I’m really really really looking forward to this year. Greg says he doesn’t really notice the difference between December 31st and January 1st, except for stores being closed and traffic being more hellish, but I LOVE this particular holiday and it feels very significant to me. It’s a whole new year! It’s a year I’ve never seen, filled with entirely new adventures! I love it!

As we were driving up, Jason said, “Is that a refurbished ambulance?”, and sure enough, it was. TEN KINDS OF BRILLIANT.

We asked the woman how she got the idea. “I really wanted some kind of mobile coffee business, and I looked on Craigslist and here this was, so I bought it. It’s been great.”

To get to the actual coffee, you walk around to the back, and she’s got the whole set-up:

That’s Beth and Jason, waiting for their treats. The woman running the place was actually sitting down, on a stool. She just rolled from place to place within the vehicle, over to the cups, then over to the espresso machine, then over to the syrups. And what was she wearing? Scrubs, of course.

The link above goes to the original recipe, and here I’ve reprinted it as I made it, with notes as to what I changed:

Green Goddess Hummus

14 oz can chickpeas (I didn’t have any 19 oz. cans)
2 cloves garlic (mine tasted far too garlicky with 3 cloves, but my cloves were fairly large, too)
3 tbsp tahini (2 wasn’t enough for me)
1/4 cup lemon juice 1/4 – 1/2 tsp cayenne
5 oz fresh spinach (wondering what 5 ounces of fresh spinach looks like? see this photo)
salt to taste

Drain the chickpeas, and reserve the liquid.*

Stick all the rest into the cuisinart, and blend it up. Add back the liquid a couple tablespoons at a time, to get it to the level of smoothness that looks good to you. Serve it with pita wedges (I did this, it’s delicious!), or with vegetables for dipping. I’m sure I’ll be making this again, Greg loved it too, and it’s a great way to sneak some greens in.

Here’s what mine looked like:

*I drained the chickpeas and tossed the liquid. This was pure carelessness, I just didn’t read ahead – Carolin advises reserving it and adding it back later to make the hummus smooth, which is the best idea. I ended up adding a tablespoon of olive oil to smooth it out, but next time I’ll use the reserved liquid.

Unfortunately they’ve turned out horribly, most of them getting burned because I either couldn’t hear the timer going off over the background music of Spore (my god that’s an addicting game), or because I was so distracted I walked off and forgot to set the timer entirely. There was also some strange cookie-flattening phenomena happening that I couldn’t explain (too much oil?), but that isn’t the point here. The point is how I’ve been eating these cookies.

I started them last night and intended to eat a few. Maybe three, maybe four. Those are what I like to call Good Intentions. If I were an lolcat, I’d look like this:

Last night I started nibbling on cookie dough. Eventually I was nibbling on cookies (they weren’t too burned to eat, just too burned to send to someone you want to impress with your l33t baking skillz*). I wasn’t overeating. I wasn’t binging. I’ve read about eating disorders before, and they seem to fall under three behaviors: starving oneself, making oneself throw-up food, or binging (eating a great deal – think Michael Phelps’s diet but without the exercise – at one sitting).

I’ve never done any of these behaviors, and yet I often feel disordered about my eating, like something is not right, or feels out of my control.

It hit me the other night that I have my own kind of eating disorder: compulsive grazing. If there is a certain type of food in the house, almost always something incredibly sugar-laden, then it feels almost physically impossible for me to stop nibbling at it, taking a few small bites every half hour or hour, frequently not eating anything else.

Last night I got so busy with the game that Greg put the cookie dough away and turned off the oven. This morning I came out to finish the baking project, got out the dough, had a taste of it, and then probably had a small spoonful of dough once every 30-40 minutes as I was making the cookies. At noon, I realized I’d eaten nothing but cookies or dough since I’d gotten up.

Over the short term, this isn’t a big deal. So what if you live on junk for a couple days? Most people get a stomachache, regret it, and move on. When it happens repeatedly over the long term, however, problems develop, just like with any other disordered eating. I have panic disorder that is very sensitive to my diet, and eating nothing but cookie dough for a day puts me in danger of having severe attacks, which can take several days to recover from. Thanks to my sugar addiction I’m also about thirty pounds overweight, and a day of eating cookie crack doesn’t help things. It’s not uncommon for me to gain a pound after eating this way for a couple days, which isn’t a big deal until you consider my over-grazing periods happen once every 2-3 weeks, at least.

So, what’s a girl to do? In the past, I’ve just beaten myself up about it (ahhh, that old standby). I tell myself that a “normal” person would just eat a few bites, and that next time I’ll be normal. I’m big on being normal. Having panic disorder for the last six years has left me feeling like a needy, unpredictable, inconveniencing freak on countless occasions, and the idea of Normalcy is something I alternately seek comfort in and beat myself with. Most people want to be exceptional or amazing. I’d settle for normal.

Beating myself up doesn’t work though. I just end up doing it again. A second thing to try might be to put some boundaries around it, like to say that I won’t make cookies at home anymore. But I resist that mightily,  because, again, it doesn’t line up with my ideas of How Things Should Be. This is another big one for my brain, it goes along with Normalcy. It’s called, “I Should.” I Should be able to have a jar of cookies at home and not eat them all over the course of a couple days. Yeah, well, but I do. What should happen and what actually happens aren’t always the same, are they? What do we do then, if we want to change our behavior?

I’m going to stop making cookies or other sweets, and stop bringing junk food into the house that I know I’ll have trouble eating at a reasonable pace. I want to do this for a few months, and see what happens.

There. There’s my decision.

Resistance, I’ve found, is interesting. It’s wily. It will do anything to maintain the status quo. I can already feel a big swell of resistance, telling me that if I accept myself, if I love myself, then it’s not okay to put boundaries on anything I do (especially things related to food and eating) because that’s self-oppression, it’s bowing to the man, it’s self-hate, blah blah blah. Clearly, not wanting to overeat sugar, and putting boundaries into effect around that, really signifies that I’ve given up thinking for myself and am now going to become a tool of the patriarchy, void of self-esteem, only happy when I look good in a bikini.

Uh huh.

But we all know people who think that way, right? And for a lot of women, especially those of us who have spent a lot of time conditioning ourselves to be feminists, especially those of us who have issues around fat acceptance, it’s hard not to escape a little bit of that conditioning too, the stuff that tells us what the right way to think about food is. Even if it’s not the way that makes us feel good about ourselves.

I strongly suspect that making this decision will contribute to me feeling better about myself, and being happier overall. So I’m going to try it, and see what happens.

That’s the best philosophy for a lot of things, I think.

*Impressing people with my vocabulary clearly isn’t high on my list either.

I know what you’re thinking, believe me, I do. If someone told me ten years ago that I’d someday be enjoying smoothies made from kale, I’d have told them they were a couple bulbs short of a box, and they needed professional help.

But here it is, in all its considerable non-glory:

Hollie’s Favorite Kale Smoothie

3 C cold water
1/2 bunch of clean, washed, fresh kale
1 ripe banana
3 small-medium apples, peeled (take out the seeds*, but leave the cores if you want)
a dash of lemon juice

Put the water into the Vita-Mix. Add the apples, and then pile on as much kale as you possibly can. I get about half a whole bunch in. Put the Vita-Mix on “high”, and use the tamper to push down the kale into the blades. It shouldn’t take much doing. Whip it up for several seconds until you see that all the greens are blended. This takes about half a minute or so for me.

Voila! Tasty green beverage, that is so weird your friends and family will probably wonder what came over you, so be ready for the jokes: “Who are you and what did you do with my wife?” Greg, at first, was shocked I’d drink such a thing, but now even he likes them. Our three-year-old will drink them too, she calls them a “Green Smoothie”, which is what a lot of people call them. Our six-year-old, well, he thinks that peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches should be a staple served at every meal.

After I started drinking these early this year, I started to feel amazing. I had more energy, my digestion improved (which is a polite way of saying “more pleasantly efficient”, if you catch my drift), and through drinking them regularly I developed more of a taste for green vegetables. I now eat salads a lot more often, and with much greature pleasure. Green smoothies become a habit after awhile, and when I fell out of the habit after I started taking a couple classes at school, I really noticed the difference.

*That whole apple seed cyanide issue. Basically, if you’re going to juice or blend apples, you generally want to remove the seeds. Apple seeds (or “pips”) contain chemicals that will degrade into cyanide when metabolized. Our bodies can handle cyanide in small amounts, which is why a few swallowed pips won’t hurt you. Also, the pips tend to stay intact in most bodies, so you’ll generally just poop them out. However, if you’re eating a green smoothie every day like I try to, that means I’m getting a lot of seeds, and the blending (or juicing, if you do that too, like I do) means they’re being crused open, and while it’s still unlikely I’d get sick, it’s much better to be safe than sorry. So ditch your apple seeds. If one or two get in here or there, no worries. But in general try not to eat them, and especially try not to blend or juice them.

While my game-mates were rolling to see how much cash they got for their wheat harvest, I leaned over and grabbed Dreena Burton’s Vive Le Vegan!, and started flipping through the chapter on Breakfasts. The Apple Oat Pancakes and Banana Bliss Pancakes seemed especially yummy, so this morning I attempted them. Unfortunately, it didn’t go so well.

The Apple Oat Pancakes look yummy….

…but I couldn’t get them to cook all the way through without burning them. I don’t know if this was a problem with my pan (a Le Creuset cast iron skillet) or if I just wasn’t getting the burner set at the right temperature. The oaty and apple flavors went great together, but both pancake recipes call for a whole tablespoon of baking powder, and I think that might be responsible for the metallic aftertaste that I seem to be so sensitive to. I’ve tasted it before in recipes that have a lot of baking powder, like some cornbreads. Maybe I just have weird taste buds?

I managed to get about three okay-looking pancakes out of this batch, and I gave a couple to Miles, my six-year-old. He loved them.

Since we were all still hungry, I cleaned out my bowl and dove right into the Banana Bliss Pancakes:

These cooked up a lot better, but I still had problems with burning (you can see the uneven color), and the taste was pretty awful. The banana flavor was, for me, drowned out by the taste of the baking powder, and they weren’t sweet at all. Jason suggested I add some honey, so I put two tablespoons in the remaining batter, but it didn’t seem to improve things. The household declared them “Hippy Pancakes”, and they got a thumbs-down.

I’m disappointed they didn’t work, but I think this might have something to do with my Vegan Pancake Curse. Almost every single vegan pancake or french toast recipe I’ve tried has been awful, and I don’t know why. The one exception to this rule is the recipe we tried for Easy Weekend Pancakes, from VeganYumYum. Those are DELICIOUS, I mean crazy-delicious, the kind of pancakes that are hard to get to the table because we keep wanting to eat them right out of the pan.They were immune to the curse, maybe because they go through the Vita-Mix, and since I’m a whiz with the Vita-Mix, my mojo with that appliance might be canceling out the curse.

I will keep trying. I will fight the curse!

I loved the sign, but I didn’t actually try any. Their “variety plate” had onions, mushrooms, and zucchini, and I don’t like the first two. Onions are good when they’re in something, but I’m not a big fan of onion rings, and mushrooms I don’t like at all. Picky, picky, picky. The zucchini I probably could have gotten behind.

Instead, I got an elephant ear, a caramel apple, and some cotton candy. I reasoned that the fair comes only once a year, so it’s okay to indulge. The kids helped with the elephant ear (Miles was mollified only after learning it wasn’t from a REAL ELEPHANT), and I gave most of the cotton candy to my Mom. But that caramel apple was all mine, and it was the most delicious sugary delight I’ve had in awhile. I’m tempted to make my own at home, but really, where does that madness stop? Pretty soon I’d have caramel pears, caramel peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, caramel kale, caramel edamame. Mmmmmm, caramel edamame. I know someone’s going to try that. You can thank me later.