moult liquor

Real Food - Fail

Total weekend Real-Food experiment fail. Binged on burgers and Chicken Tikka Masala. Not eating on the road at all is tough.

Best. Video. Ever.

From the cover of a work-related publication I got today.

“Abstinence and withdrawal should be DEFENSE policy and not SEX EDUCATION policy.”

Real food - Eating out

Went to the unassuming Carnitas with @jonnyrashid today. You can get rice, beans, plantains, chicken and salad for $5 at lunchtime. But how can I have any idea what’s actually in it and what they gooped up the beans with? Eating out = impossible to know. Unless you get salad, ask them to hold the dressing and anything that’s not straight from a plant. Which brings me to Pollan’s other other rule of thumb, don’t eat anything your grandparents wouldn’t recognize as food (today’s meal would be a thumbs up). I’m still going to try the 5 ingredient rule through the end of the month, but for eating out, this is probably a better rule for real life.

Real food - Bread

I went grocery shopping yesterday. I need bread to make sandwiches to bring to work. There were hundreds of different types of bread. I wish I had taken a picture of the aisle. I checked the labels of every single one to see if any had 5 or less ingredients. Not even close. Here’s the label for bagels we have lying around.

So, I pulled out the bread machine and made a loaf.

Ingredients:

-Water

-Brown Sugar

-Salt

-Whole Wheat Flour

-Yeast

Real food.

Shout out to Wes for calling me up today to talk food revolution.

K.A.A.L. - June 2011

My goal for June is going to make May look easy. You know Michael Pollan, the guy who wrote Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and Food Rules, right? He talks about how we’ve come to accept eating food with 30 ingredients (chemicals, preservatives, etc) we’ve never heard of. He recommends only eating food that your grandparents would recognize, that way you know it’s actually real food. Another rule of thumb is to only eat food with less then 5 ingredients on the nutrition label.

So I’m going to do it. KAAL Goal for June is: Only eat food with less than 5 ingredients on the label.

A couple house rules that I’m inventing:

-All fruits and veggies combine to count as one ingredient. I shouldn’t be banned from eating a stirfry with 8 different types of vegetables.

-Beer is allowed. I don’t care. I’ll try to research this month into the ingredient lists for my favorite beers to see what there is to see, but it’s outside of the rules.

I plan on being forced to learn a lot. I also expect this to be really hard. Going out from now on will be all salads I guess, since it’s the only thing I can know for sure what’s in it. I’ll keep you posted.

Check out the ingredient list and you’ll know what I’m saying:

GOOD

BAD

K.A.A.L. Goal - May 2011

So for May 2011 my goal was to bike 250 miles. I used the super old, but still working Gmaps Pedometer to figure out my mileage then geeked out putting it into dailymile.com every night. Final result: 261 miles, including a trip to De Lorenzo’s Tomato Pies in Trenton, NJ just because. I also got in a 27-mile backpacking trip to Old Loggers Path in Central PA.

So, blazing success. I feel like I hardly biked more than I usually do. I’m going to keep tracking the miles but not be deliberate about it and see what I end up with.

Photo: bike trail at Pennypack Park in NE Philly