Saladosity, Part 5: Further Adventures in Produce

[This is the fifth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


So at this point we’ve raided our produce section for the base veggies for our salad.  But that doesn’t mean we’re done here in produce.  On the contrary, there’s a good deal of other bits and bobs we’ll need for extras, dressings, etc.  Let’s break it down.

Fruit (eating)

Fresh fruit is awesome, and you should probably buy lots of it.  I don’t add it much to salads though.  I generally eat it straight, mostly in a desperate attempt to use it to replace sweets.  Sure, eating sugar-packed fruit is not necessarily the best choice you can make, but compared to eating candy, or cookies, or that sort of crap, it’s easily the better choice.

The biggest problem with fruit is keeping it from going bad.  So you not only have to buy fruit that you like to eat; you also have to make sure it’s going to survive in your fridge for a week.  ‘Cause, let’s face it: you’re not going to go to the grocery store more than once a week.  Maybe you want to, maybe you even should ... but you’re not gonna.  You just don’t have time.¹  So concentrate on stuff you can both eat out of hand and keep around for a week without rotting.  My favorites are bananas, apples, grapes, and pineapple.  But pineapple only because my local TJ’s² sells it precut.  There’s no way I’m going to chop up my own pineapple.  Way too much effort.

All this will last just fine for a week, all in the fridge except the bananas.  At the end of the week, whatever I have left over I freeze, or just toss out for the birds and squirrels.  (If you compost, that’s also a great choice.)  Never be afraid to throw out food and get fresh stuff.  Of course, some stuff will last two weeks: the grapes and apples generally will,³ and bananas I buy green as hell every week and let them ripen throughout the week while I work on last week’s bunch.  At the end of two weeks, though, into the freezer they go.  Pineapple, strawberries, blackberries, and cherries can only stay for a week.

Now, we will need a fresh fruit accent for one of our salads.  In a perfect world, I’d use pears.  But here’s the problem with pears: they don’t keep all that well, and I don’t like to eat them out of hand.  So, if I were to use pears, I’d only be able to have this salad toward the beginning of the week, and, if I missed my opportunity, I’d end up with pears lying around and nothing useful to do with them.  So I use apples instead.  Apples are just as good as pears, really, and much more likely to get eaten for other purposes.  And they last longer.

Get organic apples, and look for sweet varieties.  My TJ’s has recently started carrying opals, and I think they’re amazing.  (So do my kids.)  So that’s almost always what we buy these days, when they’re available.  Other good choices are pink ladies, galas, or honeycrisps.

Fruit (juicing)

You’re also going to need lemon juice, so buy some lemons.  You won’t need these every week (or even every other week, most likely).  I like to buy a bag of organic lemons, which generally contains about six or so lemons, and juice ’em all at once.  This will last anywhere from two weeks to a month before I need to buy lemons again, and, generally speaking, the lemon juice will last that long.  In my experience, lemon juice doesn’t go bad: it just gets extra sour.  But it’s so acidic anyway that I dunno if bacteria can live in there.  Keep it in small tupperware containers (I keep mine up in the butter area at the top of the refrigerator door), and, if it gets a bit cloudy, just skim off the white bits with a spoon.

You can substitute limes here if you prefer, or maybe Meyer lemons.  Mainly what we’re going to use it for is making mayonnaise, so, you know: however you want your mayo to taste.

Don’t be tempted to buy bottles of lemon juice though.  That crap almost always contains sulfites, which is not good.  I’ll show you how to juice lemons so it’s not a huge chore.  Promise.⁴

Aromatics

I always buy a bag of organic yellow onions, which I will cut up along with my base veggies.  But, strictly speaking, we won’t need those for any of our salads.  I just like to do all my veggie chopping for the week in one go.

On the other hand, we will need garlic.  I also buy organic garlic, which happily will last basically forever.  It’ll sprout, eventually, although I rarely keep any around that long.  And, even after it sprouts, most of the garlic is still good.  If you do manage to keep garlic around for more than, say, a month, it’ll get soft, and I consider that a sign that it’s time to toss.  As long as it stays firm, it should be fine.

I also love garlic, so, fair warning: I will advise you to use lots of it for those dressings where we need it.  If you don’t dig garlic as much as I do, you can tone down the amounts.  As I say, I buy organic, but that’s mostly on principle.  Garlic is actually one of the few items of produce that I can’t really taste any difference between organic and non-organic varities.

I suppose jalapeños aren’t technically aromatics, but I threw them in this section anyway.⁵  We’re going to make some cilantro dressing which needs a bit of heat, and jalapeños are an easy way to provide that.  Now, cutting up fresh jalapeños is a giant pain in the ass, although I will try to offer some tips to make it as easy as possible.  I used to buy them in little cans, pre-cut, but my TJ’s stopped selling them.  So I bit the bullet and started buying fresh.  TJ’s sells a small package containing about 3 or 4 peppers, which is enough to make 4 batches of dressing.  So what do you with the other 3 batches?  Simple: you freeze them.  And, since one batch of cilantro dressing will last a week and a half to two weeks, you only have to go through this giant pain in the ass once every six to eight weeks.  I can live with that.

Herbs

I’m not huge on fresh herbs.  I’m perfectly happy with buying powdered or ground or pummeled whatever from the spice section.  But there’s one area where you really do need to buy fresh: cilantro.  If you can manage to grow it yourself, bonus for you.  But for me, TJ’s sells it in little flat plastic packs that’s a perfect amount for a single application (either cilantro dressing, or aloo gobi, which are the two things I use fresh cilantro for).  I also sometimes buy it at my local farmer’s market, but the smallest amount I can buy there is about 3 to 4 times what I need to use at a time, so then it becomes a challenge to keep it from going bad.  But I’m working on getting better at that.

So far I’ve not seen any organic cilantro.  (Although my local farmer’s market⁶ grows their produce using generally organic means, they don’t choose to get certified organic, so their products don’t have that label.)  Certainly if I saw it I would buy it.



That’ll do it for us in the produce department.  Next time, we’ll move on to nuts and dried fruits.

__________

1 If you do, I doubt you’re reading this anyway.  You don’t need tips from me.

2 Remember how I said I was going to be a walking advertisement for Trader Joe’s?

3 Apples will in fact last much longer than two weeks if kept properly.  But they generally won’t last that long.

4 Although I will admit to using the bottled crap sometimes when I’m feeling lazy.  It does last forever.  But that’s primarily because it’s chock full of sulfites.  So I try to avoid it as much as possible.

5 Primarily because there’s wasn’t anywhere else good to put them.

6 Which, honestly, is not all that local, which is why I don’t go that often.

Perl blog post #40

This week I’ve been off with The Mother, her parents, her sister, our 3 human children, and our 1 canine child, on simultaneous vacation and work conference.  This year’s YAPC was in Salt Lake City, a mere 700 miles from our home and 550 from that of the grandparents and aunt.  So we met in the middle(ish) and rented a small vacation house.  I rode the train into the conference every day and brought the boys in at night for social activities.  If you’re interestd in the mostly technical details of my experience, feel free to check out my Other Blog.  But there’s also some non-technical stuff buried in there, so hopefully it’s of some value even to my non-geeky readership.  Assuming there’s any readership at all out there, despite my repeated warnings to the contrary.

But in any event, my YAPC reflections is all you get this week.  The vacation part was quite lovely, to be sure, and I’m quite glad we got away for a while, and quite glad we got to see the closest things I have to in-laws again.  Still, it’s an exhausting week: driving 1500 miles or so, sleeping not in one’s own bed, dietary changes (e.g. a hell of a lot more fast food than I’ve been eating lately), dealing with multitudes and multitudes of people.  So these few paragraphs are about all I can muster at the moment.  Next week I hope to return to my salad series.

Saladosity, Part 4: Choose Your Veggies

[This is the fourth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


Obviously the first step to making a good salad is buying good ingredients.  This time around I’m going to give you some tips on how to do just that.

First, let’s give ourselves some goals on what we’re looking for:

1. We want veggies that taste good.
2. We want veggies that provide a variety of tastes and textures.
3. We want to buy organic as much as we possibly can.
4. We want veggies that can stand to be in the fridge for at least a week, after they’ve been chopped up.

Hopefully it’s obvious why we want all these.  #1 is because, if they don’t taste good, you’re not going to eat them.  #2 is because, if your salad is boring, you’re not going to eat it.  #3 is because a) organic just tastes better, and b) it’s at least probably better for  you.¹  And #4 is because chopping up veggies for salad is an annoying task, so you’re not going to want to do it very often.  You’re going to want to shoot for once a week, maybe twice a week at the most.  Any more often than that and you’re going to come to dread it, which means you won’t do it, which means you won’t have salad in your fridge when you want it, which means you’re not going to eat salad that often.  Severely counter-productive.

So, first off, find yourself a grocery store that’s not too far away and has decent prices on organic food, especially veggies.  For me, that’s Trader Joe’s, but you can use whatever you like.  (But I have to warn you: I buy just about everything at TJ’s, so I’m going to sound like a walking billboard for them throughout this discussion.)  Perhaps you find Whole Foods affordable.²  Or maybe it’s Fresh & Easy.  Or maybe even a local Wal-Mart which carries organic produce—whatever.  As long as it’s convenient and moderately cheap.  Expect it to be a little more expensive—never fret over paying more for healthy and delicious food—but not so much that you’re tempted to stop eating salad for budgetary reasons.  Again, counter-productive.

Next, you have to find the mix of veggies that you like.  For me it’s this:

• lettuce
• cucumbers
• bell peppers
• celery
• scallions

Every single salad will use the same veggies.  Why?  Two reasons:  First, it’s just easier to distinguish salads with their extras rather than their base.  Secondly (and probably more importantly), if you have exactly one giant bowl of pre-chopped veggies in your fridge, making salads will be easier and more convenient.  And that’s what we’re shooting for.

Now, you don’t have to use my mix.  Maybe you like radishes.³  Maybe bell peppers give you gas.  Whatever.  Pick your own 5 or 6 veggies.  Experiment if you need to.  I strongly recommend you have some sort of lettuce, but, other than that, use what you like.  Go crazy.

Now let’s talk about the individual veggies.  I’m going to tell you how I choose my varieties; hopefully you can extract the general principles for yourself.

Lettuce

So, first let’s address the pervasive myth that “iceberg lettuce has no nutritional value whatsoever.”  This is not completely without merit, but it’s also a vast oversimplification.  The truth goes something like this: the greener the leaves, the more nutrition it has.  The dark green leaves are the best, the light green less so, the yellow leaves are pretty pathetic, and the white bits are mostly just water in plant form.  So, while it’s true that iceberg lettuce has more white than green, and what green it has is pretty light, that’s not the same as saying it has no nutritional value at all, now is it?  Not to mention that all types of lettuce have some yellow and white.

Furthermore, there’s a vast gulf between “not necessarily good for you” and “bad for you.”  The white bits of lettuce may not have a lot of nutrition, but you know what they do have?  Crunch.  Do not underestimate the value of crunch in a salad.  Crunch is crucial for a good salad, so don’t turn your nose up at the white bits of the lettuce.  They’re great for providing crunch, and if they don’t provide much else, who cares?  You’re still eating plants, not crap.

Now, all that having been said, I don’t use iceberg myself.⁴  But don’t be so quick to rush off to the romaine: in my experience, romaine will turn slimy in the fridge so fast it will make your head spin (and your stomach turn).  I tried romaine a few times, only to vow “never again.”

In my opinion, the best lettuce you can get is butter lettuce.  It has some crunch, some darker green leaves, and it will hold up in the fridge for at least a week.  This is perfect for salad purposes.

As always, buy organic if you can get it.  Although I find organic lettuce a lot harder to come by.  If all you can find is non-organic, that’s fine.  I buy mine in bags, just because that’s the most common way I find it.  Or buy heads if you can get them.

Cucumbers

Cucumbers are absolutely my favorite salad vegetable.  You can generally find 3 varieties at your store:⁵ American, English, and Persian.  American cucumbers are the ones you’re probably most familiar with ... they’re fat, dark green, and about as long as your hand (or a bit longer).  English cucumbers are longer, skinnier, and lighter green, as well as far less regular in shape, but not a whole lot different, really.  Persians, on the other hand, are a whole different thing.  They’re small, thin, and vaguely cute—they fit easily in your hand, and they’ll keep well in the fridge.  Keep them in the fruit drawer—with the humidity cranked up—rather than the meat/veggie drawer; I’ve found this makes a huge difference in how long they’ll keep prior to cutting.

The best thing about Persians is that they’re firmer, crisper, and less mushy than the American or English varieties.  That means less water content, and that means they’ll last longer after they’re cut.  I buy organic only; they come in a little plastic container with about six in each.

I also sometimes throw an Americn or English cucumber into my mix.⁶  I used to do this very regularly, but it does limit how long your base salad mix will last, so I’m starting to discontinue this practice.  If you can eat all your salad in well under a week, that’s fine.  Otherwise, you may want to stick with just the Persians.

Celery

Not much to say here.  Celery provides a great crunch that even the whiter parts of the lettuce can’t achieve, and it tastes great too.  I buy organic celery when I can get it, which is most of the time.  You can buy precut stalks, but I usually just get the whole “heart” (comes two to a bag at my local TJ’s).  There aren’t different varities of these to choose from, at least not in my store.

Bell Peppers

Some people don’t care for peppers.  They are nightshades, and some people have a problem with the nightshades.⁷  However, in my opinion peppers provide even more of that great crunch you need, plus they have a great flavor: it’s not really spicy, like their cousins, but it certainly ain’t bland.  Plus they come in red, yellow, and orange, so they provide some color for your salad.⁸

Again, buy organic if at all possible.  My local store sells a bag with three organic bell peppers: one red, one yellow, and one orange.  So that’s what I get.  I personally can’t really taste much difference among the various colors, but perhaps you can.

Scallions

Also known as green onions, a scallion is not just an immature onion (and, if that’s what you’re getting at your grocery store, you’re being sold a bill of goods).  A scallion is a whole different species which doesn’t form bulbs.  They’re milder than regular onions, making them perfect for salads.  At my store, they come anywhere from 6 to 12 in a bag, and I’ve never seen any organic ones.  I would certainly buy them if I could though.



I go to my store once a week and raid the produce department pretty heavily.  I generally plan to make one or two large batches of salad base, plus cut a few extra veggies along the way.  So my shopping list looks like this:

• 2 or 3 bags of butter lettuce
• 1 or 2 packages of Persian cucumbers (about 12 cucumbers)
• 1 bag of celery (two celery hearts)
• 1 bag of bell peppers (3 large-ish peppers)
• 1 bag of scallions/green onions (6 to 12 stalks, depending on size)

Of course, this is just the base veggies I’ll need for my salad mix.  We’ll need more stuff from the produce department to make our various dressings.  But that’s a topic for next time.

__________

1 Yes, that opinion is contested here and there, and people will also claim that not everything labeled “organic” is necessarily any healthier.  But I think it’s a generally accepted principle.  Besides, if it tastes better—and it really really does—who cares whether it’s any better for you or not?

2 Perhaps you’re in a very tiny minority.

3 Whereas I think they taste like dirt.  But, hey: to each his own.

4 Although I would in a pinch.  It’s still better than many of the alternatives.

5 At least that’s what I commonly encounter at my Trader Joe’s.

6 Yes, in addition to the Persians.  I really like cucumbers.

7 Or at least are convinced they do.  Or believe that there are health concerns.  Personally I don’t subscribe to this point of view.

8 As I’ll talk about later, I’m not a big “we eat with our eyes” sort of guy, but that doesn’t mean I think your salad should be monochromatically boring either.

Perl blog post #39

This week I finally solved a Perl problem that had been kicking my ass for quite a while now.  So I decided to write a post about it on my Other Blog.  If you’re not one of my more techie readers, you may want to take a pass.  But, if you are, go check it out.  It’ll be fun.  Promise.

Moonside by Riverlight I

"Far Beyond the Stars"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Retro-swing is all about recreating the big-band sound, but that means more than just swing.  Swing songs are the fast songs, the upbeat ones, the ones that make you want to move your body.  But of course any band has to have at least a few slow songs, and many have more slow than fast.  The big bands were no different, and the retro-swing bands follow suit.  This slower music, typically performed by the same bands doing the more upbeat swing, is itself sometimes lumped in with swing.  But in my view it’s more correctly referred to as lounge.

Frank Sinatra is of course the godfather of lounge, but his compatriots Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., as well as other greats such as Tony Bennett and Burt Bacharach are equally famous for this style.  The “lounge” of the name is undoubtedly referring to a lounge in Vegas, where most of these fellows became famous.  In contrast to proper swing music, lounge is smooth, usually with a slower tempo, inspiring one to slow-dance rather than jitterbug.  The vocals are crooned, and while the instrumentation is still brass heavy, it’s more likely to be one lonely saxophone than an insistent horn section.  Even when the tempo is faster, it’s more likely to make you want to snap your fingers and bob your head in your seat than to get up and dance.  It’s the type of music you might expect to hear while sitting in an outdoor café, with a huge full moon in the background, the sound of the river closeby, the house band playing, the singer singing directly to you and your date ...

Several of the same bands we’ve grown familiar with from the various volumes of Salsatic Vibrato can be found here as well.  In fact, it was Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ excellent “Come Back to Me” that inspired this mix in the first place, and it kicks off the festivities here on volume I.  It’s a fairly upbeat tune for lounge, but it still has that smooth, romantic quality that defines the genre.  The Brian Setzer Orchestra is back as well, with two more cuts off The Dirty Boogie—including an excellent duet with Gwen Stefani (“You’re the Boss”), and a rich, smooth ballad that really epitomizes the sound (“Hollywood Nocturne”)—as is Lee Press-On and the Nails with another excellent track off El Bando en Fuego!.  Koop and the Honeydrippers are actually even better suited to this mix than Salsatic Vibrato, and both contribute two tracks here.  For Koop the standout is another Yukimi Nagano track (“Come to Me”), which is probably the least electro- this electro-swing band has ever done.  For the Honeydrippers it’s their hit “Sea of Love,” which is of course a song from way back in 1959.  We also have what is likely Pink Martini’s best song ever (“Let’s Never Stop Falling in Love”); they too are a band whose ouevre falls more into lounge than swing.  And, finally for the Salsatic Vibrato crew, we return to the soundtrack for Swing, for the rare track not sung by Lisa Stansfield, Georgie Fame’s playful “I Thought That’s What You Liked About Me.”

The most prevalent newcomer is, indirectly, Bobby Darin.  Now, remembering that my father is an avid collector of early rock-n-roll 45’s, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that I always thought of Bobby Darin as “that guy who sang that silly song about taking a bath.” That is, until I saw the fascinating biopic Beyond the Sea.  It turns out Darin had like 3 totally different careers: the first with straight pop/rock like “Splish Splash,” and the final one drifting more into country/folk.  But that middle one ... pure lounge, baby.  Kevin Spacey plays Darin, and Kevin Spacey can sing.  I picked up the soundtrack pretty quickly after seeing the movie, and I found that I enjoyed Spacey’s versions even more than Darin’s originals.  So we have 3 tracks off of that album here, all great, but the title track being the greatest.  There’s something about that song that really makes my blood sing.  It also provides our volume title this time out.

Of course, while most of the artists we associate with lounge are men, the truth is there are some great female vocalists in the genre as well.  Besides the Pink Martini track, and the aforementioned Koop track, I use the Brian Setzer/Gwen Stefani duet to springboard into a female-dominated section which takes us to the center of the mix.  And that stretch kicks off with Sarah Vaughan.

Now, I have to confess that I never even heard of Vaughan before accidentally stumbling across “Whatever Lola Wants” (and I can’t even remember how that happened).  I was blown away.  Now, often when I hear an older track like this, I immediately start hunting around for more modern versions, to see if anyone has done anything exciting with the tune that might strike my fancy more than the original.¹  But the simple truth is that no one else can sing this song the way Vaughan can.  Her voice just oozes sexy, and it traipses up and down scales in a way that makes you shiver.  When she sings

I’m irresistable you fool

you fucking well believe it.  And the arrangement (by lesser-known bandleader Hugo Peretti) is strongly rhythmic, containing just a touch of the exotica sound that will be more featured on another mix.²  Like Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” Sarah Vaughan’s “Lola” isn’t the original version, but it’s the definitive one.

“Lola” blasts right into “Heartbroken” by Meaghan Smith.  The Mother heard Smith’s version of “Silver Bells” sometime around last Christmas and asked me to download it for her.  Since I’d never heard of her before, I decided to see what else she’d done, and discovered The Cricket’s Orchestra.  This album is a little bit lounge, a little bit pop, and a little bit country, which means that it has two songs on it that I have to skip every time I listen to it.  But the rest of the album is crazy good, and “Heartbroken” is probably the best.

Then we hit “Coax Me a Little Bit,” another fine Lee Press-On tune sung by Lee’s lovely wife.³  And we wrap up this stretch of songs devoted to crooners of the fairer sex with Devil Doll.  Another of my Pandora finds,⁴ Devil Doll is the ultimate purveyor of that style I keep threatening to make up a name for.⁵  Wikipedia calls DD’s music “rockabilly,” but it isn’t.  Nor is it neo-rockabilly, like the Stray Cats or Dave Edmunds, nor is it psychobilly like the Cramps or the Reverend Horton Heat.  Although that last is much closer: it’s fast, and vaguely punky, like psychobilly, but it’s not punky enough, plus it lacks the camp so often associated with true psychobilly acts.  And it has brass, which destroys the basic rockabilly simplicity of guitar + bass + drums.  All the other bands I’ve mentioned as examples of this style also do retro-swing, so of course it has brass, and the 50’s songs it harkens back to (without ever truly imitating) often had some brass in them as well, or at least a single saxophone.  While Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Eight to the Bar are about half-and-half between this and retro-swing, Imelda May is closer to 70/30, and Devil Doll is all the way, baby.  It’s a rich, diverse style⁶ that allows for some rollicking tunes, some dancy tunes, and the occasional slow ballad ... such as might fit on this mix.  “Bourbon in Your Eyes” is a smoky, sultry track that fits in perfectly here.

And, speaking of psychobilly and the Reverend Horton Heat, he has a track here as well: “In Your Wildest Dreams,” one of the rare serious moments from the good Reverend.  Not that serious is a requirement here: both the Jane’s Addiction track and the one from the Circle Jerks are examples of the respective bands just goofing around.  Although they’re fine tracks: “Thank You Boys” is a lovely bridge into our first Kevin Spacey/Bobby Darin tune, while “When the Shit Hits the Fan” provides one of many amusing moments in Repo Man (“I can’t believe I used to like these guys ...”).

Moonside by Riverlight I
[ Far Beyond the Stars ]

“Come Back to Me” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“In Your Wildest Dreams” by Reverend Horton Heat, off Liquor in the Front
“Let's Elope” by Koop, off Koop Islands
“Let's Never Stop Falling In Love” by Pink Martini, off Hang on Little Tomato
“Thank You Boys” by Jane's Addiction, off Nothing's Shocking
“Hello Young Lovers” by Kevin Spacey, off Beyond the Sea [Soundtrack]
“You're the Boss” by The Brian Setzer Orchestra, off The Dirty Boogie
“Whatever Lola Wants” by Sarah Vaughan [Single]
“Heartbroken” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“Coax Me a Little Bit” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off El Bando en Fuego!
“Bourbon in Your Eyes” by Devil Doll, off Queen of Pain
“Young Boy Blues” by The Honeydrippers, off Volume One [EP]
“Beyond the Sea” by Kevin Spacey, off Beyond the Sea [Soundtrack]
“I Thought That's What You Liked about Me” by Georgie Fame, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Flake” by Jack Johnson, off Brushfire Fairytales
“Wedding Vows in Vegas” by Was (Not Was), off What Up, Dog?
“Sea of Love” by The Honeydrippers, off Volume One [EP]
“Hollywood Nocturne” by The Brian Setzer Orchestra, off The Dirty Boogie
“Wicked Ways” by Blow Monkeys, off Animal Magic
“Come to Me” by Koop, off Koop Islands
“When the Shit Hits the Fan” by Circle Jerks, off Repo Man [Soundtrack]
“That's All” by Kevin Spacey, off Beyond the Sea [Soundtrack]

Total:  22 tracks,  72:19

The other 3 tracks here are a mixed bag.  First we have Jack Johnson’s first hit, “Flake.” Johnson can’t really be described as lounge, but there’s something polished and laid back about this tune that’s always put me in the same headspace as the true lounge songs.  Towards the end of the tracklist, a reminder that the 80’s weren’t composed entirely of new wave and synth-pop; occasionally there was a band that hit a mood I usually describe as “alternative smooth jazz.” Most of those tunes will have to wait for another mix,⁷ but the Blow Monkeys often blew well past smooth jazz territory into lounge-land.  “Wicked Ways” wasn’t the hit off this album,⁸ but it’s a smooth track that slots in nicely here.  And, finally, a true gem of a song, Was (Not Was)‘s offbeat track “Wedding Vows in Vegas.” WNW is one of those bands that’s very hard to pin down: much of their output was powerfully soul and R&B infused alternative tracks such as “Walk the Dinosaur” and “Spy in the House of Love,” but every once in a while they would just go off the map the map entirely and do something really out there.  This is a true lounge tune with a wry lyrical twist, sung by no less than Frank Sinatra Jr, giving this volume a real touch of authenticity and respect for its roots.

There’s another volume of Moonside by Riverlight in the works, but it’s not yet ready for primetime.  Instead, next time, I think we’ll see what happens when the music from a video game gets under your skin.

Moonside by Riverlight II ⇒

__________

1 Although the Vaughan version in this case is not the original.  Much like the situation with “Sing, Sing, Sing” from Salsatic Vibrato III.

2 Which we shall come to in the fullness of time.

3 LPN vocals tend to be split about 50/50 between Lee and his wife Leslie Presley.

4 Along with Caro Emerald, Imelda May, and Eight to the Bar, as we discussed back on Salsatic Vibrato III.

5 Recall that I brought it up in both Salsatic Vibrato II and Salsatic Vibrato III, in connection with Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Imelda May, and Eight to the Bar.

6 In fact, I note that, of the five Devil Doll tracks that I’ve put on mixes not a single one shares a mix with any other.  That’s pretty unusual for an artist.

7 Which we shall come to in, you guessed it: the fullness of time.

8 That would be “Digging Your Scene,” which ... well, refer to previous footnote.

Another working weekend

I started on a blog post this week, but I never got the chance to finish it.  I’ve been working on a particularly thorny problem for $work.  Well, it’s particularly annoying to test in any event.  I have to build two different machines simultaneously, but they have to coordinate with each other at various points as well.  An interesting problem, and most of it is solved, but it’s still giving me more trouble than I’d expected.  So I’ll have to finish the post later this week and throw it up for you next week.

In the meantime, I’ve got to get back and iron out the last lingering issues in this script of mine.  It’ll annoy me no end if I can’t figure it out before it’s time for bed.

A Developing Biannual Traditon

Four years ago I wrote my first blog treatise about The Mother.

Two years ago I wrote about her again.

Apparently, every two years I feel compelled to write a meandering post on Mother’s Day noting how much I appreciate The Mother of my children.  So, I suppose it’s that time again.

Although that makes it sound like a chore.  The truth of the matter is that every two years is about how often I need to be reminded of how much I rely on The Mother and appreciate her.  Obviously without her I wouldn’t have my 3 adorable children.  Who, I was just recently pondering, are very similar to the Animaniacs: one talks a lot, one eats a lot, and the other is small and cute.  It’s somewhat disconcerting living with real-life Warner Brothers (and Warner Sister), but at least it’s always entertaining.  And I would have none of that without The Mother.

Every year around Mother’s Day, we ask The Mother what she wants to do—where she wants to go, what she wants to eat, if there’s anything we can buy for her, and so forth.  Her demands are always very modest, considering.  Here’s a person who does a fair amount of cooking and cleaning, not to mention all the bill-paying and child-educating.  She plans all the family trips, handles all the appointments for medical visits, home repair, and yard work, and does all the educational and financial planning.  In return she asks for very little—this year, at her request, we’re going to relax, maybe swim in the pool a little, and grill outside.  We might go out this afternoon and buy her some wind chimes.  Not terribly taxing for a once-a-year celebration of all she does.

When we first moved to California, she decided to become a stay-at-home mother.  This despite the fact that she had continuously held a job since she was 17 (which is longer than I have, honestly).  I was convinced she would hate it.  I told her she’d be bored, that she’d fight with the kids too much.  That they’d soon be sick of each other.  But I was wrong.

She deals with crap that I don’t want to, so that I don’t have to.  Which is a good thing, because I generally suck at dealing with things I don’t enjoy.  Happily, I enjoy my chosen profession, and I enjoy going to work every day, and even more happily I’m employed by a group of people who respect me and treat me well (including paying me well).  But paying bills and dealing with repairpeople and all that: I hate all that.  So I procrastinate doing it forever, and then I suck at it when I finally get around to doing it.  Except that I don’t, and I don’t, because I don’t do it at all, because she does.

Likewise, I really suck at planning things such as vacations or children’s birthday parties.  This is partially because I’m not very organized.  But also because of my laissez-faire attitude towards outings: I prefer spontaneity and just going with the flow.  Which is one of those things that sounds nice in theory but in reality means you’re just plain unprepared.  So The Mother takes care of those things for me.  I’d like to tell you it’s because she’s better at it, but that’s not it at all.  She’s just more determined to do a good job than I am.

Sometimes I think I’m not as impressed by everything she does as I ought to be.  As time goes on and stuff just happens without you having to really think about it, it becomes easy to take the agent of those accomplishments for granted.  But it’s not like the planning fairy stops by, or the chore gnomes come out at night.  These things take time, and effort, and patience.  None of which I have a large supply of.  Happily, I don’t have to worry about it.

So, for the most part, I get to concentrate on my work, and my hobbies (such as this blog), and, when it comes to my children, I get to have the fun times without much worry over the parts that are more like work.  That’s something that is worth celebrating, I think.  And, if some food and some swimming and maybe a set of wind chimes once a year is all it costs me, I’ll count myself lucky at twice the price.

To The Mother, I say: cheers.  And thank you.  For everything you do.  It’s more than I deserve.  And I just wanted you to know that I know that.

Salsatic Vibrato III

"South of Hell's Borders"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

And now we come to my favorite volume of Salsatic Vibrato, and in fact one my favorite volumes of all my mixes.  It’s just such a fantastic collection of tracks which are all pitch-perfect for this mix.  And we start it all off with “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

“Sing, Sing, Sing” has been called the “swing anthem,” and for good reason.  It has everything that epitomizes the genre, and it’s insanely popular.  It’s been in two of the four movies we talked about as being at least partially responsible for the popularity of retro-swing,¹ and dozens of others.  There are countless versions of it, and pretty much every retro-swing band has at least one song that sounds just like it.  Its reputation is well-deserved.

Now, typically, I prefer retro-swing remakes over originals when it comes to classic swing tunes, so when I decided to include “Sing, Sing, Sing,” I listened to a lot of versions of it.  But the thing is, nothing beats the Benny Goodman version.  Now, it’s not the original version, despite the fact it’s the one most people think of as the original.  But the original is actually a Louis Prima song, with words.  Really stupid words, but words.  Prima, in fact, is a bit of a swing godfather: he did the original “Jump Jive an’ Wail” from Salsatic Vibrato I, and of course his famous song from The Jungle Book, which we’ll see next volume.  But while Louis Prima is amazing at writing swing songs, he’s not really that great at performing them, which is why Benny Goodman smoked him with his own song not a year and a half after Prima originally released it.  Goodman’s clarinet playing is part of the reason, for sure, but let’s not kid ourselves: it’s Gene Krupa’s fantastic work on the toms that makes the song.  Distinctive, electrifying, driving ... it gets under your skin and doesn’t let go.

For the rest of the set, there’s plenty of old friends come back for more.  Cherry Poppin’ Daddies with another great tune off Zoot Suit Riot,² Lou Bega with another track off Little Bit of Mambo, and Movits! with another one off Appelknyckarjazz.  For Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, we’re branching out; they don’t really have any other full albums as good as Americana Deluxe, but there are plenty of great individual tracks, such as the one we use here.  We have a similar situation with the Brian Setzer Orchestra, straying from The Dirty Boogie to what is certainly their best song not off that album and one of their best tracks all around.³  Contrariwise, for the Squirrel Nut Zippers we go back to their best—Hot—for their biggest hit: “Hell.” I’d avoided using it on the first two volumes because it seemed like too obvious a choice, but it really is just a great tune and doesn’t deserve to be overlooked just for the crime of being popular.

Plus we have plenty of new friends.  One of my favorite discoveries in the retro-swing genre is the Atomic Fireballs.  John Bunkley’s voice is just so rich and gravelly.  Running a close second is Lee Press-On and the Nails.  LPN can be so campy and kitschy that it starts to cross a line, but they can also be brilliant.  And then there’s Asylum Street Spankers, which is where we really start to deviate from the swing revival umbrella.  Some of their songs are retro-swing, true, but others are more reminiscent of Squirrel Nut Zippers, still others are more country-fied,⁴ some are just raunchy fun,⁵ and some are nearly impossible to categorize.  The track here, “Digga Digga Doo,” is a remake of a song from a Broadway show from the 20’s.  BBVD also has a version, but the ASS version is better.⁶  We’ll hear from all three of these folks in future volumes of Salsatic Vibrato.⁷

Another out-of-the-blue discovery was Eight to the Bar, one of those bands who is mostly known in their local scene⁸ (which is the greater Boston area).  I first heard them on Pandora,⁹ and was intrigued.  Their style covers a fair amount of ground, from swing to that Motown-grounded 50’s sound that I tried to define last time.¹⁰  After listening to a hell of a lot of their songs, it turns out that there’s only a few that I actually like, but I like those quite a lot.  We’ll hear more from them as well.

Also introduced to me via Pandora are Imelda May and Caro Emerald.  Imelda May actually concentrates on that hardcore Motown/50’s rock sound,¹¹ but she has a few really brassy songs that fit perfectly here.  Caro Emerald, on the other hand, is one of Europe’s new-ish electro-swing acts,¹² combining swing, loungy jazz, and electro to forge something truly inspiring.  Her album Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor is highly recommended.

Of course, the masters of electro-swing (as far as I’m concerned) are from the birthplace of swing mash-ups, Sweden, the same country that brought us Movits!.  For electro-swing, it’s Koop.  When I first discovered their seminal work Koop Islands, I was totally blown away.  If you go backwards from there in their discography, they get more electro and less swing, but Islands is the perfect balance in my view.¹³  The selection I chose here has, atypically, vocals from two of Koop’s prolific stable of singers: Earl Zinger and Yukimi Nagano.  It’s a great song, which gives us our volume title as well as a magnificent clarinet solo.

But neither Koop nor Movits! can claim the title of Sweden’s most bizarre swing mash-up: that honor has to go to Diablo Swing Orchestra.  Remember the first time someone tried to explain to you about how Dread Zeppelin was a reggae band doing covers of Led Zeppelin songs with an Elvis impersonator for a singer?  This is going to be worse.  DSO is a swing-inflected metal band with an opera singer and a male vocalist who sings through a voice-distortion unit.  Now, swing and metal are already bizarre enough of a mash-up, but throwing the opera and the VDU into it means that most of the songs from this Swedish outfit just don’t work.¹⁴  But, when they do ... it’s glorious.  Completely indescribable.  Their track here, “A Tap Dancer’s Dilemma,” which is our centerpiece, is their very best.¹⁵

The ska this time around is brought to us primarily by old-school greats Madness, and another new discovery, the lesser-known Mad Caddies.  The Caddies are from Solvang, just up the coast from me, and concentrate on power-ska, but also have eclectic tendencies and do pleny of branching out.  There’s just a taste of their brilliance here in the bridge track to DSO, but we’ll hear more from them in other volumes and mixes.

The touch of salsa in this volume comes via Kid Creole in the Coconuts, who were contemporaries of Miami Sound Machine and had a similar style of dancy, latin pop: sort of disco-salsa, you might say.  I never cared for Kid Creole at the time, but in later years when I had grown to have a greater appreciation for the big band personalities who inspired them,¹⁶ I thought I’d give them another try.  Most of the music I found hadn’t grown on me.  But I picked a few tracks that were pretty good,¹⁷ and at least one that was great, which I included here.

Salsatic Vibrato III
[ South of Hell's Borders ]

“Sing, Sing, Sing” by Benny Goodman [Single]¹⁸
“Hell” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off Hot
“Man with the Hex” by the Atomic Fireballs, off Torch This Place
“I'm Trumpin'” by Eight to the Bar, off Behind the Eight Ball
“That Man” by Caro Emerald, off Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor
“Why Me?” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off Rattle Them Bones
“Bai Mir Bist du Schøn” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off El Bando en Fuego!
“Digga Digga Doo” by Asylum Street Spankers, off Mercurial
“The Dirge” by Mad Caddies, off Keep It Going
“A Tap Dancer's Dilemma” by Diablo Swing Orchestra, off Sing Along Songs for the Damned & Delirious
“Big Bad Handsome Man” by Imelda May, off Love Tattoo
“House of Fun” by Madness, off Complete Madness [Compilation]
“The Glamorous Life (Club Edit)” by Sheila E., off The Glamorous Life
“The Most Expensive Girl in the World” by Lou Bega, off A Little Bit of Mambo
“The Lifeboat Party” by Kid Creole and the Coconuts [Single]
“Lilly” by Pink Martini, off Hang on Little Tomato
“Forces ... Darling” by Koop, off Koop Islands
“One More Night with You” by the Brian Setzer Orchestra, off Wolfgang's Big Night Out
“Ta på dig dansskorna” by Movits!, off Äppelknyckarjazz
“Mister White Keys” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“This Business of Love” by Domino, off The Mask [Soundtrack]

Total:  21 tracks,  77:26

The tracks that fill out this set are anything but filler.  First off is Sheila E.‘s über-classic “The Glamorous Life.” This song has it all: intelligent lyrics by Prince, salsa touches provided by Sheila E.‘s amazing percussion, and brass courtesy of one of those sax solos you only get from the 80’s ... they just don’t make ’em like that any more, more’s the pity.¹⁹

Pink Martini is another band in the same vein as Diablo Swing Orchestra or Kid Creole and the Coconuts for me: most of their stuff I don’t care for, but when they put out a winner, it really cooks.  Their music is sort of a cross between loungy jazz and world.²⁰  Generally, I like my world in the form of electro-world (what some call “ethnic electronica”), like Transglobal Underground or Thievery Corporation.  So the majority of Pink Martini’s non-English work doesn’t particularly excite me.  And even the English tunes are more often suited for a different mix,²¹ but “Lilly” is an unusually upbeat track for them and fits perfectly here.

Finally, to close out this great set, I go back to the soundtrack for The Mask, the same place I first heard “Hey Pachuco!”.²²  This time out it’s the almost loungy “Business of Love” by West Coast rapper Domino.  It’s a sly, brassy, fun tune and a great way to end the set.

Next time around, I think we’ll go lounging around.²³

⇐ Salsatic Vibrato II

Salsatic Vibrato IV ⇒

__________

1 Specifically, Swing Kids and Bright Young Things.

2 For some reason, I’ve always felt that “Mr. White Keys” was the spiritual cousin of SNZ’s “Bad Businessman,” which we saw on our first volume.

3 It is, in fact, off Wolfgang’s Big Night Out, in which every song reuses the tune of a piece of classical music.  See if you can guess which one “One More Night with You” is based on.

4 Some too much so.  There’s a couple of ASS tracks that I have to regularly skip lest they trigger my country music gag reflex.

5 As you might have guessed from their initials.

6 Not to mention includes a hot-jazz-jump-swing version of some very familiar movie music in the breakdown.  See if you can identify it.

7 And on other mixes as well.

8 Remember my definition of an obscure band: must have only skeletal entries or no entries at all on both AllMusic and Wikipedia.  Eight to the Bar definitely qualifies by that definition.

9 I don’t typically listen to Pandora—that is, not just sit and listen to it for entertainment—but as a music discovery service it’s tough to beat.

10 In reference to Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, about half of whose music falls into that category.

11 Man, I wish that style had a name.  Besides CPD and EttB and Imelda May, we still have Devil Doll to get to, so I’ll have to dance around my vague description all over again next volume.

12 Ms. Emerald is from the Netherlands.

13 Not that I want to discourage you from checking out their first two albums as well.  Both are very good, if not quite so good as Islands.

14 Well, maybe they’d work for me if I was a bigger fan of speed metal.  But I only dabble, at most.

15 Although they’ll crop up again on Salsatic Vibrato IV with one almost as good.

16 In particular, Cab Calloway.

17 This is one of the joys of buying music in the digital age.  In the old days, I would have never sprung for a full album of Kid Creole and the Coconuts, not even one of their greatest hits compilations.  But now that I can purchase individual tracks that I’ve pre-sampled, I can get just the stuff I like.

18 There’s like a million versions of this song out there, most of them free.  The one I linked you to is not bad.  Actually, the one I personally use is a five-minute one I found on YouTube.  You just have to convert it to MP3 and trim the dead air off the end.  But use any version you like.  Except I think the 8-minute versions—and even longer ones—make the volume too long.  Certainly it won’t fit on a CD any more if you go with one of those.

19 You want the “Club Edit” version of this track.  Like the 8-minute version of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” 9 minutes of “The Glamorous Life” falls under the rubric of “Too Much of a Good Thing.”

20 Singer China Forbes sings in 15 different languages, according to Wikipedia.

21 Which we shall come to in the fullness of time.

22 Which you may remember from Salsatic Vibrato II, although there I used the slightly different version off Royal Crown Revue’s own album.

23 Yes, I know I said that last time too.  But next time, for reals.

work work work ...

I’m going to have to miss another post this week.  I have a fair amount of work to do, of all stripes, and I just can’t seem to scrape together enough time to crank out a reasonable post.  The Mother and 3 out of 3 of our human children (and 1 out of 5 of our furry children) will be off without me during the upcoming week, so hopefully I can parlay that into a chance to get back to being ahead on blog posts for a change.  No promises, but it’s a worthy goal.

In the meantime, you’ll have to find some other corner of the Internet to amuse you.  But the Internet, being made of cats, is a vast place, so this should pose few problems for you.

Saladosity, Part 3: My Chosen Path

[This is the third post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


So, if I don’t buy into any of the nutritional tribes I talked about last time, what is my personal food philosophy?  What is my diet?  (And remember: “diet” means the food that you eat all the time, not a temporary menu change for losing weight.)

Well, until about a year ago, I didn’t really have one.  I had managed to cut sodas out completely, almost by accident,¹ and I’d radically reduced my McDonald’s consumption,² but not eliminated it completely.  My beer intake had declined to the point of near-non-existence.  As a family, we were eating more organic foods and cutting out a lot of the pre-processed meals.  But there was no real guiding principle behind any of it.  Until one day, The Mother said, “let’s do Whole30.”

Now, Whole30 is a form of paleo, and I’ve already given you my views on the paleo tribe.  So, on the one hand, I wasn’t completely on board.  But, on the other, if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it right, and, if The Mother is going to do something, it’s just easier to say I’m going to do it too.  So I started looking into it.  And it definitely has some upsides.

I’m not going to try to convince you do the Whole30 yourself—that’s above and beyond the scope of this series—but I’ll just give you a couple of reasons why I found it helpful.  Basically, the program involves cutting vast swaths of food types out of your diet, but only for 30 days: after that, you add them back in, slowly, preferably one at a time.  This allows your taste buds to “reset,” first of all.  If you’re like the vast majority of Americans, everything you eat is too salty and too sweet.  When you cut out all that stuff, everything tastes remarkably bland for about a week or so.  Then everything tastes fine again.  Then, when your 30 days is done, you’ll find that you can’t really go back to the same crap you were eating before, because it now tastes awful.  This is a good thing.

Your digestive system will reset as well.  There’s a decent number of things your body is simply tolerating right now.  Give your body (and in particular your gut) a chance to live without the constant bombardment of that stuff for a while, then, when you try to go back, your body will happily tell you just when to slow down.  You can listen to your body and trust it to know when things are bad for you ... but only after you recalibrate it to real food.

There’s also some stuff in the Whole30 program about not replacing things.  For instance, if pizza is your downfall, don’t just start making pizza with almond flour instead.  Almond flour is perfectly fine on the Whole30 plan.  But the point is to break your bad habits, and almond flour pizza or almond milk ice cream or sweet potato chips is not helping you do that.

But, as I say, my goal is not to convince you to try the Whole30 program.  Rather, I’d like to talk about what you can and can’t eat during that 30 day period and how I’ve modified that to suit my own needs.

So, the first thing to say is that when you look at what Whole30 wants you to cut out, it seems impossible.  In fact, it is technically impossible, unless you never eat out.  It’s just completely impractical to try to quiz your waiters to that level of detail about what’s in the food they’re serving you.³  But that’s okay.  Even if you’re only hitting 95% of your goals, you’re achieving a massive improvement in your diet.

Now let’s look at each category of things that they want you to cut out and see if we agree with where they’re coming from:

No added sugar of any kind.  This the big one.  It’s huge, in fact.  There are very few things you can buy at your grocery store that don’t contain any added sweeteners, even if you’re shopping at Whole Foods.  And companies have gotten insanely good at finding new names for sugar.  “Evaporated cane juice” is one of my favorites—it’s even more ridiculous than referring to water as “hydrogen dioxide.”  How do you think they make sugar, anyway?  But the main point here is that you’re not just cutting out high fructose corn syrup, which I think most people already agree is pretty terrible for you, but even the healthier versions: your honeys, your molasseses, your raw organic cane sugars.  I agree with this one, for the most part.  I was willing to give them all up for 30 days, and I’m still pretty selective in how much I allow currently.  Get used to food without all the extra sugar first, then you’ll be better able to keep your total amounts down.  In the salads that I’m going to show you, the amount of sugar or other sweeteners will be remarkably small (and zero for some of them).

No grains.  This is one is pretty damn big too.  Mainly because corn is a grain, and corn is also in just about everything you buy at the grocery store.  (This probably has something to do with the nearly 7 billion dollars per year in corn subsidies.)  This not about removing gluten from your diet;⁴ this is about all grains.  Whole30, being paleo, will tell you this is because primitive man never cultivated grains.  I say that’s a silly reason.  Better to focus on the fact that grains are nearly pure carbs, which are not only bad from the paleo standpoint, but even worse from the Atkins standpoint.  And the first thing your doctor will tell you cut down if you start developing diabetes.  My family has a fair amount of that in its history, so cutting out grains was a no-brainer for me.  Hard as hell, of course, but I couldn’t really argue with it.  There will be no grains of any kind in any of our salads.⁵

No legumes.  This is one of those things that doesn’t seem so bad at first.  No beans: well, I like beans, but I can live without them.  They’re pretty damn starchy, so I can’t really argue with the nutritional advantage.  No peanuts: now it’s starting to sting.  Peanut butter is one of the healthiest things I used to eat, really.  Shame to lose that.  But it turns out that cashew butter is pretty damn awesome, especially if you mix a little almond butter in it.  So I’m okay there.  But here’s the one you forgot was a legume: soybeans.  And soybeans are in just about everything in your grocery store that doesn’t have corn in it (and most things that do, as well).⁶  And the problem with soybeans is, first of all, the same as it is with corn: we just plain eat too much of it.  Even when something isn’t bad for you, eating massive quantities of the same thing is probably bad for you.  But, worse, soybeans (along with corn) are one of corporations’ favorite things to genetically modify, if you believe that that sort of thing is bad, plus there are new studies suggesting that the compounds in soy that mimic estrogen are pretty awful for us too.  So I’m down with cutting out soybean oil, as really really difficult as that may be.  None of the salads I present in this series will contain any legumes at all.

No dairy.  And here we hit the first place I disagree with Whole30 completely.  I actually don’t drink milk any more because I’ve become fairly lactose intolerant as I’ve gotten older.  But who can live without cheese?  I would miss sour cream as well, though I could live without it, but there’s also yogurt.  Assuming you’re managing to find yogurt which has not been infested with high fructose corn syrup (a difficult proposition, granted), that’s a pretty healthy product right there.  Also excellent in helping keep your digestive tract on ... well, track.  As I said last time, I’m unwilling to give up dairy just because cavemen hadn’t gotten around to domesticating cows yet.  So there will be cheese⁷ in some of these salads.  But often that will be easy to omit if you don’t agree with me on this one.

No alcohol.  Twaddle.  First of all, new studies show that alcohol in moderation can actually help reduce your risk of a heart attack.  But for me it’s not really about drinking.  It’s practically impossible to go out to eat without encountering some sort of sauce containing wine—especially if the restaurant is Italian.  Hell, even most dijon mustard has wine in it.⁸  Now, I still respect the restriction on grains, which means no beer (or not very often anyway).  Also no whiskey or derivatives, and no rum (’cause, you know: sugar).  But vodka and tequila and gin are okay ... and wine.  Still, there will only be alcohol in any of our salads if your particular brand of dijon has wine in it.

No fries or chips.  Originally this rule was no potatoes.  But then they realized that it meant people were avoiding relatively healthy things like potato leek soup and aloo gobi and just eating sweet potato chips and sweet potato fries instead.⁹  Not ideal.  I mostly respect this—I’ve cut potato chips down to no more than once a week, and fries to even less than that.  But there won’t be any chips or fries (or potatoes, for that matter) in our salads.

No carageenan, MSG, or sulfites.  Well, first of all, there are natural sulfites in wine, and also balsamic vinegar.  But those are not the sulfites that Whole30 is attempting to ban.¹⁰  It’s the sulfites used as preservatives.  In fact, this whole rule is about avoiding food additives, as far as I’m concerned.  There’s lots of debates about this sort of thing, and “additives are bad” is a bit like “drugs are bad” (which is to say, lumping all of them together is pretty silly).  Nonetheless, simpler is better in my opinion, so additives in our salads will be few to none.


So that’s what I got out of the Whole30 plan in terms of nutritional goals for myself, and my salads.  My nutritional philosophy isn’t really Whole30, or even paleo at all.  Or any other tribe.  It doesn’t have a name, and I don’t feel compelled to give it one.  I don’t follow it slavishly, and you needn’t follow it all, if you have your own ideas.  Or you can feel free to follow it partially: adopt some of my salads and reject others.  Personally, I’m pretty happy with this level of selectivity: it cuts out a lot of things which are most likely bad for me, but completely eliminates hardly anything.  I tend to believe in “everything in moderation,” but moderation can mean pretty small amounts of some things, and pretty hefty amounts of others.  Preferably all-natural organic others.

And at least now you know where I’m coming from.

Next time, we’ll go shopping.

__________

1 Which is an amusing story in itself, but too long to go into here.

2 Thank you, Morgan Spurlock.

3 And likely they wouldn’t admit to every last ingredient anyway.

4 Although I’ve tried avoiding gluten as well, even after reintroducing grains into my diet.  It doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference for me personally, but it does for The Mother.  So that’s something you’ll have to experiment with yourself.

5 Okay, technically speaking, the shredded cheese I use for one salad has corn starch in it to prevent caking.  But I’m willing to allow that much.

6 If you need more sources than just me to tell you that nearly everything you buy in your grocery store contains either corn or soy or both, I’m happy to oblige.  But just go read labels.  It won’t take you long to figure out this is correct.

7 And other dairy as well.  But mostly cheese.

8 Not all, admittedly.

9 I know I was.

10 They already banned wine with the “no alcohol” rule and vinegar is an explicitly listed exception to the rules.

Saladosity, Part 2: The Nutritional Tribes

[This is the second post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


First of all, let me say that I don’t particularly subsribe to any one nutritional philosophy.  Much like religion.  Gandhi once said:

I came to the conclusion long ago ... that all religions were true and also that all had some error in them, ...

The same is true of the various camps on nutrition, as far as I’m concerned.  In fact, people treat nutritional philosophy a lot like religion: if you’ve ever had a friend go all Atkins on you, you know very well that’s it’s hard to distinguish that from their having joined a cult.  But, I’m not going to get anywhere trying to convince you that your favorite nutritional evangelist is really a televangelist.  So let’s not call them “cults” ... let’s call them “tribes.”

So I believe the various tribes are all right, a bit, and all wrong, a bit.  The truth of the matter is that the complexities of the way nutrition is absorbed by the human body are so intricate, and they vary so widely across individuals, that even as much as we know about biology and science, we still don’t know exactly what’s good for us to eat and what’s bad.  We have ideas, true, but unfortunately many of the ideas are contradictory.  Also, many of them are most probably wrong.  Too bad we don’t know which ones.

And so we’re presented with a bewildering barrage of information with no clear way to choose which bits to rely on, and it constantly changes.  Remember when cholesterol was bad for you?  Well, now only some of it is bad for you.  Remember when milk was the most awesome thing you could drink?  Now it’s full of fat and complicated by lactose intolerance.  Remember how butter was terrible for you and margarine was the savior?  Now margarine is Satan because it contains trans fat and butter looks pretty healthy in comparison.  Whenever anyone tells you that this or that food is “bad” for you, you can almost bank on the fact that, if you wait five or ten years, it’ll be good for you again.

Amidst all this data flying at you, groups will agglomerate certain facts, conveniently ignore others, and announce that they now hold all the secrets.  The majority of these have a rationale that sounds perfectly sensible, so it’s easy to fall under their sway.  The trick is to remember that nutrition is often counter-intuitive, and to question everything.  I’m going to briefly cover what I consider to be the most important of the nutritional tribes (in no particular order), and I’m gong to tell you what I buy and what I question.  These are only my opinions.  I might throw in a few links here and there, but I’m not trying to convince you to believe what I believe, especially since what I believe changes fairly regularly.  I just want to you hear my reasoning, and hopefully convince you to question things for yourself.

The Low-Fat Tribe

I sometimes call this the Weight Watchers tribe,¹ but that’s an oversimplification.  Lots more folks than just Weight Watchers believe in the siren call of low-fat.  The rational here is pretty simple: if you don’t want to be fat, stop eating food that contain fat.  An offshoot of this tribe is the low-calorie tribe, which is so similar I just lump them both together.  The low-calorie rationale is only slightly more complex: you consume X calories, and you burn off Y calories.  If X is bigger than Y, those extra calories turn into fat.  If Y is bigger, you lose weight.

Where I think these guys get it right is in their emphasis on exercise.  You really do need to burn some calories or you’re not going to get very far.  Besides, exercise is not only important for losing weight: there are plenty of other health benefits to be gained from reducing your sedentary time.

But the questionable bits here are pretty questionable.  Recently a lot of nutritional folks are saying that not all calories are created equal, and that fat doesn’t actually make you fat.²  Rather, it’s sugar and carbs that make you fat.  Some folks will even go so far as to say that reducing fat intake can be less healthy for you, if you’re reducing certain types of fat.  (But of course no one will agree on which fats are which.  Except everyone agrees that trans fat is evil.)

The Atkins Tribe

The natural reaction to information that fat isn’t bad for you but carbs are is to create a new tribe.  The Atkins folks have the most complicated rationale of any of the tribes (which is why it sounds the most cult-like).  There’s a lot of stuff about glucose and ketosis and it sounds all science-y and cool.  And it absolutely is based on actual science.

The good parts of Atkins are that carbs really are evil ... or at least mostly evil.  Lots of folks, even outside the Atkins tribe, are now agreeing on this, particularly as regards refined sugars and refined flours.  Reducing carbs also seems to help with diabetes, which is one of the major health issues with being fat.

On the other hand, cutting out all carbs is not sensible, and some folks have claimed it isn’t healthy either.  Looking at it from the opposite angle, I agree that fat can be good for you, but that doesn’t mean I agree that consuming all the fat you can stomach is good for you.  And all that meat ... too much meat makes me feel vaguely ill, and if that’s not a danger sign, I don’t know what is.

The Paleo Tribe

The paleo folks have taken a riff on the Atkins philosophy and then doubled down on it: it’s not the carbs that are bad, per se, it’s the grains.  Also the starchy vegetables, and the diary ... basically, if cavemen didn’t eat it, you shouldn’t either.  The rationale here, as usual, sounds pretty believable: the diet of our primitive ancestors was, by definition, the most natural diet we’ve ever had.  Every technological advance took us farther and farther away from that ideal.

Rejection of preservatives and sweeteners and suchlike is the best advice from the paleo tribe, in my opinion.  Folks can say all they want that there are no studies proving that all our modern food additives are to blame for all our modern health issues, but the fact that we didn’t have the health problems when we didn’t have the additives is pretty hard to argue with.  The way I see it, it’s entirely possible that sodium benzoate is perfectly safe.  But it’s also entirely possible that it ain’t.  Do I really need it that bad?³

The problems with the paleo tribe is, again, going too far.  No dairy?  Really?  Yogurt and cheese might well be the most healthy things I ever ate, before I got onto my salad kick.  Do I really want to eliminate all dairy just because cavemen hadn’t manage to domesticate cows yet?  Also, there’s sort of a giant flaw in all this: who wants to have the life expectancy of a caveman?

The Vegan Tribe

The vegetarians and vegans are possibly the most interesting group of all.  Lately they’ve almost entirely given up on trying to convince us that cutting out meat is more healthy, and concentrated instead on pointing out that it’s a hell of a lot cheaper, uses less water and energy, and produces a hell of a lot fewer greenhouse gases, if we put our time and energy into growing crops to eat instead of growing them to feed herbivores so we can eat them instead.  All of which is hard to argue with.  Also, cows, and pigs, and chickens are cute, and we should probably stop torturing them.

There are lots of studies that suggest that reducing meat in our diet can be healthy.  Unfortunately, nearly all those studies are contested on some grounds or other.  For instance, if a study suggests that people who eat more meat are more likely to get cancer, someone is bound to come along and point out that the most likely reason for that is that meat tends to get overcooked more, and we already know that burned stuff is carcinogenic.  And, honestly, that sounds pretty logical.  Still, I can’t deny that I don’t feel good when I eat too much meat, or eat it too often, and I know for a fact that cutting back my meat intake is the surest way to guarantee that I lose weight.

Again, though, elimination of all meat just feels like going too far to me.  I love animals, and I really don’t want to see any of them mistreated.  But I also know that a carnivore is a carnivore, and animals eating each other is a perfectly natural part of life.  And we are animals, and we most definitely are carnivores.  Watch a documentary on chimpanzees sometime.  They don’t eat meat all that often, but, when they get a hankering for it, the results are ... bloody.  There are also plenty of studies that show that the protein from meat is crucial to our diet (those are also always contested, of course).

The Other Tribes

This list isn’t exhaustive, of course.  It isn’t meant to be.  It’s just designed to cover what I feel are the most convincing viewpoints out there, and why I think they’ve all got something going for them ... and yet I’m not completely sold on any of them.  But there are plenty more folks out there who claim to have The Way and The Light when it comes to knowing what you should eat.  There’s the juicing tribe, and the fasting tribe, and the raw tribe, and the Weston A. Price tribe, and oh-so-many-more.  All of them sound very convincing—at the very least in that late-night-infomercial way that sounds good at first, but can break down after you examine it later a bit more critically.  Many of them even hold up after careful scrutiny, just to disappoint you with mediocre results when you try them out personally.  There’s a lot of reasons for this, many of which I mentioned above.  But the biggest one is this:

People are all different.

Oh, we’re all the same, too,⁴ but we’re certainly all different, often in very fundamental ways.  And I’m not just talking personalities here.  We’re biologically—genetically—different.  And we start out different and get differenter as we go along—as some of us get diseases others don’t, some are subjected to stresses which subtly alter our internal processes and some aren’t, some of suffer injuries that change our bodies in fundamental ways while others never even suffer a scratch—until it’s frankly amazing that doctors can treat people at all, that biology doesn’t just throw up its hands and go “the answer to everything is: it depends!”  It’s one of those cool things that makes us stand out as individuals—even identical twins can be distinguished by people who know them well.  But every upside has its downside, and the downside of this one is that you’re always going to run into advice of a medical or biological or anatomical—or nutritional—nature that simply won’t work for you.  That doesn’t make it bad advice, necessarily (though certainly a lot of it is just that), it just means it doesn’t work for you.

And absolutely that applies to my advice as well.  Take it all with many many grains of salt, modify it to suit yourself, question it and test it and disparage it as you will.  But I think there’s some value in some of it, sometimes, for some people, so I’m going to keep on prattling on about it.

Next time I tell you what my personal goals are in designing my salads (and some of my oher meals too), so you can better know which of my advice to take to heart and which to throw out on the grounds that I’m insane.

1 I did so in our last installment, even.

2 I could link you to several articles, but, again: question everything.

3 Let me stress that I’m perfectly willing to risk purely hypothetical dangers if there’s some benefit from it.  I’m just not seeing the benefits here.

4 As I explained both in my views on balance and paradox and individuality.