It’s coming up on summer party season, kicking off with Canada Day and Fourth of July – both happening next weekend already! With so many outdoor parties and barbecues that involve so many kids, I’m always trying to come up with fresh fruit in festive form. (And to be honest, I need something to nibble on to keep me away from the chips and cupcakes!) I came across these adorably carved watermelons courtesy of the watermelon experts, and I figure if I can carve a pumpkin, I can carve a watermelon. How cute is this spiky hedgehog? I may dig out and dust off my old melon baller and bring it back into rotation in my utensil drawer.

I like pasta. I’d like to help people make better pasta. It pains me to think about all the poorly prepared pasta being served and eaten in America. I’m specifically talking about plain old store-bought dried pasta. Nothing fancy. You’ve probably made some yourself.

I’m specifically not talking about preparing or cooking fresh pasta, how to execute any particular pasta recipe, or why you should never, ever buy pasta sauce in a jar. (You really shouldn’t, though.) This is just about the basics: how to cook and serve dried pasta as part of some larger recipe, the details of which are out of scope, for now.

Here’s my advice, in no particular order.

TRY this: place a forkful of food in your mouth. It doesn’t matter what the food is, but make it something you love — let’s say it’s that first nibble from three hot, fragrant, perfectly cooked ravioli.

Now comes the hard part. Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry.

Today’s experiment in eating, however, involves becoming aware of that reflexive urge to plow through your meal like Cookie Monster on a shortbread bender. Resist it. Leave the fork on the table. Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam.

Continue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you’ll experience the third-eye-opening pleasures and frustrations of a practice known as mindful eating.

The concept has roots in Buddhist teachings. Just as there are forms of meditation that involve sitting, breathing, standing and walking, many Buddhist teachers encourage their students to meditate with food, expanding consciousness by paying close attention to the sensation and purpose of each morsel. In one common exercise, a student is given three raisins, or a tangerine, to spend 10 or 20 minutes gazing at, musing on, holding and patiently masticating.

If you're unfamiliar with naan, it is basically just an Indian style flat bread. Okay, maybe it's not "just" flat bread. This stuff is AMAZING. It is soft, pillowy, full of lovely bubbles and so extremely versatile. You can eat this along side of a meal to sop up gravies and juices, you can make flat bread sandwiches with it, top it with tomato sauce and cheese for a quick personal pizza, use it in place of tortillas for quesadillas... the possibilities are endless!!

This recipe is so quick, easy and delicious that it is most definitely my new favorite yeast bread recipe. I can't quite get enough of it. My favorite way to eat it so far is to use it for my breakfast quesadillas or to just melt some mozzarella in it with a slight sprinkle of garlic powder... oh, it's divine!

False advertising 101.
So, I went to some fast food places (I won’t say “restaurants”, just “places”), and picked up burgers and tacos, so I could compare them with the ads. (I’m always on the hunt for little projects like this. Stoked.) I brought the food home, tossed it into my photography studio, and did ad-style shoots, with pictures of the official ads on my computer next to me, so I could match the lighting and angles.
-
People around the world know fast food as one of the most reliable distributors of disappointment ever produced by the business world. We know that if we ever feel the need to complain about something, we can just grab a page out of a coupon booklet, adorned in pictures of juicy burgers, then go have a party. Why, the places themselves usually plaster their walls with pictures of juicy burgers – often hanging right over your table – so you need only open your eyes to find something to compare your food with, while you eat it.
Needless to say, the results of my little project were unsurprising… which shouldn’t be a surprise.

At my height, 180 lbs. isn’t terrible, but the trajectory is obviously wrong. Without adjustments to my lifestyle, you can see what would happen. So I started paying attention.

In February, Laura and I got iPhones. Shortly after, I discovered Lose It!, a calorie-counting and weight-tracking app. I knew my eat-box-of-cheez-its-when-bored habit was bad, so I began simply tracking calories with Lose It!, hoping to break some bad habits. After all, if you give an engineer some data, he’ll optimize it.

A few weeks later, I ended up reading The Hacker’s Diet. It’s a quick, educational, and inspirational read. John Walker’s thesis is that anyone can lose weight if they correct the flawed feedback mechanisms causing them to eat more than they consume every day.

See, our bodies are complicated machines. We can’t entirely understand them, so we use models (created by people smarter than me) to help us predict how our bodies will behave under various inputs. Thus, there are tons of weight loss plans, and I’m sure they’ve all worked for someone: all raw, low-carb, no-carb, low-calorie, intense exercise, glass of red wine every night, protein shakes in the morning, seven snacks a day, etc. etc.

All of that is too complicated for me, so I chose the simplest model I knew: Calories In, Calories Out. It goes something like this:

Ett rätt avancerat recept på chili med en stor mängd ingredienser, en del rätt udda för att vara chili.

After discovering the recipe for Robie's Buttermilk Flapjacks in a magazine a year or two ago, my wife has been making them for breakfast most Saturdays and they are, no foolin', the best pancakes I've ever eaten. They are fluffy and moist and delicious. Here's what you do.

Kyle MacLachlan was 15 minutes late to our dinner at Strip House restaurant in New York, but he looked quite stylish when he finally arrived, carrying a brown leather Cole Haan wine tote bag. "That's a good-looking bag," I said admiringly. "I had a gift certificate," he offered, half-explanation, half-apology.

Mr. MacLachlan is best known for his starring roles in the film "Blue Velvet," and the cult-favorite television series "Twin Peaks," as well as turns on "Sex and the City" and "Desperate Housewives." He has also taken on a role that a number of actors have dabbled in: celebrity wine producer.

If you like roasted tomato salsas, this kicks ass. It's almost exactly the same as the stuff I get from Whole Foods for $4.99 for a little 1 pint container; this recipe makes something like 3x I think. Costs about half as much.