_Cooking at Home_ by David Chang and Priya Krishna

Subtitled: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Recipes (and Love My Microwave)

I _love_ the subtitle.

I _love_ the idea of the book: to actively push back against particular ingredients, exact measurements whether of volume, temperature or time. To actively push back against, or at least be more flexible on, technique. To encourage the person learning to be guided by their own preferences, or the preferences of the persons they are cooking for. Love. Love. Love.

Also, OMG this thing is full of salty meat. Ugh. And honestly, more milk products (and less shellfish) than I was expecting.

Chicken is abused horribly in this book. DC’s preference for neutral (the flavorless end of olive oil, rice wine vinegar, a surprisingly low-heat red pepper choice) in all non-salt / non-fermented seasonings is discouraging in the extreme. He rips on Instant Pots while laboriously reproducing what Instant Pots do best. He only grudgingly allows that a thermometer maybe could be used to determine what was going on with the meat. His flatbreads are … kinda phoned in. He says he’s not making mayo or that something doesn’t contain mayo … and then he basically makes it as mayo. Repeatedly. Advocates for making rice in the microwave even tho it takes as long as on the stove. Obsessively rinses rise. Puts potatoes in “fajitas”.

Gravy technique with another sentence or two would have actually had a decent roux, but missed. Problems with order and timing of additions to a stew (either there was a lack of clarity, or it was just wrong). Double starches over and over and over again.

The best chapter is the brisket one at the beginning, probably. I do like the sections where someone other than the two main authors presents Helpful Information / Background.

The dynamic between DC and PK is a real life saver. She skewers his most ridiculous impulses quite effectively, and I trust her judgment a lot more than his … basically always. I’ll go take a look at her other cookbooks, but may or may not buy any. I’ve got another anti-recipe cookbook all ready to read next.

As little respect as I have for his abilities with chicken and/or vegetables (PK says he’s great with vegetables, but you can’t tell from this book, at any rate), and as obnoxious as I found his aversion to tools that seem perfectly matched to his meat and salt intensive style (Get a Thermapen! Use an InstantPot!), he _is_ consistent and insistent on the basic principles that drew me to this book. _Do it the way you want to._ Experiment. Fail. Try new things. Don’t try to exactly reproduce … anything, really.

I hope this gives you a clear sense of whether reading this book is a good idea for you or not. I learned a ton by reading it, even tho I doubt I will ever cook anything even close to how it is presented in this book.

Which is probably exactly the right response to have.

I should go look at duxelles recipes.

ADHD subtypes

R. and I have a couple of long-running questions between us. Our son has both ADHD and autism diagnoses. Our daughter has an autism diagnosis. It’s pretty clear that there is a lot of subclinical if not actual ADHD going on with R., and throughout is family, and in parts of my family. Obviously, R. and I are both autistic, and one of our debates is which one of us is “more” autistic. (OK, we _know_ that that is not a question that is answerable, and honestly does not really make sense. Further, our definition of “more” is unstable from moment to moment. It can be, more cartoonishly meeting the diagnostic criteria. It can be, more disruptive of day to day life / relationships / etc. It can be, More Superpower / Mad Skillz.)

The other debate basically comes down to: does Walkitout have ADHD. I am _deeply_ aware of how the definition of attention deficit with or without hyperactivity has evolved over time. I am absolutely clear that I display a bunch of the “motor” like speech and behavior associated with the disorder (pressured speech, can’t sit, can’t sit still, etc.). I am also completely aware of the cartoonish qualities of my ability to hyperfocus. The current definition of ADHD has multiple subtypes, and I very obviously belong in the HI subtype (Hyperactive Impulsive) if I belong anywhere at all.

I _finally_ have time to poke around at this question (I’ve been working through some backlog lately).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4253348/

This looks specifically at adults, notes that HI is really rare, and raises a bunch of questions about whether it really even exists. “Combined” (ADHD-C) exists. “Inattentive” (ADHD-I) exists. But the small number of people that were ADHD-HI in their study were actually _more_ inattentive than the ADHD-I group, which makes you really wonder why they weren’t ADHD-C.

They went into this with this perspective:

“In summary, current research suggests that ADHD-HI is rare, developmentally unstable, with no evidence of being a specific disorder, and often accompanied by subthreshold attention deficits suggestive of ADHD-C.”

Noted as a result of their analysis that:

“In this sample of 691 adults with ADHD there was no patient who met the DSM-IV cut off for having six out of nine hyperactive and impulsive symptoms and less than six out of nine inattention symptoms. This would indicate that the Hyperactive-Impulsive subtype in adults is either so rare that it represents a tiny minority of patients, or simply does not exist as a clinical condition in adults at all.”

Mind you, that’s all based on the DSM-IV criteria. I’ll see if I can figure out whether they did any validation off of the DSM-V criteria.

This is an imaging study, that is also able to distinguish between -C and -I. They rather conspicuously mention and then drop -HI.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30985833/

This Italian study suggests -HI is more common in women, and more likely to be associated with anxiety.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28580295/

Going further back in time, and adolescents, this one attributes the anxiety to the attention side, vs. the hyperactivity/impulsivity side.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6607691/

Some people who run an anxiety clinic decided to test their population (mostly female) for ADHD and found some things.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6493806/

The impulse control NOS (nail biting)/motor tic disorder sounds a lot like my extended family! No subtyping in this analysis.

Part of the debate with R. revolves around the absolutely bonkers extent of my control-freakiness. As he has put it on occasion, I expend consider energy in controlling how much of people can perceive my control-freakiness. (From my perspective, this is me running my life so that, in the event I wind up in front of a nominally neutral arbiter, I win. Like all ridiculous but effective strategies, this isn’t easy to stop, even if I thought it would be a good idea to stop. Which I don’t. Hence the long-running discussions.) I -absolutely- have all the nail chewing, hair twirling, picking, you name it impulses. Everyone wandering around with headaches and tooth and jaw problems because they grind their teeth at night? I controlled for decades ago. Which makes me very sympathetic to the problem … but also you can kinda see how I _also_ have to really stomp on my natural, hey, here’s how you can fix that! impulses.

Am I an anxious person, who has so relentlessly managed that anxiety that it’s kinda … not there? Does that even mean anything? This feels too philosophical. YES I am impulsive in a way that is annoying to myself and other people. We are in wild agreement about that. The question is, is that a disorder, and if so, which one.

Years ago, I learned the term “non-exercise activity”, and I laughed hysterically when I saw the somewhat jaw-dropping estimates of the range of calories expended in this way. Basically, it turns out that leg bouncing, can’t sit still, driven by a motor type people burn _a lot_. And now, there are people trying to _teach people_ how to do it too.

https://blog.nasm.org/exercise-programming/neat-approach-weight-loss

So, where is the ADHD research community on actual _exercise_? Because I do less non-exercise activity when I do more actual exercise. (Homeostasis FTW)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6945516/

Welp. Didn’t see that coming! Exercise good for ADHD population _and probably also borderline personality disorder_! Mostly, it is a really extensive literature review, and, as always, there just isn’t nearly as much high quality exercise research specific to whatever population you are interested (or, really, any population) that you might want. And, apparently, none for BPD. Nice summary, tho.

Discouragingly, in this study from 2021, kids diagnosed with ADHD were _less_ likely to have recently engaged in physical activity than kids not diagnosed with ADHD.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31838947/

Returning to the core question!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8017439/

This is very technical, and I’m not convinced I understood it completely. Earlier (2010 article near the beginning of this highly edited, link heavy ramble), we had people questioning whether pure hyperactive / impulse Was Even a Thing. Well, the reason why it’s _not_ a thing, is because you can get inattentive from hyperactive/impulsive, _and when you do_, you wander off into ODD relatively quickly. The 2010 editing of the population to remove comorbidity etc. basically removed all the HI, leaving a few weirdos who managed to be hyperactive/impulsive without, you know, what happens to people with ODD diagnoses.

It’s a lot to think about, really, and it clearly does not apply to me, which puts me very firmly back in the territory of, no, actually, I do not have and never have had ADHD. Period.

Also, I am hyperactive.

I think what we actually have going on here is reification into the individual of something that is an artifact of the social context. And yes, I know that this is an observation that has been made before. Teachers refer out for ADHD, because the kid is being disruptive, and can’t seem to pay attention. This is either going to be -HI and turn into -C (or ODD) or it’s going to be -C when detected. The kids who just are not attending rarely get referred out, because they are not being disruptive. The _parents_ may agitate for some action, and you can _really see_ how a pure-play -I would benefit from stimulants. A -C that stimulants do _not_ tip over into ODD will benefit from stimulants the way just about everyone benefits from stimulants. We really should never have told people to stop giving kids coffee, tea, etc. But that’s neither here nor there. Honestly, the attention demands of school / work / life are probably ridiculous, and we could make a lot of it work better for everyone with exercise breaks. Also, not relevant to the current question.

Also important is the difficulty of mutually regulating attention. Under this theory, autism is super important. I have no trouble focusing, and, for that matter, neither do my kids (or, really, R.). We do need to be interested, and we do need to be able to follow along; a lot of our disruptiveness and impulsiveness is breaking in with questions and derailing. That can probably be slotted much better under our autism than under ADHD. More collaborative parenting and teaching styles that incorporate the preferences / interests of the kids help with this.

I’ll have to do more thinking to understand whether I even believe my son has ADHD. I’m not convinced any more. He occasionally loses things, but the _way_ that he loses things is shockingly non-repetitive. When we problem solve a solution after something fell out of a pocket, it doesn’t happen again. He’ll occasionally do something novel, like recently he left a helmet behind at school, but he got it back again. I don’t know _anyone_ who doesn’t occasionally forget an item. He’s on time, unless he’s failed to understand what’s involved in getting to a place on time. He keeps track of a relatively complex schedule independently. These sound very NOT ADHD.