Mayoless Chicken Salad

02/28/17 252.4 lbs

 HAPPY MARDI GRAS, MAIS AMI!

For size of container. Hand is 7 inches long.

Not the whole of container. This is what survived a pot luck.

There's a lot of calories in a tablespoon full of mayo. And when I make a egg baded salad, I can easily use up to half a jar of the stuff--or even more. So, I had to find a filler sauce that wasn't plain water.  In the past, I increased the mustard level, which made it only fit for the spouse.  (He will put mustard on anything.) And they STILL have a ton of mayo in them. This is no healthy snack item.

I had bought a biiig rectangular tray of boneless chicken thighs (around 4-5 lbs) on sale, and threw it in the crockpot over a busy weekend, unseasoned. The roommate bought a dozen and a half eggs and never got around to eating them, so they needed to be cooked.  Now, this is the basis for chicken salad: bland, boiled to death food that needs to go, and quick. Yay for chicken salad.

But what to use for the glue that holds this junk together?  Especially when you are trying to gwt your act together? This time I chose cottage cheese, around 1/5 the calories of mayo.



Most people hate the taste of cottage cheese. The trick with it is to put it in things that override the taste--for all that it is hated , it is extremely mild. Eggs alone are strong enough to mute the flavor. But again, bland. This Couillon wants something that has at leaat a little flavor.

So, enters in the green olives (local Italian tradition), 20ish, diced.
1 Ranch seasoning packet
2 tablespoons soy aminos
3ish oz yellow mustard
1 skillet seared diced onion (non-stick pan, no butter needed)

All into the:
4-5lbs of chicken, boiled, strained, shreaded
18 boiled eggs, diced
1.5 lbs container of cottage cheese (good the way it is...erm, well, open the container)

This is the point where it starts to taste like a normal chicken salad. Pretty sedate, but not so bland that it was a failure. Add a tablespoon or two of Sirracha sauce if you need a kick.

I arbitrarily chose to call it 12 servings...which is right around 500 calories, but that is a lot of chicken salad.

This made it through people eating the heck out of it, and not even going through but maybe half?  That's a pretty big bowl.

The consistency is closer to subway's tuna salad than to my normally veggie heavy chicken salad. Which means that you could stretch it further by doubling the onions and adding celery.

The onion was sauted because if you put it in, raw, it both dominates the salad (which gets worse with time) and causes it to seperate with a liquid runoff (which also gets worse with time). Knocking out the strength and liquid of the onion is done when it is half cooked.

But the good thing is that all.you have to do, for your regularly prepared chicken salad, is substitute the mayo for cottage cheese. Thia stuff ia versatile.

Let's eat!

This is NOT what it looks like.

02/21/17 254.6 lbs

It's dried spinach.

This is what 2 biiig serving bowls of fresh  spinach looks like dehydrated and ground up in a coffee grinder. This is a coarser grind than most any given supplement on the market. At a totally fine grind, it would be up to half that size--if not more compact. Processing it to remove some of the fiber? Even more of a reduction.

The thing is that no one eats 2 big bowls of spinach a day. They might eat a couple slices of bread or a mountian of shrimp, but not the nutrients that they need from vegetables, and the more the soil they are grown in is degraded from overfarming, the less of what you need is in each bowl.


The biggest problem with processing your own powders is that it's time consuming. I started the dehydrator at no later than 10 this morning, and ground it all by about 7pm. To be able to do a whole big bag of spinach? That's 3 days of processing. Thankfully, you don't have to baby the dehydrator. You will, though, have to wait days to do a big recipe that calls for spinach powder.

And it makes a mess and puts spinach powder in the air. I don't mean to accidentally snort my daily allotment.  But, I did want to make some homemade tortillas with veggies in them, or some waffle boats, so suffer a green nose, I will.

But not with this batch. This one is for my mom.

 (Please, if you are going to transport anything that looks like this, clearly label it what it is.)

Experimenting with Shake Mix

O2/17/17 253.8 lbs

When a shake system is extremely versatile (multiple ingredients in the products), they will have recipes galore for the product. This one does, but I am not going off any of those, so I bet that there will be something similar on there.


So I had a clamshell of strawberries, fairly cheap, early in the season. Only to find out that they were sold cheap and early because of being disfigured, minor hidden bruising, and ready to turn nasty before going ripe. (Not local, but was a nationally known brand associated with fruits, and none of this showed from the outside of the container.)

I sliced them into chunks to get around the white spots (not ripe enough to be soft), the bruising, whatnot, mostly in half, except for the really large ones--those were quartered.

I took a small container and put 1 scoop of the shake mix, and dripped each strawberry half into it, one piece at a time, coating it. I put them directly on the dehydrator's grate.

At this stage, not much of the powder came off, and you can see that it used up the majority of 1 scoop, to coat them.

So then, I turned on the dehydrator, and ignored it for a couple of hours. When I went to check on them, I turned each berry (they do stick a little) and tested one for moisture content (yes, that means eating one or two).  And again, this knocked some powder off them.

Because of preparing for a baby's birthday party, I have some peanutbutter chips laying around, and I stuck 2 on, per piece on the side showing. Unfortunately, that was the powdery dry side, which means that they don't stick worth a darn, and once they melt, they stick to whatever else touches them. To compensate, I pressed two into each other and let them cool that way--which works fine.

Problems:

Because of the powder being loose on the outside of the berry,  this will not travel well. It's best as an at-home snack. It also prevented me from using a healthier alternative to basically candy. You need something self-contained to keep the powder from getting everywhere--and as earlier stated, it still was a hair messy. Not too much because most the powder, even though lose, is still on them.

What I should have done is cut them into slices, instead of chunks, that way both sides would allow powder to absorb the fluid, leaving only the ring of dry powder, then after drying, put on peanutbutter and a tiny dab of honey (or other sweetener--strawberries are tart, when out of season--very ripe ones you won't have to sweeten).

Also, I was hoping to catch this at the "leathers" stage. This is where the dehydrated thing has no discernable water still locked in, but is soft and pliable--kind of chewy. But there was still water locked in, and had to let it go overnight, to end up "crisp". Fortunately, strawberries do not dry hard like bananas, so they are still comfortable to eat.

So, what does it taste like? Like someone made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into a candied treat (especially for someone who isn't  overconsuming sugar anymore), but is well balanced by the tartness of the berry.

The hubby will eat them all in one sitting.

Let's eat!

Upgrading a recipee for the calories or volume you need: Chicken and Mushroom Stroganoff

02/12/17 254 lbs.

The site's recipee that I am trying is from SkinnyMs. Generally speaking, they are full of ideas and a great resource to have, especially if you need help trying to figure out how to have flavorful meals when you can no longer eat like a waste disposal.

A lot of flavor is in fats, salts, sugars, and  starches.  Fortunately, for me, I am only looking to cut out the worst of the sugars and starches from my overall diet becauae I am tired of living in pain. Unfortunately, I didn't do that when modifying this recipe (as you will see later), but it was within reason.

The claim is for Chicken and Mushroom Stroganoff  is "under 300", which often means restricting the portion size. If you are doing shakes, for most meals, you want more than a scant 8 oz. of partially liquid food, for your one "real meal" a day. So to use this site, you will have to modify to add volume to this dish, and likely some of their others as well, (and still keep the same serving count).

Which means you got to either know precisely what you are doing, or be a crazy Cajun who thinks recipees are a joke.


So, modifications I did:

8 boneless thighs, since:
A. Thighs are cheaper
B. Thighs taste better
But: they take more work, since there's  fat to trim off them, and yes, more calories per pound because you ain't getting it all off.
But trying to gague how much calories you are dealing with is nearly impossible:

Most the time, a skinless chicken thigh is counted with the fatty lobes still on it because that's how it comes from the store.  This one has the ratio of 58% protein to 42% fat calories. Some have the fat as high as 48%. Sanderson farms puts the calories at 130 per serving (4 oz), with 40 from fat, a ratio of 30.7%.  But at best, you get rid of about 35 calories by trimming each thigh, which puts it at 95 calories per thigh. I had to custom enter information to get Lose It! to accept that I was eating half the calories it thought I was.

2 lbs portabellos, and sliced them myself, extremely thin (close to 3 slices per normal processor's slice). Only see it cut this way in Asian cooking, really.


Commercially bought chicken stock, not broth, which thickens in cooling (some folks don't count them as different, but you want bone-in boiled broth because that is a thickening agent, AND there's nutrients you miss out on, without that), Which is needed, since I doubled the mushrooms.

Upped the Balsamic vinegar (they mean the cheap one, cream woukd likely ruin the artesianal one ....and here is the sugar) up to 1/3 a cup. The volume increase in other ingredients requires more so the flavor isn't dissipated, but not doubled because the fluid volume was going to be too high.

I wanted to do spaghetti squash, but didn't find any, in the stores this grocery trip. Wound up boiling some of the Chickpea rotini, which thickens up what it's boiled in, quite nicely. (But upon reflection, the squash would have added to the water volume without thickening it, for all that it would have been a lower calorie count. So, without a thickener, this will become a soup.)

Did not use full fat Greek yogurt. Which is fine. It would have been more a comfort food, with the higher fat, though.

Did half a teaspoon of Tony's instead of straight salt, but wound up putting in a 3rd of a tsp of garlic salt to make up what was lacking in salt, so I find the salt is necessaary to make this dish. Partially the fault of getting a stock, and not broth, so there really wasn't a need to cut the salt.


What I changed in the cooking methods:

1.Browned onion, first, with a tablespoon of butter. But you can brown without fats.

2. Set garlic, onion, mushrooms, and chicken to soak in the balsamic vinegar and stock overnight. Which may have been why I had to add an extra cap (tsp.) of the balsamic vinegar--too much flavor stuck in the mushrooms.

3. Pulled a full cup of resulting juice from the pot, to cut down the thinness of the sauce.

4. Turned off the crockpot and let it cool down for roughly half an hour before adding the yogurt.  The whole point of adding milk products to the end of a the cooking process, at lower heat, is to preserve the character of the milk product. This, I didn't learn from being a Cajun. I learned this from being in prep. at Olive Garden,  making butter sauce for the Shimp Scampi, well over a decade ago. You ruins it, Precious!

What this dish does not have is the extreme fattyness and starchiness that I am used to from a boxed kit.  Stroganoff is a cheap comfort food, of mild flavor, and people eat it like they do Mac-and-cheese. You think up all these grand ideas about what to add, like the original recipee, or my additions, spend time dreaming of it, but in the end you wind up eating 2 pounds of the boxed mix while watching your favorite Netflix show. And your waistline thanks you for it later. (Thank Terry Pratchett for this set-up.)

So, to make up for this, instead of boiling the noodles in 32 oz of water, I should have pulled as much broth as possible out of the dish, once cooked (I am guessing at about 3 cups, and just add 1 cup of broth or water), so you could keep the thickening from the pasta. (Yes, even beany pasta has that thickening.)

But, oh, the thiness of the mushrooms! I must do that again.

That, and maybe some hotsauce...no? This isn't a southern food? Ok.

But, without having tried following the recipe strictly, from the way that this dish adjusts well to the changes, I would say that this is a really good dish to make--my way or their way. Timeless recipes withstand a little bending of the rules, and come out looking like a champ.

Even with the additions, it cooked down to about 9-9.5 cups, with noodles in, so the original would have been really light, and based on the calories, possibly excluded the noodles. I realistically ate about a serving and a half, or around 528 calories, by best recipee estimation.  If I messed up on the chicken's calories, it would bump it up tp about 650.

Now, where did I put the Tabasco...

Let's eat!

Expirimenting and Throwing Things Together

 02/10/17 254.4 lbs

Justin Wilson  is the quentessential Cajun cook, especially of his era. Typically, he would lay out his recipee, give you the ingredients, then he would fudge his recipees, often with the wine being the biggest culprit of bad measurements.

My husband's Grandpa? His recipees were a bit more like my own: "If you're gonna cook, start with a bottle of wine. Drink that bottle of wine, then throw everything in the pot and cook it."

Being of a more sober cooking mind, you would expect that I would have better recall of what the heck I put into my meals. Until recently? Naw. Not until I started to use Lose it!

I randomly pick up food at the grocery store, and only rarely pick up stuff with an actual meal in mind. The yogurt, I picked up to try another recipee with, but only needed a cup of. The Pork Spareribs? Bought a day earlier than reguar shopping while killing time at a Rouses Epicurian Market. The Cheese is a staple good of our house.  But it was the  Collard Greens that gave me the idea to do this 2-for-1 recipee. They are a part of the common food of my people.

So, this was cooking for two,  which resulted in two seperate meals and a lunch for my spouse.

2.5 lbs of Spareribs,  trimmed, and cut in to pinky-knuckle or so sized chunks. Split into two piles. Cook the fat down.
14 washed and deveined Collard Greens (be sure to leave the front intact.
2 cups of plain Greek yogurt
1/2-2/3 cup of Colby & Monterey Jack Cheese, shreaded.
1 cup of brown rice and broth

So, I put 1 healthy tablespoon  (not heaping, but still more than a Tablespoon) of yogurt, about 8 pieces of meat and a pinch of cheese, probably about a teaspoon or two.

The fold of the leaf was to fold in the edges parallel to the leaf vein,  first, then roll from stem to top of leaf, second, and to place seam side down in the pan you used to cook the fat in. (I gave it to my spouse to split with the dogs--whatever he was willing to give up, that is. Oh, yeah!) You will need to keep this from sticking.

So, mistakes made:

1. I forgot to season it. Bland food with lots of fats is still decent, but this could have been better. Not very Cajun of me. Even the spouse noticed it was bland.

2. I cooked it on too high a setting for the collard greens, cooking it at a lower temperature  (between medium and low) would have been better for the entirety of the dish. It also works better if the meat was pre-cooked.

3.This would have worked better if the stuffing was premixed, so that you can cut back on the cheese and yogurt.

4. Steaming the Collard Greens a tad bit beforehand would have made them easier to roll without breaking. Being thorough in removing the veins would make it easier to bite into. (They have veins like celery--stringy, we don't normally eat this part.)


The second dish is easy: you throw what remains together and you cook it down, WITH SEASONING, and eat it the next day (today, in fact).

What, no roux?!?!? No  Holy Trinity?  Cut up my  Coonasse  Card, and declare me a full  Couillon!

Both dishes, as they are, were approximately 650 calories, with each wrap being about 175 (ate 5), and 2 bowls for the second one. Out of the wraps, there was a light lunch for the spouse to bring to work.  Overall, it wasn't bad, but a heck of a lot of changes to make for next time.

Eating at Applebees

02/08/17 256.4 lbs

Resturaunts do a lot to keep their healthy eating customers happy. There's usually a low calorie menu, with quite a few options. And a more savy diner knows what to substitute to to bring down the calories from particularly carbed-out sources. Applebee's is no exception. You can eat very healthy at Applebee's if you try.

But no one expects a chicken salad to be the biggest culprit of processed sugars on the menu.  But people should know better with the Oriental Chicken Salad--when a salad is not on the calorie-friendly menu, you better figure out where it is packing calories.  

One tablespoon of the dressing is 175 calories! There is no reason for a dressing to carry that much sugar in it! And you get 5-6 tablespoons on the whole salad. A meal should be between 400-600 calories, ideally, but being a little over is fine. You wate the whole meal's worth on the dressing! That is insane.

But if you really must have the salad (it's on their 2-for- $20, but there is a lighter fare option on that same menu),  there are ways to bring that count down.

1. Do the dressing on the side. Either litghtly dip each bite in, or only use one tablespoon of the sauce.
2. Do the asian croutons on the side, only use what you must to keep the taste authentic.
3. Trade out the fried chicken for grilled.
4. Ask for the boneless chicken wings grilled, and sauce on the side. (Yes, this comes with another whole meal, calorie-wise, in the 2 for $20.)
5.And if you want a different dressing and could do without the croutons, just get a different salad, where you don't have to modify everything. (Frankly, it's what I should have done, me.)

You will still go over by a several hundred calories, with this meal, but my best eatimate after looking at all the removed calories, I logged my meal as 729 calories, and my apetizer as about 282 on Lose It!

The program I am on, aims for around 1200 calorie days, which is fine. Most days, it don't bother me. The Lose It! app allows me to go much higher: around 1750 to lose weight. So, I figure that on the rare times I fail to do 1200 because of a bad choice, if I can keep it under the other, then I likey haven't blown the whole week's work on one day.

But, when you have been avoiding processed sugars and simple carbs like the plague, and you already have unpleasent reactions to them. Sugar inflames the veins and joints, and causes quite a bit of pain. The veins under my tongue swole up like I was pregnant again--which left me nauaeous. And of course, the sugary jitters. And the aftermath today? Pain and exaustion. My own body was playing Conan the Barbarian on me.

For me, that's a meal I should not eat again. It's not worth underperforming the next day.

Making Changes: Weightloss is mostly in your food.

Wed, Feb. 8, 2017  256.6 Lbs

Hi, I am the Quarter Cajun Couillon, and I live where people are fat. I don't mean just fat, I mean they are fat fat (really fat for the outsiders). The food is wonderful, and I could eat it all day long and never tire of it.  And it shows round my midrift--a whole lot of belly fat. But, alas, I am a quarter Cajun, so northern desserts get me, too. I am an equal oppertunity absorber.

So, at the beginning of this year, I decided, totally not of my own free will (nah, I chose to do so, me...just wouldn't have started so quickly without family encouragement), to start controlling what I eat,  and getting off my butt to exercise and "lift weights".

And like most people who have to make a big lifestyle change, especially with seafood resturaunts like The Shack in Houma (the only place I know of where the onion rings are good cold!), it is hard to find the motivation to make dietary changes.

And I mean permanant ones, whole lifestyle changes. Part of it is that you cook the way your family cooked. Most Cajuns that I talk to do not follow recipees--and those that do, they rarely are exact.  (May God help someone that puts a gumbo recipee  down on paper that ain't Cajun enough.)

So, here I sit, needing to measure my own cooking, and needing to try out recipees, to see how much I dislike being told how long I should boil and sear meats for, and who gave these measurements out? (Don't you know they ruins it?!?!) And for the love of all that is holy, there is such a thing as spices!

But as most all the health nuts on my friends and family list say, more than just weightloss is in your food. And your wellbeing is actually more important than your weight.

So, here's to the month-long journey, so far, it's ups and downs:

Like a lot of plans, your meals and snacks should be automatic.  I buy a shake mix from a really good company, that frees me from having to think of 2 of the 3 meals you should eat a day. My snacks are mostly around 100 calories, often 2 a day: heavy whipping cream in rich coffee (if you see the bottom of the cup, it is a weak tea, NOT coffee), in the morning with no sugar. The middle snack is veggies, Harvest Snaps, or pistachios, and yes, the company has snack options. This leaves me with one 400-600 calorie meal to plan, a day.

I get intense arthritic style pain with highly refined amounts of sugars, so, that's a thing of the past, for me. I do not get them with any of the other assumed triggers. Bloating comes from breads, and isn't good for PCOS.

Other than 2 tablespoons of heavy whipping cream, and they whey in the shakes, most days I do not have dairy.  Fats, I don't worry about--just avoiding high-glycemic foods, for the most part.)

Your first month you are, for the lack of a better word, detoxing.  Your body is used to all the things you are now denying yourself, the tastebuds are in the habit of tasting things a certain way, adjusted to all the crud you eat. Your palette will continue to change after this, but the hardest part is that first month.  This no sugar thing ruined the taste of soy sauce for me, forever. Switching over to aminos salvaged that situation.

The biggest culprit in  my weight gain has been poor eating timing. Skipping meals arbitrarily messes with your blood sugar levels and if you are not strict about counting calories, triggers overeating. I have actually scheduled my meals and snacks because I could not find a rhythm to my eating habits. I can guaranter that while I put on weight, a third of my days, I ate under 1000 calories.  But meals need to be closer to 400-600 calories.

But, it has lead to around a 13 lb weightloss since the beginning of the year.

Well, that's enough exposition, this is supposed to be food commentary, not my health issues!

Let's eat!