August's Food Challenge Was a Dismal Failure. Good Thing There are More Months.

August was supposed to be this month of BIG changes to our food life. Oh, we were going to eat simply and only eat out once per week and volunteer at food justice organizations and pray and fast and I totally expected that by early September, I'd be able to announce on the blog that Oh My Gosh, Our Food Life is Totally Overhauled! We are "more with less" rockstars! You can TOTALLY do it, because we love food and eat too much and go out too much, so if we can make it work, then you can totally do it.

Well, we failed. Miserably.

We didn't do any of those things. In fact, we spent more money on groceries in August than most months in recent memory. AND we bought lunch and dinners outside of the house more times than I can imagine as well.

I talk a good game, friends, but when it's time to put down the aged English cheddar and walk away from the third Panera salad of the week, I failed. I blogged and talked and thought about food much more than usual, but I didn't actually change anything. I am a fraud.

Or, to be more charitable with my wobblings, I could say that I am in the "Preparation" stage of one of my favorite Social Work models, the Transtheoretical Model of Behavioral Change. The TTM, as it is called, outlines 6 stages of change that people go through in order to make dramatic life changes.

Here it is, copied and pasted from good old Wikipedia:

Stages of Change

• Precontemplation (Not Ready)-"People are not intending to take action in the foreseeable future, and can be unaware that their behaviour is problematic"

• Contemplation (Getting Ready)-"People are beginning to recognize that their behaviour is problematic, and start to look at the pros and cons of their continued actions"

• Preparation (Ready)-"People are intending to take action in the immediate future, and may begin taking small steps toward behaviour change"

• Action – "People have made specific overt modifications in modifying their problem behaviour or in acquiring new healthy behaviours"

• Maintenance – "People have been able to sustain action for awhile and are working to prevent relapse"

• Termination – "Individuals have zero temptation and they are sure they will not return to their old unhealthy habit as a way of coping"

Ok, so we still have some significant work to do before I could say that we have made specific overt modifications in modifying our problem behavior (eating like we own the world) or acquiring new healthy behaviors (mindful, simple, grateful eating habits and food advocacy activities). 

Just wanted you all to know that. Because I read a lot of blogs, and I see the sheen of the bloggers awesome self-transformations, or Gold Star Parenting or Garden of the Millennium badges or whatever, and I feel bummed that I am not that awesome. So I just wanted to go on record with the admission that I am Not That Awesome about food. It is difficult. It involves a lot of psychological, emotional, and practical junk upon which I have clearly not yet gotten a handle.

So we're still trying. Still trying to take those overt modifications. Still working on our food budget, our menus, and our lifestyle to see some progress and lasting change. When it finally starts working, you'll be the first to know. In the mean time, I'll keep writing about our aspirations, flops, and successes. Because I'm sure we'll eventually have some of those too.

Message me if you have had any grand success in overhauling your food life. I'd love to hear from you! And if you'd like to guest-blog, that would be awesome too.

You Win Some, You Lose Some. Or Why You Should Never Ask Me for Gardening Advice.

I decided it was about time to check in on my little garden for an update. It ain't so pretty.

For reference, here's the shot I took last month when I had just happily plunked my little plants into the vertical garden:

So cute, so green, so promising!

Well, friends, some combo of too much/too little water, too much/too little sun has turned my plump little basils into these straggly yellow miscreants.

They're still kickin', but I'm less hopeful that they will live to see themselves star in my "Totally Made From Scratch Tomato Basil Mozzarella salad" (yes, my plan is to make my own mozzarella from scratch to see that dream come true).

But speaking of tomatoes, I was delighted to come home from a long weekend away to see this little baby hanging out all round and chubby-cheeked when I returned!

Is it normal for your tomato plant to have only ONE tomato on it after several months? Don't get me wrong - I grew this little baby FROM A SEED, and I will eat it like it is the Most Amazing Tomato That Has Ever Been Grown. Because after it's inauspicious start, it will definitely be that incredible to me. 

Anyway, tomato baby is looking good. The green beans, on the other hand, have had their leaves chewed off and are sporting only ONE faintly green-bean-looking appendage:

It looks like I'm going to be making a pretty pathetic garden melange. Contents: One green bean, some droopy basil, and a cherry tomato. 

Even my mint, which I hear is supposed to grow like a weed, is suffering under my unskilled gardening thumb:

 Great. I kill weed-herbs too. I rock.

Besides my hopeful tomato, the only other plant that seems to have inexplicably thrived with me at the helm so far is.... drum roll.....

The Lemon Tree! Hooray! It's bursting with lovely pink blossoms just waiting to open up and get all good and pollinated by some of our frisky neighborhood bees. It's like prom season over here. My little girl is getting dressed up in her flirty frocks to bat her eye lashes and get smooched by some eager pollinators. That visual quickly turns my lemon tree into a trollop when I try to make the leap to her producing some sweet lemons, so I'll just end it right there.

So, this little porch garden is full of hope, pathetic vegetables, pink blossoms, and some too dry/too wet herbs. And it is still my favorite place in North Caroline so far.

Suggestions welcome for my brown-thumbed failures.

Delicious Grain Free Baking Failure

Let's be honest: Grain is delicious. I love grain. Fried Rice, Corn chips, Bread, Pasta, Biscuits, everything inside and around every Burrito I've ever loved. Grains are everywhere and in everything. Everything pre-made. Just about everything you can "whip up" on the cheap. Try finding a grain-free, vegetarian microwavable entree. Not just gluten-free - GRAIN free. Paleo adherents have their meat. Vegans have pasta, polenta, and rice. Grain-free vegetarians have most of the produce aisle and the dairy case. Thank heavens for pastured eggs and the total lack of convicting conscience about cheese, or I seriously think I would have chewed my arm off a long time ago.

Anyhoooo, when people ask me how the grain-free thing is going, I usually say something like "It's hard, and I cheat a lot". Which is true. I do. I have polenta one night, veggie gyoza the next, just a "handful" of chips with the guac. Just "half a spoon" of rice in my Chipotle burrito bowl. I've turned down cookies, bagels, bread, pasta, and cake almost every time I've been tempted by it. I've tried to scoot by with nibbles and cheats.

But you know what?

I FEEL CRAPPY EVERY SINGLE TIME. Tired, achy, broken-out, creaky-jointed, bloated and overall gross. Every time. I keep telling myself that this bite will be the last one, but it hasn't held yet.

Until maybe today.

It just so happens that my dear Hubs has gotten on a baking kick. And out of the blue, he decided to start baking bread and to try to perfect Challah. What? Only my favorite kind of bread in the history of bread thankyouverymuch. Not only that, but his first loaf (of bread, ever) turned out like this:

Perfect. Golden brown on top, beautiful butter yellow on the inside, and that marvelous doughy goodness that lets you tear hunks off with your hands and eat them all carnivorously.

And I ate some. And I felt crappy.

Undeterred, I ate another steaming slab of the second loaf he baked last night, complete with butter dripping warm from the crusty fringe. And then I ate another. And then I felt, SURPRISE!, really disgusting for the rest of the night and most of today.

But it doesn't have to be this way. There is hope.

Thanks to a review in my dear Whole Living magazine, I made an Amazon impulse buy a few weeks ago and brought this little beauty into my life:

La Tartine Gourmande - Recipes for an Inspired Life by Beatrice Peltre. Friends, this is a beautifully photographed, delightfully written cookbook that just might change my life. Not only are most of the dozens of recipes vegetarian, they are ALSO mostly grain-free. A vegetarian, grain-free French cookbook. Be still my heart.

I have taken this book into bed with me to read while I fall asleep. I read the recipes with a glimmer of wonder and excitement. I mapped out a plan to bake something. Something savory and biscuit-like. I choose these delightful Cumin and Parsley-Flavored Cheese Gougeres:

Oh. Yum.

They are made with Quinoa flour, which turns out to be hella spendy. So I turn to my mega-bag of plain old quinoa from CostCo (We pretty much live in the suburbs now, so we shop at Mega Marts. I choose not to feel bad about this).

A few pulses in the coffee/spice grinder....

And viola! Quinoa flour:

Ok, so technically the recipe does have a little corn starch in it. But Geez Oh Pete! Try finding anything that even slightly resembles a biscuit that does not have any grain of any kind. I dare you.

After a pretty simple set of mixing, pouring, and piping steps and a mere 20 minutes in the oven, I pulled out these little babies:

Notice their distinct lack of "Puff". Hmm. Well, they smelled pretty awesome, and tasted like a digestible dream. And do you know the best part about mynewbestfriend French cookbook? It recommends you eat your Gougeres warm out of the oven with a glass of Champagne:

In fact, I'm noshing some un-puffs and sipping some sparkling white wine from good ole' Trader Jacques' right now.

There may be hope for this food deal yet.

I try some "simple gardening", screw up, and make a mess

I started out the day with such high hopes.

Having Sunday and Monday off instead of the traditional Saturday/Sunday weekend has actually turned out to be great. I get a ton done in the office on Saturdays when I am one of the only people in the building, and on Mondays, I can Accomplish 10,000 Things! At least, that's what I think every Sunday when I start planning for my day off.

I decided that today I would start my garden. I was so excited I could barely sleep. I got up, finalized my shopping list, and headed out to the local Ace Hardware. Sometimes those huge home improvement stores just wig me out and I feel lost, and a bit like a fraud since I am not buying any j-channel or PVC pipe or windows. The Ace stores in Chicago always felt a bit more like a local home-and-garden store, so decided to give the nearby Raleigh outpost a go. And I immediately knew I was in trouble. Not only were the clerk ladies knowledgeable, friendly, and encouraging, but they both are on Pinterest, and we started swapping pin-spired ideas all over the place.

And so I ended up spending a lot more than I had planned. As usual.

I bought a couple of packets of organic seeds, a couple of mid-sized containers, some various gardening implements, and 2 bags of soil. One organic bag for edibles, and one regular bag for the peony and dahlia bulbs. (Ok, I know I really don't have any business spending resources like water and cash on peonies and dahlias. But I just.couldn't.help.myself. So we'll see how that goes. I have a plan.)

Anyway. I also bought this thing called "The Simple Garden". I thought that this would be a good way for me to gain some confidence, learn a bunch from the included guidebook, and start some seeds indoors. The external packaging made it look foolproof. I should have known better.

Cute, compact, fairly eco.

I should have realized that planting seeds from a guidebook is more like baking a cake than like microwaving a TV dinner, but in my enthusiasm to get started I failed to read through the entire instruction manual before beginning. I just started with Step 1 and careened carelessly to Step 2 and 3 without so much as a glance forward. Which is how I ended up flooding the kitchen table with about a gallon of warm water and ruining my first try at loosening the potting medium.

Potting medium in the bottom of the growing pot.

It's hard to tell from this picture, but I had stupidly placed the whole container on the table so I could work it from a comfy height. You also cannot tell from this pic that the little plastic tray that is supposed to catch any overflow of water is actually a separate piece of plastic that just snaps on to the bottom. So when I started pouring the warm water over the medium to "watch it expand to 10X its original size!" it didn't dawn on me that I was essentially pouring a gallon of water onto my kitchen table. Because it didn't absorb right away. It filled up around it, and into the overflow pan, and gloriously and shockingly all over the table in a flash. I'm really happy I had rested my DSLR on a box rather than directly on the table top.

I decided it would be wise to move the operation to the sink. And there with the help of the sink sprayer, I was able to really watch the soil become a potfull.

Neat.

 The next step was to plant the seeds. The kit came with cherry tomatoes and basil seeds, and this nifty spacing guide and seed-sticker-inner. Since I didn't read any farther than the next step, I gleefully put the seeds in their color coded spaces and tamped them down with the seed pusher.

Fun!

The next step revealed that you are really only supposed to plant one kind of plant in the container at a time, not all of them all together. Blast. I had thought that that was part of the point of a fun space saving container kit - plant complementary plants next to each other to maximize space and resources. WRONG! Nope. Straight up wrong. But the tiny seeds were already nestled into the dirt, and I didn't know how I could possibly retrieve them, so I just went on to the next step. I figured I could gently transplant some of them when they started to come up.

IF they come up. Because the last step of the instructions is to "cover your Simple Garden with the clear plastic Simple Garden Dome (not included) to start the germination of your newly planted seeds"*. Yeah. Hum. Didn't get a dome. Didn't do any kind of seed starting. I kinda thought that was the point of the kit.

Ugh.

Well, I put the pot in the sunniest indoor window we have, wished them luck, and decided to call it a day.

At least it is kind of cute.

I learned several valuable lessons today.

1. If you do not know anything about gardening, it is best to read all the instructions before plunking your seeds in the dirt.
2. There is a reason why a bajillion pinners have pinned a bajillion DIY seed-starter instructions. Apparently, seeds work better when you start them off with some training dirt/some kind of cover before tucking them in to their home dirt. 
3. Gardening is not that simple, not matter what the elegantly packaged starter kit tries to tell you.

And so I end my day off with a little bit of far fetched hope and a cute little plastic bowl full of seeds. I think I would have been better off starting out with seedlings, but what's the fun in that?

* The quotes from the guidebook are not actually quotes. They are more like paraphrases because I am too lazy to get up and get the guidebook. But you get the idea.

Veganish

Ugh! Eating vegan is hard! Not that it is not good and awesome and everything like that. But so far I have managed an average of 1-2 vegan meals per day. I have had only one FULLY vegan day so far, and I'm barely a week into it. Yesterday and today were total flops.

Here's what kills me:

Cooking.

Yes, there are tasty vegan options to be had when eating out, but they are fewer and farther between (even in Chicago) than many of us can reasonably plan on when going out with friends on the weekends. And I have not been organized enough this week/weekend to cook balanced vegan fare. I've ended up with weird odds and ends that leave me a little hungry, which is then quickly remedied when seeking out the crucial next meal. Often purchased on the fly. And this weekend, almost entirely un-vegan. (Still veg, of course, but cheese-laden and egg-tacular).

Anyway.

I set my sights on a new week, and plan "grocery shopping" into my to-do list.

Vegan MOFO is a thing. Who knew?

So apparently October is also "Vegan MOFO", more politely known as Vegan Month of Food, which is a blogosphere celebration of vegan eating and vegan bloggers. Or something. It depends on who and what you read, and my internet is behaving poorly tonight so I couldn't look it up very easily. I think also part of the intent it to help people see that you can eat a plant-based, animal-free diet and still, you know... eat.

And in that spirit, I must confess that my first two days of vegan experiment were hit-and-miss.

Yesterday, I ate:

Granola and almond milk (turns out the granola had honey in it - technically NOT vegan, but I'm not going to stress about honey)

Veggie rice bowl and an edamame dumpling from Wow Bao + an apple

Um. For dinner I had half a slice of deep dish pizza. FAIL. Allow me to explain.

Les went out to the burbs to see his family yesterday during the day, because Mondays are his mom's day off. He ordered a pizza. He very thoughtfully brought a slice home for me, forgetting that I had just announced that I was going vegan for the month of October. As a former strict vegan himself, I thought he would be totally gung-ho about this plan. And he is. But I couldn't resist a sliver of Lou Malnati's pizza. Good thing we can start fresh every day.

Today I ate:

Granola and soy milk

Pasta and sauce from home, apple, cup of minestrone soup and saltines

Soy latte + KIND bar (it had honey in it too)

English muffin + peanut butter

Handful of spiced almonds that Les made

And now I'm sitting here blogging, wishing I had made it to the grocery store tonight so that I could have some ACTUAL dinner. But I was lazy and didn't make it, and we don't have a whole lot in the house at the moment. So hopefully the rest of the vegan month will be more interesting. And more vegan.

Get it Together!

My inspiration has been pretty short-lived lately. Flaky. Like my dry little elbows.

Remember how I read "Urban Homesteading" and got all psyched up to transform the barren glass-strewn dirt patches of the neighborhood into verdant guerrilla gardened oases? Or when I made elaborate blog schedules and even mentally blocked off writing dates in my calendar? (Do you see what I did there? I only blocked off the dates in my head rather than committing to them on the binding agreement pages of my planner). I started researching definitions for my Word Nerd posts, but trailed off somewhere; assuming that if my attention was not being held by the subtle joys of household vermiculture, yours probably wouldn't be either. And trying to "cook from scratch" for the month of June was a complete flop.

I think I was so enamoured of this Chihuly sculpture because it reminds me of the chaos of my brain:

 
Reflecting on this scatter-brained refrain of "too many ideas and not enough steam" has given me some helpful insight into restructuring the G3 blog's future. The experiment is already 1/4 over, and so far the only "results" I can show you would be 5 inches of gray roots, some "Everything I touch/eat/smell is going to give me cancer" paranoia and my sock bottle.

But here's the good news: Just like I rarely hit my groove at work before lunch, I think the best stuff is yet to come. I've had a few months to try out the "Throw All Your Random Ideas at the Blog Whenever You Have a Spare Minute" approach, and now I'm ready for a new approach. Focused, calmer.

Less like yellow hot mess of Chihuly and more like lovely daffodils.

Healthy Lunch FAIL

It only looks tasty.

Les came home with a 1LB package of soba noodles (Japanese buckwheat noodles) last week, and their addition to our pantry inspired me to dig through my ideas-torn-out-of-magazines binder for the soba noodle salad recipe I had saved from Women's Health a few months ago.

It has all kinds of good things in it, including orange juice, edamame, carrots, and sesame seed oil. I picked up an orange and some scallions at the grocery store last week, and looked forward to what I thought would be a quick toss-together healthy meal. Plus, it made 4 servings! Plenty to eat for dinner, save for work lunch, and give some to Jackie and/or save for Les.

I started prepping around 7 last night, snacking on string cheese with Auggie and nibbling carrot nubs as I shredded 5 carrots into wispy strips. By the time I was done shredding veggies, whisking dressing, cooking noodles and edamame, grating orange zest and then juicing the orange, I was famished. And it was 8:30. And then I read these dreaded words, which I apparently missed when I scanned the instructions the first time: Allow to chill at least 30 minutes before eating for the flavors to mingle.

Grrrrrr.... I toasted an English Muffin and shoved the covered bowl into the fridge. Cheese and muffin for dinner it is!

So I was really REALLY looking forward to tucking into my hard-earned superhealthy lunch today now that it had had 16 hours to mix and mingle.

I dove in, started chewing, and waited and waited to taste something.  Here's what I tasted: Wheaty, chewy noodles with orange juice and soy sauce.

Gross.

I picked out a few dainty edamame, stirred it around again, and gave it a few more bites. But it was a no-go. And now I am lunch-less and hungry, so I will have to go out in search of edible food. AND I have a big bowl of leftovers in the fridge that will sadly end up in the garbage.

The soy-milk/whole wheat/oatmeal/blueberry muffins I made this weekend fared much better. They look pretty stumpy and weird in photos, though, so they didn't get their own post. Win some/Lose some.