Summery Vegetable Salad

Pretend you're me and it's a rainy Sunday afternoon so you left the confines of your bedroom for the first time since you woke up to rustle up a meal. You open the refrigerator door, one hand on your cocked hip, give the contents a once over then close the refrigerator door. You do this two more times before letting out a big dramatic sigh that implied, “Okay, I give up! The contents of the fridge won't magically change every time I open it, so I'll just make a summer vegetable salad (even though it's raining)!” So you gather all the ingredients and proceed to make the following salad.

Ingredients

Vegetables**
Broccoli
Sweet bell peppers
Cucumber
Onion (optional)

Meat**
Chicken breasts, cooked
Bacon strips, fried til crispy

Dressing
Mayo, 3 to 5 tablespoons
Lemon juice from one lemon
Splenda, 1 packet
Salt and black pepper

**Basically anything in your fridge that you need to use up before it gets too squishy**

1.Prep the veggies. Since you're me, you steamed the broccoli until they were a little soft, but not too soft, crisp tender is the term you're looking for. Slice the bell peppers and cucumber into thin rings. See the remaining half of the onion you used to make something you forgot about a couple of days ago? Dice it up.
2.Prep the meat. Roughly chop the left over chicken breasts that your hubby fried for dinner two nights ago. Crumble up some of that bacon, too.
3.Make the dressing. Add all the ingredients you THINK make up a decent dressing and mix them all up, making sure you dip your pinky in a few times to gauge the taste. Add salt and pepper if you must.
4.Toss the salad. Put everything in a big bowl and armed with two plastic ladles, toss the vegetables, meat and dressing until everything is lightly coated with the dressing. Refrigerate until serving.
5.Serve to sick hubby.
6.Accept compliments.

Now stop pretending to be me and you make this salad.

No Rice For Me, Please!

Rice. These white, pearly beads that accompany every Filipino meal is nutritious and delicious. It's very adaptable. You can make fried rice, rice toppings, garlic rice, bagoong (shrimp paste) rice, the list goes on and on. I loved rice.

When I was a kid my mother would always tell me not to eat too much rice. I remember slicing up my fried chicken thigh into tiny pieces so I could shovel three tablespoons of rice into my mouth with one tiny piece of chicken. Hence, making the chicken last longer. I would do that with everything, every meal. If we had chorizo (sausage) for breakfast, my brothers and I would fight over the chorizo grease, mix it with cups upon cups full of rice. Rice made us eat more. It made our delicious chorizo or hotdogs or corned beef last longer. It filled us up.

Fast forward to when I spent a few months in Japan where the rice is not only as white as snow and as fat as rosary beads, it also smelled so sweet! When the rice finished cooking and the rice cooker is open, the aroma wafting through our apartment would make my mouth water. I would immediately grab a bowl, fill it with rice and just sprinkle soy sauce, tongarashi (chili powder) and mayo and I'm good to go.

I had a love affair with rice. It seduced me, tempted me and left me weak with desire, longing for more. It made me sluggish, tired all the time and most of all it filled me up.

See rice is a filler. The way I ate it was to make my "other" food last longer. Much like feathers fill up and fluff up pillows, that's what rice did to me, to my hips, to my thighs, to my tummy. It fluffed me right up. But I stopped it.

After 29 years of my rice love affair, I quit it. I quit rice. It wasn't easy for a couple of days but now, after three weeks I can honestly say I'm over rice. I don't miss it, I don't crave it not even a little bit, not even at all.

I've had people ask me why I'm not eating rice anymore and I just say I want to lower my sugar and starch intake, tell them I'm going low carb or Atkins. The reply is 99% the same. "I would LOVE to go low carb but I can't LIVE without rice!"

1% of the time I want to say, "I thought that too, but look at me now. I can eat an 8 oz steak with a side of salad and finish it all because there's no rice to fill me up and ruin my meal. I can eat 3 cups of veggies in a day, bacon, eggs and not get tired or feel sluggish because of the carbs rushing through my blood. I thought I wouldn't survive it. But here I am."

But 99% of the time I end up just smiling and shaking my head. And when that big rice platter is handed to me I just say with a big smile, as I look down at my FULL plate of fish, chicken, beef, pork, veggies, cheese and butter, "No rice for me, please!"

And I mean it.