mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Healthy dish of the day: bun rieu oc

As I've observed before, Vietnamese cuisine may be some of the friendliest food out there for people looking to eat light and healthy. Especially when it comes to soups. A big bowl of pho, for instance, with all the veggie mix-ins and the right-size portions of meat and noodles, can keep me satisfied for hours. And when you get tired of all the variations on pho, there's a whole galaxy of other soups to try.

Pictured is one such star of the Vietnamese soup galaxy, bun rieu oc, which contains round rice noodles (bun) and the meat of little bitty snails (oc), plus tomatoes, cilantro, onions, fried shallots, and assorted other goodies in a crab (rieu) broth; usually the meat left from making the crab broth is formed into crumbly little patties and added to the soup.

This bowlful is the dac biet (special) version at one of my favorite local Vietnamese joints, Mien Trung. In addition to being an extra-large portion, it contains some extra garnishes of cooked pork blood and fried tofu puffs. The broth has a great chile kick that does not blot out the rich crab flavor; and unlike other versions of this soup I've had, the snails are super-tender, with just the slightest bit of chewiness (in other places the snails can be tough as rubber erasers). Mien Trung also supplies an especially generous side-plate of veggie mix-ins, plus a little saucer of deliciously savory dipping sauce.

Another thing I really dig about Vietnamese soups is that the garnishes are not just there for looks, but make functional contributions to the dish. The fried shallot garnish, for instance--their savory taste spreads out to flavor the whole bowlful of soup. And I love the veggie mix-ins--stir them all in while the soup is still steaming hot, and not only does the broth cook them, but they also cool the broth down to a more mouth-friendly temperature.

The only downside to Vietnamese soups is that, with all those ingredients and garnishes, they're a little labor-intensive for the home cook (especially the single home cook). But when a huge bowl like the one pictured goes for less than six bucks, I'm totally content to let the experts pound the crabs and shell the snails for me.

P.S. For those who are wondering, my weight is still plateaued at 192 pounds. I've decided that from now on I'll only make a separate post on my weight if it does something other than plateauing.

First major travel under the new dispensation

By the way, I'm about to confront another couple of milestones in my weight loss saga: first major trip out of town, and first airline travel.

Many of you reading this know all too well what a hell-on-earth of discomfort and humiliation an airline trip can be for a person of size. Remember the huge flap a few years ago when it became public knowledge that Southwest Airlines had a protocol for charging passengers who could not fit into their even-narrower-than-industry-standard coach seat a double fare for a second seat? And that said protocol involved informing the unlucky passenger that they were fat enough to require an extra seat right there in public in front of all the other passengers? Well, at my top weight I happened to be just borderline on their humiliate-the-fat-person double-seat protocol--I could just fit between the armrests of their preternaturally tiny seats, but had to request a seatbelt extender. So, fortunately, I never had the pleasure of the buy-a-second-seat humiliation, but I did experience the joy of having to ask the flight attendants--and sometime remind them multiple times--to please bring me the goddamned seatbelt extender already.

Not to mention enduring the baleful glare of whoever wound up sitting next to "the fat slob." Never mind that those super-narrow coach seats are also too narrow for strapping healthy young men, whose little butts might fit perfectly in the seats, but whose manly broad shoulders and gun-type biceps might still infringe on their neighbors' space in all directions. Naw, nobody whines and snivels about having to sit next to passengers with huge shoulders poking them, but you should hear some of the crap airline passengers spew about sitting next to people with big bellies or hips. And hardly anybody remembers this is all an artificial problem created by the airlines, intent on packing as many sardines into the tin can as they can get away with.

Oh, and don't even get me started on airplane lavatories. How the hell anyone bigger than a twelve-year-old uses those little coffins in anything resembling comfort, I do not know.

Well, for better or worse, I will now by virtue of my smaller bod be spared the majority of that insanity ... but that doesn't mean I'm out of the woods. For on my e-ticket are the fatal words: "food for purchase."

Yep. Airlines make you pay for your meals now. And they no longer seem to have any way to request special meals for various health reasons. Further, I haven't flown since they instituted all those new airport security restrictions on what you can bring on the plane. And I'm sorry, I've read the TSA website a bazillion times now, and can still find no definitive answers on what foods it is safe to take through security. And if you guess wrong, guess what? You're automatically in trouble with the law. I'm sorry, but that's fucked up.

Okay, yeah, I can buy food and drink inside the security perimeter. But just think of the quality--and price!--of the typical fast-food crap you find in airports. If I'm lucky, I might be able to score one of those awful salads that Mickey D's put on their menu so they can pretend they serve "healthy" food, with the boring mass of iceberg lettuce and the disgusting low-fat dressing. If I'm unlucky ... guess I'll be eating my very first fast-food burger since I went on my regimen, huh? Bleah. A food item I have not missed one whit, and now it's looking like my best chance at an even slightly palatable meal.

Anyway, enough of my whining about that. Once I do touch down in Charlotte NC, where I'll be visiting family, things should get a bit more pleasant ... and also a bit more challenging. This is a pleasure trip, after all, and so I have to figure out how I will navigate the food aspect, balancing legitimate enjoyment of the area's local cuisine against the desire to stay healthy and not go overboard. Considering Charlotte's local-cuisine claims to fame are apparently soul food and North Carolina-style barbeque, this might look a little dicey.

But I have decided two things: 1) this trip will not be an excuse to just randomly blow away the whole regimen with indiscriminate eating; and 2) neither will this trip be about puritanical self-denial. There is always a middle path, and I intend to find it.

Once I get off the damn plane anyway. Gah. I never liked flying. And I still don't. I may have made a lot of changes in the past fourteen months, but some things never change.

P.S. I will have Internet access while I'm traveling. I'm not sure how much time I'll have available to post, given that I'm supposed to be doing a lot of family stuff. So we'll see if I can make some progress reports while I'm out there. I'll be for sure posting a summary report when I return.

A day in the life, with food

Last Thursday somehow turned into a non-stop out-of-house experience from about 11:30am until well past midnight. So inevitably a lot of those thirteen hours happened around food eaten on the go.

To start with, for lunch I made a return visit to a restaurant I was about to write up for SanDiego.Eats.It, the  local dining website I freelance for. It being a Mexican restaurant, I was anticipating a major carb hit, and was already planning my day's food to accomodate that. I wound up having a fairly leisurely and fairly substantial lunch of a couple of veggie enchiladas in mole poblano, and some of the refried beans that came with--but not the rice which, while okay, was not quite exciting enough to waste any of my remaining carb allotment on.

I knew this meal would keep me going for several hours while I did errands, but around five I'd be hungry and needing to grab a quick dinner before a chorus sectional rehearsal at 6:30pm. But that dinner would need to be a salad or something else real light on the carbs, because I'd already blown my main stash of 'em on that lunch, and I wanted to save my little bonus stash of discretionary carbs for later that evening (more on that anon).

Five pm found me near my rehearsal site in Linda Vista, which is home to a Vietnamese neighborhood. I headed to a big Vietnamese supermarket I knew of in that area, which is surrounded by a bunch of little restaurants and other shops. Over in one corner I found one called Le's that served Chinese/Vietnamese/Thai, with a separate vegetarian menu. This intrigued me enough to get me through the door.

They did have an impressively long menu with many interesting items that I might yet go back and check out, but the thing my eye immediately gravitated to was som tam. This spicy shredded green papaya salad is one of my favorite ways to inhale a mass quantity of produce and love it. Seven bucks and change bought me a major hummock of the shredded stuff, with an only okay dressing with light heat, and halves of rather limp cooked fresh shrimp on top. But that mound of papaya still satisfied even under that relatively perfunctory treatment. Maybe if, the next time I come back, I gently inquire as to whether they can make it for me the way they make it to serve at home, with dried shrimp and some respectable heat.

Anyway, I'd gotten my bod sufficiently refueled to make it through my chorus rehearsal ... and then I was off to Pacific Beach to hear a gig one of my musician friends was playing--it happened to be the fabulous Mike Keneally, sitting in with The Playground Slap in a Garnet Street hole-in-the-wall tavern called the Tiki House.

This beer and wine only joint had Guinness on tap, and I had saved those discretionary carbs so I could have a pint, or even two if I wanted. I wound up just having the one. I'm not much of a beer drinker, but when I get in the mood for one I nearly always go for either a dark beer or a hefeweizen. What can I say? I like what I call "crunchy" beer. And beer has got enough real nutrition (such as a B vitamin bonanza from the brewer's yeast) that my bod willingly accepted this one as a late-evening snack.

And then I got home past midnight, to wind up waiting a half hour to pull the car into my apartment parking lot, because the entrance was blocked by cops dealing with some kind of auto mishap ... but that little whine is definitely off topic.

So anyway, with a little ingenuity and planning, I managed to make everything work out for me foodwise that day. And writing all of that out has made clear to me why I was so wiped out the following day--whew, a little too marathon, huh? Oh well ... it seemed a sensible plan at the time ...

Healthy dining: vegetarian restaurants

Vegetarian restaurants, and vegetarian cookery in general, seem to have gotten a bad reputation among certain of the foodies I hang out with on-line. Some of this bad rap seems to be just the latest version of popular stereotypes about vegetarianism. You know the stereotypes I mean: meals of bean sprouts and lawn clippings either poorly cooked or raw, with haphazard seasonings except for large dollops of moralizing from humorless animal rights activists. And to be perfectly frank, I have seen, and eaten at, a few restaurants that do embody those cliches.

On the other hand, I can't help thinking that at least some of the (over)-harping on these negative stereotypes by certain scoffers is more about their unconscious reaction to having to actually consider changing their behavior, in the face of some serious ethical and health questions about their daily food practices. Besides, there are lousy restaurants (and bad attitudes, for that matter) in every category and style of cuisine--to judge an entire cuisine solely on the basis of its sub-par exemplars is like dismissing the entire American culinary scene solely on the basis of Denny's and McDonald's.

Especially since I have also dined at many excellent vegetarian restaurants. So they really are out there, folks! And they're worth looking for, because they have a definite advantage for the diner seeking to put together a healthy weight-conscious meal out. Namely--no meat, and therefore much less opportunity for the cholesterol, saturated fat, and high-calorie issues of more omnivorous restaurants.

Mind you, it's still very do-able to put together an unhealthy meal at a vegetarian restaurant--just order all the dishes that are really high in fat and calories. A killer breakfast of wholegrain waffles drenched in maple syrup and vegan margarine-spread is still a killer breakfast, regardless of the "healthiness" of the ingredients. The point is that you don't have to pick that meal. You have healthy options on the menu that just don't exist on many conventional restaurant menus--especially if you're willing to be a little adventurous.

I especially like to frequent restaurants that specialize in one of the many Asian cuisines with centuries-long traditions of vegetarianism. Cooks in these traditions have inherited time-tested methods for producing tasty meals without depending on meat products for flavor, with really wonderful results. Plus the Asian cuisines in general, in my opinion, have such superior approaches to vegetable cookery that their vegetarian traditions have an advantage right from the git-go.

For example, there are whole traditions of Buddhist-influenced vegetarian cookery in China and neighboring countries, in which wheat gluten and soy products are coaxed into surprisingly convincing, and very yummy, approximations of classic meat dishes. I have been served vegetarian "chicken" dishes in which the texture and mouthfeel of the chunks of chicken have been so convincing that I was double-checking the menu to make sure this was a totally vegetarian restaurant and they couldn't have served me a real chicken dish by mistake. Some of that artful gluten meat in a stirfry makes a delicious meal that fits right into my food regimen.

And then there is the subcontinent of India, with its many rich and varied cuisines, including its own approaches to lactovegetarian cookery. For example, I had a wonderful meal over the weekend at a restaurant here in San Diego that serves South Indian vegetarian food. I feasted on several different vegetable dishes, fragrant spiced rice, stewed chickpeas, beautiful and fascinating unleavened breads such as naan and idlis, and a refreshing yogurt drink known as lassi (this one spiked with lots of sweet/tangy mango). One of the most satisfying meals I'd had in a good long while--and again, fitting surprisingly well into my food plan.

It is true that, in my heart of hearts--or rather, in that ol' debbil Food Jones that haunts my heart--I will always have a soft spot for a big-ass slab of prime rib. But that way of eating, except for extremely-low-frequency special occasions, is Over as far as I'm concerned. And let's face it, a petite eight-ounce serving of prime rib carefully trimmed of all fat, with a typical lackluster steakhouse salad and football-sized baked potato rendered boring without its usual saturation of sour cream and butter, is more like a sop to food nostalgia than an actually satisfying meal. So why would I want to dine that way, when instead I can feast much more happily--not to mention more frequently--on excellent curries and stirfries that happen to be meat-free? I dunno, except that my dining pattern seems to be voting for those curries and stirfries and such almost every time these days.

Healthy dining? Pho is one way to go

Depending on where you live and how adventurous a diner you are, you may have never heard of pho; or else you've been happily sucking down bowlfuls of the addictive Vietnamese noodle soup for years now. Because I do continue to run into pho virgins, but I've yet to run into someone who has tasted pho and not become instantly enamored.

And what's not to love? Pho (more correctly spelled with several diacritical marks clinging to the "o" which I can't reproduce here, and most correctly pronounced something like "fuh") is delicious, comforting, nutritious, and just as fast as standard American fast food--but much healthier for you.

The dish consists of a big bowlful of broth (traditionally beef, flavored with enticing Asian seasonings such as star anise), containing a generous wad of slender rice noodles, plus various assortments of beef and vegetable tidbits. Some of the beef goes into the bowl thinly sliced and raw, to be cooked by the piping hot broth in the time it takes for your soup to travel from the kitchen to your table. Other beefy tidbits vary from the familiar (beef brisket) to the more exotic (tripe and beef tendon, pre-cooked till tender but still pleasantly chewy).

Veggie tidbits vary somewhat from one pho restaurant to another, but a traditional--and charming--feature of all pho establishments is to provide you with a side dish of additional veggies and herbs to add to your soup. This assortment also varies, but almost always includes a stack of bean sprouts, several sprigs of Vietnamese basil, wedges of lime or lemon, and a few slices of fresh jalapeno. With these, and the ever-present bottles of condiments at your table (hot sauces, soy sauces, and more) you customize your soup as desired--and also cool it off just enough so that you can start inhaling soup ASAP.

The menu of a typical pho restaurant offers a dizzying array of these soups, varying by the types of meaty tidbits included. Many also include a chicken-based version, and a few have even started carrying vegetarian versions with tofu and a veg-based broth. And one of the best features of these places: a huge honkin' bowlful of this stuff usually sells for under five bucks.

This stuff happens to fit into my diabetic-style food plan just fine--all that broth counts as a "free food" on my plan, and the small-but-choice amount of protein is perfect for me. For those who are taking other strategies regarding their food, some nutritional information for this soup can be found here.

There is admittedly a certain knack to eating pho without winding up wearing half of it. The main challenge to Westerners: those very very long rice noodles. Most pho places simply provide a rack of chopsticks and those big flat-bottomed Asian-style soup spoons at each table, but will also supply a fork to their more chopsticks-challenged customers.

But as a fan of chopsticks I was bound and determined to learn how to master pho, so I watched the many Asian customers around me. The trick seems to be to pick up a small wad of noodles in your sticks, pull it up three or four inches above the bowl, bring the sticks to your mouth, and then slurp up your noodles without shame (Asian peoples, quite sensibly in my opinion, are totally okay about noodle-slurping). If in mid-slurp you start losing the battle against gravity, simply clip off your mouthful noodles with your teeth and allow the rest to slip back into the bowl to be picked up in a later round.

Pho restaurants have become fixtures of the urban landscape in many major US cities, including here in San Diego. You can find out more about pho and where to find it--and get a few giggles on the side--by consulting this entertaining blog dedicated to the dish.