Prajantr, Thoughts and Wanderings

The weather has been beautiful lately. Gorgeous, in fact.  I’ve thought about cooking, but it’s not as much fun to cook for one. The last time I cooked was when the Velez family came down for a visit.  I had a blast cooking for them!

First up was a fresh mint and roasted pork salad dressed with fresh squeezed lime juice mixed with a touch of sugar and fish sauce, thin sliced shallots and garlic. The key to this salad is the toasted rice, ground up and tossed in there right at the end to add texture and a fantastic roasted flavor. Of course, the huge amounts of fresh mint leaves made it a cool and happy salad.

The salad is called “nam tok” or water fall salad. It can be made with pork or chicken, but I personally like it with pork. Besides, I’d roasted chicken to go along side as well as had chicken as the base of the next dish.

I also made red curry chicken, my way. It’s Thai style, with coconut milk and bamboo shoots, but you’ll find every Thai cook does things in her own way and the curry comes out different for every cook. I use fresh holy basil from my garden in my curry, and probably more coconut milk than most. Plus I add a kaffir lime leaf or two in there and a touch of sugar to balance out flavors. Instead of serving the curry with rice, the way I normally do, I made nom gene or Asian white rice noodles instead. They’re lighter and nicer with the curry for summer time.

I also made “sticky rice” or sweet rice to go on the side with some roasted chicken. That’s a summer favorite as well. You gotta be careful with sticky rice though, stuff continues to expand in your stomach.

See? It’s so much more fun to cook for friends than it is to cook for just one. I get a lot of joy out of feeding my friends and putting my heart into my cooking for them.

Still working on the slimming and toning to a healthier and better feeling me.  I’ve reduced my P90X workouts to about 2 times a week, for strength training and cardio rather than following the actual program.  Three other days a week I’ve been going to mixed martial arts class – for fun and for stress relief.

I’ve been holding pretty steady at my current weight for a few weeks but I hope to break the plateau again and start losing some more.

With the end of summer coming into sight I’ve had to admit some of my clothes just don’t fit anymore. (This is kind of cool. LOL) So I’ve been going through my drawers one at a time and ditching anything that hangs all loose and baggy with no hope for a decent fit with my new body shape. I’m realizing that most of these garments are several years old anyway and the only stuff that fits at all is even older.  I didn’t do much in the way of clothes shopping in the last couple of years and what I did buy was only for work!

Yesterday, Hel met up with me for lunch and a walk through the mall. With her coaxing and a pack of helpful store clerks, I ended up getting quite a few fashionable upgrades to my wardrobe. Not something I plan to do often, mind you, because that could be seriously dangerous to my budget. But this one time, it was worth it.

There’s something therapeutic about ditching the old, baggy clothes. It’s more than cleaning out your clothes drawers. A few lingering emotional cobwebs go with them.

Is love enough?

Sometimes it isn’t. Actually, for me, it’s never been enough for happily ever after.

You can fall in love with more than one person in your life. If life gets really interesting, you might fall in love with more than one person at the same time and then you have to make choices.

Me? Once I love, I never stop. It doesn’t just fade away or burn out. Every love is different, with a different taste and texture and feel to it. But what remains the same is that I will feel it always. I’ll hold love in my heart forever. And I’ve made choices.

When a lost love touches my life again, I remember. I love. Have no doubt of that. And right now, I’m free to pursue love if I choose. I haven’t chosen yet.

But there is always the truth remaining that sometimes love isn’t enough for a happily ever after. Just my love hasn’t ever been enough.

And I deserve a happily ever after.

The schedule is up for Otakon – this allows for a sneak peek into just how little sleep I’ll be getting.

See? Schedule

Anime viewing is a little sparse for me this year, not much catching my attention.  I might pop in to watch Ponyo and Helen does love the horribly, truly bad live action such as Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstien Girl. In fact, I think the lil sis and I saw a couple of clips of that at AnimeBoston and thought it was hilariously bad, in an epic kind of way.

I’m mildly interested in the concerts and will go if my buddies attend. There’s also some potentially funny panels such as Voice Actors after Dark.  Additionally, WAH and Great SG have their panels and I might attend to give them support.

It’s a fairly light Otakon schedule for me this year, honestly. There will likely be more socializing and possibly photography of cosplay, if the cosplay is good this year. So maybe I will be getting some decent sleep…

I took two major steps this week, returning to two things I enjoy: Dance and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).

Back to dance

Originally, I’d quit both because my ex had felt the money and time would be better spent on doing things together. Not a bad thought, but unfortunately, he didn’t really have a suggestion for what we were supposed to do together. So, I lost those two outlets and the benefits of the exercise without a real replacement for it and the original reasoning was also render non-applicable.

For dance, I decided to try out the Koresh School of Dance in Philly. It didn’t feel right to return to my old dance school, because their curriculum is continuous through a school year. You show up weekly and learn a full dance that’s presented in recitals at the end of the year. With my work and business travel schedule, it really wouldn’t have worked out. Koresh runs stand alone classes – you don’t have to show up every week. The open classes are walk in and learn a combination for the day. Instead of paying for a whole school year, I just pay per class or buy a batch of 10 classes at a time – applicable to any of the open classes available (Hip Hop, Ballet, Jazz, Modern…) Overall, it’s much more affordable for me and the classes are more advanced. The only killer is the cost of parking in the city. >_<

Tony Jaa - Muay Thai

For MMA, I decided to return to the Tri-State Martial Arts Academy.  It’s a good quality school teaching the disciplines I want to learn in MMA: Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Jun Fan/Jeet Kun Do, Kali/Silat and various conditioning classes. Again, due to my work and biz travel schedule – I needed a flexibility available in their schedule. Honestly, I needed to get back to this to work off stress, tension and whatnot. I haz rage.

Okay, okay, I admit it was a little insane to jump into both. It might have been wiser to start one, then add the other. That’s the beauty of it though – if I want, I can just go to Koresh once every other week. There’s no set schedule that I need to attend.

And honestly, I needed to get out and take action. I was driven. It was getting too comfortable hiding inside of the house.

There’s a fine line between being driven to work through the challenges life slams down on you and being driven to run away from them. We know I have drive, but have I stepped up to the line?

It has come, that evil plateau. Obviously, P90X can only do so much for me when I can’t follow the program every single day. I do the best I can but hey.

In any case, I need more cardio in my life and I can only take the P90X workouts to a certain degree and then I get very annoyed at the instructor’s voice. So it’s time to change it up just a tiny bit to kill the plateau and to save me from getting too annoyed.

Alexd00 uses DDR for exercise. My game consoles are gathering dust and it’s been so long since I’ve played any game that I’m in danger of losing my geek status. That being the case, I’m going to start trying to play once a week as a weird cardio routine. And of course, have a little fun.

Chicken Pot Pie

This a post late in coming, but the results were uber tasty. My good friend, Mandy, celebrated her birthday a few weeks ago. In honor of her special day, we had a gathering of friends at my house and a bit of a pot luck. The theme was “Mandy’s Favorite Dishes”.

To contribute, I made my chicken pot pie for her…and cupcakes…and some other stuff, because I’m a little crazy.

There’s no real recipe, I’m afraid. I sort of made it up a long time ago and it comes out a little different every time.

The key to my chicken pot pie is that I either fry or roast the chicken thighs and legs first. Then I debone and cut up the tasty, flavorful meat for filling.

For veggies, I tend to throw in whatever sounds good – but the usual suspects are carrots, celery, yellow onions and potatoes (sometimes corn or peas end up in there too, maybe even mushrooms).  I wash and dice them into bite sized pieces.  The potatoes, once diced, I rinse and boil in salted water until just cooked but still firm.  I sautee the rest in a really big pan with extra virgin olive oil, seasoning with salt and pepper as I go. A dash of cinnamon goes in there too, usually. Don’t ask why – it’s not a strong taste but it adds a nice little something.

To the cooked veggies, I add the prepped chicken meat and potatoes and give it all a stir.  The gravy base for my chicken pot pie can be made from scratch (browning a rue of flour and butter and then adding chicken stock and finishing with cream) or if I’m in a hurry, I’ll use cream of chicken soup.  There’s usually a splash of milk that goes in there and a spoonful of sour cream. More salt and pepper are added to taste at this stage as well as any fresh herbs I have on hand that I think will add a nice flavor.

A scoop on a party plate

The whole mixture goes into my deep dish stoneware pan and is covered by two layers of puff pastry. It goes into the oven at about 425F or so until the puff pastry is puffed and golden brown and gravy is bubbling out at the edges.

This is a hearty dish, my friends, and probably not a good choice for the dieters

I’m not as original with the cupcakes, I’m afraid. I was a little crunched for time and baked them from boxed cake mix instead of mixing them from scratch the way I normally.  Still, I baked two kinds: devil’s food cake frosted with creamy chocolate and vanilla cake with little fun chips baked into the batter iced with creamy white frosting.

Omm nom nom nom. The cupcakes turned out moist and light, so I guess the box mix wasn’t bad.

Cupcakes!