Today I got the chance to hobnob with Henry Abbott of TrueHoop.  We talked about the Blazers, basketball philosophy, and blogging.  Take a gander.

Dave:  2010-11 Portland Trail Blazers.  What are your lasting impressions of the season?  What did we learn about the team this year?

Henry:  We learned a lot. Off the top of my head:

• The really big sobering piece of news was that Greg Oden was both more fragile than we ever knew and entirely essential to the whole "just let them age together and they'll win a title" view of the team. (We also learned that phrase probably is pretty true in places like Oklahoma City and Memphis.)
• We learned the same, to a smaller degree, about Brandon Roy, and that he's not going to go quietly into a supporting role, which is not surprising or hard to understand, but could indeed be problematic.
• LaMarcus Aldridge and Andre Miller can do some great things together on the run and at the rim -- things that don't happen as much with Roy on the floor.
• Nate McMillan can depart from his preferred approach of covering the floor with shooters, driving, kicking and offensive rebounding.
• The Blazers tend to underperform in the playoffs.
• It might be good to have some more shooters.
• Paul Allen seems to confirm, in the angst of his book, that he's the common thread in a lot of bitterness at the top of the organization through the years.
• We learned that Rudy Fernandez can be happy living in Portland.
• We didn't learn how to value Nicolas Batum. "Potential" and "great moments" are not definitions. If he's going to really reach his ceiling, great. If not, better to trade when he's still young enough to dream on.
• We didn't learn how to value Brandon Roy, post-surgery. At times he's the best player on the floor, at times he's the worst.

Dave:  The Roy issue is fascinating.  I haven't addressed it directly on the site yet, but Brandon is making me waver a little.  In this modern Blazers era when potential has been king and depth has been sufficient to cause Portland fans to clamor for different starters on a weekly basis I've lived by a simple mantra:  the guy who earns the starting spot gets the starting spot.  Don't talk to me about Sergio Rodriguez or Jerryd Bayless or Travis Outlaw starting until they've earned it and we'll know they've earned it when we see them in there excelling with consistency.  Start promoting people on potential or hunches and you're sending a message that playing well and winning are secondary priorities.

Then again, we're not talking about Sergio Rodriguez here.  This is Brandon...Roy.  Obviously there's a physical component to his declined play.  Who knows what those knees will do?  But there seems to be a mental component as well.  When a guy explodes for 20 points in a quarter and then follows it up with 20 points in a week, something is going on there.  He's in a binary state, either gifted by the gods or unable to hit a single free throw.  Some of that has got to be in the old noggin. 

Brandon's role has always been go-to guy, scorer, savior, and starter.  The Blazers may not need a full-force return to his glory days but they can't afford next-to-zero from him 6 games out of 7 in all those departments.  If the title of starter is what it takes to get him back on track mentally, give it to him.  You can still limit his minutes if desired.  He can become one of those nominal starters, beginning the game, the third, and playing as necessary in the fourth.  I have no problem with Wesley Matthews getting big minutes off the bench.  I have no problem with Wesley Matthews playing in crunch time instead of Roy if the occasion warrants.  Matthews can still give everything he gives now from the pines whereas Roy apparently can't.  All of Matthews and something of Roy beats all of Matthews and none of Roy...at least for now.  Two years down the road maybe this story is different.  But for now you have to give Brandon a chance to be Brandon.

Am I catering to star whims?  Yeah, I probably am.  But I need a little Roy and if this is what it takes, I do it.

Am I crazy?  What's your take on the Roy enigma?

Click through for Henry's thoughts on Brandon Roy plus even more discussion!

Henry:  In a way I'm glad it's the offseason and he's signed up to a huge contract for ages. Unless his one great playoff quarter dazzled some owner out there, we can assume he'll be in Portland for the long haul and we know he's desperate to be good, smart and works hard. We know he has time to retool.

So, presumably, he comes back not like the Brandon of the past, but as some kind of Brandon of the future.

He better! 

Because if you wash those highlights out of your eyes, by just about every measure he has been an average NBA player. He's often the team's worst defender, and the offense that made him famous works best (or only?) when he can finish at the rim, or draw a double and kick it to an open shooter. The team doesn't have those shooters anymore -- they were shipped out to help assemble a team that can win without him -- and evidently he can only finish in the paint with power a few times a month. 

What used to be a third option -- to shoot the step-back with a defender in his face -- is now the first option. 

Thus performance plummets.

Injured Brandon trying to play like healthy Brandon ... I'd assume that long-term team success would hinge on playing that guy as little as possible. But a guy who has always coped with limited athleticism, and who can create space without speed and explosiveness ... maybe he can come up with something.

Dave:  Yup.  Now stuck with him, the Blazers need him to be SOMETHING.  Whatever you have to do to make that happen, you at least try it.  If he wants to be SOMETHING, that is...which seems to be the burning question.  What is going on in Brandon Roy's head?  It's cruel to have to ponder that question along with all the others that afflict this team.

Either way, Brandon's over-reliance on the jumper at least will keep him out of the way of Aldridge, provided LaMarcus embraces the role of lead scorer and getting in the paint every once in a while.  That Miller-Aldridge space should be wide open even with Brandon on the floor.  Then again, is even the new LaMarcus good enough?  Will Gerald Wallace get uncorked?  Can Nicolas Batum become a star?  Does Marcus Camby have anything major left?  Will Miller even be with the team?  And don't even ASK about Greg Oden.  The Blazers have talent, but there's not a guy among them that isn't facing questions...questions about location and role if not inherent ability.  This team is supposed to be getting more settled, not less.  

What's going on?  Why can't they seem to get out of their own way?  Or are we in Portland too close to the situation to judge fairly?

Henry:  Well, look around the league, at the teams still alive ... they're all facing profound questions too. Is Miami's "little nine" anything like good enough? Is Boston too old? Can Gasol and Bynum co-exist? Is it OK to rely on Zach Randolph? Is Westbrook a ballhog? The Hawks recently handed out one of the worst contracts in sports. All those big salaries for so-so players in Dallas ...

And on and on and on.

Stresses and tensions are part of success. The key is not to add to that with a big helping of "why me?" 'Cause it's not you, or us ... it's everybody. That's just life -- or at least, that's life without Tim Duncan in his prime.

The best teams, someone once said to me, see the good in their players. The other teams see the flaws.

So, to me, yes Portland has had big bad luck. But also great luck, in that there are players all up and down the roster who can contribute. 

We're talking about how best to deploy a former rookie of the year, what to do with the returning-from-injury top overall pick, the obsessiveness of an incredible and affluent fanbase and the moodiness of one of the richest owners in sports history. In a lot of cities, they'd LOVE to have problems like that.

Dave: Every team indeed faces questions, even the once-unquestionable Spurs now.  But in Portland those issues seem to be embedded in the DNA.  The questions aren't just in the spaces between teams and players, such as LeBron fitting into Miami or being able to come out of the East, but internal to the players:  Who am I?  How good am I?  How much am I supposed to take on here?

Your "helping of 'why me?'" statement is apt.  It's not just a Portland fan mantra.  It still feels like this team sinks too much into questioning when the pressure is on and things don't go right.  "Why did the refs make that call?  Why did Dirk's crazy shot just go in?  Why is Jason Kidd all of a sudden shooting 60% from the arc against us?  Why can't I hit a shot?  When's our turn to win?"  It never gets to be your turn unless you make it so.  It's less about figuring out why and more about bowling over whatever it is that's getting in your way.  The Blazers will push and overcome sometimes, usually just when you think they're finished, but that pushing always seems to lead to a rousing bout of navel gazing instead of triumph.  It's like when success is in front of them, begging to be taken, they get Woody Allen neurotic and shrink back.

Part of that may be the main guys having grown up without real veteran leadership, trying to figure out the league on their own.  Look how long it took Zach Randolph to make his game success-friendly.  Even the veterans they brought in--Miller, Camby, Wallace--haven't overdosed on playoff success in their careers.  But you'd hope some experienced players and a good session of getting punched in the face by Dallas...and Phoenix...and Houston would snap you out of it.

On the other hand, maybe this really is as good as the Oden-less, Roy-mostly-less Blazers get right now.  I don't know if it's the habit everywhere, but Blazer fans are notorious for 50 wins being less of an accomplishment than a sign you should have won 55.

Henry:  This, to me, is pretty much the definition of mental toughness. You see what Gerald Wallace does out there? Just fights his ass off play after play, regardless of outcome. You do that every time, and you'll have more than enough success in this life.

Anything that keeps you from that ... and for a lot of people, a victim complex is one such thing ... hurts.

Any notion this franchise is snakebit I find laughable, childish and harmful. Get over it!

Also, from my point of view, in the NBA there is no magic elixir, no formula, no ninja training, no real rites of passage even. We like the idea that after getting beat up in the playoffs you then are informed about the playoffs for next time.

But in reality, it was only ever basketball, which does have roles for experience and wisdom and all that, but is also heavily haphazard, random and based on things like the bounce of a ball or the spring in a step. You could look at this year's playoff elimination and question the souls of all involved, or you could just say "that's a pretty darned good team that Kevin Pelton calls the most injured in the NBA, and they missed a bunch of free throws in big games, and didn't have homecourt advantage anyway. And by the way, the Mavericks are beating the Lakers right now."

In other words, there is not one shred of insight into anybody's soul. It's just that the Blazers are a good basketball team, at a time of year when good basketball teams are often left by the wayside.

Dave:  In a sense I agree.  For years there's been a mystique surrounding the Blazers, espoused by pundits and commentators...I have preached it as well.  "This team is 'X' now but just you wait a year or two and they will be 'Y'.  And have no doubt, 'Y' is much greater than 'X'."  That may have been true at one point, but I think it's safe to say that the cavalry isn't coming in the way anticipated.  The mystique is gone.  "X" this year will be "X" next year unless something changes.  But the team itself has been in mystique mode since its main players were rookies.  One wonders if they know another way.  I wonder if the Gerald Wallace everything-at-all-costs mentality--the only thing that matters--is within the reach of some of these guys, including some of the major figures.  They should be fighting their asses off.  Instead they're waiting for next year.

This, to me, was the essence of the Dallas playoff series.  Dallas fought, the Blazers waited.  On paper, even without a healthy Roy and Oden, the Blazers had advantages alongside Dallas'.  Dallas exploited their advantages better, played harder, and turned a two-way paper matchup into a one-way road to success.  The Blazers got beat between the ears as much as on the court.  This is where we diverge maybe because I didn't see it as a matchup of two good teams, one naturally better.  I saw it as a matchup of two good teams, one of which knew what it was doing and refusing to lose because it had been battered before and hated that feeling and the other of which was still waiting for something...waiting for the series to turn their way while the opponent was busy making off with it.  That's often the dividing line between good teams and great.  Put another way, to me there are no great teams.  There are good teams and then there are good teams that refuse to lose and have both the knowledge and drive to back that up.

So...there is no 60-win team waiting in the wings here anymore.  There's a 48-win team that wants to be a 60-win team and is going to have to change somehow--through internal development or roster changes or both--in order to become that great team they want to be.  How do the Blazers get there?  What are the keys?  Is it even possible?

Henry:  I think we see it exactly the same way, but I'd add one wrinkle: Being convinced, in your bones, that you got screwed, and are really better than this, is doom.

In other words, focusing on what's wrong is not just ill-advised, but causative of the mentality you abhor.

Oh yeah, I'm about to quote Shakespeare. Believe it. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

In other words, a big part of developing the mentality you crave is to scoff at the notion this team is cursed.

"We are here right now and 100 percent ready to rip this game right out of your hands," ... that works.
"Some of us are here right now and you wouldn't believe what we could do at full strength," ... that doesn't work.

Being a 48-win team that can overachieve (on the court, in the huddle, in the front office) and make it deep into the playoffs ... that's to be ahead of the NBA curve. That's every team except the very luckiest and most skillfully managed. The only difference with this team is that there was reason, for a minute there, to think all that success was going to be easy -- thinking like that, though, is almost always harmful. It was going to be hard then, and it's going to be hard now. So it goes in an enterprise where 29 of 30 teams "fail."

Dave:  Gotcha.  It's not so much what questions get asked, but how you answer them.  That, my friend, is why you are the best in this business.

Speaking of, I would be remiss in the extreme if I let you go without asking about your specialty.  When we met I was just starting out but you were already a giant in this business...the ONLY giant in this business at the time, the guy who broke the mold.  The world has changed in the last few years.  The world of online journalism has exploded.  I remember when we used to say "online journalism" 90% of the gravity came from the word "online".  Now it might as well not be there in most cases as quality and quantity have eclipsed anything that could have been imagined a decade ago from traditional or nouveau sources.

What has struck you as you've watched this industry develop?  How does it compare today to when you began?  Do you still love doing TrueHoop as much as you did on Day 1?

Henry:  Holy mega hard-to-answer succinctly question.

[Unprompted Editorial Note:  Hey, you get a chance to sit down with Jesus you're not going to ask him something he can answer with yes or no.  You get a chance to eat dinner with Pamela Anderson and you're going to take at least one decent look at her rack.  So I'm taking my shot.  Now back to the show...] 

Henry (cont.):  A lot has changed, but a lot is exactly the same.

Journalism, the job of developing sources and calling people and sticking microphones in people's faces ... That's the same job it ever was, which I say as a guy who did it the old way on murder scenes and at public meetings and the like as a reporter. It's easier now, because people call you back when you're from ESPN. But when I talk to the ESPN news editors, they are literally people who used to do the same job at newspapers, and they have the same questions and standards. So this whole "fall of journalism" thing ... it's a fall of a business model, but not of a process.

At the same time, there has been a publicizing, through the internet, of conversations that were once private. I talked to my UPS guy today. Great guy, just love him. He told me a bunch of stuff about the NBA. A lot of it was really just completely detached from reality, but who cares? He's making small talk! Nowadays, that happens online, too. And some of it gets traffic and makes money. This really riles some people, but I can't see what the big deal is.

The real issue is in getting to know who's talking. So long as I, as a reader, can tell if I'm reading somebody who is really responsible with information or not, then I'm safe. 

We all know how to do this, really. We do it every day. If your toddler tells you he saw a goat jump over a tree, you know -- based on the source and the tale -- to discount that a little. (Although, in fairness, goats do have mad springs.)

I long for a day when every reporter's name comes with an accuracy score, but until then, I think readers with what my journalism professor calls "crap detectors" can do the job well enough. In the end, people who are rash with information will demonstrate themselves foolish again and again.

That's why I tell everyone in the TrueHoop Network all the time that the most important thing is to build credibility. I think that drives value in online journalism.

As for fun ... I mean, I have long treated this like a job, and no job is always fun. (Reference earlier point about when you think it's going to be easy, you're wrong.) However, let's step back for a second and realize: I get paid to watch basketball. I go to work every day and write more or less whatever I want. I get to talk to people like you. Most days nobody even cares if I shave or not, and only once in a while do I have to eat balut.

Not too shabby.

Dave:  Ding! Ding! Ding!  And Henry has spoken the Word of the Day, "Balut"!  For that he'll win a spa pedicure at Lavender Springs Resort and everyone in the audience will receive a copy of the new Blazersedge cookbook, "Oops!  Was I Supposed to Do That?" Seventy-Two Theoretically Easy Meals with Ben Golliver.  I don't think balut is in there though.  Ben's more of a Kraft Mac and Cheese tartar guy.

Thanks so much Henry.  Best of luck during the lockout.  Keep your head high and the content coming!

Henry:  Ha! That is awesome. This was fun. Thanks for having me!

Be sure to check out Henry's work at TrueHoop!  

--Dave (blazersub@yahoo.com)

The following list of activities are from braininsights activity packets. They were carefully chosen and put together as this valuable calendar  by Nancy DeWitt, BS, FSP, Preparing Mentor.
Nancy is a wonderful woman I met while working with the community of Rhinelander, WI. This community is working together to create awareness and put in place services to support the optimal development of children's brains. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute to these important efforts. 

This calendar is something Nancy is hoping you will share with families in the hopes that parents will use these easy and practical ideas to promote mental health for all children.


LOVE YOUR BABY: (May 1-12)
 
1. While changing my clothes or diapers, take a minute and warmly and gently
rub my back, arms and legs. Let me feel your warmth.
3. Notice what I like and respond to me. Try to tune in to the level of o
activity I seem to need. When I am more active, do a playful activity. When I seem calm, read a story
or sing a lullaby to me.
6. Make up a song using my name to sing to me while you feed me.
8. While you are cooking or doing dishes, let me explore safe items you use. For example, a rubber spatula, a wooden spoon, a
plastic container, measuring spoons, etc
9. Realize how I love when you show excitement for my achievements.

 
FUN WHILE I’M ONE: (May 13-15)
13. While we are interacting throughout the day, give me kisses and loving hugs.
14. When I am lonely, scared or bored. I will let you know by crying. I need you to comfort me. I don’t know how to handle it
on my own.
16. Create a winding down, calming bedtime routine for me. Things like taking a warm bath, reading a story to me and cuddling
with me will help soothe me.


MORE TO DO WHILE I'M TWO:      (MAY 17 -20)
17. At a grocery store point to items: or while in a waiting room point to pictures in magazines. Ask me to name them.
18. Turn on the radio, sing a song or play a CD. Tell me to move to the music stops. Have me stop until the music starts again.
19. While dressing me, ask me what piece of clothing to put on next. Example, “Should I put on your jacket or shoes next?”


 
PLAY WITH ME WHILE I’M THREE: (May 21-24)
21. While grocery shopping, have me help you find the items you need. Example: Ask me to pick out the biggest or smallest
item on the shelf.
23. Starting with breakfast everyday, develop daily routines for meals, naps, bath and bedtime. It is very important to have
order in my life. I learn what to expect through a regular pattern which helps make me calmer.
24. While you are cooking, ask me to close my eyes and guess what you are doing by the sounds I hear. (Breaking eggs, pouring
milk, running water, opening the microwave, and so on.

 
LETS LEARN MORE WHILE I’M FOUR: (May 25-28)
25. Find or save things for me to pretend with. Save food containers to play grocery store; line up chairs for a train or bus; set
up combs or brushes, etc for a barber or beauty shop;, books and index cards to play library etc.
26. Make a game of putting laundry away. Give directions to follow. For example: Say, “Put the towels on the middle shelf in
the closet and hop back.” Use words like: under, below, on top and so on to help me learn where things belong.
27. Take me on a “listening walk”. While we are out walking have me listen and talk about all the sounds I hear. Ask, “Do you
hear a bird, the wind, a car horn…..?

 
HELP ME THRIVE WHEN I’M FIVE: (May 29-31)
29. While folding the laundry tell me to try not to laugh as you do silly things. See if you can get me to laugh. Just start
laughing. See how long it takes me to join in. It is contagious.
30. While playing catch with me outdoors, change the way we pass the ball. Count to 10 while we pass it. Now have me think of
a new way to pass it 10 times. Take turns thinking of new ways to pass the ball.
31. Create a “giving jug”. Provide an empty milk container and a supply of pennies. Every time I do something nice or
thoughtful for someone else, I get to add a penny. When the jug is full, help me use the money to donate to a cause we decide
we want to support or help.


~ All braininsights activity packets are also available in Spanish! 

A big part of the fitness lifestyle is to stay as active as possible when you aren't working out! By staying active, you keep your fat burning enzymes and metabolism active.


Don't make the mistake of laying around as much as possible until your workout. Research proves that your fat-burning enzymes SHUT DOWN when you SIT DOWN! Get up and move around during the day to keep your metabolism ramped up all day and burn more fat and calories.

You can't always workout. You have to let your body recover and rebuild itself. Over-training is common with many people. How do you know if you are over-training? Here are some signs:

1. Sluggishness
2. Lack of control during exercises
3. Longer rest periods are needed between sets
4. You are usually tired before your workouts
5. You are stressed out (when exercise should be your stress-buster!)

Here are 10 Ways to Stay Active between Workouts:

1. walk 30 moderately-paced minutes,
2. go swimming or play water volleyball,
3. walk-in-place while you watch television,
4. take a 30 minute bike ride after dinner,
5. take walking breaks at work,
6. walk or bike when you can instead of driving the car,
7. walk your dog,
8. do yardwork, (stop putting it off),
9. do your house chores (right!) and
10. walk at least 5 minutes every waking hour.

Remember, all movement burns calories. If you have other ideas, let us know!

Subscribe to my FREE Fat Blaster eNewsletter and get FREE eBooks: "10 Must Know Fat Loss Tips," Free Fat Loss Meals and Free Fat Loss Workouts!

"Exercise is not my life.....exercise makes my life better!"

Check out my other great blogs:

Her Fitness Hut Blog Her Fitness Hut is featured on EmpowHER, a great health issues website for women! Her Fitness Hut has also been named in the Top 50 Personal Training Blogs by Physical Therapy Assistant Schools!

Sports Fitness Hut Blog has been recognized by Stanford University Wellsphere as the #1 Sports Fitness Blog and NursingDegree.net as one of the Best 100 Health and Nutrition Blogs for Athletes! The blog has also been named as one of the "50 Best Sports Medicine Blogs by Masters In Healthcare! It is an honor to be recognized by those in the health and academic fields! Afterall, health is number one for everybody---including athletes!

When I was working in the Cairns Casino I’d often arrive on the floor to replace a guy who had been in the industry as long as casinos had been in Australia.

He had started back at Wrest Point in a time when people would dress up to go to the casino, and the penalty rates for dealers were so outrageous that some used to work casual for half the year, then take the other half off skiing around Europe. He would often greet me by saying, “Welcome once again, young man to this international playground of the idle rich.” It was a standard joke the two of us had as we then looked around and saw no playground, and certainly no idle rich.

The line was a sort of gallows humour – an attempt to divert us from the grim task we were there to do – namely, take money from people, and make them feel good while doing it. One of the other jokes we had was to refer to the pokies in the casino as “wages” – they took people’s to pay ours.

This joke was unfortunately much nearer the truth.

Working in a casino provides an interesting insight into people’s psyche – on both sides of the gaming tables. One of the first things a new dealer has to get used to quickly is to not give a damn about whether the punters won or lost – because they mostly lost. Often the reaction of the staff was then to become indifferent – all that mattered was that things were run well, that everyone was happy, that turnover was good, that no mistakes were made. Punters would often accuse us of wanting them to lose – mostly that was not the case (unless they were particularly loathsome), we didn't need to want them to lose, mathematics took care of that for us. On the games I dealt and supervised the House advantages were as follows:

Blackjack – 0.80%
Baccarat (banker) – 1.17%
Baccarat (player) – 1.63%
Roulette (single zero) – 2.7%
Caribbean Stud Poker – 5.26%
Big Wheel – 11.1% to 24%
Sic-Bo – 2.78-18.98%

We didn’t need to wish or try and rig the game, the mathematics had rigged it for us already. All we had to do was keep the turnover going and keep you happy – happy enough so that if you did happen to win, you would come back. Because the golden rule of the casino world is that the house always wins in the end.

Usually I worked nights, but for 6 months I worked on the day shift and it was without any doubt the most depressing time of my life (the only time that came close was the period that I worked night shift). At night there is always a chance you’ll be dealing to tourists and people out for a night; but during the day for the most part you are dealing to addicts.

The casino doors would open at 10am, and within a week I could predict 6-7 of the first 10 through the door. Many were pensioners. Those I did know played roulette; the many more I didn’t know played the pokies.

In life you often look around for someone or something to compare yourself favourably with. The games dealers and supervisors in a casino whose souls are troubled can look to the poker machines and say, well at least we provide entertainment (we’re in the hospitality industry, don’t you know!). But in reality, that was just bullshit we told ourselves. The machines blinked and made music while they took the money; we smiled and chatted aimlessly while we took it.

We liked to think that the pokies were the ones that did the damage but the fact is all casino games do damage, just more slowly, and with a smile. If you were a regular we quickly signed you up to the Casino Club. This meant that when you bet you gave us the card and we recorded how much you bet, for how long and how much you won or lost. It was like a frequent flyer card – the more you bet the more points you were awarded that got you free drinks, meals, rooms in the hotel etc.

Of course that was all just a guise. It was there to ensure we knew where our money was (it is the casino’s money – if you are a regular and you won, we’d refer to it a “short term loan” – and we sure as hell knew it would come back with interest).

The worst moment for me as a dealer was during that 6 month day-shift stint, when on a quiet day in came a couple on their honeymoon. They were full of joy and love, and life was grand and beautiful. And then they came to my Blackjack table. The husband took out $50 from an envelope – it was obviously their holiday spending money – and the careful way they treated the envelope gave a pretty good indication that it was all they had to spend.

They bet $10 a hand and I took it all off them in 5 hands. This was unlucky, but not remarkable. It was a bugger because they were actually very nice and I would have liked to be able to chat to them on this very boring shift; and given it was their honeymoon it would have been nice to see them win.

They moved to leave, but then they looked at each other with a “well we’re only here once” and put down another $50. This time it took me a bit longer to win it, but win it I did.

Now the faces were losing that flush of joy and happiness and life and grandness and beauty. For the first time in ages I was truly sad and wished I could somehow help them to win (but alas, mathematics had them beat). I apologised and wished them well – almost telling them to leave – but instead of going the husband said let’s try it one more time and pulled out not $50 but $100, which I then took in less than 20 hands. Blackjack can be fast, but when you are the only player on the table, it is lightning.

And so they put the envelope back in her bag, and it dawned on them that the $200 which could have been spent on a trip out to the reef, or on a couple dinners, or presents to each other, or perhaps just a crap load of souvenirs was now in the money box on my blackjack table, and it wasn’t coming back. No beauty, grandness, life, love, joy or happiness went with them.

Such examples caused me to go very close to the edge after two years of full time work, and so I went back to university, worked casual at the casino for another four years until the bile inside me from working there reached a point that I walked out after one shift and never rang up to ask for another shift.

This of course – in a very long and windy way – brings me to the Wilkie-Xenophon anti-pokies proposal.

One of the other jokes we had was about the poker machines in the casino was that no casino ever took out poker machines to put in more blackjack tables. It was another gallows humour joke, because we always knew our job could be replaced by a machine. The reason of course is because each poker machine doesn’t need a dealer, they have a lot higher turnover and better winning percentage.

The truth of this can be seen in the Productivity Commission’s 2010 Report into gambling. Pokies are to gambling like crack cocaine is to drugs. We on the gaming tables were dealing out the gambling equivalent of marijuana and Ecstasy (not good, but good enough that in a moral free zone you could convince yourself you weren’t too bad), but the pokies? Wow.

It’s all about speed. The best thing about my abilities as a dealer was that I was fast; I may have been the least hospitable dealers in the history of the industry, but management loved that I churned out the cards and kept the ball spinning. Turnover is the key. I was fast, but unless you were the lone player on the table, there was no way I could match the pokies.

And the horses? There may be race meetings all over the country and throughout Asia, but you’re still going to have to wait to bet – and geez they take ages to run around the track and then there’s the whole correct weight thing.

You want to spend money, and you want to spend it quick (and let me tell you that is what the owners of casinos and clubs want you to do)? Then sit yourself down and start feeding in the notes – no need to worry about some human changing the money for casino chips and then dealing out cards – just press that button as fast as you can.

And how fast is that? The Productivity Commission tells us that as well:

In NSW there are no regulated spin rates – so you can be sure it’s short – all the quicker to allow you to press the button again, and given Victoria can allow 28 spins a minute (up to $10 a pop) that is zipping by too fast to even register the losses. But losses there can be – $1,200 an hour.

Now I certainly saw people lose $1,200 in an hour – but not at the seemingly low value $10 a hand. In fact $10 black jack tables are about the cheapest you can get nowadays – the casino makes up for the lack of speed by increasing the minimum bet. To lose $1,200 in an hour on blackjack would have meant you doing some serious punting – probably $25 a hand at minimum.

The Productivity Commission also nicely shows the adage that the House always gets you in the end is true. As you can see in the upper left graph below, 30 per cent of players can win if they just play the pokies one session of one hour. That sounds about right – a group of 10 friends playing the pokies – three winning, the rest losing seems about right. Come back four times though and that winning per cent is down to 21 per cent. Sixteen times – and only 7 per cent. Sixty four times – and yes, we may well be talking problem gamblers here – and the winning percentage is 1 per cent.

The problem is that people addicted to gambling focus on the 30 per cent and ignore the 1 per cent. How many people do you know who gamble who tell you about the wins, but from whom you never hear the losses? It’s not just because they don’t talk of losses, it often is because they have forgotten them – until the time comes that they are so big that they can’t be ignored, and so they keep playing thinking this session they’ll be one of the 30 per cent, not realising they’re already in the 99 per cent losers category. (And remember we're not talking the horses where you can study the form guide and make an educated bet – this is you against mathematics – the machines are programmed to win.)

Reading the submissions from clubs into the Parliamentary Inquiry into pre-commitments scheme is like going back in time and hearing the protestations from tobacco companies when they were being banned from sponsoring sports. All the talk is of the valuable input into the community and into sport that the revenue from the clubs provides. For example the submission from Clubs WA which is the only state not to have poker machines in clubs complains about that fact:

Western Australian clubs are smaller and have much lower revenue and smaller capital expenditure, employ fewer people, are able to donate less to charity and sport groups, provide more limited services, and have a smaller economic presence and contribution. A stronger club industry in Western Australia would bring benefits to all. It would increase club viability and expand the benefits they could provide to their communities.

I love how there is all this talk of more revenue but with bugger all acknowledgement of what that means – it means people are losing money. The Commission also found that the people contributing to this lovely revenue are not all just having a “flutter”:

About 4 per cent of adults play gaming machines weekly or more often. Around 15 per cent of this group would be classified as problem gamblers, with around an additional 15 per cent experiencing moderate risks. And their share of total spending on machines is estimated to range around 40 per cent.

So how good is it to know that 40 per cent of any so called “benefits” of sporting equipment etc comes from people addicted to gambling?

The Productivity Commission also looked at these societal benefit claims as well, and found they were all a bit rubbery. Take sport. The PC found there was no correlation between number of poker machines and kids playing sport:

WA had more kids as a percentage playing sport than either NSW or QLD – the two states with the longest and deepest pokies and clubs cultures. The commission also found that the bigger the club was in terms of poker machines, the less money as a share of revenue was spent on sporting facilities – i.e. more pokies did not lead to better facilities:

The Productivity Commission also found that the talk of employment was pretty iffy as well – because the assertion by the clubs implied that the people employed there would not be able to find other work. It found

Many people are employed in the gambling industry. However, most are highly employable and would be in demand in other parts of the service sector were the gambling industry to contract. In that sense, the gambling industries do not create net employment benefits, because they divert employment from one part of the economy to another.

But the Productivity Commission then did the figures and found this surprising statistic:

While it is not possible to be definitive about the costs and benefits of gambling, the Commission estimates that in 2008-09:

* the benefits from tax revenue and enjoyment of gambling for recreational gamblers ranged between $12.1 and $15.8 billion

* the costs to problem gamblers ranged between $4.7 and $8.4 billion

* the overall net benefits ranged between $3.7 and $11.1 billion.

So it seems all is good then – there are costs to gambling, but the benefits outweigh it? No need to do anything? Well yes, except straight afterward the Commission includes this very telling point:

The net benefits could be much larger if governments reduced the costs through effective prevention and harm minimisation policies.

And what do they consider to be the best harm minimisation policy? Well there are many – but the key one for poker machines was this:

Each state and territory government should implement a jurisdictionally-based full pre-commitment system for gaming machines by 2016, subject to initial development (recommendation 19.1), trialling (recommendation 19.2) and compatible monitoring systems (recommendation 10.6). This system should:

* provide a means by which players could voluntarily set personally-defined precommitments and, at a minimum, a spending limit, without subsequently being able to revoke these in the set period

* allow players to see their transaction history

* encourage gamblers to play within safe spending and time limits, by specifying default limits

* include the option for gamblers to set no limit on their spending as one of the system options, but with periodic checking that this remains their preference

* allow occasional gamblers to stake small amounts outside the system

* include measures to avoid identity fraud

* ensure players’ privacy

* be simple for gamblers to understand and use

* present few obstacles to future innovation in the presentation and design of the system

* apply to all gaming machines in all venues in a jurisdiction, with an exemption until 2018 for venues with less than ten machines that also face significant implementation costs relative to revenue.

This is what Wilkie wants – note a few key things – “allow occasional gamblers to stake small amounts outside the system”. So no, it is not a licence to gamble. Is this an infringement on liberty? Pfft. No more than my having to show ID when I buy the pseudoephedrine cold and flu tablets at the chemist. Does it stop me buying them? Nope.

Let’s cut the crap about “nanny state”. You like betting on the horses? Nothing will change. You like playing blackjack? Nothing will change. You like betting on the AFL? Nothing will change. You like playing the pokies. Well you would need to get a card and set a limit on how much you will lose. The big thing – you choose. Here’s what Xenophon says:

Mandatory pre-commitment allows gamblers playing these high intensity machines to choose what they are willing to lose before they start using the machines. It will be a national system to protect all Australians who may become addicted to poker machines.

So people choosing for themselves how much they are prepared to lose is a restriction on people's rights?

Please. Imagine if say you had a credit card where you were able to set how much you could borrow against it, would you consider that an infringement on your rights? Of course not, because we all have that right now. My wife and I constantly get letters from our bank telling us we can increase our limit, but we don’t because we are happy with what we have – it protects us – it forces us if we want to use more credit to transfer real money into our credit card account.

The Clubs Association in response to the Wilkie-Xenophon reforms have gone absolutely ape-shit. And started an advert campaign including this absolutely stupid ad.

First off, who the hell do the Clubs think are their members? If this advert is anything to go by they think they are all Neanderthal dopes whose parents are supremely glad they learned to walk upright.

Need a licence to bet $10? Nope. Government tracking you? Nope. (But don’t worry the clubs will, but think of it a frequent flyer points, remember). And as for the Government telling you how many beers you can have? Well they do already – unless you haven’t noticed all the signs in pubs saying they can’t serve people who are intoxicated. In SA for e.g.: 

It is an offence to serve liquor to a person whose speech, balance, coordination or behaviour is noticeably impaired and it is reasonable to believe that the impairment is the result of the consumption of liquor.

So yep the law already says how many beers you can be served. And then there’s the sporting grounds who don’t allow you to bring beers into the ground etc etc, so let’s not carry on like the world is a total beer free-for-all.

Sure my views on gambling are biased from my time being part of the problem, but the Productivity Commission is not generally known as a cuddly, basket weaving won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children type organisation. I would be against the Government setting limits on losses – but we’re not there – as Xenophon above points out.

Gambling is already restricted to those over 18 – you think that might give away the fact it has some negative impacts – so let’s not pretend that we can come out of the womb and start playing the pokies.

These new laws aren’t about stopping your fun, they’re about helping those for whom it is no longer fun, and they no longer can stop. And what the clubs want you to forget is that 40 per cent of their revenue is from these people. I don’t think Governments need to always tell us what to do (but I have no problems with say, seat belt laws or road speeds) but Governments should help the helpless.

Problem gamblers need help, if that means you have to get a card before you go blow $200 on the pokies? Big deal.


Greg Jericho is an amateur blogger who spends too much of his spare time writing about politics and not enough time watching all the DVDs he buys each weekend.

This post originally appeared on his blog.

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The key to a great meal on a weeknight is one that does not taste like it was made in less than 20 minutes.  I like to make meals for my family and peersonal chef clients that taste just like one that you can get at a fine restaurant but without the steep price tag.  Wild Shrimp with Feta Tomato Sauce with Jasmine Rice is a stellar recipe with complex flavors with a minimal amount of effort on the cook's part.

I came across the recipe on the Fine Cooking magazine website.  I made a few adaptations (I cooked the entree entirely in a  large saute pan and served it with jasmine rice instead of chickpeas) and this quick, one dish meal was on the table in no time.

A bonus of this dinner is that it can be made ahead of time and reheated gently in your microwave at dinner time.  To heat on 70% power for 1 minute and continue heating at 30 second intervals until heated through. I like to package meals for my refrigerator in reusable glass dishes; just doing my part to help save the environment and they make your storing neat and easy.


Wild Shrimp with Feta Tomato Sauce with Jasmine Rice

Adapted from a  recipe  in Fine Cooking magazine.  Wild shrimp was used in this recipe and is more and more readily available in your grocery's freezer or at your local fish market.

4 servings

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 can (14 1/2 ounces) fire roasted tomatoes, diced
1 1/4 pounds large sized shrimp, peeled and deveined
1/4 cup fresh parsley, finely chopped
1 teaspoon dried dill
salt
pepper
3 ounces feta cheese (about 2/3 cup, crumbled), plus more for sprinkling on top

1 1/4 cups jasmine rice, cooked to package directions and kept warm

Heat olive oil in a large saute pan over medium high heat. Add onions and saute until softened, about 3 - 5 minutes. Add garlic and saute until fragrant, about 30 seconds more.

Add the tomatoes and bring the sauce to a simmer. Reduce the heat to medium and let simmer for 5 minutes. Add the shrimp and continue simmering until the shrimp are just cooked through, about 4 - 6 minutes. Add the herbs and feta cheese and stir to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve immediately over hot jasmine rice and sprinkle with extra cheese if desired.

Die Serie, in der Arnold Schwarzenegger gegen das Böse kämpft, soll 2012 gezeigt werden. Auch 3D-Neuproduktionen von "Wicki", "Biene Maja" und "Heidi" laufen im ORF. Jamie Oliver kocht "30 Minute Meals".

Jamie Oliver’s hit book 30 Minute Meals has gobbled up another new record after topping the charts for half a year.

This is a recipe from Jamie Oliver’s new Channel 4 show – 30 minute meals. The concept is simple – a delicious meal cooked from scratch and served within 30 minutes.

Related Posts: Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals | Behind The Scenes | Channel 4 Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Episode 3 Part 1 Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Episode 1 Part 1 Jme @ HOME / LAMB / PART THREE Jme @ HOME / PIZZA / PART TWO

Excellent opportunity to join the Mayflower Park Hotel, a very busy boutique hotel located in the heart of downtown Seattle. We are looking for a Night Auditor to work from 10pm – 8am, 30 hours a week. The ideal candidate has strong leadership skills, loves working with the public, takes initiative, is detail oriented, thrives in a multitask setting and as an excellent team player. Experience is preferred but we will train the right person.

We take pride in being a local owner/operated hotel that thrives on the creativity and diversity of our dedicated staff. No corporate politics here!

We recently celebrated our 83rd year of Seattle hospitality. The minute you walk into our lobby you will notice something very different about us…. and there is!

We offer competitive wages; medical, dental and life insurance; free meals; paid meal break; discounted hotel rates throughout the U.S.; subsidized bus pass; and a work environment that is a genuine pleasure to be in.

Check us out by visiting our website at www.mayflowerpark.com

• Location: Downtown Seattle
• Compensation: $13.10 - $14 DOE
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Phone calls about this job are ok.
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

My 30 second meals – starting with the pancakes Related Posts: Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals | Starts October 11 | Channel 4 Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals | Behind The Scenes | Channel 4 Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals | What Is It, Jamie? | Channel 4 Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals Jamie’s 30 minute Dance off

When you think about it, 24 hours in a day doesn't seem like nearly enough time to accomplish everything we want. I mean, how are we supposed to put in a full day of work, eat three nutritious meals, hit the gym, stay connected with friends and loved ones, volunteer for the causes we care about, meet our clients' last-minute deadlines, and sleep the recommended 7-8 hours a night? Not to mention those who do all that with kids or elderly parents to worry about.

http://www.mtfjourney.com Welcome to this week’s episode of the MTF Journey and we're looking forward to getting you in the best shape of your life. Follow us on our 90 Day Weight Loss Journey. Every week we will be uploading new workout video, motivational videos and 30 Minute Meals and much more. To Get the complete real time "follow along" workout video just go to http://www.mtfjourney.com. When you sign up for updates we'll give you instant access to everything you need to lose weight, get toned, a rock hard six pack and an overall sexy body. Follow on our 90 Day Transformation Journey. It will be an awesome ride just go to http://www.mtfjourney.com

Some of us have been blessed with Norman Rockwell-esque families, when holiday meals have days and days of preparation carefully presented on Christmas Day alongside thoughtfully planned gifts for each dinner attendee. However, for many of us, we are the furthest from this picturesque family, and often face the panicked search for a last minute gift.

For the foodie friends in your life, hop on over to one of the stores listed below which are open today, on Christmas Eve, and have staff on hand to help you pick out food gift items and pairings or unique bottles to impress your foodie friends.

1. Binny’s Beverage Depot located on 213 W. Grand, 1531 E. 53rd St., 3000 N. Clark and 1720 N. Marcey; Open Christmas Eve from 9 a.m. 6 p.m. -
   • This holiday season, Binnys is suggesting foodies try out their Whiskey Hotline, where seasoned whiskey, cognac, bourbon and tequila connoisseurs can provide a helpful suggestions for different aged spirits and unigue flights of specialty spirits. Gift ideas range from vodka packaged in fire extinguishers to Dan Aykroyd’s vodka creation that comes packaged with skull shaped shot glasses.
2. Trader Joe’s located on 1840 N. Clybourn, 3745 N. Lincoln and 44 E. Ontario; Open Christmas Eve from 8 a.m. - 6 p.m. -
   • Everyone loves the guy who brings the beer to the holiday party. Pick up a pack of Trader Joe’s 2010 Vintage Ale which hints at festive flavors and aromas of cocoa, ginger and dark spices. A wining combination of flavors for any seasonal and festive gathering.
3. Whole Foods Market located on 3300 N. Ashland, 1550 N. Kingsbury, 30 W. Huron, 3640 N. Halsted and 1101 S. Canal; Open Christmas Eve from 7a.m. - 7 p.m. -
   • Wine and dine your food friend with a wine and dish pairing from Whole Foods. Whole Foods wine specialist are on hand Christmas Eve to help you pick out a last minute bottle and even suggest a dish, with ingredients to be found in the store. Sending a gift far away? Whole Foods offers online shoppers gift boxes filled with tasty and organic options from chocolates and coffee to pastas and sauces, with overnight shipping available for just $10 a box.

A happy holidays wish, and a good luck as well, on all that last minute holiday shopping!

Ending today, KraftStore.com offers select Food Network Cooking DVD Sets for $4.99 each, as listed below. Plus, coupon code "C97258" snags free shipping on all orders with no minimum purchase required. Combined, that puts each item at the lowest total price we could find by $3. The deals, each with free shipping after the coupon:

• Food Network 30 Minute Meals Vol. 2: All Around Tasty on DVD (pictured) for $4.99
• Food Network 30 Minute Meals Vol. 4: Entertaining Made Easy on DVD for $4.99
• Food Network 30 Minute Meals Vol. 7: Sports Night Snacks on DVD for $4.99
• Food Network Quick Fix Meals Vol. 1 on DVD for $4.99

Why is it that Jamie Oliver seems to be encouraging us lovers of good food to compartmentalise cooking into a slot?

I love Jamie Oliver. I am able to ignore his irritating affectations and pretence at being bish-bosh working class. I tend to adore his style of cooking and the end results. What Jamie does for charity is commendable, and he handles food like he appreciates every single morsel.

Why, then, has Jamie reduced his recipes to a race rather than the loving attention they deserve? The phenomenally successful cook book Jamie's 30 Minute Meals has sold a million copies and may well end up in your Christmas stocking if you haven't already bought it for yourself. How could you Jamie? Cooking is, to me, about leisure and pleasure not haste and waste (in cooking quickly the best bits of the ingredients, such as the tops off leaks and scrag ends of meat, so good when used in stock, get binned).

In the TV series to accompany the book we see our boy wonder racing around the chopping block, slinging ingredients together while watching the clock. What a departure from his previous programmes where we get to see Jamie caress his coriander-infused salad leaves, massage rosemary into his meat, and gently stir the stock bubbling away on the stove.

I have written previously about the middle-class assumption that we all have the time to shop in markets and cook from scratch. I know how hard it is for single, hard-up mothers of small children to spend the precious time available to them chopping organic vegetables and slow-cooking every evening.

But why is it that Jamie seems to be encouraging us lovers of good food (those of us who watch his programmes and read his books are, I would wager) to compartmentalise cooking into a slot in the same way we seem to be controlling all aspects of our busy lives these days. Exercises? Twenty minutes should do it. Weekly phone call to mother? Fit it in between the soaps and walking the dog.

If I want to rustle up some food in a hurry the last thing I am going to attempt is Jamie's so-called "roast beef, baby yorkies, little carrots, crispy potatoes, and super-quick gravy" recipe. Most of the recipes from the book take me a damn sight longer than half an hour, and I am a quick and efficient cook. Jamie ignores the time it takes to find the cooking utensils, wash the ingredients, clear up while cooking and washing up afterwards. But even if we could produce a so-called "roast dinner" in 30 minutes, why would we?

Watching Jamie spin around like a whirling dervish on TV preparing this meal, I felt personally affronted. "Jules loves a roast dinner," says the man to camera, "so if I have been working late I can still dish this up in good time." Everything about this meal is wrong. A roast should be made from a piece of meat consisting of fat, sinew and bone in order to preserve flavour and moisture. Jamie's was a chunk of beef so lean it should have been on a hospital drip. The potatoes he prepared were not the roasties we know and love – slow-cooked in unctuous goose fat, crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle – but were fried in their skins. Yuck.

And can someone tell me how to make decent gravy in half an hour? You can't. It needs the slow-cooked juices from the meat that incidentally needs to have been rested after cooking for at least half an hour. Garlic should be softened in water first and then thrown in with the meat to slow cook, in order for it to turn golden and sticky. His quick yorkshire puddings would have my grandmother spinning in her grave. "Rest the batter for an hour," she used to drum into me when teaching me how to cook the classics.

If you are short of time in the evening and have friends coming for dinner, don't attempt a meal in half an hour. Instead go to the deli counter and buy some nice cheeses and fruit and open some good ready-made soup. Or cook while they keep you company. Hungry children? What is wrong with some nice stir-fry or something else that actually benefits from quick cooking?

Life is both short and hectic but do not shove cooking time into your electronic calendar like we are increasingly doing with most other activities these days. Food is too important to be rushed.

Thai red curry is delicious, but only when the coconut milk has infused with spices over a low heat for as long as it takes to melt the beef, or the aubergine into it. When you come home hungry enough to eat a horse between two mattresses, as I often do, you would be better off taking your time over some lovingly prepared beans on toast, with some posh cheese grated over it and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar than pretending to yourself that it is possible to make piri-piri chicken and Portuguese tarts in the time it takes to watch EastEnders.

Job Description

POSITION: SEASONAL CHEF (SCOTT RIVER LODGE)
REPORTS TO: EXECUTIVE CHEF-SECOND WIND PROGRAMS
EXECUTIVE SOUS CHEF-SECOND WIND PROGRAMS
EMPLOYMENT
DATES: APRIL 17-AUGUST 17, 2011

SALARY: DOE + HOUSING
NON BENEFIT ELIGIBLE POSITION

Seasonal Chef to direct daily Food/Beveage operations for Scott River Lodge in Fort Jones, CA..
Will work in coordination with sister property JH Guest Ranch with the Food Services and
Programs Departments on a daily basis. Chef will be responsible for the planning and preparation
of satisfying, creative, eye appealing, and nutritional menus.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

Plan menus in conjunction with Executive Chef (Second Wind Programs) taking into
consideration guest needs, staffing, financial and a variety of other factors.
Develop recipes and techniques for food preparation and management, which help
assure consistently high quality and portion control.
Establish controls and monitor kitchen activities to minimize waste/loss of product.
Cook or directly supervise the cooking of all items which require skillful preparation.
Have the ability and desire to supervise college age volunteer staff.
Work directly with Guest Services Manager, Staff Deans in the scheduling and
coordination of all assigned to kitchen.
Manage staff activities for kitchen members including but not limited to performance,
training, evaluations, and reassignment as necessary, work and communicate with
Guest Services Manager and Staff Deans on any issues which arise.
Train, develop and encourage staff and volunteers giving them a sense of ownership
and accountability. Create an atmosphere of joy, encouragement, and caring.
Working understanding of latest Culinary trends.
Plan and manage staff meals in coordination with JH Ranch.
Coordinate with Guest Services Manager, facilitators, Program Personnel as to location,
counts, times of all food and beverage services, be prepared for last minute potential
changes based upon Guest and Program needs.
Ensure all table service properly prepared for all meal service including all areas,
(ie, outdoor kitchen, barn, beaches, main lodge decks, dining hall, bar deck etc)
Ensure all meals are served in a timely manner to include starting service times,
speed of service and clean-up of all meals.
Guests, Staff, VIP's enter kitchen on a regular basis, you must be able to work with
these distractions and remain hospitable at ALL times while continuing to perform
required tasks.
Maintain a clean and efficient kitchen, outdoor kitchen, and all dining areas by
meeting and exceeding health department standards, oversee all clean-up of servicewares,
maintenance and cleaning of equipment, track all inventory, order all food/beverages
and supplies, maintain vendor relations.
Train kitchen staff regarding safety, sanitation and accident prevention principles.
Work with Guest Services Manager prior to events regarding special dietary needs.
Clear understanding of budgets pertaining to Food/Beverage Costs, proper records
keeping as required by Second Wind Programs, to include review of weekly expenses,
invoices, receipts, paid staff time sheets and other administrative responsibilites as
directed by Executive Chef.
Ability to lift, carry boxes up to 50# up and down stairs and in and out of storage.
Ability to self-manage, be proactive, creative, energetic and multi-task.
Good communication and interpersonal skills, recognition of how your position
supports the Goals and Mission of Second Wind Programs.
Ensure code of conduct principles of Second Wind Programs are adhered to in all
areas of Food Services by all Staff at all times.
Must display a sincere love for Jesus and a working commitment to him
in every area of life.
Employee for this position must be willing to work irregular and extended hours as
needed. Must be willing to be on-call as needs arise and live on-site for the convenience
of Second Wind Programs in order to respond to emergency or special needs.
Perform other duties as assigned by Executive Chef.


QUALIFICATIONS:

3-5 years of progressively responsible positions as Chef, Executive Sous Chef,
Chef de Cuisine, Executive Chef or Kitchen Manager with emphasis on Northwest
Cuisine and multi-faceted food service operations.
Demonstrated ability to analyze and solve problems; efficiently handle multiple
tasks, on-site locations, schedule changes, work flexible hours as required by
previous employers.
Must have or obtain within 30 days of hire Serv Safe Certification.
Verifiable references to include former supervisors.
Must be willing to follow all Second Wind Programs Code of Conduct policies and
Statement of Faith.

One celebrity memoir made our reviewer cry – but the rest just bored him to tears. What would reading 11 of them in four days do to his brain?

Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas famously begins: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." The first sentence of The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, goes like this: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

But never mind all that. Life & Laughing is the autobiography of Michael McIntyre, the 34-year-old comedian who is now arguably as successful as any standup has ever been. At the time of writing, it has sold 169,210 copies. People like it; at my local WH Smith, it seems to be selling like cut-price gold. It starts: "I am writing this on my new 27-inch iMac. I have ditched my PC and gone Mac . . . It's gorgeous and enormous and I bought it especially to write my book (the one you're reading now)."

While we're here, consider also the enticing kick-off passage of My Story, by Dannii Minogue: "Having a baby; joyful, a quiet celebration with family. An intimate and magical moment of discovery shared with your partner. Hmmm . . . I wish!" She goes on: "The car is stuck in rainy London traffic and, as usual, I'm running on what some of my closer friends would call 'Minogue Time', which basically means I'm late." This does not quite get me hooked, though I persevere. But more of that later.

To begin The Woman I Was Born To Be, that blessed national treasure Susan Boyle goes for a gnomic statement of the obvious: "My name is Susan Boyle." Cheryl Cole's Through My Eyes commences no less prosaically – "In 2009, we decided to take a break from Girls Aloud. During this time an opportunity came for me to make a solo album" – but it's essentially a picture book, so maybe I should leave off.

Anyway, these books are not only dominating the bestseller lists at he moment, but my life too. The plan is simple enough: to collect these less-than-literary works, resolve to get beyond the first sentences, and thereby take the national pulse. So, I duly line up the memoirs of McIntyre, Minogue, Alan Sugar, Chris Evans et al – along with the supposed work of a fictional meerkat – and get to it.

First, though, I speak to my agent. Jonny Geller is managing director of Curtis Brown's books division, and down the years he has occasionally sat me down and patiently explained the frazzled economics of the publishing industry. His contribution to the Christmas market is Nelson Mandela's Conversations With Myself, which is doing respectably – though it is not quite up there with the work of Radio 2 DJs, TV tycoons and failed Australian pop stars.

How did we get here? He begins the story with the collapse of the net book agreement, which kept prices high and thereby held back the creation of a truly popular market, until 1997. "When that happened, the supermarkets came in with huge discounts, and you got a mass market. And what does a mass market want? They want what they get on radio, and TV, and in music, and film. So suddenly celebrities become the natural thing."

The watershed book, he reckons, was Billy, the biography of Billy Connolly by his wife – and Guardian columnist – Pamela Stephenson, which was published in 2001, sold more than a million, and thereby pointed the way. Down, on the whole: though the Connolly story was full of pathos, and capably written, what followed did not do great things for the culture. One thinks of, say, the four memoirs credited to Katie Price (she's already on to number five, apparently), Jason Donovan's Between The Lines, or Kerry Katona's landmark Too Much, Too Young: My Story of Love, Survival and Celebrity.

Last year, Geller tells me, was something of a celeb-publishing disaster, embodied by the underperformance of Ant and Dec's Ooh, What A Lovely Pair: Our Story (which did 330,000 in paperback, but failed to recoup a mind-boggling £2.8m advance). But 2010 is looking much better: with Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Meals leading a high street publishing stimulus, and McIntyre, Sugar and the meerkat also doing their bit, the seasonal book market seems to have been miraculously revived, even as consumer confidence apparently plunges. That said, some of the numbers do not quite add up: McIntyre, Geller reminds me, received a reported £2.3m advance from the Penguin group, which means he'll have to sell in advance of 600,000 hardbacks if anyone's to make a profit. "There's no way he's going to do it, but that's still a successful book. It depends how you gauge success."

This last point goes straight to the book industry's strange business model, the fact that financial exactitude may be less important than keeping the whole machine ticking over.

"You buy turnover by having celebrities," says Geller. "You've got costs: distribution, employment, printers to keep happy . . . and if you've got something you know you're going to print at least 200,000 copies of, that keeps the machine running. You have to have turnover: if you don't, you're left with a small company. It's a self-fulfilling thing." To some ears, this may sound like the economics of the pre-internet music industry: sign a lot, pay whatever it takes, keep the fun going – and hope you luck out with at least one big hit a year.

But anyway: I have books to read. Having put down what I'm currently reading (Keith Richards's Life, which is great), I begin with Minogue's My Story, because she is the one contemporary celeb author I have met: at a west London branch of TGI Fridays circa 1997, when we fell into a weird and bitter argument about whether Robbie Williams should be blamed for losing himself in drink and drugs after exiting Take That. I sympathised with him; she, like a true show-must-go-on veteran of an Australian institution called Young Talent Time, did not – and it all got rather heated and shouty. Which is more than can be said for My Story, in which most of her anecdotes fall flat, like the kind of pub stories that are followed by pregnant silences.

She recalls watching a cast-member from Prisoner Cell Block H chainsmoking at an Aussie TV studio: "It's odd to think of it now," she says. Oh, it is! One paragraph from the end, she serves up this gripping picture of her current domestic bliss: "I wouldn't exactly say it's a quiet house . . . Kris [her other half] has bought a new 3D TV that looks as big as a cinema with surround sound that makes the house rock." To cap it all, there is this picture of her less-than-spectacular pop career circa 1989: "I seemed to be a mysterious, dark punk version of my older sister . . . it gave me more street cred." No it didn't!

There is much more: a boob job, nude shots for Playboy in which she was done up like Crocodile Dundee, and her valiant efforts to pretend Kylie's success has never been an issue: "The truth of the matter is that I never felt like I was competing with my sister. I'll say it again: I NEVER FELT LIKE I WAS COMPETING WITH KYLIE." So there you are.

After that, I do the Michael McIntyre book, which is a bit like having someone with a mild personality disorder shouting in your ear for six hours. He has an interesting story, of sorts: among the other strands of his pre-fame life, his father was a close associate of the anarchic DJ-turned-comic Kenny Everett, with whom his mum – some 17 years dad's junior – sated her appetite for the high life by regularly going clubbing. This all contributes to amusing enough stories, but there are insurmountable problems: a habit of digressing at ridiculous length; gags that don't work too well in bald print; and quite unbearable smugness. This is him, for example, on performing at the O2 arena: "Before my tour started, I saw Madonna there, the first night I did was replacing Michael Jackson, the night before my final gig Beyoncé was there. It simply doesn't get any bigger than this."

Over four days of mind-bending effort, I then tackle five more.

Chris Evans's Memoirs of a Fruitcake picks up where last year's It's Not What You Think left off: in 1997, when he borrowed £85m to buy Virgin Radio off Richard Branson, and commenced a long lost-it period that included his transformation into "a multi-millionaire part-time DJ", visits to hundreds of pubs, and his strange marriage to Billie Piper. It just about holds my attention, though I am left wondering how a book so defined by the getting and wasting of huge amounts of money will play in an age of fiscal grimness and belt-tightening. One chapter begins with a list titled "10 must haves when I built my dream house" and describes Evans being helicoptered around the stockbroker belt with a view to buying a new mansion, which I'm sure will resonate brilliantly in, say, Middlesbrough.

Still, at least it vaguely gets my blood rising – unlike Simon Pegg's distinctly un-gripping Nerd Do Well, in which he expends hundreds of pages on his memories of the 70s and 80s (you know the drill: Spangles, Star Wars, Princess Di haircuts, the usual), mysteriously fails to tell the reader anything much about Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, and decides to weave in a very odd, half-written story about a re-imagined version of himself and a "robotic butler". A talented and apparently nice fella, I'm sure, but his publishers have reportedly paid him £1m for three books, and so far, this one has done around 25,000 copies (insert Family Fortunes-esque "Uh-uhhhh!" noise).

After that, I have to speed up, for fear of madness. Cheryl Cole's Through My Eyes is a picture portfolio, peppered with laser-like insights ("the paparazzi can be really scary"), which can be satisfactorily dealt with in around 20 minutes. Russell Brand's Booky Wook 2 seems slight and widely spaced, and amounts to a breathless diary of his recent experiences – though there is a reasonably diverting chapter about what we must now call "Sachsgate" (when, he recalls, "the sky was black with scandal").

Paul O'Grady's The Devil's Ride Out centres on his often grim experience of the 70s, and has one unexpected advantage over most of the competition: on this evidence, he can actually write, with an understated grace and admirable sense of comic timing. Susan Boyle's The Woman I Was Born To Be, by contrast, is pretty much what I expect: an icky feast of anecdotes, homespun wisdom (eg "Memory is like a jukebox: push the right button . . . and you're transported straight back to a time and place") and truisms ("Being a postman is a full-time job") that seems to have been put together by someone called Imogen Parker. On the whole, it makes me feel unbearably sad: the dedication says simply "for my mother", which comes unexpectedly close to making me weep.

In other words, I have now taken a distinct turn for the worse – something conclusively proved by an afternoon in the company of Gok Wan's Through Thick and Thin. Just to make it clear: I have only ever watched How to Look Good Naked by accident, and the entire Gok phenomenon makes about as much sense to me as, say, Coldplay. But after 20 minutes, I cannot put it down.

The plotline is simple and affecting enough: raised by a Chinese father and English mother who ran restaurants in Leicester, he feasted on what he calls "deep-fried love", and ended up chronically overweight, and bullied. On the former score, he does not hold back: "My eyes were deep set and appeared piggy in the mass of fat on my face," he writes – a condition that led eventually to anorexia, described in the unsparing detail of food diaries ("Saturday 16 March: two teaspoons of honey, 40 laxatives"). Of course, everything eventually aligns correctly, and he becomes the successful if slightly irksome stylist-cum-unqualified psychiatrist we now know, but fair play to him: he probably deserves it.

And so to Alan Sugar. The thrillingly titled What You See Is What You Get is the best part of 600 pages long. Obviously, there is a story in there somewhere: how a wily Jewish kid from east London sussed out that the future would be defined by consumer electronics, and made a mint. But where to find it?

At one point, Sugar writes: "I could spend hours talking about every single amplifier and product we ever made, and it would be dead boring to everyone other than the old saddo hacks who used to work for me or buy from me." This lifts my spirits, slightly. But he follows it with this: "Stan Randall arranged the construction of the production line at Ridley Road and Mike Forsey got on with the design of the IC2000 [a hi-fi amplifier]. I did the mechanical drawing for the cabinet and chassis. This time, we moulded some very fancy silver knobs and slider controls. The front panel layout design of the product was down to me. I designed some flash aluminium toggle switches and the whole thing looked a real mug's eyeful. Moreover, it was a bloody good amplifier and it ticked all the boxes as far as the specification was concerned."

Who is this for? What is the point of it? The same exhaustive approach is applied to the mathematics of pricing, problems with "hard-disk controller cards", and just about everyone Sugar has ever employed ("the production line was being run by a no-nonsense fellow by the name of Dave Smith"). You would have to be out of your mind to persevere much past page 30. I have to, and that's roughly the state in which it leaves me.

Which brings us to the essential reason why the majority of modern Christmas bestsellers are so amazingly bad. Even if some of them have been ghostwritten, you often sense there has been precious little editing. No one – apart, in fairness, from Paul O'Grady – ever seems to deliver much context, or pause for thought, or indulge in any kind of reflection: better, it seems, to just go: "I was born ages ago and my mum and dad were nice but poor but then I got a lucky break and now I'm on TV and everything and here is a picture of me on our honeymoon in the Maldives."

Put simply, many of these books are deeply, desperately, profoundly infantile, and at my lowest point – roughly, at around page 300 of the Sugar memoir – I begin to suspect that a miserable formula is at work. It goes like this: get celeb, let them write whatever slipshod rubbish they fancy, and don't worry because 1) the more pages, the more people feel they're getting value for money; and 2) by Boxing Day, these books will already be either gathering dust, or on their way to the local Sue Ryder shop.

One other thing. The aforementioned meerkat book is titled A Simples Life, is credited to "Aleksandr Orlov" and contains the chilling inscription "this is an advertisement feature on behalf of comparethemarket.com", which essentially means the public are being asked to pay for an advert. It is an extremely cynical and thin work, based around a dependable enough trick: laughing at Johnny Foreigner. The prose, if you can call it that, features such gems as: "My home is a bit like English palace of Bucking Hams." If someone buys you it for Christmas, you should probably hit them with it.

My ordeal finally comes to a close on a Thursday afternoon, when in celebration of the end, I put in a call to the HQ of Waterstone's and speak to their head of PR, a book industry veteran named Jon Howells, who has been in the trade since 1991.

We talk for 20 minutes: he concurs with Jonny Geller's picture of the end of the net book agreement sending everything haywire, tells me that McIntyre may have stolen Peter Kay's comedy-book thunder, and mentions the promotional importance of TV chatshows. Most importantly, he suggests I stop thinking about all this stuff in the same context as what industry types call "range" – ie the books racked in the back of the shop – and realise what I'm dealing with.

"These books are a part of mainstream entertainment," he says. "Cheryl Cole has got a book out this Christmas, she's also got a new album out, and she's all over the telly. The book is one part of a general programme for somebody like that. You could make the same argument about Gok Wan, or Paul O'Grady. Or Michael McIntyre. It's all part of a brand. These are people with a huge amount of fans, and they want to buy product."

Has he read any of the big Christmas sellers? "I'm reading the Keith Richards book," he says. "I'm eking that one out, because it's brilliant. I've read some of the Russell Brand, which is good fun. I've read about half of the Stephen Fry book. I've got quite a few books on the go."

I reveal how I've spent the last couple of weeks, and mention them all: Minogue, McIntyre, Cole, Boyle, Evans, Pegg, O'Grady, Brand, Wan, Sugar and the meerkat.

"You've even done the meerkat," he marvels. "That's above and beyond the call of duty." A Simples Life, he tells me, took people such as him by surprise.

"How do you judge how well a book based on a fake animal in a car insurance ad is going to do?" he marvels, and then delivers his version of an inescapable truth about capitalism. As Paul Weller once sang, the public gets what the public wants – so maybe jumped-up pseuds like me should leave them to it.

"That book is doing well," he says. "People like it." He says the next bit with slightly less cheer. "Merry Christmas to them."

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The hotel includes a breakfast buffet consisting of some western food and some local foods: baguettes, real French (as in imported from France) butter, sliced pancakes, French toast, fried eggs, noodles with chicken, fried rice with vegetables, fruit juice, and excellent coffee. The noodle dish and the baguettes were really good. The French colonial masters burdened this country with their style of bureaucracy (there's a reason that word has a French origin) but tempered that with French architecture, city planning and baking. Parts of the city are reminiscent of New Orleans, which is only odd until you realize that the French had a hand in both places.

After breakfast a group of us hire a tuk-tuk, a motorcycle with a trailer (seats four Canadians, or approximately fourteen Cambodians plus a live pig) to take us to the Russian market. I suppose the market takes its name from communist times, either because manufactured goods were mainly imported from the Soviet Union or because the Russians were the ones who had the money to shop there. It's now a huge complex, not a mall, just a whole lot of ordinary vendor stalls grouped along dark, narrow aisles by type of product and absolutely spilling over with manufactured goods and foodstuffs of every description. At the entrance we came in, the vendors had tourist stuff like t-shirts of the local signs and beer brands. I can't remember if slogans went quite as low as "Someone I know went to Cambodia and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" but it wouldn't have been out of place. I remember being startled by a sandals stand, because all the shoes were displayed with fake feet in them. A young man is selling large silk cloths embroidered with elephants and his come-on describing their use amuses me because he is accidentally demonstrating a feature of the Khmer language that is confounding me. There are two separate b sounds, one like English and one that does not involve exhalation of breath. The phoneme is written in my guidebook as "bp" and I can hear the young man urging me to consider his product as a "bped cover" or "tabple cover." I have lately noticed the decrepit condition of the things covering both my bped and tabple, and they are both reasonably priced and gorgeous, so after a little bargaining I have two for $12. Other people try to sell us jewellery, scarves, wooden carvings, pretty boxes, incense, handbags, books, and more. I'm not sure if it's cooler inside the market than outside because of the shade, or hotter inside than out because of the confinement. It's hot, maybe mid-thirties. I buy a light wraparound skirt and a top that matches.

While I am negotiating for the skirt and top, a woman comes up selling cards made by landmine victims. The country is absolutely riddled with landmines that not even the soldiers who laid them have records of. Someone who tries to care for his family by clearing land for crops or grazing may end up crippled by a mine. The woman is herself a victim of something, not a mine, but she has been severely burned. Her eyes have been spared, but the flesh of her nose is completely burned away and I can see mottled scar tissue down her chest, too. Could be a cooking accident or maybe an acid attack. It's something you see, and then stop seeing, because she doesn't physically carry herself like a person disfigured, or otherwise seem to expect anyone to waste any time over it. I look at the cards. They are watercolours of local scenes. I ask if there are any with tigers, or other animals. I like tigers. There aren't, but she flips through and points out oxen and birds in various scenes. The cards are pretty, and I need something to send home anyway, so I buy a package of ten. She counts out ten envelopes to go with them. If you sponsored the house building project and requested a postcard, you may have received it in an envelope with one of these cards. And these stamps.

I've seen people wearing thongs (the shoes that have a strap between the toes) with socks here: they have special socks with one toe. I ask the vendor if she sells those, or knows who does, and she tells the landmine card woman where. I follow her through the various aisles of the market in search of the right socks. At one point she leaves me and comes back with a vendor and socks, and I choose a couple of pairs. It's good to be able to wear thongs, yet have some protection against sun and blisters. And I like strange socks.

We wander through the aisles of the market some more, switching from shopping to sightseeing. We have seen enough repeats of the same carvings and crafts that we realize we'll see these all over the country and don't need to buy right away even if we see something we want. The card woman comes back and finds us again, this time with an armload of placemats featuring tigers. They would have been the best thing ever when I was about nine years old, as they are plastic and feature 3D images, with lots of depth, the tigers jumping right out of the jungle at you. My tastes have moved on a little since then and I have to turn her down, but I'm impressed and appreciative. If you go to a place like this, a personal shopper is pretty useful. In some cases a tuk-tuk driver will be able to come and help you find or ask for what you need.

We wander deeper into the market and find ourselves in the food market area. A lot of the food is still alive, fish flopping in baskets and shrimp escaping down the corridors. There's no refrigeration, meat just hangs on hooks the same way handbags and second hand car parts do in their respective parts of the market. The meat picture is by permission of my roommate who has more skill and a fancier camera than I do. Mine wasn't capable of capturing images at the light level inside the market.

We get back in the tuk-tuk and go to another market, the Olympic market. This one is in an actual two-story building as opposed to an area mostly roofed in patchwork tin. There I buy another suitcase, as it's already evident that souvenirs are going to overwhelm the one I brought, and a pair of light cotton trousers labelled XL, and falling to about mid-shin on me. I'm not entirely sure they were designed as capri pants, but they'll serve that function for me. It's a conservative country and we've been warned not to wear shorts or tank tops, especially in the village. I don't really want to wear shorts, and risk getting that much sunburn, anyway.

It's time for lunch. We buy a couple of pastries from a stall on the ground floor, and then go outside and look at the food displayed there. There are a lot of dried fish, and they smell good, but they are entire large fish, or dried really hard such that they would have to be boiled to be reconstituted. They are such interesting shapes. I'm reminded of the discovery of the coealacanth. Only the fishermen who caught this stuff know what wonders lurk in the Tonlé Sap. We buy a couple of meals by pointing at things displayed and then nodding in response to questions we don't understand. Between us we have fish with noodles and a variety of fried things with rice. The food is displayed on the counter and then they deep fry it after you select it. It's tasty and we have delicious coconut pastries for dessert.

In the afternoon we go to Wat Phnom, the hill temple, as are many of the people in town for the water festival. It's not an ancient temple, but it's probably an ancient site, the latest of many rebuildings. The whole scene is completely analogous to any number of public holiday events I've attended in good weather in Canada or the US: lots of people in a park with things to buy and eat and just milling around smiling at people. There's a big garden clock near the base of the hill, paths up to the temple at the top, and vendors all around the paths at the base.

First we go up the hill. There's an admission fee of one dollar for foreigners. We'll see this kind of thing a lot, and I don't have any problem with contributing my share to something the others probably support with their taxes. Right after I pay my dollar, for which I receive a receipt, an old woman in white robes offers to tie a red string around my wrist. For a moment I think this is the equivalent of a fairground plastic wristband or hand stamp, and then realize as it's being tied that it's an optional service, a good luck blessing in return for a donation. It even matches my hatband, and the donation is about 30 cents Canadian.

At the top of the hill is a tiled terrace and a roofed pagoda housing a large number of Buddha statues. I take off my shoes on the terrace and realize that as this is a culture where you take your shoes off indoors, even in public places, the floors are very important. The texture of the terrace is very interesting to my feet and I'm glad to feel it. I wonder what else my feet have missed. Inside the pagoda there are musicians playing on the concave xylophones we saw at the restaurant, people praying (kneeling and bowing low with their hands pressed together fingertip to fingertip and palm to palm), people leaving offerings of fruit, flowers and money on and around the buddhas, and incense burning in pots of sand. We go back outside on the terrace and wander down the paths on the other side. There is another smaller temple a little lower down on the hill, with Chinese-language banners.

At the base of the hill is the most exciting part, the food. We didn't know what most of it was, and didn't have enough language in common with the vendors to ask. A popular item was eggs containing half-developed foetal chicks. I don't think there was ever any possibility of us deciding to sample those. A borderline item was what looked like very large frogs barbecued while held in split bamboo sticks. While trying to rationalize these we discussed our own fairground food. "They're frogs-on-a-stick, like corndogs ... cornfrogs!" We did not sample cornfrogs at this time. Our excuse was that a group meal was planned, and we didn't want to spoil our dinners. We did try some kind of roasted insect, they looked like grasshoppers or crickets. They looked exactly like grasshoppers or crickets, large ones, too. They were tasty, spiced with something good, but the hard parts of the insect stuck in my teeth for hours, the way the seed coating does with popcorn.

We just had fun walking around and looking. At one point I felt a hand and turned, suspecting a pickpocket, but it was a little kid being carried who had just reached out from mom's shoulder to investigate this strange milk-coloured person. When I turned, mom realized what was going on and stopped him, but I smiled to show no offence taken and then we all laughed and the kid turned shy. We sat down on the base of a statue to eat and people watch. A family came up to sit next to us and I made sure I made room for them all, but the littlest girl obviously wasn't sure she wanted to sit next to the scary foreign people, and sat on mom's lap. I caught a Khmer word I knew, thom meaning big and a gesture around the end of the mother's characteristic flat nose. They were discussing the looks of these peculiar strangers. I grinned and echoed the word and gesture with my own nose. Djaa, yes, I agreed, inducing giggling in the kids. I don't actually have a big nose, by Western standards, but it's not flat and broad like theirs, either.

I bought a small bag of crickets to take back and share, but got few takers. Not knowing the shelf life of roasted insects, nor how to tell if they have gone bad, I threw some away. That's the first time I've felt badly about putting dead bugs in a garbage can.

Dinner is at the FCC --Foreign Correspondents' Club-- obviously a fairly longtime enclave of privileged foreigners amongst the natives. I imagine it's the sort of place one can get a gin and tonic. I'd rather get frog-on-a-stick or barbecued Mekong eel or something else I've never seen before, but I also want to bond with my team, so a European meal won't hurt me. There's a group walking and another group taking tuk-tuks to the FCC. I elect to go with the walkers, but somehow get my times crossed and miss their departure time. Never mind, I'm a fast walker. I get directions and set out. "Straight down the main boulevard to the river, then turn left and just ask for the FCC. Everyone knows where it is." I clarify that it is the Foreign Correspondents' Club or if it has another local name, and am told no, just say "Eff-See-See," they'll understand.

The main street quickly becomes extremely congested with people, mostly walking, but a few embedded in the crowd on bicycles and motos, and occasionally beggars sitting on the ground in the midst of it all. The streets are partly taken up with booths, selling food, or mobile phone services, or things I can't figure out because I don't read Khmer. Again it's typical festival booths, just translated into a different culture. Many of the booths are blaring music or announcements. One might be a bingo game as I recognize a lot of numbers being said. Or maybe when numbers constitute over half the words you know in a language, everything sounds like a number. There are too many people on the street to move at a normal walking pace, but I've given myself almost an hour to go a couple of kilometres, and it looks as if I'll need every minute in this crowd.

I can see a decorated bridge ahead with people standing on it. (Fortunately I'm tall and everyone here is short, so I can see well, even in big crowds). That must be the river. As I try to keep going forward towards it, I'm not certain that it's a road that continues this way. I may be in a riverside park now. There is a Ferris wheel and other fairground equipment straight ahead, but I think that may be on the other side of the river. I turn left. There is too much noise from all the loudspeakers for me to easily ask anyone about the FCC, so I just go a couple of blocks, looking. There's a gated building with a security guard but while he's clearly willing to be helpful he doesn't understand my guidebook Khmer rendition of "Please, where is the FCC?" The thronging crowd presses me up against a metal barricade across the road, but I just need to make my way across to the gap in the fence. It's a roadblock stopping vehicles from coming this far into the festival. I repeat my FCC query to a police officer who is supervising the crowd, but he doesn't know either. He finds me another officer who speaks some English, but he also does not know what is this FCC of which I speak. He wants to know if it is a hotel. "It's a restaurant." It might be a hotel. "It's a big restaurant, lots of Europeans there." Europeans means white people here, the way Africans means black people in the US. I get uncertain directions to continue the way I am going. It's possible that there are out-of-town cops here for the festival, but this is the biggest city in the country. Most of them must be from here.

A few blocks later--or maybe it was half a block and just felt like a block--I spot a tourist information building. They speak English and have heard of the FCC. They mark it on a map and say it's about four hundred metres on, just past the National Palace. These sound like great directions and it's only when I'm back in the thick of the crowd that I realize that I can't see any street signs because of the crowd, that everything in this country looks like a national palace to me, and I couldn't read the words National Palace in Khmer if they were suspended on a two metre wide banner over my head. Which they probably are, but it's getting kind of dark now.

The river is on the right and I can see incredibly decorated barges sailing back and forth. Each barge has a superstructure which must be the height of a three-storey building, depicting a temple or a Buddha or a goddess, all illuminated with electric lights, probably LEDs judging by the precision and brightness of the lettering and designs. This festival dates back at least to the eleventh century and probably to the seventh, so at one time these boats must have been decorated with candles or bonfires or something. I pass something that looks like it could be a national palace, so I study my map. Wait, according to this map, either the FCC is on the other side of the street, in the other direction, or the person marked the map incorrectly. I think the last. I make my way to the sidewalk and ask again. A "European" (actually, judging by the accent, a southern United Statesian) is in earshot of my question and he knows where the FCC is. I suspect that my informant's "everybody" (who knows where the FCC is) consists of all European-descended people who have been in Phnom Penh more than two days. He didn't consider that I was going to ask locals. Silly Aviatrix. I'm told now that the FCC is about another block on, on the right, big white building, can't miss it. So I relax about being able to find it and struggle slowly through the crowd, appreciating the festival for a bit longer. It's remarkable how quickly it gets dark in the tropics. Fireworks start over the river. I know I'm late now, as part of the purpose of going to the FCC was to see the fireworks from their balcony. I hope they aren't worried about me.

After what I'm sure is well over four hundred metres past the tourist place and more than a block past the American, I still haven't found a big white building that says FCC or Foreign Correspondents' Club, so I ask again, this time smartening up and asking a white person. A New Zealand accent tells me that it's back the way I came, "You could miss it." This time I don't. It's easier to see from this direction, being kind of halfway around the corner onto the side street. By the time I arrive, everyone has pretty much finished their dinners. Some people were worried about me, but the group leader knew me well enough that he was fully confident I'd turn up eventually, so it wasn't too bad. I apologize for my tardiness and get a great meal out of sampling other people's leftovers. There are geckos running across the ceiling eating bugs. I wonder if they would have liked my spicy roasted crickets.

We all walk home together, as it's now much too crowded to get any kind of taxi or tuk-tuk down here. We start out on some back roads, which aren't too bad, and must have been the way the other walking party came, but then we merge with the main road and it's even more packed than it was on the way down. Now it's like the area in front of the stage at a concert, hot, everyone pressed up against one another and happy, smiling. Lots of people step on my feet, but they're all wearing sandals or thongs and they don't weigh very much. The motorcycle going over my toes is going to leave a mark, though. It gets to a point where we can hardly move at all. We've been trying to go the short half block from the main street to our hotel street for over half an hour. It's disconcerting when I realize that there are some food vending carts in the crowd--and I know the technology they use to heat things on the card is concrete pots of hot coals. We're packed tightly enough that there could be a real problem here. I don't know enough to Khmer to be able to yell something useful to prevent people from pushing forward if there was fire, or a child fallen, or something. There's a car embedded in the crowd near me. I could jump on it and grab children up to safety, hope people understood. I know how to say "Help me," and as there are no noun or pronoun cases in the language and it follows strict SVO word order, I can reverse that to declare "I help." A siren starts to wail and I realize that one of the embedded vehicles is an ambulance. There's not a chance of it moving. There's nowhere to get out of the way. People walking with bicycles or astride motos make it impossible for the crowd to push sideways, and there isn't any room anyway. We're already right out to the sides of the street. "Now you see why I was late!" I explain to the people still within earshot, but admit that it wasn't this bad on the way down.

We all get home safely and watch the crowd, festive searchlights, and more fireworks from the roof of our hotel.

Tom Jaine finds inspiration for adventurous and everyday cooks alike

No subject area excites designers and their cohorts to a higher state of ecstasy than cookery: full-page photographs on every spread, coloured type, textured paper, tricksy formats and rubbish legibility leaves them trembling at their desks, but hinders the involvement of the reader with the writer. Which bright spark at Conran Octopus determined that David Thompson's Thai Street Food (£40) would be so large that it would never fit a bookcase? That, when open, it would cover most of the kitchen table on which you are meant to be pounding, chopping and blending? The book itself is first-class. Few people will cook much of what Thompson describes: the materials are hard to come by, the techniques are often not domestic, but the value of his record of a subculture (which, counterintuitively, is of very recent origin) is great.

Meanwhile Phaidon have done their worst with René Redzepi's Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine (£35). Undeniably handsome, it offers a stay-at-home glimpse of the intellectual underpinnings of this year's world's best restaurant. Chef Redzepi's exploration of the true meaning of local food and sympathetic, seasonal construction of dishes will send many readers off to their markets, hedgerows and gardens, but don't expect to get much culinary help from him. Once you're through the introductory matter (not to be missed), there are a hundred full-page photographs (without captions) of bits and bobs, mood-enhancers, and finished dishes that give gastro-porn a bad name. After that, the recipes. Some you might try (just), others might inspire, others will have you searching shelves for sea lettuce, Cladonia lichen, Grise Bonne pears, birch wood chips or wild chervil. Still more will leave you looking for the Thermomix, the Pacojet and sundry other gadgets. A present for the cook who likes a project.

These irritations are assuaged by the stand-out book of the season, for its virtues of no photographs, white paper and seemly typography. F Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen, Its Traditions and Recipes (Birlinn, £20) is a classic from 1929, introduced and edited by the Scottish writer Catherine Brown. A hundred ways with a neep may excite a few and depress many, but McNeill's use of quotation and description to portray a nation's food ways is artful and delightful. The recipes, as used to be the way, are generally laconic and require a cook to use the brain.

That organ is not in overdrive when following Jamie Oliver's instructions in Jamie's 30 Minute Meals (Penguin, £26). It promises a revolutionary approach, but seems merely to suggest trolling the supermarket shelves to buy as much as possible half-prepared, pre-washed and processed. This should have been a promotional booklet from one of the big four, whose tyranny over us is close to Orwellian.

Not many books this season concentrate on a particular subject beyond the personality of their author. Two exceptions are garden-centred. Nigel Slater's Tender: Volume II, A Cook's Guide to the Fruit Garden (Fourth Estate, £30) carries on where his first volume covered vegetables. His recipes are really very good, and as this covers fruit and nuts, there is welcome respite from the constant Mediterranean/Oriental tendency of most modern work. Then there is Stephanie Alexander from Australia's Kitchen Garden Companion (Quadrille, £30), which has growing instructions and comments in similar vein to Slater's (but not so artistic), followed up by a heap of recipes (which are not so simple). Alexander's previous Cook's Companion has a very high status in our house for its scope and imaginative take on a thousand ingredients (she will always have something useful to say), so I am sure this will be used with pleasure. For ease and directness, however, Slater has the edge.

Cookbooks often work to two paradigms. One is the dedicated enthusiast, willing to shop, search, source, chop, sniff, wait, work and dream until the masterwork emerges to boundless admiration. The other, the slightly put-upon soul whose task is to produce sustenance each day, every day, week in, week out. The two may mingle in many combinations, but this year the second has been well served by inventive collections of creative yet practical dishes from the likes of Sarah Raven, Rose Prince and Diana Henry. The curious cook was also lucky to have Yotam Ottolenghi's second book Plenty (Ebury, £25), which expresses to perfection our kitchen zeitgeist in this multi-cultural, demi-veg era, and to have his or her horizons broadened by Niki Segnit's Flavour Thesaurus (Bloomsbury £18.99), which miraculously broke out of the recipe straitjacket to range free over a thousand flavour combinations that could provoke a decade of furious cooking. Back to the daily round of meal production, the chef Skye Gyngell has written How I Cook (Quadrille, £25). The recipes are disarmingly simple but extremely appetising, and her practical advice is sound: a good book for the beginner with aspirations, dealing in clean and upfront flavours. Another general collection, this time of greater range and complexity, is Josceline Dimbleby's Orchards in the Oasis (Quadrille, £25). This is just great. She has welded a memoir to a cookery book, and it works. Her tone, thank the Lord, is unpresuming, but her life has been full of thrills, from an ambassadorial childhood in Syria and Peru, to motherhood in south Devon and travels hither and yon. She is an inveterate hoarder, so her scrapbooks have been raided for illustrations which, for once, are a delight. Long practice ensures that her recipes are sound.

I would like to rumble longer about soup books that have hopeless recipes for stock; pig books with no instructions for making bacon, sausages or hams; the decontexualisation of Elizabeth David into a "best of . . ." with full-page photography when you can buy the real thing unmediated from Grub Street; or the author who writes inanely: "I don't really feel a kitchen is mine until I've cooked a chicken there"; but I'll close with cheerful endorsement of Mark Hix's Hix Oyster and Chop House (Quadrille, £25), which has bold and muscular recipes that will feed the inner diner and, finally, Stephen Markwick and Fiona Beckett's A Well-Run Kitchen (Culinaria, £12). At this point, I should declare a professional interest, as we used to work together. Markwick has fed Bristol for more than 20 years, most recently at his restaurant Culinaria, from where you can buy this book (www.culinariabristol.co.uk). The recipes come out of Elizabeth David via George Perry-Smith and Joyce Molyneux. Everyone can cook them, and they result in much admiration and much happiness. You can't ask for more.

To order any of these titles call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846

Iona's picks of good and bad PR today. Enjoy!

Good PR
A lot of good PR jostling for poll position in the race for today’s award, but the lucky winner is Jamie Oliver.

The naked chef has topped £100 million pounds in book sales, making him the UK’s second best top selling author, after J.K. Rowling. His most recent cook book, Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals, sold almost 80,000 copies last week alone.

Publisher penguin called the figures “amazing”, whilst the kitchen crusader is said to be “delighted” with the news. Bit of an understatement I feel, especially in the pricey run up to Christmas.

Pukka job Jamie, pukka job indeed...

Bad PR
A big PR thumbs down to supermarket giant Tesco today after a woman found a live giant Egyptian grasshopper nestled amongst her salad which she had purchased from a branch of the superstore in Lewes.

The unnamed shopper was about to sit down for a healthy lunch when she noticed the three-inch insect alive and well, after surviving the arduous journey from Egypt.


The female Egyptian grasshopper- what a corker!

Showing admirable calm under insect pressure, the woman handed the grasshopper in to the RSPCA, where ‘she is in excellent health and settling into her new home, where we hope she will be very happy’ (the grasshopper, not the unnamed shopper...)

Wow, after that last line, I think I have just launched my new career as a poet/rapper...

Happy Thanksgiving! What are you most thankful for this year?

Two turkeys are thankful for their lives.

President Obama offered the traditional presidential pardon to two 45-pound gobblers named Apple and Cider Wednesday morning at the White House Rose Garden. The 21-week-old birds were chosen out of 20,000 feather-flocked applicants. Apple is the official National Thanksgiving Turkey, and Cider will serve as a backup. The two pardoned birds will spend the remainder of their lives at George Washington’s estate in Mount Vernon.

Later in the afternoon, the President, along with First Lady Michelle, daughters Sasha and Malia, and First Grandmother Marian Robinson volunteered at Martha’s Table in downtown Washington. The First Family passed out Thanksgiving staples such as stuffing, sides, and turkeys that were less fortunate than Apple and Cider.

Last-minute help for Thanksgiving

Sometimes no matter how much you plan, things just fall through. Or, sometimes you’re just so busy, you put things off until the last minute. Or, maybe you’re just feeling a little lazy this year. Whatever the reason, here are some resources for those of you looking for last-minute recipes, places for Thanksgiving take-out, or organizations that are still in need of volunteers.

• Thanksgiving recipes and cocktails
• Thanksgiving menu from food bloggers
• Video - Prepare the perfect turkey
• Restaurants, Thanksgiving take-out, places to volunteer
• 10 Thanksgiving dinners for less than $30
• Last-minute Turkey prices and Thanksgiving hours at grocery stores
• Chefs share Thanksgiving tips and what they’re thankful for

In other food and restaurant news....

• Chef R.J. Cooper of the forthcoming Rogue 24 is the challenger in this season’s debut of Food Network’s Iron Chef America, scheduled to air this Sunday, Nov. 28 at 9 p.m. Cooper will be hosting a viewing party at Long View Gallery from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m. on Sunday. He, along with Chef David Guas of the recently opened Bayou Bakery, Cathal Armstrong of Restaurant Eve, and Robert Wiedmaier of Marcel’s will be preparing hors d’oeuvres for guests, while PX Lounge’s Todd Thrasher mixes up cocktails. A $50 donation is required to attend. All of the proceeds will go to Chefs as Parents, an organization dedicated to improving school lunch programs.

• The cafe side of Clarendon’s IOTA Club and Cafe now serves lunch. The 16-year-old bar and live music venue increased its hours and expanded its menu, which now includes a variety of sandwiches and vegetarian options for the mid-day meal. (TBD)

• Construction on Crumbs Bake Shop in Clarendon is almost complete. Additional work on the interior needs to be done. The company is hoping to open by Christmas. The New York-based bakery recently debuted their first District location at 604 11th St. NW. (ARLnow)

• Frozen yogurt will be overflowing out of Arlington next year.  D.C. frozen yogurt chain FroZenYo is planning to open locations in Rosslyn, Ballston, and Crystal City. Specific addresses haven’t been disclosed yet, however, all three are expected to open in 2011. The company has locations in Friendship Heights, Columbia Heights, and near Metro Center. (TBD)

• Panera Bread opens its second ‘pay what you can’ store in Dearborn, Mich. The bakery and cafe launched a non-profit Panera restaurant with the same menu as all of its other stores earlier this year in Clayton, Mo. The non-profit store allows customers to pay whatever they want for their meals. There are no cash registers, just donation boxes. According to Panera co-founder Ron Shaich, the company began the social experiment as a way to address societal needs and to make a direct impact in the community. In the Clayton store, Shaich says, “about 20% of customers leave more than the suggested donation, about 60% leave what's suggested and about 20% leave less.” The company is planning to open a third Panera non-profit near Portland Ore. in January. (NPR)

From TBD’s Community Network

• Metrocurean: 701’s Lunch and Dinner Deals
• Gut Check: Just a taste: Michel
• The Hill is Home: First Bite - Ba Bay
• DC-Wrapped Dates: Veritas

Plan Ahead -- This week’s food and drink events

• Nov. 25 -- All-Day Happy Hour at La Tasca
• Nov. 26-27 -- Flamenco Dinner and Show

Sweet Deals

• Free download: Martha Stewart’s Thanksgiving Hotline cookbook

Today's food trucks...

Christmas Top Toys Include Lego's City Airport Money High Street Christmas top presents this year include Lego's City Airport, Jamie Oliver's 30 minute meals and music from Cheryl Cole and Susan Boyle, shop online with ...

It's a grand tradition here at Chicagoist to share some great recipes with our readers. Sometimes, we call all the chefs we know and ask them for advice, and sometimes we raid our cookbook shelves. This year, we are keeping it in the family. Sometimes the foodie side of the staff (read: Anthony) forgets that most of the non-food-writers here at the Chicagoist home offices are just as good in the kitchen as than they are. One of the reasons we love this tradition so much is that it lets the rest of the staff have a moment at the stove, and we hope you enjoy their offerings as much as we do.

Wherever you'll be this year, at home or away, with family, friends or by yourself, we here at Chicagoist hope you have a tasty and satisfying Thanksgiving holiday.

Laura Browning's Comprehensively Stuffed Squash
from the original Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen

This recipe is a satisfying main course for vegetarians, but you may have to fight the omnivores for it, as they'll be sneaking it onto their plates as a side dish. Replace the butter with olive oil and voila, it's vegan. (I never put the cheese in it anyway -- it's perfect without cheese, and that is not something I say lightly).

2 medium-sized winter squash, halved and prebaked
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup minced onion
1/2 lb mushrooms, minced
1 large clove garlic, minced
1 stalk celery, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt
lots of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon sage
1/2 teaspoon thyme
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 cup minced walnuts
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup raisins (optional)
2 cups good bread crumbs (from good bread)
6 to 8 dried apricots
1 cup (packed) grated cheddar (entirely optional)

Preheat oven to 350F. Melt the butter in a large skillet. Add onion, and saute over medium heat for about 5 minutes, or until the onion is translucent. Add mushrooms, garlic celery, and seasonings, and saute about 10 minutes, until everything is tender and well mingled. Stir in remaining ingredients and mix well. Taste to correct seasonings. Fill the prebaked squash and bake, covered, until heated through (20 to 30 minutes).

Betsy Mikel's Roasted Pear Salad

This Roasted Pear Salad is adapted from one I clipped in my Sunday Tribune coupon inserts. It said to use Marzetti brand dressing, but I'm sure any kind will do.

1 cup Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing, divided
1/3 cup brown sugar
¼ cup chopped pecans
4 ounces blue cheese
¼ dried cherries, finely chopped
3 firm pairs
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
8 ounces lettuce

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix ¾ cups of dressing and sugar in covered pan over low heat until sugar is dissolved. Set aside. Place pecans in skillet and toast over medium heat. Set aside. Once cool, mix with cherries and blue cheese. Set filling aside.

Slice pears in half lengthwise and remove cores to make room for filling. Place the pears in a baking dish and sprinkle with lemon juice. Spoon filling into pears and sprinkle some balsamic vinaigrette on and around them. Bake until tender, about 30 minutes and baste 3-4 times while baking. Once finishing baking, toss lettuce with more balsamic vinaigrette and arrange with pears. Spoon brown sugar pan drippings over the top.

Carrie's Green Bean Casserole
I'm a sucker for green bean casserole but prefer using fresh ingredients and taking a few of the shortcuts out to make from scratch. Here's a recipe I'm working off of from Alton Brown. Instead of regular yellow or white onions, try shallots and add in a few more varieties of mushrooms for a greater depth in flavor. I like crimini and shitakes. Your local grocery store may also carry packaged wild mushrooms to help save some time.

For the topping:
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons panko bread crumbs
1 teaspoon kosher salt

For beans and sauce:
2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt, divided
1 pound fresh green beans, rinsed, trimmed and halved
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
12 ounces mushrooms, trimmed and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup half-and-half

Preheat the oven to 475 degrees F. Combine the onions, flour, panko and salt in a large mixing bowl and toss to combine. Coat a sheet pan with nonstick cooking spray and evenly spread the onions on the pan. Place the pan on the middle rack of the oven and bake until golden brown, approximately 30 minutes. Toss the onions 2 to 3 times during cooking. Once done, remove from the oven and set aside until ready to use. Turn the oven down to 400 degrees F.

While the onions are cooking, prepare the beans. Bring a gallon of water and 2 tablespoons of salt to a boil in an 8-quart saucepan. Add the beans and blanch for 5 minutes. Drain in a colander and immediately plunge the beans into a large bowl of ice water to stop the cooking. Drain and set aside.

Melt the butter in a 12-inch cast iron skillet set over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms, 1 teaspoon salt and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms begin to give up some of their liquid, approximately 4 to 5 minutes. Add the garlic and nutmeg and continue to cook for another 1 to 2 minutes. Sprinkle the flour over the mixture and stir to combine. Cook for 1 minute. Add the broth and simmer for 1 minute. Decrease the heat to medium-low and add the half-and-half. Cook until the mixture thickens, stirring occasionally, approximately 6 to 8 minutes.

Remove from the heat and stir in 1/4 of the onions and all of the green beans. Top with the remaining onions. Place into the oven and bake until bubbly, approximately 15 minutes. Remove and serve immediately.

Caitlin Roth's Prosciutto-Wrapped Asparagus

Problem: My vegetables are boring.
Solution: Wrap some pork products around them.

1-1.5 pounds of asparagus
Olive oil
3 cloves of garlic, pressed (or peeled and minced)
Cracked black pepper, freshly ground
10-12 thinly sliced strips of prosciutto

Clean and cut the woody ends off the asparagus. Lay flat on a baking sheet. Drizzle olive oil over the asparagus and toss until covered. Realign asparagus onto the baking sheet. Spread the garlic evenly over the top, and top with cracked black pepper.

Roast the asparagus for 20-25 minutes, or until bright green and the skin starts to wrinkle slightly. Bring out and allow to cool enough to handle. Cut the prosciutto lengthwise into thin strips. Wind the prosciutto around each asparagus spear like a Maypole. Tuck the ends under to secure.

Kimberly's Pumpkin Whoopies
For a different take on the pumpkin dessert, a Pumpkin Whoopie is a nice choice. It's a low-key homey cookie that fits in especially well at the Thanksgiving meals you might have with your friends/urban tribe.

2 cups brown sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
1-1/2 cup cooked, mashed pumpkin, canned pumpkin works
2 eggs
3 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1-1/2 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/2 tablespoon ground ginger
1/2 tablespoon ground cloves

Whoopie Filling:
1 egg white
2 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups confectioners' sugar
3/4 cup shortening

Preheat oven to 350º F. Lightly grease baking sheets.

Combine the oil and brown sugar. Mix in the pumpkin and eggs, beating well. Add flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, vanilla, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Mix well. Drop dough by heaping tsp. onto prepared baking sheets.

Bake for 10 - 12 minutes. Let cookies cool then sandwich the filling between two cookies.

Have I mentioned the large pile of review books that has been steadily growing taller in my house? I am so behind! I usually try to "road test" at least four to five recipes from each book before reviewing, but time is not on my side so you may see some reviews with one or two recipes as I struggle to catch up. This little cookbook, "Simple Comforts: 50 Heart Warming Recipes" by Sur la Table made it's way to the top of the pile this week and I'm glad it did as it produced a delicious, sunny-hued bowl of Kabocha Squash Soup with Toasted Cumin and Chiles, that we will talk more about in a minute. "Comfort Foods" says, "The Japanese kabocha squash is squat and round, and has nubby, dark green skin and dense, sweet flesh. Use a large heavy chef's knife to cut the squash into big chunks. Because the skin is too thick and brittle to peel, the squash is cooked and then the flesh is scooped from the skin. Pureed with coconut milk, it makes a rich, golden soup. Balance the richness with a generous addition of fresh lime juice, slivered chiles, and a shower of chopped cilantro."

Filed under: Reality-Free, Features

We can all agree that Food Network has changed over the years, right? What was once a network filled with shows that taught you how to cook (oh, I still miss Sara Moulton's 'Cooking Live' so, so much) has turned into a channel with more competition and reality shows than shows that teach you anything.

Sure, there are still many shows on the network that show you how to create a meal -- '30 Minute Meals,' 'The Barefoot Contessa,' 'Everyday Italian' and others -- but the other shows get all the attention. There's a lot of great stuff on Food Network (as Allison Waldman noted in her list of 10 best Food Network shows), but also a lot of terrible stuff.

Here are my choices for the very worst of the worst shows on Food Network. I'm not sure what you might be surprised by more though, what is included on the list or a certain show that isn't.

 

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Observer Food Monthly's picks of the year: perfect presents for the foodie in your life

• Click here to order any of the books below at a discount with free UK p&p;

1 Eat Tweet: Maureen Evans (Artisan, £12.99)

The anti-cookbook cookbook. No evocative prose here, just 1,020 recipes boiled down to 140 characters or less. For people who don't read much.

2 Kitchenella: Rose Prince (4th Estate, £26)

"A book about feminine cookery" and treatise against the "phoney cooking" of celebrity chefs, but full of family-friendly meals. The lack of pictures might irritate some, but that kind of attitude is what this book sets itself against.

3 Biscotti Mona Talbott & Mirella Misenti (The Little Bookroom, £9.99)

As you'd expect from a book with a foreword by Alice Walters, its recipes are sustainable yet delicious – 50 types of Italian cookies from pine nut and rosemary to honey and cardamom.

4 Food From Many Greek Kitchens:Tessa Kiros (Murdoch, £25)

If you can see past the turquoise typefaces, you'll find delicious dishes from a relatively under-plundered cuisine.

5 Leon Book 2: Henry Dimbleby & John Vincent (Conran, £20)

Subtitled Naturally Fast Food, this is one for anyone who needs weaning off ready meals. The jazzy layout often disguises quite challenging projects.

6 Reinventing Food: Ferran Adria, Colman Andrews (Phaidon, £19.95)

Meticulous biography of the Catalan chef who makes Heston Blumenthal look a bit slapdash.

7 Jamie's 30 Minute Meals: Jamie Oliver (Penguin/Michael Joseph, £26)

For the friend who doesn't have the time, money or inclination to cook – most decent chefs would be happy if they turned these meals out in an hour.

8 Whoopie Pie Book: Claire Ptak (Square Peg, £15)

Whoopie pies are the new cupcakes – a cookie-cream sandwich invented by the Amish. Ptak, is their chief evangelist – she's the owner of east London's Violet cakes, a graduate of Chez Panisse and Jamie Oliver's "favourite cake maker".

9 Canteen: Cass Titcombe, Dominic Lake & Patrick Clayton-Malone (Ebury, £16.99)

Uncomplicated British comfort food without a twist. For anyone who needs a refresher course on the classics.

10 Keys to Good Cooking:Harold McGee (Hodder & Stoughton, £25)

If all the other books on this list are the How?, then this is the Why? If you want to know why cakes collapse, sauces separate and why you shouldn't serve fresh oysters, then Harold McGee is your man.

11 Curry Easy: Madhur Jaffrey (Ebury, £20)

The latest volume from the most trusted of Indian food writers, featuring new, speedier, simplified recipes that don't compromise on taste or authenticity.

12 The Flavour Thesaurus: Niki Segnit (Bloomsbury, £18.99)

Something different for your pal with a fridge-full of cookbooks. A forensic yet fun exploration of flavour combinations and why they work, from the usual (lamb and mint) to the unlikely (watermelon and oyster).

13 My Kitchen, Real Food From Near and Far: Stevie Parle (Quadrille, £14.99)

At last month's OFM Awards our panel named 25-year-old Parle Young Chef of the Year. This collection draws on his time travelling in the east, Morocco and Ireland, and working in Britain. If he wasn't so fresh-faced we'd suspect him of lying about his age.

14 Momofuku: David Chang (Absolute Press, £25)

Chang runs five of the hippest restaurants in the world, all in New York – where he creates "bad pseudo-fusion cuisine" such as shaved foie gras, and pork belly ssäm with mustard seed sauce. It's so tricky to get a reservation that cooking your own approximation might be the closest you get.

15 Mexican Food Made Simple: Thomasina Miers (Hodder & Stoughton, £20)

Mexican food has a bad rep. With dishes such as oriental ceviche and courgette flower omelette with ricotta and tarragon, this book will transform your view.

16 Liquid Memory: Jonathan Nossiter (Atlantic, £14.99)

Written by a film director and ex-sommelier, a spirited critique of the globalised wine industry that caters to American tastes at the expense of terroir – the soul and sense of place of a wine.

17 Quay: Peter Gilmore (Murdoch, £35)

A beautifully produced tome that will be more at home on a coffee table than a butcher's block. The book of the feted Sydney restaurant features dishes such as "slow braised Berkshire pig jowl, maltose crackling, prunes, soubise cream perfumed with prune kernel oil" and another that uses 20 varieties of radish and turnip.

18 Cook: Rebecca Seal (Guardian, £25)

OFM's very own book! Introduced by Nigel Slater and Jay Rayner, a compendium of seasonal recipes from Britain's greatest chefs – Giorgio Locatelli, Mark Hix, Claude Bosi and many others.

19 How I Cook: Skye Gyngell (Quadrille, £25)

From Petersham Nurseries' doyenne, recipes that reach their optimal deliciousness if eaten al fresco, on a summer's evening, with scented candles on the table.

20 Plenty: Yotam Ottolenghi (Ebury, £25)

The chef who has reinvented vegetarian cuisine as sexy and decadent – so ideal for all your sexy, decadent vegetarian friends.

21 Thai Street Food: David Thompson (Conran, £40)

Take advantage of the Michelin-starred chef's trawl for the best of Bangkok's street vendors. Follow the precise, authentic recipes and the results will be better than your local Thai. Probably.

22 Noma: René Redzepi (Phaidon, £35)

Named this year as the best restaurant in the world, even its oak chairs have been smoked for seven hours. Only the most ambitious would attempt these amazing amalgams, but there's plenty of pleasure to be had from looking at the pictures. For the kitchen confident.

23 Tender II: Nigel Slater (4th Estate, £30)

Subtitled "a cook's guide to the fruit garden" this is the companion book to the successful vegetable volume. Seasonally organised, with succulent prose.

24 The French Menu Cookbook: Richard Olney (Collins, £20)

Earlier this year, OFM's expert panel voted this the best cookbook of all time. Only problem was it was out of print. But it has been reissued, so now everyone can delight in Olney's passionate, idiosyncratic rendering of French cuisine.

25 At Elizabeth David's Table: Elizabeth David (Michael Joseph, £25)

Elizabeth David's original, seminal cookbooks didn't contain any photography – so this greatest hits compilation is a wonderful introduction to one of the greatest cookery writers.

• Click here to order any of the books below at a discount with free UK p&p;

by Bonnie Azab Powell.

Like my colleague Tom Philpott, I believe that cooking “from scratch” doesn’t have to be either intimidating or onerous. Tom is a much better cook than I am, but I’m not going to let that stop me from sharing some of the simple meals I make from local, seasonal ingredients in this Everyday Ethicurean series.

I’m lucky enough to live in Northern California, so 90 percent of what I eat comes from local farms or the raised beds in my backyard. But like this guy, I am no locavore saint. I also buy California produce from the supermarket, because I have a full-time job, two part-time jobs, a baby, and a pretty restricted household budget. In this column, I’ll show you how I go about feeding myself well despite my limited time and money (and skills).

Half the battle about cooking, I’ve found, is mental. Instead of starting with some complicated recipe and buying all the ingredients for it, like I used to, I now decide what to make based on whatever is threatening to rot in my fridge or my garden. If I need inspiration, I’ll then look up whatever it is in the index of my two trusty Mark Bittman cookbooks (How to Cook Everything—which is now available as a terrific iPhone app, only $5—and The Best Recipes in the World, which has lots of unusual dishes that would never occur to me), one of the other 30 or so cookbooks I own, or the couple of food blogs I like and trust. I tend not to just Google “X and recipe”—I’ve been burned too many times on mis-typed ingredients. 

Right now I have a thriving bed of Swiss chard and a glut of backyard tomatoes. Yes, in November. That’s because I didn’t get around to planting them until May, because of the aforementioned baby. I got a few in early September and then a whole bunch of green ones sat there on the vines (I trellised them) until someone told me to stop watering them. It worked: in late October, they finally turned red. Alas, they’re not great tomatoes. The big heirloom Brandywines are pretty flavorful, but the others are mostly mealy. Still, they’re mine, and they’re free, compared with $3.50 to $4 per pound for the organic tomatoes at the farmers market all summer. I’ve already canned some, made sauce with others, and eaten a lot of tomato sandwiches.

Using what you have, frugally, also means putting stuff by. This summer I grew a lot of basil and other herbs, so I made a lot of pesto—both a straight basil one, and a parsley and sage one, using walnuts, which are local and way cheaper than pine nuts. Stored in the fridge in jars with a layer of oil on top, or frozen in ice cubes, pesto is great for quick pastas or sauces for chicken and fish. The 10 minutes you spend washing the herbs, drying them, and combining with garlic, oil, salt, and nuts will be more than repaid later in time saved. And growing herbs is easy and way cheaper than buying them, especially when you only need a teaspoon here and there.

Wednesday I was having a friend over for dinner, so I wanted to do something a little fancy. I’d been intending to try this “Savory Sweet Potato and Poblano Rustic Tart” that April McGreger wrote about for Grist, so I’d already made and frozen some pie crusts. Using Bittman’s recipe and the food processor, it takes all of five minutes, but if you make them ahead, you can just defrost in the fridge in the morning and be ready to go by dinner.

The result was this “Rustic Tomato and Chard Tart,” which I served with Tom Philpott’s “Butternut Squash Soup with Sautéed Greens.” (What makes a tart “rustic”? The freeform shape—no futzing with pie pans.)

You can make one with just about any fall/winter vegetable and cheese combination, and it will be delicious. As my friend said, “You could put an old shoe on this pie crust, and I would eat it.”

Share your concoctions in the comments to inspire me, please!

 

Rustic Tomato and Chard Tart

Serves two greedy people as an entrée or four as an appetizer  

1 flaky pie crust, uncooked (I like this easy Mark Bittman recipe)
Two medium-size tomatoes, sliced
Four or five large leaves of Swiss chard (spinach would be good, too)
About one-fourth cup of feta cheese, crumbled
1 clove garlic, diced
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary or other savory herb (dried is OK)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 or 2 tablespoons basil pesto (or any other herb)
Splash white wine vinegar
Flour for rolling out crust
Salt to taste
Basil for garnish, cut into ribbons

Preheat oven to 400. Line a pizza pan or cookie sheet with parchment paper. Dust a cutting board or counter top with the flour, then sprinkle half the rosemary (or whatever herb you’re using) in the flour.

Make sure the pie crust is thawed but still cold, then roll it out into rough circle, incorporating the herb as you go. Carefully transfer to the parchment-lined pan, fold the edges over and press (to contain any juices), then prick with a fork. Pre-bake the naked pie crust for 10 to 15 minutes, or until it’s starting to turn golden. (If you’re making the tart with less watery vegetables or some that need to be cooked, you could skip the pre-baking.)

While it’s baking, cut out the stems from the chard, reserving a few to dice for color and crunch. Slice the leaves into ribbons. Heat the oil and garlic and sauté the stems for a minute or two, then the leaves just enough to wilt them. Splash with a touch of vinegar and salt to taste. Since I was also making Tom’s Squash Soup with Sauteed Greens, I cooked enough chard to go in there as well.

Remove half-cooked tart from oven. Spread with pesto, arrange sliced tomatoes, and sprinkle with salt. Top with chard, feta, remaining rosemary, and a little olive oil. (I use a fork to spatter it on.) Bake for another 15-20 minutes or until crust is deep golden brown. Sprinkle with fresh basil and serve warm.   

Related Links:

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Playing squash: my tweak of an iconic fall soup

A close encounter with China’s sewer-oil trade

A dinosaur hunting weekend on the southern coast of the Isle of Wight turns up more rare fossils than you can poke a pickaxe at

""Wow, look at that! I don't believe it! Isn't it just gaaaawww-jus!" I was standing with Agnieszka on a beach on the south side of the Isle of Wight when she made this exclamation. Her accent was a curious fusion of Björk and Martine McCutcheon and she was flashing a smile so radiant it rivalled the nearby lighthouse. The object of her excitement? A black sliver of rock on the beach. Only this tiny black sliver of rock happened to be the fossilised tooth of a mighty flying pterosaur that passed this way 125 million years ago. I'd been a dinosaur hunter all of five minutes when this discovery was made … and I was hooked.

I confess that when I first stumbled across the Isle of Wight dinosaur weekends run by fossil expert Martin Simpson and his assistant Agnieszka, I was a little sceptical. Although winter is said to be the best time to look as storms reveal new finds, I had visions of hours spent chipping away with one of those miniscule pickaxes Tim Robbins uses in The Shawshank Redemption with only the outside chance of unearthing a bit of amorphous-looking bone to sustain me. What I got instead was a rip-roaring couple of days in the Cretaceous period and a bag of fossils so heavy it nearly did for the rack on my bike on the way home.

I arrived in Cowes on Friday night and settled in at the 150 – a friendly B&B; full of sleek white lines. Martin picked me up the next morning and took me to his dinosaur museum, Dinosaur Farm. Inside, he led me around the collection of finds he has made over the past 30 years, throwing out extraordinary dino-tidbits (who knew that the brain of the tyrannosaurus rex was smaller than any one of its teeth?) and introducing me to Agnieszka, who took me the short distance to the beach and our date with a pterosaur tooth. As we wandered along, she told me what to look out for, helped me out with the occasional, "Ooh, now do you see anything interesting 'just there?" and imparted some nugget of knowledge on each new find. Our fossil haul soon included coral, oyster shells, snail shells and the fin spine of a shark – all more than 100 million years old. For her next trick she picked up two pieces of fool's gold and showed me how to make sparks by striking them together, before urging me up the cliffs in search of Isle of Wight diamonds (or, less romantically, selenite crystals). I found a couple, entirely unaided, which made me beam like a child.

I was still smiling inside when I met Martin for lunch in a nearby cafe. Universally known as the "fossil man", he shares his house with 46,000 of the things and once swapped his car for a mammoth tusk, as you do. He told me that the island's southern coast is losing around a metre of its sandstone cliffs to the sea each year, so more fossils are being exposed all the time.

No fewer than 29 dinosaurs have been found here over the years – Charles Darwin himself popped over before penning On the Origin of Species – which has given rise to the nickname dinosaur island.

Taking advantage of my luck in choosing the weekend of the lowest tide of the year, I ventured with Martin in the direction of France and almost immediately we came across the perfectly formed cast of an iguanodon's foot. And then another. And then another. We even discovered the smaller foot cast of a rarer dinosaur. "Possibly an allosaurus," Martin mused, "they were only 30ft long."

So not utterly terrifying then. Jumping from trunk to trunk of a fossilised forest, we swished the seaweed back with our hands in search of dinosaur bones. "They look like small jet black rocks and are patterned like the inside of a Crunchie bar," he said. I suffered the indignity of having the end of my finger nipped by a miniscule pea crab but Martin came up trumps and donated the bones we found to my burgeoning collection.

But the best was saved for last. Refreshed by a night on the town in Cowes, I returned with my guides to a third beach where, somewhat alarmingly, small chunks of cliff tumbled down before our very eyes.

Entirely unfazed, Martin and Agnieszka began scanning the strand and within a minute we found an ammonite that yesterday's tide had uncovered for the first time in 115 million years. Rather than forming a beautiful ribbed circle, however, the spiral on this one was uncurled at the end. "That's pretty rare," purred Martin. "How rare exactly?" I asked. "Oh, there are probably fewer than 50 of these in museums throughout the world," he replied nonchalantly.

The discoveries then came thick and fast. Fossilised clams and lobsters, an ammonite full of crystal, an ammonite made of fool's gold, a tiny shark's tooth, and then a "wow!" from Agnieszka alerted us to another choice discovery: a fragment of bone from a plesiosaurus, the Godzilla of marine dinosaurs.

"And what would really top it off," said Martin, "is if we were to find a green calcite ammonite … but that's very unlikely." Then, walking back along the sands to the car, there it was: a green calcite ammonite – a perfectly formed six-inch spiral that was once home to a lowly mollusc. It had evidently been washed in by the sea just a few minutes beforehand, as if to order. Jaws duly dropped.

But my favourite moment of the weekend came after we had stopped looking for fossils. We'd headed off for a celebratory lunch at Seven, a cool cafe-bar in the otherwise somnolent village of Brighstone. I was approached by a gentleman who asked me if I'd seen "the big dinosaur bones poking out of the cliff further up the beach". Intrigued, I went with him to inspect them. "Ah, my friend," I said, wishing I had a beard so that I could stroke it sagely, "what you've found here are so called 'crackers' – calcareous nodules filled with sea snails and the occasional ammonite. Very popular with Victorian collectors, I believe." He thanked me, and walked on, thus missing the sight of me punching the sky and crying a silent, "Yes!"

Watch out, fossil man, I'm only 45,953 fossils behind.

• The Dinosaur hunting weekend (Friday night to Sunday afternoon) is £200 including two nights' at the B&B; 150 and all meals (01983 740844, dinosaurfarm.co.uk). The Red Funnel ferry from Southampton to Cowes (0844 84499898, redfunnel.co.uk) is from £34 return for a car and up to six people, or from £12.60 return on a high-speed foot passenger ferry

More than 1,000 types of insect are eaten in countries around the world. So why are we so squeamish? Carlene Thomas-Bailey talks to a man on a mission to change your mind

He's not a professional chef, but Marc Dennis has hosted a string of surprisingly successful dinner parties, particularly considering what is on the menu. The increasing numbers of guests who gather in his Brooklyn loft have travelled, often long distances, to sample some of his signature dishes, from dry-roasted crickets and deep-fried worms to caramel-glazed, cricket-crunch-coated flan and salted cicadas. "Waxworms are by far the easiest to cook," Dennis says. "You just pop them in the pan, like you would with shrimp or lobster. Add a little bit of butter and garlic, and a minute later they are ready to go. Crickets, on the other hand, take a little bit more work."

Dennis is an entomophagist, otherwise known as someone who eats insects. He is also one of the leading voices in a campaign to get more people in the western world to eat bugs. While 1,400 insect species are eaten in 80% of nations, western populations have so far been reluctant. Yet Dennis believes it's vital that we start considering insects as an alternative source of protein, in order to reduce the emission of harmful gases produced in the raising of livestock. He's not alone: in 2008 the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations held a workshop in Thailand that highlighted insects as an environmentally friendly alternative source of protein, vitamins and minerals.

Which is why, two years ago, Dennis held his first "bug dinner" in Brooklyn and, a year later, launched his website, insectsarefood.com, an online resource for entomophagists, including a selection of insect recipes. Since 2008, Dennis, an artist, professor and amateur chef, has hosted seven dinners in his insect-themed pop-up restaurant. He doesn't charge for the meals – he just wants to spread the word – and says cricket stir-fry is his most popular dish.

Dennis, 45, grew up in Puerto Rico surrounded by lizards and cockroaches, which fed his fascination. These days, he sources his insects from pet shops and farms, as well as breeding some in plastic aquariums in the basement of his property, feeding them on a diet of oats and grains. "For the most part I get my crickets from cricket farms in New Jersey." When he goes to shops, he's often asked what he plans to do with 4,000 crickets. "When I say they are for human consumption, everyone stops and looks at me," he says.

"People view me as extreme, but if anybody studied the amount of methane gases being released into the air by traditional livestock alone, they would think, 'How do we reduce that?' Well, we start by incorporating into our diet different foods that offer us the same, or relatively close, amounts of protein, but no fat." In other words, insects.

"When farming insects, there's absolutely no labour-intensive working, or butchering of animals. There are no veterinarian bills, there's no need for tractors, which reduces fuel, there's no need for ripping up the soil... Also, there is no such thing as mad cricket disease, you know?"

He says the crickets are killed in a humane way. "I put them into a state of hypothermia by leaving them in the refrigerator for half an hour, so they go to sleep, and then putting them in the freezer for another half-hour." As for the waxworms, though: "I cook them live, so that they are fresh. They do wriggle a bit, until you put them into the pan."

In fact, Dennis says, most of us are already unwittingly eating insects every day. "There are a lot of bugs in our food supply that people are unaware of. It's impossible to prevent them getting into the mills or granaries. In any wheat flour, to every 50g, there are 75 insect fragments." But he is quick to admit that not all bugs are good for you. "I always tell people at my dinners, do not go into the corners of your apartment and scrounge up cockroaches to sprinkle on your cereal, or pick insects from your back garden." As with any other food, Dennis suggests getting your insects from a trusted source, so you know how the soil has been treated. "Avoid most brightly coloured insects, too," he adds. "Typically, the colour is a sign to predators to stay away because of a toxin in the body."

As well as high-end dinner parties, Dennis plans to branch out, making cricket flour for crackers and creating a new line in insect snacks. "One of my goals is to create protein bars: Hoppin' Good bars, with crickets, oats, grains and nuts – triple the protein with zero fat content."

Banana worm bread

75g shortening
130g sugar
2 bananas, mashed
300g flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp salt
60g chopped nuts
2 eggs
50g dry-roasted mealworms

Mix together all the ingredients and bake in a greased loaf tin at 180C/350F/gas mark 4 for about one hour.

Cricket fried rice

Serves four to six.

2 large eggs
1 tsp kosher salt
Powdered ginger, to taste
Powdered coriander, to taste
Garlic powder, to taste
1 tsp fresh ground black pepper, or to taste
4 tbsp oil for stir-frying, or as needed
1kg cold cooked brown rice
180g roasted crickets (about 3–4 dozen)
150g chopped spring onions
1½ tbsp light soy sauce or oyster sauce, as desired
125g cooked corn kernels

Lightly beat the eggs with the salt, ginger, coriander, garlic powder and pepper.

Heat a wok or frying pan and add two tablespoons of oil. When the oil is hot, add the egg mixture and cook, stirring, until lightly scrambled but not too dry. Remove the eggs and wipe clean the wok or frying pan.

Add two tablespoons of oil. Add the rice and stir-fry for a few minutes, using a wooden spoon to break it apart. Add the crickets and onions, and stir in soy or oyster sauce as desired. Continue stir-frying for a few more minutes. When the rice is heated through, return the egg to the pan, mix and stir in corn kernels. Serve hot.

Chocolate-dipped candied ginger crickets

Makes 20.

110g high-quality dark chocolate
20 pieces crystallised ginger
20 dry-roasted crickets

Line a plate with parchment paper. Break the chocolate into pieces and put in a microwave-safe bowl. Heat for 30 seconds at 50% power, remove, stir, and continue cooking at 50% power in 10-second increments, stirring after each burst, until the chocolate is melted.

Take a piece of ginger, hold a cricket alongside it and dip the bottom half in melted chocolate. Let the excess drip away. Place each chocolate-dipped ginger and cricket duo on the prepared plate and leave in the fridge until the chocolate sets.

There was a time when I used to post all sorts of stories like the upcoming one. I wonder how many readers remember my infamous Manila posts, my rant about a certain restaurant in London, the origin of the Muqata Wafflemaker or Elvis the Drug Dealer...

Regardless, I don't rant everyday but its time to let off some steam.

Last time I flew to India for business, I brought all my food with me. Not that there's so much Kosher food to eat in India to begin with, but I brought everything: cereal, boxed milk, tuna-fish, pitot, a bunch of manachama (manot chamot) [just add hot water for an instant meal], and bottled water.

I sparingly ate every meal knowing that there was no margin of error, and I didn't want to get stranded without any Kosher food.

After a few days, it was time to fly home to Israel, via London and I was thrilled that I'd have a "normal" kosher meal on the plane, even if it was "airline food".

During check-in, I double checked to ensure that my kosher meal was in fact reserved, and I'd be receiving it on my flight. All was in order.

Luckily for me, this leg of the trip was in business class and I sat in the upper deck of the plane (you'll soon see why this factoid is important for the story)

About 30 minutes into the flight, the stewardess (air-hostess? what's the proper politically correct term?) came by and reassured me that my kosher meal would be ready shortly. My stomach growled in anticipation -- I guess there's something about flights that makes one hungrier than usual, and having spent the week rationing my food, I was famished.

Meal service began.

Meals were given out one at a time, as I hungrily looked on in anticipation...one more minute...and I'd have "normal" food for the first time in a week.

And then, the stewardess smiled and presented my meal to me.

A linen napkin covered tray with steaming hot food, smiled at me.

"Excuse me," I said, "I ordered a Kosher meal."

"This is a Kosher meal," stated the stewardess, as she smiled and pointed to a piece of paper written in Hebrew, Yiddish and English which was neatly lying on the tray.

Shaking my head in hungry disbelief I asked, "didn't you see that the entire tray was wrapped in plastic, with big red letters on it, "ONLY TO BE OPENED BY THE PASSENGER", and that the hot dish of the meal had the same warning on it?"

The stewardess smiled back, "This is India. They didn't want you to feel bad that your meal looked different than everyone else's, so food services opened up your meal, and we heated it up with everyone's food, so you wouldn't feel different than everyone else ."

It took a minute for all this to sink in.

"Do you know that I'm not able to eat this now?" I asked?

The stewardess sighed.

I asked her if she could look out the window of the airplane for a second, and if she could read what it said in big letters on the wing.


"DO NOT WALK OUTSIDE THIS AREA," she read from the wing.

"Exactly!", I said, "Maybe...just maybe someone in the India ground crew thought the wing would 'feel bad,' and walked all over the wing. After all, you can walk on other parts of the airplane, but not that specific part of the wing, and we wouldn't want the wing to feel differently, would we? Even though there's a clear warning on it, how do we know that no one walked all over it?"

The stewardess nodded her head seriously and said, "You're absolutely right. Would you like anything else to eat?"

She managed to find me some fruit and a coke.



Ten minutes later I was surprised when a member of the cockpit crew, perhaps the Captain or Co-pilot walked over to me.

He bent down to talk to me and in a very serious voice said, "We radioed back to Bangalore airport. Apparently, the person you saw walking on the plane's wing was a fuel technician, and he is specially trained where he is allowed to walk on the wing, and where not to walk."

I stared at him in disbelief.

"I didn't say I saw someone walking on the wing," I blurted out, "I was trying to make a point by comparison of my meal to the wing, and how instructions should be listened to..."

The cockpit officer gave me a puzzled look, and said, "I thought you would be happy to know that the person you saw on the wing knew where he was allowed to walk."

"Thank you," I said, "I'm very relieved now," and he turned around going back into the cockpit.

No one seemed to "get it."

And why am I reminded of this now?

I'm going back to India soon, and needed to apply for a visa. The procedure required that I provide my current and expired Israeli passports, as well as my US passport to the Indian Embassy in Tel Aviv.

Now, my US passport was very recently issued and is therefore a "USA Electronic Passport". You can tell from the weird symbol underneath the word "Passport" that this is electronic passport.

The exciting features of an electronic passport include some of the following (but isn't limited to)...

* Securely stored biographical information and digital image that are identical to the information that is visually displayed in the passport;

* Contactless chip/RFID technology that allows the information stored in an Electronic Passport to be read by special chip readers at a close distance; and

* Digital signature technology that is used to verify the authenticity of the data stored on the chip. This technology is commonly used in credit cards and other secure documents using integrated circuits or chips.

Sounds great, right?

Located on the inside back cover (where the electronics are located) is a message in clear, bold, block letters:

THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS SENSITIVE ELECTRONICS:
FOR BEST PERFORMANCE, DO NOT BEND, OR PERFORATE,
OR EXPOSE TO EXTREME TEMPERATURES

Imagine my surprise when I received my Israeli passport with the new visa to India in it and all my other passports...AND THEY WERE ALL STAPLED TOGETHER BY THEIR BACK COVERS.

The "do not perforate" rule doesn't apply to India...(after all, you wouldn't want your passport to "feel bad" that other passports can be perforated, and not new US electronic passports...so who cares what it says...who cares if it ruins the electronics?)

Will this affect the validity of my US passport, now that it has 7 pairs of staple marks in the back cover, probably ruining all the high tech invested in it?

Probably not yet, but I doubt the friendly people in TSA will care or even believe me when I say, "it's not my fault, the Indian embassy in Tel-Aviv did it," as they drag me off to one of those newfangled full body naked scanners.

PS: My travel agent informed me today that the airline I'm flying on from India to London leg of my trip, no longer offers Kosher meals when leaving India. I guess following directions proved to be impossible...




Wherever I am, my blog turns towards Eretz Yisrael טובה הארץ מאד מאד

It all looks so easy on the television. But is it really possible to cook Jamie Oliver's 30-minute recipes in the allotted time – and do they taste any good?

Rogan josh curry with fluffy rice, carrot salad, poppadoms and flatbread

Tester: Tim Hayward

Time spent cooking: 10 mins prep/setup, 30 mins cooking

Time spent clearing up: 45 mins

Stress levels: 6/5

Tastiness: 0/5

Overall rating: 0/5 (but only if I can't use negative numbers)

Find the recipe here

I'll admit I cheated. I watched the Jamie programme right the way through first, worked out that it was a simple veg curry from a premade paste as performed daily in a thousand halls of residence – and then happily bet my editor I could knock it out in 25 mins.

With the oven pre-heated, kettle boiled, everything laid out in place in the kitchen and the laptop on the bench, I made a start and, within three minutes I was hopelessly in the weeds. It should have been obvious that the rhythms and timings of engaging television are not the same as those of a working kitchen. I've got above average knife skills but I couldn't get the onions and squash into the pan anywhere near as quickly as Jamie seemed to, even allowing time for his health and safety lecture on cutting with a knife. The helpful suggestion that 'you can always chuck it in the food processor' was made too late (besides which, I bloody resent spending 20 minutes cleaning it for the sake of a single damn onion and so, I bet, would any other home cook). By the time the spice paste went in I was catching up again but without the commercial break I'd have lost the plot entirely.

To be honest, the individual details of the ensuing debacle are just too depressing to relate. As the closing credits rolled, my kitchen looked like a crime scene. I had enough undercooked curry sludge to feed eight students with no sense of taste and iron stomachs. The rice was burned to the base of the pan, I'd had to skip the chapatis altogether (not juh-patties, Jamie), the pickle tasted like bath cleaner and the salad was reminiscent of something I'd once thrown up after a wedding buffet in 1978. I also owed my editor a fiver. It took just under 45 minutes to clean up the kitchen, after which time on a slow burner, the cauliflower in the rogan josh had become edible. Sadly everything else had liquefied.

Taking into account the amount of food waste, it would have been cheaper, greener, healthier and far more fulfilling to send out for a ruby or buy a Sainsbury's ready version. I have nothing but respect for Jamie and what he's trying to achieve in communicating to the public about cooking. But it's a shame that nobody seems to have bothered to work out what a completely awful experience it's going to be trying to recreate the recipes from this show at home.

Spinach and feta filo pie, cucumber salad, tomato salad and coated icecream

Tester: Tim Lusher

Time spent cooking: 59 minutes

Time spent clearing up: 20 minutes

Stress level: 2/5

Tastiness: 3/5

Overall rating: 3/5

Find the recipe here

There isn't anything remotely difficult about this spinach and feta pie, but I was undone from the start because none of the six local shops I visited sold filo pastry. If you had time for a supermarket run, this wouldn't be a problem, but I had to settle for puff. The result was like a labrador impersonating a chihuahua; my effort related muttishly to the recipe but lacked snap.

Jamie makes the whole thing look so simple, I wonder how I took double the time to make it – I only got the pie in the oven at 28 minutes (he banged on to the dessert at 11 and boshed out all four parts in 28). I'm pretty sure that if I make it again, I'll hit the deadline – it's not a recipe that requires careful measurement (you could do it by eye and improvise) or tricky techniques. Will I bother? It's not a new favourite.

The pie looked plump, golden and appealing in the pan, fresh from the oven, but was stodgy like a huge vegetarian sausage roll – my fault – and was also a little bland because it lacked the cayenne between the filo layers. But the cucumber salad was delicious even without the mint (I discovered too late that the plant in my garden had died) and with flaked chili instead of fresh, and the olive/spring onion combo is a trick I'll reuse. The tomato salad looked beautiful on a slick of blitzed basil (although good luck finding Greek basil).

Perhaps I over-chopped the nuts and chocolate for the ice cream coating. There was no crunch and it had the mouthfeel of something from the bottom of an exotic pet's cage.

The clear-up wasn't too bad but the whole business felt like a big to-do for a quick midweek supper (I have a delicious salmon and noodle dish I can make in four minutes). I reckon it cost about £20 – not bad as the pie would certainly serve four, perhaps the claimed six, although two of us easily saw the salads off. I also now have a huge jar of posh ice cream dust in the larder. I'm going to try it as a crumble topping instead.

Thai red prawn curry with jasmine rice, cucumber salad and a papaya platter

Tester: Susan Smillie

Time spent cooking: 1 hour 10 minutes

Time spent clearing up: 40 minutes

Stress level: 5/5 (though to be fair, it was 3/5 before I started)

Tastiness: 1/5

Overall rating: 0/5

Find the recipe here

Having just come back from a fortnight in south-east Asia I approached Jamie's curry recipe with gusto, although my levels of grumpiness were accelerated by shopping – and shelling out £25 – for the 30-odd ingredients required to make it. I hit the kitchen, following Jamie's instructions to "peel the cucumber in long ribbons over the first 'platter' of the evening" - disregarding the fact that I neither knew what a "speed-peeler" was (er, a peeler it seems) nor own a platter. I just tried to do it fast. So fast in fact, that wasn't until I finished grating my third finger that I spotted his note to "discard the watery core". Oh well.

I chucked my rice on with the two jasmine teabags, doubting the advice to cook for seven minutes and let steam off the hob for seven, blitzed together the ingredients for the curry paste and chucked double the amount of king prawns he specifies into a pan (Eight? I'm wasn't going to all this trouble for eight king prawns). When I tasted the paste, I was struck by how un-currylike it was – but threw it in with the prawns. It smelt pretty good so I remained cautiously – very cautiously – optimistic.

The addition of coconut milk, however, turned it into a huge soup which didn't reduce, even with extra cooking time. The rice, surprisingly, came out pretty well, although I'm not convinced the jasmine teabags added much in the way of flavour. I left them in the rice for the element of surprise. The papaya and banana yoghurt dessert thing was fine, in that it tasted like papaya and banana with yoghurt, though the instruction on the recipe to serve the banana skin-on is clearly mad (and, as the video shows later, wrong).

The curry itself tasted ... weird. Mainly, I put it down to Jamie's addition of two jarred red peppers in oil – red peppers in Thai curry I get; roasted red peppers in oil have a very distinctive taste, which turned the finished dish into an odd Spanish-Thai fusion. My partner in dining said he enjoyed it. Until he got stuck with the washing up and revised his view: "So not worth it".

Ultimately, this mid-week 30-minute against-the-clock extravaganza sucked the joy out of cooking for me. If you need to rush out 30-minute meals, pick something simple to make; if you want an elaborate three courses, cook when you've got time to shop for quality ingredients and the luxury of a few hours in the kitchen to enjoy the cooking.

Piri piri chicken with dressed potatoes, rocket salad and quick Portugese tarts

Tester: Vicky Frost

Time spent cooking: 55 minutes

Time spent clearing up: 45 minutes

Stress levels: 4/5

Tastiness: 3/5 (points deducted for mad spice levels)

Overall rating: 2/5

Find the recipe here

It wasn't a complete disaster – the results were edible, if a bit too fiery for even the super-strong hearted – but it would be a stretch to describe my attempt to cook Jamie's 30-minute dinner as a success. Not least because it took me almost twice as long as it should have done, and made me use every bit of kitchen equipment (and indeed swearwords) in the process.

It's obvious that there's a great big flaw in this 30-minute dinner plan – and that is that nobody (or nobody in their right mind) bakes a pudding for a midweek dinner. The whole hideous battle against time could be alleviated and made more pleasant by just cooking a main course. Except the little Portugese custard tarts were delicious. Of course they'd benefit from a proper custard filling, rather than crème fraiche whisked with an egg, but the pastry method – roll it up into a log with cinammon, cut it into rounds and then squash into a muffin tin – is something I will actually use in the future. When I have enough time to do it justice.

No, my problem wasn't the pudding – it was the main course. The brilliant thing about Jamie's recipes is that you multitask. The rubbish thing is that because you do one thing after another – instead of one thing after a certain number of minutes – if you overrun, things start to get overcooked. Exhibit one: the chicken which managed to end up both too dry and, thanks to a piri piri sauce that even my spice-loving partner was slightly terrified of, far too hot. Think of it like the desert in a dish. With roasted peppers on the side. (Also a thought: the chicken quantities seemed a bit off to me – one chicken thigh per person appeared a wee bit mean.)

And yet other areas seemed to benefit from the delay. The potato salad – the overall winner of the evening and a dish that looks likely to make it into our weeknight dinners most often – was so much better for a extra five minutes of steaming. This is actually worth making: steamed sweet and white potatoes roughly chopped with coriander, chilli, feta and olive oil. It is divine. In fact give me the potato salad, a bit of rocket and a custard tart and I'd quite happily skip the chicken. Which would also, of course, mean I could probably get it made in time.

Every Saturday, we post a piece from the CHG archives. This one is from November 2007.

From The Onion

Yes, she plugs Dunkin Donuts.

Yes, her recipes occasionally don't work. (The applesauce in this one? Takes almost 45 minutes to mushen.)

Yes, she undertips on her $40 a Day show, the nutritional aspects of her 30-Minute Meals are occasionally questionable, and if I hear “yummo” one more time, I’m going to kill a kitten.

Yet, undoubtedly, Rachael Ray is one of the best things to happen to American kitchens in the last 20 years.

Sweet, sweet Anthony Bourdain was pretty rough on her in his Time interview (“She genuinely offends me.”), but I think he might have confused her with She Who Shall Not Be Named. And while some of his criticism was warranted (seriously, WHY is she shilling for Dunkin?), most of it was a wee bit off.

Think about it. No other ‘90s and ‘00s cheflebrity (not even Emeril) has driven average citizens back to their stoves like Ray has. Nor has anyone else made sort-of upscale cooking look as affordable and achievable. Oh, it’s easy to rag on the ear-splitting accent and the kitchen-sinkiness of some of her meals, but Ray-Ray’s good points far outweigh the bad. In fact, let’s break ‘em down:

She encourages fresh ingredients. Though Rachael’s the spokesperson for donuts, Munchkins, and other assorted sugar, her shows nearly always highlight produce and non-processed foods. I’ve never seen her break out a pre-chopped onion or a store-bought meal base. And while her dishes may be high in calories and fat, they don’t contain half as many bizarro chemicals as most convenience foods.

She tries to keep things vaguely affordable. As opposed to other, more upscale TV chefs, Rachael thinks like a middle-class mom, focusing somewhat on frugality. She may use a large number of ingredients, but most aren’t particularly exotic or expensive. Plus, she’s pretty good about mentioning thriftier substitutes.

She stretches. You will never find authentic Mughal Indian or Indonesian dishes on 30 Minute Meals. You might even raise an eyebrow at what she calls Greek food. However, Rachael often tries to bring one or two ingredients relatively unfamiliar to American palates into her cooking. It’s a solid way to introduce kids and finicky adults to foreign cuisines without overwhelming them, and she should be lauded for it.

Her recipes are available for free. Sure, Ray-Ray makes sweet bank off her cookbooks, but as of this morning, 1558 recipes were on Food.com, and several hundred more were listed at her personal website (stunningly, at RachaelRay.com). She doesn’t HAVE to do that, and would make even more moolah if she didn't. Yet, it's a concession she make for her economy-minded fans. It's really great, actually.

She knows her audience. Maybe this is an insult to those who believe all cooking shows should be aimed at French Culinary grads, but working moms can’t be braising beef or whipping up a gelee every night of the week. Rachael aims her food at families and/or young people getting into a kitchen for the first time, not professional or even proficient chefs. That’s why her dishes are relatively simple, fresh, and fast. In her case, brevity is the soul of food, not complexity. And that’s just fine.

Her food isn’t intimidating. I’ve been to two of Mario Batali’s restaurants, and the man doesn’t make dinner; he makes manna. Alas, trying to duplicate those dishes at home would be extraordinarily time-consuming, expensive, and well beyond most folks’ humble culinary expertise. For better or for worse, Rachael avoids cooking methods that busy people would find unmanageable. Like Bourdain says, taking the path of least resistance should never be encouraged (especially in the kitchen) but again, she’s marketing to home cooks with massive time constraints.

She’s not a chef, and doesn’t pretend to be. Ms. Ray is not a dummy. (Loud, yes. Dumb, no.) She knows her limitations, admits them readily, and tackles the big, bad job of meal-prepping anyway. That takes guts, as well as some level of competence in the kitchen. Ray/Batali didn’t beat Flay/DeLaurentiis on Iron Chef because they got lucky.

I’ve now spent the first day of my thirties defending a celebrity. If you'll excuse me, I’m going to the bathroom to wash my brain, but if anyone has any other convincing arguments for or against her, bring ‘em! I’d love to read.

The HARD TIMES CAFE located north of the University of Maryland in College Park is accepting applications for Full-Time Prep Cook(s).

Responsibilities include receiving/stocking/organizing of product from food vendors, prepping food items using recipes found in our recipe book, demonstrating safe food handling procedures and cleaning food preparation areas before, during and at the end of your shift. The ability to lift 50 lbs to chest level (on occassion) is necessary and you will be on your feet during most of your shift. FULL TRAINING IS PROVIDED for this position and a formal review will be given at 3 months.

The ideal candidate(s) will have previous recent food preparation experience, demonstrate a stable work history, have great image and communication skills, be fluent in english and have reliable transportation to and from the restaurant (yes, even when it snows). A typical work week at the restaurant will be to work 5 days (Sunday off and either Wednesday or Thursday off), 8am - 430pm with a 30 minute lunch break. Some days will be shorter or longer depending on the volume of prep work for that day.

During training the position pays $9 per hour, after 3 months of satisfactory training a review will be given and a raise will be determined.

Benefits for Full-Time employees include: Participation in our 401k program and Group Health Plan (50% paid by employer) and 40% discounts on employee meals.

Applications will be accepted at the restaurant Monday through Friday after 3pm. Ask for the manager on duty when you have completed the application.

HARD TIMES CAFE
4738 Cherry Hill Road
College Park, MD 20740
www.hardtimes.com

If you've ever watched 30 Minute Meals or her daytime television show, you'll know that celebrity chef Rachael Ray, who coined the terms Yum-O and EVOO, sometimes says the silliest things. Her demo at the Food Network New York City Wine and Food Festival was no different. While she walked the jam-packed audience through her bacon, leek, and tomato halibut and roasted tomato burger recipes, she managed to spit out some of her signature one-liners. I thought it would be fun to turn them into a quiz. I'll list a supposed quote, and you tell me if she said it at her demo or not. Ready, go!

Take the quiz

Christmas on a Shoestring


With all of the economic uncertainty many people are looking for ways to save money in every

area they can. With Christmas fast approaching, and my budget quite tight, I am planning

ahead to celebrate the holiday this year without needing a financial recovery period afterward,

not to mention with a bit less stress! Here are some of the ideas that I came up with.


Shop year-round to get the best deals.

1. There’s no reason to wait until November or December to begin your Christmas shopping.
   
   I like to begin looking for great bargains for everyone on my list throughout the year. End-
   
   of-season sales are a great time to pick up clothes to set aside for gifts. Also, watch out for
   
   changes in a product line -- whether it’s electronics or dishes because you can often pick up last
   
   year’s model for less than the new model and often the differences are barely recognizable.
2. Stock up your pantry with those items which may be more expensive due to greater demand
   
   around the holidays. Also, as store change out their selections they will often clear out older
   
   merchandise. If it’s got a long shelf-life, pick it up and save it.
3. Plan your holiday menu based on what you have on hand rather than planning it and then
   
   going out and buying what you need. Another option is to do what I do; I plan my menu months
   
   ahead to make sure I can get what I need at the best prices possible
4. I greatly enjoy serving fruit during the holidays to my family as well as for parties, but fruit
   
   can be quite expensive in December. Since many deserts and dishes use frozen fruit, I look for
   
   good deals during the summer and freeze it meaning I don’t have to spend on the fruit later.
5. If you, like me, just have to have a real tree for it to be Christmas, then a great money saving
   
   tip is to get your tree on Christmas Eve when many sellers will be marking them down. This
   
   isn’t universally true and you will need to be prepared for disappointment, but you will get to
   
   know the places where you can go at the last minute. At first this was hard for me -- there’s
   
   nothing I like better during the weeks leading up to Christmas than sitting in our living room,
   
   sipping hot chocolate, and looking at the decorated tree, but we’ve established some traditions
   
   that have made it easier. We have great family time on Christmas Eve, working together to trim
   
   the tree and singing carols as we do it. We also have a tree in our front yard that we have been
   
   growing for several years that I decorate early in the season.

Do-it-yourself.

1. Make your own ornaments to decorate the tree and decorations for the house. You can use
   
   old Christmas cards to create striking ornaments with festive colors, pictures, and designs.
2. We make our own wrapping paper by buying from plain brown paper and letting the kids draw
   
   and write messages for the recipients. This gives a real personal touch and involves everyone
   
   in the gift giving.
3. Homemade gifts are a great way to save money and show that you care. Our gifts this year
   
   will include herbed soaps and candles and homemade teas, (we have actually grown our own
   
   herbs!). Homemade bread, cookies, and other foods are also big hits every year. The kids
   
   love the gingerbread men kits that I put together with marshmallows, caramel, and, of course,
   
   gingerbread cookies.

Keep it local.

1. Visiting light displays and live nativities are a great way to spend less while celebrating the
   
   holidays. We have our list of favorite neighborhoods and areas that we visit every year and add
   
   more as we find them. We make a plan and go out at least one evening per week to see the
   
   lights. Add in some homemade hot chocolate and you have a great Christmas season family
   
   activity.
2. Be on the lookout for churches and other organizations having free sing-alongs, concerts,
   
   and plays. Community bulletin boards (in the library, for example) and free local papers are
   
   good places to check for these events.
3. Our caroling parties are the highlight of the Christmas season. We usually have 30 to
   
   40 adults and children who attend to spread Christmas cheer around our neighborhood.
   
   Afterwards we have a cookie exchange and everyone brings their favorite finger foods and
   
   drinks. We supply plates and napkins along with punch and hot chocolate.
4. When entertaining we use our regular plates and cloth napkins. The up-front cost is a bit
   
   higher than paper, but we save money in the long run and people love the added touch that it
   
   gives our parties and meals.

These are just a few ideas that we have come up with to celebrate the season in style without

going bankrupt. The main thing to do is be creative and everyone will enjoy the time that you

can spend together making it a memorable holiday.





Isabella York is a mother dedicated to living prudently but not giving up her life in the process. Along with raising her son, she works for Balsam Hill, a purveyor of Artificial Christmas Trees.

Today at 5:30pm wieden + kennedy's Lurpak sponsorship idents for Jamie Oliver's new show '30 Minute Meals' will be going live on Channel 4. The name might suggest that Jamie will be cooking up 30 extremely tiny meals but in...

The TV chef and campaigner explains why nothing wil deter him in his fight to improve school dinners

"God, why do I give interviews to the Guardian?" Jamie Oliver groans. "They always try to dissect you, and I don't really think about stuff in the way that you're asking me these questions. It's far more natural, and less . . . less strategic than you seem to think." Looking thoroughly fed up, he mutters under his breath, "I just know what this article's going to be like." It's only halfway through the interview, and I fear he may get up and walk out.

Well I am mortified. You would have to be mad, in my view, not to admire Oliver, whose evolution from mildly grating Essex geezer to heroic public campaigner has elevated him to secular sainthood. From his restaurant Fifteen, training troubled youngsters to be chefs, to his campaigns for decent school dinners and basic cooking skills, he has been a national inspiration. My mistake had been to assume that the popularity of these campaigns must have given him invincible confidence – and to infer from their success that he must have the mindset of a political strategist. On both counts, it turns out I'm completely wrong, for instead he is a scattergun of raw emotions, chief of which appear to be beleaguered frustration, and acute sensitivity to any perceived criticism.

Part of this may well be down to the fact that he is exhausted. When we meet, his fourth child is only two weeks old, and Oliver's speech patterns bear the unmistakable mark of sleep deprivation, with sentences abandoned halfway through, and thoughts colliding into one another. But he also seems shattered by his campaigning work, as if unaware of quite how much respect – even adoration – it commands. He describes his new TV series, a straightforward cooking show called Jamie's 30 Minute Meals, as "an antidote", and "heaven", after all his struggles to change the way we eat.

"I hate making TV documentaries," he says with feeling. "Because it takes quite a lot of energy to know that you're going to get your arse kicked and people will hate you, or fight you, for large proportions of time. You know when I did School Dinners I got so much abuse for a year and a half, and the people who were getting in the way of some of the biggest progress . . . you know, once the show was broadcast, all of a sudden it was 'authentic'. But until then it was just lots of – well, people hate change. So I don't particularly enjoy doing the stuff I'm most proud of."

The health secretary Andrew Lansley recently accused him of "lecturing" people about what to eat. I ask if he thinks the remark was a one-off, or suspects it may be indicative of the new government's hostility to anything that smacks of the nanny state.

"It's very clear that there's a lot of double standards going on. Should there be a 30mph speed limit? Of course there bloody should. And certainly with kids and school food, kids need to be nannied for sure. So give them a bloody good meal at school."

But I wonder if he ever worries that he might lay himself open to the charge of lecturing by saying things, as he did in School Dinners, like: "If you're giving your young children fizzy drinks you're an arsehole, you're a tosser. If you give them bags of crisps you're an idiot. If you aren't cooking them a hot meal, sort it out."

"But that," he says indignantly, "came after a sequence where some obviously quite thick woman was having a pop at me about taking her kid's sticky toffee pudding away, and we gave them fruit and yoghurt instead. And while she was having a go at me she had the gall to have a baby in her arms feeding it Coke in a bottle, so she's obviously thick as shit, you know; she was clearly thick as shit, because you don't feed babies Coke in a teated bottle, and anyone who does is categorically wrong.

"I challenge you," he adds angrily, "to go to any school and open 50 lunchboxes, and I guarantee you there will be one or two cans of Red Bull, there'll be cold McDonald's and jam sandwiches with several cakes." Then he pauses, as if reminding himself to be diplomatic.

"Look, Lansley wrote an apology letter. For me it's all in the past, I've got nothing against him. But it's easy to say you can't tell people what to do, when clearly it's the only way forward. If you're going to be civically responsible for feeding children once or even twice a day for 190 days of the year from age four to 18, you'd best know what you're talking about, cos we're half responsible for all their nutritional intake. You know that government advertising campaign, Change4Life, cost £20m on billboards? I could have built over 100 Ministries of Food in towns all over the country for that. The public doesn't need to know that we're in a fucking state, that we need five a day. What it needs is skin on skin, it needs beacons locally where you can find out stuff for free, and have lessons. It's the only way forward, and it won't blossom through cuts."

Jamie's Ministries of Food have been established in four cities now, where the public are taught basic cooking skills in a bid to wean them off processed food and ready meals. But the future of the original Ministry in Rotherham is now in doubt, threatened by cuts, and Oliver is incredulous.

"The reason why I'm so passionate about the Ministry of Food is that we're fully booked, and if we had another staff member we could put another third on the numbers. We do about 8,000 people a year from one little cheap £130,000 setup grant from Rotherham council. We're fully booked, we're busy. It works. But they're all looking at me now for money, and the thing is I don't have it. I haven't got dough sitting in banks for me or for anything else."

Some readers may think come off it, you're really rich, I suggest. His wealth is routinely reported to be anywhere between £25m and £45m; could he not write a cheque for £130,000?

"I can't. I can't. I just can't, it's as simple as this. I've got my businesses that I look after, I don't have venture capitalists swoop in and pay for everything. Basically everything I've got funds my restaurants, the vulnerabilities are all mine. I've got 18 months of wages for my staff in the bank, but I'm not spending their money."

Oliver has recently extended his campaign to America, where he made a series called Jamie's American Food Revolution, set in the nation's most obese town. It won him an Emmy, and has been recommissioned, but far from celebrating, Oliver is still recovering. "The town didn't react very well to me being there, and there was one fellow on the radio who did a lot of shit-stirring that caused basically six weeks of aggro for me. No one really wanted to get involved or help, they thought we wanted to make them look stupid." With hindsight, I ask innocently, does he feel he made any tactical errors?

"No," he shoots back, "it was brilliant. You know, change is very hard – structures, organisations, businesses, people, anyone really. And if you're shining a light on one of the most unhealthy places in the world, it has to be a car crash, there's no pretty way. I knew what I was flying over there for, I knew it would be horrible, but I hadn't done horrible without my family. When you have shit days you need to be able to go and hug your kids, do you know what I mean? I didn't have that, and it was hard, really hard."

And yet, I say, it's these documentaries which make us love him. "But there's still lots of people who don't like me," he counters straight away. "You can tell that if you go on any blog. I annoy lots of people. You know people often don't like the good guys, and I try to be a good guy, I'm consistent. You know, I've been consistent in my direction, the beliefs that I have. And people hate that."

It's on the subject of consistency that he takes offence. Oliver has always been passionate about his family life – "Family first, always, always," as he says. He and his wife Jools were childhood sweethearts, and family life with their three daughters and now a son too provide the narrative backdrop to many of his programmes and his books.

"Jools is a militant Gina Ford and it bloody works," he volunteers. "What people don't understand is that sticking to Gina Ford is a job, it's not easy, it's not casual, it doesn't suit you. I see some of my friends who have a very casual approach – you must never judge," he adds quickly, "but when their kids are going to bed at two in the morning they look knackered. Gina's basically just a structured routine, and it's quite a lot to remember, but it does work. It's like communism," he grins. "If everything's done then it does work."

Authenticity is what makes Oliver's television so compelling, and part of this has involved filming his personal life in intimate detail. I want to ask him about how he navigates the balance between authenticity and family privacy, but as soon as the words are out of my mouth he begins to look annoyed, anticipating an attack. "Now you're going to ask about family, compromising, why have you put your family on the telly and all that sort of stuff," he says grumpily. I only make matters worse by asking him about his contract to promote Sainsbury's, which is now in its 10th year and earns him a reported £1.2m a year, but has laid him open to the charge of hypocrisy by critics who point out that the supermarket sells the very processed meals he tells us not to eat. Personally I don't see a problem, so my question is purely one of strategy: as a political campaigner is the money worth it, when it allows critics to claim it undermines his message? But Oliver thinks I'm attacking him again.

"I think journalists try to get more upset about Sainsbury's than the public, cos the public shop in supermarkets. And that's the truth of it. Sainsbury's does feed the country. It's nothing I apologise for," he snaps.

I think Oliver is sick and tired of people trying to define him – is he a chef, a businessman, a social entrepreneur or a TV star? In his mind the distinctions are irrelevant; he talks instead about following passions, creating cultures, and prefers to employ people who "get it"; his righthand woman "isn't qualified to do her job at all", but just pestered him in the street for a job, and "she knows what I care about, and the things that are true to me". His ambition appears to be literally infinite – even if, he sighs, his motivation doesn't always slot into a neat category.

"No one understands me. No one. My wife doesn't even understand me in terms of what I want to do. Everyone thinks everything's about money. You think I'm going to America to make money? That is probably the worst financial use of my time in the world, going to America next year, cos there's no money in TV, and they don't buy books. I don't want to break America, I don't want to move there, I'll be there for three months next year but I don't want to be making that show, I want Americans to be making that fucking show. I'm not pleased I got the Emmy cos I got the Emmy; I'm pleased because it will get other people to make these shows, and get the public active, and get McDonald's to start doing some other shit instead of the shit they are doing.

"I have a fairly low regard for money to be honest, it doesn't really add that much to a lot of the things that give me pleasure in life. However, if you have an idea, and you've got it, you can do it. If you haven't got money and you've got a great idea, it's hard to get it done. So for me I want to get in a position where I can do stuff myself. I want to be able to go into Essex and say: 'I want all your schools.' I want to set up a company that would be not for profit; I want to set up a company that would be like the government used to be, where we train dinner ladies militantly, where we'd fit the kitchens out and deliver on budget. But it's not just Essex, you see, it's trying to create things that can be rolled out elsewhere. But it all comes down to money."

In the end, Oliver believes that change will only come through public pressure. "Although they don't know it, the public is still king. So what I try and do is shit-stir. In America, what hasn't happened yet is the public haven't really told business what they want. For instance, McDonald's America and McDonald's UK are totally different. You've got one public that's fairly well informed, which is here, so you know you've got organic milk, 100% free-range eggs; they do a huge amount of salads, they've done a huge amount of inward thinking in the last five years. So although they've been the enemy for many years, you've got to take your hat off and say well done, and carry on. America hasn't even done that, they've done nothing in comparison. The only difference is the public ask for more."

So if he had to choose only one element of his empire – the cookery shows, the restaurants, the books, Fifteen, or the campaigns – which one is closest to his heart?

"I'd love to be elitist, cos that's where my heart is – I'm a food geek. But it's fuck-all use to anyone, absolutely no use to anyone, it doesn't change anything really. I really want to get school food sorted, and it ain't going to get sorted by the government. It needs investment, entrepreneurialism, expert management – and it's not going to happen, cos they'll never put their hands in their pockets or be there long enough to change anything."

Jamie's 30-Minute Meals is on Channel 4 every weekday from today at 5.30pm. The book of the series is published by Michael Joseph

Heidi Klum's Diet and Workout

Being a model as well as a beloved TV personality is sure not an easy task. More so when it comes of your silhouette however thanks to Heidi Klum's diet and workout tricks, the supermodel succeeded in adopting a healthy lifestyle that does miracles also with her silhouette. Experiment with these efficient and pro methods that would help you control your weight and also get rid of the eventual extra-pounds if necessary.

Heidi Klum managed to achieve worldwide success both thanks to her charisma as well as spotless silhouette. Becoming one of the Victoria's Secret angels got her into the spotlight therefore it became more important to adopt a healthy lifestyle and show a fabulous examples for those who wished to follow her footsteps. Besides embracing a balanced nutritive plan she also encourages us to book for regular exercise sessions that combine various elements from some of the most brilliant workout plans invented by pro trainers.

Giving birth also meant climbing pounds however she managed to land on the runway again in the blink of an eye with this miraculous and well-defined planned. These are some of the most import Heidi Klum diet and workout tips worth considering before beginning a weight loss or control regime.

Healthy Snacks

• Heidi is a great fan of healthy snacks that include fresh fruits and most importantly apple as well as leafy vegetables. In spite of her commercials done to various companies that encourage the consumption of pretty unhealthy dishes she still sticks to a well-defined diet that includes the healthy and efficient weight controllers. Apples are in fact her secret tools to keep her weight on the desired level therefore she consumed these fruits due to their low calorie content.
• 
  
• Moreover apples are also rich in pectins which trick your mind and give you a sense of satiety sparing you from food cravings for long hours. Make sure you include this healthy ingredient in your diet and consume it on a daily basis especially if you would like to master the transition from a normal and fat-filled eating routine to a healthy diet. Additional snack she consumes are leafy and fresh vegetables that are also perfect to keep your diet balanced.
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Smaller Meals

• One of the weight control secrets of Heidi is to consume smaller meals at least 4-5 times per day in order to keep your metabolism on high speed. Besides making the digestion easier you'll also have the chance to burn fat by keeping your organism on constant alert.
• 
  
• Your metabolism is in fact the main factor that would help you get rid of the toxin build-up as well as extra-pounds. Indeed those who decide to embrace this ritual will also spare themselves from cravings and munching attacks that might leas to overeating.
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• Calories are burnt on top speed if you offer your organism the essential vitamins as well as energy sources extracted from the healthy meals. Pay special attention the the food you choose as well as the composition of the meals you prepare. Instead of choosing the 3 dishes per day method adopt Heidi's diet secret of having more and smaller meals at every three or four hours.
• 
  No Munching After 8:00 p.m.
  
  
• Indeed the successful model adopted this trick which might not have a valid background as nutritionists disagree that it would matter when you eat. Indeed your organism might not be aware of time still calories should not be neglected when preparing your afternoon or night-time meals. There's no need to drive you into starvation when you have the chance to consume healthy snack even after 8:00 P.M. however if you are tempted to eat fast food or any other fatty and sugary treats it is highly recommended to adopt the trick also promoted by Heidi.
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High-Protein Food

• The Victoria's Secret model also managed to promote an eating plan which allows you to consume versatile meals topped with the delicious taste of high-protein ingredients. Those who would like to keep a diet which won't let your starve should take over the ritual popularized by Heidi and her followers. This program presupposes the inclusion of turkey, eggs as well as chicken in the meal plans.
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• Indeed she was extremely careful with the portions in order to keep the meat consumption inside the moderate limits still decided to eat colorful dishes and provide the organism with the necessary protein which is essential to complete the daily routine activities as well as crown the day with a pro exercise session which appeals to her energy sources.
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  90 Minute Workout
  
  
• Heidi Klum succeeded to lose all those stubborn pounds after her pregnancy with the help of a 90 minute workout plan envisioned by pro trainers. Indeed this pretty exhausting still extremely efficient workout includes various strength training exercises as well as aerobic sessions that would tone her muscles to look fabulous. Diet and exercise should be obviously combined when it comes of both models as well as ordinary people.
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• There's no need to lose weight in a few weeks if you are eager to adopt a less restrictive and sever workout plan. Heidi indeed included this ritual in her weekly schedule no less than 4 times. However if you would like to go slow and get into the groove gradually make sure you embrace a 30 minutes per day exercise program you can repeat 3 times per week. This way you'll be able to stay dynamic and lose weight equally efficiently as Heidi did.
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Heidi Klum, Marisa Miller and Doutzen Kroes

Photos: Getty Images

Tags: heidi klum diet, heidi klum workout, heidi klum exercise, heidi klum diet, heidi klum weight loss, heidi klum, celebrity diet, celebrity workout, celebrity exercise, weight loss, diet tips

← Older revision		Revision as of 18:16, September 30, 2010
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-	[[Category:Un-answered questions]]	+	Raw chicken meat is bad period. Unless it is raised in its natural diet without antibiotics and bone meals in free range condition. These chickens are less then 1% of total chicken raised in US.
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		+	Arsenic-containing compounds are most widely used in chicken production, and most chickens receive arsenic-laced feed. Most arsenic-containing animal feed additives are not used to treat sickness. Instead, these additives are commonly used in poultry production to induce faster weight gain and create the appearance of a healthy color in meat from chickens (and to a lesser extent, turkeys and hogs).
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		+	Arsenic is a known and powerful carcinogen, and it is now well known that these feed additives lead to arsenic residue in conventionally raised chickens—chickens sold in supermarkets and restaurants across the country—and in the environment, putting our health at risk.
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		+	According to renowned cancer specialist Virginia Livingston-Wheeler, most chicken and nearly half the beef consumed in America today is cancerous and pathogenic. Her research has convinced her that these cancers are transmissible to man.
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		+	The chicken fecal matters which contain arsenic, antibiotic, growth hormone, and all other infectious bacteria are part of bone meal ingredients nowadays and these are feed back to cows, pigs, and chickens….
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		+	No government laws or standard regulate the use of terms like "free-range" and "free-roaming" some free range eggs may actually be produced by hens who spend their entire life in small conventional cages.
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		+	This sounds bad enough, but the bone meal, which is fed to chicken is abominable.
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		+	===========================
		+	What's in the Bone Meal - how it is made.
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		+	All the inedible parts of animals for human and pet consumption are gathered - like skin, hooves, tongue etc... Half of cow and 1/3 of pig slaughtered are not edible for human consumption. Considering there are 37+ million cows killed each year, this is enormous amount. There are 250+ rendering plants operating in US.
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		+	It takes days for carcass to arrive there and there is no refrigeration process before, during, after, or anywhere else in this process. By the time meat is got there, it is already rotten to half - especially in the summer (not to mention maggots). The collars animals have, ropes on animals are not removed, but put it in a big barrel which has huge saw, which breaks down everything. All the meat that passed the expiration date in supermarket goes in there. Not only this, but also oils discarded after deep frying in diners and fast food restaurants goes in – these are high trans-fat oil. Food left over from restaurants, lard taken out from meat while cooking goes in there as well.
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		+	Work need to be done fast, but there are not enough workers, so workers put all these stuffs without separating plastic and Styrofoam. Astronomical number of cats and dogs and other stray animals who are being euthanatized goes in there too. Green plastic bags that contain euthanized cats and dogs go in there too. All the road killed animals goes in there as well. This is not all. Since 1990’s chicken fecal matters and feathers gathered at the bottom of factory chicken coop went in there too. This is extremely dangerous considering 83% of chicken are infected with food poisoning bacteria - not to mention 90% of them have cancer cells, and also they are fed arsenic.
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		+	Every year, 3-4 million cats and dogs are euthanized (some say 6-7 million), not including other pets. Veterinarians inject pentobarbital sodium in order to euthanize shelter animals. These neither disappear nor destroyed in high heat. Also most of these animals have vermicide in their body and this is not destroyed either - same for all the hormone and antibiotics. The hormone, antibiotic, vermicide, and the toxic to kill shelter animals, and toxic produced by bacteria are not destroyed but feed back to animals. Factory farmers in turn inject more of hormone, antibiotic, vermicide, etc., to live cattle in order to keep them alive. The concentration of these substance increase with each cycle and bacteria which were easily killed before are not killed because they develop super gene, creating super bacteria in ever increasing speed.
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		+	All these are boiled around 135 C (275 F) for 20 minute to 1 hour and 1/2. On the boiling surface all the fat is floating. This fat contains most of heavy metal. This fat is sold and used in lipsticks, deodorants, soap and other personal hygiene products.
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		+	===========================
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		+	You should only eat meat from free-range-completely-organic-natural-chicken-diet-only-chicken. Unfortunately, this is hard to find, as only less then 1% of chickens raised in US meet this criteria. 99% of chickens are raised in abominable diet mentioned before.
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		+	However, you should not worry about high price of organic meat. USDA’s recommended amount of meat intake is about 2-3 ounce per serving, which look like a deck of card. If anyone have a stake, how many people eat meat as size of deck of card? – almost none. Most stakes served in restaurants is about 2 to 4 times bigger then that.
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		+	For all primates, meat intake is around 1-5% of their diet except human. Too much meat cause problem even if it is organic. No wonder human has so much disease like cancer, diabetes and etc., which wild primates do not have.
		+	[[Category:Answered questions]]

Back in 2006, when we were preparing to have the wonderful Sara Moulton around for a chat, I wrote a review of her (then) new cookbook, Sara's Secrets for Weeknight Meals (click here for a Society-friendly Amazon link to the book). In a sidebar to that review, Fat Guy makes some snarky jokes about the preponderance of cookbooks whittling the time down from Pierre Franey's 60 minutes to 30, 5, and so on.

Well, I ain't laughing no more. We just moved out to the suburbs, meaning two 30 minute commutes that extend already long days, and our kid just started full-day kindergarten, meaning very early mornings. The dinner upshot is that most weeknights I've got 15-30 minutes to make meals for myself, my wife, and my two daughters. We're usually all pooped, take-out is not a regular option, and everyone's sick by Wednesday of the stream of leftovers that flows from the fridge after my weekend kitchen projects.

This cannot hold. Either they're gonna kill me, or I'm gonna kill them.

Instead of turning to Rocco, Pierre, Sara, et al, I'm turning to you. How in the world can I maintain my commitment to making genuine, tasty food for my family and at the same time get the kids to bed, all the while retain my sanity? Your tips appreciated!

ResultsName/weight class/placing/snatch/clean and jerk/total* denotes personal records Kelly Rexroad-Williams 48 kgs 17th place 71/84/155-Kelly's  lifts have been very consistent lately. She hit 72 and 87 at Pan Ams in MayAmanda Sandoval 58 kgs 15th place 86/109/195-After a disappointing performance at Pan Ams, Amanda got PRs at the World Championships. Way to come back! Natalie Burgener 63 kgs 12th place 96/114/210-Natalie's first international competition since the Bejing Olympics, was quite a success going 4 for 6 and totaling 5 more kgs than she lifted at Nationals to qualify.  Danica Rue 69 kgs 19th place 90/115/205-This was Danica's  first international meet since 2005! Totaling just 1 kg under what it took her to qualify, she is making a great come back and doing a great job being consistent.Rachel Crass 75 kgs 27th place 86/109 /195-Competing injured; Rachel totaled 14 kgs less than it took her to qualify. At nationals she hit 92 and 117 to qualify for her first international competition since 2003 I believe. Erin Wallace 75 kgs 18th place 98/117/215-Erin went 4 for 6 only missing her last attempts, which would have been prs. She totaled 2 kgs less than her 6 for 6 pr performance at Nationals.Sarah Robles 75+ kgs 10th place 111/140/251* -Pr snatch and total. 2nd highest total in US history. The HotelThe World Championships was held in Antalya, Turkey. The competitors stayed in two separate all inclusive resort hotels. We were located right on the beach of the Mediterranean Sea. Our hotel had many pools and water slides, hammocks, a carnival area for children , a bar/club, restaurants, many beach activities including a boat tour some of our athletes did, nice rooms, all you can eat Turkish buffets, free wireless internet, and a couple English speaking television channels. The hotels were about 30 minute bus ride from the venue and airport. The dining area was quite spacious and we had a lot of cat friends roaming around. Our favorite one was "crusty cat" Haha. A lot of the food was some sort of sausage or meat ball, tons of bread (like a bakery full of bread every day,) desserts soaked in honey, a lot of dill, cheeses, fresh fruit, and sour yogurt was served with everything. Our least favorite yogurt thing was the "Yogurt Water" just sour yogurt mixed with water. It tasted like you were drinking cheese.The PeopleThe people in Turkey were very nice for the most part. The athletes, coaches, and officials were friendly. The bus drivers are aggressive drivers. We tried to get to the venue one day and a car was blocking our way and the driver opened the door and started yelling at the valets. The car was moved promptly and we were on our way. Natalie tried to take food out of the restaurant for after weigh-ins. This resulted in tears but, she was OK later. These were the only examples of poor behavior I've seen. The resort was full of people from all around the world. We saw many people in bikinis and speedos many of them probably should have worn something else haha.We noticed many people don't believe in lines. It was frustrating one of the athletes said, "Without lines; there's no order!" It sure felt like it. Overall, they were pleasant.The VenueThe venue was an expo center. It had a really huge banner outside of the logo for worlds and inside it had a floral display of the world championship logo. It was pretty cool. The training hall had like 60 platforms. Imnot 100% sure. No one had to share a platform at anytime. We saw some pretty big lifts going on. The Iranian super was attempting 190 kgs snatches a few days before competing. They had a dining room for the athletes with hot meals in the middle of the day and cold drinks. The competition area was poorly set up and security was pretty loose. People without the proper credentials were all over the place. We had people that weren't athletes or staff members training in the training hall and Joe Schmoes in the media area and fancy seating. I think the spectating area was about half the size of worlds last year and even in the A sessions it didn't get full. The Competition The atmosphere wasn't as intense as I would have hoped but, the athletes were positive and brought their own energy which was good. It was ran smoothly and the loaders were fast and seemed excited about their jobs. The technical officials were very strict. Even though it was your turn, they wouldn't let you on the stage until your name was called. Which wasn't OK sometimes because the clock was already running, so you wasted time not chalking up. When teams found out that only 6 and 4 counted for points for Olympic slots, many countries didn't send teams. This helped out USA for placing. Some athletes who could have placed anywhere from sub 20th place to sub 30th place were placing in the teens and 20s. There were surprises, upsets, and lots of excitement when watching the competition. The World Championships is a great meet and always a great chance to learn, make new friends, and have fun.Reflection on my training cycle and my competition     This training cycle has definitely been interesting. It was very emotional. This was my first cycle in two years not being a resident athlete. When I got back, I realized a lot of my friends I had made here either got married, moved, or I had lost touch with them. So I have to start all over again making friends. So it's been pretty lonely. One month I had a couple checks not come in on time and I wasn't able to plan properly with my finances so I was stressed out over that. Of course there are lots of little normal things to have to be conscious of like; getting on my own car insurance, grocery shopping, paying rent, etc. Normal people stuff. I have to drive everyday to the gym. It's not so bad. I actually like it because I feel like I'm making weightlifting a priority vs. doing it because I'm already there.      At some point I hurt my thumb and every time I had weight over my head It hurt really bad. I was afraid to catch anything so I missed a lot of weights or I caught everything forward to avoid pain. I have zero pain tolerance so this was a big deal to me. We trained a lot heavier here than I did at the OTC or NMU. It was exciting to get under heavy weights more often but, most of the time I didn't feel ready. So I wasn't really confident getting under them. I felt really beat up too. Mostly because I wasn't used to training this way. Not because anything was actually wrong. One day I actually felt good and hit PRs! I did a 113 and a 145. Normally I don't pr until I'm in competition so I was feeling pretty confident. I also rarely front squat and I hit a 175 which was a 10 kg pr. I power cleaned 130 which was a big pr. If you saw me at nationals, I power cleaned 120 so 10 kgs in 3 months was cool. Everything was going well and I had mentioned several times, "150 at Worlds Joe! 150!" I felt it. I knew it was in me. Our goal was to hit 150 at worlds.     By the time Worlds came around I was pretty emotionally exhausted. Of course I had the excitement of being at worlds and lifting heavy weights but other than that, I was pretty spent emotionally. Warming up for the snatch felt pretty good. If you know me or my training at all, you'll know, I always manage to find a way to miss at least one snatch. My first snatch is always very stressful because I usually miss it. (I think like 3 out of my competitions I have made my opening attempt.) Goal #1: Make my opener. I actually did! I made my second, then my third! I never make all my snatches. It was quite an accomplishment. I was thinking, "Sweet! I might actually have a chance to go 6 for 6!" Clean and Jerks are what I'm good at and even if I mess up I can usually pull something out.     I had a couple goofs in the back looping 65 horribly, stumbling around with 85, and getting chalk in the eye at 130! Most of my attempts were forward. Usually, once I'm on the platform I can fix little technical issues and my attempts are easy. Not the case at this competition. I did worse on the platform than I did in the back. I opened with almost my pr, 139 so I could do 139-145-148.  I got stuck a little in the bottom then missed my jerk forward. The next attempt at 140; the clean was bad then I over jerked it and missed it behind. Panic set in. I've never missed my first two attempts. I kept telling myself  "You gotta make this lift. You have to get USA points. Make this lift. Make this lift." I caught it horribly and jacked up my upper back pulling it back, then I pushed it forward but, I made it. I have never been so relieved! I usually never hear anything while I'm lifting but I managed to hear my coach say, "Fight Sarah! You're still in this!" I heard Collin yell, "Let's go Sarah!" I also heard someone from another country when I was recovering from my jerk, "Duro!" which roughly means "be strong or tight" something like that. It's always nice when people from other countries have good sportsmanship.      This training cycle taught me about how tough it is to be a full-time weightlifter. It's only going to get harder. Worlds gave me a taste of what's to come in 2012. Had I lifted what I was capable of in the clean and jerk; my total could have gotten me 5th or 6th place. Instead, I got 10th. I'm hungry for more.  Weightlifting has proven to me that I can do anything. There's no such thing as impossible.