The Michael Pollan Experiment

You already know that I'm obsessing about the Michael Pollan, aka Mr. Persuasion, article for the NYTimes magazine from a weeks back.  Well, it convinved my husband and I to undertake a little experiment.  This discussion of the decline of home cooking and suggestion that eating only home cooked food could potentially be the best diet out there.  So, with that in mind we decided that for two weeks we would not eat sweets unless they were made at home. 

Now normally, this would not be a big deal for me and I might have just not eaten sweets for two weeks without noticing.  But something odd has happened to my body chemistry.  Perhaps it's all the calories lost while breastfeeding, but I suspect that when my body gave birth to two children with my husband's DNA mixed in there I somehow acquired his incredible sweet tooth. So, after a panic attack when I realized this meant no Oreo cookies for two weeks (oh, the mint ones from Paul Newman, soo good.).  I proceeded to crack open The Bible of cookbooks, The Joy of Cooking.  This book has it all including how to 'donutize' your muffins...we didn't do that but you had better believe I thought about it.

The husband went straight for Nigella Lawson's "How to be a Domestic Goddess."  He started it all by making her cream cheese brownies.  And, I'm glad he didn't listen to me when I was saying 'cooking chocolate is tricky, I don't know honey.' because they were gorgeous.  We also indulged in peach pie, carrot cake cupcakes, angel bars, hazelnut and dark chocolate cookies, and my personal favorite chocolate mousse pie (Oh Yeah!).  It was a nice experiment and near the end of the two weeks the husband was making cream cheese brownies all while holding the baby and he was even playing around adding maple syrup and dried cranberries (delicious!).  He is also convinced that he lost weight, I'm not so sure.  We never actually weigh ourselves so it's all vague impressions.  But, regardless, it was a great experiment and strengthened my confidence about baking good things.  Thanks Michael Pollan, you are both a blessing and a curse.