I am struggling  to keep my new year resolution to try and be a more “regular blogger”; without much success.  It is really hard to maintain one hobby, then I had to go and take another one on. A bunch of us are doing a project called Project 365 from the beginning of this year. The idea is to take and post a picture every day for the whole year, to journal our lives one picture at a time. I didn’t think I’d last this long, but it has become …

So, how are you all doing on those New Year Resolutions? Broken any yet? I don’t mean to gloat, but I’ve been doing an awesome job on mine. What? It’s only been four days since the year started? Oh well, let’s see how this week turns out before I go get myself a medal.
I heard on the radio today that the two most popular resolutions this year are Eat Healthy and Save Money. Big surprise! Aren’t those the most popular resolutions every new year? Anyway, those two are …

I made this eons ago, but never posted the recipe as the picture didn’t look all that appetizing. Today while hunting through the drafts for my next post I realized that I only had chicken dishes in there. I am sure you guys have had a chicken overload by now, so I had to get this one out to give you a break from all that cluck cluck. Don’t let the lackluster picture and those burned edges deceive you, this is a great way to have pizza on South Beach …

If I had to pick my favorite meal of the day, I’d pick brunch without giving it a second thought. It might be because brunch is a strictly weekend deal, so it feels special or it may just be the fact that no brunch is complete without eggs. I absolutely love eggs, in any form and any time of the day. What’s not to love? It goes so well with everything, there are so many ways to have eggs that you’d never get bored. I know there are all those …

It is not yet soup weather here in Seattle, but then again I am not really one of those by-the-season eaters anyway. I can have a nice hearty bowl of soup even when it is 100F outside, provided there is air conditioning inside. This soup was invented out of necessity last week as a quick fix lunch by throwing a bunch of ingredients together from the pantry and the fridge, aren’t all good dishes invented that way? I didn’t have any chicken or vegetable stock in hand, so I used …

Looks like I have been starting every other blog post with an apology. This time I have a genuine excuse for my tardiness. Over the past three months I have spent a good amount of time at the chiropractor’s office and with a physical therapist due to a constant pain in the neck. (And no, I am not figuratively speaking about Siv or my boss) I don’t want to bore you with all the details but I have been doing a lot of exercises as part of the Physical therapy …

Phew! I got through the first two days of the second round of SBD Phase 1 successfully. Today was considerably better than yesterday both on energy level and on the cravings front. It is just going to get easier from here. I don’t think I’ll be able to post day-by-day menu and recap on the blog this time, but I’ll try my best to update as frequently as I can. Today it’s going to be a quick post on a brand new discovery which I feel is going to be …

It’s been almost 5 months since I got off South Beach Diet. It was early March. I had reached my target weight; I was happy with the way I looked and the way my clothes fitted; I had learned all the basics of a good healthy diet which was sustainable; my body was well-conditioned to not crave for bad carbs; my metabolism was at its best. Then came summer, it got really warm around here and my one and only true weakness started popping up everywhere – BEER! There was …

I know I posted a broken wheat recipe just a couple of weeks ago, but I just had to share this one as soon as possible. After the first successful experiment with broken wheat, we were totally smitten by its crunchy texture. It can take some serious abuse without going all mushy on you, so we talked about trying a chicken fried broken wheat (for lack of imagination to come up with a better name) in the lines of chicken fried rice . Then Mamatha came along and suggested adding …

In my last post I ranted about folks who don’t respond to my oh-so-very-helpful e-mails. But to be honest, I have to say that I am no saint either! I have promised many things on e-mail to readers which I never delivered. One such undelivered promise is about posting an Indian themed South Beach Diet menu plan. It is one of the most frequent queries I get after I started sharing my SBD experiments here.
Many Indians -even the non-vegetarians- are not comfortable with eating meat or seafood three times a …

I just realized this week that I haven’t really updated you all about my weight loss experiments in a while. If you are new to this blog, let me give you a quick recap of how it all started and what I’ve shared so far.

I am not exaggerating when I say that this is my new favorite dish! I have always liked chickpeas aka garbanzo beans aka Kabuli Chana, but the black chana which we call Kadala in Kerala has always been my favorite. I normally buy canned garbanzo beans only for quick fix dishes and for salads, but recently I came across an interesting recipe called Lemony Chickpea Stir-Fry on 101 Cookbooks. Just reading about the golden, crusty, pan-fried chickpeas had me drooling and made me wonder why I never tried chickpeas this …

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. I’ve been doing so well this year, keeping up with my resolution of being a more active blogger and all. Like all new year resolutions, that one had a shelf life of exactly one month. On the same note, I couldn’t reply to many emails and comments in the past two weeks either, my apologies! I am so glad I started my diet long before New Year’s, I am still sticking with it. I did slightly slip last week, on …

I just celebrated another birthday this week. An year older, and not a bit wiser! Just like last year, it was a truly rewarding birthday and by rewarding I mean loot-wise of course. What can I say, I am a Material Girl and stuff makes me happy! Especially now that I’ve really cut back on shopping, gifts are extra special. I didn’t take a picture of all the loot like last year due to sheer laziness, but trust me, the gifts were even better this year! Well, happy birthday to …

This is my last SBD weekly update post, till I get to my target weight. SBD has become a way of life for me, with occasional indulgences. In some ways I think I might be in Phase 3 already, but I still have 4.5lbs to lose, so I am officially sticking to Phase 2. Weight loss is really slow now, it has been toggling up and down 0.2-0.3 lbs every day, which sounds like a plateau to me. But at the end of the week I am 0.7lbs down from …

I think I have ranted enough about my breakfast issues in previous posts. For someone who lived without breakfast for more than a decade, getting used to regular breakfast was a challenge. I have 10 am meetings on most days, and the morning commute is around 30 minutes, but I wake up only at 8 am. So within that 90 minutes in which I have to spend at least 15 minutes with my coffee in front of the computer, cooking a hot breakfast is virtually impossible. That’s when I found …

Before I get into my weekend SBD update, let me just share that this this is my 300th post! I’ve been blogging for about 750 odd days now. Do the math, quick! Yep, that comes down to 1 post every 2.5 days, a fact that completely baffles me! I am sitting here going like, what?? really??? I did that??? Me??? Oh well, it is a milestone, and a big achievement considering the life span of my other hobbies. I’d like to celebrate this joyous occasion with you, my dear reader, …

I desperately need a muse! There are six different recipes in my drafts, but I can’t think of any story or introduction to go with any of those. So I am just going to serve this one up on its own, hopefully I will get over the rut in time for the next post. Sometimes I think I should’ve started an anonymous blog. If I did, I am sure there wouldn’t be any shortage of stories. There are incidents that happen almost daily that amuse or annoy me to the …

I’ve been on the diet for 6 weeks now, if someone told me last month that I’d stick to a diet for so long, I wouldn’t have believed them! But now it has become a normal part of life. I don’t really have to remember to eat breakfast or the daily snacks now, my body tells me when it needs food, and I always have something handy.
I started missing some of my favorite foods though, not rice and potatoes, but the fatty cuts of meat! I have professed my …

When I started the South Beach Diet, I naturally assumed that coconut is a big no-no. Since coconut is very high in saturated fat content, nobody would consider it a diet food. As a typical true-blooded mallu, I use a lot of coconut in my cooking, especially coconut milk, so I was sad to lose one of the major ingredients from my pantry. Then a few days ago, I was browsing my South Beach Diet Quick and Easy recipe book and saw a couple of recipes using Coconut milk, that …