Was cooking breakfast when this started writing itself. I have inherited a muse - I really have: is the strangest experience! - who will start writing things for me in my head. This entry is from my muse:
Am very impressed with all the cooking and wonderful pictures you've been making. The photos are so well done. I don't know what technically makes a good picture, but I know I like what I see with yours. They're pretty!, colorful, centered well, interesting to look at.
Re getting more viewers for 13Ingredients
Diets are always a draw. People on diets look for recipes that will work with theirs. People are always looking for the newest diet.
Ergo question if someone [overweight, non-wheat tolerant and/or just looking for a healthy diet] were to live on 13Ingredients as its own diet, what would 13Ingredients need to be a complete diet on its own.
Answer - not much at all. You have a variety of protein, good carbs, and it's low fat. The fat you do use is healthy for the most part. There's dairy for calcium & vitamin D, greens for B vitamins, carrots and greens for the Vit A and K, lemons and tomatoes for Vitamin C, rice for grains if brown rice is included, beans and veges for the fiber.
In fact, 13Ingredients would work very well as a stand-alone diet. It's not Atkins low carb, but that wasn't healthy anyhow. It is a healthy low-carb diet. Even the unhealthy fat in the beef/chicken is moderated by the low healthy fat of everything else in the diet.
Suggestions:
1. Modify lemon to citrus so dieters and other visitors who decide to make 13Ingredients their main diet could have oranges, grapefruits, limes and: kiwi limes! (marinated jerk chicken - heaven!). That one thing would greatly expand your range of easy to fix, healthy foods.
2. The one thing the diet could be weak in is Vitamin E because of the no wheat. But sunflower oil, safflower oil, spinach and broccoli all have good amounts of Vit E. Would be good to have recipes using them. Also could recommend that people take daily multi-vitamin which most diet books do anyhow.
3. Fiber. Extremely important these days because baby boomers (huge market there!) have discovered that eating fiber keeps their aging digestive systems from becoming constipated. The fiber in 13Ingredients would come from brown rice, beans, carrots, potatoes if skins are used, and greens like broccoli. Also beyond all its other health benefits, eating more fiber helps compensate/digest the fat in beef and chicken. Adding more recipes with fiber would be good.
Think "a diet with cookbook" which all profitable diets have. You're building that already. Just go with it.
13Ingredients is catchy and gee whiz now we even have a 13 sign Zodiac.... Nifty art ideas there for chapters...
4. Put calorie, protein, fat, carb, fiber content per serving with the recipes. You can get books from the library that have these contents; it's also available online. When you list the ingredients - look up what their content is then. Then figure out the number of servings the recipe makes and divide. I know when I look at recipes online I check their content. If that info isn't available, often I'll move on to the next.
Doing those things would allow you to put these words in your search tags:
diet, dieter, low carb, fiber, high fiber, low fat, nutritional content
which I'm convinced would get more people coming to the blog.
So maybe for a year, build up an inventory of recipes + your wonderful photos. Then the next year, you and whoever else volunteers live on the diet for that year.
Participants blog a journal of the experience. Collect, analyze, make necessary modifications if any.
You even have a medical doctor in the family who could look over the diet to make sure it is healthy.
Third year, turn the blog into a diet + diet recipe book.
And - get a business license for 13Ingredients this year. So all the food, utensils, books, gas, utilities, room space, internet, phone, you spend on this project is deductible for at least the next three years!
Then you can get deductions for 13Ingredient stuff AND GSS stuff.
Keep track of your hours too. If this were to become a nonprofit 501c3 to help people who can't tolerate wheat, then the value of the hours you spend (number of hours x the current minimum wage) could be used as in-kind contributions to get grants.
Ok my muse is silent - time to get some tea.
:)
2 comments:
Lots of good comments, Alice. Thanks!
Remember that the "Baker's Dozen" restriction is before anything else, a game! Can I come up with 100 unique, good entrees using just those ingredients? When I start numbering them, the projects I've put up on flickr that depart from the list won't be counted (i.e. quiche with bacon in it.) Of course anyone can add, subtract, modify.. and I'll be guilty of minor cheats as well, such as putting lime juice in the soup rather than lemon. And calling coconut milk and water chestnuts "seasoning."
As you know, trial and error has shown me that for my own sort of metabolism, restricting carbs is necessary. From the Atkins people I learned that calories from carbs should be replaced with calories from fats. There are too many carbs here for me, actually - too much rice for day in and day out.
I cook for people who tend towards thinness and who eat a lot. I am making traditional foods, or riffs on traditional foods, and don't really worry about counting anything (other than pennies at the grocery store.) I hope that lots of people will discover some of the dishes which I have learned from others through the years. Many of the preparations I know are not online or in any cookbook.
There's a precedent for games growing into something more. Think Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy for example.
You're already doing the work that could become a book. If you don't want to do nutritional counts, I'm sure someone will be able to ghost a chapter on counting food values when it's getting closer to being published. Google even has an app that will turn a blog into a book.
"I cook for people who tend towards thinness and who eat a lot"
This sounds like a line that would be perfect for a diet/cookbook. Those are people who eat a lot and are thin because they eat your cooking. Your way of cooking/eating stays with them throughout their lives. I can certainly attest to that. I still have a mental Margaret advising me on what's healthy and what's not re food.
The ethnic and old historical ways of cooking will be fascinating to some people.
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