I've been making fruit smoothies at bedtime to take my daily pills and supplements with. Besides being good for that, drinking the smoothies (essentially fruit salads in pureed form) means I indulge in a lot less ice cream and other high-sugar, high-fat snacks than I used to.
I use a wide variety of ingredients. This combination worked particularly well, so I thought I'd preserve the recipe.
Coconut-Pineapple-Ginger Smoothie 11/2 C. coconut milk 1/2 C. Del Monte pineapple in coconut-flavored light syrup (these come in lunchbox-size plastic cups with a half-cup in each) 1/2 tsp. ginger paste (or more, if you like ginger) 1 scoop whey protein powder (about 34 grams, or slightly over 1 ounce by weight, or about 3 ounces by volume; it's fluffy stuff) Blend until smooth. Enjoy. About 300 calories. (My carton of coconut milk came out of the fridge in slushy form. You might want to add several ice cubes to chill the mixture.)
World/Political Links:
This story has, rather appropriately, gone viral already, but hey: GOP Senator: Don't Force Employees To Wash Hands After Using Toilet. This is the triumph of ideology over sanity. The GOP's tolerance and endorsement of extremists and public menaces like Senator Tillis is a major reason why I haven't voted for a Republican office-seeker in years.
Related to the above: The Sepsis Allianceis an organization promoting awareness and prevention of sepsis (aka "blood poisoning"), runaway infections that are the third-leading cause of death in the US and leave large numbers of survivors with physical and mental impairments. A primary cause of early infections developing into full-blown sepsis is insufficient education and enforcement of sanitary procedures.
Oh dang, I missed National Chocolate Cake Day on January 27th! To make up for it, here's baking-savant Dorie Greenspan's recipe for Double Chocolate Marble Cake.
Art Links:
Here, Kitty, Kitty.... Because nothing says "Sci-Fi" like a Cowboy Space Bear riding Rocket Sharks in pursuit of a Space Cat With A Jetpack. Doing it in black-velvet-painting style is a bonus. (Design by Cory Freeman and chazwick31. I liked it so much I bought the t-shirt!)
Zim & Zou are the team of Lucie Thomas and Thibault Zimmerman, French artists who work in paper, leather, and other materials. The image at left is a sample of their work. The link above goes to a large list of other projects they've posted on behance.net.
I will occasionally see something weird at the grocery store that I can't resist picking up andtaking home to try out. International Delight puts out a line of flavored coffee creamers, in the usual flavors (Hazelnut, etc.) and some less than usual ones. But those have all been on the "sweet" spectrum of flavors.
This new flavor, Vanilla Heat, is the first I've seen that uses a flavor generally reserved for the savory spectrum: This is vanilla-flavored with the addition of a chili-pepper flavor.
It's... pretty weird. I like sweet, and I like savory. But I generally don't like them together. A couple of exceptions: Picadillo, a Spanish ground beef dish flavored with capers and/or green olives, vinegar and (yep, really) raisins. And I've liked some of the salty-sweet snack crackers and chips from various producers.
As a coffee creamer, though, vanilla-and-chili doesn't really work that well. The whole point of a coffee creamer, in my experience, is to mellow out the bitterness and occasional "burnt" flavor of coffee, especially the dark-roast varieties. So the basic creamer calms down some of the flavors going into your mouth, and the added "sweet" flavors also help cover up those less pleasant aspects of drinking coffee. (No, I don't do black coffee. Ever.)
The chili flavor in Vanilla Heat works against that calming aspect of the creamer. It excites and stimulates your taste buds, and not in a way I expect or enjoy. It also leaves a mild "burn" in your mouth and/or throat. I don't mind that type of burning sensation when I'm eating Mexican food or other spicy dishes, but it's not what I look for in my coffee. (I tend to use enough sugar and creamer in my coffee in general that it comes closer to dessert than beverage, in some people's view.) So overall, I have to say that Vanilla Heat fell solidly into the "Try It Once" category for me.
It reminds me of an old product called Cajun Cola, the story of which was profiled in a very interesting article in a 1990 issue of Inc magazine. It was a "spicy cola" with a chili kick, and it sold very well... at first. What the producer of the cola failed to realize was that a spicy cola was essentially a novelty item, and that most people would try it once or a few times and then go back to their standard cola drinks. After a while, less than a year, sales tanked, and Cajun Cola died and went to the Museum of Failed Products.
International Delight's website lists Vanilla Heat as one of their "Seasonal" offerings. From other reviews online, it seems to have gone on the market back in September. I can't help wondering if it's being offered this last holiday season was an example of test marketing. (Phoenix's diverse population makes it a popular city for companies to test-market new products.) Personally, I'll be just as happy if they try out a different flavor next holiday season.
Every once in a while Hilde and I need to remind ourselves that there's more to the world than the house and doctors' offices. So when I saw there was a barbeque festival being held this weekend in Scottsdale, I went ahead and got tickets.
The Arizona BBQ Festival was held on the grounds of Salt River Fields, a large multi-diamond baseball/sports facility. Besides numerous BBQ and other food vendors, there was live music, cooking demonstrations, the Redneck Games Arena---
---where they had such events as Dead Lawnmower Racing, Hubcap Hurling, Arm Wrestling, and Bobbing For Pigs Feet. We left a little early to catch the contests for Best Redneck Moustache, Best Redneck Tattoo, and Best Daisy Dukes & Cowboy Boots.
There was also a children's area, with lots of inflatable slides and other activities for the kids there.
We caught several of the cooking demonstrations. The 4:00 event was Chef Craig Driml of Uncle Bear's Grill & Bar (a growing chain of "comfort food" -- burgers, pizzas, BBQ, chili, etc -- restaurants, named after the owner's dog), where some very nice pulled pork sliders were prepared and served to the audience.
The 5:00 demo was by Chef Mel Mecinas from the Four Seasons Resort in North Scottsdale. The Four Seasons is very upscale, and I have to say there was a noticeable difference in quality between Uncle Bear's food ("very nice", as I said above) and the brisket and coleslaw prepared by Chef Mecinas. The brisket was excellent, deeply flavored, pulling apart easily, and served so fresh from the oven that the slices of meat were still hot enough to zing your fingertips if you tried to eat the brisket by hand. But what really impressed me was Mecinas' coleslaw.
I detest coleslaw. It always seems to be a standard side dish for BBQ, fried chicken, and other comfort-food dishes, and it always sucks. It takes ingredients that are perfectly usable and edible in other dishes, and combines them into a product to which the best reaction is "Blehhh." In the last forty years or more, I don't think I've eaten more than a teaspoon or two of the default-coleslaw found on most tables. But I tried a forkful of Mecinas' coleslaw... and I wanted more. Holy crap, it tasted good. Really no-frikkin'-around good.
I wasn't the only person in the demo's audience impressed by the coleslaw. Mecinas was asked if a recipe was available. No, actually; he'd thrown the coleslaw together by eye and taste, and didn't have formal proportions or measurements available. But here's the list of ingredients, as closely as I could hear or reconstruct them. (The helicopter-rides vendor was close by, and copters taking off or landing occasionally drowned out the audio in the cooking demo tent.):
Napa cabbage
Raddichio
Apple
Fennel
Fresh tarragon
Celery seed
2 parts creme fraiche
1 part mayonaisse
Sherry vinegar
Cider vinegar
Sugar
There may also have been a dash of kosher salt and/or pepper in there. But now I want to go to Four Seasons and try their restaurants.
One of the bands listed to perform at the Festival, Voodoo Swing, sounded like the type of fast-beat, pounding-rhythm ("Rockabilly" is the usual term) performers I frequently enjoy. But Hilde and I were still in line at one of the food vendors on the opposite side of the Festival when they began their set. Which was actually a good thing. I've complained before that too many live performers seem to feel obliged to turn their amplifiers to "11" when they're playing in public. Voodoo Swing appears to be yet another. I could hear their music pretty damn well even way over in the food court area. If I'd been in the official audience area by the bandstand, it would have been physically painful.
As it turned out, I did enjoy Voodoo Swing, as long as I was far enough away to hear them at a tolerable level. Here's a YouTube video for "My Rockabilly Martian Gal" from their latest album. (C'mon, could I really write a post this long without including a science-fiction connection?)
And that's how we spent an afternoon actually acting like normal people.
Diced fruit (strawberries & mangos), a shotglass (1 oz.) of half-&-half, a bit of sugar. About 200 calories.
I've been trying to eat a little healthier. One of the annoying side effects of breaking the arm is that I get a lot less exercise when I stay at home. (My job usually called for about 3 to 5 miles worth of walking per shift.) So I gained about eight pounds in the first month after the accident. Since extra pounds had already been slowly creeping up on me even before the accident, that meant I got back up into the 190's. Ideally, I'd like to be about 165 pounds.
Those height-&-weight charts say my ideal weight should be about 155, but on the rare occasion when I've gotten down to that weight, I look gaunt, I don't feel great, and I'm hungry all the time. (True story: The last time I got down to 155, I was still working as a letter carrier, and several of my customers expressed concern that I had cancer.)
Getting down to 165 is do-able (I've done it before), I look good and feel good, and with a bit of time management and planning I can usually stay within a few pounds of that goal for a considerable time. I've managed, even with the arm restricting my exercise, to drop back down to 187 since the end of February, about a 5 pound loss.
The main tool I've been using to monitor my eating habits and activity is an Android app called Noom. No, I don't know what "Noom" is supposed to mean, other than being "moon" spelled backwards.
I've used earlier versions of Noom before with some success, tempered by problems with the application. An earlier version kept freezing up in mid-action, and a later version presented itself in ways that annoyed me. One example was that they used sports-similes to judge food amounts: "golf ball size", "tennis ball size", etc. Hey, there are people who have so little interest in sports that they have only the vaguest idea how big a baseball or softball is. (I'm the only person I know of who flunked grade school P.E. Yes, I really did. I was the original "does not play well with others" kid.)
The newest update, which I downloaded onto my smartphone last month, seems to have fixed most of those problems. Operates smoothly, and you can now choose between measuring by simile or by actual measurements.
One of the things I like about Noom, compared to other diet or fitness planners, is that they use an estimation system for food calories and value. Other planners I tried had huge databases of specific foods and brands, and it was easy to get lost and spend lots of time finding and entering those specific choices.
Noom's first-level food choices divides food into three major categories, "Green" for healthy foods, "Yellow" for okay foods, and "Red" for foods that should be avoided or minimalized. Each of those wide categories has two to three dozen subcategories, broken down into more specific but not too-specific choices (egg whites are "Green", whole eggs are "Yellow", bacon is "Red"). Clicking on one of those subcategories gives you various amounts to choose from for what your meal contained and calorie counts ranging from 25 for a tiny "Green" portion to 600 calories for a large "Red" portion. I find this system a lot easier and quicker to use than other planners' more detailed breakdowns.
But it can get even quicker and easier. When you've familiarized yourself with a bunch of portion sizes and calorie counts for various foods, you can go straight to a "Dial A Menu" feature that lets you enter the general category, portion size and calorie count in a single click.
Noom also has features to track exercise and weight, and provides daily tasks and advice to help keep you on track and motivated.
I use the free version, which I find sufficient. The paid version ($9.99 per month, yikes!) features extra individualized coaching and guidance. Android-only, though they're supposed to be working on an iPhone version.
Coconut-Pineapple-Ginger Smoothie
Coconut-Pineapple-Ginger Smoothie
