Bean Counting

I went to Maggiano's last Friday after work with my colleagues for happy hour and dinner. I always liked Maggiano's. I know is a chain restaurant and all but the food is pretty good in both quality and quantity. I'm still on my diet, so I avoid anything with carbs. I didn't order any wine/beer/cocktails, I had diet coke. Didn't eat bread, no food with breading or pasta. No dessert, not even my favorite chocolate zuccoto cake and the nice tiramisu that they had. I thought I was being pretty regimental and was pretty proud of myself especially when I weight myself that morning and I've lost six pounds in five days of effort.

I knew it will be trouble dining out, all the sauces involved, if I were I chef I'll probably use flour to make roux for sauces and use sugar to make to tomatoes sweeter. But i still went, because one of my colleagues just got a job in another agency as the executive director and I was happy for her. So I tried to be on my best behavior, but I come to find out yesterday that beans have carbs and I ate quite a bit of them when we were out. My colleagues ensure me that beans were pure protein. I had my doubts, but they did taste very good with the mussels. So I gave in. When I weight myself again yesterday my original six pounds lost has lowered to four pounds. I'm quite disappointed. If I knew that would have happened, I would have gone for the cake.

I'm still sticking for my diet though. I don't know why I'm so obsessed right now. I'll be a lot happier if I can lose 20 pounds and I only have 20 more days to go. Last night I made a huge pot of stir-fries with chicken, cauliflower, celery, shiitake, green onion, ginger and garlic. I also added some oyster sauce, soy sauce and chicken broth for flavoring. I figured since soy sauce and chicken broth do not have any carbs, I could use some oyster sauce sparingly. 5 carbs per tablespoon, I used about 3 tablespoons, but I'm not eating the whole thing all in one day so I wouldn't have exceeded my 20 carbs per day limit. Besides, it wouldn't feel right if I cook shiitake and don't use oyster sauce.

In some way, I think you could say the whole diet thing forces me to be inventive in my cooking, but then I can't shake the feeling that the whole thing is quite pathetic.