A new direction

I know many of you are wondering when I’m going to post my latest vegetarian recipe. Pictures … I know you want pictures! And I’m sorry that I haven’t been doing much of that recently. I have reasons that I’ll blog about later, but I promise, you’ll get more photos of eggplants and escarole in time.

However, there is a very important point that I need to make to you first, one that I think I’ve let go unrecognized for some time. And that point is this: This is not a food blog! I am not a food blogger. This blog was not started for the sole purpose of sharing food discoveries, photos of food, or my long-winded stories about what happened when I made food. No, this blog has never had any direction at all, and it was never meant to. Not food, not dogs, not health nor fitness, not even history, travel, the environment, or love. It’s just been something that’s here. As a random outlet for whatever’s on my mind. And it has worked well for that purpose.

And you may rest assured that it will continue to do so. You’ll be seeing your foodie photos again, right here on this blog, in time. Along with whatever other random musings come to mind.

But wait! It turns out that I have found a new direction. This is something that’s been brewing for the past year or two, but I haven’t known where to go with it. But thinking about it recently, and thinking about this blog and how I could work it into this blog, I finally decided that I would not work it in with this blog, but create a whole new website to devote to it. Within the next few days (or weeks, or however long it takes … you know how I roll) I’ll post again and let you in on the new project. I may want some help with it, so you may be able to contribute. For now I’ll just tell you that it’ll be a sister site to this one, a much older sister who knows who she is and where she’s going, and her focus will be on some of the things I’ve touched upon over the lifetime of this blog.

Tune in again for all the details.

Spin music

As a part of my routine, I go to spin class on Saturday mornings at Bally’s. I go to the 9:30am class. You can either show up at 7:00 (when the gym opens) to get a seat for the 8:30 class, or you can show up at 9:30 to get a seat for the 9:30 class. So 9:30 is my class.

I show up around 8:30 anyway just to warm up on the treadmill for a while and catch up on news and stuff on TV. People-watch. Wake up. It’s Saturday morning, after all.

Last Saturday I was not in the mood. Walking on the treadmill for 45 minutes was fine, and I had a TV with captioning that worked, and life was fine. But by the time I got situated on the bike, I started to think, “It’s beautiful outside. Why am I not riding my bike outdoors? I could have ridden into the city. I’m not into this class today. They already made us rearrange all the bikes. What a pain. I’m not in the mood to sprint. Now that I think about it, I haven’t eaten since yesterday at 5pm. Maybe I should leave now, before class begins.” Of course, that would never happen, so I decided to grind my teeth and bear it.

And then class began, with a guest instructor.

And if you’ve ever attended or witnessed a spin class, you know it’s all about the music. And this spin instructor couldn’t have tailored the music better for me even if she had known I was coming.

The first “Oh my gosh I can’t believe they’re playing this in SPIN class, let alone at ALL” song was Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight.” I’m still not sure which is weirder: that it was chosen for a spin class, that I had coincidentally heard this song 3 other times on the radio this week, or that I still remember all the words from 1986.

The second oddity was Bryan Adams’ “Summer of 69,” which I’m sure you’ll recall, has already made an appearance in this blog. Very strangely, I was one of three people in the room who hadn’t yet been born in 1969. Strange in a different way, the instructor didn’t seem to understand that the song was not written in the summer of 1969, as Bryan Adams was 9.

The third notable song was not odd, but amazing in an “Oh my gosh this is another 80s song and it’s awesome and it’s kicking my ASS” way. And, come on, listen to it. It’s so me. Bonnie Tyler, “Holding Out for a Hero.”

Needless to say, by the end of spin class I was glad I stayed. Not that that ever varies.

Today’s spin class did not sweep me off my feet with its music, but I was quite surprised at the choice of Fleetwood Mac’s “I’m So Afraid.” Such a long, slow song. Until I remembered that “I’m So Afraid” also means a big, badass guitar solo by Lindsey Buckingham. The day is saved.

Happy birthday, Maple

Poor Maple.

Maple happened to be born on a day that, eight years after her birth, her mom would be too busy to pause to celebrate.

TurboTax gave me a surprise and I ended up spending about six hours completing my tax return instead of one or two.

I encountered an unexpected snag in a project I was working on and I spent the balance of the day debugging code.

It was a stressful, full day of work.

The good news: I finished my taxes on time and even paid both Fed and State in full. I also finished my project for work. At around 6:30pm, I took all the dogs out for a nice birthday walk.

A wheelable feast: Happy Easter

Not an uncommon occurrence in my family (and I do not exclude myself), we made our Easter plans at the eleventh hour yesterday. My mom and I decided to spring my grandmother from her nursing home and take her out to Easter lunch. Gammy (my grandmother) is in a wheelchair, having lost one leg to diabetes last year. So she doesn’t get out much, and we thought she’d like to venture out into the real world for a while.

And so we also recruited my cousin, and the three of us had a nice visit with Gammy in her room before signing her out and driving toward the nearest restaurant. But first, we decided to stop at Walgreens so she could pick up some supplies. I decided that while the ladies were shopping I could drive across the street to the restaurant to put our name on the list and find out how terrifying the wait would be. We’ve never even considered going out for Easter lunch, as we always have it at a family member’s home, so I had no idea what to expect.

Well.

Just inside the restaurant I was greeted by a person dressed in a bunny suit. There was a sign pointing to the right that read, “Egg Hunt –>”. Children in dresses, carrying Easter baskets, swarmed everywhere. I pressed through, and almost made it to the hostess desk before I was accosted by a woman asking me for my name. I explained that I had just arrived and hadn’t put my name in yet. She said, somewhat incredulously, “Ohhh.” She apprehensively approached the desk and asked, “We’re all full, right?” to which she was told, in unison by a gaggle of hosts, “Yes!” Apparently one must make reservations early to Easter lunch. Apparently everybody knows this but me. To everyone’s credit, everyone was very nice and turned me away with a smile. I turned and walked out, still in good spirits, but the terror was building inside as I tried to imagine where to go next, considering I didn’t even know the area.

And then it happened.

As I walked to my car I heard, “Miss! Miss! Wait, miss!” I turned around, shocked to find that I was the Miss being sought after. I began to return, nervously, to the restaurant. It was the incredulous hostess, followed by the restaurant manager. “How many are in your party?” I was asked. “Four,” I replied. “Well, we have a cancellation so it looks like we can fit you in.” I beamed. “That would be wonderful, but I have to go pick up my grandmother who is in a wheelchair and then come back … will that still work?” “Yes, any time you can get here.”

Ahhhhhh. My karma was good today. I returned to Walgreens and suggested that the shoppers should pick it up a little bit so we wouldn’t lose our good fortune. Before I knew it, we were back at the restaurant and we were taken straight to our table. This was an outcome far better than I had expected possible. No reservations, no waiting. How often does that happen? Especially when there’s an Egg Hunt going on?

Our only surprise at that point was that the lunch was a buffet. An interesting proposition with a wheeled diner, but we guided her through and a nice holiday meal was had by all. Happy Easter.

(Note: This is Day 5 of Month of Awesome. Not bad, huh?)

What is this “Month of Awesome” anyway?

I have a Twitter account. I’m on Twitter. I tweet. I am, in fact, a prolific Twitterer, which means, for the uninitiated, that many times a day as I sit at my desk pounding out website code or blog entries, I also type these little 140-character status updates into my Twitter client, announcing to the world the minutiae of my life.

Allow me to show you roughly what this looks like in a web browser:

Here are the basics: Each line represents a blurb that I decided I had to get out of my head and out into the open. Where you see “@so-and-so,” those are replies to other tweeters. In the first blurb I was replying to something ValeriaL said. “RT” means “re-tweet.” When I type “RT so-and-so” I’m forwarding something another tweeter has already tweeted. Using the hashtag, “#so-and-so,” is used as a way to give sort of a category, or tag, to a tweet. Say the Superbowl is coming up and a lot of people are tweeting about it. Adding “#superbowl” to these tweets is a way for other Twitter users to find them (using a search feature) all in one place.

But that’s just the backstory, as this post isn’t really about Twitter. This post is about the line at the very bottom of the above Twitter page snapshot where I say, “Well, this may just end my #MonthOfAwesome.”

So what’s this “Month of Awesome” thing? I get that all the time. And when I explain it, then people get it, and people like it.

Many people make New Years’ resolutions. Almost everybody wants to improve themselves in some way; everyone can relate to this. Yet I don’t typically make New Years’ resolutions for a couple of reasons that are just as irrational as making them. One is that everyone makes them, and most people fail. The other is that I have no personal connection to the first day of the year. Everybody starts dating their checks differently on January 1, and everybody starts dating them exactly the same as everybody else. If I’m going to do something life-changing and if I require a special day to base it on, it’s going to be my day. It’s going to be a day unique to me. It’s going to be my birthday. Sure, everyone has one, but only one out of roughly 365 people share mine, and only a fraction of those people turn the same age that I turn. So of all the days, this is the most personal, and this is the one that means the most to me.

So for the past decade or so, I’ve set personal goals leading up to my birthday. “Leading up to” is very important to me, because who wants to start off their year in the crummy slump they’re trying to get themselves out of? My idea is to kick myself in the pants in the days leading up to my day, so I can begin my new year on a strong note, hopefully having reached the goal I set for myself. This year the main difference from previous years is that I decided to give it a name. That name, on a whim, became the undignified but effective “Month of Awesome.”

Another difference between this year and previous years is that I don’t have a quantifiable goal. Indeed, my goal is more about quality. This year I recognized what a slump numerous aspects of my life were in, and I decided I was going to spend a certain length of time living the way I really wanted to be living, starting down the road of being the person I wanted to be. In my case this means doing things such as exercising more regularly, eating better, waking up earlier, working harder, finding more work, actively engaging in projects that I had barely begun or pledged to begin, and generally, living each day in such a way as that by the end of the day I could say, “Today was awesome,” and add it to the tally of days that make up my Month of Awesome.

I brought up Twitter because it plays a large part in all of this. Like having a workout buddy or some kind of sponsor, my Twitter followers have become my support group. Each day I have mentioned Month of Awesome, using Twitter’s hashtag convention (#MonthOfAwesome), and my Twitter friends have acknowledged my quest and they lend me support. And this is a decent chunk of people from all over the U.S., and even a couple other countries. Do you think there’s a day that I really want to admit to all these people that today was not so awesome? That I screwed up and behaved in a way I regret and that I had wanted to leave behind?

That day hasn’t happened yet, but today is only Day 2 of Month of Awesome. MoA was planned to begin yesterday, April 8, because starting on that day gives me about a month leading up to my birthday, May 9. (It’s actually a month leading up to May 7, which is the day I leave for vacation, so I chose to start the math on May 7 just so I wouldn’t expect myself to behave exceptionally on May 7 and May 8, when all I’ll really want to do is lounge by the pool drinking umbrella drinks. But that’s unimportant.)

So, what’s been awesome about Day 1 and Day 2? Well, on Day 1, I found a penny. And on Day 2, I found two. More importantly, I completed the tasks that I set for myself, I’ve exercised, eaten well, been social, and have generally had a nice time. I set pretty high standards for myself, so it takes a bit for me to be happy with things at the end of the day. These may sound like simple things, but they’re simple things that allow me say at the end of the day, “Today was awesome.”

If it’s Wrestlemania, it must be … time for pasta salad!

When a gal has her girlfriends over to watch Wrestlemania on Pay-Per-View, there are two decisions of the utmost importance that must be made:

1) What color feather boa to wear
2) What to serve

The first was easy. I piled my collection of feather boas on the dining room table, plunged my hand in and randomly chose the hot pink and black one, and draped it around my neck. Within five minutes the thing got so scratchy against my bare skin (it’s been a while since I’ve regularly worn feather) and so many feather bits were falling to the floor, into my wine, and the pizza sauce, that I had to de-boa.

The second was a little bit tricky. Not only is cooking relatively new to me (hosting parties in the past I was in charge of the alcohol, and left the food up to others), but I was preparing food for a vegetarian and someone who doesn’t eat onions. And really, what on Earth tastes better than meat and onions?

So in addition to a couple kinds of chip and a few kinds of dip (all of which were store-bought and contained onions), I decided on my famous tomato, basil and mozzarella pizza and some pasta salad. I’d been making pizza every weekend since I cooked my first one, so the only challenge I gave myself was making pasta salad for the first time.

I googled for ideas but the best instruction I found was at Allrecipes: Five Steps to Perfect Pasta Salad. This recipe gives enough direction that I didn’t have to make any hard decisions, but is open enough that I could tailor it to suit my taste.

As the recipe’s title implies, it’s a five-step program. The formula looks like this:

The recipe goes on to give lists of options for kinds of pasta to use, the “key ingredients,” “intense flavors,” etc. I’ll let you follow the link to get all the details. (This recipe takes 4 pages to print in full.) But here are the items I chose:

For the pasta, I chose tri-color rotini.
For the key ingredients, I chose broccoli, zucchini, bell peppers, tomatoes.
For the intense flavors, I chose … one flavor: feta cheese.
For the onions & herbs, I chose nothing. I had to skip onions, and didn’t leave myself enough time to procure herbs.
For the dressing, I chose Newman’s Own Oil & Vinegar.

Had I more time and options I’d have added onions, sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts (which I did have and actually forgot to use), some kind of beans, perhaps some celery and fennel. But my five-step pasta, consisting of five ingredients (minus the pasta), tasted fantastic. After my guests consumed several bowlfuls, I luckily had enough left over to continue eating it for days.

I’d like to add one piece of information about the preparation: with one minute remaining in the pasta cooking time, I dumped the broccoli and zucchini into the boiling water. This is just enough time to bring them to a nice texture, and to turn the broccoli that great bright green color.

Several wrestling-fan thumbs up.

Vegetable garden 2009: decision time

The last time I broached the subject of vegetable gardening was on January 24. I haven’t made much progress since then.

However, today I finally pulled the trigger and ordered a boatload of seeds from Gurney’s Seed & Nursery, a seller with a pretty decent reputation for producing and selling quality seeds. It’s not quite time to get some seeds into the ground, but I’d like to have them all on hand, ready and waiting, when it is.

I still don’t have a blueprint for this year’s garden, but now I can tell you what will be planted:

California garlic
Yellow onion
Brandywine tomato
Beefsteak tomato
Roma tomato
Early Girl tomato
Chives
Carrot
Hot tabasco pepper
Banana pepper
Basil
Hot pepper mix
Eggplant
Zucchini
Mesclun – mild and tangy mixes
Arugula

Plus, the wild forest of parsley already growing. There are also several strawberry plants in the garden, but they didn’t yield a single edible berry last year. I haven’t yet decided what to do with them.

I’d like to plant the garlic strategically around the garden, as it’s supposed to ward off bugs. I may just kind of stick cloves into the ground at regular intervals around the perimeter and see what happens. This whole gardening experience has been an experiment in “see what happens,” a tactic that has worked pretty well so far. So it makes sense to stick with it.

I’m extremely eager to get this going. I’ve already all but sworn off purchasing tomatoes (they’re breaking my budget) and eggplants (I keep accidentally letting them go bad in my fridge). Which means I need to get my personal supply up and running.

Happy 7th birthday, Dazzle!

All morning, Dazzle slept in the sun, dreaming about her fun-filled afternoon.

Meanwhile, mom baked her a Peanut Butter Delight dog birthday cake. It was a peanut butter and carrot cake with cottage cheese frosting.

While the cake cooled, mom took Dazzle for a 1/2 mile run on the nearby Green Bay Trail, good for running with dogs because it’s straight and there are few distractions. Dazzle is new to endurance running; greyhounds are best at sprinting. We hope to work up to 2 miles eventually.

At 2pm, several friends tuned in to watch the party on our webcam. All three dogs enjoyed nearly half the cake, live on camera, Dazzle taking hers out into the hallway to eat (yes, the hallway is carpeted) and Tammy managing to get frosting on her ear.

Unfortunately due to a technical glitch there was no sound, and the video was not recorded. But Maple’s birthday is next month, and we hope to do better then.

The cake was VERY much enjoyed by all! It tasted good, in a healthy sort of way. Vegetarian to the core, and only a small amount of honey was used for sweetening. Happy birthday, MC Razzle Dazzle!

Tomatoes, parsley define my St. Patrick’s Day ‘09

A raise of hands, please: who knew parsley was perennial? Yeah, sure ya did, but I definitely did not. Thus, I have two rows of curly parsley popping up in my as-of-yet uncleaned vegetable garden bed, right where I left them last fall. It’s so exciting: I didn’t even have to lift a finger to grow parsley this year! Stunning, considering all the trouble I’ve had with parsley in the past.

Last year on this date I started seeding veggies indoors for what was to become my first vegetable garden. It turned out, based on 2008’s weather, anyway, that I started about a month too early. Moreover, a lot of what I seeded indoors did just fine when I later planted seeds directly into the ground, and my indoor seedlings just didn’t fare well overall.
 
So as of today I haven’t even purchased seeds. I haven’t cleaned up the garden bed, either, despite cleaning most of my other beds in today’s 75° weather, because I figured the veggie bed could use another couple weeks of fertilization from the dead leaves and last year’s leftover tomatoes.
 
Speaking of tomatoes, I am growing desperate to have my own tomato plants again! Last Saturday I inadvertently overpurchased tomatoes in a grandiose way. I bought $15 worth of tomatoes on the vine, which were reduced to $11 on sale, thankfully. These were to be used for the pizza sauce that I planned to make that day. (A friendly/chatty woman at the store asked me what I was going to do with all those tomatoes, and I told her that they would first be used for the pizza, and that I’d have no problem using whatever was leftover because I love tomatoes.) Alas, when I got home I found that I already had enough tomatoes in the fridge to cover the whole pizza project. So there I was with $11 worth of store-bought tomatoes; $11 is more than the total amount I spent on the 8 tomato plants I grew last year, which probably yielded hundreds of tomatoes. (Though $11 is quite a bit less than I spent on the tomato towers I then had to purchase to hold them up. My lands, they’re on sale today!) I was breaking out in nervous sweats wondering what I could make with all these tomatoes other than the same old pasta-topping or caprese salad that I seem to spend most of my tomatoes on recently.
 
Then I remembered I had an overabundant supply of onions as well (they were on sale for $1 per bag!) so I decided to just use them together. With feta cheese, which I was also desperate to use before it started to misbehave in my fridge. And so I created St. Patrick’s Day Tangy Tomato Salad.
 

This salad is delightfully tangy thanks to the onion, vinegar and feta. Depending on your taste, you may wish to use green onion or chives. I used yellow onion because that’s what I had. I love onion.

And no, there is nothing inherently St. Patrick’s Day-ish about this salad, except that March 17 is today’s date. So there.

All good things come to an end

On Sunday, March 8, 2009, I ate meat for the first time in six weeks.

My dad enjoys cooking on the weekend. His recycling bin looks a lot like mine used to: full of empty frozen dinner trays. So since he works during the week like a normal person, he eats a lot of convenience-type foods Monday through Friday, and then makes something fun, better tasting, and better for you, on Sunday. This week, he made seafood gumbo.

This was possibly the best dish he’s made. It was fantastic. I’ve had leftovers two days this week, and sadly I only have a tiny bit left.

Avoiding meat has been criminally easy for me. I really like meat and when I see it on TV I’m still attracted to the dishes; I’ll never be a person repulsed by meat no matter how cute the little sheep are or how unsustainable meat production is. But I don’t crave it. The things I crave are sugar and bread. I’m a carbohydrate fiend. I can have a refrigerator full of amazing leftovers and still make a run for store-bought cookies or candy and a loaf of bread. Just to eat by themselves. For dinner. That’s my drug, not of choice, but of my physiology. I hate it, but carbs are what give me the shakes.

Unfortunately, carby foods are allowed on a vegetarian diet, which is why I actually avoided going vegetarian in recent years. I figured I’d subsist on a diet of bread and pasta alone, and gain 100 pounds. This is why I’m trying so hard to learn to cook real vegetarian dishes containing real vegetables. I’m even willing to load them up with cheese, to an extent, to avoid a side of bread or whatever. Or even buying bread at all. In fact, I’m going to avoid buying bread for a while, because it’s become a problem again lately.

But I digress. I was saying that I’ve been able to avoid meat without a problem. The one category of meat I’ve found myself wanting, however, in the context of the dishes I’ve been cooking (for example, pasta) has been fish. Like a shrimp alfredo pasta … that one’s been calling to me. I can eat the alfredo pasta without the shrimp, but when I’m thinking of flavors I can add to it, shrimp is what comes to mind. It’s more difficult for me to come up with ideas for vegetables, because I just don’t like vegetables as much, and don’t yet know how to cook them.

So over this time that I’ve been experimenting with vegetarianism, I’ve considered the possibility that if I commit to anything, it may be pescetarianism. There are still issues with eating fish that I struggle with (overfarming, destruction of habitat, etc.), but in my mind thus far, the green/sustainability issues with seafood seem to be less than those associated with eating other meats. I may be wrong. I’m not an expert. But I’m pretty sure there is less abuse involved with raising/harvesting fish than with other animals.

And then, we can only do the best that we can do. Just about everything we do hurts the environment, and we have to make decisions about what we’re willing to do in order to meet sustainable ends and also maintain our quality of life. So you know, maybe pescetarian is the best I can do. We’ll see what happens.

But eating the seafood in the seafood gumbo would still allow me to say that I’ve been pescetarian for six weeks. Alas, the recipe called for chicken broth, and dad didn’t get out to the store in time to procure vegetable broth (which I’m sure would have worked fine) so I’ve officially eaten poultry. It’s kind of ironic that chicken broth did me in, since chicken is my least favorite kind of meat.