Author Archives: Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition

My errand boy has a bum knee

Matthew has a couple of normal routes to/from work, that, with small detours, can easily include a stop at the library, a store on The Hill, or Local Harvest Grocery.  Since we’re rather heavy library users (we traded paying for Netflix for free DVDs from the library), having a branch conveniently located along his work commute is not only convenient, but rather essential for picking up holds and returning materials in a timely manner to avoid fines.

Part of Matthew’s motive in getting a road-ish bike (first the Surly, then the Salsa) was the hope that a different riding position/posture would address some ongoing knee pain he’s had since at least this time last year.  While the pain may just be an overuse thing, he’s been wondering if it’s related to the crash he had in the October 2012.  At the time, the severely sprained toe got all the attention, but it’s certainly possible he damaged his knee at the same time.

Anyway, after buying the Salsa, and then going through a series of bike fittings, adjustments, and part swaps (new handlebar stem, new saddle) to tweak his position on the bike, he hoped to resolve the problem, but the pain persists, and it seems that cycling is the one thing that aggravates it.

He has an appointment with a doctor, and he also decided to take a hiatus from biking to work.  This is a bummer on many levels: 1) instead of coming and going on his own schedule, he has to work around the bus schedule; 2) he’s not getting his usual physical activity; and 3) he can’t easily run the library and grocery errands.

For the time being, we’ve switched our library requests to the branch that is closer to our apartment (which is [usually] more convenient for me than the branch on his way to work).  The grocery errands end up being delayed until one or the other of us will be in the vicinity with the car (or until I will be in the vicinity on my bike), since I don’t usually have time to make a bike trip just to run that one errand.

For all of our sake’s (but mostly his), I hope we figure out the knee thing soon.  Biking is a great form of transportation, but while you certainly don’t have to be an Olympic athlete to commute by bike, it does depend on having a relatively healthy, able body.

Big things from the garden

Exhibit #1: A ridiculously large sweet potato

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Shown with a grapefruit and my hand for some sense of scale, what this guy lacks in beauty, he makes up for in size, weighing in at just over 12 pounds.  He suffered some damage from voles during the growing season, and his growth outpaced their eating.

I made a huge, way-too-thick batch of this sweet potato peanut bisque, which I originally read about over on Spatoola, with half of it.  I roasted the other half in big chunks, and stuck them in the freezer for a future batch of mashed sweet potatoes.

Exhibit #2: Lunga di Napoli winter squash

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Unlike the sweet potato, which was abnormally large, this lunga is rather par for the course for this variety.  It’s just a big ol’ squash.

We sliced and roasted about a fifth of it as a dinner side earlier in the week.  For the remainder, I roasted big chunks to puree into a simple soup consisting of squash, coconut milk, grated ginger, and a bit of salt.  This very simple soup perked up significantly with the addition of some carmelized onions, plus Paul’s beans.

I actually thought this big guy would go further, perhaps yielding some extra puree for pumpkin bread or pumpkin butter.  I guess that will wait for the next squash.

After a failed attempt at pumpkin butter last year, I finally figured it out several weeks ago.  Turns out that it’s pretty simple — you just have to let it simmer for. ev. er.  That’s the trick.  Anyhow, we’re about finished with my first batch, and I’m looking forward to making more.

Decisions, decisions

Before last Friday, I had gone almost four years since my last professional hair cut!  Over those four years, I saved a lot of money by trimming my own hair (with a pair of professional-grade hair shears).  But I was ready for a change, so, after getting some recommendations, I visited Erinn at Bouffant Daddy in Maplewood, with the intention of chin length or shorter.

After talking with Erinn, we decided to start with a chin-length bob.

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I like it, but I’m still tempted to go shorter.  In some ways, this is an awkward length — too short to really pull back, but long enough that it takes a decent while to air dry (I don’t get along too well with blow dryers).  Shorter might play nicer with bike helmets and sun hats, too.

It also doesn’t feel completely different, or “new,” since it’s similar to a cut I had at the end of high school / beginning of college (minus some excessive Sun-In highlights). On the one hand, I could live with this cut for awhile, and just go shorter in a few months.  On the other hand, I have seven days from the date of the initial hair cut to change my mind and get a different cut for no charge.  The clock on that is ticking.

Bike Seat
The clock is also ticking, somewhat, on a child bike seat color decision.  Unfortunately, the Yepp Maxi seat I bought on EBay is the ‘standard’ model, which doesn’t play nicely with the Edgerunner rack.  Instead, we need the ‘Easyfit’ model.  (Since I can’t return the EBay purchase, I’m hoping I’ll be able to resell that seat . . . . )

I am not finding any used Easyfit seats, so we’re planning to order directly from Xtracycle (apparently what I should have done in the first place!) . . . which means we have color options.

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We’ve narrowed it down to these four (orange, lime, blue, and silver), but it still feels like too many types of cereal to choose from at the grocery store.

Matthew’s leaning toward the lime, which would look like this with our blue bike . . .

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The ‘silver’ seat (which mostly looks gray to me) was not on our original list, but I found this photo of the silver seat with the blue bike, and I like the look.

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Lime or orange seem like they would have some visibility advantages, though.  Gah, decisions!

Ready for that longtail
At any rate, it will be nice to have the cargo capacity of the longtail.  My decision to buy not one, but two furnace filters at the store today (they were on sale!), seemed great until I reached my bike and realized the diagonal of my milk crate is the perfect size for ONE filter.

I managed to rig up something that worked well enough for the short ride home . . . 0224141450-00

. . . but it was not the most secure set-up, so I stuck to smaller streets than I might have otherwise.  I made it home with everything (two furnace filters, a fire extinguisher, and a half-gallon of milk) on board and intact, but it would have been much easier on a longtail!

Photo Credits
1. http://www.amazon.com/Yepp-GMG-Maxi-Easyfit-Blue/dp/B004PYEAZS
2. http://www.splendidcycles.com/-/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/EdgeRunner-003aw.jpg
3. http://www.motoredbikes.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=48488&d=1367821550

Food philosophy: Eat your beans

Wow, I feel like I wrote my first “Food Philosophy” post (on fad diets) yesterday, not two months ago — time really does fly!  In that post, I mentioned beans as an innocent victim of low-carb diets.

Beans (as in legumes, dried or canned) are a fabulous food: high in fiber, good source of vegetarian protein,  and easy to store and transport.  Despite being vilified by some diets because of their high carbohydrate levels, they are a low Glycemic Index (GI) food, another factor in their favor, since low-GI diets are associated with reduced risk of a number of chronic diseases (including heart disease and type 2 diabetes).  In short, a food’s GI is a measure of how a particular food impacts blood sugar levels when consumed (you can read more about GI here).

The variety of beans is almost endless, and they can be prepared in many ways.  I try to incorporate a serving of beans (1/2 cup cooked beans) into at least one meal a day, which is relatively easy, with a bit of planning.

In grad school, I ate some variation on beans and rice for lunch almost every day.  I prepared a big batch at the beginning of the week, and had a cheap, nutritious, portable lunch easily at hand.  These days, the recipes are often a bit more complicated, but I enjoy going back to that staple, as in this oven-baked twist.

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Something about sitting in a hot oven for 45-minutes really elevated the flavor, making it almost creamy and cheesy (though no cream or cheese were involved).

Dry vs. Canned
Canned beans are convenient, but because of the BPA in can linings, I almost exclusively buy dry beans.  I can also buy dry beans in bulk, reusing my own bags, with little to no packaging waste.  You can read my full list of advantages of dry over canned in this post.

I rarely use the brining method for preparing dried beans mentioned in that post anymore.  First, it requires a quick soak, which uses more energy than an overnight soak.  Second, it wastes salt.  Sure, salt it cheap, but I realized I could get nearly the same effect (nicely salted beans) by doing a regular soak (either quick or overnight), cooking and draining and beans, and then adding salt directly to the hot, cooked beans and letting it soak in a bit before using the beans.

Quick tip: prepare twice as many dried beans as you need for a recipe/meal.  Freeze the extra cooked, cooled beans in a quart-sized freezer bag, and they’re ready when you need them, almost as fast as opening a can of beans!

Eat your beans
Until recently, if asked, I probably would have said that chickpeas (AKA garbanzo beans) were my favorite legume.  They still rank high, but over the last year, two other legumes stole my heart: lentils and cowpeas.

Lentils (or dal, in Indian cooking) rank high for their versatility.  I love blending well-cooked lentils into a variety of soups to make a hearty base.  They are also fabulous in chili (recipe post languishing in draft form).  Lentils also star in Snobby Joe’s, a vegetarian take on Sloppy Joe’s.  Unlike other legumes, many types of lentils don’t need to be soaked before cooking, so they’re great in a pinch, when you realize you forgot to soak beans for dinner.

Cowpeas come in an amazing number of forms.  If you’ve eaten black-eyed peas before, then you’ve had one type of cowpea.  Matthew grew one variety last summer (and Gabriel helped shell them).  Our harvest was enough for just a few meals, but they were delicious.

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For the past few years, we’ve been fortunate to have a local source for some of our beans.  Paul at Bellews Creek Farm grows two types of [dried] beans every year, usually black beans and something else.  This year, the “something else” was a type of cowpea: a pink-eyed cowpea.

Both varieties of cowpea — what we grew in our garden, and the pink-eyed peas from Bellews Creek — rank among the most flavorful beans I’ve ever had.  While I’ve incorporated them into a number of dishes, I also enjoy then straight-up, with just a bit of salt.  If you’re in StL, look for Bellews Creek beans in the bulk bins at Local Harvest Grocery.  Seriously, try some!

I hope to have that lentil chili recipe ready soon, but in the meantime, check out the other bean-y recipes on my recipe page.

Waiting on our longtail bicycle

At the end of December, we started talking with a local bike shop (LBS) about options for ordering an Xtracycle Edgerunner.  The guy we worked with did a great job helping us price the different options.  Then came decision time.

To make the comparison easier, I added some details to the “pricing” page of the standard bike specs document for the Edgerunner, so we could see options with prices all on one page (details here: EdgerunnerOptions).

We were fairly sure we wanted an internal hub, and the most affordable option was to just start with the frame & fork and build it up from there (by which I mean the bike shop will be building it up from there, with some input from us as to the components).  As for accessories, we’re getting Standard Racks, the FlightDeck, the KickBack Center Stand (a super-stable, two-legged kickstand) and the X2 bags (which are waterproof).

By the time we made all of the decisions and finalized our order, Xtracycle was sold out of the frame & fork in our chosen color (Zone Blue) until mid-March.  (A note on frame color: we quickly ruled out both the white and the orange frames, leaving light blue or black. Despite blue being my favorite color, I didn’t love that shade of blue for a bicycle, and I had some temptation toward the sleek simplicity of the black — but we went with the blue.)

So now we wait.  The fact that we’ve had so much crappy weather and so much snow and ice on the roads actually makes the wait easier — even if we had the bike already, it would mostly be sitting around, lonely and gathering dust.

UPDATE: I wrote this post on Sunday.  Yesterday, our LBS guy checked in with Xtracycle, and they’re now not expecting this shipment until early- to mid-April.  Boo, hiss!!!

I decided not to order the child seat (Yepp Maxi EasyFit) directly from Xtracycle, in the hopes of finding a used one on EBay or Craigslist.  Turns out, there aren’t many out there, at least not on EBay or my local-ish CL options (StL, Kansas City, Colombia, MO), so when I saw an auction for a “new, opened-box” blue Yepp Maxi on EBay, I decided to go for it, and I won the auction.  Once you factor in the shipping, it wasn’t a great deal, but it did save some money.

The seat I bought included the adapter for attaching it to a regular bicycle, which we won’t need once we have the Edgerunner.  However, since we don’t expect the Edgerunner for at least a month, I installed the seat on Matthew’s bike.

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When I first opened the box and started looking at the seat and the mounting hardware, I had a moment of panic where I wondered if we would, in fact, actually still be able to use our rear racks and panniers with the child seat.  The assumption that we would not was largely what led us to purchase a longtail in the first place.  Had we just spent all that money for nothing?

While you can’t necessarily tell from the above picture, my fears were quickly assuaged once I actually started installing the seat — no way is the rear rack useable with the seat in place.  (We noticed that Yepp UK has a rack extender accessory that would theoretically allow you to use the seat and standard panniers on a regular (i.e., non-longtail) bicycle.)

At just over 35-pounds, Sir is still under the 38-pound weight limit for the IBert front seat (though his height means his legs are a bit cramped), and I’ll enjoy getting at least a few more rides with him up front with me.  Once we get the Edgerunner, I’ll be looking for a new [long-term loan] home for the IBert (if you’re interested, and local, let me know), hopefully someone who will use and enjoy it as much as I did!