bearing blog

Fascinating update on grocery store munching.

Remember back when I asked readers whether they thought it was acceptable to eat your groceries in the store before you paid for them?

Check out this comment from Angela C.:

I work as a cashier for the world's #1 retailer, and I see some things that people do that would make you want to douse your hands and shopping baskets in hand sanitizer. Case in point: there is a homeless man who brings a live turkey into the store with him sometimes, and has it sitting in the child's seat of his basket. I live in a major metropolitan area so this is not a normal thing, at all. I see people with their dogs and kittens. Customers who leave the bathroom without washing their hands. I could go on but I won't. Suffice it to say, it might be better for those more inclined to eat at the store to wait till they get home and wash their hands first.

My kids don't ask to eat food in the store because they know I won't let them, but believe me, if they ever ask, I will now say "Are you kidding?  For all we know the last person to touch this food was carrying his pet turkey around with those hands."

Perhaps we could make Angela's story go viral, and then everyone would be AFRAID to eat in the grocery store.  A moral victory!  Without even ruffling any feathers.

Beer for beginners, part II.

part I is here.

So one of the first things I did as I read through The Brewmaster's Table, taking notes, was to try to get a handle on the "family tree" of beers, so to speak -- all the classifications and sub classifications.

It started out fairly simple, with the world of Lambic:

Then things got a little more interesting, when I turned to the chapter on Wheat Beer:

But then I turned to the chapter on the British Ale Tradition, and my family tree sprouted suckers all over the place:

 

Let's just say that things didn't get any simpler when I got to Belgium. I have a few more pages like this.

This was all very overwhelming. I got myself a lab notebook:

I made myself a little Beerwatching List, so I could check off each variety as we tried at least one bottle of each:

But it was still kind of overwhelming, with 59 different kinds of beer, and that doesn't even count the fact that you can generally buy more than one brewery's version of each sort of beer.

Clearly I needed to prioritize.

After fussing around a bit considering what made the most sense (start with easy-to-find and move towards rarer? Tote the notebook to restaurants and order the most obscure draft beer on the menu every time? Geographical organization?) I decided to start with the most useful beers, by which I mean the beers that were listed in the book as being quite versatile and going with a lot of different kinds of food. Theoretically, from among that set we would find something that we wanted to keep in the fridge all the time.

The Brewmaster's Table has a handy lookup table to answer the question, "What should I drink with my food?" Conversely, one can use this really cool pairing chart to answers the inverse question, "What should I eat with my beer?" Turning back and forth between the two and taking notes, I came up with the following list of "Beers that supposedly go with lots of stuff:"

1. Hefeweizen
2. English-style porter
3. Belgian saison
4. Pilsner
5. Helles
6. Vienna lager
7. American pale ale
8. American amber lager
9. Altbier

Ah, nine. What a nice short list to start with. Much better than 59.

 

Mind you, these aren't "beers that go with everything," they are just "beers that showed up a lot in the list of food pairings." Whatever. I went with it.

 

Tune in next time and I will regale you with Adventures in Hefeweizen. Hint for fellow northern plains staters: Not at all like Leinie's Honey Weiss.

 

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.

 

The Paleomom: Unmasked.

She's no longer just a stick figure.  Go read her story.

(A link I was saving for a slow day.  Paleo Mom is a well-written blog, mostly nutrition-related, by a self-described "scientist turned stay-at-home mom."  If you like me, you'll probably like her.)

Fasting in Paradise.

Melanie has dug up a quote that suggests the Genesis "don't eat that fruit" rule amounted to a prescribed fast:

"Fasting restores to those who practice it the father’s house from which Adam was cast out… God himself, the friend of man (Wsd 1,6), first entrusted to fasting the man he had created, as to a loving mother, as to a teacher. He had forbidden him to taste of one tree only (Gn 2,17) and if the man had observed this fast he would have dwelt with angels. But he rejected it and so found anguish and death, the sharpness of thorns and thistles and the sorrow of a miserable life (Gn 3,17f.) Now, if fasting is shown to be of value in Paradise, how much more must it be so here below to win us life eternal!". 

(Link: http://thewinedarksea.com/index.php/weblog/on_fasting/ )

It is a fruitful meditation. I wrote about a similar theme some time ago, only I identified the forbidding of the Edenic fruit as a "dietary law" rather than a fast:

"Which takes me to the Garden of Eden. How many times have you read or heard a non-Christian, non-Jewish person complaining of the arbitrariness of that whole "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" nonsense? Why would God care if they ate this one fruit? There's no good reason for it -- whoever wrote it down even made a point of mentioning that the stuff was good to eat, so what's the big deal? Alternatively, you'll occasionally see a well-meaning believer defending the don't-eat-that rule on some practical ground of healthfulness or learning obedience or some such thing.
I think it's easier to understand the story -- and this works both if you take the story as something that really happened, or if you take it as a useful teaching story passed down by one of the world's most influential cultures -- as the story of the first dietary law. The first "We eat this, not that. Just because."Pointing at the fruit of the tree while uttering "In the day you eat of it you shall surely die" is not, inherently, any nuttier than pointing at your tablemate's cheeseburger while muttering, "That shit'll kill you." It doesn't matter that the modern health nut thinks that science is on his side -- it's still a prediction of religious significance -- because in reality the connection between any given cheeseburger and the untimely death of the cheeseburger-eater is practically zero, unless the eater chokes on it, I suppose. And even if a lifetime diet of cheeseburgers will shorten your life, who's to say that's not a reasonable choice for someone who likes cheeseburgers?But let's go back to dietary laws for a minute. It's significant that the breaking of a dietary law should play such a crucial role in the stories I'm speaking of. And it's not something that's alien to human nature either. There are many layers to the story, but I can't help but think that it's in part a lesson that there are limits to our natural inclinations. The tree's fruit was "good to eat," and there is no reason to assume the senses of the man and woman couldn't be trusted. Yet, as the story goes, it was better, in that place and in that time, to choose not to eat it. Resisting, if only on occasion, what we naturally want and can see is a good thing, must itself be something good. And doesn't that fit with our ordinary experience?"

(link: http://arlinghaus.typepad.com/blog/2010/04/dietary-laws.html )

One difference between a dietary law and a fast is that a dietary law is generally lifelong -- see the regulations of keeping kosher or halal, or the philosophy of an ethically committed vegetarian. Fasts, on the other hand, are generally temporary. In Jewish history, the permanence and complexity of the dietary law served many purposes -- among other things, to provide a concrete manifestation of identity among the chosen people, to clearly demarcate them from the peoples that surrounded them.  

Another difference is that fasting can be regarded as a positive act, and when prescribed, as a positive duty similar to the duties of prayer and almsgiving. To adhere to a dietary law is more like a negative duty, a "thou shalt not." Negative duties are by their nature more binding than positive ones.

Does it matter whether we identify the forbidding of the fruit as a dietary law or as a fast? Or is it simply a third example of the same sort of class of commandments? Either way it is instructive to meditate upon the words, "for in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death."

   

Something to be thankful for.

Mark just returned from a business trip where he had been meeting with British colleagues who had been living in Switzerland.  

The British colleagues bemoaned the lack of good food in Switzerland.  "It's great if you really, really like cheese," they said.

 So Mark, being that day in eastern Iowa rather than in the vast food desert that is French-speaking Switzerland, took them to a Vietnamese restaurant.  He says the imperial rolls with curry vegetables were quite nice, and the phở looked pretty good too.

"We really take it for granted, living in the U. S., that lots of people will have migrated here and opened restaurants," mused Mark.  No kidding.  

Pandora's sugar bowl.

Monday evening I announced, "Muffins for breakfast tomorrow!"

And the children fell to their knees (okay, it was only the 11-year-old) and begged, "Please, Mom, don't make them completely whole wheat!  Put some white flour in!"

I raised my eyebrow (okay, not really; I am physically incapable of raising one eyebrow; probably I just made a frowny face) and said, "Oh, come on, they're not that bad.  Muffins are quick breads. You barely notice the difference in muffins."

"They don't taste as sweet as other people's muffins."

He probably has a point there.  I don't like to eat super sweet muffins, so the slight bitterness of whole wheat flour has never bothered me, and I usually do not add extra sugar to make up for it.   

Maybe if I could have kept my children's taste buds safely sheltered from the world, he would not know what he is missing.  But this past year the 11-year-old has acquired the freedom to range around our urban neighborhood unsupervised.  He has, I suspect, tasted the illicit luxury of coffeeshop muffins bought with his own money.  There is scant going back once innocence is lost.

"Or, Mom, at least could you put more sugar in them?"

Hmph.  Philistines.  "How about I sprinkle a little sugar crust on top?"

"No, it's the middle that isn't sweet enough."

"But it'll have blueberries!"

"They're sour."

I turned to my spouse, the food processing engineer, who (a) has to stay somewhat abreast of the nutrition literature, and (b) has perfected the art of rapid calculation followed by a guess that makes it sound like he knows exactly what he is talking about.  "Mark."

"Hm?"

"If we had to live on homemade muffins, would it be better for us to eat low-sugar muffins made with some whole grain flour and some white flour, or would it be better to eat whole-grain muffins with more sugar in them?"

He rolled his eyes at me (okay, he probably didn't roll his eyes, but I'm not sure how to describe what he did.  Let's say he made a "here's a caveat" face).  "You realize that all the relevant research about this sort of thing is inconclusive."

"Yeah, yeah."

"Well, if it is an either-or, my instinct -- just my instinct, mind you --"

"Duly noted."

"-- is that it's better to keep it 100% whole grain and add the sugar.  Because the relevant research does indicate that more whole grain is associated with better outcomes.  And also the white flour has the same effect on your body as sugar anyway.  So at least you're not leaving out the additional nutrition and fiber, even if it comes with sugar."

"Got it."  I turned back to the pleading child.  "Okay.  This time I will make sweet muffins."  I stormed into the kitchen (okay, I probably did not storm so much as stalk) and made these.  They weren't blueberry because I discovered the dried cherries while I was rooting around in the fridge.

Extra-Sweet Cherry Yogurt Muffins

• 1 cup yogurt thinned with a little milk, OR 1 cup buttermilk, plus extra if needed (which you will)
• Heaping 1/2 cup dried tart cherries
• 1/4 to 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1 egg
• 3 Tbsp butter or coconut oil, melted and cooled, or other oil
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup sugar (it hurts my teeth just writing that -- a *tablespoon* in every muffin!)
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

The night before:  Put the dried cherries in a bowl and add enough thinned yogurt to moisten all the cherries.  Stir and let soak overnight in the refrigerator.  (Even a half-hour's soak will do some good, if you don't have overnight.)

In the morning, grease a 12-cup muffin tin and preheat the oven to 400° F.  Beat the egg and melted butter together with the remainder of the thinned yogurt.  Add the almond extract.  Mix the dry ingredients together in a medium bowl, then gently stir in the liquid ingredients and the cherry-yogurt mixture.  Add more yogurt and milk if needed to moisten all the dry ingredients (it's hard to say how much liquid will have been soaked up by the cherries).   Divide among the cups of the muffin tin and bake for 20 minutes; test with wooden pick before removing.  Allow to cool in the pan 5 minutes before taking the muffins out of the cups to finish cooling on a rack.

+ + + 

Now let me tell you something.  I do not (repeat, do not) like sweet muffins for breakfast.  And the idea of these terribly sweet muffins -- I used the amount of sugar suggested in Mark Bittman's "Sweet and Rich Muffins" recipe, but did not add the extra fat -- kind of horrified me, which is why I used yogurt instead of the ordinary whole milk I usually used; I thought perhaps it would balance the sweetness a little bit.

Fatal mistake.   I should have left it unbalanced.

These were very yummy muffins.  I had a taste "of Mark's, to evaluate it" and now I am personally responsible for demolishing three of them.  

So now I have this "aaaaagh, what have I done?!?!" feeling.  I fed my kids a tablespoon of sugar in their muffins and I liked it.  This is less sugar than in the most current formulation of Cocoa Puffs.  

Argh.

 Of course the kids liked them too.  I am still going to write "dried cherries" on my grocery list this week.

But, argh.

 

Well, this is a timely article: How to stick to your resolutions.

I was talking to Mark this evening about trying to nail down the general principles of behavioral change -- not the list of "handy weight loss tips," but the general principles that I've followed to choose my new, permanent habits and to make them stick.  

All right, I'm fessing up:  I've been tossing around the idea of putting these disconnected eating-and-exercise blog posts into a longer and more organized form.  What I'm not yet sure about is focus:  gluttony?  personal change in general?  willpower defeating?  straight-up weight loss?

Anyway, I was amused tonight to encounter this article from the NYT's John Tierney, "Be It Resolved," which is very much like the sort of thing I was envisioning writing.

IT’S still early in 2012, so let’s be optimistic. Let’s assume you have made a New Year’s resolution and have not yet broken it. Based on studies of past resolutions, here are some uplifting predictions:

1) Whatever you hope for this year — to lose weight, to exercise more, to spend less money — you’re much more likely to make improvements than someone who hasn’t made a formal resolution.

2) If you can make it through the rest of January, you have a good chance of lasting a lot longer.

3) With a few relatively painless strategies and new digital tools, you can significantly boost your odds of success.

Now for a not-so-uplifting prediction: Most people are not going to keep their resolutions all year long. They’ll start out with the best of intentions but the worst of strategies, expecting that they’ll somehow find the willpower to resist temptation after temptation. By the end of January, a third will have broken their resolutions, and by July more than half will have lapsed.

They’ll fail because they’ll eventually run out of willpower, which social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.

Well, that explains a lot.  Dieting is hard because low blood sugar depletes your willpower!  

But this is the paragraph in the article that really resonated with me (emphasis mine):

One of their newest studies, published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tracked people’s reactions to temptations throughout the day. The study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago, showed that the people with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.

This.  This.  A thousand times this.  Using willpower sucks, so you have to exert it in advance.  So much of what worked for me is about this very principle.

The article goes on to give a somewhat outlandish anecdote and then from it derives some strategies that ring very true to me:

• Set one clear goal at a time
• Precommit (like Odysseus lashing himself  to the mast, remove your options to break your resolution)
• Be accountable to someone else, and plan to pay a real penalty if you don't reach your goal
• Keep track of how you are doing
• Don't overreact to a lapse by saying "what the hell" and figuring the day's already ruined
• Tell yourself you can have some later (rather than swearing off pleasures for good)
• Reward yourself, or find reward in your actions, often.

I will have to spend some time thinking about this -- but maybe the first step is to read the book about willpower that is referenced in the article.

A whole post on half sandwiches.

Part of the New Year's gluttony roundup.

+  +  +

So I have this problem:  I don't actually need very many calories per day.  This means that I should have smaller portions than are typically served.  Logically, then, I should not eat all of most sandwiches, which are standardized to maintain (or, realistically, to fatten) a person much larger than me.  And yet, the sandwich is a sort of a quantized food.  Except in restaurants that do the half-sandwich, cup-of-soup lunch thing, you generally get an integer of sandwiches on your plate.  And there's a strong visual cue there that says "eat the whole thing."

For a little while, in trying to maintain my new weight, I was  trying out sandwiches that promised to be low in calories.  Take the Subway "fresh fit menu," for example.  I happen to like turkey, so I thought:  Well, maybe I will go ahead and have all of a nominally-six-inch turkey sub, with lots of pickles and hot peppers and spinach on it.  Indeed, as fast food goes, it's pretty good.  Truthfully, though, I probably would have been more satisfied with half a nominally-six-inch Spicy Italian loaded with cheese and oil.  Fat is satiating, after all.

But the real problem with the whole six-inch sub is that it is huge-looking; it reinforces the habit that says it's normal and good for me to eat huge-looking sandwiches; and next time I meet a huge sandwich, it might not be as innocuous as turkey on wheat.  Given that many restaurant sandwiches are huge-looking because they are, in fact, huge, it is a much better strategy for me, the terminally calorically challenged, to default to half sandwiches.

But when I started off on a mission to eat only half sandwiches, I was forced to probe my emotional obstacles to restrained eating yet again, and I discovered this: 

I have serious reservations about eating only half of a sandwich.

Even if the sandwich is twice as big as what I actually want to eat, I am disturbed by the asymmetry of the undertaking.

The data suggests that aspect ratio matters.  I don't mind so much if the sandwich is long and skinny (aspect ratio >> 1), so that by cutting it in half it is transformed into two sandwiches that are still long and skinny (aspect ratio reduced, but still noticeably > 1).  

Take a submarine sandwich, for example, such as the nominally eight-inch versions produced by Milio's, which delivers to my house.

  A nominally eight-inch sub (and yes, that is not half a sandwich already, that is a whole sandwich; a sixteen-inch sub counts as two sandwiches, I don't care how many calories you are allowed to eat per day) is pretty skinny and long (actually it's more than eight inches), and even after you cut it in half it's still longer than it is wide.  It is still, in other words, sub-shaped.  It has preserved the essence of sub-sandwich-hood.  I can eat it and say, "This is a sub."  I am supported in this intuitive conclusion by inductive reasoning:  if there are sixteen-inch subs, and there are eight-inch subs, then logically there should be no reason why there cannot be a nominally four-inch sub, and so on and so on -- too bad this name is already taken.

So I don't have any problems with those.

And I don't have too much trouble with wrapping up half of a sandwich made on wide-pan bread that is wider than it ought to be.  Such sandwiches usually arrive already cut in half, the better to artfully arrange the halves so that they are embracing a cup of soup or a bowl of salad or perhaps a pile of potato chips.  There, you're taking an aspect ratio that is approximately 2 and reducing it to approximately 1, which is really the appropriate aspect ratio for food that comes between sliced bread.

 So easy just to wrap up one of those halves and take it home.

But I find I have this horrible resistance to, for example, half cheeseburgers.  Now I love a good cheeseburger as much as anyone, and I'm not very fond of little cheeseburgers.  When I want a cheeseburger, I don't want the kid's-menu version.  I want a thick medium-rare patty and a lot of lettuce and tomato and pickles and mayo and maybe some bacon.  I would rather have half a grownup cheeseburger than all of a kids' cheeseburger...

... at least till it is time to cut my big grownup cheeseburger in half.  And then I am daunted by the prospect of sawing to pieces something so beautiful and complete, the Platonic ideal of a sandwich in all its circular perfection.   I just know that the tomatoes and lettuce will slip to one side, lubricated by the mayonnaise, and the bun will be shredded to crumbs, and I'll be left picking through the pickles and trying to distribute them equitably between two sort-of semicircular half-patties, no longer crisp all around a lacy edge, rapidly cooling and drying out as the juices run all out of the center, its tender pink cross-sectional area now exposed to the ambient environment, and to the disapproving eyes of any nearby E. coli researchers.

This is where Mark points out to me, "You never have any trouble eating the second half of a whole cheeseburger."  

(Too, too true.  But cheeseburgers are about love and geometry, not reason and rhetoric.)

+ + +

N. B.:   The above rant also applies to bagels.

+ + +

And then there's the prospect of making one's own half sandwiches from scratch, by which I mean cutting a slice of bread in half and then putting the fillings on one half and topping it with the other half slice of bread.  Do I even need to explain why this is so abhorrent?

Nigel Tufnel can do it for me:

It's okay to make a whole sandwich and cut it in half and share the other half with someone.  But if there is no someone in sight, I have to make a half sandwich.  And that is just wrong.  Perhaps if I laid in a store of frilly-ended wooden picks.

+ + +

Mark:  "Perhaps if it is the aspect ratio that bothers you, you should cut circles out of the middle of your sandwiches with a cutter, and eat those."

Me:  "Ummmm... I can't drive and calculate at the same time... what's the diameter of a circle that is half the area of a square of side 1?"

Mark (pulls out iPhone, calculates):  "Approximately zero point eight."

Me:  "So I could eat a half sandwich that looks round if I cut off the edges, a tenth of the width on each side, and trimmed the corners, and only ate the middle."

Mark:  "Sure, why wouldn't that work?"

Me:  "Mark, I already eat all the children's sandwich crusts.  What makes you think I will be able to resist my own?  Duh."

+ + +

So this month, I decided to try to beat my irrational resistance to half sandwiches by making and ordering a lot of half sandwiches.

 My first homemade half sandwich was a grilled ham and brie on pumpernickel rye with wedges of green apple melted inside it.  There was no hope of getting anyone else in the family to share this with me, so I was unwilling to grill a normal sandwich and cut it in half.  Nor did I wish to waste brie.  So I carefully took half a slice of bread, cut the rectangular way (since the cross-section of my brie was rectangular) and folded up the ham, a little more deftly than Nigel up there.  I kept the ham from unfolding by weighting it down with the three little pieces of brie.  Then I propped my apple slices among them, and balanced the other half-slice of pumpernickel on top, and smacked it down with my spatula when it threatened to topple over.  How am I going to butter the bottom of this mess? I wondered, but then remembered that I could put butter on the skillet instead.  Somehow I managed to transport the whole topheavy mess to the skillet where it sizzled away, and by employing tongs as well as spatula I managed to turn it over to brown on the other side, only having to stuff one stray piece of apple back in between the chinks.

Once the sandwich had cooled it was pleasant and fragrant as any whole sandwich, and of course the brie had fused it all together so it didn't want to come unfolded anymore.  So that was a success story, though not without its trials.

+ + + 

It has been slightly easier navigating restaurants, where I vowed to order sandwiches and only eat half until I had firmly established the half-sandwich habit.  

Along the way I amended the rules somewhat:  some naturally-small sandwiches, such as gourmet sliders or Skyline chili dogs, can count as halves (at least if normal people might ordinarily eat two or more of them).    

But most of the time I stuck to it.  On a recent road trip, I asked for my Subway six-inch Italian BMT to be cut in half, and I put the other half in front of the baby, who likes salami.  I asked for a plastic knife at Chick-Fil-A and bisected my #1, hiding one half in the foil-and-paper sack (after harvesting the pickles from it) and consuming the other with a side salad.  Once the sandwiches were safely gone, I found, I no longer felt anxious about their aspect ratios.  

With practice, and a lot of sandwiches, I am optimistic that I will beat this thing.  I'm learning all the time, and that gives me hope.  The other day, at "Moe's Almost World Famous Diner" in Osseo, WI with the kids (en route from Madison), I ordered a patty melt.  

What a revelation:  A patty melt is a cheeseburger on square bread that comes already cut in half!  And here I have been eating patty melts on occasion my whole life, and never noticed that they break the don't-cut-a-cheeseburger principle, and they still taste good.

I gave the other half to the baby (yes, it was cooked through, I checked), and I ate my half patty melt, savoring the taste of triumph.

And the entire basket of fries, too.

Guess I'll have to work on that next time.

What's a Christmas dinner that's still relaxing for the cook?

Red at ...and sometimes Tea has a great reader bleg up.  I'm interested in it myself and I know some of my readers have interesting solutions so I'll send you over there to discuss the "Christmas Dinner Dilemma" (which isn't really a dilemma but never you mind).  I'll reproduce most of the post here to encourage you:

One of the problems for us Americans is that we've had Thanksgiving a month before. Some families find it extremely important for Christmas dinner to be Thanksgiving Mark II, complete with turkey, dressing, cranberries, traditional sides, fine china and glassware, and all the panoply of the Thanksgiving meal, with, perhaps, a few unique Christmas touches (such as, perhaps, a real Christmas pudding, though that is not something I've ever tasted myself). Other desserts may be anything from the much-maligned yet under-appreciated fruitcake to the same sorts of pies one might serve at Thanksgiving; and the whole scene is supposed to convey the rosy glow of a Norman Rockwell painting.

But I have to be honest: I find the idea of cooking what is essentially a second Thanksgiving dinner a month after Thanksgiving rather difficult. On Thanksgiving Day the cook or cooks have the whole day to prepare and cook the meal; on Christmas Day the cook has considerably less time, and unless he or she absolutely loves cooking a huge meal and finds it a relaxing and enjoyable hobby to do so he or she is possibly going to be a bit cranky by the time the family troops in to eat. And, let's face it: preparing what is essentially the same "Holiday Meal" twice in a month is a bit boring. Sure, you could change the main course from a turkey to a ham or vice versa, and you can tinker with the sides and desserts a bit, but you're essentially doing the exact same sort of cooking.

Now, I know that lots of people skip the "Second Thanksgiving" type of Christmas dinner. There are all sorts of other meals that individual families embrace as their own family tradition. For instance, my sister's late mother-in-law reportedly made Christmas a day for a deli spread (which would be great in Texas in years when it's 70 degrees at Christmas). Around here, it's traditional for some people to order tamales for Christmas (or for New Year's). Many cultures have traditional Christmas foods which are very far from what is customary in our culture.

So, my bleg is this: I'd like to hear from readers who have Christmas food traditions that go beyond a second round of Thanksgiving fare. What do you cook and serve? Is it a family custom, a cultural tradition, or some combination? Is Christmas a day to pull out all the stops and go gourmet, or is it a day for a sort of glorified snacking?

As for me, I've only been the matriarch of Christmas day twice.  The first time, I was nearly eight months pregnant, and if I remember correctly we had Christmas Eve dinner with friends, then went to Midnight Mass on the way home with our sleepy kids.  It snowed us in in the morning.  I made cinnamon rolls for breakfast; we didn't eat lunch (just more cinnamon rolls); and I'm not sure what dinner was, but I vaguely remember it being chili or something equally simple.  Since Mark and the kids spent the whole afternoon building a snow fort, they were good and hungry.

The second time, our whole family got sick and we were unable to travel to our families in a different state (although almost all of our presents had been shipped there... that was a singular Christmas).  Christmas Eve dinner was certainly chicken soup, that year -- I don't remember what we did for the big day.

Both times we had a few different kinds of Christmas cookies, which is EXTREMELY UNUSUAL for me as I hardly ever make cookies of any kind.  (I had baked and frozen them ahead of time).   When we were sick, my father-in-law sent us a gift basket from the local posh grocery store, with fruit, cheese and crackers, and chocolate, and that was a big part of Christmas.  

Personally, I liked the pattern of festive Christmas Eve dinner with friends, Midnight Mass, cinnamon rolls for breakfast,  and a simple but hearty soup with fresh-baked bread for dinner (plus cookies all day and who really needs lunch?).  Since you're home all day, the soup doesn't have to be crock-potted -- it can burble along in the oven or on the back burner, and can even be the sort of thing that you have to Do Something To every couple of hours, which is sort of unusual.  Christmas might be a good day for boeuf bourguignon, perhaps, or ratatouille, if you can take care of some of the prep ahead of time.  But good old homemade chicken noodle or minestrone, as long as everybody loves it, is also pretty special.

Anyway, shoo, don't comment here -- go over to ...and Sometimes Tea.  Then if you want you can come back and copy your comment.