I love cooking. Most of my skills in this area were honed when I worked as a line cook in various restaurants but they started watching people in my family cook. My grandmother was your typical Italian Nonna, always at the stove making something delicious. My mom wasn’t what you’d call a great cook (she…
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of meditation – the idea that you could train your mind and bend it to your will through breathing exercises seemed, on it’s face, a bit silly. However two things happened that caused me to reevaluate my ideas. The first was reading a book called “The brain that…
When I was younger I worked in various restaurants as summer jobs and really enjoyed the experience. I know it’s probably the naivete of youth but for a while I considered trying to stage at some fancy restaurants in NYC to build a career as a chef (this was before the food network and the…
This one wasn’t actually that difficult in concept. I’m just not a big meat eater. I do enjoy beef (in all it’s glorious varieties) and chicken and eat them often but only a few times a week, trying to balance them with vegetable heavy meals. I enjoy pork in sausage or bacon form but that’s…
Sitting down and trying to come up with 50 goals for a year is not as easy as you think it would be. Once I got up to 30 or so I started to slow down and really struggle to come up with goals that were interesting and actionable (something you can measure with experience…
I’ve been playing guitar for over 30 years. I would say I’m an intermediate guitarist, mostly in that I can play a lot of songs, I can sight read a tab and pick it up quick. I know my scales and chords, circle of fifths and all that jazz but I never really took that…
So.. I listen to a lot of podcasts and something that kept popping up across some of them was this idea of a dopamine detox. A dopamine detox is basically hitting the reset button on your brain’s reward system. Think of dopamine as your brain’s “feel good” chemical – it spikes when you do anything…
Now, I’ve done intermittent fasting (IF) a few times in the past, notably during covid out of necessity to stretch the groceries we had as we were only going one once a month to stock up. It’s a simple thing really – just don’t eat breakfast and stop eating at 6:00 pm every night. The…
This one was a bit more of a challenge than I originally anticipated. While I don’t frequent fast food places with any regularity I did hit them up a couple of times a month when I was in a hurry or was leaving work late and needed to grab something for myself on the way…
OK. So I like pizza. I mean.. you say you like pizza sure.. but not like I do. I don’t think I’ve gone pizza-less for more than a week my entire life. When I was just starting my career and saving money I used to get 2 for 1 pizzas on Tuesdays from the local…