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 made valances for our patio door and office window back a year ago, with the window valance still needing to be installed. These added (or will add) a nice finished look to the space. But I had way overbought the material for the valances and had several yards left over. (I don’t think it was very expensive.) So I planned to make throw pillows from the remaining fabric and bought some coordinating stuff to use for trim. I’d come up with a complicated method for making the pillow covers, with mitered, contrasting flanges. One pillow hadn’t come out very well, which was discouraging, but then I decided that
Here I sit in Kansas City, Missouri, well after the events I described in my last post: the post-concert reception and the dinner for the annual business meeting. So I’ll give you a quick update and then a great, simple frosting recipe that you can use in the place of that horrible powdered-sugar stuff. I’ll be doing an exhaustive (and exhausting) recipe and variations for my streamlined Swiss buttercream, but that will have to wait.
In the meantime, here’s what I did, with some helpful hints along the way:
I nixed the black pepper-Parmesan biscotti and just stuck with the spicy Cheddar cookies.
I nixed the banana cupcakes and just stuck with the pistachio ones, part of them with strawberry buttercream (recipe to come) and part with white chocolate-cream cheese frosting (recipe below).
Sorry about the rather distorted photograph; it was taken in haste via smartphone at the reception itself.
So far I’ve discussed the keto, paleo, Whole30, food sensitivity, and Tom Brady diets, and there are many more out there. I’m going next to veganism as a lifestyle. As I’ve said before, there are two principles to keep in mind in looking at these various eating plans:
1) People are free to choose how they eat, and
2) Personal convictions/conscience should not be violated.
I mentioned in a previous post that I was facing foot surgery, which took place on March 11. So it’s been about 2 ½ weeks since then, and I didn’t feel that I could stand on the scale without my surgical boot or shoe until the 2-week mark. Guess what? I was four pounds up. FOUR POUNDS.
Why did this happen? Well, my activity levels had gone way, way down. I went nowhere at all for about the first week except for my doctor’s appointment, and I spent a lot of time lying on the couch with my foot up on pillows. I
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’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.)
Yesterday I ranted and raved about Melissa Hartwig and her crazy diet (that’s made her a very, very rich celebrity), but I went on and on without ever getting to the central question, which is:
Exactly what is this whole hoop-de-doo supposed to do for you?
Let’s get to that now. Remember, the idea for “going clean” for 30 days was an impulsive idea from Hartwig’s then-boyfriend, now-divorced-husband, Dallas:
The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts that Make Us Overeat by Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D., originally published in 2017, now available in several formats. I accessed the book via Audible.com.
This is a book that mixes immensely practical, down-to-earth information and advice about our current diet and health issues with somewhat-technical information about the actual biology of the brain. I found some of the biological sections to be rather frustrating, as Guyenet seems to subscribe to the idea that all of our thoughts, desires, motivations, decisions and choices can be boiled down to biochemical reactions at the cellular level. So in an early chapter he goes into an explanation about how our “lizard” brain (or, in this book, our “lamprey” brain) functions, with “feedback loops” putting in “bids.” Guyenet is careful to say that whole process is how scientists understand this all might work, as there’s no way
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro, available in multiple formats.
This is a pretty interesting book, and I enjoyed reading it. Dani Shapiro is an accomplished and best-selling author of several previous memoirs and novels. If you like real-life mysteries, especially ones that involve delving into the past, you’ll probably get seriously drawn into the story. I read it in big chunks over the course of a couple of days.
The plotline of the book centers around Shapiro’s discovery, by way of an impulsive DNA test, that the man she considered to be her father, whom she loved and revered, was not. She had been conceived with the help of a sperm donor. I won’t give away more of the story as I don’t think that’s fair, so you’ll have to read the book to find out if she finds her biological father and how she handles all the fallout. But here’s the central question for the purpose of my post today: Would she have been better off not to have known? Or, to put it the other way: Is it always better to know the truth?
In the first of my four posts on problems with the keto diet I made the point that it’s probably a mistake to label our desire for sugar as an “addiction.” Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist whom I’ve quoted and posted from, does posit that sugar is addictive in his video #4 which I post below and have also posted on my author’s Facebook page. I’ve been doing some further reading and thinking, and, with all due respect to Dr. Lustig, I still think he’s wrong. (Notice—patting myself on the back here—that while I’ve gained excellent information and insight from Lustig, I don’t just take what he says at face value. He’s not my guru.)
Here’s the central objection that I have to saying that sugar is innately addictive:
It’s food.