Please note - the cover picture is generated by DALL-E (Co Pilot).  I asked the AI engine to great a picture of a red bearded viking with his native american (Aztec roots) wife.

I attended a full-day workshop in NYC last week at Microsoft to learn more about their unified support arrangements, and they also showcased some of their AI capabilities.

So, I started to play with the DALL-E feature in Co-Pilot, which allows you to create images. It’s fun and impressive (and scary) to see what can be produced using AI.

While I’m convinced AI is the future, it comes with a lot of responsibility, and we need to have clear guidelines (and rules) in place to ensure it is not misused. Some industries can adopt AI faster and have a much more profound impact, whereas we have to tread carefully within the healthcare industry.

I am playing with AI to enhance how providers (doctors) interact with the EMR (electronic healthcare records) and alleviate stress and burnout. However, we must consider the ethical usage of AI, especially in the healthcare industry, and we cannot open up to generative AI until we have trained AI more.

AI will significantly impact healthcare in 2024 and 2025, but it will also bring about some significant malpractice lawsuits. AI will get it wrong, and some providers will use AI to prescribe medication or treatment plans that might cause further medical issues for the patient.

As such, AI is the future, but we must tread carefully and assess each AI capability to find the most suitable approach for each scenario.

International Women’s Day

Talking about strong women, I want to express my gratitude and admiration to women across the Globe as we celebrate International Women’s Day. The world would not exist without these fantastic individuals vital to solid family foundations, keeping us men in line, and making valuable contributions to the workforce.

I’m proud of all the women I work with and have worked with, especially the women on my team. They are phenomenal.

More importantly, I treasure and embrace the women closest to me: my daughters and wonderful wife. They continue to impress me, and I’m grateful for having them in my life.

Week Eleven Meals

Eleven – the famous and fabulous character from the Stranger Things series, performed exceptionally well by the talented Millie Bobby Brown.

Stranger Things brought back many excellent memories from growing up in the 1980s, but I do not recollect encountering another dimension. We did spend a lot of time playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).

According to my DNA profile at Genomelink, adopting a Mediterranean diet will help me lose weight more successfully.

The Mediterranean diet is a diet inspired by the eating habits and traditional food typical of southern Spain, southern Italy, and Crete, and formulated in the early 1960s

Wikipedia

While most of my DNA originates from the Viking land (Denmark), I still have some ancient DNA traces from the Mediterranean region. As such, my body might be better suited for healthier options from that region, such as olives, feta, peppers, tomatoes, seafood, and chicken.

It is also clear that people in the Mediterranean region live healthier and longer, perhaps not only because of the diet but, more importantly, because of the produce and lack of artificial flavoring and other chemicals put in food to enhance or prolong flavors.

I firmly believe that food makes a difference. We must try to cook with fresh ingredients and eliminate store-bought, ready-made, canned foods.

It is unrealistic to eliminate all fake foods, but we can attempt to make small changes to reduce the consumption of chemicals and additives and make stuff from scratch.

I attempt to make as much from scratch as possible but often use store-bought bread, canned food, etc. It is easier, and we have busy family lives, too.

I would love to live off the land, but maintaining a kitchen garden for a family of five is a lot of work, so I support our local farmers instead. I apply the same logic with meat and will source my meat from local farms or top-quality butchers.

Using fresh and organic ingredients gives all flavors a boost. You can taste the difference!

School Lunches

I wish I could make pasta from scratch, but I have limited patience, and I’m unable to make a whole portion of fresh pasta for dinner on the evening of the dinner. Well, I probably could, but then we would eat a lot later than usual.

We start the week with the ox tail (and shank) stew I made a few weeks ago. I want to keep freezer meals to a minimum and only store what we need for meat and other items.

I gently fried some onions, garlic, mushrooms, and spinach and mixed it with pasta and herbs.

Then I marinaded a large batch of chicken thighs in a hot lemon and garlic marinade and grilled the chicken on the Traeger some hours later.

Lastly, I boiled some rice and mixed some spices and chickpeas. The mixture is often referred to as Mediterranean rice. It’ll be served with grilled salmon.

Dinner Time

I continued the Mediterranean diet theme for the kids’ school lunches, and I hope they enjoy the flavors and the fact that most lunches contain feta cheese.

In honesty, I made a few pigs in blankets stuffed with mozzarella cheese and spiced with BBQ rubs from FragOutFlavor – the best rub around and with low or no sodium.

Instead of traditional quesadillas, I made a Greek version. It consists of spinach, roasted tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and feta on a regular tortilla. The tortilla is heated in the oven for 5-6 minutes until the cheese gets soft, and then I place a second tortilla on top.

I made two salad bowls: shrimp & farro and Mediterranean Tuna Salad. Each bowl contains chickpeas, cucumber, tomatoes, olives, and feta.

I’ll make smash taco burgers on Friday instead of the regular weekly pizza.

Meal Prep Party Pictures

Meal Plan

	Lunch	Dinner
Monday	Pigs in big blankets	Ox Tail Stew (leftover)
Tuesday	Shrimp and Farro Bowl	Garlic Pasta with Spinach and Mushrooms
Wednesday	Greek Quesadilla	Spicy Honey Lemon Chicken Skewers with Rice
Thursday	Mediterranean Tuna Salad	Mediterranean Salman Pan
Friday	Smash Taco Burgers	Friday night fire pit wonders

Have a fantastic week, my friends. I hope you enjoy these meal plans. It is much easier to make food in advance, although you must invest several hours preparing meals during the weekend.

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