Rice And Peas, Inauthentic Style

You've probably heard of the West Indian dish, "rice and peas".  It's a side dish and you have it with jerk pork/chicken/goat/etc.  Or at least I believe you do.  Despite living in a West Indian neighbourhood for several years and eating my fair share of West Indian food, I never really learned the finer points of the cuisine. 

I remember once trying to make potato curry the way the local curry-n-roti place made it.  I used to have it often with a vegetarian friend.  My attempt didn't work out in the least.  After thinking about it for a very long time, I came to the conclusion that the secret ingredient in that place's vegetarian dishes was meat.

Anyways.

Rice and peas is made with black eyed peas, which are one of my favourite legumes.  They aren't really easy to find outside of West Indian neighbourhoods, but thanks to all the health-conscious SUV-driving (isn't it ironic?  don't you think?) people in my current neghbourhood, they're way easier to find now than they used to be.    

One of many rice and peas lunches. 

The rice and peas from the other night -- which I had for lunch several times in the subsequent days -- was not authentic, but it was still tasty.  It was made with Uncle Ben's basmati rice that I found on sale.  I didn't even know Uncle Ben's made basmati rice! 

How Much Yoga Do I Have to Do to Burn Off My Lunch?

Do you remember The Raccoons? You know, that Canadian cartoon about a bunch of scrappy raccoons that prevented some evil aardvarks and their piggy minions from ruining their forest? Of course you do because I'm talking to myself here. I mean, I even remember that the theme song for The Raccoons was called Run With Us and was sung by a chick that I confused with Alanis (pre-Morissette). I also remember that The Raccoons debut was on some education kids show about fitness.

Of course, I also seem to remember that that guy from The Guess Who was somehow mixed up in all this, so it might not be totally accurate.

Anyways.

300 Calories?

The point is that on this fitness show, some old guy and a pig would demonstrate how many minutes of physical activity you'd have to do to burn off the calories in foods. Like you'd need to do half an hour of jogging to burn off a chocolate bar.

And full-fat yogurt, too!

This is salient because today, before lunch, I went to the gym. In a fit of post-New Year's resolution fanaticism, the gym posted the expected number of burnt calories per class. The yoga class I attended boasted 300 to 600 burnt calories. That probably took care of the VIA Xmas Bleuch, cheese string and Japanese rice crackers I had in the morning, but it was all negated by my lunch of leftover black bean and sausage soup with avocado I had after the class. I did, though, opt not to drink one of the millions of cans of Sprite currently sitting in the office fridge, so there's that.