Category Archives: Food

Adding More Places to Eat to My List

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Over the last nine or ten months of the pandemic, I have been gathering places to eat at Gotta Eat Here. So with not going out to eat or even having the means to do so. Such as a car or using the bus or metro (commuter train) that I do not want to use either right now.

New Food Resources

I have found many food-related shows. Been reading articles or found new people on Twitter with great food recommendations. The list of places they all are suggesting is adding up.

Adding My Backlog or Making Updates to the Application

So I have been adding them to my backlog in GitHub of places to add to my web-based application when I have time. The application lists all the places I have been or want to go to when I travel or even go to in the DC area.

Each day I make an effort to either add at least one place to the JSON files that power the application. Or add a new restaurant to the backlog.

I have found many new places to make it worth adding a new location (city or state) to the application. So that’s work that needs to be done too.

New Features

A feature I need to add to the website is the ability to link to a page with a dynamic map of places near the person. Or at least put the restaurants for that location all on one page. A more useful option is the ability to store the page contents with service workers. It’s for when there is no internet in some big cities or out in the middle of nowhere. So you can at least show the pages you brought up before.

Finding the Time

So here’s to making more time to work on these items.

I’m thinking a good time will be over the upcoming five-day long weekend. I figured since I already have MLK day off and the Inauguration off, I would take Tuesday the 19th off.

P.S. You can find my list of places to eat the website “Gotta Eat Here“.

A Lazy Saturday in January 2021

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Today’s one of those lazy Saturdays where I have no major plans.

I managed to sleep until 9:06 AM after waking up around 6:26 AM and then falling back to sleep sometime after 7:00 AM. I stayed in bed for a bit, reading some Twitter. Before getting ready to head to the Del Ray Farmer’s Market to drop off my compost.

Farmers Market

I left the house around 9:37 AM to walk the mile-plus to the farmer’s market. I managed to walk in the street the entire trip there. Okay, I did have to walk across the sidewalk from my driveway to the road, but otherwise managed to do that.

I ran into a few friends sitting outside in the cold (36 F of 2 C) of a local coffee shop (St. Elmo’s Coffee Pub) talking. They were getting ready to leave, so I went to the market a block away. I dropped on my compost.

Then I picked up a Philly style tomato pie that was on a Focaccia type bread. Along with some Ecuadorian beef, empanada’s at another stand.

On my walk home again, I was taking the long way. I stopped at Adli’s to get some salad. Because last night, when I went, they were sold out. The salad was on sale for like 80 cents to a dollar per bag, which is why there was none. I also grabbed two ginger-based GT’s Kombucha’s.

Made it Home to Start Cooking

Once home emptied my backpack and put things away.

Then started soaking 8 oz. of Trader Joe’s Wild Rice and Rancho Gordo heirloom Classic Cranberry beans. I think it was around 14 oz because I save 50 beans to grow them myself later.

The heirloom classic cranberry beans, wild rice, slow-roasted farrow from Anson Mills will get combined with garlic, onion, Trader Joe’s Corn and Chile Tomato-less Salsa, Trader Joe’s Fire Roasted Diced Green Chiles, a 12 oz packed of Impossible Burger, salt, pepper, and some spices. Who knows what else will end up in there.

Once the beans start cooking, I’m going to continue reading Heydon Pickering’s book “Inclusive Components – Accessible Web interfaces, Piece by Piece”. Maybe nap some and watch more of Ron Finley’s MasterClass on gardening. You need to watch Ron Finley TED Talk if you haven’t heard of him before.

To More Slow Weekends

So here is to more slow Saturdays or even Sundays or any day of the week for that matter.

Yes, I will post a final list of what goes into the soup/stew, whatever it’s going to end up in a later post. I might even add a photo or two.

Eating Healthier

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In the last nine months to a year, I have gotten healthier because I have been eating almost all my meals at home and making better food choices.

By only bringing in healthy food, it’s easier not to eat less healthy foods. Doing so has made it easier to eat what is in the house.

Another reason is when you are walking to the grocery store with a backpack, there is less room for junk food. Plus, when you are stocking up on fruit and vegetables, along with kombucha and eggs every two weeks. You buy less junk since there is less room. Not that I haven’t been buying tortilla chips to crumble on my salads for some crunch or dark chocolate bars, etc.

I think I’m healthier partially because I’m not eating at restaurants. Or I haven’t had any takeout since mid-March, and I’m walking more. Doing so has improved my eating habits. I have been making, cooking, or assembling (salads) for all my meals, which I enjoy doing. But hadn’t done much of or as often until this year, especially when cooking for one person.

Changes in Eating Habits

I have managed to eat more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, on tortillas, than in the last ten years. Which is still better than what I would eat for breakfast or lunch from the work cafeteria.

Breakfast at work used to be scrambled eggs and pork sausage. Or two egg, pork sausage, and cheese sandwiches on a croissant or toast or a toasted bagel. At the same time, lunch ended up being about a pound or more of hot food from the lunch buffet.

I have eaten more fruits, vegetables/salad, nuts, this year, which has been a good thing. Along with trail mix of peanuts, cashews, almonds, raisins, and M & M’s.

Rethinking My Cooking

When cooking hot meals, I have used more grains, fresh vegetables, and less meat. When using meat, I would put a pound in what I was making. That gets divided amongst the six to eight servings that I ended up eating over time. So there is less in each portion. I even ate more tofu and plant-based meats too.

By making larger quantities, I was able even to make enough to have many extra meals. So I only had to reheat them and put others in the freezer for later. That way, I wasn’t cooking every day, but a few days a week. Then I would have salads, etc., so I wasn’t eating the same thing for every meal.

Not Everything has Been Healthy

Not that everything I ate was healthy, but it’s been an improvement. I have eaten more fruits and vegetables, healthier snacks, salads, etc. The snacks have been more nuts (peanuts and cashews).

I nice dessert I have made many times is to take a large handful of nuts. Put them in a bowl with half a pint of blueberries, a sliced up banana, and then add some dark chocolate sauce. To me, it’s like an ice cream dessert without the ice cream and a lot more fiber.

How I Fared with Eating Better

All in all, I have been eating better but not on what I would call a diet per se.

So here is to making more eating improvements in 2021 for the long term.

2020 What a Year

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All in all, 2020 wasn’t that bad a year for me. At least there was more positive than negative.

The following are things that went well for me and will be written about in more detail in the coming weeks.

Purposeful Walking

The first thing that improved for me was, I did more purposeful walking this year, Meaning, it wasn’t because I was commuting to and from the house to the train to the office and back, but out taking lunchtime walks most days and then again in the evening after work along with ones on the weekends.

Because of this, I managed to walk 3,200,944 steps, 2,314 flights of stairs, not many living on the first floor of a house, and finally a total of 1,468 miles, which is two or three hundred more miles than an average year of mostly walking during my commute.

More Sleep

Another positive thing with this year has been I have been getting more sleep because my commute is now from one part of the house to another. Even if I woke up at 7:00 AM or before and couldn’t get back to sleep, I would stay in bed and rest until close to 9:00 AM when I would start my workday.

Doing this has been helpful and cut back on my need for naps on the weekend.

Eating Healthier

With not eating out or getting takeout since mid-March, my eating habits have improved. Been making, cooking, or assembling all my meals, which I enjoy doing but hadn’t done much of or as often until this year.

This year I managed to eat more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on tortillas than in the last ten years, which is still better than what I would eat for breakfast or lunch from the work cafeteria.

I have eaten more fruits, vegetables/salad, nuts, trail mix (peanuts, cashews, almonds, raisins, and M and M’s) this year, which has been a good thing.

When cooking, I even made enough to have many extra meals, so I only had to reheat them and put others in the freezer for later.

Read More Books

The year started out well, and I was reading a book about every five days or so on average, and then when the pandemic hit, it slowed up a lot. I finished the year strong in December and managed to read 22 books.

Some books were longer than others and others not so much. A bunch were between 120 and 150 pages. A list of those books will be coming out in another blog post.

No More Car

In the fall of 2019, I had car issues that I decided not to spend the money to fix, so I used the metro (commuter train), bus, and walking to get around the DC area.

I sold my car to a friend’s friend in late August because they thought it would be cheaper to fix mine than theirs. Now I need to find out if that was the case.

Met My Neighbors

With all the walking around my neighborhood, I have met more people on my block or within six or eight blocks of my house.

Some I met for the first time, and we have lived a few houses away for over ten years. I saw others a few times a week and would say hello on my commute to and from work, and I finally learned their names.

I even met a couple that is retired and is now Certified Master Gardeners. I even got a small fig tree from another neighbor that I replanted in a five-gallon bucket.

Attended More Conferences

It worked out deciding not to attend CSUN, which is an accessibility conference in Los Angles, as it was at the beginning of everything closing up related to the pandemic.

Because many other conferences had some time to switch to remote events, I used my vacation to attend more of them, and part of it wasn’t used to travel. I attended four or five conferences, a workshop, a few couple hour food-related classes/demos, etc. More on these in the future.

Learned More

I spend more time at night and on weekends on YouTube learning about homesteading/small farming about grow my own food and raise animals for when I get my plot of land to put a tiny house on, cooking, JavaScript through the JavaScript book club, which I joined in January, tiny houses, and much more that I will write about soon.

My Weight Loss

With all this purposeful walking and eating better. Not perfect, but an improvement from what I have been doing. I have lost almost 60 lbs. since the end of September 2019. Almost half of that has been since the beginning of the pandemic.

I even had to buy a set of metal leather punches to put new wholes in my handmade leather belt because I had run out of wholes.

I even purchased one new pair of jeans this fall because the others were at least four sizes too big. I only bought one pair for now since I’m mostly sitting in the house working and then out for a walk, so I don’t need more.

With having to walk to the grocery or farmer’s market and using a backpack, I found there was less room for junk food that way, which helped too.

Conclusion

So all in all not a bad year for me.

I know it’s been hard and difficult for many and will be for a long time to come too.

So here’s hoping for a better year for all of us in 2021.

Playing Around with Flexbox by Starting with Articles and CodePen’s from Others

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About a week ago on January 13, 2019, I saw a tweet from Heydon Pickering  ( @heydonworks ) talking about how he was using Flexbox to switch directly between multiple and single column layouts but didn’t have time to read it at the time because I was at work.

Later that day I saw Jonathan Snook ( @snookca ) had tweeted about some tweaks he had made to Heydon’s CodePen example.

Here is Heydon’s “The Flexbox Holy Albatross” article which he didn’t want to use media queries or JavaScript, along with Jonathan’s article about Heydon’s “Understanding the Albatross” article. NOTE: I used media queries to change font sizes in my example.

Started to Play with Heydon’s Code

After reading through both articles, I started playing around with Heydon’s CodePen to see what would happen with only two blocks for my jfciii Ate Here restaurant list. After playing around for a bit, I grabbed the HTML and CSS I had messed with and copied it into Textmate to make one page using my template for jfciii Ate Here. At that point, I gathered a few restaurants from my list of place to eat in Washington, DC and replaced the blocks with real content to see what doing so would be like on the page.

Part of my picking certain restaurants was to gather ones with different lengths to content for the same row for a wide width screen (think desktop/laptop). At first, I started with two per restaurants to see what that looked like for desktop/laptop and different width between there and a narrow width for a phone.

To me, it seemed that having two items to a line/row seemed like it could be confusing when reading the content, But then I remembered that most of the time people would most likely checking for restaurants on their phones while they were out wandering a city or sitting with friends instead of a desktop or laptop.

Pushed My Code Example

After pushing the updates a few different times to my website, I asked a coworker what they thought about the two columns, and they thought maybe adding a bit of space between the two columns would make it easier to read.

I then spent some time working on my CSS to add a few REMs worth to the right of them which seemed to work. But then I had the problem of forgetting I had to only added it to the first item in the list for a widescreen device. I ended up using :nth-child(odd), so the extra padding was on the first item in the row. Next, I had to remove the extra padding when in a narrower view such as on my phone.

Then I decided to attempt to use three restaurants to a row for a few rows and then two for one, and one with only one restaurant to see how they all looked before updating my PHP code to generate a given amount to my application page.

When I did that, I then had to add a max-width to the restaurant content container, so it didn’t span the width of a row, so the reading experience was better for people because of the long line length.

So here is my experiment with a bit of flexbox for jfciii Ate Here and the current look of one restaurant at a time for the wider width.

Thanks, Guys

Thanks, again Heydon and Jonathan for your articles and examples to get me to play around with flexbox.

Further Reading and Video Watching

Now it’s off to spend time finishing up reading Rachel Andrew’s ( @rachelandrew ) book from A Book Apart “The New CSS Layout“. Then start reading Rachel and Jen Simmons ( @jensimmons ) other work and watching both of their amazing videos to understand CSS Grid better. See below for more of their work.

Rachel Andrew

Jen Simmons

Conclusion

Please leave a comment of which number of restaurants per row for wider screens you think works for ease of reading and compare against my current version of jfciii Ate Here.