How to manage a special diet on a long road trip

Conversely, this post could be titled "How to enjoy a week at the cottage without having to cook".

Answer:  Consider incorporating the following simple equation into your vacation food management strategy.

A diet that is largely freezer-based (see this humorous post and this other post) PLUS a Yeti Tundra cooler to keep items frozen over an unprecedentedly-long duration of time EQUALS a whole lot less hassle for the traveler, especially if the traveler happens to be their family's chief cook and bottle-washer.  

As we found out during a recent 3,000-mile (one way!!) car trip, the Yeti is a game-changer for consumers.

That is one loaded-down minivan, but stuff-dragging is inevitable if you're driving your family cross-country.  Retrospectively we realized that we should have put our Yeti 50 (at upper left) squarely above the rear axle, because it was very heavy.  In this photo we had it pushed too far toward the rear of the van.  

In our case, it wasn't a special diet per se that prompted me to try this food management approach, but rather the following two considerations:

1. We were rendezvousing with other family members for the proverbial cottage-by-the-sea vacation, and I wanted everyone to be able to sample some of the home-grown goodies that I harvest from my gardens here in Houston.
2. More importantly, I was looking for some relief from my aforementioned chief cook and bottle-washer status.  Does this ever happen to you?? -- You travel to some lovely cottage in an idyllic remote location only to spend half your "vacation" time mired in the logistics of how to feed everybody.  Typically, 'idyllic remote' means two things:  not many services to start with, and those few that are available are extremely expensive.  So it is with our annual cottage destination, which largely caters to the resort crowd rather than to middle-class travelers.  Your options in that scenario are as follows:

• Pay sky-high prices daily for nutritionally-unbalanced restaurant meals (unacceptable)
• Admit defeat and eat chicken nuggets and french fries most of the time (unacceptable)
• Take your own home-made food along for the ride (ideal if you can find a way to preserve it long enough)

We had heard about the Yeti's superior cold-retention capability but we'd had no previous experience with it, and Yeti itself hedges its bets where longevity guarantees are concerned.  Here is how we tackled our food transport challenge, and the results:

• A few days prior to our trip, we bumped our freezer temperature down to the lowest it would go, which was minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
• About 12 hours prior to the trip, we packed the Yeti with ice to "pre-cool" it because we had read somewhere that this would help with cold retention.
• On the morning of departure, we dumped out the pre-cooling ice (which had partially melted), quickly loaded the cooler with our food, and then carefully packed new ice (cooled to below freezing) into the void spaces.  

Here is an ice-free view.  Most coolers are elongated, but I chose the Yeti 50 because it is closer to being cube-shaped - maximum volume for minimum surface area.  As I described in this previous post, I only use Pyrex ware for food storage, and by this time we own approximately 120 Pyrex pieces of various sizes.  The Yeti 50 can hold about 12 to 16 one-quart Pyrex containers and perhaps 4 to 6 of the 2-cup size, depending on your desired ice-to-food ratio.  That's a whole lot of food!  

• We continued to monitor the ice throughout our long journey.  Here's the kicker - we weren't going directly to the cottage.  We spent 9 sight-seeing days on the road before we even got to our final destination.  By Day 7, some of the ice had begun to melt and the frozen food was beginning to thaw, but we re-packed any void spaces with new ice daily to keep the temperature as low as achievable (properly refrigerated frozen food generally has a shelf life of 7 to 10 days after initial thawing).  Then, as soon as we arrived at the cottage, I cranked down the refrigerator to its lowest possible temperature in order to maintain the thawed food as long as possible.

And the strategy worked very well, indeed.

Mexican pork and squash stew (recipe here) and Cuban black beans (recipe here) three thousand miles from the point of preparation and ten days after having been removed from our freezer.  Served with brown rice.  

OMG - I WENT ON VACATION TO A COTTAGE AND FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY HALF-CENTURY LIFE, I DID NOT HAVE TO COOK!!!  All I had to do for each day's main meal was to prepare fresh rice or pasta, warm up my home-made food, and set the various dishes on the table to be served.  In this way, I fed 5 adults wonderful meals for 7 consecutive days with almost no effort.

And here's the added bonus that I neglected to consider at the outset:  What would the corresponding price of 35 high-quality restaurant dinners have been in an expensive area?  Or conversely, cooking 35 person-meals from scratch by buying ingredients at substantially inflated local pricing (not to mention the incredible amount of time and energy that would have sucked out of my vacation time)?  Yeti coolers are not for the financially faint of heart - our Yeti 50 cost almost $400.  But if you do the math on this scenario, what you'll conclude is that the money saved by bringing food 3,000 miles substantially offset the purchase price of the cooler.  Effectively, the thing almost paid for itself in one trip.

Marvelous, I tell you.  I had no idea at the outset whether this scheme would work, but it was successful beyond all my expectations.  And I have never enjoyed my own cooking more than after a succession of absolutely grueling, miles-long mountain hikes.  It tasted twice as good as it normally does.
:-)

The additional possibilities are substantial:  Gluten allergy?  Medical condition?  Losing weight and don't want to experience the type of inevitable set-back experienced from being forced to eat whatever crappy food is typically available while traveling?  Try a Yeti - it might work for your situation.

As always, this is a noncommercial post expressing personal opinions only.  I receive no compensation from any referenced source.  In those cases where cited manufacturers have felt compelled to furnish me with products, I donate them to charity.

An average rating of 4.9 out of 5 on more than four hundred reviews?!  That kind of phenomenon almost never occurs in the consumer universe, but I can see why it did with this product.  Five stars, indeed.

Screengrabbed from this Academy website.    

Best briefcase lunch

Do you ever have to make do with whatever food items you can cram into your briefcase, no space for more, no refrigeration, no time?  If you work in a place like east Harris County, you might find yourself in this undelectable position.  For while it is developing rapidly, right now it's a service wasteland, a food desert.  There's a Baytown Seafood on Sheldon Road.  There's a Subway in a gas station a short distance south of Baytown Seafood, but you can forget about getting in there - the place is constantly mobbed by the starving masses who have no other local food options.  So when my service contracts take me to this particular corner of Rome, I do like most other local working people do:  I brown-bag it.

But I do it in style.  Just because you're eating out of a briefcase doesn't mean you have to choose junk food.  

Here's my line-up:

• St. Dalfour French Bistro Three Beans with Sweet Corn - Surprisingly good for a product that looks like it's packaged in a cat food tin.  Available at some Whole Foods stores some of the time (hard to get).  280 calories.  
• Wild Garden Traditional Hummus - Also surprisingly good for a packaged food (congrats to the Jordanians who produce it).  I got hooked on these after finding them in United Airlines Tapas snack boxes, although I've been told that UA has since switched brands.  Available in 3-packs at HEB if you can find them; Amazon's unit price tends to be surprisingly high - 2x to 3x grocery retail.  67 calories.
• Stacy's Pita Chips - Pita chips are relatively new to the market and most of them are so overloaded with salt that I literally cannot eat them.  This brand seems to be more balanced (I'd vastly prefer whole wheat, but beggars can't be choosers).  I don't know where to buy locally - I order single-serve bags by the case from Amazon.  200 calories.
• KIND Dark Chocolate and Sea Salt bar - As near as I can tell, this is the lowest-sugar bar this manufacturer offers.  Available in most grocery stores although prices vary widely.  200 calories.
• Perrier.  I find that Sam's Club has the best local prices.  Zero calories.

Obviously I'm not the lightest lunch eater at 750 calories for that little haul.  I actually prefer to eat my biggest meal at mid-day and have a smaller dinner, which is supposed to be the ideal strategy for weight management.

Anyway, I thought I'd post this as a counterweight to all the "excitement" about the dual Baskin Robbins - Dunkin Donuts that opened either today or yesterday in League City, depending on which published source you believe.

Photo of the new establishment screengrabbed from Facebook, where it had about 450 "Likes" as of Friday evening. 

Seriously?  Diabetes and obesity continuing to climb in America and people are excited by the prospect of more side-by-side glorified sugar outlets?  This is newsworthy both north and south of the Galveston County line?  Or it it all just clever marketing hype?  Pardon me for being my usual fit and healthy (knock wood) party-pooper self, but compared to eating mostly empty carbs, you'd feel a lot better after a 750-calorie feed of nuts, legumes, and grains such as what is shown above, even if they are a bit more processed than ideal.  But such is life when temporarily lived out of a briefcase.

So you think you can't garden, Part 2

My title is not perfectly a propos of my content, but I have to pay homage to the fact that "So you think you can't garden..." ended up on a Swamplot linkpost the other day (insert smilie here).

OK, so maybe you've figured out by now that you can garden.  But harvesting is only half the backyard battle - what do you actually do at that magical moment when you end up with more fruits and vegetables than you ever thought possible?!

You could arrange them in an artistic still life, as I've done here with Japanese eggplant, green peppers, Anaheim peppers, and about a gazillion Sweet Million and Yellow Jellybean tomatoes.  But ultimately, it would be a good idea to actually eat the stuff that you took the trouble to grow.  

Eat it how??  If you are a suburban family of three or four people, how do you deal with the fact that even a micro-garden such as mine is expected to yield five to fifteen pounds per week of fresh fruits and vegetables during harvest time?!  How does anybody eat all that?!

That artistic still life above represents one day's worth of harvest from about 40 square feet of active growing area.  What I'll do below is show you how I route all of that stuff to productive use, and on a short time frame to boot.  It's important to remember that you don't get a long window of opportunity to process home-grown food.  It spoils more quickly than store-bought food because it's not chemically treated, it's not irradiated, it's not waxed, it's not adulterated in any way.  That's good from a health standpoint but it can be a bit of a challenge from a logistical standpoint.

I cook the fresh tomatoes into prepared dishes to the extent possible, many of which I then freeze in mass quantities.  However, there are still too many tomatoes to be used all at once, and therefore I have to freeze some of them.  I do this by sealing them in gallon zipper bags with the air sucked out, freezing them one layer at a time so that they'll freeze as quickly as possible. 

After each layer has frozen solid, they can be stacked up like this for efficient storage.

I had really good luck doing this last year when our entire crop consisted of volunteer tomatoes (because I didn't get to the nursery in time to buy new hybrids).  Cherry tomatoes don't need to be blanched before freezing as many other vegetables do - you can just pop them in the freezer and then take them out to cook later in a wide variety of sauces and stews, using them the same way you'd typically use canned tomatoes.

However, cross-bred cherry and grape volunteers tend to be smaller, less sweet, and have tougher skins than their pure hybrid progenitors.  All of those volunteer characteristics make them ideal candidates for freezing.  I'm a bit worried about my efforts to freeze and use these pure hybrids the same way.  They are larger, which means that they took longer to freeze (which is always bad), resulting in some splitting which you can see in the photo above.  Hopefully they will still work acceptably months down the road in prepared dishes.  There's only one way to find out, and that's to go ahead and try, as I have done here.  

OK, so that's the day's tomatoes taken care of.  Onward...

I roast almost all of our Anaheims on the BBQ in preparation for freezing.  

If you roast until the skin is a golden brown and then let cool, it will be easy to peel off the skin and remove the seeds, leaving the flesh.  

This is very labor-intensive work for a relatively small amount of New Mexico-style green chile, but this stuff adds so much taste to prepared dishes that it's well worth the time.  Italian sauces, Mexican dishes, omelettes, you name it - it does wonders for everything it touches.

To my knowledge, New Mexico-style green chile cannot be bought anywhere in greater Houston (someone please email me if I'm mistaken).  If you want it, you have to make it yourself.  

I freeze this stuff in these little leftover containers that are available at any mainstream g-store.  One container works well in a vegetable omelette.  Two or three containers will do wonders for a batch of chili or spaghetti sauce.  

Next, the eggplant.

I combined those two shown in the initial still life picture with two more I'd harvested the day before.  Japanese eggplant needs to be eaten quickly - it is very perishable.  

Incorporating two of our front-yard onions, one Anaheim, and other ingredients specified in this well-rated recipe, I cooked up a batch of spicy eggplant, most of which we ate on the spot and some of which I froze. 

Last but not least, the green peppers I harvested that day.

I actually combined the green peppers, three of the Anaheims, two of our front yard onions, about a pound of our fresh tomatoes, and two pounds of okra that I'd harvested, blanched, and frozen last September into a shrimp and sausage jambalaya which I then proceeded to also freeze.

I do not recommend that okra be frozen for as long as nine months (three or four months would be preferable), particularly if you plan to re-freeze the resulting dish.  However, it's a hardy vegetable and the age of it did not detract significantly from the resulting jambalaya in this case.  

I actually get exhausted at this time of year because I have to be processing a significant number of fruits and vegetables daily, on top of every other life responsibility.  But the upside to this is that, once the toils of June are completed, I really don't have to do much more cooking until September rolls around.

This is what my freezer looks like right now - crammed to the brim.  As long as we don't get a hurricane-related power outage, we are set for months.  

Incidentally, if you keep up with the daily commercial news, you are probably aware of the intensifying dialog on fat vs. carbohydrates within the context of health, obesity, and heart disease.

This iconic juxtaposition of TIME magazine covers shows how beliefs have about-faced in the past 30 years.  This month's TIME article is paywalled, but their tag line reads "For decades, it has been the most vilified nutrient in the American diet.  But new science reveals fat isn't what's hurting our health."

Magazine covers screengrabbed from Facebook, originator unknown.  

This other nonpaywalled recent article presents some of the strongest arguments to date for eating in a style consistent with what I'm showing in all of my garden-, freezer-, and food-related posts.

Screengrabs above and below from that article.  It's worth reading.  

The obvious question then becomes - how the hell is a person supposed to eat like Grandma's generation did?!  We are not living in 1955 - this is 2014!!

I'm showing one answer here.  Look at that freezer photo above.  There is not one teaspoon of refined sugar anywhere in that freezer.  Not one teaspoon of refined white flour.  Not one teaspoon of corn or soybean oil (I use only animal fats and olive oils, and I use both liberally).  In a perfect world, we'd be able to prepare all of our meals fresh from scratch each day, rather than batching and freezing them for future use like this.  I don't know about you, but I don't live in any such perfect world.  I am the mother in a two-working-parent family.  We simply don't have the kind of kitchen time that both of my non-employed Grandmas had at their disposal.  This is our viable alternative, and it works.

Let's close with a bit of a meme-fest, shall we??  Particularly if I'm going to get linkposted, I'd like as many people as possible to enjoy these gems.  

I embedded Finley's TED talk at the end of this post.  

Garden work-out guide.  

My all-time favorite Libertarian. 

Meme attributed to this site.  

Best business casual clothes for normal weight women

Answer:  The obesification of America has left physically fit professional women with drastically diminishing options when it comes to their professional wardrobes, but I'll show one of my favorite workarounds in this post in the hopes of giving my peers a coping strategy.

But first, let me describe the problem fully so that the need for a specific solution becomes more evident.

Thirty years ago when I was just beginning my acquisition of a professional wardrobe, the size difference between the very smallest and the very largest American female clothes shopper probably amounted to about 50 pounds.  I had no trouble finding clothing that fit in those years.

However, with the coming of the Obesity Age, that smallest-to-largest spread increased to, what?  At least 100 and perhaps it could be more accurately stated as 200 pounds!  That had two effects on the market:

1. Manufacturers changed the dimensional ratios of clothing to account for the excess weight now carried by the average woman.
2. The difference between successive sizes increased to account for the greater spread.

Both of those market responses are evident in these example dressing room photos:

No, that's not a store mannequin - that's your friendly neighborhood blogger.  As bad as this photo looks, it was actually much worse to start with - I had to Photoshop it to tone down the grossly revealing effects so that it would be fit for posting.  I'm 50 years old - I can't go around with my rack hanging out like that.  That's ridiculous.  

OK, so it's obviously inappropriately tight across the chest even while fitting well through the torso, waist, arms and shoulders.  But look what happens when I go just one size up:

It's a tent.  It looks like I stole a man-shirt out of my husband's side of the closet.  And this is just one size up.  

I'm sure many readers are muttering, "If that's your biggest problem in life, you have nothing to complain about" and it's true that there are many worse challenges a person could face.

However, I and women like me still have to deal with this.  Those of us in the conservative, educated professions are expected to be appropriately tailored:  traditional shirts with collars and a well-put-together deportment.  I work in a male-dominated profession, so it's even more important that my presentation be unassailable in every way, including appearance - I can't go around looking like either a slob or a Barbie doll caricature, especially as a middle-aged woman.  For the past several years, I've been operating with only three appropriate shirts.  Three business meetings with the same parties and my entire wardrobe is exhausted.  I sometimes have this imaginary dialog in my head whereby one of my clients asks, "What the hell?!  Do we not pay you enough to properly dress yourself??" And I reply, "Yes you do, but there's virtually nothing available for me to buy."

Retailers don't make this process any easier because each and every one of them engages in flagrant deception when it comes to their wares.  They all sell tent-like clothing for the masses, but you can't confirm that until you actually waste your time by walking into the stores and inspecting more closely.

Whether casual or dressy, all of the shirts that they sell are pinned in the back to take up excess fabric.  What from the front  looks like it might fit a normal-weight woman is actually a tent in disguise.   

Yes, this particular mannequin is anorexic.  But even if the mannequin were filled out to the size of a 130 lb. woman, this shirt would still be tent-like.  

Much of the time, the retailers aren't even subtle about this practice.  Some of them use big file binder clips instead of discrete pins.

You can't even find relief if you try to go for a traditional conservative knit instead of a tailored shirt.  They're all tents regardless of style.  

Complicating the shopping challenge further is the fact that the euphemisms have reversed in a rather confusing manner.  Thirty years ago, the word "curvy" was a polite way of saying that a woman had a bit of extra weight on her.  These days it means exactly the opposite - a woman is "curvy" if she is still in possession of a waistline that has not been filled in with excess fat to the point where she becomes straight-bodied.

A waistline that must be accounted for in the fit of the clothing.  I am the 21st century's definition of curvy, apparently.  These are the pants I was wearing in the ill-fitting shirt photos above.  They fit fairly well.  Loose but reasonably proportioned. 

Anyway, keep those annoying perversities in mind if you're a woman facing this predicament while shopping for yourself: what looks at first glance to be made for normal-weight women may actually be made for overweight women, and what looks like it might be referencing overweight women might actually be made for normal-weight women.  Duh.

And now for one of my favorite workarounds:

Go ahead and get the traditional tailored shirt, capitulating to the fact that it's never going to fit through the bust while simultaneously fitting through the ribs, waist, hips, arms, and shoulders, because they just don't make shirts like that any longer.  Those years are gone.

Focus on achieving the proper dimensions through the rib cage, waist, and arms so that the fit looks neat and clean.  But then underlayer the shirt with a coordinating sleeveless so that it looks like you want to leave the front of the tailored shirt open, rather than it being a situation whereby you have to leave the front of the shirt open because it is so ill-fitting.

Make sure that the sleeveless is a silk or a very thin polyester so that it won't add sloppy bulk beneath the tailored outer layer.  The sleeveless should have one color in it that matches the outer shirt so that the combination appears stylistically legitimate.

I'm essentially using a shirt to act more like a light jacket or blazer here.  It's a bit unusual, but I think it works.    

If anyone else has any good workarounds in this same vein, I'd love to hear from you, either through the Comments section below or via centerpointe.blog - at - gmail.  Thanks and good luck.

Coincidentally, about three hours after I wrote this post, someone shared this meme on Facebook.  I had to pass it on.
:-)

Healthier banana muffins

I can't tell you how many calories my recipe has because I have no way of measuring calories, but you can be fairly certain that these muffins have less than the up-to-740 calories (!!) in the offenders on this list of "Top 12 Dangerous Muffins".  

And it's not just muffins that are our present culture's sugar-bomb offenders.  WHAT IN THE SAM HOUSTON IS THE MATTER WITH PEOPLE SUCH THAT THEY'D ACTUALLY PUT CRAP LIKE THESE DRINKS INTO THEIR MOUTHS?!

Screengrabbed from this source.  

Physical depictions of sugar equivalents have become very popular since "The Weight of the Nation" was released by HBO (they were one of the first to make this kind of presentation to people).  Read on to see an analogous sugar-in-a-bag depiction for my muffins.

Screengrabbed from this site.  

Seriously, I don't know what the hell goes through peoples' minds when they consume crap that is so obscenely chock full of refined sugars.  It does not take an aggregate IQ over 85 to know by common sense that sugar-heavy drinks and sugar-heavy muffins are extremely unhealthy.  As in, poison yourself unhealthy.

There are no analogous sugar-bag depictions for muffins, just calorie summaries.  This is the standard ridiculous Google return for 'muffin sugar', although obviously muffins will vary tremendously in calories.  

Big Mac, just for comparison.  Both screengrabbed from Google.  

Anyway, here's my ingredient list and I will follow with step-by-step pics of the preparation process.  All dry measures are heaping measures except for the sugar.  

Ingredients:

• 3.5 large bananas, aged
• About 0.5 cup brown sugar (or less)
• Dollop of molasses (1 tablespoon)
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 0.5 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 0.5 cup Teff flour (if available, else substitute white or wheat)
• About 3 tablespoons of ground flax meal
• 0.3 cup light olive oil
• 0.5 to 0.75 cups ground almonds (depending on taste)

Procedure:  

Start by preheating your oven to 350 degrees.  As it is warming up, combine ingredients thusly:  

Bananas should be mushy but not rotten.  

Combine dry ingredients EXCEPT for brown sugar in a sifter.  That's the heaping cup of whole wheat flour in the background and my favorite other flour, teff, in the foreground.  Teff is no longer available locally - Whole Foods used to carry it but now it must be ordered over the internet.  It ain't cheap, but neither are cancer and diabetes.    

Sift to the extent possible.  Obviously the flax meal won't go through the sifter, but get as much of the material through as possible and then just dump the remainder on top.  

In a separate bowl, combine eggs, olive oil, molasses, and brown sugar.  Mix coarsely - do not homogenize.  

By the way, this is what my brown sugar looked like in the obligatory plastic sack.  This is not for one muffin - this is for TWELVE large muffins. And I used less than depicted here.  Obviously the muffins also get some natural sugars from the bananas, but my point is, this recipe is not overflowing with refined sugars.   

Ah yes, the bananas.  Peel them and mash them on a plate.  They should be nice and soft.  

Mix the bananas in with the other wet ingredients.  I do not like homogeneous banana bread or banana muffins, so I leave mine lumpy.  Not as extremely lumpy as pictured here, but visibly lumpy.  

Fold together the wet and dry ingredients, again, not making the mix too homogeneous.  You MIGHT have to add a couple of tablespoons of water, depending on how dry your mix turns out to be.  If it looks like this above, you should be OK.  

Once you've got it mostly mixed, throw the almonds in and continue to stir.

This is what my almonds looked like.  You'll notice that the volume of my almonds exceeds that of my brown sugar.  Almonds are good for you.  Refined sugar is not.  

Spoon into a muffin tin.  I like to use muffin papers.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes.  

Voila.  

You'll notice that my muffins are a little muffin-toppy-saggy.  I don't have much gluten in this combination of two flours (whole wheat and teff), so they don't rise all puffy like higher-glycemic muffins.  No matter - they are light enough so that you won't notice anything wrong with the texture, and they taste great.  Try 'em.  And for God's sake, stay the hell away from sugary drinks.