"So are we not hanging out??"

Hey look, a post not about food!

This, rather, is about a trend I'm noticing in my friends and people around me. I don't know if it's an age-group thing or not.

Let's start with last Monday. A friend of mine, L, gets a phone call from an out of state friend letting her know they'll be in town for a week, and would she want to make plans to go to the movies on Sunday? She casually agrees Sunday will work out fine, and makes a mental note to not plan anything for that day.

Sunday: after lunch L hasn't heard anything from her friend, so she texts them. They respond that they're painting their parents' house. She decides to take a nap in the meantime, assuming that they'll go out later in the afternoon. She's losing her patience at 4 o'clock when her friend finally calls. They catch up for a few minutes, and when the appropriate lull in the conversation comes up, her friend asks for a number of a mutual friend. NOTHING is said about their plans for that evening. L hangs up thoroughly confused and annoyed. Which is when she calls me, and asks if she's crazy. Yes, I say, but not about this. She was too flustered to ask about their plans for that evening, and she had kept the day clear to hang out.

As I mentioned, things of this nature seem to be happening more and more frequently. I have been known to have plans with a friend or two for about 7 or 8 pm, only to have them show up at 9 or 10. My close friend K is always thanking me for my reliability in her life; her other two close friends are infamous for setting a day to spend time together and then forgetting and/or planning other things.

Is this just me? Is reliability going out of style? Is it a 20something malady? If you say, Hey let's get together on Thursday night, then I'm going to go ahead and block that time off for you. Please don't cancel on me the day of, because I still consider that plain rude.

It occurs to me that this has always been my pet peeve: people who bail or are ineffective at keeping plans. But lately it just seems like it has gotten worse, and after L's experience on Sunday, I'm as baffled as she is. Did her friend forget? Did they just flat out ignore them? Has L started hallucinating?

All questions I'm going to ponder as I go off to dinner.

(And I was so close to not including food in this at all...)

family food

Apparently my food theme is continuing. I guess because it's new to me and I think it's a good thing to talk about...

Anyway, I promise I don't normally spend Saturday nights at home with my family in my parents' family room. But my sister and I had plans to go camping with our best friends, which fell through on Thursday. (Said best friends had to bail.) So I'm sitting down with my mom, dad, brother and sister to make them watch Food, Inc.

This 2008 documentary explores the sources of our food and the people that work in the factories. Most of it does center around meat, but the film also discusses the history of factories and the economic effects and implications of how our food is created.

I sat down to watch this on Thursday with my friend Brenda, who is also a vegetarian. We munched on our Indian veggie meals while thanking God that there was no beef, pork, or chicken in our food. After I finished, I was slightly bummed to realize that I couldn't just return it to the library like I wanted to. I knew my family had to watch it, but I wondered about my dad's reaction. He loves to acquire new knowledge, but he equally loves conservative politics and hamburgers. If you can combine them both for him, all the better. Fortunately, my uncle had recommended Food, Inc. to him so he is all for it. We are currently about 45 minutes into it, and he says he is intrigued. (He has to stop now to go watch the Ravens get some Skins.

I'm kind of okay with pausing the movie to let him and my brother go downstairs. It started a conversation about what we could do as a family to eat better, which I'm all for! Secretly I'm hoping it will push my mom and sister to vegetarianism...they're somewhat close. My dad is throwing out ideas about getting a large freezer in our garage to store locally grown meat and produce. (I would be more excited, but I'll believe it when I see it. We need to have further conversation about this.)

My brother, J, is currently the hardest sell. Who can blame him? The kid is 14, and perfectly content to be ignorant to what's in his food. He doesn't want to work harder, and his youth and metabolism prevent him from having health issues or weight issues that would inspire him to eat better. In his eyes, everything is fine, and his crazy hippie sister coming back from the DR with all these new ideas about food is not sitting well with him.

My mom's been sick for over a week now, and when she gets sick she's kind of out of it, so it's hard to see what her reaction is. As a general rule she doesn't eat red meat, and a few weeks ago after I read her a chapter out of Eating Animals she didn't eat the chicken she had made for dinner. She tries to eat healthy anyway for her health, BUT since my dad doesn't consider it dinner unless it has meat, what she cooks usually contains ground turkey. (She also does turkey bacon and turkey hot dogs instead of beef.) She doesn't like cooking, so she'll go ahead and eat whatever she's made for her dad. I think she would be an easy convert if my dad could be convinced.

As for my sister, I think she's starting to try eating differently. I like to feel like she's not eating meat with me, but she's not quite there yet. We'll see what happens.

What's next? My dad has promised to finish the film tomorrow, and I'm hoping he'll make J watch too. I'm excited to see what kind of dialogue this sparks amidst the fam.

If you're reading this and you're from my county, I highly recommend checking Food, Inc. out of the library. If you're not from the area, I would check your local library anyway!

I have a few more thoughts on food, so they'll probably show up here in the next week or so...

More new things

I'm aware that it's been over two weeks since my last post, but I think when I sum up all that has been going on, I will be excused by the general public. And by general public, I mean my mom. Although I don't know that even she reads this...

Anyway, following my grandmother's funeral and my birthday, I skipped over to Lubbock, Texas to visit Holly. We did a lot of fantastic things, but one of my favorites was flying with Holls and her dad in this plane!!

I also got to eat Huevos rancheros, which is one of my new favorite dishes :)


On my last Sunday I discovered via facebook that my new best friend Chad decided to move to Seattle for a new job, much to my chagrin. So new start for him.

Thursday night I got three calls from my best friend Erica. The first two I ignored, since it was 2:30 am. I finally picked up it a sleep induced rage, but quickly forgave her since she was calling to announce her ENGAGEMENT. So new start for her too!

Also Thursday night I went with all members of my fam minus my mom to M&T Bank Stadium for the Ravens Preseason opener. It's great to watch live football.

Anyway, it's been a busy few evenings and I'm fairly sleep deprived, which is why this post is pretty rambly. Speaking of rambly, Kaylie informed me that my blog needs more of a theme. But I'm not really sure what theme to go with...and I'm too tired to think about it. It appears that all 3 posts thus far have been about food...but I don't feel like that can last too long. With my new job starting in TWO WEEKS and grad school starting in three, there's a fairly decent chance the theme will be education. But who knows. :)

For now, I'm off to see Kaylie since she's leaving for Africa in two weeks. What a crazy August!

DIY: Spinach Pasta!

In coordination with my previous post, I would like to share a fun and healthy thing I made last week....Spinach pesto pasta! My wonderful Italian grandmother passed away yesterday, so I think it is only fitting to publish this in her honor. I'm fairly certain she never cooked anything healthy, but she did cook alot of pasta.

First, I am the blessed owner of a pasta machine, purchased because I wanted to make pasta with whole grain flour instead of eating the boxed stuff. Last week I started to ponder the power of pesto and the benefits of spinach, and thus was born my idea. Here are my tools:

Eggs, spinach, whole wheat flour, blender, pasta machine, and a little bit of basil. (I cheated and used a packet for the actual pesto.) Since pasta dough is essentially just eggs and flour, I decided to blend the spinach leaves in with the eggs, and came up with:

It LOOKS nasty, but it's healthy! After that I added flour until there was no stickiness in the dough, and then I separated it into golf-ball sized sections. (Once you crank it through the pasta machine, the pieces become HUGE.) Voila:


I put it through the next section on the pasta machine, and behold my...linguini??


I failed to get a final picture...so this is as good as it gets.

I mixed around in pesto, and it was enjoyed by all! Even the 14 year old brother who thought it looked weird admitted it was tasty.

The moral of the story is that there are other main dishes besides meat. And very good for you!