Design your Diet.
Flavour boosting
&
Portion Size
When I was talking about salt and vinegar, (Diet 9 in Ingredients at the top of the page)
I mentioned this:
‘Both salt and vinegar in moderation,
might help as flavour boost to some other less-popular stuff that we could eat –
so they might be helpful to us?’
Here’s a little bit more about sauces and there will be more to come about them later.
Sauces are very important.
Ask anybody who is addicted to Subway southwest sauce.
I'm NOT talking about commercial sauces
- just the simple ones and what's in them.
Learning more from sauces.
Sweetened Vinegar. Well, it’s time to mention these condiments again. Sweetened vinegar, it seems to me, is the basis of most of the popular sauces. I noticed this when eating a small, pickled onion with a meal.
It didn’t taste of onion at all.
Its flavour wasn’t even close, so why was I eating it?
I examined the taste and found it be mainly ‘vinegary’.
Nobody would drink a spoonful of neat vinegar.
The closest we come is on fish and chips
The vinegar had been sweetened by adding sugar and a little salt (It says on the jar). The little onions are dropped into the vinegar to soak it up, so that you can move the sweet vinegar from the plate to your mouth more easily. With a blindfold test you’ll find that tomato sauce comes close and mayonnaise can do it too, but the thicker consistency and more sweetener gives them away, plus some additional flavourings.
What else is added to the sweetened vinegar?
Still comparing energy levels
Brown pickle = 115. The other sauces that I mentioned right at the beginning (Diet 10 Detective work), French dressing, Garlic and Herbs, Honey and Mustard (Reduced fat) = 101 are also based upon sweetened vinegar. Worcester sauce = 96 has anchovies listed as an ingredient. All these rate around our yardstick of Tomato sauce = 100.
The pickled onions themselves are 53.
Now, that is a result! The label said that a 440ml jar of pickled onions contains 4 servings of onions– there must be a mistake somewhere. If you eat brown pickle, you can add Cauliflower, apple and dates to the fruit and veg that you eat, but in such small quantities that, they don’t really count.
More about Quantities
Portion size. Eating a quarter of a jar of pickled onions as ONE serving, as it suggested on my jar, made me think again about quantities and, reminded me about the energy ratings of Marmite and Strawberry jam (See Diet 17. Strategies) which are both about 250.
This is worth repeating. If I was eating two different sandwiches using these ingredients, I would smear the Marmite as thinly as possible, but I could load on the strawberry jam. I might eat ten times more jam, than I would have Marmite. To borrow from George Orwell: ‘All spreads are equal, but some are more equal than others.’ They have similar energy numbers, but potentially different portion sizes. Understanding this, is the key to applying the right controls on what you are eating. You can eat everything, but you have to understand how much of everything. The amount of Marmite you put on the bread is probably not significant in making you fat, but the amount of strawberry jam you put on, definitely IS. Energy at 250 may not be as ‘dangerous’ in some foods, as it is in others.
Imagine how this relates to Crunchy Peanut butter.
Next time I’m going to look at some helpful information about for Portion sizes, but for now
I’m going to take a break and return to my poem based on
The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carol.
The last episode was on a page in Ingredients at the top of the page.
To find out what this is all about go to Introduction at the top of the page
and find the page The Time Has Come -
This from the original poem
“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said,
‑‑“To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
‑‑And made them trot so quick!”
The Carpenter said nothing but
‑‑“The butter's spread too thick!”
This is our rewrite
“It seems a shame,” the Vicar said,
Life plays you such a trick,
Sadly, to bring an end like this.
A life so short - so quick.
The fattest ones said nothing, but
The butter must be thick!”
The poem is
About making decisions
About who you trust
About thinking for yourself
About the consequences of your choices
Walking
This image is NOT about eating.
It is about things that I see on my walks.
We are supposed to be walking to MOVE MORE.
But if you walk you see interesting things.
Seeing and thinking means that you forget why you are walking,
- you just enjoy it.
In wet Autumns there comes a time when all the fungus comes up and it happens very quickly. One day there is nothing to see and the next, all manner of fungus is there. I snapped this fungus on a piece of rotten wood. I understand that under the ground there is a vast network of the fungus busily helping to make the soil. I wouldn't have learned about that if I hadn't been out for my morning walk.
Now it's your turn
What have you seen when walking and what have you learned?
I will just add that mushrooms - proper ones,
not ones like in my picture - are very low in calories.