Rabbit Food for Lions
Smoked Turkey and Black Bean Chili

We hear “rabbit food” and think all that’s bad about dieting. Dull, lifeless, uninspiring. Not our thing — fitness and fine food should both enliven your experience of life, not deaden it. So the food Kevin and Russ cook, and the techniques and philosophy they share, turn standard rabbit food and make it fit for a lion. Read more about our cooking philosophy in the Second Helping Toolbox.

Even amid all the excitement and affirmation Sunday’s game has been for New Orleans, my mind harkens back to Super Bowl Sundays with my family in my native North Carolina. Those Sundays weren’t too much more healthy.

My father, taught by two excellent country cooks, always made a huge pot of fatty chili, covered in white onion, cheese and served “corn fritters,” which were basically salt, cornmeal and a little water fried in a pan. Maybe some chips and dip to complement. An ode to starch and fat, essentially.

And yesterday on television in my gym’s locker room, local newscaster’s planted their tongues firmly in their cheeks when The New Orleanians who made the voyage to the Super Bowl were already screaming “Who Dat” and reaching for the nearest cocktail as soon as they got off the plane.

As men were changing and going about their day, one man stopped and smiled. “Yep, Miami will love them. Or at least bar owners will. They better to get a cocktail in them, else they get into trouble.”

The more things change, right? Well, many years and many pounds lost later, I wondered: Can you do something using nutrient-dense, healthful and creative with something as tempting as a fatty chili? Can it be done? So a few months Kevin and I were discussing chili – it’s a cheap dish to make and bulk and freeze, after all – and were exploring the possibilities.

He came back with a Smoke Turkey Black Bean Chili, garnished with the Red Grape and Avocado Recipe we published a while back.

“I wanted to do something totally different,” Kevin said over the phone as I scrambled to take the recipe down. “This is going to be a white chili; no tomato in it.”

So that’s what Kevin did, creating a Turkey Chili (high protein, low fat) with black beans (moderate protein with a fiber punch). True to Kevin’s tastes, the chili features a variety of flavors that meld together into something incredible: the bite of red onion or our Cocoa-Spice Mix, the sweetness of roasted garlic and reconstituted cranberries, and the tart grace note of apple cider vinegar. Butting so many flavor profiles together is more of a foodie concept than a weight loss one, but it makes your food complex and interesting – as satisfying to your mind and pallet as it is your body. With flavors this strong, it’s difficult to overeat them — the eating equivalent of a sipping whiskey, if you will.

Well, it’s a counter-intuitive – a fancy term for “not common sense but it works” in North Carolina – but it makes a difference. Think about it – on one extreme, you have extremely low-calorie dishes that don’t keep you satisfied. So you eat more of it. On the other extreme, you have high-calories, nutrient poor, dishes. And they’re kind of boring when you think about it from a foodie perspective – they’re the same old food you’ve eaten for years that you also eat way more of than you should.

But there’s an escape hatch from all that – creating food so sexy, so creative, so alive – that even if the dish is higher calorie in one serving, there’s a tremendous nutrient density and sense of satisfaction form dishes such as these.

Things like nutrient density and fat/carb/calorie statistics are important; but it’s also the same old things everyone discusses in the same old way. There’s another consideration: literally finding a a new frame of reference for food. Cooking food that bears no resemblance to the emotional eating favorites of yesteryear helps accomplish that, elegantly and effectively.

Particularly for emotional eaters, our feeling and our food are so linked, and we usually think that’s a weakness. But what if you subverted all of that? What if you made turned your weakness into a strength? What would your food look like then, and how might you think of yourself differently?

No matter what, keep exploring the possibilities in your food and cooking, in yourself and your body. There’s no greater strength than daring yourself to see what’s beyond your wildest hopes, fears and expectations. And if you can learn that from a pot of chili, that’s the best recipe you ever learned. Lord knows it was for me. –Russ Lane

Kevin DeMarco is a personal trainer and personal chef in North Carolina. He and Russ Lane are on a mission to bring invigorating health food to home kitchens, and use cooking as a way to redefine self-defeating relationships with food. Read more about our cooking philosophy, and learn more about us at the Team Second Helping page.