Specific strength

During my evening off from jiujitsu yesterday I decided to do some yoga.  It's probably been a year since I did any, and two years since I did it regularly.  I was surprised by how much of a difference I felt.  I've obviously lost some areas of strength and flexibility that yoga emphasizes, like shoulder and front-hip flexibility.  But I've also grown stronger at other movements that are common in jiujitsu. 

At the end of my workout, my posture felt temporarily better and I had stretched some muscles that really needed it.  I don't have the extra time or money to start attending a yoga class right now, but I will be checking Netflix for yoga videos tonight. 

Excellent Lunch Launch!

If you would like to continue reading about food, I'm setting up a separate blog where I will only talk about food, and most of what I talk about will be how to pack lunch.  It's called Excellent Lunch.

How to Pack an Excellent Lunch: The Elements of Style

I Hate Sandwiches


Actually, I only hate sandwiches when they've been sitting around for several hours, like the sandwich in a packed lunch has.  Sandwiches for vegetarians are especially susceptible to the problems that beset a sandwich when it's been sitting around.  The cheese gets slimy from being next to the lettuce and tomato, the lettuce wilts, the tomatoes' texture gets strange, the bread absorbs too much moisture from the vegetable fillings.  And really, bread and cheese are quite dry and hard to eat together unless they're freshly toasted.  Who's got a toaster oven in the office?  Not me.  Honestly, I'd rather eat all the parts of a sandwich individually than suffer through a sandwich that was assembled the night before.  A bit of salad or grilled vegetables with bread and cheese on the side works.  Sandwiches just don't. That rules out what's probably the number one lunch in the US. 


A Dazzling Array of Side Dishes

I cook lunch for the whole week all at once, on Sundays.  I'm not home much in the evenings, and that allows me to have delicious lunches without becoming an insomniac.  It also means I eat the same thing for lunch every day most weeks, which is why side dishes are crucial.  I keep around a few "staple" snacks, and lunch isn't complete without at least one of them.  I'm more likely to enjoy the main dish I pack if it's not the only thing in my lunch.  Monotony ruins a lunch, ad variety elevates it.  Here are some of the snacks I like:

• apples with peanut butter
• carrots or other vegetables with hummus
• nuts
• dried cherries (usually with nuts)
• berries, with or without yogurt
• salads (especially non-leafy salads, which don't wilt as quickly)

Sauce for Everything


Sauce is a crucial ally in my anti-monotony crusade.  Sure, samosas taste pretty good on their own, but they're better with chutney.  They're even better if you have tamarind chutney and green chutney.  Apples are similarly great on their own, but with peanut butter they're more filling and they contribute a sweet-savory combination taste to the meal instead of just being fruit.  Carrots go with hummus; they're boring on their own.  When I make Big Gujarati Lunch, of course I include pickles and pureed mango sauce too.  Sauces and garnishes keep food interesting and remind us that even poor, maligned, packed-from-home, eaten-quickly lunch deserves to be delicious.


Always Pack Dessert

Lunch deserves to be delicious.  We deserve to enjoy our lunches, not just to refuel so we can make it to dinner time.  Dessert is there to remind us of that.  It doesn't have to be a lot -- often I just pack a couple of ounces of dark chocolate.  It just has to be present.  The way I like to pack lunch turns it into a true meal, and a meal is more satisfying when there are a variety of dishes and a dessert.


Can I Microwave This?  Can This Keep in the Fridge?
I've made a big deal of variety, but this last point limits the variety of foods that work well in a packed lunch.  Food I pack has to be good cold, or I have to be able to reheat it in the microwave.  It also has to survive overnight (or even a day or two) in the fridge.  I don't pack things that have to be reheated in the oven or toaster.  I never dress leafy salads beforehand -- I use tiny salad dressing containers to take dressing along separately.  Basically, I think lunch should taste good when you eat it, not make you wistful for what it must have tasted like when it was freshly cooked. 

Excellent Lunch 2: Cold Soba Noodles

Yesterday F. and I stopped by Reliable Market to pick up some groceries, but we'd just been at jiujitsu practice so we were tired, hungry, and impulsive.  At the store they were giving out samples of kimbap and cold soba noodles, both of which were delicious.  We took some kimbap home to eat for lunch right away, and bought some soba noodles, which we cooked up this afternoon.  The bottled soba sauce they had wasn't vegetarian, so we made some of our own.  The noodles were great with the sauce, ground radish, green onions, tofu, wasabi, and shredded nori.

Directions:

1. The dipping sauce I used is called tsukejiru. Here's the recipe I used, modified from The Japanese Kitchen: 6 tablespoons of soy sauce, 2 teaspoons tamari, 1 tablespoon sugar, 3 cups of mild veggie broth, and a chunk of dried kelp.  I put the kelp in there because the original recipe uses fish broth, and the kelp helps replace the ocean-y taste but is still vegetarian.  Let the sauce cool.
2. In a food processor, grind a daikon radish or one of those big Korean non-daikon radishes, depending on how strong you like your radish taste.
3. Slice some green onions.
4. Slice some nori into pretty shreds for garnishing.
5. Cut some fresh tofu into cubes.
6. Cook some soba noodles.  Run them under cold water immediately after they're done so they don't overcook.
7. I think the "official" way to eat this is to add wasabi, ground radish, green onions, and nori to a small bowl of dipping sauce and then dip the noodles in, but I couldn't find a logistical way to include the tofu cubes I wanted in there.  Instead, I topped the noodles with all the garnishes and tofu cubes, then poured a little sauce into the plate.

Excellent Lunch 1: Bi Bim Bap

Lunch packed for tomorrow: brown rice bi bim bap with carrots, broccoli, bean sprouts, enoki mushrooms, baby bok choy, shitake mushrooms, and fried tofu.

Directions:

1. Cook some rice.  I have a rice cooker, so that's all there is to this step.
2. Choose 4-6 kinds of vegetables, and slice them thinly or cut them into suitably small pieces.  
3. For each vegetable, you have two choices.  EITHER: blanch them in some boiling water, then toss them in a little sesame oil and salt, OR pan-fry them in some sesame oil.  This choice really depends on the vegetable.  I blanched the baby bok choy and carrots, but stir-fried the mushrooms.
4. If you like, fry some tofu.  Or cook some meat, if you swing that way.
5. For each serving, first scoop a good amount of cooked rice into the bowl.  Top with about 1/4 cup of each kind of the various vegetables.  It looks nice if you keep each vegetable in its own zone, like in the picture.  
6. Put the tofu in the middle.
7. Put a just-barely-fried egg.  You want it extra runny, because if you're packing this in your lunch you'll probably have to microwave it, and that will cook the egg a little extra.
8. Squeeze on some bi bim bap sauce.

Lunchtime at home

I'm working from home today because my officemate gave me his cold.  Yuck.  To console myself, I used up the last of the dosa batter to make an uttapam for lunch.  With chai and sambar, because I don't do things halfway.

I'm pretty good looking, for a girl

My own Big Fat Indian Wedding also introduced me to the fun and flashiness of South Asian formal wear. I recently bought this as a present to myself, to wear at the cousin's wedding we're going to this winter:

It's from exclusively.in, which is like the gilt.com of India. I like them a lot, because it would otherwise be hard for an American like me with marginal Hindi skills to get a hold of clothes from a lot of the designers they feature. I admit it, I have expensive taste in flashy Indian clothes.

More posts about fighting and food

Actually, just food this time around.

I haven't posted anything here for a while because I was busy talking about getting married to F on that other blog where I talked about getting married. That was great. Now it's done and I'll get back to my usual favorite topics.

It's spring, and although the weather is disappointing the vegetables are holding up their end of the bargain. I have some great meals planned for the next week or so. I'll describe them now, and when I have made them I'll put up some pictures.

• Friday, dinner with some friends at our house: potato gnocchi with garlicky broiled asparagus, a fried egg, lemon & basil from our newly established container herb garden.
• Sunday, brunch with some other friends at our house: masala dosa (that's when you fill the dosa crepe-style with spicy potatoes) with sambar, coconut chutney, and sweet yogurt sauce. Maybe uttapam too (that's when you embed things like tomatoes, onions and ginger in the dosa batter, blueberry pancake style). And chai.
• Dinner #1 sometime next week: Brussels sprouts broiled with cumin and mustard seeds, greek yogurt (probably also gujarati spiced), and some polenta or something.
• Dinner #2 sometime next week: My family's go-to Thanksgiving wild rice stuffing with dried cherries, mushrooms, celery, onions, and herbs. I will probably add some tempeh to this so it'll be more main-dishy, and might use wild rice & quinoa instead of wild rice & brown rice. The recipe is based on this one from epicurious, but I replace the pears with cherries and leave out the sausage because I'm vegetarian.
  
• Dinner #3, sometime when I am feeling homestyle: bataka poha, because F likes it so much. Bataka poha is potatoes (bataka) cooked with "flat rice" (poha), spices, and topped with cilantro & lemon. I think flat rice is partially cooked, pounded flat, and then re-dried. Here's what bataka poha looks like:

Come to think of it, I'll post some photos of the back porch garden later, too. I'm very excited about that.

I'm back

I have abandoned this blog recently because I was pretty busy doing this:


But let me tell you what's been going on! We also bought a house....

...which has a beautiful kitchen...

...in which we've been cooking some delicious inventions to put in our awesome new Mr. Bento lunchboxes.

All it takes to make packing lunch fun is to have an exciting lunchbox.

I suppose it also helps to have exciting ingredients. This week I invented a very tasty thai-ish flavored chickpea salad. It had tomatoes, cilantro, green onions, young coconut (the soft kind), chickpeas, and a chili-garlic-lime-ginger dressing. I am really into bean salads because they're so satisfying, easy, and healthy for ladies who are going to big jiujitsu tournaments in a month like I am.

I've also got this dining room set, which used to be kind of grungy-looking white (it's ok to be grungy-looking if you were painted white several decades ago).

I'm going to lacquer it black, with cream and limey/grassy green accents, to go with our kitchen's black lacquer. I think it won't be too dark because the top of the table is glass, the seats of the chairs are upholstered, and the cabinet doors have panels where I can paint or stencil a cream & green image to lighten it up.