Mediterranean Diet Help!!

Not to be a downer, but just to get this out of the way: A lot of people underestimate just how much sugar there is in fruit. This is not inherently a bad thing, obviously, but it's sometimes easy to fall into the trap of going "I'm gonna eat healthy, fruits are healthy!" and next thing you know you're slamming down an amazing amount of sugar every day.

Now, just to emphasize the point: Your body needs sugar. Your brain runs on glucose, and glucose is a type of sugar. But the way your body is "meant" to work, for lack of a better way of putting it, is for you to eat mostly things called complex carbohydrates two or three times a day. You stuff your stomach full (well, partly full) of mostly carbohydrates, and then your digestive system spends hours converting those carbohydrates down into individual glucose molecules. This process — starting with big, complex carbohydrate molecules and then digesting them gradually over hours — gives your body a nice, steady supply of glucose throughout the day. That's what people are adapted to; it's what works best.

So if you want to aim for that, then a good place to start is to identify a set of staple carbs and build your personal cuisine around them. I'm from Louisiana — I grew up there though I live elsewhere now — so my staple carb is rice. I'd say not quite half of the suppers I eat include rice. Rice is extremely economical; I'll buy a 20-pound sack of the stuff and store it in a large, airtight Cambro tub. As long as you keep the weevils out, dry rice has an indefinite shelf life. That forms the basis of my jambalayas, my beans and rice, my shrimp a la Creole, my gumbos, all that stuff. That's a significant fraction of my cuisine.

If I don't have rice on my plate, I probably have some potato preparation. Mashed potatoes are easy; roasted potatoes are easy and they taste amazing. Baked potatoes are a great sometimes-food because once in a while — once in a very great while, like maybe three or four times a year — you just need some butter, sour cream and bacon in your life.

Between rice and potatoes, that probably covers nine out of ten suppers in my house; I'm just estimating but that's probably a good estimate. For the rest, there are things like grits and polenta from corn, biscuits and other breads based on wheat, tortillas of corn and wheat (and plantains on Taco Tuesday), that kind of thing. Every meal must have some carbohydrate component, in responsible moderation, to provide the fuel part of the meal.

But if you ate nothing but carbohydrates, you'd (a) be really bored, (b) probably have some pretty bad deficiency diseases. The other two slots on the plate you need to fill are the vegetable component and the protein component.

All other things being equal, the vegetable component on a plate should be green. Spinach, broccoli, asparagus, brussels sprouts, green beans (a personal favorite of mine), peas, collard greens, okra, yes, even kale (I've given in to the trend). Occasionally a non-green vegetable may step in: carrots or beets, say. But when in doubt, make it green. Green vegetables have vitamins and minerals. Nobody ever went wrong eating green vegetables on the regular. Besides, they're tasty.

Then comes what is really the least important component on the plate, but the one that in our culture takes the spotlight anyway: the protein. Steak, pork, lamb, chicken, fish. These are the proteins we eat, in general. Steak is expensive, and where I live doubly so (and triply so because I like the good stuff), so it's very much a special-occasion food for me. In my house we eat steak maybe four times a year, maybe a little more if we're celebrating. Lamb also tends to be pricy here because something like half of all American lamb is imported from New Zealand, and that jacks up the per-pound cost. Plus which, I have the misfortune of having somebody in my house who doesn't enjoy lamb too much, so we tend not to eat it here (except when I can slip it into the chili without telling her … which is always).

So our proteins are pork, chicken and fish. Of those three, we eat mostly fish, including shrimps. We eat tons of shimps here. I try to source them locally whenever possible, especially the spot prawns (they're not really prawns) caught off the coast of Santa Barbara. They're very tasty. But IQF shrimp shipped to the States from places as remote as Indonesia are also a regular item on our supper table. We mix it up with local wild halibut, farmed trout and as much red snapper as we can get our hands on because that shit is bananas.

Pork is our mammal of choice. I buy whole subprimals and butcher them myself. I have to spend a significant amount up front — approaching $100 or so — but then I've got a freezer full of chops and roasts for the next two to four months. And they're good ones too, because I cut them just how I like them. Leave the fat cap on the chops, roast them in a cast-iron pan to 135°, let 'em coast up while they rest, serve with roasted potatoes and pan-sautéed green beans. We eat well here.

Then there are the chickens. Lately I've been buying all my chickens from my guy at the farmer's market, not because I want his organically fed, free range, cage free, gluten intolerant, homeschooled, Baby Einstein chickens, nor because I want to pay for them. But because the big commercial suppliers like Foster Farms have been flooding the market with enormous 5 and 6 pound chickens. It's the bird flu; they're getting rid of their older stock and cleaning out their pens. A 3½ chicken is the perfect size for us; it feeds the family without waste or unreasonable, unwieldy leftovers. My guy has kept me in a steady supply of 3½ chickens when no other supplier I've found has been able to, so I'm happy to pay his premium. (Roasted chicken, garlic and rosemary mashed potatoes, wilted nutmeg-scented spinach. Always a crowd-pleaser.)

So anyway, long story short: Experiment with different stable carbs to find ones you like that are easy to cook and that fit your budget. Always — always! — include a green vegetable on your plate, even when it becomes awkward. Fit your protein to your budget and portion-size requirements, not the other way around. That's my advice.

/r/EatCheapAndHealthy Thread