It’s a brand new year, and like most people who have made resolutions, I’ve decided that this is the year that I get in the best shape of my life.  This is not just an empty threat, not this time.  I’ve realized that I’m way too young to feel out of shape.  I’m 23–why shouldn’t I be in the best shape of my life?  Besides, it’s not only a choice to be healthier; it’s a choice to be happier.

Picadillo was one of the first Cuban dishes I learned to make because it is a one-pan recipe that is difficult to mess up and easy to customize.  Traditionally, picadillo is made with ground beef, green pepper, tomato, onion, garlic, potatoes, olives, raisins, and various seasonings. (There’s lots of variations, including this one, so this isn’t a strict recipe.) If you’re still feeling carnivorous, an easy way to make it healthier is to substitute ground beef for extra lean ground turkey.  With Spiral Diner in mind, I decided to give the recipe a vegetarian twist by substituting the ground beef with Morning Star Grillers Recipe Crumbles.  I also substituted regular potato for sweet potato for some of extra fiber and vitamin A.

There’s nothing like the smell of fermented beans on a chilly evening. Well, unless you count the tangy musty odor of an old boxing glove.  I exiled myself from the kitchen after my Japanese roommate over-nuked fermented beans in a defrosting attempt gone wrong.  It brought back the horrific memory of sniffing an old boxing glove before an MMA Bootcamp class at the gym: gagging and choking ensued.

Spoils of my trip

Almost fall into the toilet in the bathroom when Kelly Pickler abruptly and loudly welcomes you to the Nashville airport over the intercom.

Observe a middle-aged woman and a young gay man at baggage claim embrace each other and cry for a long three minutes. Try with all your might not to cry too.

Notice more gray hairs in your dad’s beard and marvel at how your mom never ages.

Feel supernaturally tall in your childhood home after coming from your sleek modern apartment with high ceilings.

Lay on your stomach on your old bed and peruse the books on your shelf, a chronology of your adolescent and college years.

Shop at Kroger with your mom for Thanksgiving stuff and pray you don’t run into someone you know.

Begin feeling the symptoms of dehydration from sitting in the same chair for hours reading, symptoms you recognize because of every Harry Potter book release of your young life.

Read too much thoughtcatalog and come to terms with the 20-something hipster you probably are.

Drive around your empty college campus with pangs of sadness for a time of your life you will never get back and for memories you had almost forgotten. Compare the person you were in college to the person the “real” world turned you into.

Cross a threshold in your relationship with your mother by talking about times when you were drunk.

Spend hours combing through your brother’s massive itunes library for songs to burn and asking his opinion on every artist.  Wish that you could hang out with him more often because you feel like you might be a better person.

Become irritated that you aren’t able to come and go at your leisure without having to tell anyone where you’re going or who you’ll be with.

Enjoy talking for 5 hours to someone you haven’t seen in 5 years, mostly while in a dark classy bar sipping on sidecars that make you feel warm and more acutely post-college.  While walking out, observe a couple giggling continuously while crossing a street for no apparent reason.  Then do the same in reaction.

Drink sangria and sing along with Al Green while making mac & cheese with bacon and caramelized onions for Thanksgiving.  Feel more intoxicated by the smell of bacon than the sangria. Be complimented by two people over the age of 45 in your taste in music.

Spend 30 minutes writing personalized thanksgiving texts to the people you care about and hope that you didn’t forget anyone.  Literally “lol” when one person recognizes the gesture while accusing you of sending the same one to all the people you know of the same name.

Be asked by two family members if you have a boyfriend.  Say that you are too busy making big bucks as a teacher.

Be asked by your mother about the boy who texted “Happy Thanksgiving” to you while your phone was innocently near her. Tell her that he’s your lover and he’s pregnant and that you’re the father.

Eat the cranberry sauce you made from scratch with a spoon, turkey be damned.

Inhale copious amounts of second hand smoke from cigarettes and the fire pit your dad bought without your mom’s permission.  Sing Al Green again around the fire with your childhood friends after changing your dad’s country pandora station.

Share stories about your students and your job because you can’t help yourself and don’t have much else to say.

Laugh and laugh and laugh.

Watch the younger people play a classy game of beer pong on your parents’ oak dining room table while you try to stay up past your old person bedtime.  Bang your head against the iron chandelier accidentally.  Feel more awake.

Peel your clothes off before collapsing into a deep post-Thanksgiving sleep still smelling like a bonfire.

Cry at least once or twice.

Scream CONGRATULATIONS into the phone for a friend that got into medical school and feel like you got into medical school too.  Pop open a bottle of beer to celebrate 400 miles away from him.  Become momentarily worried that you don’t know what you’ll be doing a year from now.  Only momentarily.

Play Al Green again while writing this because he just makes you feel good, dammit.  Be embarrassed to wish for a split second that you were in a cheesy rom-com so someone would take your hand and slow dance with you because the holidays will make you feel lonely sometimes.

Pack your bags and think about the people you didn’t get to see while in your hometown.  Promise to see them at Christmas.  Hope that reality doesn’t smack you in the face too hard when you get home and that you don’t find spiders in the storage closet that holds your Christmas tree.

“And do what?” I asked with a mouthful of cheerios.

“Well we can go to Walmart…We can go to JCPenny, watch old ladies buy polyester pantsuits for Thanksgiving…”

I laughed, but my mother had just snarkily summed up the most thrilling activities in my hometown.

Now it’s possible that I have a skewed perspective; I’ve been spoiled for almost 6 years.  I lived and went to college in Nashville, Music City, significantly more entertaining than my small town.  Plus I was in college, so there was, ahem, plenty of fun to be had.  I’ve been able to experience other cities such as Chicago and New York, and now I live in Dallas, the 9th largest city in the US, a city with plenty to do and see.

I’m spoiled, I know it, and I kind of feel guilty about it.  When I come back to my hometown I feel like a snob.  I can’t just hop over to a Whole Foods or Central Market and buy my favorite local milk or a unique food I’ve never tried.  I don’t have my choice of dining options in all styles from all corners of the world, from taco truck to fine restaurant.  I can’t walk to an art museum and browse.  Hell, I can’t even browse a bookstore.

I can go to Walmart.  I can go to JCPenny and watch old ladies buy polyester suits.  Actually I can go to any number of places and watch old white people do things.

When I come back now, I find myself repeating “In Dallas we have this and that.  In Dallas I can do this and that.  In Dallas I would be blah blah blah.  Dallas Dallas Dallas Food Food Dallas.”

Have I become a city girl?  Or worse, have I become a Texan???

Jokes aside, I am a city girl.  I need variety, movement, diversity, modernity, and some damn good culinary options.  My hometown has just always felt too small for me.  And though I really like Nashville, Tennessee has always felt small for me too.  But people I love love Tennessee, so I try not to sound like a broken record about Dallas for fear of sounding like a snobby d-bag.  And there are things I love about Tennessee…but not many are in my hometown.

So what did my mom and I do today?  We left.  We drove 45 minutes to Cool Springs. Went to Whole Foods.  Bought some delicious Olive & Sinclair artisan chocolate, a local Nashville company while there.  Browsed Barnes & Noble.  Watched Puss in Boots at a once-nice-now-shitty movie theater.  And we were still scraping for things to do.  If not for the heavy rain, I might have suggested driving the extra 15 minutes to Nashville, but that will be another day.  We took the scenic route back home.  There are beautiful things here, but today the rain and season casts a depressing pallor over everything and obscured one of my favorite things about Tennessee: the gorgeous sunsets.  Something else for to save for another day.

I spent my last night in Dallas at the Arts Crawl downtown, which was in convenient walking distance from my apartment.  Food trucks lined Flora St, vendors sold their wares, and music pounded from a DJ in a truck selling tongue-in-cheek t-shirts.  One was printed with The Price Is Right logo but restyled with “The Swag Is Right.”

Food trucks are growing more and more popular in Dallas, and I love the concept.  My roomie and I decided to hit ssahm BBQ, a food truck that sells gourmet Korean tacos.  She got two tacos, but I decided to try their kimchee fries–french fries smothered in jack & cheddar cheese, cilantro, onion, caramelized kimchee, and spicy mayo.  It was an absolutely delicious kick in the mouth.  Right now I’m wishing they could take a roadtrip to Tennessee and park in front of my parents’ house.

We waited a while for our food since it was the most popular truck, but there was plenty of people watching to be done.  Everyone was out in their artsy best, especially with the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit just down the road at the Dallas Museum of Art’s Late Night at the Museum event.  There were young families corralling their kids, couples of all orientations having their date night, art kids being art kids, etc.

We got to the Art Crawl late so I don’t know how much we missed, but we were able to browse some of the remaining vendors besides the previously mentioned t-shirt company.  One was laalicia who sells really neat recycled accessories; another artist sold really cool jewelry made from guitar strings (I’ll have to find her name because I really liked her stuff.)  Another was The Vintage Mobile, which sells vintage clothes out of a repurposed school bus.

I was feeling kind of sick that night but I’m so glad I went out.  This thoughtcatalog post I read earlier that day was in the back of my mind.  I’m young.  I need to get out.  And while currently I’m a little bummed because I’ve come to the conclusion that grad school will have to wait another year, I’m looking on the bright side.  I can still collect experiences and learn.  Oh, and eat excellent food from trucks.

When I got home, I scoured my Yelp app for places nearby that struck my fancy.  I came across reviews of Off the Bone BBQ and most of them were very positive, touting the great service and super tender meat.  I’ve been unimpressed with BBQ in Dallas, so I was very interested.

It wasn’t at all what I expected.  Usually when I go to BBQ places, they’re hole-in-wall places or fake hole-in-the-wall places–you know the type, with the faux down-home shack decor.  Off the Bone was a neat little restaurant with no traces of the BBQ shack look.  This is probably because they tout themselves as “gourmet.”

The reviews were right about the service.  The man at the order counter, who I believe was the manager, greeted me with a smile and was very friendly.  He turned my order of a half rack of baby back ribs and two sides into one of their special combos, saving me some change.  We chatted a bit and when he found out I was a teacher, he let me get a free drink.  I was really pleasantly surprised.  Lately I’ve felt more unappreciated than usual as a teacher so even something as small as a free drink made me feel better.  I left with my take-out order feeling good, just because of the friendliness of a stranger…and also the prospect of some delicious food.

On the way home, I felt like I hit every single red light in downtown and got stuck behind the slowest drivers in existence, but it was probably the smell of bbq sauce that distorted my perception.  After eons, I finally got to my apartment and was able to enjoy.  The back back ribs were delicious and very tender.  When I was lifting one up to my mouth, the meat literally fell OFF THE BONE.  The sauce was mild with a tiny little bite, but the meat was definitely the star of the show.

For my sides, I had honey baked beans and cole slaw.  Usually most cole slaw turns me off because of the excessive mayonnaise, but he told me that his mother (he pointed and she was right there in the kitchen) makes it fresh everyday with blue cheese and bacon, two of my favorite things.    As you can imagine, I thought it was great!  For dessert I had a brownie, also baked by his mother.  It had a soft gooey frosting with walnuts on top that reminded me of german chocolate cake.  Heavenly.  I will definitely be going back for the excellent service and great food.

After several hours, I finally finished writing my midterm for the semester.  I probably could have written it in half the time, but I was busy jamming out to 90s tunes on Pandora (Breakfast at Tiffany’s station is the bomb dot com), Facebooking, and other internet time wasters…in the name of making planning more bearable.  For example, I laughed at this photo for about 10 minutes because it perfectly describes me on a daily basis:

I think it’s the look of joyful denial that really gets me.  The Pretend-It-Doesn’t-Exist Forcefield was at max strength after I finished that midterm.  My roommate Allison and I got 5 tacos each at Fuel City and took them home.  After that, I found any excuse not do work-related things, such as watching TED talks.

Inevitably I got the urge to bake.  I cooked up a dozen chocolate chip cookies from some cookie dough I had left over from last night’s urge.  Then I decided to make use of some cranberries in the fridge by baking some cranberry bars.  They’re very basic but the tart cranberries remind me of the holidays AND the fact that my Thanksgiving break is TWO WEEKS AWAY!!!!

Chocolate Chip Cookies:  I used Mark Bittman’s recipe from my How to Cook Everything app.  Simple but makes some great cookies that are almost fluffy in texture.

Cranberry Bars:  I used this Gourmet recipe I found on my Epicurious app.  (Take a guess about how many food related apps I have on my phone and iPad.)  I just halved the recipe (because of lack of cranberries) and replaced water with apple cider and half the granulated sugar (that cooks with the cranberries) with brown sugar.  I also added a pinch of cinnamon and a few cloves to the cranberry mix, which I was careful to pick out later.  This was another simple recipe that could be easily dressed up, but it did the trick.  My leftover cranberries are way more useful this way than sitting in my fridge.

I’ve been dying to go back to Tennessee, which is something I’d never thought I’d write.  I miss my family.  And lately I’ve been very nostalgic about college and Nashville.  I’m definitely going to be taking a trip down memory lane when I go back and visiting some of my favorite places.

Not that I haven’t found some good places in Dallas…I ate at least four seriously gigantic slices of New York Style pizza at Serious Pizza in Deep Ellum.  I actually had to fold the leftovers so it would fit in my fridge.  I had cold pizza for lunch the next couple of days but I didn’t mind at all because it was absolutely delicious.  The sauce they use on their pizza must be seasoned because it was certainly not like the bland acidic tomato sauce you’d get at other places.

Still…I am ready to go.  I am so burnt out that I fantasize about going to grad school on a daily basis.  Post-Halloween my students were bat-shit crazy.  (Halloween should NEVER be on a Monday.)  I need a break. The kids need a break.  Everyone needs a break.  I’m sure you can sense the desperation by now.  But we’re almost there.  And I am two weeks away from some gobbling up some McDougal’s chicken tenders with buffalo sauce.  That will get me through the next 14 days.