Category Archives: Uncategorized

>Tea Time Chatter reviews a new tea house at Crossroads Mall in Bellevue. Has anyone tried the tea house in Crown Hill on NW 85th St.?

>While researching duck-fat fries, I came across the website Serious Eats. They have, among other things, recipes for Girl Scout Cookies.

>I’ve always wondered if I were communicating clearly when I talk about belly dancing with a weight belt, which I do every Tuesday or Thursday at Delilah’s Visionary Dance studio in Fremont. Fortunately, Delilah’s just done a promotional video about it! (Yes, she really does teach the class in jeans and a tank top.)

>Roasted turkey with garlic cloves and olive oil (no stuffing, just herbs inside) served with a mushroom-infused reduction of the pan juices
Fresh cranberry orange relish
Butterleaf lettuce salad with pear (or tomato) slices and vinaigrette
Grill-roasted herbed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, and chunks of squash
Sourdough and butterfly rolls (store-bought) with whipped butter
Baked Granny Smith apples (baked with liquor-and-ricotta filling)
Individual pumpkin puddings (same recipe as pie filling, but substitute brown sugar and double the ginger)

Yes, this is Thanksgiving dinner without gravy, stuffing, pie crust, and whipped cream. I think eating it would make me feel satisfied but not overwhelmed. But I can’t imagine having the nerve to serve this for fear people would think I’d joined the food police.

What do you think?

>A thousand years from now some archeologist will be pondering over early 21st century skeletons and wondering why we all had hunched shoulders. Or perhaps some of us will be buried in our Aerons and the answer will be obvious: deskwork.

Massage therapist Larry Swanson has assumed the persona of The Office Rat to help us bring a fitness mentality to our office jobs. His Office Rat blog provides a tip a day, many with You Tube videos, to help us combat desk debilitation. Larry interviews fitness and bodywork experts like Reta Wright-Kinghorn (a sleep disorders clinician) and Lara McIntosh (from Wassa Dance), and draws on his own experience as a massage therapist.

Larry is the therapist who helped me figure why I was having trouble with the warrior poses in yoga. He showed me how years of hunching over a keyboard had shortened and tightened the muscles in my chest, making it very difficult for me to release and extend my arms back and out to the side. Some assisted stretching, and persisting with the yoga, eventually solved the problem.

Check out his latest tip, on stretching your forearms.

(Cross-posted at The Mysterious Traveler)

>Two years ago this week, an ad on Craig’s List changed my life. I didn’t even read it, but my friend Angie did, and she posted to a Yahoo list we both belong to, and invited people to come with her to a yoga-based exercise class being taught by Susan Powter.

I barely remember the first class, I was so exhausted. Fortunately, I keep a digital journal, which records that after the class I went to QFC, got whole grain bread, came home, and made French toast. “Watching Susan Powter in action is like going to a show in Las Vegas,” I wrote.

One week after starting the classes (four of them a week) people noticed a difference in my appearance. Two weeks later, I had my first encounter with muscle fatigue — I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. That was scary. A few days later I had my annual medical checkup, and there was a strong reflex reaction from my right knee for the first time since I’d herniated a disk 10 years earlier.

As I read through the journal, I remember taping my feet (they were too weak to work out barefoot), living on Ibuprofen, having a second round of muscle fatigue in mid-November, and the horrible grinding sound in my right shoulder. I can’t believe I finally got past all that!

I’m thankful every day that I did.

>The Fu Man Dumpling House on Greenwood Avenue in Shoreline makes absolutely exquisite food. The fresh-made meat-filled dumplings, served with a fresh garlic-ginger dipping sauce, are legendary. But just about everything else on the menu is exceptional, too. A complex hot-and-sour soup. A won ton soup with a peppery chicken broth base. A complex fried rice done with a light, almost buttery, oil, with fresh peas and some of the tastiest shrimp I’ve had in a long time. And I didn’t go wrong tonight by ordering a little seaweed-in-garlic-sauce side dish, which combined the cold seaweed with cilantro in a slightly sweet dressing.

The distinctive element at Fu Man Dumpling is the quality and freshness of the ingredients they use. Realizing this is making me a bit less grumpy about paying top dollar for organic, heirloom, and local produce for my own cooking. It makes such a difference.

>Grrr! I stubbed my second toe yesterday, and this is going to keep me out of fast-moving exercise classes — though only for a few days, I hope.

>I just opened Susan Powter’s new yoga DVDs and am incredibly excited to see that one of the DVDs has exactly the routine she developed with our Seattle group last year. Well, it’s the beginner version, but one that can be easily revved up to a higher level.

It’s a bit amusing to hear the new age music in the video, since Susan always worked us out to a fairly raucous combination of rock, club/dance, and hip-hop. But it’s just so great to hear Susan, saying those things like “big huge oxygenated movements” and “stay in breath.” I can hardly wait to put the PowerBook in the dining room tomorrow morning, roll out the mat, and do yoga with Susan again.

>I’ve been belly dancing for the past six or seven months, and I’m trying to decide what I think of it as exercise. Here are a few observations:

• Beginning classes (for technique and basics) aren’t much of a workout.
• Power belly classes (the basic moves done in rapid succession while wearing a 10-pound weight belt) are pretty effective as aerobic, fat-burning exercise. And they are very easy on the joints.
• Two-hour performance classes (done for endurance and skill) can be quite strenuous. They’re good for burning calories, but watch out for repetitive stress injuries (and other injuries) to feet and ankles if performances are done on non-studio surfaces, such as concrete or asphalt.
• Performances are exhausting. Even your face muscles will hurt from smiling for two hours.

I haven’t tried tribal-style belly dancing, but based on my experience with mainstream belly dance performance classes, I have high expectations of them for aerobic benefit. Tribal troups do a lot of fast traveling across stages.

Belly dancing twice a week has not kept my muscles as toned as a similar amount of Vinyasa-style yoga did, so that is a disappointment. But it certainly can and does burn fat. I’m going to try to do it once a week as a good (fun) workout to mix with yoga.