Weekly Round Up: Still In It

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  I know I've been absent for a few weeks, but I'm still in it.  Lemme catch you up.

Eats

Move over Cheap Lazy Vegan!   Lately I've been watching Sarah's Vegan Kitchen videos on Youtube.  As a reminder, I'm not vegan but I enjoy good food and these videos are the perfect background to relax to when I find myself in front of the TV.

I made the cabbage crunch salad with sesame panko tofu.  My notes are:

• Made the salad as written but with the shortcut of a bag of Trader Joe's coleslaw mix in place of the veggies.
  
• Used peanut butter and crushed peanuts.
• I had serious doubts that 1/3 cup flour and 1/3 cup milk would be enough for dredging the tofu.  Sure enough I came up a bit short but it went further than I thought.  Part of the reason could be that I cut my tofu into smaller pieces than she did.  For the remaining pieces I just lightly sprayed them with oil and dipped them in the panko mixture.
• If this sounds like something you'd be into, I recommend getting on it

For family dinners, Jo Cook's cheesy chicken broccoli pasta caught my eye.  I made it on Saturday for date night with the hubs, and somehow the leftovers stretched into a full family dinner tonight.  If you're looking for something easy but elegant that's been endorsed by all members of my household (including me, the certified chicken hater), this is your dish.  The only change that I made was shortening the chicken cooking time.  The recipe starts with cooking the chicken, and adding onions with more cooking time, and then boiling the chicken with the pasta...uh that's some well cooked chicken there.  I cooked up the chicken and then took it out of the pan, let it rest while I cooked everything else, and then added it back in at the end.

Workouts

Still doing the Caroline Girvan thing/still doing the walk-run thing.  I got inspired by all of those "100 days left in the year" posts a few weeks back, and my "100 day" thing is to stay consistent with pushups until the end of the year.  In theory by them they'll be a habit and/or I'll have pushup gainz to show off.  I still can't do them in the context of a workout, but I'm in a good groove of doing sets of 6-8 reps throughout the day, three days a week.

Watching

A lot of Youtube.  Minimal in the way of actual TV shows or movies.

Reading

Here's what's been going down:

• I'm about halfway through Tomorrow Will Be Better by Betty Smith.  Sigh, do you really need me to tell you that it's no ATGIB?  Both are books about poor people, but ATGIB has rich characters, heart, and all of the Brooklyn ambience.  Tomorrow is just a book about poor people with the occasional mention of Brooklyn.
  
• I read the current "it" book: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang.  The story of an Unsuccessful Author (UA) who is friends with a Successful Author (SA).  One night they get together, and UA happens to see SA's rough draft of her next book, which conveniently exists only on paper since the SA is anti-tech and notoriously secretive about her work.  A freak accident happens and SA dies.  UA just happens to leave the scene with the manuscript, just happens to make a few tweaks to it, and the next thing you know UA just happens to have written the newest "it" book.  But oops SA is Asian and UA is not, and the book is about Chinese culture, so her publisher figures it's fine to give UA's name an Asian tweak.
  
• What I liked: I LOVED the main character!  No I would never walk away with someone else's manuscript let alone have the writing chops to pass it off as my own and get it published, but the way the temptation is laid out is so juicy.
• What I didn't: at times I felt like the book got bogged down in Woke Culture, which was overkill when we're already doing plagiarism and yellowface. After a solid start and middle, my interest started to peter out toward the end, your call on whether that was a "me" problem or a book problem.  It was a fun ride and I recommend it.
  
• Last but not least, I continued my Nora Ephron binge by listening to I Remember Nothing on my lastest road trip.  I'd read it back in the day but didn't really remember it, and now I know why.  It's basically I Feel Bad About My Neck 2.  There's nothing wrong with that, quite the contrary, but there's nothing that really stands out about it.  It's a very efficient three hour listen.

That's all for this week!  I'm in a busy phase so my posting schedule might be choppy for a bit.