Angel Food (lowfat)

I’ve been keeping my food diary very faithfully now for a few weeks, and that is the only way I can remember what I’ve been eating. I’m in a bit of a funk, and my sustenance has been of either the feast or the famine sort. Case in point: two nights ago, I chowed down on macaroni and cheese (at least I worked out that afternoon); last night, I just didn’t eat. The hunger in my stomach feels somehow more appropriate to my mood, and I’ve no desire to feel full. I know skipping meals is unhealthy, so I basically forced myself to have breakfast and lunch today. I’m supposed to bring dinner to my grandmother this evening, yet absolutely nothing sounds good to me. I usually love food - eating it, cooking it, talking about it, reading about it - so I’m disturbed by this total lack of desire to eat.

It’s very rare for me to go through an experience like this. The last time I can remember feeling the way I feel now was when I was trying to get over a heartbreak. I’m not heartbroken now; I have a very lovely man who pledges always to be in my life. Yet, we are in a period of transition as he prepares to move across the country and we prepare to get married. Can someone experience grief over ending a chapter in her life? That’s what I feel I’m going through now.  I’m closing the chapter on an old, deeply rooted set of hopes and dreams, yet the new chapter hasn’t quite started. I’m foundering in this uncertainty but recognize that I can’t continue with the emotional achy-ness that I’ve become immersed in for the past few days.

There are a lot of things I don’t have control over in my life these days, but I refuse to lose control of my own happiness. Ignoring my friends, eating boxed meals, and climbing into bed at 8:30pm certainly aren’t good remedies for staying happy, are they? I need better remedies. I need to be with friends right now. I need to rest. I need to cook. I need to eat. No one else is going to take care of me, as much as I’d like them to, so I need to be sure that I’m taking care of myself as I close one chapter and start working on another.

Things are changing with me, and I’m so exhausted. My emotions have been so jumbled, so bittersweet lately. Not only am I getting married soon, but so is my brother. My nephew will be graduating from high school at the end of this school year. I’ll be changing jobs and moving halfway across the country in a few months. Perhaps things wouldn’t be so difficult if my family were as disconnected as we once were. But, in the past 5 years or so, we’ve worked really hard to tighten the threads of the family quilt, to be stronger and more closely knit. With all the changes taking place in the coming year, I can feel the threads unraveling again. I’ve been feeling nearly overwhelmed with sadness during what are, by all accounts, happy, happy times for my family. I’m watching my mom become more and more disapproving and rigid in her attitude with my brother, catching me in the middle of their disputes. My sister is withdrawing at a frightening pace. I’m torn between wanting to get the heck out of dodge to be with Andy, and never wanting to leave so I won’t disrupt the family further.

My heart is overfull, and I want to eat any number of good things and replace all the difficult emotions with pasta, ice cream, and cashews. Nearly every day for the past three weeks has been a struggle for me to keep my emotions in check, my eating in check. Thank God I’ve identified that I’m an emotional eater, so I can limit myself to just a third of a pint of Haagen Dazs at a time. Still, I miss those days when life was more boring and green beans and other healthy things could fill the hollow spot in my gut.

My fiance won’t be in Pensacola too much longer. Soon he’ll be heading to Oklahoma to live out his fighter pilot dreams. So, visiting him a couple weeks ago, I had to take advantage of what may the freshest seafood available to us for quite some while. There’s this great fresh seafood market in Pensacola, FL called Joe Patti’s Seafood. It sits right on the water, and boats dock alongside it to deliver their catch. Doesn’t get much fresher than that!

The market has all sorts of really cool (re: intimidating) whole fish, crab legs, claws, lobsters, clams, etc. Wanting to make a quick and tasty dinner, rather than exercise my culinary muscles, I chose some very approachable 21/25 jumbo shrimp.

I love spicy food in the summer (it goes so well with a crisp pale beer), so I decided to make Shrimp Fra Diavolo for dinner - a tasty saute of shrimp served with a spicy tomato sauce over whole wheat pasta. I’ll have to make the Fra Diavolo sauce again to be able to give an actual recipe. Essentially, I used San Marzano tomatoes, a little garlic, fresh basil leaves, cayenne pepper, and a splash of balsamic vinegar. It was too sweet. Then, my fiance got home and decided to dump some cajun seasoning in it, against my protests. Turns out he’s got a pretty good palate after all. The sauce was suddenly nicely spicy and not too sweet. The shrimp, however, were more controlled affair. So, here’s my homespun recipe for Spicy Lemony Sauteed Shrimp (or Shrimp Fra Diavolo when served with the spicy tomato sauce).

If you have fresh herbs on hand (especially basil, parsley, or oregano) mince the herbs and toss with shrimp at the end of cooking.

1 tbsp olive oil

1 medium shallot, minced

2 large cloves garlic, minced

1 lb shrimp, peeled and cleaned

generous pinch Cayenne pepper

generous pinch of salt

1 lemon, halved

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add minced shallot to pan and sauté until shallot softens and is translucent. Add garlic to pan with shallot and sauté until garlic just begins to color (do not let garlic turn brown). Carefully add shrimp to pan so oil does not splatter. Stir and sauté shrimp until it is barley cooked, just opaque on each side. Remove pan from heat. Sprinkle cayenne and salt over shrimp to taste. Squeeze juice from lemon over the shrimp. Add herbs, if using. Toss shrimp until well coated with spices and aromatics. Serve immediately.

Serves 4, est. time 30 min (incl. prep), est. 4 WW points 

I had a strange little weekend in Florida these past few days. My pilot, his dad, and I had planned to go to the beach (my double-digit sized tankini be darned), but the mean Navy scheduler decided that my fiancé couldn’t have the day off after all. So, my darling pilot-in-training cursed and went flying with an embittered instructor pilot (who, no lie, started the flight by saying, “I’d rather be with my kids right now than flying with you”) while my future father-in-law and I spent the day together at the beach.

I love my FFIL, but he can be an annoyingly randy old man. He’s not creepy toward me (well, there was that one time he drunk dialed me), but he’s the kind of man who admits to watching Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade simply because “she’s stacked.” Yeah. One of those men. I still haven’t quite figured out how he spawned my lovely husband to be.

Before hitting the beach, FFIL and I lunched at one of those tourist trap restaurants that dot the Gulf Coast. Our waitress blessedly steered us away from all of the fried seafood, suggesting that we try a grilled Amberjack sandwich for lunch. It was truly the best piece of grilled fish I’ve ever had and totally worth sitting through a day with the FFIL checking out women half his age. After lunch, I did my best to enjoy my time with said FFIL and not drown in the red flag surf. We got absolutely pounded by the waves. I’m usually an ocean gal, but it was stressful constantly bracing ourselves against the whitecaps breaking over our heads. Somehow, even with all the beautiful women on the beach, I managed to avoid freaking out about being in a bathing suit. Until, that is, my FFIL decided to take some photos of me jumping over the waves. I saw myself in a picture and thought, “dear Lord, where is my muscle tone?”

It was such a frustration to look at pictures of myself and still feel so dissatisfied with my image. Immediately, my thoughts turned to scrambling for my cover up, never eating again, or just eating everything because darn-it I have made no progress dieting in the past year and a half. But, I realized that I couldn’t let my frustration morph into desperation. You know the desperation I’m referring to? The one that means eating an itty bitty dinner because it’s low in calories, only to see your diet melt into a hungry puddle of butter later in the evening?

So, despite being unhappy with the state of my flabby midsection and arms, I didn’t eat a grilled chicken salad for dinner.  No, I ate quite lovely grilled steak and shrimp kebabs. I also ate a little bread (just a little), a little rice, and most of my grilled veggies. I even drank a non-light beer. I felt satisfied and not over full. I repeated the same dining process on Saturday and Sunday, refusing to think about dieting, instead thinking about enjoying my meals. I ate what I wanted, and not too much of it, and I lost 1.5 lbs this weekend. Perhaps this is how thin people eat?

So, I just finished reading Julie and Julia, the book about the Julie/Julia Project. If you don’t know what the J/J Project is, er, was, it was a raucous blog about one woman’s obsessional cooking through Mastering the Art of French Cooking (524 recipes) in the span of just one year. It was also the first food blog that I regularly read. I loved it as an antidote to my Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines, publications that have you believing that there’s something wrong with you if you balk at paying $28/lb for organic chanterelles. (I actually spent that on mushrooms one Thanksgiving, although I only bought 1/4 of a lb for the salad course, thinking I’d ruin the precious recipe if I substituted a cheaper fungus. Sadly, the chanterelle and pear salad was possibly the most underwhelming plate of food I’ve ever eaten on Thanksgiving.) Well, having finally finished the book about the blog, I find myself wanting to cook, and write, and give my little spin on the recipes I encounter.

Also, I still want to lose weight.

Here’s the deal, though. With the exception of the recipes in Cooking Light, I nearly always hate any recipe that purports to be low-fat, low-cal, or ”points-friendly.” (I most especially have hated the “points-friendly” recipes written by Weight Watchers.) But, since I love to cook and love to eat yet still have 10-20 lbs to lose (depending on how nice I’m being to myself), I most definitely need to focus on low-fat, good-for-me comestibles. So, my plan going forward for my 3fc blog is: when I’m feeling a bit lazy, I’ll cook and share tasty recipes I come across in Cooking Light; when I’m feeling more spirited, I hope to revamp others’ recipes to make them a little more healthful (or, in the case of the WW recipes, a lot more tasty).

I’ve not yet picked out a first recipe to write about here. I’m in Florida this weekend visiting my pilot-in-training fiance, praying that he rocks his checkride this afternoon and the visual navigation route later tonight. He’ll not be in from his two flights until about 11pm or so. That leaves me about 6 1/2 hours to do a bit of recipe research and experimentation. Now, where did I leave my uppity Aug 08 Gourmet?