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08/02/2007 Archived Entry: "Cook at Seliano on Eyewitness News"

I think we – meaning me and my Cook at Seliano guests -- looked pretty good on Eyewitness News Monday night, the ABC/Channel 7 evening report. If you’d like to see the feature on Cook at Seliano, go to: http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=local&id=5524823 (I somehow can't find the keys to make a link on this Italian keyboard, so copy the address, please, and put it your internet line above).

By the way, only one of my many correspondents (youse guys, as we say in Brooklyn) told me to keep quiet about my diet. “Do we really have to know all this?” she wrote. Most of you wanted to hear more. Many of you are in the same boat that I am, needing to lose weight for one health reason or another.

I don’t really have much to report, except maybe you’re interested in what I have been eating. There are whole blogs out there in blog-land that do nothing but report on what the blogger eats. I figure I can get away with doing it once in a while.

Yesterday for lunch, for instance, I had an approximately 3-inch square of lasagna filled with sautéed eggplant, zucchini, and red peppers, a tiny bit of mozzarella, and tomato sauce. With that I had about a cup of small sweet green peppers, which are called friarielli in local dialect, meaning “little fried things,” except in this case they were cooked in a sauce of cherry tomatoes with a whiff of garlic. For protein, I had about a half cup of creamy buffalo-milk ricotta, maybe less. (Remember, I am on a water buffalo farm.) I am really trying to be careful about portion sizes.

The lasagne had very little pasta – maybe a half cup, if that. It was mostly the vegetables, although they were fried. I think I am going to try to make this with boiled eggplant and zucchini, and roasted peppers. I have tried baking and broiling eggplant already. I end up using almost as much oil as when I fry. I am thinking, that even with boiled vegetables, the oil in the tomato sauce should be enough to make it delicious. The little green peppers had oil, too, in their sauce. And the ricotta, of course, has butterfat, besides protein.

So, okay, the lunch was a little high in fat, but my portions were very small so I don’t feel I exceeded 600 or so calories. Given my breakfast of a hard-boiled egg and two slices of dense whole-grain bread with a schmear of low-fat cream cheese, and my upcoming dinner of boiled zucchini (it tastes so good here, and I can eat as much zucchini as I want), cherry tomatoes with just salt (they don’t
really need anything else), roasted eggplant and peppers with no oil if I can manage it, and a slice of grilled provola (like scamorza, which is available in New York metro supermarkets), I should be okay for today. I try to stay at about 1,500 calories. I swam some laps in the pool, so I even got some exercise.

It’s one day at a time.