More stupid food similes

Made potstickers today. This is something I haven't done since I was pretty young. I remember sitting with a giant bowl of pork filling, clumsily stuffing and tearing dumplings and setting them on thin, white serving plates that covered every flat surface within reach. I couldn't remember how they looked when we cooked them back then, but the triangular tips of each potsticker promptly flopped to one side as I set them in the pan. They looked like killer whales that have been kept in captivity, their dorsal fins drooping from - what? A lack of freedom? Not sure. Should probably look it up.

Rule: If potstickers touch while they're in the pan, they are doomed to tear when you separate them.

Rule 2: Eating potstickers while they're too hot is definitely not something you only do once.

Posting random stuff from your chat logs is a great idea

...It totally counts as a valid post. It's CURATION!

Rule: Book/reading lists are like a mixtape, but you have to do more work to enjoy it.

Yes, the blog will start up again soon, and I will attempt to update weekly again. I also have imbibed some gin so that's why this post is like this.

I love you all.

Also you should really check out that podcast about curation from SXSW and David Carr was a salty grandpa with some good points.

Holidays 2011.

Rule(s): Love yourself. Love others. Eat some things. Find meaning in your relationships. Renew your passion for life. Make these dark days radiant. Don't worry too much about the reason for the season. Think more about the reason for love.

The "diet" advice I follow.

I talk about eating food and making food a lot. Let's talk about the other side of this coin.

This is possibly the simplest, good argument for the type of eating habits I strive to follow. I'd like to say this is the one thing everyone should strive to follow too, but honestly, everyones' body/mental state/priorities are different. However, it does leave a lot of room for flexibility. I think flexibility is important because somehow as humans we've turned "diet" into a verb, as opposed to a noun, like it used to be.

If you think in a biologist way, and talk about the diet of the pygmy shrew, you're not going to say something like, "The pygmy shrew diets on dew and half a grass blade because she read that on a health site somewhere and she's already lost .5 ounces!" You're going to say that the pygmy shrew has a diet consisting of x, y, and occasionally z when she can find it in these climates. That's because what you're gonna eat is what you're gonna eat. Rigid guidelines that radically change that are always going to be a phase because that's not your diet. That's not what you eat.

Not sure if any of that made sense, so read this by someone who actually gets paid to write, okay?

THE TRUTH ABOUT DIETING

"If I was smarter when I was young health journalist, I probably would have eaten more cake. It’s tasty, I like it, and the infrequent indulgence could have served as the personal experiment I needed to better understand what it takes to be healthy."

Rule: Eat cake. Eat pie. Read Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Dan Barber, Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver. No, seriously, read them (they have less to do with dieting, but a lot to do with putting good fuel in your body).

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food

Most anything by Marion Nestle

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Wendell Berry's essays. Here are some.

Dan Barber writes things and is in a few videos.

FUNGUS

I love the way mushroom caps bump and bumble in the pan, like unformed rubber duckies in a tub.

Rule: Making ridiculous similes is fun.

Been reading a lot of HBR recently

This is actually one of the better articles I've ever read on how to encourage creativity and spark. Of course, your mileage may vary, but rarely is there ever an article that both gives specific, easily-achieved actions as well as room for personal interpretation. I wish it were a little longer and contained a bit more science or explanations as to why this works for the author, but oh well.

Here is the exercise/thought-process:

http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2011/11/how-to-think-creatively.html

Is this similar to what you do, creative folks? Or does something different work better for you? I find when I can get into the rhythm (or "wave" as he calls it), I am feeling my most satisfied creatively. More often than not, life interrupts though.

Rule: Always get out of bed and write that thought down. You know the one. The brilliant one.

Looking instead of writing

Hey guys, I've been doing a lot of looking instead of writing. I've been completely addicted to Pinterest.com. It's an online pinboard/tearsheet box. I hate tumblr. I'd rather have real posts with real writing (HAHA OOPS THIS POST SUCKS) or art pieces versus an un-trackable, mishmash of stream-of-consciousness journal-y stuff (which is often affected since it's public, so there's gotta be some mental edit of "how do i want people to perceive my stream-of-consciousness" which negates the activity), BUT (oh geez clauses) if you want to check out just a bunch of things I find pretty, check this out.

As far as I am aware, you don't need to be a member in order to look at my pins. Let me know if that's not the case.

http://pinterest.com/thrimpth/pins/