Happily Ever After - Food for Thought

by Valerie Nusbaum It is said that “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”  I believe this idea was fabricated by a group of men whose wives or girlfriends refused to cook. This month, I have a few thoughts on the topic of eating well. I do most of the cooking at our house for several reasons: I’m home more than Randy, I’m faster in the kitchen than my husband, and I like to know what I’m putting in my body. I try to feed us healthy, tasteful food, but that’s getting harder all the time. The age-old question of “What can I make for dinner?” often comes back to bite me where I sit. Randy doesn’t balk at cooking. He does all the grilling at our house, and he makes breakfast on the weekends. His waffles are delicious, and, no, they are not previously frozen. If I’m sick, he pitches right in. Still, most of the meal planning and grocery lists are on my shoulders. According to some expert, here’s a formula for how many calories a person should consume in a day. Multiply your weight by 13. This number applies whether you’re not exercising at all or only working out moderately for an hour or less. If you’re exercising more heavily, add 100 to 200 calories per additional hour of exercise. If I subscribe to that theory, I should consume around 1,650 calories on any given day. You’re sitting there right now doing the multiplication, aren’t you? Does that mean, though, that if I burn 500 calories on the treadmill, I can then eat 500 more calories? That’s half of a double chocolate doughnut, and I’d like to know the answer.  Anyone? There are so many things we can’t eat any more. A new study says that we shouldn’t consume Splenda because it can raise insulin levels, which may cause diabetes, but we shouldn’t eat sugar either because that can give us diabetes, or make us fat, which will give us diabetes. There always seems to be a new study, contradicting whatever the old study has been telling us. Can someone tell me which one is correct? I heard that we shouldn’t eat brown rice for fear of arsenic poisoning. We had switched from white rice to brown in order to be healthier. What am I supposed to serve with my burritos and stir fry now? I was told by my gynecologist that I shouldn’t eat so much chicken because chickens are fed estrogen. At my age, one would think that consuming some estrogen wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. So, am I now supposed to make beef burritos and stir fry? There’s also some reason why I can’t eat soy, but I can’t remember what it is. Goodbye hot and sour soup? Eggs are a controversial subject, too. They’re a great source of protein, and the yolks are high in cholesterol. This reminds me of the egg poacher my mom had. It was a neat little plastic cup that held an egg, and Mom put it in her microwave for a specified amount of time and took out a perfectly poached egg. I mentioned that Randy might like one. Mom got one for him for Christmas. He tried it and it blew up in the microwave. There was egg everywhere. The directions instructed Randy to cook his egg for 1.5 minutes. Mom said she probably should have told us to cook it for 35 seconds. Probably. With all the recipe substitutions I make so that we can have healthier, lower-fat food with fewer carbs, the resulting dish hardly resembles what it started out to be. Factor in the things we’re allergic to or just plain don’t like, and we’re living on lettuce and broccoli. But, wait, not too much of those either, because they can cause our blood to either thicken or thin—I forget which. We go out to eat a couple of times each week, but finding places where we can get a delicious, health-conscious and lower-calorie meal is not easy. We also like to eat in restaurants where we can have a conversation without yelling over the din of screaming kids and background music. Randy wanted to take me out to dinner a while back, and he wanted to try that new barbecue place down on North Market Street, so we went to Carrabba’s. The barbecue joint had a line of people waiting for tables. We don’t wait for tables. We were very distressed to read that Carrabba’s restaurant in Frederick had closed its doors. Why is it that when you find a good place to eat, either the menu gets “new and improved” or it goes out of business? We were trying to figure out what to have for dinner the other evening. Randy said that he’d see if we had a can of soup in the pantry, and we could have soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. I told him that we couldn’t have sandwiches, because we’d had pancakes for breakfast and croutons on our salads at lunch. And I reminded him about the doughnut he’d forced me to eat.  We’d already had way too many carbs that day, so no more bread. He looked at me blankly and said, “Well, that’s silly. Then it’s just soup and cheese.”