Books

A Pause on this Site

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Image by raphaelsilva from Pixabay

Hi Everyone!

If you’ve been a subscriber here from the beginning, you know how many iterations this site has gone through: from a series of posts about my son Gideon’s cancer and successful treatment, to a blog focused on a concept I called “Intentional Happiness,” to a more general “Intentional Living” area, and then finally to a food and healthy eating emphasis with the catchy title “Respect Food Roles.” I’ve written a cookbook, which I encourage you to purchase on this site or through Amazon. It’s focused on feeding crowds, tellingly titled Feeding the Masses without Losing Your Mind. My earlier book, Intentional Happiness, is available through the same outlets.

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Read “Just Eat” and Learn Lots about Good Food Choices

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My husband listens to a podcast called “The Art of Manliness” and occasionally tells me about an especially-interesting episode. Recently he told me about an interview with Barry Estabrook, a journalist with wide experience in the food world, who has written this book. I love it, love it, love it–because, as I’ve said before about other authors I love, HE AGREES WITH ME. In fact, his book is going to join my small stable of books about eating and weight control that I plan to promote in a future podcast episode of my own.

Honestly, the book is quite short and very entertaining. I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you do decide to purchase it, follow this link to use my Amazon affiliate link, which will give me a small commission at no additional expense to you.

 

Upcoming Food Events

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Image by Uwe Conrad from Pixabay

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!

A Book to Make You Think, “Hey, It Ain’t So Bad!”

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I was irresistibly reminded of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter as the cascading news reports have been coming about the coronavirus. It’s so interesting to see the different sources that people are drawn to in responding to bad news. Some want to distance themselves, reading, watching and listening to material as far removed as possible from the real world.

And then there are people like me, who always find it consoling to say, “Well, other people have had it worse.” For some reason, I’m especially drawn to the last days of the Roman Empire. Hey, the Goths haven’t poured into the city, looting and burning! So we don’t have anything to complain about!! And, in concert with about 95 million other people, Jim and I re-watched the movie Contagion this past weekend. I must say, I have some serious issues about the plot, especially on a third watching. Society almost immediately descends into chaos and looting, but then, suddenly, as soon as there’s a vaccine, everyone is lining up perfectly to snort the stuff. (I have no plans to watch it a fourth time; that honor is reserved for Inception.)

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Some Timeless Sensible Eating Advice–from 1934

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Your carriage madam A guide to good: Janet Lane
Image from AbeBooks; follow the link to purchase: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/your-carriage-madam/

Two recent interests have led me to the above source, and I’ll be developing these ideas in further posts. First, I’ve been struck over the past year or so about how important it is to keep your core muscles—your abdominals—pulled in. I realized at some point that I had gotten into the horrible habit of going around with my stomach pooching out. As soon as you allow that to happen, your whole body goes out of alignment. The stomach sticks out, the spine curves too much, the hips (ahem) stick out, and the shoulders and head poke forward. We tend to think that good posture involves throwing our shoulders back, but in reality our shoulders will just hang naturally straight if the rest of the body is carried properly. (And of course last week’s “Happier” podcast with Gretchen Rubin and Liz Craft was all about . . . posture. Once again the stars have aligned. Be sure and listen to that episode; I will just say that I have no intention of doing the exercises they recommend because I have a routine that works for me, but you may find their ideas helpful.)

So I’d been planning to do some videos showing the exercise routine I do and emphasizing the importance of

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The Daniel Diet, Part 2: Evolution of a Fad Diet

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Image by Martin Ludlam from Pixabay

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.

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Four Great Books by the Great Michael Pollan

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I first got acquainted with Michael Pollan back when I was trying to be a vegetable gardener as well as a flower gardener and was reading every gardening book I could get my hands on.

Second Nature: A Gardener

Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education was written in 1991; I probably read it 3-4 years later after we bought our first house and I was trying to get do something worthwhile in the yard. Pollan’s book uses his experiences in starting a vegetable garden of his own as a jumping-off point for all sorts of thoughts about how we provide food for ourselves and how a garden shapes the gardener as well as the other way around. I’d recommend it highly if you’re interested in growing anything in the dirt. I have officially taken myself out of the vegetable gardening business, but even so I’d probably enjoy re-reading this book. (How it can be possible that someone can grow flowers successfully but not vegetables is a puzzle, but I seem to fit into that category, so I’ve thrown in the towel. The farmer’s markets around here should be getting some business from me starting soon.)

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A Weighty Book on a Weighty Subject that You Should Totally Read

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The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America by Tommy Tomlinson, 2019, available in several formats. I strongly recommend the audiobook version, as Tomlinson reads it himself and has a very distinctive voice stemming from his surgery for throat cancer over a decade ago. The voice adds to the whole experience. (Amazon Affiliate link)

I hope that Tommy Tomlinson makes a million dollars net profit after taxes from this book, and I did my part by buying the audiobook instead of putting it on hold at the library. The book is actually several genres in one, any one of which would be worth the purchase price:

1) It’s a vibrant, beautifully-written and meticulous memoir of a childhood in the Deep South. Tomlinson’s parents are descended from sharecroppers (whom we tend to think of as 

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A Family’s Hilariously-Written No-Sugar Memoir

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Year of No Sugar: A Memoir by Eve Schaub, first published 2014.  I read this book way back in 2014, having seen it on the new-book shelves at our local library. It had a catchy cover, and I was just getting awakened (awoke?) to how high my sugar consumption was and how I needed to cut down. So I thought the book might help me with my own struggles. But I have to say that I didn’t enjoy it much. I remember skimming parts and thinking that the book was losing steam as it went on. I ended up getting the book Sweet Poison by David Gillespie that had kicked off the Schaub’s family project and writing about it.

Then somehow last week I ran across the book again and checked out the Kindle version. This time I enjoyed it thoroughly, laughing out loud several times a chapter. Eve Schaub is a very, very funny woman with a gift for ridiculous similes. I have no idea why I didn’t care for the book the first time around. Maybe I’m just more attuned now to this whole idea of severely limiting sugar in our diet than I was back then. Who knows?

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