good recipe I’ve been making a lot recently. make or buy some tomato sauce, spoon a layer in a greased casserole dish. crack 3 eggs over top and bake at 350 for 10-15 minutes, depending on how you like your eggs. great, healthy breakfast, especially if you make your tomato sauce spicy!

don wood made a cool video of our fight gone bad workout yesterday, it’s about 4 minutes. also this guy sean took a lot of pictures.

Today, at crossfit we did a charity event called “fight gone bad”. basically, we raised some money and did a workout called “fight gone bad”. greg glassman, the guy who started crossfit, was hired years ago to develop a workout that mimicked the metabolic demands of an MMA fight, to help train BJ Penn for an upcoming fight. after doing the workout for the first time, greg asked BJ how it was, and BJ said it was like a fight gone bad, hence the name. here’s a description:

In this workout you move from each of five stations after a minute. This is a five-minute round from which a one-minute break is allowed before repeating. the workout is 3 Rounds. The stations are:

Wall-ball: 20/14/10 pounds 10/8 ft target. (Reps)
Sumo deadlift high-pull: 75/55/45 pounds (Reps)
Box Jump: 20″/15″/10″ (Reps)
Push-press: 75/55/45 pounds (Reps)
Row: calories (Calories)

here’s everyone warming up:

I started on the rower, which is tough because rowing takes a lot out of you and then you move directly to throwing a heavy ball high in the air, which uses a lot of the same muscles. charmel and I rowing (note the awesome pullup bar + jungle gym in the background!):

wall balls with a 20lb ball. this is pretty tough, on the squat portion your knees must break paralell with your hips. there’s a target on the wall that you have to hit:

deadlift high pulls. this or rowing was probably my strongest exercise:

push press, my last exercise in the round. in this, you basically dip slightly and then explosively extend your hips, driving the bar from your chest to above your head:

me resting in between rounds. laying on your back is the most effective way to recover and everyone does it:

a picture of everyone at the end:

my score was 235, which is pretty good. it’s very hard to get a sense of how difficult this workout is until you do it, I had only done it once before and mostly forgot how hard it was. watching how wrecked everyone in the first heat was reminded me of how demanding it is. having a lot of spectators and doing it for charity, as well as all the people videotaping, really spurred me on.

afterwards, we were all messing around on the equipment, and sarah got this very cool pic of me doing a muscle up on the rings (basically you start from a hanging position, and then get to where your arms are fully extended and holding your torso above the rings):

basically from a hang, you get into this position:

and then just press yourself up, fully extending your arms. I can do one, which is a pretty good accomplishment as they require some strength as well as technique, and am working on string multiple muscleups together. it’s a basic gymnastics move, and really makes you realize how strong and coordinated gymnasts are.

special thanks to everyone who contributed money for this event, it goes to a great cause!

are at lucille’s in boulder, colorado. lucille’s is in a small house just off pearl street in downtown boulder. you can tell from the outside it’s going to be good

the specials board read “corn pancakes with coconut milk syrup” on the day we were there, but I can make some pretty good jiffy corn pancakes at home and we didn’t come to boulder to fool around, so I ordered the eggs new orleans: poached eggs with hollandaise sauce served over two fried eggplant slices, with creole tomato sauce. if you are a grizzled breakfast veteran like me, you know that hollandaise sauce is a gutsy move, because it’s either going to suck or be the greatest thing ever. at lucille’s, it’s pretty damn close to the greatest thing ever:

your breakfast comes with a buttermilk biscuit and grits or potatoes. grits are damn near impossible to screw up and after all I am from the south, so I went with the grits just in case the hollandaise turned out poorly.

before you get your food, they bring you this:

fluffy, light, crusty on top, unbelievable, no honey required buttermilk flavor biscuits. for me, this biscuit was as close as I get to having a religous experience. I just didn’t think it was possible to get a biscuit this good in a restaurant. hell, I didn’t realize biscuits this good existed at all. according to the waitress, they freeze the butter, grate it in a cheese grater, and mix it in at the last minute so the biscuits get large air pockets and stay light.

by the way, lucille’s is from boulder by way of new orleans, so they serve chicory coffee with 20% chicory (less than cafe dumonde), and make their own ketchup and jellies. the coffee is top notch chicory coffee, and they had apple butter, strawberry rhubarb and pepper jelly the two times we visited. yep, it was so good we had to stop back by for lunch on the way to the airport. they serve breakfast all day. have mercy.

the eggs new orleans were pretty good the first time around, but since we were in colorado, the second time around I got the eggs ponchratrain, poached eggs with hollandaise served over pan fried trout.

I got the potatoes this time because the grits were good but unremarkable and I wanted to try the homemade ketchup. potatoes were a bit overdone but excellent with ketchup all the same. the trout was the single best dish I had in colorado, and we ate pretty good. very fresh, crisp exterior and flaky on the inside. they must make the hollandaise to order, I can’t see how they could get it that perfect everytime otherwise.

anyways, lucille’s is my idea of a perfect restaurant. staff is cool, service is casual but good, the old house is awesome (there’s a second bathroom upstairs, the glass doorknobs reminded me of my grandmothers house), and the food is damn close to divine.

been doing mostly crossfit since getting home from vacation. squat @ 225, deadlift @ 275 this week. today my shoulder was bothering me a bit, so did 30 reps each of:
pullups
pushups
back extensions
l-sits
dips
situps
squats

pretty easy workout. in other news, I’m taking either composition or orchestration in juilliard’s evening division! pretty excited about this, hopefully I’ll be posting some new recordings soon!