Semi-vacation day!
It should be a mostly-vacation day soon: just have a couple of tasks to do. Then, on to some fun.
Here’s a brief list of what the options are:
- Cooking/baking
- Hiking
- Photography
- Knitting
- Painting
- Making paracord bracelets
I love days like that.
Yesterday’s experiment with tuna & carrot pulp went well: I decided to make some vegetable juice and save the carrot pulp for a pate of sorts. Here’s how it went:
- Run 2 giant carrots & 4 stalks celery through juicer.
- Empty pulp bin into bowl & refrigerate.
- Run remaining vegetables through juicer & discard pulp.
- 20 minutes of washing out the blasted machine (see previous post).
- Drink juice while assembling tuna pate.
The pate itself was good: it was 1 can of Trader Joe’s Tongol tuna (in water, with no added salt), the carrot/celery pulp, enough mayo to moisten the whole thing, a couple of drops of nam pla (Thai fish sauce), and soy sauce & celery seed to taste.
It works for me because it lets me extend the tuna with something very healthy, carrot’s a really pleasant taste with tuna, and it allows me to use something that otherwise was going into the compost. Don’t get me wrong: compost is awesome, just not for lunch.
Dilemma 1
About a year ago, I crashed & burned after a very poor implementation of a raw vegan lifestyle. It was the usual failures: too much reliance on nuts & avocados, and not the giant amount of greens that’s needed to bolster the system through such a radical change. And although I lost 20 pounds pretty quickly, I felt absolutely horrible.
The thing is, I feel pretty strongly that eating the right way is the best way to have individual control over health care costs (from a personal level, of course…cumulatively, that can only come if the whole country becomes more involved in ditching junk food, etc.). So, it’s incumbent on me to harness some sort of knowledge & apply it to some sort of diet…and right there is where it starts to get murky.
I’ve got some routines established, mostly in the area of making breakfast for myself, which I have never embraced before, mostly due to early-morning ennuie. And I like it, I really like having a complex meal in the morning. At this point, it consists of homemade refried beans, salsa, cooked egg whites, and soy cheese, rolled up in a whole-grain tortilla. And it’s great, I love it. But I’m pretty sure it’s still got elements of “cop-out” in it (especially the soy cheese). If a person takes a stand against processed food, it all becomes seriously inconvenient, when combined with a long commute & a long workday. And yet, it seems that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing 100%.
An article popped up on Yahoo yesterday about the nutrients lost when microwaving vegetables, which threw another spanner in the works. The microwave is currently pretty essential to my daily routines: we certainly don’t have a stove at work. I’m seriously considering getting a VitaMix, and just making everything into a smoothie, and being done with it, except that would get old pretty fast. I love juicing, and will drink stuff that makes most people run away, like kale-collards-carrot juice that’s a hideous green-brown color. It’s just a lot of work to prep all the ingredients & take the juicer apart & wash every piece: it comes down to about 30 minutes of work for a glass of juice. (It seems ridiculous that I’m complaining about this, seeing it in writing. Hmmmm. Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe it’s more like 45 minutes. Damn it! Prepare for a follow-up post, complete with time trials.)
My Dad’s Pet Fig Trees
real food challenge
my awesome cousin