Eating real food involves a certain amount of effort, unfortunately. Your great-grandma wouldn’t recognize frozen pizza. Learning to make something that’s good for you and tastes good is a true life skill and a test of your ability to take care of yourself. You can’t just eat cold cereal for dinner or order takeout every night. You can’t go out to eat for every lunch. And you can’t skip breakfast! If you do these no-no’s you’ll spend way too much money, almost certainly weigh more than you should, but, more importantly, you’ll be eating lots of processed food, which means you’ll be eating lots of salt, non-healthy fats, and weird stuff. That’s the technical term: weird stuff.
This isn’t a cooking blog per se, especially for regular weekday meals. Most of the recipes you’ll find on this site as it is going to be re-branded and re-purposed will be for party food, and even
Yes, I know. We’re all so tired of being told to drink lots of water. And there’s plenty of evidence out there that the whole thing has been somewhat overblown. The original standard of eight glasses of water a day came from a paper written back in the 1940’s, and references to that study usually don’t include its caveat that much of the needed water comes from food. Also, other liquids besides water count. So if you drink orange juice (which you shouldn’t be doing, as it’s just sugar water, but never mind), or coffee, tea, or other beverages, all of those count as water. (Contrary to a very silly idea that circulated for awhile, coffee doesn’t cause you to excrete more water than was in the coffee to begin with.) The current state of medical advice is that your body will tell you if you need water, because guess what? You’ll feel thirsty.
How well I remember the morning that the tree crew arrived to do some work on our 75-foot oak tree at our house back in Virginia. Gideon was little, and I was home with him. I hadn’t planned on going anywhere that day, so I had on my grungy “at-home” outfit, an old t-shirt dress that was frayed around the edges. It was easy to pop on. I think I had taken a shower but hadn’t done anything to my hair, a sure recipe for the Wild Woman of Borneo look. (No disrespect intended to the real women of Borneo!)
On Wednesdays I look forward to listening to 
Since our out-of-town company arrives this evening for a stay of a week, I may not be posting much over the next few days and figure that I’ll get something written about the resolutions I’m making as of RIGHT NOW. (Why should I wait until Jan. 1?) These resolutions are in the area of small, consistent actions, the kind of thing that I hate doing. I mean, like, DESPISE. My kitchen has been a disaster zone for the past week, for example, because I never got it completely cleaned up after last week’s big baking extravaganza for our church’s Christmas party and then haven’t been very consistent about cleaning up after meals since then.
So the titles of yesterday’s and today’s posts fit together: 
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think by Brian Wansink, Ph.D., Bantam Books, 2006, new editions available along with new resources. Check out Dr. Wansink’s website at 
You know the type of thing I’m talking about: