I mean, seriously: it’s been four days. I figured the whole process would take about a week, am I right?
I’m not right, am I? Well, damn. I might have to rethink my commitment.
Dinner tonight, coconut chicken with stir fried veg, comes from The South Beach Diet Cookbook
And that’s all I’m-a gonna say about that. Moving on!
Here’s a picture of some chicken breasts cooking up in a pan, although if you need a photo to tell you what that looks like you’ve been out of the kitchen for WAY too long. I let them brown up while I got my mis en place together for the coconut sauce: onion, garlic, ginger, lemon, turmeric, cumin, cayenne, coconut milk, ground macadamias and tamarind. And there was a great chopping and zesting and grating across the land.
Okay, yes, I maybe feel a teensy bit funny cooking out of a diet cookbook. But see, these two weeks are Phase One, and you’ve gotta be a little more careful about what you suck down, and…
… you know, never mind. I will not apologize for subjecting you to the South Beach Cookbook; you’re free to not read. Besides, this chicken is good, so who gives shits where it comes from? NOT ME.
When the chicken was out of the pan, I quickly sauteed the aromatics with the spices until they were nice and soft, and I would like to bottle that smell and dab it behind my ears except that then the dogs would constantly be licking my head, disrupting my naptimes.*
I dumped in the coconut milk and whisked in the tamarind concentrate and nuts, and left the whole mess to simmer and come together. Once it did, I returned the chicken to the sauce to let it finish cooking through and turned my attention to the vegetables.
I did use the dreaded lite coconut milk. Some sacrifices must be made, so I womanned up and did it.
*Currently, they only spend about 50% of the time licking my head. Yes, I let them. Yes, I’m one of those people.
Oh, the vegetables. I was unprepared for you, vegetables.
You see, vegetables contain something called fiber. And fiber makes you shit. So when you suddenly dramatically increase your consumption of vegetables – especially cruciferous or raw/barely cooked vegetables – there is poop. A lot of poop. Sometimes violent poop. It’s a good thing that I’ve always found time on the toilet to be quality time, because the commode and I have become fast friends over the past few days. (To be fair, it probably doesn’t like me as much as I like it.) I’m assuming things will even themselves out as times goes on. I hope. Please.
Aren’t you glad you know this about me? Hello, my name is Michelle and I pooped four times today.
Because I hadn’t shat enough of my internal organs out today and still had a lung and spleen left, I quickly cooked up a mess of colorful bell peppers and snow peas with a touch of sesame oil. Let’s hear it for poop number five!
I nestled a sliced-up chicken breast on a generous bed of veg, spooned some sauce over and rang the dinner bell. Metaphorically.
I just typed “methaphorically,” but I’m pretty sure that’s something COMPLETELY different and I want no part of it.
This coconut chicken will definitely be making repeat appearances at my table. The chicken is perfectly moist from being gently poached in the sauce, which is slightly sweet (coconut) and slightly tangy (tamarind) and slightly spicy (cayenne). Lite coconut milk notwithstanding, it tastes rich and decadent and not at all like “diet” food. The nuts add a nice textural element, as do the crisp, just-kissed by the heat vegetables.
And now, you’ll have to excuse me. I think you know where I’m going, and the computer can’t come with me.
Thursday Night Smackdown 
Protein is your friend! Actually, I’ve looked at some SBD recipes; they look quite reasonable.
I’ve always considered coconut milk lite to be fattening, and coconut milk normal to be completely untouchable!
…But more than anything else, I consider it to expensive, which is why I barely use it. That meal looks darn delicious though.
I saw somewhere that you can duplicate lite coconut milk by using half regular coconut milk and half water. You might want to look into that if you end up using a lot of it.
That all looks really tasty; I may have to look into that diet myself.
Oh God that made me laugh. I can’t really eat carbs so have a high veggie diet and am familiar with that of which you speak. I as yet, have not had the balls to discuss it on the internets, so kudos to you.
You can’t take your computer to the bathroom? It must have a short battery life like mine does. Get yourself a BlackBerry! Or an iPad. I mean, just the name makes it sound like it’s for the bathroom!
Also, good for you. I’ve never tried these diets, since I’m a vegetarian; they’re always filled with lots of “lean meats,” blah. So instead I sit here with a container of cereal. But I eat lots of vegetables all day!
I don’t care of it’s “diet food.” That looks AMAZING. I love all the colors of the veggies! (Of course, I tend to stick to a protein-and-veggie diet myself. Simple carbs make me feel bloaty and gross.)
One of my epiphanies over the past couple of years has been that eating healthier can be expensive.
We’re trying to eat locally and seasonally. Not absolutely everything, but nearly, and over 90% of the time. Our meat comes from either our county or any county that touches our county, our vegetables are grown by us or picked up from local farmers or at the farmers’ markets.
We had broccoli a couple weeks ago, as an exception. But we can even buy our lettuce locally, grown by a hydroponics farmer down the road.
The cookbooks and the meal plans don’t care. And they all give price advice as though we were buying chicken from the supermarket (which I no longer know how much it is, but it is cheap compared to pastured locally-raised, slaughtered on the farm heritage chickens). And we have to buy chicken when they have it, they don’t slaughter chickens every week, so we buy whole chickens, cut them up, and freeze them and hope they last.
We do grow our own snow peas, and can look forward to them every year from say May until the heat in late June kills their production.
Bell peppers are pretty seasonal too, and darned expensive in the grocery store, even. Fortunately, i still have some on the vines.
Furthermore, all the good healthy foods even in the supermarkets, like fresh produce, are more expensive than the packaged processed food products you can buy.
All that being said, Michelle often leads me down the path of temptation, and I’m considering adding snow peas and coconut milk to the grocery list this week. Yum.
…and beans, you’ll be eating more beans, and those, well, we know what’s gonna happen there. BUT!!! Your body adjusts and the green cloud stops whafting out the back ‘o yo’ pants!
So! Something to look forward to there!
kay, it IS my friend. but right now, it can’t compete with the veg.
anna, yeah, it didn’t help the grocery bill. then again, this meal made enough for dinners and lunches, so maybe i shouldn’t complain.
adina, diet or no diet, this is just plain good food.
sally, yeah, i’m all about sharing the unsharable this week.
sara, i COULD take my computer to the bathroom, but i choose not to expose it to those fumes; it’s a pricey piece of machinery.
veronica, really, i hesitate to call it diet food at all; it’s got coconut milk, for god’s sake. plus, i don’t really like to think of myself as being “on a diet,” y’know?
foodgarden, you’re not kidding. i’m hoping that NOT spending cash on lunches out and takeout for dinner will help balance what was a mammoth (for us) grocery bill this week.
cynic, seriously! we just made a pot of veggie chili, and lord only knows what will happen after i eat that. and dinner tonight involves cabbage, so clear the room.
You sure make SBD food look good. I would totally eat that and the fact that it’s good for you is just a bonus.
I know right? I had to eliminate many delicious foods from my own diet a while back due to the fact that I have frickin’ GOUT in my big toe and it’s really really painful. First to go? Beer. I was a 3 pint a day girl and when I cut it out, I lost 2 pounds almost immediately. Add that to the massive quantities of salad, greens, veggies, and whole grains we started eating and I feel pretty darned good. But why am I not 145 pounds yet? I felt like this should be happening faster than it is…
ps- gout means no bacon, fish, legumes(!!??). yay.
You know, I have the South Beach Diet Cookbook. It’s got some damn tasty stuff in there and very little of it really seems like “diet food.” That’s part of why I bought it during one of my ‘I’m getting skinny, dammit!!’ phases. But anyway, now that I’m at my more reasonable ‘I’m going to just try to eat good food.’ place I still use stuff from there. It’s tasty and most of it is pretty easy.
As for the fiber, yet it gets better. It shoudl soon. It takes a week to 10 days for you body to adjust to a change like that. Well, my body, everyone is a bit different, but the important thing is that it will get better and you’ll normal out, maybe a bit more poo than before, but only because you body is doing it’s cleaning thing a bit more efficiantly than before, but it won’t nearly be as bad as it is now.
did I just read “veggie chili”? Please post a recipe! and of course the results after eating it… did you remember to soak the beans? My boyfriend fed me some kind of veggie/bean stew a few weeks ago and man oh man it was toxic. Apparently soaking beans eliminates the uber-gas effect that they can have
Michelle, you should allow at least ten days for the diet to take effect. Then, according to most weight-loss programs, you should be losing about 40 pounds per week.
So I’d say that gives you about a year to live before you disappear completely.
Go for it!
OH jesus, you make me laugh! The recipe sounds fabulous! The photo of the veggies was veritable food porn and the poop? WELL HOW THE HELL ELSE ARE YOU GONNA LOSE WEIGHT? 10 gallons of water a day will flush the fat cells out faster than you can….well, hell, I don’t know, you have a much better flair for finishing sentences.
I hope you will try to mashed cauliflower from SB cookbook. The first time I tasted them it was BETTER than mashed potatoes but I’ve never been able to achieve the perfection of that first experience.
Love you Michelle!
karen, right? that’s how i like to look at it.
kay, wow, i didn’t know people still got gout. and i’m sorry about the bacon, or lack thereof.
beth, i only pooped TWICE today, so we’re on an upswing!
deb, chili recipe coming soon!
nick, that’s what i thought, thanks for the corroboration.
connie, we are big fans of the mashed cauliflower around these parts. in fact, i just finished polishing some off!
Pooping Your Way to a Thinner You was going to be my self-help book’s title the year I had some digestion-related malady and lost 40 pounds.
Well, hey, never had quite that amount of praise from anyone except the convenience-store owner, but thank you, thank you!
But see, the problem here is that we DON’T WANT to see you melt away! We like you just the way you are!
Anyway. Whatever you do, just share it with the rest of us. We’re here to support you!
Nick
I was a HUGE skeptic of the low carb “fad”. I always told people that I was a fan of the “Eat Sensible and Exercise” weight loss plan. But…..I done got myself converted. I started off on Atkins and now I’m just plain ol’ lowcarbing it. 30 pounds in three months don’t lie. Don’t feel you have to apologize for shit (pun intended….sorry). Also? I’m totally going to make this.