Jeremiah Blatz

1 sausage
celery, about twice as much as you have sausage
onion, about as much as celery
carrot, about as much as sausage, maybe a little less
garlic, the more the merrier
chicken/veggie stock
frozen spinach
herbs, especially rosemary and smoked paprika (also salt and pepper)
Olive oil
(Bonus, truffle oil)

Chop up the onion, celery, and carrot. Chop the garlic fine. Defrost the stock (which you made previously and froze, right?)
Fry the sausage in a pan. Cooked through, brown, etc. Medium heat. Probably want to use a little oil here.
Remove the sausage from the pan, add the onion. While the onion and stuff is cooking, cut the sausage in half lengthwise and chop.
You should be stirring/tossing this periodically
When the onion begins to get translucent, toss in the celery
When the celery begins to soften, toss in the carrot and garlic
Wait a little bit, then toss in the herbs and some pepper, and the chopped sausage
Before the garlic browns, add the stock to cover the stuff in the pan, and then that depth again
You might want some more olive oil here. Fat is yummy!
Taste, adjust seasoning
Bring to a boil, the turn off the heat and lit it sit a bit

To serve, fill a bowl about 1/3 full with spinach, then add hot soup. If the soup isn't super hot, microwave it up. For extra yums, add a little truffle oil. It takes away the peasant cred, but are you really a peasant?

P.S. I'm not dead.

A mere 2.5 months after getting back, our pictures from Hawaii are online. At the very least, you'll want to check out the lava.

( background info... )
So, the review:
They grip like crazy. If you slip in these, you would slip no matter what.
If you're used to thin-soled shoes with no heel, you shouldn't have any trouble adjusting to these.
They actually have decent padding, the rubber under the ball and heel is pretty thick.
They're super-breathable, except in the toes.
They weigh next to nothing.
They're machine washable!
They look ridiculous.
I matched my PR in the squat the night I got them, and set a new PR in the bench, deadlift, and 1 mile run. It's gotta be the shoes!

So, yeah. If you don't mind looking like a dork, get a pair. They're awesome!

OMG, so good. Get restaurant week reservations, go! No reservations left? It's worth it during not restaurant week, too!

I've been using this to get Jess to eat yoghurt and fresh fruit, and it's working quite well. It's a little heavy on the carbs for "healthy," but it's a lot better than regular fruit honey snacks, and it tastes much better. Also note that it's vegetarian and has an almost perfect protein balance.

(Despite all the nutrition rambling, it tastes really good.)

Apple with yoghurt and slivered almond snack
Serves 2

1 apple
slivered almonds, approx 1 small handfull
approx .5 cup yoghurt (whole milk, fat is good for you)
Honey for drizzling

Slice apple into bite-sized chunks, mix with slivered almonds to taste, and a few big spoonfuls of yoghurt to coat generously. Drizzle with honey.

Westside Market
77 7th Ave, NYC 10011

Somebody smashed together the world's biggest deli with a grocery store, and it kinda works.

Today is rainy any yuck, so we decided to not go to the Union Square Greenmarket and Whole Foods to pick up veggies and stuff. On the way home from Tea & Sympathy, we saw this place from across the street, and thought we'd stop in. It's a maze of twisty passages, all different, except with food instead of green phosphors.

The have a *lot* of prepared food and a *lot* of packaged cheese. We didn't look too hard at this stuff, except to note that they have a lot of different kinds of parm (which is good). It's pretty firmly a yuppie grocery, they have organic stuff and the like, but not hippie food. They have expensive food, but not wierd gourmet stuff. That said, they had a lot of produce and it was mostly really nice. They had a lot of meat that looked great, and a lot of meat that looked like it had been out too long. We got a nice-looking flank steak for $5.99/lb. Gotta get that going sous-vide if we want it to not be yucky...

The prices for the stuff we bought was on par with Fresh Direct, which is pretty suprisingly good, given the upscale nature of the place.

We will probably return on days that we go to T&S.

Our pics from our trip to Barcelona are up.

Most Barcelona:

Most awesome:

1) Great, they're laying off MTA workers, jacking up fares, and reducing service. What's the stimulus plan doing for you?

2) The EEE 900HA is tiny and quite capable of running Adobe Lightroom. This is win.

1
I make damn fine eggnog

2
Most of what one needs to know about making eggnog is in the 1976 edition of the Joy of Cooking, and not, for instance, the 1997 edition. The later edition may have more varied and convenient recipes, but it's lost its soul. Not in that it sold out (which, AFAICT, it didn't), but that it started to be a recipe book, and stopped being a book about how to cook and eat food.

3
Go buy the 76 edition. It's not getting any cheaper. Don't bother with any newer edition (the 75th anniversary one may have gotten better, but I doubt it). If you want a recipe book, get How to Cook Everything.

4
That said, the 76 edition recipes could stand a little updating. If you've cooked from it a bit, and thumbed through it a bit, this shouldn't be a problem, since you know how to cook. For example, eggnog:
Use the ingredients for eggnog for one (pages 71 and 72). The preparation is different, though.
Separate the white into a cup suitable for your immersion blender (whisk attachment), and the yolk into a tall drinking glass.
Using a rubber scraper, cream together the yolk, sugar, salt, and nutmeg. Then mix in the rum (Capt Morgan is barely rum, but it's great for rum & cokes and eggnog). I think it's supposed to be better if you refrigerate this for a few hours to overnight.
Beat the egg white until medium peaks form, pour the foam into the drinking glass
Without cleaning the immersion blender cup, add the heavy cream, beat to just shy of soft peaks
Pour all the stuff from the drinking glass into the blender cup (use the scraper to get everything out), mix together with the scraper, then pour back into the drinking glass.
If you're trying to impress someone, sprinkle some nutmeg on top.

So, when I make quiche, sometimes I had pools of egg whites on the top, which got tough when they were baked. For my last quiche, I separated the eggs and lightly beat the eggs. The only problem was the foam, you don't want it, since it makes burnt meringue on the top of your quiche. Next time, I'll spoon the foam into the pie pan before I add the goodies, popping all the bubbles.

On Sunday, I made steak sous-vide again, but this time I stepped it up a bit.

( Good steak, improved sucking )

To conclude, sous-vide is the real fuckin deal.

Short version: Sous-vide is the real fuckin' deal.

( Longer version )

After my trial month at Schulmann's Mixed Martial Arts, I had a bit of travel and fell off the Martial Arts Walkabout wagon. On Oct 21, I climbed back on, attending an intro class at Seido Karate. I had seen their advertisement for 100 days of training for $100, and was intrigued.

The intro class is an abridged and watered-down version of the white belt class. We did a warm-up consisting of static stretches and pushups, then ran through a few techniques. There were some basic straight punches, a backfists, blocks, and two kicks (front snap kick and roundhouse).

After that I observed the tail end of what I think was a "Step-by-Step Kumite" class, and then a "General Class" that was split between white belts and blue belts.

The step-by-step kumite class was, well, a little sad — tappity-tap point sparring with a lot of protective gear on. There were a couple black belts in the class, and even when they were partnered up, they looked like they would get destroyed in a fight/MMA match by someone with a year of a "practical" fighting art like Muay Thai, BJJ, Sambo, etc. Looking at the schedule, it appears that there may be more useful kumite classes, but of course they are for advanced students only. Now, I understand that point kumite is a real sport, and that they are training their students for that sport. However, there is a "self-defense" curriculum, and I definitely got the impression that they were claiming that they can teach you to fight. This triggers my scornful frown reaction. If they want to teach their students to defend themselves, they should teach them sprinting and recognizing the pre-contact cues, not point sparring and their ineffective self-defense drills.

The general class was, after warm-up, split up into white belts and blue belts. Testing was coming up, so the class was largely about filling up the holes in their knowledge. They started with individual techniques and short combinations. The instructor would correct techniques and the students' Japanese, and quiz them on the latter. There seemed to be a lont of emphasis on learing the Japanese names for the techniques. Class for the white belts ended with kata practice.

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the blue-belt part of the class, as they were far away and I couldn't hear the instructor. I noticed that they were doing the standard self-defense drills. (Here's a hint, nobody attacks with a stepping reverse punch. Ever.)

So, I left. Didn't ask them about what the promotion really cost (apparently it's more along the lines of $175), etc. However, maybe I should've signed up. Their web site doesn't say anything about "the street," but instead talks about discipline, tradition and fitness. They certainly have a nice space, and $175 for three months is still ridiculously cheap. The folks seemed nice, and hey, Jodi trains Seido, how bad could it be? So maybe I'll go back and see how a few months go.

My, I've been a slacker about updating.

Okay, so a long time ago, I signed up for a free (with $50 uniform purchase) month at Tiger Schulmann's Karate Mixed Martial Arts. The place has kinda a rep, and that rep isn't really good. Does it deserve the rep? Stay tuned!

( Read more... )

So, I've been reading some CrossFit propaganda lately, and it's been a great boon to my home fitness un-routine. I just did my first proper WOD: The Fluffy Cloud Dance. I did the squats and pistols with just bodyweight and subbed 15lb dumbbells for the kettlebells, as that's the closest I have (also, I am a candy ass). (Yay for doing less than half the Rx'ed women's weight!) Anyway, I did better than I expected, almost 23 rounds (23 in 20:06). What I did not expect was that the back extensions were the hardest part. Guess that's what I get for wussing out on the squats and renegade rows.

Long ago (July 3rd) I went for a free intro class at City Wing Chun. This was not a trial class, it was a special class for prospective students. The instructor welcomed us all in and had us fill in a form about ourselves and why we wanted to learn WC. He then had us gather around and gave us a tour of the school. There was one mid-sized room with a wooden dummy, some makiwara (wall-mounted punching pads) and a B.O.B. At City WC they don't actually teach you any wooden dummy forms until you're an advanced student. Early emphasis is on "self defense," which I think means 2-person drills.

After the tour we got a speech about how WC was the best martial art in the world blah blah. It may be true, but I've heard this speech at many different kinds of places, and they can't all be right. We then went into actual training. The intro class was separated from the regular class, so we could hear what they were doing, but not see it. The topic of the intro class was chain punching. We did chain punching while standing, chain punching while stepping forward, chain punching while doing squats and kicks. The instructor also showed us a chi kung type forearm/wrist exercise. After that was a one-on-one thing where the instructor went over their various membership programs.

I definitely got a good workout at the class, in that WC punching uses a muscle in my shoulder that I apparently had never used before. Despite not getting tired during class, my arms were sore for days. That said, there were a lot of red flags during class. They held themselves out as a self-defense school, but seemed to only teach self-defense against drunk guidos with no training. (Which is fine, but not really what I'm looking for.) Their programs were all gimmicky, and implied that you could basically buy an "instructor" rank. They did have a program that included actual free-form sparring, but it was expensive and you had to buy a lot of gear (including headgear with a face mask, chest pads, etc.). And, of course, you can't even watch a real class.

So, who knows? Citi WC might be awesome, effective, and fantastic, but i can't tell, and don't expect I will find out. Unless I pick a fight with one of their students, which is not likely.

I just signed up for a month at Tiger Schulmann's KarateMMA. Okay, fine, laugh. But it was just $50 for an intro month, so whatev. Starting next week sometime, my walkabout will be all Tiger Schulmann, all the time.

Getting a little behind on these, but here goes.

( Five Points Fitness, three classes in one day (kali, Brazilian jui jitsu, and muay Thai) )