Fitness, Food and Fashion

>You’ve heard of Peeping Toms? I have a Peeping Mark — a former boyfriend who has for the past 13 years come by the house and hung a bag full of boxed Peeps on the front door.

I was in the basement doing the laundry today when the Peep-and-run occurred. This year it’s a batch of traditional yellow Peeps. Very nice in their traditional Bartell bag. (Somehow, I don’t think this would work if they weren’t in a Bartell bag.)

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the sentimental pull of food. Since very few of us were raised with treasured recipes for tofu and salad, these sentimental foods tend to be on the unhealthy side. This, then, introduces the question of how to avoid overindulging in Aunt Helen’s fudge, the five-pound box of chocolate from the candy store in your old home town, and the deep-fried goodies at your family’s favorite clam shack (forgive the East Coast reference).

My solution? Eat one meal of the goodies and then ask someone else to make the leftovers disappear. Face it, you will never be able to put even a tablespoonful of Cousin Guido’s lasagna down into the trash. Another approach is to tuck the items into the back of the fridge until they are no longer appealing. And yet a third approach is to let someone else in your house finish them off (unless, of course, this gets into the territory of “sabotage.”)

Not being a sweets person, I’m most likely to have these eat it/toss it interior dialogs in front of a bag of bagels and tub of cream cheese, or looking at a piece of fried chicken. So, fortunately, the Peeps are harmless. I’ll eat a package of them today and then put the rest in a basket for the Easter bunny. He’ll burn it off hopping around tomorrow.

>A friend turned me on to Mashiko in West Seattle last week. The meal — plates of sashimi composed for us by the chef as we sat at the sushi bar — was amazing. Toro. Monkfish liver. Scallops wrapped in proscuitto. Geoduck. Mashiko offers a sampler of three types of saki, and, that, too, was stellar; one type was redolent of cedar.

The next morning I woke up feeling so healthy and energized. I think it was the food!

>(cross-posted on The Mysterious Traveler)

Ten years ago, fat was the bane of dieters. Today, it’s carbs.

But there are carbs, and there are carbs.

One one hand, you have Minute Rice, Ritz crackers, instant oatmeal, and white bread. And on the other hand, you have brown rice, Rye Krisps, steel-cut oats, and breads like Ezekiel Bread and Dave’s Killer Bread.

The difference is whole grains and fiber. The high-fiber carbs are very filling and nutritious. Eaten with a little cheese or peanut butter, they’re a whole meal.

Somewhat to my amazement, I’ve come to love brown rice. I cook a big pot of it every Monday morning, and live off it for the rest of the week. (See the brown rice recipe, below.)

Brown rice heated up with a little cinnamon and brown sugar and chopped apples makes a quick breakfast. Leftover baked chicken or leftover vegetables (or curry) can be mixed with brown rice for lunch. And brown rice pudding with currents makes a very good dessert or evening snack.

My favorite brown rice dish is brown rice pancakes. I mix cooked brown rice with lots of browned onions, eggs, a little potato flour (or regular flour) and a pinch of baking soda. Then I drop the batter by 1/4 measures into a frying pan with oil to make something very similar to potato pancakes.

It turns out there are many types of brown rice. I’ve been using the plain, large-grain brown rice. Here’s the basic recipe:

Either:
• 2-1/3 cups of rice to 4 cups of water
• or 3 -1/2 cups of rice to 6 cups of water

Rinse the uncooked rice three times and drain well. Put the water on to boil in a separate saucepan. While waiting for the water to come to a boil, put two tablespoons of oil in the bottom of a heavy, tight-lidded sauce pan, then sauté the well-drained rice in the oil while you wait for the water to boil. Do this over fairly high heat. It has to be stirred constantly, otherwise it will scorch. This process coats the rice with the oil and evaporates the water from rinsing. The rice will begin to smell very nutty after a minute or two.

When the water in the other pan has come to a vigorous boil, pour it over the rice in the sauce pan. It is very important at this point not to stir the rice anymore, not even once. Let it come back up to a vigorous boil, put the lid on, turn it down as low as you can and cook for 45 minutes. During this time, do not lift the lid or do anything else to it. When 45 minutes is up, turn off the heat and let the rice sit undisturbed for at least 15-20 minutes before serving.

>I’ve had a cold in my chest for more than a week, but no fever. I get tired in the late afternoon, and start coughing when I’m tired. The first day this happened, I took a nap, but now I’m chugging along at pretty much my regular rate.

I’ve been doing yoga, but skipping the African dance aerobic cardio workouts.

Mulling over whether to get back on the track with the cardio class tonight, I did some online research. The best article I found quoted Mayo Clinic physicians advising against doing a major workout after a cold has settled in your chest.

So it’s yoga at home again tonight.

>There’s something about being sick that strips your life down to basics: Bathrobe, shearling slippers, bed, and food that doesn’t have to be cooked much, if at all.

>There are people who enjoy making charts, counting calories, and weighing and measuring, and generally tracking everything they are going to eat.

It doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t work at potlucks, at other people’s houses, or in most restaurants. It doesn’t work because I don’t like a way of eating that makes a fuss or calls attention to me.

To my way of thinking, the American way of eating (out) is so far removed from what’s good or recommended that it feels almost ludicrous to count and measure and nickle-and-dime it (“Let’s see, I can have one-fourth of the bacon cheeseburger, with three french fries…”). So I’ve found that I need whole new strategies to deal with eating out.

Currently, I’m playing around with these three:

1. The 1-in-9 strategy. Eat eight healthy, low-fat, high-fiber, yada-yada, meals at home or at your desk and get one meal out in High-calorie Land. And enjoy it.

2. The half-of-what’s-on-the-plate strategy. This works particularly well with American breakfasts. Order the standard bacon-eggs-toast breakfast and eat half of it. This also works well with “one-dish” types of meals such as pasta dinners and sandwich lunches, where you can get a doggy bag and take the rest home. And it’s also a life-saver when you’re on vacation and none of the menus are within your control so the 1-in-9 strategy can’t be applied.

3. The two-appetizer dinner plan. This is for elaborate multi-course meals in special restaurants where everything looks delicious and, of course, you aren’t going to sit there and nibble the boring Caesar salad while everyone else vacuums up the trout meuniere or fettucine quattro formaggio. Quite often much of what appears on the dinner menu, surrounded by potatoes, rice, sauces, etc., is available in a smaller, less starchy, version as an appetizer. So when everyone else orders an appetizer and a main course, you can order two appetizers, having the second as your main course.