Whole 30 and Random Thoughts

Fuck.

I should be working on something, but obviously I'm not since I'm on here.

There are so many things I should be working on, but instead I'm typing into this. You're welcome.

• Lice combs do a very good job of getting the larger pieces of cajun seasoning mix out of one's hair.
• cajun seasoning does not feel so great when it gets in your eye. I do not have first hand knowledge of this, but I have been told that this is true very vehemently. 
• I've been running on caffeine, adrenaline, and cortisol for the past month+ with the occasional ounce of ethanol thrown in for good measure. do not recommend.
• I similarly do not recommend jumping head first into Whole30 when insanely stressed
• and yet, here I am. Goddamnit.
• I'm letting myself off the douche hook and am instagramming the shit out of what I eat so I can at least be entertained while I spend the next 28 days extremely hangry
• while I prefer the syntax and ease of Postgres, switching between that and hive is fucking up my brain.
• Ramona is super into quesadillas, excuse me, tortillas with melted cheese right now. It makes me want to buy a quesadilla maker since I am currently weak to shopping. 

ube ice cream kid cone - Cookiebar Creamery - $ 2.5

NaBloPoMo 2k15 Meal Plan #1

Can I actually just eat bacon all week instead?

It's November, which means that i get that itch to do something writing-related. i'm not saying that I'll success with NaBloPoMo, but whatever. Made this earlier today because we need to start eating better/cheaper:

Monday - rotisserie chicken, arugula
Tuesday - slow cooker pork, butternut squash in a brown butter and pine nut sauce, swiss chard
Wednesday - mac and cheese, leftover pork
Thursday - pan-fried chicken breast, roasted okra, swiss chard + lentil soup
Friday - chicken + vegetable pasta toss

I'll actually be out of the apartment for Monday and Wednesday to attend various events, so those are actually just for Colby to do while I'm gone.

Yerba Buena Gardens Children's Playground

It's hard to take pictures in San Francisco. This is due to a number of things conspiring against me, but mostly it's because the sun sets early and Ramona hates sleep. We went hung out in San Francisco this afternoon and I actually got to take a few pictures. I can't believe I have an almost 3 year old.

Blogging again

I think I'm going to start blogging again. I'm not sure if it's all going to be food-related, but some of it definitely will be. Right now we're moving, time is passing so quickly, and I want to record what's going on for posterity. Or something.

A lot of the women who participate in Hackbright have kept blogs to chronicle their experiences and I've really enjoyed them. It's given me some insight into what it'll be like in the program and has helped to ease my worries about how it's going to go. I think I'd like to do this, if I can keep up with it. It'll help me to focus (I hope) and stay connected with people in Austin (because I haven't begun to emotionally process the fact that I'm leaving behind 6+ years of friends in less than 2 weeks).

And since I firmly believe that most blog posts are enhanced with pictures, here's one that we took of Ramona during bluebonnet season. It's only about 5 months late.

Maybe I'll get motivated and redesign the blog. The possibilities are endless!

Slow Cooking

She is way cuter than an ugly slow-cooked meal

To say that things have been tumultuous lately would be a vast understatement. The uncertainty of the future combined with the incredible stress that comes with finishing a thesis would be bad enough, but having to maintain some facade of sanity so as to not terrorize my 2(!) year old, makes it a lot more challenging. One thing that is abundantly clear is that we need to really start saving money because my last guaranteed paycheck comes in May.

We've started using the slow cooker a lot more. We actually have two of these, and they've mostly sat in the pantry neglected, only to come out during the holidays to warm whatever alcoholic beverage we're serving (think spiked hot chocolate or mulled cider). My main issue with the slow cooker is something that I still don't understand. If you have a recipe that cooks in 6 hours, how exactly do you time your slow cooking so that you don't come home to a giant mess of over-cooked food or do you just eat at midnight?

I thought that I'd link to a few recipes that we've tried with some notes, mostly for me.

Chicken Philly Sandwiches
This recipe calls for "Dale's Steak Seasoning", which I gather is basically just Maggi with some other things in it, but we didn't have any and neither did Central Market, so I used ~3T or so of Pecos 83 BBQ Marinade. I also added some Zehnder's Chicken Seasoning (although I have the one with MSG in it because yum) because I somehow have two bottles of this stuff and I have no idea what to do with it. This turned out really well.

Barbecue Pulled Chicken
I'm not even sure that this is the recipe I used, but it's close to what we did. What you should NEVER do is use Sweet Baby Ray's. That shit is a) nasty and b) way too high in sugar to slow cook because it burns. I'd probably use that Pecos 83 BBQ marinade and try to make this again.

Beef and Farro Stew
Admittedly, slow-cooking is the opposite of pressure cooking, but I'd been watching a lot of old school AB lately. We had almost all of the ingredients on hand, minus the beef, so I figured we'd give this a go. I substituted farro for the barley because we have a lot of if and I have no idea what to do with it. I also subbed in sage and thyme because I hate rosemary and we don't have any marjoram and obviously, I used prepared beef stock. At the end, I added a big dash of porcini powder and some frozen corn that we had on hand. The first day I was super disappointed because it was so one-dimensional (i.e., it was like tomato stew with other things in it), but after sitting in the fridge for a couple days, it made for great leftovers.

Italian Lessons

Someone told me that I should blog more. Considering that I posted only 23 times last year (which is the lowest since the first year I had my blog, which was started in August), that's not such a tall order. In lieu of the traditional new year self-flagellation, I want to achieve these two goals, listed in order of importance:

1. Spend quality time with Ramona and Colby
2. Finish my thesis

I don't know how this blog will fit into these goals, but I hope that it will provide an outlet for me and to help make 2014 a lot less horrible than 2013.

30 Day Photography Challenge: Self-portrait

I miss blogging. I miss the food blogging community here in Austin too. I just don't think I have the time to do it on the regular yet, and I'm doubtful that I will until I graduate; however, I did find something that I think I can do and will let me satisfy that blogging urge I get now and again.

The 30 Day Photography Challenge at White Peach is doable, I think. I'm not going to join their forums, but I will post to this blog. Hopefully daily, but if not, I'll be taking daily pictures. So here's my first picture, a self-portrait. We took it at St. Theresa's in Austin right after Ramona's baptism. And since I'm in this picture and I'm never in pictures, I'm going to call this close enough.

Twenty-seven

We interrupt the string of poorly-written posts on San Francisco for my annual birthday check in.

I've officially left my mid-twenties for my late twenties and so far, so good.  Twenty-six was a very good year for me, mostly because of this face:

I can only hope that twenty-seven treats me so well.  So happy birthday to me and happy Valentine's day to everyone else.

Franklin Barbecue

I'm doing something I almost never do: post about a restaurant the day I visit it.  In most cases, it's days or weeks or months (ahem) after I visit, but this was really good and there is at least one cute baby picture involved, so that's motivation enough.

I'm not a huge fan of barbecue, but everyone else is, including Colby.  Two years ago, when it was Colby's birthday, we tried to go to the Franklin trailer, but I was about to fly out to Boston for a work trip the next day and we didn't have time to stand in line.  Colby's maybe only a little bit bitter about that still.  I found out from a friend this year that we could pre-order and pick up if we got our order in early and were willing to buy 5 lbs of meat.  Challenge accepted.

Colby sent an email 5 days before his birthday this year and the earliest availability they had was 11 days later, so this morning we picked up 3 lbs of brisket, 1 lb of pulled pork, and 1 lb of ribs along with a pint of beans.  It comes with three kinds of sauce, bread, and pickles+onions.  Let me preface this by saying that I don't really like barbecue.

We've been to Rudy's a lot, Sam's once (you know, pants meat), Iron Works, Bill Miller Barbecue, places in Lockhart and Elgin, the Salt Lick, and several other barbecue joints and trailers around Austin that I'm sure I'm forgetting.  They run the gamut from should-have-known-better to nationally renown.  From all of those places we've visited, these are my favorite things: Salt Lick's potato salad, getting the hell out of Bill Miller's, Rudy's ice.  Yes, Rudy's used to have crushed ice, which is the best ice and I enjoyed that more than any of the food.  Franklin Barbecue is hands down the best barbecue I've ever had.  This is nothing new.  Everyone thinks this, but let me just say, that as someone who just doesn't like barbecue that I thought this was good, great even.  And not "good for barbecue", just plain good.

beans - $4.50/pint

When I saw the order Colby put in, I questioned why he would get beans, but he said that the reviews said that the beans were excellent.  I no longer question these people.  The beans were magnificent, though it's probably a misnomer to call them beans.  There was a lot of meat in the beans, but I'm not complaining here.  Their hot sauce isn't incredibly hot and it's on the acidic side, but a splash of hot sauce on the beans?  Perfection.

ribs - $14/lb

I really really liked the ribs.  They were fall-off-the-bone good.

pulled pork - $13/lb

The pulled pork comes unsauced and is dry enough to warrant some.  The three sauces were the aforementioned hot sauce, a more traditional barbecue sauce that has espresso in it, and one that reminded me of the tamarind chutney that gets served with samosas at Indian restaurants.  I definitely liked the tamarind sauce with the pulled pork the most.

meatucopia - $16/lb

From all of my friends' exclamations, the brisket is the reason to come to Franklin Barbecue.  It was definitely delicious.  When we put the 3 lbs of brisket on the table to photograph, it looked like a cornucopia filled with meat.  A meatucopia, if you will.  And this bounty of meat lived up to the hype.

take in the meaty abundance
 

Kimchi was about to keel over with excitement

Kimchi, no surprise, wanted in on the action.  She got a few bites. :)

brisket - $16/lb

Eating this with the loaf of Mrs. Baird's bread is a mistake.  I made a sandwich with pickles and the espresso sauce and the bread brought the meal down, as the juxtaposition of carefully crafted meat with chemically-preserved white bread is strange.  Perhaps a loaf of homemade white bread would have been better.

baby's first barbecue - priceless

We also decided that this was probably the best opportunity to introduce Ramona to brisket.  She really liked it too, although now she's probably ruined forever, since no other barbecue that we get on the regular can really match this.


Will we ever go there "for real", with the lines?  Unlikely.  My barbecue apathy combined with my extreme aversion to waiting will prevent me from ever getting up at the crack of dawn to wait for hours for meat; however, I'm already looking into pre-ordering again.

The unwilling insomniac

Right this moment, my house smells of garlic and onion and chicken and Ramona's sitting on the floor playing with a pile of toys.  It's quite lovely.  We had chicken and 40 cloves last week and I harvested the thighs and drumsticks from an organic roaster chicken to make it.  Since I knew I had time to kill, I decided to cook the rest of it in the slow cooker on a bed of onions, garlic, and carrots.  While this all sounds like a wonderful Sunday afternoon, it's not Sunday afternoon.  It's 4:48 AM on Monday morning and I started the chicken at about 3 AM with the knowledge that I would be awake at 8 AM to get it out and (likely) put it in the fridge.

"Why," you ask, "are you going to be awake at 8 AM if you're awake at 4:48 AM?"  Good question.

This all started with Ramona's 9 month well check.  When the pediatrician asked about her sleeping habits, she was surprised to hear about her late schedule (down at 3 AM up at noon) and then gave us a pamphlet about sleep phase disorders.  It turns out that I probably have delayed sleep phase syndrome and Ramona either has it too or is being subjected to mine.  I guess what happens is that for whatever reason, your circadian rhythms get out of whack and you just want to go to sleep later than most people in your time zone do.  I've been like this for as long as I can remember.  My family used to joke that I was "stuck" on Korean time, but I'm pretty sure that after 26 years here, I should have adjusted by now.

For the most part, it's not a big deal.  DSPS has been linked to ADHD (which I probably have), and clinical depression (which I don't).  It seems like the problem stems from not getting enough sleep since people with DSPS don't have a problem staying asleep, they have problems going to sleep at a societally indicated time.  In high school and college, I powered through and consumed a lot of caffeine.  I also relished the days in which I had no classes before noon.  In grad school, it was mostly more of the same, although I've always had to TA early classes.  Once I became pregnant, the caffeine stopped, but I did manage to sleep more because I was tired all. of. the. times.

And now I have a 9 month old who likes to go to bed at 3 AM, which is around the time her mama prefers.  I'm currently being paid as a graduate research assistant, which means that I can make my own hours.  While most people are getting to work , I'm in the middle of my night.  I usually end up working in the afternoons and late at night, saving the early evenings for Ramona and Colby.  There isn't this tired all the time problem because I do get enough sleep, it's just offset from everyone and my work output isn't suffering because I'm tired, it's suffering because I have a baby.  The one thing that is kind of hard, however, is Colby's schedule.  Colby usually goes to sleep around the same time as us, but he *does* have a job that requires him to be somewhere before the early afternoon (oppressive, I know!).  This means that he usually averages about 5 hours of sleep a night.  When the doctor mentioned DSPS and the "simple" way to fix it, he was super excited.

So.  After all this rambling, my birthday present to him is to try to fix our weirdo sleep schedule in time for the holidays.  While we could work on sleep hygiene and take melatonin and blah blah, we're currently trying to stay up an hour later each day until we get back around to a normal schedule.  While most people can't do this, this has been perfectly timed because it gives me extra time to work and Colby time to sleep.  Today, I'm supposed to go to bed around 8 AM, although I suspect it'll be a bit later.  By the weekend, we'll be going to bed at 2 PM, which sounds crazy, but I'm hoping that we can get back to some sort of normal schedule so that Colby isn't so sleep deprived.

Thanksgiving Photos

sweet potato pie with cinnamon roll crust

apple pie

apple+cranberry sauce

bacon cheddar mashed potatoes

stuffing

Kimchi's plate

the spread

action shot of the sweet potato pie

Kimchi trying to swipe Ramona's dinner

Baby's first

Ramona and Kimchi wish all of you the very happiest of Halloweens.

Baby Food Chronicles

I've been making lots of these lately:

Spinach + sweet potato

Ev.er.y.one. extols the virtues of making your own baby food and I totally agree.  We've been able to control what ingredients get put in Ramona's food and we get to do it for a lot less cost and waste than buying prepackaged baby food from the grocery store.

"Mama, solids are clearly more delicious when spread all over your face.  Duh!"

So far, she's eaten: sweet potatoes, carrots, broccoli, zucchini, blueberries, avocado, banana, chicken, beef, apples, pears, beets, and a lot of other things that I'm probably forgetting.  You'll notice that she's not eating rice cereal and that's with purpose.  There's really no good reason to start a baby on rice cereal and with recent concerns about arsenic, it's something that we're glad we chose to skip.  At this point, she's eating two solid meals a day, but we're going to start giving her three: one pureed, one easy to mash chunks (think banana or avocado), and one with some meat to give her iron and zinc.

We've been using a variety of utensils to make her food, but lately we've been using a dim sum steamer basket and our mini food processor.  Awhile back, we broke our immersion blender, so Colby decided that it would be brilliant to get a commercial kitchen grade appliance.  I'm pretty sure that has more power than our weed whacker (which, admittedly, is not very powerful) and I basically have to stand on a stool to use it comfortably at the stove.   We'll use it if we're blending a lot of stuff at once, but for general purposes it's just not practical.

At first I thought that starting her on foods was going to be a very sad event because I'd no longer be her sole source of nutrition, but it's actually be really fun.  I can't imagine how awesome it is to try something as delicious as sweet potatoes for the first time ever, but I know that she's really enjoying herself.

Our dog, Kimchi, is also very happy that we've started Ramona on solids. ;)

too late

Sometimes I take food pictures and write about them a long time after the meal.  Usually this isn't too big of a deal, but in this case, I waited too long.  This was taken in February.  It was some sort of mushroom tart from Bistrot Mirabelle, a French bistro restaurant in the Far West area.  It closed in June and was slated to reopen as some sort of American-style concept restaurant last week.  I don't know if it ever did or not.  It was a good meal and I hope that they do reopen.  Meanwhile, I'm still here, trying to make sure that Ramona doesn't get into too much trouble.

You can totally see the mischief in her eyes.

Baguette House and Texas Bakery

My kitchen is a horror show.  It looks like a band of hooligans came in, cooked a bunch of stuff, and used all our dishes without cleaning anything up.  It turns out that this does not put me in the cooking mood.  I told Colby that we weren't eating at home tonight and we decided on Baguette House.  Baguette House serves up banh mi and an assortment of other Vietnamese dishes, including dessert.  It's seriously one of my favorite sandwiches in Austin and I don't know why we don't go there more often because it's criminally inexpensive as well.

grilled beef - $3.75

grilled pork - $2.75 

It's always tasty.  These sandwiches come with the meat, house made mayo, and vegetables, which include pickled daikon radish, pickled carrots, cilantro, cucumber, and jalapeno all on a ridiculously good baguette.  I get the vegetables on the side because I hate cilantro with the fire of a thousand suns and also because the jalapenos are crazy hot, so I usually only eat one.

On our way out of the shopping center, we noticed a sign for the grand opening of a place called Texas Bakery (no website, unfortunately).  They have an assortment of savory and sweet pastries, along with white and whole wheat sandwich-looking bread.  We grabbed a few pastries for dessert.

coconut bread - $1.39

pineapple bread - $1.39

red bean bread - $1.29

The coconut bread had coconut and raisins baked inside.  The pineapple and red bean breads were both stuffed with filling, though there was no pineapple in the pineapple bread.  If we go back there, I'd like to try the sandwich bread, since the bread part was the better part of both the pineapple and red bean breads (as opposed to the fillings).

Oh... and since I haven't posted a baby picture in awhile, here's Ramona, helping out with the photography.

"Mama, try a different angle on that one."

"Yes, much better!"

microwaved eggs

I love my microwave.  Yes, I know it's totally uncool to declare my love for a machine that makes atrocities like Easy Mac possible, but I'm going to hazard a guess that most people who declare war against microwaves don't have kids.  At least, they don't have infants and can usually eat breakfast before 5:30 PM.

I've read about microwaving eggs for awhile now, but I haven't tried it until tonight.  I really should have done it earlier.  Ever since Ramona's been born, I've basically let myself eat whatever it was that I wanted.  This has actually been a good thing because my milk supply is amazing and the ratio of fats and carbs and protein in my milk has been sufficient to grow a very happy baby who is in the 95th percentile in both height and weight.

Mushroom omelet from the hospital about 20 hours before Ramona was born. I GUARANTEE this egg was microwaved.

This has not, however, been so great for my waistline.  Well, I guess it hasn't been that bad either, I'm down 5 lbs, which sounds wonderful, but isn't when you consider that I'm about the same size as I was before so there's some not-so-great redistribution going on.  Suffice it to say, I should probably start monitoring what I'm eating again and my current plan is to get back to what I was doing for the gestational diabetes and monitor my carb-to-protein intake.  I used to eat a ton of eggs while I was pregnant, but now it's a big process to figure out how to get out a pan, cook an egg, and then eat it all while holding a baby.

Enter the microwave.

2 eggs
salt, pepper, whatever else you put in your eggs
oil

Grease a microwave-safe bowl with a little bit of oil.  Whisk together the two eggs plus whatever seasoning you're going to put in.  Microwave on high for ~45 seconds.  Remove the bowl and stir.  See if there are still wet bits.  If so, microwave for 30 second increments until everything is cooked.

So how do these microwaved eggs taste?  Like eggs.  Their texture leaves a bit to be desired, but they're protein and it's nothing that a little bit of sriracha can't fix.

twiddlerecipe: stuffed french toast

My friend Chris is visiting this week to meet Ramona and to work with me on a project that he'll be presenting at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.  I'm more than a little bit jealous about that.  Chris also likes to cook, so we've actually put my kitchen to its intended use again, as opposed to the baby washing station that it's become.

images from my past fade into the background (i.e., the kitchen aid stand mixer)

Last night we made strawberry and cream cheese stuffed french toast, using uncut bakery burger buns as the bread.  I didn't really note the exact amounts or the time, but the method is pretty simple.

strawberry stuffed french toast

butter

~8oz strawberries, washed, hulled, and thinly sliced

~1/4 c sugar give or take to taste, depending on your strawberries

4 oz cream cheese, room temperature

~1 t vanilla extract

4 uncut bakery burger buns

3 eggs

1 c cream

~1/2 cinnamon

~1 t vanilla extract

~2 t honey

Combine the strawberries and sugar and allow to macerate.  Pulse together the macerated strawberries, cream cheese, and vanilla extract until mostly combined.  It's nice to not completely pulverize the berries, so that there's a bit of texture.

Cut holes into the burger buns, such that a pocket forms.  Stuff the buns with the mixture.  The pockets shouldn't be overflowing, but just filled.

In a large, shallow bowl, whisk together the eggs, cream, cinnamon, vanilla extract, and honey.  Soak each of the stuffed buns in the mixture.  Cook in butter on all sides, rotating the buns so that all six sides are done (so you're not eating raw eggs) and golden brown.

hi again

This is a picture from a really terrible meal that we had last week.  It's actually a plate from a Mother's Day brunch buffet from a restaurant that we've eaten at twice before.  The first time we went was actually for Restaurant Week and it was really good.  I was sooo disappointed, in part, because I wanted to love it and then blog about it.  Unfortunately, the meal wasn't good so I don't really have anything to say and I'd rather not take a giant crap on a restaurant that I think is probably better than what they served up here.  It'll probably be awhile before we go back, but it's never going to close because, even though it's basically empty every time we've been there, it's part of a hotel.

but at least I'm a cute money pit

So herein lies the problem.  I have nothing to write about.  It's not that I don't eat.  I do, every day, in fact. It's just that recipe creation has been tough and given that we now have a giant money pit, we've been trying to scale back the restaurant eating.  We've been going with tried and true recipes.  The one time I tried making something new, it took forever and I felt like I was neglecting Ramona (she fell asleep in her swing almost immediately so it seems like mommy guilt is a natural progression from Catholic guilt) thus, we've stuck with quick cooking meals since then.  So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm here and I'm eating and I just needed to write something so I could remember what it felt like to write a blog post.

6-0.

It's one of those milestone birthdays, you know?  It's not nearly as big an ado as 50, but it's a decade and decades are still significant.  From what I've been told, my mom always hated her birthday because it was a sign that she was older.  I think, though, that this year she would have been much happier because right before she turned 60, her first grandchild was born.  Years that end in 2 have always been significant to me.  My grandma was born in 1922 and will be turning 90 in May.  My mom was born in 1952 and my parents got married in 1982.  And now there's Ramona.

So happy birthday, Mom.  Our gift is this picture and a promise that we'll never forget your birthday.  We wish you could have been here to enjoy it.

Love,

Julie and Ramona

Austin Restaurant Week: Brunch at Cru

It's that time of year again where the prix fixe menus come out and my eating-at-home willpower all but disappears.  Yes, it's Austin Restaurant Week.  This time around, the beneficiary is Meals on Wheels and More.  The past two ARWs we went to Urban: An American Grill and McCormick & Schmick's for brunch.  Since these were both successful endeavors, we decided to try brunch again and we weren't disappointed.

This time it was a bit trickier with Ramona, but after asking twitter whether or not it was a good idea to bring a baby to a wine bar, I received the helpful tip to call the restaurant and ask.  Cru said that they totally encourage families to eat there, so Colby, Dustin, Ramona, and I made our way to the Domain.  We had a reservation for which we were almost 15 minutes late, but they seated us anyway.  It was such a nice day that we decided to eat outside.

Ramona had no preference between indoors and out.

Part of my motivation for brunch was to have my first alcoholic beverage in nearly 10 months.  I've always been a lightweight and taking a year-long hiatus from the booze didn't really help that.  Colby, Dustin, and I all ordered mimosas, which seemed on the strong side.  So strong, in fact, that I made it about 1/3 of the way through mine before I quit and gave it to Colby.  I could feel the Asian Glow coming on and I really didn't need to get drunk at brunch.

Party time!

The prix fixe menu included the cocktail, an entree, and a dessert.  I got the croque madame, Colby got the steak and eggs, and Dustin got the eggs benedict for our entrees.   The steak and eggs were excellent.  I had to fight Colby to get a bite.  My default argument for anything now is "I was in labor for 23 hours and she weight 8 lbs 9 oz".

The croque madam consisted of a croissant with smoked ham, gruyere cheese, and a bechemel sauce all topped with an egg.  Unfortunately the bechemel sauce had separated a bit, but considering the strong flavors of the gruyere and ham, it didn't really matter.  And adding an egg with a runny yolk to pretty much anything makes it more delicious.

Dustin got the eggs benedict, which he said that he liked.  Colby took the picture, which is why only part of it is pictured.

For the dessert course, Dustin and I both got berries and cream, which was served in a cookie-like tart shell.  I really really liked this.  The creme was actually a citrus mousse and it paired nicely with the blackberry, raspberry, and blueberry sauce.

Colby, being the chocolate-fan, ordered the molten lava cake with raspberry coulis and creme anglais.  He said that he liked it too.