P90X - "phase 1" results

No one is as surprised as I am that I've stuck with this "extreme home fitness" program through the 30 days of  "Phase 1." I am not naturally inclined toward anything extreme, but hubbie was filled with enthusiasm, so I figured I'd give it a try, dislike it intensely, and return to more girly workouts by the end of the first week. But turns out I like it.

Not that I've followed the program ("lean" version,) exactly. For one thing, I hated (hated!) the "Kenpo X" (kickboxing) workout. Really, completely, loathed every minute of it. I slogged through it once, distracting myself from the so-not-my-type-of-thing awfulness by pondering what I would need to be paid to keep it in the rotation. Conclusion: $125/workout, or $500-$600 a month. No generous benefactor has materialized, so I have replaced it in my rotation with the oldie-but-still-goodie original "Firm Total Body Workout" that's been kicking my butt since the mid 80s.

Two other workout schedule adjustments:

1) "Core synergistics" is okay, but relies far too much on push-up, plank, and chatturanga variations for me; past reconstructive surgery limits my ability to do much of certain upper-body moves, so I'm doing Jillian Michael's "30-Day Shred," also a proven butt-kicker, instead.

2) "Cardio X": a fine workout, but the tougher option, "Plyometrics," is more fun, so I'm doing that one instead. I might, possibly, by day 90, be fit enough to get through the entire Plyo routine; in the meantime, it's fun panting and stumbling through as much of it as I can.

Best pleasant surprises:
-- "Ab Ripper X" (tough, but more fun than endless crunches, and it works!)
-- "Plyometrics" (even though I'm so wimpy at it still)
-- "Yoga X": this I did not expect to like. Yoga, I figured, should be taught by yoga instructors. But whaddayaknow... it's a VERY good (tough!) power yoga routine. I hesitate to describe a yoga workout as "brutal" as that language is so un-yoga-y, but wow, does this one kick yoga butt.
-- "X Stretch": the best hour of stretching I have ever done. Not sure yet how I'm going to fit it in more frequently, but I want to, 'cause it feels so good.

RESULTS from 30 days of upping the workout intensity six days a week:
Weight:  2.5 pounds down; had hoped for 3-5, but 2.5 is okay given noticeable improvements in strength overall
Waist and abs: each 1" smaller
Upper arms: each 1/2" smaller, and noticeably firmer

I regret to say that hip and thigh measurements have not budged since day 1, but things are definitely firmer down there, though not yet smaller. I have hopes for slimmer results by the end of Phases 2 & 3.

That's all WITHOUT DIETING (!). The program comes with a nutrition and menu plan, but I'd rather chew nails than weigh all my food and track nutrient ratios and calories. Pleh. Been there, done that, and just don't want to. I have nudged my eating, in general, SLIGHTLY towards fewer carbs/fat and more protein, but haven't changed much: less cheese and chocolate, wine on weekends only, that's about it.

What have I been eating?
Breakfast (post workout): banana-berry smoothie with a little yogurt and a scoop of vanilla whey protein
Lunch: turkey or bison burger on a whole wheat bun, maybe a small salad on the side if I'm feeling virtuous
Snack: small apple and some tamari almonds or a spoonful of peanut butter
Dinner: chicken or fish (sauteed with a little olive oil and spices 'cause it's quick and easy that way); lots of steamed fresh organic veggies; brown rice or quinoa; salad

I have not blogged about any of that because,well, it's chicken or fish, veggies, a grain, a salad. Not the sort of thing I use (or record) a recipe for.

Desserts, although limited to Sunday night only, have not completely vanished from the menu. I've got a post or two coming up about that, but this one seems plenty long enough, so I'll stop here.

Bring on "Phase 2"!

Feeling tubby

The Cake Junkie is feeling tubby. With good reason because, let's face it, I am a little tubbier than I used to be. "A little" in this case being a slow but steady gain of 20-something pounds over the past 20 years, since I was in my early 30s and looking and feeling pretty darned good. You can call it Middle Aged Spread (MAS) if you want to, but it's still pudge and I don't like it.

I had a plan to get rid of it. A nice plan. An easy plan. A plan based on simple math: a half-pound of pudge reduction every week, for one year, would result in being 26 pounds lighter by the end of 2010. That's more than enough! I could hit my target by Columbus Day, easy. And only half a pound a week? Even factoring in a middle-aged metabolism that ought to be doable without too much sweat and deprivation, right? (The Cake Junkie doesn't mind a little sweat, but she prefers a moderate workout to an all-out effort, and who are we kidding: deprivation in the food department is not ever gonna happen.) I figured some mental attention to LOA principles and some mild improvements in the move-your-hiney arena and I'd be on my way. No diet required.

Then Mr. Wonderful filled some night-owl hours by channel-surfing through a glut of workout infomercials, and got majorly psyched to make 2010 the year he fulfills a lifetime dream of becoming "super fit."

So, while I'd been making my minimal-effort-required slim-down plans, Mr. W went ahead and ordered the P90X workout, which promises jaw-dropping body transformation in just 90 days. Now, this kind of high-intensity, push yourself to the max 6 days a week for an hour at a time workout program is not exactly what I had in mind when I decided to get serious about losing weight (slowly!) without going on a diet. So when Mr. Wonderful told me all about it and how excited he is to do it, I figured it would be his thing. He’d sweat and grunt and jump up and down, and I’d take a more leisurely path to a new me. 90 days? What’s your hurry? I just want to be slimmer by the end of the year.

The thing is, now that he’s so pumped up at the P90X idea, I have to admit that I’m kind of curious. Exercise is good. I'm not opposed to it. I do like to move my body some every day, and I do want to be more fit. It’s just that I’d planned to get there the long and lazy way, a teeny tiny bit at a time, over a long time. And I hadn't planned to ever aim for "super fit." Cake Junkie doesn't like to work out that hard, and besides, she's a girl, and she thinks six-pack abs on a girl are weird.

The Law of Attraction works in unexpected ways, however, and I’m unable to ignore the possibility that maybe my beloved hubbie was inspired (in part) to order P90X because it’s something that will be good for his beloved and slightly tubby wife, too.

So probably I ought to at least give it a try. When it gets here.

Good thing the parcel is still in transit, because no way am I starting on a workout program the moment my period arrived (hate the cramps, love the excuse to be lazy and eat chocolate for 48 guilt-free hours). Plus, I’m still working myself up to getting serious about maybe, possibly, doing a workout program with the letter X (for EXTREME!!) in it.

That's not a word that features prominently in my vocabulary. I'm more of an "easy-peasy" type, in all ways.

Herbed Spelt Popovers

These little lovelies are from the "Herbed Spelt Popovers" recipe in this book.

Don't know why I had popovers on the brain, but I did. But I wasn't at all convinced they are the kind of food item that can be duplicated using any kind of whole grain flour.

But apparently they can be. I actually followed the recipe almost entirely exactly. The only change I made was that it calls for either whole grain spelt flour or whole wheat pastry flour (and a small amount of AP). I'd planned ahead and put spelt flour on my shopping list, but when I got home from the health food store and reread the recipe I realized that no way was my white and fluffy spelt flour from the bulk bin "whole grain." So I mixed 3/4 cup each WW pastry and spelt flour and added 1/4 C AP and hoped for the best.

I also used whatever dried herbs I had on hand, and about 2 TB of pecorino-romano cheese. The batter was so thin I couldn't imagine I'd get anything other than eggy hocky-pucks from it. The recipe made exactly 3 cups of batter according to the marks on the side of my blender so I used a 1/4 cup measure to fill my buttered 12-muffin tin. Each "cup" was way more than the half-full recommended, which then had me worried that instead of remaining hocky pucks the batter would puff too quickly and I'd end up with baked-on and burnt popover batter all over the floor of my oven.

But my fears were needless. These puffed up gloriously, did not leak and overflow in the oven, and are delicious. Unfortunately, most of them de-puffed significantly as they cooled, so by the time I snapped this pic they were no longer at their most magnificent. I suspect this means they are slightly undercooked, and will bake them a few minutes longer next time. Fortunately, the yum factor is unaffected by deflation and once pulled open they perform admirably as what popovers of any kind really are, which is a delivery vehicle for butter.

We enjoyed these warm from the oven with soup for dinner on Friday night, and yesterday I used one cold from the fridge to make a chicken-avocado-sprout sandwich for lunch. Which was quite good, but the popover was not at its best cold. So for Saturday dinner I sliced a couple open and ran them through the toaster on a light setting. Yum again. There are still a couple left, and in a few minutes I'm going to make myself another chix-avo sandwich, but this time I'm going to toast the popover first. (A microwave oven would probably reheat them nicely, too, but then you'd be microwaving your food, which I don't do for reasons I'll maybe get into some other time and which will reveal my nutjob side.)

Seeing as how it's Sunday, which is "dessert night" in this house, after lunch I am going to make some kind of cupcake (carrot, maybe?) to hold up the leftover lemon frosting I took out of the freezer this morning.

And then I'm going to get serious about slimming down.

The Best Thing I Ate for Christmas

Hawaiian-Vanilla ice cream with Lemon-Ginger Sauce and crystallized ginger

No, I did not make the ice cream. I don’t do that. If I had an ice cream maker I might be tempted to use it, and then there would be way too much ice cream in the house. I do buy ice cream for special occasions, although I try to keep that indulgence to a few times a year.

This is Roselani Hawaiian Vanilla. It’s a beautiful creamy, almost ecru shade of ivory, amply speckled with vanilla bean and a luscious foil to any other flavor you might think to pair with it.

I thought “lemon” because the lemon tree is our yard is producing lemons the size of softballs. Seriously, some of them are huge. Here’s a quick quiz: which of these is the lemon and which is the grapefruit?

Yup, that's the lemon on the left. Freaky.

Sometime in early December I had made ae quick lemon syrup by juicing and zesting a few lemons and adding a roughly equal amount of light brown sugar and heating it all to a simmer on the stove. Yum, but runny and rather aggressively sweet-tart.

I used some to make lemon-pecan cookies (no photo of those: they were not the kind of holiday lovelies you think of as “Christmas Cookies”), using the syrup both to sweeten the dough and to brush on top before they went in the oven. Uh, no, no recipe either. They were a basic butter cookie, with a generous amount of ground pecans and some lemon zest added. I was not in a measuring or documenting mood, as so often happens in this kitchen.

The Lemon-Ginger Sauce came about because I was pondering what to make that would involve lemons and/or lemon syrup, and while browsing through my dessert cookbooks was advised by Sherry Yard, in “The Secrets of Baking” that a lemon sauce can be made by thinning lemon curd with simple syrup. Aha.

I figured I could use my lemon syrup to make a thin curd, by whisking in some eggs and cooking over low heat to around 170 degrees. I started with about a cup of the syrup, and added one whole egg and one yolk, and -- here’s where the true inspiration came in -- about a tablespoon of fresh ginger juice (made by grating a large piece of very fresh and moist gingerroot and pressing the results through a fine sieve). When the sauce was slightly thickened and to temp, I whisked in about a tablespoon and a half of butter.

OMG, this stuff is delicious! And it packs a very gingery punch. The sweet, cool, smooth, creamy vanilla ice cream is awesomely perfect with it. Add some diced crystallized ginger on top and yum.

We had this for Christmas Eve dessert. I’d thought maybe I would use the remaining sauce to make some kind of lemony-gingery mousse (reheat with another egg yolk or two, add some gelatin, fold in whipped egg whites and whipped cream... yes, a day will come when I will need to make that particular vision a reality) but the ice cream combo was so delicious we simply repeated it the next day.

If you want to try making something like this, start with a basic lemon curd recipe, cut the egg quantity in half, and the butter to very little, use light-brown sugar instead of plain old white, and add a generous amount of fresh ginger juice. It might not turn out exactly the same as mine, but I can promise you it will be delicious.

Lemon Layer Cake

We had a birthday in the house this week, and birthdays call for layer cake. I made this one with fresh lemons from the tree in our yard.

For the cake layers I made the Whole Wheat Genoise from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking book. The only change I made to the recipe was to blend a about 2 TBSP of fresh lemon zest with the melted butter before adding that to the cake. This recipe made a generous amount of batter. So generous it was almost too much for my mixer bowl. If I make this again (and I probably will) I'll adjust the quantity downward by about 20-25%. Other future changes include adding lemon extract, which I would have used  had I remembered to buy some). With just lemon zest the citrus flavor of the layers was not as pronounced as I would have liked.

This genoise is the basis for Daffodil Cake on page 404 of the cookbook. I glanced at that recipe but planned to use other sources for the lemon filling and buttercream parts, so didn't study the details. Now I wish I'd read the bit where they recommend soaking each cake layer with 1/4 cup of citrus syrup, which seems like a lot. I thought I'd drenched generously, but probably only used at most half that amount per layer and yes, the final result is a little dry. Not a problem if the cake is served with lots of icecream, but next time around I'll drench more thoroughly.

Overall, I'm impressed by any genoise that can handle 1-3/4 C of whole wheat flour, even if it's ww pastry flour. This did turn out well, and managed to not have the overly eggy flavor of the last genoise I made. It is a little denser than a white flour genoise: it does not slice as cleanly and should be flavored more aggressively.

I cooked the genoise in two 8" round pans (rather than the three pans the recipe calls for), so they came out about 2" thick each. I then sliced each into two layers, to make four total.

For between-layer filling I started with a half recipe of Master Lemon Curd from this reliable book (made a couple of days ahead).

I did not bother to strain the curd as recommended, because I felt leaving the little bits of lemon zest in there would improve the flavor and I knew no one eating the cake would notice or object to the zesty bits. The lemony-ness of the curd improved noticeably from the make-ahead date to the time the cake was assembled, so advance prep is not only convenient, it resulted in a better flavor, too.

When I was ready to fill and frost the layers I turned the lemon curd into a mousse by first soaking 1 tsp of powdered gelatin in 2T of lemon juice mixed with water. The next step with gelatin (after soaking in cold liquid) is to heat and dissolve, which I accomplished by pouring in a little bit of the hot lemon syrup I boiled up for the Italian Meringue Buttercream frosting (more on that, below). I stirred the warmed gelatin into the lemon curd, then used a whisk to fold in some of the (extra) meringue I'd made for the frosting. Mousse typically also includes a fair amount of whipped cream, but I left that out as unnecessary excess and well over the line into just-too-much-more-work land. I chilled the mousse until it had started to set, then spread some over each of three cake layers and chilled the layers until the mousse was fully set before assembling the final cake.

This lemon mouse made a not-too-heavy but very stable cake filling that did not squish out the sides even under the weight of multiple whole wheat genoise layers. I will definitely use it again, and look forward to experimenting with other flavors.

The final piece of this effort was a lemon frosting which was close to a disaster. I have not attempted a classic Italian merinque buttercream in many years and thought I'd give it a go. As mentioned above, I made extra (2 add'l egg whites) of the meringue so I could use some for the lemon filling. The meringue turned out perfectly! I've used my stand mixer to whip egg whites before, but this was the first time I'd done a hot sugar syrup meringue with it, and the results were awesome, huge, voluminos peaks of fluffy but exceptionally stable sweet lemony whiteness.

Unfortunately, that's where the success ended. Adding the butter sort of seemed to go okay: the whites did not curdle, and remained a smooth emulsion, but the loss of volume seemed way beyond what it should have been, and the result, while not the "soupy" texture threatened by too-soft butter, was not stiff enough to frost with. So I stuck it in the fridge to chill up a bit.

In hindsight, I can see that's where I went wrong. I should have put the bowl of not-stiff-enough into an icewater bath while continuing to beat with my hand mixer as it firmed up. Left to its own devices in the fridge a horrible separation of liquid into the bottom of the bowl occured. This appeared to be way, way, way beyond the "curdled" effect that buttercream troubleshooting tips say can be saved, and I was running out of patience, so I drained off the liquid and beat in another stick of butter and some confectioner's sugar.

At that point it was still a bit soft but I could see it would be way too much quantity by the time I got it to a spreadable consistency, so I removed half of what was in the bowl to a freezer container for some future use. To the remaining portion I mixed in a quickie white chocolate ganache I made by melting a bag of white choc chips in some heavy cream. I have great faith in the firm-up potential of ganache and it did chill up beautifully. The final result -- half failed lemon buttercream and half white choc ganache -- handled extremely well, did not sag or droop or end up in a pool on the cake platter, and tasted divine, with an exceptionally smooth texture and a lovely subtle flavor hinting of vanilla, white chocolate (which can be too cloying on its own), and lemon with no one element dominating. Too bad this exact frosting will never be duplicated, as it is well worth eating again and again, but that's what usually happens when I cook.

Although I will do some things differently next time I make a lemon layer cake (which will not be for a good long while, layer cakes being way too much work for anything other than special occasions, although they can be a fun way to make a mess of the kitchen), this was a delicious cake and we ate a lot of it. Leftovers have been divvied up into more reasonable portions and frozen for future cake night indulgence.

Farewell, my toasty friend

My toaster, a Cuisinart model from the late 1980s, died yesterday. I am very sad. And guilty: I suspect I killed it when I turned it downside up over the trash bin and shook it to get the crumbs out. I'm so sorry...

This toaster served me well for many, many years. About twenty of 'em, in fact. I bought it at the flagship Macy's in NYC (I lived in Brooklyn then), and I think I paid $39 for it, which was a lot for a basic toaster in those days but works out to only half a penny per day.

The plastic knob on the lever came off several years ago, but the lever still worked, so we kept using it. And the chrome finish, as you can see, has been no match for the humid ocean air here in Hilo. Even the shiniest bits are no longer very shiny. (Ignore, please, the streaks of flour dusting Hercules, perched to the left; I'm in the midst of making bread and haven't cleaned up yet.)

My husband has been dropping new toaster hints for some time now, but the grungier and more pathetic-looking this one got, the more loyal to it I became. It worked so well still, and I felt compelled to reward its stalwart service with continued use and appreciation.

But the dreaded day has finally come, and we have replaced it. Our new toaster is a KitchenAid, sleek and black and shiny, and it works fine, but I'm having a hard time warming up to it. It's from Macy's, too (the Hilo outpost, which we're glad to have in town, but which is much, much, smaller than the Herald Square store, with only three toaster models to choose from). I paid $50 dollars for this one (sale price). I wonder if I'll get 20 years of use from it....

Pineapple-Mango Upside Down Cake

I was all set to make an apple dessert the other day. But apples keep for close to forever in the fridge, whereas the white pineapple and a lone mango in my fruit dish were aging quickly and needed to be put to use soon or end up in the trash.

So I made a Pineapple-Mango Upsidedown Cake instead. As you can see, it's the kind of "cake" that is at its best spooned into a bowl and topped with the creamy dairy product of your choice. My husband ate his from a plate, with a fork, and without the topping, but I think he was missing out. I've tagged this post as both "breakfast" and "dessert" because the result has performed delectably in both functions.

There's no precise recipe for this, as I was in my typical slapdash baking mood, and didn't bother to measure anything. For those who are curious, here's my best guess at what I did:

1) Lavishly buttered a 9x13 baking dish.

2) Cut up approx. 4 cups combined fresh mango and pineapple, in roughly 1" pieces, which was extremely juicy so I set it in a strainer over a bowl to catch the juice. Went off to do something else for about 20 minutes, then put the drained fruit in the baking dish and sprinkled with two handfuls of macadamia nut pieces.

3) Added the reserved juice (1/3 C?) to some light brown sugar mixed with lemon juice and zest (which was loitering in the fridge as an uncooked syrup waiting for me to do something interesting with it; quantity is anyone's guess), and brought it all to a boil in a small saucepan to reduce for a few minutes. Don't ask me how long; I didn't time it. Stirred in about a tablespoon of unsalted butter and set it aside to cool slightly.

4) Cracked three eggs into the bowl of my stand mixer, added a splash of vanilla extract, and whipped on high with the whisk attachment, while drizzling in most of the sugar-juice syrupy stuff (still warm, but not so hot it would cook the eggs on contact). Let Hercules (my mixer) run for a few minutes, and drizzled the remaining syrup (a few TB) over the fruit.

5) When eggs were very light and foamy (though not greatly increased in volume, probably because the fruit syrup had a lot more moisture in it than straight sugar would have), I added about 3/4 C ww pastry flour and tapped in some baking powder straight from the cannister.

6) Ran the machine on medium briefly to mix it all up, then poured the batter over the fruit and baked at 360 for 40 minutes, until a lovely brown on top.

Experienced cooks will recognize this as a very haphazard sponge cake. The result was a very light, not too sweet cake with a delicate fruity aroma/flavor. The fruit was nicely cooked without disintegrating, and the whole thing was not overly juicy or mushy. I'll definitely take this approach again, although next time I might reduce the fruit syrup a bit more before adding to the eggs.

I doubt this would win any cooking awards, but for a slapdash effort it turned out extremely well. We've been enjoying it both as dessert and breakfast, with plain yogurt. It's the kind of dessert that is awesome warm from the oven with vanilla icecream, but that's not the sort of thing I keep in the house.