Fitness, Food and Fashion

>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.