XKCD comments on my last post.

Well said.

All about MEEEEEE!

Not like every post isn't anyway, but this one's even a bit more so than usual. I have been Getting Fit, you guys.

Kind of. What had happened was, moving back to the US wreaked havoc on my body. The ready availability of massive quantities of delicious fatty foods combined with living with my parents for nine months meant that I put on a size and a half. It was Not Good.

It was an interesting study of how much impact food has on my body, I will say that. From when I started at my current job in July, I have had free access to a gym and have been going 2-4 times a week since then. I also saw a trainer at another gym for three months, but gave that up when I moved for reasons of cash deprivation. But nothing I was doing was making much of a difference; or rather, it wasn't helping me lose any weight - god knows how much more I'd have put on if I hadn't been making those efforts. The weight gain was entirely down to the change in my diet.

Before leaving Sydney, I wouldn't have said that I eat especially healthily. I do cook a lot, mostly from scratch, and I'm pretty good about cooking with veggies or having salad; but I traditionally eat a lot of starchy, carby goodness as well: pasta, bread, noodles, dumplings, oh my god I'm going to cry. And while my sweet tooth isn't my biggest problem, I will snack on whatever's in the house. Basically, with food as with everything, I have no impulse control.

Moving back Stateside has made me reevaluate. Yeah, I eat a lot of stuff I shouldn't, but my day-to-day cooking and eating habits are streaks ahead of how people tend to be here. I don't want to get all 'Supersize Me' on you; it's not new territory. I'll say only that it is *amazing* to me how hard it is to get my hands on good-quality fresh food. I live in the middle of a populous residential area in the city, and it just... like, fruit and veg shops don't exist, and small markets don't waste space or money on perishables, so supermarkets are the ONLY place to get fruit and veg right now. In the spring, the weekly farmers' markets will start up again and there are a couple within reach, but for now it's so limited. And people here have become used to living like that, and a lot of times don't want to - or aren't able to - put the work in to accessing fresh food, let alone preparing it. Why would you when you can get two huge pizzas to feed your family of four for the same or less than it would cost you to buy and prepare real food for them? I'm not being facetious; if I were a working parent, the temptation to save myself the time and energy involved in shopping and cooking would be strong. Hell, I only have myself to look after and it's still hard to beat back most nights.

I realised pretty quickly after I moved to Dorchester that I was starting to lose weight, and this was clearly due to the change back to my preferred eating habits: oatmeal with fruit for brekkie; homemade food for lunch; few prepared/packaged foods; more vegetables, etc. I also found that I wasn't buying bread or pasta in the amounts I usually would, which meant that a huge component of my starch overintake was cut out. I've barely touched butter or cheese, and I've had no sweets around. I've had ice cream once since Christmas.

And the thing is, I don't really miss those things. Much. There was a day a couple of weeks ago when I'd have pushed my own mother into a snowbank and left her there for a whopper with onion rings, and the last few days I've had to tell myself out loud to keep walking past the pizza places. And having just mentioned butter, all I want now is a huge pile of hot, crunchy toast. Of course. But apart from those very intense moments, it's actually fine. It's good. I've been lunching on Sophie's Magic Veggie Soup for the last few weeks, and loving it; I'm cooking a lot of casseroles and stews in my amazing Colombian clay dish (and speaking of magic, this thing... I swear, I could throw a pile of old newspaper in it, simmer for three hours, and end up with a dream of a meal); I'm playing with food again and loving it.

This has spurred me to rededicate myself to the gym. I'm going 4-6 days a week now, and have been since before Christmas. I've actually fixed my work schedule for this semester so that I can take a 2-hour lunch break every day (except Thursday) and go to the gym then, because the gym doesn't open early enough for me to go before work and if I leave it to after I just won't bother. It's not what I'd call fun, but I'm hitting the awesome point where I'm really starting to see a difference and that's encouraging me to keep at it. Today, for example, I noticed that my ass is moving back up my body and I'm starting to be able to see muscles under the mess that is my thighs, and that was all I needed to go a bit harder. I'm now into jeans that are two sizes smaller than what I had been wearing, and while they're still not *quite* as comfy as I'd like, the size up has become unflatteringly baggy so the smaller ones it is, and in a few more weeks I expect that they'll be fitting perfectly. Ideally I'd like to come down another size before US summer, and I think that's achievable if I keep this up. Mind you, Sydney's likely to bump me back up - you can't eat laksa and pies every day for three weeks without feeling some effects - but I'm okay with that. I'll fix it.

Of course, all this having been said, you-all might not notice any difference in me when I get there because as I said, the bulk of what I've got rid of so far is what I put on since I moved. But that shouldn't stop you telling me I look great. :)


XOXO

Things I can't.

1) The Patriots. My gridiron team bombed out of the playoffs in the most... augh. It's more than a week later and I still feel like I died inside. I had to get whiskey drunk, y'all. (Actually, in a text from that night I described myself as 'whiskety drunk', which I think is probably more accurate.)


2) The weather. You lot might be besieged with floods and locusts and rains of blood or whatever, but it is fucking cold here. And that's not just my unacclimatised ass complaining: in the last 24 hours we have hit temperatures lower than Boston has seen in about a decade. Like, in the negative Fahrenheits. This morning the five-minute walk from the train to work reduced me to tears. I was wearing a big wool coat with a hood, a wool scarf, a warm sweater with a huge cowl neck, a thermal shirt, a singlet, heavy jeans, huge thick socks, sneakers, and gloves. But halfway there my legs were burning - burning - from the cold. When I went back out a few minutes later to walk another five minutes to the gym, I put my yoga pants on under my jeans; and while I took them off once I was settled back in my office, I will be putting them back on when I go home. One of the major local channels described today's weather on their website as 'ridiculous cold'. I swear I'm not making that up.


3) The weather, some more. We have also been getting record snowfalls. I've had one snow day a week at work for the last three weeks, and am likely to have at least one more this week thanks to the rain/snow/ice storm scheduled to hit us Tuesday-Thursday. (By which I mean all of those days. Not sometime between Tuesday and Thursday. All three days. Really.)

Now, I know that some of you will look at that and say it should be exciting and fun. And you know what? Yes, snow can be really pretty when it's fresh and you're watching from somewhere warm. But at the risk of shattering some illusions, let me tell you that that is not the whole picture.

Snow is messy. It gets everywhere and is hard to clear away completely to make safe paths for walking or driving. What's left behind turns to nasty wet slush that gets into your shoes and socks and pants, or more dangerously freezes and tries to kill you. The sand that the city and residents put down to melt the snow gets all over the snowbanks, which adds a texture effect to piles already discoloured by pollution and dogs. Snow is heavy to shovel and hard to to walk through, until it gets packed-down and becomes impossible to shovel and hard to walk over. And while getting snow days is exciting and fun when it happens, what are you meant to do when the Mayor and the Governor are telling people it's too dangerous to be on the roads, but your work is open anyway? Because that happened to me last week too, and you know what? It's a shit decision to have to make, and one that people here have to make far too often. I'm lucky that I work at a college and as
such am more likely to have classes (and therefore work) canceled, but most people don't have that luxury and it's fucking dangerous. And don't even get me started on the mess that happens when schools get the day off but their parents have to work.

It's not that nice. It's really, really not.

*****

Lest I sound overly grim, though, I will add that I've had a lovely 24 hours courtesy of A Certain Chef who took me out for fancy drinks and fancy food at fancy places last night. Still can't quite shake the feeling that something's missing, but I'm putting the time in to work it out. I'm well aware that what's missing might just end up being 'the crazy', and while I will say it's kind of boring without the crazy, it's also kind of nice. We'll see how sensible I end up being.

American / Salad

I've written a bit about about the awesome food I've had since I've been back in Boston. And I've enjoyed that (the writing and the eating). Unfortunately, I have not been entirely lucky.

My good luck ran out on Monday. I was temping at the non-profit, which is in... certainly not a bad neighbourhood, but not a great one, and not one with brilliant lunch options. In Boston, the pizza-and-sub shop has the ubiquity of the Thai restaurant in Sydney. This means that wherever you are, you're likely to have some reliably good munching options, but they're almost inevitably high-fat, high-carb, low-fresh-anything. After a few meals like this on my first days at the non-profit I was burnt out, and I decided to try a Greek salad from one of the local joints. I figured that, while Greek salads are hardly the healthiest option, it's not a bad choice from this kind of place: there's a whole subgenre of Greek pizza places in and around Boston, of which this was one. (You can identify Greek pizza most easily by the crust, which tends to be thicker all around and quite crunchy on the edges, but the cheese blend is also a giveaway.) In addition to the usual pizza and subs, they usually offer gyros, Greek salads, and the other odd Hellenic bit and piece, so I thought I might be safe.

Oh, how effing wrong I was.

To start with, there was approximately a metric tonne of feta crumbled over the top - and by over the top I mean to a depth of about an inch. I never thought there was such a thing as too much feta... well, they showed me. The feta was dyed a pale pink where it was touched by the black olives. I chose not to think about this too closely, and dug deeper.

The vegetable mix included the standard iceberg lettuce and tomatoes (more on them in a minute), but was spiked with the somewhat less orthodox green capsicum, carrot, and radish. I didn't mind them - in fact, the capsicum and carrot turned out to be my favourite bits - but they were unexpected.

The dressing was of the creamy Italian variety (casual cultural insensitivity? you be the judge), but had a surprising pink tinge to it that worried me more than a little. Maybe it had been dyed to match the olives, like cheap bridesmaids' shoes? Moreover, I got two vats of it; one would have comfortably drowned a dinner-sized salad, which this was not. Two was... well, I reckon it was about equivalent to half a standard bottle of dressing, no exaggeration. And the pita bread I'd been told came with it turned out to be a massive round white bread roll. Sure, fine, whatever. Nothing could harm me, I'd faced down the tomatoes.

You guys, the tomatoes.

First off, they were green. Not, like, red with green tinges, but pretty well fully green (while still having enough of an anaemic pink blush to indicate that the restaurant wasn't just having a Fannie Flagg moment). Weirdly, though, they weren't as hard as green tomatoes tend to be; in fact, they were weirdly and unpleasantly squishy. And as if that weren't off-putting enough, the tomatoes had a coconutty taste that was, while not entirely unpleasant, certainly inappropriate given the context.

Coconut-flavoured juvenile tomatoes. Oy vey.

Look, I know it's the middle of winter. I know it was a moderately dodgy neighbourhood sub shop in a moderately dodgy neighbourhood. I know I should adjust my expectations accordingly: I wouldn't expect a dream-come-true salad from the equivalent-level chicken shop in, say, Rockdale in July. And I did have an awesome salad at Alchemist with Liz the other night: the tomatoes were still a bit hard and clearly out of season (just use grape tomatoes people, damn!), but the greens were lovely, fresh and tasty, and there was just enough dressing to emphasise the flavours without covering them. So it can be done. I've eaten the proof, and it was delicious. It's just... it's a rotten, cold, rainy day on the back of a number of rotten, cold, rainy days, and all I wanted was some vegetables. I've never cried over a salad before.

On a lighter night, this was on the homepage of boston.com the other night. I invite you to look closely at the menu bar on the left, where they have posted what they apparently consider to be the two most important maps of my fair city.

XOXO

Link du jour: OH MY GOD, YOU GUYS. I promise I will tell you about this in every possible detail. It might almost make up for the salad.

My destiny calls.

I wanted to avoid turning this into a food blog: there are already so many of those, and eating habits can be an unreliable source of material. No one wants to read about your having eaten leftover spaghetti at lunch for the third day running, you know?

On the other hand, I love food. Lurrrrrrve it. And one of the great things about moving to a new place - even when it's an old new place, like I'm in now - is discovering the yumminess on offer. Furthermore, Constable Parker has already demanded more specifics about what I've eaten, and far be it from me to refuse an officer of the law. So....

Yesterday I ate the kind of lunch that makes you happy to be alive.

El Oriental de Cuba is one of those places that has never made it into my high rotation, despite being local and excellent. Hear me now, that is changing: I intend to become a regular.

I've only been in the restaurant once or twice before, but we used to order from there occasionally when I worked at Brookside (lo those many years ago). The ropa vieja is beautiful, and the first time I ever tried yuca it was from there. (I didn't love that but that's not on them, I just don't like yuca much for the same reason I don't especially care for taro: there's something kind of gluey about them that I just can't come at.) But yesterday I had something very specific in mind: I wanted a Cuban sandwich.

When you examine the ingredients, a Cuban sandwich probably doesn't sound particularly special: ham, pork, Swiss cheese, mustard, and dill pickles on crusty bread, grilled in a sandwich press. But this is a classic example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts: the flavours meld to become something spectacular; the pickles and the crusty bread give texture to counterbalance the meatiness. It all just works.

The Cuban bread is a big part of the awesomeness. It's crusty like a pane di casa, but with a soft inside that feels to me more like damper. It's beautiful. I got to eat a lot of it yesterday, as I had an appetizer* of chicken soup that came with a basket of grilled, buttered Cuban bread for dipping. It almost eclipsed the soup, and that's saying something: this was proper chicken soup, with big knuckles of chicken meat (on the bone, natch), huge chunks of potato and carrot, and bright yellow egg noodles. This soup could cure most things that ailed you, including a broken heart and leprosy. Of course, because I haven't yet acclimated to American food sizes, I figured that a small soup and a sandwich would be an entirely reasonable lunch. I began to rethink this when I saw the 'small' vat of soup and the half-loaf of bread that accompanied it. But let it never be said of me that I am easily daunted.

I had almost finished the soup when my sandwich arrived. It can be argued (and is, at length - check Chowhound) that El Oriental's version is less traditional, as it also includes lettuce, tomato, onion and mayonnaise, which are common additions in South Florida but were not part of the sandwich as it was originally made in Cuba. I skipped the tomato myself, but left the lettuce and onion because I think they add a nice crunch. So awesome, all of it. So awesome. I kept giggling to myself with how delicious it was, especially when I chased a bite of the sandwich with a piece of the Cuban bread left from my soup. It just made everything better.

I left the restaurant about an hour after I'd first walked in, feeling just on the fungry! side of the fungry!/hull line and grinning from ear to ear. I'll be back but quick.

XOXO

* FYI, in an attempt to adjust to the local dialect I'll be using the American terms 'appetizer' for entrée and 'entrée' for main course. I know that 'entrée' for main course makes absolutely no bloody sense; the link du jour is a stab at the etymology that seems reasonable, even if I still disagree with the result.