Eat to work, work to eat

I suggested stuffed bell peppers for supper tonight — I would have suggested it for yesterday, if we’d had some thawed ground beast. It was quite good, and she invited her parents up to help us eat it. Still, there was enough left over to stuff a microwave dish with a pepper, ear of corn, potatoes, and a slice of Mexican corn bread that Mrs. Fetched’s mom made (hot stuff! yum!). It won’t be any problem carrying it to work, since we’ll be getting my Civic first thing tomorrow.

Since the mom-in-law is going to the farmer’s market in the morning, I cleared the jalapeño bushes of the larger peppers, ending up with over two pounds of biiiig green chiles. Maybe someone will have cilantro and want to trade… I just can’t seem to grow cilantro.

The last of my “restricted” stock just got un-restricted. The HR department sent a memo around saying that they were going to use shares to withhold taxes, and “your net pay will not be affected.” Um… they forgot the Social Security part, which knocked a cool $600 off this paycheck, and I can ill afford to not have that money. I need to sell some of that stock, I guess… and since it’s lost about $2 in the last week, I’ll have to sell more than I needed to in the first place. At least I have the option (pun not intended). Maybe it will shoot back up tomorrow. Maybe pigs will… oh, never mind.

Ramen done right

It could use some mushrooms, but otherwise the broth turned out loads better than I expected! Chuck that sodium packet in the trash and Know the Potential of Ramen. As with all my CubeDweller recipes, all of the ingredients can be stored in a file cabinet or other dry place (no refrigeration required).

CubeDweller Ramen Soup

4 c. water
6 sun-dried tomatoes, broken
4 pearl onions, peeled and quartered
1 clove garlic, diced

Herbs (substitute as you please, this is what I used but would have added basil if I had some):
1 sage leaf
1/4 tsp. marjoram
1/2 tsp. black pepper
Mrs. Dash® Tomato/Basil Blend
3/4 tsp. chives, chopped
1 large parsley leaf

pinch of salt
1 tsp. olive oil
1 packet ramen
Protein source of choice, cooked if necessary (optional, I used a tin of sardines packed in water)

Put tomatoes, onions, garlic, sage, marjoram, pepper, olive oil, salt, and 2 cups of water in a microwave pot. Cover tightly and microwave on high for 10 minutes. Stir. Add ramen, protein source, and remaining water; microwave on high for 2 more minutes. Garnish with chives and parsley.

Serves two with a side dish, or one if you’re hungry.

Nice winter days

The only thing you can say for certain about January and February on this planet is that the days steadily get longer. I noticed yesterday that there’s now more light at 6:30 p.m. than there was at 5:30 p.m. at Christmas. Spring training is about to get under way, another sure sign that winter really is not permanent. I don’t follow baseball nearly as much as I used to, but to me baseball is still a metaphor for summer nights, the voice of which is Ernie Harwell calling the play-by-play for the Tigers on a static-y AM radio:

For, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth;
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

I mean, really. The announcers for the Braves are OK, but nobody can do “swinnnnnnnng an-a miss!” like Ernie. God, I miss him. Maybe that’s why I don’t follow baseball these days; my personal Voice of Summer is now only in my head.

So yesterday, I didn’t feel like fixing lunch, and I needed a little exercise. I stepped outside and ohhhh yeahhhhhh, sixty-some degrees, the sun was shining, and you can’t enjoy a day like that in a car! Off to the Kroger Grill to get some grilled chicken, to be consumed at an outdoor table with some baked beans and a Diet Cherry Coke (an indulgence I allow myself once or twice a week). I walked quickly, both to save some time and so I could count it as my day’s exercise. Just to have a little fun and make it a bit more aerobic, I took the shortcuts through the weeds in the back of the office park and the parking lot of the building where I used to work.

And... the grill wasn’t open? WTF!?? A day like this, when people are going to want to have lunch outside, perhaps for the first time in months? Sheesh! There are plenty of other restaurants close by, but nothing I particularly want (or need, given I’m trying to limit sodium). But wait! They have a sushi bar inside! I asked the chef on duty about sodium, and he showed me their booklet that has all their nutrition info plus other neat sushi facts (not to mention all the groovy things they’ll sell you, including a complete DIY sushi kit for $37.50... yum). The Shoreline Combo looked like a pretty good match of moderate sodium and low cholesterol, so I grabbed one. Since I was there, I picked up a six-pack of ramen since I was out. The cashier actually asked me if I was from California. Um, no... but Lord knows this planet could stand to be a little more like it.

Turns out that little soy sauce packet they give you has more sodium than all 12 pieces of sushi combined, so that went in the trash and I just spread the wasabi over each piece. It was a very pleasant meal, and I had the entire outdoor dining area to myself. I saw another (full) soy sauce packet on another table, so it looks like someone else may have had the same idea before I did. Walking home after a very satisfying meal, I had to take my coat off and carry it. Mid-February can be like that, or it can be cold steel rain, or slush storms. You just make the most of the good days.

Just think... in a few months, we’ll be wishing it was cold again. But for now, it might snow again tomorrow night. sigh

Dangit

Mrs. Fetched baked some salmon last night, with some potatoes etc. on the side. I put the leftovers into two microwave plates — one for my lunch today and one for The Boy after he came home from band practice.

As things really went, Lobster ate The Boy’s plate... and The Boy ate my plate.

Sodium dodging

There's a new extreme sport for middle-aged men, called “Sodium Roulette.” Here’s how you play:

1. Go to the supermarket.


2. Pick up something that sounds good.


3. Now, look at the label and see how much sodium there is in one serving. Write it down.


4. Repeat until someone goes over 2400mg of sodium. That person is out.


5. Last man standing wins!

Actually, I spent my lunch in the supermarket yesterday and actually found some good stuff. I’ve been trying to come up with some foods that are easy to fix in a microwave, don’t require refrigeration, are tasty, and not bad for you. I consider the trip a success, coming back with:

• “Instant” brown rice (I don’t consider 7 minutes cooking time to be “instant,” but whatever.)


• Cipollini onions (they’re small, so you can use whole onions and not have halfies left over)


• Albacore tuna, marked “very low sodium” (at albacore prices, naturally... ouch)


• Sardines packed in water (very little sodium, especially compared to packed in mustard or oil)


• Smoked oysters (more sodium than the fish, but still within reason)


• Low-sodium Triscuits (I was looking for Wheat Thin(g)s, but these will do)


• Bean sprouts (there’s a refrigerator at work, fortunately... I just didn’t want to fill it up


• Mrs. Dash Tomato/Basil/Garlic Blend


• Bananas

I have a few packs of ramen hiding in the back of one of my overhead bins; chuck the “flavor” packet and what’s left is the closest thing to instant pasta that I know of.

Googling for “cipollini onions,” I found some recipes for roasting them that sound absolutely divine as a side dish to beef or pork... but right now, I’m primarily concerned about what I can cook in the break room microwave. I cut up a couple of onions into the rice pot, threw in a small handful of bean sprouts, added some Mrs. Dash, and nuked the whole shebang then topped it with a can of tuna. The result was edible, if a little bland; I need to vary the ingredients a little bit and maybe toss in some green pepper. I’ll post a recipe when I get it right.

I’m thinking about how I can do something with the ramen & smoked oysters...

Born pure, salted to death

Given my aging-male issues (blood pressure, cholesterol), I decided to take a closer look at some of the labels on stuff I eat. I was surprised; except for that one weekend breakfast where we fix bacon & eggs, I don’t eat that much cholesterol at all. Through the week, I eat oatmeal when I get to work then have a pop-tart in the mid- to late morning; not much of the artery-clogging stuff.

But My God! the sodium!

It’s in everything, it seems. Even Coca-Cola (which I don’t drink much of) has a little! I had lunch at Subway today, and grabbed one of the nutrition charts they keep handy: most of the sandwiches have like 1100mg (or more) of sodium. Hunh? That’s as much as a cheap can of soup (the Healthy Choice soups are better). The sandwiches must absorb it from the Chinese restaurant about three doors down or something. “On average, Americans consume 4,000 to 6,000 milligrams of sodium daily” (recommended intake is 2400mg, just over a teaspoon of salt). No wonder over 25% of the population has high blood pressure!

I was already taking a hard look at cheese, thinking the cholesterol might be a problem there. Well, not so much as the sodium. Mom was telling me about touring a cheese-making operation last year; she saw them literally using shovels to throw salt into the batch. Low-fat Swiss cheese seems to be the best bet in terms of both sodium and saturated fat.

Even a slice of bread has 120mg to 180mg of sodium. That just floored me; I often make my own bread, so I decided to have a look at my own product. Aha... preservatives. My bread recipes call for about ½ tsp. of salt per loaf (and I tend to skimp on the salt anyway), the only sodium in any of the ingredients I use — at 14 slices per loaf, I get 82mg of sodium per slice. Yup, gonna be making my own bread from now on. And maybe slicing it just a little thinner, too.

When it comes to scary, Stephen King’s got nothing on food labels.

Busy weekend

Current music: DI.fm Chillout
I’m not terribly fond of weekends where you have no decompress time.

Saturday morning dawned; Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest headed out to deal with the chickens. I decided to try fixing some pancakes for when they got back, and botched them totally (my brain-fart was forgetting about the self-rising flour). With no milk, I used the remnants of a can of condensed milk plus water to thin it out, then tossed in some self-rising flour hoping to correct the mistake. Didn’t work. Not even the boys ate them.

So we rushed out the door to a 50^th wedding anniversary for some friends of the in-laws. It was a nice outing overall; starting at a Ryan’s, then we ended up at one of their houses where we shot a couple rounds of pool and shot the breeze with people we haven’t seen much of. From there we went straight to a Christmas party put on by a couple at church; I enjoyed some spiked eggnog and we all chowed down again.

This morning, I got dressed and sat down with the iBook for the first time in several days. Her Imperial Highness came out, literally looked down her nose at me, and ordered me to get the boys up and go over to the church early to vacuum the sanctuary and take the greens out of the window (there was a wedding this afternoon). Ooooooookayyyy... first off, she certainly knows that getting the boys up doesn’t go with getting anywhere early. Of course, The Boy had a friend over (we wish he had more friends like EJ, but that’s a different story), so of course he had to have an attitude.

First trip upstairs: “OK, I’m getting up.”
Second trip: “I’m not going to church, I’ll go help at the chicken houses.”
Third trip: “I don’t have to get up.”

At that point, I told him that he could remember that when he was walking to work and back today, then asked EJ if he wanted to come to church with me. He did, they both got moving, I dropped The Boy off at the chicken houses and grabbed the church keys out of Her Imperial Highness’s purse (another minor detail), then took care of things at church.

After church, we ended up getting some pizza, had about an hour and a half before going out again with the in-laws. Then SWMBO decided the living room had to be cleaned up (and it’s mostly her stuff), but I got a reprieve to pick up M.A.E. from work.

Now it’s bedtime. I can’t wait to get back to the office and relax a little...

Lunchtime blogging

Second night in a row that I couldn’t get to the computer — I was mucking out the gutters in the outbuilding, by hand, in the dark cold rain, last night. Blog stuff is backing up, so I compromised on my self-imposed “no blogging at work” rule and decided to post all this junk at lunch.

The NWS was a little more optimistic about last night’s weather than they should have been — they said we would be well clear of any significant freezing rain. WRONG! Power glitched at the house and rang a phone once, this morning, but everything else seems to be OK. I disconnected the DSL box at home just to make sure. Going to work was a bit of an adventure; the roads were only wet (not icy) but power was out in town and several traffic lights were dark on the highway. And how the juice managed to stay on at FAR Manor is a puzzlement. At work, the power had glitched some time last night, long enough to shut off my G3. I ran the disk repair stuff and got to work.

It’s still this cold steel rain (phrase borrowed from Pink Floyd, it’s perfect) outside, so I dug into the more dubious reaches of my overhead bin for lunch. I have several packs of ramen for days like this, but I only used a pinch of the beef-flavored sodium packet and opted instead for this “Kyo-Green® dietary supplement” packet that’s been sitting on my desk for like forever. Oh, the ingredients sounded soooo appetizing: barley grass powder, wheat grass powder, Bulgarian Chlorella (an algae grown in mineral springs, yum), cooked brown rice, and Pacific kelp (more yum). I’m not a picky eater, so when I say it was “edible,” adjust for your own level of picky. I figured worst-case, I’d be out 20 cents for the ramen and I could still go out. I’m scarfing some potato chips and some quality candy & nuts that the employer handed out yesterday as a side dish. We’ll see if I end up with with a major download event this afternoon....

Thanksgiving, and giving thanks

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving where such is celebrated. We did pretty well today; lots of chow and laughter. My contributions to the spread at the in-laws were challah bread (using this recipe, and a sardine spread which I threw together. If anyone else wants to try it, here’s a recipe:

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Sardine spread
1 tin sardines, drained
3 oz. cream cheese (approx)
1 large basil leaf (I used two, which made it kind of strong)
3 oregano leaves
1 sprig of parsley
pinch of thyme & rosemary
(substitute herbs as needed for availability and taste)

Remove the stems from the herb leaves. Chop finely (food processor works great for this). Add the cream cheese. Remove backbones from sardines and add the sardines (not the backbones... but you knew that). Blend/process until completely mixed. Serve with crackers.

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What am I thankful for this year?

As with every year (day) this millennium so far, I’m thankful for having a job. These last two years I’ve been thankful that the job, as crazy as it drives me sometimes, provides good medical insurance and meets at least our basic needs.

I’m thankful for having a family and friends, both local and online, who care.

I’m thankful for having an imagination and a place to let it run.

I’m thankful for living in America. Bush-league has damaged it, but hasn’t broken it. Better times are coming.

Eating Season

Current music: St. Elmo’s Fire – John Parr
It occurred to me this morning that the two months starting with Hallowe’en and ending with New Year’s Day could be called “Eating Season,” at least in the US, Canada, and maybe Europe. Why do we have so many holidays at this time of year that involve candy, big meals, or both?

It actually makes sense if you look at it on an instinctual level. This is the time of year when non-tropical creatures are working on storing up fuel for the winter. Winter fat has a couple of survival advantages: one, you have a reserve when regular food gets hard to come by; two, fat insulates, so you don’t burn as many calories to stay warm. Calories, after all, are a measure of heat... although a dietetic calorie is 1000 “chemical” calories (or a “kilocalorie”). I don’t know why. So it makes sense that we, on a sub-conscious level, would look for excuses to load up on the chow this time of year.

Nowadays, we have other ways to survive the winter. Grocery stores are well-stocked with fresh produce from South America, we have nice warm houses (if we don’t forget to order fuel for the furnace, of course), and most of us have warm jackets if and when we do have to go outside. But racial habits, built on over thousands of years, are the hardest of all to break. So this year, I'm not going to worry about how much I eat during Eating Season. If I feel led to try a little of everything, I will. A little of everything. I’ll try to get outside more over the winter, letting Mother Nature burn those calories for me.

Death by Number 33

We went to one of the local Mexican restaurants last night (there are two in town, and two more in the retail district — people here like their tacos, I guess). Since I was on the way, they ordered #33 (chili relleno, tostada, quesadilla) for me. The barking started soon after leaving the restaurant; Daughter Dearest made the mistake of riding with me and I got to “share.”

It gets worse: the wife tells me the snoring (from both ends) went on most of the night and she ended up sleeping in the living room. I was even more oblivious than usual.

It continues to get worse: they haven’t completely gone away yet, over 24 hours later.

Gnarly-Top Wheat Bread

I really need to start adding a little more water to the dough when I put the bread machine on dough cycle. Quite often, the dough is good & tight, and I have to prod and pull and stretch to get it to fill the pan. Tonight’s wheat bread needed some extra water — not only was it on the dry side, it was bogging the machine down to the point where the motor wouldn’t turn without some help, and that was after I added more water.

Naturally, those finger-pokes and so on don’t flow or rise out of the dough after it goes in the pan, so the result looks like the above. It’s still good though. I’ll cut it up first thing in the morning. Right now, it’s bed time!