I’ve been health conscious ever since I underwent triple bypass surgery nearly two years ago. Very often for breakfast I have a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and craisins (dried cranberries), plus whole wheat toast with a garlic and oil spread. The oatmeal keeps my cholesterol lower by as many as 15 points, the raisins and craisins supply me with two of the recommended nine servings a day of healthy fruit and/or vegetables, whole wheat at almost every meal is now recommended by the latest medical research, and garlic is the next best thing to a wonder drug. It is my garlic spread that I enjoy the most, however. I keep a little bowl on the counter that I fill with extra virgin olive oil, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and lots of chopped garlic. The raw bitterness of garlic mellows after a day immersed in the oil and it makes a delicious spread (applied with a small paint brush) on my toast. About three days a week I drop an egg fried in healthy canola oil onto the toast. The latest research shows that an egg a day does not raise your cholesterol. Our eggs are also home grown by our chickens who free-range so pick up a lot of phytochemicals in their eggs, and phytochemicals are very healthy for humans. Lenie and I try to pass on our healthy eating to our kids. They have come to like healthier olive oil, rather than butter, on their toast. They don’t like the straight garlic chunks or balsamic vinegar of my mixture, but those two things separate and drop to the bottom of the bowl, so I just paint their toast with the olive oil from the top. And they like their eggs cooked in healthy canola oil; if you stop cooking with butter or lard or other unhealthy oils, your taste buds will get used to the healthy oils. Our kids have also gotten used to turkey bacon, which is at least 65 percent less fat than pig bacon. And they prefer whole wheat bread over that worthless pasty white stuff. Now is the time to get the kids used to eating healthy foods. Autopsies done years ago on our young dead soldiers during the Vietnam Conflict revealed a surprising level of coronary artery blockage among these young men. It sent alarm bells through the medical community, as doctors began realizing that heart disease can start at a very young age. The best book I have read on eating healthy and putting all these things in perspective is Eat, Drink, & Be Healthy by Walter C. Willett. After I read it, I bought five copies and sent them to my brothers and close friends, then put it in the Books section of the General Store of the website. We live in an age where there is plenty of accurate life-extending information about disease prevention; my bypass surgery compelled me to go out and read it. A publishing tip — promotion in a changing world Publishing a magazine like BHM is a lot of fun. I go my own way when it comes to the editorial content, dismissing the “experts” who say I can’t write about this or that because it will hurt my sales. But I do keep in mind that to publish a magazine you must earn a certain minimum amount of money to stay in business. Since I’m not very good at keeping track of what that minimum amount is, I let my wife, Ilene, do it. She doesn’t mess with the editorial content of the magazine, but understands you must send out a lot of mail solicitations if the magazine expects to get a lot of subscribers’ checks in the mail, so she is always hunting down appropriate mail lists we can solicit. No mail out equals no mail in. My editorial approach sometimes makes certain subscribers cancel their subscriptions, but Lenie finds new subscribers. The subscribers who do stay with us tend to treat us like family, because I think they appreciate the magazine’s editorial candor and honesty in a publishing industry that is easily intimidated by special interest groups who want only politically correct topics discussed. So promotion of the magazine is a key to success. The internet, including this blog, is another arm of our attempts to promote BHM. But the internet, so far, earns BHM very little money; our income comes primarily from the sale of our print issue. But this blog and our internet website will hopefully alert potential subscribers to the value of our print issue. As publisher of BHM, I am betting that the amount of money and time put into our internet presence will eventually translate into print issue sales. But I’m not sure! The jury is still out on internet sites for all publishers. We are treading on new ground here, as no one really knows how to make money from the internet because readers’ have come to expect all information on the internet for free. But the internet has one attribute that plays into the hands of a good magazine like BHM: It allows readers to select what they want to read. Before the internet, readers had few choices, being forced to choose from among a few magazines covering their chosen topics, and those magazines were typically produced by large corporations who served up a sort of bland mush of politically correct topics. Readers have many choices on the internet, including the choice to stop reading the bland mush and search out quality in-depth articles about subjects in which they are interested. So I’m betting that if BHM offers its typical quality articles, as we have done for 18 years, readers will automatically migrate to the BHM website. Magazines who continue to offer the bland crap that they have offered for years will lose their readers. The internet, I believe, will force all publishers to either offer a lot of quality material free, or they will lose subscribers to those (like BHM) who do. I believe that the BHM website, and vehicles like this blog, will stimulate the conversation about BHM and what it has been offering readers for 18 years. The internet, by its nature, forces the cream to the top. It will eventually eliminate the need for the large sums of money to do the large snail mailings a publisher must now do to let people know you offer quality material. The internet is the greatest equalizer of the publishing playing field in history. If you do not already subscribe to the print issue of BHM, I invite you to do so. It is even better than our website and the four blogs we have recently launched from its Home Page. If you are contemplating ever becoming a publisher yourself, look to the internet as the key ally of the future. The world of publishing is changing rapidly, thanks to the internet, and it is those people with good ideas and products who will benefit most. — Dave

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I leave most of the dinner cooking at our house to my wife, Lenie, because she’s a great cook and enjoys cooking, but now and then I make Kale Soup, specifically the Kale Soup recipe perfected by John Silveira. It is better than any soup I’ve ever eaten, and that includes the pea soup at the Pea Soup Andersen restaurants in California. The recipe is pretty long (it’s in the BHM cookbook), but the kale is the most important ingredient. That’s why we grow lots of kale, because fresh kale from the garden makes the soup even more spectacular than it already is. The recipe calls for a linguica sausage, but I decided to use a smoked chicken and apple sausage this time because I’ve tried to eat foods that have less saturated fat since I had my heart surgery nearly two years ago. I was afraid I’d miss the linguica, but the new sausage tasted fine. This is the type of soup that is good fresh off the stove, but it tastes even better if it sits a day in your refrigerator. That gives the flavors time to meld together. I generally make a double batch, as I did this time, so we eat kale soup for a week. The soup is also healthy. Kale always ranks number one in the charts of nutritionists rating vegetables. The soup also contains lots of garlic and onions, which are also very healthy for you. This Saturday, Silveira will make a big pot of kale soup using linguica and bring it to the pot luck celebrating Pat’s life at Fall Creek Ranch near Ashland, Oregon. I’ll send him a copy of this blog post and ask him to include the recipe he uses Saturday in his next blog post. It’ll be the same one contained in the BHM cookbook. If you don’t own a copy of the cookbook, by the way, you’re missing the boat on a lot of great recipes. The Kale Soup I made is only one of hundreds of recipes in it. If you click on the image of the cookbook, you’ll find Kale Soup listed under the recipes contributed by the BHM staff. This one was contributed by John. By the way, have you noticed that both John Silveira and Jackie Clay are now blogging from the BHM website.

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