Healthy Food


birds

In a few short days, I’ll be meeting my best friend from back home in New York City for a long weekend. It’s been over six years since we’ve had time by ourselves face-to-face, mainly due to this hectic day-to-day thing called life and the literal ocean that sits between us.

As an expat, you learn to live without your family and friends as that’s just part of the deal. When I was preparing to move from Los Angeles to Ireland five years ago, all of my friends promised they’d visit. “Finally we have a reason to go to Ireland!” they’d say, earnestly. Five years later, only one (the aforementioned best friend) has actually followed through.

I’m not bitter about the lack of visitors. Let’s face it: it’s a huge ask, especially for my friends back home who get about 10 paid vacation days a year. Throw in kids, the expense of overseas travel and the not-so-amazing weather around here and you can’t blame them for spending their precious holidays in other locales. If the tables were turned, I’d probably do the same.

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For the first year after I moved to Ireland, I lived alone in a lovely upper-floor apartment in Drogheda. And for several years prior to my move to Ireland, I lived alone without any live-in beaus or roommates to speak of.

I don’t look back on this with any sadness or regret; in fact, when I finally decided to ditch the roommate situation and branch out on my own, I was beyond ready to go solo. My last roommate (in Los Angeles, where I lived at the time) was an actress who didn’t have a day-job, which meant she was in our apartment all the time. It got to the point where I’d pull into our driveway after a long day at work and groan when I saw her car there – just once I wanted it and her NOT to be there, laying about on the couch and nagging me about everything from whether I’d read her magazines without asking to when I’d planned to move the unwashed fork from the sink into the dishwasher.

Though for the first few weeks I was a bit chicken (one unfamiliar noise in the dark would almost make pine for the company of that lay-about actress) I settled into bachelorette living and embraced having my own space. It was nice to come home from work, fix myself dinner and not have to worry about whether someone else had already tuned the television to some stupid show I had no desire to watch. I could literally kick off my shoes, flip on the telly and eat cereal out of the box if I so pleased.

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Happy

“Did you put a clean tea towel in the kitchen?”

It’s a Saturday afternoon, and Mountaineering Man and I are doing a full house cleaning in preparation for his parents’ visit. While I’m in the bedroom primping the bedcovers, he’s finishing up the kitchen.

“Yep, all done!” he says.

“Is it the dark blue one with the stripes?” I ask.

“Yep!” says he.

“Noooo – not that one,” I said, before grabbing another tea towel from the hot press and running off to the kitchen.

MM looked confused, and understandably so. The blue striped tea towel was clean, and fresh from the press. But what he doesn’t know is that this particular tea towel is a mockery of a tea towel, or any towel for that matter. It has a large weave and a very rough surface and is cheaply made. When you wipe it across a wet surface, it doesn’t soak up any moisture; it merely spreads the water around, creating big streaks of wetness across the counter – the kind that dries into a pattern of unattractive water spots, ones you have to then wipe over again. To add insult to injury it lost its rectangular form after the first wash; it’s now just a sad, shapeless version of what it once was, when I first spied it in the kitchen aisle at TK Maxx and thought it would go nicely with some navy oven mitts I already had.

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Friends Old and New

Though I’ve never had an enormous group of friends, I’m lucky to count a good dozen who I can describe as my closest. There are a few of us who’ve known each other since childhood, a few more who met in high school and a handful with whom I connected in college and during my early working career.

Sadly, they’re all back in the U.S. and lately I’ve been missing them something fierce, as an American might say. I miss our spontaneous happy hour meet-ups after work and our weekend trips away and our long, slow dinners washed down with far too many bottles of wine. Skype is a great tool but with the time difference and our hectic lives requires some scheduling, and it pales in comparison to an actual meeting or a night out.

I do take heart knowing that some of my best friends will be here in less than six months for our wedding; it will be so, so good to see them again and to celebrate with those closest to me. The thought of being together again gets me through the more difficult days. But I’m also bolstered by the fact that I’m forming friendships with Mountaineering Man’s circle of tight-knit mates, who over the last year-and-a-half I’ve gotten to know quite well.

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Things have been so nuts lately I completely forgot that March 4th marked the two-year anniversary of my move to Ireland. I suppose in one sense, that’s a good thing – living here has become so normal that I don’t find myself counting days or marking time based on when I arrived – or when I’ll leave, if and when that day ever comes.

If I thought the first year of living here was a whirlwind, the second has been a down-right blizzard of activity and major life changes. In the last year, I moved from my humble little apartment in the centre of Drogheda town centre into Mountaineering Man’s bachelor apartment in Dublin 8. We then moved together to our place in Raheny a few months later.

I spent my first Christmas in Ireland with MM’s family, which was lovely (though no sign of snow this year, which to be honest was a bit sad for me!); I’m working like crazy (a good thing) and I’ve made a good number of new friends in Dublin over the last 12 months. Of course there was the engagement (!!) and now I’m in the thick of wedding planning. We’ve already got our appointment at the courthouse and in the autumn we’ll marry in Tuscany (more on that later, I promise!).

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Beach 10 Many, many Christmases ago my mother gave me a little picture with a message inside: If you can see it in your mind, you can find it in your life. It was a small stocking stuffer, something she’d found somewhere probably months before Christmas and stashed away in her gift drawer for safe keeping.

This was years before The Secret and all that power of positive thinking stuff became trendy, but the message in that small frame conveyed the same meaning. I took it to heart, and every once in a while I’d look at it and try to picture what I wanted; initially it was superficial things like a new car or wardrobe. I’d picture myself in a fabulous new dress and wish for it – a bit childish, really.

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Then a couple of years ago I found myself entirely frustrated with my life and wanting to make some major changes. And though I’d lost that framed message somewhere in my many moves I thought a lot about the meaning behind those words. I was fed up with the way things were: work was unfulfilling, dating was downright sufferable and while I had a few good friends I felt they were all moving forward with love and career and I was stuck in a holding pattern.

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Beaumont

When it comes to healthcare in Ireland, the news isn’t good. The headlines in the papers and the television news reports are ripe with exclamations of how badly the system has broken down in recent years. Stories of patients waiting for beds, tests and appointments are featured daily in the Irish media.

As someone who has no private health insurance here, my own experience has been quite good. For 50 quid I can see my general practitioner and she’s available with one or two days’ notice. My prescriptions cost about 10 euro on average. Of course I have never needed emergency hospital care – which according to the news reports is a whole different story all together – until recently.

Last week I went to my GP complaining of chest pain, rather a tightness in the middle chest area, for the previous few days. She surmised it was likely esophageal spasms caused by an upsurge of stomach acids. While I was there she took my blood pressure, which was surprisingly high; I’ve always had perfect readings and my last check was only a few months ago, also perfect. She prescribed meds for the spasms and told me to come back in a few days. When I returned with the same symptoms and high blood pressure, she sent me to the emergency room at Beaumont – a public hospital in Dublin.

And that’s where I got my first dose of the reality that is public healthcare in Ireland.

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LA Mushrooms

I don’t think it’s commonly used here in Ireland but in California we describe uber-healthy, slightly hippie food/people/things as “crunchy,” which is short for “crunchy granola.” For example, you might go to a “crunchy” shop to get organic spelt flour, maple oat syrup and some flax seed crackers. Or my sister might describe her vegan friend who only wears vegetarian shoes and hemp clothing as “super crunchy.”

LA Surfers But you don’t have to be stuck in the ‘60s, buy only organic and drive a low-emission vehicle to appreciate wholesome food, and when we were back in my hometown of Los Angeles on holidays recently I was reminded of the sheer variety of crunchy food available at shops and restaurants there. It also made me realise how much I miss being able to find a great beetroot and cashew cheese sandwich on sprouted grain toast or a green antioxidant smoothie without having to look very far. As Californians are generally active and health-conscious, there’s a wealth of interesting nourishing fare available at a number of places.

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Today’s post is by the one and only Mountaineering Man, who has recently found himself in charge of the cooking at Casa la MM and An American in Ireland.

MM Cooking Between the living room and the hallway, in our apartment, there is a small, clean but intimidating room. Intimidating in parts, mind you. Not the bins or the dishwasher. Or the fridge.

But our kitchen is full of cupboards, cubby holes crammed with pots, strainer things, many, many bowls (large and small, and in between). Sharp knives abound.

And that’s before I get to the entire drawer full of exotic mashers and dicers, prong-type things and ladles. Way, way too much stuff for me to ever use, even in a lifetime of cooking. That’s about as much as I knew about our kitchen.

Until this week.

Clare is working a new contract at present, so our previous dinner arrangement has been turned on its head. Instead of dutifully turning up each evening to some seriously good  dishes – listed here in other posts – circumstances have now pushed me in front of the cooker.

A declaration – I used to cook before.

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DUBLIN

It can be incredibly difficult to see the bright side around here these days. Not only has this summer been quite gloomy weather-wise, but the air is thick with defeat and depression over Ireland’s ever-increasing economic woes. Between the nightly news reports on the mortgage crisis and the tabloids’ hysterical headlines about Ireland’s doomed future, it’s hard to stay positive.

As I stated in my last blog post, work has been quite slow and sometimes I feel like I will *never* make it here in Ireland. Though I still enjoy a decent amount of work from back home, it’s been an exhausting, uphill climb to get any work here. But with enough persistence and a positive attitude things do work out sometimes, and I’m happy to announce that I’m now writing restaurant reviews for The Dubliner magazine! The first review is out in tomorrow’s edition.

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Part of the reason why I keep pushing forward is because of my friends here. Against all odds, they are making it work and I’m constantly inspired by their unending dedication to succeed in an utterly sh*t marketplace. When I first met my friend Catherine last year, she had recently lost her job and was on a diligent search for a new one. I’m certain she was aware of how difficult it would be in the midst of a terrible recession, but she plugged away and found one within a few months. She’s thriving and recently moved into a bigger rental (complete with a gas cooker, I’m green with envy!) with her partner.

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