Ten Simple Changes to Cut Calories and Keep Flavor + Add Nutrients The beautiful Natalie gives 10 tips for easy, healthy, yummy foods.  Lose weight, get more and better nutrition, and reduce fat.  This is  a  long video, but worth watching. To check out the book by Seinfeld’s wife about sneaking in healthy foods into [...]

City Pushes Veggies Gardens By Growing Own There is something new in the flowerbeds around Baltimore City Hall and the War Memorial. Where there were once beautiful flowers you now can find some good vegetables to eat. Their main idea is to lead by example to get people to plant their own food gardens in [...]

The Beautiful Cookbook SeriesI’ve started a new collection of cookbooks. The Beautiful Cookbooks truly are beautiful, as well as informative. These are oversized coffeetable books about various regions in the world. So far, I have the American, Texas, Asia, and Provence cookbooks. Each of these cookbooks has historic information about the region, including its people, [...]

Food is, of course, the most basic of our needs beyond water and air (and toilet paper!). Isn’t it funny how we take these simple things for granted? You breathe in and out, you pull on the roll, you turn on the tap, you pop a Lean Cuisine into the microwave, or answer, “Yes”, to “Fries with that?” Easy, automatic, instant. But of course, it’s not. All of these things, with the exception of air, require a complicated combination of infrastructure and workforce to get to us. We only think about it when the system breaks down (imagine a toilet paper factory worker’s strike!), or when we pay our bills.

Whale Rider Movie ReviewWhale Rider is a lovely little movie about a rural Maori town in New Zealand and their search for a leader. It’s about the struggle for a little girl to be accepted, about the struggle between tradition and modern ideas, fulfilling your dreams, and about love within a family and within a [...]

Melvin Durai, the Rajah of HumorI subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but my favorite is the “Funny Columns” from self-described “writer Melvin Durai, who was born in India, raised in Zambia and brainwashed in America”. He apparently now lives in Canada (go Canada!), and most of his columns have a sarcastic political message, often [...]

Movie Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless MindI absolutely love to see Jim Carey in a serious role. I think that Kate Winslet is beautiful. Charlie Kaufman (screenwriter for Adaptation and Being John Malkovich among others) is brilliant. And I think that Michel Gondry is an absolute genius. It also has Elijah Wood and Kirsten [...]

The Garden Club and the Kumquat Campaign by Des KennedyThis is one of those perfect stories that I just couldn’t quit reading and was very sad to finally put down. Des Kennedy is a resident of Denman Island in the Georgia Strait of British Columbia, Canada, which I have had the recent pleasure of enjoying. [...]

The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan I’ve just finished reading The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan. As with The Joy Luck Club, I was very impressed and found myself lost in the realism and emotion of the story. As with many of her books, Tan brings in the elements of the mother-daughter relationship, and old [...]

Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish by Sue BenderI loved this little book (just 152 pages, I read it in a few hours). It was not only a delight to read, but also aesthetically pleasing and nice to hold in my hands. It is an autobiography, but also a spiritual book. Although [...]