Taster Spoon

Happy All Saints' Day!

What did you do for Halloween? 

Tuesday night Ace and I watched The Ring.

Wednesday and Thursday I tried to keep up with the Kitchen Cure, but it's getting the better of me.  Our kitchen is seasonally-appropriate: horrifying.   

Friday night we had a game night with very rummy spiced cider (with shrunken heads) that devolved into pretty raucous karaoke, but we haven't heard a peep from the neighbors, so it seems like they've given us a free pass.

What did you go as?  I recycled last-year's costume.  (Before that I had gotten three years' wear out of a chicken costume that originated when "avian flu" was still a thing, mainly because a lot of work went into it, but it was time for something fresh.)  It was store bought.  I kind of feel like it's cheating to wear a store-bought costume, but this one makes everyone happy so I make no apologies.

 

What's that on my feet, you say?  Yes!  Our friend who is a sexy French maid has her birthday on October 30 so this year she organized a roller skating party on Halloween.  Is that not the bestest?

Frenchie was unable to attend our wedding last month because on the very same day, she and her husband Chief were renewing their vows and baptizing their daughter Genevieve.  

Genevieve!  Also the bestest!

Frenchie and Chief have the greatest party ideas.  Their backyard wedding last year included a self-serve ice cream bar, salsa lessons, a hula hoop contest, and a fire juggler.  Possibly the most fun wedding Ace and I have ever been to.  Frenchie has previously thrown trampoline parties, trapeze parties, you name it.  Her mom mentioned that she'd had a pitch black party where the only light came from everyone's glowstick necklaces.  Saturday was par for the course, with a costume contest as well as roller skating.  

Reno 911, here in a death spiral with Frenchie, was the crowd fave.

Frenchie and Chief also tend to collect really open, welcoming people, so even though Ace and I didn't know anyone but them, we immediately felt included.

Included in the roller train!

 

It  was a good time all around.  Then Ace and I went to a Halloween feast at Rad and Victor's, where there was a very small fireman named Austin and a princess named, oh shoot, what was her magical princess name? 

Sunday Ace and I sailed, hoping that the next time we do we will pass our basic cruising certification practical test, and then be only one course away from being able to rent a boat in Croatia or some such.  Finally.  Then, since we were in Oakland already, we stopped in at the house of friends who just bought a house/had a baby and were captivated.  Srsly, babies everywhere.

Last night we tried watching Night of the Living Dead, which neither of us had seen, because it's supposedly on that Top 100 Movies of All Time list...but I got fed up with how useless all the women were and we turned it off.  I guess I'll have to watch the last 45 minutes just to check that off my list. 

Next up: Turkey Day. 

Speaking of which, I'm thinking of quitting animals again.  We've been veg at home for about four weeks now, ever since getting another one of those "if you only met them, you wouldn't eat them" pamphlets at the Strictly Bluegrass festival.  Nothing I didn't know in there, but a reminder that I do basically agree with the sentiment.  And then a friend posted the NYT excerpt from Jonathan Safran Foer's new book as a Facebook link, which made me think about, you know, integrity and what have you.  I'm not eeked out by animals (like us) eating other animals, it's the abuse associated with factory farming that turns my stomach.  So I'm game for making exceptions for meat where we have knowledge of where (whom) it came from, but know that those occasions, practically speaking, will likely be rare. 

Then again, if industrial husbandry were my issue, I'd swear off eggs and dairy, too, which I'm struggling with.  I hate that free range eggs and sympathetic dairy are so hard (and expensive) to come by; they do have eggs (with photos of the happy scratching chickens) at our Sunday Far Mar, but we've been so busy we haven't been to it in a month and anyway the eggs are about a buck apiece and sell out in the very early hours.  I'm annoyed that things I think our grandparents took for granted as cheap and plentiful are now so scarce and precious.  Of course, you know what this means: Eglu. 

I've put the book on my Amazon wish list (I order only once I've accumulated $50 worth of merchandise, you know, for the free shiping).  Anybody else newly affected/motivated?

Our showers have sliding doors.

Otherwise I would totally order this!

(Courtesy spinninghat.com)

Hi, guys!

I've been mighty busy and out of town over the last several weeks, and work has been pretty consuming.  Both in actuality (real work that requires real time) and in my head (guilt that all spare time should be directed to working). 

But today I was shamed into showing my face for a moment.  I was reminded that I do actually have 'material' that I'm looking forward to sharing (such as my recent travels) and there's no reason I can't shoot off a hello every now and then. 

I could protest that my life story has unfolded on Facebook instead of here, but that's not even true.  I update seldom, and when I do, it's not usually pertinent to...anything real.  Example: A couple of days ago I Facebooked that I had consumed one of those Digestive Yogurts.  Commence the snickering comments concerning the well-being of my gastrointestinal tract. 

But the backstory is simply that I went to the dentist last week, and when I go to the dentist I have to take a bunch of antibiotics so I don't die.  And my mom always used to say that when you take antibiotics you kill all the good bugs as well as the bad, and therefore you should replace them by eating yogurt. 

So I thought I'd buy yogurt with extra bugs and lo, Activia and its Yoplait competitor were both half off so I basically walked out of Safeway with a one month supply. 

If you must know, GI-wise, I'm actually shooting for twice a day!  So there.

In related news, our CSA started up again last week!  Our pickup day switched to Friday, and I spent a pleasant Friday evening chopping off stems and blanching greens and whatnot so it all fits in the fridge.  Having to do that every Friday evening has potential to be a drag, but it's still fresh and new for now.

They sent us a great recipe for parsnip soup that I made, and for all it is shockingly easy, it tastes unusual (parsnippy) and luxurious:

Grate a mess of ginger (1-2 T) and saute it in a saucepan till fragrant.  Dump in a mess (4 cups) of peeled and chopped parsnips.  Add a quart of chicken stock.  Heat until the parsnips are very soft.  Whip it all up with an immersion blender (my favorite kitchen toy) and add about 1/4 cup of cream.  Salt and sugar to taste. 

I have read that parsnips are of questionable healthiness because they contain arsenic or cyanide or something.  But I guess apples do, too.

To your health!

RAW IS WAR

What do you do when all your girlfriends are on the verge of delightful motherhood?

You console yourself by doing all the things pregnant girls can't do!  Go wild!

Like, buy raw milk at the farmer's market.

Hippie? 

Even lowest-common-denominator RealAge published an article suggesting that if you are going to drink milk at all, at least some of its nutritional benefits are destroyed through pasteurization.  It may help with allergies.  On the flip side, the New York Times depicts devotees as death wishing crazies.  But I'm young, I'm single, I have life insurance!

A quart of skim and a quart of whole were both $4.25.  A pint of cream was $10.  Naturally I got the whole.  I figured I could separate my own cream, thanks anyway, nice try. 

I was kind of excited by the prospect of un-homogenized milk, ever since I went to the San Mateo country fair last summer.  I prefer skim anyway, but was completely converted when I looked at a homemade sign made by a little girl for a 4-H project, explaining how milk is obtained and prepared.  She described the milking process and the pasteurization process, and then, just as straightforwardly, explained the homogenization process, which distributes the cream and remaining white blood cells throughout the fluid.  White blood cells?  You mean pus?

If that doesn't turn you off milk, nothing will.  My solution was to stick to skim, in the hopes that nothing was distributed throughout the milk, no pus mixed in with the cream.

It was fun - so olde tymey! - to see the layer of yellowish cream on top of the whiter skim in my glass bottle of milk...only I had no idea how I was supposed to "skim" it off.  I don't have a cream skimmer.  I can't even do the butter churn on the dance floor.  And I've had enough experience pouring things to know that you don't always get the top layer, or the bottom layer, or whatever layer you're trying for.  And then I remembered - my gravy separator!

I poured about half the bottle into the separator, only couldn't see the clearly delineated cream layer anymore.  So I put it in the fridge, and lo, what was left in the bottle sure looked like skim milk.  I had a small glass.  Would it taste strange and funky like that time I got 16 ounces of goat milk yogurt?  Would it taste "ethereal" like the milk in that New York Times article?

I have to be honest with you.  It just tasted like milk.  Skim milk. 

Pregnant ladies can relax.  You're not missing anything over here. 

I think I'll go pour myself a cocktail, light a cigarette, have some sushi and dye my hair.

Moldy Oldie

We were standing around thinking of where to eat after run club, and because it's my birthday coming up this weekend, I proposed Sushi 85, the all-you-can-eat sushi place. It's not the cheapest, but birthday boys and girls eat free, so I figured we could spread that deduction around. Ace informed me that not only is it more expensive than it used to be, but to claim the birthday freebie, you have to go on the day.

So we went to that burrito place on Rengstorff that used to be a Jack in the Box, and I was schooled in what is apparently a whole world of birthday freebies.  I've made stabs at investigating this in the past, and have been disappointed.  By the time you think of it, you sign up for the program and have to wait a whole nother year for it to kick in.

But a couple of the runners inquired whether I was signed up for this and that birthday discount, and I kept saying "no."  Which made me think, what DO I get?

Currently I get a real birthday card in the mail from Cost Plus offering 10% off.  It's nice to get friendly mail like that, and I like Cost Plus anyway.

I get a card from my mom.

I get an e-mail from Buca di Beppo.

It takes considerable orchestration to get enough people to go to Buca to make the huge family style dishes worth while (otherwise you can order only one thing between the four of you, and that's boring)...but if you can do it, one birthday dessert is enough for the table.

I don't know whatever happened to my free scoop from Baskin Robbins - I suspect they may have an old e-mail address of mine that eventually vaporized.  Guess I'll go over and re-register for the Birthday Club.  Do they take people over 35?

Okay, I'm back, and they let me print out my coupon right there.  Yay!  (In fact, when you complete registering, the "Next" button is replaced by a "Yay!" button.) 

And I got an e-mail from Hanes that was titled, "Happy Birthday!  Our gift to you."  OMG!  OMG!  I spend a fortune on hosiery.  What would they send me?!  A pair of fishnets?  Something lacy?  A "Thank Goodness it Fits" bra?

OMG!  OMG!  OMG!

Wait.  What?

$1.99 shipping?  That's their "gift" to me?  Not even a pair of Slightly Irregular thigh-highs?

I tell you, OneHanesPlace gets on my nerves.  I've bought hosiery from their website every other year or so, because it's easy and it's not something you have to try on, and it's not something I ever think about when I'm shopping for anything else.  BUT, then they insist on sending me their catalogue in the mail every month.  It's a thick catalogue and I have e-mailed them repeatedly to say that I don't want the junk mail, I don't read it, I certainly don't buy from it, and I will stop buying even from the web site if I get another one.  But then I move to a different house, run out of taupe, they capture my new address, and it starts all over again.  Why do they think an online customer wants a paper catalogue anyway?

In sum: they kind of suck, and their birthday stinginess may have sealed their fate. 

I'm all about leg warmers these days, anyway.

So!  I welcome any further suggestions of birthday clubs that it might profit me to belong to!  Does Sephora have a club?  How about a local hair cuttery that gives a discount or a glass of orange juice?  Or a massage place, that would be nice.  Or Whole Foods?  A Wheatgrass Shot from Jamba Juice?  Shoot me a comment so we can share the wealth.

Nope, nobody here by that description.

Psst.  She went thataway.

CSA Week 2: Taking a Leek

We were champion vegemunchers this week, getting through most of our stash, part of which I credit to a more satisfactory selection of CSA items.  More carrots, but of a different color, and everything else was different from Week 1.  (I had worried about celery fatigue.)  Along with the carrots we got fennel, spigariello, tumbleweeds (!), teeny radishes, a couple more winter squashes, and leeks.

It has taken me a long time to come around to liking leeks.  I did my college Junior Year Abroad in England, in Bristol, which right across the river from Wales.   At the time, I was vegetarian, and in Wills Hall where I lived, there was but a single vegetarian option each night - nine times out of ten involving leeks, white beans, or some combination of the two.  I grew very quickly to hate leeks, and have been unable to tolerate them ever since.

But a couple weeks ago Jamie Oliver did a pasta with caramelized leeks and pancetta that looked kind of awesome, and I made it, and it kind of was!  I'd broken the leek curse!  Then last week I got the weekly marketing e-mail from America's Test Kitchen where they try to lure you with some free recipes and tool tips (a.k.a. the poor man's Cook's Illustrated), and they had a recipe for salmon pot pie that looked mighty good - involving leeks.  So last week I was pretty happy that leeks were part of our haul.  I haven't yet gotten around to the pot pie (would involve going to store to buy puff pastry), but I did use a leek Monday night to great effect. 

First course was a savory custard full of leeks, carrots and agretti that went over like gangbusters.  Seconds were had.  Then we had grass-fed steak with parsnip/apple puree and green peas.  (Parsnips are mainly sweet, but can be quite sharp on their own, so to tone them down I boiled/steamed two chopped parsnips in a very little water, adding a chopped golden delicious apple in the last five minutes, then threw them all in the blender with two teaspoons of butter.  Creamy and sweet - I loved them.)

Also this week we put our booty to use in stir fried radish greens, fennel soup, radishes as munchable lunchables, pumpkin-coconut soup, tumbleweeds with chicken maple sausages for breakfast, lots of sauteed dark leafy greens, carrot custard, and (the big cheat) - vegetable stock with the green leek tops and carrot tops and what have you.

Here's my big discovery of the week: an unbelievably easy recipe for a custard you can complete in less than 45 minutes that's a great way of getting rid of unwanted vegetables but which makes it seem like you actually planned it out.

The farm newsletter included a recipe for a sweet carrot custard.  I made that (it was yummy), and I modified it the other night to make a savory one.  I mean, basically it was quiche.  But either one serves as a super easy way to use up any old vegetables you've got lying around the house.

Foolproof Sweet or Savory Vegetable Custard

For sweet:

• 1/2 c sugar
• 1 cup grated carrots (or probably anything else sweet, like parsnips or zucchini or pureed pumpkin)
• 1 cup bread crumbs (I toasted 2 slices of bread on low a couple times till they were dry then ran them through the mini prep processor. )
• grated nutmeg
• some vanilla

For savory:

• About a cup or two of mixed vegetables - grated or chopped small
• maybe some grated cheese?
• seasoning to taste (I used salt and red pepper flakes)

For both:

• 2 cups milk
• 3 eggs

How to:

Turn on the oven to 350, put a kettle of water on to boil.  Set some adorable little ramekins, around six of the teeny 4 oz. ones, fewer if bigger, in a big oven pan with sides - i.e. a roasting or cake type pan, not a cookie sheet.   (For containers, I used those glass ones with lids so I could just seal them up for lunches.)

For the sweet: do your grating; whisk everything together.  (Note: the original recipe demanded 2 cups of scalded milk, but I forgot and just used cold milk and they turned out fine.)

For the savory: I don't know if precooking is reallynecessary, but I used 1 piece of bacon chopped small and a little olive oil, and sauteed a finely sliced leek, a handful of chopped tumbleweeds, and a grated carrot until they were bright in color. Pour the milk in to cool the veggies, season, and whisk in the egg.  Whisk in half a cup of grated cheese if you like.

Ladle your mixtures into your little dishes, pour the boiling kettle around the dishes, and transfer to your oven and bake for 30ish minutes. 

Voila, a first course for supper, a dessert, an easy breakfast, or a simple snack or lunch for work.  Great way to clean out the fridge.

Speaking of unwanted vegetables, Amy made the awesome suggestion last week to donate my extra escarole (the neighbors didn't want it either) to a rabbit rescue organization.  First I inquired with a friend who I knew had two bunnies, only to learn that his bunnies had both gone to the great Mr. MacGregor's Garden in the sky, but he also knew about and referred me to the House Rabbit Society (which led me to start really wanting a bunny - look at these faces...and these!), and also mentioned that there are a couple of donkeys who live in Menlo Park who might appreciate fresh produce.  Hee haw.

When two heads are not better than one

I subscribed for a share in the Two Small Farms CSA this year.  It costs about $20/week, and you can pick up your box at some thirty locations all up and down the Peninsula on varying days - easy peasy.  Last Wednesday I picked up the first box.

It contained

• a few bunches of spring garlic (looks like green onions, but smells and tastes like garlic)
• LOTS of parsnips
• 2 small butternut squashes
• 2 petite bunches of celery
• multicolored carrots - an enormous orange ones, and pink and white ones, too
• a little bunch of hot-pink radishes
• a tight, crisp green cabbage
• more escarole than you can possibly imagine.

For about six extra dollars a week, you can (and I did) also receive a bouquet of local, organic flowers.  I was skeptical of these, expecting buggy, spindly wildflowers, but the bunch was gorgeous - enormous pink tulips and two colors of iris and branches of flowering rosemary and bay leaves (whose leaves I'm going to dry and save when they're done being colorful) and a number of other bright orange and pink flowers I don't know the name of.  I enjoyed them as a bunch for several days, then separated them out into four different, smaller bouquets I put around the house, and which are still going strong.  Six dollars well spent.  If they're still looking good when the next box comes in tomorrow, we're going to have an embarrassment of flowers.  (But if they're organic, maybe we can eat them.)

I'm accustomed to organic produce costing an arm and a leg (and, truthfully, don't buy it when it does), so I'm amazed how much eating $20 provides.

So far, I've used the veggies in:

3 meals' worth of cream of vegetable soup (celery, parsnips, spring garlic)

4 meals' worth of honey glazed root veggies (multicolored carrots, parsnips, radishes)

2 servings of Asian-style cole slaw (cabbage, radishes, spring garlic)

1 serving of stir fried radish greens (radishes)

1 wilted salad (escarole, spring garlic)

1 serving of smoked salmon dip-filled crudite (celery and radishes).

I'm not crazy about celery, but I'm chastened by the idea that food dislikes are to some extent acquired, and have managed to get through it all, by seasoning highly the above (mostly celery) soup, filling raw stalks of it with crazy delicious salmon-dip, hiding chopped celery as a base layer in a mushroom risotto and freezing the small amount that remained for stock.  Very pleased with myself.  I suspect that at least one item a week will be my 'challenge' item, which I will have to really push on through.

I am NOT pleased with myself re the escarole.  There is a ridiculous amount.  I guess it's just two heads, but it's a little bitter, so it doesn't make for an inviting salad, so I don't know what to do.  I stir fried some on the weekend, but can't say I enjoyed it.  But they're looking at me, wiltingly, and I know I need to make some headway before tomorrow's box comes in. 

Anyway, I've only gone shopping once - a last minute run on Good Friday to grab some mussels and frozen fish filets for dinner.  Ace picked up some milk and cereal and OJ, and bread at the farmer's market.  So, financially, this CSA thing is not as much of a hit as I thought it might be, now that I'm forced (by the threat of waste) to build most meals around the produce. 

The threat of waste is no small thing.  I have a few things remaining, besides one and a half HUUGE heads of floppy escarole, but they don't bother me yet.  Three quarters of a cabbage (we can blow through this in a couple of stirfries and slaws), a handful of parsnips and carrots (just enough for one roasted dinner) and the butternut squashes, which I've refrained from cracking into in favor of the perishables.

It's a challenge, for sure, but I'm looking forward to the year. 

Tomorrow, I'm expecting to get a bunch of greens that are mysterious to me - Italian greens I've never heard of, tumbleweed.  The farm is kind enough to include some recipe ideas in their weekly newsletter, which they send in advance so we can plan ahead.  They manage to make a lot of the vegetables that intimidate me (bitter greens, chard) seem, instead, sophisticated and refreshing.   So I'm going to hew closely to their recommendations on these - I feel like I'm being thrown into an area of cooking that's completely new to me, dealing with mystery produce, and it's exciting. 

I think I'll learn a lot this year.

Tasterspoon 0, Ikea 3

My list of 100 exceptions to my buy-no-new-things plan had three things knocked off last night.

I made it a week into 2008 without buying anything except food, and those were items from the farmer's market and the Milk Pail, too.  (*Pat-pat*, why yes, thank me very much!)  And despite a little fussing when we got unexpected presents from out-of-town visitors.  These are people who have excellent taste and run the Web site Satinbox, which is full of lovely things!  But I realized we could pick up, at the farmer's market, a few 'tastes of California,' should we see them again before they head home - bottled apricot sauce and sugared walnuts from Hollister or thereabouts, or yummy blackberry honey from just over the hill.  If we don't get a chance to meet up, we have delightful items to add to our own cupboard.

But last night I stumbled.  Ace had asked, very nicely, whether next year we couldn't have a tree that was more...I forget the word he used.  Festive?  My tree this year (and for the past couple of years) has been decorated kind of femininely.  It has navy blue ball ornaments, swags of pale pink fabric and a very very long string of pearls.  I think it's kind of elegant, but most people (brother/dad/Ace) complain that it's morbid.  The navy balls, they say, look black. 

I got the balls from Ikea, when they were on sale shortly after Christmas, when they were a 12-pack for fifty cents.  Therefore, though I knew this flew directly in the face of my "don't buy any more cheapie goods that you'll have to store or which will end up in the landfill," I went to Ikea to see whether I couldn't find some colorful cheapie after-Christmas ornaments to please Ace.

It was a dangerous proposition, me entering Ikea.  I never fail to buy a whole bunch of things I don't need there, things that would look great in SOMEbody's house, or my "someday" house, just not in my house just now.  I tore myself out of the lighting section, after spending ten minutes comparing various wall spotlights that would be just great over the bed for reading at night.  I reminded myself, firmly, that we were in a rental whose lease is up in a month and I did not need to be installing fixtures.

I walked around for a while with some adorable boxes for presents - I love their animal print boxes for wrapping presents, because you don't need to add paper, just stuff the inside with shreds from the home shredder.  And they were on sale, 8 boxes for $1.50.  But I put them back on the shelf, reasoning that if I can't buy presents this year, why should I hang onto boxes, however cute, however reusable?  (Though, I put my mom's presents in these boxes this year and I don't think I ever got them back.)

I was very close to leaving the store empty handed (unthinkable!) - I was even going to resist the $0.50 hot dog because I had promised to make dinner - when, just before passing through to the the furniture warehouse area I saw all these people rolling carts around with these 8 foot palm trees.  I found the display, and before I could stop myself, I had a cart of my own with three of them.

I don't know if these should really fall into my no-new-possessions category, because I intend to keep them alive, and even if they died they'd end up on the compost heap, not the landfill.    But I am forgetting about the front end: surely also they were transported from somewhere, and as long as they ARE alive I will need to house them, and move them if I move.  So they are definitely possessions.

I hope they're worth it.  They are my incentive for taking down the Christmas tree.  When we put the tree up Ace moved my big potted banana leaf type plant up to my bedroom, and it looks great there - that room badly needed greenery, and the high ceiling required something big.  But now we'll have an empty spot when we take the tree down, which my new palm is supposed to fill. 

And of course, once I rationalized one, it was easy to add two more - one for the office, one for the guest room!  How much more inviting is a home with plants!

Oh, shoot.  I have to buy three pots now, don't I?  3 pots, one bag of soil.  I'm down to 93 items.  This resolution is going to last until March, isn't it?      

Spot reduction

Back to working on my New Year's Resolutions. 

I had this idea that in 2008 I would "Buy no new things."  Part of my motivation is environmental, part of it's budgetary, and part of it, I mean, let's be honest, is the excuse to find virtue in being a cheapskate.

Oh, and part of it is to use up all the bazillion toiletries and paper plates and hostess gifts and crafty supplies and whatever that have accumulated around me and trapped me in a 3 bedroom house-with-garage when my life really only requires a studio apartment-plus-carport.  Somebody once said, What is a house except a place to keep your stuff?  I can't believe I'm paying rent for my stuff!  It's like, no matter how cheap something is, when you add in the cost of storing it over the years - it just keeps costing money - so every thing you have had really better be worth it! 

I digress.  Anyway, not expanding my stuff, and hopefully decreasing it, seemed like a good goal in a lot of directions.

But then I started thinking about t.p. and toothpaste and CoverGirl and decided I'd have a budget of...100 new things.  And then I had to decide what I meant by "things."  I decided "things" just meant stuff - stuff  that would eventually turn into clutter, landfill or the Goodwill pile.  Stuff that takes up resources and comes in packaging and has to be trucked from yon to hither and stored in the closet or one of those tupperware bins in the garage. 

I don't want to limit food - that doesn't seem practical to count, and anyway, if I eat it, it doesn't add to the landfill or otherwise clog up my life.   One woman who's done the no-purchases thing didn't allow any food she didn't make herself at home, but part of her purpose was saving money.  I'm just trying to cut down on stuff.  I don't mind paying for people's effort (making me dinner, cutting my hair, entertaining me), because that doesn't weigh me down or add to the landfill, either. 

So how about, "Buying nothing, excluding consumables."  But I kind of do want to be accountable for some consumables in my 100-thing budget, so that I replace them less and limit their consumption.  Like gasoline.  And, as I said, makeup.  Maybe I'll even cut back on t.p., like some people we know. 

But then I find myself tempted to 'stock up' on things (laundry soap).  I find myself desperately shopping for a commuter bicycle so I can do my bike to work one day a week thing (which still seems like a good idea, though it's interfering with that other goal to volunteer more - time crunch issues).  Stocking up now sort of undermines the goal. 

Anyway, it's not an original idea, and I don't plan to make this a blog stunt, plenty of people have done that.  I'm just working through the mechanisms before I go with that advice, "Don't diet, change your lifestyle" and chuck the whole 1-year campaign in favor of incremental changes in awareness and behavior. 

What do you think, will this be a good, eye-opening path to self discovery, or is it a self-important distraction from goals that'll have more impressive impact?