I'm Just Sayin'

I’m creating a home gym in my basement. Ok, that might be a slight exaggeration. My “gym” consists of a TV, DVD player, three workout DVDs, some hand weights, a figure-8 band, rug, yoga mat, and a stack of golf towels. I am accepting donations of equipment, if anyone is ready to get rid of their clothes rack, I mean, treadmill or exercise bike.

For those of you who might be considering setting up your own basement exercise room, I thought I would share my experience. You might want to hold your applause until you’ve read this entire post, I mean, in case you do read this entire post.

If you are considering setting up an exercise room in your basement, and you have cats, your first step must be to ask their permission. Chances are, they consider the basement their private domain, and they have been very generous in allowing you access to do laundry, store your stuff, and scoop the crap out of their litter boxes. My cats responded thusly:

• Chloe said it was fine, as she never goes to basement except to use the you-know-what. She is my girly girl, a real southern lady, and would never discuss bathroom habits.
• Fannie said yes, provided I do not interrupt her own basement workout routine, which includes a warm-up nap on the table by the window, scratching the old upholstered chair, a nap on the back of the old upholstered chair, a quick trip upstairs for a sip of water and to see if there is anything new and interesting in the food bowl, a visit to the crapper (Fannie tells it like it is) and finally back to the table by the window for a cool-down nap. I promised not to interfere with any of that.
• Sophie said ok as long as I realized she might occasionally leave me a hair ball offering on the rug. She thinks I actually LIKE her gifts, and she is quite generous. Apparently, “Dammit, Sophie, not again!” translates to “Darling Sophie! Thank you so much!” in catspeak.

Step two in establishing a basement gym will probably include moving some junk . In my case, it was necessary to break down and discard the cardboard boxes from my new lighting fixtures, load the old lighting fixtures into the car for a trip to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and relocate the unused cat scratching toys that I already relocated from the living room.

The third step is optional, but highly recommended: give the floor a quick sweep. Unless of course, you want to inhale cat hair and dust as you work out.

Next, resurrect the dinosaur television that you carted down there after buying a sleek flat-screen last year. Procure a DVD player. For me, this required a trip to my least favorite place in all of creation. You got it, Walmart. Ok, I could have gone to Kmart, but I had to get my prescriptions filled anyway, and unfortunately you really can’t beat the Walmart pharmacy prices. While at Walmart, if you are very fortunate, you might be treated to a complimentary pearl of wisdom, courtesy of a friendly Walmart employee. The nuclear physicist I encountered yesterday educated me on oranges. “You can tell them are navel oranges cuz they got ‘em a navel right thar.” Honestly, I didn’t even have to pay for that insight!

And here is my own pearl of wisdom regarding DVD players. The $100 unit comes with batteries for the remote control, and has a life expectancy of about a year. The $30 unit does not come with batteries, and the life expectancy is about a year. Those are some expensive batteries, huh? Hey, no charge for that nugget of technical knowledge. Aren’t you glad you kept reading?

In establishing a basement gym, you must consider your heating and air conditioning needs. My basement has neither, so I got out the emergency space heater that I bought last year when my heat pump died and couldn’t be replaced for three days. And I think I can manage to be drying a load of clothes in the adjacent laundry room, which should help. I also have a room air conditioner (Okay, Thelma has a room air conditioner which I borrowed a few years ago, when my heat pump first started showing its age. It’s still in my basement, and she hasn’t asked for it back, soooo ….) But wait, by the time I need an air conditioner, I will be trim and svelt and running the streets for my work out! Optimism burns calories, you know.

You should also consider your flooring situation. Since my partially-finished basement has a totally unfinished concrete floor, I bought a cheap area rug (WalMart again) and added the yoga mat I bought for fitness boot camp a while back. That meant digging it out of the closet under the stairs, where I store all the stuff I don’t want to subject to cats’ claws, random acts of litter box rejection, and hair ball offerings.

Okay! Now for the equipment. I have a rainbow of hand weights: red three-pounders, blue five-pounders, and purple eight-pounders. Perhaps soon I will invest in some ten-pounders. Green, I think. I also have a figure-eight band and corresponding yoga/pilates DVD. This is the DVD with the hot mama (according to my brother) on a platform at the beach, the sight and sound of crashing waves in the background, along with a tinkling of wind chimes. Very zen. Very good stretching sequence and core workout.

I have two additional DVDs in my collection. One came with the 17 Day Diet Book, and is what prompted this whole adventure. It has four 17-minute aerobic work outs -- one for general conditioning, and others which target abs, buns and arms. I got through the general workout and the abs workout just fine. Then I tried the aerobic workout for buns, and that resulted in a painful blow to one of my coffee table cubes (it was painful to both my shin and the cube) and a necessary straightening of every piece of framed art in the living room. I knew something had to give and decided to move my workout to the indestructible basement.

My final DVD is what I call the Pimps and Hos workout. I found it last year in the clearance bin at TJ Maxx and decided it was worth $3. I don’t know when I have gotten so much entertainment for three bucks! This workout is led by a man who would seem to be more at home on a used-car lot, or in a Cadillac cruising the seedier side of town. His back up dancers are a rainbow of sleazy, spangly-dressed, pockmarked “ladies” who all look like they just climbed out of the backseat of said Cadillac, and who all seem to be staring continuously at his gluteus maximus! I must have laughed off a few hundred calories with this jewel!

Throw in a bottle of water and some towels (I figure this is a good off-season use for the golf towels) and you have a basement work out room. Now all you have to do is drag your sorry ass down the steps. I’m just sayin …

If I don’t find happiness and prosperity in 2011, it will be Julia Child’s fault. Because of Julia, I did not make my Lucky New Year’s Soup this year. I live in the South, where we place great stock in eating black-eyed peas, collard greens and pork on New Year’s Day. A few years ago I developed a recipe for soup that contained all the required ingredients, could be made during halftime of a bowl game, and was lighter than the traditional grease and calorie-laden holiday meal.

But I didn’t make it this year, because of Julia. You see, I picked up a copy of My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme. (Okay, I snagged the book off my brother’s coffee table when I was at his house for Christmas. I think he might have borrowed it from someone else, but I’m not sure I will have the fortitude to return it.) I started thumbing through the book last week, reading a passage here and there, checking out the photographs. And the book inspired me to cook a chicken.

I’ve cooked lots of chicken over the years, mostly breasts charred on the grill, baked with rice, or sautéed and served with pasta. But I had never cooked a whole chicken. I can hear Julia now:

“Tsk, tsk, young lady.” (Yes, I believe Julia would call me young lady. It’s one of the reasons I love her so.)

“There’s nothing like a nice, fat, roasted chicken. You absolutely must cook one immediately.”

Can’t you just hear her wonderfully shrill, nasally chortle? Love, love, love.

So I did it. I roasted my first whole chicken, stuffed with lemon, rosemary, garlic and onions, skin massaged with olive oil, crushed garlic, salt and pepper. It was beautiful. It was fragrant. It was delicious. It was a lot of meat for one person!

So I threw the carcass into a pot of water and made my own stock, which I then turned into roast chicken and wild rice soup. At this point, I swear Julia was looking over my shoulder, humming, sipping sherry and prompting me to add a pinch of this or a drop of that. Oh, the comfort of cooking soup on a cold day! Oh, the anticipation of dipping some good crusty bread, slurping up the savory, salty broth!

It was a happy, day long project. And at the end of the day, I had a big pot (a really big pot) of tasty soup. And it was December 30. Two days before time to cook Lucky New Year’s Soup! I know what you’re thinking. I could have frozen the chicken soup and gone ahead with the New Year’s tradition. But seriously, I never seem to get around to actually eating any of the stuff I freeze, and my freezer space is a little cramped with martini glasses, beer mugs and Edy’s Gourmet Limited Edition Peppermint Ice Cream.

So I have postponed the New Year’s Soup until later this week. Surely, for the love of butter, grits, and Texas Pete hot sauce, the gods of southern superstition will forgive a few days’ lapse. If not, Julia’s got my back. I just know it. Just sayin ...

Lucky New Year’s Soup

3 cups cooked black-eyed peas or yellow-eye beans, drained of cooking liquid
8 slices bacon
2 cups chopped onion
1 large clove garlic, chopped
1 can diced tomatoes with liquid
3 cups chicken or vegetable broth
1 cup water, or more as needed

1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
¼ teaspoon allspice
Pinch of dried thyme
Splash of hot sauce, or to taste
3 cups frozen chopped collard greens
Salt and pepper to taste
Small can (single serving size) Spicy Hot V8

Cook bacon in large soup pot. Drain on paper towels and crumble. Reserve 1 tablespoon drippings in pot. Add onions and garlic to soup pot and sauté over medium-low heat until onions are soft, scraping bottom of pan to loosen brown bits. Add next nine ingredients (through collard greens) and increase heat to medium-high heat. Bring to a boil. Add salt, pepper, V8 and beans. Reduce heat to low and simmer until beans are heated through. Add water if necessary to achieve good ratio of broth.

Serve topped with crumbled bacon if desired, accompanied by corn bread.

If beans and bacon are cooked ahead of time, you can assemble the soup during half time and it will be ready to eat by the start of the third quarter.