Pumpkin Update

I promised to report on how the great pumpkin experiment in Wishing for a Blue Moon turned out. We harvested a total of four pumpkins in spite of our very short, cool summer. Two are still stored in the garage; two have been successfully fried, steamed, creamed, souped, and candied. I purchased a large butternut squash to cook along with the pumpkin in each of the preparations for comparison. They were almost identical in taste and texture. The available nutrition information is not specific enough to differentiate between pumpkin varieties, but butternut squash comes in at 12 net grams of carbohydrate in ½ cup, cooked and mashed, while the pumpkin net count is given as only 4 or 5 for the same amount. If the blues really have the same number of carbs as the generic pumpkins that were used for testing, they would have a significant advantage.

My kids think it wouldn’t be Christmas if I didn’t make candied sweet potatoes for them. I bit my tongue and served them their old holiday favorite without recriminations, but I made my faux version for my husband and me with the new blue pumpkin. For the ultimate test, I persuaded my son to try a taste to see how it compared to the real sweet potato dish. He agreed that the sugar-free, blue pumpkin was quite acceptable as a substitute for the original, in all its gooey glory. The blue pumpkin had the same texture and it caramelized beautifully.

So it looks like I will try growing blue pumpkins again next summer. Perhaps there will be enough to put some in the freezer so I won’t have such a long wait for another blue moon.

Faux Candied Yams (Candied Pumpkin)

One fresh pie pumpkin (about 1 ½ pounds)
4 Tablespoons of butter (½ a stick)
2 slices of lemon with peel (about ¼ of a small lemon)
½ cup of granular Splenda®
½ teaspoon of cinnamon
A pinch of salt
¼ cup of Da Vinci Sugar-free Simple Syrup or substitute ¼ cup of water and increase the Splenda to ¾ cup (add 1 net carb per serving)

Cut the pumpkin in half, scrape out the seeds and fibers, and cut into slices. Pare the slices with a vegetable peeler. Cut the slices into ½-inch by 3-inch pieces, similar in size to fat french fries. Melt the butter in a skillet and add the pumpkin. Squeeze the lemon slices over the pumpkin, and then drop them into the pan. Mix the Splenda with the cinnamon and salt and sprinkle over the pumpkin. Add the syrup or water. Cook, stirring and basting with the pan liquid, over medium heat until the pumpkin is tender and starting to brown and caramelize. Add more water if necessary. It will take about 20 to 25 minutes.

Makes 6 servings.

Per Serving—Total Carb: 4.8g, Fiber: 0.4g, Net Carb: 4.4

Menus for New Year's Celebrations

NEW YEAR'S EVE BUFFET:
With a low-carb feast like this one, your actions will match your words when you raise a glass and toast “to your health!”

Hot Brie with Almonds and Candied Kumquats
Macadamia and Coconut Crusted Shrimp with Sweet and Spicy Sauce
Platter of Cold Sliced Roast Beef, Turkey, and Ham with
Mustard, Horseradish, and Cranberry Sauce
Sliced Tomatoes, Dill Pickles, and Assorted Olives
Pumpkin Tamales
Waldorf Salad
Basket of Mixed Flour Bread, Tortillas, and Parmesan Sesame Crackers
*
Raspberry Trifle
Champagne and an assortment of beverages on ice

NEW YEAR'S DAY DINNER:

Traditional foods for New Year’s Day are not the festive, rich feasts of the recent holidays, but simple, rustic, everyday foods. The belief that eating such foods would insure a plentiful supply of the same for the coming year has its roots in many folk customs. In Arkansas, where I grew up, eating pork and black-eyed peas guaranteed good fortune. My husband, from West Virginia, says his uncle Ben always had a bite of pork and sauerkraut on his fork ready to eat at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Pigs symbolize luck, fertility, and abundance in many different cultures. Beans of various kinds represent coins; cabbage and leafy greens signify paper money, while yellow-colored cornbread means you will receive gold.

Ham and Tepary Bean Soup
Choucroute Garni
Fried Cornbread
*
Apple Galette with Heavy Cream

Recipes in bold are from Carb Wars; Sugar is the New Fat

Happy Holidays!

If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the kitchen.

Minding Your Brain

If you haven't already found Dr. McCleary's Website, http://www.drmccleary.com/, don't waste another minute. The brilliant author of The Brain Trust Program has already posted eight not-to-be-missed articles about the care and feeding of your brain. His latest, explains the chicken or the egg conundrum of how we could have developed the kind of intelligence necessary to provide our brains with a nutrient dense diet before we actually had brains capable of the skill and cunning needed to procure such a diet.

Living along the shoreline, where eggs, mollusks, and crustaceans were abundant and easily harvested, would have provided a high-protein, high-fat diet for early humans, according to Dr. McCleary. As I mentioned in the seafood chapter in my book, humans are the only primates who have webbed digits, bearing testimony to our historical stint along the coast of some ancient African sea and providing a clue as to why Omega-3 fats are so essential to our well-being.

The Brain Trust Program should be required reading for those of us who have trouble remembering what we were going to say long enough to finish a sentence or where we parked the car; for anyone who suffers from hot flashes or migraines; in fact, for anyone who has a brain. Dr. McCleary's easy-to-understand articles on his Website are an additional bonus. Don't miss a single one.

Here is a quote from Becoming A Brain by Dr. McCleary:

"High energy requirements and the demand for a nutrient dense diet with abundant long-chain omega 3 fatty acids are critical for optimal brain function and act to slow brain aging. The efficiency with which the brain metabolizes glucose declines as we age. If energetic demands are to be successfully met as we age, ketone bodies are an ideal fuel source because they generate energy with lower oxygen use and are delivered to the brain via a different transporter than glucose uses." http://www.drmccleary.com/2007/12/21/BecomingABrain.aspx

A Chocolate Star is Born

Yesterday’s mail brought an unexpected treat. If you are a fan of Jimmy Moore’s blog, livinlavidalowcarb, you have probably heard that he has designed a new candy bar made by the company that gives us ChocoPerfection™, the world’s best sugar-free chocolate bar. Lucky me, I was one of those chosen to receive a free sample of his new bar before it hits the market.

If he wanted an enthusiastic endorsement, he sure picked the right mailbox! The Jimmy Moore Livin' La Vida Low-Carb bar is a chocoholic’s dream come true. The same wonderful, deep dark chocolate on the outside as the dark ChocoPerfection™ bars, but with a surprise on the inside—a soft, moist, raspberry-flavored, truffle center. Jimmy is letting the suspense build before he tells us how to order them, but I’m going to ask him to reserve several boxes for me, because I know they are going to sell out as soon as he makes the announcement.

Thanks, Jimmy for making this fabulous candy available. What a great gift to all your readers!

USA Book News Awards

Carb Wars; Sugar is the New Fat has been named as one of the finalists in the USA Best Book Awards of 2007 in the Health, Diet, and Weight Loss category. You can see the listing at: http://www.usabooknews.com/health/dietweightloss.html

The Best Anti-wrinkle Treatment Money Can’t Buy.

I came across an article in Harper’s Bazaar Magazine about some of the latest anti-aging beauty treatments that included this description of a very expensive product developed by Dr. Fredric Brandt to prevent wrinkles:

“A new category of antiaging treatments is aimed at preventing sugar from damaging skin. When we consume sweets, excess sugar attaches to elastin fibers, causing them to harden. This process, called glycation, makes skin lose elasticity and wrinkle more easily. ‘Products containing anti-inflammatory alistin prevent glycation,’ says Brandt, who recently introduced Dr. Brandt Lineless Anti-Glycation Serum ($90).”

This reminds me of the anti-smoking ads showing how cigarettes cause pucker lines to form on the upper lip. If cancer and death wouldn’t convince you to quit smoking, perhaps the fear of wrinkles would. Maybe the same tactic would work for sugar.

Dr. Brandt’s serum may be a dandy way to prevent sugar damage to the skin on your face, but just think of the implications! If you don’t eat the sugar to start with, you can have the same treatment, not only for your face, but for ALL of your skin and every other part of your whole body as well, inside and out, without spending a penny!

How to Overcome Sweet Holiday Temptations

A big thank you to Connie Bennett for hosting a panel discussion titled How to Overcome Sweet Holiday Temptation: 4 Low-Carb Experts Weight In, yesterday on her blogtalk radio show. Thank you also to Jimmy Moore who organized the panel, which included Jimmy, Laura Dolson, Christin Sherburn, and me. Connie plans to post the tips gleaned from the discussion on her site. You can listen to the show by going to: www.blogtalkradio.com/feeds/stopsugarshock.

Gary Taubes at UC Berekey

Gary Taubes gave a presentation at UC Berkeley called "The Quality of Calories; What Makes Us Fat and Why Nobody Seems to Care." If you have read Gary's book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, it gives a bit more detail about the subject. If you have not, you'll see why you should. It is 1 hour and 45 minutes long, but well worth the time: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

One quote from the lecture shows very clearly how things went so terribly wrong and why it is so hard to bring about any change:

"There’s a group at the University of Cincinnati that did an Atkins vs. low-fat study and they found that the Atkins people lost twice as much weight and they liked the diet much better. I was interviewing the dietitian who did the study. She had agreed to talk to me but she was very hesitant — she didn’t offer up any information. Finally, at the end of the interview, the one thing she offered freely: I asked her who funded it and she said the American Heart Association.
I said, “Well, I have to give them credit for funding it.”

She said, “Don’t. They funded it because we proposed it as a study that would refute the benefit. And when we found that the Atkins diet really worked and worked better than the low-calorie diet, now we’re trying to get money to look further into it and they won’t give it to us.”

There's also a fantastic article on the Taubes book from a Canadian paper, the Ottawa Citizen, called "Good Food, Bad Food." Here is the link: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/arts/story.html?id=0e14c04c-5ff8-431d-bd8b-7fbcb55a35f0"

Thank you to Jimmy Moore, http://www.livinlavidalowcarb.com/ for finding this article. We can always count on Jimmy to keep us up to date on all the low-carb news.

Postponed again!

My interview on the “What’s Cooking” show on CRN, scheduled for today, was postponed again. I’ll post the new time when I know it, but this time I’ll wait until I see my name on the guest list on the CRN Website.

A good NYT article on Taubes' book...

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus

Sugar Shock Radio Show Appearance

I have been invited to participate in a panel discussion on Connie Bennett’s Sugar Shock Radio show on December 11, at 3:00 PM EST (12:00 noon PST) to talk about how to survive the holidays without sugar. Here is the link for the info: http://www.sugarshockblog.com/2007/12/low-carb-expert.html.

Connie is the author of "Sugar Shock! How Sweets and Simple Carbs Can Derail Your Life and How You Can Get Back on Track."

You-Tube goes Low-Carb

Check out this video from YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jFcKPpZleI