Noreen, now that the much-ballyhooed divide between social conservatives and Tea Partiers has been demonstrated to be a myth, the question arises: Is there anything that divides the right, turning culture warrior on culture warrior?  I'm happy to note that the answer is yes.  A chasm is opening up on the right on the subject of healthy living.  Is eating right and exercising a liberal plot to turn us all into communist cogs, or is it just a good idea?

Thank you, Jessica, for coming down on that silly article trying to raise ire against people who are, whether they dress with more flair than the average Joe, still victims of the recession and deserve our sympathy.

The Guardian's food blog is reminiscing about foods from childhood today—or, more accurately, foods from childhood's library.

Kim Brooks' piece at Salon praising the new emphasis on keeping pregnant women from getting fat—and lamenting her own pregnancy weight gain—left me sad. It was hard to put my finger on it. Was it that she called a size 10 "fat"? Was it that she was upset that she had "only" lost 25 of 40 intended pounds before she got pregnant again?

The dawn of DoubleX inspired me to start a project in which I entertained on Tuesdays, a day I had decided unscientifically was the most inconvenient in the week. For eight months,  I doggedly slogged through regular dinner parties , fending off strep throat and fatigue as I spatchcocked game hens and brewed big pots of chili. Though I am a food writer and a former professional cook, I had shied away from entertaining because I have a tendency to overdo it. I dirty too many pans and make too many trips to the grocery store for expensive ingredients.

What fro-yo addict worth her Pinkberry card wouldn’t kill for a zero-calorie sweetener that doesn’t cause bladder cancer or carry the faint taste of rubber? And if it comes straight from the earth and not from the corridors of a scary laboratory? Why, even better.

I have vowed to stop letting my perfectionism in the kitchen keep me from entertaining. I’ll toss aside my restaurant finesse and make do with what is already in the fridge. Like exercise, I’ll make entertaining a habit, and see if I can make it less overwhelming—less about the food, even, and more about the people I welcome into my house.

As part of my never-ending war on clutter, I was about to scrap the 20-odd-year collection of Gourmet magazines in my office closet, but then I heard the news today of its demise, and I’m glad I didn’t. I thumbed through an issue from 1996: It has a dozen-plus page article from Nancy Silverton with exhausting details on making sourdough breads from scratch. Gourmet always pitched its articles and its recipes for the ambitious—it was a point of pride both before and after Ruth Reichl took over the magazine in 1999 and modernized it.

I have vowed to stop letting my perfectionism in the kitchen keep me from entertaining. The old me could barely pull off a dinner party because my ambitions of restaurant finesse just didn’t scale down to my kid-crowded life. So I decided to change my model.

“We had the best dinner ever at our friend’s house,” said my twins over dinner a couple of months ago.

“Wonderful, what was it?” I asked.

“Chicken tenders and broccoli,” they said.

“Oh, really?” I said, spooning the lamb siniyeh (a Palestinian dish of rice, eggplant, pine nuts, and lamb) onto their plates. “What made it so good?”

“The broccoli had cheese sauce!”

“I see,” I said. “What other dishes do you really like?”

My three boys didn’t have to think much.

“Sushi.”

“What else?”