5 things I’ve learned about meditation

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Elizabeth Calimente

Ommmm.

Just last post I was whining about meditation and how my erstwhile suitor always jettisons me after a torrid courtship. He’s a fickle sort, my tormentor, but he seems to have settled in for the long haul this time around. What happened? you ask. Wish I knew.

All I know is that a month ago, my husband and I were thrust into a chaotic situation in dealing with my mother-in-law’s medical treatments after her stroke. We’d thought she’d been recovering, but the truth was something far worse than we’d guessed. Suffice to say, a thousand miles from home and sanity, both of us came unraveled. And, somehow, in the unraveling, I finally found what everyone else in the universe finds in meditation.

For the first time in the months I’d been floundering and flailing, I actually found a moment’s peace. Everything went quiet, and just for the five minutes of guided meditation, I was still and in myself fully. Maybe all of the pain had finally set me up for a breakthrough, or maybe I was having a breakdown. Either way, meditation has been almost easy ever since.

You’ll note the almost. Meditation is a discipline, and when you’re a space cadet like yours truly, discipline isn’t something that will ever feel fully natural. Here are a few things I’ve learned in the process:

1. The time to begin meditating is before you truly need it.

Your breath is coming harsh in your lungs. Bands tighten across your chest when you try to inhale. Your thoughts circle in your skull, around and around, racing the Indy 500. You think, “I should learn to meditate.”

That was me, trying to head off editing’s anal madness. And it was the wrong time. When you sit and observe your breath when you can’t actually breathe, you create a feedback loop that just intensifies your anxiety as your ever-shallower breaths turn into soup in your lungs. And then you panic.

If you’re not currently anxious, start meditating now, so you have a coping tool when the tough times hit. Meditation can be a valuable tool for easing anxiety if you’ve sharpened your skills before it takes hold.

2. Don’t feel stuck with your current form of meditation if it isn’t working for you.

When you’re anxious, you don’t want to focus on mindful breathing. A body scan or chanting a mantra might be more effective. When you’re feeling furious, you probably don’t want to focus on unconditional love (metta). Instead, perhaps, mindful breathing might work better. When you’re feeling jumpy and overwhelmed, you might not feel comfortable sitting. Maybe a moving meditation or yoga might be more helpful.

If you’re having issues with a particular type of meditation, maybe you shouldn’t keep forcing yourself to practice. Keep an open mind and be willing to try something new.

3. Start slowly and if that’s too fast, take it even slower.

You’ve probably read what I have—that you should aim for twenty minutes of meditation a day. Even the wimpiest meditation trainers I’ve found on Google Play start at five minutes per session before jacking you up to ten minutes within a couple of weeks.

That’s too fast. It definitely was for me. Five minutes of observational breathing to someone completely untrained feels like five centuries.

Scale back. A lot.

In the heart of my most anxious moments, I found two minutes to be almost more than I could handle. Even then, I had to baby myself by keeping my eyes open—closed brought me panic attacks—and by watching a timer visually count down on my tablet as I counted my breaths.

Two minutes of extremely controlled, deep breathing actually relaxed me. It was the first time “meditation” actually felt like it was supposed to.

4. If you’re learning how to practice from a book, make sure the program style fits your personality.

I think I wrote about my joys in dealing with Meditation for Your Life: Creating a Plan that Suits Your Style by Robert Butera. I thought, “Bingo!” Most things don’t suit my style because I’m weird. This book didn’t either, despite its five-star rating on Amazon. It’s one of those, “make your entire life revolve around meditation” books, delving into every irrelevant aspect of your existence. Maybe the process works for some, but for me, well…

I really hate wasting time. Time dredging up endless past emotions just to be told, “The only thing that works is trial and error.” I’m not bitter. Really.

I’ve personally had better luck with 8 Minute Meditation: Quiet Your Mind. Change Your Life. by Victor Davich. It’s a straightforward, breezy look at meditation, introducing a progressively more difficult form of meditation for each of the eight weeks of the program. I’m finding its deceptive simplicity almost profound and a hell of a lot easier to deal with. I’m on Week 5 of the program, “Gracious Declining,” and I’m finding I’m a lot more focused these days.

You might not, however. You might like Butera’s book, or (in my view) the surprisingly obtuse Mindfulness in Plain English by Henepola Gunaratana. Or the classic, but very mystical, Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

If the book you’re reading and practicing from isn’t working, dump it quickly and move on to whatever suits you the best, otherwise all you’ll court is frustration.

5. Find your proper time of day to meditate.

This is, I think, the real biggie. I was meditating midday and wondered why I kept falling asleep late in the afternoon. Meditating at the wrong time can be more destructive to your energy levels than not meditating at all.

Davich, in 8 Minute Meditation, recommends meditating either when you first wake up before your morning coffee, or before you go to bed. I’ve started meditating an hour or two before I go to sleep, and suddenly, the meditational energy drain is gone. I also sleep better because my mind has stopped racing.

That doesn’t mean either of those times will be better for you. Experiment. Maybe you’ll be better off taking a few deep breaths during your lunch break or after you get off work. Just like any other aspect of meditation, timing can be equally important to your success or failure.

I hope a few of these tips might make your journey into the deeper realms of consciousness a little more bearable than mine. Good luck!

Misadventures in Meditation

Posted on August 13, 2013 by Elizabeth Calimente

Aren’t I pretty? I’ll eat your soul alive!

Meditation and yours truly have a long, ongoing flirtation. Over the last decade, I’ve winked and twisted my hair at my fleeting suitor and sometimes he winks back. Mostly, though, he uses me in a torrid fling and then casts me aside like yesterday’s garbage. And then I weep silently until I summon the courage in another few years to give him another try.

Not this time! This time, I’m going to conquer him! I’m going to be the one who uses him. I’m going to wring every last positive benefit from his fickle carcass and then I’m going to use him again. Or so I’m telling myself.

Until I can master him, I’m going to console myself by telling my tale.

First Courtship

Meditation and I met each other a decade ago when I ended up in another brief affair with a yoga studio in Berkeley. That flirtation was rather dull, aside from a Ganesh puja I participated in (awesome!), but the meditation class I signed up for wasn’t. What it was could only be described as difficult. Really difficult, in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I whipped out my checkbook.

The first basic tenet of meditating is that you should be silent. Unless, of course, you’re chanting. This is usually a no-brainer. Words aren’t things I utter unless I’m around people, and even then, unless I’m discussing ideas or something of vague interest, I tend to keep them to myself unless I’m debating myself in the shower. Except meditational silence isn’t the kind I’m used to maintaining. It’s a mental silence. It’s a place where thoughts flit by like little chirping birds, or drift serenely like clouds. Just a blip and then quiet.

That isn’t my brain. Not by a long shot.

Still, after trying a number of techniques over the six weeks, which, coincidentally enough, were the last few before I got married, I sensed the mind’s true depth.

I can’t remember much about the meditation itself. It must have been guided, and I must have been sitting in a chair, because I could never do the cross-legged thing for the two hours the class lasted. All I know was that the layers of my mind peeled aside like an onion as I delved deeper. Emotions went away first, then all of the random minutiae of the complete life change ahead of me. Then went my sense of the universe, my intuition. After that, I arrived at the core.

We were supposed to sit and observe that core without judging, in complete mental silence, and to tell the class about the image we received once we emerged. Mine was a lone scientist alternating between a telescope and a microscope. I knew her by name.

“She’s the unbiased observer,” I said.

I got a few profound nods in acknowledgement. Sweet, I finally mastered meditation! I thought. And then I got married and forgot all about breathing and peeling away layers of thought and listening to other people chant in the presence of harmoniums.

Besides, I’d mastered meditation.

The Fourteen Day Twenty-One Day Challenge

Flash forward eight years. Things aren’t going so well outside of the marriage department. I’m trying to wrestle with the emotional wreckage of a couple of disastrous failures, and I’m drowning in a sea of emotion. I’m dealing as best I can. I’ve started practicing yoga, but only the DVD variety. I browse to Huffington Post’s GPS for the Soul which I’ve taken to reading. It’s of dubious use, usually, but sometimes there’s something good.

This time it was an ad for Deepak Chopra’s 21-Day Meditation Challenge that caught my eye. It was free. And only 21 days. I could do that with one eye tied behind my back.

Right.

It started off well enough. I sat down and listened to the introduction. I breathed and chanted “So hum” to myself with every inhalation. The music was pretty, a nice mix of sitar and New Age synth. You know, one of my favorite things to listen to. The voice was soothing. I opened my eyes at the end of the twelve minutes oddly relaxed. Then I did it again. And again.

And then came the journey. See, I’d started the challenge thinking I was going to relax and quiet my mind. To embrace the oneness of self and universe, and to flow with the currents of possibility. To find the place beyond anxiety and pain. Except, meditation number 7 was all about delving back into crap, and dredging up random traumas in all their full detail. The kind of traumas that really aren’t, but sometimes come to mind and then go away after a few seconds of emotionless pondering.

My instigator floated on a cloud next to my serenely speeding cloud in the crystalline blue sky. Who was it? I hadn’t thought of him in years. I hadn’t needed to.

What did (s)he do to you? Write this person a letter, and read it aloud to them as you float along side by side, said my tormenting guide.

I wrote the letter. I read it aloud. As the guide of my vision spoke, I set the letter on fire and told my long-forgotten ex, “I forgive you.”

Except I hadn’t. I didn’t care enough to forgive because I’d already mostly forgotten. I spent the rest of the evening in a funk, because all the details of all the years-ago pain came back. Thanks, Deepak!

The next seven days, I listened to a bunch of chant mp3s and mentally repeated “So hum,” as I inhaled and exhaled. The irritation never quite left, and meditation’s unpleasant house-guest came for a long, exhausting stay.

The Fourteen Day Slump

Meditation’s a crappy janitor. His loud guest, Mr. Energy-Slurping Shop Vac, takes control of his flaky steerage and sucks the wrong things from my head. I’m supposed to lose the anxiety and stress of life, not what limited energy I have left. Instead, anxiety hides away from the Shop Vac of Slumber, lodging itself permanently in my chest, and my worst thoughts run wild. My will takes a deep nose-dive, and alertness gets sucked away into meditation’s voracious gut.

Yep, I’m talking about the 14-day sleepies.

I was relaxed early in the process, and the good inner peace sort of relaxation. I was harmony, I was flow, I was serenity. And then I was asleep from the eighth day on. Ten hours a night, and two more hours during the day. My waking hours were dulled and lifeless, and when I did manage to have a slight energy peak–VZZZZZZH!–the Shop Vac would suck it away.

On day fifteen, I told myself, “Enough!” and I quit.

And my sleep went back to normal.

ConZentrate! The Game is On!

Another year went by. Stuff happened, both good and bad. And then, suddenly, my mother-in-law had a major catastrophe: a heart attack and then a stroke that left her paralyzed on the left side. I haven’t been able to relax since April.

What better to blunt the edges of constant anxiety and grief than meditation, right? My suitor began another seduction attempt. I’ll help you control your emotions! I’ll help you master your thoughts! I’ll help you relax!

By making me sleep my life away? I asked him.

I knew his mischievous grin too well and that I was going to give in to his false charms.

This time, I was armed. I was going to take meditation slow and steady. I was going to start out by searching out an app with a timer. I was going to progress slowly. I was going to enjoy the process, dammit! I was going to level up!

Dharma Meditation Trainer promised a good start in gamifying meditation. I made it to level 2, then three, and then four. I breathed mindfully and allowed thoughts to drift through me as I returned to my breath. I was Zen incarnate as I waited for the chime to go off, patiently. I was peaceful, I was bored for ever longer periods. I wanted to shoot myself.

I started napping again after fourteen days. VZZZZZZH! The Shop Vac slurped out the last of my energy.

Then I thought, “I love games! I love leveling up my Steam profile—maybe I can find some way to gain achievements!”

I started ConZentrating. I got new balls. I unlocked new chants. New backgrounds for the bouncy ball that my eyes followed for five minutes at a time. Ommmm! Then, I figured with all my achievements, I could go back to the Dharma Meditation Trainer and exploit the tiredness so I could sleep again at night.

I did five minutes of bouncy ball focus just after having coffee and five-then-six-then-seven minutes of boring breathing before I went to bed.

I made it to a solid month with both. My will to live joined my energy in the Shop Vac’s guts. My creativity was starting to follow.

You won’t win, Meditation! There are lots of different forms of you I can try! With this in my head, I browsed every New Age bookstore I could find. I came across a book that sounded promising: Meditation for Your Life: Creating a Plan that Suits Your Style by Robert Butera. Well, personality influences everything else, so why not meditation?

The book was packed with questions. Exercises. Introspecting on things that really don’t require thinking about. Lots and lots of journaling. But the goal was simple: to find a form of meditation that wouldn’t suck my life away. So I did them. I delved into things that should be un-delveable. I drew stupid pictures of stick figure me and drew circles around the stick figure and wrote out everything I liked and disliked. I put in a huge amount of effort over the space of three weeks and filled pages and pages with pointless emo wankery, all in the interests of finding the type of meditation that wouldn’t kill me.

Finally, I’d had it. I read ahead, and made it to the Sentence of Doom.

The only solution is old-fashioned trial and error.

Yes, I’d just wasted weeks for nothing. I’d lost. Meditation had won. I’d been mastered.

A Labyrinthine Problem

Well, back to the drawing board. I quit my ConZentrating and my Dharma Training. My energy returned. I found a blog post somewhere suggesting that guided meditation might be the solution to getting out of my head for a few minutes a day. I found The Voice of the Muse Companion: Guided Meditations for Writers by Mark David Gerson. They were pretty relaxing and focused. I’ve made a little peace with my inner critic but haven’t rediscovered my missing deep relaxation.

I’d always been vaguely intrigued by labyrinths. Something about staring into the pictures I’d seen sent me spiraling off into my inner universe and I’d read about the inner tranquility legions had achieved by tracing their convoluted paths. Besides, walking a labyrinth just once couldn’t hurt, could it?

According to Labyrinthlocator.com, my area is lousy with them. In fact, there are two or three within ten minutes of me.

Some labyrinths are inlaid tiles. Some are paved stones set within dirt. Some are spirals of paint on concrete. Guess which one I ended up trying today?

It was striking. If I stared into the heart, my mind would whirl as I tried to trace a mental course. I’d never thought white paint upon red concrete could be beautiful, but this was. Even though traffic sputtered by just a few feet away, I could almost feel the tranquility calling me within.

Yes, walk with me, meditation whispered. Bask in my promise!

I should have walked away right then.

But I walked. I watched every step as I made my way around the narrow tracks. I switched forward, I switchedback. I spiraled. I kept my feet within the confines of the lines, just wide enough for a man’s single footfall, and I had to pay attention to my balance to keep myself from toppling over during the narrow turns. It must have taken me ten minutes to reach the center, a mere five steps away from the entrance.

I didn’t feel any more Zen, even though the labyrinth was surrounded by a high bush and a stand of trees that rustled in the gentle breeze. The sun was shining, and tiny clouds scudded across the brilliant sky. I should have felt myself slip into the inner relaxed state I used to achieve effortlessly only a few months ago.

I should have walked away.

Instead, I reversed course, trying to figure out if I’d actually skirted the center boundaries. I couldn’t remember doing it. My mind tried to plot the next turn, and the following turn on the way out. I twisted and turned again. I almost left when I finally reached the exit.

That’s it? I thought. I had a second chance to walk away. How many times are you supposed to walk through a labyrinth anyway?

Instead, I did it all over again. And reversed course again. This time, I could see where I went through the near-center points. My feet were a little surer, but my mind wasn’t. I wasn’t clean or clear. Instead, I wanted to yawn.

Meditation had returned with Mr. Energy-Slurping Shop Vac, and both were determined to make me lose my zest for life.

I drove home. Then I slept for an hour, the VZZZZH! loud in my ears.

I hate labyrinths, I really do. That was the only insight to come out of this afternoon’s meanderings. Labyrinths are convoluted, tangled. They’re as twisty-turny as life is, but unlike life, which is an infinite array of choices spread out before you, there’s only one true course ahead of you. And only one way out, if you’re to honor the experience properly. I really hate that. Life is possibility. Life is change. Life is a universe of potential. Labyrinths are a deliberate restriction, a single pointless path into a center of nothing. A false universe.

And they’re boring, unless you’re contemplating them from a photo.

And where does that leave me?

Dunno. Am trying some binaural beats, and I’ll maybe do a guided visualization or two. I’ll shake hands with my inner critic a few more times and say hello to my muse.

And then I’ll get a massage. Then do a yoga class. And feel the axé in my next roda.

7 Things I Learned after Two Months of Cooking

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Elizabeth Calimente

I wish our pans were this new!

It’s been about two months since my cooking “experiment” began, and if I’d used that as a goal, I’d have managed a moderate success. What I wasn’t prepared for was to actually learn something more than cooking mechanics from the process. Cooking is life in its simplest form: order, chaos, alchemy, and human bonding, all set in a kitchen. Or, in short, cooking enhances life in unusual ways.

1. Cooking with your nearest and dearest deepens your relationship.

I’d always thought this was nonsense: maybe our bored cavemen ancestors used to bond over cooking, but that was only because there weren’t many intellectual possibilities to keep them better occupied.

When I first started the experiment, I’d intended to be the one who suffered, since I was the one who was pickiest and the larger source of the food problems we’d been having. Instead, two weeks into the process, my husband insisted on being a part of it.

“It’s not fair for you to do all the work,” he said. Awww!

I’m now the “executive chef,” and he’s the chopper, which works perfectly. While he chops and I sequence, prioritize and handle the stove-stuff, we talk about just about everything in under the sun. When we’re waiting for a piece of chicken to sear on one side, we hug and laugh. Kitchen time is actually almost fun!

2. Two sets of hands make grocery shopping easier.

This one actually surprised me. I’d always dreaded shopping with my husband, since he’s got a lot of the “explorer” in him. “What’s that?” he’d say, looking at the bottom shelf of what I consider an irrelevant aisle, while I’d want to scout ahead and get all of our items as fast as possible.

With a good, plentiful list, on the other hand, he gets to explore, and I get to chart the most efficient course through the store. He manages the cart, gives me a second set of sharper eyes on the items, and I don’t have to fumble with my list-and-cart-and-grocery klutziness.

3. You really do need good knives—or at least adequate knives.

I just picked up a new set after getting sick of dealing with my existing crap set not actually cutting what I tried to slice. Apparently, finger flesh penetration isn’t a reliable test for knife “goodness.” I’m not sure if my new set is actually good, but it’s definitely better, and cuts down on chopping time by a minute or two per item.

4. Cooking can enhance on-the-fly creativity, even if you’re totally clueless.

Or, maybe, especially if you’re clueless. Hate the smell of buttermilk? Half and half doesn’t reek and adds a similar heartiness. Can’t stand cilantro? In Indian-ish and Vietnamese-ish and Thai-ish dishes, a little mint adds a lot of fun. Don’t have enough cutting surfaces? A frying pan works just as well. Once you’ve gotten the knack of creative improvisation, you’ll find endless opportunities to use it when you’re not cooking.

5. Cooking brings out your hidden talents and enforces your strengths.

I never realized until I started cooking that I’m a decent delegator, a good prioritizer, and competent “scheduler.” When you’re juggling three different dishes from a dual-recipe deal, and you’re trying to coordinate both you and your husband’s activities, you need a solid sense of the flow of the activity. You need to be able to say, “Chop this first. Measure this next,” to both yourself and the person you’re cooking with after interpreting the sometimes cryptic recipe instructions. You need to create systems in the course of the process of the recipe, or to harden your logistical sense. In the process, you learn to appreciate those unexpressed aspects of your personality all the more.

6. There is value in stillness, in settling, in waiting.

Some things taste better the next day, after they’ve chilled and relaxed in the fridge.

Take, for example, some vegetarian enchiladas my husband and I made. We were both cursing and champing at the bit, hungry because the recipe was surprisingly time-consuming and a lot of hard work. Then we had to wait another twenty-five minutes as the enchiladas baked in the stove. And another five for them to sit and cool down. The tomato-cream sauce tasted decent the first day, but after a nice overnight wait, the leftovers tasted heavenly. The sauce and the filling, left to settle, had blended into a completely different whole. The epitome of enchilada-ness, if you will.

Usually, when I do anything, I aim to eliminate the stalling, the gridlock and the periods of idleness in the name of efficiency and progress. But sometimes, those moments are when magic and potentiality truly happen. In between writing periods, the stillness of meditation creates a vision, and the vision becomes a scene. A stray abandoned line of dialog becomes a character’s major turning point.

7. You can make almost anything if you have the right instructions.

That killer green curry you had last night at your favorite Thai restaurant was orgasmic, wasn’t it? You can make it! How about that chicken tikka masala that made you and your significant other drool? You can make that too! How about a bookcase? Quite possibly, so why not try?

After a few recipes, you gain a sense of what makes something taste decent. You’ve grokked the inner logic of cooking, and you’ve begun to make sense of its operating principles. By quickly skimming a recipe’s ingredients and instructions, you can begin figure out whether it’s worthwhile. This same skill help you extrapolate whether a crafting recipe is going to be a waste of time.

The Building Mentality

Perhaps the largest lesson I’ve learned is to appreciate the allure of the Building mentality. I’m talking about the urge many people have to make physical, tangible objects. That’s never been a huge personal priority: my models tend to be purely mental and internal. Crafting has been something I’ve done for very short spates of time, whenever a rare, random urge hits me.

There’s just something, though, about seeing your creation come to life after slicing and dicing and simmering and sautéing. And then eating it and not actually vomiting, though we did have a close call with some shrimp a couple of weeks ago. (Warning: always boil your “cooked” jumbo shrimp for a minute or two. Don’t trust the store!) You can actually point to something and say, “I made this!” You can’t do the same thing with Word document, even if said document is a novel and required a billion times more work.

So, cook! And enjoy!

Streamlining Grocery Shopping–Featuring Wunderlist

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Elizabeth Calimente

Why can’t I shop for him?

Grocery shopping: a simultaneously annoying and necessary process for those of us who wish to eat food. If you’re anything like me, you’ll do anything to cut down on the amount of time you spend pacing product-overloaded aisles trying to find that elusive Reduced Fat Organic Coconut Milk (yes, this was an actual ingredient for one of our selected recipes last week). Fortunately, there are only two major components to master to significantly reduce your shopping time.

I’m talking about learning your store’s organizational scheme and refining your grocery list-making process. The former may require a little time investment up front, but it will save you far more time down the line.

Learning Your Store’s Organizational Scheme

This might be the more esoteric of the two factors. If you’re shopping at a chain grocery store (Safeway, Lucky, or for the East Coasters, Kroger), you’ll probably have an easier time with this than if you frequent smaller independent stores. since most chain stores follow some sort of corporate format dictated by headquarters.

Chances are, if this is your favored store, you probably already have a general idea of its layout. This layout will generally follow from town to town, though there may be exceptions. Below is my crude reconstruction of the standard Safeway layout from memory, and I’ve found it’s reasonably consistent, though I have seen the produce and bakery sections reversed once or twice. Safeway generally observes standard profit-making organizational principles (expensive items near the entry, most expensive toward the right where most people enter the store).

All hail MS Paint! And I accidentally forgot the soda and chip aisles, apologies.
(click for full size)

Independent grocery stores are a radically different proposition. My second go-to store chain, Sprouts, has differing organizational schemes for each of the two locations I’ve visited.

Why on earth would you want to do this? Once you know your store’s layout, you can transform your grocery list into an expert tour guide, so you don’t have to worry about retracing your steps. This has happened to me more than once; the last time, I missed a lone orange at the bottom of my list at the other end of the store, and got bruised by cart after cart on the way back to the produce section. Not fun.

A few tips:

Use technology! Not everyone creates a mental model of the store in their minds. So bring a camera or your phone. Take pictures of each store section and aisle labels sequentially as you walk through the store. Refer to these pictures later after you formulate your preliminary shopping list.
Use personal experience! If you’ve been shopping at your store of choice for a while, you probably have a fair idea of where everything is. As you continue to shop there, take mental notes on the general location of each of your items. Imagine where they are in relation to the overall store layout.
Use a notebook! Paper’s always good for sketching quick schematics of your store.
Don’t worry about minute details. Having a general idea of item categories and their locations is good enough; your objective isn’t to memorize the location and type of every last item in the store.

Refining Your Grocery List

I’ll admit, this part has been a challenge, especially since my unique cooking requirements force me to make a new grocery list every week.

First, I did the pen and paper thing, writing down every last ingredient in each recipe. I missed several, and it took forever. Not to mention, my list was out of order and I wandered in aimless circles all over the store. Next, I tried Notepad, the default Windows text editor. It worked. Sort of. At least typing the list took a lot less time. Still, I ended up backtracking several times during the subsequent shopping trip. I toyed with copying and pasting each individual line into the right order, and said, “Nope.”

Then came OneNote. This was almost better. At least I could enter each item as a separate text box and categorize all of them correctly when I’d finished. But you can see the real problem right here: when it came time to arrange the items, the text box handles overlapped, making organizing the list a pain the rear.

Enter the oh-so-appropriately-named Wunderlist, available for Windows, Android, Mac, and iOS. I highly recommend this program, not simply because it works seamlessly for those of us using more than one manufacturer’s platform (me: Windows and Android), but because you can drag and drop items easily. You’ll see why this is so important in a moment.

So, you have your diagram of your store’s layout, or a series of sequential photos of the aisle labels, or a mental reconstruction. You’ve installed Wunderlist on your PC or Mac. You’ve created an account to sync your items to the web or your phone, if you wish. What next?

1. Type your items in the “Add item” box one at a time, hitting the “Enter” key after each one. Because I’m lazy, I’d recommend just using the default “Shopping” list that Wunderlist includes by default. Entry time for 20-25 items: 3 minutes

Picture of dragging and dropping item in Wunderlist

No, I really can’t spell “shrimp.”

2. Now that you’ve finished, refer to your diagram or your photos, and begin dragging and dropping each one into the approximate order they’d appear in the store. Example: produce is nearest the front, so drag and drop all fruits and vegetables at the top of the list. Organizing time: 2-5 minutes for 20-25 items.

3. If you’re clumsy, right-click on the list name in the left pane to print your list and skip Step 4.

4. If you’re not, install the mobile version for either iOS or Android and sign in. Your list will be right there when you open the app. Happy shopping!

Pretty!

5. For us clumsy, phone-dropping types, the printed list is a thing of beauty. Happy shopping!

If you have stock items you purchase every week, Wunderlist will save them for you, or your non-standard items if you don’t delete them. Unfortunately, the Windows version of Wunderlist doesn’t include a menu bar or standard drop-down menus. If you want to interact with the program, you’ll need to play around with right-clicking everything.

To remove your non-standard items:

If the items you want to delete are sequential, hold down the “Shift” key and click the first and last items. Then press the “Delete” key, and click “Yes” when Wunderlist asks if you really, really do want to delete those items.
If the items are scattered throughout your list, hold down the “Ctrl” key, then click each of the items you wish to remove. Press the “Delete” key, and click “Yes” to verify you want to delete the items.

Another drawback to the Windows version is that Wunderlist likes to minimize itself to the Notification Area or System Tray (depending on which version of Windows you use) when you click the X. You’ll need to right-click the icon and select “Exit” from the menu in order to actually shut the program down. Overall, though, I’ve found these nuisances are minor.

Conclusion

Organizing and sequencing your shopping list may seem cumbersome at first, but after a try or two, it’ll become almost second nature. Additionally, I’ve found that this technique shaves about ten to fifteen minutes—at the very least—off of each shopping trip in store. And Wunderlist makes list-making much faster than the old-fashioned pen and paper variant, probably shaving off another five to ten minutes of the list-making process.

The Mysterious Psoas– How Working with this Hidden Muscle Re-ignited My Intuition

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Elizabeth Calimente

And, in looking at that title, I’m thinking as you probably are, “What hooey!” Yeah, I understand. Completely. A simple muscle that joins your lower rib to your pelvis shouldn’t have any bearing on your brain’s functionality.

Some people have a very intimate and familiar relationship with their bodies; they understand what it wishes and what it needs. They don’t resent satisfying its demands or disciplining the mind to serve its whims. That hasn’t been me. For most of my life, my body has pretty much been a life-support system for my far more important brain. I’ve felt it as a huge encumbrance that weighs down and limits my intellect: the tether at the end of the balloon string that’s attached to a giant block of cement.

The body that cages the mind

About eight months ago, I drowned in the depths of a deep depression whose root cause I won’t discuss just yet (maybe later). I could barely move, and when I forced myself to take walks with my husband, he’d glare at me when I asked him to slow down. I didn’t understand what was happening to me; my feet had always seemed to move at the same speed, and so far as I could tell, he was the one always speeding up. Strange, that change! I’d always been the faster walker, leaving him to choke on my dust as my long strides took me far, far away. I’d been choking on my own mind’s metaphoric dust for two years.

To say that I was bound up to almost claustrophobic tightness is akin to claiming a mote of dust is the size of the moon. I was beyond that. If I could see beyond my inner nothingness when I woke up, it was a good and rare day. I’d force myself out of bed, but that was about all I could make myself do. My body weighed more than the sun, more than the black hole at the center of my inner universe. My mind had turned to jello, and when I’d walk, my thoughts moved through me more slowly than a snail’s slimy wriggling.

Re-connecting

Finally, something sparked based on some of the best advice I’d ever received.

“You need yoga,” my mother said.

I’d been a yoga dilettante when I was thirty. I’d purchased a full set of Kathy Smith’s New Yoga Basics DVDs and I’d done them sporadically, along with taking the occasional yoga class at my old gym when it wasn’t too crowded. I’d burned out on running with a number of small ankle and Achilles’ tendon injuries, and hadn’t had a good boxing class in a couple of years. I’d enjoyed the workouts, but I’d never enjoyed much more than a cursory sense of grounding or connection from them. The one thing I’d noticed then was that my feet felt strangely rooted to the ground, and I could feel the totality of every phase of every footstep at the end of a practice. Usually, I only feel the full impact of my foot against the ground, if I even pay attention to that much.

I hauled out my DVDs a week or two after my mother’s advice and “practiced.” I managed a couple of days a week, and slowly I noticed my moods improved. I still spent a good half of each day deep in the emptiness, but that was better than a whole day. I started collecting DVDs: Rodney Yee’s Yoga for Beginners, Rodney Yee’s AM PM Yoga for Beginners, etc., etc. I highly recommend his workouts, by the way. I’d almost created a regular practice when I got a real introduction to my mother’s yoga instructor (Nancy’s utterly awesome!) and a new addiction.

Before the addiction came revelation on a warm, but not too hot day in early June of last year. I walked the length of the Oakland side of College Avenue, seeking a little creative boost from the funky clutter-shops and art stores that make the Rockridge area so wonderful. I walked, and for once I felt a breeze moving around me. My hair followed behind as I moved, even though the air itself was still. Not only did it it fall back, but it bounced with my steps. Hunh. I used to bounce when I walked. The movement felt almost natural, but after a few laps from Rockridge BART to Broadway and back again, my calves started screaming from the unfamiliar movement. But it felt good. Really good. I kept bouncing anyway, passing most of my fellow shoppers. I took a short glance into a window, and noticed my strides were long again. I felt the expansion within as I settled into the rhythm of the universe and the flow of all around me. I could feel my inspiration slowly waken, and ideas danced just out of my grasp.

The next day, the smaller strides returned as my muscles ached, and inspiration took a short vacation. I watched my feet in reflections as my stride shrank again. I forced my legs wider as I walked for the next several days, keeping an almost obsessive watch over every footfall. If my steps felt too short, I jammed my foot even more forward before I allowed it to make contact with the ground. Slowly, I could feel creativity awaken, and a little more of the emptiness faded each day. My stride length was a direct reflection of the state of my creative health. My intuition.

In September, I started a real yoga class at my mother’s yoga studio, since the DVDs weren’t quite cutting it anymore. Now I was yoga-ing in a more demanding way with fellow yoga-ees in a wonderful and supportive environment. As winter descended, and the days shortened, I dreaded the return of the blackness. Really, to pretend I was “all better” was kind of ridiculous, but though I wanted to hibernate, the true darkness and emptiness never returned. I’d always surrendered to the season, and my mood had always gone with me, but this time, I didn’t. Well, not completely.

And what about the psoas?

One of the things that we work on most in my yoga classes is core strength from deep within the body’s musculature. We’d talked about the mysterious “soaz” muscle more than once, but I’d never really felt it, even if I’d felt myriad other benefits of a regular practice. Practice had freed my body and had slowly re-integrated my mind with “holistic” me.

After today’s practice, I finally achieved consciousness of my psoas. We’d worked the muscle heavily, including several isolating movements and exercises, but I hadn’t felt it. Maybe it’s better to say that I wasn’t actually aware I’d felt it. The psoas is one of the deeper of the body’s muscles, running behind the abdominals, and most of the yoga poses done to work with it also involve larger surface muscles like the quadriceps and hamstrings. When you’re stretching your legs perpendicular to each other, for example, it’s the thighs and hamstrings that really demand your attention, even if the psoas is doing a fair amount of the work—not surprising if you know the muscle is the thickness of a woman’s wrist.

The muscle’s oddly fascinating in ways your abdominals or your deltoids aren’t. When you cringe at a traumatic memory, Nancy told me, your psoas is the muscle that clenches your at your midsection. When you sit too long at a computer desk writing or surfing the web (guilty! and guilty!), the psoas contracts and shortens, especially after repeated exposure. When you suffer from a long bout of depression, good posture isn’t exactly your first priority. When the world and the emptiness weigh you down, you slouch, as I know all too well from experience. You cringe away from life, and your psoas suffers. If your psoas contracts too much as you age, you lose your ability to stand fully upright, since your back muscles aren’t strong enough to counter the psoas’ pull. This is especially a problem for women.

A supple psoas, she told me, lengthens a runner’s stride, and makes walking easier. Suddenly, I understood why my stride had improved with even a small amount of yoga practice, and the muscle-body relationship came clear. I forced a cringing movement to finally connect to the muscle and felt the contraction behind my abdominals. Oh, that vaguely sick feeling is the psoas protesting! I thought. As the muscle protested, so did my mind; yoga always leaves me vaguely euphoric but the contraction made me feel just a flash of dark emotion. I’d actually felt the muscle before, but I’d never known what it was. I still feel my psoas eight hours later—ouch!

Body and mind – all part of the system that is you.

Certain types of muscle movements change mood, this much seems to be almost scientific fact. Studies have shown that the mere act of smiling can induce happiness, so it’s not much of a stretch to consider that the state of one of the body’s major muscles can have a huge impact on one’s mental state. Movement and exercise are often prescribed to ease depression.

You aren’t just your mind, you’re body as well. You’re the hormones and the muscles, the contractions and expansions that move and support you through the day. That’s been a startling realization for yours truly. Appreciating that connection, and that I can heal it if I’m aware and conscious of my physicality is even more staggering. My body has usually felt like an afterthought except when a sickness forces my mind to halt. Yoga has reversed a little of my obliviousness, though I still have a long way to go. But the journey itself has been wonderful so far.

As Nancy says at the conclusion of every practice, Thank your body, mind, and breath for supporting you every day. Even when your body isn’t at its peak, your bones and muscles support your mind, your thoughts steer you, and your involuntary functions like breath keep you alive. Realizing how much I actually owe my body has made me renew my commitment to care for it.

A few random thoughts

If you’re feeling mentally off-kilter, don’t discount that the source might well be physical.
Appreciate the life and the health that you do have. Be grateful to the parts of you that you don’t usually appreciate. They’re sustaining you. They are you.
If you haven’t tried yoga, give it a shot. Just once.

Namaste.

People actually like shopping?

Posted on March 2, 2013 by Elizabeth Calimente

No! No! No! Don’t make me!

A little sanctimony goes a long way.

It’s been a good day, unmarred by madness or bad drivers or the usual range of human stupidity. For the last three weeks, I’ve been compacted, convulsed by coughing spasms, my mind shrunken by extended confinement to beds, tiny apartment rooms, and endless episodes of Angel. But now I’m free, and I’m flowing with the universe. I’m expanded, and my mind runs freely like a river after a session of restorative yoga poses. I’ve made some progress on my novel, finally, and I have a vision for what happens next. I can finally see the end of this project which I began last April. I’ve had a little fun socialization with one of my writing groups.

In short, I’m the very definition of contentedness, gratitude and harmony. I’m actually—gasp—happy! I’ve found Nirvana. Now I just need yogurt and to pick up cashew butter for my husband and the elixir of life for the two of us: Sprouts’ organic Sumatran blend.

What can go wrong? For the first time in a long time, I don’t actually ask myself the question. Nothing can go wrong. All is right with the universe, and there is eternal peace within. My inner self is mirror to the harmony without.

I head for the bakery section. Sprouts doesn’t have my heavenly sprouted wheat apple cinnamon bagels. Instead, I settle for honey sprouted wheat. Well, most of them taste okay except the blueberry. Whatever. My inner Zen returns. They have the pretzel-hummus snack packs again! I stock up. The yogurt selection’s pretty sad, though. I have a week’s worth in the fridge. No problem. I snag a couple of half-hidden jars of cashew butter—they’ve gotten smaller. Whatever. I fill up a bag with Sumatran beans and inhale the heavenly scent. Aaah! Life is wonderful.

The checkout line is long, so I browse the check-stand magazines. Ooo, a magazine with a brain on the cover! Hey, it talks about creativity! I slide it into my basket and join the masses. The lines split and re-connect as new registers open. I flow with them. I muse about my novel as the line I’m in grinds to a halt. Who cares? Life is grand!

A small family gathers its bags at the end of the register. The cashier runs the next set of items over the scanner for the couple just ahead of me until something halts her flow. Why, it’s white, and looks a little like the stylized artistic brain on the over of my magazine! I stare down at my basket for a moment before beginning to unload it at the end of the conveyor belt. The universe whispers to me that I might be making the perfect purchase at the perfect time.

“Did you get cauliflower? I thought you hated it,” the woman says.

“No. Didn’t you?”

“This isn’t yours?” the cashier asks.

The man and woman both shake their heads.

“I had a cauliflower. You got me a cauliflower. I remember!” The family pauses in their grocery wrangling as the mother claims her vegetable. She grabs her purse and whips out her wallet.

A scuffle ensues as the cashier grows increasingly confused. I should pay attention. I should be mindful about what’s happening around me. I don’t care. Instead, I examine the precise placement of olives on the yummy-looking plate of pasta on the cover of a food magazine. Mmm. Olives. Too bad my husband hates them. Whatever. Like all things, this kerfuffle too will pass, and life will continue its serene flow through time and space.

And it does. Now my items are getting dragged over the scanner. The cashier looks befuddled. I pull out my wallet and start shuffling through the pile of receipts there for actual monetary units. I half-sense the long line of people behind me, so the least I can do is try to make my time in line efficient.

“Do you have a bag?”

At the beginning of the year, Alameda County outlawed plastic bags in grocery stores. If you want a paper bag, you have to pay a dime. It’s vaguely annoying, but so is most legislation. I still haven’t made the mental shift, so sometimes I just pay the dime and buy my paper bag. It gets promptly recycled when I get home. You know, “reduce, re-use, recycle.” I lean on the third part of that probably more often than I should, but at least I adhere to part of the triad.

“No. Could I get a bag?”

She stares at me, and then those eyes widen until they’re about to fall free from their sockets. “Why don’t you have one?”

“I wasn’t thinking about it.” If I’d actually thought about anything beyond getting my mental shopping list, I’d have remembered the cloth bag in my car trunk. But I was flowing; I had story in my heart, and poetry in my soul. Who cares about bags?

“Did you plan on shopping?” There’s probably venom in her voice, but I’m a little busy trying to pull a couple of twenties out of my wallet.

“Yes.” Of course that “plan” was just thinking I was going to head to Sprouts after my writing group meeting. Bags don’t enter into planning, just wrangling with location and timing. Bags are a whole separate level of logistical pain that I can’t process unless my only plan is grocery shopping.

“You were planning on shopping, but you didn’t think of bringing a bag?”

Instead, I’m wrangling cash. I’ve found the two ones to go with my two twenties as she huffily starts stacking my groceries into an easy-to-manipulate paper bag, unlike the cloth monstrosities she usually has to wrestle with. I pull out a dime and hand her exact change as her dudgeon finally bludgeons me over the head. Wait, you’re lecturing me on proper bag use? You’re guilt-tripping me when there’s a huge line of people behind me and you’ve just screwed up the two transactions directly ahead of me?

“Exact change.”

Yes. What does that have to do with anything? She puts the money away in the register and gestures to someone else’s specials flyer left behind on the customer platform. “Do you want to take that home with you?”

“No,” I say, trying to re-center myself. I don’t bother to tell her it isn’t mine.

She snatches it off the platform and chucks it disdainfully in the trash. No bag, and she’s a litterbug to boot! I can almost feel her think.

I take my grocery bag and my suddenly too-heavy but inadequate selections. I don’t have my bagels. I don’t have good yogurt. And I’m suddenly muttering invective beneath my breath. There is no flow in the universe. Instead, it’s cold and stark and disorderly. My serenity is shattered and I notice just how horrible the other drivers are around me as I merge onto 880 North. I get cut off. I’m tailgated. Some blue light special with his douche-beams is blinding me in my driver-side mirror.

Just what I need, I tell myself out loud, some complete moron giving me a guilt trip. Want a side of sanctimony with those bagels? That’s my new mantra for the rest of the evening.

Let’s take a wok!

I probably like Target too much for my own good. My husband’s the same way. It’s well-organized, well-lit, there’s no crappy music, and no massive displays block the open aisles. It’s a weird sort of heaven that’s close to things we usually go to, and it’s open late!

We get the random items that my husband needs, and then I remember my abortive Thursday cooking attempt. You’re not supposed to improvise the way I do, but what else are you supposed to do when confronted with, “Brush barbeque sauce on chicken,” besides use a paint brush (not used, and generally clean) if you aren’t specialized enough to have the pastry variety? I remember my “hack” as we walk by the mixers. They’re cherry and cotton-candy colored. My mouth idly waters as I think of those sour-cherry ball things and carnivals.

“We need a pastry brush,” I say.

My husband stares at me.

“Remember the paint brush I ruined?” I couldn’t imagine putting it in the dishwasher, or shoving it in watercolors after I’d contaminated it with salmonella. And I sure was never going to use it on food again.

He snorts.

Target’s kitchen section is utterly insane. You’d think items would be organized by type or by color, or by something that resembles a scheme. Instead, I think they use brand as their standard. This means you have a whole wall of random thingamabobs interrupting the measuring cups. You can’t compare prices, types, or anything else without a long walk between, and lots of overwhelming gadgetry to befuddle the senses. We’re engaged in a long debate over the merits of steel vs. plastic measuring cups, or whether we should get a spoon/cup collection when I find the only pastry brush on the wall. Aside from the silicone one he finds a minute later for $5 less. Done. I settle on a set of blue plastic measuring cups. Sky blue! Pretty! Unlike the oddball black and white ones we have lying around, this one reminds me of a sunny day and is a completed set. And it’s blue! Blue! And it’s $3 cheaper than the metal cups halfway down the long aisle.

Did I mention I like blue?

He’s found the larger measuring cups. We used to have a really pretty clear blue plastic measuring cup (2 cup size), but we haven’t been able to find it for months. I liked it for two reasons: 1) you could drop it, and it wouldn’t break, and 2) it’s blue. He liked it too. We have a nostalgic conversation about just how wonderful that missing cup is. These new ones are glass aside from some weird slanty-measured plastic things that cost a mint. One claims to be Pyrex, and I remember that Pyrex isn’t supposed to shatter when you drop it. But it will hurt your foot. I know that from experience. We debate the merits of glass and shudder at the $8 pricetag on the plastic slanty-measure cup. We muse about hurt feet and dropping things. Or at least I do as my husband snickers at me.

“Excuse me?” The voice that interrupts us comes from a young and gangly man who is ridiculously well-dressed for Target or Rubio’s, where I remember seeing him staring befuddled at the menu. He’s wearing a suit that’s both somewhat stylish and somewhat expensive. He matches, which is more than I’ve ever managed in business attire. “Do you know anything about woks?”

I had a wok once. I tried to season it, and ended up smoking up my old Oakland studio, setting off the smoke alarm, and gunking its surface up with burned oil. “I had one once but I barely used it.”

He shows me a sink scrub-brush. It’s one of the ones that has space in the top to store dish soap. We once owned something like it, but it got gummed up with dried soap so badly it became useless. “Will this work to clean it?”

Maybe? I’m not really sure what to tell him. My brain starts shooting off in all directions, including my failed seasoning attempt, the times I’ve seen woks used on Yan Can Cook, and I swear that I’ve actually owned a real wok brush. I start thinking about potential problems, and as my gears start grinding, I say, “I’m not really the wok expert. I got mine and the cleaning tools at The Wok Shop in Chinatown. I just let them sell me whatever.”

Surely this disclaimer should make him back away, right? I mean, I’m talking with my husband about injuring myself with cookware, after all!

“You don’t think it will work?” His eyes beseech me, and I have to give him something.

“Well, um… I think I had a wok brush. The bristles were made out of bamboo or something. That plastic might melt.” I start thinking about how all of the plasticware in Target is made in China. I remember the melamine-infested pet foods, about horrible cancers, and how real melamine is used on shelves. Eating shelves. Not healthy, especially not on a healthy-food device like a wok. “Maybe there’s something else here that will work better.”

We start scouring the displays for something else. He puts back the scrubber. I try to remember what my wok-cleaning brush looked like. I half-remember the one on Yan Can Cook. I see nothing except—is that a brush? No, it’s an egg slicer with brushy-looking yellow plastic things on the bottom. My husband laughs at me. I laugh a little uneasily; someone’s asking me for cooking advice. The young man picks up the scrub-brush again.

“There’s more stuff here than at Nob Hill,” he says, and I manage a self-effacing laugh.

“Kind of overwhelming, isn’t it?” I pick up the plastic slanty-measure cup. “I don’t want glass.”

My husband nods as he snickers under his breath. When the young man focuses on the rack ahead, we sneak away, new cups and pastry “brush” in basket.

“That melting thing was stupid, wasn’t it?” I ask. “He’s probably just going to cool the wok down with water, right? I was just thinking that he’d make multiple things in the same wok like Yan Can Cook. But he’s probably not. Why was he asking me for help?”

“You’re a woman.” And right then, I know my husband’s right. This scares me. A lot.

“And he’s single.”

“Well, if he was attached, wouldn’t he be with his wife?” Things are so obvious to my husband. I wish I could be that realistic. “She’d be telling him what to buy.”

I spend the rest of the evening wondering what happened to my wok brush, if my memory’s actually faulty, and if my brush was really a figment of my imagination, brought on by remembering Martin Yan’s brush. My husband asks me if my wok brush memory is a fabrication. I wonder myself and torment myself for an hour as we wander around a bookstore. Did I actually own one? Or am I confusing reality with television?

“Nope,” I say as we leave the bookstore. “I ruined the brush seasoning the wok. I tossed it in the trash years ago. The brush part was all gunked up with that black oil crap. The couple of times I used the wok before we chucked it, I cleaned it out with water and a paper towel, and ruined it in the process.”

“You’re still thinking about that?”

As we drive home, I think to myself, Shopping sucks. At least I’m not thinking about woks.

Shallot is another word for “Waaah!” – A Space Cadet Confronts the Mysteries of Cooking

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Elizabeth Calimente

Was ist das?

Why cook?

That’s the real question, isn’t it? Why? I’ve asked myself that one time and time again. Unfortunately, the answer has usually been, “Don’t wanna.” I mean, there are legions upon legions of locations that will do all the hard work for you. You know, all the chopping, all the washing, all the measuring, all the actual stirring and sautéing and baking and grilling. And all of them can do a better job than I can. McDonald’s does a better job.

Except that I’m not a young string bean anymore. I can’t eat the kind of sludge I ate at twenty and not expect to show extremely adverse results. Then there’s the marriage thing, and the inevitable discussions and debates and utter lack of decision-making that someone else equally wishy-washy brings into the whole food-obtaining process. In short, eating after you’ve paired up is a lot more complicated than when you’re single and eating a bowl of cereal for a late-night dinner-snack-whatever-meal-thingie.

So, yeah, after nine years of marriage, the time has finally come to actually try to wrestle a little sanity back into eating and food procurement. My innards, honestly, can’t take much more.

Problems, oh the pain of problems!

I hate eating the same thing over and over. Recipes are huge and cumbersome affairs that result in the hell of leftovers.
Finding a decent recipe is nigh unto impossible. Cooking and chopping and mixing and stirring for three hours just to end up with tasteless slop is unbearable agony.
Husband can only cook three things: chili (terrible), spaghetti (boring!), and Kraft Mac N Cheez. He doesn’t mind eating the three things forever for the rest of his existence. Note inherent conflict with my problem #1.
I utterly suck at cooking. I utterly suck at shopping. I hate doing the same thing every day over and over.
I manage to injure myself doing the easiest and stupidest of things.
Making shopping lists and actually getting the right items at the store is surprisingly challenging for a space cadet like me.
I hate cleaning up and doing dishes.

I can just hear the voices tut-tutting me for being so petty and useless. You’re right. I am. The most simple and routine of activities for most humans, the most trivial of things that many take up as an actual hobby has proved near impossible to me for most of my childhood and adult existence.

Research, the root of all solutions!

So, I started digging. My husband had seen several threads on Reddit about low-cost, low-prep and simple cooking. I started reading and digging and all of a sudden the detail centers of my brain overloaded. My eyes bled as I read yet another recipe and tried to envision the interplay of yet another ten ingredients. Really, I can do a pretty good job of predicting taste from a list of ingredients, but I can only do it for a few minutes before my brain goes into shutdown mode.

Still, after three or four nights of brain overload, I came to a few realizations:

I can put up with cooking if the dish take less than an hour to prepare.
And the dish tastes decent.
And there aren’t too many leftovers.
And I can handle the process four or so times a week, which meshes reasonably well with my writing group schedule.
And said dishes are sort of almost healthy.

So I read. And I read some more. All I had to do was to find a decent cookbook with simple recipes and not too many ingredients in each. I’d be willing to put up with a failed recipe or two so long as the cooking time didn’t require a billion hours. I scoured Amazon for “no item” and “microwave” cookbooks.

May I divert for a minute and ask the cooking pros out there why there aren’t more recipes focused on the most useful of all cooking devices? The microwave has to be one of the best inventions ever in human history, up there with refrigeration, indoor plumbing and soap. But every single cookbook out there focuses on the vastly more inefficient and annoying stove/oven. I mean, to boil a kettle of water for a cup of tea takes five or six minutes while the microwave can warm up a nice cup in a minute, and if you stuff the teabag in before you nuke, the tea comes out just perfect after the beep.

Still, the nuker cookbooks were a bust, full of disgusting canned ingredients and just general uckiness. The Amazon reviews said as much. If cooking in the microwave was going to end up as preservative-laden and nasty as Applebee’s, why bother cooking at all?

And then I came across the Cooking Light series of books. Maybe it was a Reddit post, or a random browsing of Amazon that led me to the original book: Cooking Light: 5 Ingredient 15 Minute Cookbook. I mean, five ingredients? Fifteen minutes? I could do that! I hurried to Barnes & Noble for more exhausting mental ingredient-synthesizing. Except this book was full of nothing but heavy-duty meat dishes. And lots of cilantro. Oodles of cilantro.

My brain near exploded when I came across my near savior: Cooking Light: Fresh Food Fast. Unlike the first, this one had salads and sandwiches and noodles and variety! And most of the recipes included some kind of side dish for an actual meal. Also, it suggested things like using pre-sliced veggies, and for those that weren’t, simple vertical cuts. No julienne, no cubing. In general, these recipes don’t require exotic equipment, so that was also a huge plus.

Devising A System

What’s any project without a pointless system to “streamline” and simplify the process? In my case, I needed to find a way to somehow pre-plan, pre-anticipate indecision and get early buy-in from my husband on any week’s choices of food. The system’s still in its early working stages, but it seems to “work” in a loose sense.

Both parties scour recipes for things we can eat and mark relevant recipes as “edible.” This was the hard part. My husband and I don’t have many overlapping dislikes. He hates olives. I love them. I despise cilantro. He can’t taste it. He likes eggs and cheese. I don’t particularly like either. Still, we ended up with about 100 mutually acceptable recipes, which has pretty much ended the “what do we eat?” debate.
Each week, I pick two recipes and he picks two from the acceptable pool. Since we’ve pre-consented to the recipes, neither of us is particularly unhappy with the other party’s choice. This stops the whole “cook decides” potential series of arguments, since both parties have an equal voice in the meal choosing process. And it cuts down on the number of decisions either of us has to make, since it’s only two each, instead of four.
I make the grocery list and shop for the ingredients. I have to say, this is the part I hate the most. I’m terrible at following lists. I suck at finding ingredients in any store. And last week, I didn’t have the faintest clue what a raw shallot looked like. Sure, I’ve eaten them cooked, but I’d pictured them as being more like a green onion than a half-garlic half-yellow onion mutation. Anyway, you might ask, “Why doesn’t your husband shop with you?” This one’s simple: there’s a nice organic market near my Thursday night writing group’s meeting spot, so I just do the shopping before the meeting. What really sucks most about the experience is having impatient yuppies glaring at you as you try to figure out the difference between a cutlet and a butterfly-cut chicken breast.
Based on my mood, I pick one of the four things and cook it. Yeah, there went the whole pretense of “democracy” in the process, right? Well, whatever. I’ve noticed my bias goes toward making my two choices first. My husband picks the heartier, more complicated recipes. I choose the salads and easy-peasy sandwiches. I’m lazy. You do the math.
My husband cleans up the balance when the dishwasher gets too jammed for my lack of spatial ability. Since that’s pretty much every day, and he can cram in three times as many dishes, this one’s a natural.

The hard stuff.

A couple of my friends are cooking gurus. The biggest piece of advice I got was, “Get good knives.” My husband claims the Faberware knife set I got in my single days is good. I’m not actually sure. It came in a handy-dandy tiny caddy that fit well in my old studio eleven years ago with some measuring spoons and cups. The whole shebang was $20.00 at Ross or Marshalls or something. I honestly don’t know if they’re “good” or not. Still, they cut things. And sometimes those things have been my fingers. They seem to be sharp, and penetrate my finger-pads easily, so I’m guessing that means they’re good. So that wasn’t the real hard part.

“Where’s the cutting board?” I asked my poor coughing husband on my first attempt. We’re both still sick as dogs from the unholy flu-cold hybrid that’s floating around.

“Don’t we have one of those pull-out built-in things?”

No, our apartment is defective.

“Then it’s hiding in with the pans.”

Nope. It was in with the unused rice cooker in the cupboard that’s almost permanently stuck shut by the melted felt sticker.

Set the grated cucumber aside in a separate dish. Wait, I need more than one pan? And I have to chop up meat-like ingredients, but I can’t use the same cutting board I’m using for the green onions, the mint and the peanuts. What do I do?

Mix the bean sprouts with the mint and the peanuts. I need bean sprouts? Wait, I got everything on the list! Except the bean sprouts. Because I forgot to write them down in the three-page-long mutation that claimed to be a list. Not that I would have been able to find them with all the yuppie-glaring as I blocked their entitled access to the cilantro as I tried to manipulate pen (for crossing off items), plastic bag, list, and grocery cart all in one hand.

Still, improvisation has always been one of my strengths, and I learned a few things quickly.

A frying pan makes a good meat-handling and mixing board. And it washes easily. No cross-contamination fear!
If you only have a couple of measuring cups worth of ingredients, you can store them easily in said cups.
A hand-blender works well in lieu of an actual blender if you don’t mind spending six times as long “blending” and you’re stuck in the middle of a recipe.
Never ever ever underestimate just how awesome a George Foreman grill can be, especially if you don’t have a real grill.
You can actually make an unusual and tasty hummus from thawed frozen peas, two cloves of garlic, a bunch of mint, and a little water and olive oil. Oooo! And it was good with crackers too.
Recipe quantities of an ingredient never actually match what comes in a can. What the heck do I do with the other two ounces of pimentos?

Ongoing modifications.

Problem: Writing the grocery list sucks and takes forever. Low-tech solution: Use Notepad. Contend with annoying Windows 8 printer networking laziness. Misspell “cabbage” because you’re in a rush. Time savings: 15 minutes. Need to improve: Actually categorizing ingredients with general store layout and location. Annoying because this can take forever and I hate organizing things.

Problem: Where is everything at the store? Low-tech solution: Mentally catalog store layout and odd, illogical locations of ingredients. Time savings: None. You’re still bumbling around like an idiot until the third or fourth comprehensive visit.

Problem: Not enough dishes and measuring things. No chopping or blending devices. Solution: Buying more. Further problem: Research and expense and general additional shopping annoyance. In progress.

Real lessons learned.

I’d originally intended this cooking thing as a quick experiment. I wasn’t sure I could take cooking as often as I’d hoped, and I can’t say that I’ve actually cooked four days out of a week. But I have cooked on four evenings before the ingredients I’d purchased went bad, and the process wasn’t that onerous beyond the actual hell of shopping. We haven’t saved that much money over eating out, but the overall quality of the recipes and ingredients required in Cooking Light: Fresh Food Fast has been quite good. Most of the expense has been toward building some kind of library of spices, so in the long run, costs will go down.

And I do mean the recipes are good. Each of the four recipes I made has required relatively little oil, the ingredients are generally clean, and even though the quantities appear to be small compared to a typical restaurant portion, the meals are reasonably nutritionally balanced and filling. And there’s none of that obnoxious no-carbiness, so woo-hoo! Plus, for as few “ingredients” as the recipes claim to require, they actually taste like food!

I’ve also learned that “five ingredients, fifteen minutes” is a total exaggeration. The average recipe requires about ten, and takes, with my utter lack of experience, about forty-five minutes to prepare. There are leftovers, but not horrific weeks’ worth as in your typical recipe. Instead, there’s a decent lunch left over the next day. Eating something twice isn’t as awful as eating it for weeks at a time. I’m guessing actual prep time will decrease as I get better at slicing things.

The best part, though?

Neither of us is dead from food poisoning!

Yet.