Mushroom, Tomato & Goat Cheese Cavatappi

 Mushroom, Tomato & Goat Cheese Cavatappi with Herb-Roasted Zucchini

Tonight's meal is a meatless selection from Factor 75.  It’s vegetarian, not vegan; it’s also my favorite so far.

Done well, I prefer good mushrooms to medium-quality meat, and these were done well.  This is the second dish I’ve gotten served over a cauliflower-based cavatappi, again trying to make your carbs count.  If you’re shooting for less than 300g of carbs per day, this entire meal is only 44g.

Goat cheese is a factor in weight loss in that it’s digested more easily than cow’s cheese.  It can also have the effect of making you feel more full than cow’s milk cheese.   The main reason to use goat cheese, though, is its tangy fresh goodness.  I’d put goat cheese on anything.

This is the second time I’ve had a dish with their Herb-Roasted Zucchini as a side.  Side dishes can be carb and fat bombs, Factor 75 wisely spends those calories in the main dish while making the side dish still very enjoyable.  It might have been on two meals this week because zucchini is in season.  Using seasonal vegetables is a very good sign.  

With good mastication, it took about thirty minutes to prepare and eat tonight’s meal.  That’s two minutes for heating and twenty-eight for enjoying.  With wine and a dinner partner, this could easily stretch to an hour.  At 440 calories and a good time, you can’t go wrong.

Nutrition Per Serving Per Serving

Calories         440kcal
Fat         23g
Saturated Fat 12g
Carbohydrate 44g
Sugar 13g
Dietary Fiber 6g
Protein 15g
Cholesterol 105mg
Sodium         890mg

I have been heating up flavorful, filling food with Factor for some time now, and I thought you’d want in too. Sign-up with my personal link and you will get up to $150 off your first boxes. 

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Per aspera ad Astra

 Nero ruled Rome from 54 to 68.  For those of us born in the sixties, that's quite a number.  He was generally considered a horrible person.  Besides feeding Christians to lions and setting fire to Rome, and blaming the Christians, Nero also ordered the suicide of his mentor, the philosopher Seneca.  Nero accused Seneca of taking part in a plot to overthrow and murder him.  To this day, historians argue whether or not the charges were false.  If Seneca had a part in the plot, it wasn't a large one.

In the first century, stoicism dominated Roman philosophy.  Stoics pondered such things as the nature of matter, happiness, virtue, divinity, and more.  Their influence on what was to become Christian thought is unmistakable; even though Seneca spoke about Christianity and Judaism, he was a pagan and a pantheist.

Seneca was known for his poetry.  He had a remarkable way with words.  One of my favorite thoughts from Seneca was "Per aspera ad Astra."  It's now part of official Star Trek lore, which is what started me thinking about it.

By "aspera" challenges, difficulties, struggle, effort, and resistance, we achieve "Astra" the Stars.  Through hardship, we reach the stars.  The Romans didn't have a very clear idea of what the stars actually were, so, like many cultures before them, "the stars" became an idea, the highest accomplishment, or the greatest goal.

We get the word "exasperate" from "aspera."  Considered a Southern expression, our use of exasperate probably comes from the 19th-century Southern obsession with romanticism and classical philosophy.  A fairly common practice among Southerners was to name slaves after classical figures, both real and mythical.

This idea that we reach the stars through hardship resonates with what I've been going through for the last two years.  I had to get really, very near death before I flipped the switch and started becoming something much greater than I had ever been.  Robert St. John tells a similar story.  He had to come very close to destroying himself to ultimately become himself. 

You see the influence of "Per aspera ad Astra" in Christian thought.  There are a number of instances where Christians advise perseverance in the face of adversity as the only path to a higher place.

In Star Trek, they take the ad astra part as quite literally the stars around us.  The real world isn't quite there yet; we have to make do with our one star.  Seneca's thought remains valid and strong though.  Through struggle, we become much more than what we were.  

Factor 75 Sun-Dried Tomato Chicken Fusilli

Sun-Dried Tomato Chicken Fusilli with Italian Herb-Roasted Zucchini

One thing I've noticed about the Factor 75 foods is they really like to be flexible and creative with the pasta they use.  Fusilli is a spiral-shaped Italian pasta.  Pasta is made in different shapes because increasing the surface area gives more places for the sauce to cling, increasing your flavor profile. This particular dish uses Lentil flour to make its pasta rather than wheat flower.  Lentils are tiny beans, and they make pasta with the same texture as wheat pasta but with more protein and more fiber, basically more bang for your carbs.

You get about 2/3 of a boneless, skinless chicken breast cut up into the dish.  You don't miss having more chicken as it's about eight ounces of food.  It's seasoned with basil, oregano, and garlic and then covered in a generous portion of the cream, sun-dried tomato sauce.  

Like with my last review, the zucchini side dish was generous.  Normally you'd expect chefs to just load it down with salt and butter and call it a day, but since they're choosing to spend their fat ounces on the main entry, there's hardly any fat at all, so they make up for it by really developing a garlic-centered flavor profile.  It's a generous portion and really very good.

They recommend you not freeze your meals, although you could.  From a cold but not frozen state, they recommend you microwave it for two minutes, which gets the meal very warm, almost too hot to take the cover off, but doesn't overcook the pasta or the meat.

Summary: Of the two meals I've reviewed so far, this was my second favorite, but still very good.  I'd have no problem serving this to an important guest.  It's flavorful and filling and under 500 calories, which is important to me.  You get 28 grams of protein, which is just two grams less than a Premier Protein shake.  

     Nutrition
1 serving - 12.4 total ounces.  

Calories            490
Fat                    27g
Saturated Fat    12g
Carbohydrate    36g
Sugar                9g
Dietary Fiber    6g
Protein              28g
Cholesterol      130mg
Sodium            900mg

Sign up with Factor 75 with this link for a generous discount

Women Who Don't Celebrate Holidays

 Wayne LaPierre and the NRA are big fans of the idea that a "good guy with a gun" is all you need to solve the problem of "bad guys with guns."  They believe in it so much that they plaster it all over their social media every time it works.  

That's the problem; every time it works is between one and two percent of all the gun violence in the nation.  One or two percent make their evidence in this argument almost anecdotal.  While it does work at some level, their strategy simply isn't solving the problem.

Usually, their social media post will go like this: Larry Smith takes out Rico Warez with the AK47 he kept in the back of his truck in case he wanted to go deer hunting.  Their posts are filled to the brim with racial dog whistles. Then 500 middle-aged men will comment how great it is to be an American and FU Brandon!  

Problems like gun violence amplify problems with economic disparity.  The darker and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be the victim of gun violence.

Going to the grocery today, I was struck by what a terrible job we do of governing the people who live here.  Morgan Place is so filled with potholes you can't navigate it with a normal vehicle.  Inside the grocery, the women at the deli counter were talking.  I suppose the topic before I walked up was why they're working today (July 4).  One of them said she didn't mind working on the fourth because that's when her cousin got shot, and her family doesn't celebrate it, and the other woman said she felt the same about Christmas because that's when her daddy got shot.  

Two women, Americans both Mississippians and Jacksonians, laid out a testimony before me of what a horrible job we've done of governing the world they live in.  By "we," I mean me too!  There certainly have been thousands of times when I could have done more, said more, and tried more to make things better but didn't.  

Our city has an administration that was elected on the premise that they could and would do something about economic disparity, but they've done such a shit job at maintaining the basic functions of a city that they've actually made the effects of economic disparity much worse.  Our state has a decidedly conservative legislature and administration, by word, absolutely devoted to providing security to its citizens but failing utterly for these two women.  Both ends of the political spectrum made promises to help these women, and both failed.  Their lives are bad and getting worse.  

I think we have to admit that conservative gun policies are a failure.  I think we also have to admit that liberal policing policies are also a failure.  I think we have to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate everything we're doing and look for solutions to the problem rather than ways to protect our empire of ideas.  

It's not fair that these women have to work on July fourth while I get to fuck around and do what I want.  It's also not fair that in one of the world's most advanced countries, we can't keep that woman's father safe on Christmas Eve or the other woman's cousin safe on the Fourth of July.