THE NEW ALCOHOL-VEGETABLE DIET

The last time I featured cuisine was a month ago with SPAM, WAGYU MATSUTAKE AND BREAD.  My recent eating pattern featured tailgates (though I used a table in front of my TV set), for it began during the World Series, carried me throughout the presidential election period, and included those football/golf games this past weekend.  

So with all that, here is what I ate, beginning with an artichoke with three sauces, radicchio, onions, avocado and potato chips, with beer and a glass of a Stanford Cabernet:

Tonkatsu, Hirame sashimi, miso soup and a lot of vegetables, with beer and hot sake:

Then an Irish whiskey tasting during the World Series watching the Dodgers beat the Devil Rays.  Incidentally, while I thought I had totally lost all the money I invested in my fantasy teams, one actually won $50.

On the eve of election day, I gathered an assortment to imbibe through November 3.  In the back is a cognac within a crystal dragon, as I was born in that year.

Ham and eggs, tsukemono (Japanese pickles) and tofu with hot sake and tea, and cold beer and tea:

Sticking with Japanese, chazuke with salmon, tsukemono and hirame sashimi, with hot sake and cold beer:

15 Craigside provided a pizza supreme, so I fried it in butter and heated the top in a toaster oven.  Then I added some of my own Basil with tomatoes.  A large salad, beer and white wine (I was storing it in the beer bottle):

I want to note that my basil patch growing just few feet from this table has really grown only in one month.  I have a supply for the whole building:

I continued Italian when 15 Craigside provided spaghetti with meat sauce, so I enhanced it by frying some garlic into which the meat sauce was added, then some mushrooms and onions:

This tailgate only had a vegetable salad, topped with some leftover spaghetti sauce and piece of chicken, so I thought I would splurge with a cinnabon.

I cut a sliver of the cinnabon and fried it in butter, to have my first dessert in a month.  I then had my second splurge of an anpan prepared by a close friend, a day later.  I also first fried it in butter.  It was heavenly.

I once loved tacos.  More recently, I have stopped frying the tortilla in a pan to make it crispy, for that is too much work, for then everything falls out of the shell anyway.  So I now start with a large salad, add the ingredients provided for the tacos, add some Fritos, then the sauce, which I fry in some wagyu fat first:

My new tacos with beer and margarita.

My final tailgate was Chinese.  Steamed fish from the dining room, beer and some Johnny Walker Black Label.  I might have eaten maybe two grains of that rice.  However, that Bloody Mary was effectively a salad with tomato soup, horseradish, basil, cut onions and asparagus.

Why scotch?  There was a time when Chinese banquets in Hawaii had a bottle of this brew on the table to share.

I do use the wellness center at 15 Craigside for cross- and weight-training.  Plus, on TuThSat go through  a personally supervised knee therapy session.  Sunday I rest.

The result is that I just weighed myself, and saw 154.8, the lowest in maybe 25 years.  More than eleven years ago when my wife passed away, I spent a month visiting her in intensive care at Kuakini Hospital, where I must have gone back and forth 3-6 times daily, a one way walk of about a mile.  After it was all over I found out I had lost 11 pounds, from 167 to 156.  I gained most it back since then, but only in lockdown made a purposeful attempt to lower my Body-Mass Index.  I was becoming a Donald Trump, and reduced myself more towards Barack Obama.

But back to the focus of this posting, usually tailgates feature hot dog, hamburger, and in Hawaii, poke (marinated tuna).  As I hardly walk on a golf course anymore, I have had to significantly alter my eating habits.  You have noticed above, for example, an emphasis on alcohol and vegetable, with two dessert splurges.

Essentially, I have developed an alcohol-vegetable diet.  I eat and drink all I want, am satiated at the end of the meal, and feel full for many hours that I don't want to snack.

So I went to the internet to see if anyone else has proposed such a diet.  NOTHING!  The closest thing to my mine is the Mediterranean Diet.  But their link with alcohol is that the food they eat battles the side effects of alcohol.

No leading dietician, doctor or government promotes alcohol.  There is something in the Hippocratic Oath they take that considers ethanol as dangerous to anyone's health.  There is that red wine aura that a limited amounts of this potion might enhance your longevity.  Then, of course, there are those national loyalty thrusts like in Ireland, where "new scientific research shows that drinking whiskey will make you live a longer, healthier life, and be more creative."  Come on now, how can this be true.  Well:

• 
  This 15-year study was presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018 promoting moderate alcohol consumption for a longer lifespan.
• Presented by University of California Irvine neurologist Claudia Kawas and her team studying lifestyle habits of people who live until their 90's.  Those who drank two units of alcohol every day were less likely to die prematurely.

• 
  What is moderate?  Two units.  What is a unit?
• 750 ml bottle of wine at 13.5% ethanol contains 10 units.
• single shot  (1.2 ounces) of spirits (40% ethanol) = 1 unit
• bottle of beer (5%) = 1.7 units
• Why?  Whiskey contains ellagic acid, a powerful antioxidant that can eliminate harmful, cancerous free radicals in the body.  Whiskey contains more than red wine.

The analogy I use has to do with beef and fat.  In the USA and most of the world, this combination needs to be limited at all costs.  Not so in Japan.  I've read several medical studies from Japan indicating that Japanese wagyu beef fat is actually good for your health.  Here is a Japan-Korea summary.

The point is that conventional belief is difficult to adjust in medical science, especially when applied to the elderly.  At my age, heck with standards anymore.  I eat what I want.  

• 
  But I want to remain in the normal portion of my Body-Mass Index, even though science has shown that overweight people live longer than normal human beings.  You don't want to be underweight, for that is the group that dies off first.
• Thus, as much as going on a diet is antithetical to my way of life, I've found that an alcohol-vegetable diet might actually be fine for me.  
• A huge benefit, it has turned out, is that the high blood sugar level I have lived with the past couple of decades has actually dropped closer to normality.  I worry some about my liver and kidneys, but they seem to be functioning okay, as verified by regular blood tests.

I'm not advocating that you subscribe to my alcohol-vegetable diet.  This might only apply to me.  But check with your doctor, and keep abreast of any breaking news that might hint about this new diet pathway for a more enjoyable life.

The finalists for song #49 are:

• Blue Tango:  Leroy Anderson
• San Francisco:  Jeanette MacDonald

Leroy Anderson had a long Harvard education, led the Harvard University Band and became fluent in English, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, German, French, Italian and Portuguese.  His first composition was Jazz Pizzicato in 1938.  During World War II he was in counterintelligence.  While on duty in 1945 he wrote The Syncopated Clock.  He was recalled to active duty for the Korean War, and again while in the service wrote Blue Tango in 1951.  Recorded by Hugo Winterhalter and his orchestra in 1952, the song reached #1 and named by Billboard as the top song of the year.  This was the first instrumental to sell 1 million records.  He had follow on hits like Sleigh Ride,  Fiddle Faddle, The Typewriter and A Trumpeter's Lullaby.

Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy had more hits than I can count, but the one song that sticks in my mind is her San Francisco.  The song was specifically written by Bronislaw Kaper, Walter Jurmann and Gus Kahn for the 1936 film about the 1906 earthquake, and sung a half-dozen different times.  Also starring were Clarke Gable and Spencer Tracy.  In many ways, it has become the anthem for earthquake survivors.  The film, rated 100/70 by Rotten Tomatoes, was the top grosser for the year.

I guess I identify most with it because I lived in the Bay Area several times, and actually missed the devastating 1989 San Francisco earthquake only by a few hours.  So much damage from only a 6.9 scale earthquake, for the 1906 version was measured at a moment magnitude of 7.9, or thirty-two times more severe.  Thus, San Francisco is my #49.

Tropical Storm Eta could re-gain hurricane strength, then over the next few days weaken, with land fall anywhere from New Orleans to Tampa on Sunday:

Tropical Storm Theta formed in the Caribbean, and that close-by disturbance could well become Iota:

In the West Pacific, Typhoon Vamco (Ulysses) will threaten the Philippines.

I close with a Nuuanu Valley rainbow and my water lily:

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