Phase 2, Day 51

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Breakfast: strawberry-orange soymilk smoothie with flax seed; hot coffee with fake cream

Lunch: roasted vegetables on whole grain bread; veggie gumbo soup; diet Snapple lime green tea [from Food Court]

Midafternoon snack: large hot coffee with soymilk; a pear

Dinner: eggplant and bell peppers stir-fried with tofu; a spring roll [from Thai restaurant]

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I made my living mostly as a waitress for over a decade, and I've worked in a lot of restaurants, and seen a lot of different types of cuisines being prepared. Do you know how restaurants make everything taste so good? So much more decadent and refined than anything you can manage in your own home, somehow? Two ingredients do the trick; and two ingredients alone: oil and salt. Lots and lots of oil and salt. To give you an example, at a Cambodian restaurant I worked at in Boston (a very nice one--favorably reviewed by the New York Times), the cooks sauteed the vegetables for each order in no less than a quarter of a cup of oil. And that doesn't even include the oil in the sauces--this is just what they cook with. A quarter cup of oil is over 400 calories.

I was reminded of this eating at the Thai restaurant last night. The dish was literally swimming in oil. The spring roll dripped grease. Needless to say, it was delicious.