Less is More

I've got a new cookbook, and I'm absolutely loving it. It's called Small-Batch Baking by Debby Maugans Nakos. I like home-made breads, but my husband doesn't; and we both like baked goods, but we don't often like the same things. So a regular recipe of pumpkin muffins or chocolate walnut brownies is just too much for me. Either I feel bad about wasting them, or even worse, eat more than I want/need simply because they are there. Even when we both want chocolate chip cookies, we don't need 24 of them. Two or three apiece will do. Now that I've found this cookbook, my problems are over.

The book has recipes for breads that are baked in a 3x5 loaf pan, muffin recipes that make only 4 muffins, a chocolate chip cookie recipe that makes 6 cookies, and a brownie recipe that makes just 3 brownies. Nakos included recipes for single-serving cakes, small pies and tarts, even some holiday treats. I've tried three or four of the recipes so far, and all of them were simple and delicious.

Another great thing about being able to bake only a few decadent brownies or moist muffins is that I've found that when I appease my cravings with something that's really delicious, I'm satisfied with much less. Also, knowing I can whip up another batch whenever a craving hits defeats that "gotta eat it all now because there won't ever be any more" mentality.

What I'm Reading Now

I know this one's been around for a while, but better late than never.

From Publishers Weekly

Schlosser's incisive history of the development of American fast food indicts the industry for some shocking crimes against humanity, including systematically destroying the American diet and landscape, and undermining our values and our economy. The first part of the book details the postwar ascendance of fast food from Southern California, assessing the impact on people in the West in general. The second half looks at the product itself: where it is manufactured (in a handful of enormous factories), what goes into it (chemicals, feces) and who is responsible (monopolistic corporate executives). In harrowing detail, the book explains the process of beef slaughter and confirms almost every urban myth about what in fact "lurks between those sesame seed buns." Given the estimate that the typical American eats three hamburgers and four orders of french fries each week, and one in eight will work for McDonald's in the course of their lives, few are exempt from the insidious impact of fast food. Throughout, Schlosser fires these and a dozen other hair-raising statistical bullets into the heart of the matter. While cataloguing assorted evils with the tenacity and sharp eye of the best investigative journalist, he uncovers a cynical, dismissive attitude to food safety in the fast food industry and widespread circumvention of the government's efforts at regulation enacted after Upton Sinclair's similarly scathing novel exposed the meat-packing industry 100 years ago. By systematically dismantling the industry's various aspects, Schlosser establishes a seminal argument for true wrongs at the core of modern America. (Jan.) Forecast: This book will find a healthy, young audience; it's notable that the Rolling Stone article on which this book was based generated more reader mail than any other piece the magazine ran in the 1990s.

What I Just Finished

"No matter how sophosticated or wealthy or broke or enlightened you are, how you eat tells all. If you suffer about your relationship with food -- you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all -- you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don't run. Look. Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive. We touch the life we truly want and evoke divinity itself.

Since adolescence, Geneen Roth has gained and lost more than a thousand pounds. She has been dangerously overweight and dangerously underweight. She has been plagued by feelings of shame and self-hatred and she has felt euphoric after losing a quick few pounds on a fad diet. Then one day, on the verge of suicide, she did something radical: She dropped the struggle, ended the war, stopped trying to fix, deprive and shame herself. She began trusting her body and questioning her beliefs.

It worked. And losing weight was only the beginning.

She wrote about her discoveries in When Food Is Love, her first New York Times bestseller. She gave huge numbers of women their first insights into compulsive eating and she changed huge numbers of lives for the better.

Now, after more than three decades of studying, teaching and writing about what drives our compul-sions with food, Geneen adds a profound new dimension to her work in Women, Food and God. She begins with her most basic concept: The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning, transformation and, yes, even God. But it doesn't stop there. Geneen shows how going beyond both the food and feelings takes you deeper into realms of spirit and soul to the bright center of your own life.

With penetrating insight and irreverent humor, Roth traces food compulsions from subtle beginnings to unexpected ends. She teaches personal examination, showing readers how to use their relationship with food to discover the fulfillment they long for.

Your relationship with food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom, says Roth. What you most want to get rid of is itself the doorway to what you want most: the demystification of weight loss and the luminous presence that so many of us call "God."

Packed with revelations on every page, this book is a knock-your-socks-off ride to a deeply fulfilling relationship with food, your body...and almost everything else. Women, Food and God is, quite simply, a guide for life."

I Don't Usually Watch Horror Films, But . . .

. . . I did watch this one, and if you care about what you put into your body, you should, too.

"In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here."

Booking It--Recent Informative

What’s the most informative book you’ve read recently?

This is hard because a lot of the books I've read recently have been very informative, just in different ways. I guess if I had to choose one, it would be Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

"Michael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers 'putting food by,'as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field—local food and sustainable agriculture—is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl. Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food—in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling—demands teamwork."

What's Up? If I'm not careful, it's gonna be my weight

This place is gonna get me in trouble. We had cake during orientation. There are soft peppermints on the secretary's desk. Yesterday morning there were donuts, and by lunch slices of homemade carrot cake appeared in the breakroom. It's easy saying "no" when all you have in the fridge are fruits, veggies, and whole grains. It's a lot harder when you're surrounded by the enemy.

Food Fight

The other day my husband walked in the door and yelled, "Come here and look at our mail."

Well, that's kinda scary. I figured either we'd won the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes or we'd gotten in a bill we'd never be able to pay. So I walked into the kitchen where he stood, smiling. "Just flip through it," he said.

I did, and I noticed something odd. There were pink blotches all over every piece.

"Keep going," he instructed. (There was a lot of junk mail that day.)

Finally, I saw what he was grinning about. Attached to a now-pink-and-white envelope was this sticky note:

I'm not joking. Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.

Maybe jello needs to come with a warning label.

Faulty Association

Back in my youth, for some unknown reasons which will not be analyzed here (got any ideas, Mom?), grapefruit became associated with diets and deprivation. So for years, I ignored them when I browsed the local produce section.

But one day, a year-and-a-half or so ago, a large, beautifully shaped grapefruit caught my eye. I picked it up, enjoyed the heavy weight of it in my hand, and decided to buy. The next morning, I cut it in half, admired its firm pinkish-red flesh, and tentatively separated a section to taste. Oh, my.

Now, no breakfast is complete without half a grapefruit. If I don’t get to eat one—because I ran out unawares, because I haven’t gotten to the store, because those at the store didn’t look worth eating—I am not a happy camper.

Weird, huh?

Gleanings from My Readings

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”
---Jane Austen, in Persuasion

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NEW WORD: orthorexics—people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating

“...nutritionist thinking has become so pervasive as to be invisible. We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.”
---Michael Pollan, from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

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“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
---Aldous Huxley, novelist

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“To me the mark of a great book is that it can move a variety of people, even though each person is connecting in a different way. The purpose of a story is to be a crowbar that slides under your skin and, with luck, cracks your mind wide open.”
---Jodi Picoult, novelist

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From Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress”:

“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
[. . .]
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”

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From Henry Vaughan’s poem “The World”:

“I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurled . . .”

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Happy Reading!