• Turkey / Chipotle Chili

    I’ve yet to try anything chipotle I didn’t love. I’ve bought chipotle powder by the pound and recently tried buying whole chipotles (now by the pound as well). My favorite source is myspicesage on the internet (good to know if you live in the boondocks).

    My process has two major steps –  1) cook the beans and whole chiles; roast the onions and fresh jalapenos then 2) assembly.

    Day One (or in the morning)

    Weigh out 1 lb pinto beans; wash and put in slow cooker. Add 8 whole chipotle peppers, 2–3 peeled garlic cloves and 3 or 4 other dried chiles of whatever variety you have lying around. Cover with water about 2x as deep as the solids, cook on high setting until the beans are tender –  usually takes about 6 hours for me. I start testing them about hour 5 and make sure there is enough water to cover everything.

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    Set oven to 375 F. Halve and peel 2 large onions, leaving on the roots. I cut them into about 4 sections, still joined at the roots. Wash 4–6 fresh jalapenos. Put in a baking dish, roast for an hour. Your kitchen is going to acquire a beautiful odor.

    Day Two (or when the beans are ready)

    I use my wok, but any large pot with good heat distribution will do. Have at hand:

    • Ground cumin
    • 2 cups or so of riced roasted tomatoes
    • 3 pounds of ground turkey (probably any ground meat will work)
    • The roasted aromatics
    • The cooked pintos and chiles
    • Salt. Non-iodized if you’re planning on canning.

    Chop the roasted onions (time to get rid of the roots) and jalapenos (remove the stems. Don’t remove the seeds – too much flavor there). I like them rough chopped for a rustic look.

    Put the onions and jalapenos in your pot over medium heat. Break up the ground meat over the veg, cover and cook 15 mins or so. Open, stir, recover and cook until the turkey is cooked through.

    While this is happening, rice the roasted tomatoes. Pick the chiles and garlic out of the beans. Mush the garlic. Remove the stems from the chiles and tear them apart. Again, I like it rustic.

    Once the meat is cooked, pour the tomato / chile / garlic mix over the meat. Add a big palmful of ground cumin. Pour in the cooked pintos. Heat through, stir, let simmer for 15 mins or so. Salt to taste.

    Dig in. I’ve made this over and over and it always comes out around 26 calories per ounce.

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    Paleo? Leave out the beans. You’ll need to braise and soften the chipotles somehow.


  • Sweet Potato Bread Pudding

    When it’s time for dessert…

    • 1 1/2 cups whole milk
    • 1 cup cooked sweet potato, mashed
    • 1/2 cup sugar (or more wholesome Sucanat)
    • 2 large eggs and 1 yolk
    • 1/2 teaspoon salt
    • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
    • 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
    • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
    • 2 tablespoons bourbon or dark rum (optional)
    • 5 cups cubed day-old brioche (or other bread)
    • 3/4 stick unsalted butter, melted

     

    1. Preheat oven to 350F degrees.

    2. In a large bowl, stir together milk, sweet potato, sugar, eggs, yolk, salt, spices and bourbon/rum.

    3. In another bowl, toss bread with butter, then fold in sweet potato mix and gently stir to coat. Transfer to an ungreased 8-inch square baking dish and bake until custard is set, around 25 to 30 minutes. Alternately, use a springform pan, the dessert can then be unmolded for a more cake-like presentation that is a bit more elegant.

    4. Serve with whipped cream or ice cream (or clotted cream or mascarpone) sprinkled with extra cinnamon.

    Source


  • “Thanksgiving All Year” Turkey Burgers

    Image

    Ground turkey is a staple around here, especially in burger form. One of the challenges for turkey burgers is keeping them from being dry. We’re pretty fond of this recipe with an Asian twist, but – variety is the spice of life, right?

    It’s fall, and my mind turned to turkey and stuffing, then to the fact I don’t really want stuffing, just the yummy spices and veggies, so…

    In a large mixing bowl, combine:

    • 5 whole organic eggs
    • Stuffing spices – I used sage, thyme, oregano, fresh grated black pepper, marjoram, & rosemary all crushed with a mortar and pestle
    • 1/2 tsp salt
    • 8 ounces of grated organic apple (apples are currently  #1 on the Dirty Dozen list)

    Pour in the cooled onion / celery mix. Add ~50 ounces of ground turkey and squish it all together with your nice clean hands.

    I measure the burgers out 5 oz at a time with my kitchen scale, put them on cookie sheets (with sides) and bake at 350 for 20 minutes, then transfer them to a grill on medium heat to finish them off.

    They were outstanding…


  • 2012 Summer Sierra Peak Bagging

    We rock climb so much that I’ve basically been moving from one injury to another.

    I recently became aware of a concept called “resting and taking time off from climbing” that many an online climbing blogger claims has some benefit in terms of injury avoidance and getting stronger in the long run. I know, right?

    OK, but what’s a person to do if they’re not climbing? Oh, yeah, how about hiking some Sierra canyons and climbing some peaks. It is summer after all, and high season for the aforementioned activities. Plus, we’re in pretty good shape!

    20120808122005 sierragoodell

    Tioga Peak (11,526′)

    Arriving in Tioga Pass late in the evening in early July, we decided to try a hike from our “Tioga Tramps” guidebook, parked and headed up to Gardisky Lake. From the lake, looking up and to the south, there’s an easy Class 1 scramble to the top of Tioga Peak, so we headed up. The “easy” part would be if one had done any high altitude (>10,000 feet) hiking anytime recently. No matter, slow and steady usually overcomes most any obstacle, and before too long we were at the top with a pretty awesome view of the Tioga Pass area.

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    More Tioga Peak pictures.

     

    Continue reading  Post ID 660


  • Damn You, Rotator Cuff – LFMF

    “Generally speaking, pain is what makes the body a particularly important concern for the individual” – A.J. Vetlesen

    “Yes. Now that my fill_in_the_blank hurts less, I’ll probably stop doing what I did to make fill_in_the_blank feel better – until it hurts more again. Rinse and repeat…” –  Me

    The shoulder is a marvel of range of motion + ability to apply force in many different directions. When it all works, it’s awesome. When it gets sore –  different story.

    I suppose I’ve done everything I could to damage my shoulder – 1) years of playing tennis wherein the only thing I really liked to do was serve as hard as I could then get to the net for a volley –  long ground stroke rallies are for the patient. 2) more years of playing volleyball wherein the things I liked to do most were serve as hard as I could and then spike the ball hard whenever I got the chance.

    And now 3) I’ve taken up rock climbing and hard (for me) bouldering, which puts another severe load on the shoulder, although it’s more pulling and pushing rather than a throwing motion.

    Long story short, one shoulder is sore (I’m right handed so there’s a clue which one) and I’m now forced to take care of it.

    After a couple Google searches and a conversation with my soft tissue repair guy (whom I can’t recommend highly enough; he’s repaired me many, many times over the past 7 years), I’ve settled into this (almost) daily routine:

    1. Internal rotation, external rotation, scapular retraction exercises –  all with strength bands of various resistance levels. At the moment the external rotation is very weak and painful, but getting better. 2012/05/28 update – external rotation is now pain free at low weights; big improvement. Now I have to not overdo it on weight or reps per the article below…
    2. Shoulder flexor exercises by doing push-ups. Thanks to Alyssa’s sharing of this article, I now know how effective push-ups are for shoulder rehab.
    3. Bat wings
    4. Supraspinatus and Subscapularis lift. Stand holding a light pair of dumbbells in front of your thighs, palms facing each other. Keeping your thumbs pointed up, raise your arms up at a 30-degree angle to your torso until just above shoulder height. Hold for 1 second, and lower to the starting position. Do 2 sets of 8 to 10 repetitions.
    5. Scapular wall slides
    6. Light dumbbell military presses.
    7. Lots of ROM stretches
    8. Foam roller sessions to release the lats.
    9. Yoga stretches

    And, eat a low-inflammatory diet, take fish oil daily, get lots of sleep, and – probably most important of all – work on climbing endurance more often than climbing power until it all settles down.

    Examples of shoulder articulations.

    It all seems to be working (it was up until a couple days ago when I applied my “if some is good, a lot more must be a lot better” mantra, anyway). Please do your own research…

    I’d also like to hear what’s working for you in the Comments section below!

    Namaste, Rick

    P.S. – 2012/05/28 – found a nice T-Nation article on sore shoulders.

    P.P.S. – 2012/09/18 – found a good Men’s Health video on the “The Surprising NFL Shoulder Exercise”.


  • Yosemite Winter Climbing Weekend with Mat

    20120203YosemitewithMat 3up

    As has become usual for trips with Mat, short notice, late night driving and camping, big fun and outstanding results.

    I made a nice HD video of the funs. It’s HD, so if you’re on a slow Internet connection, you’ll need to let the video buffer or it will stutter and restart. Here’s an explanation of how to enjoy HD videos on the Internet.

    This time, the weather looked good for a trip to Yosemite NP –  unseasonably warm and dry –  sucks for our future water supply; works wonders for winter climbing trips. We spent our climbing time at Pat and Jack Pinnacle –  an excellent crag to learn to deal with Yosemite cracks and slabs.

    Climbs:

    • Knob Job, 5.10b trad, 4 stars, Mat led it twice, Carol and I followed twice. I haven’t yet gotten it clean; plan to go back and run laps on it until it goes clean and I’m ready to lead it.
    • Boneheads, 5.10b sport, 4 stars, Carol led it, I followed twice, Mat followed. The crux is right off the ground on slabby moves, be prepared to smear your climber onto the rock if they fall before the first bolt –  there are ankle-breaking rocks in the LZ.
    • Babble On, 5.10a trad, 2 stars (can’t imagine this rating, it looks like awesome fun), Mat led, Carol followed and cleaned. More adventure maybe than she planned on, as she slipped and fell under the roof  and found herself having to self rescue by ascending with Prusiks to get back up on the climb. Well done, Carol. I did not follow in deference to my sore shoulder –  the climb looks really physical.
    • Golden Needles, 5.8 trad, 3 stars, I led the bottom pitch which goes at 5.7 (we saw the second pitch; looked burly and I chose to come back another day, again in deference to my shoulder). I had a couple firsts here:
      • – about 5 placements up, I looked up and realized I didn’t have enough hand-sized gear for the rest of the pitch, so I lowered, got more gear then reclimbed.
      • –  I encountered maybe 10–15 feet of verticalish, pure crack –  I had to place gear with hands and feet in the crack –  a first for me and a real confidence booster.

    We wanted to get back on Sherrie’s Crack, 5.10c, but it was busy whenever we were in the area. Climbers were running laps on it and trading off leads –  some real inspirational stuff.

    Speaking of inspirational –  guy and gal are there; she’s running laps on Sherrie’s Crack while we’re doing our Knob Job thing. Once we’re off, she gears up to lead Knob Job; the guy starts backing slowly down the hill to get to the belay spot. I detect that something’s amiss; turns out October last he took a whipper on some Yosemite pinnacle, broke his patella (kneecap), had surgery to repair. He showed me the big scar and swollen knee –  and next I know he’s going to follow his partner on Knob Job. As he puts it, “I can climb cracks, because I lead with the good leg, stand up and drag the bad leg, then place it in the crack while I move my good leg up again.” Wow.

    We’ll be revisting this crag frequently to work those cracks and slabs –  our climbing gym is excellent for learning to face climb, but slab and crack climbing opportunities are sparse.

    Thanks to Mat for proposing the trip and getting us out and about!!!

    Namaste, Rick


  • Viewing HD Video on the Web

    You may have found that Internet videos sometimes don’t play cleanly –  that is, they start and stop and stutter. I’m going to talk about how to fix that problem.

    When you watch a video “on the Internet”, what’s actually happening is that the video has to be downloaded to your computer before viewing. Don’t worry, Windows (or Mac or Android or whatever) will discard the video file after you’re done; you don’t have to do anything.

    When you start the video, you’ll see at the bottom left a little “progress bar”. The number is the time into the video; the little green bar shows how much video has been downloaded. As long as the green bar is ahead (to the right) of the time, the video will play smoothly. The best strategy is to wait for the green bar to get at least half way before playing; otherwise you’ll probably experience some “stuttering” where the video stops and starts over and over.

    Smugmughdbar

    Another tip for enjoying HD video is to make the video “Full Screen” – to do this, click the little icon in the lower RH corner:

    Smugmugfullscreenbutton

    This will expand the video to full screen on your PC. Don’t worry, to switch back, you press the “Esc” key on your computer keyboard.

    Happy Viewing!


  • Things that go fast – Laptop Edition – Round Two

    A couple years ago, I wrote about upgrading my laptop from an HDD to an SSD. The change in performance was awesome, but the longevity of that particular SSD – not so much. Long story short, the SSD bricked, I went through the replacement process, then discovered that software encryption does not work on an SSD. There’s a technical explanation for this if you care to go down that particular rabbit hole.

    I have a self-imposed requirement of full encryption on any laptop I travel with –  two words: “identity theft”. The issue at hand is that if your laptop is stolen, even assuming you have Windows passwords, etc., it’s a pretty simple matter to pull the drive out, mount it and read all the data on it. Unacceptable.

    Before moving on to the result of the new SSD upgrade, I’ll spend a few words on “Why you would care” (above and beyond the onboard encryption)…

    Computer Subsystems

    The picture above shows the major subsystems of a computer –  PC / Mac / iPhone, supercomputer, whatever, all have rough equivalents.

    • CPU –  the brains of the outfit; where all the thinking goes on.
    • Memory –  AKA RAM, AKA fast and expensive, this is where the information needed for the things you are working on or looking at right now (like on your desktop) is stored. Important point –  the information in RAM disappears when the computer is turned off. That’s why you’re prompted to “save work” when you’re shutting down or restarting your computer.
    • Video Card –  processes the information needed to change what you’re looking at on a computer screen.
    • Hard Disk –  the computer equivalent of a file cabinet or library. Information that you need kept for the long term is stored here. I’ll insert an editorial comment here  –  if there’s information (pictures, videos, spreadsheets, letters, etc) that is really important to you, you’ll have a backup copy of that information in some safe place.
    • Motherboard –  ties everything together and provides lines of communication between the subsystems, including, but not shown, your mouse / touchpad / keyboard.

    All of these subsystem components are currently running at speeds such that individual events happen in a range of .000000001 second or less – except the hard drive, where things happen in the .001 second range – in other words, the hard disk is the horse and buggy at the Indy car race. An SSD, being fully electronic, gets long term storage back in the race.

    OK, lots of technical verbiage –  here are a list of things that will happen much faster on an SSD system vs an HDD system:

    • “Boot” time –  from when you turn your computer on until it’s ready for you do something. On my laptop, this went from over a minute down to 21 seconds.
    • Installing a program
    • Launching a program
    • Tagging pictures
    • Editing videos
    • Backing up your hard drive

    Bottom line –  your computer will ‘feel’ far faster overall in every circumstance that involves the drive.

    Back to the upgrade –  two things have happened since a couple years ago –  1) Intel produced a secure solution, and 2) I’m home with time to mess with a laptop.

    I installed the new Intel SSD, did a clean Windows 7 install (from a thumb drive, what an improvement that is!), and set up the BIOS HDD password. Then I downloaded 64–bit benchmarking software from PassMark and ran the tests on the old system (HDD) and the new system (SSD). The  resulting awesomeness in chart form:

    Graph

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The most important number to you is the ‘Random R/W’ number –  a more than 50 times improvement. At first I thought “there must be some mistake” –  until I remembered that the HDD is the equivalent of buggy-whip technology in a computer. HDD technology was invented in the early 1950’s, and although optimized to the nth degree by the subsequent 60 years of development, still remains dependent on rotating disks and moving arms –  and mechanical things cannot physically move at the speeds of electronic circuitry.

    Armed with that, plus a little cross-referencing on other testers’ results, and –  I’m good with that number.

    Bottom line –  the single biggest change in performance for that aging laptop or desktop system might well be to get rid of that HDD and replace it with an SSD –  and if you also require the security of drive encryption, at least consider the Intel 320 series.

    Namaste, Rick

    P.S. –  if you happen to be thinking about a new laptop, be sure to consider the new Ultrabooks, a little competion for the MacBook Air…

    P.P.S. –  this my first blog entry edited entirely offline. MUCH more pleasurable. Thanks, Amy!!!

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  • Cinnamon Nutmeg Spiced Roasted Nuts

    nutmeg seeds

    We first had home made roasted nuts courtesy of our friend Amy – so good we had to try them ourselves.

    A few words about spices – spices are Real Food ® and therefore have a shelf life – if you use cinnamon and nutmeg from those bottles leftover from the 20th Century, the results will not be the same – use only the freshest spices.

    Preheat oven to 250 degrees.

    • 1/4 c sugar – or less turns out OK for us
    • 50 g egg whites (about 1/4 cup)
    • 1/2 tsp salt (or less)
    • 1 whole nutmeg seed, grated with a fine microplane
    • 1 heaping Tbsp of ground cinnamon

    Mix this all together in a large bowl – this mixture will be used to coat the nuts.

    • 2 lb of raw nuts – my favorite mix is 1 lb walnuts + 1 lb almonds. I imagine any two pounds of nuts and seeds you can throw together will turn out fine.

    Use a spatula to turn the nuts, coating them well. Turn out onto 2 cookie sheets and pat down to a single layer.

    Put the cookie sheets into the 250 degree oven for 1/2 hour. Remove and stir the nuts. Put back in the oven for another 1/2 hour. Remove and cool. Ready to eat.

    Bonus! 3 cups of roasted spiced nuts run through the food processor until ground to a paste makes about a pint of the best nut butter I’ve found…