I Browned Almost 9 Pounds of Meat This Evening.

ADDENDA:
At yesterday's meeting, Ilsa yelled at me a bit for not restricting my calories enough, and for not eating enough vegetables. -sigh- I guess some childhood habits are harder to break than others.

I spent a good part of the evening browning 2 pieces / 8lbs of bottom round and making the marinade for sauer braten, which I will be contributing to a friend's Passover this weekend.

Went to a basics yoga class today after putting some hours in at the office. Did a shoulder stand (off the wall) for the first time, actually seeing (a very tiny bit of) progress there.

Culinary starts in less than a week. I'm excited/nervous/curious. Slowly putting together the new blog TBD....

BREAKFAST: 9:15am, good yogurt with honey vanilla raw nuts, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Milk spoiled, this was my only option. I like how short a shelf-life my unhomogenized organic milk has - it tastes fresher when it's fresh, and when it's bad, you know it right away.

LUNCH #1: 12:15pm, 2 samosas, pumpkin noodles, 1.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Midtown vegan lunch with the HVS.

LUNCH #2: 4:30pm, 1 large piece salad pizza, 1 large piece fresh moz pizza, orange soda, water, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
Went to Pie on 4th Ave (pizza by the inch) after yoga, just didn't want anything too healthy!

DINNER: 8pm, 1 pork chop, stir fried broccoli & mushrooms, chocolate soy ice cream, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5
Pork chop on the bone only marinated for an hour, only browned it for 3 minutes on each side then went for it - it's rareness would of scared most people, but it was SO juicy and delicious and simply porky. Stir fried the veg fast and hot in the wok with salt and sesame oil, and it came out crunchy and flavorful. No sauces, just the flavors of the main ingredients.

Hope avoiding a pasta/rice/potato and having a large serving of broc & mushroom will please Ilsa! :)

First Superhippy Bread, Now GRANOLA!!

ADDENDA:

The short bread has the illusion of being low sugar (1 cup butter, 2 cup whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup powdered sugar) but I had the worst insomnia last night, up till 2:30am. I suspect it was the late short bread.... had a carb-heavy lunch, aim for a high-protein dinner, try to have a sweets-free day....

The evening today brought a serious round of sugar-craving.

BREAKFAST: 10am, apple granola with good milk, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5
Found this new brand of granola during my trip to WholeFoods yesterday, looked like it may be developed for adult tastes, rather than the cloyingly sweet and industrial tasting stuff I've had in the past. Pretty good, tasted pleasantly oaty, and just subtly sweet. I guess I should go out and get some Birkenstocks?

LUNCH: 1pm, 3 samosas, brown rice, cold pumpkin noodles, cucumber salad, 2 bowls, hunger 4/5

Midtown lunch at Green Symphony with the HVS.

PM SNACK: 6pm, spinach salad with organic Italian dressing, 1 bowl

DINNER: pork chops in mushroom gravy with roasted broccoli, water, 2.5 bowls, hunger 4/5
Started marinating a pork chop yesterday that I split the long way (olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper), browned the hell out of it, then made a simple gravy in the pan by boiling up some sherry, vegetable broth, more garlic and a large pinch of flour for about 10 minutes. Used the Good Eats recipe for the broccoli. Didn't really pay much attention to amounts, just kind of threw stuff together. The gravy needs work, it was a little too thin in texture and flavor, and I should of sauteed the mushrooms and garlic before deglazing with sherry, but it was still a nice compliment to the juicy meat with a crisp brown layer.

While I was cooking, NPR radio had a story about the crap economy and how health tends to improve in bad times because people work less, do more exercise and cook at home more versus going out to restaurants. This pork chop meal wasn't quite restaurant quality, but it was definitely a step in the right direction - and the cost of the food was less than $10....

EVENING SNACK: 11pm, veggie booty, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
Sugar cravings kind of blurring with hunger, so grabbed a non-sweet snack...

Putting My House in Order

ADDENDA:
Woke up this morning at 7 after a restless night, grabbed the laptop on the floor and emailed work, saying I wouldn't be in today. Rather than feel crappy about work all day, I've decided to start putting my house in order now instead of 'later'. So far I've done some crucial fixes to my commuter bike, vacuumed and done the dishes, drano'd the sink and will soon set the over to auto-clean. I'm gonna shower, then update my resume and send it off to a headhunter who I've kept contact with over the past year. Will take 5 minutes to look at some job listings on line, then go see an afternoon movie with the retirees/trustfund babies/unemployed shmoes!

And tonight, I shall cook like I never cooked before. Went book shopping yesterday, and got an interesting cook book, which after picking it up realized I was in the same social circle with the authors years ago, back when I was young n' hip. Not sure what I'll make, but it's gotta be vegan and wheat/potato-free, in advance of the eventual HVS Chapter meeting in January...

BREAKFAST: 7:30am, good yogurt with honey, vanilla and raw nuts, hunger 3/5

AM SNACK: 11:45am, 1 slice superhippy bread with good homemade hummus, 33 oz bottle of seltzer, hunger 4/5
Seems aging a few days in the fridge takes the bite off the raw garlic, nice. Gotta hydrate or I'll feel weird or falsely hungry, gonna treat myself to some bubbly.

LUNCH: 1:45pm, 12 seared mixed dumplings, hunger 4/5
Ate them in the movies, very relaxing.

DINNER: 6:30pm, green salad, grilled curried tofu over brown basmanti with sauted broc, cipolinis and criminis, apple crumble & choc. gelato.
My first effort out of the veganomicon, not very good. The curry marinade tasted bitter, the tofu stuck to the grill. But the sauteed veg was delicious. This will not be the HVS Chapter meeting meal, but I do want to experiment more with pressing, grilling, baking and marinading tofu....

Stringbeans of My Father

ADDENDA:
As I was preparing dinner last night, I popped a raw string bean in my mouth and the taste-memories came flooding in. The bean tasted really fresh, and it's flavor really took over my mouth in a good way. I remembered walking around the supermarket with my dad, and he'd grab a bunch of the string beans and start munching on them as we walked through the market - he'd give me some, too. This was slightly unnerving, as we hadn't payed for them. I know the few times my mom came with us, this really annoyed her. But it was fun, it was something I was doing with my dad.

Usually with guests, my dad would steam string beans until their color popped, and put butter and salt on them. I never liked them, but I never really tried them, either.

BREAKFAST: 8am, conventional cornflakes with the good milk, hunger 3/5
Bought this milk at the farmers market directly from the producer instead of Wholefoods. It came in a thick glass bottle with a $1 redemption - they reuse their bottles - that's REAL recycling!

AM SNACK: 10am, 24 oz still water

LUNCH: 12:15pm, chickpeas, black lentils, spinach w/paneer, basmanti rice, nan bread, lettuce and onions, a few spoons of yogurt sauce, hunger 4/5
Got hungry early. Decided to aim for 2 packed lunches a week to start with, as I felt a little overwhelmed to begin. Start slow.

Spiciness made me desire sweets, but I waited. Desire went away, but now it's 2 hours later and I'm tired and feeling the urge for sugar again, but I'm not hungry at all....

PM SNACK: 4pm, 2 sesame pretzel sticks, hunger 4/5
From Tamar's stash, way too salty, but good. These minus the salt would rule the world.

DINNER: 8:30pm, small salad, fresh pasta with a little sauce, stirfried brocolli, mushroom and onion, apple crisp with homemade whipcream, 1 glass wine, an extra serving of apple crisp.
Had Keliy (our wedding photographer) over to deliver the pics, figured make a nice celebatory night and cook, too. Used a lot of wedding gifts through out the meal, plates, pots, wine. Especially the pasta making attachments to the mixer - it helped me make the pasta in half the time (still took an hour) but it came out so much better, firmer to the bite.

Not feeling gelato, so bought a cup of heavy cream and whipped it in the mixer with a bit of vanilla and honey, was really good, though next time I'll use less honey and vanilla. Weird texture, nothing like the chemically stuff that comes out of a can. But very delicious.

Cuffed

ADDENDUM: I just ordered a one-touch digital blood pressure wrist cuff from Amazon. After my dad's stroke, my parent's got an old school blood pressure cuff, with the inflation, the deflation, the needle going round. They took each other's pressure regularly and took mine. I wish I paid more attention to what they were doing and talking about, I wish I could talk to them about it now.

BREAKFAST: 7:15am, hot oatmeal and half a diet sprite, hunger 3/5. Hadn't made oatmeal since the winter, it's usually a cold weather food for me, but I was craving something heavy, and another bagel is a little boring. So I prepared it as I always do, with water, a dash of sugar and a dash of salt....hmmm. Just finished the Quaker tube, gonna look for an organic brand. And use the evaporated cane sugar, the sea salt, and maybe whole milk and the good butter to make it a real treat. The diet sprite AGAIN tasted a bit....fakey and thin. Not different, just realizing that after cutting off the diet coke, I don't particularly LIKE diet soda!! Weird. It was such a staple for me for so many years. Ilsa warned me this might happen, discovering stuff that I was in the habit of eating might be found distasteful upon cutting back on them and reflection.

AM SNACK: 10:15am, 25 oz of still water from the sippy cup. Hot day, road the good bike to work, going to leave early and shoot out to Coney & back. I just learned it's 4 miles door to door to work. Thats 40 miles on a bike a week, just for going to work! That's so cool!

LUNCH: 12:15, shrimp curry & basmanti, dal, one pakora, 2 small pieces of nan, water, hunger 4/5. Relaxed afternoon lunch with Erikka. Cheap n' tasty.

PM SNACK: 1:15pm, 3.5 oz dark chocolate bar, hunger 3/5. After lunch went to the Hershey's tourist trap store to buy a 'Cacao Reserve' bar - Consumer Reports named it #1 in dark chocolate, which surprised my chocolate-snob self. On one hand, it's friggin' Hershey and it contains both milk fat and milk, which means technically it's milk chocolate and not proper chocolate (properly snobby chocolate only uses cocoa butter as it's fat), but after eating it, I must say it was damn good, a nice balance of bitter and sweet, smoothness. As I'm slowly eating it, hoping not to like it, I thought of the 'mindful eating' document Ilsa gave me. Without purposefully doing it, I was paying close attention to what I was eating, how it was interacting with my mouth and taste buds, how it felt from touching my lips to going down the hatch - it really does increase the pleasure. Regardless, the chocolate was really good, but in more of a generalized 'dark chocolate' way - Jaques Torres chocolate is still more interesting and tastier. So there.

DINNER: 7:30pm, sauted brocolli and mushroom with seitan over brown basmanti, small green salad, chocotlate hagen daaz bar. Hunge 3/5. Was good, but not as good as the first time, too bad as Betsy was eating with me. Maybe overcooked teh broc a little. Seitan wasn't as yummy as I remember it, from when I was vegan. After the meal, I was unsatisfied. I craved.....meat?

PM SNACK: 9pm, small amount of onion rings, hunger 4/5. Remainder from the freezer, not as high in sodium as I thought, but still not a health food. At least it had whole onions, unlike that weird industrial onion ring stuff I ate the other day.

PM SNACK: 12 midnight, bagel and humus. hunger 4/5. -sigh-

PM SNACK: 12:45am. Popcorn fried in olive oil, a little sea salt. hunger 4/5. Just hungry. Should of had meat. Thought of eating something sweet, but not desiring sweet, oddly enough. A different kind of hunger.

Everything in the World is Salty.

ADDENDA:
Today I meet with Ilsa, so I need to recap the last couple of weeks, can't go in there with an empty head. Ofcouse, immediately after, I will be taking B to shmancy restaurant to celebrate our 2nd anniversary since our first date, where I will violate all sorts of rules and scripture. Actually, the restaurant local sources most of it's product, so it'll be a step above KFC.

I salted the brocolli yesterday. Exactly how much salt is a miligram? The low-salt cook book Ilsa gave me at my last meeting scares me a little - each recipe is obsessive about how much salt, down to measuring the trace amounts of salt in salt-free ingredients. EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD HAS SALT IN IT. I get it, let's move on. Plus, a lot of the recipes call for scary industrial things like 'low-salt bullion cube' and name some brand. I thought cooking means you use the unprocessed elements, and you use them like blocks to build something more than the sum of it's parts. Some of this low-salt cooking is more like low-salt preparing. Boiling dry pasta in salt-free water and throwing jarred sauce over it is preparing. Making pasta from flower and water by hand and throwing sauce over it you made yourself is cooking. I've been preparing for years, just like my mamma used to. I wanna cook.

My friend Tamar is going to ride the NYC Century with me in early September - she's not a dedicated cyclist, so this is a big deal for her. I would love to have her for company on a ride like this, so motivate her I promised that if she completed the century, I would take a month of yoga classes. I've never done yoga and think it's all a bit trendy and hyped, but she's just as hardcore about yoga as I am about cycling, and in September after the wedding, I'll have a head to focus on stuff more constructive than menus, guest lists and registries.

Rereading this blog, I don't know what I've learned these past few weeks...I guess my sweet tooth is larger than I thought, it took recording it open my eyes. My dad had a big sweet tooth, too, it lead him to diabetes in later life. Kicking diet coke was no big deal, don't think about it or desire it. Chocolate gelato, on the other hand....5 donut Sundays.....he he he.

I got broccoli and not asparagus yesterday because I was feeling lazy and never cooked asparagus before. I've seen veg like brocolli cooked on various food television shows and dealt with it before, but Asparagus is the great unknown...I've had it at restaurants, usually it's good, but....I gotta get out more.

BREAKFAST: 8:15 am, off-brand rice crispies with unhomogenized whole milk, hunger 4/5. A little insomnia last night, strong sugar cravings but knew it would keep me up longer. Couldn't sleep because felt excited about me and B's 2nd anniversary the next day, Tamar riding with me and yoga, good things at work. Woke up hungry, which is a nice feeling. You know you're alive. Fun to shake the milk, too. This was my first time drinking this milk, I only used it for pancakes before. Wow. It has this dairy flavor to it, and thickness to it, too. Sweet but not cloying.

LUNCH #1: 12:15am, 2 small trays of sushi, hunger 4/5. From the lobby shop of the building, absolutely horible, must of been sitting there for a few days. Just craving sushi. Did not use soy sauce. Reminds me of when I was a kid, was at some boyscout summer camp my older brother was attending, me and mom went on visiting day. Went into 'town' to a bar that had food. They mostly did burgers, but there was pizza on the menu. Both my brother and I desperately wanted pizza, but my mom warned us it was not wise to order pizza in a burger joint. We got it anyway, and despite our large appetites, could not eat most of it - it was disgusting. (I've since learned it unwise to order pizza anywhere except in the 5 boros and Italy) Don't order pizza in a burger joint and don't buy sushi in a corporate lobby.

PM SNAK: 20 oz still water

LUNCH #2: 3:45, falafel sandwich from kosher cart, hold the pickle, hunger 4/5. Funny, my stomach went from feeling queazy for hours after that suspicious sushi to hungry in the space of 5 minutes. Avoided a salty pickle, but the falafel balls themselves taste kinda salty, the same way the kasha did, but not as intense. Felt good to be hungry again.

PM SNACK: Didn't want to eat it, tried to resist, but there was a birthday in the office, tried not to go over, but unfortunately I like the people in my office. Was hoping to feel a little virtuous right before going to see Ilsa, oh well....

DINNER: 7:30pm, roasted pork loin with cheek, fragrant sausage, small amount of gnochi in butter sauce, heirloom tomato salad, fava and pecorino salad, few pieces of bread n' butter, water, 1 glass presecco, half a choclate & peanut butter tart with caramel icecream, hunger 2/5. Unfortunately that dumb cupcake destroyed my appetite, but this was STILL a fabulously tasty meal with a fabulously tasty woman, my 2nd anniversary with B. The only thing I didn't think was 5 stars was the desert, the tart was good but underwhelming.