In celebration of the glorious weather that has finally shown up here in the last few days, I cranked up the grill last night for the first time in months.  This was the result:  a recipe from one of my most beautiful cookbooks:  Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.  The book is about the foods of Southeast Asia–specifically, the areas of Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos that are traversed by the Mekong River.  It’s almost a coffee table book, almost a travelogue, but mostly a spectacularly photographed cookbook.  I have all of their books, but this is one of my favorites (and the one I cook from most often, I think).

My version, though, is a far cry from authentic; it’s not even all that close to the recipe as Alford and Duguid interpret it.  It’s the suburban-American-housewife-on-a-weeknight version.  It’s still absolutely delicious, though.

The most significant change I make is the rice:  the Thai version of this street food would apparently involve sticky rice, a Southeast Asian variety of rice that I lovelovelove, but that doesn’t lend itself to spur-of-the-moment dinners.  Sticky rice is a short-grain rice (for comparison, Uncle Ben’s is a long grain, while what you probably know as sushi rice is a medium grain) that requires a 24-hour soak, followed by steaming in a bamboo rice steamer.  Yes, I have such a steamer, and yes, it’s worth the effort for a special occasion, but on a Tuesday evening when Delaney has Girls on the Run and Toby has the 10th grade writing exam tomorrow?  Not so much.

So instead I use a medium-grain Japanese rice (a variety that would ordinarily be used in sushi), and cook it in my rice cooker.  It makes, by my lights, the perfect bowl of rice.

Also, the original recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of cilantro roots.  Now, if you garden much, you know that cilantro actually grows pretty well here in NC at this time of year.  So if you are on the ball enough to have a nice patch of cilantro, and you’re willing to sacrifice enough plants to get 3 tablespoons of roots, by all means–be authentic.  I do not have such a patch, and I have never been able to find the roots for sale in our local Asian market.  So I just use 3 tablespoons of cilantro instead, leaves and stems.

So here’s what you do.

Thai-ish Grilled Chicken
Serves 4, with rice

Rice for 4 people

Marinade:
3 T. cilantro
6 large cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
2 t. whole black peppercorns
a pinch of salt

1 large boneless, skinless chicken breast (about 1 pound), cut into about 8 chunks

1/2 cup rice vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
2 garlic cloves, pressed
1/4 t. salt
1 1/2 t. crushed red pepper (this amount makes a SPICY sauce–adjust according to your preference, but it’s supposed to be quite lip-tingling)

First, make the marinade:  put all the ingredients in a mini food processor or blender (I use my spice grinder) and process to a smooth paste.  Alternatively, you can use a mortar and pestle, but be prepared for it to take a good ten minutes.

Spread the marinade on the chicken chunks; you’ll have to use your fingers.  Refrigerate for a couple of hours.

Next, start your rice (assuming you have a rice machine that will hold it until serving time; otherwise, start it in time to be hot for dinner).

While the rice is cooking and the chicken is marinating, make the sauce:  pour the vinegar in a small saucepan; heat to boiling.  Add the sugar and stir until the sugar is dissolved.  Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes.  While the vinegar/sugar mixture is simmering, use a mortar and pestle or a small bowl and the back of a spoon to work the garlic (which you’ve already pressed or minced) and salt to a smooth paste; it will seem almost like a liquid.  Stir in the crushed red pepper.  When the vinegar mixture finishes simmering, add the garlic paste and stir.  Leave to cool.

Heat up your grill to a high enough heat for cooking chicken.  When it’s hot, put the marinade-coated chicken chunks on the heat, close the lid, and leave them alone until they’re done enough to not stick.  Then turn them over, and again leave them until they stop sticking.  Continue to cook until a piece of chicken looks done when you cut into it with a knife.

Serve a couple of chunks of chicken on a bed of rice with a good drizzle of sauce.

Two notes:  if you examine that photo closely, you may see some tiny blue dots.  They are garlic.  Garlic sometimes turns blue when you put it in vinegar–don’t let it freak you out.

Also, Toby took that picture.  Sorry about that.

Suddenly, miraculously, Spring woke up over the weekend, and we were treated to the most glorious weather we’ve had in months–sunshine, shirt-sleeve temps, and bird song.  I resolved to spend as much of it outdoors as possible.

So we raked leaves.  A lot of leaves.  For hours.

By bedtime, we were all satisfactorily exhausted, and the backyard had shed its winter blanket.  Now I can actually see my feet when I walk around out there, which is good–we only disturbed one snake on Saturday, but even one unseen and stepped-on is more than I care to experience.

The real beauty of the day, though, was the gratification of getting plenty of exercise without making any special effort.  I didn’t have to carve out an hour to fit in a workout; I didn’t have to talk myself into getting started, or sticking with it to the end.  The physical exertion was just a by-product of the work that I really wanted to get done.

Sometimes the word exercise takes on a life of its own–it looms over us, the most unpleasant, guilt-inducing part of the day, the thing we have to get through in order to enjoy the rest of the day.  We bargain with ourselves, twist our schedules inside out, and sacrifice all manner of other priorities, just so we can spend the requisite number of minutes running to nowhere or lifting a pointless item up and down and up and down.

A study came out a couple of months ago that shows that sitting all day shortens life expectancy, even in people who “exercise” regularly; I wrote about it here.  It bears repeating, I think:  our bodies weren’t meant to sit for a living.  We evolved to spend our days in vigorous, and essential, activity.

That intersection, between vigorous and essential, is useful to consider.  I find that I have trouble convincing myself to exercise consistently if my only goal is an hour of sweating.  If the activity has another purpose–any other purpose–I’m more likely to jump in enthusiastically.  Functional exercise (exercise that happens more-or-less unintentionally as I go about my other chores for the day) is vastly more satisfying, and “easier” than the isolated, pointless hour-on-the-elliptical variety.

Raking leaves, shoveling snow, digging up a garden bed, riding a bicycle to the grocery store, walking to a doctor’s appointment–all these things get my heart rate up and work my muscles.  Effortless exercise.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?

I’ve noticed something recently:  snacking is an art.  Everyone I know seems to have a different way of doing it.

Lee’s snacking has two components.  1–He only snacks when he’s bored.  He’s much better at resisting the siren call of the kitchen if he’s occupied.  2–He’s a grazer (this particular characteristic drives me up the wall).  He walks through the kitchen periodically, grabbing a handful of whatever is available.  Sometimes that’s a delicious baked good, but as often as not, it’s dry Cheerios.  He then leaves a trail of whatever he grabbed all through the house.

My kids are activity-based snackers:  some activities (television and movies being the primary one) require a snack.  Toby will just grab a container of something and take it with him to the vegetating location; Delaney will prepare herself a lavish spread, including plate, napkin, silverware, and drink, and then sit in front of the television to eat it.

I’m more of a time-of-day snacker.  I tend to eat a small snack around 4:30, hoping that it will prevent the hunger-induced meltdown at 5:30.  I’m also a prepared snack person; if, for instance, I’m having cheese and crackers, I get out a specific number of crackers, line them up on a plate (and put the cracker box away), top each one with a little postage-stamp of cheese, then I sit down at the table and eat them very deliberately.

Some people (who are those people?) snack when they’re hungry.  Some people view a snack as an opportunity for a treat, while others view it as a chance to get in more of whatever nutrient they need more of.  Some are grazers, while others would rather sit down and eat a mini-meal.  Some people don’t even notice when they’re snacking–they roam through the grocery store, trying all the samples, or they eat that bar-mix stuff by the handful, without even realizing they’re doing it.  If food is available, it must need to be eaten, right?

Interestingly, the diet programs that I’m familiar with all incorporate snacking into their daily menu plans.  The importance of not allowing yourself to get absolutely famished is widely recognized:  if you get so hungry you could chew off your own arm, you’re much more likely to eat more than you need, and choose poorly, at your next meal.  Moderate hunger is reasonable (and necessary, if you’re trying to lose weight); the feeling that you’re starving to death is not.

It seems to me that if you are going to the trouble to think carefully about what you put into your body at meal time, it would be a shame to abandon that good sense between meals.

What kind of snacker are you?

This is another one of those immensely useful basic protein dishes that you can plug into your menu rotation, in the category of “what else can I do with chicken cutlets?”

This is from Bluestein and Morrisey’s 99% Fat-Free Italian Cooking.  I follow their instructions exactly*; I would make only one recommendation:  choose a wine you’re willing to drink.  Just so you know–that holds true any time you’re cooking with wine.  If it doesn’t taste good in a glass, it probably won’t enhance your food (except for the crappy vermouth you buy in the grocery store; it seems to be okay in most things, in a vermouthy sort of way).

When I made it a few days ago, I served it with rice a green veggie and plain Japanese rice.**  The wine and lemon juice make a little bit of a thin sauce, so if you don’t like your rice plain, like I do, drizzle some of that sauce over it.  But it would also be delicious with mashed potatoes, or pasta, or polenta–whatever carby-grainy sort of side dish you happen to have lying around.

Chicken Piccata
Serves 4

1/4 cup flour
4 3-oz chicken cutlets
3 1/2 ounces shiitake mushrooms, cleaned, stemmed, and sliced
Olive oil cooking spray
salt to taste
1/2 cup dry white wine
2 T. freshly squeezed lemon juice

Put the flour onto a plate.  Pat the chicken in the flour to coat very lightly all over.

Preheat a large nonstick skillet over medium heat.  Add the mushrooms and cook until they begin to soften, 2 to 3 minutes.  Push the mushrooms to one side of the pan with a wooden spoon.  Spray each cutlet lightly on both sides with the pan spray and place them in the pan in a single layer.  Cook until the edges are cooked and firm, 1 to 2 minutes.  Turn the cutlets and allow them to cook through, about 2 minutes longer.  Lightly salt the chicken, add the wine, and continue to cook until you can no longer smell the wine, about 2 minutes more.  Stir in the lemon juice and remove from the heat.

This is approximately 174 calories per serving, with 0.74 g. of fat per serving.

*Except that I leave off the parsley garnish.  For the record, most of the recipes I post call for a parsley garnish, but I never, ever use it, because I think parsley tastes like grass.  If you like the flavor of grass, feel free to sprinkle it over your food as much as you want.  It’s bound to be good for you, with all that green-ness.

**We’re eating a lot of plain rice these days, because I came home from the Asian market one day recently with a fifteen pound bag of Tamanishiki.  It’s a short grain rice that’s often used to make sushi.  I’m slightly in love with it.  Yeah, I’m weird that way.

I was sitting out on deck 7, reading and writing and minding my own business, when Lee came out.  He had lost the little silicone piece on the end of his earbud.  I was really sorry to hear that (especially since I was going to need to use the earbuds during our nightly Skype check-in with Delaney).  He hovered behind me, waiting.  Finally I asked if he needed something else.

“I want you to help me look for it.  You’re good at finding things.”

Ah.  I packed up my book and computer, and we went looking.  First we upturned the furniture in the Fyzz lounge, where he had been hanging out.  Then we ransacked our cabin.  Finally, while I was rummaging in the depths of the closet, Lee found the errant ear piece–under his pillow.  Problem solved.  I went back out to my lounge chair in the sun.

Half an hour or so later, re-appeared next to my chair.  I looked up.

“Now we have a real problem.”

I stopped writing, mid-sentence, and waited.

“I think I’ve lost my wallet.”

“Do I need to come help you look?”

“Yes, please.”

I closed up my computer, and followed him up to our cabin.  We thought it through, together–when he had last had it, where we were when he pulled it out of his pocket–mentally retracing our steps.  We got to our room, and once again turned it upside down, looking.  We took turns looking in the closet, under the bed, in the safe, in the far corners of all the drawers.  We checked behind each other, even going so far as to use my booklight as a flashlight for peering into dark corners.

No wallet.  We knew he’d had it when he paid the cab driver in Mexico.  We knew he’d had it when we re-entered the port.  That’s where the trail went cold.  He must’ve dropped it.  We listed the contents, double-checking each other, just to be sure, and he pulled out his computer and headed down to the internet cafe to get on Skype and start canceling things.  I went back to my happy place on Deck 7.

When I went up to dress for dinner, he listed off the cards he’d canceled, and what we’d have to do to replace our driver’s licenses (yes, he was carrying mine for me).  Luckily we had left our passports in the safe, so we didn’t have any real problem, just some minor inconvenience.  I changed into a skirt, and was brushing my hair, when he pulled on his khakis.  He’d hung them upside down in the closet, to keep them from wrinkling (we had packed light, and were re-wearing things).  We must’ve missed the actual pocket part when we were looking for the wallet, because THERE IT WAS.  In his pocket.  What a relief–we haven’t started losing things (yet).

It got me thinking, though, about how we work as a team.  We have different skills and abilities–we complement each other.  One of us often a second set of eyes for the other, a fresh perspective.  But sometimes, it’s not about the actual functionality.  What matters most, sometimes, is the moral support. When you’re facing a crisis, or a missing earbud, having someone in your corner cheering you on can make all the difference in the world.

This was especially important back when we were first figuring out how to incorporate Lee’s heart disease into our lives–it was essential that we were both on the same team.  I think this is true for everyone–a major lifestyle change (unless you’re a total hermit, living in a vacuum without human contact) is only possible when you have a support system.  Weight loss, or nutrition overhaul, or smoking cessation or the building of fitness can all take years.  Cholesterol management (or diabetes, or asthma/allergies, or a zillion other long-term conditions) is a lifelong proposition.  YOU CAN’T DO IT BY YOURSELF.  You need to let the people in your life support you.  And if you live with someone who needs to make a lifestyle change, or who has a chronic condition, you need to talk to that person about how you can help.

Go team.

Last winter, a neighbor kid came around selling citrus fruits to raise money for her high school band.  I’m a big believer in supporting the neighborhood kids who go to the trouble to go door-to-door, instead of just hanging out in front of the grocery store, or sending order forms to the office with mom and dad.  And citrus–I’m on board with that.  I’d far rather buy fruit than candy bars, or soap or pansies or wrapping paper or popcorn or raffle tickets.  So when this order form allowed me to choose a quantity, I went for the biggest.  I ordered, sight unseen, a bushel of tangelos.

It turns out–that’s a lot of tangelos.  Our front yard slopes steeply down to the street, and this poor kid could barely haul the box up to our front door.  There was no way we could just eat that many tangelos as snacks (which was my brilliant idea).  They keep pretty well, especially if you can find room for them in your refrigerator, but still–it would’ve taken us months to eat them all.  We definitely wouldn’t have gotten scurvy.

So I decided I needed to do something with them–find a way to preserve them, or incorporate them into dishes so we wouldn’t feel like we were just sitting around eating plain old oranges all the time.    I made a lot of things that satisfied my urge to try interesting new things in the kitchen:  orange curd, marmalade, candied orange peel (that was a particular hit, especially when I dipped the strips in dark chocolate).  I made muffins, and coffee cakes, and pilafs and sauces.  It’s a good thing we all like orange as a flavor.

I found this bar cookie on recipezaar.  I don’t necessarily love that website, but every now and again I come across something useful there.  This was a very quick and easy bar that has the added bonus of being (relatively) healthy–it has no butter or oil; the fat all comes from walnuts and the one egg.  It only uses one orange (a disadvantage if you have a whole bushel to get rid of), but I discovered that the carpool kids liked them, and I made them a whole bunch of times.

It’s chilly and gray here again today, and it’s my carpool day, so I decided to throw together a batch of these to treat the middle-schoolers.  The kitchen smells like oranges and toasty walnuts; it’s going to require great willpower on my part not to eat the whole batch before carpool time.

Fresh Orange Squares
Makes one 8″ square pan

1/2 cup walnuts, chopped and toasted
1 orange, peeled and cut up
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg, room temperature
1 cup flour (I weigh a cup of flour at 5 ounces)

Glaze:
2 T. orange peel, grated (but I didn’t bother measuring; I just zested the one orange)
1/3 cup powdered sugar
2 t. water

Preheat the oven to 350, and spray an 8″ inch pan with pan spray.

Before you get started, zest the orange, then peel off the pith and cut up the insides.  Also chop your walnuts and toast them.

In a medium bowl, beat the brown sugar and egg for 3 minutes, at a pretty vigorous speed (I started at a low speed to mix them together, then gradually increased the speed, mainly because 3 minutes is a long time to hold a hand mixer, and I was bored).

Stir in the flour, the oranges, and the nuts.

Spread in the greased pan, and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until golden brown.

While it’s baking, mix together the glaze ingredients until smooth.

Spread the glaze over the warm bars, then allow to cool.

Cut into squares; serve with napkins, because they’re sticky.

Obviously, you can cut these anyway you want, but if you make 16 bars, each one has 121 calories, and 2.7 g. of fat, making them roughly twenty percent of calories from fat (but like I said above, that fat comes mostly from walnuts).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avhfc-vxe48

This is a very short little video Lee took on his iPhone last week, at one of the ports-of-call on our cruise.  It was an odd (but very appealing) little community called Costa Maya, in the very southern-most part of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.  Not too long ago, it was a very sparsely populated stretch of jungle and coastline; pretty much the only settlement was a fishing village with a population of about 400.  About six or eight years ago, the government built a cruise-ship port, with an attached shopping/entertainment complex.  Then, in the fall of 2007, the category 5 Hurricane Dean hit the area pretty hard, closing the port for a year, and doing a lot of damage to the surrounding topography.  The port has re-opened, but it’s kind of strange–you can buy all the t-shirts and jewelry and liquor you want, or you can swim in a really beautiful pool, but that’s about it.  There are plenty of cruise-line-operated excursions into the jungle to see various things, but we really wanted to just hang out on a beach, so we ventured into the fishing village.

The road is a mess (when we asked our cab driver when the government was planning to repair it, he said never), and it looked to us like some people are still living in tents.  The trees were fascinating–bleached white tree trunks, twisted from the prevailing sea breeze, were massed along the coast, completely bare, like an army of skeletons.  They were filled with flocks of snowy egrets and other birds I didn’t recognize.  It was beautiful, in a lonely, haunted sort of way.

We had done a little digging online before the trip, so we had a destination in mind:  a little four-room hotel on the beach, with lounge chairs and a restaurant.  They said if we ate lunch there, we could hang out in their lounge chairs all day.  Lee’s discovery of their free wi-fi was an added bonus, as was the guacamole-to-die-for.

But my real agenda was some snorkeling.  I love to snorkel almost as much as I love to scuba dive (I should’ve gone with my early instincts, and been a marine biologist).  So after lunch, I put on my mask and snorkel, gathered up my fins, and waded into the water.

If you look carefully, in that video you can see the fringe of breakers that mark the reef, at the outer edge of the cove.  That’s where I wanted to go–fish love a reef.  So I flopped down into the water, wrangled the fins onto my feet (there’s nothing–nothing–that makes me feel clumsier than putting on a pair of fins), and struck out for the reef.  The water was maybe 15 or 18 inches deep, so I crossed my arms behind my back to keep them from dragging in the sand.  It was pretty silty and sandy, so I couldn’t really see anything at all.  I just kicked in the general direction of the reef.

If you look at that video again (you’re probably getting tired of it, but at least it’s short), you’ll notice that as you move away from the shore, there are some lighter-colored areas, and some darker-colored areas.  I started off in a light-colored (sandy) area, but after a few minutes of kicking and peering into the murk, I hit a dark spot–a bed of seagrass.  Seagrass is  . . . well . . . exactly what it sounds like.  It grows on the ocean floor, mostly in shallow-ish water, I think.  It creates dense clumps and beds.  Lots of sea creatures seem to like seagrass, but honestly?  It gives me the willies.  It’s so dark, and you can just imagine what kinds of things could hide in there, waiting to reach out and grab an unsuspecting snorkeler.  I’ve seen lots of barracudas hovering over beds of seagrass, and I know intellectually that they aren’t interested in my, but they look so ominous–my heart always beats a little faster when I see one.

So when I came up on that wide bed of seagrass last week, by myself, I turned parallel to the shore, thinking I could swim around it and find a clear channel out to the reef.  No such luck–the only way was to go through the seagrass.  But the water was still so shallow; I’d barely be able to clear the tops of the grass.  The idea of brushing against it as I swam along, my bare arms and shoulders and legs dipping into that dark, sinister tangle of plants, was just too much.  I tried to talk myself into it; really, I did.  But my fear took hold, and it proved to be stronger than my logic.*

I had come up against a barrier that was all in my head–a mental obstacle.  Yes, there was seagrass, but it wouldn’t really have stopped me, if I had been determined enough.  What held me back was my own mind, playing tricks on me.  It happens to all of us, from time to time.  We let our fear keep us from doing something that we very much want (or need) to do.  Back when Lee was first diagnosed with heart disease, the lifestyle changes that we knew we needed to make seemed scary and impossible.  Any kind of big change can seem insurmountable–but very few challenges really are.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of telling the scared part of your brain to shut up, so you can get past the seagrass to where the beauty is.

*For those of you wondering, I never did screw up enough courage to get myself out to the reef.  I wish I had.

We’re back, having had a fabulous time on our little grown-up getaway (although, I have to admit that by the end, other people’s children seemed incredibly cute).

A few quick tidbits, before I get back to the mountain of laundry we brought home.

Pounds gained by me:  1.5.  I don’t know about Lee; I asked him this morning, but he was vague, so I dropped it.  I’m pleased, though–I’m telling myself it’s just a little water retention from the flight yesterday, and it’ll melt right off as soon as I get fully rehydrated.  Yes, that’s what I’m telling myself.

Number of times I circumnavigated the track on deck 13 in pursuit of exercise:  88.

Number of books read:  3.5, plus a big chunk of a fourth on my iPod.  Bookish bliss.

Number of naked persons seen on the beach engaged in illicit activity:  2.  Sadly, I was the only witness.

Number of persons previously engaged in said illicit activity who desperately needed to share our cab back to the port: 2.  Luckily, they had put their bathing suits back on by then.

Number of times we stepped into an elevator: 0.

Unanticipated benefit of taking the stairs:  no waiting for the elevator.

Fascinating creatures I got to watch in their natural habitats:  hermit crabs, starfish, sea urchins, more hermit crabs, pelicans, dolphins, herons, and inebriated cruisers (they were the most amusing).

A few lessons learned:

–Banana Boat sport sunscreen doesn’t seem to work very well, while Neutrogena is excellent (it is possible, I suppose, that the cause of my sunburn was the hour and a half I spent lying on a raft, floating in the sea, but I really think the sunscreen should’ve done more . . .)

–If there are no bean dishes available on the buffet, the chickpeas from the salad bar are delicious dumped into a bowl of tomato soup.

–My children are resourceful and independent and can survive just fine without me.  They can even do their own laundry.

–The size of the jellyfish is directly commensurate with the severity of the jellyfish sting.

–If you put me in a small, dark room, on a soft bed, and make the whole room sway gently all night long, I will sleep like a log.  For many hours.  This is a very good thing.

–Everyone should take time to sit and stare at a distant horizon and do nothing–it’s good for the soul.

–The world is full of lovely, fascinating people, if we just take the time to hear their stories.  The snarky corollary:  I could sit and people-watch all day.

–The world is also full of people who don’t move as quickly as I do, and I’m not very patient.  I should work on that . . .

–Mobility is a beautiful thing, and I hereby resolve not to take mine for granted.

–My husband is still the funniest, most interesting person I know.

As a nod to our week of tropical sun and sand, I offer today a refreshing orange salad, rich with sweet, gooey dates, and fragrant with exotic rosewater.   This is the kind of fruit salad that, served with brunch, makes your guests think you are a genius.

There’s a well-known restaurant in London, Moro, the owners of which (a married couple, both named Sam, a fact that amuses me to no end) have written three beautiful cookbooks.  Their recipes are mostly Spanish, with some Arab influences (which makes sense, if you remember your Spanish history).  This one is from Casa Moro.  It makes me wish with all my heart that I had visited the restaurant when I had the chance.  I hereby vow to do so, as soon as possible.  This is their recipe, pretty much as they wrote it.

Orange and Date Salad with Rosewater
Serves 4

4 large juicy oranges, or 5-6 blood oranges in the winter (I like to use a mix, for the visual impact)
8-12 dates, preferably Medjool, stoned and broken up roughly or quartered lengthways
a generous sprinkling of rosewater (about 2-3 tablespoons)
a handful of small fresh mint leaves*
a fine dusting of icing sugar (I think this is what is known in the US as caster sugar)
1/2 t. ground cinnamon
a small handful of dried rose petals (optional)

With a sharp knife, cut the rind off each orange, leaving no bitter yellow pith.  Slice each orange into rounds, discard any seeds and arrange on a plate.  Scatter the dates over the orange, then sprinkle the rosewater on top.  Scatter with mint leaves, then dust with icing sugar and cinnamon.  Finish with a few rose petals.

*I left these off this time, because my garden is dormant at the moment, and I have such an aversion to buying mint, given how much I grow.  But it does give this salad a lovely vibrant freshness, so if you can bring yourself to buy one of those little boxes at the grocery store, by all means do.

Monday morning, after a nice bowl of Raisin Bran, I decided to go for a run. Given that we were at sea, that meant a choice: run on a treadmill, in a small room overlooking the bridge, or run up on the top deck, where a small track encircles one end of the ship. I chose the outdoor option.

On this particular ship, the running track is short, and therefore requires lots of laps to make up a mile. Five and a half laps, to be precise. My normal 4 mile run would require 22 laps. Luckily, I had the latest Audrey Niffeneger novel on my iPod, so I struck out into the wind.

And came to an immediate halt–an obstacle, in the form of a bikini-clad woman re-arranging her deck chair, threatened to bruise my shins. I picked my way around her, and started running again. A few seconds later, I ran up behind an elderly couple, shuffling along, and nearly ran them over. Then, as I rounded a corner, a little kid barreled toward me, looking over his shoulder at something; I dodged to miss him.

This went on for all 22 laps. It definitely wasn’t my speediest (or most efficient) run ever. But it did the job. When I wasn’t yelling at people to move, or hopping from one foot to the other trying to get around someone, or leaping over the wayward giant chess pieces, I devised a set of cruise ship jogging-track rules. Should you ever find yourself ambling along on the deck of a ship, please keep these guidelines in mind (in the meantime, don’t be surprised if you hear that I was escorted off the ship in Belize for yelling at people–I get a little testy when my run gets interrupted).

1: The walking and jogging track is for walking and jogging. Stopping, standing, chatting, and photo opportunities are not on that list.

2: There is a flow of traffic around any track; stick with that flow. Slower movers stay to the right, faster to the left (or inside). If you must go against the direction of traffic, you are responsible for getting out of the way of oncoming runners. If I have to go around you, don’t be surprised if I fart as I go by. Consider it a gentle reminder.

3: Please do not disrobe in the middle of the track. Just–don’t.

4: If you are going to blow your nose over the railing, be aware of the prevailing wind direction.

5: If I run up behind you and yell, really loudly, “On your left!”, that means that I am approaching on your LEFT SIDE. That’s what left means. It doesn’t mean you should move to your left. It doesn’t mean you should stand stockstill in the middle of the track. It doesn’t mean you should turn around, fling both arms out to your sides, dance a jig, or do a handstand. MOVE OVER.

6: If there are many decks on a ship, all with lovely wide promenades on which you can stroll and amble and gaze out to sea to your heart’s content, please don’t decide to walk three abreast with all your besties on the two-foot wide path that is designated for runners. If you do, don’t look surprised when I shove you out of the way.

7: Please don’t stand in the middle of the track to smoke. I know you aren’t intentionally being ironic, but really–you couldn’t choose a worse place if you tried.

I know this all makes me sound like a curmudgeon; I promise, when I’m not trying to run, I’m really all sunshine and happiness. Just to prove it, here’s one last helpful tip for which I’m sure you’ll thank me next time you’re running (or walking) on a cruise ship:

If you cut across all the inside corners, you’re not going nearly as far as you think you are. Just sayin’.