Now I know that was a very long sentence, but I wanted you to experience the hold your breath quality of my rushed discovery that has led to this part of your website!!

Your cooking videos are an interesting combination of beautiful graphics, bouncy tune, very modest home cook kitchen (white Amana range, dish-soap bottle at the sink), insightful clearly described commentary, attractive intro segment set with handsome custom shelves full of bottles, and You!

They are so inviting and well done (some tuff angles,and the visual editing not quite as tight as 'network) it made me wonder why I havn't seen you on PBS, The Food Network, Or the new Cooking Channel?

Am I looking in the wrong places?

Your light touch style, ideas, photogenic looks, tone of voice, intelligence, easy gracefull movement, uninhibited easy graceful movement looks like you have been doing this on camera for centuries.

All that and You Read and Write Cookbooks Too!

I'm thrilled to find you and your attractive web packaging. I'm in the midst of writing my first cookbook and am blown away to discover you. Almost shut me down when I found we have cooking attitude/style in common except I will be 60 this year and you are the age of my children.

Yes those Kettle Chips are like crack.
I try and stay with popcorn, at least it has fiber…
I love a Classic coke and have to restrain myself from them consciously = because no nutrients for the calories, they dissolve seashells (we did the experiment as kids) think of the enamel on your teeth, and I have heard it will take rust off (urban legend?). Can't wait to get my fingers on the Kessler book.

Am going back to see the rest of your beautiful, informative website. Thank You and those that contributed to your journey to this place in time when our paths crossed. Oh and I wish I had thought to 'expose my children directly to scents as you did with Daphne. Smiles and warm thoughts, Andy

I drink the occasional coke with popcorn.

You’ll definitely keep the weight off in France — you’re now part of the French Paradox!

There’s a brilliant section in the Kessler book on Doritos on “texture dynamics,” “flavor dynamics,” and “mass dynamics,” which sounds like awfully dry reading but it’s just gripping. He concludes that there are five key influences on irresistability, in order of importance: calories, flavor hits, ease of eating, meltdown, and early hit.

What do I give into? Well, there’s a French company that makes a variety of Cheetos which are flavored with Emmental. And MSG, but not nearly as overwhelmingly as German junk food. About once a month in the summer, I buy a Coke. And I buy the occasional supermarket thingy that I’m too lazy or unprepared to make myself (we have something like six different kinds of tabbouli available).

I suspect I’ll eat more meat when it cools off, and yet I expect some of these lessons to stick. I’ll start exploring fish (never an option in Germany: if it wasn’t herring, it wasn’t available) and I bet the weight I’ve lost stays off, too.

Ed, despite my frequent postings about meat, we’ve largely become vegetarians, too. I would say my diet is roughly 90 percent veg. Small amounts of meat satisfy and leave one feeling great, not the gross feeling of just Eating Too Much.

What exactly do you give in to once a month? Buying processed foods?

Judy: thank you! I haven’t read any other reviews — I try not to when I’m reviewing something, but thanks for the nudge, I’m going to go look some up!

And Abi: mother’s breast milk is CHOCK full of umami! Baby starts getting the glutamate hits right away! We definitely come out of the womb with glutamate receptors on the tongue fully formed. Which tells us: umami is very, very old. It’s only since about 1908, I think, that we came to really understand it (thanks to Kikunae Ikeda, a Japanese chemist at Tokyo University).

I try to give in to it once a month, to remind myself it’s there and what it is, but you’re right: those same cues can be manipulated at home with small amounts of quality ingredients which deliver the same bang for the buck.

Great post.