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National Public Radio recently ran a history of USDA dietary advice from 1943 to the present. The only problem is that they forgot the most important one: the Drink Your Carbs Food Pyramid, the only pyramid that allows dieters to continue enjoying alcohol. 
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 Andrea’s older brother is a fast runner. He is not Usain Bolt fast, but when he competes in smaller 10k races and Half Marathons, he often wins his age category. He has been running since high school. His collection of plaques and medals is now so large that they could be melted down and used to cast a life-sized bronze statue of him frozen in the classic victory pose. At age 46, he still puts in around 50 miles of training per week.
For most of his life, running was enough to keep him rail thin. In the past few years, however, something shifted. No matter how much he ran and no matter how often he raced, he slowly began to put on weight. For the first time in his life, he had to start thinking about what he ate rather than simply how many calories he burned. There is no getting around it: getting old sucks.  We could insist that we invented this cocktail. Everybody else does. In fact, so many people have claimed this particular recipe that we have no idea who to cite. Followers of the Paleolithic Diet refer to it as “The Paleo Margarita.” Atkins, South Beach and Zone have all made claim to it under similar, “-rita” appended names. Mexico refers to it simply as the original Margarita recipe from the time before hotel bartenders sugared it up to make it more palatable to tourists.
For the sake of proper citation: The Drink Your Carbs Margarita originated somewhere between two and 10,000 years ago. It probably originated in the Americas, since the agave required to make tequila is a native plant. The most likely scenario is that the drink was invented in Mexico and we stole it without giving them credit, just like we did with Texas.  Andrea is the cook in our house. Steven is in charge of dishes. In most households this would be an unfair division of labor. In our household, it balances out perfectly because when Andrea cooks she uses every pan, dish and utensil in the kitchen. Andrea cooks like our four-year-old nephew eats. It’s a joyous, full-body experience. Nothing is left untouched. The aftermath looks like the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
 Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, except for Santa who trying to choke down his billionth cookie of the evening.
In our experience, the over-21 set tends to be Santa skeptical. Some people get hung up on the impracticality of delivering presents to the roughly 2.2 billion Christians worldwide. Others concern themselves with the physics of flying reindeer or the difficulty of stuffing a morbidly obese man down the narrow flue of a modern chimney. At Drink Your Carbs, our skepticism springs from the sheer volume of cookies left on hearths that, for politeness reasons, Santa is required to consume.  We are not to be trusted. We will lie to you. We will tell you that your outfit matches if we think you are too fragile to hear otherwise. We will tell you how much we enjoyed dinner with your new boyfriend. If we are performing a card trick, we will look you square in the eye and tell you that your card is “lost in the deck,” even though we know exactly where to find it.
We will not, however, lie to you when it matters. You will never hear us say, “You’re guaranteed to double your money” or “To us, that lump looks harmless.” Nor will we try to convince you that cocktails are just as enjoyable under the No Mixer rule. The sad truth is that most cocktails are now off limits.  We just returned from a trip to the East Coast. We visited friends in New London, New Hampshire. Then we attended a wedding on Cape Cod. The trip was fabulous. The weather was mostly sunny and warm. The wedding took place on a beautiful stretch of beach, no one was pregnant and both the bride and groom looked happy to be there. The trip was a success in every way but one.
We won’t candy coat this. From a dietary perspective, we cheated more often in the past week than we did in the previous three months combined. This dietary lapse, however, did not come as a surprise. We knew that would fall off our diet and exercise routine even before we purchased our tickets. When it comes to divining the future, Uri Geller and Sylvia Brown can only dream of such certainty. Our not-so-psychic premonition left us with two choices. We could act surprised when our diets faltered and return home to a week of self-loathing and Nightmare Mode. Or, we could plan ahead and perform the DYC equivalent to the Polio Booster. We opted for immunization.  In our home, burgers serve the same role that pizza delivery serves in the average American household; if we are tired, lazy or just feel like kicking back in front of a football game, we make burgers.
Of course, our version removes the bun and the fries in favor of wine and beer because we prefer to drink our carbs. Until a recent cooking mishap, we believed that we made damn good burgers. We were wrong. A fortunate accident set us straight. We now know how to make burgers so ridiculously good that they cause Tourette’s. Everyone who has tasted them has reacted similarly, “ Holy f@#k! I will never make normal burgers again.”  Hello. My name is Steven. I used to hate kale. Now I love it.
When did it become a virtue to never change your mind? Watch any recent political coverage and the conclusion is unavoidable. We, as a country, have decided that new information should have no impact on opinions and beliefs. If you abandon a single conviction you held in seventh grade, you’re a weak-minded flip-flopper. It doesn’t matter what life experiences you’ve had between then and now. New evidence be damned. Changing your mind for any reason betrays you as indecisive and lacking in backbone. Go ahead and accuse me of being un-American. I have flip flopped on kale. I used to think that kale was far too bitter. It turns that my dislike of kale had everything to do with how it was prepared. The minute I tasted Andrea’s kale it became my favorite vegetable. Andrea and I are now in complete agreement that kale is the world’s most perfect vegetable. It’s low-calorie and high-nutrition. It’s delicious. It is the perfect compliment to any Drink Your Carbs meal. |
