Garden bounty

It's that time of year again! The time where I spend my days consuming as many home grown tomatoes as I possibly can and trying to give away the rest. I swear, if vegetables tasted this good year round I would never have to convince myself to eat them. Right now I have five plants in full production. Yum. As if that weren't enough to keep me full and satisfied, my mom and dad have gone away on thier first retirement vacation and left me twelve more plants at their house to add to my bounty!

My favorite home grown tomato meals showcase the tomatoes. My quick, everday meal is sliced tomatoes with soft crumbled goat cheese and balsamic vinegar. Pictured here I have cherry tomatoes, pineapple tomatoes, better boy tomatoes, purple cherokee tomatoes, and paul robeson tomatoes, all from my garden. Heaven!

 

The longer but amazingly worth it recipe is a tuna salad with sliced tomatoes. I usually make a ton of this stuff at once because it's time consuming and so loved around here that it dissapears quickly. This is a rare original recipie that I'm quite enamored with.

End of Summer Tuna Salad

makes approximately six 1 cup servings

•  5 5oz cans tuna in water, drained
• 1 4.25oz can chopped olives
• 1 bunch green onions, chopped
• 6 egg whites, cooked and diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 4 tbsp. fat free mayonnaise
• 2 tbsp. real mayonnaise
• 1/4 cup dijon mustard
• 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
• 2 tbsp. worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2 1/2 tsp pumpkin pie spices
• 1 tsp. dill

Mix all ingredients. Serve with tomato wedges. Note: Normally these days I'm against things like fat free mayonnaise, but in this particular recipe it has a critical role in the balance of flavors. My attempts to make this recipe without it were not successful.

Nutrition information is for one cup of tuna salad plus two large tomatoes

Calories: 265

Fat: 11 g

Total Carbs: 12 g

Fiber: 5 g

Protein: 32 g

Stay lazy my friends

So my treadmill broke. It was a gift from my in-laws (it was taking up space in their basement) and I've been using it for about a year and a half now. I've logged so many miles that the bearings have become worn down which means it makes a really delightful woogity woogity noise all the time. I of course still use it and I'm imagining myself being violently projected into the wall one day when it breaks for real.

New treadmills are really expensive. Given that I'm a little frugal (read: cheap) I headed over to Craigslist. And it turns out that a lot of other people have treadmills taking up space in their basements too. In fact, the SF bay area Craigslist had over ninety entries for treadmills for sale just today. And the day's not even over yet.

If you're looking for some new exercise equiptment, grab a paddle, the second hand market is flooded.

My first alien abduction

Ouch. Just dammit. It may seem like I’m starting at the end of this story. You can see that my snowboard is somehow buried all the way up to the binding in snow and my right foot is already unclipped. Alex caught the ordeal from his helmet-cam, which was running at the time. Unfortunately there’s no good footage of the actual fall. 

How I managed to get myself into that particular position is still a mystery. My best guess is partial alien abduction followed by me falling from mid-tractor beam. Regardless of what nonsense I did to get myself there, the first thing I did after the fall was reach down and unclip my boot because my ankle was seriously pissed about being bent in a way that was just not right. 

My next thought of course was this: “I’ve been waiting all year for it to snow and it’s only 11 am on my first day. I better get a few more runs in before my ankle really starts to swell." Brilliant. And obviously that’s exactly what I did because I’m a grown up and I said so that’s why.

This of course was stupid. And painful. Fast forward to lunchtime and after I took my boot off I realized it wasn't going back on again. My friend who is a PA told me I wasn’t going to die, but I couldn't put any weight at all on my foot. Since we were at a mid mountain lodge my dad went to find out about how we enlist the help of that guy who drives hurt people down the mountain on a sled (for joy). It was a frickin’ beautiful day. Perfect day. And I was already headed home on a sled.

So I’ve got a torn ligament on the right side of my foot and a torn tendon on the left, plus some stuff in between that’s not too happy either. It’s was about 2 days before I could put even the smallest bit of weight on it. Those days involved a lot of hopping to the bathroom. Luckily I had a staff of about 10 family members to wait on me hand and foot, but it was small consolation for having to spend the rest of my vacation laying down. Nothing was severed or broken (woot!) and it should heal on it’s own...in about a year. Um, what? For an ankle sprain? Turns out ligaments are one of the densest and slowest healing soft tissues in the body, and the fact that it’s in my ankle means it gets less blood circulation than most everything else due to good old gravity.

Hilariously the sled guy had to ask me some questions, one of which was how this accident could have been prevented. I said, “Um, don’t snowboard?” Is it not obvious to everyone else that we’re all taking risks out here? If there's one thing I learned from therapy after my car was totaled by a drunk driver, it’s that my quality of life benefits from me taking risks. Yeah, driving is dangerous. But staying at home all the time is depressing and I could still be killed by an errant drunk pilot. So I snowboard. Because there’s not much else I love doing more than snowboarding. It’s like the freedom of flying plus the glinting snowcapped beauty of nature, all miles away from any and all responsibility. If I have to spend all year healing up so I can be whole again come next snow season, so be it. Some people might say I haven’t learned my lesson. I say I’ve learned the most important one of all: do what makes you happy. Do it with wild abandon.

Burton gets it right:

How could I possibly resist going back to this?

Team Finnick

I just finished The Hunger Games series and per my usual style it took me about 6 days to read all three books. Then I looked up and proceeded to go figure out what of importance had happened since I started reading and checked out of life. Finnick's advice is the one part I will never forget:

“Better not give in to it. It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”

I find this to be so true about my efforts to exercise and eat right. It's so easy to say that I'll get back on track tomorrow but it's not so easy to do it. Is it bad that I most relate to the character who is right on the edge of falling apart? Nah, I'm embracing it. A little while ago my Weight Watchers leader gave me a little charm that say "never give up" on it. I'm thinking about adding on a trident charm to remind me of Finnick's resolve and loyalty. Maybe some of his confidence will rub off on me too.

'“Finnick?" I say, "Maybe some pants?"
He looks down at his legs as if noticing his outfit for the first time. Then he whips off his hospital gown leaving him in just his underwear. "Why? Do you find this" -- he strikes a ridiculously provocative pose -- "distracting?"'

Musings on fast cars and fast women

Before I understood about nutrition I thought that people who lost weight basically just stopped eating all the time and only ate when they absolutely had to. That was the only way I’d ever lost weight in my life and having no other experience, it seemed like the way to go. The only problem I saw with this plan at the time was that it was hard, but my role model was Catherine Banks from the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. Something deep inside me longed for the carless abandon with which she seemed to shun food, as if it was BENEATH her. She’s so high class that when the detective character asks her to pizza, she does a big eye roll and declines, saying “I’m on London time.” “Okay, I get it, pizza’s not your thing.” he says, dejectedly. No pizza’s not her thing, billionaires are her thing. Oh, and green superfood juice which is featured prominently as the only thing she eats in the movie (besides wine of course). The love interest Richie Rich has his butler serve the juice to her the morning after their rendezvous, rudely interrupting her post-coital glow with the realization that he had already known she would go to bed with him. Imagine the audacity! A filthy rich dude who is confident in his ability to attract women, shocking.

Okay, back to the juice. The point is she’s beautiful, stick thin, glamorous, and she doesn’t give a tiny rat’s ass about food. It’s not PC for me to admit that I wish I could waste away to a supermodel physique without a care in the world for my next meal. (Not PC doesn’t mean it’s not true). But this attitude never helped me slim down. I would go a few days without eating much, get super light headed and weak, and inevitably give up. It was only when I learned about calories and filling up on produce that I was able to understand a new way. I was 21 years old. Note to public school: maybe some info about calories and credit cards should make it’s way into your curriculum. Thank goodness my parents filled me in on the latter.

Over the years one of the most valuable things I’ve learned about eating is that I can have ton of nutritious food for very little calories and still lose weight. Understanding that I don’t have to starve to be thin is amazing and life changing, but it still leaves me wishing that I could be like that character and not care at all about addictive junk food, the foods that make us want, buy, and eat more, more, more. Mentally I feel like I’ve made progress, but I’m still hanging out here in crazy land where my wishes are healthier but not a single centimeter closer to coming true. And on one particular day I found myself breathing and extra big sigh about some unexpected free pizza (free food isn’t free BTW, it costs my health and my precious time spent working it off at the gym) when I let out a rant about how I wish I could feel like I’m BETTER than that kind of food. Cue my dear husband who said something I’ll never forget: 

“Yeah, eating that stuff would be like putting regular gas in your Ferrari.”

And I’m thinking, whoa, I’m the Ferrari in this analogy.

So why aren’t I treating myself that way? Cue the unlocking of a Pandora’s box realization that my mind exists on a default set of assumptions. That I am lazy, have bad genes, am always going to have to struggle against my most basic nature if I want to be healthy. I was unknowingly putting myself down all the time. But his comment has caused a restructuring of my brain. What if, instead, I started with the assumption that I am the Ferrari, the perfect machine, the phoenix after being transformed. My basic, natural state of being is eating mostly plants and moving my body all the time. Anything I do that deviates from the plan is simply not giving myself the respect I deserve. Not worthy of condemnation, just not worthy of me.

And all of a sudden everything feels lighter. Less scary. I can do this forever. It’s part of who I am now. Sure, I’ll probably have a brownie now and then, maybe even a few too many. But the next day will be back to regularly scheduled programming, AKA me, being awesome, and enjoying my delicious salad. Anything less would just be regular octane fuel, and I'm better than that.