Flow Fit Deconstructed: John Sifferman Breaks down the Rotating Tripod

My next run at Flow Fit will be one where I concentrate on technique, not conditioning. John Sifferman has been steadily uploading a stream of short videos that fill in some of the gaps and answer some of the questions that older, stiffer guys like me haven't successfully answered yet. This one is really good and shows just how to progress in this particular "backward" move (which I normally can't do well on flat ground.) Once I'm back from my trip, I'll be applying some of the advice here.

Thanks, John!

One Year And Counting.

Won't be posting for several days. "M" and I are celebrating our 1st year anniversary with a short trip out of town. Smooching may be involved. In fact, I think smooching is inevitable.

Still Messing Around In the Kitchen

Been too busy to post all the minutae of cooking and menus, but I wanted to remind myself of a couple of new recipes that worked out well. Next time I make them, I'll expand on them here for references' sake.

Sam The Cooking Guy had an excellent take on a stir fry basic he calls "Honey Beef". Essentially sirloin or rib eye steak sliced thin, marinated in a combination of honey, crushed garlic, dry sherry, and soy sauce and then briefly seared in a pan along with whatever green stuff you feel like that day. Tasty indeed, and basic top sirloin worked just fine.

Got a couple of nice dishes out of a new cookbook, "The Good-To-Go Cookbook" that I got used from Amazon after browsing it in my local Borders. "Cinnamon Chicken" had the same flavor as "Moroccan Chicken" but was a bit simpler to make.

Also from "Good To Go", "Savory San Antonio Pork Chops" was a classic skillet dish - rub the chops with garlic salt and chili powder, sear them in the skillet, take them out and heat/saute garlic, corn, bell pepper, sliced red onion and whatever else looks good, then put it all back into the skillet to finish cooking. Basic, nothing exciting, but you just can't go wrong with pork chops in a skillet (unless you're Muslim or Jewish.)

Made my first actual recipe from Jeanne Jones' "Light And Hearty", a book I got at Friendly's Used Bookstore in downtown Benson more than 18 months ago: "Garden Patch Soup". Essentially a ground beef based soup dish with tomato sauce, a bunch of veggies, and then shredded cabbage added for the last three minutes of simmering. (The short cooking time keeps the cabbage crisp and also keeps it from turning gray and stinking up the kitchen). Nothing special, but variety is important, and I like anything that lets me incorporate more cabbage into my diet.

Made my second recipe out of "The Complete Idiot's Guide To Cooking For Guys", another "basics" book: "Hot Shells with Ham". 8 oz ham steak cut into cubes, sauteed with onions and bell peppers and cayenne pepper and black pepper, tossed with medium size macaroni shells. I could have gotten fancier with this one, but I was low on time, energy, and innovation, and "M" wanted something straight-forward and basic. This served nicely. The combination of peppers gave a potentially bland dish a pleasant, subtle bite (hence the "Hot" designation") for every bit of the pasta. Worth making again and dressing up a bit with a light Alfredo sauce or pineapple chunks and teriyaki, etc.

Finally, returned to one of my magazine recipe collections, BH&G "Easy Family Food" and made "Popover Pizza Casserole". Ground beef, pepperoni slices, bell peppers, onion in a skillet, with s , pizza sauce for moisture and crushed fennel seeds and Italian seasoning for flavor. Add shredded mozzarella and broccoli florets (??). Then you whisk together 1 cup of whole milk, 2 eggs, 1 Tb of olive oil, and then blend in a cup of all purpose flour for the topping which is poured over the top for a "popover style" crust. Sprinkle Parmesan over the flour and tuck the skillet in a 400 degree oven for 25-30 minutes. I've done this kind of thing before, but it's always neat to see how the crust rises and thickens over the ingredients. A little bland (not a surprise for "family food") but pleasing hint of fennel and the pepperoni slices did make it seem a little bit like pizza in a skillet. Even better the next day as leftovers.

I think that's about it. Nothing as amazing as the last entry, but you can't swing for the bleachers every time. Establishing the habit and continuing it is what's important, and doing the extra little things to help "M" remember why she likes me.

BER: Not afraid to accessorize, I am!

Haven't done a lot of groundwork lately. Something about the season and the weather just killed my enthusiasm for training. Not completely, of course. Still doing standing meditation and the Tai Chi Chi Kungs sets on a regular basis, plus a bit of walking on the trails, and the occasional two hour session of "lawn cardio" when the leaves in the front and side yards get out of hand.

And I'm paying the price - not so much in terms of weight gain, but in terms of soft tissue aggravation. Specifically in my left sacroiliac and my left sub-occipital area. I am blessed with good health in most things, but I have soft tissue/trigger point issues from way back (as far back as I can remember) due to getting knocked slightly off kilter by an auto accident in child-hood. I can tell when I'm not doing enough to dispel tension and stress because when the anxiety and tension levels rise, those two areas are where I feel it - owww, owww, owww. Nothing that 1000 mg of ibuprofen can't usually dispel, but you don't want to do that every day - that's just asking for a torn-up digestive system.

So: no more skimping on the joint mobility and the yoga. And I need to be walking a lot more for an hour or so at a time.

Still, new toys are nice, and this one looks good:


I've ordered this as an early Christmas present for myself, as a way to ease into "Forward Pressure" and also as an interesting tool all by itself:


I'm hoping that this will get me working on the ground again even in a house where the dog all too often gets careless on the carpet (it's not really her fault - she's old, blind, and gets confused a lot). And anyway it'll keep me out of the opium dens.

I Can't Help It...

It's not as if "I Can Has Cheezburger" needs the extra exposure, but this is too damned (I was about to say "doggoned") funny not to post:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Well, the plan was to take a 3 day weekend and drive most of the way across the state to help close up my in-law's family cabin by the lake for the winter. Very noble of me, if I do say so, since I had a grand total of one 3 day stay there this year. But it's family, and I can hardly have my wife go without me, so...off we go.

Except for the part where the typically psychotic Midwestern weather enters the picture. No sooner are we on I-80 than we get highway info signs informing us that the highway is closed beyond North Platte (300 miles west) due to weather conditions. Well, North Platte was our destination, so no problem, right?

Wrong-o, Rhetorical-question breath! We stopped half way there at "M"'s mothers place for lunch and discovered via phone call, that our destination looked like this:

12+ inches of snow and huge drifts blocking the entrance to the road leading to the cabin. Not an unexpected development for early December in Nebraska. However, this is late October.

(Thanks to the gracious and considerate neighbors for providing the photos they emailed to us here in Hastings! - Not to mention saving us from an unpleasant surprise!)

My wife didn't want to drive all the way home tonight. So here we sit in my mother-in-law's cozy house in a small village outside of Hastings. She dived deep into her pantry and pieced together a very nice slow-cooker stew and biscuits. Her Home Ec degree skills, honed by 2 decades of cooking for 6 people, compare to my modest 3 year hobbyist run in the kitchen as Joe DiMaggio compares to the star of the local slo-pitch softball league.

It's a lot better than trying to bring THIS back in off the local lake:

It Only Hurts When I Cook: Milk Braised Pork Loin (in a Dutch Oven)

I decided to celebrate the end of my stint of "on call" duty by putting a little extra "oomph" in Monday night's meal. Went back to the book stash and looked at some of the cookbooks I bought but never used (sort of like Linux distributions, but my intentions are good!) and came up with a couple of recipes from the "Dutch Oven Cookbook: Recipes for the Best Pot In Your Kitchen".

See, we have been blessed with an abundance of enameled Dutch Ovens - between the ones I requested (and got) as Christmas and birthday presents and the ones we got as wedding gifts and the ones that may have been left in our kitchen by elves, we have at least 4 enameled Dutch ovens of various shapes and sizes. So I decided to use one on the stove top and put another in the oven and do a couple of other little extra things to thank "M" for putting up with me during my stretch in "durance vile".

So...pork loin braised in milk, hmmm? I wasn't sure what to make of this, but the authors claimed this is an Italian tradition by way of Giuliani Hazen, so what the hell, I went with it.

• 2 lb pork loin, salted and peppered all over and allowed to sit for a bit.
• 2-3 Tb of olive oil/butter
• 2 1/2 cups of whole milk.
• salt and pepper

For the accompanying "Oven Baked potato" dish, I needed

• 2+ lbs of Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 in slices
• 1 large red onion, sliced thin
• 5-6 slices of bacon (preferably smoked), cut into 1 inch slices (just use a pair of scissors)
• 2-3 cloves of minced garlic.
• salt and pepper to taste

And that's it. This takes a bit more than 95 minutes to make, allowing for a long, slow braise in a 3 1/2 to 4 quart Dutch oven.

First I turned the oven up to 350 F to preheat for the 2nd (potato) dish.

I brought several Tb of vegetable oil to smoking hot over medium high heat in my oval 4 quart Dutch Oven on the front burner. I seared the seasoned loin on all sides, 2-3 minutes a side. I put in 1 cup of the whole milk, put the lid on, turned the heat to medium, and let it sit for about 20 minutes. Then I turned the loin over, added the rest of the milk, dropped the heat to low(ish) and let it braise covered on the stove top for another hour and 10 minutes, opening it up and turning the loin over again every 20 minutes or so.

Once the pork loin was started on top of the stove, I started on the Oven Baked Potatoes. I put 2 quarts of water on to boil, and when it was boiling, I boiled 2+ lbs of Yukon gold potatoes (peeled and sliced into 1 inch thick slices) for 3-4 minutes. Then I put them in my 4 quart round Dutch oven and tossed them (gently) with a few Tb of olive oil and salt and pepper. Then I put them in the oven (covered) to bake for 30 minutes. While things simmered on the stove top and baked in the oven, I sauteed the bacon slices with the onions and garlic in a little oil and butter and tossed over medium heat until the onions were soft and the bacon was fairly crisped.

When it was time (30 minutes), I pulled the Dutch oven out of the oven, removed the lid, stirred in the bacon/onion/garlic mixture (gently!) and put the utensil back in the oven for bake - UNcovered this time - for another 30 minutes. At the end, I added a bit more salt and pepper to taste.

Near the end, I had 20+ minutes to go before both dishes were ready, so I steamed/sauteed some trimmed brussel sprouts in the skillet I prepared the onions and bacon in. Got the skillet good and hot, put in the sprouts added 1/8 cup of water and clamped the lid on the skillet as the water turned to steam and raged around inside the skillet, taking its anger out on the sprouts. Three minutes later, I removed the lid, and the water/steam evaporated almost instantly, leaving the tenderized sprouts to soften and roast in the dry heat of the skillet. Neat! (Then I tossed the sprouts in a bowl with some balsamic vinegar).

Sliced 1/2 in thick slices of the finished loin, took some of the milk/juices sauce from the Dutch oven and used that as a sauce to go on top. Served the potatoes and brussel sprouts on the side.

When "M" and I took our first bites of the slices of pork loin, we literally could not talk for about 20 seconds. We were...awestruck. Due to the cost, lack of availability and political incorrectness, I've never eaten veal, but this had to be like that - so tender and succulent and flavorful it seemed to melt in your mouth. And the potatoes and sprouts were wonderful side dishes.

The coolest thing about this meal is that my palate never seemed to lose the delight in the taste and texture of the dishes. You know how sometimes the first couple of bites of something really grabs you and then it just kind of loses its impact after that? Well, not this time. Call it the layering of flavors, credit all the pepper in the dishes, maybe I was just plain lucky and the balsamic vinegar helped to keep resetting the taste buds....but "M" and I agreed that the last bite of this meal was just as good as the first - it was a gift that kept giving.

I could kick myself for not trying this earlier...but I am glad I know about it now.