Pressure cookers and broken treadmills

[sarea]

I was a cooking fiend yesterday. I made a big pot of fish soup in the morning (using fish as a base for soup is a lot less time consuming than using land-protein, as it takes minutes rather than hours to get all the flavor out -- BUT you do have to deal with all the fish bones). Then I felt like having dessert and made some pancakes. I made aloo gobi for dinner, and found this thing online where you can make 1 serving of ice cream without an ice cream maker and had to try it out (it worked). I've also got a sourdough starter in the proofing box so that I can hopefully make a loaf today. And I also cut up the pineapple I had (I'm now 3 for 3 in terms of selecting pineapples that are sweet and wonderful -- I think I finally have the hang of it!). Today I'm going to make crispy puris.

I've always been into Indian food, but I think I'm going to be cooking it more often. I have nearly all the myriad of spices that the cuisine uses by now, and I found these videos that this Indian housewife has made of all these different dishes, that are really helpful and fun. It's also cool because she's a vegetarian, so everything she makes is vegetarian, which is good because it'll force me to eat better. I've always thought that being a vegetarian is really hard except for Indian cuisine, because everything is so tasty and there are so many different ways to prepare it that it doesn't get old (as opposed to having salad constantly or veggie sandwiches, etc.). Still, if I'm serious about cooking more Indian food I'll need to invest in a pressure cooker, because cooking lentils/daal will take way too long without one. Aaaand I just ordered one on Amazon. Do any of you have or use pressure cookers? What else do you make in them besides daal? :P

So that's good when it comes to the Aspirational Jeans Diet. What's not so good for the AJD is that for the first time in months and months, I tried to use my treadmill yesterday. Unfortunately, sometime in the long winter months, something happened where now the buttons don't work. It turns on, it recognizes the iFit card when I put it in, but when I hit Start (and every other button), it doesn't work. Sigh. So now I have like a 500-lb paperweight (or however much it weighs). I guess I have to call the NordicTrack people, though a friend is like, don't call them yet, let me take a look first. And I'm like, you don't know anything about treadmills! And he's like, well I'll at least poke around for more than just 20 minutes! And I'm like, fine, I'll let you poke around until you get frustrated with it and then I'll just end up calling them anyway! And he's like, fine!

What a bummer. I can't recall, when I lost all that weight before, how much exercising I did. I think it was mostly portion control and eating better, but was it also walking a lot? I can't remember. If it was the latter it would have been when I was living in my condo, and walking around there is a lot easier than where I live now, which doesn't have nice paved sidewalks on the thoroughfare that my street connects to. Sigh.

Comments

[lyndsiefenele.livejournal.com]

The only person I know who uses a pressure cooker is my mom's husband... who uses it for lentils/daal. He's Indian and he does all the cooking at my mom's house. I've tried a bunch of times to get recipes out of him by helping, but he's too vague about measurements. (He's all, "Just put in a good amount of X" and I have NO idea with the seasonings.)

I wonder if there's an Indian grocery around here. Maybe that's not a thing here, but in Detroit area there were loads of little tiny family-owned stores dedicated to Indian cuisine. You could get fresh ready-made samosas, yum.

[sarea-okelani.livejournal.com]

Oh there is! I'm not sure exactly what area you're in, but there's a couple of stores I know of on the East side. That's where I've gotten all my spices and the daal that I will be making once my pressure cooker arrives.

Off the cuff cooks like that, including my mom, drive me nuts because I am such a cook-by-the-recipe kind of girl. I wish I had a more natural talent for it like they do.

[lyndsiefenele.livejournal.com]

Ooh, whereabouts are the stores? I'm north, up by Everett, but my boyfriend lives in Kirkland so I spend some time there.

I think I'm generally okay without a recipe on something that I've cooked a few times, but with Indian spices I have zero beginning knowledge so he is wildly unhelpful. Plus I think I'd actually want to tone it down, as he as long ago ruined his taste buds and apparently doesn't taste anything until it's making me hurt...

[sarea-okelani.livejournal.com]

Oh they are super close to Kirkland (where I used to live). There's one in Redmond called Mayuri (there's an Indian restaurant by that name in Bellevue, I think it's the same owners), it's in the same strip mall as Malay Satay Hut (great Malaysian food) and Seoul Hot Pot. Then there's one, I don't know the name of it, just a few streets down in Bellevue, next to an Indian buffet called Seven Spices or something like that. It's the same plaza as the Fred Meyer, just toward the side/end.

They also opened up Mayuri in northern Bothell, which is closer to you. Right across the street from it is Om Home Foods, which is also new, but I went in there the other day and apparently they're remodeling so they won't be opening up again until next month.

I am sure there has to be at least one such store in Everett though!

[jade-okelani.livejournal.com]

Yeah, dude, we were walking for like 50 minutes a day - power walking, all at once. And we talked on the phone, so it went by faster for both of us. But that's totally what did it, I ate better, of course, but I was so not following a strict diet, and the weight melted off.

Then we started playing WoW and never moved again.

[sarea-okelani.livejournal.com]

No, I remember when we walked a ton, me in particular (I mean, remembering it, not that I walked more) -- I just am not sure that was exactly when I lost all the weight. Because I seem to recall that there was a time when I did exercise/walk a lot, and it helped keep the weight off, but it wasn't when I lost lots and lots of weight -- that didn't happen until I drastically changed my diet. In fact I remember thinking (but this could have been after I stopped, after doing it awhile) that it was really the food that made the difference when it came to my weight loss, because I'd tried everything but going that drastic, and when I did, it made me shed the pounds.

[jade-okelani.livejournal.com]

You really dramatically cut out food, but it wasn't until you put the two together that it really did it, I think - like remember, you had your "no fast food" rule, and you were really, really strict about it.

But that's just how I remember it - it's possible that you noticed stuff we didn't discuss in depth. I'm pretty sure you wrote about it faithfully on LJ - so just go back to pre-WoW and look up our activities!

[sarea-okelani.livejournal.com]

Yeah I was really strict about the fast food thing, but also I did stuff like skip dinner or eat an apple for dinner. I also know that this was even after WoW, because I totally remember thinking that WoW was actually good for my diet (at the time) because I got so involved w/ playing that I would stop eating in the middle of a plate of food. Which also means that some of it won't be chronicled, as the beginning of WoW was also when I stopped writing.

I remember faithfully chronicling the conversation that I had with my cousin re: food. I followed that very strictly. I didn't really talk about exercising ... which doesn't mean I didn't do it, but because I'd been doing some form of exercise for awhile. It wasn't like I kept a food/exercise log (at least, when it was working -- I totally kept one in fits and starts before that, in order to help me count calories). Basically, I think I was most unhelpful to myself when I was doing the stuff that actually worked.

[idrinktea.livejournal.com]

hi, delurking for a second. if you get a pressure cooker that's deep enough to take the lentils in one steel container and can stack another on top, you can totally cook potatoes in there.

[13oct.livejournal.com]

I can't really talk, coz I suck at cooking. But when my husband cooks Indian food, he uses the pressure cooker for just about everything from meat to daal. *shrugs*

I will be posting all the Indian recipes that I've learnt online if your are interested. If you have anything typed out, I'd be really interested in seeing them too. :)

[sarea-okelani.livejournal.com]

You're right, I'm sure you could cook pretty much any dish in there and it'll just cut the time by a lot (and preserves more nutrients, so I've read). It seems that it's mostly used for Indian cuisine though. I do wonder if there are other cuisines that a pressure cooker would do well with.

Here (http://returnoftheyummy.blogspot.com/2008/12/palak-paneer-and-homemade-cheese.html) is the only recipe I've got written down; it was an adaptation of palak paneer (and making my own paneer).

Otherwise, the places where I get recipes to follow are here (http://showmethecurry.com/) (non-vegetarian) and here (http://www.manjulaskitchen.com/) (vegetarian).

I look forward to seeing your recipes!

[sarea-okelani.livejournal.com]

Hi! Thanks so much for the tip!

[jade-okelani.livejournal.com]

http://missvickie.com/