Archive for the 'Food' Category
June 18, 2009 @ 8:31 pm | Filed under: Books, Food
We’ve been hearing about the health benefits of dark chocolate for a couple of years now—woowoo antioxidants, right? But have you read up on the subject? I hadn’t, until Jane insisted I order a copy of Rowan Jacobsen’s Chocolate Unwrapped: The Surprising Health Benefits of America’s Favorite Passion. Rowan, you recall, is the author of Fruitless Fall, the book on bee colony collapse I wrote so much about last month.
His chocolate book proved just as interesting and illuminating.
Published in 2003 (which is to say, on the cutting edge of the chocolate-has-health-benefits revelation), Chocolate Unwrapped is a close look at what chocolate is, how it’s produced, what role it has played in history, and—the best part—exactly why it is good for us. I knew a good bit of the history, having researched cacao and cocoa for a book myself many moons ago, but I enjoyed the thoroughness of Rowan’s examination.
What I appreciated most was the in-depth look at antioxidants—what they are and why we care. I mean, we’ve all been inundated with the ANTIOXIDANTS GOOD message these past five or ten years, and we’ve seen dozens of lists of antioxidant-rich foods. If you’re on FaceBook you’ve probably had those darn acai berries rubbed in your face more times than you can count. “Although everyone has heard of antioxidants,” Rowan writes, “most people have only a hazy conception of what they are.” Bingo.
“What,” he goes on to ask, “is so magical about antioxidants? How can they help prevent such a wide range of diseases?” The answer has to do with free radicals—something else I knew about in a hazy FREE RADICALS BAD, ANTIOXIDANTS GOOD way. But the science of it isn’t hazy at all.
Free radicals are molecules gone bad: they have had one of their electrons knocked off, or have had an extra electron forced upon them, so they have a charge. But (as we all remember from chemistry class), molecules don’t want a charge, they want to be neutral, so free radicals search their environment for a place to unload their extra electron, if they have too many, or steal an electron if they are one short.
Of course, the molecule victimized by the original free radical now has a charge of its own. So what does it do? It turns around and does the same thing to its neighbor. A chain reaction occurs that continues until something else comes along to intervene.
Now picture a free radical in your body. If it steals an electron from one of your cells, you then have a chain reaction of radical cells in your body. If it attacks your DNA, so much the worse. Cells don’t respond well to having their molecular structure altered. Cancer is just one of many diseases resulting from this. Blame free radicals for everything from wrinkled skin to memory loss, immune system deterioration, and arthritis….The average DNA receives 10,000 “hits” from free radicals per day.
Well, that cheerful information is enough to send me running to the fridge for my favorite comfort food. Fortuitously, it turns out that’s exactly the right move to make.
Enter the antioxidants. Antioxidants neutralize free radicals in several ways. The polyphenol antioxidants in chocolate are molecules composed of a ring of six carbon atoms. Some of the bonds between the carbon atoms are double bonds, but a single bond between carbon atoms is all that’s necessary for the molecule to hold together, so polyphenols can easily “shuffle” their bonds to have one free to latch onto a charged particle that comes along—like a free radical. They then carry the free radical out of the body with them when they are excreted through normal processes.
As you can see, your body needs a constant supply of polyphenols and other antioxidants to continously eliminate free radicals from the body. Chocolate is one of the best places to get this supply.
This is where Elaine shoves Jerry: GET OUT! I mean, it’s a bit of a jump from “ANTIOXIDANTS GOOD and chocolate’s got ‘em” to “chocolate is one of the best places to get this supply.” Oh but listen:
A bar of dark chocolate has twice the antioxidant content of a glass of red wine and seven times that of green tea. What about fruits and vegetables? They don’t even come close. Oranges have 750 antioxidant units per 100 grams, kale 1770. Blueberries, poster-children of the antioxidant world, have 2400. And dark chocolate? More than 13,000.
Of course, as Rowan points out quite clearly, the cocoa bean is actually the seed of a fruit. And when he says “dark chocolate,” he means the darker, the better—certainly not milk chocolate, so full of sugar and milk powder that the actual cocoa content may be quite minimal. His examination of the history of chocolate illuminates the path the seeds traveled that led to their being so heavily diluted with sugars and fats that it is practically impossible for a contemporary Westerner to think of chocolate as anything but dessert (ergo a wicked indulgence).
Also discussed is chocolate’s famed (and quite factual) mood-lifting power, containing as it does a number of brain-affecting chemical compounds, including caffeine (in minimal quantities, however), theobromine (another mild stimulant), seratonin, tryptophan, and PEA (phenylethylamine), a chemical which, “like speed and heroin…triggers the release of natural opiates in the brain, which brings on feelings of ecstasy.” As if that weren’t enough, there’s anandamide, a “pleasure chemical” found in chocolate that is “almost identical to the THC in marijuana.”
(Bonus children’s literature connection: according to this book, anandamide was named for the Sanskrit word for bliss. In junior high, I was dead set on naming my firstborn daughter “Ananda,” after the awesome dog—stay with me—in Madeleine L’Engle’s novel, A Swiftly Tilting Planet. According to Mrs. L’Engle, the word meant “that joy in existence without which the universe would fall apart and collapse.” I thought that sounded like a pretty fine name for one’s child. A bit much to measure up to, perhaps, but I planned to call her Nan for short—an homage to Anne Shirley Blythe, of course.)
Anyway: Chocolate Unwrapped: fascinating book, another excellent source of discussion between my children and me, and exactly the justification I needed for my mid-afternoon daily dose. And, yes, for me, where chocolate is concerned, the mantra has always been: the darker, the better. Free radicals, begone.
antioxidants, chocolate, Rowan Jacobsen
June 15, 2009 @ 8:13 pm | Filed under: Food, Links
Today was another sick day for me. The kids are much better, though. I could have cried with relief when Scott told me he was staying home from work today to take care of everyone. Here at the darkening end of the day, I think I’m finally seeing a glimmer of wellness in the distance. I still have no voice and a cruel cough, but I’m getting better. Hurrah.
Sick or no, we took a fun little spontaneous stroll through an interesting topic today: bento boxes. In Harvest Moon your character is given a box lunch every day, and Rose was curious about what exactly a box lunch IS, and I told her about bento and starting looking up links, and oh my, the internet is a wondrous thing.
Links we enjoyed:
Anna the Red’s Bento Factory. Amazing site. What an artist she is. My girls are Mario fans and loved her Super Mario Galaxy characters. But my favorite were the totoros and—here’s one for all my kidlitosphere friends—her tribute to Where the Wild Things Are.
This isn’t a bento but it may be the cutest thing I have ever seen in my life, EVER. (Remind me to tell you someday about my family’s deep affection for My Neighbor Totoro, which I think is my favorite animated movie of all time.) (You see how Totoro brings out the extreme declarations from me.)
Bento Box has some good background, especially the page about bento staples.
Loved the FAQ at Lunch in a Box…and every other page we went to!
Cooking Cute is everything its name promises.
You could spend all day oohing over the bento photos on Flickr.
We are almost always home for lunch, but these beautiful pictures give me much food for thought (ba dum bum) about simple ways to bring more beauty to the table and make healthy foods appealing. Not that all of the links above are about simplicity…there’s some pretty elaborate artistry happening there. But the principles are worth pondering.
May 20, 2009 @ 6:50 pm | Filed under: Books, Food
The giant strawberry display in Henry’s this morning reminded me of this post I wrote in February, 2006, back when we lived in Virginia instead of strawberry country. Strawberries here in San Diego are plentiful and cheap months before they hit the Virginia farmers’ markets, but I still get excited when I see them piled in the produce section under a big sale sign.
I wonder if the people who bought our house when we moved left the backyard berries in place?
I have berries on the brain.
Have you seen them? They’re back in the supermarkets—even our little small-town grocery store—big, shiny, alluring strawberries pretending to be on sale at $5 for a two-pint container. Do you know how fast a family of six-going-on-seven can inhale two pints of strawberries? What family can afford to wolf down five dollars in one juicy, delirious, ten-minute frenzy?
And yet…yesterday I succumbed. When I placed the bowl of berries on the table after the broccoli had been dutifully dispensed with, oh how the children celebrated! What jubilant praises rang out, what an outpouring of gratitude for the beneficence of their marvelous mother! I’m telling you, the show of appreciation topped the songs sung by Bill Cosby’s children when he fed them chocolate cake for breakfast.
(Their praise might have been tempered somewhat had they known what I was planning for my own dessert, after they were all in bed. While they snoozed in ignorance above stairs, I claimed the privilege of the eight-months-pregnant woman and treated myself to a giant helping of strawberry shortcake. Veteran readers of this blog may recall my fondness for confections consisting of berries, cake, and whipped cream.)
All right, indulging in those berries was a temporary lapse of prudence, and I stubbornly do not regret it. But it mustn’t happen again. Not too often. Um, maybe once a week. No! No, I must be strong…I need only wait a couple of months and then we’ll have berries raining down upon us like a scene from Jamberry
I have never understood why more people don’t plant strawberries as groundcover. Perhaps my neighbors, who have been staring at dead berry leaves on my side-yard slope for four months, have a counteropinion. Sure, strawberries aren’t evergreen and by late February they look as pitiful and straggly as everything else in my yard. But wait until June. First the thick, attractive mat of leaves, then the dainty white blossoms, then the fat berries in that irresistible shade of red: a dangerous, tempting, sexy hue that suggests perhaps strawberries were the first new plant to come along after Adam and Eve got booted out of the Garden. There is nothing demure about a strawberry.
Four years ago, inspired by Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots
Eighteen dollars: less than four times the amount we paid for last night’s gone-in-a-flash berry feast. And now I get a steady stream of berries from June to September. Like the wantons they are, the plants have multiplied with abandon: we must have hundreds of individual strawberry plants now, each fertile and heavy with fruit in its season. I am a neglectful gardener (just ask my neighbors) and I do nothing to baby these plants. I ignore them. I don’t do chemicals and I can’t be bothered with fertilizer or compost. We have terrible soil: thick red Virginia clay that is not at all disposed to encourage root growth. The kids’ caterpillar farm (fennel and rue) springs up right from the middle of the strawberry bed. The strawberries don’t care. They thrive on adversity. They scoff at the miserable growing conditions; they sneer at the crabgrass; they launch themselves over the retaining wall and bloom in mid-air. They send exploratory runners into the lawn, and Scott mows right over them. For this callous treatment, they reward us with a riotous, bountiful harvest. You can’t beat us down, they proclaim. You only encourage us to flaunt our fertility. We will, we must, reproduce! We will fill the world! Let those fat, bland, expensive greenhouse-grown excuses for berries beware! We are sun-warmed and sweet. We will make you weep for joy.
There is no modesty in strawberries.
Legend has it that if you share a double strawberry with someone, the two of you will fall in love. I doubt this has ever been proven: who shares a strawberry? Go pick your own!
Strawberries were long believed to be the symbol of Venus, Goddess of Love. This does not surprise me. Later, during medieval times, strawberries came to be associated with righteousness and perfection. Perfection, I can see. But righteousness? I think not. They are too decadent, almost indecent: so beautiful, so delicious. And yet you’ll sometimes see them carved on very old church altars and pillars, the signature of the stonemason. He was probably looking forward to a bowlful of berries and cream after work.
Jacques Cartier, traveling along the St. Lawrence to Quebec in 1534, wrote in his diary about “vast patches of strawberries along the great river and in the woods.” One wonders that his journey did not end right there!
“Doubtless God could have made a better berry,” wrote William Butler in the year 1600, “but doubtless God never did.”
Amen to that.
Children’s books to feed your strawberry appetite (as if such a thing needed help):
The First Strawberries
The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear
Strawberry Girl 
(More to come, but Wonderboy just woke up from his nap.)
UPDATE:
The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher by Molly Bang. Gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. A wordless picture book about the efforts of a comfortably frowsy-haired old woman to escape the thieving grasp of a mysterious creature who has his eye on her basket of berries. (Who can blame him?) I’m linking to Chinaberry for this one because that’s where I discovered this gem of a book years ago. And a hat tip to Sherry of Semicolon for reminding me of it. (And don’t miss the poem she posted in the comments.) I think I’ll send Jane upstairs to hunt for this book right now…I’m not sure Beanie remembers it, it’s been so long since we pulled it off the shelf.
August 7, 2008 @ 4:16 am | Filed under: Food, Household
People are sharing their Costco (and Sam’s) shopping lists in the comments. Care to add yours? I am learning a lot. Am also getting hungry.
August 6, 2008 @ 7:21 pm | Filed under: Family, Food, Household
I wrote this for my daily notes blog but halfway through decided I wanted to ask the Costco question here so am sticking it here instead. Forgive the chatty blah blah and lazy writing.
Really nice day, though at the outset I thought it was going to be too busy. Turned out to be productive (in the a.m.) and mellow (in the p.m.).
Piano classes first thing. Rose was deeply troubled by a back tooth about to come out, afraid it would fall out during class and there’s no bathroom right there and what would she do?? I told her she could skip class, stick with me.
We dropped the other two off and went to the gas station to vacuum out the car. Machine took coins only. Turned out Rose had a whole purse full of quarters—saved up for buying bouncy balls at the taco shop on piano days. Hee. She helped me clean out the trash and vacuum two thirds of the car. We didn’t do the last row b/c I didn’t feel like taking out the carseats (and Rilla), and without doing that, not much point in vac’ing.
The panic alarm went off when I started the car back up. COULD NOT get it to stop. Had to call Scott at work. Wonderboy was shrieking: awful sound in his hearing aids, I imagine. Poor guy. I was too flustered to get out of the car and turn off his aids. Scott knew the trick, so whew.
Back to piano to pick up Beanie. Told Jane she could hang out & talk to her friend whose sister is in Rose’s class. That gave us an hour and a half to kill. Needed to pick up something for dinner. On impulse, I went to Costco—finally—and got a membership. Which took a while, so we didn’t have much actual shopping time. I love how the big bulk packages of chicken are sectioned into six meal-sized portions. NOW I get why all my friends buy all their meat there. Cheaper, I knew, but I thought I’d have to divide up the big packages of meat for freezing and I loathe doing that. This perforated portions thing ROCKS.
Made children happy by buying case of fruit leather, which Katie Z had served with lunch yesterday & mentioned getting at Costco. Yum.
Loved the double-seater shopping cart, too, but Rilla begged to ride in the sling anyway. Ah well.
Mean to ask local friends this, but I’ll ask it here too: what do you buy at Costco? What are the best deals? I put off joining for ages because those big warehouse stores overwhelm the bejeebers out of me.
Back to piano to pick up Jane. Home, unpacked groceries, everyone snacked for lunch. All were ready for some veg time. Uncle Jay had sent a copy of Gail Carson Levine’s Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg in the mail: a library favorite, producing much shrill excitement from the girls. Rose called dibs on first read, so that’s how she spent the next couple of hours. Jane is re-reading Oz books (because Beanie has just discovered them) and I forgot to ask what else.
Later: computer games for the girls, Blues Clues for the littles, puttering around for me.
Afternoon tidy up, nice phone call with a Virginia friend, folded laundry, read a stack of Boynton books to the boy.
Around 4:30, hit a wall of exhaustion. Asked Jane to watch the little ones for 20 minutes so I could nap. Took the nap, woke so groggy, wondered if it had been a bad idea.
Started dinner. Slam dunk tonight. Sauteed two onions, boneless chicken thighs (yay Costco), took out a couple for the kids and added some Trader Joe Cuban Mojito sauce to the rest. Found the jar in the pantry when looking for something else. Oh. My. Goodness. So incredibly tasty. Had a big loaf of rosemary bread from Costco, also smashingly good, for sopping up the pan drippings. Kids ate their chicken plain, with sliced peaches, carrots, bread. Rose set the table, made it so lovely. When I finished eating (actually got to sit through the meal, mostly—Rilla had crashed on the sofa, which is a bad thing in terms of her bedtime but made dinner easier), Rose plopped Favorite Poems Old and New in front of me and insisted I read a few. Read some new ones and then was implored by all three girls to read “the funny poem”—their old favorite, “To My Son, Aged Three Years and Five Months.” They shrieked at the lines that especially fit their brother: “Where did he learn that squint?” and “Thou imp of mirth and joy” most of all.
Started the dishes, enjoying the sound of Jane practicing “The Entertainer” on piano. How I love that piano: Jane’s Steinway, her wish from the Make-a-Wish Foundation when she was three years old. Very good choice, my dear. And hurrah to Mr. Rogers for inspiring a tiny little girl with awe at the sight of a “big mommy pah-no” those many years ago, when the only keyboard she knew was the little tabletop one in our apartment. No one could believe such a bitty girl really wanted a piano, but she clung to that wish for six months until everyone was convinced she meant it. What a gift she gave the whole family, choosing a piano over the VIP trip to Disney everyone expected a three-year-old to ask for. She wouldn’t even have remembered the Disney trip, but that piano blesses our family every single day, ten years later. Standing there at the sink, watching the little ones play outside the kitchen window, smiling to see how my neglected petunias have revived in the hanging basket now that we’re actually watering them, listening to Jane’s music ripple off the keys, I felt suffused with contentment.
And then finally Scott was home, and he ate standing at the stove as I knew he would, scraping the juices out of the pan with the good bread. And now he’s on kid (and dish) duty, and I’m here in the bedroom gearing up to write. And answer mail, oh my goodness. I made the stupidest flub: accidentally archived a hundred messages waiting to be answered—some from weeks ago. Have so far pored through 1600 archived emails looking for the ones I need to answer. Needles in haystacks. If I owe you a reply, please be patient. Or write me again, in case I didn’t find your needle in all that hay.
May 21, 2008 @ 6:54 pm | Filed under: Breadmaking, Family, Food, Fun Learning Stuff, Home and Hearth
We haven’t baked bread for a really long time (witness my neglected bread blog). Lately the reason is because it’s been too hot. Yesterday our heat wave broke and I had a breadish impulse, and I thought I’d better act on it because it’s bound to get hot again soon and who knows when I’ll feel like baking again. The girls mixed up a batch of dough (Wisteria’s recipe) and I read to them while they kneaded.
Later, after the rising and shaping and second rising, we put the bread in the oven and I had another impulse. Someone blogged recently about making butter—I can’t for the life of me remember who it was. Years ago, summers during college, I had a job as a tour guide at a prairie wildlife refuge where, in addition to 2,000 acres of open prairie full of pronghorn and owls and snakes and prairie dogs, there was a small sod village. Sometimes my job was to give tours to school groups, and in the sod house we always baked johnny cake on the iron stove and churned butter to go with it. We had a jar with a special hand-crank churn blade attached to the lid, and the kids would take turns cranking while I gave my talk and mixed up the johnny cake. When the butter was ready I’d turn it out into a wooden bowl and mash it with a wooden paddle, squeezing out the buttermilk. Even in hot Colorado July weather, the warm johnny cake and sweet, creamy butter was heart-stirringly delicious.
So you’d think with all that buttermaking experience under my belt, not to mention the whole Little House motif threaded through our lives, I’d have made butter with my kids a zillion times. Not so. I think I was spoiled by the fancy churning gadget; I always figured doing it the shake-it-in-a-jar way would take a really really long time and be one of those experiments with a spotty success rate.
But this blog entry I read (my apologies for forgetting where) described it as a simple and sure-fire process that took about 20 minutes. So when I put our bread in the oven to bake, I grabbed a clean spaghetti jar I’d save for rinsing paintbrushes and poured in some heavy cream. Filled it about half full. Called the girls. Commenced a-shaking.
We took turns and everyone was very giggly and excited. Of course we had to pull Little House in the Big Woods off the shelf and read the churning passage there:
At first the splashes of cream showed thick and smooth around the little hole. After a long time, they began to look grainy. Then Ma churned more slowly, and on the dash there began to appear tiny grains of yellow butter. When Ma took off the churn-cover, there was the butter in a golden lump, drowning in the buttermilk.
We couldn’t resist unscrewing the lid every little while to check our progress. At first the cream got very thick, just as Laura described. Our shaking had whipped it, and when we shook the jar we couldn’t hear or feel it sloshing around anymore. Then, about ten minutes later, it began to thin out again, and we felt the sloshing. We peeked inside and it really did look grainy. Another five or six minutes, and it looked lumpy. Right after that it happened to be my turn to shake the jar, and all of a sudden I felt a thunk inside from something solid smacking the lid. We had our butter.
The girls erupted in squeals. We opened the lid and there it was, not golden like Laura had described, but the faintest of pale yellows. I scooped it into a bowl, and Rose and Beanie took tastes of the buttermilk. They liked it. I mashed the soft butter to get out the rest of the liquid. Ma washed hers in cold water, but I didn’t bother doing that. I mixed in a little salt, and the timer beeped on our bread, and we couldn’t bear to wait for the bread to cool. Thick slices, slathered in butter; a blissful hush in the kitchen. Mmmm.
You are not to be impressed with my industrious domesticity on this day because 1) if such a state occurs in this house, it is a passing fluke; and 2) it turns out making butter is incredibly easy. Come to think of it, it was easier than, say, loading all the kids into the minivan and running to the grocery store to buy butter would have been. You know how those grocery-store runs can reduce me to a frazzled wreck.
I have since poked around a little online and it seems baby-food jars make excellent mini-churns. Just remember to only fill the jar half full, leaving plenty of sloshing room. And I wouldn’t give each kid his own jar because your arms do get really tired and it’s good to be able to pass off to the next shaker down the line. It sounds like it only takes ten or eleven minutes to go from cream to butter in a small jar like that. Ours took about 24 minutes, which I only know because the bread timer was set for 25. From (I’m guessing) 6 ounces of cream, we got about half a cup of butter, maybe 2/3 cup.
Oh, a last note about the bread—we did NOT use my fancy mixer with the dough hook because the children object to the way it usurps their favorite thing about breadmaking: kneading. In retrospect I realize that’s one reason we cooled off on breadmaking after our wildly enthusiastic beginning. My co-bakers drifted away because the machine killed the fun. So yesterday, I just set a mixing bowl and the six simple ingredients on the table, and the kids went to town. Yeast, water, flour, honey, salt, melted butter. They can mix this dough all by themselves. I gave each of them her own cutting board (nothing fancy; two of them were plastic, and one of those was quite small, but Beanie asked for it because she wanted to make a small loaf for herself) and divided the dough into three lumps. It’s better if they don’t have to take turns for the fun part. We stuck it all back together for the first rising. The kitchen table works better for kneading than the counters, because they can get above the dough and push down. This is stuff I figured out as we went yesterday, but it’s the kind of fiddly logistical stuff that can make or break an experience for us, and I share it under the assumption I’m not the only mom for whom that’s true.
December 9, 2007 @ 8:42 am | Filed under: Family, Food, recipes
…my dad’s family recipe. Biscuits with chocolate gravy. Mmm. There is nothing finer, let me tell you. Hot biscuits dripping with butter and covered with a thick, warm, rich chocolate sauce. Just cocoa, flour, milk, and sugar* brought to a boil over low heat. So good.
The picture does not do it justice.
Now back to my birthday boys.
(*Thanks, Dad, for permission to share the recipe. 1/4 cup cocoa, 1/4 cup flour, 1 cup sugar (hush), 1 1/2 cups milk. Mix dry ingredients first, right in your saucepan, then stir in the milk. Heat slowly, stirring constantly. You want to bring it just to a bubble but you don’t want to let it scorch. Take it off the heat, keep stirring. It will thicken upon standing. Spoon over hot buttery biscuits. The butter is vital—the magic of this dish is in the delectable combination of warm chocolate and melted butter. Trust me.)
(As I understand it, this was an inexpensive way to fill little bellies in times when cash was tight.)
(And yes, we are starting the day with my dad’s chocolate gravy and finishing with my mom’s famous cake. Two birthdays = double pigging out.)
March 1, 2007 @ 1:27 pm | Filed under: Food
I have been wishing this confection into existence for, oh, some twenty-five years. I think I hear my Easter basket snickering with glee already.
P.S. If I start blogging about candy, will I get put on the free sample lists? Because I really think I could wax poetic about all manner of sweets…
December 8, 2006 @ 7:19 am | Filed under: Food
This week, in our ongoing efforts toward Getting Settled, I resumed my old (sporadic) practice of jotting down quick notes about what we did/read/discussed/made each day. I do this in blog form* because that works better for me than paper. Yesterday I added the new chores & meals schedule the girls and I drew up. Chicken is a staple for us, and it’s on the menu twice a week. Tonight, Friday, is grilled chicken night. I have a big bag of frozen boneless chicken breasts, and I’ll thaw a few, slather them with Tastfefully Simple Raspberry Chipotle sauce and cook them on my trusty George Foreman grill.
(Have I gushed about my George Foreman here? I love him. He is my friend. He makes my life much easier. He feeds me panini sandwiches, and there’s pretty much no faster way to my heart.)
Anyway, I was reading Genevieve’s delightful blog this morning and saw that she has linked to an article full of recipes for grilled chicken. Very useful. I’ll have to give some of these a try, especially the nut-crusted recipe. Yum.
*As blogs go, my daily journal is nothing special. I ignore it sometimes for months at a stretch. It isn’t really fit for public viewing, but I share the link in the spirit of putting people at ease. It’s so easy to read people’s blogs (real blogs, I mean) and feel overwhelmed by how much Great Stuff everyone is doing. I think it’s useful, once in a while, to see how much (or as is often the case, how little) REALLY happens in the course of a real live day. And what I love is that even on the days when I have comparatively little to record, there is always, always, some great conversation or moment of discovery to remember.
