Hau'oli Makahiki Hou! (Happy New Year)

Kadomatsu display and Kagami mochi

We wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year!  Thank you to everyone who visited our blog and we hope our recipes were useful to you :-)

We spent this weekend baking and prepping for New Year's Eve.  As mentioned in a previous post or two, New Year's Eve is a big thing here in Hawaii with our various customs and traditions.  One would be consuming mochi or sweet rice cakes.  At one time our family actually pounded mochi, displayed the traditional Kagami Mochi, bought a kadomatsu or two, burned long strands of firecrackers at midnight to ward off evil spirits and ate Ozoni on New Year's Day.   Today, we still buy our kadomatsus, but now we buy our Kagami Mochi display and as the older generation passes, our display becomes smaller and smaller.  We have a new fireworks ban, banning certain fireworks, so as a family we've decided to just enjoy fireworks on the television.

This year since New Year's Eve landed on a Monday, we took advantage of the weekend and baked 3 pans of mochi - chocolate and custard.  Yes, we cheated, we sampled the mochi (eeek!).  We also made some kamaboko dip.  The male half who is from the mainland never even heard of kamaboko dip but he liked the dip!  Kamaboko is a fish cake and we ate tons of it growing up...every New Year's Eve every party we went to had kamaboko of different colors and shapes cut up as an appetizer.  Both of these recipes are not Dukan or Paleo friendly, but we may post them as Celebration Recipes.

Every Thursday we usually plan out our weekend meals and shop for our weekend groceries.  Unless we are meeting friends on the weekend for dinner, we generally eat at home and is the easiest time for us to eat healthy.  As mentioned in previous posts, once the female half of this couple reaches her weight loss goal, we will be easing into a Paleo or Caveman-like diet.  The more research we do on the internet and on prices of organic, natural products here in Hawaii and on Amazon, it's looking like we will be moderate Paleo people.

With that in mind, for the rest of our Cruise Phase, we are sticking to Dukan, but if our Dukan recipe can easily be Paleo'd without compromising Dukan Rules, we have been Paleo-ing our recipes too!  Once we get to Consolidation (around February of next year), we'll stick to the Consolidation Rules but add in the Paleo rules -- mainly the no grains rule.  The no processed foods will probably need to be less processed foods for now.

This weekend, we made 4 meals -- all were Dukan Cruise Phase recipes and were Paleo'ish.  The male half actually has three meals with no grains, yay!  He actually could have had all his meals without grains, but we didn't want to waste the brown rice and mashed potatoes given to us.  (BTW, our other meals, like breakfast I don't count as "made meals" since most times we have yogurt with oat bran, Appelgate natural deli meat, low fat cheese with Dijon mustard and steamed broccoli on PV days.)

The results, a pound loss (we only exercised once this weekend, wonder how much more we could have lost had we stuck to our aerobic exercise), no bloated tummies for either of us, no sluggish Kanak Attacks (a local saying after you eat a heavy meal and you just want to sleep or lay around).

Again, Happy New Year to everyone and here's wishing all of us a healthy 2013!