bearing blog

Beer for beginners, part V: Fruity stuff and saison.

(part I, part II, part III, part IV)

Before I get into this, I need to tell you that my drinking has spiralled out of control. Which is to say that I am, in fact, already breaking into the cases of Belgian witbier (aka bière blanche, if you're dealing with the Frenchy sort of Belgium), which is the next thing I want to write about, and I am even starting to attack the oatmeal stout, which is, like, three styles ahead. And I am just now sitting down to write about the Belgian fruited lambic and saison. And I still have one bottle of raspberry lambic in my basement.

Also, I recently discovered gin and tonic. Seriously losing focus here, and I am pretty sure it is not because my eyes are crossing.

So let me just knock this bit out, and then I can get on with the witbier in peace.

+++

Belgian saison is where my opinions and the opinions of Garrett Oliver, author of The Brewmaster's Table, part company. He is really into them. They are "one of the world's most refreshing and enigmatic beer styles," "light, brisk, refreshing, and sustaining," "some of Belgium's most exciting beers," "truly glorious and endlessly interesting," and "[w]ith food... beyond versatile... virtually invincible."

The style is interesting in that they are traditional farmhouse ales, unfiltered and artisanal, and varying from bottle to bottle. As Belgian beers are wont to do, they carry flavors of spices and citrus peel. They often are sold in Champagne-style bottles complete with cork -- so they might be a fun alternative to expensive French bubbly for your next celebration.

But I don't know -- our bottle of Saison Dupont failed to impress either me or Mark. Maybe I just got a bad bottle, or maybe I didn't match it well, or maybe Mr. Oliver just set up my expectations too high. I just remember finding it kind of boring, and it wasn't cheap either. The people at Beer Advocate like it fine, so maybe I should give it another chance. I almost feel embarrassed saying that I didn't like the stuff, at least not at the $11 price point.

+++

Fortunately for my perception of Belgium, the next bottle we tried was also from Belgium and not boring in the least. It left me wondering aloud, "This? This counts as a beer? Impossible!"

What left me so incredulous was Brouwerij Lindemans Framboise. This is a sweet fruited lambic beer. Lambics are not always fruited, by the way; they are a traditional style that is fermented with wild yeast and bacteria, sort of like old-fashioned sourdough bread. I don't know what they taste like, I still haven't had any plain lambic yet. I have not seen any in the beer store.

But I did see the Lindemans Framboise, and carried it home along with some kriek. The fruited lambics get a secondary fermentation on cherries or raspberries -- sometimes whole fruit, sometimes purée or juice. Oliver writes, "The result was a stronger, transformed beverage that sat squarely on the border between wine and beer."

We poured the framboise into champagne flutes and admired its beautiful rosy color. It tasted jammy and sweet and tart at the same time. It tasted kind of crazy, to be frank. Soda-pop, with an alcoholic kick.

I think I would rather have it than almost any dessert wine that I can afford to buy regularly (I have had luxurious ports and eisweins and muscats and the like, sure, but I think of them as special-occasion wines, not something to keep always on hand). The book says it goes well with cheesecake, and I had managed to procure some for the occasion -- indeed it did. On another occasion we tried the kriek. It was also fruity, tart and sweet.

I would recommend trying one of these to anyone. They are just so over-the-top -- and they don't taste very much like beer. They taste more like sweet bubbly fruity wine. I don't want to think too much about whether it proves that I don't know much about beer, that I liked this frothy sweet stuff. I bet it isn't for everyone. But you won't know until you try it.

I still have one bottle left to try, of an American kriek -- Wisconsin brewery New Glarus's Wisconsin Belgian Red, which proclaims that each 750 mL bottle contains one pound of Montmorency cherries. I am waiting for an evening in which we can kill a bottle without regretting it in the morning.

 

Beer for beginners, part III: hefeweizen, altbier, and American pale ale.

(part I, part II)

The first trip to the beer store after I made my plan to learn about versatile beers, I came back with two German weissbiers, one American alt-style beer, and one American pale ale.

I am pretty sure that I had never had a proper wheat beer before in my life. Around here in the Upper Midwest, one of the more popular summer beers is Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss. I have had that more than a few times, especially when I was in graduate school. I am afraid I don't remember much about the taste (you can follow the link to see what Beer Advocate says about it), but what I do remember is that people were always wedging lemon slices in the necks of the bottles, something that (however they do it in Wisconsin) doesn't really function as an advertisement for beery goodness.

To learn about weissbier, I dutifully purchased a six-pack of Paulaner Hefe-Weizen (described in The Brewmaster's Table as "perfectly correct, though perhaps a bit lacking in flair," and as having "a by-the-books corporate literalness"). I also brought home two or three bottles of Erdinger Weissbrau, which was the second weissbier listed in the book. I made a mildly spiced korma for dinner (weissbier being supposed to go well with Indian food) and presented Mark with the bottle of Paulaner.

He observed that it was unlike most of the beers that he drinks, in that it was not an India Pale Ale, and gave it a suspicious sort of "hmmmm."

"The book says it is supposed to be redolent of bananas and cloves," I explained eagerly.

"Bananas and cloves? In beer?"

"Well, yes," I said.

"Hmmmm."

We poured the bottle into two glasses (it's true: I am such a lightweight that we split twelve-ounce beers) and I oohed and aahed approvingly at the fluffy head and the pretty yellow-orange color.

I sniffed it and didn't smell any bananas or cloves -- well, maybe a little bit. As for the flavor, it was a little bit surprising. I had been conditioned to expect all yellow-colored beers to be, well, like a pilsner, which was the only yellow sort of beer that generally made it into our house (mostly in the form of Pilsner Urquell or Summit Pils), or perhaps like a Corona. This was... different. Mostly because it had a flavor. "It's... nice," I ventured. "I do think it goes with the food."

Mark said, "It's okay. We can buy it again if you want. I don't really like wheat beers. They aren't hoppy enough."

I wrote expressively in my lab notebook, "Nice. Mark not impressed."

The next night that we had beer, I made salmon patties (weissbier being supposed to go well with fish). I opened the Erdinger and poured it again between two glasses. Sticking my nose into the top of my glass and inhaling, I was met with recognizable banana-and-clove-y odor. "It's true!" I said excitedly to Mark. "It really does smell like bananas and cloves!"

Mark did not think so, although in his defense he does not eat very many bananas or cloves, so perhaps he is desensitized to traces of their presence. Quite possibly I am susceptible to suggestion, in that if a beer-tasting book had told me I could expect dill pickles, raspberry sorbet, or mothballs, I might also have discovered their notes in the weissbier.

I liked it, I remember, but sadly I forgot to write down my impressions. Probably if I had written them down it would have said "Nice. Mark not impressed."

Anyway, I went back to my beerwatching list and checked off "hefeweizen." Over the next few days we finished the beers, and I liked them better and better as the week went by, enough to note that I would not mind keeping them around, perhaps to have when we made curry.

"What do you think? Could we keep weissbier around?"

"I'll buy whatever you tell me to buy."

+ + +

Just a few short words about the other two beers we tried in this round.

First: The American altbier was my introduction to a beer concept that had somehow escaped me: What an American beer calls itself is not necessarily accurately descriptive. I knew from reading THE BOOK (yes, The Brewmaster's Table is starting to acquire all caps in pronunciation around here) that there exists a class known as an "American Amber Ale" (aka "Red Ale") and there is a class known as an "American Amber Lager" (interestingly enough, aka "Red Lager").

You might think, therefore, that a beer called "Alaskan Amber" would, on account of Seward's folly, be one of these two. It is not. It is an Altbier. Why it is not called "Alaskan Altbier" is something to ask their marketing people, I suppose. Anyway, I liked it okay -- not so much by itself, but with dinner (bean-ham soup) it was nice. I remember, however, enjoying a local alt quite a lot the last time I had it, and so if I start experimenting more with American Altbier, I will probably return to that one (Schmaltz's Alt, brewed by Schell's in New Ulm, MN).

Second: The definitive American Pale Ale is supposed to be Sierra Nevada's -- not that it is the best, but that it is exemplary of the style. I am sure I have had it before without paying attention. Mark likes it, and I don't, because of what I am beginning to think of as the Essential Beer Dichotomy of our family: hoppy enough for him is too hoppy for me. Although as you will see there are some exceptions to this rule.

Next time: Porter and pilsner, but not at the same time.

Beer for beginners.

This post also functions as a test of the Blogsy app to post from the iPad.

I grew up (part-time anyway) in a wine-drinking house. From the time I was sixteen I was allowed a glass by my plate at dinner, and always some of the dinner conversation was devoted to the bottle on the table, where it came from, who recommended it, and always how well it matched with the food. I like to think I picked up at least a working understanding of wine-and-food matching there in my dad's kitchen, and I usually still don't make any gross errors when choosing a glass of wine in a restaurant. Although I am a bit rusty, as I will explain.

I was only of legal age to buy alcohol for three years before I got married, and of course I didn't buy many bottles while I was living on my own. When Mark and I married, we spent part of our honeymoon skiing and part touring the Sonoma wine country. When I came home and found myself browsing Surdyk's to put together a little bottle collection, I became aware of a rather steep mismatch between my appreciation training and my grocery budget. Also, the layout of Surdyk's emphasized a major tradeoff that had never really been apparent at home: the more expensive wine I bought, the less cheese I would be able to eat.

I always keep a couple of "good" bottles around just in case, and a bottle or two of bubbly in the fridge. But the short version of the long story: I learned to drink cheap (well, good-value) wine and like it.

Anyway, I sort of missed the whole serious wine-food-matching snobbery thing, because it's fun. We have a bit more disposable income now, and I suppose I could have started buying more expensive wine, but old habits die hard. I am not a penny pincher by any means, but when I heft a $30 bottle, I can hear a little voice whispering in my ear: "you can feed your whole family of six for this money at the family restaurant around the corner, the one with the $1.00 pie special."

Enter beer. Beer has a lot going for it. Let's review:

• You can buy really great beer for a fraction of the cost-per-serving of upper-middle-class wine.
• It usually comes in smaller containers, meaning that there aren't leftovers oxidizing in your fridge all the time, and it is always worth opening a container even for one person.
• It often (not always) has lower alcohol content, so you can enjoy a flight without necessarily landing under the table, and that is particularly good if you are a lightweight like me.
• There's plenty of variety to explore, both locally and globally.
• Some kinds of food match better with beer than with wine.

And finally -- I didn't actually know much about beer, let alone about beer-food matches, so I would get to learn about it. To tell you the truth, I didn't really know the meaning of words like "lager" and "porter" and "ale" and "stout." I could recognize a pilsener and that was about it. I could identify a few specific local beers I liked, and I knew I did not like the bitter IPAs with which Mark filled our fridge, but other than that I didn't have a working knowledge even of my own taste. I decided I needed to rectify this situation. And for this.... I needed a BOOK.

 

The trip to the beer store would have to wait. I must first acquire the theoretical underpinnings, and then move on to the practical applications.

 

The book I chose was The Brewmaster's Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food by Garrett Oliver. It proved to be a good basic introduction to the world of beer.

 

It begins with a basic overview of how breweries produce the different kinds, what the various ingredients do to the product, and a history of the developments in beer-brewing. There is also a basic explanation of the principles involved in matching beers to food -- the basic equivalent of knowing whether to choose red or white, demi-sec or dry, when you select a wine to go with your dinner. In that chapter, by the way, he argues that it's much easier to match beer than wine to your food, because there aren't really any foods that clash with every beer the way that some foods fight with any wine you want to pair it with -- eggs, vinaigrette salad dressings, certain desserts.

 

Then it goes on to describe different "brewing traditions" around the world, each tradition divided up into specific styles, explaining what sort of food each goes with, and recommending individual beers that are good representatives of the styles. As a beer novice hoping to learn about the world of beer, this was exactly what I needed. Mark and I began working through the book immediately. (I'll write another post telling you about our process, which has only just begun.)

 

The "brewing traditions" chapters in the book, by the way, are lambic, wheat beer, British-style ales, Belgian-style ales, and Czech-German lagers, plus a chapter on American craft beers and one that pulls together three "unique specialties" (altbier, Kölsch, and smoked beers, in case you are curious) that don't fit into the other categories. Each chapter covers several styles: for example, the lager chapter has sections on pilsner, helles, Dortmunder export, dark (dunkel) lager, Vienna/märzen/Oktoberfest lagers, bock/doppelbock, and schwarzbier.

 

The book finishes up with a few short notes on glassware and serving temperature, neither of which we have bothered with much yet, except to note that if we decided to buy special beer-tasting glassware, a lot of the different shapes can be found at IKEA.

 

I will post later on what we have learned so far (some) and what we still have left to learn (a lot). For the time being, I will just note that as self-improvement projects go, you could certainly find many that are less fun than resolving to drink better beer.

 

Ramen hacks.

If your kids like plain ramen, and you don't, maybe you could use these ramen hacks to jazz up your portion and avoid making two lunches.

I think I might try one of these next time I am serving lunch to 11 kids and three moms.  For the moms.

Who doesn't like noodles with some greens, poached egg, and sriracha sauce?  But hey, that's so traditional it's almost boring.  On the other hand -- Doesn't the ramen-topped shepherd's pie (near the bottom) look twelve kinds of awesome?  Come on.  Admit it.  

Michael Pollan: "Pay more, eat less."

This interview really resonates with me.

We've been conditioned by artificially cheap food to be shocked when a box of strawberries costs $3.

But it's important to know that farmers aren't getting wealthy. When you see strawberries being sold for $1 a box, picture the kind of labor it takes to pick those strawberries and the kind of chemicals it takes to produce those kinds of strawberries without hand weeding.

Eight dollars for a dozen eggs sounds outrageous, but when you think that you can make a delicious meal from two eggs, that's $1.50. It's really not that much when we think of how we waste money in our lives.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that buying local is better for the environment in terms of shipping costs,  because it usually involves some seriously-inefficient distribution schemes.   And living as I do in Minnesota, I'm not sure I'm on board with the idea of eating seasonally, as I like green vegetables and fresh fruit more than 5 months out of the year.  But I'm pretty well on board with "pay more, eat less."

ADDED:  His point about the eggs is well taken.  We expect eggs to be pretty cheap, but considering the high-quality protein they provide, maybe we should be doing the math on a per-meal basis, and comparing them to the meat they replace.   Four ounces of meat easily costs more than $1.50 for two eggs. 

Summer dinners: not too boring, I hope.

Thanks for your input on the previous I'm-feeling-boring post.  Here is one of the requests.

Is there anything particularly special about dinners in the summer?  

Well, there's a strong incentive not to heat up the house or at least not to fight the air conditioning, so we turn to alternatives.    Meals that aren't cooked at all, or things that are cooked outside on a grill; things that cook quickly, or that use appliances smaller than the oven or stove, like the slow cooker and rice cooker and microwave, maybe even the toaster oven.    Failing that, I like to make things that finish all their cooking in the morning while it's still cool outside.

Hot food doesn't seem quite as appealing, but I never give it up entirely.  I like soup with my sandwiches, for instance, and in certain summery situations I like the flexibility of food-ready-and-waiting-in-the-crockpot.  And all that summer produce is beautiful in many cooked dishes and stews.

Still, the summer produce calls for lots more things served raw:  fruit finds its way onto the dinner table far more often, sometimes by itself, other times joining other fruits, often in our salads.  ( Here is a wonderful list of salads from a year ago that I printed, saved, and keep drawing on all year.)  

Let's look at this week's meal plan.  What's different about summer?

Breakfasts

It's still cool in the morning, so I still frequently make pancakes, waffles, and muffins for breakfast.  A major difference:  fresh blueberries, not frozen, dot the pancakes and muffins.  We probably won't see "banana nut" again till fall.  

Hot steel-cut oats is a lot rarer.  My children and I have been enjoying our oats European-style:  rolled oats with cold milk poured over to moisten.  The younger kids like them plain or with maple syrup and maybe bananas.  The 9-year-old likes a lot of unsweetened shredded coconut mixed in.  Me, I like fresh berries or cherries, a lot of nuts, and a little honey.  It's chewy and filling and easy to personalize.

Another thing I like to make for breakfast, especially the day after we shop, are fruit and yogurt parfaits:  just like the fast food version.  I sweeten plain yogurt with sugar and vanilla, and layer it in a glass (careful; a 4yo needs only a tiny amount) with blueberries and strawberries, and top it with something crunchy.  One child likes coconut, another likes raw oats, a third likes Grape-nuts.  Or I could crush a granola bar.

Lunches

Here's an admission:  Since we often spend mornings at the park in the summer, I'm often sorely tempted to take the kids out for lunch, or at least to run through the drive-through on the way home.  There is a possibility of compromise here:  sometimes I'll get them sandwiches only, take the burgers or tacos or whatever home, and serve them with milk and good summer fruit, like berries or melon.  Spend a dollar per kid, save a little time, and still get a fries-free, not-too-unbalanced meal.  

As for homemade summer lunches, we stay pretty simple around here.  The kids love corn on the cob and that's pretty easy to cook without heating up the house -- you do know you can cook a whole pot of corn by steaming it in an inch of water, right? Corn, fruit, and a few cubes of cheese makes everyone happy.  Tuna salad sandwiches appear much more often in the summer, replacing grilled cheese, I suppose... but nobody ever tires of quesadillas, it seems, even though they're hot.  Nor do we ever get tired of peanut butter.  My 3yo daughter invented a snack she calls "babies in cradles..."  you know "ants on a log," right, celery stuffed with peanut butter and dotted with raisins?  Well, if you make one-inch long logs with only one raisin, you get "babies in cradles," where the raisin is the baby's head, the peanut butter is the swaddling blankets, and the little celery is the rocking cradle.  She will happily make these and we will all happily eat them as part of our lunch.

 On Thursdays this summer I'll be feeding 9 to 11 children at my house, immediately after returning from a couple of hours at the park.  So lunch has to be already made and ready to go.  I'd be happy to serve cold lunches every time, but my audience can be a little finicky.  So my default, I think, will be something everyone loves, even if it's hot:  Emergency Chili (from the crock pot) stretched by serving it with pasta (cooked the night before) or rice (in the rice cooker).  One pound of ground beef is enough, believe it or not.  Another time, if the stuff goes on sale, I may do a cold platter of summer sausage and crackers.  Fruit on the side is always welcome.  A third thing that's fairly popular with all those kids:  cold olive-oil-dressed pasta, served plain with things on the side they can mix in: canned tuna, black olives, canned or fresh chopped tomatoes, cheap Parmesan-from-a-can, and frozen peas.

Dinners.  Let's take a look at my menu plan for this week.

Thursday (yesterday):  Salmon filets baked in foil packets (fish cooks quickly, and you could also do this outdoors on a grill).  Inside the packet the salmon rests on top of a pile of canned chick peas and is topped with thick slices of fresh tomato, a sprinkling of fresh basil, olive oil, a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper.  We had it with whole-wheat pasta leftover from lunch (I made extra on purpose) and a green salad.

Friday (tonight -- and no, we don't do meatless Fridays at this time):  I have a single 14-ounce strip steak defrosting on the counter, which we'll grill very simply and slice thinly, each of us getting only a few slices.  I'll serve it with a pile of asparagus, quick-sauteed in olive oil and rosemary; a salad of shredded carrot, olive oil, sunflower seeds, and fresh blueberries; and chunks of fresh watermelon.  Maybe I'll have Mark try grilling the watermelon.  As for a starchy side dish, I'm just going to put homemade whole wheat bread and butter on the table.  Quick, easy, healthful, no cooking.  Did I mention cold beer?  There will be cold beer.

Saturday is always busy, a chore day.  A great day for something I will do all summer long:  once-a-week cold sandwich night.  There are lots of possibilities; this week it's ordinary deli turkey with green apples and blue cheese (for grownups) or with mustard (for kids).  As for the side dish, sometimes it might be salad, but this week I'm going to use my crock-pot to make tomato soup.  I really wanted to make bell-pepper soup, but the peppers were too expensive this week:  as soon as they go on sale, we'll make a pot (it takes eight big peppers).    

Sunday morning I'm going to put a crock of ratatouille -- that wintry-seeming dish that is made of summer vegetables -- in the oven at a fairly low temperature to cook slowly through the morning.  I hope to serve it just warm for an early supper, over crock-pot polenta, and topped with parmesan cheese.  If the kids hate it they can eat their polenta with maple syrup instead, and there will be more for me.

Monday won't be particularly summery.  My 6yo son begged for spaghetti and meatballs, and that's what I'll make.  Concession to summer:  The meatballs and spaghetti can be cooked in the morning and the meatballs can stay in the crockpot with the sauce, which will hopefully keep from heating the house too much.  On the side, we'll try to keep it cool by serving a big fruit salad:  melons, grapes, strawberries, and kiwis.  

Tuesday I spend the day at Hannah's and will need to make something that goes together quickly after I get home.  I'm going to try a new recipe (it's another one from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian for beer-glazed black beans.  Using canned black beans to save time and heat.  I'll have made extra polenta on Sunday, and that polenta will go into a savory pancake batter (another new thing -- I never tried savory pancakes before).  We'll put the beans on top of the pancakes, top them with shredded cheese, and eat them with some quickly sauteed greens, probably collards out of my freezer augmented with a small bunch of fresh kale.  And some hot sauce.  And some more beer straight out of the bottle.

Wednesday is the day we go grocery shopping so I always leave it blank, hoping we can use up leftovers.  If there aren't any leftovers we have scrambled eggs for dinner:  another quick and easy and not-too-hot option.

Monk's meal.

This morning I rolled out of bed at 5:45 to get my last chance for a swim this week.  I had to get back in time for Mark to leave for work.  I can't really exercise on an empty stomach, but I was rushed, so I sawed off a slice of homemade bread, buttered it, found a cheese stick in the fridge, and ate them up.  Not my favorite breakfast -- I like having an egg -- but it would have to do.

As I chewed my bread, I thought about a post I read yesterday by Willa at Quotidian:  "Bread and Pittances," about the daily diet of Cistercian monks.  The monks (except the sick) get bread and vegetables on ordinary days, and small amounts of eggs and fish on feast days.  Willa did a nutritional calculation on the monks' meals; the results may surprise you.

If nothing else, it should be a corrective for that twice-annual fast day panic:  "OMG it's Ash Wednesday, I only get to have one normal-size meal, I better make sure it's BALANCED AND HEALTHY."

Reality check number one with this:  Fasting is not about eating healthy.  It is supposed to be a mortification.  Check out the root of that word.

Reality check number two, a corollary to the first:  Clearly if we think our TWO fast days per year should be balanced and healthy, we must secretly be thinking that "eating balanced and healthy" is a penance, rather than everyday life.  Balanced and healthy is Ordinary Time, folks.

Reality check number three:  Check out that monk's meal.  Bread and vegetables.  And?  Balanced and healthy.  In particular, it's got plenty of protein.  These guys are living simply, but they are not starving.  They live every day on something that we would be worried we wouldn't make it through ONE day on.  Clearly we are messed up.

For people who are inclined to be concerned about "balanced" meals, it is really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you need animal protein at every meal to be "balanced."  I am no vegan, believe me.  I am pretty sure humans need at least a little bit of animal fat and animal protein for optimal health.  (And the Cistercians that Willa mentions do get this, just not every day).   But the longer I have spent living and eating my new life, the more I am shedding my Fear of Bread and the more often I find myself making meatless meals.

The past and future of celiac disease.

An interesting article at Scientific American.  War-related food shortages can save lives, it turns out.

CD [celiac disease] acquired a name in the first century A.D., when Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a Greek physician, reported the first scientific description, calling it koiliakos, after the Greek word for “abdomen,” koelia. British physician Samuel Gee is credited as the modern father of CD. In a 1887 lecture he described it as “a kind of chronic indigestion which is met with in persons of all ages, yet is especially apt to affect children between one and five years old.” He even correctly surmised that “errors in diet may perhaps be a cause.” As clever as Gee obviously was, the true nature of the disease escaped even him, as was clear from his dietary prescription: he suggested feeding these children thinly sliced bread, toasted on both sides.

Identification of gluten as the trigger occurred after World War II, when Dutch pediatrician Willem-Karel Dicke noticed that a war-related shortage of bread in the Netherlands led to a significant drop in the death rate among children affected by CD—from greater than 35 percent to essentially zero. He also reported that once wheat was again available after the conflict, the mortality rate soared to previous levels. Following up on Dicke’s observation, other scientists looked at the different components of wheat, discovering that the major protein in that grain, gluten, was the culprit.

Celiac disease is of special interest among autoimmune disorders because

it is the only example where the addition or removal of a simple environmental component, gluten, can turn the disease process on and off. (Although environmental factors are suspected of playing a role in other autoimmune diseases, none has been positively identified.)

Many more interesting details in the article, including recent research on the mechanism of the autoimmune reaction and prospects for non-dietary treatments of the disease.  Finally, something to think about if you've got celiac in the family and are still having babies:  The author and colleges have

...begun a long-term clinical study to test whether having infants at high risk eat nothing containing gluten until after their first year can delay the onset of CD or, better yet, prevent it entirely. “High risk,” in this case, means infants possess susceptibility genes and their immediate family has a history of the disorder.

We suspect the approach could work because the immune system matures dramatically in the first 12 months of life and because research on susceptible infants has implied that avoiding gluten during the first year of life might essentially train that developing immune system to tolerate gluten thereafter, as healthy people do, rather than being overstimulated by it. So far we have enrolled more than 700 potentially genetically susceptible infants in this study, and preliminary findings suggest that delaying gluten exposure reduces by fourfold the likelihood that CD will develop. It will be decades, however, until we know for certain whether this strategy can stop the disease from ever occurring.

Interesting.

Malnourished: a head game.

I posted some time ago that I'd given up bedtime snacks for good -- after dinner, I'm done with solid food.  Last night I learned a little more about that

I had a late afternoon/early evening bit of volunteer work to do at church, so I made dinner for my family and left it in the oven, dropping the kids with Mark on the way, and headed out.  I'd brought some paperwork with me, thinking I would stop in a little sandwich shop/bakery on the way home, catch a sandwich for dinner and a cup of coffee while I looked the papers over.    

The plates other people were eating from looked too big.  A sandwich by itself should be the right size.  I ordered a cheese-and-other-yummy-stuff sandwich. When the server came around and plopped my dinner in front of me, the plate was indeed too big, but the sandwich was normal-sized. The rest of the plate supported a good-sized pile of beautifully crisp and brown, curly, sparkling-with-large-crystals-of-sea-salt, batch-cooked potato chips.   I suspect them of having been made in-house.

I cleaned my plate.  

As I was finishing my water, I looked around, and I saw a family near me who had ordered a side dish of Szechuan green beans.  They were bright green and lovely.  They filled a plate.  And I began to wish that I had ordered the green beans to go with my sandwich, and that I had asked the cashier "Hold the chips."  Oh, my plate would have looked ever so much more beautiful with the veggies on it!  And I would have felt so much nicer about myself!

A little voice in my head told me, "You should go right up to the counter and order some green beans right now.  You need vegetables.   Those potato chips gave you no nutrition at all.  Go on!  Eat your vegetables!  They're good for you.  YOU NEED TO BUY SOME GREEN BEANS AND EAT THEM ALL UP.  Do you want to get rickets or scurvy or whatever it is that comes from a diet of cheese sandwiches and potato chips?"

This is what gluttony always sounds like to me:  I convince myself I really need to eat more.

I said no.  That meal is behind me now, I told myself.  I ate a whole plate of food.  No, the potato chips weren't ideal (tasty though).  Yes, the giant pile of green beans would have been better for me.  You know what?  IT'S OVER.  Better luck next time.  There will be other meals.  Even, maybe, meals in this sandwich shop.  Yes, the beans are more healthy, but more important is sticking to and reinforcing the don't-stuff-myself habit, the one-plate-meal habit.   I AM DONE EATING.

(That all sounds very glib.  Actually, as I sat there in the restaurant, I was gritting my teeth and clutching the table edge with the effort of making up my mind whether to go buy and eat a half-pound of stir-fried green beans.  I know.  Sad.)

Potato chips are not terribly filling.  I got hungry again a couple of hours later.  I lay in bed listening to my stomach growl and  telling myself I'd learned my lesson:  Order the big pile of veggies up front.

I am going out for breakfast now.  I am going to a place not far from my house where they serve salads with breakfast, a little pile of organic mixed greens tossed with a nice vinaigrette.  I am totally craving that salad.

Loss mode. Also known as The Bearing Diet.

Mark, who you will remember is a process engineer, wants me to come up with a list of rules for "loss mode" as a weight maintenance tool.  He has cheerfully volunteered set up an SPC (statistical process control) chart on which I will plot my weight every morning, watching for trends.  When the data indicates that I am so many standard deviations above my target, I will switch to the loss mode rules until the data returns to the target.  

This is the idea, anyway.  Right now I'm more than a few sigma away from that target, and so should be in loss mode all the time.

What are the rules?  If I were to distill The Bearing Diet to simple, objective instructions (eschewing judgment-requiring stuff like "only eat when you're hungry"), what would it be?

The first set of rules have to do with the content of meals and snacks:

1) Breakfast is one egg and a half-glass of tomato juice, plus coffee or tea-with-milk.

2) The optional 10:30 AM snack is zero to ten nuts, zero to one ounce of cheese, and zero to 1.5 ounces fruit. 

3)  Lunch is a single plateful, half of which is simply prepared vegetables.

4)  The mandatory 3:30 PM snack is zero to ten nuts, zero to one ounce of cheese, and zero to 1.5 ounces fruit, plus coffee or tea-with-milk.

5)  Dinner is a single plateful, half of which is vegetables, plus one extra helping of vegetables or salad, if I want.

6) No solid food after dinner.

The others are general ones:

7)  Always measure the foods I have trouble limiting:  for me, bread, crackers, pastries, grains, and pasta.  

8)  Periodically, pre-plan and measure a day's meals and snacks to ensure it's in the weight-loss calorie range:  for me,  1200-1500 calories.

9)  Stick to one serving of alcohol at a meal.

10) Dining out or in a pinch where the other rules are tough to follow, eat only half of whatever's not a plain vegetable.  Faced with desserts or sweets, the limit is three bites.*  

*I think of this one as The Annie Rule, named after my stepmother.  She swears by it as the single strategy with which she has maintained a healthy weight for, like, forty years.

That's it:  The Bearing Diet For Not Eating So Damn Much.  Does it look hard to follow?  Or complicated?  It hasn't felt complicated or even very difficult to me -- although the rules developed gradually.  I tried some rules that I later threw out; for instance, I tried and abandoned "no sweets" and "no snacks," but did settle on "no bedtime snack."

The big question -- still theoretical, I might add -- is, how would my behavior change if I wasn't in loss mode?  It's going to happen eventually -- either I'll hit my target, or I'll get pregnant.  One of these things will happen.  I won't be trying to lose weight forever.

I guess I'd allow myself a larger breakfast, I'd drink more alcohol, I'd serve myself bread/pasta/grains more freely.  I'd still periodically pre-plan my day's meals, only for a higher calorie range -- maybe something like 1850-2150 calories (gleaned from this nutritional needs calculator that takes lactation into account, and within a couple hundred calories, reinforcing my previous engineering estimate based on my weight loss rate).  I'd probably drink more milk and use more butter on purpose.  

I think I'd still stick to the one-plate meals, the Annie Rule, and the fruit-cheese-nuts snack regime.   They're pretty powerful at maintaining the habit of moderation.