Lana — Page 30

Dinner brought to you by the letter E (for Ethiopian)

July 14, 2013 by Lana 6 Comments

If you read about my Friday night alphabetical country tour you will know that this Friday we were up to E. If you haven’t read about it, you can catch up quickly here. (Basically my sister and I are taking turns to cook meals that are themed with a different country each Friday night – from A to Z.)

This week was my turn and I was very tempted to go for English and serve bangers and mash but I thought I better put in a little more effort. I waivered between Egypt and Ethiopia for a while but settled on Ethiopia when I saw that they served lots of curries and stews that could be made in advance.

An Ethiopian “feast platter” usually includes a couple of meat stews, a lentil dish (which I opted not to cook because I know my family and the lentil dish would NOT have been a success), a cooked vegetable and a raw vegetable dish served on a large platter covered with Injera, which are Ethiopian sourdough pancakes type things and the biggest challenge of my meal. Some of the ingredients (tef flour) are very hard to source in Sydney and usually the injera are made days in advance to allow the culture to develop and the yeast to rise. I was never going to be that organised so I cheated with a quicker recipe you can find here. Injera are also served as a side and are used instead of utensils to pick up the rest of the food.

Ethiopians don’t typically do starters but I had some roasted chickpeas to nibble on. You can find the recipe here.

Ethiopian spiced chickpeas

Main meal was the injera (recipe here) with a chicken stew known as Doro Wat (recipe here), an Ethiopian beef, spinach and peanut stew (recipe here), a vegetable stew known as Amhari-Atklit (recipe here) and an Ethiopian tomato and cucumber salad (recipe here).

My injera which may have been too think but turned out better than I had imagined

Doro Wat (or chicken stew). Bad lighting – in reality it was quite a reddish colour

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Ethiopian Beef, Spinach and Peanut stew (with a lot of capsicum)

Amhari-Atklit (although we called it vegetable stew)

An Ethiopian salad which resembles a salad from most countries but with chilli

And this is how the plated meal looked

Ethiopians are not big on dessert but I am so I made an icecream with honeyed almonds and a salted butterscotch sauce. Yum

No one complained that it wasn’t on theme

Next week we are having a break because we are going to my mother-in-law for dinner. She has opted to do E again – she is doing E for easy.

Filed Under: Featured, Food Tagged With: alphabet dinners, food

I can’t believe this happened to me

July 9, 2013 by Lana 11 Comments

Every night I sit at the exact same place on the couch. I balance my computer precariously on the arm of the couch and I spend the evening skipping between Twitter, Facebook and listening to my husband admonishing me that the computer is in a very precarious position and is going to drop.

Last night was no different except when the phone rang underneath my bum I got such a big fright (and admittedly I could not find the phone) that I jumped right up and dropped the computer. And I killed it.

Well I didn’t kill it completely. Its heart is still beating erratically but it’s on life support because its face (otherwise known as screen) is smashed.

After my initial tears I cried some more. I am addicted to my computer like fish are addicted to water or humans to air. It’s not a matter of wanting to use it, I actually need to use it.

My son tried to placate me with offerings of his computer until he realised that if I was using it he wouldn’t be able to. My husband tried to placate me with some silly box called the TV that you can’t even interact with. He even tried offerings of real life but there was nothing that could lift me out of my heartbreak. I was shattered. Much like my screen. And so I took myself off to bed.

I lay there empty handed and alone until I caught my iPad beckoning from the bedside table. I quickly installed Pages so that I could get on with the business of writing and while I was waiting for it to load I noticed that the previously sparse screen looked very busy. Little Pencil, who was watching that box thing next to me, explained that all of his purchases must have downloaded onto the iPad because the accounts are synched.

And that’s when it happened. Unsuspecting and unaware but with a vague memory of reading a million requests to play Candy Crush on Facebook I clicked on it and decided to give it a shot while I waited for my application to load.

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I am addicted.

I get what the people on Facebook are nagging me about.

I am a woman possessed.

How do I get new lives? How do I get past level 23? How do I stop playing this game?

Are you a candy crush player? Do you understand what I am going through? Will you forgive me if I take ages to respond to you because I’m just playing ONE more game…

Filed Under: Featured, My Life Tagged With: funny

My onesie fashion confession

July 8, 2013 by Lana 16 Comments

I have a fashion confession that I need to get out into the open.

I’d suggest you get comfortable before you listen to me but that might be easier once you’ve read the post (and followed my style advice) because my sense of fashion is closer to what you’d call comfort than couture.

As I stall my confession for fear of bring ridiculed let me give you two very important facts as background.

1 It’s cold
2 I’ve never been a trendsetter

Okay.

I own a onesie.

I don’t just own it, I wear it and I love it.

It’s not one of those uber cool fluffy animal types. It’s way more functional and far less cute. In fact it looks a lot like a hazmat uniform used only for when you have to clean chemical spills – the fact that it’s white doesn’t help. Nor the fact that it’s the full deal with feet included and it is by far the most comfortable item of clothing that I own. Like clouds for your body.

I actually received it as a gift last year when I was still working for iVillage and at the time I laughed and laughed and laughed. And all the girls in the office who also received one, laughed and laughed. And then when I was finished laughing and no one was looking I tried it on and fell in love.

I haven’t worn it in front of anyone other than my husband and my son, nor do I intend to and judging from their reaction I think that’s a pretty wise move.

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I’ve kept the onesie secret for a while now but lately I have seen a few famous faces rocking the style….

Admittedly not even One Direction can make the onesie look cool

Justin Bieber who, now that I think of it, is not that much older than my son

Beyonce (who is actually quite cool) rocks the onesie. At least she does it in bed not out on the street

Macklemore who is just an incredible writer and singer can get away with a onesie because he probably bought it from a Thrift Shop

Brad Pitt, however, cannot and should not get away with wearing a onesie in public

Although I must admit to having seen horses wearing them too.

Very warm horse obviously has no access to a mirror

At least I have never left the house in mine. Yet.

Do you own a onesie? Would you ? Could you?

Filed Under: Featured, My Views

Friday night dinner brought to us by the letter D

July 7, 2013 by Lana 13 Comments

Every Friday night I have dinner with my close family – my mother, my sister and her family and a revolving parade of members of my husband’s family. It is a well polished routine one Friday at my house, the next at my sisters. And so on and so on for ever.

I adore having my family over and although the origins of the Friday night together are based in Jewish religion we use the time together to connect rather than for any religious significance. It “forces” us to get together and it is one of the traditions of Judaism that I love and hope that my son will carry with him way into his future because at the end of the day – and more specifically at the end of the week there is nothing like family.

The only real problem with making dinner every second Friday night (and it needs to be a proper dinner where we all sit at the table not grab pizza take away) is thinking about what on earth to make. There are so many weeks that you can sit through soup and a roast dinner followed by a decadent dessert and then you start to tire of it. And so it was that a couple of weeks ago we decided to theme our dinners. I so love a theme!

Starting at A we are going to cook the food of a country with every letter of the alphabet. I started 4 weeks ago with an Austrian dinner, my sister did Belgian the next week and I did Chinese the week after. On Friday night my sister (and her very helpful and uber capable son) made food from the Dominican Republic and Dominica (they may have blurred the lines between the two countries). While my husband was exclaiming that it was the best food that he had ever eaten and reminding me to take photos for my blog I realised I had never ever blogged about my alphabet dinners – and so that’s about to change.

This is what we ate on Friday night (although I didn’t because Michelle Bridges is not Dominican). We don’t usually eat all our food deep fried but then again we don’t always eat Dominican. Also bear in mind I am not a very good food photographer and I really don’t know a thing about retouching photos.

Chicharrones de Pollo – My husband said that this was the best chicken he had ever eaten. Click here for the recipe (My nephew’s variation: equal parts flour, corn flour and panko crumbs, 2 tbs rosemary, 2 tbs dried chili, 2tsp cinnamon)

Empanadas very impressively braided and everything by my nephew. Recipe here

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Tostone which are plantains cut into 1 inch slices, deep fried, cooled slightly, smashed flat and deep fried again. Did I mention we don’t always eat so much fried food?

Caramel three ways. Inherited from the Spaniards, common across Latin America creme caramel is one of Dominican’s favorite desserts. Who knew?

As I said photography is not my forte so forgive me and trust that it looked a lot better in real life.

This Friday night is my turn and I have the letter E. I’m tossing up between Egyptian, Ethiopian or English (although I think English may be taking the easy way out).

Would love your ideas! And I’ll try to take better photos.

Filed Under: Featured, Food Tagged With: alphabet dinners, food

Trying to reconnect

July 5, 2013 by Lana 64 Comments

I started my blog in 2009, which may feel like a million years ago except it’s only four. I had really good intentions when it began and I was so stoked to have a little place on the internet to call my own, to write about what I wanted, when I wanted. But then I kind of got side tracked by work for about three and a half of those years.

At the beginning it was cool, I was reading blogs almost every day – how awesome is it that it was part of my job? I read blogs and I followed bloggers on Twitter and Facebook and I read and requested many brilliant blogs for republication on Mamamia. But then the job literally swept me off my feet and all of a sudden I wasn’t able to read as much as I did before. As for getting involved and commenting – well that was just a distant, albeit very fond, memory

And while I tried desperately to hold on in the one hour a day I wasn’t working, I wasn’t able to keep up. The whole blogging scene was changing before me. It’s a funny thing how you notice things from the outside in when you aren’t on the inside. And it’s funnier still when you go back inside and look at it again from a different perspective.

Some bloggers monetised their blogs (which I think is fabulous and clever and good on them). Some bloggers became very serious about the art of blogging and decided that there was only one way to do it. Some bloggers formed alliances and created very cool collaborative websites of their own and some bloggers tried to distance themselves from others. Hundreds of blogging competitions popped up and people began attending blogging conferences/workshops and seminars. It makes me feel 107 to say “they weren’t doing that in my day”.

In essence I guess blogging grew up a bit while I was furiously paddling alongside it. Just not in it.

So where does this leave someone who was paddling during the change period?

I’m still blogging much like I was doing in 2009 but hoping to do that with a little more frequency now that it is one of my primary tasks. And I am thrilled about that decision.

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But there is so much I feel like I may have missed out on because what I don’t have is the connection with the blogging world that I used to have. And I want it back.

I don’t want to be part of a clique. I’ve hated those since about 1973 when I started school, I don’t want to be part of some inner sanctum and I don’t even want to attend the seminars and conferences (unless breakfast is included – I love breakfast).

I don’t want to ask you who your favourite blogger is because I HATE competition as much as I love breakfast. The thought of putting people in order puts me off my food, but I’d love to know if there are any blogs you recommend I follow?

Also do YOU have a blog? Give me the address so I can follow you in the most non stalkery way possible.

Hit me with it – and thank you also for sticking with me.

Filed Under: Featured, Work Tagged With: social media

There is one healthy ingredient in these cupcakes (and lots of delicious ones)

July 4, 2013 by Lana 1 Comment

The other day an old acquaintance asked me what I blog about. “Nothing” was my immediate answer although I said it only in my head so that I sounded like I knew what I was doing. “I know” old acquaintance said “you are a food blogger aren’t you because I remember that you love food?”. Not sure how to take that but still, she’s right, I do love food and I like to cook and it’s something that I do every. Single. Day.

So why not blog about it? Or at least share a recipe or two?

Here’s a little something I made yesterday at hubby’s request. The best ever carrot cupcakes. Seriously a friend came over last night and tasted one and said I should go into business making carrot cupcakes. Niche – but they are that good.

Ingredients

2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/4 cups oil
1 1/4 cups sugar
3 cups grated carrots
2 teaspoons cinnamon
4 eggs
1 teaspoon bicarb
2 teaspoons baking powder

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Method

Beat eggs and sugar very well.
Add oil and beat again until just blended.
Add sifted dry ingredients and then fold in sifted dry ingredients
Pour into prepared cupcake tin
Bake for 20-30 minutes in a 180′ oven (or till you touch them and they spring back)

Icing

Contents

125 grams butter (softened)
125 cream cheese (also softened)
500 grams icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Method

Cream the butter and icing sugar until it’s combined but still stiff.
Then stir in the cream cheese and vanilla by hand.
When the cupcakes are cool spread the icing on top of the cupcakes while trying not to eat all the icing with your fingers

May I just take a minute to thank the person who invented cream cheese icing?

Filed Under: Featured, Food Tagged With: food

Here’s a healthy tip: Don’t take your vitamins

July 2, 2013 by Lana 6 Comments

I am the world’s easiest person to market to. If you tell me that your product will do something miraculous I believe you – which may explain why I recently bought 3 tubes of mascara simply called “better than false eye lashes” (it’s actually not better than false eyelashes– in fact it’s only just better than using cocoa powder on your lashes*). It’s also why I sometimes (always) spend way too much money in the cosmetics section of any department store. I see a sign saying purporting that a certain cream will reduce fine lines and I’m there before my lines get any deeper.

It’s not just make up that get’s me – I once had to explain to a washing machine repair person that the reason I had used washing powder for a top loader for my front loader was because the ad said it was really, really good (and I am not brilliant at reading the small print).

But the one thing that I have managed to steer clear of is health food proclamations. I just don’t fall for them – I understand that there are certain things you should stay away from like you know, too many additives and palm sugar and overly processed foods but I don’t really rush into buying “super foods”. Especially super foods that are only grown in remote South American regions and exported all over the world so that the local people can no longer eat them – but that’s a rant for another day.

I’ve not fallen for bread with extra fibre and added iron and 25% more calcium because I know that I’m getting all the fibre, iron and calcium I need from foods that actually had this stuff to start.

So, as you can imagine, I have never really considered taking vitamins. It’s been a point of much contention because my husband’s family like vitamins a LOT and I am often alerted to the miraculous benefits of ingesting them. And it’s not just them– people everywhere are seeking to teach me the error of my ways by suggesting I take vitamins as a preventative measure or to cure any existing ailment.

It’s been a hard job justifying to ardent vitamin takers why I don’t slug down A’s B’s or C’s – until I read this in The New York Times by Paul A. Offit, chief of the infectious diseases division of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Most people assume that, at the very least, excess vitamins can’t do any harm. It turns out, however, that scientists have known for years that large quantities of supplemental vitamins can be quite harmful indeed.

In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1994, 29,000 Finnish men, all smokers, had been given daily vitamin E, beta carotene, both or a placebo. The study found that those who had taken beta carotene for five to eight years were more likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease.
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Two years later the same journal published another study on vitamin supplements. In it, 18,000 people who were at an increased risk of lung cancer because of asbestos exposure or smoking received a combination of vitamin A and beta carotene, or a placebo. Investigators stopped the study when they found that the risk of death from lung cancer for those who took the vitamins was 46 percent higher.

There are a lot more scary satistics before the article goes on to say

What explains this connection between supplemental vitamins and increased rates of cancer and mortality? The key word is antioxidants.

To neutralize free radicals, the body makes antioxidants (good). Antioxidants can also be found in fruits and vegetables, specifically in selenium, beta carotene and vitamins A, C and E. Some studies have shown that people who eat more fruits and vegetables have a lower incidence of cancer and heart disease and live longer. The logic is obvious. If fruits and vegetables contain antioxidants, and people who eat fruits and vegetables are healthier, then people who take supplemental antioxidants should also be healthier. It hasn’t worked out that way.

The likely explanation is that free radicals aren’t as evil as advertised. (In fact, people need them to kill bacteria and eliminate new cancer cells.) And when people take large doses of antioxidants in the form of supplemental vitamins, the balance between free radical production and destruction might tip too much in one direction, causing an unnatural state where the immune system is less able to kill harmful invaders. Researchers call this the antioxidant paradox.

You can read the full article here.

Paradox indeed. I’ve never felt healthier about not taking vitamins or worrying about anti-oxidant intake. Even though if you offer me an anti-oxidant in a cream that’s guaranteed to remove fine lines I don’t know how I will react.

Do you take vitamins or supplements?

Filed Under: Featured, My Views Tagged With: current affairs, health

Seems as if all this helicopter parenting is turning out okay

July 1, 2013 by Lana 2 Comments

The first thing I noticed was something in his voice. If I hadn’t been watching, eagerly videoing every movement he made I don’t think I would have even recognised that it was him.

Little Pencil was giving a speech at the Bat Mitzvah of one of his best friends. He was standing in front of 160 people with two of his best mates happily and confidently talking about how much his friendship with the Bat Mitzvah girl means to him.

As I listened to his voice and I disconnected for a minute, I heard the voice of a young man. Not in the broken, squeaky way a young adolescent man speaks, but in the tone and confidence that a little kid would never use.

It wasn’t a little boy speaking.

As the night wore on and I watched him shaking his little hips doing the Harlem Shuffle and prancing around Gangnam Style I realised that this was not my little boy dancing. This was “one of the boys”. One of the kids that I had never been at school myself – confident bordering on cocky, self assured, happy, loving every minute of his life. Only interested in the here and now because there was nothing else clouding his vision.

This was not a little boy on the dance floor.

I have tried for a while now to look for signs that he’s still actually just a little boy but the truth is that Little Pencil is 12 now and he’s just not a little boy anymore.

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He needs different things from me now that he borders on adolescence. He needs different things from all of his relationships and however hard it is for me to watch from the sidelines and give him the space he needs the one thing that keeps me strong is pride. Pride that he turned out so extremely well.

I may have been the clingy helicopter mother, I may have fussed and worried and been over protective and done too much and helped too far but in the end my child is growing into an amazing young man. He is happy, he is self-assured, he is outgoing and smart but most importantly he surrounded by friends that adore him and he loves living his life.

What more I could ask for as my child enters the next phase of his life I don’t really know. But I do know this – as he grows up I’ll still be there for him. I will still worry about him and look out for him. I can’t stop that – I am his mother. Also I am a worrier.

He may make his own social arrangements, he may be far more self sufficient, he may spend all night on the dance floor and ultimately spend more time with his mates than with his family but he will always know that of all the things that I have done in my life – he is the most important, the most meaningful. And he will always know that I am here for him.

And even when he’s 50 and his dance moves have become a little less flamboyant and his speech making relies less on rhyming words I’ll still be proud of him.

Because he’ll always be my son. No matter how old he is.

Filed Under: Featured, Little Pencil Tagged With: kid, kids, parenting

Another day another breastfeeding smack in the face

June 26, 2013 by Lana 2 Comments

I was never going to breastfeed my child. I had vomited for what felt like forever, I had stopped eating sushi and I had given up my ankles and I just knew that I wanted my body back after my baby was born. I was working in a corporate environment, no one around me had babies and I just didn’t think that breastfeeding was for me.

And then I had my son 10 weeks early and he was sick. Very sick and really ridiculously small. He was whipped away into the Neonatal intensive care unit and I was transferred to high care. We were both sick it seemed. But him more so and before long a midwife was standing by my bed giving me instructions on how to express milk for a son that I had never touched or held.

There was no option it had to be done, and to be honest I was desperate and afraid in this very intensive medical setting and I did whatever the doctors/nurses/people wearing official uniforms said and I expressed.

I was happy to be doing SOMETHING for my child, anything because all his other needs were being met by machines and medical staff. So I persevered and I pumped and I expressed and luckily he was only on 2ml feeds and I could manage just about that. (I was really bad at expressing )

It didn’t really go so well though. Little Pencil failed to gain weight. The hospital added Human Milk Fortifier to his feeds (yes like formula but added to the breast milk!) and he didn’t handle that well. So he was taken off feeds and put back into intensive care. He got sicker. He required a blood transfusion. You get my drift – he was really unwell.

But he got stronger and better (just not much heavier) and after 2 months we left the hospital with my beautiful son weighing 2kgs. Boy was I proud of him.

And then he was sick – all the time. He could not put on weight. Repeated and hideous invasive testing eventually showed that he was severely lactose intolerant. Breast milk is full of lactose.

What does a mother who has been told that “Breast is Best” for 8 months do? When for 8 months every day you hear people repeating the mantra “at least you are able to feed him, you are doing the best thing for him” Repeatedly. For 8 months. And then your doctor tells you to stop breastfeeding THAT DAY because you are damaging his stomach lining?

I know that my situation was extreme and that breast IS best for most babies. But I also know that sometimes it’s not. Sometimes formula is best – sometimes for the baby and sometimes for the mother.

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Breastfed babies have an increased chance of climbing the social ladder and carving a better life than their parents, research shows.

Breastfeeding increased the odds of moving up social classes by 24 per cent and reduced the odds of sliding down by 20 per cent, a large British study found.

The study, published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, examined the social class of the children’s father – measuring them as unskilled, semi-skilled, professional and managerial – when they were 10 or 11 and their own social class at age 33 or 34.

“We found breastfeeding for longer periods increased the probability that someone would move up the ladder more than for someone fed for a shorter duration,” said lead author Amanda Sacker, of the University College in London.

But further down, and perhaps most importantly, there’s this

Professor Sacker said mothers who did not breastfeed should have skin-to-skin contact and cuddle while bottle feeding, adding that it was difficult to pinpoint if breast milk nutrients or bonding afforded the greatest benefit.

Wouldn’t it be great if the study results could be reported as “babies who are cuddled have better chance at success.”

Even though undoubtedly breast is often best even this study cannot claim whether it’s the breast milk or the close bonding that helps the child in the long run. So why lead the article with breastfed babies when the link has been difficult to pinpoint?

Because it’s sensationalist scaremongering.

The Breast is Best message is strong. It is accurate (in most cases). But sometimes it’s not. And no amount of guilt is going to make that different

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Featured Tagged With: parenting

The place where nobody knows your name

June 20, 2013 by Lana 2 Comments

Very keen readers (Hi Mr Pencil) will remember that I went to Byron about two months ago. It was on that trip that I uncovered the full extent of my sloth when we attempted to walk up to the lighthouse and I nearly died. Seeing 70 year-old people literally prance ahead of me was bad, still being the colour of a beetroot and puffing a day after the event was a hideous reality check.

When I came back and my mum had surgery I went into the pre-op consult with her and listened to the anaesthetist tell her that the effect on the heart of having an anaesthetic could be compared to a jog around the block. I almost needed the services of a doctor myself when it dawned on me that I might actually die trying to jog around the block.

And so something had to change.

I signed up to Michelle Bridge’s 12 week body transformation challenge (which is a post of huge praise for another day) and bought new running gear. I used to be a runner so I was keen to get back on to the road.

The road running was going really well until it started to get rainy. And cold. My husband very kindly suggested that I go to the gym and run on the treadmill. “It will be kinder on your knees” he said. (And there I was thinking that I had been hiding the fact that my knees were so old sore that I couldn’t walk properly.)

So I stumbled off to the gym where he holds a contract. Except it’s not so much a contract as a key card that you swipe and it allows you into the gym 24/7 as long as you keep paying them money. Okay, I guess it is a contract.

It’s a wonderful thing this gym. It has all the things about gyms that I love – ie

Treadmills
Loud music
Water

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And it has none of the things that I normally hate about gyms – ie

The smell of fear, sweat and exhaustion
Very fit people
Personal trainers who laugh at the way that you execute a squat
Anyone wearing lycra
People in general

Seriously there are so few people that I always go with a back up plan in mind lest I arrive and there is a “For Lease” sign hanging in the window.

It’s quite liberating training without eyes on you. Sometimes I worry that I might fall off the treadmill and be left to die but other times I just love the fact that no one is watching me. Trust me – I am NOT pretty when I exercise. Imagine a beetroot with sweat.

But there are one or two people there who I wouldn’t mind occasionally looking up. They work there. I know this because they wear shirts bearing the name of the gym and they sit behind the counter with multiple scarves on because it’s cold and they are not planning on doing any exercise.

I have set myself a little extra challenge – not only do I want to be able to run 5km without dying or pausing to catch my breath, I want to actually make eye contact with one of these staff members.

They see me 6 days a week and every time I walk past the counter to rehydrate I look at them with a red, sweaty smile and they look straight through me. Sometimes I say “hi” and they ignore me. Sometimes I try a “thanks” trying to show them how grateful I am for their services (which is basically paying the rent) and they look right through me.

I know not many people think to engage with sweaty beetroots but surely if you work at a gym you must be comfortable with seeing people look like this. Surely you should at least check occasionally to see if your customers are still breathing.

But nothing. Not even a raise of the head.

I guess I am not going to this particular gym for the great service because, in all honesty, personal trainer types intimidate me. But what kind of business runs itself without any eye contact at all?

I can’t wait to take my fitness back to Byron where the 70-year-old prancers on the lighthouse walk will look me in the eye and, in all likelihood, offer me some water and a lie down.

Do you go to a gym? Are you intimidated by the fit people or are you one of them?

Filed Under: Featured, My Life Tagged With: health