Author: Mary Dan Eades

An article from NY Times columnist Nicholas Bakalar caught my eye recently. Its title, “Brain scan find spot linking stress, asthma” intrigued me, so I read on. The title seemed to imply validation of the long held folk lore that linked an asthma sufferer’s becoming upset or stressed with the onset of an asthmatic attack….

A recent article in the New York Times caught my eye with its color photo of a beautifully browned capon. For those readers who may not know, a capon is a gelded rooster, a castrated bird, a feathery eunuch–in Arnold-speak, a girlie man of the chicken world. All the effort that would have gone into…

The title of a recent article by Sarah Gordon in the Santa Barbara Newspress caught my eye the other day: Survival of the Strangest. The thrust of the piece involved the rapid growth of niche farming in California for unusual crops, such as mangos, passion fruit, litchis, pineapple guavas, zapotes, cherimoyas or custard apples, and…

Since the premier of our new PBS cooking series Low Carb CookwoRx, we’ve gotten a ton of mail about the use of Splenda in recipes. The queries range from the venomous (How can you recommend a deadly toxin in your cooking?) to the merely inquisitive (Is Splenda safe?) With so much interest in the use…

Recently, our good friend and fellow author Loren Cordain (The Paleo Diet) and family came to dinner at our house during their annual summer trip to Lake Tahoe. They gifted us with a large, whole trout that their sons had caught on a fishing trip on the lake. We love cooking whole fish on the…

Of all the edible wild foods that man has figured out how to exploit, one has to wonder about how hungry he must have been to tackle the prickly pear. (To be perfectly correct, I would speculate that woman probably tackled this one while man was out tackling the cave bear. It’s a tough call…

In the hot days of summer it’s no fun to heat up the kitchen and so we find ourselves looking for dishes to make that are either cold or can be cooked on the grill. We’ve recently been indulging in pizzas on the grill. Say what? You read right. Pizza on the grill and low…

Back in the good old days of low carb dieting,life was simpler. A prudent and sensible low carb diet consisted of real food–real beef, real chicken, real fish, real cheese, real butter, real cream, real olive oil, real nuts, real lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, strawberries, melon…you get the picture. That how it…

The fields of lavender in the Santa Ynez valley (and one would presume in Provence and elsewhere throughout the world where the herb grows wild) are in full bloom. Bundles of fresh lavender perfume our local farmers’ markets, in Santa Barbara and Santa Fe, where stalls sell everything lavender from oils, soaps, bath salts, sachets,…

If stress reduction is on your to-do list, a new study by Dr. Karen Grewen and colleagues at the University of North Carolina suggests that you need to add a loving hug or two to your daily regimen. Doing so has been shown to enhance the release of one of the body’s natural stress-fighting hormones,…