Tag: gardening

Re-entry; it’s a…(well, YOU know)

by Karen, posted in fitness, friends, health, Life in the cube

So, first day back to work after a few (or many) days off is always difficult, right? Add to that being sick and having major dental work the day before, and you’ve just added a heap of insult to injury.

The sound of that alarm going off for the first time in days was a rude awakening.

Here’s what I did to ease my transition back to Real (working) Life:

  1. I skipped the gym. I am always looking for excuses to back out of my Tuesday workout but today I got permission from an impartial bystander (my husband!) whose advice was, “I wouldn’t go; why look for trouble?” Point well taken. I didn’t go.
  2. Instead of woofing my usual Tuesday Vitatop and cold coffee for breakfast as I ran out the door, I made some scrambled (fresh!) eggs and packaged it up with my leftover home fries from The Good Table in Cape Elizabeth (the portions are so big that this is the third meal I’ve made with them!) and even was slowed down enough to remember to bring a little container of ketchup (what are eggs without ketchup? I ask you) to accompany them.  When I got to work (early!) I discovered they had my (current) favorite coffee, Spicy Eggnog. I had a good book, good food, and good coffee. Things were looking (somewhat) up.
  3. Reminded myself: Go slow!!! It will all still be there tomorrow (and the day after that, and after that…).
  4. Look for any positive things you can find in your day. Look hard. They’re there somewhere. I had a nice ‘thank you’ phone message from someone for a Christmas gift waiting on my voicemail at work, which totally gave me a positive energy boost.
  5. Coffee. Make sure you have plenty to get you through the day.

Of course, don’t underestimate the value of support from friends,  in person or even via email. Sometimes, a bit of empathy from a friend is really all you need. 🙂

The best yoga class ever!

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, fitness, friends, quest for the best, yoga
Kathy, Alexis, Kristen (our teacher!), Janna, Me, Jeannie
Last night was a special yoga class at Windsong Yoga Studio in South Berwick. My friend Kristen (right in the center) is the instructor, and she teaches nice blend of many different styles of yoga. She has studied with some of the top teachers in the United States,  including Doug Keller, Desiree Rumbaugh, Sianna Sherman, and Judith Lasater, to name just a few. A bonus: she teaches women (no men allowed!). 🙂
She planned a special class to celebrate the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year).
After this excellent class, we were treated to an excellent meal, prepared for us by Kristen. A Tempeh Wreath was the main course, accompanied by a side salad of mixed greens, lightly dressed. Dessert was partially by way of Whole Foods  (and may I just say, OMG! Especially the chocolate covered figs? Unbelievable!). There were also some delicious Christmas cookies made for us by Janna, because, after all, what is Christmas without the cut outs? I ask  you.
Now, if you are someone who practices yoga, and midway through most classes you start thinking about pizza and/or assorted baked goods, this was like a class made in heaven. Thank you, Kristen! Put that Tempeh Wreath recipe in your cookbook!
What holiday celebrations are you participating in this year?

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Dinner, revised

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, tweens

As I was rushing to get out the door the other morning, trying to make it to the gym before my workday, I heard my daughter say to my husband, “What’s for supper tonight?” He replied, “I don’t know yet. What do you want to have?”

I didn’t hear the response, having made it outside and to the bottom of the stairs by then, but I thought about it often throughout the day after I got to work.

Making supper every night had usually been my job, since after we had kids that were old enough to sit at the table and eat human food, I usually worked during the day, and my husband usually worked at night. About five years ago, however, we did a 180. I started a new job that required me to work evenings at first,  and so my husband changed his work schedule, and became the primary supper cook.

Now, it’s not like he had never cooked a meal before; he was a restaurant cook when we met, and he’d worked as a pizza maker for several years as well. It’s just something that he had rarely been called on to do at home, since a) I loved doing that job and b) he wasn’t home at suppertime. 🙂

His style of cooking is quite different from mine. I usually think about it for hours in advance, shop for all the things I need or may potentially someday need, and often will painstakingly follow a recipe, but he almost always just walks into the kitchen, looks around to see what we have, and then makes something out of what’s there. If there isn’t anything appealing in the house already, then he’ll go to the grocery store, and do basically the same thing: look around to see what they have that looks good, then go home and put the ingredients together into a meal…

…a meal that the kids (more often than not) actually like, and will eat. Really, what more could a parent ask?

So, here’s to all the Dad’s that are cooking dinner for the fam tonight; YOU ROCK!

Eggstra special breakfast

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, raising chickens, tweens
A double yoked egg!

I decided to cook a big breakfast last Sunday morning, so my daughter and I headed to the kitchen to strategize.

Me: Pumpkin Pancakes?
Izzy: No.
Me: Waffles?
Iz: No.
Me: Bacon and eggs?
Iz: Yes! And sausage!
Well, no surprise there; that’s almost always her breakfast of choice (we do raise chickens, after all!).
I headed to the cupboard for a pan; she headed to the fridge for the eggs.
She brought two eggs over to me for inspection, one of which was a very large egg with a network of funky ridges on it surface.
Now, I had been watching that egg for a few days…often when a young hen first starts laying, she will produce eggs of interesting sizes, shapes, and … textures.
I made Izzy her “tween omelet”:  egg scrambled with the mushrooms cooked separately and served on the side.
Then I bit the bullet and cracked the unusual egg into the bowl…and it had two yolks! Now, this wasn’t our first chicken egg that contained two yolks, but it was the first one that I’d ever personally cracked that did.
I was absurdly pleased by this.
One great thing about this egg was how bright and beautiful the yolks were. What was also great was that it was big enough to make an entire omelet from just the one egg!
Note: I put my mushrooms (and spinach!) in the actual omelet, as opposed to the “tween” version with them on the side. 🙂

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Garden update: November

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, fitness, gardening, raising chickens, tweens
Pumpkins gone wild!

Remember the (multiple) posts I’ve written about how much chickens love pumpkins? Well my husband did a wild and crazy thing: he bartered with the local Walmart and struck a world-class deal to help rid them of all of their end of season pumpkins. (After all, as soon as Halloween is over they have to make room for those Christmas decorations! 🙂 )

He came home with is 4-Runner stuffed to the gills with pumpkins of every size, shape, color, and some even with painted features (one had a frog!). The chickens are now in pumpkin heaven, and as a side benefit, our yard is very extravagantly decorated for fall. 🙂

Since we were having a warm day in November, I decided that would be relatively painless to check out what was left of the garden. I was thinking I’d harvest the dregs of the carrots and beets and check on the lettuce.

Well, the lettuce is not growing very much yet; maybe we got it into the ground a couple of weeks later than we should have (totally my fault). Hopefully there will be some that is harvestable and edible before the snow comes. The carrots were a big surprise though. Since I wasn’t having much luck pulling them up by the green above-ground fronds, I gave up and started to harvest them like potatoes: I dug into the ground under them and pushed them up through the soil. I couldn’t believe how many of them were lurking under there, just minding their own business. Had I not gone in after them, regardless of the presence of waving fronds, I would have missed at least half of them.

Up for next weekend: carrot soup.

P.S. Chickens also love carrot tops and beet greens.

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Book Club at Mekong Thai

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, friends, quest for the best, restaurants

This month’s meeting was at Mekong Thai in Wells. The six of us met there at 6pm and were given a nice table by the windows, which they opened to give us some fresh air (a 65 degree evening in Maine in late October? Booyah!).

Susan is a quick study!

The wait staff was lovely, solicitous, and helpful. Lemon for your water? Sure! Another piece of lemon? No problem! A straw? Okay, at this point even I was getting annoyed with me, but not the waitress…she cheerfully went back to get me another straw.
And not only did she produce the straw, but when some of us expressed interest in the decorative way the straw was presented, she came back to the table with a fresh straw, paper intact, and taught us how to make one ourselves! My friend Susan was actually able to reproduce the effect, so our waitress was a good teacher, having transferred the skill to another in less than 5 minutes.

The great service was evident in other small ways as well, like when I was given a small container of peanut sauce (instead of scraping what remained of my used condiment in the bowl on my plate) to go with my leftovers that I had doggie bagged.

The food was great too. I had checked online for healthy Thai food choices (when eating out) beforehand, and easily found plenty of choices within this framework. I chose the Tom Yum soup with chicken, which was excellent, as was the chicken satay with peanut sauce. The free salad was a nice bonus; it had a mildly spicy peach colored dressing that was great.

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Why am I talking so much about the food, and so little about the book? Well, you may have guessed this: the book was…distressing. None of us liked it much. What was interesting though is that (as Shannon pointed out), we seem to have a much better, involved discussion about books that we don’t like than about books that we do like.

When we met to talk about The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, we didn’t have much to say, other than that it was a good book.  When we met to discuss Lowboy by John Wray, we were all talking over each other, interrupting each other, and in general making a big commotion in the small, otherwise pretty quiet, restaurant.

Hmmm, maybe this should be a go-to destination for book clubs?

The garden’s last gasp

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, gardening, raising chickens

So I went out to see what was left in the garden, and was surprised to find that there actually was something left. A

October garden harvest

handful of cherry tomatoes, a japanese eggplant, and the sole orange bell pepper that was produced by that plant. There is also some basil, beets, carrots…lettuce and spinach coming up that was replanted last month. There are a few apples, but they have black marks on them, souvenirs from the hail. They taste great, but their eye appeal is zilch.

What else? Oh, yes…3 raspberries! There is also a cherry tomato vine that is kicking butt, covered with green tomatoes that showed up as a volunteer in the raspberry bed, a covert stowaway in the compost, I presume. I don’t think the tomatoes will ripen before the frost, but who knows? They won’t go to waste anyway. Chickens love tomatoes as much as they love pumpkins!

The herb garden is going strong still: a few different oreganos, probably a half a dozen varieties of thyme, rosemary, bay, lavender, lemon verbena, the sages. Will be bringing the rosemary and bay plants inside to (hopefully) live through the winter.

Even though the “pickin’s is slim”, there is still a lot to do in the garden, like: getting it ready for winter. How to do this? Not sure! Have to check with my husband…has something to do with compost, I think. And getting dirty. 🙂

Fall!

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, baking, restaurants
Dunkin Donuts Pumpkin Muffin

Fall is a time when a young(ish) woman’s thoughts lightly turn to…pumpkin muffins! What is a better harbinger of the new season? I ask you. 

Pumpkin muffin is a term that should be used loosely; more of a suggestion than an edict. There are many different versions of the pumpkin muffin. 

Here are a few: 

  1. Dunkin Donuts has a Pumpkin Muffin. You may want to know (if you are on Weight Watchers) that it has about 16 POINTS. Really. Almost my total allotment for an entire day. You might prefer to assuage your pumpkin craving with a pumpkin donut if you are at DD; they have about 6 POINTS. (Disclaimer: these point values were calculated last fall with nutrition info from the DD website using the online WW point calculator and I am recalling them to the best of my memory since the pumpkin products aren’t on the DD website at the time of this writing).
  2. Better yet, cheat: make them at home with this recipe from Copykat.
  3. Tim Horton’s version of Pumpkin Spice Muffin is “healthier” at only (count ’em) 9 Weight Watcher’s Points. Hey, it’s better than 16. Way better, actually.
  4. Your local bakery/coffee shop/breakfast place most likely will also have some pumpkin muffins of some sort, and most likely they will be very hard to resist, and probably better than #1 or #3 above.
  5. The local supermarket will probably have pumpkin muffins in their bakery section. Smallish, plain (as in unadorned by streusel topping and/or glaze), unappealing ones are offered at my local market.

The choice is yours. My choice was purely based on proximity; I was driving by DD and had a half an hour to kill before the football game started Sunday morning. I also had a DD card with some money left on it. Can you say DD combo with black french vanilla coffee and a pumpkin muffin??? 

So, only the 3rd day of being back to active weight loss and a pumpkin muffin knocked me off the wagon. At least my daughter split it with me…well, she had a bite of it. 

Tomorrow is another day. 🙂

Eat, Pray, Love

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, italian, movies, no fear
Eat, Pray, Love promotional poster

 

Eat, Pray, Love came to theaters in movie form on August 13, 2010.  If you read the book by Elizabeth Gilbert (published by Viking in February 2006) like I did, you may have been eagerly anticipating the release of this movie. I know I certainly was.  

Then I saw a trailer for the movie, and noticed who had been cast to play Elizabeth Gilbert: Julia Roberts, who is one of my least favorite actresses. It’s not just because she basically has one character that she plays over and over; hey, I do like Meg Ryan. I usually do end up liking movies that JR is in though…  

 So, I reluctantly resigned myself to seeing it even though Julia was playing the lead character and therefore would most likely be on the screen a lot of the time (hello? it’s a memoir; told from the first person point of view). I went with a friend so that it wouldn’t be a totally lost Sunday afternoon…at least I would get to spend time with a friend sans children for a few hours.  

So, need I say it more plainly? My expectations were low. I thoroughly enjoyed the coming attractions (3 more good-to-see-with-a-friend movies to watch for) so I was in a good mood when the feature finally started.   

I am happy to report that the book was great, but the movie was also perfectly fine! It was not a total waste of two hours and thirteen minutes (plus travel time) after all! Of course, I love all things that have to do with Italy so it helped that the first country visited in the story was Italy.  

Also, the other actors in the film were all appealing, interesting, and (a side benefit) some were pretty easy on the eyes. 🙂 

Verdict: worth seeing.

Exercise? Ugh!

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, fitness, gardening, health, local fun

Some people love exercise; I am not one of those people. I like to eat big, however, so I have to (at least sometimes) engage in physical activity of some sort to avoid doubling in size.

I subscribe to the idea that little (read: bearable)  increments of exercise throughout the day that add up to a half an hour are as good as 30 consecutive minutes. Better, maybe. So.

Here’s what I do in increments on the days that I can’t talk myself into going to the gym (ugh!):

  1. Hula hoop. I keep one in my cubicle at work. Some days if I get in early (eg: before any potential witnesses) I go into an empty conference room (one with enough clearance!) and hoop for 10-15 minutes.

    Hooping!
  2. Yoga. There are several yoga poses that you can do at your desk, in line at the supermarket, even in the car.
  3. Gardening. Depending on the time of year, that might mean berry picking (straw, blue, black, in that order), weeding, dealing with tomato staking and harvesting, digging potatoes, watering, and so on.

    Yukon gold potatoes from our garden
  4. Walking. Go to the ocean for a walk. Also, getting out for 10 or 15 minutes to walk on a work break is usually doable. Problem: I often walk to the gelato store…nothing like a caramel turtle or a cappuccino fudge brownie gelato to lift one’s spirits… 🙂
  5. Bike ride. Not in “treks” or “marathons” of any sort; just in circles in the driveway or around the block on flat pavement.
  6. Dance! Crank up the stereo/iPod/mp3…almost painless. 🙂

A bonus is that all of the above can be done with your child present. Maybe they will even participate. You can feel good because a) you are setting a good example for him or her and b) not having a babysitter is not valid excuse to blow it off.

What do you do for exercise? Do you love it or hate it?