The tasty improvised salad roll
This started out to be a food blog interlude, and it's going to veer in that direction very, very soon. But if you're in the market for a very sound book on diet and nutrition, or a diet, I highly recommend The Omega Diet by Artemis P. Simopoulos, M.D., and Jo Robinson. This is very much not the latest fad approach, and the book provides a very understandable, educational discussion of the physiology involved. Of course, the more you understand why you should be doing something, the easier it is to convince yourself to do it. One example may suffice. You know how they always say how the best way to lose weight is a combination of diet and exercise? There is a whole dimension to that I'd never understood, despite being an amazing genius in most other areas. Logically, of course, it makes sense that if you both dieted and exercised you would lose weight faster than if you just did one or the other. But you could just diet more, right, consume some still smaller number of calories, and achieve the same result? But . . .
When you diet without exercising, you can lose one pound of muscle for every three pounds of fat. It's important to hold on to every muscle fiber you have because your resting metabolic rate (the rate you burn calories while resting) is largely determined by your amount of lean muscle. If you have sixty pounds of muscle, for example, you burn about 1,600 calories to fuel your body while at rest. If you lose five pounds of muscle, you will be burning 150 fewer calories a day. Over a years time, this could amount to 54,000 extra calories, which could cause you to regain eighteen of those twenty pounds! If you maintain your body mass, however, those twenty pounds are far less likely to come back.That's a very interesting insight, isn't it? Did you know that? Maybe you did. I, however—a key member of the team that stormed to the Health Occupations Students of America 1985 Oregon "Brain Bowl" Championship with less effort that I'm taking to craft this sentence—did not.
Let's shift gears as promised so I can tell you about the healthy snack I whipped up earlier. Since this is neither my diary nor a food blog, and it's late, I'm not going to give much detail at all here about the provenance of the idea or the ingredients, or the technique (not that there is much).
I improvised a quick Vietnamese-style salad roll with the following in it:
- Fuji apple
- cucumber
- pea vines
- mint
- purple basil
- sriracha (hot sauce)
The wrapper requires a 30-second dip in warm water. For guidance beyond that, consult your favorite Vietnamese cookbook or elsewhere on the web. The whole process was very pretty.
For a dipping sauce, nuoc cham or peanut sauce would be traditional. I just mixed some fish sauce, mirin and sugar, which wasn't bad. Elapsed time for the whole endeavor was about five minutes. Well, maybe ten. But it seemed like only five!
Labels: food blog interlude, what passes for introspection
posted at 1:16 AM
2 Comments:
So, was this a snack, or intended to be a meal?
By hour and size, a snack. If each day includes three meals, a meal.
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