A Tale of Two Eggs

Growing up, I was very lucky to have all four of my grandparents throughout my entire childhood.¹  I was also lucky in that both my grandmothers cooked, although they had very different styles.  Which is not surprising, as they were very different people.

My father’s mother was born poor and seemed to have a fierce sort of pride in it.  She considered herself salt of the earth, and was very proud of being humble.  Her cooking came from her North Carolina farm upbringing.  There was lots of ham and chicken and corn and butterbeans and biscuits and collards and mashed potatoes and potato salad and boiled potatoes and, for special occasions, all of the above all at once.  Barbecue meant pulled pork, old hambones were dropped into anything boiling, be it potatoes, cabbage, or soup, and bacon grease was used to fry everything, from corn to cornbread to grilled cheese.

On the other hand, my mother’s mother was born poor and seemed determined to never be poor again.  She married for money (twice, I believe) and did her utmost to avoid work (at which she mostly succeeded).  The vast majority of her housework was done by the maid, but she did her own cooking.  She made steak and steak fries, spaghetti and meatballs,² and chicken tetrazzini.  When she wanted a snack she would spread soft bleu cheese or Braunschweiger on saltines.

As you can imagine, Sunday dinner was radically different depending on which set of grandparents we were visiting on any given week.  For the most part I gave the edge to the paternal side, not being impressed by fancy food, but honestly I was a very picky eater and didn’t eat that much of what I was served no matter who was cooking it.  Still, I had my favorites in either place, and, being the eldest grandchild on both sides, I often influenced them to emulate each other to some degree.³  But there wasn’t a huge amount of overlap in terms of dishes.

The one I remember most distinctly is scrambled eggs.

My maternal grandmother cracked her eggs in a bowl, added milk, whisked them to within an inch of their lives, then cooked them low and slow in a saucepan with butter and not much else in the way of seasoning.  When they were done, they were light, and fluffy, and buttery, and I hated them.  Breakfast at her house meant Fruit Loops.  After a while she wouldn’t even bother to make me eggs at all.

My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, took a gigantic cast iron skillet and cranked up the heat until a flicked drop of water would dance around the pan for a few seconds before vaporizing.  Then she fried up an entire pound of bacon.  Then she cracked a dozen eggs directly into the pan, with the bacon grease still in it (obviously), peppered them enough to make the devil’s eyes water, and then essentially fried them while beating them with a fork, till they were good and scrambled.  Her eggs were spotted with brown—often nearly black—crust, and greasy, and so firm you might call them rubbery ... and they were delicious.  I would eat the bacon because it seemed expected of me, but honestly I didn’t care anything about it.  Bacon existed to create grease, and bacon grease existed to scramble eggs in.  And bacon grease—and salt, and pepper—were all the eggs needed.  No butter, no namby-pamby milk ... just eggs: chewy, and tasting of bacon.

After I went away to college, I can’t remember my grandmother making eggs for me any more.  Of course, by the time I was a teenager, I was regularly sleeping through breakfast, especially on weekends.  For many years—probably over a decade—I never even ate breakfast.  I would get up late and proceed directly to lunch.

I lost my grandmother on my father’s side just before I turned 30 ... although she was the youngest of my four grandparents, she was the second to go.  She had always been overweight, but otherwise relatively healthy, so it was completely unexpected.  She died in her sleep, apparently peacefully.

Of course I missed a lot of things about my grandmother, as I did about all my grandparents after they passed away.  I didn’t even think about missing the eggs so much for another ten years or so.  This was about the time that eggs became healthy for you again,⁴ and eating breakfast had somehow become an essential part of losing weight.  And I suddenly began to develop a craving for my grandmother’s eggs.

Of course my first attempts were disastrous.  First of all, I was not going to cook a pound of bacon and a dozen eggs, and I rapidly discovered that even two strips of bacon could easily overwhelm 2, 3, or even 4 eggs.  Maybe I was getting old, but I just couldn’t handle the quantity of bacon grease my grandmother used to use, and it probably wasn’t very good for me anyway.  I also can’t scramble my eggs in the pan.  I’m just no good at it.  I need to pre-scramble them before pouring them in.  I’m also pretty sure I’m not using as much pepper as she used to.  But overall, after fiddling with my prepartion methodology for the past decade, I’ve gotten to a point where I’m happy with it.  It’s not “just like Grandma used to make,” but it retains enough of the character to satiate my nostalgia, and I probably couldn’t handle her eggs these days anyway.  I’m old and fat now, and less grease-resistant.

I eat eggs about 3 times a week.  I generally make 4 at a time, as I only get to eat them on those days when I can sleep in, so it’s sort of a brunch meal.⁵  Here’s how I make them, in case you ever want to try it yourself.

First, you need some bacon grease.  If you actually like eating bacon, then lucky you.  Otherwise perhaps you can do what I do, which is convince The Mother to cook a package of bacon, give me the grease, then put the cooked bacon in the fridge and make sandwiches out of it later.⁶  I put the grease in a small glass jar which we keep in the fridge.

You’ll also need ghee.  Using only bacon grease isn’t particularly good for you, and besides: the taste will overwhelm the eggs.  You can use butter—I did, for years—but it doesn’t stand up to the high heat as well as ghee.  Plus ghee is supposedly better for you.  Although butter also magically became good for you again recently.  So who can say.

Other than that, you just need salt, pepper, and eggs.  I like sea salt, peppercorns which I grind myself on the medium setting, and jumbo cage-free/organic eggs.  I buy brown, but honestly there’s no difference in taste between the egg colors.  You’ll also need a decent pan: it doesn’t have to be a cast-iron skillet, but that might be nice if you have one.  I just use a regular old small pan.  Other “hardware” (as Alton Brown would say) is a glass, a butter knife, and spatula or non-metal serving fork.

Put the pan on medium-high heat and add a dollop of ghee and a dollop of bacon grease.  “Dollop” here is an intentionally vague measurement; once melted, the grease shouldn’t even cover the bottom of the pan.  It doesn’t take much.  You’ll get a feel for how much is too much after a few tries.

Crack your eggs into the glass and add a large pinch of salt per two eggs (or a small pinch for one), and 3 grinds of pepper per egg.  You can put the salt in first if you like,⁷ but don’t add the pepper first, or you’ll end up with one giant clump of pepper somewhere in the middle of your eggs.⁸  I also like to let the pepper sit for a minute or so before stirring up the eggs (with the butter knife); if you stir it right away, it won’t clump as bad as it would if you had added it before the eggs, but it still isn’t pleasant.⁹  Take advantage of this time to spread your ghee and bacon grease around the pan with the spatula or fork.

Now just sit back and wait for a bit.  I generally use this time to make myself a glass of tea.  But whatever floats your boat.  What you’re waiting to see are the first barest wisps of smoke from the grease.  Once you see that, stir your eggs quickly but thoroughly, then pour them in.  Your pan should be plenty hot, and your eggs will start to bubble.  Rinse your glass out: that allows a few seconds for your eggs to firm up on the bottom.  Now use the spatula to stir the eggs.  (If you chose the serving fork route, you may find the tines can do a better job here.)  You want to pull the edges of the eggs toward the center, which keeps the edges from getting dried out and burnt.  And you just basically want to swirl everything around a lot.  As your eggs start to change from liquid to solid, start doing more of a flipping motion.  The goal here is to get the wet stuff to the bottom of the pan and the dry stuff on top.  Once you either see your first browning, or the eggs stop looking “wet” (whichever comes first), turn the heat off and grab a bowl from the cabinet, if you haven’t already.  Keep stirring and flipping, with the length of time being dependent on how done you like your eggs.  I’ve come to like mine a bit softer and less burnt than my grandmother did.  But they still taste like scrambled up fried eggs, which is what I’m shooting for.  Once you achieve the consistency you’re looking for, dump them in the bowl and hit that pan with some hot water to remove the bits of egg from it.  I don’t know about your dishwasher, but there’s only two things mine won’t get off dishes: rice, and dried egg.

And there you have it: the perfect scrambled eggs.  Well, my other grandmother wouldn’t say so, and I bet there’s a lot of you out there reading this that wouldn’t think so either.  But give it a try sometime: at the very least, they may be different from what you’re used to, and different is always good.  For me, they embody a little slice of my grandmother.  I think about her every time I make them.  And that’s a pretty fine breakfast.

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1 I lost the first a few months before my 18th birthday.

2 In fact, her recipe is what we still use today; when my kids ask for “spaghetti,” they mean they want my grandmother’s sauce, and for the most part could care less what you put it on.

3 By the end of my childhood, their mashed potatoes were indistinguishable.  At this point, I can’t even remember which of them changed to match the other.

4 This is still contested, of course.  As is all food wisdom.

5 Plus usually I have to share them with my daughter.  She can really put a hurting on some eggs, even though she’s only 3.

6 Also good for crumbling into bacon bits and putting on salad.

7 I always do, personally.  But that’s mainly because after I crack the eggs, I generally have egg on my hands.  So I either have to reach into the salt cellar with eggy hands, or with wet hands after rinsing them off.  Either way gets yucky.

8 Trust me on this.  I speak from experience.

9 I’m sure there’s some scientific explanation for why letting the pepper sit on top of the eggs for a bit makes it clump less, but I confess I have no idea what that is.

Saladosity, Part 6: Picking Nuts

[This is the sixth 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 produce is the most important thing you need to shop for to make a great salad, but it’s not the only thing.  There are several other categories of groceries to stock up on.  Today we’re going to talk about nuts and seeds and dried fruit.  In my local Trader Joe’s,¹ all these items are on the same aisle, so it feels natural to me to put them together.  Your store my be laid out differently, of course.  But look at it this way: these also constitute everything you need to make trail mix.  So there’s another common thread.

Nuts

There are some sort of nuts in nearly every salad I make: four out of the six salads I want to show you how to make have nuts in them.  Besides, you can’t make trail mix without nuts, and trail mix is an excellent snack to try to replace your potato chip and cookie cravings with.  So we’re going to need some nuts.

In general, I prefer dry-roasted nuts to raw.  I just think there’s more depth of flavor in a dry-roasted nut.  So, where possible, I get the roasted nuts.  In my grocery store, that means the only raw nuts I buy are walnuts, because I can’t find them roasted.  And I’m not going to do it myself.  I’d happily pay extra for dry-roasted walnuts if I could find them, but actually going to the trouble of roasting them myself is way too much effort.  Remember: we want to keep things simple so that we’ll be more likely to eat salad.

Next comes the question of salt.  Most of the nuts at my store come in 3 varieties of saltiness: “full salt,” “half salt,” and no salt.  Half salt just means half the salt of the full salt variety, which is however much salt they felt like putting on, so on the one hand it means nothing, but I still prefer that over the full salt for most types of nuts.  I rarely buy the completely unsalted unless I don’t have a choice (with one exception).

When it comes to flavorings other than salt, though, I just say no.  I don’t want wasabi almonds, or candied pecans, or what-have-you.  Partialy because a lot of times those types of things contain ingredients that defeat my nutritional goals (e.g. corn starch, added sugar, MSG, etc).  But also because I just want to taste the nuts.  They’re yummy.  I don’t think they need a lot of dressing up.²

Finally, there’s the organic question again.  With nuts, I’m not as adamant about the organic thing.  I just don’t find as much taste differential with nuts as I do with produce.  With fresh fruit and vegetables, I can really tell the difference between organic and non-organic.  With nuts, I can’t.  It’s just that simple.  Also, organic nuts are harder to come by, and often, unlike with the produce, significantly more expensive than the non-organic varieties.  But do what you feel is right for you.

Now let’s talk about the specific nuts we’re going to need.

Pistachios.  I have come to love pistachios more than all other nuts combined.  I can just eat them by the handful, and I never get tired of them.  Pistachios are the only type of nut that I actually prefer unsalted (but still dry-roasted, of course).  We’ll see pistachios in two of our salad recipes.

Cashews.  A lot of people really love cashews.  I’m a bit cooler on them.  I like them well enough, but I get tired of them easily, and too many will overwhelm a taste profile, in my view.  I buy dry-roasted, “half salt.”  I stopped buying whole cashews, though, because they’re more expensive, for some reason.  Pieces are just fine for salad purposes.

Pecans.  I never liked pecans as a kid.  Now I adore them.  Almost as much as pistachios.  I buy dry-roasted, “full salt” (because I can’t get “half salt”), “halves and pieces.”

Walnuts.  Man, I wish I could find dry-roasted walnuts.  I think I would really like them a lot better than raw walnuts.  Still, raw walnuts are pretty good, and indispensible for one of our salads.  I buy raw, unsalted (again, no choice), pieces.  In the case of walnuts, I might even be willing to pay more for pieces, because whole walnuts are too damn big.  But generally pieces is all I see anyway.

Almonds.  Almonds are completely optional: we’re not actually going to need almonds for any of our salads.  But almonds are super-tasty, and, if you’re also going to try making some trail mix, you’ll want almonds for sure.  I buy dry-roasted, “half salt.”

Seeds

Some folks like sesame seeds or sunflower seeds in their salads.  I’m not going to recommend those though.  What you will need in this category are pepitas, also known as dry-roasted pumpkin seeds, shelled and salted.  A bag will last you roughly forever, but that’s okay because they don’t appear to go bad ... at least not bad enough to need to throw out.  If you keep them around too long, they get a little “flat,” and you probably won’t want to eat them out-of-hand (assuming you enjoyed eating them out-of-hand in the first place, which I personally don’t).  But for purposes of our dressing, that won’t impact the taste significantly.

Dried Fruit

Again, dried fruit is not only great for salads, but also awesome for trail mix purposes.  To my way of thinking, trail mix is all about the perfect mix of salty and sweet, and if you’re trying to avoid anything with added sugar, you pretty much have to get your sweet from fruit.  Also, dried fruit (like nuts) lasts quite a long time, so you can stock up and not have to worry about it for a while.

Plantain chips.  A plantain is some sort of miracle fruit.  When ripe, you can use them much like bananas, and, if you’ve ever had plantains at a restaurant serving Caribbean fare (i.e. plátanos), they were most likely sweet and sticky and vaguely reminded you of bananas.  Which is fine.  But where the plantain really shines in my view is when they’re unripe, when you can treat them pretty much like potatoes.  You can make tostones out of them, which are sort of like french fries in taste (although not in shape), you can mash them up like mashed potatoes, and, best of all, you can make chips out of them.  A bag of fried plantain chips is just as good as a bag of potato chips, and (unfortunately) just as addicitive.  I used to buy those, but I don’t any more.³  Now I buy the roasted plantain chips, which are not as good for eating out-of-hand ... but still pretty decent.  You can dip them in guacamole, for instance, and there’s another excellent healthy snack for you.  Or you can crush them up and sprinkle them on your salad to give it an extra layer of crunch, which is what we’re going to do with them.  Trader Joe’s sells them in 6 ounce bags, and my family goes through them 2 to 4 a week.

Raisins.  There’s no point in talking about dried fruit without talking about the king of dried fruit, the raisin.  I actually like to buy organic here—unlike with the nuts, I think I can tell the difference taste-wise, and they’re just not that much more expensive.  The particular kind I’m buying happens to be Thompson raisins, but I don’t know how significant that is in the long run.

Dried cranberries.  Now here is the first place we’re going to “cheat” a little bit from my nutritional goals, because as far as I know it is physically impossible to find dried cranberries that don’t have added sugar.  I’m willing to cheat a bit for this particular salad, though.⁴  Besides, who would want to eat unsweetened cranberries?  Bleaugh.  I buy organic, preferably sweetened with organic sugar.

Optional dried fruit.  We won’t need any more types of dried fruit for the particular salads I’m going to show you, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop here.  If you happen to be shopping at Trader Joe’s too, there are two other types that I heartily recommend: berry medley, and golden berry blend.  You can use these for trail mix, as I do, or experiment with making your own types of salads.  (Just remember that dried fruit can contain quite a chunk of sugar, so keep it light.)  Berry medley is dried cherries, dried blueberries, and dried strawberries.  This is my all-time favorite dried fruit for trail mixes, even though dried strawberries can sometimes be too big for eating out of hand (i.e. a handful of trail mix that includes one of the bigger dried strawberries by necessity doesn’t contain much else).  Golden berry blend is golden raisins, dried cranberries (with no added sugar!), and, again, dried cherries and blueberries.  Also good for trail mix.

On the other hand, if you’re just looking for dried fruit to eat out of hand, I’d recommend dried figs.  Pair them with brie (in particular, Trader Joe’s brie bites).  Yum.

Storage

Remember to keep your nuts and seeds out of direct sunlight: sunlight breaks down their natural oils and makes them go “rancid.”  Rancid nuts aren’t particularly bad for you;⁵ they just taste disgusting (very similar to stale potato chips or tortilla chips).  So keep ’em in a cool dark place.  Ditto on the dried fruit, which I keep in our “chocolate fridge.”  We have a tiny little fridge that was designed to be something you’d take to your office, but it’s so wimpy that it can’t really keep things as cold as you’d want for a real refrigerator.  But it’s perfect for chocolate, which needs to be kept cool but not too cold.  So I just toss the dried fruit in there as well.  But you can use any cool dark place; wherever you put your potatoes and/or onions is likely good.  Just make sure they stay well sealed to keep them from soaking up unwanted flavors (e.g. onions)

Stored properly, nuts, seeds, and dried fruit will last an insanely long time.  Not that that’s going to be an issue.⁶



Next time around, we’ll do even more shopping.  Up next: meat and cheese.

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1 Which is, you may recall, where I get nearly all my groceries.

2 And, if they do, I’d prefer to do the dressing myself.

3 Besides, I could only find them at Whole Foods, and who can afford that?

4 And, honestly, the dressing will have added sweetener too.  So we were going to be cheating either way.

5 Unless you eat a whole lot of them.  Of course, some sources will tell you that they’re bad for you even in small quantities.  More conflicting nutritional information.  Big surprise.

6 Well, except for the pepitas.  I use ⅓ cup of pepitas perhaps every 2 weeks or so, and the smallest container I can find is a 1 pound bag.  So those hang around for quite a while.  But everything else never has much of a chance to go bad.

Series Listing: Saladosity

This a list of posts in my series about salad: why I’m eating it more often, how I manage to keep it interesting enough to eat several times a week, and what specific salads I’m eating.

This series is currently unfinished, but it has a definitive stopping point.

1. Introduction
2. The Nutritional Tribes
3. My Chosen Path
4. Choose Your Veggies
5. Further Adventures in Produce
6. Picking Nuts
7. The Savory Proteins
8. Some Condiments, You Just Want to Buy
9. The Rest of the Cold Stuff
10. Dry, but Good
11. The Right Equipment
12. Always Be Prepared
13. Bleu Cheese and Pecans
14. Sweet Tuscan
15. Autumnal
16. Mexican
17. Chef’s
18. Egg

Although not technically part of the series, I also did a one-shot post on salad way back when.  You might also find it interesting:

• Salad Days

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Saladosity, Part 1: Introduction

[This is the first post in a long series.  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.]


About a year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post about salad.  Nothing wrong with that post—feel free to go back and (re)read it if you like—but lately I’ve been wanting to update it.  In fact, I’m going to do an entire series of posts about salad.  Not just the one salad I talked about in that first post, but several different kinds of salad.  But, you may be asking yourself: why devote so much time and effort to salad?

Allow me an analogy.  I’ve mentioned before that I’m a gaming geek.  Well, the first page or so of any roleplaying game (D&D, Vampire, Shadowrun, what have you) is devoted to answering the question “what is a roleplaying game?”  It goes on for some length about how it’s a game with no winnners or losers, and it’s cooperative, and blah-di-blah.  All us gaming geeks just skip over that part.  Because we all know what a roleplaying game is already.

Similarly, when you read about a new diet, it starts off with a bunch of hooha about making life changes in the way you eat and blah blah blah.  You always skip over that part, right?  Because everyone already knows what a diet is.

Except we don’t.  We’ve forgotten what the word actually means, because we’ve started using it in an entirely different way.  We mean the food that you eat (or mostly don’t eat) when you’re trying to lose weight.  But that’s not what it means at all.  Here’s the primary (first) definition of diet according to Dictionary.com:

food and drink considered in terms of its qualities, composition, and its effects on health

In other words, a diet isn’t what you eat when you’re trying to lose weight, it’s what you eat all the time.  Viewed in this way, “going on a diet” doesn’t make any sense.  You’re always “on a diet,” because you’re always eating something.  “Going on a diet” implies that at some point you get to “come off” the diet.  But you don’t.  Even when you stop trying to lose weight, you still eat.  You just go back to eating all the crappy stuff you ate before the “diet.”  Then you gain more weight, and then you “go back on a diet.”

This is silly.  You’re not going on and coming off a diet: you’re changing your diet—and then changing it back.  But this isn’t helpful in the long term.  The truth of the matter is: anyone can lose weight.  It’s actually not that hard.  The hard part is keeping it off.  And, honestly, losing weight is not the only thing you should be thinking about.  In fact, I personally believe it’s not the most important thing to think about at all.  I say, plan on eating healthier, more sustainably, more organically, more locally—whatever buzzwords turn you on—and the weight thing will mostly take care of itself.

Michael Pollan has famously said (over and over):

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

The thing I like best about Pollan is that he doesn’t demonize any particular types of foods.  He doesn’t tell you not to eat carbs, like the Atkins people.  He doesn’t tell you not to eat grains and dairy, like the paleo people.  He doesn’t tell you not to eat fat, like the Weight Watchers people.  He doesn’t even tell you to limit your calories.  He just says: eat food.  As long as it’s real food—not over-processed, over-preserved, pre-packaged crap that’s so far away from actual food that it doesn’t even go bad any more—you’re good.  He does advise you to stop before you get full, and to favor plants over non-plants, but that’s it.  Well, salad is real food, and it’s mostly plants.  You’ll have to handle the not eating too much by yourself, but the rest I think I can help with.

So what this series is about is making a change to your diet that involves a new appreciation of—and a concentration towards—eating salad.  I happen to think this is a positive change in just about anybody’s life, regardless of what tribe of priests you subscribe to when it comes to nutrition: if there’s a group out there claiming that salad is bad for you, I certainly haven’t heard of them.  Now, there may be various ingredients that I advise you to put in the salads that go against your particular viewpoint on what’s good for you and what’s bad for you.  But that’s okay.

Because the point of this series is not to give you exact recipes to follow.  Well, I suppose it sort of is, but you’re free to modify them as you see fit.  Because the real point is to get you excited about the possibilities inherent in eating salads as a regular recurring meal.  Because that excitement is what’s going to help you make a change in the way you eat, and what you eat.  And that’s where your long-term benefits will come into play.  I personally think you will feel better, and get sick less often, and maybe even live longer.  If you also happen to lose some weight: hey, bonus feature.

But it’s hard.  Salad is not an inherently exciting food.  Getting to the point where you will actually want to eat it 5 times a week, if not more, will be a challenge.  And the most general answer to that challenge is “variety.”  It’s not enough to find one type of salad that you like: you must find several.  I personally have six, so I can eat salad six times a week and yet never repeat a meal.  Some of them are so good that I want to repeat them, which opens me up for eating salad even more often ... or just having fewer different types in a week, because sometimes you need variety even in your variety.  You don’t require any salad schedules, or planned meals.  You just need a way to prepare your kitchen such that you can, on a whim, walk in there and say “I think I’ll have a _______ salad today,” and, in 5 minutes or so, start eating it.  If that amount of preparation is combined with a rich menu of possible salads to choose from, and all of them something that you really enjoy eating, you won’t have any trouble getting maximum vegatation into your diet.

So that’s our goal here.  I’m going to talk about how I got started down this road, and what my goals are for ingredients, and then I’m going to talk about building up a stable of handy ingredients to have ready for a variety of different salads, and I’m going to talk about pros and cons of those ingredients according to different nutrition philosophies, and I’m going to talk about how to make sure none of them go bad on you (because it’ll be real food, remember, so it can go bad), and I’m going to talk about how to combine all those ingredients together in interesting ways, and at the end I’ll display six completely different (and yet very functionally similar) salads that I personally eat on a regular basis.  You can make those exact salads yourself, or you can use them for inspiration to make your own, different salads, or some combination of the two.  As long as it inspires you to make a change—not to “go on” a diet, but to change your diet—then I’ll feel I’ve been successful.

Next up: debating various nutritional philosophies.

And Now for Something Completely Different ...

Alas, I’ve had no time to do a proper post.  I’ve spent a bit of time exploring doing an improper post, but all those plans seem to have fallen through as well.  As a last resort attempt to come up with some actual content as opposed to just a lame excuse, let’s play a game of Last Two.  (I totally made this up, by the way, in case you were wondering why you’d never heard of it before.)

Last two movies I watched: Dallas Buyers Club and RED 2.  Both decent.  Nothing to write home about.

Last two audiobooks I listened to: Currently listening to A Game of Thrones, read by Roy Dotrice, which I’ve previously read in paperback.  I also read A Clash of Kings, but had stopped there because I didn’t want to read too far ahead of the series.  Now I’m trying to get through the first 3 or maybe 4 on audiobook.  Last thing I finished was The Dying Earth, read by Arthur Morey.  It’s one of the few books credited with helping to inspire D&D that I’ve never actually read, so I thought I should probably remedy that, finally.  Honestly, I wasn’t that impressed with it.

Last two physical books I read: Well, I’m currently rereading (for at least the third time) Lord Foul’s Bane, because my kid chose it to do a book report on (weirdly).  It’s a bit more pretentious than I remembered, but also more influential: I had never realized just how much Loial from Wheel of Time is a reflection of Saltheart Foamfollower.  Before that ... well, it’s been a while since I had the opportunity to turn actual pages.  Probably my latest reread of the Reign in Hell graphic novel.

Last two televison shows I watched: Hannibal and Penny Dreadful.  Hannibal I’m still enjoying, for the most part, although I thought this season has been straining credulity on Will Graham’s character; also, the number of scenes stolen from the books to jam into this series, which is supposed to be a prequel, is getting disturbing.  I mean, what are they going to do when they get to those points in the actual story?  Maybe they think they’ll never get that far.  But, they keep killing off people they’re going to need later, so I’m not sure how it’s all supposed to work out.  Penny Dreadful is new, of course (this was only the second episode), but I’m digging it so far.  I was concerned it would come off as too much of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen rip-off, which there certainly are aspects of (but our African explorer is played by a totally different James Bond!), but it’s a very different vibe, and so far I’m intrigued.  We’ll see if it can hold up.

Last two restaurant meals I ate: Let’s see ... Friday we ordered Chinese from Golden Tiger, which is our go-to Chinese place, because it’s one of the few places we can find East-Coast-style chow mein here in California.  Before that ... I suppose Tuesday lunch with co-workers at Vito.

Last two things I bought at the grocery store: Well, I went to Trader Joe’s on Friday and bought a whole bunch of crap.  The last two thing I put in my cart were probably plantain chips and a 5lb bag of seedless mandarins.

Last two albums I bought: My One and Only Thrill by Melody Gardot and Keep it Going by the Mad Caddies.  Both recommended.

Last two times I took the kids outside: Just today we spent quite a while in the backyard playing in or near the pool.  The pool is still a bit cold, although it’s starting to get hot enough around here that the smaller two at least will brave it (at least for short periods).  But mainly it’s just shooting each other with pool water from squirt guns and throwing pool toys like diving rings at each other and stuff like that.  Before that, hmmm ... well, we all went out thrift shop shopping on Mother’s Day last week.  The Smaller Animal found a pair of goggles and the littlest one found two stuffed animals for like a buck.

Last two meals I cooked: Well, the word “cooked” seems to preclude making a salad, which I do quite often, so it’s probably going to have to be my scrambled omelette.  That is, it’s sort of like an omelette except that I scramble it.  I use trinity and what we generally call “pizza cheese”.  I made some this morning and probably yesterday too.  Once I cut up all the veggies, I usually make it over and over again until they’re gone.

Last two non-work programs I worked on: Just today I was trying to write a script to take a playlist and automaticaly look up the Amazon URLs for those tracks.  This would make it easier to post playlists like I did last week; I make lots of playlists for myself and I would be happy to share them with you.  But Amazon failed me by not having one or two tracks that I was looking for, and YouTube never has all of them, annoyingly.  You’d think by this point we’d have a better situation for sharing music over the Internet.  But whatever.  Yesterday I worked on the help system for my VCtools program, which we use at work, but I still develop on my own time.

Last two web pages I looked at: Uhhh ... before I started this post, you mean?  I guess Amazon and MetaCPAN, according to my browser history.

Last two animals I saw in real life: Um ... well ... I can see two of our cats from here.  Also two of my children, which are pretty close to being animals.

Last two messes I had to clean up: I have a kid who’s potty training.  You really don’t want to know.

Last two multi-syllabic words I spoke to another adult: Okay, now we’re just being silly.

So that’s what I’ve been up to.  Hope your day/week/month is just as exciting.