“If I had to give you a single secret ingredient that could apply to the prevention — and treatment, in many cases — of heart disease, common cancers, stroke, infectious diseases from influenza to tuberculosis, type 1 and 2 diabetes, dementia, depression, insomnia, muscle weakness, joint pain, fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, and hypertension, it would be this: vitamin D.”

During the whirlwind that has been my life of late, I managed to make my way through Dr. Michael Holick’s terrific book The Vitamin D Solution from which the above quote comes.  Before I get started on my review, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve got to tell you that of all the books I’ve reviewed on this blog since its inception, this is the first and only one that I’ve been sent gratis by the publisher.  It was strange how it came about.  I learned of this book long before it was published and had pre-ordered it through Amazon.  A few weeks or so after my pre-order, I received an email from the publisher’s PR agent for this book asking if I would like a pre-publication copy for possible review.  I sure would, said I, and promptly canceled my Amazon order.

I’ve been a fan of Dr. Holick’s for years now, reading every paper he publishes, which is a considerable job given his prolific output.  I’ve corresponded with him a time or two on a few issues and he has always been very generous with his advice.  I consider him THE authority on vitamin D.  So, I was eager to dig into his book.

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I’m putting up a short post just to let everyone know I’m still alive.  MD and I have both had incredibly hectic schedules lately that have precluded us from attending to our blogs.  MD and the Santa Barbara Choral Society just performed Ralph Vaughn Williams A Sea Symphony over the past weekend, which activity (the aforementioned wretched choral society) has consumed all her time.  I, for the first time in a long time, have become a working stiff.

The sous vide project has gone wild.  Instead of watching from the sidelines and showing up at board meetings, which heretofore has been my chief activity vis a vis the company, I am now in charge of the entire direct-to-consumer operation.  Consequently, I have been on the road and will continue to be a road warrior for a while.

Tomorrow, in fact, will find MD and me in San Francisco at the Sur La Table store for a Sous Vide Supreme demonstration.  Richard Blais, the chef pictured above with the two us (he’s the one with the faux hawk), will be doing the demo, but MD and I will be in attendance.  So, if you want to drop by and meet us, have a chat or just see how much older we look in person than in our photographs, come on down to the Ferry Building Marketplace in San Francisco tomorrow (May 8th) from 10 ‘til 2.  Hope to see you there.

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A couple of weeks ago, through the agency of a friend, I ended up spending the evening in a commercial kitchen preparing food.  The restaurant was closed for business that night, but had a full kitchen going for the dozen or so people who turned out to try their hands at being chefs.  We all cooked various portions of a four or five course meal. That’s me at the left in my chef’s attire chopping scallions for garnish for one of the dishes.

Sad to say, but this wasn’t the first time I’ve ever labored in the back end of a restaurant.  Both MD and I are very familiar with those duties.  One of the truly bad moves of my financial life was investing in a franchise restaurant years ago.  I still don’t know what came over me, but whatever did, it cost me a lot of money.  I distinctly remember how it all happened.  I was sitting in the kitchen of our house in Little Rock going through the mail and came upon a magazine buried in the pile.  I don’t remember now what magazine it was, but it had an article on hot new restaurant concepts.  One of the hottest, and one that was taking Dallas by storm, was a Mexican restaurant franchise called ZuZu.  ZuZu Handmade Mexican Food, to be exact.

I read the article and inexplicably reached around behind me, picked up the phone and dialed the number to get more info.  (A phone call, I might mention, that cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars before it was all over.)  The person on the other end – a honcho from ZuZu corporate office in the Rolex Building in Dallas – painted a wonderful picture of restaurant ownership, and before I knew it, MD, our eldest son and I were headed to Dallas to see a ZuZu restaurant in the flesh and try the food.

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While on a recent whirlwind trip that included a stop in Seattle, I purchased a copy of Meatpaper at my favorite newsstand hard by the Pike Place market.  I always grab a copy of this magazine whenever I’m in Seattle because I can never find it anywhere else. Today I finally broke down and subscribed.

The quarterly Meatpaper was founded by a couple of vegetarians who made the conversion to meat eating a few years back.  (The founders say that when vegetarians cross over to the meat-eating dark side, bacon is the most common conversion food.)  It’s a difficult magazine to pigeonhole.  One would think it would revel in meat eating, and, in a way, it does.  But it does it in a daredevil sort of way, much in the way a magazine on skydiving might portray the thrill of that sport while still noting that certain death is only a chute failure away.  My take is that the writers and editors believe that meat-eating is a perilous undertaking, but one that many people choose for the taste despite the risks involved.  As anyone who had read this blog for anytime knows, my beliefs don’t quite fall that way.

The most recent issue contains a couple of articles I want to tantalize you with.  One that describes an almost unbelievably scrumptious food that I’ve yet to eat, at least knowingly, and another article I find deeply disturbing.

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It’s time for the 2009 bestseller list.  These are books purchased last year through this website from readers either going through the Amazon portals on the page (more about which later) or clicking on Amazon links appearing in many of the posts when books are mentioned. As always, these are all the books purchased that are not books MD and I wrote or co-wrote.

The number one winner going away was Lierre Kieth’s brilliant The Vegetarian Myth.  If you haven’t read it, grab a copy ASAP.  For those of you who don’t know, Lierre was recently the victim of an assault at a San Francisco reading.  Masked thugs came out from behind the stage and smashed her in the head and face with pies laced with cayenne pepper.  After the assault took place, while Lierre was trying to get the burning pepper out of her eyes, the audience (of mainly vegetarians) cheered.  It was truly disgusting.  Richard Nikoley and Tom Naughton reported on the assault here and here.  Jimmy Moore has a  interview with Lierre about the attack here. Tom Naughton proposes a rationale for such behavior here.

It appears that militant vegans have secured  Lierre’s name and other versions of her name on Twitter and are mounting a vicious smear  campaign against her.  Purchase her book to fight back.  Success is her best revenge.

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