cloudy with a chance of meatballs

and i mean a lot of meatballs. enough to feed over 35 women. mike, the sous chef was feeling wiped out from the bbq at the chef's house so i offered to dig my hands into the mix and make up the meatballs (i had gloves on! although they are so large that it looked like my fingers all got amputated in the process of making them). i used a scale to get the weight right for the first couple (each women got three 1.5ish ounce meatballs) and then was able to eyeball it for the rest.

this morning, kate, the fitness specialist, and intern coordinator, took us out to the long trail to test out a hike for the women on friday. it started out w/ a mini suspension bridge (too short in my opinion) but w/ a nice view down.

the water looked really low but we did have some rain last week. 

the long trail is part of the appalachian trail and we hiked up part of it and got this awesome overlook of rutland and beyond. unfortunately we kept hiking and could never figure out if it connected back around so we ended up hiking back down and around and then hiking another section which made the morning a long 3 hr hike, but it was pretty. i just hope my feet heal soon so i can actually walk and workout properly on them (esp as i teach kickboxing on thurs).


oh, and PA and i made a mini trip to sunoco to get contraband. bwhaha. it closes at 12 so now we know our hook-up. biggy iggy's ice cream cookie sandwiches are pretty excellent.


tmrw is 4th of july so we're doing fun games and different food. woot woot! i'm excited:D i'll update you guys on that soon. have a wonderful 4th!

bonjour!

spent the weekend in montreal w/ my roommie. we left at 5 on saturday morning and got to our hostel around 9 am and then didn't sleep again until we last night after a bbq and fireworks night (where i got to play bartendar and perfected the margarita)

we dropped our bags off at the hostel and then asked the front desk person where we should walk and he pointed straight south and told us to head to Old Town and the port (towards the st. lawrence river).

old town was really quaint- cobblestone ground, small little shops and pretty churches (notre dame church for instance) and fountains. very european feel. b/c montreal is a small island everything was a lot closer together than we thought so we walked everywhere.

from old town we went to the port and saw a cookie truck opened early in the morning so of course our first purchases (and she took american $!). i got the dark chocolate cookie and they are fabuloussssss. not very big but totally worth it. which is why, later that night we went back and got more. :) we grabbed a quick lunch and gelato in old town and then headed back up to our area for a smaller drink and window shopping (tequila taco on sherbrooke and st laurent has that dive bar look but the food is pretty good).

old town was pretty dead during the day but we headed back down after checking out the jazz festival downtown and that's when we saw the crowds. they were doing fireworks for canada day and there were crazy numbers of people everywhere and all the stores and restaurants were still open (i'm still living in ludlow time...). after the fireworks we headed back up to st laurent street where all the younger people go to drink and club and had a couple drinks at an irish pub. these two guys, one french canadian and one french started talking to us and got us drinks and then took us to a tequila lounge that was crazy packed (bars in montreal close at 3. and also, no right turns in the city!). 


after the bars closed we went back to their place and sat around and talked and by the time PA and i figured we should get some sleep the guys said we had to watch the sunrise at the park overlooking downtown.

this is plateau mont royal park and it has two overlooks where you can see the whole spread of the city. so after leaving ludlow at 5 in the morning we stayed up 24 hours later to see the sunrise in montreal. gorgeoussss. apparently a lot of kids will go up to watch the sunrise after prom. we didn't even need our hostel b/c we ended up checking out afterward so we could make the trek back into the US before we really did just hit the sack in montreal and never make it back home.

got lots of recommendations to try bagels in montreal at this specific place (freemont bagels) but we weren't impressed b/c we were munchy from the alcohol and wanted fluffy big bagels but these were more like 2 day old bagels. so really, i'll have my big american bagel next time:)

we got back to ludlow really early (we felt a bit silly coming back so early but we actually spent 2 days in montreal, just condensed in one 24 hour period). but we finally took showers and then headed out to the gm's chef's house and had a bbq and shooting off fireworks. i love fireworks and it's pretty sweet that you can buy/set off big fireworks in vt. i mastered the blended margarita (2:1 ratio of tequila to mix). but since i can never handle more than one night of alcohol i was the driver (which was good since 5 people finished off 4 bottles of tequila!). 

looking foward to 4th of july on wednesday, the fireworks on the mountain are apparently supposed to be awesome. 

cheesecake success!

look what i baked! gluten-free cheesecake :D last night was baked dessert night so i got to whip up this cheesecake before heading out to take women for a walk. the base was made with brown rice "krispies," sugar, and butter. the cheesecake was neufchatel (the lighter cream cheese), tapioca flour, vanilla extract, eggs and some sugar. it was crazy hard to mix the 15+ cups of neufchatel and other odd ingredients by hand but the mega huge whisk was nice. so was melting the cream cheese a bit by hand.


there's a curse on ankles at work, we've had at least 4 sprained ankles since i've been here and i rolled my ankle this morning on my run but i think if i just be nice to it today then i can still teach my first cardiokickboxing class tmrw!


today we re-hiked the plymouth vista and i remember my first week one of the participants was starting her first week and she couldn't make it to the top to see the view and she wanted that to be her goal before she left and today she made it! it's amazing what these women are accomplishing in the time they spend here and the changes their bodies undergo. and i think i want to become a life coach if this whole dietetics thing doesn't work out...haha, i think i just need to make up my mind in life.

nightlife

PA and i made it out to killington tonight to get in the real world and check out another local bar. killington is about 30 minutes from ludlow past plymouth and the lakes. we went to JAX, which felt like the middle of nowhere but was pretty big. it's on top of a laundromat and we were probably the only two females there among a group of post college guys and a very low-key bachelor party. we liked the bar, one b/c it was more our age than outback, and the bartendar was really nice and she really talked to everyone at the bar. 


we noticed that no one we meet in bars is from VT and that they are always going to be golfing at okemo golf resort the next day. there must be a special at okemo for sundays for large groups of guys wanting to get their game on.


there was a 100 mile relay on route 100 that we saw on our way to the bar and the people were running by GM on our way home tonight, i'm not sure i would ever want to run at night by myself even w/ a headlight especially in these dark roads.


oh, and we saw a bear on our drive home! it looked pretty small but it lumbered across the street pretty quickly.


i think i'm just plain old allergic or super intolerant to alcohol. every time i drink i get sick and today i broke out in hives, so i guess i will have to do some experimenting to figure out if it's all alcohol or what, but after a drink and a half today i felt ill and the first drink ended up in hives (note to self, no more rum). the weather is back to being crisp and fall-like, it's a nice change of pace, but swimming in the lake today would have been much nicer with a hot day.


have a good night!

drama llama

more drama in the kitchen- apparently i flopped on both baking things i did. so really, lets just leave me out of the drama and i'll just do some back stuff like bulletin boards and putting dishes out onto tables...it's amazing how different personalities clash and i'd rather not be the one in the middle. i'm getting where both the chefs and the dietitian are coming from, but it would be nice if they could communicate w/ each other and not have me as a middle funky ground.

today's vermonting walk/hike was hawk walk, which starts at hawk mountain resort. i took 2 of the more gung-ho ladies up salt ash road which had some snazzy houses on the mountain. i wish i nabbed a shot of lunch (mac and cheeseeeeee, man, i wish i could live off this stuff...which also was apparently too salty...). after four weeks here i think i finally got the wednesday self-serve lunch plate servings down. minus the part where i went back for 2nd helpings of the mac&cheese:D i may have finally found a mac&cheese that i like more than the kraft box version. i got to showcase my cardioboxing skills (my nutrition supervisor joined in on the class in her skirt no less!) and then the highlight of the day- spontaneous decision to go swim in a lake!

the fitness/intern coordinator lives in a house by lake echo (it's a private lake except for the state park section, which is still not re-opened since hurricane irene damage) and she offered to show us how to enter through her section so we asked the kitchen to hold our dinners and we just drove there after work still in our workout clothes (i had like full workout pants on). there's a little dock and a floating platform a bit further. the water was actually warm (it probably helped that it was in the mid-90s today) and you couldn't touch the ground, which was really nice b/c the storm apparently brought lots of ickies to the bottom. it was sad when i couldn't haul myself onto the platform...so some more upper body is necessary or else i will just have to keep pretending that i just like to float around in the water all day...lol. 

now i can say i swam in a lake! i think i'll use my vibrams as water shoes just so i can avoid the murky bottom by the dock and walk up onto the beach when i don't even have the energy to flop onto the deck like a beached whale. you'd think as a fitness instructor i would have some mad muscles, which i think oftentimes the women here judge me for when i'm not as strong or as quick as the other intern. sometimes i think they see me as more approachable b/c i look more like them, but sometimes i don't know if they take me seriously b/c i don't look like joy bauer or jillian michaels. but it's something to adjust to, and it's always a work in progress, but it was really fun jumping into the lake (much less daunting than the cliff diving).

happy first day of summer!

i would never run a restaurant...

...but i sure like to eat at them :D

we went to the downtown grocery on monday night for their prix fix dinner to celebrate karen's bday and her last week at GM. man, this stuff will burn a hole in your wallet but leave your stomach so happy. it was $25 for a starter, entree and chef's dessert (i didn't get a solo shot of the dessert...) but i got the tomato soup (delish!) and salmon w/ fingerling potatoes and wild mushrooms. dessert was a trio of pineapple and basil sorbet, chocolate souffle w/ i think a caramel kind of sauce (or knowing vt, maybe maple), and a mini donut w/ a raspberry sauce. 

i also got a rum and ginger beer (they make their own) w/ mount gay rum (which was very tasty). eum eum. a wonderful night to celebrate one of the nicest ladies i've met here. the clientele at the restaurant is definitely averaging around 65+ but that might have to do w/ the price of the place, but for the prix fix days it's definitely worth a trip (plus the people there are soooo nice!)

but onto intern stuff- first real day in the kitchen (9-2 w/ an hour break for lunch). i got to use the flour mill and grind brown rice into brown rice flour (quick but also overloaded the poor machine and the poor thing went crazy). with the brown rice flour i made gluten free cheddar cheese sesame crackers (which also had tapioca flour and sorghum flour). it was all sorts of complicated ingredients and i really just wanted butter and flour and cheddar cheese. plus, i have no idea the point of having three different flours so i was feeling a bit lost on how to cook w/o really measuring (i love the ginormous mixing bowl machines). the last 10 minutes before lunch time were sort of frantic (thus the not wanting to ever run a restaurant) and i felt like i needed to be meryl streep playing julia child in that movie where she practices dicing onions to be really fast.

after that it was a bit smoother (sort of). i made the chocolate zucchini cake (which was actually squash b/c there was no zucchini) and keeping track of quantities and baking/cooking to those proportions for a certain number of people is very awkward (case in point, using MasterCook program it said to use 2 and 5/8 of an egg...). plus, i got the wrong number scooped out so i had to do lots of fiddling to spread the batter out (which made for small looking cakes) but they tasted pretty good. keeping track of what people do and do not eat and allergies is also a whole 'nother fun game so there are charts all over the kitchen w/ the menus and layouts of everyone's diet.

tmrw's hump day! it's supposed to be killer hot so the walk tmrw should be uber fun. ack, i can't believe i missed taking a pic of my first attempts at cooking in large batches!

water, water, everywhere

from last night's shenanigans at the downtown grocery to today's exploring, this was probably one of my favorite weekends here so far. lisa and i went to the downtown grocery which is in ludlow- it's a very cute, tasty, but pricey place. it has a great fresh foods menu (they have a garden in the basement and on the roof) and everyone there is super nice. the plan had been to get 1 drink, but we ended up talking to everyone at the bar and the owner until past midnight. haha, which means drunken food search which is very difficult when everything in town closes early evening...but we ate their homemade potato chips and sampled some of their signature mixed cocktails so i'm excited to try out their dinner food tmrw night! 


but anyway, got about 3 hours of sleep but was ready for getting out of green mountain and going for a hike (it helped that i probably ate 3 extra dinners in a "please soak up this alcohol" late last night. we got lost getting to manchester for this hike, so 2 hours later we made it to the lye brook falls trail. it's a pretty straight forward trail to the waterfall- about 3 hours round trip at a leisurely to steady pace. the incline wasn't bad at all and a stop to enjoy the view.

lye brook falls is one of the tallest in the state of vt. it's a gorgeous waterfall and the water runs over all the shale-like rocks.

there was a small path up to a higher point on the falls, you can kind of see me in the middle of the picture.

after the hike we got some gelato at a really cute diner in downtown manchester (i'll remember the name eventually). and then headed to dorset which was about 10 minutes from manchester to look for the quarry that the locals use for swimming and cliff diving. 

the quarry was pretty big and there was a good number of cars parked outside. one section w/ the lower rocks had families w/ lawn chairs parked and smoozing, but once you walked around the quarry to the other side, were the teenagers and teenagers who looked about 12 smoking and drinking and diving off the cliff (all seemed like bad combinations). there's some shallower jumps at around 6' but also a 30' and 40' jump. after watching this girl stare down at the 30' jump for about ten minutes i figured i would start out at 30 and see how things went...

the water was freezinggggg. i was definitely stalling jumping off and couldn't look down other than to check if there was anyone below i would kill before i just had to jump off. it was tons of fun, not sure if i'll make it to the 40' jump but maybe next time when the weather gets really warm.


happy father's day and happy sunday!