I find just drawing up a shopping list of diet-enhancing ingredients fills me with all the zeal, good vibes, and necessary I-can-do-thisness to make me feel positively impatient for it all to start. My stock list would be something like this.
PANTRY STUFF
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best-quality vegetable bouillon cubes and a small selection of other packaged stock, including Thai pork and tom yam (a spicy, citrus-y broth) cubes
about 92,000 types of soy sauce (tamari soy, shoyu, light soy, dark soy, Japanese soy, citrus-flavored soy, Indonesian kecup manis, the lot)
teriyaki sauce and sukiyaki sauce (both these are really just soy sauce with other ingredients, itemized below, added for you)
Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce, nam pla or nuoc mam
sake
dry sherry
vermouth
mirin
rice vinegar
miso
instant dashi (sometimes called dashi-no-moto or hon dashi)
few packs Japanese instant miso soups and ramen noodle soups
Japanese pickled ginger
balsamic vinegar
good red wine vinegar
various mustards—English, powder and made, Dijon, Meaux, tarragon, and other flavors you like
various dry pastas and noodles (Italian short and long and Asian rice, buckwheat, and egg noodles)
Tabasco, red and green
chili sauce
comprehensive collection of spices
dried shiitake mushrooms
basmati rice
garlic
onions
shallots
lemons
limes
dried red chili peppers
good bought low-fat tomato sauce for pasta (check nutrition tables on bottles in the stores and try out till you find one you like)
toasted, or fragrant, sesame oil (yes, really)
garlic-infused oil (ditto)
IN THE FRIDGE
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There is no way you can make sure of an adequate supply of all the ingredients you might like to use without also having, sporadically, to throw away stuff that’s gone off. Even the exotic ingredients can mostly be found at the supermarket.
one each, at least, of each package of supermarket prepped vegetables
bok choy or similar leafy greens
salad stuff
bunch each of coriander and flat-leaf parsley
lemon grass
Thai basil
fresh rice sticks and somen noodles
shrimp paste
miso (I add it here, too, as it goes in the fridge once opened and I buy containers from a Japanese shop, for preference, not awkward-to-use plastic bags of it)
fresh chili peppers
fresh ginger
scallions
a ready-prepared but nonfrozen meal (see below)
fat-free fromage blanc
fat-free yogurt
very-low-fat fruit yogurts
FOR THE FREEZER
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kaffir lime leaves
one or two bagged-up portions cooked rice
some ready-prepared (either by you or the supermarket) frozen meals
¼-cup portions of good Cheddar, shredded
1 steak, well wrapped
1 chicken cutlet, well wrapped
sliced bread
frozen whole-leaf spinach
frozen raspberries or mixed fruits
Bread, good bread, is one of my weaknesses, and I can eat an entire loaf without difficulty. If I’m having a poached egg on toast, as part of my dieting intake, I want to make sure I know I’ve eaten it. For this I need proper bread. I go to a French bakery and buy a couple of loaves of their pain du campagne (sludge-colored and grainy with a toothsome, tough hide) or other round country loaf, which I get put through their slicer and bagged up. I put these bags in the freezer. I can then toast, slice by single slice, as needed, from frozen, and it’s not quite so easy to chomp through an entire loaf without thinking.
EQUIPMENT
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If you’re keeping food in the freezer, a microwave is a near-essential piece of equipment. I figure that most of us who need (and often repeatedly) to lose weight are those for whom instant gratification takes too long. I seek to minimize damage (it’s awe-inspiring how many calories you can consume, standing up, just while the dinner’s cooking) by having a supply of food I can get from frozen to cooked in a few minutes.
I am not going to suggest that you rush out and buy a great number of gadgets. Many of you will already have a food processor and a microwave. I think there is really only one other essential item and that’s a good nonstick frying pan. The only other piece of equipment I’d mention isn’t essential but is useful: a griddle. No one needs reminding about plain grilled fish or chicken, but I find too much of this stock-diet food immensely depressing. Most domestic broilers are just not hot enough, so that all lean cuts dry out before they are cooked—which is where the griddle comes in. By this I mean one of those heavy cast-iron slabs, ridged on one side for meat and vegetables, smooth on the other for fish. You do need to oil this to some extent, and I use here an oil and water spray I make myself (pinching the idea from the low-fat culinary evangelist Sue Kreitzman) by buying an atomizer and filling it with one part best olive oil to seven parts water. You can, of course, just buy an olive oil spray from the supermarket if it makes life easier. The griddle’s good for giving that charcoal-striated edge to otherwise plain foods, and the searing heat that comes over cast iron seems to make food taste more acutely of itself, keep it juicier, and make it look better. On the down side, it is very heavy (often I feel just too limp-wristed even to contemplate dragging it out of its drawer beneath the lower oven) and can be nightmarish to wash up; the feel of scourer against cast iron is rather like nails down a blackboard.
Dieting demands exact measurements. You need scales, proper teaspoon and tablespoon measures (the whole set, indeed, comprising ¼- and ½-teaspoon measures, too), and, of course, measuring cups.
BASIC PRINCIPLES
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Immerse yourself in the desirable ethos before you begin and settle into good habits once you do. Alcohol is immensely useful in bringing real depth of flavor to food cooked without fat, but if you really want to lose weight, I think you have to give up drinking. I am more of an eater than a drinker so I don’t mind, but I know this is difficult for many people. It’s not just the calories in the alcohol; even a small drink makes me feel positively insouciant about weight, diet, food, calories, all of it. This is a wonderful feeling while it lasts, but dismal when—several thousand calories later—it stops. Also, if I drink enough to give me even a little shadow of a hangover, I have to eat vast amounts of fatty, stodgy food the next day to absorb—or so it feels—all the excess alcohol of the previous evening.
With eating I am less rigid. For just as I find a balance between large portions of low-fat and small portions of relatively high-fat food the best way of maintaining interest in what I’m eating when trying to lose weight, so I find I can stick longer to any diet if I keep a balance between repetition and variety. For example, I find it uncomplicates matters if every day I have the same breakfast and more or less, but not exclusively, the same lunch. Dinner I like to vary, and as much and as thought-consumingly as possible. Those who can’t make their own lunch (although many workplaces have rudimentary cooking equipment now) might prefer to swap lunch with dinner, though I must say I’d find it hard to stick to a diet if I ate the same dinner every night. I need to feel dinner is a proper, celebratory meal, when the food I eat is food I can concentrate on, think about, both beforehand and afterward. Breakfast is about 1⁄3 cup oatmeal (preferably organic, or it’s just a slimy, too-smooth wallpaper paste) cooked with a scant cup water and eaten with 1 tablespoon golden syrup. If I know I will just stagger into the kitchen in the morning and get that underway, it stops me from deciding on the spur of the moment to put a couple of
pieces of toast on, slather them with butter, then heap them with marmalade.
Although a low-fat diet makes things easier in terms of losing weight, for me a low-sugar one doesn’t. I found that if I used hardly any sugar (or some ghastly sugar substitute), the food I ate just wasn’t as filling. The same’s true with hot drinks. I don’t take sugar in tea, but I do in coffee. For ages I used one of those powdered ersatz sugars, the sort that fizz up spookily after you add them to the filled-up mug; then I just went back to sugar. What I found was that if I had a mug of coffee with sugar, it filled me up as if I’d eaten food (which of course I had, in the form of the calorie-bestowing sugar). Having said that, I virtually inhale all those fizzy, Nutra-sweetened drinks, the ones we are finger-waggingly told to give up in the name of cellulite-banishment, when I’m trying to lose weight.
BAKED POTATOES
CHEESE
Now, lunch: the most filling and somehow undiet-tasting lunch I found was a baked potato with cheese. Diet books and magazines advocate reduced-fat cheese; I cannot. Despite my love for the well-piled plate, I would prefer to have a small piece of some proper, good cheese than double, quadruple the amount of some low-fat, depressing variant. (Yogurt and fromage blanc, however, somehow taste low-fat even when they’re not really, so you may as well go for the low-fat ones.) Food shouldn’t be tampered with so that all its rightful, taste-giving properties are taken out of it. Try to find a way of cooking food that’s meant to be low fat rather than eat strangulated versions of food that was born to be saturated in the stuff. That is one of the reasons why most of my diet-minded suppers (see below) are Thai and Japanese, or otherwise Asian in tone, if not directly; these cuisines quite naturally don’t use a lot of fat in many of their dishes, so the food tastes right, is right, cooked like that. Fake diet food, like reduced-fat Cheddar, which tastes like bitter rubber, is a waste of your time. In your baked potato, real, strong Cheddar in a smaller quantity will have more taste, and will melt more seductively into the floury flesh, so that you won’t even feel that you’re getting less for your calories: 1 ounce true Cheddar comes to about the same calorie count as a similar reduced-fat cheese. So we’re not even talking about much less in quantity. To be this precise (or obsessive) about calorie counts, it is easier to buy well-labeled packaged cheese. You also need electronic scales. And the grater and the freezer. Were I to have a chunk of Cheddar in the fridge, I’d eat it. So instead I keep a large supply of bagged-up grated cheese, all weighed and uniform, at 100 calories a bag. (And this principle is worth applying to any food that is permissible for your diet in individual portions but not eaten en bloc.) Each lunchtime, I take the little frozen bag out to thaw as I put my potato in the oven to cook. It is a routine, a ritual. If you work in an office that has a microwave, you’ll have to make do with that. (I absolutely can’t take a packed lunch anywhere with me or I’d eat it by eleven in the morning. I can feel it throbbing away beneath the desk or in my bag and just can’t concentrate until I get rid of it.) This is the advantage of the baked potato option—it becomes routine, which prevents lunch being a significant, decision-provoking issue, but somehow makes it a reassuring fixed point; and it’s there, but uncooked till the moment of blitzing, so you can’t just wolf it down.
A potato that weighs about 7 ounces raw, which is a goodish-sized potato, plus my 100-calorie package of cheese, makes a lunch of 250 calories. Include my breakfast, of just above 150 calories, and I’ve still got quite a lot of calories saved for the evening. But I want to offer up one more pearl of dietetic wisdom. Don’t allow yourself to get too fiercely and unforgivingly hungry. If you leave eating till you could scrape the wallpaper off and eat that, then two things will happen: the first is that you will be jumpy and depressed; the second is that you’ll be so hungry you won’t be able to stop eating when you’re full up. The more nagging hunger you feel during a diet, the more likely you are to ditch it.
YOGURT
FROMAGE BLANC
PRETZEL STICKS
If you need to eat between meals, don’t allow yourself to feel you’ve failed or that you’ve given in or whatever it is that makes people inflate with self-reproach and then eat double. Instead, take a low-fat yogurt or fromage blanc from the fridge. The yogurt is about 70 calories for a 6-ounce cup, the fromage blanc, 60 calories for 4 ounces, and, small as these quantities are, they fill you up quite efficiently for a while. Of course it would be better in any number of ways to have an apple or an orange, but sometimes you need the gloop too. Reconcile yourself to this now, count it in, and then move on, sister. It’s all very well getting hungry when you’re at home, because you can be sure to find something suitable to eat. But it’s more difficult when you’re out. Pretzel sticks are 120 calories per ounce and low-fat with it. And because they’re so salty, they feel filling (strong tastes do that; see more on this below), plus they’re portable. If you had a huge drum of pretzel sticks in front of you, you’d find it difficult to stop eating after your 120 calories’ worth, so weigh and stick to a 1-ounce allotment. A bar of chocolate with about 230 calories, or a bag of chips at about 150, are not disasters, either. There are times when chocolate is what’s needed and it’s better to have just one bar, count it in, and adjust your eating for the rest of the day accordingly, than to brood obsessively on it, have grilled fish for dinner, and then go out, buy, and eat the entire contents of the all-night deli and live, self-flagellatingly, to regret it.
A diet that eliminated all fats would be extremely bad for you (and unpalatable). My point is to find balance, not to veer off into extremes. And to vary pace and plate, I often prefer a small portion of something high-fat bolstered by forests of green vegetables. One of my regular dinners when trying to lose weight is a supermarket-purchased package of macaroni and cheese. Now, I am not going to claim that this is a low-fat food, but there is not very much of it, and what there is is filling. When I’m too hungry or too tired to cook, I have one of those, with a whole package of ready-prepped lettuce and some other green vegetable with strong mustard on the side. Given that the macaroni is under 500 calories for a 12-ounce portion and I don’t count calories in vegetables, this is a trim little dinner all told. Anyway, I can’t reiterate too often the need for balance and variation. The thing to remember is to pile, next to almost anything you’re eating, a huge amount of soy-dressed or lemon-squeezed leafy or crunchy vegetables.
Much, as Byron wrote in Don Juan, depends on dinner. If I eat well at night, and not only eat well but make something of a ritual pleasure out of the meal, I don’t feel that edginess, that diet-deprivation thing, that boredom above all else, that can make it all intolerable. Dinner has to feel civilized, or life doesn’t feel civilized.
SALMON
First, stagger the food, so it feels as if you have a wonderful procession of things to eat, not a great mound of stuff on a plate. These quiet rituals—and the low-fat, health-store foods they involve—create a pleasantly virtuous and serene mood. A girlfriend and I refer meaningfully to such meals as temple food. And, as the Japanese know, it makes a difference. If I’ve decided to have a salmon steak, seared speckly brown and tangerine without, still Fanta-colored within, and some still-crunchy broccoli with soy and a few pinprick dots of sesame oil alongside, I might—to prolong my eating evening—make some grilled zucchini to eat before or drink a bowl of miso soup, and, afterward, peel and finely slice an orange and drizzle over with orange-flower water. This is to make me feel it’s something special that I’m eating.
ZUCCHINI
This is a regular supper-enhancer. Get in from work, put a griddle, corrugated side up, on the stove, and then slice a few zucchini down the length of them so that you have thin, long, butter-knife-shaped strips. Spritz the griddle with your water-and-oil spray, then cook the zucchini strips briefly on each side till they’re tigered brown. Remove, sprinkle with salt, chop over some herbs—parsley, mint, coriander, any one or all three—douse with lemon juice, and just eat.
PEPPERS
> SEVILLE ORANGES
Another fatless and, in my book, calorieless picking-food is charred, peeled, and sliced peppers (see page 86 for the method) over which you’ve sprinkled a drop or two of good balsamic vinegar, squirted a little orange juice, and sprinkled a little salt and more than a little chopped flat-leaf parsley. And this is transcendental in January when the Seville oranges are sometimes around. Their particular biting but fragrant sourness points up the oily sweetness of the skinned and softened peppers. Pomegranate juice (use an electric squeezer) is heavenly, too. (I like to keep this soused tangle of peppers on standby; leave to steep in the fridge and add grassy clumps of freshly chopped flat-leaf parsley whenever you eat it. This oil-free peperonata also happens to make a fabulous sandwich filling.)
LEMONS AND NUTMEG
TOMATOES
LEEKS AND ASPARAGUS
But this flavor-intensifying principle works all year round. Just use lemons. It’s not only broccoli whose sweetness is made the more vibrant with a squirt of lemon, but all greens. Nutmeg—with all of the above—works in a different but equally effective flavor-enhancing way. And any of the soys can be substituted for the lemon. Make a tomato salad, leafy with basil, dressed just with a few drops of good balsamic vinegar. Roasting vegetables also seems to make them taste more emphatically of themselves; leeks (see page 319 and reduce the oil a little), or asparagus, or, indeed, more or less any vegetable can be cooked with a very little oil (if you use none at all, you’ll just have a wizened, limp mess) in a fiercely hot oven. To look at they’ll be muted, but the flavors will be kickstarted into vibrant life.
How to Eat Page 49