Summer Training Regimen: Days 6-8

Day 6--otherwise known as Saturday--was intended as a rest day, but I almost ruined that plan by going for a run. Don't worry folks: I managed to stop myself!

Day 7, I almost did it again, but instead I picked up two of these babies that we bought from friends who are moving to NYC:






Moving these suckers was just a bit of a workout, which I compensated for with some German Gatorade--if you're not familiar with this magical exercise-enhancing elixir, it's a combination of water, hops, and some grain or another that uses a natural fermentation process to make it more delicious and nutritious. It's basically the beverage equivalent of yogurt or sauerkraut in terms of healthfulness, I'm pretty sure. Speaking of yogurt, we had some of that too--frozen, with workout-enhancing, rapidly-digesting carbohydrates, as well as peanut butter, cake batter, cookie dough, and marshmallow.

Okay, so I took advantage of Father's Day for all it was worth as an excuse to eat bread and cheese and ice cream and beer.

Today, Day 8, got me back on track (I say that as if I hadn't planned for my weekend to be basically what it was!) with a body-weight workout: today, I simplified it a bit but added sets, so it looked like this:

5 sets of 5 reps of one-legged squats
5 sets of 5 reps of something-like-one-armed-push-ups (I did use the other arm to provide stability and take a little of the weight off)
3 sets of Australian pull-ups to failure
3 sets of push-ups to failure
3 sets of reverse crunches (holy cow! it's an ab exercise sighting!)

Although it might be a stretch to count it as a workout, I did also get in some time on the tennis court this morning while our 3-year-old was at her tennis "lesson" (I've said it before and I'll say it again: any lessons at this age--tennis, ballet, pole dancing--are basically about developing physical coordination and the ability to listen to directions and focus a little bit, with a little bit of excitement also generated for the nominal activity). I got in a half hour to forty minutes of much-needed work on my serve. I've always said that the only excuse for a bad serve in tennis or poor free-throw shooting in basketball is lack of practice. And right now, I'm pretty lousy at both.

Summer Training Regimen: Days 4 & 5

Yesterday morning, I decided to take another run, but since 1) my calves were still a bit stiff from Tuesday's run and 2) I was looking at a league tennis match later that day plus 3) I needed to take our 3-yr-old to a tennis lesson, which meant that I couldn't go out too long if I wanted to work out in the morning (and I do, because I'm not a big fan of running under a heavy sun). I wasn't really sure how far it was to run down to one of our corners, but I thought it might be a mile. It wasn't--more like .81. So I ran there and back a bit faster than what I did on my longer run on Tuesday.

It was something like an 8-minute mile, but I can't say for sure because the stopwatch app on my iPod did something very weird: it didn't start right away. I started it (I thought) as I took off down the road. When my second song came on, I realized that I was on the wrong playlist (yes, it makes a difference), so I went to change it, and the stopwatch was only at :36, even though I was sure I must have been running longer than that. When I got back to our house, the stopwatch app said 10:30-something, even though I left at 6:48 and got back at 7:01. I started walking at that point, but then decided to take an easy jog down to the other corner from our house, which turned out to be about a quarter mile each way. So ended up doing 2.1 miles.

Day 5
I was back to a strength-training day, but I wanted to mix it up, so I decided to give a different Bodybuilding.com bodyweight workout a shot.  It mixed in some different exercises and a different approach: a circuit workout instead of doing sets of the same exercise before moving on to the next exercise. The cycle went from Handstand push-ups to One-armed push-ups to pull-ups to one-legged squats to knee jumps to headstand leg raises and finishing with Mahler Body Blasters, which are either named after the guy who put together this workout (Mike Mahler) or else requires you to whistle, hum, or sing (depending on your fitness level) the tune to your favorite movement from a Mahler symphony. The idea was 5-10 of each of these, except the last, which was a lot more than that. And doing 5 circuits. So how did that go?

Handstand push-ups: I've been doing these previously with my feet on a high stool because I couldn't do them straight up. I figured I'd try to actually do them, and I actually got 5 of them the first time through. I only ended up doing 3 circuits, and I got 3 each of those next two times through. I was pleasantly surprised.

One-armed push-ups: So, clapping push-ups are easy enough that I'm getting more than 15 on my first set and quite a few on subsequent sets, so one-armed push-ups seemed like a good step up. Except that I can't really do them. I eeked out 3 each circuit, but only by using the other arm to offer a bit of support (but not too much--I mean, there's a reason I only got three on each side!).

Pull-ups: Okay, I can rock these: 10 or more each time.

One-legged squats: I'm right where I have been all week: I'm doing 5 each time, but I don't have the full range of motion--you're supposed to get all the way down, with your butt barely off the ground. Cripes. I can't do that with both legs. I'm getting down about as far as I usually get with back squats (the one with a bar on, you know, your back), which is to say not far enough. If I'm ever able to actually do one-legged squats the way God meant them to be done, I will feel like the biggest badass in the history of badassery. And you will all know about it, either because you'll see me strutting around like God's gift to one-legged squats, or because you'll read about it here and/or on Facebook, 'cause you know I'll be bragging if I get there.

Knee jumps: I wasn't familiar with these, and the description on the workout didn't quite do it for me (thank you to Youtube for clearing matters up, even if the video didn't deliver on the promised "tips"). Basically, you start out in a kneeling position, resting on your knees and the tops of your feet, butt down on your heels. You use your arms a bit for momentum with a backward and forward swing, and spring up into the bottom of a squat. It sounds harder than it is. I went ahead and stood up from there, which made it marginally more difficult, but even so, I didn't find it that hard. I was managing 20 of these in the third set, which my math skills tell me is more than the requested 5-10. Does that make up for my poor performance on Handstand and One-armed Pushups?

Headstand Leg Raises: In the first round, my basic conclusion was "What the frak are these?" I couldn't figure out any way to make my body do what it was indicated that I was supposed to be doing. So during the 3 minutes I took between cycles, I looked it up--thanks once again to Youtube, though the first video I looked at was not very helpful--yeah, thanks for showing me you can do them, now how about some advice since I can't? Getting my back up against a wall helped, but I still found these to be crazy hard. With the wall, I did 3 each time, but they were quite possibly the crappiest headstand leg raises in the history of headstand leg raises. I had to use momentum to get them going, I bent my legs, struck deals with the devil mid-rep, just to get up there. It was not pretty. Oddly enough, I won't feel nearly as hardcore mastering these as I will if I ever get the one-legged squat.

Mahler Body Blaster: this is like a 1st cousin once removed to the classic burpee that everyone knows and loves and/or hates. Start out in a full squat, rock back on your back all the way so that your feet touch the ground behind your head, then roll forward so you get back into a squat. Hands down, kick back into the top of a push up, do the obligatory push up, bring those legs back, and stand up. Which, I now see, is not quite how this guy interprets it. He doesn't roll back as far and doesn't stand up, but he's more explosive in the way he gets to the push-up position. And, looking around, I see that Mike Mahler describes it differently elsewhere, in way that's exactly what the guy in the video was doing. Nowhere did I hear a symphony theme, though.

All in all, I'm a little bit ambivalent about today's workout. I cut it down to 3 circuits because I was short on time and short on energy too. I felt like the workout was hitting my quads pretty good, but most other things weren't getting as much--no doubt that's in large part because I couldn't actually do the requested 5 reps of several of the other exercises, so even though I was getting to the point of muscle failure, I wasn't really getting quite that feeling of muscular exhaustion that I might have expected. I don't think I'll do this same workout next week, but maybe I'll come back to it later in the summer with hopes of being able to complete it more fully (I was stoked about getting 5 real handstand push-ups the first round)--I may also incorporate a few aspects of it into what I'm doing.

Oh, and when I do get around to this workout again, someone remind me to throw Symphony of a Thousand in my playlist.

Building the Dream by Alternate Means

Lauren and I went through the process of designing a dream house once, back when we thought we might actually be able to afford to build a dream house. It was nothing too fancy, nothing too ostentatious (the castle-like towers and the cupola reading nook all got nixed by Lauren before we even talked to the architect), but it was what we wanted in a house if we were building from scratch. Its essential features were: a super energy-efficient straw bale design, with an amazing kitchen, an open floor plan that ran said kitchen into the dining area into the living area in a seamless whole, one full wall of bookcases in that living room, and a basement (after all, our address is "Tornado Alley"). Also, it had a neat arrangement that gave our daughters connected but separate bedrooms, had office space for us, and lots and lots of windows.

Bookcases, a fireplace, and a huge wall of windows.

In the end, buying a house turned out to be the way to go, and though it would be easy to lament the lost time (and money) that went into designing our dream house, we're too happy with where we ended up to waste much energy on it. Let's see how we did:



Energy-efficient straw bale design: um, no. Not even close. But there's a certain efficiency in not building a whole new house, right?
Amazing kitchen: "amazing" would be an overstatement, but the kitchen was definitely a selling point of this house: check
Open floor plan: Not really, though it's true that I'm currently sitting in the living room and I can look through the dining room and see into the kitchen (or, anyway, 2 square feet of the kitchen)
One wall full of bookcases: no, but there was one free bookcase left with the house
Office space: yes, though it's basically a poorly insulated enclosed porch
Lots of windows: check
Separate-but-connected bedroom arrangement for the girls: does making them share a room count?
Basement: absolutely. In fact, here's us cowering in the basement during the tornado warning last night:

If we're trapped down here, we can live on maple syrup; also, the rubble will make finding the Easter eggs more fun.

It may look dungeonesque, and it may not be water-tight, but the metal post gives a remarkable sense of security in a tornado.

Now, even if the house didn't come ready-made with all the features we dream of, it's not as though we couldn't find ways to bring it closer to our ideal. For instance, Ikea was just the ticket to give us more or less the living room wall of our dreams:

Yes, it did need to be a bigger photo: it's the wall of our dreams.

 Hardwood floors and a wall of hardbacks (and quality paperbacks... and mass market paperbacks): throw in a couple comfy chairs for reading and another wall of bay windows and you've got everything we need. 

But while we're on handy storage arrangements, Lauren went one step forward in the happy display of my obsessions when she suggested repurposing two towering cabinets that originally went with the entertainment center we bought from some friends before they moved to Pakistan. They didn't fit in our living room and, anyway, there was nothing TV-related that we needed them for, so they went in a nook between our dining room and our office space. Originally, we had craft supplies for the girls in them, but Lauren suggested that I could put our board game collection inside. So, behind its doors, we have this:

It could still use some organization. And more games.

It's right off the dining room, around whose table we would likely be playing these games, assuming we ever get around to playing board games while our kids are 1 and 3 (which is to say, prone to anti-board-gaming behavior).

And these are some of the things we love in and about our home.

Summer Training Regimen: Days 1-3

Overview
Monday, I started my summer workouts after a week off. I took a week off because 1) the school's gym is closed and 2) I was feeling too busy to work out. Now, with the true advent of summer, I've got a couple other problems: 1) the gym is still closed for another week or so and 2) the gym is 15 minutes away, which is kind of inconvenient now that I'm not going to work.

So: what to do? One option would be to get a membership at Lifeplex, which is within sight of our house... but it's not exactly a great value. And I have a hard time paying for a gym membership when I have free access to a pretty decent gym (even if it's 15 minutes away). So I'm thinking along different lines: for the next two months, I'm planning to forgo the gym entirely. Which is tough, because I love lifting weights. Seriously: love it.

But I'm also usually up for something new. I drew some inspiration from this article on Bodybuilding.com suggesting bodyweight alternatives to weightlifting standards. So I put together the exercises into a workout. Normally I would do a workout that combines a couple muscle groups and hits them hard, in different ways. Like, say, 3 different chest exercises, then three more tricep exercises, plus some ab work; and then on another day, I'd do a bunch of back exercises and then a bunch of bicep exercises. Etc. But while I do think that these bodyweight exercises can be good substitutes, I don't get the sense that I can get that kind of variety. So what I'm thinking is doing a full-body workout three days a week, with something else in between. So far, with a sample size of one, that's been running.

 Day 1
 So what am I doing? Monday, it was Handstand Push-ups (modified), Clapping Push-ups, Diamond Push-ups, 1-legged Pistol Squats, Wheels, Pull-ups, and Australian Pull-ups. Three sets of each, and between each set I did a minute of cardio, per Jim Stoppani's Shortcut to Shred on Bodybuilding.com. Cause, you know, who needs actual rest between sets? One problem: while I have a pull-up bar, and pull-ups are great, our beautiful old farm house has no doorways that will accommodate a pull-up bar, even if I did want to ruin the gorgeous moldings on our door frames. But hey, we've got a rusty old clothesline post in the back yard, so that's good. I'm pretty sure my tetanus shots are up to date.

Day 2
Up bright and early, but our oldest daughter was up right after me. Crap. She'll freak out if I leave to go for a run. Fortunately, a little chocolate milk and Dora put her right back to sleep. That's my favorite part, Dora. That.

I pulled up my running mix on my iPod and set off down our street, which resembles nothing so much as an industrial wasteland. But hey, it's home, and the shoulders are nice and broad. My plan was to run 40 minutes and see where that got me--or, more precisely, to run 20 minutes and then see if I could get back home in another 20. The good: I did, in fact, get back in 20 minutes, so my pace didn't slow in the second half. The less-good: I was really hoping when I mapped out my run that I would have gone 5 miles or more, since that would have translated into 8-minute miles; instead, it was just 4.66, which put my miles just slower than 8:30. Still, for the first day out running, I was happy enough just to be there.

Day 3
Got out of bed and could hardly walk down the hall. I guess I forgot to mention in Day 2 that I did  the run in my Vibrams. I ran a 5k less than a month ago, but that was in tennis shoes. It's been months since I pulled on these babies:

These shoes, by the way, are very good at encouraging you to strike the ground with the balls of your feet rather than your heels. Which is to say, a run with these is a great way to shred your calves, as every step I took this morning reminded me.

But I took our oldest to peewee tennis and spent 20 minutes serving, then came home and pushed through my workout: chin-ups, close-grip overhand pull-ups, Australian pull-ups, pistol squats, clapping push-ups, inclined push-ups, and--what the hell--diamond push-ups. So it was a back and chest day, with nods to biceps and triceps, and legs thrown in for good measure. And I did the whole "cardio acceleration" thing between sets.

And I almost died.

I thought, at the end, that I should really be doing some ab work. But no. I was out of gas. And given how I woke up, just psyched that I still managed a great workout.

Day 4
Day 4 is still an open book. I was leaning toward another run, because there's a part of me that wants to make running a bigger part of my training. But given the severe thunderstorms we're having tonight, I don't know what to expect. There's another weather to consider: whether or not I'll be able to walk in the morning. So... maybe yoga. Because that will be easy when I can barely walk.

Recipe: Paleo Avocado Tomato "Pasta" Salad with Cilantro Lime Dressing

I love me some of that traditional salad of corn, black beans, tomato, avocado, and all, but on a Paleo diet, two of the main ingredients are out. What to do? Modify the heck out of it, obviously! The solution I hit on was to use spaghetti squash, which if you think about it has kind of the rich flavor of corn without, you know, being corn--or otherwise forbidden on a Paleo diet (not that we've been exactly strict about the Paleo thing lately). I thought this turned out really well, and I would definitely make it again--it has a great coolness to pair with basically any meat (for instance, something off the grill). We had steaks tonight.

Ingredients
1 small to medium spaghetti squash
1 pint grape or cherry tomatoes
2 medium avocados
1/2 med. red onion

1/2 c. olive oil
1/2 c. packed fresh cilantro
2 T. lime juice
salt and pepper to taste

Cook your spaghetti squash. My preferred method: bake whole at 400F for 45-50 minutes. You can do it faster if you slice it open, which might be a good idea here in the summer. When done, slice in half and scoop out the seeds. Scoop out the "noodles." Allow to cool before adding to the remaining ingredients (I let it cool before scooping out).

Grape tomatoes are small enough that you might forgo slicing them in half, but I would halve cherry tomatoes for sure. Dice the avocados into small (1/2" or so) cubes. Cut the red onion into small pieces. Because of the sharp flavor, I like to soak my onion in water for a while to mellow the flavor a bit. I also went ahead and added it to the food processor when I finished making my dressing, to chop the onions more finely.

Speaking of the dressing, in a small food processor, combine the oil, cilantro, lime juice, and salt and pepper. Mix everything together and give it some time for the flavors to mix. Enjoy!

5ks and Competition

Recently, a friend posted on Facebook about his weight loss and--probably more importantly--his efforts and successes at becoming more fit, which included working up to running a 5k (and now he's aiming for a half marathon!). That's a pretty cool accomplishment, in my book, to go from not being able to run a 5k to actually running a 5k. I know other people who've made that journey.

I'm not really one of them. I mean, yes, there was a time when I couldn't run 3.1 miles all at once, but it was sometime before I went to college (or, anyway, before I graduated). And it was at least 5 years after I was regularly running 5 miles at a time that I ran in my first organized 5k, so I wasn't exactly feeling suspense about whether or not I could complete it. Basically all my adult life, I've felt pretty confident that I could complete a 5k. This was true regardless of whether I was running daily or getting all of my exercise between the couch and the fridge (shout out to Pizza Rolls and beer every night, aka "spring schedule" movie nights in 2005 and 2006 and to Tastefully Simple's beer bread and spinach dip, aka every night in my first year of marriage and to massive pool of molten cookie dough covered with ice cream, aka every night of Lauren's first pregnancy). But really, I still could manage a 5k, even if it would hurt the next morning. And at the same time, even at my fittest, I've never been a fast runner (again, excepting short sprints to the fridge), so it didn't seem to make any sense to care about times. They were never impressive enough to care about.

Saturday, I ran an organized 5k for just the third time in my life. And I'll be damned if there wasn't a part of me that really wanted to brag about it, to say something about it on Facebook, or whatever. Where does that come from?

Only my shrink knows for sure.

But by the same token, as I've already outlined, it's hard for me to feel like running a 5k is anything to brag about. Now, this might have been my fastest organized 5k, but it was a run rather than a race, so there was no official time. I didn't even time it myself, so all I have to go on is what a friend who finished 30 seconds ahead of me said, that I'd finished in 24:00 even. He didn't feel like he'd run it as fast as all that, so my friend wondered if maybe the course was short, but yet another friend had some kind of GPS or something and it said that we'd all run 3.23 miles, so 24:00 would be even better than I thought.

Still, that wasn't the sort of time that put me anywhere close to the fastest finishers.

Of course, all this thinking just brought me back around to something that I've known for a long time: we should remember that if we're competing, we're really competing against ourselves. It's the only competition that's meaningful. Seriously, what would it matter if I was faster than my friend? Maybe if we were always running against each other, if we had some kind of back and forth where he sometimes wins and I sometimes win, but even the, so what? I could win while failing to improve or lose while getting a personal best. So who cares?

And yet, there's a sense in which competition does matter and is important. There's a sense in which the answer to my rhetorical question is: "I do!" Take my experience at the run. Somewhere in the last half mile or so, two girls from our school passed me (which, of course, I resented!). Up ahead of me, one stopped to walk and the other kept running, and I decided I was going to beat her to the finish line. I caught up and started passing, then she sped up to stay with me. So it's not like I was the only competitive one here. By the end we were in a full sprint, equally matched, and ended up in a photo finish that I absolutely won. In my own mind--she might have seen it differently. In any case, I'm sure we each ran faster and pushed ourselves harder because the other was there. For that moment, it was all about the competition.

As soon as we crossed the finish line, it didn't matter who "won." I clapped her on the back: "great finish!" (For the record: I won.)

And before that, my friend alluded to earlier spent most of the run about 20 yards ahead of me. The fact that he was there and that I had a vague sense that his mile splits were near where I hoped mine would be, I pushed myself to keep at least that close and maybe play a little catch-up when I could (mostly, I couldn't). Again, I probably ran faster because of the "competition" than I would have if I had just gone out for a nice jog by myself. Hypothetically, I know this could have worked against me: if I'd picked the wrong "competition," I might have started too fast and not been able to finish. But that's all part of running at this amateur level: figuring out whom to measure oneself against. It seems to me that if you have a general sense of how fast you can go / want to go, you can figure out as you go who's who. There was a joy, too, in discovering along the way people that got ahead of me earlier in the race that I could later pass (some were left behind, some passed me later; so it goes).

If it wasn't already obvious, I state it for the record: I'm a pretty casual runner. There was a time in my life when it was my primary form of exercise, when I would go for 5-mile runs three to five times a week, but now I hardly ever run any distances. Instead, I gravitate mostly to weight training and tennis. Which, really, are the opposite ends of the spectrum, with running squarely between them.

Hitting the weights is, for me at least, pretty purely about competition with myself. I'm not going to be entering any strongman competitions, and I've learned long ago not to bother with comparisons. If someone's lifting a lot more weight that I am, well, good for them. Maybe some day I can get there. Maybe I can learn something. If someone's lifting a lot less weight than I am, well, so what. Everyone has to start somewhere--there shouldn't be any shame in being a beginner. If you're showing up and doing the work, you're in the club.

While I still sometimes do it, mostly I don't judge the workouts that other people are doing, either. Sure, I might feel like some of the kids are spending too much time just on bench press and curls or that some people should venture away from the cardio machines and join in the fun of moving heavy weights around, but the bottom line is that we're all on our own journey with our own goals. We've found our own "information," and I'm happy to share what I "know" (I put it in quotes because I recognize the provisional nature of that knowledge), but I don't think there's one right way that everyone should be working out.

Then there's tennis. I can wax Zen on the subject of tennis, but really, it's pretty competitive, whether I'm playing against a former D-1 college player in a tournament or against a JV player in our local league. I want to win, and basically so does everyone else you encounter on the courts.

If we were just competing against ourselves to play the perfect game or to improve, we could "just hit" and I could be happy because I've been more consistent with my forehand or I'm getting more zip on my backhand or whatever. Most of the people I know who play tennis are bored with hitting about 30 seconds in and will suggest taking some serves and starting a set. And then best two out of three.

In the summers, I play in a league. It's set up to provide roughly equal matches, to an even greater extent than the format of high school tennis, where there's a similar organizational principle, with teams required by both rules and a sense of fair play to present their singles players  and their doubles teams in order of ability. But for most of us, whether our opponent is "better" or "worse" than us (and most of us have made a judgment about that within the first 10 seconds of hitting with them), we're there to win. That's probably why tennis players, as a category of people, tend to be so poorly adjusted. We have an intense desire to win, but we're constantly losing. Even when you win a game, you're likely losing points. Even when you're winning a set, you're likely losing games. But anyway, we care about winning and losing.

I've rambled long enough for most and far too long for some. If there's a point here, it's simply this: we humans have a natural tendency to compete, and that's not a bad thing. It can push us to do better in whatever it is that we're doing. But at the same time, for myself at least, I know that competition is just a thing of the moment. My ultimate worth isn't on the line when I'm under the bar, on the race course, or stepping up to the service line. It's all about perspective: we should embrace competition exactly to the extent that it makes us better, that it pushes us to work harder and achieve more, but beyond that we have to let it go and appreciate the moment of competition itself more than result of that competition.

Paleo Greek Lemon Chicken Soup

I hope I'm not alone when I admit that I get a lot of e-mail blasts from a lot of different places, most of which I barely even read. At some point in my life, it seemed appropriate to sign up for whatever it is. At this point in my life, I'm too busy to read the subject line of most of these, much less the actual message. A couple years ago, I did four solid months of P90X and got loosely involved in the Beachbody world. One lingering memento of that time, beyond the ripped body that I've gained (trust me, you don't need to see the pictures, just trust me that I'm totally jacked now), is the Beachbody newsletter that I get every so often. Beyond advertising their various programs and Shakeology (which I presume is an on-line degree program in the study of old-school furniture), they have health and fitness articles and usually one recipe per blast.

Now, Lauren and I have been eating Paleo most of 2013 so far, subsisting on recipes I've found in a cookbook or on the internet, or else something so simple to throw together that it doesn't even merit the term "recipe." Now, the Beachbody recipes are what most people would consider to be healthy, but they're rarely Paleo, so I took a pretty healthy recipe and not only made it amazingly healthy (unless your definition of healthy is limited to vegetarian/vegan recipes, in which case this is definitely not healthy) but also made it Paleo. Wait, I feel like I'm repeating myself. Anyway, you're welcome.

The reason why this recipe appealed to me is because it reminded me of a recipe Lauren and I loved that was even less  Paleo than this one: Creamy Lemon Pasta from The Moosewood Collective's Simple Suppers cookbook. We were blown away by the combination of creamy and lemony (Parmesan cheese and pasta didn't hurt, either). Now, pretty much every ingredient in that original recipe is out: no cream, no Parm, no pasta... just lemon. But this Beachbody recipe? Just one ingredient that doesn't fit (pasta), and it's got a great workaround to give a creamy lemony texture. High in protein, lots of the most healthy vegetables. Big win. And without further ado:

Paleo Greek Lemon Chicken Soup

1 c. cauliflower

1 lb raw chicken, cut into bite-sized pieces
4 c. chicken broth (hot)

3 large eggs
6-9 T. lemon juice
1 c. chopped fresh spinach
salt and pepper to taste

Cook cauliflower. Cook chicken. Heat broth. You can do this any way you want, but let me suggest a couple options. What I did: put the chicken (I didn't pre-cut it) and the cauliflower in a steamer, turned on the heat and let it go. It's done in 15-20 minutes. What I considered: bring the broth to a boil, cut up the chicken, and cook it in the broth, then scoop the chicken bits out--it's like a whole lot of fondue, sans forks. You might even cook the cauliflower along with it.

If you haven't already, cut up the chicken. Mash the cauliflower or puree it.

Whisk together eggs and 6 T. lemon juice in a medium saucepan. Slowly add broth, whisking constantly, until outside of pan feels warm to the touch. Add chicken, spinach, cauliflower, and any remaining broth. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring frequently, for about 2 minutes. The spinach doesn't need to get all the way to wilted, unless that's how you roll. Season with salt and pepper, add remaining 3 T. lemon juice if desired. Serve immediately.