Different strokes for different folks

I had lunch with a good friend yesterday over at Rudy's BBQ, which is phenomenal. Apparently he has lost 30 pounds this year doing a diet called SNAPP - Smoothies, Nuts, Apples, Protein, Produce. The theory behind this diet is that you only change your intake every other day. Eating "normally" every other day will keep your body from thinking you are starving and maintain your metabolic rate. On the alternate days eating the SNAPP categories keeps your calories low and burns the fat. Very interesting diet to be sure, and it has worked great for him.

It amazes me how many different diet plans there are out there, most of which actually work effectively. I'm pretty sure everything boils down to simple consciousness about what you're actually eating, and most plans just trick you into consuming less. Still, there is genius and logic in each interpretation to be sure.

Before lunch yesterday I did a speed workout for 33 minutes, running 3.5 miles in under a 9 minute mile pace when all was said and done. I planned on working out, but felt drained, and later that day I became a little ill. So I took today off to recover. It is pretty incredible that my midsection is still sore from golfing as well.

Yesterday for dinner we had a nice seared tuna loin. Put it in a pan with a drop of oil and coated it with jerk seasoning, until it was just brown on each side. The sauce was a banana cilantro sauce, with caramelized onion, seranno pepper, banana, and guava cooked in a saucepan until mushy, with a touch of lime juice, rice wine vinegar, and a big pinch of cilantro to finish. On the side I made brown basmati rice with cilantro-serrano-onion in veggie stock (it was delicious) and simple green beans in soy sauce. About 600 calories for the whole meal.

On the road

I've been away from the blog for a while with travels and a generally crazy existence. I've also been off the diet wagon during that time, well, as off the wagon as I'll let myself be.

Early morning flights on Thursday, 6 AM to midnight meetings Friday, up at 3:30 AM for a plane Saturday, then a day chasing kids around, and then another similar day Sunday, and it is four straight days without exercise. I did sneak in a little exercise when I could, like running up stairs, running to the car instead of taking the bus, bjorning the baby while watching soccer, and a little Tabada even. Oh, and I can't discount a couple of hours making a complete fool of myself in a bouncy house for a kids' birthday party. But no serious workouts to be sure.

This has been killing me because the day before my trip I got a new pair of running shoes. I finally decided to throw out the old ones, mainly because they felt line I was wearing Earth Shoes while running. Straight to the trash after the run, where they should have been 9 years ago. Apparently you're only supposed to run 300 miles or 6 months in a pair of shoes. Not sure the math is correct there, but I am quite sure the abuse I put on my shoes far exceed the correct number. But alas I have yet to run in them, save the jaunt from the terminal to my car in Austin just because I was going crazy from hours on a plane.

Today I snuck in a round of golf for my exercise, which was awesome. Hadn't played in months, and I was hitting the ball far, if not accurately. Great to be in the sun for that amount of time in a perfect day.

As for food, I think I held up well to the perils and temptations of travel. I kept my intake reasonable in the face of pressure to do otherwise. Went to Benihana one night, which is delicious and fun, but seeing them cook your food is really eye-opening if you watch carefully. Every dish had a giant glob of butter tossed into it at the end, which is completely unnecessary, and the rice portions were gigantic. Definitely a chore to keep everything in check.

Hopefully things will get back to normal here. I should be back in the gym tomorrow for an abusive workout. I look forward to it.

Bad run good dinner

Despite working my legs a little yesterday, I still decided to go on a run. Given my competitive nature and the speed training I've been doing, I wanted to run a good time. The confluence of these bad decisions, naturally, was a predictable result.

I had a new app on my Android phone that I downloaded to track the run. It was worth exactly what I paid for it. It overestimated the course by half a mile, and I couldn't drill down into the run to see the mistakes I made that led to the wheels completely falling off the bus. It did show me starting off near an 8 minute pace, which isn't a good thing for me on worn legs. And it did show me hitting the wall at the 4 mile mark when I absolutely had no legs left, and me walking home from there.

One of the best aspects of the run was that I downloaded Pandora and was able to have my custom music mix stream to me as I ran. Pandora does a great job of creating a custom mix especially for me, with songs not otherwise in my iTunes library. So I could get my horrible musical taste served with different songs than I'm used to. Woot!

Tonight for dinner I dipped once again into molecular gastronomy for the feature pairing of mango and rosemary. I made a "salsa" consisting of diced mango, tomato, finely minced rosemary, balsamic vinegar, lime juice, salt, and a touch of red onion (a very delicate touch) that I served over broiled halibut. Side dishes were great northern beans with a caramelized red onion-rosemary-tomato essence, and roasted artichokes. The thing about the rosemary-mango pairing is that it makes you think about the individual flavors of both ingredients, and taste them differently, as they do have chemical similarities. I'm beginning to enjoy these new taste experiences a lot, and I've been scheming new madness as I get deeper into the science of food.

Easter brunch and roasted beets

Yesterday for Easter we did a family brunch in the middle of the day. I'm beginning to be a little afraid of restaurants, because you really don't have any control over what you're eating. Of course, you can read the menu, and try to figure out the caloric content, but most restaurants that want to do such things as "stay in business" and "make money" focus almost exclusively on delivering food that tastes great, and will sneak a calorie or two in there to make that happen.

As I've said before, I'm not going to be "that guy" that complains and gets special treatments and preparations on his food. My weight is good now, and I want to appreciate the genius of the chef in the restaurant I visit, not insult him or her by forcing them to cook something my way. Plus, going off diet every now and then is perfectly okay. So I enjoyed my brunch with the family. I did resist the temptation to eat the delicious muffin that came with my meal though. Muffins, cupcakes.... anything you bake in those little cups is kryptonite to me. Delicious kryptonite.

Brunch sets you in a weird place when dinner comes. Do you eat a full meal? Do you eat late? Light snack then another snack? I decided to make a light quick dinner with pan seared chicken breasts topped with a caramelized onion-caper-marsala sauce, served with green beans in a sun dried tomato and caramelized onion sauce with oven roasted yellow beets. The beets were incredible - I tossed them in a touch of oil, salt, and pepper, and roasted them at 400 until they started to brown lightly and got nice and soft. Absolutely delicious, and surprisingly low in calories - about 35 calories per beet. Overall, the less than 500 calorie meal seemed to do the trick.

Today I went to the gym and did weights at lunch. This is a slight deviation from my normal routine, but I've decided I am going to add more weights to the routine in order to maintain the weight and improve tone. One of the most painful things I did was a Tabada routine of jumping up on a block that is about 2 feet high, 7-10 times per 20 second jump. I had to sit on the block for a minute or two after to catch my breath from that one.

Dinner was with the kids - simple pasta with red sauce. I made my standard meat sauce with lean turkey breast inspired by Mario Batali's basic red sauce of onion, thyme, and tomato (I added carrots to it for additional sweetness). One serving of pasta with meat sauce is about 500 calories if the lean turkey is used, and a side salad with balsamic vinaigrette rounded out the meal.

Vegan Night

Tofu. What can I say about tofu? I like to use it occasionally, if only that using a tasteless mass with a bizarre texture challenges my inner chef to make something tasty and delicious. High in protein and low in fat, it is a healthy ingredient and it makes a nice light meal if prepared well. So tofu! Woot!

I usually go to Asian cuisine when preparing tofu because you can put a lot of richness and flavor into the sauce. I considered making pho again, but I'm better than that, so I decided to make a spicy stir fry with it. I had bought some salsify, also known as oyster root, and I thinly shaved it with a peeler to make a tagliatelle-like "pasta" to serve as a starch in the meal. The rest of the ingredients were garlic, ginger, lemongrass, carrots, snow peas, veggie stock, coconut milk, cilantro, sriracha, chili paste, and a magical tablespoon of cashew butter. To be honest, I was just throwing stuff in the pan, so I'm not even sure of the recipe, but with the tofu and salsify as the main ingredients, I had calories to spare, so it didn't really matter.

By the way, I have to give Marcus Samuelsson credit for the idea of using salsify as pasta. I saw him do that once, and I now use that as my primary preparation for the product. It cooks nicely, and has a good flavor and texture to it when cooked. I'm not even sure how to prepare it with traditional means, if there is such a thing as a "traditional" salsify preparation.

In workout news, today was Saturday so it meant a long day at the gym. I couldn't get there until around noon, which is a horrible time because that is lunch time and I'm hungry, and therefore low on energy. I started with a 5-4-3-2-1 interval speed workout, ramping up from 7:30 per mile for the 5 minute interval all the way up to a 6:30 pace for the final minute. That pretty much took everything I had in me, but I still managed to struggle through some chest, back, and abdominal workouts before I had to quit and grab some lunch. Lesson learned, again, make sure you're properly fueled before you work out. You'd think I'd know that by now...

24

Since I hadn't gone for a swim in a while, I decided to get back in the pool today for my workout. I've been varying my workouts a lot, and as such I wasn't in the mood to do my usual 2x3x10 freestyle and breaststroke combination. Problem is, I wasn't sure exactly what I was doing when I hopped into the pool. Luckily, the workout didn't turn into the disaster my run did the last time I tried this, mainly because I enjoy swimming a whole lot more.

I started out with an 8 minute warmup in freestyle, and then switched to breaststroke as normal. I decided to try a Tabada-like approach, but since I didn't have a clock, I did 20 strokes at max effort, and then 10 strokes at light effort, for the standard 8 repetitions. I then replicated this with freestyle, and decided to try to swim a mile as fast as I could. When I realized it was going to take me longer than I had to do the mile, I scaled it back to a half mile, and swam away.

I could tell the difference when I really locked into the new correct technique, and when I was struggling with my old inefficient technique. My lap times (lap = 50 meters) were about 1:20 each but if I swam correctly I could get them into the 1:10 range. I felt everything coming into alignment about 4-5 laps into the swim, and felt strong throughout. I wound up swimming it in a respectable 18:46, a time that I am proud of, and would be competitive in my age group in a triathlon. Cool.

Tonight's molecular gastronomy pairing was mint and mustard. Actually, I also worked in the strawberry-mint pairing I used last night to synchronize the plate and all the ingredients. I made crab cakes, using spicy whole mustard, mint, 1/2 pound lump crabmeat, a tablespoon of sun dried tomato paste, and 1/2 cup panko, sautéing them lightly in a teaspoon of oil in a non-stick pan (about 200 calories per two cake serving). I made a mustard sauce out of an egg yolk, dijon mustard, olive oil, agave nectar, and Frank's red hot, which added about 100 calories to the dish. The mint and mustard paired nicely, the flavors both stood out but still complimented each other and kept them from dominating the taste. Worked very nicely.

I carried the mint into some bok choy I sauteed in garlic, mint, and stock (about 100 calories per serving), and then added some strawberry jelly and roasted garlic to some Quinoa (about 250 calories) on the side. The strawberry and mint combination works nicely as discussed yesterday, and it caramelized a bit in the preparation process.

Oh, why did I title this segment 24? I weighed in today at 218, down over 24 pounds since program inception. I'm not even trying to lose weight anymore and it is still coming off, so I need to tinker a bit to get back to equilibrium. More bacon seems to be the logical choice.

Molecular Gastronomy

It occurred to me the other day that the natural fusion of my chemical engineering background and my culinary interests is the emerging and fascinating field of molecular gastronomy. My wife is none too thrilled about this potential hobby, not wanting to eat anything containing sodium alginate or have a veritable kitchen full of beakers, flasks, and other scientific equipment. Of course on my side of the coin, these are driving and compelling reasons for me to proceed.

I was studying up on it today and learned there is a lot to the field. Understanding the molecular composition of food allows you to come up with non-traditional pairings and flavor combinations, and certainly using non-traditional ingredients allows the preparations to be more complex and interesting. Yeah, "interesting" isn't always the word you want to hear when someone describes your food, but I've never let that stop me before. So as I continue to learn more, I'll be turning mad science into good science, and alchemy into chemistry. In theory, at least.

I applied two things in my initial studies today. First, reading up on Maillard reactions, which simply put turn proteins and sugars into yummy, they apparently work better in a less acidic environment. As such when I browned the shallots I was using tonight in a few of the preparations, I tossed a little baking soda into the pan. The theory is that it will brown nicer, and produce a richer flavor, and it did seem to do that without any averse effects on taste from the baking soda. Win one for food science.

Also studying food matchings, I learned that strawberries and mint share a common chemical in them which allows them to pair nicely, and that strawberries and tomatoes are chemically similar as well. Since I have this giant field of delicious Kentucky mint in my side yard that always beckons me to do something with it, I decided to make a strawberry-tomato-mint topping for the sea bass tonight. And it worked brilliantly.

Recipe for dinner

Seabass:

1 lb sea bass filet (440 calories)

2 cups cherry tomatoes (50 calories)

2 tsp olive oil (80 calories)

1 tsp minced garlic

pinch dried Italian seasoning

1 cup strawberries (50 calories)

1 tbsp fresh mint, chiffonade

1 tsp balsamic vinegar

1 tbsp caramelized shallots (per above)

Slice the tomatoes in half, and toss in 1 tsp olive oil, garlic, and Italian herbs. Roast in the oven at 300 degrees until they just start to brown (roast with the bell peppers below). Mince tomatoes and strawberries, and toss with mint, vinegar, and shallots, season with salt and pepper, and refrigerate. Meanwhile rub the sea bass with the rest of the oil, salt, and pepper, and then grill on high heat, turning once. Serve with topping, serves 2 at 325 calories per serving or so.

Roasted Pepper Asparagus

1 bunch of asparagus, trimmed (80 calories)

2 red peppers, seeded (100 calories)

1 yellow pepper, seeded (50 calories)

2 tsp olive oil (80 calories)

1 tsp garlic minced

pinch Italian seasoning

2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 tbsp caramelized shallots

Roast the peppers in the exact way as the tomatoes above. Add roasted peppers to blender and add vinegar and shallots. Toss asparagus in oil, salt, and pepper, and grill until just brown on the outside. Serve with the pepper puree on the top, 160 calories per serving or so.

I served about 200 calories of purple fingerling potatoes tossed in pepper medley to make a balanced meal.

On the workout front, I'd been traveling the past two days, but still managed to get a good interval workout in yesterday. Did a 5-4-3-2-1 running workout, running at an 8:00 pace for the first 5, 7:30 for the 4 and 3 minute pace, 7:00 for the 2, and 6:40 for the minute, jogging at a 12 minute pace when "resting". I was happy to be able to get that done, and I definitely put a lot of sweat out - much better than the previous day's effort. Today, I woke up at 2 AM and was on planes for about 6 hours, so I skipped it.