Summer rations

I know I’ve whined about our weather here in Seattle before, but it’s been a pretty craptacular spring. And summer isn’t looking much better. Day after day of gray, cloudy, depressing gloom. Every now and then, we’ll get a gorgeous sunny day (usually on a weekday, when I have to be inside a cubicle all day. Grrr!) but then it will be back to the grayness. But finally, the stars aligned and we had a gorgeous sunny weekend in the forecast.

T and I took advantage of the nice weather to do a bike ride up to Edmonds. It was T’s first time climbing the dreaded Shoreline climb (and he ended up doing it twice, because he came back to get me while I was wheezing in one of the cul-de-sacs and missed me.) It’s disgusting how well that boy climbs…

When we got back to our neighborhood, I had a few errands to take care of, so I bribed the boy with ice cream to walk with me. En route, we came across a bike crit (race for the non-cyclists) that we had no idea was going on. We stopped to watch the action for a little while. We got to see the women start their race:

Those girls are amazing (and fast!) Afterward, the boy started on his new experiment/hobby: coffee roasting. Using the $5 popcorn popper he found on Craigslist:

The best part is that his hobby justifies the pizza pan I haven’t been able to let of:

The fruits of his labor:

M & J were coming over for dinner and got to witness some of the coffee-roasting goodness. We had a great summery dinner: grilled chicken and corn on the cob, plus a salad made with lettuce from my little balcony garden. Followed by a strawberry cobbler that we got from a local place that makes everything with local, organic ingredients. And of course no evening would be complete without some Wally-snuggling…

When you pack this much summer into one day, it almost makes it okay that you only get one day’s worth of sunshine. Almost.

Garden party

I have a confession to make: I am terrible with plants. I’ve killed so many over the years, that I pretty much never expect anything when I buy plants. But that doesn’t stop me from trying. So, when I saw some beautiful herbs and tomato plants on sale at one of our local grocery store, I decided to give horticulture another try. So far, they are doing pretty well. (Except for the basil. I don’t know what it wants.) But the rest of them are happy:

I already need to re-pot two of the tomato plants and my cilantro is going crazy. It even had a guest over:

I definitely like being able to cut herbs from the balcony and it looks pretty having them out there. We’ll see how long it lasts…

Spring Cleaning

Back in January, I read an article in Outside magazine about this crazy detox diet called the Clean Program. Usually, things that involve the words “detox” or “toxins” or “cleanse” make me shudder, but the writer himself talked about entering into the experiment with the same amount of scorn and skepticism that I would have, so I put the book on my library hold list and actually read it. To my great surprise, I found it fairly compelling.

I’ll spare you all of the details behind it, as some of it is very hippie-dippy. The basic premise of the diet is to give your digestive system a break by eliminating everything that “taxes the system” (I warned you!) which includes just about everything: wheat, caffeine, alcohol, gluten, corn, soy, dairy, starches, some kinds of meat, eggs, and some fruits and veggies. You start with a sort-of prep phase where you just eat foods on the “approved” list, which is tough enough. Then you move to the full diet where you have a liquid breakfast and dinner and solid food lunch, with snacks as you need them.

With all of that, it might be surprising that such a thing would appeal to me. But after some of our terrible road trip food, I was having a really hard time getting back on track eating wise and doing a re-boot of our diet didn’t seem like such a bad thing. More surprising was T’s willingness to do it, but he felt like he needed a reset too.

So, for the last two weeks, we’ve been trying foods I never thought I’d ever buy (hemp protein powder anyone?) Breakfasts were mostly smoothies, beefed up with said protein powder and some ground flax seeds. We ate grains I’d never tried before (millet) and discovered the joys of almond butter on brown rice cakes and toasted “everything-free” bread. The only real challenge was the first weekend breakfast. We’d gotten in the habit of making a nice breakfast on the weekends and this just didn’t cut it:

(Those are vegan blackberry pancakes made with buckwheat flour.)

But for the most part, it wasn’t too bad. It definitely took some getting used to, but I’ve noticed a big shift in my eating habits. I don’t crave the junk food that I had been. I discovered the times where I eat when I’m bored rather than when I’m hungry. And I’ve gone two weeks without a Diet Coke, which might be a record for me. (I’m hoping to continue that streak, but the coffee is already back on the menu.) I’m planning to continue some aspects of the diet and keep the whole grains, veggies and lean meats as the foundation of my diet. We’re also going to keep some smoothie breakfasts in the rotation, as they were surprisingly filling and yummy. But not this weekend, I think we’re going back to our old tradition of yummy breakfasts. No more zombie pancakes allowed…

Experimental poultry

T’s dad gave us a turkey for Christmas (don’t ask) and with all of the freezer cooking, it had to be evicted from the freezer to make room for all of the other food. The nice thing about having to cook a turkey in February is that you are free to experiment with Mark Bittman’s 45 minute turkey recipe. If it’s Thanksgiving, you don’t feel quite as free to experiment.

The shorter cooking time of this recipe comes from the fact that you cut the turkey in half (warning: this is not for the faint of heart, it was DISGUSTING and I made T do it. But even hearing it was gross and traumatizing… ) The end result took a little longer than the promised 45 minutes (closer to 1:15) and it looks like a crime scene:

I will say it was pretty delicious and a lot faster than roasting a turkey the normal way. If I cooked it for Thanksgiving, I think I’d have to make some miniature crime scene tape and some mashed potato outlines or something. Have a “Film Noir” theme. Might be fun…

Further adventures in freezer cooking

Our first round of freezer cooking was so awesome that we decided to do a more ambitious batch. So, as opposed to the eight recipes (one breakfast, three lunches and four dinners) we did last time, this time we did 13: three breakfasts, four lunches and six dinners. It was a big jump, but we were confident in our abilities. The first order of business, prepping the mise en place (all of the veggies we’d need for the recipes.) So pretty:

We had a upbeat playlist going on the I-pod which prompted some awesome dancing. (And I mean that in the literal sense of the word – T’s dancing inspires awe. And terror. And fits of laughter… )

More photos from the day… Here’s the mixture that is soon to be granola bars:

Burritos aplenty:

The rest of the afternoon was filled with endless amounts of cooking. (So, SO much cooking… ) Even though this is our second round, we learned a lot from this session. Next time we’ll do our food shopping two days beforehand and do all of our prep the night before. And we’ll take a better inventory of freezer bags. We’ll also do our own prep lists (rather than blindly using the ones from the website) and read the recipes more thoroughly before we start. It was exhausting, but I’m sure in the weeks to come it will be all worthwhile.

More kitchen hijinks

I love the blogosphere. I find the whole blogging movement fascinating. I love that we live in a world where people pick some random thing to do and then write a blog about it. Like the woman who decided to cook something in a crockpot every day for a year. I have blogs of all kinds in my reader, ranging from food blogs of all kinds to various friends random musings to triathlon training to frugal lifestyle. Unfortunately, they do put crazy ideas in my head, so when one of the blogs featured a post about once a month cooking, I should have averted my eyes.

Basically, the premise is that you do a huge cooking day where you produce a bunch of dinners (plus lunches and breakfasts, if you’re so inclined… ) to put in your freezer for the rest of the month. I don’t know if they are still around, but there were a bunch of retail businesses in Portland built around this idea. Like most people, T and I definitely struggle with trying to make healthy dinner choices when we get home tired from work/class/the gym, etc. So, I decided to give it a try and talked T into helping me.

We decided to make one breakfast, three lunches and four dinner recipes. I made the breakfast the night before (a cherry steel cut oatmeal recipe.) The next day was a flurry of prepping and cooking. Luckily, the site had great advice for how to organize everything in logical steps and it actually wasn’t too painful. (All of the Top Chef watching and the boy’s restaurant experience didn’t hurt either… ) Here’s T prepping the turkey burger patties:

Lasagnas ready for the freezer:

New Lodge dutch oven being put to good use:

By the end of the day, we’d finished all of our recipes and had created 74 servings of food and crammed them into our freezer. The best part was that M & J had invited us to dinner at their place, so we got to hang out and take a break from cooking for a while.

Erroneous grumpy toast on display:

J made some gorgeous baguettes:

It was a very enjoyable low-key evening with delicious food and some RockBand. Excellent Saturday night festivities all around.

The great experiment

This year, I really wanted to make most of my Christmas gifts and happened upon a recipe for wine jelly. Now, I’m a sucker for “interesting” foods, so I promptly looked it up online to see what one would use wine jelly for. To my surprise everyone seemed to be using it just like regular jelly, so I decided to give it a try. I’ll admit, the fact that I’d never tried to make jelly did make me a little nervous, but I decided to go ahead anyway. (Luckily, Google contains a wealth of jelly-making lore… )

I did the first batch of red and aside from buying liquid pectin instead of powder (the only difference is that liquid has to be added at a different time in the cooking process than powdered… ) it went pretty smoothly. One of the jars didn’t seal properly so we had to eat that one right away, so we had a chance to taste it and I must admit, it was pretty tasty. It has some of the red wine smell, but basically tastes like a more complex grape jelly (there’s the sweetness of grape jelly but paired with a nice tartness.) Let’s just say the jar we have is almost gone and it’s only been about two and a half weeks…

I didn’t get any pictures of the actual jam-making process, but I did snap a few of the cooling jars:

*** Sorry for the delay in posting, I had to wait until some of the blog-reading recipients had opened their gifts! Now, hopefully my parents won’t read it before I go down there next weekend. Luckily, I’ve also gotten them something else, so they will still be half-surprised. ***

Battle of the junk

Like most people, we have too much “stuff.” After watching M go through a very impressive de-cluttering phase, I decided it was time for T and I to do a “Purge” of our own. Two weeks ago, I told T to set today aside in his calendar to spend on this project. I’ve been reading a few organization books and de-cluttering blogs, so I had a plan-of-attack in mind. Basically, I wanted to go through all of the rooms in our apartment and do a quick initial sort, identifying things that could be sold/donated/thrown out immediately and what would require more thoughtful sorting. To make the process more enjoyable, we went to Cafe Besalu for some pastries and pre-planning, where we loaded up our much-depleted butter stores and determined the order of rooms we wanted to tackle.

Once home, we wrote our agenda down on the chalkboard:

Then it was off to the races. I didn’t take a lot of pictures, as we were too busy sorting. Suffice it to say, we found a lot of useless crap that can go to Goodwill/Craigslist/FreeCycle. We didn’t get through the whole list (the office and bathroom escaped.) But we were able to make a nice plan of attack for next steps, so now I don’t feel so overwhelmed by the whole process. Our overall goal is to end up only with stuff we love/need/use and I feel like we’re well underway. (And Mom, if you’re reading this; no, I didn’t throw out any of your stuff.)