Health and Fitness Journal

Last weekend I had some friends come over for dinner who are all very health conscious eaters. At first I was a little confused as to what I should cook, until I checked out this chefs site. Wow - what an amazing collection of recipes to choose from. I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to pick anything with so many delicious food ideas on offer. In the end I decided to go with seafood and salad as my main course meals. Being summer here I thought these would be nice and light and of course very healthy.

I made a beautiful salad with egg, bacon, avocado, pine nuts, mango and the usual lettuce, tomato and cucumber. I topped it off with a nice light olive oil, balsamic vinegar and sweet mustard dressing. For the seafood I made prawn skewers marinated in chili sauce, garlic and continental parsley. They were quite a hit with the guests. These days I really think you can still eat great food without all the calories. Most of the diets that people go on tend to offer really crappy food and it’s no wonder why people end up failing. They inevitably go back to eating their usual unhealthy food. All it takes is a bit of recipe research on the net and ta da you have found some great healthy recipe ideas.

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After a lovely late-night dinner at Carny’s, I had just ordered an after-dinner coffee and éclair when my date Cathy reached into her Louis Vuitton handbag and produced a mysterious-looking bottle of black goo. Before I could say anything to stop her, she had popped out the miniature ancient cork and had taken a quick swig of the vile concoction.

“Cathy! What on Earth…” I stammered. My heart was doing quadruple backflips in my chest. My tongue had dried up and was pasted to the inside of my cheek. I gripped the faux aluminum hand rests of my deck chair and ground my bare feet into the wooden slats of Carny’s soft wood patio.

Had she tried to kill herself? How much time did I have left before the poison ground her system to a crushing halt? My nervous system ran amok with questions.

“Charles, calm down,” Cathy waved me off. “You really don’t know what this is, do you?” She flashed the tiny bottle beneath my nose. Her eyes were wide and inflated with a mixture of cat-like mischief and flirtatious desire. She ran a long-nailed hand through her shoulder-length blond hair and shook it.

To say I was boggled would be a gross understatement.

“Cathy, what is that liquid? Please tell me it’s not poison – or heroin,” I blurted.

“Charles, you really are a museum piece, aren’t you?” she laughed gaily. “You’re always so concerned with your health, I’m surprised you don’t know – it’s balsamic vinegar. Part of the new vinegar craze. All the girls at uni drink it. It’s slimming and packs a kick.”

Vinegar! I knew from my research that pirates had used it for much the same purpose during the early 1800’s. But in 2007? It knocked me for a loop.

When I asked Cathy to try some of it myself she passed the bottle across the table and I took my first sip. It hit me like a cat bite on the thigh. My head snapped back and my feet shot out straight in front of me. My left hand pounded the table. My tongue lapped at my nose. I said: “Arrrrrrr!”

It turns out that, unfortunately for me, I’m one of only about 0.05% of the world’s population who suffer from an extreme form of allergic reaction to balsamic vinegar. After Cathy and Rizot, the main waiter at Carny’s had pumped my stomach, apparently with the help of some locals, I was carried back to my boat. What a night indeed!

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Last night was so embarrassing! I put out candles, tuned the radio to some slow jams, and just as my date, Debbie, arrived, the sauce was ready.

Everything looked about to go according to plan. But when Debbie looked up from her plate she wasn’t smiling.

I should have known! How could someone like me impress someone who has studied fine cooking at a place like the kitchen academy in Hollywood? After she’d left I took a hard look at what had gone wrong; she hadn’t even touched the brisket; the pile of mayo was intact as well; and I saw the cookies and root beer were barely sampled.

My conclusion: I needed to stop thinking about what foods I thought were delicious, and zero in on cooking healthy! Sure I knew that that brisket was a yummy possibility, but Debbie was thinking differently, she had other goals, and I wanted to understand them.

This morning so far I’ve found a number of possible new dishes on the net to try if Debbie comes back. One of them is a goulash from Cairo.

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