Wednesday, November 23, 2011
On vacation!
I have the pleasure to be on vacation right now. Therefor the blog will return for a bit while I have some time to relax. A recent update is that I will be taking up Golf! I practice swings in my minds eye while I hit the pavement on my runs. I wonder how strength training and yoga moves will translate to my new sport? Friends warn me that the game will be too slow for a runner like me. Perhaps I will learn patience or maybe it will be an excellent core workout. Whatever it is I have a warm feeling in my skin. I know this means something good is about to happen.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
From the Golden Gate to Calistoga: A Ragnar race that will never be forgotten
If you've never run in a Ragnar race you must promise me that you'll Google it after your short sojourn with me here on The Moxie To Thrive. Friends new and old met at an Italian restaurant near the Golden Gate Bridge the night before the race so that I, Captain of Team Got Runs?, could bring the nine runners up to speed on the seriousness of our situation. We were three runners short and we all would have to pick up an extra leg.
After a quick survey of the group we cinched up the race order. Glasses clinked, ales absorbed, down the gullet and off to our team rooms at The Crazy Cow's Cottage. Well, it had a different name, but I can't recall it. Something about a Cow's rear end. By morning Van 1 headed to the start where our first relay racer was honored with running a portion of the Golden Gate Bridge.."..after a cup of coffee," he said. There was an issue already brewing in our team because we didn't stop at a coffee shop pre-starting line. Sans java the first leg might have proven to be a complication for our friend and teammate however, the coffee was provided, and the leg began without a hitch.
Subsequent legs wound through singular seaside towns, up and over hills geometrically patterned with grape vines, and by quaint farm houses dotted with cattle, chickens and crafting cottages. 329 teams ran with beside us, ahead of us or behind us. One of our girls caught up with walkers as they leaned and slumped into a modest hill. The weak ones unexpectedly got the vapors while whiffing manure and, she noted while smirking, they were throwing up. The sun was setting and our time had come to run from dusk to dawn with little sleep.
After a three hour break for pasta and a nap we found our trainers and slipped them over clean socks. Headlamp and buttlamps made us all look like miners and the reflective gear was truly a fashion statement for ravers. Protection from motorists is key. Death is not an option on a Ragnar Relay. My goal as a captain was to have my team come out extant.
Sunrise in this part of California was peculiar: no glowing bulb rising from the east to squint at. Light crept in on all sides of the horizon like many silent tiny fingers. North, South, East and West: My natural compass was lost. But all at once the sky went from a stygian underworld where one sticks close to other runners for assurance and support, to an glowing earth with trees and air, fresh and moist. And with that, Van 1 was done. Van 2 in our relay would carry the team the rest of the way to Calistoga which is where we met up with them.
In the end, the whole team raced in together. Our final picture shows a troop of runners that learned a lot about each other. We sat in vans together for about 72 hours! As we were all driving home the next day it was really hard to say goodbye. We lived together in war against sleep, food cravings, and manure odors. We had conquered this with a laughter... so much laughter: There were more gufaws and gut-splitting giggles than some of the team had felt in their bellies in weeks, months, or even years. The shrieks, snickers and shouting were tribal and raw. We nine got away from things for a while and returned restored and revitalized. Our vigor and vim may still be shining through and we hope and pray each day that it doesn't get tarnished.
I love what I discover about myself each time I put on my running shoes. What will you discover when you put on yours today?
After a quick survey of the group we cinched up the race order. Glasses clinked, ales absorbed, down the gullet and off to our team rooms at The Crazy Cow's Cottage. Well, it had a different name, but I can't recall it. Something about a Cow's rear end. By morning Van 1 headed to the start where our first relay racer was honored with running a portion of the Golden Gate Bridge.."..after a cup of coffee," he said. There was an issue already brewing in our team because we didn't stop at a coffee shop pre-starting line. Sans java the first leg might have proven to be a complication for our friend and teammate however, the coffee was provided, and the leg began without a hitch.
Subsequent legs wound through singular seaside towns, up and over hills geometrically patterned with grape vines, and by quaint farm houses dotted with cattle, chickens and crafting cottages. 329 teams ran with beside us, ahead of us or behind us. One of our girls caught up with walkers as they leaned and slumped into a modest hill. The weak ones unexpectedly got the vapors while whiffing manure and, she noted while smirking, they were throwing up. The sun was setting and our time had come to run from dusk to dawn with little sleep.
After a three hour break for pasta and a nap we found our trainers and slipped them over clean socks. Headlamp and buttlamps made us all look like miners and the reflective gear was truly a fashion statement for ravers. Protection from motorists is key. Death is not an option on a Ragnar Relay. My goal as a captain was to have my team come out extant.
Sunrise in this part of California was peculiar: no glowing bulb rising from the east to squint at. Light crept in on all sides of the horizon like many silent tiny fingers. North, South, East and West: My natural compass was lost. But all at once the sky went from a stygian underworld where one sticks close to other runners for assurance and support, to an glowing earth with trees and air, fresh and moist. And with that, Van 1 was done. Van 2 in our relay would carry the team the rest of the way to Calistoga which is where we met up with them.
In the end, the whole team raced in together. Our final picture shows a troop of runners that learned a lot about each other. We sat in vans together for about 72 hours! As we were all driving home the next day it was really hard to say goodbye. We lived together in war against sleep, food cravings, and manure odors. We had conquered this with a laughter... so much laughter: There were more gufaws and gut-splitting giggles than some of the team had felt in their bellies in weeks, months, or even years. The shrieks, snickers and shouting were tribal and raw. We nine got away from things for a while and returned restored and revitalized. Our vigor and vim may still be shining through and we hope and pray each day that it doesn't get tarnished.
I love what I discover about myself each time I put on my running shoes. What will you discover when you put on yours today?
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
What I Have Learned From Bottles In The Shower
To this day, shower bottles divert my attention from the actions at hand. So many times I have found myself absently lathering my shoulder for the 15th time, circling and circling as I read the back of the shampoo bottle. For the longest time the three languages extended my foreign language experience. I studied the nuances of English colloquialisms and how they translated into French and Spanish and how they often didn't translate at all.
I imagined these same bottles being read by fair-skinned, dark-haired Spanish women in Barcelona while bathing in their tiled showers. Were they thinking the same thing? Did they wonder why the description of Abba Shampoo was for "chemically treated hair" but in Spanish and French the translation is "colored, fragile or stripped." I wondered if there wasn't a word for chemically treated hair and why not. (Slowly the lather would accumulate on my shoulder or my belly as the questions bubbled up in my mind).
Why are there instructions in French? Why are they being shipped to France? It took me a while to figure out that our friends in the frozen North spoke French and English. Now I got it. Marketing. Okay so the Spanish was for the women and men in tiled showers in Mexico instead of Spain, I bet. It started to make more sense, that was until I looked at the back of my bottle of Kerastase Ciment Thermique (Heat Activated Reconstructor Milk) by L'Oreal, Paris. The instructions are translated into 12 different languages. My imagination went wild developing the routes that Fed-Ex took to deliver this reconstructor milk (sans rincage) to Italy and Finland, Great Britain and Espana, the U.S of A and Russia and other countries that I can't decipher the language.
When I was taking more advanced chemistry classes in college a new language opened up to me and the ingredients or ingredientes started to sound very interesting indeed. In my minds eye the pentagonal structure of methylchloroisothiazolinone appeared. I knew what isopropyl looked like from my organic chem class as well as what a paraben or methyl group was. Flying around in my brain were 2 dimensional chemical structures.
Recently I started to share a bathroom with my husband and son and they have all sorts of men-only care products. One of them is Irish Spring. When I was a kid there was a commercial on tv with a handsome Irishman who would cut the bar of soap and one would see the green and white clean Irishness through the whole soup. You knew that because he was doing this next to a refreshing waterfall, you too would be that clean and marry a Irishman that carried a pocketknife and a bar of soap.
Body washes are not as fun as bar soaps. Soaps are fun and slippery and you can twirl them in your hand, sculpting them into hourglass shapes or scratch your name into them. The particular body wash in my husband's and son's shower is in a bottle shaped a lot like a rocket ship and claims to have an "invigorating scent," but the bottle claims to be for men. I worry. If I use it, will I smell like a man? Does smelling like an Irish Spring scream, "welcome to the 80's?" I use it anyway some days. Did you know?
I imagined these same bottles being read by fair-skinned, dark-haired Spanish women in Barcelona while bathing in their tiled showers. Were they thinking the same thing? Did they wonder why the description of Abba Shampoo was for "chemically treated hair" but in Spanish and French the translation is "colored, fragile or stripped." I wondered if there wasn't a word for chemically treated hair and why not. (Slowly the lather would accumulate on my shoulder or my belly as the questions bubbled up in my mind).
Why are there instructions in French? Why are they being shipped to France? It took me a while to figure out that our friends in the frozen North spoke French and English. Now I got it. Marketing. Okay so the Spanish was for the women and men in tiled showers in Mexico instead of Spain, I bet. It started to make more sense, that was until I looked at the back of my bottle of Kerastase Ciment Thermique (Heat Activated Reconstructor Milk) by L'Oreal, Paris. The instructions are translated into 12 different languages. My imagination went wild developing the routes that Fed-Ex took to deliver this reconstructor milk (sans rincage) to Italy and Finland, Great Britain and Espana, the U.S of A and Russia and other countries that I can't decipher the language.
When I was taking more advanced chemistry classes in college a new language opened up to me and the ingredients or ingredientes started to sound very interesting indeed. In my minds eye the pentagonal structure of methylchloroisothiazolinone appeared. I knew what isopropyl looked like from my organic chem class as well as what a paraben or methyl group was. Flying around in my brain were 2 dimensional chemical structures.
Recently I started to share a bathroom with my husband and son and they have all sorts of men-only care products. One of them is Irish Spring. When I was a kid there was a commercial on tv with a handsome Irishman who would cut the bar of soap and one would see the green and white clean Irishness through the whole soup. You knew that because he was doing this next to a refreshing waterfall, you too would be that clean and marry a Irishman that carried a pocketknife and a bar of soap.
Body washes are not as fun as bar soaps. Soaps are fun and slippery and you can twirl them in your hand, sculpting them into hourglass shapes or scratch your name into them. The particular body wash in my husband's and son's shower is in a bottle shaped a lot like a rocket ship and claims to have an "invigorating scent," but the bottle claims to be for men. I worry. If I use it, will I smell like a man? Does smelling like an Irish Spring scream, "welcome to the 80's?" I use it anyway some days. Did you know?
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Pancakes For A Sunday Morning
I am back from the Paleontology expedition and for my first weekend home I decided it was time for pancakes. I jumped into the kitchen and whipped these up with coffee-cup in one hand and grapefruit juice in the other.
Pancakes for a Sunday Morning
Mix the following in a big bowl
1 Cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
Fill a measuring cup with..
1/4 Cup vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar)
3/4 Cup milk (I used 1%)
Let this sit while you....
Break 1 egg and whisk in a separate bowl
Add 2 Tbsp of Smart Beat Mayonaise to bowl.
Add milk vinegar mixture to bowl and whisk till smooth
Add liquids to dry ingredients and stir until mixed. Lumpiness is okay. It shouldn't be overmixed. If you like it a little more thin then add some milk or vinegar.
Heat a large, flat pan to medium-high heat. Use some wax paper to spread a thin layer of oil on pan.
Pan is ready when you can flick water on it and there is a little sizzle but there should be no smoke coming off of the pan!
Use a ladle scoop out the amount of pancake goo you want and put it in the pan. Don't even attempt to turn them over until bubbles form on top. Then test a little. They shouldn't be flipped until they easily release. Turn them and wait until they are ready (peak at the bottoms if you want to be sure).
This recipe makes 6 fluffy hotcakes or countless small ones. I would double this recipe if my whole family wanted some but as it turns out, only Joe and I were takers. Divine.
Once again, my blog for today comes to an end. There is so much on my mind to express however, and soon enough I will get to things like how to pick out running shoes and how to get off your couch.
Lastly, stay positive out there even though people are going to try to knock you down by insulting your looks, education, family background, job, political affiliations, religion or non-religion, the books you read or don't, the people you talk to or choose not to. Choose to make some pancakes or go for a run or a walk and know that you have so much to give.
Friday, July 22, 2011
A Zeal for Sweet Potatoes
The side dish I created last night to go with the pepper stakes was to be mashed sweet potatoes. It sounded great and in my head I imagined whipped, fluffy masses like little mountains towering above the beef in swirled gelato-like fashion next to a simple Caesar salad. I mashed away at the boiled tubers and added a few shakes of smoked paprika, 2 generous pinches of sea salt, eyeballed a tablespoon each of half and half and unsalted butter and two good pinches of brown sugar. I stirred it up and tasted the mush. The flavor was acceptable for a weeknight sidedish but it lacked that meringue effect I was going for so I scraped it into the mixer and shifted that Kitchen Aid into high gear.
Despite the whipping motion of the paddle no soft peaks formed. The vision of the ruddy mush in the mixer evoked a jolt of creativity. This could be bread. And without a further thought two eggs dropped into the bowl. Round and round went the paddle as the mash softened. Within arms reach I always have my cooking reference compendium The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook knowing it would have the fundamentals for a quick break recipe. I looked at the ingredients and quickly calculated the ratios as applied to my sweet potatoes in the mixer. It was going to be a matter of texture, palatableness and science. I would create my own recipe because what I saw in the cookbook was a good skeleton but I needed to put the meat on the bones. Here is what I came up with.
Time 20 minutes for the potatoes to cook
10 minutes in the mashing and mixing process
60-70 minutes in the oven
The Recipe for Sweet Potato Bread (exactly how I made it)
1/2 tsp Baking soda (note I would probably increase this to 3/4 tsp next time just to see what happens)
1 1/2 Cup flour (note: I would probably increase this to 1 3/4 cup flour next time)
3 medium sized sweet potatoes skinned, chopped, boiled and mashed
A few dashes of paprika
A a couple of pinches of sea salt
1 Tbsp half and half
Two big pinches of brown sugar
1 Tbsp unsalted butter
2 eggs
1/4 Cup applesauce
1 Cup sugar (I may do a little more sugar next time)1 tsp vanilla
1/2 Cup chopped pecans
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease bread pan (standard sized) only half way up.
Mix flour and baking soda in one bowl and set aside
In the mixing bowl put the prepared sweet potatoes and add everything up through the butter and mix on medium until mashed. You can also do that part by hand. Pretty simple if your sweet potatoes have simmered for a while. Next add the eggs mix medium high until incorporated. Add applesauce, sugar and vanilla and mix. Grab your bowl of flour and baking soda and add that to the wet ingredients and mix in slowly just until incorporated. Do not over mix. Then swirl in the pecans (just barely stir them in) and finally pour the mixture into the prepared bread pan. Bake for 60 - 70 minutes (You know how ovens can be).
Set out on wire rack to cool. Take out of bread pan to cool after about 15 minutes. Eat how you want.
Despite the whipping motion of the paddle no soft peaks formed. The vision of the ruddy mush in the mixer evoked a jolt of creativity. This could be bread. And without a further thought two eggs dropped into the bowl. Round and round went the paddle as the mash softened. Within arms reach I always have my cooking reference compendium The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook knowing it would have the fundamentals for a quick break recipe. I looked at the ingredients and quickly calculated the ratios as applied to my sweet potatoes in the mixer. It was going to be a matter of texture, palatableness and science. I would create my own recipe because what I saw in the cookbook was a good skeleton but I needed to put the meat on the bones. Here is what I came up with.
Time 20 minutes for the potatoes to cook
10 minutes in the mashing and mixing process
60-70 minutes in the oven
The Recipe for Sweet Potato Bread (exactly how I made it)
1/2 tsp Baking soda (note I would probably increase this to 3/4 tsp next time just to see what happens)
1 1/2 Cup flour (note: I would probably increase this to 1 3/4 cup flour next time)
3 medium sized sweet potatoes skinned, chopped, boiled and mashed
A few dashes of paprika
A a couple of pinches of sea salt
1 Tbsp half and half
Two big pinches of brown sugar
1 Tbsp unsalted butter
2 eggs
1/4 Cup applesauce
1 Cup sugar (I may do a little more sugar next time)1 tsp vanilla
1/2 Cup chopped pecans
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease bread pan (standard sized) only half way up.
Mix flour and baking soda in one bowl and set aside
In the mixing bowl put the prepared sweet potatoes and add everything up through the butter and mix on medium until mashed. You can also do that part by hand. Pretty simple if your sweet potatoes have simmered for a while. Next add the eggs mix medium high until incorporated. Add applesauce, sugar and vanilla and mix. Grab your bowl of flour and baking soda and add that to the wet ingredients and mix in slowly just until incorporated. Do not over mix. Then swirl in the pecans (just barely stir them in) and finally pour the mixture into the prepared bread pan. Bake for 60 - 70 minutes (You know how ovens can be).
Set out on wire rack to cool. Take out of bread pan to cool after about 15 minutes. Eat how you want.
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