Sonoma Diet Menu
I’ve talked about how much I enjoy the food on the Sonoma Diet, here’s a typical day.
For breakfast I have steel cut oatmeal with strawberries, blue berries, and walnuts. Steel cut oatmeal is wholegrain oats that have only been cut. It takes about 30 minutes to cook but today I have some leftover from earlier in the week so no prep time, I just need to warm it up. I also have coffee with nonfat Half & Half cream. This breakfast is delicious and the oatmeal is very filling. I love strawberries, blueberries and walnuts (can’t have too many though). It’s all good.
The menu for lunch is “Greens with beans and artichoke hearts, wasa and raspberries”. I don’t have raspberries so leave that out since I had fruit for breakfast. The Greens with beans and artichoke hearts is a hearty salad which also includes chicken, red onion, goat cheese, pine nuts, parsley, and a homemade vinaigrette. The beans are supposed to be canned white beans, I happen to have canned soy beans and use those. Prep time is less than half an hour, I have to cook the chicken and prepare the salad and vinaigrette. Wasa is wasa crisp bread. I have been eating wasa since the 1980’s when I was on The Diet Center program. It’s a high fiber cracker, pretty tasty, with no bad ingredients.
For an afternoon snack, I have celery with peanut butter. Again I have to watch the quantity on the peanut butter.
Dinner is “Grilled Moroccan Pork Tenderloin Kabobs with Carrot Salad and Brown Rice”. This meal takes some time to prepare. The pork is marinaded in a sauce of parsley, lemon juice, oil, garlic, oregano (fresh), coriander seeds, paprika, ginger (I started using fresh ginger in a jar to save time and it tastes like fresh), black pepper, kosher salt (I use it all the time now), cayenne pepper, and tumeric. The marianade is prepared about 2 hours in advance and combined with the park. Brown rice takes about an hour to cook so we get that going next. Now we have the time to chop our carrots and prepare ingredients for the Tunisian Carrot Salad. We need garlic, kalamata olives, feta cheese, lemon, Harissa (I’ve never found it in a store so substitute a hot sauce that I have), olive oil, caraway seeds, coriander seeds, and kosher salt. The carrots are cooked for about 5 minutes and then combined with the other ingredients. Instead of doing kabobs on the grill, I stir fry the pork which retains more of the marinade. It’s very good on the brown rice. The whole prep time on this dinner is about an hour and a half. To go with this great meal I can have 6 ounces of wine, I have a red pinot noir. I use very small wine glasses, 4 ounces, and then can have seconds (another half glass). It’s all good.
This is a typical day. I cook quite a bit more than prior to starting the Sonoma Diet particularly because I am cooking a substantial lunch in addition to dinner. It’s so worth it to me to eat this great healthy and filling food and to loose weight with it.