Habits of Variety

I noticed recently that I've been trying to live my life according to two conflicting principles. On the one hand, I am always trying to give my life the structure of good habits. I journal every day, I write a blog post once a week, and I am currently working on the habit of washing my glasses every morning. I like not having to make the decision every day; instead, I made the decision once and act on it again and again, preferably without having to think about it.

On the other hand, I want to fill my life with a variety of different experiences. I suspect that life seems to go by faster the more each day is filled with familiar things one can experience without noticing: unlike our first few months here in Leiden, when everything was new, the last year has flown by at a terrifying rate. And sometimes a lack of variety can be dangerous: eating the same thing all the time can lead to vitamin deficiencies, and exercising only some muscle groups can lead to imbalances.

I haven't yet fully sorted through how much I want to do intentionally and how much I would like to mentally automate. But it occurred to me that it's also possible for a habit to promote variety in one's life. For example, a friend of Clara's planned her meals around whatever organic produce was on sale that week. That simple rule allowed her to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables from week to week without having to specifically plan out a rotation.

photo by Carol Moshier

Then I realized that I had developed some habits of variety myself without realizing it. There are several ways to bike from our apartment to the opposite side of Leiden, and instead of going the same way every time, I fell into the rhythm of going one way when on my way to work, another way on my way to Dutch class, and a third way for Bible Study, even though it didn't make much difference to the travel time. That way I'd keep visiting different parts of our beautiful city without having to plan it.

I also exercise using an ipad app that takes you through a different combination of exercises every time you use it, and which is designed to gradually ramp up in overall difficulty as you get stronger. In the past I've gotten bored by exercise routines that are basically the same week after week, but this method has let me practice both consistency and variety in my physical fitness.

In each case, the habit is tied to a regular trigger that varies: which produce is on sale, or what day of the week it is, or what exercise the app tells me to do next. I think that's the key to making the behavior both habitual and varied.

Here are some other areas of my life into which I'm thinking of incorporating more habitual variety. Suggestions are welcome!

Fun spending:

It's inefficient to spend money on the same fun activities every week if the fun gradually diminishes. What are some ways I can make sure my money goes toward a variety of experiences, while still keeping to a tight budget?

Chores:

I would love for chores to be one of those habits I do without thinking. I wash the dishes every day, but how often am I supposed to dust behind the refrigerator or clean out the junk drawer? It's hard to make a habit out of things that are only necessary once in a while, so how can I make sure I'm getting to everything regularly without thinking about it too hard?

Relationships:

At this point in my life I've accrued a lot of friends from all over the world, but it takes more effort to keep in touch with the ones who are farther away. (This is especially relevant to me now, as I prepare to move to a new home over four thousand miles away.) What are some ways to habitually reach out to more of my friends, and not just the ones it's easiest to talk to?

What are your ideas? Do you have any habits of variety you've found helpful?

Foods making us happy in Leiden

One of the things that we were not expecting to be so wonderful here is the food.  Our Dutch friends helpfully warned us before we left that clothes and electronics would be much more expensive in the Netherlands than in the US, but they also said that food would be cheaper.  What they didn't tell us is that the food would be delicious.  Here are two of the star ingredients we are so delighted to be eating:

Potatoes

We had heard that potatoes are a staple of the Dutch diet.  One of Van Gogh's peasant paintings is called "The Potato Eaters"; we saw it on our trip to the Van Gogh Museum:

The Potato Eaters

Even now, french fries with mayonnaise are standard fare alongside Dutch cuisine, even if that cuisine is pancakes.  But now we know why the Dutch eat so many potatoes: Dutch potatoes are amazing.  (Something about the soft, wet soil and the mild winters, I'm guessing.)  We've been eating potatoes chopped in soups, sliced and baked with vegetables, and about once a week mashed as the topping of shepherd's pie:

Yes, Clara and I ate half of the pie so you could have a cut-away view.  Not because it was so delicious we forgot to photograph it first.

Apples

Okay, it's true: we're not yet in the habit of photographing our food before we eat it.  As further proof, here's a picture of the same dish as above, now not-containing roman apple cake:

We've made this cake several times and each time forgotten to take a picture for you.  When we post the gluten-free recipe, we'll include a photograph then.  But to give you an idea of how delicious this cake is, we fed it to a friend who afterward told us he had never before enjoyed a baked apple dessert.  Yet here is this friend, all smiles!

Some of you may recognize a game of backwards-IZZI being played.

Another way our lives are improved by the apple products here is the applesauce.  Since I'm allergic to the sulfites used to bleach most non-organic sugar, we do a lot of shopping at health-food stores, at one of which Clara found this gem of a product for 1 euro per jar:

Ingredients: apples.

It tastes like apple pie.  Sweet and tart with a beautifully thick texture... we have it on pancakes, mixed into rice pudding, or by itself as dessert.  Yum!

Delivery Burgers

Now you can order online!

Just kidding!  We got this advertisement for delivery burgers in our mail.  We're not using them in our cooking (for multiple reasons), but it is one of the foods making us happy here in Leiden.

Have you ever traveled (or moved somewhere) and been blown away by the food? Tell us in the comments!

Birthday Cake

When my mom grew up in Nigeria she lived most months at a boarding school. The cooks would make cake (any kind of cake) for the whole school whenever one of the children had a birthday, and since there were about 300 students... that was most days, (sometimes two or three flavors a day), and chocolate cakes were frequent. For decades afterwards my mom had never tasted a chocolate cake that really tasted chocolate-y and good like the chocolate cakes she had in Nigeria, until she happened to try this recipe from the side of a baking chocolate box. It has two eggs, a stick of butter, and sour cream in it, but oh, it is good, and to my mom and to me, it tastes like home.

Quick and Easy Chocolate Cake by Hershey’s

4 bars (4 oz. unsweetened baking chocolate, broken into pieces) (I substitute 3/4 c. cocoa & 4 Tbsp. additional butter)
1/4 c. butter
1 2/3 c. boiling water
2 1/3 c. all-purpose flour
2 c. sugar
1/2 c. dairy sour cream
2 eggs
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Heat oven to 350 F. Grease and flour 13x9x2-inch baking pan.

In large bowl, place chocolate, butter and boiling water, with spoon, stir until chocolate is melted and mixture is smooth. Add flour, sugar, sour cream, eggs, baking soda, salt and vanilla; beat on low speed of electric mixer until smooth. Pour batter into prepared pan.

Bake 35 to 40 min. or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool completely in pan on wire rack. Frost as desired. We always have it just with whipped cream. Maybe strawberries.

Owen and I are moving to the Netherlands soon, where I hear birthdays are extremely important. I hope to have lots of opportunity to make this cake, and see what I can do to gluten and egg replace so that my husband can eat it.

Purple tastes delicious.

So we decided that it would be a great idea to make a dinner of all purple ingredients. Because purple is a fantastic color. Because purple foods are often the cooler versions of normal foods (like cabbage or potatoes, even onions.) And because doing it sounded like a really fun plan. So here is how we did it, so you can make your own purple meal if you like.

We diced up three little purple potatoes and three big beets. Peeled the beets, washed the potatoes, coated them with olive oil and roasted them at 400 degrees, stirring every 10-15 minutes until they were tender.

We browned some ground beef (not purple, we know), drained it, sauteed a purple onion (also diced and then added the beef, some salsa (also not purple, but delicious) and a drained, rinsed can of black beans, (sort of purple) and a can of refried black beans (more purple), with some little shavings of beet, to make everything look more purple. Add cayenne and cumin to taste. We stirred that up til everything was hot and well mixed and vaguely purple.

We cooked half of a purple cabbage just in water in a pan until it was softer, very dark purple, and still a little bit crunchy.

Then we mixed the roasted root vegetables, the taco-y stuff and the cabbage in bowls together and ate it with blue corn chips. And it was beautiful and amazingly delicious. We thought about finishing off with a mixed berry smoothie, but none of us felt like it after all the deliciousness.
 
We're already scheming for our next color meal. Green? Perhaps with a spinach pasta, a salad with avocado, a fruit salad with kiwi fruit, green grapes and granny smith apples? Or orange with butternut squash, carrots, sweet potatoes, oranges, and perhaps a pumpkin pie or something for dessert? Wouldn't this be great to do with kids? I know of a lot of kids who only like white foods. Like Bread. Or Rice. Or mashed potatoes. Wouldn't it be great to start them early and cook lots of colorful foods? Have a week of color meals? Or every once in a while just have a purple meal?

At Labyrinth we sell a lot of beautiful cookbooks, many of which seem to be as much about the photography as they are about the food. One in particular is arranged by color and is called "Ripe" and goes through fruits and vegetables at their peak of ripeness, and gives one recipe for each ingredient. It's sort of a funny book, self-indulgently beautiful, and more expensive than I think is necessary, but it is nice to look at, and makes me want to cook more intensely colorful meals.

Food. And its complexities.

Growing up I had a pretty healthy relationship with food. I think Rochester is a really good place for people who like food, Wegmans being an exceptionally nice grocery store, and the Rochester Public Market being one of the oldest and best loved in the country. Some of my favorite memories of growing up involve chopping vegetables for dinner while my mom or brother read books outloud, or getting basket after basket of peaches or sweet corn or red peppers to can or freeze. At my best friends-the Kennedys'-house I learned how to make a consistently excellent white sauce, how to caramelize onions and how to bake oatmeal bread. My favorite food growing up wasn't french fries or jello (we only had jello at church dinners) but my mom's tomato soup, which does not in any way resemble Campbell's, being packed full of potatoes, vegetables and ground turkey, often eaten with fresh bread. Food was a nice part of my world, and I was glad to know how to make it, liked eating it, and felt like it was one of the simple, good, parts of life.

Events over the last several years shook up my ideas and feelings about food. Many of my close friends have become vegetarians or vegans out of strong moral convictions. One of my closest friends developed an eating disorder, family members have had some serious medical issues and my parents went on a "separate your starches from your proteins" diet which made me sad and angry and other feelings I didn't know what to name. Is it weird to grieve for my mom no longer making "my mom's tomato soup" because with potatoes and turkey it doesn't fit their diet? Add into that a discovery of many of my friends with a plethora of food allergies including a couple of friends with celiac. My fiance went through a grueling nine month allergy identification diet in which he could eat very, very few things besides vegetables, most fruits and rice and potatoes. We got through it, but it was tough, and now his short list of allergies (including eggs and wheat) seems easy to handle. With all of these climactic food changes in the lives of people around me, I started noticing what everyone around me was eating. I watched the PEGs choose food at the cafeteria. I learned to make tex-mex breakfast foods from my friends from Texas, and I tried lots of things at our remarkably varied (and often excellent) cafeteria.

Now with all of that at my back, I and my housemates are cooking for ourselves three meals a day, and there are so many decisions. Decisions before we grocery shop. Decisions before we cook. I'm not sure what to do with them all. I recently read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's staggeringly good, and focuses around the question, "what should we have for dinner?" looking at food in our culture, on our dinner plates, and through history. I read it almost entirely while eating my lunches at work, which is not an experience I recommend, though I wholeheartedly encourage you to read it. Pollan writes winsomely, expertly and with feeling about topics which would in other hands seem bland. As he writes it, corn is a tragic hero, mushrooms radiate mystery and organic paradises leave much to be desired. He doesn't answer the question, doesn't say, "this is what you must do" but tells the stories of our food where it comes from and what does into it, and suggests that we should "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

That's what we've been doing in our apartment. It's been a joy to make all the soups and the curries, the salads and the breads and the muffins. We've had some meals which were real flops, some meals which were not healthy (Guy Faulks Day dinner was fish fingers and sweet potato fries), but mostly I've been really proud of us. Many of our most delicious recipes so far have come from the Moosewood Family Restaurant cookbooks. The sweet potato-apple-chipotle soup is a thing of beauty, and their chili-fest chili was pretty delicious also. Their recipes are all vegetarian, many of them vegan. It's been really nice to bring food to work in tupperwares and eat home cooked food I made myself or made by one of my lovely housemates. It's been nice having ownership over my food, and it's been nice to share it with others. I think that's my favorite part of food.

One of the people I look up to the most is one of the women who TAed us when we were 1st year honors kids in London. She said one day, "Isn't it wonderful that we have to eat? That we have to stop working and sit and feed ourselves, and hopefully with other people." It was a blessing in college (when the food was just there for us) and is still a blessing, every day to be able to eat. To have the means to purchase and prepare food. And to enjoy it with friends, and this week, family.