The Fruitlessness of Expert Ideas for Weight Loss

Recently, I read about a study that indicated that repetitive eating can lead to weight loss (How Repetitive Foods Can Mean Weight Loss).

What a total crock.

First of all, macaroni and cheese? Really? It doesn't even matter if it was Kraft Mac 'n Cheese or someone's deliciously crusty homemade version, I would be bored after the second helping in 2 days. I would probably be more bored with the Kraft version, but is there a food in the world that is less interesting than macaroni and cheese?

According to the article in the link, people have a threshold for tolerance of the same thing over and over again, be it a popular song getting too much radio airplay, a shitcom episode rerun too many times, or food, and the article claims that " [i]t’s not even necessary that the repetitive food be boring: you’ll habituate to pizza almost as easily as you do to boiled chicken."

I know I complain that, cooking for just myself, I end up having to eat the same thing for 2 or more days in a row. However, this study claims that people who had the mac and cheese every day got tired of it and decreased their portions, while the people who had it only once a week consumed more of it over time. I'm sure the full study was written up in the journal this article mentioned, but in the article there were a few salient points that never got mentioned, such as what were these bitches eating at home? What time of the day did they report to the study site? And the most significant question, in my opinion: When they were growing up, were they often told, '"This is not a restaurant," and/or, "if you're hungry, you'll eat what I cooked"?

Because those things matter.

You Can't Stuff Turkey Sausage

As I blogged earlier, I purchased a package of Jimmy Dean turkey sausage patties and found them wanting - as in wanting some flavor. The package included 8 patties, and I'd only used 2 in my watery sausage-egg-and-cheese fritatta, so here I was, left with 6 patties.

You know what? The only way to make awful food delicious is to make it fattening.

Hello, biscuits and sausage gravy!

It had been a long time since I'd had biscuits and gravy, mainly because there really isn't a way to make it other than as a batch of biscuits and gravy. I don't know if I typed it here or just in an email to my sister, but in the last month or so, I attempted to make biscuits with Bisquik and failed miserably; the batter/dough just stuck to everything, no matter how much more of the floury mix I tried to throw on it. I decided thereafter to stick to the canned bitches. But I'm really new to this grocery shopping thing (not really, but yes I am inexperienced at many foods that aren't microwaveable, fryable, or boilable). My local Meijer recently had Pillsbury buttermilk canned biscuits on sale, for the low-low price of 2 cans for $2.69, and since the generic cans were $2.39 each, I thought this was a great deal.

For some reason, I thought these things would be like canned soup, with an expiration date a year or two down the road. Nooooo. I noticed, after getting home, of course, that these cans are stamped "USE BEFORE 02JUN12." I really, honestly, wondered if I could freeze them, and no, I would never consider throwing a can in the freezer, because I'm sure it would explode. I'll have to ask my sister what she thinks (although she would probably tell me to just make fresh, since she CAN make them from scratch).

In the meantime, I had to prepare at least one of the cans in its entirety. I followed the instructions, tearing off the entire label (but preserving the heating instructions so I wouldn't have to bother pulling the other can out of the fridge), and pressing the handle of a spoon against a seam. After trying several spots, it finally popped. These were pretty big biscuits. For some reason I thought they'd be much smaller. Anyhow, into the oven.

So I put 4 sausage patties in a skillet. Honestly, these things produce no grease whatsoever. None. I vaguely wondered if they had been treated with some of that RainX shit, that is supposed to repel water from your car windshield. What to do, what to do? Paula Deen would probably say, "Put some butter on it, y'awwwl," so I did. I melted the butter, sprinkled a few teaspoons of flour into that mess and cooked it up. I added about a cup of milk, a bunch of pepper, a few shakes of salt,  brought it to a boil, stirred it around a little.

I probably should have used more milk, or at least had a lower ratio of sausage. The crappy sausage taste still came through, and I had to eat that shit for brunch and dinner on Saturday. The gravy helped a lot.

I should probably do the math on it, because I think the turkey sausage kept this mess from being a fraction as fattening as regular biscuits and gravy. No, the butter didn't help, but the butter most likely wasn't as bad as regular sausage. I don't know.

But I still had 4 biscuits left. Yeah, I know that two biscuits + gravy is a huge portion. When my cats sniffed around, I decided to break up a biscuit and see if they really wanted to eat it. They didn't, but I don't consider that wasting, because after they stuck their noses in it, their noses which they regularly stick into their own and eachother's asses, that biscuit was unsanitary, so throwing it out was more of a safety issue than a wasting one. I put the other biscuits in Tupperware.

On Sunday, I made gravy again, this time with only 2 sausages. Thank goodness that's the last of that sausage. I used more milk and more pepper. The gravy was thinner, but it really tasted much better. Earlier, I googled a recipe for turkey sausage gravy, but the author used mustard (I think dried?) and Worcestershire sauce, and that didn't appeal to me. But now I know -- other people use gross turkey sausage to make an unfuckinghealthy meal.

I don't feel terrible about it. If I hadn't made this, I might have resorted to microwaving some pasta-based meal, not been filled up, and so had another pasta- or rice-based meal.

Sausage and Meatballs; There is No Hidden Meaning

Pretty much all food is fattening, or it can be easily made fattening (think Rachel Ray and her pounds of CHEESE all over everything). I remember reading something somewhere, probably back in the 1990's, about how when the U.S. got into a "low-fat" food pushing mode in the 80's, in order to keep food palatable, fat was removed and replaced with sugars - probably high-fructose corn syrup, since it's the cheapest sweetener out there. By the 90's, the food industry wised up, and instead started using fat substitutes in food that the human body was not capable of digesting, such as Olestra ("warning: may cause anal leakage," thank you, Jesse).

I think that when I was growing up, I and my siblings probably had a lower-fat diet than a lot of our peers. By sheer dint of having a large number of children and grandchildren to cook for on a daily basis - there were 10 of us living at home by the time I was 8 - and a limited budget, Mom took pains to stretch the most important part of the meal, the meat. To this day, I cannot eat gawumpky (cabbage rolls) that other people make, because my mother used a much higher ratio of rice to beef than a typical recipe suggests. Mom also made the best meatballs, and she probably got 25-30 out of a pound of beef. I miss those meatballs; when we had spaghetti, I used to save the meatballs for "dessert."

A few months ago, my yahoo news page featured a video for making the "perfect" Italian meatballs, hosted by Fabio Viviani of the "Chow Ciao" feature. http://screen.yahoo.com/women/chow-ciao/ I eventually tried Fabio's method, because hell, he's cute, but I didn't like the results. It involved cooking the meatballs in sauce, with water added to the top. I just didn't care for the mushy texture; Mom's meatballs were browned first, which made them firm, and she probably drained the grease.

Mom used the broiler pan a LOT. I remember having to wash the dishes and clean that shit up. She made hamburgers with onions and bread crumbs and eggs, cooked on the broiler pan, and the grease dripped away from the burgers. She cooked her meatloaf on a broiler pan; I remember in later years, she lamented the availability of good ground beef, stating that when she used to make meatloaf (on the broiler pan) she could dip her finger in the runoff, and it tasted good, but these days, it was just gross grease.

Mom used to make Italian sausage, which I loved. She cooked it forever, for like an hour in a tomato sauce with onions, and then served it like hotdogs on these excellent hard rolls that didn't get too soft with the sauce. I remember her telling me a story about cooking for her brother-in-law Pete, for some reason, sausage with onions and peppers (no sauce) on a big grill, I suppose state-fair style.

Sausage is so damn fatty. However, since this past week I had such a disappointing experience with turkey breakfast sausage, I decided to let sausage redeem itself as delicious in my eyes/in my stomach. Plus, Italian sausage was on sale for $2.49.

I've always been a dumbass about freezing meat, but I'm getting better. I wrapped up 3 of the 5 links and put them in the freezer. The other 2 I cooked today. I used a small saucepan, filled it about 2/3 with water, added the sausage, and cranked up the heat to get it started. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying close attention and the water came to a boil. Let me tell you, it was gross. A thick layer of foamy fat formed on top of the water. I removed it from the heat, skimmed off the fat - it was so weird - and put the pan back on the burner at a medium-low heat. I let it simmer for about 45 minutes, then drained the water, which had an orangey tint which means I probably lost significant spices, but the water was greasy-looking, so I probably dumped out some more fat. I poured about a third of a jar of Newman's Own spag sauce on it, and heated that for about 15 minutes while I boiled some thin spaghetti.

I have to say, it was pretty damn good. I know it wasn't low-fat, but with a significantly smaller portion of pasta than what I might normally eat, one sausage and the spaghetti was pretty filling, especially since I'm still having bread issues so I didn't have any bread with it. I will have the leftovers tomorrow. It's probably still just as healthy as a microwave meal, and I'm sure it's much healthier than fast food. My sister could make this even healthier with her homemade pasta sauce made with fresh tomatoes.

Turkey, turkey, turkey

I have been neglectful this week. I had some people from my past turn my life into a turmoil, but hopefully, that is all behind me now.

So, I made the parm cheese chicken, using smaller pieces of chicken, egg to coat it, then I cooked it on top of the stove for several minutes before putting it in the oven. It worked! At least in terms of the breading sticking to the chicken. I still left it in the oven for 20 minutes, so it might have been overcooked. I don't know if the stove-top cooking it in a little oil makes it any less fried than baked, but since the original recipe called for baking it in oil, I just don't know. Maybe it's just as well to cook it in a frying pan?

The chicken was  a few days ago. Today I decided on a frittata, with turkey sausage. Turkey sausage tastes like shit - or at least the Jimmy Dean brand tastes like shit. I cooked the sausage, and took a taste, and I thought, "whose bright idea was it to make sausage taste like eating dirty socks?" It is pretty gross. Let me make this clear: I don't like all the grease in regular sausage. When I cook it, I squeeze the cooked patties between paper towels to get some of the grease out, and there's a LOT of grease that squeezes out of regular sausage. The turkey sausage didn't have anywhere near that mess, but it isn't worth eating.

I've never had so much difficulty making a frittata. I used about a half cup of egg sub, which was supposed to approximate 2 eggs. I cut up 2 turkey sausage patties, ate most of one just to taste it, and added the rest to my eggs.  I added some jarred mushroom slices, dried onion, salt, pepper, and once the eggs were solidifying, I sprinkled shredded cheddar on top and put it under the broiler for about 6 minutes, until the cheese started browning. This was the worst frittata I've ever made. It tasted okay, but there was liquid in the bottom of the pan, and that didn't happen when I made this in the past. Maybe because I've made it with ham and the salt in that draws the water. I don't know.

At any rate, the sausage frittata isn't something I will try again. I probably should have just scrambled the eggs with the sausage and threw some cheese on top and microwaved it in a burrito or something. I do not recommend shoe-leather turkey sausage. Then again, I'm not a fan of turkey, so that might be a clue.

Eggs

At some point this week, probably today, I am going to redo the parmesan cheese chicken recipe, with tips from JessesMom, using egg to coat the chicken before the breading.

Eggs are a pain in the ass for a single human household. There are 12 eggs in a regular carton, and the expiration date is about 10 days after the date of purchase. I kinda think an egg a day is probably not healthy. I could be wrong, since there was this whole outrage about hamburger leading to cancer a decade or two back, and then whoever published that shit backed down. Still.

One day, when I was in the grocery store, I reached for the half-carton of eggs. Some nosy-ass woman pointed out to me that a dozen eggs were 99 cents, while the half-dozen was $1.69. I told her I didn't want to waste them, instead of telling her to mind her own business, but she said I could just freeze them. Freeze eggs? Apparently, you break the eggs and freeze them, either in icecube trays or freezer bags. I have yet to try this.

So this week, I bought the meijer brand egg substitute. The carton was $1.50, and it claims to contain 8 eggs. Since regular eggs were $1.79, I don't think I got screwed on the deal.

For breakfast, I like Cheerios, so I'm not big on eggs for breakfast. But breakfast food for lunch or dinner works for me.   I mean, the chicken recipe probably won't need more than an egg or 2, so I have to do something with the rest.

Unfortunately, I'm still grossed out from the l-cysteine in most bread, so I'm not up for eggy in the basket. But a nice fritatta might be good. I bought some turkey sausage, because I didn't realize how much of a difference there was in turkey sausage versus pork sausage until I stood in the store comparing nutritional values. I would probably choke on turkey sausage. So I'll be trying a frittata with turkey sausage later this week. First, the chicken.

Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit

I like beans. I really like beans. Not necessarily green beans, because I only like those when they are fresh. But I like butter beans and lima beans. I like chili with beans (I don't understand the weirdos who think chili is simply meat soup and don't put beans in it).

One of my gripes about cooking is that it is so difficult to cook for one person, unless you plan on eating the same meal for 3 days. Chili -- or probably the correct terminology is chili con carne -- is one of the worst offenders. I have never seen a chili recipe that didn't feed at least 10 people. I've seen some recipes that use 3 lbs of meat -- like 1 1/2 of ground beef and another pound or more of ground lamb or pork or something. I would never make that sort of chili, because I grew up with a mother who always cooked for 10 with about a pound of ground beef. Mom never really adjusted to cooking for 2, but that's another story.

Personally, I like my chili with a lot higher bean to meat ratio than most recipes call for. When I've made white chili, I used 3 cans of northern beans instead of 2, because I like it that way. I have only recently (this week) learned to appreciate dried beans.

I learned that with dried beans, you can reduce a recipe for chili pretty drastically.

The last time I bought meat was a couple of weeks ago. I had this big family pack of chicken breasts that I had divvied up and frozen, and since chicken all the time is boring, I bought a pound of ground sirloin, because it was the same price as chuck and I figured I wouldn't have to rinse that shit with the lower fat content. I split it into roughly quarter-pound pieces, and froze 3/4 of it (because I used 1/4 lb to make burritos).

So, this week, I figured I could make chili for one with 1/4 lb of meat. I started with about 2/3 of a cup of dried beans, since that looks like a very small amount of beans. I did the quick-cook thing, boiling them for a few minutes and leaving them to soak afterward for an hour. They still seemed a bit firm for me, so after draining and rinsing, I simmered them in fresh water for about an hour. I browned the beef with about a handful of chopped onion, drained off the grease, then added the beef & onions to the drained beans, added a can of tomato sauce, sprinkled in some oregano, chili powder (I threw that canister out afterwards, because it must've been 10 years old), smooshed a clove of garlic in it, and I think I threw some cumin there, too. I STILL had to eat it 2 days in a row. Rachel Ray (fuck her, I'm not giving her the extra "a", ala Michael K) often cooks shit using tomato paste from a tube. Maybe there's a way to use tomato paste instead of tomato sauce? Because with these ingredients, the consistency of the chili was more soupy than I wanted it, so if I reduced the beans and meat, it would have been much worse with that entire can of tomato sauce. I've seen little cans of tomato paste, but neither my local Meijer nor Kroger carry tubes of tomato paste. It figures, though, that Rachel buys gourmet tomato paste to make her cheapass beefaroni recipes.

The point of this is that I think mixing beans with meat or poultry goes a long way towards making a person satisfied with the meal, while making it less fatty. I don't know. Beans seem pretty healthy to me, but what do I know? Last week, I cooked a quarter cup of northern beans, and managed to make 3 bigass burritos for lunch, dinner, lunch with the beans and 1/2 a chicken breast. I don't know why Taco Hell isn't pairing chicken with northern beans for cheap ass burritos. I should probably suggest it. Maybe they would put me in commercials, like that woman who makes "gourmet" bowls of mixed shit for them.

ANyhow, my cooking hasn't freaked out my cats. Here they are, sharing the chair next to my computer chair in the kitchen.