Malcolm Gladwell Was Completely Wrong About Cooking

I'm sure many of you have read or heard of Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's book about exploring the sources and drivers of exceptional success. One of the key themes in his book is the concept of the 10,000 hour rule--that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to get good at a new discipline.

Another way to think about that number is to call it 10 years of roughly 20 hours of intense practice per week. You wanna learn to sculpt? 10 years of practice. You want to earn a living playing blackjack? Yep, 10,000 hours.

But there's one discipline where the 10,000 hour rule is complete crap: cooking.

You can become a good cook, a really good cook, in a small fraction of that time. In fact, if you can read and follow simple instructions--a pretty low bar--you can learn the basics of cooking simple, good meals in a matter of days. Seriously.

How to go about learning to cook? First, spend a few hours perusing a basic, introductory cookbook. Books like Julia Child's The Way to Cook, Better Homes and Gardens and The Joy of Cooking are the traditional resources for learning how to cook, but a more recently published work like Delia's Complete How To Cook will teach you the basics just as well.

Second, spend just a few more hours trying some recipes out in your kitchen. If you're nervous picking out recipes, have a look at my essay on How to Tell if a Recipe Is Worth Cooking with Five Easy Questions. And if you're unsure what kind of cooking gear you might need to get started, read my essay on mastering the costs of setting up a kitchen.

Then, start cooking. You'll be shocked at what you can do in just your first few attempts.

Readers, what were your experiences like when you first began to cook?

Related Posts:
The Favorite Cookbooks of My Favorite Bloggers
Six Cookbooks That Should Be the Foundation of Your Cookbook Collection
Six Secrets to Save You From Cooking Burnout
The Basics of How to Modify a Recipe










How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me from your own blog, or by subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

CK Friday Links--Friday November 27, 2009

Here's yet another selection of particularly interesting links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts and your feedback.

PS: follow me on Twitter!
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A Thanksgiving dinner I'd rather not be invited to. (Back to San Diego via Alosha's Kitchen)

How to avoid getting sucked in and ripped off by grocery store loyalty cards. (Erica.biz)

How one food blogger started saving money left and right by finding the courage to "just ask" for discounts. (Oil and Garlic)

If you claim that you don't like beer, then you haven't tried a lambic. (Accidental Hedonist)

Recipe Links:
Simple, easy-to-follow steps to help you make your own Brioche Bread. (Jeena's Kitchen)

You'd never guess it would be so easy to make Slow-Roasted Garlic. (Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once)

Easy homemade Gluten-Free Crackers. (ChelseaJans.com)

A delicious, intriguingly flavored Spiced Sweet Potatoes and Chickpeas. (Sprouted Kitchen)

Off-Topic Links:
The difference, the only difference, between those who are successful and those who are not, is that they make and keep good habits. (Personal Development Pro)

For the aspiring writers: an exceptionally useful post on the key character types in fiction. (This Business of Writing via @CafeNirvana)

A brilliantly cynical take on the Army Corps of Engineers. (Taunter Media)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe that you'd like to see featured in Casual Kitchen's Food Links? Send me an email!



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Four Final Conclusions From My Raw Foods Trial

I learned so much and drew so many lessons from my 100% raw foods trial that writing this post turned out to be far more difficult than I expected. However, instead of writing an exhaustive (and endless) post covering every takeaway from the week, I decided simply to share what I thought were the four most crucial lessons.

[For readers tuning in for the first time, here's the archive page for my entire raw foods trial.]

1) You don't have to go 100% raw to capture most of the benefits of raw foods.
I'm convinced that it would be nearly as effective, and far easier, to apply an 80/20 approach to raw foods rather than going 100% raw. In fact, I'd suggest a trial of eating a raw breakfast and a raw lunch, then perhaps at dinnertime starting with a platter of raw veggies followed by a modest serving of cooked food.

You'll capture most of the benefits of a 100% raw diet (better mental clarity, better nutrition, and a healthy, satisfying diet on a fraction of the calories), with none of the food cravings and detox symptoms that are fixtures of a strict, absolutist raw diet. Moreover, a diet structured this way would save you from becoming a culinary outcast in your own home.

2) Weight loss.
I clearly lost weight and looked noticeably thinner after just one week of eating raw, even though I was already quite thin to begin with. Weight loss is an almost universal result experienced by new raw foodists (for one of the most highly compelling examples, see Angela Stokes' experience). I didn't weigh myself before and after my trial, but I'd guess I lost 3-4 pounds, despite the fact that I literally ate as much as I wanted to all week.

Therefore, if you are above your optimal weight, I strongly encourage you to explore raw foods. The bottom line is this: it takes so much effort to overeat on a raw food diet that it becomes easy to lose weight. If you can stick to a fully- or mostly-raw diet for a meaningful length of time, I'm convinced you will achieve powerful results.

3) Own your food cravings.
This week of raw foods helped me completely reframe how I think about food cravings, and it was by far the most significant (and unexpected) benefit of my raw trial. Normally when I have a food craving, I simply react to it. If I want chocolate, I go into the kitchen and eat some. If I want ice cream or chips and we have them around, I'll just dig in. It goes without saying that responding to food cravings in this way is a deeply unconscious act.

I had all sorts of cravings during my week of raw foods, but I obviously couldn't act on them without ruining the trial. As a result, I essentially spent the week having no choice but to observe these cravings and think about them more consciously and more objectively.

This was an enormous blessing, because it turns out that under conscious and thoughtful observation even the most powerful food cravings shrivel up and become easy to resist. Whenever I took a few moments to think instead of react to my food cravings, I had a far greater ability to consider the nature of the craving and then decide whether to act on it or say no to it. And being forced to do this repeatedly over the course of my week of raw foods helped me deeply grasp that I have much more power over my feelings and food cravings than I ever imagined.

I believe there are important implications here for anyone who wants to control their relationship with food, and I encourage any reader who struggles with unhealthy food cravings to try their own raw foods trial--not just for the opportunity for weight loss, but for the opportunity to experience food cravings on a deeply objective and intellectual level. I believe you will prove to yourself once and for all that your cravings don't own you--you own them.

4) Gratitude.
A final thought: if you really want to appreciate the things in life that make you truly happy, try giving them up for a while. Seriously. This raw trial helped teach me true gratitude for many daily food habits I took entirely for granted--things like my morning coffee, an afternoon snack of dark chocolate, or an evening glass of red wine. I never would have guessed that one of the most powerful lessons of a one week raw foods trial would be to teach me a deep appreciation for a simple life that grants us these seemingly minor things.

Readers, for those of you who have experimented with raw foods, what did you learn? And those of you who are new to raw, are you thinking of doing your own raw trial? Why or why not? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

For any readers who want to go beyond the context of food and pursue further reading on the issues of emotions and cravings, let me recommend four books that helped me significantly:

How To Want What You Have by Timothy Ray Miller
The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin
The Power of Now and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

CK Friday Links--Friday November 20, 2009

Here's yet another selection of particularly interesting links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts and your feedback.

PS: follow me on Twitter!
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Are vegetarian diets truly healthy? It's a common question, and this post gives a balanced and well thought out answer. (Food Politics)

Ten great tips on how to stay focused on your diet and fitness goals during the holiday season. (Functional Fitness) Bonus post: CK's own 15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating.

Everything you need to know about brining turkey. (Serious Eats)

15 things you probably didn't know about coffee. (The Oatmeal via Eat Me Daily)

Got a cold, or worse, H1N1? Here's a spicy drink that will ease your pain and clear your sinuses. (Food Woolf)

A food blogger finds a lost wallet and rediscovers what's truly important in life. (5 Second Rule)

Recipe Links:
How can a potato recipe be both this easy and this good? Potatoes Anna. (The Buttery Blog)

One of the coolest looking cakes ever: Zebra Cake. (AZ Cookbook)

How to make a simple and delicious Pork Roast. (Beach Eats)

Not sure whether this is vile or brilliant: making Scrambled Eggs with the steam wand of an espresso machine. (Abstract Gourmet, after The Amateur Gourmet)

Off-Topic Links:
Unsolicited book recommendations of the week: If you're looking for a few investment/stock market related books, either to get a jumpstart on investing next year, or to give as gifts this Christmas, let me recommend three excellent ones: Jim Cramer's Real Money (I know he might play the buffoon on TV, but this book is extremely useful on many levels), One Up On Wall Street (really good for beginner investors) and Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (for intermediate/advanced investors).

Does social media simply feed our delusions? (Dave Johnston's Blog)

Our three primary obligations as bloggers: show up, deliver value and keep improving. (chrisbrogan.com via @dragosroua)

An interesting personal finance idea: your household should practice "financial fire drills." (Bargaineering)

How to stop fearing death. (Erin Pavlina's Blog)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe that you'd like to see featured in Casual Kitchen's Food Links? Send me an email!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Raw Foods Trial: Day 8--The Day After Raw

This post, the last of the daily posts on my seven-day 100% raw trial, documents my official return to cooked foods. Once again, I'm sure you all know the drill by now: first I'll list the foods I ate and the schedule I kept, and then below I'll share my closing thoughts on the day. [See the full archive of posts on the raw foods trial.]

Breakfast: 8:00am
2 cups of pineapple, 1 apple
1 splash of caffeinated coffee (yep, I seriously had about 1/16th of a cup--literally a splash).

Note: we played some doubles tennis that morning and the first piece of cooked food that I had--during a break between games--was a simple bagel. Pretty anticlimactic, I know. More below on how my body dealt with it.

Lunch: 1:45pm
2 apples, and yet another huge veggie platter of carrots, celery and a tahini dip.

Laura's comment after I made up this platter: "you know you don't have to eat this stuff anymore, right?"

Dinner: 6:00pm
All cooked food. A small glass of red wine to start things off, followed by a Tortilla Espanola (it's basically a frittata with fried potatoes and onions--a recipe post will be forthcoming!). Dessert consisted of a couple of pieces of dark chocolate and another glass of red wine. Delicious.

Concluding Notes/Thoughts on the Day:
1) On returning to cooked food: Most raw foodists are quick to share war stories about how they can get totally sick on even small amounts of cooked food. And most raw food trials seem to end with a final post describing how horribly sick the trialee became after the very first day of returning to "dead" food.

Sorry to disappoint, but that just didn't happen to me. I felt fine. The dead bagel I ate on the tennis court didn't make me barf, nor did it give me projectile diarrhea, much to the relief of our tennis partners. And dinner didn't make me double over with cramps or keep me in bed the next day.

Of course, that didn't stop me from worrying that I'd get sick. In fact, the whole reason I only allowed myself a teensy splash of real coffee this morning was because I was literally afraid to drink any more than that. I didn't want to suffer a spontaneous death from toxin overdose, or suffer something even worse--a spontaneous bowel movement.

Once again, nothing untoward happened. It was all so anticlimactic. And I'm not ashamed to admit I was just a tiny bit disappointed.

2) My first glass of wine: I had a tiny glass of red wine (don't worry, the dark chocolate part is coming up) right before dinner. The wine didn't taste all that good to me, oddly enough, and just a few sips made me feel surprisingly buzzed. (Talk about a completely unexpected way to save money on wine!)

3) Chocolate: After dinner, I helped myself to another very small glass of red wine. Thus fortified, I helped myself to a single individually wrapped square of Dove dark chocolate. And then another. And then 10 more, and then another 20. And then... I'm kidding. I managed to stop at two. Once again, nothing happened, other than perhaps a few quiet moans of pleasure.

4) Despite Laura's comment above about not having "to eat this stuff anymore," my diet on Day 8 was mostly raw by design. I thought it would be prudent to gradually work up to cooked foods over the course of the day, rather than start out with a heavy, eggs-and-sausage type breakfast and shock my body first thing in the morning.

5) I will say that cooked food, and particularly the dark chocolate, tasted stronger--and better--than ever today. They tasted "loud" to me, for lack of a better word. I'm sure my palate became quite a bit more sensitive after eating relatively bland foods for a full week.

6) On how easy it is to overeat cooked foods: My dinner, a Tortilla Espanola, was a simple dish which I lightly seasoned with some ground thyme and fried onions. It was really good. Really good. But I will say I felt heavy and really full once I finished eating, and (this part is sort of hard to explain) I had this vague guilty feeling, as if I had just eaten a ton of food that I didn't really deserve. It all went down the hatch so easily, too easily, with almost no effort or chewing, and I felt almost like I hadn't really earned all those calories.

It was so much less of a mindful experience than eating a big platter of fresh veggies and being forced to take the time to carefully chew through everything. Clearly, it's far easier to thoughtlessly overeat cooked food because it requires so little effort to consume it. I can't imagine how anyone could have a mindless eating problem on a raw-centric diet.

Stay tuned--in a few days I'll run my final conclusions from my raw foods trial!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!