Election Night Stress Eating

There is hope in this endless, bitter war!

No, not Melody Pond.  I wish.  No, it's finally election day!  Soon we can put to rest what has seemed like the longest, most endlessly prolonged, most annoyingly partisan election season ever.

I will never be so happy to see local carpet cleaning commercials.

But first I have to get through the day, and even worse, the night.  A night of being glued to the news channels and their needlessly high-tech maps and their commentators of varying (but mostly low) tolerability.

I'm trying not to be too emotionally engaged in this, but I can already see it's going to be a bad day for stress eating.

Consider the circumstances:

• We have a ton of leftover Halloween candy.
• And a box of Mozzarella Cheez-Its. 
• Ohio is a swing state.  THE swing state. The one it always comes down to.
• Ohio can go either way.
• The freezer is really full, and two ice cream cartons are taking up a lot of room.

Oh yes, it's going to be ugly.

Tips managing the election night emotional binge eating:

• Focus on what you can control:  I voted, and things may go my way, or they may not.  Now I will focus on not eating another Twix Fun Size bar.
• Know your triggers:  Some things just might cause an uncontrollable upsurge in stress.  Please, please do not me hear Sarah Palin talking on TV. 
• Relieve the stress some other way:  Take deep breaths!  Vent something you may later regret on Facebook!  Do push ups!  Ha ha!  Got you on the last one.  Like I would do push ups.  Foodgoat will be the one who does all the crazy push up variations just for fun.
• Drink black tea instead: Black tea, according to one study, reduced cortisol (stress hormone) levels and helped men de-stress more quickly.  Black tea doesn't sound nearly so satisfying, though, as a salad made primarily of Cheez-Its. 

In the Medicine Cabinet

It's the season for sickness in the Goat home, and along with Kleenex and a humidifier and soup, we have been calling up soothing honey sticks to the front lines.  GoatSpawn will occasionally tolerate them, which is more than I can say for almost anything else we try to give her. 

Another Day of Lactose Intolerance

When I was a kid, I was told I was allergic to milk. When I was a teenager, I realized nothing happened when I drank milk, so I drank milk to my heart's content, pints of the stuff every day. When I was in my mid-20s, I found that drinking milk starting giving me queasy, uncomfortable feelings. I cut back. I cut back more. Eventually, I stopped drinking any milk at all.

But every once in a while, I'll drink milk again, just to see if I'm still lactose intolerant.

I am.

I should really just try Lactaid - milk modified for the lactose intolerant. But I can't help thinking it's not "real" milk. The same way decaf is not "real" coffee. But it's just milk with a lactase enzyme added to break down lactose into simple sugars (glucose and galactose).

The lactase comes from fungi, and the process was developed in the 1980s by a scientist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (her work also led to the development of reduced fat mozzarella, which I am far less motivated to try).

When You Are the Food Source

August is Breastfeeding Awareness Month, and although GoatSpawn started solids at six months, it wasn't until she was about 9 m0nths that it seemed like she needed to eat much more solid foods. Until then, breastmilk was a pretty much a complete food - it had everything a she needed, all the calories, liquids, nutrients and minerals, continually changing in composition, both throughout the day and over the months, to suit GoatSpawn's changing needs.

But now GoatSpawn seems far more interested in cheese these days, but being just a few months shy of the age when she can drink cow's milk, I still have to make sure she's still getting the milk she needs. So, in addition eating oatmeal, I am drinking Mother's Milk tea.

A blend of herbs traditionally used to encourage lactation, including fenugreek, anise, blessed thistle, fennel and coriander, the tea does in fact seem to work, and doesn't taste half bad. Mostly, it tastes like licorice.

What else works? Beer. It's the hops in the beer that works to increase lactation, so if you go this route, pick something hoppy, like an IPA. I see a Mother's Milk beer in the future!

Ten Tips When Obesity Is Your Goal

I don't know who, how, or why someone ended up on this blog with the key words "obesity is my goal," but if obesity is indeed your goal, and the hugely effective Donut and Pepsi Diet isn't working fast enough for you, I can help! Here are some new concrete tips for getting fat:

1. Eat those 100-calorie snack packages. Now, they are ostensibly for those for whom obesity is not the goal at all, but eat enough of them and you're on well on your way. And because they come in such small packages, and typically feature such non-filling, nutrient-low foods, eating a few at time, a couple of times day will make you feel like you're not eating much at all! You'll hardly notice those extra hundreds of calories!
   
2. Go for a short, easy walk every day. Just because you get some exercise doesn't mean you can't get fat! And, let's face it, if you will be carrying around a lot of extra weight you'll want your heart to get used to the workout. Fifteen minutes of walking at 2.5 mph will burn some calories, but you can use that minimal workout to walk to your local coffeeshop where you can cool yourself down with an extra large coffee beverage with whipped cream and sugar! Don't wear yourself out though - use the drive-thru at the donut shop, liquor store, fast food place, whenever available!
   
3. Finish your plate. Eat everything you have piled onto your plate, no matter how stuffed you already are. You don't want leftovers crowding up the fridge, and that poor starving kid in China is not going to be happy if you don't use those last bowl of pasta to become fat.
   
4. Have lots of salad. Have a big, big plate of greens. But be sure to have lots of creamy dressing. Can you see green? Add more dressing! And don't forget bacon and cheese and anything else that can smother the slightly bitter taste of green vegetables.
   
5. Eat at chain restaurants. Yes, fast food restaurants can help you become obese, but their portions tend to be small and well, transportable, while chain restaurants, like Appleby's, have gigantic portions, free refills, and endless breadsticks.
   
6. Cut out a favorite food entirely. Do you love ice cream? Bacon? Whatever that high fat or high calorie food is, drop it completely from your diet. Don't let celebrations or holidays or being a guest in someone's home deter you! Over time, cravings will build and build, until you binge big time on a level that will more than make up for not having it every once in a while.
7. Consider becoming a vegan. You might think a vegan diet would never get you to your goal of obesity, but not necessarily! Make up for the total avoidance of meat and dairy (which are high in protein and quite filling) by overeating things with too much sugar and simple carbs, including lots of processed foods.
8. Wear scrubs, even if you don't work in the medical field. The very loose and stretchy nature of these clothes will allow for your steadily increasing body shape without you noticing at all. More form-fitting clothes may tempt you to stop eating or start exercising, neither of which will get you to your goal!
   
9. Get pregnant. For you ladies! "Eating for two" is a societal license for eating whatever the hell you want, in whatever size portion you decide, even though pregnancy only actually requires 300 more calories (or two sensible snacks) a day after the first trimester. The downside is that the excuse only works for 9 months. The upside is that babies typically weigh less than 10 pounds at birth, so the other 25 pounds (or more!) is yours to keep!
   
10. Succumb to depression. Throw out that Prozac! Give up on the power of positive thinking! Dwell on your problems and the next thing you know, you'll be self-medicating with bags of potato chips and pizza to go along with too much daytime TV. Don't forget about alcohol - use beer to drown your sorrows, and a beer belly is sure to follow.

There you have it - if obesity is your goal, with these steps you can be there in no time.

Next, look for our "10 steps to Financial Ruin"!

Tasty, and Medicinal Too

Recently, Foodgoat's drink of choice has been a gin and tonic, garnished with a slice of lime. The gin is Bombay Sapphire, the tonic is Canada Dry, and it all started when an Irish midwife I know mentioned that back in Ireland they used to say that a gin and tonic and a warm bath would help induce labor.

A couple sips were included in the arsenal of old wives' tales methods used to encourage GoatSpawn's well-timed arrival (just after Ladygoat's mom came in town, at the start of the weekend, after dinner, and on the Cleveland Browns' bye week), and since then, he's fixed up the cocktail regularly.

Gin and tonics was first popular with the army of the British East India Company in India. Tonic of course contains quinine, which was used prevent malaria. But since quinine was very bitter, the addition of gin made it easier going down. Modern tonic water has much less quinine, but lgin and tonics remain popular. Winston Churchill apparently once said that gin and tonics saved "more Englishmen's lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire."

GoatSpawn Blogs Again

Nine weeks to go, and the big question is: am I a boy or a girl? Nobody knows!

Some people thought it was a good idea to keep my gender a surprise, and some people seem to be annoyed and frustrated by the suspense. Some have strong convictions of one side or the other, but an informal poll is pretty evenly split.

Did diet have anything to do with this? According to old wives tales, women who eat more meat and salty foods get a boy, while those who eat more sweets and desserts get a girl. New research also suggests that a higher calorie intake around the time of conception, with its higher quantity and wider range of nutrients, is linked to boys. There was also a strong correlation between women eating breakfast cereals and sons.

So what was Ladygoat eating around January?

In other news, to pass the time, I've been trolling the web. Here's some stuff I found:

from I Can Haz A Cheezburger, courtesy of my soon to be uncle PJ ...




and an alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell of bacon ... by actually cooking a piece of bacon by two halogen lamps. Delicious!

GoatSpawn Exposed

GoatSpawn here, checking in with the world.

When I'm not busy growing all the necessary parts for human life (which takes a lot more time than you would think), I'm already contemplating this food thing. So far, I only get to see the food after some processing by Ladygoat, but I've found when she eats, I have the energy to begin another round of trying to beat my way out of this place. Especially since she has continued to insist upon a daily cup of coffee. (My current digs are quite comfortable, except that every once in a while, this loud booming voice announces, "Spawn ... I am your ... Father." )

Indeed, Ladygoat has continued to eat a lot of things since I've been around. While some women get puritanical every little thing that passes into their system, Ladygoat has tried to forestall pregnancy paranoia. Fortunately, her doctor seems to follow the same philosophy, since, when asked about diet, he just shrugged and said, "Everything in moderation."

Among the foods I've already be exposed to:

• Soft cheeses, including mozzarella, feta, bleu cheese, and brie: Puh-leeze, as if Ladygoat could go nine months without cheese. And the risk of food poisoning, specifically listeriosis? Ladygoat's never, ever gotten food poisoning from her cheese sources.
• Deli meats: What would Foodgoat make for lunches without deli meats? The alleged problem is risk of food poisoning, listeriosis again. And like the cheese, Foodgoat's preferred deli meat sources have never steered him into food poisoning.
  
• Liver: Ladygoat loves liver. And the fact that it's high in Vitamin A sounds like a good thing. Unless, maybe, you eat liver and have a vitamin A-packed supplement. But if you have a choice between the nutrient-rich food and the nutrient-rich pill, don't you always take the food? Especially if it comes with fried onions?
  
• Bacon and hot dogs: They may be high in nitrates. But they're also very high in tastiness. And, the research is skimpy and inconclusive (nitrates in well water as a result of contamination is probably far more problematic than the occasional, but oh so delicious! slice of bacon). And Ladygoat must ... have ... bacon.
  
• Fish: The whole mercury thing has made fish a complicated ingredient to monitor. Just keeping track of all the different types of fish and the various suggested frequencies made Ladygoat's brain hurt. She resorted to the general philosophy that some fish was better than no fish.
  
• Uncooked foods like sushi: Ladygoat specifically asked her doctor about sushi, who assured her that as long as it was prepared properly, sushi was fine. They had a long discussion about the merits of particular sushi restaurants, and Ladygoat's favorite was deemed safe. So sushi she did. Very happily.
  
• Alcohol: While it's pretty clear that more than 3 - 4 drinks daily during pregnancy isn't such a great idea, what risks (if any) light to moderate drinking have are much fuzzier. There may even be benefits (which makes sense, since pregnant women have had wine in Europe for time immemorial, which has not seemed to cause a collapse in civilization). Ladygoat's doctor said she could have the occasional glass of wine with dinner, so she has had the occasional sips of wine and beer. Foodgoat has responded by drinking twice as much.
  

Well, I see that it's getting late, so I will now wait 'til things quiet down around here, so as to begin yet again to try to kick my way out. I'll bust out of here eventually!

Cheesy Dreams

It's an old wives' tale that eating cheese gives you nightmares. I've actually never heard of this, until I came across a study by the British Cheese Board in 2005 that looked into it.

They found that eating cheese before bed actually helps with getting a good night’s sleep (it's the tryptophan). The best finding, though, is that different cheeses cause different types of dreams. For example:

• Stilton, a blue cheese, not surprising perhaps, resulted in really vivid and weird dreams, though not necessarily bad dreams, for 75% of men and 85% of women who ate it. How weird? Talking soft toys, a vegetarian crocodile upset because it could not eat children, dinner party guests being traded for camels, soldiers fighting with each other with kittens instead of guns and a party in a lunatic asylum.

• Brie caused women tended to experience nice dreams, such as Jamie Oliver cooking dinner in their kitchens, or sunny beaches, but men had obscure dreams, such as driving against a battleship, or having a drunken conversation with a dog.

• Cheddar-eating participants tended to dream of celebrities.
  

Now this is a study just crying out for verification and reproducibility. Time for some nighttime snacks!

Sick and Tired, of Being Sick and Tasteless

It's no fun being sick. Especially when it's a sickness that hits Foodgoat, then takes me down, then gets Foodgoat for a second go round. And a sickness that wipes you out, and keeps us in bed, delirious and coughing, for days, and one that continues to linger on annoyingly for weeks.

But, even worse, being sick means having losing your sense of taste and your appetite. When your great comfort and enjoyment in life comes in food, it's depressing to find that nothing tastes good and nothing even sounds tasty. As a result, we haven't managed to make a good, interesting meal in weeks.

Instead, the only things we have had the energy or inclination to eat are Cheerios or bagels with cream cheese. One day we managed miso soup. Oh, and lots and lots of hot tea with honey. Indeed, we've gone through more honey in two weeks than we have in two years. Everything else, though, just tastes like cardboard. Which is really very sad.

Milk It For All It's Worth

Last Friday was National Milk Day, in honor of the first day, in 1878, that milk was first delivered in bottles.

Foodgoat is a longtime devoted milk drinker who routinely pours a big tall glass to go along with his dinner at home. But now, he has also made milk his drink of choice for lunch at work. While everyone else grabs a soda (or pop, if you must call it that) or a bottled water at the cafeteria, Foodgoat is among the few adults drinking milk along with their meal.

And why not? Maybe because buying milk at the cafeteria is sooo 3rd grade. But for Foodgoat, as in about 36% of those of Southern European descent, milk can continue to be a healthy, delicious option for adults as well as children. Milk, more nutritious and more filling than soda, has calcium and protein and a whole host of other vitamins and minerals. There's surprisingly a lot of controversy around the health benefits of milk, but I attribute it to the agitations and warmongering of vegans.

Me, I do not have dairy herding in my genes. I am among the 90-100% of Asians, who stop producing lactase, the enzyme required to digest milk, in adulthood, and thus can be found curled up and clutching their tummy after having a big a milkshake. Fortunately, there is yogurt.

Horehound

Foodgoat was sick last week, and treated himself partly with a bag of Horehound candy. (And here you thought this was going to be another Larry Craig post.)

Horehound, a weed in many countries and a member of the mint family, is an old herbal treatment for coughs and colds and other sorts of respiratory troubles. Claey's has been making the horehound herb tea candies for generations, and still brews and steeps them in copper kettles.

Horehound drops were commonly sold in pharmacies The FDA banned horehound as an active ingredient from cough drops in 1989 due to insufficient evidence supporting its efficacy, but horehound is still widely used in Europe, and can be found in European-made herbal cough remedies - such as Ricola. And it is still recognized as safe when used in small amounts to flavor beverages, candies, foods, and medicines. For Foodgoat, the horehound worked about as well to soothe his sore throat as any other cough drop or hard candy.

But how does horehound candy taste? Well, sort of root-beer-ish, somewhat bittersweet. Not bad.

Supersize Me

Well, we finally saw Supersize Me: A Film of Epic Portions.

Let's just say I am reconsidering my "it's okay once every two weeks" rule.

Aside from provoking sympathy nausea, the documentary also provoked considerable debate about the recently resurrected lawsuit against McDonald's. Isn't it obvious that fast food is bad for your health (though it takes the movie to see just how bad)? Isn't health and weight an issue of personal responsiblity? Is it so wrong for McDonald's to make a buck or two (or $5 billion) by providing something that people want (even if they shouldn't want it)?

Then again, many of the same arguments were used to criticize the lawsuits against tobacco companies for promoting smoking.

There's a little public health advocate in me, based on the population-wide obesity epidemic, that has me reserving some judgment on the lawsuit.

But, in terms of tastiness, the judgment of McDonald's is clear: not good food. Except maybe for the fries. Once every two months, tops.

Ladygoat Guidelines for Americans

Everybody should know by now that the feds came out with new Dietary Guidelines for Americans: recommendations include 60 to 90 minutes of daily exercise, more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and less sugar, sodium, and highly processed foods.

Yawn. It's all sounds so sensible.

My dietary guidelines would include more dark chocolate, a wider variety of tea and cheese, more orange vegetables, less of the assembly-line meats, limited intake of anything "instant," an abolition on high-fructose corn syrup, and least 30 minutes of sunshine (or puddle-splashing, as the case may be) a day.

Medicinal Liquor

I'b sick. I hab a cold. *cough cough* Same wid Foodgoat. Dis is what habbens when you go to a kid's birthday party in Sebtember.

Calling Dr. McGillicuddy! Forget Nyquil when Dr. McGillicuddy can make a house call. We each took a couple of swigs from a bottle of Dr. McGillicuddy's Vanilla Schnapps last night. For a sweet liqueur it sure can clear out your sinuses. And I was out in 15 minutes. At 10:30.

Unpleasant photos of the day

Beware! This post is not for the faint of heart!

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Skinned lamb heads and livers for sale at the West Side Market ...


What happens when Foodgoat has a new hatchet and sees a mouse in his garden ...


Foodgoat's shingles rash ...

Healing food product of the day.

Foodgoat is sick.

Around here, the treatment of choice for sore throats and general feeling-lousiness is a cup of hot calamansi juice. Calamansi (or kalamansi, or kalamonding, or suwa) is a tiny green lime indigenous in the Philippines. The smallest of the citrus fruits (just a few centimeters, and the tree is only 4-5 feet tall), it is very widely used, not just for drinks but also as an ingredient in many dishes, dipping sauces, marinades (I've been meaning to try it on salmon), even health care and beauty products. Little bowls of them, cut in half for squeezing ease, would be placed on the table with the other condiments. But what I really like is the juice.

The thing of it is, it's difficult to find. My parents have a tree in their backyard, but I've never seen fresh calamansi in the store, unlike in the Philippines, where baskets of it can be found in the market (it would tough to juice the tiny things anyway). I tried a powdered calamansi, which is okay. What I really look for is calamansi concentrate: a thick syrup sweetened with honey, that you just have to mix a little bit of with water for a hot (or cold, if it's summer and you're not sick) drink. But that's not so easy to get a hold of either. Most Asian markets or even Filipino stores don't carry it. So the thing to do is to pick a bottle or two up while you happen to be in the Philippines (or have someone pick it up for you).