Vegan for a Week Challenge

Morgan at Life After Bagels is hosting a Vegan For a Week challenge starting on Monday, February 7 and I’ve decided to join in.  (Thanks Sarah for bringing it to my attention.)  From Monday through Sunday of this coming week, I will try to eat vegan (no animal products, including dairy and eggs.)  I think this challenge will be a great time to try new recipes and ingredients and to reflect on my dietary choices.  I know it won’t be easy–particularly since I live in the land of cheese–but I think it will be a fun and fascinating challenge.

Here’s my plan to prepare for and engage in the challenge:

This weekend (pre-challenge):

• Go through my cupboards and refrigerator and figure out what I have on hand already that’s already vegan.
• Try to use up and/or properly store things that aren’t vegan so that this challenge doesn’t result in wasted food.
• Make a meal plan for the week:
  • I will definitely be looking for recipes on sites like Peas and Thank You (Mama Pea just launched a weekly vegan meal plan series!), Oh She Glows, the Daily Garnish, and Love Veggies and Yoga
  • I may buy a vegan cookbook or two at Barnes and Noble (cookbooks = big weakness of mine!)
  • If you have any ideas for recipes, sites, or cookbooks, please let me know!
• Grocery shop on Sunday night

During the Challenge (Monday, February 7-Sunday, February 13)

• Try to eat vegan from Monday morning through Sunday  night.
• Blog daily about what I ate during the challenge (probably not every meal, but at least a snapshot of one meal a day).
• Join in on the discussion via Twitter tag #7dayvegan

After the Challenge:

• Reflect on and blog about what I learned during the challenge

Is anyone else joining in?

Snow Day!

The university canceled classes yesterday and the roads were practically impassable until mid-afternoon, so Brian and I enjoyed an
unexpected day off together.

Our apartment complex has a small gym in the main building that’s about a block away from our apartment, so we thought we’d walk there when we woke up to get a nice workout in. I looked out around 11 am and saw this:

The footprints looked pretty deep, and they trailed off a few feet past the edge of this picture, as if someone had just given up, turned around, and walked back to their apartment. Then I realized the snowman that someone had built a few weeks ago (which is roughly person-sized) was up to his torso in snow.  (It also looks like he’s yelling for help, which makes me laugh!)

A few hours later, I heard the joyous sound of a snow blower and looked out to see this guy struggling to uncover the sidewalk inch-by-inch:

On days like yesterday, the convenience of not having to shovel/snowblow/curse the 17 inches of snow that was drifting as high as 4-6 feet in some places totally makes up for all of the inconveniences of apartment living!

When we finally made it to the workout room around 2:30, it was PACKED!!  I guess many of our neighbors decided to take advantage of their day off by working out, too!  I did about 10 minutes on the elliptical while I waited for a treadmill to free up, then did 40 minutes of walking/running intervals.  I was slower and got more winded than before I got sick, but it was SO NICE to be able to finish a workout.

I am REALLY looking forward to yoga tonight!  It’s been 2 weeks since I last practiced, and I have been missing it so badly.

Why I didn’t go to yoga tonight…

8:30 pm

9:30 pm

We’re in the middle of a blizzard!  The graininess you see in those pictures is not from my camera; that’s blowing snow.  It sounds like a hurricane out there.  Classes are canceled tomorrow, which is a relief because I was really worried about how I was going to get to campus safely in the morning!  Now I’m excited about a snow day to sleep in (a little), get caught up on paperwork, and hang out with my fiance.

Cranberry Orange Oatmeal Cookie Dough Balls

After buying (delicious!) baked goods at the coffee shop next to my office twice last week, I realized I need to come up with some healthier sweet snacks to take with me on days when I’m on campus all day.  Inspired by Mama Pea’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Balls and Averie’s 5 Minute Raw Vegan Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, I came up with:

• 1/4 cup oats

• 1/4 cup nuts (pecans, almonds, and/or cashews would work well)
• 4-6 medjool dates, pitted and quartered
• 1/4 cup dried cranberries
• 1/4 tsp orange zest
• 1/8 tsp almond extract (optional)

I put the oats into my mini food processor and processed them until they were coarsely ground:

Then, I added the nuts and processed them until they made a coarse, sandy mixture:

I added the dates, cranberries, orange zest, and almond extract and processed until they were well incorporated into the “dough.”

At this point, though the mixture will look like wet, grainy sand, you should be able to condense it into dough balls with your fingers.  If it won’t stick together, try adding another date and processing until it’s well-incorporated into the dough.

This recipe made 8 small (tablespoon-sized) dough balls.  With the ingredients I used, I calculated that each ball has about 86 calories.  They’re pretty calorie-dense, but that’s what I wanted because I want to be able to take one or two and eat them as an afternoon snack.

(There are only 7 dough balls in this picture, because I ate one before I took it.  They were too good not to try!)

Getting Back on Track: Weekly Workout Plan

Remember when I said I thought I was getting better on Thursday?  Apparently, I jumped the gun and was in for two more days of congestion, sore throat, and a terribly runny nose that makes me feel like a kindergartner.  (I am resisting making a green slime joke here.)   I refuse to jinx myself again by declaring that I’m feeling better, but I am hoping that I will be able to get back to a normal workout schedule this week.  Since I didn’t work out at all last week because I was sick, I’m re-doing Week 4 of Couch to 10K before moving on so that I can build my endurance back up.

Here’s my plan:

Today (Sunday, January 30): Off

Monday (January 31): yoga

Tuesday (February 1): Run Week 4 Day 2

Wednesday (February 2): yoga

Thursday (February 3): lift weights

Friday (February 4): run Week 4 Day 3

Saturday (February 5): yoga

Saturday is the only day that’s going to have to be a bit flexible, because I’m driving down to my hometown to go wedding dress shopping!  I’m very excited about it, but also a little overwhelmed.

Obsessed: Roasted Broccoli with Colorful Potatoes

A confession:  up until two weeks ago, I hated broccoli.  HATED. I am a BIG texture eater, and something about the texture of raw and steamed broccoli has always grossed me out. I have tried many times to like it, because it’s full of nutrients.  (Did you know that one cup of broccoli has only 43 calories, but contains about twice the recommended daily value of vitamins C and K, and is also a good source of folate, vitamin A, iron, riboflavin, and even Omega-3s?  Add in almost 5 grams of fiber, and it’s a nutritional powerhouse!)

About two weeks ago, on a whim, I Googled “broccoli recipe for broccoli haters.”  Several different results pointed me to the Barefoot Contessa’s Parmesan-Roasted Broccoli. I made it, and, to my surprise, I loved it.  The broccoli was crunchy on the outside, tender on the inside, and it was delicious!

Since that first attempt at the recipe, I have been craving broccoli.   I’ve gone through two 12-ounce bags of pre-prepped broccoli from Trader Joe’s in two weeks, and I keep dreaming up new ways to eat roasted broccoli. After playing with different combination of vegetables, I think my favorite combination is:

Roasted Broccoli with Colorful Potatoes

Adapted from Ina Garten’s Parmesan-Roasted Broccoli

Makes 2 side-dish servings, or 1 entree-sized serving

• 2.5 cups broccoli florets, trimmed into small pieces
• 4 small potatoes (I love Trader Joe’s that combines red, yellow, and purple baby potatoes), sliced into 1/2 inch thick rounds
• 1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil (or oil of your choice)
• juice of half a lemon (~1/2 tablespoon)
• salt and pepper to taste
• optional: grated parmesan cheese or 4-cheese Italian blend

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. In a small bowl or directly on baking sheet, toss broccoli florets and potato rounds with olive oil.  Spread out evenly in a single layer on a baking sheet.   Sprinkle with salt.

Roast for 20-25 minutes until broccoli is brown and crispy but not burnt, and potatoes are soft with a slight golden crust.

After removing from oven, toss with lemon juice and salt + pepper to taste.  (Feel free to add a little more olive oil, too.)  If desired, top with cheese.  Eat, get addicted, make every night, dream about it, go to broccoli rehab.

Green Slime Sludge

I apologize for being so absent from blogging lately.  Right after I got back from my relaxing weekend trip to my hometown, I got sick.  I think I caught the virus was making my adorable little niece miserable.  (Did I mention that while I played with her, she stuck her hands in my mouth repeatedly, sneezed in my face, and tried to feed me a gooey, half-eaten cracker?  Hmmm…  I wonder how I got sick?)   I *think* I am finally getting better now, but it’s been a rough few days.

Though my “comfort foods” when I’m sick have always been saltines, Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, and ginger ale or 7-Up, I figured highly processed white flour, extreme amounts of sodium,  gross processed chicken pieces, and lots of high fructose corn syrup was probably not the best thing I could eat while my body tries to get over this virus.  (Plus, scratchy saltines HURT on a sore throat.)

Enter the Green Slime Sludge Smoothie.  Soothing on my sore throat, delicious (really!) and full of good-for-me nutrients, but also weird enough to satisfy my inner child:

 

In the mix: vanilla almond milk and orange juice as a base, a few handfuls of baby spinach, a tablespoon of chia seeds (added for Omega-3s, plus the cool sludgy gelification factor), half a frozen banana cut in chunks, frozen mango chunks, and frozen pineapple chunks.

It tasted really tropical, which is great on this snowy winter morning when I wish I were on a beach somewhere much warmer than Wisconsin. (Though the coldness of it did mean I had to put on an extra sweater…)

If you’ve never had a smoothie made with baby spinach, you need to try it!  If you add banana, you really can’t taste the spinach, and it’s a great way to get an entire salad’s worth of greens into a small cup.  Check out the Green Monster Movement for lots of great recipes for green smoothies.

On a side note, did anyone else love Ecto Cooler when they were little?

I’m not even sure if the actual Ecto Cooler was green (it was lemon-orange flavored), but because it was Slimer’s favorite drink, I was humming the Ghost Busters theme song while blending this up!

Putting the “teach” in Teach, Write, Cook

As you may have noticed, though this blog is called “Teach, Write, Cook,” I have not talked much about the teaching part. There’s a good reason for that: I started this blog during my Winter break from teaching, and although the new semester started last week, today was my first real day back in the classroom.

This semester, I’m a graduate teaching assistant for a large, 200-level college course. The lectures are taught by a professor, and I teach 4 discussion sections each week of 15-20 students per section. I love teaching in these small groups because I feel like I can connect with each student individually.  A big part of my job as a teaching assistant is to encourage my students to think critically about the world and to empower them to articulate their opinions, and that’s significantly easier to do when I can connect well with my students.

Many of my students were born in the early 1990s and have been taking state-mandated standardized tests since elementary school. They have spent a large portion of their educational careers trying to figure out how to get the “right” answer that fits into the bubble or box of a standardized test , which is then scored by a grader trained to look for only a very narrow range of answers (or by a machine that only recognizes one correct answer).  By the time they reach college, many of them are extremely adept at coming up with the expected answer for an exam, but struggle when asked to engage in critical thinking and writing.

Though I often hear people complain about millennials¹ having poor critical thinking skills, I have found that my students often actually do have unique, insightful, and interesting ideas, but they are terribly afraid to express them.  They become extremely uncomfortable when asked to complete an assignment that asks them to express opinions and make critical judgments; what if their opinions and judgments aren’t right? (I cannot tell you how many times in the past few years students have come to my office to ask me to look over a critical analysis essay to see if it is “right;” it probably numbers in high double digits.)

It sounds strange, but I find a lot of inspiration from body-positivity-oriented projects/sites  like Operation Beautiful and Already Pretty. Much like young women and men are inundated with messages from media representations, their families, their friends, and even strangers that their bodies should fit within a narrowly-construed ideal of the perfect body, they also receive messages from educators and administrators that tell them their ideas and opinions should fit into a narrowly-construed ideal of the correct answer.  Sometimes I feel like my own one-woman Operation Beautiful: Mind Edition to convince students that they can and should express their ideas. (Perhaps I should start putting up “You are smarter than you think you are!” Post-Its on the mirrors at school?)

I don’t have a magic formula for helping these students overcome this deep-rooted fear, but in my own teaching, I’ve found that the three most effective things I can do to engage my students are:

• ask them open-ended questions aimed at critical reflection
• truly listen to and acknowledge their responses
• encourage them to ask their own questions of me, of the course materials, and of the world

Of course I still have to assess their written work and assign it grades, but I find that grading is easier when I have this sort of engaged, open communication with students.  The work they turn in is better– more clearly written, more analytical, more critical– when they feel empowered to engage and interrogate the material on their own terms, and I even find that their reactions to their grades (high or low) are better when they know that I respect them.

This afternoon, when I read over the teaching evaluations my students filled out at the end of the fall semester, the most rewarding comment I read were not the ones that said I was a knowledgeable about the material (though I am really proud of those comments, too), but this one:

This is the most comfortable I have ever felt participating in discussion section because I felt like giving the wrong answer wouldn’t be judged or shunned.

Although this one was pretty high on the list, too:

 

—

1I just Googled “millennials” and realized that by some definitions, I am one.  Interesting!  I’m not sure if/how this applies as much to my generation, because I graduated from high school just before No Child Left Behind went into effect, but I do wish more teachers had encouraged me to think for myself and own my opinions when I was younger.

Weekend, unplugged

After my hectic week of writing, I spent the weekend in my hometown with my family.  I spent Friday and part of Saturday at my sister’s house.  I went down to spend time with my adorable nephew and niece, and to help my sister out because her husband was gone for the weekend and her one-year-old was sick.

I spent hours doing art projects with my 4 1/2 year old nephew, Sam.    We painted with water colors, made masks out of construction paper, made a 15-foot-long paper chain, created “fossils” by stamping toy dinosaur feet in Play Doh… he is very creative!   I played a little with my niece, Claire, but because she was sick and crabby, she mostly wanted to be held by her mama.  After the kids went to bed, I had a great time catching up with my sister over a glass of wine.

I was originally planning to drive back to Madison on Saturday afternoon, but I got talked into going out to dinner with my aunt, uncle, cousins, grandmother, and mom at a great little local Mexican restaurant (I didn’t need much convincing).   After excellent conversation, great food, a margarita, and a complimentary tiny shot of almond-flavored tequila, I was not in the mood to drive home!

So, I ended up staying at my aunt and uncle’s house in their gorgeous guest bedroom.  The guest bed had a heated mattress pad that was heavenly!  When I woke up yesterday morning, I made the mistake of checking the weather on my phone while I was still in bed and it was -12 degrees (F) outside!  I did NOT want to get out of the toasty warm bed.  I am definitely going to look into getting a heated mattress pad for my bed–it kept me incredibly warm all night.  (Which is saying something, because I am ALWAYS cold.)

I didn’t take my laptop along on my impromptu weekend trip, so other than checking my e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook on my phone a few times, I had a relatively unplugged weekend.  After staring at my computer screen for hours upon hours each day last week, it was really nice to take a break from it.

Exhausted!

I hit my deadline for turning in a chapter draft to my dissertation director this afternoon.  For the past week, I spent hours and hours each day reading, writing, and revising.  Everything else in my life (even cooking, working out, and cleaning up after myself –my desk is a disaster right now) had to take a back seat to writing my dissertation for a few days, but I finished my chapter draft and turned it in!  Whew!!!

This is literally all that I can bring myself to write for now;  my brain needs a break from composing sentences and paragraphs.   I will hopefully be back in the morning to write something more coherent, but for now, a cat picture will have to suffice: