stocking weather

It's coming.  It will be here before you realize, making even the fittest women feel like slobs.

Stocking season.

Now, I know bare legs have been the trend lately, but nothing is going to change the fact that every day it gets a little further into autumn, a little closer to winter, and the new season of stylish legwear is making its way into stores: tights, stockings, nylons - whatever you want to call them, they are coming and they are cruel.

You can cheat a little - I know I do - by wearing thigh-high stockings, but there comes a part of winter when it's too bitterly cold for anything but serious, sweater-material, covering every-last-part-of-my-legs stockings.  This is the part where I start wondering if I've been deceiving myself when I see a woman in the mirror who appears to be an appropriate weight.  By design, stockings are meant to be tight - this helps to prevent adding bulk to the legs and prevents any possibility of cold air squeezing in.  That does not mean they don't give otherwise healthy-weighted women a "fat" complex upon donning them the first, second, or hormonally-driven time.

Why do I tell you all of this?

I have been a size 4, more or less, for about 13 years.  Since my early twenties, I have managed to stay within a 10-pound range in my weight, with a couple of odd life circumstances bleeding an extra few pounds on one side or the other for a very brief time.  Over the course of my life, I've been subjected to the misdirected ire of overweight and obese women.  Some "can't wait" until I get fat, others insist I weigh so little because I don't eat anything.  More than a few people want to blame my horribly restricted dietary choices for my ability to maintain my weight, but let me tell you - there are plenty of fattening vegan foods.  For heaven's sake, there are several cookbooks devoted solely to making delicious vegan desserts, followed by a vegan diet cookbook...

No, friends, the reason I have done a fair job of maintaining my weight for most of my adult life is because I keep myself in check.

I know that sounds boring as heck, but it's true.  If you've been reading Angst Loves Spinach for a little while, you may have even experienced some of my "OMGINeedToDetox!!!" moments already.  Well, hold onto your hats, because I'm pretty sure stocking season will bring on another round of that panic/vigilance.  Which is good.  Because I'm having Mardi Gras a few months early.

Every once in a while, I have a day where I am completely aware that I am taking in way more calories than my body needs and I do it anyway because sometimes, I just can't make myself care.  Now and then, I have a week or weeks like that...that is when I start to gain weight.  Not a lot, of course - it takes far more effort than you might imagine to gain a lot of weight (unless there are extenuating circumstances), but my skirts fit a little tighter, I like my profile a little less in a full length mirror, and I dread putting on full stockings.

After a healthy breakfast, a several-hundred-calorie snack at our staff meeting this morning, and two large slices of tomato pie (more in a minute - let me finish my self-flaggelation first), I recognized that I was probably about topped out for my small body's caloric needs for the day, but I still had my heart set on Put the Tex in Your Mex Chili from The 30 Minute Vegan for dinner tonight, served with a generous bowlful of tortilla chips, which I have come to accept as our standard "utensils" on Chili Night.

testing the limits of my saute pan... crowded much? 

It really is a fabulous recipe - two kinds of beans, two kinds of peppers, an acceptable amount of garlic (not that I needed more after lunch today!) and seitan, among other things.  It's hearty, savory, and fun to scoop with tortilla chips.  Fortunately, I was able to stop after just one bowlful purely because I don't want to have someone carting me to work in a wheelbarrow tomorrow.

Ah, well.... as I used to tell my clients when I worked for a weight loss company, tomorrow is a new day with new opportunities to make healthy choices.

Now, about that lunch: any local readers, please do yourselves a favor.  If you find yourself in the vicinity of 21st and Chestnut Streets, find a way to be hungry and then head into Mix Restaurant and Bar.  I went there for lunch today with a colleague, so I can't speak for the bar part of the restaurant, but the pizza!  They have several pies available from which you can select a slice, including a masterful tomato pie: fresh chunks of tomato, tons of garlic, olive oil, and an artful spiral of jade green pesto adorning the pie.  I thoroughly enjoyed both of my pieces and happily wolfed them down accompanied by water they don't charge you for and a delightful lunchtime conversation.

I absolutely do not regret my lunch choice and I will do it again (with an overpowering mint gum as a chaser, in the best interests of my customers), but again, the time for moderation is at hand... we can't start stocking season with a over-thought body image crisis, can we?

2 ways to pre-game Friday

Today is kind of like Friday Part One.  I took tomorrow off from work because Mister and I have big plans.  Well, actually, Mister's and my big plans could have been accomplished by taking a half day, but I decided to take advantage of the fact that PIFA is still going on and avail myself on some free arts stuff.

Some women go to a salon/spa to pamper themselves.  I go to museums and live music with food carts.

Today was also an interesting food day.  It was Hot Dog Day at work.  It never fails to completely astonish me how much crappy food we serve our employees at a weight loss company.  This year's Hot Dog Day was only more civilized than last year's in two small ways:

1. We managed to avoid polluting Earth Day with our little tubes of nitrates and leftover skin.
2. We managed to avoid the novelty of a fat and toothless man serving hot dogs from his little cart.

Apart from that, it served as a reminder of two more things:

1. Just because we work for a company trying to establish itself as a total wellness solution and just because we aim to teach overweight and obese people how to establish healthy eating habits while losing weight on our program does not mean we feed our employees healthy food.

2. If there is something novel available, like, say, veggie dogs, people will choose that over their pink tubes of manipulated meat out of pure curiosity.  Unfortunately, this can end with no food for the people who can only eat the veggie dogs...people like me.

I'm trying to "be the bigger person" (not literally, obviously) and look at this from a generous and enlightened perspective, but there are two points at war within me:

1. I really, really want to focus on how awesome it was that so many meat-eaters voluntarily chose to eat something that was not dead.  I want to be happy for their excellent choice of a [albeit processed] vegetarian protein over their usual choice of rotting, preserved flesh.  I want to believe that running out of veggie dogs before the event was half over will indicate to management that there is a larger interest in good, non-meat options than they originally thought and that this revelation will result in more veggie choices in future events.

2. I wish they had "reserved" at least enough for the known vegetarians, and allowed omnis to eat "extras."  I mean, really.  I, like everyone else, had believed the company was feeding me today, so I did not bring lunch.  Them running out of veggie dogs resulted in me having to buy my lunch at the cafe, who, fortunately, had vegetarian lentil soup for me to dunk my naked hot dog rolls in.

In any case, I was happy to head home at the end of a very busy and hungry day and find that Mister was actually awake and alert.  I had nothing to say last night because when I got home, Mister was passed out in the dark in the bedroom, got up for about an hour and a half before giving up and going back to bed.  In the absence of a formal, cooked dinner, I had a grilled peanut butter sandwich and a plate of strawberries.  It was a nice little dinner, but nothing to blog about, especially since the strawberries could have been a lot closer to in season.  Speaking of seasons, I know Mister and I are quite ready to wave Allergy Season goodbye.

So, despite Mister's ambivalent hunger, I set about making Mediterranean Chickpeas and Vegetables, from the July 1998 Cooking Light magazine.  Click the meal name for the recipe - and you should - it's tasty and very easy.  If you have precooked rice, or use a faster cooking rice like Basmati or Jasmine, or even a fast-cooking grain like bulgur or couscous, you can easily get this on the table in 30 minutes, which was exactly what I was aiming to do.

It has been such a long time since we've had this that I'm pretty sure I've never served it in those bowls...which we got the first Christmas after we were married (2007).  See, it took me quite a long time to find my cooking "wings" so for the first several years of our vegetarian lives together, I just kind of made the same things in an ever-widening rotation.  I was always trying to learn new recipes, I just hadn't become confident enough in my ability to cook to take as many chances as I do now.  So, before I learned how fun it is to be adventurous in your menu selection, even if it leads to disaster from time to time, we would generally do a rotation of pizza, pasta, veggie burgers w/fries, pizza, rice and beans, my own weak version of veggie lo mein, pizza, and rice cooked in vegetable broth with whatever vegetables I found palatable that day sauteed in some olive oil with not quite enough garlic.  And pizza - did I mention that?  Yeah, Mister and I ate a lot of pizza when we stopped eating animals.

Anyway, this had a high priority in our rotation because it was the first time I thought to combine canned tomatoes with the sauteed veggies and definitely the first time I realized you could have beans (chickpeas) and rice AND veggies - I know, it blew my mind at the time, too.  So, I probably overdid it a bit, so when I started building my cookbook collection, it fell away.

I'm glad I made it and I'll probably try to remember to make it a little more frequently than once every 3 years or so, because it's really good and simple.  I always enjoy the recipes that involve bay leaves because they lend such a bizarre flavor to dishes; smoky, like I mentioned.

Anyway, I have some French wine to drink in preparation for my day of French fun tomorrow.  I'm so glad I decided to take the day off - I so enjoyed the PIFA gala and I've wanted to attend far more than I have, but alas... that whole pesky working-6-days-a-week thing gets in the way of a lot of things I want to do.  I plan to enjoy every moment of tomorrow and hope to capture as much as I can on film so we can have a little picture party tomorrow night in preparation for Real Friday.

Bonne nuit et Beaux rêves, mes amis, à demain!

mine over manners

In one hour, it will be my birthday.

I am all snuffly but still hopeful that if I just keep warm and get a good night's sleep, I will wake up tomorrow feeling rested, refreshed, and most importantly, not sick.

I have recently come up against several obstacles to maintaining my awesome record of health.  In case you haven't been paying attention, I've spent at least one sentence in almost every post I've written since November complaining about just how darn cold it is in Philadelphia.  Stick with me - I promise I only want to say one thing about it.  In addition to making my face hurt (insert mean, overused joke here), prolonged exposure to cold does actually weaken the immune system, making a person more susceptible to....everything else.

I'm sure walking a mile in the cold and then traveling via public transportation are probably a Disaster Cocktail, garnished with a few well-placed germy hand-rails that you could avoid touching if the stairs weren't slick and wet with the melting snow and slush of dozens of boots... I'm not a fan of that weird evaporating sanitizing germ-weapon people call Purell, but I may reconsider my position shortly.  It seems like I've been at least a little sick each month I've been traveling by train.

Even if we somehow pass through the gauntlet of hostile micro-organisms and get to work safely, let's not forget that I work in a cube farm with about 500 other people.  At any given time, at least 25% are sick and 2-5% have some kind of plague.  This time of year?  It seems like every January, at least 50% of the people I work with the closest/most frequently contract Black Death and then spread it around the office before staying out of work for a week.  Also, I am always the last to fall.  Maybe it IS because I take care of myself or maybe it's because I am stubborn wench and I'm still in denial that I'm sick (even though my nose is getting raw).

You know what I think is the icing on the proverbial cake?  The buffet.  Feel free to put on your flashback hat and travel back in time to read about The Salad Plague last year.  I may have mentioned that management is providing lunch again this year, but this time, instead of hand-delivered pre-plated meals, they set up a buffet for self-service.

There are a million things wrong with this.  The obvious one (especially if you click that link) is that every single person who partakes is using the same tongs to grab their food.  If you take just a moment to think about the implications, you'll realize the absurdity that we don't want them to pick up the rolls or cookies with their hands.  They'll get their germs everywhere!

The one that is less obvious will lead into tonight's PSA (a little different from my summer rant).  Three times every day, the catering crew sets up the food and helps supervise the buffet.  Although they regularly bring multiple trays of whatever (non-vegan) thing they are serving, they run out of food every single day at every single serving time before everyone has had a chance to eat.  The food is usually completely gone within 20 minutes of being set down.

The enthusiasm the employees are showing for the food they've been provided is not what troubles me.  What troubles me is their complete disregard for one another.  There is absolutely no thought given to how many people might be in line behind ME as long as I get MY food.  Maybe it's just the way I was raised (you know, with manners...), but when I go through a self-service buffet, I take a roll, a modest but appropriate amount of salad, one moderate portion of the offerings that interest me/I can eat, and one cookie.  Not these folks...nope.  Apparently, they will never eat again so they pile their plates so high there is an actual, visible peak of food, as well as possibly a whole second plate for their mountain of salad, and a smaller plate piled up with 3-5 cookies.  So, here's your friendly, office-hood PSA about self-service buffets:

1. First of all, you work for a weight loss company, for God's sake.  Do you really need 5 cookies?

2. The first shall be last and the last shall be first: the closer you are to the front of the line, the more miserly you should be in your own portions, to ensure your hard-working colleagues will also be able to eat.

3. If you feel like you need to hide that you are taking 5 cookies, you must know you're being a jerk, so just don't do it.

4. If there are only 3 rolls left in the bowl, you should try really hard to limit yourself to one.  If you want to go the extra mile, you could let the caterers know we're about to run out of something.  Of course, you could just take two or three because you're actually the only person who matters and if people wanted rolls, they should have gotten here sooner so it's really their fault.  Or, you're a big jerk.

I could keep going, but I think you get the idea.  I just do not understand the reasoning.  Where are these people's manners??  Who raised them?  Did they all come from the slums of Norristown and have to fight their five half-brothers for cereal in the morning and then have to eat it with water because their jerk half-brother used all the milk?  That might be a reasonable excuse, but I refuse to believe that it the case for half of the employees.  It's just appalling to me.  Appalling because I think you should practice what you preach, and we preach portion control, and appalling because it displays absolutely no respect for another single human being in the office.

In other news, since my rye roll and chocolate chip cookie appear to have finally infected me with Bubonic Plague, helped along, no doubt, by the intrinsic cleanliness and sterility of public transit, although I briefly entertained the notion of making Corn Chowder for dinner, we ordered Chinese.

If you're ever in Philly, Golden Empress Garden on 5th St, just below South St, has one of the best veg-friendly menus outside of Chinatown.  That's the Garlic Chicken.  It was supposed to have red and green peppers, but I like snow peas, carrots, and baby corn, so I'm okay with the substitutions.  It was just as tasty as it looks.