04Projects

On the workbench.

What I’m making now that the only roadmap is my own. Some of it is public, some is still taking shape.

Featured · live

ChezJK

A decade of home cooking, turned into recipes you can actually cook.

I have photographed what I cook for more than ten years. ChezJK takes that whole Instagram archive, writes a structured recipe for every post, and makes it browsable by week, by month and all the way back. It is public, with no account needed.

The name has history: chezjk.com began as my food blog around 2010. Now it is a permanent home for every meal, on the web and in a native iOS reader.

Visit chezjk.com ↗ Get it on the App Store ↗ @jkatzman on Instagram ↗ WebiOSAI recipes

Open source

Pillow Wrestling with Judaism

Jacob wrestled an angel all night. You can start with a cushion.

A conversational web app for wrestling with Jewish tradition, gently. Ask a real, modern question about doubt, ethics, AI, grief, money or God, and get an answer voiced by a sage: Hillel, Rabbi Akiva, Rashi, Rambam, Ramban, the Baal Shem Tov, Buber, Heschel or Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

Every answer is grounded in texts fetched live from the Sefaria library, with citations you can click through and read for yourself. A Beit Midrash mode stages a debate across the centuries.

View on GitHub ↗ ClaudeSefaria APINode

Bookshelf

Every book I have picked up on Kindle, Libby and Audible since 2013, more than 750 of them, lined up as spines on one long shelf you can drag through by year. An insights page reads what the shelf says about me.

Reading, visualizedLive site ↗GitHub ↗

Desktop Focus

A menu bar utility that locks you to the current Desktop for a set amount of time. It blocks the shortcuts and swipes that switch Spaces, and lets you out early only if you type an escape code.

macOS · SwiftGitHub ↗

Personal health

Fifteen years of Paleo/Primal.

The longest-running project here has no code in it. In 2011 I changed how I eat, move and sleep, and I have been running the experiment on myself ever since. I think of it less as a diet than as a practice. To my Jewish friends I explain it as closer to keeping kosher: a way of thinking more deeply about what you eat.

Eat food. Mostly vegetables. Not too much. Cook. Exercise.My food manifesto, 2010: Michael Pollan’s rule, plus two words of my own

190^{→ 160 lb}

Body weight over the first six months, starting August 2011.

28^{→ 16%}

Body fat over the same six months.

34.5^{→ 29 in}

Waist. Buying new pants was a nice reward; feeling better was the best one.

15^yrs

And still going, with the rules loosened where my own experiments said they could be.

The practice

Four defaults that kept working.

Eat

Real food, mostly vegetables

Whole foods with enough good protein and real fat to make a meal satisfying. No wheat, sugar or industrial seed oils most of the time. Eggs over greens, salads big enough to be lunch, fish or meat with two or three vegetables, something fermented.

Move

Movement without drama

Walking and biking as the foundation. Bodyweight strength twice a week. One short, hard sprint session: hill sprints, burpees or cycling repeats. A cycling century or two in a good year.

Rest

Sleep, stress, play, outdoors

Probably worth equal billing with the food. A real night’s sleep in a dark room, time outside, and removing stress where I can instead of only coping with it.

n=1

Flexible edges

Strict rules helped at the start. Years of single-subject experiments brought back white rice, potatoes, some legumes, good cheese and summer corn. The goal is a set of defaults I can live with for decades, not a purity contest.

The record

What I did, and what I wrote down.

2010

JK’s Original Food Manifesto

Ten rules riffing on Michael Pollan, written before any of the rest: eat what your grandmother could have eaten, know the farm, cook as much as possible, do not fear real fats.

Chez JK blog

2011

Slow-carb, then Primal

Started the Four Hour Body slow-carb diet and exercise plan in August. By December I had moved to the approach in Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint.

Start

2012

The Chez JK Paleo series

A run of posts for everyone who kept asking: Did you lose a LOT of weight?, The Primal Diet, How do I get started? and Cooking Paleo. The advice then is the advice now: start acting first, then read to fill the gaps.

Chez JK blog

2013

Update and Big Summary

After reading Perfect Health Diet I added safe starches and adjusted supplements. Wrote up the whole system: what I eat each day, the weekly sprint and strength routine, thoracic mobility, sleep and stress.

Chez JK blog

2022

Eleven years of Paleo

A nine-years-later update. Same pattern, more personal: the results of a decade of n=1 experiments, and a reading list that had grown.

Chez JK blog

Now

Paleo/Primal Lifestyle

The current, consolidated version of all of the above, published as an evergreen essay on ChezJK.

chezjk.com ↗ Now

Cooking Paleo

Practical kitchen notes: shopping, stocking fats, batch prep, and meals that bend around real life. Alongside it, a decade of what I actually cooked, as recipes.

chezjk.com ↗

Books that shaped it. The Primal Blueprint for the overall lifestyle, Perfect Health Diet for the research and the modifications, Convict Conditioning for exercise progressions, The Primal Connection and The Paleo Manifesto for the larger context. This is my personal experience, not medical advice.