by Sam Tackeff | Sep 22, 2013 | Challenge, Meal Planning, Seafood
When in doubt, look for the light. I caught the light tonight at the John C. Potter estate right as the sun was starting to set – illuminating the stately mansard roof, and making the house feel magical. Somehow in the past two days nature has gotten the memo – the leaves are already starting to turn bright colors, and well, everything is beginning to look spectacular.
Today I had my first coaching session after a long hiatus – I’m not sure what prompted the shift, but I realized a few months ago that I was missing something, and working with women to help them reach their health goals is something that I really love to do. I always hear coaches and trainers going on about how much they cherish their work, and how much they learn from their clients, but I’d forgotten how true it is: listening to a client be open, honest, and trusting with you is a very special experience – and an incredibly inspiring one.
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The rest of my day was low key and relaxed. I spent a good deal of time cleaning the house, organizing, and tidying. I didn’t need to do much batch cooking today because this week will be full of evening activities and most of my dinners will be solo. My meal plan will be simple: salads, eggs, some chicken are on the docket. Last minute cooking for one is so much easier than last minute cooking for two. My reluctance to cook when tired stems directly from anxiety about the meal not being fulfilling for both of us – but when I’m on my own, I’m happy enough with the simplest of foods: a mess of greens, a tin of sardines, leftovers, poached eggs.
The kitchen did get some use today – first order of business was making a pitcher of green juice to sip on for the next few days. This version has fistfuls of spinach, a large cucumber, the juice of three limes, a few green apples, and some filtered water. Typically you don’t need water with a juicer, but I made this in my Vitamix and you need a little bit of liquid to get things going.
And then there was dinner. Sunday is fish night in this house, and flounder was on sale for $6 off a pound. I grabbed a pound of fillets from the fishmonger, and brought them home with me with plans to make a riff on rollmops – stuffed pickled herring filets that are often served with buttery potatoes. I’m pretty sure that rollmops wouldn’t be appreciated by anyone other than me in this household, but stuffed flounder is another story. I preheated my oven to 400, then I took my fish and stuffed them with Whole Foods feta salsa – a mix of feta, sun dried tomato, parsley, and dill. Then I rolled them up, put them on a bed of pre-steamed baby potatoes (which I had nuked in the microwave for 6 minutes), nestled in a few halved tomatoes, seasoned with salt and pepper, and slicked everything with some olive oil. They baked for 20 minutes, and dinner was served.
by Sam Tackeff | Sep 22, 2013 | Holidays
The summer’s end is always bitter sweet, but this one ended pretty much as well as I’d have liked – starting with getting locked out of our house (okay, that part wasn’t so great), walking a mile to pick up the set of spare keys in some really glorious weather, stumbling across a free Jazz festival and sitting on the grass listening to some great music for an hour, and spending a last hurrah warm summer evening eating dinner with family outside under the stars.
Heading over to Joe and Susan’s house tonight – Joe is technically my dad’s first cousin, and while I did grow up calling him Uncle Joey, that had to stop after watching years of Full House – I tried to explain to Devon what the Jewish holiday of Sukkot is like. While we’ve hit many of the major holidays several times, somehow we hadn’t made it to a Sukkot dinner, and I was excited to share the tradition. “Well, it’s sort of a Jewish harvest holiday where we’ll be tailgating on the porch under a hut.” I can see the great rabbi’s rolling over in their graves at that. Devon looked at me skeptically. “And there will be chili!” I proclaimed!
Aside from the celebration of fall, and the harvest, Sukkot is a week long commemoration of the Israelites in pilgrimage and exile. The Sukkah is an outdoor hut that is built to remind us of the fragile nature of exile dwellings, the joy that can be had with simplicity, and we eat outside (and some sleep outside) in the hut each night of the seven days. There is great symbolism represented in the lulav (a frond of the date palm, willow and myrtle branches) and the etrog (a yellow citron), which are sort of shaken about after waiting for three stars to appear in the sky. It’s tradition to have friends and family gathered each night of Sukkot in the sukkah, and because we don’t actually have one at home, I was happy to head out to Hingham for this shindig – Sukkot is one of my favorite holidays!
Being a Saturday, it was also the end of the sabbath, and the beginning of the new week, so in addition to Sukkot blessings, we also performed the Havdalah ritual – ending the sabbath with blessings over the wine, the lighting of a traditional many-wicked candle, the smelling of spices, and finally extinguishing the candle in the wine.
Tonight marked a nice transition into fall, and I’m looking forward to the adventures and excitement that this season holds. Happy Sukkot, and happy Fall everyone!
by Sam Tackeff | Sep 20, 2013 | Blogging, Fitness
This is how I started my day – with a walk along the waterfront, ambling my way towards the office and a long workday ahead of me. It’s always a peaceful stroll from where we park – about a half hour away from the office – and I make an effort to head out on the Harborwalk (the longer way) when I can. I had a breakfast date with Devon at Sportello, and although he could have driven me after that, I decided to walk the normal way to start things off right. That’s my happiness tip right there: start the morning off with a walk, and no matter how the day goes, you’ll already have accomplished something. Okay, so the same goes for making your bed. Do both, and you’ll be golden.
Our office was buzzing today – the exciting type of morning in startups: our app was a) somehow above Pinterest yesterday afternoon in the app store rankings. Yes, Pinterest. And then we made Time 50 best apps of 2013. And then someone realized that Jay Leno had actually mentioned RunKeeper on the show, and the video started circulating the office. I got to run our weekly Twitter chat – and I do *love* Twitter. And the afternoon highlight was a team-effort bug bash complete with a gavel spray painted gold with plastic bugs glued to it. For such a hard working group, it’s delightful how silly folks can be. And then my longest meeting was a walking meeting, accompanied by my coworker Rebecca, and her dog Connor. Here he is in the throws of ecstasy. Gotta love that pup!
After work I decided that I’d walk home (Newton home, not New Hampshire, although that’d be a new type of adventure). My plan was to take the “short” way, along the Charles, from Boston, to Allston, to Brighton, and over to Newton. The long way would be on the river itself, but that’s about 9 or 10 miles including all of the curves of the river.
I wasn’t actually sure I’d make it, and I left a little too late to ensure a light passage the whole way, but why not try? Sometimes I amuse myself with these “ambitious” ideas. And by ambitious, I mean, slightly off-balance. I should mention here that I am still sore from working out at the gym on Wednesday. So much so that I was getting up and down like a geriatric (but not my grandmother – she does Tai Chi and Zumba), with stiff limbs all day, and doing a lot of that achy waddling that you hope nobody notices. A run tonight seemed unimaginable, but the one thing I can do, even when sore is walk, so I just left the office with my bag, and started off. Here’s what I came across.
7.77 miles and nearly three hours later, I made it home. And now, I’m expired on the couch. And all of my favorite takeout options have already closed, and I haven’t had dinner yet. And if you’ve made it this far, you might have one last laugh with me: last night, after my second attempt at watching my recorded episode of Broadchurch, Devon fell asleep 8 minutes in, and I paused it. Tonight, I have yet to have eaten, and I’m pretty sure that attempt three is going to be a bust. C’est la vie!
by Sam Tackeff | Sep 19, 2013 | Challenge, chicken, Fitness, Restaurants
Before I even bother mentioning any part of my day, isn’t this a glorious sunset? You can’t quite see it, but the moon was huge on the horizon tonight. As I took the long way back from work there were dozens of people stopped taking photos on the Harborwalk. Folks had iPhones, iPads, you name it directly in front of their faces to get a shot of this thing. Yes, yes, I know, why can’t we just stop and enjoy things with our eyes? But who will know that we saw it?!
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I hope you don’t mind that this blog has turned into a serial novel. Now where were we here? Oh yes, we left off last night as I was about to watch Broadchurch. And then I posted my little essay on the interwebs, and promptly passed out. Turns out that two hours at the gym has a soporific effect.
Today was a sad day at work, as a coworker who I’m particularly fond of left to move onto new things. We had a big team lunch across the Charlestown bridge at the new Papagayo location, ate massive amounts of guacamole, and witnessed said departing coworker’s first ever tequila shot. (I’m not actually sure how that one is possible, but there is video documentation) I ordered the shrimp and avocado salad with mango and jicama, and a little side of black beans. It was good, but I think I’d like to recreate it at home with slightly riper mango!
It pushed me right into nap time territory, but I think that could have been because I had been walking all morning long, rather than the food. I racked up 16,000 steps today, which I managed to track with my Fitbit, Jawbone, and several RunKeeper logged activities. Can’t have too many measurements! Here’s what the Jawbone app looks like – that’s my main page on the left. The purple bar is sleep time, and the red-orange is steps. You can zoom in on your daily step total (on the right), and see the breakdown of your activity time. Neat!
After walking over to the car, I met Devon and some coworkers at Atlantic Beer Garden, where I turned down burgers, fries, and a half a quesadilla, alas. When I got home tonight, despite my activity level, I was actually not very hungry. (Might have been the extra guacamole which tided me over?) Here’s dinner: a bowl of spinach and cherry tomatoes, and a leftover spicy chicken leg from Capitol Grille. There may… or may not be a small bit of ice cream in my future.
And before I go, here’s one last photo – the seal that caught me checking him out in the mirror at the aquarium tonight. I try to pass by the window on a regular basis, because, come on, these guys are too cute. (I decided to hold back from posting the screen shot of my mom as I FaceTime’d her seeing the seal, but, man is it great knowing that I have that shot on my phone.)
Because we’re going full circle here, I’m headed to attempt Broadchurch again. Goodnight all!
by Sam Tackeff | Sep 18, 2013 | Challenge, Fitness, Meal Planning, Seafood
Hello! Today was a quiet day, I dropped off Devon at work at 8, and headed over to Trader Joe’s to pick up some food so that I wasn’t lost without options. Newly armed with chicken thighs, broccoli, and several samples, I headed over to Formaggio Kitchen to pick up my cup of George Howell coffee, and an egg salad sandwich on caraway bread for lunch, and made it home in time for my first meeting.
I worked from home today, and it was largely full of meetings, calls, coordination, and follow up work. It was blissfully uneventful… except for a small period of panic as I waited patiently for the iOS 7 release. After several false starts: “Sorry, your phone is too damn full, this program needs 3.1 GB of storage!“, and “Sorry, you’ve waited two hours but Software Update is unavailable at this time, sucker!“, I can finally say that in my hands is the flat design and brand-spankin’ new features we’ve all been waiting for.
Actually, I’m having trouble adjusting. But I just don’t like change.
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If you are only around for the food, warning, fitness rambling ahead! Just go ahead and skip below the fold for my dinner notes.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been missing many weekday CrossFit classes because I haven’t been able to make the commuting work, so a few months ago I decided to commit to Wednesday afternoons to head in for the WOD, and for Olympic Lifting class. Despite my attempts, because of traffic, I was barely making it to the later classes, so a few weeks ago I decided to try working from home on Wednesdays so that I’d avoid the nearly two hour rush hour trip from Boston to Needham. Many folks in my office work from home a few days a week – and unlike at Yahoo, we get things done! – and I feel so fortunate to have such flexibility. Today’s workout was the scheduled Lurong Paleo Challenge workout, and although I’m not competing, I jumped right in with the group.
B. “The Triplet Tester”
21-18-15-12-9-6-3 reps of:
Wall Ball 20/14
Deadlift 115/75
Box Jump 24/20
For this workout, there was an 18 minute cap. I chose the prescribed weights, and the wall balls nearly killed me. I knew going in it would be hard work, but I assumed that I’d get closer to finishing – but… no dice. I made it through the 21 and 18 round with a rough time on the wall balls, and only made it through 12 wall balls of the 15 round. This was *not* my best work, and I kept missing the wall target. But, I do still feel quite sore from the weekend, and I’m not going to beat myself up about it. It felt so good just to be in there working hard.
After the workout, I stayed for Lifting class – we spent an hour warming up, doing drills, and practicing Squat Cleans. I’ve been trying to get back to heavier weights, but I know that I need to commit to the best form possible, even if that means a light bar. I spent most of the hour focusing intently on leaning back, pulling the bar close, and getting my elbows up. I know these classes pay off in the end, but man, is it an exercise in patience!
After the gym I headed back into the city to pick up Devon from work before heading home.
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And then we eat!
When I got home, I was keen on prepping dinner quickly – it was already past 8 when we walked in the door. After 10 minutes at the fish counter debating flounder (on sale) or scallops, the scallops won out. I think it was Adam Roberts’ instagram that got me hungry for them this week, and I knew I wanted to take them home and sear them in butter. Butttttttah.
I took out my stainless steel pan, added a few pats of Kerrygold butter, and let it heat up until it was just starting to foam and brown. The scallops, which were quite large, got seasoned with salt and pepper, and I popped them in the pan and let them sizzle in the bubbling butter. I gave them about three minutes on the first side without so much as poking them, flipped them over, and let them have another two. Afterwards I let them rest on a plate while I reheated some asparagus (leftovers from Devon’s dinner last night at Capitol Grille – I can’t complain, because yesterday I was eating lobster), heated up his small piece of leftover filet mignon, some potatoes, and cooked some pre-steamed fairytale eggplant and cherry tomatoes in the buttery dregs of the pan. After I plated, I sprinkled the eggplant and tomato with some sherry vinegar, and dinner was served!
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And now? Tonight’s episode of Broadchurch. Are you watching it? It’s the newest series to premiere on BBC America – a small seaside town crime series starring the former Doctor, David Tennant, and it’s completely captivating! Are you watching it? Do you have a favorite BBC series?
