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August 22, 2009
Just What the World Needs: Another Way to Stuff a Squash
One of my co-workers brought in squash again from his garden, so I did a variation on a well-worn theme:
Squash, cut in half lengthwise and hollowed out
2 tsps nonfat sour cream
grape tomatoes, cut in half
garlic
2 oz non-fat mozzarella
olive oil
you know what to do. Mix up the sour cream and the squash guts with the tomatoes and garlic. Stuff back in the squash, top with mozzarella. Microwave till cheese melts (no need to pre-cook squash the way you do with eggplant.) Top with olive oil and serve.
Maybe tomorrow I'll come up with a more creative dish... or a new vegetable to stuff...
Posted by april at 6:07 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 20, 2009
It's Too Hot To Cook!
In this weather I can barely stand to look at the stove, much less cook on it.
Here's a nice cold recipe for a super hot day.
Icy Mango Bean Salad
1 cup frozen mango chunks, thawed but still very cold
1 cup black beans, canned is fine
tiny bit of fresh jalepeno, diced
1 green pepper, diced
large tomato, diced, or two small
dash cider vinegar
your favorite hot sauce (mine is Texas Pete!)
fresh cilantro, unless you're one of those people who doesn't like cilantro
Mix, allow to marinate in the fridge over night or all day, serve very cold!
Kinda high calorie due to mango and black beans, but in this weather I don't really feel like eating a lot of volume anyhow, so I can get away with somewhat more calorie dense foods.
Hope all are surviving the heat! Or living somewhere not quite so hot. Like Alaska.
Posted by april at 5:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 12, 2009
Cauliflower, Shrimp and Zucchini Salad
It is way too hot here to cook on the stove, eat hot food, or turn on the oven. Here's how hot it is: MR actually agreed to turn on the air conditioner. He opposes AC for environmental reasons, and will suffer almost endlessly in the heat before he'll resort to it. But it finally (in the nineties) got too bad for him.
Dialogue between me and Susie:
Me: He won't let me turn on the air conditioner. Environment thing.
Susie: (rolls eyes)
Me: He's quirky, but he's so good to me!
Susie: He's trying to cook you!
This is a great cold salad, almost naturally zoned, for a hot summer day. It's how I used up the leftover shrimp from the weekend.
Shrimp
Cauliflower
Zucchini
Avocado
dry white wine
lemon and lime juice
Boil the shrimp in their shells, then, shell on, marinate in dry white wine and lime juice overnight. Peel, and reserve the shells for someone who likes to eat shrimp shells. Reserve the marinating liquid.
In the same night, chop the zucchini and cauliflower and microwave in a covered dish with a dash of lemon juice stirred in for about a minute. Microwaves vary, but you want the veggies only slightly cooked, so that they're not raw but still have crunch. You can also leave them raw if you want. Marinate overnight in lemon and lime juice, chilling in the fridge.
Before serving, drain the liquid from the veggies, then add the shrimp and the wine/lime juice/shrimp juices liquid to the veggies. Stir. Add chopped avocado. Serve cold.
Looks like it's going to stay hot here for quite some time, so more cold salad recipes to come!
Posted by april at 4:59 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
August 11, 2009
Cheesy Stuffed Tomatoes
This is one of the world's easiest stuffed veggie recipes, and it's great for this time of year when the basil is good. Especially if you have basil in your garden, give this a try!
Large tomatoes, probably the beefsteak variety or any sort of big round kind, preferably
from Jersey if you live around here
fresh basil
garlic powder
1 oz nonfat cheese per tomato, I used a mixture of mozzarella and cheddar
olive oil
Hollow out the tomatoes. This is not as difficult as it might appear: just chop off the top and scoop out the insides with a spoon. Cut up the tomato guts and mix in a bowl with basil and cheese. Replace the tomato tops and steam in the microwave until the cheese is melty. You could also put cheese on top, but I think that spoils the surprise of opening the tomato to find cheese there. After removing from heat, drizzle a half teaspoon of olive oil into the tomato and then replace the tomato top.
I served this last night for dinner along with a kale salad with Walden Farms Caesar dressing, a cucumber salad of cucumbers marinated in lemon juice and chipoltle Tabasco, and an apricot parfait of nonfat ricotta, one fresh apricot, and cinnamon, with flax oil.
It was MR's first dinner back after his conference and we had a lot to talk about. Both of us are feeling extremely energized by recent developments in our work, and we're feeling particularly united in our life mission these days. Some things have started to fall into place in my mind about how I see my work, and how it ties in with the rest of what I do in life. But more about that later.
Meanwhile, go see Julie and Julia. It's downright creepy for me because it's about a girl blogging about food. I had read the book... a gift from my dear friend L from the UK. But seeing the movie was even more surreal. Merryl Streep is magnificent as Julia Child, and the guy who played Paul Child was downright sexy as a foreign service officer who gets called before McCarthy and questioned. Julie, the food blogger, is so extremely 30, complete with existential angst and meltdowns on her husband, that I spent the entire movie thanking the passage of chronological age that I am not 30 anymore. 30, I think, is one of the most awful ages for women. 35, however, at least so far, rocks. I'm kinda excited to see 40...
Posted by april at 3:41 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
August 10, 2009
Frequently Asked Questions
Hello new readers... glad you liked the Food Network piece, if you did.
Here's a link to a page you might find helpful where I answer some FAQs.
Posted by april at 4:21 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 9, 2009
Media, Shrimp
Oh dear, the Food Network special just showed again. "Die in a fire, hippie," is the new clever comment. In all my years of labor organizing, I never got death threats.
That and the newest round of, "I have an eating disorder so you must to!" This is why I stopped doing media. It's just so ridiculously stupid. Did
But thanks to all for the nice comments, and the even civil ones! The comments don't go to available until I get to my computer and manually publish them, so if there's a delay, don't fret.
I made dinner for a friend last night and made my favorite easy shrimp dish yet. Steamed a pound of raw shrimp, then drained. Then I marinated them in dry white wine and lime juice, allowed to chill in the fridge for the afternoon. That's all. In their shells. It was delicious. Almost a cerviche, but without the fear of someone screwing it up and giving everyone food poisoning.
The other dish, not a brilliant choice for a ninety degree day, was red peppers stuffed with tomato, basil and goat cheese, cooked in the oven for about half an hour at 350 in a pool of white wine.
More soon...
Posted by april at 10:12 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 6, 2009
Magnificent
So I'm 35 now, and so far so good. Great yoga class, not so great standing water in the basement. That's what it's like to be a grown-up: you're in charge of your own health (yoga) and you have to figure out what to do with the basement (home ownership.)
35 may not be that big a milestone to everyone, but to me it's a watershed. I used to imagine what it would be like to be 35. When I took my current job as Director of Organizing at Parsnip (the code name for my union so I don't come up when you google it!) I had all sorts of visions of what it would be like by the time I was 35. I was 28 then, and dealing with the strange phenomenon of being under thirty and having absolutely everything I had ever wanted. I was an organizer, had just won the biggest private sector organizing campaign that year (1200 RNs at Fletcher Allen, Burlington, Vermont) and landed a job in my favorite city on earth, Philadelphia, directing an organizing program that was supposed to organize the entire city and then state.
It's seven years later, and while we've had our ups and downs, I am happier in my work than ever. I finally have some experienced staff... the kind you can leave for a week and not freak out... and I'm looking at a very bright future. But things look very different now than they used to. When I was 28 I figured that the city was just waiting for me to show up, and then they'd all be ready to organize. I used to spend twelve hours a day calling through semi-random lists of nurses from Philly hospitals, recruiting for some Suzanne Gordon event, but really trolling for organizing leads. It's there, I just have to find it, I thought. I know now that it's there, but when it's ready it will find us, as all of the ones we've won in the last seven years did.
I grew up in the South, and it was a brutal South in those days, the Reagan years, when single mothers were demonized just as much as the Evil Empire. I guess I come by my communism honestly. My parents split when I was two, so I have no memory of the perfect two parent family. I've always been extremely close with both: my mom is more like my sister than anything, and my dad never missed a child support payment (in fact he was never a day late) and used to drive more than six hours just to have lunch with me but my early years taught me that the white picket fence two parent vision of the world wasn't going to work out.
My mother turns 65 this year, and in so many ways she is the heroine of my story. She gave up so much to make sure that I had everything I needed, and she instilled in me a sense of freedom, that I deserved anything I had the guts to go after. When I was eight and we left my first step-father, we moved into an apartment complex in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, that was integrated by economic necessity. My Hello Kitty pencil case carrying school friends were not allowed to come play at my house cause their racist parents thought it was too dangerous. But it wasn't dangerous at all... I had some of the best moments of my childhood hanging out with friends in that apartment complex. Heritage Hills it was called. Sure, there were young girl catfights, and I learned to make up for in wit and quick exits what I lacked in physical strength. But what I learned in the mid-eighties on the ground floor of class struggle was that the deck was stacked against us, and that we would only win by engaging in full scale war.
I remember one year when my mother and I stopped over in Savannah on our way to Jacksonville, Florida, where her family lived. We were at a restaurant waiting for our food when she launched into a discussion of how the middle class was under attack, and soon the bottom would drop out... people would either jump to the upper class or be doomed to wage slavery at the bottom end of the class ladder. She wanted to make sure I had a choice, when that moment came.
She also foresaw the economic downturn in which we currently find ourselves. She said that the movie "Titanic" was a vision of the disaster. She was right.
So I applied to Yale, and I got in. The day my letter came I had been checking the mailbox everyday for a week, and when I read it I ran out in the street screaming. "I'm going to Yale!" I yelled as loud as I could in that driveway in Raleigh, North Carolina.
When I got there I asked my RA (that's residential advisor, I remember after all these years) what a good job to get would be. Financial aid assumed that you would work some. He said to get a job in the dining hall, they paid the most.
I had no idea it was a union job. To be honest I had no idea what a union job was. All I knew was that while other student jobs were paying around $5/hour, I was making $7.50 to start, in 1992.
The staff in the dining hall, the grown-ups, were incredibly friendly to me. The cooks, line servers, everyone, never failed to speak to me when I showed up for my shift. The prep ladies in the basement particularly took me under their wings. I still think of them sometimes when I'm finely chopping vegetables.... :)
It was my senior year when we went on strike. Yale wanted to get rid of the unions and subcontract out all our jobs, the last good jobs in New Haven, to Aramark or Marriott. I got involved with the student movement (Student Labor Action Coalition: SLAC, yeah, we realized it was stupid at the time) and it wasn't long before we took over the president's office in what remains, to date, the best planned action I've ever taken part in. I was the chief spokesperson for those sitting in, and Francis was the chief spokesperson for those outside. We had a total of 31 people arrested, 9 of us inside the office, and the rest sitting on the steps of the president's office blocking the path for the police to come in. I remember Francis standing at the window holding a sign that said, "There are 23 people sitting on the steps."
Last night I ended up in a long conversation with two close friends, oddly close considering how brief our acquaintance has really been, and we talked about the most influential people in our lives. Francis hit my top five list first.
Francis was a long haired hippy freak, and Francis was one of the best organizers I've ever known. I hated him the first time we met.
But to make a long story short, my senior year I ended up at a pro-union rally asking Francis what I could do to help, and he sent me off to make some photocopies. A few months later we were standing at the gate of Old Campus arguing about strategy and Francis was teaching me lessons that I use every day now. He had learned them two days before from Tripp, the GESO organizer who was also my philosophy TA, but it didn't matter, I was learning.
I fell in love with Francis in that way you can fall in love with someone you barely know... it was years before we really knew each other, and even now we know each other the way that organizers know each other whether they've met or not. We are Luke and Leia: separated at birth but still twins.
He had a girlfriend. I pined away in secret.
I left for the Organizing Institute (after a hideous episode of dropping a couch on my foot and ending up at Yale New Haven Hospital, but anyway) and resolved that I would become the best organizer in the country, and that once I had won the biggest campaign in the country, Francis would decide I was the woman for him.
This in fact happened, in 2002. I won Fletcher Allen, he decided he wanted me, we had a very short-lived fling, we decided we were better off as friends.
It was Francis who convinced me to be an organizer. Once I was an organizer, I knew I would fight till I was dead to keep organizing. And I still do... in spite of all the horror, in spite of what's happened to the labor stagnant (made a pact with some buddies to cease referring to it as the "labor movement") I still believe in organizing, in talking to workers, in handwritten wall charts and accountability and in the magic it is we do every time we move a worker from complicitous cog in the machine to active force against the capitalist political economy. Or even if we make her wonder if maybe the messages she's gotten all her life are lies.
So in so many ways we've won so many times, and I'm 35 now and I'm happier than ever. The highs are higher but the lows are more easily managed, and even when it's hard it's wonderful. There's more to say but time is short and there are veggies to chop.
These days I am happy to be alive, happy to be healthy, happy to have a body that can take Bikram and tai chi and vinyasa and Pilates and still walk around a little. Grateful to the universe for all of the blessings it has bestowed on me.
And I've gotta chop some squash...
Posted by april at 1:30 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
August 5, 2009
Home Cooking
MR has to go to a conference in California for his work soon, and I've been preparing by a) lining up friends to stay with me because I'm scared to stay alone (I know, I was a single woman living alone for ten years and was just fine, but now that I'm used to having someone in the house I can't stand to be by myself at night) and b) making him all his favorites so that he's all loaded up on home cooking before he has to go on the road. He'll only be gone for four nights, but it's so rare that he travels these days that it seems like a big deal to me.
Last night's dinner was a sorta classic April homecooked meal, but he especially liked it. Don't know if it was just a good combination or if the veggies were unusually fresh or what, but it was a hit.
Portabella Pizzas with Yellow Zucchini:
very fresh locally grown yellow zucchinis, sliced thinly
locally grown fresh tomatoes, also sliced thinly
3 portabella caps, precooked in microwave for 1 minute
2 oz nonfat mozzarella
1 teaspoon olive oil
capers
garlic powder
dried basil and oregano
Dust the mushrooms with garlic powder. Top with squash slices and then tomato slices, and fit about a half teaspoon of capers per 'shroom into each between the veggies. Sprinkle the remaining spices liberally. Cover with mozza and microwave till cheese melts. Then top with olive oil and serve.
Cilantro Salad with Tomato, Asparagus and Squash:
the rest of the squash, diced
the rest of the tomato, chopped
a bunch of asparagus
lime juice
fresh cilantro
Steam the hard parts at the bottom of the asparagi in lime juice for one minute. Allow to cool. Then add the other veggies, more lime, garlic powder and cilantro. Serve chilled.
Yellow Plum Yogurt Parfait
1 locally grown yellow plum
1/4 cup yogurt, nonfat plain
Walden Farms chocolate sauce
You can figure out this one... chop the fruit and put it on the yogurt. Good with 1 teaspoon of hazelnut oil and five grams of hazelnuts.
We always add oil to our food before serving, so you can just assume either olive, flax or hazelnut oil added to the dishes I write about.
I'm meeting some friends for dinner tonight so I put up a dinner for MR, something very simple:
135 grams of portabella stems (leftover from the pizzas of course)
1 bag of "Italian blend" frozen veggies
100 g Quorn tenders
Worschtershire sauce
garlic powder
Pre-cook the mushrooms in water for a minute or two, then add the rest to the pot. Stir. This is not complicated.
and the last yellow plum for dessert!
Posted by april at 3:25 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 4, 2009
Stuff Eggplant This Way!
I put up a dinner for MR before heading out to tai chi class last night (which was awesome, btw, more about that soon.) This one was a huge crowd pleaser:
Tomato Stuffed Eggplant
1 eggplant, sliced lengthwise and pre-cooked in the microwave (in a dish with a lid, or a plate with a bowl inverted over it to seal in the moisture) for three minutes, then gutted
1 large ripe tomato, chopped
Garlic, basil, oregano
Capers
Olive oil
2 oz nonfat mozzarella
Mix all the eggplants up with the spices and the tomato. Put a few capers in the bottom of the eggplant shells. Place the mixed up mixture into the eggplant shells, top with mozza. Microwave till cheese melts and top with olive oil.
You could also do this with a teaspoon of nonfat ricotta mixed in.
I served with a side dish of locally grown yellow squash in lime juice with fresh cilantro, and a little plum parfait of fresh locally grown yellow plums in nonfat plain yogurt, which MR likes to cover with Walden Farms chocolate sauce.
Okay, off to Bikram! More on that too... I appear to be addicted to Bikram now. I realized last night that I talk about Bikram yoga and tai chi the way I used to talk about a new boy I had a crush on. "He's just so amazing!!!" It's a bad sign when even my mother looks bored! At least MR will let me talk at endless length about how much I love to sweat...
Posted by april at 4:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 2, 2009
Product Endoresements
Here are a few new things I've tried lately that I really like:
Canada Dry Diet Green Tea Ginger Ale: I love diet ginger ale, drank diet cranberry for years, and was waiting eagerly for them to come out with a diet version of their green tea ginger ale. They finally did!
Caffeine Free Diet Coke: This isn't really a new product, but having recently become an almost-no-caffeine person (I just have one cup of Coke Zero first thing in the morning) I have developed a new appreciation for Caf free.
Activa Light yogurt shakes, especially vanilla: 160 calories, in a convenient package, you can drink it in the car, perfect for breakfast on the road or on the go. They come with me to Scranton and on all my travels. For breakfast I have one with a shot of flax oil (unfortunately the flax doesn't mix in well so I just shoot it.) For snack I have one with almonds.
Yogatoes Yoga Towel: No, it's not just a scam to get you to buy an expensive towel. Those little grippy things do work!
Steamtown Hot Yoga in Scranton: if you're anywhere in Northeast PA, you've got to stop in for a class. Everything else you do for the rest of your life will seem easy.
Posted by april at 8:14 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 1, 2009
An Astonishing Squash
One of my friends gave me a gargantuan squash from his garden. We measured it: exactly a foot.
I stuffed it with nonfat ricotta mixed with garlic, curry, and shiitake mushrooms, topped with nonfat mozzarella, and microwaved till cheese melted, then served topped with a teaspoon of olive oil per side of squash.
Tonight's dinner is:
Zucchini Stuffed Mushrooms:
finely chopped zucchini marinated in Ortega taco sauce and horseradish, stuffed into mushrooms. Then you top the mushrooms with nonfat cheddar and dot the tops with chipotle Tabasco. Serve topped with olive oil.
Cauliflower "coleslaw"
Cold cauliflower served marinated in Walden Farms cloeslaw dressing and a dash of cider vinegar, pinch of garlic, topped with 1 tsp flax oil
And a dessert of yellow plums in yogurt with Walden Farms chocolate sauce!
Posted by april at 3:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack