Category: Uncategorized

Back Home, No Pictures

1 Comment

I just made it home a few minutes ago, and sadly I have no pictures.  I don’t usually like to post without pictures but I left the lovely fella my fancy camera so he could play with it and take pictures of his family, but didn’t think that I might want pictures.  Honestly, I didn’t take many pictures because I didn’t want to be the stranger taking pictures.  There were 9 people at Thanksgiving dinner (so a rather small group compared to the latin takeovers that occur at any of my family get togethers).  Everything was fantastic and meeting the lovely fella’s extended family was great.

As for my first vegetarian Thanksgiving… It was fine.  I didn’t miss the turkey at all.  The only sad thing was the lack of gravy but other than that everything was meatless (I ignored chicken broth).  The lovely fella’s mom made a delicious eggplant parmesan, which while she didn’t say was because of my vegetarianness… I have a hunch it was but everyone enjoyed it.

I didn’t miss the turkey but I missed my family 😦

Now I’m back home, hopefully I’ll have picture updates soon.

I hope you all had a fantastic thanksgiving!  Goodnight!

Headed Out

1 Comment

I’m headed to the lovely fellas house in a few minutes.

I got a lovely fella’s family a bottle of wine as a gift

I hope they enjoy it! (I know I did)

I’ll try to keep up with posts in the next few days but no guarantees!

I hope you all have safe travels and a Happy Thanksgiving!

Stress Eating

4 Comments

Yesterday, I came home from class, exhausted.  I had been pretty irritable all day and was seriously considering taking a nap but I was hungry so I decided to have an early dinner.  All was well.  I had some broccoli with some faux-“chicken” (aka morningstar chicken patyy) Parmesan.  I started working on my stats project then decided to give in to my day long craving: baked good.

I used this recipe (minus the frosting + peanut butter chips) and made some pretty tasty brownies.

I intended to have a piece then take the rest to school the next day.  However, by the next day, all that was left was this:

Between me and my roommate (aka two girls) we managed to eat all by what is left above.

I’m a stress eater.  I hate it, and I’m trying to deal with it.  I’m posting this because it may seem like I’m a healthy eater and I am 80% of the time.  But 20% of the time I freak out and overeat.

I read a lot of health/fitness/food blogs, most of the time when I read them I find myself thinking “These women are perfect, I wish I could have that amount of self control.”  It seems like they rarely overeat (and when they do, it’s a bowl of ice cream or 4 cookies and most of the time it doesn’t matter because they ran 5690 miles today anyway).  I’m not trying to criticize other food bloggers, but I want to make it clear that I’m not perfect.

As a blogger or a reader, do you ever feel pressure to be perfect from reading blogs?

I’ll end this sort of sad post with a more positive anecdote:

A friend walked up to me and my roommate, he looks at her and says “Thanks for getting me sick!”  She sort of laughs and says: “Karla didn’t get sick and she lives with me!” then she looks at me and says “it’s probably because of all the vegetables you eat and the fact that you exercise and sleep, so basically your overall healthy lifestyle”

I may not be perfect, I may eat half a pan of brownies in one night but overall I’m healthy.

Have a great day!

What Causes Food Insecurity: Part I

3 Comments

In developing nations, I believe a large problem regarding food security is the economic issues associated with food security.  I plan on having another post about international agriculture, trade and the World Trade Organization (WTO), but for now I’ll try to explain some things that affect the price of food.

Some of these are quite contentious and people can argue the effects of one or the other on actual food prices and access to food.  That being said, I will try to provide an unbiased look at food issues.

I decided to break this topic into multiple posts, as there’s kind of a lot to say and I really don’t want to bore you all (not that any of this is boring!!) or oversimplify it to the point of making it inaccurate.

So I’ll start with one cause

Potential Cause #1:  Low Food Stocks

As the supply of a certain good decreases, the price increases if demand does not change.  Today I will only cover one of the things that influences the supply of food in the world.

Natural Disasters: Natural disasters and weather patterns can negatively or positively affect the harvest in any given year.  However, this may not be a particularly strong argument as, generally speaking, countries with adverse weather patterns generally are aware of these possibilities and therefore can often mitigate negative outcomes.

Bad harvests in certain areas are often offset by good harvests in other areas, as was the case in 2007.  Bad harvests the EU and the Ukraine and Australia were offset by good harvests in Argentina, Kazakhstan, Russia and the US.  While weather issues can contribute to decreases in food production and subsequent increase in prices, the impact should not warrant a global food crisis.
(Source: Jenifer Piesse and Colin Thitle, “Three Bubbles and a Panic: An Explanatory Review of Recent Food Commodity Price Events.” Food Policy 34)

Next time… Government Policies that affect food prices…

What are your thoughts?

Being a “Picky” Eater

8 Comments

I’m not sure I’ve made this completely clear, but I’m a vegetarian.  Right now, I won’t get into the reasons why I am a vegetarian, but I point it out because I came across an interesting opinion article in the NY Times today called “Complaint Box: Picky Eaters.”

In essence, the article talks about the million dietary demands (see cartoon above) that people place on themselves and the difficulty in tailoring a dinner party to meet all these needs.  It’s sort of a funny article and relevant to me, especially with Thanksgiving coming up.

I’m going to the lovely fella’s family’s house for Thanksgiving because it’s too expensive to get to California but the Philadelphia area is within driving distance. They are not vegetarians, nor do they plan on being.  That’s fine.  I don’t expect everyone in the world to make the same lifestyle choices I do.

That being said, I have a few concerns:

1. I don’t want to eat Turkey (or really any other meat).  I was never that big a fan of it anyway, but the idea of it right now sort of makes me sad.  I also think it might be rude of me to offer to make something because I would hate to ruin their established traditions (aka what if they have a sweet potato casserole that they LOVE and look forward to each year?)

2.  I don’t want them to feel like they have to prepare a special meal specifically for me.  The author of the article mentions the difficulty in preparing something that everyone can enjoy, but I don’t think that should be her concern.  She ends the article:

I have had enough with people who want to have it their way, and I am done catering to the quirks of food-obsessed numskulls. If you eat in my home, I will grudgingly respect medically diagnosed allergies, since it puts a pall on conversation when a guest goes into anaphylactic shock at the dinner table. But beyond that, I expect you to eat what you can, ignore the rest and not make trouble. On Thursday, 15 people are sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner at my house, and with God as my witness, I promise you this: There will be dark meat.

I can completely appreciate that.  While I don’t consider myself to be a “food-obsessed numskull,” I think everyone is entitle to make choices about what he or she puts in his or her own body.  However, when you are a guest at someone’s house, you shouldn’t inconvenience your host.  I know her language is a bit brash, but I agree you should “eat what you can, ignore the rest and not make trouble.” Do you disagree?

That’s what I’m going to try to do.  Thanksgiving should be about spending time with people you care about (I know this sounds cheesy) not about the food. I’ll try my hardest not to complicate matters and if I have to eat something with meat in it, one day won’t kill me, right?  I can push bits of bacon to the side and deal with chicken broth.

How do you deal with “picky” eaters? What are your plans for Thanksgiving?

Coffee

3 Comments

I love coffee.  I’ve drank it since I was about 4 years old.  I know that sounds ridiculous, right?  Who’s mother lets them drink coffee at such a young age!?!  My parents are from Guatemala, so coffee is pretty common at all ages and at all times.  I was never kid that liked to play with the other kids.  I was a grandma from day 1.  I would rather chat with the ladies and have coffee than go out and play with the kids.

I know there are a lot of mixed feelings about coffee and caffeine.  Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having coffee everyday. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a household where coffee was perfectly natural all the time, but I don’t think it’s harmful.  I’ve taken a biology class (Brain, Mind and Behavior way back when) and understand the effects of caffeine on the brain but from what I recall, nothing too adverse (please correct me if I’m wrong).

On another note, coffee production is a huge part of the economy of many countries.  I found this really cool set of data (aka really cool for me the econ/development nerd) through the Food and Agriculture Organization that shows commodity production by country (you can change it to search by commodity or by country). I had fun playing around with it for a while 🙂

If anyone is interested, I saw a really interesting documentary on coffee production (it concentrates mostly on Ethiopian coffee production and commodity trading in Britain) called Black Gold.   I highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested

I’m almost done with my next food security topic.  Stay tuned!

What are your thoughts on coffee/caffeine?

New Moon + Long Day Ahead

1 Comment

Last night I went to see New Moon.  I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I will say that the first 5 minutes were terrible but then it got infinitely better (with ridiculous lines throughout).

Also… I may or may not have been converted to Team Jacob.

Need I say more?  (Anyone else feel like a dirty old woman admiring a 17 year old???)

Okay so on to other things.  I feel like staying home, drinking tea and listening to Christmas Carols.  Unfortunately, I’m going to the computer lab to try to bust out a draft of my 15-20 page paper due Dec 4th so I can spend more time with the lovely fella when he visits.

I’m going to a-we-can-make-it-through-the-week gathering later. What should I bring?

Do you have any crowd pleasing recipes??  Do you have a go to dish that you bring to events/parties??

Fantastic Day So Far

1 Comment

This morning I woke up at 6am to go to a 6:30am spin class.  However, as I was getting my clothes together, I decided that I could really use some extra sleep and go to the gym later.  So I put my gym clothes down and hopped back into bed for another hour.  That extra hour of sleep really energized me.  I think it was a good decision.

Then I lounged around for a while, read a few blogs (see the new page up top “Blogs I Enjoy”) and got some school work done.  Around 11am, I headed to the gym for a fantastic work out. For some reason, I had a ton of energy today!  Another huge plus was that Project Runaway reruns were on the TV at the gym (it was the episode where they design for drag queens!).  So I did a little more than an hour on the treadmill, nice and easy.  Time flew by and I didn’t feel like I was working too hard.  I intended to do 30-45 minutes, but I was so into the show that I just kept going.  I guess that happens when you don’t have cable at home!

Once I got home, I made lunch, which was delicious!

A bed of spinach, topped with Quinoa (left over from last night) and a Spicy Black Bean Burger then sprinkled with a ton of lemon lime juice.  It was to die for!  The lovely fella has been telling me to try these Spicy Black Bean Burgers for a while now (he’s not vegetarian, but eats them all the time apparently) and I bought some a few weeks ago but didn’t try it til now.  Pretty delicioso!

Plans for the rest of the day:
-Class/Work on Papers
-Dinner with Friends
-New Moon???  (Let’s be realistic this is probably on the top of my agenda right now…)

Hope your day is going as well as mine!

P.S. I’m super excited to see the lovely fella in 4 days!  It’s been over a month! (We’re doing the long distance thing for a bit)

Vegan for a Day Continued…

6 Comments

Today was ridiculously busy so I really didn’t even have time to think of food.  I had class from 9am until 3pm then I stayed in the computer lab and worked on my statistics stuff (I probably ran 67892038666 regressions today! Ahh!)  Luckily my lunch and snacks held me over pretty well and it was all vegan!

Then I came home and raided the fridge for something to have for dinner.  In my desperation, I didn’t get too creative tonight 😦  I had left over Coconut Curry from a few nights ago (didn’t realize then that it was in fact vegan) with some quinoa and broccolli.

As I was waiting for the quinoa to cook (only 15 minutes!  Woo!), I had a little bit of an appetizer: some artichoke hearts

I love artichokes!  Whenever I walk past the artichoke/pickle/olive section of any super market, I instantly start to salivate!  Weird, right?  Does that happen to anyone else?

The quinoa really was the star of my meal this evening.

It really is delicious and nutritious.    The only thing I hate is having to rinse it.  I have an itty bitty strainer so I can only do about 2 tbsp at a time.  It’s a pain in the butt… I guess I could invest in a larger strainer right?…

Dinner was pretty darn delicious. I’m thinking maybe I’ll have a baked apple for dessert 🙂

Overall, I think my one day vegan experience has been good.  However, I think a lot of this was that I had an extremely busy day.  Things could have potentially gone the other way had I been sitting home all day (since I usually get the munchies when I’m home for too long trying to get work done).  I definitely think I’d like to try this again.  I’m not saying I’m ready to become a vegan but it’s definitely something I could consider transitioning in to.

Did anyone else try the Vegan for a Day Challenge?  Or are you vegan?  Your thoughts?

Anyway, I’m off to finish my self evaluation, start a paper, work on stats project and formulate my next post about food security!  If there’s anything you’d like to know about in particular, please let me know!  Have a great night everyone!

Vegan For A Day

Leave a comment

After a little bit of thought, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and do the vegan for a day challenge.  At first I was a bit apprehensive because well, I’m a planner… (not just a city planner) but I like to make sure I’m fully prepared for this.  The thought that I wasn’t prepared for a day full of vegan meals made me uneasy.  However, after some thought, I realized that going at it unprepared could make the challenge more fun.

That being said, Breakfast was a DELICIOUS Green Monster.

My green monster contains: 2 handfuls of spinach, 1/2 a frozen banana, about 5 frozen strawberries, 1 tbsp of almond butter, and some water. Some was enjoyed at home while writing this post, the rest will be enjoyed in class in my travel mug 🙂

For lunch, I’m packing some garbanzo beans and vegetables with Wegman’s Asian Style BBQ Sauce.

I was looking at the ingredients then realized it told me it was vegan right on the side of the container! I love these labels that Wegman’s puts on it’s products.

Then while making lunch there was a slight disaster with my frozen vegetables

Spilled all over the counter!  Yes, my vegan meal will be eaten out of a cottage cheese container.  I’m a ridiculously broke grad student environmentally conscious and recycling plastic containers…

Have a fantastic day!