I’ll start with a recipe:
Deluxe Hash Browns
- 2 yukon gold potatoes
- 2 oz. cheddar cheese
- 1/2 onion
- 3 cloves garlic
- 1 tbsp flour or corn starch
- 3 tbsp green chile
- 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 2 tsp oil or melted butter
Peel the potatoes, cut them into thumb-size chunks and boil them for 10 minutes. I recommend doing this in advance to lots of potatoes. You can keep them for about a week and make these hash browns, roast potatoes or boxty from that start.
Preheat oven at 400 degrees.
Shred the potatoes and the half onion. Combine them with the green chile. Toss the mix with nutritional yeast, melted butter, the flour or corn starch and spread flat on parchment paper on a cooking sheet. Season to taste. Shred the cheese and keep it by.
Cook for 10 minutes, turn it with a spatula and cook for 10 more minutes. Turn it with a spatula again, add cheese and cook for ten more minutes.
Let cool and eat.
The green chile and cheddar cheese remind me of the green chile hash browns at the Frontier Restaurant in Albuquerque. However, I’ve made this with mushrooms, pecorino romano and pepper, and whatever I had on hand. Onions were originally one such experiment, and I liked them so much I consider them an essential ingredient.
The Diet
I’m a week in. I’ve eaten 10k calories (about 1400/day) the first week. I was chasing food that would go bad if I didn’t eat it fast. I ate the bananas, the oranges and most of the apples. I had one pound of tofu and six potatoes that I’d gotten a few weeks earlier than most of these groceries (which I mostly bought on the first of February). I made hash browns for three days and fried up the tofu and had it with 3/4 cup of rice I’ve cooked up.
This second week, I have the rest of the apples, the mushrooms and the tomatoes that will go bad if I don’t eat them. The leeks and carrots aren’t looking their best. I’m planning a couple frittatas, some big batches of soup and a lot of apples.
My initial plans are a little too simple and seem optimistic about how fast vegetables spoil. I wish I had more lettuce to make this part of “salad week”, but it was looking like it’d spoil if I didn’t eat it. I’ll make a lot of soup and freeze half for the final week.
I weighed in this morning at 196 pounds. I experience a lot of odd weight fluctuations, and that’s a big drop from 200 a week ago.
I’ll write in another entry next Saturday, when I’m halfway done.
