My previous roommates had a Magic Bullet, so I could kind of experiment with making shakes like the one in Jorge Cruise’s “Belly Fat Cure” book, but the Magic Bullet has a small capacity and really not a lot of power for some serious blending. Now that I’ve moved and got my own kitchen, I didn’t have a blender of any kind. And I really didn’t want to spend any money on one either.

At work, when we meet our customer service goals, they award us a bonus. The bonus used to be a quarterly cash bonus that maxed out at $200 but once taxed at the rate the government taxes bonuses, it was barely more than half the value. As part of a cost cutting measure last year due to the economy, the quarterly bonus opportunity was transitioned into a point program where the points could be saved and redeemed through an awards catalog online. The points can be redeemed for a wide variety of products and if that’s not quite enough for you, they even have a partnership with Amazon.com for supplying Music and DVD options to be redeemed for points.

When I logged in to look at what was available, I really wasn’t looking to purchase yet with the point I had available. But I just happened to look and not only did they have a variety of blenders available, they also had KitchenAid Blenders. I’m already familiar with KitchenAid quality thanks to my grandmother’s mixer being passed down to me. And I love a great deal, the mixers are normally 7,176 points, and they were on special for 3,915 points, essentially 45% off the usual “price” only thing was there’s only one choice of color, the “Willow Blue” model. Fortunately, it’s a nice color and since buying the blender for real money would be about $100, I felt it was a great deal and placed the order. Within in a couple days the blender arrived. (more…)

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One of my favorite parts of the holidays is Egg Nog. And because I’ve been on Jorge Cruise’s Belly Fat Cure program all year and have eliminated high amounts of sugar from my diet, it meant it wasn’t looking good for having Egg Nog this year, well at least not the store bought variety. It didn’t help any when Jorge did a video with tips for surviving the holidays and his answer to Egg Nog was to just avoid it in general. Although it was meant as a tip for at holiday parties where it Egg Nog is being made by other people.

Not to let the season pass by without any Egg Nog, I went on the hunt for a recipe and came across several, but some seemed more complicated than I wanted to make it. Some called for Egg Nog flavored syrups that are sweetened with Splenda which is simply not an acceptable option for me. I tried a couple of recipes on a small one serving batches to try them out, but wasn’t really pleased with any of them. I did find one that seems to work the best. I found it on About.com. It also has a variation for those who don’t want to use eggs. The recipe calls for alcohol which I don’t always like in my Egg Nog and I decided to borrow Cinnamon from another recipe for Egg Nog I found and have liked this one the best.

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Junior’s Cheesecakes make the best desserts and wouldn’t you love to share an amazing cheesecake with your family this holiday season? I would never have considered getting one myself without having gone to New York and tried a slice of Junior’s Sugar Free Cheesecake, it was so incredibly delicious that I ordered a whole cheesecake shortly after I returned home to San Diego.

Sure the cheesecakes aren’t cheap, but they taste incredible. For my Belly Fat Cure friends, Junior’s offers two cheesecake options that are okay to have on the Belly Fat Cure program. A Plain sugar free cheesecake and a sugar free cheesecake sampler. The sugar free cheesecakes are made with Xylitol, an all natural sweetener so you don’t have to worry about any of the toxic artificial sweeteners. While this does leave out the option of getting one of Junior’s more creative cheesecakes like the Christmas cheesecake pictured above, trust me you won’t be disappointed. It’s a special treat you’ll want to savor and it can be completely guilt free.

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Yesterday, I took on the daunting task of making four batches of Nanaimo Bars using the Sugar Free recipe I developed earlier this year. (For those new to my blog and unfamiliar with my adventures developing my Sugar Free Nanaimo Bar recipe, click here to see all my Nanaimo Bar entries. The recipe also appears below.) It was the first time I have made multiple batches in one day and it was certainly an interesting experience. As the dessert is a layered treat, I did all four sets of each layer before moving on to the next layer. It was definitely a big production and of course, I couldn’t do them all the same, so I did three batches as the regular version of the recipe and one batch in the peanut butter variation.

Part of the reason for doing so many batches at once is that I promised a batch to be a gift for a friend for his birthday, also I’m attending a couple of Thanksgiving events that I don’t want to arrive at empty handed. Also my roommates really liked the peanut butter variation when I first tried that variation of the recipe but I haven’t made a second batch of that one, until now.

I had to set up the kitchen into almost a factory setup with many little “stations” to handle the various preparation work. I had a food processor station, a mixer station, a boiler station, as well as a station to store the pans between batches. And I was jumping between the various stations often working on more than one batch at a time. In some cases I was putting butter into the double boiler to melt for the next batch while finishing the chopping and mixing for the previous batch. It definitely felt like quite like a factory production with various stations I set up in the kitchen to handle the specific preparations tasks. It definitely worked really well for getting the base layer made.

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This week is a holiday week with no class for Jorge Cruise’s 12 Week Belly Fat Cure coaching program due to the Thanksgiving Day holiday. Some of the folks in the 12 week coaching program have elected to use the “free” week as an opportunity to present a recipe exchange on our respective blogs and I was invited to participate in the exchange.

Rather than give my Sugar Free Nanaimo Bars recipe yet another time, I thought maybe I’ll take a crack at something new. Even though my Sugar Free Nanaimo Bars are arguably the most amazing dessert creation I’ve ever made, I’ve posted it several times here on my blog. And since I find desserts to be next to impossible to get Belly Fat Cure compliant versions in a store bought form, I will offer a dessert recipe. Sugar Free entrées and side dishes aren’t so difficult to find and since I don’t consider myself a cook, I usually just get store bought versions of those.

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The Internet has certainly made the world a more interesting place for people to connect with one another. Recently I was contacted by Kirsten Sherlock. Kirsten found me on YouTube through Jorge Cruise’s “Death By Sugar” video that showcases the sugar experiment I assisted Jorge with. (Click here to see the video on YouTube and click here to read more about the experiment.) I had left a comment on YouTube identifying myself as the Ryan in the video, and Kristen found the comment and got in touch with me.

Kristen is a distributor for a brand new product called Yoli. It’s a new beverage product that employs a brand new technology called “Blast Cap Technology.” This innovative technology is designed to counteract three problems with the current beverage industry. Those problems are heat pasteurization, plastic leaching, and loss of nutrient potency.

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I was recently asked what the nutritional breakdown of my Sugar Free Nanaimo Bar recipe was and I thought I’d see what Google would came up with for finding out how to do that. I ended up finding Recipes.SparkPeople.com which would not only allow me to find out the nutritional information for my recipe but would allow me to compile my recipes into a virtual cookbook.

I found the interface for entering ingredients a little clunky because I ended up having to manually enter nutritional information from a lot of the products I used in my recipe. And then I ended up having to do some funky calculations to determine how to translate that nutritional information into the quantities needed for the recipe. Take for example the Xylitol featured in the recipe, the nutritional information for it is based on a 2 teaspoon serving size and part of the recipe calls for 1 and 3/4 cups of it. So it was a little tricky, fortunately, the final recipe doesn’t show the weird quantities and sizes I had to enter to calculate the recipe.

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When I was in New York, I went to a Junior’s restaurant specifically to try a slice of their sugar free cheesecake. It was absolutely incredible as I detailed previously on my blog. (Click here to see my entry about the Junior’s Sugar Free Cheesecake. So needless to say, I decided it was time to order a whole cheesecake and it was definitely good enough to justify a price tag of $29.95 plus $11.00 for shipping.

I placed the order for the cheesecake a week ago and picked to have it shipped on Monday, October 19th, for delivery today, October 21st. I had actually forgotten I had ordered it by the time the email from Junior’s showed up in my e-mail box to indicate the cheesecake had shipped and the e-mail also provided the UPS tracking number so I could monitor it’s progress on its way across the country to me here in San Diego.

I watched the cheesecake progress from it’s arrival at the Lawnside, New Jersey UPS center, it’s transfer to the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania processing center, where it was loaded onto a airplane and arrived at the Ontario, California processing center. As soon as it arrived there, I even reported to co-workers I told about the cheesecake that my cheesecake had landed in California. And soon after the cheesecake was sent to the UPS center in San Diego where it was loaded into a truck and arrived at my door in a brightly colored box in the Junior’s colors.

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My mom is an avid fan of QVC and about a month ago, I somehow ended up on QVC’s website and one of the items that popped up to look at was a Sugar Free Chocolate Mousse Cake from Junior’s Cheesecakes of New York. I ended up clicking on it just to check it out and it looked amazingly good. There were endless reviews of how wonderful the cake was, so I was intrigued. I saw they also had a Sugar Free Cheesecake listed that also was highly reviewed. As I am on a low sugar program I thought it might be worth trying one of these, but I was a bit hesitant to spend $30-$35 plus another $11 for shipping for a whole cake and QVC also charges tax, so a few more dollars on top of it for something I haven’t tried. Plus that’s a huge chunk of money for a single cake.

Well since I had an upcoming trip to New York, I decided I was going to wait on these expensive cakes and take advantage of the fact Junior’s has restaurants in New York and hunt one of the restaurants down while in New York and try a slice of their cheesecake. I looked up Junior’s website and found they have several restaurants in the New York area and it looked like for my visit to New York, my best option was to find the one in Times Square, so I added it to my agenda for New York.

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When I got invited to a pool party for today, I decided I should make something to take and why not make a sugar free cake? I didn’t want to do something as elaborate as the Black Forest Cake I made for my birthday, so a simple, single layer yellow cake with some frosting would be good.

I found a recipe by doing a google search and didn’t need to run out to the store for any of the ingredients, I already had them all on hand. That was handy. This was a great opportunity to use my KitchenAid Mixer I inherited from my grandmother’s kitchen. The mixer made the making of the cake as well as the frosting quick and easy. I basically just added cocoa powder to the same frosting recipe I used for my Black Forest Cake and the frosting came out great too. I even chopped up some walnuts to sprinkle on top of the cake as well. I got the idea for that from the photo of the cakes that were featured on the label for the foil pans I bought to put the cake in for the party.

The cake was a hit at the party. Once people started cutting pieces out of it, it didn’t last long. One of my friends there, saw me cut a slice out if it and he came over to scold me on it as he knows I’m on a low sugar program and he was convinced the cake was made with sugar. He was pleasantly surprised to find out I made it and told me how he thought he was being bad by having a slice of it. He couldn’t tell it was sugar free. It gave him a good excuse to try another slice. I was quite pleased the cake came out so well. I will definitely have to use it again.

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