SAHW

Healthy Living Update & a Few Thoughts on Holiday Eating

2011-11-21T09:00:00.001-08:00

As anyone who knows me or has read my last blog post knows, I've been trying low-carb eating as a way to control my blood sugar. I've lost 30 pounds since my surgery. Right now, I'm maintaining that weight loss.

I've discovered that my blood sugar readings get better the longer it's been since the surgery. The illness, the shock to my body of having the operation, and overall stress were all partly behind the super high readings I had back in June. However, I don't have normal blood sugar, so I do need to keep track of my diet, exercise, stress levels, etc. and keep taking the readings to make sure I'm on track. The past few days I've been noticing slightly higher blood glucose numbers, although still below my target number. That tells me I need to back off the total daily carb count a bit. If I want to lose more weight, I need to reduce the carbs significantly.

The holidays are super hard for people with special dietary needs. Holiday food doesn't fit most of the special diets many people are following. it's loaded with carbs, fat, sugar, gluten, nuts-basically everything that often people's health says they shouldn't eat. If you're trying to lose weight and don't have any health issues, you can decide to maintain over the holidays to allow yourself a few indulgences. But, if your overall health is at stake, relaxing your vigilance is not an option.

My body doesn't care if it's Thanksgiving or Christmas or my birthday or a holiday party or whatever. It's going to respond to the food I eat, my exercise level, the stress, etc. exactly the same as it does when it's not Thanksgiving or Christmas or my birthday or a holiday party or whatever. And that's the difference between being on a weight loss diet, as I have for a lot of my life, and working to maintain the best health I can. It's a different attitude. I can't tell myself, "I'll start the diet again on New Year's Day." Or even, "I'll start it again tomorrow." When faced with the temptation to eat more carbs than I should, I have to remind myself why I don't do that anymore.

The other problem is that, for the most part, the recipes I've found for low-carb eating are boring and unappealing. The carb count varies from super low-carb to "this is low carb?". The recipes in cookbooks for diabetics tend to be better in terms of quality, but way too high in carbs. When I ate the recommended diabetic diet, my blood sugar was way too high. This challenged me to find a way to eat well, while keeping my blood sugar within the range that will keep me healthy. I'm discovering that I can eat real food, including some foods that seemed to be automatically "off-limits", as long as I balance the carbs at the meal and throughout the day.

I realized I'd have to develop a new attitude. Moaning about what I "can't" eat anymore just makes me want to eat that food. I'm telling myself that I can eat it, but choose not to right now. Or I plan an appropriate serving size into my meal plan. There are tradeoffs. I can't eat high-carb foods in normal size servings without messing up my blood sugar. No super-size piles of stuffing and mashed potatoes. But I can eat some turkey skin on Thanksgiving, which is one of my favorite things. I can eat a tablespoon or two of the stuffing & mashed potatoes. I can eat a bite or two of dessert. It's a matter of choosing carefully and really enjoying what I eat. Again, it's that positive perspective that makes a difference.

With that attitude in place, I realized I'd have to adapt my recipes to cut the carb count. I'd have to plan my meals around a target amount of carbs and if one course is higher, the rest have to be lower. I know there's a big hype about eating complex carbs instead of refined carbs, but my blood sugar readings don't seem to care much what type of carb I'm eating. I choose mostly complex carbs because I like them better.

People keep talking to me about the glycemic index and glycemic load. They oversimplify it into "don't eat white foods". Ummm...cauliflower is white and it makes a wonderful low-carb puree. Brown sugar is not white and it can easily become a carb nightmare. Some foods that mess up my blood sugar are low on the glycemic index or have a low glycemic load. It's a complicated food plan to follow because what you eat with what affects the glycemic load. It's complicated to follow and there are way more foods they don't have the numbers on than foods on the list. It doesn't make enough of a difference to be worth the time spent working out the glycemic load of everything I eat and sticking to foods on the glycemic index list is super limiting. It's much easier to choose mostly complex carbs and keep track of the carb counts. That is working fine, so I'll stick with doing it that way.

Sometimes cutting the carbs in a recipe is hard. So I cut as many as I can. Then I cut the serving size down until the carb count fits my plan. I fill out the meal with low carb items and it's fine. The American Heart Association says to use meat as a condiment. That advice sends my blood sugar through the roof. So, I've turned it around. I use carbs as a condiment and thinking about it that way really helps keep it in perspective. It also helps me in figuring out how to revise recipes. I was making a pasta and peas dish, both of which have a lot of carbs. I substituted whole wheat pasta, reduced the amount of pasta and peas, and added cut up sausages. Even though the serving size ended up smaller, it was enough.

Eating out is much easier on a low-carb diet than it was on a low-fat diet. I love to get cheesesteak sandwiches and a salad. I take the meat, cheese, and vegetables off the bread. At a Mexican restaurant, fajitas without the tortillas work the same way. It's easy to tell the waiter not to bring the bread, or put it at the other end of the table if I'm with people who want it, because I remind myself of what I will enjoy instead of eating that bread. I can eat a bite or two of dessert, if the people I'm with get some and are willing to share, as long as the rest of my meal is low-carb.

There are days when I don't want to do this anymore. Those are the hardest days. I remind myself what the consequences of not doing it are and remind myself what good things I have to look forward to. And mostly I stay on track. No one is perfect, but somehow, it's easier when the readings remind me every day that what I'm doing is paying off. I noticed that if I take a break from measuring my blood glucose, I tend to restrict my diet too much because I don't have that number to reassure me that I'm doing OK. So, I take the readings and adjust as I need to in order to stay within my target range.

I'm cooking a pretty traditional Thanksgiving meal this week. I think that's why I decided to write this post. I wanted to give myself a pep talk to help me get through it without messing up my health. I'm fine with cooking food for other people that doesn't fit easily into my food plan. I'll figure out the carb counts and figure out my serving sizes and have a great meal. For us food people, Thanksgiving is first about the food because it takes a lot of planning to pull it off. But without other people to eat it with, it's not nearly as much fun. We're having around 10 people and I'm looking forward to enjoying the party.

Diets

2011-09-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

Although I don't want this blog to become a fitness & nutrition blog, I've been pretty focused on those things since my last post. Right now, fitness is pretty easy for me. Since I broke my arm and had major surgery this year, it consists of walking 2-1/4 miles, Monday-Friday. I can do that. It doesn't strain my still healing upper arm and shoulder the way a lot of other types of exercise would. It's also gradually strengthening my abdominal muscles.

Diet is another issue. It's much more complicated. So, I've been reading and doing research. Here's what I've concluded:

Some people get sick eating a vegan diet. Others get sick eating a low-carb diet. Yet others get sick eating a high-carb diet. Yet others can eat any of those, but specific foods make them sick.
Therefore, everyone should not eat the same diet.
However, no one should eat highly processed, refined flours, sugars, and junk food. I've not seen any research or indications that anyone is made healthy by eating those foods.
If you're eating the high-carb diet recommended by the major medical associations, you should make it a low-fat diet.
If you're eating the low-carb diet recommended by many diabetes specialists, you should make it a high-fat diet.
The jury is still out on whether saturated fats cause heart disease, especially since most saturated fats are not totally saturated. It's simply not that simple.
No matter what diet you choose, getting enough protein is important.
If you're eating vegetarian, you can do a low-carb diet. If you're eating vegan, you can't.

When I was in the hospital, drugged out from surgery, they kept sending people in with information about how to manage my diabetes. It kind of went in, but didn't really take hold, thanks to the drugs. When I got out and off the drugs, I read through the information they gave me. I went online and read everything the usual experts recommended. My reaction was, "Huh?"

The thing is that what they were telling me to eat was exactly what I was eating when I got the disease. Plus, since diabetes is a disease where your body doesn't handle carbs well, It didn't make sense to me that eating more of what my body didn't handle well was going to help me. "Well," I figured, "I'm not carb counting and keeping my carb intake even throughout the day." Maybe that's what makes the difference from what I was doing vs. what they're telling me to do. So I did that for a month. My glucose numbers were very stable in the normal to a bit high range. They only went into the diabetic range once-after I ate a very small baked potato. DAMN! Potatoes are one of my favorite foods.

Well, turning my fingers into pincushions wasn't giving me any new information, so I decided to take a break from testing. I'd learned that my sugar was a bit high in the morning. Completely normal after breakfast and lunch. And a bit high at bedtime, as would be expected because we eat a late dinner. I learned that my blood sugar hits its high point a bit faster than average-1-1/2 hours after eating, rather than 2 hours.

I also decided that since my numbers were a bit higher than I wanted them to be, the standard recommendation of high-carb, low-fat diet was not working. I decided to try what many diabetes experts recommend and go low-carb. However, all the research said that I should be monitored by my physician if I followed a low-carb diet. Even though I know it's a CYA, I think that's wise advice. But, I don't have a physician, so I decided not to do a program like Atkins where you immediately drop down to 20 carbs a day and gradually add them back. I decided to use my research and make up my own program.

This is what I decided to do:

No sugar.
No refined flour.
No potatoes.
Cut carbs in steps, starting with 90 carbs/day, spread out evenly.
Walk 5 days a week.

Results:

The walking is going well. I got back to 2 miles fairly quickly, then about a week later added another quarter mile. That's about all I can do right now, but I've gotten the speed up to an average of 3 mph.

I'm doing really well with the sugar, refined flour and potatoes. I have eaten a bite of my husband's dessert and a couple of french fries. It's getting easier to "just say no".

I've dropped down to an average of 70 carbs/day. I wasn't trying to drop to a lower level. I just seem to end up there. It's as if my body prefers that level of carbs. I'll reassess the number of carbs I'm aiming for after I start measuring my blood sugar level again.

I'm having an interesting reaction to the low carb diet. When you read about low-carb dieting they always say you don't get hungry. I don't think that's accurate. I think it's more accurate to say that you get full. On the high-carb, low-fat diets I'd finish eating my portion and want more. With the low-carb diet, when I'm finished, I'm full. When I was on the high-carb, low-fat diets I'd want to eat when I wasn't hungry. With the low-carb diet, after I've eaten I don't want food again until I'm physically hungry. I actually know when I'm hungry and when I'm full. It's really, really hard to eat too much. My stomach just says NO to more food. That's a real revelation to me because my biggest complaint my whole adult life is that I don't know when I'm full and when I'm hungry and I thought that was why I overate. Hmmm...maybe not. Maybe I was just eating the wrong foods for my particular body's needs.

I've lost 7 pounds. Weight loss isn't my goal, although I hope it will be a side effect of what I'm aiming for, which is good blood sugar control. However, I don't know what my blood sugar levels are yet. I wanted to give my body a few weeks to adjust to my new way of eating before I measured them so I plan to measure the first week of October.

Medical Care--or the lack thereof

2011-08-24T22:09:00.000-07:00

I'm so angry and scared I can't find the words to say what I feel right now. I keep wondering whether what happened to me is how the American public really wants people to be treated. We have millions of unemployed people who don't have health care, since most health insurance is through people's employment. We have millions more working people who don't have health care because their employers don't offer it. Somehow we have to fix it, but I don't see how and certainly not in time to help me.

I recently had surgery. They diagnosed me with type 2 diabetes. They said I didn't need medication. I need follow-up medical care to try to keep me off medications. They sent me a referral letter and I called. The registration clerk told me the referral was for the classes I already attended. She offered to make an appointment with a pharmacist. I told her I didn't see why I needed to talk with a pharmacist since I don't need medication at this point. She told me they don't offer ongoing care for people who aren't on medication. I can get medical supplies to test my blood sugars and take all the healthy living and education classes they offer and attend the diabetes support group.

She said that I could get a primary care physician to work with me. I got the number from her and called. The clerk who answered that phone told me some garbage that made no sense about them redoing the clinics so no doctors are taking new patients right now. I wondered if I had insurance or cash if that would have been the case, but I saw no reason to ask because she'd say whatever she'd been told to say. Someone on Yelp posted that they got the same story and the post was over a year ago. The clerk said if I go to outside clinics there's no guarantee that they'd take the program I'm on. I got the message. If you don't have outside insurance or the money to pay, you don't get care unless you need something that specifically requires a doctor. In my case, that would be medications that need to be prescribed.

Right now my disease is barely started. My numbers are not in the "You're not diabetic" range, but they're pretty stable and mostly in the lower range of where you'd be diagnosed as diabetic. If I could get individualized help to tweak what I'm doing to try to keep it under control and improve those numbers, I may not need medication for a long time. But what do I do without that help?

My research is leading me to the same brick wall. At some point, all the book authors, medical web sites, etc, all say to discuss various aspects of your care with your doctor or health care team because they have to be personalized to how your body is responding to your efforts to treat the disease. How do you personalize it when you have to be your own doctor and you don't have the medical degree and medical experience and access to a lab to test your blood regularly?

And back to my original question-Is leaving people to get sicker to make them need medication so they need to see a doctor to prescribe it, rather than helping people stay healthy and off medication, really what we want to do? Apparently, the answer is yes. When you don't have insurance, people ask why didn't you go to the doctor before it got this bad? Or get angry that you went to the emergency room because what you have isn't life-threatening. What else can you do when no doctor will treat you until you get sick enough to need the emergency room or, if the hospital has it, a clinic for immediate needs that aren't life-threatening?

Changes

2011-08-16T10:04:00.000-07:00

This year has been about change. Life is always changing, but this year things have been turned on their head more drastically than any other time except for the other real biggies-getting married and having my children. This year I broke my arm-alerting me to the osteoporosis that I didn't know had started to develop. Several months later, I needed surgery and they discovered I've begun developing type 2 diabetes. That's a total life-changer. While still getting my head around that, we moved in with friends. I'm feeling a need to sort through it all in my head and I do that best by writing about it.

I've been researching the subject and finding that they don't, in fact, really know what to do. The literature seems to assume people won't do the diet, exercise and weight loss that's needed to perhaps avoid needing medication, at least for a long time, and to avoid the nasty complications of the disease. It's a progressive disease and, like every other physical process, your body's ability to produce/use insulin gets worse as you age. it's likely that even if you manage it for a long time without medication, eventually you may need it. But some doctors say they always prescribe medication, just in case you don't do what you're supposed to do. They figure they can always stop the medication.

But it seems to me that sets you up to fail. Plus, using the medication alters your numbers, so you really don't know what they would be if you didn't take the medication. Everyone is a bit different, so you have to tweak their advice based on your own body's reaction to what you eat and how much you exercise. When I was in the hospital, the doctors said I'd just begun to develop it, so they recommended I start with diet and exercise and losing weight.

To that end, I'm monitoring my blood sugars to start to figure out my body's pattern. I'm following the carb counting diet recommended by the dietician. I'm using Weight Watchers to keep track of appropriate portion sizes. And I'm walking the track every morning. I can do a mile. I could walk farther, but my post-surgery abdominal muscles aren't up to it yet. I'm hoping to build back up to walking an hour and aiming for at least 3 miles. None of that is especially difficult. It's doing all that stuff every day, all the time, that can burn you out. Keeping accurate records is hard for me because it's tedious and time-consuming and I get bored and don't want to do it. But without the records, I'd have no idea what's working and what isn't.

The hardest part is the feeling that I'm pretty much on my own due to our broken health care system. I haven't yet seen a doctor about the diabetes, although I'm in the middle of the diabetes education classes. In order to see a doctor, I had to get the business/insurance stuff dealt with first and that took much longer than it should have. That's finally done and I'm calling this morning to make an appointment.

The blessing is that the woman we moved in with has had type 2 diabetes for years and she's been super helpful as I've started to learn how to live with this disease. She knows so much, but she waits for me to ask her for help because she knows I need to be ready to hear what she's learned. It's not just a physical disease. It affects you mentally and emotionally, too.

I think the hardest thing for me mentally and emotionally is that I knew it was in my family history, so I've always tried to exercise regularly and eat healthy food. I've not been able to sustain weight loss because of the emotional eating, but I can't just give up and quit because of past failures. I've learned a lot from those failures and hope putting what I've learned to good use will help.

However, in the long run, the weight and the genes won out. I'd like to think I managed to stay healthy until I was almost 60 because of my attention to my health, but who knows? My grandfather's family has a lot of people with diabetes in it, including him. My aunt also had it. She died of kidney failure. She seemed to do less of what she needed to do as time went on, which was probably burnout. That's the lesson I'm taking. I'm not going to pretend it's going to go away or that it's a mistake or that I can ignore it and be OK, somehow. I'd rather be like my grandfather who lived well into his 80s and he was diagnosed much earlier in his life than I have been.

Need a Techie Guru's Help

2011-08-11T17:35:00.000-07:00

We've set up three computers in our recent move. I almost hesitate to say that the SJCO Mac, my work computer, is the only one that works properly when connected via the wireless network to the internet because I don't want unhelpful comments like, "Just replace your PCs with Macs" because that's not a viable solution for our situation. Neither do I want a PC vs. Mac war. So, please limit your comments to suggestions I might actually be able to use to fix the problem. Thanks. On to describing the problem:

Paul set up his computer and checked his email. When he tried to go to any site not connected with Google, the sites wouldn't load. He did get Craigslist to load, once, but after he shut the computer down and rebooted it would no longer load. It doesn't matter what browser he's using.

I set up the office Mac and, once the first page loaded, which took longer than normal, everything worked perfectly.

When Paul set up my desktop computer, I experienced the same problem he's having with his laptop. My computer will not load any pages except gmail, etc.

Here's where it really gets weird. Paul hooked up his laptop using a LAN cable and it worked perfectly. When he unhooked it and tried it wirelessly again, the problem returned.

Anyone ever heard of this? Anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you all for taking the time to read and consider our problem.

Fundraiser Dinner is Coming Up Soon

2010-09-28T08:06:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the year, our church youth had a fundraising dinner. A group of ladies paid a lot of money for me to cook them a dinner with the main course being Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon. I'm making the dinner in the beginning of November, so I'm recipe testing everything throughout the next month to make sure all the flavors go well and I like the way the recipes turn out.

The dinner will be a lot of fun. Paul is going to don his tux and play waiter. He's also gathering the music and setting it up to run in the background. I know what I want to do for decorations, which are very simple and won't take a long time to do. That's a good thing because once I get in cook mode, it's hard for me to focus on the ambiance. The meal is for eight people. My current menu is:

Creamy Beet Soup-half made from red beets and half made from golden beets: I'm not sure whether I'll pour them both into the bowl at the same time to make it half-and-half or pour one into a small glass then top it with the other. I'm going to try it both ways and see which one tastes better and works better for presentation with the salad. The other issue is whether or not I need my bowls for something else. I only have eight of each size dish/bowl and I don't want my guests to have to wait while I wash dishes between courses.

Fall Salad: I'm testing the salad with Asian Pears, walnuts or pecans or almonds, mushrooms, spinach, and either feta, blue, or goat cheese. The dressing is a honey-poppy seed dressing. I'm substituting extra-virgin olive oil for the canola. I'm not sure which vinegar I will end up with. I'm testing pomegranate champagne, citrus champagne, champagne, and white balsamic. I'm also thinking maybe lime juice would work better than vinegar. But I want to taste them before I choose. I'm also considering the mustard. I have a Maple-Champagne mustard that I think would be very nice. I often think recipe writers get boring and just automatically grab the Dijon. Dijon is a very nice mustard, but there are a lot of others out there you can use to vary the flavor.

Herb & Onion Bread: People like bread with soup and salad, plus they like to mop up the sauce in the stew. So I'm doing an herb and onion bread I can make in advance. The herbs will complement the flavors in the soup and the stew.

Julia Child's Boeuf Bourgingnon: Because of my work schedule, it would be great if this recipe could work in my crock pot. So, I'm making it this week in the crock pot and if it's not as amazing as when it cooks in the oven, I'll use the oven for the party. I've made it before, so I have a benchmark to test it by. The main issue with the crock pot is that you end up with more liquid, so getting it to thicken properly is the main problem.

Side dishes: I'm doing a simple green bean saute with bacon and garlic, topped with crispy shallots. Since the stew is pretty soft, texturally speaking, I wanted some crunch in the veggies. And the green beans look nice with the brown stew.

Thinking about the bland color of the stew led me to a pretty nontraditional starchy side dish. The traditional is boiled potatoes or noodles, and they're white. The stew is brown. The plate looks boring. So I chose for my other side an unusual dish called Sweet Potato Kisses. It's mashed orange-flavored sweet potatoes piped with a star tip onto an orange slice. The shape resembles a Hershey's kiss, thus the name. They're browned under the broiler and dusted with powdered sugar. I'm thinking the sweet potato color will be wonderful.

I'm not sure the orange flavor will blend well with the stew. The palate in my brain says it should be a nice contrast. But, if upon tasting them together, I find that it clashes, I'll change the flavors of the mash. I'm thinking apples with maple syrup instead of sugar may be a good substitute, if I want to keep the emphasis on the sweet in the sweet potato. I can substitute precooked apple rings for the orange slices. If the emphasis on the sweetness turns out to be the problem, I'll do savory flavors and top them with a very fine dust of hard cheese--an Asiago, Parmesan, Romano or dry Jack.

If I decide that the sweet potatoes just won't work and use noodles or traditional mashed potatoes for my starchy side, I'll do baked tomatoes with a flavored bread crumb topping to add more color to the plate. If I don't want to do an additional dish, I'll add tomatoes to the green bean saute or do braised green beans with tomatoes instead of the saute. The braise can be made further ahead of time, but the saute has more crunch.

I'm leaning toward adding tomatoes to the saute as my backup plan. Doing the braise further ahead of time isn't as much of an issue with this meal, since almost everything is done ahead of time. The only last minute items are piping and broiling the sweet potatoes, assembling and dressing the salad, and the green bean saute. All the prep can be done in advance. Then it's just getting it on the plates and serving. Plus being aware of the timing so people don't feel rushed, but aren't annoyed because the food is coming out too slow. On to the final dish.

Dessert: I'm doing a very spicy gingerbread with a lemon curd cream topping. This is one of my favorite recipes. It uses fresh ginger and freshly ground black pepper, which gives it a bit of a bite. It's a wonderful contrast with the lemon topping. I found a recipe that makes the topping from scratch. I have a recipe that uses jarred lemon curd. I've noticed that different brands of lemon curd act differently in the recipe. Some of them blend nicely with the whipped cream and some seem to break down the cream and I end up with a thick lemon sauce. It tastes good, but isn't the texture I'm looking for. And both the gingerbread and the lemon topping recipes were from David Lebovitz (but he didn't write the cookbook I got them from), which is why they're so good. He's a genius at doing recipes that work for a cook in a home kitchen with home kitchen equipment.

Tonight I'm testing the beet soup and fall salad. We're having leftover chicken and baked potatoes, so I can focus on cooking my test recipes. I'm going to try the salad two different ways tonight. And continue with different combinations until I've found the one I want. Maybe it will be one of the two I do tonight and I won't need to test further. We'll see.

Game Night 1-Final Menu

2010-09-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

Children never believe you when you tell them that when they grow up they don't get to do whatever they want to do. Hence, my plan is on hold. I've decided Game World Dinner Night will be on the weekend-Friday, Saturday or Sunday, whichever life allows me to do. This week, I'd originally planned for tonight, but my three errands to do this morning turned into an all-day marathon because my mom needed us to help her with her errands.

I started this post way back at the beginning of the month. Since then, the folks at Zynga have made some changes in Cafe World that I'm not enjoying. So, I'm not playing anymore, which kind of makes it hard to do my whimsical idea. Except I have some friends who are still playing, so maybe I'll just help them with their games and not worry about finishing the catering jobs for myself.

I'll be working on the recipes for this menu a little at a time. When I get them the way I want them, I'll put them all together in a meal.

The Final Menu

I'm calling it: Italian Pancetta-Provolone Burgers

Burgers:

Burger
- lean ground beef
- pancetta
- provolone cheese
- sun-dried tomato pesto
- whole wheat semolina buns w/black olives

Pasta Caprese Salad
- whole wheat orzo pasta
- heirloom tomatoes
- fresh mozzarella cheese
- home-grown purple basil
- roasted garlic yogurt-mayo aoli

Caesar Salad w/a Twist or Two
- Traditional Caesar ingredients
- Mushrooms
- Pickled Peppers
- Stuffed Green Olives

Dessert
- Gianduja Gelato
- Very Vanilla Biscotti

Notes:

The Buns:

I'm basing my recipe on a semolina flour bun in a cookbook called Burgermeisters by Marcel Desaulniers. The main change I'm making is to substitute whole wheat flour for some of the bread flour. This will likely mean adding a little more liquid, since whole wheat flour tends to absorb more liquid than white flour. The other change I'm making is to add asiago cheese in the dough and on top, as a garnish.

I made the buns and discovered the recipe needs some tweaking. It came out a bit dry, but that may be due to my addition of white whole wheat flour. Next time, I'm going to start with a bit more water. I'm also going to add another tablespoon of olive oil to the dough, which I think will improve the texture.

The picture in the cookbook resembles a crusty French roll, but the instructions neglect the step of using a pan of water to create steam in the oven. Another method to create steam is to squirt the bread with water, but I've found that the pan of water works better. Regardless of what method you use, you don't get that crust without some steam.

So, before I make the complete menu, I need to work on the recipes.

One recipe that needs no work, however, is the Gianduja Gelato. This is a hazlenut milk chocolate gelato. The hazlenuts are used as a flavoring, so the ice cream ends up being super creamy. I made that recipe the same day I made the buns. It's amazing, as are all of the other recipes I've made from my favorite ice cream cookbook. It's The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz.

Planning

2010-08-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

Although I keep a well-stocked pantry and can usually cook a meal without needing to run to the store for one specific ingredient, I won't be able to do Game World Dinner Night meals without plenty of planning. I've been thinking about my bacon cheeseburger and how I want to do it.

The first thing I thought about is what a bacon cheeseburger consists of. The standard diner burger is bun, burger patty, bacon, cheddar or American processed cheese, lettuce, tomato, red onion, and sweet pickles. I'm not making that burger. I'm making an homage to that burger because I don't particularly like the traditional diner bacon cheeseburger. I never order it when I eat out. There are too many more interesting burgers on restaurant menus these days.

I'm starting with flavors I'm in the mood for. I considered Mexican, Asian and Italian. Asian doesn't really go with bacon and cheese, so I'll use those flavors in another meal. I've been eating a lot of Southwestern spicy food the past week, so I decided to go Italian.

I come from an Italian background. My Italian-born grandmother was a superb cook, but alas, not really a teacher, so I only have the memory of the food she made, not the recipes. Traditional Italian flavors include garlic; basil; tomatoes; olive oil; and various cheeses, particularly Parmesan, mozzarella and provolone. When Americans think "Italian" they first think of pizza and pasta, particularly spaghetti and meatballs with tomato sauce. These days, pesto and Alfredo sauce are also common.

I could make a pizza burger or a calzone, but that strays too far from the original diner burger and defeats my purpose in doing this challenge. I want to make a bacon cheeseburger with a twist, but it has to be a burger on a bun.

Baking bread is one of my passions, so no store-bought buns for my burger. I'm thinking either a bun with semolina flour, which is what they make pasta from, or cornmeal, which is what polenta is made from. The final choice will most likely depend on the other flavors in the burger and on whether I do a pasta salad or a polenta dish as a side. The other Italian ingredient I plan to use in the bun is a hard cheese--Parmesan, asiago, or pecorino romano. I'm leaning toward asiago, which you can get as a hard cheese, which would be lovely grated in the dough, and as a softer cheese I can shred and top the buns with.

The burger itself is easy. Some cookbook writers use blends of meat. I have one recipe that's actually a grilled meatball, and it's not my favorite. I like grilled meat without eggs, bread crumbs, and other binders that are used in meatballs to prevent them from falling apart while they simmer for hours in the tomato sauce. The burger will be made from a simple lean, but not super lean, ground beef to which I will add Italian flavors.

Toppings come next. One no-brainer for me is to replace the lettuce with fresh basil, since Paul has a great container herb garden growing on our terrace. I'm replacing the bacon with pancetta. The cheese is a sticking point. I can't decide whether I want to make a pasta salad with fresh mozzarella and tomatoes or use the mozzarella in the burger. If I do the pasta salad, I'll top the burger with provolone.

The remaining ingredients are red onion, tomato, and sweet pickle. I don't think the sweet pickle will go very well with the Italian flavorings. However, I have a jar of pickled peppers leftover from an antipasto platter. I can use the red onion with sun-dried tomatoes in a pesto to replace the traditional ketchup/mayo/mustard condiments that really won't work with my burger. I'll also add the pickled peppers to the pesto because if I slice them and lay them on top of the burger, they'll tend to fall off. Things falling off my sandwiches is one of my pet peeves when I eat in restaurants and I try to create mine so people can eat them with their fingers and not have bits land on their shirt front.

I think I've got the basics for the burger. It meets my goals of making a burger on a bun with the same type of ingredients as the diner burger and using flavors I prefer to the original--the Italian twist. In my next post, I'll be figuring out the side dishes and refining the herbs and spices in the burger and pesto.

The following post will be devoted to dessert, which is a challenge because it seems the only things people can come up with are tiramisu and more tiramisu, with a side of spumoni ice cream or a canolli. Occasionally you might find a panna cotta on a menu. I need to do research because I know Italians make more than those four things for dessert and I want to do something a bit different from the usual thing. I can't look to my background, though, because my grandmother made American desserts like peach pie. The only Italian dessert I remember her making is grispelli, a fried-dough topped with powdered sugar that's like a doughnut, except you drop spoonfuls of batter into the hot oil. When it's done it looks like two attached balls of dough with little bits hanging on around the edges.

A Whimsical Idea

2010-08-24T19:10:00.001-07:00

I had a whimsical idea, which is precisely why I like it. It's a purely for fun idea. It lets me play in my kitchen. And I can't think of anything I'd like to do more. It's not serious, like my special project. And I can do it without a lot of planning or designing and creating a web site. So, I'm going to change the look of this blog to a more whimsical one, just so it fits a bit better. Besides, all that green is hard on my eyes.

I'm a big fan of social network games. I don't care whether you like or don't like Farmville and its cohorts. I think there's room in the world for people who like to play and room for those who don't. When Facebook added the ability to hide apps without hiding everything my friends post, that solved the "you're game is spamming my page" problem. If you don't like to play, hide the app and don't whine about me and my friends enjoyment. I'm sure you do things for fun that don't interest me and that's fine.

I'm currently playing Cafe World, with a small group of people who play occasionally. A lot of people I know play Farmville. And some have discovered Frontierville. A lot play other games, but I haven't explored many others because I don't have time. While playing, I get some time to think while I wait for the game to finish various things or load pages, and so on. I was playing Cafe World when I started wondering what the food you make for the cafe would be like in real life.

I thought, "Why don't you try making it?" I couldn't think of a reason not to, so I'm going to slowly cook my way through the cookbooks and recipes in the games I play. And using the food you grow in Farmville or grow/collect in Frontierville. Some things are purely imaginary, so I'll have to come up with an "Earth equivalent". I doubt I can summon Mystic Pizza or bring Sirius Sorbet down from outer space. I also doubt my ability to find bear meat and some of the other things used on the frontier in this game that imagines a more palatable frontier than it was really like.

My schedule doesn't have time available to do something as ambitious as cook one recipe every day. Many of the dishes will have to be created by me. Others will have to be researched because I have no idea how to cook them, or even if they're real dishes. Some, like the baked goods in my Farmville Bakery, have weird combinations of ingredients and it will be a challenge to figure out how to use them in a way that creates a dish worth eating.

I decided that Saturday night will be Game World Dinner Night. I'll cook one dish from one of the games I'm playing. To help keep track of them, I'm going to create a schedule that rotates through the games, cooking or baking the dishes used in each game. Farmville and Frontierville have the added interest of growing crops and fruit trees. I want to use those fruits, grains, vegetables, herbs and spices in my finished dishes. I hope to use as many as I can, skipping only those that are not easily available.

The other criteria is that I don't want to just cook the standard "fast food" type dish that is often what appears to be the basis of the images they use. The hash browns in Frontierville look like a breakfast hash brown patty from Mickey D's. And the macaroni and cheese is the orange stuff from a box we all grew up with. I don't cook that way and I don't eat that way. So the challenge is to make the food the way I'd make and serve it if I were running a real restaurant, farm, or feeding my family on the frontier.

The first recipe you get in Cafe World and the first one in their cookbook is a simple bacon cheeseburger. It's on a plain bun with a slice of orange cheese, lettuce, and tomato. It's amusing that the cover of Bon Appetit this month has a hamburger that looks like the one in the Cafe World cookbook. But it's probably nothing like the hamburger the Cafe World designers were thinking about when they created their graphic. Bon Appetit's hamburger has three different cuts of beef, beef suet, and bone marrow in it. Plus red miso. Cheddar cheese. Tomato. Red onion. Watercress instead of lettuce. And a recipe for Red Vinegar pickles and spiced ketchup to go with it. But, interestingly, the buns are not made from scratch.

I cook somewhere in between those two extremes. I'm obviously not a person who doesn't care about the quality of her food, happily scarfing down the latest offering from the local fast-food joint. Nor am I a pro chef looking for the ultimate, perfect burger. I'm somewhere in the middle, a foodie home cook who wants to make food that's made from fresh ingredients, that can be made by a home cook without equipment you can only get at restaurant supply stores, and that tastes as good as I can make it.

Looking at the calendar, my first Game World Dinner Night will be Saturday, September 4. The menu will be Bacon Cheeseburger with appropriate accompaniments. I will post my recipes as I develop them. And my son lent me his old camera, so I can post pictures. YAY!!

Mishucalanza

2010-08-08T07:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't had time to post much lately, so this post is a mishucalanza of topics.

Birthday Parties for Kids

My husband and I were at Santana Row recently. We saw a white limo driving down the main drag. That's not unusual. People cruise Santana Row in exotic cars; cars with thumping music that screams, "Look at me;" and the regular folks, in their regular cars, cruise around seeking the elusive parking place. The new parking garage has helped tremendously with the latter, especially if you're willing to park at the top. But, I digress.

The limo had a sign on the windows in pink writing. It said, "Happy 8th Birthday!" Peeking out of the moon roof were several little girls. Obviously, a ride in a limo on your eighth birthday is not over-the-top in some circles. But how do you top this kind of excess, year after year? And how do you instill the idea that it's nice, and special for a special occasion, but you're not entitled to this? And in this economic climate, how do you teach children who are raised with this level of expectation about material goods that it can all go away with one sentence: "I'm sorry, but we're laying you off?" How do you give children this kind of excess and teach them life's realities? How do they learn to cope when their every whim is granted? Or when they know you have the resources to grant it, but won't? I'm glad I didn't have to deal with those questions, but I wonder sometimes whether parents who do even ask them.

My Secret Project

I'm slowly making progress with it. I think I have a name. I need to do a bit of searching with other starting points besides Google, but it's based on something we made up as a family and I've never heard it used by anyone else, so it's likely no one else has anything with a similar name. I have a logo, too. It's in my head, but I know what it's going to look like. And, I borrowed the camera David's not using so I can practice taking photos for the blog.

I need to design the look of the site. I need to figure out the scope of it and create a backlog of posts. I need to figure out a realistic schedule for new posts. And I need to launch it. It may take a while, but I have a reasonable plan. The main hitch is how much time I have, since my work schedule is not steady. Sometimes I'm really swamped and other times it's slower so I have more time to spend on personal projects.

Vegan Food

I have a cookbook called The Conscious Cook by Tal Ronnen. It has amazing food in it. I am looking forward to trying a lot of the recipes and techniques taught in the book. They look absolutely wonderful and with our budget taking a nosedive as Paul's income becomes his unemployment check until he finds another job or builds that business he's working on, we need to cut back on meat and dairy, since they're the most expensive things I buy. I don't want to cut the overall quality of ingredients I use, so using the most expensive ingredients less often, or in smaller quantities, whenever possible, will allow me to cut the total amount we spend. We're going to eat more vegan and vegetarian meals.

On the other hand, the book also highlights some of the reasons, aside from the fact that I like honey, meat, fish, poultry and dairy, why I don't want to eat exclusively vegan. He uses a lot of food I consider "fake food" because he's trying to mimic haute cuisine without using any of the above list of ingredients. I'm not talking about foods like the cashew cream or cheeses made from nuts he includes recipes for. I'm talking about purchased products like "meat" made from wheat or soy. It seems to me that vegan food should be a celebration of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds, not an attempt to mimic the omnivore diet so as to convince people they can switch to a vegan diet without substantially changing the way they eat.

It's been my experience that foods created to substitute for other foods usually fail because they taste like a pale imitation of the original, or are simply completely unpalatable. Something is always missing. Nonfat mayo or salad dressings taste awful. Low-fat and nonfat cheeses are like rubber. But people convince themselves they're good because they think they're getting health benefits from eating those foods. As they eat them, they forget what the real thing tastes like.

But I'm not sure that we really know what a healthy diet looks like. There are a lot of people that make a lot of money selling us on the health benefits of the fake food they're trying to get us to buy. Yet people thrive on a wide variety of foods, including many that are on the experts' current hit list. As long as researchers take the easy way out and study nutrition by taking food apart and studying individual components, they'll never really know the answer to "what's a healthy diet?" because we eat foods in combination and that makes a difference.

Case in point--the glycemic index thing. When you eat a food high on the glycemic index chart by itself, it digests quickly, creating a spike in your blood sugar levels. However, if you eat them in combination with other foods, particularly adding a bit of fat, it slows down the digestion of that food and you don't get that huge spike. So, as an example, the "rule" that you shouldn't eat potatoes because they're high on the glycemic index is not accurate. The rule should be, don't eat a plain baked potato all by itself. Eat it as part of a meal, particularly one that includes some fats. Perhaps our penchant for adding butter and/or sour cream to baked potatoes shows instinctive nutritional wisdom on our part, but we tend to go overboard and put too much. So we overreact and instead of putting a smaller amount, we decide we should forego it altogether.

An example of "fake food" vs. the real thing: I read recently that when you eat salads with no-fat dressing, you don't get the full complement of nutrients from the vegetables when your food is digested. But when you use regular dressing, you do. And again, I think the problem people have when they use any dressing is the amount they add. One other thing that I think makes a difference is making it yourself because when you buy a bottle of salad dressing, it doesn't taste that good, so you tend to use a lot of it. When you make a vinaigrette, which takes about five minutes, it has more flavor, so you can use less and be satisfied.

So maybe the future will look a little like Woody Allen's film, Sleeper, where he wakes up and all the food that was considered bad for you is now considered healthy. However, I doubt we're ever going to get to his exaggerated prediction where vegetables are unhealthy. Good thing because vegetables are amazing. I think the real key to eating healthy is to prepare food from raw ingredients as much as you can. And carefully choose those you do buy prepared, like sun-dried tomatoes, roasted red peppers, olives, and so on.

Posting Progress

2010-07-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

Project Progress

I've done several things in the last couple of days that will help me move forward with this project.

First, I did some brainstorming by myself. Then I got some ideas from Paul. And I called David and asked him if he, Chris, and Ann, and any of their compatriots would be willing to get together with me for a brainstorming session. I'm starting to get some ideas about the scope this project can take. It won't all happen at once, but I will add things in stages, depending on whether anyone is interested.

Second, I discussed with a friend some ideas for researching whether anyone else is doing anything like this, and if yes, where's my niche? What's different from what I want to do compared with what's already out there? Based on his suggestions, I did some research and found some useful information. I'm not finished with the research. I need to really get creative with search keywords, if I'm going to do a really thorough job.

Third, I realized I need to start a notebook for ideas and planning, plus a file for the computer files that go along with this idea. I made a file on the computer, but haven't done the notebook, yet. That's most likely going to happen this evening or tomorrow, depending on whether I need to help a friend with her computer set up or not.

Other Topics--after all, this blog wouldn't be a mishucalanza if I didn't post on more than on topic.

I found this template and I really like the way it looks. I may not keep it, though, because the gorgeous green text is a bit hard on my eyes after reading it for a while. On the other hand, just reading one post may not be too bad. If I can figure out how, I may change it to white or a lighter green.

I've been reading various interesting books lately. I've been reading Geneen Roth's books about emotional eating and Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. The two together kind of mingled around in my brain and I realized that one of the main reasons we don't achieve our goals is that we set them up using rational, logical systems. We create a goal and a projected time line and figure out the steps we need to take to get there and think we're done.

But if we don't consider the emotional component of the goal, we're likely not to complete the steps. And then we get very confused and upset with ourselves. We think we're a failure because we don't do very simple, obvious things. We know what they are. We wrote them on our plan. But sometimes the steps make us feel things we don't want to feel. Or sometimes we just don't feel like doing those things and the emotional side wins that battle.

I'm using my journal to try to look at the emotional side of the changes I thought I wanted to make in my life, but haven't been successful with. Many of them are standard things many people want to do--lose weight, become more organized, pursue artistic or creative interests like writing or art or music--things we tend to fail at, usually because of emotional issues. The thing about what I learned in Switch is that you don't have to fix your emotional issues in order to make changes or reach goals. You can set up things in your environment, for example, that can help nudge you into doing the things you want to do. That's kind of vague, but as I think about the various techniques, I'll figure out how to make it specific enough to actually be useful.

Sometimes Progress is in Your Head

2010-07-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

I realized why it's often hard to come up with posts to report on progress with creative projects. The main thing I've noticed is when I'm in "musing" mode, pondering possibilities and staring out the window and letting my mind wander over whatever I'm creating, it feels like I'm not doing anything. It seems like progress isn't happening.

But if I don't do that musing, I never figure out what the project is or what the next steps are. So, the past few days I've been musing. I've been trying out various approaches in my head to see which seem to lead to dead ends and which might actually work. I'm starting to want to write it down, which means I'm nearing the end of the current musing and ready to move on to brainstorming.

Musing, however, happens throughout the creative process. It's particularly useful when I'm writing. Doodling is the artistic equivalent, I think. When I'm designing a web site, I grab graph paper and doodle.

The other thing I've been musing on is whether to take a class that would be helpful for my project or take something for fun. I'm thinking I could do something that fits both modes, but I really, really want to take more drawing classes. I think that learning how to draw better would do two things. One, help me to develop a skill I've always wanted to have. Two, when I'm working on computer art or designing a layout for a flyer or web page, being unable to draw decently has really held me back. It would be much easier to learn some of the graphic software if I had a more solid ability to draw.

I know that taking a sketch book and practicing is one of the main things I need to do if I want to draw better. But my monovision creates a challenge that is much easier to overcome with the help of a good teacher. I never thought I could do anything with my interest in art until I took some classes with teachers who understood the challenge having no depth perception poses. I needed to learn how to "see".

And I got better. I was surprised when the class picked one of my drawings as one of the best in the bunch. I'll never be a great artist, but I don't care about that. I just want to be able to draw well enough to make what I want for projects I'm working on. So, I've pretty much decided to pursue drawing right now, assuming I get into the class.

As I move forward with this project, I'll have to work on developing other skills. Some of them I can learn on my own, using the information that's readily available via the internet, books and people in my life who already have the skills I'll need. Others will require more formal training. Mostly, I'll need to pare back some of my other activities so I can carve out time to practice, work on developing the project, and the ongoing work to keep the project going once it launches. It's possible to create it in a way that has an end point or to keep it open-ended and ongoing. I haven't decided which way I want to go, yet.

It's interesting that this post seems to indicate the project has to do with art. But it doesn't. It has to do with cooking, but I need art in order to create the images for the web site. I also need to learn some more advanced skills with photography, particularly with using light when photographing food, and how to style food so it looks appealing.

This is because I noticed that I don't stick around food blogs and web sites if the food looks awful, no matter how good the content is. I'd rather read about food without photos than be looking at food that's not appealing.

I also need to practice a different style of writing than I usually do. Writing will be a major part of this project, but not fiction writing. I think that's one of the main reasons it appeals to me. It uses a variety of the creative arts, plus the more creative aspects of my cooking skills.

So, even if I get impatient and want the project done now, I'm not going to give in to that impulse. I'm not ready to do more than create a reasonably doable, but entirely flexible plan of action, which is my next step.

It's not likely it will be done in a day. I don't want to post "today I worked on the plan" every day until I'm finished. So, I'm going to reserve my posts for whenever there's something worthwhile to report. The boring report about working on the plan today will be relegated to my calendar, just so I don't lose the momentum.

New Project Progress

2010-07-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I signed up for WordPress. My oldest son recommended it as a starting point for creating the blog that will be the center of my project. I envision a much larger site in the future and Blogspot doesn't have the tools to create what I have in mind. I can import this blog into my WordPress site, when I'm ready to do that.

None of their standard themes really fits my project, so I'm going to have to find out how customizable WordPress is. I suspect that with some practice and digging around in the tools, I can do whatever I want with it. If it turns out I can't do what I want, I'll get a host and use my web design skills to create my own.

Today I researched the subject of my project to see if anyone else has done anything similar, but so far, I haven't found anything. I've found blogs and web sites that have the same theme, but not the same approach as the one I want to take. So, I'm encouraged that my idea is unique enough to make it worthwhile to give it a go.

I need to contact a friend who once suggested searching beyond Google, but I need to find out what he meant by that. I suspect that I won't find anything that's not on Google, though, because my idea is mainstream enough that, if they're tech savvy enough, I'd expect anyone who has done it to get it on Google because that's how their audience will most likely search for it. And if it's not on Google, I wonder if their intended audience would be likely to find it?

My goal is to do at least one thing toward getting this project off the ground each day. I've been thinking about doing "lists of 5", which is a list of 5 things I want to do today toward whatever needs to be done in the various areas of my life. If that turns out to be too much, since I like doing so many different things, maybe I'll go with "lists of 3". It's just a way of keeping the projects moving and manageable.

So Much for "Rules"

2010-07-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

I love this template. So, I'm going to be using it for a while, at least. I'd design one, now that Blogger has tools that make it easy to upload your own designs, but I'm working on a new project and don't have time to design two blogs. More on that below, but not a lot more.

It's been a while since I posted last and my idea of following Michael Pollan's rules, adding one per week, is a total bust. I'm just not a "follow the rules, no matter what" kind of person. It makes me crazy to do that. So, no more food rules. I'm going to stick with my basic approach to food. Eat food made with the best ingredients I can afford. Cook from scratch whenever possible. And don't sweat it if I can't do those two things. Usually if I can't it's because I'm with friends and family, and they're way more important than anything else.

However, I finally found my food & cooking-related project. It will take a while to get it going, since I need a couple of expensive tools and must save up for them. I'm going to be starting a new blog for that project and keeping this one as a general blog. I'm planning to work on it slowly, so for a while there will be only posts on this blog about how the planning and design and all is going. I'm not going to say specifically what it is for a while. Right now it's pretty much just an idea.

My first step is to work out the parameters of the project. My creative brain wants to get on and design the look and feel of the site, but I can't really do anything about the site itself until I know what the content will be. That tells me that my creative side is being thoroughly neglected.

To regain balance in my life, what I'm planning to do is to cut back on my choir singing in the fall and take some classes in drawing or graphic design or digital photography. And continue in those subjects, one class at a time, until I've taken all the ones I'm interested in. Some of the classes I want to take are to develop skills I need to do my project. Some of them are just to get more creativity back into my life.

The other thing I still want to do is to add more writing to my life, starting with more blogging, because I enjoy doing it. I don't like to blog when I don't have anything to say. Thus, this has become the "Occasional Blog", rather than the "Blog in Which I Wrack my Brain for a Topic so My Nonexistent Audience Doesn't Leave". The first has the advantage of being both more interesting and shorter. I also want to get back to writing more fiction, even if it's just a little bit a few times a week.

Part 2

2010-03-06T07:26:00.000-08:00

Well, so far, one new rule each week hasn't happened. I'm making some changes to get better control of my schedule so I can have a better shot at doing the things I need to do to live a healthier life. I've gained a little weight and it's mostly due to stress and too much going on, so I've not been taking the time to plan and track my food and to make sure I get in enough exercise.

So, back to the food rules book. The first rule in part 2 is rule number 22. It says "Eat mostly plants, especially leaves". One thing about that kind of rule is it's lack of specificity. What does "mostly" mean in terms of creating our everyday menus?

When I look at my favorite way to eat, it's full of veggies and fruits. I prefer to have a small bowl of soup, a salad, and one or two vegetables, either as side dishes or incorporated into the main course. I also include a starchy something and meat, cheese, eggs or beans. I like oatmeal or an egg and whole wheat toast in the morning. On the weekends, Paul often makes scrambles with veggies in them. I like to have fruit with each meal. When I do that, I don't crave sweets as much. I pretty much prefer to eat a healthy diet of actual, real food. I suppose that's why this book is so appealing to me. I've been trying to eat that way and it kind of refines the process.

The problem I find with eating that way with is the time issue. The time issue is why a lot of people grab fast food or frozen microwave meals or similarly awful food. I can see that making ingredients during the time I'm not as busy can help. But that requires preplanning and knowing how long it will actually take to do it. I tend to plan, but not allow quite enough time, so I don't get it done. Then I'm scrambling to make good food at the last minute.

So, this week I need to work on making a realistic plan that I can actually follow. One other issue is the whole Weight Watchers thing. I don't cook the same recipes over and over. It takes time, even with the online tools, to figure out the points for a recipe. And time to measure the finished dish to get the proper serving size for the number of points.

I think I need to spend some time every week looking at next week's schedule and seeing where I can do the planning and the prep and the cooking. I can't just set up a routine and follow it because my work schedule varies, but not like when I worked retail and knew each week what my hours would be for the next week. I can set a schedule, but get emails or phone calls from my many employers that require last-minute changes in it. It makes it hard to follow any kind of plan I make for my outside of work life.

I'm making some changes in the way I handle my work life that will help bring some sanity to my life. I'm asking people to tell me when they need a task completed by, which will help me set priorities and get things done when they need to be. If everything is just "do this, please", I have no way of knowing what I can do tomorrow and my hours get crazy. And I'm asking for as much lead time as is possible. Sometimes people don't get things they need to give to me until the last minute. I understand that. But if they know about it a month ahead of time, I'd like them to send it to me. Then I can work on it, a little at a time and say ahead of things instead of contstantly feeling behind.

I hope that will help me manage my whole life better, including being able to stay on track and lose the small amount of weight I gained, as well as continuing to make progress toward that goal.

Pantry Clean-out

2010-02-23T08:08:00.000-08:00

I went to my pantry and found one box of organic granola, with a couple of "unpronounceable", but natural ingredients. I found organic vanilla wafers, ditto on the ingredient list. And trail mix bars, ditto again on the ingredient list. Everything else is just food. Dried fruit, pasta, canned tomatoes, rice, oatmeal, etc. I have some condiments like Tabasco sauce and salsas. They're food, too.

My fridge is even better. I didn't find anything that wasn't food in there. I don't keep a stock of frozen dinners. I can make omelettes in less time than cooking a frozen dinner and we'd rather have that.

If I want to be strict about this, I will need to make granola and make my own granola bars. I have the ingredients and plan to make it tonight after dinner. I like a bit of it on top of yogurt and fruit. I use a teaspoon of jam instead of sugar to sweeten the yogurt and it's a really good snack. The brand of jam has to say "fruit spread" because there aren't any fake ingredients in it. Go figure!

I should make my own cookies, if I'm going to eat them. Normally I do that, but these were purchased for one of the recipes I got to test, but had my schedule change and didn't have time to make the recipe.

I guess I'm doing pretty well on the eat food front. I think I have recipes for a lot of the condiments and could make them myself, but I don't see the need, for the most part, because they pretty much are just food and the serving size is so small that I doubt it makes much difference. I like to make that stuff, but it's hard to find the time.

I found out that vegetable stock keeps almost indefinitely in the refrigerator if you boil it for 5 minutes every few days. You also can freeze it. I'm going to make a batch of roasted vegetable stock and a batch of mushroom stock. Some of the vegetable stock I'm giving to my mom so the friend who cooks a lot of her meals can use it. I don't add salt to the stock, so it's better for her salt-restricted diet. And it means that I won't have more in my house than I have space to store and use.

The thing about vegetable stock is that it's a good base for anything. If you need chicken, veal, or beef stock, you can put a little of the appropriate demi-glace in the vegetable stock to get the flavor you're looking for. Demi-glace is concentrated stock. It keeps in the fridge for a very long time. It seems expensive, but the cost per serving is actually pretty small because it's so super concentrated that you don't use very much at a time. It's a great way to boost the flavors of sauces and gravies, too. One thing to note is that you should add the demi-glace before you season the stock, sauce, or gravy. Then taste. Often there's enough salt in the demi-glace to season your dish without adding more.

You can make your own demi-glace. It's very time-consuming. You make a poultry, beef, or veal stock. Then simmer it for a day or two, until it's concentrated down. A woman I used to work with made some and I think 8 or 12 quarts of stock made something like 2-4 cups of demi-glace. And it took 2 or 3 days of simmering. I'm not super comfortable with simmering stock on my stove while I sleep, but I suspect you can simmer it all day, then cover it and store it in the refrigerator overnight. Repeat until you get the stock concentrated enough. But I doubt I'll be doing that any time soon. I need to make better use of my time, so I'm using the demi-glace I bought at Williams-Sonoma.

Ingredients & Michael Pollan

2010-02-18T10:01:00.000-08:00

I've been really busy and frustrated by not being able to find time to make ingredients. We've been eating more in restaurants than I'd like to. But I'm doing extra cooking now because my mom needs super low-sodium meals and she can't cook for herself. So, I need to revisit this idea and time-shift more of my meal prep to times other than immediately before dinner. My new slow cooker really helps with that.

I made steel cut oatmeal in the slow cooker. Best oatmeal I've ever eaten. And that takes care of breakfast for a while. I know that's not an ingredient, but it gives me ideas for other things I can do.

An online friend made dulce de leche in her slow cooker. You put the can of condensed milk in water and cook it in the cooker on low. I wonder if you can put the finished dulce de leche in freezer containers and freeze it. I'll have to try it sometime when I'm looking for ingredients for dessert, not meals.

I think the first ingredient I want to use my slow-cooker for is beans. Cooked beans freeze really well in plastic bags. Plastic bags take up less space in the freezer than containers, so I prefer to use them whenever I can. Then I can use them instead of canned beans. Dried beans taste so much better and they're so simple that they're worth making and keeping around to use in recipes.

I have a reason for wanting to do dried beans first. Silicon Valley Reads 2010 is reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. We went to a free Q & A session with Michael Pollan, hosted by Mike Cassidy, a local newspaper columnist, which was the kickoff event in the 2010 Silicon Valley Reads. There's a video of that conversation on the web site.

The front cover of the book has a seven word phrase that sums up Michael's theme. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He has a new book, Food Rules, which consists of 64 rules that explain how to follow that seven-word theme. I read both books and he makes a lot of sense.

It occurred to me that if you adopt one rule a week, you could be following them all in a bit over a year. It would be an interesting experiment. I probably could do it in a year, since I already do some of them. It makes sense to start with rule number 64-Break the rules once in a while, so I don't go crazy trying to be perfect. Or maybe keep Rule 64 in mind as I add the other ones to my life.

He divides up the book into three parts. Part I is What should I eat? That seems to be the big question of our time. People avidly read nutrition studies looking for what constitutes a healthy diet. But the nutrition studies have one huge flaw-they pull out one nutrient at a time to study because it's easier to study one thing. But we don't eat that way. We eat foods in combination with other foods. And the nutrients get all mixed up in our system, so one may enhance another or cancel it out. That's one reason why it's so hard to figure out what to eat.

It seems like there's the "Nutrient of the Month". A study comes out and suddenly there's fiber being advertised in everything. Or probiotics. Or something else. Then another study comes out and that recedes into the background in favor of the next nutrient. It does get confusing.

Part 2 is Mostly plants. That seems self-explanatory, until you start to think about it. He came up with 21 rules on that subject. One question is which plants? Another is how much of your diet should be plants and how much everything else? This--mostly plants-is why I want to keep more precooked beans around. I see more vegetarian meals in my future. I've been eating less meat lately because of the expense, but I can see that we'll be cutting back a bit more and beans are a really good and easy base for fast vegetarian meals, especially if they're already cooked.

Part 3 is Not too much. There's a sticky one. How much is "not too much"? People really don't want to hear "eat less", but that's his message. And he talks about how to do that.

Anyway, I think it's less likely to hurt my health to follow Michael Pollan's rules than to continue to participate as a guinea pig in the food experiments perpetrated on Western society by the huge food processing companies. I don't eat much processed food anymore, so it's mainly a matter of refining my choices and figuring out how to make them work in the trenches of a busy life.

I think I want to alternate between each section of the book. It will keep a better balance. So, this week I'd start with Rule One. Next week will be Rule 22. The following week would be Rule 44. Then back to Rule 2. And so on. I'll try to post at least once a week on how it's going.

Rule One is Eat food. This rule is about choosing real food, not food created by food processing companies. My task for the week will be to get rid of any fake food that happens to be in my pantry and fridge. I suspect there won't be much, but I won't have time to do this until tomorrow or Saturday.

Pulled Pork & Mashed Potatoes

2010-02-18T09:50:00.000-08:00

I thought since I've been writing about food a lot lately, it was time to post a recipe. This is the easiest pulled pork recipe.

Pulled Pork

Ingredients:
1 pork roast, about 2 pounds
1 T olive oil
3 medium onions, sliced
2-4 cloves of garlic, minced
4 cups barbeque sauce, approximately

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 400º. Heat the olive oil in a Dutch oven. Brown the pork roast on all sides. Mix the onions and garlic. Take it out of the pan and spread the onion mixture evenly in the bottom of the pan. Put the pork roast on top of the onions. Pour 2 cups of the barbecue sauce over the roast. Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil. Bake for one hour. Turn the roast over and baste with the sauce, adding more if it's getting too dry. Bake for one hour longer. If the roast is small, it might be done at this point. It's done when it's tender enough all the way through to pull into shreds. If it's not done, turn the roast over and baste with the sauce, adding more if it's too dry. Bake a half hour longer and test for doneness. It takes between two and three hours. When it's done, use two forks and shred it right in the pan. Stir to mix back into the sauce. Serve.

Notes:

The amount of garlic will depend on how big the cloves are,how much you like garlic, and how much, if any, garlic the sauce has in it.

If your pot doesn't have a really tight lid, it's important that you seal the top with foil or it dries out too much and can burn.

If it starts to dry out or the sauce thickens too much, add liquid. You can add broth, water, or more barbeque sauce, depending on what flavor you want to end up with.

You can use a larger roast. Just add more time, turning and basting every half hour after the first two hours. You will probably need more liquid.

I served this with the roasted garlic mashed potatoes. You can put in on a sandwich roll to make pulled pork sandwiches. You can serve it over pasta or rice, too. It's pretty versatile.

It's simple to change the flavors, too, since you can use whatever sauce you want.

Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes
A lot of healthy cookbooks and magazines recommend using broth instead of milk or cream in mashed potatoes. The problem with it is the potatoes don't get that creaminess that make mashed potatoes so good. Using mostly broth, and adding a little cream, gives the creaminess without adding a lot of calories or fat.

Ingredients:
4 large potatoes, peeled and cut into about 6 pieces
salt and pepper
1 tablespoon roasted garlic, or to taste.
1/2-1 cup vegetable stock, warmed
2-4 tablespoons cream, warmed

Instructions:
Boil potatoes until tender. Pour into a colander and drain. Put back into the pan and cook briefly over low heat, shaking the pan or stirring the potatoes until dry. Put the garlic and potatoes through a ricer or mash with a masher. Add enough stock to make the potatoes almost as moist as you want them. Then add cream, one tablespoon at a time, until the potatoes are creamy. Add salt and pepper, to taste.

Notes:

It's more important that the potato pieces be approximately the same size than how many pieces you cut them into. Smaller pieces take less time to cook and should be checked for doneness sooner than larger ones.

The type of potato makes a difference, too. Yukon Golds take less time to cook than russets. I don't use any other types for mashing.

The amount of broth and cream depend on how many potatoes you use. Add the broth a little at a time and mix it well before adding more. Stop when the potatoes are still a bit dry. The cream will take care of the dryness.

I didn't add butter, but you could add a little. I had some whipping cream I needed to use and decided that it was enough. If I'd used milk instead, I might have wanted a tablespoon of butter and less milk.

Boeuf Bourguinon a lá Weight Watchers

2010-01-13T08:25:00.000-08:00

I'm reading the current issue of Weight Watchers magazine. I turn the page to find an article titled Just Like Julia. The hyperbole at the top of the article states, "If you liked the movie, you'll love our recipes." Ummm...no. Liking the movie has nothing to do with liking their recipes. The next sentence tells the real story. "We've updated the beloved chef's timeless classics, keeping the French flavor, but trimming the fat." The idea was to make Julia's recipes low in points, fitting in with their weight-loss program better than the original one does. But does it really?

I turned to the recipe pages. Their changes were much bigger than the statement in the article implies. I don't have a problem with them making similar recipes that fit the Weight Watchers plan. My problem is with them saying they're "Just Like Julia's", especially considering the technique changes would kill the intense, deep layers of flavor in the original recipes.

Take the Boeuf Bourguinon recipe as an example. They decreased the calories, simplified the techniques, and shortened the cooking time. When you oversimplify the techniques and reduce the cooking time, along with reducing the calories, you end up with less flavor, which doesn't inspire me to want to substitute it for the original.

Here's an analysis of what I see as being the biggest problems with their dish:

They omitted the bacon completely. But the bacon added one of the flavors that made it her dish.

They reduced the wine to one cup. A cup and a half would be the amount to use if you also reduce the beef from three pounds to two, as they did in their recipe, because it keeps the ratio of ingredients the same.

They cut the beef into smaller pieces and toss them with flour before it's browned. The original breaks this into a two-step process of browning the meat, tossing with flour and browning the floured meat in the oven. I'd never tried that technique before this recipe and it's the first time the sauce actually thickened the way it's supposed to.

They add the mushrooms, onion, and garlic raw with the liquid, herbs, and seasoning. The original browns the carrots and a yellow onion in the pan after the beef is browned. The mushrooms and pearl onions are cooked separately and added after the meat is cooked.

They cooked it on top of the stove for a mere hour, added the raw carrots, and cooked another 30 minutes. The original called for a three to four hour simmer in the oven.

As you can see, there are a lot of steps in the original that the Weight Watchers recipe condenses or skips altogether. The original does have a lot of steps, as is usually the case with classic French cuisine. You wouldn't cook this as a quick weeknight supper. But those steps are necessary to build the flavor layers that gave classic French cuisine its status as one of the finest in the world. And the beauty of it is that if you enjoy cooking, you can take a day when you're at home and make it in advance. It's better after sitting in the fridge overnight, anyway.

I haven't tested the following changes, but here's what I'd do if I wanted to reduce the calories, but retain the flavors of the original:

First, I'd decrease the serving size, making the recipe serve eight.

Since a half pound of meat is twice as much as anyone needs at one meal, I'd use two pounds of meat for my eight servings, cutting it into the large cubes called for in the original.

I'd use four slices of bacon, rather than the six ounces called for. That's two ounces and usually is plenty to give the flavor I'm looking for.

I'd reduce the wine to 1-1/2 cups, which maintains the proper ratio for the flavor I want.

I'd follow Julia's original techniques for browning the meat, onions, and carrots. She only uses 1 tablespoon of olive oil, which is the same amount in the Weight Watchers recipe. She also pours out the leftover fat after everything's browned.

I'd make two small changes to Julia's original recipe--about a minute before the carrots and onions are done browning, I'd toss in the garlic and sauté it to release the oils. Then I'd add the tomato paste and mix it well, cooking until it's a more rusty-red color. It's called the Maillard reaction and it adds to the browning, intensifying the flavor, in the dish.

I'd follow the original for cooking the dish.

At the end, she strains the sauce and skims off the fat. Skimming fat is a pain and nowadays there's the handy fat separator. I strained the sauce into mine and poured the defatted sauce back into the dish.

I'd follow the original recipes for cooking the pearl onions and the mushrooms, reducing the oil/butter for browning them by using olive oil spray in a nonstick pan and a half-teaspoon of butter for flavor.

I'd do what I did on New Year's--cook the whole thing in advance and reheat it for serving.

Back to my original question: Does their version really fit better into their plan than the original version? Well, since Julia's recipe has several steps devoted to ridding the dish of excess fat, there must be something else causing it to be 17 points per serving. I keep coming back to the portion size. Weight Watchers calculated the points in Julia's recipe using the number of servings in the cookbook, which is six. But Julia's portion isn't the same size as Weight Watchers portions. I decided to recalculate the points of Julia's basing it on serving the same size portion as Weight Watchers uses in their recipe.

Using the portion size of the meat as a guideline, 1 serving of Julia's recipe contains 8 ounces of meat and 1/6 of everything else. The Weight Watchers version contains 3-ounce portions of meat and 1/6 of everything else. If I increase the number of servings in the original so each serving has 3 ounces of meat and a proportionally smaller serving of the remaining ingredients, it's 16 servings. I did the math and it's 6 points per serving. The Weight Watchers version is 8 points per serving. Hmmm....It looks like Julia's recipe is more of a weight loss winner than Weight Watchers, when you compare the same size serving side-by-side. I guess I can toss my list of calorie-reducing ideas and just make Julia's.

Fast Food

2010-01-11T08:36:00.000-08:00

One of the things I've noticed about people's reaction to my comments that I cook from scratch is that they think they don't have the time or expertise to cook that way. Many people rely on packaged foods, complete meals frozen by food processing companies, and fast food or restaurant food because they think cooking from scratch is too time-consuming or too hard. But neither is true.

Last fall I had a juxtaposition of things that got me to one of those aha! moments. I read two books that used the idea of preprepping ingredients. They were Tom Colicchio's Think Like a Chef and The Pleasures of Cooking for One by Judith Jones. Judith Jones was Julia Child's editor and Tom Colicchio is one of the judges on Bravo's series, Top Chef. Both of these books are about creating food and using it in multiple ways. They're about making ingredients to be used in the recipe, but having extra to use in another recipe.

Although that seems like a fancy term for "leftovers", they're not like the how to use leftover articles I see in women's magazines after Thanksgiving. Those recipes don't have the creativity I see in the above mentioned books. That creativity is one reason I think of them as ingredients, not leftovers. Another reason is that you can make the food without making the original recipe and just use it in other dishes. That's an ingredient, not a leftover.

The second aspect of the things that got juxtaposed in my mind was when a weekend came up and I had some rare free time. I wasn't using the recipes or cookbooks I mentioned. I don't think I had them yet. I was just trying to be more efficient. So, I cooked granola, oatmeal, rice, beans, baked some potatoes and browned some ground turkey. I don't remember what else I made, maybe some salsa? The next week I was able to prepare meals from scratch in about the same time as if I'd used packaged ingredients from the store. I realized that by time-shifting as much prep work as I can, I can work the odd hours and run the weird schedule I have without sacrificing fresh meals.

Those two things came together in my mind and I realized that cooking from scratch when you don't have hours to spend before dinner making dinner is mainly a matter of planning and having preprepped ingredients, along with a pantry stocked with staples, you can use to create meals.

I've always enjoyed pulling things out of the pantry and fridge and just cooking whatever comes to mind. What's a new concept for me is the idea that I don't have to cook everything at the last minute. Nor do I have to cook entire meals in advance or an extra casserole to freeze for later. I don't like to do that because there are only two of us and we end up eating the same thing for days if the whole meal or main course is completely prepped in advance.

But most people, including me, weren't taught how to break recipes down into prep steps and how to figure out which of those can be done in advance. If people manage to do that, there's the problem of how to prep the ingredients so you can store them without losing flavor and nutrition or having them spoil before you make the dish. That's why it seems hard.

I've learned a lot from professional chefs, experimentation, and research about how to do this. I think I need to practice what I already know and continue to study how to use that knowledge because becoming proficient in planning, making and using preprepped ingredients is the best way I can think of to achieve my personal goal of eating at home and reserving restaurant meals for special occasions. I'd much rather eat out less often, but eat at really good, which usually means more expensive, restaurants.

Sometimes it's not the time to make dinner that makes people go out. It's the added time to clean up the mess from cooking that makes eating in seem like too much work after a long day. Foods like one-skillet dishes from a box or microwaved meals from the freezer or take-out pizza guarantee fast, easy clean up. Planning and prepping ingredients in advance also gives you easy, fast cleanup on the busy nights because most of the cooking mess is from prepping, not cooking the meal.

So, one of my goals for this year is to streamline the planning process, which will allow me more time to do the actual cooking, and use the knowledge gained from my aha! moment to allow me to get meals on the table at a reasonable hour even if I get home from work late.

2010 & Lots of Changes

2010-01-09T11:18:00.001-08:00

My last post was in November. I'd just started my second job at the Steinway Society. I had already made commitments that made December a super busy month. Adding a second job ensured that I was not going to find time to write anything, including this blog, in December. Now it's January and one of the things I'm doing is writing more.

Last month's concerts went really well. I enjoyed every one, whether I was attending or participating. I had the opportunity to hear a local pianist, Sandra Wright Shen, presented by the Steinway Society as part of this season's concert series. She's awesome. The other concert I attended was the San Jose Chamber Orchestra's joint concert with The Choral Project called Winter's Gifts: Hope. Daniel Hughes wrote an awesome Alleluia that I'd love to sing someday.

I sang in three concerts, plus the Christmas Eve service at church. STOCtet sang our annual concert in the lobby at the opening of Ballet San Jose's Nutcracker. That was fun and some people came up to the mezzanine and listened to the whole thing. We sang the same program for our holiday concert. Prince of Peace Sanctuary Choir did Sing Noel, a piece arranged in a similar way to a lessons and carols service. It has readings intermingled with music.

We went to a bunch of holiday parties. Caroling parties, work parties, post-concert parties. We gave a party on New Year's, at which I cooked Julia Child's Beef Bourguinon. I can see why that recipe sold the book to Judith Jones, who became Julia's editor. It was "superb", to quote one of my guests. We attended the Nutcracker,which is a delightful production. We had a great time throughout the season.

Despite the busyness and rushing from one thing to another, I only gained a pound and a half over the holidays. My last weigh in was 2 pounds down, so I lost that plus a half pound more. So my strategy to eat normal days and holiday days worked pretty well. It was the last week of the year where I had problems sticking with my plan. That makes sense because that was when I had the least control over my schedule, my food, my exercise.

I hope to be at least 50 pounds closer to my goal by the end of 2010. But I realize I have no control over that, so my goals are to continue to exercise regularly; to keep track of everything; to continue to eat a healthy diet and see how it goes.

The first concert of 2010, the San Jose Chamber Orchestra and the Cypress String Quartet, is tomorrow. We're almost sold out, so I'm off downtown to work today.

More Lessons from the Weight Loss Front & a Bit of NaNo

2009-11-24T07:07:00.000-08:00

NaNoWriMo

I'm not going to come close to making 50K, especially since I haven't been writing for at least a week. I talked a bit about why in my last post. This story wasn't thought out enough. I lost interest because it didn't have enough depth for my taste. And then I ran out of time. Next year maybe I'll give it another go and do something else. We'll see. Between now and then, I'm scheduling writing time. The main thing I learned from this year's NaNo is how much I miss writing and even if it's just a little bit every day, I need to write.

Weight Loss Lessons

Lesson one: I was sitting in the booth at The Cheesecake Factory perusing their menu, and their nutrition information. California now requires chains with a certain number of locations, I believe it's 20, to make available certain nutrition information. The Cheesecake Factory puts the calories and saturated fat and the amount of carbs, but not the total fat content or the grams of fiber, both of which you need to calculate points for Weight Watchers. What I do is take the average calories per point, which is 50, and divide it into the total calories to get the points. Most of their stuff is in the "this is a whole day's worth of calories" category. So I was feeling really discouraged at trying to choose well. I flirted with just ordering anything and writing the meal off. I really didn't want to do that. So, I decided to eat no more than 1/3 of whatever I ordered. I ended up with a reasonable number of points for the day.

While I was trying to decide how to manage the situation, I thought about how far I'd come and what the consequences of writing the meal off would be. First, it could start a pattern of writing off difficult situations. That's the way back to my previous weight and I don't want to go there. So, that idea was totally out.

Second, I thought about the consequences of what I decided to do. I could give up, probably gain weight, and start the gradual climb back up. Or, I could do my best and at least stay where I am. And, by making the best choices I can in every situation I'm confronted with, I can keep moving toward my goal because I'm maintaining the good habits.

The AHA! moment was when I started thinking about how we as a culture think about weight loss. Because we gain weight so easily, we think that if we're not losing, we must be gaining. We think in that dichotomy--weight loss or weight gain--and ignore the third option--maintaining our weight. I wonder if that mind set isn't part of what gets us when we reach our goal. We don't want to lose any more, so we assume that gaining is what will happen--and it does. We get tired of doing the things that got us to our goal and gradually relax the vigilance and the weight does creep back on. But if we can change our thinking so that we think loss or maintain, maybe we can more easily get to goal because we're being consistent in our choices and by building that pattern of consistency, we'll be more likely to stay at our goal.

That reminds me of a related issue--perfectionism. We often think that if we don't follow our preferred program perfectly, we won't lose weight. Not only that, we'll automatically gain weight. That's another attitude that doesn't work. If we're faced with situations where our choices for healthy, low-calorie food are limited, we can make the best choices we can and not stuff ourselves. The worst that will happen may be that we don't lose weight that week. Or if we do gain, it won't be very much. Remembering that it's not one meal that causes weight gain helps. It's when we decide that meal makes us a total failure and we top it off with more meals that aren't the best choices that we usually see a gain.

Lesson two: I'm facing a Thanksgiving holiday that is not my first choice, not even close. I'm not cooking. If you've read very much of this blog, you know that's unheard of. But the last two weeks have been full of other obligations and I haven't had time to make a menu or grocery shop. My family wants to celebrate on Friday at a favorite restaurant. With all that happening, my husband and I made reservations at LB Steakhouse at Santana Row for Thanksgiving day.

I started thinking about the "holiday season". We start at Halloween now and go through New Year's and think of it as all one long "season" with lots of good food and parties and so on. That can lead to disaster for people who are trying to lose weight, or even to maintain their weight. I realized it's an attitude problem. Lumping it all together makes every day seem like a holiday. If every day is a holiday, we tend to overeat because we're celebrating the holiday or even if we don't eat too much, we may make less healthy or higher calorie choices.

It occurred to me that when we're thinking about food, exercise, etc. and this time of year, we might be better off to think of it as "holiday days" inserted in between "normal days". It's thinking of the whole season from Halloween to New Year's as "difficult" or "challenging" or a "time when we struggle" that makes it harder than it needs to be. Instead, we could look at each day separately. On the normal days, we would do our normal routine. And on the holiday days, we choose what we want to do to celebrate the occasion.

That's not to say this time period isn't more challenging than the rest of the year. We often do have more restaurant meals and meals out with friends and family. We have more parties and holiday concerts, pageants, etc. to attend, usually with a sweet-treat laden reception afterward. A strategy that works if we're not thinking of every day between Halloween and New Year's as a holiday is to ask ourselves if this is a substitute for a regular meal at home and eat the way we would if we were at home. Bringing food along and getting a beverage at a coffee place is another alternative to high-calorie restaurant eating I've used when I knew in advance I wasn't going to be home. If it's a celebration, then we can use whatever our celebration meal strategies are, including saying no to treats that aren't worth the calories. Just because it's a party or occasion doesn't mean we have to eat something.

Other Stuff

Since I now have two jobs, I'm not going to survive until New Year's without a good solid plan. So, that's my goal for the weekend. I have from Thursday through Sunday off. I'm spending part of that time with my calendar putting everything on it that needs to be done. If I don't, I'm going to go nuts because I'll be trying to do too much in a day and not leave enough time for recharging the batteries. I have to consider Christmas in there, too. I haven't thought beyond Thanksgiving. My budget will be small, but at least I'll have one this year. It's nice to have both of us working and we can celebrate. I love holiday celebrations and it's always hard when your income doesn't go beyond the basic necessities. I'm grateful for having those, but I also like to have a bit extra to get gifts and make a special meal and so on. Since I couldn't cook at Thanksgiving, I'm going to plan something extra special for Christmas.

NaNoWriMo and Other Stuff

2009-11-11T15:07:00.000-08:00

I was planning to work on my NaNo novel while I had a hot cup of coffee at Peet's. The one thing about losing weight is that once I lose 30 pounds or more, I start to be cold a lot, thus the desire for hot coffee. I digress. I've written more than 10K on the story, but my flash drive only has 9K. Apparently, I saved my afternoon session, but not last night's work. So, the novel is on my other computer. That means I have some time to write a blog post.

I'm having fun writing this bizarre, but fun, story. No one will ever be allowed to read it. The writing stinks and I don't think the story is worth revising. It's just a fun bit of fluff.

But it's showing me some things about being a pantser, a writer who doesn't use an outline, that make me want to learn how to make at least a loose outline. A lot of what I've written is stuff that would be cut, if I were going to try to revise this into a decent story. It's stuff that's in there because the writer is looking for the story I know is in there, not actually writing the story itself. That means there's a lot of repetitive, meandering, and totally boring stuff in between the good parts, the parts that are actually the story I'm trying to write. For NaNo, that's wonderful because it's lots of added words, but if I were actually writing a story with the intent of publishing it, it's a very inefficient way to write. I can handle inefficient because it doesn't bother me to cut words. It's the boring and repetitive stuff that's the problem for me.

I'm ready to move past that way of working and on to something else. So, after NaNo, I'm going to focus more on Holly Lisle's Think Sideways class. If I can spend the same time I'm spending on NaNo, I'll make progress, but slowly. I've been working at it more on a hit and miss basis because my life has been so chaotic lately. I've had a hard time focusing on creative pursuits, particularly on writing.

I'm testing an oven-fried chicken recipe tonight. It looks really good. I'm looking forward to this one. I haven't figured out the points, but the ingredients are not super high-calorie. The only added fat is cooking spray. I don't use cooking spray, but I have my Mistos. I have one for regular olive oil. I'll fill one with peanut oil, which is what I prefer for recipes like this one. And the other one is for the oils I don't use as often.

Also, on the cooking front, I've been thinking about flavor and ingredients. I want to write a post or two about those things, but it may have to wait until after NaNo.

I lost three more pounds last week. Paul's been losing weight, too. He said yesterday that he lost another three pounds. He jokes that when I go on a diet, he loses weight. I don't put food in serving dishes. I serve it onto the plates because in my house, everyone prefers not to wash any more dishes than necessary. So, I pretty much give him what I'm eating and if he's still hungry, he can always have more. He rarely does, which is one reason why he's been losing weight.

His blood pressure's been going down pretty fast, with this new medication. He has an appointment next week to have it checked, but he's been checking it in the morning. The one thing I wish he'd do is make getting some exercise in every day a priority. That's the piece that's missing in his efforts to stay healthy. It would be lovely if he'd challenge himself to get his medicine down to the lowest possible dose. Maybe even get rid of it altogether, but at his age and with his family history of high blood pressure, that may not be possible.

I hate that medical stuff is starting to be our conversation topic. But, there comes a time when that becomes more of an issue in your life. So, I'm dealing with it.

I've made progress with my boxes. I think I have 4 or 5 left. I need to put lids on them and stack them with the others in the bedroom hallway. Then I can move on to the next step, which is sorting the things that are already unpacked and giving stuff we don't use to charity, throwing away any junk, and figuring out how to best use the storage I have. I need to pare down our stuff because our apartment is so small. I really don't want to have boxes in my hallway. When that's done, it's back to the boxes and figuring out where to put that stuff when I unpack it. When you live in an apartment without a garage or attic or basement, the hardest stuff to deal with is stuff like holiday decorations that you need to keep, but don't use every day.

It's amazing how fast the process went when I spread out the boxes I was sorting into. I could take 5 minutes and go through one box. That's a lot more doable than taking 10 minutes to spread out the boxes, 5 minutes sorting one, and 10 more minutes putting the boxes back in stacks. Once I convinced Paul not to stack them back up, I made real progress.

But I need to find a day sometime when I can recharge my batteries without feeling like I'm neglecting important things in order to do it. I need one of those mental health days. I had a difficult day yesterday and realized that was the problem. I need to schedule regular time to recharge. If I don't, then any writing or other creative pursuits suffer. Creative work operates at a different pace and in a different way from the type of work I get paid to do. Or from household chores and similar types of work. When I forget that, my life gets out of balance and I get depressed.

A Mishucalanza of a Post

2009-11-04T16:58:00.001-08:00

I've been trying to write a new post for several days, but I can't seem to focus on one topic. So, here's a bunch of topics.

First, NaNoWriMo. I started a novel for NaNo. I was right on track on November 1. The second day, thanks to the time change, (I'll skip the rant and just say I hate that they do this twice a year.) I was way too tired and only got about half the words. November 3 Paul was sick, so I didn't write. Today, though, I stopped at Peet's after work and got in about a half hour. I'll write more later tonight.

The story is going well. It's turning out to be a very bizarre story. I'm writing it in the first person, which I usually don't do. But this one seemed to want to be written that way. I trust my instincts about a story, so I'm writing in the first person. I'm having a lot of fun and hope to catch up the words as the month goes on.

Second, Paul's headache thing came back, but not quite as bad as a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to the COBRA thing where you don't have to pay the whole premium, we still have good health coverage, so he's back on medication for his blood pressure. He goes back in on Friday to get it checked after having been on the medication for several days. We need to pin the doctor down about the headaches, though. I don't think they're caused by the blood pressure problem because he started getting them back when his blood pressure was normal.

Third, weight loss. I've lost a total of 25 pounds, as of last Friday. I've noticed some changes in my approach this time around that are making it a lot easier. I changed a lot of eating habits over the years. The kinds of changes seem to make it easier to make choices that allow the weight to come off without me being hungry.

(I suppose I'm repeating myself a lot in my weight loss posts, but that helps me to cement it in my brain. I apologize if anyone is actually reading this blog and gets bored when I do repeat myself.)

One thing that's making a huge difference is that I'm paying attention more to flavor, texture, color, etc. If it looks pretty, has a variety of textures, and really good flavor, it's satisfying, even if it's not a large amount of food. I get full on smaller amounts of food these days. But that's pretty common when you start losing weight. Regular exercise also decreases my appetite a bit.

Another thing that's making a huge difference is paying attention to how full I am. It's hard for me to do that without paying a lot of attention. It's not an automatic process for me to know when I'm full. So, I use a couple of tricks. I start the meal with soup or salad. Sometimes both. That starts to fill me up and takes some time to eat. Then, when I get to the higher-calorie main course, I'm able to eat appropriate portions and feel satisfied. If I have dessert, I tend to eat only a few bites, which is why when we're out, we usually share.

Fourth, music. This is a big time of year for music. I'm so glad STOCtet chose early December for their concert. Prince of Peace is the week after that. It will make for a much calmer holiday season. While I love doing music, I'm glad we gave up a couple of the choirs. Juggling the rehearsals and concerts for four groups was too much.

Fifth, I still need to figure out a better way to manage my kitchen and food and my weird schedule. I'm discovering that it helps a lot to keep prepped ingredients on hand to make dinner from during the week. But I need to plan the ingredient-making sessions so they're spread out over time, not crammed into a couple of days. I just don't have that much time.

Sixth, that whole organizing thing. A while back I joined the Fly Lady web site. I've been getting the emails, but only doing a little bit. I realized that I have to do the same thing with organizing my life as I did with weight loss--make very gradual changes. I'm starting very small with adding a few new habits. I'm picking the things that bug me the most as the place to start. And the biggie right now is finishing the boxes in the living room. I need to sort, put labels and lids on them and restack them in the bedroom hallway. Then I can deal with all the storage issues one at a time, in those 15-minute spurts Fly Lady talks about.

Seventh, I enjoy Farmville and Cafe World on Facebook. I discovered that if you use your time properly, you can time the crops to ripen and the food to cook at a time when you can play. A few minutes and you can go off and do other things while stuff grows and cooks. The thing is, I'm making myself let myself have fun with them. I was raised that adults don't "play". It's another area in my life where I have to fight my upbringing and allow myself to be myself. I need to play. It sparks my creativity and if I don't play, I can't write stories. Besides, the things I was taught adults do for fun aren't fun for me. The thing that makes me sad is how long it took me to realize that it's OK to be myself. And that realization is one of the reasons I'm able to successfully lose weight now.

Recipe Review--Classic Bread Pudding

2009-11-04T16:50:00.000-08:00

I started this post a coulpe of weeks ago, and didn't have time to finish and post it. So, here it is.

The latest recipe I'm testing is a bread pudding with an optional bourbon sauce. Unfortunately, the older bottle of heavy cream I had in the fridge was too old, so I ended up substituting 1/2 cup milk for part of the cream in the bread pudding and skipping the bourbon sauce. It's in the oven and I'm not sure it will be done before the deadline, which is today, but they're on Eastern Daylight Time, so if they have a midnight deadline, I'll miss it. I tried to do it on time, but the timing was awful. I got the recipe right before the concert last week, so time was an issue for me.

This is NOT a "point-friendly" recipe. But it's supposed to be an indulgence. I'm not eating a whole portion of it. Just a bite or two. A whole portion, even if I cut it into the smaller size they suggest, is 13 points and that's with the whole milk substituting for 1/2 cup of the cream. Whew!! If I like the recipe, I may play with it and see if I can make a lower-point version that's worth eating.

I finished the recipe and it was very rich, but very bland. The texture was good and they met their goal with the recipe. But it wasn't worth the calories, as is. The other people who tried it had the same reaction. It's a good base, but it needed more. Spices, raisins, something. I warmed it up and put fresh raspberries on it and it was wonderful. My son topped it with whipped cream and loved it that way. However, I suspect more fat isn't what I'd top this rich dish with.

BTW-I can't post the recipes I test because the people who run the magazine ask us not to share recipes that haven't been published.

Pasta Pomodoro & Cocola

2009-10-23T19:36:00.000-07:00

We went to Pasta Pomodoro at Santana Row last night. It had been a while since we ate there. We enjoyed it the last time and were in the mood for Italian. Unfortunately, like a lot of chain restaurants, the quality of the food has diminished over the past couple of years. We were totally disappointed.

My husband had a Caesar salad and frutti de mare. I had minestrone soup, mista salad, and butternut squash ravioli. I had the dressing on the side and an appetizer portion of the ravioli. We both had their bread with pesto/olive oil dip. For the most part, the food was mediocre, at best.

The bread had good texture for dipping, but not a lot of flavor on its own. The pesto dip was mostly olive oil. They mixed pesto with olive oil, apparently substituting the pesto for balsamic vinegar in the traditional bread dipping sauce. Pesto is mainly olive oil, so adding more oil just made it all taste like oil, with little basil flavor. Traditional basil pesto has parmesan and pine nuts, although I've seen it made with walnuts, too. If there was any cheese, I couldn't see or taste it. It was too smooth to have nuts in it.

Our starters were pretty ordinary. The vegetables were fresh, which was nice. But the flavors in the dressing were nothing special. I could get the same flavors in bottles from a local grocery store. The minestrone was beans, zucchini, broth, & croutons. They garnished it with the same pesto they used in the bread dip. It was good, but not great.

Our main courses were the biggest disappointment. Paul said his dish had no flavor. But I tasted it and it was just fishy. Not that good, fresh fish flavor, but that bitter fishy taste of fish that's not spoiled, but not entirely fresh, either. It probably was previously frozen, thawed fish. And it was overcooked, with that rubbery texture it gets.

My ravioli was good, at first. I liked the ravioli, sage leaves, cheese, and browned butter. But then they did something really weird--they crushed amaretti on top. I know orange veggies can be sweet, but pairing amaretti--ameretto-flavored cookies--with Parmesan cheese and sage just didn't work for me. That sugary flavor, laced with cinnamon, clashed with the rest of the dish. I probably wouldn't have ordered it, had I read the menu more carefully and noticed the amaretti in the listing of ingredients.

The last thing that was an issue for me is one of my pet peeves. I really, really hate it when they either ask me to keep my salad fork or, even worse, take it off the plate when they clear it and put it on the table for me to use for the main course. Is it really that much trouble to bring a fresh fork? The best service in recent memory for me was when we went to Julia's Kitchen at Copia, which, unfortunately, is no longer open. Not only did they bring fresh silverware for each course, they looked at what you ordered and brought the appropriate silverware.

We declined dessert, opting to head for Cocola, where we'd enjoyed their desserts and pastries. They still have the same good food. We had the Pumpkin and Milk Chocolate Mousse, a new seasonal dessert. My first bites were good. But I think overall, that dessert needs to be rethought. The pumpkin mousse was wonderful. I liked the milk chocolate mousse and the chocolate cake on the bottom. But, there was also a raspberry gel on the top and a hazelnut filling in the middle of the pumpkin mousse. These additions caused the dessert to have too many flavors competing for your attention. I would use a flavorless, and colorless gel on the top. The red didn't really make the pumpkin orange, which seemed to be its purpose, and I'd rather keep the pumpkin pie brown and skip the sweet, fruity flavor of the raspberry gel. I'd also omit the hazlenut filling. Hazelnuts are too strong a flavor to pair with pumpkin mousse.

All in all, it made me wish I'd had time to go home and cook--or that we'd chosen one of the other restaurants in Santana Row. And chosen a different dessert at Cocola. They have so many wonderful ones. This was the only one I've ever eaten that I didn't like.

On other fronts:

Friday is my weigh in day. I lost 1.5 pounds this week. It's 10% of my total body weight and .5 pounds away from the first goal I set myself. Go me!

I'm testing another recipe for one of the magazines today. I'll write another post about it when I'm done.

A Week-and-a-half Later...

2009-10-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

I've been so busy this past week and a half. I look at my blog and think--I need to write a post, and then I don't have time. Today I do.

Paul got a job. YAY!! We don't have to move. I may be able to resurrect my cooking project--or come up with a better one. It's not as much money, though, so I may not have much budget to play with.

I'm 2 pounds from reaching the first weight goal I set. I don't expect to reach it this week, though. I'm at a point where the weight loss is slower, which is fine with me.

Today I'm going to test another recipe. This one is for a bread pudding with a bourbon sauce. I'm going to have to find someone to give some of it to because it makes way too much for Paul and I to eat by ourselves.

I'm considering signing up for NaNo again. I sign up, get started, and then life gets busy and I don't finish. But I miss writing, which is why I keep signing up for NaNo--to give me a goal and a reason to write. If I do, I won't start any specific cooking projects, or other new projects, until January. The holiday season is way too swamped for a choir singer and I won't have time for new projects.

I guess my blog is back to being a mishucalanza, what with writing about weight loss, cooking, and writing.

More Lessons from the Weight Loss Front

2009-10-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

I started this post on Oct. 11 and finally got it edited today.

So, my week of eating almost exclusively Filling Foods is over and I've been doing points again. That's been going well. However, the contrast pointed up a lesson learned.

I was reading that people tend to eat the same volume of food regardless of their calorie level. So, as an example made up by me, if you normally eat 10 cups of food every day and try to lose weight by cutting back to 7 cups, you might lose weight, but you will feel hungry. However, if you substitute 10 cups of food that totals fewer calories than the 10 cups you normally eat, you will lose weight and you won't be hungry. That's the problem with just eating less of what you usually eat. You miss the volume and feel hungry and deprived. But if you eat high-volume, lower calorie foods, like those on the Filling Foods list, you'll lose weight without feeling hungry.

The problem with that is that food habits are among the most difficult habits to change. Mine have changed drastically over the years, but change has come very slowly. I didn't think I really got the baby step concept because I was always falling short of my goals. But I see that over time, I've made changes that are baby steps and those baby steps have helped make following the program easier.

I eat produce at both lunch and dinner. When I don't, I tend to feel less satisfied and overeat. I love veggie soups and salads. I prefer to eat both, but one or the other works.

I've discovered that if I have fresh fruit at every meal, I don't crave desserts as much. That makes it easier to be super picky about what desserts I eat and in what quantity. My current favorite is one Godiva chocolate gem. They come in truffles or caramel and they're one point. Although they're small enough to eat in one bite, I take several small ones and really taste what I'm eating. And it's enough.

I choose whole grains whenever I can. When I bake, I use whole grain flours as much as I can. Not all recipes will work with only whole grain flours, but I've discovered that I can substitute up to half of the flour with whole grains in most recipes. I experiment with various amounts until I find the maximum I can use without losing the flavor and texture.

I eat vegetarian more often. I eat less red meat than I used to. I eat a lot more beans and oatmeal. The next thing I'm adding is cooked polenta and cooked rice to the precooked foods in my freezer. I also plan to make yogurt cheese mixed with roasted garlic and herbs or salsa or whatever I feel like putting in it to use as a dip for raw vegetables. Yogurt and yogurt cheese can also be used to stretch the mayonnaise in a creamy salad dressing.

I've read books where the author talks about changing their diet to eliminate processed and junk foods. They often claim that just changing to more healthy food like that will cause you to lose weight. But it doesn't, not all by itself. I tried that idea and it didn't work for me. You still have to watch portion sizes and choose the higher-calorie foods less often and in smaller portions. The Weight Watcher point system helps me with that aspect of my weight loss efforts.

Lost .5 This Week

2009-10-09T13:16:00.001-07:00

I lost another half pound this week. I went back to counting points, but I've eaten mostly from the filling foods list. What's made the difference today is that satiety factor. I've used 1 point, that I didn't use last week, for a 1/2 tablespoon of maple syrup in my oatmeal and 1 tablespoon of shredded cheese on my huevos rancheros. Those flavors make a huge difference in how the food feels, whether it's satisfying or not. So, I think this is a good plan.

I don't want this blog to become a weight loss blog, even though that's been my focus for the past couple of weeks. I have a new recipe to test. This one is for a traditional bread pudding--and it's NOT diet friendly. However, I'll make it, taste and analyze it. Do the survey. And give the rest away. Or freeze it in small portions to have as a treat, now and then. I need to figure out the points before I do that, so I can decide what's a good serving size and freeze it in that size portion.

I think my next thing will be to go for a walk. I need to get out of here for a while and I have an errand that I can do. It's a beautiful day out there, too. A perfect fall day to be outside--not too hot and sunny.

Almost the End of Week 1

2009-10-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

I had a couple more thoughts about the Filling Foods thing today. I didn't have many points left. I only had a couple of activity points, so I was really working hard to figure out what to eat that wouldn't require that I count points. And, I made extra sure to get in some activity.

It wasn't really difficult to find no point foods. I did eat one corn tortilla, but I had activity points to cover it. The big thing was that it took quite a while to put it together. I'd drained some yogurt. I mixed that with garlic I'd roasted and fresh basil and a little salt and pepper. I spread that on celery sticks. That's a keeper for a snack, whether I'm doing Filling Foods or not. I made what amounts to vegan huevos rancheros--black beans, eggs, no-fat salsa and the corn tortilla. It all was very filling. I couldn't finish it. But I was hungry a couple of hours later, so I ate the rest then.

So now I have to figure out what to do about dinner. I think I can easily fit it into the remaining activity points. So, this was a good program for me. I may keep it as a backup or as a way to break a plateau. We'll see how weighing tomorrow goes.

Thoughts About Week 1--So Far

2009-10-07T15:37:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the last day of my first week following the Simply Filling Foods plan. It's been an interesting week. I won't know if I lost weight until Friday, but there are other things to write about besides the number on the scale.

When WW says the food is filling, they're not kidding. I did an experiment and calculated what the points would have been had I been tracking. If you don't count the Weekly Points, I've averaged 15 points per day for 5 days. When you include the Weekly Points, I've averaged 22 points per day for 5 days. Since my point level is 26, not counting weekly or activity points, if I were tracking points, I'd be under daily points by an average of 4 per day for 5 days, and not using any weekly or activity points. So, hunger is not one of the problems I'm having with this plan.

However, satiety, feeling satisfied, as opposed to simply not being hungry, is a problem for me with this plan. I really like the food on the list. I can see basing my food plan around them. But this week as I worked out the plan, I discovered that it's super low fat unless you use points. That wasn't really a problem. I don't eat a lot of added fats.

It also ended up being super low carb for me. You can't eat bread without counting points, and I guess that's a huge problem for me, since I keep talking about it. Rice, whole wheat pasta, and potatoes are all once a day foods. I'm not clear whether you can eat them more often if you count the points for the other meals. That question isn't addressed in the printed materials or online. Other grains and starchy vegetables are filling foods and can be used to up the carb count. I don't feel well when I eat very low anything. I feel better if I balance the various food types, although I do go overboard with the vegetables sometimes. I love vegetables!!

The way to make that work would be to plan meals more fully than I do now. I often take a look in the pantry and see what there is. Bread, pasta, rice and potatoes are staples that can become the basis for a meal. Soup and sandwiches are a favorite. Stuffed baked potatoes are another. If I keep the filling foods around, I can still do those kind of meals. I just have to have some things cooked in advance or ready to go. That works fine with this plan, until you head to a restaurant--any restaurant.

One restaurant meal can easily add 10 or more points to the total, even when you choose filling foods like salads, with dressing on the side; grilled meats; steamed vegetables and brown rice. A lot of restaurants are putting their nutrition information in the menu, online, or in brochures on the tables. I use them, whenever possible, to help make the best choices or, if I'm splurging, to figure out as accurately as I can, what the point count is. One restaurant meal can eat up enough of your weekly points that the built-in restrictions of this plan can make me feel like this is a diet, not a lifestyle.

I think that after this week, I'm probably going to go back to the regular point plan. But, I'm going to use what worked for me. I want to base my food plan around the filling food list, but count the points so I can include the variety of foods I'm used to eating, especially my homemade whole grain breads.

At the beginning of the week, I feared I'd overeat, since I could eat as much of the filling foods as I wanted. I started using the hunger scale and discovered that 1/2-1 portion of anything is plenty. I'm going to continue using the hunger scale. I think that, more than changing the food plan, is what made a difference this week. I'm going to continue to stop eating, as I did with the filling foods, when I'm full--even if I don't hit all the points for the day, with the caveat that if for some weird reason I'm below the minimum anyone should eat, I'll eat more. I don't think that's going to happen. If that were a likely possibility, I wouldn't need to lose nearly a hundred pounds.

I'm also not worried about nutrition, since I love the healthy food we're supposed to eat. My weight problem is mainly due to not knowing when I've had enough of those healthy foods. That's where the hunger scale comes it. If I know I'm going to be recording it, I pay more attention to when I'm hungry and when I'm full. I think that's a better way for me to use the program effectively.

Simply Filling Foods

2009-09-28T16:19:00.000-07:00

Weight Watchers has a food plan where you don't have to count points for everything you eat. You eat from the Filling Foods list, follow a few rules, and only count points if you eat foods that aren't on the list. Sounds easy, but the key to having that plan work is to stop eating when you've had enough. Well, knowing how much is "enough" is my biggest problem. However, I'm planning to try it, anyway.

My reasoning is that following that plan will force me to be more aware of how hungry I am and when I'm done eating. I can't just rely on the point count to tell me when to stop eating. And I won't end up eating more than I want "because I have to eat all of my points". Plus, I'd rather not have to calculate the points for everything I eat.

It seems restrictive because of the rules. I don't like food restrictions, except that when I look at what I eat, most of what I eat is from the Filling Foods list. I'm already choosing to eat mostly from that list because it's mostly whole foods. There are some foods that I'll have to count points for, mainly bread and full-fat dairy. I really don't like nonfat dairy products. They're not very satisfying.

One thing that could be a problem is the way they handle starchy foods. No breads, not even whole grain breads, are considered to be a Filling Food. Baking bread is my specialty. So, I'll do what I do now and use my weekly point allowance to cover my homemade bread. Most days I only eat one slice with breakfast, anyway. Whole wheat pasta or potatoes or brown rice can only be eaten once a day, although you can have other types of grains, like polenta or quinoa, at other meals. It makes it kind of hard when you eat out or at pot lucks and so on, since so many pot luck main dishes are based around pasta or potatoes. I'll have to plan in advance for those times.

It will be really interesting creating recipes using this food plan. I can see that there will be some challenges, but I also see that it will be easier in some ways. A lot of my favorite recipes will fit right in. Others will need a bit of tweaking, but it will be fun to figure out how to make them work.

Tomorrow I'm cooking some meals for a friend who's pregnant. She can't stand the smells of cooking, but when it's prepared for her, she can eat a lot more types of foods without getting nauseous. So we worked out some things and she or her husband will be picking them up tomorrow evening. And I have to bake bread. My sourdough starter needs refreshing and we're almost out of the bread I baked a couple of weeks ago.

20# Gone

2009-09-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

My total weight loss is 20# since last June. That's an average of about 5 pounds per month. That's a nice, steady pace.

I think quick weight loss is an awful goal for many reasons. If you're losing weight to improve your overall health, then trying to lose weight in a unhealthy way seems counterproductive. Then there's all the research that says if you lose it too fast, first it's excess water. Then instead of burning fat, you lose your own muscle tissue. That's also counterproductive to good health.

But that's not why I prefer to lose slowly. I prefer to lose slowly because it gives me time to build (or rebuild) habits that will help me keep it off. Some of what I do is based on things that worked in the past. But a lot of what I'm doing now is in response to living in a culture that promotes weight gain.

It's easier to lose weight if you stay home and make your own food. But that's not a realistic lifestyle for the average person. Although we're not eating out these days, I discovered a couple of new strategies for dealing with restaurant food before Paul was laid off. The problems with restaurant food are mainly the amount of fat they use and the enormous portions they serve. I deal with the fat by eating small amounts of the higher calorie items and getting all dressings, sauces, etc. on the side. Then I get to pick how much of them I eat.

I deal with the portion sizes by getting a separate, small plate. Then I take about a third of what's on the serving-size plate they've given me. I eat that. Usually, it's plenty of food, especially if I've eaten a salad or soup to start with. The rest goes home and I get two or three more meals from it. The other strategy for dealing with portion sizes is to share. Even with sharing, we usually have food to take home.

Another strategy is to use my overall food philosophy--go for the veggies. I always order a salad or vegetable soup. It fills me up and makes it easier to eat smaller portions of the main course. Sometimes I substitute veggies for French fries, depending on what's available. There's no point if the vegetable dishes are all drenched in a butter sauce.

The traditional advice is to order plain steamed vegetables. But they usually aren't cooked properly and are unappetizing. They make me feel like I'm "on a diet". That "on a diet" feeling is hard for me because it makes me feel like I'm being punished for having a body that tends toward fatness. That's a killer for me, psychologically. It makes me want to pig out on high-calorie foods. So, I lose weight better if I eat reasonable-sized portions of foods I like (which includes properly-cooked steamed vegetables).

I'm learning to eat differently if I want dessert, too. If I'm just wanting a taste, a bite or two, I don't worry about it. But if I want a reasonable serving, I don't order a high-calorie main course. I'll have soup and salad and eat lightly the rest of the day (or the next day, if the meal out wasn't planned in advance.)

What's interesting about all of the above is that so much of it is traditional advice I never could figure out how to follow before. I don't want to eat so differently from the people around me that I'm advertising, "I'm trying to lose weight". It's that "punishment feeling" again. I much prefer that it appear that I'm eating the same as everyone else and I stopped eating because I got full.

That's probably why the current Weight Watcher program works so well for me, as well as so many other people. If you plan carefully and make good choices, you can eat like everyone else, just not as much food as the big people. I'm an average height woman with a medium build. I don't need as much food as a woman who's 6' tall and big boned. The problem is learning how much food is the amount my particular body needs. I'm working on it and feel like I finally have some good guidelines.

So Much for the Cooking Project

2009-09-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like I'm going to have to give up on doing anything like my Cute Cooking or Cooking in Miniature idea for now. Or any other project that's just playing because I can't afford to experiment. My cooking project will have to be eating fresh food on a super tight budget.

So, today's cooking will be to do something with the food I bought before I fell this past week and bruised my ribs. One of the biggest issues with cooking for two people is that there is a lot of food that doesn't come in packages sized for two people. The cheapest stuff is usually sized in huge quantities, which was great when I had growing boys living with me. Planning carefully helps because I can make multiple recipes that use the same ingredients.

That dilemma kind of inspired my cute cooking idea. The biggest problem I have is lack of freezer space. If I can buy ingredients for two servings and cook that much, I don't have leftovers to take up space in my freezer. I can then cook and freeze things like rice and beans blanch produce that comes in bunches and oatmeal and bread and stock--ingredients or meals that can be thawed and used when I have less time to cook a whole meal from scratch. That was the theory, anyway.

Experimenting with recipes and food will have to be put off for a time when I have the budget. It's disappointing because I was getting excited about having some fun in my kitchen. I'd been putting a lot of things off that I wanted to try because I wasn't sure about Paul's employment situation. Then he got his benefits and everything was set up for the long haul and I was thinking about doing fun stuff. But with yet another layoff, that's not happening. Time to move back into super frugal budget mode. We're being way more frugal at this point because whether he gets unemployment is really iffy and we may need to have as much as possible to move somewhere else. Who knows where? Our options are pretty limited at this point, but we're always open to workable ideas.

Weight Loss Lessons

2009-09-05T08:49:00.001-07:00

Background

I've lost about 20 pounds since I started taking the train to work. I first lost a few pounds from just walking to and from the train. When I exercise, even a moderate amount, my appetite goes down. This happened back a few years ago when Paul and I started walking the track near my mom's house. I lost between 20 and 30 pounds. Then I stayed the same until we moved. I had to stop walking because there was nowhere except sidewalk and I was getting muscle cramps on the fronts of my legs. I gained most of the weight back.

So, when I started losing again, I decided to do more than just adding exercise to my life. I rejoined Weight Watchers, using their online tools. I get my support from online groups and friends and family. I don't find the meetings help me, personally, very much. I tend to tune it all out because I've been there, done that.

Also, I get tired of people's games to make the scale as low as possible each week. People wear special clothes. Take off their shoes. Even make sure they use the toilet right before they weigh in. Some people don't eat before a meeting. It's crazy!! I don't want to get sucked into compulsive, crazy behavior. If that's what it takes, I'd rather stay fat.

Plus, I get frustrated with recipes and food advice because that's another kind of game. You win the game by getting the most food for the fewest points regardless of the nutritional value of your meal. The fact is that what people are really trying to do is to lose weight without making any real changes. The diet food industry is rife with fake foods that mimic the foods people don't want to give up in order to lose weight.

Weight Watchers sell food that's not as high in nutritional value as the fresh food they promote as being healthier. Yet, despite their healthy eating advice, they don't really want you to eat only fresh food because they make a lot of money from selling you their food products. The last time I attended meethings, part of the meeting time was spent promoting Weight Watchers products and I'd prefer to skip that. I ignore the ads when I'm online.

Lessons Learned So Far

The main thing I've learned is that a lot of the advice the professionals give you is true, but until you experience it for yourself, you don't really believe it. And I learned that a lot of research needs to be done into the effect of female hormones on weight.

Details

1. When I was growing up, my mom decided how much food went on the plate and we were expected to eat it all. If there were leftovers, but not enough to save or the leftovers would tempt her too much, she'd beg everyone else to eat them whether we were hungry or not. Consequently, I have no idea how to know when I'm full. I'm used to eating to overfull.

I decided to try an experiment and not put a bite in my mouth until I've swallowed the previous bite. I still forget. Old habits die hard. But I'm getting more consistent with this. The result: I feel full and more satisfied on less food because I'm eating more slowly. This is especially beneficial when eating higher-calorie foods because they require eating super small portions. A side benefit is that I'm more aware of the flavors in my food and that helps me become a better cook.

2. When I grew up and discovered that canned vegetables were not the only way to get vegetables, I discovered that I love vegetables. So, now I go for the fruits and veggies. I'm starting to base my meals more around the veggies and fruits, adding whole grains, protein, and some fat to them. I'm not a vegetarian, but when I make a meat-based main dish, I keep the portion small so I can have a lot of vegetable dishes, too. This strategy allows me to eat a reasonable volume of food and still lose weight. However, I'm discovering that the total volume of food I'm eating is a lot less. I get full faster when I eat this way, especially when I use whole grains.

3. Whole grains are amazing. When I put one serving of white rice or regular pasta or white bread on my plate and eat it, I feel neither full nor satisfied. I need two or three portions for that. But, when I put one serving of whole grain bread, whole grain rice, or whole wheat pasta on my plate, not only am I both full and satisfied, sometimes I can't finish it because it's too much food.

I think one of the main problems people have with whole grains is unfamiliarity with them combined with the poor quality of a lot of the whole grain products, particularly breads, in the markets. You have to keep trying different types and brands to find what you like. When I first tried whole wheat pastas, they were horrible. But now I prefer them because the quality has improved since then. I solve the whole grain bread issue by making my own. Baking bread is one of the pleasures in my life, so that's a no-brainer for me.

4. Beans are one of my favorite foods. I've always liked them and I've been trying out new varieties lately. They really fill you up. I love to add them to pureed vegetable soups because they also thicken the soup. What I've discovered is that when you buy beans at Whole Foods or any store that has a lot of vegetarian customers, they're fresher and take less time to cook. When I eat beans several times a week, I tend to lose more weight than when I don't. I'm not saying that beans cause weight loss, but they probably keep the total calories lower because they're so filling.

5. I'm eating a lot more vegetarian meals these days because it's cheaper. This will be an especially crucial issue as Paul and I deal with yet one more time he's been laid off. I don't want this to derail my weight loss efforts, so I'm going to have to plan meals carefully, keeping the budget in mind.

Time magazine had a disturbing article recently called Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food. They were talking about how difficult it is to eat a standard American diet and not gain weight. And how the agriculture and industry's subsidies allow them to make cheap, but unhealthy food. I haven't figured out how I'm going to continue to eat high-quality, healthful food on my now super-limited budget, but I'm not giving up on it, at least not while I still have a kitchen of my own to cook in.

6. The food thing is really all about portion control and balancing high-calorie and low-calorie foods. Weight Watchers says that you don't have to give up foods you love in order to lose weight. But when people talk about the program, they talk about OP foods. OP stands for On Program. That implies that there are foods that are off program. They usually mean the foods that have been pounded into our brain as being bad. But Weight Watchers is right. You can eat whatever you want, but you have to be willing to change the portion size and what you eat with it. You have to balance your food over time and you have to learn what balance works best for you.

An example: You can eat real macaroni and cheese, just not a huge bowl full. If you make it with whole wheat pasta, which is how I like it, and add some vegetables, you can eat a nice-sized portion. If you just want the comfort food, without adding veggies to the dish itself, you eat a smaller serving. Then, fill the meal out with a vegetable soup or a vegetable side dish and a salad. That's plenty of food.

The problem is that we don't think of macaroni and cheese as the main course. We eat it with high-calorie hot dogs or hamburgers and buns. If I want a hot dog or hamburger and bun, I pair it with grilled corn and watermelon, plus a salad. And I've discovered that one slider-sized hamburger is plenty, especially if I make the buns myself.

My point is that I've been rethinking what constitutes a healthy, satisfying menu and coming up with a very different combination of foods from what I grew up with. It more closely resembles the types of foods recommended by professional nutritionists, with one major exception--I eat mostly whole fat dairy products. I don't like low-fat dairy. I don't substitute cup for cup, though. When I eat whole milk yogurt, I eat a quarter of a cup with fruit and granola. I couldn't eat a whole cup of it. It's too filling.

7. As for the hormone thing, before I stopped having the monthly hormone swings, I lost about 50 pounds, twice. But then I got stuck gaining and losing the same 5 pounds every month. I gave up and gradually regained some of that weight back. I never got back up to my highest weight ever. I managed to permanently keep off about 20-25 pounds. Back then it was all or nothing. You were a failure if you didn't get to the goal they set, and those goals were unrealistically low. Now, you're encouraged to set more reasonable goals and you don't feel like a failure if you've lost a significant amount of weight, but not every pound the experts say someone of your height and gender ought to lose.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the hormone thing--now that I don't have those monthly food cravings, anxiety, etc., my weight loss has been steady, as has my ability to adhere to the program. If I were a researcher working in the field of obesity, that's an area I'd love to examine. One of the things everyone knows about weight loss is that it's harder after menopause. I'm not so sure that's true for everyone. Thus far, it's not been true for me.

Easy Chicken Recipe

2009-09-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

I made this last night. It's super good and super easy. This isn't the kind of recipe that needs to be exact, so adjust it for however many people you're cooking for. I baked it in the oven, but it would be a perfect grilled chicken dish for a Labor Day weekend barbecue because it's not very labor-intensive.

Lemon Chicken

Ingredients:

Note: The amounts given are for about 2 pounds of chicken pieces, which is about 4 whole chicken legs. Adjust the ingredient amounts up or down according to your tastes and how much chicken you're cooking.

1. 4 whole chicken legs, or 2 pounds chicken pieces.
2. Approximately 2 cloves of garlic. How much garlic you use depends on how big the cloves are and how much you like garlic.
3. Salt and pepper
4. About 1/2 cup fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley, chopped.
5. 3 lemons, juiced, for about 2 pounds of chicken. If you're feeding a crowd, add more lemon juice, as needed, to marinate the chicken. Juice it through a sieve so you can catch the pits. Don't throw out the rinds.

Instructions:

1. Wash and dry the chicken pieces. Put in a large bowl. Add the garlic, salt, pepper and parsley. Rub it into the chicken. Make sure the garlic is rubbed over all the chicken pieces.

2. Pour the lemon juice into the bowl and turn the chicken pieces to make sure they're all coated with the juice. Add the lemon rinds to the bowl. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least an hour, two is better. Every half hour or so, pull the bowl out and turn and rub the chicken pieces with the marinade.

You could marinate the chicken overnight, but it doesn't need that long and rubbing the marinade into the chicken periodically gives it deeper flavor. But, if you want to cook it after you get home from work, do the marinade in the morning. Give the chicken a good rub before you leave. Again, when you get home, give it a good rub and let it sit a bit longer while you heat the oven and prep whatever you're eating with the dish.

3. Preheat the oven to 375°F.

4. Take the chicken out of the marinade. Throw out the marinade and lemon rinds. Coat the chicken lightly with olive oil. I don't waste extra virgin olive oil on this type of recipe because it doesn't really add anything to the dish. I use a light olive oil and spray it with my Misto. Then I use my hands to rub the sprayed oil evenly over the chicken. You only need enough oil to keep the chicken from sticking to the rack and promote browning.

5. Put skin side down on the rack. Bake 20-30 minutes, depending on how big the chicken pieces are. Turn over and bake another 20-30 minutes, until done. Check the chicken about 10 minutes before they're done. If it's not browning enough, turn the heat up to 400°F for the last 10 minutes.

Julia Child's Book

2009-09-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

Here's another post I started before concert week:

I'm not even trying to cook this week. It's concert week and I'm in charge of the box office. I'm working a lot of hours. So, we're baking potatoes on the grill. We're grilling steak and chicken. We're going to use the cooked meat and potatoes as the basis for quick meals. Tonight, though, it's the traditional steak, salad, and baked potato meal. It's yummy and simple. We both got home after 5, so we didn't want to fuss a lot.

I've been really glad to see Mastering the Art of French Cooking get the attention it deserves. She wrote something special. It's headed for the top of the NYT bestseller list this week, 40-some years after it was first published. I hope people don't buy it, leaf through it, and put it on their shelves to cook from "when they have more time". Her recipes are indeed time-consuming. I bet she'd have loved the slow food movement. Here's a link to Slow Food USA, in case you're interested in the American version or want to find a chapter you could participate in.

Back to the book. If you cook from it, you will learn so much about good cooking techniques. And, if you study the recipe variations, you can learn a lot about creating your own food. People are often intimidated by the idea of not following a recipe exactly. If you look at the types of changes she makes in the variations, you can start to get a feel for what changes will work and what won't.

I've noticed two interesting things about what she wrote. First, her recipes are supposed to serve six people, assuming a three-course meal that was standard in America when she was writing. She says that in France, they'd have six courses and the portions would be half as large. The six courses are hors d'oeuvre, soup, salad, main course, cheese and dessert. As you go through the book, she mentions what recipes would be good hors d'oeuvres for a dinner and they're pretty much vegetable dishes. The cheese and dessert courses are at the end of the meal, so you would most likely be too full to eat too much of them. By dividing the meal up into courses, you take longer to eat, so you're more aware of being full before you've eaten too much.

I think the French paradox thing makes perfect sense when you look at that eating pattern. (The French paradox=eating more saturated fat, whole fat cheeses and dairy and so on, but not getting fat or having a lot of heart attacks. Small portions that include a lot of vegetables and taking a long time to eat mean you're less likely to overeat. But I digress, and that could easily be another post.

I wonder if even the French today cook that many courses for dinner. You'd have to spend all day cooking. That would be fun, but most people have to work. I like small portions of a variety of tastes. So, my personal preference is to do soup, salad, main course/sides and fresh fruit. That's really hard to find the time to do, even with doing some advance cooking, so I don't often get my preference. The Tables for Eight group from my church gets the benefit of my love of multi-course meals. I usually substitute a dessert for the fruit and add some pre-dinner munchies, since it's a dinner party.

Second, she has such a reputation for loving butter and cream that everyone thinks she cooks super-high-fat, unhealthy food. But when you read the recipes, she doesn't add fat willy-nilly. She uses the right amount to get the results she wants. She carefully pours off or removes extra fat because she doesn't want greasy food. Her philosophy was that we shouldn't be afraid of our food. That's a philosophy I agree with, but have struggled with most of my life due to an upbringing that was drenched in being afraid of food.

I very much enjoyed reading the book. Yeah, I'm one of those weird people who reads through cookbooks the way I read novels. I'm definitely going to be cooking from it. I'm thinking about having a fall dinner party with Boeuf Bourguignon as the centerpiece. After going to see Julie and Julia, Paul asked me if I'd ever cooked it. I had, but not Julia Child's version because I didn't have the cookbook at that time. It was a gift from my son who worked in a used bookstore for a few years. Someone gave it to the store and no one wanted it. He gave it a good home.

Local Eating

2009-09-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

One of the things I'm doing today is catching up on things that were put aside while I worked a ton of extra hours. The concerts were amazing! So, here's one post I started around mid-August.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote a book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life which tells of her family's attempts to eat only food they've grown themselves on a farm they bought in Virginia. The locavore movement refers to eating locally grown food, but the definition of "locally grown food" seems to be up to the individual. If you scroll down the page, you come across the definition of "locavore" and the radius seems to be 50, 100, or 150 miles from where you live. I'd heard 100 miles was kind of the standard.

Paul had talked about eating meals centered around locally grown vegetables. We had an interesting conversation about eating only locally produced food. He said he didn't mean to eat only local foods, but rather to use local foods, specifically vegetables, as the center of the menu. I started thinking about the 100-mile thing and wondered what foods are available from within a 100-mile radius of here. I decided to research it, just because I'm a curious person.

So, I got a cardboard wheel from Amazon that shows what's local to the San Francisco Bay Area and when it's in season. It's called The Local Foods Wheel and it's by Maggie Gosselin, Sarah Klein, and Jessica Prentice. Their website: Local Foods Wheel. It's pretty amazing to see that I could, theoretically, get almost anything I want to eat from somewhere local to this area. Tropical fruits like bananas, pineapple, etc. are, as I expected, not on the wheel. There are some things I've never heard of, like burdock root and cardoons. Did you know there's a plant called jujube? And you thought it was just a candy.

I doubt I'll be eating exclusively locally produced food. It would be an interesting exercise to try it for a year, hitting every season, but I don't have the resources to do this. I'd need a car and the time to go to the farmer's markets, farms themselves, and other sources to purchase locally grown food. What I do now is to choose locally grown and produced food whenever possible. It helps that they post signs saying where your food comes from.

In my quest for the best ingredients, because the best ingredients make the best food, I also try to use organic whenever I can. I've noticed that organic is fresher and more flavorful. And local organic is often the best. It's more expensive, but my strategy is to eat more vegetarian meals and to cook from scratch. I don't spend my money or calories on junk food very often. Organic junk food is still junk food. But that's an issue for another post, another time, if I feel like ranting.

I've had some time to think about this whole idea and what I want to do is to use the wheel to help me plan meals that are in season. That can be tough. I subscribe to several food magazines and they send the October issue in late August, so the magazines hitting my mailbox now are full of fall braises and stews. But it's still summer, with late-summer food in the markets.

I'm thinking of storing magazines away by month and pulling them out when that season gets here, so I'm not tempted to cook food that's not yet in season. That's more expensive, as well as not as good because the ingredients aren't at their peak. It's not yet time for braised short ribs and root vegetables. Right now is the time to enjoy tomatoes, peaches, and corn, before they go out of season.

Cooking in Miniature

2009-08-19T20:43:00.000-07:00

I've been looking at my refrigerator. It's small. Not the smallest I've ever had in an apartment, but not really big enough for someone who cooks from scratch. I've also been reading Cooking for Two 2009 from Cook's Illustrated magazine. It occurred to me that an answer that would allow me to tackle a variety of projects, but still have a theme, is to work on scaling recipes for two people.

I always cook large amounts of food. It's partly because I cooked for a family with two growing boys for so many years. And it's partly my Italian heritage. We Italians seem to have a mission to feed the world. You couldn't walk into my grandmother's house without her offering you food. But now there's only two of us to cook for. So, I cut recipes in half and we still end up getting 2-3 meals out of them because everything is super-sized.

Cooking in Miniature would go right along with Weight Watchers, too. I'm learning what portion sizes I need to eat if I want to be a healthy weight. And they're a lot smaller than what is served in restaurants or found in cookbooks. I think if you made recipes from cookbooks published during my childhood and divided them up into the number of servings the recipe says it makes, you'd think you'd stumbled upon a kid's cookbook because the portions would seem so small.

I think miniaturizing recipes is the perfect challenge for me at this time in my life. The question remains, though, whether to revisit the basics or go international. Maybe I could alternate. Choose basic techniques to practice one month, including using them in recipes. The next month, I could visit a new cuisine. I think I'd get bored with just practicing basic techniques, so alternating would allow me to improve my basic skills and stretch my cooking comfort zone.

I think I may have found my challenge. But, there's one more thing I want to think about before I start planning it. When my Amazon order gets here, it will be easier to figure it all out.

I've got food simmering on the stove. I took stuff I had in the fridge and put it in a pot. It's black beans, salsa verde, vegetable stock, and roasted spicy vegetables. It didn't work for what I originally planned, but I put some of it together, spooned it over a steamed corn tortilla, and topped it with a poached egg, making huevos rancheros with a green sauce. It's not too dry to eat as a soup, especially if you top it with some cheese. I may try that for lunch tomorrow. I think of it as a serendipity recipe. It's serendipity that I found another use for the ingredients since my original idea didn't work.

Musings on Advance Prep Cooking

2009-08-17T19:29:00.000-07:00

I was really tired today, so I made the simplest dinner. We had Mushroom-tarragon soup that I made a couple of days ago. Melon with berries. Toast with butter. And eggs scrambled with some of the vegetables I roasted. It took about ten minutes to put together and was yummy.

One of the things I'm trying to do is to make food when I have more time. Then do only the last minute stuff on the busy days. My biggest problem with that is that I have an apartment-sized refrigerator and freezer, which limits the amount of food I can store. People who have family-sized appliances don't know how lucky they are to have space for storing both ingredients and finished dishes. Upon considering the problem, I've thought of two things that could help.

One is to make half recipes whenever possible, which means fewer leftovers to store. The benefit of half recipes is that Paul and I won't be eating the same meal every day for a month. That's obviously an exaggeration, but sometimes it feels that way. I'm noticing that portion sizes in recipes, particularly from books written by restaurant chefs, are growing, just as they are in restaurants. So, a half recipe is about perfect for two meals.

The drawback to half recipes is that I'll have to cook more often. There will be less food I can freeze to reheat on busier days. I'm thinking of getting one of those food saving devices that vacuum seals the food. Then my freezer won't be filled up with packages that are half food and half air. I could fit more stuff in there.

The other thing I can do is to use some of my evening time for prep work. I'd rather just cook on the weekends, which is what I've done the two times I've tried achieving this goal. But since I don't have space to store a whole week's worth of food, I'm going to have to spread the cooking out more. I only go into the office three days a week--Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I do the rest of my work from home. Every other week I visit a woman from our church. I prefer to do that on Tuesdays and have Fridays for catching up with household chores. But, I think I'm going to have to change my visits to Fridays so I can have Tuesdays, and whatever time I can scrape out of the weekend, and maybe an hour or so occasionally in the evenings for advance prep work. Of course, the weeks I don't do the visit, I'll have Tuesdays and Fridays available. So maybe I could plan two weeks at a time and spread the work out so that the most time-consuming work is planned for the weeks I only have to go out three days.

Then there's the weekend schedule issue. This weekend, for example, I have a wedding Saturday afternoon and something scheduled Sunday morning, afternoon, and evening. And next weekend are two orchestra concerts, plus my usual Sunday church time. So, I'm going to have to schedule fairly simple food for next week. These types of scheduling issues crop up fairly regularly. It means I'm going to have to plan and use my time as efficiently as possible. That will be crucial if I'm going to combine the necessary everyday cooking with a special cooking project.

My Friday deadline for figuring out what my project will be may have to be put off. I found an interesting gizmo that I've ordered from Amazon. It may help me figure out what I want to do, so unless it gets here sooner than I expect, it will be next week before I choose what I'm going to do. On the other hand, it may end up being just a good research tool for the post on local eating that I started earlier today. I have to do some research before I can finish my other post, choose my project, and get a schedule going.

Back to Your Reglarly Scheduled Foodie Program

2009-08-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

Now that the jeans rant is out of the way, back to food.

Last night I recreated a favorite meal from Left Bank Brasserie, located at Santana Row in San Jose. I really love their food and have always had a good experience at their restaurant.

One of my favorite things for brunch is the SALADE LYONNAISE: frisée, warm poached egg, bacon, mustard vinaigrette & FONDUE AU FROMAGE brie, blue and goat cheeses. That's the meal I decided to recreate last night.

The Weight Watcher thing means making adjustments to recipes re: portion sizes, how much fat and higher calorie ingredients I use, and so on. So I often add veggies to fill me up without adding extra calories. One of my favorite ways to do that is to make soup. A half cup is the perfect size to go with a meal. Last night I filled in with a Mushroom-Tarragon Soup.

For the meal itself, I used a very small amount of dressing on the salad, just enough to coat the frisee and give me the flavor I'm looking for. The bacon was thick sliced so I only used a half slice per serving. More would have overwhelmed the other flavors in the salad. I discovered that the eggs I buy, which are super fresh, are simple to poach. They are the first eggs I've poached that look like the pictures of poached eggs.

A quarter cup of the cheese fondue was plenty, maybe even too much. I served it with one slice of olive bread and steamed orange cauliflower. The olive bread went very well with the brie, roquefort, and goat cheese blend in the fondue. The cauliflower was wonderful with the cheese. The pale orange color looked good and cheese sauce really enhances the mild flavor of cauliflower.

The meal was easier than I thought it would be to make. After I test some changes, including the portion sizes, I'll post the recipes. I think a smaller serving of fondue and a half slice of bread, along with the cauliflower, would be enough food. I'd like to add some berries, peaches, or apricots to the meal. I think that would make it a more complete light meal.

Note on the lack of pictures: I need to get a better camera so I can take pictures for this blog. Bad food pictures are NOT better than no pictures. Trust me. I've seen blogs with bad food pictures and I never go back to the blog because bad photography makes the food look disgusting. But, I'm picky about photography, anyway. My dad was a professional and my oldest son, David, is also a photographer. So is Paul. When we were dating, we used to take our cameras and go on photo shoots. My family would give me grief if I posted bad food pictures, even if they never read it. And, since no one else is reading this blog, it doesn't really matter whether I post pictures right now, since I know what it looks like.

Jeans & Clothes--a little rant

2009-08-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

I, like every other woman I know, hate buying jeans. As soon as you find some that fit, they stop making them. My problem: I cannot find jeans that sit properly at my waist and aren't too long. I can't wear petite sizes because the rise is too short. But I walk on the hems of average length jeans. And my new jeans fit perfectly, except they're too short in the back and my underwear sticks out the top.

And what's with the 'boot leg' jeans? I can't find straight leg jeans that have normal waists. They all fit below the waistline. Not a good look for me. Can you say "super muffin top"? I hate spending the kind of money they charge for clothes that don't fit or need mending after one wearing.

I have two shirts I need to buy buttons for because the buttons are too small for the buttonholes. So, they don't stay buttoned. I have one shirt that needs the facing ironed because it folds back in the wash. And the style has fabric hooks instead of buttonholes, so there's a gap and my stomach shows through. It's frustrating to dig out the iron for a 1" strip of fabric.

My consolation is that as I lose weight, these clothes will get too big and have to be replaced. Maybe with clothes that fit properly? Or maybe I'll have to buy a sewing machine and start making my own again. At least I can alter the patterns so they fit. And choose colors, fabrics, etc. that appeal to me, rather than being a compromise I've spent too much money on. If I really get ambitious, I could dig out my flat pattern design book and design some of my clothes from scratch. No time these day, but maybe in the future?

Suggestion from Paul & Musings

2009-08-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

Paul had another suggestion that really surprised me. He suggested that rather than creating meals around the protein, I start with seasonal vegetables. Instead of saying, "We're having chicken. How do I want to cook it and what goes with it?", he suggested saying, "We're having asparagus. How do I want to cook it and what goes with it?" It's an interesting approach, especially since he's not suggesting going vegetarian, just thinking of the meat, fish, chicken, etc. as one of the "go withs" not the "main deal".

I like that suggestion because it will force me to think differently about how I cook, and that will get me to try new techniques and push myself to be a better cook. It surprised me that he made it, though, because when he gets a salad in a restaurant, he never finishes the lettuce. What he does is pick through for the "good stuff", which he defines as the chicken, shrimp, etc.--in other words, the protein. I'm wondering if maybe he's wanting a change.

I'm leaning toward doing a World Tour, cooking my way around the world. It could fit into Paul's suggestion, since so many of the world cuisines are based on beans, rice, vegetables, etc. And the variety is infinite, especially when you look at regional cuisine. I bet if I separated it into regional cuisine, I could cook a year's worth of cuisines, doing one a month, without leaving the United States (or any other country), which is yet another idea. This doesn't feel like a project with an end, though, unless I do something like exploring one cuisine a month for a year. Or maybe it would be better to do that as year two and revisit the basics for year one.

The world tour seems more interesting than the basics, but I can't help but think I need to go back to basics every so often and refine those techniques. Plus, there are some I've never really learned as well as I could because I don't use them often enough. On the other hand, cooking different cuisines from around the world will require learning the basics of those cuisines. Learning what ingredients define those cuisines and how to work with them and what they taste like and so on.

I see research in my future. But researching something I'm interested in is fun. The hard part is stopping the research. Once I start googling for stuff, time tends to slip away. I slip into "the zone" or "flow" or whatever you prefer to call it way too easily.

Hmmm....I see a foray into new restaurants, too, because that's the best way I can think of to taste food I'm unfamiliar with. The problem is knowing which restaurants have good examples of authentic cuisine from various places around the globe. I'm lucky to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I doubt it's possible to find a cuisine that you can't find a restaurant to go to or ingredients to use to cook it yourself. It's foodie heaven, which is probably one reason I love living here.

More on Julie/Julia

2009-08-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

I've been trying really hard not to think badly of Julie Powell, the blogger who cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But it's kind of hard not to agree with Julia, who was quoted in this LA Times article as having said:

"she just doesn't seem very serious, does she?

"I worked very hard on that book. I tested and retested those recipes for eight years so that everybody could cook them. And many, many people have. I don't understand how she could have problems with them. She just must not be much of a cook."

Case in point: I was reading Julie's blog and she complained about having to boil the bacon for a recipe. She said she did it because Julia said to, but she had no idea why. Well, if she'd bothered to read the chapter on Ingredients she'd have known that the bacon Julia was used to in France wasn't smoked and wasn't readily available in America. She recommended parboiling it to get the smoky taste out so the dish didn't taste only of bacon.

That kind of inattention to detail, which is something I noticed cropping up again and again as I read through Julie's book, is what I think made Julia respond the way she did. If you read My Life in France, you see that Julia takes an engineer's approach to her recipes. Everything was carefully thought out and tested over and over to make it repeatable and to ensure the cook gets the result she expects. Yet Julie kept making beginner mistakes like not reading through the recipe and I very much doubt she did her mise en place. I get the feeling that Julie is kind of a dabbler in cooking. She enjoys it, but lacks the passion Julia had. Any project that had a deadline to keep her motivated and was interesting enough to write about would have done.

The reason I'm choosing to pay more attention to my cooking and to trying to find a good cooking project is because I've been a passionate cook since I was a teenager. My mom wouldn't let me cook when I was a kid, unfortunately, because I've always been interested in food and cooking. I've never dug into it the way I'm thinking about doing now because of the weight thing. I had this niggling feeling in the back of my mind that if I really went for it as a cook, people would say that if I didn't cook, I'd be thin. And I didn't want to have more blame heaped on my head. I realize now that my fear is a stupid one. Neither has anything to do with the other. Great cooks come in all sizes. And without that issue to deal with, the question comes back to where to start?

Considering Ideas

2009-08-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm still considering ideas for some type of cooking project. Paul suggested a couple of things. He suggested I cook recipes from the cookbooks I have that were written by great chefs. There seems to be something missing in this idea. I can't figure out what I could do to flesh it out into something I could get excited about.

And he suggested I could focus on making recipes with lower fat and calorie content. He says I'm good at it. I'm always having problems with the recipes when magazines like Cooking Light or Eating Well or Weight Watchers recreate recipes. I know they're following the current health guidelines, but they insist on using food I call "fake ingredients". I'm not eating Jello sugar-free pudding made with nonfat milk and topped with fat free Cool Whip. I'd rather eat a fresh peach, plain.

Or the finished dish is so different from the original that the flavors aren't what the person who gave them the original were looking for. When I reduce the calories and fat in dishes, they're lower than the original, but usually not what you'd consider "diet food". This is something I'm doing a lot of these days, though, because I signed up for Weight Watchers online and have lost 13.5 pounds. (Go, me!)

The main problem with this as a project is that it doesn't really excite me as a fun project. And it doesn't really tie into my goal of learning to be a better cook. It uses my current skills in a different way. That's a good thing, but not what I'm after for this project. I think this one is more my everyday cooking life, not a special project.

Another thing I've been noticing about my cooking interests is that I've been cooking a lot more vegetarian meals these days. Good quality meat, poultry, and fish are not cheap meals anymore. So by cooking more vegetarian meals, I can stretch my budget. I'd rather eat top quality less often than poor quality every day. So maybe focusing on more variety in my vegetarian food would be a good project.

I read the New York Times health section on a regular basis. I love both Mark Bittman's blog and Martha Rose Schulman's healthy recipes. I have Mark Bittman's books. I've been looking for Martha's but apparently I'm going to have to buy them online. I could do their food, but it has the same problem as Paul's first idea. I can't figure out what that would do to improve my cooking skills, although it might give me ideas for new recipes.

I also would like to explore Asian cuisine more. I love to eat it, but am pretty unfamiliar with cooking it. I have a few Asian cookbooks, but I have no idea how authentic or good they are. I don't know how to choose Asian cookbooks that would be good for a student to learn from.

World cuisine is appealing to me. I love variety and trying new things. I have several international cookbooks. I could choose one cuisine I'm unfamiliar with every month or two and explore their food. That would be fun and definitely improve my skills as I try techniques unfamiliar to the food I've learned to make so far in my life.

See what I mean about having too many ideas? I've always been an idea person. It does me in every time because I can't choose one. Maybe I need to list pros and cons of each idea with regards to how they fit into my goal of cooking better. Then choose the one that fits the goal best.

I think I need to give myself a week to research and consider various ideas for my project. I'm going to pick one by next Friday. If I don't set myself a deadline, I'll dither for weeks and never get started on it.

Meantime, I need to go start the tomatoes I'm roasting. Tom Colicchio's recipe takes three to four hours to do properly. Today I don't need to bake bread, so I can use my oven for the tomatoes without worrying that the bread will need to go into the oven. I'm planning to use the tomatoes to make a black bean and roasted green tomato chili. I'm roasting pasillas and jalapeños with the tomatoes. We'll see how the whole thing turns out.

Julie/Julia & Foodie Me

2009-08-13T20:30:00.000-07:00

I've been very foodie lately. I know, what else is new? I read Julie/Julia during the past couple of weeks. I also read Tom Colicchio's How to Think Like a Chef. And I'm reading My Life in France by Julia Child. I saw the film Julie & Julia last weekend.

The main thing I came away with from the books and film is that Julia is more interesting to me than Julie. And as good a cook as I am, I still have a lot to learn. I feel very frustrated because I don't know how to learn it. I could cook my way through the cookbooks of the best chefs. I can cook their recipes as many times as it takes until I'm satisfied with the results. But that only will tell me if I like it. It doesn't tell me whether they'd think I've got it right.

I want to be Julia Child, in a way, because she had the food career I've wanted from the time I figured out what brings out the passion in my foodie side. I've always wished I could be good enough to teach cooking and have my cooking taken seriously enough to sell cookbooks.

What I lack, first of all, is credentials. I could never afford cooking school and I didn't & don't want to cook in restaurants. My thing isn't cooking the same thing, exactly the same way, day after day, so customers get the same experience no matter how many times they eat in your place. That's what a restaurant chef does.

My thing is making great food for people. I love cooking for friends and family. I love creating recipes and honing them until they're just right. I love figuring out the best words to use to communicate how I made something to other people so they can make it, too.

Another thing I lack is a budget that would allow me to make a recipe over and over until it's just right, even if I end up with more than we can eat or have to toss some because they're awful. That limits my creativity. I can't take the chance that something I think might work doesn't and has to be thrown away.

The third thing I lack is large blocks of time in which to work in the kitchen. I'm thinking I could probably find some blocks of time I could use to work on a regular basis, if not every day. But that doesn't solve the other two problems.

Since I can't teach or write cookbooks right now, I'll take a cue from how Julia handled difficult situations. She did what she could without whining. So, I'll do the thing I can do. I can work on getting better at cooking the best way I know how--by cooking, but in a more scructured way than I usually approach the subject. I think what will work best is to set specific goals geared toward improving my skills, rather than just cooking what I'm in the mood for right now. As for my other two issues, I think I can manage the budget by adjusting my priorities and choices. As for not having teachers or going to cooking school, I guess I'll just have to trust my own instincts. I learned a lot from the chefs when I worked at HomeChef and I'll have to trust that I developed good enough instincts to know when it's right.

The difficult aspect of this idea for me is figuring out where to start. I'm, as usual, full of too many ideas. I don't know whether to dig out my technique books and cook my way through the basic stocks and sauces and so on or pick something I've always wanted to be able to make and try different people's versions until I feel I've mastered it or pick variations of interesting recipes and figure out my favorite. Or maybe there's some other approach I can use, if only I could figure out what it is. Whatever I choose, when I'm satisfied with the result, I want to create variations of the recipes because I can't leave a recipe alone. Ask my family who always complains that I never cook a recipe the same way twice. Not true, by the way. I cook my favorites the same way and then they complain I don't cook them often enough because I love variety.

If anyone's reading this, I wouldn't object to suggestions as to an approach to take. If you make a suggestion and I love it, it will give me a starting point. If I hate it, at least I'll know where I don't want to start.

A Pasta Recipe

2008-10-13T14:06:00.001-07:00

I made a pasta dish last night that was mostly stuff I had in the cupboards and thought I'd share. It doesn't have a name because it's just something I threw together for dinner.

I took a cup of dried fava beans cooked and drained them. I cooked whole wheat spaghetti. I sauteed sliced onions, reconstituted dried mushrooms, a sliced zucchini, some sun-dried tomatoes, sliced roasted red and yellow bell peppers and some garlic. I put in about a quarter cup of water and covered the pan with a lid. I let it cook for a few minutes, just to soften the zucchini a bit more. I dumped in the beans and a bunch of fresh spinach leaves. I stirred it until the beans were reheated and the spinach was wilted and hot. I seasoned it with salt and pepper. I tossed the spaghetti with enough olive oil to keep it from sticking, a bit of salt and pepper and served it with the vegetables poured over the top of each serving. I topped each serving with a bit of crumbled Feta cheese.

It was really good and really filling. And that's my favorite type of cooking--just pull stuff out of the cupboard and cook it.

I've been discovering dried beans lately. Canned are convenient, but dried taste better. I'm still getting a feel for when they're done. I sometimes don't check them often enough and they get mushy. I use those for things like bean cakes and refried beans that require you to smush the beans into a paste.

The cool thing is that you can get heirloom beans now. I've tried a variety called Red Calypso that's colored red and white. I used them with a blend of black and mahogany rice in a "red beans and rice" dish. I bought some called Eye of the Goat that are light brown with chocolate-colored swirls. I haven't tried them yet. I'm still trying to figure out what type of recipe will show them off well.

I suspect, when I get time to write, I'll be writing more about food I've been eating, since I've been sort of on a kick of trying new things. I found some rice that has been colored green with bamboo juice. It intrigued me, so we'll see how that tastes.

Mangia!

Blogging and Stuff

2008-07-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

I read a story in the news today. The world's oldest blogger died recently. She was an Australian woman who lived to 108 years old. I'd love to live that long and have enough brain power left to write this blog. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed blogging when I wrote more often until that story made me think about my blog, and made me want to write something in it.

I often wish I could do without a few hours of sleep. I envy my cousin who regularly runs on 5 hours sleep a night and she's not sleep-deprived. It's her natural biological rhythm. I'd do all my stuff that has to be done in the daytime and use those late night hours for writing, reading, and other creative projects because I'm at my most creative between 10 pm and 2 am. So, why am I writing this blog in my least creative time--early morning? Because it's when I can spare a few moments.

The rest of the day I need to spend working on three projects for work, finishing the homework assignment that's due today, practicing the music for Ladyesong and Funtimes Singers, and planning and buying next week's groceries. The homework is for my Dreamweaver class. The music is for Saratoga's American Cancer Society's annual Relay for Life fundraiser they do every summer. STOCtet sang forCampbell's Relay for Life last Saturday. Saratoga and Campbell are local small towns you probably won't have heard of unless you're familiar with the San Jose area.

So, I've looked at my busyness, and while it seems to be a symptom of contemporary life to be busy, I take it to an extreme. I realized the other day while talking with a friend at church that I always book myself to the limit because if I don't, I get bored. If I get bored, I start acting like a depressed person who doesn't want to do anything. And it's not depression--it's boredom. Once I figured out that my brain craves exercise, challenges, and so on, it became easier to figure out how to live my life.

It's also one of the reasons I have so much trouble with the routine, and totally boring, chores in life. I overbook myself so I don't have time to do them because boredom is my brain's worst enemy. But, if I have challenging intellectual work, to do, I'm more tolerant of the chores. And if I don't have to spend hours on chores, I tolerate them better.

If you read my blog earlier this year, you know I made a stab at following the Fly Lady's advice. It didn't work well for me, but I include a link because it does work well for a lot of people. I've been considering this problem a lot over the last few months. I think I may have a solution for the boring, routine chores of life. I could do 15 minutes of chores out of every hour I spend on the more interesting things I do. If I write out a plan for my chores, I can make sure I rotate them so everything gets done regularly and often enough to keep the health department at bay. 15 minutes doesn't sound like much time, but I live in a tiny apartment. I can get a lot done in a 15-minutes slot. Plus, those 15 minutes add up to an hour or two over the course of a day.

Of course, there's always option 2--plan a dinner party. If we have a dinner party, my ever-patient husband cleans the house so I can focus on the meal. I'd much rather spend my time planning and cooking a superb meal. Unfortunately, our budget and my aging body can't handle too many of those.

I'm reading Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. It's going slowly because I have such limited reading time, but I'm really enjoying it. I'm enjoying reading again. I'd pretty much given that up, too, because I was too busy. I have a list of things I want to get back into my life and I'm slowly managing to do it. I realized that I have more time than I think, but I have to accommodate my brain's quirks--it's need for challenges, for musing time--to let the creative projects simmer, and for exploring the rest of the world--refilling the well. If I don't do that, nothing gets done. If I do, lots gets done.

The length of this post tells me I do need to blog more often. I really enjoy it and will continue my efforts to write more often.

Happy Birthday!

2008-07-04T16:37:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday, America.

Happy Birthday, Guys!
All of the guys in my family have summer birthdays. This year, we celebrated them all on America's birthday. We had a great time!

My blog has been on the back burner these past few months. I had to reformat my hard drive and reload everything, so it's taken me a while to get back to having even a few minutes to blog. I'm glad Google doesn't delete inactive blogs because I'd like to start writing in here again, now that I've got a working computer.

I'm taking a class in Dreamweaver. It's step one in my plan to finish that web development degree I started back in 2000. I'm hoping to take over the orchestra web site soon and to start a part-time business creating and maintaining web sites for small businesses. I see so many awful sites done by people who decided that HTML is easy and they can do it themselves, but they have no design skills. Doing an effective web site is about so much more than coding HTML. That's a rant for some other time, though.

Anyway, I'm planning to blog regularly, which I keep saying, but not doing. I doubt I'll be writing anywhere near daily, but maybe once a week or every other week. I really do enjoy doing this. I miss writing fiction, too, and want to start writing regularly again, even if it's not for extended periods of time. An online buddy, Holly Lisle, is a published author and extraordinary teacher. She has some online courses that a lot of people find helpful. I'm going to start my quest to write fiction again by doing some of her courses, particularly the one about writing when your life is falling apart. Here's a link to her web site, which has links to her free articles and her shop where you can buy her courses, if you're interested in learning a lot about writing.

Closing Doors

2008-03-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

"The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors" by John Tierney of the New York Times. (By now, it's possible that you have to register in order to read the original article.)

He starts out discussing a Chinese general who took his army into battle and set things up so they couldn't retreat. They had to win or die. Dan Aierly had written a book, "Predictably Irrational", that spawned Tierney's column. Aierly did some expirements at MIT, where he's a professor of behavioral economics, that showed people's penchant for "keeping their options open", even when it's clearly in their best interest to close some doors.

Apparently, this is about having that feeling of loss. It's a feeling people will do just about anything to avoid. So, we don't break off bad relationships. We hang on to our stuff "because it might come in handy someday" or "as soon as I throw it out, I'll need it." Sometimes doors close so slowly we don't see that in our rush to keep all options open, we can pay a huge price. Airely's example is working long hours while your children's childhood slowly slips away. Those hours you might have spent with your kids can't be regained, so that's a closing door.

Speaking of work, choosing a career has major closed doors. If you choose one, you're giving up others. I know a lot of people, often super creative people, who can't pick one art to focus on. They write, paint, and make music. They don't make progress into making money at any of them because they don't put enough practice time into any one to get good enough at it to make a living. Or people like me who love and are curious about tons of stuff, so we take classes and learn about them. After a while we get bored with that subject and move on to something else. Barbara Sher talks about that phenomenon in her book about Scanners. I've found several things I'd love to cobble together into income-producing work, but I haven't figured out how to connect them yet. Maybe I never will get them all going, but maybe I can work enough of them so I don't get bored and quit before I make any actual cash.

This phenomenon is also why people like the Sidetracked Sisters and the Fly Lady got their jobs. They're helping people deal with the doors closed by being unable to get rid of excess stuff. They call one door "CHAOS"--Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. Excess stuff also causes you to waste enormous amounts of time looking for things. Your budget takes a hit if you go out to dinner because you didn't have time to do yesterday's dishes because you were looking for stuff or otherwise dealing with clutter. Or you pay late fees because you couldn't find your bills to pay them on time. And so on.

It's interesting how much of it isn't the stuff itself. It's the emotion attached to the stuff that causes the problem. Examples might be: sentimental feelings because "it's a family heirloom". Or getting rid of it means a dream absolutely won't happen, such as selling a musical instrument you haven't touched since high school, thus giving up any dreams of being a musician. Or you feel guilty because you bought the wrong whatever, often clothing items, and you feel like you're throwing money away if you don't keep them. So you plan to wear or use the stuff and don't follow the plan because you really don't like or want or need this stuff.

Ditto for the career choices. You don't want to give up all of your choices in order to pursue one, so you don't pursue any. You "keep your options open", but spend years in nowhere, dead-end jobs that don't cover the rent, let alone all of your expenses. Or you don't focus on one art, so you scatter your attention among lots of things. Then you never make enough money to give up the day job, and even if it's paying your way just fine, you hate it and yourself because you want to work at your art full-time but can't afford it.

The conclusion is that sometimes we need to close doors. Aierly talks about one door most people close and how they do it. He says when we marry, we close the doors to other relationships. We do it by telling other people we're making that choice. That public statement is one of the main ways we use to help us close that door. But this idea shows why the commitment-phobes have the problem. They can't face the loss of a possibly better someone they might meet in the future. So they refuse to close that door and commit to one relationship.

Airely says that those social connections can help us with other doors, too. I've seen that in the Fly Lady phenomenon. People write to her about how following her advice and flinging out the stuff has helped their lives. By writing, they're making public their commitment to getting rid of stuff they don't use and don't love. Making it public makes it easier to do. But he says he struggles with it himself. After all, he's human, too.

Obviously, recognizing the problem is one thing. It's pretty easy to see it and it's effect on your life. But it's often hard to change because we don't want to deal with the feelings of loss. Sometimes, after reading yet another story of how much junk people's parents left for their kids to deal with after their deaths, I wonder if the incredible personal losses of friends and family that pile up on us as we get older isn't partly behind that phenomenon. Some elderly people cling to their stuff because it's something they can keep from leaving them, unlike their friends and relatives who are dying. I suppose this thought, at least in part, comes from having attended more funerals in the past year than in my whole life up to now.

I'm not sure exactly how to deal with this phenomenon in my own life. So much of the stuff we were looking forward to using again after we moved out of my mother's house was destroyed and I greived, not over the stuff, but over the loss of the life I was looking forward to. We've gradually rebuilt a lot of that life and so I'm feeling more comfortable with sorting and weeding out the rest of the stuff in our boxes. I can see, though, that the clutter in all areas of our lives, not just "stuff clutter" is one result of not being willing to close doors. And that clutter keeps us from clearly seeing what will bring the most joy to our lives. Until we clear the clutter so we can see what will bring us joy, we can't figure out how to bring that joy into our lives.

March, so far

2008-03-09T08:34:00.000-07:00

My life is a zoo, but if you read this blog very often you know that. I have a couple of things I want to blog about, but haven't had time to write them up. Today, my husband and I are taking a day off from chores and everything except the concert tonight. The concert is the best part of my job. I get to hear such amazing music.

I've started an essay, but it needs super editing before it's ready to post. I need to let it simmer in my head a bit, so I'll finish it soon and post it. It's about the idea that we're so reluctant to close any doors, give up any options in our lives, that we often pay huge prices in our lives in order to avoid giving up an option, or even, in some cases, just getting rid of some types of trash.

Some Thoughts on Food

2008-02-20T13:48:00.000-08:00

I recently read Michael Pollan's books, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. The first book is about where our food comes from. He discusses where the ingredients that make up four different meals came from. It's an interesting background to the second book, in which he discusses what he thinks we ought to eat. On the cover is a picture of red Romaine lettuce and it has a yellow band around it with his concise conclusion: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Defining this phrase and discussing how to implement it is the major goal of the book. In discussing the part: "Eat food" he makes a comment about how to decide if what you're eating actually IS food. One rule of thumb he talks about is whether your great grandmother would recognize it. A trip to the local grocery store, part of one of the major national chains was an interesting experience in light of what I'd been reading.

One thing you often read is to "stick to the perimeter of the store". You'd think this is good advice. That's where the produce, dairy, and meat is. But is pre-marinated, ready-to-cook meat still real food? How should I know? I have no idea what they put in their marinade. What about "fat free half and half", a product found in the dairy section? Or the "Grapple"--apples somehow flavored with "real and artificial grape flavorings"? Would my great-grandmother recognize any of these? And, if I stick to the perimeter of one of my favorite stores, I'd have to eliminate a lot of food from my diet--beans, rice, pasta, baking ingredients and breads. Then there's the vegetables. Some canned and frozen vegetables are well worth eating, and are pretty nutritious, too. Canned tomatoes, pumpkin puree, canned beans and frozen baby onions are good examples.

That trip to the store, along with what I'd been reading, got me thinking--a lot.
I started to wonder what my great-grandmothers would have fed their families. I know nothing about my great-grandparents on my dad's side of the family, so that leaves my Calabrian great-grandparent's food to use as a guage. I googled.

I discovered that my great-grandparents ate a variation on the much-touted Mediterranean diet. However, they ate a lot of pork, something we don't think of as being a part of that diet. They ate lots of fish, since Calabria is the toe of the boot--right on the Mediterranean Sea. The region produces 25% of Itailan olive oil, so olive oil and olives would have been a big part of their diet. They ate a lot of pasta and polenta. Vegetables were a major part of their diet, too, particularly eggplants and tomatoes. Their food was spicy, using lots of peppers. Butter and cheese were also a part of their diet. Desserts were mainly fresh fruit, particularly citrus and figs. Today they grow a lot of clementines, a variety of orange. They made fancy desserts mainly for special occasions such as weddings and Christmas holidays. Breakfast was often biscotti and coffee. Cappuccino is a breakfast beverage. I didn't see any references to alcoholic beverages except for wine, which is another thing this region produces.

Family meals consisted of a first course--mainly soups, pasta or a rice dish. The second course is either a small meat or fish dish, accompanied by a side dish, usually vegetables. Here, the Italians veer away from what we Americans are familiar with--they eat their salad after the main course, to cleanse the palate before dessert. I remember that from my childhood. My grandfather always ate his salad at the end of the meal. The last course is usually fruit, fresh and cold, or dried fruits with nuts. Celebratory meals would add a starter course of antipasti and a final course of a fancier small dessert. Meals end with coffee, usually espresso.

That's what my great-grandmothers were feeding their families. It's a pretty healthy way to eat, according to current nutritional wisdom. The nutritionists might think it's a bit high in fat, what with all that pork and full-fat dairy. But they didn't eat large portions of those foods. They mostly ate vegetables, which is exactly what Michael Pollan (and our nutrition experts) recommends, after he finished the research and writing of his books.

The question then becomes, how do I do that? How do I find that kind of food? It's getting harder and harder to do so in our supermarkets. I was shopping with my husband the day he found the Grapple and I said to him, "Do you realize how little actual food is in this store?" I've noticed over the three decades in which I've been responsible for the food purchases for a family that there is less and less real food. It's getting harder and harder to find plain ingredients to cook with because even the simplest thing now has a chemical soup along with the simple ingredient. Take tomato paste--one brand had tomatoes and a bunch of other stuff. The other had one ingredient-tomatoes. My question is--if one company can figure out how to make a product without the chemicals, why do other companies think they have to put them in? Anyway, I read the ingredient lists. If I don't know what the ingredients are and what they're made from, I don't buy it.

The other hard part is figuring out what are the best things to eat. It seems like every time you read an article about healthy eating, they have new information that contradicts what the current wisdom is. When you dig into the research, you come up with studies that seem to have been ignored because they don't fit in with the current way of thinking. I found this gem today about high fat dairy and fertility: Eating Ice Cream may Help Women to Concieve. I see stuff like this all the time. Chocolate is good for you. So is coffee. And alcohol, particularly wine, especially red. Reminds me of Woody Allen's film, "Sleeper", where he wakes up in the future and steak and hot fudge sundaes are health food. Yet a different study will be reported saying exactly the opposite. Do I want to be a guinea pig in the unscientific cultural research that's taking place by default as we try to follow expert nutritional advice that may or may not be correct and eat food designed by people who want to maximize our consumption so we'll maximize their corporate profits?

The conclusion I've been coming to is that maybe it's not as simple as the nutrion "experts" would like to believe. You can't isolate one nutrient, making it the "magic pill of good health". Everything works together and what may seem like a bad thing can be a good thing in combination with the right other things. One example is a diet based on corn tortillas. You'd miss out on essential amino acids, if that were your main food. But the Mexicans have been eating that way healthfully for a very long time. How? They fill those tortillas with beans, which has the amino acids corn lacks. This is why I think the glycemic index thing is baloney. You don't eat high glycemic index foods in isolation. Who munches on raw onions, for Pete's sake? When you eat those foods with a little fat, it slows down the absorption of the glucose and that solves the problem with those foods. So, you're better off to put a bit of butter on that baked potato than to eat it plain.

That's probably why we've ended up with the patterns of eating we've developed over the course of human history. The problem with our current eating pattern is that it's not based on anything we've evolved to eat. Our caveman ancestor didn't hang out at the local fast-food joint, nor did he nuke a complete meal and eat it standing over the sink. That's why the current wisdom to eat lots of fruits and veggies, a little meat (Or not, if you choose. Apparently, we can do just fine without it.), and whole grains makes sense. That's what humans have been eating forever. So the challenge is finding those foods, at a price I can afford, and arranging my schedule to allow time to cook them. We've started to build a "food now" culture, so our lives get swamped and we don't take the time to cook or make the time to eat with our family and friends. But that's another post, one I think I already wrote.

The Slow Movement

2008-02-01T08:23:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has an article about "The Slow Movement". (Note: you have to register with them to read the article, but if I remember correctly, they don't ask for your whole life history.) Essentially, it's about slowing things down in opposition to our fast food culture. I think it's interesting that they likened our life to fast food more than to any other measure of speed they could have used, such as the computer industry's never-ending quest for faster, particularly when it comes to the Internet.

There's a woman in the article who knits rugs from the wool of sheep she's met. She uses three-foot long knitting needles. I admit I want to try that one, even if I don't get to meet the sheep or make my own yarn. The rug is absolutely gorgeous. There's a picture on the left sidebar of the article.

But I digress from my original thought. It occurred to me that food is really the ultimate speeded up part of life, and I often wonder if that's not to our detriment. I think we'd all be better off if we took the traditional Italian way of eating to heart. Fresh, real food, made from fresh ingredients cooked properly, which rarely can be done super fast, microwave ovens notwithstanding. Take time to eat the meal with family and friends, focusing on the meal and the company, not on the gazillion things we think are so important that we must forego soul-satisfying meals to do them. Or, if you're eating alone, still setting a pretty table and enjoying good music and your own company.

A lot of people have posited the theory that our large food industry with its faster to prepare, ready-to-eat, chemical stews that pass for food are behind the rampant obesity in our country. I'm pretty sure that's a factor because it was with the rise in prepared foods and fast food restaurants and cake from a box being called "from scratch", and a true cake from scratch, made with eggs, flour, sugar, milk, vanilla, etc. being considered old-fashioned, too difficult to do well, and too time-consuming to make. People cook for fun, not as a routine part of life to feed themselves and their families.

I can't help but wonder if there's another factor in the obesity thing that's directly related to the whole fast eating. I don't eat in fast food restaurants because I always eat way too much because the food doesn't satisfy me. If I'm out with other people and we go to a fast food place, we eat fast and get out--no lingering over conversation. That's the whole point of fast food-the whole experience is fast. Ditto for microwaved frozen dinners. They don't satisfy, either. And they mostly are eaten alone because it's when the family is all scattered doing their own things.

All of this lack of strong social structure to our meals could be one reason people overeat or eat to fill the gap left by unsatisfying meals eaten quickly so you can get on with other things. I wonder if we made an effort to make time to cook good food, make the dining room or kitchen table or wherever we eat a pleasant place to be, put on some quiet music, and gather family and friends for that Italian-style focus on the food and the people we love whether some of those emotional needs we eat to fill might not be filled. I also wonder if filling ourselves with freshly cooked food wouldn't satisfy us before we'd overeaten.

I don't know if that's true, generally. I do know that I tend to eat less when I'm eating really well-prepared food. I know that I eat less when I'm not feeling rushed. Although I talked about family and friends, this is true for me if I'm alone, too. If I prepare a nice meal and eat it without rushing, I still eat less and enjoy it more.

In a more general sense, I admit that part of what appeals to me about this whole idea of slowing down, as opposed to just slowing down with regards to food, is that I've always hated being forced to rush through things. I like being busy, but not to the point where I can't take time to "stop and smell the roses". I want to enjoy what I'm doing, not rush through to get to the next thing that I rush through to get to the next thing and before you know it, I have no idea where the time went and I hated every minute that's now gone.

I think that's why I'm working on being more thoughtful about how I spend my time. I've been doing too little cooking and too much eating out and quick pickup meals. Part of the problem is other people demanding things from me without advance notice. I know the answer is to say no, but sometimes I can't because they're things that have a time limit.

I'm hoping that by being more thoughtful about how I spend my time will help me focus my attention on the things that matter the most. We'll see if that turns out to be true as I take steps that will allow me to do that, mainly using my calendar more to keep track of the things that matter to me and doing those before the rest of the stuff that often just fills up the time.

Pretty?

2008-01-24T08:34:00.000-08:00

An RSS feed on my Google sidebar came up with an article that linked to this blog post about prettiness . It's a subject I've thought about for a long time. I love the way she puts it--'Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked "female".' And she says the opposite, too--"You don't owe UN-prettiness to feminism..."

She's talking about the idea that as a woman, we're "expected to" or "supposed to" be pretty. I remember reading comments in fashion or similar types of articles where men said things like, "I felt cheated when I saw a woman with long hair and a good body, but when I saw her face, she was old." Or one who was offended by fat women who wear shorts. I never could express my anger at the idea that I was somehow shirking my duty if I didn't conform to their expectations. I've rebelled against that idea my whole life. I've never liked the idea that I was on display, just because I'm female. I don't think it's my duty to fuel some random stranger's sexual fantasies. It's my duty to be happy with myself and how I look.

Yet, thanks to my shallow, vain mother and a shallow, vain culture, it's really hard to get past that idea. Although, in my last paragraph, I mentioned men, I think it's the women in our lives that make the "rule" most personal. I sometimes wonder if part of the reason I've had issues with my weight aren't related to that rebellion against being defined by how I look. But being fat dosen't prevent me from being defined that way. It exacerbates it. I've known people who think I'm not "good enough" to be friends with because of my weight. Their loss, not mine. It doesn't bother me because they weren't people I have enough in common with to want to socialize with anyway, but it does bother me that people think it's a valid way to choose friends.

I'm not sure that there's a solution to this problem, since it's in part inborn. We're drawn to more attractive people in order to keep the human race going. We all want healthy babies and our biology goes for the most healthy people, which we assume attractive people are.

But I also think that the technology we have has skewed our perspective. It allows us to see people from all over the world, to be able to compare ourselves (usually negatively) with the few who look "right", even if those looks are the result of makeup, dress, hairstyling and a lot of Photoshopping. We see the ideal, and don't see the parade of normal people around us. For an eye-opening experience, look at the portfolio from a professional retoucher: Glen Ferron. Roll your mouse over the ads to see what the models looked like before the retouching. And remmember, the "after" pictures are the ones held up as being "ideal", even though they're complete fakes. The actual models don't even look like that.

I've often thought that we fool ourselves when we talk about losing weight "for our health". It's the "acceptable" reason to want to lose weight because, while our culture puts its stock in appearance, we all know that's a shallow value. And so we pretend not to care so much about it. Yet, even though our health may be affected by our weight, we don't usually look to health improvement as a measure of our success. We look at numbers on the scale, measuring tape around our middles, clothes sizes and what we see in the mirror. When our health does improve, we often think we're still failing because we haven't "lost enough" weight, which is usually defined by how we look.

This post rambles a bit, because it's kind of my random thoughts on various aspects of the subject. I've been facing issues that may or may not be weight-related, so I've been exploring in my mind my attitudes towards food, weight, appearance, health and all of that stuff. I really don't have any conclusions, but it's important to me to figure this out. I was just told that my favorite aunt died last night. She had complications of diabetes and she's the one I seem to take after the most, genetically. I don't have symptoms, but she didn't either--until she was in her 60s. I see a potentially ticking time bomb, even though I've lived a generally healthier lifestyle than she did. And the diabetes is not in a direct line (parent or sibling) to me, but my grandfather had it, so the possibility is there.

Lest this seem like my aunt's death is about me, it's not. I don't grieve in public. And my grief isn't the topic of this post. I will miss her very much. She was the one I talked cooking with. And she was the musical one. We had a lot in common. But I don't want to follow her into an early grave. I hope that doesn't make me seem cold. It's just that I'm not done with life, yet.

Doomed!

2008-01-09T10:26:00.000-08:00

Apparently I'm doomed to write in spurts. I have time here and there, but not consistently. Part of that is the nature of both my job and my main hobby. When it's concert time, I have no time. When it's not, I have a bit of time. So, that's something I have to deal with in terms of all of the things I want to do in my life. And this week is a concert week at work. But I hate to skip so much time between posts because when I do that, the few people who care about this blog stop reading because it wastes their time to come here and not have a new post. A dilemma that most bloggers face in some form or other. I'm going to keep trying to post more regularly, though. I enjoy doing it.

I'm gradually getting the house more in shape. As soon as my husband and I get over the cold we both caught, I'm going to unpack the books onto our bookshelves. We've known that getting our stuff out of boxes has to be a priority because looking for stuff is a real time-waster. So, I decided that's my priority around the house and my deadline is when school starts next quarter.

So, I'm mainly working and unpacking these days. Writing and school are still on hold, mainly because the furniture we needed was on back order until after the busy holiday season started. Playing catch up, as usual. It's back to that baby step thing. I have to keep up with it by doing a little bit when I have a few minutes. Those minutes add up. I think my personality gets in my own way, but I also think I can learn to work with it.

Baby Steps

2007-12-05T06:19:00.000-08:00

The term "baby steps" has been bugging me lately. I think it's because it's absolutely everywhere. The concept is a good one. Break large tasks, projects, and so on into chunks you can easily manage. But "baby steps"? Can't we figure out some grownup thing to call it?

Probably not. It seems that if we call it something grownup, it will end up sounding like work. "Work?"-choke, as Maynard G. Krebs used to say. (OK--how many of you know who that guy is? lol He was a character on a very old TV show, Dobie Gillis. The guy, Bob Denver, who eventually became super-famous for being Gilligan on Gilligan's Island played the character. I was too young to watch it, but I got to see the reruns when Nickelodeon started running really old TV shows. Great show!!)

Back to "baby steps". I can't think of a better term for it. I'm thinking that my problem with it isn't really what it's called, but that I don't seem to be able to do it. My brain sees the whole project and wants to get there--NOW!! I can break things down into little chunks, but I can't seem to do "today's chunk" and be happy with that. I want to do all the rest of them, too. Thus, my problem with doing habit-changing projects. Their nature is "baby steps" because they don't have a time when they're "done".

Our houses will always have something that needs cleaning. We will always have to exercise. We will always have to make food choices. We will always have to deal with that kind of thing, whatever our particular thing is. And the nature of that bugs me. I like being "done".

Life doesn't work that way. Many projects are never done. So, it's something I have to deal with. And many projects don't get done fast. Many, like writing a novel, making a movie, writing a symphony, and so on, by their nature, take months or even years of small steps to complete. But we can finish the small steps. If I plan to polish my sink, as the Fly Lady suggests for her first day's baby step, and I do it, I've finished something and it doesn't matter if I didn't do other things that weren't one of today's baby steps.

It's so easy to only see what didn't get done and not realize what did. We're all too prone to beating ourselves up because we didn't blah, blah, blah. But do we give ourselves credit for what we did get done? Rarely. That's why most systems of habit-changing suggest we reward ourselves. Or at the very least, pat ourselves on the back. Notice when we do what we want to do, instead of whatever thing we used to do that got us in the mess we're in. Paying attention to the good stuff, instead of the bad stuff is a powerful tool to help us make changes in our lives.

One of my new baby steps is to note in my journal when I do those baby steps. And to stop complaining when I don't do them. I think good planning is the key to being able to do what I want to do. And paying attention to when I follow the plan will make me more likely to keep doing it. I tend to get too hard on myself, like a lot of people do.

Anyway, baby steps, for lack of a better term, do work. If I don't plan more than I can reasonably expect to do and pay attention to the successes, I should make progress. And progress is all anyone can hope for. None of us can ever be perfect and trying to achieve some mental picture of perfection guarantees failure.

More about the Fly Lady & Other Stuff

2007-11-30T20:05:00.000-08:00

The emails from the Fly Lady are mostly working now. So I'm getting a better handle on how the system works. It was bothering me that I haven't been doing it much. Then I got some that I couldn't do because they were already done. YAY! I realized that I was letting that perfectionism she talks about get to me. After all, I cannot do some of the things because of circumstances beyond my control.

For example, I can get rid of the paper that needs recycling or shredding. Bag it up and dump it down the recycle chute. But I cannot file or put away paper because the filing cabinets that are the legs for my desk, and part of the desktops, won't be here until Tuesday. I need to be happy with what I can do. And the house actually looks pretty good, in terms of cleanliness.

I have piles of books hanging out on my dining room table and in a box and one pile on the floor. It sounds like a lot, but I had to take them out of my small bookcases so I could move them. Then I had to do other things in my life, so they're hanging out for a few days. I'll use Fly Lady's slogan--You can do anything in 15 minutes. Set a timer and get it put away.

Next week, after our computer table gets here and we get it set up, we'll measure the walls and head to Ikea for bookcases. I can actually imagine a day when I don't have boxes lining my walls. YAY!

In other news--we're hitting the busiest concert season of the year. I already did one concert. We have three more, plus I have an additional concert, in the next two weeks. Along with that, we have two more to attend. Plus Christmas Eve service to sing at church. It sounds hectic, and it is. But it's also fun and January can be a bit of a letdown.

I finished off the last of the turkey today. I made a pasta dish with a white sauce. It didn't resemble any of the Turkey Tetrazzini recipes that seem to be in every food magazine after Thanksgiving every year. It was good. I can't give you the recipe, though, and I'll never make it again. It was one of those recipes created by tossing in everything that needed to be cooked or it was going to have to be trashed. I had a great time in the kitchen.

November

2007-11-21T19:17:00.001-08:00

I was shocked at how few posts I've done this month. I expected to keep up, since I started building the habit of posting again. But I haven't been home. I'm on a forensic science list for writers and I have over 40 digests I haven't read yet. It's an active group and regularly has at least two digests daily, so it's not 40 days worth, thankfully. So, I guess I need to catch up for those who actually come here every so often and read this little blog.

NaNo is halfway a bust. It's a bust because I'm not going to finish it. It's not a bust because I discovered I have little bits of time in which I can write. I also discovered that I really didn't want to start a new novel. I really want to finish the one I'm in the middle of. I started NaNo with a different novel because the rules are that you have to do something new. I decided to put my effort where my muse wants to go--on 50 Ways.

It's not happening soon, though. We've had a small inheritance and have been using some of it for things we desperately needed to replace--old, worn out things or things that disappeared or were ruined while we lived at my mom's. The biggie is our Mazda 3 5-door, to replace our over 20-year-old Oldsmobile. We couldn't justify putting more money into the Olds, which was just wearing out. We love the Mazda. So far, we haven't found anything we want to carry that won't fit in it. It handles all the driving we normally do. And it gets decent mileage. Besides that, it's a really pretty dark blue, with a hint of green, and a metallic undercoat so it's nice and SHINY in the sun. What more could you ask for in a car?

Our computer desk and filing cabinets are trickling in. Some of it was backordered, so was shipped separately. Currently, we have one proper cabinet and 2 boxes topped by some of my cookbooks holding up the desktop. It gets the desktop computer off the dining room table. I still have to use the laptop there, but that's easy to move so we can eat. The rest of the modular system is en route. It shipped last weekend and I expect the holiday weekend to extend the waiting time by a day or two.

Our TV died the other day. We can live without a TV. But we'd planned to get a new one for Christmas. We knew it was going, but were hoping to replace it a bit later than this. We dithered around about it and finally decided to go ahead. We ended up with the same TV our oldest son has. He's trying to talk us into buying a Playstation 3, so we can play Blu-ray discs and I can start collecting Final Fantasy video games. It's a video game series we both enjoy. That's not happening. If so much of our stuff didn't need replacing, maybe we could justify spending the extra money. But we have to be mostly practical.

We had to replace our waterbed. It was not going to survive one more move. Then my youngest son used some of the wood for shelves, which sealed its fate. Our current bed is gradually getting off the floor. We'd started with an Aerobed. Then the box springs came and we had the aerobed on top of the box springs. The mattress got here about a week ago. So, we crushed the Aerobed and have the mattress and box springs. The bed itself is on backorder. It's supposed to be shipped on or before Dec. 10. So, maybe by Christmas we'll have a whole bed.

We found a small pantry online. We're planning to move as much of the food that's in our built-in pantry into it. Then we can use the built-in pantry for large pans, small appliances, and large bowls. All the stuff that doesn't fit in the regular kitchen cupboards. Then my kitchen will me much easier to keep clean. It will never be a convenient kitchen. A lot of the shelves need a step stool to reach and a lot are deep, so you have to move stuff to get to other stuff. I try to put the stuff I don't use as much in the back, but nothing is never used, so I expect to be moving stuff a lot.

I have almost all my bathroom stuff unpacked. This apartment has a good-sized bathroom with a decent amount of storage. I love that. I also love not feeling cramped in there.

So, that leaves the rest of the books, music, keepsakes, projects, photos, and misc. stuff that doesn't have a home yet. I expect a trip to Ikea for bookcases and a trip to the storage place for appropriate storage containers will take care of that. Maybe I can meet my goal of having all the boxes unpacked by Christmas. It's costing us a fortune. I expect mainly it seems that way because we had to pretty much start from scratch, like 20-year-old newlyweds or something. At that age, you'd have hand-me-downs from the family and accumulate a lot of this stuff the way we originally did--gradually. But at our age, there are no family hand-me-downs. We already handed them down to our kids.

OK--so, along with doing all the unpacking and shopping for stuff so I can unpack, and working at my job, I've been doing a ton of music. Plus some volunteer work. That's why I haven't been home so I could write posts.

We've done the first of our concerts since fall rehearsals started. Ladyesong had a great concert of works by local composers. Man, these people write wonderful music. But challenging! And totally fun.

We had the first of three Thanksgiving dinners at my church last Saturday. Two of us cooked turkeys, stuffing, and gravy. The third woman in our group took care of table decorations. We shared the shopping chores. A bunch of other people helped with set up and clean up. The guests brought the rest of the food. It was terrific, fun, and a lot of work. We're already discussing next year.

Tomorrow my youngest son, husband and I have been invited to a friend's for dinner. I'm bringing the cranberry relish. My friend moved to a new place a bit before we did. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Saturday, my family is coming to my house for Thanksgiving dinner number three. My married son is at his in-law's tomorrow. So we decided to take a day between turkey dinners and do our family holiday Saturday. My fridge is stuffed. I wish I had a bigger fridge, but it's an improvement over the ones they used to put in apartments. And I have a gas stove. It's wonderful to cook on. I'm looking forward to cooking my family's favorites, since I haven't really been able to do that for a few years. They all requested apple pie. It's wonderful to be able to make the apple pie and NOT feel forced to make pumpkin, too, just because you're "supposed to" have pumpkin. No one really likes pumpkin that much and no one wants two desserts, anyway.

Next week is my birthday. My hubby gave me a budget and I spent most of it on replacing my food processor (one of the casualties of the leaky, damp storage shed where my stuff was for the almost 4 years we lived at my mother's), and got the mini-prep Cuisanart for free, thanks to a coupon at the store where I bought it. I bought several expensive cookbooks I've been eying. There's one I'm still searching for. I could buy it online, but I'm in bookstores often enough. I'll run across it, eventually. Then he's taking me out to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants on my birthday. It's special because I went for all that time not really cooking at all. It's a super treat to rebuild a decent kitchen and cook the good, healthy food I love to make.

I haven't forgotten the Fly Lady, either. I've talked about her emails. She's had trouble with the software not sending them consistently. It seems to be fixed. Anyway, I'm reading them and seeing how it works. I've also noticed that as I get useable storage and get my stuff unpacked, it's easier to keep the clutter down. When I get the filing cabinets and actually have a place to put all that paper, maybe I can keep it under control. I didn't have that problem when I had my big rolltop desk with places to put everything.

The Fly Lady's thing is to start with a shiny sink. I think it's kind of ironic that tonight everything in my kitchen shines except the sink. I had too many dishes for the dishwasher, so it will get cleaned tomorrow. I'm not staying up late to do another load of dishes and I'm not stacking dirty dishes on my clean counters, so I can shine my sink.

NaNo--Days 3: 162 & 6: 375

2007-11-06T18:00:00.000-08:00

My current total is a mere 1,421. I didn't write Sunday or yesterday, but I plan to write more words after Dr. Who and Torchwood. I know. I should write now, but Dr. Who is a two-parter and I just have to know how it turns out. After Dr. Who I have to cut up all the veggies for salads. Cutting them after I go to the store makes it simpler to make salads for lunch and dinner.

That chore is done and I have about 15 minutes, which I'm going to use to write a bit. But that will have to do for today. I'll have more time tomorrow. Today was emergency errand day because we didn't have time to go grocery shopping and do errands for about a week and a half. A quick trip to the local Safeway to pick up a few things was not going to be enough.

As you can see, I did manage 375 words today for a new total of 1796. Not bad, considering how swamped it's been. I'll need a marathon to catch up, I bet, but the next FM marathon will be when I'm cooking Thanksgiving turkey for our church dinner. I guess I'll have to do my own marathon, on those mythical two days when I don't have a lot to do.

I knew going in that I have a busy month. I'll keep chipping away at that word count and maybe I'll manage it. If not, I will have accomplished two things-whatever words I get on a story I'm having a lot of fun with. And established some kind of writing routine, which I want to continue after NaNo.

NaNo--Day 2: 498

2007-11-03T07:47:00.000-07:00

So, yesterday I was not home. I managed 498. I figure every word I get before next week is a winner, since November 1-4 were not going to have long writing sessions, no matter what I did. I knew before I started NaNo that they'd be busy days. I'm going to try to get some words in before we leave for the weekend. And some when we get back. I'm not taking my computer, so I won't be posting any word counts until Sunday or Monday. Anyway, the story is going well. The writing stinks, but there's stuff to work with in revising, should I like this enough to do something with it after NaNo is over.

NaNo--Day 1: 761

2007-11-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

My first day's NaNo count is: 761. Yeah, it's not the magic 1667, but I had a ton of stuff to do yesterday and wasn't home. I will be writing this morning. If my son doesn't need a ride to take care of paperwork for his new job, I'll write this afternoon, too. Tonight, my other son needs a ride to do an errand and we have an errand to run, too, so no writing after dinner.

(Funny how our children, neither of whom has a driver's license yet, suddenly need rides. Ya think it has anything to do with our spiffy new vehicle?)

I'm going to be out-of-town this weekend and I'm not taking the laptop. I don't expect to have time to write. I'll do my best to do a bit more on the days I can write in order to make up for the days I can't. Like next Sunday, when I have a concert. And Saturday the 17th when I'm cooking for the church Thanksgiving feast. And whatever day I end up doing the family Thanksgiving. It looks like I'm going to need 2053 words a day on the days I can write in order to make 50K.

My current plan on work days, since most of what I'm doing is pretty tedious computer input stuff, is alternate the two things. Use the work time to plot the novel, write a bit, then go back to the work stuff. We'll see how it goes.

So far, it's going great. I figured out what my protagonist wants more than anything. It's cool to see story developing where I had a void for a whole month.

Re: my Halloween Hangman link:

In the comments, Kristy Shreve Powers noted that it's a great NaNo procrastinator. Yeah, it is. I have another of those, if anyone wants to do a bit of charity and procrastinate on their NaNo novel: Free Rice. It's a vocabulary quiz, which someone posted on Forward Motion. For every word you get right, they donate one grain of rice, through a UN food program. You can rack up a lot of rice in a short time. Anyway, it's a cool way to while away some time, learn some new words, do some good, and have fun. Cool beans -- uh--maybe I should say--cool rice!

Halloween Fun

2007-10-31T20:47:00.000-07:00

I know Halloween is almost over for this year, but I couldn't resist sharing this bit of addictive fun.

Set a timer. It's easy to keep going and going and going...

Cooking and Life

2007-10-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday Paul and I had a new experience. Our church has a cadre of volunteers that cooks at the San Jose Family Shelter several times a year. The shelter looks for volunteers to cook on the weekends when the regular staff is off duty. Our head chef, Andrea, is a super-organized lady, which is why it all works. Someone joked that she's a slave driver, but she isn't. She doesn't need to be because she posts a list of what has to be done and the time schedule, so it's easy for us to choose the next most important task and get it done.

After we madly slice, dice, and cook, we serve the food to the families. It's a lot of fun. I see I'm going to have to get coached to revive my high school Spanish. I could almost, but not quite, remember how to ask the Hispanic people what they wanted. Then we get to eat. However, we had more people than they ever had before and we ran out of chicken. Everyone got some, but we ended up trying small bits of what was left and eating later. Andrea brings good recipies.

It was a fun day and we're all signed up for the next one. Our church's turn comes up about four times a year. It's yet another way I can thank God for one of the gifts he's given me, since cooking is one of my greatest pleasures. And it's much more fun and rewarding to cook for other people, no matter who they are--friends, family, or strangers.

In a couple of weeks, I get to do more cooking. Our church hosts a Thanksgiving dinner a week before Thanksgiving. Three of us are gathering to cook the turkeys and dressing. Everyone is bringing the sides as pot luck. We did this last year for the first time and it was a blast. We decided to make it an annual event.

In other parts of my life--before we do the Thanksgiving dinner, my women's group, Ladyesong, is singing our fall concert. It's called "California Connections" and all of the music has been composed by California composers. Some of them will be attending the concert. We're also having Dan Levitan playing the harp and Michael Touchi on flute. It's going to be a good concert. And I get to cook some more. I'm bringing 2 dozen cookies for the reception afterward. I think I'm going to make these to-die-for fudgy chocolate cookies that are rolled in powdered sugar before you bake them. If anyone living in or near the SF Bay Area is interested, the concert is November 11 at 7 pm at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Saratoga. And it's free. The Thanksgiving dinner I mentioned is also at Prince of Peace on November 17. I don't remember the time, so I'll have to post that later.

Paul and I got a new car yesterday. We retired the old brown Olds and got a Phantom Blue Mica Mazda 3 5-door hatchback. We got a good deal because I fell in love with this color that no one wants. It's a beautiful dark blue green with a metallic undercoat, but it looks really green and kind of ugly on the Mazda web site. When I saw it in the dealer, it looked totally different and really pretty.

We decided to get a new car since, we were looking at putting at least 5 grand into repairs on the Olds and that's way more than the car was worth. The dealer gave us 50 bucks to take it off our hands. lol If only we could have gotten it to fail the California smog test. Then we could have sold it to the state, as part of their gross polluter program, for one thousand dollars.

Paul's phone interview last week went well. The interviewer wants him to come in for an in-person interview. We're waiting to hear the details for that from HR. We hope that will happen soon and that he gets this job. He'd really like the work and it's a good fit for his skills. We're also, of course, hoping it pays enough to cover the bills. A lot of technician jobs these days don't, just because housing is so expensive here. I guess almost everyone who lives in California complains about the cost of housing.

We'd be willing to move to a cheaper location, if companies would give him a chance, but he rarely gets interviews when he applies out of the area. The couple of job offers he's had over the years wanted him to start at entry-level jobs and pay, even though he had 20 or more years of experience. What's up with that? I can't believe they really think someone with that kind of experience would move hundreds of miles to take the bottom job in his field.

On the whole, though, things are looking up here. And I'm hoping for a bit of stability, at least for a while. I really, really like our new apartment and the money we saved on the car is paying for a bed and computer table and filing cabinets and other furniture we need so we're not sleeping on the floor and can unpack the rest of our stuff. It would be a great Christmas present to me if I could have an apartment not decorated with boxes lining every available wall, and half of the main closet.

Habits

2007-10-27T09:26:00.001-07:00

Since I subscribed to the Fly Lady emails, I've been a lot more aware of habits. I've started to notice the domino effect of the habits in my life. The effective habits I have make other things much easier. The ineffective habits do the opposite. That seems like a no-brainer, especiall if you're one of the naturally organized folks. What Fly Lady, with her baby steps, is trying to get us to do is change one ineffective habit at a time into an effective habit. Effective habits have their domino effect, too. I think it's easier to make the changes when you really see how it all fits together. Having a positive domino effect is great motivation to change one habit. And move on from there.

I decided to go back to school and finish that web development degree I started before we moved to Salinas. I pulled the information from their web site and now I have to decide what to take. I also want to work on general drawing and design skills. What I love is designing web sites, but I'm not a skilled artist. I do fine with page layout, but I really want to create the graphics I'm using, as well. So, I'm planning to take classes that aren't required, but will help me reach my personal goals. Since I only have one or two GE classes left to take, I have room in my schedule to take classes that will improve the skills I'm weak in. But, if I'm going to continue to do the things I'm doing now--work, sing in my ensembles, take care of the stuff everyone has to do--I need to build better habits. I have the holiday season and NaNo month in which to do it before school starts. That's a good motivation for me. Heck, I to build effective habits just to get through NaNo and the holidays.

I've often tried to create effective habits, and have succeeded in some areas. But I've never before really understood the relationship doing one thing has on everything else. I always thought I had to change everything all at once or I'd be stuck with things the way they are. But I don't. I only need to change one thing. After I see what effect making that change has, I'll be able to see where I'm being ineffective and choose what the next one change should be. I may not make changes in the same order as the Fly Lady suggests, but that's not the important thing. What's important is that I develop habits that make the life I'm leading work for me in a way that's less stressful than it is now.

A Quick Post on NaNo

2007-10-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

I'm not preparing anything other than a character and the essence of who she is for NaNo. It's not that I don't want to know more, it's that every time I try to do background stuff, what comes out is story. Writing story before November 1 is against the rules. My husband says I should just wait for NaNo and start writing.

That's a scary proposal for me because I've tried to write about this character before. She's really interesting to me. But I got stuck because I cannot figure out what the main problem she's facing is. I feel like I ought to have that, at least, before I start writing. But it's not happening.

I suspect what I'll end up doing is follow her around her normal day and see what happens. Something interesting is bound to happen because my imagination hates being bored. Start with the alarm clock going off and soon she'll be up to her neck in trouble, or at least talking to someone else up to his neck in trouble--and she'll want to help.

We'll see what happens when NaNo gets here. I'm determined to do something with it.

Fusion Food

2007-10-12T12:37:00.000-07:00

Sometimes fusion food is nothing more than a technique borrowed from one cuisine used to create a dish using ingredients from another. Take my last night's "Fried Rice". It's just a veggie sauté with rice added in. I needed a simple dish to go with baked trout. Here's what I came up with:

Veggie Fried Rice

Toasted nuts
Olive oil
Frozen veggies--thawed and drained well
1-2 slices cooked bacon--diced
Garlic
Shallots or onion
Cooked rice
salt & pepper

The amounts you need will depend on how many veggies you're cooking. Heat olive oil in a large skillet. Add veggies and onion. Sauté until the veggies are almost done. Add the garlic and bacon. Sauté a minute or so. Add rice. If your pan isn't nonstick--the rice will stick a little no matter how much oil you use, however, adding a bit more oil before adding the rice helps keep sticking to a minimum. Sauté to heat the rice through. Stir in the toasted nuts. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.

Note: This is one of those basic technique recipes you can use to create a lot of different dishes. Different vegetable combinations would go with different combinations of herbs and spices. You could melt in some grated cheese right before you serve it. I'd recommend adding the salt after the cheese, since cheese can be salty, so your dish could end up too salty if you do the salt before the cheese. You could use fresh veggies and prepare them the way you would for a stir-fry. After all, a stir-fry is simply the Asian version of the French sauté.

Mangia!

Changes

2007-10-11T18:10:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting revelation this week while reading the emails from the Fly Lady site. I thought I was adaptable and accepted the inevitability of change, a "go with the flow" person. I realized that I do expect change and I am "go with the flow", but only in certain situations, those I'm fairly comfortable with or have faced successfully before. Or those I have no control over.

What I also realized is that I'm spontaneous, so I don't cling to my routines so much that I end up with a boring life with no fun in it. I realized that I'm a good problem-solver, so I often can come up with good solutions to the problems that arise in life. But when those solutions mean I have to make drastic changes, I resist. Changing makes me feel uncomfortable, as it does for most people.

I realized that one of the important things in dealing with this quirk is knowing why I'm uncomfortable in a situation. I need to know that the benefits that result from my being uncomfortable, but doing it anyway, are something I really want. I need to know that the discomfort will only last until the new thing becomes the comfortable old friend our habits eventually become. If I have those things, I can live with the discomfort and change my habits.

I also remembered that I need to take time to understand what I'm supposed to do before I actually start doing it. So, I'm not being ornery in not doing what's in the emails from day one. I'm being myself. I plan to start doing day one next week, after I understand the first week. I think I'm more likely to be successful if I use my natural approach, rather than push myself to act totally against my personality.

The Fly Lady & Being a "Scanner"

2007-10-08T13:40:00.001-07:00

The Fly Lady site is about organization for the genetically disorganized. She broke down the system developed by Pam Young and Peggy Jones, the "Sidetracked Home Executives" or "SHE", into baby steps. Her approach filled in some of what was missing in the original system. Pam and Peggy invented the system and the Fly Lady figured out how to implement it successfully.

I've tried using Pam and Peggy's system ever since I first found the original book. I never was able to stick with it. My current situation is not nearly as bad as it has been in the past. I don't have as much clutter to get rid of. Just about a hundred boxes to unpack and nowhere to unpack them to. That sounds like we have a lot of stuff we could get rid of, but every time we move we weed out anything we don't want badly enough to schlep it around. For this stuff, we need bookshelves and appropriate storage containers, but that will have to wait until the job hunt is over.

I have to let that aspect of things go, even though it bugs me to have all these boxes stacked up around the walls. At least I can cook a meal, do laundry, sleep, and get my work done. Most of the books I really want access to are unpacked onto the bookshelves my son gave us. (Bless him! I don't know what I would have done if every book I own had to stay packed in boxes.) And we found some really small, cheap bookshelves at a local drugstore during back-to-school that I've been able to unpack most of the cookbooks I use the most onto.

But my challenge in this new place is establishing routines that will keep it clean. I don't want to go back to the way it used to be in other places we've lived. I think my problem in the past was my usual pattern of trying to fix everything all at once. The Fly Lady's contribution to this is that you don't do that. You fix one small thing and build on it, bit by bit. Each "bit" is a baby step.

Now for the "Scanner" part. Barbara Sher has written a book called Refuse to Choose. It's directed at people like me who want to learn about everything and do tons of interesting projects, which contributes to the clutter, for one thing. For another, although she doesn't discuss housework specifically, it explains to me, at least, part of why housework is such a challenge for "scanners". We have more interesting things to do besides clean. The problem is that often the chaos around me keeps me from doing the projects I want to do. I end up trying to get control of that and neither the chaos gets fixed nor the projects get done. I end up feeling overwhelmed and depressed.

I hope that as I use the tools provided by the Fly Lady, the SHE developers, and Barbara Sher, adapting them to fit my own life, I can figure out how to balance my life so I don't keep going from one extreme to the other. I'd really like to find that elusive middle ground because when I've been in that place, which has happened on occasion, I've been so much more content with my life. Barbara Sher makes the point that Scanners can't be happy unless they do the projects they want to do. I know she's right about that and I'm finally in a place where I'm ready to get back to working on those things that matter to me.

Blog Archives

2007-10-06T07:35:00.000-07:00

I've been reading through the archives of blogs my friends posted. My friends write interesting blogs. Anyway, I found this little quiz on Tambo's blog and can't figure out why I didn't do it before. It's so me. (lol)

You Are an Excellent Cook

You're a top cook, but you weren't born that way. It's taken a lot of practice, a lot of experimenting, and a lot of learning.

It's likely that you have what it takes to be a top chef, should you have the desire...

Are You A Good Cook?

So, are any of you great cooks?

Fruit & Veggie Salads, Plus a Veggie Eggs Benedict

2007-10-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

I have a couple of simple recipes I wanted to share. They're for fruit salads, even though avocados and cucumbers are usually thought of as veggies.

The first one is as Strawberry and Cucumber Salad. You peel and slice a cucumber. You slice strawberries. How many depends on how many people you're serving and how big your plates are. You have to make this one on individual salad plates. You start at the outer edge and layer alternating, concentric circles of cucumber and strawberry. I like to put a srawberry half in the middle, so I try to end up with cucumber in the center and the strawberry on top. It looks prettier that way. Sprinkle either champagne vinegar or raspberry champagne vinegar and ground white pepper over the top. That's it.

DON'T try to take a shortcut and make this in a bowl. The strawberry juice makes the cucumber turn the most ghastly gray you've ever seen. Hmmm. . .might be appropriate for a gross Halloween food, but try it at your own risk. (grin)

Tonight, Paul tried a variation. We had some strawberries, papaya, and avocadoes that needed to be eaten. He cut them into a bowl. I sprinkled some raspberry champagne vinegar and white pepper, and voila! A great, healthy fruit salad. It was really good.

It would be perfect with that veggie Eggs Benedict I made a couple of weeks ago. I roasted a portobello mushroom cap and slices of tomato. I put the portobello upside down on the plate. I put the tomato slices inside the mushroom. I wilted a few spinach leaves and put them on top. A poached egg topped the vegetables. Then a spoonful or two of freshly-made hollandaise went over the whole thing.

Mangia!

NaNoWriMo

2007-10-03T20:15:00.000-07:00

I went and signed up for NaNoWriMo yesterday. I'd thought at one time that I'd never do that again. I thought I'd gotten out of it what I needed to get out of that writing madness.

Perhaps I'd better explain NaNo, as it's affectionately called. Well, "affectionately" depends on when in November it is and how many words you've written. Because NaNo is all about word count. The idea is to write a 50K novel starting on November 1 and finishing on or before November 30. You only have to write 1667 words every day for the whole 30 days to win. That can be done in a couple of hours, if you just write the story, no editing, no worrying about the quality of this very rough draft. The NaNoWriMo (which stands for "National Novel Writing Month") official web site can be found here, in case you'd like to join several hundred thousand mad folks from all over the world.

Anyway, I signed up. I've beaten NaNo. I know I can put that many words on the page, if I want to. So, why do it? Especially since I may not be able to finish. I've got a much busier life than I had the year I beat NaNo. So, why do it? Because I want to play with words. I want to just have fun with writing. I've forgotten that part because so much of my life has been about money, as it tends to be when your income is as uncertain as ours has been for the past ten years, but particularly the past three, almost four years. And even though I'm not sure I can get that couple of hours every day, I signed up officially. I'll push myself harder if it's official, than if I decide in advance to lose, which is what I'd be telling myself if I just said I was doing it "unofficially".

I'm going to play with some ideas this month and see which one screams, "Write ME!" Then I'll pick that one and start and see what I get. Maybe I'll put up a progress bar for NaNo. Maybe I won't, since, for me, it's about having fun with other people having fun with writing a story, not about whether I win or lose. We'll see when I get closer to NaNo. My competitive spirit may stick up for itself and insist on keeping careful track of the word count. I'm feeling ambivalent about it because I really just want to rebuild the habit of writing.

Books

2007-09-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

My friend, Margaret Fisk, has a blog she occasionally posts in. She set up a mailing list so people who are interested can read it when she posts and not be frustrated by how long it is in between posts. Anyway, her most recent post, which you can read at Stray Thoughts of Margaret Fisk, is about her reading list. She's asking for help in choosing what she should read next. I wasn't too helpful, having only read one of the books on her list.

But, it led me to writing about what I'm reading now. That got to be really long, so I decided to post it here. I'm reading Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series. I read Dime Store Magic and Industrial Magic several years ago. Due to our financial situation, I only recently acquired the remaining books that are out in paperback--Bitten, Stolen, Haunted, and Broken. She has one more out, No Humans Involved, but it's hardcover, so I have to wait for the mass market version before I can read that one.

What makes this all interesting is how I don't like werewolves, vampires, etc., etc., etc. Really, I don't. Or--maybe--I didn't? I love these books. I can't put them down. I'm reading when I should be doing something else. A friend, knowing my taste, said I probably wouldn't like the werewolf books. Most likely because of the violence. But the violence made so much sense with the world she created and the characters in the world, that it wasn't a problem. I probably would have liked them less if the violence wasn't in there because it would have felt like she'd held back from her true imagination.

And then there's Buffy. I refused to watch it when it was on. I didn't get it, and I understand why. I didn't see it from the beginning. I came into a random episode and had no clue what was going on. Then my son shoved it into my hands and made me watch season one. I was hooked. I've watched it all the way through three times since then. He mentioned he and his wife are watching them again and it's made me feel like it's time to go for a fourth go-round, at least with my favorite episodes.

And then there's Lynn Viehl's Darkyn series. I love her writing, but I'm way behind her output. I have at least one StarDoc and two Darkyn books on my shelf. I mention them, though, because the Darkyn are her version of the vampire myth and I love it.

So, what's the point of this seemingly rambling post? I learned, yet again, not to discount a genre, a type of book, or other any general category, just because I've had one or two bad experiences with it. What makes a good story is the combination of writer and subject matter. Different writers will deal with the same subject in totally unique ways. So, while Laurel K. Hamilton or Anne Rice's take on vampires don't thrill me, Kelley Armstrong and Lynn Viehl's do.

I think, in general, people do themselves a disservice when they stick to only one genre, or only a few favorite authors. One thing I used to do, that I don't do as much anymore, is pull books off the bookshelves at random and see if they look interesting. That's how I found a lot of the authors that are now my favorites. But when the money got tighter and tighter, I started sticking to trying to keep up with my favorite writer's books. I think I want to alternate or something. I think it's important for a reader to branch out. And even more important for me, as a writer, to go beyond what I usually read and am most comfortable with.

Music

2007-09-25T18:47:00.001-07:00

We had such a great musical day on Sunday. Dr. David Cheriwen, is a Cantor of Mount Olive Lutheran Church in Minneapolis and conductor of the National Lutheran Choir. He visited one of our local Methodist churches for a Hymn Festival/Concert. The choir members of the local churches were invited, so Paul and I took advantage. It was amazing.

He did mini organ solos to introduce each hymn. Then we sang the hymns. In between, members of the church read reflections on living a godly life. It was set up kind of like an old-fashioned English lessons and carols service. We brought the house down with Every Time I Feel the Spirit. It was so much fun.

Then on Sunday night, we were invited to join one of our fellow choir members and her husband for a piano concert hosted by the local Steinway Society. The pianist was Joyce Yang, 2005 Silver Medalist in the Van Cliburn competition. It was amazing. I'm always astounded by excellent pianists, probably because I can't even come close to doing what they do. I can play the notes, in correct rhythm, if the piece is simple enough. But I was never taught good technique, so, for example, I don't know how to bring out one line, with the rest as accompaniment.

I love days like that. They're definitely worth writing about.

Man, Am I Out-of-date, or What?

2007-09-20T17:24:00.001-07:00

I was tooling around the web, looking at blogs I enjoy. I opened up Tambo's blog, Tamboblog, and saw her moon phase widget. I remembered that I used to have it on my blog and I liked it. So I thought I'd just pick it up and put it on again. No way! They've changed things so much that I'm reading the code and it's gibberish. I can see I'm going to have to learn advanced HTML all over again. Things change so fast in the online world, but I'm looking forward to challenging myself to put stuff back on my blog. I'll figure it out, but it's going to take a bit more time than I have right now, as I have to go make dinner and get to choir rehearsal. It just seemed weird to me that something that was so easy a couple of years ago has become harder, just because I haven't looked at it for so long. Thought I'd write about it, but I think this is going to be "Out-of-date--Part One". The idea is sticking in my brain, tickling it, saying that there's more to be said here--more general stuff, as opposed to specifically about the blog. So, I'm going to think on it and see what pops out--later.

A Quickie Dinner

2007-09-18T20:26:00.000-07:00

I've unpacked my cookbooks since we moved. I'm enjoying making a lot of old favorite recipes. This one is NOT low-fat, low-calorie or healthy, according to current nutritional standards. It's worth making for the occasional splurge. Plus, I don't eat a lot of it at one time. And I pair it with good, healthy stuff. It's a pasta sauce that's made by infusing cream with lemon zest and crushed red pepper flakes. I serve it over those crab & shrime ravioli you can get at Costco. I eat about 3 ravioli, because they're really filling. You don't need a lot of sauce for three ravioli, so I cut the recipe in half. Next time, I'm going to make a quarter recipe, which should still be plenty of sauce for that amount of ravioli.

Here's the recipe--Spicy Lemon Pasta Sauce (based on a recipe from The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces by Diane Seed)

The sauce:

1-2 cloves of garlic, finely minced. Use however much makes it taste the way you like it. Judge by the size of the cloves, as well as the amount. I've seen large garlic cloves that are easily as much garlic as two small cloves.

1 tablespoon of butter

1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes. You can use 1/4 teaspoon, if you like it spicy, like I do.

The zest of one lemon. You can zest the lemon with a zester and leave it in strings or mince it, depending on your tolerance for eating cooked lemon peel. Be sure not to get any of the bitter white pith that's just under the skin of the lemon. Save a little zest to sprinkle over the top after it's done.

1 cup whipping cream. (I've tried several different ways to make lower fat dairy products work, but they tend to burn too easily.)

Salt, to taste.

Melt the butter. Add the garlic and crushed red pepper flakes. Saute briefly, just to get the oils out for a stronger flavor. You shouldn't cook them longer than a minute and the garlic shouldn't get darker than golden brown or it starts to taste bitter. Pour in the cream and add the lemon zest. Turn the heat down. Watch it carefully to make sure it doesn't boil above a simmer or it will tend to boil over. Stir it occasionally as it cooks. It takes about 45-50 minutes to thicken and get a good flavor. If it gets too thick, stir in a bit more cream. Just before serving, taste it. I usually end up adding a tiny pinch of salt. Literally a pinch--I take my fingers and pick it up between my index finger and thumb because that helps me keep from putting too much in. This doesn't need very much and it's easy to shake too much from a salt shaker.

6 crab and shrimp ravioli. Cook according to package directions. Time them to be done when the sauce is finished. Drain. Put on a plate and drizzle the sauce over the ravioli.

I like to garnish this dish with snipped chives or Italian parsley, in addition to the reserved lemon zest, just to give the dish some color. All that white pasta and lemon yellow sauce can be kind of boring-looking on the plate.

Since this dish is so rich, I serve it with a very simple salad, like mixed greens with a bit of balsamic and olive oil. It's summer and there are good tomatoes around, so I might toss in some tomato, to give it more color. Grilled veggies would also be good. Or, if you don't want any additional fat in the meal, steamed asparagus is wonderful with this.

Mangia!

Hmmm. . . it just occurred to me that I could try making the infusion with stock. Thicken it with a cornstarch slurry. Then put in a tablespoon of creme fraiche to give it the proper texture and dairy flavor. I'll try that next time and let you all know whether it works. I'm always trying to figure out ways to keep the flavor and texture of my food, but make it as healthy as possible for everyday meals. Come holidays or special occasions, I splurge. A Weight Watcher leader once said that we could have ten meals a year to eat what we wanted. Her point was that if you splurge every day, it's not special and it makes you fat. Saving it for truly special occasions makes it truly special and doesn't make you fat. So, this is one example of my love-hate relationship with weight, food, good nutrition, and so on.

Been Reading

2007-09-16T18:49:00.000-07:00

This has been interesting. I've been reading a lot more lately. I'd forgotten what a pleasure just reading to enjoy a story is. So often, when a person starts writing, especially writing fiction, you start reading to anlyze the book. What works. What doesn't. Or worse, to critique a book--the writer should have done this or that and it would have been better.

But I've been just reading. No analysis. No critique. Just enjoying the story. Getting lost in it. Letting it become my world for a few hours. And it's wonderful. I heartily recommend any writer who has forgotten what it was about books that got them writing in the first place relearn reading for pleasure. Turn off the editor and just enjoy.

The ironic thing is reading for enjoyment makes my fingers itch to be writing my own stuff. My brain starts thinking of characters and what's going on with their lives. I start seeing the world around me from their perspective, not mine. A sure sign storytelling is imminent.

That reaction doesn't happen when I analyze or critique a book. It's probably because when I'm analyzing or critiquing, it's too similar to parts of the writing process. It feels too much like working on a book, so it pulls me away from my own stories. It also spoils the pleasure of reading the story.

I'm beginning to think that unless I'm looking to learn a specific technique or studying something a particular writer does especially well, I should analyze and critique my own stuff. And read the books I buy strictly for pleasure. After all, I bought them because I thought they'd have a good story inside. If I'm looking for how to write stories or what could be better, I'm missing that good story.

April

2007-09-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

April slipped by with nary a post from me. In June, our church had a Sunday dedicated to reports of our trip to New Orleans, which took place in April. I had started this post, but never posted it. Instead, I turned it into my contribution to that Sunday service. Months later, I'm checking out my blog, which I'd like to resurrect and found the original draft of this essay. I decided to finish and post it. Maybe I'll even manage to keep my promise to myself to start posting regularly again.

I'm not sure how to relate what happened in April. First there was the Easter season, with lots of extra music, rehearsals, etc. That was wonderful. As a musician, I love the big religous holidays because there's so much great music written for them.

Then, right after Easter, we went to New Orleans. Easter is a season of contrasts--the rejoicing of Palm Sunday, followed by the sobering week before the crucifixion, followed by more rejoicing as we Christians celebrate the resurrection. New Orleans is a study in contrasts, too. I think that's the main impression I brought back from there.

There's the desolate neighborhoods with brick shells that used to be houses next to empty concrete slabs where the house was completely destroyed. Some lots have grass and nothing else left. No trees, flowers, nothing but the grasses that are the first things to start to grow back. Contrast that with the neigborhoods we drove through after taking the ferry across the Mississippi. They hadn't been touched. They looked like middle-class and upper middle-class neighborhoods anywhere. They were lush with the greenery that grows rampant in the area. There were no boarded up, empty stores. You could find a grocery store to go to.

Yet, there was a spirit of hope, too. Some neighborhoods had the same destruction, but every so often, you'd see a renovated home with people living there. It takes a lot of courage to go back and live in your house. Think about what it must be like to be the only people on your street with a home. Every time you leave or come back to your house, you drive by reminders of those who may never be able to come back. It wasn't just the homes and stuff they lost. It was family, friends, their community.

We went with members of our church. We spent a day and a half painting the sanctuary and new preschool classrooms of Gethsemane Lutheran. We painted part of the small dormitory. People who come from all over the country to help will be able to stay there. We planted new landscaping, which helped make the church look a bit less desolate.

We sang. Most of the people were choir members. We were part of a Musicale put on at Grace Lutheran to help raise funds to repair their pipe organ. Someone took two of the destroyed wooden organ pipes and made a cross for them. It sits in the narthex and is a testament to their resilience. They have a map of where people have come to help. People from all over the country are represented on that map.

We sang again. Our choir director is also a harpsichordist. She accompanied us on a harpsichord built by the organist of Grace Lutheran. St. Mark's escaped the devastation of Katrina, but its members did not. Yet there they were, diminished in number, but huge in spirit, helping each other recover from what they'd experienced.

We ate. There's a contrast for you. The members of Grace cooked dinner for us. It was amazing, topped off with that irresistible Southern guarantee to cause tooth decay, homemade pralines. On Sunday, our council president directed a bunch of us in a very California-style brunch. Great food, there, too. I keep forgetting to email her and ask for the recipes.

But it wasn't all work. We had time to walk around the French Quarter. Somehow, a small part of me felt a bit guilty playing when there was so much work to be done. Yet, playing is as important as work. Another contrast, but one we often forget in our supercharged Silicon Valley life. It's different in New Orleans. They have a different pace of life. If the kitchen crew isn't ready, you wait for them. If that means church is a half hour late, you just have more time to chat with everyone. And the pastor simply cuts bits of the service so it doesn't run over too long. Pastor Lisa got a bit carried away with the cuts--she almost forgot that all-important ritual--passing the offering plate. If your waitress needs to tell her story, a coworker grabs the heavy tray and lets her talk. Out here, she'd probably get fired for chatting so long with the customers.

It was the French Quarter Festival, an annual street festival they have every year. We spent some time listening to the music. But somehow, we managed to miss the jazz and get the pop stuff. Yet, on the streets, the street musicians sang and played the jazz New Orleans is famous for. You can't walk through that part of town without hearing music.

We went to the famous Cafe du Monde for beignets. Do not go to New Orleans without having some. Diets be damned. They're worth every calorie and it's open 24 hours so you can't say you couldn't find the time. As we walked back to the hotel to get ready to leave, an old guy started playing Amazing Grace on his trumpet. It was gorgeous and I couldn't help but sing along. He started singing a capella after playing one verse on the trumpet. I sang softly as we walked past. He smiled and gave me a thumbs up sign. It was a fitting end to the trip, somehow.

Because the ultimate contrast for me was that we went to help, yet they helped me more. They had every reason to whine about their lives. They had every reason to be angry with God or lose their faith, as many people do when faced with tragedy in their lives. But these people, not just those we met at the various churches, but even people like the waitress I mentioned above, who we met while exploring the rest of New Orleans, had a spirit and faith that humbled me. They put my life, which as many of you know, has been a struggle the past three years, in perspective. And I think their expression of faith helped when, near the end of April, Paul's mom died. They showed me how important it is for people to tell their stories, to share the important things that happen to them. Those stories, full of the richness of spirit they all expressed, are the main thing I bring back in my heart.

Even busier, if you can believe that.

2007-03-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

OK, so here I am singing in three choirs and working and walking and doing all the stuff you have to do in life. What happens? The leader of the group Paul sings in that I wasn't singing in emails me to say he had an opening in the alto section. Wondered if I wanted to sit in and see if it works out. I did. And so now I'm singing in four groups. It's so much fun. And because I'm now singing 5 days a week, my voice is getting better. The voice is like any other set of muscles--working out helps it.

I'm still walking every day except Sunday. I probably won't walk tomorrow. Paul's getting a rare Saturday off. We're going to spread out the errands and chores over the weekend so we can have some time just to do something fun. I don't know what that will be, but I imagine it will involve lunch or dinner out and a walk and maybe a simple bookstore browse. We'd go to a movie, but there's nothing out we want to pay movie ticket prices to see right now.

Sunday evening we're going to a local church that does a Messiah Sing. They put together a small orchestra and the audience is the singers. We sing any part we want, including all the solos. It's the only time I get to sing the tenor solos at the beginning. But I sing the alto parts in the choruses. Sometimes I sing the bass parts up an octave. I don't sing the soprano stuff, though. It's too high because I never sing up there anymore.

I'm almost finished with my prayer shawl. I have a foot left to knit. Then I have to put the fringe on and I'm done. I should finish this weekend, a week before the deadline. It's going to be a good trip. We're looking forward to it. Even if it is in the 80s and humid this time of year. Bad for my sinuses and they took the teeth out of Sudafed, so it doesn't work as well. (sigh)

Once I'm done with the prayer shawl, I'll have a bit of time I can use for writing. Once I'm done inputting music into my computer for rehearsal CDs and transferring my part to my MP3 player, I'll have that time free for writing. The problem is I'm starting over with one of my choirs because we just started a whole new set of music. It's all good, though, because I have most of the stuff done for next year's concert, so I won't have to do it then.

I've given up trying to write in the blog on anything like a set schedule. I know that means I don't have many readers, but that's the way it goes. Maybe things will settle down more later in the year, if we manage to move out on our own again. Somehow, I suspect that being able to set our own schedules and have an office will make it easier to find time to write.

I used to have time to post

2007-03-09T14:04:00.000-08:00

I used to have time to post almost every day. Now, I hardly ever post. I'm just busy. I have three rehearsals a week, plus singing in church almost every Sunday. It's Lent, so we have midweek service on Wednesday. One of my rehearsals is on Wednesday, so we leave church and walk across to practice. Luckily, the choir rehearses at my church. Makes things easier and we pretty much only miss the warmups. Not a problem; we warm up singing in the church service.

I've been typing my handwritten material into a computer file. Once I get it all typed in, which means I can read it in chronological order, I can put it into the manuscript and move on to the next part. I don't write in chronological order. My handwritten drafts are a mess of arrows and numbers pointing to places where I need to rearrange sentence and paragraph orders so they make sense. Anyway, I'm enjoying getting some work done on the WIP, even if I'm not writing new material right now and my progress bar is staying the same.

I started a prayer shawl yesterday. One of our former intern pastors heads two congregations in New Orleans. Some people from our church, including us, we hope, are going down after Easter to do some work for their people, worship with them, and we're bringing however many shawls people make as a gift from us to them. I think most people tend to think things are getting better, since so much time has passed since Katrina. But it takes a long time, a lot of money, and a lot of work to fix things after a disaster of that magnitude. It's nice to be able to do something, even if it's small like making a shawl to help them remember prayer--both theirs and that others are praying with them.

It's a busy week for the orchestra. Tickets are almost sold out for Sunday's concert. I'm looking forward to the concert. We're taking season ticket renewals, too. I've been living with my phone stuck in my ear last week and this week. It's way cool.

My mom's birthday was this week. We had a very small celebration, but it was fun.

Writing & Other Stuff

2007-02-22T10:40:00.000-08:00

I don't have a lot to say about writing. Just that I've started working on my WIP again. I'm currently catching up on typing in the handwritten stuff. It's actually very helpful in that it makes me focus on what I wrote, which is helping me get back into the story.

I didn't walk this morning because it was raining pretty hard. It's stopped for now. If the sun stays out, I might go ahead and walk this afternoon. Otherwise, it's a mall walk this evening with Paul.

This week is an easy one. We only have two nights of rehearsals. I had Ladyesong on Monday. And church choir was after the Ash Wednesday service. Then we did the last hour of Funtimes Singers. So, we ended up with Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday nights off.

I guess I'll be working on getting files and software loaded on the notebook for a while. I don't want to put too much on until I get Vista loaded. It hasn't come yet, which is no surprise. I hope the software I use the most will work with Vista. I don't want to have to replace it. That gets really expensive.

I'm getting the music entered in the computer. It's so time-consuming and it's tedious, so it goes really slowly. But I'll get rehearsal CDs done in a couple of weeks, I think. I know I'm going to have a lot to do for the orchestra, though, so that may mean taking longer to finish the music.

Music, Walking, Gaming

2007-02-15T13:17:00.000-08:00

My life seems to be mostly about music these days. I have a rehearsal almost every night. One of the women in one of the groups I sing with called me to see if I wanted to sing in a quartet. The song is one of my favorites, Georgia on My Mind, but I want to look over the music before I commit to it.

I'm working on inputting Ladyesong music into my computer so I can make rehearsal CDs. I hope they're helpful to everyone, even though it's just the notes and rhythms, no words. My plan is to do individual tracks of each part and one track with everything put together. I just hope it all fits on one CD. I guess I'll see how it goes this time and learn from anything that could be done better a different way.

I'm still walking. I haven't lost any pounds, but my wrists are smaller. My shoulders are getting bony. My pants are way too big in the seat and thighs, but not in the hips, so I can't fit into smaller ones yet. I need new shoes. I've walked this pair to death.

I spent the day with one of my sons yesterday. We had coffee. Ran a few errands. Had lunch at Togo's. Those of you who don't live around here need to have a Togo's sandwich if you ever visit this area. They're really good. I bought a couple of simple games. A version of Tetris, which I've enjoyed since the original Nintendo system introduced it to an unsuspecting world. And Jewel Quest, which I originally found on Gamehouse.com What I like about it is that as the boards get harder, you have the option of skipping and moving on, or playing it out. If you run out of lives, they start you with five more, but you don't have to start the game over. You just lose all your points. I don't care about points, so that's not a problem for me. Then I played the next bit of Final Fantasy XII, which I have to play at his house because I don't have a Playstation and TV. I try to go over about once a week and make a bit of progress on that game. David's been really getting into video games as a break from school and he's starting to get me going again.

Tomorrow my hubby and I are going out to dinner and a movie as a late celebration of Valentine's Day. We haven't picked out the restaurant, yet. But we're going to see the new movie with Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant. It's about music, too. Perfect for us.

It sounds like all I do is fun stuff. That's true, because I love my job, too. So fun is fun, work is fun and I have a really great life. All I need is a decent place, that will allow my cat, that I can afford to rent and I'll be all good.

New Stuff

2007-02-07T12:45:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting weekend. Remember I said I was saving up for a laptop? Well, we went into the Sony store just to do research. Yeah, right. Windows Vista just came out. They had a great deal on their XP machines. So, I went to the ATM, checked my finances, and got a sweet Vaio notebook at a super discount. What's amusing is that I got the discount because the computer had XP Pro on it. And if I was willing to wait 2-4 weeks, I'd get Vista Business for free. I'll end up with the same computer I could have bought, had they had any Vista machines in stock, but I got a substantial discount--all because I can be patient and don't have to have the latest and greatest immediately.

I've been busily setting up the computer. I really don't like doing all that stuff because it's tedious, but when I'm done, Paul and I will pretty much have our own computers to use. It's been getting harder to share because I'm telecommuting to my new job. Paul and I both are inputting music for rehearsal purposes. And we were starting to have more time when both of us had things we needed to do on the computer, but only had one computer to use.

The organ recital was wonderful. I heard a lot of music that was different from what I've heard in the past. I usually hear organ music as part of the church service, so the music is pretty traditional. This was a lot of different styles, since the pieces were from all around the world. The organist chose a lot of the pieces to show off the wonderful organ our church bought about a year and a half ago. One piece had no pedal part and another was just for pedals. Fun evening.

We took our kids out to breakfast last weekend, too. We hadn't all gotten together since Christmas. We had a good time, as usual. We didn't do anything special. Just chatted and caught up on each other's lives. Teased and joked and ate great food at one of the few really fantastic breakfast places in the area, the Country Gourmet. They have a place in Mountain View, but we usually go to the Sunnyvale store because it's closer.

I've almost got my new notebook set up so I can write with it. I need to go turn off all the automatic junk, starting with the annoying grammer checker, that makes MS Word such an irritant. I don't want my computer to interrupt my work because the software geeks think I need help formatting a simple business letter. By tomorrow I can write away from home, which is how I get most of my work done. I think it's partly that if I'm not home, I'm not looking at all the other things I "ought to be doing" or "could do instead". If I take my stuff and go away, I can focus better. Unfortunately, it's supposed to rain the rest of the week. So, no walking for a few days. (Sigh)

I'll try to mall walk on Friday night. And I should be able to walk over the weekend, either mall walking or doing my usual outdoor walk. I think I've lost a few more pounds. My jeans are loose in the thighs and seat, and they don't stay up around my waist. These are my new, smaller jeans. I'm happy with that.

New Blogger and Other Stuff

2007-02-02T14:29:00.000-08:00

I've switched to the new Blogger. It's not a lot different from the old one, but I see I have to redo my sidebar. Luckily, my template stuff is saved in a separate folder on my computer. It's weird, though, Wednesday when I switched, the sidebar and everything was the same. Oh, well. I needed to edit and update it anyway. My problem is finding/making the time to do it.

I'm writing along and staring at the new compose screen. There's a title bar at the top of the create post screen. And a space to put a label at the bottom. I have enough trouble coming up with titles. I have to do labels, now, too? I think I'll pass unless someone begs me to collect all my posts about one subject or other into a group. (Please don't beg me. I hate that kind of tedious stuff. (grin))

I've walked to Peet's yesterday and today. I had errands near there this morning. It's two miles one way, plus today I added the walk to do the errands. I need new shoes. I've walked this pair to death this year. I found the same size and type of shoe online for about half off, so I'm going to get two pair and alternate them. It's better for your shoes and your feet to do it that way, anyway. I'll get twice the wear out of the same amount of money, too. Good deal.

I've been reading and doing some of the suggestions in Barbara Sher's new book, Refuse to Choose. It's about the flakes of the world who can't seem to settle on one thing to spend their life on. She calls them "Scanners", not "flakes". A lot of the material is helping me to figure out how to get what I want to do done without having to figure out what to give up. It's a good book, if you're one of the people who thinks committing to doing one job for your whole life is like a prison sentence, since you have so many interests and things that you want to try.

I'm really looking forward to this Sunday. Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Saratoga is offering a free organ recital. The organist is playing a program that features music from around the world. From what my friend Barbara, who's heard him, says it will be great. It's at 7:30. If you're anywhere near the San Jose area and looking for something fun and free, you're welcome to come.

No Complaining Day

2007-01-23T13:02:00.000-08:00

I had a weird thought the other day. I'd had a day where I was talking to a lot of people. I noticed that most of the conversation was about what's wrong with their lives. I'm not talking about problems they're working on solving. I'm talking about whining and complaining about things they can't do anything about. I do it, too. So I suggested to Paul that we should have a "No Complaining Day". And I wondered if people would have trouble finding things to talk about, if they couldn't complain. I think we all need to "get over ourselves" and find reasons to be grateful for the good things we have. But, that's just my opinion. YMMV, as they say online.

I'm still walking. I think I lost a whole pound in the last two weeks. It's winter and super cold. I suspect my body is hanging onto the fat to keep warm. I don't know if that's scientific, nor have I ever seen any research on it. But thinking that makes me feel good, so I'm going to keep thinking it. And keep walking.

Today is one day I don't have a rehearsal, but I have music to do every day. Practicing the songs I'm singing is the main thing. But I'm also working on putting the Ladyesong music into my computer so I can burn rehearsal CDs for everyone. I hope they'll help people, particularly those who don't read music, hear their parts and learn them accurately. It's so hard to do that when you don't have a way to listen to your own part, without the other parts muddling up the works.

Last night the San Jose Chamber Orchestra celebrated Barbara Day Turner, the founder and music director's, birthday with a fundraiser. It was one of those milestone birthdays, so they called it "Maestra's Milestone". Good food. Lots of cool people. Fun entertainment that included a bit from a concerto for harp that will be premiered in May. And a humorous look at the birthday girl's life, put together by one of the board members. All in all, it was a great evening.

Blogging

2007-01-19T12:04:00.000-08:00

I suppose it's only natural that when you blog, eventually you'll write about blogging itself. It's an interesting phenomenon, this blogging thing. I'm noticing that many of my posts have been sparked by what I've read on someone else's blog. This is one reason I think blogging has become a kind of conversation, not just individuals musing about stuff and hoping other people will care about their musings.

I think the conversation aspect is also why people enjoy getting comments from people reading their blogs. Blogs have a connection between people that writing essays for traditional publications don't have. In traditional publishing, pre-blog days, you waited to see if maybe someone wrote to the editor about your essay. When you write a blog, you get instant feedback when people comment on what you've written. Today, though, even traditional publishing has that more immediate connection because usually you can email the writer directly. A lot of writers have blogs, too, and you can read more there and comment.

This all seems obvious, now that blogging has become so common. But blogging is such a recent phenomenon that it boggles my mind how quickly it's become a part of our culture. No surprise to me that us social creatures will glom onto any way to try to communicate with each other. Sometimes I wonder, though, if we're really communicating because, as with every type of communication, there's what we think we wrote, what we wrote, and what you read.

Stuff

I walked an extra day this week. Paul worked overtime and I didn't want to sit at home this morning. So I meandered off to El Paseo and had coffee at Peet's. That's two miles each way. I didn't push for speed because this wasn't supposed to be a workout, yet it only took me 50 minutes to get there. That's a ton faster than my normal walking pace of a year ago, and a year ago I wouldn't have been able to make it at all. I've come a long way since I started walking and that's a good thing.

I normally don't write fanfic. But I have one that won't leave me alone. It's in a world who's creator has said it's OK to do fanfic and I'm not going to post it up anywhere or anything. It's just for me to play with. The idea includes some types of writing that I've never done before and they're not needed for my current WIP. So, I decided to explore this idea and these writing techniques as a reward after I finish my work on 50 Ways for the day. It's a just for fun thing, and I'm always up for fun stuff.

Other than that, things are pretty much the same around here. Paul and I are celebrating the first paycheck of the new job by going out to dinner. It's kind of a ritual thing we do when he starts a new job. We hope this is the last one for a very long time. We have tickets to a concert tonight, too. We're not sure we're going because it's about 30 miles away and he's worked six days this week. A late night may not be in the cards. If he's too tired, we'll give the tickets to one of our sons and just enjoy a quiet dinner and maybe a browse in a bookstore.

Walking and other stuff

2007-01-16T12:34:00.000-08:00

Walking is becoming a bit of an addiction, I think. I get grumpy if I can't walk. That's a good thing. I discovered I can walk to the mall that's two miles away, have coffee, and walk home without any problem. That's a total of four miles. I don't think I've ever been able to walk that far this easily. It's cool.

I'm thinking that good days to update this blog are Tuesday, Friday, and over the weekend, since those are the days I don't have rehearsals and stuff. That way I won't be taking time away from practicing music and writing in order to write in the blog. So, I don't think I'm sticking to my original plan of writing every weekday, not that I've been doing that recently, anyway. It's just that I'd thought of trying to get back to that original goal. My life is much busier now, though, and I don't have as much time to blog. A busy life is a good thing, so I'm happy with making that change. It's doable, so I'm more likely to do it.

I'm settling into a good routine for my new job, my music, church, and family stuff. I don't like rigid schedules, but a general routine is helpful because it allows your brain to think about more important and interesting things than, "When am I going to do this or that?" I started a to do list in my little calendar. I don't always get everything done, but I expect that and start with the most important things first. I put things on my to do list that are fun, rewards for doing the not-so-fun stuff. I'm not rigid about it, though. Sometimes I do the fun things first and sometimes I only do the fun things. But sometimes I eat dessert first or go out and get dessert instead of dinner. Life's too short not to enjoy as much of it as you can, as long as you don't become a total hedonist and ignore your responsibilities completely.

Things are Humming Along

2007-01-11T13:46:00.000-08:00

All of my music has started back up. Paul has one group that won't start for another week. I've joined another choir, one Paul sang with over Christmas. It's called "Funtimes Singers". I need to get back in the habit of posting concert dates and info, in case any local folks are looking for something fun to do.

It looks like spring is bustin' out with show tunes. Two of my choirs are doing a lot of show tunes this season. It's going to be fun. The music for Funtimes isn't going to be too difficult, which is a good thing, since Ladyesong looks like there will be some super challenging stuff and lots of memorized music.

I like my new job a lot. It's another musical thing, in a way. I'm taking care of phones, ticket sales, and miscellaneous office work for the San Jose Chamber Orchestra. It looks like music is going to play a bigger part in my life, now that my kids are grown up and I have the time for it.

Writing may seem like it's far from my life, but it really isn't. I just haven't been blogging about it much. This past year I've been writing the occasional blog entry, emails, chatting, and doing lots of journaling. Lots of words have left my pen, but not much fiction. I'm not super upset about that. As I look back on it, there are a lot of good reasons more journaling got done than fiction writing. It's not important what they were. What's important is that things are now working better and I can focus on fiction more this year than last year. I knew it would work out this way. I just didn't know when. It's kind of ironic, in a way, that it all changed right at New Year's, since I try so hard not to make resolutions or changes at New Year's, mainly because doing it is sort of expected.

Anyway, I have a lot of typing of stuff I wrote by hand to do. And then I can write new stuff. It will likely be a couple of weeks before the word meter moves. I have a tendency to lose words, not add them, when I type stuff in. I don't change the progress bar when the word count goes down. I just wait until I've added more, as I always do. We'll see.

Still walking. When I started walking to the shopping center, it took me 45 minutes each way. Today it took me 35 minutes to get home. So, I'm walking faster. I wonder if the cold weather is partly at fault. I walk faster to stay warm. In any case, I'm enjoying my walks and coffee and private time to write in my journal.

Happy New Year!!

2007-01-06T15:18:00.000-08:00

I don't do resolutions, so don't expect to see a post about them here. You'll have to move on to someone else's blog for that.

Here's an update on the ongoing drama that is my life. First, Paul loves his new job. It's working out great. Benefits start after only one month on the job. I see new glasses, dental work, and routine medical stuff on our horizon, finally. I can find out how to handle the health issues that have kept me from working the past few years. I am going to have to find the "dreaded day job", as artistic types call the money work that puts a roof over their heads and food on the table so they can devote some time to their art. It's just too expensive here in CA to rent a place on one average income.

I hope to finally get a notebook computer sometime this year. I'm doing some part-time work from home for a friend. It's not a lot of money, but if I save it up, I should have enough for the machine I want before the year is up. And when I get that regular job, I can add some of that money to the PT income.

I'm still walking. I was up to 3 miles on the track. After Paul started his job, I started walking to a local shopping center for coffee. It's about 3-1/2 miles, total. It surprised me how easy the walk is. I'm thinking about walking a different direction to a coffe place that's 2 miles, one way. At least while I'm not working and have the time to do it. I don't know what my current weight loss is or my blood pressure. I started walking mainly hoping to lower the blood pressure, so we'll see, come February, whether I succeeded in that. The last time I was on a scale, which was a few weeks ago, I'd lost 33 pounds. Not bad for a person who wasn't trying to lose weight. I used Christmas gift money for much-needed new clothes. 4 sizes smaller. I'm happy with that and, while it would be great to keep losing, I'd be fine with maintaining for a while.

I didn't post for the last couple of weeks because of the super busy holidays. We had the regular stuff everyone does, plus four choirs between us to do rehearsals and concerts and stuff. It was great!! Then it was kind of a letdown because they all took a break. We needed the break, but I still missed it. It's all starting back up again this week and I'm looking forward to it. I'm going to be singing in three groups this spring. The music looks like it will be challenging and fun.

Last, a recipe, sort of, to start the new year with. It's not a recipe as much as a technique. I've been experimenting with braising these days because all the cheap cuts of meat need long, slow cooking to be tender. And that's what's been on sale. I'm looking for really simple stuff, so I started experimenting with that pot roast recipe I posted a while back.

I got a large pork shoulder roast on sale a couple of weeks ago. I had them cut it into two smaller roasts. I decided to try to do one like Pork Carnitas and the other like BBQ Pulled Pork. So, I kept the idea of putting the roast on a bed of sliced onion and cooking it at 400º F. I added one large can of enchilada sauce for the Carnitas and two regular-sized bottles of BBQ sauce for the Pulled Pork. Next time, I think I need to double the amount of enchilada sauce so there will be enough to spoon on the filled tortillas.

I cooked them on two different days using the same technique. I put them in for an hour. Then I turned the roast and spooned sauce over the top. I cooked them for another hour, turned and spooned sauce over. I stirred the sauce in the pan, too, so it wouldn't be as likely to burn. The last couple of hours, I did the turning, spooning, and stirring every half hour. Because I wanted shredded meat, I cooked them for a full four hours. If I'd wanted to slice it, I'd have only cooked them for 2-1/2 to 3 hours.

To serve them, I used two forks to shred the meat. I put beans and cooked rice in the enchilada-flavored pork, but next time, I'm serving the rice separately. I thought the rice flavor covered up the pork flavor too much. I served the enchilada filling in whole wheat tortillas. I made sandwiches out of the BBQ Pulled Pork, using ciabatta rolls, rather than softer hoagy rolls. The BBQ sauce really soaks into the bread, so you need a hard roll or it will get soggy and hard to eat.

Both were excellent and better left over, as long-cooked dishes often are. Both of these are wonderful winter dishes. The oven keeps the kitchen toasty warm while you cook dinner. Mangia!!

News!

2006-12-15T12:15:00.000-08:00

Ok, so Paul didn't get the job I mentioned in the last post. He got the one he interviewed for last week. Good job for him as it's his favorite type of work. It starts after the holidays. It's not a temp job, so all's good here. It's the best Christmas gift we can imagine. Maybe next year we'll manage to be celebrating in our own place. That's our next goal.

We've been super busy, since between the two of us, we're in four different choirs. Last week and this week are the two busiest for us. We've had rehearsals or concerts almost every night, and a few in the daytime, too. It's fun. For us, doing music kind of makes the holiday season extra special. So, it's been a good year for that.

We're still walking. I have no idea how much I weigh because I don't have access to a reliable scale, right now. But the jeans I bought are four sizes smaller than the ones I used to wear. I'm up to three miles in an hour, five days a week. The only thing I'm doing, really, is trying to walk at a challenging pace, which means gradually speeding up. My next goal is to add another lap without adding more time. There are people who walk a lot faster than I do, so I know it's an achievable goal.

I've decided to try a different approach to getting the writing done, once we're finished with super concert season. I'm going to reward myself for working on 50 Ways by playing with an "indulgence". It's something I want to write just for fun. I have some things I want to try, but they don't fit into 50 Ways, my current WIP. It will be a way to stretch my writing ability without waiting for a project that needs those types of scenes. We'll see how it goes, but it's going to be a bit before I can start because right now my life is so busy. The other thing I want to do is to post more regularly and let anyone who might still be reading this know how it's going.

I Hate Figuring out Titles for my Posts

2006-10-19T13:15:00.001-07:00

I'm considering numbering them. lol I want to try to post more frequently, now that I'm getting out of the funk I was in for the first part of the year. We'll see how that goes.

Writing, Writing, Writing--

I figured out why I wasn't writing. I needed to do what my friends Sheila (PBW)and Holly did a while back. A lot of the blogs I read, whether by aspiring or published writers, are very focused on the publishing industry and how hard it is to get published. How hard it is to write to that standard. How hard it is to whatever. It's a very negative and discouraging message, especially with my current financial situation. It became too easy to think about needing money and how hard it is to earn it by writing. I needed to step back and evaluate my thinking, so I stopped reading blogs and stuff for a while.

If I'm tinking about needing money, I start to feel guilty about writing. I feel like I'm wasting time I should be spending figuring out how to bring money into the house--now. The picture painted of the publishing industry by people who write about it makes it seem like it's hard to focus on what you want to do--write--once you start to sell. Because there's the sales numbers and building "buzz" and working to create a career. But you can't build a career on one book. You have to keep writing more. And it seems like a lot of published writers are crazily being obsessive almost to the point of not having a life outside of their writing and career. I don't want to live that way. I like doing a lot of other things and I'm not willing to give everything up to be a writer. (Or to be any one other thing, either. But that's a subject for a different post.)

Another aspect of it is that worrying about whether the WIP might or might not be publishable or sell stops my creativity cold. I start judging the work almost before it's on the page. The best way for me to do my best work is to just write it. Put aside all thoughts of publication, money, sales, career, etc. I don't know how that will work when I finally do sell something, but the time to worry about that is later. After it happens.

These thoughts led me to is back to the WIP. I need to focus on the current project. I need to focus on writing the book that's in my head, getting that story on the page. That's it. To do that, I've decided to limit my blog reading and other internet stuff, so it doesn't overwhelm me. And not read blogs or do internet stuff until after the day's writing is done. So, if I don't post often to your blog, don't think it's because I don't read it anymore. I just don't read as often. I have to take the same attitude Sheila once posted about: Protect the work.

Other Stuff

Everything else is pretty much going along the same as it has been. We've learned that David and his team will find out at the con whether they came in first, second, or third. That's in LA the first weekend in November. So, I wish them the best and hope they come in first. :)

I'm B-a-a-a-a-ck

2006-10-17T20:23:00.000-07:00

Blogger tech support has been very helpful and I can now post on my blog again. YAY!!

Woo Hoo!! David and Chris and Ann and Michelle and Andrew won a finalist's spot in the D&D contest. I don't know if they won first, second, or third, but two of them are going to LA for the convention to show off their video and have a great time with other role players. Congratulations to all of you. You done good!!

I'm walking 10 laps on the track, for 2.5 miles. On the trail, I'm doing one loop, which is about 2.25 miles, but it's a slight upgrade, with two small hills to get up to the bridge across the creek. So, it's a bit shorter, but as much of a workout. I decided to add some distance because I'm at about the top speed I can go at my current weight without getting strain on my knees. Current weight loss: 31 pounds

I looked over the manuscript of my novel. And I'm working on finishing up the first three chapters. Then I'm sending them out for critique and moving on to the next section. I have a good friend who offered to give me a daily nudge to help me stay focused. So far, she's been wonderful and patient with my start/stop efforts. I'll get back to the daily discipline, one little step at a time.

I'm enjoying my two choirs. We're gearing up for Christmas and I have a nice variety of music to sing this season. Paul is singing in church choir and he's found a couple of other groups to sing with, too. He's enjoying the variety of music, too.

And Paul has another job nibble. We'll see if this one works out. If we can get some money coming in, life will be extra blessed, instead of ordinary blessed. :)

Stuff

2006-09-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

Stuff is one of my favorite words and I don't know why. It just is.

David's movie: Voting is open until September 30. Just click on the link in the previous post and rate it to vote. You can vote as much as you like. The deal with awarding the prizes is that the official judges at Wizards of the Coast will be choosing the top three from the ten with the most votes. So, the goal here is to keep his video within the top ten, but as high as possible so more people will see it. Thanks for your support.

I've lost 20 pounds and had to replace the boring stuff in a person's wardrobe. I also need new jeans. I used to have 4 pair, but I cannot wear 2 because they're just too big. And my belt is too big, too. I hate wearing a belt when they're this much too big, anyway. It's really uncomfortable. I'm still walking 2 miles, but I'm walking faster. I haven't decided whether I want to increase my distance next week or work on continuing to increase my speed.

Life is pretty much the same, other than that. I've been studying up on writing techniques, which is a good thing. I keep getting more ideas, but they go into the idea file. I learned a long time ago that new ideas need to simmer before you can write them.

David's Movie

2006-09-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

My oldest son, David, and some other people, who he names in the email so I won't repeat it here, made a movie. It's a 5 minute video for a contest sponsored by Wizards of the Coast. He wants anyone who's interested to take a look and rate it a 10 so it stays near the top of the list. He's hoping that keeping it near the top will increase its chances of being watched and voted on. Anyway, he gave me permission to post his email with details and a link, so here it is:

Hi All,

My friends and family (Michelle Alvarez, Andrew Haws, and Ann and Chris Sprinkle) and I have made a movie for a contest. The contest is through Wizards of the Coast, the current owners (and manufacturers) of the Dungeons and Dragons game. The movie is intended to have to do with the game. I would appreciate your comments about the movie. It would help a lot if you would watch our movie [and give it a rating of 10 (out of 10)]. Even more important, however, is that we need your votes on the 15th of September, when the the real voting begins. Voting by the public is meant to narrow the entries down to the 10 most popular, from which Wizards of the Coast will choose the three winners.

Here is a link to our video*:

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/5534

Although it will ask you to verify that you are at least 18 years of age, I can assure you that there is nothing more adult than the average PG movie.

I will send out another e-mail, on September 15th, to remind you to vote for our film. If you would prefer I left you alone, let me know.

-David

*Note: When I put in the code to make a live link, it didn't show up on the screen, so you'll have to copy/paste it into your browser. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Thanks for your support, anyone who happens by and reads this. :)

Summer's Almost Over

2006-08-23T13:54:00.000-07:00

Summer's almost over and fall stuff is starting again. I think September is more the new year than January. Community and church activities all seem to start their seasons in the fall. There are lots of ads for season tickets to the theater and music scene showing up now. I feel like I should be gearing up for doing something new and different. I don't feel that way in January. In January, I feel like I should be succeeding with the old stuff I always fail at, the old New Year's Resolutions thing. Maybe that's why I prefer fall new year to January new year--new and different are more appealing than trotting out the same old resolutions one more time. That's why I stopped making resolutions in January at least a decade ago. It seemed pointless to keep promising myself to do things I never actually do.

Ladyesong started up on Monday. We have some cool stuff for Christmas this year. And, as usual, the stuff I've sung before was different arrangements, so I have to keep them straight in my head. When the music is memorized, it's easy to goof up and start singing the old arrangement automatically.

Church choir starts in a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to seeing what Barbara has in store for us this year. We do some really cool music.

I've lost 19 pounds, as of the last time I got on the scale. This is the weirdest weight loss experience I've ever had. It's the only time I've not followed a specific food plan in my whole life. I've been walking and eating the same stuff, but less because I'm not that hungry. I'm not losing it in the same pattern I'm used to. What I'm used to seeing is that I lose it in my face, feet, hands--basically the extremities first. Then, eventually the middle catches up. But this time, I've been losing it pretty much all over, pretty evenly. I measured myself for bras and I'm down a size. I've lost 50 pounds in the past without that clothing size changing. It's a good thing, in my opinion, that it's working that way. I also think I'm repeating myself, but it kind of amazes me because it's so unexpected. So I keep thinking about it and POP, out it comes when I start typing.

Nothing new with Paul's job hunt. I find between 2 and 4 jobs to send to each week. It's frustrating how often the same jobs show up. After six months or so, we resend his resume to those same companies, which keeps him in the system.

Yet Another Update

2006-08-14T13:09:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I haven't posted since the end of July and it's halfway through August!! We haven't heard anything about the job. It's still posted on the web site, so we don't know whether to assume they didn't make a decision yet or just haven't taken it down. Oh, well, back to the waiting game.

Paul's birthday's in the first part of Auguest. We went to Red Robin for dinner. I like Red Robin because the food is fresh. They have a lot of fried stuff, including the best fries and onion rings. But they also have a lot of grilled stuff and salads. You can eat really healthy food, or not. And it's always fun to get my family together because they're a bit nutty and always have good jokes and stuff to tell.

Ladyesong starts up again next week. I've missed it and am looking forward to singing again. I'm sure church choir will be gearing up for fall, soon, too. Next week is the last of the summer choir sessions.

I've been writing in my journal a lot lately. I've been thinking a lot about why I'm not writing like I used to and part of it, at least, is just that I'm out of the habit. There are other factors, too, but I think we often look for complicated explanations for things that are pretty simple. I've been reading Twyla Tharp's book on creativity and she talks a lot about routines. It's interesting and I'll probably have more to say about it after I'm done reading it and start doing some of the exercises.

On the exercise front, I'm still walking 2 miles a day, 5 days a week. Paul says I'm walking faster, which is cool. According to David's scale, I've lost 15 pounds. According to my jeans, I'm losing inches in the middle, where you need to lose them for optimum health.

Update & Something Amusing

2006-07-29T20:32:00.000-07:00

Update: It turns out Paul's job interview is on Monday morning. I'll keep you posted about how it turns out.

Something Amusing:

This came to me via Bob's blog:

Your Bumper Sticker Should Be

Even if the voices aren't real - they've got some great ideas

What Bumper Sticker Should Be On Your Car?

Perfect for a fiction writer, right?

Good stuff going on

2006-07-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

First, I hopped on David's scale on Thursday and discovered I've lost 12 pounds. It's pretty cool, even though weight loss wasn't my goal. Two pair of jeans are nearly falling off, so I'm losing some in that all-important middle where they worry about the fat causing heart disease.

Second, Paul's passed the phone interview and is going to be interviewed in person next week, probably Tuesday, for a good job with a good company. This is a real job, not a temp/contract job. With benefits. Any good vibes, prayers, finger crossing, whatever you do to wish others well will be appreciated. Paul's birthday is a week from Tuesday. Wouldn't a good job be a great birthday gift?

I've been gone a lot this week.

2006-07-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

It seems like I'm hardly ever home these days. My oldest son has been walking with us once or twice a week. Then he always seems to have an errand or two to run. It's no big deal for us to take him, so we do.

We're finally in the cooling off stage of that heat wave. We spent a part of one of the hottest days at the movies. We went to see Pirates of the Carribbean--Dead Man's Chest. I loved it. I'd already been forewarned that it doesn't wrap up the story in a nice, neat package. We have to wait until next summer for the end, which is fine with me. That's no different from the last two Back to the Future films.

Next week, Woody Allen's new film Scoop is coming out. I think we're going to go see it. We saw previews when we went to see The Devil Wears Prada and it looks good. A bonus for us fans of Anthony Stewart Head of Buffy fame--according to his official web site, he has a cameo in it.

Other than that, things have been pretty quiet around here. Nothing happening with the job hunt. The paper says there's been an increase in hiring, but it's mostly in the hospitality industry, not the tech industry. Paul's put in applications in at places like restaurants and retail, but they won't even interview him. I suspect it's because nothing he's done uses a similar skill set to transfer over to that kind of business. So, we're still looking at whatever's out there in engineering technician work. And trying to keep a positive attitude.

Time Wasters for Heat Waves

2006-07-21T13:20:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Dave Kuzminski, who posted the link in the comments on Miss Snark's blog, we can have fun pretending to be Jackson Pollock.

Or you can go here and pop bubble wrap.

Or you can go here and see part of The Lord of the Rings, as told by Peeps--those marshmallow bunnies you get in the spring.

Or you can go here and make snowflakes, a fun thing to do in a heat wave.

A last suggestion, go here and see the Bible performed by Legos.

This is Fun!

2006-07-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

It's summer! It's the middle of a heat wave. I don't feel like being all serious and "writerly" today. Besides, it's my youngest son's birthday. Happy Birthday, Chris! So, it's a fun stuff day.

From Evil Editor: Want to know what your blog or web site would sound like if it were written in jive? Go Gizoogle it. Warning: the language is a bit rough, so if that bothers you, don't go there. (So, now I've done it. All of you know my little secret. I'm really not a prude. (grin) I think writers cannot afford to flinch at any words. You never know which ones you'll need to tell a story. But that's just my opinion.)

As for Evil Editor's blog--go there. It's funny and informative. He skewers and revises one of the things all writers dread having to write--the query letter. I've learned a lot about how to write one and you will, too.

Another fun thing from my friend Andi's blog:

You Are Kermit

Hi, ho! Lovable and friendly, you get along well with everyone you know.
You're a big thinker, and sometimes you over think life's problems.
Don't worry - everyone know's it's not easy being green.
Just remember, time's fun when you're having flies!

The Muppet Personality Test

I love Kermit and I agree--it's not easy being green! :)