Vegetables for lunch

I started watching food television heavily around the early 2000s. I'll forgo the old food curmudgeon rants, and just state that I enjoyed the Food Network more when it was more instructional. Bobby, Giada, the Barefoot Contessa, Mario, the whole gang. Emeril had the whole talk show entertainer vibe, but essentially he was teaching you how to cook something. 

As I got better at cooking (or at least as I thought I was getting better at cooking), I started to look down on using recipes from my former food heroes. I hopped on the anti-Rachael bandwagon. 

I have really softened up since those days. Perhaps it's just that I've reached a level of confidence that I don't feel the need to put down those shows to prove my cred or whatever. 

Perhaps it's sort of like bike snobbery--in the end, isn't riding a bike a good thing, no matter who is riding or what they are riding? If someone is cooking a hamburger impregnated with bits of hot dog (a real Rachael creation), at a basic level, at least they were inspired to try to cook for themselves, right? 

Where my food television sweet spot has revealed itself is with two very different people--Jacques Pepin and Guy Fieri. 

Guy gets savaged in every corner. But "Triple D" is absolutely mesmerizing television. Quibble with whatever you want, but the man has an unarguable knack for television. He is good at what he does. And the food at these places sort of speaks for itself. Sure it can lean toward the ludicrously heavy turducken-level end of the scale, but at a lot of places all I see is largely scratch-cooked meals made with care and respect for ingredients. 

But Jacques is my one true food television personality. I just love to watch him work. The way his hands move, the gentle but fussless way he handles ingredients. His fondness for simple combinations that work well because they are rooted in French ideals that have been tested over hundreds of years. He cooks how people should eat. 

For example, take the above plate of endive and olives. The video of how to make it is only two unedited minutes long. Water, salt, pepper, endive, olives, garlic, chives (I didn't have any so I used shallots), vinegar, soy sauce. Place it all I a pan, cover, and 10 minutes later you have a wonderful lite lunch, perfectly healthy and satisfying. 

There's a demystifying quality to Mr. Pepin' dishes that I like. Some chefs I think get carried away with ingredient lists and overly complicated recipes. It's almost like Jacques realizes people have to buy all those expensive spices, or more importantly, he realizes that people have to load dishwashers! At any rate, everything the guy makes looks delicious and I have proven it several times by trying his recipes. 

Down hills

One of the best things about biking that is also one of the most obvious is that included in all the hills we tackle is the built-in reward of going down the other side. 

The downhill of McKeon Road is one I always look forward to. Supposedly a plan is afoot to install sidewalks as part of a master-plan style reimagining of the area, which I hope doesn't narrow the road any. I think that's why I like it so much: it's big, fat shoulders. Call them breakdown lanes, call them shoulders. They are perfect for bike travel. In the summer you have to duck your head a bit to avoid a few low-hanging branches, but it's smooth and fast and long, every time. 

Out of the frying pan

Oy vey.

It's funny sometimes, the responses you give in the course of conversation. When I talk to myself (which is all the time), deep in thought, up in the woods, I always sound so articulate; every word is chosen carefully, every sentence declarative and deliberate. In my own mind, I'm up on the stage giving a TED talk on why I like salmon so much.

But when it comes time to drop that knowledge in polite conversation, there is, shall we say, some lost energy there. I don't think I'm unique in that sense; it's just funny.

I was thinking, for example, about talking with people about observations made now that I have been back on a bike for a few years now. Typically the person I'm talking with will ask where I ride, since I live in a busy part of the city. If I go left, I go into Auburn, which is a little more low-key. If I go right, I head downtown into the city. More lights, traffic, etc. But I usually caution them that it's not so bad; I rarely feel like I'm going to get killed while I'm in the city. Remarkably enough, on balance, I find other motorists to be quite patient most of the time.

At some point, though, my subconscious takes over and I usually blurt something out about all the trash. And that's not exclusive to the city. In my 2 years (in May) back on a bike, I can say that until you ride in the gutter (or near it), you don't realize just how much trash is in and around our streets. It's disgusting. As someone who was raised by parents who looked at littering as on par with swearing, hitting your sister, or quite possibly murder in the pantheon of awful things you could do in life, I detest littering, and litterers. Especially this day and age, when there are publicly available trash bins basically outside every convenience store, shopping center, gas station, fast food restaurant, and parking lot. It drives me nuts how much people litter, which is why I felt compelled to stop and photograph this freaking frying pan on the side of the road in Auburn the other day.

It's not that it was in a bad spot, or that I could have gotten a flat. It's just that someone saw a small wooded area, had a frying pan, said to themselves, "jeez, there's a huge commercial strip of businesses with myriad trash bins right up the street. But I guess I'll just toss this frying pan out right here."

Pick up after yourselves, people. Because I said so.

Willing spring into existence

After last winter, I declared my lower temperature limit for bearable biking was 20 degrees. But it has been such a long, cold winter that this week I crumpled that up and tossed it. The screenshot below was from this afternoon; this morning it was about 14 degrees when I put my winter gear on and hit the road.

Translation: cold

It wasn't so bad, and it was such a short ride that I was back inside by the time things got too numb. But the sun was out, and the benefits by far outweigh the challenges of riding in the cold. It's not wind-in-the-hair, soaking-in-the-rays-of-the-sun satisfying. It's more of a "Nice, I grounded it out and I feel 1000 times better, because I rode my bike." 

I got out four times this week; that's by no means "laying down base miles" like the guy at the bike shop told me last year, but even after just a few consecutive rides I feel like my body is getting back in the swing of things. I adjusted my saddle height up just a bit because I had been feeling a little cramped (my Pug, I think, is a tad on the small size for me). 

I am impressed at how my off-season maintenance paid off. Well, I should say off-season repairs. The wheels are rolling sweet after bearing replacement in the fall (prompted by that broken axle on Vernon Hill!), and cleaning the freewheel and the complete teardown/rebuild of the rear derailleur seems to have worked wonders on the drivetrain, which feels smooth and is almost completely silent. 

I look forward to the day (hopefully late spring/early summer) when I roll out of the bike shop on a shiny new road bike, but today I felt really connected and comfortable on the Pug. Anything I've ever read about Peugeots makes some mention of how well they go down the road; count me among the masses. It feels solid and it feels like it is always covering a lot of ground. It might not be fast, but it feels swift. I think I will realize and be able to take advantage of the benefits a road bike will offer me: light weight, modern construction and components, the low rolling resistance of skinny tires. 

The Peugeot will stay with me, that is assured. When I first made up my mind in that regard it was, I think, due to nostalgia and the emotional connection of the 80s relic getting me back on a bike. But the more (and more and more) I ride it, the more I think it stands on its own. It stands out as a hidden gem, a relic of the dawn of mountain biking, as imagined by a bunch of French guys who really, really knew their stuff when it came to building road bikes. It's a really nice bike, and I will continue to ride it. 

Back on the road

Greek salad pizza

But first, some food.

Greek salads have been a recent obsession. Over the past few years, as I have gone a different way with my eating habits, it has been interesting to see what has filled the gap left when I drifted away from other foods.

For example, I always enjoyed pasta occasionally. Now I eat it at least 3 or 4 times a week. I basically gave up candy, but I have zeroed in on high-cacao chocolate as one of my few indulgences.

Then we have Greek salads. When I first lost a lot of noticeable weight, questions always came about my secret forumla--what was the hidden trick that was melting off all this fat? I would rattle off all the foods I stopped eating, and all the foods I started eating. Sometimes I felt this weird need to state how much I didn't eat salads. I would say similar things about tofu.

Two years later, I eat Greek salads like they're going out of style, and I love myself some tofu, though not as regularly

Truth is, I wasn't the hugest feta fan in the past. But tastes change, and I now find the sort of tangy clumpiness of feta a textural and flavorful treat. I love tomatoes, olives, onions, peppers, and lettuce, so it turned out to be a sort of natural fit. I even started making my own Greek dressing--a little Dijon mustard, some sugar, salt, pepper, red wine vinegar, oil, oregano, and lemon (there are many variations).

Today for lunch I had a Greek salad pizza. I used the dressing as both the sauce and as a finishing drizzle. I used storebought pizza dough (so sue me), and added the lettuce at the end to preserve the crunch. I've never baked lettuce, but I would imagine it turns into a wet mess.

The best thing is the little bit of caramelization of the feta. Just takes a little bit of the edge off. Good stuff.

It's not June at sunset, but it will do

This weekend also marked the end of a dark month in the life of this bike rider. According to Strava (don't worry, I just have the basic free membership and I only risked my life once to get a medal on the Vernon Hill descent), before yesterday my last ride was Feb. 2. The temperature and road conditions finally agreed with my schedule and I headed out.

It's funny--I think the slightly warming temperatures creates a sort of neat uniformity in the snowbanks. They sort of peel back at this point. Dirty, compacted reminders of a brutally cold and snowy month. But the Earth is tilting in our favor these days, and the sun is getting higher in the sky. A predicted 3 to 6 inches tonight into tomorrow has faded into a dusting. Proof, I am convincing myself, that winter is losing its bite.

 I rode just 3.5 miles yesterday and today, but it felt great. That new shifter is working great, and the Pug feels strong and smooth. It's amazing how much "shape" you lose when you take just a month off from being on the bike. I look forward to building that endurance back up. I chose a nice flat route (as flat as possible, at least), and didn't push it. And it is still pretty cold. But it was just what I needed to elevate my mood.