CSA week 4

Yay farm. We got some vigorous beets in the box this week, and they included this recipe in the weekly email:

Risotto with Beet Greens and Spring Onions
5 cups chicken stock

1 Tbsp olive oil

1 cup thinly sliced spring onions

1 1/2 cups uncooked Arborio or other short-grain rice

1/4 cup dry white wine

3 cups coarsely chopped beet greens

1/4 cup (1 ounce) grated fresh Parmeasan cheese

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

6 lemon wedges  

 

Bring broth to a simmer in a medium saucepan.  While broth is simmering, Saute onion in olive oil until tender.  Add ride and cook 1 minute stirring constantly. Add wine and stir 1 minute. Reduce heat to low and stir in greens.  Add 1/2 cup of broth at a time and stir until each portion is absorbed before adding the next.   Stir in cheese and pepper.  Serve with lemon wedges.

I've never done anything risotto like before... This may be a ridiculous question, but can I do this with sushi rice (which I have in my cabinet) or should I go get some more risotto-ish rice?

I'm excited about eating the beet greens. Previously I'd just cooked them in olive oil with green onions, and if I run out of cooking enthusiasm, I'll probably end up doing that again. It's fun because even the beet greens leak beet juice.

Besides the beets, we got broccolli for a third week, some very happy green onions, snow peas, and some herb thing. I think it's thyme.

Recovery Week!

So it's only been two weeks with the triathlon club, but I think with all the meeting new people, new longest bike rides, and meetings to learn stuff, I've earned this recovery week. The two weeks on/ one week recovery seems like it will be nice because the next recovery isn't *that* far away.

After a nap yesterday, I was able to perk up enough to make the collards and onions dish I made last year to use up my greens from last weeks farm box. Then I ate a third of it for dinner, along with a giant strawberry milkshake. I'm soooo lucky to have a stomach that doesn't hate me.  The strawberries were from the farm too, so maybe it was like a family reunion in my stomach.

The hardest part of the bike ride this weekend was in my head (if this link works, this was the course we rode on). I just got the clipless pedals (and the cute sandals that I linked to in my previous post), and that meant that when I was riding, there was a constant low-level fear of falling over whenever I slowed down. After about 12 miles, we took a break and I was very happy to get all the way off the bike and re-set my brain a little, but towards the end of the ride, I was barely holding it together. I felt like crying at how nice the ride leader was being for hanging back with me, I felt like crying at how scared I felt when there wasn't anything scary going on ... There was probably some low blood sugar going on in addition to the brain meltdown, but I sure look forward to not being mentally done before the ride is over.

I had to walk the bike up a hill when my breathing and mental freak-out got the better of me, but the people who were keeping me company were able to ride as slow as I was walking.  That was pretty awesome to watch, and gives me something to work on.  It would be great to be so sure of the bikes handling that you could keep churning up the hills like that at such a slow speed.

Tomorrow, I'm riding to work which is an easy ride, and I'll use the pedals and shoes, and I'll be happier about it, or else. Then after work tomorrow, I'll take my new veggies home and then ride my bike to the pool to go swimming, and it will be a delicious summery day, except instead of leaving my bike on my friends front lawn, I'll be locking it with a U and cable lock and then paying to swim. Whatever.

exercise blah blah blah

I've been all kinds of sporty since last updating.  I thought I'd been running around and biking a fair bit before joining the triathlon team, but I sure didn't reach this level of tired.  I woke up on Tuesday thinking it was Friday and happy that the week was almost over -- unfortunately, that obviously wasn't true.

Our training group had it's kickoff meeting on June 13 and after looking at the different "tracks" of training and seeing how much faster Track 2 ramps up the running than Track 1, I decided I was pretty much a Track 1 kind of exerciser.

There are 4 tracks for each of 3 training programs.  You can train for "Under 70.3" (Sprint and Olympic distance races), 70.3 (half-ironman distance) and 140.6 (ironman distance), and then Track 1 is for beginners/much-improvement possible people, Track 2 would be people who have done a race like that before, or can go some significant fraction of the required distance, and then Track 3 and 4 are for people who are too strong, aerobic and speedy for Tracks 1 and 2.  At least that's how I understand it.

The Track 1 workouts aren't necessarily individually challenging so far -- they aren't really supposed to be -- but all the exercising and going to the newbie clinics where they are telling us lots of useful information is tiring.

Last Saturday, there was an open water swim about 30 minutes south and a group run afterwards.  It was super-extra humid, but when it finally started raining, it felt so good to be standing around getting rinsed off by the warm rain. The Sunday there was a group ride.  I went out with the 30 mile group and felt awesome after 10 miles, pretty good after 20, and tired and ready to go home after 25. Unfortunately, there were still 8 miles to go since the 30 mile route was actually 33.  It was a new longest ride ever for me, and my average speed was 13mph.  That isn't a fast speed compared to more in-practice people, but it was a great speed for me.

The coach set up his grill after both of the weekend group run/ride events, which was awesome.  Both days last weekend I ended up stomach-growling hungry during parts of the exercise, so I need to carry some snacks on the bike and/or eat more breakfast.

I'm probably going to buy some of those "clipless" pedals for my bike this week.  "Clipless" in quotes because these are the pedals that you like click your bike shoes to and then you are attached to the bike, and it seems that that would be a clipping system if anything was, but the old kind of shoe attachment mechanism was "toe clips" where you stick the front of your shoe into a cage of sorts on the pedal, and since the new pedals don't have toe clips, they are called clipless.  I'd been hesitating on switching to these pedals on the bike because then I would have to wear bike shoes to ride it and would end up clomping around the grocery store and stuff, but I've been doing some research, and it looks like there exist bike shoes that aren't velcro (making it look like you can't tie shoelaces) and have the attachment bit recessed (so you don't clomp as much).  The sandals above are about as un-dopey as bike shoes get.

Besides exercising, I've been enjoying my farm vegetables, but have already had to throw some out as they withered from neglect in my fridge.  I couldn't get excited about most of the spinach, and had some lettuce give up on me also.  This week, I got some sturdy collard greens, so I'm going to make the cheesy collard and onion dish that I did last year.

I made a batch of strawberry jam too -- third year in a row of jam-making :)  I hadn't tried any in all this time, I'd just been giving it away, but the other night I was hungry for dessert and didn't want to eat marshmallows (the only sweet thing besides semi-sweet chocolate chips I could find in my kitchen) so I had bread and jam and, wow! it was good! I'm looking forward to finishing the jar and then trying some of my blackberry jam from last summer.

Finally, the cat with his stupid-expensive teeth seems to be doing well. He was doing a weird thing with his food the other day -- taking a bite and then walking away from the bowl to eat it, then walking back to the bowl to get another mouthful of food, etc -- but he is eating and active and his shaved forearm looks mostly normal now.

Open Water Swimming tips

This made me laugh outloud.

Things to remember when open-water swimming

• Do not put your pet rock collection in your pocket for luck.
• If the water is cold, do not wear you winter coat, gloves, and boots.
• If passing the one mile mark causes you to remember you forgot something, do not go back for it.
• Do not answer your cell phone.
• Breathe when you head is above the water.
• Shaving your head may reduce drag, but it may not be worth it.
• Avoid swimming upstream if possible.
• Do not pick up hitchhikers.
• If you hit your head on a cement wall say, "dam."

I'm very excited about the triathlon team kickoff meeting this Saturday

Kale and stupid expensive cat teeth

Last week was the first delivery from my farm for this year. The picture on the left shows the bounty. I had a kale and strawberry salad which was pretty tasty, but the sweet and sour kale I made tonight (picture on the right) was much, much better.  My favorite non-cheese kale dish by far.

Sweet and Sour Kale

 Ingredients:

1 bunch Kale (around a pound or so), washed and ripped into eatable pieces

Dried cranberries

1 bundle spring  onions

Apple Cider Vinegar

Garlic Powder or freshly chopped garlic

Salt

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Sugar in the Raw

Water

Seeds

1. Chop and Saute onion in olive oil for a few minutes- ½-full onion or so.

2. Add:

¼ - ½ cup cranberries

3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 tablespoon sugar in the raw

1 teaspoon garlic powder or chopped fresh garlic depending on what you have

A sprinkle of salt

3. Mix this all up and cook for a minute or so until the cranberries can soften a bit

4. Put your Kale in and pour a little (3 Tablespoons or so water over Kale) and put the lid on. You can open to stir, but mostly the kale will be steaming. Cook it on medium for a few minutes or until Kale is wilted but not mushy.

5. Throw on some seeds (pumpkin, sunflower..) or whatever you have to add.

Now for the cat news. Stupid Zozo has bad teeth. The vet said it was "stomatitis" and described it as essentially, his gums are allergic to normal cat-mouth bacteria. Lovely.  Do Not google for images of feline stomatits, ick ick ick. 

The good news is that they only had to take out one of his molars, and there is some hope that the rate of decay can be dramatically halted with some additives to the cats drinking water.  The bad news was that the two options I thought I was getting from the initial vet visit turned out to not really be options, but rather the *two* *expensive* things they were going to have to do to him, instead of one expensive thing.  At least he takes liquid medicine easily.  In the picture of Zozo, you can see where they shaved his arm for the IV.

Jaxby was completely not pleased with being left alone all day long while Zozo was at the vet and spent the next two days hissing whenever they ended up face to face. I'm hypothesizing that Zozo's mouth smelled like stitches or something or Jaxby has never smelled Zozo without extra stinky cat breath.  Because I am a bad cat owner, I spent part of Saturday making them chase the same bell trying to take pictures of angry Jaxby.  This was as close as I got, the hiss had finished, but the ears are still shouting angry cat language.

Thunderstorm with a chance of biking

I went out for a bike ride after work today. Unfortunately, me wishing really hard was not enough to keep the giant thunderstorm away.  It rolled in while I was starting my laps of Hains Point and, instead of going to hide in the bathroom, I decided to keep riding. I know this was stupid, but wow it was exciting.  Thank goodness for my sunglassess -- the rain was coming so hard it would've probably hurt to have it hitting my eyes directly. In my second lap (I know, I know, to do one lap in a thunderstorm is foolish, to do two? Is there even a word for how un-fore-thoughtful it was?) I ended up going through a flood of the road where my shoes were completely submerged during the bottom part of the pedaling.

Needless to say, I got a little wet.

However, I didn't start getting dirty until the rain let up while I was riding home, and then I got really dirty. Stripe up my back, mud on my shins, dirt on my helmet??

Now, I'm sitting warm and dry in my house with that wonderful exercisey radiant body heat feeling listening to the storm rage outside and totally happy that I went out, even though it was dumb.

In the time of kale

I got my first CSA box for the year yesterday, featuring kale and more kale.  The neat thing about the seasonal nature of the CSA is that this early mix of veggies has anchored my memories for the last two years. I might not be able to remember what happened in meetings I was in last Friday, but I can think of what sort of things I was doing last year and the year before with my spring kale.

I've been feeling so good recently, enjoying running and biking around, celebrating the weather, that I was a little surprised to remember how I'd felt before in the kale-times.

Two years ago, I sniffled my way through trying to make kale pesto so that my massive quantities of kale wouldn't go bad while I was out of town for my grandmothers funeral. I filled multiple tupperwares with the green goo and stuck it in my freezer. It's still in there, I have no idea how it tastes, because I can't quite bring myself to defrost it and either eat it or throw it out.

Last year was a little better. I made up a Kale and Strawberry salad to eat while on the train up to Connecticuit for a conference. It felt exciting  to have my healthy, farm-fresh lunch to eat while staring out the window at the cities and countryside that I'd never seen. But at that point in the year, I was still (pathetically) sniffling over someone who "isn't falling in love" with me, and I spent part of the train ride wishing I were alone so I could melt down in private.

This year, I'm thinking hopefully that there will be no crying into my Kale.