Sunday afternoon cocktails, and a cigar, on the deck are a pleasure we look forward to on many weekends during the warmer weather. It's a great time to talk, reminisce about the week past, plan for the week to come, and also just sit and relax. This past weekend was warm and humid, so we looked for a refreshing summer-suitable libation. What resulted was a bit of an experiment using a recipe found online. Some Sparking Ice Mango Orange carbonated water, Four Roses Single Barrel Bourbon, bitters, and an orange peel made a refreshing concoction. The Four Roses is one of my favorite bourbons for cocktails. Of course, I always have suitable single "rocks" of ice at the ready. I initially used a few splashes of orange bitters in the drink. While not bad, the drink seemed somewhat flat in flavor. When I made a second round, I switched to Angostura Bitters. A bit of bitterness to balance the sweet of the sparkling water was just the touch needed. We added some veggies, humus, and tzatziki to the table and we were all set!

We took a long weekend trip to Blacksburg, VA recently to relax, do a little bit of hiking, and of course overindulge a bit on food and drink. Blackburg is one of our favorite "close by" vacations. During the summer, when VA Tech is not in session and the 30,000 students are not present, it still has some of that small town feel.

We went birding this morning at Echo Lake Park, right down the street from our home. I was just trying to get a good shot of the Great Blue Heron, and when I got home, I loved how this looks like the turtles are all lined up to worship their great blue leader.

Happy Friday. 

After a period of wildfire smoke filled skies, which was followed by days of high temperatures, we've finally enjoyed a few days of temperatures in the low to mid 80's. That made this week's practice outing at the range all the more pleasant.

This was a pairing I enjoyed very much. Neither the Padrón 1964 Anniversary nor the Weller Antique 107 are new experiences, though I am not sure if I've had them together. They are however, both top of the line in my book.

A family member gave me this book recently. She found it in the bargain bin of a used bookstore and thought I'd enjoy it. Titled International Connoisseur's Guide To Cigars, the guide by Jane Resnick was published in 1996. To many of us, 1996 was "the other day," but was actually some 17 years ago!
The whole section was very interesting despite, or perhaps because of many of the featured companies are no longer in existence. I also had a chuckle at the photos used for a couple of the Cuban brands. The illustrations were complete with cracks in the wrapper. 

Book Review: Ultra Processed People by Chris van Tulleken

Pringles are everything that is wrong with food in our world today. Pringles are gross. If you ever wondered how they get that uniform shape, it’s because they are less than 40% potato and are made from a slurry that is injected into a mold in the manufacturing process. It’s an ultimate example of ultra processed food. You take something as simple as the potato chip, a sliced potato, fried and salted, and process the living hell out of it to result in something that looks and tastes almost but not quite like the thing you started with.

Why do we do this? Profits, of course. What other reason is there?

Unfortunately, there is a lot of evidence that our breaking down natural foods into component parts, then putting them back together with chemistry to maximize shelf life (and profits) ruins the nutritional benefits of the food. It also hacks our system by bypassing millions of years of evolution in how we digest and process nutrients. It is very likely a primary factor in the rise of obesity and related health problems.

Ultra Processed Food makes up well over ½ the calories consumed in England. I assume it’s at least that bad in the US. The author goes into the science of what UPF food is, and why it exists. He explores what it may be doing to our health. He follows the money to show that much of the “science” promoting ultra processed foods is funded by the food industry. All that “fat is the real villain” stuff of the last 40 years? That was Coca-Cola Inc. diverting attention from themselves. Backed by 40 or 50 pages of end notes, this is a well documented exploration of our manipulation of the food system, the reasons for it, and the unforeseen (or just ignored) consequences of that manipulation.

A few takeaways for me include:

I’ve always been a sugar = sugar guy and not bought the hype that HFCS is any worse than table sugar. I might have been wrong about that.

Likewise, I’m definitely rethinking my relationship with artificial sweeteners. I’m not worried about getting cancer from them. But the idea that the fake sweet taste triggers your system to expect sugar, and when it doesn’t arrive that triggers a follow-on craving for sugar, has legs. I had quit diet soda pre-pandemic, but starting drinking it again when we are all stuck at home dealing with all that shit. I think it’s time to wean myself off it again.

Also, globally, we stopped growing food and switched to growing raw ingredients for UPF. The global food supply is really built on about 12 components, beef, chicken, pork, soy, corn, rice, etc. If you have a diversified food system and a plague or weather takes out one component, the world can adjust. What we are doing is practically begging the universe to drop in a microbe or bug that takes out the global rice or corn supply over a couple of years. Climate change only increases the odds of that happening.

The author is a medial doctor (infectious disease) but he stops short of giving direct dietary advice. But I think everything in this book supports what Micheal Pollan suggested with The Omnivore’s Dilemma years ago. Eat food your grandparents would recognize, not too much of it, and mostly plants.

Advice from someone who should know.