Bike to Work

I feel like a hero. Dressed in bike shorts and helmet, rolling right through the carpeted Capitol Hilton past all the suits and heels, I am the girl walking down the city street, turning heads.

This is Bike to Work Day, last Friday. I almost didn’t ride, as I had to attend a conference here, two miles further from home than my usual office—a conference with all the usual expectations (like, wear something other than shorts and a t-shirt, and arrive relatively un-sweaty). Plus, thunderstorms were forecast for the afternoon. But Tyler, who commuted to Dupont Circle all last summer, pointed out I could always metro home if it poured, the morning was clear and sunny, and really, who can resist a good bike ride?

So I decided to make a statement and join thousands of others who participated in the annual celebration of the bicycle commute.

Two years ago on Bike to Work Day, I rode to NIH in Bethesda, researching an article about the thriving bicycle commuter club there (Bethesda Magazine, Sept./Oct. 2009). That trip was an eye-opener. After years of commuting just up the stairs to my office, I was surprised at the intensity of a ride I thought would be a pleasant pedal through the park. Instead, drivers on the two-lane road squeezed me onto a tiny shoulder full of gravel and uneven pavement; I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up every time I heard a vehicle approaching from behind, and was relieved to finally roll onto the NIH campus.

Oddly enough, now that I commute to the more urban Union Station neighborhood, I enjoy the ride more. It’s not canopied in trees, like the Beach Drive/Rock Creek Park route to Bethesda; it’s industrial, along beat up back roads with auto repair shops and abandoned buildings, then beside the railroad track and a gravel processing plant. But I have found unexpected beauty along the way: the funneled shape of enormous gravel bins, neatly numbered one through six; the brick arches filled in with more brick, lined up along the outside wall of on an empty building; the pyramid-like hill of black, tar-smelling substance piled up beside the metro tracks. There are the vibrant colors of street murals meant to dress up a transitional neighborhood, the irreverent stencils and scrawled tags graffiti’ed on warehouse walls, the curious establishments I pass (compressor rentals, charter schools, community gardens) and the occasional surprise, like the ripe mulberries, first of the season, fallen onto the sidewalk along the highway.

On Bike to Work Day, it was no different. I pulled my old red Nishiki out of the shed and carried it down the 27 steps from my yard to the street, pedaled up and down the hilly neighborhood roads of Takoma Park, up the sidewalk along New Hampshire Avenue, on to Ft. Totten Drive and then the Metropolitan Branch Trail. At 2nd and M Streets Northeast, I pulled off the trail to hit the Bike Day pit stop set up in the NOMA (North Of Massachusetts Ave.) neighborhood. Since I’d registered for the event, I got to pick up a purple Bike to Work Day t-shirt and a re-usable shopping bag with various promotional brochures plus a water bottle, a bike commuter map, and a tire patch kit. There were also muffins and bananas and friendly faces asking about my ride in to work.

Then I finished the ride, winding my way through downtown D.C. (on hyper-alert for unexpectedly opening car-doors, swerving cabs and turning buses). At the Hilton, the door man tells me the most secure place for my bike is inside, so I follow him through the lobby to the luggage check. The attendant gives me a tag, as if the bike were a suitcase I could pick up later; then I find the nearest bathroom to change into work clothes.

After dipping my toe into bike commuting about a month ago, riding only occasionally, I can now say I am fully immersed and committed to making the bike trail my primary commuter route. I want to tell everyone how, as one of the NIH bikers said, it feels as though I get to play before work. I want to tell them how liberating it is to leave the office building at the end of the day and feel the wind on my face as I pedal home. I want to describe how virtuous I feel for having reduced my carbon footprint, and how pleased I am to save the $6 round trip metro fare to work. And I want to urge everyone to try this for themselves: imagine what a difference it would make if just one in five of the drivers during morning rush hour were on two wheels instead of four.

Of course, I won’t lecture folks into commuting by bike. But I do hope that, striding through the Hilton lobby, I made people think: some people ride their bikes, even on conference days. Maybe I could do that, too.

Sweet on honey

Everywhere I turn this week, there have been sweets. Good sweets.

Not the tired pastries languishing on trays beside vats of big-hotel coffee, or the generic boxed cookies put out at low-rent art openings. These sorts of token treats are easy to pass up. Which is good, since I gave up refined sugar and cane sugar (white sugar in disguise, IMHO) for May.

Harder to resist are the gooey, delicious sweets I conjure up when I’m craving the best sorts of desserts. And, now that I’ve given up sugar, it’s those mouth-watering temptations that keep appearing before me.

Like the cake that called to me from the sideboard at Cayo’s house last week. Cayo is one of the best cooks I know. She once ran a restaurant in Adams Morgan, but more importantly, she cooks and bakes with intention. Though we’ve never discussed this, I am sure that, as she cooks, she thinks of the people she will be feeding, and because of that mindfulness the dishes she puts together become lovely gifts to share with family and friends.

It’s the same thing as putting something of yourself into whatever it is you’re doing. When Tyler was maybe four years old, and we were making cookies or some such kitchen project together, we oooohed and aaahed about how delicious they were, and talked about how they had the “special Tyler touch.”Okay, how corny is that? But it sounds great to a four-year-old, who thinks that he has some sort of magic to create something so good. And then, he does.

Just like Cayo.

Which is why the chocolate cake sitting on her sideboard was so hard to resist. Not only was it beautiful to look at, a deep, dark chocolate stack of at least two layers (I couldn’t look too closely), studded with chocolate kisses and oozing with chocolate frosting. It was also a birthday cake for her daughter (18!!), which makes it that much more alluring.

But I said no, thank you. I’m off sugar for just a month. I figure, I’ve got the rest of my life for chocolate cake, and if I can’t resist for one month, any discipline I thought I had is completely shot.

The other major temptation this week appeared on a plate at book club, from our generous hostess, Ellen. Cupcakes. These were not grocery store dreck, obligatory snacks served because it was her turn to host. They were from Curbside Cupcakes, one of the portable food trucks that travel around D.C., park, and create an exodus of hungry people escaping the city’s office buildings for something good to eat, served out of (surprise!) a truck. Like the Good Humor Ice Cream truck, but for grownups, Curbside attracts long lines of people who order up classic vanilla and chocolate cupcakes or more unusual combinations like vanilla with raspberry icing, carrot cake and peanut butter cup. They are decadent; the mocha at Ellen’s looked especially good.

Again, I resisted.

But I do have a confession. All this resistance is made easier due to the pretty phenomenal substitutes I’ve found for the usual white sugar treats. Starting with Mother’s Day, when Clara inspired me with miniature, sugar-free muffins, I poked around ‘til I found a honey-sweetened recipe for berry muffins that was quite good. There are plenty of other, easier sugarless-but-sweet options, too: fruit with yogurt and honey or agave, maple syrup on pancakes with berries or bananas, fruit-only jam on toast. When you allow for all those other sweeteners, life, is still pretty sweet.

Another favorite: a big schmear of Really Raw Honey on bread and butter. The Baltimore-produced honey, a thick, opaque spread, is so good that, the first time I bought it, the cashier at the food co-op warned me that it’s so addictive she eats it by the spoonful. I feel good about this indulgence, though, because it has bee pollen in it: energizing and healthy.

More unusual is the trail mix I’ve come up with: sweet raisins with whatever nuts are around (walnuts or pecans, usually) and bitter cacao nibs, the little flakes of ground up cacao shells. Yum. And, it’ll give you a kick when the afternoon slump is setting in.

But the best sugar-free sweet treat thus far is so good it really shouldn’t be allowed and does make me question whether eating all these yummy snacks is legit. The secret to this one? Powdered cocoa. Which has no sugar if you buy it in the can for baking. I wound up with Ghirardelli brand, since the day I bought it I happened to be in Whole Foods, and they had no (much cheaper) Hershey’s.

So here’s the recipe, if you want to call it that: Put raisins & walnuts into a favorite bowl, sprinkle a teaspoon or two of cocoa on top, drizzle on some honey, and add a couple teaspoons of cream. Stir it up for a while – at first the cocoa will be powdery but eventually it all incorporates into something that is awfully close to a candy bar you can eat with a spoon.

Suddenly a month with no refined sugar seems delicious.

Brown bag or Chop't?

The difference between my leafy, close-to-urban-suburban home (plain old “suburban” sounds too Desperate Housewives, we like to think we’re way more hip and artsy), and bustling, busy D.C. gooses me every time I ride into the city. It is the contrast between ambling dog-walkers and purposefully clicking high heels on pavement; between the idyll laughter of children playing in a garden and the rumble of a city bus squeezing by the crosswalk.

I love to straddle these two worlds, ramping up to the city’s pace in the morning, settling into a steady office groove during the day, then easing back home in the evening, feeling the pressure of relentless activity fall away under the canopy of oaks and maples. It is not exactly a schizophrenic enterprise, but the two facets of my life do seem distinct.

At lunchtime, though, I tend to mix it up and bring Takoma Park to my city office building – in a brown paper bag.

This week it was leftover grilled veggies sandwiched in fresh Farmer’s Market bread smeared with goat cheese—a taste of my backyard grill and Takoma Park’s Sunday market on a plate. Another day it was pasta with roasted eggplant, which reminded me of the little dinner Clara and I had with her friend the night before, when I first served the dish. I especially like bringing salads harvested from the garden, and always hope someone in the office kitchen asks me what’s for lunch so I can boast that I grew the greens myself.

Once in a while, though, I join the throngs of going-out-to-lunch folks and buy. My favorite place to go is Chop’t. This custom-order salad spot is a study in contrasts, too: the food is healthy, clean, and delicious, much like what I aspire to make in my own kitchen. But the city-influenced pace is so fast I can barely keep up.

Chop’t reminds me of the New York deli's where I have to rehearse what I want to order before someone barks at me to speak up and I lose my turn, or, worse, someone rolls their eyes at me and pegs me as a slow country bumpkin. Chop’t isn’t quite so intimidating, but the pace is still breathless. Last time I was there, the more experienced customer next to me helped me out, interpreting what my “chopper” was asking me, since I could barely hear him over the din of other customers, and prompting me to move along to the registers when it was time to pay up. This made me feel way more middle-aged than usual, but also grateful for quick young brains that can pull me along into the swiftly-moving traffic of a fast-food restaurant line like this.

About Chop’t: fabulous salads, as good as the ones we make at home and sometimes better. Some locally sourced ingredients. Some organic. “Naturally raised” meats (could use more of the organic, locally-raised items, please!) Nothing is pre-chopped, and you never get that weird chemically taste that comes with some bagged or restaurant salads (what is that? Do they spray it with some preservative or something? You go for a bite of what you think will be super good and fresh and it tastes like it’s been sprayed with chlorine, blech)

Anyway, the Chop't deal is much like Chipotle: you go to the line and tell the folks working furiously fast behind the counter what you want, chosen from the array of brilliantly colored fresh veggies and other ingredients set neatly in bins before you. I especially like the selection of greens: romaine, mesclun, arugula, spinach or iceberg.

If you’re making your own salad, you can choose four add-ons. At home we call these “sinkers,” as they sink to the bottom of the salad bowl (thanks Joe Fairbank). They include things like carrots, beets, bell peppers, tomatoes, green peas, snow peas – it’s a long list, and then there are “premium” add-ons like Applegate Farm salami, smoked tofu, wild planet tuna (sustainably caught), and six kinds of cheeses. And there are 32 dressings. If it’s all overwhelming (and it was for me) you can go with an established combo like the Grilled Asian, with spinach, oranges, carrots, almonds and snow peas, or the Cobb, with grilled chicken, avocado and bacon.

Once you’ve chosen, they throw all the ingredients into a recycled bowl and pass it to the choppers, who dump it all out again onto a cutting board and go at it with a bow-shaped knife, chop-chop-chop. Then the salad goes back into a big stainless steel bowl, gets dressed, tossed, returned to your takeaway bowl and they whisk you to the register to pay.

I love the results. So much, in fact, that I’m sure I’ll visit enough to get accustomed to the mad pace – and eventually I’ll be the one helping a newbie through the line. Unless I’m in the office having a mid-day visit with the much more laid back Takoma Park, imported via brown paper bag.

Coffee break

It’s two o’clock and my favorite coffee shop is full.

I must be in sync with the urban afternoon call for café time. I like this notion. Because in many ways, I am out of sync, I am “other” in this hip-and-cool find of a place.

For one thing, every other boy here reminds me of my son—especially the 20-something sitting at the bar, raking his fingers through long, tangled hair as he reads the Post. Maybe he’s just now decided not to let the hair go to dreadlocks, after all. He’s wearing shoes with no socks, pants rolled at the ankle, and though his look is perhaps a bit more studied than Tyler’s is, he gives a haphazard impression that is attractive and endearing.

At a nearby table, a delicately featured girl with a buzz cut reminds me of my daughter Clara, whose hair is undergoing radical change this year, from long to short, red to blond to purple and pink. The coffee shop girl is talking with a friend, but other tables are singletons, and all about the laptops. I feel old-fashioned, with my journal and my newspaper (and the 25 years or so I have on just about everyone) but being different seems to be the thing here so in a way I fit in as well.

And even if I didn’t, I love this place. Not only for the beautiful people (and I mean that in a creative way, not an LA way) but for the general vibe. Much of this is due to industrial-but-intentional, off-the-cuff décor, another study in unstudied style. There’s exposed brick that gives way to drywall that is chipping at the top to expose more brick. And cinderblock. Maybe intentional, maybe just disrepair. The space is long and narrow, and from where I sit, at the end of the counter looking out, that element is magnified by a dark rectangle of dropped ceiling that mirrors the service counter’s length. Framed photographs dot the uneven walls—a red Banksy-like stencil, a dock on a lake, three Buddhist statues.

Behind the counter, three skinny young guys are in perpetual motion, in shorts and torn tee-shirts, frothing milk and tamping down espresso grounds. The one who serves me is especially friendly: when I order cake with my cappucino, he says, “yeah, bring it on,” as if this is the best decision I’ve made all day.

It very possibly is.