30 Grams of Protein Within 30 Minutes of Waking Up

I know I've been kind of hard on Tim Ferriss in the past here at Casual Kitchen, but there's one idea that I got from him that changed my mornings forever:

Eat 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up.

It's a great dietary rule of thumb because it's simple, flexible, and easy to remember. And this easy-to-employ diet hack drives three significant benefits:

1) You'll have a steady blood sugar level for hours after eating, which helps keep you in a calm, focused mental state. This is the ideal state for creative or knowledge work, and it's helped my writing immensely.

2) 30 grams of protein will give you complete satiety for up to 3-4 hours. You won't feel hungry and you won't need to eat.

3) Finally, this is an extremely flexible rule. The world won't come to an end if you eat 24 grams of protein one hour after waking up. You'll still capture all the benefits.

Contrast this with a more typical breakfast of fruit, or worse, starchy, sugary branded boxed cereal. These foods merely put you on a hunger roller coaster, leaving you craving still more carb-rich food within an hour or two of eating. Result? You eat twice as many calories and twice as often, yet you still feel hungry. Pointless.

What kinds of foods can you eat to achieve 30 grams of protein? Here are some ideas:

A dollop or two of peanut butter (7 level Tablespoons yields about 30g protein)
2-3 fried or boiled eggs (about 6-8g protein per egg, depending on size)
3-4 handfuls of nuts (almonds, walnuts, peanuts, cashews, etc.)
A few pieces of good quality breakfast sausage
1 can of tuna (about 40g protein)
A whey- or soy-based protein shake (a typical serving size contains 30g protein)
Canadian-style bacon or ham (5-6 oz yields about 30g protein)
Cottage cheese (½ cup yields about 15g protein)
Hard cheeses (yield: roughly 10g protein per ounce)
Unsweetened yogurt (roughly 10g protein per cup)

Obviously you can mix, match and combine any of the above. Best of all, none of these food items costs very much money--in stark contrast to branded boxed cereal, which is far more expensive, far less healthy and far less filling.

This protein-based meal technique is easy to remember and it easily solves the "what do I want for breakfast?" problem. Try it, and let me know what your results are!

Related Posts:
Eat Less, Exercise More Doesn't Work. Wait, What?
How Do I Follow the Wheat Belly Diet?
Why Box Wine Is Better
How to Blind-Taste and Blind-Test Brands

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

On the "Value" of Low-Calorie Food

You head over to your favorite breakfast cafe one morning, and you see that the owners have (finally!) changed up the menu by adding some new healthy food options. Normally, you just buy your usual bran muffin and a coffee, but today you have a potentially interesting new option.

1) a bran muffin, 400 calories, for $2.49, or
2) a "low-calorie" bran muffin, 320 calories, for $2.49.

Question: which of these two choices is the better deal?

Here's another one: You're sitting down to dinner in a casual restaurant, and these two entrees on the menu really grab you:

1) The Homemade Lasagna Special, 900 calories, for $10.99.
2) Caesar Salad with Grilled Chicken (a "heart-healthy, low-calorie" entree), only 475 calories, for $9.99.

Which of those is a better deal?

Now, before you answer, I have one more question for you. which item--in both cases--do you think yields higher profits for the restaurant?

Food for thought, isn't it?

So now, let me open this up to you, dear readers: how should an empowered consumer respond to this? What's your take?

Related Posts:
The Do-Nothing Brand
Meat Versus Miles: Why Less Meat is Better Than Going Local
What Drives Prices? The Secret to Maximizing Your Consumer Dollar


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Shrimp Creole, Paul Prudhomme Style

"Mmmm.... this is restaurant-quality stuff!"

Whenever we have dinner guests over--especially friends who eat out all the time and rarely cook--I know this is the highest of high praise.

And Chef Paul Prudhomme's Shrimp Creole is one of those "restaurant quality" recipes. It's not an easy recipe, and it's not exactly laughably cheap like many of the other recipes here at Casual Kitchen, but it's still very much worth the slight extra expense and effort--and it's still far cheaper than a similar restaurant meal. If you like spicy, rich food, you won't believe you made something this good with your own hands.


So many people are shocked to find out that a regular person--yep, a person just like you or me--can cook amazing dinners just like this at home. You can.
******************************
Shrimp Creole
Modified from Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen

Ingredients:
2 pounds medium to large shrimp, with shells on
2 1/2 cups, in all, of seafood or shrimp stock

1/4 cup chicken fat, pork lard, bacon fat or Crisco
2 1/2 cups, in all, chopped onions
2 cups chopped celery
1 1/2 cups chopped green bell pepper

4 Tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons white pepper
1 teaspoon cayenne (hot) pepper
3/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons Tabasco
1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil
1 Tablespoon dried thyme leaves

3 cups peeled tomatoes, chopped
1 1/2 cups canned tomato sauce
2 teaspoons sugar

Plenty of cooked rice

Directions:
1) Peel and rinse shrimp, refrigerate until needed, saving the shells to use in your shrimp stock. Chop onions, celery, bell peppers and garlic. Also, bring a medium saucepan of water to a boil, briefly blanch tomatoes, peel, and set aside for later.

2) Heat the chicken fat or other fat over high heat in a large pot. Add one cup of the onions and cook over high heat for 3 minutes, stirring frequently. Lower the heat to medium and keep stirring, until the onions have caramelized* (see below) into a rich brown color, but not burned, another 3-5 minutes.

3) Add the rest of the onions, celery, green peppers and butter. Cook over high heat, stirring occasionally, until celery and pepper become tender, roughly 5 minutes.

4) Add: garlic, bay leaf, all spices, Tabasco, and just 1/2 cup of the stock (basically add everything but the tomatoes, tomato sauce, sugar and the rest of the stock). Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, stirring and scraping the pan bottom well.

5) Add the tomatoes and simmer for another 10 minutes. Then add the tomato sauce, sugar and remaining 2 cups stock and simmer for about 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

6) Cool and refrigerate if making the sauce the day before (and do not add the shrimp yet!). If serving immediately, turn the heat off and add the shrimp. Cover and let sit for 5-10 minutes, or until the shrimp are just plump and pink and not overcooked. Serve immediately by placing a mound of rice in the center of a plate and ladling a generous portion of shrimp creole sauce around the rice.

Serves 8-10.

******************************
Several recipe notes:
1) I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to make your own stock for this recipe. I know it adds extra steps and time, but it is worth it. Our labor-saving trick is this: we will make one of our typical vegetarian soups or stews earlier in the week, and I'll save all the veggie trimmings from that dish, chuck them in the pot and simmer the stock for a few hours that day. Then, when we buy the shrimp, I'll devein and peel the shrimp one day before I make the sauce and add the shells to the stock, simmering it for another 4-8 hours to give it even more body. You'll have plenty of extra stock left over that you can freeze and use in other recipes, like our Risotto, our Easy Sopa de Lima or our Chicken Marsala. You won't regret it.

2) * Caramelizing the onions is perhaps the single most important process step in the entire recipe. Somehow, this step imbues the entire dish with a soft and sweet flavor:


3) It really helps to have a helper for this recipe, especially one who's sufficiently motivated by the promise of a delicious meal that she'll happily do this recipe's worst prep job: peeling and deveining the shrimp.


4) A word about the fat used in this recipe. Many of Paul Prudhomme's recipes involve the use of a disturbing amount of butter and/or fat. This recipe is not health food, people. Just remember these kinds of meals should be cooked (and gorged on) in moderation. Furthermore, I would not use olive oil as a substitute--it is too likely to smoke during the step where you caramelize the onions on high heat. Be sure to use a fat or an oil that has a higher smoke point.

5) Like many recipes, this dish tastes even better the next day, so if you really want to wow your guests or your family, make this sauce a day in advance, and then when your guests arrive, bring the sauce to a good boil, and then add the shrimp (PS: any sauce that can be made a day ahead of time lends itself very well to dinner parties).

6) Oh, and try to avoid overcooking the shrimp.

7) As I said earlier, this dish isn't laughably cheap--in fact, it might be the single most costly meal in this entire blog. That being said, the aggregate cost of this dish was $20.08, of which $11.48 was the cost of the shrimp. But given that it serves 8-10 quite generously, the cost per serving was still in the neighborhood of $2.00-$2.50. Once again, proof that with a little practice anyone can cook restaurant-quality meals and still eat cheaply at home.

8) Finally, it's hard to believe such an amazing recipe has such a simple list of ingredients. Like I said before, you too can make food like this at home!






Related Posts:
Cookbook Review: Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen
Garden Gumbo Recipe
Shrimp in Tomato Sauce: Middle Eastern Cuisine
Shrimp in Garlic Sauce (Camarones Ajillo)

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The Priming Reflex: How to Control Your Appetite (And Turn Your Back on a Million Years of Evolution)

Why do "appetizers" make us hungrier, when in theory they should make us less hungry? Why is it so easy to keep picking and nibbling at the food in front of us, even when we're full? And why do we always have room for dessert?

It's all because of priming.

Psychologists use the term priming to explain why people become reflexively hungry in the presence of a large supply of tasty food.

There's a simple logic to why this trait exists. Back in prehistoric times, food was scarce and infrequently available. That delicious mammoth that your tribe just roasted up might just be your last meal for a while. Having the ability to summon an enormous appetite so you could consume extra food would significantly increase your odds of surviving until the next mammoth roast. That's why it made a ton of sense for our brains to develop adaptations which would enable us to eat far beyond satiety when the (infrequent) opportunity arose.

In the modern era, however, we are constantly surrounded by cheap, palatable and energy-dense foods. And this has turned the priming reflex into a singularly harmful adaptation. It drives us to wolf down our food, ingest calories far beyond our needs, and worse, do it again the next day, the day after that, and the day after that. After all, the food never runs out, and neither, it seems, do our appetites. As a result, priming has become one of the key drivers behind the global obesity pandemic.

What can you do to help fight off the priming reflex? How can you stop it from subverting your health and your diet?

1) Wait.
Everyone knows that the sensation of fullness occurs with a lag. Your stomach always waits a good twenty to thirty minutes before it decides to tell your brain that it's full. This time lag is in fact a key part of the priming reflex, because it makes it lot easier to eat beyond satiety.

The trick is to recognize that those twenty to thirty minutes are the most precious minutes of mealtime. They offer you a fulcrum moment: you can overeat during that time and hardly notice, or you can take your time, slow down and eat sparingly for the first half hour of your meal. These delaying tactics will allow your brain to catch up to your stomach, helping you push away from the table without eating too much and without feeling hungry or deprived. (See more ideas on how to avoid overeating at the dinner table.)

2) Think, don't react.
Remember, priming is just a reflex. It's nothing more than an autonomic urge. You, however, are are much more than the product of your reflexes and urges: you're an intelligent human being, blessed with an enormous cerebrum that sits up on top of those unruly, instinct-based parts of your brain. If you use your higher brain to intellectualize the urges and appetites you experience, you'll find that your unhealthy instincts and reflexes suddenly have a lot less power:

"I know that chili relleno platter looks amazing to me right now, but if I eat the whole thing I will feel awful in an hour. If I split it with my friend, then I'll still get to taste plenty of food, and I won't regret it later."

Having a quick internal dialog like this is a great way to bring higher-order mental processes into an eating situation. If you can train yourself to have a higher-brain conversation like this each time you sit down to eat, you'll find it a lot easier to outwit the priming reflex.

3) Notice.
Finally, build a habit of using noticing and mindfulness techniques every time you sit down to eat. Pay close attention to the taste, smell and sensation of your food, starting with the very first bite. Chew slowly and carefully, and take the time to savor and enjoy the full experience of eating. Do this throughout your meal.

Mindful eating is in fact a perfect synergy of all three of today's eating tips. It helps you enjoy your food on an intellectual (higher brain) level, rather than a reflexive (lower brain) level. It slows you down. And most importantly, while you're carefully chewing your food, you're also chewing up the clock, making it all the more easy to use up that critical 20-30 minutes of critical "fulcrum time" while your brain catches up to your stomach. Result? You will eat much less, yet still leave the table perfectly satisfied with your meal.

Remember, hunger is often a highly misleading mental state, and the priming urge causes us to experience hunger far out of proportion to our nutritional and caloric needs. With the help of our higher brains and a few minor habit changes at the dinner table, we can permanently put the priming instinct where it belongs--in the dustbin of human history.

Wait, think and notice, and recognize that hunger doesn't have to be mindlessly obeyed.

Related Posts:
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food

I owe a debt of gratitude to David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite for prompting me to think about the issues in this post.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Make Your Diet Into a Flexible Tool

After all my years of pontificating about cutting back your meat intake and embracing part-time vegetarianism, after all of my posts about leafy green vegetables and how good they are for you, and after all of the other discussion of healthy eating here at Casual Kitchen, I have a terrible confession to make:

For the past few weeks, every single morning, I've been having a truly unhealthy breakfast: two eggs, sunnyside, and four or five good sized slabs of high-fat, high-protein, artery-obstructing, Portuguese sausage.


(The fact that this sausage is made in Hawaii--the one state where SPAM is considered a delicacy--tells you all you need to know about its fat content.)

I'll happily admit that this kind of food will kill you if you eat it to excess. But there are instances where this kind of diet actually serves your body's purposes. And in my particular case, I'm in recovery mode from being seriously ill. I need to rebuild muscle, increase my weight (yes, I know, a perfect problem to have...) and try to increase my strength and endurance.

So I've been starting off each day with a breakfast just like this, combined with a pretty aggressive exercise schedule. And since I've applied this diet, I've had deeper energy reserves, I've returned to my normal fighting weight and I've been able to do increasingly difficult workouts from week to week.

So, what, you ask, is my point? My point is that too often we think of our diets as fixed and rigid things. They shouldn't be. Instead, I want you to think of your diet as a flexible and powerful tool.

There are times in your life that you might need to bias your diet towards healthy, cleaner foods, and there are times when you might need to bias your diet towards more energy-dense foods. You change it up as your body requires it.

Let's say you have your annual physical, and your bloodwork tests show that your cholesterol levels are running a bit high. Well, then bias your diet to oatmeal, fresh fruits and veggies, and cut back on, uh, exactly the kind of food I've been eating lately. You might be surprised by the results. And, of course, results achieved this way are certainly preferable to the expense and potential long-term side effects of taking Pravachol or Lipitor.

Let's say your blood pressure is on the high side. You can choose to relentlessly remove salt from your diet and start up an exercise program. If you're on blood pressure meds, perhaps this can lessen--or even eliminate--your reliance on them.

If you're trying to improve your fitness and lose some weight, you can increase your intake of lean protein (chicken breasts, turkey breasts, lean beef, etc) and antioxidants (kale, swiss chard and other leafy greens). You'll replenish your body and fend off potential free radical damage.

Don't think of your diet as a rigid set of rules that can never be broken. Think of it as a license to experiment--with different foods, different components, different routines. You can tweak things here and there, or you can make aggressive wholesale changes. You'll find that your diet can help you achieve a wide range of goals, and it can be as powerful a tool as any pharmacological solution.

Related Posts:
15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating
Seven Ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs
How to Create Your Own Original Pasta Salad Recipes Using the Pasta Salad Permutator
Six Secrets to Save You from Cooking Burnout
How to Live Forever in Ten Easy Steps

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating

I have a long and storied history of overeating during the holidays, so much so that I know exactly where the Tums are in every home of practically every single member of my entire extended family. But a few years ago, I started to build my own personal list of tips and techniques that I use to survive a time of year when, for me, overeating is all too easy.

Today's list of tips will give you plenty of ways to resist holiday snacks and food, whether you're staying with family or in-laws, hosting the holidays at your own home, or even if you're at a holiday dinner out at a restaurant.

This list comes in two parts: Part I contains tips you can apply to prevent subversive overeating--the kind of overeating that occurs gradually, with you hardly even noticing, over the course of an entire day. Part II contains tips designed to help you once you sit down to a specific meal where you think you might be at risk of overeating.

Part I: Managing Food Intake Over the Course of the Day

1) Start The Day With Exercise
One of the best ways to set the right tone when you know you're going to be surrounded by food all day is to get in some exercise the very first thing in the morning. Any sort of physical activity will do: treat yourself to a brisk walk with family, go for a run, or play some tennis with your nephew.

Why at the beginning of the day? Three reasons: First, when you exercise first thing in the morning, not only do you start the day having burned a few hundred extra calories, but the exercise also helps suppress your appetite. Second, once you get started with the day's eating, you'll have less and less inclination to exercise as the day goes on. Third, the extra exercise will put you in a healthy frame of mind and help you resist the high-calorie food you'll be surrounded by all day long.

2) Make Your First Meal Mostly Fiber
Breakfast is often an informal meal at most homes, which means you'll be able to choose more carefully what you eat for this meal without offending your hosts. So take a pass on rich, energy-dense foods like eggs, sausage or pancakes, and have a small bowl of high-fiber/low-sucrose cereal and two or three pieces of fruit instead. Rather than starting the day off 1,000 calories in the hole, you'll fill yourself up with healthful antioxidants. And if you followed tip #1, you'll likely find that this is exactly the kind of food your body craves after healthy morning exercise.

3) Allow Yourself Some Treats....
Nobody likes a Grinch. I don't want to force you, especially during the holiday season, to gnaw on rice cakes all day and abstain from all cookies or goodies. So go ahead and indulge yourself a little, and enjoy a cookie or two, in moderation, every so often over the course of the day. However, when you do indulge, be sure to...

4) ...Alternate with Fruits and Veggies
Ah, there's always a catch, isn't there? After you've enjoyed your occasional cookie or other fiendishly energy-dense snack, make your next snack a piece of fruit or some raw vegetables. Alternate the good with the bad and you'll be able to have some holiday fun and still save yourself hundreds of calories over the course of a day. Try the alternating snack method this holiday season and see if it works for you.

5) Skip Lunch
Another idea to save yourself a few hundred calories is to skip lunch entirely. Normally, I wouldn't recommend skipping meals, but these are the holidays--you're surrounded by food all day long, and you're likely to end the day with an enormous dinner. You certainly aren't going to starve. If there's any meal you won't miss on days like today, it's lunch.

6) Brush Your Teeth
Would you like a powerful, foolproof and easy strategy that will prevent you from eating anything for a minimum of one hour? Just give your teeth a good brushing. There's no better temporary protection from snacking. Who wants to eat anything when you have a minty-clean mouth?

On any big eating holiday, you can use this technique a couple of times over the course of the day and you'll be shocked at how much less food you will consume.

7) Keep Track
Another powerful and foolproof strategy (although admittedly one that's not quite as easy to implement as brushing your teeth), is to keep track of the food you eat in written form. And when I say keep track, I mean literally writing down absolutely everything you eat over the course of the day.

This doesn't mean you have to show up to Christmas dinner with a pen and notepad like detective Harry Bosch. There are ways to do this with various degrees of discretion. For example, you can quietly retire to your room every hour or so to record the things you've eaten over that time.

But the basic concept at work here is this: what gets measured gets controlled. Just the simple act of writing down (and therefore observing) what you've eaten over the course of a day will cause you to eat less. This strategy is probably the most labor-intensive on today's list, but it is also the most powerful and effective.

Part II: Once You're Seated for Dinner:

8) The Two Glasses of Water Method
Everyone knows the old trick to drink a large glass of water before a meal. Water takes up extra room in your stomach and it contains no calories (actually, cold water contains negative calories, if you want to get all technical-like).

Think of this tip as the water method on steroids. By drinking two glasses of water instead of just one, you will have significantly less room in your stomach for food. You will likely eat much more sparingly. Interestingly, I find that I enjoy my food even more when I apply this tip, despite the fact that I end up eating quite a bit less.

9) Eat Half Portions
I always go back for seconds. There's something about that second plate of food that adds extra satisfaction to a big holiday meal. But let me tell you about one year when I did something really stupid: thinking I had discovered a way to eat more efficiently, I piled a double portion of food onto my plate, thinking I'd save myself a trip back for seconds.

Well, guess what? I outwitted myself and I still had seconds. And I had to lie totally still the rest of the evening to avoid doing a Mr. Creosote.

What I thought would be a quantum leap in eating efficiency actually taught me a valuable (if counterintuitive) lesson: the truth is it didn't matter how much I ate on that first trip: my meal wasn't going to seem complete until I made that second trip for more.

The next time you sit down to a huge holiday meal, use this counterintuitive logic to your advantage. For your first plate of food, eat a half portion of everything. If somehow you manage to avoid making a second trip for more, congratulations! But even if you still serve yourself that seemingly inevitable second plate, you've still only eaten two half-portions of food, which is just another way of saying one regular portion. At holiday mealtime, that's still a big victory.

10) Wait to Go Back For Seconds
Most people know that our stomachs tell our brains "I'm full!" with about a 20-25 minute lag. The reason it's so easy to overeat is simply because Mr. Brain doesn't think to tell Mr. Hand to stop ramming food into Mr. Mouth until it's much too late.

But we can turn this staggeringly unhelpful evolutionary trait to our advantage by combining the half portion method (tip #9) with a 15 minute delay. At your next holiday dinner, try eating a half portion for your first plate of food, and then wait 15 minutes before you go back for more. That oh-so-brief 15 minute lag, combined with the time you spent eating your first plate of food, should get your brain on the same page as your stomach. Result? You'll probably take much smaller portions for your second plate of food. Oh, and you'll score a rare victory over human evolution too.

11) Alternate Bites of Food with Drinks Water
Remember our tip #4 above, which recommended you alternate treats with healthy fruits and veggies over the course of the day? This tip is similar, but it's designed for the dinner table. It's easy to do: alternate every bite of food (and I mean every bite) with a swallow of water. Just put your fork in one hand and your glass of water in your other hand and take turns.

This technique aids in digestion, and it causes you to eat much more slowly. Your brain will catch up to your stomach and get the "I'm full!" signal before you've eaten too much, yet you won't really experience any feelings of deprivation or hunger. You'll be amazed at how much less you will eat over the course of a full meal using this strategy.

12) Don't Clear Your Plate
One of the less-than-helpful traditions dating from the Great Depression is the maxim, usually told to us by our parents, to clean your plate. Well, guess what? The rules have changed. You don't have to obey your parents, and it's not the Depression anymore (although, now that I think about it, what if history repeats itself and it is the Depression again?).

Uh, in any event, I give you permission to leave food on your plate this holiday season. This tip works particularly well with holiday dinners out, since you can take that extra food home and save yourself from cooking another meal later in the week.

13) Cut Back on Your Alcohol Intake
"You can't seriously want to ban alcohol. It tastes great, makes woman appear more attractive, and makes a person virtually invulnerable to criticism."
--Mayor Quimby

Alcohol may be the cause of, and the solution to, many of life's problems, but it can present particular difficulties at your holiday dinner table. Few foods are more disturbingly efficient at delivering excess calories into your body. And because alcohol is absorbed through your stomach, it only fills you up temporarily, thus letting you continue to drink and thereby ingest still more calories. So at your next holiday dinner, drink extra water instead of extra glasses of wine, and take a pass on the before-dinner cocktail or the after-dinner liqueur. Note: Do not follow this rule when staying with annoying relatives or in-laws.

14) Talk
Here's a radical tip for the next time you're sitting down at a big family dinner. Instead of concentrating on your food, why not ignore your food and concentrate on the family and friends around you? Have a few bites, but then put down your knife and fork and just talk. Ask a few questions of the relatives sitting closest to you, and get them talking too.

If you ask the right questions and get a really good conversation going, 20 minutes can go by in a flash. And of course another wonderful thing happens during those 20 minutes: your brain "catches up" to your stomach and figures out that you're full! Voila, you've just avoided overeating at dinner, and you've had an enjoyable time conversing with your family. I can't think of a better way to spend the holidays.

15) Save Room For Dessert
If you've successfully implemented some or all of the tips in this post, congratulations! You deserve to indulge yourself. This last tip is a rule-breaker of sorts that takes advantage of that curious breach of the laws of physics that happens at the end of every big dinner: no matter how much you eat, no matter how full you are, there is always room for dessert.

Well, help yourself to dessert then! And enjoy it, because you deserve a pat on the back for eating a lot less over this holiday season than in prior years.

But save that second piece of pie for tomorrow's breakfast.

******************************

Readers, what did I miss? Which of these tips did you find most effective? Which were the least effective? And what other tips have you found helpful that you'd like to share?

Related Posts:
The Dinner Party: 10 Tips to Make Cooking for Company Fun and Easy
The Pros and Cons of a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet
When High-Fat Food Can Actually Be Healthy For You
Brown Rice: Dietary Penance

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

How to Make Pernil: Puerto Rican-Style Roast Pork Shoulder

Today's recipe, pernil, or roast pork shoulder, is one of those ideal recipes that 1) seems a lot harder to make than it really is, and 2) will seriously impress your guests.

And it's a particularly fitting recipe for this time of year, as many Latin American families serve pernil for Christmas dinner. There is nothing like the aroma of a delicious roast like this filling your home on a cold December day.

This recipe also illustrates one of the key central themes I hope to convey to my readers here at Casual Kitchen: it is both easier than you think and less expensive than you think to make surprisingly fancy dishes in your own kitchen.

Even if you don't have much experience or confidence in the kitchen, you can cook fascinating, delicious and amazing recipes at home. You already have the skills inside of you--they just need a little nurturing. All you need is a little push and a little bit of encouragement (perhaps from a food blog like this one!), and you'll amaze yourself with what you can do.

And at the risk of being a little too didactic, let me share one more lesson that I learned from making this recipe: always keep your eyes open for cooking opportunities. The initial catalyst for this dish was finding a huge sale on pork shoulder in my grocery store at the preposterous price of $0.49 a pound. Thus a 4.5 pound pork shoulder, which pretty much fed the two of us for an entire week, cost only $2.27.

I thought that was a great deal, but it was nothing compared to the rush of amazement and gratitude I had when I pulled this roast out of the oven.

If you're in the grocery store, your local farmer's market, thumbing through an old cookbook, or even surfing some new food site in cyberspace, you never know when some amazing example of good fortune (or luck, or synchronicity, or whatever term you'd like to use here) might happen. If you can try to be in a frame of mind to notice and receive gifts like this, you'll be shocked at how cooking ideas and opportunities seem to rear up right in front of you.

And they are out there, like lucky pennies lying there on the ground, just waiting for you to pick them up.
******************************
Puerto Rican Style Roast Pork Shoulder
(adapted from Daisy Cooks)

Ingredients:
A 4lb to 4.5lb pork shoulder, with skin on
Wet Spice Rub

Wet spice rub recipe:
12 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
1 1/2 Tablespoons kosher salt
1 Tablespoon coarse ground black pepper
2 Tablespoons dried oregano
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 Tablespoons vinegar

Directions:
Up to three days ahead of the date you serve the roast, do steps 1 and 2. On the day you cook the roast you'll do steps 3 through 5.

1) To make the wet spice rub, grind the garlic and salt into a paste using a mortar and pestle (you can save yourself buying the extra kitchen items; we used the back of a heavy spoon in a smallish Tupperware bowl and it worked just fine). Add pepper and oregano, grinding and mashing to incorporate the spices into the paste. Stir in the olive oil and vinegar, mix well.
2) Once you've made the rub, use a very sharp paring knife to cut several slits in the pork shoulder, about 1 1/2 inches apart. Make the cuts as deep as you can, through the skin and well into the shoulder meat. Wiggle a finger into the slits to widen them, and then fill each cut with wet rub, using a small spoon. Do this on all sides of the pork shoulder. If you have any leftover wet rub, just smear it all over the outside of the roast. Refrigerate the roast, covered, for at least one full day (but preferably two to three days) before cooking.

To cook the roast:
3) Preheat the oven to 450F.
4) Set the roast, skin side up, on a rack in a roasting pan. Roast for 1 hour, turn the heat down to 400F, and then cook the roast for another one and a half hours, or until a meat thermometer reads the meat in the center of the roast at 160F.
5) Let the roast "rest" for 15-20 minutes after you've taken it out of the oven. Then, pull off the skin (it should come off fairly easily in big pieces) and then carve the meat parallel to the bone with a large and very sharp knife. Pile the meat on a platter and enjoy!

Serves 5-6.
******************************
A few recipe notes:
1) Be sure to prepare the spice rub and do steps 1 through 3 a minimum of 24 hours ahead of time. However, if you can do these steps two to three days ahead and give the spices extra time to do their magic inside the meat, your roast will taste even more amazing.

2) The rule of thumb for cooking time for a pork roast (this applies for shoulders as well as other cuts like pork butt) is 30 minutes for every pound. Note that in this recipe the first hour is at a higher temperature.

3) There's a bit of an art to cutting the meat off of a pork shoulder, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't have a knack for doing it artfully. But it doesn't really matter--this meal is still going to taste absolutely amazing no matter the aesthetics. Just do your best, try not to waste any of the meat, and don't sweat it if it doesn't come out looking perfect.

4) You can consider using the leftover meat in sandwiches or in homemade fajitas or wraps for later in the week.

This post is part of Regional Recipes, Joanne Bruno's brilliant group blogging idea of traveling the world from our very own home kitchens! If you'd like to learn more, visit Joanne's blog Eats Well With Others.



Related Posts:
How to Make a Mole Sauce: Intense, Exotic and Surprisingly Easy to Make
Ten Tips to Save Money on Spices and Seasonings
Braised Pork in Guajillo Chile Sauce
When High-Fat Food ... Can Actually Be Healthy For You
How to Make Burritos

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Mint Melts: Teaching Kids to Cook With an Easy Cookie Recipe

Cookie recipes aren't something you'll typically find here at Casual Kitchen. But after having an absolute blast assisting my 14-year-old niece in making today's Mint Melts recipe, I realized a fundamental truth: yes, cookies might not be all that healthy for you, but they are a perfect teaching tool to get your kids interested in cooking.

Think about it--cookie recipes are easy. Kids of almost any age can participate. Very young kids can do basic tasks, like measuring flour or getting eggs and butter out of the fridge. Older kids, say nine- or ten-year-olds who have already had some practice baking, can do most of a basic cookie recipe by themselves under adult supervision. And of course, people of all ages love to play with--and eat--delicious, squishy cookie dough.



Some of my most vivid childhood memories involve working with my mom in a kitchen filled with the aroma of baking cookies. And these early experiences ultimately led to my lifelong curiosity and interest in cooking.

If you have kids, try making a batch of Mint Melts with them and see how much they enjoy it. The recipe has an interesting and unusual process step that kids will love, and of course the end product is absolutely delectable. And you never know, you might inspire a future cooking genius!
**********************
Mint Melts

Ingredients:
3/4 cup margarine or butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 Tablespoons water

1 12-ounce package of semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 eggs

2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 6-ounce package of Andes Candies

Directions:
1) Heat butter, sugar and water over low heat until the butter is fully melted. Add chocolate chips and stir until uniformly melted. Cool 10 minutes, then pour into a mixing bowl and beat in the eggs.
2) Sift together dry ingredients (except Andes Candies), then mix with the liquid ingredients. Refrigerate dough for one hour. While the dough is being refrigerated, take the Andes Candies and cut each one in half with a sharp knife.
3) Roll teaspoon-sized balls of dough and place on a greased (or foil covered) cookie sheet. Bake for 12 minutes at 350F.
4) Remove from oven and immediately top each cookie with half of an Andes mint candy. When the candy has melted on top of the cookie, swirl the mint over the top of the cookie to complete the mint frosting.

Makes 40-60 cookies, depending on size.
***************************
A couple of brief recipe notes:
1) The unique and interesting part of this recipe comes when you put the mint Andes Candies on each cookie. I'll include a few quick photos to demonstrate. And make sure you have all of the Andes Candies cut in half and ready to go ahead of time; you don't want to be scrambling to prep them after the cookies come out of the oven.

As soon as you take the cookies come out of the oven, place half an Andes candies on each cookie. Then, wait just a couple of minutes...

...and as the Andes Candies melt, take your finger and smush it around on top of the cookie:

Make sure everyone licks their fingers repeatedly during this part of the recipe--it will help your family's collective immune system.

2) I'd ruin Casual Kitchen's entire reputation as a healthy food-related blog if I didn't include a brief warning on the health detriments of cookies. So here goes: Cookies are horribly energy-dense and they should not be eaten to excess. Just a half-dozen cookies from a typical cookie recipe can add up to 400-500 calories--which means that just a few inattentive moments of mindless eating, and all of a sudden you need to do a four mile run to get back to even! These little buggers can be dangerous.

Ah, but who says you have to eat them all? Enjoy a few, but then bring the rest of 'em to the office. Let your coworkers do the four mile runs.

Related Posts:
Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking
How to Team Up in the Kitchen
The Favorite Cookbooks of My Favorite Bloggers
The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

How to Make a Simple Frittata

The frittata is an easy dish that everyone should consider adding to their cooking arsenal. In many ways, it's the perfect dish for the typical Casual Kitchen reader. It's like an omelet, but easier to make. It's like a quiche, but healthier. And best of all, this dish looks like it's a lot more work to make than it really is.

And since nobody has yet coined the phrase "real men don't eat frittatas," sitting down to a easy and laughably cheap frittata dinner doesn't include an implied threat to your manhood.

The frittata recipe I'll share with you today includes spinach, feta cheese, garlic, onions and tomatoes, but keep in mind the primary advantage of the fritatta is that it can contain almost anything. Leftover veggies, invigorating greens--whatever you have sitting around in your fridge is fair game, as long as you think the ingredients will go well together.

Finally, for those of you who are interested, I've included a brief list of additional frittata recipes and resources at the bottom of this post.

*******************************
Greek Frittata

Ingredients:
6 eggs
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 small onion, chopped
1-2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1-2 Tablespoons olive oil
4 cups spinach, torn into medium-sized pieces
1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese

Directions:
1) Beat eggs and black pepper, set aside.
2) In a large, deep, broiler proof non-stick pan, saute onions and garlic in oil on medium heat until soft, about 4-5 minutes. While onions and garlic are sauteing, turn on oven broiler. Add torn spinach, saute another 2 minutes until spinach is limp. Add feta cheese.
3) Pour egg/pepper mixture into pan. As the eggs begin to set, run a spatula around the edge of the skillet, lifting the mixture to allow uncooked portions to flow underneath. Continue cooking and lifting until the entire egg mixture is almost set (the top surface should still be moist).
4) Place pan under your broiler roughly 4 inches from the heat source. Broil for 2-3 minutes, until the top of the frittata is set. Cut into wedges and serve.

Serves 3.
*******************************
This recipe seems almost too easy to be true, but it really does amount to nothing more than sauteeing whatever leftover veggies or frittata fillings you have handy, dumping the beaten egg mixture over the top of it...

Futzing with it for a few minutes by lifting up the edges and making sure the entire egg mixture starts to set....
(Isn't it shocking how unappetizing it can be to look at a close-up photo of a partially cooked egg dish?)
....and then just take the entire pan and stick it in the oven, just a few inches away from the broiler burner. In a matter of minutes you'll be eating!

Frittata Recipe Resources:
40 Frittata recipes at Recipezaar.com
Top 20 best Frittata recipes at Allrecipes.com
30 Fritatta recipes at Cooksrecipes.com

Related Posts:
When High-Fat Food Can Actually Be Healthy For You
Seven Ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs
Ten Tips to Save Money on Spices and Seasonings
How to Make a Perfectly Boiled Egg Every Time
How to Make Pickled Eggs

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Navy Bean and Kielbasa Soup

I fell into acute cookbook exploitation mode two weekends ago, and I spent some careful time thumbing through my Better Homes cookbook.

I had two goals. One was to make it up to my old warhorse cookbook after recently making some condescending remarks about it in my Mexicali Pork Chops post. Sure, Better Homes may reach a bit when it comes to ethnic recipes, but this cookbook really tries hard. And it just sits there on the shelf--it doesn't ever hurt anybody. Why did I insult it? I'm sorry.

After I finished this heartfelt conversation with an inanimate cookbook, I settled on my other goal: to find a really simple and quick recipe that would feed us a for few days. What I found, right in the middle of the most humble cookbook in my kitchen, were the seeds of the most humble, simple and delicious soup ever.

"Better than chicken soup if you ask me," was Laura's verdict. Swish!
********************
Navy Bean and Kielbasa Soup
(modified from "Ham and Bean Soup" from Better Homes)

3 Tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, chopped
4-5 stalks celery, chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
A dash of salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper, or more to taste
1 bay leaf

1/2 lb kielbasa or other sausage, chopped into pieces

3 cups water
One 15-ounce can navy beans or white beans, drained and rinsed

Heat oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add onions, celery, thyme, salt, pepper and bay leaf and saute on medium for 5-7 minutes. Add the kielbasa, water and beans and bring to a boil. Simmer for 45 minutes. Serve immediately.

Serves 4 easily. Can be easily doubled (or tripled!).
********************
A few brief recipe notes:
1) This soup was so preposterously easy and so laughably cheap that it literally burst off the page (don't you just love when that happens?). And the recipe is so scalable that it can be doubled or tripled with minimal extra effort. A textbook 80/20 recipe.

2) Keep in mind, if you make this soup with kielbasa, you will not be making a diet soup. It will be more on the energy-dense side. If you want a lower-fat soup, you can add less meat, or replace the kielbasa with relatively lean cuts of ham to the soup.

3) Finally, let me quantify the laughable cheapness of this recipe, because it just doesn't seem believable that a soup this good can be this inexpensive to make.

1/2 lb kielbasa, on sale for 2.50/lb: $1.25
1 medium onion, 5 celery stalks: ~75c
1 15 ounce can navy beans: 69c
olive oil, salt, pepper, thyme, bay leaf: ~40c
Total cost: $3.09

A delicious and easy-to-make soup, all for the staggering cost of 77c per serving!

Related Posts:
Two Useful Cooking Lessons From Another Cheap and Easy Side Dish
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
Paul Prudhomme's Barbecued Shrimp: The Most Glorious Meal So Far This Year
Cookbook Exploitation: How to Get More Mileage Out of Your Cookbooks

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! Another way you can support me is by submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

How to Use Leftover Ingredients

There's a regular occurrence in cooking (I call it the hot dog phenomenon*) that invariably happens whenever you buy ingredients for a homemade recipe: you will always end up with random leftovers of at least some ingredients.

After you're done cooking, and all those leftover ingredients are scattered around your kitchen, how can you make creative use of them? Today I'll share with you a simple example of ingredient reuse that shows how you can make a practically free meal, while reducing waste and saving time and money.

The other day, we had extra cheese left over from making burritos, as well as leftover corn tortillas after stuffing ourselves with homemade tortilla chips a few too many nights in a row. In fact, the corn tortillas were already cut into chip-sized wedges, ready to go, but we just didn't have the stomach for them.

So for the next few mornings, we put the two together and made mini-quesadillas to go along with our eggs. It made for a creative, and essentially free, breakfast, and it was delicious enough to qualify for our list of ways to Jazz Up Your Morning Eggs.

This painfully simple example of ingredient reuse illustrates some of our favorite concepts here at Casual Kitchen. First, reusing leftover ingredients that you've already bought for another recipe is an excellent example of the benefits of scale. We bought these ingredients in bulk, so they were already inexpensive to begin with, yet we derived still more scale benefits by making extra breakfasts from them. And here's yet another scale benefit: we didn't need to plan another meal or make another trip to the store.

Furthermore, how much does it cost to re-use ingredients that likely would have otherwise gone to waste? That's right: nothing. This delicious breakfast was pretty darn close to free, and yet it didn't have the boring and monotonous feel so typical of a meal made of leftovers. I've eaten similar meals in Manhattan diners and foolishly paid $13.95 a plate.

The next time you cook at home and have leftover ingredients, try and think of ways you can make extra meals from the remaining ingredients you have on hand. This is a skill that improves with a little practice--once you put a few simple and inexpensive meals together you'll really start to get the hang of it.

And for those of you interested in how we made our mini-quesadillas, I just put a few pieces of cheese (seasoned with a couple of generous shakes of ground chipotle pepper) between two tortilla triangles...

...and then fried a few of them in a pan right next to our eggs.

What are some examples of free extra meals you've made from leftover ingredients?

* The hot dog phenomenon refers to the fact that hot dogs come in packages of ten, while hot dog buns come in packages of eight--essentially forcing the consumer to buy extra dogs or buns.

Related Posts:
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
More Applications of the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
When High-Fat Food ... Can Actually Be Healthy For You: Diet and Athletic Training Part 1

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! Another way you can support me is by submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.