I found daikon at my Tops. I was pretty psyched. I'm not entirely sure why, but it's such a large silly component of various anime, that I've always been intrigued. Also, it just looks slightly insane. It is HUGE, and it is white.

And is a radish. (Which is what it tastes like when raw.)

So, in light of this, I decided to make a mess of Japanese-ish food for dinner today:

- Heidi's Sushi Bowl. I used white rice, but it actually has enough flavor that it would make brown rice taste pretty good. The rice-fixin's were DELICIOUS in my book, and while I doubt I toasted my nori correctly, I'd thrown in a blend of nori, sesame seeds, and some other stuff that I picked up at the store awhile ago, so I think it balanced out. Great summer-food.

- Edamame Salad. This was also really light, and I forgot how yummy edamame is. (And it's such a pretty shade of insanely bright green!)

- Japanese Zucchini and Onions. A good generic heavy-soy stir fry thing. Really yummy.

- Cooked daikon, and Red and White Salad (aka daikon slaw), which I found by scrolling aways down here. The boiled daikon.. is really not very appealing. It's way better raw. The slaw is pretty yummy, not really anything too unusual, but a delicious little condiment.

- A large bottle of fairly cheap sake (because O'Malia's has been out of our favorite little bottle for a few weeks now).


Tom enjoyed the sake.

And the soy-soaked onions.

While I continued happily eating away at my mini-feast, he cooked himself a couple of hotdogs. siiiiiiiigh.

lmao. It was a little ridiculous, that I managed to not make a SINGLE dish that he liked. Even the rice! Apparently he's not big on citrus flavored foods, despite the fact that he munches on raw lemons. He was sure to tell me that, though he didn't LIKE any of it, he still really appreciated all the effort I went to etc.

He has now heated a smaller bottle filled with sake, and gone upstairs. I am left with enough food to basically feed myself for an entire week. Which is not totally a bad thing, I was low on lunch-food anyway. Still... I've got to find a way to combat his insanely strong dislikes. hmmmmm.


...though, this does come on the heels of an AWESOME victory yesterday. I cooked this:
Baked Ratatouille-Sausage Penne. Which sounds way more complicated than it is - it's a pasta bake with sausage and stuff. BUT. It contained one entire eggplant. I was a bit nervous about that. The sauce obviously coated everything (once I added a small can of tomato paste and 473902 spices - the recipe doesn't really make much sauce as-is, and Tom needs flavorful sauce), but...

When he came downstairs to eat some, I was almost beaten.
"So before I eat it all, what's in this?"
Brief panic, and feigned casualness: "Eh, basically what it looks like. Pasta, and sausage..."
He asked no more. He ate. A lot. He never asked! Never complained! I'm so psyched. That is an INSANELY healthy casserole, and so long as he never learns there was that much eggplant in it, I can make it again. XD (Also - he didn't say anything about the whole wheat pasta. I may be winning him over on that one.)

Labels: cooking, health, life in general

 
Tom and I have discovered a weird side-effect of not eating fast food.

It's been a couple of weeks since we've bought fast food. This was largely because we realized just how much money got dumped into it every week, but also for health reasons. [I'm more about the healthy part. Tom's deciding factor was the money part.] It wasn't quite an every-day thing, but three, four times a week, Tom would swing by Burger King, either when he got out of work or when I did.

Now, he's still eating one Subway sub each day, but his body seems to handle those just fine and dandy. (Plus, at $5 for an entire meal for him, it's an awesome deal.) Me, I'm nibbling at more rice and veggies. I baked some muffins yesterday (which, btw, are AMAZING - shredded carrot, cinnamon, cumin, I forget what else; just savory enough to satisfy a craving, while still sweet). I'm keeping more munchable healthy things around the apartment, and not letting myself buy so much candy at work.

Yesterday, since I wasn't working, I nibbled at some rice'n'veggies, had a muffin or two, and picked at bits of things while making a simple casserole for Tom: This is an amazing, amazing little meal-maker. SUPER cheap. I've found the chicken is optional. Salsa can sub in for the tomatoes and peppers. Rice + chicken broth for the boxed thing. Everything but the cheese is always on-hand! Add some spices to the rice to make it more interesting. Yesterday's variations: ground chicken from the freezer that I cooked in a bit of Frank's Hot Sauce, left-over chicken broth from the fridge that I cooked the rice in; cumin, chili powder, ground chipotle; bought some veggies cheap - used half a red pepper, half a green pepper, a jalapeno, a small onion; found sharp cheddar on sale and grated it myself. I had a smidge more casserole than would fit in the intended pan, so I nibbled at it while Tom attacked the main dish. (This is when I found that a light dusting of bacon bits was FANTASTIC, so I added that on.)

Anyway, I got enough food to get us through the week for $20. Little more than I'd hoped to spend (given that I have $50 to work with this week...it was a rough rent-payment this month), but, I realized I have enough on-hand to make a whole second one of those casseroles! woo! (I may even have a chicken breast in the freezer, though Tom reminded me that skipping the chicken is fine.) Plus there's *both* pb&j and ham&cheese for Tom to have sandwiches.


So, point of the story:

While Tom was wolfing down the casserole... he realized he was still *starving* after a bowl. He had a second. I threw a muffin at him. This got him down to "regular hungry". As he filled the cereal bowl a third time, we stopped to consider this. Typically, he'd only need like two bowls, and then nibble at the third for awhile. This third bowl was going to be gone in the next five minutes. (Bearing in mind, the boy always eats way, way too fast. I'm still working on that one.) He told me he's been hungry for the better part of the last week, way hungrier than usual. And he's been eating more.

And then we realized:

His Burger King meals included a big burger combo (burger+fries+Coke) and a second, usually smaller burger. ONE combo meal is likely close to 2000 calories. (Which is why they make me feel queasy - my calorie requirements are something like 1400 per DAY.)

Tom's body had acclimated to that ginormous calorie intake! It was *expecting* to have something like 3000 calories or so, basically every day. (I'm sure it's higher - he'd often do two Subway subs or a sub and a BK. On top of whatever he ate at home.) So even though he's now eating *more* food, I don't think there's anything I could possibly cook him that comes anywhere near the calorie level of a BK Quad Stacker.

Now, listening to my nutrition lectures.. your stomach's "full" message comes from volume, not calories. So we might be able to work with that to an extent. But that won't keep him from being hungry again ten minutes later. "Your body remembers what it *usually* does", the lecturer often repeats. His usually ingests a LOT of energy. I'm sure he burns through an awful lot of it - walking across his store twice is undoubtedly a mile, he's a freaking giant so it takes more energy to just pump blood around, etc.

I need to figure out how to make healthy, HIGH calorie food for him. At least as an intermediary, to slowly convince his body to only take in what it should really need. This is going to be interesting...

Labels: cooking, health, life in general

 
The lecture series on nutrition I'm working my way through taught me that having coffee or tea within an hour of having a multivitamin cancels out some of the nutrient absorption. (I forget which nutrients, but I think they were minerals, which I probably don't get enough of in my daily food. Also, it's not the caffeine, but some other ingredient in the coffee/tea. Tannins maybe?)

In the same lecture, I learned that eating a vitamin on an empty stomach gives you the most bang for your buck, but that it can also make your stomach upset.


Now, Melissa's previous morning food intake involved:

Toast, orange juice, vitamin if remembered, some variant of coffee/tea/mocha/hot chocolate depending on the day. These were ingested at various times, with a shower and maybe some dishwashing occurring someplace in the process.


Learning what I learned, I changed it to:

Roll out of bed. Bit of orange juice or water to moisten mouth after a long night of sleeping in dry air, vitamin, maybe wash dishes, shower, toast and tea.

But then I discovered that the upset-stomach thing was spot. freaking. on. holy crap. My stomach is not usually the most friendly thing first thing in the morning (thus the toast, whether I feel hungry or not), but that was NOT fun.


So now, we're at:

Roll out of bed. Bit of orange juice or water. Saltine cracker. Vitamin. Maybe another saltine. Shower dishes whatever. Then toast and mocha or whatever.


...this should seriously not be this complicated. Body, you'd better be absorbing things happily.

Labels: cooking, health, life in general

 
Halloween season is craziness, but it's fun anyway. Costume days are awesome. Today was supposed to be pirate day, so I walked in with a black'n'white striped tank top under my tattered-ruffled black jacket, dark chain necklace full of crosses and coins, and a pirate hat.

Behind the front registers were a whole swarm of Disney princesses.

...fortunately, one of my bosses was a pirate, and everybody else was whatever they felt like. I snagged one of the rental pirate costumes, and added some bits: a purple'n'black striped corset (striped the opposite direction that my tank top was, but it still worked somehow), purple'n'black striped head scarf, aaaand the most amazing skirt EVER, which I forgot we had. Long, black, with chunks of lace, mesh, and solid fabric all patchworked together, with a jagged-edged bottom. Awesome.

-

Since everyone else at the store has been bringing in cookies like every week, I figured I'd chip in. Last night, I spotted a recipe for Spooky Witches Fingers, and decided THAT WAS IT OMFG. So I made a whole stack of them, skipping the green food coloring (used a bit of whole wheat flour in with the generic stuff, which made it a bit more fleshy-looking), and used the raspberry jam route instead of the red icing (since that meant assembly happened all at once). They looked AMAZING - and tasted surprisingly delicious! (Probably helps that I always throw in more vanilla than is called for...the real stuff isn't usually in my budget, I figure the fake stuff is probably a bit less potent.) Everyone at work was spazzing over them, Ann especially, and Mac asked for the recipe. YAY I win.

...though more of a win is the real food I made yesterday. This Apple-Sausage Rigatoni? Amaaaaaaazing. I'm on such a fall-food binge. I sifted through some soup recipes over on Better Homes & Gardens' site tonight, and I have a good dozen to try (with a few of Heidi's in there too). I should probably find out what kind of soups Tom likes... (Not that it will hinder my soup-making. Tom eats fast food half the time anyway, when left to his own devices. I will eat my soup.)

I also tried some wine biscuits, out of my King Arthur cookie bible, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the results. They'd be better more biscotti-like than mine turned out, and I think there may actually be too much wine(!?!) in them. May also be that the red wine I had was a smidge strong - drinkable for me, but not all that great, which is why I was willing to part with half a cup for cookies. Also...they are NOT pretty little cookies. They didn't puff up or round out aaaany in the baking, so they're the same ugly little scraggly lumps they began as. (One of these days, I will pay attention to how baking soda/baking powder/eggs make things puff up/not puff up, and to what degree.) Also they are a tanned purple in color, which is disconcerting.

In other cooking news: we had an AMAZING dinner...last Monday? Monday before? whenever I last worked 9-5, and Tom didn't work at all. We thought we'd take advantage of having a normal human being evening, and actually have a nice sit-down dinner. I'd been trying to think of a main course to suit the little red potatoes I'd picked up, and had been a bit stuck. Tom has been talking steak fairly often lately. He didn't see the sort of steak he'd had in mind when we went to Tops for supplies, but, we wound up with a pretty awesome menu:

- mixed baby greens salad (which Tom wrinkled his nose at, because the leaves still had stems! oh horror! ..it was insanely delicious)
- Garlic Red Potatoes
- steak, with blue cheese on top, wrapped in bacon (which I'm pretty sure has an actual name, but Tom forbids me to look into this, since he wants to be able to claim credit for inventing it)
- really, really delicious dry red wine (yay! we're grown up enough to like (the occasional) dry red wine!)

...the potatoes, despite cooking for absolutely ages, were a smidge under-done. The steak, despite Tom's constant poking, was a smidge over-done. Didn't really matter a bit. :)

-

What else is new... I went to the hospital, at the family planning clinic nurse's suggestion, and got a thyroid test taken. The day I was going to call the clinic to find out the results...I got my bill in the mail. x_x Which means I need to start figuring out how to get it paid for - the clinic said they'd be covering it, but I'm not sure how to make the paperwork know that. At which point I remembered that I canNOT, not, EVER, navigate the phone directory for the clinic. The options make no sense, I can't ever figure out which extension I'm supposed to be heading toward. Last time I wound up calling into what I think was child protective services...which is obviously not what I was looking for. (Note: this is NOT just me. A coworker assured me that she has the same problem every time she calls.) So, I'm thinking Monday morning, since I am not working, I'll gather up all my paperwork and troop down to the clinic, and ask them what I'm supposed to be doing - and ask them what the heck my thyroid is up to.

...as much as I enjoy being a generally healthy person, there's a bit of me that almost hopes there *is* something off with my thyroid. It would explain a lot of the random issues I have, including the fact that I'm always so damn tired. (Eight hours of sleep last night, probably more like nine. Alarm at 11:20 yanked me from a DEEP, deep sleep, smack in the middle of a dream, and I had to battle all morning to keep moving.) Plus the spotting (so far continuing, despite the new birth control), and the migraines (which may be linked to female cycles - I'm diligently plotting every weird thing that might possibly be related to hormones on my calender now, to see what correlations there might be). wheeee.

-

I'd forgotten how freaking fast I read. I've been doing audiobooks for ages, but going through L.M. Montgomery's Anne books...there are several Librivox hasn't done yet. So, thank you Project Gutenberg - both the general and Australian sites, I snagged .txt versions of the books I needed. Flung them onto Tom's Kindle, and discovered that the sucker really *is* great for reading on. The screen does not glow, so there's no eyeball issues. Battery life is insanity (I haven't plugged it back in for like two whole books, and it's still only half down). Text size is ADJUSTABLE - so it's tiny and there's lots to a page when I'm reading normally, and I can make it bigger when I'm reading while crocheting (yes this is possible - sick, but possible) or washing dishes (shhh don't tell Tom I had it near water!). The other plus? YOU DON'T HAVE TO HOLD THE BOOK OPEN!!! I'd never even thought of that, until I started flying through the Anne books. All my actual, physical L.M. Montgomery are those little travel-sized 5x7-ish paperbacks that are like two inches thick. And they are SUCH a pain to hold open, whether you're trying to pin it under something, or using your hand, it just *hurts*. Kindle? Flat. Tap the side to turn the page. (Can tap on EITHER side to turn the page forward, even.)

Anyway, commercial aside... I remember when I first read Anne of Green Gables. Pretty sure it was when I had chicken pox in third grade. I'd always put off reading it, because the print was the tiiiiniest I'd ever seen in my life, and it was a really thick book. Chicken pox gave me a lot of time on my hands. This time around? I think some of the later books are shorter, but, honestly, maybe two days, and that was with maybe half a day of solid reading, mainly just the four hours between me getting home and Tom coming home.

So I'm audiobooking the last original Anne book (looks like there's a compilation that was published after her death, which doesn't seem to be public domain yet), but I wanted to get some more things to *read*. I had a few things sitting around on my computer, and I've a few more things in mind. I'm trying to ingest anything that might possibly inspire ideas for NaNoWriMo next month - so, ghost stories, maybe some religious things, anything set in gardens, Victorian-era things, and the cozy sort of girly classics that just make me happy. I just realized I have an audiobook of Louisa May Alcott's "Flower Fables", which I'm super-excited to dig in to. Probably going to re-read L.M. Montgomery's "Magic for Marigold", or maybe one of her others - I absolutely love her dreamy-eyed young girls, full of imagination and seeing beauty in every tiny thing around them. Trying to hash into consumable form "An Adventure", which is the book of "The Moberly-Jourdain incident" - these two scholarly women seeing ghosts around Versailles, of Marie Antoinette and others... it's such an incredibly detailed account, from these two insanely credible people, it's really grabbed my fancy. The full text is in pdf online, but... the pdf is embedded into a website in some totally absurd way, and all I could do was save it one page at a time. I just tried compiling them into a multi-page pdf...but I'm not even sure if the Kindle will take pdfs. I think it will? I don't even know. But, the book is ghosts and gardens and faded royalty and kindred spirit women at the turn of the century. Totally worth a bit of work.

Wikipedia, by the way, is so awesome for linking to the Project Gutenberg copies of books that turn up in articles. I always forget to check the Australian Project Gutenberg, and they have all sorts of things the main site doesn't, though in a less-searchable manner. Via that, I tracked down "The Well of Loneliness", which I'd been dying to read - generally considered the first lesbian novel in English, and caused all sorts of legal furor and was banned and everything else...even though there's no blatant sexual content or much of anything besides vague insinuation. But I like vague insinuation and subtle undertones and things. Just started in, and so far, I actually really like it - I've gotten as far as: a little girl is born when the parents expected a boy, so they name her Stephen, and she's developing rather male characteristics and personality quirks, hates dresses, has a crush on a serving maid... but it's all handled in such a way that... I'm not even sure how to describe it. It's handled in a very believable way, just day-to-day things, like she plays dress-up, but dresses up as a soldier... but the undertones are almost mystical, like there's a weird element of predestination, you have the sense that she's developing this way not so much due to a quirk in her genes, but because she was conceived and developed in the womb while being thought a boy. It's feeling very like the "Rose of Versaille" anime, which I adore, so it's all good.

-

One of our hamsters died. :\ We knew they were nearing the end of their typical lifespan, so Tom, darling that he is, has been sure he's the first to go poking into their cage lately when we go to clean it out. This time... he told me to stay outside the room awhile. I can't even say how grateful I was for this, I really don't think I could have handled it, Tom barely could. He said it looked like they'd been in a fight (they'd always fought a bit now and again)... and I'm sure it wasn't a pretty sight. I *am* a little sad, even though we've never been overly-attached to the critters - hamsters don't really have a whole lot of personality to get attached to. Still, it was sad.

-

Our ceiling in the kitchen, which has had cracked plaster for ages, finally started dripping about a week ago. Poking around in the bathroom, we discovered that the seal around the tub is totally shot. Soooo, as long as the shower curtain is plastered to the wall at that end, and we keep a towel on the floor for back-up, it doesn't leak, so that works.

We have been doing, in small doses, major house-cleaning. A few weeks ago I tackled the tub hardcore, and the leak issue motivated me to clean the scary corner between the shower and the radiator. The whole town has been invaded by something like fruit flies, and they are driving me COMPLETELY FREAKING INSANE, so that motivated a hardcore cleaning of the kitchen sink. (Note: didn't help. There do seem to be a few more of the damned things when I have cookie-batter bowls in the sink, but no matter how clean things are, the flies are still there. Tom can catch the pests in mid-air, so that helps, but I can't, and they make me insane, so boo.) I bought a mop! I'd been seeing ads for the Swiffer version of a mop, and that struck me as a perfect solution for the apartment. My kitchen floor? like 3x7'. My bathroom floor? probably like 3x3'. Tiiiiiny scraps of floor. I'd been tackling them the old-school way, on my knees with a sponge, there's really no room for a full-on mop situation. But WalMart had the Swiffer things - and, for a few bucks less, a Clorox version, which is what I got. It works AWESOME. I was a little skeptical, it's basically glorified paper towel, but... one towel thing got me through 90% of my kitchen, including the scary bits under the stove and fridge. Whatever liquid is in the little sprayer (I am probably saner not knowing) is pretty amazing stuff.

-

And, still crocheting. One Christmas present: DONE!, once I fix the lazy way I tried blocking it. Another Christmas present: DONE!, once I block it. Another Christmas present: ohgodSOCLOSEtodone, but I need the attention span to go back and work on the edging. Another Christmas present: started and... well, let's just say a glove that doesn't fit my hand is not going to be very useful for anyone not a lot younger than me. Nearly everything is planned, I just have to scrounge up the money for yarn, and settle on a few patterns. The main trouble is, is that since these are gifts for people important to me, I want to do the best I can. Which means, in some cases, waaay more expensive yarn than I would use for myself. I have a little throw blanket in mind for one family member, and I found the *perfect* yarn, in just the colors and texture I want, and even in an alpaca blend, which I hadn't dared hope for but wanted desperately (since it's sooo lightweight for how crazy warm it is)... but it's like $8 a skein. So I'm trying to figure out how to get as much blanket out of as little yarn as I can, but I'm soooo bored with every freaking throw blanket pattern being either V-stitches or giant granny squares. I like both well enough, but, I've done those, I want something else!

I'm a little scared, given that there's a lot of crocheting that should be done in November, when I'm going to have a novel to crank out...

Labels: apartment, books, cooking, crochet, health, work