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Books, Cooking/Recipes, Uncategorized

Summer Foods

heather

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve been going totally off the rails since Saturday.  One hour and 56 minutes of straight exercise does NOT create a caloric deficit equal to beer + ribs + pizza + Chubby Hubby + jalapeno poppers/onion rings/fried mushrooms + nachos + several (and I do mean several) chocolate coconut bars.

Anyway, today is a new day, and I look forward to putting this backslide behind me and getting rid of my volleyball tummy.  I made some bone broth yesterday, and I have some sprouted almonds roasting in the oven.  We ordered another hog, which is going to the butcher today.  We’ve learned some lessons from our prior experiences. We are getting a lot more ground pork instead of smoked hams, for one.  We’ve also requested the bones (for bone broth), and we’re not getting any sausage since we don’t know what exactly they put in that (msg??).  It’s easy enough to turn ground pork into sausage with the addition of a few spices.

My brother’s girlfriend just sent us a new book that will come in super handy too –Good Meat.  It has a ton of helpful information on how to have the pig butchered, as well as recipes on how to cook the pastured pork.  Plus, it’s just a beautiful book, at least if you are into food pictures.  🙂

Before going on the bad-food binge, I did make a great primal recipe: Better Than Fried Chicken with Coconut Aminos Dipping Sauce.  This was a very easy recipe to make, and the results were super delicious!  The skin was crispy, and the flavor was sweet, almost teriyaki-like.  I still have not found a place to buy coconut aminos locally though, and on Amazon, the shipping (it’s not available through a prime seller) is more than the aminos!  Since I don’t have aminos, I used tamari instead.  It has soy in it though.  🙁  The result was still delicious, if not 100% paleo.  We couldn’t eat all of it, so we put the leftovers in the fridge.  The skin lost its crispness (as disclosed in the recipe), but the chicken flavor was awesome cold.

In the midst of binge week, I also tried a non-paleo recipe:  Perfect Summer Basil Burger.  We have SEVEN basil plants growing, 4 different varieties. I pulled leaves from each of them to make the Perfect Basil Sauce.  We also used fresh mozzarella instead of shredded.  To make the recipe slightly healthier, we used olive oil instead of vegetable oil, and we skipped the grated parm.  I also made homemade mayo with olive oil.  The results were DELICIOUS!!  I LOVE that basil sauce.  Next time to make it more primal-friendly I will use greek yogurt instead of sour cream, but I think that’s the only change I would make.

And that’s my update.  It’s Friday.  I am off work.  We’re planning on a nice, long bike ride on a sunny day.  Life is good.  Have a fabulous weekend!!

Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness, Paleo, Uncategorized

I killed winter dead

heather

It’s 50 degrees and sunny today.  I’m declaring winter dead.  Officially.  My name rhymes with weather, so my word actually holds some weight.  To celebrate the non-depressingness of today, I got a great massage for $15 this morning, had a Bloody Mary with a friend, ran 3.1 miles, raked a portion of the yard, and took a shower.  After planning the meals for the week (Slow Cooked Chicken Adobo, Beef & Cabbage Stir Fry, Salmon, Spaghetti Squash Crusted Quiche, Swedish Meatballs, and Amaretti Thins (for dessert)), I started this blog post, wrestled with whether or not to buy running tights from REI (said no for now – super proud of myself), and then went to the store.  And that’s my March 29th so far.

Last week I made a couple of tried and true recipes and one newbie.

1.  Oven-Baked Paleo Pork Ribs.  I put the spice rub on these ribs the night before, and then put them in the Nesco on 200 for about 6 hours.  While I was at work, Tim kept a close eye on them and took them out right when they were fall-off-the-bone tender.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve tried the bbq sauce mentioned in the recipe, and it did not turn out AT ALL for me, so I didn’t make it again.  We saved the juice that cooked out the ribs, however.  It mixes with all the spices and makes a super tasty sauce for the meat.

2.  To accompany the ribs, I tried a new recipe, the tantalizingly named, Broccoli Salad.  The mix of bacon, raisins, sunflower seeds and bacon sounded very interesting.  I sauteed the sunflower seeds in the bacon grease and added some salt to them. I left out the onions, as Timmy Tee is not a fan of raw onions.  This turned out amazingly delicious.  Tim and I both loved it, even though I typically do not like raw broccoli.  Here’s a pic of the ribs, broccoli salad, and the kimchi Tim made.

photo3 (1)

This morning I prepared supper for tonight – pork chops and sweet potato salad.  I’m using a garlic ginger marinade I found in an Allrecipes magazine, so I can’t link to it, but I sure can show you a picture of it!  Tim is grilling these babies up as I type.

photo2 (2)

Here is the recipe for the potato salad.  It seems as if whenever I make paleo mayo, I can never use it all before it supposedly goes bad (3 days).  I had some leftover mayo from the broccoli salad that I made last week.  It still smelled totally fine, but I was wary of using week-old mayo.  Instead, I added some rice wine vinegar, olive oil, and mustard to the potatoes and accouterments.  It turned out really good, and you can’t even tell it doesn’t have real mayo in it!  I think I’ll continue to use this shortcut in the future and save myself the expense of wasting 1/2 a cup of premium quality California olive oil.

And that’s it for today!  Tomorrow is supposed to be even more beautiful, so we are planning a 30 mile bike ride.  I’m going to be falling asleep at my desk on Monday…  I need to find a job where I can cook, eat, run, and bike for a living!

Hope you have a great Saturday!

Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness, Paleo, Uncategorized

Devils on Horseback and Other Random Shiz

heather

My good friend, Michael, hosted a Drink & Draw at his place on Saturday.  Well, ostensibly it was a Drink & Draw.  In reality it was a Drink & Eat & Play Dirty Cards.  No drawing was to be had.  We did TALK about drawing, at least, so that’s something.  We also did drink.  A lot. We definitely had the drinking part of the Drink & Draw covered.  We also ate a lot of tasty food – nice cheeses, gluten-free crackers, grapes, corned beef & cabbage, lots of dark chocolate, etc.  It was all very tasty.  What was my contribution to the festivities, you may ask?  Any guesses?  I’ll just tell you – Devils on Horseback (aka the boringly named “bacon wrapped dates”).

This was my first attempt at making these tasty treats, but not my first attempt at eating them.  I generally love dates, so when I saw them on the Biaggi’s New Years menu in 2013, I had to try them.  They                 BLEW                    MY                      MIND.  They were so delicious.  So I finally got around to trying them on Saturday.

They are incredibly easy to make – you just cut bacon in half, wrap it around dates, stick them in the oven to cook, and then hit them with the broiler.  They turned out pretty damn tasty too. However, next time I make these I will broil them for about 3 minutes and then flip them and broil them on the other side for 3 minutes.  My dates got a little too toasty on the top when I broiled them on one side for 5 minutes.  I would also like to try the modification mentioned in the recipe and stuff the dates with goat cheese before wrapping them in bacon.  I think that would be amazing.

This is not a cheap treat, what with the cost of dates and pork these days, and with the high carb content of dates, this is not something you should be eating a ton of anyway.  I think I ate 3 of them at least.  They are dangerous.

Now on the “Other Random Shiz.”

My skin, which always does poorly in the winter, was finally starting to clear up and look semi-good, only to regress back to annoyingness.  I tried to pin-point the cause of the relapse.  All I can think of is that for awhile I was drinking about 1 cup of bone broth a day, but then I ran out, so I stopped.  To rectify this situation I journeyed to the Farmers Market on Saturday to pick up some soup bones.  I got a few packages of chicken bones for $10, but then.  Then, I hit the mother load.  I went to the Sawyer Beef guy, and he sold me this for $16:

IMG_6325

That is 16 pounds of grass fed marrow bones.  I was in heaven.  I eagerly carted them home with the intention of separating the bones into more reasonably-sized packages.  When I opened the box, I realized that the bones were hopelessly frozen together.  After pounding  away at them for a few minutes and ruining a perfectly good Pampered Chef wooden spoon, I  gave up and just left the bones out to defrost until I could pry them apart.

Once I could break off a few bones, I combined them with apple cider vinegar, a frozen bag of veggie clippings, a chopped onion, a bay leaf, garlic, and filtered water.  I set the Nesco on low and let it cook away.  I bagged up the rest of the bones into more reasonably-sized packages, but them in our freezer, and headed off to run errands.

When we returned home, we were assaulted by the odor of marrow being forcefully sucked from the insides of large cow bones.  I promptly set up a table in the back porch and took the broth out there to cook down in peace.

About 24 hours later, I drained the chunks out of the broth, let the bones cool, and then took a knife to the inside of the bones, pulling out all the marrow that was still remaining.  I dumped the chunky marrow into the broth, and then poured the broth in batches into our Vitamix, blending the broth until it was a nice, foamy caramel brown, which I then poured into jars for freezing.

IMG_6331

The broth turned out really well, IMHO.  I had some yesterday and today and will continue to drink it until my stupid skin starts to behave again.

And that was our weekend!  Hope you enjoyed your Saint Patrick’s Day in a healthy, responsible matter.  🙂

Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness, Paleo, Uncategorized

Sunday Recap

heather

Wow. What a week.  I thought the week before last was busy, but this week put it to shame.  First of all, an update on the topics discussed last week:

  • Meals
    • I DID make the Crockpot Coffee Ancho Chile Short Ribs.  I think they turned out fine, but I wasn’t blown away by them, which was really too bad because Tim has been knocked out by a severe stomach issue for the past 7-10 days, so I had to eat all 4 pounds of this by myself.  It was tasty at first, but after about the 5th meal of ribs and sauerkraut (which Tim made and which turned out SUPER awesome), I was very much over it.
    • I made Heavenly Paleo Meatloaf, leaving out the onions, red pepper, and cayenne to protect Teeeeeeem’s tummy.  It still turned out really good.  It seemed to sit well with Tim, too, who got all creative and made meatloaf and sauerkraut soup with some homemade chicken broth (recipe from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman).  The meatloaf recipe can no longer be found online, but if you want a copy, let me know in the comments.
    • Paleo Fudgy Brownies.  A large portion of my favorite recipes are from Health-Bent; however, this one did not turn out well for me.  I baked the brownies for 18 minutes as indicated in the recipe.  They still looked very under-done when I took them out, but I didn’t take the time to really test them.  I waited for them to cool and realized that they were still completely doughy in the middle.  I refrigerated them and was then able to scoop out bars and microwave them for about a minute (they burn something fierce if you microwave them for 2 minutes, fyi).  They get a little more cooked that way.  The flavor is pretty good – but very nutty.  These won’t stay in my dessert rotation, especially since they call for 1 cup of almond butter.  These are some EXPENSIVE brownies.  In fact, after failing this recipe, I went through my recipe binder and tore out all the recipes calling for full cups of nut butter.  I’m trying to be more thrifty with my cooking.  More on that in a later blog post.
    • I didn’t get around to making the Cowboy Breakfast Skillet, but that’s on the docket for this week.  Since I’m trying to be more frugal, I didn’t plan many official meals this week; we are just going to scrounge around and eat what’s here.  That means we’ll have a lot of scrambles, stir fries, and tomato soup.  If I can get our monthly food spend below $700, I’ll be happy!

And to tie up some more loose ends from last week:

  • My water kefir turned out!!!  YAY!!!  I’m so excited.  I did a double ferment which means I fermented the water for 2 days, then transferred it to a flip-top bottle, added 1/4 cup of organic cherry juice, and let it sit for 6 days.  When I opened it up on Thursday, it shot carbonated water 6 inches into the air! Out came fizzy pink, delicious water kefir.  The flavor was great.  The only disappointment is that the kefir didn’t stay very carbonated after I transferred it to a regular mason jar.  Maybe I have to keep it in the flip-top bottle for it to stay carbonated.  I need to get some more of those bottles.  The single-fermented water kefir is way too sweet for me, so I’m going to have to double ferment everything.  I’m so excited that this turned out.
  • Yoga – We didn’t go on Monday, but we did make it on Wednesday.  There was a different teacher this time, and instead of telling you exactly what to do, she allowed you to make it “your workout.”  That meant that she described several variations of what you could be doing at any point in time.  It was very confusing to me.  I just want to be told to do one thing, so I can look at the teacher or the other students and figure out exactly what I should be doing.  We are trying a different class with a different teacher on Tuesday to see if we can find something more our style.
  • Swimming – We actually made it to the pool yesterday!  We went to the Y at 9AM, and had no trouble finding a lane.  The water was tortuously cold though!
  • CBRC Chili Chase – The 4 mile run last Sunday was an adventure!  The sun was out, but the temp was only about 20 degrees.  The course was damn hilly too!  The finish line is at the TOP of a hill, which is just so painful and cruel. I probably would have stopped and walked if there wouldn’t have been so many people watching the finish line.  As it was, out of 123 female runners, I came in 39th, which means I got a free CBRC coffee mug! It’s the first time I’ve won any award for a race, so that kind of made up for being extremely cold while simultaneously hot and sweaty and generally miserable.   This was our first CBRC run, and it was actually, all told, a really fun time.  The crowd was in good spirits, very supportive, and they gave us beer afterwards.  🙂

So there’s my update!  This week looks to be another busy week – yoga on Tuesday, drinks with coworkers on Wednesday, Wine & Art at the Figge on Thursday with my Mammacita, and then a trip to Monticello to visit the folks.  HOW do people regularly exercise and/or take exercise classes in the evening??  It seems impossible to get anything else done (like making supper).  I can’t wait until the weather warms up so I can start running in the AM again.  It makes me feel so much better all day, and then my evening is free.

Wow, this is kind of a long post.  Maybe I should start writing more than once/week.

I want to thank the new subscribers to my blog – thank you for reading!  I’m used to my blog only being read by my Mom, husband, best friend, and occasionally one or two of my brothers.  While I’m sure they are always RIVETED by the content, I realize they are bound by love and duty to read this; whereas, you are not.  So thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the posts and find them useful.

Have a great week!

Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness, Paleo, Uncategorized

Primal Potluck

heather

Back in early January, I proclaimed my intention to re-do the 21 Day Challenge (after being primal for 2 years).  After a long road trip, subsequent vacation, long road trip back, and then a long, cold, dark winter, I felt as if I needed a primal re-fresh.  The 80/20 was slipping to 70/30 or even worse.  So on 1/6, I started The Challenge.  Some of my friends at work were also trying to eat better, so I invited everyone over for a Primal Potluck to be held on 2/8 to celebrate our success.

Well, if you read this blog, you know that my plan ran into some snags, so I fell of the wagon.  We still had the Potluck, however.  This winter has been brutal, and hanging out with friends and eating good food makes one evening of it less brutal.

I originally invited 6 other couples, which including Tim and me, would have made 16 people and one oblivious chihuahua in our little house.  I would have loved to have everyone though – the more the merrier, right??  Well, it ended up that only 2 other couples could make it, and the 6 of us made a full, merry household.

For the main course, I made this Texas Oven-Roasted Beef Brisket.  I usually use honey instead of sugar, but we were all out, so we used organic sugar instead.  Also, instead of the beef stock, I used home-made bone broth.  It turned out very tasty!

For a side dish, I made Chipotle Slaw.  To be more exact, Tim and I made Chipotle Slaw.  As I was chopping the cilantro, I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what I was doing.  I sliced off the right 1/3 of my left index fingernail.  It hurt like a mother.  Tim had to take over chopping duties, after tossing the fingernail-tainted cilantro.  Despite the drama, the slaw turned out quite tasty and went well with the brisket.  I also defrosted the chicken liver pate I made a couple of weeks ago (read more here).  We served it with Blue Diamond Almond Nut Thins.  People said it tasted better than it looked as if it would taste – which is a compliment I will take.  I think the flavor did improve whilst in the freezer.  It tasted more like braunschweiger the second time around, which is a good thing.

For dessert, I hazarded a new recipe – Lemon Basil Cookies.  I was intrigued by the idea of basil in a sweet dessert.  These turned out fabulous!  They have the consistency of a peanut butter cookie – very dense and flavorful.  They go great with coffee and are not too sweet.  I cross-hatched the top with a fork like you do with peanut butter cookies, and they looked beautiful when baked.  Everyone liked them, or at least said they did.  😉

Our guests brought a delicious array of food as well – French wine, a salad with endive, radicchio, apples, walnuts, capers, avocado and a lot of other stuff, baked salmon with fresh dill, dark chocolate bars, bacon-wrapped shrimp, and bacon-wrapped pineapple.  It was a smorgasbord of tastiness.  Oh!  And we bought a Bota Box of wine – the Redvolution.  For $17.99, you get a box full of the equivalent of 4 bottles of wine. It’s pretty good too, for wine that average $4.50 a bottle.  While searching for wine, I picked up a bottle of Pinot Nior for $9.99 and a bottle of Malbec for $10.99, but then I heard Mr. Money Mustache’s  in my ear.  I decided to be frugal and smart instead of a fancy pants, and went with the cheaper (probably just as tasty) alternative.

Hmm.  Am I forgetting anything?  Oh yes.  Well, this is not primal at all, but a friend of mine got me a cheesecake for my birthday.  While I absolutely love cheesecake, it does not love me.  I had a piece at work on Friday, and on my way home experienced one of my old anxiety spells at a stoplight. I just can’t handle the sugar/dairy that well any more.  However, my adoration of cheesecake is so intense, that I will continue to eat it if it’s in my house, despite the deleterious affects.  To relieve myself from that personal demon, I served the rest of the cheesecake to our guests.  Everyone loved it.

While the whole supper was not strictly primal, it was a really fun evening, with interesting company, really tasty food (that was mostly really good for you), and good conversation.  Maybe we’ll do it again in February 2015!

Well, Tim and I need to head off to the pool before we cross over that hump where we don’t get out of our pajamas all day.  Hope you have a great Sunday!

Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness, Uncategorized

The Comfort of Home

heather

Well, I’m back.  I can’t say, “and better than ever.”  It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, or actually a crazy month, here in the Longoria household.  We returned from a monster road trip to AZ on January 2nd, finally got all settled in and reacclimated, only to head back out to AZ on January 11th.  We got a call on the 9th that Tim’s mom passed away unexpectedly, so we went down for a week to be with Tim’s brothers and their families and to help with all the arrangements.  We flew back home on the 17th.  We spent the weekend unpacking, cleaning up, spending time with my parents, and getting prepared for really going back to work.

The first week back to “normal” was anything but relaxing.  I caught up on the 3 programming classes I missed whilst in AZ, only to discover that I was in WAY over my head.  The first homework assignment almost had me in tears.  I’m not usually super emotional, but a week away from home handling stressful business had worn away my protective layer.  So I ended up dropping the class, which was hard on my ego and pocketbook, but relieving to my shoulders and mental state.  I also discovered I completed my benefits form incorrectly, so I have to spend $1500 on vision and dental in 2014.  I think I’m going to get all 4 front teeth capped with gold.  Or maybe I’ll get lasik.  Who knows??  Anyway, it was a stressful week.

But today starts a new week, and I have faith it’s going to be a good week.  It culminates in my birthday, so how could it be bad??  I’m trying to figure out what to do for my birthday.  I get a day off for it, and I’m trying to decide if I want to spend it with people or spend it just doing whatever the heck I want to do for a whole day.  The latter would probably mean watching Pride & Prejudice for the 33rd time, eating a pan of paleo cupcakes, and trying to resist the urge to get my nails shellaced and my hair dyed red.  I’m *trying* to be more fiscally responsible.  I guess I have 4 days to figure it all out.

In the vein of getting back to normal, we did a lot of grocery shopping this weekend, so we are fully stocked with healthy food.  The past month has been hell on my digestion (and energy), so I’m looking forward to getting back on track.

I tried a new recipe yesterday – Beef Stew.  I tried this recipe.  Wow.  That really says it all.  This turned out SO fantastic.  I followed the recipe except for I subbed a large sweet potato for the turnips, I used dried thyme instead of fresh, and I used button mushrooms instead of cremini.  Nom Nom wasn’t lying when she said this recipe is a lot of work. I swear I was chopping and sauteeing for 2 hours yesterday!  But the result was fabulous.  The sweet potatoes disappeared into the sauce, making it sweet, and the meat was ever so tender.  This recipe is  definitely a keeper.

It being winter, and me missing the AZ sun and all, led me to crave pancakes today. I have yet to find a paleo pancake recipe that I love, so I searched around and found this one.  The flavor was excellent!  Like all paleo pancakes, I struggled with getting the inside cooked while not burning the outside.  I powered through though, and we ended up with edible, tasty cakes.  I might experiment with baking them next time.  I just get so pissed when they won’t flip.  Dammit.

I tried a couple of new recipes last week too but didn’t get around to writing about them.

Crispy Coconut Kale:  I absolutely love coconut milk.  I love to put it in my coffee, but often I will open a can to use in coffee and not use most of it before it congeals and goes bad. This time I was smart and found a couple of recipes that use coconut milk before I cracked the can open.  This recipe turned out amazingly delicious.  I will definitely make this again.  I used the rest of the coconut milk in these cupcakes, which Tim and I ate up in 2 days.  That’s why I REALLY want a paleo bakery in Dport.  I want to spend $3.00 to get ONE cupcake instead of spending $3.00 to make 12 paleo cupcakes and then eating them all.  I can’t be the only one.  If no one else is going to do this, I’m going to have to quit my job and launch HloDeCello’s Paleo Bakery!  So help me!

Silky-Smooth Chicken Liver Pate:  Hmm.  I do like the taste of liver.  I do.  But pates just go so much better with something crunchy.  I tried to eat this with carrots, and it just wasn’t that fantastic.  I made almost 2 pounds of it, so I need to figure out a good way to eat it.  Tim had the brilliant idea of making hardboiled eggs and mixing the pate with the yolks for the centers.  I may just try that.  This pate had a whole stick of grassfed butter in it, so I  HAVE to use it.  Plus it created a ton of disgusting dishes that Tim bravely washed for me.  Oxidized chicken liver is pretty hideous.

This week I kind of lazed out and didn’t plan any meals.  I did make a list of all the food in the fridge and freezer, however, so at least we can quickly plan a meal with a quick glance. I see lots of sauteed veggies and scrambles in our future.  But that’s alright.  I’m just so glad to be home and eating our own food again.  I’m sick of eating out.  At least for awhile.

I hope your 2014 is off to a better start than ours!  Take care, and I’ll write again soon.

Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness, Uncategorized

Primal Challenge – Day 2

heather

Here’s the detes for the day.  I started tracking my food on MyFitnessPal, per the recommendation of a friend.  I know it’s not 100% accurate (partially because I estimate the amount of food and partially because you can’t always find exact matches), but it will at least give me an idea of where I am getting most of my calories.  Today I’m at 67% fat, 23% protein, and 10% carbs (it was a heavy bacon day).  I’m at 1719 calories for the day, which I think would be low for me in the summer but is probably pretty accurate for me in the winter time.  I’ll keep using this for a few days and see how it works.

  • Did 30 minutes of yoga.
  • Breakfast
    • 2 cups of coffee with 1/2 teaspoon of coconut oil.
    • Sauteed broccoli, red bell pepper, and kale in bacon fat, 2 pieces of bacon
  • Lunch
    • Salad with mushrooms, sardines, cucumbers, walnuts, red bell pepper, and olive oil and ACV
  • Supper
    • Grilled eggs with chorizo with 1/2 an avocado
    • I think the Fitness tracker probably WAY overestimated the fat & salt in the chorizo, because I used homemade chorizo.
  • Snacks
    • 2 slices of bacon, 2 carrots, handful of walnuts
  • Drinks – all day long lots of herbal tea.
  • No improvement yet in allergies/joint pain.
  • Verdict for the day:  Success!  I resisted 20th anniversary cupcakes, a veiled insinuation that I should go out for drinks after work, and a counter-top full of toffee and peanut butter cups.  So far I haven’t been seriously tempted, but that’s probably more hormonal than anything.  You girls know what I mean.  🙂

Our gym membership lapsed in December.  We really only need a gym Feb – May, so we can train for the triathlon (pool).  We were going to save some cash and sign up next month, but we are already going stir crazy.  I know the primal community is not big on running, but Tim and I miss it.  We can run when it’s 30 outside, but not when it’s 30 below.  We’re going to have to join up somewhere so we can get our bodies moving again.

Life is ramping up to be busy again.  I start a new class at Iowa State on Monday. It’s a programming class, and I have NO programming experience.  I just read the syllabus, and we have a GROUP project.  Bah!!  That’s going to be no fun.  Hopefully I’ll get lucky and group up with a brilliant programmer.

So between projects at work, school, meal planning and cooking, ramping up training for the tri, and crocheting a scarf (which is turning out super cute, btw), I’m going to be one busy Hlo.  But happiness is growth right??  Hlo in June is going to be happy that Hlo in January was miserable.  You are welcome, future self.

Health & Fitness, Paleo, Uncategorized

Primal Challenge – Day 1

heather

I have a new recipe to tell you about.  I made this tried and true garlic pulled pork recipe on Sunday.  Since we were going to be home almost all day, I cooked it in the oven instead of the crockpot like I normally do.  It turned it sooooo much better – very tender and butter-soft.  To get an even healthier dose of the super food that is garlic, I paired it with Couve a Mineira and a side of avocado.  It was delicious!!  And cheap!  Collard Greens are only 59 cents.  Bonkers.

Anyway, here’s the super exciting food/exercise details of Day 1.

  • Meditated 5 minutes using Mindfulness app.
  • Breakfast
    • 2 cups of coffee with 1/2 teaspoon of coconut oil.
    • 2 eggs with red peppers & kale sauteed in bacon fat, and squash seasoned with s&p and turmeric. Ate 1/2 at home and 1/2 about an hour later at work.
  • Lunch
    • Salad with organic lettuce, albacore tuna, red peppers, walnuts, mushrooms, green onions, and cucumbers, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
    • 2 slices of bacon.
  • Snack
    • Organic apple, 1 piece of celery, 1 carrot.
  • After-work snack.
    • Two pieces of celery with almond butter.
  • Supper
    • Leftover garlic pulled pork.
    • Salad with red peppers, green onions, and cucumbers.
  • Drinks – all day long lots of herbal tea.
  • Exercise – Did 10 pushups, 3 pullups, did 10 flights of stairs at work.
  • No improvement yet in allergies/joint pain.

I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to keep a food log.  I have the Evernote Food app, where you can take pics of your food and then make comments on it, but I’m not liking it so far.  It’s too complicated for what I need.  I also don’t like typing my food into my phone and then retyping it here.  I might just resort to a little old school notebook.  We’ll see.  Logging food is pretty tedious, but lots of folks say it really opens your eyes as to what you really eat in a day.  We’ll see!

Health & Fitness, Paleo, Uncategorized

21 Day Challenge Reboot

heather

It’s January 2014, and you know what that means – resolutions!!  I won’t share all the nitty gritty details, but like most folks, my resolutions revolve around living a healthier, more fulfilling, happier life.  To start the year off on the right foot, I’m doing another 21 Day Challenge.  Why would I do this after being paleo for almost 2 years?  Well, the whole 80/20 thing is a slippery slope, for one thing.  It’s very difficult to be specific about what 80/20 means.  In theory it means eating a cookie maybe once a week, or having a beer here and there.  In practice, however, for me at least it means eating too many sweets, too much gluten, and drinking too many drinks, all under the guise of “20%.”

So I’m doing the 21 Day Challenge again for several reasons.  I want to reboot my system to reduce sugar cravings.  I want to eat clean for 21 days and see if my allergies (which still bother me a little) and skin improve.  Also, in winter I tend to eat just as much as I do in the summer, but my activity level is much, much less (due to days with only 11 hours of daylight and sub-zero temps).  Over the past couple of months I’ve seen the effects of this, not in any weight gain, but in body composition.

With those goals in mind, I’m starting the 21 Day Challenge tomorrow.  To help keep me on track, I will post my food diary and exercise log here on this blog.  To most people I know this will be boring, but for those wondering what a primal lifestyle looks like, it might be helpful.  Plus, selfishly, posting this information publicly will help keep me on the straight and narrow.

With that said, I better sign off, so I can get my solid 8 hours of sleep tonight!