the exact path back which minimizes the effect of the rip tide.

I am utterly amazed that the photo collection of all the marine life that Chuck has captured on the Internet is not yet online.  That is an oversight which I will try to get corrected as it is a spectacular collection.  The best part is this is not a “tourist attraction” but mother natures everyday work for the enjoyment of all humanity.

Overall, I guess my weight loss was good for something other than making Dagny and Cait happy. Only gained 3 pounds while Lauren, Andrew and Pippa were here so I guess my losses to date are fairly permanent as I really didn’t behave when it came to having a few beers.

Green Eggs and Ham!

Well Andrew, Lauren and Pippa are visiting this week.  Andrew is my Son and Pippa is my granddaughter so of course Lauren is my daughter in law. I’m having a great time enjoying all of their company.  I kind of knew that it would be rough because my son is a foodie who enjoys three meals a day and I am a true social eater.

I set my hoped for weight gain  at no more than 5 pounds which I should be able to loose in the week before I go up for Cayla’s birthday and to see my Mom where I’ll probably gain another  5 pounds. I knew it was going to be a rough week when Andrew showed up with an over abundance of cookies from his co-worker Yvonne who baked some luscious moist thick chocolate chip cookies which are now all gone because of my great expertise at binge eating.

One of the great joys of having children around is to use them as an excuse to do weird things and one of the things to do was make green eggs and ham in tribute to Dr. Spock.

The recipe should be obvious. Use a cookie cutter in the shape of a train  to punch a whole in a slice of bread,  butter the pan and slowly fry the bread until it is toasted.  Fill the hole in the center with spooned in scrambled eggs.  My son chose yellow as his favorite color and of course Pippa wanted green eggs and ham.  Green egg coloring turned the trick.  Of course she wandered off and skipped breakfast but I ate it and it was fine.  Tasted just like scrambled eggs and toast.

Green Eggs and Ham.  Gourmet cooking at it’s best.

Slow Cook – Black Beans with Ham

Went back to Jen Fong Eats for another black bean recipe which I really never used when Dolores was alive. She preferred red beans and she always made the rice and usually any meal including beans. When we went out and it was on the menu, I would always order black bean soup which I like and I suppose that one of these days I will learn to make it.

In the meanwhile I adapted the Jen Fong Black bean with pork and tomatoes recipe to the tastes I like and it also served in getting rid of half a can of garbanzo beans which I also like and hate to waste.

Ingredients:

Tablespoon olive oil

2 small carrots sliced

1 celery stalk diced

½ onion diced

1 clove garlic minced

½ tsp cumin

½ tsp thyme

½ tsp paprika

piece bay lief

thin slice scotch bonnet pepper

4 oz. Diced cooked ham

small can (10 oz) black beans with liquid

½ can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes

½ can (14.5 oz) chicken broth

½ can (14.5 oz) garbanzos without the liquid (optional)

Method:

Put all ingredients up to and including ham into the coffepot and put on the hot plate, stir occasionally and go take your morning shower.

Stir again when you finish your shower and get back to the pot. Then add the rest of the canned products to the pot and cook covered all day.

When you return to the pot 10-12 hours later, take off the foil cover and let it cook down while you make the rice.

Serve over white rice as shown above. This actually made enough for two meals.

I have always loved the rice, meat  and beans type of meal so there are a few more to come.  My niece wants me to learn to make Arroz con polla which would be a step up as the rice would have to be made in the coffeepot.  I have yet to see an appetizing picture of rice made in a slow cooker which was not part of a soup or stew which look good.  Pictures of rice dishes look too moist and pasty to be considered as good rice.  Most look like oatmeal.

If anybody has a good recipe for a slow cooker I would love to see it.

Sprout Bread Pizza, 2.0

I tried my very best to make a decent sprouted grain and beans flat bred pizza in my second try. I made it exactly as I had the wheat tortilla pie with a sprinkle of mozzarella on the crust, sauce above that and a topping of fresh mozzarella and anchovies. The pie was beautiful and all I discovered was the same thing I already know about pizza. It’s a shame to use good ingredients on a bad crust because it ruins the whole experience.

I went back to my Bible and reread Chapter four of Ezekiel along with Chapter 3 to get a better understanding of the context. Now God was mad at the House of Israel for there sins but he did offer a diet that wasn’t meant to harm anyone. The water level was a little light with only about a quart a day and the meat level was appropriate allowing a meal with ½ pound of meat “from time to time”. Since the punishment of putting dung in the sprouted gain and bean bread seemed a little harsh in comparison, I have to conclude that the dung was added to improve the flavor of sprouted grain and bean bread.

Forgot to mention that I cooked this meal by candle light and kerosene lantern as the power was out. It was cooked in the oven of my gas stove without a pilot light that I can use after hurricanes or whenever there is no power.

Sprout Bread Pizza

As described in a previous post, I had made a Pizza using a wheat tortilla and it was fantastic and easy.  As discussed separately, I wasn’t too excited about a grain and bean sprout tortilla I had found because I had read the Bible passage cited on the package label.  Well, this is the first attempt at a sprouted bread pizza and parallels the original post.

First the pan was oiled and the defrosted sprout tortilla placed on the pan and since I had some locally grown fantastic ripe tomatoes, I decided on making a real tomato pie.  Naturally I put my fresh mozzarella on top.

After that I topped it with anchovies and black olives.

The pie was baked for 15 minutes and I wasn’t sure whether to call it Mexican Pizza or Italian Nachos. Either way it was mediocre.  The toppings never bound to the bread so everything was sliding off like messy nachos.  The crust had the texture of soggy cooked nachos.  In the end I guess Italian Nachos is closer to the truth than Mexican Pizza.

I am going to do one more try with traditional sauce and some shredded cheese on bottom like the original recipe to see if I can improve the taste and presentation.  If not I’ll pass the tortillas on to my nutritionist who says she eats sprouted bread and has gotten used to the flavor and texture.

Slow Cook – French Onion Soup

I don’t have a strong sense of which foods are going to kill me or not so I let my body crave what it wants in new found moderation. If fresh vegetables are available and the recipe looks like it will taste good, I’ll cook vegetarian. If it’s after a hurricane and I’m eating foods only fit for a revolution, I will make the best of it and make them taste as good as I can. I provide two recipes here for vegetarian and traditional French Onion soup with a little help from a very young mentor.

The concept of mentor is a funny one as I see far to often my former student employees becoming my mentors in their new specialized field of expertise. Tracey was a student in culinary arts until money became an issue and since then she has worked in some of the finer restaurants in America from Cape Cod to Florida.

She is visiting Paradise for a short visit and I was talking to her about my relearning to eat properly, cooking meals for one and using coffeepot cooking for portion control which she sort of raised her eyebrows over. I was telling her about cooking French Onion soup in my coffee pot and she asked if I thought I could do it vegetarian. I said no because the color would be all wrong and the biggest part of French Onion soup was visual because it is rather easy to do very well.

Well being young and brash, Tracey bragged that she could convert any food recipe to vegetarian and because of her culinary arts background and using better ingredients, hers would be as good or better than the original.

So lets look at a comparison of the methods.

Step one was to add the onions to the butter and salute them in the coffeepot. She preferred the white onion I had used a yellow one. She didn’t believe that the coffee pot would do as good a job as a human and a skillet.

In fact the coffeepot was superior because after putting the ½ onion sliced in quarter inch slices and separated into rings in 2 tablespoons of butter and 1 level teaspoon brown sugar, we went out to lunch and didn’t bother checking the pot again for two hours. When we got back, they were perfect, no charred edges, no dried out onions and all were perfectly glazed. From my experience, the time is quite flexible to saute the onions because the temperature is perfect. Anywhere between between ½ hour and a few hours is fine

For broth, I used beef and Tracey wanted vegetable but I refused saying the color was all wrong. She said use Chef’s Magic. I said no because it was Chemicals. Tracy correctly asserted that it was just caramelized sugar and caramel color with a little soy so I said OK.

Next step was to put the can of broth and coloring into the onion rings and add a ½ cup of good dry sherry to the pot and cook covered for enough time to drive around the island about 4 hours. I had used beef broth. When we got back to the house the soup was done.

The toast was a diagonal cut on the long Italian role toasted in a toaster. Tracey said that the new “in vogue cheese” for French Onion was an aged provolone so slices were placed on the toast and microwaved for 20 seconds.

The toasted cheese was floated on the bowl of soup as shown in the top picture.

Tracey’s soup was excellent. I personally doubt that many would recognize this as a vegetarian substitute for the original recipe. The rich onion flavor and the flavor and aroma of the sherry more than offset any losses from not using the beef broth.

As to the cheese, both were flavorful and good. I had used Baby Swiss .Tracey had suggested the aged provolone. Since the Swiss is about ½ the price, I am more likely to use it in the future.  Tracey was happy the soup came out so well.

OK Tracey, you proved your point with at least with one meal. If you like French Onion soup at all, it can be made vegetarian with no loss in enjoyment. I proved my point; it can be well made in a coffeepot.

The Diet is Working.

It’s about 10 weeks since I started the diet that Cait and Dagny ordered me to do and I am down 34 pounds to 211.  Even more amazing is the above belt pictures of my past and current belts show my waist is down six inches with only an inch to go before I need a new belt.  Realistically,  I believe the limitations of the size of a meal you can fit in a coffeepot  along with early morning meal planning and portion control is the sole reason I have lost weight.

I also believe that going to the gym has contributed to my waist loss.  In an hour at the gym, I can burn a little over 300 calories and I go three to four times a week.  I could skip  a glass of wine a day and break even calorie wise.  However, since I am spending 15 minutes each visit on a rowing machine, I believe that that is tightening up my abdomen and contributing to the waist  loss.

Speaking of Dagny and Cait, the following picture of Cait and Dagny surfaced when  I was cleaning my photo files off an old Windows ME machine before it crashes. I gave them both their first flying less for Christmas that Year.

Carson calls the two cousins Bookends. The date on the picture  says it was 6 years ago and they both look great today.  With as much crap as they gave me about losing weight, they better both stay good looking and in shape forever.  Otherwise I plan to live another 35 years and harass them when they start sneaking up on sixty.