Brief Hiatus hopefully over

Well, our eating experiments have been somewhat curtailed of late for a few reasons:

1) We are trying to lose some weight. While we are not circus-freak level fat, both Mr Eating Alaska and I could drop 20-30 pounds each. The problem? We like food (a lot) and are both extremely lazy. So we are trying to acheive our aim via the Slim Fast method. We are enjoying delicious shakes, which were surely engineered by someone who hates all that is good and holy in this world, for breakfast and lunch. And then having a sensible dinner. Now, for me, a sensible dinner after a day of SlimFast is about 2 normal meals worth of dinner. But that is counterproductive, so I am trying to keep it to an actually sensible dinner and then maybe some carrot sticks or pickles or something. It is slow going, but we are gradually losing inches. This has short-circuited our attempts to eat all of AK by cutting out food-based lunching.

2) Various social obligations and activities have somewhat cramped our style in terms of being able to go out to try new restaurants, but we are getting back on schedule.

Somewhat off topic, but still kind of fun:
We recently bought Jane and Michael Stern's Chili Nation, and decided, more or less on a whim, to try a different chili once a week. We're eating our way around the USA! In chili! Before I get too deep in this, I should point out that there's not much here for an actual chili purist. If you have strong feelings regarding what exactly constitutes chili, move along. Also, some of these recipes were made up by the Sterns based on the sort of foods that are popular or local "signature" foods of an area. But we don't care, having grown up in the northeast, so we think it's kind of fun. We started, of course, with Alaska's chili - Line Camp Chili and Biscuits. This is Alaskan by virtue of having a lot of root veggies and beef chunks and good thick sauce - hearty and good for winter weather!