If you believe that you are what you eat, this recipe is for you. And, in fact, many people believe that if you eat fat you get fat (hence the low fat dogma). Maybe if you eat brains ....

My mom had the most incredible youth, in the backwoods of Kentucky, where they actually had to shoot and eat squirrels for dinner. And, I'm told, the brains were the best part of all. I suppose all that fat made the eggs, or anything, taste so good.

"You just crack that skull on the side of the skillet, stick your finger in there and pop it out! Good Eatin!"

The recipe below is modified from a couple I've seen on the net. Disclaimer: it hasn't been tried and verified, so you're on your own here.

You’ll Need:

1 pound fresh brains, washed
2 cups water
1 Tbsp salt
Juice of 1 lemon
4 strips bacon

4 eggs

Salt & Pepper to taste

To Start

Bring the water to boil, add the salt, and cook your brains in it for 20 minutes. When finished, add lemon juice. Drain and chill in cold water.

Scramble brains in bacon grease and cook until almost done. Beat 4 eggs (salt and pepper to taste). Then add 1 tablespoon milk to the above ingredients and scramble well. Grace Hair has cooked this recipe so long, she said it was impossible to give a list of ingredients. So, just read and cook!

Meanwhile

Cook your bacon until it is the crispiness you like. Remove bacon, and scramble the brains in the drippings until almost firm.

Finally

Then add scrambled eggs to the mix. Salt and pepper until you are very happy with your brains. I suppose one might have these for breakfast on test day!!

September is also National Breakfast Month

What is better for breakfast than biscuits and gravy? Nothing!

Here are, quite honestly, the best biscuits on the planet. You can have anything at all with these biscuits, but you can't do much better than this sage sausage gravy. Enjoy, and let me know how you like them.

You’ll Need

2 cups self-rising flour

1 pinch baking soda

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

1¼ cups buttermilk

About 2 tablespoons butter

To Start With

Begin by mixing the dry ingredients (self-rising flour and baking soda). Then mix the wet ingredients (olive oil, buttermilk) into the dry ingredients. You can either stir these around with a wooden spoon, in a food processor, or just put your hands in there until the dough is nice and smooth. If your hands get a bit sticky from the wet dough, just dust a bit of flour on them. By the way, you can use all-purpose flour, too, by adding in 3 tsp of baking powder and 1 tsp of salt.

Next

Sprinkle a cutting board with flour and lay the dough on it. Gently kneed this a few times to increase the fluffiness you can expect from the biscuits when they come out of the oven. As the dough incorporates the flour on the board, make sure it takes on just enough to be soft and barely NOT sticky.

Form the dough into a ½ inch thick round, and get a small glass. Use the open end of the glass to cut the biscuits. My mom used a small cleaned out tin can, in which one end was completely open and the other end had holes cut into it. This way air wouldn’t poof flour out of the sides when it was pressed onto the biscuits. If you’re not all that poof-sensitive, just use the glass.

Dab your cutter in the flour periodically or it’ll get sticky from the wetter flour on the inside of the dough. The biscuit cutouts you make don’t have to be perfectly round, and you can mold it into any shape you want (it’s only flour). Once everyone is sardined in, cut a thin sliver of butter to place over the top of each.

Finally

Bake at 475 for 14ish minutes. When you smell them and the tops are golden. Take them out and enjoy.

Sage Sausage Gravy

You’ll Need

2 slices of sage sausage per person (Jimmy Dean has a good one)

~1 Tbsp AP Flour per person

1 cup milk per person

Salt & Pepper to taste

To Start With

Cook the sausage until done. Then chop into tiny bits and set aside.

Next

Sprinkle in the flour. The trick is to have equal portions of oil and flour to make the roux. So the amount you will use will depend on the sausage you use. If you are making for one person and have only a little oil in there, you can supplement with some vegetable oil or butter.

Now the good part

Reduce the heat to a bare medium. Move the flour around in the oil with a whisk to make sure it's smooth. When the roux turns hazel brown, then chestnut, it's time to add the milk. You can make it as dark as you like, but start with a nice medium brown.

Add sausage bits back. Whisk in milk until lovely and smooth. Slowly cook until it begins to thicken to your liking. Salt and pepper to taste and serve over the top of a hot steaming opened biscuit.

More Exercise!

You've got to do this! The weather is PERFECT right now for picnics and walks. In Pittsburgh, we have a place called the Phipps Conservatory where there are beautiful plants from all over the world. On another one of these last few fall weekends, we took off to stroll through the lanes of tropicals and natives to see what they had. It was so relaxing and peaceful -- and we spent an hour and a half walking about! The best part was the butterfly room.

If you don't have a place like this in your city, find a set of trails, a museum that has some quite peace to it, and walk it for the afternoon. Take someone you love.

Afterwards, take a picnic, sit outside and look at the perfect periwinkle of the sky above you. Wonder aloud to your friend about its depth and beauty. Then enjoy the picnic below with the beverage of your choice. I love when this happens.

The Fat Fallacy exercise, you'll notice, involves food at the end!

You’ll Need:

1 Bagel per person

1 smear, to your liking, of cream cheese

2 slices smoked salmon

1 healthy slice of tomato

1 thinly sliced Vidalia or other sweet onion

1 scatter of capers

1 respectable wedge of lemon

Salt & Pepper to taste

To Start and Finish

On a half of a bagel, spread the cream cheese, then put on the capers (so they'll stay put!), then the onion, then the salmon, then the tomato.

Squeeze your lemon juice over the top, and sprinkle with the salt and pepper.

Variations on a theme

Don't sweat the layering or the specifics of the ingredients. My son gets sea sick when looks at the gelatinous guck in the middle of a tomato. And a dear friend of mine told me that capers are a mature taste -- meaning that they might not be for everyone!

The key is to make this open faced sandwich of yumminess. Play with it. Experiment. What's the worst that could happen?

The Puzzler

Supercharging Brain Food ...

Every now and then, when people find out I have a Ph.D. in neuroscience, they'll ask me, "What do I need to do to boost my brain power?"

I love the mental exercise of hearing the assumptions that wriggle behind questions like these. Boost your brain power, enhance your memory, supercharge your creative juices; all these phrases assume the brain is a machine with a switch, located on one corner of the dim walls of your brain. And just over the switch is a little sticky label that says memory booster, or creativity enhancement. Flip the switch and, viola, Einstein city!

In other words, what sorts of foods or drugs does one need to take or eat to toggle the turbo button, kick your thinking into overdrive, and unleash one's full potential?

To answer this puzzler, we have to step into the brain to see how ridiculous its complexity really is. A memory, for example, is not found in one area of the brain. Your grandmother's face doesn't live in a brain cell somewhere. It's found within the ongoing chatter, the passing pulsations, of brain cell activity across many regions -- like a gigantic conference call where everyone talks at once (picture it taking place in Italy).

This means that the language and syntax of brain activity is not about one neuron spitting bags of neurotransmitter to another, but about 100,000 neurons, each receiving 10,000 large and small inputs from all over the brain, and sending their own message forward and backward to other cortical and subcortical sites.

The boggle of distributed activity somehow, holographically or at least magically, creates creativity and thought and memory and emotion -- in short, our humanity. It's the ephemeral wispy passage of some collection of blips and microelectric potentials.

Memory, then, is a pattern of passing activity, in the same way that Morse code makes words by its passing dots and dashes. This means that there is no place to poke a pipette and get better performance. There is no switch (no sticky notes either).

But what if we add more neurotransmitters?

Neurons use neurotransmitters like we use currency. To ask which special neurotransmitter boosts brain performance is like asking which of my dollars confers spending power. They all do. And a neuron, unlike us, cannot put extra transmitter in the bank or getting any more oomph out of its activity by having more of this chemical around.

So. Answer the question. What do I need to eat/take to boost brain power? Nothing. You can't improve on the brain until you understand it completely, and you can expect that to happen in about a million years. Dipping our understanding of the brain from the total amount there is yet to know, is like draining the ocean with a drinking glass.

The bottom line is that, while you can't crank up your hidden genius knob, you can prevent harm -- allowing your brain to work at its optimal level. And you can do that by eating small, keeping your weight down, avoiding foods that will clog your arteries and starve your hungry mind for the basic nutrients it needs. Get some sleep. Be active. Live a balanced life.

Not a sexy answer, I know, nor is it destined to make a million dollars in pill form.

But there is a way to boost your brain power, it just doesn't involve miracle drugs or foods. Be active: mentally, physically, emotionally.

These are the big three. The more you use your brain, the better it can be. Just as your memory and skills lie within brain activity patterns, your brain activity patters are strengthened by being active. You don't have to do logic puzzles every day or the New York Times Crossword with a pen, just avoid passive "vegging out" all the time.

Turn off the TV and read or walk or play a dice game or figure out whether that dastardly Professor Plum was whacking around the conservatory with the candlestick after all.

Finally, have fun. Your ability to engage the world depends on you making it engaging. Loving your life makes it easier for your brain to do the things it was developed to do! Surprise your partner with something. Do the unexpected once in a while. Enjoy yourself.

Resources:

Neuroscience for kids http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html

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