Well, it looks like I'm going to have to give up on doing anything like my Cute Cooking or Cooking in Miniature idea for now. Or any other project that's just playing because I can't afford to experiment. My cooking project will have to be eating fresh food on a super tight budget.
So, today's cooking will be to do something with the food I bought before I fell this past week and bruised my ribs. One of the biggest issues with cooking for two people is that there is a lot of food that doesn't come in packages sized for two people. The cheapest stuff is usually sized in huge quantities, which was great when I had growing boys living with me. Planning carefully helps because I can make multiple recipes that use the same ingredients.
That dilemma kind of inspired my cute cooking idea. The biggest problem I have is lack of freezer space. If I can buy ingredients for two servings and cook that much, I don't have leftovers to take up space in my freezer. I can then cook and freeze things like rice and beans blanch produce that comes in bunches and oatmeal and bread and stock--ingredients or meals that can be thawed and used when I have less time to cook a whole meal from scratch. That was the theory, anyway.
Experimenting with recipes and food will have to be put off for a time when I have the budget. It's disappointing because I was getting excited about having some fun in my kitchen. I'd been putting a lot of things off that I wanted to try because I wasn't sure about Paul's employment situation. Then he got his benefits and everything was set up for the long haul and I was thinking about doing fun stuff. But with yet another layoff, that's not happening. Time to move back into super frugal budget mode. We're being way more frugal at this point because whether he gets unemployment is really iffy and we may need to have as much as possible to move somewhere else. Who knows where? Our options are pretty limited at this point, but we're always open to workable ideas.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Weight Loss Lessons
Background
I've lost about 20 pounds since I started taking the train to work. I first lost a few pounds from just walking to and from the train. When I exercise, even a moderate amount, my appetite goes down. This happened back a few years ago when Paul and I started walking the track near my mom's house. I lost between 20 and 30 pounds. Then I stayed the same until we moved. I had to stop walking because there was nowhere except sidewalk and I was getting muscle cramps on the fronts of my legs. I gained most of the weight back.
So, when I started losing again, I decided to do more than just adding exercise to my life. I rejoined Weight Watchers, using their online tools. I get my support from online groups and friends and family. I don't find the meetings help me, personally, very much. I tend to tune it all out because I've been there, done that.
Also, I get tired of people's games to make the scale as low as possible each week. People wear special clothes. Take off their shoes. Even make sure they use the toilet right before they weigh in. Some people don't eat before a meeting. It's crazy!! I don't want to get sucked into compulsive, crazy behavior. If that's what it takes, I'd rather stay fat.
Plus, I get frustrated with recipes and food advice because that's another kind of game. You win the game by getting the most food for the fewest points regardless of the nutritional value of your meal. The fact is that what people are really trying to do is to lose weight without making any real changes. The diet food industry is rife with fake foods that mimic the foods people don't want to give up in order to lose weight.
Weight Watchers sell food that's not as high in nutritional value as the fresh food they promote as being healthier. Yet, despite their healthy eating advice, they don't really want you to eat only fresh food because they make a lot of money from selling you their food products. The last time I attended meethings, part of the meeting time was spent promoting Weight Watchers products and I'd prefer to skip that. I ignore the ads when I'm online.
Lessons Learned So Far
The main thing I've learned is that a lot of the advice the professionals give you is true, but until you experience it for yourself, you don't really believe it. And I learned that a lot of research needs to be done into the effect of female hormones on weight.
Details
1. When I was growing up, my mom decided how much food went on the plate and we were expected to eat it all. If there were leftovers, but not enough to save or the leftovers would tempt her too much, she'd beg everyone else to eat them whether we were hungry or not. Consequently, I have no idea how to know when I'm full. I'm used to eating to overfull.
I decided to try an experiment and not put a bite in my mouth until I've swallowed the previous bite. I still forget. Old habits die hard. But I'm getting more consistent with this. The result: I feel full and more satisfied on less food because I'm eating more slowly. This is especially beneficial when eating higher-calorie foods because they require eating super small portions. A side benefit is that I'm more aware of the flavors in my food and that helps me become a better cook.
2. When I grew up and discovered that canned vegetables were not the only way to get vegetables, I discovered that I love vegetables. So, now I go for the fruits and veggies. I'm starting to base my meals more around the veggies and fruits, adding whole grains, protein, and some fat to them. I'm not a vegetarian, but when I make a meat-based main dish, I keep the portion small so I can have a lot of vegetable dishes, too. This strategy allows me to eat a reasonable volume of food and still lose weight. However, I'm discovering that the total volume of food I'm eating is a lot less. I get full faster when I eat this way, especially when I use whole grains.
3. Whole grains are amazing. When I put one serving of white rice or regular pasta or white bread on my plate and eat it, I feel neither full nor satisfied. I need two or three portions for that. But, when I put one serving of whole grain bread, whole grain rice, or whole wheat pasta on my plate, not only am I both full and satisfied, sometimes I can't finish it because it's too much food.
I think one of the main problems people have with whole grains is unfamiliarity with them combined with the poor quality of a lot of the whole grain products, particularly breads, in the markets. You have to keep trying different types and brands to find what you like. When I first tried whole wheat pastas, they were horrible. But now I prefer them because the quality has improved since then. I solve the whole grain bread issue by making my own. Baking bread is one of the pleasures in my life, so that's a no-brainer for me.
4. Beans are one of my favorite foods. I've always liked them and I've been trying out new varieties lately. They really fill you up. I love to add them to pureed vegetable soups because they also thicken the soup. What I've discovered is that when you buy beans at Whole Foods or any store that has a lot of vegetarian customers, they're fresher and take less time to cook. When I eat beans several times a week, I tend to lose more weight than when I don't. I'm not saying that beans cause weight loss, but they probably keep the total calories lower because they're so filling.
5. I'm eating a lot more vegetarian meals these days because it's cheaper. This will be an especially crucial issue as Paul and I deal with yet one more time he's been laid off. I don't want this to derail my weight loss efforts, so I'm going to have to plan meals carefully, keeping the budget in mind.
Time magazine had a disturbing article recently called Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food. They were talking about how difficult it is to eat a standard American diet and not gain weight. And how the agriculture and industry's subsidies allow them to make cheap, but unhealthy food. I haven't figured out how I'm going to continue to eat high-quality, healthful food on my now super-limited budget, but I'm not giving up on it, at least not while I still have a kitchen of my own to cook in.
6. The food thing is really all about portion control and balancing high-calorie and low-calorie foods. Weight Watchers says that you don't have to give up foods you love in order to lose weight. But when people talk about the program, they talk about OP foods. OP stands for On Program. That implies that there are foods that are off program. They usually mean the foods that have been pounded into our brain as being bad. But Weight Watchers is right. You can eat whatever you want, but you have to be willing to change the portion size and what you eat with it. You have to balance your food over time and you have to learn what balance works best for you.
An example: You can eat real macaroni and cheese, just not a huge bowl full. If you make it with whole wheat pasta, which is how I like it, and add some vegetables, you can eat a nice-sized portion. If you just want the comfort food, without adding veggies to the dish itself, you eat a smaller serving. Then, fill the meal out with a vegetable soup or a vegetable side dish and a salad. That's plenty of food.
The problem is that we don't think of macaroni and cheese as the main course. We eat it with high-calorie hot dogs or hamburgers and buns. If I want a hot dog or hamburger and bun, I pair it with grilled corn and watermelon, plus a salad. And I've discovered that one slider-sized hamburger is plenty, especially if I make the buns myself.
My point is that I've been rethinking what constitutes a healthy, satisfying menu and coming up with a very different combination of foods from what I grew up with. It more closely resembles the types of foods recommended by professional nutritionists, with one major exception--I eat mostly whole fat dairy products. I don't like low-fat dairy. I don't substitute cup for cup, though. When I eat whole milk yogurt, I eat a quarter of a cup with fruit and granola. I couldn't eat a whole cup of it. It's too filling.
7. As for the hormone thing, before I stopped having the monthly hormone swings, I lost about 50 pounds, twice. But then I got stuck gaining and losing the same 5 pounds every month. I gave up and gradually regained some of that weight back. I never got back up to my highest weight ever. I managed to permanently keep off about 20-25 pounds. Back then it was all or nothing. You were a failure if you didn't get to the goal they set, and those goals were unrealistically low. Now, you're encouraged to set more reasonable goals and you don't feel like a failure if you've lost a significant amount of weight, but not every pound the experts say someone of your height and gender ought to lose.
Anyway, I digress. Back to the hormone thing--now that I don't have those monthly food cravings, anxiety, etc., my weight loss has been steady, as has my ability to adhere to the program. If I were a researcher working in the field of obesity, that's an area I'd love to examine. One of the things everyone knows about weight loss is that it's harder after menopause. I'm not so sure that's true for everyone. Thus far, it's not been true for me.
I've lost about 20 pounds since I started taking the train to work. I first lost a few pounds from just walking to and from the train. When I exercise, even a moderate amount, my appetite goes down. This happened back a few years ago when Paul and I started walking the track near my mom's house. I lost between 20 and 30 pounds. Then I stayed the same until we moved. I had to stop walking because there was nowhere except sidewalk and I was getting muscle cramps on the fronts of my legs. I gained most of the weight back.
So, when I started losing again, I decided to do more than just adding exercise to my life. I rejoined Weight Watchers, using their online tools. I get my support from online groups and friends and family. I don't find the meetings help me, personally, very much. I tend to tune it all out because I've been there, done that.
Also, I get tired of people's games to make the scale as low as possible each week. People wear special clothes. Take off their shoes. Even make sure they use the toilet right before they weigh in. Some people don't eat before a meeting. It's crazy!! I don't want to get sucked into compulsive, crazy behavior. If that's what it takes, I'd rather stay fat.
Plus, I get frustrated with recipes and food advice because that's another kind of game. You win the game by getting the most food for the fewest points regardless of the nutritional value of your meal. The fact is that what people are really trying to do is to lose weight without making any real changes. The diet food industry is rife with fake foods that mimic the foods people don't want to give up in order to lose weight.
Weight Watchers sell food that's not as high in nutritional value as the fresh food they promote as being healthier. Yet, despite their healthy eating advice, they don't really want you to eat only fresh food because they make a lot of money from selling you their food products. The last time I attended meethings, part of the meeting time was spent promoting Weight Watchers products and I'd prefer to skip that. I ignore the ads when I'm online.
Lessons Learned So Far
The main thing I've learned is that a lot of the advice the professionals give you is true, but until you experience it for yourself, you don't really believe it. And I learned that a lot of research needs to be done into the effect of female hormones on weight.
Details
1. When I was growing up, my mom decided how much food went on the plate and we were expected to eat it all. If there were leftovers, but not enough to save or the leftovers would tempt her too much, she'd beg everyone else to eat them whether we were hungry or not. Consequently, I have no idea how to know when I'm full. I'm used to eating to overfull.
I decided to try an experiment and not put a bite in my mouth until I've swallowed the previous bite. I still forget. Old habits die hard. But I'm getting more consistent with this. The result: I feel full and more satisfied on less food because I'm eating more slowly. This is especially beneficial when eating higher-calorie foods because they require eating super small portions. A side benefit is that I'm more aware of the flavors in my food and that helps me become a better cook.
2. When I grew up and discovered that canned vegetables were not the only way to get vegetables, I discovered that I love vegetables. So, now I go for the fruits and veggies. I'm starting to base my meals more around the veggies and fruits, adding whole grains, protein, and some fat to them. I'm not a vegetarian, but when I make a meat-based main dish, I keep the portion small so I can have a lot of vegetable dishes, too. This strategy allows me to eat a reasonable volume of food and still lose weight. However, I'm discovering that the total volume of food I'm eating is a lot less. I get full faster when I eat this way, especially when I use whole grains.
3. Whole grains are amazing. When I put one serving of white rice or regular pasta or white bread on my plate and eat it, I feel neither full nor satisfied. I need two or three portions for that. But, when I put one serving of whole grain bread, whole grain rice, or whole wheat pasta on my plate, not only am I both full and satisfied, sometimes I can't finish it because it's too much food.
I think one of the main problems people have with whole grains is unfamiliarity with them combined with the poor quality of a lot of the whole grain products, particularly breads, in the markets. You have to keep trying different types and brands to find what you like. When I first tried whole wheat pastas, they were horrible. But now I prefer them because the quality has improved since then. I solve the whole grain bread issue by making my own. Baking bread is one of the pleasures in my life, so that's a no-brainer for me.
4. Beans are one of my favorite foods. I've always liked them and I've been trying out new varieties lately. They really fill you up. I love to add them to pureed vegetable soups because they also thicken the soup. What I've discovered is that when you buy beans at Whole Foods or any store that has a lot of vegetarian customers, they're fresher and take less time to cook. When I eat beans several times a week, I tend to lose more weight than when I don't. I'm not saying that beans cause weight loss, but they probably keep the total calories lower because they're so filling.
5. I'm eating a lot more vegetarian meals these days because it's cheaper. This will be an especially crucial issue as Paul and I deal with yet one more time he's been laid off. I don't want this to derail my weight loss efforts, so I'm going to have to plan meals carefully, keeping the budget in mind.
Time magazine had a disturbing article recently called Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food. They were talking about how difficult it is to eat a standard American diet and not gain weight. And how the agriculture and industry's subsidies allow them to make cheap, but unhealthy food. I haven't figured out how I'm going to continue to eat high-quality, healthful food on my now super-limited budget, but I'm not giving up on it, at least not while I still have a kitchen of my own to cook in.
6. The food thing is really all about portion control and balancing high-calorie and low-calorie foods. Weight Watchers says that you don't have to give up foods you love in order to lose weight. But when people talk about the program, they talk about OP foods. OP stands for On Program. That implies that there are foods that are off program. They usually mean the foods that have been pounded into our brain as being bad. But Weight Watchers is right. You can eat whatever you want, but you have to be willing to change the portion size and what you eat with it. You have to balance your food over time and you have to learn what balance works best for you.
An example: You can eat real macaroni and cheese, just not a huge bowl full. If you make it with whole wheat pasta, which is how I like it, and add some vegetables, you can eat a nice-sized portion. If you just want the comfort food, without adding veggies to the dish itself, you eat a smaller serving. Then, fill the meal out with a vegetable soup or a vegetable side dish and a salad. That's plenty of food.
The problem is that we don't think of macaroni and cheese as the main course. We eat it with high-calorie hot dogs or hamburgers and buns. If I want a hot dog or hamburger and bun, I pair it with grilled corn and watermelon, plus a salad. And I've discovered that one slider-sized hamburger is plenty, especially if I make the buns myself.
My point is that I've been rethinking what constitutes a healthy, satisfying menu and coming up with a very different combination of foods from what I grew up with. It more closely resembles the types of foods recommended by professional nutritionists, with one major exception--I eat mostly whole fat dairy products. I don't like low-fat dairy. I don't substitute cup for cup, though. When I eat whole milk yogurt, I eat a quarter of a cup with fruit and granola. I couldn't eat a whole cup of it. It's too filling.
7. As for the hormone thing, before I stopped having the monthly hormone swings, I lost about 50 pounds, twice. But then I got stuck gaining and losing the same 5 pounds every month. I gave up and gradually regained some of that weight back. I never got back up to my highest weight ever. I managed to permanently keep off about 20-25 pounds. Back then it was all or nothing. You were a failure if you didn't get to the goal they set, and those goals were unrealistically low. Now, you're encouraged to set more reasonable goals and you don't feel like a failure if you've lost a significant amount of weight, but not every pound the experts say someone of your height and gender ought to lose.
Anyway, I digress. Back to the hormone thing--now that I don't have those monthly food cravings, anxiety, etc., my weight loss has been steady, as has my ability to adhere to the program. If I were a researcher working in the field of obesity, that's an area I'd love to examine. One of the things everyone knows about weight loss is that it's harder after menopause. I'm not so sure that's true for everyone. Thus far, it's not been true for me.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Easy Chicken Recipe
I made this last night. It's super good and super easy. This isn't the kind of recipe that needs to be exact, so adjust it for however many people you're cooking for. I baked it in the oven, but it would be a perfect grilled chicken dish for a Labor Day weekend barbecue because it's not very labor-intensive.
Lemon Chicken
Ingredients:
Note: The amounts given are for about 2 pounds of chicken pieces, which is about 4 whole chicken legs. Adjust the ingredient amounts up or down according to your tastes and how much chicken you're cooking.
1. 4 whole chicken legs, or 2 pounds chicken pieces.
2. Approximately 2 cloves of garlic. How much garlic you use depends on how big the cloves are and how much you like garlic.
3. Salt and pepper
4. About 1/2 cup fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley, chopped.
5. 3 lemons, juiced, for about 2 pounds of chicken. If you're feeding a crowd, add more lemon juice, as needed, to marinate the chicken. Juice it through a sieve so you can catch the pits. Don't throw out the rinds.
Instructions:
1. Wash and dry the chicken pieces. Put in a large bowl. Add the garlic, salt, pepper and parsley. Rub it into the chicken. Make sure the garlic is rubbed over all the chicken pieces.
2. Pour the lemon juice into the bowl and turn the chicken pieces to make sure they're all coated with the juice. Add the lemon rinds to the bowl. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least an hour, two is better. Every half hour or so, pull the bowl out and turn and rub the chicken pieces with the marinade.
You could marinate the chicken overnight, but it doesn't need that long and rubbing the marinade into the chicken periodically gives it deeper flavor. But, if you want to cook it after you get home from work, do the marinade in the morning. Give the chicken a good rub before you leave. Again, when you get home, give it a good rub and let it sit a bit longer while you heat the oven and prep whatever you're eating with the dish.
3. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
4. Take the chicken out of the marinade. Throw out the marinade and lemon rinds. Coat the chicken lightly with olive oil. I don't waste extra virgin olive oil on this type of recipe because it doesn't really add anything to the dish. I use a light olive oil and spray it with my Misto. Then I use my hands to rub the sprayed oil evenly over the chicken. You only need enough oil to keep the chicken from sticking to the rack and promote browning.
5. Put skin side down on the rack. Bake 20-30 minutes, depending on how big the chicken pieces are. Turn over and bake another 20-30 minutes, until done. Check the chicken about 10 minutes before they're done. If it's not browning enough, turn the heat up to 400°F for the last 10 minutes.
Lemon Chicken
Ingredients:
Note: The amounts given are for about 2 pounds of chicken pieces, which is about 4 whole chicken legs. Adjust the ingredient amounts up or down according to your tastes and how much chicken you're cooking.
1. 4 whole chicken legs, or 2 pounds chicken pieces.
2. Approximately 2 cloves of garlic. How much garlic you use depends on how big the cloves are and how much you like garlic.
3. Salt and pepper
4. About 1/2 cup fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley, chopped.
5. 3 lemons, juiced, for about 2 pounds of chicken. If you're feeding a crowd, add more lemon juice, as needed, to marinate the chicken. Juice it through a sieve so you can catch the pits. Don't throw out the rinds.
Instructions:
1. Wash and dry the chicken pieces. Put in a large bowl. Add the garlic, salt, pepper and parsley. Rub it into the chicken. Make sure the garlic is rubbed over all the chicken pieces.
2. Pour the lemon juice into the bowl and turn the chicken pieces to make sure they're all coated with the juice. Add the lemon rinds to the bowl. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least an hour, two is better. Every half hour or so, pull the bowl out and turn and rub the chicken pieces with the marinade.
You could marinate the chicken overnight, but it doesn't need that long and rubbing the marinade into the chicken periodically gives it deeper flavor. But, if you want to cook it after you get home from work, do the marinade in the morning. Give the chicken a good rub before you leave. Again, when you get home, give it a good rub and let it sit a bit longer while you heat the oven and prep whatever you're eating with the dish.
3. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
4. Take the chicken out of the marinade. Throw out the marinade and lemon rinds. Coat the chicken lightly with olive oil. I don't waste extra virgin olive oil on this type of recipe because it doesn't really add anything to the dish. I use a light olive oil and spray it with my Misto. Then I use my hands to rub the sprayed oil evenly over the chicken. You only need enough oil to keep the chicken from sticking to the rack and promote browning.
5. Put skin side down on the rack. Bake 20-30 minutes, depending on how big the chicken pieces are. Turn over and bake another 20-30 minutes, until done. Check the chicken about 10 minutes before they're done. If it's not browning enough, turn the heat up to 400°F for the last 10 minutes.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Julia Child's Book
Here's another post I started before concert week:
I'm not even trying to cook this week. It's concert week and I'm in charge of the box office. I'm working a lot of hours. So, we're baking potatoes on the grill. We're grilling steak and chicken. We're going to use the cooked meat and potatoes as the basis for quick meals. Tonight, though, it's the traditional steak, salad, and baked potato meal. It's yummy and simple. We both got home after 5, so we didn't want to fuss a lot.
I've been really glad to see Mastering the Art of French Cooking get the attention it deserves. She wrote something special. It's headed for the top of the NYT bestseller list this week, 40-some years after it was first published. I hope people don't buy it, leaf through it, and put it on their shelves to cook from "when they have more time". Her recipes are indeed time-consuming. I bet she'd have loved the slow food movement. Here's a link to Slow Food USA, in case you're interested in the American version or want to find a chapter you could participate in.
Back to the book. If you cook from it, you will learn so much about good cooking techniques. And, if you study the recipe variations, you can learn a lot about creating your own food. People are often intimidated by the idea of not following a recipe exactly. If you look at the types of changes she makes in the variations, you can start to get a feel for what changes will work and what won't.
I've noticed two interesting things about what she wrote. First, her recipes are supposed to serve six people, assuming a three-course meal that was standard in America when she was writing. She says that in France, they'd have six courses and the portions would be half as large. The six courses are hors d'oeuvre, soup, salad, main course, cheese and dessert. As you go through the book, she mentions what recipes would be good hors d'oeuvres for a dinner and they're pretty much vegetable dishes. The cheese and dessert courses are at the end of the meal, so you would most likely be too full to eat too much of them. By dividing the meal up into courses, you take longer to eat, so you're more aware of being full before you've eaten too much.
I think the French paradox thing makes perfect sense when you look at that eating pattern. (The French paradox=eating more saturated fat, whole fat cheeses and dairy and so on, but not getting fat or having a lot of heart attacks. Small portions that include a lot of vegetables and taking a long time to eat mean you're less likely to overeat. But I digress, and that could easily be another post.
I wonder if even the French today cook that many courses for dinner. You'd have to spend all day cooking. That would be fun, but most people have to work. I like small portions of a variety of tastes. So, my personal preference is to do soup, salad, main course/sides and fresh fruit. That's really hard to find the time to do, even with doing some advance cooking, so I don't often get my preference. The Tables for Eight group from my church gets the benefit of my love of multi-course meals. I usually substitute a dessert for the fruit and add some pre-dinner munchies, since it's a dinner party.
Second, she has such a reputation for loving butter and cream that everyone thinks she cooks super-high-fat, unhealthy food. But when you read the recipes, she doesn't add fat willy-nilly. She uses the right amount to get the results she wants. She carefully pours off or removes extra fat because she doesn't want greasy food. Her philosophy was that we shouldn't be afraid of our food. That's a philosophy I agree with, but have struggled with most of my life due to an upbringing that was drenched in being afraid of food.
I very much enjoyed reading the book. Yeah, I'm one of those weird people who reads through cookbooks the way I read novels. I'm definitely going to be cooking from it. I'm thinking about having a fall dinner party with Boeuf Bourguignon as the centerpiece. After going to see Julie and Julia, Paul asked me if I'd ever cooked it. I had, but not Julia Child's version because I didn't have the cookbook at that time. It was a gift from my son who worked in a used bookstore for a few years. Someone gave it to the store and no one wanted it. He gave it a good home.
I'm not even trying to cook this week. It's concert week and I'm in charge of the box office. I'm working a lot of hours. So, we're baking potatoes on the grill. We're grilling steak and chicken. We're going to use the cooked meat and potatoes as the basis for quick meals. Tonight, though, it's the traditional steak, salad, and baked potato meal. It's yummy and simple. We both got home after 5, so we didn't want to fuss a lot.
I've been really glad to see Mastering the Art of French Cooking get the attention it deserves. She wrote something special. It's headed for the top of the NYT bestseller list this week, 40-some years after it was first published. I hope people don't buy it, leaf through it, and put it on their shelves to cook from "when they have more time". Her recipes are indeed time-consuming. I bet she'd have loved the slow food movement. Here's a link to Slow Food USA, in case you're interested in the American version or want to find a chapter you could participate in.
Back to the book. If you cook from it, you will learn so much about good cooking techniques. And, if you study the recipe variations, you can learn a lot about creating your own food. People are often intimidated by the idea of not following a recipe exactly. If you look at the types of changes she makes in the variations, you can start to get a feel for what changes will work and what won't.
I've noticed two interesting things about what she wrote. First, her recipes are supposed to serve six people, assuming a three-course meal that was standard in America when she was writing. She says that in France, they'd have six courses and the portions would be half as large. The six courses are hors d'oeuvre, soup, salad, main course, cheese and dessert. As you go through the book, she mentions what recipes would be good hors d'oeuvres for a dinner and they're pretty much vegetable dishes. The cheese and dessert courses are at the end of the meal, so you would most likely be too full to eat too much of them. By dividing the meal up into courses, you take longer to eat, so you're more aware of being full before you've eaten too much.
I think the French paradox thing makes perfect sense when you look at that eating pattern. (The French paradox=eating more saturated fat, whole fat cheeses and dairy and so on, but not getting fat or having a lot of heart attacks. Small portions that include a lot of vegetables and taking a long time to eat mean you're less likely to overeat. But I digress, and that could easily be another post.
I wonder if even the French today cook that many courses for dinner. You'd have to spend all day cooking. That would be fun, but most people have to work. I like small portions of a variety of tastes. So, my personal preference is to do soup, salad, main course/sides and fresh fruit. That's really hard to find the time to do, even with doing some advance cooking, so I don't often get my preference. The Tables for Eight group from my church gets the benefit of my love of multi-course meals. I usually substitute a dessert for the fruit and add some pre-dinner munchies, since it's a dinner party.
Second, she has such a reputation for loving butter and cream that everyone thinks she cooks super-high-fat, unhealthy food. But when you read the recipes, she doesn't add fat willy-nilly. She uses the right amount to get the results she wants. She carefully pours off or removes extra fat because she doesn't want greasy food. Her philosophy was that we shouldn't be afraid of our food. That's a philosophy I agree with, but have struggled with most of my life due to an upbringing that was drenched in being afraid of food.
I very much enjoyed reading the book. Yeah, I'm one of those weird people who reads through cookbooks the way I read novels. I'm definitely going to be cooking from it. I'm thinking about having a fall dinner party with Boeuf Bourguignon as the centerpiece. After going to see Julie and Julia, Paul asked me if I'd ever cooked it. I had, but not Julia Child's version because I didn't have the cookbook at that time. It was a gift from my son who worked in a used bookstore for a few years. Someone gave it to the store and no one wanted it. He gave it a good home.
Local Eating
One of the things I'm doing today is catching up on things that were put aside while I worked a ton of extra hours. The concerts were amazing! So, here's one post I started around mid-August.
Barbara Kingsolver wrote a book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life which tells of her family's attempts to eat only food they've grown themselves on a farm they bought in Virginia. The locavore movement refers to eating locally grown food, but the definition of "locally grown food" seems to be up to the individual. If you scroll down the page, you come across the definition of "locavore" and the radius seems to be 50, 100, or 150 miles from where you live. I'd heard 100 miles was kind of the standard.
Paul had talked about eating meals centered around locally grown vegetables. We had an interesting conversation about eating only locally produced food. He said he didn't mean to eat only local foods, but rather to use local foods, specifically vegetables, as the center of the menu. I started thinking about the 100-mile thing and wondered what foods are available from within a 100-mile radius of here. I decided to research it, just because I'm a curious person.
So, I got a cardboard wheel from Amazon that shows what's local to the San Francisco Bay Area and when it's in season. It's called The Local Foods Wheel and it's by Maggie Gosselin, Sarah Klein, and Jessica Prentice. Their website: Local Foods Wheel. It's pretty amazing to see that I could, theoretically, get almost anything I want to eat from somewhere local to this area. Tropical fruits like bananas, pineapple, etc. are, as I expected, not on the wheel. There are some things I've never heard of, like burdock root and cardoons. Did you know there's a plant called jujube? And you thought it was just a candy.
I doubt I'll be eating exclusively locally produced food. It would be an interesting exercise to try it for a year, hitting every season, but I don't have the resources to do this. I'd need a car and the time to go to the farmer's markets, farms themselves, and other sources to purchase locally grown food. What I do now is to choose locally grown and produced food whenever possible. It helps that they post signs saying where your food comes from.
In my quest for the best ingredients, because the best ingredients make the best food, I also try to use organic whenever I can. I've noticed that organic is fresher and more flavorful. And local organic is often the best. It's more expensive, but my strategy is to eat more vegetarian meals and to cook from scratch. I don't spend my money or calories on junk food very often. Organic junk food is still junk food. But that's an issue for another post, another time, if I feel like ranting.
I've had some time to think about this whole idea and what I want to do is to use the wheel to help me plan meals that are in season. That can be tough. I subscribe to several food magazines and they send the October issue in late August, so the magazines hitting my mailbox now are full of fall braises and stews. But it's still summer, with late-summer food in the markets.
I'm thinking of storing magazines away by month and pulling them out when that season gets here, so I'm not tempted to cook food that's not yet in season. That's more expensive, as well as not as good because the ingredients aren't at their peak. It's not yet time for braised short ribs and root vegetables. Right now is the time to enjoy tomatoes, peaches, and corn, before they go out of season.
Barbara Kingsolver wrote a book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life which tells of her family's attempts to eat only food they've grown themselves on a farm they bought in Virginia. The locavore movement refers to eating locally grown food, but the definition of "locally grown food" seems to be up to the individual. If you scroll down the page, you come across the definition of "locavore" and the radius seems to be 50, 100, or 150 miles from where you live. I'd heard 100 miles was kind of the standard.
Paul had talked about eating meals centered around locally grown vegetables. We had an interesting conversation about eating only locally produced food. He said he didn't mean to eat only local foods, but rather to use local foods, specifically vegetables, as the center of the menu. I started thinking about the 100-mile thing and wondered what foods are available from within a 100-mile radius of here. I decided to research it, just because I'm a curious person.
So, I got a cardboard wheel from Amazon that shows what's local to the San Francisco Bay Area and when it's in season. It's called The Local Foods Wheel and it's by Maggie Gosselin, Sarah Klein, and Jessica Prentice. Their website: Local Foods Wheel. It's pretty amazing to see that I could, theoretically, get almost anything I want to eat from somewhere local to this area. Tropical fruits like bananas, pineapple, etc. are, as I expected, not on the wheel. There are some things I've never heard of, like burdock root and cardoons. Did you know there's a plant called jujube? And you thought it was just a candy.
I doubt I'll be eating exclusively locally produced food. It would be an interesting exercise to try it for a year, hitting every season, but I don't have the resources to do this. I'd need a car and the time to go to the farmer's markets, farms themselves, and other sources to purchase locally grown food. What I do now is to choose locally grown and produced food whenever possible. It helps that they post signs saying where your food comes from.
In my quest for the best ingredients, because the best ingredients make the best food, I also try to use organic whenever I can. I've noticed that organic is fresher and more flavorful. And local organic is often the best. It's more expensive, but my strategy is to eat more vegetarian meals and to cook from scratch. I don't spend my money or calories on junk food very often. Organic junk food is still junk food. But that's an issue for another post, another time, if I feel like ranting.
I've had some time to think about this whole idea and what I want to do is to use the wheel to help me plan meals that are in season. That can be tough. I subscribe to several food magazines and they send the October issue in late August, so the magazines hitting my mailbox now are full of fall braises and stews. But it's still summer, with late-summer food in the markets.
I'm thinking of storing magazines away by month and pulling them out when that season gets here, so I'm not tempted to cook food that's not yet in season. That's more expensive, as well as not as good because the ingredients aren't at their peak. It's not yet time for braised short ribs and root vegetables. Right now is the time to enjoy tomatoes, peaches, and corn, before they go out of season.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Cooking in Miniature
I've been looking at my refrigerator. It's small. Not the smallest I've ever had in an apartment, but not really big enough for someone who cooks from scratch. I've also been reading Cooking for Two 2009 from Cook's Illustrated magazine. It occurred to me that an answer that would allow me to tackle a variety of projects, but still have a theme, is to work on scaling recipes for two people.
I always cook large amounts of food. It's partly because I cooked for a family with two growing boys for so many years. And it's partly my Italian heritage. We Italians seem to have a mission to feed the world. You couldn't walk into my grandmother's house without her offering you food. But now there's only two of us to cook for. So, I cut recipes in half and we still end up getting 2-3 meals out of them because everything is super-sized.
Cooking in Miniature would go right along with Weight Watchers, too. I'm learning what portion sizes I need to eat if I want to be a healthy weight. And they're a lot smaller than what is served in restaurants or found in cookbooks. I think if you made recipes from cookbooks published during my childhood and divided them up into the number of servings the recipe says it makes, you'd think you'd stumbled upon a kid's cookbook because the portions would seem so small.
I think miniaturizing recipes is the perfect challenge for me at this time in my life. The question remains, though, whether to revisit the basics or go international. Maybe I could alternate. Choose basic techniques to practice one month, including using them in recipes. The next month, I could visit a new cuisine. I think I'd get bored with just practicing basic techniques, so alternating would allow me to improve my basic skills and stretch my cooking comfort zone.
I think I may have found my challenge. But, there's one more thing I want to think about before I start planning it. When my Amazon order gets here, it will be easier to figure it all out.
I've got food simmering on the stove. I took stuff I had in the fridge and put it in a pot. It's black beans, salsa verde, vegetable stock, and roasted spicy vegetables. It didn't work for what I originally planned, but I put some of it together, spooned it over a steamed corn tortilla, and topped it with a poached egg, making huevos rancheros with a green sauce. It's not too dry to eat as a soup, especially if you top it with some cheese. I may try that for lunch tomorrow. I think of it as a serendipity recipe. It's serendipity that I found another use for the ingredients since my original idea didn't work.
I always cook large amounts of food. It's partly because I cooked for a family with two growing boys for so many years. And it's partly my Italian heritage. We Italians seem to have a mission to feed the world. You couldn't walk into my grandmother's house without her offering you food. But now there's only two of us to cook for. So, I cut recipes in half and we still end up getting 2-3 meals out of them because everything is super-sized.
Cooking in Miniature would go right along with Weight Watchers, too. I'm learning what portion sizes I need to eat if I want to be a healthy weight. And they're a lot smaller than what is served in restaurants or found in cookbooks. I think if you made recipes from cookbooks published during my childhood and divided them up into the number of servings the recipe says it makes, you'd think you'd stumbled upon a kid's cookbook because the portions would seem so small.
I think miniaturizing recipes is the perfect challenge for me at this time in my life. The question remains, though, whether to revisit the basics or go international. Maybe I could alternate. Choose basic techniques to practice one month, including using them in recipes. The next month, I could visit a new cuisine. I think I'd get bored with just practicing basic techniques, so alternating would allow me to improve my basic skills and stretch my cooking comfort zone.
I think I may have found my challenge. But, there's one more thing I want to think about before I start planning it. When my Amazon order gets here, it will be easier to figure it all out.
I've got food simmering on the stove. I took stuff I had in the fridge and put it in a pot. It's black beans, salsa verde, vegetable stock, and roasted spicy vegetables. It didn't work for what I originally planned, but I put some of it together, spooned it over a steamed corn tortilla, and topped it with a poached egg, making huevos rancheros with a green sauce. It's not too dry to eat as a soup, especially if you top it with some cheese. I may try that for lunch tomorrow. I think of it as a serendipity recipe. It's serendipity that I found another use for the ingredients since my original idea didn't work.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Musings on Advance Prep Cooking
I was really tired today, so I made the simplest dinner. We had Mushroom-tarragon soup that I made a couple of days ago. Melon with berries. Toast with butter. And eggs scrambled with some of the vegetables I roasted. It took about ten minutes to put together and was yummy.
One of the things I'm trying to do is to make food when I have more time. Then do only the last minute stuff on the busy days. My biggest problem with that is that I have an apartment-sized refrigerator and freezer, which limits the amount of food I can store. People who have family-sized appliances don't know how lucky they are to have space for storing both ingredients and finished dishes. Upon considering the problem, I've thought of two things that could help.
One is to make half recipes whenever possible, which means fewer leftovers to store. The benefit of half recipes is that Paul and I won't be eating the same meal every day for a month. That's obviously an exaggeration, but sometimes it feels that way. I'm noticing that portion sizes in recipes, particularly from books written by restaurant chefs, are growing, just as they are in restaurants. So, a half recipe is about perfect for two meals.
The drawback to half recipes is that I'll have to cook more often. There will be less food I can freeze to reheat on busier days. I'm thinking of getting one of those food saving devices that vacuum seals the food. Then my freezer won't be filled up with packages that are half food and half air. I could fit more stuff in there.
The other thing I can do is to use some of my evening time for prep work. I'd rather just cook on the weekends, which is what I've done the two times I've tried achieving this goal. But since I don't have space to store a whole week's worth of food, I'm going to have to spread the cooking out more. I only go into the office three days a week--Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I do the rest of my work from home. Every other week I visit a woman from our church. I prefer to do that on Tuesdays and have Fridays for catching up with household chores. But, I think I'm going to have to change my visits to Fridays so I can have Tuesdays, and whatever time I can scrape out of the weekend, and maybe an hour or so occasionally in the evenings for advance prep work. Of course, the weeks I don't do the visit, I'll have Tuesdays and Fridays available. So maybe I could plan two weeks at a time and spread the work out so that the most time-consuming work is planned for the weeks I only have to go out three days.
Then there's the weekend schedule issue. This weekend, for example, I have a wedding Saturday afternoon and something scheduled Sunday morning, afternoon, and evening. And next weekend are two orchestra concerts, plus my usual Sunday church time. So, I'm going to have to schedule fairly simple food for next week. These types of scheduling issues crop up fairly regularly. It means I'm going to have to plan and use my time as efficiently as possible. That will be crucial if I'm going to combine the necessary everyday cooking with a special cooking project.
My Friday deadline for figuring out what my project will be may have to be put off. I found an interesting gizmo that I've ordered from Amazon. It may help me figure out what I want to do, so unless it gets here sooner than I expect, it will be next week before I choose what I'm going to do. On the other hand, it may end up being just a good research tool for the post on local eating that I started earlier today. I have to do some research before I can finish my other post, choose my project, and get a schedule going.
One of the things I'm trying to do is to make food when I have more time. Then do only the last minute stuff on the busy days. My biggest problem with that is that I have an apartment-sized refrigerator and freezer, which limits the amount of food I can store. People who have family-sized appliances don't know how lucky they are to have space for storing both ingredients and finished dishes. Upon considering the problem, I've thought of two things that could help.
One is to make half recipes whenever possible, which means fewer leftovers to store. The benefit of half recipes is that Paul and I won't be eating the same meal every day for a month. That's obviously an exaggeration, but sometimes it feels that way. I'm noticing that portion sizes in recipes, particularly from books written by restaurant chefs, are growing, just as they are in restaurants. So, a half recipe is about perfect for two meals.
The drawback to half recipes is that I'll have to cook more often. There will be less food I can freeze to reheat on busier days. I'm thinking of getting one of those food saving devices that vacuum seals the food. Then my freezer won't be filled up with packages that are half food and half air. I could fit more stuff in there.
The other thing I can do is to use some of my evening time for prep work. I'd rather just cook on the weekends, which is what I've done the two times I've tried achieving this goal. But since I don't have space to store a whole week's worth of food, I'm going to have to spread the cooking out more. I only go into the office three days a week--Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I do the rest of my work from home. Every other week I visit a woman from our church. I prefer to do that on Tuesdays and have Fridays for catching up with household chores. But, I think I'm going to have to change my visits to Fridays so I can have Tuesdays, and whatever time I can scrape out of the weekend, and maybe an hour or so occasionally in the evenings for advance prep work. Of course, the weeks I don't do the visit, I'll have Tuesdays and Fridays available. So maybe I could plan two weeks at a time and spread the work out so that the most time-consuming work is planned for the weeks I only have to go out three days.
Then there's the weekend schedule issue. This weekend, for example, I have a wedding Saturday afternoon and something scheduled Sunday morning, afternoon, and evening. And next weekend are two orchestra concerts, plus my usual Sunday church time. So, I'm going to have to schedule fairly simple food for next week. These types of scheduling issues crop up fairly regularly. It means I'm going to have to plan and use my time as efficiently as possible. That will be crucial if I'm going to combine the necessary everyday cooking with a special cooking project.
My Friday deadline for figuring out what my project will be may have to be put off. I found an interesting gizmo that I've ordered from Amazon. It may help me figure out what I want to do, so unless it gets here sooner than I expect, it will be next week before I choose what I'm going to do. On the other hand, it may end up being just a good research tool for the post on local eating that I started earlier today. I have to do some research before I can finish my other post, choose my project, and get a schedule going.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Back to Your Reglarly Scheduled Foodie Program
Now that the jeans rant is out of the way, back to food.
Last night I recreated a favorite meal from Left Bank Brasserie, located at Santana Row in San Jose. I really love their food and have always had a good experience at their restaurant.
One of my favorite things for brunch is the SALADE LYONNAISE: frisée, warm poached egg, bacon, mustard vinaigrette & FONDUE AU FROMAGE brie, blue and goat cheeses. That's the meal I decided to recreate last night.
The Weight Watcher thing means making adjustments to recipes re: portion sizes, how much fat and higher calorie ingredients I use, and so on. So I often add veggies to fill me up without adding extra calories. One of my favorite ways to do that is to make soup. A half cup is the perfect size to go with a meal. Last night I filled in with a Mushroom-Tarragon Soup.
For the meal itself, I used a very small amount of dressing on the salad, just enough to coat the frisee and give me the flavor I'm looking for. The bacon was thick sliced so I only used a half slice per serving. More would have overwhelmed the other flavors in the salad. I discovered that the eggs I buy, which are super fresh, are simple to poach. They are the first eggs I've poached that look like the pictures of poached eggs.
A quarter cup of the cheese fondue was plenty, maybe even too much. I served it with one slice of olive bread and steamed orange cauliflower. The olive bread went very well with the brie, roquefort, and goat cheese blend in the fondue. The cauliflower was wonderful with the cheese. The pale orange color looked good and cheese sauce really enhances the mild flavor of cauliflower.
The meal was easier than I thought it would be to make. After I test some changes, including the portion sizes, I'll post the recipes. I think a smaller serving of fondue and a half slice of bread, along with the cauliflower, would be enough food. I'd like to add some berries, peaches, or apricots to the meal. I think that would make it a more complete light meal.
Note on the lack of pictures: I need to get a better camera so I can take pictures for this blog. Bad food pictures are NOT better than no pictures. Trust me. I've seen blogs with bad food pictures and I never go back to the blog because bad photography makes the food look disgusting. But, I'm picky about photography, anyway. My dad was a professional and my oldest son, David, is also a photographer. So is Paul. When we were dating, we used to take our cameras and go on photo shoots. My family would give me grief if I posted bad food pictures, even if they never read it. And, since no one else is reading this blog, it doesn't really matter whether I post pictures right now, since I know what it looks like.
Last night I recreated a favorite meal from Left Bank Brasserie, located at Santana Row in San Jose. I really love their food and have always had a good experience at their restaurant.
One of my favorite things for brunch is the SALADE LYONNAISE: frisée, warm poached egg, bacon, mustard vinaigrette & FONDUE AU FROMAGE brie, blue and goat cheeses. That's the meal I decided to recreate last night.
The Weight Watcher thing means making adjustments to recipes re: portion sizes, how much fat and higher calorie ingredients I use, and so on. So I often add veggies to fill me up without adding extra calories. One of my favorite ways to do that is to make soup. A half cup is the perfect size to go with a meal. Last night I filled in with a Mushroom-Tarragon Soup.
For the meal itself, I used a very small amount of dressing on the salad, just enough to coat the frisee and give me the flavor I'm looking for. The bacon was thick sliced so I only used a half slice per serving. More would have overwhelmed the other flavors in the salad. I discovered that the eggs I buy, which are super fresh, are simple to poach. They are the first eggs I've poached that look like the pictures of poached eggs.
A quarter cup of the cheese fondue was plenty, maybe even too much. I served it with one slice of olive bread and steamed orange cauliflower. The olive bread went very well with the brie, roquefort, and goat cheese blend in the fondue. The cauliflower was wonderful with the cheese. The pale orange color looked good and cheese sauce really enhances the mild flavor of cauliflower.
The meal was easier than I thought it would be to make. After I test some changes, including the portion sizes, I'll post the recipes. I think a smaller serving of fondue and a half slice of bread, along with the cauliflower, would be enough food. I'd like to add some berries, peaches, or apricots to the meal. I think that would make it a more complete light meal.
Note on the lack of pictures: I need to get a better camera so I can take pictures for this blog. Bad food pictures are NOT better than no pictures. Trust me. I've seen blogs with bad food pictures and I never go back to the blog because bad photography makes the food look disgusting. But, I'm picky about photography, anyway. My dad was a professional and my oldest son, David, is also a photographer. So is Paul. When we were dating, we used to take our cameras and go on photo shoots. My family would give me grief if I posted bad food pictures, even if they never read it. And, since no one else is reading this blog, it doesn't really matter whether I post pictures right now, since I know what it looks like.
Jeans & Clothes--a little rant
I, like every other woman I know, hate buying jeans. As soon as you find some that fit, they stop making them. My problem: I cannot find jeans that sit properly at my waist and aren't too long. I can't wear petite sizes because the rise is too short. But I walk on the hems of average length jeans. And my new jeans fit perfectly, except they're too short in the back and my underwear sticks out the top.
And what's with the 'boot leg' jeans? I can't find straight leg jeans that have normal waists. They all fit below the waistline. Not a good look for me. Can you say "super muffin top"? I hate spending the kind of money they charge for clothes that don't fit or need mending after one wearing.
I have two shirts I need to buy buttons for because the buttons are too small for the buttonholes. So, they don't stay buttoned. I have one shirt that needs the facing ironed because it folds back in the wash. And the style has fabric hooks instead of buttonholes, so there's a gap and my stomach shows through. It's frustrating to dig out the iron for a 1" strip of fabric.
My consolation is that as I lose weight, these clothes will get too big and have to be replaced. Maybe with clothes that fit properly? Or maybe I'll have to buy a sewing machine and start making my own again. At least I can alter the patterns so they fit. And choose colors, fabrics, etc. that appeal to me, rather than being a compromise I've spent too much money on. If I really get ambitious, I could dig out my flat pattern design book and design some of my clothes from scratch. No time these day, but maybe in the future?
And what's with the 'boot leg' jeans? I can't find straight leg jeans that have normal waists. They all fit below the waistline. Not a good look for me. Can you say "super muffin top"? I hate spending the kind of money they charge for clothes that don't fit or need mending after one wearing.
I have two shirts I need to buy buttons for because the buttons are too small for the buttonholes. So, they don't stay buttoned. I have one shirt that needs the facing ironed because it folds back in the wash. And the style has fabric hooks instead of buttonholes, so there's a gap and my stomach shows through. It's frustrating to dig out the iron for a 1" strip of fabric.
My consolation is that as I lose weight, these clothes will get too big and have to be replaced. Maybe with clothes that fit properly? Or maybe I'll have to buy a sewing machine and start making my own again. At least I can alter the patterns so they fit. And choose colors, fabrics, etc. that appeal to me, rather than being a compromise I've spent too much money on. If I really get ambitious, I could dig out my flat pattern design book and design some of my clothes from scratch. No time these day, but maybe in the future?
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Suggestion from Paul & Musings
Paul had another suggestion that really surprised me. He suggested that rather than creating meals around the protein, I start with seasonal vegetables. Instead of saying, "We're having chicken. How do I want to cook it and what goes with it?", he suggested saying, "We're having asparagus. How do I want to cook it and what goes with it?" It's an interesting approach, especially since he's not suggesting going vegetarian, just thinking of the meat, fish, chicken, etc. as one of the "go withs" not the "main deal".
I like that suggestion because it will force me to think differently about how I cook, and that will get me to try new techniques and push myself to be a better cook. It surprised me that he made it, though, because when he gets a salad in a restaurant, he never finishes the lettuce. What he does is pick through for the "good stuff", which he defines as the chicken, shrimp, etc.--in other words, the protein. I'm wondering if maybe he's wanting a change.
I'm leaning toward doing a World Tour, cooking my way around the world. It could fit into Paul's suggestion, since so many of the world cuisines are based on beans, rice, vegetables, etc. And the variety is infinite, especially when you look at regional cuisine. I bet if I separated it into regional cuisine, I could cook a year's worth of cuisines, doing one a month, without leaving the United States (or any other country), which is yet another idea. This doesn't feel like a project with an end, though, unless I do something like exploring one cuisine a month for a year. Or maybe it would be better to do that as year two and revisit the basics for year one.
The world tour seems more interesting than the basics, but I can't help but think I need to go back to basics every so often and refine those techniques. Plus, there are some I've never really learned as well as I could because I don't use them often enough. On the other hand, cooking different cuisines from around the world will require learning the basics of those cuisines. Learning what ingredients define those cuisines and how to work with them and what they taste like and so on.
I see research in my future. But researching something I'm interested in is fun. The hard part is stopping the research. Once I start googling for stuff, time tends to slip away. I slip into "the zone" or "flow" or whatever you prefer to call it way too easily.
Hmmm....I see a foray into new restaurants, too, because that's the best way I can think of to taste food I'm unfamiliar with. The problem is knowing which restaurants have good examples of authentic cuisine from various places around the globe. I'm lucky to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I doubt it's possible to find a cuisine that you can't find a restaurant to go to or ingredients to use to cook it yourself. It's foodie heaven, which is probably one reason I love living here.
I like that suggestion because it will force me to think differently about how I cook, and that will get me to try new techniques and push myself to be a better cook. It surprised me that he made it, though, because when he gets a salad in a restaurant, he never finishes the lettuce. What he does is pick through for the "good stuff", which he defines as the chicken, shrimp, etc.--in other words, the protein. I'm wondering if maybe he's wanting a change.
I'm leaning toward doing a World Tour, cooking my way around the world. It could fit into Paul's suggestion, since so many of the world cuisines are based on beans, rice, vegetables, etc. And the variety is infinite, especially when you look at regional cuisine. I bet if I separated it into regional cuisine, I could cook a year's worth of cuisines, doing one a month, without leaving the United States (or any other country), which is yet another idea. This doesn't feel like a project with an end, though, unless I do something like exploring one cuisine a month for a year. Or maybe it would be better to do that as year two and revisit the basics for year one.
The world tour seems more interesting than the basics, but I can't help but think I need to go back to basics every so often and refine those techniques. Plus, there are some I've never really learned as well as I could because I don't use them often enough. On the other hand, cooking different cuisines from around the world will require learning the basics of those cuisines. Learning what ingredients define those cuisines and how to work with them and what they taste like and so on.
I see research in my future. But researching something I'm interested in is fun. The hard part is stopping the research. Once I start googling for stuff, time tends to slip away. I slip into "the zone" or "flow" or whatever you prefer to call it way too easily.
Hmmm....I see a foray into new restaurants, too, because that's the best way I can think of to taste food I'm unfamiliar with. The problem is knowing which restaurants have good examples of authentic cuisine from various places around the globe. I'm lucky to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I doubt it's possible to find a cuisine that you can't find a restaurant to go to or ingredients to use to cook it yourself. It's foodie heaven, which is probably one reason I love living here.
Friday, August 14, 2009
More on Julie/Julia
I've been trying really hard not to think badly of Julie Powell, the blogger who cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But it's kind of hard not to agree with Julia, who was quoted in this LA Times article as having said:
Case in point: I was reading Julie's blog and she complained about having to boil the bacon for a recipe. She said she did it because Julia said to, but she had no idea why. Well, if she'd bothered to read the chapter on Ingredients she'd have known that the bacon Julia was used to in France wasn't smoked and wasn't readily available in America. She recommended parboiling it to get the smoky taste out so the dish didn't taste only of bacon.
That kind of inattention to detail, which is something I noticed cropping up again and again as I read through Julie's book, is what I think made Julia respond the way she did. If you read My Life in France, you see that Julia takes an engineer's approach to her recipes. Everything was carefully thought out and tested over and over to make it repeatable and to ensure the cook gets the result she expects. Yet Julie kept making beginner mistakes like not reading through the recipe and I very much doubt she did her mise en place. I get the feeling that Julie is kind of a dabbler in cooking. She enjoys it, but lacks the passion Julia had. Any project that had a deadline to keep her motivated and was interesting enough to write about would have done.
The reason I'm choosing to pay more attention to my cooking and to trying to find a good cooking project is because I've been a passionate cook since I was a teenager. My mom wouldn't let me cook when I was a kid, unfortunately, because I've always been interested in food and cooking. I've never dug into it the way I'm thinking about doing now because of the weight thing. I had this niggling feeling in the back of my mind that if I really went for it as a cook, people would say that if I didn't cook, I'd be thin. And I didn't want to have more blame heaped on my head. I realize now that my fear is a stupid one. Neither has anything to do with the other. Great cooks come in all sizes. And without that issue to deal with, the question comes back to where to start?
"she just doesn't seem very serious, does she?
"I worked very hard on that book. I tested and retested those recipes for eight years so that everybody could cook them. And many, many people have. I don't understand how she could have problems with them. She just must not be much of a cook."
Case in point: I was reading Julie's blog and she complained about having to boil the bacon for a recipe. She said she did it because Julia said to, but she had no idea why. Well, if she'd bothered to read the chapter on Ingredients she'd have known that the bacon Julia was used to in France wasn't smoked and wasn't readily available in America. She recommended parboiling it to get the smoky taste out so the dish didn't taste only of bacon.
That kind of inattention to detail, which is something I noticed cropping up again and again as I read through Julie's book, is what I think made Julia respond the way she did. If you read My Life in France, you see that Julia takes an engineer's approach to her recipes. Everything was carefully thought out and tested over and over to make it repeatable and to ensure the cook gets the result she expects. Yet Julie kept making beginner mistakes like not reading through the recipe and I very much doubt she did her mise en place. I get the feeling that Julie is kind of a dabbler in cooking. She enjoys it, but lacks the passion Julia had. Any project that had a deadline to keep her motivated and was interesting enough to write about would have done.
The reason I'm choosing to pay more attention to my cooking and to trying to find a good cooking project is because I've been a passionate cook since I was a teenager. My mom wouldn't let me cook when I was a kid, unfortunately, because I've always been interested in food and cooking. I've never dug into it the way I'm thinking about doing now because of the weight thing. I had this niggling feeling in the back of my mind that if I really went for it as a cook, people would say that if I didn't cook, I'd be thin. And I didn't want to have more blame heaped on my head. I realize now that my fear is a stupid one. Neither has anything to do with the other. Great cooks come in all sizes. And without that issue to deal with, the question comes back to where to start?
Considering Ideas
I'm still considering ideas for some type of cooking project. Paul suggested a couple of things. He suggested I cook recipes from the cookbooks I have that were written by great chefs. There seems to be something missing in this idea. I can't figure out what I could do to flesh it out into something I could get excited about.
And he suggested I could focus on making recipes with lower fat and calorie content. He says I'm good at it. I'm always having problems with the recipes when magazines like Cooking Light or Eating Well or Weight Watchers recreate recipes. I know they're following the current health guidelines, but they insist on using food I call "fake ingredients". I'm not eating Jello sugar-free pudding made with nonfat milk and topped with fat free Cool Whip. I'd rather eat a fresh peach, plain.
Or the finished dish is so different from the original that the flavors aren't what the person who gave them the original were looking for. When I reduce the calories and fat in dishes, they're lower than the original, but usually not what you'd consider "diet food". This is something I'm doing a lot of these days, though, because I signed up for Weight Watchers online and have lost 13.5 pounds. (Go, me!)
The main problem with this as a project is that it doesn't really excite me as a fun project. And it doesn't really tie into my goal of learning to be a better cook. It uses my current skills in a different way. That's a good thing, but not what I'm after for this project. I think this one is more my everyday cooking life, not a special project.
Another thing I've been noticing about my cooking interests is that I've been cooking a lot more vegetarian meals these days. Good quality meat, poultry, and fish are not cheap meals anymore. So by cooking more vegetarian meals, I can stretch my budget. I'd rather eat top quality less often than poor quality every day. So maybe focusing on more variety in my vegetarian food would be a good project.
I read the New York Times health section on a regular basis. I love both Mark Bittman's blog and Martha Rose Schulman's healthy recipes. I have Mark Bittman's books. I've been looking for Martha's but apparently I'm going to have to buy them online. I could do their food, but it has the same problem as Paul's first idea. I can't figure out what that would do to improve my cooking skills, although it might give me ideas for new recipes.
I also would like to explore Asian cuisine more. I love to eat it, but am pretty unfamiliar with cooking it. I have a few Asian cookbooks, but I have no idea how authentic or good they are. I don't know how to choose Asian cookbooks that would be good for a student to learn from.
World cuisine is appealing to me. I love variety and trying new things. I have several international cookbooks. I could choose one cuisine I'm unfamiliar with every month or two and explore their food. That would be fun and definitely improve my skills as I try techniques unfamiliar to the food I've learned to make so far in my life.
See what I mean about having too many ideas? I've always been an idea person. It does me in every time because I can't choose one. Maybe I need to list pros and cons of each idea with regards to how they fit into my goal of cooking better. Then choose the one that fits the goal best.
I think I need to give myself a week to research and consider various ideas for my project. I'm going to pick one by next Friday. If I don't set myself a deadline, I'll dither for weeks and never get started on it.
Meantime, I need to go start the tomatoes I'm roasting. Tom Colicchio's recipe takes three to four hours to do properly. Today I don't need to bake bread, so I can use my oven for the tomatoes without worrying that the bread will need to go into the oven. I'm planning to use the tomatoes to make a black bean and roasted green tomato chili. I'm roasting pasillas and jalapeños with the tomatoes. We'll see how the whole thing turns out.
And he suggested I could focus on making recipes with lower fat and calorie content. He says I'm good at it. I'm always having problems with the recipes when magazines like Cooking Light or Eating Well or Weight Watchers recreate recipes. I know they're following the current health guidelines, but they insist on using food I call "fake ingredients". I'm not eating Jello sugar-free pudding made with nonfat milk and topped with fat free Cool Whip. I'd rather eat a fresh peach, plain.
Or the finished dish is so different from the original that the flavors aren't what the person who gave them the original were looking for. When I reduce the calories and fat in dishes, they're lower than the original, but usually not what you'd consider "diet food". This is something I'm doing a lot of these days, though, because I signed up for Weight Watchers online and have lost 13.5 pounds. (Go, me!)
The main problem with this as a project is that it doesn't really excite me as a fun project. And it doesn't really tie into my goal of learning to be a better cook. It uses my current skills in a different way. That's a good thing, but not what I'm after for this project. I think this one is more my everyday cooking life, not a special project.
Another thing I've been noticing about my cooking interests is that I've been cooking a lot more vegetarian meals these days. Good quality meat, poultry, and fish are not cheap meals anymore. So by cooking more vegetarian meals, I can stretch my budget. I'd rather eat top quality less often than poor quality every day. So maybe focusing on more variety in my vegetarian food would be a good project.
I read the New York Times health section on a regular basis. I love both Mark Bittman's blog and Martha Rose Schulman's healthy recipes. I have Mark Bittman's books. I've been looking for Martha's but apparently I'm going to have to buy them online. I could do their food, but it has the same problem as Paul's first idea. I can't figure out what that would do to improve my cooking skills, although it might give me ideas for new recipes.
I also would like to explore Asian cuisine more. I love to eat it, but am pretty unfamiliar with cooking it. I have a few Asian cookbooks, but I have no idea how authentic or good they are. I don't know how to choose Asian cookbooks that would be good for a student to learn from.
World cuisine is appealing to me. I love variety and trying new things. I have several international cookbooks. I could choose one cuisine I'm unfamiliar with every month or two and explore their food. That would be fun and definitely improve my skills as I try techniques unfamiliar to the food I've learned to make so far in my life.
See what I mean about having too many ideas? I've always been an idea person. It does me in every time because I can't choose one. Maybe I need to list pros and cons of each idea with regards to how they fit into my goal of cooking better. Then choose the one that fits the goal best.
I think I need to give myself a week to research and consider various ideas for my project. I'm going to pick one by next Friday. If I don't set myself a deadline, I'll dither for weeks and never get started on it.
Meantime, I need to go start the tomatoes I'm roasting. Tom Colicchio's recipe takes three to four hours to do properly. Today I don't need to bake bread, so I can use my oven for the tomatoes without worrying that the bread will need to go into the oven. I'm planning to use the tomatoes to make a black bean and roasted green tomato chili. I'm roasting pasillas and jalapeños with the tomatoes. We'll see how the whole thing turns out.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Julie/Julia & Foodie Me
I've been very foodie lately. I know, what else is new? I read Julie/Julia during the past couple of weeks. I also read Tom Colicchio's How to Think Like a Chef. And I'm reading My Life in France by Julia Child. I saw the film Julie & Julia last weekend.
The main thing I came away with from the books and film is that Julia is more interesting to me than Julie. And as good a cook as I am, I still have a lot to learn. I feel very frustrated because I don't know how to learn it. I could cook my way through the cookbooks of the best chefs. I can cook their recipes as many times as it takes until I'm satisfied with the results. But that only will tell me if I like it. It doesn't tell me whether they'd think I've got it right.
I want to be Julia Child, in a way, because she had the food career I've wanted from the time I figured out what brings out the passion in my foodie side. I've always wished I could be good enough to teach cooking and have my cooking taken seriously enough to sell cookbooks.
What I lack, first of all, is credentials. I could never afford cooking school and I didn't & don't want to cook in restaurants. My thing isn't cooking the same thing, exactly the same way, day after day, so customers get the same experience no matter how many times they eat in your place. That's what a restaurant chef does.
My thing is making great food for people. I love cooking for friends and family. I love creating recipes and honing them until they're just right. I love figuring out the best words to use to communicate how I made something to other people so they can make it, too.
Another thing I lack is a budget that would allow me to make a recipe over and over until it's just right, even if I end up with more than we can eat or have to toss some because they're awful. That limits my creativity. I can't take the chance that something I think might work doesn't and has to be thrown away.
The third thing I lack is large blocks of time in which to work in the kitchen. I'm thinking I could probably find some blocks of time I could use to work on a regular basis, if not every day. But that doesn't solve the other two problems.
Since I can't teach or write cookbooks right now, I'll take a cue from how Julia handled difficult situations. She did what she could without whining. So, I'll do the thing I can do. I can work on getting better at cooking the best way I know how--by cooking, but in a more scructured way than I usually approach the subject. I think what will work best is to set specific goals geared toward improving my skills, rather than just cooking what I'm in the mood for right now. As for my other two issues, I think I can manage the budget by adjusting my priorities and choices. As for not having teachers or going to cooking school, I guess I'll just have to trust my own instincts. I learned a lot from the chefs when I worked at HomeChef and I'll have to trust that I developed good enough instincts to know when it's right.
The difficult aspect of this idea for me is figuring out where to start. I'm, as usual, full of too many ideas. I don't know whether to dig out my technique books and cook my way through the basic stocks and sauces and so on or pick something I've always wanted to be able to make and try different people's versions until I feel I've mastered it or pick variations of interesting recipes and figure out my favorite. Or maybe there's some other approach I can use, if only I could figure out what it is. Whatever I choose, when I'm satisfied with the result, I want to create variations of the recipes because I can't leave a recipe alone. Ask my family who always complains that I never cook a recipe the same way twice. Not true, by the way. I cook my favorites the same way and then they complain I don't cook them often enough because I love variety.
If anyone's reading this, I wouldn't object to suggestions as to an approach to take. If you make a suggestion and I love it, it will give me a starting point. If I hate it, at least I'll know where I don't want to start.
The main thing I came away with from the books and film is that Julia is more interesting to me than Julie. And as good a cook as I am, I still have a lot to learn. I feel very frustrated because I don't know how to learn it. I could cook my way through the cookbooks of the best chefs. I can cook their recipes as many times as it takes until I'm satisfied with the results. But that only will tell me if I like it. It doesn't tell me whether they'd think I've got it right.
I want to be Julia Child, in a way, because she had the food career I've wanted from the time I figured out what brings out the passion in my foodie side. I've always wished I could be good enough to teach cooking and have my cooking taken seriously enough to sell cookbooks.
What I lack, first of all, is credentials. I could never afford cooking school and I didn't & don't want to cook in restaurants. My thing isn't cooking the same thing, exactly the same way, day after day, so customers get the same experience no matter how many times they eat in your place. That's what a restaurant chef does.
My thing is making great food for people. I love cooking for friends and family. I love creating recipes and honing them until they're just right. I love figuring out the best words to use to communicate how I made something to other people so they can make it, too.
Another thing I lack is a budget that would allow me to make a recipe over and over until it's just right, even if I end up with more than we can eat or have to toss some because they're awful. That limits my creativity. I can't take the chance that something I think might work doesn't and has to be thrown away.
The third thing I lack is large blocks of time in which to work in the kitchen. I'm thinking I could probably find some blocks of time I could use to work on a regular basis, if not every day. But that doesn't solve the other two problems.
Since I can't teach or write cookbooks right now, I'll take a cue from how Julia handled difficult situations. She did what she could without whining. So, I'll do the thing I can do. I can work on getting better at cooking the best way I know how--by cooking, but in a more scructured way than I usually approach the subject. I think what will work best is to set specific goals geared toward improving my skills, rather than just cooking what I'm in the mood for right now. As for my other two issues, I think I can manage the budget by adjusting my priorities and choices. As for not having teachers or going to cooking school, I guess I'll just have to trust my own instincts. I learned a lot from the chefs when I worked at HomeChef and I'll have to trust that I developed good enough instincts to know when it's right.
The difficult aspect of this idea for me is figuring out where to start. I'm, as usual, full of too many ideas. I don't know whether to dig out my technique books and cook my way through the basic stocks and sauces and so on or pick something I've always wanted to be able to make and try different people's versions until I feel I've mastered it or pick variations of interesting recipes and figure out my favorite. Or maybe there's some other approach I can use, if only I could figure out what it is. Whatever I choose, when I'm satisfied with the result, I want to create variations of the recipes because I can't leave a recipe alone. Ask my family who always complains that I never cook a recipe the same way twice. Not true, by the way. I cook my favorites the same way and then they complain I don't cook them often enough because I love variety.
If anyone's reading this, I wouldn't object to suggestions as to an approach to take. If you make a suggestion and I love it, it will give me a starting point. If I hate it, at least I'll know where I don't want to start.
Monday, October 13, 2008
A Pasta Recipe
I made a pasta dish last night that was mostly stuff I had in the cupboards and thought I'd share. It doesn't have a name because it's just something I threw together for dinner.
I took a cup of dried fava beans cooked and drained them. I cooked whole wheat spaghetti. I sauteed sliced onions, reconstituted dried mushrooms, a sliced zucchini, some sun-dried tomatoes, sliced roasted red and yellow bell peppers and some garlic. I put in about a quarter cup of water and covered the pan with a lid. I let it cook for a few minutes, just to soften the zucchini a bit more. I dumped in the beans and a bunch of fresh spinach leaves. I stirred it until the beans were reheated and the spinach was wilted and hot. I seasoned it with salt and pepper. I tossed the spaghetti with enough olive oil to keep it from sticking, a bit of salt and pepper and served it with the vegetables poured over the top of each serving. I topped each serving with a bit of crumbled Feta cheese.
It was really good and really filling. And that's my favorite type of cooking--just pull stuff out of the cupboard and cook it.
I've been discovering dried beans lately. Canned are convenient, but dried taste better. I'm still getting a feel for when they're done. I sometimes don't check them often enough and they get mushy. I use those for things like bean cakes and refried beans that require you to smush the beans into a paste.
The cool thing is that you can get heirloom beans now. I've tried a variety called Red Calypso that's colored red and white. I used them with a blend of black and mahogany rice in a "red beans and rice" dish. I bought some called Eye of the Goat that are light brown with chocolate-colored swirls. I haven't tried them yet. I'm still trying to figure out what type of recipe will show them off well.
I suspect, when I get time to write, I'll be writing more about food I've been eating, since I've been sort of on a kick of trying new things. I found some rice that has been colored green with bamboo juice. It intrigued me, so we'll see how that tastes.
Mangia!
I took a cup of dried fava beans cooked and drained them. I cooked whole wheat spaghetti. I sauteed sliced onions, reconstituted dried mushrooms, a sliced zucchini, some sun-dried tomatoes, sliced roasted red and yellow bell peppers and some garlic. I put in about a quarter cup of water and covered the pan with a lid. I let it cook for a few minutes, just to soften the zucchini a bit more. I dumped in the beans and a bunch of fresh spinach leaves. I stirred it until the beans were reheated and the spinach was wilted and hot. I seasoned it with salt and pepper. I tossed the spaghetti with enough olive oil to keep it from sticking, a bit of salt and pepper and served it with the vegetables poured over the top of each serving. I topped each serving with a bit of crumbled Feta cheese.
It was really good and really filling. And that's my favorite type of cooking--just pull stuff out of the cupboard and cook it.
I've been discovering dried beans lately. Canned are convenient, but dried taste better. I'm still getting a feel for when they're done. I sometimes don't check them often enough and they get mushy. I use those for things like bean cakes and refried beans that require you to smush the beans into a paste.
The cool thing is that you can get heirloom beans now. I've tried a variety called Red Calypso that's colored red and white. I used them with a blend of black and mahogany rice in a "red beans and rice" dish. I bought some called Eye of the Goat that are light brown with chocolate-colored swirls. I haven't tried them yet. I'm still trying to figure out what type of recipe will show them off well.
I suspect, when I get time to write, I'll be writing more about food I've been eating, since I've been sort of on a kick of trying new things. I found some rice that has been colored green with bamboo juice. It intrigued me, so we'll see how that tastes.
Mangia!
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Blogging and Stuff
I read a story in the news today. The world's oldest blogger died recently. She was an Australian woman who lived to 108 years old. I'd love to live that long and have enough brain power left to write this blog. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed blogging when I wrote more often until that story made me think about my blog, and made me want to write something in it.
I often wish I could do without a few hours of sleep. I envy my cousin who regularly runs on 5 hours sleep a night and she's not sleep-deprived. It's her natural biological rhythm. I'd do all my stuff that has to be done in the daytime and use those late night hours for writing, reading, and other creative projects because I'm at my most creative between 10 pm and 2 am. So, why am I writing this blog in my least creative time--early morning? Because it's when I can spare a few moments.
The rest of the day I need to spend working on three projects for work, finishing the homework assignment that's due today, practicing the music for Ladyesong and Funtimes Singers, and planning and buying next week's groceries. The homework is for my Dreamweaver class. The music is for Saratoga's American Cancer Society's annual Relay for Life fundraiser they do every summer. STOCtet sang forCampbell's Relay for Life last Saturday. Saratoga and Campbell are local small towns you probably won't have heard of unless you're familiar with the San Jose area.
So, I've looked at my busyness, and while it seems to be a symptom of contemporary life to be busy, I take it to an extreme. I realized the other day while talking with a friend at church that I always book myself to the limit because if I don't, I get bored. If I get bored, I start acting like a depressed person who doesn't want to do anything. And it's not depression--it's boredom. Once I figured out that my brain craves exercise, challenges, and so on, it became easier to figure out how to live my life.
It's also one of the reasons I have so much trouble with the routine, and totally boring, chores in life. I overbook myself so I don't have time to do them because boredom is my brain's worst enemy. But, if I have challenging intellectual work, to do, I'm more tolerant of the chores. And if I don't have to spend hours on chores, I tolerate them better.
If you read my blog earlier this year, you know I made a stab at following the Fly Lady's advice. It didn't work well for me, but I include a link because it does work well for a lot of people. I've been considering this problem a lot over the last few months. I think I may have a solution for the boring, routine chores of life. I could do 15 minutes of chores out of every hour I spend on the more interesting things I do. If I write out a plan for my chores, I can make sure I rotate them so everything gets done regularly and often enough to keep the health department at bay. 15 minutes doesn't sound like much time, but I live in a tiny apartment. I can get a lot done in a 15-minutes slot. Plus, those 15 minutes add up to an hour or two over the course of a day.
Of course, there's always option 2--plan a dinner party. If we have a dinner party, my ever-patient husband cleans the house so I can focus on the meal. I'd much rather spend my time planning and cooking a superb meal. Unfortunately, our budget and my aging body can't handle too many of those.
I'm reading Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. It's going slowly because I have such limited reading time, but I'm really enjoying it. I'm enjoying reading again. I'd pretty much given that up, too, because I was too busy. I have a list of things I want to get back into my life and I'm slowly managing to do it. I realized that I have more time than I think, but I have to accommodate my brain's quirks--it's need for challenges, for musing time--to let the creative projects simmer, and for exploring the rest of the world--refilling the well. If I don't do that, nothing gets done. If I do, lots gets done.
The length of this post tells me I do need to blog more often. I really enjoy it and will continue my efforts to write more often.
I often wish I could do without a few hours of sleep. I envy my cousin who regularly runs on 5 hours sleep a night and she's not sleep-deprived. It's her natural biological rhythm. I'd do all my stuff that has to be done in the daytime and use those late night hours for writing, reading, and other creative projects because I'm at my most creative between 10 pm and 2 am. So, why am I writing this blog in my least creative time--early morning? Because it's when I can spare a few moments.
The rest of the day I need to spend working on three projects for work, finishing the homework assignment that's due today, practicing the music for Ladyesong and Funtimes Singers, and planning and buying next week's groceries. The homework is for my Dreamweaver class. The music is for Saratoga's American Cancer Society's annual Relay for Life fundraiser they do every summer. STOCtet sang forCampbell's Relay for Life last Saturday. Saratoga and Campbell are local small towns you probably won't have heard of unless you're familiar with the San Jose area.
So, I've looked at my busyness, and while it seems to be a symptom of contemporary life to be busy, I take it to an extreme. I realized the other day while talking with a friend at church that I always book myself to the limit because if I don't, I get bored. If I get bored, I start acting like a depressed person who doesn't want to do anything. And it's not depression--it's boredom. Once I figured out that my brain craves exercise, challenges, and so on, it became easier to figure out how to live my life.
It's also one of the reasons I have so much trouble with the routine, and totally boring, chores in life. I overbook myself so I don't have time to do them because boredom is my brain's worst enemy. But, if I have challenging intellectual work, to do, I'm more tolerant of the chores. And if I don't have to spend hours on chores, I tolerate them better.
If you read my blog earlier this year, you know I made a stab at following the Fly Lady's advice. It didn't work well for me, but I include a link because it does work well for a lot of people. I've been considering this problem a lot over the last few months. I think I may have a solution for the boring, routine chores of life. I could do 15 minutes of chores out of every hour I spend on the more interesting things I do. If I write out a plan for my chores, I can make sure I rotate them so everything gets done regularly and often enough to keep the health department at bay. 15 minutes doesn't sound like much time, but I live in a tiny apartment. I can get a lot done in a 15-minutes slot. Plus, those 15 minutes add up to an hour or two over the course of a day.
Of course, there's always option 2--plan a dinner party. If we have a dinner party, my ever-patient husband cleans the house so I can focus on the meal. I'd much rather spend my time planning and cooking a superb meal. Unfortunately, our budget and my aging body can't handle too many of those.
I'm reading Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. It's going slowly because I have such limited reading time, but I'm really enjoying it. I'm enjoying reading again. I'd pretty much given that up, too, because I was too busy. I have a list of things I want to get back into my life and I'm slowly managing to do it. I realized that I have more time than I think, but I have to accommodate my brain's quirks--it's need for challenges, for musing time--to let the creative projects simmer, and for exploring the rest of the world--refilling the well. If I don't do that, nothing gets done. If I do, lots gets done.
The length of this post tells me I do need to blog more often. I really enjoy it and will continue my efforts to write more often.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday, America.
Happy Birthday, Guys!
All of the guys in my family have summer birthdays. This year, we celebrated them all on America's birthday. We had a great time!
My blog has been on the back burner these past few months. I had to reformat my hard drive and reload everything, so it's taken me a while to get back to having even a few minutes to blog. I'm glad Google doesn't delete inactive blogs because I'd like to start writing in here again, now that I've got a working computer.
I'm taking a class in Dreamweaver. It's step one in my plan to finish that web development degree I started back in 2000. I'm hoping to take over the orchestra web site soon and to start a part-time business creating and maintaining web sites for small businesses. I see so many awful sites done by people who decided that HTML is easy and they can do it themselves, but they have no design skills. Doing an effective web site is about so much more than coding HTML. That's a rant for some other time, though.
Anyway, I'm planning to blog regularly, which I keep saying, but not doing. I doubt I'll be writing anywhere near daily, but maybe once a week or every other week. I really do enjoy doing this. I miss writing fiction, too, and want to start writing regularly again, even if it's not for extended periods of time. An online buddy, Holly Lisle, is a published author and extraordinary teacher. She has some online courses that a lot of people find helpful. I'm going to start my quest to write fiction again by doing some of her courses, particularly the one about writing when your life is falling apart. Here's a link to her web site, which has links to her free articles and her shop where you can buy her courses, if you're interested in learning a lot about writing.
Happy Birthday, America.
Happy Birthday, Guys!
All of the guys in my family have summer birthdays. This year, we celebrated them all on America's birthday. We had a great time!
My blog has been on the back burner these past few months. I had to reformat my hard drive and reload everything, so it's taken me a while to get back to having even a few minutes to blog. I'm glad Google doesn't delete inactive blogs because I'd like to start writing in here again, now that I've got a working computer.
I'm taking a class in Dreamweaver. It's step one in my plan to finish that web development degree I started back in 2000. I'm hoping to take over the orchestra web site soon and to start a part-time business creating and maintaining web sites for small businesses. I see so many awful sites done by people who decided that HTML is easy and they can do it themselves, but they have no design skills. Doing an effective web site is about so much more than coding HTML. That's a rant for some other time, though.
Anyway, I'm planning to blog regularly, which I keep saying, but not doing. I doubt I'll be writing anywhere near daily, but maybe once a week or every other week. I really do enjoy doing this. I miss writing fiction, too, and want to start writing regularly again, even if it's not for extended periods of time. An online buddy, Holly Lisle, is a published author and extraordinary teacher. She has some online courses that a lot of people find helpful. I'm going to start my quest to write fiction again by doing some of her courses, particularly the one about writing when your life is falling apart. Here's a link to her web site, which has links to her free articles and her shop where you can buy her courses, if you're interested in learning a lot about writing.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Closing Doors
"The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors" by John Tierney of the New York Times. (By now, it's possible that you have to register in order to read the original article.)
He starts out discussing a Chinese general who took his army into battle and set things up so they couldn't retreat. They had to win or die. Dan Aierly had written a book, "Predictably Irrational", that spawned Tierney's column. Aierly did some expirements at MIT, where he's a professor of behavioral economics, that showed people's penchant for "keeping their options open", even when it's clearly in their best interest to close some doors.
Apparently, this is about having that feeling of loss. It's a feeling people will do just about anything to avoid. So, we don't break off bad relationships. We hang on to our stuff "because it might come in handy someday" or "as soon as I throw it out, I'll need it." Sometimes doors close so slowly we don't see that in our rush to keep all options open, we can pay a huge price. Airely's example is working long hours while your children's childhood slowly slips away. Those hours you might have spent with your kids can't be regained, so that's a closing door.
Speaking of work, choosing a career has major closed doors. If you choose one, you're giving up others. I know a lot of people, often super creative people, who can't pick one art to focus on. They write, paint, and make music. They don't make progress into making money at any of them because they don't put enough practice time into any one to get good enough at it to make a living. Or people like me who love and are curious about tons of stuff, so we take classes and learn about them. After a while we get bored with that subject and move on to something else. Barbara Sher talks about that phenomenon in her book about Scanners. I've found several things I'd love to cobble together into income-producing work, but I haven't figured out how to connect them yet. Maybe I never will get them all going, but maybe I can work enough of them so I don't get bored and quit before I make any actual cash.
This phenomenon is also why people like the Sidetracked Sisters and the Fly Lady got their jobs. They're helping people deal with the doors closed by being unable to get rid of excess stuff. They call one door "CHAOS"--Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. Excess stuff also causes you to waste enormous amounts of time looking for things. Your budget takes a hit if you go out to dinner because you didn't have time to do yesterday's dishes because you were looking for stuff or otherwise dealing with clutter. Or you pay late fees because you couldn't find your bills to pay them on time. And so on.
It's interesting how much of it isn't the stuff itself. It's the emotion attached to the stuff that causes the problem. Examples might be: sentimental feelings because "it's a family heirloom". Or getting rid of it means a dream absolutely won't happen, such as selling a musical instrument you haven't touched since high school, thus giving up any dreams of being a musician. Or you feel guilty because you bought the wrong whatever, often clothing items, and you feel like you're throwing money away if you don't keep them. So you plan to wear or use the stuff and don't follow the plan because you really don't like or want or need this stuff.
Ditto for the career choices. You don't want to give up all of your choices in order to pursue one, so you don't pursue any. You "keep your options open", but spend years in nowhere, dead-end jobs that don't cover the rent, let alone all of your expenses. Or you don't focus on one art, so you scatter your attention among lots of things. Then you never make enough money to give up the day job, and even if it's paying your way just fine, you hate it and yourself because you want to work at your art full-time but can't afford it.
The conclusion is that sometimes we need to close doors. Aierly talks about one door most people close and how they do it. He says when we marry, we close the doors to other relationships. We do it by telling other people we're making that choice. That public statement is one of the main ways we use to help us close that door. But this idea shows why the commitment-phobes have the problem. They can't face the loss of a possibly better someone they might meet in the future. So they refuse to close that door and commit to one relationship.
Airely says that those social connections can help us with other doors, too. I've seen that in the Fly Lady phenomenon. People write to her about how following her advice and flinging out the stuff has helped their lives. By writing, they're making public their commitment to getting rid of stuff they don't use and don't love. Making it public makes it easier to do. But he says he struggles with it himself. After all, he's human, too.
Obviously, recognizing the problem is one thing. It's pretty easy to see it and it's effect on your life. But it's often hard to change because we don't want to deal with the feelings of loss. Sometimes, after reading yet another story of how much junk people's parents left for their kids to deal with after their deaths, I wonder if the incredible personal losses of friends and family that pile up on us as we get older isn't partly behind that phenomenon. Some elderly people cling to their stuff because it's something they can keep from leaving them, unlike their friends and relatives who are dying. I suppose this thought, at least in part, comes from having attended more funerals in the past year than in my whole life up to now.
I'm not sure exactly how to deal with this phenomenon in my own life. So much of the stuff we were looking forward to using again after we moved out of my mother's house was destroyed and I greived, not over the stuff, but over the loss of the life I was looking forward to. We've gradually rebuilt a lot of that life and so I'm feeling more comfortable with sorting and weeding out the rest of the stuff in our boxes. I can see, though, that the clutter in all areas of our lives, not just "stuff clutter" is one result of not being willing to close doors. And that clutter keeps us from clearly seeing what will bring the most joy to our lives. Until we clear the clutter so we can see what will bring us joy, we can't figure out how to bring that joy into our lives.
He starts out discussing a Chinese general who took his army into battle and set things up so they couldn't retreat. They had to win or die. Dan Aierly had written a book, "Predictably Irrational", that spawned Tierney's column. Aierly did some expirements at MIT, where he's a professor of behavioral economics, that showed people's penchant for "keeping their options open", even when it's clearly in their best interest to close some doors.
Apparently, this is about having that feeling of loss. It's a feeling people will do just about anything to avoid. So, we don't break off bad relationships. We hang on to our stuff "because it might come in handy someday" or "as soon as I throw it out, I'll need it." Sometimes doors close so slowly we don't see that in our rush to keep all options open, we can pay a huge price. Airely's example is working long hours while your children's childhood slowly slips away. Those hours you might have spent with your kids can't be regained, so that's a closing door.
Speaking of work, choosing a career has major closed doors. If you choose one, you're giving up others. I know a lot of people, often super creative people, who can't pick one art to focus on. They write, paint, and make music. They don't make progress into making money at any of them because they don't put enough practice time into any one to get good enough at it to make a living. Or people like me who love and are curious about tons of stuff, so we take classes and learn about them. After a while we get bored with that subject and move on to something else. Barbara Sher talks about that phenomenon in her book about Scanners. I've found several things I'd love to cobble together into income-producing work, but I haven't figured out how to connect them yet. Maybe I never will get them all going, but maybe I can work enough of them so I don't get bored and quit before I make any actual cash.
This phenomenon is also why people like the Sidetracked Sisters and the Fly Lady got their jobs. They're helping people deal with the doors closed by being unable to get rid of excess stuff. They call one door "CHAOS"--Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. Excess stuff also causes you to waste enormous amounts of time looking for things. Your budget takes a hit if you go out to dinner because you didn't have time to do yesterday's dishes because you were looking for stuff or otherwise dealing with clutter. Or you pay late fees because you couldn't find your bills to pay them on time. And so on.
It's interesting how much of it isn't the stuff itself. It's the emotion attached to the stuff that causes the problem. Examples might be: sentimental feelings because "it's a family heirloom". Or getting rid of it means a dream absolutely won't happen, such as selling a musical instrument you haven't touched since high school, thus giving up any dreams of being a musician. Or you feel guilty because you bought the wrong whatever, often clothing items, and you feel like you're throwing money away if you don't keep them. So you plan to wear or use the stuff and don't follow the plan because you really don't like or want or need this stuff.
Ditto for the career choices. You don't want to give up all of your choices in order to pursue one, so you don't pursue any. You "keep your options open", but spend years in nowhere, dead-end jobs that don't cover the rent, let alone all of your expenses. Or you don't focus on one art, so you scatter your attention among lots of things. Then you never make enough money to give up the day job, and even if it's paying your way just fine, you hate it and yourself because you want to work at your art full-time but can't afford it.
The conclusion is that sometimes we need to close doors. Aierly talks about one door most people close and how they do it. He says when we marry, we close the doors to other relationships. We do it by telling other people we're making that choice. That public statement is one of the main ways we use to help us close that door. But this idea shows why the commitment-phobes have the problem. They can't face the loss of a possibly better someone they might meet in the future. So they refuse to close that door and commit to one relationship.
Airely says that those social connections can help us with other doors, too. I've seen that in the Fly Lady phenomenon. People write to her about how following her advice and flinging out the stuff has helped their lives. By writing, they're making public their commitment to getting rid of stuff they don't use and don't love. Making it public makes it easier to do. But he says he struggles with it himself. After all, he's human, too.
Obviously, recognizing the problem is one thing. It's pretty easy to see it and it's effect on your life. But it's often hard to change because we don't want to deal with the feelings of loss. Sometimes, after reading yet another story of how much junk people's parents left for their kids to deal with after their deaths, I wonder if the incredible personal losses of friends and family that pile up on us as we get older isn't partly behind that phenomenon. Some elderly people cling to their stuff because it's something they can keep from leaving them, unlike their friends and relatives who are dying. I suppose this thought, at least in part, comes from having attended more funerals in the past year than in my whole life up to now.
I'm not sure exactly how to deal with this phenomenon in my own life. So much of the stuff we were looking forward to using again after we moved out of my mother's house was destroyed and I greived, not over the stuff, but over the loss of the life I was looking forward to. We've gradually rebuilt a lot of that life and so I'm feeling more comfortable with sorting and weeding out the rest of the stuff in our boxes. I can see, though, that the clutter in all areas of our lives, not just "stuff clutter" is one result of not being willing to close doors. And that clutter keeps us from clearly seeing what will bring the most joy to our lives. Until we clear the clutter so we can see what will bring us joy, we can't figure out how to bring that joy into our lives.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
March, so far
My life is a zoo, but if you read this blog very often you know that. I have a couple of things I want to blog about, but haven't had time to write them up. Today, my husband and I are taking a day off from chores and everything except the concert tonight. The concert is the best part of my job. I get to hear such amazing music.
I've started an essay, but it needs super editing before it's ready to post. I need to let it simmer in my head a bit, so I'll finish it soon and post it. It's about the idea that we're so reluctant to close any doors, give up any options in our lives, that we often pay huge prices in our lives in order to avoid giving up an option, or even, in some cases, just getting rid of some types of trash.
I've started an essay, but it needs super editing before it's ready to post. I need to let it simmer in my head a bit, so I'll finish it soon and post it. It's about the idea that we're so reluctant to close any doors, give up any options in our lives, that we often pay huge prices in our lives in order to avoid giving up an option, or even, in some cases, just getting rid of some types of trash.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Some Thoughts on Food
I recently read Michael Pollan's books, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. The first book is about where our food comes from. He discusses where the ingredients that make up four different meals came from. It's an interesting background to the second book, in which he discusses what he thinks we ought to eat. On the cover is a picture of red Romaine lettuce and it has a yellow band around it with his concise conclusion: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Defining this phrase and discussing how to implement it is the major goal of the book. In discussing the part: "Eat food" he makes a comment about how to decide if what you're eating actually IS food. One rule of thumb he talks about is whether your great grandmother would recognize it. A trip to the local grocery store, part of one of the major national chains was an interesting experience in light of what I'd been reading.
One thing you often read is to "stick to the perimeter of the store". You'd think this is good advice. That's where the produce, dairy, and meat is. But is pre-marinated, ready-to-cook meat still real food? How should I know? I have no idea what they put in their marinade. What about "fat free half and half", a product found in the dairy section? Or the "Grapple"--apples somehow flavored with "real and artificial grape flavorings"? Would my great-grandmother recognize any of these? And, if I stick to the perimeter of one of my favorite stores, I'd have to eliminate a lot of food from my diet--beans, rice, pasta, baking ingredients and breads. Then there's the vegetables. Some canned and frozen vegetables are well worth eating, and are pretty nutritious, too. Canned tomatoes, pumpkin puree, canned beans and frozen baby onions are good examples.
That trip to the store, along with what I'd been reading, got me thinking--a lot.
I started to wonder what my great-grandmothers would have fed their families. I know nothing about my great-grandparents on my dad's side of the family, so that leaves my Calabrian great-grandparent's food to use as a guage. I googled.
I discovered that my great-grandparents ate a variation on the much-touted Mediterranean diet. However, they ate a lot of pork, something we don't think of as being a part of that diet. They ate lots of fish, since Calabria is the toe of the boot--right on the Mediterranean Sea. The region produces 25% of Itailan olive oil, so olive oil and olives would have been a big part of their diet. They ate a lot of pasta and polenta. Vegetables were a major part of their diet, too, particularly eggplants and tomatoes. Their food was spicy, using lots of peppers. Butter and cheese were also a part of their diet. Desserts were mainly fresh fruit, particularly citrus and figs. Today they grow a lot of clementines, a variety of orange. They made fancy desserts mainly for special occasions such as weddings and Christmas holidays. Breakfast was often biscotti and coffee. Cappuccino is a breakfast beverage. I didn't see any references to alcoholic beverages except for wine, which is another thing this region produces.
Family meals consisted of a first course--mainly soups, pasta or a rice dish. The second course is either a small meat or fish dish, accompanied by a side dish, usually vegetables. Here, the Italians veer away from what we Americans are familiar with--they eat their salad after the main course, to cleanse the palate before dessert. I remember that from my childhood. My grandfather always ate his salad at the end of the meal. The last course is usually fruit, fresh and cold, or dried fruits with nuts. Celebratory meals would add a starter course of antipasti and a final course of a fancier small dessert. Meals end with coffee, usually espresso.
That's what my great-grandmothers were feeding their families. It's a pretty healthy way to eat, according to current nutritional wisdom. The nutritionists might think it's a bit high in fat, what with all that pork and full-fat dairy. But they didn't eat large portions of those foods. They mostly ate vegetables, which is exactly what Michael Pollan (and our nutrition experts) recommends, after he finished the research and writing of his books.
The question then becomes, how do I do that? How do I find that kind of food? It's getting harder and harder to do so in our supermarkets. I was shopping with my husband the day he found the Grapple and I said to him, "Do you realize how little actual food is in this store?" I've noticed over the three decades in which I've been responsible for the food purchases for a family that there is less and less real food. It's getting harder and harder to find plain ingredients to cook with because even the simplest thing now has a chemical soup along with the simple ingredient. Take tomato paste--one brand had tomatoes and a bunch of other stuff. The other had one ingredient-tomatoes. My question is--if one company can figure out how to make a product without the chemicals, why do other companies think they have to put them in? Anyway, I read the ingredient lists. If I don't know what the ingredients are and what they're made from, I don't buy it.
The other hard part is figuring out what are the best things to eat. It seems like every time you read an article about healthy eating, they have new information that contradicts what the current wisdom is. When you dig into the research, you come up with studies that seem to have been ignored because they don't fit in with the current way of thinking. I found this gem today about high fat dairy and fertility: Eating Ice Cream may Help Women to Concieve. I see stuff like this all the time. Chocolate is good for you. So is coffee. And alcohol, particularly wine, especially red. Reminds me of Woody Allen's film, "Sleeper", where he wakes up in the future and steak and hot fudge sundaes are health food. Yet a different study will be reported saying exactly the opposite. Do I want to be a guinea pig in the unscientific cultural research that's taking place by default as we try to follow expert nutritional advice that may or may not be correct and eat food designed by people who want to maximize our consumption so we'll maximize their corporate profits?
The conclusion I've been coming to is that maybe it's not as simple as the nutrion "experts" would like to believe. You can't isolate one nutrient, making it the "magic pill of good health". Everything works together and what may seem like a bad thing can be a good thing in combination with the right other things. One example is a diet based on corn tortillas. You'd miss out on essential amino acids, if that were your main food. But the Mexicans have been eating that way healthfully for a very long time. How? They fill those tortillas with beans, which has the amino acids corn lacks. This is why I think the glycemic index thing is baloney. You don't eat high glycemic index foods in isolation. Who munches on raw onions, for Pete's sake? When you eat those foods with a little fat, it slows down the absorption of the glucose and that solves the problem with those foods. So, you're better off to put a bit of butter on that baked potato than to eat it plain.
That's probably why we've ended up with the patterns of eating we've developed over the course of human history. The problem with our current eating pattern is that it's not based on anything we've evolved to eat. Our caveman ancestor didn't hang out at the local fast-food joint, nor did he nuke a complete meal and eat it standing over the sink. That's why the current wisdom to eat lots of fruits and veggies, a little meat (Or not, if you choose. Apparently, we can do just fine without it.), and whole grains makes sense. That's what humans have been eating forever. So the challenge is finding those foods, at a price I can afford, and arranging my schedule to allow time to cook them. We've started to build a "food now" culture, so our lives get swamped and we don't take the time to cook or make the time to eat with our family and friends. But that's another post, one I think I already wrote.
One thing you often read is to "stick to the perimeter of the store". You'd think this is good advice. That's where the produce, dairy, and meat is. But is pre-marinated, ready-to-cook meat still real food? How should I know? I have no idea what they put in their marinade. What about "fat free half and half", a product found in the dairy section? Or the "Grapple"--apples somehow flavored with "real and artificial grape flavorings"? Would my great-grandmother recognize any of these? And, if I stick to the perimeter of one of my favorite stores, I'd have to eliminate a lot of food from my diet--beans, rice, pasta, baking ingredients and breads. Then there's the vegetables. Some canned and frozen vegetables are well worth eating, and are pretty nutritious, too. Canned tomatoes, pumpkin puree, canned beans and frozen baby onions are good examples.
That trip to the store, along with what I'd been reading, got me thinking--a lot.
I started to wonder what my great-grandmothers would have fed their families. I know nothing about my great-grandparents on my dad's side of the family, so that leaves my Calabrian great-grandparent's food to use as a guage. I googled.
I discovered that my great-grandparents ate a variation on the much-touted Mediterranean diet. However, they ate a lot of pork, something we don't think of as being a part of that diet. They ate lots of fish, since Calabria is the toe of the boot--right on the Mediterranean Sea. The region produces 25% of Itailan olive oil, so olive oil and olives would have been a big part of their diet. They ate a lot of pasta and polenta. Vegetables were a major part of their diet, too, particularly eggplants and tomatoes. Their food was spicy, using lots of peppers. Butter and cheese were also a part of their diet. Desserts were mainly fresh fruit, particularly citrus and figs. Today they grow a lot of clementines, a variety of orange. They made fancy desserts mainly for special occasions such as weddings and Christmas holidays. Breakfast was often biscotti and coffee. Cappuccino is a breakfast beverage. I didn't see any references to alcoholic beverages except for wine, which is another thing this region produces.
Family meals consisted of a first course--mainly soups, pasta or a rice dish. The second course is either a small meat or fish dish, accompanied by a side dish, usually vegetables. Here, the Italians veer away from what we Americans are familiar with--they eat their salad after the main course, to cleanse the palate before dessert. I remember that from my childhood. My grandfather always ate his salad at the end of the meal. The last course is usually fruit, fresh and cold, or dried fruits with nuts. Celebratory meals would add a starter course of antipasti and a final course of a fancier small dessert. Meals end with coffee, usually espresso.
That's what my great-grandmothers were feeding their families. It's a pretty healthy way to eat, according to current nutritional wisdom. The nutritionists might think it's a bit high in fat, what with all that pork and full-fat dairy. But they didn't eat large portions of those foods. They mostly ate vegetables, which is exactly what Michael Pollan (and our nutrition experts) recommends, after he finished the research and writing of his books.
The question then becomes, how do I do that? How do I find that kind of food? It's getting harder and harder to do so in our supermarkets. I was shopping with my husband the day he found the Grapple and I said to him, "Do you realize how little actual food is in this store?" I've noticed over the three decades in which I've been responsible for the food purchases for a family that there is less and less real food. It's getting harder and harder to find plain ingredients to cook with because even the simplest thing now has a chemical soup along with the simple ingredient. Take tomato paste--one brand had tomatoes and a bunch of other stuff. The other had one ingredient-tomatoes. My question is--if one company can figure out how to make a product without the chemicals, why do other companies think they have to put them in? Anyway, I read the ingredient lists. If I don't know what the ingredients are and what they're made from, I don't buy it.
The other hard part is figuring out what are the best things to eat. It seems like every time you read an article about healthy eating, they have new information that contradicts what the current wisdom is. When you dig into the research, you come up with studies that seem to have been ignored because they don't fit in with the current way of thinking. I found this gem today about high fat dairy and fertility: Eating Ice Cream may Help Women to Concieve. I see stuff like this all the time. Chocolate is good for you. So is coffee. And alcohol, particularly wine, especially red. Reminds me of Woody Allen's film, "Sleeper", where he wakes up in the future and steak and hot fudge sundaes are health food. Yet a different study will be reported saying exactly the opposite. Do I want to be a guinea pig in the unscientific cultural research that's taking place by default as we try to follow expert nutritional advice that may or may not be correct and eat food designed by people who want to maximize our consumption so we'll maximize their corporate profits?
The conclusion I've been coming to is that maybe it's not as simple as the nutrion "experts" would like to believe. You can't isolate one nutrient, making it the "magic pill of good health". Everything works together and what may seem like a bad thing can be a good thing in combination with the right other things. One example is a diet based on corn tortillas. You'd miss out on essential amino acids, if that were your main food. But the Mexicans have been eating that way healthfully for a very long time. How? They fill those tortillas with beans, which has the amino acids corn lacks. This is why I think the glycemic index thing is baloney. You don't eat high glycemic index foods in isolation. Who munches on raw onions, for Pete's sake? When you eat those foods with a little fat, it slows down the absorption of the glucose and that solves the problem with those foods. So, you're better off to put a bit of butter on that baked potato than to eat it plain.
That's probably why we've ended up with the patterns of eating we've developed over the course of human history. The problem with our current eating pattern is that it's not based on anything we've evolved to eat. Our caveman ancestor didn't hang out at the local fast-food joint, nor did he nuke a complete meal and eat it standing over the sink. That's why the current wisdom to eat lots of fruits and veggies, a little meat (Or not, if you choose. Apparently, we can do just fine without it.), and whole grains makes sense. That's what humans have been eating forever. So the challenge is finding those foods, at a price I can afford, and arranging my schedule to allow time to cook them. We've started to build a "food now" culture, so our lives get swamped and we don't take the time to cook or make the time to eat with our family and friends. But that's another post, one I think I already wrote.
Friday, February 01, 2008
The Slow Movement
The New York Times has an article about "The Slow Movement". (Note: you have to register with them to read the article, but if I remember correctly, they don't ask for your whole life history.) Essentially, it's about slowing things down in opposition to our fast food culture. I think it's interesting that they likened our life to fast food more than to any other measure of speed they could have used, such as the computer industry's never-ending quest for faster, particularly when it comes to the Internet.
There's a woman in the article who knits rugs from the wool of sheep she's met. She uses three-foot long knitting needles. I admit I want to try that one, even if I don't get to meet the sheep or make my own yarn. The rug is absolutely gorgeous. There's a picture on the left sidebar of the article.
But I digress from my original thought. It occurred to me that food is really the ultimate speeded up part of life, and I often wonder if that's not to our detriment. I think we'd all be better off if we took the traditional Italian way of eating to heart. Fresh, real food, made from fresh ingredients cooked properly, which rarely can be done super fast, microwave ovens notwithstanding. Take time to eat the meal with family and friends, focusing on the meal and the company, not on the gazillion things we think are so important that we must forego soul-satisfying meals to do them. Or, if you're eating alone, still setting a pretty table and enjoying good music and your own company.
A lot of people have posited the theory that our large food industry with its faster to prepare, ready-to-eat, chemical stews that pass for food are behind the rampant obesity in our country. I'm pretty sure that's a factor because it was with the rise in prepared foods and fast food restaurants and cake from a box being called "from scratch", and a true cake from scratch, made with eggs, flour, sugar, milk, vanilla, etc. being considered old-fashioned, too difficult to do well, and too time-consuming to make. People cook for fun, not as a routine part of life to feed themselves and their families.
I can't help but wonder if there's another factor in the obesity thing that's directly related to the whole fast eating. I don't eat in fast food restaurants because I always eat way too much because the food doesn't satisfy me. If I'm out with other people and we go to a fast food place, we eat fast and get out--no lingering over conversation. That's the whole point of fast food-the whole experience is fast. Ditto for microwaved frozen dinners. They don't satisfy, either. And they mostly are eaten alone because it's when the family is all scattered doing their own things.
All of this lack of strong social structure to our meals could be one reason people overeat or eat to fill the gap left by unsatisfying meals eaten quickly so you can get on with other things. I wonder if we made an effort to make time to cook good food, make the dining room or kitchen table or wherever we eat a pleasant place to be, put on some quiet music, and gather family and friends for that Italian-style focus on the food and the people we love whether some of those emotional needs we eat to fill might not be filled. I also wonder if filling ourselves with freshly cooked food wouldn't satisfy us before we'd overeaten.
I don't know if that's true, generally. I do know that I tend to eat less when I'm eating really well-prepared food. I know that I eat less when I'm not feeling rushed. Although I talked about family and friends, this is true for me if I'm alone, too. If I prepare a nice meal and eat it without rushing, I still eat less and enjoy it more.
In a more general sense, I admit that part of what appeals to me about this whole idea of slowing down, as opposed to just slowing down with regards to food, is that I've always hated being forced to rush through things. I like being busy, but not to the point where I can't take time to "stop and smell the roses". I want to enjoy what I'm doing, not rush through to get to the next thing that I rush through to get to the next thing and before you know it, I have no idea where the time went and I hated every minute that's now gone.
I think that's why I'm working on being more thoughtful about how I spend my time. I've been doing too little cooking and too much eating out and quick pickup meals. Part of the problem is other people demanding things from me without advance notice. I know the answer is to say no, but sometimes I can't because they're things that have a time limit.
I'm hoping that by being more thoughtful about how I spend my time will help me focus my attention on the things that matter the most. We'll see if that turns out to be true as I take steps that will allow me to do that, mainly using my calendar more to keep track of the things that matter to me and doing those before the rest of the stuff that often just fills up the time.
There's a woman in the article who knits rugs from the wool of sheep she's met. She uses three-foot long knitting needles. I admit I want to try that one, even if I don't get to meet the sheep or make my own yarn. The rug is absolutely gorgeous. There's a picture on the left sidebar of the article.
But I digress from my original thought. It occurred to me that food is really the ultimate speeded up part of life, and I often wonder if that's not to our detriment. I think we'd all be better off if we took the traditional Italian way of eating to heart. Fresh, real food, made from fresh ingredients cooked properly, which rarely can be done super fast, microwave ovens notwithstanding. Take time to eat the meal with family and friends, focusing on the meal and the company, not on the gazillion things we think are so important that we must forego soul-satisfying meals to do them. Or, if you're eating alone, still setting a pretty table and enjoying good music and your own company.
A lot of people have posited the theory that our large food industry with its faster to prepare, ready-to-eat, chemical stews that pass for food are behind the rampant obesity in our country. I'm pretty sure that's a factor because it was with the rise in prepared foods and fast food restaurants and cake from a box being called "from scratch", and a true cake from scratch, made with eggs, flour, sugar, milk, vanilla, etc. being considered old-fashioned, too difficult to do well, and too time-consuming to make. People cook for fun, not as a routine part of life to feed themselves and their families.
I can't help but wonder if there's another factor in the obesity thing that's directly related to the whole fast eating. I don't eat in fast food restaurants because I always eat way too much because the food doesn't satisfy me. If I'm out with other people and we go to a fast food place, we eat fast and get out--no lingering over conversation. That's the whole point of fast food-the whole experience is fast. Ditto for microwaved frozen dinners. They don't satisfy, either. And they mostly are eaten alone because it's when the family is all scattered doing their own things.
All of this lack of strong social structure to our meals could be one reason people overeat or eat to fill the gap left by unsatisfying meals eaten quickly so you can get on with other things. I wonder if we made an effort to make time to cook good food, make the dining room or kitchen table or wherever we eat a pleasant place to be, put on some quiet music, and gather family and friends for that Italian-style focus on the food and the people we love whether some of those emotional needs we eat to fill might not be filled. I also wonder if filling ourselves with freshly cooked food wouldn't satisfy us before we'd overeaten.
I don't know if that's true, generally. I do know that I tend to eat less when I'm eating really well-prepared food. I know that I eat less when I'm not feeling rushed. Although I talked about family and friends, this is true for me if I'm alone, too. If I prepare a nice meal and eat it without rushing, I still eat less and enjoy it more.
In a more general sense, I admit that part of what appeals to me about this whole idea of slowing down, as opposed to just slowing down with regards to food, is that I've always hated being forced to rush through things. I like being busy, but not to the point where I can't take time to "stop and smell the roses". I want to enjoy what I'm doing, not rush through to get to the next thing that I rush through to get to the next thing and before you know it, I have no idea where the time went and I hated every minute that's now gone.
I think that's why I'm working on being more thoughtful about how I spend my time. I've been doing too little cooking and too much eating out and quick pickup meals. Part of the problem is other people demanding things from me without advance notice. I know the answer is to say no, but sometimes I can't because they're things that have a time limit.
I'm hoping that by being more thoughtful about how I spend my time will help me focus my attention on the things that matter the most. We'll see if that turns out to be true as I take steps that will allow me to do that, mainly using my calendar more to keep track of the things that matter to me and doing those before the rest of the stuff that often just fills up the time.
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