Saturday night turned into an unexpectedly fun (and boozy) night with the neighbors. Bear in mind, we live on a farm, and aren’t exactly used to big nights out. And who would expect a night like that would happen in a place like this?

But it did happen, which is just a testament to how awesome our neighbors really are. They had us over for an amazing dinner of roasted red peppers, wild mushroom risotto and TWO desserts: Christmas pudding and lemon posset, two quintessentially British desserts that they knew I’d never had before. How sweet is that?

Yes, the way to my heart is definitely through my stomach.

I didn’t take any photos – for some reason I’m still a bit shy about my food/photo obsession with the not-so-new-anymore neighbs. But I like these people. And despite the hangover, I didn’t really have any regrets. Which makes me think: I never felt like this in London. In London, going out always came with this weird level of worry and premeditated regret. Why am I so much more relaxed here? Maybe I’ve found the balance I’ve been looking for. Add to that a few kindred spirits, and what’s to feel bad about (aside from the splitting headache)?

One other upside: the hangover enabled me to enjoy some of my favorite comfort foods that I haven’t treated myself to in a while: scrambled eggs and toast with avocado!

But back to the day after the hangover (the day after a day after a good night out). After stoking Sunday’s hangover with scrambled eggs, Mexican food, and a good nap on the couch, I felt right as rain on Monday and ready to rock the gym.

After a warm up and a stretch, I did some leg presses, assisted wide-grip pullups, dumbbell pullovers, and cable upright rows. Finally, I went for a nice easy swim before heading home for a tasty breakfast – buckwheat crepes with loads of fresh fruit and soy yogurt.

The weekend seems like a distant memory now. Time flies when you’re having fun (and getting hard).

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Saturday may have been the best day of 2010, weather-wise at least. The sun was shining and it was warm enough to be outside wearing only jeans, t-shirt, and a hoodie. This is precisely what I needed to keep my gardening mojo going strong.

After an hour’s walk in the sun, I wasn’t ready to go back indoors, so I tidied up the garden by picking up the leaves, sweeping the path, and making everything good and ready for our plants when they’re ready to move outside.

Back indoors, I sowed my lettuce, rocket, and cilantro, and in the process, discovered a few pleasant surprises.

First, one of my tomato seeds has begun to sprout! The first sprout of the year – so exciting. It’s like magic! And I’m totally stoked for many more to come… I can’t wait to check on these bad boys tomorrow morning. Secretly, I’m rooting for the jalapenos most of all.

Speaking of tomatoes, I’m definitely noticing a Mexican theme to this year’s garden: jalapenos, tomatoes, cilantro, lettuce. That’s like 4/6 of a taco right there (the other 2/6 being refried beans and corn tortillas). A goal for the future: to enjoy Mexican food in England, with zero food miles. I think I’ll need a bit more space if I’m going to get jiggy with the corn masa and frijoles negros.

I was happy to see that at least one of last year’s gardening attempts survived the winter: this humble chive. I thought it would have died but it seems to have sprung back to life. Mmm, looking forward to some tasty omelettes in the future.

My other notable find was not edible, but exciting nonetheless: my yucca plant has sprung a new bud! This plant was in dire straights last year, so after some advice from gardener mom and the Helpful Gardener, I lopped off the stem in two places and planted it back into the soil. A couple months later, behold! A new sprout!

Overall, Saturday was a pretty spectacular day. And on top of the gardening, I also got an MRI scan of my ankle. MRIs, by the way, are totally out of this world. The room sounds like the “bleep bleep” of the bridge from the Starship Enterprise (classic Star Trek) and the drumming noises during the scan sound like aliens coming into attack. They let me bring in my own music to listen to, but I’m not sure why when I couldn’t hear it over the machine. Still, I’m anxious to get the results, and to be one step closer to solving this pesky ankle problem.

And of course, while I wait for all this new food to grow in, I’m making do with the fruits (and vegetables) of our organic box:

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But not strong enough?

A few incidents over the last year has me convinced that I could do with being a bit stronger. I’ve had ankle pain for years, and about a year ago my knee started playing up. I think the real wake-up call was a kidney infection last summer that caused me to lose way too much weight, and I’m pretty sure some of that was muscle mass.

Lately, I’ve been rethinking my anti-gym stance. In search of truth I went to one of the truest blogs on fitness I know, Cranky Fitness, and revisited my April 2008 guest post: Five Good Reasons to Quit the Gym.

For the most part, I still feel the same way: the whole idea of paying for physical fitness boggles my mind. I want a lifestyle that lets me stay healthy naturally, and the gym is once of the most unnatural environments I’ve ever been in.

And then I got to the end of the post, where I included a few good reasons to stick with the gym. A few of these really rang a bell:

• You have a gym buddy
• You like to swim and your gym has a pool
• You live in a shitty climate
• You enjoy lifting weights but don’t have the space or cash for a home gym

Neither January in Chicago nor February in England have been terribly conducive to long afternoon walks in the sun, and I’ve really missed swimming. But perhaps most importantly, I want to get strong, and I have a really hard time motivating myself to do strength exercises at home. I know if I show up at the free weights, I’ll use them.

So last December, during my month-long trip to Chicago for the holidays, I decided to give the gym another chance. I scored a 30-day membership at the YMCA near my parent’s place, and used it almost every day. Something must have been working for me, because when I got back to England, I signed up at the “local” gym (thanks to Tim for the encouragement).

I have a pretty basic workout plan that works roughly like this:

• Monday: Strength – Quads / Back / Abs
• Tuesday: Swim 2000m
• Wednesday: Strength – Hamstrings / Chest
• Thursday: Swim 2000m
• Friday: Strength – Quads / Shoulders / Abs

My physio suggests that weak hamstrings are the cause of my knee pain, so I’ve been giving them special attention. Lately, the knee has been feeling better. Whether that’s due to strength training, stretching, rest, or ice, I can’t say. But nevertheless, something seems to be working, so why stop now?

I’m still at odds with the gym. I don’t want to feel like I need it in my life. And when I walk in and see the rows of treadmills, stationary bikes and TVs, I feel a little disgusted with the whole thing. But on the other hand, it’s kind of nice. Everything is just there, and having Tim along adds extra motivation, even though we don’t work out together while we’re at the gym.

So I’m going to stick with the gym for the next little while and see how it goes. I know it takes a lot longer than I think it should before I can expect to see any real noticeable changes from my exercise. So I’ve just gotta be patient and enjoy the journey as much as I can. At the end of this month it will be about 3 months since I got started at the YMCA. I’m excited to find out where I go from here…Stay tuned!

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One of the reasons I moved to the country is to have some outdoor space where I can grow my own vegetables. I moved here last July, too late for the 2009 growing season, so I decided to use the months that followed to prepare myself for gardening in 2010.

Well, 2010 is here and already I’m running late, largely due to my total lack of experience in the gardening department. My previous attempts to grow potted peppers all ended in pots full of dead and shrivelled vegetable matter. But this time, I’m determined. Really.

Last week, Tim and I were musing over the possibilities when the door rang – it was the postman with a long-awaited package from my parents in the States. Inside was a little surprise: a little growing kit and a few packets of seeds. The timing was uncanny.

In fact, it seems that timing is a pretty important thing when it comes to gardening. Knowing when to sow, plant and harvest all depends on various factors such as frost, temperature, the condition of the plant’s shoots and flower buds, and I’m sure a hundred other things I haven’t thought of.

There is much to learn.

So I’m starting simple.

(Sort of.)

My 2010 garden will consist of


• Peppers: Jalapeno and sweet red
• Tomatoes: Moneymaker, sungold and cherry
• Herbs: Parsley, cilantro, basil and rocket/arugula
• Lettuce: Dynamite and romaine
• Potatoes

Tim will fill in the fruit front with strawberries and raspberries, and hopefully lend a hand with the potatoes and everything else. If things go well this month, I may also add purple sprouting broccoli and pumpkin to the list, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.

My entire veggie garden will be planted in containers since (a) we rent our place and (b) we want to make sure we like gardening before we dig up a bunch of soil.

I’m in desperate need of a good gardening book (any suggestions?) but for now, the Sustainable Living Initiative’s Rough Guide to Growing Vegetables is doing a pretty good job of filling in the knowledge gaps, specifically these handy PDF charts:

• What To Grow When and Where
• Vegetable Growing Monthly Calendar
• How Much Space is Required to Grow Vegetables?

So the jobs for this month are to

• Acquire containers, seeds and plants (done)
• Prepare containers for planting (done)
• Prepare sprouters for sprounting (done)
• Sow directly into containers: lettuce, rocket and cilantro
• Sow in pots: Moneymaker tomato, jalapeno pepper, sweet red peppers, parsley (done)
• Plant in large pots: sungold and cherry tomatoes (half-way done – I bought these as plants rather than seeds and planted the cherry tomatoes in a large pot, but still need to find a container for the sungold)

So far, the main lesson of this activity is clear:

Start planning the veggie garden in January.

Lots of plants such as peas and onions were to be sewn in February. Early planning may also have given me time to prepare raised beds if I were feeling really ambitious. I also wish I had the time to do more seed searching, particularly for good heirloom tomatoes and funky potatoes. Instead I settled for what was available at the nearby gardening shop.

But hey, I’m growing my food. Or at least trying to. Now I wait impatiently for the first buds to sprout from my seeds. Tick tock…

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I’m feeling pretty good about the “wholeness” of my diet these days… except for perhaps those veggie sausages that sneaked in on Saturday. The sausage recipe, courtesy of Vegan Dad, relies primarily on wheat gluten, the main ingredient of seitan, as the binder. Wheat gluten is made by washing wheat flour dough with water until all the starch dissolves, leaving insoluble, high-protein gluten as an elastic mass which is then cooked before being eaten. In other words: wheat gluten is highly processed.

My mind tells me wheat gluten should be off my radar, but my soft spot for veggie hot dogs has me craving these wheat-based wieners. What’s a girl to do?

Eat and enjoy, I guess. In moderation.

Sunday

Breakfast

Cornmeal crepes with fresh fruit and soy yogurt

Recipe: Vegan cornmeal crepes

Lunch

Swede and potato mash with beetroot salad and veggie sausages

Recipe: Homemade vegan sausages
Recipe: Rote Rubensalat (Red Beet Salad)

Dinner

Enchiladas with mexican rice and refried black beans

Recipe: Refried black beans

Sunday

Breakfast

Buckwheat crepes with fresh fruit, almonds and soy yogurt

Recipe: Vegan buckwheat crepes

Lunch

Bubble and squeak with panfried tofu and beetroot salad

Dinner

Red beans and rice with broccoli and leeks

Recipe: Red Beans and Rice

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There’s much to be said for the minimalist kitchen. Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to pare down my kitchen the the absolute essentials. In this time, I’ve learned that I can live without a garlic press, bread machine and mandolin grater. I cannot, however, live without sharp knives, good cutting boards and a vegetable peeler.

When it comes to “kitchen essentials”, I’ve been trying to invest in high quality tools that won’t die/melt/rust after a couple of years. My latest investment is a Gefu “Flotte Lotte” Food Mill.

A food mill? Is this really essential? Come on!

Such was my eternal debate for weeks before I took the plunge (life is hard, isn’t it?). But throughout those weeks, I kept finding myself wishing I had one. I had a big bag of apples from the orchard stored in the fridge that needed to be turned into applesauce. But what really pushed me over the edge was this minted pea and watercress soup that was delicious but a huge faff to prepare. This step was the culprit:

Set a sieve over a heatproof bowl and drain the soup through it. Put the solids caught in the sieve into a blender with a little of the soup liquid and purée. Push this mixture through the sieve into the bowl with the back of a ladle and repeat with any solids left in the sieve. Discard any bits that won’t pass through.

Straining and sieving and blending – why did I even make this soup? Oh right, cuz it sounded good and we had a big bag of watercress to use up from the orgasmic box and I don’t really like raw watercress.

So throughout those 20 minutes of pushing peas and soup matter through a sieve, I kept thinking “this would be a no brainer with a food mill”. Tim convinced me to go the extra mile on the Gefu, a German-made, stainless steal, dishwasher safe food mill whose only discernible flaw I’ve found is that the handle has holes in it which collects water in the dishwasher which then drips out in a somewhat unappetising way.

The food mill is awesome and for me, passes the “kitchen essential” test: namely, it’s enabling. I’m making some tasty food I couldn’t have made without it. For example:

• Curried Parsnip and Apple Soup
• Applesauce
• Refried Black Beans
• Mashed Potato and Swede

So maybe the latter two items could have been made with a potato masher. The point is: I probably wouldn’t have bothered with either if I didn’t have an easy way to make nice smooth mush.

Why not use a blender?

My reason is lame: my blender broke a couple of weeks ago and I’m biding my time until my next trip to the States to treat myself to a Vitamix. Yes, a Vitamix costs more than my car, but I’m pretty sure it’s got a better engine and should last me a lifetime.

Besides, a blender couldn’t make perfectly creamy mashed potato and swede. This was yesterday’s lunch, made possible by my Gefu food mill and Vegan Dad’s recipe for homemade vegan sausages:

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This weekend, we decided to stretch our attention span with a couple of movies. On Friday we watched District 9, one of the most original sci-films I’ve seen in a long time. On Saturday, we watched Julie and Julia, a film which intertwines events in the life of chef Julia Child with that of wannabe-writer Julie Powell, who challenges herself to cook all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s cookbook during a single years, an effort she chronicles in her blog.

Julie and Julia is a fairly average film, perfect for those nights when you don’t feel like thinking very hard about anything. Though the film itself doesn’t inspire any deep analysis, it did get both Tim and I thinking about a lot of things beyond the film.

Tim noted how blogs have popularised the concept of challenges, for example, doing one thing every day for a year. In fact, some of my favorite blogs about these sorts of life experiments: Living Healthy in the Real World and The Great Fitness Experiment, just to name two. The thing I like about these challenges is that they have a definitive goal, and their tendency to be fairly extreme make them fascinating to read about. But is this trend really the way forward as far as health is concerned? I wonder.

We both agreed that a challenge like “do one thing every day for a year” just isn’t the way real people live. And what if you miss a day? It’s the end of the world! I don’t know. At the same time, maybe a “challenge” is a good way to kick start a good habit, be it walking or cooking or writing. But if there’s anything that the Seinfeldian Chain taught me, it’s that doing one thing every day for a year is really hard to maintain, and to me, feeling like a “failure” doesn’t qualify as healthy.

Julie and Julia also got me thinking about my own blog here at SmarterFitter. Strangely, after all that lamenting about goals and challenges, I started wondering what MY goal was with this blog wishing I had one that was better defined. Is this why I haven’t been blogging for the last two months? Maybe… I fell out of the rhythm after my winter travels and just never got back into it. Is it because I didn’t have a goal to push me forward?

After a bit of soul searching, I decided that I didn’t want SmarterFitter to feel like an obligation – this is supposed to be a labor of love. Its only “goal” is to help me tune my life towards those activities that make me happy and healthy (and here, happiness and healthiness go hand in hand). So what are those things? Well, maybe THAT’s the challenge.

On the surface, it’s very clear that I like cooking and eating. Let’s face it – I’m obsessed with food. But there’s a broader lifestyle thing going on here – living in the country, going freelance, buying “forever things” instead of shopping at Ikea – that I’m still trying to figure out. Who knows – maybe blogging about it will help me get there.

So I’m going to write about things that help me get happy, healthy and free. This will usually involve food, but sometimes it will involve all the things around it, like growing vegetables, climbing mountains, writing for a living and building a clay oven (I hope).

Now I realize that I’m blogging about blogging. Gross. Oh well, it’s good to be back. Now on with it!

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I haven’t disappeared – am just completely inundated in holiday-related travel and festivities. I flew to Chicago on Christmas eve and am now about to head to Ohio for more family fun (and a long road trip with the immediate family – haven’t done that in a while). I’ll be back in town on New Year’s Eve and just wanted to say Happy Christmas and Merry New Years to all my readers. I hope you’re all celebrating accordingly!

Now, I’m off for a swim at the local YMCA – a bit of a grind at 5am but I think I’ll feel a lot better for it after eight hours in the car).

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Breakfast

Sourdough toast with fresh fruit and almond butter

Lunch

Stuffed peppers with quinoa, cannelini beans and tomato sauce

Stuffed veggies are awesome, especially when you happen to have some cooked beans or grains around. I happened to have both, so I mixed up some quinoa, cannelini beans, frozen corn, diced tomato, salt, pepper and thyme. I baked this for about 30 minutes while I made some tomato sauce to serve on top. Very yummy.

Hefty tip: when stuffing veggies, be careful that your stuffing doesn’t dry out in the oven. You can get around this by topping the stuffing with something “oily” like cheese or buttered bread crumbs. But if you want to avoid oil, instead of cutting the peppers in half, cut a hole in the top and remove the stem and seeds. Then jam your stuffing into the whole and bake the peppers on their side.

Dinner

Hot sauce glazed tempeh with roasted brussels sprouts and pumpkin and parsnip mash

Something about this mash didn’t sit well with me. It didn’t really go with anything else on the plate, and I don’t think I cared much for the pumpkin prepared this way. Parsnip and carrot mash would be tastier I reckon. Or maybe something else altogether, especially with hot sauce glazed tempeh, which is best with regular mash, roasted potatoes, or quinoa.

Recipe: Hot Sauce Glazed Tempeh [theppk.com]

Food Diary | Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Breakfast

Oatmeal with pears and toasted pecans

Lunch

Quinoa with Avocado, Greens and Black Beans

Avocado is so incredibly awesome with quinoa – you have to try it. They someone compliment each other: the quinoa coats itself to the avocado, which brings out the avo’s creaminess while the avo brings out the quinoa’s beautiful texture.

So in light of my desire to avocado and quinoa, I made this quick quinoa dish with a mexican flare. First I fried some mustard seeds and cumin seeds in a little oil. When the mustard seeds began to pop, I added some diced chipotle pepper and crumbled tempeh and sauteed that until it browned. Then I added a diced shallot, one minced clove of garlic, diced bell pepper, corn, a couple squeezes of fresh lime juice, tomato, cilantro, salt and pepper.

I then took this mixture out of the pan and tossed it with a bowl of pre-cooked quinoa.

While the pan was still hot I tossed in some chopped and washed kale and cooked that until tender (the water on the kale was enough to steam it in the pan).

I had the quinoa with the kale, a side of black beans, and of course, the avocado. It was really nice and only took about 15 minutes to prepare!

Dinner

Tempeh burger with cabbage and roasted brussels sprouts

Brassica fantastica. That’s right, I had cabbage AND brussels sprouts in this meal. And quite a lot too. I’m a fiend for the Brassica oleracea family of veggies: cabbage, brussels, cauliflower, broccoli, kale. I’m also a fiend for burgers and sandwiches filled with sauteed cabbage, onion and caraway seeds. This burger was a variation on a tofu burger I’ve been enjoying lately. I must say, it’s way better with tofu.

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For someone who spends her whole life in front of a computer, I’m very disciplined when it comes to the websites I visit. Being prone to distraction has made me very anti-distraction, so I never look at YouTube, GoogleReader or anything else that might suck me in and spit me out two hours later with little show for it (the exceptions being RecipeZaar and Flickr).

But today I did something I rarely do: I surfed the web. I don’t know why, who cares. I got to stumbling around blogs on “primal” fitness. Zen To Fitness, Mark’s Daily Apple, Feel Good Eating – these are all blogs about the primal lifestyle, a nutritional plan based on the presumed ancient diet of wild plants and animals that cavemen used to eat. As Mark Sisson puts it: “eat as our ancestors ate and you’ll be healthier for it.”

The primal lifestyle consists mainly of meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, roots, and nuts; and excludes grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils. Now, as a dal-loving, bread-baking vegetarian, I’m not about to take up the primal lifestyle anytime soon. However, there are aspects of the diet I find interesting (e.g. its emphasis on raw food) and I like reading about how people have used this diet to better their health and explore aspects of human nutrition.

Enter Son of Grok. He went from being a 250 pound smoker and heavy drinker to a 186 pound beefcake with abs of steel and perfect cholesterol levels. I stumbled upon his blog post from last August: One Year of Cavemanning It. His before and after photos were impressive, but what really got my attention were his list of things he learned along the way. Some of these lessons were just so spot on, I had to share:

- It is WAY easier to be fit and healthy that you would expect
- A lot of people are going to think you are crazy
- You have to do it for you
- The outdoors is an awesome place to be
- Over-analyzing and over-sciencing your approach is a waste of time
- Food is more than something to tide your hunger over. Real food is delicious.
- I love cooking
- I really can live without bread and french fries and chips and corn and sugar… and live well!
- Eating fat can make you NOT fat
- Most people do not realize how much of an impact what you eat has on your health
- I don’t think that I ever want go back

Except for the bit about living without bread, I could totally relate to this. And it got me thinking… he’s doing the primal thing… I’m doing the mostly vegan thing… other people out there are doing other things…. who’s to say one lifestyle is better than another. Getting fit isn’t about being “primal”, or vegan, or finding the perfect diet, or training for a marathon. It’s about finding the lifestyle that lets you realize your full potential, and that’s going to be a totally personal choice. Like SoG says: “you have to do it for you.”

I think what really pumped me up about that post was the reminder that a lot of change can happen in a little amount of time. I mean, look at all that stuff SoG learned in just a year. And life is just a lot of years tied together until you die – so why not make every one of those years like SoG’s caveman year? Not from the primal aspect, but from the “do stuff to make life better” aspect. I want to be able to end every year with a big long list of awesome things I’ve learned. And the only way to do that is to keep learning and experimenting. And yeah, people will think I’m crazy, but so what – they already do, especially after I tell them that I live in a barn in the country.

So where to start. I have a few things in mind for this year:

• Fix my ankle
• Start running again
• And if I’m running, why not start training for a triathlon?
• Do some cycle touring
• Do lots of camping and hiking around the UK
• Start a garden
• Get a bird feeder and learn about birds
• Learn how to identify UK trees, shrubs and shrooms – especially the edible ones!
• Figure out this whole strength-training-at-home thing
• Publish more freelance articles
• Learn how to make really good sourdough bread
• Brew my own beer and/or wine
• Keep a journal

And probably a lot more stuff I can’t think of right now. So I guess I better get started, before I get sucked into primal-inspired caveman musings:

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