I am a loser

Well, last night we went out for dinner, and tonight I’m having leftovers cleverly disguised as a different meal:

That’s a tempeh melt with grilled veggies on the side. I polished off the veggies no problem, but I’ve only had half of the sandwich so far. I had a bigger lunch than usual, and I’m having a lot of trouble with my hunger cues today.

The AC is still broken at the gym, and yet they still keep opening and then (BIG SURPRISE) having to close early due to “extreme heat.” Today they opened up at 5:30 and then had to close at 9:00am. This is really throwing me off my routine, and I’m all agitated and I feel like I could just start yelling at any moment. I’m hoping to take a walk later, but the heat index is still 100 and it’s already 7:00pm, so yeah. We’ll see. I did some yoga this morning, and I would do another round, but it would require 1) getting off the couch and 2) moving things out of the way. That feels like so much effort.

In which I persevere in the face of adversity.

The stars were aligned against my workout today. Somehow, I powered through in spite of:

1. Knee pain the morning that ruined my 5:30 workout plan.
2. The AC being broken at the gym. Again.
3. Yoga being canceled due to #3.
4. My iPod crapping out 12 minutes into my workout.
5. Did I mention the AC was broken?

They had two floor fans. Two. Floor. Fans. Yeah. That helped. When I was leaving, I think I may have noticed a slight change for the better, but at that point, the damage was done. My kicky green workout top may never be the same again. I also heard one of the kids working there, who was walking around with some sort of temperature gauge, say that it was 88 degrees.

So, I somehow made it through 45 minutes on the Arc Trainer. Seriously, I think I already blocked it out, because I know it happened, but I can’t really recall it.

I was pretty wiped out when I got home, so I wanted a nice, replenishing meal. And I came up with grilled veggie and tempeh fajitas.

I marinated the tempeh in a tapatio/honey/paprika/garlic/black pepper mix and grilled it. I left the veggies plain and just grilled those, too. You probably can’t tell, but there’s also zucchini, yellow squash, a green pepper, and some mushrooms under there. And, of course, cheese.

I really love tempeh, but I’m always hungry an hour after I eat it. I’m waiting for that so I can have another snack. You know how I love my snacks.

Whole grains are delicious.

I’m having an RA flare, and while it’s relatively mild, I’m still finding it quite annoying because it’s all spread out - left knee, right hip, left hand, and jaw. Fun times all around, basically. So, no kickboxing for me, but I did hit the gym after work to do some cardio and weights. I’m always really proud of myself when I manage to exercise through pain - as long as it’s not excruciating, it really helps.

But enough self-congratulation. Wait, no. I’m not done. This meal was really delicious, too:

I’m going mostly meatless this week, just because meat is expensive and I didn’t want to buy any before we go on vacation. Good thing, too, because I took some WebMD diet assessment today and it was all DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! TOO. MUCH. PROTEIN.

So the main course (top right corner) was a delightful barley and walnut salad. It was inspired by a recipe from Food and Wine, with some major modifications. I’m more of a Cooking Light kind of girl, so I was a little appalled by the fact that the recipe called for 1/3 cup of olive oil. Just the idea of that makes me feel kind of sickly. Anyway, it’s barley, a few toasted walnuts, some spinach that I threw in with the barley at the last minute, a nice lemon vinaigrette, and some feta.

Close up:

I also roasted some veggies to have on the side, because I wanted to take advantage of the fact that it was only 78 degrees.

Now I’m off to clean and read and stress out over whether or not I can make it to the gym in the morning.

What day is it?

I made it to the gym this morning. Score. But obviously, my body wasn’t prepared for the change, because I am now dying of exhaustion and I don’t know what day it is.

I also blame my body on the fact that I ate a bunch of leftover cake right before dinner. Oops. I think that’s why this is a smallish portion of baked pasta:

That’s whole wheat rotini and penne baked with a can of crushed tomatoes, a can of diced tomatoes, some cottage cheese, yellow squash, zucchini, and a little mozzarella and parmesan. Also, side salad with spinach and carrots and Annie’s Goddess dressing. I bought it for the first time this weekend. Why didn’t anyone tell me? It’s so good.

I’m pretty sure there are ten or more things I need to get done before I go to sleep, but now I’m just concentrating on figuring out what tomorrow is, and whether or not I need to pack my gym bag for yoga.

Curry times two.

I rarely make enough portions of a meal to have substantial leftovers. I cut recipes in half or thirds or whatever, just to avoid having food that’s going to sit in the refrigerator. I usually make enough of whatever we have for dinner so that Matt can have another serving for lunch the next day, but it’s my personal philosophy that leftovers are gross and can kill you.

What? That’s totally logical. BACTERIA, PEOPLE. It grows. Plus, our fridge stinks. So there you go.

But last night,  I made a gigantic pot of Zucchini/Chickpea/Tomato Curry from Eat, Drink, and be Vegan. It has a real name but all of those components are in it, so if you have EDBV, you should be able to use your deductive skills to find it.

Which I would recommend. Because it’s major.

It’s got pretty much everything I would ever want from a curry: chickpeas, red potatoes (I subbed these in for sweet potatoes), zucchini, spices, a nice tomato base. Matt was also pretty into it, so even though I was worried at first about what we’d do with all the leftovers, we ended up polishing the whole batch (”4-6 servings” according to Dreena Burton) in two nights. Not bad. We had it with Brown Basmati rice, which is really good. I think the company is RiceSelect, and I’ve heard they make a whole wheat orzo, as well. And I’m all over that, so hopefully it’s not just a rumor.

Also - I went to the gym and I did not ride the bike. I hit the Arc Trainer and managed to stick with it for 40 minutes, when my toe got kind of numb and I had to quit to walk the indoor track for a while and then lift in the weight room, aka, the dude section. I hate the way guys at the campus gym lift weights. They go way too fast, they’re always yelling at each other (COME ON, MAN, YOU CAN DO TWO MORE REPS), sharing stores about getting food poisoning from eating raw eggs, and at least once during every trip to the gym, I am convinced that one of them is in labor because of the way he’s grunting. Honestly. Nothing should hurt like that.

There was only one other woman in the area, and she was doing bicep curls with 40 pound weights. Is that normal? Because I don’t think I can do that.

Anyway, the point is.

With all of that activity and weight room anxiety, plus the fact that I spent five hours cleaning and organizing this morning, I was starving for dinner, so the leftovers actually worked out nicely. We also just took a walk because it’s unseasonably nice outside, and now I’m hungry again. LUCKILY, I happened to buy some delicious soy ice cream today with a gift certificate to People’s (thanks, Tara!). And now I’m going to eat it.

Detox

Last night I went out with some friends for a dinner/drinks thing to celebrate my upcoming nuptials. We went to Coco Bolo’s, where I had a salad with shrimp, chicken, and pico de gallo, and some crazy banana/rum/ice cream dessert that set me on a really bad path for the evening. I bet most people wake up with a normal hangover after their bridal showers/bachelorette parties, but not me. I woke up with a sugar hangover. I had that banana thing, most of a piece of baklava, half of a “magic bar” which had coconut, chocolate, 46 tons of sugar, and a bunch of crack or something in it to make it almost impossible to stop eating. And some “dirty shirleys” which have 7-Up and grenadine. I haven’t been able to eat anything remotely sweet all day. Even smelling my peanut butter, which is only made from peanuts, made me feel a little sickly.

We volunteered to help with the post-tornado clean-up today and it was insane. They were busing people from campus to the areas that were hit the hardest. The house we were helping with was completely leveled, stuff was everywhere. We worked for about two hours (the sweat helped with the sugar detox, btw). It was really surreal work, you’re going along and throwing stuff in big bags and boxes and everyone once in awhile you stop and think, “Oh, this is someone’s roof. This is someone’s wall. This is a piece of a mirror that someone used.” We even found the rotating plate from inside her microwave, broken into a bunch of pieces. The woman who owned the house was there, trying to get the last bits of stuff out of her basement. She had a cute dog. I’m sad for them.

I came home and basically slept for the rest of the day, got up at 6 and took a walk with Matt, then made dinner. We had chicken and veggie skewers grilled in the grill pan, with some quinoa pilaf. I also had a little salad bar salad from the grocery store that I didn’t eat at lunch.

Now I’m watching The Tudors (still dirty) and getting ready to go to bed because I have to work in the morning. Yes, on a Sunday.

Wrap it up

Wrapping up the weekend, I feel more tired than I did on Friday when I left work, and I didn’t get most of the things done that I needed to do. I did, however, see some pretty awesome high school basketball, including games featuring a few future K-Staters like Latavius Williams and Wally Judge. These kids are huge, these AAU players. They are twice my height and weight and they are all under 18 years old. It made me want to eat a lot, like I had some kind of irrational idea that I would still be able to grow to their size.

That’s my way of saying I had a lot of snacks.

Yesterday, I was still having a lot of problems health-wise, so I wasn’t really up for making dinner when I got home after 10 hours of basketball. And I’d hit the concession stand, so I wasn’t that hungry, and all I wanted was some fruit and a salad. So I mashed them both together and here they are:

Mixed greens with strawberries, pineapple, mandarin oranges, goat cheese, walnuts, and balsamic vinaigrette. I also had some cottage cheese. Because it’s going bad soon, I can feel it.

Today, I limited myself to one concession stand trip, and I also went to the gym before the games, and did some tough grocery shopping afterward, so I was actually hungry for dinner. We had another Ellie Krieger recipe: Hummus and Grilled Vegetable wraps. Can you buy stock in a person? Because I’d buy it in her.

Pre-wrapping:

Hummus, grilled zucchini, pine nuts, roasted red pepper, red onions, and spinach. Here it is with a mixed greens, cucumber, and tomato salad with lemon vinaigrette:

We need new plates. I’m really bored with taking pictures of these.

Wherein I cook chicken. Again.

Tonight was another Ellie Krieger special - Tuscan Roasted Chicken and Vegetables.

We got the recipe from her cookbook, but I think it’s probably also on the Food Network website somewhere. I could Google it and find a link for you, but come on people. I’m a librarian. I Google things all day long. I blog to find solace from my day to day life.

I don’t travel much, so I have no idea what made this “Tuscan,” but I do love a good roasted tomato. Roasted zucchini is also a winner. The recipe called for fennel as well, but we are not fancy like that, so I just ignored that line. I’ve gotten excellent at that. I also made some rice. That Uncle Ben’s 90-second microwaveable stuff, because I fell asleep while dinner was cooking and woke up when the oven buzzed. The rice is kind of creepy. But I think I like it. As much as one can like shelf stable rice in a bright orange pouch.

In other news, it is almost the end of the semester, which means that next week at this time, I could potentially be having a beer in a virtually student-free environment for the first time since early January. And then, it was too cold to leave the house.

Wow, I almost just teared up with excitement. Living in college towns can be challenging. Fortunately, I’ve chosen a career path that will keep me in them for the next forty years.

Good move, Jenny. Good move.

Eating local

We’re lucky to live in a state that is so heavy on the agriculture, because we can buy local produce, dairy products, baked goods, etc. And by baked goods, I mean cookies.

So, at the first farmer’s market of the season, I picked up some spinach. I buy those plastic containers of baby spinach all the time, but I’ve never cooked regular fresh spinach. It was much easier than I expected. Also, even more awesome. I made “Garlicky Spinach” from Joy of Cooking.

Now, I’ll admit it. It could have been the cheese that made it so good. But Matt had his sans cheese and he liked it, too. It’s always exciting to find a vegetable that I can effectively cook, especially when I only paid a dollar for a basket of it.

We had it with some pasta topped with a sauce I made to use the rest of the zucchini balls.

I was really hungry so I just snapped this picture before inhaling my dinner, but maybe you can appreciate it for its representation of the gritty realities of my life. Yes, those are our recyclables. And, yes, that is a pink heart-shaped tablespoon (it was ON SALE). Also featured is the top of a juicer. I don’t know where the bottom is so I just… leave it on the counter. Next to the tofu.

I’m going to continue working on the assumption that we all live this way. Please don’t ruin it for me.

I’m going to go clean up now. Something smells funny in here. I can’t help but think it could be related to an incident that occurred on Saturday night in which our upstairs neighbors broke the tank of their toilet and water suddenly rushed into our shower and light fixture and shot out of our electrical sockets. You haven’t lived until you’ve had to create a makeshift indoor umbrella to use in your own bathroom, just in case someone else’s refuse happens to rain down on you.

Actually, just writing about that makes me tired. Maybe I’ll go to sleep instead. I’m experimenting with my work schedule and I worked an extra hour today. Once you factor in cooking time, a few episodes of The Wire, and a good chunk of time spent thinking about what I should be doing (dishes, ironing, investigating the stink), you’ve got bedtime.

Some kind of chicken

When I was growing up, we weren’t a very adventurous family in terms of eating. This explains why I’d never eaten totally normal things like pears or hummus until recently. So, pretty much every night for dinner, when I’d ask my mom what we were having, she’d say “Oh, some kind of chicken.” And so, every time I make chicken, I think of her, fondly. Especially tonight, since she actually provided the chicken that I so expertly prepared.

Spicy Citrus Chicken Packets with vegetables and couscous

With some ginger beer. To be followed later by barley beer. You know how much I love my grains.

Close-up of the chicken packets. It’s a fancy way of saying: cooked in foil. This is a Clean Eating recipe that Matt requested. Something about those orange slices just makes the chicken so much better.

Lime roasted asparagus and zucchini balls. These are the guts left from last night, professionally melon-balled by Matt.

I think I’ll have some fruit in a little bit. We have a mango that’s looking kind of sad.

The farmer’s market started up again today, which is quite exciting, because it’s right across the street from our apartment. Last year, we only went once, but I think we’ll be hitting it every week this spring/summer. Especially now that I know about all of the baked goods. The produce was still a little sketchy, but I picked up some cheap local spinach that looked decent, so we’ll see what I can do with that.

I also did the Arthritis Walk with Matt and Donna, went to the gym, got coffee, did some work, and now Matt’s watching No Country for Old Men and I’m trying really hard not to because it’s a little intense for my current state of mind. So, I think I’ll drink some beer and eat some fruit and call it a night at like 8:30. Perfect. That should give me a good, solid 12 hours of sleep and make it easier to face my Sunday.