You may recall that last winter, after the Low Carb Cruise, I wrote about the snacks I'd encountered in Dixie, and my newfound addiction to Golden Flake Pork Cracklin's. Well, I'm now in Gainesville, Florida, blogging from a Super 8 motel, having gotten off the Carnival Fascination yesterday in Jacksonville. The cruise was fantastic, but I'll blog about that later. Right now my obsession is this:

I CAN'T FIND ANY GOLDEN FLAKE CRACKLIN'S! AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

Long-time readers know that I keep all my chicken bones in a plastic grocery sack in the freezer till I have a potful, and then make chicken broth. It's super-simple: Just dump the bones -- they can be picked absolutely naked, that's fine -- in a stock pot. Cover with water, add a teaspoon or two of salt (no more; it concentrates as the broth boils down) and about 1/4 cup of any kind of vinegar (this helps draw calcium out of the bones, so you get a high-calcium broth.) Put it over low heat and let it simmer till at least a quarter, maybe a third of the water's cooked down.

Y'all know that Mardi Gras is coming, right?

Jimmy Moore wrote to me:

I don't know if you're aware of this yet or not, but the health food retailer Whole Foods Markets has launched a nationwide "Health Starts Here" marketing scheme that endorses a low-fat, vegetarian diet, with promises that the diet will "improve health easily and naturally."

- Is this a smart move by Whole Foods or will it backfire on them?
- Do you think Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is fully informed about the health benefits of fat?
- What should the response of people supporting high-fat, low-carb diets be?
- What alternative places for healthy foods should people consider instead of Whole Foods?
- What do you think the ramifications on the health of the Whole Foods consumer base will be?

Here's my response:

It's February 9th, just five days till yet another holiday America has managed to make all about the sugar. Sheesh.

I've been writing about Valentine's Day for ten years now, and really, I don't have a lot that's new to say, so if all of this sounds somewhat familiar, thanks for being a long-time reader.

It's a cold, sloppy day here in Southern Indiana; it can't quite decide whether to rain, sleet, or snow, so it alternates between the three. Yuck. The sort of day that makes me wonder why the heck I live in the Midwest.

I revised and updated last year's Super Bowl article for Carb Smart. Take a look!

It's all over the news the last few days: A new study in Archives of Internal Medicine showing that a low carbohydrate diet beats a low fat diet for lowering blood pressure. This was not a big study -- just 146 subjects -- but it did look at the effects of both diets over 48 weeks time, almost a year, which is a reasonably ample time frame. Too, the study involved subjects who were not only obese -- an average BMI of 39 -- but who also had obesity-related health problems such as diabetes, elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, and, yes, hypertension.

In the Resolutions and Goals thread, georgiapeach asks:

How many carbs per day should I be aiming for? I am reading a lot of low carb material and my head is spinning. Please help.

I ran across this poem on another website recently, and I thought it very wise. Wanted to share. I hope I'm not messing with Ms. Nelson's copyright -- I do know that this piece is found all over the internet. But Ms. Nelson? If you want me to take this down, let me know and I'll comply immediately.

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
Portia Nelson

Chapter 1
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost… I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2
I walk down the street.

Dr. Jim is James Carlson, MD. I met him last winter on Jimmy Moore's Low Carb Cruise; he had the cabin right next to ours. Along with being a nice guy and a lot of fun, he's that rarest and most valuable of people, an MD with an understanding of low carbohydrate nutrition. He spoke at length about using a low carbohydrate diet in his practice.

Rummaging through one of my freezers the other day, I ran across a 2 1/2 pound chuck roast that had clearly been in there a tad too long. Add to that the fact that I'd bought it at a super-cheap grocery store, not known for its excellent meat, and I'd bought it marked down because it was close to expiration date. In short, this was not a gourmet piece of meat.

However, it was a good-sized hunk of animal protein, and I was loathe to throw it out, or even to feed it to the chickens. (Chickens will eat anything.) I was determined to make it into at least a passable supper.

That Nice Boy I Married and I spent New Years Eve watching the third episode of Mad Men, which we're just getting into. (It's pretty much the story of my father's life; he was a Madison Avenue ad exec in the 1960s and '70s. No spoilers, please!) When that was over, and it was still hours till midnight, we popped in a VHS I'd picked up at the Goodwill, a cheesy old monster movie called "Gorgo."