Before, and Not Before (or, On Deeply Human Jerks).

I confess I enjoy reading memoirs written by jerks, especially those who do not appear to be very tortured by their own misbehavior–the Renaissance artist and braggart Benvenuto Cellini, the drug-addled rock-star-chef Anthony Bourdain, the 18th century savant J.J. Rousseau, James Boswell’s London Journals, the Mexican politician and reformer Jose Vasconcelos, the ex-criminal-turned-saint Malcolm X, the gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson. (In this vein, I recently got through Michael Lewis’s Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. A negative review in the Times accused it as by-the-numbers, “dialed in,” facilely trying to get rise, and laughs, from its audience. I’d tend to agree with this assessment, especially with regards to the anecdotes; there are lots of stories of misbehavior, both by the author and his children, which sound awfully close to standup comedy–the kind of stories that were either exaggerated, or if true were permitted to happen simply because the narrator was thinking of how they would look on paper later on. A common risk run by memoirist cads, but as jerks go, he’s fairly amusing.)

I guess I’m drawn to this kind of story for a couple of reasons: the first, obviously, is that it is much easier to identify with flawed individuals than with saints. The other is that these tales  are always about halfway points. They are stories of transformation (How I Became Remarkable Enough To Have You Want To Read About Me), but they are also about the imperfection, or rather incompleteness, of that process. Despite their protestations of greatness, they are still clearly works in progress.

I am in such a state of half-wayness. I weighed in yesterday, down 2.4 lbs. I’m at tricky place: I’ve lost enough weight to have something to show for it, since it’s now been 17-20 lbs depending on when I start counting. Like any recidivist dieter, in the damp basement I have an embarrassing number of plastic crates full of graded sizes of clothes, each crate witnessing my outward growth, like tree rings. I was finally able to rifle through the first crate down, and get into things I haven’t fit into in about 2 years. Hooray.

The problem is that there are still 3 crates to go, and no matter how much I bluster and thump my chest about my progress, I’m still fat, although not as fat as I was five months ago. It is not quite Before and After yet. You get the sense that the confessional jerks I enjoy reading are full of bluster and lack of remorse in order to convince themselves of their own advancement. Hoo-ah. Now keep going.

As a parting, a little recipe from the now doomed Gourmet magazine from last spring, which in typical Gourmet fashion is both kind of deeply ordinary (canned chick peas; dried, not fresh, spices) and edgy (hints of Azerbaijani food). Like those boastful jerks.

Tomato Spiced Chick Peas (from Gourmet)

1/3 c virgin olive oil (I used only 1 Tbsp to cut down points)

1 Tbsp ground cumin

1 Tbsp ground coriander

1 tsp ground ginger

¼ tsp rounded red pepper flakes

1 1.5 in piece cinnamon stick

1 28 o can whole tomatoes in juice

2 15 oz cans chickpeas, rinsed

½ C chopped parsley

¼ c finely chopped mint

heat oil, cook spices until fragrant and shade darker, Add tomatoes, break up, add chick peas. Simmer 20 min. Discard cinnamon stick. Stir in herbs. Serve warm or room temp.

PS It is my birthday today,  so I allowed myself a little splurge this morning: a refrigerator raid off the books. Olives. Waffles with sugar free syrup. Turkey and Laughing Cow cheese. I am human, and flawed. Oh well.

A weigh in.

I was fairly good last week, or at least I though so. I did not journal, but I did keep track of points with my little bead bracelet I made years ago with crafts materials from the boys’ daycare. I got the idea from an old item they used to sell at Weight Watchers, a river-pearl bracelet with black pearl every 5 points–you just move a little marker down the beads for every point consumed. Not very manly, so I made mine using earth tone beads, with every fifth bead a dark green. A kind of calorie rosary, as it were. I made a little elastic loop to move down the line of consumed calories. When I first tried this, years ago, it worked fine– I kept to my allowed 26 points, with no real effort on my part.

    No longer the case. 

  So this week, for the first time in years, I am going to journal again, writing down everything that goes in my body. Boring, but it might be what it takes. When I was flipping channels last night, there was some rotund comedian talking about his failed dieting experiences– “I tried Weight Watchers for two weeks. Wanna know what I lost? Two weeks.” Those damn desires. Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum. . . 

Boys have been gone this week with Grandma at nature camp.  It is too quiet around here, and I’ve been cooking all the things they won’t eat, mostly for myself– I did my killer, low-fat puttanesca sauce, with enormous shrimp and a whole tin of anchovies. 6 points a serving, I think, since shellfilsh are fairly innocuous. Weigh-in tomorrow. We’ll see.

My marinara.

Mirepoix marinara sauce (vegetarian)

3 stalks of celery with leaves

4 large carrots, peeled

1 can crushed tomatoes

1 lb roma tomatoes, cored, seeded and chopped

2 large onions

4 garlic cloves, minced

 

                     1/3 cup sweet sherry (!)

                     1 cup fresh basil leaves, chopped coarsely

                      2 tbsp olive oil

                      1 thai chili, seeded and chopped finely

Some recipes add sugar. The carrots and the sweet sherry take care of that here. 

In food processor, chop celery, carrots and onions. Heat oil in heavy saucepot and sautee onions until translucent; add  garlic, chili and sautee 1-2 minutes until aromatic. Add celery and carrots, sautee for another 4-5 minutes to coat with oil. Deglaze with sherry. Bring to slight boil. Add canned tomato and diced fresh tomato, bring to boil and reduce to low. Add salt to taste (about 1-3+ tsp, depending on the salt content of the canned tomatoes). Simmer covered for about half an hour, stirring occasionally until thick. Add basil 2 minutes before serving, stirring until wilted. Before serving, you can stir a small amount of extra olive oil to give it a glossy finish. Makes a thick, hearty sauce that clings nicely to thicker pasta shapes like radiatori and orechiette. Also serves as a good base for a meat sauce; or with the addition of olives, artichoke hearts, anchovies and 2 more chilis, makes a nice puttanesca.

yield– about 7 cups

In theory, 2 points/half cup.

The Mysteries of Pittsbrugh

When hungry, shave. 

We just moved to Pittsburgh, a lovely city, with all its post-industrial squalor and its impenetrable hills. I read on a web search that the steepest street in the country is somewhere here in town (37 degrees!), not in San Francisco, mind you. One curiosity about this city is that its streets and neighborhoods are almost impossible to figure out. Even the GPS has gotten confused, bonging, producing multiple arrows and screaming “when possible do a legal U-turn!” It is a so hard to figure out precisely because of its loveliness: all those hills and valleys produced little independent nests of neighborhoods which eventually crept to each other and interlaced fingers, sometimes with bridges, sometimes with tunnels, sometimes connecting streets that shouldn’t have connected. The basic problem is that each of these neighborhoods had its own distinct logic that doesn’t necessarily correspond to a composite whole. Forget grids. This town is a literal non-sequitur, “doesn’t follow.” And proudly so. 

So non-sequitur seems to be the order of the day around here. I gave a fly-fishing demonstration (yes, a patrician affectation from when I lived in New England) to Junior’s first grade class. I showed them flies I had tied, how a multiplier reel works, how to lift a weight-forward line into the air and cast it into a coffee cup twenty five feet away.

“Any questions or comments?” Hands rise. “Yes?”

“My dog ate a butterfly.” Lovely.

When hungry shave. When pressed for time, plant an heirloom tomato. Be good for a week, show up on time to the Weight Watchers meeting, lose nothing. Be so-so for the next week, lose four pounds. Don’t try to figure it out. The GPS will go crazy.

La vita è circolare

I recently tried a thought experiment, while on a plane trip back from San Francisco. I gave myself a span of about 5 minutes, and then made note of where my mind wandered, to see just how often I think about food. This was the approximate list from the cocktail napkin:

the pain in my neck (thanks, Continental)

wonder if the kids are killing each other

sleeping in my own bed

snuggling with the wife

making a really tall Dagwood, avocado, ham, redleaf lettuce, low fat swiss, deli mustard

do I have some of the breakfast bread I swiped from the restaurant in my briefcase?

snap out of it

snuggling with the wife

snap out of it

work (an article I’m writing on travel literature during the Cold War)

road trips

barbeque. Really, really good barbeque, the kind you find on road trips. There was this place out in the desert in California. . . 

Retro

 So I finally showed up to a Weight Watchers meeting in order to assess the damage. As I sat down glumly and started flipping through the first-week material–usually they give you a refresher if you’ve missed more than two weeks in a row– and realized that everyone was flipping through first week material.

Something’s up. I pay attention. The the leader is laying out the “new program.”

It seems they’ve revamped the entire system and they thought it was so urgent that it couldn’t wait until the new year, the customary time for radical change. It’s as if we, the obese, like Chrysler, are in such danger of sinking that we needed an immediate bailout. It turns out that the points  accounting system, like the credit market and the finances at the car companies, was being abused, and too many people were failing. If all you needed to do was count the calories that went into your body, that left it open for people to fill up on Tastee cakes and 400 calorie frappucinos, and gleefully (and legally) writing it down as kosher. And everyone was doing it.

     Odd: the “new” program looks an awful lot like the old one, from about twenty years ago and before the discovery of points. Just like then, now you have little boxes for portions of the things you need: protein, carbs (back in the day they were simply “breads”), fruits and vegetables, water. Another thing: their claims are now footnoted, from staid sources like  Journal of Human  Nutrition and Obesity and Morbidity. 

Signs of the times: a return to things that had worked beforehand, but  were abandoned to disastrous consequences; underestimating greed; cooking the books.  Perhaps not coincidentally, the curvy 50′s pinup Betty Page died this week. She was an example of something that worked well, then fell out of fashion,  and was later resurrected as a retro found object. Pax vobiscum, Ms. Page.

Five Year Old Renders Parent Irrelevant (Nothing to do with weight loss, but cute)

The setting: Me in my armchair, after dinner. The phone rings. A small voice at the other end of the line. “May I speak to Smiley, please?”

Moi: “Uh–all right.”  Smiley summoned, the phone handed over. Pleasantries, small talk, then business. When is a good time for the play date? Well, how about for you? That would be fine. All right, I’ll see you then. Good bye. Hang up. Return to coloring book downstairs. 

Moi: “Excuse me? What just happened? Who was that?”

Smiley: “Oh, just Nicholas.”

Moi: “And Nicholas would be…?”

Smiley: “From school.”

“You just seemed to have organized an event with him; care to inform me, or his parents, about it?”

“I guess we should, to see if it’s all right.”

“Darn tooting.”

“Can you dial his number for me?”

Falling Down (with Hummus)

Happy thanksgiving. 

That’s it people, I’m off the wagon. I have not been to a weigh-in in two weeks, and I’m back to my old addictive behavior– gorging at night, damn the consequences. Heartburn. At least I’m going to the spinning classes at the gym, which means the earthwards tumble has been slowed down a little. I’m not sure what the damage is yet, but I’ll know on wednesday. .  . . And it’s not even Christmas.

Here’s a comfort food of mine, a kind of spackling that fills you up nicely for not a lot of points. I will make a lot of this in the near future.  

Reasonable Hummus

2 teaspoons olive oil

2 onions. chopped

3 garlic cloves. minced

1 (19-ounce) can chickpeas, rinsed and drained

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons tahini (sesame paste)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

In a medium nonstick skillet, heat the oil. Add the onions and garlic; cook, stirring as needed, until the onions are softened, about 5 minutes.

In a blender or food processor, puree the chickpeas, lemon juice, tahini, salt and pepper with the onion mixture. Refrigerate, covered, until chilled, at least 1 hour.

per serving: 89 calories, 4 g total fat, 147 rng sodium, 10 g total carbohydrate, 3 g dietary fiber, 3 g protein, 37 mg calcium.

Servings: 8; points per serving: 2

Instead of pita, serve with 0-point delivery system (sliced zucchini, cauliflower, tomato slices). 

E=mc2, or m= F/a

So mass is a function of speed. Apparently, if you slow pure energy down enough, say radiation from outer space,  it’ll congeal into tiny little particles of iron. Likewise, if in theory you accelerate anything quickly enough, say, for instance, me, it should dissolve into a massless blast of pure energy.

    The main problem with this neat little equation, of course, is that some of us are simply not built for speed. Large, craggy creatures of habit and substance, we are constantly buzzed by the quick. Junior, for one, cannot sit still. He can, and will, consume half his weight in pizza, bothered because he has to slow down at the table to do so, and keeps getting told to stop kicking the empty chair or to stop standing up when he’s supposed to be eating. 

“Slow down,” I tell him.

“I’m built for speed,” he says, quoting Lightning McQueen. My chair creaks under my weight as I nudge over to let him breeze by.

On fate

(Belated. October 10.) Today is my birthday, and no one called. Granted, I am traveling, but one would have thought with these newfangled cell phones and all. . . Maybe my wish to become less weighty, bordering on the invisible, is working in realms unexpected. Take for instance the bike versus car accident I had earlier this week. I was racing home on the bike, along a wide-ish boulevard in a working class section of town. A beat up station wagon was ahead of me, and started to slow down. I started to slow down. Then, the car put on its right turn signal almost at the same time as it turned into the parking lot. I slammed on the brakes, fishtailed, and landed on the pavement, sort of thumping into the car’s side. Old lady got out. I lost it. Never rudely- I used no curse words, and adressed the ancienne as “ma’am”. Instantly, the neighbors came out of the woodwork, accusing me. Bizarre, full of bad karma, bordering on lynch mob. I didn’t like how I started to behave. I limped off and made it home barely in time for the babysitter to get to her class. I know I’m not much to look at in Spandex, but this was uncalled for. 

     Bad karma seems to be in the air: my weight seems to be in inverse proportion to the stock market, if not in degree, at least in direction. Market went way down, I went up slightly. It had the greatest single point gain in history, I retreated. Portentous times, these. Think I could save the world from the next Great Depression by going on a hunger strike?