Renewing the food blog

This blog, with a different name, was originally set up to teach my friend David, who retired to Mexico a couple of years ago, to cook. I could have started a new blog, of course, but I like some of the things I had written, as well as the layout and photo, so I decided to keep them.

This is about a new venture, though, another culinary project, on a path I've been down before: using my love of cooking to help me lose weight and improve my health. My last successful attempt at this was via Atkins/South Beach and involved a lot of exercise. Now I'm older, and issues such as blood sugar, blood pressure, and possibly arthritis have reared their ugly heads, and so I think perhaps an approach that doesn't include huge hunks of fatty meat might be more suitable at this time in my life. (Oh, yeah, there's that exercise thing, too. And the ongoing challenge of defeating alcoholism and depression.)

I'm using three tools: a book by Oprah's Dr. Oz, You on a Diet, a 3-month online subscription to Weight Watchers, and Living Cookbook, software that lets you organize your recipes, meal plans, nutritional info, etc.

The idea is to watch your intake, of course, but this is not your mother's Weight Watchers, and you get credit for eating whole, filling, fiber-loaded foods rather than treating all calories as equal.

As for the ethnic part, I realize a lot of people are blogging about food now. One woman has embarked on the ambitious project of cooking a meal from every country in the world. An admirable endeavor, and you can bet your buppie I will be stealing recipes from her, but her reasons and methodology are different from mine. She is doing research and coming up with a complete, dinner-party-worthy menu for each country, and then she posts background info, music, I'd not be surprised if she makes costumes, too (and I mean that in the nicest possible way).

I'd like to give dinner parties, too, but what I am aiming at is something different: spend two weeks to a month exploring one country's or ethnic/religious/geographic group's cuisine and develop everyday meals that I can incorporate into my daily diet. I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up having some kind of dal pancake for breakfast when this is all done.

To this I want to add the locavore aspect; that is, create menus appropriate to the season. I live in California, where fresh produce of every kind is available not 30 miles from my farmers' market, so why not exploit that?

I think that my first country will be Egypt, and I've two books on order through Link+, due to be delivered to my local library in Alameda County tomorrow, with any luck at all.

In the meantime, I will try to post about things I have been cooking, focusing simply on mindfulness, making things from scratch, and figuring out how to get the stuff done so I'm not required to fall back on fast-food from around my office building or impulse-dial to the pizza man. When my kitchen is sufficiently tidy, I will start posting photos, too!

Just one more note: a lot of food bloggers take the approach: choose a recipe, go shopping for the ingredients, and a couple hours later, voila! A meal fit for Ruth Reichl. But again, I'm more interested in working out a system that works for me. Three days a week I get home at 6 p.m., which conventional wisdom suggests it pretty close to the latest you should be having supper. I have received a lot of inspiration from another two books, Monday to Friday Cooking by Michelle Urvater, and The Pleasures of Cooking for One, by Judith Jones (the editor who pushed for Knopf to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking). I'll review these in more detail in another post, but the short version is that they both give you good ideas about planning your meals a week at a time instead of dinner by dinner.