When I find life giving me beets, I make beet chips. Sorry, no pictures; I didn’t think of it, and they’re gone now. Recipe:

Ingredients
Beets
Olive oil
Crumbled feta cheese
Dried rosemary
Garlic salt

Instructions
Peel the raw beets and slice them as thinly as possible (I use the thin slicer on my food processor).

Cover a baking sheet with aluminum foil and lay out the sliced beets in a single layer on the foil. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle evenly with feta cheese, dried rosemary, and garlic salt. Place in the top rack of the oven and broil until the cheese begins to turn golden-brown and the beets have softened to edibility. (This is a nice way to eat beets, but they don’t tend to get actually crispy after broiling.)

Optional, for crispier chips: Transfer cooked beets, with toppings, to the trays of a food dehydrator. Dehydrate at 130° for as long as it takes for the beets to become crispy. Eat warm or allow to cool completely before storing them.

Note: I’m betting you could grill these and have it come out really amazing, but we don’t have a grill (heresy, I know! Especially for the summertime), so I can’t say for sure.

While we’re on the subject of food, I also tried dehydrating cucumber, since we had so much of it. I seasoned it with dill and sesame seeds. Turned out fairly weird, actually, but at least it’s easier to store one small ziploc baggie’s worth of dried cucumber than when it was a hydrated and as big as my arm. No, I am not exaggerating.

And, since I had the dehydrator out, I am also trying out dehydrating blackberries. Dried fruit can be super awesomely delicious, and these blackberries already started out almost sinfully sweet, thanks to some late-August sun. I’m thinking of making my own granola, but I need a good granola recipe that would work with blackberries. Meanwhile, I’m eating fresh blackberries on Tillamook vanilla ice cream out in the sun on our back porch, enjoying our new patio table and chairs.

Summer wouldn’t be as sweet if we had it all year… but that doesn’t keep me from wishing we got more of it.

Blackberry season, at last! The first time this year, Rachel and I met up last Friday afternoon and picked blackberries. It was hot; I got sweaty, scratched, and covered with those little dried bits of blackberry flowers that stay on the berries — in short, exactly what I expect and hope for when going out blackberrying. We each ended up with a bit over half a gallon of berries. Even so, most of the berries we saw were still green and unripe, and some of the vines even still had flowers on them — in late August!

My use of choice was, of course, berry pie. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to make my favorite deep-dish, so-good-you-swoon pie this year because we’ve hardly had any berries, and the ones we do have are too expensive to buy in large quantities (the recipe calls for 11 cups of mixed berries, not an insignificant investment). Thus, blackberries are the perfect berry for this pie. This time I made a peach-blackberry pie in our 3.5-quart Le Crueset pot; the pie has to be cut with vanilla ice cream or you risk berry overload. In short, heaven.

And we finally found some good-sized heirloom tomatoes to turn into tomato soup, which I’ve been craving since summer started. I’m drooling just thinking about that, plus some no-knead bread and (of course) sauteed squash… My future looks delicious. I may mention that both the berry pie and tomato soup are foods I associate with much earlier in the summer — easily late June, early July. It’s indicative of our bizarre weather that only now are we actually getting summer produce.

In other news, almost three years ago, I signed up with this website called WarmShowers.org. It’s a site that links touring bicyclists with people willing to host them. Ian and I figured we could host somebody at our Marlboro apartment. Then we moved… and bought a house… and I updated our information, and forgot about it. And then yesterday, for the first time, I got an email from a touring cyclist who needs a place to stay! He’ll be here Friday night, which should be interesting because we’re also having other friends are coming over; I think I’ll make lasagna with squash in it, enough for everyone. Anyway, I’m excited to actually get to do that. We have this big house, yard, and garage, and — most important — extra shower. I like the idea of sharing this with others.

Well, gosh. Where has time gone? I can hardly believe it’s been 10 days since I last blogged. On the other hand, enough has happened that I could well believe it’s been more like a month.

Quick health-related update: I went and saw Emily Edison, a sports nutritionist, today (I now have two alliterative-name healthcare people in my life. Just sayin’). Wow, so much information to assimilate. Yet I think it may be the best $185 — the visit was definitely not covered by insurance — I’ve spent in a long time. I’m going to see her again in a couple weeks, by which time if I follow her recommendations, I will have revolutionized my eating. For some reason talking with her about food and my eating disorder made me a bit teary, which was odd.

I also am in the midst of getting an appointment with a scoliosis specialist. I found the doctor I’d seen back in high school — his name is Wally Krengel, and he now works for Seattle Children’s Hospital. Because he works for Children’s, they don’t readily make appointments for anybody over age 21, and definitely don’t see people over age 30. Dr. Morrison’s office had faxed a referral to his office, but when I called to make an appointment, they told me he didn’t work there anymore, and I needed to have it faxed elsewhere. And, last but not least, Children’s did have me in their system — as Kathleen Sullivan. I can’t get them to change my name without documentation of the name change. Ha! So that’s in the works: I have to wait until my request for an appointment is approved (hopefully!) by some high-up scheduling manager, and until Dr. Morrison’s office sends the referral that includes my maiden name to the right office. All this so I can talk to Dr. Krengel and hopefully get him to agree to weekly PT visits as palliative care for my scoliosis. If he does that, then I get to start the real fun of trying to convince the insurance company to agree to pay for it.

In happier news, I earned some money these last two weeks! I started up teaching again, albeit on a limited basis. As you may recall, I do work for two Bicycle Alliance grants: CPPW (Communities Putting Prevention to Work, a broad-based anti-obesity effort) and OSPI (Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, a Safe Routes to School initiative aimed at getting kids walking/biking to school specifically). The OSPI teaching stalled for five months thanks to the Great Buy American Fiasco. The CPPW grant initially only scheduled two trainings, so it was always a secondary concern; it’s OSPI that has 27 school districts to train. Neither of them scheduled any trainings during the summer, partly thanks to the Buy American issue, and partly because PE teachers don’t work in the summer and contractually aren’t obligated to come to trainings during that time. That’s really a shame, because summer is still the best time to do the training. All that to say that, although I’ve been hearing rumors that the OSPI grant coordinator has hammered out some solution, my work for the last two weeks came from CPPW.

I taught August 17 and 18 in Auburn, at the same site where we did the fateful late-March monsoon training. This actually turned out to be a boon, since I already knew the area, had a road ride route scouted, and generally needed less time for setup than at a totally new site — all beneficial after almost 5 months off.

It was a difficult training, for a few reasons:

1. I didn’t remember all the material perfectly. It’d been months since I thought about this, after all, so transitions weren’t real smooth and I repeated myself too often. I didn’t have details at my fingertips anymore, and I didn’t remember what was happening next very well. The Feet First trainer, Lisa, was also rusty on her material, and she and I have only taught together once before. That made it a bit tricky to start.
2. We had three students, all male PE teachers, none loquacious, and one tending toward taciturn. These guys had not chosen to attend the first training, and were less enthusiastic than the first batch of CPPW trainees. Even with a higher level of enthusiasm, though, it’s just hard to get a good discussion going with only three people. One of the trainees hadn’t ridden a bike since elementary school, and he’d specifically avoided bike-related classes when doing his PE degree in college. He confessed to me at the end that he’d been dreading the training (no wonder he was late!).
3. I co-taught with a newly-minted LCI named Mark, who volunteers for the Bicycle Alliance and gave his time for those two days for free. That was extremely generous of him, but it’s always rocky teaching with somebody for the first time. Each LCI tends to have his or her hobbyhorse, too, issue(s) that the LCI just feels MUST be covered — even if it’s not 100% relevant or necessary for that specific audience. Not having taught together, I didn’t know what Mark’s hot-button issues were, and we didn’t have the kind of rapport that would let me cut him off gracefully.

For those various reasons, I exerted a lot of energy on the training, and came home exhausted at the end of each day. Getting up at 5:00 am and commuting to/from Auburn each day probably contributed, too (I cannot BELIEVE people do that commute on a regular basis! How awful!). However, I think it was a success overall. The guys all expressed a greater level of enthusiasm about teaching the unit at the end; they gave high marks on our mostly-useless evaluation sheets; the guy who was dreading it asked how much an introductory-level bike would cost and where he could get one, and told me he felt much more confident and at ease; one of the other guys was already planning how he’d use his experience with the unicycle club in the unit. We also certified one of the teachers as passing Traffic Skills 101, and he did very well at the additional handling skills, which Mark taught par excellence.

A couple days after the class finished, I talked over my experiences with Mom, and we came up with some alternative ways of covering some of the material that I felt went less than smoothly.

On August 23 and 24, I taught for CPPW again, this time in Burien. I’d already gone down to the site, Cedarhurst Elementary School, the previous week to scout out the roads. The downside of teaching at the school was that it didn’t open until a bit later than I’d like, so I felt frazzled for time as we set up. The room, however, was perfect, and we were ready when the participants started showing up.

We had three participants schedule for that training, too, so I was ready with some modifications to how I taught for very small classes. Good thing, because only two people showed up. The third guy, who’d missed the previous week’s training, managed to also miss this week’s training (food poisoning one week, car trouble the next; I expect to hear he has to wash his hair or something next time). John, the Bicycle Alliance CPPW coordinator who has attended every one of his trainings so far, got a flat tire on his way there and had to replace all four car tires, making him 3 hours late. Fortunately, I didn’t actually need John there, so we just went on without him.

This training went more smoothly. It helped that I’d just gone over the material. I also taught with Jen from Feet First, and she and I have taught together often enough to do it smoothly. I didn’t have a co-LCI (what’s the point, with only two students?), so I could do whatever worked for me without negotiating. BWAHAHAH. Anyway — The students were also more familiar with bicycling. Both had done STP at some point, even if it had been many years in the past, and were familiar with traffic principles and bicycling principles in general. Both were women, although only one was a PE teacher, and it was actually really great to have all women in the training. I’d like to do more all-women classes.

So the Burien CPPW training went better. We finished early on both days; the first day, I did additional Traffic Skills 101 material with the one student who wanted to do certification in the extra time. She passed with flying colors. The second day, I left at 12:30, a record, and I felt anxious that I’d left out something important because it was so early. Anyway, it went well, and by the end, the PE teacher (who just dropped her daughter off in Pullman for her freshman year as a Coug) was calling me “dear.” Success?

Now I have a few weeks until the next training. Nothing is scheduled, but CPPW needs one more training, and OSPI should be starting up mid-September. I had forgotten how good I feel when I can leave knowing I’ve had an impact on how people ride, getting non-riders to think about bicycling… And how many hundreds of students are impacted? It’s amazing to think about, really. In the meantime, I have a PT appointment, I meet with Emily again, and I will be riding my bike plenty. Most of all, I need to reconnect with some friends I haven’t seen for most of August.

About a month and a half ago, I decided I wanted to do something more with my time. (I still feel that way, incidentally, but onward!) In talking with a friend, I realized that I’ve had a long-term interest in nutrition and helping people who struggle with eating disorders, and the last few years that’s fallen by the wayside as I got more involved in bike stuff.

I contacted the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) about volunteering there. Now I go in once a week, for just a few hours, to answer phones on their helpline. So far I only do operator calls, taking the callers’ information and passing it on to trained volunteers. I’m also in the midst of being trained myself, though, and fairly soon I will probably be answering helpline calls myself (an intimidating prospect, to say the least!).

Why NEDA? Because, starting in high school, I have struggled with anorexia. Right now, I’d describe myself as recovering from anorexia, and I know firsthand what it’s like to be in that place mentally. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to say that I no longer have any anorexic urges, but I am cognizant of the lies coming from my “anorexic brain,” and I’m able to counter or ignore them. Here’s my abridged story.

It all started in high school. Before that, I was never really aware of what it looked like; my body just was. Then, in 1998 I started running cross-country. The best cross-country runners ate a rice cake and half a banana before races. Naturally, I wanted to be like them, so I emulated their eating habits. Unfortunately for me, they had genetics on their side and I did not. At the same time, I went on an acne medication that gave me an ulcer in my throat — an astonishingly effective eating deterrent, believe me!

By the time we figured out what that was and stopped the drugs, I’d established a firm pattern of eating well under 1,000 calories a day, with high running intensity and mileage. It felt good to control something, but my self-esteem remained very low. I started cutting myself as an additional outlet for the pain, sense of inadequacy, frustration, loneliness, and misery that haunted me during high school. Despite going to the state cross-country finals two years, being valedictorian, and having a reasonable number of friends, I was never good enough. Not eating felt like a way to purify myself and prove that I could control something in a time when it felt like everything was out of my control. At my worst, I was obsessed with “fat” on my body — that I could pinch together skin on my stomach at all was a sign that I was too fat. Thank God, I never had to be hospitalized or caused any (apparent) long-term damage to my body during that time. But those years in high school were terrible: Hearing from classmates how good I looked while silently struggling with depression and trying to release my feelings by hurting my body. Those years established a thinking pattern that even now, over 10 years later, I continue to combat.

I’m not going to get into the long story of recovery. Suffice it to say that I quit cross-country (I never liked running that much anyway), started dating a sweet guy, and began moving on. When Ian and I got engaged, we began talking with a marriage counselor, who also serves as a therapist for us individually when we need it. No miracle cures here; just maturing, education, and a long slog towards better mental health. Some months it was better than others. College was difficult, for a variety of reasons, and my recovery has by no means been a linear constant growth pattern.

It took many conversations with many people, but eventually I learned that I start feeling like I need to clamp down on food consumption when I feel stressed out, anxious, or like my life is getting out of control. The need to feel like I have control over something is incredibly powerful*. So now when I feel that, I look at other aspects of my life and ask, “OK, what’s causing me to feel like I need to regain control?” The food-restriction urges serve me as a cue to evaluate what’s going on in my life. Then I can address the underlying issues that cause those symptoms. Over time, I have begun to disentangle food, eating, and weight from my emotional and mental health.

Then there’s the other part of it, too: When I feel inadequate or like a failure, food restriction becomes a deserved punishment. In my head, I don’t deserve food because I failed. Usually it’s not a big failure, either, if one at all. That really goes back to the feeling out of control, because a failure is a lack of control. Again, self-awareness is the best cure I know. Taking those urges out into the light, acknowledging them, examining them, and addressing them gives me the power. I can say I’m recovering because, although I still hear them, I am no longer controlled by subconscious lies about food. I know the truth and use it to overcome the desires caused by my eating disorder.

These days, I focus on being healthy: Eating enough to sustain my high-mileage, high-intensity biking, which right now comes out to consuming probably around 3,000+ calories a day. I don’t obsess about my weight, I don’t count my calories, I don’t critically scrutinize my body in the mirror. I do try to eat every two or three hours; keep a food journal (when I remember); and have a friend to be accountable with on food issues. My body has normal metabolic functions. I’m getting to enjoy pushing my body to its limits, riding hard and fast and staying healthy while doing it. Proper nutrition has enabled me to ride stronger than I ever could have imagined. It’s a wonderful positive reinforcement in favor of healthy eating habits.

I know it’s hard for anybody who hasn’t been there to understand, but eating disorders aren’t a logical thing. You can’t just “change your mind” and easily change your eating habits. Eating disorders are a mental illness, and the sufferer no longer can see reality. Looking in the mirror, your brain lies to you about what you’re seeing. It’s terrible, lonely, and painful. I’m grateful that today I am healthiest (both mentally and physically) and strongest I’ve ever been in my life. In volunteering with NEDA, I hope to be able to use the experience of my own long struggle into something meaningful to help other people. This has also made me start pondering the idea of going back to school to become a nutritionist.

Side note: The perfectionist/control freak urges can be channeled into useful things. It’s what made me an excellent scientific writer and makes me a spectacular copyeditor, for example.

*Also, as a Christian, I’ve spent innumerable hours struggling with passages like the one in today’s Verse of the Day. Check out the entire passage here. It’s like an anorexic’s nightmare: Giving control away to somebody else entirely.

When I don’t have much to say, I post pictures. Like this:

This is the entirety of our strawberry crop this year. We would’ve had more, but the strawberry growing instruction sheet I got from Molbak’s said that it was better in the first year to remove flowers and berry buds to let the strawberries get established. These three are ones I missed, and I’m glad I did. What they lacked in size, they made up for in flavor.

And, excitingly, we received our first small box of strawberries from our CSA, too. Those berries are much larger and more beautiful, but frankly seem rather late. The year we did the CSA in Massachusetts, we had strawberries at the beginning of end of May/June. This year’s just been so difficult for anything not leafy and green. But this week we got delicious pod peas, some humongous carrots, strawberries, a couple heads of lettuce, and leeks. I know how to deal with all of these, which is a relief after last week. In that box, we got more pea tendrils and kale (among other things). The kale was very pretty, but typically I don’t like kale much.

I’m not asking what to do with kale, by the way. Apparently the single most popular thing to do with it is put it in soup, so that’s what we did. I made sausage, white bean, and kale soup, only we got the sausage loose (a pound of sausage filling not in its casing) from Bill the Butcher. That turned out excellent. The soup is rather salty, so I’d probably go for low-salt broth in the future, and when I do it again, I’ll use 8 cups of broth; 6 turned out so thick there was hardly any liquid after it sat overnight. However, I’m really quite pleased with that as a way of using up kale. It lets us get the good kale nutrients without trying to actually struggle through the kale flavor.

I also made a chocolate cake with beets in it as a way to use up some beets. I was really hoping for a fuchsia-colored cake — the batter was unmistakably, vividly fuchsia — but baked it turned out like regular cake. It wasn’t noticeably beet-flavored, either, so I’ll count that a success, too.

In other non-food-related news:

• Last night I finished reading Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin. It took me just over 4 days. Now I really have to get my hands on the rest of the series.

• On Saturday I rode 121 miles, my new personal longest ride ever. That won’t be true for much longer, though, since RAMROD is 150 miles.
• I spent a little over 17 hours helping Mom clean up (compile, format, copyedit, implement changes) some science curriculum files for BCS. I liked having something resembling real work to do, even if only for a little while. (Insert slightly plaintive sigh here.)
• New glasses time. My old ones snapped in an irreparable way, and while the glasses repair people soldered a kludgy type of fix, they said that wasn’t a permanent fix and I now can’t fold them, so they don’t transport well. I haven’t gotten new glasses frames in years. This is going to be weird.
• We got a trail-a-bike for my Red Bike. Now, it’s true we don’t personally have any kids between the ages of 4 and 9 years, but Kallie, my parents’ god-daughter (my god-sister? I could be her mom!), is 5 and very energetic. I am looking forward to riding around with her. And don’t tell anybody I said this, but every time I see parents out with their little kids on bikes, or towing small kids in trailers, I secretly hope that’ll be me in not too many years.

This is our first box of food from Chinook Farms, the CSA we’ve signed up with for the season. It contained:

• 3 Beets

• 3 Carrots
• A bag of potatoes
• About 10 leeks
• A large bag of spinach
• A bag of wheat grains (unmilled)
• A box of wheatgrass (growing)

Now, I know or can figure out what to do with most of this stuff. Heck, I immediately peeled and ate one of the carrots on the spot — there’s nothing like a fresh organic carrot for sweetness. But the wheat and wheatgrass have me stumped. I’m not into green smoothies, whatever the potential health benefits; besides, we don’t want to buy a juicer just for this. So: Anybody want some organic wheatgrass? Theoretically it’s fabulously good for you.

Meanwhile, I converted a number of the leeks and potatoes, plus some bacon, chicken stock, and heavy whipping cream I had on hand (really!), into a delicious and hearty soup. I found that sprinkling the soup with a dusting of paprika added a bit of interesting zip. We still have lots of leeks left, so I’ll probably try some other soup, plus throw them in with… well… everything, until they’re gone. Which will have to be before next Wednesday, when we get our next box.

I am already delighted and it’s one day into the CSA. This summer’s gonna be great.

You can fit things like this into it:

(There’s a large-size pickle jar next to it for reference.) Next time I’m making the hamburger buns a bit thinner. And maybe we’ll slice the tomato and avocado (not visible) a bit thinner, too. Still — yum.