Happy New Year, The Mayo Clinic Diet Book Giveaway , and Ten in Ten

Happy New Year friends and readers. Hard to believe its back to the grind tomorrow at work. I have really enjoyed this last week just chilling with Certain Someone doing nothing really. Even my tweeting has decreased, although he would argue with that. Certain Someone gave me some great tools for the New Year. Kitchen Aid pasta rollers, and IPhone 3GS. I'm going crazy with the IPhone as I'm a Blackberry addict. I love all these apps, esp the recipe and fitness related ones. I have a lot of seeds and plans for this year. Certain Someone has surprised me the past few days with agreeing to some tiny changes in ways we eat. He didn't balk when I suggested whole wheat pizza dough for our New Years pizzas. I even got him to eat some greens and beans. Last night he made me dinner, a pizza with the whole wheat dough I made. It was good, but couldn't convince him to go totally meatless. Baby steps. If it wasn't 7 degrees right now we would be going for a walk. But There is the treadmill.
I was the lucky recipient of an advance copy of the Mayo Clinic Diet. I'm not really a dieter as I love food and life to much to deprive myself. However I need to put things in check. Many have claimed they had world renown Mayo Clinic certified diets before, but, this is the only official one ever released by them. In reading through the book and journal. its not a diet per say, but a way of life. Using the classic pyramid, the book educates you on proper serving within the food groups. Fitness and breaking of bad habits is emphasized as well. All nothing new and gimmicky, just clearly illustrated good practical sense. A few recipes and menus are given , but you really do the work in figuring it all out with the tools they give you. I like this as you can work with what you have and not have really expensive shopping lists of items you have and never will eat again like some diets.Although here is a whole link to Mayo Clinic Weight Loss Recipes.You can jump start your way with the Quick Start Plan designed to help you loose 6-10 lbs in 2 weeks. I love the tool they give, a journal to record your progress. If only they had that as a IPhone application.

About Donald Hensrud, M.D.
Donald Hensrud, M.D., M.P.H., is chair of the Division of Preventive, Occupational, and Aerospace Medicine and a consultant in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Nutrition at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. He is also an associate professor of preventive medicine and nutrition at the College of Medicine, Mayo Clinic. A specialist in nutrition and weight management, Dr. Hensrud advises individuals on how to achieve and maintain a healthy weight. He conducts research in weight management, and he writes and lectures widely on nutrition-related topics. He helped publish two award-winning Mayo Clinic cookbooks.
About Mayo Clinic
Mayo Clinic is the first and largest integrated, not-for-profit group practice in the world. Doctors from every medical specialty work together to care for patients, joined by common systems and a philosophy that the needs of the patient come first. Over 3,600 physicians and scientists and 50,000 allied staff work at Mayo, which has sites in Rochester, Minn.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Scottsdale/Phoenix, Ariz. Collectively, Mayo Clinic treats more than 500,000 patients a year.For more than 100 years, millions of people from all walks of life have found answers at Mayo Clinic. Mayo Clinic works with many insurance companies, does not require a physician referral in most cases and is an in-network provider for millions of people.
For more information, please visit www.goodbooks.com/mayoclinicdiet.

I confess this will be hard with food blogging, recipe development for future projects, etc. But I can only try. I am giving away a copy of this book and journal to randomly picked commenter. Just leave a comment telling me what your Food or health related goals are this year .

Adapting recipes
If the recipe calls for
Butter Margarine Shortening Oil

Try Substituting
✚✚ For sandwiches, substitute tomato slices, catsup or mustard.

✚✚ For stove-top cooking, sauté food in broth or small amounts of healthy
oil like olive, canola or peanut or use non-stick spray.
✚✚ In marinades, substitute diluted fruit juice, wine or balsamic vinegar.
✚✚ In cakes or bars, replace half the fat or oil with the same amount of
applesauce, prune puree or commercial fat substitute.
✚✚ To avoid dense, soggy or flat baked goods, don’t substitute oil for butter
or shortening, or substitute diet, whipped or tub-style margarine for
regular margarine.

Meat Try Substituting

Keep it lean. In soup, chili or stir-fry, replace most of the meat with beans
or vegetables. As an entrée, keep it to no more than the size of a deck of
cards — load up on vegetables.

Whole milk (regular or

evaporated)

Try Substituting

Fat-free or 1% milk, or evaporated skim milk
Whole egg
(yolk and white)

Try Substituting

¼ cup egg substitute or 2 egg whites for breakfast or in baked goods
Sour cream

Try Substituting

Cream cheese
Fat-free, low-fat or light varieties in dips, spreads, salad dressings and toppings.
Fat-free, low-fat and light varieties do not work well for baking.
Sugar

Try Substituting

In most baked goods, you can reduce the amount of sugar by one-half
without affecting texture or taste, but use no less than ¼ cup of sugar for
every cup of flour to keep items moist.
White flour
Replace half or more of white flour with whole grain pastry or regular flour.
Salt

Try Substituting

✚✚ Use herbs (1 tbsp. fresh = 1 tsp. dried = ¼ tsp. powder). Add towards the end of cooking and use sparingly — you can always add more.
✚✚ Salt is required when baking yeast-leavened items. Otherwise you may reduce salt by half in cookies and bars. Not needed when boiling pasta.

I have committed myself to Ten in Ten(10 weeks to Healthy 2010). I know its cliche to begin a new regime at New Years, but better now than never. I have found since I began food blogging,turning 40,change of job to more sedentary one, and co habitation, I have gained a significant amount of weight. I rarely work out like I used to. The Mayo Clinic Plan appeals to me because its its not a fad diet, but is just streamlining and actually practicing what basically I know and is not about deprivation, but just good common sense. I realistically plan to lose 2 lbs per week. I need that extra motivation to exercise and move.

My goals are realistic.

• Try to stay within 1200 calories for at least 1 month
• Exercise at least 2-3 times a week. I may join gym near office with pal and work out at lunch( undecided about the lunch time part).
• Try to lower blood pressure
  
• Lose 20-40 lbs this year.
• Pay more attention to portion size.
  

So enter a comment on your food and health goals for the New Year. Be sure to spread the word via Twitter and Facebook too. Cutoff is January 10, 2010.

Daring Bakers Make Gingerbread Houses... Home For The Holidays

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.


For someone who's into cake decorating , I can say Ive never made a Gingerbread house. It was always on my list. I'm amazed I even got it done with the craziness of December, I can think of no challenge more apropos than this.Linda of Make Life Sweeter, who I meet in Vienna last week insisted I do it as we dined over Wiener Schnitzel in the Nachtsmarket.

Certain Someone is finally home and the holidays will be as they should, warm and comfy in the confines of our home. I don't want much for Christmas , really....



I remember last Christmas in Germany and hearing the news the late great Eartha Kitt had died. They don't make stars like that anymore.
Back to the Gingerbread. I had the same issues as everyone else with a very dry dough. I used Ana's Good Housekeeping recipe and added more cream. After chilling overnight, the moisture expanded and the dough became manageable. Still a dry one compared to to other recipes, but it worked. I m glad I used cheap Flour for this as 9 1/2 cups of flour were used. I still have plenty to make another house if I wish! Here is the template I used.
I had wanted to shingle the roof with some sliced black licorice fudge I had from Denmark. Unfortunately when I was satisfied and turned my back to wash my hands, the roof caved in. I had to scrape the roof and rebuild. Thankfully I had enough powdered sugar to make more royal icing to salvage a messy situation.
My decorations are just piped and painted royal icing (food color gels), pecan pralines I made, some coconut flakes for snow, and edible glitter. I broke some cinnamon sticks to make a wood pile. Certain Someone was impressed and we are bringing this to his bosses house for Christmas later. Although next year he challenged me to make a house like the White House's Gingerbread House.

Please Check out my fellow bakers. You can find the hostesses recipes and instructions on their sites which I have linked at the beginning.

Certain Someone and I wish you Happy Holidays, Peace, Health and Prosperity.