Tomorrow is the annual member picnic for the Cherry Creek Chorale, with about 75 people attending. I went to Costco this morning to pick up the food for the items I’m making, and I had the same experience that I’ve had many times before: going ahead and getting started on the preparations gave me a shot of adrenaline. I’d been going around in a state of low-level anxiety about this event, but now that the fridge is loaded up with the food and I have a plan for tomorrow I’m looking forward to it.
There have been quite a few temptations around here lately, especially the leftover lemon bars from the wedding. I love lemon bars! I’ve kept them in the upstairs garage freezer, but they’re still there. I’ve eaten some that were still frozen, and they’re not even very good that way. My brownies have only four grams of sugar in them, and I’m not all that into the butterscotch ones so their sugar content isn’t too relevant to me, but the lemon bars are 12-13 grams per tiny little tart. That’s not too bad, but only if I eat just one. Which is pretty well impossible.
Anyway, we had a lovely, lovely wedding at our church Saturday. The colors were navy blue and yellow, the flowers were sunflowers and baby’s breath, and all in all it was truly charming. They even had little packets of sunflower seeds at each place setting, and while normally I think such things are a total waste, somehow this little gesture seemed quite fitting even though I have no plans to actually, like, plant them. (I’ll probably give them to my mother-in-law.) People had labored to put up draped
Yesterday I looked at the actual story in the Old Testament book of Daniel chapter one, in which the Israelite Daniel and his three friends refused to eat the food offered to them at the Babylonian court, not for health reasons but because of their determination to adhere to Jewish ceremonial law even in a pagan culture. But there’s a further passage in this book that’s being used as the basis for several diet plans, and it comes in chapter ten, verses two and three:
At that time I, Daniel, mourned for three weeks. I ate no choice food; no meat or wine touched my lips; and I used no lotions at all until the three weeks were over. (NIV)
Other translations say that Daniel neither bathed nor shaved during the 21 days; it’s fair to say that none of the modern versions of this short-term diet plan includes that idea!
The whole idea of the Old Testament prophet’s being a health and wellness guru was given a bit of juice in January of this year when the superstar actor Chris Pratt announced on Instagram that he was going on a 21-day “Daniel Fast” (which is only slightly different from the original 40-day Daniel Diet Plan). Today I want to take a look at the initial Scripture passage that has given rise to this whole craze. First, though, some historical background:
Although some Bible scholars want to give the writing of this prophetic book a later date, according to the actual events described it dates to sometime around 600 BC and takes place beginning with Nebuchadnezzar’s successful siege of Jerusalem in which he captures the city, burning much of it down, and carries off both inhabitants and sacred vessels from Solomon’s temple, which he destroys. During the siege the inhabitants of Jerusalem run out of food, and then perhaps ten thousand of them are taken into exile by being marched off to Susa, the capital of Babylon, a distance of almost 850 miles. So believe me when I say that Daniel and his friends had no need of a weight-loss diet! They were probably skin and bones by the time they finally arrived in Babylon. (There are actually multiple sieges of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army, but I’m not getting into all those details here.)
Here’s what happened, as Monk used to say on the old TV show:
As I explained in the previous post, Rick Warren realized that he was fat and out of shape, as were many people in his congregation, in late 2010. According to the NYT article I linked to yesterday, he told his congregation the next Sunday that he needed to lose about 90 pounds (having gained weight at the rate of 2-3 pounds a year for the 30 years he’d been pastor of the church) and that others could join him if they wished. The article doesn’t say what the reaction was on that Sunday. Then we’re told that shortly after Warren’s announcement he was “in Lenox, Mass., for a personal medical visit with Dr. Mark Hyman, a prominent metabolism expert and author of several best-selling books on avoiding chronic disease through healthier living.” I’d like to get some clarification as to why Warren was seeing Hyman, traveling all the way across the country from his home in Lake Forest, California.
It’s been over a week since I’ve posted anything on this blog, but that lack of posting doesn’t mean that I haven’t been thinking and pondering about various food fads floating around in our modern society. As I said in my previous short post about the blood-type diet, I had thought that I’d pretty well covered at least the most egregious fads out there, but there’s always something more to be explored in this area.
We are helping to host a group of international students/interns as they attend a two-week seminar on leadership and get some good American cultural experiences. My husband is doing yeoman duty as the van driver, thus freeing up the actual leader to do more interacting with the group, and I’ve been lending a hand here and there. One issue that has come up several times is that some people in the group don’t eat pork. At our first group meal we had various dishes that were contributed. One was a big hunk of meat, wrapped in foil
Somehow, we have to manage to do two contradictory things at once: Passionately enjoy and pursue the present, with whatever challenges and pleasures it holds, and at the same time keep at least a corner of our minds focused on what comes next.
I’ve been pondering this lately because, and I’m sure you couldn’t possibly have guessed this, I’ve been listening to Liz Craft, a TV writer and producer and the sister of Gretchen Rubin. I reference her podcasts all the time,
I’ve decided that I will be making two pies a year from now on, the Brandied Butternut Squash Pie from the peerless Melissa Clark that I made for Thanksgiving last year and this apple pie for July 4th. (I don’t think pies count as “massive.”) While I’ve made apple pies in the past, and I liked them okay, there were problems:
1. The apples always seemed to be partly raw.
2. The crust tended to be soggy on the bottom.
But in spite of these drawbacks I wanted to make an apple pie sometime during the July 4th weekend. This desire was mainly fired by a Sally’s Baking Addiction post in which she demonstrated how
I’ve decided that I will be making two pies a year from now on, the