Day 3

Well I'm starting day 3 of the challenge and I'm looking forward to trying a new recipe for lunch. Last night I made a modified version of a quinoa and black bean dish and we'll see how it performs in T-minus 3:22. As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to focus on a plant-based diet this time around so I could gain some perspective for integrating this into the Food Outreach menu.

The Modifications

The first thing I noticed while shopping was this was going to be a quinoa-less, quinoa recipe. It was around $4.00 a box and it wasn't a big box. Dropping 14% of the budget on a box the size of my hand just wasn't going to happen. I settled on the couscous as it was closer to $2.00, although it too seemed to suffer from boxatrophy. Upon examining the nutrition label, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had 8 grams of protein per serving. I also noticed that one serving was 225 calories which is approaching 3x the calories for 1 diabetes exchange for starches. I'm no food scientist but I'm guessing it's due to the small, dense nature of the product. By comparison, the brown rice in our grocery center has 3 grams for a 150 calorie serving. So you get 28 calories for every gram of protein in couscous and 50 calories for every gram of protein in brown rice.

The other major change I made was swapping out the corn for frozen broccoli. Corn is what I like to call a paper vegetable akin to a paper champion in boxing. It's only a vegetable on paper; as far as the physiological effects on your body, think of it as a starch. Since I'm not a Navy SEAL or training for a marathon, I didn't see any reason to add more starch to a dish that was already giving me 45 grams of carbs per serving. I'm not anti-carb but high carb dishes tend to be calorically dense. For example, about 1/3 a cup of cooked pasta is around 80 calories vs. 1/2 cup of cooked vegetables is around 25 calories. To clarify, for roughly the same volume of food, starches give you almost 3 times the calories!

When it was all said and done I basically had a pot full of couscous, broccoli, 4 cans of black beans, the other half of my chopped onion, and low sodium chicken broth. If I had to do it over, I would cook off the couscous first and then add the broccoli, beans, and onions. I boiled my broth and then added it all which made cooking it more challenging to say the least. I did burn some of it before I realized I'd need to be there to stir it continuously. I tasted the burned couscous and it formed an interesting crispy layer, something between the texture of the crust of corn casserole and a Twinkie. I liked, so I left it in and it adds more of my favorite color; black!

On a closing note, one pleasant benefit for me has been that I've already dropped two pounds. I'm trying to be a certain weight for the Missouri State Arm Wrestling Championships later in the month. Although this will help me, the trend is disturbing, especially if I had a chronic illness, and it's definitely been the food as I've been too sick to train.