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Sat, 09 Jun 2007

The Shangri-La Diet 3

Been on the diet for about four months. Have lost one notch on the belt. The single most important thing on the diet is to not eat when you're not hungry.

Switched to sugar when I was in India, but I also ate something which disagreed with me that prevented me from digesting anything about about a day. So I don't know how sugar works for me.

posted at: 06:20 | path: /food | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 31 Mar 2007

The Shangri-La Diet 2

Been on the diet for about a month. I don't feel like I'm losing weight very quickly, but of course, that's a benefit, not a feature. Good things happen slowly, bad things happen quickly. I noticed that I've been really hungry the last few days. Then I realized how much bicycling I've been doing. Of course the diet predicts that I'll be more hungry. Eat to maintain setpoint. Exercise and you'll just get hungrier

Going to India for a week. I'll have to switch to hot sugar water, but in the land of tea, that shouldn't be a problem. I'll also try eating as many strange (to me) foods as I can.

posted at: 02:48 | path: /food | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 24 Feb 2007

The Shangri-La Diet

I weigh too much. The weight itself isn't the problem. It's more that the pad of fat in my belly interferes with proper taiji breathing. Have tried various dieting schemes and of course none of them worked over the long-run. Hope springs eternal, of course. What makes the Shangri-La Diet more likely to succeed is that it has a theory for why diets fail based on evoluntionary biology.

So, I'm gonna give it a try. First dose of ELOO last night. Not so hungry for breakfast, but of course that's probably me fooling myself.

posted at: 16:53 | path: /food | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 05 Mar 2005

I've never eaten clam fritters

I was going to make Clam Fritters (from the Joy of Cooking recipe) for my honey, shortly after we moved in together. Everything was going fine. I'd just separated out the egg whites when the whole universe exploded. Well, okay, just our part of it. Fortunately, we were both standing next to the kitchen counter, because the kitchen cabinets fell off the wall, and would have taken a dive for the floor except for our combined presence.

You might speculate that there was no ledger board underneath the cabinets. You would be right. The only things holding them up were a few flimsy screws. When we'd loaded it up with two people's worth of dishes and food, they pulled further and further out until BLAMMO the entire cabinet fell down. Right into the egg whites and bag of flour, knocking the former into the latter, effectively gluing it to the counter. No clam fritters for us; we ate pizza that night.

After the dust had settled, we stuffed soup cans under the cabinets to prevent further movement, and checked each other for bruises. Fine. Checked the brand-new speakers still sitting on the tops of their boxes. Fine. Checked the dishes in the cabinets. Fine. Checked the contents of the dish drainer, which was full of glassware, including my class year graduation glass. Tragedy struck! My precious Burger King Star Wars glass had shattered. Much pretend wailing and gnashing of teeth followed, once we realize that that was the only victim. Seemingly.

The next day the landlord's son came to put all right. He was a klutz, but at least he was prompt about fixing things he'd installed improperly, like the the hot-water tank which drew its hot water from the bottom, the front door which "latched" but could be sprung with a hip check, the interior walls which leaked conversation from one apartment to another, and the ground-fault interrupter circuit breaker which triggered when you turned anything on but didn't stop the flow of electricity. He re-hung the cabinet, this time with a ledger board.

We got ourselves breakfast, but when Heather poured her orange juice, it started pouring onto her feet. She did a double-take, and yes, she was pouring it INTO the glass. Turns out that that glass had been a victim of the dish drainer of destruction. It had two small puncture holes in the bottom, which didn't disturb the integrity of the glass other than its ability to hold fluids.

We've never eaten clam fritters.

posted at: 04:27 | path: /food | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 24 Feb 2005

"We season our garlic with food"

That's a trademark of The Stinking Rose (an ancient term for garlic, for no obvious reason) in San Francisco. I went there in October of 1998, while consulting in SanFran. I'd wanted to go there for years, but never had the opportunity. So when my customer was taking me out to dinner, and we were wandering around North Beach looking for a restaurant (the problem not being a dearth, but a surplus), I hit upon The Stinking Rose.

Well, when we walked into the restaurant, our noses were immediately assailed by the perfume of garlic. Led to our seat past an impossibly long garlic chain (they claim it to be the world's longest), we opened the menus. Surprisingly, a number of the dishes had no garlic in them. Presumably the inescapable smell was sufficient seasoning for them. I located the "40 Clove Garlic Chicken", and ordered it. Our waiter pointed out the minced garlic on the table.

I split a roll and dug in with a spoon. As I heaped the garlic on the roll, my customer (Vijay), who's from India, said, with eyes ever growing wider, "Um, Russell, that's a lot of garlic. That's a LOT of garlic. Russell, I like garlic, and I wouldn't eat that much." Ignoring his sage (or was it garlic?) advice, I dove in. Again and again I hit the minced garlic, roll after roll.

By that point, when the 40 Clove Garlic Chicken arrived, it was disappointingly mild. Tasty, yes, but not the whole garlic experience I was expecting. Of course, cooking the cloves tends to mute their effect.

Had an excellent dinner that couldn't be beat, went home, and got up for the last half-day of the consulting gig. Nobody noticed anything strange about the two of us (well, me more than him but still). Vijay took me to the airport mid-morning, spending nearly an hour in an enclosed car, without saying a word about garlic.

Flew home via Philadelphia to Ottawa. Heather (wife) was waiting up for me, and forcefully noted that I reeked of garlic (remember, this is 24 hours later). In the morning, the children ran into the bedroom to greet me. They stopped mid-step as if they had hit an invisible force field. They said "Daddy, you stink!".

By itself, that's a great story. It gets better, though. A week later, Heather was telling the story to Rebecca, a Friend of the family. Rebecca said "Wait. What airline was he on?" Heather said "USAir". Rebecca said "Friday?" "Yup." "Well, I was on the next leg of that flight, and the whole airplane smelled of garlic!!"

Damn, that was a good meal.

posted at: 05:21 | path: /food | permanent link to this entry

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