Go Fast!

Somehow, in the middle of another hellishly hectic working week, I managed to successfully fast for THIRTY-SIX HOURS without a hitch or a hint of hunger! Huzzah! I will definitely be working more fasts into my week, since I feel so good without having to worry about food and I have proved it to myself now that my body is more than capable of burning my stored body fat efficiently enough to keep my energy levels at an acceptable level. The only level at which I noticed the lack of food was on the emotional level - the staff is heavily over-worked this term, and I'm on the metaphorical front-lines since I have a number of additional commitments, so even though I haven't really been over-eating (thanks to going meat-only), I have been taking pleasure in food on the emotional level. This aspect has bitten me in the bum a bit this weekend, since meat wasn't terribly accessible, but I'll get to that later...

I'm heading into the last week of term, starting with Parent-Teacher Interviews tomorrow, lots of rehearsals, and busy evenings, but then I have two weeks off and we'll be away from home a lot, so the ability to comfortably fast will be of great benefit when accessing good meat is difficult. And having a chance to relax is desperately required!

Wednesday

FAST! Begun after dinner on Tuesday, broken at breakfast on Thursday.


Thursday

Bacon & scrambled eggs - breaking the fast with a traditional favourite:


And with a massive afternoon and evening, running from commitment to commitment, I cooked up a few pork-based snags from Jonathan's and took them to work with me for lunch and pre-concert dinner. I trust you all know well enough what Jonathan's gorgeous sausages look like by now... :) And I hope that you all, one day, with also get to enjoy what they taste like!

Friday

More snags, plus a trip down memory lane with The Usual - a ham & cheddar omelette (yep, a little bit of cheese - testing out my reaction to goat's cheese!)


After work, tried a different omelette composition for a snack - smoked salmon, and soft goat's cheese - amazing!!


Finally, the beau & I sat down to a plate each of lamb chops and Jonathan's chipollatas


In preparation for a weekend away, I made some 'care treats' for the beau, to help discourage his interest in junk food and sweet treats - I whipped up an experimental concoction of baked goodness using unmeasured amounts of coconut flour (about 1 cup), dessicated coconut (~ 1 cup), unsweetened cocoa (~ 1/2 cup), cacao nibs (~ 1/2 cup), a few eggs, and then a healthy serve of coconut oil and water to make the mix into a semi-liquid. Then I shaped the mix into biscuit-sized blobs, and some into mini-muffin pans, and baked it all for a good half-hour until the mixture was hard on the outside (though it won't cook the same way all the way through - but you don't want raw egg still inside!). After they cooled, I tried them out on the beau, and he roundly approved! No sweetener, no dairy, totally Paleo (though yes, it's Neolithic mimicry, assuming no cultures ground flours pre-wheat agriculture...), and he loved them! In curiousity, I even tried them to see where the enjoyment came from - absolutely delicious! I look forward to more in the future, once the fat levels are back under control.


Saturday

With four hours of public transport travel in front of me, I didn't want food in my belly (I don't do the moving vehicle lavatory thing), so I fasted until I arrived in my home town and met up with family at one of the local pubs. I ordered the tastiest-sounding dish on the menu - beef eye fillet, wrapped in bacon. How could the kitchen get it so wrong?? Limp bacon that hadn't been pre-crisped, and a sad clump of meat that was visually unappetising, and had a fairly average taste despite being served rare, as requested. Boo! (If only I' d had my phone with me!) Plus, I had to watch as my aunt bought chips and battered fish/chicken nuggets to my little cousins, washed down with Neapolitan ice-cream... Noooo! I know what I'll be getting her next Christmas.

Later, after attending a reunion of my old primary school (which was merged with my old high school seven years ago, and had its original buildings demolished), we bought some Chinese food for Dad's birthday dinner (for him), selecting the least icky items from the menu: five-spice quail as an entree, garlic chicken & veg, black bean beef & veg, and prawn & veg, without any rice. Not too bad! For Mum & I, we picked up some smoked salmon, roast chicken, and some cheeses.




See, my parents are renovating their kitchen, and the only cooking implement they have is an electric frying pan which Dad won't allow to be used in the house. This makes cooking things a nightmare of flies and night-time vision impairment. No-cook meals, or microwaveable leftovers are what they're living on at the moment, and will be for the next month or so! As you can tell, this situation was bound to pose a problem to my chosen diet...

Sunday

What to eat?

I ate the last few bits of chicken from last night's roast bird.

I wasn't well-prepared for a fast, as I had a headache from the heat, and without a kitchen, my water sources were the bathroom (where the water has always tasted a bit funny) and the laundry (and who wants to drink water that has come from a sink so close to the toilet?))... How lame am I?! So instead, I tried to get my hydration from food - a cheddar omelette.


Thank goodness for the satiety provided by dietary fat! Although the dairy left me with the munchies, I was able to pull it together and fast (without caloric restriction) for the rest of the day, with its long journey back to Melbourne. And now I'm home, with meats defrosting in the fridge, ready to help support me through the 50 hour working week I have ahead of me - and only around 10 of those hours are NOT face-to-face teaching or meeting times!

See you at the other end...

ADF - Week One

(Apologies for the delay - Blogger has obviously been suffering a chronic bout of cranky-pants lately, since it has steadfastly refused to upload any of my images for the last two days... I'll post this once it gets over its little temper tantrum...)

Although my first week was interrupted by being away from home for a family wedding where nothing was served but finger food, I've finessed the ADF plan to best fit my life. I've enjoyed the energy boost and litheness gifted by fasting, although I am still struggling with adequately digesting reincorporated carbs, despite upping pro-biotic supplementation. I won't be weighing in until I can tell that I'm not bloated or retaining water.

So, the schedule that I'm current experimenting with is designed to fit the stressful, longer days I work (Tuesdays & Thursdays), leaving the fasting days at Monday, Wednesday & Friday. I thought about fasting during one day of the weekend, but that would result in two fasted days in a row, and that isn't encouraged in the literature. Therefore, weekends will be normal eating days.

Although I will carry emergency supplies with me to work on fasting days, I plan to only eat a small dinner on those days, after fasting through breakfast and lunch. Ultimately, I will be incorporating three 24hr fasts into my week, consuming around 2500kcal in between, since that seems to match what my body requires, as suggested by hunger.

Thursday - Feasting
Breakfast - Salmon sashimi, sans lemon juice


Lunch - Smoked salmon, brought from home, mixed with a sad pile of garden salad: the only edible item served at a work conference...


Dinner - More salmon sashimi, with sautéed cabbage and bacon


Friday - Fasting
Fast until dinner - Pork roast (mainly crackling) with sautéed cabbage & fennel, plus some steamed zucchini.


Saturday - Feasting
On Friday night, the beau & I travelled back to my childhood home as we were to attend a cousin's wedding the next day. After a sleep-in, we lunched pre-wedding on lamb chops, smoked salmon, tomatoes and double brie.


The wedding ceremony was at 5pm, and afterwards we headed back to the local Surf Club for the reception. Platters of junky finger-food circulated, and I managed to score a couple of unadulterated prawns that were served amongst bowls of fried substances, pita bread, and questionable dips.

After watching everyone feast on garbage, I asked our hosts what the main meal would be.

"It's just finger food tonight, it's easier."

Oh, great.

We then contacted the kitchen staff to enquire whether actual food was likely to be prepared in there...

Thankfully, the chef said that there was some squid salad that I could have (from where it appeared, I did not ask), and she gave me the tiniest bowl of sad-looking salad, with a couple of measly strips of squid plopped on top. A satisfying meal, it was not.


So the beau and I had to LEAVE the wedding, to go back to our rented unit, so that I could cook up some dinner! I fried up some eggs and bacon, and grabbed out a bit of herbed cream cheese and some organic tomato pesto I brought from home.


We returned to the party and had a great time - I even had some celebratory bubbly.

The day of eats did go a little awry when we finally plodded home to our unit for the night, and a member of our party was keen to stay up and vent and snack on nuts, cheese and apples. Depressing revelations and bottomless walnuts do not mix well...

Sunday - Feasting
The hosts threw a post-wedding BBQ at their place on the Sunday, and I scored a delicious serving of barbecued lamb and beef, with fresh green salad and cheddar as a side.


Then it was time to get back in the car and return to Melbourne. Unfortunately, the late-night snacking threw my leptin levels out of whack (or something) and I found myself gagging for food all evening. No meat was defrosted, so I reached for nuts, nuts, nuts, cheese, nuts, and even some fruit leftover from the beau's family visit. Stomach = not happy.

Monday - Fasting
It was a joy to fast! I wasn't hungry in the slightest for the whole day, and only ate a little in the evening as I tested my Dip recipes for flavour levels. My digestive system certainly needed the break! I made the most of the fast by being active in the afternoon: walking up to the local shopping strip to pick up the veggie box and other dip ingredients, and boy were my feet, legs and biceps tired afterward!

Tuesday - Feasting
A normal, albeit somewhat light, day of eats:

Breakfast - The Usual (cheddar omelette), and salmon sashimi


Lunch - forgot to pack anything, so I dipped into my emergency stash of tuna. Yuck, so drying...

Dinner - Pork chops served with a spoonful of each of my veggie dips. Turns out that pork is absolutely brilliant served with a side of my Chunky Beetroot & Herb Chutney!


Finally, some inspired info by that champion of the health blogosphere, Stephan - Changing Your Body Fat Set-Point. That's my goal with ADF, since counting calories does allow me to lose weight, but doesn't teach my body to reset my fat balances. As Stephan points out, IF has been anecdotally reported to achieve this, and I hope I can add a successful anecdote to the growing body of evidence.

A New Academic Year, A New Academic Experiment

Today marked my return to the educational institution I call my second home. My holidays are officially over, and once again I'm faced with the reality of what most people consider 'normal eating habits'. Case in point - morning tea & lunch were provided to the staff today. I didn't even bother going to the social staffroom to see what 'food' was served for morning tea, but I did cross the hall at lunchtime with an ultimately misplaced glimmer of hope. I was greeted with platters of party pies and sausage rolls, deep-fried spring rolls, tiny club sandwiches with minimal filling, and nori (sushi) rolls with sugary mayo coating the fillings.

I am seriously considering making a formal request for the food provided at such events to be whole, nourishing, and at least avoiding the most common allergens in at least ONE food option!

This experience further consolidated my idea regarding a new way of eating I wanted to try. I love sticking to a carnivorous diet - I feel energetic and lithe - but I am repeatedly reminded that for many people merely adhering to a low-carb plan is difficult enough, let alone a 'hardcore' regime such as Zero Carb. One of my passions is education, and whilst I know that self-experimentation can only ever be an n=1 study and that my results only prove what may work for me, not what definitely works for the general populace, one of the primary motivations for maintaining this blog is to use myself as a demonstration of feasibility. Since ZC seems out of reach of most people, who may do just as well on a more varied diet anyway, I have decided to option my options back up to include all Primal fare, whilst experimenting with a way of eating that has been making waves through recent scientific reports, and has a rich history of anecdotal success across a longer period of history. It has links to evolutionary eating patterns, breaks away from the socially conditioned patterns of eating, and helps to maintain a caloric deficit without hunger and without long-term harm of metabolic capacity.

I speak, of course, of Alternate-Day Fasting.

The general premise comes in many guises - Up Day Down Day Diet, Feast or Famine Diet, etc. A popular term for a more flexible approach is the Eat Stop Eat protocol, although this is not intermittent calorie restriction if the post-fast meal makes up for the calories missed by the fast. Long-time readers of this blog and other blogs in the primal community will be no stranger to the concepts of intermittent fasting, which I practice sporadically, particularly during the working week where finding time for a primal lunch is a pain in the loincloth.

However, this experiment is going to take a stricter approach than my usual 'meh, I'm going to fast until dinner today' spontaneity. This is in order to hopefully create stronger causal links between my programme and my results, and also to make my trial easier to replicate, should readers wish to do so. The goal here is not just intermittent fasting, but intermittent caloric restriction.

The basics:

On my 'normal' day, I will eat my usual primal diet, with a focus on meat & eggs, eating fat to satiety, and including a range of vegetables. On occasion, I will also include fruit & nuts. My usual carb range, even when eating what feels like a lot of vegetation, is 20g per day or less, but I will not worry if this number increases on normal days, so long as I stick to low glycaemic load foods. Given my history, when eating to satiety I tend to consume around 1800-2200kcal per day. I will not be watching this figure too closely for the first weeks.

On my 'alternate' day, i.e. every second day, I will consuming around one quarter of the amount of calories consumed the previous day. This may be achieved through only consuming one meal per day, eating a number of small meals, or perhaps a complete fasting excepting a few doses of coconut oil. I am very comfortable fasting until dinner time, so I suspect this will be my preferred method.

Numerous studies and anecdotes have demonstrated the relative ease with which individuals can adhere to this way of eating, even when the food consumed is not low-carb. For those people, the opportunity to induce lipolysis by having low insulin levels during fasting periods is a novel way to lose weight. For us, the benefit of fasting is more closely tied to the idea of triggering the release of 'survival' hormones through fasting and caloric restriction, enhancing our fat-burning that way, whilst keeping our metabolism intact. Fasting in general is also an accessible way to achieve caloric restriction without having to always count calories. So no matter where you sit on the 'relevance of calorie counting' discussion, alternate day fasting (ADF) has visible potential.

Many, many people have discussed regimes similar to ADF, and for those of you who want hard data and expert opinion, here are just some of the people on my blogroll and their articles exploring the concept:

Mark Sisson - Feast or Famine Diet

Matt Metzgar - The Alternate Day Diet & Intermittent Calorie Restriction.

Chris @ Conditioning Research - Intermittent Fasting: more research

JP @ Healthy Fellow - Alternate Day Fasting

&

Richard Nikoley - Alternate Day Fasting, Weight Loss & Food

Unlike ZC/carnivorism, where my goal is as much about maintaining a positive sense of well-being as it is a potential fat-loss method, ADF has the singular aim of fat loss. I don't expect to feel better or more energetic on this plan than I do whilst on normal primal eating patterns, and certainly not better than when eating only animal products since I have repeatedly demonstrated to myself that there's just no substitute if I want to feel great AND have a smooth belly AND have an excellent sense of balance in all my physiological systems. ADF is all about the bottom line. And my hope is that I'll end up with results that inspire others to give it a shot and lend weight (no pun intended) to ADF as a potential fat-buster for those who lack the will-power to give up unhealthy food choices, or cannot break psychological ties to food, whether they are truly emotion-based or due to insulin imbalances. If we can get obesity under control, that's a step in the right direction.

It begins:

As a control measure, I took a few days to reintroduce fibre into my system, eating to satiety and then some in order to boost my metabolic rate. I was picking up on some flu symptoms, possibly caused by excessive air-conditioning whilst up north, so I wanted to re-feed my body to give it a good chance of fighting off whatever was ailing me.

Sunday


After a much-needed sleep-in, I served up a large, fresh salad with an array of seafood topping options: salmon sashimi, grilled salmon, and fried seafood marinara.




For dinner, I whipped up my favourite, Caveman Chicken, served with aspects of Veggie Cornucopia, plus wilted beet leaves.




Monday

Started the day with The Usual - ham & cheddar omelette.


We were off to the Australian Open, so I packed up some leftover Caveman Chicken & veggies for a decadent lunch whilst watching Davydenko slowly pulverise Verdasco. My meal was more interesting than the match - thankfully, the rest of the day was riveting watching, even though it was not a good day for the last two remaining Aussie challengers.


I had assumed that there would be nothing but rubbish served at the Open and that I would be sure to miss out on dinner. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a 'sizzling salads' stand, serving nothing but fresh salads (Greek, Mediterranean, or Green) topped with grilled meat (beef or chicken, or crumbed calamari). Delight and rapture! And a bonus - we were late getting dinner, and the stall was packing up for the day, so they stuffed my bowl as full of meat & veg as it could contain!



Tuesday - The First 'Normal' Day

The debut of the suddenly-infamous Coconut Pancakes... Sooo gooooood....




Inspired by the Mediterranean salad on offer at the tennis, I roasted up some pumpkin, capsicum, zucchini and carrot, and served it with another range of seafood options - smoked salmon, fried calamari and baby octopi!






After two big meals, we were happy with leftover salad and some barbecued lamb chops and snags for dinner. I went for some chipollatas from Jonathan's.




Wednesday - The First 'Alternate' Day

I effortlessly fasted through breakfast and lunch, distracted by the business of getting ready for the return of the students on Monday. Of course, fasting is pretty much a breeze when you know you're going out for dinner at Rockpool Bar & Grill! My usual order is the $50 Cape Grim Dry Aged 36 month old Grass Fed Fillet (250g), but tonight I felt like something a bit more special. So I upped the ante and went for the David Blackmore Mishima Grass Fed (From A Marble Score 9+ Animal) Rump (240g). Wow! The exquisiteness of this amazing beef was solidified when I was offered a piece of my usual order, as purchased by the beau's Mom... The comparison between that 'really good' steak and the utter amazingness of the tender, buttery-textured Mishima is indescribable. Go get it! We accompanied our hunks of gorgeous animal with sautéed zucchini and wilted greens (broccolini, leek, and cabbage). Culinary perfection.




My first round of ADF is in the bag! I barely consumed 600kcal today, yet five hours after dinner I'm still feeling fine. Bring on Round #2...

Ladies Don't Perspire - They Glow

Since I know that most of the readers of this blog are from the US, where I hear it is colder than a penguin's punani, I won't harp on about the heatwave currently attacking much of Australia. Australia is synonymous for summertime fun, but as the drought arrived early this season, we're all quite terrified that some freak lightning storm or bastard pyromaniac will hit us with a repeat of last year's Black Saturday horror. Tomorrow's set to be an absolute scorcher, so I will be hiding inside and eating cold meat!

The Carnivore's Weekend: In Review

Being Saturday, we didn't get out of bed til well past noon, where the temperature greeted us with full force. The plan? Eat a big breakfast, and then escape to the cinema!


I certainly was satisfied after that feed of cheddar omelet, bacon, and lamb chop, but sadly the film left me wanting a little more...

We decided to try a fancy seafood place on the way home, named Ink. As you know, I'm an avid squid fan, and could happily live on the stuff. I was imagining a gorgeous plateful of fresh squid and other seafood delicacies, and was particularly looking forward to it being served in squid ink! No such luck. The menu was incredibly basic, and priced quite steeply despite the limited atmosphere of the restaurant. I toyed with leaving and picking up some seafood from a supermarket instead, but the beau was starving, so I gave in and ordered a lobster, natural.


As the discerning eye will note, that ain't a lobster. That's just a (freshwater) crayfish, like I can pick up at my local supermarket for $40. How much did this place have the gall to charge me? $120. And they served it with fries. At least they didn't carry on the pretense on the bill, where my meal was labeled as 'Crayfish'. We will not be returning.

On Sunday, we woke fairly early (for us), and set about the business of the day. For me, that was making my breakfast, making a new batch of the beau's grain-free granola (almond, walnuts, coconut, Splenda and egg whites this time - I'm all out of sugar alcohols and stevia), tidying parts of the house in preparation for a party on Thursday, getting some sun with the guinea pigs, making lunch, doing some research online, losing a couple of hours to French & Saunders videos on YouTube, making dinner, drinking loads of water all day, and now blogging. The beau? Play Playstation, eat breakfast, play Playstation, eat dinner, play Playstation. Super. Anyone know how to decimate a PS3 without leaving evidence of tampering? Oh well, he only has about fine more games to finish, and hopefully his mates will run out of games to lend him... They're not making any new games, right? :)

My breakfast: Jonathan's chipollatas! I am officially in love! We stopped it at my old local supermarket (the wonderful Piedimonte's on St. George's Rd, North Fitzroy) to pick up some essentials, and as I was browsing through the fresh meat section, a poster advertising the products of a local butcher caught my eye. I let my gaze drift across the range of gourmet sausages, assuming that they would be packed full of grain flours. But when I looked closer, I noticed that most of the snags were nothing much more than meat and spices! Hallelujah! Spicy chipollatas! Lamb & basil sausages! Delight! I stocked up quickly, safe in the new knowledge that I had access to good quality, primal snags! Best of all, I wouldn't need to go tripping all the way out to Piedimonte's next time, as Jonathan's butcher shop is right near the beau's workplace! The chippies are absolutely delicious, and are anything but lean, so I am looking forward to trying out the lamb & basil!


Aren't they sweet? Little finger-sized gems, and not as spicy as one may imagine - just a nice flavour and a perfect moistness and tenderness in the meat.

I lunched on what is fast becoming my pride and joy - salmon sashimi, made by me! I tried to cut the anything-but-uniform fillet into uniform pieces, and did okay overall. I 'cooked' them very lightly in lemon juice, only leaving them for perhaps one minute. There was a detectable 'cookedness' to the outer edge, but the inside was still raw and delicious. Not dead yet! I washed down the meal with a few spoonfuls of creme fraiche to get my dietary fat intake up.


Finally, although it required the oven to be on for a long period, and the kitchen was already a sweatshop, I stuck with the plan to roast pork for dinner. I have now consolidated my hairdryer experiment - dry the skin of the roast thoroughly with a hot hairdryer before cooking - you don't need to add salt or extra oil this way (the oil would always burn in the pan, even when there was water added, and splash the sides of the oven). An hour later - perfect pork roast? As always, I inherited the beau's portion of crackling, and only had room for a smidge of lean. :)


My shed-the-haunch-and-holiday-paunch mission is going well, and I've knocked off a full kilo in the past two days - most of which will be water loss as I clear out remaining carbs in my gut and use up stored glycogen, of course. However, I have noticed a bit of keto-breath in the evenings, so things are working well! My level of physical activity is much lower now than during the teaching term, although last week I spent three days 'gathering' (wandering around shopping centres for hours - enough to wear out the feet and shoulders and spirit), and one day completing a massively arduous gardening task (6 hours). I have also set a challenge for my beau and myself - push-ups! I want us to do at least ten every day, together if possible. Lately, the memory has been weak, but we remembered yesterday, and are paying for it today! My main goal is to help restore the beau's biceps back to their former glory, since I'm a major arms girl! He doesn't have to use his arms much, so he was holding onto his young adolescent form, I suppose. He's now past the 30 milestone, so his muscles has shriveled a bit, with their bulk being transferred to his gut. He does eat a mostly primal diet, but obviously could use some work to held make up for the garbage he eats during the work days. I'd love to be able to show him off as my Primal Guy, but his hedonism is holding strong... for now...

Further Reading:

There have been some wonderful posts flying about the Webernets lately, and I've been collecting my favourites in earnest. The size of said collection is a little overwhelming, however. Certainly too many to discuss individually! So instead, here's a list of Team Players (posting strong, interesting articles regularly) and a couple of particularly note-worthy posts from a variety of sources.

Team Players:

Dr. A. continues to hit them out of the park, with varied topics ranging from dissections of scientific literature, book reviews, personal accounts and recipes! Some memorable performances of late include: Your Doctor Is A Liar!, Vitamin D & Cancer, Lemon & Lime Gateau, Smug Food Puritans, Carbs, Fibre & Breast Cancer, and the accessible and concise delight which I will be sharing with all of my friends and family, Carb v. Saturated Fat (or as I labeled it in an email to a friend, 'Why eating 'Low-Fat' is pointless). Love your work, Dr. A.!

Dr. T. (what's with all the Dr. X. pseudonyms?) from NephroPal always presents interesting information regarding nutrition and health. I was fascinated by the collection of foods and their origins in the post entitled, shockingly, Origins Of Food. Coconut & Red Wine also gave us a give-to-the-friends breakdown of the effects of coconut oil vs. soybean oil on our health, as well as some technical reasons to booze up occasionally. And to point out the questionable nature of rodent studies re: saturate fat's impact on human health, as well as to look at the real impact of such fats (all positive), came the tongue-in-cheek title, God Bless Evolution.

Dr. John Briffa (lookit, a full name!), in his straight-forward and accessible style, puts forward goals for the layperson to follow to improve overall health. I hear of many peple who vow to lose a certain amount of weight by a certain date (a trend being cashed in on by sites like Lose It Or Lose It... ergh, don't even get me started on how damaging that concept is!...), but it would be much better for them to follow Dr. Briffa's 10 realistic and achievable New Year's goals worth considering. His next post looked at an editorial examining the importance of looking to our nutritional past to improve our future health. Another straight-forward and inoffensive piece that you could gently pass on to your less-than-healthful mates...

Hit Singles:

The Schmaltz lists what he has learned

Dr. Michael R. Eades gives Dr. Oz a swift boot up his ignorant rear-end

Dr. William Davis points it out again - excessive carbohydrates are BAD!

Tom Naughton & Asclepius from Natural Messiah each reviews/discusses Lierre Keith's continuing-to-be-ground-breaking work, The Vegetarian Myth.

Well, I think that's enough! What has excited me most is the increase in posts explaining the importance and harmlessness of saturated fats in the human diet, provided the excessive carbohydrate intake is abolished. It makes it ever-more likely that this decade will see the conclusive disproof of the Lipid Hypothesis, and maybe we'll even see an intelligent return to a diet based on animal protein and vegetables - real food! I do suspect, however, that once people realise that the cheap carbs are bad for them, meat prices will sky-rocket and recognised healthy living will become truly elitist... Maybe permaculture-based animal husbandry will be subsidised? We can dream!

Lazy Daze

Ah, holidays. Melbourne is at the start of a predicted major heatwave, so there's not much I can do (since I don't drive) without melting. My houseguest has left, and I have a week of nothing much before the next event in my current calendar. Ahhh... So I've been catching up on those things I like to do around the house - I completely made over the garden yesterday; I restored my herb garden and extended it to include some new additions, I designed and created jewellery for my Mum to wear to my cousin's wedding later in the month, and I even tolerated about ten minutes of sunbathing this morning before the sunbeams started to really sting.

Given the heat, and the absence of air cooling or circulation in the kitchen, cooking has been one of the last things I've wanted to do. As of yesterday I started back on a carnivorous way of eating, stripping back to meat-only today. I'm already in ketosis, so hopefully the scales will starts showing progress as I'd really like to have shaken off this Christmas weight before I head off for my beach holiday in just over a week! I know my chances aren't good...

Here's a quick account of my eats over the past three days:

6/1/10

Breakfast: Camembert omelette, made with extra cream and butter. So rich and satisfying!


Lunch: to our delight, Mum & I found roast meat & veg available for lunch in the Westfield Doncaster food court, for $12.50! Such a huge amount of really great-tasting food, with tender, slow-cooked meat and fresh vegetables. Sold by "Rhumba's" or some such, right next to Borders. If you're a local, go get it!


Dinner: I made an interesting salad for the beau, with an adventurous combo of fresh produce - capsicum, carrot, snap peas, pea shoots, and blueberries! It lasted him three meals, and he adored it!


Mum and I had the last of the sashimi salad (still with some salmon roe, but no sashimi) to accompany our serving of the main, which was t-bone beef steak, with Camembert cheese.


To wash down our dinner, and accompany our guilty-pleasure movie of the evning, "Never Been Kissed", I made some guilt-free single servings of Chocolate Cream Cake with Berries, and this time I used less sweetener and mixed the eggs all together, not bothering to whip the white separately. The cake was denser, but somehow softer, and the extra sweetener was not missed. Trial and error to find the amount that suits you best...


7/1/10

Breakfast: A couple of Camembert omelets, served with four slices of shortcut bacon. Needless to say, I certainly didn't need lunch after this wonderful breakfast!


Dinner: After a day of toiling in the garden (a very warm day for physical outdoor activity, involving hacking down overgrown vines, ripping an old watering system out of the ground as well as off of patio ceiling beams, potting and transplanting various succulents and herbs, and hoisting soil and filled pots to useful places. And let's not count the amount of watering can refills I would have done, lugging the big bastard from the tap back to the patio, again and again...), I could not be arsed cooking dinner, so I sent the beau to the chicken place. Yum! I took the legs for dinner, the beau took the breasts, and I saved the rest to pick at.


8/1/10

Breakfast: picked clean the leftover chicken carcass from the night before. I possibly ate more bones/marrow than meat. Yum!

Lunch: a lamb forequarter chop, and two slices of shortcut bacon. They were the only items that were thawed and could be thrown on the grill - by lunchtime, the kitchen was starting to roast in and of itself, so no time to fuss around with frying things (or photograph them)!

Dinner: a delicious, organic porterhouse steak! I took the photo before I topped the hunk with a copious amount of butter. Mmmmmmmm! Tender and juicy, even though I tossed it on the grill straight from the freezer! Naughty!


And now I'm well and truly in ketosis! Feeling good, and even though my weight is still up by a couple of kilos compared to before Christmas, my body composition doesn't show it except for a bit of jiggliness in my lower abdomen. If I can get rid of that before hitting the beach resort in just over a week, that will make things much more pleasant! Bring on the meat!

Meanwhile, my Mum has begun her attempt at Drs. Eades' The Six-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle, starting with the shake weeks of course. She's 58 years young, so her experience on the program will be much more revealing of the potential of the Eades' design. Stick with it, Mum!

Finally, I'm thinking about decreasing my posting rate (i.e. working at the same rate as I have done this week). I have a huge working year ahead of me, with some big after-school commitments as I am directing another show, going up in May. So I am toying with reducing my rate to twice a week - one on Sunday/Monday to look at my weekend eats/reads/etc, and one on Friday/Saturday to recap the eats/events of the week. I may start using Twitter more frequently instead, tweeting about my meals as I eat them, with photos when convenient, and linking to interesting articles so that there is more immediacy to you finding out about them. With 400+ followers of the blog and on Twitter, I'm guessing a lot of you double-dip anyway, and my tweets will be listed in the siderbar of my blog, but if anyone would be saddened by this change, please let me know!

I hope the first week of 2010 has been sweet for everyone, even though it seems like most of us are dealing with the extremes of our usual weather patterns at the moment (very cold or very hot - I'd live near the equator for the consistent weather, were it not for the natural disasters and whatnot...). If you're back at work, I hope you're buoyed along by peppy New Year promise and excitement, and that you're not counting down the days til your next break! I'm still on holidays for a while, it's true, but as of Monday I'll have to get cracking on preparation for the year ahead. Fortunately for me, as the Year 12 Lit teacher, my preparation involves reading classic texts. What a chore... :P And for some of the time, I'll be doing so whilst lying beside a pool in northern NSW... It's okay if you hate me right now :) You can laugh later in the year when I'm so busy with work and the production that I have no time to cook, and all that's offered to me by the well-meaning catering team is carby garbage, which I will refuse and, instead, go hungry! Cold chicken-ville, here I come again!

The Banquet! & Recipe: Chocolate Cake 4 Dummiez

Hold onto your hats folks, and if your delicate constitution can't handle too much seriously sumptuous food p*rn in one sitting, you may need to take this one a course at a time...

But first, here's a quick blow-by-blow of the first few eats of 2010 - mostly verbal as I'm out of the swing of photographing the more monotonous meals:

NB: I'm including a small amount of vegetables every day to ease the transition from over-consumption of fruit and nuts over Christmas. I'm feeling really good even with a bit of salad, so we'll see how that goes. The extra weight is dropping steadily even with a few carbs, so...

1/1/10

Fried eggs for brekky
Roast lamb in juices/gravy for lunchables
Itty bitty prawns in a bed of sautéed red cabbage and steamed zucchini for din-dins


2/1/10

B: Sautéed red cabbage
L: Chicken drumsticks and zucchini
D: Spicy burger patty with cos lettuce and tomato

3/1/10

First: Sausage and eggs, including a double-yolker!


Second: grilled salmon fillet with salmon roe salad


Third - at a friend's wedding: fish fillet, lamb rump, and butter (and yes, even with clear RSVP instructions and a bride very familiar with my preferences, the kitchen staff STILL screwed it all up, originally reporting my needs as "no meat or cream" and, even after correction, bringing me a plate of salad coated in sticky dressing. All's well in the end though, and it was a truly beautiful wedding.

4/1/10

Breakfasted on scotch fillet topped with brie, plus some salmon roe salad


Lunched on grilled calamari, and a cheese plate at the Little Creatures Dining Hall on Brunswick St, Fitzroy.


Dined at home on peel-your-own prawns, and then BBQ'd some homemade chicken & lamb kebabs that were then eaten in the car on our mad dash to the cinema to see The Lovely Bones. (Meh.)


5/1/10

Broke my fast with a decadent Camembert omelet (The Usual with a luxe twist) followed by delicious organic smoke bacon.


Broke my shopping tripping by stopping in at T.G.I. Friday's for an Angus rump steak with bleu cheese and a side of ignored green beans, splitting the meal with Mum, who is currently visiting.



And then, for dinner with Mum, the bro, his girl, and the beau, it was time to whip up a banquet...

THE FIVE COURSE BANQUET: Primal-style!

Course The First:

In newly-purchased steel cup/bowls, I served up a fresh batch of Primal Pumpkin Soup, with a dish of heavy cream and some ground nutmeg.


Course The Second:

A new experiment - roast chicken drumsticks with a curry coating (a mix of olive oil, curry powder, and lemon juice, brushed over each piece), with roast fennel, button squash and boiled baby beets.

Before going into the oven:


And after:


Course The Third:

Trying my hand at salmon sashimi! I sliced my salmon fillet thinly after removing the skin, and sat the pieces in a bowl of lemon juice to 'cook' in the citric acid. I was then distracted by my company, so the pieces were a little overcooked in appearance, but utterly perfect in flavour. I'm definitely adding this way of enjoying salmon to my weekly rotation - grilling fillets no longer inspires me, but the beau won't eat raw fish.

I used the pieces in a sashimi salad - salmon, salmon roe, mixed lettuce, capsicum, and snap peas. Divine!


Course The Fourth:

I'm still trying to think of a name for this experiment, and I'm currently leaning toward Minced Beef Medley, or some such. I originally intended to use minced roo meat, but the package we bought was past its expiry date, and also past its smelling-good date, so it went into the bin and the hurried thawing of organic beef mince began.

First I sautéed a diced red onion and a diced red capsicum (bell pepper) in some butter, until slightly softened. While they cooked I attempted to separate an iceberg lettuce into cups, but I bought a particularly inter-folded head, making separation impossible. Instead, I ripped up each mangled leaf and laid the pieces across a platter, adding some fresh basil leaves.

Putting the onion & capsicum into a bowl, I sautéed the beef mince until cooked, adding extra butter, plus some thyme and garlic. If I were to make it again, I'd add a few more flavourings, such as cumin, but I kept it simple since we'd had some spice in the soup and chicken course already.

I then layered the cooked beef across the salad leaves, topping it off with the capsicum & onion. Light yet satisfying; simple yet delicious.


Course The Last:

After gazing many a time at Dr. A's decadent Black Forest Gateau used for the title image of The Comfort Eater's Diet blog, I decided to take a crack at the 'how is it possible?' recipe:

Recipe: Chocolate Cream Cake with Berries
a.k.a. Chocolate Cake 4 Dummiez

Ingredients:

6 eggs
100g unsweetened cocoa
Sweeteners to taste

2 cups whipped heavy cream
Fresh raspberries and blueberries, or frozen berries that have been thawed in the refrigerator.

(Please note when viewing my photos, I had to thaw raspberries and due to time constraints did not have a chance to let them cool, hence the flood of raspberry cream down the back of the cake. Still delicious, of course!)


Method:

Preheat oven to 175degC.

Combine eggs, cocoa, and sweetener in a bowl, using an electric whisk.

Pour mix into a square or rectangular baking dish - I used a square glass dish, about 20cm x 20cm (8" x 8"). No need to grease it, but you can line it with baking paper if it's an old dish.

Bake in the oven until risen and firm to the touch.

Remove and allow to cool.

When cake is cool, slice in half horizontally (and I also sliced my square in half length-ways to make four rectangles)

Place a piece on a platter, then top with 1/4 of the whipped cream (or until covered) and a layer of berries. I alternated between blueberries and raspberries.

Repeat by placing another piece of cake on top of the berries, then topping with cream and berries. Repeat twice more until cake is complete.

This cake is rich and filling, and could serve six greedy people comfortably, or more depending on the size of your baking dish (thinner, longer rectangles would feed more, due to ease of slicing).


Each course was received with an 'ooh' of visual appreciation, and then near-silence during consumption - a more meaningful sign of enjoyment to the chef than immediate verbal feedback! All dishes were praised, particularly the soup, and my guests could not comprehend that the cake was truly made with just eggs and cocoa! "But how does it stay together? Why isn't it all eggy? Didn't it need some almond flour or something? How did it puff up?" :)

And after five courses of food, no one felt stuffed or bloated, as you would had their been bread/grains/starches involved I'm sure, and only the dessert left us feeling full and a little overwhelmed, but not lethargic in any sense!

I love cooking. :D