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Posts published in “Fitness”

Thoughts on our 2023 Whole30

Sarah and I finished our sort-of-annual Whole30 this week. It’s a nice thing to do once a year or so when you feel like it’s time to clean up your act a little. And it’s a good way to be thoughtful about your eating and drinking, even if those aren’t problem areas for you. We’ve done it a bunch of times over the years and some are harder than others. This was one of the more challenging ones.

For those who aren’t familiar, the Whole30 is an elimination diet/habit-breaking challenge. For 30 days you don’t eat added sugar of any sort, grains, legumes, dairy, carrageenan, or alcohol. Additionally, you don’t recreate baked goods or treats with approved ingredients. So, no Whole30 cupcakes, no Whole30 pancakes, no Whole30 whiskey sours. You get the idea. Finally—and this isn’t a huge deal for me—you aren’t allowed to weigh yourself during the month.

Not so bad, right? With a little practice, it’s not. The real issue comes with the sheer amount of label-reading you are required to do. You’d be surprised how many items in your grocery store have banned ingredients in them. No added sugars isn’t just no white sugar; it’s also dextrose or maltose or sucrose or many others. No grains isn’t just no bread; it’s also no canola oil or corn starch or rice. No legumes isn’t just no beans; it’s also no soy sauce or peanut oil or tofu.

Go ahead. Read the ingredients in your pantry items. You’ll see all of these things in there. It’s a lot.

The first time you do this, it’s a real challenge and requires quite a lot of learning. But, as mentioned above, this isn’t our first time. It might be our sixth or seventh? We’ve got the label-reading thing pretty dialed in.

All that aside, I’ve got some thoughts and reflections about my experience on this most recent Whole30.

  • I lost 14 pounds this time, from 227 to 213. Losing weight isn’t the point, but it was worth noting.
  • I finally figured out how to make sweet potatoes that I actually like. The secret ingredient is salt. Here’s how you do it: peel and halve you sweepots. Slice into 1/4″ thick semi-circles. Toss with olive oil, more salt than you think, black pepper, paprika, cayenne pepper, and garlic powder. Spread on a half sheet pan. Throw into a preheated 450°F oven and let cook for like 35 minutes, stirring a couple times. That’s it. Fantastic.
  • Sliced napa cabbage is a great bulking item for lunch leftover stir fries. Finish it with a splash of rice vinegar.
  • I didn’t miss dairy at all. I like to have it as a snack, but I realize that I actually just like fancy cheese as a treat.
  • I also didn’t miss alcohol that much. I missed having something to sit down with and wind down, but not the beer or wine itself. It would be nice to find an adequate replacement. Tea won’t do it.
  • In past Whole30s, I would get through the first 7 to 10 days and suddenly feel great with all the added sugar and booze out of my system. This time not so much. The primary difference this time is that I have three small children and don’t get nearly the same quality or amount of rest I used to. Do with that observation what you will.
  • Radishes really scratch a lot of snacking itches. Dress with flake salt.
  • Thank god you can still drink coffee.

That’s it. I recommend the program if you’re at all interested in tinkering with your nutrition and habits. It’s pretty eye-opening and, once you’ve figured it out, it becomes a nice reset button.

Cookin’ With Lasers – Vegan Stuffed Acorn Squash

A few days ago, I was speaking with a friend of mine about a project we were working on for Moms Against Poverty and we got to chatting. The topic of dinner came up and I told him I made some sausage and pepper roasted acorn squash—a staple dish of mine as the nights get longer. He responded with interest, curiosity, and a smidge of amazement (which is wholly undeserved). It is an incredibly easy, flexible recipe that should really be in anyone’s back pocket.

To dispel the mystery surrounding stuffed acorn squash, and because Bobak doesn’t dig on animal products, here’s a vegan version of my stuffed acorn squash that I have never made. Consider this my gift.

Vegan Stuffed Acorn Squash

Ingredients

  • An acorn squash, you could use another kind of squash too, but make sure it has a decent sized seed cavity. Spaghetti, kabocha, whatever, would be fine too.
  • Some mushrooms
  • A bell pepper, any color is fine
  • A decent sized onion, or two smaller onions
  • A clove or two of garlic, or more garlic if you like garlic
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Tomato paste, or not, your call
  • Other spices you like, just make sure they go together
  • Cooking oil

Equipment needed

  • Sheet pan
  • A pot of some sort, could also be a big skillet
  • Knives?
  • Probably some other stuff I am forgetting

Phase 1 – Squash

Preheat your oven to 425°.

Cut your acorn squash in half. Scoop out the seeds with a spoon. If you run a paring knife around the inside of the seed cavity, they are much easier to scoop out. Or you can just use a spoon, like a savage.

Slice a sliver off the back side of the squash to create a flat spot for it to rest on the sheet pan. It sucks when they roll around and dump the filling out. Cutting the flat spot creates a handy little platform. You’re welcome.

Lightly rub the top, inside, and new flat spot with your cooking oil. Olive oil is fine. Avocado oil is good too. Use whatever you like. You don’t need a ton of oil. Just a thin layer to act as a conductor for the heat in the air of the oven and the exposed squash.

Place the oiled halves on the sheet pan, cavity-up, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Don’t be shy. Consider that you are salting the entire volume of the squash’s flesh. Of course, you can always add more salt later to taste. You’re a big boy (or girl, or otherwise). You can figure it out.

Put the squash into the oven for about 30 minutes, or until the flesh is tender. If you have a small squash, reduce the time to 20 minutes. You’re precooking the squash so that when we fill it later, it requires less time to cook through.

Once time is up, pull the squash from the oven and set aside. Leave the oven on.

Phase 2 – Filling

Dice up your vegetables. Not too small. You don’t want them turning to mush. Or maybe you do. Whatever makes you happy. I prefer to have texture of individual elements.

If you like garlic, mince or grate it. Good job.

Heat a little cooking oil in your pot or skillet. Put your garlic in. Once you can smell the garlic, add in the onion. Cook the onion for a few minutes until it turns lightly translucent. We’re cutting the raw onion edge, not caramelizing.

Add the rest of the vegetables and cook them until they are cooked. Rocket science.

Add a squeeze of tomato paste, salt, pepper, and whatever spices you chose because you are a grown-up and being a grown-up means learning to live with the choices we make.

If you’re feeling a little sassy, you can add a splash of water or vegetable stock, bring the liquid to a boil, reduce the heat of your stove, and let it reduce. It will help the vegetables’ flavor meld together a bit. It’s not necessary though, and this recipe works better when the filling isn’t super wet. Do what you want.

Phase 3 – Stuffing the squash

Now that your squash is precooked and your filling is ready, put the filling into the squash. A small mound just above the lip of the seed cavity is good. If it is overfilled, you risk spilling and then having the filling burn in the oven. If it’s underfilled, well, then you might as well just eat the fucking squash plain and call it a day.

Don’t worry about using all the filling. If you have extra (and you probably will) save it and eat it with rice or something the next day. It’s good that way.

Pop the filled squash back into the oven for another 30 minutes. Again, less for small squashes.

After the time’s up check the squash. The flesh should be very tender. If so, it’s done. Let it cool because that shit is hot as hell on the inside.

Congratulations! You roasted your very own stuffed acorn squash.


Photo by Kim Daniels on Unsplash

Cookin’ With Lasers – Sausage & Sage Stuffing

My friend Nicole was recently giving me my monthly haircut and we got to chatting about Thanksgiving. She mentioned that no one in her family was good at making stuffing, which was surprising to me because stuffing might just be the easiest, most delicious part of a Thanksgiving spread. Because I am such a generous soul, I offered to send her my recipe for stuffing, which I basically stole from Mark Bittman. Ok, ok, maybe not stole, but definitely adapted.

Granted, Thanksgiving is past at this point, but Christmas is coming up and stuffing is just as good then as it is any other time. Make it during the summer time, too! It’s good!

So, in the interest of bragging about my selfless, generous nature, here is my recipe. Feel free to follow it or change it or do whatever. It’s your life.

Sausage & Sage Stuffing

Ingredients:
1.5 lb sausage, herby Italian, not spicy
2 loaves of bread, I like sourdough
Butter, 1 stick, unsalted
Yellow onion, 1 medium
Celery, to match the onion
Fresh sage, half cup
Fresh thyme, quarter cup
Fresh flat leaf parsley, maybe half a cup?
Chicken stock, unsalted, for wetness
Salt, to taste
Pepper, to taste

1) Slice and toast the bread. Allow it to cool. If you’re really nuts, I like to toast the bread on the grill. I think it give the toast better flavor and better color to the stuffing in the end. You might need to scrape off some more burnt bits, but sometimes you have to suffer for your art.

Pulse the toasted bread slices in a food processor until both loaves are broken up decently. I like a mix of medium and small chunks. Save the toast powder this creates.

2) If you could only get sausage links, pull the meat out of the casing. If it’s loose, you’re set to go. In a dutch oven, cook the sausage until it’s done. Break it up into crumbles while cooking. Remove it from the dutch oven.

Dice your onion and celery. You want approximately equal portions of each. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in the dutch oven. Sauté the onion and celery in the dutch oven until soft. Salt and pepper. Add the sausage back with its accumulated juice. Stir in the sage, thyme, and parsley.

3) Next add the bread crumbs and dust. I find it’s easiest to do this in two passes. Stir the it all up in the dutch oven.

Add the chicken stock. Again, I like to do this in steps. Add some, mix it in, add some more, mix it in. That way you know when to stop. The right amount of liquid yields soft toast crumbs, but is not soupy. Better to be sparing on the liquid as you can always add more later, but you can’t get rid of it. You’re just going to need to suss out this volume yourself.

4) Bring the stuffing up to temp over medium heat for a couple minutes. Just until it’s hot. Now taste it. It should probably not be salty enough, so add more salt, but be sparing as it concentrates a little before serving. If it’s lightly salty, to your preference, then it’s good.

Transfer to a crock pot set to Warm until you are ready to serve. I like to put another two one-tablespoon pats of butter on top of the stuffing when I put it in the dutch oven. It will slowly melt and butter is good, so fuck it why not.

Yields 6 to 7 quarts. So much.

Cookin’ With Lasers – Wingin’ It Cottage Pie (Whole30 compliant)

I cook a lot, and I have been cooking with a heavy paleo bent for a long time. And, since Sarah and I are doing the Whole30 this month, I thought it might be fun to share some of my recipes with you all. Note: if you are looking for precision in your recipes, buy a cookbook. I’m just going to tell you how I do it, and you can make it work for yourself.

Cottage Pie is a generic term for a dish using leftover meat topped with mashed potatoes which is then baked again. It’s a pretty solid and filling meal-in-a-bowl and it holds up to reheating perfectly so you can make a bunch and eat it throughout the week. The dish is also commonly referred to as Shepherd’s Pie, but I’ve always understood that to be mutton-based (shepherd = sheep, obviously). I’ve also heard the dish referred to as Chinese Pie when made with ground beef instead of mutton or lamb as a reference to Chinese immigrant laborers building the railroads who didn’t have access to mutton, but did have access to beef. But, Cottage Pie is more common (and less potentially racist?) so Cottage Pie it is.

This is also a good recipe since it’s not precise at all. And I mean AT ALL. You can take my ideas here and adapt them however you like. I cooked this thing according to the ingredients below recently, but next time it will be different. As long as you follow good cooking practice, you basically can’t fuck this up.

Wingin’ It Cottage Pie

Ingredients:
4 or 5 biggish sweet potatoes
1.5 lb ground beef
1 mediumish carrot
2 or 3 celery spears
1 medium onion
4 tomatoes on the vine or roma tomatoes or other tomatoes about that size
1 14oz can crushed tomatoes
Garlic cloves as per your preference
1 box low-sodium beef stock
Ghee
Spices: salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, cumin, paprika, coriander, oregano, thyme, garlic, parsley, whatever the hell you want, really.

Steps 1, 2, and 3-6 can sort of be done at the same time. There’s a lot of waiting to be done, so multitask.

1) Peel and cut your sweet potatoes into similarly sized chunks. Not too big, but don’t waste your time making them super small either. It’s more important that they are all about the same size since they will cook more evenly.

Throw those bad boys into a big stock pot and add some salt. Maybe like a teaspoon per sweet potato, kind of like salting pasta water (but pasta is right out on the Whole30 so don’t even THINK about it, bro). Whatever. The amount of salt isn’t super critical. Use your best judgment.

Fill the pot with water so there’s an inch or so of water on top of the sweet potato chunks. They should be floating a little.

Cover the pot and stick it on the stove on high. When it comes to a rolling boil, reduce to a simmer and let simmer for like 30 minutes. Should be totally good after that. After 30 minutes, drain the pot. Then drizzle the potatoes with a little olive oil if you like (or don’t) and salt and pepper and mash the shit out them. They should be nearly pureed. If you want to stick them in a food process or something you can, but that’s a ton of extra dishes and not at all necessary. Just use a potato masher like a grown-up.

Cover the pot and set aside.

2) Dice your tomatoes into smallish chunks. Again, actual size isn’t that important. Like big chunks? Leave them big! Like small chunks? Dice the hell out of them! Don’t like tomatoes at all? Fuck it! Omit this step completely!

Get a pot, like one of those 3 quart guys, and get it hot. Add a little bit of ghee and sauté the tomato chunks until they look pretty cooked. Add some red pepper flakes because they are good. Salt and pepper too, of course.

Once the tomatoes are pretty cooked, stir in half the canned crushed tomatoes and set the rest aside for a little bit. Bring the sautéed tomato/crushed tomato mix to a simmer and then cover and reduce to super low. We don’t want it to cook, just to stay warm.

3) Dice your carrot, celery, and onion. I like a small dice, but do whatever the hell you like; it’s your life. Also dice up a couple cloves of garlic, but keep it separate from the carrotceleryonion mix.

Heat a large, high-walled pan (a dutch oven works great for this) over medium-high heat. Once it’s hot add a tablespoon-ish of ghee (full disclosure: I have no idea what a tablespoon looks like, I just eyeball it based on experience) which will melt within 20 seconds. Add in your garlic and let it cook for not too long. We don’t want it to burn, just to open up a little.

Once the garlic is slightly browner, add in the carrotceleryonion. Salt that shit. It helps draw out the excess water and makes it more delicious. Cook those guys together over medium-high heat until the celery is soft and the onions are fairly reduced in size. Keep stirring. The carrots will still look raw because carrots are jerks and you can’t trust them. Once they’re nice and cooked (5 to 7 minutes, maybe less, probably a touch more) take them out of the pan and set them aside for now.

4) Add another dollop of ghee to the pan and, once it melts, toss in your ground beef. Salt it and raise the heat to high.

Cook your beef until it’s cooked. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. Just keep stirring that shit until it’s done. You’ll know because it will be brown, you know, like cooked beef.

Lots of recipes will tell you to drain the juice at this step, but I say bullshit to that. Leave the juice in the pan. That shit is delicious. Juice drainers can go to hell.

5) Add the cooked veggies from Step 3 to the cooked beef from Step 4 and mix those guys together. Yum! It smells good! Reduce the heat to medium for now.

Time to add spices. I like to use cheap-shit paprika as a base. It gives a nice color, the cheap stuff isn’t spicy, and it kind of goes with everything. I also add salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, cumin, parsley, and whatever I mentioned above. It doesn’t really matter that much. I like these ones so this is what I use. Use whatever spice combo you like. Ground beef is basically like a blank flavor palette, so follow your joy.

Add all your spices to a bowl and stir with your fingers. This agitates the spices and opens them up a little and gives you a good sense of your balance.

Protip: when you think you’ve added enough of a spice to the bowl, add more. More spices = more delicious. This dish is not about subtlety. It’s about heartiness and flavor and making you feel warm on the inside. Add more spice. One exception: salt. You can always add more salt later, but you’ll never be able to take it out.

Stir the spice mixture into the meat veggie mixture. I also like to add a couple heavy dollops of the canned tomatoes I set aside early. I use the “Eh that feels like enough” metric, so add as much or as little as you like.

Once the spices are well integrated, add beef stock until the beef is a little wobbly in the pan. Increase the heat to high and let the stock reduce. This blends all those flavors together and increases the deliciousness of your food big time.

6) Preheat your oven to 375 or 400 while the beef stock is reducing. Whatever.

7) Once the beef juice has reduced to the point that it just looks like thick-ish sauce (but should absolutely NOT be dry), turn the stove off. Your elements are prepared! AWESOME!

Get yourself an 8 x 13 casserole dish. Or you can use two smaller dishes if you want. It literally does not matter at all. Fuck, if you want to do this in the dutch oven you used earlier, you totally can, but it might be a little hard to serve.

Spoon the beef into the bottom of the dish and spread so it’s a nice even layer. Cool! At this point, I like to give it another splash of beef stock since we’ll be putting it under heat again and dry meat sucks ass.

Next, take your tomato mixture and spread that on top of the beef in an even layer. Nice!!

Finally, scoop your mashed sweet potatoes on top of everything else. Gently spread it into a roughly even layer. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just more or less even. Be careful when applying pressure as the beef base is not a very stable foundation. Wow!!!

Once it’s all assembled I like to finish it with a sprinkle of something delicious on top. The time I did this in the photograph I used Maldon’s sea salt flakes and maras pepper because they are wonderful and you should have them. But if you don’t, regular black pepper and kosher salt will be fine. Put a bunch: you have to remember that you have a giant layer of basically unspiced sweet potato mash to contend with.

8) Stick the now-assembled cottage pie in the oven for like 30 minutes. The actual time doesn’t really matter. You’ll know it’s ready to eat when you see the beef liquid bubbling at the edges. 30 minutes will definitely do it.

That’s it! Let it cool for a minute and then eat the thing!

Leftovers go in the fridge and can easily be reheated in the oven and be just as delicious as the first time.

Physical goals and stuff, April 2015

In October 2013ish, I was at the gym and we were doing heavy deadlifts. As a lark, I was all, “Fuck it, let’s throw 305 on this thing and give it a go.” I pulled the shit out of that bar and got it off the floor. I remember thinking, Whoa. That was crazy heavy.

Yesterday I pulled 405 lbs.

And today I back squatted 305 lbs for 2.

I am pretty proud of that.

Of course there’s a ton of stuff I have plenty of room to improve on. I can’t run to save my life. My overhead movements are still pretty bad (but getting better). My handstands are pretty wobbly. I can barely chain together a few double-unders at a time. I get pretty psyched out when I see high volume wods. I’m not super great at pushups. My shoulders are tight and inflexible. And there’s probably a bunch more stuff I’m missing right now, but you get the point.

And of course, I can still improve on my deadlift and back squat. Of course!

But that is part of the fun of this whole “reconnecting with the potential of my body” thing I’ve been working on the last few years: seeing how far I can improve. There is no end game, there is only continued learning. And I like that a lot.