If you have only tried eating artichokes dipping the leaves into something fatty, try them all on their own; I don’t think they need anything to make them taste fantastic.  All I do is put a little lemon juice on them before cooking so they don’t get too discolored.  I make a few at a time, so they’re ready whenever I am.

If you’ve never prepared an artichoke, they can be a little intimidating–when was the last time you ate a thistle?  But they aren’t hard; I found this video that shows how to trim them and get out the fuzzy choke.  How do you like your artichokes?

And what about the frog?  Can’t they survive being frozen?  Perhaps after the woman warmed it up it could just hop on out of there?

It’s really, REALLY hard to eat nutritious, vegetable-rich, filling  food if you’re relying on the freezer case or fast food.  I really relied on those Weight Watchers Smart Ones and Lean Cuisine meals when I was starting out, as they were easy, cheap, premeasured–heck, they even had the points on them!

But they aren’t very filling, not especially tasty, and they sure don’t have much in the way of vegetables.  As I made a conscious effort to include more vegetables, I looked for easy ways to include them.

But you say, “I don’t have time to cook”?  I say to you, as a full time working mother of twin boys, that if I can manage to cook so can you. If you have time to watch even one of those cooking shows a week, you have time to make at least one great dish that can nourish you and your family for days to come.

It does all start with planning.  Every Saturday, before I attend my Weight Watchers meeting, I decide what we’re going to eat for the week and make a list of all the ingredients I’ll need to make those dishes.

I find too much choice to be paralyzing… when presented with more than a few options, I throw up my hands, especially at the end of a busy day.  If you’re one of those, do your weekday self a favor and take choice out of it by deciding on the weekend what the menu will be.

Too hard, you say?  You don’t know what you’ll feel like three days from now?  I’m so busy during the week that I don’t have time to think about what I feel like eating.  But if variety is the spice of your life, plan for that, too!

Start small-maybe just one dish, using lots of prepped materials such as a roasted chicken or baked tofu and prepared lettuce.  Add some low-fat tomato sauce and whole wheat noodles, a laughing cow wedge or two, and you’ve got several meals on hand, all healthier than anything you’ll get at Jack in the Box.  Cook those noodles on Sunday, and warm them up during the week with the sauce or the cheese, throw on the chicken.

Add some steam in the bag broccoli and russet potatoes, and you have even more choices.  Potato with broccoli and cheese, broccoli and pasta with cheese… lots of options from just a few ingredients!

What are your healthy meal standbys?

Secret Pumpkin Stash

Pumpkin shortage?  Hah!  Not at my house!

I don’t know if the news is true.  I don’t want to know.  Sure. there may be enough pumpkin to get us through Thanksgiving, but what about Groundhog’s day?  Or Fourth of July?

This pumpkin fan is taking no chances.  Yes, I’m a pumpkin hoarder.  And at Thanksgiving sale prices, how could I resist stocking up?

I’m thinking I should buy more now, and then sell it at twice the price on the black pumpkin market that is inevitable  (And no, that doesn’t mean people will be selling black pumpkin.  Though I wonder what black pumpkin would taste like…).  My pumpkin is now in a secret location (we’ll call it the “marage”) so don’t think you can just break in and take it.

PLUS, now we finally have some earthquake supplies.  It would probably take The Big One to make the rest of my family eat pumpkin.

Which means, YOU GUESSED IT!  More for me!

Mwaa ha ha! World pumpkin domination!  All your pies are belong to us!

Candy Inbox

I didn’t know that craving candy corn was only the beginning.  My husband had mentioned that candy had invaded his office early this October, and I was dismissive of how hard it was to resist it.

Well, I dismiss no more.  The Halloween Candy Fairy has visited my office, and now I need to dodge it everywhere I turn.

The funny thing is, my resistance muscle used to be exercised much more regularly.  When I lost most of my 112 lbs, we had a LOT more junk food in the office.  For some reason, I was better able to not see it.

Why is it so much harder now?  Is it because I’m not so actively following the plan? (I don’t want to say dieting, because I hate the entire concept of dieting as a temporary change in your eating habits).

I’m working on not seeing it… I pass by it as little as possible, and I repeat to myself that I don’t really want it.  After all, I can really have it any time I want.  Just having it handy doesn’t really change its relative availability; it’s not like I’d ever have to go far to get any kind of candy I could want.  I see candy all the time; at the gas station, in line at the grocery store.

And it’s free!  But buying exactly what I want/when I want it is so incredibly cheap-what, a buck?-that it may as well be free.

Is it because it is “fun” sized?  Fun sized means it doesn’t count?  But who ever stopped at one fun sized anything?  Plus, once you’ve tasted the fun peanut butter cup, there’s a fun Snickers and fun Milky Way that feel lonely.  Shoot, if you really want fun sized, get the M&Ms in the 2 lb bag.  Especially the peanut butter ones.

No, just having one isn’t a solution, because there is no such thing as just one in my world.  I just have to keep going la la la in my head and not thinking about it.  Maybe I can even get to the point of not thinking about not thinking about it.

How about you?  How do you resist the candy demons?

The Horror!

My kids went this weekend to get their Halloween costumes.  Sam was looking for the scariest costume he could think of, which first was a pirate, then was Wolverine, before he settled on Optimus Prime from the Transformers.

Little did he know that the thing that strikes terror in my heart is candy corn.  And all the rest of the halloween candy out there.

I am dying, craving some of that sugary nastiness.  I saw it in a Sunday newspaper circular and now that’s all I can taste, all I can smell.

And it really is nastiness.  Look at those ingredients!:

INGREDIENTS: Sugar, Corn Syrup, Confectioner’s Glaze, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Salt, Artificial Colors, (FDC Yellow 6 Lake, Red #40, Red 40 Lake, Yellow #5, Yellow #6, Blue 1 Lake, Blue #1, Yellow 5 Lake), Egg Whites, Honey Glycerin, Mineral Oil, Carnauba Wax

So it’s sugar, then sugar, coated in a delectable sugar glaze.

Diabolical!

No wrappers, either, unless you count the 1 lb bag as a wrapper.  Once open, nothing to stop me from nibbling off each one’s little white tip, then the orange part, before gobbling down the yellow part at the end.

And it’s not over after Halloween.  No!  Then they have something called “harvest mix” that has other strange shapes that defy my disturbed eating method.  Some are all the same color, which is just WRONG.  Indian Corn is wrong, too, because the slight hint of chocolate ruins the whole sugar-sugar-nothing-but-sugar fung shui of regular candy corn.

But don’t get me wrong; I’ll eat it.  Oh, will I eat it.

I haven’t bought any yet, and fortunately the people in my office aren’t “nice” the way people with big bowls of candy are “nice.”

But I don’t know how long I’ll hold out.

How do I stay strong?  And buying just a small package won’t work.  That will turn into a big candy corn snowball (mmm… candy corn snowball!).

Skinny Cow, for example.  We always have a box of bars at our house, but apparently their Weight Watcher Point counts weren’t supposed to be used (meaning they didn’t pay WW) and weren’t calculated correctly.  I was in fear that the one point fudge bars were actually- gasp!-two points, but fortunately the WW site says they are still one point.

Many of the too good to be true foods were in the frozen dessert family, but there was also Sarah Lee with its  “whole wheat” bread.  I can just imagine the marketing folks designing that wrapper… “hey, it’s got whole wheat in it, and the white flour is also wheat so it’s still WHOLE wheat, right?”

I had heard about Pirate’s Booty being too good to be true and having to change its calorie count.  It makes me suspicious about all health claims on labels, especially about “low cal” foods.  And it should.  Food manufacturers have figured out there is big money in appealing to dieters trying to get their daily fix snack without going overboard, and they’ll use everything they can that’s legal–or not.

What are you eating that you think is too good to be true?

As I’ve lost weight, I’ve been incorporating more and more whole foods, and have been slowly reducing the sweets.  I think the bread and white rice that were also big favorites back in the day were triggering sugar cravings and binges. I eat very little food with added sugar nowadays.

So I’m not surprised that the average american eats the the equivalent of 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day. mostly from soft drinks and candy, adding an additional 355 calories to their diets.  Women should eat no more than 6 teaspoons, according to the American Heart Association, and men no more than 9.

If you eat them, removing soft drinks and candy bars as a way to reduce your sugar intake is a good place to start.  But how many of us know how much sugar is in the food we eat?

It isn’t easy to know.  Nutrition labels tell us a lot, but they don’t separate out the amount of natural sugars in food and the added sugars, and it’s those added sugars we need to watch out for.  And nutrition labels give you amounts in grams.  I can’t really envision a gram (damn that metric system), so it helps me to know that 5 grams=1 teaspoon.

Sure, we know that doughnut has lots of added sugar, but you’d be surprised where else it shows up.  Frozen foods, for example.  You have to read the ingredient list to know what’s really in there, and you may feel like you need a degree in chemistry to figure it out.

The Harvard School of Public Health recommends in this article that sugar not be in the first 3 ingredients (I would say 5, if at all), and provides this list of sneaky sugars:

• Agave nectar (yes, it’s a sugar!)
• Brown sugar
• Cane crystals
• Cane sugar
• Corn sweetener
• Corn syrup
• Crystalline fructose
• Dextrose
• Evaporated cane juice
• Fructose
• Fruit juice concentrates
• Glucose
• High-fructose corn syrup
• Honey
• Invert sugar
• Lactose
• Maltose
• Malt syrup
• Molasses
• Raw sugar
• Sucrose
• Sugar
• Syrup

Anything that ends in “ose” or “itol” is a sugar, too.

What other sugars have you found lurking in your food?

Bonus video: Stephen Colbert reacts to the news that we may be facing a sugar shortage.

I can’t say Mark Bitten’s salads include relish, as I haven’t reviewed all 101 of them.  But if you’re looking for a different salad, check out his recipes in his Minimalist column.  Phew, I’m getting hungry just looking at it.  Strangely enough, he doesn’t have my favorite salad listed (red leaf lettuce, sliced cherry tomatoes, dried cranberries, toasted almond slivers with Newman’s reduced calorie honey mustard) but if you’re looking for something to do with your carrots, craving a new vegan salad, or just plain bored you’re sure to find something there.

Buy smaller yams that are called “orange fleshed” for sweetest flavor; a farmer’s market is your best bet.  Wash well, and then cook them by putting them on a baking sheet with foil on top to reduce cleanup.  I typically cook them in the oven with whatever else I’m cooking, but if I’m doing them solo I put them in at 375 for around an hour.  The skin is crispy and edible, and the sugars inside caramelize, likely even leaking out.

I eat them plain, but a smidge of butter and salt make them even better.  Don’t let the long baking time discourage you; make extra, then refrigerate and eat later after a brief trip in the microwave.  I often take them as part of my lunch.  But don’t cook them in the microwave.  Although you can, and they are edible, they are nowhere near as yummy.

There are lots of other ways to eat them as well, of course, but some involve adding marshmallows and other sweeteners.  Unnecessary, as they are plenty sweet all on their own, and packed with Vitamin A, C and other good stuff.  But if you do have some good low calorie yam recipes, do pass them along!

Points: 3 (1 cup; a good sized yam)

Calories:  180

Fiber: 6.6 grams

Fat: 0.3 grams