There’s something incredibly satisfying to recapping my week by looking through the photos on my phone these days. This is my blog version of a regular gratitude practice – something I’ve committed to over the past few years and can’t recommend enough in order to really appreciate the good things in life. (And for that matter, I appreciate each and ever one of you reading this. Hello!)
{Week 5} Good Things
a gorgeous floral delivery from Winston Flowers – my aunt and uncle are excellent at pick me up gifts. These purple flowers are stunning, and they’ll last for a while!
my curl quest – last week I ran out of conditioner, and decided to go wild testing out a bunch of new options. My typical go-to is Acure, which I pick up at Whole Foods. But to embrace my curls, I know that there are better options, so I polled some curly friend (and the cashier at Marty’s) and ended up getting a bunch of sample size – Shea Moisture, Carol’s Daughter, Kinky Curly, Cantu, and the Trader Joe’s Shea Butter and coconut oil hair mask. I’ll keep you posted.
Movement, amplified. In my quest to “spend out” – gift certificates, passes I haven’t used, memberships, I realized that I had a 10-pack to OrangeTheory that is going to expire this month. So I took my first class on Friday, another today, and I have my next two scheduled this week. Not sure how this is going to affect my year long run streak – so I’m going to be mindful of not overdoing it.
Yoga: four times! To ensure my mobility, stretching, and well, because I founded the company and get all the free yoga and meditation I want: I took FOUR! live classes onOmpractice this week. I’d love for you to join me! Unlimited membership is only $5 for your first month, and I’d be happy to meet up virtually for a class on me! Here was my lineup:
Yoga Nidra with Amya cross between yoga and meditation – all about conscious relaxation, a chance to renew, and recharge yourself. Mondays and Wednesdays at 1 pm ET, 10 am PT. (Amy was in the polar vortex of the midwest while I was complaining about our 10 degrees…)
Yoga for Office Workersis a 25-minute break from the world. Tuesdays at 3:30 pm ET, 12:30 pm PT with Charina. Harkening back to my Runkeeper stretch-o-clocks! (Charina was actually in her “outside office” for class because…. southern California..)
Chair Yoga with Marie. Chair yoga is great for anyone, but is especially recommended for those who want a gentle practice. One of the surprising things was how much I enjoyed seated sun salutations!
Yoga for Low Back Pain with Traci – a perfect low impact class. Thursdays at 7:30 pm ET, 4:30 pm PT. Also – Traci was a sport for not laughing at me as Bertram decided that instead of his usually nap, he was going to “assist” me by licking me, sitting on the mat, and generally speaking being adorable but in the way.
Two large library hauls: one of my favorite “activities of abundance” (a.k.a. making your self feel better through shameless acquisition without affecting your wallet) is checking out a huge stack of library books. I had to go to two different libraries this week. (On the literary note, I had about 50 recommendations from friends that I was going to post here but the list was too long. I’ll make a separate post if you need ideas of good reading!)
Team Retrospective: each week, one of my favorite personal activities is to reflect over the week with three questions: what worked well, what didn’t work well, what do I want to stop doing? This is straight from the “agile” playbook that most tech companies use to keep their teams celebrating their wins (hello, gratitude practice), and learning from their misses. We had a *great* team Retro this week!
New folks on my weekly *Do The Thingvirtual co-working. Each week I gather together friends (from around the world!) for a weekly digital co-working session on Wednesdays at 1:30 – 3pm Eastern. We go around, each share what we want to get done, and then I mute everyone and we get to work. Want to participate?Sign up here.
On that note, I had an “in-person” friend come to participate in *Do the Thing hour this week. Amanda came with lunch she had prepared for us, and work to do! Salad (TJ’s cruciferous crunch), roasted delicata squash, warm farro, freshly made black beans, an herb-buttermilk vinaigrette, pickled shallots, an avocado, and tomatoes. I added a little bit of chicken and cilantro from my fridge. My friends are amazing.
{Delicious Meals:}
Got ahead of myself there with a delicious meal in good things! There were so many more!
This was another week absolutely smitten with Alison Roman. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve cooked this many recipes out of a cookbook in years. If you don’t have your own copy of Dining In, RUN!
On that note, I think I’ve cooked more from cookbooks in general this month than I have in the past five years.
Here’s some of the highlights this week:
Takeout From Kimchipapi. Kimchipapi is new to Allston on Harvard street. Korean fusion poke bowls and other good stuff. (#SendNoodz.) Recommend! I had the crab fries – thin fries topped w/ crab salad, spicy mayo, eel sauce, fish eggs, scallion, and black sesame. And then a make my own poke bowl with kale noodles (thin starchy noodles), spicy tuna tartar, salmon, crab salad. Pickled radish, pickled ginger, kimchi, fresh corn and carrot, spicy mayo, ponzu sauce, fish eggs and roasted seaweed. I regret nothing.
Black bean soup with chimichurri chicken. No shame, my secret recipe is that I use Goya black bean soup in the red can. It’s excellent.
Chicken Tikka Masala with chicken thighs arugula salad with mint, basil, and cilantro. There’s no recipe here. Truthfully, I ordered a container of sauce from Shan-a-punjab, and then cooked some chicken thighs in it. Paired with an arugula salad with mint, parsley, basil, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. My salads are usually half greens half herbs these days.
Alison Roman’sturmeric roasted carrots with seeds and labne. This was *outrageously good*. I used Samira’s Homemade labne with black olives as the base for the recipe. If you are in New England, I highly recommend picking up some at Whole Foods!
Alison Roman’s scallops with corn, hazelnuts, and brown butter chermoula. Over another arugula salad with cilantro and some lime. Another complete stunner of a dish. Also: the key to golden scallops is to NOT TOUCH THEM when they are cooking in the pan. Look at these beauties.
Alison Roman’s fennel rubbed pork – so, technically I did a mashup of two of her recipes here because I had pork tenderloin and not chops, and wanted to roast everything while luxuriating in a long shower with one of my new conditioners. The pork marinates in advance in a seed bath of glory. I opted for the double fennel situation, because… why not?
Chrissy Teigen’s Lemony Arugula Spaghetti Cacio e Pepefrom Cravings. You guys. This dish. Here’s the goodness: lots of crispy pancetta, olive oil, garlic, black pepper, red pepper, lemon juice, cheese, more cheese. And then you add arugula for virtue and bite. The recipe is here, but I recommend the cookbook.
Arugula salad with avocado, green goddess, and marinated anchovies. Apparently I’ve just been craving arugula for weeks and am finally fulfilling my cravings.
Well, that’s about it for this week!
I’ll leave you with this week’s best dog portrait: Bertram, in his element.
Here’s to a great week! –– xo Sam
PS: every month or so I send out a newsletter of wellness wisdom, good things, reading, and more. I’m due for a new one imminently.
Happy weekend! Welcome to another installment of the weekly meal plan! Maybe it’s the new year, but I’m feeling particularly productive in all aspects of my life, and I hope the inspiration lasts for a good long while. There’s a recipe at the bottom of the post for these scallops with Thai scented pea purée, which were a smash hit tonight for dinner.
It’s been a low key weekend so far – we went to see the final Hobbit this afternoon, which was beautiful, but honestly a bit of a let down. I grew up obsessed with Tolkien, and I think I’m still just bitter about the creation of Evangeline Lilly’s Tauriel for the movies – a lackluster female character who definitely is not in the book, and devised for romantic tension with an all too good looking Kili. The whole thing irked me. But I was certainly glad to have seen a movie in the theaters – it’s been all too long!
This weekend I’ve also been playing around with a new app that my culinary crush Jamie Oliver is collaborating on. (Other teenagers had their favorite pop stars hanging over their beds, I had a picture of a smarmy Jamie Oliver sitting in a bathtub that I had clipped out of the TV Guide. I was completely devastated when he married Jules, but I digress.) The new app is called the YOU-app, and every day it gives you daily photo prompts to encourage simple micro-actions to make a better life. Yesterday’s action was to address your fridge – empty it, clean up, and take stock. I managed to toss a good number of things that were past their prime. Here’s the slightly more tidy version right now.
The Meal Plan: Week of December 28th
Now that you’ve seen me bare all – it’s not looking as bad as I’d worried it would, here are the things to use up in my kitchen: a little bit of cheese, some potatoes in chicken broth, a little bit of leftover tomato coconut sauce from the Moqueca (perfect for simmering an egg or two), the leftover vegetable tops from my spiralizer, some beets which I plan on pickling, some coconut milk.
Saturday:scallops and thai scented pea puree. The recipe for this one is below! I was originally planning this for last week, but life happened. Served with a Trader Joe’s potato pancakes, and a fried sardine for the cook.
Sunday: grilled chicken and winter fennel salad. I made this salad a month ago for a dinner party, and I’ve been craving it ever since. Recipe to be posted shortly!
Monday: ground beef and tomato-rice soup. My version of a stuffed pepper soup, with a Turkish twist. It’ll likely get a dollop of yogurt on top, and I’ll use up the leftover dill.
Tuesday:chicken sausage and egg shakshuka. These are all leftovers in my fridge that need to be used. I might sprinkle with some of the extra feta that needs using up as well.
Wednesday:black beans and rice. I haven’t been eating too many beans lately, but Samin got me thinking about beans with her push for ‘bean month’ this January. And I still happen to have about a dozen varieties in my house from my Rancho Gordo year of beans subscription.
Thursday:pork chops with brussels spouts. Just something simple to use up some of my CSA pork chops. I’m not sure I’ll have anything interesting to do with them – this pork is so good just on it’s own.
Friday: Out!
Scallops with Thai Scented Pea Puree
serves 2
I’ve adapted this recipe from Nigella Lawson’s original one – replacing her creme fraîche with coconut milk, and adding some extra fresh herb (mint) to the peas. Thai basil would also be good here. I use Thai Kitchen Green Thai Curry Paste, which you can find in most supermarkets now. If we’re feeling hungry, or the price of scallops is exorbitantly high, I’ll reduce the number of scallops to two, and serve the meal with some Trader Joe’s frozen potato pancakes. To cook this dish, start by putting out all of your ingredients, because you’ll want to put together this dish quickly, and eat it while hot!
16 ounces frozen peas (I get the 1 lb. petit pois from Trader Joes)
1 to 2 tablespoons Thai green curry paste
1/2 cup coconut milk
2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint leaves
flaky sea salt
1 pound wild sea scallops, about 3-4 large scallops per person
flaky salt
2 teaspoons butter
2 teaspoons olive oil
juice of 1/2 a lime
Start by prepping your scallops – dry them well, and season with a pinch of flaky salt on both sides. Then, start the mash. In a large bowl in the microwave, heat the peas until hot, stirring every minute or so until warmed through, about three minutes. (You could also do this on the stovetop.) Stir in the green curry paste, coconut milk, and chopped mint leaves, and season with a good pinch of salt, and set aside.
For the scallops, heat the butter and olive oil in a non-stick skillet on medium high heat. When hot, add scallops, making sure not to crowd the pan, and let scallops cook for 3 minutes without touching them. Check to see if they’re golden on the bottom, and if they aren’t let them go another minute. Flip. Cook three minutes on the other side.
While the scallops are finishing their last three minutes, puree the pea mixture with an immersion blender (A regular blender will also work, but will take a little bit more effort – if you use a regular blender, you may want to do this before cooking the scallops.) Taste, and add any extra salt and pepper you’d like. Plate the purée, and take the cooked scallops out of the pan, and nestle them on the purée.
To finish, make a quick pan sauce: squeeze the lime in the hot pan juices, and use a wooden spoon to scrape up any golden brown bits that have all the flavor! Stir for about a minute, and you are done. Pour pan sauce over scallops and mash, and eat while hot!
You guys, it’s hot around here. It’s hard not to feel sluggish. And back when I was bragging a few weeks ago that the extra air conditioners didn’t raise the electric bill? Well, I lied. Or at least this month we ran them harder than ever. Today I woke up at 5:05 to make my way to November Project, and going back on my verbal with a coworker, promptly fell back asleep. The heat made me do it! I spent part of the day racked with guilt, and then got over it to go to my favorite class of the week – olympic lifting at my gym. We worked on snatch balances and power snatching. Snatches are my most dreaded lift – more reason to practice them! I’m always looking to bring power to the lift, execute an efficient bar path, and reduce my tendency of muscling up the weight, which *surprise, surprise* doesn’t work when you aim to lift heavier!
When it’s blazing hot outside, it’s doubly hot in my kitchen, so if anything is going to be cooked, it has to be quick! Here’s my dinner tonight.
Summer Scallop Salad
I’m always on the lookout for light summer salads with seafood of any kind. Some of my favorites are Greek salad with grilled shrimp, Niçoise salad with the addition of smoked fish, and this scallop salad, which is equally good with scallops, shrimp, mussels, or lobster.
Serves 2 scallops 9 or 10 large olive oil tomato 1 large cucumber 1 medium romaine lettuce a few cups per person assorted antipasti (optional) olives, gigande beans, crisped prosciutto, corn, feta, roasted peppers are all good!
lemon 1 olive oil chopped fresh herbs (a handful of dill, basil)
Season scallops with salt and pepper. Heat a few glugs olive oil in a large skillet until shimmering. Add scallops, and cook over high heat until browned on the bottom, about two to three minutes. While they are cooking, go ahead and slice up a cucumber, and cut a tomato into wedges. Turn the scallops and cook for another minute, then take out of the pan immediately to avoid overcooking them! I like arranging this salad on a plate. Layer the bottom with romaine lettuce, and sprinkle on fresh herbs. Add the cucumber and tomato. Add on any extra antipasti (tonight I went for kalamata olives and gigande beans from the Whole Foods Antipasti bar). Drizzle with olive oil, squeeze the lemon wedge over top, and season, if you’d like, with a little bit of extra salt and pepper.
The Man Booker Long List has been released! I’m likely going to team up with some other voracious readers to work my way through the list this summer. Anyone else in?
Also:
I’m currently signed up for B.A.A. Half, and Newton Chilly Half. Should I add Hampton Rock Fest to the mix? (Home turf race!) Maybe Newburyport Half? Do I even like running??
First, here’s dinner tonight. I heated up my cast iron pan with a glug of olive oil and a spoonful of butter. I seasoned some large sea scallops with salt, and pan seared them in the pan, just a few minutes on each side. In a large bowl, I made the salad – baby spinach, an avocado, and a ripe mango. When the scallops were finished, I took them out of the pan, and added a single clove of minced garlic to the pan juices. I cooked the garlic for about 30 seconds, and transferred the juices, oil and butter to a bowl, and added the juice of a lime. I poured in a bit more olive oil and whisked it all together, making this one delicious pan-sauce vinaigrette. The scallops went on the salad, I dressed everything, and tossed gently. Dinner!
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You know how people look back fifty, sixty, seventy years and think “Ahhh, the good old days…now that was the life!” And then smart people realize that that life was fairly terrible back then, and societal norms were actually restricting and oppressive?
Yes, okay.
I was going to make that a metaphor for my reading habits – how years ago I used to read voraciously, except that most of the time I was reading kind of crappy novels, and so my 100+ books a year didn’t actually mean all that much because of a lack of quality reading material. Except, that’s actually a terrible metaphor, because I was reading 100+ books a year, and not wasting the rest of my time with bad habits, so even though those books weren’t all Nabokov, the fact that I was reading more often… well, that made my life better in general.
Right. Books. Let’s talk about them then. For the past two weeks I’ve been trying out a new app called Oyster – which touts itself as the “Netflix for Books” – a reading app for iPhone.
Well, I already use what I’ve thought of as the Netflix for books, which is my multiple public library accounts, which allow me to download hundreds of thousands of e-books and audiobooks on my phone through Overdrive. For free.
But the fact is, Oyster is very pretty, and Overdrive, not so much, so I thought that for the $9.95/month that Oyster is charging it couldn’t hurt try out the service for a bit and see how I liked it. While I’m never going to give up the delights of print, a proper reading experience on the phone is important to me, as I typically always have the device on me, and count on a digital library to entertain me when I can’t have a book in hand.
Set up is fairly easy – download the app – still, I believe, in locked beta – request an invite, get the invite two days later, and then boom, access. They make you choose five books that you’d like to start with – mostly I believe to get you to search through their content, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to bypass this step and start reading.
While there aren’t necessarily NYTimes top best sellers, Oyster has a good selection of literature, non-fiction, and much to my enjoyment, cookbooks! (I actually have this Adam Roberts cookbook, but it’s always nice to be able to pull up a cookbook on your phone while out and about.)
This month on Oyster I’ve read: The Art Forger, by B.A. Shapiro, about art heists, forgery, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum (my favorite museum). And then I read Scott Jurek’s Eat and Run, about his career as an ultra marathoner. I’m almost finished with the Runner’s World “Running on Air” by Budd Coates, a whole book about breathing, which might sound bizarre, but actually I found to be fairly useful.
Now I’m reading Onward, by Howard Schultz about how he re-vitalized Starbucks. I find the book interesting, if somewhat self serving, but I’m only a quarter of the way through.
My main complaints about Oyster are that the books you are reading aren’t all downloaded on your phone, so if you are in a non-service area, or if, say, you are in the middle of your office with low service and your office wi-fi happens to be down, you are not guaranteed to be able to pull up a book to entertain yourself. This certainly saves space on your phone, but limits the usefulness of the app. (Oyster says in the FAQ that they download the last 10 books read onto the phone, but I’ve not been able to pull up books a few times now in this situation. It’s possible that this is a bug in the app, so I’d like to see if this fixes itself in newer builds – additionally they mention the possibility of high data costs of roaming while reading Oyster books abroad, so this makes me curious about how the books are actually being served to the phone vs. being stored.)
At the moment, there is also a limited selection – 100,000 titles, and not all of them full books, although, for $9.95/month, I decided that as long as there are 2-3 books that I want to read per month, it’s a fairly decent value. I suspect that they’ll be getting more additions soon.
The third frustration, and perhaps the most problematic:the cataloguing and search is terrible. This might be by design, but there are limited ways to search, and it’s very hard to search by specific topic. The search bar seems to have a weak algorithm. I’d love to see the ability to search by publisher, and be able to drill down by topic better – or to see most requested books in each category. I like the idea that each book has a “related” feature, but in reality this feature isn’t all that useful.
For instance, in the screenshot above, you’ll notice a section “Similar to Onward” (the book about the business of Starbucks that I’m currently reading.) While the idea of a “similar to” feature is neat, in practice, you’ll note that two of the books “Fresh Pantry Rhubarb” and “Fresh Pantry Lettuce” aren’t all that similar at all. (Unless there’s a plot twist that I’m not seeing coming – maybe Howard will quit his coffee empire and become a hipster farmer?)
The keyword search feature is similarly frustrating – I expect to be able to search for two word keywords, but when I searched “food memoirs” and “food literature”, this is what I got – despite the fact that there are actually quite a decent amount of both types of books in their selection – you just have to dig and dig for them. It’s sort of a trial and error – to find books, I’ve been clicking the related button many times, and trying to go farther and farther down the wormhole in order to find interesting titles.
If Oyster can improve these three key issues, then I think they’ll have the edge on other reading apps. That said, until I run out of books to read, I’ll be a decently happy paying customer – and hopefully they’ll continue to improve!
Next up on my Oyster reading list: Bill Bryson’s ‘The World at Stage’, Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Spirit of Place’, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, ‘The Widow Cliquot’, Clifford Wright’s ‘Mediterranean Vegetables’ (a cookbook), Steven Sieden’s ‘A Fuller View’ (about Buckminster Fuller), Annie Dillard’s ‘The Writing Life‘, and ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’ by Italo Calvino. Admittedly, because if there is one feature I love best it is the list making feature, there’s quite a few others that I have added.
What’s on your reading list? Have you tried Oyster?
Hello! Today was a quiet day, I dropped off Devon at work at 8, and headed over to Trader Joe’s to pick up some food so that I wasn’t lost without options. Newly armed with chicken thighs, broccoli, and several samples, I headed over to Formaggio Kitchen to pick up my cup of George Howell coffee, and an egg salad sandwich on caraway bread for lunch, and made it home in time for my first meeting.
I worked from home today, and it was largely full of meetings, calls, coordination, and follow up work. It was blissfully uneventful… except for a small period of panic as I waited patiently for the iOS 7 release. After several false starts: “Sorry, your phone is too damn full, this program needs 3.1 GB of storage!“, and “Sorry, you’ve waited two hours but Software Update is unavailable at this time, sucker!“, I can finally say that in my hands is the flat design and brand-spankin’ new features we’ve all been waiting for.
Actually, I’m having trouble adjusting. But I just don’t like change.
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If you are only around for the food, warning, fitness rambling ahead! Just go ahead and skip below the fold for my dinner notes.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been missing many weekday CrossFit classes because I haven’t been able to make the commuting work, so a few months ago I decided to commit to Wednesday afternoons to head in for the WOD, and for Olympic Lifting class. Despite my attempts, because of traffic, I was barely making it to the later classes, so a few weeks ago I decided to try working from home on Wednesdays so that I’d avoid the nearly two hour rush hour trip from Boston to Needham. Many folks in my office work from home a few days a week – and unlike at Yahoo, we get things done! – and I feel so fortunate to have such flexibility. Today’s workout was the scheduled Lurong Paleo Challenge workout, and although I’m not competing, I jumped right in with the group.
B. “The Triplet Tester”
21-18-15-12-9-6-3 reps of:
Wall Ball 20/14
Deadlift 115/75
Box Jump 24/20
For this workout, there was an 18 minute cap. I chose the prescribed weights, and the wall balls nearly killed me. I knew going in it would be hard work, but I assumed that I’d get closer to finishing – but… no dice. I made it through the 21 and 18 round with a rough time on the wall balls, and only made it through 12 wall balls of the 15 round. This was *not* my best work, and I kept missing the wall target. But, I do still feel quite sore from the weekend, and I’m not going to beat myself up about it. It felt so good just to be in there working hard.
After the workout, I stayed for Lifting class – we spent an hour warming up, doing drills, and practicing Squat Cleans. I’ve been trying to get back to heavier weights, but I know that I need to commit to the best form possible, even if that means a light bar. I spent most of the hour focusing intently on leaning back, pulling the bar close, and getting my elbows up. I know these classes pay off in the end, but man, is it an exercise in patience!
After the gym I headed back into the city to pick up Devon from work before heading home.
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And then we eat!
When I got home, I was keen on prepping dinner quickly – it was already past 8 when we walked in the door. After 10 minutes at the fish counter debating flounder (on sale) or scallops, the scallops won out. I think it was Adam Roberts’ instagram that got me hungry for them this week, and I knew I wanted to take them home and sear them in butter. Butttttttah.
I took out my stainless steel pan, added a few pats of Kerrygold butter, and let it heat up until it was just starting to foam and brown. The scallops, which were quite large, got seasoned with salt and pepper, and I popped them in the pan and let them sizzle in the bubbling butter. I gave them about three minutes on the first side without so much as poking them, flipped them over, and let them have another two. Afterwards I let them rest on a plate while I reheated some asparagus (leftovers from Devon’s dinner last night at Capitol Grille – I can’t complain, because yesterday I was eating lobster), heated up his small piece of leftover filet mignon, some potatoes, and cooked some pre-steamed fairytale eggplant and cherry tomatoes in the buttery dregs of the pan. After I plated, I sprinkled the eggplant and tomato with some sherry vinegar, and dinner was served!
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And now? Tonight’s episode of Broadchurch. Are you watching it? It’s the newest series to premiere on BBC America – a small seaside town crime series starring the former Doctor, David Tennant, and it’s completely captivating! Are you watching it? Do you have a favorite BBC series?
The Second Lunch is a (mostly) food blog by Sam Tackeff about recipes, food writing, ingredient hunting, travel, healthy living, fitness, and everything in between.
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