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January 12, 2010

just a few new finds

Filed under: Blog,Favorites,Lighter Fare — Tags: barley, muffin, persimmon, pistachio, pomegranate, salad, yogurt — Kristen :) @ 11:54 pm

I don’t have too much time to blab on today, as I’m trying my darndest to focus on my proposal, but I did want to just stop by and share a few good finds I discovered and some eats I made this weekend.

Can I just say that it is absolutely glorious sleeping in till 7am and eating when the sun is actually up!! Because we went out to dinner a bit late with our friends Friday evening (terrible pictures by the way), I decided to sleep in just a little bit. I love having the sunshine to be able to take food pictures!! Yay! Most of the time I leave when there’s not enough sunlight and get home when the sun is just going down. Dang you time change.

I could even take a nice picture of breakfast! This is just a mixture of Wallaby yogurt mixed with a scoop of LF cottage cheese, topped with frozen blueberries, cereal, banana, and flax. I also had 1/2 a date bran muffin I found in the freezer. Those muffins are definitely our favorite!

Saturday we spent most of the day running errands and grocery shopping. I found some items I can’t wait to try . . .

For lunch I made a munchie plate with crackers, hummus, string cheese, apple, and salmon salad with pistachios and persimmons.

I tried a Fuyu persimmon for the first time this season and I really enjoy them. It tastes like a subtle creamsicle to me? I like to put them in chicken lettuce wraps too.

I also found the Laughing Cow cheese finally and am looking forward to adding it to various recipes like so many of you do!

Persimmon Pistachio Salmon Salad

one small can wild salmon with bones (for added calcium!)
1/3-1/2 cup low fat greek yogurt
1 Fuyu persimmon, peeled and chopped
1/4 cup cranberries
1/4 cup chopped pistachios
various seasonings (all-purpose, garlic powder, s & p, splash of vinegar)

Mix it all together!

I found this quick cooking barley at Walmart. This will be great to add to soups, oats or make a salad with because normally barley takes quite awhile to cook.

I have to say I am impressed with Walmart’s selection of healthier items and brands at a reasonable price. For some families, it’s just being able to find these and make the choice to buy them over what they usually do, and that can be tough.

That afternoon we went to a bike demo for a local bike shop that we like to go to and it was also a charity event for our local Shade Tree Shelter. Lots of bikes!

We signed a waiver and then tried out a few of them. Most of the people there were mountain bikers, which is a completely different crowd than road bikers. Kind of like the laid back surfer dude type.

First we tried a couple road bikes. Boy, it’s amazing how much better those felt compared to my baseline model. I was really looking forward to trying a tri bike, but they didn’t have any there to sample. We also got to ride around Red Rock on a mountain bike. It was so much different than a road bike but a lot of fun!

Hey, even this dog was enjoying a little road biking! I thought this was too funny. How does that little guy stay on there?

After a C25K run/walk this morning, I made one of my favorite festive bowl of oats this holiday season. I call them festive oats! (gee that’s inventive)

I just love Egg Nog and usually find the low fat version or the soy version around this time of year. I also saw some kind of pumpkin spice nog at Walmart that I’ll have to try. Both low fat nog versions taste equally yummy. I could imagine these would be awesome in your morning coffee too.

Here’s my version this morning:

1/2 cup soy nog or low fat egg nog
1/2 cup skim milk
pumpkin pie spice, cinnamon, fresh nutmeg
1/2 cup oats
1 banana (1/2 mashed to add with oats, 1/2 for topping)
1 tsp flax mixed in
splash of vanilla extract
2 dates
Handful of Kashi cinnamon cereal and shredded wheat
sprinkling of pistachios and pomegranate seeds for the festive touch!

It’s not even Thanksgiving quite yet, but I thought this would be fun 🙂

How do you add a festive touch to your dishes? Any favorite items only available during the holiday season?

If I don’t post again till Thanksgiving I sure hope you all have a wonderful holiday weekend no matter what holidays you celebrate! We are going to visit Chris’ dad and step mom who just moved into a new cabin for their retirement. It’s going to be freezing, but I’m looking forward to spending time with family and enjoying a great meal. I am definitely most thankful for my family without a doubt. It just wouldn’t be the same without their never ending love and support. Hope you all enjoy your time too 🙂

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October 13, 2009

race success!

Filed under: Blog,Breakfast,Fitness/Health — Tags: dates, muffin, peanut butter, quick bread — Kristen :) @ 1:50 am

Boy, it was an eventful weekend! Chris had a really good time on his ride and he was really psyched. Thank you so much for all your well wishes! He felt really good for most of the ride which totaled 6 hours 35 minutes riding time with an average speed of 18 mph. It wasn’t really a race or anything, but he’ll find out about his exact time and rankings towards the end of the week. He’s hoping to be in the top 100 for the century.

Chris woke at 4 am and I slept till 4:30, then quickly threw on some clothes to take him to the ride. I don’t really know how he was planning to function that early, but I think the adrenaline was kicking in. I on the other hand just wanted to go back to bed 🙂

We got there in just enough time to get Chris geared up and make it to the start/finish line. It was more like a start/finish mob because there were so many cyclists! I think this is what would scare me the most. Trying to start with all those cyclists so close would make me nervous!

I felt like a proud mama as he started and then hoped that he would be okay on the ride. He made sure to stop at every fuel station and not take any chances with his first century. Even though this slowed his overall time down, it was a good idea to make sure he didn’t fatigue.

So while he was gone riding like a maniac, I decided to get in the kitchen and do some intense baking of my own! I tried another muffin recipe from Pinch My Salt and I think this one is THE best so far. It’s an applesauce spice muffin that uses ww flour, oat bran, wheat germ and flax with 3g of fiber per muffin. Instead of raisins I added chopped dates and I think these really added to the wonderful flavor. Yum!

I also baked another recipe from VeggieGirl called peanut butter banana bread. I added 1/2 cup chocolate chips. The only thing is, my worst fears came to fruition and I over-baked it!! I had to leave it in the pan too long when I went to pick Chris up, and when I was trying to get it out it fell apart! It sure tasted yummy though and super peanut buttery. Anyone know of good vegan binding tricks for breads? It just needed a bit more binding capacity I think.

After my baking, cleaning and washing fest, I made it in time to get some good shots at the finish, so happy!!

After the ride, the participants got a free lunch from Outback. mmm lots of high quality protein and carbs to fuel the muscles and replenish all those expended calories.

As far as glycogen replenishment, general guidelines are to have 1-1.5g/kg CHO as soon as possible after the event and every 2 hours after that until 7-10 g/kg is reached. This is especially important for those athletes who will be doing an event pretty soon again. It can take about 20 hours to fully replenish glycogen stores.

I had to buy lunch and was able to grab a couple tacos from Qdoba just as they were closing down shop. Instead of eating the second taco, there was a little kid running around giving away free ice cream. Heck yes!!

I decided to go for the creamsicle which I haven’t had for ages, and it was just as good and creamy as I remember.

After the race Chris was flying on the clouds and felt really good, but as we made our way home I could tell he was getting much more tired. I made him eat a large peanut butter, jelly, banana and honey sandwich with more fluids and then he rested on the couch for most of the night watching football. I also gave him a good leg massage and ice packed his legs. I was kind of worried about him, but the next morning he was chipper as could be and actually wanted to go on another ride! He’s actually been saying how he’s never felt stronger.

Overall it was a great experience and hopefully I can work up to that someday, or at least the 62 miler 🙂

Sunday we finally got to painting the guest room. I really like the color and hope we can get it ready soon. The color is called Restful by Behr and I want to do a shabby chic theme with some antique feel. I plan to organize it more this weekend hopefully because my mom will be here next Tuesday!

I majorly need to tackle my Google Reader and visit all your bloggies. I’m leaving for the SCAN workshop at the Olympic Training Center on Wednesday! I hope to come back with some cool pictures and useful information 🙂

I hope you all have a great week!

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September 14, 2009

just one more day

Filed under: Blog,Dinner — Tags: Beef, coconut water, muffin, pancake, pasta — Kristen :) @ 4:04 am

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?