Easter dinner traditionally means one of two main courses — either ham or lamb. But neither is an acceptable choice if you’re on a low-salt, or a low-fat, or a low-salt, low-fat diet as I am. That can make being a guest at someone else’s Easter feast a problem for you.
So do what I did this year. Invite family and/or friends to your house where you control the menu. Then assemble a low-salt, low-fat meal that everyone will enjoy, even if some guests are missing the ham (they can buy some at their houses).My low-salt, low-fat Easter dinnerContinue reading “Low-salt Easter dinner: how to enjoy the holiday meal”→
Gilson’s is a neighborhood place in downtown Wilmette that has done well in preparing tasty dishes for me with a minimum of salt, fat or sugar. We enjoy it so much that my wife and I decided to dine there on New Year’s Eve before going to see a musical at a local theater.
We started with some wonderful scallops. The Gilson’s menu describes them as “Pan seared jumbo scallops over sautéed Swiss chard and cranberry onion jam and topped with crumbled bacon.” My beautiful wife Carolyn displays our scallops appetizer.
I did not eat the bacon, needless to say, but my wife enjoyed it. We asked that the dish not be salted in any way and I did not taste any salt (I’ve become ultra sensitive to it since cutting back). The scallops had a wonderful grilled flavor. Continue reading “Gilson’s in Wilmette: A local gem on Chicago’s North Shore”→
My quest to find lean meat options brought me to the Twin Cities one recent weekend and a restaurant my daughter-in-law and son recommended that serves something called a Game Burger.
The Game Burger at the Happy Gnome in St. Paul is a mixture of bison and elk, two red meats known to be leaner than most beef cuts. I had eaten deer sausage at the Berghof in Chicago years ago and not liked the taste or smell. Elk and red deer are the same species and what restaurants sell as elk is often farm raised red deer, I later discovered. But I was willing to try a blend, hoping it would satisfy my taste for a juicy burger on a Saturday night.MY Game Burger. Tasty and, hopefully, leaner than beef.Continue reading “Ever try an elk burger? Is elk lean?”→
I wrote recently about the one year anniversary of my angioplasty and about how my life has changed in the past 12 months. Although it wasn’t intended as such, the Morton’s steak house chain gave me a gift for that anniversary. It promoted Aug. 13 as national fillet mignon day and offered mini-fillets for $1.
I didn’t expect much for $1, but I’m not supposed to eat more than six ounces of red meat a week anyway, so I was just happy to be able to walk into a restaurant at lunchtime and order something beside salad. The special was only available at the bar, so that’s where I sat. I also spent $4.75 for a diet Coke. I asked the bartender how much the minis weighed and she just shrugged and so I ordered four to start, thinking they might be an ounce each.
A plate of three mini-fillets at Morton’s, I ate seven in all on Aug. 13.
Nuts are often touted as the answer when someone on a restricted diet is seeking a new source of protein to replace the red meats we once ate. I’m sick of hearing about nuts, principally because I have never liked them, hate the taste, get chills from eating some of them and generally don’t like to think that the only way I can survive these days is by eating nuts and twigs all the time.
I also disagree with those who say the answer for our obesity epidemic is for everyone to stop eating meat and just eat things like ancient grains and sprouts.No nuts for me, ever.
So I was happy to see an article in The Atlantic recently saying basically the same thing. The author makes the point that not everyone can afford to shop only at Whole Foods (who can really) and that eating like some of the anti-packaged foods forces advocate is impossible for a large swatch of the country. Continue reading “Eat nuts and you’ll be fine — baloney!!!”→
As you likely know, the biggest change you face when you get put on a restricted diet is that buying prepared or processed foods of any kind becomes nearly impossible because of the amounts of sodium, sugar and fat in them. You are forced to cook for yourself, learning if you haven’t cooked before or relearning if you had cooked but used the big three of forbidden foods that you can no longer eat.
I’ve been a cook all my adult life but have been relearning and refining old recipes to get the salt, sugar and fat out, as I write about here. I pretty much make everything from scratch now and after eight months of doing it, have a fairly good rotation of nightly dinner dishes which I make for my wife and I. But cooking from scratch every night is time consuming, and tiring after long, long days at work.
That’s why I recommend cooking several main courses at once, perhaps on a Saturday or Sunday when you may have more time to prepare. Then you can simply reheat these items and make some quick veggie side dishes during the week. I did that with the items in the picture you see here. Cooking three, or more, meals at once.
The center item is my latest take on a pizza I can eat. It’s made with a whole wheat prepared crust from Whole Foods, salt-free tomato sauce and fat-free mozzarella cheese I get from a local supermarket, along with peppers, low-salt black olives, and mushrooms.
To the right of the pizza is my turkey meatloaf, which includes two pounds of lean and very lean ground turkey combined with low-salt Panko bread crumbs and Eggbeaters (equal to one egg). A meatloaf that size is at least two meals for my wife and I, and easy ones to quickly heat during the week.
To the left are portobello mushroom caps covered in salt-free tomato sauce, no-fat cheese and peppers. I originally cooked these as a main course but we ended up having them as a side dish. Simply bake those at 350 degrees for about 20-30 minutes depending on your oven.
John
My trio of nutritionist don’t agree on eating beef on my restricted diet. The first told me straight out to eat vegetarian, which I do not want to do. The other two were more understanding and suggested limiting beef intake to six ounces a week and finding the leanest beef possible.
For me, six ounces is one serving, even though for nutritionists, it’s two. So I’ve bought some six-ounce fillets as a weekly treat.
But I also love hamburgers and wanted a way to continue eating those. Hamburgers you eat out can range from 75 percent to 80 percent lean, which means they’re 25 to 20 percent fat. That’s not doable for me, so I’ve cut out McDonald’s, Wendy’s and White Castle burgers.A lean burger, along with peppers and asparagus.
At home, I had been buying 90 percent lean ground beef, thinking it was the leanest available. But as I’ve scouted my local stores with the new eyes of someone on a no-salt, no-fat, no-sugar diet, I discovered that one Chicago supermarket, Jewel, sells a leaner ground beef, 96% lean in fact.
It’s the most expensive of course, as healthy items invariably are, but I’m paying the price to keep hamburgers in my life.
I buy packages a bit over a pound to make four burgers and freeze them for future use. My first nutritionist, the nutrition nazi as I call her, said the only type of hamburger bun I can eat is something called an Ezekiel bread bun, available frozen only at Whole Foods in my area. Continue reading “How Lean Can Lean Beef Be?”→
White meat turkey is on my approved meat list, but white meat turkey can be drier than paper to eat, as I found out when I was in the hospital last August and ate what passed for a meal of turkey there.
Turkey burgers present the opportunity to use ketchup to flavor them up a bit. But my nutrition nazi had a warning about buying ground turkey or pre-made turkey burgers. Pre-made turkey burgers, such as the ones in restaurants or sold pre-made in supermarkets, contain turkey skin to give them some moisture so their fat content can be as high as that of some red meats.Not all ground turkey is the same. There’s lean and there’s extra lean.
I found myself last October wondering if I would be able to get anything I can eat in my restricted diet at a bowling alley. I had bowled on an office team last spring that won our league championship and the team was planning a reunion night out of bowling. We were going to a different place than we had bowled at previously, so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to eat anything there.
While I looked forward to seeing the team together again, I was worried I’d be watching everyone else drink beer and eat pizza. But luckily, the place we were going, Chicago’s Diversey River Bowl, was big enough to have put its restaurant menu on its Web site, so I checked ahead of time to see what I would settle for, imagining a dull salad or maybe yet another chicken breast.A night at the bowling alley
So imagine my surprise to find a bison burger on the menu! Bison is much leaner than beef. The menu did have the expected chicken breast sandwich and some salads that didn’t sound all that dull, assuming I brought my own oil and vinegar instead of using the dressings suggested.
I gladly ordered the buffalo burger. It arrived with mayo which I scraped off, a reminder to be very specific when ordering anything. Other than that, I loved it. At eight ounces it was two ounces over my daily six-ounce red meat limit but I didn’t care in this case, it was too good of a surprise to pass up.
I woke up early this morning fighting a mild cold with a bit of an upset stomach. Still in all, I woke up glad to be alive. Six months ago today, I was being wheeled into a surgery to save my life. Doctors had discovered one of the arteries around my heart was 80 percent blocked, meaning blood was barely getting through.
An angioplasty took place, a procedure in which doctors used a small balloon to clear the blockage and then inserted a stent, a wire mesh tube, to keep my artery open. It’s fair to say that changed my life, giving me years I likely would not have otherwise had, hopefully.Me before my surgeryMe today, 29 pounds lighter
It also changed my food life more radically than anything else that has ever happened to me. My diet now bears little resemblance to what it had been. Gone are the daily chocolate candies, snack cakes and diet sodas that once were staples for me. Gone are burgers from McDonald’s, Wendy’s and elsewhere. My lunch almost every day now is a salad with oil and vinegar which I carry myself since most places don’t have it as an option. Dinners involve more vegetables and also more ground turkey, more fish and an occasionally very lean steak or 96 percent lean ground beef burger. White bread, rice and anything made with white flour are out.
The result? When I checked into a hospital Aug. 13, 2012, I weighed 219. This morning, six months later, I weigh 190, so I’ve lost 29 pounds in six months by eliminating everything I once loved from my diet.
I am constantly hungry these days, my appetite has not receded as predicted by some know-it-alls. And my taste for chocolate has not disappeared either. Indeed, yesterday I had the first real chocolate chip cookie I’ve eaten in months and it was amazingly good. This morning, to celebrate my anniversary, I ate the last two Drake’s Yodels I bought on eBay after parent company Hostess went into bankruptcy at the end of last year. And they tasted as wonderful as I remembered.
But like a diabetic who can no longer eat sugar, I can no longer eat my favorite foods if I want to continue living. So I am slowly finding substitute dishes, remaking old recipes with new healthier ingredients, and adapting. In six months, I have established a fairly decent home cooking routine that takes care of most dinners. Lunches out are salads, as I mentioned, boring but not harmful. And my wife and I are slowly assembling a new list of restaurants that have healthy dishes or that can accommodate me when I call ahead and say I want dishes with no salt, no fat and no sugar involved.
I’ve also thrown myself into a wonderful new avocation, acting. I’ve wanted to try acting since I was a kid but was too shy in those days. Luckily, my wife and I starting an acting class before my surgery and I fell in love with the whole process. Now, acting gives me the escape from everyday trials and troubles that food once did. As I write this, I’m preparing to be in my first student-made film and a play I wrote myself.
So if you’ve faced massive life changes like I have and had to leave your safety blanket of old foods behind, take some heart from my experiences. Rebuild and find new ways to enjoy the life you have now. I’m here to help. John
The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal 