Calories in 13" Flour Tortilla.

So I am trying to lose some weight and tracking what I eat with Calorie Count over at about.com. Its not perfect but its pretty good and easy to use. One thing that is nice is it has a lot of restaurant food items in its database. There is a Chipotle near my office so I eat there occasionally as I can see what is going into my food and then enter it into Calorie Count pretty easy.

Well I though that things were going well today with a healthy breakfast and upcoming dinner. After entering all of those Items I saw that I still had about 1000 calories to go for my 2000 calorie daily target. So instead of getting the Bowl I opted for the tortilla thinking I would come in well below the radar. OOOOPSIE!

Turns out the Tortilla at Chipotle is 330 calories with 860 mg of sodium. So my lunch went from 500 calories to 830 and my daily sodium is way over. Goddamit!

The flaw in the report is that it treats American consumers as passive actors who are victims of diminishing supplies, rising costs and government bias against the meat industry. Nowhere does it mention that we’re eating less meat because we want to eat less meat.

via Were Eating Less Meat. Why? – NYTimes.com.

Interesting article on American’s trend of eating less meat. I can attest that Kate and I are eating less meat mainly from a weight loss perspective, but the economics are impossible to ignore. Add to it the fact that meat is heavily subsidized and uses up a lot of oil to move around and our house is easily following this trend.

Best of all is that Kate has really jumped on board with things and is making some amazing recipes. Check out these books:

• Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook
• Appetite for Reduction: 125 Fast and Filling Low-Fat Vegan Recipes

[UPDATE] – Kate has chimed in with the following:

I BEGAN eating less meat mainly from a weight loss perspective.

I CONTINUE to eat less meat due to aforementioned reasons.

General Halfacat's Chicken

Getting it on till the break of dawn

So we have a new crack tasty recipe that will be getting a lot of rotation on the homefront: General Halfacat’s Chicken. It’s a blantant rip off of this recipe from famed and noted blogger

STEPHANIE O’DEA My name is Stephanie and I have an unnatural obsession with my slow cooker’s Slow Cooker General Tso’s Chicken Recipe

. I’m okay with this because I took the Garlic called for (4 garlic cloves, minced) and increased it X6 by taking the jar of pre minced Garlic and turned it upside down. This allowed me to create an armor coating of garlic all over the Chicken. In essence preparing the carcased warrior one last battle for dignity by becoming my delicious dinner.

Ingredients

If you clicked on the link to the fancy Blogspot™ website above you saw her recipe. I basically took that as my framework and kicked it in the balls:

• 1.5 Cups of Garlic minced
• 3 Tablespoons Brown Sugar
• 2 teaspoons of Ginger dried
• 2 Tablespoons Soy Sauce (Sprouts has good stuff for cheap, get the big bottle)
• 2 teaspoons of Chinese Five Spice
• 1 Chicken (Frys had em for $0.67 per pound, thats quality)
• 1 Frozen Bag of Veggies (Stir fry veggies is a racist thing to say)

Mix up the first 5 ingredients above (thats why I wrote them in that order, more recipes should follow this standard) in a mixing bowl. Take the Chicken out of the plastic and rinse it out. Its a corpse so there is shit on it that you don’t wanna feel slithering down your throat while you fake a smile at your spouse. Put the Chicken in the mixing bowl and make it happy with the special Garlic happy sauce you made in the first sentence of this paragraph. Now place the Chicken into your Crock Pot/Slow Cooker/Crack Maker and pour the remaining happy sauce onto the Chicken. Place the lid on the cooker, set it to low and leave it alone for 5 hours. Add the veggies and kick that shit up to high for 1 more hour. Let sit for a bit, peel the meat of the bones, add to quinoa or something and the veggies and try not to eat it all by yourself. There should be 6 to 8 meals there and for stoners 4.

Kate and I managed to take two dinners to eat it all but the temptation was there to eat everything the first night.

While watching Netflix I saw a documentary called ‘I Like Killing Flies’ about Shopsin’s restaurant, or old one, in NYC. Kenny immediately became my hero and upon reading the wikipedia page for the film I discovered that he wrote a book a few years back. Purchase made on Amazon and 15 minutes later I was reading the best cook book I have ever seen. Forget cookbook though cause even though you can learn about 200 recipes from this one volume they can easily permutate into hundreds more.
Kenny has great wit and his philosophy on life is what I want to hear more of: we are not here to slave for each other, we are here to hang out and be nice when thats called for and enjoy company. While I am pretty sure I would be thrown out of Shopsin’s before even being seated, I am a bit of a foodie, I would enjoy every moment of it.
Watch my review and if you don’t have a seizure let me know what you think:

Been buying coffee from Hanover Coffee which is run by a good pal of mine, so I can brew fresh coffee everyday. He is working to make this thing for real so I am trying to help people understand why to buy Hanover Coffee. Its Fresh! You know how you like Fresh Milk and Veggies? Well Coffee is the same way. After a few weeks its lost a lot of flavor. Hanover roasts everything to order so you get the freshest possible coffee.

Once you decide that you like treating yourself to fresh coffee is worth your while you will want to learn about the French Press. For the uninitiated the French Press is a water container that has a press in the lid. When the coffee is done brewing you push down the press and pour out liquid gold, aka Coffee. I made a video showing how it goes down every morning.
Remember that Coffee is the first thing you drink in the morning, shouldn’t you make it the best?

This is a great question and the answer is: yes it can! (surprised?)

Yoga can affect your weight in a number of ways:

1. Yoga increases your metabolism
2. Use yoga to prevent injury from other exercises
3. Learning to calm the mind with yoga allows you to recognize unhealthy eating patterns

Also keep in mind that weight loss is not the best measure for health. As you start working out you will build muscle which weighs more than fat and you may see some weight gain. Do not be discouraged. Think about how you feel. Are you stronger and more comfortable during the day? How about your energy levels? Consider that Western Science may not have all the answers.

If weight loss is your biggest concern exercise will only get you so far. The biggest factor here will be your diet. Focus on eating more vegetables and fruits while reducing overall consumption especially of Corn Syrup.

What do you think? Has Yoga helped you lose weight? What have I missed?

I ran into Waylon of Elephant Journal about 7 weeks ago at the Yoga Journal Conference in Estes Park. We talked about a number of things and exchanged some different ideas about the Internets, Yoga, and being Vegan. He explained that he would be a vegan if it weren’t so difficult to do so when going out on the town.

I thought that this was a valid issue and started to explain how I coped with the issue. This resulted in my writing a little post that was published there about Being Vegan is Easy. I have been encouraged by the comments and effects it has had on a number of people.

In the end remember to do your best to eat with a conscious mind, always being aware of what you are consuming. Being vegan doesn’t require a snobbish or religious attitude. It just requires that you care about what you are putting in your body and what it takes to get that food to your plate.

After today’s marathon cycling session I didn’t feel like putting too much effort into much of anything. This is when the Miso Soup recipe from the Vegan Planet book comes in handy. It takes all of 20 minutes to make, most of which is waiting for the water to boil, and is delicious and nutritious.

Are you ready for the Vegan Potluck or what? Let me know and I will host, figure having about 10 people over would be rocking!

Rounding out my late afternoon of kitchen slavery labor of love, I put together a nice little chili to go with my cookies and potato salad. This recipe came from Vegan Planet as well which has like 400 recipes and I do my best to make them all but am nowhere close to halfway on that. I think I need to start doing some Pot Lucks as an excuse to make more of them. Who is interested in this? Let me know!
Anyway this recipe is very straight forward. I got hung up on the black beans because I went with doing the pressure cooker action with dry beans, at first I only did 3 minutes once the clicker got going, then I had to go back for another 3. Lesson learned: 1.5 cups of dry black beans take 6 minutes to cook in pressure cooker. Moving on!

After that the challenge was the Butternut Squash. Peeling these awkward vegetables is a PITA but its totally worth the hassle. I am very happy with this recipe and give it 5 stars out of 5.

When I cook at home I always have to do at least 3 recipes and they usually have to be the first time I have made them. In fact hardly ever make the same thing more than once, this is something I need to work on, maybe tomorrow…

Today I decided to try a new cookie recipe which you can read about here. I am not unhappy with the results, but I am also not jumping up and down about it either.

I also decided to try two recipes from Vegan Planet (Blog) that I haven’t done: Black Bean with Butternut Squash Chili and a Potato salad. I have made some of the other potato salads from VP in the past and enjoyed them. This one uses Soy Mayo and is delicious as well. VP also has a recipe for making your own Soy Mayo and its so easy I always do that too. So I actually made 4 dishes today but I will stop rubbing your face in it, maybe tomorrow…