<p>Well, I think I have finally broken my plateau. Lost 10 lbs from Sept to Dec and then stayed there until April! I think adding weight-lifting has made a difference. Plus I’m doing more biking and walking longer distances. Hey, it’s only 3 lbs of weight loss this month but it has been staying off with little or no “weekend damage.” I only have about 10 lbs to go to be happy…those will be a tough 10 I have a feeling.</p>
<p>Congrats to all who are on their way to their goals. And MOWC, hang in there. You’ll be running again soon!</p>
<p>My wife did it by giving me a cookbook for Christmas. It seemed so innocuous at the time. I loved cajun food, so getting Paul Prudhomme’s* Lousiana Kitchen *was great. I had always been a 5-star grill man, but this got me learning how to cook gumbo and stuff. Of course, that led making roux (cooking flour and oil, sound familiar?) and sauteeing the holy trinity of onions, peppers, and celery as the base for dishes.</p>
<p>Then came the Japanese cookbook. And the Thai cookbook. And Rick Bayless’ Mexican cookbook. And Julia Child’s 2-volume set. And Marcella Hazen’s Italian classics. And Bobby Flay’s incredible cookbooks. And all the sudden, I’m making homemade Thai curry pastes and Blue Corn Tortilla Crusted Crab Cakes with Carrot Habeneros Sauce and Mango Scallion Salsa.</p>
<p>Ah, but your screen name says it all: interseteddad. I’ve bought him numerous cookbooks…he never opens them. I love the Weber cookbook that I bought him with the gas grill. I get all ready and he’ll grill it if I tell him what temp and how long.</p>
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<p>We even went to one of those classes at the New Orleans School of Cooking when we were in NO in March. He can certainly TALK about roux, but won’t try to make one.</p>
<p>Fantastic! That’s a pretty impressive start. If you are that far along, consider spending the same amount of time on the treadmill and do what is called “interval training”. Same thing you are doing, but you warm up at an easy pace (like your walk) then do intervals - like jog for 1 minute- walk for 4 minutes- jog for 1 minute - walk for 4 minutes - and so on and so forth. Then finish up with a walking cool down. You can infinitely vary the intensity by adjusting the ratio of fast time verus slow recovery time, by adjusting how many intervals you do, and by adjusting the pace. Basically, it’s the same thing you did, but taking the jogging part and interspersing it with walking, back and forth. It allows you to get in more hard exercise because of the recovery periods, it’s much less boring, and the elevated heart rate from the higher intensity bouts raises your metabolism and burns calories for as much as 16 hours after the workout.</p>
<p>I do them on the exercise bike and it is just incredible what a workout you can get. The great thing is that you get a killer workout in 30 minutes. I’m doing a 1 to 2 work to recovery ratio. Ten intervals of 10 seconds hard and 20 seconds recovery (a total of 5 minutes) is brutal. Then I recover for a few minutes and do five intervals of 20 seconds hard and 40 seconds easy. Then, I finish up with three intervals of 40 seconds hard and 80 seconds easy. Including five minute warmup and cool downs, I’m on the bike for 35 minutes. I’ve done over 5 minutes total at a pace that would be pretty much impossible for me to continue for more than a minute if I weren’t breaking it up – a pace where muscle burn sets in at about the 40 second mark.</p>
<p>missypie - the absolutely best piece of outdoor cooking equipment we ever bought was The Big Green Egg (got it about two years ago). It is so easy to set a temperature and maintain a consistent heat. And things come out of it amazing, so much so, that you hardly have to do any prep work to the food. H did a pork shoulder roast on Sunday, with just a rub, and it was awesome. Once you get the smoker set up and the food cooking, there’s very little to do, except take a quick peek at the thermometer every now and then.</p>
<p>Will warn you… they’re very expensive, but like I said, I can’t imagine having any piece of equipment that produces the kind of food that this one does, and we’ve had them all. H is known among all our friends now for the foods he prepares on the smoker, and I think likes the notoriety a bit!</p>
<p>I know what I want for my birthday (I’m the grill master in our house). And I know what we are going to have for dinner, too! Something grilled :)</p>
<p>But I did do five loads of laundry, changed the linen of four beds, walked the dog and covered my hydrangeas against a forecast of frost in the am. I moved today. Tomorrow I will MOVE.</p>
<p>Yikes, looked it up and the egg is expensive!
We have a weber and it will have to do. </p>
<p>I DO like grilled fish and veggies…although lately I’m stuck on seared fish and scallops in a pan, sometimes finished in the oven with a light sauce. Love the light-brown crust. I feel like I’m at a fancy restaurant :)</p>
<p>Mama didn’t raise no fools. When I’m smokin’ baby back ribs for 6 hours or pork shoulders for 12 hours or Turkey for Christmas in the snow, I’m not going out there to check the temperature. I have a remote thermometer. Put one probe in the cooker, one in the meat. They transmit using radio signals to a temperature readout with alarms in the kitchen!</p>
<p>That’s what I’m talking about. When I do ribs or a pork shoulder, I want to keep the temperate at 225 to 275 all day. My thermometer has two probes. I put one in the cooker like an oven themometer and one in the meat. I can read both from the kitchen.</p>
<p>Actually, for Thanksgiving and Christmas now, I have the turkey on a spit in the smoker. I just use one prob to keep an eye on the “oven temperature” and then about when the bird should be getting done, I turn off the spit and move the thermometer probe into to the bird to know when it’s done.</p>
<p>Back from the gym…again! Did a little over 3 miles on the treadmill in an hour. Then lifted free weights and did some machines. My triceps are tired!!! Want to be able to wear sleeveless shirts by next summer…I can dream can’t I??? ;)</p>
<p>Would you abandon the Weber for the Big Green Egg? From what I saw, the Egg looks like a better product. My D catches blue fish all summer and smokes a good deal of it, which we use to make blue fish pate. (The best stuff ever–but not at all good for someone watching calories, unless you have the discipline to stop!)</p>
<p>No way, for me and I’m familar with the Green Egg. The Weber is just too versatile, too convenient, especially with the propane charcoal lighting on the Performer model. The One-Touch ash removal system on a Weber kettle is a truly brilliant piece of engineering.</p>
<p>The one place the Egg has it over the Weber is in long slow low-temp cooking. This with a large pizza tin and pizza stone placed above the fire – leaving a one inch gap around the circumference, thus producing a indirect heat “smoker” that is very easy to keep at a steady 250 degrees – for four hours or more without adding charcoal – simply by adjusting the bottom vents.</p>
<p>NM, keep going with those weights! You will be wearing sleeveless shirts this summer! It took me just 2 months of 15-20 min X 3 times a week (with 9-lb weights) to see the results. And the best part - I can wear a C bra again! Doing a happy dance!</p>
<p>My running buddy is still not feeling well, so for a couple of weeks I’ve been torturing my home Precor dreadmill while he’s been sitting nearby and reading me news off of CNN and BBC. I think we need to move our TV to the dreadmill room - time just flies by when I’m distracted.</p>
<p>Bunsen, TV helps, but I now find that I absolutely positively can’t run without my ipod and some zippy running music. Try “Love Shack” by the B52s and you’ll be flying!!</p>
<p>Well, we still have our Weber, but it gets used very rarely. I’m sure we could get by without it. We also have an electric starter for the Egg. Another key component is using charcoal lumps as opposed to charcoal briquets. More and more places are carrying the lumps around here which is convenient. As interestedad says, the charcoal can last a very long time without being replaced. If you use the Egg for something that doesn’t require long to cook, you just simply close the vents when you’re done and they stop burning, so they’re there when you’re ready to use it again. </p>
<p>For last Christmas, I got H a Mini Green Egg - although it’s still quite heavy, it can fit in the back of your trunk or SUV, etc. to take for tailgating. He hasn’t used it for that yet (football season was basically over), but maybe we’ll try it for one of the baseball games we have tickets for coming up.</p>
<p>I don’t think I mentioned this earlier, but the Big Green Egg is a heavy sucker. Real, real heavy. Don’t think about getting one without getting the nest with wheels that it can sit in. Even the mini is heavy, but liftable. I guess the thing I like most about it, is that there are many more food items that appeal to me when cooked on the Egg. Because you don’t really need all those extra sauces, etc. for taste, you’re cutting out unnecessary calories and getting a much better taste. We do use rubs, though, and have had fun trying out various ones (one day I will get ambitious and try to make some of my own). Our favorites around here from the Egg… pork ribs (they fall off the bone as you pick them up). We have friends who watch their gluten and never get to have some of the meats we fix when dining out because of all the sauces that the meats are cooked in (at one very upscale restaurant (Wildfire), our friend called ahead to let them know what she needed, and it was still wrong when they brought it out to the table). I’m not a huge chicken eater, but will eat any chicken that comes off the Egg.</p>
It took me just 2 months of 15-20 min X 3 times a week (with 9-lb weights) to see the results. And the best part - I can wear a C bra again! Doing a happy dance!</p>