Kitchen Disaster: A Beginner's Cook book

I started cooking a lot a couple of months ago and I love it. I love trying out new recipes, making unhealthy foods healthier by switching out ingredients, figuring out how to use the odd new ingredients(fennel anyone?)  Sean and I are eating healthier(though we still take far too many trips to what Sean lovingly calls, "Old McDonald's Farm") and I am teaching him that food doesn't always come out of a box.

However, along the way there have been some missteps. Mostly due to the fact that I was unwillingly to follow a recipe until my late twenties and I rarely let my mom or dad teach me how to cook anything.  Here are some of the recipes and substitutions that did not work out:

AWESOME BEER,
AWFUL SHRIMP MARINADE

 Porter Boiled Shrimp - My friend's husband is a fisherman and at one of their parties his mom told me a nice recipe for shrimp. Boil it in beer until it turns pink and season it with old bay. I tried this twice before my disaster; 1) once with a nice citrus beer and once with a cheap pale ale.  The shrimp were wild caught US gulf prawns and they were amazing. The next time I got shrimp at the store, I came home to find that the only beer available was a mocha porter. You know, the dark, coffee-ish beer.  And that is what my concoction tasted like: shrimp boiled in coffee.

Boiled lettuce - I subscribe to a CSA, they bring me absolutely amazing in-season fruits and vegetables every week and I love almost every bite. The problem is that the greens spoil quickly. During the winter, I would take the Kale, Chard and Collard greens and boiled them in vinegar, wine, or broth. It was tasty and made the vegetables last longer. The thing about the above greens is that they are bitter, and continue to retain their texture after boiling.  I did not get that lettuce would not do the same thing. It was limp and the wine I boiled it in made it taste vinegary, but not in a good way. And according to my co-workers, boiled lettuce does not have a pleasing look or aroma. 

 Convenient Salmon Lunch - I usually do salmon well. I buy a fillet from the guy at the farmer's market. I brush it with olive oil and squirt a little lemon on top. I bake it until it is flaky and it tastes amazing. Then, I use the leftovers to make salmon caesar salad.  This particular salmon had three problems: 1) I bought it sight unseen from a large online grocery outlet, it said it was wild-caught sockeye, but who knows, 2) I waited to bake it until one day before the "freeze by" date and 3) I didn't bring it for lunch until three days after I baked it.  I guess I am lucky that my sense of smell is poor because I microwaved my salmon the same day that one of my co-workers cleaned all of the old food out from the fridge and my salmon was apparently ten times worse. Needless to say, I am not allowed to bring salmon to work anymore.

Oh.....and I also suggest that you do not freeze shrimp and then saute it directly from frozen.....ewww

Adventures in Ballard: Elissa Style

I love Ballard.

 

I love being able to run to the beach at sunrise(See video).  I love taking my son to the farmer's market to buy salmon and halibut directly from the guys that caught the fish. There is an amazing yoga studio, a perfect gym, several great bars and I can watch the boats go through the locks whenever I want. AND one of the best playgrounds in town in just three blocks from my house. 

 I do not love how ridiculously stupid I was in Ballard yesterday.

I was going to the very beach pictured in my sunrise running video for a wonderful early evening service. Knowing that said beach is usually crowded, I decided that my son and I could walk the 1.6 miles to the beach and back (I did not bother to bring bus tokens for the way home because the bus route to the beach takes 20 minutes and involves 1.4 miles of walking) Instead, I brought warm clothes for Sean, a cell phone, a credit card (in case we needed to take a cab to get home), a camera and snacks for the journey. 

Things I did not take into account:

1) 1.6 miles is a very short distance for a 33 year-old marathon runner. 1.6 miles is a marathon distance for a 4 year-old.

2)  Flip-Flops are GREAT walking gear for hanging out on the beach. Flip-flops are horrible shoes for getting to the beach. Flip-Flops are especially bad for moms who are carrying their children down steep dirt staircases to get to the beach. Flip-Flops are even worse for moms who are carrying their children down steep dirt staircases when it starts raining. 

3) When there are clouds in the sky this often means it will rain.  

4) When my 4 year-old, who I had been carrying on my shoulders for an hour, refuses to put on his rain coat this is a good time to take cover.

5) Taking cover at Anthony's restaurant would have been a great idea, if Anthony's restaurant wasn't about a mile from the beach.  

5a) Counting the several available parking spaces, where I could have parked my vehicle, just added insult to injury. 

6) It often stops raining soon after it starts in Seattle, so by the time I got to Anthony's, we had missed the service we were originally going to AND it was now just cloudy and somewhat beautiful outside. 

7) Waterfront seafood restaurants, like Anthony's, do not actually cater towards people in Flip-Flops and jeans who are wet from the rain, and, covered in sweat from long walks carrying their children on their shoulders. (Though, I will say that they were very nice, sat us at a hidden table, right next to the window overlooking the sound. They got us our food quickly and I tipped them WELL)

8)  Cabs in Seattle do not have car seats, so calling a cab to pick me and Sean up from the beach was not particularly well thought out.

9) Calling Tam to come pick us up (which he very graciously did) was a particularly humiliating phone call to make. 

However, having Sean with me made the whole experience a fun adventure instead of a disaster. He was happy the whole time, loved looking at all the trees going to the beach, had fun on his shoulder ride and thought the "fry sticks" at Anthony's were particularly tasty. 

This is Sean's apple juice at Anthony's.  Both the waitress and I were concerned about the cup in came in. She smelled it, and I taste tested it three times before I let Sean drink it. (He probably thought we were weird)

The Only Elissa version of Plane travel with a child

The day started out great. My sister made us roasted potatoes, eggs benedict and mimosas.  She is a great cook, uses mostly fresh organic ingredients and makes everything as healthfully as she can. Then the cousins wore each other out for a couple of hours before I headed out to the airport.

This is when the fun started.  Sean and I got to the airport with the four bags I packed for the two of us for our three day adventure to Dayton.  I packed six shirts and  seven pairs of pants for sean, which might have been necessary if we were going somewhere with no laundry facilities AND if Sean hadn't insisted on wearing the same baseball shirt the entire time. Amazingly, I still forgot things, such as my glasses, which for an almost blind person are a necessity.

I had the four bags and a worn out 3 year old that refused to walk anywhere. So, I did the best thing in that situation. I ran my bags into the airport, left them unattended and then ran back to the car to grab the almost sleeping preschooler from my sister.  The airport staff was not particularly thrilled with my complete ignorance of the "Absolutely no unattended baggage ever, no we are serious, rule." But they let me pass.

Sean chose the security line as the best place to have a temper tantrum. His tantrum was justified. He was thirsty and they had water at the store before the security line. He could not understand why we had to take off his shoes, force his toys all onto long belt and walk through a metal detector just so that he could get a glass of water.  Hell, it does sound rather ridiculous to make someone wait to buy water until the other side of the security checkpoint.  As we age and mature, we learn to say rude things to the security guards under our breath instead of being held kicking and screaming through the line as our shoes are pried off our feet.

Next up: the dramamine overdose scare. We got water in the shop post security and I got sean calmed down. I bribed him with a mickey mouse activity book (as I have been told by many people before, the plane is a good time to keep your kid quiet, it is not a time to employ good parenting techniques). We went to the local, random american food restaurant chain and had chicken nuggets and chips. While there, I proceeded to split Sean's dramamine pill in half and gave him the proper dose for a three year old, one half pill). Unfortunately, the other half fell on the floor and I gave up looking for it after about thirty seconds.

The dramamine is important for Sean, he has an actual diagnosed vomiting disorder AND he regularly gets motion sick. I have only been on very few trips with Sean that did not involve at least one change of clothes and a spray bottle of Febreeze.  But now that he is old enough for dramamine, we give it to him, he eats it, and we do not see random american restaurant food on the seat of the plane.

As we left the restaurant, Sean casually said, mommy, I am taking the other half of my medicine, you forgot to give it to me. The poison control, emergency room and missed flight issues all rushed through my head as I used my mom super powers to quickly remove the half-pill from his mouth before he swallowed it.

Then we got to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, the most evil airport in the world. The first thing out of Sean's mouth was the phrase, "I am hungry and tired", okay cool, I have got this under control, we will get our seat assignments, grab a snack and then he can sit in my lap and sleep on the plane (Did I mention that I took Sean, my three year-old on a red eye from Dallas to Seattle? Oops....)

I went to the evil seat assignment minion and kindly asked for a window seat for my child. I explained that my child tends to throw up and that, as his mom, I was pretty sure that he would not behave well in the aisle (I envision Sean, my active little guy, continually taking his sitting belt off and running up and down the plane. I know my son.) She said, in that take back to the SNL sketch of the late 90's way, "I'll see what we can do, it will be hard enough to just get you seated together." Sean was tugging at my pant leg at the time, so I did not have time to compute her phrase, more on this later....

We went to dinner. I had a pint of beer.  I needed it. Then Sean proceeded to fall asleep on the nasty floor of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Okay, he wasn't sleeping, it was more like shutting his eyes and then whimpering that it was too loud and too bright and that he was "tired".

The seat minion then called me up to the counter to explain the good news, she got us seats in the aisle and center on the plane.  I asked if there was any way she could request someone to move out of the window, and she said the following choice phrase "You are lucky you even got seats together. People had to voluntarily move to accommodate you having seats together." At which point, I flew off the handle (well, Elissa style, so no real flying, but my voice was slightly raised.) I said, "you had to put me in the same row as my three year-old"and gave her a dirty look.

Later on, when sean was lying with his seat belt on, sleeping, in the window seat (the kind lady next to us actually volunteered it without prompting), I had to laugh about the evil seat assignment minion. I  spent a great deal of time thinking of scenarios where my single and/or childless by choice friends would randomly end up seated next to some other person's three year-old. And when asked where his mother was, the preschooler would say, "the seat assignment lady said there was no way for us to sit in the same row".   I am sure many of us parents would long for this forced plane babysitting, but I bet that seat assignment lady would have found us seats together instantly when the involuntary babysitter made a complaint.  :)

For his part, Sean did not throw up, he slept the whole way back on the plane and was very cuddly as he slept....

Yoga Injury

I had a "brilliant" idea on Friday. I decided that I was going to go to two yoga classes in a row. I thought this would be a great way to test my limits and learn something new about myself. What I learned: It is stupid to go to two hot yoga classes in a row.

I started at hot hatha, which is basically a class where one holds several poses for long periods of time to work on strength and focus.  I was rocking it in the first class. My leg went over the back of the head while I did the dancer pose.  I was able to do a few poses where I was balancing on one leg and I was in head stand for a significant period of time. I looked at the back mirror while doing a backbend.  I was feeling very self-righteous and unyogic.  And then I went to the second class.....

It started out okay, but I could tell that something was not quite right with my back. I felt a twinge right over my right hip, so I was like, cool, I will be so super awesome and do the modified versions of the poses. But the twinge was still there....and then I did warrior one, I was working hard to move my hips in line and then did a slight back bend and.....*$#%^ .....no more yoga for Elissa. And, the self-righteous feeling, gone.  First, I tried to move my broken frame to my mat and lay in child's pose. Child's pose was not possible, my arms flailed out in front of me but I could not sit on the back of my legs. Next, I rolled over and tried savasana (corpse pose), but laying on my back was excruciating.

So, I did the next best option, I quietly ratcheted myself up and moved quietly out the door. I walked around the building until the class was over and as I went back in to pick up my mat, it actually took my a minute or so to get back to a standing position to get to the car.

But I decided that this experience was actually very good for my yoga practice. Doing stupid things is a good way to learn how to silly people can be.

Lessons Learned:

1) Yoga is not a sport and so trying to do advanced moves as an advanced beginner is just silly.
2) When the body first twinges, STOP then.
3) Over confidence almost always leads to some sort of humbling experience.

Next class: will listen to my body and do what I can......

How to make a Diet Poke

One of my friends at work once used the following analogy to describe diet soda:

    Diet soda is to real food as the shadows on the wall of the cave are to reality.

If you didn't understand the reference, you need only get two things from it: 1) my addiction to diet soda is so bad that it somehow justifies references to ancient greek philosophers and 2) diet soda cannot be compared in any way, shape or form to real food. If you know the reference, and you think I am badly misusing and misquoting Plato, go drink some hemlock and shut up.

Anyway, back to diet soda. I know it is bad for me, I read an article last week that correlated excess consumption of diet soda to strokes. Aparently, people who drink diet drinks are actually fatter than those who drink regular sodas. I get that, I tend to make up the excess calories I save with my diet coke many times over. And most importantly reading the can is like going to a chemistry class:

Carbonated Water,
Caramel Color, (So, how does one grow caramel color, is there a plant?)
Aspartame,  (Anything we lovingly call FAKE SUGAR has to be bad)
Phosphoric Acid, (I think this is the ingredient that makes diet soda eat away the enamel in your teeth. MMM)
 Potassium Benzoate (to protect taste),
Natural Flavors, (I bet they use a different meaning of natural than the rest of us)
Citric Acid,  (This must be like vitamin C, right?)
Caffeine    (I have nothing bad to say about caffeine, I live in Seattle, it is heretical to hate caffeine in Seattle)

But like a girl who always goes after the bad boys, I keep going back to my diet soda. Eventually they will  ban it in the work place as a health hazard, those of us who drink the mess of chemicals will have to put on our coats and take coke breaks outside (and NOT that kind of coke break). There will be law suits, and I will sue the fake sugar companies for causing me to lose my teeth and gain weight. But until then, I will continue to enjoy my low-calorie beverage of choice.

And this is where I really annoy the mainstay providers of diet cola drinks. I do not like either of their products. The one that starts with a C is too carbonated and too harsh for my discerning fake sugar taste buds. The one that ends in Epsi is very smooth, but is too smooth. It is like the skeezy guy at a bar with one too many lines.

 So, I do the unthinkable: I mix them together in a drink I like to call Diet Poke (yes, that is what she said). It provides me an even larger dose of diet goodness and combines the very worst of both beverages into a wonderful bubbly mess that I consume every day at around two.  I have gotten to the point that I am unable to drink either major soda brand without a dose of the other brand.

Occassionally I will have a Diet Cherry Poke or a Lime Poke to mix things up a bit. I vary which brand I get the flavor from.  When I was a kid, we made these types of creations at the soda fountain and our parents shrieked in horror. But try it, I am sure you will enjoy the taste and health benefits as much as me. ;)

After a sick break

So, I wasn't really sick, I had pink eye. If you don't know what pink eye is, you were never a toddler and/or you never were the parent of a toddler. The point is, I had to take an entire week off yoga and running to prevent the spread of said disease. There are many things about this that stink for me and the rest of the universe.  (I will say I still walked a bunch, I did mange to log 16 miles over the week, but I didn't really run and I didn't do yoga at all)

 First and foremost, I have a lot of energy. A LOT of energy. I am like that 90's commercial for the energizer bunny, I keep going and going....  I can talk and jump around forever causing all sorts of havoc if I can't exercise. If I don't get my workout in, there is a slight chance that I will start doing push-ups or sit-ups on the floor off my office or, sorry Ryan, I may do them on the floor of some other poor colleague's office. Second, I am able to get out any anger, sadness and general neediness with a good session of yoga or a good run. Less exercise, more time spent talking about "my feelings" with anyone and everyone who will listen (trust me I talk about these things plenty even with my exercise outlet).

So, I was very excited when my antibiotics ran out and I felt safe conquering a short run and a yoga class. I was psyched to redo the beautiful backbend and head stand I had performed just a week and a half earlier. I desperately wanted to up the amount of time I spent at 6.5 miles per hour on the treadmill.

 I forgot the main rule of being sick and not exercising, my body was not the same at it was a week earlier and I didn't to do the things I wanted to do with it.  Before I started exercising, I forgot that I had eaten loads of cookies, chips and jimmy johns sandwiches while I was sick because I felt sorry for my self and could be bothered to go out. I was a couple pounds heavier than my last attempt at exercise greatness. I forgot that the abdominal muscles have a very short memory and that extra crunches from the week before do not carry over.

I managed to get into a back bend, but it looked more like a deflated balloon than a beautiful wheel. My body didn't even want to go into the headstand. My breathing sounded a wheezing dog than the sound of the ocean (the sound of the ocean is the goal for yogic breathing). As I ran, my body only wanted to go 6 miles per hour and it only wanted to do that for 15 or so minutes before I had to transition to the power walking mode on the treadmill.

This was the kind of workout day that would have sent me further down the spiral of inactivity until I was spending my time sitting on the couch watching Hair Battle Spectacular. That is until I found yoga. Okay, the entire city of Seattle and most of the rest of the country found it first, but I still had to find the studio. Okay, the studio was about 15 blocks away from my house, so I didn't even need to find the studio. Finding yoga was about an unlikely source telling me it was a good idea and deciding that my hamstrings needed some love after so many months of running.

The yoga people have this whole thing about being where you are with your body as it is, everyday. In yoga, you can have an awesome class where you do a headstand one day and be just as awesome sitting in child's pose(the rest pose) half the class, the next. There are no fat days, gross days, I suck at everything days in class. You just are where you are and go with it. And for the next few days, at least, I am going to be slower and less bendy, and I am going to try my yogic brains out to be perfectly okay with that.

The one thing diet

After reading almost every diet book in existence, I have decided, aribitrarily, with no scientific proof, that there is a class of diets called the "one thing diet". These diets involve either eating one thing or giving up one thing in an attempt to create perfect health and wellness. For example, Atkins is a one thing diet because it requires you to give up sweet, yummy carbohydrates. Apparently, following this diet makes you full, happy, healthy and thin. The problem with Atkins is two-fold. First, most of the people I know who have used Atkins do not get enough fiber and and have to take laxatives. Ewwww..... Second, sugar tastes good, and as soon as that large chocolate cake with super chocolately fudgy frosting comes by on the dessert tray, Atkins ceases to exist.

 The low-fat diet is another example of the one thing diet. Really, it makes sense when you think about it, removing fat from your diet should remove fat from your body. And fat is 9 stinking calories per gram (compared to 4 calories per gram for protein and carbohydrates), so it seems like another brilliant way to get thin, and become extremely attractive to anyone you meet. But, as with carbs, FAT tastes good and low-fat foods generally taste horrible. So, when you are at the restaurant choosing between the lean turkey burger and the fatty, fat burger with a side of mayo, it gets increasingly difficult to choose the low-fat option.

The other class of one thing diet, is the "only eat this" and life will be perfect, diet. I think there is a cabbage diet, several bar and shake diets and I think I once heard of an ice cream diet. I have tried two of these fun eating regimes. They both involved drinking a large amount of juice for a couple of days and eating nothing else. They were supposed to "detoxify" my body, make me lose weight, etc..... The problem was that the only toxin that left my body using the juice diets was WATER, and I am pretty fricking sure that water is not a toxic substance. I also noticed that eating a very small amount of food every day made me kind of crabby.  It is not really a surprise that not eating enough turns a nice ordinary overweight citizen into a mean person. But I guess the point is that you can be a hot, thin, mean person. I'd rather be nice and overweight, thank-you very much.

So after realizing that the other one thing diets sucked, I decided to go on a mission to create my own, "one thing diet". Okay, it was more like I was desperately giving up random things in an effort to lose a couple of pounds, and my colleague started asking me, "what are you giving up today?" in an overly sarcastic voice. After a couple of weeks of general office harrassment, I decided to just go with it.   The idea was that I would give up one bad thing everyday, it would change up and this would gradually make me a happier, heathier person. The diet started out great. I would give up alcohol one day, sugar another, fried foods on Thursday, coffee the next (just kidding, I live in Seattle, we don't give up coffee).  I think it was working to a degree, I was more conscious of what I ate and I was giving of something unhealthy every day.

The problem came when I realized that my diet had way too much flexibility. I had the power to give up anything I wanted, right? And that is when the diet devolved. I am still following the one thing diet....and this is what I gave up last week:

• Monday - Pilsners
• Tuesday - Sugar Packets (not the sugar from a cannister or the cubes, just the packets)
• Wednesday - Boones
• Thursday - Vegetables (okay, that one was really bad)
• Friday - Burger King (this one might have actually been tough if I had eaten at a Burger King in the last 10 years)

Poses for my Yoga Studio

When I open my own Yoga studio, years in the future, I will include these poses to make beginners and people like me feel better about themselves:

Real yoga poses and links to information about this life changing activity can be found at yogajournal.com

• Full Moon - This pose involves wearing skin tight pants that are too small while executing a forward bend, nuff said
• Flat Tire - There is a beautiful pose called wheel in yoga. It involves doing a full back bend, it looks gorgeous and feels great on the back. Flat tire is the pose that happens when either the arms, legs or butt won't lift all the way or at all.
• Blow Out - This is a pose that is nastily created by slipping and falling in one's own sweat while attempting wheel.
• Peeing Dog - This pose is halfway between downward dog and three-legged dog. The leg lifts, but it does not bend back beautifully in the air behind you.
• The Elaine Dancer -  This pose is a variation of dancer. The legs are the same but the outstretched arm flails in an odd way behind the practitioner
• Forest Pose - This is just sickenly cute, it is the pose that involves both my preschooler and I having our legs in Tree Pose while holding hands.
• Zombie Pose (reanimated corpse) - This pose is executed by either sneezing or getting a really bad itch during corpse pose.

More to come.....but lunch break is over. :)

Where did the nickname red come from

It happened at band camp....it involves my lack of ability to tell the difference between red and magenta...and frankly that is all anyone ever needs to know


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