Food in the age of Modern Medicine

If you look back through the archives of most food blogs, they just start. No intro, no tag line, no "Hi, this is my blog, thanks for reading, this is why I'm starting it," just a single first entry:

"Recipe #1. Crappy Unhealthy Thing That I Made Yesterday and For Some Reason Think You Should Make Too."

So in the spirit of the first cooking blog I ever followed, this is my intro post. Hi. This is my blog. Thanks for reading. I'm starting it because I've been a regular reader of the cooking blogosphere for about 5 years now, and I've recently gotten disappointed that there doesn't seem to be a blogger out there who cooks like I cook. I'm certainly not saying they aren't as GOOD cooks as I am - most bloggers are much better cooks than I. No, what I'm saying is different. Some blogs have great recipes, and others have beautiful pictures that my camara just doesn't seem capable of. A few even treat cooking as an experiment in the kitchen, and their blog logs both the good and the bad, the things that turn out well and those that turn out crappy. It makes me happy when I read a post that says "I tried this and it turned out badly, but this is what I would do next time to make it turn out better." That's having fun in the kitchen, and it also a more realistic depiction of what really happens in most of our kitchens. Some things turn out great, and many others fall into what I fondly call "cooking disasters."

But there are definitely bloggers out there who do that. So what I really mean when I say I'm disappointed is that there aren't any blogs that I've seen that do this while pursuing really, truely healthy cooking. Some use whole wheat flour or integrate quinoa or even replace oil with unsweetened apple sauce every once in a while, but on the whole the majority of their recipies just aren't that healthy. But when I cook, I almost always do in while trying to create something that not only has nutritional value, but also has very limited amounts of things that are bad for your long term health. Which isn't to say I don't eat butter or real sugar from time to time, but to be honest I don't use them often.

For the sake of full disclosure, I never eat red meat or any mammal - gave them up five years ago for health and environmental reasons - but I'm not a "true" vegetarian because I eat tons of fish and sometimes chicken (no ducks - they're too cute). I cook and bake with fake, cholesterol lowering butter and use sugar substitute almost always possible. I tend to avoid oil, white or starchy carbs, and high sugar ingredients. I also don't eat egg yolks, instead using egg whites or egg substitute or sometimes flax seed meal.

So there it is. This blog serves as a means to that end - my pursuit to tweak healthy recipes to make them even healthier, to try substitutions that both help and sometimes harm flavor, and all the disasters in between. I'll throw in the medical data behind some of my ingredients (or why I avoid others) whenever I can.



Maybe it will work; it probably won't.

Happy reading.