Easy Waldorf Salad

Well, I've started on the "Whole 30", an eating plan devised by the Hartwigs, husband and wife.  Demons that they are.

It isn't as if I'd been deprived of food before. And I do find elimination diets the easiest way for me to alter my food consumption.  But, with all of those, there'd always been a little OUT, a corner of former bliss and ease, with which you could manipulate the diet for youself.  As, in Atkins, which is quite straight-laced, you can have your teaspoon of heavy cream and your packet of sweetener in a cup of coffee...and that's heaven after a day of nothing but meat and veg.

On this regimen, there's no recourse. No dairy at all, even butter. You can make ghee, which in my case comes out imperfect, a little opaque...does that mean I should throw it out and start all over with another two cubes of butter...? Why ghee, and not butter? you well may ask.  Because butter has milk solids in it (that's what tastes so good plus the salt.) When you make ghee, the milk solids burn off leaving you, after a lot of manipulation, with a clear amber colored liquid that solidifies like a stone in the refrigerator. You cook with it.

Read the book...It Starts with Food is the name of it.  The Hartwigs will tell you all you want to know and more.  This diet is for health, not for weight-loss, yet when I weighed at my diet group I'd lost 2 1/2 pounds in 5 days.  I'll have to do something if I keep losing at that rate...don't know what, yet. The Hartwigs are very young, judging by their pictures, and maybe they don't know that 85 year old boneless ladies don't need to lose weight that fast.

I had phantasies of donuts, cookies, bread, cakes, for the first four days. Day five was better. Today they're back (the phantasies, not the cakes, alas.) We just need to try. I had a doctor visit on day five, and he was pleased to learn about the plan. He encouraged me to stick to it and then we'll test me at the end of the month (that's the 30 in the plan) to see what's become of my "numbers," the be-all and end-all of US medicine nowadays.

You get primitive on this plan. Waldorf Salad has been reduced to a half-apple, some celery sticks and a few pecans eaten out of hand. I could put it in a bowl with some of my homemade mayo, which you can have since you're allowed olive oil and eggs...and salt. But why elaborate it? Simple is good. You get so hungry that it's easy to kid yourself that an apple, a stick of celery, and a few nuts is a Waldorf Salad. And it's GOOD FOR YOU.....YAZZYBEL