In which there’s baking.
Tonight’s dinner:
A freshly baked loaf of bread on the left.
On the right, leftover bucatini with store-bought vodka sauce and tofu “meatballs” I made with basically no regard for the recipe I’d read. Fresh basil from the plant on my kitchen window sill!
Not shown: it cooled down to the 70’s so all the doors and windows are open for the first time in what feels like weeks!
My better half more or less quit eating my cooking a year or two ago (he sometimes eats what I make, but the majority of the time he declines and survives on quantities of red meat sided with shitty grocery store deli items), so I guess I’ll be taking half the pasta dish for lunch tomorrow.
This always happens with the men I live with. In the beginning, they swear they’ve “always wanted to eat more vegetarian food,” but after a few years they just want dead cows and processed garbage—honestly I cannot imagine wanting grocery store potato salad over homemade, but whatever.
I like to think I’m an accomplished cook, but I’m probably not, since nobody who can eat my food ever chooses to for long. Thank God for all the likes on my Instagram, or I’d probably get real sad about it!
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Good Gawd! That is beautiful! I always your cooking was stellar, mostly because nothing thats made by a real person and looks that amazing in photos isn’t, well, amazing.
Here’s a clue:
Let’s get in an old white Buick and drive hours and hours
home from a gig that’s hours and hours away, singing Steve Miller songs.
Hit me and let’s have a brief chat, please.
That’s a plate of mediocre plant protein on refined wheat with a side of refined wheat. I don’t doubt that it tastes better than corporate deli counter fare, but it’s no less “processed garbage” than the deli items your BF eats. And, the end result of this low nutrient density, hypercaloric diet is a body you describe as “fat”, “constantly uncomfortable”, “hurts all the goddamned time”, and “uglier day by day.” Why on Earth do you do that to yourself? Is a few minutes of gustatory pleasure really worth the significant drop in quality of life?
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
This is a single meal. I do not eat pasta every day. I mostly eat legumes, eggs, aged cheeses, squash, homemade whole wheat bread, nuts, olives, and vegetables. That might have been my only meal that day, as on my days off I often only eat once.
It turns out that humans were gathering and grinding grains for pottage and bread at least ten thousand years earlier than we previously thought. These grains are second only to fire in being instrumental in allowing human beings to get enough calories to evolve the big brains we’re using to have this stupid little argument.
Homemade food has fewer ingredients than processed foods, no fillers, stabilizers, or conditioners, less sodium, and no preservatives (not that there’s anything wrong with preservatives). There is absolutely a difference between homemade dishes and shit from the Safeway deli in terms of taste, texture, freshness, and flavor.
I repeat myself from a previous reply: “Weight gain is a complex issue encompassing factors like childhood diet, past individual and familial trauma, food deserts, fad diets, hormones, mental health, medications, genetics, and more.
“There are two kinds of thin people: those who are genetically thin for whom thinness is effortless, and those who obsess about it day after day, decade after decade, because they care more about how they look than anything else. If weight loss were simple to achieve and easy to maintain, nobody would be fat.”
A decade ago, back when we were all reading Taubes, I thought the way you apparently do now, but he still can’t prove any of his theories after teaming up with scientists and running actual clinical trials. They just don’t get the results they expect, even when they design their own trials.
What does this tell us? It tells us that LCHF/keto/paleo is no more effective than any other diet in the long run. It’s just another fad diet.
Wheat is a fine and traditional food source in a balanced diet, unless you have an autoimmune disease called celiac, which I don’t.
You can’t change your genetic legacy or all the environmental experiences you’ve already had, but it is true that one should eat less and move more.
I try, to the best of my personal ability, to eat less than I could and move more than I want to. I bike to work, I bike to the store; I work a job standing, walking, and lifting hundreds of pounds a day. I refuse to own my own car because I know that if I did, I’d drive it. (This is more an environmental choice for me, but it does have the added benefit of making me exercise more.) I hate working out because it’s dismal and boring, but I can bike instead of drive, and I can work in cheese rather than at a desk job. So I do.
But most salient to your comment is this: I’M A WOMAN ENTERING MENOPAUSE, for fuck’s sake. Telling me that I’m somehow “doing this” to myself is dumb as hell.
I’m lucky enough to have a lot of older living female relatives. They all look exactly like I do. Some are lifelong ranchers who did hours of heavy chores every day, some were office workers, some in between. They all eat different diets, for various reasons. But I look just like they do. Ergo, it’s genetics and menopause, you absolute potted plant, not my avoidance of steak and avocado luncheons.
You’re an untrained amateur with an internet connection, not an expert. You do not know what you think you know. For example, you previously mentioned “a study” showing some high percentage of Covid-19 patients had clinically low vitamin D. Well, so what? Maybe the disease causes it. Maybe the study, like many studies, was garbage. Bringing it up probably implies you think people should be taking vitamin D supplements. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Covid-19 is a deadly disease that has killed over 800,000 Americans, not a fucking vitamin deficiency.
We’re all gonna die, Stanley. Will you die having spent your adult life on a perpetual diet and exercise regime that made you cranky and judgmental? Why would you do that to yourself? I’m just not vain enough to live a life of self-torture and privation in an effort to remain, what, fuckable to a demographic I don’t care about? Doesn’t matter how thin you are when you’re old, because you’re still old. The best you can hope for is to look good for your age.
Everybody I know my age is on meds, but I’m not. I’d rather eat noodles when I want them (because happiness is a huge factor in longevity, and I don’t even particularly care to live that long) and bitch on my blog about stupid shit like being old, menopausal, and fat.
“Low nutrient density, hypercaloric” is a joyless, bloodless, and awful way to describe a delicious meal. I made those tofu-mushroom balls myself, and they were wonderful. You’ve written condescending, outdated, disproven shit about diet, and suggested that enjoying food is somehow disgusting, or a moral failing?! What the fuck is THAT? Sounds like you’re on a bad trip of austerity and self-denial and control, probably because you’re also freaked out by the process of aging (and who wouldn’t be, it’s WEIRD).
I’d like to lose weight, and am doing what I can, within reason, to do so. But I’m not going on a fad diet, and I’m not going to deny myself entire groups of food because you apparently still believe in that hilarious paleo bullshit.