fendel

I could swear I've seen bottled unsweetened teas. Definitely powdered unsweetened. Better yet, make triple-strength tea in a saucepan and then dilute with ice. Sweeten as needed. Personally I'd go for a sugar substitute and cut out the sugar carbs. As for soda and teeth... My dentist also says it's bad. They have brochures in the office with some pretty damning pictures of soda-drinkers' teeth. But they say that using a straw helps--the soda bypasses your teeth to some degree that way. And rinsing your mouth with water afterwards, or just drinking some water afterwards, also mitigates the effect of the acids.

Oh, wow. I thought I had bad meals, but from now on I will have to try to appreciate my not-very-good-at-cooking friends. Their saving grace is that they are unambitious cooks. It would not occur to them to make any of the fabulous monstrosities described in this thread--the Kool-Aid chicken a l'orange, the turkey stuffed with cereal. They go for the easy stuff. They throw a ham steak in a pan and warm it up. Canned green beans with a lump of cold butter. Or steamed vegetables. Chicken caesar salads with storebought dressing, bagged pre-cut lettuce, and unseasoned chicken. Or chili from a mix, with a pound of meat for five people. Or a taco kit. Or one of those packaged marinated Hormel pork roasts. The biggest problem over there, though, is the underuse of butter (and it's straight from the fridge), the low-fat milk, the big jug of rancid cooking oil, and the fact that nobody seems to put salt on anything. I had to ask for a salt shaker and then pour some salt into it, since it was empty.

I've really been getting hooked on the heavier AC stuff. The 10" MC2 skillet I bought a while back has been a joy to use. I'm using a gas stove. Guess I'm hoping to avoid the heat diffuser thing; since I never needed one before (even for very low simmers, melting chocolate, etc) I'm reluctant to get another piece of equipment. My kitchen storage space is extremely limited. (Although that doesn't seem to stop me from buying new pieces that I can sit and ogle, like a 12" AC LTD fry pan. ) I'll probably still be using the saucepans regularly for boiling stuff; for stuff that sticks (pudding and the like) I have a couple AC sauciers (1 qt LTD, 2 qt MC2).

If it has a disc bottom, they've camoflaged it pretty well--it looks fully clad (the label said Tri-Ply). But I noticed that stuff stuck to the bottom of the saucepans--not the sides.

Hi Richard -- I did use oil in the pan (always do), but when I've cooked chicken cutlets, they don't cook evenly, and the fond tends to scorch in some spots. I'd turn down the heat, but some of the cutlets invariably aren't browned enough. Haven't tried a heat diffuser... guess I've never had to use one of those. My All-Clad MC2 pan, on the other hand, seems to handle searing/sauteing better.

Well, been using this stuff for almost a month now... The saucepans are fine for boiling things, not so great for stuff that sticks--because, well, stuff sticks. More so than in my All-Clad pans. The saute pan has hot spots, I think. I haven't had much luck with it. I gave in and ordered a 12" All Clad Ltd fry pan (what I really wanted in the first place) and I'll probably just use the Tramontina saute pan occasionally when I need a larger cooking surface.

Holy cow! The first ingredient listed for Whey Low is sucrose. Second is fructose. I'm mystified as to how that could possibly be low-glycemic. I'd love it if it were, but how??? I'm intrigued, but it's hard to believe... As for baking with Splenda (I found this thread late)... ugh. I've had lousy luck. It's excellent in cheesecakes and dismal in brownies and cookies. I made "molten chocolate cakes" with a liquid form of it, and they were like a rubber sponge. Mixed half-and-half with Diabetisweet, though, granular Splenda seems to work ok in the little cakes. Haven't tried the mix in brownies yet. I noted some of my experiences in my blog. Off to go research WheyLow... fendel

Pork rinds and onion dip (not quite the Atkins holy trinity, but somewhere in the neighborhood). Cheddar cheese. Pepperoni.

~~ blush ~~ Hey Stone, the ice cream looks fabulous! Let me know what your guests think. I've been thinking about revising the recipe a little to reduce the vanilla, since 2 tablespoons is a lot. (The last batch I made with 2T had a distinctly brownish color and sticky quality to it, maybe from using the last dregs of some cheap supermarket vanilla.) I had fabulous results using a scant tablespoon of Penzey's double-strength vanilla--all the flavor with less of the alcohol taste. Man, do I sound like a Penzey's spokesperson these days. I just love their stuff. As for the Diabetisweet... some people count polyol (sugar alcohol) carbs, some count them as 0.5g carb for each gram of polyols, some don't count them. I don't. They're not supposed to have an impact on your blood sugar. Best thing to do is probably to watch the scale and see whether they have an effect on you. The recipe makes somewhere between a quart and a quart and a half, depending on how much air gets whipped into the mixture. I find low-carb a lot more pleasant when I can have good ice cream.

About sugar-free chocolate... it's usually sweetened with maltitol and/or other "sugar alcohols" (dunno why they call them that, they're not alcohol per se). Sugar alcohols can cause, um, some intestinal distress for many people for the same reason that they're not considered "impact carbs": most people can't digest them. I've heard that if you can eat SF chocolate without getting gas and other unpleasant effects, it means you're digesting the stuff and should count most or all of the sugar alcohol carbs. And if, like me, you suffer after eating the stuff, then you're not digesting it and needn't count the carbs. Most of the time, the label will break down the carb count into sugars (like if there's lactose from milk powder), fiber, and sugar alcohol -- only the actual sugars are considered "impact carbs." My friend who's diabetic can eat that stuff without it affecting her blood sugar much, although she learned the hard way (as did I) not to eat a whole lot of it at once. Sugar-free Reese's PB cups are particularly tasty but particularly awful that way--the lactitol they use has a pronounced laxative effect.

I wonder if we've read some of the same books--"Overcoming Overeating" was my bible for years. Some of what you've said has a very familiar ring to it. I tend to agree about having a little of something if you crave it, rather than clearing out the 7-11--and rather than eating a bunch of stuff you think you "should" want and then finally giving in and adding the thing you crave on top of it. (An old specialty of mine.) On the other hand, some people find a little of something actually worsens the cravings. I can eat a little dessert or pizza now and then, it seems, without going bonkers; but donuts just kick off every carb craving imaginable. Go figure: I never even used to be that much into donuts. But now they're my kryptonite. Atkins doesn't exactly forbid the kind of carbs you describe--the sprouted wheat bread--except during the first few weeks. As people get further along into the diet, they're supposed to add in more carbs. If you read his book "Atkins for Life" it gives a good picture of how he envisioned the ongoing weight loss and maintenance phases, where you wouldn't eat white bread or sugar but you might have small quantities of whole-grain bread. Everybody thinks of the induction phase when they hear "Atkins," but that's only part of the plan. My own plan is looser--not because I think Atkins is extreme or wrong, but because I don't want to give up some things. I can give up cookies and donuts and that sort of thing; but I have fresh sweet corn, and "lite" bread in small quantities, and sometimes starchy vegetables like winter squash. And actually, all of those things would be permissible on Atkins during the later phases, if you counted the carbs -- the main difference is probably that I'm not keeping a close count most of the time, and that I skipped induction altogether. As for the guy in your restaurant... sometimes I wonder if people are using the old out-of-print editions from before Atkins embraced vegetables. I'll sometimes have all-meat meals at the cafeteria where I work, but only because their salad bar is atrocious and their hot vegetables are canned and overcooked and usually recycled from one day to the next (if someone doesn't buy those forlorn mixed veggies today, they're coming back for an encore performance tomorrow). At home there are always vegetables. I grew up on "meat + 2," so now that's usually meat + veg + salad, hold the potatoes. (Except for the occasional scraped-out baked potato skin, mmm.) Now, a reply to Socrates... You say Atkins isn't sensible in the long run because sooner or later you crave the carbs you can't have. But it sounds like you're equating Atkins with the "induction" phase. Later in the plan (or in my case, throughout it, since I skipped induction) you can have moderate quantities of carbs. And my calorie intake, I should add, is not lower on this plan. I'm eating calorically dense food like butter, cream, nuts, steaks, cheese--in sizable quantities. (A normal steak for me is between 8 and 16 ounces, none of this "deck of cards" baloney.) You should see how much butter our household goes through. I can run through a stick cooking one dinner for two. And yet I'm down 15 pounds. So much for the caloric restriction theory...!

Stone: sorry to hear your cheesecake didn't turn out so well. Maybe adding the "sugar" late was a problem, I don't know; I've made lots of perfectly fine cheesecakes with Splenda. Drinkingchef: I did the "listen to your body" thing for a long time. Something to be said for that, but by the time I got up to 224 pounds and a size 18/20, I decided maybe letting my appetite call all the shots wasn't the best idea. If I had to stay at this weight (207 now), I could accept myself the way I am, of course... but I don't have to stay at this weight. I can eat well, cut out the flour and sugar and rice (etc.) and lose the weight. I should also point out that, like other low-carb dieters posting here, I eat plenty of vegetables--more than I did before I started the diet. Why does this "no vegetables" myth persist, even when so many of us are saying loud and clear that we eat lots of vegetables? And then there's the kidney issue. Funny, if this diet is bad for the kidneys, why are my friend's lab results improving? Her nephrologist--that's a kidney specialist--can't help but observe that her kidneys have gotten better in the year or so she's been doing a low-carb diet. Did your research include reading Atkins' book?

Bet that's why my significant other mistook the Elite bar for regular, sugar-added chocolate. Hmm. Thanks for the tip on that. I wish Splenda would put a liquid version on the market. I suppose they'd either have to dilute it to a ridiculous extent or charge a stunning sum for a tiny bottle of the stuff, but a lot of LC dieters would like to avoid the carbs from the maltodextrin in granular Splenda. I know a source for a sucralose-based liquid "syrup concentrate," but it's a small and little-known coop with a long shipping delay, not as convenient as picking something off the shelf at the supermarket.

I love hearing about doctors who "get it." (Mine is mildly positive about Atkins, but doesn't seem quite convinced enough to prescribe the plan.) About women getting sick on Atkins--do you mean really, verifiably sick, or just panicking about consuming all that fat? So many women are scared to death of eating fat, after being bombarded with the anti-fat messages over the last couple decades. (Lest I sound like I'm bashing women here, I should note that I am a woman.) Most of the men I've known never got all the worked up over the issue of dietary fat. The men I've known on Atkins seem to lose more easily, but I've seen both men and women do well on it.

Dana Carpender's newsletter, Lowcarbezine, discusses Indian food in the Sept 2 issue -- http://www.holdthetoast.com/archive/030902.html

The Splenda you buy in stores has carbs because of the bulking agent (maltodextrin, IIRC). About 24g per cup of granular or per 24 packets. It's unfortunate that they're bulking it up with a high-glycemic substance. Why not a soluble fiber instead... If you see sucralose on a product label, however, there's no carbs from it because they're using pure sucralose. As for At Last, yeah, the more of it I eat, the less enthusiastic I get. "It doesn't give me gas!" is just not a good enough reason to eat something. I've drifted back to the maltitol-based chocolate that tastes more like decent chocolate. I'll be ordering more Elite bars from One-Stop Sugarless Shopwhen the weather cools down more, and one of my local markets now carries Guylian sugar-free chocolate, which is OK. (The Elite stuff has a higher carb count, maybe because it contains milk powder, but it's actually GOOD.) I'll have to see if Z-Carb is available around here. I guess I have some motivation to stick to the sugarless stuff; I need to lose some weight and sugar tends to make me crash rather badly (tired, irritable, foggy after the blood sugar plummets -- reactive hypoglycemia, maybe).

See my post above. The idea that Atkins isn't healthy is an unfortunate myth. Many people find that their cholesterol drops; others find that the total rises slightly but their HDL rises a lot more, making the overall ratio healthier. Triglycerides usually drop dramatically (did I mention my friend's went from 600 down to 150?). I am convinced that saturated fats have been unfairly maligned these past couple decades. Just about everybody thinks "eating cholesterol raises your cholesterol" and "eating fat makes you fat," but both these things are simplistic and inaccurate. Most serum cholesterol is made in the liver, and not in response to eating cholesterol, either. And when people point the finger at junk food for causing obesity, they're often focusing on the wrong component of it. It's not the fat in our burger, it's the potato in our fries--and the trans fats, which are one fat I will agree is bad (it raises LDL and lowers HDL, a double whammy). Gary Taubes makes many interesting points in his widely reprinted "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat" -- among them, the fact that nearly half the fat in a porterhouse steak is "oleic acid, the same healthy fat that's in olive oil." A good proportion of the saturated fat in the steak is stearic acid, which is "at the very least, harmless." The remaining "bad" saturated fat in the steak may raise LDL but also raises HDL, which protects against heart disease. Mmmm... steak.

Neat - thanks for posting that link. I was looking at some Tramontina roasting pans in the store, but the smallest one was just too big for one chicken, IMO. I'm sticking with the Graniteware for roasting, at least for now. I cooked some chicken cutlets in the big saute pan last night. Still not sure what to think of it; it seemed a little unpredictable, but then, I'm not used to cooking in that big a pan. Making a pan sauce for two plates in a 12" saute pan was a little surreal. I had to keep reminding myself to tip the pan, not let the liquid disperse over that vast expanse. The chicken did almost burn--I think I had the heat too high because I wasn't confident that that little gas burner could really heat up this enormous pan.

~rapidly scribbling down notes~ Thanks for the tip! I think I will have to get the cast iron pan and try this. Maybe I can sneak it into the cupboard and avoid the usual "Why do you need more cookware??" reaction from my significant other.

Funny, to me it tastes like sugar. At least, it tastes like what I vaguely remember sugar tasting like. Ever since I was first doing low-carb I've been using Splenda--even when I fell off the wagon in most ways, I stuck to the Splenda (hey, save a few carbs where you can...). I really would like to see some better chocolate made with Splenda and erythritol. Carbolite gets points for effort and innovation, but the At Last bars just aren't as good as some of the other SF chocolate I've had. The problem with a lot of low-carb foods is that they settle for being "not bad, for low-carb." I want stuff that is actually good. I'm contradicting myself--earlier I said sorta positive things about At Last. But my significant other--he who is not really on a low-carb diet but eats whatever sweets are around the house, sugar-free or whatever--reminded me tonight that I had half an Elite bar hidden away in a drawer, wrapped only in its foil inner wrapper. He swore it was "real" chocolate and was surprised when I said it was sugarless. Was. ~snif~ Gotta order more...

I finally sat down and really read through slkinsey's course. It was excellent. Finally I understand the difference between All-Clad's stainless line and their MC2/Ltd lines! As for the cast iron skillet... the link you included was for a pre-seasoned pan. But I thought high heat (like half an hour at 450) was bad for seasoning--or is that not high enough to make a difference? I'm wondering, would a plain old unseasoned pan from the corner hardware store work for this if I didn't bother to season it?

I don't worry about the small amounts of sugar and cornstarch in Chinese food. But then, I'm not exactly the paragon of purity when it comes to this diet, either. If I were concerned, I'd try to find a typical Chinese recipe on the net, cut it down to 2 servings, and figure that's probably roughly equivalent to one good-sized restaurant plate (or 1 serving if your favorite Chinese place goes for smaller servings)... then figure out, how much carbohydrate is in that amount of cornstarch/sugar/veg/etc.

Hmm. Think I can get away with a non-cast-iron pan? (I have an All-Clad 10" fry pan that would probably fit a chicken. Or the cheap little Graniteware thing that I normally use to roast in, although it's thin metal and I'm guessing it wouldn't build up the heat like cast iron...)

Some conditions I can handle. I have a friend with a bit of a seafood phobia who can't eat something with any fish derivatives in it (except tuna, oddly). If I make beef stew I put away the Worcestershire before she arrives. If I make Thai curry, I go light on the fish sauce or skip it altogether. She also has this thing about raw eggs--I made the mistake of serving her homemade chocolate mousse once and muttering to myself about "better beat the egg whites longer next time." She went pale and wordlessly gave the rest of her dish to her friend. I also can't cook mushrooms if she's there, unless they're in a separate dish that she can avoid entirely. She's better at voicing her needs than I am, I think. Once I was over at her place and dinner consisted of mac'n'cheese with tuna in it, and I have this deep aversion to hot tuna. I managed to hold my breath and swallow a few bites. While clearing away dishes afterward, I asked, sheepishly, if next time I could grab some of the mac'n'cheese before the tuna went in... Luckily nobody has asked me for low-fat food. That's where I draw the line. My standard repertoire actually leans more toward low-carb, though I'm willing to make a starch side dish for guests. The last thing I want to do is put out an entree that's all carbs and no fat, because (a) it won't be worth eating and (b) it'll torpedo my own diet without even providing some pleasure in return. No way. If I ever get guests who are into that, we'll just have to go to a restaurant.

I go out. Usually to one of my "cheap and good" haunts like Chipotle (does that make me a bad person?) or this little Vietnamese place that does amazing grilled pork chops.