Upcycling My Liquor Habit

Posted on March 23, 2012 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

What do you get when you put three yuppies in a downtown apartment together? Among other things you get a decently stocked liquor cabinet. Mix in a little environmental consciousness and you get upcycled liquor bottles. We had a few bottles that were finished last month and we hadn’t recycled them yet. I was looking for something to do with them and considered turning them into change jars, cutting them in half and using them to pot plants (not to grow pot as my landlord thinks), or just something more interesting than sending them to the recycling. I figured that the timing was right to do something because of my sober month; I might as well turn them into something useful. Finally I came up with the idea to fill them with water and use them to hold bamboo plants.

Knob Creek and Jack Daniels Bamboo Plants.

There’s a place down the street that sells bamboo plants for $4 so I bought two, money well spent in my opinion. I had wanted to plant something that used my compost (read: worm poo) because I have a lot of it now after almost 8 months of composting my food. I suppose I’ll save the compost for my next horticulture project. The bamboo plants were fast, easy, cheap, and they helped turn my affinity for good liquor into a cool decoration, not a bad deal.

Baby’s First Vegetarian Barbeque

Posted on December 4, 2011 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

My friends and I use the term “Baby’s First (fill in the blank)” to describe when someone does something for the first time. Baby’s First Hike, Baby’s First Bruins Game, Baby’s First etc etc. So today for me was Baby’s First Barbeque. I was going to get ambitious and make a dish but I opted for veggie burgers from Shaws instead. First however, here’s the outline of my day.

Sarah and I spent the morning cruising around Boston and we came across a CrossFit promo in Copley Square. Apparently they are putting in a new gym in Back Bay and they were giving out Paleo-Muffins. CrossFit is all about the paleo-diet. It’s basically a hunter-gatherer diet where you eat only the things you would have been able to scavenge for, mostly nuts and berries with a huge de-emphasis on carbs and an over-emphasis on protein. From the reading I’ve done, the paleo-diet has been discounted by nutritionists as a viable way to increase your level of athletic performance. In order to perform at a high level, you need carbs (even in power lifting), the paleo-diet has a grudge against carbs and an emphasis on protein which people tend to abuse. Carbs do not make you fat, it’s actually very difficult for your body to turn carbs into fat because evolutionarily your body wants to ingest carbs and then immediately use them for energy in your muscles. It’s excess calories that make you fat, not carbs (sorry Atkins diet). OK, enough pontificating, the moral of the story is that CrossFit as a workout is awesome, but these paleo-muffins tasted like sawdust, no thanks.

Nasty paleo-muffin from CrossFit table in Copley Square.

We then went to Boloco for lunch. My go-to choice would have been an original classic with chicken but this time I went for the original classic with grilled vegetables. I liked it well-enough but I prefer fresh and crunchy vegetables, not sautéed or boiled, give em’ to me right out of the ground. Then Sarah brought up the fact that we’re “that couple”, the well-educated, city couple who are both vegetarians and who should probably move to Cambridge in order to fit in (no offense to the vegetarians in Cambridge, but you’re definitely a “type”).

Veggie Boloco Burrito after picking up my previously Macbook from the Apple Store.

That night my broomball team from Social Boston Sports was having a BBQ out in Somerville. On the way there we picked up some Morning Star Veggie Burgers. As usual I looked at them with disdain and skepticism, really doing it just because I have to. I also picked up beer from Peak Organic out of Portland, ME. My buddies busted my chops a little bit about bringing veggie burgers and organic beer. I defended myself on the beer-front by explaining that Peak Organic is awesome beer regardless of how it was made, after they had a few they shut up about it.

Morning Star veggie burgers from Shaws, I heard they were the best so I picked them up.

Stuffing a veggie burger into my face. At first I wasn't 100% sure it wasn't a real burger. After consulting two of my vegetarian friends they confirmed it was indeed veggie.

I took a couple of small bites out of it to see if it was veggie or meat.

The veggie burgers were actually awesome. I could hardly tell that they weren’t real burgers, I had to double and triple check to make sure my buddies weren’t pulling a fast one on me. They definitely weren’t as tasty as real burgers but they were passable. We noticed that most of the ingredients actually came from corn. I’m learning that this is not uncommon when it comes to industrialized food. We’re consuming more corn in our diets than ever before. I can’t imagine that it’s corn itself that is the problem, but when it’s present in almost everything we eat then it certainly changes our diet as a culture in a drastic way. I’m not sure what the impact of that is but it’s definitely a change from how we ate 30-40 years ago.

By the end of the night I reached an epiphany about being vegetarian. For me, vegetarianism has always been associated with eating healthy. The two are perhaps correlated but not synonymous. You can eat as much junk food as you want, you just can’t eat meat. You can be vegetarian and still be super unhealthy, this is something that I hadn’t considered before tonight. So I had a bunch of peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies as well as beer (both organic and non-organic, I don’t discriminate) and Knob Creek bourbon whiskey. I think I’ll probably be the only person who actually ends up gaining weight as a result of becoming vegetarian.

Ate a gratuitous amount of chocolate chip cookies at the BBQ. This sounds obvious, but being vegetarian isn't exactly about being healthy, it's just about not eating meat.

Thursday October 27th – Saving My Worms, Whiskey, and Microsoft Excel

Posted on October 29, 2011 by The Young Urban Unprofessional

Tonight was a pretty successful yet probably uneventful evening. I had to troubleshoot my vermiculture composting bin because my worms were freaking out trying to crawl out of the bin. So I did some research and figured out how to fix the solution. I’ll find out in a week or so whether or not what I did will work. Then I spent some time doing a few logistical things with my blog. I updated the Facebook page I created a few weeks ago and then came up with an excel spreadsheet that will help me analyze my photo-blog challenge this month. As evidenced in the quality of my photos this month, my point with this challenge was not to be artistic, it was to take a look at my lifestyle through random photos (10 or so every day at randomized time points). So like a good engineer I’m going to do a bit of analysis afterward to look at trends and whatnot.

Self explanatory; reading Dracula on the train.

When I went to put my week's food scraps in my compost I saw that my worms were buggin' out and trying to crawl out of the bin. I did some research online and realized that my bin was probably too wet, so I added some dry newspaper bedding to help absorb the moisture. I'll check it again next week to see if it's less moist and if my worms are happy again.

I read online that your bedding should take up 3/4 of your bin. I was putting minimal bedding in assuming that the worms would be happy playing in the composted material in the bottom, but apparently they hang out in the bedding area. So I filled the bin about half-full with dry newspaper pieces (to help absorb excess moisture). I'll check next week to see if anything has changed.

Checking out my Blog's Facebook Page. When I upload a blog post it is automatically Tweeted (@youngandurban) and my Twitter feed is embedded in my Facebook page. This way now people besides my friends on Facebook and my Twitter followers can follow my updates. Like me on Facebook! http://on.fb.me/slQvpI and follow me on Twitter @youngandurban

More Twitter stuff on Facebook. If anyone knows how to make my twitter feed my landing page for my Facebook page, please let me know, that'd be great, thanks.

Devising a way to analyze my randomized photo blog. I'm basically counting up how many pictures I took throughout the month and then categorizing them; inside, outside, with friends, in transit, physical exertion, etc. This will help me to "calculate" how I am spending my time and thus what is important to me. Is this how I want to be spending my days as a freshly new 25 year old? Less working and more playing outside maybe.

Watching the Bruins lose horribly in a crappy game instead of watching game 6 of the baseball world series. I don't know how we messed that one up, I guess we were just over-stoked for the hockey season. The baseball game was apparently unreal, walk-off homerun in the 13th inning, bummed I missed it.

Enjoying some Knob Creek Kentucky Straight Burbon Whiskey while coming up with a good excel sheet to analyze the content of my photo blog.

I’ll find out in a week or so whether or not my solution of adding dry paper scraps to my compost will help to dry it out a bit. Also, I’m going some time over the next few days going through my month’s pictures and plugging info into the excel spreadsheet that I made; am I inside/outside, with/without friends, being physically/intellectually stimulated, etc. I’m interested to see how it turns out. I’m excited for Halloween weekend, lots of time with good people, hopefully a few adventures, and most importantly it’ll be the first weekend in a longggg time that I haven’t been in NH hiking. So I’m looking forward to hanging out in Boston for once instead of being out in the woods every weekend (although I much prefer the latter).