Life after meat

The binges of December and January always take a toll on my health. It seems that after the holiday season, the excesses that I enjoyed with pure, utter relish invariably tell on me and my periodic blood exams, and I get a good "sermon" from my well-meaning physician. The holiday season has always been a good excuse to indulge in good food, and meat has always been associated with good food. This, plus all the high seasoning that makes food more palatable, more interesting to the palate-the result is havoc on one’s blood analysis. And this goes on yearly, and I have to make some sort of retribution for my sins by way of special, careful diets for some time until the numbers are reversed. Fortunately, they are still reversible with good sensible eating and do not require the assistance of drugs to get the numbers back to normal levels. But I realized that if my unhealthy diet and eating habits do not kill me, my kind physician’s disapproving looks will, so it’s back to re-aligning my eating habits.

Doc says enough binging on steaks. This extraordinary love for red meat has bordered on pre-occupation for me, perhaps because I was tying it up with my new-found fondness for body-building. My personal trainer recommended a high-protein diet, if I were to make swift progress in my mass-building program at the gym. So it was steaks, and more steaks, and I asked my wife to stock up on good marbled Angus beef or at the very least US Choice, rib eye steaks and prime rib at home for special Sunday lunches at home. These constituted a good Sunday lunch for the family, and we always looked for ward to this.

The kind doctor was aghast at my new diet!

Anyway for now, it’s no meat and less sodium for me. For this foodie, that’s really bad news. At home, it was time to check out the cookbooks for good healthy recipes. Vegetables are the order of the day, as well as seafood. There are only so many ways you can cook sea bass, and for the rest of the days, it was tilapia, bangus, shrimps, etc. cooked mostly sinigang style. Other days, the same stuff would be grilled, with simple vinegar as dip. The native kalamansi has been my new-found friend, as with other herbs I was mostly unfamiliar with but which have made my sea food more palatable. I have also discovered the benefits of sodium-free artificial salt in keeping with the good doctor’s advice.

Veggies are a little trickier, though admittedly healthier. The family had never been vegetable lovers, though we make sure there is always a good stock of these. But short of sautéing a variety of them together, we don’t have too many options for this at home. We resolved to research on more varied and interesting vegetarian dishes, not just for my special diet but for the general well-being of the family as well. Making vegetables more palatable can only translate to better eating habits for the adults and the kids at home as well.

As for eating out — well, we just have to be a little more discriminating for now. But choosing a good restaurant offering healthier food choices is no longer a problem with the proliferation of dining destinations we now have. After some two weeks of Spartan eating, I had a jolly good time re-discovering the joys of shabu-shabu with family and friends.

The Mini Shabu-Shabu restaurant at EDSA Shangri-La is a good choice. We had platefuls of fresh vegetables and an assortment of seafood that we boiled in a simple bland broth that the restaurant provided in built-in containers on the table. We did away with meat altogether and just concentrated on fish balls, squid balls that were so plump they were a grand treat, prawns, oysters, and slivers of fish fillets. We ended up ordering more and more of the squid balls as everyone loved it.

To balance it off, we had good leafy vegetables and even taro for the soupy delight. The secret lay on the tangy, spicy dip where you dunked the squid balls and all the other ingredients from your own personal built-in simmering pot of broth and seafood/vegetables. The base was light, flavored I guess by soy sauce, but very lightly. The dark brown sate went into the dip which made it a little thicker. Then in went too a good helping of fresh chopped garlic, tangy and spicy, and some chopped spring onions for more flavor, plus some chopped red chili bits for good measure. I had extra helpings of the sate and the fresh garlic, and each dunking was a delight, after two weeks of strict dieting. Surprisingly, though I appreciated the big plump prawns and the fresh oysters, I was content with an extra helping of the squid balls which I thoroughly enjoyed dipping in my own concoction of extra spicy bowl of condiments. By the way, everyone had a second helping of the squid balls. Next time around, I may not even bother with the pricey prawns and just have the fish fillet and squid balls, plus the green leafy vegetables. Not a bad dinner treat at all. I left the restaurant groaning with delight, giddy with good food that was guilt-free, pleasantly surprised that, for a carnivore like me, healthy eating can be just as pleasurable and rewarding.

Another joy re-discovered is the pleasure of having soups and salads for lunch or dinner. We are a certified rice-eating populace, and lunch or dinner seems to be incomplete without this. On top of this, we have all sorts of dips for our fish or meat, dips which are laden with soy sauce or even patis and the sinful bagoong, a Pinoy all-time favorite. This sodium-rich diet is the culprit in many health concerns, and pay-back time is now earlier than a decade ago. Elevated createnin levels result from this, and choosing the restaurants that offer healthy options is now a must.

Sugar Not is one such healthy option. They offer hearty soups and salads, and on a late lunch at their Podium branch one day last week, I was pleasantly surprised to see some yuppies enjoying their meals. These young office workers actually opted for Sugar Not’s light meals, which they capped with coffee and sugar-free pastries. So eating healthy is now not just a mind-set for the more mature population. It has trickled down to the late twenties and early thirties generation who used to think that they can postpone this option to their forties.

It was an over-all healthy and delightful mid-week lunch.

Mabuhay!!! Be proud to be a Filipino.

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