Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your Soul, by Gary Thomas

****

An excerpt from a review recently posted on Schaeffer's Ghost:

[...] We know from Scripture that Christians’ bodies are ‘the temple of the Holy Spirit.’ We are not our own; we were bought with a price. It follows, therefore, that we are to honor God with our bodies. After all, everything we have—including our bodies—was entrusted to us by God for the purpose of glorifying Him and enjoying Him forever. It is our chief end. But all too often we act like our purpose is to dishonor Him (or glorify ourselves), and enjoy bacon forever. Our gods are our stomachs, and we alternate between expanding them by our indulgences and making an effort to undo those indulgences and shrink them down again. We enjoy our Doritos (or our flat abs) more than we enjoy our sovereign creator who loves us and redeemed us. Like the servant entrusted with one talent, we are crummy stewards, and thereby tell the world that the Master we claim to serve really isn’t worth respecting. [...]

Full review available here. 

Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table (With Recipes), by Shauna Niequist

***

A defense of messy hospitality--of honest friendship, transparent love, and lots and lots of delicious food.

At the back of this book, author Shauna Niequist lists some of her favorite writers, including bestselling author Anne Lamott and author, former New York Times restaurant critic, former Gourmet editor, and reality TV show judge (!!!) Ruth Reichl. I'm not surprised. Their influence is clear. If Ruth Reichl and Anne Lamott had a less-talented baby, and that baby wrote a book, this could be that book. That's not a dig, either--Lamott and Reichl are incredibly skilled writers; to be described as less talented than these ladies is no insult. Niequist does not rise to their level, it's true, but she writes in that tradition, and as she has a pleasant--and occasionally charming--style, the book is, by and large, an enjoyable read.

The Southern Foodie: 100 Places to Eat in the South Before You Die (and the Recipes That Made Them Famous), by Chris Chamberlain

**

One glance at the rather unwieldy subtitle of this book will tell you precisely what it is.  Nashville food writer Chris Chamberlain presents a collection of short write-ups of, well, 100 noteworthy restaurants scattered across 13 Southern states. Chamberlain doesn't limit himself to the pricey, big name, world-famous establishments--in fact, there are precious few such restaurants included here. Instead, he focuses on the relatively unknown gems; there's many a locally famous dive or inexpensive diner tucked into these pages. Or at least, I assume they're inexpensive. Chamberlain doesn't really include information about prices--not even a $, $$, $$$, and $$$$ designation to help out those of us who might have to adjust our dining plans to fit our budgets. He does provide website information, where applicable, which may include a more detailed menu complete with prices. Still, it seems a shame to force readers to consult outside sources in order to ascertain something that would be quite simple to include, especially since it's by no means unheard of to provide such information in a book like this.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, by Ruth Reichl

*****

Food critic and chef Ruth Reichl traces her lifelong love affair with food, beginning with her mother's atrocious culinary creations during her childhood, through to her very first restaurant reviews out in California. The entertaining anecdotes are interspersed with recipes that have been particularly important to her over the years.

Reichl, a highly respected food writer, doesn't seem to have had any formal culinary education. Instead, her expertise is the result of varied experiences cobbled together over the years. She learns about apple dumplings and potato salad from her grandmother's maid. Her mother's housekeeper teaches her the secrets of Beef Wellington and wiener schnitzel. A school friend's father introduces her to souffle and fine cuisine, and a college roommate introduced her to several South American delicacies.

My Big Bottom Blessing: How Hating My Body Led to Loving My Life, by Teasi Cannon

**

A memoir of sorts, tracking the author’s struggles with obesity, self-image, and spiritual growth. I confess, I was expecting more of a how-to book—something that would offer me advice and hope in my own attempts to achieve (and maintain) a healthier weight. I’m not sure exactly where this idea came from, other than the fact that nearly all books about weight loss and “body image” are, at heart, guidebooks to the svelte figure of your dreams (or at least to the wholehearted embrace of the beauty of your body, whatever its shape). And this book is more autobiographical than instructional.  It tells me about the author’s story, but offers little to no help for my own battles with gluttony, laziness, self-indulgence, fear of man, and vanity. But now that I re-read the blurb on the back of the book, I realize that the book was billed as a memoir from the start. There’s a brief line on the back cover, telling me that her story will propel me to realize my own value and beauty, but I suspect that’s just hype from the publisher. This is her story, not yours. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The South Beach Diet Supercharged: Faster Weight Loss and Better Health for Life, by Arthur Agatston

***

A good update of South Beach Diet: Original Recipe. Essentially, it's just the South Beach Diet plus interval training (to increase metabolism) and core muscle development. Agatston has added more recipes, of course, and lots of success stories, as well as a whole slew of studies supporting the science and results of the the South Beach Diet. And while of course he touts his own diet, from what I understand, this is one of the better ones. Not only does it help people lose weight, but it's supposed to do wonders for your blood chemistry. Agatston, a cardiologist, is more about being healthy than skinny. His main concerns are diabetes, prediabetes, and heart and cholesterol issues.

And the food really IS pretty good and satisfying (I've tried it on and off before). The trick is, it's mostly fresh stuff that doesn't keep well (which means lots of potentially time consuming trips to the grocery store) and stuff you make yourself (which consumes yet more time). I would like to try this, but I worry about having enough time to do it well. All too often I come home starving and create something from whatever non-perishable items I happen to have on the shelf. Successful completion of the South Beach Diet requires a less haphazard approach, and more meal planning.

Whether or not you end up trying the diet, though, Agatston does a good job of explaining why it works. The book definitely motivates you to improve your diet and exercise. And it's a fast read, since the last half of the book is mostly the step-by-step exercise plan and recipes and meal plans for the different phases.

Tastes like . . . chicken

So what are Chicken Mc-Nuggets really made of? Chicken! Pollan provocatively implies that the nuggets are 56 per cent corn. Where does that number come from? Well, chickens are reared on corn, and Pollan calculates the amount of corn that is converted into chicken flesh, and adds to this the weight of other ingredients that are made from corn, such as the dextrose used in the batter, and comes up with the meaningless but attention-grabbing 56 per cent. Using this logic, we could all be described as being made of plants, since every bit of our flesh can be traced back to some plant product.

~"What McDonald's Chicken McNuggets Really Contain," by Joe Schwarcz

Sugar and spice and everything nice...

“In retrospect, they’re disgusting, many of the things we used to do—too much fat and too much sugar, and a series of clichés taught while being rationalized,” he said. “The key thing now for a cook is to develop a library of flavors that you can recall. If I say to you, ‘Apple and cinnamon,’ you would click in immediately. ‘Yes, apple! Yes, cinnamon!’ The library of your mind contains that. But what if I say ‘Apple, asafetida’? Nothing! You have nothing stored there.” He added slyly, “Now, this is a benefit to the chef, because if I do apple and cinnamon and you don’t like it you think there’s something wrong with me, but if I do apple and asafetida and you don’t like it there’s something wrong with you.” He laughed briefly, professionally. “The development of a pastry chef is not the development of techniques. It is the slow, careful development of a catalogue of savors and flavors, which you can develop the way you develop muscles. There is a logic in every dessert worth eating. Consider the logic of white peach and rich cheese. We must be conditioned not by sight but only by flavor, the tongue, the nose, and the feel in the mouth.” He went on placidly, “It is to avoid these errors that we do so much of our teaching and learning blindfolded.”

“Blindfolded!” I said, wondering if I had misunderstood.

“Yes, blindfolded,” he repeated. He went to a drawer and took out a handful of silken eye masks, which he threw on the desk. “It is important to be able to work with the sensations of the nose and mouth alone, so we spend hours in the dark, tasting. Of course, appearance matters, but it is the last part of the equation. Taste, taste, taste—that is what matters. So I keep people blindfolded for much of the work, which is devoted to the marriages of taste.”

Then he opened the door to an immense, pristine kitchen, dominated by a great length of polished black stone. Here, he said, “as many as fourteen young chefs can work, blindfolded, to discover the taste and enlarge their flavor libraries.”[...]

We sat down for dinner in the nearby restaurant, and had a meal of five courses, all sweet, or at least sweetish, yet all beginning with a savory theme. First, there was cucumber-ginger-pineapple-tarragon sherbet, then olive-oil cake with San Simón cheese and a perfect white-peach sorbet. “The combination is a classic conception of the savory kitchen: cheese and olive oil,” Jordi observed. Then came an Idiazábal-stout-beet-cherry cake, too various to make much sense. Then a green-apple granita with bay leaf, as fresh and acid as a winter morning, and, finally, truffle-hazelnut-toast cream pudding. The genius showed in the details: a curry-and-salt cookie, thrown in as an extra but a study in itself. There was something perfectly modulated in the transition from savory herbs (tarragon and bay) and savory tastes (salt and curry, particularly) into sweet dishes.

“This is kind of amazing,” I said to Lisa, as I scraped the plate of truffle-toast pudding and grabbed another curry-and-salt biscuit. Lisa gave me a seraphic, you-ain’t-seen-nothing-yet smile, and said, “You’ll meet Albert tomorrow.”

~"Sweet Revolution: The Power of a Pastry Chef," by Adam Gopnik