My friend Stacey just invited me over for a vegan pumpkin-y Halloween-
y potluck this week and it reminded me of this time I was over there
this summer.
You know that crazy KFC sandwich with fried chicken patties as buns?
She made a vegan version. Seriously. I won't lie, even though the
professional me is slightly embarrassed, I can get down with fried.
But needs some green. Or balance. This here is over the top. But
that's part of the experience and sort of the point, right?
I’m a little late on this as some it starts in fewer than 12 hours, but hey, that’s how I roll. The first is Saturday morning’s LA premiere of Ride the Divide, a documentary about the Tour Divide mountain bike race 2700 miles, mostly off-road, from Banff, Canada to the Mexican border. Through the Rockies. Unsupported. Awesome. I’ve ridden most of the route as a bike tour from the Canadian border to Silver City, NM. Like the ride, my my blog posts about it are unfinished. Here’s the trailer:
Ride The Divide Movie Trailer from Ride The Divide on Vimeo.
Later on Saturday is the Tour De Fat in the Not A Cornfield state park in Chinatown/downtown. I’m not exactly sure what it is. Sort of a ride maybe, but mostly a beer party? Biking In LA does the best job of explaining what happens that I’ve read. Check it out.
Now if I can get over the Yankees losing and actually leave the house maybe I’ll see you at one of these events. Ride safe this weekend!
I’ll admit that I’m not above buying something because of the way it looks. I’m all about practicality, but if that great rain jacket looks like it’s leftover from the Cross Colours era (but without the social and political context), I ain’t gonna buy it. With food this is especially true. We eat with our eyes, the saying goes. As a public health dietitian I know my eyes are a little different than the average person so I find things like this irresistible:
Cuban squash. Apparently it is the most commonly eaten vegetable in Cuba! It’s a pumpkin/squash hybrid and is also called crapaudback. This is at the local grocery store in my East Hollywood neighborhood. We are surrounded by (and part of) Armenia, Russian, Thai, Korean and Salvodorean neighborhoods and the grocery stores reflect this. Here is my housemate laughing at what 16 pounds of pumpkin/squash/crapaudback feels like:
Upon cutting it open we found that the skin is not as tough as it looks and is closer to a butternut squash than pumpkin. It also has more ‘meat’ than pumpkin.
Despite cooking often, I’m not the most creative in the kitchen. My preference is to make simple, healthy meals taste good. My first thought with squash is always: roast it. Cut it up, leave on the skin, coat with olive oil, salt and pepper and cook until slightly brown. Delicious. This is what we did first and you can see how quickly it went:
Next we got a little creative and pulled out one of those books you see on people’s kitchen shelves that have recipes. We grabbed my friend Isa’s newest cookbook Vegan Brunch. We used the Pumpin Bran Muffins recipe as a guideline (though I hear some people follow recipes exactly) but by the time we sorted what we had on hand it ended up very different.
Crapaudback Interpretive Bread
1. Mix dry ingredients in a big bowl
2. Mix wet ingredients in a small bowl
3. Add wet to dry and don’t over mix!
4. Bake for 20-25 min at 400 degrees.
Because we had eight freakin pounds of this stuff we steamed some for dinner. This is another favorite meal of mine, beans and rice. Here we have brown rice, dried black beans with haas avocado, cherry tomatoes and steamed crapaudback. The majority of the meal is from our buying co-op or the Hollywood farmers market.
Boom. One vegetable, three meals. And this is only half of it! As I type this I’ve the rest roasting in the oven (the creative folks aren’t around this morning so I’m resorting to my stand-by methods). I’d also like to try this oatcake recipe because I’m a sucker for anything pancake-like.
Farmers market art on art at the Farmers Market
I love the way tiny cherry tomatoes look in a giant pile. And the way they taste, duh.
There are more salons than I can count in Bernal Heights and they all have advertisements for ‘vegan nail polish’. Isn’t all nail polish vegan? Is this a pressing issue for salons in this neighborhood?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HX5-ulcdXc&fs=1&hl=en_US]
There are a lot of lessons in 508 miles. No matter how many times I do this race, there’s always so much I don’t know and so much still to learn about myself. Case in point: hallucinating riding up Salsberry Pass. Some say the desert is empty, I say it is full of plenty of stuff, some real, some not. The rattle snake that sent Dave running? Real. I heard that rattler from 20 feet away! The Golden Retriever with floppy ears on the side of the road panting because of the heat? Not real. I saw it, smiled at it, but knew it wasn’t real. Does that make it less of a hallucination?
This climb last year, at about mile 300, came after the insane headwinds. I raced up it. This year it was earlier in the morning, but I was taxed at this point. Yes, it is possible to undertrain. This ride taught me that! Anyway, I was having so much trouble staying awake that the van pulled next to me off and on just to check on my level of awakeness (which ranged from able eyes open and not hallucinating to full-on eyes closed falling asleep while pedaling). A four-person team passed me and not long after I looked up and said to Dave, ‘Whoa, what are all of those lights up there?’ It was the support vehicle. Again, I knew this, but not until after I said that. Dave was concerned.
At the top of the climb they gave me some potatoes cause I hadn’t eaten much on the long climb (everything tasted super duper dry- had trouble swallowing. From all the black tea? Anyone ever experience this?). They also let me in the van to sit and eat, which I would learn later was some drama amongst the crew. On the ride home Monday I was told the conversation went something like this:
Lisa: Why’d you let him in the van? He’s not suppose to get in the van for any reason.
Sabrina: He needs to eat! And sit! It’s okay.
Lisa: It’s not okay! Morgan said to never let him in the van under any circumstances!
Sabrina: He’s a human, damnit, he needs some comforts!
Lisa: He’s not human, he’s a machine and he needs to keep going!!
Meanwhile I had fallen asleep while eating. I woke up with half chewed potatoes in the my mouth and had no idea what they were. At least Dave saw the face I made which can best be described as the face one would make upon waking up with an unidentified substance in his mouth.
Needless to say, they decided it was unsafe for me to ride the fast, long descent into Shoshone, in the dark, while I was unable to stay away on my own accord. I laid down to sleep for 30 minutes, which would be the longest sleep I had ever had on this race.
What could possibly cause that? Notice I’m running two different Mavic wheels. I’d been having weird noises with my rear and it turned out to be the Patented Mavic Death Squeal. So I was running my old rear wheel, but we never figured it out and it didn’t happen again. Lots of flex in my frame though. Getting it checked out this weekend…
Wild Burros 4-person team passed me here and I’d never see them again.
I bet the Swarm! 4-person team Wild Burros $80 that they couldn’t close the two hour gap between the solo and team starts. I lost, this is me paying them at the post-race breakfast. They did great! On a good day I could have fended them off, but not with the ride I had.
Thanks so so much to my crew: Dave, Sabrina and Lisa for being SO awesome and supportive. You took a whole weekend to help me ride my bike 500 miles, not many people would do that. You rule. And special thanks to Lisa for all the photos.
“ Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.”
– Polly Berends
I stole this quote from here, which is a blog I found after BikeSnob posted her VEGAN neck tattoo. I guess there’s some learning there. Or something.
via Unreasonable Faith. Fundamentalism is a disease.
Wtf?
This is going to be historic. When I first heard about Ciclovia coming to Los Angeles I thought, ‘no fucking way. Not here.’ I was wrong! It’s not only happening, but Mayor Villaraigosa even held a press conference promoting it. More than a cycling and walking event, it’s a reclaimation of the the streets. People over cars. End the dictatorship of the personal use automobile!
This LA Streetsblog post has details for the feeder rides heading there and the other events happening in the streets. Get over there if you can and please promote this to other Angelenos! The CicLAvia site has all the details of how to get there, what to do and what to eat.
At the start. I know what I’ve gotten myself into, but do they?
Obligatory devil-horns. Photo by AdventureCORPS.
The clouds and storms kept the temps low at the expense of the usual first day tailwinds.
The crew had a lot of this. Looking and waiting.
And then lot of this: bottle hand-off.
Trona.
Trona bump. Here I’m wondering why I’m so far behind last year’s time. It was the less favorable winds. What a difference! I was getting sore and tired and I hadn’t reached 200 miles or Townes Pass yet.
Approaching Townes Pass, elevation 4956ft, the entrance to Death Valley. Mike Sz rode this section for the Wild Burros team and would later say it was the hardest thing he has ever done.
