December 17, 2005

• not-cheese not-blintzes

  My semantic quandary…

  I have intended for some time now to post this recipe.  I am
  perplexed over more than just what to call these things.  Every
  time I start thinking about how to explain why I eat the things, I get
  stuck.

  Since sugar, cream cheese, and wheat flour are not on my diet…

  The trouble with that opening is that
  every time I mention the word, “diet,” some casual reader gets the idea
  that I’m trying to lose weight.  Some of them even go so far as to
  mention exercise or cutting calories. 

  Good grief and goshalmightydarn!  If I could exercise, I’d jump up
  right now and go dancing.  If cutting calories didn’t have the
  effect of lowering my blood sugar dangerously and putting my body into
  famine mode so that I gain weight, I’d fast.

  Mentioning the word “diet” just gets me into trouble and I either have to ignore the bullshit or respond to it.  No thanks.

  Because I am not allowed to eat certain foods…

  Well, the problem with that intro is
  this:  just who is it that doesn’t allow me to eat what I choose
  to eat?  Nobody, that’s who!  I choose to eat
  what I choose to eat.   I’m not following any prefab eating
  plan or diet guru’s suggestions.  I use applied kinesiology
  (muscle response testing [MRT]) to determine which foods are safe for
  me and which ones cause allergic reactions or have addictive
  qualities.  Years ago, I read books such as The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet : The Lifelong Solution to Yo-Yo Dieting and Eat Right 4 Your Type: The Individualized Diet Solution to Staying Healthy, Living Longer & Achieving Your Ideal Weight,
  which gave me some clues and keys to my problem, but I didn’t stop
  there.  Nobody else’s diet has ever worked for me, so I had to
  find my own.

  MRT was the way I did it.  One very important thing I learned with
  it is that my food sensitivities change over time, so that I can’t even
  be sure that last week’s diet is okay now.  I have to keep testing
  daily and eat accordingly.  A technique similar to the one I use
  can be found under “Self-Testing” on this page.

  So, you see, there are some foods I don’t eat.  They include
  wheat, unfermented cow’s milk (yogurt is okay for me), sugar, honey,
  and lots of other things of no interest to anyone but me, since
  everyone’s biochemistry is unique.  The wheat, dairy and sugar are
  the biggies, and are things often not recommended for diabetics, people
  with celiac or Krohn’s disease, people with chronic systemic candidiasis, people in my blood group (A), etc.

  Making cheese blintzes without wheat, cream cheese, or sugar isn’t just
  challenging.  It’s impossible.  A cheese blintz is a thin,
  soft wheat crepe wrapped around a sweet cream cheese filling, or you might think of it as a sweet burrito. 
  Thus:  not-cheese not-blintzes, my new favorite food.

  I start with my homemade pancake mix, which includes several
  gluten-free flours, usually garbanzo, fava bean and sorghum, but also
  rice and/or buckwheat and others sometimes.  I throw them together
  with a proportional amount of non-fat dry milk (for some unknown reason
  the MRT says this is okay for me, even though other forms of cow’s milk
  aren’t), a small amount of xanthan gum to replace the gluten as a
  binding ingredient, just enough salt, baking soda, and baking powder,
  and Splenda* instead of sugar for sweetness.  I whisk them all up
  together in large batches and store the whole mess away in an airtight container in a
  cool dry place until I want to make pancakes.

  When I’m ready to make pancakes, I scoop out the right amount of mix,
  add enough eggs, oil and water to make a semi-thin batter, and a splash
  of bottled lemon juice to activate the baking soda for leavening. 
  Then I stir the batter until it is ready to bake on the griddle. 
  If you can’t cook that way, just find a suitable recipe and make
  substitutions.

  The filling is much simpler, just plain old fashioned full-fat yogurt
  and vanilla extract,
  sweetened to taste with Splenda* .  I use full-fat and not nonfat
  or low-fat because the milk fat in there lowers the glycemic
  index.  Low-fat and nonfat milk or yogurt are simply too glycemic
  for me.  My favorite yogurt is Mountain High
  Original Style, and I buy it by the half-gallon tub, not just because I
  eat a lot of it, but because it gives me an easy way to approximate
  “yogurt cheese.”  There is a way to turn plain yogurt into a
  semi-reasonable approximation of cream cheese, by lining a strainer
  with cheesecloth, filling it with yogurt and leaving it in the fridge
  until the liquid drips out of the yogurt. 

  What I do is scoop the
  first servings out of the middle of the tub, leaving a “well” all the
  way to the bottom, into which the sour liquid seeps, leaving the
  cream-cheesy solids around the edges.  It goes on my baked
  potatoes as a sub for sour cream and into my not-blintzes as
  not-creamcheese.  I pour the liquid that accumulates in the well
  off into my pancake batter (instead of lemon juice sometimes) or other
  things where it is suitable.

  That is really unnecessary if you don’t have time to let your yogurt
  seep or you don’t want to buy it by the half-gallon.  The moist
  yogurt just as it comes from the cup is okay, so long as it is PLAIN
  yogurt, not the sugary stuff with fruit added.  If you’re going to
  eat that stuff, you might as well make real cheese blintzes.
  

  *Splenda update: 
  When I started using Splenda as a sugar replacement, I reported that I
  was addicted to it.  It was true at the time, but since then I
  have learned that my body was just responding to the sweetness as if it
  were sugar.  That’s probably a neurochemical mechanism similar to
  the conditioned response known as “needle flash” or “needle rush” that
  IV drug users or former IV drug users get when they have blood drawn
  for lab work.

  Both of those phenomena wear off after a while, when the inert stimuli
  (non-caloric sweetener and empty hypodermic syringe) repeatedly fail to
  pack the anticipated neurochemical punch.  I had started out using
  1/3 of a little paper packet of Splenda (sucralose) to sweeten a cup of
  tea, finding it cloying after a couple of years off sugar.  Very
  quickly after that, I had escalated to using two or three packets to
  sweeten the same tea.

  Then, I started looking for things to sweeten, slicing fruit and
  sprinkling sucralose over it and such, until at the last extremity I
  was ripping the little envelopes open and sprinkling the stuff right on
  my tongue.  Gradually my subconscious mind became used to the idea
  that the stuff just tasted sweet and didn’t give me any sugar
  rushes.  I don’t put it on fruit now, and have gone back to a
  single packet where I had been using three.

  Recently, when Greyfox mentioned Splenda in passing while ranting on
  his blog about a local big box store’s sleazy practices and stupid
  setup, the people who commented zeroed in on it with lots of warnings
  about the toxicity of it.  I haven’t read those comments, but
  Greyfox said they cited websites with info about the dangers. 
  Before I started using sucralose, I checked it out.  So did
  Greyfox, who checked sucralose out and started using it before I did.

  Most of the sites that say negative things about it take their
  information from Dr. Mercola.  Based on what I have read of his
  writings, Joseph Mercola DO is possibly pathologically obsessed and
  misguided, and probably opportunistic, preying on people’s fears for
  his own profit.  He has been officially warned by the FDA to cease
  his misleading statements, and he features prominently in the alerts
  from Quackwatch.  Of course, in all fairness it must be said,
  Quackwatch isn’t completely reputable and reliable, either.

  I bought an ebook Mercola was selling and then got a refund when I
  found it to be about half bullshit and the rest common knowledge. 
  It reminded me of the literary reviewer who said that a certain work
  was both good and original, but unfortunately the good part wasn’t
  original and the original part wasn’t good.

  Sucralose is made by replacing one hydroxyl group from a molecule of
  sugar with two atoms of chlorine.  That is the sole fact upon
  which Mercola bases his dire warnings about its toxicity.  
  Chlorine is toxic.   It is also necessary for most life on
  this planet.   NaCl, sodium chloride, common table salt, is
  the primary electrolyte for our nervous systems.   I know of
  no scientific study that has shown any significant danger from
  sucralose consumption thus far.

  It will be years before enough is known about long-term effects of
  Splenda to make any definitive statements.  Since I already know
  the deadly effects of sugar and the sadness of never having anything
  sweet to eat, I’m willing to play guinea pig on this one.  It’s a
  helluva lot safer than I was when I was working as the lab rat testing
  new batches for the meth chemist.

  There are eight more days until Christmas.
  In last year’s countdown to Christmas,
  on this day I took on
  THE THREE WISE MEN.

  

  • 4:08 am
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