Thursday, November 23, 2006
I'm not going to lie,
drinking all of this bottled water is making me feel a little bit like a movie star.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
how much do my new boots rule?
So much!!!! My feet are dry, dry, dry, and warm to boot! Ha ha, to boot!
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
best tuesday night dinner ever
If any of you know me at all, you are already familiar with the "routine". For those of you who don't, in brief, dinner at our place goes like this:
Monday: spinach salad w/ cottage cheese*
Tuesday: carb night**
Wednesday: spinach w/ cottage cheese
Thursday: omelet night***
Friday: varies, but often salad****
Saturday: varies****
Sunday: varies, but seems to be evolving to pizza night****
*This is mainly a Paul thing. I'll have a scoop of cottage cheese every few weeks, but his salad is always doused with dressing and cottage cheese. I don't do dressing.
**The carb changes. Can be a pasta, a stir fry, a pilaf, a risotto. Must be carb heavy.
***I'm pretty touch and go with eggs, so for me Thurday is often left-overs from Tuesday, but for Paul it is always a massive omelet.
****Weekends vary depending on whether Paul is racing. If he is, normally a huge pot of spaghetti is his pre-race dinner, with a meat sauce for him and a veggie sauce for me. We try to really treat ourselves one weekend night and get some great cheese and good wine and whip up something gourmet. This weekend past saw fresh sheets of homemade pasta turned into tortellini with spinach, pumpkin, pumpkin seeds and asiago inside. Yum.
Anyhoo. When Paul and I first moved in with each other I found the routine to be a little much. I didn't want to eat salad just because it was Wednesday! I wanted food to be exciting with new stuff happening all the time. Time went by, and little by little, I adopted the routine. Now if you were to call me on a Wednesday and invite me out for sushi you'd get a reply that sounded something like, "For god's sake, don't you know it's salad night? I can't eat sushi tonight! Try me on a Tuesday, or a Friday!"
I admit that the routine is neurotic and crazy, but I love it. Why? Limited thinking, and thus limited tendency to stray from the plan. It has made it easy for me to maintain my 30lb weight loss for over 2 years with no journalling!
The salads are most often the same, with the odd twist thrown in. Paul's omelet is ALWAYS the same. Weekends are fun and exciting and we often try new things. Tuesdays are fun because there are so many different carbs to play with.
Tonight I had a recipe in mind for Curried Coconut Pumpkin Stew. I think I got it from Martha Stewart. I have this 22lb pumpkin I've been trying to use up (most of it is in the freezer in puree form) so the recipe fit the bill. Unfortunately, when I set out to start cooking I realized I was missing some essential ingredients. I went for a bit of a dig around my cupboards, and then across the street to Sambal and Ginger where I grabbed a bag of split mung beans, and then the magic began!
Katie's Curried Coconut Pumpkin Mung Stew:
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 onion, minced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ginger powder
1 tsp cumin
2 tsp curry powder
2 cups pumpkin, cubed
1/2 cup split mung beans
1 can coconut milk
1 can water
1 large head broccoli, chopped
salt to taste
To make: In a large heavy bottomed pot, heat oil over medium heat. Add onions and garlic and saute 1 min. Add ginger, cumin, curry and pumpkin and split mung beans, and saute for 1 min more. Add coconut milk and water, and bring to a simmer. Cover and let simmer for 15 min, stirring occasionally. Add broccoli florets and cook uncovered until just tender. Salt to taste. Serve over brown rice.
This was freaking delicious. Paul said, and I quote, BEST TUESDAY NIGHT DINNER EVER!!!
While at Sambal and Ginger I discovered a new (to me) ingredient I want to play with. Stay tuned for next Tuesday's dinner!
Monday: spinach salad w/ cottage cheese*
Tuesday: carb night**
Wednesday: spinach w/ cottage cheese
Thursday: omelet night***
Friday: varies, but often salad****
Saturday: varies****
Sunday: varies, but seems to be evolving to pizza night****
*This is mainly a Paul thing. I'll have a scoop of cottage cheese every few weeks, but his salad is always doused with dressing and cottage cheese. I don't do dressing.
**The carb changes. Can be a pasta, a stir fry, a pilaf, a risotto. Must be carb heavy.
***I'm pretty touch and go with eggs, so for me Thurday is often left-overs from Tuesday, but for Paul it is always a massive omelet.
****Weekends vary depending on whether Paul is racing. If he is, normally a huge pot of spaghetti is his pre-race dinner, with a meat sauce for him and a veggie sauce for me. We try to really treat ourselves one weekend night and get some great cheese and good wine and whip up something gourmet. This weekend past saw fresh sheets of homemade pasta turned into tortellini with spinach, pumpkin, pumpkin seeds and asiago inside. Yum.
Anyhoo. When Paul and I first moved in with each other I found the routine to be a little much. I didn't want to eat salad just because it was Wednesday! I wanted food to be exciting with new stuff happening all the time. Time went by, and little by little, I adopted the routine. Now if you were to call me on a Wednesday and invite me out for sushi you'd get a reply that sounded something like, "For god's sake, don't you know it's salad night? I can't eat sushi tonight! Try me on a Tuesday, or a Friday!"
I admit that the routine is neurotic and crazy, but I love it. Why? Limited thinking, and thus limited tendency to stray from the plan. It has made it easy for me to maintain my 30lb weight loss for over 2 years with no journalling!
The salads are most often the same, with the odd twist thrown in. Paul's omelet is ALWAYS the same. Weekends are fun and exciting and we often try new things. Tuesdays are fun because there are so many different carbs to play with.
Tonight I had a recipe in mind for Curried Coconut Pumpkin Stew. I think I got it from Martha Stewart. I have this 22lb pumpkin I've been trying to use up (most of it is in the freezer in puree form) so the recipe fit the bill. Unfortunately, when I set out to start cooking I realized I was missing some essential ingredients. I went for a bit of a dig around my cupboards, and then across the street to Sambal and Ginger where I grabbed a bag of split mung beans, and then the magic began!
Katie's Curried Coconut Pumpkin Mung Stew:
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 onion, minced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ginger powder
1 tsp cumin
2 tsp curry powder
2 cups pumpkin, cubed
1/2 cup split mung beans
1 can coconut milk
1 can water
1 large head broccoli, chopped
salt to taste
To make: In a large heavy bottomed pot, heat oil over medium heat. Add onions and garlic and saute 1 min. Add ginger, cumin, curry and pumpkin and split mung beans, and saute for 1 min more. Add coconut milk and water, and bring to a simmer. Cover and let simmer for 15 min, stirring occasionally. Add broccoli florets and cook uncovered until just tender. Salt to taste. Serve over brown rice.
This was freaking delicious. Paul said, and I quote, BEST TUESDAY NIGHT DINNER EVER!!!
While at Sambal and Ginger I discovered a new (to me) ingredient I want to play with. Stay tuned for next Tuesday's dinner!
Saturday, November 04, 2006
survey
For those of you who are a part of a couple, or have ever been a part of a couple:
How often do you fight?
How often do you fight?
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
The Reunion
To begin with, a little background:
My highschool, like all highschool's, I'm sure, had it's drama and it's cliques. There was one clique, the "popular people" who were called the Beverlys. It was a nickname given to them due to their likeness (or wannabe likeness) to the affluent folks on the then popular Beverly Hills 90210. They adopted this nickname and made it their own, and even wrote things like, "Beverlys 4 ever" in their yearbook grad writeups.
While I have remained in contact with really only a smattering of people from highschool, and of those only two who I consider to be good friends, the Beverlys have stayed together. The reunion was originally scheduled to be a few weeks earlier, and I was totally on the fence about going. Harmony was unable to come, and our long planned Romy and Michelle style entrance was not going to be possible, so what, really, was the point? It turned out the event organizers had made a HUGE mistake . . . they had set the date of the reunion on the same day as one of the Beverlys was getting married! Oh, the humanity! An email was sent out saying that the date would have to be changed due to the "large number of people" who would be attending the wedding. This made me so fucking angry. I felt like in 10 years NOTHING had changed, so what was the point of going at all? What percentage of our grad class would be attending the wedding to justify changing the entire thing around? Such bullshit.
A friend bought me a ticket, so I was committed.
A couple of weeks out of the reunion I bumped into a couple of people who I hadn't really been friends with in highschool, but they seemed like alright folks, and we agreed that we'd go, and if it sucked we'd ditch out early and go get a drink somewhere. Before the reunion I met up with a good friend, and another guy who I'd actually gone to school with all the way from grade 1 or 2, and we had some dinner and (I felt) much needed drinks. Fueled by liquid courage, we went to the reunion.
Upon arriving my first thoughts were mainly, "who the heck is that?" and a table of "hello, my name is _______________" stickers quickly solved that problem. I felt pretty awkward for the first 15min or so, and the hairs on my neck were on end. A couple of gin and tonic's later, I was much more relaxed. I did the small talk thing with some people, didn't bother with some others, and made some surprisingly real connections with a select few. What surprised me the most was the lack of Beverly presence in the room. There were maybe five or six Beverly girls, and only a couple of Beverly boys who bothered to show up, and the kicker is, they all left early to go to a Beverly Halloween party! Thank god the entire reunion was rescheduled for that!
A guy I had always thought was pretty cool told me he had a crush on me in highschool! A number of people told me they had really hoped I was going to show up, and were glad to see me. One girl who I had always respected quite a bit told me that I stood out in her mind as the person who had changed the most over the 5 years of highschool, from wearing all black in grade 10 to becoming (in her words), a rainbow in grade 11, to seemingly figuring out who I was in grade 12. She told me she had always admired how blatant and obvious I was about trying to figure it all out, and she had felt intimidated and not known how to talk to me back then. It felt really good to hear that, and to know that someone had noticed when I really thought no one had. With the Beverly coningent gone, it seemed to become a room full of really interesting people who were fun to talk to. I talked to people who I had absolutely no recollection of whatsoever, but who were great, fun, people. I even left and went to some house parties with people who I would have never considered spending time with before.
I'm very glad I went. Going to the reunion has actually put an entirely new spin on my highschool experience, and made me feel remarkably better about it. I've made some new connections I'm very excited about following up on. Yesterday I made a phone call to a girl who I had exchanged phone numbers with, and it made me laugh when she said, "Didn't it make you so mad that the whole thing had to be rearranged for the Beverlys, and then hardly any of them showed up and those who did left early?"
Yep.
My highschool, like all highschool's, I'm sure, had it's drama and it's cliques. There was one clique, the "popular people" who were called the Beverlys. It was a nickname given to them due to their likeness (or wannabe likeness) to the affluent folks on the then popular Beverly Hills 90210. They adopted this nickname and made it their own, and even wrote things like, "Beverlys 4 ever" in their yearbook grad writeups.
While I have remained in contact with really only a smattering of people from highschool, and of those only two who I consider to be good friends, the Beverlys have stayed together. The reunion was originally scheduled to be a few weeks earlier, and I was totally on the fence about going. Harmony was unable to come, and our long planned Romy and Michelle style entrance was not going to be possible, so what, really, was the point? It turned out the event organizers had made a HUGE mistake . . . they had set the date of the reunion on the same day as one of the Beverlys was getting married! Oh, the humanity! An email was sent out saying that the date would have to be changed due to the "large number of people" who would be attending the wedding. This made me so fucking angry. I felt like in 10 years NOTHING had changed, so what was the point of going at all? What percentage of our grad class would be attending the wedding to justify changing the entire thing around? Such bullshit.
A friend bought me a ticket, so I was committed.
A couple of weeks out of the reunion I bumped into a couple of people who I hadn't really been friends with in highschool, but they seemed like alright folks, and we agreed that we'd go, and if it sucked we'd ditch out early and go get a drink somewhere. Before the reunion I met up with a good friend, and another guy who I'd actually gone to school with all the way from grade 1 or 2, and we had some dinner and (I felt) much needed drinks. Fueled by liquid courage, we went to the reunion.
Upon arriving my first thoughts were mainly, "who the heck is that?" and a table of "hello, my name is _______________" stickers quickly solved that problem. I felt pretty awkward for the first 15min or so, and the hairs on my neck were on end. A couple of gin and tonic's later, I was much more relaxed. I did the small talk thing with some people, didn't bother with some others, and made some surprisingly real connections with a select few. What surprised me the most was the lack of Beverly presence in the room. There were maybe five or six Beverly girls, and only a couple of Beverly boys who bothered to show up, and the kicker is, they all left early to go to a Beverly Halloween party! Thank god the entire reunion was rescheduled for that!
A guy I had always thought was pretty cool told me he had a crush on me in highschool! A number of people told me they had really hoped I was going to show up, and were glad to see me. One girl who I had always respected quite a bit told me that I stood out in her mind as the person who had changed the most over the 5 years of highschool, from wearing all black in grade 10 to becoming (in her words), a rainbow in grade 11, to seemingly figuring out who I was in grade 12. She told me she had always admired how blatant and obvious I was about trying to figure it all out, and she had felt intimidated and not known how to talk to me back then. It felt really good to hear that, and to know that someone had noticed when I really thought no one had. With the Beverly coningent gone, it seemed to become a room full of really interesting people who were fun to talk to. I talked to people who I had absolutely no recollection of whatsoever, but who were great, fun, people. I even left and went to some house parties with people who I would have never considered spending time with before.
I'm very glad I went. Going to the reunion has actually put an entirely new spin on my highschool experience, and made me feel remarkably better about it. I've made some new connections I'm very excited about following up on. Yesterday I made a phone call to a girl who I had exchanged phone numbers with, and it made me laugh when she said, "Didn't it make you so mad that the whole thing had to be rearranged for the Beverlys, and then hardly any of them showed up and those who did left early?"
Yep.
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