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| Eat, Drink, & Weigh Less Wrap-Up |
| m-c: |
| Ummm . . . |
| mb: |
| Err . . . |
| m-c: |
| Well, uh . . . |
| mb: |
| I -- I -- oh, sorry, no, you first . . . |
| m-c: |
| I guess we just have to come out and say we didn't like Eat, Drink, & Weigh Less very much as a cookbook. |
| mb: |
| It was so wonderful of Molly and Walt to give this a try -- their intentions were so good, but . . . |
| m-c: |
| But . . . |
| mb: |
| But the reality wasn't up to their usual standard. |
| m-c: |
| I blame myself entirely. |
| mb: |
| For choosing the book, you mean? No, I too thought, Molly Katzen, how could it possibly not be great? |
| m-c: |
| And it wasn't terrible. |
| mb: |
| No, not at all. It just wasn't inspiring. |
| Maybe we should make it a rule never to choose a book without photographs? |
| m-c: |
| No, that's not it. Our next book -- I'm not giving away any secrets here, but it doesn't have any photographs. And it's big-time inspiring. |
| mb: |
| You've already been cooking from it? |
| m-c: |
| Yes, I have, and I'm sure that's where the problem lay. Neither of us had cooked anything from ED&WL, and we should never choose a cookbook of the month till we've both cooked at least a handful of recipes from it. |
| mb: |
| I agree. Let's make a pledge to our readers always to do that -- cook first and then choose. |
| And it's not as though there was nothing good about the book, right? |
| m-c: |
No, there's a lot that's very good. The "turning points" section is
a summary of current weight-management thinking from
the foremost nutritional epidemiology researcher in the country:
|
| Not as pithy as Michael Pollan's "Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." But Pollan is as good a writer as Willett is a researcher. And the turning points include what to do, not just what to eat. "Move more" is one of the turning points but doesn't come up per se in In Defense of Food (Penguin, 2007). |
| mb: |
| There's lots of what Pollan calls "nutritionism" in the turning points -- fats, carbohydrates, proteins, rather than oils, grains, meat. |
| m-c: |
| My guess is that we're a long way off from abandoning nutritionism. |
| mb: |
| After the last twenty years of nutritionism, it's hard to think of food in terms of ... well, in terms of food. |
| m-c: |
| I'm guessing that's part of what makes the recipes so bloodless. Right there on every page, it's not just a broiled cheddar sandwich, it's 15 grams of protein, 1 gram of saturated fat, blah blah. |
| mb: |
| What's that word, obsession with nutritional values? |
| m-c: |
| "Orthorexia." |
| mb: |
| Right, orthorexia. It's hard to wean yourself off orthorexia. |
| m-c: |
| I've had it bad -- remember when I was weighing everything I ate? I took a scale to a restaurant -- I remember the look of consternation on the waiter's face. |
| But we're straying from the topic here. |
| mb: |
| I liked the analogy where they say "your food budget -- live within your means." |
| You're always quoting that line from Charles Dickens. |
| m-c: |
| "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." It's from David Copperfield (1849). |
| mb: |
| So let's bite the bullet here. What's wrong with the recipes? |
| m-c: |
| Nothing's wrong with the recipes, they're just not engaging. I think they should do the book over with a third collaborator, a brilliant photographer like Christopher Hirsheimer or Martin Brigdale and lose the nutritional analyses. |
| mb: |
| I think the recipes themselves lack pizzazz. |
| For instance, compare the recipe for acorn squash in Eat, Drink with the one in Molly's The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without (Hyperion, 2007). |
| The one in Eat, Drink calls for nonstick spray, acorn squash, and apple juice or defrosted frozen apple juice concentrate. |
| The one in Vegetable Dishes loses the plain apple juice, goes for concentrate all the way, replaces the nonstick spray with health-giving olive oil, and adds maple syrup and lemon wedges -- nothing radically different, but the Eat, Drink recipe is lackluster, where the one from Vegetable Dishes is sparkling. |
| m-c: |
| Right. I hate recipes that use non-stick spray for anything but greasing pans. |
| Take a look at the recipe for roasted asparagus in Eat, Drink. It's roasted asparagus, period, while the one in Vegetable Dishes is for roasted asparagus with pomegranate-lime glaze. |
| Mollie and Walt even have the pomegranate-lime glaze recipe in Eat, Drink, but they don't put it together with the asparagus. So they can use it with other things as well, I suppose. Day 10 of the diet they use it with protein-of-choice, day 18 with butternut squash. |
| I hate that kind of menu planning, the catsup solution. You make some kind of general-purpose sauce and then put it on everything in sight instead of gauging one or two dishes with which it will work well and then making other sauces or other preparations for other dishes. |
| mb: |
| And not all the recipes are blah. The one for braised greens with walnuts and sour cherries seemed like a real recipe, not just the skeleton of a recipe. |
| m-c: |
| True, and I liked the mushroom-nut burgers, as did Mark. I made a number of things for lunches (I try to cook real food for myself for lunch, to supplement leftovers). The vegetable-almond fried rice was good, and so were both of the Thai-inspired curries. I've been on the edge of making one of the miniature frittatas half a dozen times, but something else always comes up. |
| mb: |
| OK, we're getting into the diet part of the book now, the 21-day plan and so forth. |
| As somebody who has sworn a vow never to go on another diet, was there anything in this diet that would change your mind? |
| m-c: |
| Nope, not even close. |
| Mollie and Walt are such decent, lovely people that I feel pretty sure neither of them has even been on a diet. They don't understand what it's like to need 2000 calories a day and eat only 1500 or 1600. I'm sure there are people who have to go on a diet once or twice in their lives, lose the weight, and never need to diet again -- more power to them, but they are rare. The rest of us go on diet after diet, losing, gaining, losing, gaining, and becoming thoroughly addled in the process. |
| mb: |
| You said at the beginning of the month that you were going to try to use the recipes to get calibrated on serving sizes. Were they helpful? |
| m-c: |
| Yes, although it took more work to decode them than I had hoped. |
| I realized that I couldn't just look at the individual recipes to gauge portion sizes, I needed to look at them in the context of the menu for the meal. |
| Broiled eggplant parmesan was said to make two servings, but I had to go to day 11 supper to see what else was on the plate. The first course is unlimited vegetable broth with wheat berries, then the menu goes on to the eggplant and unlimited spinach with pine nuts and raisins, and finally blackberries and yogurt for dessert. |
| So the eggplant serves two as a main dish. As a side dish it might serve four. |
| Along the way I was flummoxed by the serving sizes in the recipes. Some serve one (always great), some two, some three, four, five, six -- it keeps you on your toes. |
| The worst confusion is when equivalent recipes make different numbers of servings. The recipe for baked vanilla-cinnamon-coated nuts on page 177 makes 20 servings, the recipe for baked Cajun-style savory-covered nuts on page 178 makes 16 servings, and they're treated as equivalents in the menus. Why not make 20 servings or 16 servings of both? |
| The amount of leftovers lying around is a problem too. I'm sure Mollie and Walt would sit there with a scale weighing out portions and sealing them in plastic bags, but your average dieter (me, when I dieted) would be sorely tempted to eat all 36 servings over two or three days. Well, in two days. OK, let's be honest here, I could eat them all for breakfast and wash them down with a quart of milk. |
| mb: |
| No wonder you've stopped dieting, if that's what it leads to. |
| m-c: |
| It does for me. As I say, I'm sure there are other people who would read the book, a light would go on in their head, they'd go on the 21-day diet once or twice or however long it took them to get off the extra weight, and that would be it, the end. They'd never diet again. That's just not me. |
| mb: |
| So would you recommend the book to somebody who was going to diet? |
| m-c: |
| Whole-heartedly. It's kind, it's helpful, it has tons of real ideas, and it's not crazy the way most diet books are crazy. (It does, however, in common with most diet books, have too many exclamation points.) |
| On the same day when folks buy Eat, Drink, they should also buy Mollie's The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without (Hyperion, 2007, if you missed it the first time). The two books make a good combo. |
| mb: |
| And did you actually lose that pound you were working on? |
| m-c: |
| I did. I'm quite pleased. I'm planning to take a break and then work on another pound. |
| I have a great idea for a diet book, How To Lose a Pound Every Two or Three Months. Guaranteed best-seller, eh? |
| mb: |
| Oh mom, you're so silly. |
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