Grocery shopping

One of my favorite things to obsess over is food. I have dreams where I am eating, finding or preparing food. Food shows up in my dreams at least once a week, as it has done since I can remember.

According to the dream site I just checked between this paragraph and the last, food dreams symbolize physical or emotional nourishment.
Dreams containing fruit symbolize sensuality, which I find a little disturbing because from ages four to seven I have a recurring dream I had about walking through a citrus grove and a grapefruit falling into my hand off one of the trees. So it would appear I was a little pervert back then wouldn't it?

Before I digress on some kind of weird analysis of my childhood, I have to talk about some exciting ways to get more out of food.

Everybody knows that eating fewer calories means eating more produce. But part of the problem is that we get stuck in ruts with our eating and it is sometimes scary or difficult to try anything new. In short, we eat the same boring food all the time.

Chances are if you are reading this blog, you are trying to improve your fitness. And one of the most obvious effects of being fit is an optimal body composition. Which means you look good in a bathing suit, Sunday suit or birthday suit. What, you thought I meant naked? you're the perv, pervert.

What I am talking about is packing in the most nutrition for the least amount of calories. I am talking about the produce department.
Adam and Eve were nudists and they lived in a produce department. They walked around the garden in the nude until some classical painter guy made them cover it up with a fig leaf.

Since we are usually in the habit of making the same ten or so dishes when we cook, we tend to go to the store, pick out what we need for those dishes and then go home and make them and then watch Dexter while chowing down to the the same boring casserole/beans and rice/meat and potatoes that we always do and basically living the same boring day that we did last week.

What if instead we got some kind of new produce, planned the meal around what is fresh and in season and got the whole family involved in preparing a delicious feast?
Although my wife and I do not have kids, I often include our cat in the preparation of dinner by letting her smell what we are making and then mocking her by making hissing noises, like another, bigger, territiorial cat who knows how to make a london broil.

But in this internet blogorific world where everything I say makes sense and is ridiculously simple yet somehow genious, this is what the family kitchen should look like.

• Head chef - Parent
• Sous chef - Other parent or oldest child/pet
• Line cook - kid or pet
• Prep cook - kid or pet

... and so on.

Everybody cooks, everybody helps. It's what socialism wants to be when it grows up.

Let's get back to the produce. Produce is super tasty and it can be very inexpensive if you know where to find it. Unless you are addicted to heirloom tomatoes (I have not found anywhere that has them for less than what I would expect pay for a wino's liver. That is a few dollars a pound).
Here are the places you need to be buying produce right now:

• Winchester Farmer's Market. Winchester and Kirby in Hickory Hill (across from that crazy church with the statue of liberty holding a cross). It is not a farmer's market, despite the misleading name. It is like America had a baby with all your favorite ethnic foods. The store is in a defunct Schnucks and I literall had to pick by jaw up off the floor in the produce department. Bananas, apples, guava, papaya, chinese and indian eggplant, a thousand different kinds of mushrooms and peppers, purple sweet potatoes, weird squashes and melons with spikes all over them. Some of these vegetables could double as a weapon! BTW cheap awesome prices. We got what seems like a bushel of basil for a dollar!
• Viet Hoa Market. Cleveland and Court in Midtown. Has a ton of exotic produce as well as live eels swimming around in tanks. What's not to love?
• Easy Way. Various locations. Hands down one of the best places to pick up old ladies. All you have to do is talk about this weather we've been having and you are golden. You may have to watch some of the prices, for example pineapple can sometimes be more than $3 (which is a fair price).

That is all I've got for right now. But I want to post theis recipe for slaw. It goes really well in a wrap with some chicken breast or london broil.

you will need:

• 6 or so baby bok choy
• 3 radishes
• chili paste or crushed red pepper
• 1 tbsp. rice vinegar
• 1/2 tsp. low sodiom soy sauce
• 1 tsp. sesame oil
• 1 tsp agave nectar 

Slice bok choy into shreds. Sliver the radishes. Put vegetables into a bowl and add the other ingredients. mix it up.

Music to work out to

I love going to estate sales and satisfying my morbid obsession with peeking into other peoples' lives. the place I like to head when I get to an estate sale is the tool shed or garage. after that I head immediately for the records. There is nothing like going through someone's record collection and finding out if they are a sad bastard with a tear in my beer, into show tunes and jazz hands, addicted to shaking their ass to anything with a beat, angry at the world, secretly (or not so secretly) into Kelly Clarkson, the list of possibilities is endless.

You get the idea.

Now you are about to hear some of what I like to listen to. Sometimes the music we work out to isn't the stuff we listen to at other times, but sometimes it is. Sometimes it is really lame music.
I have to admit a Lady Gaga song got stuck in my head. It was like a gay bar DJ had taken over the radio station in my head and left the song on repeat while he left to get another blueberry mojito and do a line off a drag queen's somewhat recently shaved caboose in the bathroom.

So my wife and I share I-tunes because we like a lot of the same stuff. She also likes some very womany music, and although I might never mean for it to happen, I listen to some of her playlists while running. This is for a couple of reasons. The First is that I am lazy and can't seem to make more than one playlist per season. Second, she seems to constantly be making new playlists, thus contributing to my own sluggishness on that tip.
Sometimes something so girly will come on (like female rapper Peaches) that I will need to change it. But I don't. Because it has a constant rythm, good beats and lyrics that are so raunchy that I have to look around to make sure no one can hear what is coming out of the tiny i-pod earbuds that are drowning in a moat of sweat from my ear canal.
And then there are the Black Eyed Peas. So vanilla and safe, yet with that constant beat that is great for cardio.

The best thing I have found for cardio is Girl Talk. Girl talk is a DJ who does insane mash-ups of different genres. He does a Black Sabbath guitar riff with a Ludacris vocal track and it works! Another one is a conglomeration of Beastie Boys, Iggy Pop, and Lady Gaga (looks like she got stuck in someone else's head). Another example is the Ramones with Missy Elliott! One mash-up flows into another into another so seamlessly that you have just completed your first marathon when you realize you were just going to get on the treadmill for a few minutes before you had to go work. So you call in and go buy yourself some icy-hot, because you're a winner.

So these are some of my cardio guilty pleasures. When I lift weights I need something more manly, like the Misfits, GG Allin or Minor Threat. Because I am still a man, despite the occasioal listening to girly cardio music and that close call when Lady Gaga invaded my brain that one time. Don't judge me.

What is your favorite workout music? Any guilty pleasures? Write it in the comment box. I want to know!

HIIT you in the face

Cardiovascular conditioning is a strange beast. Some people love it. Some people hate it. Sometimes we love and hate it at the same time.

I have that love/hate thing with cardio. I get bored if I have to run a really long distance, because it means doing exactly the same thing for a really long time.

That said, I love running outside. I love swimming. I hate ellliptical machines. I thought I hated treadmills, too.

Until high intensity interval training happened to me. That's HIIT for short.
I like to think of HIIT as a way to make treadmills less boring. Kind of like alcoholic beverages make boring people somewhat more interesting. Or ugly people more attractive. On the flip side, HIIT will never be the reason you have sex with an uggo.

The idea is short bursts of maximal effort followed by periods of rest or recovery, like running sprints. This is a great way to blast fat and raise your metabolic rate for several hours. Unlike distance running, it breaks up your run into manageable chunks of time. As you progress through your run you see yourself achieving each of the smaller goals you have set for yourself.
At the end of the run you have an awesome feeling of accomplishment, which makes it easy to stay on track with your workouts and healthy eating.

Here is how to get a great HIIT workout:

Imagine a scale from 1 to 10. 1 is almost no effort at all and 10 is maximal effort. This scale is called rate of perceived exertion (RPE). Maximal effort is different for everyone because we all have different levels of conditioning.
A highly conditioned athlete can run at a 6 mph pace for 30 seconds with very little effort, translating to a 2 or 3 on the RPE scale. That athlete can probably run at 10 mph for 30 seconds at an 8 or 9 RPE.

A sedentary overweight individual might struggle to run 6 mph for 30 seconds. That would be that person's 10. Maybe that person can walk briskly for 30 seconds at 3.5 mph for 30 seconds. That might be a 2 or 3 for them. Making sense?

Here are two killer HIIT workouts for you to try:

5 minutes warmup begin at a fast walk and at 3 minutes begin an easy run RPE 2-4
1 minute sprint RPE 8-10
2 minute recovery RPE 2-4
Repeat sprint and recovery segments 5 times
5 minute cool down

or

3 minute brisk walk
30 seconds at a 9 RPE. Remember 9 RPE doe not mean 9 MPH. You may feel like you are going to die, but you will be OK.
30 seconds recover (jump your feet to either side of the belt) and catch your breath. It has never felt  so good to stand still.
Repeat the 30 on 30 off sequence 20 times.
3 minute cool down brisk walk.

The second workout is one that my boss at the gym showed me. He is completely insane.

Protein-packed silver dollar pancakes w/ blueberry syrup

Holy crap. 2010 is over and it is next year already. Everybody is making plans to conquer the world. How about some breakfast first, slugger?

The best way to start your new year is with a delicious breakfast that is also good for you. You may have  made wrong choices up to this point, but it doesn't matter now because you are going to kick ass this year.

These silver dollar pancakes are busting at the seams with protein, fiber and deliciousness. This recipe uses oats, which provide the slow carbs that will give you energy without the crash.

Top your pancakes with the blueberry syrup and make your tongue slap your brain in the face.

Here's what to do:

1 cup low-fat cottage cheese
3 egg whites
1 banana
1/4 cup water
1 cup oats
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Put all the ingredients in a blender. Process until you don't see chunks. Spray some olive oil onto a pan and pour batter in 2 inch circles. wait until you see bubbles start to form around the edges, then flip.

2 cups frozen blueberries
1 tsp agave nectar (optional)

In a saucepan, heat blueberries and agave nectar over medium-low heat until they are hot. Do this while you are cooking the pancakes. When all the pancakes are cooked and the blueberries are nice and hot, you can use a blender to make the blueberries into a syrup.

Makes 3 servings.

Calories 399
carbohydrate 60 g
fat 6.5 g
protein 22.5 g