Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, and in the words of Arlo Guthrie, we had “a Thansgivin’ dinner that couldn’t be beat.”  Along with all the traditional Thanksgiving fare at Casa Eades, we had dueling turkeys: one cooked the traditional way and one cooked sous vide.  And let me tell you, there was no comparison.  I’m not saying this just because we’ve got a sous vide cooker for sale, either.  I’ve never had turkey that tasted so good.  Because I’m not really a big fan of turkey, I eat turkey on Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving only.  I found our sous vide turkey to be so good, because it didn’t really taste like turkey.  At least not turkey cooked in the traditional way that I’m used to tasting.  It was like a different meat entirely.

MD has posted on how she cooked both turkeys on her blog and on the Sous Vide Supreme blog, giving precise recipes for both.  As you can see when you read the posts, cooking a turkey the traditional way is a major pain (both figuratively and literally).  It’s just not worth it when the taste and texture outcome is so much better using sous vide.  Especially since the sous vide method is so much easier and less time consuming. Vastly easier, in fact.

Lest you think this is another post cleverly designed to promote and sell the Sous Vide Supreme, let me disabuse you of that notion.  I’m going to show you how you can try the sous vide method at home without having to purchase a machine to see if it’s really for you.

Not long ago I wrote a post on how MD and I came up with the idea for what ultimately became the Sous Vide Supreme.  We wanted to try cooking sous vide, but there were no sous vide units available for the home cook, and we weren’t about to fork over $1500 for a commercial unit just to give the technique a try.  So, we cobbled together a Rube Goldberg kind of set up and tried it out.

I went back and pulled some of the photos I took of our contraption, which was made of a stock pot, a steaming basket turned upside down, and a candy thermometer.  And, the most important piece of equipment of all: constant attention.

The secret of cooking sous vide is the maintenance of a constant temperature over the cooking period.  Since most things are cooked sous vide at a significantly lower temperature than 212F/100C (the temp at which water boils), you can’t put the container directly on the stove even with the burner on its lowest setting.  The lowest setting is typically for simmering, which holds the temp right at the boiling point.  When we were trying to set up our first try, we experimented with several different ways to get the stock pot high enough up off the flame of our gas stove so that we could get the low temperatures we needed.  We found that the steaming basket (made to set inside a pan) turned upside down gave us the height we needed given the flame on our stove.

Sous vide cooking requires that the temperature be maintained precisely for long periods of time, sometimes up to 72 hours for, say, fall-off-the-bones beef ribs.  On the Sous Vide Supreme, you simply set the temp and walk away.  It’s not so easy with a homemade unit.  You’ve got to monitor it closely because temperature fluctuations of even a degree or two will make a difference in your outcome for many foods.  One of the ways you keep the temp where you want it is to use an important piece of equipment not pictured in the photo above: a pitcher of ice water.  You watch the temp carefully – you don’t have to stand there and watch it minute by minute – checking the candy thermometer every few minutes or so.  If the temp starts to drift up a little (the most common thing), you need to pour in a tiny bit of ice water to bring it down.

Since you’ve got to stay on top of it, it’s best that you limit your cooking in a homemade device to foods that don’t require a long time in the bath.  Which means you’ve got to stick with good-quality beef cuts such as rib eye, New York strips or tenderloin, chicken breasts, salmon, turkey breast, etc.  If you read MD’s post on cooking our Thanksgiving turkey, you’ll notice that she cooked the breast for 2.5 hours at 140F and the dark meat at 176F for eight hours.  If you’ve got a Sous Vide Supreme, you can stick the dark meat in, set it for 176F and get it out eight hours later.  If you’re cooking it using the homemade device, you’re going to be standing close by watching it for eight hours.  Since you probably don’t want to spend eight hours fiddling with it, I would avoid trying the dark meat of a turkey as your first outing in the homemade device.  Try the breast or, better yet, some salmon or even steak, lamb or pork chops.  You want to minimize the amount of time you have to remain vigilant in your temp watching.

Let me give you a couple of never-fail recipes so you can give it a try. And let me say that these were not the same recipes we used the first time we tried our rigged-up machine.  These are recipes that we’ve developed after a lot of bad experiences.  We suffered them so you don’t have to.

Chicken breast sous vide

The first thing you should try is chicken breast.  Why?  Because it’s easy and because the taste difference between a chicken breast cooked sous vide and one cooked any other way is so huge that you can really experience the virtue of cooking this way.

Take your chicken breasts (they can be skinless or with skins in place) and brine for for hours in an 8 percent brine.  You make an 8 percent brine by putting five tablespoons of salt in one quart of water.  Make your brine, put the breasts in, and put in the fridge for four hours.

Pull the breasts from the brine, rinse with fresh water and pat dry.

Put each breast into a food-grade plastic bag along with a big pat of butter.  (If you like it, you can add some cracked pepper or herbs to the bag at this stage)

Vacuum seal the bags with a Food Saver or one of the little hand vacuum pumps.  (You can even press all the air out with your fingers if you don’t have a pump of any kind, though you risk having your meat float and cook unevenly–and perhaps incompletely, which isn’t good with poultry–if any significant amount of air remains.)

Bring your sous vide machine to 140F and put the bags in.  Watch it like a hawk (assuming you’re using your homemade setup) to maintain that temp for about 1.5 hours.

Remove the bags, open and dump out the breasts.  They won’t look particularly appetizing, especially if they have been cooked with the skins on.  If the breasts are skinless, you can actually slice and eat just as they come out of the bag, and they’ll taste something like poached chicken, but infinitely better. But they are better yet if you sear them first to give them a little color and caramelized flavor.

To sear them, you need to put a stainless or cast iron skillet on the stove at the highest temperature you can get.  Gas or electric both work, just put the burner on its highest setting.

Leave the empty skillet on the hot burner for about ten minutes.

Add some clarified butter (ghee), which will sizzle and steam like crazy if the skillet is hot enough.

Put the breasts in the hot skillet and turn from side to side about every 30 seconds with tongs until you get a nice golden brown exterior.

Remove and eat.  You won’t be disappointed.

Steak sous vide

You can also try steak.  Here’s how we did it last night.

Get a nice cut of steak, a rib eye or porterhouse or something tender.  I wouldn’t use grass-fed beef for this experiment because you have to cook it too long to get it nice and tender.  If you use a regular grocery-store steak that isn’t too think – one inch, say – you can get by cooking for only 40 minutes to get it perfectly medium rare.

MD puts a sprinkling of sea salt on each side, a few turns of the pepper mill and a little garlic powder then puts each steak in a food-grade plastic bag and vacuum seals it.

Heat your water bath to 135F, put the bagged steaks in the bath, and watch carefully.

Pull the steaks out after 40 minutes and let them sit at room temperature for 5 or 10 minutes to drop their internal temperature just a bit.  Remove them from the bags and pat dry.  (The patting dry is actually an important part of the process.)

Do the deal with the skillet as described above for the chicken breasts.  Get it hot, add the clarified butter, then sear the steaks.

Sear them on each side no longer than about 20 seconds.  If you want, you can flip them around a bit from side to side.  You should even hit the edges of the steak with the hot skillet as well so that they are seared all around and the fat on the edges gets a nice color.

Serve immediately.

You can see from the photo on the right how the interior looks.  Perfectly medium rare from side to side with a tiny layer of caramelization on the surface.  Must be tasted to be believed.

Several of your fellow readers have used the sous vide method and posted on it.  You can read their posts here, here, here and here.

One of the nice (and sometimes aggravating) things about the sous vide method of cooking is its precision.  If you don’t like your steaks at 135F, try them at 130F or 140F.  Or even at 133F.  You can get as precise as you want.  The meat at each temperature will be a little different than when cooked a degree or two hotter or cooler.  It takes some diddling with and experimentation to find the temperature that works best for you.

Once you do, you can turn out steak after steak after steak or pork chop after pork chop perfectly cooked just as you like it.  The food will be more nutritious because nothing is lost in the cooking process, including the moisture, which is why the meat is so tender.

When we were in London a few weeks ago we met for an hour or so with Heston Blumenthal, who treated us to a four hour lunch at his famous restaurant, the Fat Duck. The meal was unlike anything we had ever had anywhere, and it shows why the Fat Duck has won the Best Restaurant in the World honors for a couple of years running.

I’ve intended to post on this fabulous meal, but haven’t yet because of the time it would take to describe everything.  I took photographs of every course, and if I included them all in one post, it would probably take a half an hour just to download it.

An article in the Telegraph, the UK’s most widely read newspaper, last week gave me an idea as to how to do the post on the meal.  I’ll divide it into multiple posts whenever something comes up that inspires a description of one of the courses.  Since all of the courses at the Fat Duck are of a theme, this won’t be too difficult.

The Telegraph article is about Heston’s new Alice and Wonderland menu.  We tried one of the entrees from this new menu while we were there, so that’s what I’ll post about this go round.

This particular entree, Mock Turtle Soup, was inspired by the Mad Hatter’s tea party and the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

In Victorian times turtle soup became the rage.  It was prepared from turtle meat imported from the Orient and was unaffordable by all but the very wealthy.  Less well-to-do households had to resort to an ersatz version made from the head, hooves, tail and other non-muscular parts of the calf in place of the turtle meat and called, appropriately enough, Mock Turtle Soup.

Lewis Carroll took advantage of this substitution in his book, creating a beast called the Mock Turtle.

Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, “Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?”

“No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”

“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from, ” said the Queen.

Heston Blumenthal used these lines for his jumping off point in developing his own version of Mock Turtle Soup, but he added another twist, still from the same book.  During the Mad Hatter’s tea party the March Hare dips the Hatter’s pocket watch into his tea.

The Hatter was the first to break the silence.  “What day of the month is it?” he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.

Alice considered a little, and then said “The fourth.”

“Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!” he added looking angrily at the March Hare.

“It was the best butter,” the March Hare meekly replied.

“Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,” the Hatter grumbled: “you shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.”

The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea…

The presentation of the entree begins when a server puts down a cup containing a sort of a tea bag shaped as a gold pocket watch.  Then a teapot filled with hot water was placed next to each of us.  As with all entrees at the Fat Duck, this one is accompanied by an explanation of how Heston was inspired by the Mad Hatter’s tea party to create this piece of the menu.

The gold fob watch is molded of a kind of gelatinized bouillon (composed of beef and mushroom stocks reduced into a syrup, leaf gelatine and 10-year-old Madeira) hand-wrapped with edible gold leaf.  When we poured the hot water into the cup and onto the watch, it dissolves into a delicious, savory consomme with flecks of the gold leaf swirling about.

Once the tea is made, the server brings a large white bowl with the makings of a caterpillar arranged on the bottom.  The striped body of the caterpillar is made of terrine of ox tongue cooked sous vide compressed with slices of Lardo.  The mock turtle egg is made of a puree of turnip and swede with little enoki mushrooms sticking out to represent antennae so that the egg doubles as the head of the caterpillar as well as to call up an image of the toadstool on which he sat, smoking his hookah.  Sprinkled about the terrine and the mock egg are small cubes of pickled cucumber, truffles, and turnip brunoise.

The server then invites the guest to pour the ‘tea’ into the bowl over the above ingredients to make the Mock Turtle Soup.  The entire entree then is a dazzling soup shot through with flakes of edible gold.

All that’s left now is to eat it, which we did with relish.  As you might imagine, it was delicious.  What you might not realize, however, is all the work that goes into this single entree.  Here is the recipe in full.  As one of the commenters wrote:

I think it’d be a lot less hassle for me to fly to London and go to his restaurant than to try to make this at home.

After looking over the recipe, I would tend to agree.

After our meeting at the factory we’re working with, the president of said factory treated us all to a feast at our restaurant.  As Chinese tradition dictates, such feasts are accompanied with many, many toasts.  The toast works this way:  the person making the toast picks out a specific person to toast, walks over to that person, raises his/her glass and gives the toast.  The translator translates.  The person receiving the toast answers back.  The translator translates back.  Then both toaster and toastee down drinks in one swallow.  After this, the glasses are immediately refilled by one of the servers.

In our case, the liquor used for toasting purposes was either red wine or bai jiu, a Chinese white wine that is actually more of a distilled liquor.  The Chinese love bai jiu, which has a distinctive flavor.  It’s about 50 percent alcohol and has a front end taste that is kind of like the essence of an infusion of dirty socks in some sort of floral alcohol and a back end like lighter fluid.  It’s an acquired taste, and one that I had sort of acquired after a zillion toasts.

As the meal progressed, the toasting evolved into each toast requiring the downing of both a glass of red wine and a glass of bai jiu.  Thank God we ran out of red wine and baiu jiu before I ran out of consciousness.  The photo above shows me just before downing a glass of each after a toast from the head of operations at the factory.

The meal we had was spectacular. And pretty low-carb.  I kept a photo log of it, which I will lay out below. (We had another good meal earlier in the day that MD posted about moments ago.)

We started with shark fin soup, which I didn’t take a picture of because…I don’t have a good reason.  I just didn’t.  I guess I didn’t think about taking photos until after the shark fin soup.  From there we moved on to a giant prawn and an abalone.  Both were delicious, especially the abalone.  I don’t know what kind of sauce it was cooked in, but it was savory and out of this world.

Then came a weird dish that was served with plastic gloves.  It was a baby dove with head included.  You put the gloves on and tore the little bird to pieces and gnawed the bones.  And, yes, we ate the head.  We didn’t just throw it back and chomp it; we nibbled off the small amount of meat on it .  I watched the Chinese so I could follow suit, and that’s what they all did.  After picking the bones clean, we all removed our gloves and awaited the next course.

What came then was some sort of seafood salad.  And remember, all this food was interspersed by dozens of toasts.

After the seafood salad came the main course, which was a piece of succulent steak that was extremely tender.  It was served with a little pile of fried garlic chips and a stalk of broccoli.

Following the steak, we had a dish of some kind of green vegetable.  I never could figure out what exactly it was, but it was very tasty.  I asked the woman sitting next to me what it was, but she didn’t know the English word for it.  All she could tell me was that it was grown in the area where we were.

Then came a tiny bowl of fried rice.  You can see the size of the bowl by comparing it to the spoon next to it and the little glass the bai jiu is served in.

The we had some sweets, which I admit to eating.  Everyone of them.  By that time, after all the wine and bai jiu, I would have eaten anything.

And finally we were served a small plate of fruit for the end of the meal.

By that time all the wine and bai jiu were gone, thank God.  I thought we had made it through the worst of it, but the factory president, who was the founder of this feast, had brought two kegs of German beer, so nothing would do but that we all traipsed upstairs to a small room and drank glass after glass of mildly chilled beer and ate dried squid, squid jerky, I guess you could call it.  The beer and squid were served along with, believe it or not, french fries.  I ate no fries, but did eat a fair amount of the squid jerky, which was pretty tasteless but did give the jaws a good workout.

It was a memorable evening, and I can even remember all of it.  I even woke up the next morning feeling fine.

I’m rushing to get everything together to catch our flight to London.  I’ll post later on my thoughts on the China and Hong Kong experience. I do want to make one observation, though.  Earlier in the day that this feast took place, we toured the factory.  There were probably at least 400 people working there of all ages.  I didn’t see a single obese person – all were thin.  You may think that they weren’t obese because they were working hard.  You would be wrong.  Almost all of them had fairly sedentary jobs.  They were sitting doing very little strenuous labor.  Mainly just screwing one component on to another as they came down a line.

Your faithful correspondent slaving away

As those who follow me on Twitter know, MD and I made it safely to Hong Kong.  We have in enormously busy schedule while we’re here, so I’ll put up smaller posts as we go along interspersed with some larger ones as I have time.  As you can see from the above photo, I’m hard at it, ensconced in our hotel room overlooking the harbor with the Hong Kong skyline in the background.  Below is another photo from our hotel room window.  Our hotel (for one night) is on Kowloon across from Hong Kong Island, which is the skyline you see.  Actually, it’s only a small part of the skyline.  Hong Kong is New York on steroids.  An amazing place.

We flew over on Cathay Pacific business class, which, if you’ve got to make a 15 hour flight, is the only way to go.  Great seats that make into beds, great service and spectacular food.  The only wierd thing about the whole experience is the realization of how seriously the Chinese and the Honk Kong-ese take the swine flu.  All the cabin attendants on the plane wore masks.  We had to fill out a health declaration to enter Hong Kong and another when we got to our hotel.  I would estimate that about a fifth of the people walking around are wearing masks.

But, masked or not, the folks at Cathay Pacific put out some good food.  Good low-carb food, at that.  Below is a photo of my breakfast on the plane.  Lightly scrambled eggs with salmon, terrific wobbly bacon, sausage, broiled tomato and some hash browns (that went uneaten).

Cathay Pacific breakfast

Last night we ate in a restaurant not too far from our hotel.  We asked our guide (the guy we’re working with who is a Brit, but lives here about half the time) for a traditional restaurant, not a tourist restaurant.  The restaurant he chose was capacious; I would bet there were at least 200 people dining there.  And we were the only non-Asians.

We sat at a large round table with a lazy susan in the middle.  The waiters kept bringing food and putting on the lazy susan; we rotated the dishes and served ourselves from them with chopsticks.  Our host apologized because he said the restaurant wouldn’t be serving rice like we were used to in Chinese restaurants in the US.  He said the notion that people ate a lot of rice over here is not true – at least not in Hong Kong and the parts of China to which he travels often. (Our host doesn’t know what MD and I do – we are here on a totally different matter that has nothing directly to do with low-carbing.)

We had numerous dishes, all of which were some kind of meat.  The favorite of the table was crispy beef, which is shown below.  Absolutely delicious.

We ate mountains of various kinds of meat and fish and ended up with a giant plate of Peking duck, which we were almost (but not quite) too full  to eat.  During this entire feast, the servers brought only one vegetable dish to the table.  It’s pictured at the right.  Sauteed, not steamed, broccoli. Delicious. Not a single grain of rice did we see.  A few noodles, but not even many of them.  And no bread. And, sadly, no napkins.  There was a box of what we would call facial tissues on the table that we used as napkins.  But that was it. Oh, in looking at the picture above of the crispy beef, I noticed one other vegetable dish that I had forgotten about because I hadn’t photographed it specifically.  It is the Chinese cole slaw to the upper right of the beef.  All cabbage that is tangy, crisp, spicy and delicious.  They must have brought us a dozen of these little dishes of it.

I looked around at as many of the other 200 patrons as I could see from our table and as we walked in and out.  All were eating the same things we were.  Meat, meat, meat. Of the 200 patrons and dozens of servers I saw, there wasn’t a single obese person.  My observation of Hong Kong as a whole is that there aren’t really any obese people here, at least by US standards.  There is some chubby, but not much obese.  At least not that I’ve seen.

We are heading via ferry and car to mainland China today to go to an industrial city with a population of 60 million.  You read that correctly.  60 million.  The factory we are working with is there, and I’m keen to see it.  We will stay there tonight, then be back to Hong Kong tomorrow.

MD loves to sing and does so every chance she gets.  Our trip to Mexico has really given her something to sing about.  She is joyous because even here it’s possible to stay on a low-carb diet.   Not only possible, but pretty easy.  And a good low-carb diet at that.

Since everyone seems to enjoy photos of good low-carb food, I decided to put up our day’s worth of eating today so that everyone can see the kinds of low-carb foods available in Mexico for not much money.

The only real problem we encountered was that at almost every restaurant we were presented with chips, salsa and guacamole when we sat down.  It’s tough not to dip a few chips and eat them, especially since they’re the greasy tortilla strips cooked in lard.  When we first got here, we ate a few just to quench our lust for them.  But then were able to simply let them sit there.

Breakfast this morning was a great omelet that had everything in it.  Chorizo, ham, green peppers, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes – the works.  It came with some potatoes and a little tortilla cup of refried beans.  I avoided the potatoes and left the beans alone.  It wasn’t a great sacrifice because I’ve never been a big fan of refried beans.  Besides, the omelet was pretty huge and totally filled me up.  And it was a good thing I tested the red sauce before I slathered it on the omelet, which was my first impules.  It was muy caliente.  At least as hot as Tabasco.  So I used only a little.

At lunch we had a real treat.  We started with a bowl of gazpacho.  It was my first time to have gazpacho in Mexico, and I was absolutely delighted to discover they do it here in the Andalusian way.  I love my gazpacho chunky instead of non-chunky.  In the US you never know how you’re going to get it, but you do know it’s going to come all in one bowl already put together. I always hope it’s going to be the chunky variety.

A few years back MD and I were just starting off a trip through Spain with a visit to Seville.  We stopped in a little restaurant for lunch, and I noticed gazpacho on the menu.  I ordered a bowl, hoping against hope that it would be the chunky variety.  When the waiter came bearing the soup and sat it before me, I was muy disappointed because there wasn’t a chunk in sight.  In fact, it looked kind of like the Campbell’s cream of tomato soup I had grown up on as a kid.  Then came the next waiter carrying a cloverleaf kind of a serving dish with each of the little leaves filled with chopped up stuff.  In one there were finely chopped tomatoes, in another, chopped cucumbers.  Another was filled with chopped onions, and the last was filled with chopped green peppers.  The waiter held the serving piece before me, and I ladled out as much of each of these as required to make my gazpacho as chunky as I wanted it.  Then the waited put a little dollop of sour cream right on top.  I took a bite and thought I had died and gone to heaven.  The soup was piquant, but its acidity was set off nicely with all the chunks of fresh vegetables.  For the rest of the trip, we went to only restaurants that had gazpacho on their menus.  I couldn’t get enough.

When we got home, I raced to the bookstore to get a cookbook with a recipe for Andalusian gazpacho.  I found a couple, noticed that the recipes both looked about the same, bought the best looking one, and brought it home.  I badgered MD until she finally made the stuff.  I, myself, finely chopped all the stuff to go in the base.  When it was all ready, I filled my bowl with the soup, spooned a bunch of the chopped stuff in, and took a spoonful.  It sucked.  It didn’t compare to the Spanish variety.

We tried a few more iterations of the recipe (and tried some others we had found in different Spanish cookbooks), all of which didn’t come close to matching up.

We had a chef friend who was a culinary genius and who had grown up in southern Spain.  We told him about our misadventure with the gazpacho making and asked him if he had a recipe for Andalusian gazpacho.  He more or less gave us a slight variation of the same recipe we had been trying without success.  We told him that we had tried the recipe and it didn’t match up to what we had all over southern Spain.

After thinking for a minute, he said, “Ah, I know what the problem is.”

He told us that tomatoes grown in Spain tasted much different than tomatoes grown in the US.  Spanish tomatoes, due to the different soil they’re grown in, have a different level of acidity and a different taste.  He asked us to let him fiddle with it for a while to see if he could come up with a way to add some ingredients to the mix to make the US tomato base taste like the Spanish one.

In a week or so he sent us a new recipe.  It wasn’t simple.  MD went to work on it and cranked out some gazpacho that was as good as the Spanish version.  She makes it for special occasions now (or when I whine enough for it), and it never fails to be a huge hit.  My contribution is to always chop the stuff because I don’t think she ever chops it fine enough when she does it.  I got the job with the admonition, “If you don’t like the way I do it, do it yourself.”  And I have ever since.

The gazpacho served in the restaurant in Mexico was Andalusian style, and was good.  But it wasn’t as good as the Spanish version or as MD’s version.

Here is how it comes to the table.  It came with only three chopped vegetables instead of the four I’m used to, so that was a strike against it.

Here is what it looks like all loaded up.  Plenty chunky for me.

After the gazpacho came the main course for lunch: ceviche made with octopus, shrimp and mahi mahi.  It was fresh and stunningly delicious.  I could have eaten three more bowls, but I didn’t.  I can never get enough good ceviche, and this one was outstanding.

For dinner we started with salmon carpaccio.  I didn’t really know how it was going to be when I ordered, but it ended up being superb.  The tiny slice of toasted bread in the middle of it is a slice of bagel that is probably one eighth of a bagel.  It contained I would guess about 4 grams of carb, and I ate every one of them.  This terrific carpaccio cost about $8.  It would have cost at least twice that in the US.

The next item I chose was called a Two Oceans Broth, and was made of clams and mussels.  Since it was called a broth, I assumed it would be a clear soup.  I was disappointed when it came, and I realized it was a cream-based soup – both sides of it.  I don’t have anything against cream-based soups – I’m just not crazy about them.  It was nice to behold and great tasting, but I didn’t eat all that much of it.  I fished out the clams and mussels and ate them, but ate little of the soup.

The final course was a pistachio crusted tuna with mashed potatoes and vegetables.  I told them to hold the papas and give me some extra legumbres, which they did.  It was as good as it looks.

You will notice a couple of dinner rolls in the back on the left side. And you should also notice that they are untouched and remained that way for the entire meal.  We had no dessert and no coffee.  Just some agua minerale con gas (sparkling water) and a little wine.

The wine was a Mexican sauvignon blanc made in Baja California.  I was a little hesitant to order it because I couldn’t imagine a Mexican wine being much good.  I was pleasantly surprised as this one was quite delicious.  We each had about a glass and a half.  I had the waiter leave the empty bottle so I could photograph it for this blog and to remember what it was so that I could try to get some back in the states.  It was that good.  Kind of piquant and crisp, just like I like a sauvignon blanc to be.

So there you have it.  Low-carb Mexican style.  And for not much dinero.  The Two Oceans Broth cost about $8.50, which is less than a comparable bisque would cost at home.  The tuna set me back about $15, which is far less than such an entre would be anywhere in the US.  The wine was less than $4 per glass.

As you can see, there is no reason to avoid traveling to Mexico because you’re worried about your diet.  You can eat low-carb here for less probably than anywhere in North America.  Go for it.

Note: For those of you who have comments languishing in comment purgatory, don’t despair.  I’ll get to them soon.  I have a long flight and a long wait in the airport, so I can get to them then.  Assuming, of course, that wifi is available.  But if not, I have some time over the next day or so.  Sorry for the delay.

MD came through tonight with my all-time favorite dessert, which you can see in the above picture.  I would rather have this mixture of pomegranate seeds and blackberries than just about anything else.  Not only is it remarkably tasty, it is chock full of all kinds of phytonutrients and antioxidants.  And it tastes unbelievably good. I lust over very few desserts, but I truly do lust for this one.

MD’s secret is to put the seeds and the blackberries in the bowl, then douse the whole thing with Torani Sugar Free Black Cherry Syrup.  It makes for an unbelievable taste combination, yet few calories, and a ton of nutritional density.  When I ran the recipe through the USDA nutritional calculator, it comes out to contain about 12 grams of effective carb and around 100 kcal.  I’ll guarantee you that you won’t find a better, tastier, more nutritious use for 12 carbs anywhere else.

And it’s not all that expensive.  We got the whole thing at Costco.  They were selling large clamshells of huge blackberries for $4.99 each.  And package pomegranate arils for $6.99, which is practically a give-away price for these.  The twelve bucks we spent for these will give us about 8 desserts, which calculates out to about a dollar and a half for a dessert (maybe $1.75 if you include the Torani syrup) that is incomparable and would cost at least $6-$10 in a restaurant.

If you want to really soup this recipe up and make it even more elegant, you can add a little bit of a fortified red wine along with the Torani sugar free syrup.  And serve in in a nicer dish than our everyday china.

I encourage you to try it.  And let me know what you think.

Squeeze In, Truckee, California

If you ever make it up Lake Tahoe way, make sure to have breakfast at the Squeeze In, a little restaurant in Truckee, California.  MD and I run over to Truckee at least once a week for our Squeeze In hit, and this week was no exception.  After voting on empty stomachs we drove to Truckee, an old railroad town about 13 miles from our house and a stone’s throw from where the Donner party holed up for the winter of 1846/47 and ate one another.

The Squeeze In, as you can see from the photo above, is a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant ‘squeezed in’ between a number of other businesses on Truckee’s main drag.  It doesn’t have many tables, and there is often a wait, but the breakfasts are out of this world.  Especially the omelets, which are world class. And huge.  MD and I have our favorites, but yesterday we decided – in honor of the Donners, perhaps – to be adventurous.  We each selected an omelet that we had never had, and were rewarded for our culinary courage.  And selecting omelets is no easy task at the Squeeze In because there are at least 80 of them, and all of them are good.  (If you go to their website you can take a look at the menu, which is old.  They have at least double the number of omelets now that they did when this menu was put up.  In fact, the omelets that we had aren’t even on their menu from the website.  In case you’re wondering, MD usually has the Racy Tracey and I have the Dierdoni.)

Along with outstanding omelets, the Squeeze In makes the best mimosas we’ve ever had.  They start with glasses kept in the freezer, ice cold champagne and – best of all – very little orange juice.  Just enough to provide a little flavor and a slight amount of color.  After our heavy day of voting, we each needed two.  Here is what they look like. This one looks more orangy in the photo than it really is.  They are almost pure champagne.

For my omelet selection, I picked the Juanderful, which was stuffed with bacon, artichoke hearts, zucchini and sour cream.  I substituted fruit for potatoes.  The other stuff you see is a tomato pesto and a mushroom sauce in the little cups and salsa in the large cup.  The bread came with it – I left it uneaten.

The Juanderful omelet

Just so you can see the way these things are made, here is a photo of my omelet half eaten.  You can see that it was filled with large chunks of zucchini, artichoke heart halves and substantial pieces of bacon.  A real low-carber’s treat.

MD ordered the Straight Eddie, which was filled with bacon, sausage and mushrooms.  She substituted the fruit for potatoes (we usually substitute tomato slices, but not at this time of the year) and left her bread uneaten.  She left half of her omelet uneaten as well.  She took it home in a box and ate it later.

As we ate, the snow came down.  Here you can see the view from our table through the door outside.  The black car you see (Volcano black, to be precise) is our venerable 1998 Audi A6 that will drive through anything.  When we came up a few days earlier, it was snowing like crazy as we climbed the grade up I-80.  We came upon five different chain stations (places where they make you put on chains before they will let you continue on).  There were cars and trucks stacked along the side of the freeway with their drivers mucking around in the freezing cold putting on chains. But when the officials would come out of the little huts, they would see our Audi and wave us through.  It’s been the single best car we’ve ever had in our entire married career.

Double cut pork chop from Trump room service (click to enlarge)

MD and I had to come to Las Vegas – a place we both hate – for a conference.  We looked around for the best deal we could get on a hotel, and we found it at the Trump.  We went ahead and booked, figuring that it was going to be just like all the other hotels in Las Vegas.

We were wrong.

After just one night it has become our favorite Las Vegas hotel.  We can both heartily recommend the Trump International Hotel if you have to stay in Vegas and are looking for something non-Vegas-y.

Why?  Many reasons.

First, unlike all the other large hotels in this town, there is no casino on the ground floor.  In fact, there is no casino at all.  When you come into the hotel, you don’t have to walk through acres of slot machines ding ding dinging.  It’s like a regular hotel lobby – nice and quiet and clean.

Second, it is a totally non-smoking establishment.  You don’t get to your room smelling like smoke after having had to walk through a phalanx of smokers playing slot machines on the ground floor.

Third, the rooms are terrific.  The clerk asked us when we checked in if we wanted to upgrade to a suite for an extra $150 per night.  We declined because we weren’t planning on spending a lot of time in the room.  When we got to the room, it was of suite-like proportions.  A huge bath, a kitchenette, and a monster-sized room.  I can’t imagine what the actual suites would be like.

Fourth, the staff is incredibly friendly.  In most of the Vegas hotels we’ve stayed in, the staff seems really jaded.  Here they have been exceptionally friendly and helpful.

Fifth, the room service food is great.  And doesn’t cost a kings ransom as does room service food in just about every hotel in which we’ve ever stayed.  The giant – and I mean giant; it’s hard to tell how huge it was from the photo and from the fact that I had eaten half of it before it occurred to me to take the picture – double cut pork chop shown at the top of this post cost $19.00.  The serving of steamed asparagus – also half eaten – cost a whopping 5 bucks.  It was all cooked exactly as I like it instead of how room service food is typically cooked.  We normally don’t use room service because it’s so outrageously expensive, but when we saw the prices on the menu, we couldn’t believe it, and so gave it a whirl.  And were very pleasantly surprised.

All in all, the Trump Hotel would be a great hotel anywhere, but in Las Vegas it is a real gem.  And well located. It’s right in the middle of everything.

As always, I have no financial affiliation with any Trump enterprise and have not been paid to endorse or recommend.