My Favorite Topic: Food

One of the great things about going to the University of Wyoming is the surprising diversity in the music department here (at least concerning the graduate students). Many of my colleagues are from different areas of China and South Korea, and it’s been a lot of fun talking to them about the many differences between their home countries and America. One of the big differences that I like to talk about is in the style of teaching, both in the university setting and in the private lesson setting. Since I’ve spent the last five years of my life at college I have a pretty firm understanding of how American institutions tend to work and it’s just really neat to think about how it works in different countries.

But more importantly there are huge differences in food and diet. For some reason since I’ve moved to Laramie I have become a food monster, I’m always hungry and I’m always eating! The logical part of me says its because I’ve been lifting a lot more and working out a lot more than previously, but it still seems a bit odd to me. Anyways, the fact that I focus on the food differences between my friends and I won’t come as a surprise to any of them.

So what of these differences? Well, a couple of weeks ago a group of us got together and we had our friend Stephanie make some authentic Mexican food. That wasn’t exactly the plan; we were breaking in my new ice cream attachment for my beautiful new stand mixer (thanks mom!) when Stephanie decided she wanted to contribute to the food as well! It was great: the food was delicious, we had a blast helping Steph prepare everything, and we just had a lot of great conversation. So naturally I decided that this was something that needs to happen more! Even for my American friends (which actually aren’t very many here as Ashley and I are the only two American graduate students in our year) we all come from different environments. We all grew up eating different things; we have different tastes and skills. So why not share it? Which is super exciting, because that means we all get to get together and eat! What an excellent idea!

So for tonight we will be going to Mei’s place and indulging in some homemade Korean cuisine. I have no idea what’s on the menu but I am really excited. Especially since my boyfriend and I recently broke up, I’m looking forward to going on and seeing people—maybe we’ll go out for a few beers afterwards! (: The interesting thing about Mei is that she is Korean but grew up in China. She retained her Korean culture but also absorbed some of the Chinese, so this is going to be an even more unique insight into her life.

I’m not trying to say that food can reveal everything about a person, but it does say a lot. The cliché is that you are what you eat, and I think it has a point. How you approach eating says a lot about how you take care of yourself. If you don’t care about yourself and your body, what says you will care about me and mine? Obviously this is a generalization—enjoying fast food on occasion is by no means a deal breaker, but if McDonalds is your idea of a daily lunch, then we might have a problem.

The cultural differences in food can be a great eye-opener for many other differences. When eating with my Korean friends we don’t all have our own plates, instead we order a variety of plates and share everything on the table. Korea is a very collectivist place, fitting in and working together is far more important than being an individual and this is revealed through how they eat. When eating with my friends I learn many things about them because it gives me space to relax and just ask. Perhaps the straightforward act of sharing a meal makes you feel closer to someone, or maybe that’s just me. Regardless it’s something I love to do.

So tonight we will continue the new tradition of enjoying each other’s cuisine, company, and stories. I look forward to it and I’m glad that food is something that can bring us all together.

U Dub

I spent this last weekend in Salt Lake City with eight people who I had only met once before. Even though I didn't know them really well, I definitely had fun getting to know them a little better. We were all attending the regional tournament for 9-ball and table tennis, two guys and two gals representing UW in both tournaments. And I had a lot of fun, more fun then I have had in a long time. Perhaps I had so much fun just because I didn't have to do anything other then play pool and hang out (that would make sense anyways). Despite not being proficient in 9-ball (I’ve always played straight eight or ball-in-hand eight ball) I managed to take first place. I shot some good pool, and some bad. There was one match in particular where everything went right: I beat the girl 4-1. Unfortunately the championship match was probably the worse I had played all weekend. The other girl was struggling pretty badly too, it was kind of pathetic. But nonetheless I was victorious! Which means? Sometime this summer I’m going to nationals for 9-ball. Aww yeah!

Boom! Who knew?

I’ll put up a better, more thoughtful blog later. For now I have a lot of catching up to do and many deep thoughts to swirl around in my head. Things are gonna be working better for me soon, I just need to figure out how to make it happen.

Salsa

Today I made salsa. Not just any salsa, but the homemade salsa recipe that my mom has perfected over the years. However, I did add a few unique touches: i.e. jalapenos and spicy taco sauce! It was and/is some of the best salsa I have had in a long time and greatly surpasses Applebees’ recipe. (Which means that I get to save some money this week by not going to get half off apps after nine.). Salsa is surprisingly healthy- my recipe is straight up just tomatoes, peppers, onion, and cilantro. Veggies and more veggies. Unfortunately I don’t have a food processor so it’s usually quite chunky, until today when I realized I could throw it all in my blender. Which was quite successful, might I add.

This is a good reminder to me about what I eat and why I eat. Obviously one eats to give the body sustenance and to enjoy the flavor. But I’ve recently been thinking more about how what I eat makes me feel. Ever since I was a small child I have been plagued with migraines, and from a very young age I was told to be very careful and aware of what I was eating. Because for me my migraines are triggered by food—too much dairy, too much candy, too much protein, too much happiness. It seemed to me that everything I ate was a “trigger” and that there was no way I could give it all up, so instead I simply continued to eat what I wanted to eat, when I wanted to eat it. Flash forward a few years and you will see that my migraines never got any better, although I got a bit better at functioning when they struck (minus the vomiting part, you can never really get good at that).

Recently though I have realized something. Something I probably should have realized a long time ago, but alas…I’m a slow learner. When I eat a healthy amount of food and am very careful about what I put inside of my body, I can splurge on candy and treats—all the things I’ve always eaten, but now can eat without succumbing to the migraines of doom. If I haven’t eaten breakfast and I have a pop tart for lunch (something that happens at school sometimes), I can expect a full blown migraine by the end of the day. Even if I eat some healthy food after the treat, my body will just shut down on me.

So lets flash-forward to today. I have been lifting weights and working out three days a week and I have been focusing on what I eat. Not because of some new years resolution, not because I hate my body, and not because I am trying to look like what society expects a woman to look like. Instead I have been eating healthy because, shocker, doing so makes my body feel better. I have been lifting weights because I want to be strong, confident, and I want to feel good about my body. Sure my body has been changing, and I’m not going to lie, I think it has been changing for the better, but that doesn’t mean I will reach some sort of goal down the road and quit lifting. I lift three times a week because that gives me three times to add more weight to the bar, to pull myself up higher, and to squat a little bit lower. My self-esteem has shot through the roof and I’m noticing changes in my body that I never would have noticed had I resigned myself to mindless cardio for the rest of my life. (Not that cardio is a bad form of exercise, in fact I can’t wait to start running outside again, but rather cardio was never effective for me to make me feel good about my body and myself).

If only I had realized sooner that in order to feel better about myself I simply needed to alter the way I treated myself. It seems like such an obvious solution but it has evaded me from twenty-two years. Luckily I have a full life ahead of me, one that I will fully enjoy after finally realizing how to reach my full potential.

 

times they are a changin

I’m not usually a fan of declaring New Year’s resolutions. I feel like people more often then not announce their list of life changing resolutions on the first of January (many of them referencing alcohol and the moderation they hope to embody) only to just shift back to their original habits by the first of February. That being said, I do think that every once in a while we should reflect on our lives and look at what there is in it that makes us happy, what makes us sad, where our stress comes from, and our happiness? If there are changes to be made, then incorporate them slowly—change one element of your life, once that has become habit, alter another element, and so on.

My resolution is not one of physique or consumption—I have already changed these elements of my life, and although they are not perfect they are not the new change for the New Year. Instead I am focusing on my mentality, the way I handle different situations, and the ways in which I deal with change.

Change is a funny thing. It can be gradual—where, in the middle of it, you don’t even realize it’s happening until you reflect back on where you were before. Or it can be drastic and life changing, where you would have to be blind or dumb not to realize that something just happened. This sort of change is the one that most people focus on, fear, and avoid at all costs. The end of a relationship, a move to a new city, state, or country, the loss of a loved one, or starting all over with a new job, these are all things that cause pain, uncertainty, and trepidation.

But sometimes it’s the gradual changes that we should be more aware of. The gradual diminishing of conversation and interaction between friends, the drifting apart of loved ones, but also the systematic building of strength as you work out, the piecemeal revelations of your self.

Over Christmas these two types of change were combined into one epic, awful relationship explosion. Simultaneously everything changed and yet there has been a gradual effort of rebuilding what once was. And it’s making me appreciate the little things that had previously gone unnoticed. The way one doesn’t notice as one builds trust and comfort in a relationship. The way in which, if not careful, two people can gradually take each other for granted. The fact that, even if we think we do, in our twenties most of us don’t really know what we want and need in our lives. And that we sometimes overcomplicate it through our ceaseless need to share our lives with another. Even more so that it is completely worth it to do so, it is worth the possibility of a break up that a relationship brings. 

But sometimes the end is at the back of your mind, and you don’t know how to make it go away. You don’t know how to handle the change that a break up brings, the open ended possibilities, the self-reliance and lack of commitment to another when making choices. When the future has always included another in your mind, what do you do when that other is no longer? Whether it be a significant other, a family member, or a good friend, this absence can be extremely profound.

Even if that absence is temporary—perhaps you are travelling alone, rather than with a friend, now you can do whatever it is that You want without having to compromise with another. Does this excite you? Or does it make you nervous; do you not know what to do?

One thing about this upcoming year is for certain: I will be travelling to Europe for the first time, and I will be alone for the first three weeks of my trip. I hope to have friends join me after those three weeks, but that isn’t even for sure. What will I do when I land in the airport, don’t speak the language and have no idea where I am? I can speculate about what I will do, but the only thing for sure is that when I get there, something will be done. I need to take comfort in the fact that I am strong and independent, and that when I make it to Rome I will be able to stand on my own two feet. There is a lot of time between now and then, so who knows what will happen, and I think that the best thing to do is to just trust myself.

My New Year’s resolution, then, can be seen to be to trust myself. To do what I do and know that it’s what I do, so have fun while doing it. This resolution isn’t a fad, it’s not me committing to some stupid diet or crazy exercise program, it’s a fundamental mental revaluation of my self, and I will commit to it. 

Winter

I have been trying to convince myself lately that I do not like winters, that autumn, spring, and summer are superior to this dreadful, dead season. Unfortunately I am proven otherwise the first snowfall of every year. There is just something so refreshing and necessary about winter. Winter is a time of cleansing; sure everything is dying, the trees are losing their leaves and the grass is shriveling up, but this only makes the growth and life of spring all the more satisfying. Winter forces us to appreciate what we have in the summer by making the process of growth more apparent. It’s the physical embodiment of a process that people go through constantly throughout their lives: the process of letting something go, reflecting on its absence, and then allowing something new to replace it later on. With winter comes the constant reminiscence of the joys of summer that many did not even partake in when summer was here. We all tell ourselves that if only it was nicer outside, if only the sun was shining and the beaches were beckoning, then we would take time for ourselves and relax with friends.

And yet there are countless things to do in the winter: one can snuggle up on the couch with some hot chocolate or tea and watch a movie with a friend; one can build a snowman, run around outdoors, or go ice skating; winter is the perfect excuse to bundle up in ugly sweaters, wear thick boots and tall socks, and just be comfortable. It’s the season where sitting around inside reading all day is not considered to be socially unacceptable.

I think that if only we could change our perspective of the seasons and embrace each one for each of its unique elements, then we could find ourselves enjoying more of each year. Rather than loving summer, yearning for it, enjoying it, and then missing it immensely when it is gone, we should keep it in its place. We should recognize that without winter summer wouldn't have it's power, without the slow decay of fall one couldn't enjoy the gradual emergence of spring: it is not necessary to love each season equally, but being able to appreciate each one for what it is is important.

It's similar with people. Especially for those of us that have worked in the service industry. Without the complete assholes, those jackasses that complain, are rude, treat you like an object, try to manipulate and take advantage of you, and are just in general mean people, we wouldn't appreciate the kind and good people. I'm not justifying the jerks out there, nor am I encouraging people to fulfill that necessary asshole-space. Rather I am simply saying that if one can see those people and contextualize them in a more positive way, then it will be easier to tell yourself that he is just having a bad day, or that maybe she got some bad news this morning and is being uncharacteristically rude.

These are the things I consider when I think about winter. When ice, snow, cutting wind, and frigid temperatures come upon me I always remember this poem by Wallace Stevens. 

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

There’s just something about that last stanza: “and, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” that catches my imagination. What is this nothing that is simultaneously absent and present, that fleeting something that one can only be grasped when one is also a nothing noting the nothingness? 

What do you think?

Thanksgiving alone

Today was the first holiday I’ve ever spent alone- no family, no friends, not even a puppy to keep me company, and I think I learned a lot about myself. I got up early and made the decision to be happy, rather then dwelling on the fact that my plans were cancelled at the last minute and being sad and gloomy all day. Since I hadn’t bought food for Thanksgiving the first thing I had to do was buy some food…I was not going to be hungry on Thanksgiving, no matter how alone I was. I decided to go the route of comfort food and bought the ingredients for some chicken and gnocchi soup (I was hoping it would taste like Olive Garden’s soup, alas it did not) and decided to buy a bottle of wine as well—a nice Zinfandel I have had in the past that never disappoints—plus it was on sale!

I spent all morning making soup, enjoyed it around noon, and then proceeded to sit around doing nothing. It was at this point that I realized that I wasn’t extremely sad or lonely, I was content just relaxing in my apartment with some good soup and the full day ahead of me.

I’m not going to go through my entire days activities, mostly because it would bore you to tears, but I did get some good practicing in. Unfortunately my upstairs neighbors do not appreciate flute music, we have gotten into mini fights about the amount of time I practice, the amount of loud music I am always playing (note that I do not play loud music all the time), and various other things of this nature. So I wasn’t too surprised when I started hearing a lot of obnoxious stomping around upstairs and loud shouting. Alas, such is life.

I’m thankful for so many things in my life: my wonderful family and friends, the teachers and colleagues I have met at my new university, my students who seem to teach me more then I teach them, and my newfound comfort with being alone. It’s not that I was always afraid of being alone before, but I always preferred being with people, running around and doing stuff with friends and family. It was very rare for me to want to stay home and actually stay home all day and enjoy myself. I think a big part of growing up is being comfortable enough with yourself to go out alone, stay home and relax, and just enjoy those moments of alone time without being bored or distracted or just wanting to be somewhere else.

Although this Thanksgiving didn’t have turkey, mashed potatoes, ham, stuffing, pumpkin pie, or good time with family, I think I have found myself to be more thankful for much more of my life after thinking about it all day alone then I would have if I had spent all day with family and friends. Sometimes one needs time to reflect in order to truly appreciate how much one has.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, I hope you enjoyed your day of food, friends, and family—or if you didn’t get the chance to partake in those traditional activities I hope you enjoyed yourself anyways!

So much soup!

….also here’s a picture of my soup! Yummy!

Stress Relief

I think everyone has those weeks where you are just so ridiculously busy and stressed out that you don’t even know what part of your to-do list to begin on. Whether you’re a graduate student, undergrad, full time employee, full time parent, or whatever it is that you do between waking up and going to sleep again, we all have busy weeks. For me it has been an interesting orchestra tour, many different concerts and rehearsals, important tests and long papers, stressful relationships and sleepless nights. To sum it up: all hell broke loose a few weeks ago, and it’s only now clearing up.

What do you do for stress relief? I go to the gym, I make time for sleeping, and lately, I’ve been baking. Honestly the gym is the most important part for me, lifting weights, getting stronger, playing my newfound sport of racquetball (which is hard to do alone, so I don’t do it very often), these all combine into a de-stressing exercise that becomes essential after a while. Trust me, you don’t want to run across me if I haven’t been to the gym in weeks, I will be irritable and easily annoyed.

So it’s not surprising that I have been periodically searching through blogs and sites for a new recipe to annihilate (in a good way, as in—make some damn good food and have a good time doing it). Somehow I stumbled across this blog post over at Smitten Kitchen, which is just about the greatest blog ever: awesome pictures, humorous dialogue, and some super delicious recipes. This recipe, cheesecake and brownies, all in one, need I say more?

I knew my friend Ashley was pretty stressed out lately too, so I invited her over to indulge in our domestic sides in an attempt to make this brownie mosaic cheesecake. It seems that I have been stocking my kitchen with the proper ingredients for these things lately, because all we needed was cream cheese, the springform pan, and some baker’s chocolate. And since Laramie has countless different wonderful kitchen stores to choose from, we found the cutest one and began the adventure to buy the springform pan. Not. Walmart was the only option—which is probably a good thing on my tight budget.

Ten minutes after entering the store we left with bulging plastic bags (what ever happened to the option of paper?) filled with cheesecake ingredients as well as snacks to tide us over until we were done baking.

I won’t go into a step by step instruction of how to make the cheesecake (if you really want to know you can go to Smitten Kitchen’s blog and check it out), but I’ll go through the highlight reel:

So innocent..

The first thing we needed to make was the brownies—a brownie mosaic cheesecake has tiny little chunks of brownies within the cheesecake itself. Luckily for everyone involved we only needed to cups of chopped up brownies for the recipe, that meant that we could eat the rest of the brownies before the cheesecake was finished (fatties need something to hold ourselves over until the pièce de résistance). Unfortunately for you all, we devoured those brownies before taking a picture of them for the blog… alas, such is life.

Many teddy graham lives
were lost that day.

The cheesecake itself was quite simple. The crust was to be made out of teddy grahams and butter (with a few other ingredients, but really… those are the only important ones). Which means that I got the task of chopping each of those tiny little bears into a find powder—much easier said than done I’m afraid. It was very reminiscent of my youth, biting of the heads of the teddy grahams, or the arms, or the legs, before finishing off the entire thing. Teddy grahams are pretty sadistic now that I think about it, why do they have to be smiling and waving at you?

As you can see, pure manpower
was not going to work.

The cheesecake itself require, you guessed it, cream cheese! And a few eggs and some sugar, luckily Ashley had a hand mixer at her apartment, because I was attempting to whip it into pure, decadent fluffiness with a spoon and I could feel the tendonitis and carpal tunnel just dying to assert their dominance in my arms. After carefully adding the brownie pieces to the cheesecake mixture and unceremoniously dumping it all into the teddy graham graveyard of a crust, we got to sit back and relax…

…for about fifty-five minutes. We couldn’t leave out the cherry on top could we? The cherry is a metaphor for chocolate ganache... we wanted to put chocolate ganache on top of the cheesecake. Right-o, moving on.

In a word: delicious.

Have you ever encountered the directions “scald the butter and cream”? If so, did you immediately know what to do? If so, leave me alone, we googled it and were still confused. According to the handy website we found, to scald butter and cream meant to put it in a pan and heat it on low until it boils. A process that supposedly would only take 30 seconds. Perhaps that website wasn’t account for the ridiculously high elevation I have somehow managed to live at, because it took about five minutes and me impatiently turning the burner up to medium before the butter and cream were scalded sufficiently. Adding this to our blender-acting-as-food-processor (I’m very good at improvising) concoction of bakers chocolate, doubling the recommended amount of confectioners sugar, and throwing down some vanilla and voila! Ganache!

Man, does this cheesecake taste good! I think Ashley agrees, and it was definitely a day well spent. But now I might need to hit up the gym a few more times in the upcoming week or my de-stressor of baking may have added a new stress of possible obesity to my plate. Get it? Because I ate the cheesecake on a plate?

My jokes are bad and I should feel bad. 

What do you do to relax and unwind?