Amanda's Amazing Diet Plan

I have no dietary authority, just opinions and ideas. So you don’t have to listen to my amazing diet suggestions. But I strongly recommend you do. Because they’re awesome.

WARNING: This is an explicit post.

Amanda’s Amazing diet plan consists of two simple rules:

1. Don’t eat shit
2. Move your ass

It’s explicit because you need tough love to get the idea across. Plus, who wants to eat shit?

I’m sure you’ll have many questions regarding these two rules.

Question 1: What counts as shit?

Good question. Shit is most anything that comes from a fast food restaurant. Even salads. I just don’t trust them. Fried chicken shouldn’t be on a salad. Shit also counts as eating too much of any one thing. I saw a TV show where an overweight man couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t losing weight. “I’ve been eating oranges!” he exclaimed. Eating 16 oranges for a meal doesn’t count as eating healthy.

Same goes for 16 brownies, sliders, and beers. Vary your food and eat it in moderation. If you eat a small amount of a variety of food, you’ll probably have a meal with more complete nutrition.

Question 2: What doesn’t count as shit?

The lines between shit and non-shit are blurry (as with the previous orange example). There are many distinctions you’ll have to learn for yourself. In general, you should up your fruit and veggies. Did that meal you just ate have any fruits or vegetables? If not, it was probably a shit meal.

Just about anything you cook for yourself at home is not shit. There are some examples of cooking shit for yourself that isn’t good. Case in point, I made some sodium-laden fried gnocchi and I could feel my arteries working harder as I ate. Just because I peeled and mashed the potatoes myself doesn’t mean it was healthy. Additionally, if all you make for yourself are cinnamon rolls and chocolate cake… that is also shit.

Bonus time! Cooking for yourself helps accomplish rule 2, “Move your ass”. While cooking you’re up and about, going hither and thither, while if you eat dinner sitting at a restaurant well, you’re just sitting. Also, when cooking you become more conscious of what you eat, good and bad. Plus, it allows you to really enjoy your food because you put the effort into making it. You’ll realize you’ll start thinking things like, “I put too much time into this damn pizza crust and we will scrape this doughy mess off the wax paper and eat it raw if it kills us!” One exception to the “Don’t eat shit rule” - if your homemade recipe turns into an inedible disaster, getting take out is OK.

Question 3: What’s a good way to “Move my ass”?

Move your ass means stop driving around the parking lot for 10 minutes to get the closest spot. Just pull into the lot and pick the first spot you see and walk the extra couple of yards. It won’t kill you. Also, work activity into your day that makes you more active. Get up and talk to someone at work instead of calling or emailing. Take the stairs when you can. Go for walks, after dinner, after breakfast, during your lunch break.

Flexing your abs while you watch TV doesn’t fulfill rule number 2. Speak of… turn off your damn TV. It’ll suck you in until you didn’t realize its midnight and you haven’t moved for the past four hours. I know because I’ve been there. Gyms and stuff are nice, but our skinny-assed ancestors didn’t go to the Y four times a week. They just worked hard and were thin because there was no other way.

At this point I realize this is not really a diet plan, it’s a lifestyle plan. There is overwhelming evidence that says you can’t be healthy by improving just diet or exercising more. You have to change both at the same time to improve your health.

One last tidbit and it’s something that really irks me: STOP MAKING EXCUSES. “I’m too tired, we don’t have all the ingredients, it’s too late, I have a cold, I’m in a hurry.” It’s all bullshit. If you keep making excuses, you’ll never make it a habit and you’ll never get where you want to be.

Now go outside and play.

The Life and Times without Cheese

I've never had a test that said I was lactose intolerant. But my brother might be. And one of my most popular blog entries includes the very searchable phrase "horrid farts." I know, this isn't what you want to read about while you snack in front of the TV. So I'm warning you now, it doesn't get better.

In that blog post in September 2007, I decided to lay off the milk products for awhile. Well, I can guarantee you that didn't last long. Andy supported me while I purchased something strange like almond cheese, which was a disaster in making cheesy chips. The almond "cheese" solidified so hard immediately after coming out of the microwave that we had to bang the chips on the plate to get them apart. Cheese substitutes just don't cut it. Much to the detriment of my bowels.

I've since realized that I'm addicted to cheese. I LOVE cheese, cream, butter, yogurt, and sour cream. Somehow, I have managed to put soy milk instead of regular milk in my cereal and my mornings are much more manageable. But I haven't gotten to the point where I don't eat cheese. It's too hard. Everything delicious has cheese on it. Here is a list of delicious things that are best with cheese/dairy: sandwiches, pasta, tacos, cheesy-chips, yogurt with frozen fruit, salads, toast (including garlic cheesy toast), pizza, eggs (and egg sandwiches), corn on the cob dripping with butter, lefse, and ice cream.

Recently though I've been getting terrible stomachaches and they're distracting. I can't concentrate at work and I hold my breath while walking around. And that's no way to live. So with Andy's prodding, I've decided to go cheese free and keep a food journal with my symptoms. Hopefully in 2 weeks I'll be able to not eat dairy and feel like a million bucks. I vowed last night not to have dairy and so far today I've eaten buttered popcorn and had four cheese sauce on my pasta for dinner (though no cheese on top!). We'll see how this goes.

To get my encouragement up, I will make a list of delicious things that don't include cheese/dairy. Help me out if I've missed something: fried rice, noodles (like for holidays), cranberry sauce, sliced pears, olives, applesauce, salads are OK without cheese, beer, whiskey, chicken, bacon, tomatoes (are still delicious without mozzarella), carrots, green beans (French cut!), tea, tofutti cuties are good, and actually tofu ice"cream" in general is good.

Here goes!

Harvesting Pumpkins

This past weekend was the last weekend the Midtown Farmer's Market would be open, so Andy and I thought we'd swing by and see what we could see. We rode our bikes over since it was a wonderful day. Once there we saw lots of delightful foods available, so we made some purchases and we rode home with 2 pumpkins, a bunch of potatoes, pork chops, carrots and lettuce.

This is what Andy did with his pumpkin. He got lots of compliments from trick or treaters.

I used a bigger knife on my pumpkin.

Earlier this fall I decided I wanted to make something with pumpkin from a real pumpkin, not out of can. So today was the day and I made a pumpkin pie! It was an interesting experience, especially since our cheap blender sucks and a food processor would have worked a million times better for pureeing the pumpkin stuff.

But first I had cut open the pumpkin, which was a task. The directions in the old version of The Joy of Cooking instruct you to "hack" the pumpkin into 4 inch pieces. Hack I did. Next I roasted the hacked up pieces for a good while. Then I scraped off the soft flesh and then "processed" it so it wouldn't be stringy. This is me scraping my roasted pumpkin pieces.

After the frustrating experience with the blender, everything else worked out pretty well. The pumpkin pie turned out great! Though I wouldn't recommend listening to how The Joy of Cooking tells you to check how it's done, sticking a knife in the center would work much better.

This is what I came up with today after an afternoon spent hacking, scraping, whisking and baking. On the bottom is the pumpkin pie, above that is extra puree for pumpkin muffins and on top pumpkin seeds to be roasted later.

But you can't eat pumpkin pie without whipped cream! We didn't have any cool whip on hand, but I had leftover heavy whipping cream from the pie, so I whipped up some whip cream. It's fast, easy and delicious!

Here's the finished product (with a bite missing)!

Overall, my making a pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin experience was a lot of fun and I got to try out some new things. I learned more about baking and took the first tentative step to cooking with winter squash. Also, I learned that it's helpful to have the right tools in the kitchen. Sometimes improvising with what you have works well, like using coffee filters to strain the pumpkin puree instead of cheesecloth. But other times, a blender just doesn't do the trick.

Army of Applesauce

Mott's can eat it! I've been making my own applesauce recently and here are the results of my latest effort. I feel that this beats out any pre-packaged applesauce any day. It's delicious, fresh, natural and comes in cute, reusable, single serving containers.

Also, I'm getting married in 1 week! I'm getting kind of nervous for it, there's a lot to make sure I do. It's a lot of attention. Andy and I are starting to pack for the trip to Indiana and our trip after to Portland, Oregon. It's going to be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone who is going!

Today is my first big day of October, I will be running in a 5k as part of the Twin Cities Marathon. I couldn't do a marathon, the 5k seems hard enough. Andy and I have been training for the past 3 weeks though, so I'm in lots better shape. When I was putting lotion on last night, I found a muscle that I didn't have before! That's quite exciting. Here's hoping it doesn't rain too hard this morning!

Out and About

Andy and I have recently joined a club, the Twin Cities Bicycling Club. It's a lot of fun. So far we've only gone on 3 rides, but it's been a great time. The first ride was a bit slow, but the second ride we went on last weekend was perfect! We went on the same ride again today and I learned a good lesson about the speed at which I ride. The thing about this ride, is that the group is large and it tends to split up into a few groups going at different speeds. Last week we stayed in the back bunch at went between 14 - 16 mph. This week, Andy wanted to keep up with the first group going the fastest. I can't ride as fast as Andy, but I still tried. I was sort of able to keep up with the group as they did their warm up of 20 mph, after that I was toast.

After awhile Andy was dropped from the fast group and we maintained with the middle group. I was pretty tired though. Andy determined that I do pretty good until 17 mph, then I fall back. It'd be neat if I could keep up with the fast people at some point. Right now, I know what pace I can ride at and I will try and keep up to that. Usually when I ride I'm pretty poky, so I know I can pick up the tempo if I want.

Also today Andy and I visited the best bike shop in the Twin Cities, Freewheel Bike. I've thought Freewheel was a great shop and the place I felt most comfortable, but today really solidified that feeling. A couple years ago Pete (from Ireland) got me a gift card from Freewheel, which was really store credit. I didn't use all of it up, but kept my receipt which showed the $9.52 I had left over. Today I went to Freewheel to make some purchases and I remembered I had that receipt, but I wasn't sure if it'd still be valid. So after we shop around a bit and make our picks someone from Freewheel approaches us to check out and I show her my faded receipt from 2007. She recognized it was her handwriting that marked how much I had left and honored my $9.52! It was great, I couldn't believe either!

Freewheel is great for many reasons. They have awesome customer service, they're friendly. They know and love bikes without being pretentious about it. I'm the type of person that doesn't have a type of person, so I feel weird when I don't fit in somewhere, like many bike shops in the Twin Cities. But at Freewheel, I don't feel uncomfortable, I feel welcomed. Not to say other bike shops are bad, but that Freewheel is awesome.

Anyway, off of the bike topic. The garden is doing great. We've harvested all of our bush beans and our crazy pole beans have finally flowered. I made a delicious dinner last night with tomatoes, summer squash, carrots and thyme from our garden. It felt good to eat all that and know we grew it ourselves. Plus it was tasty.

Food and Fun!

Yesterday I made the most delicious lunch that I probably have ever made. Check it out:

It is prosciutto wrapped asparagus with focaccia, olive oil dipping sauce and some Honeyweiss! I've never had prosciutto before and it's delicious! It's like very thin bacon without being fried. It was really peppery and had more flavor than a little strip like that should.

Andy has been doing some cooking as well. He's become our bread master and we rarely buy packaged bread anymore. Here are some of his delicious creations:

Braided bread and pretzels! They were delicious.

We've also been planting stuff and it's been growing. Here is what our parsley seedlings look like:

We also went to the Green Expo last weekend and had a lot of fun! We tried out segways, looked at wind turbines and electric cars. We saw a demonstration for very expensive pans but ate lots of delicious food. It was a fun event. We even saw Don Shelby! Without his pinstripe suit, he looked sort of grumpy. I was awestruck anyway.

I'm a wind turbine, love me!

Andy is a wind turbine too.

An array of home-use wind turbines in front of Sweet Martha's cookies.

Trying out the segway. I didn't fall flat on my face like our former president.

Andy on the segway. He was a pro, but still a little stiff.

Bring Your Own Lunch

I make my own lunch for work pretty much every day.  Anytime I don't make a lunch, there's a good reason; such as I'm getting lunch for free that day.  It's work to make a lunch everyday.  Especially to make it not the same boring thing all the time that I'm going to get tired of eating, or worse, that Andy will get tired of eating.  Sometimes I don't want to make lunches and I'd rather sit around in the morning and read the news.  But then I think of the consequences.  If I don't make a lunch, then I'm going to have to buy a lunch.  Even with my mall discount, a comparatively delicious lunch would cost me between $6-7.  To me, that is expensive and money could be better spent in other ways.

One thing I really dislike: microwave meals.  I have probably not had a microwave meal for the past 10 years, and that is something I really appreciate.  If you try and think what process food has to take to get to the point where it can be frozen and regenerated like that after being shipped thousands of miles, gross.  Also, I like the idea of a person making my food, not a machine.  I'm not a "locavore" or anything.  I just like buying ingredients and making food from scratch.  Cooking is a skill that is in short supply and I like to learn how to cook new things. 

Granted my best recipe that I created myself is butter noodles with seasoning, I still like to learn.  Cooking good food is a challenge with delicious rewards, and I like anything delicious.  Andy has been a great help in getting me to be more experimental and try new vegetables and recipes.  When I was little I really wanted to be a vegetarian for animal rights, except that I didn't like vegetables.  So I'm getting there.

For some reason I just feel a lot better making my own food than going out and eating.  Sometimes it's lots easier to just get some food, but it's more rewarding to me to just have my own food that we make.  Andy is really good at cooking, so I'm lucky to have him around to make fresh bread and buns.  It's nice to take my own lunch to work and tell everyone that Andy made the bun that my sandwich is made on or the salad dressing I'm using is a gluten-free recipe from Andy's mom.

My biggest food problem is planning ahead for each dinner, it's really hard to make a menu a week in advance.  Then we have to go out and get a bunch of ingredients and stick to the plan. I like flying by the seat of my pants sometimes.  But it gets hard when there's nothing in the cupboards and we're hungry.

I'm open to hearing new recipes from anyone if they'd like to share!

Camping!

This past weekend Andy and I took a trip down to Frontenac State Park for a camping trip! This was our first time camping together and it was loads of fun. We reserved a sweet cart-in site, where we packed up our stuff in a cart and pushed it about a 1/4 mile to our site. Think of it as one step away from car camping.

Andy being my pack ass. On the way back I carried the backpack.

The pooper wasn't too far from our campsite.

Only one other couple and their dog was camping in the same area as us, so it was really quite and nice. The site was nice too, except it was really muddy due to recent wetness. The first day we set up our site, ate a snack, and then took a hike around the area. We saw some large birds of prey, though we weren't sure what kinds of birds they were. We were able to get pretty close, until Andy stepped on a stick and scared them off. A bird book might be helpful for identifying the birds we see on future hikes. A tree book would be nice as well, so that we know what trees we're looking at when they start to grow leaves.

Andy enjoying a delicious snack.

Andy and I by Lake Pepin.

Birds! They have red faces, so I really don't know what they are.

After hiking Andy built a fire and we started cooking our dinner. I don't think I've ever been camping without some sort of camp stove and guaranteed method of cooking, so I was a bit nervous trying to cook without one. We planned on cooking brats and wieners; however, we forgot a utensil for taking our cooked wieners off the grate. In Wabasha we went to a very friendly hardware store and found this nifty clamping grate thing that we could stick in the fire and cook our dogs. It worked beautifully! Much to my surprise.

Cooking wieners.

The finished product! A delicious dinner.

After that there wasn't much to do and it was getting pretty cold. So we retired to the tent and Andy tried to patch his Thermarest, it didn't hold. My air mattress is in Indiana still, so I slept uncomfortably on the hard ground. It was terribly cold that night and I couldn't sleep because I hurt on all sides from the ground and I had to pee, but I didn't want to get up again in the dark. Finally when it was light I ventured out and relived myself. I was able to get back to sleep and wake up to the wonderful words, "Amanda, I got the water boiling!" Andy had managed to get the fire going enough to boil our water for our morning tea and oatmeal! It was a wonderful start to the day.

Andy enjoying his morning tea and oatmeal.

We then took a morning hike in the fog and started down the side of the bluff. It was a really pretty walk down and exciting to get closer to the water. On the way up the fog burned off and it turned out to be quite a beautiful day. After packing our stuff up and heading out, Andy and I stopped at the Whistle Stop cafe in Frontenac Station for lunch.

The foggy road.

These are the switchbacks that lead down the side of the bluff to Lake Pepin.

Me in front of the steep climb.

One of the few things that were actively growing.

My artsy reflection picture.

Camping was a lot of fun and Andy and I plan on doing a lot more. We've decided a blow up air mattress and a camp stove are two important things that we should get in the future. Hopefully since it's getting warming freezing to death at night won't be as much of a concern now. We've also discovered campsites that you can hike into that are 1 to 5 miles from parking. This is our next step as we get better at this whole camping thing.

My Life Home, Alone

I keep wanting to take out the trash. I've thought of what I'm going to throw away, the timing of throwing it away, and how to throw stuff away with using as few bags as possible. This is far too much thought about an event 2 days away yet.

Since I've gotten home from Indiana no one else has been here, except Snell for an afternoon. I've been much more jumpy. Whenever someone is in the backyard I know about it and I don't like it. I've had a stressful night or two, but generally, living alone is kind of cool. I've been cooking a lot. And no, not just pasta or chicken and rice. Here's what I've cooked (because I know Tony likes lists):

• Turkey Tetrazinni
• Cream Cheese Mints
• Herbed Whole Wheat Muffins
• Spiced Whole Wheat Muffins
• Breaded chicken tenders
• Risotto
• Italian style meatloaf
• Apple Struesel Muffins
• Turkey Tortellini Salad
• Garlic Cheesy bread
  

I'm sure theres more, but I'm not feeling like remembering. Back to living alone...

I've cleaned a bit, and I've fallen behind on the dishes. But they do actually get done quite frequently. With all this new found cooking, I've been doing more dishes have been getting dirty. I like living alone and doing whatever I want and not worry about disturbing anyone. I just wish that I was living in a house that hadn't been broken into so that I wouldn't be so scared.

Also, I dislike onions.