This evening I made some mashed cauliflower (a dish prepared like mashed potatoes but with steamed cauliflower). It's a recipe used in the South Beach Diet, but it's pretty tasty and worth trying.

Another cruciferous veggie I've been eating steamed a lot lately is broccoli. In 8 Weeks to Optimum Health, Dr. Andrew Weil, alt health guru (I noticed ( Read more... )

This evening I saw the most amazing burlesque act, Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey, from right here in Charm City. Here is the website, which does not even begin to indicate the excellence of the show. Do go see it if the opportunity arises ( Read more... )

Women’s clothing sizing is such b.s. Today I went to my friendly neighborhood thrift store. Predictably, I didn’t find any of the items I sort of need, but I did get a nice pair of dark brown corduroy trousers that looked to be my size (no fitting rooms) even though they professed to be a size 4. When I eventually tried them on at home, I ( Read more... )

This morning, after trying to ignore about half an hour of the pug’s barking, I got up, executed some sun salutations, and went for a jog in the park on a superb New Year’s day. I resolved to give my body a brief chance to purge the toxins of 2005 with a fast, but gave up by late lunchtime and made some bran muffins. Pathetic. I am going to need ( Read more... )

One of the books I finally got around to reading this past fall was “Freakonomics”. I had thought it got so much hype because it was sort of groundbreaking in its edgey approach to economics, but when I looked a little further into the topic, it appeared to me that this sort of irreverent, pop econ thing has been going on for several years, at ( Read more... )

This past weekend I visited a coupla friends in Rhode Island, a state which, if I’ve ever visited previously, I don’t remember. I was mostly in Providence, which was full of exceedingly large houses and sheets of ice. We briefly toured the campus of Brown University (which was not as imposing as I expected an Ivy League U., even an oft-overlooked ( Read more... )

This article was brought to me by ConsumerWorld.orghttp://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Banking/Yourcreditrating/P100244.aspRead more... )

Last night I went swing dancing. (One of the things I did instead of blogging during the past six eight months or so was take swing dance lessons. I've never been quick on the uptake, dance-wise, and if that theory of multiple intelligences stuff is correct, I think I am probably a standard deviation or so below average on that kinesthetic one ( Read more... )

Yeah, I haven’t blogged in a long time. Since last spring I have taken dance lessons, learned that I can fix my clogged garbage disposal with energetic plungering, reinstalled my OS with semi-disastrous results, and read some things. I actually read a fiction book a couple of weeks ago, Cory Doctorow’s “Eastern Standard Tribe”. It was good stuff, ( Read more... )

Gardiner, Ann and Sue Wilson. The Inquisitive Cook (Accidental Scientist).NY: Owl Books, 1998.I read this book perhaps a couple of months ago but wanted to mention it. It’s a short book comprised of scientific explanations of why things work certain ways in cooking. It was both interesting and usefully applicable to my cooking, although perhaps a ( Read more... )