Running is a well-sharpened knife: #3

In our wintry economic climate, I’ve been increasingly interested in (read: panicky and obsessed over) how to cope with my wildly uncertain financial and vocational future. As many readers know all too well from personal experience, most of us post-graduates in the humanities aren’t in the English literature business because we’re confident that one day we’ll end up like Scrooge McDuck, performing our daily ablutions in gigantic swimming pools full of Spanish doubloons. We’re more likely going to end up screaming about socialism while trying to sell urine-stained poems written in Crayola in exchange for pennies and secondhand copies of Lorca on the streets of Kansas City (see, for example, Will Weston’s future).

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. So the economy doing a  convincing impression of Emilio Estevez’ career path. I’m desperately trying to figure out what the heck I’m going to do with my life next year with my advanced degree (“Welcome to Chili’s! My name’s Cameron, can I get you guys started with some drinks?”). And after gazing into the blood-curdling pineal gland of this maelstrom I’ve decided to play it safe by becoming as frugal as a Dickensian ragpicker.

Look, I’m not trying to be any more of a tightwad than necessary. I’m not at the point where I’m dumpster diving for packages of dental floss, or using a sun oven to bake casseroles. There is a very thin line between a life of self-reliant frugality, and one that involves reading Soldier of Fortune in an Idaho compound while cutting your own hair with a machete, or starting up a Victorian counting house named “Marley & Marley”. I’m just saying that saving money right now by not spending it on dumb things is probably a good idea. Oh, and being frugal is actually better for the environment than switching to a Prius, or shopping/trysting with your spicy Pilates teacher in the shadier produce aisles at Whole Foods.

So let’s talk about groceries.

I’ve got to admit that cutting back in this department was excruciating. Gone are the halcyon days when I would blow a hundred simoleons at Trader Joe’s on dried fruit, lil’ pizza-ettes, cheese, wine, and cleaning products that were so green that they probably planted tiny adorable trees inside drainpipes on their way down. Full disclosure: I’ve dropped my weekly grocery bill from roughly $95 a week last spring–and that’s a guess, it might’ve been even higher–to a calculated average of $32.16 a week so far in November. That figure’s so sharply precise because I actually called my mother (hi Mom, if you’re reading this!) and had her e-mail me her Excel budget spreadsheet (the cheerfully nicknamed TurBud). The one she’s used to calculate family expenses ever since we purchased our first PC, back when Kris Kross was still on the radio. I’ve modified it somewhat (It’s now saved as TurBud: The Next Generation on my desktop), and it’s been the guiding light as I’ve begun the arduous, unpleasant process of figuring out where exactly my paycheck goes each month.

I manage to save such an obscene amount of money mostly by buying things in bulk. baking my own bread, and going to WinCo (think Costco, but creepier). But also by making a *huge* pot of something involving grains, vegetables, and protein every Sunday night, which then provides sustenance throughout the week. Here’s the recipe I made last week, which I doubled, and whose basic template comes courtesy of our lovely friends at the Post-Punk Kitchen.

Amitav Ghosh-darn that’s a pretty good curry!

Ingredients

(I double the amounts and omit optional ingrediants, but hey–they’re your tastebuds)
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped (or more–you really can go pretty hog wild with the garlic and ginger on this dish, if you want)
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/4 lbs pumpkin, peeled,seeded and cubed (about 2 ½ cups) (you can also use yams or sweet potato–OR you can buy sketch canned pumpkin at WinCo that probably comes from sweatshop pumpkin mines in Guatamala)
1 tablespoon hot curry paste (2 if you truly want to test the mettle of your intestinal lining)
2 ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 dried red chilies (canned anaheims work here, too)
1 1/4 cups vegetable stock
1 3/4 cups canned chick-peas, drained
1 large banana (for a HILARIOUS prank while making this dish, you can pretend that the ‘nana is a telephone, make it “ring,” call your German roommate into the kitchen, and tell him that the INS would like to speak to him)
optional:
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro or parsley
1/2 cup pine nuts, to garnish

How to make this thing
1. Heat 2 tbls. of the oil in a saucepan, add the onion, garlic,red pepper, ginger and ground spices, and fry over a medium heat for 5-6 minutes until the onion is lightly browned.
2. Place the pumpkin in a bowl, add the curry paste (add a bit of hot water to thin it out) and toss well to coat the pumpkin evenly.
3. Add the chopped tomatoes, chilies and stock to the onion mixture, and bring to the boil, simmering gently for 15 mins.
4. Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a GIGANTIC frying pan, add the coated pumpkin and fry for 5 mins until golden.
Add to the tomato sauce with the chickpeas, cover and cook for 20 mins until the pumpkin is tender.
5. Peel the banana, slice thickly and stir into the curry 5 mins before the end of the cooking time.

Stir in the chopped cilantro or parsley, and sprinkle the pine nuts over the top.
Serve immediately and eat. Repeat for the next six nights, to the point where you’re so sick of curry that you threaten to burn your copy of Midnight’s Children both to keep warm on these chilly Reno autumn nights, and, ideally, to insult the entire nation of India.  

So what am I doing with all this extra money that I’m squirreling away, you ask? Naturally, I’ve converted it into gold bullion and piled it up into an enormous money-ziggurat in my bedroom. I now nest in it. Like Smaug in The Hobbit.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: quick workout at the rec between long, long reading and writing sessions today at the library.

Workout: 6 miles.

Total Mileage to Date: 700-something. I’m writing from the office ‘puter tonight, and don’t have access to my running log. Which is also berthed in an Excel file, entitled “TurRun: The Voyage Home.“

Days remaining to Boston: 153

Running is transgression and errancy

I have to make two important decisions today:

1) Do I notify/reimburse my bearded, Viking Metal-loving roommate, Darryl, since I borrowed ± ½ jar of his Pace Mild and Chunky salsa. I’m normally pretty OCD about the convoluted, inter-fridge rules about whose food is whose in our household. I wouldn’t even have crossed the line, except that my waning food budget in these last, lingering days of the month before I get my paycheck (here’s lookin’ at you, Nevada taxpayers!) have led to me to inventive culinary measures employing the scanty, sad-looking contents of my cupboard. The de facto meal in these gastronomic doldrums has been a lively little number I call “pasta with peanut butter,” which is more or less exactly what it sounds like. Sometimes soy sauce is involved, too. Last night, the pasta ran out, so I cooked up my other signature, late-in-the-month dish: the “Pueblo Steelrunner,” which consists of a microwaved flour tortilla with a flotilla of black beans and lumpy bits of potato sailing atop it. The ‘runner is totally taste-impoverished without some kind of cheese or salsa propping it up. I was out of the former (cheese is wayyy too expensive for end-of-the-month criteria). And, unbelievably, I was also out of salsa. Which, let’s face it, is my personal, piquant, much cheaper version of crack cocaine.

I hope Darryl will understand. He probably won’t even notice, since that jug of salsa is bigger than a porpoise head. But I can’t stand it. The guilt is slowly ravishing my conscious, feasting on it like a giant, Puritanical polyp. As such, I’m soliciting your opinions:

2) It’s increasingly worn on me that the byline, or subtitle, of the Belfry isn’t very accurate as to whatever it is that goes on here. I don’t even run every day, so “the daily run” is misleading. And I run through sagebrush once every two weeks, at most. And running the stark, spartan, brownish hills outside of Reno is nowhere near as “spooky-ass” as running through downtown Reno at twilight. There, my friends, unspeakeable, scrotum-tightening things scorch one’s eyes and turn even the strongest woman’s heart to dribbly marmalade. (E.g., my friend Jaffney was hanging out down on 4th street one hot, dry morning when a rheumy-eyed woman in a peacock-patterned raincoat approached her out of some scummy alley, blood running out of a corner of her mouth, offering to “do anything you want for four dollars”).

(don’t do meth, guys.)

Running through even the most rattlesnake-infested sagebrush is like eating Jiffy with a spoon in a recliner while taking in “Geraldo at Large” compared to that shit. So the “spooky” moniker is inaccurate. And most of these posts have been about running in Colorado, anyway: the true spiritual home of my dusty sneakers and too-hot-to-trot Union Jack shorties. So I figure it’s time for a change.

Some of my best ideas for a replacement slogan—“Bowerman’s Belfry: Where Duchovny Happens,” and “Bowerman’s Belfry: Because You’re Worth It,” and “Bowerman’s Belfry: The Legendary Journeys of Zip the Goat”—have tenuous, perhaps nonexistent, connections with the Belfry’s subject matter. Which, for the sake of argument, we’ll pretend is running. As such, I’m opening up the forum to you. Yes, you! Everyone! Even the Googlebot (and those sketchballs who leave spam comments about “the sex photo of hot iPod young girl better wireless coverage” on seemingly every one of my posts) can participate!

How do you, dear reader, think the Belfry’s subtitle should read? The winning entry (provided that it’s penned by someone other than, well, me) gets a special prize. Which may or may not be a The Legendary Journeys of Zip the Goat lithograph that I’ma blackmail Amber into making. Which may turn out to be complicated, if Amber writes the winning phrase. Because then I’d have to blackmail her into giving a prize to herself. One that she’s spent hours working on.

Running is a well-sharpened knife: #2

I probably should’ve posted this recipe in the first of my cooking-related pages, since it’s preternaturally cheap, suspiciously simple, unbearably delicious, and has been my dietary staple for much of grad school. The finished product may or may not sound revolting, depending on your predisposition towards chickpeas. It’s suitable both as a quick lunch and as a salad-ish sidedish at dinner. Slam-Sloth can attest to just how palate-tickling this concoction really is. I think she might eat “The Chickpea Thing,” as we colloquially refer to it, more often than I do. If that’s even possible. Between the two of us, we probably eat roughly thirty pounds of garbanzo beans a week.

War and Chickpeas

1 can no-salt-added organic chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1/8 cup olive oil
1/8 cup balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons stoneground dijon mustard (more or less, to your liking)

Whisk together the bottom three ingredients. Dump chickpeas into bowl. Dump dressing on top. Mix together, preferably while half-listening to NPR. Dump into stomach. Subsist.

I’ve taken the last four days off from running, and my long-undiagnosed ADHD is beginning to really kick in. I ended up swabbing my bathroom floor last night, something I highly recommend if you want to uncomfortably boost your awareness of just how filthy of a house-dweller you *really* are. I spent an extensive amount of time on Google, asking the internet questions I’d been curious about for a long time, like “is a weasel like a beaver?” and “how much does a cheese-of-the-month club membership cost?” (answers, respectively: “sort of” and “more than I thought it would.“) I reorganized my vinyl collection along chronological lines, replacing my previous, increasingly byzantine genre/similar artist hybrid system. I even did some ironing.

Luckily, I’ll be able to rechannel my energy from domesticity back into running here in a couple days. My recovery week will come to an end and I can don my Peruvian snow cap and snot-covered running gloves to brave a winter pounding the cobbles in northwestern Nevada. But first, I’m going to go replace some lightbulbs and vigorously dust the top of my bookshelf.

Other things I’ve been digging lately are Nashville-based photographer Thomas Petillo’s work, Stephen Dunn’s poetry, and music from Tvärvägen.
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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Denver Marathon. Again, review is forthcoming.

Workout/whether or not I heaved: 26.2 miles of leg-eviscerating torture/bliss.

Total Mileage to Date: 635

Days remaining to Denver: -4

Running is a well-sharpened knife: #1

It all started, as most life-changing decisions usually do with me, with regrets about eating shitty food. While taking in Burn After Reading (captivated by Brad Pitt’s incredible, skunk-stripe, blowed-beyond-dry hair and Madonna-inspired gyrations), I drank roughly a gallon of Cherry Coke, pawed greasy little fistfuls of popcorn (with extra yellow topping!) from an oversize bag into my maw, and, uh, “ate” an entire package of these:

Confession: the only reason I purchased and consumed an actual package of Nuclear Sqworms was so that I, apparently a 22-year-old man-child, could utter the words, “Yes, and I would also like Nuclear Sqworms, please” and mean it.

Bad idea.

If you can’t tell from the picture above, the Rocky Flats-styled psychedelic nightcrawler mascot for Nuclear Sqworms is wearing a hardhat emblazoned with the international symbol for radioactive materials. This is less a marketing ploy than an actual, very sober warning. Beware! Beware, indeed, to anyone impulsive enough to put these things into his/her GI tract that doesn’t have the well-seasoned stomach lining of a 12-year-old boy who eats 2 cubic meters of candy a day. As a squirmvivor, I can attest that the half-life of Nuclear Sqworms is, roughly speaking, 3 hours. That’s how much time elapsed between the Sqworms’ initial penetration into my gullet and my collapse onto my recliner, breaking into a feverish cold sweat, curled into a comma shape, feeling like someone had poured the contents of a car battery into my abdomen. When I awoke the next morning, the taste in my mouth was something like a Sorel boot marinated in high fructose raccoon feces.

So. I’ve decided that I’m going to try to eat better. No more Mike ‘N Ike/habanero bean-dip/soy milk dinners. And I should say that this impulse isn’t coming out of a desire to lose weight–I’m actually the most svelte I’ve been since high school cross-country right now, which is to say that I’m rocking the Macaulay Culkin-meets-Skeletor look. Rather, the Belfry Real Food Project is motivated by the following: (a) not killing animals and eating them, thereby superficially and somewhat lazily doing something about climate change and my own ethical arguments about animal representation in my thesis/comps, (b) spending less money on things like XXL Fishbomb Burritos while out on the town, and in the process saving dough (zing!) to buy things like Phil Elverum records and sweaty locks of Gabriele Anderson-Scheiss’ hair off of eBay, (c) avoid further trauma to my threadbare stomach lining, as seen in the above episode, and (d) most importantly, do something to lighten the glowering raincloud of my mood.

Yes indeed–let’s talk about sadness and running and food! I’m thrilled to tell you that my faithful copilot through the ennui and meaninglessness of life, The New York Times, recently reported that exercise doesn’t do squat for depression:

Dutch researchers studied 5,952 twins from the Netherlands Twins Registry, as well as 1,357 additional siblings and 1,249 parents, all 18 to 50 years old. They recorded survey data about the frequency and duration of exercise and used well-validated scales to uncover symptoms of depression and anxiety. The study was published Monday in The Archives of General Psychiatry.

Studying twins allowed the researchers to distinguish between genetic and environmental effects, and they found that the association of exercise with reduced anxious and depressive symptoms could be explained genetically: people disinclined to exercise also tend to be depressed. One does not cause the other.

I’m tempted to look a little askance at these findings because they involves the Dutch. And, as anybody who has even a passing acquaintance with our good friend in Boulder, M.B. Postma, can attest, the Dutch, considered as a people, are suspiciously lanky, cantankerous, enjoy bad film, have goiter fetishes, and wear too-small, garishly colored underwear.

Ok, so running isn’t going to turn the U.S.S. Weltschmerz around. And neither is moping underneath an afghan in the basement, morosely selecting the most bedraggled-looking Cheez-its out of the bag, while listening to the entirety of Louder Than Bombs for the four hundredth time. So what will?

Foooooooooooooddddd! Real food, that is! Gastronomie! The sweet science! All hail Alton Brown! Silpat! Gentlemen, start your salad shooters! Procrastinating on grading papers by making tulip-shaped, toooottalllyyy great Parmiaggiano crisps! Thaasss right-we’re adding a kitchen onto the belfry! So once a fortnight or so, I’ll spotlight a recipe. They’re original. I will attempt to try to make a literary pun on each title. You should make them! They’re liable to be affordable, edible, and runner-friendly! (in that they won’t cause your stomach to break into an impromptu Cirque du Soleil show every time you’re out for a jog–see, for example, my post-supper 4-miler experience with ramen, coffee, and two nectarines last week.)

Here’s what we’ve got on the smorgasboard this week:

The Grain Gatsby: A Salad (since, you know… uh… radishes are aristocratic? And rice vinegar is disillusioned about hedonistic materialism?)
Salad
1 1/2 cups quinoa, cooked according to the package. Or not, if you’re feeling risky and also want to end up with bad-tasting quinoa.
1 cup green onion, white & green parts; finely chopped
1 cup thinly sliced bell peppers–yellow and orange ones work the best here
1/2 cup radishes, thinly sliced
1/4 cup tarragon leaves, fresh

Dressing
Whisk together the following really, really well:
1/4 cup rice vinegar
1/4 cup pure sesame seed oil
1/4 cup soy sauce

Make dressing separately. Then, in a large salad bowl, toss everything together. I’ve also tried this with 2 cups of quinoa and cucumbers from the garden out back, and it was ok. It’s even better with wild rice instead of quinoa, but then you’re missing out on protein. Make extra dressing if you’d like, following the same proportions. Stick in fridge. Wait impatiently for an hour or so. Eat with too-large, novelty Thundercats spoon. This shit is the delish.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: To Mogul and back along Truckee River Path/West 4th Street. Nice feeling to run from one town to another. Harassed briefly by asinine, X-TERRA-champ cop who pulled over along 4th after sunset to glibly inform me that “20 miles is way too short to get a *real* workout in.”

Workout/whether or not I heaved: 21 miles/no, but I could barely roll myself out of bed this morning.

Total Mileage to Date: 523

Days remaining to Denver: 25