Bakeram Yoga

When I was little, I remember my mother making me a mixture of lemons and lots of honey to help soothe a really bad sore throat.  It was delicious.  There was something about the interplay between the very sour lemon and the the spoonfuls of yummy honey she would add in.  Then she would heat it up so it was nice and warm.

As I grew older I took the recipe and added hot water to make a “lemon tea” that I made for anyone that was sick or starting to feel that way.  I have been not feeling so well the last couple of days.  It started with stuffed up sinuses which progressed into a sore throat and coughing. Yesterday, the shit hit the fan and I was achy all over and didn’t want to move much. I am blaming in on too much flying. We didn’t have any lemons so Jake made me some lemon tea out of key limes.  There was lots of love in it, but the key limes just didn’t quite do the trick.  So last night he, I and Sophie headed out for our evening walk to the nearby grocery store to get some lemons.  Then he made me the tea and it was just exactly what I wanted.  For that split second that I was drinking it my throat didn’t feel like knives were tearing it apart.

Last night I tossed, turned and coughed in the way you do when you are sick.  I had crazy dreams that seemed even more real than usual.  Then about 4 a.m. in the midst of one of my coughs that was just dreadful, I had an idea.  What about if I added fresh grated ginger and mint leaves (from my very own mint plant that is going crazy) to the lemon tea?  I have read that ginger is supposed to have healing qualities and the mint it seemed would help break up the crap in my chest.  So this morning, into the small saucepan I put

• juice from one good sized lemon (the softer the skin outside the juicier they seem to be)
• about an inch of ginger grated with my dear microplane
• and a handful of mint leaves
• a coffee mug full of water
• a good drizzling of honey (I like my pretty sweet so I am very generous with the honey)

All of the amounts of these ingredients can be played with according to your tastes. Then I let it heat up and boil for a minute to get everything all mixed together. After the minute passed, I turned off the burner, put the lid on and just let the whole mixture set for a couple of minutes while I started some cinnamon buns for Easter breakfast tomorrow. Then I strained the whole mixture and am currently sipping.  It is really delicious.  The flavors seem to meld together nicely and it seeems to be forcing up the crud in my chest.  I hope everyone is feeling nice and well, but if you aren’t give this a whirl.

In the mornings I generally have chocolate whey protein powder with milk and oatmeal.  I like my oatmeal old school style so I make it with whole oats on the stove with water and a some raisins thrown in for a bit of sweet.  It is a yummy breakfast and it fills me up.  So this morning, I thought, I can cut out the milk (minus about 100 calories-yeah!) and just put the whey powder directly into the oatmeal which will make a lovely warm chocolate concoction that still has protein and and oats.

So into the pan all the ingredients went.  I added in some extra water to account for the extra dry ingredients and started cooking it.  It smelled lovely – kinda like hot chocolate cooking.  I was all excited and then I started eating it.  It tasted awful, well maybe not entirely awful, but as I worked my way through the bowl (cause I wasn’t going to waste it!) it become more and more chalky and gross in consistency.  So to all of you out there that think putting protein powder in oatmeal is a wonderful idea, I strongly recommend against it!  Now I am off to wash the taste of it out of my mouth!

In addition to being a baker and yogi I am also a runner.  Today, I had a revelation of sorts, but first some history of me and running that seems like a good thing to share with you my lovely readers.  I have been running ever since my freshman year of college when I realized that I wasn’t going to play tennis for 3 hours a day so in order not to pile on the pounds I should do something else.  So I started running.  I didn’t enjoy it at first.  It was hot and sweaty and involved really early in the morning to get it done before I went to class.  But over the years, I have grown to love it.  It has been one thing that I have consistently done for the last 11 years.

The problem comes is that all my crazy head issues come out in my run and seem to be amplified because in running you are supposed to be hard on yourself and the “better run” comes when you just beat the crap out of yourself.  But the victory is sooo sweet.  When I beat my personal best and have just a really good run, I feel like I am walking on air, like my whole body just flows together and it is lovely.  So I push myself and heavily criticize myself when I don’t measure up. This makes the good runs really good, but the bad ones just suck. I am working on having just ok runs and being fine with this, but it kinda a struggle.

Enter my wonderful new puppy, Sophie (pictures!), who is just wonderful and the cutest thing ever.  I always tend to shy away from running partners as my run is generally my time to just be.  Although in recent years, I have had really nice runs with Jake, Jane, my sisters and some adventuresome friends.  You see running is way more personal that you might imagine.  Everyone has a different pace and different way of going about the run.  I have always wanted a dog to run with though.  I had visions in my head of sprinting along the path with puppy at my side, tongue hanging out (off the leash of course because the dog would be very well trained) and the two of us  just being at one with the trail and lovely day outside.

Yeah, not so much.  It turns out that a dog has an even more different pace than humans which is further complicated by the fact that they have four legs instead of two.  This is further complicated by the fact that Sophie enjoys running, but she would just as rather go chase the nearby bird, squirrel, bike passing us, or bark at the nearby dog and starting lunging for him.  So a run with her involves me winding up the leash and not being able to use one of my arms to pace myself and then letting the leash go as she settles into the run, but being constantly wary of any approaching interesting object to her.  It doesn’t sound like much, but I am realizing that it has basically turned my run upside down.  My times are bad and it is much more tiring to run when you are constantly on alert and reigning in a puppy. So I have been a bit down on running and sad that things didn’t quite measure up to what I had envisioned.  I know, shocking, expectations not met.

But today, I was running along and I had one of those lovely “aha!” moments.  I realized that if I were to apply yoga philosophy to my run, then each day the run should meet me on my path exactly where I am that day.  If there are lots of things for Sophie to chase, then I need to take the time to address that and somehow let go of my need for a good running time.  Besides, there is no reason that I have to get good running times.  It is just my ego.  Theroeticallly I am running for the exercise for both me and Sophie and I would do good to remember that original aim.  Sophie needs me to be patient with her while she learns to be a good running puppy.  Perhaps she also trying to remind me that there are so many interesting things to sniff out there that I really should do some sniffing myself.  This won’t be easy cause a good run releases so many endorphins, but perhaps that is no longer worth the cost.

I have been studying for the California Bar for the last two months which would account for my blogging silence.  It has not been pleasant because law has never been particularly nice to me and being required to work on it full time was an interesting experiment.  In this intense studying period, I have notice something slight, but interesting to me.  In both yoga and law, it is referred to as a practice.  I have a legal practice, but I also have a yoga practice.

As I think about my yoga practice, I feel that it is a process of learning and discovery.  There are those “aha!” moments when I finally figure out exactly how to get into a pose or oft-repeated words of a favorite teacher finally make sense.  These moment are often followed in rapid succession by  having a completely off day where my body does not want to do what I want it to do or insists that it just wants to go into shivasna.  But overall, I feel that in yoga it is ok and accepted that you will gradually make your way through the asanas in whatever way you need to that day.  As a favorite teacher of mine said, “Yoga meets you on your mat each day wherever you are.”  It is encouraged that you should listen to your body and even rest when you are tired and not getting anything more beneficial out of the pose.  All of this combines together to make me excited and not afraid to try new things for fear of failure.  I almost need to fall over or do something ridiculous to really learn the new thing and incorporate it fully into my practice.

I say all of these things about yoga because the practice of law is so fundamentally different, but yet I wonder if it was more in the way of yoga would be a nicer profession for everyone involved?  Law practice is filled with fear.  It begins your first day of law school.  You inevitably have one of those stereotypical professors who feels it is his job to beat you into submission.  All in the name of teaching you to “think like a lawyer.”  It is furthered through a brutal grading process and jobs that only go to the top of your class.  Once you get out of school, you have to take and pass the bar.  This is a brutal two month study marathon followed by a test that is somehow supposed to measure whether or not you know enough law to practice.  Then once you actually get a job, the partner you work for reigns supreme and often he or she is not a nice person and makes the office environment toxic.  There is no room for learning from your mistakes, there is only harsh criticism for anything that goes wrong, because of course, it is your fault.  It has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t know what the hell you are doing.

I have such awful feelings associated with practicing law and such warm and fuzzy ones associated with my yoga practice.  I can’t help but think that lawyers would be a much happier group if law was practice like yoga.

I have been using the holidays as an excuse to do more than my normal amount of baking.  This year I decided that since money was a bit tight, I would bake everyone’s Christmas presents.  I started with larger batches of strawberry marmalade and salsa as the core of my gift giving and then went from there.  I made Christmas cookies, challah, and granola.  Then there was a request from one of my sisters, M, for biscotti as part of her Christmas present.  I have made biscotti in the past and have had some success with it.  So I went to my trusty pile o’ papers of recipes and hunted for a lemon walnut biscotti that I remembered making in the past.

I had just broken down and bought a microplane from Williams Sonoma (which is wonderful!!! so much easier to zest than with just a regular cheese grater.  I highly recommend it!) and so my lemon zesting was super nice and easy. I mixed all the ingredients together divided the dough up into three balls and then proceeded to smush them down into rectangular pieces to do the first baking.  I put them in the fridge for three hours and then suck them in the oven to bake.  This is where it gets tricky.  Two of the logs, as the recipe refers to them as, baked perfectly, but one didn’t.  It was slightly burnt on the bottom and hard to cut up into pieces.  Oh well, I thought, more for me to snack on with my coffee.

The next day Alex was on a coding spree for his wonderful new language called Nil and I thinking of things that I needed to do to keep myself occupied.  I started counting the biscotti and realized that I didn’t have quite enough to give out.  I started feeling creative. I liked the lemon walnut recipe, what if I were to replace the lemon parts with some chocolate chips, almonds and a bit of almond extract?  Then I would have a lovely chocolate biscotti addition too.  So into the kitchen I went.  By this time Alex was ready for a break so he helped me chop up the almonds and chocolate chips.

It is generally pretty simple to mess with a cooking recipe because there is very little chemistry involved in it.  Not so true with a baking recipe.  So I wanted to make sure that I kept the liquid to dry goods ratio the same and that I didn’t mess with any of the other ingredients too much.  So I took the recipe and subtracted out about 1/4 of cup of  flour to account for the missing lemon juice.  Then added in about 2 teaspoons of almond extract and another 2 teaspoons of vanilla to create  a good background flavor for the chocolate chips and almonds.  Then I split up the batter and smushed them into logs and stuck them into the oven.

50 minutes later out they came.  This time there was one log that was perfect and the other two were too crisp and not what I wanted.  So Alex and I further inspected the logs to see why one had done so well and the others not so much.  It appears that the thicker I made the logs, the better they did.  It also seems that the recipe isn’t really enough to split it up into three logs, so perhaps next time I made this recipe, I will only split it up into two logs.  I think also it would be advised to take out at least another 1/4 cup of flour for the chocolate almond biscotti.  We will see how the family likes them at Christmas.  Let me know if any of you make the recipe with any of the further additions and have more tweaks to it.  Thanks!

This morning I woke up to find frost on the ground.  In years past this wouldn’t have been of any particular note.  It would have just meant a couple more layers on my way out the door, but this year I have a garden.  Since this is California, I was under the impression that I could have it growing all year long.  Evidently not so much.

Before we moved out to the Bay Area, my husband, Jake, looked up the weather to see what it would be like.  According to Wikipedia, it was a mediterranean climate.  This had me picturing warm breezes all year round.  However, as the year has progressed and the temperature has sunk lower and lower, it appears that it gets cold in California too.  The last couple of weeks, it has gotten even chillier.  Jake found an alert on the weather channel that would text me if it was going to freeze that night so that I could tuck in my garden.  Two days ago, I got just such a text.  So I went hunting for old sheet and pillow cases and cleverly used clothespins to attach the sheet over parts of my garden.  I woke up the next morning and there might have been a wee bit of frost, but nothing too bad.  Yesterday, I got no such text, so I figured that my plants were fine.  However, this morning proved otherwise.  I think this is a lesson to me that weather forecasts are only so accurate and if it is cold outside, perhaps I should just cover the plants anyway.

My mother has made granola for as long as I can remember.  We never ate store bought cereal unless it was our birthday and then it was a special treat.  By the time I left for college, I swore that I would never eat granola again.  I had had my limit and besides it was definitely not “cool.”  Much time has passed since I left for college and about six months ago, I decided that I would make granola again.  I rationalized it as a cost saving measure since store bought cereal cost so much for so little.  I pulled out a big baking dish and dumped in oats, wheat germ, dry milk, a bunch of nuts, honey, brown sugar, safflower oil and anything else I could find that looked like it might be good in granola. Then I dug my hands in and mixed it all together and stuck it in the oven for about 30 minutes.  I had mixed feelings about eating it.  But the next morning, my husband, Jake,  mixed it into his yogurt and fruit and it seemed to be quite good.  Then a couple of weeks later, a friend, Jane, came over and I gave her some and she loved it too.  Over the last couple of months my granola has become quite a hit which amuses me considering how much I tried to not eat it for so long!

So that is the background to my granola, the reason for this post is that I have stumbled across a tweak to the recipe that I thought I would share.  Last time I made it, I didn’t have enough brown sugar, so I added in extra honey.  The extra honey made the granola clump together and much crunchier which is how I like it.  I admit to grabbing a couple of clusters for a snack from time to time, so more crunchier clusters means more fun snacking.  Oh boy, now I sound like a cereal commercial!  Anyway, here is the recipe for your pleasure updated with the extra honey and less brown sugar update.

5 cups rolled oats (not instant)
1 cup wheat germ
1 cup sunflower or pumpkin seeds
1 cup slivered almonds
1 cup pecans
1 cup dry milk
3/4 cup honey
1/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup of safflower oil

I tend to switch out what I use for the nuts and sometimes I add sunflower seeds and sometimes I don’t.  Currently Costco sells a big jug of mixed nuts that I am loving.  It is also really good when you add raisins or dates to it after it is cooked.  Mix it all together and put it in a large pan and put it in the oven to cook at 325 for 30 minutes.  Then turn off the oven, stir the granola and just leave it in overnight to crispen up.

Happy Baking!

Today in yoga we started a couple week series of adding on a few minutes of meditation to the end of each class.  I have done some meditation before, but I have a very hard time calming my mind down enough to really just be in the moment.  The class was structured around waking up the body and opening it up so that we could be comfortable to meditate at the end.  This involved a lot of stretches that I am simply not good at even getting into the beginning phases of them.  For whatever the reason, my muscles are very tight.  So there I was crossed legged and attempting to go forward to get a stretch in my hips.  I was frustrated because yet again, I could barely sit up straight much less go further forward.   I could hear my yoga teacher’s voice in the background.

“Check in with your body.  See how it is feeling today.  View this as an invitation into the pose.  See if you can make your practice into a meditation today.”

An invitation?  I had heard teachers say this before, but it didn’t really ever make sense to me.  My muscles generally did not go anywhere without a lot of prodding and work.  It didn’t seem to matter how much I attempted to get them to relax into whatever I was doing, they were not budging and they frequently told me so. But this time, something clicked.  I closed my eyes and began to concentrate on my breathing.

“Let go of your expectations.  You don’t want to have expectations when you meditate.  You want to be open to the experience and whatever you are experiencing at that moment.”

No expectations.  Hmmmm….ok, maybe just for this moment I can let go.  I felt myself sink a bit further into the meditation and a sense of relief wash over me.  Lo and behold, I felt my hips open a bit and I began to go further.  Not much, but just a bit, which was just lovely.

One of my favorite things about baking and cooking is the warm cozy feeling inside that it brings me.  At that moment all the negativity in life is brushed away and everything just feels so right and good.  My mother used to always say that she baked love into the dish and I agree that there is always a bit something extra in the food when you eat a home cooked meal.  There is such a feeling of satisfaction when I completely destroy the kitchen and then pull something warm and fragrant out of the oven.

Cooking with someone else can be even more lovely and warm.  However, it can also deteriorate quickly into a down and dirty argument about exactly how you should chop something.  It gets so vicious because cooking technique is so unique to each person.  In my family growing up we always had a one person in the kitchen at a time rule.  If there were two people, one person tended to be the head cook of sorts and the other took instructions.  I generally followed this rule.  I tended to be the head cook and I could very easily delegate to others to get a meal going.  I had a very good friend come to visit a couple of weeks ago and we had a very intense menu planned out for her birthday dinner.  At first I got really tense about making sure everything go done, but then I realized that I was being silly and I just needed to let go of certain parts of the dinner that she was working on and that everything would turn out just fine.  I could help if she needed it, but otherwise I should just assume everything would turn out wonderfully.  And you know what?  It did.  It was a wonderful meal that I got to share with close friends and that made me so warm and content that I was quite sure what to do with myself.

Yoga was hard today.  While we do the poses my teacher always talks about something to bring your mind and thoughts into the poses.  It is a way to approach the different poses in different ways each day.  Today is Election Day.  So today she talked about voting and making choices both for you life and for the world. She asked us what choices we wanted and needed to make in our lives.  My heart almost screamed out, “I don’t know what to do.”  I could feel the tears coming to my eyes each time she repeated it.  I am at a crossroads in my life right now.  Growing up my dreams for the future centered on work and finding my “dream job” in politics.  I desperately wanted to be a part of the “Beltway” and work to make the world a better place.   My dream didn’t work out and I am still mourning it while trying to figure out what I do next.  My dreams each night are filled with conflict and people yelling at me.  They range from mildly frustrating to all out awful and I wake up drenched in sweat and petrified.   I am constantly exhausted from all this.

As we moved into the standing poses, she asked us what we stood for.  I could answer that easily.  I stand for caring and loving other people and trying in my own little way to make the world a bit brighter.  I enjoy taking care people and like to help them where I can.  For as much as my life did not go in the direction I originally wanted, there have been many wonderful things along the way.  I have a wonderful husband, a supportive family and the best friends ever.  I get to live in Silicon Valley where is generally sunny and a perfect temperature.

Then she asked us to stand up for ourselves in this world and speak back to all that criticism whether internal or external.  My inner voice spoke back and said, “but what about if the criticism is true?”  I am more than capable of standing up for other people.  I am a lawyer, I can walk into a courtroom and convince a jury that my client was wronged.  However, talking back to the critic in my head is much less easy.

My yoga teacher also told us that one of the definitions of voting was to vow.  She asked us what we would commit or re-commit ourselves to in our lives.  My inner voice replied that I needed to re-commit myself to figuring out what comes next.  However, this leaves many more questions than answers.  I left yoga today with my thoughts running in circles in my head.  I guess I have lots to ponder.