Sugar and Yeast Detox - Phase 1, Day 9

In my first post, I promised to blog everyday about this sugar yeast detox that the husband and I have inflicted on ourselves.  We are still doing it and that is why I haven’t had time to post much.  This diet is labor intensive.  I plan elaborate menus that include snacks and then create grocery lists from the menu, go shopping for the ingredients, and then concoct them into something that is hopefully edible.  OK – I admit that it isn’t all that different from my normal life and diet, but because this is such a low calorie low carb diet, I have to make sure that I buy enough so that we aren’t still hungry after eating.  And for me that is the hardest part; making sure that I eat enough calories.

I will not lie.  This diet has been difficult.  Friday was a tough day and all I wanted was comfort food – fried chicken and biscuits or maybe a nice glass of wine to finish off a weird week.  What’s worse is that is exactly what the husband wanted too.  But we persevered and unwound with dry salads from Dion’s that I doctored up with fresh lime juice and olive oil and salted sunflower seeds.  We devoured the evidence so there are no pictures.

While difficult to maintain, this diet has been fun too.  The husband has been boiling eggs for ourbreakfasts – the days when we don’t have a delicious mixture of plain Greek yogurt and unsweetened coconut.  He puts them in a pot of boiling water along with an egg timer that looks like a blue egg, but this egg sings tunes like Oh Susanna, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and Hail! Hail! The Gangs All Here so that you can tell the doneness of the egg by song. Thank you to my beautiful mother for finding such a treasurer.  It has added a bit of entertainment to this diet!

Here are some dinner highlights:

Roasted Herb Salmon

We roasted salmon in the oven that was drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice and sprinkled with salt, pepper, and a few other spices that seemed good at the time. It was served with zucchini "pasta" and grape tomatoes.  It was very fresh and almost seemed too fancy to be diet food.

Spaghetti Squash "Pasta" and Meatballs

I've made something similar to this before, but I made a tomato sauce that seemed to take forever to make.  This sauce is much more simple - diced fresh tomatoes seasoned with oregano and warmed with a little bit of garlic.  We roasted a spaghetti squash that was carefully seasoned with salt, pepper, and Italian seasonings.  Then we made the meatballs out of ground beef, an egg, onion, and more garlic.  We boiled the meatballs out top of the stop and then put them in the oven to get a bit crispy.  They were a bit bland, but I would try them again and add more spices to the meat.  Overall it was a delicious fresh take on common spaghetti.

We have also altered some of our usual recipes like turkey burgers and chicken fajitas.  We serve the burgers without bread and fajitas are served in a bowl with beans and bell peppers.  Today is the half-way mark.  We are going to make it to phase 2!

Boston By Food

Boston has been deemed a walking town. Who would call it this?  Probably all of the residents walking there and now my mom, my sister, and me! I overheard one man in an Italian restaurant say that he drove to the city, parked, and then walked 20 miles to get to there.  He may have been exaggerating, but probably not by much.   There was no parking in the Italian district and really no parking anywhere now that I think about it, so it is good thing that we didn’t bother to rent a car.  It was definitely worth the walk for the homemade pasta, homemade gnocchi, and, of course, the polpette (meatballs) at the Cantina Italiana in Boston’s Northern End.  And so we took our walking shoes and walked everywhere we went.  I loved it!  We developed a routine of walking, eating, and walking. Perfect!  There are a number of tours out there – Boston by Foot – but I’m calling my Boston experience Boston by Food.

When in Boston, you should have lobster or some kind of seafood, right?  We decided to splurge after our trip to the New England Aquarium and eat at Legal Seafood on the harbor.  It had great ratings on Trip Adviser and a few other sites, so we thought it would be a safe bet.  I ordered the Louisiana Gumbo, my sister ordered a Fried Clam Sandwich, and my mom ordered the Crab Roll.  Out of the three, the gumbo was the only thing tolerable. It was good – spicy, with meaty shrimp, fried okra, and LOTS of rice.  I would have liked more okra and less rice.  Because the other two dishes were so bad, we decided to share our food.  The clams in the sandwich were too greasy, slimy, with an oily taste.  It came with seaweed salad, which tasted exactly what I imagine the bottom of the ocean tastes like.  The crab in the Crab Roll was odd, very cold on a hot roll.  It tasted like cold fish that shouldn’t be on a sandwich.  For the cost of lunch, the food should have been superb and the service exquisite.  It was neither.  To make the experience even worse, the waitress was rude and ignored us as soon as we ordered water instead of alcohol.  I guess Boston isn’t known for its hospitability.

Just when we thought the food of Boston was a lost cause, we found a quaint, cozy, Irish pub called The Black Rose.  It had a green door and a green stair case that led to extra seating on the second floor.  Our waitress greeted us with a smile and in a thick Irish accent gave us recommendations, which we took.  I ordered my very first Fish and Chips, my sister ordered the Guinness Beef Stew, and mom ordered Shepherd’s Pie.   This time we all shared our dishes because they were so good! 

Fish and Chips- All I can say is delicious! Two haddock filets fried to a perfect crispiness and accompanied with fried potatoes that were cut perfectly - not too thin and not too thick.  I don’t like Tartar sauce and usually opt for Ketchup, but these fries were seasoned so perfectly that I didn’t even need it! All fish and chips will now be compared to this.

Guinness Beef Stew – Hearty is the best word that describes this dish.  The beef was thick and so tender that it hardly had to be chewed.  It was accompanied by potatoes, carrots, in a rich gravy-like base.  This is comfort food at its best. I would definitely order this for myself.

Shepherd’s Pie – This was made with ground beef and ground lamb.  I’m not a big fan of lamb, but because it was mixed with the hamburger, the taste wasn't as wild to me.  The combination was interesting.  The peas and carrots stood out to me as a yummy compliment to the mashed potatoes that topped the dish.  The best part to me was that it was served with broccoli.  The broccoli was slightly salted, but not overpowering.

We also tried Sam LaGrassa’s for lunch one day.  It was on an episode of Diners, Drive-ins, & Dives, so we couldn’t resist.  The menu of sandwiches is extensive and it was difficult to choose, especially in a line that was meant to move fast in a busy downtown lunch environment.  We decided to share the Pastrami Sandwich and the Club Sandwich.  Both were delicious.  They were so big that we decided to split them and share.  Of the two I enjoyed the Pastrami the best – thick cut slices of meat with tangy mustard.  However, the bacon from the club sandwich added just enough saltiness to keep me eating the club too.  The pictures speak for themselves.  

And so that was our trip to Boston by foot and mostly by food.  There are so many pubs and resturaunts there that we barely sampled them.  And I can't close this post without mentioning Duncan Donuts. There are over 107 Duncan Donuts in Boston and we couldn't pass up stopping in a few time for donuts, tea/coffee.  Yum!

Deboning Da Fish

My dad wanted to go fishing for his birthday, so one cool Sunday morning in August he picked me and my husband up and we met my sister at Fenton Lake about an hour north of Albuquerque.  It was perfect fishing weather: cool with a light rain.  We set up our lines and cast out into the unknown yet small lake and waited and waited.  A big part of shore fishing is waiting, which is probably why some people consider it relaxing and others boring.  It can be both, but the waiting also creates an air of anticipation – waiting on the edge of a folding chair, waiting for the unknown, waiting for a possibility, waiting for that slight moment when the tip of your pole dips and snaps back upright, waiting for that bite, waiting for the exhilaration of setting the hook and reeling in a mystery – is it a fish, a boot, lake muck, who knows? – waiting.

Eventually my dad walked back up to the truck that was parked not too far away.  As soon as he was out of sight, the waiting ended.  My sister’s (the Pie Goddess) line jerked, she grabbed her pole, set the hook, and reeled it in.  I ran to get the net to the surprising cacophony of clapping and cheering from fellow fishers.  The Pie Goddess had an audience!  I unnecessarily netted the fish.  It was little and the Pie Goddess decided to throw it back.  My dad missed the entire show, but from then on the bite was on!  At least for the Pie Goddess.  She had a number of missed bites, but caught two more and kept one.  I even managed to catch a little one that I threw back.  Somehow the girls caught the fish and the boys were skunked!

But this is what the waiting game is all about: it’s fun – you never know what might happen or what might not happen.  But luck is always on my side with this game because my dad and sister don’t eat fish, but my husband and I do!  So even if I don’t catch anything, I always go home with the fish! 

But that means I have to figure out how to cook it.  (I always manage to have someone else clean it!)  However, I still had to debone out how to debone a trout.  Wikihow gave 3 options on how to do it.  Because this fish was still on the small side, I decided to cook it with the bones in.  The cooking part was actually a lot easier than I expected.  I thawed the fish, combined olive oil, parsley, and a little salt and pepper and basted the inside of the fish.  Leaving the bones in with all of the seasoning seemed strange, but I did it even though it felt wrong. I wrapped it in foil and put it in the oven. It cooked fast too – maybe only 10 minutes.

And then for the deboning.  I couldn’t do it; I was too nervous of ruining the whole thing.  The husband stepped up to the plate and did a fabulous job!  He put his fingers into the hot fish and pulled the entire backbone out.  Impressive!  There were no bones left in the meat of the fish!

Trout is a bit on the wild side and has a definite fishy taste to it, but the olive oil and seasoning mellowed it out.  We paired it with some shrimp (concocted by the husband) and some veggies for a yummy, healthy dinner.