High Holy Mass of Contradictions

I've decided to switch to a raw diet for a while. Again. I've done it a few times before and I always feel incredibly healthy and energetic, but it takes so long to prepare enough food for a day that I usually find I don't have enough time.

And that will probably happen this time, too, but at least I can get a few good days of it in, hopefully, or learn to mix it into my lifestyle as a day or two each week of raw eating.

The other side effect I'm hoping for, predictably enough, is to shed some of the extra me I've gained since my thyroidectomy last year (and there's a pretty generous amount of me gained). I'd prefer to be a somewhat thinner me again. (I want to stress that I'm not dieting in the women's magazine sense of the word - I'm changing my lifestyle in a way that feels great and has historically resulted in my body dropping some of its excess.) We'll see how it goes.

(Ooh, and I went for a pretty decent run Saturday for the first time in weeks, if not almost months. I think just the idea of eating raw gives me energy. :) )

Anyway, the above article caught my eye because Karsten and I were just chatting yesterday about making a trip to Germany. We weren't specific about whether we meant for our next vacation or just sometime in the indefinite future but I kind of think it might be within the next year, which is exciting! I haven't been back to Germany since I spent a summer there as an intern in 1993. But I was also not vegetarian then let alone vegan, let alone raw vegan, and I was totally unaware at the time of the groundswell of alternative diet support there seems to be throughout pockets of Germany. This time it will be essential, but also exciting to explore and discover veggie-friendly places to eat and shop. Basically, I want to be a food tourist. :)

I'm trying to get a local sushi place to create a menu item based on a custom roll I devised. Some friends have since named it the "Kate O'Roll."

It's avocado, cucumber, and mango inside with seaweed salad over top.

Yummmm.

No really! I want to know. Food is very serious to me, y'all.

So, rawfoodists don't eat food that's been exposed to heat over 100 or 110 degrees or whatever (I've seen a pretty broad range cited, actually), right?

So does that mean that produce grown during a heat wave is out of the question? Or does the heat restriction only apply once the fruit or vegetable is removed from the plant or the plant itself is no longer in the ground?

(Yes, the attentive among you will surely point out that I should know as I myself kept to a raw diet for a short period of time once. I felt great, too. But it was too much work and I got lazy.)

I made beef-style seitan on Sunday and stir-fried it with broccoli for dinner last night, and just ate leftovers of that for lunch. I am very pleased with the results. Yes. Very pleased.

That is all.

I got home from work, excited to tear into the crates from Plumgood with all the (hopefully) yummy produce and other stuff... only to find my empty totes from last week still at the back door and no new totes anywhere in sight.

I emailed customer service and let them know that I can only conclude that the driver didn't follow my instructions to deliver to the back door, and that the new totes were stolen.

Grr.

And as a private "fuck you" to whoever stole the totes, I'm snickering at the fact that they got a bunch of tofu and produce rather than meat and fun junk food. Not that I can prove that people who steal prefer meat, but that's the way my imagination prefers it as some sort of consolation.

Grr again.

Edit: It's not as bad as all that, actually. The Plumgood driver just delivered our totes to our neighbors' house. The customer service person who called me was apologetic and refunded the delivery charge. I still don't know if we'll use the service again, but we probably should -- now we've gotten the kinks worked out!

You may know this already, but one of the great undocumented features on Amazon.com is the ability to track the price fluctuation on items you "save for later" in your Shopping Cart. Nearly every day, I hit Amazon and click on "Cart" to see what messages appear to let me know if an item's price has increased or decreased (and they only appear the first time you access your cart, so don't miss them!).

One of the items I've been tracking for a while is this Cuisinart 14-cup stainless steel food processor. Its retail price is $400, but the average Amazon price over the past few months or so has been about $180-190. Once or twice, it's dropped to about $170, and I was sorely tempted to spring for it. But I always held off hoping it might go even lower one of these days.

Today it's down to $149.99. Moreover, Amazon is having a promotion for $25 off when you buy $125 or more in their Kitchen & Housewares department.

Needless to say, I sprang.

(Clearly lots of other people are springing too. As I write this, this item is the #2 seller in Kitchen & Housewares.)

All told, I spent $126.95, and that's including one-day shipping (only $3.99 with Amazon Prime) so I can get it tomorrow and play with it over the weekend. Whee!

Now I'm eyeing the KitchenAid Stand Mixer Attachment Pack set which is down to $89.99 when the lowest I've ever seen it drop before today was to about $120. I don't know if I'll really need most of those attachments when I'll already have a really good food processor, and I'd have to put in some extra hours to cover my spending spree. But I'm wondering if it'd be worth having.

You know how I was talking about ordering that CSA basket from Plumgood Food? Well, it showed up Thursday and it was a bounty of vegetables. Something like 20-25 tomatoes, 20-25 okra, 8 ears of corn, 3 cucumbers, 3 leeks, 1 zucchini, 1 crookneck squash, 1 red bell pepper, 1 green bell pepper, 1 head of cabbage, 1 eggplant, and 1 cantaloupe. It barely fit into the fridge. And then I got overwhelmed by the idea of how to cook it all up and not waste any, so over the weekend we only ended up using, like, 2 ears of corn, 2 tomatoes, and the cantaloupe. I planned to make a big pot of ratatouille but it was always too much to think about.


Well, I'm home sick today but I had a little energy, so while I was taking a break from writing use cases, I started chopping some vegetables. And once I had the eggplant, peppers, zucchini, and okra chopped, I didn't feel like going any farther. So I tossed them gradually into my big frying pan and sauteed them. The outcome is this:


I don't think the picture does it justice. I tasted it a few times as I was finishing it up, and it's amazing. I hardly added anything to it -- just a healthy dollop of safflower oil at the beginning to get the juices goin'. It's all veggie-flavor-power from there, baby.

And the bad news? After that little victory, I started to attack the tomatoes and found out they're nearly all bad. Well, all the ones that the cats hadn't already eaten since Thursday, that is.

Oh well. I have delicious eggplant stir-fry to enjoy for lunch for the next several days, and I'm happy.

My cilantro plants were sky-high, so I was curious to try this cilantro pesto recipe stashed away in my recipe files. I made it last night, and Karsten said he felt like he was eating at a fancy restaurant in Monaco. Not sure about that, but it is pretty tasty.

( cilantro pesto recipe )

"If a swimmer like Michael Phelps or a bike rider like Lance Armstrong tried to focus on primarily eating proteins and fats, there's no way they could ever perform the way they do."

I also enjoyed the following quote from the article:

After athletes compete, they tend to bypass more healthful entrees in favour of sweets and junk food. They are especially susceptible to all things chocolate.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Brunch at the Pineapple Room was wonderful. Just wonderful.

We're never going back. ;-) It would be far too tempting to eat ten times my average meal amount and then feel disabled for hours afterwards. In other words, much like I did today.

We received word from our apartment property manager yesterday that they were doing some work this morning requiring us to move our car from the lot by 8:00 AM, so it seemed like a good morning to go out for ( breakfast. )

( Then thrift shopping. )

Alright, now this is kind of ( embarassing. )

( Workout. )

( Lunch. )

( More shopping. )

( Dinner. )

( Live music. )

And then it was back home. And now I'm getting sleepy. It's been a good, long day.

Cheekwood rocks the house. Can't believe we've lived here this long and yesterday was our first visit. I knew it would be nice, but that's as far as my expectations went: "nice." In fact, it was spectacular. Beautiful. Tranquil. Loved the sculpture trail. Loved the Japanese garden.

So we bought a "Family" membership, which means we now get in free as often as we want, and we can bring two guests with us. And we plan to go back frequently. Yay!

Lunch was at Baja Burrito (as was dinner, thanks to the magic of huge burritos and reheated leftovers). We gave up on trying places we'd never been before: they were all turning out to be so disappointing!

And I mostly finished my CD ripping project. I have a small stack remaining, and they should be finished by the end of today. Feels great to finish a household project finally. I've had so many of these kinds of things in limbo for, well, for years, really. Should have done this vacation at home thing a long time ago. Maybe not a whole week, maybe that amount of time is too much. But a few days and a weekend, that should do it. I'll have to plan for that again in maybe a year or so.

Yesterday was another peaceful morning of organizing MP3s and writing songs. Finished a draft in the morning -- that felt good. Organized my office and closet somewhat.

Then it was off to a god-awful lunch at U.S. Border Cantina, a party-hearty Mexican place apparently popular with Vandy frat boys who drink too many margaritas on Sunday afternoons to leave peacefully. Ugh. Never going back there again.

A little grocery shopping at Wild Oats, and then home again. I was determined that it would be a restful day, in spite of the efforts of Vandy frat boys.

We ate pasta for dinner and watched America's Sweethearts, which is one of the DVDs we bought for cheap at The Great Escape. It was better than I remembered. The ending was a little smarmy, but I laughed out loud several times prior to that.

I've been using some of this vacation time to rip the rest of my CD collection so I can sell it and be done with it. I've made a lot of progress, but I have probably over 100 to go.

I'm counting yesterday as the start of my vacation 'cause that makes it seem longer.

Spent a lazy morning organizing my MP3s. I deleted a bunch I never listen to and swapped in some new workout music onto my Clie.

Went out for lunch at Cafe Coco. Disappointing. Greasy. Pricey. Small portions. (I only ever eat small portions, but I like to take home leftovers.) But we sat outside and that was nice.

Next stop: The Great Escape outlet and the main store. Finally found The Thorns CD and for only $3.99! Also picked up some super-cheap DVDs and a book on how various songwriters got inspired to write certain songs. I love books like that.

Quick trip to the zoo for Ice Day! Many of the animals got frozen treats appropriate to their diet, such as bloodsicles for tigers and fishsicles for otters. (The otter looked as eager for the treat as Karsten was to see the otter eat it.) Karsten's favorite animals there are the meerkats and mine are the clouded leopards -- and neither of them seemed to have been given any icy treats that we could see, so that was kind of a bummer.

Picked up our holds at the library, some goodies at Kroger, and then swung by Big Lots for some English muffins. Karsten noticed that they had the Kellogg's Strawberry Mini-Wheats with the AAdvantage miles again, so we bought all 25 boxes of them. I felt like Adam Sandler's character in Punch-Drunk Love buying all the yogurts or whatever... but it really makes a lot of sense when you break down the cost per mile. And you're getting all that tasty cereal, to boot!

Cooked up some homemade pizza for dinner and watched "Nicholas Nickleby," which was OK, but not fantastic.

And now I'm posting this update while munching on Strawberry Mini-Wheats. I have enough of them to eat them all the time. :-)

Last night we kicked off our Nashvegas vacation by hanging out on the Demonbreun strip. For non-Nashvillians, this strip (pronounced something like "duh-MUN-bree-un" or "deh-MON-bree-un" -- no two native Nashvillians pronounce it the same way) is what used to be a line of so-tacky-they're-funny gift and souvenir shops. Now they're so-trendy-they're-not-even-cool bars and restaurants. Like Christopher Pizza Company, where we ate dinner, and Caffeine, where we had coffee and juice afterward. It's great people-watching, though -- some of the best this town has to offer. And last night, Gary Allan was scheduled to play at an outdoor concert series for one of the bars, so the strip was mad packed.

We got bored with it eventually and couldn't think of anywhere else we were dying to go, so we went home and watched our DVD rental: "Along Came Polly," which was OK, but it was very obvious that it was the same screenwriter who did "Zoolander" and "Meet the Parents" -- he rehashed a good many gags. Jennifer Aniston was great, though. She made a role that could have been a little hard to get across -- someone flakey and commitment-phobic -- seem endearing and credible.

Oh, and I gave myself a mud mask facial last night, too. That was nice. Except Karsten made fun of my mint-green face. Bastard. ;-)

Not sure what's on for today yet.

A coworker brought in a 3-pound bag of M&Ms and refilled the candy jar near my desk.

Great.

I've been absentmindedly taking mini-handfuls of M&Ms since lunch. As if, as long as I don't eat more than 6 within two minutes of each other, they won't count.

Our power came back on last night around 10 PM. It had been out for over 24 hours.

I was already asleep at that wacky hour because, hell, there's just about nothing else to do. But I got up and immediately went to inspect the food in the fridge and freezer. I'd left the fridge doors closed all day to keep in the cold, but now that the power was back on I wanted to see how they'd truly held up. Amazingly, everything in the freezer still seemed to be frozen solid and nothing in the fridge seemed any less cool to the touch than usual.

Does anyone have any idea if it should be safe or unsafe? I'm vegan, so there's nothing animal-derived involved.

Oh never mind, here's a food safety link that says that a full freezer should keep for up to two days. Whew. And it suggests that anything in the fridge is probably unsafe, but then where it gets specific about what to discard, it's all animal-derived stuff. I think we're safe.

One of the lesser-known hazards of such a lengthy power-outage is that you have to eat out for every meal. So we had breakfast at my company's cafeteria, Karsten picked up lunch from Baja Fresh and brought it to eat with me at work, and we ate dinner out at the Mediterranean place. Our dining budget is now as bloated as my belly is from all the food. I'll be thrilled to have a whole day of normal at-home meals today.

I just got three copies of the next issue of Vegetarian Journal in the mail, complete with my article on Cajun & Creole cooking. I'm pretty sure I queried that article back in the spring of 2002. Gotta love editorial calendars.

Ran three miles this morning, hurrah! It's beginning to look a lot like recovery. :-)

One of my coworkers brought me in blackberries she picked from her property. They look luscious; I can't wait to eat them.

I found an auction on eBay yesterday for a $25 gift certificate to a local Indian restaurant (Taste of India, for you Nashvillians). We've been there, and it's pretty good, so I bid on it up to $10. Well, I won it for $7.29 (plus $1 processing, which is kind of a scam since it's all done electronically, but never mind). Woo hoo! We'll be able to either have an extra dine out dinner in the next few months (it doesn't expire for one year) or we can save that portion of one month's dining budget. We'll see how frivolous I feel. ;-)

As a bonus, the seller (Restaurant.com) threw in a free 16 month subscription to Saveur. Whee!