Busy busy busy

Reading novels. The Help by Kathryn Stockett. So very good. And some Nora Roberts. I can't help it - I've always loved romance novels.

Slow down & breath

First off - Kelly - thanks for checking in with me. Yes - I am still drinking my water. I followed delayed eating in a haphazard fashion - but I did allow myself to feel hunger a few times. I do tend to post updates over in the Goals section but I have been a bit lax of late.

I cooked dinner

Mark Bittman let me down. I don't know if it was a typo, but chicken does not brown ir even get done, for that matter, in15 minutes in a 325 degree oven. I knew that. D tells me to always follow the recipe exactly, the first time I try it. Since I rarely do that and D invariably finds something wrong with what I cooked, I decided to try it his way. Halfway through, I pulled the chicken out the oven, and browned it up in a skillet, deglazed the pan with the sauce Mr. Bittman had me concoct: chicken stock with parsley and dill. Then I added lemon juice and reduced it to a demi-glaze. And then I sinned; I added a splash of heavy cream. It was the D influence.

Anyway, despite having to rescue the chicken, dinner turned out OK and I enjoyed being in the kitchen preparing real meal food instead of yogurt or snacks.

Chinese Style Marinated Celery and Carrots

Have I mentioned that I have a long-distance, one-sided, completely unrequited crush on Mark Bittman?

I loved his Bitten column in the NY Times (now changed to a food/dining column I don't like so much), his book Food Matters, and I finally splurged and purchased the How to Cook Everything iPad app. For an app, it's a bit pricey: $9.99 - but it is well done and I really like it.  So much I'm thinking about gifting one to my mother.  (I love that iTunes lets you do that).

*@#$ Computer!

I had a nice long blog post just about ready to submit and then somehow managed to delete the entire text and couldn't get it back!

So, here I go again - round 2.   Let's see if I can actually post it this time.

D and I are on the backsides of our colds.  Still some drippy noses, coughs and sneezes, but my head no longer feels like it should explode any second.  I'm thankful!

I read a FREE ebook (Kindle or iBooks) yesterday - How to Lose Weight Without Dieting by David Nordmark.   In terms of the food part, he offered nothing new.  The main point was to lose weight, we have to stop eating when we aren't hungry.  Duh.  But he did offer a new way to look at it:  Look at the wild animal kingdom - how many unnaturally fat animals do you see? I think hippos and rhinos are supposed to be a bit fat, but not lions and tigers and gorillas and monkeys, etc.  Good point.  What do they have in common?  They don't eat if they don't need food.  I am phrasing it a bit differently.  I do think that wild animals may eat more than they need to satiate current hunger, but they eat to store food because they know it may be a few days before they get food again.  They eat to meet that need, not the current hunger.