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A salty piece of prosciutto along with a drizzle of tangy balsamic vinegar is the ultimate contrast to crisp, sweet cubes of watermelon. And that’s just what makes this trio play so well together.
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Tomato purée is a cooking essential you might be missing. Simpler and a bit thicker than its flavorful cousin, tomato sauce, tomato purée is a fast way to quickly prepare and freeze a bushel of fresh tomatoes for future cooking. Tomato purée can be turned into tomato sauce or tomato soup. It can be used to cook rice for a colorful side dish, or cooked with rice and seafood for a showstopping paella. Oh, and it’s a great base for homemade barbecue sauce.
All you need is a knife, a blender, and a little bit of time to stock your freezer with tomato purée to use year-round.
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When you’re trying to get dinner on the table fast, the quantity of ingredients required by a recipe might determine what you make. It can be hard to know just by looking at a photo how time-consuming it will be, but once you’ve made something a few times it becomes a little easier. Do you think you know your stuff? Let’s put your knowledge to the test!
This recipe quiz includes 9 classic dinner recipes from Kitchn, and all of these recipes are made from scratch. Do you know how complex a homemade salad recipe really is? Or what it takes to make a sauce? This quiz will decide.
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The Olympics are here — neither Zika, nor heat wave, not presidential impeachment, nor plumbing woes could keep this age-old competition from moving forward. We’re planning marathon Olympic-watching sessions, of course, but all these amazing athletes got us thinking about what it takes to fuel such terrific prowess — in the pool, on the field, in the ring. We asked 10 athletes to share what they eat on a daily basis. Here’s what we found out.
Age: 24
Hometown: Kannapolis, NC
Event: Discus Throw
Training Regimen: Throws for up to 2 hours 3-4 times a week; weightlifting for 2 hours 2-3 times a week; running once a week.
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While nude nails, camel coats, and head-to-toe ensembles in putty may be a fall must, beige has a bad rap when it comes to your plate. Frequently associated with words like processed, battered, and fried (i.e., tasty), neutral-hued foods often rank low on the nutrition totem pole. And admittedly, there is something to be said for eating the rainbow.
But let’s not bash the beige just yet. Kale may be healthy, blue may be trendy, but what khaki-colored foods may lack in nutrition and visual appeal, they more than make up for in comfort and convenience. Here are five reasons why beige foods will always have a place in our hearts and on our tables.
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Sweet, juicy watermelon really can do no wrong. Sliced into thick wedges and eaten with sticky fingers, it’s summer fruit at its finest. You can also toss it with feta for a sweet and salty fruit salad or whiz it into a ridiculously refreshing cocktail, but you already know this.
What you might not know is that watermelon can be transformed into something hot, savory, and spicy. I am talking about watermelon curry.
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Summer flowers, whether grown in the yard, picked roadside on the way home from a trip, or purchased from a farm stand or farmers market, are a far cry from those sturdy, cheap-and-cheerful blooms bought at the grocery store. With the exception of zinnias and sunflowers, summer flowers are usually more delicate, a jumbly collection of weeds and gauzy blossoms and stems. Their temperament is casual and spontaneous.
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There are some kitchen chores that grow tedious when volume becomes a factor. For example, slicing a handful of cherry tomatoes goes quickly, but when you have a pint or two to get through, the task feels daunting. Cutting cherry tomatoes is a necessary evil because slices are easy to eat in salads and cook faster in quick pasta sauces. So how can you cut a bunch of cherry tomatoes in half at once instead of slicing a whole pint one by one? There’s a trick.
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Think for a minute about how many times you felt pressure today—pressure to do something you were nervous to do, pressure to perform in the moment, pressure to make the right choice, pressure to take a big step toward a change or experience you want in your life? What was it like? I find pressure to be an intriguing concept. It certainly feels stressful, but it’s ultimately more than stress. Whereas stress at its core is really just a state of physical and/or emotional strain (generally in response to what we somehow perceive as challenging circumstances), it’s initially a response versus a force (but can become a force when chronic). As a result, stress is most essentially a reaction we can at times avoid or use any range of strategies to minimize or manage. Pressure, on the other hand, is more of an input, a force not just acting in us but on us, influencing and compelling us toward action, much like the concept in physics. The pressure we experience may come from outside expectations or from internal sources (e.g. perfectionism), but the net effect is the same: in one way or another, we’re called to act.
Let me say it a different way. When it comes to stress, the most pressing issue is how we take care of it. When we’re talking about pressure, however, the question is how we will meet it.
Let’s look at some Grok-style Primal examples, shall we?
In response to a circling predator, Grok is pressured to attack or run. Upon seeing that the band’s main water source has dried up as a result of diminished rains, Grok and his group experience pressure to find a new source in the area or to relocate for a time. In response to an aggressive neighboring band, there’s pressure to actively take up the conflict or to carefully negotiate by some means. When a competing suitor challenges him, he feels pressure to either fight or back down. Our good man here undoubtedly feels stress resulting from all of these scenarios, but the pressure itself is to act in some regard. In each case he’s called upon to move, react or perform, and the instinctual stress response works to this advantage—prepares him physically for the output of extraordinary strength or effort, readies his body to address injury or trauma, focuses his senses and thinking for clear-headedness. The stress response is inextricable from facing these survivalist pressures and gives him an advantage.
Our challenges these days undeniably vary from most of Grok’s to degree if not in nature.
Today we’re more likely to experience “performance pressure” in the form of giving a speech or presentation at work, participating in a competition, mastering a skill to perform on demand, making an important financial or professional decision, handling a conflict in our family life or social circles, etc.
But the substance doesn’t matter as much as the structure here. The same overall Primal pattern still holds in these modern “make it or break it” moments. We experience these and other daily or near daily pressures that induce stress and call us to take action. In the face of these pressures we can perceive and even be totally overwhelmed by a natural fight or flight instinct, and yet with practice we can learn to harness that instinct to our advantage.
There’s the saying “grace under pressure,” grace in this context meaning the refinement of movement. Yes, movement. Our power in meeting pressures is how we choose to interact with them. If we accept pressure as a force, we can learn to move with it (rather than cover our heads and be emotionally overtaken and rendered helpless). It’s a similar principle as those you find in martial arts—the observation of and interaction with a force that flows between you and your opponent.
In the original primal times, cool heads not only prevailed, but survived. And that’s what we’re going for here. If Grok seized up when a predator approached and lost himself to inward anxiety, he’d literally be dead meat. Choking wasn’t an option in the Darwinian circus.
So, what was the alternative; the survivalist option? In short, to keenly observe the challenge (in this case, the predator), to move how it moved and to anticipate its likely choices in a given moment with the intent of an appropriate reaction that would foil its attack. Fight or flight at its most successful had a coolheaded strategy—and good timing.
When we want to remain coolheaded in the less insidious challenges of modern life, we can view our circumstances in a similar way—as a game of observation and response.
As you stare down a decidedly non-Primal buffet at a work luncheon, realize that it’s not the actual food that’s the challenger but the onset of cravings or the will to sabotage. When you’re nervous about giving a presentation, discern the challenger not as the speech itself but the out-of-body inner critic that critiques you as you talk. In navigating an argument with a loved one, understand the challenger isn’t the person him/herself but first and foremost a disconnect in communication. Personifying the challenge as challenger shifts it to a dynamic force you can work with rather than a solid, stationary mental object you can’t move, let alone move with.
Keeping in mind how you’ve correctly identified the real challenger, now picture yourself distanced from it. As far removed as you need to imagine yourself. Give yourself space to observe. The farther you get from it, the smaller it will seem. Again, you’re not taking yourself physically out of the situation (although sometimes that’s a good strategy when stress gets overwhelming). You’re simply learning a discipline of skillful observation. No one can observe anything that’s on top of them or that feels like it’s entangled in their emotional fabric.
Separate yourself in order to put yourself in rational relationship to the challenger. In an argument, visualize the disconnect in communication (and the emotion that results from it) as a separate entity. Imagine what it would look like from 20, 30 feet (or more) away. The sabotaging cravings are now on the other side of the room rather than in your own head. The fear of failure as you begin that first 5K is now on the sidelines behind the fire hydrant. Be with the visualization as long as you need. Carry it with you. And work with a mindfulness practice to sharpen this skill every day.
This is a quote from the Sufi poet, Rumi, but I find it a potent truth that applies to nearly every decision or challenge in health and life if you look at it from the right angle. Now that you’ve distanced yourself from the challenger of a particular situation and given yourself room to think beyond the range of the reptilian brain (what’s generally activated under pressure), you’re ready to act from strategy rather than fear.
When you act from strategy, you’re acting from a place of decision as opposed to reaction. You have options for what will drive the bus so to speak. There’s space to imagine the commonplace advice like “keep an even keel,” “fake it ’til you make it,” “go in confident,” etc. But there’s also no need for pretense when you’re not identifying anymore with emotional strain.
Squarely ask yourself, “How would fear move in this situation,” fear generally being the “cheapest room in the house” (in the words of yet another poet). There’s no need to go write a thesis about it. With practice, you’ll get your answer pretty swiftly. Fear would decide on presentation day that I’d go home sick. Or, if I did show up and do the presentation, I’d focus on myself and my feelings for the entire miserable hour. Fear would believe that I’m not capable of selecting a few mostly Primal options during the buffet luncheon and that I might as well surrender to my reptilian desires. Fear would have me say anything in an argument to protect my fragile ego. Fear would tell me not to expect much from myself in my workout or 5K race.
But what would a non-fear response look like? (It’s easier to identify once you put fear in a corner.) Resist getting too ambitious by calling it the “brave” choice or the “smart” choice or the “confident” choice. Just go for a non-fear choice. Period.
A non-fear choice in an argument accepts that your ego isn’t on the line. In fact, it can sit down and simply listen. It can decide not to decide anything for the moment but to listen now and wait until clarity comes at another time. A non-fear choice can see the possibilities in a buffet or, if need be, can summon the self-attunement to excuse yourself from the event while you find something that will fit the Primal bill and carry you to your next meal. A non-fear choice doesn’t squander energy on self-defeating thoughts while you try a new section of the gym or decide this time to walk around the whole lake for the first time. A non-fear choice decides that it doesn’t matter how well you perform at today’s company softball game and let’s go of assessment because critique doesn’t do anything but disrupt the flow (not to mention the fun).
Discerning your non-fear options in the face of pressure helps to untangle choice from cortisol. It recognizes the Primal fight or flight stress response but removes it from the decision-making process. You might still feel the heightened energy, but you’re leaning into it now instead of pulling away from it. The difference, especially with practice, can become a whole new level of Primal power.
Thanks for reading today, everyone. I’m curious how you handle pressure and especially how you apply principles of strategy and mindfulness in more challenging situations. Share your thoughts, and have a great end to your week.
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