Local fitness enthusiast Jason Murphy remakes favorite meals of his youth into healthy dishes. See the full list of his recipes at www.mysaline.com/shirtless.
Everyone has those major events in their life that becomes a marker where one phase of their life stopped and a new phase started. The first of those bookmarks, if you will, in my memory is the first time I felt like an adult on an equal level with my parents. This was when I believed I was no longer viewed as a boy in the family, but a man. It wasn’t getting married, going off to Navy boot camp, having a child, buying a house…you know, the usual big picture life events. No, the first time I stood up straight and walked as a man was at the age of eight years old in a McDonald’s restaurant, when I asked for a Big Mac instead of a kid’s meal…and they bought it for me. Not only that, I ate it with a large order of fries and a coke, and had room for an apple pie. I walked out of there ten feet tall and bulletproof, having earned my place at the table as a grown damn man:
Now, it’s been so many years since I’ve had a Big Mac that I don’t honestly remember the last time I had one. When I drive in town, it actually surprises me to see vehicles lined up in drive-through lines at fast food joints. It’s been at least seven years now since I’ve been in one, and I forget they exist. What brought the Big Mac to the forefront in my mind lately has been the commercials for their latest monstrosity, the Land, Air, and Sea burger. What is that, you ask? It’s a Big Mac, a fish fillet sandwich, and a chicken sandwich all combined into one giant gut-busting serving. This isn’t a man size serving, it’s more of an Orca size serving. Let’s take a look at the tale of the tape: calories clock in at 1,300, fat at 69 grams, carbs are 123 grams, and sodium is 2,150 mg. I take back what I said about an Orca size serving. This would have Shamu floating upside down like a dead goldfish in a bowl. The average human adult calorie needs is around 2000 a day, and this one sandwich takes up almost all that. Add in the calories from the large fries and large soda and it hits 1,998. That’s an entire day’s worth in one meal, and not one bit of nutrition your body can use in the lot. And here’s the rub I discovered looking this up…you have to put it together. That’s right, it’s all a marketing ploy to get you to buy all three sandwiches, then it’s up to you to disassemble them and stack this mountain of slop up into something resembling a sandwich and not the bottom of a trash can. Here’s the picture McDonald’s uses to promote the Land, Air, and Sea:
See how straight and tall it stands? It’s like you could use it to jack up a car to change a tire. Now ask yourself what a real Big Mac looks like, all lop-sided with the guts spilling out, limp wet bread barely holding on for dear life like Jack at the end of Titanic. Now picture having to pull that apart and somehow insert a fish sandwich which comes glued together with Kindergarten paste, along with a chicken sandwich to boot. I don’t know what that would look like, but folks, that picture ain’t it. By the time you were done, you’d be covered in food like a one year old tearing into his first birthday cake with both hands.
Now, having said all that, Big Macs are delicious. Of course they are, it’s the result of millions of dollars going into research to construct the perfect balance of salt and fat to hit the pleasure part of your brain to light up like a casino slot machine. I don’t know the exact ingredients in the Big Mac secret sauce, because, well, it’s a secret. We’ve all seen enough big corporation mass produced foods to take an educated guess that it will be full of cheap inflammatory oils, sugars, and preservatives with such long chemical names that you would reach for rubber gloves if you saw it on a chemistry set experiment. The Big Mac just by its lonesome has 550 calories, 30 grams of bad fats, 45 carbs, and 1,010 mg of sodium, so it’s no wonder they want to keep that sauce secret. Of course, anything a big corporation can mass produce, we can do better, both in taste and nutrition. This sauce tastes exactly how I remember it, back when I had no knowledge of nutrition, and was transported from child to man by that first Big Mac sandwich. Comparing the nutrition would be like comparing the 0-60 times of a Ford Pinto to a Porsche 918 Spyder. It’s so different, there’s just no point. Of course, it’s vital to use the correct ingredients in your homemade sauce or you could end up with something more like the processed version. This means using avocado oil based mayo, ketchup with no sugar or preservatives, and pickles with no nasty unnecessary ingredients. Pickles like that are harder to find than you would think. I usually end up reading almost every jar at the mega-mart before finally finding one that isn’t loaded with sugar or fake coloring and weird sulphates. Look for ones that no sugar or other preservatives on the ingredient list, and ones that use tumeric for color. 365 brand organic pickles is a good option here, and it is also lower in added sodium that the standard pickle offerings from the big brands.
I use my healthy tortillas and make this as a wrap, but it works just as well as a salad if you don’t have any wraps made. Here is a link to that article if you want to make the wraps to go along with your new grown up version of a Big Mac for the actual grown up you.
Grown up Big Mac wrap/salad:
Sauce ingredients:
1/2 cup Primal Kitchen avocado oil mayo
2 tbsp Primal Kitchen ketchup
2 tsp mustard
1 dill pickle finely diced
2 tsp white vinegar
2 tsp Stevia in the Raw
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
Salad or wrap Ingredients:
1 lb ground turkey or grass fed beef
1/2 tsp sea salt, black pepper, onion powder, garlic powder
Grass fed cheddar cheese
Yellow onion finely diced
Chopped Iceberg lettuce
Sesame seeds
Sliced dill pickles
Instructions:
Mix all the ingredients together and place in a container. I like to make this at least 3 hours before to let the flavors blend in the fridge, but it’s not required:
Brown the meat with the seasonings and cook through, draining any excess fat when done:
Dice up your onion, chop the lettuce, slice the pickles, and prepare any cheese you will use:
Heat up your pre-made tortillas if using in a skillet with a splash of olive oil until warmed through:
Spread the sauce onto the tortillas:
Layer with cheese, meat, onions, pickles, lettuce, drizzle with more sauce, and enjoy.
See the list of all the Shirtless Chef recipes at www.mysaline.com/shirtless.