be still, my heart

Happy Heart Month!

Check out my new heart rate monitor!! 

(Jen, if you're reading this, I looked all over for the green one so as not to copy you in every aspect of my life, but they are no longer making the green one and this model was significantly cheaper than any other model on Amazon.  And it's pink.  Thanks for understanding.)

I was SO excited when my heart rate monitor showed up on my doorstep!  I've had grand plans for this sucker - aerobic base training.

Whaaaat?

Aerobic base training is basically where you train your heart to get efficient at pumping blood and oxygen throughout your body by moving at a snail's pace.  Ok, not really, but it is essential to keep your heart rate relatively low to effectively train your heart.  It is also boring. Very very boring.  BUT the idea here is that aerobic training is the most effective for fat burn AND helps prevent burnout, which I am so incredibly prone to (not fat burn...fat...and burnout).

So...here's to my new heart rate monitor and aerobic base training!

I've used it three times now to run around my neighborhood.  Mind you, I'm not in the best shape of my life and haven't really been running much lately, and spinning doesn't necessarily train you to be more efficient at running, SO these first few trips were interesting.  I honestly don't know if my heart was confused or if my monitor was confused, but something went horribly wrong on my second run - my heart rate dropped to like 63 mid-run....yeah right!...and I noticed some ridiculous lag in the time it took to report that I was, indeed, huffing and puffing.  I have to say, I was quite disappointed in my heart toy; I'm a scientist, I want my tools to be reliable - timely and accurate.  I later realized that my sportsbra was tucked into the chest strap and that may have been a likely the cause of my issues - wardrobe malfunction - it'll get you every time.  We'll see how my next few 'round-the-neighborhood adventures go.

Do you have any heart rate training tips to share?

heart month

I hereby declare May to be heart month.  I made this decision upon the exciting arrival of my new heart rate monitor, and the super heart-healthy meal we made ourselves.  I suppose I could have made it heart week, as both of those events took place last week, BUT there's one important event that I've missed that's incredibly important in declaring the entire month of May to be heart month.

More to come!

wake up call

The dog woke me up this morning at 6am.  SIX!  On Saturday!

I've noticed this pattern recently with the pooch's choice for wake up time.  It seems that on the weekends, when I would otherwise be able to sleep in, my dear sweet pup wants to wake up early.  And play.  And let me tell you, he is relentless.  Ok, I get it, he's an early riser, and that's fine.  I'm a morning person too.  But the weird part is that he likes to sleep in during the week.  So when I have to crawl out of bed on Monday morning to go to work, I wake up to a crappy alarm and have to un-cuddle myself from the dog, who inevitably has his head (or more) resting on some part of me.  It's painful!  Could you resist this face?

(Ok, so maybe this is a bad example since this shot was taken as he was caught destroying my down comforter, but STILL, you get the point)

In never really made sense to me why he had to get up super early on the weekends but not during the week when I could really use that early morning nudge to wake up.

But then I got to thinking - maybe he's right.  Maybe he's been right all along!

I mean...don't you walk in to work on Monday mornig exclaiming that your weekend just wasn't long enough?  Well maybe if you'd gotten your butt out of bed before noon, as my pooch would say, you'd have had more time on the weekends to have fun!  Weekends are free time (for the most part) to do whatever you want!  Why, oh, why would we want to sleep the weekend away just so we can kill ourselves at work the next week?   And why am I in such a rush to get to work and sit at a desk all day long?  So I can get out earlier?  And do what?  It's still a 9-hour work day, and no matter how you slice it, I still don't have enough time for any real adventure at the end of the day.  So why not get up early and get the most out of my weekends? 

I'm pretty sure that's just what my brilliant dog has been trying to tell me this whole time.  Thanks for the wake up call, pup!  Oh, and you want to go for a walk too?  OK...since we have time!

Happy Saturday!  I hope you make the most of it!

really?!?!

Can we please talk about the kind of day I had today?

Yeah, that kind.

I was innocently walking my dog around the neighborhood and felt a snap on my shoulder.  Thinking it was my bra strap, I put my hand on my shoulder to check on it.  Handful of crap, I realized that a bird had pooped on my shoulder.  ON MY SHOULDER!  That bird is so freaking lucky that crap didn't land on my head!

if only...

If only every Monday started like this...

...went something like this...

...and ended like this:

i'll snicker your doodle

Huh? 

So...the boy started this thing where he takes a word or a couple of words that come up in conversation, and he fits them into the phrase, "I'll (blank) your (blank)", to make it sound really funny or inappropriate. For example,

"I'd like a snickerdoodle."
"I'll snicker your doodle."

See?  It's actually quite hilarious.  He uses this at nearly every opportunity, some are funnier than others.  I've picked it up too, but my contributions are always both perfectly timed, and magnitudes funnier than the typical i'll blank your blank.  Snickerdoodle was my masterpiece and I'm quite proud.

Why did this come up, you ask?  Well I'm getting to that, since that was the point of this post anyway, not blanking your blank.

I offered to bake cookies for my work friend for her last day of work (sad!), and she requested snickerdoodles.  I'd never actually heard of anyone requesting a snickerdoodle cookie, I thought people just stumbed upon them and ate them.  "Do you know how to make those?" she asked.  Umm...do I know how to make a cookie?  Do I know how to follow a recipe?  Yes.  Do I have incredible superhuman cookie talent?  Yes.  I think I can handle a snickerdoodle.  And, by the way, I'll snicker YOUR doodle!

My mom made snickerdoodles for us all the time when we were growing up.  I have her recipe but I decided not to use it because it's a Colorado recipe.  Everyone knows that you have to alter a recipe for high altitude when you live in Colorado.  Growing up, I mastered the technique of altering a recipe to bake at high altitude.  And then I moved to California.  The problem is, I'm not backwards compatible with high altitude recipes.  In other words, I can't take Mom's Colorado snickerdoodle recipe and bake stellar snickerdoodles in California.  Thank goodness for Google.

As I figured, there's really only one snickerdoodle recipe (as opposed to chocolate chip cookies, which people do some crazy things to), with really only one slight variation:  full cup of butter vs 1/2 butter and 1/2 shortening.  I didn't have shortening, so I went with the all butter version, which wouldn't have been my first choice, but incredible cookie makers have to roll with the punches.  Here's the recipe in case you'd like to copy me.  I recommend it:

Snickerdoodle Recipe

Here's why:

Gorgeous!  Actually...the one in the front isn't gorgeous at all and I question my photographic talent here, but LOOK at the beauty right behind it.  Have you ever seen a prettier snickerdoodle?   I doubt it.

And YES, stop doubting me, they taste just as good as they look.  Better, actually.  It's very important to test them at the appropriate time, though.  Which brings me to my next announcement: 

(drum roll, please)

I am going to start a cookie baking series right here on my blog so I can preach to you about the important of such concepts as test cookies and cookie scoops and melted vs. softened butter vs shortening, etc etc.  Exciting, right?

If you have any cookie topics you'd like me to blog about or questions you'd like me to answer, please feel free to post a comment or email me!

the royal treament

And finally I get a chance to sit down and tell you about the dinner.  It's been over a week and the shock has almost worn off, but it's still worth telling the story and showing off my incredible iphone photography skills.  Get ready...

So...last Friday, the boy took me to dinner at the restaurant where he works on the weekends as an apprentice (in preparation for culinary school).  Every weekend he comes home with a weird story about shelling fava beans, or peeling cipollini onions, or burning his arms on some huge tray (if you're lucky, one day he'll share his blog with you and you can read all the gory details).  In any case, I was really excited to see where all his blood, sweat, and tears end up.

It was a little bit funny at first because he parked in the employee parking lot and acted totally cool. The valet guy apparently didn't recognize him and started giving him a hard time. 

"That's employee parking only."

"Yeah, I work here."

"I've never seen you before."

"OK, talk to the chefs."

(We walk in to the restaurant anyway).

The waitress also didn't recognize him initially, but then came back to the table a few minutes later, apologizing profusely for not recognizing him until she was notified that he worked there.  And it's a good thing...for a split second I started to question where he really spent his weekends!  It's also funny, because from that point on, I no longer doubted that he worked there, but doubted that he was really only a 'prep guy', because we were certainly given the royal treatment...and it was fantastic!

We asked if the chefs could just decide what to feed us, thinking we'd end up with an appetizer, a couple of entrees, and a dessert or two.  Well...chef's choice turned out to actually be a multi-course tasting menu (I love tasting menus, by the way, but that's for another post), and the chefs themselves brought most of our food out for us.  Yeah...special treatment.

In an effort to not bore you with every last detail, I'll just show you my awesome iphone pictures.  I unfortunately don't have pictures of everything because I was embarrassed that I was photographing food.


Anyway...


Wine.  2 Flights, 3 Whites, 3 Reds (Cab Sav, to be specific). 

Bread.  And butter. AND olive oil.  Who does that?

Really awesome orange polka dot water glass.  Where can I buy these?

Oysters! 

There was some crudo (not pictured).

Peas and carrots.  But not just 'peas and carrots'...'chef peas and carrots', which means creamy carrot soup and English pea agnolotti.  It's unfortunate that I only have half of this photographed (and with a crappy iphone camera) because it's my new favorite food.  I've dreamt about it every night for the past week.

Scallops with risotto and seared ahi.  Yum and Yum.

And then there was meat.  Pork belly with bbq beans (not pictured) and foie gras with strawberries and rhubarb.

Whoops! Too slow.  Lack of foie:

Finally...Colorado lamb, also not pictured (I was too full at this point).

And by finally, I mean we were done with our main dishes.

Dessert involved a cheese plate, some weird chocolate cake and popcorn gelato concoction with way too much ganache, and a weirder lemon meringue tart-ish with spicy red pepper gelato.  Oh, sad dessert (except the awesome cheese plate)!

Don't ever forget the post-meal cappuccino!  Foamy-licious!

Pretty awesome, huh?  I thought so.  Especially when the bill came and we realized that they gave us a ridiculous discount because the boy works there.  I'm ok with VIP treatment any day!

Thanks for reading! (PS...I wrote a review of the restaurant in my other blog, so if you want more detail, you can read it there).