Today’s cholesterol intake is about 221 mg. We went out for nasi lemak with chicken rendang and for supper we made cholesterol free, healthy banana pancakes.
Breakfast keeps to be the usual cooked rolled oats with almond milk and brown sugar. For me it is delicious, as almond milk tastes similar to coconutmilk, which I find better tasting than cows milk.
However cow’s milk is ready available in a bottle, almond milk means you need to soak the almonds in the evening, peel them in the morning and then blend them with water. If a little bit of extra work keeps the doctor and the cholesterol drugs away, it is well worth the effort, isn’t it 🙂
For lunch, a typical Chinese fried noodle (organic brown rice vermicelli, which contains brown rice and sago) dish with the usual 60 grams (about 2 oz) of pork meat: 50 mg of cholesterol.
For early dinner nasi lemak or coconut rice with chicken rendang (I didn’t eat the skin), curry sauce, half an egg (I didn’t eat the egg yolk!), peanuts, sambal (I didn’t eat the fried ansjovis) and a soy milk drink. I assume the only cholesterol I ate comes from the chicken, and according to fatsecret.com, one large drumstick without skin contains 51 mg cholesterol (with skin 59 mg). Now the chicken is cooked for a very long time in the skin, so the fat of the chicken must be on your plate as well. The estimation made by food.com that one serving of chicken rendang contains 171 mg cholesterol feels more like
it…
My wife went for char kway teow (fried noodles) which according to the Singaporean nutrition.com.sg site contains 235 mg of cholesterol. Now that’s including the usual prawns and other seafood, where my wife’s version only contained chicken. However, this is a meal containing egg. Using the Singaporean website, 1 portion of beef rendang contains 83 mg cholesterol, 1 portion of mutton rendang contains 99 mg cholesterol, and one serving of nasi lemak contains 71 mg cholesterol. Making the 171 mg estimation of food.com – the highest – what we will use as estimation for now. Note to myself: must find a complete table with cholesterol values of typical restaurant food.
Unfortunately we were hungry and had to eat out for dinner. Unfortunately in the sense that it’s difficult to really know how much cholesterol you are eating when in a restaurant, and with all the fat and oil floating around (not really sure what kind of fat is used for cooking), most likely cholesterol intake estimations are on the low end. All you can do when you eat out is to look for what you think is the most healthy. Avoid:
- meals with butter and milk, desserts with eggs, milk, butter or cream
- salads with eggmayonnaise.
All easier said than done lookig for the most healthy food, and you will easily end up like us: not eating any dessert.
Since we had early dinner, we ended the day with supper: healthy banana pancakes.
Healthy whole wheat banana pancakes recipe
Every time you need to make a "substitute recipe", you need to know that using different ingredients will lead to different cooking techniques as well. Having no egg in the pancake batter, means that when you start frying, the typical gold brown crunch will be missing.
Because we add banana to the batter, you can’t simply fry on a very hot fire: by the time your mushy banana’s are dry enough to turn your pancake around in one piece, your pancake will be most likely burned.
So the trick is finding the right not too high temperature to make sure the mushy banana is dry enough at the same time 1 side of your pancake is baked brown. All in all that was about 5 minutes "frying" for 1 pancake. Nevertheless the end result was delicious 🙂
Healthy whole wheat banana pancake recipe: zero cholesterol
- 125 ml soy milk from organic soy milk powder
- 35 gram organic whole wheat flour
- 10 ml organic olive oil (for cooking)
- a tiny pinch of Himalayan rocksalt
- 1 teaspoon of organic brown sugar
- 1 heaped teaspoon of baking powder
- organic olive oil to fry the pancakes
Mash the banana with the sugar. Stir all ingredients together with a fork and blend (or whisk). This batter was a bit thick but could still be poured out from the container in the pan.
Total daily cholesterol estimated: 221 mg
- breakfast: 0 mg cholesterol
- lunch: 50 mg cholesterol
- dinner: 171 mg cholesterol
- supper: 0 mg cholesterol
We learned today that planning needs to become a part of your diet as well. We went out and returned a bit late to cook, so opted for eating out. It would be great there were restaurants out there that stated the amount of cholesterol of each meal on their menu card. Now we chose for what we hoped had the least amount of cholesterol but we do now we surely didn’t eat the most low fat meal available. On the other hand: if I only would have opted for low fat and
zero cholesterol, my choice would have been limited to black coffee, tea or soy milk…
Why is it that eating out healthy is such a difficult challenge? It’s obviously not too difficult to go bust with one restaurant meal. From now on, when we decide to eat out, we will make sure that the rest of meal of that day must be 100% cholesterol free.
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