Note: none of the sea life depicted here was harmed in any way during our class observations. We were observing and listening to our knowledgeable instructor, retired marine biologist and author Rick Harbo. All flipped over rocks were carefully and gently replaced to protect the wildlife revealed.
Rock on,
The WB
Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Air Fryer. Air Fryer, who?
Knock, Knock. Who’s there?! Air Fryer. Air Fryer, who?!?
Knock, knock. Who’s there?!?!? Orange. Orange who?????
Orange you glad it’s not another Air Fryer post? But it does involve potatoes, again…LOL!
This month what’s on my plate is such a delicious, easy recipe first introduced to me by my darling daughter: The Primal Gourmet’s Greek Potatoes.
The first stage is to dress the peeled spuds with olive oil and spices, and the chopped garlic. Then plop them in the oven for 20 minutes.
Then remove from the oven and pour over the chicken broth/tomato paste mixture before returning to the oven for the next 20 minutes of roasting time.
Time to add the last, vital ingredient:
And here is what they look like, when the roasting is done.
These potatoes are absolutely delicious. And, if you’re lucky enough to have leftovers, they make a sublime fried potato…I think I would make extra next time, just so as to have plenty more some on hand for the next day.
Ironically, I never took an actual photo of said potatoes ON MY PLATE. I promise to do better next month!
Please let my co-host Donna or myself know what’s on your plate at your house, in the Comments section of either of our WOYPBC posts (or both, if you are so inclined!). Please check out Donna’s May post, here where she lets her pictures do the talking on a fabulous curry dish.
Oh, and here’s the Link party button if you’re so inclined (🤞 it works for me again!).
Rock on,
The WB
Waaaaay back in January (late December, actually) I made Limber my word of the year, for 2022. My focus is on being limber not only in body, but in mind. I think most would agree that if we are not actively and continually working on our flexibility and strength (mental or physical), we will surely start losing it. And that has certainly been true for me, mostly in the physical sense…(but I do also worry about getting stuck in a mental rut).
So far this year, I have been sticking with my daily Qigong, and also am still working on my deep squat. In working on the latter I realized how weak and out of shape I was overall, despite being someone who gets “out there” regularly, and walks and hikes whenever possible. Walking is great exercise of course…but does very little for flexibility and strength overall. I was also dabbling with occasional and brief videos involving free weights, but without any real plan. Naturally, I wasn’t seeing much in terms of results or change.
Then I received an email in March from a fitness YouTuber I follow that changed up my Limber plans for this year. Jessica Smith was offering a digital download of a 3 month program called Lift & Shift she designed specifically to help women of any age improve strength, stamina, and functionality in all aspects of their lives. I checked it out, saw that it would help me reach my goals in a way I could never do on my own, and out came the credit card!
The program started March 28th so I had time to purchase the extra equipment needed to begin, in advance. I already had some weights, but I added a heavier set because I am delusional GOALS!
I also got a bigger mat (yoga mat on steroids, basically), a step, a squishy ball, sliders, and a resistance band. The mat also came with a bonus pair of gloves, for lifting weights with.
So my living room looks like this now, most of the time:
Before I started the program I gave myself a stern talking to. Self, I said, you are going to do this right this time. You are going to listen to your body and stop before you injure yourself. You are going to take your time – it’s a marathon not a sprint – and slowly but surely you will make progress.
I knew it was going to be a very rough start, so I thought I should document how each workout went and how I felt during and afterwards, so I could have a record of the progress I was making.
OMG, the first few sessions were SO. DAMN. HUMBLING. Even though I thought I was mentally prepared, I was not prepared to feel physically ill partway through each workout video. Not only humbling, but discouraging! Starting this routine was way worse than I had imagined. Yet I persevered with the daily workouts even though I couldn’t come close to completing them, and the sick feeling went away as my stamina improved.
What I enjoy about this program is the variety of the workout videos and the calendar that tells you what video to perform, and in what order. There are lighter days (yoga-like stretching workouts), medium days (fine toning routines) and heavier days (lower/upper/core days, compound superset days and HIIRT). There are “rest” days each week where there are no scheduled workouts but you are encouraged to remain active and/or do a cardio session of your own choosing. So far the cardio session I choose is NO DAMN WAY as I need those days for my body to recover from all the abuse the challenges I am throwing at it. 😉 But I am getting stronger and my stamina is increasing, so that could change.
It is a 3 month calendar of exercises, and of course you can repeat it as often as you would like. As someone who wants to remain strong, flexible, and independent for as long as my body will allow it, I can see me incorporating this into my daily routine for life.
At the beginning of month 2 as of writing this post, I am starting to see some real results in my day to day activities and Lift & Shift is even helping me get closer to my deep squat goal:
As for working on being mentally Limber, I have my upcoming move to help me with that. How to make do with a smaller indoor space? How can I make the smaller space I will be inhabiting do everything I need it to do, and still look inviting and uncluttered? Planning, scheming and dreaming about all of this has indeed made me look at EVERYTHING I currently own with a very critical eye. I am suddenly aware of and questioning any assumptions I hold about what I really need, in order to be happy in my new space.
I am loving my new hair, my new workout routine, my upcoming move (challenges and all), and most of all my WOTY. I love how it serves as a touchstone of sorts for me as I journey through 2022. As change happens and opportunities and challenges come up in my life, I can judge them against my WOTY and that helps me to decide if/how it contributes to my big picture for this year, my Limber goal.
How about you? Got a Word of the Year? Doing good things with it? Do tell!
This month I am joining the 2022 WOTY Link Party, from my buddy Donna’s site…maybe I’ll see you there. 🙂
Rock on,
The WB
My site is experiencing all kinds of fuckery technical difficulties today. It started yesterday, actually. Won’t let me reply to yesterday’s comments, or only very sporadically. Please know I am thankful for all the wonderful commenting on my post. I am VERY FRUSTRATED but working on it….
Rock on,
The WB
Donna sang me this song as we ate our dogs. Now I can’t get it outta my head. Uhhhh…thanks for nothing, Donna!?!
Hope your Earth Day was as great as mine.
Rock on,
The WB
Donna and I had so much fun dressing up and setting the tone for France last month and we wanted to do the same for this (and all subsequent boxes). I had a plan for music and setting, and Donna researched how to dress Scandi-style (lots of black and they love plain white shirts, apparently). We were set to start snackin’!
The box included this cute sticker:
That sticker inspired me to change the artwork on my Frame TV to this:
Here are the contents of this month’s box:
The very first item to try was the Danish Yankie bar – a weirdly wonderful pairing of Nougat and (salty) Licorice, in a chocolate bar. I have to say that even I – a salted licorice afficionado – was taken aback by this pairing.
We gave this first treat the ol’ college try what even does that mean.
As you can tell from the above photos, it nearly came to blows surprise! We both really really liked the damn Yankie bar. 🙂 Oh – and nice gun show, Donna – your online gym sessions are really showing results!
Next up was the Cheesy Corn Puffs, also from Denmark.
Then, another savoury Danish snack…these tasted like very nice BBQ-flavoured chips:
After this, it was the biggest package in the box: the Oat Cookies.
So far, so great! Everything we tasted up to now was wonderful. Next up, the Cocoa Mud Cake Balls.
Wild Strawberry Toffees (Sweden) were up next in our snack travails travels. Apparently this candy is reminiscent of the start of summer (Midsommar) festival, where locals go “to the countryside to eat strawberries, wear flower crowns, and dance like frogs around an ivy-covered pole called the midsomar staang”. Dance like frogs????
Lastly came another sweet treat: the mixed fruit licorice (again with the licorice???) stick. “Copenhagen’s chewiest, fondant-filled secret” the booklet proclaimed.
This Yum package was another winner. It was difficult to pick amongst so many favourites, but we managed to come up with very similar rankings for the Scandinavian box.
Thank you for joining us on this snack trip through Scandinavia! From your frog-dancing fools friends…
Until next time,
Rock on,
The WB
My love for my air fryer is still going strong. It is a rare day that I do not use this thing to reheat, broil, roast or air fry something. I know (I think, anyways) that I have mentioned on Ye Olde Blogge that I am not a lover of the french fried potato most days. If we are out to eat and you see me ordering a side of fries or a plate of poutine please keep your digits away from my face because clearly I am hungry enough to bite your hands off. That is the only time that fries have any appeal for me now that I am done with PMS forever. Well, that was BTF (Before Truffle Fries)…
On Valentine’s Day of this year, my WOYPBC co-host and I decided to try a new restaurant for lunch (Galentine’s Lunch, we unoriginally called it). So after a very brisk and windy walk along the shore, we headed to the newly opened Fern and Cedar Brewing Company in Qualicum Beach, to fill our bellies.
You know what? I can’t even remember what I ordered. But what I do remember is that Donna ordered truffle fries, and when they came to the table I was immediately taken in by the glorious aroma of her dish. And it didn’t take much coaxing from my table mate for me to try a few of her fries.
Cue the choir of angels. Wow. What have I been missing all of these years?!?!
Even though I had had this complete food revelation mid-February, I kinda forgot about the truffle fries (I know, I can’t believe it either) until a few weeks after I got the air fryer. At that point I googled “air fryer truffle fries” and came up with this recipe. It seemed simple enough except I didn’t have any truffle oil. After coming up empty-handed at the local grocery stores, I ordered some from Amazon as one does these days. The first time I made the fries I was less than wowed. So I re-read the recipe and saw that, as an option, one could add truffle salt to the finished fries. Back to Amazon I went. And that, my friends, made all the difference in the world…my world, anyways!
Life ATF (After Truffle Fries)…sigh… I will never be the same again. 😉
Please let my co-host Donna or myself know what’s on your plate at your house, in the Comments section of either of our WOYPBC posts (or both, if you are so inclined!). Please check out Donna’s April post, here.
OK, I am going to try the InLinkz thingy again too…for those of you who want to join the Link Party Donna set up. Fingers crossed it works…
Rock on,
The WB
It ain’t easy being the family matriarch, I have realized. When my mother passed in 2015 I took on the role (willingly, I might add) of being the keeper of my parents’ photo albums, slides, and home movies. I had always meant to go through all of this media methodically and judiciously, at some point. To carefully – and with as much information as possible – get them into a digital format, so as to preserve them for sharing with my siblings as well as future generations. I had planned this to be a nice, leisurely retirement project.
I suppose you may have guessed by now that I had to box up all of the photo albums, slide boxes, and reels of film and haul them along with me, to my new home on Vancouver Island. Because – despite being retired for almost 6 months prior to my move – I had yet to begin the process. Oh, how wonderful it would have been to just have all of this stuff whittled down to a couple of photo boxes, some DVDs, and a home on the cloud somewhere! Alas, I had to sacrifice the shelf in the spare room closet of my new space for all of this stuff. That remained untouched as I approach my second anniversary here…until just this past week.
So what finally kicked my lazy ass into gear spurred me to action, you may well ask? Another move, of course! This summer I will be moving to a new abode, after my daughter and son-in-law take possession of the property that they have signed a deal to purchase. They are currently living in the home I will be moving into, which is on the property they are purchasing from their landlords. They will be moving into the landlord’s home (right next to where they are living now), and I’ll be moving into their space. We’ll be together on the same 1/2 acre property, but in completely separate dwellings.
This new dwelling-to-be of mine is even smaller than the apartment I’m living in now and quite dated, but I am looking forward to the challenge of updating it and making it work for me. To have a yard (and future garden!) and the potential to have a dog again (!!!), as well as being even closer to family…well, these are things that fill me with anticipatory joy, even though it will be a summer filled with packing/unpacking and renovation work. I’m looking forward to updating Ye Olde Blogge with all the Befores and Afters!
OK, back to the Photo Project: I’ll be damned if I am going to haul these photo albums to my new place, I have decided. This past week I finally dove into it. I have set myself a restriction of only 1 photo album (two if they are not too big – emotionally OR physically-speaking) per day. This work is hard let me tell you…so many memories are being revived as I go through the pages of the albums, and not all of them are good. And if they are good memories, for the most part the persons in the photos are long gone…and that brings up a renewed sense of grief and loss.
But – I am putting on my big girl pants everyday, and gettin’ to it! Yay me! So far I have managed to condense this:
To this:
I did start out with some of the easier albums – the ones full of pictures of the various cruises my parents went on. Plenty of bad shots of scenery (neither of my parents could take a picture worth a damn) and other cruise guests they met onboard. Meaningless except to my parents, both of whom have left this world…thus easy to ruthlessly cull. One album was full of pictures of my first wedding…I managed to get through that in one go and kept most of the shots. I was so young and delusional back then….sigh.
I can’t rest on my laurels though, because I still have all of this to contend with:
And this:
Phase 2 of this project will be digitizing as much as possible. I’ve been looking into my technological options, and so far this appears to have the most favourable reviews online (and not just on Amazon):
In the past I’ve used an app on my phone (Photoscan, by Google) to take the odd snap of an old photo and digitize it…but it would be incredibly tedious to do so for all the photos I have in my possession. I need a better solution. The Epson might be it, but I want to ask you – Dear Readers – for your advice. Have you digitized your old photos? What worked and what didn’t? What was your strategy or what would you do differently if you had a do-over? Please do share if you can, in the Comments.
Rock on,
The WB
While waiting for the next snack box in my gift subscription to arrive, I received an email from the giver of such deliciousness advising me that the upcoming box would be from Russia and that Universal Yums was offering to switch that out for another country instead. I didn’t feel comfortable receiving and blogging about a Russian box given the current situation with Ukraine so I said yes please to the switch. Barely 2 days later my box arrived and I was a bit apprehensive that there hadn’t been enough time to sub in another box. Luckily though:
Once again, I enlisted the snack-judging prowess of my blogging partner-in-crime Donna, and a date was set. Then I had a thought and texted her to see if she had a French beret or two hanging around her place. I thought it would be funny to dress stereotypically “French”, while we sampled the goods. Of course Donna being Donna 😉 , she had to take it much further including a soundtrack while we “worked”.
Here’s what was included in the box, besides the guidebook:
First up, a bag of French strawberry chews. According to the book, we have France to thank for strawberries, and these particular candies were the top-voted Yum in the last two French snack boxes.
Next up was a bag of French Cheese tubes. The book advised us that French cheeses are better and so are their cheese snacks. We both agreed. So far, two winners!
Think of a really good cheesy Bugle-type snack.
We left “Savoury Town” and headed back to “Sweetsville” with the next offering: Pure Butter Sablés. The book explained that the name “sablé” (French for sand) came from how these cookies are made: by rubbing cold butter into flour and sugar to form tiny particles that look like sand.
After the cookies, it was time to try the other savoury snack in this box: Garlic Aioli Potato Chips. “Yes, you will get garlic breath. And yes, it will be worth it” the brochure opines. We have to agree. These were amazing. (Apologies to my hairdresser, who I met later on in the day. Thank goodness for masks, non?)
Salted butter caramels were next in order. Confectioner Henri Le Roux created the first salted caramel in 1977. Sir, we salute you. Hopefully in Brittany they have erected a statue of this god amongst men.
After waiting forever for me to finish my damn caramel, it was time for truffles. Apparently truffles were a happy little accident (RIP Bob Ross!). In the 1920s Paris Confectioner Auguste Escoffier mistakenly dumped hot cream into the wrong bowl, which contained chocolate. Rather than waste it, he rolled the paste into balls and coated them with cocoa powder, and named them of what they reminded him of: mushroom truffles.
Last (and probably least) were French Fruit Chews. I had the raspberry and Donna selected the orange one. Made by Confiserie du Nord, this family-owned company has been making bon-bons since 1912. These French “Starbursts” are supposed to be bigger, chewier and juicer than the American candy. It’s probably been decades since I had a Starburst so I can’t compare but I have to say my raspberry chew was excellent.
And here are the results:
France, you are a snacker’s paradise and we salute you!
Le Rock On,
The WB
After resisting the urge to get one of these for – uhh – at least two years now, it finally happened. An air fryer has appeared at Chez Badass. My reasons for hesitating included (not limited to): having to surrender even more precious counter space to yet another small kitchen appliance; pondering if it was all that and a bag of (air-fried) chips i.e. being not entirely convinced it would be better than roasting things in my convection toaster oven; not liking most fried foods anyways; telling myself to “get a fucking grip” on most of my random thoughts on the daily. Meantime, I was studying air fryers…at times, intensely.
The first thing I made in my new toy kitchen appliance was sweet potato fries.
Next up – I found a package of chicken wings on sale at the grocery store (and it was the time of the Superbowl – not that I pay attention to sports – but in keeping with the situation…):
I also tried my hand at “regular” fries, learning in the process that russet potatoes make the best ones.
Alas, my success with my new toy appliance just couldn’t last. In keeping with Widow Badass tradition, I will let you in on my kitchen failure. I attempted to make a recipe with tofu. Not just any tofu but puffed tofu (something new to moi). My daughter and I had tried a delicious tofu appetizer from Shed, when we were in Tofino earlier last month, and I was hoping to recreate it at home. I found this video, which is a close contender to Shed’s version:
Now I just had to find the elusive tofu puffs.
I tried the mini-puffs first.
Unfortunately I had let them go a bit too long in the air fryer. I was left with candied air, basically. So, let’s try this again…this time with the regular sized puffs:
Lesson learned. When the YouTuber says to check every 4 minutes while cooking, do as he instructs!
Since I brought the air fryer home, I have used it almost every single day. In addition to the foods featured above, I have also used it to roast asparagus (delish), kabocha squash (delightful), and chicken thighs (crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside). Dare I say it: this could be my new favourite thing in the kitchen. (Sorry, pressure-cooker!) I love how quick it is to add a roasted vegetable to a meal. And using this little guy instead of heating up an oven (even my toaster oven) is much faster and therefore less wasteful of electricity, methinks. Consider me a convert!
That’s what’s on my plate for this month: anything I can cook in my new air fryer!
Please let my co-host Donna or myself know what’s on your plate at your house, in the Comments section of either of our WOYPBC posts (or both, if you are so inclined!). If you are feeling extra chatty 🙂 and have the time, please let me know if you have an air fryer, and what are your favourite tips/tricks/things to cook in one. I’d love to learn more about this wonder appliance and what it can do! Please check out Donna’s delicious March post, here.
Rock on,
The WB
