I have two thoughts after completing my first triathlon. First, you only get one shot at writing about your first triathlon, so it better be good and second, a marathoner does not a triathlete make!
Author: Ed Hart
For Laree & my Date Night Dinner this week, we basically combined a series of appetizers into a meal. I got inspired for this by a couple of things. First of all, how often have you fixed a killer appetizer that was so good you weren’t hungry for the main course after eating it all up? Happens to us all the time. And with all the spring time fruits and vegetables hitting their peak, I wanted a smorgasbord of fresh and healthy flavors that would satisfy and celebrate the beginning of summer and kind of balance each other out and create a full meal.
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Spelt Flour Pancakes
One of my favorite breakfasts is pancakes, especially after an early long run on Saturday morning. Even then though, I’m not fired up about all the processed and refined flour, so I’ve been experimenting with other options for my pancake fix. Here’s my latest creation using spelt flour (made to server me and 3 hungry children, you can decrease or increase proportionately).
Seems that I’ve tumbled across more articles lately about how bad sugar is for you. I’m not sure if it’s just what I happen to be reading or if there’s a sudden surge of publicity about the negative effects of sugar, but it’s gotten me to really think about how much sugar, particularly refined sugar, I’m ingesting every day.
I love a good café latte, but I’ve been going broke paying $3 and $4 a pop every time I go to the local coffee shop, and that’s just for a tall! So I decided to try and figure out how to make the perfect café latte at home. I’ve tried in the past to make my own (since I’m a die hard do-it-yourselfer), but I could never seem to get the system down to make a really smooth latte at home. They were ok, but tended to be a little bitter and just didn’t have the same verve as the ones from the local coffee shop. There had to be more to it than money!
One of my favorite post run meals is pancakes. There’s just nothing like coming in from a long run after getting up at an insanely early hour (on a weekend of all days!) and whipping up a big stack of pancakes with blueberries, raspberries or whatever fresh berries we happen to have on hand.
So in my continual quest to improve my nutrition, I thought it might be a good idea to make my pancakes out of something other than Bisquick. So after perusing Whole Foods for different flour options, I decided to give it a go with organic brown rice flour with interesting results!
First lesson in this project is that brown rice flour is not all purpose flour. I tried to make pancake mix similar to what I’d do with wheat flour:
- 2 Cups flour
- 1 Tablespoons of Baking Powder
- 1 Teaspoons of Salt
- 1/3 Cup Butter (unsalted)
- 1 Cup Milk
- 2 Eggs
- about a cup of Frozen Mixed Berries
The results were less than spectacular. The brown rice flour had a grainier texture and totally stuck to the (well greased) pan. The consistency was notably more runny than my regular flour recipe and that’s probably because of the lack of gluten, but I need to figure that one out.
So I opted for plan B, waffles. Again working from the recipe that I know (off the back of the Bisquick box), I added some Canola Oil (2 Tbs) and an extra egg, thinking that might help the consistency a little more when cooking.
The mixture was still pretty soupy, but did cook up pretty well in the waffle iron. After topping my waffles with some Greek Yogurt and local honey, I have to say that they were really good. I’ll probably try and refine this recipe a bit, but it’s one that I’m definitely going to try again!
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Fried Eggs Over Easy, Kicked up a Notch
I’ve started complimenting my morning smoothie with a couple of eggs, particularly as my marathon training has intensified and I’ve been trying to intake more protein.
But eggs by themselves can be rather bland in both taste and appearance, and so I like to kick my eggs up a notch with some sea salt, crushed red pepper, cracked black pepper, parsley flakes and (if I have any on hand, some percorino romano cheese) so that I can feel like I’m in a quaint bed & breakfast somewhere cool rather than in a hurry to get out the door to work.
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An Amazing Mango Black Bean Salsa
I’m not exactly sure where this recipe originated otherwise I’d give credit to the genius that concocted it! We had this salsa last weekend and it is totally awesome. This recipe is the most recent addition to my list of healthy snacks to keep on hand along with hummus and good old regular salsa.
- 16oz canned black beans, drained & washed (1 can)
- 2 Mangoes, peeled & coarsely chopped
- 1/2 Cup finely chopped Red Onion
- 1 Jalapeno, stemmed, seeded and finely diced
- 1/2 Cup coarsely chopped Cilantro
- 1/2 Cup fresh Lime Juice
- 1/4 Cup Olive Oil
- Salt & freshly ground White Pepper
Combine the first 7 ingredients in a bowl. Season to taste with salt & white pepper.
This salsa gets better the longer it sits as the flavors blend together. The hardest part of this recipe is cutting up the mango. If you’ve never cut one up before, the seed is shaped more or less like a disc and runs up and down, so the best strategy is to peel it first and then slice it lengthwise down the side trying to get as much of the flesh as possible. It’s kind of like filleting a fish, so get the two sides off then try as best you can to slice the rest of the flesh around the seed.
The other thing that really makes this salsa visually appealing (that’s every bit as important as the taste of the dish itself!) is to wash the black beans after draining them. Otherwise you’ll end up with a kind of gray residue that takes a little of the vibrancy out of the dish.
The recipe calls for white pepper, but you can use whatever you have on hand. But the white pepper does have a different taste and compliments this dish perfectly, so if you’ve got it, I recommend using it over black or telicherry.
Enjoy and let me know what you think if you try it!
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Sasha Dichter’s Generosity talk on TED
I was intrigued by Seth Godin’s blog post today, so I clicked the link to Sasha Dichter’s TED presentation entitled The Generosity Experiment. I would encourage you to watch & then peruse the comments.
The gist of the talk was his commitment to saying “yes” for a month to anyone who asks for a handout or financial help. The video discusses the impact of this experiment on himself in the context of the work that Acumen fund does.
The whole concept hits me squarely in the sweet spot of my own personal quest of investing my own life, passion & skills in something that has a sense of purpose and meaning (granted that the specifics of what that means are different for everyone).
I wasn’t all that familiar with Acumen fund, but am aware of similar investment funds and that’s something that I love to see happening. I found Sasha’s talk quite inspiring & was curious to the reactions in the comments on the presentation page (again, worth looking at). There are a number of good points that people brought up that pretty much fit into the typical responses to giving people handouts on the street, many of which I think are totally legitimate questions that people have to work through. I remember being in church leadership a few years ago and asking a lot of the same when trying to determine how we were going to handle our relatively small ministry budget.
However the point that struck me most was the idea of trajectory. It seems that the whole idea behind the generosity experiment for Sasha was to change his personal trajectory from habitual avoidance of those around him in need to habitual sensitivity to the issue. It’s not so much about “should I give some money to this particular person” as it is about cultivating an attitude of generosity.
I think it’s easy, when considering a talk like this or similar discussions in a church or other organization, to hear a “system” instead of a journey. “Well,” I may argue, “if I give money to someone, I may be inadvertently supporting the heroine trade because all they’re going to do is to buy drugs.” There are a couple of implicit assumptions in this kind of reasoning. First, there’s the assumption that if I help a particular person in a particular way, that I’m always going to do it the same way. Second that the person on the receiving end is going to always do a particular thing and react in a particular way every time (or at least more often than not). There’s the assumption that there exists a particular right or wrong way to deal with similar circumstances and that there exists some sort of systematized approach or methodology that should be used.
However, I think that line of reasoning, while making good arguments in the abstract, is faulty because they assume consistency of methodology. Instead, the whole point is that by changing a habit, Sasha felt himself becoming more attuned to the needs of those around him and his own capacity for having a generous heart (at least that’s what I took from it), not that his experiment was going to determine his methodology forever.
Just like a child learning to walk, one has to try and stumble before maturing and accomplishing. It’s the trajectory of change that’s important. Because we crave formulas, there’s little room for the idea of organic growth as we engage, attempt, help, are taken advantage of, learn, connect. The problem is that while we are often well intentioned, it is just as often that it is to a point. After which it gets messy because you have gone past checking the charity box to engaging another human being with a complex set of issues. We must each ask ourselves how far we’re willing to go, a question who’s answer is highly individualistic.
Exercising the capacity and desire to help someone is a complex thing. Our motivations have as much variation as the circumstances in which they manifest action. Will copiers of the Generosity Experiment do something wrong? Probably. Will we get taken advantage of? Sure. Will we do some genuine good and make a difference? There’s a pretty good chance of it. Will we experience and learn things that we wouldn’t have possibly known without having taken the journey? We will never know unless we try.
Since I’m spending a lot of time sitting these days, I picked up Daniel Pink’s book Drive and started to read. This is the second time, actually, that I’ve tried to read this book. Picked it up at the library the first time and got a few pages into the introduction before it got buried underneath some other books I was reading at the time.
However, I have gotten past the intro and the first chapter and am realizing what a provocative book this is. So far, I’m delighted and anxious to continue reading, having much the same emotional response to Pink’s book as I did to Sir Ken Robinson’s book, The Element.
Pink’s assertion up front is that “too many organizations still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.” Those assumptions being based on what he terms Motivation 2.0, the industrial revolution era theories still very much in vogue in corporate America that external rewards and punishments are the principal drivers of human behavior.
Pink posits, based on a number of research studies and experiments in behavioral science, that the nature of our economy is changing the way work is done. To probably oversimplify, outsourcing of algorithmic work tasks and similar automation of others enabled by computer technology is resulting in a rapid growth of more heuristic work (work that requires creative thinking and innovation). However, the old school system of rewards and punishments, the carrots and sticks that corporate managers love to talk about, actually lead to reduced performance and actually undermine the goals that they are supposedly in place to achieve.
Like Robinson (and Lisa Gansky in The Mesh), Pink is keyed into the revolution happening all around us as years of economic crisis are forcing real human questions about wealth, possessions, the debt it took to acquire them, meaning and purpose of work and social consciousness and how these trends are re-shaping work and business in the 2010 decade.
So far, so good. Where I’m finding this book most helpful, a few chapters into it now, is in articulating some of what I’ve experienced personally, but not quite been able to turn into words.