The Ultimate Carb Buster

Before the Adkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, and the Zone Diet, my grandfather discovered the ultimate low carb diet.  He had Diabetes and was supposed to avoid sugar and simple carbohydrates.  In some ways, he followed the standard protocol.  He avoided high carb foods like bread, watermelon and potatoes.  He drank Diet Dr. Pepper instead of regular Dr. Pepper.  And he never ate dessert — at least not at the table.

Skipping dessert at the table is the key to my grandfather’s Carb Busting diet.  My grandfather never ate dessert at the table.  This is no small feat when the dessert in question is pecan pie.  He loved pecan pie and I don’t think I can remember a holiday gathering that didn’t include at least one.

Someone would slice the pie and ask who wanted a slice.  My grandfather would remind us that he couldn’t eat it and pass the slices along.  Then, while everyone else was wallowing in the misery of overindulgence, my grandfather would sneak into the kitchen and eat pie over the kitchen sink. This happened every holiday and not once did my grandfather have issues with his blood sugar shooting through the roof.  The obvious conclusion is that there are no carbs in pecan pie as long as you eat it over the sink.  I imagine the same is true for cheesecake.

Addicted: Take Two

Addicted:  Take Two

In retrospect, I realize that my plunge into addiction to dehydrating started as a child.  I remember seeing a package of sundried tomatoes in the store.  I wanted to try them but my mother refused to buy them, no doubt because they cost a fortune.  That only made me want them more.  She also refused to buy chocolate covered ants, but somehow, being blocked from eating ants didn’t seem as frustrating.

I was intrigued by the idea of drying tomatoes in the sun.  We lived in the Southern most part of Texas and it got hot in the summers.  We also had a had a tin roofed barn and I figured that if it was hot just walking around, the tin roof got even hotter – hot enough to make my own sundried tomatoes.

I made a “sundrying” tray by nailing chicken wire to a wooden frame.  I cut some tomatoes in half and put them on the tray.  I threw a few lemon, orange and grapefruit slices on the tray for good measure and put the tray up on the roof of the barn and waited.

The experiment didn’t work so well.  Nothing really dried.  I hadn’t calculated the effect of humidity on my efforts and summers in South Texas are not just hot, they are humid.  Second, the fruit attracted bugs.  Even the thought of insects crawling on my fruit made them unappealing.  Still, these early efforts must have simmered in my system, waiting for an effort to bloom into a full blown obsession.

Addicted

I never thought it would happen to me. It never even occurred to me that a person could get addicted to dehydrating. I was oblivious to the tell tale signs of an addiction when I saw my neighbors’ eyes gleam as they pulled out rolls of dehydrated tomato paste to put in the soup we were making. They said they’d gotten the dehydrator to make meal pouches they could fix when they were back packing. At the time, I thought they were just excited to have a use for the leftovers. I missed the significance of the fact that they had little jars of dehydrated vegetables and herbs stacked in rows on their kitchen counter.

And then Marie left her husband. She was in trying to rebuild her life without him. She’d moved, planted a garden and gotten a dog. She’d also bought a food dehydrator. She’s actually the one who gave me the first glimpse of dehydrating in action. She’d invited my partner and me over to see her new bachelorette pad. During kitchen segment of the tour or her house, she showed us package after package of fruits and vegetables she’d dehydrated. We thought she’d just gotten a little carried away with a new hobby, like people do when they take up knitting or photography. That was until we got to the living room.

Instead of the usual chips, dip and salsa appetizer plate, she had a platter full of dehydrated fruit and another of dehydrated vegetables. I didn’t quite know what to say, so I asked her about dehydrating. Her eyes gleamed like my neighbors’ had when they pulled out the rolls of tomato paste. She all but dragged me into the kitchen to see her dehydrator in action, and the stock pile of what she was going to dehydrate next. The fact that she already had enough dehydrated produce to feed a small army didn’t seem to faze her. In that moment, I knew she’d crossed the line from recreational dehydrating to dehydration addiction.

Ten years passed before I got a dehydrator of my own. We had a garden. The cherry and grape tomatoes were all ripening at once and I couldn’t bear to see them rot. And someone told me how to make flax seed crackers in a dehydrator. That sealed it. I found a dehydrator on Amazon.com that was cheap and got good reviews. Within a week, I was dehydrating tomatoes and making flax seed crackers. Then, I put it to use on our surplus of zucchini, peppers, kale, raspberries, blueberries, and peaches. I played with marinades and seasonings. Soon, just about anything in the kitchen was open game: snow peas, bananas, garlic, onions, eggplant. Within a month, I was dehydrating 24/7, just like Marie! My father started joking that one day Jen would disappear and he’d find me, eyes gleaming, hovered over the dehydrator, looking at a tiny, shriveled version of Jen. This is when I knew…. I’d gotten hooked.

How To Get Rid of Unwanted Dinner Guests and Other Pests

I grew up in the country, so not many people just “dropped by” my house, unannounced.  Even when gas was less than a dollar a gallon, people called before they made the drive.  When people did drop by out of the blue, it was a big deal.   When I moved into my first house, I believed the same rules applied even though I lived in town and relatively close to everyone I knew.  So when Steve, my boyfriend at the time, started showing up unannounced almost every night at dinner time, I thought, “Yea!  He’s falling for me.”  If the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, I was determined to make sure that hook got set.

My focus on winning Steve’s heart made me oblivious to the fact that he always showed up empty handed and never helped cook or wash up.  It was actually my roommate, Terrie, who pointed out this pattern.  Looking at things from this perspective, my “Yea!” shifted to an “Ugh.”

Confrontation would have been the obvious step but I was a Southern woman and we simply did not do such things.  So I took the subtle approach.  I encouraged him to join me in the kitchen and handed him knives and things to cut.  He just started showing up a little later or brought paper work to do while I cooked.  I told him about the rule my family had when I was growing up:  “He who cooks the fishes doesn’t have to wash the dishes.”  He said it was a good thing I never cooked fish.  I even started making things the average person would have shunned like liver and salsa tacos and stir fried squid.  Turns out, salsa goes pretty well with liver and stir fried squid is actually good.

It was Terrie who figured out how to drive him away from our table.  Her family had a ranch and one night at dinner she told us about helping to castrate the calves.  I grew up on a farm so this seemed like normal meal time conversation to me.  For Steve, not so much.  He went pale.  This only enticed her to be more graphic. When she figured out that she could make him get queasy, she began sprinkling tales from the lab (she was a biology major) into every dinner conversation.  Still, queasy or not, Steve kept dropping by.

It was the mouse that finally did it.

Terrie had a pet snake, Em, that she kept in a glass cage in the living room. One night Terrie thought it would be cool to feed Em while we were eating dinner.  She dropped a mouse into Em’s cage and we sat transfixed as Em “hunted it down” (no big feat in a small cage), wrapped her mouth around it and swallowed it.  You could actually see the lump that had been the mouse move down her body, shrinking as it moved along.  Steve turned white and put his fork down.  I can’t remember if he finished eating or not, but he did stop dropping by unannounced and even took me out to eat a few times.

Boyfriends aren’t the only thing that snakes can get rid of.

When Terrie and I first moved in together, someone gave her a pair of finches.  Where Em was a quiet, non-intrusive pet, the finches were loud, obnoxious, and messy.  They squabbled  at each other all the time.  Living with them was like living with an old married couple that had grown to hate each other.  The female seemed to nag at the male and the male retaliated by pecking her.  They were miserable to be around.  I fantasized about setting them free.

And then one day, I came home to silence!  The female finch was missing and the male sat eerily still on his perch.  Em lounged in her cage looking a little bloated.  Terrie never admitted that she’d committed “finchiside” but when the male finch disappeared, I saw a feather in Em’s cage.  In retrospect, I guess it’s a good thing Terrie and I got along.

Burn Baby Burn

Eat an entire large pizza.  Get a horrific stomach ache.  Sleep sitting up on the couch.  Forswear pizza.  Forget about the stomach ache.  Repeat. I used to laugh at a friend of mine who regularly spun in this cycle of self-inflicted consumption injuries.  He didn’t have any sort of eating disorder so this wasn’t a result of bingeing.  He was just in denial that finishing those last three or four slices of pizza would be a problem.   I chalked it up to one of those absent-minded professor guy things.   According to Albert Einstein, another one of those absent-minded professor guys, this behavior, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” is the definition of insanity.

Given the tenuous grip I held on sanity at the time (I was in graduate school and wondered about my sanity on a daily basis), I took great comfort in the thought that at least I’d never taken a spin on the “eat, pain, abstain, try it again” cycle.  That was until a bottle of Dave’s Insanity Sauce found its way into my kitchen.

My own fall into consumption insanity started innocently enough.  I saw “The Original Hottest Sauce in the Universe!” on the label, and even though the heatometer said, “insane+,” I thought, “How hot can it be?”  So I splashed a couple of drops into my pesto.  Or at least that’s what I meant to do.  Turns out, Dave’s Insanity Sauce is more like a paste than it is a liquid.  So the two “drops” that landed in my pesto were about a quarter of a teaspoon each.  It occurred to me that this might make my pesto a little hot, but I stirred it in anyway.  Turns out, a little dab of Dave’s Insanity Sauce goes a long way.  One bite of pesto with half a teaspoon of insanity sauce set my mouth on fire.  The sensible thing to do would be to toss the pesto and start over, there’s nothing sensible about insanity.  My ego clocked in and I was determined to beat the heat, even if it meant that my eyes got a little watery.

The funny thing about egos is that they are totally focused on right now.  Probable consequences are irrelevant because they happen later.  Unfortunately, just because egos find something else to focus on doesn’t prevent the consequences.  Eating half a teaspoon of Dave’s Insanity Sauce generates consequences.  Hot sauce aficionados have a saying, “you know it’s hot if it burns twice.”   Let’s just say that by this definition, Dave’s Insanity Sauce is HOT!

You’d think a night of intestinal agony would have burned the desire to beat the heat out of my system, but it didn’t.  My ego went on a mission.  I was going to conquer Dave’s Insanity Sauce or die trying.  First, I tried a lighter touch when shaking the bottle.  A few fiery concoctions later, I gave up trying to get Dave’s to come out in drops rather than blops.  Next I tried dipping the sauce out with the tip of a skinny knife.  This might have worked if I could have gotten the sauce off the knife without using my fingers (which I then licked).  Finally, I tried diluting the sauce with rice wine vinegar.  This meant that I had to keep using it to make room for more vinegar.  (A reasonable person might ask, “Why not just dump some sauce out?”  Then again, a reasonable person would have probably not bought something with, “The Original Hottest Sauce in the Universe!” on the bottle.  For the type of person who would buy something with that on the label, it would be heretical to dump out the sauce.)  Finally, after weeks of putting a little Dave’s Insanity Sauce in everything from beer (if Crazy Ed made Cave Creek Chile beer, why not make my own Insanity Beer?) to salad dressing, to marmalade, I came to a place of acceptance.  Even diluted, Dave’s Insanity Sauce is still insanely hot.

I’d like to say that I have gotten off the “Add Dave’s Insanity Sauce.  Burn.  Forget.  Repeat” spin cycle, but the truth is, I haven’t.  The bottle still taunts me from its perch on the refrigerator door.  And sometimes (say like yesterday) my ego gets the better of me and I’m burning again.  I guess it’s a good thing I don’t eat pizza!

Blender Drinks

Jose Cuervo, you are a friend of mine.  I like to drink you with a little salt and lime. Shelly West

When I was in college, all the best blender drinks started with tequila.  Give me a bottle of tequila, a bag of ice, some limeade and little bit of triple sec and dash of salt and I’ll give you a concoction fit for Jimmy Buffet.  Unfortunately, back then, we usually ran out of limeade and/or tequila before we ran out of ice, so I usually had to improvise.  Here of some improvisational blender drinks you won’t find in any bartender’s guide.  For each recipe, start with a blender full of ice and add the rest of the ingredients.

Lemon Drop Light Margarita – Two packs of Chrystal Light Lemonade, 6 ounces of tequila* and a shot of triple sec.

Tequila Sunshine – a 6 ounce can of frozen orange juice, 6 ounces of tequila, water if you need it to get the blender run, and if you’ve got it, grenadine syrup or some sort of red juice or punch.  The plus of this particular concoction is that we could usually get orange juice and some sort of red juice in the vending machines in the dorm.

Gatorbites – 12 ounces of Gatorade (lemon lime is best but if you’re mixing with Gatorade you’ve probably already stepped over the line so be brave and try whatever you have), 6 ounces of tequila and a little salt.

Purple Poison – 2 packages of grape Chrystal Light, 6 ounces of Tequila, a little bit of water.  This one also works with 6 ounces of whiskey with no notable decrease in taste.  Either way, this is probably not the recipe to start with.  I think it goes down much better at the end of the evening.

These are definitely party drinks.  Most of the fun is scrounging through the pantries together looking for ingredients and laughing at the interesting results.  Watching people howl when they get brain freeze is pretty fun as well.  Still, I don’t recommend them.

Here’s the best basic frozen margarita recipe:  One 6 ounce can of frozen limeade, 6 ounces of tequila (one limeade can full)  and 3 ounces (half a limeade can) of triple sec.  Add ice and, if necessary, a little water and blend away.  If you like salt, dip your glass in a bowl of lime juice and then in a bowl of margarita or sea salt.

*These recipes all start with 6 ounces of tequila.  If you want to be able to walk, cut the tequila in half.

Just Add Wine

The kind of cooking I love to do is …. you look in the fridge and say, “oh look, there’s that, there’s that, and there’s that.  What can I do with them?”  I find restriction kind of inspiring in a way.  I think sometimes when you have complete freedom, you can have whatever you want, you can afford whatever you want, you don’t come up with something as good.”  (Diana Henry, British food writer and author of Plenty speaking to Lynne Rosetto Kasper on A Splendid Table.

Inspiring.  Well, that’s one way to frame the scavenger’s approach to cooking.  It works pretty well for the first few days after a visit to the grocery store, when the lettuce and peppers and are still fresh and the carrots still have their turgor pressure.  It can get a little scary when when the fresh produce is either gone or looks like the creature from deep lagoon and all that remains are a few potatoes, a box of pasta, and things that come in cans and jars.

This is when you get no holds barred creativity in the kitchen.  Say you look in the fridge and you find eggs.  You look in the pantry and you find an onion, a potato, and a can of enchilada sauce.  Assuming you’ve got some sort of oil, you’ve got it made!   Saute the onion and potato.  While that’s still cooking, beat the eggs and dump them in on top of the potato and onion and then mix in the enchilada sauce.  You have just made eggs to die for.  But what happens when all you find that looks like a vegetable is a jar of Kim Chee at the back of the refrigerator.  If you’ve got tuna, you’re in luck!  Dole out a cup or so of Kim Chee, drain the tuna, stir it in with the Kim Chee and you’ve got a meal in less than five minutes.  Add a few corn chips and it’s almost heaven.  Though it occurs to me that perhaps a better word for it might be desperation.

This said, the real question may not be, “What can you come up with?” but “Can you eat it?”

Three simple rules will help you fit most of your scavenger concoctions into the “edible column.”  First, don’t cook until you get hungry.  If you are hungry enough, you can eat almost anything.  Second, if it’s not good, add wine.  You’d be amazed at what a little wine can do to elevate a dish.  Finally, if you added wine and it’s still not good, drink wine.  If you drink enough wine, you won’t care what it tastes like.

These rules work.  My first roommate and I followed them religiously and there was only one meal we cooked that got declared “inedible.”  As I recall it was a pasta sauce made from tomato paste, onions, canned tuna and frozen corn.  Even then it wasn’t a total wash.  Her boyfriend finished up the leftovers.  I guess compared to dorm food, it wasn’t so bad.