The next session starts on October 9th at 7pm and we have room for you! There comes a time in everyone’s life when they realize they don’t know how to cook. Whether the epiphany strikes in middle school or mid-midlife crisis varies from person to person, but the solution remains the same: It’s time to learn! And it’s not as impossible as it might seem –even if you’re intimidated by cooking spaghetti. Chef Eric’s 4-Week Culinary Basics Series is especially crafted for beginners, and take it from graduate Alan Weil: “Anyone interested in learning to cook will come out of this series much more confident about his or her cooking skills.” Chef Eric will make sure of it! So what’ll we cover? Lots of meals that YOU learn to make and we eat them at the end of each Class! Week 1: Knife skills. Proper technique is the foundation of proper cooking, and we make sure you’ve got it down. We’ll go over how to hold, use, clean and sharpen a knife before you start slicing and dicing. Then you prepare some simple meals like Latin-Style Strip Loin Steak with Chayote Squash, Risotto-Style Orzo Pasta with Parmesan Cheese and Spiced Peruvian Chickpea Cakes. Week 2: Meal prep. We’ll build off what we learned in the first class and start playing with international recipes like Spice Rubbed Skirt Steak, Thai-Style Noodle Salad with Asian Five-Spice Chicken Skewers and Spicy Peanut Sauce, Italian Chicken, traditional Meatloaf, and Lemon Orzo Pasta with Kalamata Olives. And yes – taste-testing is encouraged! Week 3: Homemade pastas and potatoes. By now, you’ll be ready to tackle the art of pasta-making. Trust us; it’s far better fresh! We’ll learn how to make it, cut it, cook it and pair it with splendid sauces like Bolognese, Herb and Cheese Spaetzle, and creamy Alfredo. We make a killer Potatoes au gratin, too! Week 4: Seafood. With a focus on safety and sanitation, we’ll prepare fantastic fish dishes like Seared and Spice-Crusted Ahi Tuna, Grilled Chipotle-Spiced Shrimp and Sole Vin Blanc with Ginger-Lime-Scallion Butter – all of which are sure to blow your friends and family away at the next dinner party you’ll be hosting, armed with your newfound knowledge. Don’t let takeout take over your life. To quote the great Julia Child, “The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude!” So don’t be afraid to learn to cook; Chef Eric will be there every step of the way. You ARE capable of cooking! Register for our class now  The next session starts on October 9th at 7pm and we have room for you! ...read more

CHEAP LANDSCAPERS IN SAN TAN VALLEYS&C; Landscape offers both commercial and residential landscape and irrigation installation, full-service lawn care, YARD CLEAN-UPS, tree trimming, rock installation, pavers, and property maintenance around the San Tan Valley/Queen Creek area. ...read more

Symptoms of a narcissist   Narcissism is based on an inflated “false self”, which has developed as a result of a developmental arrest in childhood. As a child, he/she withdrew inwards and resorted to grandiose fantasies of being superior, special, perfectly loved, self sufficient and self important. This was to cover the vulnerability, self doubt and worthlessness that was at his/her core. To keep his grandiose “false self” alive in his mind and his fears of abandonment at bay, he/she is in constant search forsources of narcissistic supply, an abundant “fan club”, which will supply him/her with positive attention, adulation and appreciation, and if that is not possible, fear from others will suffice. The more damage he/she sustained in childhood, the larger the grandiosity and the more severe the Narcissism, and the more donations are desperately needed from others to keep propping up the fantasy self. Emotional pain dominates his/her internal landscape. He/she may project arrogance and charisma, but underneath he/she feels unworthy. It is a constant and exhausting endeavour as he/she continually seeks to manipulate others to give him/her the required fix. He/she will do anything to get it, and won’t let people’s feelings or the truth get in the way. To keep this all going internally, he/she uses a combination of 6 defense mechanisms 1. Splittingis the first one. This means he/she fails to regard anyone, including himself/herself, as a composite of good and bad. Instead, he/she sees everyone as either “all good” or “all bad”. He/she, of course is “all good”, and you as the partner begin by being “all good” which has him/her idealisingyou, and internalising you to support his/her grandiosity, but as soon as you fail to do this, you become “all bad” and he/she immediatelydevaluesyou, with the resulting punishment in various forms metered out to you. 2.  Dissociation&altered perception.Narcissists often recall things very differently from healthy people, or fail to recall things at all if they don’t resonate with his/her superiority. 3.  Rationalisationis the assertion that a flaw doesn’t exist, or if it does, it isn’t the Narcissists. (“There is nothing wrong with me.  I never have problems”) These rationalisations can be very convoluted and obscure, as they often fly in the face of observable facts. 4. Projectionis the curious strategy whereby the Narcissist is subconsciously aware of what he/she is in fact doing himself, but  projects it onto you, with the result that you then get blamed for exactly what he/she is doing himself/herself, and he/she casts himself/herself as the blameless victim. 5. Denialis simply the assertion that something is not so, when ordinary observation or common sense confirms that it is in fact true. Anything that doesn’t reinforce his/her grandiose image will be denied. The Emperor has no clothes and he can’t be told. 6. Blame shiftingis whathappens when the Narcissist insists there is nothing possibly wrong with him/her, so all the blame must be attributed to you or everyone else in the world. How did you become a willing victim? Why you? If you find yourself in a relationship with a Narcissist, at some stage you might wonder why you?  What does this say about you, your tolerance for pain and your sanity? It is true that there is a particular kind of person that finds themself with a Narcissist, at least often well beyond the first indication that there is an underlying nastiness in him. The kind of person who seems to unwittingly attract a Narcissist is someone who has what I call a“Sacrificial Self”,(which has also been referred to as Co-dependent or compliant or a deflated false self). This means you may have a tendency to unnecessarily attribute blame to yourself in situations when you haven’t done anything wrong. In Transactional Analysis terms, a Narcissist’s underlying Life position isI’m Ok, You’re Not OK, whereas  a Sacrificial’s underlying Life Position isI’m Not OK, You’re OK.   How Can I tell if I am a Sacrificial Self? Here again, it is important to understand that there are varying degrees of this kind of Self, as there are with a Narcissistic self. A Sacrificial person is characterised by: 1. A deflated False self 2. Your feelings are often numbed, and you are not always aware of them in the moment 3. You experience a lack of awareness of your own needs. 4. You also are not good at knowing what your real wants are. 5. You often feel guilt and shame for not being able to meet people’s needs 6. Your loved ones withdrawing their love, or threatening to withdraw it, triggers a lot of anxiety in you 7. You are often not truly in touch with your own deeper truth 8. You can often prefer to live in a fantasy where you believe your partner truly loves you, even though much of the evidence can show you the contrary 9. You have experienced poor self esteem over your life 10. You are not always able to see where your boundaries should and shouldn’t be 11. You are not often able to assertively stand up to those you love 12. You can at times feel a vague sense of depression and emptiness 13. You can lack a sense of a healthy entitlement in your relationships 14. You can often feel frustrated and dissatisfied with your life 15. There are times when you feel your life has no meaning 16. You have an underlying belief that I must sacrifice myself to survive in a relationship 17. In a relationship, you may be responsive and reactive to your partner, rather than proactive 18. You excessively blame yourself in your relationship 19. You often have the underlying sense that if something is going right for you at the moment, it probably won’t last. 20. You tend to take more than your fair share of responsibility in a relationship, to make it better and improve it. Interestingly and importantly, a Sacrificial’s profile is less defended that the Narcissist, and less destructive to others, and therefore closer to achieving a healthy relationship, if you can gain true insight into what is happening and what is going wrong in your relationships and be able to develop a stronger identity and boundaries. If this is you, during your childhood, as you were developing your real self and identity as an individual, your mother or father may have been challenged by your emerging separate self. It often happens that she or her was a Narcissist. So whenever you expressed your real feelings, needs or wants, you were abandoned, criticised or blamed. Often, your relationship with your parent was set up so that you took responsibility for meeting your parents’ needs, rather than she/he meeting your needs. So you learned that in order to survive and experience any form of love and attention, you had to abandon yourself and “toe the line”. As a result your individual identity may have been severely compromised. ...read more