Weekly Round Up: A Tale of Two Soups

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition I made two soups with two different results and saw two 70s movies, also with different results.

Picture above c/o a weekend outing.  I'm soaking in the fall colors and being outside as long as I can.

Eats

I'm still obsessed with potatoes and eggs for breakfast.  I've taken to cooking the eggs in Trader Joe's crunchy chili and onions for a little extra pep.

On the lunch front I had a miss and a hit.

The miss was beer cheese soup.  I like the concept of cooking with beer, but I also have a cheap streak and hate to "waste" a beer in cooking.  Luckily one of the dads in our Boy Scout trip works for a beer distributor, and he's passed on some extras so we have a good supply of "cooking" beer.

When I cook with wine, I always assume that any wine is as good as another so I took the same approach with beer.

Let me tell you that whatever kind of beer is meant to go in beer cheese soup that triple IPA is not it.  Fortunately I only made half of the recipe so I only had two servings, and I ate them both because I'm stubborn and also because I was oddly fascinated by how bad this was.

Now let's talk about a hit!  I came across a recipe for kimchi jigae (a Korean soup).  There were a few things about the recipe that I couldn't figure out on paper.

• The quantities didn't make sense.  Three servings of soup from 0.4 pounds of meat (a lot),  3/4 cup of kimchi (a lot), TWO mushrooms, and ONE cup of water????
• An unfamiliar ingredient.  Idk what pork belly is but in the pictures it sure looks like bacon.  One of the comments said that pork belly is hard to come by where they live so they use 2 slices of thick cut bacon which can't be 0.4 pounds but that made a lot more sense.

In the end I couldn't stop thinking about the soup and the reviews were so positive that I felt like I needed to try it once.  If you've already had one soup fail why not make it two?

I used two slices of bacon and a handful of mushrooms.  I didn't bother to stir fry the kimchi since I didn't see the point.  I did everything else pretty much as written.

Result: I failed to fail!  The soup is delicious, though in my eyes it's two servings and not three.  If I make this again I'd add a bit more water to get more broth but no harm no foul.

Workouts

I started the week with a planned 3 days of rest.  I didn't really feel like I needed it but I'd been hearing a lot of chatter about deload weeks.

On reflection now that I've gotten the rest and gotten back to working out==>meh.  It was nice to sleep in, but I don't feel like I needed the break.  Going forward I won't take time off until the next time that I feel like it instead of at the end of a program.  I got major DOMS from the first workout that I did which I attribute mostly to the time off.

My plan was to start a two week workout series called Beastmode but my schedule is a bit choppy next week so I decided to do the one week Pyramid series instead, fill up the rest of next week with some one-off workouts, and then I'll tackle Beastmode once things return to normal.  (P.S. here is a nice summary of the different Caroline Girvan programs and links to their playlists). 

As you might suspect, Pyramid is ascending and descending time based intervals.  The first two workouts are 20 seconds-40 seconds-one minute-40 seconds-20 seconds with 20 seconds breaks in between==>move on to a new exercise with the same pattern.  The third workout mixed it up with 30 seconds-45 seconds-one minute and that's as far as I've gotten as of this writing.  The workouts are in the 40-45 minute range. 

Review so far: I like it BUT man each pyramid feels like it takes a really long time.  One thing that I liked about the Iron series was that there was so much variety in the workout structure from day to day so three straight days of the same format has me yawning a bit.  Only two workouts to go: a full body which I'm sure that I'll like and a HIIT workout that I'm looking forward to since I haven't done any HIIT with Caroline yet and I have no idea of what to expect.

Watching

In case you're wondering==>the way that I pick a lot of the movies that I watch is from a podcast called Unspooled.  Without that context (OK, OK, maybe even with that context) my choices and pairings must seem totally bonkers.  I took a trip to the 70s to see a very famous movie that I'd never seen before (and wasn't sure that I wanted to see) and a very famous movie that I saw one billion times back in the early 80s (grade school) that I had no memory of.

First up: the famous movie that I had never seen and wasn't sure that I wanted to. I didn't see any good short recaps on Youtube and I don't like the trailer so I'll give you a hint with this picture that I took in 2013 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.  No it's not Blade Runner, it's what's on the right.

Yes friends, I saw The Exorcist!  When I was a kid I heard mumblings that this was a horrible, terrifying, awful movie and recently I've heard some mumblings that this might not be the case.  

Rumors confirmed!  I'm glad that I saw this in the bright afternoon sunlight at home instead of in a theater in 1973, but it was a good movie that I enjoyed.

The only other experience that I've had with this movie is that a really long time ago when I was in D.C. I climbed the stairs but I didn't have the context to know what they were besides a really long flight of stairs called "the Exorcist Stairs".  I haven't been to D.C. in a long time and don't have any plans to go, but if I do I will have a dilemna...on the one hand I feel like I would love to go back and walk around the neighborhood BUT I also feel like it would creep me out to climb the stairs now.  For sure I think that I would need to climb up them rather than down them.

Second up: the famous movie that I saw literally one billion times as a child.  Ooh what luck that I have a random picture from the same 2013 NYC trip:

It's a bird it's a plane it's Superman.

I remember that I loved the Superman movies when I was a kid but my memory has been wiped so it was something of a fresh look.  My thoughts are:

• I have vivid memories of Clark Kent in the phone booth transitioning into Superman, but it never happens in this movie.  On his first transition, he sees a phone kiosk (not a booth) on the street and looks at it quizzically and then runs through a revolving door in a nearby building to do his magic.
• The movie has so much fun with Clark vs Superman and those scenes are a joy to watch.
• Whaaa...no one told me that Marlon Brando or Gene Hackman plus several other more obscure cast surprises were in this movie (P.S. I can't stand Brando but I kind of appreciate the way he handled his role).
• As for the rest sorry to say that I enjoyed this movie every bit as much as I enjoy the D.C. and Marvel action franchises of today, which is to say that I would have enjoyed it more if I'd seen it with my family.  On my own it was a very looooooong and draggy 2 hours and 20 minutes.  I watched this in bits and pieces over the course of the week and it felt like to took forever.
  

Reading

Yay another hit!  The Love of My Life by Rosie Walsh was described as a thriller, but unless I'm missing something it's more of a literary mystery.  Emma is a semi famous marine biologist and her husband Leo is an obituary writer.  In the obit business, it's standard to have pre-written obits on file and Emma is just famous enough/dealing with cancer, so Leo's office is working on her pre-write.  The only problem is that once Leo starts putting pen to paper, he realizes that there is a lot that he doesn't know about his wife of 10 years and oops a lot of it doesn't add up.  IRL if I was in Leo's situation I'd sit my husband down and say "dude what's up with x,y, and z?" but that wouldn't make for much of a book so Leo takes the opposite approach and starts trying to figure it out behind Emma's back.