Bread and Ssambap

I'd be lying if I said I never eat bread, but I have cut back by some huge margin.  I don't miss it, or crave it or anything like that, but the loss that the convenience of bread provides was devastating. 

Sandwiches are so easy to make, they travel well and they're delicious.  It's hard to eat sandwiches without eating bread, so that alone cut out a giant percentage of my meal options. 

I mean, bread is just so dang easy to eat!  And it's everywhere!  Every meal comes with bread in some form or another.  Sometimes the bread is the meal, sometimes it's just alongside the meal, sometimes it's in a basket in the middle of the table before and during the meal. 

Restaurants love giving people bread.  Maybe because it's a comfort food. 

I've found that in lieu of bread, a big leaf of lettuce works pretty good as a wrap for lunch meat and cheese or whatever.  I actually like that a lot, lettuce is awesome when it's all crunchy. 

Check it out:  I got that "lettuce burrito" method from a Korean dish called "ssambap" (I had to look it up, and it's really spelled with the two s's like that) which is absolutely delicious.  If you get a chance, find a good Korean restaurant and give it a shot.  You get like thirty little dishes with different ingredients and you just mix and match what you want.

When the lettuce fails me, I just use a plate and a fork.  Ol' standby.  Pretty hard to mess that up...

TSN

Additional things related to steaming... sort of

Here's a terrible artist's depiction of what I'd look like while steaming vegetables for me and my family to eat. 

Yeah that about sums it up.  I get THAT excited about steamed vegetables, you know?  How can you not? 

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I Steam Because I'm Lazy

As a clueless bachelor, I wasted years of my life eating 7-11 speedy burritos until I could literally smell it coming out of my pores in the shower.  My goal when I went into a grocery store was to get out as quickly as possible with as much cheap, fast and easy to make food as I could ram into a hand carried grocery basket.  At no point would I enter the vegetable isle. 

What an idiot I was!  There's so much tasty food out there!  Here's one thing I learned that has proven valuable time and time again:  Almost all vegetables are good steamed, and steaming is super easy and even faster than an oven pizza.  Can you believe it?  I can. 

We have a sweet steamer pan, it looks something like this.

Thanks Google image search.  You saved me from walking all the way into my own kitchen to take a picture of my steamer pan. 

Here's how it works:  Wash the veggies, chop em up and throw em in the top part of the pan (I throw in some butter too).  Put an inch or so of water in the bottom part of the pan, put the lid on and heat the whole mess on the stove until steam comes out of it for a few minutes.

The veggies get bright in color, it doesn't take very long.  I never time it, I just wait a few minutes and poke em with a fork, and if they're not still crunchy that's good enough for me.

I won't be appearing on iron chef, copper chef... or even Play-Doh chef anytime soon.  Whatever.  

We steam all sorts of stuff... zucchini, peas, green beans, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus... whatever sounds good.  The baby is all about some steamed veggies.  She'll happily munch until she's got a broccoli stem poking out of each nostril and milk in her ear. 

The moral:  Steamed vegetables are easy, fast, tasty and a hell of a lot better for you than a box of preservatives.  It's win/win/win/win. 

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Maple Syrup Fo Yo A$$

Grilled pineapple is wicked good.  We got a grill pan so we can almost simulate the grill when it's crappy out, or when I don't feel like doing the coal dance.  It works great for veggies. 

Since I bought that natural hog we eat pork chops fairly regularly, those are great with a sweet glaze like pineapple, regular apple, or my personal favorite:  Maple syrup.  Trust me.

I'm from Vermont, you can't take maple syrup out of my diet or I'll die.  I don't mean that garbage corn syrup that's served all over the country, I mean real maple syrup.  It has no equal!  If you look carefully at syrup containers in restaurants like Waffle House, Ihop, Bob Evans, Dennys... any number of places that serve breakfast, you'll find that the word "maple" never actually appears.  It's all corn. 

It doesn't even taste like maple, it's just a sweetener!  For me, calling it maple syrup is along the same lines as blasphemy.  I shudder at the thought. 

I found myself in a breakfast joint in Virginia a few years back.  I had bacon and an omelet with some toast (wheat toast, which I'd ordered thinking it was healthier...) and I asked for syrup.  The lady looked at me like I'd just fallen off the wall. 

Her:  "Why?"
Me:  "Whaddya mean why?" 
Her:  "You didn't get pancakes."
Me:  "I know."
Her:  "So what's the syrup for?"
Me:  "Everything."
Her:  "I've been working here for fifteen years and I ain't never seen nothin' like that."

I think I blew her fragile mind.  I put it on everything.  Toast, eggs, bacon, french fries, ice cream, peanut butter sandwiches... and of course it's an excellent glaze for pork ribs/chops/steaks/tenderloin/etc. 

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I Should Get an Award For This One.

So I bought a hog that was raised organically and with healthy slop and all that.  Since the Mrs. and I went in on a deep freezer big enough to train sled dogs in I went ahead and bought the whole hog.  I had it butchered, processed and wrapped up ready for me to pick up without ever actually meeting the hog in person. 

Part of me regrets not meeting the hog, and part of me is glad I didn't.  The part that regrets is the part that understands and appreciates the ultimate sacrifice the hog has to make in order to feed me and my family.  The part that's glad I didn't is the part that's perfectly happy being ignorant of that sacrifice.

Here I'm doing my very best not to make any references to the way our culture at large has perfected the art of turning an ignorant eye towards the real "how" of what's going on, be it our food supply or our government, our soldiers or our scholars, our farmers or our CEOs. 

Well I failed to not mention it but there it is.  We're so blind, so willing to take what we get and not think twice about where it came from or what it took to get it there.  We put blind faith in a system we don't understand to protect us while we worry about the other little details of our lives. 

Along with a lot of documentaries and notes from Bryan on various books and studies, TPT helped open my eyes to the darkness which looms over our food industry.  It helped me recognize that we're all systematically poisoning ourselves and each other, all the while paying directly into the hands of people who are conscious of the issues and who manipulate the system to continue it on its course.  We pour our dollars into the hands that manipulate entire societies with expert marionette finesse, marching us one step at a time toward our own doom. 

Quit buying garbage food!  Support local businesses that don't contribute to turning every town in America into identical interstate exits!  Recognize the value of a family owned diner!  Stop shopping at Walmart!  It may save you a few bucks, but it costs you your soul and it's killing this country.  Look around.  I'm right.  We are the problem, and it's because we've been conditioned to be mindless consumers. 

Thank you, local farmer who sold me a naturally raised hog;  I support you!  Thank you small business owner who struggles to stay afloat next door to massive corporate chain stores.  Thank you for providing me with the choice to be free.

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Despite all This...

Well Peanut came down with a good quality case of hand, foot and mouth disease, despite every advantage we've tried to give her with her nutrition.  It happens, her peer group is seven or eight other kids her age in a daycare environment and if I were a betting man (which I am) I'd wager she'll get worse before it's all said and done.  Poor little nugget.  She's handling it like a champ though. 

Being sick blows.  I remember getting chicken pox.  That was a huge drag and I remember all my friends having it here and there as well.  I got it twice, which is not supposed to happen.  I was also in the .3% of people who suffer nerve damage when they have their wisdom teeth out... I should have known!

A girl I had a crush on in fifth grade had a bad case of chicken pox, and asked me out while she still had it all over her face.  I told her I didn't think it was a good idea.  Why?  I imagine it was some built-in defense mechanism to not attempt to mate with people with a visible pox, even from the perspective of a 5th grader. 

"It's a pox!  A POX!  No I will not go out with you!  Are you gonna eat that fruit roll-up?"

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Something Weird Happened

Further evidence that my exercise paradigm has finally shifted:  I had an excellent excuse for skipping the Tabata workout today, and didn't take it.  What?! 

I have a man-cold.  It's the worst thing ever naturally, and I'm as pathetic looking as the next man with a cold when I want to be, and boy do I want to be. 

"You should just take it easy tonight." said my wife, who generally makes smarter decisions than I do. 
"But I gotta do something " I reply, in my infinite wisdom.  "What are you gonna do?"
"Take it easy tonight."

Old me would run a mile just to get out of running half a mile.  So what did new me do?  Two sets of Tabata curls, and then could barely lift the shampoo when I took a shower.  Smart?  We'll see. 

Not too much jumping around, nice little compromise there I thought... but it occurs to me that I'm the one with the head cold and she's the one who took it easy tonight.  That doesn't make any sense!  Ah, whatever. 

Alaskan halibut (I pulled it up from the ocean floor myself!  Damn they're ugly!) and buttery brussel sprouts with lemon rice for dinner last night and lunch today, pretty hard to beat that. 

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