What's new?

So things have been changing over here in Boston. First I got sent to Cape Cod for two weeks to help out at a hospital. Now I am permanently at my new job as the Clinical Nutrition Manager/Chief Dietitian of a small hospital in Boston. This job is keeping me quite busy. I am learning how to manage myself as well as others, eek.

I am finding that I need to stay abreast on the most current nutrition news now more than ever. The vitamin D frenzy seems to be catching on: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/25/AR2008042503119.html. Notice that a researcher from my alma mater is quoted. :)

For now I will be studying up on very low calorie diets and protein sparing modified fast diets as those are a current interest of many at the hospital I am at. I am not too sure how I feel about them yet. Granted the patients are all 400 pounds and higher. Any thoughts?

Sweet...

So this may not look that good, but its amazing. I must say that I got this idea from Kath. A few months ago she made a sweet potato with black beans, hot sauce and greek yogurt as the topping. I decided to go sans beans and just add yogurt and hot sauce, plus a lot of black pepper. It was the perfect side for a meal. I simply baked two sweet potatoes in a 400 degree oven for about 45 minutes. Sweet potatoes have long been thought of as a super food. You have got fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C plus they are low calorie and filling! I definitely suggest the greek yogurt on top, I added a hefty dollup. Perfect.

On a side note, I have taken my own advice and started taking 1000 IU vitamin D a day. The recommendation is still 200 IU per day but I know that is going to change soon. If you have any history of osteoporosis in your family, I highly suggest taking a supplement. Also, next time you are at the doctor ask them to check your vitamin D level, even if it is at the low end of normal, you may not be getting enough. The "normal" is ~20-70 nanogram/mL.

I also may have some new job news shortly...

Coffee, tea

There is some controversy over whether caffeinated beverages should be counted towards your daily water intake. Everyone knows that the more water, the better. The recommendations vary from 8 cups to 13 cups of fluid which can come from anywhere (food, drinks, etc). But people often ask me if coffee and tea can count towards their water intake since they have heard that it has a diuretic effect, which means it dehydrates.



Well, good news. Coffee, tea and even diet sodas can be counted towards your daily water intake. Why? Because any liquid has the positive effect of filtering through the kidneys and preventing the build-up of waste products. This includes liquid in fruits, vegetables and even yogurt and ice cream. Of course, too much of anything can be bad. I advise that any more than four cups of coffee or caffeinated tea a day should not be counted towards your water intake. The take-home message is that you should be drinking and often.

Got me thinking...

Friday at work I got to be in the room for a minor surgery where a patient got a permanent feeding tube, called a PEG tube. This tube goes directly into the stomach and helps feed people who are not able to chew or swallow for different reasons (head and neck cancers, etc). A cool part of this procedure is that something called an endoscope is placed down the patients esophagus and can go all the way down the through the stomach into the intestines. This endoscope has a tiny camera on the end and the picture is projected onto a TV screen in the operating room. In other words, I got a tour of a person's entire gastrointestinal tract.

This may sound gross to some people, but it really opened my eyes. I saw, up close and personal, where we send our food after we swallow. It made me think how important it is to (mostly) only put whole, nutritious foods into our bodies. I was just imagining some of the things I used to eat in high school, frosting directly out of the can, skittles by the pound, going into this delicate environment.

So in honor of this amazing experience I made a healthy dinner of pan seared chicken breast, brussel sprouts (it was my first time making and eating them!) and roasted yams. It felt good. But so did the mint chocolate chip ice cream I had for dessert. :P

Homemade sushi!

Success! I got a fantastic sushi making kit for christmas and finally got around to trying it out. This is what our rolls looked like.






The ingredients are:


raw tuna: from Whole Foods- we had to ask specifically for it

avocado

cucumber

carrots

brown rice

wasabi

soy sauce






We bought pacific nori which is a seaweed, it is used as the outer wrapping. It turned out being a lot simpler than I thought it would be. One of the tricks to making a really tasty rice is following the recipe and adding rice vinegar, salt and sugar to the rice after it is cooked.




Here is a bite. I definitely filled myself up to the brim, but it is all healthy, fresh foods. There is nothing better.




My favorite new mix of flavors is avocado with wasabi and soy sauce. Something about the texture of the avocado. I could eat it as a snack.

Cheese

For my birthday, B got me this kit because I have talked about making my own cheese.

This is everything that came with the kit. The little tablets are rennet, an enzyme that makes the milk coagulate to form the curd and whey. The curd is the cheese and the whey is just leftover. Whey is high in protein and can be used in place of buttermilk, so I learned.

The first step is adding some citric acid to a gallon of non ultra-pasteurized milk and heating it slowly to about 90 degrees F. Then you add the rennet enzyme and take the milk off the heat. After 5-8 minutes the curd and whey will separate and I took out the curd and put it into a bowl, draining any excessive whey. Then you simply microwave the curd to allow for syneresis, which pretty much squeezes out the extra whey.

After microwaving it starts to be able to stretch like taffy, which is the goal. At this point it is mozzarella and salt can be added. The final step is kneading it like dough and you have got yourself some mozzarella cheese!

I actually used 2% milk when making this instead of the recommended whole. I probably should have used whole milk but I thought I would see what happened with low fat. It turned out tasting exactly like string cheese. I know that it looks kind of gross, but I haven't perfected the molding process. For my first time, I would say this was a success!

Easy Eggplant Parm

OK, this was the easiest dinner I have ever made. Trader Joe's has done it again, impressed me with the quality of their products. I learned about this from some of the dietitians at work and when I tried it the boy and I decided to put it into our normal rotation.

So first you take however many of the breaded eggplant cutlets as you want and bake them directly from the freezer in a 400-425 degree F oven for about 15 minutes.

Then you smother it with the cheese and sauce and bake it for another 20-30 minutes depending on how much you are making. It turns out perfect every time. The RDs at work recommend putting fresh basil in there as well. Serve with a salad and you've got the perfect dish for any day. I made this last night and the boy had to go back for seconds. Yum.