Think Thin Tuesday: Sweet and Sour Patch Soup
Oh the Fad diet. Most people have tried at least one. Fasting, juicing, celery sticks, eating only foods of a certain color or only having sugar on days that end in Y…most Americans have been there. They almost never ever work and when they do, you end up gaining back all the weight you lost and then some. That’s because most of the time what you lose is primarily water and muscle. Yet we continuously cycle back to them as a culture because we want to get skinny and we want it NOW –just like everything else.
One fad diet I distinctly remember from being a kid growing up in the 80s was the cabbage soup diet. You know, 7 days of a stinky, flatulence inducing bland soup promising to help you drop 10 pounds! Miracle of miracles. Except it didn’t work because people go bored, people got gassy and people were basically just filling up on nutritionally empty soups loaded with fiber. I don’t remember if my mom ever tried this diet because we ate cabbage soup as a Ukrainian/Russian Jewish thing and our cabbage soups were far from boring and bland.
Cabbage itself is actually really quite good for you when eaten raw or steamed. It has amazing cancer fighting properties—specifically colon, bladder and prostate cancer. It contains the chemical sinigrin—present in pretty much all the incredibly bitter and offputting vegetables we love to hate as kids. Brussel sprouts, broccoli and horseradish are all high in the stuff but Savoy Cabbage especially is loaded with it. Makes you wonder if Russians and Germans have a lower incidence of these really nasty cancers—all that sauerkraut does a colon good? Red cabbage is also a particularly potent anti-inflammatory agent.
As such you really are better off eating cabbage for health either raw or steamed…but sometimes we just want a really tasty, low calorie, warm and filling recipe for those freak cold nights before summer. At least I know I do. The cabbage soup recipe that comes from centuries of Jewish cooking also manages to round out some of the lacking nutrition through the addition of tons of vegetables and tomatoes. Thus it’s got a nice dosing of vitamin C so I don’t feel like I’m just filling up on fiber and water. Plus we spice it up with some caraway seeds—which are also great chemical powerhouses of cancer fighting agents. So even though this recipe is more diet fadly than diet friendly…it’s something that you can eat once a week to reduce your over-all caloric load and still feel like you’re doing the body some good.
Sweet and Sour Cabbage Soup
Just like Nana used to make…with a few Olivia Modifications Read more
I’m going to be 25 this June. I’m still single with no prospects and no dependents. I’m renting a room in an overpriced Bay Area apartment. My mom and stepdad are within “I’m crying on the phone because there’s a spider in my bathtub” range. My mother was 25 years old when she had me. My mother was married; my mother owned a house and she lived further than 45 minutes away from her parents. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that part of me gets overwhelmed when I think about how far behind I feel in relation to this. When I was half my age I would have told you I planned to be having my first child by now too. At 20 I would have told you I should be getting married at least around now with plans to have a child in two years or so. Now standing here at the precipice of being halfway through my twenties I feel like marriage, kids, the picket fence…they are years away—if ever.
Despite the fact that the only thing I know I can plan is for life to upset my plans, I still have all these guidelines for the love and marriage thing. The underlying strategy to these guidelines follows that old idiom “only fools rush in.” Marriage would follow years of dating—children should be held off until the marriage is at least two years tested. A home should only be bought in a neighborhood that’s been thoroughly vetted for these theoretical children’s future education from K through 12. Definitely can’t have a kid until I’m ready to simultaneously start saving for their college fund! All these well intentioned plans that are meant to keep me safe and secure and probably will ensure I never do any of the above.
I’m physically at the right stage. I’ve got a real job with real future prospects. I’m just too damn selfish, too damn scared and well I would ideally like to have a life partner to raise a child with so I’m not really equipped but still…I could do it on my own. Is there an opposite phrase for “Only Fools Rush In” something like “and even bigger fools need to be pulled in kicking and screaming?” I know plenty of people who do…well the opposite of what I think should be done and they do it quite well.
Question from reading facebook last night: Are we, that great high school essay “we” meaning “society”, getting smarter or just louder about politics?
Sometimes I really wonder if this magical interwebs is making us better voters or just louder whiners. No one on either side of the aisle denies that our political system currently is a mess. We’ve got a gaggle of elected officials who don’t seem to be worth a damn and they are running us into the ground. You might disagree about which side they are on but republicans and democrats all in general seem to be pretty dissatisfied with something. United we stand…in our disgust. But why? I mean we elect these officials—the power is theoretically in our hands. Why is this happening?
There’s another phrase that I think of on the topic of politics. Lesser known and often misattributed (thanks facebook) to President Lincoln: “Every country has the government it deserves.” Lincoln didn’t say that—in fact it came from a French lawyer by the name of Joseph de Maistre—who supported monarchy over democracy by the way. Still the quote often times seems valid. Ultimately we seem to be getting what we ask for. How many of our politicians have actually read the constitution? Great question. Here’s another one: how many voters have actually read the constitution?
This doesn’t pertain to all of you, or even most of you, directly but I think you all need to be made aware of this so you can understand women and stop this behavior when you see it. Now I will make small talk when I’m in a good mood with my cashier or the cab driver. I know that it breaks up the monotony of the day in the service industry to have someone friendly engage you for even a few minutes. I’ve been there. I had my high school stint as a worker bee at Mervyn’s. But if there is a woman you are ringing up, or helping, or in a car with who is clearly having a bad day–leave her the frak alone. Seriously. Don’t make it your job to cheer her up because if she’s anything like me she really, really doesn’t want you to. In fact having a strange male approach me when I’m in that mood doesn’t help me feel better–it puts me on edge.
Then I thought about it some more and realized that if you consider insects “people too” you basically have to desist from eating anything manufactured. In fact even growing a backyard garden and employing some organic tricks for pest control would mean impacting and killing the insect population should be disallowed. At what point do you draw the line? In a normal day any plant processing your vegan agave nectar is going to kill a thousand insects simply as a side effect of running the plant. Bugs get in the gears; bugs get in the food; bugs get everywhere and they get filtered out. So I can’t really get on board with the anti-honey vegans. The issue of animal-cruelty hypocrisy has been pretty prescient lately when PETA was exposed for “putting down” up to 
I accept that in the natural order of things some animals eat other animals—and that I am one of those predators. That doesn’t limit my desire to see these animals raised humanely and slaughtered as painlessly as possible. I think of this way: torture is often seen as something worse than death. Keeping someone in a state of constant pain and agony until they desire to no longer exist is horrible and overall we tend to object to torture more vehemently than even death itself. I accept this because, as with the honey issue, finding a way to eliminate any negative effect of our human need to eat on other living creatures is impossible. I’m not convinced that honey farming, especially the small scale local level, is particularly harmful to the mental state of the insects. I do buy locally sourced honey and not just because I try to be a locavore, but because eating local honey has been demonstrated to help with allergies—local pollens and all that.
‘So it is,’ they answered, ‘But we call it lembas or way bread, and it is more strengthening than any food made by Men, and it is more pleasant than cram, by all accounts.’
I don’t necessarily believe in veganism as a sustainable whole-lifestyle choice. At least not for me. I certainly think it has applications; it’s a good diet model for people with serious obesity health concerns. With respect to animal welfare it is possible to find animal products from humanely raised animals so I don’t think someone has to cut all cheese out of their diets for this reason. As for killing animals for food…well I don’t have a problem with that aspect of it but I’m not going to judge anyone who does. Still that only means that people really need to go vegetarian if they are controlling where all the animal byproducts they consume come from. But again that would be at home. I really doubt Denny’s is getting their half & half from free-range, grass grazing cows
Yet still it has happened. I’m a social vegan. Oh you’ve never heard that term? Well basically when I eat out I stay on a vegan diet but at home I’m happy to go about my omnivore ways. Strange isn’t it? Typically you’ll hear about people doing the opposite—eating vegan at home but relaxing out in company because eating vegan socially is fucking hard. But my reasons make sense I swear… See here’s the thing I don’t have a problem with eating meat or byproducts from livestock. I do have serious problems with how the majority of livestock in this country is raised. I object to it on a number of levels and decided that if I’m going to be morally consistent at all then I need to start really watching what I eat when I’m eating out because that is where I have no control over where my food came from. Thus when I’m at home and I’ve bought the food myself, I’ll grill up a steak and slather it with blue cheese and runny quail egg. But if I’m out grabbing a bite at some corner diner? Odds are I’m asking for salad and a fruit cup. So what prompted this?
With summer finally starting to peek its head around the corner it’s time to start thinking about planning those wonderful summer cocktail parties. Or at least in my imaginative world where I’m a Manhatten socialite I’m planning those parties. You know the kind. Music. Women in summer dresses. Men in linen suits. China twinkling. The sort of Audrey Hepburn fairytale life that a lot of silly girls like to daydream about. I swear I never was one to imagine the details of my wedding but boy did I ever day dream about my ideal apartment and social gatherings in some upper-east side version of paradise.
The internal struggle within geek culture to demonstrate how geeky you really are…. Well it’s been on my mind a lot lately for so many reasons. I was deciding how to decorate my bathroom and trying desperately to find some way to reconcile my desire for a “girly” space with my geekier interests. I was spending way too much energy obsessing over which shower curtain to buy based on how it could accessorize with geekier objects in the room. Eventually I sat back and asked myself what the hell I was doing. I really didn’t want to spend more than $15 dollars on a shower curtain—I’m not actually decorating a home where I plan on living for the next ten years and my lease is month to month. I could be gone at any moment. It’s not a situation where I’m looking to nail art to the walls. I don’t need to spend 75 dollars buying this one shower curtain because it manages to both fit into the more “feminine” styling I want but color coordinates well with lab equipment. Why do I feel like I have to put my geek on display in a room which is really only used to “shit, shower and shave”?
On one hand I’ve always been “so serious” about perceived injustice. Even as a child I wanted to save the world. I guess mom shoulda named me Ka-ka-ka-Katie. **TRIVIA TIME: Name that movie and win a cookie! PS: my last trivia winner still needs to email me his info so I can mail out a treat! Hey you, yeah I’m talking to you, send me your info and any allergens to my blog’s email addy: rollingsreliableblog at g mai l dot com** I do think part of it is that I’m experiencing more of life rather than reading about it. There are issues that seem far less important than they did and others that seem to be so ignored by people around me that I want to scream. Sometimes I just want to get out a drum and hold it in someone’s face and yell “WAKE UP!” The apathy and willful ignorance that serve as a constant state of existence for some…I don’t understand it. I never have. Some stupid little voice inside me just won’t shut up and I can’t sit by the sidelines and watch and do nothing. I have to do something—even if it’s just letting the people I want to defend know I’m here. I have to do something.
I noticed that there are people in this world just hellbent upon making it a miserable place for the rest of us and I have no desire to be around them. Thankfully this is a minority of folks and I find that most people are generally decent and well intentioned. Even so these decent people have a tendency to “kid around” to such an extent that I always feel very distant from them. The joking, the kidding, the teasing…I don’t know it just gets old after a while. I’ve always been one to provide a good ribbing and I like to think that I take as well as I give—but I’m more apt to get annoyed when the target is someone other than myself. I’ll go up in arms twice as quickly when the butt of the joke isn’t my own. I’d like to think with all the squats I’ve been doing my own ass is pretty springy and most stuff bounces off of it. Provided I’ve had enough sleep and coffee that day anyway. No coffee = no sense of humor. Word to the wise and future significant others. Take for example this joke which I’ve heard far too many times and which seems particularly relevant after the flurry of rape culture commentary in the past few weeks:
