General Interest

Once again, an article about our modern eating habits. Hope you’re all doing well! Here’s the takeaway:

“In a nutshell: The root of obesity is palatability and calorie density, combined with ubiquity and convenience. Satiety hormones and other metabolic machinations have much less to do with it. We’re responding to cues from without, not from within. One new study doesn’t prove it, of course, but it’s the hypothesis that best fits the preponderance of the evidence.”

“How Processed Food Makes Us Fat“

Hello friends!

Today I shipped my final manuscript to the publisher (i.e. my husband). Then I realized I’d left out the bibliography from the Appendix. And I don’t yet have a cover picture picked out. But I’m really getting there! We will have many days of work as we set out the pages in their proper formatting, figure out an index, etc. I’m very excited about getting this baby out into the world. Of course, since this will be a self-published book, I will be in charge of publicizing it. There are lots of ideas floating around in my head about what I can do. Oh, did you ask about the title? It’s Feeding the Masses without Losing Your Mind.

In the meantime, here’s are two great articles from The Washington Post about why you shouldn’t tie your personal identity to a specific diet:

“When it comes to nutrition, we’re all too eager to ignore the evidence. Here’s why.”

“Why making your diet a part of your identity is bad for your health–and society“

Time to check in again. I’m still hard at work on the cookbook, right now in the midst of the chapter on miscellaneous appetizers, including what I hope is the definitive version of hummus. I still have a ways to go, but as soon as it’s ready to roll you guys will be the first to know!

Anyway, the Washington Post ran an excellent article yesterday about the added complications of COVID-19 for those who are carrying excess weight. I don’t have anything of substance to add, so I’m just going to include the link here and urge you to read it, if not for yourself then for your loved ones who need this info:

“If you need a lifesaving reason to lose weight, the novel coronavirus provides it“

I haven’t been writing much on this blog lately (as you well know if you’re a subscriber), but I am working away on m cookbook, my compendium of party food, tentatively titled Feeding the Masses without Losing Your Mind.  I had said that the last thing the world needs is another cookbook, but I’d already written quite a bit of material for it. So I’m putting it together, editing and testing the recipes, and saying more than you could possibly imagine on various food-related topics, such as proper muffin mixing technique and how to make many mini tarts.

Saturday I got to put some of my ideas into practice as I was asked to do the food for a outdoor wedding. My dear friend Nancy’s second-oldest daughter got married in their back yard, a necessity for this era of social distancing, and you just would not believe all the work they did making their already-lovely back yard into a veritable fairyland. Strings of lights! Acres of organza/netting/tulle, much of it wrapped around said lights! Flowers! Refreshment tents! So great.

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Hope you enjoy these! The salad dressings should keep you covered permanently and the menu sign ideas should come in helpful as we go back to giving parties:

“Theme and Variations on Homemade Salad Dressings”

and

“Making Menu Signs for Your Party“

I wrote recently about being “in a slump” and how to get myself out of it. (When I looked at the “related posts” links at the bottom of the page I realized that I’d written almost exactly the same thing two years ago. Hey, at least I’m consistent!)

Anyway, two quick items for today. One’s the funny story mentioned above, but first a practical getting-things-done nudge, from the time management guru Laura Vanderkam (who at this very moment is home with five kids, one a two-month-old baby–follow this link and scroll down to see a priceless picture of her and her new baby in “family jammies.”). She suggested this week in her “Before Breakfast” podcast that we should follow something called “the 10-minute rule.” We’ve all heard of the 5-second rule (now dead as the dinosaurs b/c of the virus) that if you pick something up off the floor it’s still safe to eat if it was there for less than 5 seconds, and the 30-second rule (championed by Gretchen Rubin) that if something takes less than 30 seconds to do, such as hanging up your coat, go ahead and do it right away. The 10-minute rule is a little different: it’s not a time limit but more like a time nudge. Tell yourself, ‘I just need to work on this job for 10 minutes. If I don’t feel like continuing, I don’t have to.’ But most of the time, as the estimable Laura says, we just need to get started, and when the 10 minutes are up we’ll just keep going. And if you do quit, well–at least you’ve worked some. This is a similar idea to that of the “wedge action” that I talked about in that earlier post–anything to get you going.

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Take a look at the two pictures above. They have a tenuous connection to the subject of this blog, as both beds are supposed to yield food. The picture on the left is of an asparagus bed and the one on the right is of a (putative) strawberry bed. You can see that there aren’t very many asparagus plants that are actually growing (it’s about 50%) and that there are absolutely no signs of life on the right.

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No picture of this one, as it was thrown together at the last minute and rushed to the dinner table. But the stock photo gives you an idea of some ingredients, and you can use whatever you have on hand. It was my turn to make dinner last night (my mother-in-law and I trade off, very informally–how I suffer!), and I wanted to use up some stuff I had on hand–cucumbers, spinach and peanut salad dressing–and I’d taken some chicken out of the freezer. We’d had a lovely Memorial Day dinner Monday that featured the Korean marinated grilled steak from Half Baked Harvest (one of only four cooking blogs to which I

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