Developing a New Talent

For Christmas '07 (yes, nearly a year and a half ago) "Santa Claus" gave me crochet needles. Rather than visions of sugar plums dancing in my head, I entertained visions of scarves, hats and bags. I was ready to take the world of crochet by storm. In a very matter-of-fact tone I informed Mr X that he would be sporting a fantastic new scarf in no time at all. About 3 or 4 months later, after spring had sprung, Mr X became the proud new owner of this work of art:


Maybe you'd like a closer look so you can appreciate all of the intricate details. Surely you're as wildly impressed with the color scheme and design as Mr X was...

As you can imagine, the making of the scarf pictured above took a lot out of me so I had a much needed hiatus of a year. Then I was back and feeling more talented than ever so I took on the challenge of making a pot holder-ish thing. I finished it a couple of nights ago. It's a pretty sorry looking thing, but it does the job for which it was intended so I'm just going to call it a smashing success.

I've already begun my next project: a beanie. Mr X casts dubious looks in my direction as I'm working on it - no doubt because I've already informed him that it will be the most wonderful beanie he has ever owned.

My weekend

This weekend Mr X and I (along with the Nye family) headed downtown to a farmer's market held in the Little Italy portion of San Diego. I love farmer's markets. They are so interesting and fun - infinitely more satisfying than shopping in a supermarket. At this particular market they were even selling sea urchins for our culinary delight. I've never tasted one, but I know they love them in parts of France. I was curious and would have tried them out but I never came across the 'sample' girls that the lady running the booth assured me were out and about providing sea urchin nibbles for those interested. Interestingly enough the only part of the sea urchin that is edible are the 'gonads' which are often referred to as roe.

I also purchased the following eggs to try out:

The speckled ones are turkey eggs and the creamy ones are duck eggs. So yesterday morning, rather than having my usual [chicken] egg and egg white omelet, I treated myself to a turkey egg omelet. The woman from whom I purchased these eggs assured me that the turkey eggs tasted nearly the same as chicken eggs but the duck eggs possess a much more rich flavor. I have yet to try the duck eggs, but the turkey eggs did NOT taste just like chicken eggs. I don't know how to describe the difference in flavor but it was definitely different. Since I'm very accustomed to eating chicken eggs most mornings of the week, I have to say I wasn't prepared for the change in taste and I didn't quite enjoy turkey eggs. I'm kind of nervous to try out the duck eggs now.

The picture above is of the turkey egg laying next to a chicken egg.

I also scored some lovely FREE flowers this weekend. As Mr X and I were driving back from who knows where, we saw a sign indicating there were flowers for the taking, free of charge. So we stopped and a man handed me a bouquet. He said they were free because they were from a wholesale place where they were 'past their prime.' I'm happy to report that 4 days later they are still looking fresh and lush.

I purchased a half flat of strawberries at the farmer's market and since they were perfectly ripe when I purchased them I knew they wouldn't last long so I made a sugar-free strawberry rhubarb pie with the rest of them. I'm not a big fan of strawberry rhubarb pie but Mr X seemed to really enjoy it.

Uhggg!

I'm so sick of seeing all those awful pictures of me in the different hairstyles every time I check or update my blog. Blech, already. So I'm posting this pathetic excuse of a post in a desperate attempt to hurry the process of getting that post in particular to fall of this blog. I think a couple more posts and they'll finally be gone! Hooray!

Healthy recipes

Since you already know that as of late there's nothing much going on for us except our ongoing battle with our bulging bellies, I thought I'd post some recipes I recently tried. I'm trying to eat healthy things with no process sugar so here are a few recipes that are actually incredibly delicious. (And, coincidentally, both gluten and dairy free.)

Spiced Nut Clusters

Ingredients:

1 large egg white
1 T honey
1 cup slivered almonds
1/2 cup raw pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
1/3 cup dried cranberries
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger (optional)
1/4 tsp ground cardamom

Directions:

1) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
2) Whisk the egg white and honey together. Add the nuts, seeds and cranberries. Sprinkle with the spices and toss to coat well.
3) Drop by 1/8 cup measures on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 18-20 minutes or until browned.
4) Let stand for about 30 minutes or until completely cooled. (If you touch them too soon they will fall apart.)

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Tomato Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients:

(Cooking spray)
4 large red bell peppers
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
3 T chopped calamata olives
4 medium sized ripe tomatoes
2 T olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Coat a large baking dish with cooking spray.
2) Cut the peppers in half lengthwise and remove seeds but leave the stems (it helps the pepper retain it's shape during the cooking process). Place the peppers cut side up in the baking dish.
3) Divide the sliced garlic and olives evenly among the peppers.
4) Cut each tomato into 8 wedges and put 4 wedges into each pepper half.
5) Drizzle each stuffed pepper with a little oil and season with a few grinds of pepper.
6) Roast the peppers until they are tender and beginning to brown around the edges, about 50 minutes and serve immediately.

My new favorite show

You know how Netflix 'recommends' movies and such to you based on your viewing history and your personal ratings? Well Mr X was browsing around in my account, trying to find something new to put in our queue. He saw that according to Netflix I appear to be a fan of television series (more so than movies - and BBC shows in particular), foreign films, documentaries and food programs. So Netflix was recommending this for a girl like me: Two Fat Ladies. It's a show that follows two overweight, very old ladies as they run around England in their motorcycle & sidecar cooking various dishes for various people. Mr X put it at the top of our queue as a joke. But we got it and I LOVE it - very funny. I highly recommend this show. (Mrs Nye might especially be interested.)

Nothing much going here

Since there's nothing exciting happening at the X household, I guess I'll just post about some of the boring things we've been up to. Last weekend we did some gardening, sort of. Because we rent, we can't really tear out our landlord's yard and put in a garden - I'm guessing he'd be a bit upset about that. So we are gardening out of mostly pots I guess.

There's a small strip of seemingly unused dirt on one side of our garage. Whether it's decent for growing anything remains to be seen. We're going to try though. We've got some wildflowers planted in the first third of it and the rest will be corn. I wonder what our neighbor will think when he sees we've planted corn along our garage.

This pot is full of various type of onions: red onions, sweet onions and yellow onions.

This is my basil pot which I love.

This pot has a couple hot pepper plants (I've forgotten which variety) and one red bell pepper plant. Maybe eventually the flavors will mingle and I'll have spicy bell peppers. I hope not.

I have no idea what types of flowers these are but I swear they are like weeds because I originally planted the blue ones in NM and they died so I tore them out and planted something else instead. I think the second we got to CA they started miraculously growing back and have now nearly taken over the pot. They're pretty anyhow so I'm happy about it.

This is my pot of rosemary which I also love.

This is Mr X's pot of melons. 2 different types of honeydews and 2 different types of watermelon. We're not entirely sure what we'll do if they actually take off. I suppose we'll have to set the melons down into the yard onto the grass and threaten the gardeners if they even think about mowing over them. In my imagination it will be like the Little Shop of Horrors and they'll just take over the entire yard.

So we'll see how this all plays out over the next several months. I'm hoping for a bounteous crop from our little make-shift garden.

Day Eight

If you’ve read a few of my recent blog posts, you are fully aware that I’ve been having trouble lately controlling my portion sizes and choosing healthy items to nosh on in general. I am always quick to push the blame onto sugar rather than my own weak will-power. But now, this article lends a little more weight (no pun intended) to my justification:

“Neuroscientists increasingly report that fat-and-sugar combinations in particular light up the brain's dopamine pathway — its pleasure-sensing spot — the same pathway that conditions people to alcohol or drugs.”

It turns out that I have a ‘condition’ called “hypereating” and it’s not so much my faulty will-power at all!

“Kessler's research suggests millions share what he calls "conditioned hypereating" — a willpower-sapping drive to eat high-fat, high-sugar foods even when they're not hungry.”

Ha! I can’t really blame it all on the fact that I’m addicted to food because like most addictions, I have the power to fight it and control it (which the article also points out). But along those lines and as a result of my Easter free-for-all and the 10 extra pounds I’ve been hefting around these days, I decided to declare war on my enemy: Sugar. It seems to me that every time I allow myself to indulge in some sort of sugary treat, I not only crave more and more of it but I also begin to crave other equally horrible food items. I also find that once I’m on the sugar train I have a harder time keeping my portion sizes reasonable. In an effort to get off that delightful train, I’m going cold turkey. (I’ve always been an all-or-nothing kind of girl.) So today is Day 8 of No Processed Sugars.

Hair

Back when I first moved to CA, long before I Mr X knew me, I went a little highlight crazy with my hair. I had so many blonde highlights that I was pretty much a dark blonde of sorts. Prior to that I had tried out the auburn look and jet black as well. After several years of meandering hair color I couldn't remember exactly what color my hair was, so I decided to gradually go 'Au Natural' before that natural color became gray. That was something like 7 years ago. Now it seems the gray is starting to creep in enough that I can no longer simply pluck them out or I'd look bald-ish.





So I decided to play around with some new looks and see what styles and color I liked. Here are a few of my attempts:

How does this auburn color do on me?

How about a nice medium blonde? Could I pull that off or is it just weird?


What if I just tried a a lighter brown with lots of blonde highlights?

Or is dark brown with highlights the way to go?

What if I tried to pull off a really light blonde look?

Or maybe I should just keep my color natural and simply stop getting my hair straightened?

Sweet Release

I think a lot of people have this misconception that I’m a health nut. This is completely untrue. I TRY to exercise regularly and I’d say that my attempts are usually successful. I TRY to eat healthily but I often fail miserably in that. Especially lately. I’m currently recovering from an Easter-induced sugar overdose. Against my better judgment I made some of those cupcakes with the mini Cadbury Crème Eggs in the center. And, of course, I ate them. (They were delightful!) The only reason I didn’t eat them all was because Mr and Mrs T were in town with their kids and therefore I HAD to share. Then I swiped some of my nephews’ sugary loot from their Easter baskets. And of course Mr and Mrs T presented me with my very own treat: a large dark chocolate See’s bunny. Unfortunately I had the brilliant idea of breaking my bunny into pieces (since it was hollow) and then dunking the ‘chips’ into peanut butter to create my very own [and far superior] version of the peanut butter cup. Then this morning, as I squeezed myself into my ‘fat pants’, the realization hit me (again for the 44th time in the last 44 days), “Wow, my fat pants are tight!” It’s all the damn sugar! I’m addicted and it’s cheap, easy and legal. (It also might be the butter but I can only fight one thing at a time and butter is the lesser of two evils.) Anyway, my point here is that I’d love to be a health nut, but I’m not. I’m just your normal sugar-addicted American woman. And I’m in desperate need of will power these days.

On being forgetful

3 days a week I utilize the company gym located in the building in which I work. It’s a wonderful time saver AND money saver. At my previous job I joined a local gym nearby my office. So it’s been several years now that I’ve been toting my trusty backpack to work with me, stuffed with workout clothes and shoes as well as shower necessities: towel, shower shoes and toiletries. You’d think that by now I would have gotten to be a pro at not forgetting anything. But from time to time I can be quite absentminded. Today I forgot fresh underpants. (I’ve done this on several occasions.) The solution? Simple, workout sans underpants. Nice and breezy. Yesterday I forgot workout socks. I just wore my running shoes without socks. Not entirely comfortable but easy enough. These two overlooked items are nothing compared to things I’ve forgotten before:

Twice I've forgoten my sports bra. I just kept my regular one on and used the elliptical rather than the treadmill. I’m confident nobody at work had a clue that I had a sweat drenched bra on the rest of the day.

Another time I forgot my running shoes. Luckily I was wearing flats to work so I just kept those puppies on and stepped on the elliptical.

I’ve forgotten my shower towel before. That one is kind of a crummy item to go without. I half ‘air dried’ and used a lot of paper towels. Even then my work clothes had splotchy wet patches all over them when I got back to work.

The worst so far is the one time where I forgot my shirt. That was the one thing that would have thwarted me (I’m not going to run around the gym with nothing over my sports bra! How embarrassing!) except one of my fellow officemates had to bail out of the gym at the last minute so she let me use her workout shirt. Bless her heart.

I have yet to forget my pants/shorts but I’m sure it’ll happen one day.

All Gone!

After my last lemon post I managed to pilfer a few more lemons, bringing my total to somewhere near 50. I'm happy to report that after a roast lemon chicken, 2 lemon meringue pies (one of which we gave away) and another batch of blackberry lemonade I still had enough lemons to make 5 pints of lemon marmalade. I even canned the marmalade. I've never canned anything before and after extensive research, I gave it a go and everything seemed to turn out well (meaning all the cans' tops snapped in and sealed) so I was thrilled. Now I have plenty of time to figure out what to do with 5 pints of marmalade. I documented the process with my camera:

One of Mr X's many quirks

Lately Mr X has developed a rather obnoxious bathroom habit. When the roll of toilet paper is almost out, he starts using a new roll from our supply underneath the stand next to the toilet so that he doesn't have to be the one to change the roll. It seems to me like a lot of effort to go through with simply to avoid the minimal effort required in changing the roll. Someday we'll just have to get ourselves a bidet so Mr X won't have to deal with the daunting chore of roll-changing...poor thing.

The King of seasonal treats

I LOVE Cadbury Creme Eggs. Of all of the seasonal candies and treats that come out throughout the year, the creme egg is easily my favorite. And all of those silly variations? The snickers egg, the orange creme egg, etc? They are just pathetic gimmicks and in no way to they even come close to achieving the perfection of the Cadbury Creme Egg. It stands alone in it's supreme-ness. Even the mini creme eggs don't cut it - they get the ratio of creme to chocolate all wrong.

What I find pathetic is that over the years, Hershey has sneakily trimmed the egg down all the while charging the same for it - in essence Hershey is simply trying to pull the wool over our eyes and I despise them for that trickery. I'm not that dumb. I'm fully aware that the egg has gone from 1.4 ounces to 1.2 ounces in recent years and I'm not happy about it, Hershey!

Anyway, on to more interesting things. I recently found this website with a recipe for baking muffins with a creme egg inside. Is that pure genius or what? I guess it's the only way to properly use those sub-par mini creme eggs anyway.

(They definitely aren't the prettiest muffins in the world but I'm confident that what they lack in physical beauty they more than make up for in deliciousness - even though I've never actually tried them.)

My latest haul...

A few nights ago, under the cover of darkness, Mr X and I stealthily snagged not one, not two, but 28 lemons and smuggled them home. Woo hoo! I've also got my eye on another tree around the corner that's chock full of juicy lemons just waiting to be liberated by me. They will be mine...oh yes, they will be mine.

Until then I need to decide exactly how to best utilize this latest batch of lemon contraband. My last uses included blackberry lemonade (with fresh blackberries from the market) and a lemon sauce for drizzling on salads and vegetables.