The dressing's made with home-made yogurt and honey.

Eating is an every-day affair, and as a person with a regular office job, I need a quick way to put together my meals. Remember that it’s not good to let the body go hungry as you work for long stretches of hours. Metabolism drops and you’re more prone to over-stuff yourself if you’re famished. At least for me, that’s the case. My brain would go blank if I don’t supply nutrients through my mouth at the time needed.

Back to the food.

I do any cooking in advance, on Sundy or the night before work, and prepare the actual lunch on the morning of.  Here’s what I did in the weekend, plus how I put the lunch together.  Continue reading if you’re curious about what to do in advance, and what to prepare before heading out to work.

Prepare the weekend before

1. chicken breast strips

I cut them in strips, following the direction of the muscle fibers. The inconvenience of chewing on the white meat is that the fibers feel tough and dry. To prevent this, I brown the outsides of the meat over medium-high heat first. Then I pour about 1/3 cup of water onto the pan, close put a lid over the pan, and steam the chicken until the insides are cooked. Even better, mix some lemon juice with the water. When no lemon juice in stock, vinegar is good. Steaming the chicken with moisture gets the meat to be less dry, more succulent.

2. caramelized onions

This is probably one of the cheapest and most delicious and most versatile things you could have in your fridge.

Finely cut up an onion into disks. (experiment with different thicknesses. I prefer a not-to thin 5mm)

Over high heat (but not to high so that the outsides burn), cook th onions until they start to smell great and become half-transparent, and brown in some places. Then reduce the heat to low and stir until everything’s wilted and soft.

A whole onion reduces in size to about 1/3 its original. Store these in a lidded glass container, and they’ll last about a week! You can put these into sandwiches, salads, or top a bowl of rice, etc.

3. baked carrot strips

Carrots are surprisingly sweet when baked, just like sweet potatoes. A theory I haven’t verified is that, the vitamins in carrots are only readily absorbed into our bodies, when the carrot is cooked with oil.

Cut the carrot into planks and pan-fry/bake them on a pan with olive oil.

4. hard-boiled eggs

There is a trick to hard-boiling eggs, so that the shell does not stick to the egg. It takes kind of a lot of work, but the peeling of the shell is gratifying.

I’ve written down the instructions from Julia Child’s book in the past.

Basically, to reiterate:

• Put a hole at one end of the egg, so that it can breathe without breaking the shell open in the heat.
• Plunge these poked eggs into boiling water (eggs need to be submerged completely)
• boil for 8 minutes
• Plunge these boiled eggs into cold water ( I often don’t have ice on hand, so I chill these under running tap water)
• re-boil these cooled eggs for a minute
• take out and chill in cold water

The boil –> chill –> boil –> chill process reminds me of an Asian practice of bathing oneself in icy cold water and then switching into hot water. (Apparently it’s good for circulation.)

The purpose of the alternation is to shrink the egg and expand the shell so that they detach from each other. Wow, this explanation is not scientific or logical at all, but it works! (I’ll find out how this really works, some day.)

5. cut-and-chopped bell pepper

Cut the bell pepper lengthwise into half, and pluck out the spongey core with its seeds and stem.

Then cut the remaining parts into strips. Put in a container and refrigerate.

6. salad dressing

Two ways to prepare a real fast delicious dressing in a minute, with ingredients already in your pantry.

The magic of taste is in the honey.

Yogurt + Honey

Whisk honey into a bowl of plain yogurt. The amount of honey is really up to you.  I like to add about 1 table spoon per cup of yogurt.  Keep in mind that honey mixes well at room temperature. But the honey+yogurt dressing tastes better and has a nice thick consistency when it’s cold.

Olive Oil + Vinegar + Honey

Whisk (or shake in a closed container) together the three ingredients. Add some salt and pepper to taste.

Put together in the morning

1. Wash and chop lettuce

2. Slice a boiled egg

3. Put everything into a nice big glass container

Pour the dressing into a leak-proof container and toss the salad right before eating.

3 vegetarian side dishes: caramelized onion, lotus roots, and sauteed carrot and broccoli

Sides for rice.

Ban-chan in Korean means “side dish.” Many of my American friends have seen the traditional table setting at popular tofu soup joints, where servers bring out about a dozen ban-chans and lay them on the table before the main dish comes out.

Perhaps the most interesting from the above is the lotus root.

I personally was fascinated by the shape of this root, and by the fact that I was slicing and cooking a root of a flower.

Well, preparing the lotus root is similar to peeling a carrot – you scrub off any dirt from the surface, and, using a peeler, get rid of the outer skin. Inside is a very bright ivory-colored root.

Slice the root into 1/3-inch thick disks, and leave them submerged in water mixed with a table spoon of vinegar. This supposedly keeps the texture crisp, and gets rid of any bitter flavor in the root.

Meanwhile, boil some water, so that the disks can be blanched (or, dunk in the boiling water) until the roots are half cooked.

After blanching, drain and transfer the pieces to a different pot.  Prepare a sauce by mixing soy sauce with water. (extra things such as seaweed can go in here to give flavor to the broth).  Pour the sauce over the lotus root pieces, and reduce.  The soy sauce dyes the root into a brown color.

When the sauce is reduced to barely cover the pieces, add some corn syrup or honey to coat the root, and give shine to the ban-chan.

Voila, this ban-chan is done and I’m packing my lunch to work.

Via Wikipedia:

An écorché is a figure drawn, painted, or sculpted showing the muscles of the body without skin. Renaissance architect and theorist, Leon Battista Alberti recommended that when painters intend to depict a nude, they should first arrange the muscles and bones, then depict the overlying skin.

pincha mayurasana against a wall

The more I experience it, I more I feel that yoga is a very generous sport. (When I say yoga, I really mean the physical practice.) I can get the benefits of a pose, without going all the way to the full pose at its technical extreme. But, if I wish, I could strive to advance the pose. At a basic level, yoga is like a soothing massage. At an advanced level, it’s like practicing for a dance competition.
It’s been nearly eight years since my first yoga class ever, and I’ve been practicing more or less regularly. Yet, I’m no where near a level that is technically difficult to achieve. What I’ve learned instead, over these years, is probably how to do poses the right way, especially since most of my teachers taught in Iyengar style.
Now doing the same familiar poses over and over again is getting kind of boring. So I’d like to try to stick to developing some difficult poses. Pincha mayurasana, or, the so-called feathered peacock pose is a good one. Today is day one.
Oh, I could use a teacher.
A perfect example of Pincha Mayurasana, found from a Gerard Arnaud studio gallery >>

So one way to practice is to get some help from gravity, by working on this pose first.

So, how about ending with this?

Today’s link is this, with photos of a French ( I assume?) yogi:
http://pagesperso-orange.fr/yoga/yoga/Yoga%20Photos.htm

Millionaire Gregory Olsen, who once paid to fly in a space shuttle, was quoted in recounting his impression.
“When you fly over the Earth, there’s no sign of life. There’s nothing to indicate that there’s anything going on there – occasional jet trails, but other than that it just looks serene, perfect.”

Considering this perspective, it’s would be easy to imagine that all human concerns and worries and problems are actually virtually nonexistent from the frame of the universe, and that everything in this life is petty. And, without these problems and extra details, earth looks perfect. On the other hand, zooming one’s view into individual human beings also brings out the same kind of natural perfection, just in a microscopic level.

Speaking of perfection, looking at brilliant works out there, all of my own endeavors with yoga and documenting the practice seem so petty and worthless.
But, yoga is still great in that practice brings out the feeling of perfection and balance, even if you’re spine isn’t exactly straight or even if one leg is shorter than the other. As for documenting, I hope to become better at taking photographs, so that things will be worth sharing.

A personal best, but not perfect, chaturanga

• The heels are pulling in the opposite direction as the head.
• Elbows are by the sides, bent at a 90-degree angle.
• The lower arms are vertical to the floor.
• The back is as straight as I can manage it to be, and,
• The head faces the floor.

This is an improvement, but I still need to gain more strength in the back to be able to keep it straight.

So, what is this an improvement from?

Here, the body is straighter:

how not to do it: Heels are not directly above toes, lower arms are not vertical, and the head is not facing the floor.

But,

• The heels are going forward from the toes,
• And the lower arms are tilting toward the heels.

Honestly, the legs and trunk look to be in better shape than in the first picture.
Unfortunately, I lost the straightness when trying to fix the arms and heels.
When keeping the elbows at a right angle, It’s easy to succumb to gravity by flexing the back, like this:

How not to do it: Unintended backbend is created due to lack of strength.

How not to do it: Buttocks pointing up incorrectly. Head should be facing the floor.

So this probably means that I should do a modified version of chaturanga, with knees on the floor, until I can keep a straight back with the lower arms coming up vertically.

The good thing is that, there are many many great people in the world who put up wonderful pictures of chaturanga dandasana, with correct posture.
Here are instructions and photo reference from the pros:

• Yoga Journal’s Chaturanga Dandasana instructions
• Perfect anatomical, photographic demonstration of chaturanga on flickr.

Above is a map of the Seoul Subway system, including line #9 that just started operating this year(2009). The interactive versions in English as well as Korean can be viewed here: http://www.seoulmetro.co.kr/station/eng/linemap.action

The watermelon juice starts out this way:
Pick the right watermelons – I lightly knock on the shell with my knuckle and evaluate the sound. If it sounds hollow, then the watermelon is ripe. I also sniff it from the outside and pick the ones that smell good.

cut the flesh into wedges, scrape out the seeds, and mash the fruit with a fork and a potato masher. I Did not use the blender, since I thought mashing by hand would create a better texture. After the watermelon starts looking like juice, I taste it and add some honey if it needs more sweetening.

Then into the jar goes the juice.

The vegetables is a whole other story.

There are eggs, white radishes, carrots, shitake mushrooms, cucumbers, and squash. All of these are matchstick-cut and cooked. The eggs are beaten, cooked like a crepe, and cut into slivers after it cools.

After hours of slicing and dicing and cooking, I was beaten up and tired. But when people started eating, it felt like I had just started a whole new day. The energy from people charged me up again.

The menu idea was inspired from last year’s JLS lunch that I and the Korean parents hosted for the faculty: http://emjaykim.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/gathering1-korean-parent-lunch/ Thank goodness I documented some of it.

sketch at the mezzanine of the Stanford Memorial Auditorium during Musharraf's talk.