Teleidoscope

Sat, Jan 26, 2008

Red Sauce

Posted at 2:05 pm MST to Technology

Today instead of making my usual microwave red sauce, I'm making a more traditional sauce. I'm using the bottom of the 6 quart enameled dutch oven, and I'm very pleased with it.

Getting the sauce out of the pot later may be a trick, considering how heavy the pot is. Incentive to get back to the free weights.

Instead of canned mushrooms and chipped garlic and onions, I'm using live ones and practicing my knife skills. So, setting up the mise en place --

Set the pot on a medium low burner.

Light a votive candle next to where you will be chopping the onion.

Get out the dried herbs and spices: bay leaf, parsley flakes, sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, marjoram, fennel seeds. Whomp everything except the parsley flakes and bay leaf in the marble spice mortar before putting them in a small bowl.

Add extra virgin olive oil to the pot (don't put anything else in yet.

Mince 4 garlic cloves and put them into a tiny bowl.

Chop a medium onion into small dice and put it into the pot. (Note: the combination of letting the candle burn for a while before working on the onion and not cutting the onion root too enthusiastically worked very well. I could actually see the whole time I was cutting the onion.)

Rinse and stem 8 ounces of fresh mushrooms and run them through an egg slicer.

Open a can of organic diced tomatoes into a strainer over a bowl.

Continue sweating the onions until they are mostly soft, then add the garlic and let them sweat together for a few minutes.

Put a pound of ground buffalo into a bowl and tear it apart into small pieces with two forks. Put the meat into the pot and let it brown.

Add the herbs and stir them through the meat.

Add the mushrooms and put the lid on the pot for a couple of minutes. Then take the lid off for a few minutes to allow some of the liquid to evaporate.

Deglaze with a 187 ml bottle of Vendage 2000 Cabernet. Leave the lid off the pot so the liquid can cook down and be absorbed.

Stir in the diced tomatoes. let them cook for a few minutes.

Add two 6 oz. cans of tomato paste. Stir well to coat the chunks of meat, then add a 15 oz. can of tomato sauce. Stir thoroughly again. (One nice thing about cooking in a deep pot is that it's easy to stir things without them spattering everywhere.)

Lid briefly to bring the sauce up to temperature, stir and turn heat to low. Taste, and add a little kosher salt, if needed.

[While the sauce is cooking, put the juice drained from the diced tomatoes into a cup, add a few drops of Worcestershire, and nuke it. Yum.]

Now to choose the pasta to put it on... maybe some ziti: this is a robust sauce. I'm currently using some imported organic pasta that Costco had in stock. In the past, I've tried whole wheat pasta, but it never really tasted right. I'll take organic over whole wheat at this point. (I stopped gaining weight around the time I switched back to non-whole wheat pasta, which seems weird...)

In the future (when I have used up the cans of sauce in my pantry -- sometimes shopping at Costco can be a disadvantage) I will switch to using 2 cans of the diced tomatoes with their juice, without the can of sauce. Unless Costco starts carrying an organic sauce with more structure than the Contadina.

This current recipe swaps the wine for the diced tomato juice to make the flavors of the saucemore complex (some tomato flavors are alcohol-soluble). Also, to some extent, the olive oil replaces some of the fat that would be present if I were using beef instead of buffalo.

I did not add much salt to the sauce because I salt the pasta water, and usually serve it with grated parmesan. For this sauce, I will breakout the real, grate-it-yourself stuff.

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39.9 Percent

Posted at 11:30 am MST to Exercise

According to my weight-and-body-fat-percentage scale, my body fat percentage is below 40 for the first time in ages. That's with the measurement taken after my shower, per directions, so the skin on my feet was properly hydrated for the measurement.

I did several measurements. One was above 40, and two others were slightly lower, so I feel safe in claiming 39.9. (How you stand on the scale can make a big difference.)

I wonder if getting rid of most of the heel callouses -- so the sensor contact was with something approaching living flesh -- made a difference?

In any case, this is encouraging, since I haven't really been exercising much for the past week or so because of giving my hip time to heal. And I had (probably too much) pizza for dinner the last two nights in a row.

My weight is staying pretty stable, but that is OK if some of the fat is being replaced by muscle. I've noticed my belts are being a bit ambiguous about which notch they want to be on, which is also encouraging. Once the hip has stabilized a bit more, I'll start up the Abs Yoga again, which should also help on the belt-notch and fitting-into-jeans front.

Exercise for the past two days has been PT exercises followed by AM Yoga in the morning and PT exercises in the evening. I think even after the prescribed week, I'm going to keep doing the PT exercises before the AM Yoga and other workouts. Giving my hip a little extra encouragement to stay where it belongs is probably not a bad idea before I go stretching it in all sorts of directions.

Despite the fat, I'm not in too bad shape even compared with some times in my life when I was a lot thinner: I was just (after loosening up with yoga and a hot shower) able to come within about an inch of touching my toes. That is VERY good for me: the times in my life when I have been able to touch my toes at all have been few and far between. Having a petite body and tall arms and legs doesn't help.

Having very tight hamstrings doesn't help either the toe touching or the hip stability or the yoga. (My downward dog is pitiful at the moment -- good thing Rodney Yee can't see me out of the TV.) But I have figured out a place where I can do the legs-up-the-wall thing to stretch my hamstrings without causing a book avalanche. When my treadmill is folded up, it bottom will provide a nice stable surface to lean my heels against. And the treadmill is on the part of the floor that is over the basement, not the unheated crawlspace, which makes a big difference for these restorative poses where you are holding still and letting gravity work instead of warming yourself by moving.

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