You know what they say…

It takes just 30 days to make a habit.

Actually, I don’t know if “they” say that.  But my good friend told me that once, and for some reason I remember it (and, since I inherited the worst memory on the planet from my mother, its pretty remarkable that I do).  But regardless of who says it, I like to think that it’s true.  And since I’ve decided that, that means that I am in the habit of cooking all of my own meals from scratch using lots of fresh veggies.  I have now been doing it for a full 30 days, and I’m pretty proud of that.

Tonight, I made a recipe that my mom used to make when I was growing up.  Its simple and delicious.  Here it is:

 

Just like Mom used to make

Homestyle Beef Stew

1 lb Stew Meat

6-8 Carrots

2 Medium Onions

4-5 Potatoes (or Turnips)

Salt and Pepper

2-3 Tbsp. Flour

Put on some water to boil in a saucepan, enough to boil the meat in (the pot has to be big enough to get all the meat and vegetables into eventually).  Take the flour and put it in a bowl, mix in some salt and pepper.  I always buy my stew meat pre-cut, but if you don’t, cut it up into the size you want.  I like leaving mine in big chunks, 1-2″ pieces or larger.  Take the pieces of meat and coat the outside in the flour mixture.  Heat up some oil in a sauté pan, and brown the outside of the stew meat on all sides.  Then take the meat and place it in the boiling water. 

Peel the carrots and potatoes (or keep the skin on the potatoes if you want).  Due to my low-carb diet, I used turnips.  They’re a decent substitute, but not as good as the potatoes.  But, if you want to use the turnips, peel them.  I like to have big chunks of veggies in my stew, so I cut the turnips and the onions into quarters or eighths, depending on their size.  I also cut the carrot into bigger chunks – do it however you like it – but remember to adjust the cooking time if you cut your veggies smaller.

Boil the meat for an hour and a half – stew meat needs a long time to get tender.  Add some salt and pepper to the water to add a little flavor while cooking.  Be sure to check the meat every now and again and make sure there’s still enough water and add more when it gets low.  After an hour and a half, your meat will be tender and you will have some delicious broth in the making.  At this point, add your veggies to the mix.  Make sure there’s enough water in the pot to cover the vegetables once you put them in, add some if there isn’t.  It takes between 15-30 minutes more to cook the veggies – test the potatoes/turnips to make sure they’re cooked all the way through.

Once the veggies are cooked through, you’re done.  I like a lot of salt, so I end up adding quite a bit to the pot when I make it, but the salt and pepper decision is up to you.  You can add some cut up fresh tomatoes too, or a can of stewed tomatoes, if you prefer the broth to be a little tomato-y.  Some people also add beef broth to the water or thicken the broth with a little flour at the end.  But I prefer it like this, you really get the clean yummy flavor of the meat and veggies. 

That’s all – Enjoy!

Veggie Tales

So, since I’ve been so good about buying fresh vegetables and cooking all of my meals, I’ve decided to start experimenting with new vegetables.  The first grocery trip, the only semi-weird thing I bought was bean sprouts.  I’ve eaten sprouts before, but I’ve never bought them at the store to use at home.

My second trip of the year I bought turnips.  I used them in a very interesting version of corned beef hash.  Since I’m doing the low-carb thing, I can’t eat potatoes.  I’ve gotta tell ya – these come pretty darn close to potatoes.  I really liked them.  The use of turnips is not what made me call the recipe “interesting”.  It was interesting because the seasoning choices in the recipe I used were weird.  In fact, it was weird to the point where I can’t totally decide if I liked it.  In fact, I think I both liked and disliked it.  I kind of think its delicious, but the flavor mix is really strange.

But because of my new-found love for turnips, I have been inspired to buy vegetables I’ve never used before, and because I want to use fresh food, I’m going to start cooking vegetables that I don’t normally cook myself.  This week, I am going to cook something that I usually buy pre-cooked.  I’m going to make a beet and goat cheese salad (one of my favorite foods in the world) but I’ve never actually cooked beets before.  I always buy them canned. 

So now I’m trying to decide what new vegetable to cook next week – and (mainly because I want to try out the poll feature on this blog site) I’d like to ask your opinion.  So, vote on one of the four choices, or if you can think of something else more interesting for me to try cooking, give me your suggestion.  When I go grocery shopping next week, I’ll let you know which one won!  I’m sure you’re not as excited as me about this, but I think that goes for most everything I write about on here.  Happy voting!

And the Oscar goes to…

I love movies.  LOVE them.  When I was in college I managed a video store (back, long ago, in the days before Netflix) and every week I got to take the new releases home to watch before they came out.  Thinking about that now, I’m not sure if I was supposed to do that, but I think it was allowed.  Anyway, I guess that doesn’t matter now.  When I graduated from college, after several years of watching tons and tons of movies, I went on a bit of a movie hiatus, probably at least partially because I wasn’t used to having to pay so much money to watch them.  Since then, Netflix has become one of my favorite things ever.  I would be their spokesperson for free.

Over the last few years though, particularly this last one, I’ve been so busy with law school that I hardly ever see any movies.  The boyfriend and I watch movies together when I’m home for visits, but we generally watch what’s OnDemand, and it almost always ends up being a horror movie, since that’s where our tastes in movies overlap.

Life-Size Trophies are Fun!

Yesterday I watched the Oscar Nominations for best picture (partly because I have a bit of a girl-crush on Anne Hathaway) and I’m going to try to see all of them before award time comes around so that I’ll care more about the results – it’s more fun that way.  Plus, I think getting back to movie watching will be a fun way to keep up with my “more me time” resolution. 

So far, I’ve only seen two of the nominees – Inglorious Basterds and District 9.  (As you can probably tell, my boyfriend generally gets his way during our movie-watching time).  I really liked District 9, but I’m still a little surprised it got a best-picture nomination.  Inglorious Basterds was fantastic, and I’m not surprised at all that it was nominated.  And yes, if you know about the rest of the nominations, that means that I am one of the eleven people left in America that hasn’t seen Avatar. 

For now, I have the Hurt Locker and Up coming my way from Netflix.  I will see Avatar in 3D soon, and next time my boyfriend’s in town, I’m going to make him go see the Blindside with me.  I think that may, all by itself, be enough of a girl movie to balance out all the boy movies I’ve seen over the last year.  Although there is football or something in it, right?  Maybe he’ll have to see Precious with me too.

Home Sweet Home

I’m hoping the title of this blog will get the Motley Crue song stuck in your head, because that’s exactly what it did to me.  And, FYI, I googled the song in order to make sure it was Motley Crue who sang it, and according to Wikipedia, it is one of the first examples of a power ballad.  Good to know.  Also, I am well aware that the o and the u in Motley Crue should have umlauts – however, I am too lazy to figure out how to get special characters in WordPress. 

Anyway, about once a month, I make it home for a visit to good old Saint Louie.  Generally, my visits are pretty friend-heavy, because my friends all live near my better half’s house, which is where I stay when I’m there, and most of my family lives further away.  Plus, my family members (since they are responsible adults) go to bed at reasonable times, and my friends and I (since we pretend that we are not responsible adults) do not. 

I'd cry too

Regardless of all that, this weekend I went home, and for whatever reason, my visit was very family-heavy, which was unexpected and enjoyable.  Not that I didn’t miss spending time with my friends, but it was nice to visit with my family in a way that didn’t feel rushed in a this-is-our-only-two-hours-together-this-month kind of way.  I got to catch up with everyone, and most importantly, I got lots of play time with my 4-month old nephew, who I adore.

My nephew is generally a pretty happy baby, but he seemed to be more prone to crying when I was holding him the other day.  My sister claimed it was because he was tired, but I wasn’t buying it (and, I’m not going to lie, it kind of hurt my feelings that he didn’t want me to hold him).  So as I was sitting there, pouting, I put my hair up to keep it out of my face, and he was totally fine with me again.  I’ve held him before with my hair down, and he didn’t have a problem with me.  The difference?  This time my hair was curly.  Best I can figure, my curly hair makes me look like some sort of scary lion.  I figure this picture is a pretty good approximation of what I looked like to him.  I don’t blame him for crying.  Its terrifying.

Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.

Last night, I had an incredibly vivid dream about stabbing a bear to death.  I know that’s kind of gross – so sorry.  I’m sharing because I think dreams are one of the most interesting aspects of normal daily life, so I like to talk about them.  And last night’s was a doozy – not that the whole fighting-for-survival-as-a-big-animal-tries-to-kill-me thing is all that unusual – because that is actually a common theme in dreams of mine (if you want to analyze that and let me know what it means, I’d be interested).   Last night’s dream was unusual because of how vivid it was.  It’s almost like it actually happened.  In defense of my dream self, I wasn’t stabbing the bear to be mean, it was trying to kill me and my friend (who at the beginning of my dream was a guy I knew in high school, but had morphed into a woman by the end).  In defense of my real-life self, I’m pretty sure I had this dream because I spent a great deal of my free time at home over the weekend playing Cabela’s Big Game Hunter for the Wii.  That’s right, I’m blaming video games for the disturbed part of my mind that created this dream.

The gun is really fun to play with

Now, I didn’t really think I would like this game, because I’ve never been the biggest fan of shooting games, although I do like video games in general.  I played it because when we were hanging out, my better half and his roommate wanted to play it.  And I don’t blame them - it turned out to be really fun.  My favorite level is one where there are more and more bears running at you and you have to shoot and kill them before they get to you and kill you.  Your goal is to survive for three minutes – which is nearly impossible.  I’m fairly certain that these bears were my brain’s inspiration for my very disturbing dream last night.  But don’t let that put you off.  If you have a Wii and want a fun game, I’d totally recommend this game.  Surely it won’t have the same weird effect on your psyche.

In the hopes that someone will analyze my dream, I’ll tell you more of the rest of it.  We were inside some store-like building, and the floor was flooded.  We were trying to stay up on the tops of the shelves, because there was a shark in the water.  It was spraying water up into the air.  When the bear part started, I was trying to jump over the counter and climb into a medicine-cabinet type thing that was behind the counter and close the door.  Other people had gotten into it before, but I didn’t fit.  The bear came behind the counter, and I started killing it, but I wanted my friend to hold the bear for me.  When he did, it started to kill him, but I killed the bear first.  There is a really gross detail about that part that I will leave out. 

Then we were hiding behind the counter, and all these people were walking by, and I was trying to hold still so they wouldn’t see us.  They did though, and came up to my friend, which was now a woman, and told her that she should regret choosing the one with a sun on his neck.  (I have no idea what that means, but I got the feeling that we got kicked out of their group or something because of that).  We followed them so that she could talk to them about us staying with them so the animals would stay away.  I was scared to walk through the water because I thought the shark would follow the blood from the bear.  When we arrived at the place where the group stayed, they were all weaving bamboo mats, which I helped them with, in the hopes that I would blend in and they wouldn’t realize that I didn’t belong there. 

That is all I remember.  I welcome your interpretations.

The Biggest Loser

My Personal Trainer

I’m watching The Biggest Loser right now.  I love this show.  It makes me cry pretty much every week.  I’m a huge sap, and its fun watching people get what they want most in the world.  Anyway, in the spirit of my love for The Biggest Loser, I’ve been doing the Jillian Michael’s 30-Day Shred workout.  My roommate bought the DVD not too long ago, and since then, another friend of mine (her blog is here) has also been doing it.  Both of them warned me that it was really difficult, especially the first time.  But I’m not going to lie, in my head, I sort of thought that I was in good enough shape that it wouldn’t be that bad.  I mean, really, its only 20 minutes.  I can run a reasonably long distance, I walk several miles a day, I’m not in terrible shape.  I tried it, and it was sooo exhausting. 

I’ve done a lot of aerobics tapes/classes and crap in my day, and Jillian sure does kick your ass in a really short time.  I never knew pretending to jump rope could be so difficult.  The second and third time I’ve done the workout, I’ve noticed a pretty big difference in my endurance for sure.  But it is still difficult, and I’m still on level one.  As Jillian says though, if you only want to work out 20 minutes a day and have it matter, then you’re going to have to work really hard during those 20 minutes.  And you do. 

So for those of you who don’t care about having a bells-and-whistles workout, and who want to get something done in a short time, I’d recommend this.  You do three minutes of strength exercises, then two minutes of cardio and one minute of abs, and you do that circuit three times, different exercises each time.  Its not fancy, its not super-entertaining.  Its just basic moves that work you really hard.  Hopefully I’ll keep it up, and I’ll be able to let you know how much difference I see in myself.  Cheers!

I’m Crafty. Very Very Crafty.

Closer for more details

So, I finished re-working the scarf that I made and hated last year.  Here are some pictures of it, in its new version.  I’m still not sure how much I like it.  I like it more than I used to, but its still kind of holly hobby, as Tim Gunn would say (I, like every other girl in America, love Project Runway – although I’ve been less happy with it since it moved from Bravo to Lifetime.  I think maybe the network has a heavier hand in deciding who stays and who goes on Lifetime).  Anyway, originally the colored squares weren’t around the outsides of the brown squares.  It just ended up looking really brown, and kind of gross.  So I took it apart, which was quite a task.  Then I crocheted the colored borders and put it back together differently.  Anyway, here it is.

Tah Dah!

The most impressive part? Check out the picture of the back.  It is kind of difficult to have the back not look like a total mess in projects like this, particularly for people like me who were never really taught how to change colors and hide the ends.  

Even the back looks good!

Anyhow, now that I’m finished with that, its time for me to move on to sewing.  I’ve dug my wonderful sewing machine out of the cabinet its been banished to for the last I-don’t-know-how-long, and I’ve been using it again lately.  Mainly just to do things like hem some pants that I didn’t want to pay a tailor to fix for me.  But, I’m headed to the fabric store tomorrow afternoon to buy some new cloth for something I’m going to make.  When I get done, if it doesn’t turn out too ugly, I’ll post pictures. 

For those of you who pay a whole lot of attention, you may have noticed that I changed the picture at the top of my blog site.  I think this old panoramic of Chicago is awesome.  I want to find a print of that somewhere and get it framed for my house.  It will be my Chicago wall decoration.  I have some kind of wall decoration from all of the places I’ve lived.  Also, I added some weird charity thing to my sidebar.  I did it because its a charity for Malawi, which I’m a sucker for, because that is where I did my time in the Peace Corps.  I almost deleted it because Madonna’s picture is on it, but I talked myself into not being too annoyed by that.  I think if you click on it, it makes you do something, like play a game, and then Frigidaire gives money to the charity.  I don’t know.  All I know is it doesn’t cost me or you money, so if you have a little free time, check it out.

Hypoglycemia and Muffins

My whole life I’ve been told that I was “hypoglycemic”.  It was something that was thrown around a lot when I was a kid, because my Dad has problems with hypoglycemia, and my sister and I both inherited those problems from him.  I think my brother was the lucky one, because I don’t think he has trouble with it.  To be honest, until pretty recently, I had no idea what it actually meant.  I knew it had something to do with blood sugar, and I knew it made it so I got shaky, sweaty, nauseous, confused and cranky until I ate. 

Recently, I’ve become more curious about what it is, and if I should be worried about it.  In my family we never treated it as much of a concern.  It was just there, it made us feel bad, so we ate something and it went away.  For me, most of the time during the day its not that big of a deal (granted, I have to carry around granola bars wherever I go so I have something quick to eat whenever I feel it coming on) but many mornings I wake up with terrible nausea and I have to force myself to eat something, even though eating is the last thing I want to do.  Sometimes it even wakes me up at night. 

So I’ve been doing some research on it lately, and I’m looking forward to going to an actual doctor and talking to them about it once I have a job and health insurance.  Because, from what I’ve learned, hypoglycemia is a symptom, not an illness.  Anyone can get hypoglycemia.  Most people who do are either hungover or diabetic, because large consuption of alcohol prevents your liver from producing glycogen and diabetic people can take too much insulin – and those are the two causes of hypoglycemia.  But for someone to just have problems with it everyday means that you have some other health problem that either causes the production of too much insulin, or that prevents the release of glucogen.  The Mayo Clinic’s website says “[h]ypoglycemia, if confirmed, can be an indication of any number of illnesses, all of which can be serious.  By seeing your doctor, you can begin the process of having the underlying illness identified and treated”.  So ALL of the things that cause hypoglycemia can be serious.  Good to know, I suppose.

Until I have the ability to go see a doctor, I’ve started on a new diet that helps to prevent the blood-sugar drops, because that’s the really unpleasant part.  My sister did the Atkins diet some time ago to lose some weight, and made the happy discovery that she stopped having nearly so many blood sugar problems.  So she told me to do it.  I did it for awhile, and it really did help (which, from what I can tell from my research, tells me that for some reason my body produces too much insulin, rather than not releasing glucogen, but who knows), but I got lazy and tired of eating the meals that the Atkins website has on it (although there are a lot more there now) and stopped. 

As part of my new year’s resolution, I’m back on a sort-of-modified version of Atkins.  I’m not doing the “induction” phase, which is the hard part at the beginning, because I’m not trying to lose large amounts of weight.  Don’t get me wrong, I certainly wouldn’t be upset if I lost a few pounds (which, incidentally I have lost some in the 3 weeks on my new diet) but that’s not the point of me doing the diet.  So I skipped ahead to the part where you get to eat some carbs again, which is just kind of a low-sugar and sort-of-low-carb diet.  Because 95% of the things I know how to cook involve tons of carbs, I need to learn how to cook food I like in low-sugar forms, or I’d never keep up with it.  So I’ve been experimenting with recipes.

Experiment #1 – Applesauce Oat and Bran Muffins

The Atkins diet is all about not eating useless sugars/carbs.  Cutting out the carbs is really just cutting out “net carbs” which doesn’t include fiber.  So when you want to eat carbs, you eat the whole wheat/high fiber-type version of it.  So I’ve been looking for a good muffin recipe that doesn’t have too much sugar and has a lot of fiber.  But I didn’t want them to taste like crap.  So I got a recipe off AllRecipes.com that had applesauce and oats in it, and made a bunch of changes that reduced the sugar/carb content and increased the fiber content (and added some extra spices for flavor).  This is the resulting recipe, and they turned out really well.  If my camera worked I’d take a picture of them, because they’re pretty, but alas, I still haven’t gotten a new one.  So I’m using the picture from the original recipe on AllRecipes – they look the same. 

Yum!

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

2/3 cup wheat bran

1/2 cup quick-cook oats

1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

1/4 cup light brown sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

2 tbsp. canola/vegetable oil

Mix the dry ingredients together, mix the wet ingredients together (brown sugar goes with the wet ingredients), and then mix the dry ingredients into the wet.  You don’t need a mixer or anything, it all mixes pretty smoothly and easily.  Grease a muffin pan, and then fill each cup 2/3 of the way full (it makes about 8 muffins).  Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  The cooking time is where I can’t totally give you advice.  Because of all my changes, I didn’t know how long to cook them, so I started with 10 minutes and checked every few minutes.  I didn’t pay attention to what the time came to, but it was somewhere around 15 minutes.  They’re ready when a toothpick comes out clean.

Since I’m just one person, I put half of them in the freezer, and I’m going to see later whether they taste okay once I thaw them out.  I’ll let you know if they’re still good when I do.

My Other Blog

I got this off the internet, like all my pics, but this happens to be right by my house in Lisbon

Last year, I studied abroad in Lisbon for a semester.  I went with two other girls from my law school, which was a blast.  In order to let our loved ones know what we were up to when we were so far away, we started a blog.  Since I’ve been home, I’ve paid little or no attention to it, but I do see a link to it everytime I get on to update this blog because they are both on WordPress, and so my “Dashboards” both come up when I log in.

Now, I don’t generally care how many people read this blog.  Its mainly for my own entertainment.  But, for the record, very few people look at it.  For those of you who don’t know, on WordPress there is a stats section that you see when you log on that tells you how many people have looked at your site each day.  Well, I went over to my Portugal blog because there was a message from WordPress about it that was getting annoying.  I looked at the stats, and I was amazed.  I have a lot of hits every day.  I don’t understand why, a year after we all came home, anyone would still look at it.  Seriously, the numbers at least quadruple what I get on here, and it hasn’t been updated for almost a year.  I’m not sure whether to be insulted that no one looks at this one, or proud that other people are still willing to fruitlessly look at the old one.  Although I guess I understand it, since, unlike this blog, it actually has pictures I took myself and talks about adventures that involve getting out of the house and doing things.

Dude, I got a Dell!

Well, I’ve been struggling to keep my old laptop alive for months now.  Because I’m going to be starting work in just a few months, I really wanted to make it through the semester, but it just wasn’t going to happen.  After 4 years of taking it with me wherever I go, using it for 16 hours a day, slamming it around in a backpack, and hauling it through my semester in Europe (where I subjected it to 220 volt outlets, which it did not like, and dropped it more than once) there was just no keeping it alive.  It sort of died last semester, but after being worked on by my dad, I thought maybe it would make it.  However, once I started using it regularly again this semester, it died very very quickly.  

Look how pretty!

So – today, I went and got myself a new laptop!  Its tons and tons of fun having a new toy to play with, which makes it easy to ignore that I can’t totally afford it.  I got a Dell Inspiron 14″ (so its super light and super portable) in Ice Blue, because with the deal that Best Buy had on them, it was the only color left in stock.  I’ve been playing with it all night long instead of doing homework.  I’m pretty happy with the new Windows 7.  My last laptop, just to show how old it was, was made in the heyday of Windows XP, so I skipped over the whole Vista debacle.  Windows 7 is set up in a way that reminds me of a Mac.  I haven’t totally figured out the configuration of files and where to put the stuff from my old computer (I have only been playing with it for a few hours), but I like how the desktop set up and how the toolbars work.  I especially like the way scrolling over the applications on the start menu shows you which windows you have open and lets you choose between them or close them.  For those of you who haven’t tried it out yet – you’re in for a treat. 

I’ll keep you updated on my likes/dislikes about the new laptop – but at the moment I’m just thrilled.  Tomorrow, unfortunately, I’ll have to buckle down and do homework instead of playing with my new toy.