Magic Spot Flowing

Ralph Nader disgusts me. That is all.

For probably only the second time ever (the first time was the chickpea broccoli casserole, coincidentally), I’m not really happy with a recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. The Chickpea-Hijiki Salad Sandwiches (and also, I must say, I am not amused by calling them sammiches — it’s not cute, it’s annoying) are … odd. The concept of the salad is that you add hijiki to chickpeas and standard cold protein salad ingredients (mayonnaise, vegetables) to get a taste and consistency approximating tuna salad. And I like tuna salad. So I bought some hijiki a while back and have been meaning to make this.

But. Although I think it’s probably about as similar as it can get, chickpeas and hijiki are not tuna. The hijiki is black strands of sea vegetable that look disturbingly like worms, and chickpeas are much firmer than tuna (especially homecooked ones rather than canned — I meant to food-process them instead of just mashing by hand, to make up for this, but I decided not to food-process at 11pm in order to not annoy my neighbors). The fishy taste is too much (for my fish-not-loving self anyway) when you get hijiki by itself, and not enough when it’s not in the bite. I also had to put in a bit of mustard to counter the Nayonnaise taste — again, I don’t think this is Isa’s fault since she actually recommends Vegannaise, which I’ve heard is better-tasting, and I could have used soy yogurt instead.

Also, the vegetables are minced onion and carrot, and I’m used to my tuna salad having celery, apples, and pickles. Maybe I should try this again with more resemblance to the tuna salad I actually like — and perhaps food process the combination of chickpeas and hijiki to reduce the worm factor.

At any rate, it’s one worth giving a try to see if you like the combo, and if you aren’t enthralled, see what happens if you change it up a bit. The recipe gets good reviews when I google for it, and a number of suggestions to try other sea vegetables like arame or nori. Though I have to suspect that a good number of these people are vegans who don’t really remember what tuna tastes like. I last ate it only about two years ago, so I’m pretty sure I remember and I’m pretty sure that while this is not far off, it’s Not Really Tuna.

Wikipedia has this to say, in their article titled Daoism-Taoism romanization issue:

The history of transcribing spoken Chinese is lengthy and inconsistent.

I just have to say “Y’think, really?”

I’ve been paying some attention to the news coverage of the Tour of California prologue that I volunteered for on Sunday, and I’ve wound up pretty disappointed. If the Merc is going to put Ann Killion in the main section, then they should ask her to give a wider coverage of the event and not just cover the sports aspects (or ask someone else to collaborate). And her article had such a heavy focus on doping that it didn’t even really cover the race at all. So we get a main section article that’s basically about the politics of the sport, and not about the event at all. The Palo Alto Daily News focused on the effect on local businesses, safety, and the cost of the event. The pre-event coverage in both papers, with the exception of one article about the bike parking published about a week before the event, was all about road closures and hassle, and none of the articles bothered to mention that there would be free guarded and valet bike parking for hundreds of bikes, so that you could forget the worries of driving and just show up on your bike. In a city and on a campus where parking is scarce most of the time, and for an event where bicycles and people on them are the main attraction, it’s mystifying that not only the parking, but that whole aspect of the event was practically ignored.

What I enjoyed most about the event and volunteering, since I don’t pay much attention to the racing, was that bikes were a big part of the scene. People rode slowly through the crowds, parked their bikes in the SVBC corrals, leaned their bikes against a tree, held them while they chatted with friends, compared them, looked at gear for them, admired them. I saw everything — folders, beaters, commuters, old-fashioned road bikes, AL-carbon and all-carbon racing bikes. Crazy tire colors, custom paint jobs, interesting handlebars. Bikes with baskets, panniers, and Burleys. Kids road and mountain and just regular kids bikes. People rode in lycra and in jeans, in sandals and in special bike shoes. Every bike was doing the right job for the person riding it. There was a pervasive joyous feeling that comes from getting a lot of people who love doing the same thing together to watch the people at the pinnacle of the shared activity. None of that really came through in the news coverage, especially not the news that hundreds of people rode their bikes to, through, and at the event, like it was just the most normal thing in the world.

Update: My SVBC mail alerted me to the fact that had I read the news on President’s Day, I would have seen a much more positive spin on the Tour, even mentioning our valet bike parking. Go, PADN, for an actual article about the actual event.

I knocked off a few more of my goals today, as well as doing my taxes (which were actually pretty easy).

#2: Make my own pizza with no help.
This wasn’t a huge deal because I’ve made pizza a number of times as half a team, but I wanted to do it by myself. I planned to also knock off a few more recipes from VWAV — the tomato sauce, and the potato and tempeh sausage pizza (the pizza dough was already checked off, so this was iteration #2 for it). But my potatoes had started photosynthesizing, so there went that plan. Instead I ended up making the sauce and doing caramelized onions and wilted greens with garlic and a sprinkle of parmesan. It was a really nice combo and I enjoyed it a lot. I did more or less make the sauce from VWAV, though the herbs I changed up a little and the amount of tomatoes wasn’t exactly the same as called for. I thought it was a good base, but I should have put in less liquid, which is probably my own fault. The pizza turned out well anyway; it was nice and crispy on the edges and not really at all soggy in the center. Caramelized onions? Take forever, but totally worth it, especially after deglazing the pan with sherry!

#60: See a live tennis match.
My dad came down to help with taxes, so I mentioned to him that I was thinking of going to see the SAP Open exhibition match tonight. He likes tennis, so he decided to come along, and we had a lot of fun. We got there early and were able to see the end of the day session, which turned out to be a great treat — the players (Jesse Levine and Steve Darcis) were very good and there was a lot of excitement and tension at the end. The exhibition match, between Pete Sampras and Tommy Haas, followed. It was just an amazing thing to watch. Those guys are like poetry in motion, and it was fun to watch Sampras basically just dominate, even after being out of the circuit for a few years (though a tiebreak might have been even more fun). There were some nice long rallies, stunning aces, and great smashes. It’s really better to see in person than on TV. You get more replays and angles on TV. But the grace and power are far more impressive in person. I’m really glad I went, and I’ll probably try to go to more live tennis in the future.

I’m happy to be knocking a few more of these off! I think I’m over 20 now.

As part of becoming aware of what I’m eating, I started keeping a food diary again. Keeping a food diary for me is sort of like keeping a budget. It’s something very picky and obsessive that I do okay with for about a month or two at a time, which is all I really need to do in order to give myself a baseline. I did one over a year ago when I was having trouble eating enough to stay satisfied, to figure out why. Turned out I wasn’t eating enough breakfast then.

So I decided to try it again, mainly to monitor how much I really am eating, when, and why. When I found out about the B12 stuff, it was easy to add keeping track of B12 to the goals of the food diary. (I don’t keep calorie counts but I do record the type and rough amount of food, so it’s pretty detailed.) Another goal it dovetails well with is my goal #9 for the 101: go a whole month without eating random crap as a substitute for any meal.

This goal, I realized, is one of those that I put in there without really thinking about what that actually means, and how I could accomplish it, besides willpower and record-keeping. It turns out that willpower doesn’t really work for me so well in this area. What I think will work is reasonably alert planning. The whole thing is much more complicated physiologically and psychologically than just saying to myself “Ok, I’m going to just eat three good meals a day now.”

What made me finally realize this was what happened when I volunteered at the Amgen Tour of California Prologue yesterday, parking bikes so that people could walk around safely without worrying about their bikes. It was fun, but hard work, and it messed around with my eating schedule because we were volunteering over lunch. I’d been doing reasonably well since starting the diary, but it kind of broke down yesterday.

Here’s what I ate yesterday (in case you all think I’m kidding when I say I don’t always eat very well):

Pineapple cupcake
1/2 blueberry vegan waffle with tofutti cream cheese spread
Coffee with 1/2&1/2 (1/2 cup total)
1/8 bagel with cream cheese
1 pc cranberry bread
Cranberry Almond Cherry Clif Bar
1 lemon sugar cookie
1 fry
1 potato chip
Veggie burger from stall at PA Amgen Tour (at 3:00 pm)
Butternut squash soup (2 smallish bowls, at 9pm)
2 cupcakes (one dessert and one late snack)
3 pcs TJs English toffee (finished the box)

I ate a lot of random stuff, and I didn’t really need to, and I didn’t really need to eat anything after I had dessert at all, except that for some reason I felt like it. My stomach was upset between lunch and dinner, too.

What I think is going te really help me improve my eating is planning and sticking to the plan more. I did plan for the weird eating: I brought the Clif bar and an apple with me, so I knew that I wouldn’t get too hungry before I could get off to eat something. And I probably should have chosen not to eat the veggie burger at all, because fair food is both expensive and not necessarily well-chosen or -prepared. I wasn’t really that hungry, I just wanted a real meal, and I could have said “I’m going home soon, I’ll have real food when I go home.”

The important part of planning for me is going to be not mainly the logistics, which are not that hard, but the confidence that with planning I’m doing the right thing for myself. One thing I’ve learned with the food diary is that I absolutely need to eat a reasonably-sized nutritious breakfast, and that it’s going to be better if I just stick to a routine most of the time because then I won’t get caught up in other things and forget, or run out, or want to eat something else but not get around to it. Now that I know that, I’m more confident about doing it and about believing that I can make it between breakfast and lunch without eating if I do it.

I’ve also discovered that if I have to go more than four hours between meals I will really want a snack, and if one is easily available I will want to eat it even if I don’t really need it because food will be here in an hour. I also won’t really go more than six hours without food, even if a real meal is only 20-30 minutes away, if there’s something that’s available quickly. So if I don’t eat a snack, and I get home at 7, I’ll eat something random before I eat dinner if dinner isn’t already ready, which will leave me weirdly full and then weirdly hungry later and I’ll eat snacks, and then I won’t sleep as well or be properly hungry for breakfast and the whole cycle repeats. It’s amazing how realizing what I really need in the food department, rather than what society dictates, and planning for it, makes everything run better.

A lot of this also ties in to eating too much too quickly, and that sort of thing. There are steps I can take to work on that, as well, once I understand why I’m gulping (often because I’m very hungry; I can eat a snack occasionally to maintain reasonable hunger levels). So I think I’m well on my way to solving this problem in the long term, not just in the “well, for a month I tortured myself to reach my goal” sense.

Relatedly, #10 I knocked off! At Mudai on Friday, we ordered one veggie combo, and I ate less than half. I was quite full, but I was prudent in how full and ordered and ate wisely, so I consider that one done.

The spambots have discovered my blog. Suck! Now I have to see if I can get a plugin working so I don’t have to moderate by hand. But while I am, thank you WP for the Mark all as spam option!

I’ve been known to complain about the lack of bike advocacy and neglect of bike commuting by racers, particularly Lance Armstrong, since he’s got such a high profile. But Armstrong is stepping up, opening a bike shop that’ll sell a lot of different kinds of bikes and equipment as well as serve as a bikestation. He’s advocating for more cycling and better cycling conditions in Austin, especially downtown. Very cool!

I’m the last person you’d think would claim to need to work on my food intake. I cook for myself and eat mostly whole foods (in spite of my obsession with chocolate mint cookies). But I feel like I haven’t really been pushing myself to eat sensibly, on the excuse that given that I buy from the farmer’s market and eat vegetarian, how could I possibly go wrong?

Well, for one thing, I could forget that since I’m effectively vegan about 95% of the time I need to be conscious about getting enough B12. Yep, I’m fine with iron (and cholesterol and blood sugar and all that, of course), but the B12 is more complicated.

According to my doctor I have low serum levels of B12. I did some research and found that this doesn’t necessarily mean I have a deficiency, since B12 is stored for a while in the body before being depleted, but it does mean I need to eat more of it. B12 comes from microorganisms and is the only thing you can’t get from an actual food on a vegan diet. The organisms use animals as hosts, so you get it through animal products if you’re ovo-lacto or omni. You can get it from nutritional yeast, fortified foods (mostly soy milk or cereals), or supplements. My doctor’s advice about supplements was somewhat misleading — it’s apparently possible to take small doses, which can be absorbed effectively, rather than larger doses that aren’t absorbed well; she recommended the latter. You can take 500 micrograms and absorb 1%, or 5 micrograms and absorb 30-50%, which is most of what you need for a day (2.4 micrograms is the RDA). Jack Norris has a good site about vegan nutrition.

I also realized that I’m just not being very conscious about how I’m eating. I’m eating random things for breakfast, eating too many snacks, and not having proper meals. I’m not thinking about eating dark green vegetables or remembering to put flaxseeds in my oatmeal, which is a pretty much 100% easy way to get omega-3s & 6s. I’m not big on eating to nutritional claims, since I already eat a varied, mostly healthy diet, but I want to be more conscious and more organized, and pay attention to what my body wants to eat. So I’m doing a food diary thing again, and I’m going to work on B12 and other important nutrients (calcium) and also just enjoying my food more and eating less crap.

This morning’s trip down Evelyn was an obstacle course for some reason. An Aramark truck, a guy backing out who couldn’t see because of the Aramark truck, a person coming out forward who was just being careless, a guy walking his bike right into the lane as I was coming (even though there is no crosswalk there and he would have been jaywalking even if there had been), a confused person stopping for no apparent reason in the bike lane, the same Aramark truck backing up, and finally, construction blocking off an entire lane. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Evelyn that bad before; it’s usually pretty peaceful minus the people who aren’t paying attention while making right turns.

The adrenaline involved in the experience reminded me of a thought I had last night about the people who shoot through every intersection with little regard for the law. Obviously some of the stuff they do is pretty stupid, but on the other hand, I’ve gotten in two bike-related accidents despite the fact that I’m usually behaving pretty ’safely’. What if those people are actually safer than I am because they don’t start from the base assumption that they can travel safely along their legal path? I’m in the habit of anticipating potential danger (which has saved me from almost certain collision at least once, probably more like three times), but I do start from this sort of belief that if I try to behave safely and anticipate issues, I should be okay. Whereas these other people tend to start from the base assumption that if they can figure out a path through somewhere that avoids all the obstacles, they should take it. Avoiding obstacles is their key goal all the time, and that’s also how you don’t get in accidents.