Field Notes #24: The best hours of your day, dangers of a pool dunk, & homemade ricotta
Who gets your best hours of the day? Tara Parker Pope asks this wise question.
Hello friends! I hope you are having a sweet July so far. I have been reading, painting, and saying goodbye to a bunch of wonderful neighborhood friends (sniff!) who are moving to Charlottesville, California, Colorado, and New Hampshire. I will miss them. I know we will stay in touch, but it’s different when you are down the street than when you are hours away. Friends are really great for your health. If you have a neighborhood friend, give them a hug (or a fist bump, or a smile) this week. And if you don’t, then join me in working on making a new friend or three this summer. Who is that moving in down the street?
This week’s Field Notes includes advice from health reporter Tara Parker Pope, a health-related warning about unexpected pool dunks, and an easy recipe for homemade creamy cheese.
1} “Give yourself the best hours of the day.”
Reporter Tara Parker Pope wrote this lovely compilation of wisdom in her departing Well column from The New York Times earlier this year. (She now works for The Washington Post.) She observed that the findings that have most stuck with her over the decades reporting on health issues have been about “inner” fitness — guidance like paying attention, nurturing self-compassion, and noticing and naming your emotions.
Among her list was this golden advice: “Give yourself the best hours of the day.”
I was reminded of a newspaper colleague, decades ago, who was going through treatment for breast cancer. She was about to embark on a daily radiation schedule. She was a morning person, and felt best in the morning, so at first she thought she should schedule her radiation treatments then. But her doctor recommended otherwise, suggesting that she keep those precious best hours for herself to enjoy and schedule the radiation later in the day.
Tara echoes this:
“What one- or two-hour period in each day do you feel your best? Your most energetic? Your most productive? Now ask yourself: Who gets those hours? Chances are you’re spending those highly productive hours on work demands, paying bills, sorting through emails or managing the needs of the household. But now that you’ve identified the time of day when you’re feeling your best, try giving that time to yourself instead, advises Jack Groppel, an executive coach and professor of exercise and sport science at Judson University in Elgin, Ill. For me, this advice has been transformative. Giving yourself your best time each day to focus on your personal goals and values is the ultimate form of self-care.”
I love this.
2} Hidden risks of pool pranks
It’s summer here in New York, and on steamy days, a dip in a pool, pond, lake, or ocean is heavenly.
I don’t understand the desire to push people into the pool — it just seems like a mean prank. A recent tweet from an author and disabled activist illuminated a bigger risk:
Here’s a list of risks when someone is forced into the water:
They might have an insulin pump, which is not waterproof and can cost $6000 or more out of pocket. (About 10 percent of Americans have diabetes.)
They might have a cochlear implant that can’t get wet.
They might have a central line (a type of catheter into a vein) that can’t get wet.
They might get injured or even die. (There are horrific stories in the above Twitter thread about this, and an internet search turns up many more. People who don’t know how to swim can drown. People who do know how to swim can panic and drown. People can hit their head in the shallow end of the pool.)
Plus, it’s just plain not nice!
3} Homemade ricotta
Ricotta — that creamy, dreamy soft cheese that is often in lasagna or other pastas — is a hit in our house. But all our nearby grocery stores only carry brands with filler and stabilizer ingredients, like guar gum, xantham gum, carrageenan, which I try to avoid.
It honestly never occurred to me that I could make ricotta. Making homemade cheese fell in my category of likely-too-much-trouble, alongside homemade croissants, wine, and Italian rainbow cookies.
But then Deb (the wonderful cook behind the Smitten Kitchen blog) wrote recently about ricotta, calling it “rich, delicious, and a cinch to make.” Deb is not fussy. She would not call something a “cinch to make” unless it really truly was.
Hmm.
There is one slightly fussy thing, though. You need cheesecloth. (Here’s an example at Target for $3.) Cheesecloth is a gauzy material, a kitchen-grade mesh that is used to separate the liquids from the creamy solid-ish cheese.
Otherwise, it’s just milk, cream, lemon, salt, and 20 minutes.
Here are the ingredients:
Whole milk
Heavy cream
Salt
Freshly squeezed lemon juice
Basically, you warm the first three ingredients to almost boiling, remove the pot from heat, stir in the lemon juice, let sit 5 minutes, and then let it strain through the cheesecloth. In 20 minutes total, you have ricotta!
Read the full recipe for homemade ricotta at Smitten Kitchen.
You can then scoop the ricotta into a bowl and use it as you like. Deb suggests drizzling olive oil, sprinkling salt and pepper, and spreading it on toasted bread.
We did this, along with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, and it was delicious.
Our own ricotta!
We also used the ricotta in this delicious pasta with butternut squash recipe from Luisa Weiss, another favorite food writer and cookbook author. (Look for the parts variation, after the main toast recipe.)
I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, full of savoring your best hours, neighborhood friends, and maybe even a homemade treat.
To our journeys,
Brianne