We all want to eat healthy, and we all want to eat delicious food. Which is why we all tend to have our own, sometimes quirky, ideas about how to do just that. Paleo, raw, vegan, vegetarian, Atkins, pescatarian–they’re all ways to help us put order to the sometimes random process of getting edible things into our pieholes. (And making sure we’re not eating too much pie!)
So here are 7 rules I agree with from Aaron Carroll of The Upshot, for your reading pleasure.I like that they’re sane, fairly unrestrictive, and very cognizant of the fact that having a cocktail and a hoagie once in awhile isn’t going to do you in. (More on that below.)
My favorite one?
7. Eat with other people, especially people you care about, as often as possible. This has benefits even outside those of nutrition. It will make you more likely to cook. It will most likely make you eat more slowly. It will also make you happy.
Good food, just like a good book, should make you feel good. Some things are that simple.
Eat:
It is one of life’s nagging mysteries: Why is a sandwich you order at a restaurant so invariably and intensely better than a sandwich you make at home?
These are the questions that keep me up at night. It’s a universally felt pain that sandwiches made by someone else are, and will always be, superior to that mash of bread and deli and refrigerator scraps you threw together last night.
Are you a writer? Do you have a website? If you answered yes to the first question and no to the second, get thee over to WordPress.com and sign up for a website, STAT. Mike Shatzkin, a publishing insider who writes a great marketing blog, wrote a post this week that sent shudders of horror through me.
He pointed out that many authors don’t have websites, and even worse, that now some publishers are thinking about building and owning websites for their bestselling authors. This is so fraught with complications (which I won’t get into here, since Shatzkin covers them already), and it’s also shortsighted. The impact the Internet will have on publishing is coming into crisper focus every day, and it’s no longer possible to turn away from the fact that authors must have an online presence. Every single one of them. And that presence must be owned and managed by the author, or by an employee or consultant working on behalf of the author.
I feel a bit like a crazed doomsday prophet screeching about the interwebs sometimes, but take heed, authors, for the Internets shall not pass! The online world isn’t going to go away, and it’s becoming an increasingly important part of our offline world. You need to exist in both places. And if you don’t have a website or some form of social media, you don’t exist to the all-powerful Google, and you don’t exist to the millions of potential readers who are looking for someone like you. So, I repeat, in my most annoyingly nagging tone possible: get a website!
Lately, I’ve been craving pasta. Just kidding. Every single day of my life since birth I’ve craved pasta. I predict that 50 years from now someone will isolate the addicted-to-pasta gene on a strand of DNA, and I will finally have answers about my condition. Until then, let’s all drool over these ridiculously good-looking bowls of pasta:
Reginetti with Savoy Cabbage and Pancetta. That reginetti is so cute I could just eat it right up. (I guess that’s the point, huh?) Recipe here.
Ebooks. It’s hard to believe that the e-book as we know it didn’t exist until 7 years ago. As Jason Matthews noted in Ebooks: What a Long Strange Trip on The Book Designer, Amazon didn’t launch the Kindle (and therefore the e-book market as we now know it) until 2007.
I still vividly remember sitting in on an editorial meeting at Simon & Schuster in 2009 and hearing the caution in the voices of editors as they discussed this new format. Back then the prognostications were big and bold (ebooks would take over the world and wreck all our lives!), but the numbers were tiny and insignificant. Ebooks were maybe 2-3 percent of the market–not a number anyone could really act on.
Between 2009 and 2012 we saw huge double-digit growth in the e-book market, and though we seem to be past the largest spike in e-book adoption, the market still grew from 23% to 27% of all book sales between 2012 and 2013.
What I wonder most: how will people read another 7 years from now? I don’t think this is an e-book vs. print book debate. I think it’s an e-book vs. print book vs. blogs vs. magazines vs. newspapers vs. online verticals vs. any other format, digital or print, where readers go for words.
As complex as the landscape is, we all want something very simple: to get our authors’ words in front of readers. I think that’s the only certainty we can cling to in these uncertain times.
So here’s hoping 2015 (and beyond!) will bring us even more ways to get writing to readers!
Eat:
Huge milestone alert! I finally, finally, finally (finally!) ate at Rose’s Luxury. It. Was. Incredible.
Which was a bit of a surprise, given that my expectations were sky-high. I’d first read about Rose’s in this article from August’s issue of Bon Appetit, when Andrew Knowlton named it the Best New Restaurant in America in 2014. So yes, I was expecting greatness.
And I am so happy that I was not disappointed. I can easily say it’s the best restaurant I’ve eaten at this year, and that the Pork Sausage, Habanero, and Lychee Salad was one of the best things I’ve eaten, ever.
But my very favorite moment of the night? Digging into the Cacio e Pepe Pasta and being absolutely floored by how something so simple can be so delicious. Granted, I have a soft spot for pasta, always and forever, but this? This was special. I would give all my worldly possessions to be able to know how they did it.
Cacio e Pepe Pasta from Rose’s Luxury. ‘Tis a thing of beauty. Source.
Oh, and there was also a Cinnamon Toast Crunch Ice Cream that blew our faces off. There was much moaning and gushing from our table that night!
Drink: Kicking it over to Jarrett, our resident bartender, for a fun drink recipe:
The holidays are behind us, and you know what that means: taking stock of all the liquor left over from holiday parties. Some bottles you savor, like that glorious bottle of Bulleit Bourbon Uncle Bob gave you as a present. Others make you cringe, like that fifth of vanilla vodka your cousin’s girlfriend brought to New Years.
This year, I decided to come up with a plan for that nasty vanilla vodka once and for all by playing a fun game. It’s called: “figure out how to make a decent cocktail with disgustingly flavored alcohol” (FOHTMADCWDFA for short). Catchy, I know. But, in the end, I actually came up with a pretty good drink – we’ll call it the Apple Pie Cocktail.
Apple Pie Cocktail (Vanilla Vodka)
Apple Pie Cocktail
• 2 lime slices
• One granny smith apple (for garnish)
• Two leaves of mint
• 3 oz. vanilla vodka
• Ginger ale
• Apple juice (we used honeycrisp apple juice, but regular works)
• Dash of cinnamon
Muddle lime slices and mint leaves in bottom of an old-fashioned glass. Fill glass half way with ice. Add vanilla vodka. Then fill remainder of glass with ginger ale and apple juice (2/3 ginger ale and 1/3 apple juice). Add a dash (around 1/8 teaspoon) of cinnamon. VERY briefly shake in a shaker (but only a shake or two because ginger ale carbonation will make it explode if shaken too much).
Using a paring knife or peeler, cut a strand of the granny smith skin off and add it as garnish. Imbibe and enjoy!
