Monday, February 6, 2017

Bean Counting

How many g of cooked Borlotti has the same calories as 5oz dry green lentils?

When Doc Karl suggested looking into Blood Sugar Diet and 5:2 Intermittent Fasting, we jumped on Blood Sugar Diet not just because we already had the book, but what food-lover wants to contemplate fasting, right? We thought the companion recipe book would help me plan, so we ordered: a book written by UK authors, based on a UK study from a UK outlet, and I so looked forward to it. Except, when it arrived, it was the US Edition. I didn't check where it was published. 

I'm fine with "sometimes" cookbooks in imperial and I have tons of American cookbooks. But this I intended to consult every day, with many substitution; I was so irritated I even sent a (guilty) email of complaint, and they said if I paid the postage to return, they'll refund. I was tempted, but the postage might have cost more than the book, and more importantly, I was eager to jump into the recipes, not to mention it was my error. So after a few days of tireless, impassioned moaning, I got over myself and started reading. Last week I was going to cook one meal a day from the book to get us closer to the 800 calories/day program. 

I studied the dinners and picked a chicken recipes, (Ben's fav), one for which we had all the ingredients, except mushrooms. (Fine, eggplants with a bit of dried Shiitake will do.) Tuesday afternoon, I started to gather the ingredients and couldn't find lentils. W always have plenty of dry beans and it just so happens I cooked Borlotti on Monday. Because we eat small amounts of beans with almost every meal now, I don't flavor it when I cook and add spices/herbs/condiment if necessary.  

I'm not bad at math, and I like ratios, but boy, this one got me flustered, and I tried at three different times, walking away and doing something else in between, but I couldn't fire it out. That websites don't agree on the calories, (as much as double!) didn't bother me as much as my inability to find the numbers.  

So I ordered the UK edition. And cooked lasagna with eggplants in place of pasta. And it was excruciatingly tasty. 

This is where I wanted to end the post. On discovering the same man also wrote books about 5:2 fasting, (and the possibility of combining the two diets,) I order the intro book and the recipe book from the same source. Except I didn't; I ticked not the recipe book but the Diet book and the Diet&Exercise book, and guess what, American editions, again. We started looking into "fasting" because we are allowed 500 (for women)/600 (for men) calories on the two days/week we "fast"; rest of the time we're allowed whatever our size/lifestyle allows. I'm fine for now reading the theories and how-to's but I might have to get the recipe book/s in metric.
I doodled over my notes on Friday. Even the camera picked up icky colors.

Happy celery sticks.

2 comments:

  1. Duh, 140g. Should have gone with my gut feeling rather than math; cooked Borlotti has roughly double the calories of cooked lentil; 5oz dry lentils end up around 280g. I knew this, so why didn't I. Oh, dear me. We feel very stupid this evening.

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  2. That's going by one of the webpages; lentil calories go from 116 to 353 calories, cooked/boiled. It depends on the color, among other things. As you know, browns melt but greens tend to stay bean-shaped. So brown lentils are roughly on part with Borlotti. And now we can't find the website that gave us 165cal/100g cooked. Anyhoo, it's WAY past our bedtime, so we'll leave the beans to you. If Ben checked one more website, we might find out we're wrong. Again.

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