Got Noah covered
2004-10-04, 1:19 p.m.

Day 40 Going to outlast Noah

It's a little weird, I've already done the 40th night, today will complete the 40th day. As of 7pm tonight - 40 complete days with out a cigarette. I'm going to break my arm patting myself on the back. Bowling team (brothers) continue to be supportive. D asks every week how it's going - specifically asking about smoking. Wiff continues to smoke (but at a much reduced rate), drink (NOT at a reduced rate), and apparently not give a shit about if I stay quit or not. She actually hasn't asked me a single question about how it's going. Took me 40 days to notice. Hmmm, what's that thing wives say about their husbands never noticing anything? No truth to that I guess.

Urges/craves seem to be backing down a bit lately. Good thing, or I'm going to have to get another bag of trail mix. (Typed that as I finished off the last of the bag. Ooops.) That's something I'd like to take up with my doctor too - a diet plan.

Following the food pyramid (one version or the other) is all well and good. But that's not what I want out of a diet plan. I'd like a varied weekly meal plan. With recipes, serving suggestions, portions and even valid substitutes. I AM NOT eating a bowl of stewed tomatoes for anybody but Joe Rogan or Jeff Probst. Same goes for bananas, strawberries and any kind of melon. I'd also like to know that I could substitute my version of gumbo or jambalaya for 2 or 3 days of typical diet food, or that I could smoke a pork butt and have a pulled pork sandwich every day for 2 weeks and still stay on plan.

To go with all that, I want shopping lists. Editable, changeable (see gumbo, jambalaya and pulled pork, above), and maybe even a little more interactive than that. Say the grocery store is having a monster sale on a particular cut of meat. I'd like to be able to tilt the menu plan a bit to accomodate that. Or be able to pick my own menu for the week, then have the shopping list generated based on known recipes. Think there's anything like that out there already? Hard part will be converting all our favorite recipes over to any system at all. Right now, the recipes we still need to use are either in a cookbook or just single sheets of paper stuffed in one of several manilla folders. Scattered, fragile, easy to disrupt. There's the added concern that many of these recipes would have to be modified to conform to a lower fat, healthier menu plan. Even gumbo, jambalaya and pulled pork can be pretty low fat if done properly. The fat in Gumbo is in the roux and what ever meat is added, jambalaya gets its fat primarily from the meat (in both cases, generous amounts of Andouille sausage - but it's pork fat) and pulled pork - you spend 8 hours rendering the fat out of it, then pull the meat apart by hand. You prety much get to choose how much fat to include. It's just hard limiting yourself to a single sandwich at any meal.

So anyhow - that's what I'd like in a diet/meal plan. Anything out there?

Better go prepare for my exciting weekend.

40 days down - Looking for Mt. Ararat

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