Cooking and Dieting

 After the over-the-top eating of December and the holidays, I stepped onto the scale in mid-Janauary and almost toppled over at the number that blinked up at me in stark LCD blue crispness. "No way!" thought I. I stepped off, and stepped on again. Nope, there it was; that same dratted number appeared again. I'd never seen it before, and it was even larger than the last time I saw a large number that crushed me.  "Well," thought I, "there's only one thing to do. South Beach Diet again." It worked once, it should work again, right?

Well, I didn't factor in being 5 years older, and deep into perimenopause. I lost 7.5 lbs during phase 1, but have been stuck at the same weight for the entire first week of Phase 2. C'mon, scale, budge! Just budge a little! Alas, alack, it mocks me. I'm blaming hormones.

I decided to combine Phase 2 with another goal I've had in mind for some time now, and that's making most of my meals out of Cooking Light. There are always letters from readers who comment they've lost 20 lbs just by starting to cook using that magazine's recipes. Phase 2 just happened to coincide with the beginning of February, so I decided to morph Phase 2 with a month of CL to see what happens. Granted, they use butter and sugar to cook with (two no-nos for Dr. Agatston), but since I refuse to use artificial sweetners, I always cheated anyway (just a little) on SBD by using agave nectar, for example. And frankly, this time on SBD, I was hungry all the bloody time.

So this post shows you my first two dinner selections from the January/February 2014 Cooking Light issue.

Pork chops with a modified orange marmalade/mustard glaze. My Trader Joe's didn't have orange marmalade, so I had to substitute apricot preserves instead. While my glaze never thickened up, the pork chops were very tasty.

Mushroom and kale lasagna. I substituted whole wheat lasagna noodles (SBD approved) for the no-cook lasagna noodles the recipe called for. My pan was much larger, so instead of each layer being two noodles wide, mine was three. This meant that I didn't have enough of the mushroom/pancetta and kale mixes to make really thick layers. There's not much cheese in this lasagna, but I honestly don't miss it.