Today we have gym clothes ready in the car, and Friday evenings are a nice low-traffic time at the gym, so I didn't feel bad about breakfast (2 slices of bread with 2 tsp of PB each, 520 kcal / 22g protein) and a $4.44 Wendy's lunch: double-stack and large chili, 710 kcal and a whopping 53g protein. That puts me at my 75g protein target for the day already. If I wasn't going to the gym I'd be at the max-safe-deficit level already. But I can count on burning an extra 500 kcal running, so there's still leeway for a light supper and a glass of wine while I make 5-bean stew and figure out its nutrition value tonight.
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3.3mi / 47m25s. 200#, 541 kcal. So, my kcal expenditure total for the day is 2160-90+541 = 2611. In theory I need to eat ~381 more kcal to make the 1000 kcal max safe deficit. In practice I just want a couple glasses of wine and to curl up in a ball until around Jan 20 or so.
Haven't made 5-bean stew in a while, and I have all the ingredients, and I definitely need a good supply of low-cost, low-cal, high-protein food handy, and I also wanted to figure out a nutrition guesstimate so:
Sort 1/3 cup ea non-lentil beans, rinse 2 passes in cool water, bring to a boil in 2 cups fresh water with a few shakes lite salt. Remove from heat and let soak at least 1 hour. Add 1 tbsp olive oil, a couple more shakes lite salt, 1 cup each frozen broccoli cuts/crowns and chopped spinach, 2/3 cups lentils, 1+1/3 cups wine (Vendange merlot) and 1 cup water. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to simmer low ~30 minutes.
Base nutrition values for ingredients:
(Beans: all .25 cup dry servings, all La Fe brand except El Sembrador lentils)
great northern beans: 70 kcal, 8g protein
pinto beans: 60 kcal, 7g protein
chickpeas: 110 kcal, 8g protein
black beans: 70 kcal, 9g protein
lentils: 70 kcal, 8g protein
oil: 120 kcal / tbsp
wine: 119 kcal / 5 oz
frozen broccoli florets: wildly variable reports, call it 30 kcal and 1.5g protein / cup
frozen cut leaf spinach: 30 kcal and 2g protein / cup
With the understanding that these tiny serving sizes lend themselves to wide margins of error, like maybe as much as 20% for the protein value of beans and more for the broccoli...
Add up all the beans and a double serving of lentils, then multiply by 1.333 to make one-third cups from quarter-cups:
BEANS: 600 kcal, 64g protein.
WINE: 254 kcal, negligible protein. (Actually it's less kcal because some of the ethanol will boil out, but, y'know, margin of error.)
OIL: (1 tbsp) 120 kcal, negligible protein
FROZEN GREENS: 60 kcal, 3.5g protein
negligibles: add .5g protein to make a neat whole number
Recipe total: 1034 kcal, 68g protein
With 2 tbsp oil (240 kcal), I got a protein-per-kcal index of .0585. Halving the oil raised it above the .0647 "health food" index level, to .0658, so that's my recipe. While we're tweaking, I think we could also reduce wine to 1 cup (63 less kcal) and add 1/3 cup water without impairing flavor. That little change would drop the recipe kcal to 971, and raise protein/kcal index above the Wendy's double-stack.
Dunno if I ever noticed this before, but black beans were the best protein per calorie value of the beans in this recipe. So I looked them up on nutritiondata.self.com and it seems they're also quite protein-complete (amino acid spectrum score 103) compared to, say, lentils, which are slightly short on leucine and methionine+cystine (amino acid spectrum score 86).