Breakfast of Champions

In case any of you missed the swimming yesterday (I think it was yesterday, it's hard to keep track of with my DVR), the American men's team won the freestyle relay. Cue Michael Phelps screaming for what seemed like ten minutes (or was that instant replay?).

So then they do a little background on Michael Phelps (and seriously, he has the cutest puppy ever, I have total puppy envy). And they read out of his autobiography (can you believe a 23-year old has an autobio already?) what he would eat for an average day for breakfast:

- 3 Sandwiches of fried eggs, lettuce, tomato, cheese, fried onions, and mayo
- one omelet
- a bowl of grits (is Baltimore considered the south?)
- 3 slices of french toast with powdered sugar
- 3 chocolate chip pancakes

He's supposed to eat 8000-10,000 calories a day. A DAY! In the piece they had on the tv, he basically says he eats as much as he can put in, because no matter how much he eats, he doesn't break 200lbs. Can you imagine how much he must be swimming on a regular basis that he can eat that much per day and not gain weight? Wow. His breakfast is more than I'd eat in an entire day.

They showed a dinner out at a Chinese restaurant, and the entire (6-person) table was covered (covered!) with plates of food.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to be able to eat that much (though training that much might be more problematic, I have no idea how he doesn't push into overtraining). But I think it'd be pretty hard to HAVE to eat constantly to keep my weight up. Easier that than to restrict to keep it down, but I think I'd be happy being able to consume about 3000-4000, that'd work for me!

Monday Recipe - American Chop Suey

Almost typed American Chop Suet. And man would that be a really damn different recipe. Ugh.

I've had a craving for American Chop Suey for a couple weeks now, and finally got around to looking up a recipe online and making it this weekend.

Somehow, the onions I bought turned out to be the gold medalists in attacking eye ducts. I'd cut up half an onion and then my eyes would sting so badly I'd have to screw them shut for about five minutes while OCD washing my hands to get the onion smell off. Then repeat. Managed to get through an onion and a half without slicing a finger off, which is always a good thing.

And this was even after I put the onion in the freezer, which is my personal trick for cutting down on the onion-y smell. Hmph. I've also heard of breathing through your mouth and chewing gum. Any other tips?

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American Chop Suey

medium onion, finely chopped
green pepper, finely chopped
red/italian pepper, finely chopped
lb ground beef/turkey (I used beef)
lb whole wheat elbows
2 cloves garlic (or more)
a shake of celery seed
a shake of chili powder
salt/pepper
olive/grapeseed oil
4-5C tomato sauce (used the same sauce as with the eggplant parm last week, and added about 1/4-1/2 lb mushrooms)

Make the sauce first, as it needs to cook for a while. The recipe listed for the eggplant parm above will make more than you need for this recipe (about 10-12C total), but it can be frozen or used for any tomato sauce based recipe you want to make.

Put onion, peppers, and oil in a large pan and saute until onion is translucent. Add meat and cook until brown. Drain fat. Stir in garlic, celery seed, and chili powder. Add tomato sauce and let simmer. While sauce is simmering, prepare pasta until al dente. Add to meat mixture and serve.

I don't know how well it comes out frozen and reheated, but I had a bunch extra, so I'll find out! This recipe made about 10 servings, if I recall correctly.

Friday Rant - you mean, that comes out of the ground?

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker the other day. I was headed to the farmer's market and asked if she wanted to come. Somehow the subject of cherries came up, and she said she wanted to get the dark red kind. This made me pause. I'm thinking in my head, "are there other colors of cherries?" (I just did a wikipedia search, and there are red, dark red, light red, and some yellowish ones).

But I didn't get the feeling she was talking about some strange variety of cherry. So I said I thought that cherries were generally dark red. And then she said something that blew my mind - "I want the dark red cherries, not the ones they put in martinis."

And there you have it - I completely understand this, because our society has become so divorced from the concept of growing food that sometimes we just don't know where it comes from. I suppose it isn't unrealistic to expect that a maraschino cherry is just a different variety of cherry, plucked off the tree and bottled (or, if you've never even seen it bottled and only seen it in martinis). And if you grow up in a city and never deal with the growing of food, well then all your information comes with whatever you're exposed to in tv, movies, and books (well, ok, then there's parents and friends too).

I read Small Wonder (Barbara Kingsolver) a while back and she made this very point. She and her family had a garden in Arizona, and when her kids' friends would come over, they'd go out and pick some veggies for dinner. And the friends would refuse to eat veggies that came out of the ground, because they had dirt on them, and they didn't believe that that's really where veggies came from (veggies come from the grocery store, don't they?).

I was guilty of this myself - my boss brought in a box of home-grown cucumbers, tomatoes, and basil for all of us in the office share (yummm!), and I went to grab a cucumber, saw dirt on it, and almost put it back. Then I pinched myself and took it anyway. Because while I wouldn't take a veggie with dirt on it in the big box grocery store, I knew he'd picked it that very morning, so it was perfectly reasonable for there to be dirt on it.

But is this a good thing, that we've come "so far" technologically and culturally and can get any fruit and veggie on earth, but we have no idea where they come from? I read Fast Food Nation earlier this year and it's true, I really didn't have a great idea where the meat I eat comes from. And I don't want to see any remnant of the animal in the food I'm eating (I can deal with fish heads and lobsters, but the idea of killing a chicken just kinda wigs me out). But I really didn't have a great idea of just exactly what the animal goes through between pasture (or pen, as the case may be) and my plate. I would've thought that the process would've improved since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, but apparently it hasn't necessarily (there are always the abattoirs that buck the trend mentioned in Fast Food Nation, but there are so many that don't).

Have you had any interactions of this, people (or you) just had no idea where the food comes from, or that a particular food was prepared and they thought it was natural? (for the record, a maraschino cherry has been macerated in flavored sugar syrup, then dyed, and is usually flavored with almond. Green maraschinos are mint flavored).

Debunking the Bunk - Salad

Wait, what? Salad? You're kidding, right? Salad's always been good for you!

This week I'm turning the tables - foods that everything thinks that are great for you, that really aren't always. And up first is salad. Ok, not salad per se, but salad dressing and salad toppings. You can't go wrong with veggies, whether it be lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, flowers, dried fruit, fresh fruit, etc.

But where I see people go wrong is on all those toppings and especially the salad dressing. I can't even tell you how many times I've seen this very scenario: coworker/friend/random person is talking about how they want to lose x amount of pounds for x event (usually it's a wedding or something). So they switch to eating salads every meal, cut out all carbs, and basically give their diet a bland make-over. You already know how I feel about restrictive diets. But whenever I see someone revert to salads and cold cuts (no bread) for lunch, I can practically count down the days until it's back to pizza.

Here's the problem with salad dressing - first of all it's made out of oil, vinegar, and sugar (with other spices and additives added in), or even worse, cream. Now, we've learned that oil is good for you, but it's really all about moderation. But the pesky little thing about oil that most of us forget is that while it does raise your good cholesterol, one serving is one tablespoon and 120 calories. So the majority of the calories in the salad are coming from the dressing, especially if that bottle is getting upended and squirted to cover every last inch of the lettuce. Plus, add in the nuts (again, good fat, but only if used in moderation), bacon bits, cheese, croutons, fried chicken etc.

And because it's a salad, we're likely to eat more of it, and then have dessert or a nice yummy sugary treat later to reward ourselves for being so virtuous in eating that salad.

Now, don't get me wrong, salads are a great idea, and we shouldn't eat less of them. But adding a variety of flavors to the salad will cut down the need to have too much dressing (purple cabbage is a great option because it's so flavorful and looks so pretty), and adding lots of pretty colors also helps satisfy the eye-stomach link too (if it doesn't look tasty, then we're less likely to be satisfied with it, right?). One suggestion: spinach or mesclun salad with purple cabbage, red peppers, some walnuts, and some dried cranberries. And here's my favorite dressing that I use most of the time (having the vinegar in there definitely helps the moderation because too much makes my mouth pucker, but just a couple T is awfully tasty):

1 part olive oil
1 part balsamic (white or dark) / or lemon juice
dollop of dijon mustard
salt and pepper

I'm starting to hate pushups

ok, not really. I like pushups, really I do. But not when I do 85 in under 10 minutes. Teaching, I'd always say something really perky like "woohoo! Now it's time for pushups!" *insert wacky cheerleader voice here* (I'm not usually a cheerleader type instructor (I hope), but pushups just seem to bring out that side of me). But then, with teaching, we'd do no more than 15-20, maybe 30. So it was easy to get pumped.

But 100 pushups is. not. easy.

I'm sure that that comes as a big surprise to you, right? You're probably asking how exactly I thought that the 100 pushup program would be easy. And I didn't, not really. But I didn't expect it would be quite this hard.

I'm in week three (of six) now. And man is the different between weeks two and three hard. Pushups are three days a week, and each day there are five sets with rest in between. So last week I was doing sets of 15/15/12/12/as many as possible at least 15. This week starts out with 25/17/17/15/amap 25. Wha-what?! This may not seem like a huge difference, but I assure you, 25 pushups is a lot, especially when you're doing 84 total in one sitting! And damn does it make my wrists hurt!

And seriously, the whole "as many as possible but at least 25" thing....are there people who are actually doing more than 25? Because I actually had to drop to my knees for the last 10 pushups, so there was noooo way I was doing more than 25.

Now, I do like the fact that I can then say "hey, I just did 85 pushups" because, well, damn that's impressive, isn't it? But I don't know if I can make it to the end. I don't feel the need to necessarily do 100 consecutive pushups, my whole goal was basically to make myself do some lifting, now that I'm teaching boot camp (and therefore teaching people on a circuit class rather than doing it myself). And I don't want to pump up the size of my shoulders at all. But I'm hoping I can at least finish week three. Let's see how it goes.

Here's what weeks 3 and 4 look like:

Week 3
Day 1: 25/17/17/15/as many as possible but at least 25 (aka AMAP) - 60sec rest
Day 2: 27/19/19/15/AMAP 25 - 90sec rest
Day 3: 30/22/22/20/AMAP 27 - 120sec rest


Week 4
Day 1: 27/20/20/17/AMAP 27 - 60 sec rest
Day 2: 27/21/21/18/AMAP 25 - 90 sec rest
Day 3: 30/22/22/20/AMAP 29 - 120 sec rest

Week 3 and Week 4 don't actually look all that different. If I can make it through week 3, then maybe I'll be able to continue to week 4. But then I have my progress test and if I want to stay in the same bracket, I'll have to do at least 40. Yikes!

Mmmmm Popcorn

This weekend was a movie weekend. I went to see Mamma Mia! on Saturday (I can't believe how many ABBA songs I actually know, wow!) and Tell No One on Sunday (enjoyable French movie with an actual plot arc). Sunday night was popcorn night, and I haven't had popcorn in quite a long time. Damn it's good stuff! And maybe I'm out of the loop, but I've never noticed a theater to have spices to top popcorn with before. Cajun spices definitely punch it up, mm mm.

Having eaten a half a large (and by large, I really mean gargantuan, as in about twice the size of my head) bag of popcorn, I ask myself, what's the deal with popcorn? I have this vague impression in my head that it's a healthier option than say, nachos and cheese or a big box of junior mints.

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Studiously doing internet research
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Yikes....um....did I say I ate as much popcorn as all that? (backpedaling, big time)

Ok, so I found one page with info about movie popcorn, not sure how official it is because I've never heard of this university. Still looking for other sources. In the meantime, I love how they describe movie popcorn: "Why is movie theater popcorn so much worse than the supermarket variety? Because it’s usually popped in highly saturated coconut oil, and because the servings are on steroids." Ahem. Yes. Or it could be that I thought my stomach was the size of a kickball and I just keep eating and eating. But man was it good. But then, we know that fat makes stuff taste good.

It's not that popcorn is bad for you. It's actually a healthy snack. Without the butter, oil, so on and so forth. But then, I've popped popcorn at home, and no matter what spices I put on it, it's just not as good as movie popcorn (I made a spicy popcorn once that was actually pretty good, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. I think there was paprika or something).

But then, I work out all the time. I won't stress about it, I'll just sit back and enjoy the good movie, good company, and yummy buttery spicy popcorn!

Monday Recipe - Eggplant Parm with Spinach and Mushrooms

Back to the cooking grind this weekend. I haven't cooked in several weeks, because of the City Chase and a relaxing weekend in Maine. So this week, I made two recipes - the eggplant parm I'm listing below and a chicken tomato feta pasta with a mustard marjoram dressing. The latter I'll mention at a later date (it's awesome, but I don't have the recipe in my head at the moment...).

Beware: if you cook this recipe and live in a shoebox like I do, you might end up smelling like eggplant parm if you go out that evening...

The eggplant parm was originally my dad's recipe until I tweaked the sauce and added some veggies. So we'll call this a father-daughter collaboration. I bought the eggplant at the farmer's market (it's in season, woohoo!), and the spinach, onions, and mushrooms came from my local farmstand. I ate it straight-up, but I think that it would probably be awesome as a sauce over pasta as well. The recipe below makes lots of leftovers (for fairly large servings, it's about 10 servings, I think).

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Eggplant Parm with Spinach and Mushroom

Sauce:
1 medium-large onion, chopped finely
3 28oz cans of italian-style diced tomatoes
t marjoram
t crushed red pepper flakes
1/2C red wine
grapeseed/olive oil

Eggplant parm:
1 medium eggplant, peeled and sliced into disks
1-2C bread crumbs
2-3 eggs
1/2lb spinach (give or take)
2 large portabello mushrooms, sliced lengthwise
1/4-1/2lb mozzarella
garlic (optional)
grapeseed/olive oil

To make the sauce:
Put some oil in a pot and add chopped onions. Once onions are translucent, but not browned, add the tomatoes, spices, and wine. Continue to cook while you make the eggplant so the flavors will permeate the sauce. Don't hold your head too close to the pot or you might get hot tomato in your face (no, of course that didn't happen to me, no sirree!)

To make the eggplant parm:
Put bread crumbs in one bowl and eggs (whisked) in another. Add oil to a skillet. Coat eggplant disk in egg then bread crumbs and place in the heated skillet (as many at a time as you can fit). Cook until browned on both sides (don't overcook as they have the tendency to turn into hockey pucks, which could both help build up jaw muscles and also crack teeth at the same time). Set aside.

Next comes the assembly. I use a glass casserole dish, so I don't preheat the oven (putting glass into a hot oven can make it crack, I hear tell), but if you're using another material, then preheat the oven to 375.

In your casserole dish, put a thin layer of tomato sauce on the bottom, then follow with layers of eggplant, sauce, mushroom, spinach, sauce, cheese, sauce, eggplant, etc etc until it's completed. Dab minced garlic throughout as much as desired (I forgot this step when I made it, so it's not essential). Pop into the oven and cook until cheese is melted and tomato sauce is bubbling (but not bubbling over, so don't pile your layers too high. Trust me, tomato and cheese caking the bottom of your over never makes for a pleasant experience when it comes to fire alarms).

Maybe next time I make this I'll try adding chicken or something, to add some protein (apart from the cheese, which (while tasty) is high in saturated fat.

It just occurred to me that there's no parmesan in this recipe. Hrm. Well, I suppose I was supposed to use parmesan instead of mozzarella, but whatever, it's all about taste, right?