Lamb, and Rant
I've been working through a database of recipes posted to this foodie group I belong to. I've run across some posts of mine I've completely forgotten about. I liked this one. It's dated 2004-02-21. It has a recipe for lamb in it.
This is gonna be really incoherent, because I'm half asleep. But the thing that strikes me about low-carb "bake mix" at all is its cheating-ness, if you will, and it's a thing I've run into in the context of other diets where the object was to cut something out of the diet. Whatever the cut-out something is, there's an effort to mimic it, as though it weren't possible for a person to stay dedicated about a diet without it. There's always the assumption that the dieter is going to crave whatever the forbidden thing is. A long LONG time ago when I was on Nutri-System, there were always these hideous dessert-y things, and all the snacks were sweet. I tend to shy away from sugary snacks as a matter of course, and I positively HATE the taste of aspartame, and that damn diet had no savory snacks at all. None. They had no clue about my kinds of cravings at all.
And the stuff made for vegetarians that's made to look and taste like meat -- I just don't grok this. If you're gonna be a vegetarian then why on earth not go the Japanese route of making your vegetables and tofu and what have you as appealing IN THEMSELVES as possible, rather than trying to disguise them as what they aren't?
And for the low-carb people, why is Atkins branding pseudo-bread and pseudo-pasta at all? What in seven hells is wrong with dishing up something like this thing I've made for someone Atkins-ing (and admirably getting thinner, mirabile visu):
2 T x-virg olive oil
1/4 c butter
2 lb lamb, cubed
1 chopped onion
1 16oz can whole peeled tomatos with basil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 c dry white wine
bay leaf
juice of 1/2 lemon
salt & pepper to taste
Heat the olive oil and butter in a large pot, brown the lamb in it. Remove the lamb cubes with a slotted spoon and lightly brown the onions in their place. Put the lamb back in, add the remainder of the ingredients (squeeze each tomato into the pot with your hand, then pour the can juice in after), and simmer the whole thing over low heat, covered, until the lamb is tender, call it 1.5 or 2 hrs.
See, CELEBRATE the ingredients you're allowed to have, rather than slinking off to some pale imitation of an ingredient you're not allowed, that's all I'm trying to say.
It's not that I'm trying to be unsympathetic toward dieters. I was one once, and the thing that was wrong about every diet I ever went on was that none of them taught me how to change my eating habits. The thing that made the difference for me was getting sick, spending a week in bed sweating and hallucinating with fever (and being kindly fed broth my my wife), and then coming out the other end of it physically incapable of eating the volume of food I used to. So basically nowadays I'm 190, I eat what I damnwell please, but about half or a third as much as when I weighed 225. And I don't recommend my weight loss method to my friends. To my enemies, maybe. ;)
Anyway, enough ranting. Prolly shouldn't have opened my mouth in the first place.
Flames are for cooking.
Oh yeah: there're a ton of my recipes in that database. Looks like I'm the #2 poster of recipes, after Martin. ;)
This is gonna be really incoherent, because I'm half asleep. But the thing that strikes me about low-carb "bake mix" at all is its cheating-ness, if you will, and it's a thing I've run into in the context of other diets where the object was to cut something out of the diet. Whatever the cut-out something is, there's an effort to mimic it, as though it weren't possible for a person to stay dedicated about a diet without it. There's always the assumption that the dieter is going to crave whatever the forbidden thing is. A long LONG time ago when I was on Nutri-System, there were always these hideous dessert-y things, and all the snacks were sweet. I tend to shy away from sugary snacks as a matter of course, and I positively HATE the taste of aspartame, and that damn diet had no savory snacks at all. None. They had no clue about my kinds of cravings at all.
And the stuff made for vegetarians that's made to look and taste like meat -- I just don't grok this. If you're gonna be a vegetarian then why on earth not go the Japanese route of making your vegetables and tofu and what have you as appealing IN THEMSELVES as possible, rather than trying to disguise them as what they aren't?
And for the low-carb people, why is Atkins branding pseudo-bread and pseudo-pasta at all? What in seven hells is wrong with dishing up something like this thing I've made for someone Atkins-ing (and admirably getting thinner, mirabile visu):
2 T x-virg olive oil
1/4 c butter
2 lb lamb, cubed
1 chopped onion
1 16oz can whole peeled tomatos with basil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 c dry white wine
bay leaf
juice of 1/2 lemon
salt & pepper to taste
Heat the olive oil and butter in a large pot, brown the lamb in it. Remove the lamb cubes with a slotted spoon and lightly brown the onions in their place. Put the lamb back in, add the remainder of the ingredients (squeeze each tomato into the pot with your hand, then pour the can juice in after), and simmer the whole thing over low heat, covered, until the lamb is tender, call it 1.5 or 2 hrs.
See, CELEBRATE the ingredients you're allowed to have, rather than slinking off to some pale imitation of an ingredient you're not allowed, that's all I'm trying to say.
It's not that I'm trying to be unsympathetic toward dieters. I was one once, and the thing that was wrong about every diet I ever went on was that none of them taught me how to change my eating habits. The thing that made the difference for me was getting sick, spending a week in bed sweating and hallucinating with fever (and being kindly fed broth my my wife), and then coming out the other end of it physically incapable of eating the volume of food I used to. So basically nowadays I'm 190, I eat what I damnwell please, but about half or a third as much as when I weighed 225. And I don't recommend my weight loss method to my friends. To my enemies, maybe. ;)
Anyway, enough ranting. Prolly shouldn't have opened my mouth in the first place.
Flames are for cooking.
Oh yeah: there're a ton of my recipes in that database. Looks like I'm the #2 poster of recipes, after Martin. ;)