Snow, food, books, etc

It's so strange; the last few winters Jersey has been the recipient of quite a lot of snow. I would have loved this when I was in school!
Here's Wednesday's snow. It was 10am delayed opening that day.


How much snow? This much:




So, on Thursday night I made two eggs scrambled and french toast made with wheat bread. Easy and yummy, though the cinnamon sort of plummeted out of the container and onto one of the slices.


Tonight I made "Chicken Fried Rice" from the "Cook This, Not That!" cookbook.

So I really wasn't thinking about the whole "rice" issue. The recipe called for 2 cups cooked whole grain rice in the ingredients list.

First, I think it's sneaky for cookbooks to put cooked items in the ingredients list. This bit me in the a** a few years ago when a recipe called for cooked pasta in the ingredients...when it was time to throw the pasta in, I did and then ha ha, realized it was supposed to have already been cooked.  Oh, crunchy entree.

So I cooked the rice first, BUT I put 2 cups of uncooked rice into the pot to start--when it was time to put the cooked rice in, I'm thinking, wow, this looks like a LOT of rice and I couldn't fit it all in the pan, but kept on cooking til the end (I think this is analogous to sewing a wavy hem--I realize it's wavy and kept going--it took a few years to get myself to STOP when I realize something's going wrong).   THEN I looked at the box. 2 cups uncooked rice = 10 cups cooked rice. ohhhhh....I had to add more (lower sodium) soy sauce to my dish because that tablespoon got soaked up in all that rice.  But it was good dinner and plenty o' leftovers! 

I saw a bit of "Worst Cooks in America" on Food Network the other weekend. I feel like those cooks. And tonight I could sort of hear Chef Anne screaming in my ear to be more aggressive with my chopping, ha ha.

Here are 9 of the 10 items I have checked out of the Princeton Public Library.


I love the library.

I highly recommend "Food Rules". Easy read, common sense guide to eating.  As the author says, it boils (ha ha!) down to "Eat Food.  Mostly Plants.  Not too much."  I think one of my favorite rules is not eating anything your great-grandparents wouldn't recognize (it means it's overly processed).   Also, not eating unless you're hungry enough to eat an entire apple (to eliminate grazing). 

I just started "Are You My Guru? How Medicine, Meditation, and Madonna Saved My Life". Love it so far.

I've read bits and pieces of "Full Catastrophe Living." I like it so much I bought a copy so that I can annotate it. I think this book will play a big role in the elimination/reduction of my back pain.  

"Heat", written by someone who worked for Chef Mario Batali, is an audiobook that I can listen to during my commute. I currently am listening to "Half Empty" by David Rakoff on my commutes (not pictured). I already listened to "Wherever You Go, There You Are" by Jon Kabat-Zinn, but took out the book for good measure.

I actually sewed today for about 45 minutes! I'm hoping to do some more sewing tomorrow and finish the Vogue shirt. But now I have to finish my "homework" for the week (I'm doing the "Pain Free For Life:  The 6 week cure for chronic pain without surgery or drugs" program which has half an hour of homework per day, for 6 weeks.  I'm doing homework 5 nights out of 7.  Today is homework day number 10.)

Like I mentioned before, I'm doing less sewing to concentrate more on my back.  The time I spent cooking and doing homework, I would have spent on sewing.  It's well worth it.

Good night!