November 2, 2004

• Food Issues

  Oh, boy, do I have food issues!  I suppose it started when I was a
  baby.  My mother weaned me from her breast with some granulated
  white sugar tied up in a bit of rag.  The formula that then went
  into my baby bottles was canned evaporated milk and corn syrup. 
  As I grew up, sweets were what people used to reward me when I was
  good, comfort me when I was hurt, to celebrate my birthdays and
  holidays, and to bribe me if I was slow to comply.

  I had a relatively easy time kicking barbiturates and
  amphetamines.  They were acknowledged to be dangerous and the
  latter had to be obtained at great cost and risk of incarceration, from
  street dealers or in even riskier chemistry setups.  When I
  decided I needed to kick sugar, back in the mid-1970s, I had no
  external support system.  I still get some incredulous responses
  from people when I talk about how dangerous sugar is.  The stuff
  was, and is, everywhere, and I could
  smell a bakery on a back street half a mile away as I went by on the
  highway with my car windows closed.  I quit and then relapsed
  again and again.

  It wasn’t just sugar.  It was also vanilla, cinnamon and
  chocolate.  Gimme a fresh warm chocolate chip cinnamon roll and a
  scoop of vanilla ice cream to cool and sweeten my coffee, and I’d be
  back for more just as soon as I’d stuffed it all into my face.  I
  kid you not!  What we call “Alaska cinnamon rolls” are HUGE. 
  Once, a few years ago at Sheep Creek Lodge, I ate three of them, warm
  and buttery, at one sitting.  Then I barely made it home before
  passing out from the blood sugar spike.  I was sick, as all addicts are sick.

  What an addict!  I hear the stories at NA meetings about the ways
  my fellow dope fiends rationalized using and found excuses in just
  about anything, and it reminds me of my adventures with sweets. 
  When I quit the hard drugs, I didn’t relapse.  I transcended those
  addictions and stayed off them because my self-esteem and instincts for
  self-preservation gave me the strength to do so.  But that shit
  wasn’t strong enough to keep me off sugar.  I’d go to the
  laundromat and stuff my clothes in the machines, and then go over and
  put some quarters in some other machines and get a Milky Way chocolate
  bar and a can of Dr. Pepper to reward myself for doing the wash. 
  When whatever guy I was with pissed me off, I’d calm and console myself
  with candy.  Like the other dope fiends say, I got loaded at him.

  What finally got me off sugar, and chocolate, and all that sweet gooey
  jazz, was desperation.  I nearly died after preparing a feast for
  about fifty people one Winter Solstice and then having only five people
  show up because of bad weather and an epidemic of hangovers in the
  neighborhood.  I ate half a dozen pies and three or four cakes
  with very little help from anyone.  Before they were all gone, I
  was hiding the leftovers from my family so they wouldn’t get
  them.  That precipitated a slide into three years of misery and
  debility.  I couldn’t walk without help or breathe without
  medication.  If I had to fight the covers to turn over in bed at
  night, the covers would win.  I got so sick and helpless that at
  one point Greyfox decided to just cut his losses, “let nature take its
  course”, and allow me to die.  But Doug helped me persuade him to
  get my prescriptions filled, and I survived.

  It was a long road back, littered with diet books such as the one for carb addicts, and The Zone.  I had an uphill fight and got nowhere until I found Charles Gant’s book, End Your Addiction Now. 
  He’s an MD and PhD now retired from the practice of orthomolecular
  medicine.  Following his guidelines, I applied the principles he
  had used to cure drug addicts, took the amino acid supplements he
  recommended, and lost my craving for sweets.  How sweet it
  is!!  Then, when Greyfox decided to quit marijuana, tobacco,
  alcohol, and sugar all at once, I had him do Dr. Gant’s checklists
  and made up a set of supplement packs for him.  Now we both
  occasionally will piss vocally into the wind at 12-step meetings trying
  to tell people they don’t have to relapse and don’t have to suffer
  white-knuckle withdrawal, but most are too firmly programmed into their
  powerlessness to hear us.

  Regular readers here are familiar with that story.  It’s mostly
  for the new ones, and probably really just because I got carried away
  introducing this blog about food.  I’ve been asked some questions
  lately about squash and about my gluten-free bread recipes.  First
  of all, Ren, I have only one “squash recipe” and that’s really a bread
  recipe I improvised last year to use up my pumpkin after Jack
  O’Lantern’s light went out.   That recipe, Gluten-Free Pumpkin or Squash Muffins, is in the Xanga cookbook. 

  Pumpkin is my least favorite squash, with a stringy texture and watery
  flesh.  Just slightly better than pumpkin are some of the common
  squashes like Danish and butternut.  These are all “winter”
  squash, so-named because their hard shells give them a long
  shelf-life.  Summer squash, such as zucchini, yellow crookneck,
  and green pattypan, is a whole different subject.  I like them
  too, either sliced and grilled or used instead of eggplant in Parmesan
  or some other recipe, but they are not sweet.  They’re a vegetable
  to me.

  Winter squash, in my mind, is somewhere between fruit and
  pudding.  When I lived off the power grid, I’d bake them in my
  propane oven.  I just split them and scooped out the seeds and put
  some butter in each hollow half and cooked them until they were
  soft.  The time varies depending on the thickness of the
  fruit.  Temperature should be in the “moderate” range, around
  350°F.  Right now, I have about 3/4 of a blue kuri squash in the
  microwave, and I keep getting up, turning it a bit (Doug let the tray
  from the microwave fall out of the dish drainer and break, so now the
  carousel doesn’t work, and there’s some screwup with my online order of
  the replacement, blah, blah, blah….), and giving it three more
  minutes between turns.  After four or five of those cycles, it’s
  starting to soften, and it smells so good.

  It’s a lopsided 3/4 of a squash instead of a neat pair of halves
  because I had to cut a “bad” spot out of one side.  Picking out
  winter squash in the store involves careful inspection for mold or
  rot.  Greyfox hadn’t gotten the knack yet this year when he
  started acquiring squash and bringing them up the valley for me to
  store for the winter.  I’m using up the imperfect ones
  first.  The rest will last through the winter, I hope.  My
  preference is for the sweet, fine-grained varieties.  If they tend
  to be sorta “dry” like the hubbards, the plus there is that we get more
  fruit and less water for our money, since they’re sold by weight.

  These are my favorites, in order, best at the top:

  uchiki kuri
  blue kuri
  delicata
  golden hubbard
  sweet mama
  carnival
  butternut

  The butternut squash are the next-to-the-last resort, when all
  the rarer varieties are gone.  When the stores run out of them,
  I’ll go for some of the Danish acorn squash, unless they’re selling cut
  pieces of the giant blue hubbards.  I like the hubbard squash but
  those big blue ones are just too much for me to handle.  Greyfox
  couldn’t even safely lift one, given his herniated condition.

  When cooking and eating squash, or corn, or my gluten-free breads, or any
  concentrated carb, the butter is an essential addition.  I didn’t
  lose that hundred pounds by cutting calories or going hungry.  I
  did it by balancing carbs and fats, and keeping the carbs mostly
  separate from the concentrated proteins.  No sandwiches, in other
  words.  Here’s the rationale for that:  In people like me,
  with reactive hypoglycemia (or “fibroglycemia”, as Dr. St. Amand calls
  it) it’s not fat that puts on fat or causes food cravings.  It is
  the glycemic index of the foods I eat.  The higher the glycemic
  index, the more dangerous the food is.  Adding fat to the carb
  reduces the glycemic index.  Buttered popcorn has a lower glycemic
  index than plain.  Fried potatoes have a lower glycemic index than
  boiled.

  The “good” cholesterol from animal fats is important to the nervous
  system.  I learned that in a promotional audiotape I got in the
  mail, called, “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie.”  The author is an expert
  in animal nutrition.  He noticed that beasts on cholesterol-free
  feeds got stupid, or paralyzed or showed other neurological deficits,
  and he postulated that the same thing was true in humans.  My
  other earlier reading on nutrition had taught me that in populations
  where their animal fats are balanced with oils from nuts and seeds,
  they don’t get the degenerative diseases prevalent in our culture or
  the clogged arteries from cholesterol plaques.  The trick is in
  getting enough essential fatty acids to digest and use the cholesterol
  to build nerve tissue.  Those fatty acids are another important
  factor in recovery from addictions, especially from alcohol.

  So, I eat all I want to eat.  The calorie restricted diets I tried
  in the past got me in trouble.  I’d end up gaining weight and
  losing health.  I try to remember to eat before I get hungry, to
  keep my blood sugar stable and prevent the overeating that occurs when
  I get too hungry.  For me, low blood sugar is the pits.  I
  get irritable, depressed, weak and shaky.  When I eat carbs, I
  make sure I get fats with them and don’t eat meat at the same
  time.  Combining meat and carbs at a meal slows down the digestion
  of the carbs and can lead to fermentation in the gut instead of healthy
  assimilation.

  I eat all I want of safe foods.  Many foods contain peptides that
  are addictive.  These include the gluten in wheat and some other
  grains, and the casein in cow’s milk.  I can handle fermented
  milk.  Yogurt has become my substitute creamy sweet, instead of
  ice cream.  I add a few drops of stevia extract for sweetness to a
  dish of whole-milk yogurt (because low-fat or non-fat is too glycemic),
  add a tablespoon or so of flax seed oil and some vanilla extract, stir
  it all up and I’ve got my comfort food.  It is yummy and I can
  feel virtuous eating it.  I used to believe that my problem was
  that I loved food.  I thought I had to stop loving to eat and stop
  eating foods I loved.  That approach never worked.  As soon
  as I simply cut out the addictive foods and started watching WHEN I ate
  to stay off the glycemic roller coaster, I was shocked at how fast the
  obesity subsided.

  
  My mainstay is the muffins I bake every two or three weeks and stick in
  the freezer.  I nuke one first thing when I get up each morning,
  and then a cup of tea, and the second muffin goes in the microwave while
  I consume the first.  Muffins are better than loaf bread for me
  because there’s portion control.  I know that two muffins are okay
  and three would be a glycemic overdose, even with butter.

   Some of my recipes in Xanga’s cookbook ended up with Kathy’s name on
  them.  It’s my name too, but the Kathy who has that as her Xanga
  username and contributes to the cookbook under that name is a different
  woman.  Anyhow, even though the index says some of these are
  Kathy’s, all the links come back to SuSu:

  Gluten-Free Muffins

  Gluten-Free Quick Bread

  High Protein Gluten-Free Muffins

  Meal-in-a-Muffin

  They are all variations on a basic recipe I’m still experimenting
  with.  My latest batch contains bits of dried figs.  The
  flours I use most are sorghum, garbanzo and fava bean.  Because
  gluten is the stuff that makes bread stick together, I use xanthan gum
  (a fungoid product) to keep my muffins from falling apart. 
  Recently, I’ve been experimenting with pancake recipes.  
  Most of my flours, and the xanthan gum, come in packages with Bob on
  the label.  Not J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, but Bob of Bob’s Red Mill.  His website also has a collection of gluten-free recipes.

  

  • 6:45 pm
  • 8 Comments