Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 79

The Unified Theory of Salads

I’m somewhat obsessed with salads at the moment. Some day recently I came home to a close-to-empty refrigerator, or empty by my standards anyway. I think it was after I got home from PA, so I’d been away for a good chunk of the previous two weeks. I had plenty of things that normal people, aka my son, could have eaten — pasta and rice, eggs, even some chips and cookies. But for my needs, it was pretty barren, because there wasn’t much in the way of vegetables or fruit. Some mixed greens still looked edible, though, and I had part of a leftover red onion. I wound up eating greens topped with chopped dates, goat cheese, smoked trout, red onion, and balsamic vinegar. It was crazy delicious.

My previous favorite salad had been arugula, smoked trout, avocado, and strawberries with balsamic. The date salad came close to knocking it out of its place. I’ve also been very big on salads with cucumbers, radishes, and kalamata olives this summer. Also salad with anything as long it also includes a honey salmon from CostCo which is yum, yum, yum. And when I was in PA, I was topping a lot of my salads with blueberries because my brother grows lots of them.

So, yeah, I think I’ve become a salad aficionado over my almost-year with AIP. And I’ve learned a lot, so I’m developing a set of salad rules. A theory of salad, in fact.

First rule, the perfect meal salad — the one that you’re going to eat to sustain you for hours, not a side salad or just a little extra color on a plate — has to include a reasonable amount of protein. Back when I ate grains and legumes, the difference between a meal salad and a side salad was usually whether it contained beans, chickpeas, pasta, quinoa, or some other similar ingredient. But when I’m making mixed green salads my main course, they need to include protein.

My favorites are the fish: smoked trout from Trader Joe’s, flaky smoked salmon from CostCo, leftover sauteed trout or salmon, even canned tuna or salmon. I’ve tried anchovies and sardines, too, but… let’s just say, they aren’t regulars on the meal plan. Leftover chicken from a roast chicken, slices of leftover grilled pork chops, roast beef, all also good options.

Second rule, the ideal salad needs a mix of textures. It wants something creamy. I used to get that from dressing, but now I can’t, so my perfect regular choice for that texture is avocado. Goat cheese is a good runner-up. Salad also wants something with crunch. Radishes are great for crunch. Celery, carrots, nuts (which I can’t use)… all also good for the crunch. Cucumber isn’t either creamy or crunchy, but it’s definitely a texture food. So are artichoke hearts. I’d call them slimy, really, but they add a different texture to the salad.

Third rule, the mix of tastes. A salad where all the ingredients are from the same flavor family is a very boring salad. It’s one of the reasons why I seldom eat a salad with greens, celery & carrots. It’s not like those three things really taste alike, but they fit together. All the bites have a sameness to them. That’s comforting in soup but deadly in salad, in my opinion. And some foods, like avocado, obviously have a flavor, but it’s more bland, less distinctive. I’m happy to eat to avocado for lunch, but generally with added salt or lime juice. I don’t know that I’d call it a flavor as much as a delightful base for different dressings.

So for me, the best mix of flavor options seems to be sweet plus tangy plus … well, I think I want to describe the final flavor as having kick. It can be salty like smoked trout or have the zing of a radish or red onion, maybe even the bitterness of arugula or roasted brussels sprouts, but it’s the surprise flavor, the one that wakes you up when you taste it.

Some options, then. Sweet: dates, pears, mango, strawberries, blueberries, apple, raisins, dried cranberries? Tangy: goat cheese, kalamata olives, pickled anything? Kick (spicy, salty, bitter, umami): radishes, red onion, smoked fish?

And, at last, my theory of salads. The perfect meal salad (based on greens) should include one protein, at least two textures, and at least three distinct flavors. But not necessarily six ingredients, since some foods, like goat cheese, can be both a flavor and a texture. And more has potential too, of course. Our Key West salad had double sweet — both mango and strawberries — which just made it doubly delicious.

Hmm, but maybe the sweetness of the mango made the strawberries seem like the tangy flavor? Because flavors do kind of change in relation to one another. Heavens, I’m finding loopholes in my new theory already. But that’s okay — the only purpose of my theory is to use the base concept to find some new and interesting mixes. Trying to eat ten cups of greens a day means eating an awful lot of salads. That’s fine when the salad is yum, delicious, different, but much less cool when it’s the fourth plate of greens with cucumber, radish, & kalamata olives in two days.

So anyway my quest is to find other foods that fit the characteristics of things I want in my salad (creamy, crunchy, sweet, tangy, kick) but that it hasn’t yet occurred to me to try in salad. I’m pretty much at the stage where I’ve tried most anything in my fridge on greens (sauerkraut, yes, capers, yes, finely-sliced lemon, yes… although note that none of those ingredients are included in any of my favorite salads, ha!) but the unexpected deliciousness of salad with dates has inspired me to look farther afield.

Alas, all the things immediately occurring to me aren’t AIP-friendly. I can’t eat nuts, seeds, legumes, eggs (or, technically, goat cheese, but it’s so good that I’ve been pretending I don’t notice that I’m more congested than I used to be). Still, I’m going to wander my grocery store with my goal in mind and see what else I can discover!

Monday mornings

Walking the dogs this morning, my brain kept cycling obsessively around the question of whether I should sell the house. I’ve answered the question for myself so many times — not now, not yet. But apparently I haven’t convinced myself of the rightness of this answer because the debate keeps coming back. Finally, I forced myself away from the house question and started thinking about A Gift of Grace.

I have been so, so, so stuck for so long. I know that’s part of the reason for the endless house ruminations. Writing can’t just be an endurance contest for me. If it’s not fun, then I should be doing something that is. Life is too short to not spend as much of it as possible in flow states, but I haven’t had a writing flow state in… well, it feels like forever, but obviously, it’s not. At the very least, 2014 held an intense and lovely two months of flow while A Lonely Magic poured out of me. But I’m not there now.

And then, while forcing myself to think about Grace and Noah, I had a moment — a brief, fleeting, glimmering moment — where the pieces started to line up. This thing, followed by this thing, and then this angle to introduce this moment… It was so exciting. I tugged on the dog’s leash to hurry her along. I knew I had to get home and grab the words while they were tickling me.

But by the time we got home, and I fed the dogs and myself, the words had faded away. The tickle was gone. By the time I sat down to the computer — after washing the dishes and doing a little vacuuming, I had that feeling in the pit of my stomach that I’ve been getting about writing lately. I think that feeling is dread.

But how can I dread writing? Why would I dread writing? I dread going to the dentist. It’s going to hurt. Writing, though — it’s not supposed to hurt. I’m trying to convince myself right now that the dread is worse than the reality — nothing to fear except fear itself, right? — but apparently the best I can do for the moment is to write a blog post. At least it’s words.

Talking B to the vet, then going to yoga. I’m going to spend my time at yoga filling myself up with as many “I” power statements as I can to see if I can meditate myself into loving writing again.

36 Hours in Key West

I had a perfect vacation in June. Thirty-six hours where everything fell into place, parking spots opened up like magic, meals were delicious, and the stars aligned.

Okay, the stars part might be hyperbole. But the weather was ideal and the tourist gods were definitely on our side.

So it started when my friend S (mentioned previously in blogs of our Belize trip) flew out from CA. We spent a couple days playing tourist in Orlando. We went out for Korean food, wandered around downtown Winter Park, rode the Orlando Eye (a giant Ferris wheel which would have been a lot more interesting if Orlando during the daytime wasn’t just a sea of parking lots), Sea Life (an aquarium in the same complex), the Skeleton Museum (super-cool, with many, many bones) and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. It was a veritable binge of touristing and really quite fun. And it set the tone for our trip within her trip. We were going to tourist and tourist hard.

We knew from the start that our little trip to Key West was going to be super quick — only two nights there, with a drive of about eight hours each way. Because of my food issues, I wanted a place to stay with a kitchen so we were booked for our two nights at Suite Dreams. We got there and it was perfect — small, cozy, tucked away, lush with flowers. But we dumped our stuff and started exploring immediately, discussing (ha, finally!) what we wanted to do on our island vacation.

All the things? Yep. Or at least all the things that could be packed into 36 hours. So we went straight to the Southernmost point of the continental US. Honestly, on the map, it really did not seem to be the farthest south spot and it turns out it’s not! But close enough. Then we wandered by Hemingway’s house before walking around Duval Street talking about dinner. In my preconceived notions, slight as they were, I had pictured Duval Street as being something like Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Maybe it is sometimes, but not, apparently, at 7PM on a Tuesday in June. It was very mellow and peaceful. Because of my food problems, I’d already spent a while looking at restaurant reviews on TripAdvisor and found one that sounded great, except we needed reservations which we didn’t have. But hey, Tuesday in June, worth a try, right? We tried, got three seats at the bar, and ate incredible tapas at Santiagos.

I took pictures of the menu to remind myself later of the best food, but the easy winner was dates stuffed with goat cheese, wrapped in prosciutto, and grilled. We got it on our first round and liked it so much we had it a second time as a dessert. On our way home on Thursday, we stopped and picked up some goat cheese, and at 9PM, before we’d been home twenty minutes, I was stuffing dates. I’ve made them three times so far and still haven’t mastered them, but I intend to. (And yes, I’m allergic to cheese, but I’m willing to pay the price for these–they’re sweet, tangy, salty perfection.)

Back to Key West — stuffed and replete with delicious food, we headed back to Suite Dreams and Suzanne and I got serious about planning out our one complete day in Key West. One day is not a lot of time. All the things is an awful lot of things. Plus transportation between things, plus appropriate meal breaks… and possibly we shouldn’t have left our planning to the day before? But by the time we turned the lights off, we had a detailed schedule planned, including meals.

Our morning started with a kayaking Eco Tour with Lazy Dog Adventures. Perfect weather for kayaking and a lovely place for it. We got to see a surprising number of sea creatures, from sea cucumbers to jellyfish, plus birds galore. The kayaking was my pick — the thing I most wanted to do — and I loved it. If that had been all we did, it still would have been an amazing trip. But we weren’t even close to done!

Next we headed to Half Shell Raw Bar. R’s thing was oysters so I asked the tour guide on our kayak trip which of the two places we’d found she’d recommend. Half Shell sold local oysters, so we went there. The menu didn’t have a lot to offer a gluten-free eater, but we got 2 dozen oysters on the half shell, shared between us, and then I ate a side of veggies and a side of coleslaw while R and S ate po’boys that looked delicious. The restaurant was right on the water, with a picnic tables & fish nets ambiance, so also a fun environment.

After lunch, we went grocery-shopping. Weird, right? But we’d decided to have dinner in, both because no restaurant was going to top our Santiago’s experience and because our evening plans meant we’d be looking for dinner around 9. At the recommendation of our morning tour guide, we stopped at the Eaton Street Seafood Market. Great people there, plus a gluten-free single serving cheesecake! We wound up buying porgy (a fish I’d never heard of, much less eaten), a bottle of sauvignon blanc, the cheesecake for me and the cutest little tray of cupcakes for the gluten-eaters.

We needed to get our fish back to the hotel fridge, which then gave us a short window of time before heading out for our evening adventure. R thought about trying to find the beach, but we didn’t really have enough time, so he hung out in the room and S and I relaxed in the small hotel pool.

Next up, we strolled across the island to Sebago Water Sports for a sunset sail and snorkel trip. I still couldn’t tell you whether the kayaking or the sailing was the highlight of my trip. Partly it was because it was such perfect weather. I love sailing, but you know, sometimes the sun beats down and you get a headache. Sometimes it’s windy and you spend the whole time eating your hair and wishing you’d remembered your sunglasses. Sometimes it’s just that hint of chilly where you’re not cold enough to complain but you’re not comfortable either. And sometimes, you’re out on the ocean, surrounded by blue and beauty and the expanse of sea and sky, and you remember that the world holds magic. This trip was the latter. At least for me. Poor S gets seasick with incredible discretion — she doesn’t even turn green, just leans over the side, pukes, turns back around and resumes the conversation. And the snorkeling and sunset were seriously so good that it could have been an ad for the experience — big fish, colorful fish, warm water, gorgeous sky, green flash. It was magic, really.

After the sun set and we returned to shore, we wandered back to the hotel. I cooked the fish — sauteed in butter rescued from our lunchtime bread plates and sprinkled with take-out salt & pepper that our lunch waitress had kindly found for me — while Suzanne made the salad. I think I’ll find the picture, because it was ridiculously gorgeous and beyond delicious.

The salad includes mixed greens, mango, strawberries, radishes, and avocado.

The next day, we wandered around a little bit more, then hopped in the car and drove home, stopping at the Key Deer Nature Preserve and taking a short hike (although the only deer we saw was by the side of the road, not in the preserve), checking out one of the sandal outlets that were everywhere, and eating lunch in Key Largo, the highlight of which was grilled shrimp wrapped in basil and prosciutto. We got home around 9, so really it was a 60-hour vacation if you include the drive. But the 36 hours actually in Key West were wonderful. Really just the kind of magic that you always want a vacation to be and that it never, ever, ever is.

Once home, stuff happened, life got a wee bit exciting, and two days later, I hopped on a plane to Pennsylvania, but that’s another story.

Bookmark Winner

Thank you so much to everyone who entered the bookmark giveaway. It’s funny, I didn’t do the typical Rafflecopter because I didn’t want it to be the kind of promotional thing where authors ask people to tweet or like pages on Facebook or have to work to enter — I wanted it to just be for people who already like the books. So instead I got to read so many lovely, lovely compliments — talk about a win for me! It was really nice. I wish I had bookmarks for everybody. Alas, though, I don’t. So the winner, picked by random number generator, is Leanne. I’ve emailed you for your mailing address, Leanne, so if you haven’t gotten the email, please check your spam folder.

Bookmark Giveaway

Beaded Bookmark for The Wedding Guests

To celebrate the release of Magical Weddings: 15 Enchanting Romances, I’m giving away a beautiful beaded bookmark, created by the talented Eve Devon. (Check out the beads–one’s a clue to an important character in the story!)

To enter, leave a comment below. You can tell me your favorite character in Tassamara or you can just say hi. Or, if the thought of posting a public comment makes your social anxiety spike and your heart race, enter by sending an email to bookmark@sarahwynde.com. I’ll give every entry a number and use a random number generator to pick a winner on June 23rd.

And meanwhile, if you didn’t pre-order Magical Weddings, it’s available today for the bargain price of .99!

Weird Foods That Worked Anyway

No pictures, but this is another food post, so skip it if you don’t care about recipes. Yes, maintaining four blogs badly started to feel like more effort than using one blog for everything, so I’m posting about cooking and writing here now. Eventually, I’m going to finish working on the Rozelle Press site and then I’ll make it my official author-y news site and let this just be my personal site, but that hasn’t happened yet. So for the moment, everything gets posted here, and today that means food.

Weird food.

Really weird food.

Last night, I had ground beef that needed to be used, and a plan I didn’t have enough energy to pull off (AIP-friendly meatloaf with mashed cauliflower, not going to happen), and a level of tired that meant all I wanted was to efficiently get my protein and vegetables down my throat so I could go to bed and not sleep some more.

I started out thinking I’d just throw what I had in a frying pan and hope for the best, but once I had a couple carrots and a parsnip chopped up and sauteing in some olive oil, I realized I’d be better off cooking the meat separately. So I started a new pan, with onions, garlic, and ground beef. In the ideal world, I would have thrown some sriracha in, but instead I sprinkled in ground cloves — maybe 1/4 tsp, not much, plus 1 tsp or so of cinnamon and 1 tsp or so of turmeric, and mixed thoroughly.

Yes, this was quite random. I just thought those three spices would probably taste good with parsnips and carrots and meat. I let everything cook slowly for a while–fifteen minutes or so?–with the vegetables covered and the meat not covered, because parsnips and carrots take a long time to get soft on the stove. I poured off some of the oil from the ground beef eventually, then added salt, the vegetables, and about half a bag of spinach. I covered it and let the spinach cook down for another couple of minutes, and then added a handful of chopped up cilantro. Mix thoroughly one last time, give the cilantro a minute to warm up but not lose its flavor. Oh, and I had started roasting the cauliflower before I decided I was too exhausted to make meatloaf, so I also added roast cauliflower before serving.

It was surprisingly delicious. The strongest flavor was the cilantro, but the hints of the other spices gave it a warm, autumn-ish flavor. R agreed, really good, but he ate later than me so I don’t know whether he might have jazzed it up with hot sauce. But honestly, for a fairly high-speed, inexpensive, protein plus vegetable meal, it was entirely acceptable. And I’m writing it down, because if I ever have the same lazy impulse, I know I’ll wonder what I included — the parsnips and the cinnamon were, IMO, the key.

Second weird food, this morning’s chicken soup. Classic leftover soup. To my homemade broth, which was perhaps a little heavy on rosemary when I made it, I added leftover chicken & broccoli slaw stir-fry, roast cauliflower, spinach, & cilantro. And salt. It was delicious. And this one I’m writing down as a reminder to myself that everything works with good chicken broth.

House Satisfaction

Being a homeowner feels sort of overwhelming most of the time. There is always, always, always another thing. If the whole house is vacuumed and dusted, with clean bathrooms and clean sheets and a clean kitchen, then the insurmountable mess of the garage is always there to make me feel guilty. If the back porch is neatly swept and organized, everything in its proper place, plants trimmed back, then there’s weeding to be done and trees that need work and plants that should be treated for bugs or infection. Even when everything’s working, there’s always an appliance making me nervous — the dishwasher not draining, the dryer not drying, the air-conditioner making a funny noise.

And all of that doesn’t even touch the big stuff, like the fact that the paint is (was!) peeling away on the garage and fading so strongly on the sunny side that it looked patchwork. Or the spot on the front where one of the boards is rotting away.

For months, I’ve been wrestling with indecision. Sell the house or get a job that lets me take better care of the house? Those felt like the only two options. Somehow a couple of months ago, I decided to try a third option — at least for the moment — and deal with the big stuff as best I could. So this past week was the week of painting the house. I started working on it a week ago — scraping paint, pressure-washing, priming, and doing my best to patch the area of wood rot. On Saturday, my family and some friends came and helped me paint. We were done with three sides of the house by noon, at which time we had a barbecue — burgers, hot dogs, fruit salad, potato chips, tortilla chips, and three kinds of dip. And then the kids went swimming.

I’m still tired, with sore muscles that twinge every time I raise my arms, but oh, so satisfied. And yes, that picture is me, sitting on my roof (and making my father very nervous — it’s his hand on the ladder, and I can almost promise that there were worried words coming out of his mouth.) But every time I look up at that wall now — nicely blue, trim bright and white — I get to think, I did that. I took care of that.

It’s a good feeling.

My dog might not be dumb

I think my dog has been deceiving me.

When a dog grows up with you, from puppy to adult, almost every day of her life spent in your company, you get to know her pretty well. When she’s your first dog, she shapes your ideas about what dogs are like. Then dog number two comes along and of course, he’s different. In Bartleby’s case, the open question has been, “Is he really dumb? Or is Zelda just really smart?” Because clearly one of those two things is true. Maybe both of them are true.

Training Zelda is pretty much a matter of figuring out how to explain to her what you want. Once she understands you, she’ll give it to you. She’s actually a lot better at training me than I am at training her. When she discovered that Bartleby’s glucosamine treats for joint pain were delicious, it took her about two days of sitting and staring at the treat box for ten minutes at a time before I started giving her one, too. Now, every morning, after breakfast, if I forget, she will get my attention and then go stare at the treat box until she gets her glucosamine. She’s ten years old and she’s learned this within the past six months. There’s some innate behaviors that I don’t think can be trained out of her, like her desperate need to chase any squirrels out of the backyard, and some behavioral stuff that I probably went wrong on too early, like her conviction that the right spot to be in a thunderstorm is on top of me, but otherwise, she’s so responsive. She tries really hard to understand me and do what I want her to do and she does really well at it. C votes for Zelda being a genius, so maybe she is.

In comparison… well, honestly, I’ve thought that possibly Bartleby’s head just isn’t big enough to have much working brain inside of it. (Ignoring the fact that he’s not that much smaller than Zelda.) Two years of putting his food in the exact same spot every single morning and evening and he still can’t bring himself to sit in the right place to wait for it. Trying to teach him to lie down seems impossible. He just gives me this blank stare out of his dark eyes and waits for me to give up. Sometimes I’m not even sure whether he knows his name. If he does, he practices very selective hearing.

But I could be wrong.

All last summer, I would bring him into the pool for a couple minutes at a time, just to get him used to the water. If he ever fell in accidentally, which happened a couple times, I wanted him to be comfortable enough not to panic. He never seemed to like it much, but he tolerated it. This summer, he’s started carefully jumping in. I’ll be in the pool, standing at the edge, when he comes up to me. Once I put my hands on either side of his body, he takes a little jump onto my shoulder. He’ll sit on me for a while, seeming to enjoy the water, and then start paddling. I let him go, he paddles to the steps, and hops out.

All that was fine, until he discovered the delights of rolling in dirt to dry off. Argh. He turns into a little mud dog. He’s got long, lovely, silky fur that becomes a matted, disgusting, tangle-y mess when covered in dirt. Not fun. Trying to convince him to stop was pointless. I’d say, “No!” and he’d give me that blank look, like, “Are you talking to me? Noise comes out of your mouth, but it means nothing,” and dash for the dirt.

So, in another instance of my dogs training me, I started promptly following him out of the pool to towel him off before he could reach the dirt. Fortunately, he loves being toweled dry. He especially loves it when I leave a towel spread on the chaise lounge so that it gets nice and warm from the sun.

But here’s the thing — it took him three days, three days, to understand that when I say, “towel” and point to the chaise, he should run there, jump up, and wait for me. Two years and he barely recognizes his name. Three days and he’s figured out how to get a warm, cozy towel wrapped around him for a full-body massage.

I think Bartleby has just been pretending to be dumb.

Guest posting

One of the interesting (and fun) aspects of participating in an anthology is working on marketing efforts with my fellow authors. I’m very much a skeptic about most marketing endeavors but for this project, I decided to adopt the “give it your all” attitude and go along with every idea suggested. And there have been lots of ideas!

One of them, though, was that we all try to guest post at three different blogs. Eep. I cannot (really, truly, absolutely cannot) invite myself to write at someone else’s blog. As I said in a comment on my last post, I don’t know how to invite myself to other people’s blogs, anymore than I could invite myself to someone’s house for the weekend. I’m just not sociable that way. Happy to write, yes, but asking to show up on someone’s blog feels like asking to add lines to their poem or something.

That said, if you are reading and you have a blog and you like it when people add lines to your poem — metaphorically, obviously, I’m not really a poet — well, yeah… I’m inviting invitations and would love to come chat with you/to your readers.

You are cordially invited…

You are invited — to the wedding of Akira Malone and Zane Latimer, set in Tassamara, and taking place inside the pages of Magical Weddings: 15 Enchanting Romances.

Available for pre-order now at:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Apple

Kobo