A Chef’s Diet - 10 rules on how to eat healthy while maintaining your substance addiction.

You’d think cooks are the best foodies ever.  Look at them at work, obsessing over details, putting finesse in everything, and expressing tender feelings through violent outbursts.  They are the John McClanes of the foodie universe. 

Hans Gruber would have a gluten intolerance.

With passion like that, one could be forgiven to assume a cook would use those traits with their own dietary habits. 

 Well, as the saying goes, the shoemaker’s children tend to eat like crap.

Get back in the kitchen!

I remember asking the first chef I worked for what he ate on his days off. 

I was prepared to hear a velvety string of words describing something passionate and cozy. 

You know;

*a window into his heart oozing with affection…

*a tale of a certain dish or ingredient he could not wait to go home too…

*a sensual secret he longed for at the end of hard week… 

I suspected it would be the kind of intimate answer said in the same close knit tone which a good buddy would use if he were secretly showing you photos of his nude girlfriend.

The answer I got was "I dunno, usually Taco Bell..."

I had to raise my standards of where I chose to work.

 Cooks in general are terrible eaters and for a simple reason, they have no time. 

For someone slinging pans for twelve hours, it’s easy to fall into some pretty gnarly habits.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/girlcook/why-cooks-are-the-hungriest-people-at-restaurants

By the time they get off their shift, a cook tends to seek the most direct route to the highest amount of calories possible.  Leftovers from a sauté pan, fryer bowl refuge, red bull, cigarettes, coffee, cheap beer, and Spadina Street grub are all AAA sources. 

It all ends up tasting like sriracha.

While nothing beats Soju and Samgyeopsal Gui at 1am after a winterlicious service, this style of approach makes it tough not getting cremated earlier then assumed.

As someone who is legally responsible for the well-being of a daughter for the next fifteen years (well, thirty if her Italian roots have any weight), it was important to make adjustments to my diet to see my Chicky flourish past the developmental years.  In fact, as a father, it’s my goal to be around long enough to discreetly and seriously threaten my granddaughter’s boyfriends.

Future CMC.

My diet is definitely far from perfect (With my chocolate addiction I am supporting a least one Peruvian cocoa bean farmer's family), but I am asked all the time what I eat on my days off.

  

So here now is my soapbox, holier-than-thou, preachy list of guidelines I use as a chef, at home.

 Rule #1. Buy whole products, and avoid impulse shopping.  Eat first.  

Rule #2. Beef & Pork - Just once a week and like, 4oz. servings.  You may feel a bit less of a man, but your heart and prostate will be happier.

Rule #3. Live off sustainable small fish, bivalves, mollusks, and shellfish. And if you are wondering how to deep fry stuff like mussels, you are dead to me.

Rule #4. Eggs. Sous Vide in the shell at 146.5 for 45 minutes to be trendy. Eat in moderation.

Rule #5. Buy a whole chicken weekly.  Kill it, pluck it, roast it, and make a great dish the first night. Reserve the remaining meat for lunch and turn the bones into stock. 

Rule #6. Take acid.  A lot of sauces, starches, green vegetables, and lettuce do not always need salt to liven up. Buy lemons and good vinegar and use these to heighten flavour.

Rule #7. Have an unreasonably large repertoire of starches in the pantry. Actually, have a pantry too.

Rule #8. Vegetables and fruit are underrated.  For once, I agree with PETA.  Avocado and champagne mangoes are the foie gras of the plant world.

Staying on the good side of the these people.

Rule #9. Invest in breakfast.  A bound-mix of yogurt, berries, bananas, flax seed and whole oats provides huge amounts of energy for the day and also gives your war-torn colon the consistent schedule it needs.

Rule #10.  Learn to love cooking at home while listening to music.  Is anyone else really feeling that new Justin Bieber song? Because I am shredding it up! 

  

Not embarrassed. 

-Jerek