Gluten-free cooking experiment :)

So, I’ve been “on and off gluten-free” since starting to date my boyfriend. It’s been “on and off” difficult. I appreciate being creative in the kitchen, eating healthy, and feeling less bloated than when gorging on wheat…. But a few times I miss a bagel sandwich, or I can’t find something both vegetarian and gluten free.

However, last night I made up a potato soup that was pretty awesome!

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All I did was

Dice and sauté 4 stalks celery, 1/2 red onions, and 4 carrots.
cut and peel 2 russet potatoes and 1 sweet potato – boil in 2 cups of water
Combine and simmer whole concoction for 15min
Season with paprika and black pepper
Mash with potato masher

…anyway, this is the first post in 2012. A year when I want to blog a bit more about eating, cooking, and ironman training.

Resetting My 30 Days

So… July was pretty crazy. I got in a little incident with my car, subsequently shopped for and purchased a new car, traveled to the mountains, the Springs, the ever exciting O-H(I-O), raced a triathlon, a dip’n'dash, and a half marathon, and hit up three different concerts with friends… what I didn’t do, was a thirty day challenge. I got a bit distracted. I apologize.

But since my blog readership hovers around 30… and that only when I push it to Facebook at the high hours of time-waste (i.e. work hours) and these are personal challenges, I’m not too worried about my ability to re-set the challenge here in August.

Just to fully catch up, in May I tried to go gluten-free for the vast majority of the month. It was kinda awesome (honestly, I could tell a difference from a digestive standpoint, but will refrain from going into details). I have been attempting to keep it up, but goddamn it’s not an easy thing to do at all, and I missed beer. A LOT… and I forget that Soy Sauce has gluten any time I get sushi! So, I might get a renewed focus, but right now, I’m definitely not consistent, and so therefore, am not gluten-free.

June I biked to work at least half of the days of the week. This is probably another reason why the car incident was so frustrating… I would have normally been on my bike!

It’s only a 6 mile route to work, and I often found it rather refreshing to do the bike commute. Sometimes I had to skip it because of plans in the evening that were too far to bike to.

For August, starting on Aug 8th (cause I’m just resetting right now… so it will end on Sept 6th), I’m going to try to only use cash for purchases. I’ll allow my auto-bill payments to stay, and I can pay off my Student Loan and new car payment with my bank account, but all “extra” purchases — food, clothing, going out, etc. etc. will have to be cash. I’m going to set a limit for myself too — more to come on that budgeting process, but I think it will be an interesting challenge. I generally love getting miles on my credit card and don’t often think what it means to put $2 at 7-11 on a card, but I’ll be curious about the new perspective.

Not my Challenge, but good for others to try!

….as I’m already a veg, going veg for 30 days isn’t going to be a challenge, but one of my favorite magazine/newsletters/daily email sites had a staffer challenge to go vegetarian for 30 days. I definitely appreciate the reasoning as well -

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that “in terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, [people eating less meat] clearly is the most attractive” way to fight climate change.

Catching up…

So, I’m a little behind on the monthly challenges — both writing them, and this month, doing one…  so I’m trying to catch-up on both today.  So I’ll start to get myself back on track by talking about what I did the past two months.  I’ll skim quickly over March as it was a pretty boring ‘challenge,’ and note more details on April as it was a fun challenge.

In March, I decided that I would go back to a dietary challenge and instead of eating something different, I just made myself record everything I ate. I used the Calorie Counter app for ipad because it was both free and had good ratings.  The first few days it was pretty easy — I would come home from work and record my breakfast and lunch; I would cook dinner and then record it’s particulars.  Generally, the app had most fast food restaurants I would eat, so my discretions were noted diligently.  It brought another level of awareness to my day and actually was paying off. I lost a couple pounds during the month as noting the whole foods cookies, or other snacks was distressing to say the least.

April was another attempt at bettering myself and my experiences by trying to tear myself away from the text messages, facebook-ing, and emails and learning how to reconnect on the phone with friends and family.   I made it my goal to call someone every day; I had a list of a cousins, friends from college, b-school, and previous jobs.  It was a relatively random grouping, and ranged from people I talk to quasi-regularly, and a few friends that I hadn’t seen in years.

It’s generally amazing how phone calls have almost become “events”… partially through the month of April, I started to consolidate my daily phone calls into one or two evenings because I knew that the phone call wouldn’t be a quick one and I wanted to savor the conversation.  I actually used my ‘commute’ to the mountains as prime time to make these calls because it was a relatively static two hours that I could focus on the person (while safely navigating i-70, of course).

I generally think that there are two types of people in this world: Callers and Callee’s.  Often in life I have fluctuated between these two classes of people.  In high school, and part of college, I was a Callee.  I wouldn’t be the one who made the plans for my group of friends, I was the one who just let someone tell me where to go and what to do.  When I lived in Park City, I became a Caller… I was a sort of central connector between people I worked with and was friends with, and people my roommate knew. It was a pretty small town, so there was a lot of overlap, and I definitely used this to my advantage to create circumstances to bring people together.  When I moved to LA, I was less comfortable, so I moved back to that Callee roll and would go where the masses went and the large b-school events were planned.

You often learn which type of person someone is relatively early into knowing them, and you fall into a particular roll naturally depending on the people you become friends with… my buddy Steve, he is definitely a Caller — almost like clockwork, he’ll call once a month to ask some random question, just chat about work, or complain about how a mutual friend of ours hasn’t returned his calls.   I never have to call Steve, but I love that he calls me.  One of my best friends from undergrad, Lauren, used to be a Callee, but since she had a baby she has become a bit of a Caller.  This role reversal generally makes sense as her time schedule has forced a bit of a change.  And so on down the line — with some people I’m always the one who calls, with others, I am not shocked when I see their name pop-up on my BB.  For the month of April I was making a concerted effort to be a Caller, and I tried to call both types of people.

It was funny the first few phone calls I made — especially the random “wait… is everything ok? why are you calling” calls that I definitely made.  I would kinda explain why I called versus emailed, and we’d have a few minutes of awkward, “i think i saw that you were blah-blah, how is that going?” but then it would become more natural, and it would end with a “let’s definitely do this again soon…”

Facebook is awesome, because it keeps you aware of your friends, their activities, and daily musings, but because it’s so public, you end up only getting  glossy version of life.  I generally feel like I’m close to my friends, but becomes of this new phenomenon, I don’t realize that I’m missing the real person until I have a phone conversation with them and get the full picture of what is going on.

However, I left a bunch of messages throughout the month… that’s the good/bad about the phone vs. a text/email. I may have had time and intent to converse and catch-up with the person that I called, but sometimes it was an inconvenient time for them. If I had texted, we probably could have slid in a short little chat, but with a phone call, it’s something you have to come back to, something you put on the to-do list… and after every call I’d have, I’d think of a couple more people I should add to that to-do list, and I definitely ended the month thinking that I should keep an hour blocked on my sunday night or saturday afternoon so that I can continue to have these conversations and these reconnections.

I read good.

My physical health is very important to me — I’ve done an Ironman, I’m addicted to the hardest spin class in Denver, and last month my goal was to eat more natural foods.

However, for February I tried to mix it up and focus on my mental health by reading one book a week…

I had borrowed the book Born to Run from a colleague of mine, and made that the first book. I had heard how this book changed lives, started a barefoot running revolution, and was really inspiring and interesting.  I had wanted to read it for awhile, but often found myself distracted or busy or just lazy in front of the iPad or TV.  This gave me a chance to refocus my efforts and give it another try.  It was an enjoyable read, but wasn’t as into the “secret tribe” as I was the other athletes and how they got into running and racing.

The next book that I started (I’ll admit I didn’t finish it… yet) was Linchpin by Seth Godin. At my old company, the VP of Marketing and CEO were a little bit obsessed with Seth Godin’s approach to representing company strategy and telling business-based stories.  Now, I believe that Seth Godin is a very smart man, and has a way with words, but I think primarily he is good to putting those common themes together in a neat package with a cool metaphor (Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside, etc.) as opposed to being the ‘be all and end all’ of how your company should work like those men made him.  Linchpin was as I expected… it had good tidbits, some representative stories, and some thoughtful items for focus. However, I couldn’t really get into it enough to read all the way through!  Part of the reason that I think I struggled was because I think I’m in a “Linchpin” like position at my current company and don’t need to eat up the ‘kick-in-the-pants’ prose to get myself to a different level.  I have it on my table to pick it up again if I ever feel complacent, and I know that Mr. Godin has those anecdotes to look back on.

For my third book, I read one of those books “everyone” has been talking about — “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. Now, obviously it took me a few years to catch onto this trend (hey, I’ve been in B-School for a couple years!) but I’m glad I did! It started a little slow, but once the murder-mystery part started, I was sucked in.  Additionally, it was my first book using my Nook App on my iPad, and though I’ll admit I missed being able to really “understand” how far I was in the book by holding the pages in my fingers, I actually really appreciated having the book wherever I had my iPad (which was a lot of places — I heart that thing!).

My last book was supposed to be Freedom by Jonathon Franzen since it was my book club book. However, it’s an epic-ly long book and the person I was supposed to borrow it from was moving as slowly through it as I assumed I would. I’m definitely interested in reading it, but it didn’t make it during the February Challenge.

I did make it through a fair amount of my “Economist” magazines this month, which are more dense and all-inclusive than most non-fiction writing.

Next up… March: Food Diary! and April: Becoming a phone talker.

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