FoodNerd!

I ran for 20 minutes straight last night. And didn’t die.

Oh, what a wretched pun. Last night we made spaghetti all’ubriaco, the delicious pasta cooked in red wine that we ate in Florence, tipped off by E&O, our intrepid eating pals. And our other pal brought over a huge baggie of ramps that she foraged with her mom, and it seemed only logical to chop some ramps and add them to the pasta. Logical, and in actual fact, truly delicious. The ramps added a sharpness and savoriness to the buttery, nutty, fruity weirdness of that pasta, and made it even better. The other nice thing is that a bowl of chopped ramps makes your whole house smell terrific if you leave it out on the table for a couple of hours while you finish off some sliced salumi and bread and cheese and wine. Better than air freshener!

Today I did this:

ran 3 minutes
walked 90 seconds
ran 5 minutes
walked 2.5 minutes
ran 3 minutes
walked 90 seconds
ran 5 minutes

and didn’t die. Yay me!

I have been struggling to actually exercise lately, aside from dragging my butt to the weekly swing dances. There never seems to be time to ride the bike to the store, and words are insufficient to express how much I hate getting up early to work out before breakfast. So tallasiandude has been trying to gently nudge me in various ways, and to his endless credit none of those ways have made me want to smack him (no small task when it comes to the topic of exercising). And one of those nudges appears to have managed the impossible, and I am now undertaking to learn to run.

For now it is “running” rather than actually running, but it does seem to be working. It is Couch to 5K, which is deliberately constructed for people who think they hate running and never exercise. I don’t hate it, and it’s quite pleasant to go outside now that it’s warming up a little, and I am not *completely* couchbound. And the online program and accompanying podcasts are I think what tipped the balance, by making it absolutely braindead-easy to follow the program.

The idea is that you start out by walking for the most part, with very short bursts of jogging in between. This allows you to “run” without getting knee strain or side stitches or generally hating each and every step. 60 seconds of jogging is over before you know it. But even this would never have worked for me if I had to constantly check or set my watch to tell me when the various timeperiods were over, or had to memorize the plan for the week — not gonna happen. This is where the Podrunner podcasts come in.

These are electronica/dance music mixes with the correct BPM for the walking and the running portions, stitched together with little beepy tones that signal you to switch from walking to running and vice versa. No thinking necessary! Just zone out, listen to the innocuous oontsa-oontsa music, look at the flowers, and whenever it beeps, do the thing you’re not already doing. There’s not even any annoying person-voice giving the instructions, just impersonal tones so you can do your thing without any cheerleading.

This means that all I have to do in the morning is get dressed, put on sunscreen, find my iPod, and leave the house. No additional preparation or thinking is required, which is essential for the pre-food pre-caffeine hours. And it seems to be working, inasmuch as I am still doing it in week 2 and my legs ache a lot less when I get home.

No one hates (hated?) running more than I do, so I figure it can help all the rest of the haters find their way too.

How much of mood can be attributed plain and simple to vitamin deficiency? I just had a weird and sudden attack of the Oh My God Everything Is Pointless and Can’t I Just Go Watch TV blues.

Trying really hard not to eat my way out of it, I went and took a multivitamin and a fish oil capsule, and half an hour later I am feeling significantly better (though I still kind of want to curl up and watch a couple hours of Tony Bourdain). Last night I drank one of those energy/vitamin packets and had a similar rise in energy and willingness to deal with my fellow humans.

I always assume that because I eat a varied diet full of vegetables and proteins that I’m unlikely to be deficient in anything particular, but I am really starting to wonder now.

I never remember to take the damn vitamins though they are right out on the kitchen counter. Morning head is a problem for me. Maybe I should bring the bottles up and sit ‘em on my desk near the computer, so when I get all mopey and unfocused I can immediately squash the problem with NUTRIENTS.

OK, granted, I did actually exercise for 45 minutes or so this morning, but why am I on constant hunger alert today? I ate granola and yogurt and black tea for breakfast right after the workout, then brown rice and smoked salmon and broccoli for lunch, plus some dark chocolate when I was still hungry afterward, and then some leftover chicken hash with turnips and sweet potatoes because I was hungry AGAIN two hours later, and now again two hours later I am STILL HUNGRY. I am drinking water, even. Healthy food, reasonable portions, lots of fiber and protein. WTF?

Sigh. I am going to go drink some more water.

LOST characters explain how to make a sandwich. Awesome.

While we’ve been in LA, we’ve gotten xiao long bao from Mei Lung Garden, and braised pork belly with preserved vegetable and clear fried shrimp from Mandarin Chateau. All of these are even better versions than what we used to have at Wing’s, but our reaction has been one of overwhelming sadness that we cannot have these tastes any more in our home city. We have perfectly reasonable Cantonese places, spectacular Sichuan places, and a reliably excellent diner-style place, but we have nowhere to go for Shanghai cooking at an equivalent level.
Shanghai emigre community of Massachusetts, hear my plea! Start a decent restaurant and I promise to eat in it and drag all my friends too.

We had dinner Christmas day with tallasiandude’s LA-based extended family, and damn, was that a spread! Enough cold plates to feed an army, followed by an equally staggering battery of hot dishes and a pair of desserts.
I may have forgotten something, but to the best of my recollection there was:
salted eel (kind of like less-salty salt-cod)
vegetarian duck (layered sheets of tofu skin from the look of it)
wood ears and vegetarian kidney (some kind of gluten I think cut to look like kidney)
jalapenos stuffed with ground pork and braised in soy sauce & sugar
steamed egg loaf with 1000-year eggs and salted duck egg yolk
turnip pickles with soy sauce and szechuan peppercorns
cold tendon
sweet & sour spare ribs (not very sour, mostly savory)
salty ham with boiled lotus seeds, on lightly toasted bread to make a li’l sammich
clams steamed with scrambled egg and green onion
shrimps sauteed with garlic and green onion and spicy stuff
braised pork hock with bok choy
tofu noodles with green beans, ham and mushroom
mustard greens with shredded ham and dried scallop
soup with bamboo, enoki, napa and egg dumplings with pork filling
rice cakes sauteed with mushroom and cabbage in a brown sauce
sticky rice with red bean paste and dried fruits
my cranberry upside-down cake

I got a copy of David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook, and it is some of the most enjoyable food porn (and writing) I’ve seen in a long time. He paints himself as a bit of a bumbler, if perhaps one with borderline sociopathic passion for good food, and frankly I find that entirely charming. The fact is, this dude likes to eat the way I like to eat, throwing the low in with the high without regard for anything but deliciousness (and maybe the occasional gleeful fuck-you gesture).
Plus, there are recipes for nearly everything we ate at the restaurants. Nom nom nom nom nom nom.
I think that part of the reason I loved the sauce that came with our bo ssam is that it may actually have been pureed kimchi. And pureed kimchi is such a blindingly simple, wonderful idea that I can barely imagine I never thought of it myself. I am going to puree up some kimchi and start putting it on EVERYTHING.
UPDATE: now I’ve read through the bo ssam part of the book, and the sauce I really loved wasn’t the puree, but I now know for sure why I loved it so much. He thins down his spicy sauce with sherry vinegar, my hands-down favorite vinegar of all time. OMG yum.
Still gonna puree some kimchi though… and maybe thin it down with sherry vinegar too so it’ll drizzle. Be still my heart.