Cooking as marriage therapy

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry aren't the only ones getting hitched of late.

This month, especially Memorial Day weekend, marks the start of high wedding season.

I'm a Memorial Day weekend bride myself. In fact, my husband and I have a hard time remembering the exact date of our anniversary. We just know we tied the knot that holiday weekend 23 years ago.

I could tell you it has been 23 years of wedded bliss, but even my husband would laugh at the "bliss" part. Oh, there have been highs — the early wonder years, new parenthood and all the firsts that come with babies and buying a home. But, it's hardly been a cake walk, because there have been the early wonder years, babies and home buying.

The past few months, in particular, have been stressful, as we've geared up for graduations for both of our sons — one from college, the other from high school.

In the midst of such pomp and circumstance, I've shifted focus away from my better half. Yet, we're about to become empty nesters. And, if my life partner and I don't want to just stare blankly at each other in the days, months and years ahead, it's a good time to take stock of where we are as a couple, and where we're going.

As the nuptial gods would have it, a new cookbook of sorts recently crossed my desk. "Cook Your Marriage Happy" (CYH Press, $14.95) by clinical social worker and self-titled "sous therapist" Debra Borden, explores cooking as a vehicle for marital problem-solving.

Borden has been in practice since the mid-1990s, but it was about 10 years ago, while providing family therapy, that she stumbled upon what she since has dubbed "cooking therapy." In order to get clients to open up, she played a lot of games, she explained. "One day, I was walking through a kitchen and saw Frosted Flakes, Cool Ranch Doritos and a loaf of Wonder white bread. I thought, maybe I could do something with nutrition. But, mainly, I needed an activity where someone would talk."

Cooking, she said, "opens the portal, and they are more likely to share." Cooking therapy, as a type of experiential therapy, works well with people who feel stuck, resistant or looking for clarity in a situation. "It can jump-start the honest self-reflection process," she said.

The difference between cooking and cooking therapy, according to Borden, is purpose. "You are purposely focusing and mining each task for metaphors."

As far as focusing on married couples, Borden said that there are four main issues that bring couples to therapy: a stale marriage where the thrill is gone; a sexually out-of-sync marriage; a maybe-I-made-a-mistake marriage; and a financially frustrated marriage, "which has a lot to do with unrealized expectations or not really focusing on financial style before the couple got together."

When I first flipped through the book, I was skeptical. The kitchen is not where my husband and I find perfect harmony. I'm the pots and pans person. He's the electric saw and socket wrench guy. Neither of us is good about sharing these tools. It results in turf wars. For this couple therapy thing, would we need to cook together?

Turns out, no. I could do it on my own.

Here's how it works: You pick a recipe from the book, then stay mindful through every step and ponder how they relate to your relationship.

It starts with gathering ingredients. "What are your ingredients? Are they a willingness to evolve? To make a healthy change? To be honest about what you might be bringing to the table (that) isn't working in the dish?" Borden said.

Then comes process and procedure. As an example, she cited the recipe for Tune In and Talk to Me Tacos, which requires "looking at the raw mass" of beef, heating it up, draining the rendered fat ("What do you want to throw away from your marriage?") and seasoning the meat.

Even a recipe that doesn't turn out right is ripe for interpretation in Borden's mind. "A bread that doesn't rise: Is it pita, crackers or something you throw out?"

Recipe names also hold import in Borden's method of cooking therapy. There is From Boiling to Bliss Cake, Life Is Sweet and Sour Meatballs, and Miss You Mucho Mini Muffins. "If I'm working with a couple on their stale marriage, a week after the session, it starts to dissipate, but she'll remember Break Up the Boredom Bread Pudding. The recipe name cements the session after it's over."

It was time to put myself through some cooking therapy. I chose Break Up the Boredom Bread Pudding. The original recipe is credited to food writer and cookbook author Mark Bittman.

How'd it go, you ask?

For one thing, the cooking exercise reminded me how bad I am at following rules.

The recipe called for leftover challah bread. I didn't have any, so I bought a new loaf. If I attempt to read more deeply into it, I'll just consider it a wife looking to keep her marriage fresh.

You're supposed cut the bread into 2-inch cubes. During the step, Borden asks, "When you were slicing and dicing the bread, what did you think about?" D'oh. I didn't slice and dice. I tore the bread. Ripped it, actually. Is that the sign of an angry wife?

"It's fluffy," said my eldest son, ever the optimist, as I pulled the finished dessert from the oven.

Yeah, the chunks were fluffy, but, as a whole, the dish wasn't very pretty. Then again, the flavors were spot-on. And, everyone did eat it, even my husband, who is not a sweets guy.

I was tempted to ask him what he thought about the bread pudding. But, I stopped short of fishing for compliments as I recalled one of Borden's many correlations between cooking and marriage. "There's a great direction when making scallops," she said. "‘Don't harass the scallops.' You have to trust them and leave them in there until it's time to turn them. Just let them be."

After 23 years of marriage, I've got a whole new perspective on scallops — and Bittman's bread pudding.

Cooking with Que: Detroit foodie to launch school program out of new food incubator and kitchen

Entertaining children might seem like a surprising audience choice for the energetic figure behind Cooking with Que, but she is brimming with ideas of how to involve young people in healthy eating programs. Broden was recently awarded a $60,000 Motor City Match grant to establish a brick-and-mortar kitchen at Woodward Avenue just south of Grand Boulevard, and she is busy launching a new foundation called Eat To Live, which will work with Detroit Public Schools to host students for free courses.

The new culinary hub, simply called The Kitchen, will open this summer and form a space for her fans to visit and learn about food. A 16-foot live-demonstration kitchen at the front will host classes and meals, while the back portion of the building will be a shared-space kitchen for Broden and other chefs interested in catering or events.

Her enthusiasm really shines, though, when she explains the school project she's organizing. Already a founder of The Brown Bag Movement, an initiative to feed the homeless in metro Detroit, Broden's new foundation officially launched on April 6 and will work with 10 pilot schools to provide free courses on food purchasing, cooking, and kitchen skills.

"When I was small we didn't get to go to the places in downtown Detroit, and hang out in the fancy-shmancy places, so I want to bring the kids to the kitchen," Broden explains. "They need to see what it's like, and learn how to eat better, and teach them while they are young because if you start them while they are young they will keep doing it forever."

In a nutshell, Broden wants people—especially youth—to get smarter about the way they eat. Her vegan blog encourages plant-based cooking, although she openly declares that her domain is a place where "vegans and meat-lovers can co-exist."

"I feel like we get so stuck on what the titles are going to be. 'I'm a vegan, you're a meat-eater,'" Broden says. "My mission is to teach people to have a more plant-based lifestyle—just eat more plant-based foods. I'm not saying you have to give up every piece of meat."

Broden encourages her audiences to live on "70/30," which means eating 70 percent fruits and vegetables, and 30 percent everything else. When her fans do want to include meat in their diet, she encourages some tips for that too, such as knowing where it's coming from and pairing it with helpful herbs and spices.

"If you want to eat beef or steak, I'm rubbing it down with ginger because it's going to help your body digest it better," she says. "If I'm feeding you chicken, I'm going to get Amish chicken. It's ok for [vegans and meat-eaters] to get along, we just have to figure out what you like, what I like, and how we make it work together."

Broden's drive comes from her own personal experiences. After being diagnosed with the autoimmune disease sarcoidosis and dairy allergies, she searched for holistic methods and recipes as an alternative to taking steroids. The busy mother of three said she was shocked to find about what was going into her family's food.

"You start researching things and once you do you find out so much stuff that you don't know, it's crazy, you don't want to give it to your kids,"  Broden explains. "Everything I researched pushed me towards plant-based. I literally had to cold-turkey everything—I don't push that on anybody but I didn't have a choice."

Broden changed her entire diet and became a vegan, but she didn't stop there. When people started asking her about what she was doing, and why, she decided to share what she had found. "I needed to create a place where people could learn this stuff together," she says.

Establishing a permanent kitchen is a natural next step in Broden's multi-platform approach to sharing her philosophy, in which she aims to "meet people where they eat."

Broden wants her contribution to the foodie movement in Detroit to help shape a new identity for the city. "For so long we were known for just cars: auto, auto, auto," she says "And my brain says, why can't we be known to be a health spot, too?"

"We have to get out of our culture of instant gratification, which has taught us to go grab a $2 sandwich, go grab a burger. … Why can't we have a fresh food market on every corner, as opposed to a liquor store?"

Broden argues that the variety of food movements in Detroit that have flourished in just the last few years is an indication of people trying to recreate and reinvent the city, and that food has been at the center of changes.

"That's why I didn't necessarily want to do a restaurant—I wanted to make it like a food museum," says Broden.

The Detroit Economic Growth Corporation (DEGC) facilitates the Motor City Match grant, and they are thrilled to be supporting Broden's plans to activate the vacant retail block in New Center. 

"[Broden] has an excellent vision," says Kyla Carlsen, DEGC Small Business manager. "We know there is a need for more access to fresh and healthy foods across the city, and Cooking with Que will provide substantial community benefit."

Broden agrees it's serendipitous that her kitchen will be at the end of the QLine streetcar route ("Que in front of the Q") and the interest from the community certainly suggests she is on the right track.

"I have people who are booking it already for events, it's awesome," she beams. "It's gone so far. I just thought I was making a blog!"

How you cook your meat could raise risk of high blood pressure

Backyard barbecues come with a new caution: Grilled beef, chicken and fish may boost your risk for high blood pressure.

The same goes for roasting or broiling these foods, because high-temperature cooking is what's key, according to a new study presented Wednesday at an American Heart Association meeting.

"Our findings suggest that it may help reduce the risk of high blood pressure if you don't eat these foods cooked well done and avoid the use of open-flame and/or high-temperature cooking methods," lead researcher Gang Liu of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a release.

Her team's conclusion is based on surveys of more than 100,000 U.S. adults in health fields revealed that the odds of hypertension are slightly higher for people who prefer meats cooked at high heat compared to ones partial to lower temperature cooking methods.

 In addition, people who regularly ate meats cooked well-done, such as President Trump, were 15% more likely to develop high blood pressure over 12 to 16 years, the study also showed.

Findings don't prove cause and effect, researchers noted. Results are limited because they don't account for all types of meat and cooking methods, as well as the narrow study population.

But they do add to studies showing that compounds created when meat, poultry and seafood are charred are carcinogenic.

 "The chemicals produced by cooking meats at high temperatures induce oxidative stress, inflammation and insulin resistance in animal studies, and these pathways may also lead to an elevated risk of developing high blood pressure," said Liu.

Bottom line: As you try to limit the amount of meat in your diet, also pay attention to how — and how long — you cook it.