Adjusted Reality

Whether you’re outside, grillin’ up a storm and blowing shit up, or inside beating the heat and chillaxin’, hope you are having a great birthday celebration for this here country of ours.  If you are outside the US, hope you are having a loverly Saturday!  Personally, we’re heading out soon to enjoy some potluck bbq action with our friends (look for a really yummy recipe post next week!), getting out the kiddie pool and the sprinklers and going all ghetto to stay cool (except the tarp-as-a-slip-and-slide idea got nixed, something about alcohol and slip and slide = death) and looking forward to setting off the 3 foot sparklers later…

I will leave you with this little ditty – enjoy and be safe!

…gonna be ok, da da do do, just dance…spin that record babe, da da do do, just-

If you don’t recognize, don’t worry.  If you got the song in your head too, then I say *muahahahaha*.

Anyhoo, so the proverbial cat is out of the bag.  The super secret July plan is a dance “cramming session” so we can look swanky at it by wedding time.  By the end of the month, I wish to be able to twirly twirly twirl around the dance floor with my Zliten with ease.  The styles offered are Salsa, Lindy and Swing, Two Step, Jitterbug Swing, Cha Cha, West Coast Swing, Bachata,  Club Style Triple Two Step, East Coast Swing, and Argentine Tango (which is what we most want to learn, but only offered at their studios on the other side of town this month.  Boo!).  They also offer yoga twice a week at noon and zumba toning and fitness classes as well – which I have always wanted to try!  Since we have purchased the all-you-can-eat-buffet of dance classes this month, the goal is to hit up as many as humanly possible and figure out what we like and want to expand upon.

Last night, we jumped right in with West Coast Swing, which the instructor said was one of the hardest dances to start with.  Hooray!  The instructor was great and first got us started with the steps – which honestly tripped me up, since I have a right/left issue (it was my only black mark in kindergarten) but got it down eventually.  Once we put the hands with the feet it started to make more sense and then once the music kicked in – well, we didn’t look like pros or anything, but we weren’t embarassing ourselves.  By the end at least.   We need practice, but that’s what makes perfect, right?

Tonight, we salsa!  We have taken a short little salsa lesson on a cruise before so the basics should be familiar, which is nice because we were so lost at the beginning of swing.  Honestly, I thought I’d be better at it, being in dance all my young life, but I have also not done much partner dance which is so very completely different.  I’m looking forward to learning to work with Zliten as a team, as I learn to let him lead and he learns to lead!  The nice thing is that we both had a blast yesterday, and thought the lesson went suuuuuper fast.  Time flies when you’re having fun!

Tomorrow, I have major workout endeavours planned – I am going to run to the gym, do a weights session, run to the dance studio, and then take a zumba class.  The smart thing of course would be to zumba first since I have no idea whether it will kick my ass or not, but I just can’t wait until noon to start this beast of a workout in the hot Austin sun.  We shall see.

I’ll keep you updated on how it’s going, but although it’s fun for us, it’s not exactly easy to describe the intricacies of each class.  Along with the classes, I am attempting to keep up morning workouts – the classes are activity, sure, but I can’t really call them a workout until we’re doing more dancing than stumbling around.  I had also wanted to get into some more heavy lifting, but that’s not going to be feasable with everything else going on since trying to get to the gym in the morning is pretty futile with my affinity with the snooze button.  Oh well, another month perhaps!  Wish us luck, grace, and not too many stepped-on-toes!

You know those days you can’t be buggered to cook anything?  It’s hot, standing over the stove sounds like the 7th circle of hell, and anything involving more than 10 minutes of prep isn’t gonna fly.  This is the perfect night for the buffalo chicken salad.

“But Quix”, you whine, “salads are so booooring.  And I’m huuuuuungry.  I want something filling.  Who just eats a salad for dinner?”  Have a little faith and give this one a try.  I guarantee the fiber and protien encased within the bowl will do you right.  First, get a bowl that looks more like it would serve a family size popcorn, or perhaps dish up potato salad at your next picnic.  This is your personal salad bowl.

Something like this.  However, do not actually attempt to ingest the bowl.  It does not end well.  However, this should give you a good idea of the size of the bowl.  Larger than your head is a good start.

The chicken part is up to you.  If you’re feeling splurgy, you can use some breaded chicken fingers or a chicken patty (nuke them for 1 minute, crisp them up in a pan, douse them in Frank’s Red Hot, and then chop up).  If you had already had a mexican fiesta earlier that day like moi, then you’re going for grilled chicken.  It can be pre-cooked or leftover or whatever, but what we did (and it was delicious) was thawed chicken breasts, pounded them out with a mallet nice and flat, marinated the chi-boob-lies (the slightly vulgar term we came up with for chicken breasts) in a mess of Frank’s, and then grilled them on good ol’ George Forman.  Not the man, but the grill.  The most important part to make it a BUFFALO chicken salad is it needs to be good and dripping in hot sauce.

Then, to the salad part.  The ingredients we had worked well, but it was mostly a matter of playing “what’s in the vegetable drawer?”.  Just be careful shredding baby carrots or you’ll get an owwie.

It looks much worse today, I promise.   To those of you who actually eat at my house, I will say I found it and removed it from the food.  To the rest of you I will admit that I’m not sure where the skin went but… more protien I say!  Anyhoo, the particular concoction I came up with was:

About half a head of romaine lettuce

A quarter of a gigantic cucumber

Half a roma tomato

Enough onion to look like a lot but not *too* much

Half a small green pepper

6 shredded baby carrots

A stalk and a half of celery

A bunch of snap peas that got sacrificed as a “pre-dinner snack” and never made it into the bowl.

About 1/3 of a small can of black olives

A couple pinches of blue cheese crumbles

A nice sprinkling of bacon bits

We topped the salads with a small chicken breast each, and proceeded to drizzle with light ranch.  Now, this is up to you, but fat free ranch makes my tongue start to riot, full fat ranch makes my jeans start to pop, light is a compromise – get it in the refrigerator section if you can.  I think they are superior to the Krafts and store brands for creamy dressings.  Also, because we are affecionados of anything spicy, more Frank’s went on top.

This was Zliten’s as he is as they say a “hater” and cannot stomach cucumbers and tomatoes.

Here is mine in all it’s glory, seconds before it took the express train to mah belly.  The awesome thing with this is I think it clocked in at 400 calories and was suuuuuper filling.  You can also easily add more veggies of your choosing, and make it even more grandiose and awesome.  You can of course remove such things as the olives, bacon, blue cheese, and change out the dressing to make it ridiculously lo-cal, but seriously, it’s a different salad then.  A little bit of the indulgent stuff is what makes this a meal and not a “ok, what next to devour in the pantry” snack.  If you’re not feeling the salad, you can roll this up into a wrap just as easy, which we like just fine as well.