Changing My Default Settings

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There has to be a reason why the URL links I place on this blog are not activated. Once more I meandered through the settings to see if there is a feature that allows this to happen. I changed one setting from No to Yes. Maybe that will do the trick. Only time will tell.

Nobody gets individual answers from these huge corporations. Especially if you don't allow Google to put their ads on your blog. I don't allow it. Why bother? They wouldn't make any money off the few readers attracted here. If Google sent me a record of how few readers I get here I might get disgusted and quit posting. I only know poor people or those who fool me into thinking they're poor.

My youngest brother and my older sister took me out to eat for a belated birthday supper. Actually, my brother and sister-in-law took me and our sister to this new Italian restaurant that has opened here. Classy place for a small town. Very sophisticated people. They fawn over their customers, and their asking price might spell their eventual doom. These used-to-be farmers are not big spenders. Many people have opened restaurants like where they come from and failed miserably. Maybe these people will succeed. It will be good for all of us if they do.

The eggplant parmesan was tasty. It came with spaghetti. They had Italian bread with olive oil and parmesan cheese for an appetizer that was good. I remember going to a place similar to this in Pennsylvania once with a former Greek girlfriend. When I realized they expected me to dip bread in olive oil and eat it I was astounded. Nobody I knew of ate oil. They just used it for frying when they didn't have any lard or fatback. Southern cooking is... ummm... unique.

Now, I'm going crazy over olive oil. After never eating it for practically all of my life, I'm sopping it up like red-eye gravy from country ham with a biscuit. Shit happens. Things change. A couple of days ago I read about olive oil in Wikipedia. The article only said good things about it. The most interesting to me was that olive oil contains the same stuff as ibuprofen has in it, but it's a wholesome food rather than a pharmaceutical product.

I had bread and oil laced with parmesan cheese for breakfast with my coffee this morning, and a teaspoon of inulin powder to feed my gut bacteria. Doing that does seem to insult my Protestant upbringing, but a man gotta do. I got brain receptors on my mind this morning, and how refrigeration screws with their primitive origins. Refrigerated foods have only been available in the temperate zones for around a hundred years. Human brain receptors have been around much longer than that.

The very idea of kowtowing to what some call The Mediterranean Diet is antithetic to the way I was raised, but upon investigation, in light of the fact that my natal family didn't own a refrigerator until I was around ten years old, my mother employed a lot of the same techniques for using fresh food before it spoiled as other civilized cultures have. She used different words and naymes to describe her processes. No blame. I gotta get back to the Garden again.

She did season food with fatback and lard. We used to have pig-killings and cook the lard out of the pig fat in a large cast-iron pot that I had to cut kindling wood for from long leaf pine roots. The only way I know of that the old folks in my youth used vegetable oil was peanut oil and mayonnaise. T

hat's as close to olive oil and other vegetable oils I was aware of, but I was a male child and wasn't allowed in the kitchen. I worked in the garden and plowed the fields and milked the cows. I didn't know nothing about no woman's work except for the physical labor of churning butter.

Soul food was eaten by both the blacks and the whites in the Reconstruction South. It was the cheapest food not having a cash based society we could grow or barter. We made do. Why would we not? Before World War Two came along it was easy to "keep 'em down on the farm" with their rustic, but horrible diet. Po' people literally died from that "soul food".

No wonder they turned to religion as a way of coping with lard biscuits and molasses. When the State cranked up the school lunchroom program in my early years, it was the best and only-est food many blacks and poor white kids had to eat. Even though it consisted of canned vegetables and processed meat, it was still mo' tasty than what we were used to at home. Lots of homes didn't have enough food. I remember stunted, skinny children from that era. Lunchroom food was just lovely.

The most striking change to my current diet arrived in the form of learning about gut bacteria. I knew a few things about gut bacteria from early on, but most of it concluded that any bacteria at all was bad news. All bacteria was the enemy of the people. It took a while for me to grok that ain't necessarily so. I had to do something. I was unknowingly killing myself trying keep from dying by my own ignorant hand.

I only started calling gut bacteria "probiotics" after seeing an informercial on PBS that they tried to pass of as a documentary and get people to send them money to run their one-side television programs controlled by the wealthy. Imagine the gall of these dunces?

Yet, when this good looking woman started explaining about the positive aspects of "friendly bacteria" I began to listen. I'm a sucker for charismatics. I wanna be just like 'em. Now, that's Protestant for you! "Hear the woid of tha' Lord!"

It took about a month of mulling it over. A relatively short amount of ti-me for me. Double Taurus not withstanding. When this woman started preaching billions and trillions of gut bacteria in the intestines, and how feeding them the right stuff to get them to proliferate in a positive way I was hooked. I just "knew" she was right.

I weighed in on my old bookworm ways and learned that what she was selling was actually old news, but with a bright new cover on that book. Presently, along with discovering a possible cinnamon allergy, I'm devilishly not taking my prescribed medicines, and I can't get enough of these wonderful new/old elixirs. They at least appear for the moment to heal wot ails me.

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