Beth Skwarecki

Amazingly, it's possible to eat decent home cooked meals while you have a demanding little child in the house. I've just had to get good at thinking up dishes I can make in a few minutes, with little advance prep (read: using whatever we already have) while dirtying as few dishes as possible. These all fit the bill.

Poached Pears
My go-to fancy dessert. This is the least fancy it gets: peel a pear, cut in half and remove core. Put the halves in a skillet, in a little puddle of water, and add some mulling spices. Cook, covered, until pears are tender. Serve with ice cream, chocolate sauce, or whatever you've got.

Roast Chicken
Buy a rotisserie chicken for $5. Done. OR: Buy a raw chicken for $4. Remove giblets, rinse, season if desired, put in covered baking pan with a little water for an hour or more at 350.

Wilted Spinach
(My vegephobic husband likes this. I can't explain that.) Mince a clove of garlic and put it in a skillet with a glug of olive oil. Then add a whole bag of baby spinach and cook over low heat, turning often, for a few minutes or until the leaves are mostly wilted. Stop before they turn into mush. If desired, add a little balsamic vinegar or Herbes de Provence.

Cornbread
Goes great with that pulled beef/pork from Costco. Buy a 39-cent box of cornbread mix. Mix it with milk as directed, and pour into paper-lined muffin tins. Bake as directed. The paper means there's nothing to wash afterward.

Carrots with orange butter
Going to try this one tonight. The night before, let half a stick of butter soften while you're making dinner. Zest an orange, and mix the zest with the softened butter and a tablespoon of orange juice. (Eat the orange at dessert.) Put it back in the fridge for tomorrow. Then, steam some carrots and serve them with orange butter on top.

Ravioli
Buy frozen ravioli. Cook as directed. Toss in a skillet with olive oil and some dried sage or whatever you've got. Serve with a vegetable.

Asparagus
Steam some asparagus. While it's cooking, melt a little butter in a pan you're going to use for something else. Add a little balsamic vinegar, then pour the butter/vinegar over the asparagus in its serving dish.

Ice cream soda
For this you need a fruity italian soda like what Target is selling now. Or sparkling juice of any kind, or do it the old fashioned way and use root beer. Pour the soda over a scoop of ice cream.

Cauliflower & dill
Steam some cauliflower. Toss in a skillet with melted butter and dill.

Green beans & basil
Steam some green beans. Toss with olive oil & dried basil.

Today's read: An interview with the author of Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) which, Babble says, "encourages letting your kids build bombs, play with fire, and drive a car."

Juicy quotes:

...if I tell a twelve-year-old, “Hey! I’m going to teach you how to pay attention better in school and how to focus,” that child is going to run away as fast as they can. But if I say, “Hey! I’m going teach you how to whittle,” I’m going to have the undivided attention of that child for hours.

...what we consider to be dangerous changes over time and from culture to culture. In India, it’s common to find people who consider it very dangerous to ride a bicycle and yet the children are allowed to run around barefoot.

As I meet more families from around the world, I find nobody can agree on what’s a dangerous topic in this book.

Not the approach I thought it would be ("duh, danger is fun") but an interesting look at what we think is dangerous, and what benefits a dangerous activity might have. So often we look only at the risks or only at the benefits of things (boy would I have a lot more to say on that, if I ever had free time to write anymore)

The book looks (from the amazon preview) like a fun set of science experiments - and it's explicit about the danger, or lack of danger, for each. One project has warnings for "go blind" and "fire" (it's about making a sunspot viewer, but is tantalizingly called "look at the sun"). Another is a not-dangerous project involving a hair dryer, and includes a brief discussion of why hair dryers are, statistically, dangerous (because people electrocute themselves in bathrooms with them - not because they are trying to make a blimp)

Looks like fun!

Other things worth reading today:
Should we parent boys and girls differently?
Why does the gunslinger who draws first always get shot?
Math lessons from Steven Strogatz (The most recent post includes a great story about a "double positive" and explains pre-WWI alliances with graph theory. And the series started with muppets! That's an automatic win in my book.)

Beth has a 4 month old baby and barely any time to write. Following this blog is like playing Scotland Yard. Hello from Mr. X!

There are 10 meals (5 dinners, 5 lunches made from their leftovers). I'm posting pictures with recipe reviews on flickr. Check back throughout the week! (Want to play along?)

Meal #1: (dinner) Rotisserie chicken with roasted vegetables

Meal #2 (lunch) Chicken Portobello Wrap

Meal #3 (dinner) Shrimp Fajitas

Meal #4 (lunch) Fiesta Rice Bowl

Meal #5 (dinner) Pasta bowl

Meal #6 (lunch) Italian Quesadilla

Meal #7 (dinner) spicy shrimp & asparagus stir fry

Meal #8 (lunch) Peanut noodles with shrimp

Meal #9 (dinner) Roast pork with vegetables

Meal #10 (lunch) Pork wrap

Hey folks - when I'm done with this week, what next? Are there other grocery-list-based meal plans I should try? I liked that this one uses quick & easy recipes, uses its own leftovers, and is healthy and high in protein. Where can I find more like this? (Don't tell me to make my own! I have a sick baby to nurse and a bathroom to remodel!)

Hello blog! Remember me? I'm Beth, your author.

The baby is doing great! Thanks for asking. There are lots of photos of him on flickr.

I had a good Christmas, including a looong train trip adventure with the baby, and my new year's resolution is to remember everybody's birthday. Not everybody, exactly, just people I know. I hope I can remember all of them.

I'm also going to come up with one novel idea (that is, an idea for a novel) each month. This way, when NaNoWriMo comes around again, I'll have 10 ideas to choose from.

I've also signed up with an online personal trainer to provide ass-kickings via email. She's already sent me my workout plan for January and it's a doozy. I hope I can keep up!

Oh, and I almost forgot. My latest project is cooking along with this meal plan - it's nothing fancy, just five dinners and then five lunches made with their leftovers. I actually did the grocery shopping and am planning on making all the meals, even the ones with shrimp in them. There's 40 grams of protein in most of the meals, so even though they'll only make up half my calories for the day (really, Men's Health, what is this, a crash diet?) I'll be in good shape, nutritionally, to withstand that crazy workout plan.

It's been good talking to you, blog. I'll let you know how the food thing works out. Maybe I'll show you pictures too! I just saw "Julie & Julia" and you know how suggestible I am.

Love,
Beth

1. Ajax Ray Skwarecki Lansdown was born 9/30/2009 at 1:30 am.


2. He was 6 pounds 15 ounces, and 21 inches long.


3. Labor lasted 22 hours. I planned on delivering at The Midwife Center but minor complications sent us to the hospital.


4. He is tiny and cute and has lots of hair.


5. He will only sleep if someone is holding him.

Sabre-toothed cats had weak bites - a new comparison of Smilodon's skull with a modern lion's shows that the cat probably didn't run up and bite its prey with those teeth. Probably it brought prey down with a full-body tackle (it had extra strong claws) and then used the famous teeth to make the kill once it had the animal pinned. At least, that's the latest theory.

Velociraptor's 'killing' claws were for climbing - I'm just ruining all the prehistoric artists' conceptions today, aren't I? Analyses of velociraptor claws shows they weren't sharp enough to disembowel prey, but were strong enough to hold the dinosaur's weight as it climbed trees.

Kids, even babies, judge others based on skin color - and we exacerbate the problem by keeping the subject taboo. The author writes of his own son: "Katz's work helped me to realize that Luke was never actually colorblind. He didn't talk about race in his first five years because our silence had unwittingly communicated that race was something he could not ask about. ... we started to overhear one of his white friends talking about the color of their skin. They still didn't know what to call their skin, so they used the phrase 'skin like ours.' And this notion of ours versus theirs started to take on a meaning of its own."

Swine flu vaccine: Too little, too late (SciAm article, first half available online) - When you're trying to make enough flu vaccine, boosting production with new methods and adjuvants is at odds with safety and testing (and the potential for lawsuits). The author seems to think litigation is the problem; but if people are suing because they've been harmed by the vaccine, wouldn't it be more correct to say safety is the problem? Deciding how much risk is appropriate is a tough question.

Jell-O shots in adolescence lead to gambling later in life - When you want to study alcohol and risky behavior in rats, do it right! Yes, they really fed the rats jell-o shots, and taught them to gamble.

Thanks to everybody who complained. No thanks to my system administrator who ignored my bug reports (who thinks that just because I'm married to him and have root access on his server that I should go fix bugs HE created) ... yeah. Fixed now. Comment and enjoy!

A single dose of H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine may be enough, something of a surprise because initial reports from the CDC said it might have to be a two-shot vaccine. That means twice as many people can be vaccinated with the available doses. There was a swine flu shot available in 1976, and people vaccinated or exposed back then (or in 1918!) seem to be protected against this year's strain. Seasonal flu immunity somehow "primes" H1N1 immunity even though the seasonal flu shot doesn't, by itself, confer full immunity to H1N1. Bottom line: get a seasonal flu shot (available now) and a single dose of H1N1 vaccine (available in October).

Placebos are getting more effective. If your new drug doesn't perform any better than a sugar pill, does that mean it's useless? Some already-approved drugs perform just as badly, even though they stacked up well against placebos when they were first tested. Meanwhile, placebos are useful for more than just testing: "The fact that even dummy capsules can kick-start the body's recovery engine became a problem for drug developers to overcome, rather than a phenomenon that could guide doctors toward a better understanding of the healing process and how to drive it most effectively." How do placebos work, anyway? Can you get around anti-doping rules by giving an athlete fake steroids? Can you even really compare today's Prozac trial results to the originals, given our changing understanding of depression? Good questions in this article from Wired.

Skim milk isn't automatically better than full-fat, something I've been trying to tell people for years. "'Probably most people who think of themselves as nutrition-savvy would be astonished to learn that evidence of whole milk’s being a ticket to an early grave is conspicuous by its absence,' says food historian Anne Mendelson in Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages." Also notable is the type of fat in milk from pastured (grass-fed) cows - more omega-3's and less of the supposedly "bad" fats.

Will my son be born late, like I was? OK, so this isn't a national news item but rather something of personal interest. I was two weeks late myself. A study of 77,000 Norwegians found that "Gestational age of the child at birth increased on average 0.58 days for each additional week in the father's gestational age (95% confidence interval 0.48-0.67) and 1.22 days for each additional week in the mother's gestational age (1.21-1.32)." Meanwhile a Danish study suggests that gestation length is 23-30% genetic (but they didn't find a paternal component).

Midnight snacks pack on the pounds. The research, done in rats and involving high-fat foods, isn't exactly ready for sweeping extrapolation. But I liked the article for this quote specifically: "'How or why a person gains weight is very complicated, but it clearly is not just calories in and calories out,' says Fred Turek, professor of neurobiology and physiology at Northwestern University and director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology." (Contrary to popular belief, people are not bunsen burners.)

Brain differences between men and women aren't necessarily hard-wired - finally, somebody making sense on this subject. A team at the U of Iowa found that the Straight Gyrus (SG) of the brain is larger in women and seems to correlate with interpersonal skills. But! They also compared SG size to a test of gender, in the personality sense - are you very masculine or very feminine? - and found it correlated better with gender than with biological sex. They also found that the relationship was reversed in children - boys had the larger SG. So do women have naturally better social skills or is that a skill they develop over time, resulting in brain changes? For once, somebody isn't willing to jump to a conclusion.

(The writer of this article, Lise Eliot, has written a book on how differences between boys' and girls' brains are shaped by culture: "Boys are not, in fact, 'better at math' but at certain kinds of spatial reasoning. Girls are not naturally more empathetic; they’re allowed to express their feelings. By appreciating how sex differences emerge—rather than assuming them to be fixed biological facts—we can help all children reach their fullest potential.")

People 32,000 years ago may have spun flax into twine (this is the same stuff as the fabric linen). We don't know what the threads were used for, but speculation is rampant - clothing to keep warm? Rope to tie sharp things to sticks and make weapons? Or, um, nothing? "It’s possible individual flax fibers blew into the ancient cave, got buried and then became twisted during microscopic analyses," says Harvard archaeologist Irene Good, who isn't impressed with these fibers but told Science News that people probably did make some kind of textiles around that era. Ancient pottery (around 26,000 years ago) sometimes includes imprints of nets and ropes.

Late Blight's genome published - the fungus that is wiping out tomato crops across the Northeast US this year (and that caused the Irish potato famine way back when) may owe its success to highly variable effector genes buried in its "junk" DNA. ("Junk" DNA is never junk, people. We just don't always know what it does.)

Brown spots in bananas glow blue in UV light. The color change, from degrading chlorophyll, probably attracts insects (lots of animals can see in UV) but is also interesting to scientists as a marker of cell death.

How long food keeps in the fridge - a chart from the new FoodSafety.Gov website. Marion Nestle says, "If we can't have a single food agency, we can at least have a single food safety site. Now if Congress would just pass some decent food safety laws..."

I'm going to try to make this a recurring thing. Five things I thought were interesting this week:

Factory-farming frogs is now possible (sort of) but still seems like a bad idea. "Just over half the marsh frogs survived three years of intensive farming, whereas only 5 to 8 per cent of the pool and edible frogs did." Doesn't sound very humane to me. The upside is supposed to be protecting wild frog populations in Asia from overharvesting. But is this really a good solution? One expert says: "it may be better to simply harvest frogs sustainably in the wild rather than building elaborate, energy-intensive farms that rely on fish meal." To quote another: "I hear frogs' legs taste like chicken. Eat that and leave the frogs alone."

But Genetically "pain-free" animals would make abusive farming practices ethically OK! "I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering," says a philosopher who published a paper on the subject this week. This ignores the idea that physical pain is the only kind of suffering that matters. Let me tell you, if I had to live in a battery cage, I would be pretty miserable with or without my Nav1.7 gene.

Lefties may have been rare in Victorian England. While currently 11% of British people are left-handed, only 3% of Victorians waved at movie cameras with their left hand. (The modern control was a Google images search of people waving.) In the Victorian clips, older folks were slightly more likely to wave with the left hand, so the researchers concluded that lefties were a dying breed that, later, bounced back.

Female fruit flies prefer to keep sex short. This is surprising (to the researchers) because male flies have pinchers and other nasty ways of supposedly keeping the females from getting away. It seems all kinds of sex research includes the assumption that the males are in charge and females are passive - and that assumption always breaks down as soon as researchers start looking into it. Best quote, about the methodology: "The team propped up the dead [female] insects—Weekend at Bernie's-style—to convince the males that they were still alive and ready for sex." (They mated longer with dead females than with ones that could get away.)

The Manahatta Project aims to reconstruct what the island looked like before it became the heart of New York City. National Geographic reports that Eric Sanderson, an ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, compared old maps and modern GPS readings to reconstruct what the island was like in 1609. (Although the article doesn't mention, the actual click-and-zoom map includes Lenape settlements and their likely uses of land. It's not like the place was unsettled.)

Bonus links! Improve your life with science!

• Avoid mitochondrial diseases by using somebody else's cytoplasm!
  
• Motivate your kids by saying they're hard workers, not that they're smart!
  
• If you're in an Olympic wrestling match, wear red!
  
• Decode your genome for just $50,000 - if you are this guy!
  
• Smuggle cheese to impress your friends!