But now that we’re committed to the journey, I’m busy looking for easy, savory recipes, particularly for acceptable side dishes, that will keep us on the path and still satisfy. And I ran across one in my clip file that is quite simply delicious. It appeared in a column by Lee Svitak Dean titled Flavors of Fall picked up from McClatchy a couple of years ago in our local daily bugle and I clipped it and put it away to try and then completely forgot about it. I tried it the other night and it is, to quote Rachael Ray, YUM-O. As Ms. Dean says, they taste like green french fries! Here it is:

ROASTED GREEN BEANS
From Come One Come All, by Lee Svitak Dean
Serves 6

Why is it that the concept of roasted beans sounds so foreign? These are wonderful, inspired by those served at 20.21, Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. They remind me of green French fries. The beans can be roasted at whatever temperature your oven is already set, if you are cooking something else at the same time.

Ingredients:

1 1/4 pound. fresh green beans, ends trimmed, if desired
Olive oil
Coarse salt
Freshly cracked pepper (tricolor peppercorns look particularly nice)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees (see Note).

2. Toss in olive oil and place in baking dish. Roast in oven for 15 to 20 minutes or so, until the beans are cooked through. They will have shriveled slightly.

3. Remove from oven and sprinkle with coarse salt and pepper. Serve immediately.

Enjoy!

And best of all, no low carb pimping required for this recipe to work for us. It’s perfect just the way it is.

We’ve never traveled in the East before and it has been something we were looking forward to doing, particularly as it involves food and nutrition. One big surprise has been the food. I came expecting rice and noodles and vegetables and not much in the way of protein and boy was I wrong.

I would have to say that rice or noodles have been a side dish, not a main dish, at most of our meals here. And there has been plenty of fish, poultry, beef, and pork…often all four at one meal.

For instance, the day we were in Jiang Men, we were treated to lunch at a Dim Sum restaurant. I was concerned that it would be all rice and dumplings with little tidbits of meat here and there.

The meal began with steamed stuff clams and fish cakes. Followed by a couple of dumplings

Pork Dumplings

Shrimp Dumplings

And the food just kept on coming.

Most of the food appeared in plates to be shared, placed on the giant lazy Susan always found in the center of a Chinese dining table. But everybody got his or her own ‘main dish’ which at this lunch was steak.

Steak with a brown sauce and fries

You’ll notice that there are a few fries artfully arranged (practically into a Chinese character) on the plate. That’s how many came with the steak. There were eight or nine (both lucky numbers in China–eight for wealth and nine for long life) fries about an inch and a half long on the plate. That’s it. Contrast that with the mountain of fries you’d get with a ‘steak frite’ in the West.

Then a shared chicken dish that was just yummy…

Chicken with mushrooms and fresh cukes and tomatoes

and one of scallops and broccoli…

Scallops and Broccoli

…and a shared plate of corn and a purple sweet potato that is a locally grown specialty. I don’t eat much corn (though I love it) so I passed on the corn on the cob, but I tried a little of the purple sweet potato. Its consistency and taste is pretty much just like an orange one, but purple through and through, like a beet.

Corn and Purple Sweet Potatoes

And finally some little sweets, which I admit to having a taste of, just to try. They were actually quite hard to get into. The outer sticky rice ‘bread’ is soft and cold and really stretchy, a lot like the Ethiopian bread, called Injera, if you’ve ever had that. It was a struggle to get the thing open, but we weren’t alone; the locals struggled a bit, too. Inside was lightly sweet cream and bits of different kinds of fresh fruit, including watermelon.

Snowballs - Steamed Sticky Rice Sweets

Quite a feast…and for lunch, no less! Wait until Mike blogs about dinner that night. Sakes alive, what a meal!

Off to London this afternoon. Will be dining at The Fat Duck, so be prepared for a blow-by-blow on that experience.

Yes, it was the real thing, not a low-carb adaptation. It’s Christmas, after all, and only comes once a year! What better time for a little stumble into the honey tree, I ask you?

Then we painted them, as has been my family’s custom for many, many years, with slightly thinned, tinted buttercream frosting.

Yes, it was real, too.

Will, the grandangel, painted the base coat of frosting on every cookie but one (his brother did that one, under duress to quit watching Frosty the Snowman long enough to at least do one cookie to give to Santa). Granny (that would be moi) painted the details and a bit of ‘repair work’.

And we put them out on our DIL’s family Christmas plate and saved them for Christmas Eve.

I figure if you’re going to eat the real thing, the rules (for me at least) are to use top quality ingredients, to make a limited number of cookies, to wait until the evening’s celebration to start eating them, and to share them with a lot of people. That way you can’t do yourself too much damage.

We’ll be here for another few days, during which I expect to be kept equally busy, and then back home, where we’re planning the Eades’ New Year’s Eve dinner. I’ll post on the big dinner, complete with photos, January 1st…or 2nd.

In the meantime, have a safe, happy, healthy and pleasurable New Year!

I just got an email from our good friend, Jonny Bowden, with a link to his latest exchange in an ongoing ‘dialog’ with Big Soda about the inherent health detriment of pushing diet sodas on the public as if they were health food.

Some of you may be familiar with Jonny and may thus have seen it, but others may not have, so here it is for all.

His point, which I think the representative from Big Soda totally misses, is that humans through the millennia had no access to nor were we ever designed to consume large amounts of high intensity sweet on a regular basis and that doing so potentially carries consequences to long term health with it. Bombarding the taste buds throughout the day, day in and day out, year after year with ever increasing amounts of sweetness, whether from natural sources or from artificial sources, bumfuzzles (Now there’s a complex medical term for you!) the digestive and metabolic system.

There’s no doubt that digestive physiology is set into motion when an intensely sweet stimulus hits the sweet receptors on the anterior two thirds of the tongue. The body has to at least begin to prepare for what the taste buds tell it will be a whopping slug of carbohydrate to deal with and then the slug never comes. It would seem logical that there would be a consequence to that false signal and indeed there’s at least some research (as we wrote about in The Protein Power LifePlan) to suggest that to be the case,

whatever Big Soda thinks to the contrary.

Is the diet version of a given beverage better than an equivalent amount of HFCS-sweetened-flavored-carbonated beverage? Probably so. But, as with most things food related, quantity matters. A diet soda here and there probably isn’t going to hurt anyone, but a steady diet of 32-ounce mega cup after 32-ounce mega cup of it might be.

A better drink option, to our way of thinking, for rehabilitation of the besieged sweet receptors and metabolism (and I’m sure Jonny would agree) is a nice cup of tea, or a glass of slightly alkaline mineral water or even just plain, old, clean, filtered tap water.

Or a bottle of wine….

The show has been picked up to air for another year by network PBS HD and given a regular time slot beginning in January 2007. We’ll be on air cooking, canoodling, and commenting Monday through Friday at 5:30 pm and 2:30 am Eastern time. What we haven’t heard, yet, is whether the programming will go out as a single feed or dual feed (which makes a difference in time slot on the West Coast stations–i.e., will it feed across the country at once, showing at 4:30 pm and 1:30 am in Central time, 3:30 pm and 12:30 am in Mountain time, and be 2:30 pm and 11:30 pm in Pacific time or will it be refed to show on the west coast in the same time slots as Eastern time.) We’re working to find that out now and will let you know by blog when we do, but rest assured that the show will be back on next year in a stable time slot.

Also, we’ve just learned that CookwoRx also got picked up by the new Create TV Network, a public tv for cable channel, which by federal mandate must be offered on basic cable packages by every cable provider in the country beginning in 2007. Our Create TV time slots are also regular: four times a day on Wednesdays and Sundays at 1:30 am, 7:30 am, 1:30 pm, and 7:30 pm beginning December 3, 2006.

The Create TV deal is great news for us, personally, since the show isn’t currently carried by either of the cable providers where we live, so we, ourselves, haven’t seen most of the completed shows on tv.

We hope that now most of you will be able to get the series and will enjoy and profit from it. And if you do, call, write, or hop online to tell your cable provider or PBS affiliate station!

If you don’t like the show, just quietly change the channel! ;D

As every long time reader of this blog knows, when we were finally able to get the Protein Power website up and running again back last spring, one of our first official acts was to offer our entire remaining inventory of the original Protein Power Plan kits that sold on tv and a newer version of it called the Protein Power Pyramid kit (of which we only had a few left) together at a very deep discount in preparation to move our warehouse at the end of May.

Anyone interested in replacement Protein Power Plan kit materials, please read the following important announcement:

We shipped out all of the remaining old inventory of old and revised kits before the warehouse move; there are no more kits or any components of old kits left.

(However, all is not lost. Keep on reading to find out where you can get the information that was in them.)

If you had that original kit and have lost one or more of your phase booklets or your cookbook, take heart! Once the tv promotional campaign ended (and with it our association with the company who had marketed the kits on tv) we wove most of the booklet information into two books, published by John Wiley and Sons in 2003 and 2005. Phase I mealplans and virtually all the recipes are in The 30 Day Low Carb Diet Solution and the transition and maintenance information (plus a whole lot more) is in our book Staying Power: Maintaining Your Low Carb Weight Loss for Good. Both books are available through booksellers nationwide and through online book retailers, such as amazon.com. You can go directly to their descriptive pages on the Amazon website, if you’d like to learn a little more about them; simply go back to our website homepage, scroll down to the bottom, and click on the photo thumbnail of the book you’re interested in. The books displayed there rotate (since we’ve written a few) so if you don’t see the one you’re looking for, refresh the page a time or two and it should ultimately pop up. If it doesn’t, just click on any book there and it will instantly whisk you to amazon, where you can hop around a bit and find it.

Unfortunately those of you who have written requesting replacements of the audio tapes from the old kits are out of luck. We do have the masters (or at least we were told they were in the pile of information ultimately returned to us after the tv campaign ended) and perhaps at some future time, we’ll redub those onto tape or CD. If we do, you’ll hear about it right here.

The shelves aren’t fully stocked yet even with what we already have in inventory, but we’re working our way through that process and making good headway. Plus, we’re planning to add new products as we find ones we feel strongly about, so keep checking in.

Those of you–and you are many–who have written about our old (very tasty) protein powder, we’re looking into reformulating it and hope to offer it again before too long. We’ll keep you apprised of our progress on that front. If you have suggestions for interesting products you’d like to see offered, drop us a line and we’ll put them on our list for consideration.

Thanks for being patient with us during this process of reconstruction and renovation; we hope you continue to enjoy and profit from the site.

It’s hard to imagine that a full year later, recovery from the devastation Katrina (and Rita) wrought across the Gulf Coast is far from complete. In some of the hardest hit areas, it’s hardly begun. But when you consider the scale of the disaster–an area bigger than Great Britain demolished–it’s clear just how much work must be done to rebuild (and more importantly revitalize) the coastal communities.

Although we’re big proponents of the notion that one of the best things you can do for your health is to spend more time in your own kitchen, we also love to eat out; we relish the luxury of being served; we appreciate the change of venue. Still, more evenings than not, we prefer to eat in. This Tuesday, however, is one time that spending a little time out of your own kitchen can really be beneficial, particularly for others still in need. Choose wisely from what’s offered and it can be a healthy win-win for all.

If just by dining out August 29, we can do a little more to help and have a good time and a good meal to boot, why not do it?

Click here to find a Restaurants for Relief2 participating restaurant in your area.

One of our favorite ways to eat melon–aside from just sprinkling a slice with salt and eating it with our hands–is with proscuitto. I cannot imagine how many orders of proscuitto e melone Mike and I have put away when travelling in Italy, particularly in the north, where the proscuitto reigns supreme. Mamma mia that’s good eats.

We love most every imaginable sort of melon, from the everyday cantaloupe, watermelon, or honeydew to some of the slightly less common varieties, such as Cranshaw and Sharlyn.

If you’re unfamiliar with this variety, it looks a lot like a mutant cantaloupe, the skin a slightly darker shade of beige to almost green beneath a prominent surface netting, the flesh usually creamy pale green to pale ivory-gold. And the flavor is sweeter and muskier, sort of a cross between a cantaloupe and a honeydew. The slightly exotic sweetness works really well against the salty proscuitto, so it’s become a favorite of ours for this purpose.

I picked up a ready-to-eat Sharlyn at the market the other day that we enjoyed two days running, draped with proscuitto di Parma, as an appetizer before dinner one night, then for a light lunch the next day. Once these babies are ripe, they won’t hang around long, so you have to make haste when you’ve got one home.

Or at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Picking a good melon can sometimes be a challenge. You thump; you sniff; you weigh hand to hand. And still, sometimes, you reap the disappointment of slicing up what appears to be a cantaloupe and getting an orange-colored sliver of cardboard. A fool’s melon: looks like a melon; quacks like a melon; but it ain’t no melon.

That’s why a little brief in today’s LA Times Food section caught my eye: Know your melons, then pick a winner. Written by cookbook author, food critic, and veteran food editor Russ Parsons, I figured it would help demystify the melon pickery magic.

And it did.

According to Mr. Parsons, we need remember that melons come in two types: the netted-skin varieties (cantaloupe, Sharlyn, muskmelon, etc.) and the smooth skinned ones (honeydew, watermelon, etc). If you’re looking for ripeness, pick the netted ones by smell and look for raised ‘nets’ on the surface. Pick the sleek ones (which don’t smell, so don’t bother) by color and thump.

Once you’ve selected a winner, take it home, split it, seed it, slice it, salt it (just a little and grind on a little black pepper if you must) and serve it…with our without proscuitto.