When I arrived back from my twelve-week trip from Guatemala to
Colombia in early April the fruit trees at The Ponds were flowering and the
daffodils blooming . It wasn’t so cold as to be unpleasant outside but still
cool enough to wear my first hoodie ever which Donna, my mom’s caregiver, gave
me for Christmas. And it was also still
cool enough for cooking good warming food like soups and stews to be enjoyable.
Although this is my travel blog, I justify including a few entries on the foods
I make while I’m based at my parents’ house as part of the travel experience.
Since I consider myself a true nomad, this is only a temporary base, a few
staycations in my continuous travel, right? And staycations they are; I rarely
spend more than two to three weeks at a time in the retirement community in central
New Jersey between trips.

The foods I’ve photographed and included in this entry are
some of those I made between April and June of 2016. I was pretty busy in the
kitchen, since during that time period I spent three weeks in New England, one
week in Upstate New York, and several days in New York City before another
shorter trip abroad to the Azores in late June .

The last time I was mostly in New Jersey for an extended
period of time was late-October to mid-January. Back then my goal was mostly to
trim down somewhat in preparation for the first part of my Central America trip
which involved climbing multiple volcanoes in Guatemala. Between diet and
exercise I was successful in dropping about 17 pounds, so hauling my big body
up and down mountains wasn’t as painful as it could have been. Between
extensive hiking and cycling on parts of that trip, I ended up returning to the
U.S. in April probably no chubbier than when I left, a real feat for someone
who usually gains weight from too much restaurant food and beer and too little
physical exertion while traveling.

My primary goal in April and most of May was to keep up the
good work with a diet similar to the one I was using through the late autumn and
early winter months – lots of soups and vegetables and lean protein sources. Without
another extended trip planned, I figured it would be a good time to get back
into lifting weights so started increasing protein and calories toward June as
I got stronger and leaner .

So what does a 48-year old aspiring muscle guy eat to get
bigger while staying lean? Well, there’s one thing I tried out and wasn’t too
impressed with. While in Central America and Colombia I had some really great
juice drinks, things like thick avocado, passion fruit, and ginger or
pineapple, orange, and watermelon shakes/juices. Why not try that at home? So I
ordered a juicer from Amazon and tried different concoction with mixes of fruits
and vegetables – apples, pears, peaches, celery, beets, carrots, ginger, etc.
Although the juice honestly tastes pleasant enough, what’s the benefits over a
smoothie when using soft fruits like peaches which puree well? Besides making a
mess in all the different bits and parts and pieces of your juicer contraption
which you immediately have to clean each time you use it, you then have all the
mashed up unjuiceable stuff left over. Well, that’s what contains all the fiber
which is supposed to be so good for you. It seems like all you’re doing in
juicing is extracting the liquids and sugars to give yourself a fast sugar rush
which is what many people might find so satisfying from juicing. Anyway, I
might use my juicer from time to time, but I’m definitely not to become a
serious juicehead.

And then there’s Caprese Salad, the uncooked combination of
slices of fresh mozzarella cheese, tomatoes, and basil drizzled with olive oil
that’s a warm weather favorite of people who don’t like to cook (or don’t know
how) and think they’re eating something “light” . Well, of course, mozzarella
cheese is packed with fat and calories, so there’s nothing “light” about it. I
often stop at a liquor store after the gym where on Friday afternoons they have
cheese tastings. In my ravenous post-workout state, it doesn’t take much arm
twisting to get me to buy a cheese I just sampled that hit the spot, in this
case a fresh mozzarella that was on a two-fer-one deal. I waited until my brother
came over to make Caprese Salad, so that way I’d eat only half the mozzarella.
Ha!

OK, now back to the serious slimming food. Soups are great
if you avoid using fatty stocks or adding cream and I tend to make a lot of
them, both the pureed (crème) versions and the more stew like ones because they
have few calories and lots of fiber. Adding a potato to a purees soup thickens
it by adding starch to make it into a “crème” without adding the fat and
calories of using real cream. I particularly like leek soup for its supposedly
cleansing qualities and like to make it as a first meal when I return from a
trip and have the feeling my digestive tract has to be cleansed of all the food
that’s been stuck in it from eating weeks or months of restaurant meals . Flavored
tomato soups and carrot cream soups are also delicious, and one of the most
flavorful ones I made (maybe one of my most delicious dishes in months) was a
carrot soup with coconut milk, ginger, and harissa. Now that’s a wild
combination of flavors!

I also especially like cooking Spanish food, and the
Spaniards have some great traditional soups too. This time around I made a
delicious sherried wild mushroom soup with just a bit of cream. Better yet was
a typical Spanish kale, white bean, and chorizo soup. It tasted OK the day I
made it but was ten times better each time I reheated some of the leftovers
after it had cooled down and the spicy, garlicky flavor of the chorizo had time
to permeate the entire dish.

Seafood soups and chowders are some of my favorites too.
Over these months I only made a few (what’s the rule about months with an “R”
in their name?), a Cajun Oyster Stew and a crab, tomato, and fennel bisque. The
oyster stew probably won’t be a repeater; I’ve determined milk or cream-heavy
soups are not my favorites. I generally hold the view that milk is something
that should never be heated – seems quite repulsive to me.

Seafood is almost all “light” in the sense of having few
calories, little fat, and being mostly slowly-digesting protein. That is, of
course, as long as you don’t deep fry it or douse it with lots of mayonnaise or
cream . Ceviche is ideal because it’s raw fish marinated (“cooked”) in acidic
lime juice. Shrimp salads can be great too as long as you don’t add too much
mayonnaise.

One shrimp dish I tried was a traditional Spanish one of
roasted shrimp in green sauce, but the green sauce is one that’s “crudo” or raw
in the sense of all ingredients, including onions and garlic, being pureed in
their uncooked state before being mixed with the shrimp and roasted in the
oven. I honestly find the flavors in these “crudo” to be overpowering. I like
garlic and onions and parsley….but not that strong!

Standard fillet fish like salmon, sea bass, cod, haddock,
and snapper are either almost entirely protein or contain significant amounts
of the supposedly very healthful Omerga-3 fatty acids. I eat a lot of them when
I’m trying to be healthy and am always looking for recipes that add lots of
flavor to rather bland fish without adding much fat. Red Snapper Veracruzana
may be the ideal dish for this . It’s a Mexican preparation in the style of the
Gulf Coast city of Veracruz that’s fish fillets baked with a marinade of wine,
red peppers, tomatoes, olives, and capers. Donna, my mom’s caregiver, often tastes
my creations if they don’t contain ingredients she objects to and went quite
wild over this one.

While on Cape Cod I stopped in at a gourmet foods outlet
store and went a little wild buying ingredients I don’t usually encounter in
the regular grocery stores I frequent. Among these were a couple North African
ingredients like spicy Harissa Sauce and preserved lemons, so when I got home I
naturally had to cook Moroccan style. My dishes included braised beef with root
vegetables and harissa sauce and a chicken tajine with green olives preserved
lemons. Although I love spicy harissa sauce, I have to admit that preserved
salted lemons have a somewhat strange flavor that I’m not too crazy about in
dishes. I guess in the future I’ll stick with fresh lemon juice as a
substitute, as if I were even likely to be able to find preserved lemons if I
wanted them .

As any male movie star who’s ever had to beef up quickly for
a role as an action hero, combined with lifting weights eating lots of chicken
breast is like a magic bullet. I could be mistaken but if I recall correctly it
was Gerard Butler who said he wanted to apologize to the hundreds of dead
chickens he had to eat while preparing for his role in “300”. Anyway, besides
working like magic, chicken breast is relatively cheap and very versatile,
something has little flavor of its own but combines with almost any spice or
sauce into something reasonably tasty. So when I’m lifting weights dishes with
chicken breast become my staple too. The possibilities are virtually unlimited,
over these three months including green chili chicken stew, chicken breast with
peanut ginger satay sauce, Scottish Cock-a-Leekie, Buffalo chicken breasts, and
pulled chicken breast with spicy mustard barbecue sauce.

Regardless of whether you’re trying to lose fat or gain muscle
mass, in my opinion vegetables should always be a big part of one’s diet . One
of my biggest objections to restaurant meals is that vegetables are almost
entirely absent, served in tiny portions as an accompaniment, or come raw in
salads where they are little more than a bed for fatty dressings. Besides being
low in calories, most vegetables are high in fiber, which is digested slowly
and thus gives you both a full feeling when dieting and helps clear your
digestive tract out. Most vegetables are, of course, available all year long
nowadays, but I still lean toward trying to use seasonal ones like peppers,
eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, and green beans in the summer season and the
so-called “winter vegetables” like root vegetables, those from the cabbage
family, and harder shelled squashes in the fall and winter seasons. In
particular I’ve been trying to make use of vegetables I haven’t eaten much of
before or have only had before in very specific ways that are traditional in
America. So that’s meant experimenting a lot with things like beets, turnips,
parsnips, bok choy, asparagus, fennel, and cauliflower . One thing I tried as an
appetizer while on Cape Cod was cauliflower with blue cheese and buffalo sauce;
while not exactly a lean and light dish with the blue cheese in it, it was
something so delicious I absolutely had to recreate it at home. Hmmmm, what
other vegetable dishes can I make with super spicy sauces?

And desserts? Well, I’m still trying to keep the calories
down and they’re rarely low in that department. Although I’d often be up for a
single serving dessert, when baking a pie or cake or making a pudding, it’s
difficult to halve or quarter the recipe. While I don’t mind eating leftovers
of a healthy meat or vegetable dish or soup over five or six meals, making a
dessert and then sabotaging my diet with it over the remainder of the week is
just not part of the program. Sorry, folks, but no dessert pics in this
installment of my food porn!