Toast and Coffee

But first, a note:  I've seen the well thought out rebuttal comments on the Viso post.  There was some serious care and thought there, so I'll address those (valid) concerns in a separate post.  I'm not sure when (I work a 12 hour shift tomorrow), but I won't forget you!

Toast:

This whole wheat bread recipe calls for cumin.  Which, for some reason, makes it excellent with blackberry jam.

Coffee:

My doppio (two shots, no water, milk or sugar) over ice and Ian's soy douple latte.

A very simple, but great way to start the day.  Mostly, I wanted to post this in contrast to the excess that was our breakfast at New Deal Cafe and probe that we are mostly reasonable folks.

Product Spotlight: Viso

Ingredients: 

(Dynamo Energy) purified water, certified organic evaporated cane juice, organic concord grape juice from concentrate, organic grapefruit juice from concentrate, citric acid, natural caffeine, calcium, natural; concord grape essence, potassium, vitamin c, magnesium, vitamin e, vitamin b-3, zinc, pantothenic acid (vitamin b-5), manganese (natural mineral), vitamin b-6, vitamin a, vitamin b-2, vitamin b-1, vitamin d, folic acid (vitamin b-9), biotin (vitamin b-7), vitamin b-12 

Why it rocks:

It's local (Portland)  It has 100% of your B complex vitamins and A, D, C and E.  That's not to mention the minerals.  It tastes great (it isn't super sweet).  It's all natural.  It has   This particular kind is loaded with natural caffeine.  I know, a lot of people consider caffeine the enemy.  But, I work 10 hour shifts.  Sometimes I work 12 hour shifts.  And I have to be nice to people, the whole time.  By the way, it isn't carbonated.  So, you can drink it as slowly as you'd like.  Viso has low calorie flavors, but they are currently flavored with Splenda.  According to their website, that should eventually be switched to Xylotol or Stevia.

About Viso:

Source: drinkviso.com

Not all varieties of Viso contain caffeine.  They're intended as a boost in vitamins (B vitamins help regulate energy levels).  I like the Organic Strawkey and Dynamo Energy the best so far.  I'll be excited to try the natural low calorie options when they are available.  From the website:

"VISO was founded in Portland, Oregon in 2001. Our mission at VISO has always been to provide consumers with the best tasting and most nutritious beverages on the market. VISO beverages are primarily a vitamin, mineral, and electrolyte delivery system, and are formatted in Energy, Organic, and Low Cal options. VISO Beverages now comfortably partake in the Vitamin/Mineral, Energy, and Organic Juice Beverage segments, offering customers a unique perspective on modern beverage architecture. For most of our history, we produced the beverage ourselves at our own tiny bottling operation in North Portland. Recently, we decided to begin flavoring our drinks primarily with Organic fruit juices at the Portland Bottling Company, a much larger, Organically certified facility in Portland. Our beverages are now available in 16 oz, environmentally friendly cans, and the beverages we design and produce are light years ahead of anything else available. No other beverages can compete with the Organically fruity flavors and great taste of VISO! We are currently available in the NW, but we will be expanding nationwide in the next three years with our constantly evolving product line."

A Walk and a Concession

The weather was beautiful today.  See that?  That's the sun washing out that picture of our neighborhood.

When Ian and I awoke to find that it was sunny for the second winter day in a row, we decided to celebrate with a walk.  Our destination was the New Deal Cafe over on Halsey Street.  It's not very far.  It was chilly, but it felt so nice to use our feet for transportation again that we didn't care (we walked almost everywhere in Korea).  Plus, it's a whole heck of a lot colder over there, so (for the sake of our buddies Ben and Amy) we'll keep the temperature complaining to a minimum.

The cafe is a simple place with a simple menu.  We ordered the vegetarian biscuits and gravy.  It comes with eggs, but I ordered fruit instead.

Housemade biscuits, mushroom gravy, breakfast-style russet potatoes and "seasonal" fruit in the background. Apples and oranges, sure, but bananas and kiwi?  In February?  Who are we kidding, there is no "banana season" in the US.

Ian's cage free eggs.  The yolk is a pretty good color, but nothing beats Mom and Bruce's chickens' orange-yolked eggs.  Those are so healthy it's just silly.

Overall, I was really impressed with this place.  I'm into simple foods.  One thing bothered me a lot, however.  In the mushroom gravy, there seemed to be a minuscule amount of soy sausage.  I don't eat processed soy products, especially this month.  They have weird things in them, like "soy protein isolate/concentrate."  I wished it had listed that ingredient on the menu.  It was too much gravy for me anyway, so I scraped it off and avoided the soy-sauge bits.

That brings me to our concession.  Eating out during this challenge needs to be extremely limited in order to reduce the chance of making a mistake and becoming entirely frustrated.  It's all too unpredictable.  It took me 15 minutes to buy soy milk at Trader Joe's today and I could see the ingredients.

So, if and when we're eating out, online menus will be perused before hand and we'll mostly be sticking to soups and salads.  Luckily, natural and handmade food is big here.  But, honestly, Ian and I need to limit our eating out on our weekends.  It's a vice of ours.  If we're firm on this it will be good for our bank account balance and our eating habits.

On a lighter note, my coffee mug had a coffee mug on it at the cafe.

Here we go!

It's February 1st.

It's the beginning of Black History Month (USA).

It's Hula in the Cool-a Day.

It's Clark Gable's birthday.

It's the first day of Spring in Ireland, Imbolic Day.

It's the day to celebrate San Cecilio, the patron of Granada, in Spain.

It's also a Feast Day for many other Catholic saints; but with over 10,000 of them, that actually happens everyday.

The weather is beautiful.

Most importantly (not really), it's the first day of Challenge 1: No Artificial Ingredients.  I'm actually really excited.  I figured I'd start by posting what I'm eating.  I grabbed a banana before the gym, but that's entirely uninteresting.

For an early lunch post gym and pre-errands I stole a recipe from Mipa.

Pumpkin oats.  I have left over pumpkin puree in my freezer (canned, but only one ingredient) and I've been craving good oatmeal.  I've never been  someone who likes fruit, nuts, or really anything but sugar, sugar and more sugar (okay, maybe a little salt) in their hot cereal.  That really started to change while we were in Korea.  Our selection had a lot to do with it, but I also started reading a lot of food blogs.  I got braver.  Significantly so.

This bowl of cold weather sustenance is super easy to accomplish:

1/2 cup dry oats (steel cut or rolled)

3/4 cup water

salt to taste

3-4 tbsp pumpkin puree

~1 tbsp natural brown sugar (or other natural sweetener)

cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, etc. to taste

1/4 cup organic soymilk

2 tbsp raisins

Cook the oats on the stovetop to your desired texture.  I like mine pretty dry. When they're almost there, add pumpkin puree and sugar.  Finish cooking and pour into a bowl.  Top with soymilk, raisins and spices.  Mix until frothy and consume readily.

If you have a microwave, I might recommend you warm the soymilk before adding it.  I don't have one, but I didn't want to cook the milk in, so it cooled down my oats a little too much.

Package from Ben and Amy!

We miss Ben and Amy an irrepressible amount.  If you followed our Korean blog you know that we had a strong connection with them from the get go and our friendship grew really strong... then we left.  It's amazing, no matter how excited we were to travel and to come home, the first thing we said to each other when we got in the cab that morning to head to the bus station was, "Sheesh, I'm really going to miss them." 

Our friendship is a little unexpected in some ways.  On paper, we're completely polar.  In fact, right after we met them in Korea we looked them up on Facebook (as is the new norm in socializing).  And what we found made us pretty nervous.  We're political and ideological opposites.  Penguins and polar bears.

It made us clam up and act a little awkward during our next couple of hang outs.  The first time we went over to their place we ended up watching The Devil's Advocate.  I don't think any of us wanted to watch it.  It was just so awkward and poignant that we didn't know what to do.  

Of course, all the awkwardness was for naught.  We have way more in common than what's made obvious on the surface.  Our world views are startlingly similar.  We want the same things from life.  We share many of the same joys and rant about most of the same problems, large and small.  Our solutions may be different, but it's never really mattered.  They listen to us and we to them.

Maybe we should all run for senate?

I kid.  Kind of.

Anyway, we received our Happy New Year package from them a few days ago.  Our management had had the box for two weeks before notifying us.  That part wasn't so great.  Especially since Amy had lovingly enclosed two packages of ornate rice cakes.  They might have been alright two weeks ago.  They were definitely not when we got to them.  So, that was a huge bummer, but the remaining contents were super exciting. 

From left to right: bag full of little Korean candies and teas, choco peanut snacks, rice ball molds (featuring two sizes of kids' faces and a bear!), soap from their resort in Thailand (smells like lemongrass), mandu folder, and awesome paper wreaths that Amy made out of repurposed magazines.

Ben's contract is up in December.  We can't wait.

A Thought

Or, rather, the beginning of one.

My brother is on a fabulous trip to Las Vegas with his family.  He does have to work, however. Obviously, we're all really excited that they're out having fun.  They had a rough couple of years.

Because we're all so happy for them, we've been saying things like, "Enjoy, you deserve it!"  As if there is anything that would keep my brother, or anyone for that matter, from deserving a trip or a divergence from normal life.

Our culture's relationship with travel and leisure is strange, don't you think?

Back to Basics

This is a 50 lb bag of rice.  You can't buy this in a regular grocery store.  Ian picked this up at Pacific Market for 50 cents a pound.

In Korea, we ate around 15-20 lbs of rice a month and I crave it when I haven't eaten it in a couple of days.  I've always preferred it to noodles and I feel much better after a half cup of rice with dinner than a slice of bread (even if it is homemade).

Granted, short grain rice isn't the best nutritionally.  It's simply tough to beat it's versatility.

Now the question is, where do we store it?