Down with Fake Food!

I have always loved cooking, but in the last year or so, it's become a much more serious hobby. Judson and I are cooking as much as we can with local ingredients from the Farmer's Market. This makes us hippies in one sense and annoying trendy people in another, but it's really working for us. We have discovered (or rediscovered) foods that we probably wouldn't have tried otherwise, including: beets, rabbit, daikon, kohlrabi, broccoli raab, chard, celeriac.

Since May, I've been losing weight. I just decided one day that I had really gotten too chubby. I'm not on a diet; I just count calories. I aim for a deficit of 750 calories per day: that's supposed to translate to 1.5 lb per week. I use Calorie Count Online, a free online tool to estimate how many calories I've burned and how many I've eaten. I like this approach. There's no voodoo, no guessing, and it's effective. Plus, I can eat whatever I want. I suppose the Weight Watchers points system attains the same end result, but simply watching calories does not involve strange formulas. Plus, I don't want to feel guilty for the occasional 480-calorie breakfast of a large chocolate-chip muffin with coffee instead of Cheerios, milk, coffee, and fruit (clocking in with roughly the same calories).

Anyhow, at some point, I thought it'd be a good idea to sign up for the Hungry Girl daily email. Now, I'm stuck in a vicious cycle, reading the e-mails every weekday and then feeling stabby for the next 20 minutes. I like the idea behind Hungry Girl... It seems to be all about finding ways to enjoy the foods you love while still losing weight. But the fine details are a little disturbing. Dinner recipes have a constant theme of coating in crushed Fiber One cereal and baking for a fried-dish substitute. Desserts inevitably involve Egg Beaters and flavored coffee creamer powders. Apparently, noodles made out of tofu are tasty. Powdered peanut butter that you reconstitute with water is supposedly just as good as the real thing but only has half the calories. It's okay to eat an Olive Garden dinner that's low in calories but somehow contains 2,700 mg of sodium (note: that is more than a teaspoon--a palmful--of salt in a dish for one person). People are perfectly happy to trade in a real margarita for one made with Crystal Light lemonade and Sierra Mist Free. I have to admit that I'd find it a bit disturbing if my margarita was fizzy.

Don't we deserve better?

I can't help but feel that all these fake foods and far-reaching substitutes either numb the taste buds or contribute to the huge number of failed diets every year. If you want some creme brulee, have REAL creme brulee--just don't eat too much of it, and don't eat it too often. Teach yourself how to cook. You can save yourself hundreds of calories by learning how to like vegetables. And you know the secret to tasty vegetables? FAT and salt (and/or vinegar). You'd be amazed how good vegetables become when you add a small amount (1 tsp per person) of olive oil or butter to them. And proper seasoning is key. Vegetables are practically calorie-free. Eat more of them and less pasta and meat, and you're well on your way to a decent calorie deficit for the day.

Sure, cooking is often inconvenient. It can be time consuming. You generally have to plan ahead. And for many people, it's downright scary. But you know what? The worst that happens is that you throw it all out and order a pizza or get subs or cook eggs and toast.

I think cooking is one of those things that grows on you. To be a good cook, you have to practice cooking. To enjoy cooking, you have to practice cooking. As you understand where your food comes from and what you can do to bring out its flavors, you will see why low-cal, sugar-free, fat-free, non-dairy creamer powder does not belong in your coffee, much less in your creme brulee.

Try to stop using "diet food" and other processed foods as crutches. Go to your kitchen and cook yourself something delicious. You deserve it.

I'm issuing a challenge. Make something that uses one of the following and write a comment about how it turned out: cabbage, dried apricots, kale, spinach, winter squash, celeriac (celery root), sweet potatoes. You get bonus points if you use two or more of them.