[sic]

So last month there was a story that made the rounds of the various local news broadcasts, online media outlets and the occasional blog about the County of L.A.’s Health Services Department offering on its website a home version of the very same checkpoints they use to scrutinize and grade area restaurants. Of course, it’s strictly a self-inspection. It’s not like for real where a duly authorized department official comes out and gives your kitchen the third-degree. So in other words, it’s open to, say, “flexible interpretation” of some of the various yes-or-no inquiries to be answered about food prep, temps, handling, storage, et cetera.

For example: Food in my refrigerator is well spaced so that cool air can circulate freely.

I went with a “yes” to that primarily because it’s true, but also because “well spaced” is not defined. Fact is, the freezer’s often stacked and packed. But then again, they didn’t ask about the freezer… they asked about the refrigerator. See? Loopholes abound.

In terms of the section on vermin things got a little sketchy, such as when asked for a yes or no to the statement “There are flies inside my home.” From a cursory examination of the residential interior at my seat in the library in front of my computer I was able to ascertain with a modest degree of certainty that there were not any flies presently within it. Thus and to the best of my knowledge, no. If the statement had been “There have been flies in your house,” I would’ve been stone busted.

Then there are statements to be answered such as “I remove all jewerly from my hands and maintain my fingernails trimmed before I prepare foods.” I answered yes in protest because while I mostly keep my fingernails trimmed and clean, I object to the department’s trivialization of the institution and symbols of marriage — especially mine. Since Susan and I were wed, I’ve never once been separated from my wedding ring and I damn well ain’t going to take it off when I’m boiling water for my friggin’ instant oatmeal, so there!

Anyway, the penalty for naivete or absolute honesty is probably a “C” grade placard or perhaps worse (is there a “D” out there?) mailed to your house. The reward for culinary sainthood or fudging a bit is the coveted “A,” which is what was bestowed on me upon successful completion and online submission of my answers.

The magnetized sign, a mini version of what hangs in every A-rated restaurant in L.A. County arrived a few days ago and has attained its appropriate place of honor on the side of the fridge. Where a fly just landed on it.

I’ve been on an instant oatmeal kick for breakfast this week. I started off plain with a little milk and brown suger and quickly graduated to adding raisins and a banana and a vanilla yogurt. Yesterday and today I’ve locked onto a mash-up that just works:

• 1 packet of instant oatmeal nuked with a half-cup of water
• 1 banana
• 2 tablespoons peanut butter
• 1/2 cup applesauce

Oh, hell yeah… but this is definitely not a calorie-light concoction. The oatmeal’s 120. The peanut butter — even though it’s so-called “reduced fat” is still 180. The banana’s 125. And the applesauce is 90. Being as that’s 515 calories gobbled up right there I opted to forego the raisins because they’d add another 120. And to be honest, it’s certainly not as substantial nor annywhere near as filling as one of my 300-calorie, vegetable-stuffed egg-substitute omelets. But it’s goooooooooood to the very last spoonscrape.

Since last month’s inaugural blender experimentation with what I’ve come to call my “Everything But The Kitchen Sink” smoothie (Jamba Juice I am not), I’ve attempted to refine the contents of my concoctions to come up with fruits that complement each other. It may seem like a no-brainer that grapefruit and banana or apple and tangerine or carrots and sugarsnap peas and sweet peppers — or all of them together — don’t play the best together, but I was ever game to give them a go.

Today, though, I crafted my masterpiece: one mango, two bananas, one cup of light vanilla yogurt.

Like I said: a no-brainer that mango and banana would make a great team. Sometimes it just takes me a while.

And Damn! I may have to double up these ingredients, whip up a batch, infuse it with a shot or several of dark rum, stow it in the fridge overnight and serve it up the next day with a straw and a hibiscus garnish.

The secrets to this success are mango availability and the proper tools. Blessedly, Costco sells boxes of fresh and ripening mangos from Peru for like $7. And the right and righteous implement is only a click away: the Oxo mango splitter.

Sure, I was skeptical at first as I eyed the contraption in whatever magazine I was perusing. After all, how hard can it be to cut up a mango. Well, certainly it’s doable, but it can also get pretty juicy. So, what the hell, we brought one home and the thing is just a wonder of convenience. Basically you stand the fruit up on its stem, place the center of the splitter over the center area of the mango (make sure the seed is oriented in the same direction as the splitter’s center hole) and push down evenly. You’re left with two precious and perfect halves of mango goodness and the monster seed is ready to be tossed. The instructions then dictate how to cube up the mango matter, but if it’s ripe enough I prefer to just divy the thing up into slices and spoon-slice the stuff away from the skin.

From a dieting perspective, while not at all unhealthy, this is a calorie-rich beverage. Mangos hit at 135 calories, bananas — times two — are knocking on the 200 door, and the light yogurt is 110. At 430 calories it’s not the most filling, either. But Ooooo… perhaps a scoop of a chocolate-flavored protein powder might make it so?

Oh yeah, baby.

After another stop at Home Depot to get a quart of test paint for the home makeover that Susan’s coordinating, we headed up into Griffith Park for a hike from the Charlie Turner Trailhead located behind the still-under-construction observatory up to the 1,619-foot summit of Mt. Hollywood.

Up and down with explorations of Joe Goldman’s oasis (not its real name but there’s a plaque placed there in his memory and it is a bit of an oasis) and Dante’s View took us slightly less than two hours.

We wrapped up today’s outdoor adventure with a visit to The Trails Cafe on Fern Dell near Los Feliz. Our first visit nearer to the new year was very nice, but today’s was a disaster. Later on Susan found that the half-year-old eatery had been reviewed in the food section of this week’s L.A. Times, so of course I — you know the rest — wrote the paper a letter:

Susan LaTempa is entirely too kind in her review of The Trails (”A meat pie, a trailhead, and thou,” February 22) when she writes “Clearly there are logistical and service issues to be worked out, but no one’s pretending otherwise.” Our visit this Sunday afternoon after hiking up to the top of Mt. Hollywood and back was one giant logistical and service mess. For the owners to admit to LaTempa that they’re “learning as they go” is an understatement. The place was in chaos after we paid for our order, which took nearly 20 minutes to be delivered and only after several reminders were made and others who ordered after us were served first. Another customer ahead of us had been kept waiting 15 minutes — for a latte.

I’m not sure how much learning will be required for The Trails to get organized and begin taking and delivering orders in a managed and efficient fashion, but clearly six months into it they’re way behind the curve and seemingly pleased as pie about it all. The place may be great in theory, but in application the Trails fails.

Will Campbell
Los Angeles

A mediocre photoset of images from the hike can be found here on Flickr. Susan has photos up on her blog, too.

I’m about an hour away from going and getting me and The Phoenix some of my as-yet-unattempted Griffith Park Loop, but in the meanwhile I’ve just been concocting in the kitchen.

See lately, as part of my healthier eating kick, I’ve been doing the egg-substitute veggie scramble for breakfast. Then if I get a touch of the hungries during the day I’ll usually do a medley of chopped up fruit consisting of a banana, an apple, a grapefruit and an orange or tangerine.

Having been visited by the aforementioned hungries I gathered together the above-mentioned fruit and as I’m cutting the grapefruit into wedges a neon sign goes off in my head that reads FRUIT SMOOTHIE.

Oh hell yeah!

So first I bust out the food processor but I quickly realize I don’t need to complicate this. I don’t need to mush things up first in the Cuisinart and then blend it all up in the blender. I can go it the whole way with just the latter utensil.

I’m not proud of this mind you, but I do believe I giggled. With glee.

So into the Osterizer goes the grapefruit and a couple tangerines and a banana and an apple and what the hell, howsabout a couple kiwi and some baby carrots while I’m at it. Room for a lime? Sure. Followed by a container of lowfat yogurt. Anything else? I give momentary but sincere consideration to both a dash of Cap’n Crunch and some coldcuts, but veto both. I’m not entirely insane.

All that’s left is to press the 10th button on the far right of the panel (the one after LIQUIFY that just has an exclamation point and a little hard hat icon) and presto-grindo I’ve got a blender bubbling full of some sort of thick oozey sludge that looks…

…shall we say: abstract. And its taste? Well, it tasted like a half-assed mash-up of a grapefruit and a banana and an apple and a couple tangerines and kiwis and lime and carrots and some yogurt, but I chugged every last fabulous yummified drop of the stuff!

Ahhhhhhhhhh!

I’d rather not write about this. I’d rather just personally and privately acknowledge the binge and move on. But in the interest of keeping it real and not wanting anyone to continue believing I have some sort of ironclad willpower, here’s what happened.

I went to the supermarket today. The trip began with me on the way to the bread aisle passing an endcap full of Millena’s take-and-bake pizzas and salads and such. The last thing to catch my eye is a little square package containing nine nuggets of ready-to-bake chocolate chip cookie dough.

I keep on walking without even breaking stride, grab the loaf of light sourdough and move on through the market and the rest of the list. But there’s trouble: Shopping for everything else, I can’t shake that cookie dough from the front row of my conciousness. And sure enough once I have everything I make a beeline back across the store “just to have another look at the cookie dough.” Yeah, right. It goes into the cart without even the slightest hint of resistance.

Fast forward and I’m home. I’ve put everything away… except the cookie dough. It sits on the counter while I make a sandwich consisting of two slices of sourdough bread (110 calories), one garden burger patty (150 calories), a double dab of mustard (10 calories), some okra pickles (60 calories) and a diet Dr. Pepper (0 calories). I scarf that down while watching the last bit of The Color Purple on TV (I always bawl at the end when she’s reunited with her sister and meets her children for the first time).

I bring the cookie dough, still unopened, to my desk and input my lunch into my Fitday.com food log. All told, I’m at about 900 calories total for the day, which is excellent.

I consider just throwing the package in the trash, or better yet, flushing the contents down the garbage disposal, and I think what a blast it would be to do that and then proclaim my triumph here. But I don’t do that. Instead I open it. I remove one of the luscious looking raw doughy morsels. I put it back. I repeat the last two steps several times. Truth is: I don’t want the stuff. Never mind that I don’t need it, I really truly don’t want it.

But I eat one. Initially it doesn’t even taste good. In fact, it tastes down right bad. It’s got that stale freezer taste that’s just us unyummy as it gets, but then the chocolate chip flavor comes shining through and for a second you’d think I’d just shot up heroin. My eyes roll back in my head and I just savor the hell out of it.

Then another. And another. By the sixth one, every part of me is screaming ENOUGH! But since I’ve eaten this much I might as well eat the rest, right? So I gobble two more as if on auto pilot and then there’s one left, and now I really don’t want it. I’m feeling a little ill, the taste is gross… so here’s the perfect opportunity for me to make a stand with what little esteem I have left and pitch that sucker down the drain Instead I eat it, too. I think I even grimaced as it went down.

Now it’s about 30 minutes past my ingestion of what amounts to nine cookie dough pieces that equals 1,170 calories in at best five minutes. I have a literal headache. And if my stomach’s reaction and behavior tothe avalanche could be translated into English it would be saying WHAT THE FUCK!?!

The showers that just rolled in preclude me from getting on my bike and going for a 15-miler up to the zoo and back, so instead for the next hour or until Susan gets home (whichever comes first) I’ll be gliding/skiing on the exercise machine she got from Sharper Image. I may not be able to get this crap out of my system, but at least I can burn some of its calories.

Too bad I can’t burn idiocy.

OK, so I blew it today, which is a negative way of saying I gave into an urge. At the market today shopping for groceries I tossed an 11-ounce bag of the new peanut butter-filled Hershey’s kisses into the cart and when I got home and had a healthy lunch of soup and sardines, I tore into the bag like a ravenous animal.

Before I could catch a breath I’d ingested three servings of the things for an additional 690 calories. But there’s good news in that last sentence: the part where I mention that it was “three servings,” which translates into 27 kisses. No more, no less.

See, I could have just as easily gobbled away and blown off keeping any sort of count. If I’d had the entire bag would be gone. But as it stands the remaining five servings are sitting right in front of me and I’m entirely uninterested in them anymore. In fact, after three-plus weeks of a terrifically limited candy intake (one half of a Fast Break bar a couple weeks ago) I’m feeling a little queasy from this mini-binge. I couldn’t eat another one if I’d wanted to. So I may take them with me when I go on tonight’s 25-mile RIDE-Arc group bike ride and pass them off to the first homeless person I see. Or I’ll just throw the bag in the trash, but I’d like not to just waste ‘em. We’ll see.

Or maybe Cybele might like them to review for her Candy Blog?

I’ve found something that’s been working for me in this the beginning phase of my quest to get, as I call it, “hipster thin.” It’s perhaps a reverse-psych way of doing business, but what I do is keep a candy bar on hand. Out in the open. Dangerously close.

I first tried it early into Week No. 1 of our diet when I was suffering from some severe chocolate withdrawal. I was at a gas station and so I gave in and bought a 460-calorie, kingsized Fastbreak bar (one of my favorites). The good news was that I didn’t scarf it. Instead of devouring it on the ride home I left it untouched, bringing it inside and setting it out in the open on the corner of my desk where it then stayed miraculously untouched for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 days until my wife and I split it for dessert.

The cool thing was that it was never really a test not to eat it. It was there at arm’s length whenever I was at my desk, but I never felt taunted by it. In fact, it was a nice shot of empowerment that I didn’t fixate on the thing.

But even better was the the candy bar’s long range as a deterrent. On several occasions it prevented me from making a rash purchase whenever I was out. If I was at Vons getting groceries or the corner store picking up a newspaper and suddenly overcome with the urge to buy that chocolate chip cookie dough or that package of Zingers, instead I would reason that there’s no need to buy such junk when I already have a fix waiting for me at home.

It worked like a charm. But in the wake of that Fastbreak bar, my resolve was showing signs of cracking. First came the commercial for those peanut butter-filled Hershey’s kisses. But damn! I could barely contain the chocolate beastie in me from purchasing five pounds of them at Costco last week. A couple nights ago there was another ad on TV for some sort of Reese’s peanut butter cookies. So good did those look that I proclaimed I was going to dive into a bag of those should I have shed three more pounds by my next weigh-in this Sunday (but at least I set the bar to an amount that I’m not likely to acheive… I’ve only lost four in the first two weeks).

Then came yesterday’s trip to Trader Joes. I managed to avoid eye contact with the majority of the containers of chocolate-covered raisins, nuts, et cetera, but I admit I fondled the tubs of cark chocolate chip cookie dough and and Belgian chocolate pudding. But I put them back. Because I’m tough like that.

I did cave in and purchase a container of triple gingersnap cookies (serving size of six equals 140 calories). And last but not least my desk’s northwest corner is once again home to a candy bar:

Specifically a Trader Joe’s Organic Dark Chocolate Truffle bar comprising three total servings at a grand total of — yikes! — 540 calories (note to self: check Cybele’s Candy Blog to see if she’s had chance to review this item).

It’s already done its job today. At Vons grocery shopping this afternoon I didn’t even think about grabbing anything even remotely chocolate related. No need, when this 3.5-ounces of decadence is standing guard at home. I can’t guarantee it’ll be on post for as long as the Fastbreak bar, but we’ll see.
About my desire to be so-called “hipster thin?” When I joined my wife in this weight-loss undertaking my goal was and still is to lose 30 pounds by July 1. I felt very fit a couple years ago at 230 (even though by strict weight-to-height chart standards that still means I’m grossly overweight). However, I’ve decided I’m not going to stop there. Next stop after that is 215 by October 1, with my final destination to be 200 a year from now, by the end of January 2007.

Why? First and foremost I want to enable my good health and contribute to my well being so that I’m around for as long as I can be for my wife and my daughter and my friends. On a more personal level, it’s quite simple. All my adult life I’ve tried and failed to get down to 200. In fact, I’ve only come close once and for the countless other times, I’ve never felt so able to achieve it as I do now. Thirdly, and I’ve written of this before: it’s a tremendous positive to be so empowered. Even though it’s only four pounds I’ve already lost (and however much else this week), it feels like 40. There’s an elation and a self-satisfaction that all the pizza and pie in the world can’t replace. And lastly, is pure vanity. I just want to look good. I want my self-perception and reality to be balanced for once in my life, not be at opposites. I want to wear clothes, not have them wear me and I want to have the confidence not to wear them, too.

It could be that having been so disappointed with my body throughout my life (going back to junior high) there’s no way of resolving the battle of how I see myself versus what’s real and that I could very well get down to 200 and still be magnifying flaws that no one else sees.

That may happen. I’m not saying this will be a magic cure-all to my ability to be self critical. But then my plan isn’t to become some Hollywood ideal. You won’t find me trying to sculpt a six-pack out of this belly. What you will find is the absolute joy I’ll be feeling at stepping on a scale and seeing myself minus 60 pounds… and all the baggage that went with it.

… my true love said to me: TAMALES!

In accordance with the tradition we began on New Year’s Day last year, tamales were the order of the day. Last year we did so on December 31, getting them from an Echo Park panderia on Sunset Boulevard, but this year being a day late we discovered that place was closed and had to find another tamale hook-up, which turned out to be the Spanish-speaking-only extablishment of Tamale Alberto on Temple Street in the Historic Fililipinotown (or “Hi-Fi”) section of the city.

Once there Susan stocked up on a baker’s dozen of beef and chicken tamales (they were out of pork), and we ended up eating not a one because mom came over in the early afternoon with New Year’s meal traditions of her own: a crock pot full of Hoppin’ John, dishes of collard and turnip greens, home-made corn bread, and a pork roast just for kicks.

All of it exquisite and enjoyed while watching the Redskins beat the Eagles. But don’t mourn the tamales or chastise us as wasteful. We’ll be chowing down on them tomorrow after our first hike of 2006 (up from Fern Dell to Mt. Hollywood) rain or shine. Besides, Susan says they’re better a day later anyway.