We've Moved!

Oh hey there. Welcome to my old blog, the one I never took very seriously. I've moved over to my own website where very exciting things are happening. If you'll just mosey along to onlearningtolivewell.tv you will see what I mean. Go on- I'll be over there waiting for you.

Summer foods: Gaspacho

Gaspacho is one of my all time favorite "Tastes of Summer." The cooling combination of cucumber and the spice of onions balanced with tomatoes is freaking awesome. My mother made it when I was a kid, and I would often have a glass of it for breakfast. There are hundreds of recipies out there, some with fish, some with cream, almost all a lot more complicated then my mother's. I learned a long time ago not to bother ordering gaspacho in restaraunts because I would be dissapointed.

Here is my recipie:

Bottle of your favorite tomato-based vegetable juice
2 cups diced fresh tomatoes (skin removed)
2 cups diced cucumbers (peeled and seeded)
1/2 cup diced red onion 
several minced cloves of garlic
1/2 cup cilantro
1/4 cup olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
hot sauce to taste (optional)

To remove skins from tomatoes, drop whole tomatoes in vigorously boiling water and shut off heat. Remove tomatoes after 60 seconds and plunge into ice water.  After a few minutes the skins will be loose and easy to remove.


You can pulse the veggies in a food processor- I don't have one so I hand chop everything.
Place tomatoes, cucumber, red onion and garlic in a large bowl (I use one with a lid) and pour just enough vegetable juice to cover. Stir it all up and add the cilantro, olive oil, salt, pepper and hot sauce. Add more juice if you want your soup a little soupier. Chill for at least an hour before serving.

RRARF day 6: My Kitchen

I usually spend about 4 hours a day in the kitchen. I hang out in there, listen to the radio, cook, think about cooking, avoid cleaning and sometimes I do the dishes. People come over, I bake and cook which everyone loves, I am master of all I survey. When my father and step mom show up I run out the door and let them have the run of the place.

They have very big kitchen personalities. My father is a "recovering chef." Meals are planned and executed, generally with about 10 more steps and 15 more ingredients then anything I would make on a daily basis. There is also a whole lot of knife sharpening and deep cleaning of pans and utensils and what-not that goes on. There are multiple dishes and sometimes courses and often times yelling. I just sit around and wait for the food to appear.

This weekend, armed with RRARF- I actually ate breakfast and lunch, in and around the larger productions of what they were doing.

RRARF day 5: Coffee

Black gold, black nectar, rocket fuel. The wonderment of coffee is something that I have had a hard time giving up. Its not the caffeine. I have long only drunk coffee on the weekend and gone long stretches of time with only decaf. Its the coffee itself, the bitter, robust flavor that I miss whenever I am off the coffee. The smell gets me all excited for relaxing and getting stuff done. Sometimes late at night Jason will turn to me and say "I can't wait until its morning and I get to wake up and have coffee!" I feel similarly about it.

My parents gave Jason a gift of some amazing coffee from this great roastery in their neighborhood. It was roasted on 1/11/11. It smelt like heaven. In 25 days it will no longer be fresh and I would have missed my opportunity. I gave in without a fight.

I drank 6 ounces, and it was blissful.

RRARF day 4: My Parents

I have three parents. Unlike the crap-show many children of divorced parents are put through my dad, step-mom, and mother are best friends. My father and step-mother came up from New York City yesterday to hang out with us Massachusetts folk. We went to the People's Pint in Greenfield and feasted on head-cheese and pickled sausage, thai curry and assorted other goodness.

My step-mother and mom tried to parental pressure me into drinking wine and beer, and eating cookies. Having years and years of experience with buffering this kind of pressure, it was easy to deny the deliciousness that passed beyond my nose. When I was 14 I told my parents they were putting me under "some weird kind of peer pressure" when the tried to get me to drink wine at dinner. I remember the three of them laughing over this for whole long minutes.

So all of them are here talking together loudly. They are hilarious and wonderful people, but they kind of make me exhausted.

RRARF day 3: Stress

The last 9 months have been crazy. I have been to 4 weddings and two funerals, hosted several weekend long parties and an endless stream of welcome house guests, and traveled to at least 5 states to see all my friends and family (as far as California and as close as New Hampshire) and finally went on a real vacation with Jason to Canada. I worked many many extra days, then worked two jobs, then had a total career shift that lasted 7 weeks. Thats just some of what I have been doing. No wonder I am depleted. Every time I thought things were letting up, they didn't.

I have stopped exercising. I haven't seen my friends at the circus studio in about a year. And my friend who teaches Pilates thought I blew her off because after seeing her weekly since November last year, I disappeared off the map in June and didn't call her until October. We played phone tag for a while but still haven't caught one another on the phone. I cancelled my gym membership. I haven't done any yoga or stretching. My garden pretty much died. I didn't even hike that much spring-fall. I spent a lot of time in the river over the summer, but that was mostly spent sitting on the dam and occasionally jumping off of it. This is a sad story for this former dancer.

Now that I have a week of unemployment and three days of RRARF under my belt, I actually find myself wanting to move. Which is my normal state of affairs, I love to move and dance and jump and climb. I am thinking that my over-taxed system shut down the impulse to move my body. Since I am rather adept at listening to my body I couldn't make myself exercise.  Yesterday I rolled out a mat on the floor and then just rolled around on it. I stretched my back and played with my abs for a while. Sara the cat seemed very pleased that I was doing this again and walked all over me and under me and wherever else she could be in the way. Even though this is Rehabilitative Rest and Aggressive Re-Feeding, movement and gentle exercise is still a must. I hope to continue to wish to move and possibly begin to do some Pilates again.

RRARF day 2: Nerve Impulses

I did better at eating copious amounts yesterday then the day before. There was one moment when I was totally in the mood for a nap. I thought to myself "oh good a nap opportunity!" Unfortunately I was not able to take it. I had an interview in the middle afternoon about 40 minutes from my house. It took Jason and I a long time to dig out the cars so that we could use them. Our landlord came by with his big snowblower and cleaned up our parking area and made some paths around the house. I was very grateful for that. I went down to this staffing agency that is looking for a new staffing coordinater right at what turns out is my "second lunch time" 3:00. On the way home I got hungry, although it had only been a few hours since I had eaten quite a bit of food. I mean REALLY hungry.  It made me think that the brain must regulate hunger in a similar way to pain.

When the body is in pain for any long stretch of time, the brain will quiet down the nerve impulses so that you don't feel it as much. You are in pain, but it isn't your sole focus. That is how there are so many of us walking around in chronic pain completely functional.  From a bodywork stand-point, once you take the body out of pain those nerves get a rest. When the pain comes back, it hurts a heck of a lot worse then it did before. As Dr. Ruch said "the body likes being out of pain, it gets addicted to it." Obviously your organism would love to be at a healthy stasis all the time. Since in the past I would spent a lot of time hungry before I ate, it stands to reason that the nerve impulses were dampened until I was SERIOUSLY HUNGRY generally around 1 in the afternoon and then dinner time. Now that I am filling myself up at the first signs of hunger (which are hard to determine, but I imagine will get stronger) those nerve signals are resetting themselves. Although I wasn't SERIOUSLY HUNGRY on the way back home after my interview, I was hungry and my nervous system definitely wanted to let me know about it.

p.s. I decided yesterday to skip a day so as to blog about the whole entire day after it happens.
p.p.s. The interview went very well