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Sunday always rolls around too fast and I’m left wishing I just had ONE more day, one more day would make all the difference in the world!  Last weekend when we did have the 3-day weekend, it was just glorious, and I felt like I got a lot of things accomplished.

This weekend, well not so much . . .

Friday night is always a chill night for us.  It’s a time when we can cook a little something together and/or enjoy a little vino.  Chris rode his bike to work, since he is training for a century race in October (118 miles!) and got home a little later, so I got started on dinner with this recipe.  I changed it a little bit and added some goat cheese to the sauce and also used this pasta I recently discovered at TJ’s.  It was sooo good!  I normally don’t like to buy packaged long pastas because it can be so much cheaper to make it on my own, but since it was late and Chris wasn’t home, I thought it would be perfect in an emergency 🙂

I think I’m going to add lemon to my pasta from now on because it gives it a nice refreshing and subtle yumminess.  This pasta would also work really well with seafood.  I didn’t know if it would go well with a tomato-type sauce, but it actually was really nice.

First I made the meatballs . . . and used oatmeal as the binder instead of breadcrumbs this time.

It really helps to form the balls beforehand and get them ready for the hot pan.

Once they are nice and golden around the edges, I added the sauce with the additional goat cheese to make it creamy.  It will look a little loose, but don’t let it reduce down too much because the pasta will absorb all that goodness.

Then I added all the pasta (I used 1.5 bags of the lemon pepper pasta), basil and parmesan and mixed it all up 🙂

At this point I decided that, yes I would like to have a glass of wine, please!!  Since Chris (crazy bike man now) was going to ride again tomorrow, he decided to abstain 🙁  So I thought I didn’t really want to open up a whole bottle of wine only to waste 3/4 of it.  Hmmm . . .  wait I had a bottle of barefoot chard in the fridge, yes!!  Perfect for any occasion when you can’t drink the whole thing because it’s only about $4 /bottle.  To tell you the truth it wasn’t that bad and actually good!  I really don’t spend more than $10-15 /bottle most of the time anyway, and you really don’t have to to get a decent bottle 🙂  I saved the rest in the fridge, but the quality just isn’t the same after several days.

And with that dinner was served!  I had to take the picture outside because the lighting inside was just terrible by the time dinner was ready.

Hello, my name is Kristen and I’m a pasta-holic 🙂

Saturday was a big frustrating whirlwind for me.  I decided to go to the library to get focused and get things done, but it really felt like a waste of time, well sort of.  I spent most of the time trying to figure out how to print since I had my laptop (well, my hard drive in Chris’ laptop since mine fried itself) and their printers aren’t supported by vista, and I forgot my unlv password, and then I had to figure out the scanner to send something and then . . . . ok I’ll just stop hehe  I did find a few articles for my thesis that sound interesting.  One of them compared 4 different drinks on hydration.  I’d like to do something like this with coconut water, just not have so many variables.  I just feel like I keep searching and searching, but still don’t feel completely confident.  I e-mailed a few professors, so we’ll see what they think and if it is doable.

Since I got myself so flustered, I decided to bake a batch of banana muffins!  I like to watch them poof in the oven, it’s very therapeutic 🙂  This recipe is from the blog Pinch My Salt.  I really like her pumpkin pancakes too.

Sunday was spent mostly cycling!  woo-hoo!  Breakfast was a quick omelet with tofu, black beans, corn and spinach (leftovers from the week) on a flatbread and of course a muffin 🙂 I went on a women’s ride and then they had a little clinic afterwards on how to change a flat and clean your chains.  They also had bagels, juice and coffee.  I completely forgot my camera!  Riding back home was really HOT and soooo windy!  This was the worst wind I’ve ridden in and I thought I was literally going to blow off the bike, yikes!  It is still blowing like crazy out there as I type.

While the ride was pretty easy, when we finally rode back home around 1pm, I was sweating like crazy from pushing against the wind in the heat and decided to re-hydrate with coconut water!!  Oh my gosh, I think I’m in love.

It has such a wonderfully sweet, yet very subtle flavor that sat well on my tummy.  I love that it has more potassium and 230% vitamin C compared to your conventional electrolyte replacement drinks, and it’s natural.  No red #40 in here.  Love that!  I’m going to look at different brands because this one didn’t have that much sodium, which is a key to rehydrating when working hard in the heat.  Yes, you need sodium!  When I looked on Nutritiondata.com, they said there was 252 mg of sodium in coconut water.  Has anyone seen this in a brand??

The version that I bought had 60 kcals, 15g CHO, 680 mg potassium, 40 mg sodium and more vitamin C than the one on nutritiondata.com.  I’ll have to look into that.  I didn’t know if brands are different?

I can’t wait to experiment with more because I really liked how it made me feel and settled on my tummy.  I usually can’t drink Gatorade and such because they are so darn sweet.

Whew!  Long recap 🙂  I hope you all had a more productive weekend than I did and have a good week!  Lots of things to do.

How do you best stay hydrated, and rehydrate after endurance activity?