I last left off around Christmas.

The day after Christmas–or as it’s commonly known in the Self vernacular, Kenmas due to my Dad’s birthday–always triggers the end of a seaosn of eating. First there’s Thanksgiving and the complicated, fattening, and expensive meal that comes with it. Then come the parties and get-togethers. Eventually there’s Christmas Eve dinner, then Christmas dinner, and finally, my Dad’s birthday. By the time my Dad’s birthday rolls around…well, so are we. We pretty much have to roll ourselves around we’ve eaten so much in the preceding month.

This year, I offered to make the Self family recipe, beef cubelets. My Dad had expressed interest in making them, and I told him that if he went ahead and bought the meat (what, like I can afford four or five pounds of that kind of beef?), I’d cut it up, marinate it, and cook it. I’ve spent enough time helping in cooking them that I thought I could do it by myself–with some adult supervision, naturally. In the end, though, my Dad decided to go a different route and wanted homemade pizza. All the better, I know how to make that and I do it really well. Three years with Papa Murphy’s really gave me a knack for it, though I need to work on my dough and how it cooks on my pizza stone. That’s my one weak spot with my pizza.

So I bought the ingredients and spent the day cooking at my Dad’s. As much as I like to make pizza from scratch, it’s always a long, messy affair. I like to start the sauce early so it can simmer on the stove for most of the day if possible, and the dough itself has to be started at least an hour and a half before you want to pop it in the oven, though it doesn’t require constant attention during that time. Once it’s mixed, kneaded, and rising, I have an hour to kill while the yeast does its work, but I find that time is best spent preparing the toppings. All in all, I’m doing at least two hours of prep for the pizza. It’s complicated, but it’s worth it. We spent the day hanging out, watching some TV, drinking beer, etc. All the stuff we like to do. Since it was my Dad’s birthday, I even sprung for the expensive beer–Old Peculiar, which runs about $12 for a six-pack. Man that’s good beer, though–it’s like a slightly bitterer Newcastle Brown.

New Year’s is always a difficult holiday for me. I spent so many New Year’s without a significant other (either in general or not in the same timezone) that it’s still tough for me to accept that not only do I have someone to spend it with, but someone I want to spend it with. I have no real traditions on New Year’s except for the societal ones (the champagne, the kiss at midnight, trying to figure out what the heck the words to “Auld Lang Syne” mean), so for the last two years Erika and I have struggled to make plans. Last year we wanted to get away and have a special New Year’s since we were still in that “brand new relationship” phase, but this year since we were both broke we decided to spend it together here in town. I promised her a meal of epic proportions to end the year, and that’s what I gave her.

Well, maybe just the preparation was epic.

On the menu was bread and lasagna, which sound simple enough until you delve deeper into the recipes. Bread is relatively easy to make–ciabatta bread is not. I love ciabatta bread, probably more than foccacia or pugliese, but it’s a pain to make as I discovered. No longer will a loaf of ciabatta purchased in the store be taken for granted–I know how hard it is to make, now. Not only does it require a starter (also called a “sponge” in bakerspeak), but the starter has to be…er, started at least 12 hours before preparation. New Year’s Eve was on a Saturday, so that means that I had to start preparation for the meal Friday night. Oy.

Saturday was a day of cooking nonstop. I started around 10 AM with the bread, because I knew it would take another few hours of rising and eventually cooking. Since I was making lasagna from scratch–including the noodles, mind you–I had to start that once the bread was out of the way. If you’ve never made homemade pasta before, prepare yourself for a real fight. It’s not terribly easy to make, even if you have a pasta maker like I do. It became simpler since I was only make the flat lasagna noodles and didn’t have to deal with cutting it up to make spaghetti, or worse, anger hair. It’s still hard. Pasta noodles have three ingredients: flour, egg, and water. Simple? Sure. Mix ‘em up until you’ve got the right consistency (add water if too thick, add flour if too wet), then roll it out. One problem: what do you do once it’s rolled out?

I stood there in my kitchen after rolling out my first noodle, immensely proud that Erika’s housewarming gift was going to good use, and all I could think was “Now what?” I had no idea where to put the finished noodles. I don’t have a drying rack to use, and I certainly don’t have one big enough to support the amount of dough I’d made. I ended up placing a sheet on the floor and letting them dry there, since that was the largest space I had available. Andrew gets +1 for quick thinking.

Next came the lasagana sauce, which was another hour of cooking. Then the cheese ingredients, so that’s another 30 minutes. I ended up timing it out perfectly, and things got finished a mere 20 minutes or so before Erika arrived for dinner. Oh, and what a dinner it was. We had one type of wine with the bread appetizer (which went quite well with the spicy tomato sauce and salty olive oil dips I whipped up), another type of wine with the lasagna, an ice wine with the sorbet dessert, and champagne at midnight. And before anyone else asks, no, we didn’t finish any of the bottles except for the ice wine, which barely had enough in it for two glasses as it was. We barely dented the appetizer wine and the main course wine, and I ended up pouring out around half the bottle of champagne. Fear not, wine fans–it was a $9 bottle of Brut. I didn’t waste much.

It was a meal and an evening to be remembered, and I enjoyed cooking for Erika. One last hurrah before the New Year and our joint resolutions to lose some of our holiday weight.

I always gain about 10 pounds between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and this year was no exception. My New Year’s resolution, much like that of millions of other Americans, was to lose that weight. I didn’t really see it as a terribly difficult goal, though, since I’ve done it before. Heck, in 2002 I lost 30 pounds over the summer, and in 2003 I lost almost 20 over the summer. My goal was that before February 15, I wanted to lose 15 pounds. That would require a bit more work than I could easily muster. In 2002 and 2003, I wasn’t working full time, and I could jog daily if I pleased. In fact, in 2003 I was: typically I’d jog five days a week, then rest on the weekend. With a full time job, a full time girlfriend, and with a small window in which to jog daily, I knew it would require a lot of willpower. I’ve been jogging in the rain, jogging as it’s gotten dark, and passing up some activities with friends to jog. All to meet an arbitrary goal! I’ve also laid off the beer, which I knew wasn;t helping my waistline. I went from having a bottle of beer at home maybe four or five days a week and beer at a pub once or twice a week to no beer at home and beer out perhaps once a week. That makes a big difference in the ol’ waistline.

I also changed my diet. No more cheese, no more pizza, easy on the fattening stuff. I’m back on cereal lunches and walking up to Safeway for a Coke and a piece of fruit during my lunch hour (a good mile walk roundtrip) most days at work. I go out for lunch once, twice a week tops now, and even that’s typically either bento (chicken with brown rice, usually) that’s easy on the sauces or a mixed salad from Salad World. I’ve been “forcing” myself to jog at least three times a week since the beginning on January, and I’ve made good progress so far. I weighed myself towards the end of December and I registered an alarming 199.4. Last weekend I weighed myself and the scale tipped up to about 191. Progress! Back in August and Sepetmber when I was jogging regularly after work in preparation for the 5k run that Erika and I did, I weighed about 185 and started to worry when I’d tip up to 190. With two weeks left, I may yet be able to pull off that last five pounds.

This has been a sort of coup for me, honestly. Not only does it show that it’s possible for me to change my body’s metabolism relatively easily to lose weight, but that I can motivate myself to jog in crappy weather. Man, I can’t wait until the weather is nicer and I actually want to be outside after work.

My original plan was to talk about goings-on at work in this entry, but my writing has gone on longer than I planned so I’ll cut this short to go watch the State of the Union address. Every year I come across the rules to a drinking game to play during the speech, and this year’s was pretty good. In 2002 the rule was to drink every time Bush mentioned 9/11. In 2004 it was every time he mentioned Iraq. In 2005 it was every time he mentioned terrorism. This year, the sole rule I read is to drink every time Bush makes up a new word (“truthiness” is a good example). I’d play, but I’m not sure I have enough liquor in my apartment. Ha!

Continued in my next entry: Part III: Work goings-on, why I made my New Year’s resolution, and miscellaneous notes.