Sweet Corn and Cherry Tomato Salad

I love to grill corn in the husk.  It keeps it moist and develops the sugars when it caramelizes a little.  It is easy.  Pull back the husks leaving them attached and clean out the silks.  Pull the husk back up and soak the ear with water.  Grill on a medium high fire about 15 minutes turning it so all sides get the heat.

You can choose to cook the corn any way you like.

6 ears of corn- cooked and kernels cut off the cob

1 pint of cherry tomatoes- halved

1 shallot minced

25 basil leaved cut in thin strips (Chiffonade)

5 T. white wine vinegar

1T. Olive oil

5 Splenda packets

Salt and Pepper

Whisk together the vinegar, oil, Splenda salt and pepper in a bowl.  Add everything else.

How Old Is That Meat In Your Freezer?

Have you ever seen the TV show Hoarders on A & E TV?  It basically takes people with a fairly serious mental illness and trades them help from professionals if they allow cameras to film how crazy they are.  It is a somewhat disgusting show, but I watch it.  The best thing I get from watching the show is the feeling that I must get up and clean something out of my house right away and I always have some area in my house that could use some serious purging.

There are a couple of traits I have noticed over the years that many of the hoarders have in common besides the obvious trouble with throwing much of anything away.  One is that often have too many pets to remember and so when a cat goes missing amidst the piles of magazines and cabbage patch doll collections they don’t really miss it because one of the other 23 cats will keep the hoarder’s attention.

Another common trait is hoarders often have things in their freezers that have been there for decades.  Each Hoarder considers the freezer some magic box that can arrest all decay from any food put inside.  (I am not even going to discuss the contents of their refrigerators.)

If you have never worked in a commercial kitchen or taken a food safety course let me be the first to tell you that even food in the freezer has a “shelf life.”  So get up right now and go open the freezer and throw at least three things away.  Good items to start with are ice cream that is over two months old (if you have been able to keep ice cream that long, congratulations on your will power), bread or ground meet that is more than 3 months old, or here is one I hate, but bacon that is more than a month in the freezer needs to be disposed of.

I am guilty of filling my freezer full of food I have cooked too much of and then never gotten around to eating it.  It does not help that I have a child who hates leftovers; I tell her she was born in the wrong family.  I also have a freezer in the garage that tends to fill up with ice so I have to do a giant defrost and throw everything away all at once.

The TLC TV channel has a show called Extreme Couponing that practically celebrates hoarding just because these people have been able to get stuff for pennies on the dollar.  There is no way that a family will ever be able to eat 700 boxes of hamburger helper before they die of a coronary.

So I am committing to be more mindful of what I already have and try and use it before I purchase something new.  And if I find things that no one in my house is going to eat I am going to give it away while it is still good.

I’m going to the freezer now, and am thankful the garbage will be picked up in 36 hours.  What about you?

Dieting Is All In Your Brain

Some people eat to live, all 6 of them and then there are the rest of us.  One of the things about doing this challenge is I have become the “diet whisper” to so many.  Now I certainly don’t mind sharing my 40 plus years of dieting knowledge, since I have lost multiple hundreds of pounds over my lifetime.  What most people and I really need is a “weight maintenance whisperer.”

Losing weight is exciting and maintaining that loss is dull boring and really a life’s work.  It is certainly not something I have mastered and am clearly a long way off from worrying about right now.  First, lose the weight.

So if you are looking for the real secret about losing weight, here it is…your brain has decide to do it and then your body will follow.  So if you are struggling with trying to lose weight stop trying.  Ask yourself if you really want to do it.  Once your brain says it’s in then your body will join.  Why?  Because changing your habits takes every bit of strength your brain has.

I heard an interesting bit of information the other day.  You don’t just make a couple of decisions about what to eat everyday, but more like two thousand decisions.  Do I have the turkey?  If I do, should I have cheese with it?  What kind of cheese? How much cheese?  I probably should not have the cheese, but now that the idea of cheese has entered my brain I really want the cheese.  I could just forget the turkey and eat the cheese.  But one little piece of cheese won’t fill me up and I will still be hungry.  Making the right decision 2000 times a day is practically impossible.

The exhaustive fight to do the right thing begins to take up all your brains computing power.  No wonder most of us give up the fight because we actually have to do something else, like go to work, the laundry or remember to pick your kid up at school.  The headmaster does not accept the excuse, “sorry I was late, my brain was fighting over the apple versus cookie decision.”

So find a way to get your mind in the game first and then do everything possible so your brain can’t get you out of it.  My way is publicly announcing I am doing this, but I know that way is more than a little crazy.  It is my crazy brain I have to work with.

Mindfulness — or more often than not, Mindlessness

This morning while looking out our bedroom window that overlooks my precious vegetable garden Russ calmly says, “There are three deer outside.”

I jump from bed and flew open the sash and scream at these unknowing thieves at the top of my lungs, which most of you know is quite an unholy sound.  The two does and one buck lazily look up at me, some 100 feet in the air from them and feel no fear what so ever.

It took Russ running outside, clapping loudly to run off the pepper-plant-eating-vermin.  Now I don’t want to hear from all you Bambie lovers until you have had a few hundred plants that you tended lovingly from seedling into just-about-to-bear-beautiful-fruit-full-grown-plants mindlessly gnawed on by deer who decide half-way through destruction that maybe this was not what they were craving.

Mindlessness is something we all can be accused of.  Just last weekend I received an invitation from a relative I refuse to name for a family reunion on May 4.  This being May 30 I consulted another relative who had received the same card and we quickly figured out she meant August 4.

Later that day I went to visit a different relative, whom I also refuse to name, who had ruined a pair of $6,700 hearing aids because she had put them in the microwave.  Apparently she was supposed to put just one small part in the microwave to clean it, but in a moment of distraction she just put the whole thing in the cleaning tube and sparked it all up.

Those mindless eating deer drove me to such perturbation that while making my standard breakfast of high protein Special K with some beautiful sweet blackberries I poured iced tea on it rather than milk.  As soon as I saw that brown liquid rise to flake level I came too and quickly dumped the liquid out of the bowl while holding all the solids in place.

Since the tea was in just a moment the flakes were still crisp, thanks to that industrialization process Kelloggs perfected to help keep cereal from turning to mush within seconds of liquid touching it.  I went to the fridge and pulled out the bottle of Maple View Farms skim milk, which had only about one cereals’ worth still in it.  I tipped the bottle up and poured the remaining milk into the bowl only to be met by a yogurt like substance covering my delicate blackberries and doomed flakes.

Cursing the deer for diverting my attention away from my regular routine of always smelling the milk before pouring (there is no excuse for the tea) I realized how easy it is to get distracted from doing the simplest things.

So is the case with heathly eating.  I know that I can go mindlessly about eating something I shouldn’t and never really realize, appreciate or register that I have eaten it.

With this wake up call I am dedicating myself to mindfulness.  Not just about eating, but about living, and a little about finding those deer and scaring them so badly that they vow to never come near my garden again.

The Numbers

“How much?”  Is the question I keep getting.

“How much what?” I ask.  The answers have been all over the place.

“How much weight have you lost?”

“How many people are pledging?”

“How close to $1,000 per pound lost are you?”

“How many green beans are in the green bean recipe?”

“How many people have you e-mailed this stuff to?”

To satisfy all these seekers of information I will be publishing all the numbers on the first of every month.  And this being June 1, oh no, it’s already June 1, I am reporting.

Weight lost:  12 pounds.  Now don’t get excited you skinny people who never had to go on a diet before.  12 pounds in three weeks is not my run rate, and if you know me, you know I rarely use the word run in any sentence that has to do with me.  If I remain diligent I might be able to lose 6-7 pounds a month.  Remember I am old, I take thyroid medicine and my life-long love affair with food has not changed.  I just have to keep coming up with more healthy recipes.

How many people have pledged?  146 pledging units, (a unit is an individual, couple or family.)  Pledges are coming not just from North Carolinians, but also from boarding school and college friends who live in places like Ohio, Rhode Island, New York and Pennsylvania.  One touching pledge came from a thirteen year old friend who is donating part of her Bat Mitzvah money.  Now that’s a good deed.

How close to $1,000:  Right now I am at $461.73 – easy math – That is 46% to dollar goal.  I am overwhelmed with the generosity of you pledgers.  If you do the math the average pledge is $3.16.  The highest pledge is $25 per pound, but every pledge, big or small is important.  I love the  enthusiasm of one friend who liked the blog so much she upped her pledge from $2-$5.  I hope you feel like you are getting value for money.

How many Green beans?  As many as you have.  Remember they are addictive and you will be sorry if you don’t make a bunch.

How many people have I e-mailed?  Too many to count.  It has got to be obnoxious when people see my name in their in-box.  So if you are reading this maybe you could e-mail it to a few people you know.  Once I get to $1,000 I will stop asking you to do anything except maybe work out with me, still not so good at running.

It is not too late to pledge.  In fact it is never too late to pledge.  So if you or your unit has not received a thank you note from me click on the pledge tab now!!  I need you and you know I will love you and your unit more for it!

What’s Not Motivating

Motivation is a very personal thing.  What motivates me is not necessarily what motives you.  I know this to be true because more people have said to me that they would rather pay me to lose weight than discuss their weight publicly.

One thing I know is not motivating to me is to be bullied into doing something.  Case –in-point is my 5^th grade gym teacher.  Even though I can’t remember his name I can picture him in my mind perfectly.

He was a little fireplug of a man, who wore those ever popular among coaches in the ‘70’s sans-a-belt pants.  They were made out of stretchy material that was not yet the perfection of today’s spandex so after a few weeks of putting his hands in and out of the slash-front- pockets the front flaps began to hang down so it looked like he had two pouches.

This Gym teacher, let’s call him Mr. Bully, announced to my fifth grade class that one requirement of our school system was that each of us had to climb the rope hanging from the gym ceiling.  Not only did we have to climb the rope the twenty feet, at the very least, but when we reached the top we had to take one hand off the rope and touch the ceiling and then make our way back down the rope.  Falling off the rope at the top did not count as a successful completion.

Every week one or two students would attempt the rope climb, cheered on by the rest of the class.  There were those stellar students who were clearly descended from chimps who could jump up and grab the rope way above their heads, coil the dangling end around their feet, shimmy up to the top, remove one hand and without fear touch the ceiling and slide back down without the slightest tinge of a rope burn.

I was not one of these agile youths.  I attempted the climb.  Having never been instructed in any proper climbing technique, I would grab the rope and try and pull my body off the ground.  I would lift my legs and after what seemed like an eternity my hands would get sweaty and I would slide the three feet down the rope, having never actually made any upward progress.

This torture went on for weeks with no actual progress.  Mr. Bully would pull me off the sidelines of dodge ball having already been hit by at least three balls in the first ten seconds.

“Dana,” he would yell.  “Climb the rope!”  It was clear I was never going to be able to climb the rope.  But he continued to insist that I do it.

“You will not be allowed to pass out of fifth grade until you pass the rope test,” he would scream at me and the other rope climbing failures.  At least I was not alone in my humiliation.

Not only was I poor in the upper body and coordination department I was deathly afraid of heights.  That fear was well developed from having to climb up the steep roof of our house to fix the TV antenna on cold Sunday afternoons when the football game reception was ruining my parents’ day.

So I really tried hard not to learn to climb because if by some miracle I was able to pull my body up the rope I certainly was not going to be able to take one hand off just to touch the gym ceiling.  I would have been more willing to kiss the gym ceiling than remove 50% of what was holding me on that rope.

Week after week, Mr. Bully never let up on me.  But as the group of non-climbers would huddle together I noticed one similarity… We all were mostly straight A students.  Now I’m not saying that all the straight A students could not climb the rope, certainly there were many of those gifted in both mind and body, but the threat of not passing out of fifth grade came into question, in my mind at least.

So one beautiful spring day, around April, when Mr. Bully had everyone come in from kickball early so they could watch the rope climbing losers fail one more time, I spoke up.

“Mr. Bully, is it really a rule that we can’t go on to 6^th grade if we don’t pass the rope test?”  I asked.

“Dana Carter, just get to the rope and climb.”

“But is it a rule?”

“Yes, stop asking questions.”

“You mean that the town of Wilton is willing to pay for straight A students to repeat fifth grade just because they can’t climb the rope?”  I knew I was on to something because they passed Curtis Zelbisher out of fourth grade and he could not read.

“It’s a rule,” Mr. Bully screamed at me.

I got a little nervous then, having never really questioned authority like that before.  I grabbed the rope and lifted my legs up, still only three feet off the ground.

The next week when called to the rope I tried another tactic.

“Mr. Bully, I am afraid of heights.  I think my parents might sue the school system if I were to climb the rope and get to the top and fall to my death when I removed a hand.”  I could see steam coming from his hairy ears.  I tried again… you know the outcome.

I had never heard the phrase, “speak truth to power,” but I certainly was feeling it.  As I would question this idiotic rule he would threaten me more and more.  His mistake.

One day I was playing at friend Wendy Maclay’s house.  She happened to live across the street from the Verrilli’s.  Jamie Verrilli was our friend, but more importantly his mother, Rosemarie was the first Selectwoman of our town, which is kind of like being the mayor.  Wendy and I went over looking for Jamie and when we saw his Mom I took it as an opportunity to question the big “rope-climbing rule.”

Mrs. Verrilli, being a brilliant and calm woman with a big hairdo, listened intently to my story, with Wendy and her own agile son Jamie backing me up on the “facts.”

After I finished my too long description of Mr. Bully and my embarrassing treatment in gym I just waited.  Mrs. Verrilli did not tell me I was right nor did she tell me I had to climb the rope.  She just said, “I’m not sure, but I will look in to it.”

The last few weeks of school went on with me in the same non-rope-climbing predicament, but I persisted in my vocal protest.

School ended.  I got my report card.  Straight A’s and no mention of repeating fifth grade.  When the fall rolled around I found I was assigned to be in Dale Stoelting’s 6^th grade class.  She was the best teacher ever.  Not only did not climbing the rope hold me back, but I was rewarded with the best teacher.

The first day we had to go to gym class I cringed, walking down the hall to the high ceilinged gymnasium.  As went entered the room I was surprised to see that Mr. Bully was not there.  Rumor had it that he had been relieved of his position.

I have no information if Mrs. Verrilli had anything to do with it, but I do know she was a very smart woman, proof of that is one of her other son’s Donald is currently the solicitor General of the United States.

Here I Am, Lord

While at church today we sang one of my favorite Hymns, Here I Am, Lord.    Part of the last stanza goes like this:

I will tend the poor and lame.  I will set a feast for them.  My hand will save. Finest bread I will provide till their hearts be satisfied.  I will give My life to them.  Whom shall I send?  Here I am Lord.

While singing this my eyes welled up with tears, and it was not because I could hear the pitiful sound of my own singing voice, but because I was overwhelmed by the thought of all of you generous friends who have made pledges of support.

You are the people tending the poor and lame, which while not a politically correct description, it is accurate of many hungry people who depend on the Food Bank.

Feeding someone is one of the most loving acts humans can do.  And I appreciate your selfishness in doing it.

You are not just giving to me, you are giving to the world through this campaign.  Here You are!

Could you feed your family on $140 a week?

I got a message today from my friend Pokey telling me about a challenge that was on ABC’s TV show The Chew.  The challenge was trying to feed a family of four on $140 a week.

Why $140, you ask?  That happens to be the highest amount that someone receiving Federal SNAP Aid, better known as Food Stamps, receives.  Now I don’t care what your politics are, but this recession has put many more hard working people at risk for hunger than you can imagine.

A really horrible statistic that the Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC has discovered is that 51% of all children in our 34 county service area are on free or reduced price lunches.  Most of them are on free and many more qualify but are too proud to ask for it, so they are just hungry kids.  How can you learn anything if you are hungry?  I have a hard time concentrating right before lunch and I had breakfast.

Pokey said she was going to try and feed her family one-week on that amount.  I need to reminder her not to use what is already in her freezer, or pantry.  If a person is at risk for hunger they usually don’t have much in those places.

The Food Bank is the safety net that fills in where food stamps leave off.   I promise to not preach in this blog, but every so often I will try and educate you on the realities of hunger in our community.

So please consider pledging something to my campaign.  Although losing weight is for me, the money raised will go to help people you may never meet who are grateful for your generosity.

Writing a Blog — Easy, Understanding How Blog Technology Works — Not So Much

As I often say to my husband, “If anything ever happens to you I will be fine, but not my computer.”  Not so romantic, but when you are married to a Masters of electrical engineering with an MBA why would you learn how to protect your computer from a virus?   I think it is very romantic when he comes to bed and says, “I just backed up your system.”  Yeah, you are the best husband, because although I know it should be done, how to do it is just something I never really bothered to learn.

That brings me to the Blog issues.  There are lots of words around setting up this Blog that I have never heard of and therefore don’t understand, like Meebo, Meta or Gravatar.  Even my spell check does not like them.  Ha, I’m not the only old one here, and by old I mean someone who grew up with a dial, pre-touch tone, phone, who if you were lucky had a cord that could enable you to pull the phone in your bedroom for private discussions about who was cuter, Donny Osmond or Bobby Sherman.

So that finally brings me to the issue of the day, forgiveness.  Please forgive me as I learn how to best utilize this tool known as a blog.  Forgive the web-site if you are unable to log in to PLEDGE, as happened to my mother, and let’s not talk about what old means to her.  Please try again to pledge.  I am fairly certain it will work someday!!

I also am going to keep my promise with recipes.  You know how May is busier than December if you have a child in school.  I’ll get one up by tonight!!

Help Me, Help the Food Bank and Maybe even help you!

I love group brilliance.  Not only are the pledges coming in, but the creative ideas are too!

A giant thank you to the 40 people who have already pledged a total of $111 for every pound I lose!  The notes of support are inspiring, but even better are the ideas on how people are taking this challenge on for themselves.

A couple of people who also want to lose weight have made pledges as well as setting goals to lose weight for themselves.  To add skin to the game they have said they will double their pledge if they don’t reach their goal.  Another friend has made a pledge, but will add to it for every pound she loses by November 1.  You know I am going to be asking her to come walk with me!

If you want to add a bogey to your pledge just let me know by sending me a new pledge on the pledge  page.  I promise I won’t double count your pledge.

Creating a supportive community is what I need.  What about you?