Featuring the Protein of the Future: Bug Dinner

On my birthday a couple of weeks ago, I started the blog back up with two commitments for my year as a 51 year-old: to earnestly track my evolution as a figure skater, and to revive, albeit in a smaller way, my commitment to new things.  In the latter category I committed to a New Thing a month, and so this post reports on the first on the list: December’s New Thing, cooking the long-promised Bug Dinner.

Roasted crickets -- served on the side, so that guests could add just the right amount of crunch to their salads.

The idea for whipping up a dinner with bugs as the featured ingredient came from my friend, former student, and almost birthday-twin, Michelle. A strong bucket-lister in her own right, Michelle and I have together taken on various hiking goals in our beloved Green Mountains here in Vermont, service learning in Tanzania, and combating the AIDS epidemic, among other activities.  Michelle’s one of the most imaginative generators of New Thing ideas I know, and we’d been talking about this one for a while.  This year, we took the plunge and scheduled the meal on the day between our birthdays (Michelle was born on December 8 and I on December 10).

Michelle, hard at work on our Cricket Chili.

The greatest challenge, we found, came in sourcing the bugs.  Although theoretically there are a number of types of bugs available — including mealworms and silkworm larvae — by far the most common is crickets, and ultimately that was the mail order option that was most manageable for us. We ordered a pound of cricket meal and a pound of roasted crickets and crossed our fingers that they would arrive in time.
With the crucial bug ingredients ordered we started thinking about the menu, which had an additional twist — one of our guests can’t eat gluten.  This turned out to be not as tough as we expected.  We selected one dish he couldn’t eat — Cheddar-Cricket Biscuits, but the rest of the menu turned out just fine.

Ultimately, we settled for:

• Tossed green salad with roasted crickets
• Cheddar-cricket biscuits
• Cricket chili
• Cricket-topped gluten-free chocolate cupcakes
• And everyone’s favorite, Cricket-Chocolate Clusters

Cheddar-cricket biscuits - with Cabot Very Sharp Cheddar (obviously).

Our guests — 11 total — were good sports.  They tried everything, claimed to like most of it, and everyone agreed that the nicest surprise was the Cricket Clusters, which were very much like Nestle Crunch chocolate bars.  For those still holding out objections, let me try one last time to make the case for Bugs (at least crickets) as the Protein of the Future:

• They’re the perfect paleo food — nothing but protein.
• They’re gluten-free.
• Their water and carbon footprints are ridiculously small for a rich source of protein.
• They’re cruelty-free.  They live a natural life until the day when they are put in a cold place and go into.a form of hibernation (torpor), then are frozen while they sleep.
• Cricket powder is actually pretty versatile (though it’s kind of gritty and gray — food stylists will need to work on that one), and roasted crickets are pretty much all crunch.

So there you have it.  For the person who’s done it all, offer to cook a Bug Dinner! And Michelle’s and my resolution for the coming year of a New Thing a Month is off to a great start.  Now we have to decide what January will bring.

Back on Track with Keeping Track

Birthdays are a great time for taking stock, and in doing that, I realized I’ve let some things slide.  I find it motivating to keep track of goals and projects, but lately, I haven’t been.  So today, I’m recommitting to two things: first, to use this blog to keep track weekly of my skating progress (and struggles), and second to get back into the swing of the spirit of trying new things, which is what I did 52 times in 2010, the year this blog was created.

Therefore, from December 10, 2017 to December 10, 2018 here are my two resolutions:
1. To post on a weekly basis about a specific skill that I’m working on my figure skating
2. Once a month to post about a new thing I’ve done.

To start things off today, I’m taking a look at what has happened in a year — what I’ve accomplished and what I’m currently really struggling with.  So here are The Good and the The Bad.

The Good:

• Passed my Pre-Bronze Free Style Test (in which I proved that I could do forward and backward crossovers, a spiral, a two footed and one-footed spin, and a waltz jump and salchow (at very simple levels).

• Passed my first Pre-Bronze Ice Dance Test, the Cha Cha.
• Started working on my first, very simple solo program.  I’ll be skating it to the Cat Stevens song Moon Shadow.
• Started working on the easiest skills for my Silver Moves in the Field Test — forward outside and inside spirals, forward and backward power pulls and forward and backward cross strokes.

The Bad:

• Spins!  For some reason, I am extremely challenged by spinning.  For my free style test I was able to eke out 3 rotations of a one-footed spin, but since I bought my new skates, I seem to have regressed backwards.  This feels like my biggest current block.
• Jumps.  I am starting to be able to do the three simplest jumps — waltz jump, salchow and toe loop, but still have extreme difficult doing them with any speed or getting higher than a little hop in the air.  Starting to work on foot position for a loop jump as well, but that one is going to be a very long process.
• Turns at speed in ice dancing. The next two ice dances I am learning, the Swing Dance and the Fiesta Tango, both require a turn called a Mohawk in going from forward to backward.  I have a lot of trouble especially on the Fiesta Tango, doing the turn quickly enough and going into the next position well.
• Backward edges.  In figures class, I am working on my backward figure eight.  That means I have to hold a backward edge for the entire length of a circle, and I am nowhere near that level of balance, control or speed at the moment.

So now my plan is to report on a skill a week that I am working on — ideally alternating between ones I’m making good progress with, and ones on which I am struggling mightily.  For this week, since today was my birthday, I decided to give myself a little present and start with my favorite skill to work on as a warm-up, forward outside swing rolls. I love the way they feel when they are going well.  My friend Laura is a fellow professor at Saint Mike’s and a fellow adult skater.  She kindly filmed both my forward and backward outside swing rolls below.

Here are the forward ones:

And here is backwards:

In both cases, I need to do a better job of looking up, of fully extending my free (non skating) leg behind and forward, and of pre-bending my knee and ankle before stepping on to the new edge.  But from a control perspective, both have improved a lot. Swing rolls are a key component of ice dance (at least the easier ones that I am learning), so I am happy that these are getting better.

Coming up:

• Yesterday my friend Michelle and I completed December’s New Thing — cooking with bugs.  Michelle’s birthday was Friday and mine is today, so we hosted a combination birthday dinner featuring roasted crickets and cricket powder. Blog posted coming shortly!
• Holiday show next Saturday! My “home rink”, Leddy Park, hosts a holiday skating show every year, so next Saturday at 3 pm, the Ladies of Leddy (adult skaters) will be doing our holiday number — Christmas Tango on Ice.  Film to follow next week. 
• This week I’ll be skating Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and possibly Saturday or Sunday, mostly during public skating sessions — let me know if you feel like joining in!