Friday, September 27, 2013

New diet and my thoughts on cooking

So wifey and I have been making some changes lately in an attempt to boost our chances of conception. One of the changes is our diets, which we started today. Mine is basically the diet outlined here (thanks to my brother for the idea). The basic idea is to boost my testosterone, and how that plays out in my diet is the following:

Breakfast every day will be three strips of bacon and three eggs. Lunch will be a large salad with meat (some form of steak), veggies, and nuts. Dinner will vary day to day.

Sounds pretty tasty to me! Time will tell if I get sick of it. There was a time a few years ago when I was considering joining the air force that I had to lose some weight so I changed my diet. At the time I pretty much ate the same thing 6 days of the week. I ate oatmeal for breakfast, chicken with rice and veggies for lunch, and steak with rice and veggies for dinner. Fruit was also interspersed. It worked pretty well at the time, with regular exercise I lost around 25 pounds.

The current diet will give me much more flexibility, with different snacks I can have and no set dinner. I think I'll get used to it very quickly, shouldn't be a problem. Exercise is the harder thing to get into, that starts next Monday. Urgh.


I don't really cook much anymore now that I have wifey around. She is certainly a much better cook with me. Don't get me wrong, I'm a decent cook, but she is excellent. She also really enjoys making new dishes or just experimenting and seeing what happens (almost always a success).

The creative process of cooking really appeals to me. I don't consider myself to be a very creative person, I'm more of an optimizer than a creator. Still, taking raw materials and transforming them into something that they're not is very fulfilling, especially when it's something you can enjoy afterwards. And let me tell you, I'm a man who enjoys his food.

When I was growing up I did a lot of baking, but I kind of stopped doing that when I got to college. I've found that baking is not as exciting because it's so precise. Baking is a science in which precise measurements are needed in order to get chemical reactions to happen properly. Cooking  is much more of an art form where experimentation and exploration can lead to delicious discoveries. In baking you always need a recipe (unless you're an amazing baker of course), in cooking you can take a dish or a concept and just start heading in that direction until you get somewhere you like. The last time I made a nice dinner for wifey I decided to make stir-fry even though I never had before. No recipe needed, just made some choices based on previous cooking knowledge and wound up with a decently good stir-fry. That's a lot more fulfilling then following a recipe and getting the result the recipe promises.

Clearly some kitchen experience is a good idea before trying to make dishes without a recipe, but I definitely recommend some experimentation in your cooking. If nothing else, at least buy a bunch of spices and find out how you like to use them. Cooking is a life skill that will serve you well throughout your life.

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