Weekly Round Up: Valentine's Report

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  My week started in balmy Florida and ended back home in the frozen Tundra.  Luckily there was good food, something new on the fitness front, and puppy snuggles to get through it.

Eats

We have a lot to talk about!  

First let's talk about my go-to "fend for yourself" dinner.  Right now a bowl of roasted potatoes, roasted broccoli, and chicken sausage is where it's at.  The key to make this work is always to have roasted potatoes in the freezer, and then it's just 20 minutes to roast frozen broccoli in the air fryer and throw the chicken sausage in at the end.  Bonus points if I have pickled onions on hand.

 

Also bonus points if I have a yummy sauce to put on it.  I'd gotten this sauce from TJs a good long while ago and it just happened to jump out of the pantry at me.

For Valentine's Day, the weather was dreadful, so we didn't want to go out and we also didn't want to grill, which ruled out a romantic steak dinner.  I raided the pantry and freezer for our perennial favorite of Recipe Rebel's Creamy Italian Sausage Pasta.  After coming up with the plan, Hubs gave me the romantic gift of making a grocery store run to get fresh spinach instead of using frozen.  This was also the first time that I made it with roasted red peppers as called for in the recipe - the first time I skipped them b/c we didn't have them, the second time I got confused and used sundried tomatoes.  All of these are valid choices, but the roasted red peppers are best.  My final reminder is that IMO there is a typo in the recipe where it says "two and a half cups of broth" - I use two cups of broth and half a cup of white wine.

For dessert I made a flourless chocolate cake.  I have a few quibbles with the recipe but not with the end product.  It was delicious.  My quibbles are that I think it would be easier to add the sugar and cocoa powder at the same time instead of separately, the case lost its shape when I took it out of the pan, the ganache needed more time to set, and it was messy to just pour the ganache over the cake.  Next time I think I would put it back in the pan after cooling so that the edges of the pan could corral the ganache.  Stay tuned. 

But wait there's more!  Last night I found another yummy looking Recipe Rebel dish that I was able to make without leaving the house.  Seriously it's cold and not fun to run errands right now.  May I present cheesy ground beef and potatoes?

My alterations were to air fry the potatoes for about 10 minutes while I prepped the rest of the ingredients so that I had better control over them being fully cooked, to use the last of a very old bag of Trader Joe's fire roasted peppers from the freezer in place of making a trip to the store to get a green pepper, and no garnish of parsley or green onions for the same reason.

This was a 10/10 on all fronts: easy to make but looks like I put effort into it/no grocery store trip/flavor profile that hit with all members of the family.

Workouts

Sigh, there is no such thing as a free trip to Florida.  I came home with light bout of sniffles and fatigue, and skipped my weekday workouts in favor of getting extra rest.

By the weekend I was ready to get back at it, so I got my normal treadmill fare.  

So how about some hiking?  Nope, because the weather has other ideas.  We've had snow on the ground for a while, and enough thaw and refreeze action to put down a solid layer of ice.  Several of the trailheads closed over the weekend for safety reasons, and I think it may take a few more weeks for everything to clear up. 

Luckily I have a side quest to occupy me.  For as long as I have been following Kim, she has participated in the American Lung Association's Fight For Air Climb.  The deal is that they pick really tall buildings in big cities throughout the country and folks sign up to climb to the top.  For the past few years I've been making some noise about how it sounds like a cool event, and this is my year to put my money where my mouth is.  My local Big City climb of 50 flights is in March.

The questions I have are:

1. Do I even need to train?  I mean, I'm active and I get a lot of incline from the treadmill and hiking.  A few months ago I got up and down the 800 stairs on the Kaymoor Miners Trail just fine.  It's not like I'm going for a speed record, and I know I can walk up 50 flights of stairs.

2. But if I were to do some training what would that look like?  Kim trains by climbing up and down her stairs, and even after reading that she has a nice little 100 flight routine, I was doubtful that a mere flight of house stairs would do anything to prepare me for the big day.  Also I can't be tramping up and down the stairs during my normal workout time because I'd wake the fam.

Well, the way to answer that question was for me to get off my butt and try it.  I climbed up and down the basement stairs for 10 rounds and why hello, it does make an impression!  I repeated this exercise five times throughout the day yesterday.  The downside is that Doggo is not entirely happy about my new past time, but the rest is upside: it's an easy way to shake up my fitness routine and it's not too time consuming.  I plan to repeat the climbs every other day until the event, and honestly it wouldn't hurt me to keep it up after that.  I'm also throwing it out there as an FYI to folks who are home bound due to weather and don't have treadmills, and also to us folks who do have treadmills but are looking for a quick way to spice up our fitness.

Watching

I had a follow up item from my visit to the Dali Museum last week.  I like Hitchcock movies, and I like Dali, so I had to revisit their pairing in the 1945 movie Spellbound.  Dali's part was to provide the images for a dream sequence.

I can visualize some of the Hitchcocks scene by scene, and the ones where I can't are either (1) OK fine I haven't seen every single movie just most of them, (2) no one remembers 50 movies by heart, but the most common reason is (3) that [gasp] it wasn't that good of a movie.

I report you decide: I had seen Spellbound before.  It has its moments, but it's not a "drop everything and watch it now" kinda deal.  Ingrid Bergman is a psychiatrist, and Gregory Peck is the incoming head of the institution where she works.  He's easy on the eyes, but everyone remarks that huh he's a lot younger than they were expecting, he doesn't seem to know what the book that he wrote is about, and he gets terribly upset anytime he see black lines on a white surface.  Luckily the new science of psychoanalysis is around to get to the bottom of this before the police do.  If you've got an extra four minutes and want to know more, here is a good summary/visual:

 

And of course we continue to make inroads into season 6 of Seinfeld.

 

Reading

Let me catch you up!

• The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery for CBBC.  I am very strict about only reading each week's assigned chapters and let me tell you how happy I am that it's Monday so I have another week of reading to do.
• As predicted, I finished The House of My Mother by Shari Franke while driving around Florida last week.  This book belongs to the genre of When Bad Things Happen to Good Writers.  Shari's mom was an OG mommy blogger later turned YouTube vlogger who had a massive following.  But then one day her brother mentioned in passing in one of the videos that he had not slept in a bed for seven months as a punishment and well, people started poking their noses into the family business.  Eventually the police raided the house and rescued the kids and sent mommy to jail.  The thing that really stands out about this book is that the author could have just done a cash grab and written a tell all.  But she doesn't do that: she focuses on the issues of parents sharing their children online and social media gone wrong.  There is a lot of food for thought here, and if you'd like to get more of a feel for the book without reading it, there's an episode of the Glamorous Trash podcast for that - or if you'd like to do what I did which is to listen to the book and then be delighted to learn that one of my favorite podcasts did an episode on it and listen to the podcast right after, that works too.
• Next up: the book that everyone is talking about right now: Annie Bot by Sierra Greer.  We're in a world where robots have joined society as nannies, housekeepers, and well, as girlfriends.  Annie is a bot, but her AI learning is so advanced that she's become sentient, and is starting to catch on to the downfalls of a human/robot romantic relationship.  This book is wonderfully disturbing.

The final thing that I have to say about all of this is that I think that either The House of My Mother or Annie Bot would make a good pairing with A Well Trained Wife.  And by "good pairing" I mean that these are three excellently written books that will give you nightmares.

• House doesn't discuss the details of the abuse, choosing instead to let the listener realize that there is a horrible blank that they cannot fill in.  Wife takes the path of giving you Every.Single.Detail of the abuse until the reader reaches the dissociative state that the author had to live with to get through the day.  I think that in both cases the authors made the right choice: having the blank makes the child abuse all the more horrible, and IMO spousal abuse is often not recognized (for example when the author left her marriage her lawyer gave her a pamphlet on abuse and even though physical violence was a constant she didn't believe she was abused because her husband had never hit her in the face), so it is more appropriate to go into every last detail.
  
• Annie's programming is eerily similar to the "Well Trained Wife" protocol.

Enough chit chat, I came here for dog content

We aim to please!

First, let's talk about The Sploot.  That would be where ya get on your belly and stick your legs out behind you.  Doggo is a champion splooter.  In business there is the saying "always be selling" and Doggo's version of that is "always be splooting".

Second, I would like to share our current favorite YouTube dog channel, Cleo Long Legs.  Because let me tell you that you need to know how to grow your snoot:

 Happy snoot growing!  See ya later.