End of term update

Not an exciting title. But! Things have been quite exciting for me of late; just take a look at the weekend I have planned:

clean room, Chinese vocab, Chinese homework, Chinese flashcards, 15 essays (grade), make book stacks (recent arrivals for the prospectus!), return library books, gym, microficheing, groceries, ballet, scrub down shower, lesson plans…

It’s a lot. And yet I spent today going to ballet class, napping, and playing video games. I did get the room cleaned, though, and I composed my grocery list. So hopefully tonight I can do 5 essays, write up my flashcards, and that should be enough for the time being. Tomorrow and Sunday are going to be nuts.

This week I have also been eating quite differently, so I do anticipate having enough energy to get through all of this. I have cut down bread, rice and pasta to amounts that I had never before imagined possible (about a cup of cooked rice a day, and no bread or pasta whatsoever), and also limited my meat intake (4 sardines, a little roasted chicken, about 5 slices of bacon this week).

I upped my intake of fruit–grapes, mango, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries–and vegetables–a TON of spinach, onions, garbanzo beans, bok choy, you cai, enoki, tomatoes, mustard greens. Mostly organic stuff. The surprising thing is, I’m eating a lot of food; I mean, I am even eating chocolate and the occasional cup of juice (I don’t drink juice, normally), and I have amazing amounts of energy. Normally, I have to sip at a frappuccino all day to get through my 7AM-7PM on campus Thursdays, but this Thursday I didn’t need it. I even managed to stay awake in Chinese. Shocking! I cut down on rice etc. because I sometimes do this when I start feeling sluggish. I’ve never done it to this degree before, and the results are really amazing. I don’t even want to eat bread or pasta anymore. And I LOVE noodles…this is really saying something. I don’t even crave it. I’m not ravishingly hungry at all.

I just feel light! Nice and light and able to focus. I have been eating about 1900 calories a day, and with this change in diet, I think I’m still landing somewhere in this range. I suppose I may go back to a higher proportion of carbs in my diet, particularly when I start doing ballet more intensively this summer. I’m taking an intermediate-advanced class that meets 4 days a week for 3 hours a day. That’s 12 hours of ballet a week from late June through the end of July! At that point, I may need to up the bread and pasta again. But for the time being, I feel really happy without them. I even think my skin is looking better…

I will say that to keep up the massive veggie intake, I have been going to the grocery store essentially every other day. So that is a bit of a drain on my time. But the results are worth it.

So…I’m feeling happy, if not as productive as I’d like to be. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I’ll be able to better judge where I stand for the last week (and the following finals week) of quarter.

A splendid little celebration

上个星期我的生日很快了.

I probably wrote it wrong, but anyway…I am celebrating my birthday, and I had a lovely little sojourn down home last weekend to celebrate it with my family and friends. Because my friends are all scattered, it was nice to see the OC gals, the nucleus of all my friendships, for once. There was much eating, and boozing. Yes, I boozed rather heavily, particularly at brunch. I had about 4 or 5 mimosas, and thought I would pass out midway through dessert, as I stabbed unsteadily at the creme brulee.

We went out Friday night and thrashed on a dance floor, drank martinis, and went on a Del Taco run at about 1 in the morning. Delicious. We went out Sunday for brunch at Cafe Jardin in beachy Corona del Mar, tucked away into the quaint Sherman Gardens.

Shifting food habits

I picked up this book at the library last week. It took only about an hour to read, but offered a hearty serving of, well, food for thought (sorry for that). My main qualm about his book was his rather vague and imprecise references to the “Western diet.” He praises Mediterranean diets–and his forbears’ Jewish diet–for being much healthier than modern American food habits; yet he continually castigates “the Western diet” for its flawed nutritionism and failure to approach eating from a holistic standpoint. I suppose he is equating the “Western diet” with the American diet, although obviously France and Italy count as “the West,” right?

I do think Pollan made some very useful observations about how we eat, however. His wholesale denunciation of food science–for example, infusing whole grains and protein hither and thither–was interesting in sight of my history of medicine course a few terms ago. We studied science-fueled fads like the glandular extract craze of the late 19th/early 20th centuries and the attempts of scientists to reduce food to its component parts (carbohydrate, fats, etc). I feel a little less cynical towards having the extra bit of fiber in my ice cream than he does, I suppose, but I can buy his point that meddling with food can make it less healthful for the human body.

These days, a la Pollan, I avoid processed foods as much as possible; I don’t eat chips, soda, frozen meals, that sort of thing. I simply feel better when I eat food that I have made from scratch (although I haven’t gotten to the point of baking my own bread!). I find that Chinese, Thai, and Italian food are the easiest for me to make. However, I do like a spot of white rice and non-whole wheat pasta here and there.

Plus, when making my own food, I can count the calories, which is essential to my weight-monitoring. I have been counting them more or less every day since February and March, and it has really made a difference in how much I eat, and what I eat. Worlds of difference in how I feel! I am not obsessive about calorie-counting, especially when it comes to stuff like baby carrots, lettuces, and so forth, but do my best to be consistent about dense, rich foods like meat, oils, pasta/rice, and sugar. So that’s my main tip-of-the-hat to food science and nutritionism: I count calories.

But I am contemplating a few more changes on how I eat, what I eat. I have noticed that many of my friends are eating differently these days, too: lots are vegetarians, or lacto-ovo-pescatarians, or some variety thereof. Basically, the main question is: what do you eat, how, and why?

Subissues are:

1. Every time I am in the grocery store, I stand in front of the produce and debate whether I should go with organic or conventional. In your opinion, is organic worth it? I think fruit especially tastes better when organic, but…it’s so darn expensive.

2. Meat. I like meat. I don’t eat a lot of it; perhaps 3-4 oz. twice a day at most, and then infrequently. I have lots of vegetarian days inadvertently, because I think meat is too expensive. I don’t really eat beef, simply because I don’t care for the taste, but I love pork. And seafood. I can leave the rest. Should I eat meat? How?

3. CSA boxes–I have been hearing a lot about these. Are they worth it, and how much are they? I think I would just end up with a lot of wasted produce.

4. Other food books to recommend? Not so much recipes or diet books or “domestic fiction,” but some thoughtful, provocative discussions of food? I’d especially be interested in books that made you change something about your eating habits.

And to close out, here’s a picture of a shared meal for Mr. P and I: a cup white rice each (340 kcal!! Ridiculous!!), bok choy with garlic, Chinese chives speckled with bits of bacon, and an egg-tomato-scallion scramble. (and also my toes, although those are not for eating).

Dark Chocolate Party

I recently discovered dark chocolate. To celebrate this milestone, Lisa threw together a dark chocolate tasting party. Friday night, Mr. P and I drove to Pasadena for the occasion.

our gracious host, Ying.

Lisa bought 15 different varieties of high quality, plain dark chocolate and broke them into pieces. They were arranged anonymously in these lovely little dishes with accompanying numbers.

Dark Chocolate

All my life, I have hated dark chocolate. Abhorred it. After a childhood Halloween candy spree, I would carefully remove each and every dark chocolate Hershey’s from my pile and toss them out. Through all my 23-odd years, I have avoided every bit of it in favor of creamy white chocolate or sweet milk chocolate. My primary complaint was that dark chocolate left a vile bitter aftertaste in my mouth.

Then, this weekend, I Mr. P bought a bar of Chocolove Raspberries in Dark Chocolate to sneak into a showing of Hot Fuzz (fine movie by the way). I broke off a corner of it and lo–! Angels did sing on high! It was so, so good. I went back to the store and purchased just a high quality organic plain dark chocolate bar for myself.

Now I’m hooked. How could this be? I feel like such a hypocrite for the years of lashing out at dark chocolate aficionados. Could it be that my taste in chocolate all these years have been perverted by low quality Hershey’s chocolates? Or even See’s? I felt unsure about spending $3 on a bar of chocolate, but dang…the pay off is good.

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The Burping Fridge, and other kitchen troubles

I opened the fridge the other day and was blasted with a scent of…well, it smelled like a burp. My fridge burps. Such that even when I am lying in bed in the opposite side of the apartment, and Mr. P gets up for a drink of water, that a waft of fridge burp will wash over me.

I have been unable to ascertain the problem, even though nothing is rotten and there are no odd drippings that I’m aware of. I installed a box of baking soda in there yesterday, though it has yet to have any noticeable effect. Le sigh.

Also, the ants are back. Bigtime. I am slowly growing to appreciate how amazing they are; I will happily watch an ant heave-ho a crumb 5x her size and carry it across the kitchen floor. However, I still do not like stepping on them and squashing their productive little lives. So now, if I want to snack, I eat over the sink. OVER THE SINK YOU GUYS. It is the very height of foodie humiliation. In my new let-live philosophy, of course, I won’t be laying any ant traps or poison. They keep me company when they’re crawling around on my desk, but I’d like to shoo them away from the kitchen eventually.

Mr. P recommended plugging up their holes with gum, but I suspect this won’t work. I like sugar based gum. More fuel on the fire. Suggestions?

New digital camera!

Introducing my new digital camera, the Canon A460. I love it. It’s so excitin’! Of course I don’t plan to abandon my faithful Nikon N80, which will be used from now on mainly for artsy black and white film photos. This Canon will be used for day-to-day snappage.

And what better way to demonstrate its capabilities than through FOOD? Here’s the tomato-egg soup I whipped up today.

What I love most about it is its super macro function, which lets me get absolutely gorgeous closeups:

More to come for SURE.

Total Recipe Success: Garlic-Parsley Fries with Aioli

It’s not often that I turn out a perfect product, but..these garlic fries were amazing. The side of garlic aioli just added to the odiferous goodness. Not only were they yummy, but they’re actually pretty healthy–3 tbsp of oil, and then baked in the oven for 20 minutes. Tastes exactly like the real thing. The aioli’s pretty unhealthy (egg and a bucket of olive oil), though, so it doesn’t get to go in the picture.

Christine, I miss WRWF! Hope you and Thor are cooking up a storm.

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