Megan Keate

About 4 or 5 years ago I saw beck at The Riveria Theater in Chicago. It was one of the most uneventful, boring and disappointing concerts I’ve ever seen. Since then, I have not been interested in what Beck was up to. This all ended when I stumbled upon his project, Record Club covering the INXS Kick Album. This one video led me into a rabbit hole on Beck’s website. I recommend taking some time to check out the Record Club videos as well as the other cool stuff on his website.

Record Club: INXS “Need You Tonight” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

If somebody had asked me if I would ever consider trying improv I would have said a big fat NO!  I’ve seen many shows especially while I was living in Chicago and although I often enjoyed them I never once thought: “Hey I should try that”. This all changed when I attended Video Camp Austin several weeks ago when I found myself in a session led by Chris Trew of The New Movement Theater talking about using improv as a tool to becoming comfortable on camera. Chris was walking two women through an improv scene using the “Yes..and” device. Although the scene wasn’t really that funny, it was funny watching them learn how to navigate the ideas and moreover it just looked like a lot of fun. This is what made me want to get up and try it out. Somehow, while watching these two women, the idea of improv switched from having to be funny to an opportunity to be able to be playful and silly.

In the weeks building up to possibly taking my first class I went to several improv shows, saw a great movie about improv and looked up several books about Del Close, long form improv and The Herald. This is how I typically would prepare for anything…read as much as possible and then read some more! However, I finally had to come to grasp with the fact that doing is the only way to really understand what is happening up there on stage. So with a little encouragement from friends and a tin of specially made fake xanax (Special thanks to Alejandra – altoids featured below) I was on my way to my first class.

I am happy to report that the improv class was not scary at all! In fact, the whole time I was so caught up in the present moment that I didn’t have time to even think about being scared. There are very few times in my day that I am able to forget about things such as trying to find a job and figuring out how I’m going to pay all the bills but this happened for 2 hours on Tuesday night. It was complete freedom and joy to spend some time playing with my fellow classmates and learning about improv. So, if you are even sort of curious about what happens at that little theater at the corner of Rosewood and Chicon, I suggest doing yourself a favor and check out one of their free classes or shows every Wednesday night!

Side note: I do hope to be at least a little funny, eventually

Last night we watched Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and although there wasn’t any new information there, it really drives home the fact that, as a nation, we are out of control with the way we interact with food. It is amazing to watch people so disturbed about having to cook food from raw ingredients rather than heat up frozen processed junk. In our house we have pretty much stuck to few processed foods but I find that it is getting easier and easier to go out to restaurants and make exceptions as time goes by.

With SXSW and family in from out of town we have been eating out way too much! I’m attempting a mini challenge of cooking all meals this week (and actually keeping the kitchen clean in the process). For my challenge I picked up an old copy of cooking light, ripped out a bunch of pages and went to Wheatsville. 

Here are a couple of things I made so far:

Chicken Stuffed w/ Goat Cheese, Canadian Bacon & Rosemary

Chipotle Sloppy Joes

Yesterday James mentioned chicken nuggets and with my highly susceptible brain, I needed to have them! So following along with Michael Pollen’s food rule “#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself”, I decided to try making them at home.  These little nuggets were pretty good and completely satisfied my craving. I think they might have been a bit more like a frozen or fast food chicken nugget if I had fried them in oil but baking is really easier once the oven is already on for the sweet potato fries. I also mixed up a honey mustard sauce with just a little dijon mustard and some sweet good flow honey.

panko breaded chicken nuggets & sweet potato fries

Found this recipe on twitter from @ATXglutenfree. Even though the recipe called for pumpkin, I already had the butternut squash from the farm so I just used that. As I’ve said before I really don’t like arugula so I substituted romaine lettuce. The squash was so good cooked this way. Not only did it taste great but it looked really beautiful!

	Last Wednesday I woke up early and headed out to Johnson’s Backyard Garden for a day on the farm. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect but I knew it probably involved picking vegetables. We headed out to the muddy fields and started with the eggplant picking. The rows of eggplants seem endless when you are walking backwards down the row hunched over lifting up the plants looking for the perfect eggplant to add to your bucket. Next it was on to some peppers and jalepenos and then it was finally time to start packing up the veggies in the CSA boxes. This was no easy feat either. I weighed sweet potatoes out at the quickest pace possible to keep up with the assembly line. I have to say this was one of the hardest days of work I have ever done and it was also completely awesome.
	I came home covered in mud, sweat and bug bites with a huge box of vegetables for my time and the satisfaction in knowing exactly where my food came from and a bit of the hard work that went in to getting it to my house.
	Now on to the next challenge: Finding a way to eat all these vegetables! Right away I gave away my arugala. I just can’t make myself like that stuff.
	First I cooked a nice chicken sausage and sweet potato soup. Basically, sweet potato, chicken broth, ginger, a onion and some garlic.
	Okra: I’ve never really eaten okra and definately never cooked it before. Everyone told me the best way to have it is fried but since we are trying to be healthy over here I decided to bake it. I mixed the okra with some olive oil then coated with panko bread crumbs, chili powder, tumeric and cumin and baked for about 30 mins. The okra turned out pretty good but I don’t think I’m an okra convert. I tried the okra raw and I think it tasted better than cooked. Not sure if people eat okra raw typically.
	Basil: I decided to make pesto for the first time. Just threw the basil, some pine nuts and some olive oil in the immersion blender and we had some delicious pesto!
	Bok choy: Again another vegetable that I’ve never cooked with. This seemed pretty easy though to just throw into some stir fry. I ate some of this raw and it was quit delicious. Will be buying this again in the future.

I would recommend everyone go out and volunteer at the Johnson’s Backyard Garden. The owner is very friendly and the work is greatly appreciated and although super hard it was very fun! Also the box of vegetables at the end of a hard day is not a bad deal.

I got a new cookbook at the library today. It’s called The Anti-Inflammation Diet and Recipe Book by Jessica K. Black. It is full of some really basic and easy recipes that are nice and healthy. After each recipe she writes a little healthy tidbit about the ingrediants in the recipe. This is really fun to read after eating the recipe. 

Made some delicious pomme frites for lunch today. I used a cooking light recipe but i didn’t really read it until now because I mixed the thyme, salt and pepper with the potatoes before I cooked them and it says you are supposed to do it after. Oh well…they were delicious! I also had quite a bit of garlic which would probably have been good raw as well but cooked it was kind of like a nice garlic bagel. Either way you can’t go wrong with home made french fries! The recipe also says to cut the potaoes into 8 pieces but this seemed way too big so I cut two potatoes into 32 pieces each. I served this with some lettuce and chicken wraps with carrots and avocado.

I made this recipe from my 2009 cooking light book. I used turmeric instead of saffron because I couldn’t find any today at wheatsville. Plus we are pushing the turmeric this week for its anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and cancer prevention possibilities (and its pretty color). The lemon chicken was great and really something different than I’ve made in a while.