Eden

So Having heard of the lower GI levels of Kamut® flour, I bought a bag, and threw together a loaf of bread yesterday. It was not bad for whole wheat bread, (it's hard to go wrong with bread fresh from the oven ) but it had a decidedly "health-food" taste to it. here's a pic of the Kamut® flour (top left) as compared to whole wheat (top right)and regular AP white (bottom) I found the kamut® flour a bit grainy, along the lines of semolina or corn meal. So I would use the flour again for say pasta, but the bread is not likely to be part of my regular repertoire when at only slightly higher GI level, I can just go buy Essential Baking's whole wheat Desem loaf, which I really love. A few more photos are over in my album...

My cherry pitter is fine on larger olives, but the itsy bitsy ones like nicoise and arbequinas just fall right through the pit hole... I Just used thyme and bay last night. Sometimes I'll add a bit of rosemary, which I think marries perfectly with lamb, but not much else. The base recipe is very simple, so I try to stick with that principle with my variations. That Chartreuse Lamb sounds fascinating.

bringing this back to the top, since I was thinking about it today, does anyone know of a pitting gadget that works on the tiny olives like nicoise & arbquinas?

Lucy, in your "copious spare time" could you post the recipes from Monday, they look very appealing. (no rush - at the rate I'm going I couldnt possibly get to them till next week at the earliest!) Thanks! I was going to try that lovely looking curried pork roast for dinner, but when I got to the store today they had pitted nicoise olives, so I am making my Olive and Herb Stuffed Lamb instead I adore this dish, but hate pitting tiny olives, so clearly this was a gift from the kitchen gods & not to be refused! When will they make a special pitter for mini-olives? I could find room in my gadget drawer, honest I also picked up a bag of Kamut flour, and if the weatherman was telling the truth it should be cool enough for baking on Saturday, so hopefully Low(ish) GI bread is in my future... I'll let you know what I think of it.

coming in a bit late, but here's an area I've done a little research on... While elizabethan savory dishes are not so much in the finger food department, this is the era when England's love of Sugar exploded, and any feast worth talking about finished up with a "banquet" a course of yummy sweets of diverse types. you could serve whatever you wanted for the main portion of the meal & then have a side table with an artistic array of elizabethan sweets for dessert. For example: Pear Tarts Meringues Carrot Pudding (sweet & rich) Pippin Pudding (pippin apples baked with cream & a spiced stuffing) Peach & Grape Tarts French Bisket (like 'nilla wafers with plum jam) White Leach (we call it Milk Jello but it's really good) Knots or Jumballs (fancifully shaped cookies w/rosewater & mace) Shell Bread (Madeleines) Another Very Good Cake (sack flavored spice cake) French Spinach Pie (sweet and really good just don't tell them it's spinach...) shrewsbury cakes (rosewater flavored shortbread) There are also various savory dishes that could be adapted to finger food servings (not just pies, and beleive me some of those pies are quite tasty) Some possibilities: Elizabethans were particularly fond of their Roast Beef (make little rolls of thin slices & serve with mustard) Buttered Shrimp Pear Puddings (meatball's shaped like pears) chicken & cauliflower in lemon sauce served on toast points. Stewed herbed mushrooms on toastpoints I have recipes for all of the above PM me if you want any of them... edited because I forgot my favorite sweet.

When I was there in Fall of 2003 there was a very nice Creperie (whose name I have of course forgotten) on Rue Joseph de Maistre. Coming up Rue Lepic from Metro Blanche, you take a left onto Rue J. de Maistre (if you went right you'd be on Rue des Abbesses) and it's just a few doors down on your left. If you look at this map I'd say it was it's just below the "e" in Maistre. And if he can't find it then I hear that restaurant Terrasse across the street (in Hotel Terrasse) is good too :->

He says to skip them in general. "avoid drinking diet soda on a regular basis as it maintains sugar addiction" which ones? Mangos, pinapples, grapes, papayas - I think that's it... Is there an indication on whether this is related to weight loss or cardiovascular health (ie. cholesterol)? It seems to me that a book oriented to the US market might come out stronger regarding cardiovascular problems. I'm pretty sure this is just CV related, so if you have good health in the CV department, cheese away

Thanks & thank you for suggesting that soup, it was lovely. Those are my Italian maiollica dishes. I love them, and after looking at the beautiful presentation on all your meals I decided that it was a good day to pull them down Well after my day off from the diet I don't think I'll run out & put hazelnuts to soak tonight, but maybe later this week... This is the first I've heard of this grain, I'm fascinated. (FYI for googlers, it's called Kamut here in the US.) I will have to go see if they have this at any of the local health-nut stores... Perhaps if you follow the menu every other day, or two days on two days off? This was my problem as well... Well that and many of the recipes have fish which I'm allergic to, so I'll pick & choose a couple recipes from the list to join you on over the next week, as there's room in the fridge - we must finish off some of the current leftovers first though!

Today was my day off. I had a long since planned DimSum brunch, with a videos & snacks party afterwards. If I'd waited for a time in my life with no food related social activities, I would never have started, so I figure it's better to follow the diet most of the time & take a day off every 2-3 weeks than not to try at all... I did specifically take a middle eastern snacks tray of mostly montignac-y foods (Non-fat hummous, veggies, whole wheat pita, NF feta, etc.) for the afternoon, but there was just no staying on the diet with Dim-sum... Wow, not eating sugar for 2 weeks makes Chinese food taste REALLY sweet! I must say though I didn't like how my body felt afterwards & am raring to get back on plan in the morning. Can you say Carb-Coma?

apparently Montignac to reccomend that you not drink during meals, but there's nothing aobut that now, just the restrictions on what you drink. he now mentions some higher gi fruits as being marginal besides bananas And he seems to be down on the higher fat cheeses in the latest US book, where-as I gather all cheese is good in the French edition (for a lipids meal)

Details on the Fauxtella experiment please? Well I made the soup & salad for dinner tonight with some notable variations.(last night I had to use up some chicken so I made a chantrelle, chicken and asparagus gratin ) Soup: I used spinach instead of sorrell, onion instead of shallot, and quark instead of the crème fraiche that I had been CERTAIN was in the fridge . Because the quark had no fat proteins for the egg-yolks to bind to, the egg/stock liason never thickened as it should have. I used a little extra yolk & quark to offset this fact, and the soup was plenty thick regardless, and VERY tasty. It reminded me very much of my favorite cream of spinach soup which is thickened with a roux, so verboten right now. Nice to have an alternative. I only made a half batch so as not to have leftovers, and deeply regret that decision - I'll be making this again very soon! I'll have to remember that you reccomend it cold as well. Salad: used asparagus instead of broccolli, jarred red peppers to be lazy, and my regular mustard vinaigrette since Lucy dissed the one in the recipe Perfectly nice, but have to agree that it wasn't very exciting. Dessert: Pears poached in red wine. (Sorry no photo) I could only eat a sliver of a pear. As usual with this diet, after a small entrée & side dish I'm just too full for dessert...

here's another interesting website (from 2002) that talks about the montignac plan in terms of variuos scientific studies that relate to his theories. It's a little behind some of the rule changes that Montignac has included in his latest book, but pretty useful regardless. also here is what seems to be the US Montignac page vs the intl site linked above... WAY preachy in the supposed Q&A section, but it does have a GI level search tool...

We have these too, I call them "free-range" parsley I had all my herbs except the rosemary & lavendar in pots so they would be up where I could reach them more easily to care for them & to harvest, but the parsley made a mad leap for freedom & is now thriving right next to the pot where the parent plant is barely alive... Yet another thing poor Bill has to mow around... We also got a free range strawberry plant this year out of no-where - I'm not arguing, I just hope it fruits! Has anyone here had success growing salsify? (aka oyster root) I adore salsify & you just can't get it in the markets...

I'm fairly positive you're right. here's an ingredient list I found on a "Nutella fan site": note the lack of hydrogenation, and what ARE the "reduced minerals" in the US formula anyway??? excellent ideas. I happen to have several 70%+ chocolate bars lying about from a recent taste testing, some of whom I would be happy to melt down & schmoosh into hazelnut spread. (not the one with black currant essences though! )

FYI Montignac allows a square or two of dark (70% or more) chocolate as an occasional dessert. I have always found most dark chocolates too strong for me, but having now tasted several brands I find that Dagoba Conacado 73% and Lindt excellence 70% are both tasty & not so strong they hurt

well potatoes are verboten regardless in phase 1, but pasta with tomato sauce, and whole wheat toast with strawberry spread both make me happy Re why no fats w/carbs: very low GI carbs can in limited quantities be combined with fats, and a little olive oil/goosefat can be used for sauteeing etc in carb meals, but in general this combo should be avoided because the carbs raise the blood glucose level, which in turn causes the fats to be stored in your body tissues.

I'm in at least for the first meal. My refridgerator is so jam packed right now that I need to make recipes that conform to what's already on hand for a while the moment. Fortunately (with modifications) these first two recipes will work just fine. Got something with chicken or ground lamb in it for tomorrow? I have spinach to sub for the sorrel, and asparagus to sub for the broccoli. I just made a fresh batch of chicken stock so that's a nice coincidence. FYI I have a wonderful recipe for sorrel soup that is very tasty & rather different: it uses celery root to thicken the soup instead of egg, skips the wine & shallots, and adds a bit of nutmeg in with the heavy cream (instead of creme fraiche). Since I'm out of celeriac for the moment I'll go with the Montignac version. Oh and speaking of montignac recipes, I made his basque chicken from "the French Diet" last week & it was very tasty, plus I had leftovers for a week

One unofficial site I found said that hazelnuts were only about 13% of the mixture

Yes there are different details depending on which book you read, but the basic concept of low GI & not combining fats with carbs seems to be consistent. I have the new "French Diet" book & find that in simplifying it for the USA market he also lost a bit of clarity on how the diet works, but having read an earlier version years ago & with Lucy's thread to refer to I find I can figure things out. I also just got a STACK of low GI diet books out of the Library in order to add to my list of foods I know the GI for. Because my edition of Montignac's book was written for mainstream america it doesn't include foods like celeriac in it's GI index, so I'm having to go see what other resources might be able to tell me... It looks like the web system gives you a menu of different items for every single meal which is indeed excessive. I make large batches of various dishes like hummous, and chicken salad, etc. at one time and alternate them around so I don't think I'm eating the same thing every day, but I also don't have to spend ALL my time cooking, which means I can still enjoy making something special for dinner every 2-3 days, which is about my normal schedule. As to how I'm doing, I know I'm eating far less, which has to have a good effect right? I can't tell you in hard#s since I didn't weigh myself before I started, but I'll know when my clothes fit differently... So far other than some unrelated issues with not sleeping I have plenty of energy, and have NO problems with feeling hungry. I have a batch of blueberry frozen yogurt I made sitting in the freezer that I never get too because I'm always too full after my veggies & entree

Just to confirm one positive aspect of this diet, I'm about 1.5 weeks in now & my biggest complaint (when I'm not actively smelling fresh pastries) is that I get full so fast I never get to dessert Seriously, I'm eating maybe a third of what I was previously & I feel full all the time. And I'm eating a high percentage of veggies, which I am not famous for in general... Because I'm just starting I kind of went a little bit insane to make sure Ihad plenty of food in the house that I could eat happily, so my jumbo-sized refridgerator is packed as full as it can hold with various different foods, from really excellent whole wheat bread, to a batch of "cream" of asparagus soup, to a nice little gorgonzola, and a box of "don't touch them, they're MINE" cherries

Sure. Here's a low-carb forum chat page talking about it. Fairly good info scattered among the noise... Here's the official Montignac website with a brief summary of the diet, and of course pushing you to buy the products. Another useful site is this Glycemic Index page if you go to the database link on the left and tell it to show you all the carb foods with a GI under 30, you'll get an idea of the range of carbs you can enjoy on this plan (you can have some higher carb meals too, but those are more restricted...) Note that it also includes a lot of "diet foods" with chemical additives which Mr. Montignac warns you to avoid. Not an issue for me, I try to avoid super chemically fake foods in general (except for cheetoh's of course ) I also read the chapter on montignac from "the man who ate everything", and of course Lucy's blog... If you're hesitant to shell out the $20 for a diet book you're not sure is right for you, see if you can get a copy from a local library to flip through.

Merci Lucy, I just didn't want to horn in on your space...

Well I made a very rough draft version last night, not trying to actually arrive at the recipe, but get an idea of what the challenges ahead would be: I got about 1/3 cup of fresh ground almond butter at the Whole Foods, this comes out fairly grainy, not smooth, because it's all nuts & nothing but the nuts. To that I simply added about 1 tbsp powdered cocoa, and maybe 1/2 tsp of fructose crystals. The result was a tasty goo, but the texture was all wrong, and it needed more sweetness to bring out the chocolate. I know with the real deal there are a lot of oils added to smooth out the texture, and I can certainly add some oil in round 2 to approximate that - almond oil perhaps? Hazelnut oil is harder to come by & pricier (plus I already have almond oil in the house.) I will definitely need to run it through the food processor a whole lot to get a smoother texture. I wonder if there's anything else I can do to make this creamier? I'll also need to add the vanilla which I forgot. (or perhaps vanillin since I won't be cooking this?) I'm thinking also a pinch of salt to bring out the various flavors. And of course I'll use actual hazelnuts. I did the almond draft on a whim after seeing the almond grinding machine in the store. In comparison here are the ingredients for US nutella per their website: Sugar, peanut oil, hazelnuts, cocoa, skim milk, reduced minerals, whey, partially hydrogenated peanut oil, soy lecithine: an emulsifier, vanillin: an artificial flavor. note that hazelnuts & cocoa aren't the first two ingredients

Lucy, thank you for the inspiration to get started with this diet myself. I've started a seperate thread here for general discussion of the Montignac method so as not to hijack your thread, which I hope will continue to focus on your experiences and your beautiful photos!

In order not to hijack bleudauvergne's thread on her experiences with this diet, I figured it was time to start a seperate discussion. After doing a fair bit of reading, including the thread above, I started the montignac diet about a week ago. I figured that it was the most likely to allow me to still enjoy cooking and eating, as well as make sure I maintained a healthy balance of many different types of foods. (my problem with the standard Low-carb programs is that I beleive many carbs are healthful and necessary to a balanced diet.) So is anyone else out there is attempting this diet? Making food restrictions work with a "foodie" lifestyle can be quite a challenge, so I'd love to hear how other people are coping with this.