Plugging Along

I'm gradually getting a hold of myself again, thank goodness.

Have really been swirling my vigilance cape around -- and I'm not kidding, either.

Last night in Whole Foods I had to close my eyes and chant "vigilance cape, vigilance cape" to avoid picking up a small packet of linzer tort cookies, oh so helpfully strewn about in a cute Valentine's display right by the checkout line.

What's scary is that I used to bypass these things with nary a second glance. Now it's a fight again, thanks to that week of moderate permissiveness that I fell into. How quickly those new habits can weaken!

However, to focus on the positive, I DID bypass those cookies, and the cheese I constantly crave, and all sorts of goodies because I knew I was making a nice dinner for a friend last night.

Managed to keep to minimal wine (helped by the fact I have a slight cold) and made a low-calorie cod fillet with yam, black beans and quinoa for dinner.

At one point in Whole Foods I was looking at a nice garlic herb marinade sauce for my fish. It had all sorts of labels on it, 'natural' and 'lite' and so on. I thought I could grab that and it would save time making a sauce for the fish at home.

Then I remembered the post South Beach Steve made the other night, about misleading labels on food products (natural and lite being two of the most frequent abusers).

I flipped the marinade bottle over to read the ingredients, and the first two were soybean oil and brown sugar!

I decided it would be stupid (and expensive) to buy a sugary, oily marinade when I could go home and mix together a dollop of our lovely dijon mustard with lemon juice, parsley, various seasonings and a smidge of low-fat milk for texture.

It was a great creamy sauce, and after dipping the fish in it, I lightly rolled them in a dusting of panko bread crumbs, sprinkled on more parsley and baked them up!

Dessert was hard. My friend brought an apple tart, so the vegan vanilla tea cake I had bought for dessert is still here in the house. It must depart the premises immediately (and not via my stomach, I hope).

I think I'm going to have to give it to the B/F to take to work. Let's see if I have the willpower to actually follow through on this. It's hard for me to let go of food that I have paid for (I'm a freak, I know) -- but I don't want to eat it.