Light and Momentary

Five weeks in

Remember my S Scheme? Today marks five weeks in, so I am posting an update.

1. Vegetables: This one is going well. Some days I don't quite hit five servings, but four is pretty good by my lights.

2. Water: This one is harder and I haven't been tracking it as faithfully.

3. Planning: This is the hardest of all. FIve o'clock feels really early for dinner, especially if there's evening stuff going on.

4. Sugar: I was very careful at first, and then I got tired of being careful. (I haven't forgotten that I said I'd write a sugar post.) I'd say I'm being very temperate, but I'm not abstaining.

5. Exercise: This one is going really well. I've hit the goal every week-- 4 hours of moderate exercise. If you look closely you can see the faint outlines of what might be muscle in my upper arm. (Or maybe it's an Alien-esque thing that's going to hatch out when I least suspect it.)

You guys, I didn't tell you the reason for this Plan because it is so SO shallow. How shallow is it? I have to go get my driver's license renewed in four weeks. When I started this plan, I was 20 pounds over the weight on my license. I thought to myself, "Let's have a little truth in advertising here. Your driver's license should reflect your actual weight, or at least something close to it." And then I thought to myself, "I cannot possibly put this weight on my driver's license, so it's going to have to change."

Now I am 14 pounds over the weight on my driver's license, and I bet I could drop a quick five if my baby aliens decide to hatch out between now and then. But I keep reminding myself: the number on the scale is not the goal. Good habits are the goal. I figured out some reasons why I'd been overeating (perhaps the topic of another post), and I stopped. I'm loving this exercise regimen and feeling inordinately, embarrassingly pleased about my baby aliens. That's what matters, right?

How to eat 5 servings of vegetables a day

Melanie asked about the practicalities of eating five servings of vegetables per day. Most often I eat one for breakfast, two for lunch, and two for dinner. 

About five days a week I have a pumpkin smoothie for breakfast. You can find a lot of frou-frou pumpkin smoothie recipes if you go looking, recipes that tell you to add three kinds of spices and whipped cream on top. Before breakfast? I think not. My recipe is easy and delicious: half a cup of pumpkin, one frozen banana (or an equivalent amount of whatever fruit we have in the freezer, or a fresh banana with some ice cubes), plain yogurt, and coconut milk to blend. It fills me up until lunchtime and it is not overtly vegetable-y. My daughter enjoys it, and she is the queen of picky eaters. 

At lunch I'll often eat a big salad with some protein. A serving of lettuce and other raw leafy greens is one cup. A cup of lettuce topped with various other veggies (tomatoes, carrots, peppers, cukes) and something meaty makes for a satisfying lunch. I'll also often scavenge in the fridge and reprise our dinner from the night before.

At dinnertime we usually have something salad-y (sometimes green salad, sometimes slaw, sometimes carrot salad or broccoli salad or similar) and something steamed. It's not hard to eat a cup of salad and a half-cup of steamed veggies along with something main-dish-y. We often incorporate veggies into our main dishes-- the broccoli thing I mentioned last night, or the pasta bake with red sauce we had tonight, or a speedy soup made from greens and potatoes. If I pay attention to the greens/potatoes ratio and offer bread for dipping, everyone but Stella will eat green potato soup.

If I'm running behind on the servings count, we usually have snackable veggies in the fridge. Baby carrots are our standby (my husband buys pounds and pounds of carrots every week-- babies for snacking and full-sized for cooking and salads, but olives are good too. This one is kind of quirky, but a favorite snack at our house is frozen peas. Not microwaved, just straight out of the freezer and into a bowl. Weird, but it works. 

I use the USDA portion size info, but I don't worry about counting the occasional serving of fries (like, once a month or so). Potatoes are vegetables too, and I'm not fussed about fat.

Tasty, easy, vegetarian

I was going to cook a version of this last night, but we were out of chickpeas. (We are never out of chickpeas. No matter how bare the cupboards may be, we have chickpeas.) I roasted the broccoli (smallish florets, drizzle/toss with olive oil/salt/pepper, 25 minutes at 375), subbed in feta for the absent chickpeas, and added a couple of chopped scallions. I kept my dressing really simple, just extra-virgin olive oil and the juice of half a lemon, because 5:00 sneaks right up on a person. 

Last night I served it warm over bulgur. The grownups liked it a lot; the kids were not enthused. Tonight the leftovers were purely delicious as part of a green salad.

Six days into the S Scheme and it's going fine so far, except I wish 5:00 came a little later in the day. Eating 5 servings of vegetables per day has become much easier for me than it was 8 years ago. (Note to my brother: I owe you a post about sugar.)

Game ON

You guys, I have a Plan. It's my S Scheme: Sixty-three dayS of Sanity and Salutariness (with Scads of Strengthening and poSSibly Some Slenderizing).

Eight years ago I found myself twenty years over my pre-pregnancy weight when Petely was two months old. I embarked on The Vegetable Project: 30 days in which I consumed 5 servings of vegetables and a gallon of water every day while giving up sugar. I lost 13 pounds in 30 days, and took off the remaining 7 in the following 2 or 3 months.

Something weird has happened to my body over the past year or so. I am eating well and exercising often, but my set point seems to have shifted. At the moment I weigh almost what I did when I started the first Vegetable Project. It's easy to be a little crazy about weight gain. (Exhibit A: when my SIL asked me to sing at my BIL's funeral in March, I thought, "I am too fat to appear in public.")

I am pushing back against the crazy. The goal of the S Scheme is not to lose a particular amount of weight. It's to work on good habits here in the summer while I have a little more space in my head. It's to tend the body that I hope will carry me into old age, and to accept that its shape is going to change over time.

The details:

1. Vegetables! Five servings a day, no excuses. 

2. Water! (Not a gallon a day, because I am not feeding a 2-month-old these days. We'll say 3 quarts, to cut down on the nibbliness that is actually thirst in disguise.)

3. Planning! Dinner on the table at 5:00 sharp, and no snacking afterward.

4. Sugar! Give it up entirely for the next nine weeks, and then re-evaluate. 

5. Exercise! At least four hours per week of moderate intensity exercise, plus daily bursts of lower-intensity movement-- walking to the library instead of taking the car, even when it's hot. Biking to the pool.

Recently I was thinking about how much more fit I am than I was ten years ago when I weighed less. I thought to myself, "If I could be that skinny and that out of shape or this weight and this level of fitness, which would I rather be?" The answer came immediately: skinny. But that's a stupid answer. I am pushing back against that nonsense. If I eat sensible portions of nutritious tasty foods, and push my body to be stronger and faster, I need to relax about the scale. This is me giving myself permission to be the shape I am right now.

TVP: Tidying Up

I am taking down the Vegetable Project recipes from my sidebar, and putting them in this post instead.

Chuffed Starred

I had a Mrs. Malaprop moment tonight when I asked my MIL to hold the baby so I could chuff the starred.  If you want to do some chuffing of your own, here's how:

Prepare chard leaves by washing thoroughly and then cutting along the tough part of the stem -- two or three inches should do it.  Blanch the leaves quickly (say a one-minute dunk in a little boiling water) and set them aside.  Dice the stems, along with a rib of celery, a large onion, and a couple of fat cloves of garlic, and cook them all with a pound of ground turkey.  You can add a handful of oats (raw) if you want to, or leftover rice (cooked) or whatever suits you.  It's flexible.  Think meatloaf.  (My MIL was notorious for her meatloaf -- Jello, butterscotch pudding, dental floss remnants (okay, I made that up) -- if it was in the fridge, it was fair game.)  Taste and see if it needs seasoned salt or Worcestershire sauce or whatever.

When the filling and the leaves are cool enough to handle, preheat the oven to 375 and spray a 9x13 baking dish.  Spoon tomato sauce over the bottom.  Overlap the edges where you cut out the tough stem, and plop a generous spoonful of filling onto the chard leaf.  Fold the top half of the leaf over the filling, and tuck the sides under.  Place the packet seam side down in the baking dish.  When all your starred is chuffed, ladle a little more tomato sauce on top.  Cover and bake for half an hour or so.  Use a spatula to remove the chard packets; tongs will allow all the stuffing to fall back into the baking dish and may induce swearing in the patience-impaired.

You can also make a vegetarian filling like the one I use for involtini.

I Do! I Like Greens Beans and Ham!

My husband does a lot of the cooking on the weekends (he thinks to himself, "Hmm, deal with fractious children at the dinner hour or retreat to the relative quiet of the kitchen?"), and one of his standby dinners is Ham & Beans.  Quick, cheap, easy:  soften a chopped onion in olive oil, add chunks of ham, stir in a couple of drained cans of beans and heat through.  Serve with something green and painless like frozen peas; grownups like hot sauce to go with.  (Do you say "go with" minus any object for the preposition?  It sounded very bizarre to me when I moved away from the upper South to go to college, but now I say it all the time.*) 

Tonight I had some beautiful organic kale in the fridge.  I also had chard and turnip greens, so I thought I needed to use some of it quickly.  The key, I think, in feeding greens to small children is making them inconspicuous.  Blob of leaf spinach on the plate = mutiny (at my house, anyway); same quantity of spinach cut up finely in a quiche = thanks for dinner, Mom!  After you stem the kale, cut it into narrow strips vertically.  Pile those narrow strips together and, going horizontally this time, shred.  Add to the Ham & Beans recipe with the onions and be sure to cook it until it's tender.

Dinner for a Scorching Day

If you have leftover meat lurking in your fridge, you can make a easy dinner without heating up the kitchen.  This comes from Nigella Bites, with a couple of alterations.

Combine one minced clove of garlic, 1T. sugar, 1½ t. rice vinegar, 1½ T. lime juice, 1½ T. fish sauce, 1½ T. vegetable oil, and red pepper flakes to taste.  Add half of an onion which you have sliced finely and leave to stand for half an hour.  If you use a red onion, it will turn a lovely color while it is steeping in the dressing.

Shred 8 ounces of cabbage (I think that's about a third of a small head) and one carrot.  Cut some leftover chicken or beef into skinny strips.  Toss in a big bowl with the dressing and add fresh mint or cilantro to taste.  I add salt even though the fish sauce in the dressing is salty.

The 8yo and I thought it was delicious but the middle boys were not convinced.

*Mary was the only person who responded to my question about "go with" last month.  Here's what she said:

Just read your recipes and your question about "go with" with no object.  oooh, that freaks me out.  I grew up in western Pennsylvania, where we have our own share of weird regional phrases and manners of speaking, but that one I can not abide.  It's like an unresolved chord at the end of music or something.  Go with WHAT??? WHAT??  I went to college in Philadelphia, which is where I first heard it, I think, amongst the Jersey-ites.  Here in Nebraska, not so much, although a friend from Chicago says it.  "Do you want to come with?"  Come with what?  Or whom?   Aargh.

Anybody else?

Skorodophilia

Lots of people say they love garlic.  This is a post for people who reeeaaaally love garlic:  raw, hot, and fierce.  First, a story:

Once a young woman went away to college with no boundary-setting abilities whatsoever.  One night during her junior year, she and her apartment-mates threw a party.  This young woman kissed one of the men at the party.  She found it pleasant enough while it lasted, but quickly decided this was not a course of action she wished to pursue.  She marched into the kitchen, where she peeled a clove of garlic and munched it up.

Immediately, a garlic miasma pervaded the apartment.  An odoriferous cloud spread all through the environs, sparking complaints from the neighbors -- both upstairs and down -- and a letter of warning from the EPA.

Okay, I made that part up.  But it is true that my friend David surveyed me with some alarm from across the room.  He said, "Whoa.  Jame.  I can smell you from here."

Unfortunately, the man whose osculatory attentions I was attempting to avert was unfazed by my hellacious halitosis.  We sat on the kitchen counter together.  He looked thoughtful as he swigged vodka straight from the bottle.  He shook his head and said (and I am not making this part up -- the memory made me stop washing dishes to laugh), "You're one hell of a woman."  He braved the Breath of Death to bestow a goodnight kiss.  "Call me," he said earnestly.

It would be awfully tidy if I could say, "And from that night I loved both the man and the bulb."  I cannot.  I have no idea where the man is today (though I married his roommate a few years later), but oh I do love garlic.

In the small Appalachian town where I went to high school, garlic was considered slightly exotic. (Although, oddly, ramps -- far more exotic by most people's standards -- were very popular when they were in season.)  I don't think my mother ever purchased a head of garlic in her life until I came home from college complaining that a person couldn't be expected to cook anything without garlic.

A Spanish restaurant near my in-laws' house serves a potato salad with raw garlic in the dressing.  The first time I ate it must have been after an error in the kitchen:  there was so much garlic that it walked a fine line between amazing and painful.  I keep trying it, whenever we go back to the restaurant, but it's never been the same.  I think of that first time fondly.  Endorphin Buzz Potato Salad, I call it in my mind.

When I saw Crescent Dragonwagon's recipe for Garlic Spaghetti, I knew I had to make it.  If you really love garlic, you should try it too.  Cook 8 oz. spaghetti.  While it's boiling, put 8 cloves of peeled raw garlic in a food processor along with a raw egg, a third of a cup of grated Parmesan cheese, 4 T. softened butter, a pinch of dried basil and another of salt, and a lot of freshly ground pepper.  Whizz to a fairly smooth paste.  When the noodles are cooked the way you like them, drain them and quickly return them to the pot.  Toss with the garlic paste until it is thickened and creamy.  (I am squeamish about raw egg, so I usually turn the heat on, very low, when I am making this or spaghetti carbonara.  Not the purist approach, but what good is a purist who gives her children salmonella?)  Serve with red pepper flakes and more Parmesan cheese.  Feeds 2-3 skorodophiles.

Now I have to warn you:  eating this is a little bit painful.  (In a good way.)  Privately I think of it as S&M Spaghetti -- the garlic is that intense.  It is not even remotely kid-friendly unless you cook the garlic first, which turns it into a pleasantly innocuous vegetarian carbonara-esque dish.  But if I am alone, cooking for myself after the kids are in bed, the grownup version is on my short list of solitary indulgences.

Oh, my goodness, while I was writing this post I googled the man from my story.  He has posted a paean to polyamory on the web, a fact I find disconcerting.  My instincts were on target, I guess -- too bad I couldn't think of a less dramatic means than my anti-Binaca strategy to get the point across.  (Hey! There's an idea for a marketing genius somewhere.  Anti-Binaca, for the woman who can't say no.  Tuck it in your purse before you go to that frat party.  Comes in Fetid Anchovy, Rankest Roquefort, and the time-tested Allium Overload.)

I am shaking my head at the monitor here, thinking of all the times I have blogged about my difficulty saying no -- considerably diminished now, but still a problem occasionally.  If I ever have a daughter I will teach her to love garlic.  But I will teach her something else, too.  When she first tells me no I will say, That's a good word, sweetie.  Use it well.

Really Good, Really Weird

I am not a huge fan of either tomatoes or watermelon.  I'll eat them both, but not with great enthusiasm.  So I'm not sure what grabbed me when I saw this recipe in Mark Bittman's "The Minimalist" column three years ago, but I wanted to try it immediately.  When I served it to my husband that night, he kept saying, "This is really good," alternated with, "This is really weird."  And that about sums it up. 

I love this salad; I start jonesing for it when the warm weather brings watermelons to the grocery store.  When I serve it to guests, they always look at me a little funny.  Usually that only lasts until the first bite, though.

Tomato-Watermelon Salad

Halve 1½ cups of cherry or grape tomatoes, and chunk 2½ cups of seedless watermelon.  Slice a half-cup of scallions and crumble a half-cup of feta cheese.  (Mark Bittman recommends blue cheese, but I do not love cheap blue cheese and prefer the good stuff unadulterated.  He was riffing on a Middle Eastern dish of watermelon and feta in the first place, so I decided to stick with the feta.)  Make a dressing from 2T. watermelon juice (no juicer required; take a hunk of watermelon and squeeze), 2T. extra-virgin olive oil, 2T. sherry vinegar (worth tracking down), salt, and a pinch of cayenne.  Garnish with a quarter-cup of cilantro.  Serve in a glass bowl so the colors show.

This is best the day it's made, but I think I am going to eat some of the leftovers for breakfast anyway.

I've started a Vegetable Project list in the right sidebar, where I'll try to post new recipes regularly.  Watch for updates.

The Vegetable Project

Item:  I just finished Morgan Spurlock's Don't Eat This Book, which is full of stories about his "Super Size Me" adventure and the latest antics of Big Food. 

Item:  I have twenty pounds (eek) of pregnancy weight to lose.

Ergo: the Vegetable Project.  For the month of June, I'm going to eat five servings of vegetables a day and cut out refined sugar.  And, of course, I'm going to blog about it.

Don't Eat This Book is flawed.  It reads like a blog in hardcover; a little more editing would have made it a much better book.  There is a "let them eat cake" tone in some places -- too many encomia to organic veggies and not enough focus on the problems of cost and availability, especially in poor neighborhoods.  It's not in the same league as Fast Food Nation, which caused me to call all my friends and family saying "Read this book!" and tell my children I would only take them for fast food once a year.  I read DETB compulsively, though, sloppy editing notwithstanding.

So this is my super-size-me-in-reverse project.  ("Minimize me" doesn't sound quite right.)  I had visions of a nifty calendar in the sidebar with links to recipes, but I'm going to have to keep working on that one.  Here's a recipe to start:

Garlicky Pasta Sauce with Kid-Friendly Greens

Peel a head of garlic (do you know the trick where you smash each clove hard with the flat of your knife and the peel slides off easily? also useful when pitting olives) and chop it roughly.  Saute in oil, along with red pepper flakes to taste, until tender.  Add a 28-oz. can of chopped tomatoes and two 15-oz. cans of garbanzos.  Simmer 20 minutes or so.  Stir in a thawed 10-oz. package of frozen spinach.  (You can substitute other greens here if you like -- I used beet greens.  Chop them finely and add them at the beginning along with the garlic.)  Serve over pasta with grated Parmesan cheese. 

I used whole-wheat pasta for that extra-virtuous feeling, but ended up with a virtue deficit when I waited too long to start cooking and snapped at my children as my blood sugar plummeted.  Here's to better planning by month's end.