Dana's blog

Remember that ham I roasted for my birthday party? It didn't get completely eaten at the party. I mean, it was nearly seventeen pounds to start with, and there was a lot of other food. We ate leftover ham for a few days -- sliced, scrambled in eggs, whatever. Finally we were down to a meaty ham bone. So I did the traditional thing: I made soup.

Somebody brought a cold germ to my birthday party, so I've been honking and snorking for a week. Seemed time to talk about cold care!

Summer’s gone, autumn’s here, the leaves are changing. You know what that means. Right,
the cold and flu season is upon us. Indeed, as I write this I have a scratchy throat, a snorky nose,
and a tight chest. Ugh.

So I thought it would be timely to fill you in on low carb cold care. Low carb cold care? Yep.
There actually are a few potential pitfalls, let me help you skirt them.

Hey, I turned fifty last weekend! Conveniently, my birthday fell on a Saturday; a party was mandatory. So what did I serve at my birthday party?

* Ham. I had a ham in the garage fridge; I'd bought it on sale and stashed it against some future mob-feeding occasion. So I hauled it out and roasted it. I even glazed it, even though that added a few carbs to the outside -- I simmered some Sucanat with apple cider and cloves, and added a good whack of mustard.

YIKES! At my age the scariest thing about Halloween is how it sneaks up on me! It's just five days away!

So here's a slightly edited reprint of an article I wrote back in the early days of Lowcarbezine!.

Don't Look Now!

It's almost upon you! It's about to LEAP on you! Run! RUUUUUN!

It's Halloween!!!

Yep, in just five days, we celebrate the most primal, bone-deep
Sugar Festival known to Western Civilization. Is there any holiday that
is more totally, utterly associated with CANDY in the American mind?

When I was a kid, I ate a lot of noodles -- generally Butoni wagon-wheels -- with Ragu's original "Old World Style" jarred spaghetti sauce and the cheap grated Parmesan out of the green shaker. Loved it. Had it for lunch at least once a week!

I gots a new dog! He is a puggy, and his name is Dexter. He's almost three, and was being rehomed because he lived in the city, and loves to run. His family had already had one pug hit by a car, and were scared for him.

I still miss Nick something awful, but Dexter is a sweet, cuddly, licky, charming boy.

That Nice Boy I Married got up today to discover that Nick the Pug had died overnight. He had been doing so well since his last surgery, full of energy, just tearing around the place. Yesterday he asked to go out and run around the yard at least a dozen times.

About the new book, and about Dr. Rob's book: Dr. Rob doesn't use the decimal point in glycemic indices, so his glycemic loads come out 100 times the ones I'm used to. So don't freak out when you read his book, and my book with him, 'kay?

My author copies of The Glycemic Load Diet Cookbook are here! And they look great. They'll be in the bookstores and at Amazon at the end of the month.

So having explained the difference between the glycemic index and the glycemic load recently, let me explain The Glycemic Load Diet.

Of all my recipes, the one I've published the most times is Dana's No-Sugar Ketchup, which appeared in... oh, goodness, 500 Low-Carb Recipes, 500 More Low-Carb Recipes, 15 Minute Low-Carb Recipes,The Low-Carb Barbecue Book, 200 Low-Carb Slow-Cooker Recipes, and quite possibly another I'm not thinking of.

Which makes it a tad embarrassing to admit that I've improved it. I mean, I've put the old version in all those books, and now with one simple change I've really made the recipe noticeably better. It's a d'oh! moment, that's for sure.

The original goes like this...

My pal Jimmy Moore, of Livin' La Vida Low Carb, wrote to me:

I wrote a blog post today about whether a zero-carb diet for a pregnant woman is advisable to instigate a conversation and somehow it turned into a debate about why I suddenly believe in zero-carb instead of Atkins. I'm not sure how people made that leap, but I'm prepared to remedy it by doing a follow-up post asking the question, "Is a zero-carb diet healthy or not?" In it I will express what I believe about a no-carb diet--namely that it is deficient of essential nutrients, variety, and healthy ingredients humans need.

I'd like to get YOUR reaction to that question for inclusion in the blog post. Anything you send to me will be quoted in the column, so please feel free to share your specific answer to the question "Is a zero-carb diet healthy or not?" THANKS!

Is a zero-carb diet healthy?

The Pillsbury Toaster Strudel ad, where they show how their nasty, sugary sugar-and-flour blob comes with icing you squeeze on out of a packet, and therefore is much, much better than Pop Tarts? The tag line is "The one kids want to eat!"

Um... have kids been refusing to eat Pop Tarts? Which kids? Where?

And why, oh, why, does anyone want to make crappy, overpriced, health-destroying junk food more attractive to children? Shouldn't the tag line be "Because you want your children to be even fatter!"?

Ads for diet foods, especially Special K, forward the notion that a good "diet" breakfast should be 250 calories or less. I couldn't disagree more; breakfast is quite genuinely the most important meal of the day. Why shouldn't it supply a third of your daily fuel, or even more?

I have found that a big breakfast, high in protein and, yes, fat, results in my eating far less during the course of the day than a light breakfast would. Accordingly, it's a rare day I have less than three fried eggs or a two-egg omelet with some sort of yummy filling.

What with the economy doing its best impression of the Titanic, the question of the cost of real, nutritious food becomes more pressing every day. So I thought I'd share my latest score with you -- because you might just be able to duplicate it.

It is an inevitable consequence of becoming a big geek about some subject that, when marginally knowledgeable people write/speak about your area of interest, they make errors which have the mental effect of Freddy Kruger's hand running down a blackboard. For me it is the misuse of nutrition terminology.