King Corn

Tonight on PBS this documentary is being shown. I've been going on and on about going green and eating healthy. This film is a good summary of what is going on in the food industry (and why people are rioting about the impossibly high cost of food in poor countries). It should be entertaining (like Super Size me was). It is on KUED at 11:00 tonight. Set your TIVO (or VCR if, like me, you are old school). Don't miss it! Thanks for the heads up Will!

A Room With A View with a Baedeker

Last night on Masterpiece Theatre they showed the new version of A Room With A View.  And it felt very ordinary and somewhat dull.  It felt like A Room With a View: the Baedeker version.  I liked Lucy and Charlotte, but who can top Maggie Smith or Helena Bonham Carter?  I also hated the liberties Andrew Davies took with the plot...ick!  And, well George just didn't do it for me.  I wished Andrew Davies would have let him use E.M. Forresters lines, they were much better than his own.  Oh well, like I thought anything could ever take the place of my own beloved Merchant Ivory production.

Happy Birthday Kalathrien

Katy, happy birthday.  I hope you get a delicious cake and that you get lots of new clothes so you can toss your old ones to me.  Thank you for being the provider of clothes for me!  Oxo!

Remember This Show?

It's been awhile, but THE OFFICE IS BACK!!!!  Can't wait!

The Link

Okay, here is the link:  Eat Food, Not Much, Mostly Plants

Lifestyle Change

I am trying to cut the meat intake of my family down and really making the shift from eating "food like substances" (author Michael Pollan's word for processed food) to real food.  We haven't been eating much processed food so in some ways it isn't a huge shift, but if you read the ingredients on your bread you may find many ingredients you don't have on hand if you were baking at home.  Breakfast is the biggest struggle but I made some yummy whole wheat banana bread, stocked up on oatmeal, and weetabix, and think I may have been able to find some good alternatives to regular old Malt o' Meal bags of cereal.  Anyway, the hardest habit to kick is the eating of meat.  It seems that for years most of my recipes revolve around meat being the main dish.  Anyway last week I way upped the veggie intake and I only made one meal with meat.  What I am lacking is a repetoire of easy standby vegetarian dishes.  To that end I would like to start a blog where anyone who is interested can go for good vegetarian recipes.  The standards for the recipes I propose would be they don't use meat (beef, chicken, pork), and they don't involve any processed foods (sorry no cream of mushroom soup casseroles or boxes of rice o'roni, or anything containing unpronounceable ingredients).  I came up with some good recipes but would love access to some of your tried and true recipes.  I would also love recipes that call for whole wheat flour.  Also I would love to know if any of you have a good alternate for refined sugar?  Millie claims to have made a killer birthday cake for Holden with honey.  Lets share recipes.  It could also be a place to share good finds.  Like yesterday I found some Arborio rice, good for rissoto dishes, at Costco for a good price that I couldn't find at my other store.  Stuff like that.  Also, this is not a low-fat place.  My food philosophy is, if it was around and people were eating it 200 years ago, it can't be bad for you.  I have little faith in "nutritionism" (another M. Pollan term) and all the nutrition crap we have been told in the last 30 years.  So, butter, cream, eggs, and real food is all good in my world.  It is the fake stuff, like artificial egg substitutes, "low-fat" butter substitutes, artificial sweeteners, and stuff like that, which are off limits. If you are interested in being a part of this, leave a comment, and hopefully sometime today I will get around to setting it up and emailing invites.  Are you in?

Escape

Sometimes it is just so nice to go away from my house and escape my life. On Friday the kids didn't have school, the weather was nice, and we escaped to Provo. We went and visited Pop-pop at his office on BYU campus, and then we went to the MOA where they have a dandy Victorian Art exhibit right now, which was fun for me. There was a nice John William Waterhouse (of Lady of Shallot fame), who was one of my favs when I really got into art at age 12.  (I still love his stuff) Then we went to the Dead Animal Museum (or the Monte L. Bean museum) which the kids loved. Then we met up with Millie and her very sweet Holden and went to the park. Then it was dinner with Grammy and Pop-pop, and Stephen and Ann and Millie and Holden at the delicious Chinese place on the road to Springville. It was very fun to hang out with Millie and hear her plans for square foot gardening and to just have a day away from the bathrooms that need to be scrubbed, the carpet that needs to be vacuumed, the clothes that need to be washed, the garden beds that need to be weeded, etc. It was so nice to escape Friday, that on Saturday we headed back down for dinner while the boys went to the Priesthood session. Ahhhh, escape.

(for any Bayou alum, they tore down the SFLC, and built this bad boy, and renamed it, perhaps to get rid of the undesirable name, but I think I want to call it the "new syphilis")

I do want to say that I know I am very lucky, or rather blessed, to be so near family. It is funny because about a half hour before Rob had to turn in his final ranking list of residency programs during his last year of med school, he bumped Utah up on his list, sort of spur of the moment style. We kept thinking it would be fun to go somewhere else in the country to have another adventure, like we did in Omaha. But then he bumped Utah up on the list at the last minute. And long story short we didn't end up in Tennessee or Albuquerque, but in Salt Lake, and it is weeks like this, when Rob has a ROTTEN schedule, and I am on my own, that I am grateful that he had the sudden inspiration to change his list around at the last possible moment.

(And Sarah, I know you are really getting a rotten deal right now, but hang in there, you are closer and closer to getting to be by family. If it doesn't kill you it will make you the strongest person on the planet! And Maren, it made me sad that you were so lonely tonight...we miss you).