Weekly Roundup: Back at it

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Sigh, the problem with taking blogging PTO is that things do tend to pile up. 

It's going to take me a hot minute to get my solo week long vacation on the blog, but it was everything that I hoped that it would be.  For right now I'll drop a hint on one of the places that I went when we get to talking about movies and books, and I'll come back a bit later and take you along with a series of blog posts.  We've got a lot of stuff to talk about in the meantime!

Food

I knew even before I left on vacation that my first meal back at home was going to be Rainbow Plant Life's Braised Tofu.  I already had most of the ingredients at home, so it was just a quick stop by the grocery store for a red pepper and green onions and I was in business.

My changes to the recipe were (1) air fry the tofu because it's hands off and IMO better tasting, (2) use a dash of sriracha instead of sishuan chili flakes cuz I didn't have any, (3) mirin instead of black vinegar for the same reason, and (4) vehemently disagree that this recipe is 3-4 servings.  It's two servings as long as you have a bit of discipline.  This was sooooo good and please take note of the technique of stir frying the garlic/ginger/et al in chili oil.  That added a ton of flavor up front and I'll be stealing that suggestion for other recipes.

My current lunch obsession is Bibim Guksu (cold noodles in spicy sauce).  You prepare it to be all pretty looking and then mix it together when you start eating it.  I followed the recipe pretty closely for this one.  Really my only change is no lettuce, smuggle some shredded tofu in with the noodles, and top with fried onions for a little extra fun. 

My final hit is The Foodie Takes Flight Stir Fried Spicy Udon Garlic Noodles.  Like seriously where has this recipe been all my life?  The only change that I made was using a decent amount of regular mushrooms instead of 3.5 ounces of shiitake mushrooms - that's what the grocery store has and I'm not going to get out a scale in the middle of cooking, I'm going to eyeball it.  When I make this again I'm going to increase the sauce just a skosh but otherwise this is shear perfection.  Though we have another serving size dispute - she says this is 2 servings and I say it's 3 but if I ever got hungry enough I'd be happy to see things her way so there's no need for a fight.

Workouts

This is the boring part of my recap.  As planned I biked to my heart's content on vacation, and then came home and eased back into my normal routine.  I did the one week long Caroline Girvan No Repeat series, which is a slew of shorter workouts.  I skipped the cardio/HIIT workouts because those didn't look like my jam and heads up that her idea of no repeat is not the same as most people's idea of no repeat, but in general I liked the program.

Watching

I managed to squeeze in a few movies on vacation.

First up, I rewatched one of the all times greats.  A Matter of Life and Death asks the question what happens when you're supposed to die but don't?  It's WWII and Peter's plane is in the middle of a crash that goes on just long enough for him to make the choice between staying in the plane and being burned alive or jumping without a parachute and going splat.  He opts for the jump and hours later he wakes up on a beach in one piece with only a headache so it seems like he made the right choice.  Meanwhile in heaven it turns out that Peter was supposed to die and now the records are out of balance.  The heavenly powers try to convince Peter to come over to the other side where he belongs while Peter's doctor thinks there is a different explanation for what's going on - but who is right?  The scenes on earth are in the most gorgeous of gorgeous 1940s Technicolor and the scenes in heaven are in black and white - you get to make of that what you will.

From what I gather it seems like this movie started as propaganda to improve US and UK relations post WWII but all that's left from that is a clunky scene in heaven about whether the UK or UK is better.  Whatever the beef was back then this movie must have solved it so now all that's left is for us to sit back and enjoy it.

 

Vacation movie # 2 is an Alfred Hitchcock that should be better known.  I can't find a decent Youtube teaser for Stage Fright, but the gist is that a famous stage actress kills her husband.  She turns to an actor who has a crush on her for help, and in the process he gets incriminated and no one suspects her.  He goes on the run while his girlfriend goes undercover to figure out what really happened.

Vacation movie # 3 is an lesser known Alfred Hitchcock that as far as I'm concerned can stay that way.  The Trouble with Harry is about a group of people who find a body (Harry) and have to figure out what to do with him.  The Trouble with this movie is that neither Harry, how he died, or anything else is that interesting.  

My final vacation watch was a documentary.  Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word is Power.  And if you're saying "huh that seems like a weird thing to watch on vacation" I'm saying "wink wink that's the hint that I promised you about where I went;-)" 

Reading

I finished Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano.  This book was being hyped to the point where I was getting annoyed but I'd seen enough "this is the real deal" chatter to give it a chance.  And thank goodness because yes this book is the real deal so I'm happy to add to the hype 😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻

I feel like the right background to bring to the book is what I had, which was nothing.  But OK, it's about the romance between a man who is estranged from his family and a woman with a large, loving family.  There are four daughters and some clever nods to Little Women.  That's enough of a background.

I need to warn you that unless you are a lot more stoic than me, you're going to want to read the final 25% of this book in private with a big box of Kleenex handy.  Normally when I say that something made me cry, I mean that I dropped a few tears and maybe had to blow my nose.  This was a big fat looong ugly sob fest where the Kleenex was not optional.  And yes it's possible to have a big fat cry and still love a book.

In a less exciting vein, I finished MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend, which was the one about a woman who moved away from her friends and went on a quest to make new ones, specifically having a "girl date" once a week for a year.  It was an interesting but EXHAUSTING process.

Another interesting but less exciting audio book for the road was Stash: My Life in Hiding by Laura Cathcart Robbins, which is an addiction memoir with a twist.  The twist is that Robbins made the leap from high school dropout to self made owner of a Hollywood PR firm to Big Deal Director's Wife.  Along the way she picked up a massive ambien addiction and had to tackle a divorce plus the addiction in one go.  All that I can say is that if I were a Big Deal Hollywood Director's Wife, I'd need a lot more than ambien to get through it because it sounds like a miserable way to live.  

Last but not least!  I did say that I encountered something Margaret Atwood related on vacay, so it was finally time to stop intending to get around to reading her someday and start turning the pages.  About mid way through the discussion in the documentary, I hit pause and got myself on Libby to get The Handmaid's Tale on my Kindle ASAP.

My words fail me besides to tell you that it did not disappoint.  The stunning thing is that it's a work of fiction that is firmly based on nonfiction.  Atwood "limited" herself to only writing about things that have actually happened to women.  For example, there was a cult where women were called Handmaids.  I put off reading this for so long because I thought it would be pompous and outdated, and I think that anyone who's read it can back me up that this is a 40 year old tightly written page turner with an eerily contemporary feel.  There is about a 100% chance that I'll be starting the TV show soon.

Your turn!  Cooked anything good recently?  Have you read The Handmaid's Tale or seen the show?