Chupaqueso.com

While I was in the local Hy-Vee grocery store today buying the usual stuff, I noticed a display case full of eye-catching boxes: Van Harden’s Cheese Crust Pizza. Naturally, I had to try one.

The crust is made with cheese and starch, and bakes up to a more-or-less crusty consistency - or would, at least, if I’d followed the directions a bit more exactly. (They call for 10-12 minutes at 450 degrees F, or until the cheese melts; the cheese had melted on mine at 8 minutes, but I let it run till 10 anyway.) It is very important to let it cool for 5 minutes to let the crust set. (I did that.)

The results weren’t bad, though it wasn’t the nice crispy crust I expected. The tomato sauce was quite good, and there was enough cheese and sausage on mine to satisfy me. I’m definitely going to try again, this time following the directions a bit more exactly.

If you live in a place with a Hy-Vee store, you should be able to find it in the frozen food section. If you don’t, and are feeling adventurous, you can also order online; they’ll ship overnight, in an insulated box with dry ice to keep it frozen.

Ah, syrup-food. Breakfast treats with sweet, mushy innards and mapley goodness drizzled over the top. They’re oh-so-strictly verboten under my current diet.

So I make do with this recipe:

Ingredients
1/4 cup “quark” (yogurt cheese) or cream cheese
1 egg
1 tbsp milk
1 tbsp butter
maple flavoring
banana flavoring
2 packets of Splenda

To begin: soften the butter, add a packet of splenda and a couple of drops of maple flavoring. Mix well. This is the topping.

Beat the egg and add the milk. Add just a sprinkle of Splenda.

Add a drop or two of banana flavoring and the rest of packet #2 of Splenda to the quark (yogurt cheese, which must be made with UNSWEETENED yogurt, or you’re getting sugar in your low-carb meal). Cream cheese will work too, but quark (pronounced “kvark”) is better.

Now… heat your griddle or large skillet, and pour the egg into a thin layer. When it has cooked mostly through, gently spread (or “carefully glop”) the artificially-sweetened, artificially flavored qvark onto it in a line near one edge. Roll it up, let it heat just a little more, and then slide it off onto a plate.

Drizzle the maple-splenda butter over the top, and eat it right now, because it is best served hot.

Carb content is about 5g - 1g/oz in the quark, 1g per packet of Splenda, and 1g per tablespoon of milk.

Chalain and I joke about low-carb dieting all the time. See, we know it works for us, but both of us “fall off the wagon” from time to time.

I’m not sure of the origin of the “on the wagon” metaphor, but it’s very visual for us. See, when I stop low-carbing it’s usually because of stress, and I begin to crave comfort foods. That means chocolate, french toast, and big bowls of fried noodles. And from there things usually progress into a diet where I’m living off of “spaghetti toast” (toast with marinara sauce) and chocolate milk.

And Chalain and I describe it not as “falling off the wagon” but as “leaping from the wagon, stripping naked, and running off into the woods to play with the faerie folk.”

Low-carb dieting, for me anyway, is a discipline that helps me break my addiction to dancing naked with elfkin.

For the last three weeks I’ve been stressed, and I’ve made it further and further into the woods. The brownies and I had quite the mosh pit last week, and Saturday I realized that I was back up to needing two naps per day, and still not having any energy. So Sandra and I agreed it was time to get back on the wagon.

Firing up the low-carb diet is not easy, because I have two days of comfort food cravings. This can be offset with medication (mostly caffeine, ibuprofen, and chromium) and exercise, but the side-effect is 18 hours of being wiped out in weird ways. Chalain and I describe THAT not as “getting back on the wagon” but as “getting on the wagon by standing in front of it, letting it hit you, and then getting caught up in one of the wheels.”

So… today I’m back under the wagon. The theme-song? “The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round.”

I swear, I didn’t plan this. It’s only been a couple of weeks since I posted about how much longer lasting cast iron is when compared to teflon… and now I hear that the EPA is seeking to eliminate teflon completely within 10 years.

Here are a few news links…

ABCNews.com - Dupont ceasing teflon-related emissions by 2010

MSNBC - Teflon emissions and cancer risks

Tuberose.com - (giving us a pile of anti-Teflon facts that I know to be true because I read them on the internet)

Apparently there is an increasing body of evidence linking one of the chemicals used in the production process, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), to cancers in laboratory animals, as well as to a number of health problems in humans.

The EPA and Dupont assure us that there’s no PFOA in teflon itself — the chemical is used in the PRODUCTION of teflon. But there’s also a growing body of evidence showing that when teflon overheats it emits ammonium perfluorooctane (also a potential carcinogen), among other (reportedly toxic) things.

I could read up on this all day, but I’ve got cartooning to do. Y’all go dig around and tell me what you think.

–Howard

(hat tip to “Dragon” for this one)

Howard’s written a fair amount about low-carb eating in the context of the Atkins diet. Far be it from me to dispute the effectiveness of the diet, given his success with it. I should note here that my interest in the chupaqueso is rather different.

Like many others, I have type II diabetes. I am very thankful that I’m not insulin-dependent, and every day I can stave off that fate is one more day I’m happy. (I’m a former paramedic. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, I intensely dislike getting stuck with a needle.) For the non-insulin-dependent diabetic, controlling blood sugar is principally a matter of medication, exercise, and consistent carbohydrate intake from one day to the next. I’m not as good about the exercise as I should be. I am doing better than I ever thought I could with diet, though.

Part of that success is consistency in carbohydrate intake. Here’s where the chupaqueso comes in: it’s a snack I can have without affecting my blood sugar. This is a Good Thing. That’s also why I’ll use ingredients that are not cheese and meat, although in small quantities. It works well and really knocks out the munchies.

One problem with low-carb diets, for me anyway, is that I get really tired of eggs every morning. I don’t mind eating salads, I like grilled chicken, fish is fine, and we’ve already established that I really like cheese.

I do like eggs, but defaulting to an omelette every morning wears on me.

This morning I had tomatoes and fried cheese, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. There are a few grams of carbs in there, but not enough to cause a problem.

You’ll need:
1) A bottled Roma tomato (or a fresh one, but it’s January, and my garden is empty), sliced or chunked so the bits are bite-sized.
2) some thick slices of mozzarella
3) two tbsp of extra-virgin olive oil
4) two tsp of balsamic vinegar

The hardest part about all of this (assuming you can find a good tomato) is frying the mozzarella. The griddle or skillet needs to be a little hotter than pancake temperature — I’d say between 300 and 400 degrees F, but I’m guessing. Lay the cheese on the nonstick (or oiled) surface, and have your spatula ready. When the cheese has a bubbling layer around the edge, it’s probably ready to flip. Be quick, and press down on the spatula so you don’t smash the fried part of the cheese out of the way and end up with a spatula full of goo. Flip.

(Note: If you’ve made a chupaqueso or two successfully, you’ll be able to figure out frying a thick slice of mozzarella.)

Flip the cheese again in about 30 seconds. Remove it from the griddle, and slap it down on the plate next to the tomato slices. Drizzle with olive oil and vinegar. Eat.

Sandra and I bottle our own tomatos (read that “Sandra bottles tomatos and I help eat them”) so we’ve got plenty of tasty romas on hand. You can bet I’ll be doing this again.

Six years ago, almost to the day, I had a heart attack. It wasn’t much of an attack, as cardiac events go — it was myocarditis, after all. It wasn’t caused by blockage, or high cholesterol, or high blood pressure, or any of the USUAL things that trigger arrests in 31-year-old males. I spent three days in the hospital being very bored (and a little scared, yes), and came home fit as a fiddle. Well… the strings needed to be tightened a bit, because the drugs they wanted me to take were worse than the myocarditis, but as soon as I ditched the battery of useless meds (including a blood-pressure regulator that prevented me from running up stairs, doing more than a couple of push-ups, or getting anything else up, if you catch my drift) I was fine.

They measured my cholesterol while I was in the hospital, and it was around 100. I was spectacularly healthy, and the ratio of HDL to LDL supported that. I’d been low-carb dieting at the time, and exercising upwards of 10 hours per week. Then I caught the “Luke Skywalker” flu — the virus made it all the way to the reactor core, and my heart muscle swelled up. That’s what myocarditis is: a viral or bacterial infection and resulting inflammation of the heart muscle.

Understand, though, that my Dad spent at least two decades being obese, had myocarditis in his 40’s, and then had a massive and quite fatal coronary at age 56. Regardless of how healthy I felt back in 1999, I also felt that there was this hereditary sword hanging over my head, and if I couldn’t move out of the way, perhaps I could put on a helmet.

So ever since 1999 I’ve been interested in my cholesterol levels. Some of you may remember the “guess Howard’s total cholesterol level” contest I ran for three or four years in a row each winter. Sadly, I’ve never dieted-and-exercised as effectively as I did back in 1999, so the levels have been as high as 235. Back when I was twenty-five years old I had my cholesterol measured, and it was around 200, maybe 205. The few times I’ve been tested while low-carbing, It’s been down around 150 to 175.

As far as I can tell, then, my cholesterol levels are high when I’m on the high-carb, high-junk, 21st-century fast-food-forager diet, and healthy or low when I’m doing some variant of the low-carb thing.

The latest round of results bear that out. I’ve been low-carbing, working out at least twice a week, and enjoying staple items like bacon-wrapped grilled chicken breast, butter-fried cheese, bacon and eggs, and ham-and-egg-drop soup for 16 days now. This morning I took a home cholesterol test, and was almost off the chart… on the low end. The chart only went down to “21 = 119″ (a reading of “21″ on the chart-calibrated device corresponds to a total cholesterol level of 119) and the fuzzy purple line generated by a few drops of my blood only went up to about 20.5. Eh. Call it 21. That puts my total cholesterol at or just south of 119, which is the lowest measurement I’ve had since 1999.

Needless to say, I’m pleased. My weight may have plateau’d for the last week, but I feel great, my clothing fits better, and now I know that my cholesterol has retreated from the borders of the Undiscovered Country.

(Cross-posted and back-dated from schlockmercenary.com)

The diet-and-exercise thing is going well. I’ve lost six pounds, and redistributed another five or ten, if the fit of my clothes is any indication. And I’ve discovered that I really, really like cheeeese.

This is a good thing, because cheese is something I’m allowed to eat. Lately I’ve been frying a “mexican snack cheese” called “Queso Blanco,” and the stuff is AMAZING. I’ll fry a couple of quarter-inch-thick slices in a little bit of butter, and they toast up nicely without going all gooey and impossible to flip. And when I eat them, they taste like grilled cheese sandwiches. I don’t know how they did it, but the cheese-mongers managed to fake that toasted bread flavor without the help of actual bread.

The addition of a small dollop of tomato sauce (yes, it has carbs, but in insignificant amounts per dollop, and besides — vegetables are GOOD) completes the illusion. Tomato soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches is one of my favorite foods, but with bread off the menu, I thought it’d be a few months before I’d be able to enjoy it again. Not so!

The funny thing is that the “Queso Blanco” I’ve been buying, with its picture of a serape-clad, burro-riding, sombrero-bedecked mexican man on the front is made in the Central American province of… umm… Wisconsin. My guess is that whatever the authentic recipe for white “mexican frying-cheese” calls for, these corporate cheese-mongers have found a way to pull it off without the use of anything hecho en mexico whatsoever. Still, it tastes fan-NAFTA-tastic. Naftastic? Whatever.

Needless to say, I tried this stuff in my standard Chupaqueso recipe, and it makes for a truly superior shell. I still prefer chupaquesos that have been filled with pepperjack, or mild cheddar (and bacon, and ham, and green chiles), but Queso Blanco is now my shell of choice.

Looking for chupaqueso recipes? Watch this space. I’ve had so many requests for them, I’ve found a special home in cyberspace for them to live, and I’ll tell you where it is once there’s some actual cheese there.

(And some ADS about cheese. I’m waaay too hungry to write recipies for free.)

Note: A little googling turned up this page about queso blanco, which apparently is a fresh white cheese made primarily in Venezuela, where I’m told they do, in fact, have lots of cows. That’s about the extent of my ability to read Spanish, though.