Finally figured out what’s going wrong with my diet over the past several months. I’m watching too much news!
Watching the news on the CBC, or any Canadian channel for that matter, I need chips. It seems like when I watch CNN, I eat cookies. Switch to Fox & it’s donuts. The BBC has me craving scones. With jam & clotted cream, of course! I’m miserably failing to focus on my French lessons now too, but I sometimes watch the French news on TV5. With closed captions on, naturellement! Then I wonder why I’m digging out my crêpe maker from the back of the cupboard? 🤪
Recently, once I recognized my problem, I thought I’d try watching Bloomberg instead. That was going great ’til I found myself regretting that I hadn’t bought shares in the hot stock of a car rental company seeking bankruptcy protection. As I questioned my sanity, one eye on the ticker, I caught myself making silver dollar pancakes for breakfast! 😁
I ate out yesterday, for the first time in 3 months. I was so excited that I made all the wrong choices. The food was blah, the service only okay, but the whole experience was so great! With half the tables removed, & all the staff wearing facemasks, it was just a little weird though. But getting out was a joy. It was great to talk to real people, not on a screen. I stuffed my face but … unbelievably … the scale didn’t punish me this morning. I might have to do more of this. Is dieting all just a mind game!?!
This is probably not going to be a good month but I feel I need to support local businesses as they gradually try to get back to normal! 😜
PS … Working on my reopening shopping list for next weekend. Imagine … a visit to a mall! Woohoo! 😂
This is silly but it might be my best cooking discovery during lockdown. I just found a new way to cook bacon. A way that is so good, so controlled. And there is absolutely no mess afterwards! No kidding. This is so simple I can’t believe it took me this long to figure it out. And if you already knew, don’t go sending me a message to make me feel any more stupid than I already do!
The secret? Use a big pot!
Offhand, I can’t think what the name of this type of pot is? Is it a stockpot? Anyway it’s the bloody big one that you’d pull out to cook a massive chili when you’ve got the whole family coming over.
Don’t get the bacon that is layered so the pack is flat. Get the big one, with thick-sliced bacon, not splayed out, so that it’s like a brick of meat in the vacuum pack. Heat up the pot up to a medium heat & toss the brick in, fat side down. You’ll want to give a little crispness to the outer edge of fat on each slice. Don’t overdo it or you’ll make the pot bottom sticky. After that, there will already be some rendered fat coating the bottom of the pot. Turn down the heat. Now you can start peeling off the slices & distributing them around the bottom of the pot. You don’t have to be careful here, any old way will do, doesn’t matter that they’re on top of each other. Come back periodically & give the whole mess a little stir to swap out the slices on the bottom. The slower pace of cooking will allow the fat to render clean & you’ll wind up almost deep frying the bacon at slow speed. Only one or two bits tried to stick to the pot & a quick scrape of the spatula took care of it. Remove the bacon slices when they get to where you like them. I prefer bacon a little rubbery myself, but many prefer it crispy. Your choice.
The lower temperature required for the slower pace of cooking gives you a lot of nice clear fat. Drain this off into a glass container & stick it in the fridge. That’s for cooking home fried potatoes later! Okay get the pasture raised bacon if you want to be really healthy.
This last step is really important to ensure the easiest, non-drain-clogging clean-up. Sautée some onion & garlic in the residual fat at the bottom of the pot. Then deglase with a little stock. From here you can make whatever you like (I made a potato bacon curry, with cilantro for a green vegetable! 😜) but now, all the fat is gone somewhere useful, & the pot is far, far easier to clean.
The big kicker is this … no fat splatter on the stove top & backsplash! None, not one spot. Thanks to the high sides on that big pot.
Sorry I’m late. But the result is from a June 1st weigh-in.
The past couple of months have been a dietary disaster. I didn’t think that state of the world was having that much of an impact on me, but I guess it was. With hindsight, how could it not. In any case, I just didn’t realize the extent to which I was stress-eating because of all that’s going on. Until I stepped on the scale the first of the month. Wow!
One thing about the news over the past day or two … and it’s a positive thing finally … is that humanity seems to be showing signs of making a comeback. Is there a glimmer of hope to be found in little outbreaks of kindness that we’re seeing these past few days?
We can but hope. No idea how this month will go, from a human perspective or with my weight loss, but I’ll try to fess up on time next month. Meanwhile, I’m going back to figuring out how to contribute something positive.
‘Til the government offered subsidies to help stave off layoffs & paycuts!
When those measures were announced, I breathed such a big sigh of relief & I held my hand out. Should I be worried that I’m a (grateful!) socialist now?
Since I’m sucking at weight loss during lockdown, I’m trying to distract myself by learning a little about things I’ve ignored for years. You can’t watch the news these days without wishing you’d studied psychology, sociology, political science, economics, & maybe a little Celtic mysticism! These are soft sciences. That means that you can make a very cogent argument, that is totally meaningless, but nobody can prove you wrong. Right!?!
Very useful in these confusing times.
Over breakfast news this morning, I heard that this is “the first time prices have risen to the negative value”. They were only previously positive in the timeframe being discussed. So what the duck did this mean? Why did the guy not just say the number went down? There is some sophisticated subterfuge being employed here, & it can only be designed to keep the uninitiated outside the pale.
How is it that neoliberalism, in economics parlance, is a faith of those on the right? I thought that anything with the word “liberal” in it was at least three shades pinker than the white centre of the political divide. Are all the meanings reversed when you go from politics to economics? And now that we’re on the colour spectrum, why are Canadian liberals red, American blue? Who is being backward here!?! The conservatives adopting the reverse in both countries, of course. Is it true that the French flag represents the balance between the left and the right? And not the liberty, equality and fraternity thing, because that is just a conspiracy theory pushed by the radical centrists!
Trickle down economics. Didn’t that fade away in the era of Reagan & Thatcher? Now it’s being touted by governments again. I remember my Dad calling it “Sucking Up” economics. Because, he said, they make it look like they’re giving you something … while sticking the vacuum cleaner hose into your pocket!
I’m still sick of politicans sniping at each other. You’d never run a good company this way. It’d be like the materials manager blaming the lack of inventory on the production manager for using all the parts. When the operations manager is asked to intervene, he deflects the blame onto the temporary workers & fires them all, while requesting the human resources people hire more accountants who will recalculate numbers that look better. Without even getting into the challenges of outsourcing & upstream supply chain management, it’d be a total duckfest. So why is it a good idea to try running a country like this? Don’t we all need to be on the same team to succeed? Especially during a crisis.
One real criticism I have of our news media is the lack of real investigative analysis & critique of the COVID responses around the world. The gross data is on TV every dinnertime, but I don’t see too much detail on which countries have the better healthcare systems, for example. This is an amazing opportunity to learn about such things. Digging into those details might educate us, the general public, on some key attributes of our differing approaches & societies. Such data might influence us on how to choose our next politicians. And I’m not presupposing what that data might reveal. It might, I would hope, have an influence on how our governments makes changes for the future. Though it may touch many of us, & our families, COVID-19 has a mortality rate that isn’t threatening for most of us. Despite that, it can’t hurt if we are better prepared, in case an even more virulent & deadly KISSYOURASSGOODBYE-23 virus rolls through a few years down the road.
My biggest conundrum? If we’re all adding to the national debt, who’s loaning us the money? And can’t we just print more to pay it back? Or is there an ink shortage now!?! 😜
Okay, so I’m having a little fun with some of this. On the premise that if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry. But I’m genuinely interested in learning a little more about economics. I would especially like to see some comparative studies on healthcare systems. If you can recommend a source of balanced information in any of these areas, please send it my way. Indeed, I don’t think I know any economists, so if you can introduce me to anyone in the field, I’d welcome the connection.
Let’s hope we can keep most of our jobs & that we can all come back stronger & better from this. Meanwhile, even if you feel it’s not necessary, please help make a fellow human feel a little better & safer … and if you can … wear the damn mask when you are asked! 😷😁
Too shocked & embarrassed to post this month’s number!
I haven’t smoked a cigarette all through the month of April. By quitting, I thought I was playing good COVID-19 defense. I believed that was the right thing to do. Right up until I read the stories about the smokers in China & France. Smokers are doing better than non-smokers! Apparently smokers are less likely to get COVID-19. When they do, they are less likely to develop serious symptoms. Even with serious symptoms, smokers are less likely to wind up in intensive care. I know, I know, smoking kills us in other ways. But still!
In France, the differences between the smoking & non-smoking populations prompted a study with a nicotine patch for COVID-19 patients and for front-line health workers. Just my totally uneducated guess here but I’m betting you actually have to puff on a cigarette or two every day to get the benefits! 🤪
One other huge negative to my quitting smoking is that, in lieu of sucking on cigarettes, I’ve continued to stuff all kinds of other stuff into my face! Okay, so it’s stuff like bread, cookies, candy, chips, ice-cream, & a whole host of food-like products that I would normally try to avoid like the plague! Speaking of the plague, let’s get back to the COVID-19 thing!
That was the deflection away from diet & weight-loss right there, did you notice!?! LOL
We’ve all had enough of the social isolation thing by now, right? What happens next? Look, nobody wants to transmit the disease to Grandma. Frankly, I don’t want to go out there & catch the damn thing myself. But we all want to get back out there, sometime soon. Some want out right now! Perhaps their jobs are in jeopardy. Their business might be going under. These are all valid reasons to want things to open up sooner. But the majority of folk still seem more concerned about catching the disease, or of spreading it to someone they love. Their preference is to keep things locked down for longer. Hey, right now, staying home is a very valid position too.
Regardless of our feelings on the matter, I think we’re edging closer to getting back out there. Even the more reluctant of us will likely be thinking this way sometime soon. Why?
Because we’re pretty predictable as a species. Once the burden of frustration exceeds the burden of fear, we’ll all start moving towards getting back out there. Some combination of things will reduce the fear factor. The people who caught it & survived will feel better about getting out there. If my grandma died already, I’m not really protecting anyone at home now. The odds are in favour of that younger person surviving it, they’ll want to escape sooner. What if my government wage subsidy ends in a few weeks time? Put enough good reasons in my basket & I’m suddenly far more motivated to get back out there too. As more & more of us shift across to that position, it will start to feel more like getting back to work is the right thing for some, perhaps many, of us to do. Since there are some braving the more aggressive approach already, any reason the rest of us shouldn’t just sit back & watch what happens for a bit?
Personally, I’m still more in the fearful & careful camp at the moment. But I recognize that this shift in attitude may already have started. There was a noticeable uptick in my day job activity this week. It just feels like people are starting to get used to this whole COVID-19 thing. Of it being a part of our lives now. You might even say it’s beginning to feel normal! Okay, it’s not quite like the regular old flu yet. But you can start to see how it might be one day. There is a shift towards this new normal. No violence, no protests, & no bullshit required, it will happen all of its own accord!
Peace, love & stay safe, y’all!
PS … I think that was a pretty good deflection away from my monthly weigh in, don’t you!?! More dietary self-deprecation & humiliation will follow. I’ll come clean on how bad this month really was, I promise. Just not now. Besides, I really could use a cigarette!
The Wry Eye 