Columbia County Bread & Granola @columbiacountybread-blog - Tumblr Blog

why organic now means dead...

The following is taken verbatim from naturalorganicwarehouse.com... They sell, among other things, approved herbicides for organic growers...

Avenger AG Burndown Herbicide Concentrate

Avenger AG® Burndown Herbicide is a non-selective, post-emergent organic herbicide that safely kills weeds, grasses and broadleaves. The active ingredient d-limonene (citrus oil) naturally strips away the waxy plant cuticle, causing it to desiccate & die.

“Burndown” is a term that I used to think of as synonymous with conventional farming. The idea is, you douse your field with glysophate (round up) or other herbicides to kill off everything in the field prior to harvest. The weeds burn down to the ground so they are not harvested. The grain also dies off but the stalks remain erect - you’ve probably driven by corn fields where it looks like all the corn is dried out and dead but still waiting to be harvested.

Unfortunately, what the above means is that organic growers are now able to engage in this practice by dousing their field with, in this case, citrus oil.

The point is, even if your buying seeds and grains and beans that are certified organic, they may not be dormant, they may actually be dead. Meaning, they will not sprout. They will not germinate and therefore, the bio-availability of these grains is lost.

This is why we only ever buy grain from farmers we know and absolutely trust who do not engage in this practice. When we buy our wheat, we often find indications of weeds and other chaff in among the grain and we are totally cool with that. We soak the grain, skim off the chaff and weed matter, rinse and soak again until clean. Is it possible you might find a mustard seed (tiny black speck) in one of our loaves of bread? Yes. It is. And it’s okay. It’s a genuine indication that the bread you bought was made with organic wheat grown by a sustainable farmer who’s first concern is the health of their soil.

And that’s as it should be.

Finally, the above is why we sprout our grain and soak our flax. This is our way of verifying we are working with a live food, not something that was poisoned and killed in the field for the purposes of expediting the harvest and reducing cleaning costs for the miller.

And quite honestly, if you’re looking to avoid breads made with dead grain then “organic” no longer offers any guarantee and this is true of wheat or gluten-free based breads. What will guarantee that the breads you eat are made with viable grain is to make sure you are buying a sprouted grain bread.

It's been interesting reading your experience, and also all the info about running your business. I've appreciated you've done the 20 days. it seems the LG Kitchen is in competition with your granola, or is it your granola repackaged? I've also appreciated your honesty about your experience. I understand "lose .5 lb every day you eat friendly" and "this couple has lost 100 lbs since Oct" sells books, but that hasn't been my experience, no matter how hard I try. So thanks for being honest.

Hi, there have been benefits but I have to acknowledge that the big drop in pounds did not happen. Still, a change in what and how I eat and recognizing what may or may not be causing me issues or inflammation is well worth knowing.

One guy on the 20 day plan (day twenty)....

Saturday

I wake up to the sound of a cat vomiting somewhere in the bedroom. I check the clock. It’s four thirty so I bury my head in my pillow but, before I drift off, I make a mental note to watch my step in the morning and hope and pray my memory won’t be jogged by stepping in something wet and slimy.

At six thirty my phone alarm goes off and before I even climb out of bed Sue says, “watch your step. Someone threw up last night.”

“Thanks,” I say, “I heard.” But even without Sue, I had not forgotten. Stepping in cat vomit must be one of those things the brain and every fiber of your being simply won’t let happen.

I reach for my digital thermometer and get my BBT. This is it, I think because, after today, will I ever reach for this little bleeper again? If Sue doesn’t ask me for my BBT, do I really want to know? I’ve come to the conclusion that if my BBT tells me anything, it tells me that I didn’t manage to drink my full allotment of water.

But then, if there is but one element to The Plan that I have come to respect and will abide by in the days and weeks to come, it is drinking about a gallon of water a day. When I fall short of this amount, by even one glass, I can feel it. It’s also become a pretty good way of countering the compulsion to grab a mid-day snack. Just take another gulp of water. Simple, but it works.

BBT and weight are up and down respectively and incrementally but I find I’m not fixated on either my BBT or my weight. What I set out to resolve when I started on The Plan, what I have resolved, is the fact that I have not had a single retching-hair-ball-type-middle-of-the-night recurrence of acid reflux. And that’s just plain huge.

Fifteen minutes later, I’m back in the bedroom with Sue’s lemon water and two cups of morning tea. I stand by the side of the bed and drink my tea. I’m in a bit of a rush. It’s Saturday and that means I have to get up to the bakery, bag the bread that was baked last night, then drive it down to the café by the time Mike opens at eight.

I promise Sue I’ll bring home a fresh loaf and that will be our breakfast. She wants to melt goat cheese on the bread. Okay, I say to that.

I get to the bakery and the loaves look fantastic with just a few exceptions – some tearing where the dough’s anemic gluten structure showed signs of breaking down altogether. Without better controls, we feel we have a very narrow window between the grind and the bake to get our loaves in the oven without over-proofing. I grab a shabby dog from the liter and put him in my bag then opt for another to tuck away in my freezer for another day.

When I get to the café, it’s just past eight and a customer is waiting. She takes every sesame loaf we have and seems genuinely thrilled. Mike and I agree – each and every one of the sesame loaves are showpieces so I grab a quick picture with my phone.

Back home, Sue has sliced up some manchego cheese; a goat cheese imported from Spain that neither of us were familiar with before The Plan but it is now a family favorite. It’s expensive, about three times what we would pay for a standard cow’s milk cheddar, but, same as our bread, worth every added cent.

We slide the bread into the toaster oven and watch as the cheese melts to a bubbling golden brown. Delicious. No reaction so I give it two yums up. As breakfast winds down, Sue and I talk about cleaning out the fridge and pantry. There are a few Plan items we aren’t likely to ever visit – a half-gallon of Rice Dreams Milk taking up valuable real estate on the top shelf of the fridge. It’s probably still good but neither of us have been tempted to touch it while on The Plan so what are the odds we’ll want to drink it once we’re off? Down the sink she goes. And then there are a lot of things that have waited for us to finish The Plan. First up is a container of orange juice that has sat behind the heretofore-untouched Rice Dreams. Freshly squeezed orange juice was a staple in this house pre The Plan but O.J. is not in The Plan book and we haven’t tested it. I pop the pour top off and a quick whiff tells me it’s turned. “Anyone care for a screwdriver?” I ask Sue. Meanwhile, Sue pulls out the bag of oranges in the pantry and finds a festival of mold – green, orange, white and very pungent.

Another container comes out of the fridge, a little plastic bin of grape tomatoes now more like raisin tomatoes. Tomatoes are a big code red on The Plan. Just looking at them I can hear alarms, ‘Reactive-Reactive-Reactive! We haven’t tested tomatoes yet and not sure when we ever will but it won’t be with this compost ready bin.

We find tons of cheeses in the cheese drawer. Up front are a slew of new varieties of goat cheese; Gouda, the Manchego, a smoked variety and a spreadable soft – all Plan Friendly. And there are several holdover cheddars pushed to the back of the drawer. Do we toss them? One of these days we’ll test good old cow cheddar, says I and Sue agrees so they stay but I immediately wonder if we aren’t just delaying the toss out date.

As for fruits, Sue has been eating apples while I’ve been eating pears – something I haven’t done in years. I seem to like the golden brown bosc but can’t stand the yellow green Anjou but only toss the worst of the Anjou saving two in the unlikely event I want a pear fix and the bosc are all gone. Sue likes her Pink Lady variety of apple but to me they look suspicious – too big, too uniform in size and I don’t know where they come from. For me, when it comes to apples, they have to be locally grown, tart and firm. Winesap is my favorite.

We’ve got nuts aplenty including two varieties of raw almonds. One bag says organic and the other does not. After reading some recent posts by Lyn on Face Book, raw almonds not organically grown may be tainted with chemicals or heated to an extent they are no longer raw. We keep the organic and toss the others

Then there are the sunflower seeds. We have a plastic bin of toasted and a tall jar of raw. Lyn only recommends raw. If you want toasted, she suggests buying raw and toasting them yourself. I really prefer the taste of the toasted so I follow Lyn’s recipe and toast a cup or so of the raw in the oven and end up with something that tastes no different but looks toasted. A cruel joke in my mind. Sue asks if she should toss the bin of the toasted. I say no. I’ll keep them until I can figure out how to get the flavor just so toasting raw.

The veggie drawer yields items that are all recently bought and will likely stay put. We love sautéed kale and fresh grated beets with carrots. Baby romaine is also a keeper. There is a bag of celery on the bottom of the drawer. I leave it right where it is even though I had a bad reaction to celery and will be leery to add it into anything ever again. So why don’t we throw it out? I can’t answer that. I just don’t know why.

The freezer has veggie stock and a forgotten container of something light green. Sue pronounces it a lost container of the broccoli soup – a favorite – so I immediately take it out to thaw. “We’ll have it tonight for supper.” Is there enough for two? Sue asks. Not quite, I realize, so we pull a frozen container of the slightly less popular but still acceptable Carrot Ginger soup. “We’ll each get a little...”

Also found in the freezer is a sirloin steak we can split. Dinner is set and, yes, we have one last bottle of red wine. Tonight will be a celebration.

I pack a pear and some almonds and head to the office to check messages and start work on a business plan. In addition to interest from B and K, there is Ben Franklin, the private-public partnership that sometimes invests in small businesses who are lucky enough to show up on their radar. But, to get that support, I’ll need a solid biz plan and I’ll need someone with real management experience working with me. I simply lack the ability or experience to run a manufacturing company and if I walk into their corporate offices and try to pretend that I am what I am not, they’ll see right thru me.

The thing that I’ve discovered about running a business is that, in the beginning, a business depends on one thing. And that’s hope. You either believe that the thing you are doing has merit and value despite what everyone else may tell you, and, if you believe that, you will find a way to persevere and make it to the next level.

But if, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, hope is the thing with feathers, hope in the world of business better be a feathered thing with talons.

Hope and vision are two things I seem to have plenty of. I see what this company can be for its employees and the community around us and even the wider world and I want to help guide it there. But bringing in investors means that decisions are going to be made that have little to do with vision and hope and everything to do with minimizing risk, trimming the fat, pushing employees and becoming profitable so that you can attract more investment and continue to grow and on and on and on…

Dinner with Sue is more a party as we polish off the wine with dinner then pull down a bottle of scotch – untouched for 20 days. We toast Lyn and all that went into The Plan. We have made it to the end and now I can speak about my experiences being on The Plan when people call the office with questions. Sue is already thinking of who she can recruit. The Plan has helped us both immensely and we decide we are going to stay with it. Sort of. Modified a bit and much less stringent but, we want to remain very aware of what we’re eating, of what ever it is that is new, that we haven’t already tested so we can track our reactions and reduce the inflammation, heartburn, weight gain, etc., as that is the heart of The Plan.

I’ll check in again in a week and in a month.

Doug

one guy on the 20 day Plan (day nineteen)...

Friday

I’m up early after another restless night. We need financing in the worst possible way. We either invest in new equipment and grow or, we wither and die. The banks continue to maintain a wait and see attitude and that means I need to court investors but what will they want in return?

I check my BBT with my digital then skew it half a degree upward per Sue’s analog reading the day before and this gives me the kind of BBT I’m looking for. Cool. I hit the scales and am rather surprised to see a half-pound drop in my weight.

This, after a night out on the town.

Sue is still fast asleep so I grab my laptop off the dresser and head downstairs to work on the blog and check my emails.

K will be in tonight and wants to meet for dinner. He has a proposal.

I nix dinner plans but I set a time in the evening and ask that we meet at my house. He confirms. We’re on.

I rouse Sue with lemon water and tea.

Breakfast lunch and dinner today is “Planner’s choice.” That is, pick and choose from previous menu offerings. Since we have a ton of Plan leftovers in the fridge, this makes perfect sense. For breakfast I think I want toast but Sue says granola so we both go with flax granola with coconut milk and the last of the blueberries which are looking a bit shabby and shriveled.

I check in with Mike at the café. He has a list of needs from ice to lettuce. I drive up to the kitchen. Now that we have wi-fi installed up there I can get online so I pull an available table over to the wall outlet, plug in my laptop and, voila, I have an office.

The guys begin arriving. First our packagers slash shippers then Nick, then the bakers.

I consult with Ian and Bill as we look thru bin after bin of sprouted wheat. The grains all show a whitish nub of between a sixteenth of an inch to as much as a quarter-inch in length. These tiny nubs are known as radicals and they are the precursor to an emerging root system. This is a sure sign that the grain has sprouted and come to life. In nature, the grain is driven to extend this proto root outward to find a source of moisture while also pulling the grain down into the soil and safely out of the sun’s harsh rays. At this point, the sprouted grain has no interest in photosynthesis, it simply wants to find purchase in the soil lest it wither and die.

Later, once the root has safely tucked the grain into the soil and tapped into a source for moisture, the grain sends up a second shoot. This flatish, narrow stem will eventually extend upward, out of the soil, searching for the suns rays. This stalk soon turns greenish in color as a blade of grass emerges. All this time, the grain is relying on its store of starch from the endosperm. It is converting that starch into simple sugars, raw energy, that it can use to grow. Meanwhile, the germ of the grain sees a sudden spike in enzyme activity. These enzymes get to work neutralizing anti-nutrients contained in the grain so that the store of nutrients, fats and minerals become available. Anti-nutrients in grain are very similar to those found in most seeds, nuts and many vegetables. They are designed to discourage anyone from eating the grain by denying them the ability to absorb and digest the very nutrition the grain requires to come to life. This is why eating whole grain breads that have not been sprouted is virtually pointless. Yes, the fiber content is much greater with whole grain flour but the anti-nutrients have not been neutralized and there is very little available nutrition when digested.

Ian, Bill and I are looking for that sweet spot when we know that the grain has fully come to life but well before the plant structure forms. Once cellulose is present, the game is over for us sprouted bakers. It would be like trying to make bread from lettuce.

Meanwhile, gluten, or rather, the proteins contained in the endosperm that can come together to form gluten, are being compromised by sprouting and the conversion from grain to plant. Once the wheat berry has become a full- fledged grass, the prospect of gluten forming has disappeared entirely. This is why you can juice blades of wheat grass and not worry about gluten – there is no gluten in wheat grass because wheat grass is all plant structure

This degradation of gluten via sprouting is why, when large-scale industrial bakers go to buy flour from a mill, they always want to know what the “falling number” is. The “falling number” tells millers and bakers how much of the wheat that had been milled into flour was sprouted, either in the field on somewhere else along the way where the grain came into contact with just enough moisture to sprout.

“The Falling Number” simply measures the amount of time it takes for a measuring stick to slowly fall through a beaker of dough. The higher the number, the thicker the dough and the better the flour’s gluten structure. A lower falling number means the stick dropped too quickly because the dough lacked gluten structure due to a relatively high percentage of the wheat used to make the flour had come into contact with moisture and likely sprouted in the field.

For us, the benefits of sprouting the grain far outweigh the near total loss in gluten structure. While other sprouted bakers add gluten back into their dough, we rely on our natural leavens; the activity of a densely populated culture of wild yeast and beneficial bacteria to make our bread robust, healthy, delicious and much more digestible.

Bill gives the wheat one last drink then a drain then begins the grind, an arduous process of grinding all the sprouted wheat into what we call our proto dough. Meanwhile, Ian is doubling the starters, making sure we have enough so we can make the number of loaves we have planned for the bake while always holding a certain amount back so the process can start all over again.

At some point in the day, they will mix the starter with the proto dough (wet ground mash). The finished dough that results during the mix is then cut into balls of a certain weight then rounded by hand and set aside for a first proof and to continue to ferment.

I skip lunch because I’m just too busy and I’m not drinking water the way I would if I were at the office. I need to get a water cooler installed up here. I run a few errands then return to the bakery to see how it’s going. Bill and Ian are now preparing for the bake. Ian is rolling out pita while Bill shapes each loaf by hand then puts them in a proof box while the ovens get to temp. We take a look at the loaves already in the proof box and they are holding their shape and rising nicely.

At this point, there are no signs of the problems that often dog us. The dough is holding its structure, the pita patties are rolling out smoothly, it looks like we’re in line for an exceptionally nice bake. I wait for the first few loaves and pita come out of the ovens and grab one of each as gifts for K.

I get home and join Sue for dinner. Steamed fish, sautéed veggies and a delicious salad with goat cheese.

K arrives and we sit down and chit chat awhile before getting down to business. Unlike B., K has absolutely no interest in the flax granola and could care less about the café. His only interest is the bread and pita. He proposes a significant investment in new equipment but would demand that I split the company into divisions; one bread, the other granola. He will take operational control of the bread division and that means absolute control over personal, production, packaging and sales of our bread. If CCBG wants to sell our bread under our brand, we would have to purchase our bread from K at the wholesale price then package it in our own bags.

K will also insist on installing cameras in every corner of the bakery so he or I can remotely view all activity to verify both parties are abiding by the agreement.

I’m stunned. This was not what I was expecting from a longtime, devoted fan of our bread and pita and someone who can’t otherwise eat bread because of his diabetic condition. It feels more like a takeover than a partnership. That said, if K were as successful marketing our bread as he claims he will be, it could mean a lot of money pouring into CCBG’s bank account.

I have a lot of questions and K seems prepared with is answers. He tells me his terms are not negotiable. I promise to think about it long and hard and get back to him. I send him home with gifts from the bakery.

I sketch out his terms to Sue. She isn’t sure what to make of it. Nor am I. I get an email from K that better clarifies what he has in mind and how it would work with respect to payroll and workman’s comp and a million other details I had asked him about during our meeting. I decide to forward the email to our lawyer and schedule a meeting in the morning. I also plan to meet with Larry who has become my closest and most trusted advisor in matters of business.

This feels like the beginning of another long and restless night but, at the very least, indigestion is no longer the culprit of so many of my sleepless nights.

End of day nineteen

One guy on the 20 day Plan (day eighteen)...

Thursday

Sue is convinced my low BBT’s are due entirely to my using a digital thermometer,whereas, her high BBT’s are due, in part, to her using an old school “analog” thermometer.

I sorta thought we settled this way back in week one but Sue’s not letting go. “Lyn recommends a mercury thermometer,” she tells me. “And you have to leave it in under your arm for at least ten minutes to get an accurate reading.”

I can’t imagine lying in bed with a thermometer tucked in my armpit for ten whole minutes. Me, I like digitals. They bleep in a matter of seconds and I’m on my way.

“Just get one reading,” she says, “and that way you’ll know how much your digital is off.”

“It’s just, if I lay in bed for ten whole minutes, who’s to say I don’t fall right back to sleep?”

“That’s what I do.”

“I really don’t like the thought of that,” I say and I say that because I have long regarded myself as an accident prone person. Sue once asked me how I thought I might die and I immediately responded, doing something stupid. Whatever it is, my last thought will be, that sure was a stupid thing to do.

“Why not?” she asks.

“Say I fall back to sleep, okay? Now say I roll over and the glass thermometer cracks. Now I’ve got a sharp glass shard piercing my skin and pumping mercury or whatever that shit is that’s in that thing, into my veins. I could be dead in seconds.”

“That seems highly unlikely.”

“But not out of the question. And let’s just imagine for one second that were to happen. Do you have any idea what that would mean? My death would get splashed on the front page of the Press Enterprise. ‘“Bread man dies in freak encounter with thermometer.’ And that’s exactly the kind of story that gets picked up by that Darwin blog, the one that tracks idiot behavior, and then my entire life is reduced to an Internet meme, “You will not believe what this idiot did to kill himself.”

The room is pitch dark. Sue is silent but I can see her face, in my mind, I know exactly what kind of look I’m getting.

She reaches over to her bed stand, flips the light on then shakes her thermometer down and hands it to me.

Ten interminable minutes pass. I lay wide awake, my heart thumping. “Okay,” I say, “Ten minutes.” I hand Sue the thermometer. I have no interested in the eye strain required to read it.

“Ninety-six point three,” she says. “Now, see what your digital says.”

Fifteen seconds later I have a reading. “Ninety five eight.”

Okay, see? It’s off at least a half a degree. Okay?”

“Got it,” I say.

Breakfast and lunch are a blur. All we talk about, all we think about the entire day is dinner tonight. It’s day eighteen and that means The Plan has okayed going out to eat.

We narrow our list of possible restaurants in town down to three and settle on RoseMarie’s largely because we know their menu, we have our favorites but, are they going to be plan friendly?

We arrive before six. I didn’t make reservations thinking we’d be early enough but the place is packed. And yet, magically, a table opens. We’re handed menus and taken to our seats.

Sue wants the filet, the steak. This is a decision she made days ago and she has not waivered. I’ve been saying house salad but, here we are, last minute, and Sue now cautions me it’s going to have tomatoes. She knows I know tomatoes can be hugely reactive on The Plan and we have yet to test them.

“I can get it without tomatoes,” I say.

“And what about the mozzarella? Or the olives or the spinach? I don’t know, Doug. Are you sure you want the house salad?”

Our waiter arrives with two glasses of water.

No, no. No thanks, we both say and waive him off. Water with a meal is verboten on The Plan.

“Something else to drink?” he asks.

“Wine. Red. Please. Your House Malbec.”

As soon as he walks away, it occurs to me, wait, I haven’t drank my allotment of water today. I tell Sue my dilemma and tell her that there’s plenty of time for me to down a glass of water before the food arrives.

“Go tell him,” she says.

I jump up and grab the waiter a moment before he disappears behind the bar.

“Yes?”

“On second thought, I’d like to take you up on that glass of water.”

“Oh, sure,” he says, more than happy to hand me one or both of the glasses he has in his hands.

I hesitate. The glasses are filled not just with water but with ice. I can’t remember the last time I drank ice cold water. Certainly not on The Plan. Ice cold water will throw my BBT’s all to hell.

“Um, actually, I’m uh…” I’m stammering. “Could I please have the water without the ice…?”

“Absolutely,” he says, sounding extraordinarily pleasant about it and not the least bit perturbed. “I’ll bring it right out.”

Back at our table I peruse the menu and settle on either the scallop salad or the scallop entree. Scallops appear to be plan friendly as they are a suggested protein option early on in The Plan.

Sue isn’t so sure. She points out that the scallop entree comes with sun dried tomatoes and a white sauce.

“White sauce…?” I say. “That could be anything.”

“Cream,” Sue says. “And we haven’t tested dairy.”

“I have,” I say.

“When?”

“Goat milk.”

“Cream in a white sauce would be cow’s milk,” she says. “We haven’t tested cow’s milk. I think there’s a difference.” Her expression shifts a bit as if searching. I fear a Lyn quote is imminent.

“Forget the entree,” I say. “I’ll just get the scallop salad.”

“On a bed of spinach…?” Again, her tone is filled with doubt.

The waiter arrives with the wine and my water. “Are we ready to order?”

Sue is. She orders the filet mignon with a side of sautéed veggies. She settles back secure in her Plan Friendly choice.

“And you, sir?”

I get an idea. We eat a lot of Kale on The Plan and it’s always sautéed. I say to him, “I would like to order the Scallop salad, however, if you wouldn’t mind, could you please ask Tank if he would sauté the spinach for me?”

“Not at all, sir,”

He walks off. “Tank” is what everyone calls the chef at Rose Marie’s. I assume it’s his build; large, squared, imposing, the kind of guy you can picture walking thru walls. Sue congratulates me on my quick thinking for turning my salad Plan Friendly but we wonder how Tank will take it. The waiter returns.

“We’ll be happy to sauté the spinach for you but would you like the mushrooms sautéed as well?”

“It comes with mushrooms?” I ask but it’s such an obviously stupid question I quickly correct myself. “Yes, mushrooms, of course, sautéed, that would be perfect,” I say. He smiles but I abruptly motion to hold on for confirmation. I turn to Sue, “I think? Right? we’re good with mushrooms, sautéed? Of course we are…?”

Sue takes my menu with hers and passes them back to the waiter.

“Sauteed mushrooms are fine,” she says then adds, “We’re on a special diet,” as if explaining her companion’s odd behavior. “We have to test everything before we can eat it. And this is our first day out, you know, where we get to go to a restaurant.”

The waiter laughs. It’s a polite, congenial sort of laugh. “I completely understand. Shall I bring you your basket of flat bread?”

“No, thanks,” we say in unison.

“Very good,” he says and leaves us. We go back to looking at each other while sipping our wine. The silence extends and threatens to become slightly awkward. I say, “So this being on The Plan... Are we turning into a couple of idiots?”

“We…?” Sue says, not missing a beat.

She laughs but also reads my expression perfectly.

“I’m teasing,” she says.

“You think I’m an idiot?”

“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous,” she says then adds, “It’s just your way. It’s endearing.”

“Acting like an idiot?” I say.

“You’re fine,” she says and indicates my water, “if you’re going to drink that, you better drink it right away.”

She’s right about that and I gulp away. The water is very cold but I find I’m extremely thirsty.

Dinner arrives and it is fantastic. I could not have been happier with my choice. I order a second glass of wine and share it with Sue.

The waiter returns for a desert choice and we explain in more detail about The Plan. He sounds genuinely interested. I realize he is a very good waiter. Sue agrees and we leave a tip that is commiserate with his skills.

Back home I get on the computer and check orders and emails. Orders are down. I try not to worry about it. Orders tick up. Orders tick down. I find I obsess either way. I check my bank balance. I can make payroll. That’s good, but I’m way late on some other bills.

I check an email from a longstanding customer of our bread, a woman from New Hampshire. She hasn’t placed in order with us in some time. She’d gone all paleo, she explains. No grains. And she was okay with that for awhile but, ultimately, she couldn’t stand not having our bread in the morning. There’s nothing else like it, she writes, and tells how she’s looked and looked for a baker closer to home. And now she’s feeling suddenly desperate. Can we ship her ten loaves? Immediately? I write back and tell her we’ll ship Wednesday after our very next bake and give her an amount and tell her to send a check.

Sue comes downstairs and announces she’s fading fast and am I coming to bed. I want to say yes but I should really put the bread order into the system right now lest I forget. The problem is, I’m going to have to dig thru old emails for that woman’s shipping address. I promise Sue I’ll be along soon. She nods turns and disappears back upstairs.

End of Day eighteen

one guy on the 20 day Plan (day seventeen)...

Part two

When I decided I wanted to start on The Plan, I contacted Lyn about my stomach distress issues and she immediately directed her assistant to get me signed up to be a part of the next Plan Team. This was all very last minute and I had to scramble to fill out digital paperwork then register for an interactive video conference Lyn was hosting for all the new team members. I finally got logged in and missed maybe five minutes. Lyn was sitting, centered on a sofa in a room that might have been a room in her home. A child’s sketch was on the wall but otherwise very little décor to speak of. Lyn sat erect, composed, her hands folded on her lap. Her voice was precise and modulated. She exuded confidence if not a considerable amount of warmth.

But confidence was exactly what she needed to project. Like a lot of people, I was going into The Plan feeling more uncertain than anything. But I was also desperate. I wanted to believe. I needed to believe. Which is why, on some level, I think the Plan is something of a belief system. Well, what program or methodology or intervention isn’t when you get right down to it? But, what I mean is, The Plan is fairly rigid, very demanding and closely monitored. When you’re on it, you can feel sort of cloistered, like a member of a sect where you will do better if you’re more isolated – no eating out, stay on track, and when you find you need support, tap into your fellow teamers on the Team Plan face book page.

Then again, on reflection, that rigidity and tight structure is probably critical for The Plan to work. And if The Plan works for you, that’s great. There’s a lot of upside. Absolutely. And perhaps the only risk is becoming one of Lyn’s many devotees. Unfortunately, this is what I see happening with Sue. She has her head in The Plan book quite a lot these days and quotes Lyn with depressing regularity. “Lyn says red potatoes are the best.” “Lyn says we shouldn’t drink white wine.” Stuff like that.

After I get out of bed, I perform my new normal morning ritual by juggling two cups of tea and two glasses of lemon water up the stairs and into the bedroom.

Sue is awake in bed but leaned over. She has her analog thermometer up to her bedside lamp.

“Okay,” she says, beaming.

“What’s up?”

“Ninety-seven-point-one.”

“Wow, good for you,” I say. This is higher altitude BBT. I’ve yet to see mine go past 96.5.

Sue climbs out of bed and says, “did you hear me? My BBT is 97.1.” She says it like someone who’s just been accepted to Harvard.

“What was yours?” she asks while filling kibble into the kitty bowls.

“Ninety five something.”

“Did you weigh yourself?”

“About the same.”

“Don’t get discouraged,” she says, “Lyn recommends you take your probiotics.”

“Listen,” I say, “it’s getting late for me. I’m gonna grab some cereal and run.”

“Take your probiotics,” she calls out.

I set myself up with a bowl of half spelt and half flax and chomp away. I really like the combo.

My first meeting of the day is with K. but when I check my email at the office, he asks for another extension. He says he’ll try to get to town tomorrow or possibly Saturday but I’m losing patience. K. is interested in making an investment in the company but he’s been saying this for a year or more. He is one of our oldest customers and biggest fans. K. is a diabetic. Hardcore. His pancreas is shot and so, to survive, he has to have an insulin pump on his person running 24 seven. Having a guy like K. advocating for our bread when he survives by virtue of an insulin pump, is, well, he makes for a powerful and compelling spokesman and a lot of people have told me it was K. who told them about us. I hope we can come to some agreement.

Lunch with Sue is the basil escarole soup I made several days ago and leftover sautéed veggies from last night. All we seem to talk about is dinner out, permitted tomorrow night, on The Plan. We’re pretty keyed up.

We part for the afternoon then reconvene for an early dinner as I have another investor meeting at seven. B. arrives at the house on schedule. The discussion centers around the flax granola. B. has reviewed all our numbers on production and sales and, clearly, flax granola is the winner. For one, the granola is shelf stable meaning it can be sold to a distributor who, in turn, can warehouse it, then sell it to stores all over the country where, eventually, it will find its way onto a store shelf and, with a little luck and the right packaging, into the hands of a consumer.

By contrast, the bread is perishable meaning it has an extremely limited shelf life. Five days maybe and that limits its appeal to an investor like B. When I counter this by talking up the enormous potential of the bread, I’m told that it’s best to stay focused on the product that has the best chance for scaling up.

By scaling up, B. means that if we can currently produce 300 bags of granola with each scheduled bake, we can, with a minimal additional investment, ramp that up fourfold. And, once we’ve done that, an additional investment of x number of dollars could then mean a ten fold increase in current production. I have to admit, the numbers, as B. lays them out, look very promising. The thought that, in a few short years we could be packaging nearly a million bags of flax granola is sort of breathtaking and when he shows me what that kind of revenue stream would look like, we’ll, what can I say? It looks like success. Of course, baking and packaging that many bags of flax granola poses a lot of challenges but B. brings that kind of hands-on production experience with him. That said, selling that many bags of flax granola is quite another challenge.

The discussion gets serious enough that I extend an invitation to B. to come to our next company meeting. Not tomorrow night, he says, but soon.

Sue comes downstairs and we walk B. to the door and say our goodnights. Sue asks me what I thought and I nod my head. “It sounds good. He seems like a really decent guy but, I’m a little worried he doesn’t get the value of the bread and he regards the café as a distraction.”

“Do you think that?”

“Not at all, but I can see why he might say that.”

Sue and I sit down. She has a lot of questions and tells me I better know what I want this company to become before I sign anything.

I lay out my “vision” as it were. I see the Bakers Guild Café slash bakery as an integral part of what I want to do. There is a movement afoot in the country and it centers around real food. People are looking for authenticity and there is a very clear preference among a growing segment of the population who would prefer to buy their food directly from their local farmer or artisan than to have it flown in from Chili or California where it is packaged and sold out of large, high-priced supermarkets. This movement has also spawned the advent of micro and craft brewed beers, farm to table restaurants and an entire array of food artisans providing specialty coffees, ice creams, cheeses, and even breads. This is especially true in larger markets but much less so in smaller towns like ours.

It is my hope to take our Bakers Guild concept – that is, an employee-centric bakery slash retail outlet for Columbia County breads and granola’s – and move it out into other, similar-sized towns across Pennsylvania and the northeast. The concept not only encompasses offering employees a path to ownership but would require sourcing most if not all ingredients from local suppliers; farmers, artisan cheese makers, etc.

I really believe that the revitalization of small town America is the future of America. A small town with an active, healthy local economy that is intertwined among local suppliers and locally based retailers can reshape the American economic landscape and end the domination of the massive industrialized supply chain that offers toxic food-like products. These products provide significant profits for a handful of corporations who control the supply chain but they are killing small businesses, they are destroying our oceans, destroying the family farm and are heavily dependent on cheap carbon-burning energy, genetically modified monoculture agriculture, and offer consumers heavily processed “value added” foods that are far more toxic than nutritious.

Cities are doing fairly well countering the industrial supply chain as a bevy of young entrepreneurs jump in and provide consumers with lots of choices. But most small towns don’t offer much beyond the large corporate supercenters located several miles outside of town and the dollar stores and quickie marts that pepper small towns and provide the junk staples of everyday life. But small towns are also where individuals committed to change, can affect the most change. It is where direct democracy still functions. Granted, many small towns can be mired in small-minded thinking but I believe change starts with better food. And if a baker can position itself on Main Street in any given small town and offer a much better, fresher and healthier product, residents of that small town will gravitate and support that baker.

And if that baker is rewarding employees with ownership potential and is committed to sourcing from local suppliers, then its success will open the door for similar businesses to fill the other empty storefronts. The butcher, the artisan cheese maker, the ice cream maker, the coffee roaster, the chocolatier, the farm to table restaurant, etc. And once you have healthy, vibrant downtown, that opens the door for other small businesses to relocate there. Businesses like the hardware store, the optometrist, specialty clothing stores, etc., etc. A town like that won’t have any need for McDonalds, or Subway or Dunkin Donuts – companies that trade in industrial food crap, pay dirt wages and send most of their profits off to a corporate entity far away. And once these companies wither, the Industrial supply chain withers right along with them.

That’s the vision that drives me. That’s the future I want to see and be a part of. Do I want to sell 500,000 bags of granola a year? Hmmm, maybe I do, if it can underwrite the establishment of the above.

End of day seventeen (part two)

one guy on the 20 day plan (day seventeen)...

Wednesday (part one of two)

I wake up early, too early to start the day but I quickly realize I’m not just awake, I’m wide awake. I go ahead and tap into my armpit to get my BBT then roll out of bed and hit the scales – not much has changed. I think about how much water I drank the day before from the office water cooler. And you know, that water is chilled. It’s not room temp water so that is most likely what is skewing my numbers, or, so I tell myself.

I return to bed and contemplate sleep but in a matter of seconds both cats descend, or, well, ascend up onto the bed then descend upon me. They know I’m awake and that I’ve gotten out of bed which would have been a perfect occasion for me to refill their respective bowls with kibble so why didn’t I do that, they seem to be asking in a rather pointed way.

Sue stirs and asks, half awake, if I’ll feed the cats. It’s not like me to feed the cats at four thirty in the morning because, well, what sane person wants to build that expectation into a cat’s nocturnal schedule? So I resist. The cats are just going to have to deal with it. But, like I said, these cats are persistent and demanding. And I know for a fact they see me as the hired hand around here and if I’m not willing to do what they want me to do, well, what good am I, really?

I imagine they try to convey these ideas to Sue whenever I’m not around. Does she listen? Sue is very cat-centric--has been all her life--so, yes, I imagine she does but so long as her priorities are met, why would she fire me?

Here’s the thing about cats and people and, by contrast, dogs and people. And, before I go any further into this, what I’m about to explain is my theory on how we humans came to be human.

Dogs and people go way, way back. Probably as far back as the discovery of fire and the fire pit and the occasion to toss a few scraps or bones off into the night where dogs circled and howled and snatched whatever they could. From there it was just a matter of time before dogs stood sentry and earned their scraps. Prior to dogs, we early humans were a fearful, reckless, brutal species grasping about in a cruel and unforgiving world but, that changed--we changed--the moment we let dogs in.

All those wonderful features we consider to be uniquely human… the ability to love, the concept of play, our sense of honor, fidelity, faithfulness, loyalty—undying loyalty—and the determination to be fiercely protective of those we love - these are all qualities I contend we learned from dogs. It is because we comingled with dogs that we began our evolution from beasts into something approaching human.

Cats came along later. Much later. Not that cats didn’t observe all this from afar. They watched and they waited. They knew that one day they would enter our lives and change us but, that was going to have to wait until they knew we were ready for what it is they had to teach us.

That something was the discovery of wheat and from that, the invention of agriculture. Research indicates that once Egyptians began collecting harvests and storing those harvests, rodents began swarming. Once rodents became plentiful, cats came along and performed a valuable service. And once cats entered our communities it didn’t take long for cats to enter our homes and our psyches.

It was living with cats that we humans first learned the concept of aloofness, we learned how to be watchful while affecting a posture of seeming indifference and we learned the value of dishing out affection as a means to an end. In short, cats taught us the concept of cool. But not just any kind of cool, they taught us that imperial kind of cool cats are so good at affecting. Because, once we had acquired those traits, we were ready to take the next step in our evolution. We were ready to become civilized. We were ready to become cultured. Political. We were ready to become modern.

And all it ties back to wheat.

End of Day Seventeen (Part One of Two)

one guy on the 20 day Plan. (day sixteen)...

Tuesday

BBT is holding. Weight is holding. I should feel frustrated. I do, but I don’t. I have not had a single day yet on The Plan were I awoke in the middle of the night with heart burn, indigestion, gas, bloating. And that’s huge. I can deal with my weight but those gastronomical burp attacks slash acid reflux tremors drive me insane and unnerve Sue who can’t do or say much more than you should probably go see a doctor. The problem is, I’m the kind of person who believes that going to see a doctor is akin to giving up. Once you enter the medical industry in this country, nearly all hope is lost. A doctor will most likely proscribe Nexium, the recent pharmacological reboot for Prilosec and the most commonly prescribed heart burn medication in the world. That, I don’t want.

What makes heartburn so insidious is that, in most cases, you can’t really say what exactly is provoking it. The steak? The potatoes? The pasta? The wine? The tortillas? Was it something I snacked on in the middle of the day? Maybe it wasn’t the potatoes at all, maybe it was the sauce that came with the potatoes? Trying to isolate any one thing amid any given day of eating is very difficult to do. And I had reached the point where I was ready to give up because I’m probably reacting to everything. My system is out of whack. I have to deal with this but how?

Isolating those things that are provoking a reaction is precisely what The Plan is designed to do. After a three day detox, you begin a diet of generally safe, low reactive foods and gradually begin introducing new categories; diary, wheat, meats, etc., and you track your weight and you track your reaction and you track your BBT or Basal Base Temperature.

So far, to date, my only serious reaction has been to celery. Celery? Something I never would have expected. Celery seems so benign. The traditional dieter’s best friend.

Anyway, sixteen days later, I feel The Plan has my system back in balance. And my ability to lose weight is probably going to be determined by my ability to curb my habit of constant snacking. Particularly at the office where the nurse corp in the adjoining office bring in all manner of tasty cookie’s, pastries, candies and an assortment of homemade treats.

Breakfast this morning is any approved breakfast so I take that to mean toast with almond butter and a slew of blueberries. Wow. Sensational.

I walk in our office to find Larry and Kristen huddled over Kristen’s computer. Her computer is actually my computer and it has all my accounts and sensitive financial info. Larry is a great guy who secured us a small loan and is interested in funding us with a much bigger investment but do I really want him privy to every little thing?

After an awkward moment, Larry takes me across the hall to his office, sits me down and expresses shock at how much money we spent on shipping last year. Or “freight” as he and Kristen both call it. This is something Kristen has harangued me about ad nauseum and, do I listen? Yes, I do, so why did I just drop the threshold for free shipping on our website. Because I have to boost sales, that’s why. Only that decision has left Kristen muttering under her breath for days. I’m guessing she’s recruited Larry to press the point home that free shipping is what’s killing our bottom line. I get it. Now leave me alone.

The problem is, people hate to pay for shipping. They come on to your website and if they can get free shipping, even if it means adding one more item to the cart, that’s what they’ll do. So then we pay for shipping. It’s a cost of doing business on the Internet. We don’t maintain a huge store somewhere so we pay shipping.

Fancy Dave arrives at the office. Dave is one of our brilliant bakers – principally on specialty granola bakes like the ginger – but he’s also tech savvy so we sit down once a week and review the website and make improvements including a new FAQ’s page and a where can I buy page.

Back home for lunch with Sue we have leftovers from the night before; Indian spice chicken and sautéed veggies. I want to stir in some coconut milk to mollify the spice rub mix but Sue says modifications like that have to wait a few more days until we’re off The Plan.

At the stage, The Plan has begun to feel very much like a routine but, as we near the end, we’re both wondering which routines will get permanently built into our day. The lemon water? I think so. The copious amounts of water? Possibly. We’ll try. The morning BBT readings? Not so sure about that one.

Back at the office I make a ton of calls and check in with Bill at the bakery and Mike at the café. Everything seems to be running smoothly. Today.

Dinner is fish again on a bed of baby romaine and sautéed veggies. We skip wine but not desert as we indulge in a half ounce each of dark chocolate. Prior to The Plan we would have polished off the entire bar. The Plan is also helping in terms of discipline and I see that habit continuing into the post Plan phase.

Sue goes to bed early while I try to prepare for two important meetings. As usual, I’m stressed. Too much to do, too many things being set aside. I can hardly find the time to write these blogs. And now I’m dead tired.

End of Tuesday

do you have to refrigerate your flax granola? Just bought the pumpkin spice and wondered if because of the flax should be refrigerated.

We don’t recommend that you refrigerate or freeze our flax granola. It’s best to keep it stored, tightly sealed, in its foil lined bag in a cool, dry place as you would most any cereal or granola.

one guy on the 20 day Plan (day fifteen)...

Monday morning and I’m psyched about the .2 decimal weight loss. Okay, miniscule, but down. Given the bread test the day before, and despite the glass of wine at the end of the day, I am pleased. And, just as important, no gastronomical distress – the sure sign for me of something reactive.

Breakfast is spelt cereal with chia and blueberries. I likes it.

I spend a good chunk of the morning writing this blog until Kristen texts me wondering where the hell I am. Before I go to the office, I drive over to see Mike at the cafe and pick up bins he’s accumulated and grab a loaf of bread from Saturday’s bake. I drive down to see Jimi. He and Candice have closed the shipping office but Jimi has remained and continues to ship for us until we can get our own shipping office set up in the school that has become our bakery. With the Internet in place, this now means waiting for an approved shipper to come down and pick up our Xerox printer and move it to Danville.

I arrive at the office. Kristen is in a good mood. She tells me she has brought our bookkeeping records well into February and predicts that, by next week, our financials will be entered in real time. “And that means you’ll be seeing a lot less of me,” she says, with a huge smile, knowing full well how pleased I’ll be to hear this. It’s not that I want to see less of Kristen, I value her insight and brutal honesty, but her hourly rate is probably what gives me heartburn.

Back in the day, I actually used to do all my own data entry into quick books. It was a relatively simple matter of logging sales data and receipt data. And, once a week, a very bright intern from the University in town would go over everything and clean it all up for me.

Then the intern graduated and not long after that Lyn Genet went on Dr. Oz and the two sampled our granola and we were immediately and completely slammed. Sales soared and everything we had in place that worked so well with ten to twelve orders a day collapsed under the sheer volume of orders. I went thru three bookkeepers and even tried Candice and they were all quickly overwhelmed. I remember the desperation I was feeling when, thru sheer happenstance, Kristen walked into our shipping office and we struck up a conversation. She casually mentioned she was a bookkeeeper with clients on the internet but none locally. I liked her right off. She had a toughness to her, a kind of biker chick persona that made me think she’d fit right into our company.

Unfortunately, when I asked her rate, there was no way I could afford her. We talked some more. We haggled. She came in and sampled our products. If I could get her to work for an unending supply of our Orange Poppyseed flat bread I would be set. She lowered her rate slightly but promised to work fast. Months went by and all she ever said to me was, “what a hot freakin’ mess.”

Back home for lunch, I get a text from Bill. His truck is fixed and he and Ian can swing by and pick up my total gym and take it to the bakery. We have room for some exercise equipment and I figure it will be a good thing to have to unwind at the end of the day, myself included. I have not been exercising lately and that’s a problem, but then, I rationalize, one of the features of The Plan is that it does not require an exercise regimen. If anything, Lyn wants her clients to limit their exercise routines and feels aerobic exercise can actually lead to weight gain. Bill and Ian arrive and remove the total gym then take off. Sue and I make another trip to the grocery store and we run into a friend who also happens to be Sue’s yoga instructor. She’s been reading the blog and suggests I come in for a session. I know it’s a good idea but I hedge and promise to get back to her.

Back home with our groceries, we get to work on dinner. Chicken with an Indian spice rub, and, of course, sautéed veggies and a salad. As Sue begins chopping, I chug another glass of water. Drinking water on The Plan is an all day thing but ends forty-five minutes before dinner and doesn’t pick up again until the morning and I still have quite a bit in my jug and I’m feeling the pressure.

I go on the Team Face Book page and write about my success testing the bread. I hear back from quite a few women – it’s all women on The Plan – at least on face book – I offer to send free samples and I get quite a few responses from women who are willing to test our bread.

It’s weird to me that bread, once the staple of life, is now a test, something we can’t readily trust to be healthy or nutritious. But then, if we’re talking about the breads that sit on store shelves then, yes, I would agree with that assumption. But what sits on store shelves in the modern American grocery store really isn’t bread. Those shiny plastic bags contain industrial food stuffs that look like bread as our grandparents might remember it, but they’re really nothing more than modified, stabilized starch modules sliced for our convenience.

And yet, for several thousand years now, a wheat based bread has been incredibly nutritious, a nearly perfect food. So you can knock bread -- the crap you buy in stores today -- all you want but wheat has been the salvation of our species at two critical points in our evolution. As I mentioned before, the first time was 2.8 million years ago with the emergence of broad, sweeping grasslands that necessitated our coming down from the trees and learning to walk erect.

All during those 2.8 million years, a succession of our proto humanoid ancestors hunted and gathered paleo style, and yet, each and every one of these groups, including the most recent, the Neanderthals, ultimately succumbed and disappeared from the face of the earth.

Only our species, Homo Sapiens, have survived and prospered beyond anyone’s imagination. Why? Because some twelve to fifteen thousand years ago we discovered that emmer, a variant of grass seed and an early form of wheat, could be harvested. It could be stored and planted and relied upon from one season to the next to provide nutrition by simply collecting the grain, adding water to it, creating a mush then letting the patty bake in the sun. This was our earliest form of bread and it is exactly the form of sprouted grain bread famously referenced in the Bible under Ezekiel.

It was this profound and relatively simple discovery of a stable food source that led to a fixed community. No more endlessly wandering about searching for food. And from that moment on, you can pretty much make any connection you want from the beginning of a family structure to the rise of agriculture and, from that, the rise of civilization. There is also evidence that our concept of math and the development of numbers came about because we had to manage harvests. And the list goes on including the incredibly important discovery that mushed grains and water, when left to their own devices, will ferment and produce alcohol. And I’ll even make one last surprising claim for wheat in the development in our species’ evolution but I’ll save that for another post. In any event, none of what I have described, none of it, happens without wheat.

I respect the concept of a paleo diet – eating whole foods – but the idea of abstaining from grains – when properly prepared – is idiotic. Paleo’s ate grains whenever they could find them; DNA studies from the plaque in their jawbones prove it. But if you really want to be true to a paleo diet, you better develop a taste for worms, bugs and tree bark because, day to day, that’s what they survived on. Finding berries would have been a rare treat. Hunting and killing animals for food involved incredible risks. Animals were not the domesticated, slow moving cows or chickens incapable of flight. You had to fight and you had to kill and your ability to do so marked your place around the fire and your access to the best food. Agriculture, and by that I mean “wheat”, had an incredibly modifying effect on our species.

Anyway, the spiced rub chicken was quite delicious but Sue and I are already discussing ways to slightly modify the recipes more to our liking. We are nearing the end of our twenty-day journey and looming is day eighteen when we can eat out. The discussion is an exciting one for us. Which restaurant do we want to go to? Who might have the most Plan Friendly entrees? What about portion sizes? And on and on…

End of day Fifteen

One guy on the 20 day Plan (day fourteen)...

Sunday. Slept in. BBT in the range of where it’s supposed to be. Weight is down a bit.

Went downstairs. Put the water on. Did this. Did that. Came back upstairs. Lemon water, dandelion tea. The usual. It’s all starting to feel like another normal routine.

Sue and I sit up in bed and read the local newspaper, the Press Enterprise, online, on our digital devices. We used to subscribe and had the paper delivered until one day we realized that the paper – either the ink they used or the newspaper itself -- had an acrid odor to it. Faint, barely detectable yet, once you caught it, it was distinctly unpleasant like something you tracked in on your shoes. We tried storing the papers outside until they could be recycled but realized the odor had already clung to nearly everything in the house, including clothing. I’ve spoken to other people in town about this and they say, yes, this is a problem and, for some, the odor is so acute they can smell a Press Enterprise reader a block away. But of course there are others who seem to like the odor. I guess it suits them.

Of any given edition of the Press Enterprise, my favorite, what makes getting the online subscription to the Press Enterprise worthwhile for me, are the Sunday nuptials; photo’s of couples who, by their very embrace and expression, reveal so much about the likely structure of their relationship and their odds for long-term success. About six months ago, there was an incident in town that drew national attention when a lesbian couple was denied service at wedding dress shop. There was a furor in town on both sides of this issue. Anti-discrimination legislation was proposed, forums were held, petitions signed. Both sides mustered their troops and appealed to either religious freedom or equal protection. But in the end, nothing much ever came of it so the issue simmers.

Anyway, for me, every Sunday, I scroll down my computer screen all the way to the nuptials page in hopes that this will be the day (the cold day in hell) when the Press Enterprise runs its first engagement photo of a same sex couple. Two men, two women, embraced and revealing the same complex emotions of fear, adoration and hope -- no different then the thousands of other intendeds who have posed before them. But, not this Sunday. Maybe next.

I go back downstairs and look out the back door. The day is cloudy, grim and feels just plain cold.

Breakfast this morning is the big thing because it’s the first time on The Plan that we can test bread. In this case Sue and I are testing our bread, Columbia County Bread & Granola bread. A sprouted wheat bread and, the only of that variety, that relies on being naturally leavened. No yeast. No flour. No preservatives. No modifiers. No added gluten, etc., etc. In short, this is a bread that is made with the simplest and fewest of ingredients. Wheat, water, salt, time and human hands. You cannot make this bread with machinery in a factory. You have to employ the riches nature provides and you have to give the process all the time it needs and it absolutely must be guided, cajoled, shaped and observed by skilled bakers. This is the only way you can make this bread. And it’s why we charge the price we charge and why so many people willingly and happily pay it.

I take two slices and put them in the toaster. Sue gets down the plates and a jar of almond butter – highly recommend on The Plan. The toaster is set to six, its highest setting. When the bread pops up, it barely looks singed and certainly not toasted. So I turn them over and put them back down and set the toaster to four, wishing our toaster had a ten or even an eleven setting. It doesn’t because, well, if it did, it would turn every type of bread but ours into a blackened, smoldering piece of char and who would want that?

Which brings me to the topic of why does bread toast? The answer is simple. Bread is made from flour. Flour is what’s known as a polysaccharide, or, more simply, a starch. When you heat starch, it converts to sugar and those sugars are caramelizing in the toaster. And so, if you take a step back, the problem with unleavened and or unsprouted flour-based breads is that, when you eat them, your body now has the job of breaking down those starches. Unfortunately, this most often means your body’s blood sugar level spikes as it has no choice but to convert those starches and, most often, store them as fat.

By sprouting then leavening (the process of fermenting bread dough), we have activated enzymes who get very busy pre-digesting the starches for you so that our bread is greeted by your body not unlike a carrot or most any other vegetable. This is why we say our bread is eminently more digestible than most other breads. Eating our bread should not make you tired. It should leave you feeling full and satisfied.

I slather almond butter across the toast and sprinkle fresh blueberries on top. Wonderful but then, I’m obviously biased and I’m hoping it tests out. Needless to say it could be a bit awkward if it doesn’t.

Given the bleak weather, we both stay in. Sue in her studio upstairs, me at the kitchen table in front of my laptop as close as I can position myself to the wood stove.

When we reconvene, the topic is dinner. Sue and I have been invited to an informal gathering of friends who meet once a month (or so) to ostensibly discuss the Victorian era homes we all live in but is more often about social drinking and munching on the fabulous finger foods each couple provides. It’s a small town, a college town, so it’s a mix of academics, business people such as myself and townsfolk. The talk is varied but mostly involves gripes about students, the proliferation of bars that cater to students and the landlords who gobble up property to make more housing available to more students.

Anyway, I’ve told Sue I’m not going – much too much to get done tonight and, besides, my willpower would fly out the window the minute I walked in and started gobbling and swilling the evening away. And this would render my bread test day meaningless. Sue, however, is going and is determined to survive but that means she’ll have to bring something Plan Friendly to share and limit herself to the one glass of wine permitted on The Plan.

She settles on steamed chicken cut into bite sized pieces topped with an apricot adobo glaze. A good choice and I hope she’ll leave me a cutlet but she’s short on apricot adobo sauce so I’ll be on my own.

I bake a potato then steam my cutlet and sauté it together in a pan with leftover sautéed veggies from lunch. No wine for me.

Sue returns two hours later with the plate she left with and one lonely uneaten bite sized chicken piece. I grab it. Yum. Sue reports that all the food tonight looked great and she was tempted but limited herself to the chicken she brought and the mini egg rolls.

Egg rolls? I say, surprised and curious how she rationalized egg rolls as Plan Friendly

Everything else looked like it was made with flour, she explains.

Yeah, so are egg rolls. Only, they’re deep fried. How is that okay?

She explains that the egg rolls were stuffed with cabbage.

But Sue, we haven’t tested for cabbage. The basic simple concept of The Plan is to introduce foods one at a time so you can check them off as reactive or not.

Sue stammers, well, I also had some chick pea salad, she says.

Chick peas? We haven’t tested for chick peas! What’s happened to you, Sue?

I didn’t want to seem accusatory. I don’t want Sue to feel badly about her Plan Unfriendly choices so, well, I do what any loving, conciliatory and, okay, enabling mate would do, I propose we share a glass of wine.

Bad idea. I know. And maybe we’re just too willing to excuse our failings or weaknesses with a drink and maybe this is something Sue and I need to take a hard look at in this relationship but, oddly, I find I want a glass of wine because wine has never “tasted” so good to me than these last two weeks on The Plan. Is it the reward factor? Or are my taste buds just sharper? Has my palette been elevated by The Plan? Is it all that water I drink? Something has changed in me, I can feel it, and I want to try to make sense of it.

I pour us both a glass while Sue brings out the double deck of cards. Sure, I nod. You deal.

End of Day Fourteen

Please confirm all your Flax granola products are gluten free. Thanks!

The plan friendly granola’s do not contain grains and are celiac safe.

One guy on the 20 day Plan (day thirteen)...

Day Thirteen

BBTup slightly. Weight unchanged. I feel like I’m locked in the same-weight-for-four-days-holding cell. Sitting on my wood bench looking around at all the other middle aged can’t-lose-ten-pounds-for-the-life-of-me-types.It’s a ghastly place. Smells of low fat beer and fat free pretzels. And socks.Put any two guys together in close quarters and it will eventually smell like socks. The guard comes along and rattles the cell door. “Michael? Michael Douglas…?” he reads off a clipboard.

Every one in the cell room gasps and looks around, “Michael Douglas…?” “Whoa!”

I let out a long perturbed sigh, stand and make my way over to the guard. “It’s Douglas Michael.”

“Oh?” says the guard, double-checking his clipboard. “Huh. You’re right. Guess that means you don’t got that Zeta-Jones honey waiting for ya’.

This actually happened to me when I was living in Manhattan and got a summons for Jury Duty. The processing room for perspective jurors is huge, comparable to St. Patrick’s Cathedral but without the stained glass, fifty thousand votive candles and any hope of an afterlife.

So there I was, sitting among some four or five hundred luckless New Yorkers waiting for our names to be called when the civil servant at the lectern leaned into his microphone and said, “Michael Douglas”. Well, we all gasped. Me too. A celebrity in our midst! These things do happen, don’t they? At the very least we’d all go home with a little story to tell and maybe, depending, an autograph. But when the actor didn’t show, I had that sinking feeling and knew exactly what had happened. I pulled on my Mr. Disappointment cloak and walked up the center aisle to a rolling wave of, “oh, it’s just some guy.”

My father, George Michael, had a similar but, for him, more exalting experience when he was in his seventies and was flying home from London’s Heathrow airport and an airline attendant hollered his name. It turns out he was flying with a rather large group of high school kids that day and the room went absolutely nuts. My dad was thrilled by it. What did he know? And when the attendant realized what had happened, they upgraded him to first class.

Flax cereal and fresh fruit for breakfast but first I have to make the drive up to the bakery and bring back loaves for Mike and the café. Another great bake. Mike will be happy and I am thrilled. We’ve been beset by a sluggish starter the last few weeks but Bill and Ian have carefully coaxed that micro biome back to health and vigor.

As soon as I pull up to the cafe, Mike meets me out front with an emergency grocery list and a pretty-please look on his face. A trip to the store but that’s okay because Sue had asked me to pick up a five pound bag of carrots for carrot ginger soup.

I get home with the carrots and a few select loaves from the crop – Sue and I are testing bread tomorrow. I can’t wait. Actually, I’m a little nervous. What if I react? What if, for all my bluff and bluster about how great our bread is, I react to wheat, sprouted or not. That could be a problem.

I get to work on the carrot ginger soup which is a huge endeavor as I food process carrots, zucchini, and fresh ginger, then add toasted spices and seven quarts of water. I end up needing two large soup pots to cook it all down in. An hour of steeping veggies goes by then I puree it all into about ten containers to last for weeks.

We have the soup for lunch that day and it is fantastic.

As soon as we finish up, Sue says a trip to the grocery store is in order. But I was just there, I tell her, but this list is for tonight, she explains. I’m feeling agreeable. It’s a Saturday so I offer to tag along.

Sue’s list is nearly all produce but we impulse purchase a mandolin slicer as I decide I want to make zucchini pasta. Also on the list of veggies is a newbie; frisee. I see that and scratch my head. Sue had wisely googled frisee before we left the house and tells me it kinda looks like curly endive. We find endive but not the curly kind and no frisee. Luckily there’s a kid in an apron unloading a bin of lettuce. We get his attention and Sue pronounces it “frisky”. The kid looks bewildered so I jump in and try to be helpful and say, Fricassee…? Do you carry fricassee? He looks at us the way any sane person would when asked where in the produce section does one find grilled cutlets.

We take a pass on the frisee and discover they don’t have raw sunflower seeds. That will mean a trip to the health food store.

As we get in line to check out, Sue asks if I picked up a bag of salt-free potato chips. “Un, no,” I say. “Potato chips…? Seriously…?”

“Yes, it’s a permitted snack. Would you hurry please, and find them.”

I haven’t been down the snack aisle with intent in ages. It’s all salty chips, pretzels and cheetos on one side and 2 liter colas on the other. I shiver even now, just thinking about it.

Salt free potato chips must exist; I tell myself, but not that I can find in among any of the major brands. ‘Low Salt’, yes. Low salt chips are a big seller these days but, no salt…? I continue down the aisle and wade into the off brands where every conceivable flavor is offered. Ah, finally, UTZ makes them. UTZ is a Pennsylvania company, a proud maker of cheapie snack type foods that ripped off Ernie Bushmiller’s classic strip cartoon “Nancy” to serve as their brand’s icon. Having once earned my living as a cartoonist, I find I’m sensitive to these things. Anyway, I grab the family size bag and hustle over to the check out line just in the nick of time.

It isn’t until I’m sitting in the car while Sue runs into the health food store that I take a closer look at the ingredient label on the bag of chips. First thing I read is, “THIS IS NOT A SODIUM FREE FOOD.”

I point this out to Sue when she returns. “I find that a little confusing.”

Sue points to the front of the bag and says, “No Salt Added. It doesn’t say anything about salt free.”

“Right. But look at the ingredient list. Two things. Potatoes and oil. Period. That’s it. So either these guys are sourcing salt encrusted potatoes or the oil is squeezed from rock salt.

“What kind of oil?” Sue asks.

“Uh, well.” I say, thinking she probably doesn’t want to know. I don’t want to know but I know.

“What?”

“Cottonseed.”

She looks at me for some explanation but I’m still fixated on how they get salt from potatoes and oil. If they’re not “adding salt” but can’t say the chips are “Salt Free”, it can only mean one thing. UTZ is covering all their bases. Obviously UTZ isn’t going to invest in a dedicated salt free facility for one line of chips. So, therefore, you gotta figure, what if a bag of salt topples off a skid one day and plops into the vat of oil. What do you do? Do you shut down production and throw away the whole batch? No, don’t be ridiculous when all you have to do is put a disclaimer on the back of the bag and you’re good to go.

We get home and Sue grabs her Plan book while I google cottonseed oil. I know it’s one of those commodity oils you should avoid but manufacturers of snack foods almost always list it as in, may contain one or more of the following, depending, I guess, on the market prices when they go to buy their oils on that particular day.

Sue reads Lyn’s description of cottonseed oil and I show her what Dr. Weil has to say.

“We can’t eat these,” Sue informs me.

Later, I decide to go back to google because, among the top five returns for cottonseed oil was an industry refute page or two or maybe even three. I check them out and learn that Eli Whitney discovered cottonseed oil shortly after inventing the cotton gin and that this became the basis for the Wesson Oil Company. Fascinating. Apparently, cotton, as in something we wear, was the by-product of cottonseed oil. That’s right, Eli Whitney was after the oil all along because the industry touts “cotton”, then as now, as a “food” crop.

And that’s the distinction they want us to believe – as odd as that might sound – because the main rap against cottonseed oil is that cotton is NOT a food crop and therefore, growers can spray the bejesus out of it (and they do) so why on earth (asks Lyn and Dr. Weil) would anyone want anything cooked in an oil that’s more like a pesticide dip?

The bag of UTZ goes into the pantry, not the trash, and I’m not sure why that is. Sue probably thinks I’m secretly going to want them next time I sit down to watch a game, and me, I just hate the thought of throwing food away but, what do we do with it? Take it to a party? Do I take it up to the bakery and leave it in the break room? Would the guys be grateful or insulted. I have no idea.

Dinner discussion comes up and Sues says we can have rib eye steaks or fish. Steaks, I say, but if we’re doing steaks, I gotta get the wood stove fired up. It’s just cold enough outside to get a decent draft but it still takes a good hour to get the wood logs burning nicely. And I want hot coals and embers for cooking so I tell Sue to be patient, this will take a while.

Once we lay everything out, steaks, sauteed veggies and a salad, the food on our plate looks excellent. We toast Lyn as we pour from a half bottle of Malbec. When we finish, we both point at our perfectly cleaned plates and nod our heads. Very nice.

Sue loves playing cards and when I suggest we get a round in before bedtime, she practically squeals. Cards is a relatively new thing in our relationship. Well, my daughter would argue that when she lived with us, all we did was play UNO and yes, that was essentially true but, as an evening activity between the two of us…? I don’t know. Why cards? And why now, at this stage in our lives? Okay, maybe I get it. It’s a reasonably nice way of interacting. I mean, it sure beats sitting in bed with our respective ipads. So I put Pandora on the sound system and we talk about this and that, have a few laughs, get three rounds in and call it a night.

End of Day Thirteen.

One guy on the 20 Day Plan (day twelve)....

BBTup slightly. Weight unchanged. Sue reports much the same.

This morning forbreakfast it’s something new. A chia blueberry smoothie w coconut milk and a bit of agave. Sue had to rush out early to meet afriend for coffee (she took a travel cup with her dandelion tea) so I got the blender and everything that was called for out of the fridge and banged out some pretty tasty looking smoothies.

I texted Sue to see if she was headed back but then immediately got a call from the cable guy. We were getting internet up at the bakery and he was on his way. This was great news but also a surprise. The day before, Customer Service told me I might not get an install date before April. I guzzled my smoothie, got in my car, drove up and let him in.

The cable guy did a professional job and walked me thru the router and how to set the password. As he got up to go, he looked around and said,” smells good in here. What do you do?”

I told him about the flax granola and he made a face. “Can’t eat flaxseed.”

So I told him about the bread; that it was sprouted and that we don’t use flour. “Flour’s bad for you,” he said and mentioned an earlier conversation he had with his doctor. I sent him home w a pack of frozen pita.

Back home I flipped open my laptop and finished up some long overdue reporting. Sue came downstairs and we both agreed the smoothie was fantastic. Lunch was reheated veggies from the night before.

We took a break and watched a little Young & the Restless. I wondered if there might be real lessons to be learned about running a business. The entire story line revolves around three mega wealthy families and their respective business dynasties. Jack Abbot and his two siblings, Billy and Ashley, run Jabot (Ja-bow) – a cosmetics company they inherited from their father. Victor Newman of Newman Industries is more of a self made man who has his fingers in every pie imaginable but, more often than not, it involves meddling in the lives of his wife and kids. There’s also Chancellor Industries, another dynasty begun by Katherine Chancellor who, in her will, turned the business over to Victor Newman, greatly distressing her family who scheme to get it back. And that’s the show. There are occasional business dealings and I suppose Jack Abbot seems slightly more ethical than Victor Newman but mostly you get the feeling these people dabble in business and spend the rest of their energy focused on their personal angst and long simmering slights, You’d think, with all the interest in business these days, the Y&R producers might layer in some real MBA management stuff. Or maybe not.

I return to the office and get an email from another potential investor who needs to reschedule. What. Ever. Ugh. I need an investor to grow but I also feel I need guidance and experience as much as money. I know they’re out there but finding the right business partner that shares my values could be tough. Do I end up with a Victor Newman or a Jack Abbot?

Back home for dinner Sue tells me we get to test a new veggie. Last time we did this we tried potatoes and it seemed to go just fine. Sue wants to try celery tonight and I say sure, why not.

She chops it up and adds to the mix of sautéed veggies along with chicken cutlets on a bed of baby romaine. We do the glass of wine again before dinner but take our time and savor it through the meal as well.

I clean up the kitchen while Sue works on her taxes. I sit down again in front of my laptop and write a few emails including one to a customer who has been a longtime and often rabid fan of our bread but is now suddenly very concerned about wheat and what she’s been reading about wheat. She asks if I think it’s causing her health issues. She says she loves our bread but isn’t sure she should eat it anymore.

What do I say? Where do I begin? I mean, hey, I get it, wheat is on the proverbial chopping block these days and is being vilified from nearly all corners. But, ask me and I will tell you that wheat has been the salvation of mankind. Not once, but twice and I am very serious about this.

The fact is, without wheatgrass, we simply would not be here. And why is that?

Case study number one...

There is widespread consensus that early man separated from his simian brothers and descended from the trees about two and a half million years ago when the planet’s climate became increasingly arid. Forests receded and glass-lands began appearing in every continent, but especially Africa. It was here where early man realized that, if he came down out of the trees he had little hope of seeing over the horizon unless he learned to stand erect. Also, it was the rise of grasslands that enabled the spread of huge, rampaging herds of grass-eating ruminants.

Isolating one of these beasts from the herd for a hunt meant early man had to achieve a level of social cooperation that exceeded his earlier primate interaction.

In other words, the rise of grasslands led directly to the evolution of man from an arboreal beast to a walking erect, early humanoid. The next great forward leap in human evolution would take another two million years but it would also require grasses and the complex seeds they produced. And I’ll get to that in the next post.

Because what happened next as I was writing emails is that I had a huge reaction. To celery. I mean of all things. Celery? My stomach churned and I slipped into the bathroom certain I was going to retch it all up. I mean come on, celery! I always thought celery was THE go to veggie for dieters. Inert food, a negative calorie exchange as long as you could overlook that eating celery was like eating green dental floss without the mint flavor.

The discomfort passed and thankfully, I slept soundly without interruption but it was the first real distinct reaction to a food that I’ve had since being on The Plan. And it turns out to be celery… Wow.

End of Day Twelve

one guy on the 20 day Plan (day Eleven)...

Okay, having gone thru ten days on The Plan. I am now beginning my descent if you will.

In those ten days I have lost five pounds which happened in the first five days so, pretty much my weight has stabilized which sorta coincided with getting the okay to have a glass of wine in the evening. A connection? I hope not. Anyway, If I can lose another five pounds in the ensuing ten days I will consider that a success. I would like to see more weight loss but ten pounds is not too bad. More importantly, my indigestion issues have stabilized. I have not had a single night since being on The Plan where I woke up with a major indigestion issue where I had to get out of bed and think about chugging apple cider vinegar or, god forbid, gobbling up some antacid. And that, is awesome.

Sue, who reluctantly (at first) joined me in this program, claims she has more energy, “feels” better and has more mental focus since being on The Plan.

I would like to say all those things as well but I think what is probably impacting my ability to do better on The Plan is stress. Running a business is extremely stressful. There are so many things that I need to get done that I don’t get done because there are so many things that crop up each and every day – there really is a feeling of putting out fires whack-a-doodle style. I think stress is what was behind my knee blowing out. My body crippling me because I am in a constant state of hyper freak out and it simply had to shut me down so I could go a little slower.

Anyway, my knee is sufficiently healed that Sue can snooze all she wants so that when she wakes up, lo and behold, lemon water and tea is there by her bedside. And maybe that’s why we had a nice moment this morning checking our BBT’s and comparing notes. I don’t know, it just felt romantic in a very odd but wonderful kind of way. We’re both down a bit on our BBT’s and are weights are unchanged. Why not better results, we wonder. Was it the chocolate last night or the wine? Or both? We blame the chocolate. Well, I blame the chocolate. Sue thinks it could be the wine. Curse you, Sue.

Breakfast is flax granola with fresh blueberries and coconut milk sprinkled with chia. I spend an inordinate amount of time in the morning writing the blog. It’s occurred to me that I might collect these posts into a kindle book. Maybe I can get Planners to review it. Perhaps Lyn would endorse it…. We’ll see.

I go to work and lament the sluggish sales. Not sure what to make of it. But then our Amazon distributor calls and, in this one call, makes the entire week worthwhile. Phew, I breathe a sigh of relief but it’s like this almost every week. Will I make payroll? Will I get suppliers paid? Our rent is steep but I have to pay it. Etc., etc. I remind myself to take it easy. Grab another glass of water. Relax. It’ll be okay.

The day ended with our company meeting and, just as I predicted, when I told the guys I wanted to hire a woman to run our market stands who also happened to work as a clown, I was met with loud derision.

The guys thought I had completely lost my mind and the jokes just kept coming. Billy promised to bake her a baguette that she could pull out of a bag and it just keeps coming. And coming. And the meeting went on like that for quite awhile. I kept saying, but guys, she’s really, really personable. Eventually I think I won them over but, later, when I called to ask my prospective new hire to come in to talk particulars, she sounded unsure and promised to get back to me after speaking with her husband and kids. I said, sure, that’s fine but, as soon as I put down the phone I flashed on clown mom sitting with her family and they’re all like, you’re going to do what? Sell bread! You can’t be serious! Mom, what if the kids at school find out you sell bread and granola!!

Yeah, I know, my head is a trip and there are times when I relish it and times when I wish I could pull it off and tap another one in place.

Dinner was a really terrific wild caught Pacific cod with a potato and kale stir fly. When you’re on the plan you get one glass of wine. Sue and I debate about when best to enjoy it. With dinner or after dinner. As it turns out, we pop the cork as we’re making dinner and, as I think of it, this really is my favorite time to drink wine. When you’re in the kitchen chopping and sautéing and a glass of wine just makes it the moment. So that’s what we ended up doing and it was a good call.

We ended the evening early and called it a night.

End of Day Eleven

one guy on the 20 day Plan (day Ten)...

Midpoint in The Plan

Wokeup and was thrilled with my BBT.

96.9.

This is the highest I have seen since starting The Plan. Got on the scales. Hey, I’m down one whole pound. Well, all right!

Sue’s BBT had dropped from the day before which of course prompts her to want to double-check her BBT temp on one of my digitals. You can borrow them, I tell her, but they’re staying on MY side of the bed.

Sure enough, she gets a better reading on the digital.

I take that to mean that she’ll either be going to bed with her thermometer planted under her arm or I’ll be passing over my digitals just like in the good days.

I tell Sue I’m feeling knee-worthy enough to go downstairs and get the lemon water and tea started but the trip back up with two glasses and two cups and one hand on the railing would not work unless I were willing to make four trips.

Sue agrees. I will go down and set up the lemon water and put the kettle to boil and tea to steep and she will go down a little later and bring it all up.

But, once I get downstairs and set up the lemon water, I find I have time to kill waiting for the water to boil so, I drink my lemon water. Then, once I put the tea to steep, it occurs to me that I can easily manage the stairs with either one glass of lemon water or one cup of tea.

This presents a dilemma. I could take Sue her lemon water but then she’d have to drink it before going down to retrieve the teas. I’d be sitting there for who knows how long waiting for my tea. As my mornings are typically rushed, this idea didn’t sit all that well with me.

I troop back up the stairs with my tea, just mine, get back in bed and open my computer to check on emails.

Sue pushes herself forward and proceeded to give me the eye. That head-lowered, gaze-over-the-top-of-the-glasses, well-practiced-almost-always effective look she has that demands your attention. I’m sure it’s something she learned from her mother who learned it from her mother going all the way back to when spectacles or stairs were invented or maybe the beginning of time.

I stayed focused on deleting about a hundred spam emails without killing something important. I’ve noticed that since the very first day I began posting this blog, my usual array of Russian bride and easy term loan offers are being overwhelmed by miracle weight loss offers. It seems Sue isn’t the only one watching my every move.

You’re drinking your tea, she says, finally saying something.

I nod. Yes, I am, I say and take a sip and add a satisfying ahhh.

Well, where’s my tea? And where’s my lemon water and why aren’t you drinking your lemon water?

I drank my lemon water, I say. While the water for tea was boiling.

She says nothing. I shut the lid on my laptop and turn to face her. Do you want me to go downstairs, make two trips, back and forth, up those stairs WITH my knee so you can have your lemon water and your tea? I mean, I will do that but didn’t we already agree that you would be more than happy to go down and get everything on your own?

Never mind, she says, and climbs out of bed.

I check face book and the Team Plan page.

Apparently, someone on the Team Blog page must have read my blog posts and my perennial low BBT scores and wondered if I was drinking warm water or cold water. She stated that drinking cold water could impact the BBT’s and drop your scores.

I thought about that. My highest BBT was this morning after spending the day at home where my water sits in a jug all day at room temp. Normally, I go to work and pull water from the water cooler and it is considerably colder. Was this variant in water temperature keeping my BBT low? It seemed entirely possible so I posted my thanks and noted that this could very well be true. A few minutes later Lyn Genet “likes my comment” which I took to mean she approved and agreed with the original post but it also felt oddly cult-like – as if I had just gotten an approving nod from the master. But then that got me thinking, how in the world could drinking cold water at say, three thirty in the afternoon affect one’s BBT temperature taken more than twelve hours later? When I checked the face book thread a few minutes later, someone else had chimed in as if anticipating that question. Warm water is better absorbed by the body. Okay. Really…?

What do I know, I mutter to myself.

Sue returns, settles back into bed and sips her lemon water then says, have you read The Plan? Meaning the original book.

Uh, parts of it, I say.

I wish you were more of an expert. I think you need to become more of an expert.

Why?

You talk to your customers and a lot of them are on The Plan. You should be able to talk to them like you know what you’re talking about.

My mind flashes back to that strategic marketing study that advised me to separate from The Plan association and here Sue wants me to become one of Lyn’s devotees, dispensing Plan advice. I could see myself talking to someone on the phone who wants to know if they should order the flax granola in the 12 ounce four pack or the bulk size and I respond by asking what their BBT’s are like.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that’s not such a bad idea.

Breakfast was an apple compote but no one remembered to turn the oven on in all our trips downstairs and I had to be up at the bakery in a half hour to make sure the bread and pita from last nights bake got properly distributed.

I said my goodbyes to Sue and drove up to the bakery in dense, heavy fog. Warming temperatures while snow still blanketed the ground made visibility terrible. It felt like driving thru a white night.

The bread loaves from last night’s bake were phenomenal. Full, soft to the touch. They just looked awesome. I couldn’t wait to get them to Jimi so he could package them up and ship them off. I figured we’d have a lot of very happy customers. And the pita too baked up perfectly. I counted out the loaves Jimi needed to ship and got them all bagged and sealed. Steve arrived to get ready to go to market with a full array of our products. Nick arrived next to make local deliveries including the Bakers Guild Café.

That done, I drove home for breakfast. Sue had the 8 oz apple streusels in the oven getting warm. We both poured coconut milk over top and let it seep in. Very tasty, once again, I finger the bowl clean.

Sue has to leave. She’s driving out to see her one of her three sisters who lives about forty-five minutes away so she can accompany her on a trip to the doctor. It sounds like the results from a mammogram. I wasn’t sure.

I have a feeling Sue’s going to talk up The Plan to her sisters individually but I don’t know how well that’s going to go. No one thinks they’re eating badly. We certainly didn’t. Every meal we prepared was with fresh ingredients. But The Plan stresses a balance of carbs to fats to sugars to proteins that I never really considered before. And, of course, all that water.

I went to the office and spent the day across from Kristen who peppered me with endless questions about this or that sale. Do you have any idea what you’re spending on freight, she asked me at one point?

You mean, shipping? I ask.

Yes, shipping and packing. Freight. You paid $49,000 on shipping alone.

But we charge for shipping, I countered.

Not enough, she said and gave me a frosty look that could shatter Sue’s best, on any day. Kristen is tough as nails when it comes to books. She trusts no one and looks askance at everything that comes her way. She can make me feel like a complete an utter idiot simply by muttering something under her breath as she taps her way thru our QuickBooks account.

What?

You’re killing me, Smalls. You’re killing me, she responds.

And this is how she talks. Lines from movies or TV shows from twenty years ago. Get schnigitz on the phone, she says, and find out why his market sheet is ninety-five dollars short.

Schnigitz…?

Schnigitz, she responds then stands up to join the ladies for a nicotine break where I imagine she talks about me as if I’m the schnigitz in there who gives away his products and pays for shipping to boot.

I get home before Sue and the cats immediately swarm me. They obviously want food but their bowls aren’t empty. I realize each one has their favorite treat. The one takes a small bowl of milk, preferably raw, while the other craves egg white.

This would be fine if we weren’t on The Plan and I had either raw milk or eggs in the fridge. But I don’t.

Would you like coconut milk, I ask the one and pour a capful into a dish.

His response is classic. You gotta be kidding me. Don’t EVER insult me like that again I can hear him say and then it dawns on me it might be kinda cool to write a Plan workbook for pets.

Hold still, kitty, while I check your BBT. C’mon, Buster, you’re not lapping up enough water…

Sue arrives and we get started on dinner. Steaks and we’re testing potatoes.

I fire up the gas grill on the porch – too warm outside to light the wood stove.

While I tend the steaks, Sue bangs out a big pot of diced potatoes with Kale. Salad is radicchio and apples and goat cheese. I find I don’t care that much for radicchio. I love to say the name but I ain’t all that fond of whatever it is. Is it a cabbage or a lettuce? I have no idea.

Kristen calls. Working late it seems because she can’t figure out if two orders ever got paid. I pop open my computer and look into it. I verify the one for over two hundred dollars but I can’t verify payment for a much, much smaller order. This can’t wait? I think to myself and it rubs me the wrong way. I get short with her and hang up. A big mistake.

Sue comes up to me looking concerned and I go off on a tirade about Kristen and all the money I pay her when all I get back is suspicion and the implication of my incompetence. I’m realizing this is a very sensitive issue with me. I’m not a money guy. I’m not a numbers guy. So are those really the two key factors in running a successful business? Okay, granted, I can be intensely insecure in my role as a business owner but I will say this and say it again. The key, in my mind, is how you treat your co-workers and how you treat your customers. The numbers stuff is important, yes, I get it, particularly now, as we court investors, but when I see someone in some small town in say, Oregon, ordering our granola then reordering it then reordering it again.

And then I see someone else in that same small town ordering granola then someone else. So now I want to reach out to that first customer and say thanks and, hey, you’re not going to pay for shipping from us anymore. Why? Because even if that means that, on some marginal scale, the cost of shipping eats away at any profit we might make on that sale, that customer is talking up our products to her friends and neighbors and so that right there means that individual is someone I want to reach out to and make them aware of how valuable they are. And if we lose money on her orders, so be it.

Anyway, I go to bed worrying that I’ve alienated Kristen and she’s going to quit and that would be an absolute disaster but I reassure myself that as long as I show up in the morning with Orange Poppy seed flat bread and some of our newly developed chocolate flax granola, she’s not going anywhere. Right? Right, Doug…?

End of day ten.

One guy on the 20 day Plan (day nine)...

Gota lot of rest last night. The swelling and pain on the knee has subsided. I’m calling it a sprain but everyone Sue or I talk to today diagnose it as torn bicardiual something or other.

BBT is up -- not too far from what the Plan team want to see. Weight is down but by just two tenths of a pound.

Sue is getting great BBT readings – right at where she needs to be, indicating an active thyroid. I’m suspicious she’s got that thermometer tucked under her arm all night. I wouldn’t put it past her in her quest to get her BBT reading just right. She’s becoming a freak about this BBT business. I go to drape my arm around her as I stir in the morning and she’s like, what are doing, you’re gong to skew my BBT.

Sue makes the trip downstairs for lemon water and tea and brings it all back up some twenty or so minutes later. Boiling water and steeping the morning tea has been my job from the very beginning of our relationship but now that I’m off that detail even if just for one day, I find I really love that extra half hour of sleep in the morning. It’s occurred to me that, if there is any one thing that has solidified this relationship and made it enduring it’s probably that – that extra half hour from when the alarm goes off to when Doug returns with morning tea. I mean, just saying, a little thing like that every morning can go a long way toward erasing all the little guy things I’m guilty of thru the course of the day.

Breakfast is spelt cereal with Coconut milk, fresh blueberries and diced fresh pear.

We pass around the Kelp pill bottle, a spoonful of the B-12 and another capsule packed with 55 billion probiotics.

Kristen calls and wants to know when I’ll be in the office. I say soon but twenty minutes later I deem it a bad idea. I’m going to work at home, I text her, and tell her I’m going to take it easy.

I fill my Brita pitcher and get to work.

Kristen stops over with papers and checks to sign.

Sue leaves to meet a friend at the Bakers Guild Café for coffee then texts me that they are both coming back to the house. Her friend has Lyme’s and it sounds serious. She’s found a doctor who’s taken her off antibiotics and, from what she describes of her treatment, it sounds very much like The Plan formula. This is why they’ve come back to the house as Sue has decided to gift her one of our Plan books. I didn’t realize she had a stack to peel off from. I got them for my sisters, she explains later.

Lunch is sautéed kale with baby romaine, goat cheese and pumpkin seeds.

We watch a little Young & the Restless then I go back to working my water pitcher.

Sue has her jug of water already polished off. “I never thought I could drink that much water in one day,” she tells me then states, “It’s really not that hard.”

Nick stops over with the new menu for the café. It looks good but I’m wondering about getting more Plan friendly items into our mix of offerings. I doubt we have many planners in this town and two hours seems like a long drive for someone coming in from New York City but, we ought to be able to star some menu items. I decide not to push it. I need the guys to see the unqualified success I’ve had being on The Plan to make the case and, at the moment, I’m looking like a broken down geezer of a wreck as I hobble about, unshaven, in my pj’s.

Snack is the rest of my pear from breakfast and a handful of almonds.

I polish off my water with plenty of time to spare before dinner. Oddly, the thing of it is, as much as I don’t relish drinking all that water each and every day, I find I miss--even more--not being able to drink water after dinner or late at night when I wake up thirsty or with that dry, nasty taste in my mouth. When I sent Althea an email on this, she wrote back and told me to add more lemon juice to my water and I won’t be thirsty at night.

It’s a Tuesday which means a bread bake is underway up at the bakery. We have a record number of bread orders on the website this week plus a few more on Amazon and I’m genuinely thrilled. I won’t be able to get up to the bakery tonight to see how it’s going but I text Bill and he sounds enthusiastic. Later in the evening I get a series of texts and pictures. The loaves are coming out beautifully and they’re seeing a 100% pocket ratio on the pita. Fantastic news.

Sue leaves for a yoga class while I bail on attending an organizational meeting for a summer farmer’s market. In part because of my knee but I’m also questioning our participating in outdoor farmer markets. Now that we have the café, I’d prefer to see people come to us, but there’s also the problem of trying to find someone to man our table. Ever since we lost Awesome Dave we’ve been without a salesman. Steve does a great job at our indoor stall in Lewisburg on Wednesdays but it’s not the sort of thing he really wants to do and Saturday mornings are out of the question for him.

Later, when I retrieve my messages from the office, I have a message from a woman I know here in town who’s looking for a part time job. She’s best known in our community as a semi-professional clown. She’s at nearly every community event and does a lot of kids parties. I immediately think, oh my god, she could be great. She’s incredibly personable and I think she could really get behind our products.

I call her right back and leave a message. A little later she calls back and she sounds interested though Saturday mornings might conflict with her clown schedule and she has kids. I tell her I love the idea of having her work with us doing markets but it occurs to me that, before I hire anybody, I need to run it past the guys – just to be absolutely certain no one in house wants to pick up a few more hours doing market sales. But honestly, I tell myself, this will be a formality. Asking if any of our guys want to get up at seven a.m. on a Saturday morning to set up a tent and sell our bread and granola. Not. Very. Likely. But then it hits me, I’m going to have to mention that I’m considering hiring a clown for the job and I flash on the kind of reaction I’ll get to that one. “First rabbi’s and now clowns?” Bill’s mocking tone sears thru my brain.

Sue returns from yoga. She’s looking svelte and energized. She tells me she’s already hit her target weight. I’m telling you, Sue is doing great on The Plan. Me, I got some catching up to do. But I will tough it out and I do expect results. And yet, quite honestly, The Plan still seems like a woman’s gig. Whenever I go on the Team Plan face book page, it’s all women. I have yet to see any men post. My daughter’s comment from the night before hits me and I think, wow, I really have set myself up. I need to show results here.

I hobble over to the kitchen counter and help Sue by chopping veggies. She wants to grate beets and carrots for our absolute favorite Plan Friendly salad and I pull out the food processor with the grater attachment and food chute and show her how to save a ton of time. Sue is in awe. I cannot believe this woman has never worked a food processor before.

We have chicken with the adobo sauce, stir fried veggies and the shredded beet and carrot salad with a little added radicchio.

No wine tonight but we’re also adding an ounce of dark chocolate apiece to the end of the meal. Plan approved. Nice.

I get a last pic from Bill. A 30 ounce monster of a loaf that looks fantastic and a boule – a rounded artisan loaf - that I could put in any bread competition in the world. Nice work guys.

End of Day nine.

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