Category Archives: Brooklyn

Rethinking Soda at the Movies

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soda at the MoviesSince I choose to do those things that amuse me most, I find myself in lots of crazy places. A few weeks ago, I was a guest on Brooklyn Independent Television’s show, Intersect, talking about Mayor Bloomberg’s sugary drink limit with host Brian Vines and fellow guest Andrew Rigie of the NYC Hospitality Alliance. At minute 23:05, I talk Brian Vine out of thinking big portions of soda at the movies are a bargain. Here is our conversation:

BV:   I was just at the movies two weeks ago and split a, what had to be a 60-ounce something, between the two of us. The thing was gone, and this was the debate we had afterwards, that if the mayor would have had his thing, we would’ve had to buy two drinks – and I believe in my health, but I more than that, I am cheaper than I am healthy – so we would have had to buy two different drinks to get the same thing, but we wouldn’t even be allowed to buy the thing if this law passed. So it hits you in the pocketbook because cheap food is usually bad food…
MH:   That’s not food. DON’T CALL THAT FOOD!
BV:   What is it then? It’s empty calorie things….
MH:   It’s empty calorie stuff. You cannot compare….
BV:   Cheap drinks. It’s enjoyment. It’s cheaper though….
MH: Well, for instance, I’m a fun gal, but one thing about me is I do not order anything at the movies. I have unhooked the idea that sitting in a movie means eating. Talk about cheap! I’m not going to that concession stand. I’m not buying any of that stuff!
BV: It’s relative. (laugh)
MH: So let’s get it all straightened out, okay, and that’s what the dialogue is about. It’s testing those ideas people have: “I need my soda!”  Well, why do you need your soda?
BV: Thank you for unhooking me, because it’s not cheap. Soda isn’t cheap at the movies.

Your thoughts: Will Brian Vine quit drinking soda at the movies?

The Cleansing Power of Dayenu

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THANXNo, it’s not a laundry detergent. It’s a song I learned at my first Passover Seder two weeks ago, and now I can’t get it out of my head – which is a good thing. Dayenu is a traditional Passover song about being grateful to God for the gifts he gave the Jewish people. For 15 stanzas, the leader says something or other and we, the audience, respond with “Dayenu.” “Dayenu” means one gift would have been enough.
“If he had split the sea for us…It would have been enough for us.”
“If He had led us through on dry land…It would have been enough for us.”
The song is surprisingly upbeat despite its woeful subject matter.

And so It’s All Dayenu All the Time for me. Honestly, the concept that taken over my brain. I lie in bed, wake up, and I think, “I am so comfortable here on this memory foam mattress.…it would have been enough.…my pillow is perfect too….it would have been enough….and the light is so beautiful streaming in through the window.…it would have been enough.… It makes it easy to be thankful for every single thing.

The other day, my friend, the Passover hostess, who lives around the corner said, “Let’s meet on the sidewalk.” I thought to have a friend who lives around the corner…it would have been enough.…to meet on a brand-new sidewalk….it would have been enough….to face a beautiful museum….it would have been enough….on such a sunny day….it would have been enough….

Somehow, I don’t think the Scholars of The Torah had this in mind – but it works for me. Saying Dayenu has a cleansing effect that I can feel. Gratitude changes us on a cellular level. When we feel thankful, our cells transmit chemicals that enhance our nervous system, immune system, cardiovascular system – all systems –  that are consistent with good health. The “cleansing” delivers a sense of calm and peacefulness that forms a base for mindful living and healthy eating too.

Your thoughts about attitude, gratitude, and Dayenu….

Confusion at the Coffee Counter

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Dunkin' Donuts Flyer

Dunkin’ Donuts Flyer

Call me blogger in absentia. I’ve been busy freelancing for the public relations agency that represents Eggland’s Best eggs – the eggs that are superior in nutrition, with twice the vitamin D, ten times more vitamin E, more than double the omega-3s, 35% more lutein, and 25% less saturated fat – compared to ordinary eggs. It’s all about the chicken feed. I eat EB eggs. And that is public relations.

But I had to take a break to comment about this flyer that comes to you newly at the Dunkin’ Donuts check out counter in New York City. Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on the sale of sugar beverages larger that 16-ounces goes into effect next week.Dunkin’ Donuts want to get ahead of the confusion, which shows that it’s easier to complain than it is to fix.

Here’s the deal: if your hot coffee is smaller than 16-ounces, Dunkin’ will add the sugar for you, but if your hot coffee is size large or X-large, then you’ll have to add the sugar yourself. For iced beverages, do-it-yourself sugar service starts with size medium because, for iced, medium is the large hot and large is the hot X-large. Got it? That ice has to go somewhere. For beverages that already come with added sugar, like hot chocolate or that oxymoron, frozen hot chocolate, you cannot buy a portion larger than medium – but you can buy two or more.

So, now, you will have to think twice before adding six sugar packets to your “Extra Extra.” Teeheehee. And it doesn’t stop there. Bloomberg is going after the Styrofoam cup next.

Your thoughts: Mayor Bloomberg: Yea or Nay?

Read about mayor’s public health campaigns in The New York Times:
City’s New Drink Rules Add Wrinkle to Coffee Orders
To Go: Plastic-Foam Containers, if the Mayor Gets His Way

Pie from The Automat

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I am still working my way through the sugar pumpkins I bought – cheap – after Halloween. They are stored on the fire escape and I have to eat them before the hard freeze.

Yesterday, I made a Pumpkin Pie that is worthy of a recommendation. The recipe is authentic from Horn & Hardart’s Automat, a fixture in New York City, opened in 1912 to flourish in branches for the next 50 years. Drop a nickel in a slot, open the door, and pull out your dish. Sandwiches, hot dishes, and desserts – lunch for office workers and tourists.

The Pumpkin Pie recipe is a take-away from an exhibit at the New York Public Library, Lunch Hour NYC, through February 17, 2013 at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Drawing on materials from throughout the Library, the exhibit looks back at more than a century of New York City lunches, exploring the ways in which New York City—work-obsessed and time-obsessed—reinvented lunch. But honestly, Lunch Hour NYC, the online exhibition is really good too. Dig deep because there’s a lot there.

PUMPKIN PIE (from Horn & Hardart’s Automat)
2 cups of cooked pumpkin (mashed)
¾ tbsp. salt (I used less)
1 can (14 ½ fl. oz) evaporated milk
2 eggs
¾ cup sugar
1 tbsp. butter, melted
1 tsp. cinnamon
¼ tsp. ginger
¼ tsp. nutmeg

Heat over to 425o
Beat all ingredients together with a rotary beater or wire whisk. Pour into a pastry-lined 9-inch pan.
Bake 40-45 minutes. Insert a silver knife into the filling about one inch from the side of the pan. If the knife comes out clean, the filling is done.

Watch “The Automat” scenes from THAT TOUCH OF MINK (1962) with Doris Day, Cary Grant, Gig Young, and Audrey Meadows.

Your thoughts: Have you been to The Automat? Tell us about it.

The Wish Tree. Keep Wishing.

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Wish Tree at the Brooklyn Museum

“Yes, I’m your angel – I’ll give you everything – In my magic power – So make a wish and I’ll let it come true for you. Tra, la, la, la, la.” 
~Yoko Ono lyrics “Yes, I’m Your Angel” from the album “Double Fantasy” (1980)

Yoko Ono presented a “Wish Tree” to the Brooklyn Museum in appreciation of her 2012 Women in the Arts Award. “Wish Tree” is an ongoing project that has been installed across continents for decades, gathering wishes from more than one million people so far. After each presentation, when all of the wishes are collected, they are buried (unread) around the Imagine Peace Tower, an outdoor light installation in Reykjavik, Iceland created by Yoko Ono in memory of John Lennon. The Brooklyn Museum’s Wish Tree is new, and so it needs more wishes, but when a wish tree is full, it looks like this:

For over fifty years, Yoko Ono has made art that requires viewer participation for completion. Yoko provides the pencils, tags, and instructions. (“Make a wish, write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of the wish tree. Ask your friend to do the same. Keep wishing.”) You make the wish. Yoko encourages us to believe in the collective power of our hopes for the future. I encourage us to believe in the power of wishes for ourselves. Wish to make it easy to eat in a healthy way.

Your thoughts: Would you like me to hang a wish for you? Let me know. Keep wishing.

Order the Wrap

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At a recent expo in a faraway place, to my surprise, my beloved Damascus Bakery had a booth. Damascus Bakery, the tiny retail shop, is on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and I walk there often. (See The Road to Damascus.)  As it turns out, Damascus Bakery has production facilities elsewhere in Brooklyn and in Newark, NJ, and they supply the flatbread used some of America’s leading restaurants, markets, and institutions. If you order the wrap at Starbucks, Arby’s, or Chick-fil-A, then you are eating a Damascus Bakery product. On the retail end, you can buy Damascus wraps and flatbread at Whole Foods, Costco, and BJ’s stores.

What Makes It Great  

The secret is the yeast. You can smell it before you walk into the bakery. Damascus’ Middle Eastern artisan flatbreads are distinguished by their rich and savory flavor. Their lahvash wraps, panini, flatbreads, and roll ups complement any fill. The roll-up (like a lahvash, but a rectangle, not of a circle) is a very flat piece of yeast-dough baked quickly (20-25 seconds) on both sides in a very hot oven (800oF). Nutrition-wise, Damascus Bakery breads are exactly what you want in bread: low in calories, carbohydrates, and glycemic load, but high in fiber, protein, lots of other nutrients, with very few added ingredients. See the Nutrition Facts label for the roll up. Watch this short video of a woman making an interesting and healthy chicken salad roll-up, and get the chicken salad recipe. Enjoy!

Your thoughts: Have you tried a Damascus Bakery product?

Walk Like Your Life Depends on It

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A bloggers holiday for me this week. Hurricane Sandy canceled life. Not that I’ve been inconvenienced in the least little bit up here in the “Heights.” Okay, my beloved Prospect Park and Brooklyn Botanic Garden are closed and my ride is busted for the foreseeable future. You may recall from past blogs (If You See Something, Say Something, Three Degrees of Separation from “Snackman” and Heineken Takes Over the NYC MTA) that I ride the New York City subway. Now, for me, the subway goes in one direction, East. To get to Manhattan, I can either wait in an insanely long line to catch a shuttle bus across the bridge or walk or ride my bike. Thank God I’m in shape.

insane line

Walking, Walking

The other day, my daughter and I walked to Dumbo to see the destruction (not bad). The walk was three miles there and three miles back. Whoops! I wore the wrong shoes. To get to Manhattan from my apartment, it is four miles to the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, and then it’s another three miles up to 34th street where the power works.

I have read that the average American walks only 350 yards a day, which is around 1/5th of a mile. That a total of 1.4 miles a week. Pretty useless, don’t you think?  I have not seen it written, but I believe it makes sense for everyone, except for the most infirmed, to be able to walk at least ten (that’s 10) miles a day. You don’t have to feel great at the end, but you should be able to do it. And so, if you can’t walk a distance, then start with this 10K (6.2 mile) Walk Training Schedule for Beginners from the Guide to Walking at About.com. You never know when your life might depend on it.

Your thoughts: Can you walk a 10K?

Building A Better Sidewalk

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Subway grates and sidewalk beds

Recently in Scientific American, Better Sidewalks Could Bring Improved Public Health:
A new report recommends 43 public health changes that can make big improvements in overcoming preventable diseases. “To arrive at their recommendations, researchers reviewed more than a thousand studies of public health. Their findings are in the American Heart Association journal, Circulation. [Dariush Mozaffarian et al., Population Approaches to Improve Diet, Physical Activity and Smoking Habits.]  Some surprisingly simple suggestions could be easiest to institute. (For instance) try improving sidewalks and visual appeal of neighborhoods to make people want to walk, bike, or run more often.”

Around the corner from my Brooklyn apartment, policy makers have put the sidewalk recommendation into action. For quite awhile now, like maybe two years, the NYC Department of Design and Construction have been working on the Eastern Parkway Reconstruction Project from Washington Avenue at the Brooklyn Museum to Grand Army Plaza. They installed water mains and sewer replacements and now they are finishing up the pavement, curbs, sidewalks, bike path, catch basins, pedestrian ramps, green spaces, street lighting, and traffic signals. The job is nearly finished.

And so, this is a public health project in action, a benefit of city living, not so “surprisingly simple,” but easier than beating down each individual to change. I, for one, need no encouragement to use the sidewalks and bike path.

Your thoughts: Does your town have good sidewalks?

An Herb Garden Grows in Brooklyn

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Enter….

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is like my backyard. I live that close. This week, I am enjoying the Herb Garden, a wildly lush kitchen garden like none you’ve never seen. The Herb Garden’s annual beds are planted with regional crops we know as food from around the world. The plants reflect the cultural diversity and culinary traditions of Brooklyn. Today’s round-the-world tour takes in The Americas, North, South and Middle, displaying corn (maize), squash and sunflowers; The Fertile Crescent and Sub-Saharan Africa, with millet, sorghum, soba (buckwheat) and okra; Southeast Asia abundant in basil and hot peppers; and the Northern Mediterranean region abounding with artichokes, herbs and beets. Then there are the medicinal herbs, echinacea and bee balm, and the ever-present kale. And this is just a bit of what’s happening. The warm weather crops, tomatoes, peppers eggplant and corn, are not ready to harvest. I hope I don’t disappoint the curator. Enjoy the tour. (Click on the pictures to enlarge.)

Your thoughts: Do you have a favorite botanic garden?

 

@MaryHartleyRD in the Word Cloud

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Check out the word cloud of my recent Tweets generated by MyTweetCloud. Riveting content, right? That’s why you might want to follow me on Twitter (and Facebook too) at MaryHartleyRD.

Up in the Cloud

Algae appetizers AskMaryRD baby back pain beer bicycles BL14 bloat body image boomers breakfast brew Brooklyn calories cereal facts chocolate city living Congress craft beer Denmark detox diet dietitian diets doctor donteatit draconian duh eating disorders eco evoo exercise faceit family farmers market farming fermentation Fitbloggin fitness FNCE food foodie fuel gardeners gut HAES health healthy food heart health heatwave homebrew hydrate icecream intuitive eating itscomplicated japan july4 junk food justsayin keepitreal kidney kids kidshealth lift lorcaserin madeitup MassHealth MeatlessMonday microbes mindfulness mommy MyFitnessPal MyPlate nodiet nutrients nutrition NYC ObamaCare opportunity organic OWS patient pizza poison ivy pool poster preschool RDchat recipe recipes respect restaurants RI road trip savings sleep snack snacks sugar summer tea TheBiggestLoser thoughtsbecomethings toddler toomuchsitting truthiness vacation walking weekend weight loss

You thoughts: What else should I Tweet about?