Category: My Family

Without a family, one seldom thinks long term

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How you two make decisions

Here’s a fun test that will help you, your significant other and friends see how each of you make decisions. Knowing how you make decisions, helps to avoid the pitfalls of each decision style. CLICK on this picture  to take this fun test!

Each of us make hundreds of decisions every day and knowing how we make decisions might help us avoid making the wrong ones over and over again. At the very least, we might be able to increase our odds for a successful outcome.

As I have mentioned on this blog before, my psychologist wife Laura has used me as a guinea pig for untold psychological tests. This time she wanted us to compare the results of a test looking at decision styles pioneered by my late college professor Allan Rowe. In the above graph we see four basic ways many people make decisions. There are ‘dominant’ styles that we use often and back-up styles that we utilize under certain circumstances.

If memory serves me, we use back-up decision styles often while under stress or under shortened time frames. If you are a person who needs to have all the facts in the universe before you and crunch it down to one solution, this only works if you have all the time in the world. However, if your bride asks you which dress you like for a social activity and she is pressing you for an answer, you might have to find an alternative decision style.

Laura and I are virtually identical in our ‘very dominant’ decision style: analytical. Where we differ is in our back up styles: I am a ‘directive’, which nicely put means that after all the discussion is exhausted, I push for results. Laura’s back-up is conceptual is a more ‘risk-taking’ approach, which can be best expressed by saying ‘pick one, anyone’.

I can see how couples with very different decision styles could come to disagreement easily. Something as simple as one’s tolerance for risk often sent couples struggling with their emotions. Often I would advise the risk taking individual to only invest 10% of their liquid assets in anything remotely volatile and then I would talk relatively safer investments with the other and their 90%.

For me, being married to an ‘analytic woman’ means that she responds to data, is willing to analyze, enjoys planning, and loves complex and challenging situations. This works for me as I am an analytic, too.

May all your decisions made together goe as well!

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a caviar but just pretend it comes from a sturgeon

Two types of non-sturgeon caviar and both are inexpensive!

 

When you think of caviar, do you think of inexpensive? Obviously, if it comes from one of the varieties of  sturgeon, then chances are it is very expensive. Caviar is fish eggs and not all command a great price. The brush of red eggs that appear on your sushi are from Smelts and are quite nice. The two Icelandic caviar products I like come from Lumpfish ( or called LUMPSUCKER  and for obvious marketing  reasons they chose a less strange name) and  Capelin.

Capelin is a Smelt that can be found migrating in and around Iceland and Greenland. It spawns on the beach very similarly to the California Grunion, which as a boy on a trip to Baja I remember filling an abandoned large glass water bottle and later wondered how I was going to get them out !

The Lumpfish is a strange looking fish which probably explains why they don’t place a picture on the bottle. Wikipedia has this to say about the importance of this fish to Iceland, “Lumpsuckers play an important role in the Icelandic fishing industry; Lotna ehf, a fishing company partly owned by Swansea City midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson, have recorded catches of lumpfish as large as 2 tonnes. Other fish often caught on trawlers simultaneously with lumpfish include cod”

For a long time, non sturgeon caviar was referred to as ‘imitation’, but is it really? To me the smaller eggs are preferred. In addition, with the cost of purchasing a twelve ounce bottle ($12 -15 normally) at a small fraction of the price of a 1 ounce of a sturgeon caviar… it is a practical alternative and makes a nice garnish for an everyday meal!

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a Wolfberry Birthday cake

Happy Birthday Karla!

Today is Karla’s Birthday and she wanted a Wolfberry Chocolate Cake! Ah, for those who don’t know what a Wolfberry is… it’s commercial name is “Goji.” Karla is very fond of anything that is offered to be ‘healthy’ and she believes that Goji berries have some sort of life sustaining properties and who am I to argue with her on her birthday!

Happy Birthday, Karla… your cake is coming right up!

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an egg salad sandwich and Tomato soup serenade

Some foods transform us to another place and time ...

…and shortly thereafter, mechanically, loaded down by the dreary day and the prospect of a sad tomorrow, I brought to my lips a spoonful of tea into which I had let a piece of madeleine soften. But at the very instant that the mouthful mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I shuddered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated – no notion of its cause. It immediately rendered all the vicissitudes of life unimportant, life’s disasters harmless, its brevity illusory… And suddenly the memory appeared to me…But, when nothing remains of a remote past, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, only smell and flavor, more frail but more lively, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, only they last for long, like ghosts, to be recalled, waiting, hoping (on the ruins of all the rest) to carry without bowing, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory. ”  — M. Proust

Foods are like that with me, they remind me of different places and times. From my childhood, I look fondly on my favorite lunch whether home or a friends … egg salad sandwich and tomato soup!

One of my favorite tomato soups is from La Madeleine French Country Restaurant ( the first located near SMU in Dallas).  I have even bought some on-line on several occasions. Laura pushed a recipe for their soup to me yesterday… and I had to see if it was close and it was. I made a few changes for my taste but I will present their recipe and my adaptation.

La Madeleine’s Recipe for Tomato Soup

some of the basic ingredients for my version ( plus lemon juice)

Ingredients:

  • 2 cans diced or cut tomatoes
  • 1 can chicken broth
  • 2 cans tomato sauce
  • 1 stick butter
  • 1 tablespoon mixture of salt, pepper and garlic powder
  • 1 cup dried and chopped sweet basil
  • 1 cup heavy whipping cream

Process

1) use a blender to chop tomatoes… but not to the point of a puree

2) add tomatoes, tomato sauce and chicken stock into a large pan or pot under low to medium heat and stir and reduce to slightly thicken

3) add cream, butter,  seasonings, a squirt or two of lemon juice and Basil … continue stirring until completely blended and bubbling

Serve with egg salad sandwich!

Bon appetite!