Scales of Injustice

If you have been following my C25k progress, or if you saw my Facebook post early last week, you probably saw that I thought I had lost 16.8 pounds since starting the running program.   THOUGHT.


Unfortunately, when I went to weigh myself this morning, I discovered a major malfunction with our scale.  It said I weighed 287 pounds.  I stepped off, and stepped back on. 68 pounds.  What the heck?


So I swapped out the batteries, grabbed an unopened sack of rice flour and tried again. 5.2 pounds. Now we're getting somewhere.


Except that when I stepped up, I hadn't lost nearly as much as I thought, only about 10.7 pounds. Instead of  feeling let down, I reminded myself that 10.7 pounds is nothing to shake a stick at, a point driven home much faster as I hefted the 5 pound sack of flour back into the cupboard. Wow, two sacks of flour lighter than when I started.


I am proud of that small accomplishment, and remain motivated.  Maybe even more so now.


I guess that is what I get for being prideful.

Thomi's Cafe

Breakfast always tastes better when you don't have to cook it.  Well, almost always.


On a mission to eat out and try one of the local restaurants at least once a week, this Sunday we really wanted breakfast.  Breakfast out is usually predictable and easy on the pocketbook, so I figured it would also be an easy entry into the local reviews as well.


Up at 4:45 this morning, by 7:30, I was starving and ready for brekkies. I trolled the internet for breakfast places, and other than the standard chains, Denny's and Perko's, the two stand-outs appeared to be Mel & Faye's Diner and Thomi's Cafe. Can you believe that Mel & Faye's doesn't list their hours on their website (or at least somewhere I could find it)?  So, by default, we chose to try Thomi's.

Photo courtesy of Thomi's website.

The building has a charming exterior on the corner of a little strip mall on highway 49. We arrived about 8:10, the first and only customers of the day.  The reception was cordial, but hardly warm and friendly.  Maybe because it was early on a Sunday and the young girl really didn't want to be there.  Really, I can't say I blame her all that much...




The interior is cute, almost cozy.  I really liked the bar/hostess station with the brick-red wall.  The wooden chairs were a nice touch compared to the faux-wood ugly tables, but they were FILTHY.  I mean, really gross.  Every chair-back in the restaurant was covered in a film of sticky fingerprints and spilled food, made glaringly obvious by the high-gloss finish of the chairs. It skeeved me out quite a bit. 


We started with coffee as we perused the breakfast menu.  Sadly, it is an over-sized laminated menu, the exact same as on the website.  For such a cute little place, you would think that the menu would be something just slightly more...classy. The hubby and I usually pick standard fair for our first visit to any restaurant, eggs being a pretty good litmus for the rest of the food; if you can cook a good egg, chances are the rest will follow suit.

We loved the large, friendly cobalt-blue mugs.

Rick ordered the Pancake Griddle Combo: two pancakes, two eggs, and four strips of bacon or sausage, $5.99. I ordered the Eggs Benedict, served with hashbrowns; I added avocado, which brought the total to $9.88. Sadly, as yummy as these pictures may look, I found breakfast to be more than a little lacking.




My breakfast arrived cold, not warm; stone-cold and starting to congeal.  As the first, and still only, customers, I could not understand how my whole plate could be so cold.  


Did they make my breakfast, put it in the window, and THEN start Rick's? Although my eggs were almost perfectly poached, they forgot the avocado (which was later brought to the table as a side), the ham was not the thick slice of grilled ham as pictured on the menu, but shaved, overly-salty lunch meat, and the hollandaise sauce was the completely bland packet variety. Had it been hot, it would have tasted a whole lot better. As it was, I ate because I was super-hungry, not necessarily because it was good.

Side of avocado, browner than in the photo.

Rick's meal was huge and fairly average; scrambled eggs were too dry, but pretty fluffy, bacon salty, but a little flaccid, pancakes okay, but fork-tough (needed a knife to cut).

My side of avocado, when it arrived, was pretty brown and looked old. (The picture looks better than it did in person) It would have been fine if it was covered by the hollandaise, or in a burger or omelette, but not very pretty served as is.  I would have re-thought bringing it to the table.


Our total, without tip ended up at $20.87. The waitress was much friendlier by the time we left (maybe she just need some coffee, too), but I don't think it was enough to make the experience worthwhile for a second visit.


Perhaps we should have trusted our instincts and stopped at Mel & Faye's; at 8 am their parking lot was full.


Rating (1-10):
Ambience: 7
Service: 6
Food: 4
Value: 7
Overall: 6


The Particulars:
Thomi's Cafe
627 S. Highway 49,
Jackson, CA 95642
(209) 257-0800
Open 7 days, 8 am - 9 pm (8 pm Sundays)

A Roya-l Lunch

I am always hunting for new ideas to jazz up the lunch hour standards: a tuna sandwich, a garden salad, leftovers... Blah, blah, blah.


And then I saw this post from a friend and fellow blogger Roya (Dirt Don't Hurt) and have been dying to try it: Curried Chicken Salad.  Why haven't I thought of this before?!

Roya's Pic. YUM!

Here is her recipe as she posted a week or so ago:


"This recipe can be eaten right away, but it is better if it's refrigerated for a few hours.
This can be doubled, tripled, quadrupled!
I used leftovers from a roasted chicken, and wish I had made more.


1 cup chicken, chopped up small
1/2 apple, chopped finely
¼ bulb fennel, finely chopped (or 1 stalk celery, but the fennel makes this amazing)
1 handful of dried cranberries 
Handful of chopped nuts (totally optional)


1 T mayo
Splash of apple cider vinegar (to taste)
Salt and pepper
Dash of celery salt
Curry powder (optional)


Mix all together, then add the curry powder to make it as yellow as you like it.


I start with just a dab of mayo (I don’t like it to be too “wet”, just a little coating, and add more as needed. I’ve made it with greek yogurt, and it’s just not the same. You could probably go 50/50 yogurt/mayo though. It’s really not that much mayonnaise ;)
I added about ¼ cup of leftover faro which added some good chewiness to it, but that is totally not necessary. I can see quinoa or brown rice being good too.


Served in lettuce wraps, or over a TON of cabbage, this is the most delicious thing ever. Eaten by the spoonful out of the Tupperware in your fridge it is also delicious ;) "

How could I NOT want to eat this?!  Having just returned from Poland, I realized this morning that there is almost NOTHING in our fridge that is still edible. And then I found this in the back of the fridge:

And this:

Oh, heck yeah, it is ON!  Although I didn't have the exact ingredients specified by Roya (I would have LOVED fennel in this), I whipped up a close approximation, with a few additions of my own.

Although I normally prefer to use leftover chicken for my chicken salads, in a pinch the Kirkland chicken is pretty yummy.  It's packed in water so no extra fat, calories, or flavor, and has really large chunks of white meat.

Kirkland Chicken

I opted to add a little bit of red onion.  I add onion to almost every recipe, including salads.

Red Onion

I definitely opted to add nuts to my salad.  I love the extra richness and crunch these toasted pecans added to the salad.  If a recipe calls for nuts of any kind, I usually try and buy the biggest bag I can budget for, and keep the remainder for future use, like today!

Toasted Pecans

Even without the dressing and the apples, I was already salivating a little at this point.

Salad pre-dressing (sans apples)

So for the dressing the debate raged: Veganaise or Mayo?

Veganaise: 90 Calories, 9 Grams of Fat

Olive Oil Mayo: 45 Calories, 4 Grams of Fat

Guess who won?  Yep, the mayo.  I always mix my dressings, whether it is for potato salad, cole slaw, or in this case, chicken salad, in a separate bowl.  That way if I screw up the dressing I haven't botched the whole meal.  In my case I added LOTS of curry (very yellow), garlic powder, a squeeze of spicy brown mustard, and a touch of cayenne to my dressing.  I like my curry with some heat!

Curry-Mayo Dressing

Mix it all together, cover and chill.  Waiting was the hardest part.

Chicken salad dressed, with apples

Finally lunch time arrived!  I dressed my greens with the barest kiss of EVOO and some fresh ground salt and pepper, topped with the chicken salad, and took this quick picture before I dove in.

How pretty is that?

And there it is, sitting on my desk as I type this, except that by now, I have an almost empty plate!

LUNCH!

Recipes like these are so quick, easy, and flexible depending on what you have on hand.  In my case, purple instead of green cabbage, celery instead of fennel, green apples instead of red, raisins instead of cranberries.  It was delicious anyways.


Thanks again to Roya for a great idea and a happy lunch.

Awesome Apps For This Small Business Owner

Starting a business, any business, is difficult for so many reasons: financial capitol and start-up costs, legal and tax concerns, licensing and insurance needs, not to mention having a good idea, a better business plan, and the tenacity and drive to actual see a venture actually launched. On top of all this, there are the sometimes more real pressures of time away from family or friends and the ever-lurking monster of self-doubt.

As I struggle to manage all these issues (and more) with not one, but two start-up ventures, I am finding little tips and tricks to help the process along.

Enter the Smartphone. In this case, my 8 gig iPhone 3. I know, I know, hardly the latest and greatest, but sometimes you just gotta work with what you've got. Besides, it was free (with another two-year cell-phone prison term, but that is a subject of another post later to come).

I now have no less than four email accounts, calendars, address books, and reminders set-up, which may sound like a headache, but has effectively kept my personal info, business contacts, suppliers, clients, and the like separate from each other and neatly organized.

And thanks to handy new apps from Etsy, Paypal, UPS, USPS, my bank and even eBay, I can keep an eye on incoming orders, packages shipped to clients all over the world, and snap photos and create new listings for my Etsy shop, and all from my iPhone. Even more exciting are the coming improvements to existing apps and all the new ones on the horizon, allowing me to do business from my phone virtually anywhere in the world.

Case in point, I am writing this from a 15th century home in Gdansk, Poland via the Blogger app.

Ain't technology grand?

Gdansk Continued: Weekend Adventure

The time zone adjustment, busy days, and long evenings have made it difficult to get here and record our trip, especially since I meant to bring my netbook, but left is behind accidentally; when the Riz goes to work, during my normal blogging hours, he takes the laptop with him.  Stupid me.


Here are some snapshots from our second day in Gdansk.  As you can tell, I am in love with the architecture, and the street we are staying on in particular.  I can't get enough pictures of it!


We spent a long day walking the Old City, stopping in cafes to warm up along the way, and ended our day, surprisingly, at a nightclub. Who would have thought it? We finally meandered home in the wee hours of Sunday and slept most of the rest of the day.


So, that was the weekend, in a quick blurb.  I promise to amend and repost broader thoughts and descriptions of the places we have been and the people we have met and seen.  For now, pictures from Saturday, January 14, 2012:

Breakfast tray

Cheese spreads

Bread basket with two gingerbread clovers

Ham & Cheese

Snow on the gutterspout

St. Mary's Cathedral, the largest brick cathedral in the world

We spooned.

Windy, windy, snowy day.  You would think someone from Chicago would be used to this type of weather and not look so pained.

Granary Island in the Motlawa River. These buildings, as was most of the Old Town, were bombed heavily during WWII. The broken structures are a grim reminder of the past, while the new construction and cranes in the background are a clear sign of Poland's burgeoning economy and modern future.

Rick gets primitive with the natives.

Mariacka (Mary's Street) from the porch of our favorite cafe. 

Mariacka, looking west after a day of light snowfall.

Mariacka, looking east towards the Motlawa River and one of the many gates.

Hit with a snowball. Not amused.

On our way to dinner

Pueblo's Tex-Mex.  We just HAD to try it!

Margarita time

We stopped in a pub after dinner.  Shots are very common in Poland. The bartender made this for us: Kahlua and Absinthe, lit on fire, and drank in one big slurp through a straw.  He was awesome enough to take pictures of us actually drinking the dang things.

Several hours later, Parliament, a nightclub.  Yes, it as bad as every Eastern European dance club I have seen in the movies.

4:45 AM, a thick blanket of snow lays on the quiet streets, kebabs in hand, we  finally arrive home.

Welcome to Gdansk!

After over 20 hours of travel on three flights, covering well over 5000 miles, we have arrived in Gdansk, Poland! The last leg was aboard a small jet plane from Copenhagen to Gdansk, about an hour’s flight across the Baltic Sea, where I got my first taste of just how cold our trip was going to be; boarding and disembarking was a hurried scurry out of the terminal and across the tarmac to the waiting plane through the very wintery air of Northern Europe.

The airport is teeny; we watched through the window as two men unloaded our luggage and brought it into the terminal, and customs is one man sitting on a high stool beneath two signs: "Items to Declare" or "Nothing to Declare", looking bored. A cab had been arranged for us by the hotel, and our driver awaited with a crude block-lettered sign on a battered piece of cardboard.  In his late sixties, and a man of few words, to say the least, he kept the tradition of cabdrivers around the world alive, speeding around slower traffic, cutting-off other cabs, and muttering what could only be assumed as some colorful descriptions of the other drivers’ skills.

Mariacka Street - Looking East outside Gotyk House

Our arrival to the oldest part of Gdansk was something out of a fairytale: three- and four-story townhouses marching side-by-side down cobblestoned streets, gothic archways leading in and out of the Old Town, and a gothic-style cathedral in the heart of it all. How lucky we are to be staying at the Gotyk House, Gdansk’s oldest house, and just the damn cutest hotel we could imagine.  The place is chock-full of supposed legend and history, claiming that Nicolaus Copernicus shared an alleged affair with a wealthy merchant’s daughter right here in these very rooms.  For more on the hotel and the legend of Copernicus and Anne Schilling, click here.

Gotyk House with St. Mary's Cathedral

Our room is small in square-footage, but the high, pitched roof ceilings help to keep it from feeling cramped. The bathroom is surprisingly modern, with the extra surprise of a heated towel rack.  That right there is enough to make the place worthy of a good review, but it only gets better; we were warmly greeted by the hotel staff, assisted with our bags up two flights of stairs, and were brought up a tray with delicious tea to help us warm-up and settle in.

After a long nap, we were ready to take a walk and explore the most immediate few blocks around us.  Being so far North, night comes earlier than we are used to, and by 4 o’clock, the sun had almost completely set, and the temperature had dropped about 5 degrees to a chilly 30F. The streets of the Mariacka, which were reduced to rubble in the Second World War, are beautifully reconstructed, with many of the porches and decorative gutters typical to the Old Town rebuilt from the original stonework. The streets are lined with cafes, pubs, restaurants, jewelry shops (mostly silver and amber), galleries, antique shops, and only one or two small souvenir stalls. You get the feeling that although the residents and shop owners know that the Old Town area is a draw for tourists, they are too proud of the history and heritage to completely exploit the opportunity, unlike the cheap and tacky stalls surrounding the many ruins in Italy or the shrines in India.

We meandered up and down the streets, just taking in the feeling of the town.  The first day I am in a foreign country, I feel like I am in a daze; the reality of being so far from home, in a place I have only barely even read about hasn’t really sunk in.  

I just kept looking at my husband, squeezing his hand, and exclaiming, “We’re in Gdansk. POLAND. We’re really here!”

 We finally stopped on the other side of the Motława River at the Hotel Gdansk, which I had read good reviews of and knew had its own brewery and restaurant. The views of the Old Town from the other side of the river are just spectacular! 

The staff at the brewery was helpful, spoke English well, and served us our first taste of Poland: two .5 liters of their very own lager.  

After our first round, we decided to order a couple of light dishes from the appetizer side of the menu: smoked sausages with beer-braised sauerkraut served with mustard, and a herring dish with what we ended up calling a “creamy slaw” of cabbage, pickles, capers, and sour cream.  Surprisingly, the herring was both our favorite, although I will admit to eating almost a whole bowl of the sauerkraut, it was that good!  After another round, this one the wheat, Heffe-style beer, we decided to walk back towards our hotel, possibly stopping at another pub along the way.

By this time, the weather had proved just how changeable it can be here; we had experienced clear skies, rain, snow, sleet, and hail, all within about 2 hours.  As we walked back across the river, the wind had picked up and snow in big fat flakes swirled around us, battering our faces and turning ears and noses red. A barge restaurant on the river was playing big band music over a PA system, and I will admit to dancing in the snow with the Hubby in the middle of the bridge as a gaggle of teenage girls giggled behind their mittens, embarrassed on behalf of our tragically unhip display.

We stopped in at Pub U Szkota, a supposedly Scottish-style pub.  The only thing “Scottish” was the name, the wood interior, and a few pieces of tchotchke on the walls, although they did have both Guinness and Murphy’s on draught.  The bartenders served behind the tiniest of work spaces, slinging mostly Polish and Czech bottled beers to the young crowd. 

At over thirty, we felt pretty ancient to the mostly late-teens and early twenties crowd that grew larger and louder as the night progressed.  Although both pubs boasted fully stocked bars, this is most definitely a beer-drinking region, with the only exception being shots of vodka and the occasional cognac or brandy.  Not really a beer fan? Here the bartenders make “girly beers”, pumping or pouring syrups and flavorings into the bottom of .5 liter glasses and topping with light beer. The available choices included raspberry, ginger, chocolate, and yes, even coconut. Coconut beer? No, thank you.

After some cajoling, we did decide to give a flavored local beer a shot.  The bartender was great, offering three bottled versions: a local Polish honey beer brewed a couple of towns over, a Czech beer brewed with natural grapefruit, and a chocolate beer.  We decided on the grapefruit as it was deemed the least sweet. It turned out to be summery, refreshing, and almost like grapefruit Fanta. We also got talked into a couple of vodka shots.  To be fair, there wasn’t that much “talking into” to be done; he said vodka, we said two, and, I think, earned a little bit of cred.  The vodka was deemed to be “the best” around. It was a little sweet, distilled with herbs, and highly sippable, although custom dictated taking it as a shot, which I had no problem complying with.

We decided it was time to call it a night, to try and get to bed to help acclimate to the time zone change (+9 hours), although we were told it was too early to turn in.  Most bars are open to 2 or 3 in the morning, with the after-hours clubs and bars open to 7 in the morning; at 10:30, most folks were just getting started.

Along the narrow streets home, we discovered our favorite thing about any town that has a late-night scene: cheap, filling, easy food!  Feeling a bit peckish, we made our last stop of the evening a small kabop shop, which offered a delicious wrap most similar in style to a gyro: shaved meet in flat bread, topped with veggies and sauce.  

Our choices were either “spicy” or “garlic”; we chose spicy, topped with three types of cabbage (no lettuce here!), onions, pickles, and sauce. Oh, how good was this going to be?! So good, that despite my penchant to want to document everything when we travel, especially food and drink, I have no picture. It was all I could do to not devour it within the one block back to our hotel.  First bite honors went to the Hubs, and his happy-food groan made me realize without even tasting our kabop that we should have gotten two instead of sharing, and at 12 zloty, or about $3.50 USD, why the heck not?

And, so ends our long day of travel and the first 12 hours in Gdansk. We are so happy to be here, and can’t wait to do, see, and taste more of Poland and further explore my family roots.