I got the okay from my publisher to post a couple of recipes per month from the new ones I'm coming up with to expand 15 Minute Low-Carb Recipes. This morning's smoothie was so wonderful I had to share!

Mexican Chocolate Smoothie

The combination of chocolate, vanilla, and cinnamon is classically Mexican, and enchanting. Try this!

3/4 cup cottage cheese
1/4 cup sugar-free vanilla syrup
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup vanilla whey protein powder
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
4 ice cubes

You may notice something you've never seen before at Hold the Toast: Outside advertising. We're now accepting ads through Google AdSense. The Webmaster, aka That Nice Boy I Married, will do his best to filter any ads that are antithetical to the message and mission of Hold The Toast -- we really don't need to be taking ads for, oh, sugared soda, or low fat snack cakes, you know?

A study came out June 14th in the medical journal Archives of Internal Medicine looking at the relationship of brown rice and white rice consumption with incidence of type 2 diabetes. The upshot of the whole thing is that the researchers have determined that white rice increases your risk of diabetes, while brown rice lowers it. Should we all start eating brown rice?

Yikes. Atorvastatin, better known as Lipitor, is one of the most frequently prescribed drugs in the country. It is especially frequently prescribed for type 2 diabetics, since they frequently have high cholesterol, especially if they've gotten the godawful advice the ADA hands out, to eat a low fat diet based on carbohydrate.

Ho-hum. Another day, another study showing a low carbohydrate diet is superior to a low fat diet for weight loss. Gee, ya think?

Still, always happy to have more validation, to get more attention from researchers, and to see this positive stuff in the news. Here's how this study went:

After ten years of Prohibition, Franklin P. Adams, writing for The New York World, summed up the effectiveness of the 18th Amendment with this bit of doggerel verse:

Prohibition is an awful flop,
We like it.
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop,
We like it.
It’s filled our land with vice and crime,
It’s left a trail of graft and slime,
It don’t prohibit worth a dime,
Nevertheless we’re for it.

Important article at Dr. Mike Eades Protein Power blog. It's a review of a book called The Vitamin D Solution by Dr. Michael Holick, but it contains a great deal of useful information about vitamin D.

It's 90 degrees here in beautiful Bloomington, Indiana. And though that's cooler than predicted, plus we're not getting quite the killer humidity we were expecting, it's definitely the sort of day for a long, cool drink. Over at ... Dana Carpender's Hold the Toast Facebook page, the talk had turned to summer libations, and I had to come here and post this recipe:

Margarita Fizz

1 shot tequila
1 shot lime juice

Here's the recipe for the salad I made for last night's Toastmasters Bash at the Lake. Super-yummy, very pretty, serves a crowd, and the leftovers are even better the next day -- and I'm betting the day after that.

Potluck "Rice" Salad

1 cauliflower, head
1 small red onion
1 red bell pepper
1 bunch scallions
1/2 cup minced fresh parsley
2 tablespoons minced fresh oregano
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
salt and pepper

I'm a long-time member of Toastmasters, an international public speaking education club that I recommend unreservedly to all. Last night, my club (Good Evening Toastmasters, Club 2471) had its annual Bash at the Lake, where we cook out at the Bloomington Yacht Club, go sailing on the lake, drink a bit, roast the outgoing officers, and install the new ones. It's one of the highlights of my year, and I had a great time, though as a result I'm facing a Steak Day today.

As is so often the case when I'm in recipe development mode, I ate leftovers for breakfast this morning. Had some avocado-egg salad, which was just as good the next day, if a tad discolored. I also had some artichoke salad left, but no hard-boiled eggs. So I fried a couple, and ate them with the artichoke salad instead, and very nice it was, too.

Promised to tell y'all how I make my yogurt, but some of the posts about how other people make theirs make me a trifle sheepish. Why?

Yogurt is popular stuff, with a quasi-mystical reputation. When I was a kid, yogurt was unfamiliar to most Americans. Dannon opened up the market with ads showing ancient-but-healthy-looking Russian folks, stating that they ate yogurt, and implying that it was the secret of their longevity. I doubt those Russians were eating sweetened, flavored yogurt little different from pudding, but it sure did work for the Dannon company.

Well, it took long enough, but it finally happened: There's finally a medical study regarding the effect of sugar on heart disease risk factors. In the April 20th, 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. And surprise, surprise, they've concluded that eating sugar worsens cardiovascular risk factors, including raising triglycerides, lowering HDL, and worsening the all-important HDL/triglyceride ratio.

So Andrew from CarbSmart was here for the weekend; we were talking a bunch of new business ventures, and particularly starting a radio show for me. Exciting stuff! Yesterday morning I made jalapeno jack and avocado omelets, and Andrew posted a photo of his on Twitter. He promised his followers that he'd tweet a picture of this morning's breakfast, too. So I felt it was incumbent upon me to come up with something different, and reasonably photogenic. I decided to make waffles.