Sunday, May 4, 2008

Weekend Report (Chemistry Set in a Can)

In Ironman, the big cartoon action movie that opened up this weekend, the super-rich, super-genius, super-fit main character is seen scarfing Burger King burgers and "New York" pizza before he becomes a good guy. After he sees the light, we see him drinking an icky green "health" shake.

My father-in-law stayed with us over the weekend. I made some KICK-ASS pancakes from scratch, using my mix and replacing milk with buttermilk, and it made all the difference. I've had so-called buttermilk pancakes from a store-bought mix where you just add water, but the flavor and mouth feel that real buttermilk gives, it's quite intense.

Following my FIL's lead, we pretty much followed the Evil Ironman diet on Saturday, with Chinese in Chinatown for lunch, and a nice buffalla moz pizza ordered in for dinner.

Sunday was a wackadoo eating day. I woke up at 6, snarfed 2 pancakes out of the freezer and a large cup of homemade ice cream, then road out into the fog and did the 5 Boro Bike Tour through the city. Ate a baggie of pretzels here, a few bananas there. Near the end they were giving out all sorts of new-fangled power drinks, including this horrible-looking Snapple thing that had just about as much sugar and calories as soda, but with a chemistry set thrown in.

Speaking of chemistry sets, I did drink a low-calorie sports drink called FRS. Here is the ingredients list:

Water, White Grape Juice Concentrate, Orange Juice Concentrate, Inulin, Citric
Acid, Natural Orange Flavors, Quercetin, Ascorbic Acid, Gum Arabic, Locust Bean
Gum, Green Tea Extract, Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate (Vit E), Sucralose, Caffeine,
Niacinamide (B3), Natural Lemon Flavor, Beta Carotene (for color), Pyridoxine
Hydrochloride (B6), Thiamin Hydrochloride (B1), Riboflavin (B2), Cyanocobalamin
(B12)
Ten percent juice, about half a cup of coffee's worth of caffeine. Tasted very sweet and strangely oily. Inulin is a plant byproduct that is subtly sweet and has about 25% the calories of sugar, and has a minimal impact on blood sugar (see wiki) Is this the Gatorade replacement I've been looking for, or just an overpriced chemistry kit in a can?

Filleted a wild-caught red-snapper Sunday night as practice and broiled the fillets in butter and Herbes de Provence. $13 worth of fish got me two very skimpy fillets, which tells me that either Wholefoods is wildly overpriced or I really need to practice more.

1 comment:

Shannon Lynn said...

This is a nice site! Good luck with your culinary career. I will be back to read more!