Bakeram Yoga

I have always struggled with my weight.  I love to eat and there is such an emotional tie for me to food.  I also yearn to be one of those French women who only eat a couple of bites of everything and seem to be effortlessly thin.  I remember when I was about 10 and I weighed 106 pounds and I was a bit chubby so I decided that I needed to get back down to 100.  Needless to say, I grew before I could lose the weight.  In my adult life (well at least since I stopped growing), I have gone back and forth with my weight.  I lost 20 pounds in high school and got down to my thinnest at 150 and then went to college and promptly started the upward climb.  Then there was law school and campaigns and taking the bar and just general unhappiness which topped me out at 5′ 11″ and 190.  According to the doctor’s charts, I should be somewhere between 143-174 for my height.  So it was time to do something.  So I joined weight watchers and got back down to 158.  Then there was my honeymoon, a move cross country and taking the bar again and again.  This has taken me back up to about 173, which is right on the line of acceptable from a health standpoint.

My vice is mainly sugar and I work to try to figure out how to manage it.  My younger sister, Peggy, and I are constantly trying to figure out what will help to keep us on a moderation track.  We have tried all sorts of things and generally it seems that avoiding it is the only full proof way to do it.  However, this isn’t sustainable either because at my birthday I want a piece of cake and at other times there is such a connection between something that someone has made for you that you don’t want to not be able to have some of it.  But once I start eating it, it is very hard to stop myself. Then there is the barrage of other junky bad for you things that you encounter in everyday life and have to attempt to avoid which is really hard.  I get worn down or am tired or hungry and then I eat it.

This gets further complicated at the moment because Alex and I would like to have a baby.  Foremost, I don’t want the baby to have the same sugar addiction that I do.  This means that I really need to somehow reach a happy ground with the sugar sometime soon.  Secondly, I would like to think that I can eat more healthy and cut out the chemically things that I eat and just generally be healthy about my food choices.  The problem is when I get to work and there are nacho cheese Doritos staring me in the face or yummy chocolate from See’s and I am almost drawn to them, or when I have just finished dinner and I want a bit of something sweet.  Or a million other times when it seems somewhat appropriate or yummy to have something that I know isn’t good for me.  It is so enticing and so far I have no lasting good solution to this.  Peggy is starting her residency and really worried about gaining weight and eating too much because she is tired and stressed.  So I think we are going to implement the start of another no sugar stretch and see how it goes this time.  It is always easier to do it together because then we are accountable to someone else.

As a forerunner to this, a friend has recommended a juice cleanse (the juice is so tasty!) and allowed me to borrow her juicer so I think I am going to embark on it first.  The juicing is connected to yoga and meditation and just generally exploring your relationship with food.  The juice follows your chakras.  So for instance you start with the root chakra which is red so the juices that you drink that day are red.  It also combines the juicing with a broth too.  It sounds interesting and fun so we will see how it goes.  This journey is an ongoing one and perhaps sometime I will come to a point of peace about it all.

This last weekend I began my yoga teacher training.  It is one weekend a month for 9 months. It was kinda fantastic.  I had forgotten just how lovely a group of women can be.  There are 15 of us and we range in age from 30 (how come I am always the youngest at these things?) to probably mid 60s.  There are mothers and teachers and engineers, but the important thing is that they are all very open-minded and loving.  This sounds so simple, but when you are apart of it, it is amazing.  Everyone is happy and excited about life and thrilled to be there to be deepening their yoga practice and learning to teach. The teachers are vivacious and lovely people also.  I was a bit afraid of them not being approachable as they seem to be important people.  Not at all, they were happy to chat and relax and just share stories too.

By the way, this teaching thing – super harder than I would have expected.  My teachers over the years just make it look so easy that I never really thought it was that hard.  I guess this just means that they are good and I am just beginning to grasp exactly how good they are.  This weekend we learned Tadasana (Mountain) and Uttananasna (standing forward bend).  These are basic yoga poses that one learns quit quickly and easily when you are learning yoga.  I can’t count the number of times that I have done each of them.  However, try leading someone through the poses and suddenly the words that seemed so easy on your teachers lips, aren’t there anymore.  But after stumbling through it a couple of times, it seemed to get a bit easier….if only I can remember to tell people to inhale and exhale!  One woman remarked, “My students are all dead! I forgot to tell them to breathe!”

A hefty part of the teacher training is classes in meditation.  I guess I logically knew that the physical practice of yoga was meant to prepare the yogi to meditate, but I haven’t really ever put the two together.  Meditation has always scared me just a bit.  I mean you are just supposed to sit and do nothing except attempt to still your mind for somewhere from 20 minutes to all day.  It is intimidating! I am a person that does things and I have an awfully hard time sitting still, which is all the more reason I should, but still….  We had a class each day on meditation and giving us the basic technique on how to set yourself, relax yourself and then just try to be.  The teacher, Sundari, challenged each of us to try to develop a daily meditation practice of anywhere from 20 minutes up to an hour if we could get ourselves to do it.  She said that it has completely changed her life for the better.  So I thought I would try, I have wanted to for years, but there were always excuses.  I thought I might blog about it from time to time just to keep myself honest!

So today I started.  I set my iPhone for 20 minutes and sat on a yoga block. (Your knees should be lower than your hips and my hips aren’t that flexible).  I am going to try to increase 5 minutes a week at least until I get to 30 minutes, then I will reevaluate.  My mind was rather scatterbrained.  I had a really hard time bringing it back to just being.  I tried to concentrate on my breathe and give myself the mantra of “om” on the inhale and “shanti” on the exhale.  I had mixed results.  I kept thinking about all the things around the house that needed to be done.  Then towards the end my leg fell asleep, which was very distracting, so I moved it a bit to wake it up.  The yoga block was a bit hard on my bum too.  I used meditation cushions this last weekend and I am thinking one might be a good investment.  Perhaps at some point my hips will be flexible enough that I can just sit on the floor.  However, until then I need some propping up!

I want to start out this post by saying that normally I am a very peaceful, non-violent person.  However, there is one thing that gets my blood boiling: SNAILS!!  I am not quite sure if other gardeners have quite so many problems with snails or it is just this part of the Bay Area, but they are on a rampage this spring. You see I try and have an organic garden which means no pesticides allowed.  I am lucky because in the Bay Area this is somewhat possible because there aren’t a ton of bugs waiting to destroy my crops.  However, there has been lots of research done saying that the more you put on pesticides, the more you kill the good bugs and get more bad bugs, but I digress.  The long and short of it is that snails love nothing better than to munch on my strawberries or my cute little lettuces or anything just poking its head out of the ground.  You can also leave out beer in little plastic cups to deal with some of the snails, but that tends to work better on slugs and rolly pollies.  I figure it is a rather pleasant way to go in that they just drown drunk.

According to the gardening books that I have read, the most effective way to deal with snails is to simply go around and pick them off and smash them.  This sounds very simplistic, but I have found in the past if I can regularly get out into the garden, this actually does work.  This year, they are all over the place.  Now granted, I did leave them alone for 5 weeks to breed and grow while I was eating lots of yummy food in Europe, but still!  Even before I left, I had done several sets going around the yard grabbing them from all their favorite places (in the compost, under the wood slats on the fence, in my strawberry patch! and hiding in the orange tree) piling them into flower pots and then smashing them all.  Then this has to be followed up by an almost daily regimen of going back over the places and more grabbing and smashing.  Once we got home, I did a thorough run through of grabbing and smashing and I thought I was doing well.  However, today while I was putting around the front yard doing some pruning and watering, I discovered so many snails hidden in a lily that was on the side of the house.  Now I have read that snails can travel over and under fences quite some distance to get to their food and these snails were big and fat so that meant that they had been eating lots of strawberries and such.  The side of our house isn’t far from the garden.  So I set to grabbing and smashing with a vengeance.  Those buggers hid really well too.  Every time I thought I had finished getting them all, there were more and more.  I thought about cutting down the lily, but then I realized that I shouldn’t because it was a good snail attraction and I now knew where to find them.  This is the bad point, when you start designing your landscaping around having snail traps……Now I need to head out to the backyard to check my traps.

This trip started about a year ago when my sister Peggy decided that she wanted to rent a flat in Paris for a month.  Then a couple of months after that Julie and Julia came out,  I read Julia Child’s My Life in Paris and I started cooking Julia’s recipes.  So needless to say I have become a bit infatuated with French food.  The flavors are just so subtle, not at all like the bold spicy flavors that I am used to in TexMex.  So I went to Paris with the idea that I would eat my way through the town and try and taste just about everything.

We arrived on a Sunday evening after a very long plane ride.  Our landlord left us a list of good restaurants around the neighborhood and we went out to a bistro nearby.  We were really concerned that we wouldn’t be able to still get food as it was about 10 p.m.  Little did we know that no one in Paris seems to eat before 8 p.m., preferably 9 p.m. so eating at 10 p.m. wasn’t really considered late at all.  Alex and I both got salads and a glass of wine for me and a beer for him.  The salads were remarkable in that the ingredients were quite fresh for the middle of the city in a local bar basically.  We were both surprised at just how good the food was.

We went back to our flat and attempted to sleep.  I was very excited as the thing I really wanted to do was to have pane chocolate warm from the nearest bakery. Julia describes a wonderful experience in her book of getting up early and having a warm croissant and a cup of coffee that really spoke to me.  I got up the next morning and went for a run.  I didn’t bring any money with me and I literally must have passed at least 8 boulangeries on the run with the smell of fresh bread and croissants wafting out the door.  Needless to say, as soon as I got back, I showered and Alex and I got out the door.  Our first stop was the patisserie across the street from us.  The pane chocolate was quite tasty and I was quite satisfied, so up the street we went in search of a cafe crema (coffee and steamed milk) to wash down the pane chocolate.  We spent a good chunk of the rest of the day wandering around our neighborhood trying pane chocolate and pane chocolate aus almond (with almonds) at the the different patisseries around us.  It was just delightful.

*Interesting side note about patisseries and boulangeries in France: The French government regulates what the different types of bakeries can call themselves and sell.  A boulangerie just means that the person who is the baker is certified to make bread and has been tested on the different recipes that make up the different types of French bread.  A patisserie means that the baker is certified in how to make the specific French pastries and will make certain ones.  An “artisan” shop means that the baker is required to make and sell specific types of bread and pastries that have been deemed “French” by the government and that they don’t wish to die out.  The French are not much on innovation, but they are very concerned that their older recipes will be lost and that bakers will not know how to make them.  This was a similar attitude with the different types of cheese.  It was all quite fascinating!

There is always something growing in our backyard.  Right now it is oranges.  We have a lovely mature tree in our backyard.  It looked a bit sad when we moved in, but it is amazing what a bit of water and compost can do!  We have oranges in spades.  I have been making fresh squeezed orange juice as fast as the oranges fall off the tree.  However, as soon as the oranges get ripe, there is an inevitable task to be done: marmalade.  There isn’t too much that you can do to preserve oranges.  You eat them, drink the juice and make marmalade.  This weekend, Alex picked a bunch of the oranges that were ripe and the timer was on to make the marmalade.  My recipe is variation on my Great-Grandmother Chadwell’s recipe.  The trick to yummy marmalade seems to be in using grapefruit.  This year I also replaced the normal lemons with a California favorite: meyer lemons.  There is just something about these lemons.  They are a bit sweet and have a lovely juxtaposition of sour and sweet flavor which leads to much tastiness!

Alex took the morning off to help me get started and I canned all day long.  In total I made four recipes which amounted to 19 pints and 5 quarts of marmalade which should keep us in marmalade until next year.  In case you are up for a day (or a couple of hours) of canning, here is my recipe.

Marmalade

Instead of normal pectin in this recipe I use Pomona’s Universal Pectin.  You can find it at Whole Foods or any natural grocery store.  It allows the jam to gel with about a third of the sugar that one would normally use.

First things first! Make calcium water:

½ t. of calcuim powder (from the Pomona’s Universal Pectin)

½ c. of water

Mix well together in a clear glass jar and put it in the refrigerator.  This solution will keep a couple of months.  If you see any discoloration: don’t use it.

This recipe will make about 7 pints of jam depending on the size of your fruit.  So take 7 pint jars, screw caps, lids and a funnel and put them into a large pot of water. The water should cover the tops of the jars.  Then cover the jars and boil the water.  Once the water begins to boil, turn it down until you are ready to use the jars.

15 medium sized oranges
4 large grapefruit
4 meyer lemons
¼ t. baking soda
1c water
1 package of Pomona’s Universal Pectin
4 c. sugar

*Note on ingredients: Our orange tree produces oranges that have a lot of pith in them.  In this recipe there is an increase in the amount of oranges to account for this.  You are aiming to have about 12 cups of liquefied fruit so you can adjust the recipe accordingly. Additionally regular lemons can also be used, Meyer lemons are just better.
Use a microplane to zest 3 grapefruit, 5 oranges, and 2 lemons. If you don’t have a microplane then you want to use something that makes the rind similarly small. When you zest just take off the rind not the pith(white part). You can add more or less zest as you like it. Then slice off the rest of the rind and the pith from all the fruit. It isn’t crucial that you get all of the pith off, just most of it. Then cut up the fruit and take out the pits. Then take the cut up fruit and put it in a blender or food processor to turn it into a fruit soup of sorts.

Take the zested rind and put it in a saucepan with the baking soda and water. Heat to boiling and then simmer for 10 minutes. Then add in the processed fruit.  Also add 6 teaspoons of the calcium water.  Then let the mixture boil.  While the fruit is heating up take the sugar and the pectin (it is tan and in the larger pouch) and mix the two together.  Once the fruit has boiled add in the sugar and pectin and stir vigorously until the sugar has dissolved into the fruit.

Once the fruit is boiling, it is time to can.  Take one jar out of the boiling water and set it near the boiling fruit.  Then place the funnel on top and pour enough of the fruit in until you have about and inch left in the jar (the bottom of the screw part of the jar is a good estimation of this).  Then place the lid on top and take your fingers and push it down to ensure that it is secure.  Then take the screw top and place it over the lid and tighten as much as possible.  Two old washcloths are good to use to protect your hands from the hot jars.  Now listen to your jars pop as they tell you they are sealed.

It is officially day 10 of no sugar.  So far, I have survived and I haven’t given in.  Both of these are good things.  However, I have noticed a couple of things that are worth nothing about myself.

1) Drinking makes the cravings really bad.  Last Friday night, Alex and I decided to get a bottle of cheap wine at Trader Joes and some baked cheese puffs and have happy hour at home.  Both were acceptable to the new diet, but felt just enough like cheating to be fun for a Friday night.  Bad decision.  Half a bottle of wine later, my desire to walk to 7-Eleven and raid whatever sweets they had was really intense.  Not fun nor good.  Lesson learned: must keep the drinking down. Upside: one glass of champagne for dinner tonight seemed to be just fine.

2) Chips should also be on the list.  I couldn’t stop eating those cheese puffs until they were all gone.  Ergo, they go on the addictive list and should not be eaten.

3) I am actually not addicted to rich foods even if they are not healthy for me.  Tonight I made a lovely Julia Child meal because I hadn’t really cooked in awhile and I wanted to create.  I made chicken breasts with a yummy port cream sauce, creamed spinach and a wild rice pilaf.  It was lovely.  It did have just over a half a cup of butter in it and 2 cups of half and half in it so it wasn’t particularly healthy, but I found half way through the chicken that I just wasn’t hungry anymore and I could easily just stop which was a pleasant discovery.

4) Sugar/sweets are everywhere.  I never really realized it until I wasn’t eating sugar, but it is all over the place.  I run into probably 10 times a day easily.  This means there are 10 times a day when I have to repeat to myself that I am not depriving myself of this, but instead this is a decision that I made voluntarily and I intend to stick to it. Society should take note of this and contemplate doing something about it. No freaking wonder our country is overweight!

I also have this constant conversation going on in my head about whether I will be able to try small amounts once the initial month is up or not.  However, I keep trying to remind myself that I need to get through this month first, then I will see what happens next.

I love sugar.  I always have.  It was always the thing that I turned to when I was sad and depressed and also when I was happy and celebrating something.  I have many wonderful memories of baking with my family while I was growing up.  One of my favorite things to de-stress is to go into the kitchen and bake or cook something, no matter what it is.

However, I have found recently that once I start eating sweets I can’t stop.  It is almost impossible for me to stop before the last of it is gone.  The interesting thing is that I don’t crash from the sugar so I don’t really have a check point where I know I have gone too far.  The more I look at it lately, the more it feels like an addiction.  I realize it sounds a bit silly.  I mean I am talking about sugar, not some illicit drug.  I am not overweight and am a healthy person.  But the more I think about it, the more I realize how much it controls my life.  It is always my go to in a stressful situation to make it better.  I don’t drink, I sugar binge.

So I have decided that I am going to try to take sugar out of my life for the present time.  I want to really see how I am without it.  Can I break the addiction and not crave it so much anymore?  Alex and my two younger sisters have also decided to join me in this quest.  They are intent on cutting it out for a month and then somehow trying to slowly add some back in to bring moderation to how much sugar we consume.  I am not sure that I am going to be able to do that.  However, we will see, one day at a time.

The ground rules, as discussed by my sisters and I, are that we aren’t to eat anything that is composed of more than one-third sugar (mainly refined sugar), but this also includes no guzzling of maple syrup, honey or agave (we are hardcore!).  However, there is a concession for not more than 2 tablespoons of my homemade low sugar jam with peanut butter and toast.  We are allowed one yogurt a day and I am allowed a small amount of agave in my chai.  The overarching idea is that we don’t want to allow ourselves anything that could be binged on to satisfy sugar cravings.  We are also trying to eat healthily so that fat doesn’t replace sugar.  We are not currently trying to lose weight, just get used to the no sugar.  We may try that later as we all seem to have this 15 pounds that it would be pleasant to have gone.

We started on January 2 and so I am at day 3.  It has been a bit trying so far.  My first day there were Sprinkles cupcakes at work to celebrate a co-workers birthday and one of my managers was insistent that I have one.  I didn’t, but it was really difficult as Sprinkles are so yummy!  On day two, we borrowed a lawn mower from our very nice next door neighbor who works at a good bakery.  He gave us a box full of pastries including a whole bunt cake.  Alex about lost it at that point.  There was even a pain au chocolate which is Alex’s favorite.  The pastries went into the trunk where they stayed until Alex had the wonderful idea to give them to the guys at our bike shop when we dropped off his bike to get it fixed.  Today has been decent so far, so almost three days down!

Note: We have a guest blogger today, my wonderful father, Bill Howe.  He is writing about something that has been really helpful to him and I hope it will be helpful to you too.

Approximately twenty years ago, as I was changing my youngest daughter’s diapers, I realized that original Desitin relieved the arthritis pain in my hands. I had been changing her diaper from a mild explosion. It was messy. I cleaned her up and to make sure she did not get any diaper rash, I liberally spread original Desitin all over her bottom. In the process, I got some over my fingers.

I could hear the inhales and exhales around me of the uji breath.  It struck me as harmonious: like the waves of the ocean.  It was oddly comforting and allowed me to melt back into the flow of my sweaty vinyasa.  I was in a small room with lovely wooden floors and the sun streaming in.  It was a lovely crisp morning and the room was quite cozy and filled with people who were excited to be there.  Their energies shown around me.  I could feel the santosha, or contentment, swell up around me.  I was sweaty with exhausted arms of jelly, but content.  I felt like I belonged. I love this feeling in yoga, when I feel exhausted and sweaty, but also peaceful and that somehow this is one of those wonderful moments to savor in life.

I was in the middle of an Ashtanga yoga class.  I had been invited by a teacher of mine, Rossana Lo.  It was a lovely class.  I had only done Ashtanga yoga once before in a mysore setting and hadn’t had a good experience.  I was overwhelmed by not knowing the series and intimidated by all the yoginis around me doing many contorted things with their bodies that I could not fathom ever doing. This was different.  The people were more accepting.  Most of them were still doing very contorted things that maybe someday I might or might not ever do, but this time it was ok.   I remember that yoga is about the journey and the destination is irrelevant because even if I were to get to the crazy pose point, there will always be something more. So I sweat and take chaturanga on my knees and remember to do the uji breath and it is good.

Butternut squash is hard to deal with.  I have vivid memories of the last time I tried to peel and dice one up.  My hands were bruised and broken by the time I was done.  However, it is fall and the wind is blowing outside and I am feeling cozy inside.  My husband and I have been eating seasonal produce with the garden cycles this year.  So it was time for winter squashes and root veggies and things that are very different from all the tomatoes and salads we have been eating all summer long.  My mother-in-law has a lovely recipe for butternut squash soup.  So I decide that to celebrate all this fallness, I am going to make the soup.

However, with the vivid memories of last time still in my head, I decide that I am not dicing up the squash nor the apples.  I will peel them both, but then the cuisinart is going to deal with the rest.  First mistake.  It seemed all well and good – it was still a pain to deal with, but I got everything sliced up.  So I started the cooking: I sauteed the leeks and the butter (the smell of butter cooking is just sooo yummy!).  Then I realized that the pot I was cooking them in was not distributing the heat correctly so the leeks started burning.  I started freaking out a bit.  However, I dive into the leeks with a pair of tongs and start fishing out the burned pieces of leek and add some more butter in.  That should fix things right?  Well it did for the moment.

Then I toss in all the sliced up butternut squash and the apples.  I am supposed to cook both until they are “caramelized” and then add in the chicken broth.  Caramelizing has always been a bit of a mystery me and I have never quite understood the difference between it and just cooking something until it is a bit soft.  At this point I realize that I might have a bit of a problem.  The butternut squash and apples that the cuisinart sliced up is way more than the required measurements of the recipe.  I had thought this wasn’t an issue, but I now realize that I have way too much food matter in the pot and a comparatively small surface to cook it all.  At about this moment, Alex walks into the kitchen.  He looks at my pot and me being slightly disheveled and says,

“Maybe this is a bit much for right now, why don’t we eat something else for dinner and I will put this away for the moment.”

I reply, “No, of course not – I am being stubborn, I am going to finish this soup and feed you some of it for dinner.”  Then I promptly begin to vigorously attempt to stir the contents of the pot, which is kinda hard.  I stir for a bit longer and Alex and I go back and forth as to whether I should be doing this or not.  Finally he wins, I realize that I am exhausted from a particularly hard workout that morning and I haven’t really eaten enough during the day so I am starving.  He directs me to Sophie’s bed and instructs me to lay down with her and he will get us some dinner.  Then he makes us some lovely boca burgers.

The good news is that today I approach the big pot in the fridge with a new take on it.  I have decided that the squash and apples are going back into the cuisinart and I will use the blade to pulse them into smaller pieces.  This worked quite well and I have soup cooling on the stove for tonight’s dinner with some pumpkin ravioli and a light pumpkin cream sauce.

Here’s the recipe if you decide you want to chop things!

Butternut Squash and Apple Soup

2 T. unsalted butter

1 ½ c. sliced leek, white and pale green parts only

1 T minced garlic

6 c. peeled and roughly diced butternut squash

3 cups peeled and roughly diced apples

6 ½ c. chicken stock

Sea salt, preferably gray salt

1 c. chopped spiced candied walnuts

Met the butter in a large pot over moderate heat and cook until it turns nut brown.  Add the leeks and sauté until slightly softened, about 5 minutes.  Add the garlic and sauté briefly to release its fragrance.  Add the squash and the apples, raise the heat to high, and cook stirring, until the vegetables begin to caramelize, about 5 minutes.    Add the chicken stock, bring to a simmer and cover partially.  Adjust the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and cook until the squash and apples are tender, about 40 minutes.  Transfer in batches to a blender or food processor and blend until smooth.  Return to the pot, reheat to serving temperature, and season with salt.  Garnish the soup with the walnuts when serving.