You probably think we eat pork nearly daily in our household, and mostly remember a lot of the “porky” posts on this blog… but believe it not, we eat a LOT of vegetables/greens and fruit at home. I was googling a little earlier and came up with some interesting calorie counts for possible “fast-food type meals” one might order on a night home alone… Without scrolling down further, do you think you could rank the following choices from highest to lowest in estimated total calories? I was a bit surprised by the answers, so I opted to make myself a salad for dinner instead. :)
(i) An “Angry Wasp” serving of pinoy spaghetti, in those styrofoam containers… I could eat this in four forkfuls, and while carb laden, one order wouldn’t be anywhere near enough for my dinner.
(ii) A standard 150 portion of Zubuchon slow roasted lechon, just the meat, no rice yet.
(iii) A “Major’s” super-crispy fried Chicken breast, one serving, roughly 150-160 grams, just the meat, no rice, mashed potato or gravy yet.
(iv) A “BigBurger” with bread, greens, sauce, etc., in college, I could eat this in four bites too… :), no fries included.
(v) One slice of Non-vegetable lover’s Pizza… Yup, just one slice.
For my salad, I took a 100g piece of skinless chicken breast and quickly pan-fried with PAM vegetable spray. Added some blanched and chilled asparagus spears, some french beans, a very small Haas avocado, 5 small cherry tomatoes, 5 sticks of singkamas pickle and maybe 4 small leaves of romaine, chopped. A little sprinkle of balsamic vinegar, no oil, and some salt and pepper. I figure roughly 400 calories total, and it would have been 300+ calories if I hadn’t put the avocado… It was a fairly substantial and filling salad, very satisfying and easy to prepare, but clearly not for bonafide meat and rice lovers amongst you. :)
So the answers?
Angry Wasp Spaghetti 560 calories!! I would eat two of these at least, 1,120 calories!
Big Hamburger with bun and stuff – 540 calories!! Yipes! With large Pinoy fries (medium in states) and ketchup, total @950 calories!
Zubuchon, no rice – @420 calories, with 1 cup rice, vinegar and acharra, about 700 calories… No MSG and other unpronouncable ingredients. :)
Major’s Super Crispy Chicken Breast Fried, no rice 380 calories, with 1 cup rice and gravy, about @700 calories!
Non-vegetable lover’s pizza, one slice 330 calories. Not enough for me, maybe two slices at least, 660 calories!
Knowing all this now, what would you eat for dinner if you were home alone, and planning to eat in front of the television? Or would you make a salad, instead? :)
33 Responses
salad……and will copy this for tomorrow’s dinner :-)
Would certainly prepare a creative salad like yours with a well balanced mix of greens, fiber and good quality oil, albeit more calorific avocado. It is not just the calories but the quality of what one eats and the combination of nutrients. One can eat meat but mitigate its inflammatory effects with lots of anti inflammatory or antioxidant veggies and fruits and raw nuts. It is a good rule not to eat meat when you don’t have veggies with it.
People have maintained, even lost weight over time on this kind of diet and eliminating practically all processed foods and reducing refined sugars and wheat or wheat products without feeling deprived. Your doctor will be happy too with your nice lipid profile. But , for those with sweet tooth, it can be a sacrifice fit for the Lenten season.
What a shame we can’t always get the variety of vegetables we need for healthy eating in our neighborhood markets or grocery.
Fast food type meals pack a wallop of hidden calories! Dont be deceive!
I adore your choice of veggies for your salad above….so colorful and appetizing!
Visually riveting, delectable and healthful. A steady diet of dishes like this can make me feel and think I am blessed and absolutely virtuous and thus unbearable to everybody else around. In the same token, staying away from meat (specially pork) can also make me antisocial and irritable. Depraved on account of being deprived, to quote Sondheim.
Hey, Ms. Connie C…that is why when you have a bumper crop of vegetables in the summer, FREEZE them! …eggplants, zucchinis…slice them and grill or barbecue them and arrange neatly in a tupperware in between sheets of parchment paper. Tomatoes, Gejo, if you have lots, skin them and make marinara sauce and freeze them! Barloloys, shell them and freeze them…asparagus ( I go directly to the asparagus farm at the Island), blanch and freeze or pickle them…dill cukes which I pick myself at the cucumber farm gets pickled (love dill pickles!), radishes gets pickled or roasted and frozen! Baby beets (red and yellow) gets roasted and vacuum packed and frozen, too! Spinach gets washed, blanched, and added to spanakopita filling and frozen, too! Sweet peppers gets grilled or barbecued and packed the same way as the eggplants above just to name a few of how I process my bumper crop of summer vegetables. The excess of my bumper crop goes to our local Food Bank!
Hope you enjoyed your dinner MM, looks lovely! I’m often home alone, consequence of a family spread on 3 continents, so I always have individual sachets of leftovers in the freezer. Tonight, alone, it’s the remnants of the lamb tagine we had at Easter, cooked with fennel, pears, almonds, raisins, saffron and Moroccan spices. With 8 minute instant couscous, it’s faster than calling the delivery man. When I know I’ll be alone for longer, I make a small roast, chicken or lamb, pork or beef, to be eaten hot with appropriate starch/vegetables, later as sandwiches, salad, noodle soup, curry…
Saves time and energy – the stove’s and mine! Never ever liked fast food, especially the commercial multinational variety. Tastes dreadful and literally dangerous. A small child in Australia was just awarded $8 million as compensation for irreparable brain damage caused by salmonella from eating KFC.
Good quality and reasonable quantity means you never have to worry about calories – I’m sure you’re never deprived nor depraved, Footloose. As the scholar priest/cook Robert Farrar Capon wrote in The Supper of the Lamb: “Only things, you see, are capable of being eaten or burned, loved or loathed; no one ever got his teeth into a calorie.”
bettyQ: Gosh, you sound like a whirlwind but sadly, I can only rely on my bumper crop of container garden greens. Deer and ground hogs I am competing with in my garden.
Did you get the burger’s calories from a US source? Am pretty sure that the Philippine version of the bgmc, if that is what you’re referring to, has shrunk in size through the years. The patty is so thin you can hardly taste it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the US version of this burger is much larger. In trying to cut costs, the local franchisee seems to have helped our waistlines.
@ Josephine, He is my favorite food (lifestyle) writer next only to Xenophon and Brillat-Savarin, suggests in the same book you quoted that, if you are going to refrain from butter, you ought not to con yourself into accepting some nasty imitation…
Footloose, no butter substitute ever enters this house, I assure you.
I’ll substitute the chicken with smoked salmon ;))) This is superb for Sunday brunch.
That’s my kind of lunch! Although I’d add a small scoop of brown rice on the side. Good thing I just had lunch else I’d be drooling over that photo.
Home alone? In front of TV? KFC extra crispy 2 piece–that’s my poison, once or twice a year. Or a bag of Lapid’s chicharon with laman…
Most of the time it’s grilled vegetables, but I’m no saint.
Whatever I eat (alone and in front of the TV) is in a big bowl, held by my left hand just under my chin, my right hand for the utensil … usually unhealthy food (well, I’m alone with no police to check up on me …).
Great post. I love salad and eat it nearly every day. Where did you get the Haas avocados. I love them but I have only seen them once in over $ years here in Angeles City.
Just curious….how many MM readers are living alone? :( We will gladly keep you company :)
I’d make a salad as a starter but would still go for zubuchon or fried chicken for the main course. :P
Doesn’t it strike anyone else as amazing that roasted lechon and fried chicken are nearly identical in calorie count?? I would never have guessed that. :)
I have always thought that lechon has more calories than fried chicken. Until somebody explained that it’s only true if you discard the skin of the chicken and not fry the meat … In that case, forget it. :)
No MM. I always knew that roast anything, especially if you let the fat drain off, will contain less fat than deep fried anything. But please stop counting calories…
josephine, hahaha, back to pork soon… at the moment, experimenting with my own homemade “char siu” pork barbecue chinese style, and making a sinful pork belly with two types of green chili bicol express… :)
One has enough reason to suspect based on the promotion of pork hereabouts that a consortium of statin manufacturers might just be responsible for this blog. Allow me to have him know that a strict diet of vegetables is equally capable of inducing vegetative state as say, intoxicating drinks and swine with skin roasted to crackling except that the second option involves neither denial, suffering nor early loss of skin flexibility.
Footloose, we need to hire you as our endorser, hahaha.
The other day, we were host to 40+ doctors from Manila for lunch. They ate like there was no tomorrow, if you pardon my saying so. :) And several returned the next day for more… :)
Doctors are usually bad patients…I should know ;)
Char siew pork? That sounds interesting :) do you need guinea pigs? Will be in Cebu one weekend in May – that’s if I can get our reservations aligned – excited to bring my mom to Zubuchon.
Pork=happiness %-) skin on, please… also a Statin consumer and a healthcare provider..
sorry, but this is off-topic…MM, why is it that when i go directly to your webswite, i am redirected to cloudfare? but when i googled marketmanila, then go to archives, i can access your recent post…am i the only one experiencing this?
@Maru and MM, this happens to me too but I assume the invisible hand is just regulating my too frequent visits.
maru, footloose, et al. The site signed up for cloudfare, a “back up system”… we have been on it for two weeks and suddenly I too have noticed a more frequent “the site off line” when the server rarely ever went off line before this… so I am a bit irate with cloudfare, I think it’s a ploy for me to sign up for a better, and with financial cost, arrangement… need to ask my tech guy whether to drop cloudfare altogether. Thanks for the heads up.
My sister credits eating a small avocado a day for lowering her cholesterol. I believe her last check up count was @ 150! She swears by it and is not worried by all that fat since it’s the good kind.
this salad sounds delish. wala nga lang akong makitang cherry tomatoes,sayang…been looking for a long time, since msarap nga raw, pero la talaga =(
Hi: Lovely web site. I am not a Filipina, but have several friends and colleagues here in Toronto who are from the Philippines and I love the different cooking styles they have brought to Canada! My favourites are the adobos and the different grilled meats. I am wondering if you are any of your readers have a recipe for a pork or chicken adobo recipe done in a slow cooker. Also, LOVE the different breads – the pan de sals, the different ube cakes … yum yum. Please – if you have some recipes done in slow cooker, please post! Salamat po!