Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Getting Resolved

Christmas hasn't come yet, but here in aircraft engine nozzle-land, the year closes with a weeklong shutdown, so the final days before Christmas end up feeling like they're the end of the year.  You still have to work, but things are slow, half the people you need are out, and any plans you make are for next year.  In fact, I've gotten so used to saying we'll do something "after the start of the year" that it almost feels like Thursday is the real end of 2010, not just work-2010.  If not for Christmas shopping and carols on the radio, this season might have totally snuck up on me.

So I might yet get to writing about Christmas; or I might not and just end up enjoying it without writing a thing about it.  But since I'm focused on next year of work, it's also started to enter the back of my mind that there's a whole new year of life outside work coming soon, too.  And if you know me at all, you know what that means: perfect time to set some goals and make some plans.  As has been well documented here, I'm significantly better at making plans than I am at following through on them and keeping them going.  But amongst all the starts and stops I've made, there have been some real changes as well.

For example, at this time last year I set a few goals - mostly cooking-related - and did surprisingly better than I expected.  Here are the results.

Meal planning - not a perfect result, but pretty darn good for all the "normal" weeks (weeks where we were leaving or arriving from a trip usually involved more scrambling for ideas and ending up dining out, but I figure that's forgivable).
New ideas/top restaurants - We haven't made a point to go to the Des Moines "Top 100" but every time we do go out, I thoughtfully look at the menu for ideas that we could try to replicate or build off of at home.  Keeping my eyes open for new ideas is a mindset that I've been fairly good about keeping.
Learn new techniques - Kicked butt at this one!  I signed up for the Des Moines Area Community College's Food and Wine Seminar.  Although it didn't fully live up to my (probably overly high) expectations, it was a great experience and I do feel I learned quite a bit.
Gain knowledge - I wanted to have the ability to make something "right," rather than having to follow a recipe.  I didn't do a ton of this, but just by cooking more and more, there are some things I know how to do the right way.  I'd go into more depth, but I think I want to make it its own post.  So for now, let's just say there are a handful of items I can make by myself and "properly"

I didn't necessarily remember each of these ideas all year long as I got better at some of them, but looking back now, I see that I did pretty well.  I'm sure there's some famous saying to this effect, but I find that I never fully appreciate how far I've come until I stop to look back at where I was.  And though I don't feel satisfied with where I am (particularly with my cooking), I have to admit I've come a long ways.

Which is all really cool, but wasn't even what I wanted to write about today.  I wanted to focus on what I want to achieve in the next year, but got so busy patting myself on the back that I haven't even gotten to it yet.  I'm not necessarily big on making resolutions on New Year's Day or whatever, but there's some tradition to it, and it's as good a time as any to start fresh.  Right now I can think of lots of areas of my life where I might want to make changes, but don't have any specifics as yet.  What say I start brainstorming now, and maybe by the first of the year, I'll have some real goals to shoot for?  Here are the blanks I hope to fill in by next week sometime:

Fitness - We're members of a gym, and I realized recently that I want to do more yoga.  Should there be a concrete goal here, like number of visits per week or a big event to be in shape for?
Cooking - Now I've been through DMACC's class - what next?  It will likely have to be self-taught, but should I aim to learn specific techniques?  Particular dishes?  I also want to focus on cooking healthy and local; does this need to be an explicit goal, or do I do it enough already?  Can I incorporate more vegetarian and/or Mediterranean diet meals into the weekly plan?
Movies - Following a re-reboot, I'm back to the AFI top 100, and I've seen 10 (haven't blogged the second 5 yet, but will soon).  Since I'm not rewatching unless I feel I need to for a second chance, this could actually be finished this coming year, but would that make it too much of a chore for something that's ostensibly fun?
Books - I once had a plan to read more classic literature, but it's really fallen off.  If I'm going to read, I need to properly dedicate time to it, which I haven't lately.  Maybe I could find a book club somewhere to motivate me?
Blog - How often, what content, should I focus on something worthwhile for side money or just ramble for the hell of it - the usual questions.
Work - A higher-up position just opened at work.  Should I go for it, and get paid more for more responsibility?  Am I happy enough at my current role?  In this climate, I should probably just be happy to have a job, but I am 5 years in, should I be looking upward, to stability or to fantasy?
Finances - The subject that exposed me to blogs in the first place.  Are we saving enough?  Conversely are we spending enough, or maybe we're too stingy?  Can we ever get our condo refinanced?  What should be the focus of our savings - paying down the mortgage, investing, etc?
House - Some of our condo needs upgrading, since it's more and more apparent that we'll be there for a while.  What should we improve?  Also, we need to be better at just keeping the place clean - I'm not a kid who can just keep a messy room anymore.  But how to actually make that change?
Happiness - I loved the idea of Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project, and realize that I can do a lot more to be happier in my life.  Should I start a focused project like hers, maybe just incorporate some of her ideas every day?
Garden - Last year's garden was a moderate success, but there were too many lazy days where I simply didn't want to water, and a lack of knowledge of plants that kept us from our full potential.  What should we change (crops/methods/etc) to make this year better?

And that's just what I thought of today.  Obviously, it's unlikely that I'll be able to make and keep resolutions in all of these areas.  I don't even know yet if I'll take a shotgun approach and make a resolution for each and hope to keep a few of them as lasting habits, or just focus on one overarching theme which might encompass several of them.  In any case, it's a lot for a guy to think about.  Hopefully by the first I'll know where I want to go with it all and make some real resolutions goals (sorry, sounds cooler that way).  In the meantime, any suggestions?  Are you making changes, and if so, how are they going?

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Focusing my Chi

Today is going to be a good day.  I feel confident in saying this, despite the fact that my work simulations are taking about an hour each to run, leaving me with nothing to do in the meantime, and despite the unkempt house I'm going to return to after work and despite the fact that I'll likely hardly see Stacia tonight as she's busy studying.  But before we get ahead of ourselves, this isn't going to be a post about the importance of thinking positively or anything like that.  No, today is going to be a good day because I'm going back to yoga.

I don't know when or how I exactly became interested in yoga.  I know I started with a bikram class in a heated room (think 95 F) where we mostly moved from one static pose to another, holding each for about a minute.  I didn't get much out of that except a lot of sweat, so I started following along with the program on FitTV, called Namaste Yoga.  I worked through the half-hour programs, found myself limbered up a bit, and discovered that it was relaxing and enjoyable.

Which was fine for a while.  Yoga was light activity, a brief thing to energize or stretch myself, and a peaceful retreat at the end of the day.  But I never was sure I was holding the poses correctly, making the proper movements, so I decided I needed to try another class.  The hourlong introductory class pushed me well beyond what I was used to, into new poses I never thought I could do and feeling exhausted into the fibers of my muscles after class was over.  That first time, I'll admit, I didn't have a lot of peaceful thoughts.  But I decided to keep coming back, and in time I was not only keeping up with the others in the class, but the teacher recommended I try a more advanced one - vinyasa.

The year or so that I was in the vinyasa class was fantastic.  Each day followed a similar routine, with a smooth flow from pose to pose.  Forward-fold to plank to chaturanga to upward dog to downward-facing dog.  Repeat.  And as our instructor mercilessly held us in downward dog, hamstrings stretching and arms straining, I realized that through the discomfort I was truly enjoying myself, and found it far more peaceful than the gentle TV classes had been.  Focusing intently on the pose, on the flowing motion from one pose to the next, and the interaction between mental effort and bodily movement freed my mind far beyond the now-dull TV motions.  Pushing the mind and body, stretching and exercising simultaneously gave an hour free of distraction and diversion.  It was great.


So why the past tense?  Well, it's not terribly interesting, but the instructor changed, so the course changed a lot, and it became less enjoyable, less worth the expense, so I let it drop.  I figured I could do routines at home, but the effect wasn't the same, and the motivation quickly lapsed.  I kept saying I needed to try another school but I never followed through.

Then the other day I was at a routine progress exam at my chiropractor and my typically acceptable back scan showed significant stressors.  As we puzzled over this, and as the chiropractor adjusted my tight middle back (which never had been a problem before but was increasingly), I decided that it was time.  I can't say for sure that my back was better during the time I was taking yoga classes, but anecdotally, my stiffer mid-back and my dropping yoga class sure lined up well.  And if it's something I wanted to do anyway, why put it off any longer?

So tonight I'm trying a new school, with a new yoga instructor.  I don't know yet how I'll like this class, since I've had mixed results in Des Moines thus far, but I do know that unless I get out and try a class, I'll never get back to the peaceful enjoyment I had at the first school.  I think it's time to give that a try.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Filmfest 1915-1927 - History

I never much cared for History class in school, but I'm starting to think I like the subject more than I realized.  Whenever I travel, I seek out the local attractions of historical interest - from the pioneers' windswept plains of Nebraska to the dark damp cells of peeling paint and cold concrete of Alcatraz (on my honeymoon, no less), from a week amongst the imposing marble and living breathing corridors of Washington D.C. to childhood afternoons at the Field Museum, breathing the musty incense of the mummy wing.  Those places are incredible for the sensation of history coming alive; where you can close your eyes and just for a moment feel yourself amongst the lives of days gone by.

I don't think anyone would find the history of this blog to be of anywhere near as interesting as any of these places, and nor do I, but I happened to look back at an older post a few days ago.  It was previewing my first film post, and it definitely brings to mind the concept of history repeating itself.

It became pretty apparent that my random recording method wouldn’t make very quick progress of the list, or ensure that I saw the best movies out there.  Sometimes I’d find myself recognizing a film name in the guide, and recording/watching it, only to find that its only claim to fame was having the 98th best film score, or something.  While I might want to see that movie sometime, it shouldn’t take precedence over the ones that are best overall.  So I drafted a new list and started a new plan.

In December of 2009, I set off on a quest to have a more organized approach to movie-watching, and in 12 short months I have come full circle to a helter-skelter shotgun approach, only now I have a field of thousands of films rather than the hundreds I had last year.  So it's time for a re-reboot, back to the AFI top 100 list again.  I'm now taking a "history of movies" approach, going from the oldest to newest.  Every five films I'll post an update, whether it's on the month or not.  And don't worry, though some will be repeats, I'm not rewatching everything.  Some merit another view, if I feel I've been overly harsh or kind, but those should be rare.

Movies 1-5


1915 - The Birth of a Nation (#44) - I hate to start on a negative, but this is one of the worst films I've ever seen.  Originally titled the Klansman, as you might infer from the movie poster, this is about as racist as it gets.  So why is it on the list of 100 movies?  History.  Though it's not the first movie ever made, this is widely considered the first to take film to a real artform, with thought given to visuals in ways that hadn't been considered before, as well as technical innovations in the method.  That's great, but the director of this film had a very skewed version of civil war history and decided to make a three-hour epic from his point-of-view. In this movie, the KKK is portrayed as a group of heroes, protecting the South from black people in the Reconstruction era.  One scene in particular stands out to me, where the klan catches a black "criminal," and an intertitle is shown that reads "giving him a fair trial," or something like that.  Naively, I thought, okay, so they're going to take him to town and put him in jail.  It then cuts to them dumping his dead body on the porch of a local black leader, while triumphant music plays.  It's really messed up, which is a shame, since the first half of the movie was surprisingly okay, kind of a Romeo and Juliet story between the North and South. And though there's a pro-South tint to the whole film, the second act digs into a whole new low that can't be forgiven, regardless of how innovative it is.

1 Srsly? owl out of 5

1916 - Intolerance (#49) - Another epic of the silent era, directed by D.W. Griffith of Birth of a Nation fame. As far as I can tell, the story is that public opinion of Birth of a Nation was overwhelmingly negative, and Intolerance was a response of sorts.  Whether it was an apology or a defense of the earlier film can be debated, but the premise of this movie is that intolerance has lead to many horrible events throughout history.  Over the course of three plus hours, Griffith weaves together four stories that he feels embody the effects of intolerance, cutting back and forth between the four.  I fully expected to hate it, given my feelings for Mr. Griffith after seeing Birth of a Nation, but it was really interesting actually.  Two of the storylines were not very well fleshed out, and could probably have been dropped from the movie to make it more watchable, but the other two were really well done.  The "main" story surrounds a young couple in what was the modern era, trying to get by while dealing with the temperance movement dictating morality to everyone and the man's prior involvement with a mafia-type organization which has its claws deeply hooked into him.  There's double-crosses, revenge, a really cool car chase (in 1916!) and intrigue along the way.  The other good story is based in Babylonian times, and follows the "Mountain Girl" attempting to save her country from the invading army of Cyrus.  This part is great, if for nothing else than the incredible sets.  The filmmakers built gigantic city walls, siege towers, and palaces, and then staged giant battles amongst it all.  Think Lord of the Rings scale, but at the turn of the century, all real, no CGI.  It looks awesome.  As I said before, the story jumps from story to story, and as the movie gets into its final act, the jumps come quicker and quicker, building up the suspense as each individual plot moves toward its climax.  It was very well done, and maybe made me hate Mr. Griffith a little bit less.

3 Babylonian warriors out of 5


1925 - The Gold Rush (#74 or #58, also #25 in comedies) - I've mentioned before that I liked Charlie Chaplin's films more than I anticipated.  That was definitely true for Modern Times, which I'll re-review a little later on.  Perhaps that built up my expectations for his other movies, but I found The Gold Rush just a bit disappointing.  It was fine; the Little Tramp was lovable, it had some fairly funny moments, and there were some serious parts that were packed with some good emotion.  But for some reason, this didn't really pull me in the way Modern Times did, and I found myself feeling neither under nor overwhelmed by it.  Nothing really wrong with it, but I didn't find it to be one of the greats of movie history.  The storyline is simple - Chaplin plays his tramp character, who heads up to Alaska in the height of the Klondike Gold Rush to make his fortune.  After numerous misadventures, he falls for a local saloon girl and tries to win her heart.  It should be really cute, but there were a couple of issues.  First, the action was a bit repetitive; almost all of it takes place while the characters are snowed in during a blizzard.  There's some chasing around, the classic scene where Chaplin eats his boot, but it starts to get old after a bit.  The other problem is the love interest.  For various reasons that I won't get into for spoilers sake, I disliked her throughout the film.  The Tramp is constantly seeking her approval and love, and I just kept thinking about what a crummy person she was and how he shouldn't be chasing after her.  There were some chuckles, but even those were more scarce than in Modern Times, but this is the movie with the classic "Roll Dance."  That is clever and funny, and really showcases Chaplin's quirky appeal.  Otherwise the movie's so-so, but I kinda loved that part.

3 Gold nuggets out of 5

1927 - The General (#18, also #18 in comedies) - If you read this blog regularly (and who doesn't) you know I've already reviewed The General, and pretty much hated it.  Well, for this month I didn't rewatch it, but I did track down some of the more memorable bits and reconsider my review.  It's still not going to be one of my favorites, but giving it my lowest rating was probably a bit excessive.  This is the one set during the Civil War, where Buster Keaton's character is a Southern train engineer who ends up on a crazy train chase with some Northern soldiers.  I disliked it for its Southern bias, but I'm realizing now (especially when compared to Birth of a Nation) that it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought.  It's still a bit weird to have a Confederate protagonist, but apparently this was loosely based on an actual train chase so that would be hard to change.  And though there is some cheering when the South prevails in the battle, there's little in here to paint the North as the "bad guys" per se.  There's still not a heck of a lot that's funny in the movie, but there are moments here and there.  I suppose my favorite is a brief scene where Keaton's love interest tries to help load firewood in the train.  Keaton always deadpans his scenes, as opposed to Chaplin's expressiveness, which works in some areas but leaves the humor just short of what it could be at times.  Better than I thought, but still not a fave.

2 Steam engines out of 5

1927 - The Jazz Singer (#90, also #71 in movie quotes) - Another film I've reviewed before, another I disliked, but this time not really reconsidering my opinion.  This is a film like The Birth of a Nation, that I think gets onto the list for its historical significance, but is really not a great movie.  Not that I'm saying it's racist, quite the opposite really, even though Al Jolson does perform in blackface for one scene.  My disappointment with The Jazz Singer comes in the conclusion of the movie.  Throughout the entire film, Jolson's character Jakie fights with his father the cantor about his direction in life.  Jakie wants to be a contemporary ("jazz") singer, while his father wants him to follow in his footsteps and sing in the church.  It's a good enough conflict to drive a movie, but at the end, after so long of both of them digging their heels in, one of them simply "wins" and gets his way, without any compromise.  I don't want to give it away, and I realize that after the climactic scene it looks as though both are satisfied, but the driving conflict throughout the whole movie is essentially settled by one character saying "okay, I'll do it your way," without the other really coming to respect his viewpoint.  That's how I read it anyway - I know many people like this movie so I could be overreacting, but I couldn't get past that in terms of liking it.  Oh, and the history?  This is the first movie to have recorded speech.  Kinda neat, probably mind-blowing if you'd witnessed it.  I wanted to like this movie, but man, that ending really killed it for me.

1 Jazz hands kitteh out of 5

Stay tuned for the next batch of five, coming out, well, whenever I finish five more movies!

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

October Filmfest

Remember October?  It happened, like 16 days ago.  And during that month I watched some movies, which I naturally planned to share with all both of my dear readers.  But then something really important happened, so much so that I can't even begin to describe it, which is convenient for me since it means I don't have to make up any details.  :)  Nope, no real reason I haven't blogged in a while.  Just lazy, I guess.  But if you've read this far, you already knew that.

Anyway, extending the theme of laziness a little further, I didn't even hit my original goal of five movies per month in October.  I saw 4, which is a solid 80% of my goal, so I'll give myself a B- for the month.  Here's what I saw, ranked from least to most favorite.

4) Cat People (1942) - Nominated for both top-100 lists, plus thrills and scores, but didn't actually make any of the final lists.  This is okay, because I broadened my search criteria for movies to now include nominees for each of the lists, not just the winners.  Incidentally, that generates a list of 1900 films, so I have movies I can watch for the foreseeable future.  If I watch one movie a week, it will take almost 40 years to see them all, which is awesome.  But back to the review...

Cat People was a pretty lousy movie.  Turner Classics often shows old horror classics right around Halloween, and I sometimes catch a few of them in the hopes that they will be fun, campy and cheesy.  Sometimes they are, and sometimes, well, they're Cat People.  It sounded awesome, as you can tell from the TCM description: "A newlywed fears that an ancient curse will turn her into a bloodthirsty beast."  Well, we end up spending about two-thirds of the movie fearing that it will happen before anything actually does, and by then I was just a little too bored.  The cat transformations took place entirely off-screen, so no fun cheesy effects there, and the beast was not so much bloodthirsty as it was kind of irritated and it attacked one guy.  Kind of a let down overall, but it does deserve a little credit.  Apparently this film was the first to use the horror movie device called "the bus."  The idea is that the tension builds in a scene until there is a sudden loud noise that we all assume is the bad guy, but then the camera turns and we find out it is just a bus pulling up to the corner.  Very cliche now, as horror movies always try to fake you out this way, but it was novel at the time, so kudos.  But it doesn't mean I'm going to rewatch Cat People.

3) The Philadelphia Story (1940) - Another screwball comedy featuring Katherine Hepburn, just like Bringing Up Baby and Woman of the Year, which I've previously reviewed.  As you may recall, I didn't exactly love Bringing Up Baby, since it was so frenetic, but I did enjoy the repartee in Woman of the Year.  I think Philadelphia Story is the best of the bunch, though.  Spencer Tracy was good in WotY, don't get me wrong, but Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are great in this one.  They play a divorced high-society couple who are reunited on the eve of Kat's remarriage as Grant tries to foil the whole thing.  Oh, and he does so by sneaking in tabloid journalist Jimmy Stewart, who naturally also falls for Hepburn.  It's witty, fast-paced, and a lot of fun.  Once you start watching, it's pretty easy to foretell how it's all going to turn out, but that doesn't keep the journey from being enjoyable.  I think Bringing Up Baby gets more accolades than this film, but I'd watch this one first, anyday.

2) The Big Sleep (1946) - I've alluded to this movie in previous blog posts, and in October I finally got around to watching it again.  I have seen it now on three occasions and I'm starting to think that I finally understand the plot.  Partly because of the production code at the time (they had to leave some parts out that were pretty important to the plot), but also just because it's a great noir private eye mystery story.  We follow Philip Marlowe as he is hired by a wealthy patriarch to resolve some gambling debts run up by his irresponsible daughter.  But it quickly becomes apparent that that's not all the daughters are up to.  This is a prototypical film noir, so you can expect unexpected dead bodies, seedy characters, unsavory locales and mysterious dames to show up along the way.  :)  I like the mystery of the story and trying to figure it out as I go, but I love the dialogue.  Just try telling Marlowe that you don't like his manners!  Or try to sell him some rare books.  Oh, and if you're not taken in enough by all that, this is pretty much the movie for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.  They sizzle in this movie in a way that you don't often see anymore.  The film is lots of fun... if you can figure it out.

1) Rear Window (1954) - I love this movie.  It's not my favorite ever, but it's right up there.  I've seen it several times, so when I saw the news that the Merle Hay Theater was showing it on the big screen, I knew I had to be there.  I don't know if that's something they often do, but I wasn't about to miss it for Rear Window!  This is an Alfred Hitchcock movie, perhaps his best in my opinion.  It is all about suspense, something almost entirely lacking in today's movies.  The concept is that photographer L.B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) is laid up at his apartment with a broken leg, so he keeps himself amused by looking out his window on the courtyard of the apartment complex and watch his neighbors.  It's all harmless and dull until he starts to notice some unusual activity in the window across the way.  With his girlfriend Lisa (the lovely Grace Kelly) and nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), he begins to suspect foul play.  What exactly is Lars Thorwald doing in his apartment?  Is it something dastardly, or just one man's overactive imagination?  As the suspicions deepen, the tension builds, up to the thrilling finale.  It is marvelously done, especially when you consider that the entire movie takes place in one room.  Again, tension and suspense, not mindless action, and it keeps you on the edge of your seat.  Oh, and seeing it on the big screen - totally worth it.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Kitchen Zink - Student Work

Sunday night was a proud one in the Zink household.  In just under two hours, from ingredients laid out to plates licked clean, we created a dish that is apparently worthy of scorn by any real chef.  But since I'm not a real chef, I would be happy to be scoffed at if I got to eat that dinner again!  Actually, I'm being a tad bit facetious about the derision for this dish - in fact it's based on one comment from one Chopped contestant on one episode.  In said show, one of the contestants makes a roulade (rolled up meat around a filling, basically), and in the talking-head interview, his or her opponent makes a snarky remark about roulades being "so culinary school."  You hear that?  I can make things culinary school students make!  Woot!

It all began, as these stories so often do, with the downtown Des Moines farmers market.  It's October, but there is still an incredible array of fresh food available.  And amongst the many squashes and potatoes, there were a few other veggies lurking, including what we found at the Grinnell Heritage Farm booth... collard greens!  Prior to this weekend I have had collards on exactly one occasion, in a steamed mass at a Golden Corral.  They were okay but not scintillating, so I had no real reason to be interested, but the greens at the Grinnell stand looked so pretty, we couldn't pass them up.  One bunch of greens, $3 down, and no real plan yet.

Once our heavily laden bags were unpacked at home, I spent a few minutes searching for recipes when one caught my eye - wild rice and collard stuffed chicken, from the Food Network website.  Sounds good, but it involves deboning an entire chicken.  So unless you live near one of these, it's a whole lot of work!


But we did have some leftover chicken breasts in the fridge with no plan and a semi-urgent need to be used before they started to turn, well, unpleasant.  Bingo!  Our super-local ingredient collection included greens from Grinnell, wild rice from Minnesota, and chicken breasts from Nebraska.  Which is great, but we had no recipe.  Time to improvise!

Drawing inspiration from a Chopped episode and a Fine Cooking magazine, we sliced the collards into a chiffonade (which is super fun to do - just try it sometime), and sauteed them in, you guessed it, bacon fat.  Just a minute and pulled from the heat.  The wild rice, meanwhile, was simmering away on low heat for 45 minutes, and Stacia did an expert job slicing the chicken into butterflies and pounding them flat.  Note: I'm not scared of raw meat or anything, but Stacia really likes that part of the prep and does a kick-ass job of it, so I'm not about to try to budge my way in.  Assembly was a bit of a task, piling up the greens and rice on the chicken and rolling them up.  One of the two tore a bit en route, but enough toothpicks held it together.

I wanted to sear the roulades, and had a slightly lousy idea to bread them first.  We rolled them in a beaten egg, then some bread crumbs and put them into my precious (All-Clad pan) over fairly high heat with some oil.  The plan was to sear the outsides in the pan, then finish them in the oven - a great way to go, but probably better without bread crumbs.  The crumbs got crunchy and all, but I think a nice sear on the meat itself would have been just a little tastier.  In the future, that's definitely the way I'd go.

So the roulades got popped into the oven at 400 for about 15-20 minutes, while I made perhaps my most successful pan sauce to date!  With my newfound knowledge from my cooking class, I opted to make a veloute: a chicken stock sauce thickened with roux.  It was so exciting!  Butter/chicken drippings and flour to a roux, cooked to about a blond color, and then whisk in chicken stock and some salt and pepper.  Nearly instant gravy!  Unfortunately my homemade stock hadn't quite defrosted yet, so we had to use boxed stuff, but it came out awesome.  Really great chicken flavor, and the right consistency with the roux.  I felt like a real cook (or at least a culinary student ;).

We had to go a little fancypants with the roulades, so we sliced them and laid the pretty spiral discs on the plate, then drizzled the gravy across the top.  Again, here a bunch of the bread crumbs fell off and looked a little less pretty, so I would opt without for next time, but still, a rather beautiful plate.  Roulades always look nice, with the fun little windows of filling between the spiraled meat, and the collard/wild rice mixture was particularly appealing.  Taste didn't disappoint either!  It all came together in a nice earthy, homey kind of flavor, from the hearty chicken to the slightly chewy, nutty rice, and the mild smooth greens, all bound together with my creamy veloute, or gravy if you don't want to be so hoity-toity.

Now, as I alluded to earlier, it wasn't exactly easy to make.  This meal took about two hours from start to finish, but if you like to cook, that's not really a downside - more time to have fun in the kitchen.  And the cool thing is that now that we've kind of figured out how to do roulades, we can fill them with anything!  Chicken kiev, chicken cordon bleu, or chicken whatever we've got in the fridge are all possibilities now.  Some might call that student work, but if they ever said that about mine, I think I'd take it as a compliment.  After all, in the kitchen, I like to think of myself as a lifelong learner.  

Monday, October 4, 2010

September Filmfest

Just in time for blogspot to become un-blocked at work, here we are at the beginning of another month, meaning it's time for the usual look back on the old movies from last month.  Apparently September was busy (although it doesn't feel any more so than the rest of the year), since I only watched five movies from my lists.  Five was my original goal, then it became more of a minimum, and now apparently that's all I had time for.  But that's fine, too, since I'm being more open about picking ones I want to watch rather than just the next one up the list.  So it was a pretty good batch.  But enough yakking, here's this month's list, from least to most favorite.

5) Raising Arizona (1987) - Extra!  This movie was only on the list of 100 comedies, not the full AFI list.  But I had heard of it, so I recorded it to the DVR at some point and decided to try to watch it.  Emphasis on try.  Out of the 54 films I've seen since starting the movie section of the blog, this was the first I've had to give up early on.  It's allegedly a quirky comedy from the Coen brothers about Nicolas Cage stealing a baby (sounds surprisingly natural when you write it that way...), but after nearly an hour, I don't think I'd even chuckled once.  All the jokes were the stupid, screaming-style physical comedy that I usually expect from lousy kids' movies, and the characters were so vapid they were just irritating.  Sorry, but I'm not going to laugh at Cage putting six babies on the floor and then running around hopelessly trying to catch them all.  I think this was the worst movie I've seen on this project, and I am so glad I quit partway through.

4) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) - This movie was very much not what I expected, and it was nasty and uncomfortable, but also interesting in its own way.  The premise is that a verbally abusive husband and wife invite a younger couple over to a late night party and basically unravel while the other couple watches/kind of falls apart themselves.  They all are really very cruel to one another, so it's not really fun to see, but it's an intriguing view of the more base levels of human nature and raw, ugly emotion.  Kind of like American Beauty, where the family's destruction isn't entertaining per se, but it does keep you drawn in.  I wouldn't recommend pulling this one out if you have guests over (ha!), but it could be worth a try.  If the first half hour or so feels too uncomfortably nasty, though, call it quits, because it just gets meaner.

3) The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - Well, I think everyone has seen this, so there's likely not much that I can say that would be informative or interesting.  It's creepy, but in a good way, or at least as good as a movie about a serial killer who eats his victims can be.  ;)  There are lots of parts that I like about this film, but the best moments are, not surprisingly, the interactions between Clarice and Hannibal Lecter.  The tension is palpable, to coin a phrase, as Clarice desperately seeks information from a psychopath who's just toying with her all along.  Bizarre as it may sound about such a twisted movie, it really is an enjoyable film to watch.  Downsides are few: the ending seems a bit happenstance to me, but not overly so.  And this may be just me, but I always preferred Julianne Moore in the sequel to Jodie Foster as Clarice.  That's probably blasphemy to hardcore fans, but I thought she was more identifiable with.  Both good though.

2) All the President's Men (1976) - As the movie jacket calls it, "the film that launched a thousand journalism careers."  This is the (perhaps dramatized) true story of the reporters who broke the story of the Watergate scandal, and one I've liked from the first time I watched it, probably ten years ago.  Now, I had not yet been born when this scandal occurred, so I can't comment on the factuality of it, but it's got to be the best newspaper movie ever.  We follow along with Woodward and Bernstein, rapt, as they slowly peel away layers of clues to find out just how far up the cover-up goes.  Played perfectly by Robert Redford, as the youthful idealist and Dustin Hoffman, as more worldly but reinvigorated by the story, the pair is the perfect inspiration for seeking truth and doing what's right.  The movie's long, but I don't think much of it could have been cut without losing the drama of the struggle to both uncover the truth and actually get it published.  My only complaint with this movie is the ending.  I can understand ending it where it does, since that's essentially where Woodward and Bernstein's story closes, but you're left wanting to know more.  It's great, though, and heartily recommended.

1) The Sound of Music (1965) - I think Stacia would kill me if this didn't rank pretty high up the list.  ;)  Although I don't hold it in quite the same esteem as she does (it's probably not in my all-time top ten) I did enjoy seeing it again.  Part of my hesitance I suppose is that I didn't really grow up with this one; the singing Julie Andrews in our house was Mary Poppins, not Sister Maria.  All that said, this is a cute and charming movie, it has a pretty good lessons about standing up for what you believe in yet encouraging fun and happiness, and it has good songs and laughs along the way.  Even if you've never seen the movie, you probably recognize the songs - "My Favorite Things" and "Do-Re-Mi" are my favorites in this film.  It's not quite as serious as most of my top movies, but it's a lot of fun, and you can't help but smile at Maria's boundless enthusiasm.  A good movie, to be sure, and worth watching if you happen upon it.  Oh, and I totally want the puppets from "The Lonely Goatherd!"  :)

The AFI lists are slowly getting whittled down.  Technically, I still have to watch one of the #79s, but I've been picking and choosing higher up the lists, so there are 71 movies to go, or just over 55% of the original list.  Fortunately, whenever I do finish the list, there are literally hundreds of other AFI-recommended movies, and thousands of other old films for me to enjoy.  I'm starting to think this project might never officially end, just adding new movies as I go.  Can't wait to see some more!

Friday, September 24, 2010

Un-banish-ed?

Sorry I've been away so long.  My workplace is apparently on the fence as to whether blogspot.com is a "non-value-added" website, since it was blocked for a few weeks, and now apparently is back.  I know I can blog from any computer really, but my evenings and weekends have been so packed that I usually just fit in a quick 20 minutes of downtime during work to compose my posts.  Maybe this doesn't make me the best employee ever, but if I don't have occasional distractions I'm going to be unhappy, and that doesn't make for a great worker either.

So we'll have to see if this lasts.  If I recall correctly, something similar happened with twitter, where it was available, blocked, available and then blocked for good.  Fingers crossed this will be different and I'll get back to blogging more regularly.  Otherwise, I'll try to find time in the evenings to check in but I doubt it would be as frequent.

At the moment, I'm pretty busy, so the next "real" blog post will probably be next week.  In the meantime, here's a fun picture of some Michigan blueberries.  We had steel-cut oats for breakfast this morning, with some of these delicious guys defrosted and thrown in.  Yum!  Good thing there's still more than 10 lbs left in the freezer!  :)

Monday, September 13, 2010

52 Changes - Semi-plagiarism edition

Apparently I have just been way too busy lately, between my awesome new food and wine class, cheering on the Cyclone Volleyball team, camping every weekend from now until snow, and riding the new scooter every chance I get.  Between all of that, I haven't blogged quite as much as I should, and actually fell behind a week.  So, let's make this change effective last week, and sometime this week I'll come up with another one.  Good enough?

So, I've been reading a pretty cool book lately, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  I stumbled upon it via a link from another blog, which ironically enough ended up being another book by the exact same title.  I tried to find that book on Amazon, and ended up finding Gretchen Rubin's book, being interested, and you can see where it goes from there.  Incidentally, I still haven't found that other happiness project, but I like this one, so that's probably good enough.

Gretchen's quest and mine seemed to have some similarities, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought mine should be like hers.  Several of my changes have been focused on more efficient use of my time, but what I really had wanted was focusing my time to the things I enjoy, i.e. the things that make me happy.  It's an interesting semantic difference between making changes to become the me I want to be, and accepting the me that I actually am inside, making changes to bring that me out more.  You should really just read Rubin's book, since she says it all a lot better than I do, but the end result is that I'm still making changes, but they may be more happiness-oriented in the short term.

In the very short term, I'm leading off with something that I don't think is in the book, but ties in to being happier.  I'm going to try to smile more.  This kind of ties in to part of Gretchen's project, where she opts to fake being energetic about something in order to actually end up being more energetic.  Kind of a "fake it 'til you make it" concept.  Well, on a broader sense, I'll give it a whirl with just being happy and smiling.  I tend to smile a lot when I actually am happy, but not so much with little everyday interactions.  If I see a neighbor walking into the condo, I'll wave and say hi, but it probably doesn't come off as friendly as it would if it came with a smile.

This will be a little tricky, since I often hate my smile, and cannot force it for the life of me.  Ever since I was a kid, there were the other kids who could smile on cue and have perfect school pictures, and there was me, who ended up with some sort of a grimace, a frightening bared-teeth look, or the years I opted not to try at all, and got what looked like a mug shot.  It really doesn't come naturally to me, unless I truly am happy.  But how do you get better at something?  Practice.  And as dumb as it might sound, I'm going to practice smiling.

Not all the time, mind you.  I don't want to walk around with a constant grin on my face - that makes people start to whisper about you behind your back.  But I'll try to be more conscious of it, and throw it in when I'm chatting with people, so they don't think I'm always so serious.  So if you happen to bump into me and I wave and say hello with a bizarre expression on my face, don't run away.  I'm trying to smile!  :)

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Double Dipping

I had to write an essay for my DMACC food and wine class about what I wanted to get out of it, and I thought, well, it's kind of like a blog post, so I'm going to recycle it.  :)  First class was awesome - we learned how to make stock and taste wine!!!  Full review/discussion may be forthcoming, but in the meantime, here's my essay.


I have always had a passion for food, but never really realized it until just a handful of years ago.  Looking back, it should have been obvious, given how much time I spent in the kitchen helping out.  Even now some of my favorite childhood memories are from the last-minute rush to put together every Thanksgiving dinner, everything finishing at the same moment, people hurrying about the cramped, warm kitchen to tend to each aromatic and delicious dish.  The energy of that moment is something I always loved to be a part of, but it took me until several years out of school before I realized I wanted it back.

I started cooking for myself once I got out of school, but I soon discovered that helping in a kitchen and having your own are two different things.  Almost continually, I’d find myself seeking confirmation that things were going right, since I was so used to my Mom’s experience and advice to simply tell me the next step.  Although I now feel that I know a little bit about cooking, I frequently ask my wife if she thinks the dish is ready, or how she thinks it looks.  This comes down to a question of technique, which is one of the main things I’m looking for from this class.

Technique to me means the knowledge that the particular skill you are using in the kitchen is being performed correctly.  If, let’s say,  I need to sear a pork chop, knowing the proper technique means that I know what steps to undertake, so that I know that it’s going to turn out right.  Or, as another example, when I made chicken stock this past weekend, I didn’t need to ask my wife at all if it was progressing properly, because I now knew exactly what to do. Regardless of which variety of stock or what application it was for, I knew the proportion of the ingredients and the steps, so I didn’t need someone telling me what to do.  Having the confidence that I know the right skills, the proper technique, to address these fundamental cooking skills, will go a long way to improving my abilities.

The next thing that I’d like to attain in my culinary journey is a better overall understanding of food.  I feel that this is a natural progression from knowing technique.  It’s a little bit like creating a work of art: you need to know the proper brushstrokes, but once you’ve mastered them, you need to understand how to put things together in a cohesive way.  Bringing the analogy back to the kitchen, let’s say I’ve learned exactly how to cook a piece of salmon; now I need to know what to do with it.  How to season, what to pair with it, sauces/sides, etc.  This goal is one of comprehending different flavor profiles and being able to put them together in a creative way.

It all kind of builds into my ultimate goal.  To be able to bring together great ingredients into a dish of my creation, and knowing it will come out right.  Naturally, this is something that takes years of experience to even get close to, but it’s something I strive for, and I think the class is a great way to begin that journey.  I’m pretty decent right now at following a recipe and making food.  I might not do every step exactly right, but I can get close.  But I want to go beyond that, to trusting that I know how to treat and prepare each ingredient, and truly appreciate how to put them together cohesively without following a recipe.

Like I said, it is a bit of a long-term goal, but if this course can give me a better feel for technique and understanding, then I’ll be happy.

As for the wine side of things, to be honest I signed up for the food aspect and considered the wine instruction more or less a bonus.  But after the first class period I was intrigued and started thinking about it more.  If one of my goals is to be able to put food flavor profiles together in a thoughtful way, why not wine?  Up to this point, I pretty much put red wine with red meat, white wine with fish, and figured if I liked the taste that was enough.  But we have five senses to appreciate food and drink, so it seems a shame to simply ignore most of them when drinking wine.

I didn’t expect it when I signed up, but if I learn the same things about wine as I mentioned I was hoping for with food, this will be a pretty great class.  Technique – knowing how to actually taste a wine to appreciate it, and understanding – actually giving thought to the flavors and how they play off of food flavors to work well together.

Based on the syllabus and the first class period, it seems that we will be talking about a lot of the things I was seeking when I signed up for the class.  Thank you for putting together such a great course, and I look forward to what more we can learn this semester!

Friday, September 3, 2010

August Filmfest

First go-round on the new DVR went pretty well, all things considered.  I found a few movies playing this month that I needed, got some from the library, did an interlibrary loan, and watched some that were on Turner Classics even though they weren't coming up on the list.  After last month's eight movies, we're down to six, but who cares?  It's not a race, as I need to keep reminding myself.  Here it this month's batch, from least to most favorite.  Unfortunately this was a bit of a down month overall, but there were some that were pretty good.

6) MASH (1970) - There are very few movies on this list that I would describe as ones that I hated, but MASH just might make that group.  I had seen clips here and there of the spinoff TV show, and hated that too, but people kept telling me the movie was funnier.  No such luck.  It's supposed to be a dark comedy about the Vietnam War, but it was really hard to find the comedy parts.  Jokes consist of people talking over one another so things are indecipherable, some really mean-spirited and borderline misogynistic pranks, and the constant reminder that the "heroes" just don't give a shit.  Then it ends with a very long and utterly pointless football game scene.  At times, Hawkeye was a little likable, but everyone else was awful.  As a movie, it was tedious, boring and depressing, but as a comedy it was a real disaster.  I hope to never see this movie again.

5) The Wild Bunch (1969) - I don't like most Westerns.  You know it and I know it.  So if a Western is pretty unremarkable, I'm not likely to enjoy it.  If instead it features emotionless and unpleasant "antiheroes" in some rote robbery scheme, you can imagine where the review is headed.  In some ways this was a neat idea, since it's set at the end of the cowboy era, so there could be a lot about how the traditional outlaw is feeling marginalized as technology approaches, but every single person in it is at best nondistinct or else flat-out unlikeable.  The story is blah, as we follow some bandits to rob a weapons train for no real reason save money, so you're unlikely to get drawn in there.  And I won't give it away here, but the ending shootout/finale is totally unsatisfying.  Comparing this to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which came out in the same year, and it's no contest.

4) Spartacus (1960) - Entry number two in a pair of remarkably similar epics on this list, after Ben-Hur.  The story is actually very comparable, with a slave of ancient Roman times rising up to become an inspirational leader against the overwhelming powers that be.  These are always at least okay, though they're always so long that they do drag on a bit.  I liked Ben-Hur better for some reason; the protagonist was more believable or likable, but Spartacus did have some pretty entertaining supporting characters.  There's a very clever, conniving member of the Senate that is fun to watch as he subtly backstabs some of the others.  Aside from that, though, the love interest seems forced (almost literally), and the ending is just pretty darn depressing.  But it's worth a watch if you want to know why everyone says "I am Spartacus!"

3) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) - Hard to find this movie in DSM.  I had to interlibrary loan it from Perry (or was that Pella?).  Anyway, this is a fun, though apparently historically inaccurate depiction of a real-life mutiny in imperial British times.  It seems that Captain Bligh wasn't truly a cruel ship's captain, but setting that aside, this version is pretty satisfying.  The film version of Bligh is so deliciously nasty that you can't help but feel that somebody needs to rise up and put him in his place.  With the dashing Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian, it's easy to cheer for the good guys.  So, yeah, it's a fun tale of adventures and drama on the high seas, with a typical struggle between the really bad and the mostly good.  The only things that I didn't really like were the new midshipman, who was just obnoxiously chipper and happy to be on the boat, and the slightly draggy last act.  If you don't use it as a history lesson, it's a quality film.

2) Woman of the Year (1942) - BONUS!  This wasn't on the list of top 100 movies, but it is listed as the 90th best comedy and 74th best romance by the AFI.  So per the original plan, I shouldn't have watched it til I finished the top 100, but in today's no-rules environment, I wanted to watch it so I did!  It's the first Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy collaboration, and as such it's fun and pretty cute.  Fairly standard romantic comedy fare, with two newspaper writers from totally different worlds getting married and trying to fit in together.  There's a little bit of good banter between the two, some actual serious moments, and a great slapstick-y ending, which did in fact make me laugh out loud.  For a moment I thought this was going to come dangerously close to reinforcing traditional gender roles, which would have been sad given Katherine Hepburn's strong character (in real life and the film), but it pulled through pretty well.  This isn't like a Great Film, but it is fun to watch.

1) The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - One of the younger classics on the list, and a good one to be sure.  If you've seen this film before, you know that a lot of the appeal is predicated on a twist ending, which usually makes me think that the rewatch value is lessened.  But just as I discovered with the Sixth Sense, Shawshank really does hold up over time.  This is one of those if it's on, I'll watch it for a while movies, but I hadn't seen it all the way through in some time.  When I did, I got to once more experience Tim Robbins in perhaps his best film role as the soft-spoken, wrongfully (?) imprisoned Andy Dufresne, and Morgan Freeman beginning his career renaissance as the wise older supporting character.  They both do a great job adding humanity to the roles, and you can't help but to feel inspired by Andy's journey.  And there's a really good, emotional sequence with the minor character Brooks.  All of it melds together really well to tell a great story in a never-dull film.  It may not be one of my absolute favorites, but still, if I catch it on TV, I'll usually stick with it for a while.

That's August!  There are still 75 movies on the AFI Top 100 lists, so I should be doing this for some time to come.  Even though this month wasn't spectacular, this has been a really cool project, as I've found a bunch of movies that I really do enjoy that I never knew.  September starts on the creepy side with the already-begun Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and who knows where we'll go from there?  Find out in another month!

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

52 Changes - Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is!

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear"

I first started this program of making a change a week over three months ago.  I didn't really know what I intended to change about myself, but I had a nagging feeling that I wasn't quite living life to my potential, and that I wasn't actively spending my time on things that I really wanted to do, instead whiling away time lazily watching TV I didn't care about and goofing off on the internet.  I wanted, in the words of Dr. Dreyfuss (The Apartment, a Zinkthink favorite movie!), to "be a mensch."  I didn't know exactly how, but I was going to start making some changes.

And those changes have gone fine, as evidenced by my recap last week.  After a quarter-year, some modifications have been made, but they're mostly all there still.  But I still hadn't made any game-changing paradigm shifts.  I wasn't snoozing my alarm clock, but was that truly all I wanted to accomplish?  Then, for whatever reason, the universe aligned, and the Big Change was made visible.  As in the Buddhist maxim at the start of this post, perhaps I was just finally ready, or maybe it was a really big coincidence, but a great opportunity came up.

For some inexplicable reason, I was poking around the Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) website.  I've done that a few times in the past year or so, since I know they have a culinary arts program, and I've thought it would be great to take a class or two if their schedules allowed.  They never do, since DMACC wants people who will take the full program, not jokers taking one class in the evenings.  Or so I thought, until I stumbled upon this listing: HCM 550 Food and Wine Seminar, will cover topics such as: food-wine pairing, stocks/sauces, meat cooking methods, poultry preparation, shellfish cookery, cheese, dairy products and bakeshop principles.  This was everything I'd wanted to learn, in one class!

I have intensely wanted, for the past year or so, to truly learn to cook.  To make that transition from one who can follow recipes, to a professional who can create dishes from whatever is fresh or on hand.  To know the essential techniques so I wouldn't have to color by number from a cookbook, but simply know how to treat a piece of meat or a batch of produce fresh from the garden to fully utilize it.  Right now, I like to cook, but I still don't think I know how.  With this class, I think I can bridge that gap.

Of course, one class for the masses is not the same as all-out going to culinary school.  But it's a heck of a lot better than the free offerings at Williams-Sonoma (bleah!), and it's just enough given that I don't actually want to work in a restaurant.  I'm trying to temper my expectations, but if we even begin to get into the fundamentals, I think this course is the kick-start that can get me on the road to cooking skill.  If they get me comfortable enough in the shallow end, I think I can use what I've learned to gradually work my way deeper on my own.

As the title implies, this class wasn't free - it cost $375.  That's going to hurt if the class isn't up to par with what I'm hoping.  But if it is, over a 16 week semester, that's less than $25 per three-hour class session.  If I gain the kind of knowledge I envision, that's a small price to pay.  And it lets me shift from talking to doing.  For ages, I've talked about how I wanted to learn to cook, but looking at what I did, there was no real progress, no action on my part.  The DMACC class gives me a way to go from a talker to a doer, and I think I'm ready as a student.  Class, and the journey to being a mensch, starts tonight.

Monday, August 23, 2010

52 Changes - Recap and regroup

Given the extreme number of ideas I've started and stopped on my blog here, I wasn't too sure this "52 Changes" would take.  At times I haven't been prompt, but I've been making small behavioral changes a week at a time. It's hard to believe, but last week marked week 13, or one quarter of the way there.  I think that warrants a look back to see which were worthwhile, and which have fallen by the wayside.  A bit of a cop-out, unless you count changing a change as its own change :) but even if I do this every quarter-way, 48 positive changes in a year is pretty good.  So here they all are.

Week 1 - No snooze - This has turned out excellently so far.  Since beginning this project I have not once hit the snooze button on my alarm clock.  It hasn't exactly made me more energetic getting out of bed in the morning, but I'd rather keep the quality sleep and lose the semi-awake, alarm every five minutes of life under snooze.

Week 2 - Decompress post-work - Haven't really done this much at all lately.  To be honest, work isn't that stressful for me most of the time.  I can chat or joke with my cube-neighbors, I take a walk most days to get out of the office, and my workday has natural breaks in it so I'm not working non-stop.  If I want to work on relaxing, I'd rather do something, like a yoga routine, rather than just deep breathing.  That might be worth a try.

Week 3 - Meal planning - Has gone really well most weeks.  Since it's been such a busy summer, there have been weeks where the meal plan still hadn't come together by midweek and had to be adapted, but that's easy enough to do.  I like doing this, but a new thing to add is a semi-regular fridge inventory check, to make sure we're using up what we have in our planned meals.  I hate to waste food.

Week 4 - Dish washing routine - Not surprisingly didn't really go far.  I always start these things and can never keep up with the rigidity of it.  It's kind of been supplanted by the Board of Labor, so when dishes need to be cleaned, they go on the board.  Easy.  I admit I need to get more into the habit of just doing dishes, but this every-other-day thing wasn't working for me.

Week 5 - Keep a clean car - This works when I think of it, the only change is that I need to be more cognizant of doing it every time I leave the car.  That's really the key if you're only taking a thing or two out each time, and I've gotten a bit slack on it, but it hasn't been too bad and with a little more effort it's really doable.

Week 6 - Exercise semi-regularly - We were going almost daily when we first joined the Y, and as might be expected it's dropped a little due to schedules/work/fun, etc.  But we've gotten over the hump where exercising sucks and the last few weeks have felt really good.  The original goal was 1x per week, but we've almost gotten to a point where it's an expected part of most days, so we should be able to keep up.

Week 7 - Blog once a week - I'm not going to be so neurotic as to go back and count, but I think I've been on pace with about one a week.  The key is to not push myself so much that it becomes a chore, and I feel like I'm still enjoying it.  If that's the case, the minimum number of posts should just flow organically.

Week 8 - Eat more mindfully - I have been doing this, and it's been a bit of a revelation.  I still may get partway into a meal before I think to slow down and really taste, but when I do I feel like I appreciate things even more.  We made a rare-ish seared Ahi Tuna last week that I was chowing down on at first, but then stopped and enjoyed it - and it was one of the best flavors I've ever had.

Week 9 - Budget tracking - This goes on a per-month basis, and we've really been tracking every penny in August.  Not to the extent that we're depriving ourselves, but again being more conscious of our choices.  We likely won't hit the "goal" for August, but we're close and most spending decisions are being made thoughtfully rather than impulsively.

Week 10 - Board of labor - As I mentioned, this has become the new way of assigning chores and keeping ourselves honest about them.  I like it better than any other way we've tried, since it focuses on the most-needed tasks and perhaps most importantly allows for some flexibility.  It's a keeper.

Week 11 - Live in the now - A major change, and majorly difficult for me to make.  This is something that I need to constantly remind myself of, but when I do I find things to be much more enjoyable.  It's hard to retrain myself after years of uber-planning, but at least I'm starting to try.  I think I can make this work, but it will continue to be a challenge.

Week 12 - Lose the excess lists - Ties in to living in the now, I suppose.  Also a major mindset change, but one that I think I can make.  I've already changed some (in my mind) from "collect them all" lists to simply lists from which to choose.  I need to watch myself to not become too much of a list collector, but as time goes on I feel it's something I can do.

One fourth of the way there, and only a few of the changes are total losses.  And in some way, each one was a change in that it made me think about things in a new way, even if that way was just to say "I don't like this change."  It's a neat program for the most part and I suppose I'll keep it up for as long as I can think of new ideas (or 52 weeks, whichever comes first).

I don't have a change yet for this week, but stay tuned for next week (8/31).  It's going to be a whopper!

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

State Fair! - the good, the bad, and the weird

Here are a couple of facts to consider.  I have been an Iowan, in some form or another, since late 2001.  The Iowa State Fair is supposed to be one of the best state fairs ever, listed in that 1001 things to do before you die book.  I have never lived more than 35 miles from the fair location.  And yet, up until this year, I had never been to a fair of any sort, much less the Iowa State Fair.  To some, this may sound blasphemous, but that doesn't make it any less true.  Laziness, heat, humidity and apathy tended to conspire to keep me at home the past 8 Augusts.  But, as I've kind of alluded to already, that all changed last weekend.

Stacia, being the incredible knitter/crocheter/all-out awesome person she is, decided to enter some of her knitted works in the fair's competition and proceeded to rake in the ribbons!  Note: Stacia is much more modest about this over on her blog, so if she's not going to brag, I will for her.  ;)  Anyway, we simply had to go to the fair, if for no other reason to see Stacia's work on display.  I took some photos, but I don't have them with me and they're largely crap anyway, so here's a (sort of) written account of our adventure.  I was going to do good bad and ugly, but there was way more weird than ugly, so I think it works.

Good - DART bus picked us up from the Capitol parking ramp, carried us through neighborhoods of varying dodginess, and deposited us right at the gate to the fair.  Nice!

Weird - First stop was the food building, where among other things we admired the blue ribbon winner for canned meat chunks.  I don't know about you, but it sure made me hungry.

Bad - We got there super early but couldn't find breakfast food at any vendor.  Hello?  Pancake-wrapped breakfast sausage on a stick would be a big seller, people!  ;)

Good - Very suitable breakfast substitute made by buying fried pineapple on a stick.  Pineapple wedge, dunked in funnel cake batter and fried = awesome.  And it's fruit, so it's good for you, right?

Good - Blue ribbon pumpkin weighed 1200 pounds.  That's a lot of pumpkin pie.

Weird - Watching judges carefully studying produce that was apparently in the judging stage when we were in the agriculture building.  Very thorough examinations going on there!

Bad - The line for the butter cow.  Of course I say this having not waited in it, choosing instead to elbow my way between people, take a picture and duck out.  Yep, I'm rude like that.

Weird - Walking into the cattle barn to realize that the cows are not in pens, just tied to posts in the center of the building.  Also, a little creepy to glance over your shoulder and find a man walking a cow trying to get past you.  "Stacia, move over.  There's a cow wanting to get through."

Good - The "Avenue of Breeds!"  It's like a zoo, only with all different breeds of farm animals.  Don't know a Jersey from a Holstein, or a Duroc from a Berkshire?  See them all here!  Plus elk, alpaca, and ostrich.

Bad - Labeling on the free state fair maps.  And also wondering what's in Pioneer Hall.  And deciding to go there to find out.  It turns out it's an ancient un-air-conditioned building at the top of a hill filled with antique displays.  No offense to those who like antiques, but when I found out I'd climbed that hill to see the blue ribbon-winning old spoon, I was not pleased.

Good - Photography salon in the Cultural building.  Many spiffy photos, and got to see friend of Zinkthink SJ win a ribbon for her goat photo.  Kudos!

Weird - Walking from the Cultural building, stumbling upon some diving show along the walkway.  It looked like people dove from a big inflatable pirate ship into a swimming pool, and a lot of people seemed to be enjoying it.

Bad - Propaganda at many exhibits.  I knew Iowa was a big agriculture state, but didn't know it was a Big Ag state, per se.  Did you know that antibiotics are good for farm animals, and that hog confinements are for their own good?  -smirk-

Good (and Bad for you) - Lunch consisted of corn dogs and root beer, finished off with fried Snickers bars and fried Oreos.  This is why it's good they only have one state fair per year!  But when in Rome... you might as well eat delicious breaded gooey candy bars on a stick.

Bad - Attitude from the "Cast Your Kernel" booth.  A certain channel 13 personality was very aloof and way too busy with her phone conversation to even acknowledge us asking for our kernels.

Good/Weird - Exhibit behind this booth.  It's a ten foot tall model of one of the Lord of the Rings cities, made out of matchsticks.  Inside the DM Register building.  Definitely worth a stop.

Weird - Iowa Secretary of Agriculture booth guy stopping me as I walked by, directing me to stand on a scale, then presenting me with a printout of my weight.  "Come back next year," he says.  Well, I wasn't going to, but you have one of those new-fangled scales?  I'll buy my tickets today!  :)

Bad - Labeling for fabric and threads.  Would it take so much to put a sign out that says "Fabric and Threads: Upstairs?"  We knew to go there, but I don't know that anyone else would.

Good - Seeing some winning knitting!  Got to see all of Stacia's stuff, and the items her friends entered.  It all looked great, and the ribbons hanging alongside looked pretty nice too!

Overall, it was a beautiful (Good) day to spend out at the fair, and despite anything I might have griped about above, I know we both had a really fun time (Good).  It was a very unique experience, and I imagine we'll be going back for as long as Stacia wants to competitively knit (the foreseeable future).  I'm still a city kid, so I'm not sure if I'll ever get the idea of showing your cow, but I'm more than happy to keep going back for the spectacle.  And the deep-fried Snickers bar on a stick.  Mmmmm.

Friday, August 13, 2010

52 Changes - Too Many Lists!

You know what the most dangerous phrase to say to me is?  Now, I don't mean to imply that I'm some sort of Manchurian Candidate-style programmed spy, and that just by saying some code phrase I become a mind-controlled killer.  Or do I?  ;)  Well, no, actually I don't.  But simply by uttering the phrase (or even implying it) "collect them all," I become an obsessed machine with an unstoppable goal to complete whatever list I'm "collecting."

Toy makers know about the susceptibility of people to this, as you can see on all sorts of packaging, from toy cars to cereal box prizes to trading cards.  Maybe this is something that most people experience as children and eventually grow out of, but it has somehow become ingrained in my subconscious that once I start a set of something, I can't stop until I finish.  Let me give you some examples.  Right now I have no less than seven separate spreadsheets listing collections that I have begun and am rating that I, on some level, want to complete. There are lists of movies, that you know about, books, restaurants, places to camp, tea flavors, music, and even baseball stadiums.  It can be fun to make these lists, to keep track of things I've tried or seen, but like all things, they can go too far.  Once I get sucked in, I become almost more wrapped up in completing the list than I am in the enjoyment I got out of the list's contents in the first place.  And some of these lists are just impossible to ever complete, so they need to get changed.  Here we go.

1) AFI's 100 Movies list - I've been watching between 5 and 8 of these a month, and have 77 left to go, making it entirely reasonable to complete.  Plus I'm still enjoying it.  But I do need to be careful.  At times it has felt a bit like a chore to see how many movies I can get through in a month just to finish the list.  I realized this the other day when my sister saw Shane sitting on my coffee table, and I said "I'm not looking forward to that one, but it's on my list."  Kind of a silly mindset for a goal I supposedly started for fun.  I still want to complete this list, since it's a good source for old movie suggestions, which I really like, but I'm going to focus less on the goal being completion, and more on enjoying the movies.

2) AFI's other lists - AFI put out ten other lists of films, in genres like 100 Laughs, Thrills, Passions, etc., and I've naturally assumed that when I finish the 100, I'd move on to those.  But with so many lists to begin with, it ends up being a lot of movies - 355 to be exact.  If that stops being fun, it's a major chore.  So my new thought is to pepper these in to the current viewing plan based on my personal choice rather than running up through the rankings.  So this month I'll still see five or six movies from the main lists, but also one or two that I choose from the whole selection.  This month TCM will be showing The Big Sleep, which I've wanted to see again for some time.  It's only on the 100 Heroes list, but since I want to see it, I'm throwing it in.  Maybe I'll actually understand it this time!  :)

3) Books - I decided a couple of years ago that I wanted to read more in general, particularly more classic literature.  Not knowing what I should read, I sought out some lists - and found a ton!  There's the Modern Library list, the Koen and Radcliffe lists, the Time magazine list, and the Hugo and Nebula award lists (for science fiction, not really literature).  Add it all up, and you've got over 700 books!  Books take longer to finish than movies; my pace is usually about one a month, so if I go at that pace, I should finish the list by my 86th birthday.  Obviously not doable.  I think I'll keep the list (since I have loved some of the selections from it), but just as one source of ideas when I'm choosing a book.  If I find something outside the list, that's perfectly fine.  And just knowing that I'll never "collect them all" gives me some freedom to not try so hard.

4) Camp in every county in Iowa - This was a fun idea Stacia and I had when we first camped a few years ago.  I'm sure you've seen those decal maps on the sides of campers, where people fill in the states they've traveled to.  Well, we decided to make one of Iowa (not stuck on the car though) and color it in as we've camped in different counties in the state.  Neat idea, but especially with the floods the past few years, it's been hard to get out as much as we'd like.  So in 4 seasons, we have camped in 12 different counties, which is quite an accomplishment, but would take another 29 years to fill out the rest of our map.  Add to that that some counties don't have great parks, and that there are neat places to visit out of state, and it becomes too confining.  This is another one where I guess we keep the list, but just use it as reference.  If we plan to camp, we'll consult the list first, but only as a source of ideas, not a need to choose one from the list.

5) Des Moines restaurants - Last year the Des Moines Register put out a list of the top 100 area restaurants, and I immediately thought, "let's go to all of them!"  But the reality is that we only go out to eat once or maybe twice a week, and it's more often an I-don't-feel-like-cooking, let's-get-some-fast-food than it is a planned excursion to a nice sit-down restaurant.  That said, some of these nice places are really great venues to find inspiration for my own cooking endeavors, to see some neat ideas and taste some new flavors.  I think I'd like to eventually complete this list, but I don't think it needs to be urgent.  When we do go out as it is, we usually check the list for ideas before we depart anyway, just because we like to try new things.  At one a week from the list, it would only take two years to hit them all, not even taking into account that we've already dined at 33 of the selections.  It will happen, but eventually, not imminently.

6) Baseball stadiums - I honestly don't know how this became such an obsession.  There are lots of websites out there documenting peoples' travels to different ballparks across America, and sometime last year or so I became infatuated with the idea.  I like baseball, I like to see new places, and on some level it's a traditional "guy thing" - the baseball pilgrimage.  I compiled a list, and came up with umpteen different plans for how many and which I intended to see in any given year.  I even wanted to get a hat at each stadium I went to (which I admit is still a fun idea).  But here's the kicker.  There are 282 stadiums on my list.  In a typical year, aside from Principal Park in Des Moines, we maybe go to one or two ballgames in other places.  I don't have 280 years to go to baseball games, and none of them will be dramatically different from ones here.  Should we travel great distances to see essentially the same game we can see at home?  Do I want to travel to Toledo, or New Jersey or Appalachia to watch baseball?  And if I'm in an awesome place (like SW Michigan), do I want to spend some of my precious time going to a baseball game (in Grand Rapids)?  Obviously, this is one list that I need to drop.  I will keep the actual list, so if we're traveling somewhere, I can see if there's a baseball team in the area that we can decide if we want to visit.  But I need to give up that idea of making trips all across the country to watch baseball just to fill out a list.

I don't know if too many of those are outright changed.  I'm still allowing myself to keep the lists, since I like them so, but at least two are no longer any form of "collect them all."  Baseball and books are going to be things I enjoy at my leisure, when and where they come up, rather than from some frenetic list.  Movies I'll continue to enjoy, but need to remember that the movies are the goal, not seeing them all.  And with the restaurants, well, that's just bound to happen anyway.  I guess in general it's a change in mindset.  Making lists is fine, and can be fun (for strange people like me).  Just don't make finishing the list outshine the enjoyment of the things you listed in the first place.  And I'll try to apply this thought process to any new lists I make up in the coming years.  I like organization, but obsession is one step too far, so this should make things a lot more fun and relaxed.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Kitchen Zink - Stone Soup

Remember these Kitchen Zink updates I used to write about my cooking before I got sidetracked by trying to improve myself and all?  Well, they're back, at least at the moment.  For whatever reason, the meals we've cooked lately have felt a little uninspired.  Ironically, that was the original motivation behind making the 52 changes, but thus far few of them have been culinary in nature.  That may have to change.  In any case, I didn't feel much like writing about the duck I horrendously overcooked (shoe leather, anyone?) or the decision to try Mixed Bean Cassoulet (yes, it really is just a pile of beans).  But this past weekend, we had all of my siblings over, so we had to make something decent.

I wanted to make something moderately healthy, since they were all off on road trips of some sort (younger ones heading out to California, and older driving home from Tulsa, OK) and were likely to be living off fast food for the foreseeable future.  Looking around the house, there was so much produce from the farmer's market and our own garden that it was pretty easy to make a soup.  In fact, we were able to make the most local soup I've ever had, created in the famous stone soup style.

I have to guess that everyone has heard the old folk tale about stone soup, but just in case, here's the condensed version (condensed version!  In a blog about soup!  I love it!).  Some hungry travelers show up in a village somewhere, seeking some food.  The villagers are tea-partiers and don't want to spread the wealth, ;) so the travelers come up with a clever plan.  They tell the townsfolk that they can make soup out of a stone, and proceed to boil some water with a big rock in the pot.  As it "cooks," they say things like, this looks great, but it would be even better with carrots.  So one of the villagers brings carrots and throws them in.  So on and so forth with all sorts of soup ingredients, until they all share the results, and are amazed at how great stone soup tastes.

Well, we did pretty much the same thing, except I guess you would call ours dirt soup.  Sounds even better, doesn't it?  What I mean by that, though, is that all of the ingredients we just threw in our soup came from our own local dirt, either in the downtown community garden, or in an area farm.  I didn't think much of it at first, since we try to eat local as much as possible, but when you tabulate it all, it's pretty neat.  Here's the rundown of the soup, complete with source:

The broth is by far my favorite story of the ingredients, especially since it didn't start its life as a broth.  It all begins with a humongous crop of Swiss Chard (a tasty green, quite a bit like spinach) at our garden.  The leaves were so immense that brontosauruses were eyeing them as tasty treats, so we had to pick a lot all at once.  Fortunately there is a great website (http://www.pickyourown.org/) with tons of information on how to preserve a harvest.  One of the great ideas they have is a step-by-step description of how to freeze greens, including chard.  It's a simple blanch-shock-freeze procedure, but we had so much chard, it took several iterations.  By the time we had put all the wilted chard into the freezer, we were left with a stockpot full of gorgeous, ruby-red blanching liquid.  It turns out that as the chard was blanching, it was also giving off nutrients and flavor into the water, until it was a veritable chard stock.

Stacia deserves all the credit for noticing the change in the water and bringing to light what a waste it would be to just dump it down the drain.  So why not make it a stock for real?  Boil it down some more, add some salt and pepper, and presto!  Free vegetable stock, and from our own garden, too!  But a stock is just a starting point; we needed more to make it a really good soup.  Stacia (again!) found a good recipe to start from, but essentially, we stone-souped it, throwing in whatever we had on hand.  And that was:

Diced tomatoes, from our garden, sliced carrots from the garden, sliced celery from Hy-Vee, diced turnips from the DM Farmer's Market, wilted kale from the garden, chopped onion from the garden, farfalle from Hy-Vee, and homemade meatballs made from Eden Farms pork, a DM Farmer's Market vendor.  Even the storebought items are from a local grocery store, and aside from making my own pasta, which I will yet do one day but haven't so far, we really had no choice on the farfalle.  The only area for improvement is the celery, which was an old Dole stalk we had in the fridge.  It certainly was grown in California or maybe Mexico, but literally all of the other ingredients were raised right here in Iowa, most within the city limits of Des Moines.  I'm not sure I want to label myself a "locavore" yet, but it sure is exciting when you can make the concept work.

The soup seemed to go over pretty well, and with the large batch we made, we're still eating it for lunches this week.  It's really nice, especially when you've had some less thrilling cooking moments lately, to actually come through with a fresh, healthy, locally produced dish.  On top of that, being able to share it with my family was very gratifying.  And to think that we were able to make it all starting with nothing but a stone, or in this case some leftover blanching water, well, that just rocks!  :)