4 hour body dinner: bangers and fake-mash with sauteed onions and sauerkraut.

for one:
- 4 medium sized (preferably not breakfast) sausages
- 1/2 to 3/4 of a can of white kidney beans (called cannellini beans sometimes, but not in canada.)
- 1/2 of a medium yellow onion
- 1/2 cup of sauerkraut
- 1 tsp gravy mix.

So first off, these don't really taste like potatoes. They pretty much look like potatoes, and have the approximate mouth-feel (my least favorite word!) of mashed potatoes, but they pretty much taste like beans. don't get me wrong, I like beans, and I like these. They're close enough to the flavour and texture of potatoes that you can sort of lose yourself in the pub-foodiness of this and forget that you don't actually get to eat potatoes anymore.

ingredients. I'm adding more pictures in an effort to make this more interesting and mask my ability to write out a recipe like a normal person!

so, boil a pot of water, open a can of white kidney beans and rinse them, and chop up half a yellow onion.

fry the onions in a pan with some butter or ghee, don't burn them but you actually do want to fry them, not just soften them. caramelize those babies.

boil the sausages in a pot of water for about 5 minutes, I feel like this helps draw out some of the fat, but I'm honestly not sure if that's true. transfer them to a pan, and fry them until they're browned and cooked all the way through.

note: I am using mild Italian sausages here, because they're the only kind I could find that didn't have some kind of sweetener in the ingredients. they were good, I probably would have preferred a bratwurst or something, but they were all sugar.

put your rinsed kidney beans into a pot and cook them with a little bit of water, some butter, and all the salt and pepper you'd put into mashed potatoes. mine were pretty soft to start with, but about 5 minutes of cooking and they were mashable. I used my Bamix (which is a fancy immersion blender) but you could probably mash using an ordinary potato masher, or even just the back of a fork here. I also added a tsp of gravy powder mix to the bean mash, in an attempt to make them taste more like potatoes. you could probably just MAKE gravy and it would add much more, but all my gravy mixes contained small amounts of sugar, so I minimized the damage with just a smidge in.

my stove is so tiny!

anyways, this is an easy meal. plate your mashed "potatoes" and add the sausages and the onions to it. I ate some sauerkraut with this because I like it, and it's good for you. fresh veggies on the side would have been good too. this is a super filling meal, and really has a comfort food feel to it.

quick meal, not too much else to say.

protein:  4 sausages = 52g (wow.) about a cup of cannellini beans, 15g, and 1g each in the sauerkraut and the onions. for a grand total of 69g of protein.  wow, no wonder this was so filling.

4 hour body dinner: pan seared scallops and curried green pea puree. with crisp proscuitto!

This was freaking delicious. I'm not joking. go buy the stuff for it right now.

first thing you need to do is get some wild sea scallops. get the big ones, the small ones always end up really salty and weird tasting to me. Giant Sea Scallops, Wild Caught. that's what you want.

defrost em.  I made 7 here, and ate all of this (in case you haven't noticed, I'm almost always cooking for one, so double or triple of quadruple or however many people you're cooking for. I'm just me.)


Put two slices of procuitto in a 375° oven.
Heat up a pot and a pan with about a tablespoon of ghee in each. (I like to cook with butter or ghee, you go right ahead and use whatever you like. ghee is kind of expensive or time consuming.)
Medium heat for the pot, medium high for the pan.

Cook some garlic in the pot, when it smells delicious, throw in one cup of frozen peas and half a cup of water. Little bit of salt, pepper, garam Marsala, (or curry powder. about a tsp of this.) thai chili sauce, unless you're heat sensitive. Boil for like... 5 minutes. (check your proscuitto right now or it might be burnt. take it out when it's crispy.)
 
Meanwhile, in camelot, dry off your defrosted scallops and season them with salt and pepper, put them in the pan with the hot cooking grease of your choice, sear for 5 to 7 minutes on each side until cooked through and there's a nice brown colour on the outside. Scallops stick like the bejezzus if you don't move them around a little but when you first start cooking them, so make sure you do that.

Puree the peas and whatever pea-broth is left in the pot with an immersion blender or regular blender. Plate the pea puree, crumble the crispy procuitto on top, plate scallops, garnish if you're so inclined.
Yum. Easy-peasy as they say, and this was suuuper tasty and fast.

protein: (can't find proscuittos information, so I'm counting 2 slices of it like 1 slice of bacon.) 3g. I'm a little unsure about scallops too, but I'm going to count 7 of them at about 150g which is 35g protein and peas which is 8g for a total of 46g.

Kale Chips! 4hrbody snack

Kale Sucks. I know some people feel differently, but I am not the worlds biggest fan of most green vegetables, and I think kale is one of the grossest. It seems like more of a garnish than anything edible to me usually.

however, desperate times call for desperate measures.

I LOVE snacking. I love it. I know it's terrible for your weight, it adds nothing useful to your life, it's just consuming calories for no reason at all, but I love it. watching tv is like 800x more boring without it, and I like watching tv.  so lately, with the 4 hour body, i've been eating a few carrots or some celery, or some assorted other crap that is mostly not delicious or salty or feels anything like a snack.

someone suggested kale chips, so here we are.  I made these.. pretty unhealthy. about as unhealthy as you can make kale, short of soaking it in MSG (which would be delicious.) ..also garlicky as all hell because I love garlic. you can substitute another spice, I'll think of some and write them at the bottom.**

okay, so buy some kale, wash it, dry it, and remove the leafy bits from the thick stems in the middle. throw out the stems or eat them or something, but we're not using them here.  this is calgary, so I can only find one kind of kale. green. there are other kinds, I've heard the red is good for this too.

preheat your oven to 350F.

chop or tear the kale up into bite size pieces. if you're using the whole bunch, i'd put about 2 tablespoons or so of olive oil (again, I used garlic infused here because I have it and it's amazing) into a bowl, and add some salt/pepper, or for me, I added a whole wack of garlic salt. because I had already planned to sit around and watch tv and eat chips for my evening activity, so I was just making that possible for myself while staying on the diet. no need to not gross out everyone with my garlic breath, I live alone.

put the kale in the bowl and mix it around until it's all coated by the oil and seasonings. if you're extra healthy here or are trying to lose more weight, they make oil spritzers that would probably do a good job of getting less oil onto the kale. or you could use pam, but I think pam is disgusting, so your call.

once you've got greasy kale, spread it out on a parchment paper covered baking sheet (or two. don't overlap, and this makes waaay less than it looks like before it's baked.)

put it into the oven and bake for around 10-15 minutes, and stay in the kitchen and watch this, because it's a fine line. kale tastes even worse when it's overcooked. so you want to cook it until it's brown around the edges just smidge, but not burning. you may need to turn your cookie sheet around or something if your oven has hot spots.

pull it out of the oven when it's ready. give it a second and poke it to see if it's crisp. if it seems limp instead of crisp, put it back in for another minute or so, it should crisp up, unless you don't know what kale is and bought the wrong thing. ;)

when it's crispy but not burnt, take it out of the oven, let it cool, (this takes like 2 minutes.) and then throw it all into a bowl and take it with you to watch tv. they're okay. they're not even close to potato chips, but they are 100x more delicious than celery, and if I was in danger of falling off the wagon for some greasy salty snacks, they'd do the trick.

I've personally embraced wine drinking with a vengeance on this diet*. it seems to curb the cravings for a lot of things for me, since I don't generally really like red wine and food together.

*I always drink red wine. I've just been drinking about a glass a night now instead of a glass every 2 or 3 nights lately. it's a small indulgence, and one that tim allows in the book, and really does ease the diet for me.

**non-garlic options.
-salt and pepper
-srichiha
-wasabi (that would be great. use sesame oil instead of olive and wasabi. yum.)
-curry
-nutritional yeast? I'm not sure if that's allowed on the diet, I think it's disgusting anyways but some people love it.

4 hour body coconut dredged salmon and fried side

yes yes, my pictures are terrible. I'll eventually start taking them with a real camera or something instead of just snapshotting on my smartphone. you'll have to just believe me when I say that everything I'm going to bother posting actually tastes good, even if it looks blah due to crappy photography skillz.

So, as a preface, I like the 4 hour body. I like the slow carb diet, I like tim ferris' nerdiness in all aspects of the book. it's great. however, while I am the cat lady version of a bachelor, I don't like cooking like one. I'm pretty familiar with slow carb, low carb, paleo, gluten free, etc, etc cooking, and I feel like there's some people out there who are sick of steak and black beans for dinner and might be looking for at least light inspiration for some meals.  I'm not great at recipes, I hardly ever write down what I do, but I'm giving it a shot.

okay, so this coconut-dredged salmon with sort of a fried side dish. and some peppers, because I like them. (they may technically be a fruit. I'm not fussing with that, I think they're fine.)

so. coconut flour you can get from any natural market, it's just ground up dried coconut flesh, essentially the garbage that's left after making coconut milk. almond flour would also work here, and may even taste better, to be honest. coconut flour is a little sweet tasting, and while I think it worked pretty good, almond might be a little better.

wash a pan. preheat your oven to 400F.
make an egg-white bowl for coating the fish. small amount of egg whites from carton, a smidge of unsweetened coconut dream or unsweetened almond milk if you have it, or a little bit of water if not. mix it up.

so, this a pretty simple recipe, I throw about 1/4cup of coconut/almond flour into a ziplock bag and add a few spices you like. I used lemon pepper and some finely ground dill I had from finely grinding some dill in my mortar and pestle the day before. any kind of spice would be good though, I do this with montreal steak spice sometimes, sometimes just salt and pepper, sometimes get a little asian and do some ginger, and then add a little lemongrass and fry in sesame oil instead of baking. get creative. You can also buy falafel mix, which is a powder, in bulk from lots of natural food markets. it's chickpea flour and spices, and it makes a delicious fish coating too. skip the coconut flour if you're using it.

anyways, make your flour/spice bag, and then pat your defrosted salmon (buy wild so you don't die.) with a little paper towel, and then dunk it into your egg whites to coat. let it drip off a little, and then toss it into the spice bag, and shake it around until it's all coated. (like shake and bake. this is just homemade, gluten free shake and bake.)

shake, and bake. I bake fish, depending on sizes of the cuts and how well done you like your fish, for about 10 minutes at 400. usually doesn't overcook it.

while that's in the oven, I made my fried-up side dish here, which is

1/2 cup canned lentils (green)
2 handfuls of spinach leaves
1/4 cup of kimchi (which you can buy at asian markets and also now in the deli at safeway I saw.)

add a little nice oil, you can use macadamia like tim says in the book, I just use a delicious garlic-infused olive oil for most things, because I have ceramic pans anyways and cook everything on medium/medium high, but never above like a 6 on my stove.

fry that up until the spinach melts and the kimchi starts to turn clear. you shouldn't need to add anything to this, since kimchi has tons of flavour and will dominate the other things in there anyways. also, it's really good for you.

take your fish out, drizzle it with a little gluten-free tamari soy sauce, (you will probably want to do this if you used coconut flour because it is really dry.) sprinkle on some sesame seeds or something if you like, plate up your fried dish, add some fresh veggies, and you have a very nice, complete meal that only took about 15 minutes.

nice.

have a glass of wine.

protein: a standard smallish salmon fillet has about 23g of protein, lentils have about 5g, about 4g in the spinach, and at least 1 in the kimchi. so you're minimum here is probably 33g, depending on the size of your fish. mine was small in this scenario, I think around a 4oz fillet.

four hour body huevos rancheros

yeah I realize the picture looks disgusting. trust me, just try it.

4hrbody huevos rancheros:

2 eggs (or one egg and a glug of whites)

I poach the eggs the night before until about 80% done right in the mason jar. I feel like if you do them all the way in the microwave they get too foamy, which I dislike. but if you don't mind the texture, you can skip this step.

in the morning, I pull my mason jar out of the fridge and add

2 heaping giant tablespoons of organic black beans from a can
2 hg-tbsp(^) of refried beans from a can

and then I microwave until the eggs are totally cooked and the beans are really hot. usually about 2 minutes.

then, mix in

1 cup of avacado cubes
about 2 big tablespoons of no sugar salsa (safeway brand doesn't have sugar in it. cool.)

add about a tsp each of cumin and paprika and a grind of pepper* and stir it up, and eat it. it looks gross, but it's really fantastic. I like to cook in mason jars because I usually have like 8 minutes in the morning, so this is put together and has a top slapped on and then taken with me to eat on the way or once I get to work.

*you can salt to taste here too. I am vaguely concerned about sodium intake and therefore rely on our too-high-levels of salt in all processed food to do my salting for me. I find with the refried beans, which are super salty, and the black beans, which are canned with salt, it has sufficient levels, but you can add if you like.

so here's the protein scoop:

2 eggs - 13g, 2oz each of refried and black beans - 4g total, avocado - 3g, to equal 20g, which is what I aim for as a 115lb lady, I don't think I need the same amount as Tim. add an extra glug of whites or some hemp hearts or something if you need to make up to 30g. (2 tbsp of hemp hearts adds 11grams of protein I think so it's a good cheat when you need a little boost.)