Old Pastry Chefs Never Die, They Just Make Less Dough

Food Blogging

Le Fruits

My dear friend Abra is a wonderfully generous and multi-talented person. She's a great chef, has an incredible knowledge of food, a fabulous writer, a speaker of two languages, a green thumb, a singer, and has a wonderful knack for food photography.
She is now living in France, the south of France no less, working on writing a book. She is keeping a blog about her French experience called French Letters and all the wonderful food photos you see here were taken by her.

I hate her. I hate her in the way a good friend hates their friend when their life is significantly better than yours. It's a good kind of hate and not a hatey kind of hate.

I read her blog every day to keep abreast on what's happening in her fairy tale life (even though she has had some problems with "the French Cable guy" and her French plumbing, not to mention the fact that Air France misplaced all their baggage, and when she first arrived at her French house she had nothing to wear but the clothes on her back and a tablecloth.) She's also had to endure a bit of French road rage; experiencing a hand gesture that she'd never seen before, but could deduce that the gesturer was probably NOT inviting her to share a glass of wine with him.

So why am I throwing an American Pity Party? Because I'm tired of being a "large gal" and because most of my life since April has been all consumed with taking care of and worrying about my aging mother. I've been managing her life and my own and it's a lot of work. I've had to put my career on hold too. My life is in a strange holding pattern and I feel like bitching. So come to my party. There'll be lots of wine. Lots and lots of wine. Not to mention whine. Maybe some cheese. Because I am a "foodie" after all.

Le Veggies

Abra's blog is what is known as a "food blog". Food blogs are all over the internet. And, if you're a "foodie" you are no stranger to food blogs. My blog is a food blog, but in a much more loosely structured way. To me, there's more to food than food. There's the people who prepare the food, how you feel when you eat food, what you went through to prepare a dish yourself, playing with new and mysterious ingredients, experiencing good or bad service at a restaurant, how food affects your life, either positively or negatively, how people claim some foods are miracle foods, fad diets, the conspiracy of corn products in a lot of mass produced foods, the ethics behind foie gras......it goes on and on. THEN there are some food blogs out there that are nothing more than, "this is what I had to eat today", and those are the blogs I just don't understand. If you really want to hear people talking about what they had to eat today, just talk to an old person or go to a nursing home. They will go into great detail about their meals, because as you get older, eating is one of the pleasures they can still enjoy (if they are healthy enough anyway). A lot of them also grew up in time when food wasn't so plentiful, so they appreciate what didn't come so easily to them in their youth.

I guess all I'm saying is, if you're going to write a freakin' food blog, make it interesting! Tell me the story BEHIND that Swanson Hungry Man dinner.......and do you really take the plastic off the chicken and the brownie before you nuke it? Do you take the brownie out of the container midway through cooking time so it won't overbake or do you just leave it in there to become a piece of concrete? And why the hell are you eating a Swanson Hungry Man dinner anyway? This is what makes a food blog interesting. If you want some clues about good food blogging, just check out Abra's.

Le Pastries

Look at her lovely photos! God I hate her.*


*In a bitchy-you're-my
-dear-friend-can't-wait-til-you-
get-back-sort-of-way.

Food and Flab

This blog isn't only about food, and pastries, and the fact that I happen to be a pastry chef. It's also about flab. My flab. The flab that comes with food and pastries and the fact that I happen to be a pastry chef.

Dammit, I'm not really FAT, I'm flabulous! But I'm heading down the slope to fat......faster and faster.
Let's look at the facts. I'm a 45 year old woman, teetering toward menopause. I work in the food business, I truly do love to eat, and I've always hated to exercise. I'm doomed, right? One would think. But I don't give up so easily.....
especially when my husband drops hints about getting out for a walk once in a while. I know he's REALLY saying this:
"Honey, someday, even the Viagra won't help." Yeah, I know the deal.

I really don't want to be one of those people you see in Costco with the oxygen tank and a scooter chair. I don't want to shop at Lane Bryant! I wanna shop at the Slut-o-Rama where Paris, Lindsay and Britney shop.

In reality, I do overeat just enough to keep me on the flabby side, but not enough to make me a BBW. My slowing metabolism and the fact that exercise is another room in hell for me is my main problem. I'm also embarrassed to exercise in public. I'm aware of the fact that no one really wants to see me sweatin' and flabbin' down the street.
Besides, my body is sort of like a freight train, once the momentum gets me going it takes a long time to stop.
I fear that one day I may mow down a child.

So I'm in the market for a little used exercise equipment. Boy there's a lot out there, and it's pretty cheap too. This isn't really saying much about exercise equipment though, is it? Is it really effective? Are so many people trying to get rid of theirs because it just doesn't work and gets too boring? One wonders. At least I'm smart enough not to buy any of it new, and if I think it was a bad purchase later, I can at least sell mine to the next optimist.

I scored my first piece of equipment for FREE just the other day. It's called a Voit Gravity Rider. Here is a picture of one:

Voit Gravity Rider

Basically, you put your feet on the pedals, your hands on the handlebars, and push down with your feet as you pull back with your arms. It's fun and easy, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to actually break a sweat on this thing. If I go fast enough to get my heart rate up, the damn thing practically jumps off the ground and I feel like I'm going to get thrown off. I have figured I can do some good quad strengthening by going up and down VEEERRRY slowly, but I was sort of hopin' for a cardio machine here.

Does anybody know how to get a good workout on this thing? Or are they all up for sale because nobody else could figure it out either?????