Super Soul Friday: My Grocery List

By the way, I'm rewatching Super Soul Sunday on OWN that's a rebroadcast of two episodes that aired back in June (I think) featuring India.Arie where she discusses her spiritual awakening.  I am the guy who watches Super Soul Sunday.  I think lessons can come from anywhere.  

My boyfriend thinks it's silly.  That's fine.  I love the tarot card readings.  I mediate while I'm running and I've been on a purge for the past three years of old ideas and ways of limited thinking.  I'm thinking of calling it "The Getting Rid of Things You Didn't Realize were Negative Thoughts" cleanse.  It's a whole body, whole spirit, whole mind cleanse.  It's a journey to be whole, actually.  

So in tribute to the episodes of Super Soul Sunday I'm rewatching and pausing intermittently while I type these blog posts, I am calling this series of posts "Super Soul Friday."

One of the things one does during a cleanse is they get rid of certain foods that are harmful.  If you're trying to connect to a deeper place, you start looking at the cleanse as a metaphor.  Where are other areas in my life where I have things I don't need or that are no longer useful?  Who or what is making me sluggish?  Why do I seek comfort in food?  What is it that I am running away from?  What are the bad behaviors I go back to when I need to feel comforted?

I have done various types of cleanses over the past three years.  One is a 21 day cleanse where you eat the whole time, but you cut a bunch of things out.  I left that cleanse almost three years ago cutting out caffeine from my diet.  I really have cut back coffee and caffeine from sodas.  I will have some mild green tea once in a while.  But I mainly do the caffeine free everything.  I'll have some chocolate...all right!

I just did a juice cleanse for three days, which was great.  I had amber pee after the first day after drinking a homemade greens juice.  I peed amber once.  Then the rest of the time it was clear.  It was important to see the toxins go out.  

I did massages for a year and a half every month.  That was cleansing.  I wanted to treat my body and take some time for myself while I was taking care of my Dad.

I go to Korean spas to steam and quiet the world.  

I turn off my radio wheneverI'm driving from LA to San Jose.

I'm finding myself much more comfortable in stillness.

But lately, I have really been trying to be focused on consciously eating.  The big lesson from the first cleanse was how thoughtless my eating was.  I would just put things in my mouth out of boredom.  And when my Dad was dying, my Mom and I would order in food every night.  I was rewarding myself and stuffing my grief with food.  Even after raising my awareness through cleanses.  I gained weight.  I couldn't get myself down.  I used to hover around 160-165.  At my heaviest (about four months ago) I was 190.  I'm 5'10".  That's a lot of weight for me.  Right now I'm just at 175.  

I'm not drinking juices. 

No pasta.

Less booze.

No processed foods.

Those four things, plus some more cardio have made a big difference.  Of course, I never say I'm never doing any of that stuff.  The caffeine I'm pretty good about.  But I don't want to deprive myself.  I love food.   I love the taste of it...real food.  

That was a long preamble to me discussing my grocery list, but I thought it was important to set the context.

I went grocery shopping tonight.

On a Friday.

Whooping it up!

I bought some things and I wanted to talk about why I bought them.

Does that seem crazy?

I've done crazier.  I don't just not do things because I think someone will think I'm nuts.

Here we go:

• Kale - last week it was spinach.  This week it's kale.  I'll probably saute it in some olive oil with some garlic, dried cranberries and slivered almonds.  Maybe I'll make a salad.  I'm trying to get those hard core greens into my diet.
• Hearts of Romaine - yeah, I love lettuce.  I put it on everything.  Lettuce wraps, salads, tostadas.  I love the crunch.
• Sprouted Wheat Tortillas - I love these.  I'm eating a burrito right now.  I use them to make flatbread pizzas.  They are amazing.
• Butternut squash (cut up) - Roasted.  Served with lentils.  Or with the kale dish.  I love it.
• Green onions - flavor.  I make fried rice at least once a week.  And to go on everything.
• Silvered almonds - ran out.  Need for a quinoa dish I make.  In my oatmeal.
• Red quinoa - love it.  I make a salad with cranberries, almonds, green onion, parsley, pomegranate vinegar and olive oil.  Lasts for a few days for a quick lunch.
• Green lentils - I made lentil soup the other night.  I want to make more lentil dishes.  I love lentils.
• Vegetable stock (low sodium) - a staple.  Can be used to flavor a bunch of different things.
• Veggie Burgers - I don't buy a lot of processed things and I can actually make my own veggie burgers, but they're good in a pinch.
• Asiago Cheese - for the flatbread pizzas I'm going to make this week.
• Black beans - a staple.  To toss in a quinoa salad.  To add to a burrito.  To make tostadas.
• Corn salsa - for a little sweetness.  A bit of a splurge.  But I used a bit in the chile verde burrito I just made.  Delish!
• Dark Chocolate Bar with carmel and sea salt - Total indulgence!  You have to have one or two.  I will eat the whole thing myself tonight while I'm watching more Super Soul Sunday.  I'm not sharing.  It makes me happy.

Why the hell am I sharing the contents of my shopping bag?  I don't know.  Just to keep myself accountable in a way.  But also, I'm trying to be aware of everything I'm putting into my body and why.  I love food and I love flavor.  That cannot be sacrificed.  But I want to only take in things that are good for me.  Listen, there's bacon in my fridge that I'm going to use on a pizza.  Or in a BLT.  But I did have a meat heavy week, so I'm trying to give myself a break.

tI want to be excited about the things I'm eating.  So detailing them gets me excited about what I'm going to make.  I have extra weight I don't need.  It's not purely an aesthetic issue.  I feel better when my body is functioning better.  I have friends who laugh at me (because they might be hiding their concern) when I said I had 25 pounds to lose (from 185).  But that's fair.  And now I have 15 pounds to lose.  It's not because I want to be thin.  It's because it's extra weight I don't need.

I have a friend or two these days who are extra weight.  I'm cutting back.

I have thoughts that I binge on every so often, but then I put them away.  And certain behaviors.

But it's all a negotiation.  If you eat something crappy for lunch, eat really healthy for dinner.  That's Bethenny Frankel's ideas, not mine.  See?  You can't be snobby about where you get your info.

I'm going to splurge for Thanksgiving.  I'm taking my Mom to my favorite place to get pasta when we go visit my brother in Portland.  I'm not limiting myself on that.  But I'm not wasting calories when I don't need to.

Maybe I should make a grocery list of friends and see who's absolutely necessary.

Fathers and Sons

I'm rewatching the documentary Step Up to the Plate on Netflix.  It's about a father and son, Michel and Sebastien Bras.  Michel's passing on his namesake restaurant to Sebastien and planning on retiring. Oddly enough, it's somewhat familiar territory for my pilot about a family of chefs in San Francisco.  Watching this complicated relationship between father and son is riveting to me,  mainly because I lived my own complicated relationship with my father growing up.  And looking back at it, it was somewhat competitive.  Not in a conscious way.  But Dad and I were competing because he knew that I had more of a capacity for greatness than he did.  Interestingly, I decided not to say he thought I was smarter than he was because I didn't want to sound insulting.  But somehow I managed to be even more insulting by saying I had more of a "capacity for greatness."  (And language.)

There's this great scene where both chefs are trying to explain to their staff how they want service to go that evening.  And they are both contradicting each other.  I love it for its simplicity and laid-bare truth. Then right after they contradict each other, Sebastien has to go get something from the kitchen and Michel defends him in explaining how the wait staff should explain the dishes.  He says that they worked on the poetry of the descriptions together, so the staff shouldn't muck it up.  So in the span of 20 seconds, they go from bickering to the father protecting the son.  That sounds like a true father/son relationship to me.

The family later explains that when Michel built his restaurant (which eventually went from one to three Michelin stars), his wife worked with him in the kitchen initially and then became the hostess.  

The lesbian couple, Pilar and Cate will have the same relationship.  And that this was passed on from Danny (the patriarch) having the same relationship with his ex-wife, Mona.

Diego, the youngest, who is running the restaurant at the top of the pilot is not married.  And this is a point of contention between father and son.  Danny believes that he needs a balance, a partner to help him.  Someone he trusts more than anyone.

Danny and Mona's relationship fell apart when she told him she wanted a life beyond the restaurant.  Once she was no longer in the intimate sphere of his life at work, she became an outsider.  And that created room for him to find other people to be loyal to him.  He saw her need for a life outside of him to be an act of betrayal.

Alex, the oldest son, is divorced.  And he needs to either reconcile with his wife or find someone new.  But until then, his mother will step in.  It gets a bit Oedipal.  

I love this scene where Sebastien is composing a dish and his sous follows behind him with the next element and they have this dance where they follow each other putting the next element on.  It's unspoken and completely shows their relationship to each other of absolute trust.

There's this sequence at the end of the film where Michel is looking out into the field, at twilight (bordering on heavy handedness), questioning his decision to hand over the restaurant.  He laments over the way Sebastien and his guys handle the harvest.  You can see the pain in him that he's got to leave a part of himself behind.  And it's not about ego, but it is such a part of who he is.  It's his legacy, what his son will have to do one day when his son, Alban, inevitably takes over.  Alban is probably six or seven in this documentary.  But it is already clear that the next generation is being groomed, even though Sebastien tells his grandparents that his son will be allowed to make his own decisions.  The grandmother tells him that he needs to make sure he follows in Sebastien's footsteps.

Probably the most beautiful sequence (besides Michel in the field) is when Sebastien is working on this desert he has been working on for the entire documentary.  He tried it one way at the start of the film.  They go to Japan and he tries it with Japanese ingredients.  Then he comes back and is working on it again.  This time he has simplified it to its most basic elements.  But then you flash to his grandparents kitchen and you see the grandmother working with the same milk skin and some chocolate on a piece of bread.  Back in the kitchen, Michel asks Sebastien what he is working on.

"It's the story of my life."

He explains the components of the dish.   The blackberry preserves and the cheese are from his mother.  The chocolate and the milk skin are from his grandmother.  He needs something that brings the savory into it because that represents him.  He hasn't yet figured out the story of his life on this plate.

Then you cut to a demonstration he's giving and he's got three dishes that now tell the story of his life.  He has broken it out.  There's a slow baked onion that is hollowed out and filled with some sort of goat cheese mixed with a chive vinaigrette.  Then you have the milk skin fried up and curled up with some blackberry gelee.  And a bunch of flowers around it--those represent his father and his mother and his grandmother.  Then there's an egg filled with a white substance that is topped with shaved chocolate.

It's this coda at the end that tells the story of his life in such a poetic way.  And the end of the film is Michel and his wife cooking dinner with Alban, while Sebastien watches.  In that moment, he looks at his son with his father, but he also flashes back to himself when he was young.

That is the story of his life.

My father would have been 70 in two days.  My father gave me my love of food.  He gave me my curiosity and my boldness about it.  I will try anything.  I am adventurous.  I associate one's willingness to try new things with their intelligence, their upbringing and how cultured they are.  In other words, I am a harsh judge when it comes to people and food.  Just like my Dad.  I don't like to have a lot of judgment about people, but that is something I can't let go of.  It's hard for me to get real close to you if you have a limited relationship with food or if you aren't open to new things.  I think it really speaks to someone's character.  It's just food.  You can try it and spit it out.  But in my estimation, you can't not try it.  That says something about you and your relationship to the world.

My mother and I (who is the only person in my life who I reserve judgment over in her unwillingness to try anything new) are going to have dim sum in my father's honor for his birthday.  I might even eat chicken feet in his honor.  I think watching Step Up to the Plate has brought back so many memories of me and my Dad.  It's also the core of why I'm writing this pilot.  The father/son relationship drives me.  Every time I have a great food experience: if I cook something great, if I try a new restaurant, if I geek out about a food product--I want to share that with my Dad.  It's a part of me that I LOVE and that doesn't come from my mother.  It comes solely from him.  Both of my Grandmothers were incredible cooks, so it's nice that it's in the bloodline.  But my Mom hates cooking.  I love food.  

I made fried rice earlier.  It's a food that I sustained myself on when I was living in New York and a broke grad student.  It's a food that I've eaten all of my life.  My father's fried rice was the best.  He made it with char siu, chinese barbecued pork.  Green onions.  Egg.  I have made it myself many ways.  I had it with smoked bacon once in a restaurant and decided that would be a great substitute for the char siu.  I've done it without meat and substituted tofu.  I love to douse it with Tabasco when it's piping hot.   It gets steamy and vinegary.  I love that smell and taste.  Sometimes I'll do chili garlic sauce.  I made it today and I didn't have any meat or tofu.  I could have just done egg.  Then I saw that we had left over hot dogs.  I threw it in.  That would have been a very Dad choice.  He would have used Spam if he had it because he was from Hawaii.  And sliced up hot dogs seemed very Hawaiian to me as well.  I stirred it up and saw the hot dog get charred a bit.  I love that dish.  Even though I make it with brown rice now.  I'm not a fan of white rice unless I'm making it with leftover rice from a chinese takeout dinner.  Then it's economical and I'm repurposing.  Otherwise, it's brown rice for me.

I don't like going to grave sites to visit people.  I hate looking at tombstones because I find it pointless.  I'm visiting a site where a body is decaying or has completely disintegrated into the soil.  And my Dad was cremated, so there isn't anywhere to visit him.  My grandmother is buried at a cemetery, but I don't go that often.  I like to remember them through stories or through the food they cooked: my Grandmother's enchiladas, posole or tamales at Christmas time; or my Dad's fried rice, his tomato beef (or Beef Tomato, as he called it) or a fried egg on top of a steaming bowl of rice with soy sauce sprinkled on it for breakfast.  But the things that I eat that I remember my Dad for the most are the things he'd go out for: Del Taco hard shell tacos (only on Tuesdays when they're a steal), dim sum, pastrami sandwiches, pate, steaks, corned beef hash.  I love all food, like I love all people: high-end, low-end, rich, poor, of all ethnicities, flavors and persuasions.  That's how my Dad rolled and that's what he taught me.

There's going to be scenes where the family is cooking both inside and outside the restaurant.  Food is another character in this script--their relationship to it reflects their relationship with each other in all of its ambivalence and love for all of it.  This is a story of legacy and how a father knew that the only thing he could give his children was a love of food and that love would give them their values and a sense of who they were.

On a plate, he presented me with The Story of My Life.