Milestone!

I hit a little bit of a blogging milestone today. Nothing huge, but it really makes me happy to see.

I checked my google reader and found that I'm just about to hit 100 people subscribed to my blog feed through google! And there's another 45 or so through other readers. Nearly 150 people out there tune in at least semi regularly to hear...errr read, what I have to say. I can't say it enough times you guys, I am honored.

Now that in itself is a milestone, and one I'm proud of, but this afternoon I was looking over the January/February issue of GRIT ... And I took to reading the editors section about Good Changes coming up for 2009. It was a good read, talking about new additions to the magazine and the online content...
And then I caught it...

What the??? My name is in print!! OK OK, I know, it's just a mention of my blog that I've been contributing to on their online magazine but, and can I say this again, it's my name in print!

I don't know what it is about print media that makes me so excited? Maybe it's just my age and the fact that I grew up on it so it seems a little more elusive than the web. Whatever the case, I'm really happy about it. Want to hear more? Do ya?

Ok, you broke me... I mentioned a little while back that I had some cool news that I just didn't feel comfortable mentioning yet. Well, I've been asked to write a couple of significant pieces for the print magazine as well! Of course, as it is with the publishing industry, I probably can't count on it too much until the work is printed, but it's still a really great opportunity for me and one that I've had as a goal for some time. In fact, it's one of the things I laid out in my 2009 goals. I'll keep you posted as I know more on it.

2009 is shaping up to be a heck of a year ain't it?
All the best to you.
P~

My story of food - IV

Tonight was the lecture with Michael Pollan, Author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and most recently In Defense of Food; the lecture was great, but more on that to come later. In the spirit of this I decided Monday to take a look at my own "Story of Food" throughout the week; to illustrate how I was influenced and how I have changed and grown.

Renaissance

So I had decided to get myself healthier, but what did that mean? I didn't want to get caught up in the diet cycle that so many people have, but if the food was what had made me gain weight then what choice did I have? Well what if it wasn't necessarily the food? What if it was me? What if my outlook on food was the problem? I had to come to terms with what my way of looking at food meant and how I could change it to affect the change that I was looking for.
For so long a period while I was on my own my diet was one of fast food or at best processed and refined foods, with few quality, healthy, home cooked meals, that when I started getting these delicious meals daily, I just stuffed myself. It was the first time since I was an adult that I had regular, complete and tasty meals and I made the best of it. That was my outlook on food, if it's good, eat as much as I can. I had not yet read Michael Pollans books, but I had accomplished the first of his three instructions to a healthy diet; "Eat Food". It was indeed food, but the next instruction is "Not too Much", that one needed a little work.

Armed with this insight to my diet, I decided to train myself to eat until I was full. But what do I mean? I thought I was going to try to eat less right? I did. I ate until I was full and not until I was satisfied, there's a big difference. I enjoyed the delicious meal, but just because there was some left, didn't mean I needed to eat it. Instruction two, learned.

Over the last few years, one of the other things that I have been working on, was learning to garden. I love to grow things, and growing a small garden for some extra veggies just seemed like a no-brainer. Well now I decided to ramp it up to true food production levels. It gave me the opportunity to begin eating more plant foods like salads, greens, zucchinis and tomatoes. Then A~ surprised me yet again. It seems that the heavy stuff like gravies and fried food wasn't all there was to her food traditions at all. As our garden matured and the harvests came in, she taught me how to put up food for the winter. Pickling and preserving, we put up beans and cucumbers and she showed me a relish-like mix called chow chow. We've also made plum and blackberry jam and baked and frozen zucchini bread to name a few others.
As the year progressed and my awareness of my diet and my connection to food grew, it seemed like for every step I made, A~ was right on pace with me as well. Somewhere along the road she began making even more of our foods right at home. She began a traditional sourdough start, made all of our breads, and has utterly spoiled us for desserts.

Today my story of food is a love story. I love to explore it and enjoy it with my kids and my wife, I love to share my passion for it with my friends and neighbors and most of all I love the connection and traditions that it brings to our home.

I have no misconceptions that my story of food is nowhere near completed, I hope you'll keep joining me as I discover it.

Happy eating

P~

"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants"

~Michael Pollan

My story of food - III

Tomorrow Michael Pollan, Author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and most recently In Defense of Food, will be in Salt Lake City to speak on… surprise… food. Or more to the point, what we eat and how we eat it. In that spirit I decided Monday to take a look at my own "Story of Food"; how I was influenced and how I have changed and grown.

Feast after Famine

Yesterday I told you about a couple of later influences in my food history and about how drastically that changed when I was on my own. I spent a lot of years essentially in a food purgatory. In 1999 I met my soul mate (and just for the record, I don't throw that phrase around lightly.) But the food drought wasn't over yet. There were a couple of very lean years after we first got together. My good job of the last 3 years had been jettisoned because I had had to relocate and the work that I could get, was barely above minimum wage. We lived on little, received food assistance from our church, and at one point needed to store food in the snowbank for a while because we had no refrigerator. In March 2001, just as we were getting settled into a routine, providence shined on us and I fell into the position that I am in today. My income more than doubled overnight, and before long we were eating like kings (or at least it seemed that way from where we had come).
I mentioned A~ being from West Virginia and having a strong food tradition of her own, well that tradition combined with her skills in the kitchen and desire to feed people had many upsides. Delicious brown beans and cornbread, Biscuits and gravy with fried eggs, sweet potato pie; all of which I had had at least limited exposure to at some point, but had never had made like these. One down side, I also quickly learned, was that the secret of such mouth watering delights was bacon grease, sugar, shortening and huge portions . I don't have a problem with using bacon grease for some things, and there's really no other way to make proper biscuits and gravy if you ask me, but my fathers entire side of the family has a long history of heart disease and now that I was finally happy with my life I wanted to be around to enjoy it for a while. Long story short, after nearly six years of the dietary equivalent of reckless abandon, I had grown to approx 220+ lbs from my previous all time high of 153. Mind you I worked physically a lot through the latter years, and a lot of that gain was in new muscle, but much was what one of my coworkers likes to call "table muscle". This brings me to last year.

One of my new years resolution for last year was to begin to get myself healthier. It was the first time in my life that the prospect of a diet was looming before me, and I didn't really know what to do about it.

Tomorrow is Michael Pollans lecture and I'll take that cue to wrap up this Story of Food with how a shift of perspective and some good advice lead to unforeseen changes.

P~

~~For those of you that read this through a reader of some sort, I appologize for the duplicate post.~~

My story of food - II

This week Michael Pollan, Author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and most recently In Defense of Food, will be in Salt Lake City to speak on… surprise… food. Or more to the point, what we eat and how we eat it. In that spirit I decided yesterday to take a look at my own "Story of Food"; how I was influenced and how I have changed and grown.

On my own

I'd had the benefit at twenty years old to have had some pretty interesting exposures to food through not only my family influences, but through the jobs I had held thus far. I worked at a Jack in the Box restaurant and at more pizza joints that I care to admit and I can't say they left a positive legacy to me, but there were a few others that did.

One of the last pizza places that I worked at was Milano's Pizza, a small, family run pizza place with a pie that was sooo good. I learned that pizza, though a simple food and often rightly lumped together with fast food, can be instead a very healthy, fresh and delicious meal. I learned to form dough by hand by rolling the dough balls, (a very handy skill when baking NY Times no knead bread by the way.) and then to toss a crust and use only fresh ingredients.

After my first year in college I was invited to study abroad at the University of London for a semester, a food journey to itself, but that's another story. I was fortunate enough to have parents that were able to help me take advantage of this opportunity, and that were also grounded enough to attach the condition to it that I had to save a $1000.00 toward the trip before they would. To earn this I worked in another small family run business near my home, "The French Gourmet". The Barabas family, a Hungarian single mother and her two grown children, ran what was essentially an up scale coffee shop that was an offshoot of an established restaurant. I worked as a combination barista, cook, dishwasher, host, waiter and assistant manager and I loved every day there. I learned how to make a traditional vinaigrette from scratch, mastered the art of cooking the french omelet and baked and assembled fresh fruit tarts. This is also where I learned to cook the Ratatouille, that I shared with you last summer. I think I can pinpoint many of the roots of my love affair with food to this job.
So there I was in my early twenties with a passion and rich tradition for good food. I was married with a young child and serving in the military, how much of that food knowledge do you think mattered one iota? You guessed it, not a bunch. We pay our service members far too little, in effect to the degree that they are little more than the working poor in many cases. Food became not tradition or pleasure, it was instead a utility. We ate the basics; milk, beef, chicken and some veggies. But far too often it was taco bell, or microwave burritos with a heaping helping of processed snacks and soda. This was the norm for most of the next 10 years.

In 1999 after a long coming separation. I met my soul mate and current wife. The food drought was over, almost. She's a city girl raised in Utah, but was born in West (by God) Virginia and has deep food traditions of her own.

More tomorrow. Hope your enjoying it so far.

P~

My story of food - I

This week Michael Pollan, Author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and most recently In Defense of Food, will be in Salt Lake City to speak on… surprise… food. Or more to the point, what we eat and how we eat it. I bought a ticket to see him, (I have to admit that $10.00 is very reasonable I think.) and am looking forward to it very much. For any of you in Salt Lake area, he was also interviewed live on KUER this morning on the RadioWest show. I’m didn't get this post up in time for anyone to get to the interview in time to hear it, but you should be able to access the recorded show HERE, I have no doubt it will be on some interest to many of you.
I thought since I’ll no doubt be thinking quite a bit about food this week, not to mention trying to finish In Defense of Food (which I’ve been whittling away at since the beginning of the year) before the lecture, that I would spend the next couple of days focusing on the story of food in my life. It’s not a fantastic voyage mind you, and I’m no Michael Pollan, but I think it’s good to look back to gain perspective and if nothing else to define the road we’re on and where we think it’s going.

Earliest Memories

My earliest memories of food are both vague and distinct at the same time. My Mother grew up in Sweden and I was born there. Though I came to the U.S. when I was only two months old many of the foods we ate came from that tradition. My Fathers family was Spanish, French and American Indian and their foods reflected the southwest diet roots where they had come from; beans, tortillas, chiles etc. Quite a range huh? It made for some pretty interesting eating.

I remember "pit i pana"; I don't know if I'm spelling it correctly, but it's pronounced Pitt-E-Punna, and I would guess it probably means something like "whatever the heck happens to be in the refrigerator". My mom would make it once and a while and I always remember loving it. Fried, sliced potatoes with some fried ham or hotdogs, sliced beets and I'm sure some other things I'm forgetting, then add a couple of fried eggs on top for good measure. Almost like a skillet breakfast, but with beets. Of course there were the obligatory swedish meatballs and pancakes, but one of the things I remember most was her "Mexican Food". I quote that name, because that was and is what the food was known as. It was basically an enchilada in that it was a flour tortilla with the red sauce, but it had ground beef, scrambled eggs, cheese and black olives inside. I have no idea where she got the recipe, but it's still a must eat whenever moms around.

My Grandparents also left some major impressions while I grew up. I remember my Morfar (Swedish for Mothers Father.) sitting at the kitchen table eating potatoes that he grew. Every meal, breakfast lunch or dinner, seemed to include small new potatoes that he would hold on his fork and deftly peel with a knife and his thumb. He had two gardens as I remember, one at home and one at the summer house both with nothing but potatoes, or at least it seemed that way. Fish was important too. He spoke little to no english and I spoke as much Swedish, but we both spoke fish. My Grandma, on my fathers side, set the standard when I was a kid for homemade torillas, beans and chile. She also introduced me to homemade bread, and a dish called SOS or S**t on the Shingle. I was about 6 so I just called it poop on the shingle and wouldn't eat it, just to be safe. Grandpa left his mark around the same age, when he let me watch as he slaughtered a goat. It was something I've never forgotten it, and have forever had an appreciation of where our food comes from.

I guess you could say I really never had a choice when it came to having an appreciation for food, although my sister did a pretty good job of it when she was young. In addition to my family, I had friends who were Iranian, Jewish, German; all of whom shared their traditions with me as well. All of this went into making my pallete what it is. It gave me a love for food, and a cursory appreciation for what it took to produce it. From there I was on my own, I left home at 18, was married and supporting a family by 20, and food changed to a much different role. More on that path tomorrow.

P~

Interested in Scribbles?

I’ve been thinking about opening up a whole other facet of myself to all of you. It’s a piece of me that I have held very close and only shared with a very very few people over the last 20+ years; my scribbles. I know that doesn’t really give you any idea of what it is that they are, but that’s what I call them. Essentially they are just that, scribbles that I have put on paper and collected since I was in high school. Some of them are poems and some merely thoughts. Some are organized and thought out, while most are more like the ranting of a madman.

In high school and the period shortly thereafter I allowed myself a lot of, shall we say, creative license with my writing. A lot of these scribbles are very amorphous and really make sense only to me. (And very little sense at that.) Later, while I served in the military, I made two tours in the middle east; Saudi Arabia to be exact. A lot of the writing from that time was so I could remember the things I saw, impressions I had, and the anger and frustrations that I sometimes felt. I carried a notebook in my BDU’s and pulled it out to scribble in it when I had the need. Some of these writings jar me now when I read them, others paint a picture in my head so that it is almost like I am there.

My question to you, and I need your input here, is whether or not you would even be interested in reading them. I sometimes wonder if I should even go off on some of my tangents like the “Philosophical Divergence” I went on a few days ago. Maybe this blog has evolved itself into a primarily simple living, gardening, explore the greener side of things type of blog. Perhaps I should just do as I’ve thought about and create a separate blog where I can post things of that nature. I want to get these things down in a form more stable than the notes that I currently have which are literally falling apart from age and mistreatment, I just don’t know if I should share them, and for that matter if I do, will anyone really care? My thought was to just kind of work them in here or there like I do with “Thoughts for Today”, not all at once, just a scribble once and a while, kind of like the way I collected them.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday weekend. I suspect traffic online will be rather slow (as it should be) due to family gatherings and generally enjoying our time together, I do intend to post a little this weekend, but if I don’t I will be back to regular next week for sure. Enjoy your weekend, and in case I don’t get the chance, Merry Christmas to you all.

I leave you with this, a “scribble”, to help you decide whether your interested in more or not:

Like cattle fighting to get in their stalls first,

Soldiers prodded by the gently hand of impatience.

Hurry up! Run! Run! Can’t wait to wait…in a cell.

Slowly, methodically they move,

Drones of repetition. Starved.

Not I. This one waits; watches the fools squander freedom.

P~ (Oct 92, Saudi Arabia)

Turn Off, Tune Out, Be Happy (Today)

Well here we are, Today. What did I learn? How has is benefited me?



Today:

Well, today I think I’m the happiest I’ve been in my life. I was never truly miserable mind you; after all I have a beautiful wife and children, a new home in a good neighborhood, and a challenging job with people I like to be around. Today however, I am focusing on those things and on the positive, possible things in my life. I feel challenged by myself to think and learn and grow. My health is better and I’ve lost nearly thirty pounds with no dieting, just a more healthy diet and active living. I have built a small but loyal group of readers and friends that I enjoy chatting and learning with. I’ve also learned that what I consume can truly have an impact on my happiness. More does not mean happier and easier does not mean better. Spending time and work to grow a garden really does make for a better salad, and the time it takes to bake really does make better bread. Of course we need things, I am realistic after all. It’s the pursuit of things as a goal in themselves that I’m talking about. There are so many people out there that are not able to have some of the basic things like shelter, clothing or regular meals; perhaps instead of throwing out that “old” coat we could donate it to someone who needs it. Few things increase our appreciation of our blessings and of the things we have, thereby increasing our happiness, like sharing with others. Slowing down and simplifying our lives can bring us so much fulfillment it’s hard to quantify it. I hope I’ve been able to shed a little light on my own journey and that perhaps it will help some of you to reflect on yours. I leave you with this…



Happiness is being where you are,

Take stock what you have and appreciate it,

Focus on the good and the possible in your world, and how you can increase it,

Slow down, participate in life and stay challenged.


Namaste
P~

Turn Off, Tune Out, Be Happy (The Descent)

“My name is P~ and I’m a recovering pessimist”, that’s how I ought to introduce myself. I know this sounds silly on the surface, but really it’s not, it’s the truth. I was fortunate enough this year to have a number of events come together and enough clarity to make some decisions that have opened a door for me to more happiness than I even realized I was missing. I’ll start at the beginning, as I see it, of a slow and creeping descent into gloom and unhappiness. I didn’t realize it was this at first, but as I reflected on it, it became obvious to me.

The Descent:
After September 11th I, like so many others, began to check in on the news regularly to see what was going on, if there were any developments in the investigation or any survivors found. This was the gateway event so to speak. Soon after, I found talk radio. I knew it existed of course, but had never really listened to it regularly. I started tuning in during the mornings to see if anything new was happening and to get the latest from the day and evening prior. Those morning tune-ins turned to all day listening and before I knew it I had it on during the drive to and from work, on the garage radio, while I worked outside, pretty much constantly. On top of this I would watch the different cable news outlets at night, and would actually TIVO some of the opinion shows that I didn’t have time for. I found that even though each host, whether on radio or television, had a slightly different way they would put the info across it was still really just the same information. I also found myself parroting the positions of many of the hosts, even when I didn’t fully agree, because I did agree with part of it. I substituted thinking for listening, a dangerous proposition; can you say mind control? Now that I was fully addicted to the hard stuff and binging all day long, the inevitable symptoms that follow any addiction followed. Need, paranoia, anxiety, anger, you name it. Really, I’m not exaggerating. I needed it and felt like I was going to miss some crucial event if I wasn’t tuned in. I started getting angry at the opposing side, many of whose positions I still disagree with mind you, but I took it too far I think; badmouthing different positions and not even spending the time to familiarize myself with them. Finally I found myself feeling afraid, almost paranoid, of “The things that were going to happen”. I do think that there are a lot of things to be concerned with, peak oil, food/water shortages and wars for example, but I was obsessing on them. There were other things causing me unhappiness as well. I’ve wanted to be in a place where I could have more land to work. I’ve often dreamt of “returning to the land” so to speak but reality and circumstances seem conspired against this. I would actually find myself feeling incredibly depressed at times and not wanting to do anything because I was focusing on this thing that I never felt I would ever be able to have. Things in general for that matter were a cause of despair. Why can’t I have this or that when I want it so badly? Life isn’t fair is it? I’ve written before about happiness; about “being where you are” and not focusing on where you wish you were and I believe that to be one of the best pieces of advice I could give on the subject. What I didn’t realize however, was exactly how much my consumption could be tied to it. I had become stuck in a rut of consuming dire news, disdainful views, and lofty wants that were continually letting me down. The more I focused on what would make me happy if I had it, or how things should be, the more discontent I was with what I had and how things were.

At this point I was pretty low. I felt full of fear, and discontent. I know my sweet wife worried about me and ask if everything was OK. I didn't to be like this, it just crept up on me. Tomorrow I'll tell you about The Recovery.

Till tomorrow.

P~