I am a retired technical writer, reporter, US Navy vet and cook. I have lived in a small town on Massachusetts’ North Shore for the more than 35 years.
Why I’m doing this.
Finding ways to live a healthy and comfortable life is something of a family tradition for me. My grandmother was a tough, hard-working head of a single parent family who worked as many as three jobs a day to provide her children with food, shelter, and a good education. I have always admired her grit and her common-sense approach to life.
My mother dealt with a series of physical injuries by learning how to help the body heal itself with a minimum of medication through exercise and thoughtful nutrition. Many of the concepts she developed are incorporated into modern physical therapy.
She published several books and had a long-running television series on WGBH called “Maggie and the Beautiful Machine”. On one of her most infamous episodes, she cheerfully explained that there was no need to starve as she ate the contents of a can of dog food.
I am not going to use that idea for a number of reasons. Some dog food is now more expensive than people food but, more importantly, a lot of it is now imported from China and the ingredients may not be healthy for pets. let alone humans. Besides, there are tastier and easier ways to live on very little.
So why am I doing this? It’s simple. I am a technical writer. For years I have struggled to explain overly complex software to people who just want to get the job done and go home. I think that it is helpful to do the same thing with life. Keeping some basic things as simple as possible gives us more time to work on the more difficult problems.
I have a certain way that I write recipes that will take you step-by-step through the process. I hate it when some vital step is hidden in the middle of a paragraph and you have to reread the entire thing to find out why things went wrong. If I suggest a side or companion dish, I’ll do it before the recipe so that you’ll be able to plan accordingly.
One Meatball 