Another three

Yesterday I ran another three miles during my lunch break. This time I ran solo, at the track near my home, and only walked about ten steps of it.

Goodness, is running any distance on a track BORING. It was nearly empty so I ran part of it clockwise instead of the traditional counter-clockwise, but it only helped alleviate the boredom a little. But mostly I just kept plugging, and finished at a slow and steady 13:30 pace.

So now what? I guess I learn how to do it better. The first  mile and a bit was brutal - I just wanted to STOP - but I pushed through it and was reasonably okay the rest of the time. My knees were tight yesterday and today as well, so my exercise today was 30 minutes of swimming which seems a good alternative.

Tomorrow, assuming my knees are okay, I think I will return to the track but do intervals - what, specifically, I don't know. Perhaps running fast on the straights, trotting the rounded ends, and alternating running and walking laps? I'm totally making this up as I go.

Tonight I'll be spending time with friends as it's the third anniversary of my friend's husband's death. I will be really appreciative of life and fitness and being with good people. I will also marvel a bit at how much has changed in three years - it was one of the nudges I needed to move back to Portland, but I sure wish he was still alive!

A routine? and a milestone!

I might be settling into something that resembles a fitness routine. My top priority is biking, but I do want to do justice to learning how to run. Right now it looks just possible that my weeks will look like this:
Saturday & Sunday - bike rides, of increasing length and hilliness
Monday - rest
Tuesday - run
Wednesday - swim
Thursday - run
Friday - rest

I want to enter both the biking and running with relatively fresh legs, and swimming seems like a good alternate way to exercise and burn some calories. We will see if I can settle into this pattern!

Something crazy happened on Saturday. As I said in my last post, I rolled back my c5k training and last Tuesday I spent time on the track alternating between running and walking. When it was time to run, I pushed myself pretty hard for 30 or 45 seconds, and then jogged the rest of the 90-second interval. It seemed to go pretty well, and my run time was an impressive sub-10-minute mile! But I didn't feel like I could sustain that pace for ANY amount of time. On Thursday I focused on sustaining a pace for the entire run time, and my pace was more like an 11-minute mile, and I was really ready to drop at the end of each chunk of running.

My running friends were certain I was running too fast and needed to try a slower pace, but I don't know how to gauge that. So on Saturday (instead of biking!) I went for a run with them. People, I ran three miles! That's 5k! We stopped at the midpoint for a little water, but I didn't feel like I HAD to stop. On the way back my ankle hurt a bit so I walked for maybe 15 seconds before resuming our very slow trot.

So, this running stuff is definitely coming together. Crazy.

Then on Sunday I did a 40-mile bike ride that has me back to being nervous about my ride in September. So this weekend, no easy 3 miles of running for me, no sir, back to the bike I go.

Easiest summer dessert ever

I wanted to make a summery dessert to bring to a pot luck; I found a recipe for roasted apricots with honey mascarpone, and decided to make it. But as per usual, I tweaked it some! I needed to scale up the recipe, and mascarpone is expensive, so I bought a good-quality Greek honey yogurt instead.

So:
Cut a bunch of apricots in half, dip the cut face into some sugar, and place cut side up in a shallow pan:

Broil for a few minutes, until the sugar starts to brown a bit. Remove from the oven, dollop the honey yogurt into the center of each, and sprinkle with toasted pistachios and chopped lemon verbena:

 Summer in a mouthful!

Deelish chicken dinner

I stumbled on a great recipe recently: Pan-roasted chicken with carrots and almonds


It was pretty easy, too: toss carrots & almonds in oil and honey, then roast:

Also pan-roast some chicken, then stick it in the oven.

Voila: delish. The crunchy almonds were a very nice touch. Just needs a salad!

Catastrophe averted?

Little did I know it, but apparently I'm a power user of Google Reader - the soon-to-be-defunct tool I use every day.

In addition to using Reader to follow blogs belonging to people I know and/or have found online, I subscribe to blogs about cooking, personal finance, knitting, biking, and local stuff. This is no different from many Reader-users. However, my power-user-ness comes from my extreme use of tagging.

I have a list of over 100 tags that I've assigned to items in my feed that I want to be able to find later. Want a peek into my brain? Here you go:
account balancing, alcohol, appetizers, baking, book rec, bread, breakfast, brunch, bundt cake,
cake, candy, cleaning, compilation, cookies, crock pot, cupcakes, day trip, decorating, dessert,
dinner, DIY, drinks, easy, fall, food processor, fruit, garden, Gardening, gift, gluten-free, happy  hour, healthy food, holiday, household, interesting ingredients, investing, loaf cake,
local info, lunch group, meat, menu, muffins, need gear, party, pasta, pdx, pie, potluck, preserving, restaurants, salads, side dish, snack, soup, spa B, spring, summer, technique,
travel, travel tips, tried and liked, useful, vegan, vegetable, vegetarian, weekend project,
winter, wine group, wow, yum

Whenever I read an article I want to find later, I tag it - almost always with multiple tags. So, for example, the Food Librarian's post about nectarine buttermilk upside down cake is tagged baking, cake, summer, tried and liked. Shove it in the oven chicken stew is tagged fall, meat, soup, tried and liked, winter. And, final example, a post titled What is a Weekend? is tagged meat so I can find the recipe it contains for world's best chicken.

You see how this is powerful? When I'm looking for ideas, I don't have to surf the web aimlessly - I can go to my reader account, click on my dinner or meat or seasonally-appropriate tag, and browse for ideas in posts I already know appeal to me.

And of course, Reader is going away and I'm devastated. So far the best option I've found is to subscribe to Feedly. I recreated my tags and it LOOKS like my content has made it over. When I look at a previously-tagged article I don't see all the tags I know I assigned to it, but when I check its various tags from Reader, it does appear in each place.

Tragically, Feedly only allows me to supply one tag per item in its interface. I'm going to suggest they support multiple tags, and they seem to have been very responsive to this Reader debacle, but I'm more than a little concerned that my six years of metadata is going to be lost at the end of this month.

Salted Caramel GENIUS

I've had this recipe for salted caramel brownies bookmarked for ages - well, for four months, I guess. I initially thought I'd make it for my housewarming party, but I ran out of time. Fortunately, a friend had her birthday yesterday and I was in the mood to bake!

I got up early to make the caramel before work.

Oh MAN it was so easy, and came out looking great. I did make a slight mistake, as I poured it a bit too thin. I didn't notice that in her example, she poured it into a plate and let it get a little deep. I think the thicker caramel bits would have resulted in more-noticeable in-brownie caramel pools, but I assure you, it didn't suck as it was.

Anyway, during my lunch break I made the brownie batter and stirred the caramel shards in; I sprinkled some on top as directed in the recipe:

The results were gorgeous:

I followed the directions to freeze them before cutting (and then had to thaw a bit), and it was a good idea. The room-temp results are dense and amazing, but quite sticky.

They were very popular at the birthday outing! They're so rich, and the guests were so restrained, the birthday girl even got to take half of them home.

Of course I didn't give them ALL to her... I've found they go very well with coffee.

Calendar:June

This is the third and, I think, last calendar shot from my trip to New Mexico last year. You can read my February post if you want a little more about that trip!

Sorry for the radio silence. I know it's the way in blog land. I've had a LOT going on behind the scenes with a large possibility of major life uprooting (in a good way, but it's scary too) so my brain has been churning but I haven't been sharing. I hope everything's settled in a few more weeks.

If not, well, I'm off to Germany again for a chunk of time in the middle of July, so I'll be sure to drink plenty of beer!

Guess where I've been?

I've been away, I know! What a summer it's been so far! Just a little show today; hopefully I'll get around to the "tell" segment soon.

WIP Wednesday: baby surprise

I am friends with a lot of great people, and a number of them have produced children over the years. In fact it seems like there's a never-ending supply of pregnant people in my life!

One of my favorite persons is having a baby later this summer. She's a knitter and has a lot of knitters in her life, so I want to make something special, but a little different. I think this is just the ticket. I'm going to remain vague about the specifics until it's completed and mailed off. (which is a hint in and of itself!)

WIP Wednesday: cookie socks, continued

I've made good progress on this sock! Too bad I need to make two of 'em. On the plus side, it's an interesting, complicated pattern. On the minus side.. yeah, it takes some serious concentration!

Actually, considering how busy my spring/summer has been, this is pretty decent progress after about a month.

Honduras report: The days after

The trip to Honduras was divided into two parts: Thursday-midday Sunday was wedding stuff; midday Sunday through the following Thursday was bonus vacation time! Four friends and I booked a three-bedroom condo at Infinity Bay, on the other side of the island from our first set of lodging. (In addition, five new friends from the wedding were also staying in the area!)

Infinity Bay was quite nice - vastly bigger than our first place, but it has an infinity pool! And a swim-up bar! And beach access for snorkeling!

To be honest, they had me at "swim-up bar" - some part of me has always wanted to experience this! That little hut to the left if the bar - accessible via land on three sides, and from the pool on the side facing us in the picture. And yes, drinking in a pool is kind of awesome, especially when it's hitting 100 degrees.

An unexpected benefit of moving to the other side of the island is that we got to see the sun sink into the ocean each evening - it was different and amazing every night.

There was also a bit more variety of things to do on that part of the island - for example, we met an eccentric Canadian guy who sold everything and moved to Roatan to build and operate a floating bar. Of course we had to check out the Reef Rider!

 Note those clouds - they are not threatening, they are promising a rain storm. Sure enough, we got massively dumped-upon as we water-taxiied back to our beach. Fortunately we all found it quite hilarious (but all had to change before going out to dinner...except the birthday girl, who was kept dry by the overhang on the taxi!).

Our wedding hosts hired some fire dancers to give us a private show on the beach. I was delighted to see them doing a weekly performance one night, so I could actually get a chance to take some pictures of them working their magic.

I was ready to leave when our week was over - mostly because I was tired of continually applying sunscreen and bug repellent - but it was a wonderful week of swimming, snorkeling, hanging out with friends, seeing a lovely couple unite in marriage, and, of course, drinking a billion monkey la-las!

WIP Wednesday: oh yeah, that sweater

So yeah, I started a sweater around the beginning of the year, and ripped it all out at the end of March. I got right back on the needle (or something!) and have made decent progress.

This is the body, take two:

And here are the arms, so far:

Decent progress, if I look at it objectively. I really really really want to get into new territory with this project, but that's a while away, because I'm also knitting at least two other projects, and sort of stumbled on a yarn sale recently. I love when that happens!

Honduras report: Wedding

As I mentioned in passing, I went to Honduras to attend a wedding! It was my first real tropical vacation ever and I highly recommend them.

Location of the Friday-afternoon beach wedding.

We all went to the island Roatan, 30 miles north of mainland Honduras. It's super easy to access - there are flights from Houston several days per week. The wedding party was the perfect size: the 28 or so of us fully booked the resort, Barefoot Cay.

I think all of us enjoyed the fact that we were all somehow associated with the bride & groom, and we easily fell into conversation at meals or in the pool; no one felt like a stranger for long!

The staff at the resort were super nice and they added all sorts of personal touches, from the couples' initials in the salsa (which no one wanted to disturb!) to cute little towel decorations in our lodgings.

Possibly best of all, I went scuba diving. Repeatedly. You may recall that I found it stressful (to say the least) when I was learning, but I am SO glad I put in the time and effort.

This is "my" boat - I went out three times while staying at Barefoot Cay, and was the only paying guest each time. If you look closely you can see that the seats on the boat are designed to hold many air tanks, so they could take out an awful lot of people if they wanted! My dive master (Delphine, who was awesome) said the policy at Barefoot Divers is that they take a maximum of 8 people at a time - so I was so lucky to be the only one going out. Delphine was especially helpful in giving me quick lessons in how to control my buoyancy better. It's really really interesting to spot something ahead & below, and to navigate down and over it just by exhaling and exhaling some more, lessening the volume of air in your lungs, and sinking accordingly. Scuba diving really is like flying, but it's a bit trippy if you think about it too hard (60 feet below the surface ... breathing through a piece of plastic hosing...yikes!).

All in all I went on seven dives when I was on my trip: it is a world of difference to dive off the back of a boat in warm waters. I still wore a wetsuit, but it was only 3mm and was shorts & shortsleeves, with no (claustrophobia-inducing) hood required. Plus stepping (or, later, falling backward) off a boat into the water made me feel like a rock star!

WIP Wednesday: Nocino 2.0

Do you remember when I was obsessed with making nocino last year? I don't seem to have reported on the eventual outcome: despite my skepticism, it actually came out pretty tasty! I didn't intend to make any more, though, at least not this year - until I was at the Ferry Building and saw a stand selling blueberries, cherries, ...and green walnuts. Score!!!! When happenstance beckons, I certainly answer.

Since I haven't begun to get through last year's triple batch, I bought enough green walnuts (30) to make ONE BATCH. And I decided to go nuts (heh) and buy some really good vodka this time around. (I bought the $7/bottle crap at Trader Joe's last year.)

I will use the same recipe as last year, but based on my blog-notes, I will also use the technique recommended by this one.  I will tone down the volume of sugar a bit, as I'm only using 750 ml, not a full liter of vodka.

1) quarter the walnuts and add to a glass jar
2) sprinkle sugar over and let sit for a day or two
3) cover with the sugary walnuts with booze
4) add the following spices: 2 cinnamon sticks, 5 whole cloves, 1/3 vanilla bean, 1 star anise, 1/4 tsp grains of paradise
5) let steep for a while, shaking occasionally (I'm going to be away for a while and feel silly getting a booze-sitter)

I've got the spices sitting out right now and wow.. .they sure smell like the end product. I wonder what the walnut-infused vodka alone tastes like?

2011:06

Hello June! I'm back from an amazing trip to Honduras - I highly recommend a visit to Roatan if you're looking for a sunny tropical vacation with amazing snorkeling!

I took June's calendar picture after a steep walk up into the hills a few miles from my place. The views up there are amazing for sure, and the yards are full of flowers. I'm not sure I would want to be quite so far from a flat place to walk though!

Long after I took this picture, I realized there was a teeny tiny worm in the center of the daisy!

WIP Wednesday: a follow-up

Tonight is the night I get to taste my limoncello! I even cleverly put the small jar of it in the freezer last night, so it should be the same temperature as the REAL limoncello I bought in Italy, lo those ten billion years ago when I was there in 2001.

I'm still working on the sweater... I'm about 2/3 done with the right-front side, which leaves "only" two sleeves and the assembly to do. (I've got zero intentions of knitting the belt that is in the pattern.)

What else? I've watched parts of many of the World Cup matches. I'm deep into the delightful world of the show Mad Men. I'm hot on the trail of making fig-infused gin. I might bake something yummy this weekend, and my neighbor and I are having an open grill on Sunday afternoon. Should be fun!

WIP Wednesday: Limoncello!

I've been working on some limoncello in my spare time. The beauty of it is that you assemble it and then forget about it for a couple of months. Easy peasy!

I used a recipe from a local blogger but made a LOT less - about 10% of her immense volume. I used some vodka that wasn't as strong as the one they recommend - the recipe calls for 100-proof vodka, but I had 80-proof and don't love crazy boozy stuff, so I went with that.

• Combine 2 cups vodka and the peel of six lemons (mine came from the tree in my courtyard !); let it sit in a dark place for 2 months.
• Strain the mixture to remove the peel (I followed directions and froze it for future use but have no idea what I might use it for). 
• Make simple syrup from 1 c boiling water and 1/2 c sugar, let it cool, then add it to the lemon-infused vodka. Let it sit two weeks.

Calendar: Two Thousand Ten: May and June

woops! I missed a month in my calendar posts. (This may mean my brother hasn't changed his calendar in a couple of months.. sorry John!)

May's picture is of crabapples in bloom at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Gardens. My mom and I made our way there on our second day in Edinburgh. It was a little tricky for us to figure out how to get there - for some reason, my guidebook wasn't helpful, and neither was the person we asked at the train information desk. Turns out that's because it's not a train trip - we asked a cabbie how much it would take to get there, and he said it would cost about 6 pounds. Total deal! It was a partially rainy afternoon, and was a lovely place to wander.

June's picture was from another rainy day (sensing a theme yet?) at Dunvegan Castle, which I mentioned in April.

WIP Wednesday: sweater!

I've been knitting a wrap sweater for a while now - I started it March 26. So far I've finished the back and the left-front side. I've cast on the right-front side and have knit about an inch.

I love the color and the yarn. I'm not 100% sure I'll love the finished product, but at this rate, I won't know for months!

A knitting-friend advised me to think of this as knitting five scarves, then sewing them all together. I admit it helps to think of this as 2 projects done and 3 to go, but I'm still estimating that I'll be lucky to be done by Labor Day!

New Zealand!

So, I've been to New Zealand and am back again, somewhat caught up on my life. I realized I forgot to do my beginning-of-month calendar post for May and June, so I have a little bit of fodder to catch up on . However! NZ!

Here's where we went:

A - flew into Auckland and spent a full day there
B - took a ferry to an island off the coast called Waiheke
C - drove to a nearly-deserted beach called Whatipu, then continued on to
D - a teeny town called Waitomo Caves, where, yep, we went into caves.
E - is a town called Taupo - we soaked in a hot mineral bath followed by an amazing meal
F - and went on to Rotorua where we saw boiling mud and had another fabulous hot spring afternoon. On the last day we drove from F to G for lunch, then to H to fly back out of the country. F -> G-> H was a bit of a rush, but we made it!

Given that this is the whole country, clearly another (longer!) visit is required someday:

I'll post more pics later. Given my dearth of blog-fodder, I've got to stretch this out a bit!