Day What? Not so sweet 16.

Bad sleep, no blogging, and a day without either meditating quietly OR jumping around like a goofy idiot have taken their toll. I wanted to start this blog before I did all the right stuff, to see if by the time I finish it, I’m feeling any better. Because right now I want to crawl in a hole, or out of one.

Okay, that was at 10:00 a.m. It’s now nearly midnight and I’ve got to get this post up before the bell strikes or I’ll turn into a chicken. Speaking of chickens:

America Stress-Bought All the Baby Chickens

Is that not adorable?

So, since I teared up writing that first paragraph I have Done the Thing. I still cried some more, including while I was meditating (pretty sure that’s not how you’re supposed to do it, but it was strangely… helpful).

I also listened to two webinars in my field, did a clumsy workout to a really awesome dancer step aerobic guy called Xtreme Hip Hop Phil on Youtube, and cleaned and prepped like thirty pounds of produce that our dear friend brought over for us. Here’s what we have now:

1. Nine artichokes
2. Three bunches of two kinds of parsley
3. Two big bunches of chard
4. One bunch of spinach
5. Six giant fennels
6. Nine blood oranges
7. Six lemons
8. Three of something I don’t know what it is (see the opening pic of this blog post – please help me identify this thing before I try to cook it!)
9. Six teensy tiny beets
10. At least 2kg of peas (to be shucked by Ramon tomorrow!) (Right, honey?)
11. One full shit-ton of various sizes and shapes of green onions/leek-like items

Recipe suggestions are welcome.

I also talked to Dad and to Tony, who critiqued my parsley cleaning method.

I might have been able to pull out of my mental nosedive with only some of these things but as it turned out, today I got all of them. They distracted me, busied me, strengthened me, made me laugh, and fed me.

Here’s what Ramon and I made for dinner – fried rice with veggies:

I burnt the rice a tiny bit on the bottom of the pan: inadvertent taadig, which would be a great name for an indie rock band made up of children of Iranian immigrants. It was delicious – Ramon was over the moon, and even if he is awfully nice to me, it felt great to have come up with this. I got the idea from Chef José Andrés, who cooked something like it on Instagram or someplace.

The peas are the last of the ones I shucked last week and blanched and froze – verbs I never thought I’d use in the first person – two weeks ago. Pulling them from the freezer this evening, I was pretty damn proud of myself.

Time to publish!