Race for the Cure

I think I've mentioned before that I work at Susan G. Komen for the Cure here in Central Virginia as the Director of Volunteer Development - meaning I manage all of our volunteers, over 350 of them, and our committees who help our small staff of 4 people plan events and make decisions with the ultimate goal of ending breast cancer. I also handle a lot of our communications and social media marketing which is a lot of fun.

The Race for the Cure is our biggest fundraising event, helping us to fund over $640,000 in grants this year to organizations who give free mammograms to women who can't afford them and educate women and men about the importance of breast health.

Where am I going with this?

The Race for the Cure is is only two weeks away on Saturday, May 7! This Race is so important to me, not only because my family has been affected by breast cancer (we lost our Aunt Dottie to inflammatory breast cancer in 2003) but because of the women and men I work with everyday who have survived breast cancer or who have lost someone they love to the disease.

Ty and I at the 2009 Race for the Cure

Since I work at Komen, I get to see the money we raise working everyday. When a woman calls our office and says "I've found a lump but I don't have insurance so I don't know what to do." we are able to get her the help she needs. No one should have to suffer or die from a disease that is very treatable just because they can't afford it.

By donating or running/walking in the Race for the Cure you are truly helping to save lives in your own community (whether you live here in Richmond or support the Race in your city). If you're going to be in the Richmond area on May 7, I would love for you to join my team, Dash for Dottie! The Race is a 5k and the course goes across the James River and back so the scenery is just as amazing as the sea of pink you'll see :)

Click here to join Dash for Dottie!

If you just need a good giggle this Monday morning, how about some of these hilarious team names people have come up with: Boobie Bushay (if you haven't seen The Waterboy you might not get that one...), Cups Running Over, Hakuna Ma Ta-Tas, and Knitters for Knockers.

Please consider joining our team or donating (click here to donate), even if it's only $10! Here are some ways your donation can make a difference:

$10 could provide educational materials for a newly diagnosed patient and her family – to help them to understand and cope with the challenge of breast cancer

$25 could provide transportation for a patient who has to travel long distances to radiation or chemotherapy treatment

$50 could provide a surgical bra to a women who has undergone a mastectomy

$100 could provide a mammogram for a woman who cannot afford one. A woman whose survival rate would be 98% after 5 years if her cancer were detected early.

Thank you!!

Happy 25x2 Birthday Mom!!

Today is my mom's 25x2 birthday - we were told not to use the "f" word. Since my mom has been my biggest cheerleader through...well everything...but particularly this blog, I wanted to dedicate this post to the ahem*fifty*cough fabulous years she's enjoyed so far.

Mom (right) with her mom & nephew....Oh the 90s

Mom and her brother Mark

Mom, Kathy and Paulette hanging out on the Bull Pasture River

She'll kill me for this one, but it was a good catch!

Me, my sister, Paulette and Mom at one of our first Sisterhood of the Traveling Glasses shows

Me, "Tequila Terry" and mom one Halloween

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!

I like vegetables!

Ok, not all vegetables...but I made a salad for lunch today that is so rockin' I had to share it.

I know that doesn't look that appetizing but it actually IS. No one is more surprised than me right now. And it was really easy. Ty grilled the chicken so all I had to do was throw together the veggies and dressing.

• spinach
• walnuts
• cucumbers
• carrot
• 1 piece of grilled chicken
• homemade red wine vinaigrette

I made the vinaigrette with red wine vinegar, olive oil and Garlic Gold Italian Herb Nuggets - you have to get some of that! And I'm loving nuts in my salads, yesterday I had slivered almonds and sunflower seeds on the salad I made at the Martin's salad bar - it's kind of hard to get those last few sunflowers seeds out of the container with a fork.

It's Day 2 of our "cleanse" and all is well. It's really not as hard to eat healthy as I make it out to be, especially if I plan ahead and don't keep tempting foods around. I'm not even missing the cheese on this salad! But I know some feta would amp up the awesome if I had it :)

Now if I can just stop eating this almond butter right out the jar...

A party and a cleanse...not at the same time :)

Saturday night we had an amazing surprise party for my mom's 50th birthday, she thought we were going out to dinner but when her and dad got to her friend Paulette's house there were about 40 of our family and friends there. She was totally surprised!

I spent all day Sunday recovering from it though, ugh. Being hungover (and the greasy food I consequently ate) got me excited for the eating plan Ty and I started today. I've attempted healthy eating plans before - I don't like calling them diets since I usually try ones that are just what a normal healthy diet should be (meaning not eating crap) - but this is the first time we've done something like this together. It's really hard to stick to something when the person you live and eat with isn't into it, I think to be successful with eating healthy you really need to be both on the same page. I can't snack on carrot sticks when Ty is munching on potato chips! I have very little will power over things like that.

The plan starts off with a 10 day "cleanse" where basically you focus on eating fruit, vegetables, complex carbs like brown rice, and healthy fats like nuts and avocados. The things you cut out are wheat products, dairy, alcohol and caffeine. I don't really know if things like this do much "cleansing" but what I hope it does is help us get in the habit of eating better foods as long as we're still getting enough calories and nutrients. It will also challenge me to get more creative with my cooking. We don't eat that bad normally but I've mentioned before that we don't love vegetables and usually I cover them in some sort of cheese to make them more appealing. Cutting out dairy for a few days means I need to try something else.

For breakfast I had some DELICIOUS pineapple and 2 hard boiled eggs. The new cookbook I've been mentioning (America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook - thank you Angela!) had a recipe, or directions really, on making the perfect hard boiled eggs. I've tried it a few times and it really works!

All you do is put the eggs in a pot of water - it is much easier to put the eggs in a pot THEN fill it with water and put it on the stove rather than trying to drop eggs in a pot of already boiling water...don't ask how I know that - bring the water to a full boil, take the pot off the burner and cover it for 10 minutes. Once they're done, drop them straight into a bowl of ice water and let them cool for 5 minutes.

Ta da! Easy to peel and perfectly cooked. The first time I tried this, I turned the burner off before the water was fully boiling and ended up with a soft boiled egg. I liked it but it wasn't what I was going for.

I wasn't sure this was going to hold me over until lunch, I'm a big breakfast person, but it did.

For dinner tonight we kept it pretty simple, Ty grilled steak and I made brown rice and steamed frozen vegetables. Nothing too exciting because we didn't get a chance to go to the store over the weekend.

Have you ever tried a diet cleanse or healthy eating plan? What did you like or not like?

Mushroom Parmesan Risotto and Braised Green Beans

Bear with me for the next few weeks, it's Race for the Cure time at work so I have almost no time to cook and even less time to blog! I actually made this meal last week and I'm just now finishing up this post...

I've heard the term "braised" used on the Food Network many times, usually referencing some type of meat. Braised pork, braised beef, braised sausage. Did you know you can also braise vegetables? Yeah me neither! One of the new cookbooks I got recently from our friend Angela has a couple recipes for braised vegetables but if I haven't established this fact yet, let me reiterate: Ty and I don't like vegetables. We try, but we're just not fans. As far as vegetables go, we do in general like green beans though and we've tried them cooked various ways, both canned and fresh varieties. Since I didn't know you could braise vegetables, the idea of braised fresh green beans intrigued me.

The official definition of braised is: to cook by sauteing in fat and then simmering slowly in very little liquid.

I can saute but I'm convinced "simmering slowly" is not possible on a gas stove. I know a lot of foodie types who would LOVE to cook on gas but other than the fact that I think it looks cooler to cook on gas (because I sometimes pretend I'm on my own cooking show while I'm in the kitchen...) I really don't like it - it's too hot!

My parents were joining us for dinner so I wanted to bring the meal up a notch. The green bean recipe looked pretty easy so I decided to go with a double whammy and not only braise green beans but also take a shot at risotto. People say it is REALLY easy to mess up. There you go Jess, make things harder!

I'm still trying to get better with our meal timing so that things get done about the same time. One thing that is helping is to get out all the ingredients and to do any dicing/chopping before I start cooking. I know Rachel Ray can multi-task in the kitchen, but this girl can't.

Mushroom Parmesan Risotto ingredients:

The risotto recipe called for 1 onion, minced. I also can't mince an onion. I try but even with pretty decent knives it just ends up being chopped in a non-uniform kinda way. Enter my new best friend, the food processor.

Totally worth the extra clean-up to use that thing! Side note: I actually get asked to chop onions somewhat frequently when cooking with other people because they don't make me cry. Well, one time I made the mistake of rubbing my eye while I was chopping...Onion juice straight to the eyeball will make anyone cry. But in general, no onion tears here and I actually like the smell of onions. Anyone else weird like me? No? Ok...

I also chopped up a container of baby portobella mushrooms to add to the risotto and mom helped by snapping the ends off the green beans and dicing up a shallot - which I have to tell you, she was not impressed by. She said an onion is an onion, what's the big deal about shallots? I don't know mom, I'm just following the recipe here!

The risotto was going to take the longest so I got it started cooking first. Once again I did not read the recipe thoroughly and started the night off with a panic attack and a four letter word. See, you start off by mixing the water and chicken broth in a pot and heating them up while you saute the onions. Well I just assumed that I'd be adding the rice and onions to the liquids so I put the liquids in the biggest pot we have and started sauteing onions in a smaller pan....


Jokes on me! Reading more carefully I saw that what it actually said was to combine the liquids in a MEDIUM size pot so that you can later add it to the risotto 1/2 cup at a time. I knew the risotto was going to triple in size (I had a batch of orzo overgrow it's pot once...) and it wasn't going to fit in the pan I was using. I'm becoming a master of these mid-recipe pot switching maneuvers, so I took a deep breath and a big gulp of wine and mostly kept my cool (after the initial stomping/whining/four letter wording).

Pan switch was a success and just in time, the onions were done!

The rest of the cooking was kinda boring...the men went out to the grill some pork while me and mom chatted over wine and the growing pot of risotto.


I threw the green beans and shallots into a pan when I thought the risotto was about 15 minutes from being done. The recipe didn't say much about sauteing them so I let them heat up a little then added chicken stock. All this seemed weird and unnecessary to me. I've made fresh greens beans before in a much less complicated way and they ended up tasting much better. When they were about done I sprinkled them with a little thyme.

In the other pot...A lot of stirring later, the risotto was finally ready for the finishing touches. I added the sauteed mushrooms and some Parmesan cheese. And by "some" I mean 1 cup :)

Seriously, risotto (and orzo) grow like those little dinosaurs you used to get as a kid, you know the ones that you dropped in water and 5 minutes later they were huge? 2.5 cups of dry risotto once cooked will easily feed 6 people.


The Verdict: YUM and ehh

Overall dinner was pretty good, except no one really ate the beans :) but I did get to make these awesome risotto cakes with the leftovers!

For some reason risotto cakes sounded like they'd be great with eggs and I was right! My cookbook had a much more involved recipe for these but all I did was make a patty with the leftover risotto, coat them in bread crumbs, and heat them up in a pan with a little butter. DELICIOUS.

Black Beans and Yellow Rice - Go Rams!

If you live in Richmond, the title of this post needs no explanation. But for those of you who don't, our hometown VCU Rams are in the Final Four this weekend! And for those of you who don't know what that means, Final Four = college basketball's Super Bowl :)

The entire city has been black and yellow this week, the Governor even declared today "Black and Yellow" day and check this out - he tweeted a picture of me and my co-workers in our Rams gear!

Yep, there are only 4 of us! And obviously I'm not in Rams gear...I was out of the office at two events yesterday so I missed the message. But I was representing the Race for the Cure so it worked :)

In honor of VCU we wanted to have a black and yellow themed dinner (FYI, neither of us are VCU alum but Ty is a VCU employee so we do have a tie to the school other than it just being the biggest school in Richmond). Black and yellow seemed like weird colors to base your food choices on to me, the thought process went like this:

We need to make a black and yellow meal!
What food is black?
Black beans!
What food is yellow?
Yellow rice!
Black and yellow beans and rice!

I actually had no idea if these would even work together until I Googled it and guess what, apparently black beans and yellow rice are actually pretty popular! And then imagine my surprise when I went over to read Meals and Miles the other night, and looky what they were having for dinner: black beans and yellow rice! I guess the VCU spirit is spreading in the blog world :)

Nico actually does the Googling for me while I'm cooking...

I'm glad I read the instructions on the back of the yellow rice box before I started cooking the chicken, otherwise the chicken definitely would've gotten cold waiting for it to cook.

I have to admit, I didn't attempt to make yellow rice from scratch. We'd had this box in the pantry for a while so I wanted to use it up. We also had black beans but I really had no idea what to do with them. I searched around a little bit and decided just adding a few spices and heating them up would do the trick.

The cinnamon was a totally random addition and that bag is Hungarian paprika brought to me straight from Budapest from my friend and former Komen Central Virginia Board member, Becky Morris, who passed away this past winter from her second recurrence of breast cancer. She was actually at a Komen breast cancer summit in Budapest when she bought this for me. Just another reminder why our fight isn't over yet.

I mixed the spices into the beans (which I drained) and heated them up in a small pot while the rice was cooking. Luckily I was watching the rice carefully, I really don't understand how people cook on low or simmer with a gas stove. Even on the lowest setting, it never got down to what I think is a simmer so the rice cooked about 10 minutes quicker than the instructions said it would. This wasn't a bad thing - I like eating sooner rather than later - but could've resulted in overcooked rice if I didn't have a compulsion to peak at and stir things :)

We went with tacos in addition to the beans and rice. If you haven't bought chicken tenders to cook before, they're a super easy and quick cooking way to eat chicken. All I did was sprinkle them with taco seasoning and cook them in a pan with a little oil.

One thing to note, (vegetarians, skip this part...) there is a tendon (or something) that runs through the middle of the tenders. I used to think this was really weird and I've tried to cut it out before...yeah, you don't need to do that. It results in a bunch of chicken bites and in reality it totally cooks down so you don't bite into it or anything while you're eating. You know I'm weird about biting into things.

Ok vegetarians can rejoin us now :) here is what we ended up with as our VCU portion of the meal:

They look pretty black in this picture but really I was surprised that the black beans weren't really all that...black. They were more of a dark brown. Which I thought was interesting because most black beans I've ever had were pretty black.

Anyway...Once the chicken was done we piled it and the beans and rice onto whole wheat tortillas and there you have it, our tribute to VCU:

The Verdict: I think I could do more with the beans but overall this was really good and REALLY easy. It wasn't complete without some of this though:

After dinner I walked upstairs to find this happening...

I think this is the only picture in existence of the three of them together. Hanging out. Not fighting.

"You smell like tacos."

"Yeah, they made tacos and didn't share with us. How rude."

Have you seen that email with a cat's journal and a dog's journal? Here's one version of it. I don't think our boys think like that all the time. Well maybe Basher...