Activity

For the past few weeks, I've been craving physical activity, in levels that are nigh-unfathomable to me.

I've known for a while now that I'm a much more physical and active person than I originally self-identified as - I spent most of the first twenty years of my life avoiding any kind of exertion like the plague. I spent as much of my time as possible curled up on my backside reading, and my primary focus in school, other than figuring out how many classes I could dodge while still graduating at the top of my class, was coming up with creative excuses to get out of gym. But over the past few years, I've slowly come to realize that, the more I move, the happier I am.

For the past couple of years, this has meant that I try to find a reasonable level of activity in my day-to-day life. I walk to the library and the bank when I can. I record little half-hour yoga shows and try to do them at least a couple times a week, and once a week if possible I hit a more intense yoga class. Once in a while I go out dancing, and I spend most of the work day on my feet.

Over the past month, though, that hasn't been cutting it. Yoga has left me feeling edgy, unfulfilled, and deeply in need of an elevated heartbeat, so I've replaced it with a 40-minute aerobics video. Given my slow work schedule, I've been able to fit that in most days, and it's usually been followed by a couple miles walk in the cold. And in spite of that, when I come home and take off my coat, scarf, gloves and various and sundry other layers and flop on the sofa to warm up, the first thing that goes through my head is, 'gee, what I really want to do now is play DDR...'

It's not bad, but it's kind of eerie - I'm used to craving macaroni and cheese, or trashy novels, not motion, and not this strongly. I'm not quite sure what's causing it, either. Maybe it's the fact that this is the first time in months that I've been able to be this active; maybe it's a weird new way for my body to sublimate stress and anxiety, maybe at some point in my sleep I was bitten by a radioactive squirrel and I am now feeling the first pangs of what will become a driving need to scamper constantly at near-sonic speeds.

On the other hand, all this walking and bending and twisting and jumping seems, for the moment, to be keeping the winter blues away. So I won't complain too loudly....

Cookbook Project, Book #2

'Japanese Homestyle Cooking,' by Tokiko Suzuki

This book was a gift from my mother. My sister has been living in Japan for the past couple of years, and mom went to visit her last year. Whenever I travel, I try to get myself a cookbook of local recipes, as a kind of interactive souvenir, and mom decided to play along, and brought this back for me. Alas, most of my souvenir cookbooks wind up going unused, and this one was the same. If nothing else, most of the recipes call for at least one ingredient that I've never heard of. But a goal is a goal, and that means not skipping the tough ones. And, to be honest, there are at least a couple of simple, American-accessible recipes in there.

So tonight's dinner was Chicken Teriyaki, and Spinach with Sesame Dressing. And, while it meant that I had to go hunt down a few specific ingredients that I don't usually keep in the house (mirin and sake, to be specific), it also means that since neither of those come in single-serving sizes, I now have enough to make almost anything else from the book that I want to.

The chicken was almost mind-bogglingly easy - it's definitely going into the repertoire of things to make again. The spinach.... needs work. It was good, but the dressing includes enough sake, without cooking it down, that the raw alcohol taste drowns out almost everything else. It has potential, but I think cooking some of the alcohol out of the dressing would make it a lot better.

So far, so good....