My blog has been inactive for some time now as I’ve focused on other things.
One of those things is my second book, Unleashing Your Inner Insect, which will be released on Kindle on April 1.
Why April Fools’ Day? Unleashing Your Inner Insect is satire, poking fun at the personality type industry. You may know your Myers-Briggs Type, but do you know your inner insect? Only this book can tell you if you are an Ant, a driven team-player, or a Mosquito, skilled at infiltration and always looking out for #1. 😉
John A. Bredesen, author of The I.T. Leaders’ Handbook and The I.T. Leader’s First Days, writes, “I have read numerous business books over the years and taken many personality quizzes. They are so ripe for satire. Unleashing Your Inner Insect is the perfect skewering of the genre. I laughed out loud during several parts, which really annoyed the HR rep who was trying to do my annual performance review at the time.”
Ready for some comedy in the guise of a self-help book? Check it out!
If you’re concerned about the environment, you may know that one of the best choices you can make for the planet is to eat a more plant-based diet.
But what if you or someone you love really loves meat?
I’m not a huge meat-eater and, despite my weakness for dairy (I love cheese and ice cream), I sometimes eat and enjoy vegan meals. (If you’re looking for a great vegan meal, I highly recommend this stuffed delicata squash recipe from the Washington Post.) My husband, however, feels strongly that a meal isn’t complete without meat.
While I sometimes make vegetarian or vegan meals for dinner despite my husband’s preference, I do try to make most of the meals we eat with some meat in them.
But I don’t necessarily use a lot of meat to make dinner.
You don’t need to use ground beef by the pound.
Instead of meatless meals, we often eat meals where meat is more of a condiment than the main portion of the meal. I do sometimes cook meat-centric meals, but most of the time, the meat isn’t the main event.
I suppose if I were the sort of person who just cooked without a recipe, I could just do this on my own, but I almost always use a recipe to at least guide my cooking. So I turn to recipes that aren’t for traditional Western meat-and-potatoes-style main dishes. I’ve found many of these recipes are on budget-friendly cooking sites (I’m a big fan of Budget Bytes) or in international cookbooks (such as Extending the Table).
How much meat do these recipes use? To give you a few examples, Budget Bytes’ bibimbap recipe, which my family enjoys, uses half a pound of ground beef for four servings. The feijoada recipe in Extending the Table serves eight people and calls for as little as a quarter pound of sausage. And bang bang chicken, also from Extending the Table, feeds four people with just one chicken breast.
Note: The sources I mention here also include plenty of meals that use a pound or more of meat, so you have to search through them for meals that use less meat, but the recipes are there, and they are delicious.
The secret’s in the sauce (sort of).
These low-meat dishes tend to have a few things in common, all of which contribute to making them satisfying alternatives to meat-heavy meals. First and foremost, they’re flavorful. Bang bang chicken uses garlic, ginger, peanut butter, soy sauce, and red wine vinegar for flavoring. Budget Bytes’ one pot sausage and sun dried tomato pasta, which uses 8 oz. of sausage, gets its flavor from garlic, sun dried tomatoes, Parmesan cheese, and (if you like) a pinch of red pepper.
Often, too, this dishes combine different textures. Think of the different textures you’d encounter in a bowl of bibimbap. Or, in another Budget Bytes’ recipe, imagine the combination of shrimp, corn tortillas, a crunchy cabbage slaw, and a creamy mayonnaise-based sauce. The complexity of these dishes makes the meals interesting, so that even a meat-lover like my husband is happy.
Eating lower on the food chain is a wonderful goal, and if enough of us pursue this kind of eating, it can make a difference for our planet. But you don’t have to give up meat entirely. Moving from meat-centric meals to meals that include meat as just one component of the dish can significantly reduce our meat consumption if we make them a regular part of our diets.
I started this blog one year ago on Oct. 3. Since then I have posted twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays with a couple of exceptions: I posted late once in November, because I lost track of time, and I took a two-week break this summer. It’s not the first time I’ve blogged, but it is the first time I’ve blogged regularly.
I decided to post twice a week because it seemed like a schedule I could keep up with. This also allowed me to share two topics each week: “something wonderful” and ways to make a difference.
I’ve learned a lot over the past year. I was worried that I’d run out of things to write about, but that hasn’t been a problem. I have long lists of topics for both categories, and I continue to add to them. Even if I add nothing more to either list, I could easily keep this schedule up for months. On the other hand, I wish I had started this blog with several posts completely written. I’d drafted a few, but they were just drafts, so — except when I briefly got ahead of the game around Christmas — I often finish a post only the night before it goes live.
I knew that blogging twice a week would stretch me, but it’s been even more challenging than I expected. It’s hard to produce well-researched, well-written posts twice a week while working full-time. And because I’m blogging twice a week, it’s hard for me to find time to write other things. Also, my job has changed significantly over the past year, so I’m away from home longer hours than I was a year ago.
So I’ve decided that it would be better for me to post less frequently. Starting this week, I will be posting once a week. I still plan to post alternately on something wonderful and on making a difference, but I will only post on those topics every other week. My posts will fall on Mondays.
I’ll see you next week with a new post on something wonderful. Thank you for being one of my readers.
