Boy, Sunday just flew by and was packed with a lot of food!! Hope you had a nice Super Bowl and/or Sunday. I wasn’t really rooting for anyone in particular and only watched maybe the last part of the game (the most thrilling part!), but it was kind of nice to see the underdog win. Sorry Colts fans!
The day started out really nice with a casual and easy breakfast of (more…)
Most mornings there isn’t much time to prepare an elaborate breakfast and I’m sure most of you can surely relate. Because of this we tend to fall into a routine, having the same 2 or 3 breakfast staples that are easy to make and tweak according to our cravings for the day. I don’t think this is bad thing at all, especially if it’s healthy, filling and wholesome. Plus different components can be adjusted based on what’s at hand, like different fruits, cereals, etc. What breakfast should be is a priority every day, even with the limited time we have in the mornings. I don’t think I’ve ever not gone without breakfast, or at least try to grab something quick out the door. It gets the metabolism going, the brain functioning and prevents over eating throughout the day.
Breakfast is one of my favorites. Hello Morning!
Extending the wonderful breakfast for lunch I had yesterday at Toast, I wanted to utilize the leftover raspberry walnut pancakes somehow because they were so tasty. For something simple, I warmed up 1/2 the pancake, topped it with a fried egg, a sprinkling of 2% cheese and a small slice of salty bacon.
On the side I used 1/2 a pear as a bowl for some NF Greek yogurt with cinnamon. mmm . . . breakfast doesn’t have to be something elaborate every day.
Yep, something simple and to your liking will do just fine . . .
Other breakfast staples of mine during the busy week, that aren’t anything extraordinary but fit the bill include:
Today we are going to spend time with my aunt and little cousin that are in town visiting! We’re going to be romping around with the animals . . . hehe
What’s your favorite simple and quick breakfast staple?
Today was another great day, not having anything to do with work or school, and I think I may just as well go into shock when I have to go back : /
It started like most any other day, except I got to sleep in till 7:30am, I ate breakfast when their was actually glorious sunlight pouring through the windows, and I didn’t have to worry about going to work or school . . . so wait, I guess it wasn’t like most any other day! . . . another great thing about today was my first bloggie meet-up with Diana from The Chic Life! I was so excited and a bit nervous to meet with a fellow blogger, but I don’t consider her a stranger at all. It’s like we were long lost friends catching up! Reading all your different blogs, it feels like we are some how connected, and I feel so lucky to be apart of this blogging community where there are so many wonderful people.
I really enjoy reading her blog and her photography is stellar for someone who doesn’t think they know a lot about photography! I’ve seen other meet-ups in the blogworld and I’ve been wanting to because it looks like such fun. There aren’t too many bloggers in the Las Vegas area I don’t think, so it’s fun to meet new friends when you have the opportunity to over the holidays.
After much contemplation, because there are just so many choices out there, we decided to meet at a place called ‘Toast’. It is absolutely adorable!!! I go crazy over local places like this, so it was perfect.
Isn’t it cozy?
I already had a small bowl of cereal for breakfast, but I couldn’t decide if I wanted to continue with breakfast or lunch. I am so indecisive when it comes to menu items, especially when there are so many good ones to choose from! I read many reviews praising them for their breakfast, so I decided I should try breakfast!
One of their specials was raspberry walnut pancakes, but I was also eyeing the cheese quiche. I always like to order items that I would never really get anywhere else, and these two made it really hard to choose. Diana helped with my decision and said to try the pancakes since they are quite unique, and I’m glad I did! They were scrumptious. Every bite had a tart/sweet zing from the raspberries and a nice toasty crunch from the walnuts. I also drizzled some real maple syrup on the side and had one strip of crispy bacon. Yum! I could only finish half and took the rest to-go.
Diana went for the chicken gumbo and 1/2 turkey reuben. She graciously offered me a sample of the sammie and it was sure tasty!
Photo shots courtesy of Diana 🙂
Afterwards, we decided to hit up a nearby Starbucks to continue the conversation. I think we chatted the whole 3 hours or so! I was feeling like some hot tea since it was chilly outside and we both ordered some Zen, which is green tea with lemongrass and spearmint. I would highly recommend this one and I think I may have to get a box for myself.
We also shared a cinnamon chip scone and of course this was awesome, flaky and butterlicious, laced with pockets of cinnamon streusel.
Oh boy I’m on a carbo overload! Dinner will include something green 🙂
Thanks Diana for a great meet-up! It was so nice getting to meet with someone who shares similar beliefs and passions and is such a nice person! My heart is full and I’m so glad we were able to get together with the short time that I have here. I still may try to meet up again for some zumba hopefully!
After picking my mom up from work, we didn’t have too much time before the b-ball game and just grabbed something quick for dinner. I made a big salad with sweet tater casserole on the side. It was actually good used like a dressing for the salad, and I scooped a little bit of the casserole with each bite 🙂
The Charlotte Bobcats basketball game was a lot of fun! Chris, being the big sports fan that he is, was really looking forward to it 🙂 GO BOBCATS!
They had a pretty big victory and afterwards we decided to check out the EpiCentre downtown.
It has shops, restaurants and also a movie theater. We wanted to see if there were any places open for some dessert, but everything was closing! I guess we weren’t in Vegas anymore 🙂 The movie theater is neat because it has a restaurant attached and you can eat and drink in the theaters! Diana said they have nice plushy chairs too. Very posh and chic inside. . .
Oh man, I’m pooped! Maybe I’ve finally adjusted to east coast time. Tomorrow will be filled with chasing around my little cousin who is visiting!
Hope you all had a nice Monday 🙂
Happy Friday to everyone!! This week went by pretty fast and I actually got some good gym time in, yay! I think this weekend is going to be packed already, and there will be no room for dilly dallying like last weekend 🙂
Tonight for the Viva Bike Vegas Ride they are having a pasta party for all the riders and friends/family. Frankly I could make a butt-load of pasta myself for $10, but I want to go and support Chris and chat with the other riders. I’ve been having Chris eat predominately carbs towards the end of the week to maximize his stores and calories. I also told him to go easy on the pasta. Just stuffing your face the night before won’t help and will make you feel bloated and icky in the morning. He still needs to make sure to get a substantial meal in, especially since it will start early in the morning and will last at least 6 1/2 hours.
Saturday is the ride! Gosh, I think I’m more nervous than he is. I don’t want my guy to ‘hit the wall’ and end up like that video I recently posted. I think he’s going to do awesome, but I still worry like always 🙂 Consistency will be key and making sure to fuel up at every station.
This weekend I have to study for my research methods midterm on Monday . . . eek! I also have to paint, organize and decorate the guest room for my mom when she comes in less than two weeks. Wednesday I leave for the SCAN sports nutrition workshop at the Olympic Training Center. Lots to do!
One of the high carb meals we had this week was breakfast for dinner!! Who doesn’t like warm pancakes at any meal?! I decided to make my favorite WW pumpkin pancake recipe from Pinch My Salt. They come out golden, fluffy and full of spicy, pumpkin flavor. You can find it here.
Instead of whip cream, I like to use Greek yogurt.
I added one vanilla bean and it was out of this world, bursting with intense vanilla flavor.
I’ll save the rest of the beans for vanilla ice cream or pudding. Any ideas?
I put the rest of the pod in the sugar jar to give it some more vanilla flavor. Yum!
Along with it I made a little omelet, with roasted red peppers, grilled chicken and spinach, and of course real maple syrup. Yum!
This is really easy to prep before hand too. Just separate the wet and dry ingredients and then mix together when you want to make them and enjoy! I just couldn’t resist and had to have another one 😉
Buster likes to help with the dishes too.
It’s funny he has to be right in the middle of the kitchen and I have to be careful I don’t trip over him!
Each time I go to the farmer’s market I plan to get a new variety of mushrooms to try out. This week I decided on this . . .
Looks very strange! It’s a wild Oregon mushroom, but I can’t remember the exact name of it. Maybe one of you mushroom experts out there can help. It sure looks similar to a Maitake? I’m not sure exactly what to do with it, but I was thinking of some kind of mushroom Bolognese, we’ll see!
I hope you have a great weekend 🙂
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?
{Just a little weekend recap} Once again the weekend just flew by and it was pretty packed! Saturday I went with a friend to get pampered with a pedicure and lunch. Then I went to a gardening class at my work (UNCE). It was really interesting, and I hope to eventually start a little raised bed in our backyard, if not for the fall, hopefully next spring. I’m just wondering when I would have the time to garden in addition to work, grad school and other life happenings. Do any of you garden?
Sunday we went for a nice bike ride to Boulder City. It was only 21 miles but I tried to push myself pretty hard to see if I could keep up with the faster pack. um, yeah. I started a little behind and just couldn’t keep up! At one point I almost gained some ground, but I was sucking air and figured I better take it easy since it was really hot outside. I just have to keep at it! I also got my first pair of bike shoes and clipless pedals. Yep, I guess they are called clipless, not clip-in, like I thought. I hope I can get out of them in time to stop or else I’ll be having a few crashes, oh dear. I’m still trying to figure out how I can take pictures while I’m riding. I can barely grab my water bottle without wobbling all over the place!
For my adv sports nutrition class we have a project looking at a sports supplement/group of supplements and seeing if research supports its claims. Anyone have a good idea for a supplement/ergogenic aid? There are just so many out there, I’m trying to decide. {end weekend recap}
I try to eat flexitarian most of the time, not only because it’s pretty darn healthy, but it’s also very budget-friendly. I usually only eat meat 4-5 times per week or less and try to incorporate meat alternatives like tofu or beans to provide some variety. I posted about this before here when I made yummy falafels, one of my favorite vegetarian meals.
Chris and I usually spend anywhere from $70-80/week for two people eating breakfast, lunch and dinner from home. Sometimes I have to control myself because grocery shopping for me is like a kid in a candy store! I swear I could spend hours in a place like Whole Foods just finding tons of things that I could buy and try, dangerous! Having a recipe plan beforehand helps to keep me on track. We eat out about 3-4x/month and try to keep this to a minimum. I mostly shop at Trader Joe’s and Walmart and mostly buy basics, that is things that are unprocessed, because it is usually almost always cheaper if you make it and chop it yourself. It may take a little bit longer, but in the long run it is worth it for health and saving money.
Recently I found a blog that is great for active vegetarians called No Meat Athlete. Recently he posted a recipe for corn-type pancakes for dinner. I thought this was a great idea so I decided to try my hand at it because, well one, it looked pretty easy and fast for a weeknight meal, and two, it was cheap! Yes please!
I made the batter for the pancakes and found it was a bit too runny for me. I wanted some more structure and puff to them, so I adapted a recipe from CookingLight and they turned out pretty darn good. They were just like pancakes and had a nice texture from the cornmeal. I topped them with the black bean mixture and added a can of fire roasted maters and an oh so glorious poached egg and mozzarella cheese. I just love egg yolk! I completely believe that whole eggs can be a part of a healthy diet, because while it is high in cholesterol, saturated fat can be more detrimental to our lipid profiles.
For the corny cakes:
Simply mix all the dry ingredients in a large bowl, and the wet ingredients in a smaller bowl. Add the wet to the dry and mix. Cook them over medium heat in a large pan or griddle until golden.
For the black bean topping:
Mix ingredients in a pot and heat together.
For the poached egg:
Gently boil a pot of water with about 1 tbsp of white vinegar. Gently pour egg into the water and simmer until desired degree of doneness (about 4-5 minutes). I always have had a hard time making my poached eggs perfectly round, but it didn’t turn out too bad this time. Do you have any secrets to the perfect poached egg?
Mid-bite yolky goodness . . .
This was such a satisfying meal and very filling with the beans! These pancakes are also great for breakfast or as a pancake sandwich, yum!
What are your best tips for eating healthy on a budget? Any ergogenic aid ideas?
Have a great week!
Mom was always right when she said that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. It gets our minds and bodies ready for the day and actually improves our mental functioning (and you thought you only needed coffee for that!) If we have a satisfying breakfast full of protein and fiber, it keeps us satisfied until lunch and prevents us from becoming famished and overeating. There is actually research that says people who eat a balanced breakfast every day actually weigh less than those who don’t eat breakfast. The reason? Well, eating breakfast gets our metabolism revving and prevents our bodies from thinking we are “starving” and hoarding the calories we do consume (which is usually more if we don’t eat breakfast). So for those of you who don’t eat breakfast because you aren’t hungry, or don’t have time, or . . . I encourage you to start the habit because your body will thank you.
Here are some of the things I eat for breakfast, along with some other quick “on-the-go” ideas:
Please let me know of your favorite breakfast food!
Every once in awhile, Chris and I really enjoy having the traditional breakfast on the weekends. The kind of breakfast that holds you over well after lunch time. You know what I’m talking about . . . eggs, bacon, the whole she-bang. Well, I recently tried a great Whole Wheat Pumpkin Pancake recipe from www.pinchmysalt.com and it was to die for. So if you love pumpkin during the holidays, you should really try this recipe along with the other must-haves like scrambled eggs, bacon or turkey bacon, etc. Insteat of maple syrup we like to mixed pumpkin butter and cinnamon into non-fat greek yogurt which is really good.
Another great weekend breakfast recipe that we love, and also works well for company because you can make it the night before, is the Sausage and Cheese Breakfast Casserole from CookingLight. I’ve tweaked it a little bit and have used a couple great products from Trader Joe’s.
I hope you enjoy these because we sure do, yum!
Sausage and Cheese Breakfast Casserole
12 servings (serving size: about 1 cup)
1. Heat a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Coat pan with cooking spray. Add sausage to pan; cook 5 minutes or until browned, stirring and breaking sausage to crumble. Remove from heat; cool.
2. Combine milk and next 6 ingredients (through eggs) in a large bowl, stirring with a whisk.
3. Cut bread into 1-inch cubes. Add bread cubes, sausage, and cheddar cheese to milk mixture, stirring to combine. Pour bread mixture into a 13 x 9–inch baking or 3-quart casserole dish coated with cooking spray, spreading egg mixture evenly in baking dish. Cover and refrigerate 8 hours or overnight.
4. Preheat oven to 350°.
5. Remove casserole from refrigerator; let stand 30 minutes. Bake at 350° for 45 minutes or until set and lightly browned. Let stand 10 minutes.
Sometimes I like to saute some vegetables along with the sausage like zucchini or mushrooms too.
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