Stories

Recently at my dentist's office I told one of the assistants that she looked great. Her skin glowed, her hair bounced and her body looked lean and firm. "Thanks. I'm killing myself doing that P90X program," she said.

Oh. P90X. In case you haven't heard of it, it's an intensive (some think masochistic) home exercise program that relies on cross-training: a mix of cardio, strength training, yoga, and stretching. As for the diet, it's high protein and low-to-no carbs. Think skinless chicken and egg whites. If you even fantasize about pasta or potatoes, you need to drop and do 50 push-ups.

The assistant added, "You should see my husband though. He has lost 12 pounds in two weeks. He looks amazing!"

"He's doing the P90X too?" I asked.

"No. He's on the soup diet," she said.

It is the consummate, diet-related cliché: “you can stop drinking, or smoking, but you can’t just stop eating.” You can, of course, stop eating; Ghandi used that strategy to magnificent effect. As a method of reaching a healthy weight, however, it’s frowned upon. What you have to do to lose weight is not to stop eating, but to stop eating the way you used to eat. I’m doing it, and it’s working, but it complicates the hell out of my life as a cook.

I’ve struggled with weight all my life, losing and re-gaining the same 30+ pounds several times. I established a pathetic pattern worthy of a medieval tapestry: the large woman stops eating (anything, carbs, second helpings and fast food), exercises (incorrectly, so intensely that she gets shin splints, until she abhors the sight of her Nikes) and becomes smaller. She buys tinier clothes, and basks in the admiration of all of the people who want to know her “secret.” She gets busy, stressed, cocky and inattentive and starts to eat like she used to, she becomes larger again, and in the final tableau she is folding her smaller clothes and putting them in bags to donate to Goodwill, and then pulling the larger versions from the back of the closet where she saved them for the inevitable.

It’s amazing that some can go through an entire detective novel or TV series without eating. I’m not talking about readers or Netflix viewers; I’m referring to the characters, for whom the ratio of meals to angst seems to be inversely proportional. The band of agents in Criminal Minds has stopped to eat, by my count, just twice in seven seasons. The Bones team, however, logs almost as many hours in the diner as in the lab. The biggest mystery of the show is why Booth doesn’t weigh 350 pounds.

It seems to be feast or famine for anyone trapped in a crime story. In episodes of the British shows Inspector Lewis and Midsomer Murders, the upper-class villains eat far better than the coppers. The downside for the affluent is that they rarely get out of the dining room alive.

The protagonists of culinary mysteries—from Rex Stout’s gourmand Nero Wolfe to Virginia Rich’s chef Eugenia Potter to Joanne Fluke’s baker Hannah Swenson—enjoy breaking bread as much as breaking cases. Most enforcers, however, subsist on coffee and whiskey (Law & Order—all versions) and the archetypal donut (Dexter).

.....well, it's really an Asparagus Popover but it looks more like a fritatta to me. I feel like a popover should have a thicker crust but that's just my opinion. Maybe if I made this in a slightly bigger pan there would have been more extension of the crust, but it's water under the bridge at this point.

We could call it a Po-tatta? No? Either way it doesn't matter, it was good. It calls for gruyere cheese. Anything with gruyere is pretty much fine by me. I'm easy to please. The recipe does say you can substitute Swiss for the gruyere but really, why would you? It's not going to be the same.

This is a great brunch item. Simple to make, easy to find ingredients. I suppose you could have it for dinner too.  It would be fabulous with a salad and a glass of wine.