Ode to Pesto

If there was ever a lowcarb taste-bargain, it's pesto.

Now, in quantity, pesto can be pretty carby. But it has a pretty strong taste, so you don't need much. Usually it has around 4 carbs per 1/4 cup, but especially if the food is temperature-hot (so the pesto gets a bit thinner), it mixes very well for flavoring into pretty decent quantities of food.

My favorite chicken-pesto recipe is the Pesto Chicken Salad. Now I have a favorite morning-food:

Pesto Quesadilla with Scramble

2-3 eggs
spices: oregano, salt, pepper
some sliced hot peppers (or onions if you prefer)
scramble it.

1 lowcarb tortilla (or 2 taco-sized ones)
1-2 oz shredded cheese (whatever you like)

Spray pan and scramble the eggs, spices and peppers. Heat LC tortilla slightly (like over the gas flame or the emptied hot pan). Re-spray pan.

Spread about 1-2 Tbsp of pest on 1/2 of one side of the tortilla. Put the tortilla in the pan (pesto side up obviously) and sprinkle on some cheese, spoon in your scramble mix, add the rest of the cheese, and fold the tortilla over. Grill until melty on the bottom, flip, grill until melty on that side, serve.

It's so ridiculously good.

I'm not including counts 'cause it's something folks should figure out based on the labels of their tortilla, pesto, and what other stuff they put in it.

I might add this is really good even without the eggs, just as a cheese pesto quesadilla, but there's more protein with the eggs. It's also pretty good even without the cheese and just with the eggs (...but not as much :-) it doesn't have the "melty") if you're trying to cut calories or dairy.

I have a dilemma in that I'm sensitive to gluten yet gluten-free flour is high carb. I'm sensitive to carbs but low-carb breadishes are higher in gluten even than normal stuff. Gah! I do have a crepe recipe I need to try again--they were surprisingly good--but that's so much work compared to taking something out of a bag. ;-)

PJ

Email

This is a bit off topic, but just in case you ever wondered how email gets from your computer to someone else's computer, now you know:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKAInP_tmHk

PJ

A Buncha Random Things About Me

This began as the 8 Random Things About Me blog-tag. Special thanks to Online Christian, Regina Wilshire, Breadless Mrs. B and Diet Pepsi Girl (?blogless?) overlapping the same tag, it is now the Buncha Random Things About Me.

Hmmmmmmmmmmn.....

1. I love red coats, red shoes, and red cars. At this moment, I have none of them.


2. I loathe nearly all politics and politicians. I am closest to libertarian but not that either. I am however fanatically a believer in all the stuff they indoctrinated us with when we were 6 about what America stood for. My biggest political gripe is that it doesn't reflect reality. I want my first-grade version of America back dammit.


3. My boyfriend lives on the Hawai'ian island of Maui. Somehow, I have managed to not yet visit him. Someone please slap some sense into me.


4. I've been devoted to Archangel Michael for nearly 20 years. It's difficult to explain but a powerful driving force in my life.


5. I once spent nearly a year training formally in hypnosis and NLP. I am in the top 1-2% of hypnotically suggestible subjects.


6. When I was 5 I had a stuffed-something I called 'black baby'. My parents left it by accident when we drove off from California and moved--by way of Oregon and New Mexico--to Oklahoma. I'm still kinda mad about it.


7. According to informal family poll, I am at least 14 different nationalities. The native american part isn't on the rolls so they aren't even 100% certain what tribe it is. Cherokee, they guess.


8. I named my daughter Rykah. I started with Rayka, the name of a pretty girl in a 'Lethal Weapon' movie. But she died, and I didn't want to name my kid after some movie character that got murdered, so I changed it. My daughter's middle name, Nadine, is after my grandmother. Grandma's name is Norma Nadine, so of course, everybody knows her as Susie.

1. When I was 10 I was constantly in trouble at school for unreadable writing. I got pneumonia and nearly died. When I came back to school my handwriting had changed radically and I won the class award.


2. I've worked on computers nearly all my life, and am on them the majority of my waking life, but I never, ever play video games.


3. When I was 19, I accidentally turned my hair a screaming magenta which literally glowed with a halo under the lights at my workplace. The looks of shock and horror from a couple office girls I didn't like, were so rewarding I pretended I'd done it on purpose and didn't dye it back for months.


4. I once had a sort of spiritual experience with a spider "deva" and now am nice to them, even though it took me 3 months at age 18 to condition myself out of a genuine phobia of the things.


5. I once took a ten year vow of celibacy. I broke it three months early to get married.


6. I've been deeply involved in a very practical approach to conscious psychic work for a dozen years now. 99.99% of anything you ever hear about that subject is bogus: wishful thinking, actual fraud, marketing, confusion, etc. The .01% left over is not woo-woo, it's not evil, and it's not imaginary or stupid. It is however, very inconsistent, albeit astounding at times.


7. I used to want to name a son Dennan, and have sometimes used that as a net alias.


8. I look horrible in black and mustard. I look amazing in deep rust. I'm told that makes me an "Autumn" in the 'seasons' approach to skin tone and colors.

OK I found even twice times 8 exhausting for some reason, so I am stopping there! Tomorrow when I get off work I will go find some victims other bloggers to tag. ;-)

PJ

Cliff Climbing

Any time I stop doing something I've been doing deliberately for awhile, I tell myself, "I'll revert to my better habits in a day or so." You know that feeling?

Then time goes by, and more time goes by, and eventually I realize I am completely off the wagon, and don't particularly feel like getting back on it. So there.

And then eventually I realize that I actually kind of miss the wagon, miss feeling better, miss feeling like I'm accomplishing something, miss feeling like there is hope. I find myself mourning the loss. I find I want to get my act together.

And so then finally I actually DO it, I'm back on the wagon, I'm happy to be there, and I have a fresh enthusiasm that I obviously lacked previously around the time I hopped off. I might add that I stopped my 12 week cycle 1 week and 6.5 lbs short of my goal. I mean that's just stupid. It's been basically six weeks I've been 'off the wagon' and eating high-carb and not much exercising.

So today, I find myself looking at this straight-up cliff that seems somewhere between impossible, ridiculous, and unfair.

"Didn't I already climb that cliff?" I ask myself. "I could swear I recognize how few handholds there are in that stretch, and how hard it was going up that place over there."

"Why, yes," says my Conscience. "As a matter of fact PJ, you DID climb that very cliff once already. Possibly twice. But then you went off the wagon, see. So those very same pounds of cliff will have to be traversed yet again. So there."

Actually, to be honest, I'm astounded that I am only 21 lbs heavier six weeks later. I believe the majority of that is probably water/glycol-weight and likely to come off in the first couple weeks of a solid induction, taking me back to where I was when I left off. We will see.

Now, I am at 392.5. I was at 371.5 on July 25 when I basically lost interest in everything that related to "me" which happened to include my food, weight, exercise, etc. Of course just around that time, the governor was out declaring my county a disaster area, the 'walking park' was like 30 feet underwater from the flooding, but that is no excuse for not lifting weights or eating right.

As I mentioned previously, I've had a lot of time to think about the stuff I blogged on a few months ago, the "fat politics" stuff. I am going to be taking my weight and the whole "weight loss" angle off the face of this blog. It is not a 'secret' and my info can be found at my lowcarb journal, or a link I'll put on an 'about' page to my weight tracking spreadsheet. But I do believe that lowcarb should be about health, and if a person is to be appreciated or congratulated for how they eat or exercise or whatever, it should be first and foremost because they are making a genuine effort toward health and happiness.

For me, that means losing weight, simply because I am not comfortable weighing nearly 400#. I feel much better than when I weighed nearly 500#, I'll give you that. But I suspect that if I continue reducing that, I'll be better able to do fun things like karate and rollerskating again eventually, and I would really like to do that.

I don't want the lowcarb focus to be "weight loss." First because "fat, not weight" is much more important to focus on. Second, because lowcarb is a health regime. If a person were underweight, they would gain weight on a sufficient protein lowcarb eating plan! So it isn't about a 'diet' to 'lose weight'. It's about improving your life via health. For me this means I lose weight. Others might gain it. Many others might not change that much, but might feel better, feel stronger, increase muscle to fat ratio.

What matters is that lowcarb is cool. The food is great, the recipes are often droolably divine, the health improvements are awesome, and the people are the greatest collection of supernice humans I've met in ANY field online (and I've known quite a few). So my blog will be changing ever-so-slightly over the next week, to shift that emphasis toward health and away from weight-loss. Just so ya know, it doesn't mean that I am not continuing on a journey that includes that pretty front and center. It just means that lowcarb is a larger-vision that deserves a better context than the one I've been giving it.

But I am back on the wagon here.

Stupid freakin cliff. Now I have to climb it AGAIN.

PJ
.

LC Blogger Humor

OK, now, this is actually pretty funny. You know the joke about how when some employee is not in the room, they get volunteered for everything? "That'll teach YOU to use the restroom when the VP is visiting!"

Well, never let it be said that the lowcarb world of bloggers doesn't have its own sense of humor. I used to just think that a surprising number of lowcarb bloggers were smart and witty people. But after spending just over a month "out of the loop" of my lowcarb stuff -- i.e., "out of the room and not looking" -- now I see that they are also mischievous sorts, like little lowcarb gremlins who probably went back to their blogs and snarkled their little LC-made-it-smaller-butts off.

In blogging there is this meme called "tagging", where one blogger will be asked to post on a given topic, or whatever, and they are supposed to do so and then go "tag" several other people. This is basically like a chain letter, for blogs. The difference is that most bloggers by nature love to talk about themselves, in fact can hardly be shut up about it or they wouldn't be bloggers to start with, so the blogging world (aka "blogosphere") regularly invents nifty games to allow bloggers to talk about themselves and then go tag other bloggers to do so as well.

And it works out well for everybody, because usually the people who are reading blogs have at least a tiny bit of interest in either the blogger or their writing, or they wouldn't be reading it to begin with.

So the blogging tag-game of the moment is "8 Random Things About Me." The idea is you tag one blogger and they gotta tag 8 more. As a given with this meme, a blogger can only be tagged once.

Now in lowcarb, this is easier said than done. There are not exactly hundreds of lowcarb bloggers. In fact we are in a position to, in some respects, help define our niche of the genre, as a result. There are the earliest blogs, I suspect that Jimmy Moore's is one of them. And there are the most influential blogs in terms of "credentials" or "technical aspects", I suspect the blogs of Dr. Mary Dan and Dr. Michael Eades and Dr. Mary Vernon are a few, though I personally think Regina Wilshire should be on that list too--proof you don't have to be a doctor to have intelligent, well-written, factual stuff on a blog regularly.

Theoretically, a blogger is only supposed to be tagged once. But apparently this only applies if the blogger is PAYING ATTENTION. Like, had I been BLOGGING, I would have seen the first tag, posted on it, and that would have been it, right?

But sneaky blogger-friends saw that PJ was obviously ignoring her blog--a blogger sin if there ever was one. So, I imagine while cackling with hilarity, I got tagged again. But wait, I still didn't respond! Well, we'll teach THIS blogger something about paying attention to the blog--I was tagged again. AND AGAIN!

It started with Online Christian of Low-Carb Lollygagging.
Then Regina Wilshire of Weight of the Evidence joined in.
Then Breadless Mrs. B (and her Fat-Cat-Fergie) thought that looked like WAY too much fun to resist, and then
Diet Pepsi Girl apparently got carried away and tagged me too, which was funnier still since she doesn't even have a blog so go figure that one out.

So... should I do 8 Random Things About Me--four times? One time? Hey, if I do it once, three people get a free ride on tagging. And how many people do I have to tag as a result? I have no idea. I've never seen a blogger get tagged more than once for the same meme. It's hilarious. It's like a funny tease for someone spending way too long away from their blog.

I will do it.