Which is to say, I am on a diet, but I am somewhat ambivalent about it.

Because of my mistrust of diets, and the fact that I didn’t really eat that badly before, I am basically restricting my dietary efforts to eating less cheese, less bread and pasta, less sugar (though not much, because it’s physically impossible), and more vegetables and fish and vegetarian sources of protein (beans, nuts, tofu, etc.). Oh, and I am drinking more water. Ideally I will start doing more exercising at some point in the future, but I don’t want to be all “new regime!” about it because I am pretty sure that putting pressure on myself to make a whole bunch of lifestyle changes at once right now (while I am writing THE THESIS) is a bad idea and will result in me just giving up completely. Plus I am lazy.

My “diet” can be differentiated from a diet without quotes in that I am not actually weighing myself or counting calories and I value enjoying food more than I value getting my dress size back down to the single digits.

Basically what brought this about was talking to my mom, who’s lost a fair amount of weight in the last few years through healthy eating and running half marathons and stuff, and she talked about how she gained her weight gradually over the course of years. A little bit of weight every year doesn’t seem like a big deal, she said, but multiply it by ten. Given my family has a history of cholesterol problems and the fact that if I really just ate whatever I wanted, I would eat pizza for dinner four nights a week, guacamole on the fifth night, and butter chicken on the sixth and seventh, I decided I need to get this shit under control.

I haven’t really been on my “healthy eating initiative” long enough for there to be any effects at all, except that I am constantly thinking about food. That is for sure the worst part because I am finding it hard to gauge if I’m hungry or just thinking about what I should eat when I am.

Unrelated photos:

Also interesting: TPM cafe book club discussion of Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream. I’m really looking forward to reading this one: I read a big chunk at Chapters a couple weeks ago and it’s excellent, if depressing.

This time of year always makes me want to cook, it’s some weird nesting thing, I guess.

Here is what I did, mostly for my own reference.

Leek, Celery Root and Cauliflower Soup

1. Take three leeks, clean them and chop them into hunks.
2. Sweat them in some olive oil (or butter or other oil) (and season with salt and pepper).
3. When the leeks are soft, add an entire celery root, cut into cubes.
4. Let that cook while you cut up a whole cauliflower; dump the cauliflower into the pot.
5. Add water to cover and a teaspoon of chicken-type Better Than Bouillon (or some kind of stock-water combo or veg stock or whatever, full strength stock might be too chickeny though).
6. Cover until it comes to a boil, simmer for about half an hour (while How I Met Your Mother is on), or until the veggies are all really soft.
7. Puree! Remember to cover the blender lid with a towel, not just with your hand, unless you want soup to spurt up from that one spot where the lid thing broke and burn you.
8. Return to the pot, add a dollop of half and half (or milk or sour cream or creme fraiche or yogurt), a generous salting and peppering to taste, grate in a wee bit of fresh nutmeg, then add a tablespoon or so of store-bought garam masala, to bring out the sweetness of the vegetables. It should still mainly taste like vegetables though, not garam masala.
9. Eat, feel restored.

This was so me this morning. But my mood was fixed by cooking and then eating corn and sausages.

1. When I was running today I went by this pond in the park and I came within three feet of a great blue motherfucking heron. It was just standing there, it was really cool.
2. Last night I wound up going to bed really late because I read “Chemo World,” and then I couldn’t sleep. It’s a memoir in this month’s Harper’s written by a cancer ward nurse and holy shit it is one powerful piece of writing. She combines the scientific details about how chemo works with anecdotal evidence and perfectly-placed details, and I won’t lie, I could feel my bones freaking out. Seriously:

   Worse than the nausea for many people is a condition called mucositis. Many drugs damage the DNA of cells in the mucus membranes of the entire digestive tract, from mouth to anus, as well as mucous membranes in the vagina. The damage and the release of inflammatory chemicals destroys tiny blood vessels and connective tissue, creating ulcers. Some patients are in such severe pain from mouth sores that they can’t swallow or even speak. They require narcotics and may need days or weeks of what is called TPN, total parenteral nutrition, a metabolically balanced liquid given through the veins. (Now and then, if a patient has a certain sense of humor about his or her dark condition, the nurses will label the big, milky bag: “Steak, baked potatoes, apple pie,” changing the menu day by day.)

   It’s pretty visceral, and that’s not even the part about how the chemo drugs are so toxic that the nurses have to wear gloves when handling the plastic bags, or how one treatment essentially constitutes destroying all your bone marrow and then replacing it with pre-harvested other bone marrow. I think I found it so harrowing because chemo’s universally acknowledged to suck, but no one really talks about it, and I know people who’ve had cancer. I think probably everyone does. And those people I know, this stuff has probably happened to them, privately. But they don’t really talk about it because cancer? Not a fun conversation topic. Ugh.
3. This delicious pineapple dessert thing I made for lunch:
   (This is for one person, for more people you’d have to double it I guess):
   Melt 1 tbsp butter in a small nonstick pan.
   While that’s going, hack up the amount of pineapple you want to eat into big cubes — my pineapple was slightly dried out and in the fridge in giant wedges already.
   Once the butter’s melted, throw the pineapple cubes in the pan.
   Sprinkle the whole mess with ~2 tbsp sugar.
   Grate a bit of nutmeg directly into the pan.
   Stir it around until the sugar’s all melted into the butter, so it looks kind of clear and syrupy.
   Grab a chair to get your rum from the back of the liquor cabinet over the fridge.
   Splash a small amount of rum into the pan — it will start boiling, but don’t put your face over it unless you won’t a noseful of booze. Let the alcohol cook off, then let everything cook up and start to get a bit of colour in the syrup — not really full on caramel, just a little darker.
   Throw in a bit more rum when you start to worry the sugar will burn. Let the booze cook off again. You could add lime juice instead of more rum if you kept limes in the house, and I’m sure that would taste even better. (I will do it this way if I make it again.)
   Dump the hot rummy pineapples into a bowl, top with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream. Spoon any syrup left in the pan over the ice cream.
   Eat right away, so you get that hot-cold thing before the ice cream all melts. Tell yourself what a genius you are.

Best Books I read (for fun): Oh, this is so hard! Turn, Magic Wheel by Dawn Powell, Heat by Bill, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and Atonement by Ian MacEwan all made huge impressions; I also really liked White Teeth, in the compulsive-reading way, but it didn’t blow my mind

Best movies: Again, there’s lots of stuff I haven’t seen that counts for 2006. Stranger Than Fiction, Little Miss Sunshine, and Tristram Shandy would almost definitely be on the list, as would Brick, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and maybe Shortbus but I still have high hopes for Children of Men

Best TV: Easy. Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica, Project Runway, the end of Arrested Development, The Office. No special order.

I don’t really hold with New Year’s Resolutions as an idea, because you know, if you want to do something you will do it, and if you kind of like the idea of doing something, you will resolve to do it on New Year’s Day and then do it really regularly for a couple of months before you slowly peter out and then give up, because it turned out to be hard and/or not that fun.

In our travels this Christmas, Alex and I ate a lot of terrible food. The result is: Alex and I feel kind of terrible now. I’m pretty sure I’ve put on weight and I just generally am revolted by the idea of heavy meals involving meat and cake, which are both normally things that I like very much. Between the insane essay-writing of early December, and the eating orgy of later December, I’ve decided I need a break. I was already planning on trying out one new recipe a week (because of the bounty of cookbooks I received for Christmas), but I have now further decided that for the next little while (by which I mean like, two weeks or something), that new recipe will be meat-free. As will all my eating. I went veggie for a month in second year, and by the end I was desperately craving chicken, but I was living in res and relying on the meal hall’s definition of “meat-free alternatives” for like, half my meals. I already don’t eat much meat, so I am re-trying the experiment now that I cook for myself.

Actually, I am already ahead on my one-recipe-a-week deal: tonight we made Aloo Gobhi from New Indian Home Cooking by Madhu Gadia, which is a low-fat Indian cookbook I picked up at BMV like, years ago. We used purple cauliflower, which was pretty. All the potatoes didn’t quite cook as well as I’d have liked — smaller chunks next time, maybe? — , but the flavour was amazing and it was a really pretty dish. We also made the Lentil Curry from the Vij’s cookbook, which Alex got me. It was pretty much your standard dal, using half split mung dal (the little yellow ones) and half masur dal (the little orange ones), but with a simple onion-tomato masala and some cilantro mixed in at the end. It wound up being delicous, but it took way longer to cook than the recipe indicated, and we wound up having to take off the lid and let the excess water boil off at the end. That happened last time I tried to make lentils, too — maybe I’m not letting it boil hard enough before I let it cook? Anyway, I’ll know to allow longer for it next time. So that’s two recipes! And I’m totally planning minestrone or something for Tuesday.

I also want to start baking more: maybe twice a month? Also, and this depresses me: exercising. I should take up jogging or something: Vancouver’s one advantage is that it’s pretty and usually not deadly cold. Also, it requires virtually no investment, as I own running shoes and a supportive tank top from LuluLemon (SHUT UP IT WAS ON SALE).

Okay, maybe it’s just because I am a bit of a dork about food and about sticking it to the man, but I was totally rapt reading this 10-part investigative series on overpriced chocolate. The dude sets out to see what the fuss is about Noka Chocolate, a.k.a. “the most expensive chocolate in the world.” It manages both to totally bust them (as it turns out they misrepresent their product, which is essentially just commercially available chocolate from a reputable supplier that they temper and repour for the squares and combine with cream to make truffles as opposed to actually making the it from the “rarest cacao sourced from exclusive plantations around the world”), and also teaches the discerning consumer a bunch of stuff about the chocolate industry at the same time. (via Mefi)

I can’t wait to stop essaying and start baking.

We wound up at Capers. We didn’t need any food besides bread, but that’s never stopped us. We came out with bread, two kinds of olives (oh, it’s suddenly olives for me; I still hate green olives, but it turns out that actual good black olives are magically delicious), baba ganoush, Island Farms eggnog, Bitch magazine, and some Kettle Chips. Also, I was looking at tea, pondering my options for essay writing aids, when this lovely Capers employee started talking about how much she liked Four O’Clock teas, did I like rooibos? They have a rooibos chai, it’s really great, she has some sample packets she can give me? Do I like green tea? Does my boyfriend? She’ll give us a few of each so we can try them out and see if we like them.

She must have sensed that I’m stressed out about writing papers; free tea has been one of the main comforts throughout my university career, though it used to be bringing bags home from the meal hall. (I kind of miss Burwash at times like this. The food was just okay at the best of times, but there’s something that no amount of fancy food stores can replace in the ability to roll out of bed at 9, walk down the hall in pajamas (and maybe a sweatshirt) and enjoy some average breakfast, juice from a machine, marginally-acceptable coffee and a bowl of pineapple, melon and grape fruit salad). Those were the days.

Oh, and shut up, Richard Dawkins.

Do you consider parents forcing children to accept their religion a form of child abuse? JAMES MACDONALD, Bronte, New South Wales Yes. What would you think of parents who forced their children to accept their politics, or their taste in architecture? Have you ever heard anyone speak of a “Leninist child” or a “Postmodernist child”? Of course not. Why, then, do we all go along with “Christian child” and “Muslim child”? Such labelling of children with their parents’ religion is child abuse.

What? I mean, for one, he’s conflating teaching your children beliefs that you strongly hold, and socially labelling children as such. For another, how is calling a child “Leninist” abuse in any real sense of the word? Way to belittle the sufferings of actual victims of child abuse to come up with the most shocking way of saying that you, an atheist, don’t think kids should be taught religion.

How did a science geek like you get such an attractive wife? GARY HAMMOND, London I suggest you go to ” The Sexiest Man Living” at salon.com and eat your words. But seriously (of course you knew there had to be a “but seriously”), science has an image problem with young people, and phrases like ” science geek” don’t help. Isn’t it a bit like “kraut” or ” dago”?

No, “kraut” and “dago” are ethnic slurs. “Science geek” is…not.

I realize he basically says shit like this because it makes people mad and then they write blog entries about him. He’s like the Paris Hilton of Darwinism.

1) Thanks, Stephen Harper. This is so dumb. For one, it already passed. For two, the Supreme Court already said that unequal marriage laws are unconstitutional. For three, even if it would fail in a “free vote,” the reason we have a constitution is to protect minority rights. Sigh.

2) Snow makes me totally want to bake; I still have a while (and a lot of essays) before Christmas baking season starts in earnest, but my muffins puffed up much better this time. Reasons: I bought new baking powder and also, I mixed even less thoroughly. My winter baking plans include Nigella’s savoury blue cheese cooking, maybe trying to find some kind of mint chocolate brownies, and I want to try out eggnog muffins. (I may try that well before. Also, it would give me the excuse to buy eggnog. I’m like Homer Simpson: “We only get thirty sweet noggy days. Then the government takes it away again.” I will totally pour eggnog on my cereal.

3) The Fame kids are snowed in. This was totally a Baby-Sitter’s Club Super Special (it hasn’t been recapped yet at BSC Headquarters. (Those were the extra-long ones with chapters narrated by alternating girls, as opposed to the normal ones, which were from the perspective of one particular sitter.) Jessi was even stuck at her dance school! I bet Ann M. Martin watched Fame, even if she cut out the teen pregnancy storyline.

UPDATE: 4) Ugh, it’s Lucille Ball day on TCM. Lucy’s not really in any movies that are considered “classic,” except maybe Stage Door, in which she’s a pretty minor character and it is awesome because of Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn and, to a lesser degree, Eve Arden. According to the website, it’s actually Lucille Ball Month. Come on TCM, you can do better than that. I could do better than that. I would be an awesome classic film network programmer.