Between all the streaming and trying to get back into the swing of daily life after my trip to Spain, I’ve spent most of my free moments either hunting for a new apartment, figuring out how much it would cost to buy a house, or trying to continue improving my workout and dietary habits. I’ve had the whole working out and going on vigorous walks thing down for one and two years respectively, so now I’m trying to incorporate some more healthy diet decisions. Nothing as (personally) anxiety-inducing as counting calories or following any of the recent fad diets. I’m just trying to make small, incremental changes that will help me live a longer and happier life.
The core of my current strategy is buying large amounts of turkey and chicken at Costco. I am an avid meat-eater, despite my desire to live a more eco-friendly life (beans are great and I’ll eat tons of those, but meat is a lot easier to prepare in ways that tastes good to me when i’ve had long, exhausting days at work), so I’ve been trying to find ways to cook meat more often without adding more stress to my day to day life and mostly failing. Until I remembered you can just buy a ton of pre-cooked or pre-marinated chicken and turkey at Costco, anyway. Now, I’ve got plenty of that stuff on deck, just waiting to be added to whatever random crap I’ve slapped together to round out my meals.
Back when I was only working 8 hours a day, I was a big fan of cooking chicken on a bed of onions with a little bit of butter. It’s difficult to go wrong with any sort of garlic or onion complimenting marinade on chicken, so butter and onions and twenty-to-thirty minutes of baking meant I could just come home, turn the oven on, slap stuff in a pan, and cook it when the oven beeped. It just took about an hour between the oven heating up, the chicken cooking, and then everything cooling off enough for me to it eat. Plenty of time for some vegetables or a starch (or, as was frequently the case, both) to be prepared. Now that I get home at seven and am trying to avoid eating after 8 (it makes it more difficult for me to get to sleep on time), I just cook it all on the weekend and reheat as needed. It makes me a little sad, but it’s the best I can do right now. And, you know, it tastes fine. It’s mostly a conceptual sadness rather than a reflection of my eating experience.
A lot of my friends who work out more heavily swear by turkey and chicken as your primary foods. I think they’re fine, and mostly dip into other dishes on days I’m working from home or on the weekends when I’ve got more time to cook, but I really don’t seem to be getting the “wholesome protein surge” one of my friends described with his mostly-turkey diet. Maybe I just don’t believe hard enough in the power of turkey and chicken based protein. Or maybe he’s just confusing it with the somewhat alarming amount of pre-workout concoction he drinks. Either way, I’m happy it works for him and enjoy chicken and turkey enough on their own to just keep this up.
Other than that, things have been going pretty much as I’ve expected. Work is busy, apartment hunting is soul-destroying, talking financial stuff with banks makes me want to crawl into a hole for the rest of time, and I’ve had very little time for any job hunting. All my idle hours are full now, thanks to the grind for apartments and my new sleep habits that are pretty much just my old sleep habits except I stick to them. I don’t know what the second half of this month is going to bring since this whole “house hunting” thing feels incredibly unpredictable, but I’m sure I’ll weather it just fine. I mean, April’s already more than half over so I’m sure it’ll all be over sooner than I think it will.