Weekly Round Up: Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.

The men in my life have brought home a lot of inspirational sayings from Boy Scouts.  One of my favorites is "improvise, adapt, and overcome".  In this week's edition I'm going to show you how that played out in our meals this week, plus another round of "movies that I remember incorrectly from the 1980's".

Heads up: there's gonna be some weight/diet talk in the books section this week, so bail after the movie discussion if that's not your thing.

Improvisation #1

We ran out of Kraft mac n'cheese.  Hubs and stepson #2 were left with no choice but to take drastic measures.  They made the real thing.

Their recipe was the Shortcut Mac and Cheese from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.  Stepson #2 picked it out, and hubs read the recipe and said "uh...this is the shortcut version?".  From the bay leaves in the sauce to the baking afterwards, it was definitely a step above our normal dinner fare.  But once they started, it came together pretty quickly.  I know I've said a few times that if I never have mac n'cheese and nuggets again in my life it will be too soon, but you better believe that I filled up my plate along with everyone else for this landmark occasion.  In related news, if you own any Kraft stock, now might be a good time to sell because I think they've lost our house as a customer.

 

Improvisation #2

This Saturday we had our big family birthday party for a certain stepson.  We got takeout pizza, fried chicken, and jo-jo's, had a ton of people over, and had a blast.

The leftovers were one pizza (score!), a ton of chicken, and zero jo-jo's.  I stepped up and took a shot at a homemade version for our Sunday dinner of leftovers.

I turned to the internets and scanned the first few hits that google gave me.  I liked the looks of A License to Grill's Air Fryer Jo-Jo's.  I used golden potatoes instead of Russets, and the potatoes were on the small side.  I took a WAG that 6 medium golden potatoes would be about the 4 Russet potatoes that the recipe called for and would be enough to get us through about two meals of leftovers.

I chopped up the potatoes and found myself surrounded by a million potato wedges.  I had to make 3x the flour and egg mixture to coat them all, and had to cook them in three batches total in our fairly large air fryer.  Sheesh it was a ton of potatoes.  Hey it's all good since it meant we were covered for two dinners and I'd find something to do with the leftovers ("something" = potatoes and eggs for breakfast).  I took a taste.  Obviously they were nothing like "real" fried jo-jo's but they were pretty good.

Dinner time.  I set out the first batch of the jo-jo's, the leftovers, and plates for everyone to take what they wanted.

Stepson #2: "How many jo-jo's can we have?"

Me: "As many as you want.  We've got a ton".  I grabbed my plate of pizza and salad and went to the table while the fellas filled up their plates.

They cleaned out the entire first half of the batch and took some nibbles from the second round.  We barely have enough for tomorrow night's dinner.

Workouts

Round 2 of Beastmode is complete!  Now that I've repeated both Beastmode and Iron, I'm going to give Beastmode the Official Best Caroline Girvan Workout Award (in addition to the Best Series Name Award).

I have to admit that I did skip the final HIIT workout in favor of a bike ride on Sunday and I think that's going to be the norm for the summer.  The weather was too gorgeous to stay inside.

Watching

It's another one of my 80's movies memory mixups!

Someone at Boy Scouts recommended In The Name of the Rose to hubs, and he texted me about it.  That sounded familiar...my memory went to work and pulled it up from the archives of my childhood movie watching memories.  I texted hubs back "Sean Connery 1980's right?  If it's what I'm thinking he's a monk and there's a falcon."  I didn't go into detail, but I remembered that the falcon was somehow a woman?  It was very hazy.  Hubs texted back "correct" which I of course took for absolute confirmation that the movie about the monk and the falcon woman was a thing. 

 

We sat down to watch it.  Yep 1300's and James Bond and a very young Christian Slater are monks.  Great movie but...where was the falcon?  The further the movie went the clearer it was that a woman turned falcon was not going to be a plot point.  Google wasn't returning any hits on "1980's movie about a falcon".   I mean, granted I have a good imagination but how had I made this up?

I think it was my search for "1980's medieval movies" that finally got me to the correct answer.  I was thinking of Ladyhawke with Michelle Pfiffer who is cursed to live as a falcon by day and a woman by night and her lover who is a gallant knight by day and a wolf at night.  If you have an extra 10 minutes on your hands and are interested in this rabbit hole, here's a 10 minute summary on it.  We didn't have enough time to squeeze it in this weekend, but we'll be getting to it soon.  Your guess is as good as mine on how I combined the two stories into one movie.

Next up: a 1980's movie that I remembered as being deadly dull and the only reason that I got in front of the TV was that hubs and both boys were dying to watch Dead Poet's Society.

Wow, this was not the snooze fest that I remembered at all.  Time and again I've found that where you are in life matters to how you appreciate a movie.  As a teenage girl I was legit bored to tears by movies about teenage boys in the 1950's.  As a stepmom to two poetic teenagers I was all about this movie.

Reading

TBR update: I'm a sucker for all things Chicago and this list from Modern Mrs. Darcy has my attention.

Reading update: two hits and a miss to report.

I'm still working on Trespasses and still liking it very much. 

On the audio side, I finished Like Family by Paula McClain.  It's a mystery to me why this book isn't better known.  Maybe because it was her second book and written before her big hits???  Anyway, I recommend it and I'll be checking out her other books ASAP (and by ASAP I mean as soon as I get through the billion other books that are on my mental TBR).  Also if she wanted to write a follow up detailing every single minute of her life I would be down for that.

And then we come to the miss.  I was tempted to just leave this out of the blog but I'm trying to stay honest and write about ALL the books that I read, not just the ones I like.  I'm a fan of the author but I could not get in to "You Just Need to Lose Weight": and 19 Other Myths About Fat People. by Aubrey Gordon.

Things that I passionately agree with her about:

• Weight is hella complicated.
• The only person whose weight is your business is the person in your mirror.  
• "People of size" get treated like crap.  You don't have to look far to see the discrimination.
• There are very real and very sad societal and economic barriers to losing weight.
  
• The stats on weight loss success are dismal.
• The weight loss/wellness industry is super messed up and has a lot of cash behind it.
  

Where I have an issue is her stance that weight loss is impossible.  She gave the example that for her to reach a healthy weight she would have to lose 200 pounds, and at the recommended rate of 1-2 pounds a week it would take her three years to get there which means three years of adhering to the diet 100% and never ever having one single slip up.

What???  Excuse my size privilege as someone who lost 50 pounds in college and still has 20 of them off...there was no 100% adherence and no perfection anywhere in that process.  That's not how real life weight loss works.  It was two years of losing five pounds...stalling out...gaining a pound...dropping two more...taking breaks when life got in the way...getting back to it when I had the time and energy to do so.  Yes it was hard, no I would not have the energy to tackle it today (as you may recall I would like to lose a few but it's not high enough on my priority list right now), no I've never been fully satisfied with my weight but also I was so uncomfortable and so miserable at my heaviest.

I get that having 200 pounds to lose is overwhelming just on its own without all of the crap that the world throws at folks on top of that and it's perfectly valid to do other things with your life (bonus points if the other things include being the cohost of the Maintenance Phase podcast).   But where is the "all or nothing" mentality coming from?  Seriously?

If I had just disagreed with her on this one point I would have kept listening, but what lost me was death by statistics..."this number is this number so this thing is this thing".  After an hour I gave up and put it on the DNF list.

I'd recommend the companion podcast episode in place of the book.  I did have some of the same gripes with the episode, but it was only an hour so they focused more on the issues instead of a bunch of numbers.  I also think that I might have fared better with the book version instead of the audio version since I could have just skimmed past the numbers to the content, assuming that there was any.

Peace out!  Ever made mac n'cheese or jo-jo's from scratch?  Has anyone seen Ladyhawke?  Am I being too harsh on "You Just Need to Lose Weight"?