Sonoma in Review

Well, we’re almost a week into the Sonoma Diet thing, and I have the following gems to share:

The meals are really good. They are tasty, and flavorful and do not make you say to yourself, “Wow, I am on a diet!” I’m not going to post their recipes due to copyright, but I can heartily recommend checking out The Sonoma Diet Cookbook. They are not afraid of intense flavors or heat. Which is nice, because let’s face it: a lot of diet food is kind of ‘eh’, flavor-wise.

The meals thus far are, however, a little too high maintenance. I felt as though I spent the entire weekend either cooking, cleaning up the dishes, or setting things into marinades or over sieves to curdle or something. Granted, there were two extra people in the house which contributes to a certain ‘extra dishes’ thing, but still. A lot of prep and flipping and stirring and mincing. Not a great diet for those with time-constraints.

In their defense, however, I didn’t do a darned thing to mitigate that. I just let their system generate a menu and went with it. They have options that are ‘quick meals’, and I need to make sure I check that box for all breakfasts and lunches, and those dinners when I’m working and can’t take necessarily be home three hours before we want to eat to marinate the chicken, turning every half hour or so to ensure even coating.

My children…will not eat most of the meals. This is because my children are afraid of flavor. My godson ate the meals, cheerfully and with good appetite. He ate feta-topped omelets, garlic-crusted pork chops and roasted vegetables.

My godson is an awesome kid. My horrid children threw gagging fits over the very idea of feta. They also would not eat eggs scrambled with mushrooms, grape tomatoes, red onion and minced garlic. They insisted on having just butter-scrambled eggs. Plain. With no pepper, even.

I used to think that my children would be adventurous eaters, because I like adventurous cooking. “Ha!” I said to myself scornfully. “My children won’t be like Those Other Children, who will only eat McDonalds blandness and boxed Mac-n-Chez! No! Ha ha! I shall cook for them the roasted eggplant from their youth and behold, they shall find such things Good…!”

Or, not. Or, they will eat it when they are toddler age and younger, but then promptly begin refusing to eat it when they hit about 3 and continue refusing to even look at the food without serious dramatics until they turn…well, I don’t really know how old they’ll have to be. At 8, Eldest is starting to occasionally not fling herself to the floor in a sobbing fit when presented with something Dire (like stuffed tomatoes, or pasta in something other than standard Red Canned Spaghetti Sauce), but she still basically takes a microscopic nibble and then says carefully, “Welllllll…it isn’t that it’s bad, exactly, but I don’t think I really like it…”

(Meanwhile, her sisters are rolling on the ground feigning their deaths, having been poisoned by the stuffed tomato.) (Boo Bug can put forth disgusting-food-related crocodile tears faster than a UPS guy can doorbell-ditch you.) (I have had that guy ring my doorbell and be back in his truck and pulling out of the court before I could cross the ten feet between my desk and the front door to open it.) (Seriously. Do they have a remote control to my doorbell? Is he actually ringing it from the end of the block? I really do wonder…)

But I digress. What was I talking about? Oh yes. The Diet.

There is a lot of lettuce on this diet. A lot of it. A staggering amount of it, really. I like lettuce, but there does come a point when you say to yourself, “OK, enough with the greenery.” A point when you find yourself thoughtfully fingering your ears to ensure they aren’t lengthening, or rubbing your tailbone in fear that a little white cottonball tail is about to erupt from it.

However, it does encourage a certain regularity that, coming from many months of gallbladder-driven “Issues”, is rather nice.

Also, there is a lot of broccoli and asparagus. Which creates a certain…atmosphere. This is not a good diet for two people who share a small space – like, say, a tiny home office. Especially if one of them is A Guy, who will proudly trumpet forth and then try to get by on cute by saying, “’Scuze, pwease!”

It’s only cute when you’re in preschool, gentlemen. After that, it’s just kinda gross. And I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that payback is a bitch. A stone one.

In terms of weight loss, my husband refuses to weigh himself until a full week has passed; I’ve lost three pounds in four days. But since my weight can go +/- five pounds a week for no apparent reason, I’m not sure I can consider that to be real weight loss. It might just be tidal pull, for all I know.

And that is the Diet So Far, more or less in brief. I'm sure there will be more to come, mostly me whining about how I'm not losing any weight at all and being pissy because I forgot to put the chicken into the marinade and had to go all maverick with the recipe and THEN my children wouldn't even touch the stuff...