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Mornings aren’t for everyone. Some people (myself included!) stumble out of bed, tumble into the shower, robotically shovel some food into their piehole, and join the zombie-like masses in their bleary-eyed commute to work. That was my morning routine, before I discovered that I was doing it all wrong… You see, how you start your […]
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If you’re like millions of other Americans, you have a love affair with your phone. It’s the first thing you see when you open your eyes in the morning, and the last thing you glimpse before going to sleep. Life without your smartphone seems impossible to imagine. But if you care about your husband or […]
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Last August, after blending together the same basic pesto for nearly my entire adult life, I branched out to try a different recipe after picking up a new cookbook. I was excited that the pesto recipe in Run Fast. Eat Slow would help me use up the quickly fading bundle of arugula in the fridge, but more than anything I was totally intrigued by one unexpected condiment in the ingredient list. It’s one that I’ve cooked with tons of time before, although never thought to include in pesto — and now that I have, there’s no going back because it makes for the most unbelievable pesto I’ve ever tasted.
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Sorry, mom and dad, I have a confession: I drank in high school. Not often. But still more often than I was technically (read: legally) supposed to. I wasn’t going to those crazy keg parties like the ones you see in the movies. Instead, a few girlfriends and I would go to one of our friend’s older sister’s nearby apartment and have a sleepover. While we were there, for some reason, we’d drink peach schnapps.
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(Image credit: Susanna Hopler)
Welcome to Kitchn’s new series My Favorite Healthy Recipes, where we show you how real people around the country (and even world) eat “healthy,” however they choose to define that for themselves. Maybe you’ll even find a few recipes to add to your own meal plan.
Name: Lauren Kretzer
Location: Mendham, New Jersey
Age: 36
Occupation: Stay-at-home mom and part-time recipe developer and private chef
Number of people in household: 3
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For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering a couple questions from readers. First, is nature always relaxing and blissful? Or are there instances where being in nature is far more stressful than being indoors? Why, and what should we do about it? Second, how do I use fish sauce, and how would a parent use fish sauce to get picky kids to try (and like) new foods?
Let’s go:
Kathy makes an important point:
Don’t get me wrong, I love nature. But a walk in the New England woods at this time of the year is downright stressful. Between the tics, gnats, mosquitos, deer flys, and unrelenting humidity, I am content to be in my comfy, air conditioned, bugless home. Think I’ll just work on my strength exercises inside today.
I grew up in New England, so I know exactly what you’re talking about. Nature is beautiful and terrible.
Where I live now, it’s beautiful. California nature is rather pleasant. It’s rarely hot or cold enough to threaten your life or even make you very uncomfortable. You can hike year round. Humidity is low; it’s more of a dry heat. The bugs are there, but they’re not intrusive and oppressive. Lyme disease rates among CA ticks are way lower than New England ticks.
Modern technology is really quite amazing. It can be a crutch, but it can also be a relief from unrelenting misery. Kathy realizes this. We’d be stupid to give that up.
People living 20,000 years ago didn’t have the option to avoid the unpleasantness of nature. It was an unavoidable aspect of everyday life. It was all they knew. It was bearable because it had to be. There wasn’t anything else.
People with smartphones and desk jobs have options. Venturing into nature is a choice, and when they’re out there in the thick of it getting bit by mosquitos and scratched by thorns and beset by heat, it’s harder because they know what they’re missing. They can compare it to the creature comforts of modern living. There’s always an out—cutting the hike short and getting back in the car.
This also means that personal preferences and capacities can determine whether something qualifies as a stressor. If you can’t swim, a “nice relaxing dip in the Pacific Ocean” becomes a life or death struggle for survival. You won’t be chilled out and blissful, GABA flowing through your synapses. You’ll have adrenaline coursing through your veins, your nervous system on red alert.
No one wants to drown, but are we missing something by using modern comforts to avoid the misery of a muggy Massachusetts forest? That kind of “manageable misery,” where it’s not killing us, just making us struggle a bit?
Maybe. What do you guys think?
I think it’s all true. Completely avoiding the dirty, unpleasant side of nature is bad, but so too is staying inside where it’s safe and clean and predictable. You need both. You need to strike a balance between chaos and order. And it’s not only a struggle between being indoors and outdoors. I remember walking through Muir Woods. It’s gorgeous, but it’s all so carefully curated—the paths, the wood walkways, the barriers. It feels like a museum exhibit. Not real.
Chaos—enough to keep things interesting and new and stimulating and novel. Order—enough that you can manage the chaos without it growing dull.
That’s the trick, and it applies to everything.
Angelica W. asked:
How are you using the fish sauce to introduce new foods? Can you give an example? I love fish sauce and am curious how it’s used outside of asian recipes and especially how to use it to entice kids to new tastes?
Here’s a perfect example from a study in 2008. Researchers gave half the subjects soup flavored with MSG (monosodium glutamate, an umami-booster similar to fish sauce) and half soup without MSG. Those who got soup with MSG found it more savory and pleasant than those who got it without MSG. After, both groups then ate soup without MSG. The group that had originally received MSG soup found the MSG-less soup more pleasant than the group who hadn’t had any MSG. Thanks to the glutamate, they’d learned to like the flavors of the soup on their own merits.
You don’t have to conduct a trial with controls and placebos. Just add a few dashes of fish sauce to the next savory meal and continue doing so. Try it on a food that your child hasn’t cared for in the past to see if that changes. As for dosage, less is more. Get it to where you enjoy the flavor. That’s probably the place your kid wants it, too.
Fish sauce isn’t just for Asian food. Oh, no. You’d be surprised.
The ancient Romans made their own fish sauce, called garum, in much the same manner as the Thais and Vietnamese—by fermenting small, salted fish for months. These days, fish sauce is most popular in Southeast Asian cuisines, but it’s spreading to other corners of the culinary world. Modern Italian cuisine frequently employs anchovy paste in non-seafood dishes, which also packs an umami punch without coming off as overly fishy.
I use fish sauce in almost everything savory. Bone broth? A tablespoon for every 4 quarts or so kicks up the umami without tasting fishy. Spaghetti sauce? A few dashes toward the end. I’m rarely let down by the results.
You’ll find that most people whose only experience with fish sauce is “that smelly stuff in bottles at the Vietnamese noodle place” won’t be able to tell that you’ve added any. They’ll just really, really like your food.
That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for reading and be sure to chime in with any comments, questions, or suggestions down below!
The post Dear Mark: When Nature is Stressful and How to Use Fish Sauce appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
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Your Instagram feed is probably full of photos of pool floats that look like food, no? (Is that why they call it a feed?) Perhaps you’ve even posted a few of those pics yourself? We love an oversized slice of pizza, so we can’t blame you or anyone else. In fact, we can only encourage you to keep the kitsch going with some equally cute food-themed towels for when you’re on dry land.
There are tons of beach towels that make us think of the kitchen (the best place to think of!) and our current favorite is this giant watermelon towel.
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I have a no-fail formula for easy weeknight dinners: chicken thighs + any veggie + my trusty sheet pan. Whether you go for skin-on or a boneless, skinless version, chicken thighs are inexpensive, versatile, and big on flavor. Toss them on a sheet pan and you have a one-pan meal that comes together in about 30 minutes and promises easy cleanup.
From classic crispy chicken thighs to maple-mustard chicken, here are 10 ways to turn chicken thighs into dinner tonight.
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There are a lot of ways you can keep your pantry or kitchen cabinets organized, and there are a lot of products on the market made specifically for that exact purpose. But with all of those “helpful” products out there, it’s easy to get carried away, spending a ton of money in the process.
Really, though, you just need your cabinets to be orderly so you don’t have to take everything out when you’re just trying to find the vinegar on a Wednesday night. And you can do that with just a few simple, good-looking baskets. That’s why we recommend snatching up a few of these wire storage baskets (on sale right now on Amazon).
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The freezer’s a handy tool for meal planning, preserving summer produce, and more — but if you’re not careful, it can become a black hole (or perhaps, a bright-white, frosted hole?) full of random food you’ll never eat and things you just stuck in there for no reason. And while the freezer (the fridge, too) does run more efficiently when it’s full, it can’t cool your food off as effectively when it’s packed.
While we can certainly give you lots of advice on how to clean and organize your freezer, you might not feel like doing an overhaul right now. So here are five things you can just take out of the freezer right now.
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