Lemony-Tahini Kale Salad

It it H-O-T in St. Louis. It's been H-O-T for the past week, and will continue to be H-O-T for the next week. I want to live in my sports bra and gym shorts. In fact, I want to live in my refrigerator.

5/3/1

After I finish NROL, I'm planning on continuing with some variation of 5/3/1 power lifting routine. Until then, 5/3/1 is going to be my cop-out list post when I have nothing to say and have done absolutely no cooking for the past two weeks. I had bad Vietnamese take-out for lunch and dinner yesterday. With white rice. It seemed like a good idea for short amount of time I took to wolf it down. Much less so when I tried to work out that night.


I will be better this weekend. Except for the beer tasting tomorrow. Oh yeah, and tacos on Saturday. 

...and we're back.

An apology is in order to my imagined readers for the long, unannounced vacation. My dad was in town (and my adviser was out of town), so somehow sitting on my computer for an extended period of time didn't sound very appealing. Suffice it to say, adventure was had (outside! in the sunshine!), primal (and no-so-primal) food was eaten, and I finally got to work out with a buddy. Some highlights are below!

How to ruin (your taste buds for store-bought) mayonnaise forever

I was never been a big mayo-eater growing up, preferring to dress my sandwiches with creamy peppercorn salad dressing (I was weird). In fact, it wouldn’t be far from the truth to say I actively disliked mayo both in texture and taste. It just seemed so unnatural. I recognized the ingredients, understood the gist of its creation, and yet how could something yellow and something transparent form that opaque, white-ish goop.

Let me tell you, I have witnessed magic. And it was delicious. 

Paleo Indian Food + City Museum = Good Times

Another weekend ends without a toe being put in the lab. I guess it is inevitable that once classes are over, I’d have more time to get my lab work done during the week and can therefore have a few weekends off. But I still feel like a slacker. As a matter of fact, I’m still not used to coming home after my 9 hour days and not having to spend the rest of the night doing homework. Not that I’m complaining; I reserve my complaining for when I have too much work, not too little.

Gym Rituals

Happy Fitness Friday, from the confines of my office where I have spent the vast majority of the past 12 hours sitting on my behind. I did make it to the gym between starting my experiment at 6:00 AM and taking a sample at 8:30, so that should cancel out some of the sitting, amirite? I’m pretty sure all of this sitting is still going to kill me one day (that is if the arsenic doesn’t get to me first).

Primal Meat-up!

Yesterday, I went to my very first Primal Meetup in St. Louis! We spent some time running, chasing, and being chased (capture the flag, definitely a blast from my past). We threw some light things (frisbee!) and some heavier things (giant-ass hammer!). I got my twenty minutes of sun (and then some), which is rare enough on a weekday. And then we ate some delicious, delicious primal/paleo food (head cheese!). I think this may be the first time I left a BBQ where I ate to my heart’s content and didn’t get sick afterwards.

Yeah, it will be ok, do nothing today

Another weekend flies by, leaving behind naught but a few happy memories and a refrigerator full of food.

Actually that’s a pretty good deal, isn’t it?

All work and no play makes Chelsea something something

It’s definitely been one of those weeks at school. For the past few days, I’ve been running experiments for 15+ hours in the lab and crawling into bed immediately upon returning home, only to roll out a few short hours later and head into the lab to start again. As a result, I’ve been falling prey to overeating and eating the wrong things; the free cookies at coffee break, several cups of trail mix over the course of a few hours while sitting in my office in an exhausted stupor. And over the past few days I’ve managed to squeeze in just one meager workout, which I’m pretty sure I sleep-walked (is that the right tense? Or is it slept-walked?) through because I can’t seem to remember a thing.

An ode to pizza

I was missing pizza long before I went primal. As an East coast transplant to St. Louis, I knew I shouldn’t expect anything on par with the New York-style hybrids that dotted our New Jersey coastline. What I didn’t expect was the profusion of bizarre crust + sauce + cheese chimeras masquerading as pizza all throughout the city. Some are more palatable than others, but none have been able to fill the very specific (wide, thin, triangular) hole in my heart.

Live life like the weekend

One thing striving towards the primal lifestyle has impressed upon me is the importance of finding balance. As a graduate student, this can (and has been) particularly hard. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of eating whatever is cheapest and requires the least amount of prep work. As an undergraduate, I tended towards Kashi frozen meals and Annie’s mac and cheese when the work got to be too much. Nowadays, I make try to make better use of my weekends in preparation for the long and trying week ahead.

On finding my workout groove

I dub this Friday, and every Friday hereafter, to be Fitness Friday, on which I prattle on about my very limited exercise experience, complain about people hogging the squat rack, and post my PRs so we can all laugh about how pitiably weak I am (but I'm getting stronger I swear!).

One year ago last January, I joined my very first grown-up gym. Yes, I was one of the New Year’s resolution crowd. You know the ones; they flood the gym, monopolizing the equipment for about a month before disappearing all at once like a flock of migratory birds. And that was me, right up to and including the inevitable backslide. I picked the gym because it was along the metro line and close to grocery store, and went three times a week out of convenience and an illogical sense of obligation to one trainer, to whom I’d assured my commitment to getting into shape.

Carbs and comfort food

When I finally made the switch to primal (and even now as I vacillate somewhat between strictly primal and more lenient versions thereof), it wasn't a huge change. I was never much of a white bread/white rice-eater and, armed with (mis)information about the benefits of whole grains, I had already switched from regular pasta to brown rice pasta and whole wheat bread to brown rice tortillas. I felt healthier, but still found that I tended to binge on carbs. That may have been the first indicator that something was up; if you can eat 2+ servings of pasta or oatmeal without feeling remotely full, then something is up.

Salutations and Strata

Ah, the first blog post.

Well, the first for this blog at least. All throughout my vast and complicated relationship with what I fondly  refer to as the interwebs I have left behind a string of blogs, never to be read again (well, technically never to be read at all). But as always, this time will be different. So welcome, hypothetical reader, to my newly refurbished corner of the internets. Here there be dragons!