Category Archives: Life Journal

Improving on Grandma’s Apple Pie Recipe

1 Reply

Apple PieOne of the things that I love about cooking is experimentation. Cooking is not an exact science, and small variations in ingredients, measurements, or techniques can lead to sometimes subtle and sometimes significant differences in outcome.

One of my favorite items to bake is apple pie, mainly because I love eating it (despite my recent decisions to reduce my sugar intake). When baking a pie, one of the things that I struggle with is making a light, flaky crust. I’ve tried different ingredients, made sure the water was extra cold, and tried various techniques to avoid over working the dough. Despite what I’ve tried. I just couldn’t get the dough as flaky as I would like it.

After doing a little research, I found a suggestion that I figured was worth a try – using vodka as a substitute for some of the water. The rationale is that vodka would provide the required moisture content for preparing the dough, but during the baking process, the alcohol would vaporize leaving a lighter, flakier crust. Given all that I had tried, I figured it was worth a shot.

Continue reading →

Cooked – a Netflix Documentary

1 Reply

Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve been doing a lot of tinkering with my diet. I cut out sugar in November 2014, and after reading Wheat Belly and Grain Brain, I decided to cut back on my carbohydrates. The result has been a loss of weight and reduction in my blood sugar, which I documented in my “Year Without Sugar” post.

The results I achieved encouraged me to share my experience with a good friend of mine. After he started seeing similar results, he told me that I needed to watch the Michael Pollan documentary, Cooked, on Netflix.

Continue reading →

The results of a year without sugar

1 Reply

Over the past couple of years, I’ve come to believe that refined sugars are one of the worst things we can put into our bodies. When you investigate the nutritional value of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and other sweeteners, you find that it’s zero, if not negative. These sweeteners are used to enhance food flavor and are highly addictive. They also create resistance to hunger suppressing hormones in the body resulting in the never-ending hunger cycles and insatiable pantry raids almost all of us have experienced. Food companies understand the flavor enhancement and addictive nature of the substance and employ food chemists to optimize the level of added sugars. Their job is to determine the right amount of sweetener to add that enhances flavor but doesn’t make it too sweet for our tastes. If you don’t believe it, just look at the amount of sugar per serving in something as benign as tomato sauce. Then start looking at nearly every processed or packaged food. If you’re eating it from a box or a bag, there’s a very high probability that some sweetener has been added to it.

With this in mind, about 18 months ago I decided it was to take a stand against sugar. I didn’t eliminate all sugar, but I significantly cut back on how much sugar I consumed on a daily basis. I cut out my morning packaged orange juice routine, starting making homemade tomato sauce (which tastes way better than what you get out of a jar), and became aware of the sugar content of everything I was eating. When you start reading labels, you’re floored by how many things have sugar in them. Even things you would never suspect contain sugar, such as a box of whole grain crackers, have some type of sweetener added.

What inspired me to run this experiment? I wanted to see if it would have any affect on my weight. It’s not that I was overweight, but I felt like I could afford to lose 5-10 pounds to get to a more optimal weight for my body type. I also wanted to see how it would affect my blood test results. Luckily, I decided to start having blood tests done annually when I turned 40, so I had six years of results to compare against.

Here are the results from 18 months of limited sugar, and what’s next.

Continue reading →

Marvin Braude Trail – redux

Leave a reply

Marvin Braude Bike Trail at Torrance Beach

At the end of last year, I was closing in on 1,000 miles of cardio activity. I needed about 30 miles or so to break the 1K mark, so I decided to ride the Marvin Braude trail with my oldest daughter Amanda the day after Christmas. The Marvin Braude trail starts at Will Rogers State Beach at Temascal Canyon Road and stretches all the way to Torrance Beach. It’s a great ride through Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Marina del Rey, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Redondo Beach. Having ridden it once before in September 2014, I figured some of the lessons learned would make for a smoother ride this time around. Unfortunately, things don’t always work out as planned.

Continue reading →

An Introduction to WordPress SEO

Leave a reply

For the April VC WordPress meetup, I volunteered to present how to setup a WordPress site for SEO and analytics. From a structural point of view, little needs to be done to a WordPress site for the search engines to index it. However, in order to optimize your search engine performance, it’s critical to understand how to analyze and measure the performance of your site’s content. That’s what I focused on in my 3-step approach to WordPress SEO.

 

Continue reading →

Places to go – Portland

Leave a reply

The pizza oven at Nostrana - Portland, ORI’ll admit I have an affinity for the Northwest. Maybe it’s because I just get to visit occasionally and don’t have to live there and survive the rainy season. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting Seattle, and I’ve always enjoyed spending time in Portland. I used to manage an office in the Lake Oswego area back in the day with Vitesse Semiconductor, The folks in the office took me to some great places around the Portland area. On a trip to the Northwest with my daughter Courtney last year, we made the drive from Seattle to Eugene. Since I had to pass through Portland, I figured we’d make a stop there for dinner.

I did a quick online search, and the restaurant Nostrana appeared to be an interesting place with a good mix of food on their menu that would appeal to both of us. I also liked the fact that their menu was built around fresh food, much of it locally sourced. I decided we would venture into the city to make the stop even though it was a bit off of I-5 on our way through town.

What a pleasant surprise it was.

Continue reading →

Miami – first impressions

Leave a reply

I got to travel to Miami for the first time ever at the end of February. Unlike my recent trip to Seattle, I wasn’t looking forward to it. For whatever reason, I’ve never had a desire to go to Miami. There just wasn’t anything about it that appealed to me. Either way, there was a conference there that I wanted to attend, so off I went. Here are my first impressions of the city and a couple of notes about getting around and places to visit.

Continue reading →

Pitt basketball 2015-2016 season – who were these guys

Leave a reply

Well, another year of Pitt basketball, and another one-and-done tournament exit. It’s becoming a disturbing trend. Pitt has not made an appearance in the second half of the NCAA tournament since 2009 when they lost to Villanova in the Elite 8. Here’s a look back on this past season, and some thoughts on what lies ahead.

Continue reading →

My first visit to Seattle

3 Replies

I moved to Southern California almost 25 years ago. Shortly after my arrival, I watched the movie Singles. It’s about a group of twenty-somethings living in Seattle and starred younger versions of Bridget Fonda, Kyra Sedgwick, and Matt Dillon. It was right around the time that the rock bands Nirvana and Pearl Jam were reaching their peak, and the grunge scene was all the rage. It was a great movie that I related to at the time, and the movie soundtrack, which featured Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Sreaming Trees, and The Smashing Pumpkins, was awesome (I still have the CD somewhere, I think).

After watching the movie, I had a burning desire to visit the city of Seattle. It seemed like such a cool place from the movie, and everyone I talked to reinforced my view. I had planned to visit, but life got in the way. I got busy with work, then with a family, and then started doing heavy travel for my job. My travel took me all over the world – Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, Washington DC, Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, Munich, Hong Kong, Sydney – but Seattle remained an elusive destination at the top of my list of places I wanted to visit.

Finally, after nearly 25 years of waiting, I got to visit last November with my second daughter Courtney during a visit to the University of Washington. Courtney set up plans to see the school on a Monday, so we left a day early and spent Sunday touring the city. I wasn’t sure what to expect and was concerned that I would be let down. I wasn’t. It was awesome. We saw a lot with our one day (or so) in the city. Here’s a sampling of what we did.

Continue reading →