Monday, October 29, 2007

They put sweeteners in EVERYTHING! The easy part of being sugar-free is the cake, candy, cookies thing. The hard part is that the stuff is in nearly everything.

I decided to check the labels at my friend's house to show how sneaky sugar is. She eats fairly healthy, as food goes these days - lots of home cooked food, meat and veggies...

Note: these foods just happened to be in her cabinet. They represent absolutely no bias for or against any particular brand. I pulled them out at random.

The first can I picked up was kidney beans.



"There's sugar in kidney beans?" she exclaimed, surprised. Yep, sure is.








Hmmm - green tea. Should be good for you... - Oops - SUGAR.



Shake-n-Bake? Yep, sugar, dextrose, and maltodextrin. For chicken coating?















Stove Top dressing - another item you wouldn't necessarily give up if you were giving up sweets, right? Wrong. High Fructose Corn Syrup, Maltodextrin, sugar, corn syrup. Stuff I surely never put in my homemade stuffing back when I ate sugar.






We all know ketchup is sweetened. Did we know it took three different kinds of sweetener? High Fructose Corn Syrup, regular corn syrup, and sugar.




Mexican rice: sugar and maltodextrin.














What's sugar doing in the peanut butter??? And, although I didn't get a picture of any, it's also in most mayonnaise.

The Rasberry Vinaigrette dressing is Organic, which is a good thing. But I really don't care that the sugar is organic - it's still THERE - and I still don't want to eat it.





















The pretzels had only one sweetener - dextrose. Still too much. BTW, another name for dextrose is glucose. I don't want it in MY pretzels.

Pet Peeve - although I can find sugar-free pretzels, I can't find Whole Wheat Sugar Free Pretzels. Why the heck not???

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Camping with The Shakes.

I just got back from a 10-day camping trip. Yes, I had a cooler, and I started out with my usual shake recipe. Later in the week, though, when the fresh food's been eaten up, it gets silly to buy ice. Also, washing dishes at camp is a bit more iffy than doing it at home. So, I present to you now, the Camper's Shake:

Take 1 good quality ziplock sandwich bag containing pre-measured MLO protein powder and oat flour.
Pour in 1 12-oz can V8. (I prefer Spicy Hot, but the regular is good too.)
Zip it up, shake it up - massage the corners gently - open a bit and sip through a straw.
Throw out the remains. No dirty dishes. No refrigeration required.
(assuming you use vitamin tablets instead of liquid vitamins when you go camping.)

Breakfast just doesn't GET any more convenient than that.