Kim attended a pot-luck brunch recently and brought a decorative fruit salad to share with her friends. The bowl for the salad is made from a hollowed out watermelon that has been engraved. The salad is grapes, apples, oranges, strawberries, blue berries, blackberries, rasberries, catelope, and watermelon balls. The center-peice is a swan/duck made by artfully slicing an apple.
Two great places to brunch in Edmonton are Culina on 99th and Cafe de Ville just north of Jasper Ave. I’ve had brunch at both places in the last two weeks and I took photos of the great food for posterity.
Today Kim and I had brunch with our friend Sharon at Culina. Kim had bacon and eggs while Sharon and I both had the special. Bacon and eggs at Culina is special. They have bacon that is pork meat taken from the shoulder and is not served in strips. You can see it clearly in the attached photo. It is quite tender and not as greasy as regular strips of bacon. It tastes more like turkey to me.
The special today at Culina was a frittata with corn and melted edam served with sausage with herbs and maple covered in a tomato chutney. The frittata was moist and light but I really don’t like quiche and this is really just quiche. It tasted fine though. The chutney was refreshing. The sausages were remarkable. The maple was not overpowering and the herbs were prominent but balanced. These were the best sausages I have had in a long time and the played well with the chutney!
The Usual Suspects will be b-luncing at Culina again in just a few weeks. I look forward to whatever the special is that week. After today’s experience I am hoping that the menu includes those lovely sausages again!
Last week the Usual Suspects brunched at Cafe de Ville downtown. I had the Catania which is reminiscent of eggs benedict; however I do it a great disservice by making such a simple comparison. The Catania is thick bread topped with sliced grilled vegetables with a poached eggs on each covered with a spinach dressing and feta cheese. It is served with potatoes fried with dried tomato and seasoning. This is truly a gestalt dish; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Attention to given to every little detail in this dish. The vegetables are sliced in a way that allows them to mix and form a meshed bed under the poached eggs. The eggs are not poached in little cups and are thus unique and not quite soft-poached and not quite hard poached (which is how I make them at home. how did they know?!). The sauce was not trying to be a hollandaise variant as would be the obvious ploy in this type of dish. Instead it was a new experience taking this dish from being a “fancy eggs benny” to being its own thing.
While at de Ville I also shared a dish of baked brie in puff pastry with a friend. The brie seemed somewhat strong to me but it was rich and delicious. I regret not taking a photo of that plate as it was the most artful presentation at the table that morning! I highly recommend trying it. I was warned that the baked brie would take 20 minutes and might not come before my main order. That was odd as it is listed as a “starter.” Why offer a starter that will threaten to relegate your main dish to the heat lamp?! However, I was delighted that the brie came in ample time.
Over at the Blue Plate on 103 Ave just north of Jasper, they offer a Eggs Benedict Florentine. Its really good but nothing compared to the Catania. Both have spinach and feta cheese. Both are like eggs benedict but the Catania is unique in some many subtle ways. Of course it costs twice as much so I’ll give my dollar to the Blue Plate much more often to de Ville and the Florentine is really worth it but the comparison is still worth making.
After I finished making Kim some tuna salad today, it was so pretty I just had to take a picture and blog about it.
The tuna salad itself is just a can of tuna, two tablespoons of mayo, and a few ounces of finely chopped onion, and dill. The plate is garnished with wedges of tomato, thin slices of cucumber, and pepperoncini peppers.
To my dear dear friends: Please, if we are eating together and I contemplate eating something calorie-rich, remind me that I am on a diet and recommend that I eat something else. Apparently, I do not have enough will-power to maintain my diet when I am in your presence and I could use a gentle (or not so gentle) reminder of that fact.
Earlier this summer I began a diet with the goal of losing a lot of weight. It went very well for a long time. I managed to lose 1 lb per week every week just as planned. The past few weeks however, I have fallen off the weight loss wagon and regressed into overeating. I just barely managed to hit my goal of 192 lbs last Friday, but this week I have bounced back to about 194 lbs.
Over-eating is very hard to avoid. My weakness seems to be related to socializing and that seems to surprise me. In the past I always thought my problem was that, while I am working, I pay not attention to what I am eating. However, since starting my diet I find that I have no problem restricting what I eat while I am working. The real problem is that when I go out with friends, I eat too much.
In the past two weeks there have been so many occasions to eat socially that my will power was broken. At first I did well. On days when I knew I would be going out with friends, I would “save up” some calories by eating less earlier in the day. However, as of last weekend, all moderation went out the window. I managed to eat about 4000 calories over and above my budget! On my diet that is about 3 days worth of food.
Yesterday was a fine example of my weakness. I was having lunch with someone and we were discussing what to order. I pointed that I had had a particular sandwich before and it was great. Then I explained however that the calories were way too high. It is a ciabatta sandwich with grilled chicken, brie cheese, and mayonnaise. Of course, you would think that after explaining how many calories there were, I would order something responsible. Nope! My friend did, but I gave into temptation and ate that high-cal baked brie delight. At least I had salad instead of fries (not that it matters since they slathered the salad in some kind of sesame dressing).
I seriously worry that I will not be able to keep up my diet when I am back in University this fall. My fall-back plan is to add an additional 200 calories to my diet which should reduce my weekly weight loss to below half of a lb but will at least ensure that I do not put on addition weight.
Today I begin a 48 hour fast. Technically, I am not fasting as I am allowed to drink clear liquids. I am fasting because on Friday I have yet another medical test. It seems like I have been fasting a lot lately. In the past 3 months I have had to fast 3 times for 3 tests including, a urea breath test for H. Pylori bacteria in my stomach, an ultrasound of my abdomen, and blood tests. If I expand that to include the last year, you can add on two more fasts. On Friday I am having a very uncomfortable test: a barium enema and that requires me eat nothing for 48 hours and drink only clear liquids.
You might not be surprised to hear that I have lost a fair bit of weight. Sadly, not from dieting. Between June 23 and July 7 I lost 10 lbs. A person really shouldn’t lose 10 lbs in two weeks. During that time I was eating between 1000 and 1500 calories a day so I should have lost some weight but not more than 4 lbs by my calculation. Clearly I’m losing it somewhere!
I read recently, possibly in Bruce Sterling‘s non-fiction book Tomorrow Now, that thousands of North Americans are dying because they cannot talk about their bowels. In light of my current medical problems I have vowed to break this great western taboo, and talk about poop. I am losing weight because of some kind of gastrointestinal problem that is causing my bowel movements to change constantly. I suffer from diarrhea frequently and it is likely that I am not absorbing everything from the food I eat. Hence the weight loss.
In the past four months I have be plagued by abdominal problems. I have had all kinds of different pains in my abdomen. I have had gas, bloating, and cramps. I have had back pains. I have had constant changes in the timing, consistency, frequency, and color of my bowel movements. In response I have had a number of diagnostic tests suggested by my family doctor. All the tests come back negative; they find nothing to explain the problem. In general all the tests have shown is that I am in good health with some fatty infiltration of my liver (not surprising considering I have been overweight for a decade).
I have also responded to the problem by changing my eating habits from time-to-time in the hopes of determining if the problems are triggered by certain types of food. At first my doctor thought I might have an ulcer so I stopped drinking coffee and alcohol and spicy and acidic food. Nothing changed much. They upon discussing more symptoms with my doctor he suggested that I might have gall stones. That made me stop eating fatty foods but it didn’t make much of a difference. I cut out dairy foods because I had noticed that some problems seemed to be triggered after I ate a lot of dairy. But the problem persisted. Finally, I tried cutting out carbohydrates and I am feeling a lot better.
I got the idea of cutting out carbohydrates after reading about people who have yeast overgrowth in their intestines. People with healthy immune systems and who have not had a recent course of anti-biotics are assumed by most doctors to be safe from a yeast overgrowth. However, recently some have begun to theorize that conditions such as colitis and irritable bowel syndrome might be related to or involved with yeast or bacterial overgrowth. The idea is that your guts contain all kinds of “good bacteria” that are normally there but balanced. If the balance of good bacteria is upset, “bad” things will take over.
One must consider what yeast eat (sugar) and that they produce large volumes of gas when they grow. If you have a yeast overgrowth then any time you consume sugars (and presumably things that break down into sugars) you are going to get a lot of gas very quickly. So cutting out carbohydrates would starve any yeast that might be present in my guts.
Another way to deal with any theoretical yeast problem would be to take “probiotics,” the good bacteria that should be present already. If yeast has overgrown in the gut then it would be important not just to starve them but to provide good bacteria to take over and restore balance to the gut’s ecosystem. So I started taking a supplement that contains acidophilus and some other good things. Within two days of taking the probiotics and reducing carbohydrate intake I started to feel a lot better. My bowl movements returned to a normal color. Not everything is perfect but the pain is present less often and less intensely.
I am not feeling perfect but I have not been this good in a long time. And losing weight isn’t such a bad thing. I have even started to actually track my diet and am dieting properly. According to the software I am using (BalanceLog) I should be able to lose 50 lbs in about a year which would put me at a weight that my doctor will approve of.