Three Great Things: A Mini Link List

I feel like I’m on a roll with lists these days, so how about a quick link list with some good reading material?  Okay, go:

* Inspiration for tackling big projects: Raquelita’s post about the parallels between running and writing.  It’s such a great essay for the new year.  Remember, all big projects are built the same way, step by step, even things like marathons, novels, and PhD theses.

* I enjoy a good style blog—it’s all about the eye candy!  Sara’s blog, To Be Worn, is my new favorite style treat.  Her style reminds me of a cross between Kendi’s and Tania’s.  For easier clicking, you can check out Sara’s Flickr set.  (If anyone would like to buy me this dress, I’d be most obliged.  Please and thank you.)

* I am drawn to stories about shopping bans and people’s relationships with consumerism.  As a reformed underbuyer**, it’s probably not a good idea for me to go on a shopping ban, but I did enjoy this post about a year-long shopping diet.  (Bummer that the author of that post has taken down her blog!  Luckily her guest post is still on-line at Yes and Yes.)

(** More about this one soon, I hope.)

My Five Favorite Kitchen Discoveries of 2011

Wait, what?  2011?  I must have drunk too much red wine again.  Damn you, Pinot Noir.  You are too tasty.

Actually, I’m reaching back into my archives to retrieve a post that I wanted to share a year ago but never did.  Surely I am not the only blogger who has more ideas than she can execute and sometimes comes back to those ideas later.  And as much as there are food trends (I hear kale is out this year?), when you come across something wonderful in the kitchen, it’s worth remembering (kale, I still love you).  So it’s in that spirit, and in the knowledge that I have no sense of time or expiration dates, that I bring you my five favorite kitchen discoveries from 2011.

* Indian bay leaves.  My Indian friend Amutha introduced me to these, and they are fantastic.  Strong, herbal, a little spicy—these bay leaves are so much more interesting than their Mediterranean counterparts.  I use them in any recipe that calls for bay leaves.

* To refresh wilted lettuce, rinse it, then dunk it into a bowl of ice water for a while.  Even just a few minutes can turn slightly wilted lettuce into crisp, sprightly leaves.  (I found this tip on Melissa Clark’s blog.)

* The easiest way to make quesadillas: broil them!  So fast, so delicious, and lower in fat too, if you’re paying attention to that sort of thing.

 * The versatility of flax.  Using flax “eggs,” as seen in this recipe, or a sprinkle of flax on oatmeal as a nutrient boost, I’ve really gotten into the habit of including flax in my cooking on a daily basis.

* Kentucky Dodgers!  These thin pancakes, made with leftover cornbread crumbs, became a kitchen favorite for me in 2011.  I haven’t made them in a while, and I haven’t posted the recipe here at all, but now I think I need to amend both of those errors.  The recipe is in Crescent Dragonwagon’s terrific book The Cornbread Gospels.

Now, let’s see if I post my list of 2012 kitchen discoveries before 2014…happy cooking, y’all!

Five Quirky and Possibly Inadvisable Things

Finally, I found a unicorn!

1)  I kinda want to raid the closet of Nicki Grant from Big Love.  I love her blouses and belts!

2)  I cannot read a blog that uses center justification as its default setting for the text.  I just can’t.  It drives my eyes crazy.  (Note that I make an exception for photo captions here.  Photo captions are typically just one or two lines—that doesn’t have the same crazy-making effect.)

3)  Nobody has proposed to me lately, but if I did get married, I’d want to dance with my new husband to this song.  I especially love the lines, “I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do…they’re really saying I love you.” 

What a wonderful world indeed!

4)  I am obsessed with the idea of making these cookies.  It just doesn’t get much better than chai spices and frosting.  Yum.

5)  This week I watched a wonderful TED talk from Sam Harris about science and morality.  Think science has nothing to say about moral decision-making?  Think again.  This talk articulated a lot of my thoughts on ethics, but Sam Harris does it so much more eloquently.  Please watch. 

Happy Friday, my dears!

Mini January Resolution: Get Rid of Stuff!

I recognize this post may only be interesting to me, since it’s my blog, but I am just so pleased with myself that I am going to share it.  Along with my big, year-long plans, I made a mini-resolution for January, and it was very simple: get rid of as much stuff as possible.

I’m not a packrat, but life happens and stuff piles up.  That’s just the way it is.  Maintaining a home requires consistent effort to keep things from descending into chaos.  Every day, there are dirty dishes to wash and more clothes added to the laundry pile.  Sometimes I find the rhythms of home to be soothing; other times I think I should hire a cleaning service to make the dust disappear.

This month I’ve been focusing on clearing clutter, and it feels great.  Last weekend I cleaned out my vegetable/cheese drawer and was just tickled by the amount of space and lack of old, slimy produce.  See?

Ah.  I feel better just looking at the photo.

Other projects include donating my old clothes to a lucky stranger from Craigslist, recycling old issues of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and bagging up other recyclables with plans to cart them away to the recycling center.  And last night I started cleaning out my freezer, tossing bags of leftover cookie crumbs and heels of bread.  How many cups of cornbread crumbs does one person need to save, anyway?!?  Right now, zero.  I’m starting fresh.  The freezer clean-out makes me especially happy, as I need room in there for all my baking supplies, like whole-grain flours, almond flour, and ground flax seeds.  My stash of leftover bits and bobs had robbed me of room to easily store the supplies that I do use on a regular basis.

(Besides, now I have a good excuse to bake a fresh pan of cornbread!)

I continue to work on my resolution.  For now, I’ve condensed my newspapers and mail into two piles.  Maybe today I’ll start sifting through them to save the good stuff and recycle the rest. 

And while we’re on the topic of organization, I’m trying something new this year.  I’m keeping a cooking journal in a small notebook so I can jot down what I’m eating and planning to eat.  I’m hoping it will make me feel less overwhelmed by weekday demands.  For example, right now I’ve got the ingredients for a cauliflower “fried rice,” a Mexican-style fried rice (with brown rice, black beans, frozen corn, and toppings), pizza, and oven-baked tomatoes.  That’s four new dinners, and if I make at least 2-3 servings, I can make lunches from the leftovers.  I’ll probably go to the grocery store on Tuesday or Wednesday as usual, but when I go, I’ll know that I’ve already got a good stash of food and dinner ideas for the week.  I can buy fresh produce to round out those meals with salads or roasted vegetables.

That’s what things look like for me at home these days.  How about you, dear readers?

Let’s Celebrate Our Flats!

Grandma that I am, I wear flats all the time.  You might think that at 5’1”, I would be self-conscious about my petite stature, but I’m not.  I’m short and there is nothing wrong with that.  I do not need to compensate by wearing heels.  I enjoy wearing heeled shoes occasionally, just for fun, but flats are my go-to, running-around shoes.  And that’s why I was so tickled by this funny tidbit from the February 2013 issue of O magazine:

“Spring fashion is shaping up to be a stiletto-free zone.  No longer will you stand at a cocktail party praying for the sweet release of death.  Embrace your ballet slippers, my friend—the flat will set you free!”

Happy weekend, friends!  I hope it’s a good one for all of you.  And definitely wear your flats—if not your ballet slippers, then your flat boots for a nice long winter walk.

10,000 Hours

Let’s talk about doing hard things today, shall we?

I am not the most adventurous soul, but I seem to keep pursuing hard things even though I know I prefer the comfort of my blue couch and a book.  A neuroscience PhD, a long-distance relationship, a marathon?!?  I mean, seriously: what the fuck was I thinking?  That’s not me!  I’m fuzzy socks and a plate of cookies and early bedtimes.  And yet, I think those cozy things are all the more comforting because I have this strangely bold side of me that says, “Let’s do it!  Let’s move to Texas, to a town we’ve never visited, to work on a project that remains TBD, with a boss we’ve met once!”

Which brings us to present day.  Despite being a bit of a basket case—fueled by chocolate and anxiety!—I do tend to believe that things will work out, so you might as well make the best of your situation.  I am a very pragmatic person, so I’m unlikely to yammer on about fate or higher powers or whatever, but things have a way of working themselves out without requiring you to have a nervous breakdown.  So I try to be kinda chill about things, even if it’s hard.

I’ve been reading Quiet by Susan Cain, and she mentions the work done by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, in which he claims that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something.  I was curious, so I did the math: 10,000 hours is five years’ worth of 40-hour work weeks.  The reason that 10,000 hours stuck in my mind this week?  I’m back to working on a technique that I suck at.  See, I’m so bad at it that I even resort to ending my sentences with prepositions!

The technique goes something like this: dissect teeny-tiny organs out of a fruit fly, put them in tubes, apply several solutions that are designed to mark specific cells with fluorescent labels, mount the organs on glass slides, and look at them on a fancy microscope.  This technique is a way of analyzing gene expression, and I am not so good at it.  I got away with not doing much of it in grad school for various reasons, but it’s a technique that I really should master as a postdoc.  I know this, my boss knows this, and yet I still feel like I’m not very good at it.

That’s probably a bit of an overstatement.  I’m okay at it.  I’m still not good at it, and I find myself avoiding the work whenever possible because I have decided that I don’t really like doing it.  Which is, I think, self-defeating behavior.  So this week, I have decided to embrace the challenge.  I don’t have 10,000 hours to work on this one technique, but I can create pockets of time and more importantly, I can tell myself that I enjoy the challenge.  That I have all the time in the world to dissect and label and fiddle around with the microscope to get the right images.  I can do what needs to be done without overthinking it and (hopefully) with minimal procrastination.

I can do this.

Currently: Copycatting

Today Raquelita posted her January currents, and you know how it goes: if Raquelita does it, I have to do it too. (Not really, but sometimes.  If she says, “Run!” I’ll say “How long?”  26.2 miles, apparently.)  If you like currents, you should also check out Tina’s blog—in my mind, she is the originator of the currents series, and her posts are always so beautiful.

{cooking, family, home—all my favorites}

* Current Food: Brussels sprouts, collard greens, and chocolate.  But not all together.  

* Current Drink: Coffee.  Now that I’ve discovered decaf, I can drink coffee ALL THE TIME!  It’s very exciting.

* Current Book: Quiet by Susan Cain.  Quiet is all about introverts and how awesome we are.  I want to write on this topic because I find it fascinating.

* Current Favorite Blog or Website: Oh my gosh, don’t make me choose!  I love you all.  But I’d say I’m especially intrigued by the Whole 30 action happening over at Holly’s blog.  And Kate is doing a pseudo-vegetarian version of Whole 30, and I keep checking her blog for an update.  (C’mon, Kate!)

* Current Excitement: 2013!  With lots of exclamation points!!!

* Current Mood: Happy. (!!!)

* Current Garden Item: My colleague Christopher is a serious backyard gardener (a gentleman farmer, you could call him), and he is letting me order some seeds from his catalog.  I picked out a few herbs: Thai basil, rosemary, and sage.  But then Christopher told me he has rosemary growing in his backyard, so he’s going to try to give me a little rosemary plant for my patio.

* Current Fashion Trend: Jeggings.  I would hang my head in shame, but they are so comfortable and so perfect for biking that I’m too excited to feign shame.  Now, I do try to wear longer tops with my jeggings (which are true leggings, really, but made with a fabric that simulates the look of jeans) so as not to be indecent, but I’ve spent so many hours in running tights that I just don’t feel self-conscious in jeggings.  I feel like me.

* Current Outfit: Right now?  Shlubby house clothes: baggy track pants, old t-shirt, cute new button-up sweatshirt, old slippers.  I am so sexy.

* Current Love: Life.  All of it.  I can’t pick one thing.

* Current Indulgence: I don’t feel like I’m being very indulgent right now.  But I always have deep pockets for great food, whether it’s fresh vegetables or a bottle of organic maple syrup.

* Currently Pondering: Whether it’s the right time to start dating again.

* Current New Find: Woodchuck Hard Cider, Winter edition.  I can’t decide if I like it.  It tastes like hard cider got together with eggnog—there’s some nutmeggy, spicy flavors in it.  It’s not bad; it’s just different. 

* Current Peeve: Nothing of note here.

* Current Song: “Upward Over the Mountain” by Iron & Wine.  I listen to this song daily.

* Current Triumph: Last week’s departmental talk.

* Current Wishlisting: New running shoes, new glasses, and a new haircut.

* Currently Delaying: Buying things on my wishlist (see above).  I think I’m going to try to hold out until February for those items.  Please note that this means I’ll be guaranteed several weeks of great hair because my hair always shapes up and stops misbehaving right before haircut time.

PS  Thanks to Kate for inspiring the photo collage!