agh, cold hands and feet

That’s what you get when you go on a fast, and in my household where for some reason my parents won’t turn up the thermostat past 12 degrees, it’s very uncomfortable.

First, here’s why I did the fast. I did it because I love food, and I was probably the biggest over indulger ever. Whenever a pang of hunger hit, I would immediately run to the fridge to search out the most tastiest food I could make or eat to stuff my face with. I wanted to go the opposite direction and not give in to such cravings. Fasting had been on my mind for quite some time, and I always thought, no, I could never fast. Even just one night without food scared the heck out of me. Which was why I knew I had to do it.

I did some quick research, and started myself off with two days of a raw fruit/veggie diet. During this time, I was so tempted to go to a bbq and cheat, or when my friends and I went out to catch up, I looked at my friends’ plates of desserts and thought, mmmmm that looks tasty! But I managed to do without, and overall it wasn’t actually that bad. I had attempted a raw fruit/veggie fast maybe 3 or 4 years back, and I don’t think I lasted even half a day, so I impressed myself that I held out for 2 whole days! I believe it’s a matter of discipline. If you want something really bad, you’re the only one that can get it; nobody’s going to do it for you.

I started to really enjoy eating salads, and fruits for my meals, and will continue to try and eat more fruit/veggies now that I’m finished everything.  I was the biggest carb eater!  I love baked items, and noodles.  They’re my weakness.

The scary part for me was the fast.  I was so scared because I would get hunger, followed by pain in my stomach if I didn’t eat and I was scared of that feeling and not knowing if I could handle it, or if I would cave in.  I told the people in my household my intentions so they would know, and surprisingly received a positive response from most of them.

I didn’t know exactly how long I planned to fast for, originally thinking 1 day, but then jumping in completely thinking, at least 7 – 10 days.  I ended up doing the fast for 5 days.  It was definitely enough.  It made me more aware of myself, my body and what exactly it was that drove me to overeat.  I learned so much about myself, and my response to food, food senses, and desire for food.

It’s only been 2 days since breaking the fast, and I am still experiencing the benefits of it.  I am so much more aware of when I am actually hungry, and how my stomach feels to the food I’m feeding it.

So if in the future, you have something that you fear, the best thing is to confront it.  Not only do you overcome the fear, but you reap the benefits of whatever it is you take on.

mmmmm cookies!

I had a coffee date with a friend from my old work earlier this week. I thought I’d be nice and bake her something sweet since it was sweet of her to be spending her entire break time with me. How sweet of her, just for me! I really like baking things for people as a little surprise. I love getting surprises, but it’s just as nice to give them as well. Not only do I get to bake something yummy, but I don’t have to worry about gaining the weight from eating it.

Anyway, my friend told me the cookies were devoured by her co-workers and she had to hide the cookie tin so she would have some left for herself. I’m glad she and everybody else enjoyed these completely organic browned butter cookies. I made some with a blueberry spread, and some with raspberry for variety. I’m thinking of making biscotti to go with their daily coffee runs next time I see her, but we’ll see. I think it’s so much healthier to bake sweets at home than to buy some highly refined and processed goods from the store – and they never taste nearly as good as the home baked stuff!

I got the recipe from thezenkitchen. I like the name of that site, I’m not sure how I stumbled upon that site, but I’m glad I did. When I saw the picture of that cookie on their site, I knew I just had to make it. Isn’t that picture so pretty? I’m terrible at reading recipes in detail, and I usually skip a step or mess up something because of it. As I was browning the butter, I realized I had no idea how long I was suppose to let it cook for or what I was suppose to be looking for as it browned. Luckily I didn’t pull the butter from the heat too early or too late, but I’ll have to remember to read all directions in the future. I get so excited that I want to jump right in and figure it out on the go. I’m still trying to work on my picture taking skills, it’s hit and miss still. But I’m trying my best to take nicer shots. I looked back at those bagel/bread pictures and well… they’re ugly!

Speaking of pictures, why does Flickr not let me upload pictures? Can anybody help? I keep getting this error,

Flickr API: Page not found

Oh my, that font is huge! Hahaha. Seriously though, I think it’s a timing thing. I can upload during the day, but in the evenings, I keep getting that message! Frustrating!!

Spring is definitely here

The city seems to be waking up from hibernation. These days I wake up listening to the birds chirping away, and the morning sun shines its rays into my room. The sounds of lawnmowers on the weekend, and when I go for walks around the city, there’s a lot more people outside. It’s quite nice, and in a couple more weeks, I’m sure the flowers will be in full bloom.

Ha! I have no idea why I wrote that. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been so fully aware of the changing of the seasons.

Flickr won’t let me upload again! Could it be that I have an older version of Firefox, or is it just a linux thing? Anyway… here’s some pictures from some baking. I’ve been trying to find alternatives to making sweet baked goods because it’s pretty fatty, and I don’t want to gain any more weight.

So, breads! This is a baguette recipe from allrecipes, it required very little sugar, no eggs, and so its perfect. Everything turned out pretty good, except my shaping. Something I need to work on, but not bad considering I have very little experience with yeast and baking breads. This was a definite confidence booster. I threw in some dried oregano and basil for some flavour. This bread was soo good with cheese sprinkled on top and toasted in the oven. It was crunchy on the outside, and nice and chewy in the middle. Not too dense, but not too airy either.

After finishing off the bagels I had in the freezer, I thought, what the heck, I might as well make myself some bagels instead of buying them. It was fun making these. I liked making the hole for each bagel, and boiling them was pretty cool. I’m not sure though, at $2 for half a dozen, it might still be worthwhile to bike over to Benny’s and pick them up on mondays. I spent literally my entire evening preparing the bagels. The first rise took an hour, and the second rise, 20min. And I didn’t read the instructions carefully enough because I wasted a lot of time trying to knead more flour into the dough than what was actually required. So next time, it might not take as long. I think the shaping of the bagel would have turned out nicer if I hadn’t tried adding so much flour to the dough. Only after the bagels were done did I find out that I could’ve added some water, but oh well. At least I know if I make bagels again, I think the 12 bagels I made should last me a couple weeks. Oh yeah, they tasted pretty good actually. Nice dense bagel, perfect for cream cheese, peanut butter, blueberry spread, or just plain ol butter.

one email trigger

How do I even begin

Just as my friends were discussing attending our 10year high school reunion, I received an email from an old old elementary school friend. I’m not sure if I was the bad influence on her, or her me… I think we fed off each other. We had a blast in our elementary/high school days. And she triggered memories of carefree days and constantly skipping class. Once, we dyed our friends hair flourescent yellow, and only had 2 gloves so we each had an orange/yellow hand. Our days of trashing a friend’s house with confetti at her birthday party, of having these candies that turned our mouths blue and making this boy beg for them.

How is it that life just spins so out of control sometimes that you don’t realize until you’ve regained a little bit of it back. And then only to realize maybe the whole point of it all is not to have control and just go with the flow. Why do people drift in and out of our lives? How does a simple email reminding me of these days remind me so much of what I’ve been trying to separate myself from these last couple years.

It’s just occured to me that I’ve been trying to control so much the direction of what my ideal life would be like, that once I had it, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted. And now I’m so clueless, and directionless. How can you know what to do with your life if you have no idea what you want of it? And that what I’ve been doing these days is trying to control it all again. What’s the balance between going with the flow, but also making decisions to help you reach closer to… well, closer to what?

My friend expressed in her email after her experimentation period with drugs and such that my friends and I thought she would remain the same, and never grow up. And there’s truth there, because when she was experimenting, it did seem as if the rest of my friends cut themselves off from her. Although I didn’t cut myself off from her, I thought things, me, her, everybody would stay the same, and I never thought that she and I would ever drift apart.

Somehow, I’ve drifted so far apart from my dad and we live in the same house. When I greet him in the mornings, he won’t even look at me, and chooses to stare absentmindedly out the windows. When I make a comment, or a silly joke, his usual response is, whatever, or I don’t know, which I finally reminded him earlier that I didn’t ask him a question and not surprisingly he didn’t respond and walked away. At the dinner table, he doesn’t address me or he talks to me. When my brother visits, I might as well not be there.

I can understand drifting apart from friends easily. But how is it that my dad and I have drifted so far even though we live in the same house, eat at the same table, sleep under the same roof. What did I do that my father leaves the room when I enter, or purposely avoids me around the house. Why is he so uncomfortable around me?

It’s so easy to wish that things could be like they used to be. But everything changes, everybody changes. If there’s one constant, it’s change.

flour, anyone?

OK, I’m retarded. I have no idea what was going through my mind when I decided to order 20kg of organic flour from spud.ca. I shoulda known…well, I do know that it’s like 40lbs, but it just didn’t register at the time. Only that “I want, I want!!” It was pretty scary when I saw how much flour I had actually purchased. Oh well, now I’ve got so much flour, I have no idea if I’ll be able to use it all before it goes bad. At least I’ll know next time, and now I have even more reason to jump into baking more breads this year.

After my friend finished laughing at me, he did tell me that you can apparently freeze flour. I googled around, and found people who put a bay leave in an airtight container which is supposed to help as well. So I’ll see what I can do, since there’s not much space in my freezer.

Anyway, I decided that I better start baking right away. There’s no time to waste!! I’m kinda scared of using yeast, it’s alive!! And because I’ve never worked with it all that much. So I made these sweet dinner rolls from allrecipes. Good thing other users added instructions on how to prepare without a bread machine, and they turned out quite nice I must say. Somehow, by fluke chance of course they came out with good texture and taste. My yeast/sugar/water/milk solution took forever to proof, and when it came to punching down the dough… well, there was nothing to punch! My dough didn’t look like it had risen an inch.

Next time, I’ll have to do something about the ends curling up and away from the roll. I’m still not so confident with using yeast, but I’m sure the more I use it, the more comfortable I’ll get with it. I think for my next bread attempt, I’ll try to find a recipe that requires more kneading. I like kneading, I like feeling the bread dough and working with it.

Read It: Eat, Pray, Love

I’m pretty certain this is the first book I’ve read this year. Nope, actually second after reading The 100 Mile Diet. I just finished reading Eat, Pray, Love and its definitely worth reading. To sum it up, its the author’s personal story of spiritual growth during a year of travels to Italy, India and Indonesia. Her writing makes this a really fast read, and parts of it made me laugh out loud, others that made me think, and others that simply touched my heart.

I copied down a few lines from the book here and there, but one especially sticks out in mind.

This is when she is getting over losing someone she considered her soulmate. Richard from Texas says:

“He probably was [your soul mate]. Your problem is you don’t understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah, too painful.”

I thought about this, and came to this conclusion. I believe that a soulmate is a perfect fit, but how perfect is that fit if individually we’re not balanced? Individually, and as a planet, we are not balanced. Look around you and you see, the degree of the imbalance. In the U.S, I believe they say that 80-90% of the wealth is shared by 10 or 20% of the population? And even though I’ve grown up in a city all my life and I love city life, the majority of the population is gathered and bunched up in such a small areas relative to the size of the country. The planet is going through some crazy weather patterns, and maybe this is indicative of the people trying to balance themselves individually, such as the way the planet is also trying to as well. But, heck, what do I know?

Anyway, so what happens when an imbalanced person is attracted to another inbalanced individual? The laws of attraction says opposites attract, so it would only make sense that the person we attract and be attracted to would be our opposite. So, as a unit the two people balance each other out. In this way, it makes sense to me that it would be too painful to be with your soulmate forever, because you’d have to be constantly living in a state of imbalance to be together. Pretty painful, and doesn’t sound like the real soulmate.

Maybe we need to redefine the word soulmate. A soulmate to me is somebodysoul that I was meant to spend eternity with, in this lifetime, in some other time, space or dimension. It would be the soul of the individual that would keep pulling us together, even if we were worlds apart. As long as I were conscious, whether conscious on this planet as human, or as some microbe, I’d still feel the pull to be with that one soul. And once we were to find each other, nothing would be able to separate us.

Don’t they have some sorta thing in chemistry denoting this? Where one element on its own is very unstable, but when bonded to another it creates such a strong bond that even if other elements came along and tried crashing the party, it wouldn’t have a chance. Hmmm… that would be interesting to look up…

Orange-Cranberry White Chocolate Muffins

I bought a 6 cup muffin tin last year, well, only in December, and still haven’t used it. I wanted to make a more sugary-ish (actually I just wanted to use some of the Lindt white chocolate that’s been sitting around) type of muffin and since most people in my family don’t like sweets or they’re watching what they eat, I figured I’d make only 6 and finally get to use this muffin tin I got.

The recipe is based off this, I halfed the recipe, and substituted with whatever I had around.

1c all purpose flour (a tad more doesn’t hurt, I dumped in all the flour I had left)

1/3c sugar

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

100g chopped white chocolate (I used a bar of Lindt)

1 tsp vanilla extract (or something like that, i just poured some in)

zest from 1 orange

1/2c milk

1/4 cup oil

1 beaten egg

1c or so of orange flavoured craisins (i threw in what I had left)

1. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, zest and white chocolate in a large bowl

2. Combine egg, vanilla extract, milk and oil in a second bowl

3. Mix dry ingredients to wet until almost combined, then throw in the craisins. Don’t Overmix!

Bake at 350 degrees for about 22-25min. Makes 6 muffins.

Note to self:

Next time I make this, I’d cut back the amount of oil to maybe 1/8 cup or around 2 tablespoons. The muffins were light and fluffy, the white chocolate chunks were pretty darn tasty, but overall just a little too oily for me.

It gets easier… hopefully

Usually, when I make things, whether it’s cooking or crafting, I usually fluke out or it’s just beginners luck, and things turn out beautifully.

Take the first time I made naan, they came out looking so good, and tasting even better. It was perfect. So when I came around a second time to make them, and they didn’t turn out so good, well… it just makes me want to try it again and again until they work out because I know from the first time that I’m capable. I’d be willing to make it every day, probably multiple times a day until I perfected the technique… too bad my family probably wouldn’t put up with having to eat it all.

Recently, I was invited to a potluck and I was to bring an hor deurve. I had no idea what to make, I thought of bringing meatballs from Costco, but didn’t and instead I stayed at home watching tv. I was inspired by French Cooking at Home to try making cheese puffs, she calls them gougeres. I thought it was perfect because I had all the ingredients at home. I was feeling especially lazy and wouldn’t need to go out to buy anything. Anyway, I believe this was the first time I made something that I totally messed up.  At least they tasted a lot better than they looked.

I ended up bringing a bottle of wine to the party, and the strange thing was that, somebody had actually brought meatballs and cheese puffs. Isn’t that weird?

I will definitely attempt this again, because I love cheese, and things that are light and airy. And I feel the need to try, try again until I succeed.  I know what I did wrong that day and like my father said to me, you only learn to do by doing.

I wonder…

How many blogs out there are started and then ditched?  Kinda like old user accounts that are floating around taking up unnecessary bandwidth online, does it even contribute to that much anyway?  I guess like many other things, it all adds up.

I know that I’ve started at least half a dozen blogs over the past couple months on wordpress and blogger.  I think I’ll stick with wordpress because I don’t know what I’m doing in blogger, and since I’ve figured out wordpress, well, I’ll just stick with it… for as long as I continue this blog anyway.  I make no promises that this will be updated consistently, or that it won’t one day just disappear like so many of my previous blogs.  At least I keep the online world cleaner by removing the domains I don’t use… I say that just to make myself feel better.

It’s snowing again in Vancouver, we’ve gotten considerably more snow this year than previous years.  It’s pretty, and I think I’ll go for a walk later tonight.  Doesn’t it just seem so much safer to walk about at night when the snow reflects the light and makes everything appear brighter?

I was going to show some of my messups with cheese puffs and naan, but I guess that can wait till next time, when Flickr will actually let me upload some pics.