Day 3 of the cholesterol diet consumes less than 100 mg of cholesterol and serves delicious fried noodles with pork for lunch and an equally delicious grilled fish for dinner. Add to that a mixed salad with lemon vinaigrette salad dressing and hummus from the leftover chickpea curry from yesterday.
But lets start with our rolled oats breakfast. Seems the trick of making good oat milk is to blend it for a long time. Today I added a bit of green tea in my cooked, rolled oats, added a bit of honey and blended for at least 1 minute.
Today’s taste was much better than the oats that were blended just a few seconds yesterday and the blend felt kind of milky. Not as tasteful as soy milk, but we are getting there… I agree: your typical English breakfast, or Malaysia’s national dish nasi lemak (coconut rice) or American pancakes are far more delicious. But the taste of blended oats makes it a bit easier to swallow than simply boiled oats in a spoonful of cooking liquid.
For lunch, my wife made her delicious fried noodles with beansprouts and about 60 grams (2 oz) of pork meat per person. I have no idea what the name of the noodles is, but they contain wheat powder, water, salt and sodium polyacrylate.
First time I heard about sodium polyacrylate. Seems it is also known under the name "waterlock" : it can absorb about 200 to 300 times its weight in water and is widely used in consumer products, like in disposable baby diapers… Know what you eat…, but zero cholesterol 🙂
After I told my wife what exactly was used in those noodles, and after stumbling when trying to pronounce "sodium polyacrylate", my dear wife immediately threw the rest of that dry noodle package in the dustbin. My wife’s lesson for buying healthy food: don’t eat what you can’t pronounce.
So only the pork chops count: according to caloriecount.about.com a pork chop of 3 oz (85g) contains 72 mg cholesterol, so 2 oz or 60 grams of cut pork chops result in 48 mg cholesterol for lunch:
For snack before dinner (I was a bit hungry), I munched away on groundnuts: zero cholesterol. Reading the nutrition information, I was quite surprised to see that about 50% weight of the groundnut results in the total amount of fat, and about 10% of the weight are saturated fats. For those reading only this post: I try to follow a low cholesterol diet, not a low-fat diet: most low fat diets lower both your bad LDL and your good HDL.
Lemon vinaigrette salad dressing
The best alternative for a homemade mayonaise high in cholesterol or buying some mayonaise from the shop with a long shelf life, is making this fast and easy lemon vinaigrette salad dressing.
The only "kitchen appliance" you need is a small jar with a lid 🙂 You can add in any fresh herbs or spices you want as long as you remember that for a thick emulsion you need oil, mustard, crushed garlic and a little water. For taste you need something sour like lemon, lime, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce in a ratio oil to sour 3:1 or 2:1 (depending on your taste). Of course add a decent amount of pepper and salt and shake.
Taste your dressing: when you feel that it is a bit to salty and a bit to sour, then it will be ideal to add over a salad, otherwise you need to add in more salt and/or sourness and shake again. All is vegetarian, so this fresh dressing is cholesterol free.
Hummus
Hummus is an Arab food dip made from mashed cooked chickpeas that are blended with sesame paste, juice of a lemon, olive oil, fresh garlic and salt. A great use for the left over curry chickpeas from yesterday: blend to taste with fresh coriander, olive oil, lemon juice and salt and voila: a delicious dip to eat our boiled potatoes with and… zero cholesterol.
For dinner we had boiled potato with hummus dip, fresh mixed vegetables with the above lemon vinaigrette, a delicious grilled fish and an equally delicious fruit smoothie with orange juice, grapes and peach.
The fish was first marinated in a sauce of:
- 1 tablespoon of Dijon mustard
- 1 ½ tablespoon soy sauce
- 3 tablespoons of olive oil
- 1 finely chopped clove of garlic.
Drizzle the sauce over the fish and let marinate for at least half an hour. Leave only a bit of the marinade onto the fish, grill in a hot grillpan on the 4 sides, brush some olive baking oil over the fish if you need to, and serve.
Unfortunately I have no clue what kind of fish we were eating, as it was a present of my sister in law and at this time of the day, it’s a bit late in the evening to call her. Therefore I will use the cholesterol content of salmon to estimate my intake.
The entire fish filet was about 220 grams (almost 8 oz), so for each person 110 grams (about 4 oz). According to caloriecount.about.com 89.5 gram of grilled salmon contains 35 mg cholesterol. So we estimate as if we ate grilled salmon and end up with an intake of about 43 mg.
Total cholesterol intake today: about 91 mg
- breakfast: 0mg
- lunch: 48 mg from pork meat
- dinner: 43 mg from fish
Today’s cholesterol intake was less than 100 mg with 2 quite delicious meals: credit goes to my wife who did the cooking today 🙂 And with still 100 mg cholesterol to play with, there is room for improving on breakfast as well. Simply boiling the oats in milk, would only add 20 mg extra cholesterol, but would make it a really enjoyable meal to start your day with like in day 1 of our diet.
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