In The Cucina With Seamas

At the Pleasantville Farmers Market, I’ve been buying sun dried tomatoes, and peppadews from the Pickle Licious stand. They are pricier than the store bought versions but a lot tastier.

I use to cut the sun dried tomatoes but pureeing makes them easier to add to meals.

One night I made English Muffin pizzas for dinner and used the sun dried tomato puree on two of them, tomato sauce on the other two. Then I topped one of each with goat cheese, the other with shredded mozzarella. Into the oven at 350 degrees and 10 minutes later I had a tasty dinner.

Another idea I had was to add the sun dried tomatoes to refried beans. A ¼ cup of them is a good amount to add if you use canned beans.

Blade Runner 2049

Supposedly Blade Runner 2049 didn't live up to it's box office expectations. Has the jaded, video-sated public finally had enough of the soft reboots and remakes that aren't needed.

Has going to the theater become so expensive that's it a lot cheaper to view it on demand, wait till cable/DVD.

Or people are afraid to go the movies in fear of getting shot?

1/2 Day Treat Yo Self

A great work perk is that we get a half day on certain holidays, so I don’t bring lunch since we’re dismissed at 1pm.

Last Labor Day Eve I treated myself to lunch at Tomatillo in Dobbs Ferry and it was still warm enough for a beer with lunch.

On the second visit prior to Thanksgiving I skipped the beer and my bill was cheaper, Captain Lawrence is pricey but so worth it. When tracking my spending, I saw on these visits that they were the only times I used my Fun Fund for those months. This prompted me to save my going out for a meal for these half days since I have the holiday schedule for the year and can plan accordingly.

MTS3K & Breakfast

I’m glad that Netflix brought back MST3K because it revived a personal tradition, a tasty breakfast and good coffee while I watch. Another “tradition” I’ve brought back is watching one episode of a show then waiting till next week to watch the next episode, the way people used to watch TV before all this newfangled technology.

Right now my TV schedule is;

Sunday - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return

  A Series of Unfortunate Events

Monday - Master of None

    Flaked

Tuesday - Twin Peaks

    Jane The Virgin

Wednesday - New/old movie from my streaming queue

Thursday - New/old movie from my dvd queue

Friday - Supergirl

The Flash

Saturday - Marvel’s Agents of Shield

I finished MST3K recently and started Agents of Shield as it's replacement.

It’s funny that binge watching is part of our culture when as a kid, Saturday mornings meant hours of cartoons.

Hey There Sugar Lips

I watch ‘Getting Doug with High’ and ‘Fatman on Batman’ and both hosts mentioned cutting out/down on foods with sugar which helped them to lose weight.

Looking at my Lose it! app, I saw that yogurt and dried fruit were my biggest sources of sugar intake, so I cut them out and substituted unsweetened oatmeal as a morning snack, carrots for the afternoon.

At first I’d crave foods like donuts, cakes, pies, etc because of the lack of sugar. Recently I had a Breakfast Cookie from Red Barn Bakery, which was such a shock to my system, my stomach had trouble digesting it while still wanting more of the sugar.

The free snacks at work were a big temptation since they were mostly junk food.

Mostly.

I like Nature Valley Oat n Honey Granola Bars which has 11 grams of sugar but eating them Monday through Friday paused my weight loss. Recently Lays Baked Potato Chips were added so I switched to those. I'm back on a gradual weight loss as of now.

Now to get back on my mountain bike...

Grocery Bag Book Covers

One perk of my Dad owning a grocery story was using the paper grocery bags to cover my textbooks to replace the ones school provided for me at the beginning of the year.

Sometimes it was the cheap glue wearing out, or the books going from the locker to my backpack which damaged the covers

I preferred the grocery bag covers because they had more room to draw on.

In addition to the grocery bag book cover, I’d color in the white space of this notebook. The lucky kids with the quad colored pen would do large sections in a different color or “tye-dye” it. I only had blue or black ink pens so my covers were boring.

Video Games

I wonder if my age has anything to do with my limited interest in video games. The first console we had in our home was Intellivision and according to Wikipedia it was available in 1980 (but not sure exactly when we got ours), I was 9 years old then and by that time I had a decent amount of LEGO and toys.

Perhaps having physical toys to play with, especially LEGO, fueled my imagination so much that I didn’t need video games. Going outside to play was a big part of my youth. Having woods behind our house to explore and in the winter we could safely sled down Welwyn Lane.

The Intellivision games I preferred were ones that didn’t require a lot of jumping but Auto Racing had a curve that would bring me to tears of frustration.

That frustration came from playing a game for weeks to months and I still couldn’t beat certain levels. Tron’s Deadly Discs was fun until the level where enemies would come at you from all 4 sides and I couldn’t block them all.

Sure I could have practiced more but cartoons after school were just as entertaining.

Another contributing factor (and many years later) may have been when I got my own computer in 1997 and would buy a new game every other month. This led me to not finishing a previously purchased game because I was engrossed in the new one. The other downside was if I couldn’t get past a certain point due to not being good enough, a difficult puzzle (with no help from a message board), or losing interest because it was another First Person Shooter (this didn’t deter me from buying another one next month).

While I enjoyed my Xbox and the games that were made for it, I lost interest… until Xbox 360 and Fallout 3. After finishing the main quest and playing through all the DLC’s, I boxed it up during an apartment move and kept it in the box till I donated it.

I was going to get a PS4 and ‘No Man’s Sky’ but the negative reviews and the thought of “I’ll play it for a while, get bored, and get rid of it” came right after.

Buying

A bad habit I’m working on stopping is talking myself into a purchase that isn’t necessary. For example, I’ll have a bag of frozen french fries in the freezer but I’ll want to buy fries from Five Guys. Because it takes 10 to 15 minutes for me to get home from there, the 5 Guy fries need to be heated up in the oven. This is an easy solution, just make the fries I have at home instead.

This past Christmas I got money from my parents and put half into savings, the other half into my pocket. I was going to buy the Lego Lakeside Lodge but recently my external hard drive stopped working. After I bought a new hard drive from the Apple Store in the Westchester, I was going to buy the LEGO set but as I walked back to my car (which meant going past the LEGO store again) I talked myself out of it since I used all of the money from the gift plus my own. I didn’t need another LEGO since I got the Star Wars Eclipse Fighter for Christmas as well.

All I Needed Was My Bike And Walkman

One thing I miss from my youth is riding my ten speed around Galloway Lane & Foxhill Road, especially at night since the neighborhood would “shut down” after 6pm.

Best was when I bought a new cassette of a favorite band or singer and could listen to both sides without being interrupted until it was time to flip the tape to Side 2. I remember how awesome it was owning a Walkman that had Auto Reverse. For the younger generation, that meant I could listen to one side and the Walkman would switch over to the other side.

One night I was listening to The Sugarcubes ‘Life’s Too Good’ for the first time when 'Take Some Petrol Darling' started and scared me enough where I almost fell off my bike.

Recently I purchased Transvision Vamp ‘Pop Art’ and while listening to ‘Wild Star’ it brought back the memory of riding on the down slope of Fox Hill Lane and swerving from one side of the street to the other.

The downside to a Walkman was the wire for the headphones also acted as the antenna so I’d get interference from the power lines that were around the block. When I rode on top of the Kensico Dam on my way to the Central Avenue Toys R Us, that problem went away.

Reading

I used to enjoy reading, to the point where I laid in bed all day reading Wizard & Glass in the Gunslinger series from Stephen King. Now I’ll read for 5 minutes and that’s enough for a month.

So I decided to remedy this situation by rereading a favorite series, The Spellsinger by Alan Dean Foster. Thanks to the Amazon gift card from my brother, I bought the first book. It was tempting to buy the complete series since it was $49.95 but that would have used up the gift card.

It’s been a slow start and Alan can’t be blamed, I still enjoy Jon-Tom’s introduction to Mudge. I could have spent time reading last Monday since I had a day off from work, but was still recovering from New Year’s Eve (I ate too much baked brie and cookies & cream)

This past Monday, I sat down, cracked open my iPad and read the rest of chapter 1. I still laugh from the humor of Mudge and Jon-Tom’s outlook of the strange world he’s now a part of.