Category: Roundup

Read, Eat, Drink: Food Rules, Better Sandwiches, and a Ginger Caipirinha

by Maria

Read:

Aaron Carroll Food Rules

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:

The Sandwich Bar Primi

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.

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Read, Eat, Drink: A Land Library, Pancake Muffins, and a Book on Bourbon

by Maria

Read:

Rocky Mountain Land Library

Two things I love: books and nature. You too? Then you’ll get as excited as I did over hearing about The Rocky Mountain Land Library, which was profiled in the New York Times yesterday. As the reporter writes:

The project is striking in its ambition: a sprawling research institution situated on a ranch at 10,000 feet above sea level, outfitted with 32,000 volumes, many of them about the Rocky Mountain region, plus artists’ studios, dormitories and a dining hall — a place for academics, birders, hikers and others to study and savor the West.

It is the sort of endeavor undertaken by a deep-pocketed politician or chief executive, perhaps a Bloomberg or a Buffett. But the project, called the Rocky Mountain Land Library, has instead two booksellers as its founders.

I love the idea of residential libraries—who wouldn’t want a getaway that involves long walks, long reading sessions, and wide views? Read more about the project here!

Eat:

Pancake Muffins

It was Jarrett’s birthday this past weekend, and he got spoiled big-time with this breakfast tray of mini breakfast sandwich sliders (with homemade turkey sausage patties!) and pancake muffins.

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Read, Eat, Drink: What No One Tells You About Publishing, Pesto Bread in a Jar, Dealer’s Choice Cocktails

by Maria

Read:

If you haven’t already seen Curtis Sittenfeld’s list 24 Things No One Tells You About Publishing, scurry on over there and soak it up. Every single item on the list is absolutely, 100% true. And even better, it spurred Scott Berkun to write his own list of the 28 (Better) Things No One Tells You About Publishing, which is a bit more focused on the act of publishing rather than the craft of writing.

Between those two lists, you have 52 nuggets of truth about the way publishing really works!

Eat:

Oh boy, do I have a good one for you today. Do you like easy, delicious, impressive, and simple recipes? Of course you do. We all do. Unless you’re Martha. In that case, try this recipe for a five-layer pastel cake that takes over 3 hours.

The rest of us: let’s enjoy this delicious Pesto Bread in a Jar recipe from Sweet Paul Magazine.

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Read, Eat, Drink: Author Websites, Pasta Roundup, and The Minimum Sage Cocktail

by Maria

Read:

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!

Read the rest of Shatkin’s article here.

Eat:

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

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.

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