photo credit: tibbygirl

I was in the grocery store earlier today after a trip through Crystal. Along the road every restaurant that I passed seemed to have suddenly added corned beef and cabbage to their menus or managed to dig out the big ol' bottle of green food coloring and started dumping it into every water-soluble substance in their kitchen.

Once in the store, the same trend was magnified. Half of the end-caps were covered in shamrocks and a significant portion of the pastries found themselves coated in green goo.

The thing is. There's lots of really good Irish food that I'm seriously looking forward to taking part in from the source when we are in Ireland in July.

Wanting to get a taste in advance of that trip, I headed to my new favorite food/recipe site: Recipezaar. I've got quite a few food sites in the list I go to when it's time to whip something up. Recipezaar isn't exactly the Web 2.0 poster child. There are plenty of other recipe sites that "feel" better. I mean I really like the look of Open Source Food.

However, Open Source Food, despite the gorgeous photography and things like tagging, when it comes down to it, a site like Recipezaar delivers on the actual task at hand. See, I use a site like these to find food worth making. And, on those features that matter, Recipezaar delivers.

If you're looking to move beyond corned beef and cabbage or want some Irish food that is more than just a cliche, it's worth digging through some of the related recipe lists they've got. I usually sort everything by rating, which brings out some really good commentary on how good or bad the recipes actually are.

St. Patrick's Day Recipes

General Irish Recipes

Recipes Containing Guiness

Once you find some that you like (I'm thinking Irish Pub Stew and Soda Bread sound good to me or maybe some Irish Cod Pie), one of the features of Recipezaar really shines. Their printable format is really one of the best of all of the recipe sites out there. You need to register for a free account to hide the stuff that shows at the top of the page and then you get nice, clean layouts with nutrition information, original comments by the submitter and a quick URL for looking it up again at a later date. Nearly every recipe I've gotten from them fit on a single side of a single sheet of paper.

Combine these nice printer-friendly layouts with a default PDF printer and you've got an easy way to save recipes for later printing or review.

When I mentioned over the holidays that the croutons on our Christmas salad were actually homemade (in response to a question on the brand), I was met with more surprise than I expected. Unfortunately, that response is something I've heard from lots of other people who actually make their own stuff, from food to robots.

The last 100 years of manufacturing, particularly the last 60 or so, have rendered the bulk of several generations incapable of seeing certain items as anything other than the result of factory production.

For food, that means that really simple items like croutons and whipped cream, when made instead of bought generate incredulity. It's as though those items have been moved from the class of things you can make yourself into the class of things you pay $3 for in the grocery store in a hermetically sealed container that's been on the shelf or in the refrigerator for 6 weeks or 6 months.

Fortunately, the whole "Maker" movement is helping to rectify some of this problem. Lots of people are taking these matters back into their own hands and discovering the joy of having made this stuff yourself as well as products that end up at a higher quality standard than the stuff plopping off the end of the Kraft factory line.

Anyway, last night, the homemade crouton supply was running low, so I made up another batch. I had the small digital camera in my pocket, so I took a few shots while I made them and strung them together early this morning into a quick slideshow and put the video up.

The croutons themselves look a little dark in the photos, but they taste great.

Photo: Théo

All my life, I've heard people talking about how their "eyes were bigger than their stomach" or warning their children against such a misjudgment. I always had to guess at what they meant. That's because for as long as I can remember, it never really applied to me. If it could fit on a plate, I could finish it.

Other than on days like Thanksgiving (and maybe one or two other days a year) I don't manage to approach that "full" feeling everyone else seems to experience at most meals until a half hour after I'm done eating, if at all. Unfortunately, I also get REALLY hungry (think "willing to walk miles to get food) fairly often, no matter how much I eat.

That, of course, coupled with a move from farming to sitting on my butt all day pretty much guaranteed that I would top 300 pounds, which I did a few years ago. That's when I went to a weight loss doctor and spent nearly a year on a weight loss program resulting in a loss of 60 pounds.

The thing that made that program work for me was the included an appetite suppressant you probably know from countless spam emails: phentermine. When I took those pills, it was amazing. It was as though rational decision-making was returned to my interactions with food. Instead of *needing* that food, I was just *wanting* that food: an impulse I had some control over.

Unfortunately, that doctor turned out to be a bit flaky. She went on "vacation" and didn't come back for MONTHS. That, of course, derailed my progress and eventually I gained about 10 pounds back. A few months later, I tried to start back up with this doctor only to have her disappear again after a couple of months.

Then, this summer, I decided to try to find another doctor and get back on the prescription. It's clearly the only thing that's worked for me. I headed in for a couple of appointments only to have the reality of keeping clients happy collide with getting to appointments.

When I missed my last one, I sat back to do some reflection. See, while the phentermine worked for me, it has always bothered me that I needed to be on a prescription in order to have control over my weight and appetite. I was never quite sure what the final exit strategy would be when I reached my target weight.

Obviously, I can't stay on that kind of prescription as a long term solution. That's why the last few days have been so exciting for me. I have been unable to finish any of my last 4 meals without any surgery or other drastic measures. The results I'm getting have every possibility of being permanent and for the rest of my life.

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Photo: Rodrigo Paoletti

For a while, it's bothered me how much soda I drink. I've always been a fan of the fizzy drinks. Pretty much all of my waking hours, I've got a beverage at hand. I can easily go through 12 cans a day.

When I was younger, it was the regular stuff: Coke, Mountain Dew and company. I also drink coffee and tea, but drink nearly all of it sweetened in some way.

For a long time, that sweetener was sugar. However, when I ended up tipping the scales at 300 pounds, I gave up drinking any of my calories. All of the experts say that you should drink plain water. The problem is that I can't stand drinking plain water. I've tried all of the things recommended in every article, book, from every expert, etc.

So, I've been drinking diet soda in one form or another for years and I managed to lose a lot of weight. Now, some of the other things associated with soda have been bugging me. For one, I hate dragging home case after case of the stuff every week to feed my habit. Then there's the cost. Even buying it by the case, I'm still spending more than I like.

The artificial sweeteners, while show in many studies to be totally safe unless you're eating the stuff by the pound, keep coming up as correlated elements in more and more metabolic studies. No one has yet proven causation (that Nutrasweet directly contributes to weight gain, etc.), I wondered if I might be able to better solve some of these problems more rationally.

I wondered if it was the flavor or the carbonation that made me like the stuff. So, a couple of weeks ago I tried a a full day with just sparkling water and discovered that I didn't really miss the soda. That's in stark contrast to the days where I tried plain water (bottled or not) and ran around desperately trying to find a can of Coke.

It was clear that what I was after was carbonation, not necessarily the flavor of a given kind of soda (though I still do like Coke Zero). However, the thought of buying sparkling water seemed even less sane than buying cases of soda.

And so it was that I consulted the oracle at Google, which resulted in my purchase of a home soda fountain, which arrived yesterday.

Now, instead of dragging a pickup bed full of cases of cans, I can just take filtered water from the tap, fill the 1 liter bottles and press the button a few times and I've got sparkling water. The gas canisters exchange for about $20 and they claim 100+ bottles per canister.

It comes with some flavored diet syrups as well, but the couple I've tried aren't terribly good. However, the sparkling water *is*. It's about noon, but I've already gone through 3 liters of water today and none of the other stuff.

Today was stressful and went longer than I wanted, resulting in a trip home right at 5:15. Given that it's road construction season here in Minnesota and the bonding bill went through (meaning more money to *do* road construction), that was the worst possible time to go home.

So, I sat on Hwy 100, staring at a proud parent of an honor student who was also the owner of an exceptionally long middle finger and a strongly held belief that sharing it with the Ford Taurus in front of her would clear out the 15 miles of non-moving cars in front of her.

As I sat there, I developed a craving for pizza. This was the kind of craving that can't be explained, but MUST be obeyed. However, I didn't want crappy frozen pizza as the craving wouldn't be pacified with that. However, as it was going to be nearly 6:30 by the time I got home, I knew that ordering for delivery was just going to put me in another long line, quite likely with some of my companions on the road.

Since I had to stop at Target anyway on the way home, I thought I'd buy one of their deli pizzas as a possible solution. I put one in the cart and walked over to the deli meats to buy stuff for grilled cheese sandwiches tomorrow night. For the last month or so, Shelly's been doing a lot of traveling and I usually just eat a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner on those nights.

Anyway, as I was standing in front of the counter, waiting for the meat to be sliced, I saw fresh mozzarella (the stuff that's packed in water). In that moment, I decided that even the deli pizza wouldn't suffice. No, I was determined to have homemade pizza for one, within 45 minutes.

I succeeded and it was delicious. In case you are interested, here's how it goes:
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