Sexy Sunday Science

I heard this bit on Weekend Edition Sunday this morning about new studies about the science behind willpower. According to a new book, called Willpower, by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, willpower is more than just a state of mind; it's an actual function of the brain. And interestingly enough, it's a function that depends on having enough glucose circulating in your blood stream.

In the interview, Tierney said a couple of interesting things about how willpower works that stood out to me. He described how it's much easier to exert willpower to resist the temptation to eat a cookie if the cookie is out of sight. You're more likely to eat some Oreos if they're sitting in front of you than if they are hidden away in a drawer across the room. When asked about willpower and dieting, Tierney explained that one reason dieting is so hard is because it usually involves taking in less food than one is used to eating, and less food means lower levels of glucose, which means willpower can't function the way it's supposed to. "In order to diet you need willpower," Tierney said, "but in order to have willpower, you need to eat."

These two points of Tierney's speak exactly to principles underlying my whole system of shopping and menu planning. To start with, don't buy things that you know you wouldn't be able to resist if they were in your house. Sometimes I crave ice cream, or something like that, but that craving is pretty easy to resist when I don't have it around. More importantly, though, you need to eat. Eating healthfully doesn't mean eating less. In my case, I've found it actually means eating more, but eating better. More protein, veggies, and fruit. Changing my diet turned out to be surprisingly easy, at least in terms of my enjoyment of food. When I have good food in the fridge that's ready to eat, I don't find myself wishing I had a quesadilla or a slice of pizza instead. The somewhat more challenging part was learning to plan ahead, and to get used to making time to cook things more complicated than burritos or tuna melts. I suspect that this is really the hardest part for most people. It's not the idea of changing what you eat, it's changing how you eat--that is, how you tend to shop during the week and what you usually do about making dinner after a long day--that's hard. Planning makes all the difference.

So how do you come up with a plan? Well, I think you have to let food be the motivating factor. You should think about the meals that you really enjoy, and that you know how to make. (Maybe you don't know how to make many things; that's a problem unto itself that I will need to address in a different post. I always say, however, that if you can read, you can cook. I think that a lot of cooking failures, my own included, are the result of not reading a recipe attentively. Just following the directions carefully is usually all good cooking takes.) Think about it this way, if it helps: if you were going to go out to eat all week, what kind of restaurants would you like to go to? Thai? Italian? Mexican? OK. So, is there anything you get at that kind of place you could make on your own? The answer is often "yes." A simple example is your basic taco, that you can get from any taqueria, which is just a corn tortilla, some spiced meat filling, topped with chopped onion, cilantro, salsa, and lime juice. This is one tasty meal that is about as easy to make at home as it is to go to a restaurant and order it. And you can dress it up or down as much as you want. Anyway. Can you come up with three or four things you wouldn't mind eating throughout the week? Alright, then, you've got a menu.

Once you've got a menu, it's fairly easy to come up with a shopping list to get the things you need. Even if you have a menu that's kind of complicated and disparate, and requires a weird mix of items, don't let this intimidate you. It's far better, I think, to spend more money in one go, knowing where that money is going, than to shop frequently and randomly--buying fruits or vegetables you have no clear plan for that end up going bad, buying bread that languishes until it's moldy or stale, buying staples haphazardly so you end up with dozens of cans of something you use infrequently while you never seem to have enough pasta or rice on hand, etc. Make a shopping list, get everything that is on it, and don't get anything that isn't on it.

Getting motivated to cook is the hardest part. You need to think of cooking as a necessary task that needs to be done regularly, just like laundry, or cleaning the bathroom. And just like laundry and cleaning the bathroom, cooking need not be something you do every day. If you want to make something complicated, make it on your day off, and on the nights when you have no energy for cooking you don't have to do anything but reheat it. In addition, having an arsenal of simple, quick, tasty recipes at your disposal, like the pesto pasta I made the other night, or the succotash, or those tacos I mentioned earlier, is great, because you can throw them together anytime without a lot of effort. The key is to make things in the proper quantity. Make enough of something that you can get some leftovers out of it, but not so much that it will go bad before you finish it. Most of the recipes you'll see on this blog will make about four servings, or enough for a person living alone to feed themselves four times throughout the week. If you live with someone, doubling the recipes for two may cost you a little more money, but the increase in time and effort will be negligible. I actually think shopping for two (assuming that you have two incomes) can be more economical, because buying things in bulk often means you pay less for something per ounce. That's why they call big packages of things "economy-sized."

So back to the willpower thing. A final thing John Tierney said about willpower is that you can build it up and train it, like muscle. With practice, you can develop stronger willpower over time. I have found this to be the case with me and cooking. It used to make me tired to even think about, but now I'm used to it and it doesn't seem like such a chore any more. In fact, I really enjoy it, to the extent that for me it can be a way of procrastinating from working on something else that needs to get done. Well, maybe it's not procrastinating. Maybe it's just my brain craving the food it needs in order to focus on my other work. Right?

Leftover Love

Here it is, midweek, and I have three tasty things in my fridge to choose from to eat, and all I have to do is reheat them. I had some of the ratatouille for lunch today. Ratatouille, by the way, is one of those things that gets better with age (up to a point, of course...). While I was looking around in the fridge, I couldn't help breaking into the puerco pibil leftovers and stealing a couple chunks of pork magic. I want you to see something:

I know it's a little hard to see, but can you see the orange goo that seems to be suspended in place despite the fact that I'm holding the container almost vertical? Yeah, that's achiote paste...and rendered pig fat. Lots of it. Did I say I made healthy food? Ha!

Well, the truth is, folks, that animal fat is an essential part of making a lot of things taste so darn good. I try to use the leanest cuts of meat I can get away with in most cases, but you just can't produce a pork dish as melt-in-your-mouth as this without a starting with a fatty cut. You could try this, maybe, with something leaner, and it might even be good, but it wouldn't be puerco pibil. Authenticity--and flavor--sometimes trump doing what's best for your arteries.

I'm going to go out on a limb, here. I'm no nutritionist, but I'm going to argue that a decadent fatty meal like this has a place in healthy, nutritious eating. The portion I ate last night (or rather, yesterday afternoon, since I couldn't bear to wait until dinner time), was a reasonable size. It was probably half the size of a serving you would get in a restaurant. I had it with rice, some avocado, and a little salad. And a beer...an extra indulgence, I will admit. But I didn't have chips, I didn't have beans cooked in lard, I didn't have any cheese. I had sensible portion of meat for an adult, rounded out with sensible sides. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If I had a Big Mac every day for lunch, and then came home and had pot roast and mashed potatoes every night, I would have a problem, and so would anyone else who does that. But I don't. Eating healthfully, I think, means being moderate. That's my thought o' the day.

Cooking For One: An Introduction

Hi. I'm the Sexy Divorcee. Welcome to my blog. Let me tell you a little about what I'm doing here. (Sometimes I use bad words. Please don't be alarmed.)

I am a reasonably healthy adult, but the desire to be healthier was the push that started me down the road to becoming a more conscious cook. I have been slightly overweight since my mid-twenties, and I realized that once I hit my rapidly approaching thirties, just maintaining my weight was going to get harder, and losing weight was going to get significantly harder. Although I bike and walk everywhere and enjoy outdoor activities, I have an abhorrence of anything resembling structured exercise. If I was going to maintain my weight, changing the way I eat was far more realistic than suddenly becoming a jogger or something. I fuckin' hate jogging. Anyway.

I think diets are bullshit. If I was going to change the way I eat, the change was going to have to be permanently viable. I had to be able to continue to eat all the foods I like...that is, all the foods period. But I was willing to make some concessions in terms of frequency and amount. I didn't think this would be too hard; I don't eat a lot of junk food, and I don't have a big sweet tooth. I do love fries and pizza and stuff, but I only have those things occasionally when I'm out with friends. I cave to fast food cravings maybe three times a year. And I almost never spend grocery money on packaged snacks or highly processed quasi-meals. No pop tarts or hot pockets or soda or any of that crap. Once in a great while I would buy some tortilla chips (an entire bag of which, I will admit, I could easily have eaten in the space of two days, but still). So I didn't think making changes would be that difficult.

I went on the USDA's "my pyramid" website (it has since become the more sensical "my plate") and got a little obsessed with their menu planner tool. When I started plugging in the things I would eat on a typical day, I learned a lot about the state of my nutrition. Things I was eating too much of: Empty carbs, butter, and cheese (...and beer). I guess that wasn't a surprise. If somebody told me it was acceptable human behavior to do so, I could probably be content eating nothing but buttered sourdough toast and quesadillas for days on end. What I was surprised and intrigued to learn was how out of balance the rest of my diet was. I tried to be sure to eat fruits and vegetables and lean protein regularly, and I thought I was doing OK, but the truth is I wasn't getting enough of any of it. I realized that I was going to have to be very clever and creative if I was going to achieve a more balanced diet.

Now, after several months of experimenting, I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. I don't think my diet is perfectly balanced, but I'm not striving for perfection. It has gotten a lot better, and I know that I feel better in general as a result. I tend to be happier and have more energy, and I've even lost a little weight. Trying to meet my nutritional goals was frustrating at first; I spend probably twice as much money on groceries now as I used to. But I eat out less, and I waste a lot less of the food that I do buy, so it evens out. Also, incorporating more whole grains into my diet and cutting out all the butter and fatty dairy was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I've also cut back on the beer. Picking up a six-pack when I went grocery shopping used to be a matter of course; I only get beer occasionally now. (I haven't cut back on my beer consumption when I go out with friends, however. All things in moderation, including moderation, right?)

There are a number of challenges unique to my situation that I should probably outline. I have a very small kitchen, with virtually no counter space and a wee gas oven and range only 18 inches wide. I have no car, so all my grocery shopping has to be done by bike. Hence, all my groceries must fit on my bike. I live on a graduate student's small stipend (I won't say how much I make, but it's well below the poverty line), and I have a graduate student's hectic schedule. And, perhaps the biggest challenge, I live alone. I love living alone, but cooking healthfully and with variety for one requires a lot of creativity and adapting. Most recipes yield at least four servings, and the most economical and practical dishes--meals that can be made in one dish and keep well, like casseroles--typically yield job lots. A lasagna, for example, is a practical, healthy, affordable meal that will provide at least two dinners for a family of four. But if I made a regular-sized lasagna for myself, chances are it would go bad, or at the very least I would get sick of eating it, before I finished the whole thing, and I would end up throwing much of it away.

Must a single lady or gentleman subsist on burritos, sandwiches, frozen dinners, and takeout? Many do, but that gets monotonous and expensive, and doesn't allow for much control over nutrition. Through this blog I want to share my experiences with menu planning, shopping, and cooking to show that it's eminently possible for a person living alone to eat well and scrumptiously without expending tons of time and money. This isn't meant to be just another cooking blog. There will be a lot of recipes; some original, some adapted, some outright cribbed from other sources. But the objective is to present a record of the entire process: planning, shopping, cooking, and enjoying (or not) the results.

Thanks for coming along for the ride. I think this will be fun.