Hi folks,
Hope you’ve subscribed to the Respect Food Roles podcast. Head on over to the podcast page on this website to listen there, or, better, subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. In this episode I tell the story of a totally made-up woman, Gladys, and how she goes to a wellness counselor, is put on a ludicrously restrictive diet, and sees her life change for the better. Did the diet make the difference, or are there other factors at play? Be sure to listen and find out!
It’s up on the podcast page on this site and on major platforms. Be sure to subscribe! I wrote a short post about the food choices pyramid back awhile ago and this material greatly expands on those ideas. Episode #1 and this one are introductory episodes that you’ll want to listen to in order to have a clear perspective on my foundational ideas. After that you can certainly pick and choose according to your interests. (All of them will be fascinating, of course.)
I’m very excited to tell you that I’ve started a new podcast under the same name as this website. Please click on the “podcast” tab above on the menu bar or follow this link to listen. We are working to get it up on every available platform, but you’ll see that the major ones are live. You can, of course, also listen through the website. I’d encourage you to do whatever works for you.
But, you may say, what’s it all about? I’ve been following your blog for awhile and I can’t imagine that you have any new material to give me. Well, you might be surprised. Some of the topics will be familiar, true. I plan to go on a fair number of tears about fad diets, for example. But I think you’ll find even these episodes to contain ideas I haven’t explored fully in my written posts. And I’m starting out with a deep dive into roles I believe food should play in your life—and what ones that it shouldn’t. That one’s up today, and next week I’ll be exploring the different levels on the “food choice pyramid,” which I’ve written about briefly. Many of the topics are ones that I’ve wanted to use in talks. Guess what? Now I’m doing it.
I plan for this to be a limited-run podcast of perhaps a dozen episodes, but we’ll see how things go. I may end up with more. Your feedback is welcome, by the way.
If there were any doubt about my love of cooking for crowds, my sense of anticipation as I head into August would end it. I have two events for that month. The smaller event is a meet-and-greet for my beloved Cherry Creek Chorale. I’ll make some cookies and also one of my savory cheesecakes from my cookbook. Someone else will bring fruit and bottled water. This food will very much fit into the “food as fellowship” role. We’ll be meeting at 6:30, so after dinner. The food is simply a reason, an excuse, for people to come early, stand around, and talk. All perfectly legitimate.
The bigger event will be the last of the pre-service breakfasts being served at my church. We started these in April, and they’ve been very successful. Once we’re into September our schedule will change and these events will be over for the time being. So I’m planning on a big blowout, perhaps making one of my sweet-roll variations and also doing a bangup version of hash browns, using the magical freeze-dried ones from Costco and building from there. I’ll do sausages and fruit, too. It’ll be great.
And with that I’ll be plunging into a somewhat-normal year. We’re planning to start up our regular four-concerts-a-year schedule for the Chorale, with the first performances in October. I’m not sure what the post-concert receptions are going to look like this year, but I’m hoping for a return on that front. I’ll be doing the retreat breakfasts as usual. We aren’t having the Chorale picnic this year, but I’m sure there will be an annual dinner next May. The church women’s retreat is in October and the Christmas dinner/party in December. On the whole I’ll probably be in charge of one big event per month through next May. Woo-hoo!
I love the idea of planning out the menus and drawing up the shopping lists. Yes, there will be times for each of these events when I’ll be tired and tempted to cut an item or two from the lineup. I’m hoping, though, to put into effect the lessons I’ve learned over the many years I’ve been doing this: doing as much as possible ahead of time, resisting the temptation to say “oh, I’ll just finish it up in the morning,” and doing due diligence on delegating.
If you’d like to get the recipes for the dark beer brownies or the savory lemon cheesecake that I plan to make for the chorale get-together, be sure to get my cookbook!
It’s now been over a week since surgery. I went in yesterday morning for my first post-op visit, hoping that I’d be told to go back to regular shoes, but no such luck. Maybe next Wednesday. Things look okay, with the implants holding in place, although my not-so-stellar bones have allowed some slippage. My hope was that Dr. Blue would exclaim with joy over how wonderful everything looked, but instead it was more of an “okay.” Guess that’ll have to do. I’m not planning on doing any driving while wearing this very clumsy shoe, so I’m dependent on Jim and Gideon for going anywhere. No big deal! I’m not sure what I’d do if I were, say, a single person supporting myself as a waiter or a housecleaner, but since this was elective surgery I guess it just wouldn’t have happened.
Last Tuesday I had some fairly minor foot surgery and have been limping around in a surgical shoe ever since. For vast stretches of time I’ve been lying on the couch with my foot elevated on a stack of pillows, a position that makes it very difficult to type. (That’s my excuse, anyway. When my son was going through his cancer and experiencing terrible back pain, he wrote all of his end-of-semester papers while lying back in a recliner and balancing a small laptop on his knees. If he could do that, surely I can type while on the couch!)
So what did I do? Well, I spent a vast amount of time watching cooking videos on YouTube. What’s been really amazing to me is how easy it is to get sucked down the rabbit hole of similar content, all guided by YT’s genius sidebars. You watch one video on a specific subject, and now you have tons more to watch on the same subject. I knew this marketing strategy well and have seen it at work in my life before, but I’ve never spent such an extended period of time letting myself just take it all in, drooling. (Well, drooling metaphorically.) Here’s a rough throughline of how I’ve gotten to know a whole host of cooking people I didn’t even know existed, starting from well before the surgery, showing how researching just one recipe can lead you far astray:
A lunch composed of mainly leftovers with chow mein noodles, sesame seeds and homemade salad dressing added. Leftovers included Savoy cabbage, some chopped/sliced green onions and cucumber, and some cooked salmon from Saturday night. Oh man! So delicious!
Here are a couple of informational nuggets:
So grill yourself up some lovely salmon, and buy enough so that you can eat the rest cold.
Hi everybody! Hope you’re enjoying the summer as we head towards some kind of normalcy. I attended a nice dinner party this past weekend and just realized as I sat here writing this post that the thought of masks never even entered my mind. There was a wedding on Saturday for which we’d specifically been told that mask mandates had been lifted, so there was that freedom too. Maybe we’ll even try for a block party on Labor Day. We’ll see.
Anyway, for the dinner party people had been asked to sign up to bring various items, and I thought, ‘If I sign up for dessert I can make cupcakes and try out the raspberry variation for my Swiss buttercream recipe.’ While I had made the master recipe a number of times, of course, I’d never actually made the variation with freeze-dried fruit. Stella Parks makes that type, though, so I knew it would work. (She does strawberry, but the technique is the same as for raspberry.) I just had no idea how well it would come out. Oh my goodness! I used a mini blender to reduce the raspberries to a powder and then added raspberry liqueur (Chambord) and raspberry extract, and it was just the essence of raspberry. People went completely nuts over them. (The cake part was pretty good, too. I used the recipe for the “lemon cream cupcakes” that’s listed in the related posts below this one. This recipe is also in my cookbook. The recipe as written in that post calls for a thin layer of raspberry jam and lemon frosting; just use the cake part with this frosting. Jam would be overkill.)
Hi everyone! I haven’t written for awhile, but that’s not because I haven’t been busy with food. (Double negative there.) I had another big church breakfast Sunday before last, serving my breakfast burritos using the guidelines from my cookbook. Order your copy from my website here or through Amazon here. I think you’ll find it helpful for your own gatherings. The burritos I served had scrambled eggs as their base protein, with sliced sausage, the smoked fully-cooked Polish type (on sale for $2/package) plus tons of sauteed onions and peppers, some canned black beans heated up with chopped red onions and taco seasoning, and the usual toppings: sour cream, salsa, and shredded cheese. I gave people a choice of flour or corn tortillas, labeling the corn ones as gluten-free. I think people who were concerned about gluten just skipped the tortillas, which was fine. For this number of people, expected to be perhaps 75 and ending up more like 85, I did NOT bother with avocado. Too much work, and too much expense! I had lovely helpers, including a couple who served as my “egg wranglers,” whisking up and scrambling a dozen eggs at a time in my big griddle and someone else who made fruit salad that she’d divided up into individual serving cups so that people could just grab and go. I bought 8 dozen eggs and I’m pretty sure we used them all up. I also got a dozen bagels just in case–all but two of them disappeared. It all went extremely well and was a great way to get people to talk and eat after we’d gone online for two weeks because of some COVID cases in our congregation. I went shopping on Friday and spent a big chunk of Saturday prepping, saying that I wanted to have my nervous breakdown early.
Today is Memorial Day, and we’re not doing much. It’s been very cold and rainy for the past couple of days, so we may not even eat outside. But today is a time to think about our veterans, and I do: my father, Peter A. Baerg, my father-in-law, Lowell Simons, and my nephew Zachary Baerg. And, because it’s so recent, here’s the obituary notice for a man from our congregation, our beloved Ralph Whitlock, who died earlier this month. I would encourage you to read this excellent essay about his remarkable life:
Small changes can make a big difference in your weight and health, as I keep a-sayin’ and a-sayin.’ Here’s a great small change you can make:
STOP BUYING SNACKS.
As I’ve said before, you can exercise three seconds of self-control as you pass by the cookie aisle, or the candy aisle, or the “salty snacks” aisle, and just refuse to go down into that valley of temptation, or you can bring junky stuff home and then have to resist it every time you walk by the pantry or the bowl on the coffee table. Just don’t buy it in the first place! In fact, here’s the question you should ask yourself whenever you see a bag or box that attracts your attention:
CAN THIS ITEM BE SERVED AS PART OF A MEAL?