En la Zona: Nopalitos! Or, Love my cactus!

Despite a crazy month and a half of gainful employment I've managed to stay reasonably within my Zone diet while shedding another 5 pounds. This is a little tougher, since according to the Zone literature, I've had to raise my protein intake by one block. I've basically been eating lots of steak to make up the difference. Woe is me ;)

I do half of my work at home and the other half is split between travelling to festivals out of town and mixing in studios around Hollywood. I've managed to get into a groove of working out for half an hour twice a day while at home. So between martial arts training, mountain biking and running up the stairs of amphitheaters I'm averaging an hour of hard workout at least 5 days a week. So with the diet to reduce and workout to tone up, I'm slowly getting to where I want to be with my health. In two months of progress, I can already tell a difference when I kneel or genuflect, a very good thing considering how often I have to do both. I'm down to around 210 lbs and my waist size is now a 36, down from 40...

Despite my progress, another difficulty has been the recent contamination of bagged spinach, a staple of Zoners.
Being a Mex-"I Can", I've found an amazing replacement - Cactus.

What?

That's right, cactus, or Nopalitos is a high fiber, low carbo vegetable which, like spinach, can be eaten in massive quantities with negligible impact on the Zone diet. Fortunately, I can walk to the back fence of my yard and harvest enough nopalitos to make myself a feast in the morning so it works perfectly for me.

So, here's a recipe for Bistec con Nopalitos [Steak with Cactus]:

Ingredients:
2.5 cups of Cactus Leaves [Nopalitos]
5 oz Beef Tenderloin "Milanesa"
2 Tomatos
1 Tortilla
.25 cups Mexican Onions


Begin by cleaning and removing the needles from the nopalitos.

DISCLAIMER: Cacti have needles. If you're not comfortable cleaning the cacti yourself, use canned 'cactus leaves' from Freida's or Goya. Otherwise, If you want to do it the old-fashioned way, follow this method, but don't sue me! With that out of the way, let's continue...

Carefully lay each piece of cactus flat on a cutting board and using a sharp knife, cut the outside edges off, while holding the base of the leaf against the board with a finger, taking care not to impale yourself with any needles. Next, scrape the wide sides of the cactus with the knife untill you have thouroughly removed any traces of needle. They actually come off easily, as they're designed to do in the soft part of your Gluteus Maximus. Once the leaves are free of needles, rinse and dice them. Dice the onions next. If you don't have access to Mexican onions, green onions will do.

"Milanesa" is a thin, lean Mexican cut of meat. I prefer to grill meat, but in this case I'm in a hurry so I fried it. Next the onions and napolitos are sauteed with a wee bit of olive oil 'til the cacti are cooked all the way through. You can tell they're done when the 'gooey' soft inside is hardened.

Lightly toast the Tortilla on a griddle or tortilla warmer, slice the tomatoes and serve something that looks like this:



This is approximately 5 blocks for you zoners out there, and even if you're not dieting is an easy way to serve something exotic for dinner.

PEACE

G