Lattes: warm milk for grownups

Drank too much wine with some ex-neighbors last night and accidentally hit 'off' instead of 'snooze' this morning. Luckily I still woke up in time to get to work, if not to yoga. :( After being (rightly) berated on Twitter by JogBlog for counting today as a FAIL by 10am when I still had the whole day ahead of me I decided to take a nice long walk at lunchtime to a nearby park and do a little bit of yoga:
I did not do anything like this, I just did a few sun salutations in my work clothes. I just like this picture, which is courtesy sporkist.






Then I came back to the office to eat my lunch, which included my drink of choice: grande skinny latte (Side note, is it a bad thing if the barista in your office cafe knows your drink before you say anything?) I have one pretty regularly for breakfast, but I also use it as a calming mechanism when I'm stressed. Remember when you were a kid and would have a glass of warm milk to settle you down if you couldn't sleep? How many adults would willingly have a glass of warm milk? Well, isn't that what a latte (as made by mainstream coffee chains, not a proper Italian one) is?

Vegan brunch: Fennel Risotto, Smoky Shittakes, and Fried Bananas

So Cathy got a copy of Vegan Brunch to give away on Planet Veggie and my friend Tracy won it but she lives in the US so I said I'd send it to her if I could make something out of it first. Meg and I flipped through it and in the savory section there was a lot of tofu, which I don't mind but Meg refuses to eat, but I didn't want to wait until I felt like making brunch to do something with this and I really wanted savory for dinner and not sweet.

In the end I decided to make Fennel Breakfast Risotto, which was REALLY REALLY good. I cheated a little in that I didn't buy quite enough vegetable stock and so I topped it up with a chicken stock cube and a little extra water. So not exactly vegan, but vegan in spirit. Other than that my only issues were that a cup and a half of chopped shallots is a LOT of shallots to chop by hand and I really wish I had a food processor, and that risotto is a lot of work in the stirring (not unique to this recipe, obviously). This was really great, I'll be saving the recipe to make this again.

I also made Smoky Shittakes, which were meant to be sauteed shittakes cut in half, but I didn't read the recipe carefully and sliced them instead. I also didn't find any liquid smoke so just used soy sauce. I think it actually worked out though. I topped the risotto with them, and they added a really nice salty nutty almost-crunch to the (clearly slightly underseasoned) risotto.

As a side we had bananas, dredged in flour/ginger/cinnamon, and fried. I neglected to tap off the flour (too many pans going at the same time, clearly) so they were a little too bready, and because I had bananas instead of plantains they weren't sweet enough to offer the counterpoint to the savory risotto & mushrooms. If I were to do them again I'd put a little sugar in the breading. Instead we put some honey over them, and it turned out great.

Thanks, Cathy, for the competition, and Tracy, for letting me borrow your book for a bit. Let me know how you get on!

Vietnam, part 0.1

Even though Meg and I keep a pretty good travel journal when we travel, we haven't put any of it online from our Vietnam trip yet. And I always get shit from people about the low number of photographs I put out there - but honestly it's intentional as I fully subscribe to the belief that "the difference between professional photographers and amateurs is that the former show fewer photgraphs." (OK, I can't remember the exact quote or who said it, but you get the idea.)

Anyway, we'll put some stories up soon but we had an amazing active vacation, and a few photos, with more to come, are here.

No on California's Prop 8: an open letter

Dear friends and family,

I'll be blunt. I'm writing to ask for your help in defeating California's Proposition 8, the ballot measure that would codify the discrimination inherent in the statement "marriage is between a man and a woman."

I could give you fiscal, social, familial, or personal reasons why I believe Prop 8 is wrong, but I'll just say this: it's fundamentally unAmerican to say that some people are more worthy of government sanction than others. It was wrong when we counted slaves as 3/5 of free people, it was wrong when women were denied the vote, and it's wrong today.

If you're in California, please don't forget to vote. And no matter where you are, please join me and thousands of other Americans in giving whatever you can - your time, your money, your goodwill and word of mouth - to defeat the proponents of inequality.

Foodie goodness

Today I have been thinking about food.

First off, about how I like it. And I like real food (and Diet Coke). I had a taste of a Powerbar Gel thingy this weekend and it was so nasty and chemically that I don't know how any of you choke them down and I'm definitely going to have to work on the DIY-realfood-energy sources. And about how I am glad that I don't feeel one bit guilty for eating an entire bag of baby carrots and a whole bag of grapes (and a sandwich) for lunch today. Someone somewhere who was doing weight watchers said that she counts all fruit/veg as 1 point because she didn't get fat eating carrots. Too true, so I'm munching away like a rabbit to my heart's content.

But it's so much easier to eat this way when I'm running and except for one week a month and it all goes hand-in-hand, which is both nice (for staying on track) and annoying (for getting back on track). But even so, I had a nice, relatively healthy dinner for New Restaurant Tuesday yesterday.

Nextly, I'm thinking about what my goals are for cooking. I like to have a healthy meal with as little time and fuss as possible. So when it's my turn to cook we have things like chicken breasts flash marinated in citrus on salad leaves with citrus vinagarette. Meg, on the other hand, likes her food to have FLAVOUR that screams at you, and she doesn't care if she uses every pan in the kitchen to do it. Cooking for her is an event, something to be savoured. So we get pork loin with spicy apple jelly and curried couscous. Neither is bad, except that I have to clean up after her while she gets to clean up after me. It's just something I've been thinking about. What are your goals for cooking?

Finally, I had a little time to kill so I've been reading my friend Tracy's awesome food blog. You should check it out.

This could be dangerous - and tons of fun!

Meg and I bought bikes today. We've been talking about it for years (ever since our bikes got ruined in our first NY winter when we didn't have any place to bring them inside in the snow) and now we definitely have a place to keep them inside and I'm sick of the tube commute (8 miles in well over an hour - most of you RUN faster than that!). And I think this might be the inspiration for her to start exercising a bit - she was talking about going for a ride to/from dinner and I might even be able to get her excited about a triathlon (when we were in Cape Cod she was so excited to swim every day).

It could be a really expensive hobby, but it's a healthy one (as opposed to our other new no-friends hobby, the Wii) so whatever. It's going to be the impetus for me to get a bladder for the Camelbak my landlord left behind (yay!) and now Meg is looking up bike trips in Vietnam for our planned tour of Southeast Asia next year.

In that spirit - does anyone commute to work on their bike? Are the big spatulas that come with the bike going to cut it as pedals? Should I graduate immediately to those toe cage things, or wait until I'm hardcore enough to justify clipins?

(Pics coming as soon as my bike actually arrives at the shop...on Tuesday!)

One step closer

I know, I know, this is a running blog. This post has absolutely to do with running, and may generate strong feeling in the comments, but it's about something too near and dear to me not to comment on.

As of May 15, same-sex couples in California have access to the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of marriage. NY state recognizes such marriages performed in other states. It's a happy day for us.

Meg and I will be getting a legal marriage the next time we're in California (likely later this year). We had our "real" wedding, in front of friends and family, a year and a half ago. We've owned real estate together for nearly 5 years. We're clearly committed to one another without the need for a state - not even our own - to tell us so. So why do it again?

Let me start by repeating what I said above - we consider the day we stood up in front of our loved ones and publically promised our lives to each other to be our real wedding day. But the protections offered by the law are either not available at all (the right to inherit from one another without paying taxes) or only available by explicit additional legal paperwork (the right to visit one another in hospital and be considered next of kin).

I actually believe that marriage is a religious rite that should be separated from the civil benefits of committed partnerships. If your church says not to recognize same-sex partnerships, more power to you - that's the beauty of separation of church and state. But the state should not be in the business of providing rights and priviledges to one group of people and denying them to another. And as long as these civil benefits are conferred via the religious rite, they should be equally accessible to all people. So, if you don't support same-sex marriage, work to separate the civil benefits from the teachings of your church. Because regardless of what your god tells you, the Constitution prohibits discrimination.

Completely unrelated to running: I'm in "print"!

My first short story has been published in an online literary magazine! You can download the whole issue. I'm very excited.

Totally unrelated: perhaps someday I can get married

No more words than this: http://pandagon.blogsome.com/2008/02/01/new-york-appeals-court-rules-state-must-recognize-same-sex-canadian-marriages/

Except to say: wtf is up with some of the comments.