The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal
Creating healthier food choices
Lose It! loves sending me badges, I’ve written about them before and seem to get lots of reader attention when I do. So here’s another one I recently received.
The Green Giant badge signifies that “Your appetite for veggies rivals the Green Giant himself,” Lose It! writes me. I’m assuming General Mills, which owns the Green Giant brand, has some involvement in this.
Lose It! is the app I’ve been using the past several years to keep track of my calories, salt, sugar and fat intake. I find it the most convenient of several I’ve tried because I don’t need to be online to record my daily food intake.
Its food database has expanded considerably over the years I’ve used it and it has a cool bar code scanning feature that allows me to enter new packaged food items that I buy which are not in its database.
It also provides reports on my eating that I find very useful for tracking patterns of consumption and weight loss. I’ll be writing more about those in a future post. Continue reading “Lose It! loves sending me badges”
I’ve written about creating a meal of lobster tails and grilled vegetables. Here’s a step-by-step illustrated guide:
Cut veggies into strips and coat with a salt-free marinade. I use either Mrs Dash or Mr Spice, each of which is available for purchase online (If you find them in a local store, let me know, I haven’t found them in any Chicago food outlet so far).
Cook them either outside on a grill or inside in a frying pan coated with canola oil spray.
One of my favorite side dishes when I was growing up was peas and onions, something my mother made quite regularly. I tried making it when I was first out of college but could never get it to taste like my mother’s (no surprise there I suppose).
Given my new diet, which is supposed to be heavy on usually boring-tasting vegetables, I decided to give it another shot. This time, rather than just boil peas and slices of onion, I first coated the bottom of the pan with a fat-free cooking spray product (PAM or a store brand version) with a small amount of olive oil and then fried my onion slices in that pan until they were translucent.
This heightened the flavor of the onions. I then tossed in frozen peas but didn’t add more water, assuming the moisture as the peas defrosted and heated would be enough and so keep the whole thing from getting soggy. I think it all worked out well.
They aren’t quite my mother’s yet, but I’m getting closer. I think adding some garlic next time will help as well. My wife isn’t an onion fan so she didn’t eat this dish but I feel like anything I can do to add some flavor depth to peas, which I consider the most bland of vegetables, has to help.
John