Equipment

Posted on August 27, 2014 by dcarmack

If you want to have fun in the kitchen, make sure you are working with good tools. By that, I mean make sure that your selection of knives is broader than a stamped kitchen knife and a couple of dull steak knives, and your pots and pans are not thin non-stick.

If you have these tools you can replace them over time. Don’t buy an expensive knife set, get good knives but get them one good knife at a time.  

Here is a good Chef’s knife, for instance:

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It is a Victorinox eight inch chef’s knife, it is very sharp and stays very sharp. The handle is dishwasher safe, but you should never wash a knife in the dishwasher, because the edge is fragile, and jostling against hard glass, porcelain and other metal objects will damage it. Refurbishing a knife edge requires grinding and polishing, which is work left to professionals. Maintaining the edge is easy. If you buy a good knife you need to buy a good steel also, or else your knife will dull over time, requiring it to be resharpened more often than necessary.

Your sharp knife will make all of the chopping and cutting so easy you will be amazed. A sharp knife is also safer than a dull one, even though that seems to go against common sense. If you have to push hard or saw to do any cutting then there is a lot more room for slippage, loss of control and fatigue. These things make losing control of your knife more likely.

You also need a good cutting board, and something to keep that cutting board from moving around when you cut. I use a piece of cabinet non-skid rubber under mine, but you can just dampen a paper towel and put that under your cutting board to keep it from moving. Don’t just cut on your counter top. Bad for knife and counter.

Your pans should include at least one cast iron skillet, a good HEAVY stock pot, and one or two different sizes of stainless steel skillets. I own one nonstick pan, it is a small omelet skillet for cooking breakfast eggs, and that is the only time I use it. Non stick is the greatest marketing scam since margarine. Nothing ever sticks to my Lodge cast iron skillet. The things that stick to my stainless skillets are things that I want to stick. When you are cooking pork chops or chicken, if the breading sticks, it is because of one of two things. Either you are turning the meat over too soon (just wait another couple of minutes before you turn them) or you didn’t put the breading on the correct way to make it adhere to the food. Most times, if you try to turn the food and it’s stuck to the pan, wait and try again and it will turn over just fine.

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There is a process called ‘deglazing’ that cleans your skillet very nicely, very easily, and creates a wonderful sauce to put on your entree. Long story short, you take the meat out, drain the fat off, put a half cup or more of ANY liquid in the pan, and stir/scrape the brown stuck on material into the liquid. Do that until all of the brown is re dissolved and perhaps cook some of the water or liquid back off. When the sauce is as thick as you need it, put the meat back in it and turn off the heat. That stuff will rinse right off after dinner. No soaking required.

Also, get a sauce pan or two, but make them good heavy ones. A heavy sauce pan won’t scorch your sauces like a thin one will. They also will hold heat better when you are doing something like frying so that your oil won’t drop too far in temp when you add foods.

I also recommend a ‘Dutch Oven’. Get this one:

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You will use this pan a lot, almost as much as your skillets. For one thing, it is a skillet when you need one, so that lots of your meals can be single-pot meals. Then you can braise or sauté in them if that is called for. The lid fits nice and tight so that you don’t lose lots of moisture from something like a roast that you are cooking in the oven.

You don’t have to spend a fortune to get a set of great tools that will make working in your kitchen fun and safer. Lots of changes, but you can just make one small change at a time.

 

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Omega-6 Makes You Fat!

Posted on August 26, 2014 by dcarmack

Great blog for those whose weight quits responding to the low carb diets.

E. M. Lores, Ph.D.'s avatarOil-Change Diet

When I started following The Oil-Change Diet, I did it for health reasons, not really expecting it to help me lose weight. I was definitely pleased when I lost 15 pounds in the first 3 weeks, but I knew that weight loss was mostly water weight (from reduced inflammation, swelling and vaso-constriction). I have been really pleased to see the continued weight loss at the rate of a couple pounds per month that has followed and helped me lose what is now a total of 50 pounds.

I have been guessing that the reason was somehow the change in omega-6/3 ratio had changed my serotonin or serotonin receptors, but I finally found a scientific basis for that weight loss: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24081493

The paper points out that increased levels of omega-6 in our diet causes an increase in endocannabanoids. As a result, these endocannabanods act like marijuana and give us the munchies…

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American Food is Dead

Posted on August 26, 2014 by dcarmack

French people love their cheese. They leave it out of the refrigerator, because the cheese is alive. Things growing on their cheeses don’t turn them off, they cut that bit away when they are going to be eating it. Here in the States, we think of our cheese as dead. In typical american fashion, any sign of life on something like cheese is an excuse to throw it in the trash. We don’t realize that without living microscopic creatures, there would be no cheese at all.

Here is how cheese is made. You take a couple of gallons of not-ultra pasteurized milk, warm it up to just under body temperature, 85-90 degrees, add some culture (which is beneficial bacteria), add some rennet, which is an enzyme that will cause the milk to curdle up. You process the curd to get all of the moisture out of it, and after the curd is firm and dry, you ‘wax’ it to keep air out and let it age, at room temperature, for a couple of months.

We buy this two month old, rotten milk at the store, all encased in plastic and promptly refrigerate it and treat it like it can spoil.

American cheese, which is a processed version of cheese, thus the name ‘processed cheese food product’, is not full of delicious, beneficial bacteria. It is dead.

Most of the foods that we eat are, likewise, dead. Our breads, crackers, boxed and bagged foods are all processed with special chemicals to keep the naturally occurring foods from getting a toe-hold on our food. Preservatives keep our foods from containing any of the things that nature planned to put on it for us to eat. For many millenia, man ate foods that were fresh, not even realizing that those foods contained the bacteria that would make them rot in a few days’ time. We ate those bacteria. Their uses by our bodies is still a mystery that is just now slowly being discovered. Some scientists are right now trying to prove or disprove that gut bacteria or the lack of gut bacteria is the reason behind the explosion of asthma and or food allergies in the US.

You can wait for the science, or if you are like me, you can just eat fresh foods. Eating foods that don’t need labels is a pretty painless way to do your own research. I know that until recently, I had never heard of a peanut allergy. The sudden explosion of cases of it make me wonder if my childhood and adolescence of eating far less processed foods than kids do today had anything to do with that. Someday we may know definitively, but for now, I will just eat fresh foods, and avoid foods from boxes, bags and bottles.

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Change Advocate

Posted on August 25, 2014 by dcarmack

This weekend I had a chance to visit with several women that I haven’t seen in about a year, and during the course of the day diet came up. I don’t remember how it came up, but I felt that, even though I talk about these topics every day online, it was difficult to convey the message that I do here, when doing it with a group of people.

Everyone has their own idea about how their body works, and by the time you are over fifty, you are pretty sure you have it all figured out. For women, though, their bodies change radically at about that time. Apparently, lots of women think that growing heavy after fifty is almost a given. I did not realize this. I know, and Karen knows, that as we age we cannot keep eating like we were still twenty years old. As our lives progress we end up doing less and less work instead of more and more. When I was thirty I was finally a civilian, but we had small children that were active. We ran a lot to keep up with them.

Now that we are only chasing the grand kids every now and then, and we have finished all of the hard physical labor around the house, we have time for more cerebral activities, like blogging. Our diet has changed to compensate for the lowering of our daily energy expenses.

I can see where a person might just keep on eating like they are used to. Eating is a habit like any other. Shopping for food is also a habit that a person might not realize that they need to change. Reading the labels on the items you are selecting at the market is work that you may not realize you need to do. Take almond milk, for instance. When I make my own almond milk I put one tablespoon of table sugar in a quart of milk. That works out to less than one teaspoon of sugar per cup of milk, but I rarely eat one cup of almond milk in my morning muesli. Silk original almond milk contains 7 grams of sugar in each cup, which is twice as much as I use. The chocolate almond milk contains four times as much sugar as I use. If you are getting almond milk because you want low fat, you are getting high sugar in exchange. Sugar is much worse for older people like me than fats are. You should never choose high sugar just to marginally lower the fat in your food.

What do you tell a friend that thinks their weight gain is something completely out of their control, if you think that it really is something they can do something about? Menopause for fifty-plus ladies is likely the cause for a lot of things, but two out of three US residents are overweight, which means that the problem is much bigger than the change-of-life. Drinking sodas, drinking beer, eating low-fat, high sugar foods is a major contributor to everyone’s weight gain. For people that are entering a period in their lives where there is less physical work required of them, continuing to eat like and average american is a recipe for health disaster. If grade school kids are getting diabetes and liver damage from eating out of boxes and bags, what are the chances that the grandmas and grandpas of the world can avoid it?

Well, this weekend, I just tried to relay my constant message of ‘shop different’ if you want to eat different. I don’t know that I was effective at all, but at least that message is easy to get across in a limited time. Tell me what you tell people that think they have a medical reason why they can’t lose weight. 

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I Don’t Know What’s In That

Posted on August 22, 2014 by dcarmack

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A thirty two ounce Pepsi has around four hundred calories of pure sugar energy in it. That comes from the 112 grams of sugar in each one. At four teaspoons per gram, that would be twenty eight teaspoons of sugar. The kind of sugar in most of your sodas in the US is ‘high fructose’ sweetener. Fructose is a kind of sugar called monosaccharide because the sugar molecule has just one sugar. Sucrose is a disaccharide because it’s molecule contains one half fructose, and one half glucose, bound together with one extra oxygen molecule. High fructose sweetener (HFCS) is sucrose that has been processed to convert some of the glucose in each molecule to fructose, the effect being that the resulting sugar tastes much sweeter.

The point of these chemicals in your drink is that when you consume a sugar your brain actually reacts to it. The flavor of sweet on your tongue actually creates in your brain the same reaction that occurs for other addictive behaviors. From WebMD:

Dopamine—the so-called reward chemical—spikes and reinforces the desire to have more. (Sugar also fuels the calming hormone serotonin.)

This is the same spike that occurs for meth users, table game gamblers, people having sex. The reaction is a normal occurrence, and is a product of human evolution, to ensure that behaviors that add to our ability to survive and reproduce are rewarded and encouraged by our bodies. The fact that chemical stimulants like sugar and meth can reproduce this reaction is, of course, not in nature’s plan, and does nothing to enhance our ability to thrive for future generations. Sugar has this feature because nature wants us eating fruits that contain it, so that the seeds of these plants will be carried away from the tree that bore them.

The sweeter the sugar tastes, the greater the mental reaction that we have to it. Like other drugs, it is possible to become accustomed to the effects, wearing out our ability to sense that we are having a reaction. This dulling of the reaction then requires a larger and larger dose to get the expected effect. Perhaps this is why a serving of Coke went from the ten ounce bottles of my youth (in the 1960s) to the sixteen ounce bottles of the 1970s, to today’s thirty two and sixty four ounce monsters of today. It costs fifty cents in 1975. Today’s quart of high fructose sweetened drink runs around one dollar and fifty cents.

I could spend the next thousand words describing for you the biological effect of drinking one or more of these drinks per day, but I will just say that two out of three people in the US are overweight. One out of three people in the US are obese.

So what about diet drinks! Avoid all of that HFCS by drinking Pepsi Free or Diet Coke, right? Aspartame is the chemical that tastes sweet in diet drinks. There has been a great deal of controversy around the world about whether or not this sweetener is safe to consume. A great number of people are now consuming it in soft drinks, breakfast cereals, and many other low calorie sweet products. In 1996 it was approved for use as a general non-nutritive sweetener. It gives things a sweet taste, but when it breaks down in your body it does not create blood sugar.

IT DOES break down in your body. It does turn into something else. That something else does end up in your blood stream. When the FDA says it is ‘safe’, it is taking the manufacturer’s word for it. Food additives are approved after an additive manufacturer informs the FDA that it is safe. Studies are conducted by the manufacturer and in the case of aspartame, also performed by other scientific groups. These studies have come up with diametrically opposed results. Some studies say, ‘safe’ and other studies say ‘dangerous’.

Who you gonna believe? The more important question is, ‘Do you know what’s in that?’ If we compare the safety of sugar to aspartame, one makes you fat, gives you diabetes, causes high blood pressure. The other one may do something to your nervous system, cause depression, release mysterious untested chemicals into your bloodstream. Now, compare these problems with water or unsweetened tea. That is the comparison you ought to be making. Water or tea have none of these issues. Water can be gotten free at a restaurant or most public places. Water contains a single ingredient. Water contains no health claims or ingredient labels.

Why in the world are we drinking dangerous chemicals, instead of drinking water? Right now, the food chemical industry is spending tons of energy trying to come up with a new chemical sweetener that doesn’t have the bad press that aspartame has, or that HFCS has. Some in the soft drink business want to just go back to fructose, since it is a popular choice when offered along side the HFCS sweetened drinks.

I say, drink neither. Have a Coke once a week to remind yourself how it makes you feel to drink one. If you quit drinking sugar and white bread and other easy starches, and you do it for a week, you will actually have a reaction to drinking a Coke. Yesterday evening we ordered a pizza and I got a two liter bottle of Coke along with it. I drank about twelve ounces of Coke with my pizza, maybe a little less when you factor in the ice. I actually got a light-headed sugar buzz, not unlike the nicotine buzz you would get from having a cigarette after years of not smoking. Sugar makes me nervous, too, and I can’t do a lot of detailed work when I am ‘on sugar’. I know this, because I have been ‘off sugar’ since April 1. Every time I have a sugar binge I get a very quick physical reaction to it. I love the taste of Coke. It’s hard to describe what it feels like, that first drink, I savor it. I just can’t stomach the thought of every bite of food I take, or every sip of a drink I take having that chemical in it. My body doesn’t need it, my brain doesn’t need it, so why would I do it?

Why do you do it?

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Now Is The Time

Posted on August 20, 2014 by dcarmack

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere like I do, now is the time to be thinking about buying fresh foods from your local farmer’s market. Right now most of the produce that is locally grown is at it’s prime, so shopping where the farmers sell directly to us will have the most to choose from at the best prices.

Here is a link to the directory of Kansas City area farmer’s markets.

I will personally visit the market at the river in downtown Kansas City, or the one here in my suburb of Liberty, Missouri. Both are well attended by farmers and eaters.

If you go, take a wagon or cart so that you can load up on easy to can vegetables. If it is your first time canning foods, think about just getting tomatoes.  Get enough for seven quarts of whole tomatoes, which should be around twenty pounds. I say get tomatoes because the canning process is the very easiest for them. Tomatoes contain enough of their own acids that you can prepare them in a ‘bath canner’.

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A bath canner is a large pot with a wire rack inside to hold your quart jars. The lid fits on the canner loosely, and the temperature of the water doesn’t go above boiling temperature at your elevation. This kind of processing is safe for tomatoes and other high acid foods. The tomato canning evolution is really easy, too.

This is where I found out all of my government approved home canning techniques, it’s free, because you already paid for it.

First you clean and sort your tomatoes. Pick tomatoes for canning whose skins are intact, and pick ripe ones. Green ones don’t yet have enough acid in them for canning with the red ones. Weight out enough tomatoes for a whole batch, then core the tomatoes so that you aren’t cooking and canning any of the green leaves or cores. I just run a paring knife in far enough to get the bits out I don’t want to eat in my foods later on.

Blanch the tomatoes so the skins come right off. To blanch them you put a pot of water on to boil, then keep it simmering. Put some tomatoes in the water for a minute, the skins might split, they might wrinkle. Remove them from the water and then dip them in cool water to keep them from cooking any farther. The skins should now peel right off.

Load the skinless tomatoes into clean quart canning jars, and pack them in as tight as you can, but only up to about the beginning of the neck of the jar. The juices will boil when you are canning them and you need some room for this to happen without forcing bits of tomato between the seal of the lid and the jar.

Run a knife into the jar to get trapped air out of it. There should be enough juice so that you don’t have to add any liquid, but if you need to, use the water you are blanching the tomatoes in. Put salt in and lemon juice or vinegar if you are using low-acid tomatoes.

Clean the sealing area of the jar and the threads for the lid with a paper towel and place the lid and ring on per the instructions that come with your brand of jars. Tighten the ring the required amount.

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Your bath canner should already be at or near boiling temperature with the wire frame in it. the frame makes it easier to get the jars out when you are done, and it keeps the jars off of the hot bottom of the pan. You should have the canner about half full of water, because when you lower the basket the jars will displace lots of water, and you don’t want to overflow. At the same time you do not want the tops of your jars out of the water. If this happens then you can actually boil water out of your jars, keeping them from sealing properly, and causing your finished tomatoes to be setting dry because there is not enough liquid in your jars any more.

Process this batch for the required amount of time, don’t go less, as you run the risk of leaving some bacteria alive in the middle of your jars if you do. I have never had a failure in this regard, but I would hate to be responsible for killing myself because I lost track of time.

When you are done, lift all the jars out using your wire basket, take the jars out to cool using a jar lifter, because they will be boiling hot. Don’t mess with the lids or rings, let the cooling product suck the lid down on it’s own. The warm sealing ring will form a perfect, air tight seal unless you mess with it. In about a half hour you should start hearing the lids ‘pull down’ as the vacuum in the bottle seals them forever. Ting!

When they are at room temperature you can remove the rings to be reused, as the jars don’t need the rings now to seal.

About thirty quarts of tomatoes will last me well into the next canning season. This year I had four quarts left over when I got my first big batch of Roma tomatoes for processing. Roma are my favorites because I can fit whole tomatoes into the jars without cutting them, and the flesh is not grainy at all, which leads to great sauces.

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Why Do YOU Eat That Way?

Posted on August 19, 2014 by dcarmack

Let’s say you are about twenty five percent overweight. You are a woman that should weigh one hundred pounds but you weigh one twenty five. You are a man that should weigh one hundred eighty pounds, but you weigh two hundred thirty pounds. It has taken you a lifetime to gradually get up to the point you are now at.

You are having different problems, your joints are aching, you sweat at night, moderate physical activity is a lot more taxing than in was just a couple of years ago. You know that you are too heavy, your clothes aren’t fitting right, your feet are hurting. You have tried a couple of the popular fad diets, but you don’t want to stick with it, the call of your old tastes and habits are too great right now. Maybe your busy life just isn’t allowing you the time to prepare your own foods, so you eat out, usually at the cheapest, fastest place on your way home from work. You tried more exercise, but all that work didn’t seem to do anything for your weight.

You see people that aren’t overweight and you wonder what they are doing right, or why their bodies don’t seem to make so much weight out of the foods that they eat. You wonder if maybe your genetic makeup is the ultimate cause of your steady upward trend. Maybe there just isn’t anything you can do about it, right?

The thing is, though, that you are in the majority in the United States. The number of people that are not overweight is shrinking, while the number of people in the same boat as you are grows year after year. If you go to a Chiefs game, where there are seventy eight thousand people, chances are that over forty five thousand of them are overweight. Calculate your BMI using this formula. Multiply Your height in inches, times your height in inches. Divide your weight by the answer you just got. Now multiply that answer by 703. This is your BMI. A good number is less than 25. Here is an online calculator.

The current debate among health professionals centers around whether our diet or our lifestyle is more to blame. That debate is also occurring in your head. Should I eat less, should I work out more. Maybe I can just jog a half hour a day and keep on eating the same way. That debate, though is a distortion of the reality of the imbalance between the normal american diet and what is possible with exercise.

Running a twenty six mile marathon for a one hundred eighty pound man consumes around two thousand calories. The number of calories that you consume through extra effort is just not enough to compensate for eating some of today’s large portions accompanied with a sweetened drink. According to this article in the Washington Post,

When the organization (Center for Science in the Public Interest) started its food survey in 2007, Hurley said, it was shocked to discover a 1,500-calorie entree. Now most on the list are in the 2,000 calorie range, and some reach 3,000.

Go out to eat and the food that you are served will clock in at over two thousand calories, IN MOST CASES. That is, one meal in the day would require you to run a twenty six mile marathon to burn it off. If you were a boiler and put that much more fuel in you than was required you would burst. In a way, you are bursting. There are 1200 calories in a 32 ounce Big Gulp at 7-11.

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The problem is the fuel supply, not the work you are asking the machine to do. You can only exercise so many hours in a day, but you can cut your fuel consumption way down very easily. Why don’t you do it? Only you know the answer to that question, here are some possible rebuttals to your possible excuses:

Cooking takes time that I don’t have. The short rebuttal is that it doesn’t. Eating out takes time. Eating frozen food out of a box takes time. Ordering a pizza takes time. So what we are talking about is how much more time it takes to eat food you prepared, instead of food prepared for you. IF YOU HAVE THE INGREDIENTS ON HAND, it takes no more time to make a salad than it does to go somewhere and eat. Making a meat patty on your stove takes less time than going somewhere for it. You have to have healthy stuff at hand to eat, though. You have to plan ahead if you want to change your outcome. You must prepare your own food, because you have no way of knowing what is in foods that are prepared for you. This truly is stumbling block number one.

Buying real food is expensive. That is true and the only rebuttal that I have is that you don’t need to buy organic foods. You don’t need to shop at Whole Foods for GMO-free or any other kind of special foods. Your goal should only be to stop eating prepared foods. If you go to the store, just buy foods that you find on the exterior walls of the market. That is usually where you will find real foods, and by real foods I mean single-ingredient foods. If you buy raw foods and eat just that simply, you have beat the beast. Drink water or unsweetened tea instead of canned or bottled prepared drinks. If you just do those two things, you will have cut your calories in half for the week. There is no increase in expense if you are buying fruit and vegetables to eat if that replaces boxed or bagged foods and canned or bottled prepared drinks. Your bill may in fact go down.

One excuse you may have for not changing is “I don’t want to.” That is the one that you must fight alone. The consequence of changing nothing is a constant march from your twenty five percent BMI to obesity. The health consequences are staggering to you personally, the cost of that can’t be measured in time or money. The thing in your head that is saying ‘I Don’t Want To’ is your old habits, your existing belief system.

A great deal of the work of eating right is forming new habits to replace habits that are in the way of the life we want to live. All habits are exactly the same to your brain. Habits keep us from having to think about every waking moment of our lives. You don’t think about every step you take when you are walking up or down steps. Doing that is a habit, and you can do it in the dark, because it is a habit. Driving to work is the same way, you are free to think about many other things while you drive because most of the trip is handled by your brain on autopilot.

Finding and eating food is a habit just like all of your other habits. When we go to the store we do our ritual. Mine is walking every aisle, hoping that the sight of something we are out of, that we normally are not out of, will break me out of my routine enough to pick it up. Otherwise, there is not a great deal of critical thinking that goes on in the grocery store. I am not one to read labels and do a great deal of comparing between items. I want to get the one I like and get on with it.

That is the enemy of change. Habit. At the beginning, just stay out of the middle aisles in the store. Make a habit of purchasing only at the edges. Decide at the start that all you need can be found among the real foods that are a single ingredient. If you must go into the danger zone, don’t purchase any food with a health claim on the label. Added vitamins are not there for your health, they are there like fish bait to hook you.

Back to the Washington Post:

…society must begin to tackle huge, unhealthful food portions the way he and others went after the tobacco industry: By stripping away its cool and fun image and revealing it for the health hazard it is.

“I’d try to change the social norms,” he said. “I’d go after big food. And I would go after things that are sold as food when there’s no real food in it. It’s just highly processed fat, salt and sugar.”

Why are you still eating the way you always have? Because you have not yet made the decision to change. You are a creature of habit, as are we all. Most of us don’t yet know how to best approach the necessary change. We are tempted by diets that give us temporary results, or we hear from others that it wasn’t worth it, because the results were temporary. You will not be able to change until you can see the change for what it really is, it is a change of habits. You must not be attempting to lose weight, you must attempt to lose habits, which is much harder, but permanent. The weight will never come back if the habits that created them are gone.

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Try to Be a Locavore

Posted on August 18, 2014 by dcarmack

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There is a relatively new restaurant in Kansas City, Missouri called The Mixing Bowl Noshery. It is on Southwest Boulevard, not too far from Manny’s. They serve nothing but fresh local foods. The photo above is their pork tenderloin sandwich. Note the relative sizes of the meat and the bun. That is a normal size hamburger bun, and it looks a little bit misproportioned to the size of the meat. The breading was not too thick. The slaw was home made, the food was fresh and hot. To top it off, nothing on the menu (that wasn’t a steak) costed more than 9.99. Great value.

My meal, with a glass of fresh water, was not that far off of the reservation for me. The breading and bun combined to give me a touch of a starch-high. This is a picture of what Karen ordered:

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That is a beef patty with cheese cooked in, a ramekin of slaw like mine, and the garnish for her ‘burger’. She didn’t have them bring the bun. She is more serious about not eating starches and sugars than I am, you might think, until I tell you that she ordered a slice of pie for us to share, as a reward for eating such a smart dinner. Good pie, but it was about one fourth of a whole pie, so we shared.  Put me even deeper in my hole.

Since I was so far out of bounds, I piled the penalties on. We went to the movies and I got a small bag of popcorn and an orange soda. The theater we went to uses real oils on their popcorn, including REAL BUTTER. (Screenland Theater, Crown Center) The soda contained real sugar instead of HFCS and tasted like orange baby aspirin. It was still real starches and sugars, though. I left the theater tipsy from all the carbohydrates I had consumed. That night I sweated it out, and the rest of the weekend we managed to get by on Real Foods ™ not processed foods from boxes, bags, or bottles. Except I had four near-beers while I watched the Chiefs practice on Sunday. Except for that.

 

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Sorry About That

Posted on August 15, 2014 by dcarmack

If you check my blog every day you probably noticed that there was no post yesterday. I plead LAZY, because I didn’t feel like writing in the morning, then when I checked in the afternoon I also didn’t feel like writing. Once I got home I had no time to write anything, and just before bed I checked again. Sorry, no post.

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Last night we had guests over for dinner and made nothing but healthy food for us all to eat. As usual, nobody would ever notice that anything is missing in a healthy meal. I made ranch dressing from scratch, which I commented on. I wanted to show off the fact that a person can actually make foods that normally come already bottled for you. They were surprised to find out that ranch dressing is only buttermilk and mayonnaise. I also told them that Russian dressing is a similarly simple thing to make, equal parts of mayonnaise and ketchup.

This morning a friend posted to one of my Facebook groups a list of things that we should all endeavor to stop eating. I appreciate the effort that we are all making to help one another get control of our food chain. Shining a light on the system tends to clean the system up. One thing that might not be helpful is to give advice like “don’t eat meat that contains ‘polyunlactorylium’. I made that ingredient up just now. As far as I know there is no such thing, but the point is, how on earth could you easily find out if your meat supply has such a thing in it? This is why my advice just about every day is to “Not eat foods out of boxes, bags, or bottles.”

By advising our friends what they should do, instead of what they should not do, we greatly simplify the adoption of great new habits of eating and shopping. I still feel that the place we need to change first is in the grocery store. Once all of the processed foods have been eaten at home, you will be left with just real foods and your imagination to guide you on how to best prepare them.

Buy naturally raised meats. Get your dairy from cattle that are eating grass. Buy your eggs from the farmer’s market from a friend or some other source where the chickens can eat their natural diet.

If you can’t find these foods easily where you live, just eat REAL foods, that are single ingredient foods. Processed foods have been modified to last forever on the shelf, and the ingredients that make that possible are in a significant number of instances not good for people. There is no agency of the government that tests the effects of artificial ingredients on large groups of the population. There are no ‘food trials’ like there are drug trials. Food companies are not required to ‘beta test’ their products, so they don’t. Making you fat isn’t something that will keep them from putting it in food. Giving you high blood pressure doesn’t keep the FDA from allowing it in your food. Be your own best help in this case. Just eat REAL.

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It Was Pretty Easy

Posted on August 13, 2014 by dcarmack

I took two fresh Boston Butt pork roasts from Paradise Meat Locker and cut the meat into about inch and a half cubes. We spiced the meat with the recipe that I posted yesterday for bratwurst. We ran that through a manual meat grinder, using the course cutting disk, then refrigerated the meat for an hour while I got the hog casings ready by soaking and rinsing them.

Putting the first casing on the sausage stuffing horn got a laugh out of Karen. Just the hand motion involved tickled her for some reason. We ground the meat up one more time using the fine cutting disc, then loaded up the sausage stuffer. The actual sausage making was something that took about two pounds of meat to really get the hang of. Loading the casing onto the horn is an important thing to do correctly, or the skin will hang up coming off. If it does that then the sausage will overfill and burst the skin. We did that one time. We just tied off upstream and downstream of the break and kept on truckin’. 

Here is the final product, which we ate for dinner last night:

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I can now make my own kielbasa, wursts, hot dogs. I will make them, too, because the German in me loves the sausage. The American in me hates that I don’t know what is in the sausages that I buy at the store, and that even if I did, I wouldn’t know what those chemicals can do to a person long-term. One less thing that I have to worry about.

There are lots of great videos of people stuffing sausages online. I can now tell you that it’s really as easy as it seems to be. The hardest part of the job is the second grind of the meat. If you had an electric meat grinder then that part wouldn’t even be hard. Then the hardest part would be cleaning up all of the tools that you use to make your sausage.

Good luck, and remember…it’s just that easy!

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