"Life is too Short to Waste Calories on Bad Food"

My dream job is to travel the world and be a restaurant critic.

When I mentioned this to Sandra during Christie and Chad's wedding luncheon, she told me about Ruth Reichl, former food/restaurant critic for the LA Times and NY Times. 

The next day as I was making a B-line through the BYU bookstore to purchase a new journal, I paused for a moment to see what they had displayed as "top sellers" and "staff picks." To my left the name "Reichl" caught my eye. I picked up the book "Garlic and Sapphires. The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise" and knew immediately that I had to purchase it.

That night after returning home from a Dallyn Bayles concert (which by the way was phenomenal) I stayed up much too late reading. The words on the page captured my attention within the first few sentences. I was hooked. Reading her description of food is almost as good as being there and eating it yourself. Despite having no photos at all, it is like you are right there with her eating the meal. You can picture each piece of food; each restaurant. How did I miss her all these years?

I've decided that if I am going to be a restaurant critic, I've got to start thinking about foods in more descriptive words. And that means slowing down and taking time to really savor what I am eating. The weight loss researchers would call this "mindful eating." Writing this way is not easy for me because it is the opposite of how I write for research publications in my current job-- professor, not  restaurant critic.

So where do I start? How about a review of Christie and Chad's wedding cake(s). Had I been thinking about writing a description of these cakes, I would have paid more attention and ate more slowly. But instead I inhaled one (or possibly two) pieces, and a taste of three others, during a brief respite of clearing tables. My FitBit said I had walked 12K steps that day, so I felt justified. These calories were definitely worth it.

Instead of a traditional wedding cake, Christie chose 10 cakes with 5 different flavors. Brilliant idea. She special ordered the cakes from Whole Foods. This chocolate cake with raspberry filling is on the top of my "Best Thing I Ever Ate" list. It is right up there with the gnocchi with mushroom sauce at Trattoria Marione in Florence and butternut squash ravioli at Giacomo's in Boston.

 Fresh fruit is piled on the top of each cake. Raspberries were as large as your thumb, oozing with juice, taking me back to my sister's raspberry patch in mid-July. The chocolate cake was dense, but moist, definitely from scratch; not a Betty Crocker $1.79 mix. Creamy raspberry filling separated the three layers. The outside was coated with vanilla frosting; it had to be buttercream. The frosting wasn't too sweet and it definitely did not leave a coating of Crisco in the roof of your mouth.

I may have to order one of these for our next "Single Sista's" party. We may have to invite Christie, though she no longer meets the criteria.

Back to reading.

Life is Good.