Cooking/Recipes, Uncategorized

Love You Long Time Cupcakes

Despite the title of this post, I am still PRIMAL!  I slipped a bit yesterday, admittedly.  I participated in the Junior Achievement Bowl-a-thon, which always involves lots of unhealthy behavior.  I did pretty good except for I caved in to stress and my frustration with bad service at our supper joint and ate quite a few handfuls of popcorn.  I also drank more Bud Light than is good for me.  It didn’t even taste good, but, you know how it is at stuff like that.

Anyway, today I am back on the wagon.  Timmy Tee made me a delicious primal breakfast of bacon, eggs, and avocado.  For lunch I had a delicious curry from Exotic Thai – full of eggplant, basil, green pepper, and pork.  So tasty.

I’ve been browning some bananas for a week in anticipation of making this amazing-sounding recipe: Love You Long Time Chocolate Cupcakes.  I finally got them made this afternoon.  I ignored the instructions to use cupcake liners.  In my experience, the cake always sticks to the liners, so you end up picking cake off of paper.  It was not a good idea to ignore those instructions in this instance, however.

I don’t know if you’ve ever cooked with coconut oil.  Well, I have.  Twice.  Both times the results tasted good but were incredibly, well, moist?  Greasy?  The oil is just so oily!  The cupcakes looked awesome from the top, but when I turned over the muffin tin to dump out the cakes, only the top 2/3rds came out.  They didn’t have enough adhesiveness to stick together, and when I picked up the tops, you could tell that they wanted to fall apart into cakey goo so bad.

I popped them in the fridge while I made the dark chocolate chip & coconut milk ganache.  Then I proceeded to further mangle the cupcakes by trying to dip the tops in the ganache.  it was a rather messy affair to say the least.  Once ganached, I stuck the cupcakes in the freezer.  Hopefully they will firm up in there.  I love cold chocolate, too, so I think these might turn out to be pretty tasty.  The bits I scraped out of the bottom of the muffin tin were pretty damn tasty, at least.

Here is a photo of my sad, little cakes.

I’ll let you know how they taste frozen.  If anyone has any tips for cooking with coconut oil, I’m all ears!

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bAH!

Bah, I say!  Tonight I did absolutely nothing. Well, I tried to bake a chicken, but it was a “stew” chicken.  Which I guess means you shouldn’t try to bake it and then eat it.  It was the scrawniest-looking bird I’ve ever seen, and after it was baked, it didn’t look much better and tasted even worst.  Well, I couldn’t really get a good bite of it because it was the consistency of rubber.  It smelled delicious, but was bad in every other way.  So, I made that and then retired to the couch and Lost for the reminder of the evening.

I did nothing constructive.  I blame the greyness of the weather.  It’s the only reasonable explanation for my total lack of initiative.  Bah!  Bah, I say.

Cooking/Recipes, Product Reviews, Uncategorized

It’s my Hundred and Elleventieth Birthday!!

No, it’s really just my 35th birthday.  And actually it was on Thursday.  But at my current place of employment, you get your birthday off, or at least a day off relatively close to your birthday.  So I took yesterday off.

It’s been a long time since I’ve taken a day off without some specific reason such as, one of my brothers is in town, we’re going to Chicago, Tim has the day off, etc.  I forgot how nice it can be to just spend the day by yourself to do whatever you want.  And I did.

I made myself a delicious breakfast of sautéed kale & red peppers, topped with avocado (10 for $10 at HyVee this week!) and two fried eggs.  Then I did a little online shopping.  At Sephora, you get a free gift when you place an order during your birthday month.  You can also always find extra promo codes to get even more free stuff when you order.  Plus I had over 100 bonus points, so I got to upgrade a sample.  So, I got a ton of stuff for $50.  Way more stuff than I need, especially considering I got one of the Sephora sampler kits.  They are always so fun – so many different things to try.  With makeup, I am definitely on a pendulum, I will go for months, trying to pare down my makeup kit to the bare essentials, trying to minimalize and simplify my daily routine and life.  I will start to feel suffocated by all the little bottles and tubes and cases clogging up my bathroom shelf.  So I will purge the stuff I don’t love – giving it away or tossing it.  Then, eventually, I will swing back the other way, buying way more makeup than I can use before it gets bad.  Maybe this swing is because I turned 35.  I think it probably has more to do with me working in an office that is predominantly women, so there is A LOT of estrogen floating around, making me extra girly.  Also, since I’m trying to eat primally, I fully expect to lose 5 more pounds at least, which means it’s silly to buy any new clothes right now because I will likely need new stuff in a month or two.  So my shopping outlet (since I just bought a new purse) is forced in the makeup direction.  Enough about that.

What else did I do?  I tried to order some pork from Geest Farms, a local farm that raises non-CAFO pigs.  They are out of pretty much everything, so I have to wait until they kill some more pigs in a couple of weeks.  Poor pigs.  Poor, delicious pigs.

I did some tech maintenance – figured how to listen to the iTunes radio stations on my iPhone. Just copy the URL from the iTunes station to a text document in Dropbox, open Dropbox on your phone, click the link, and you are listening to All 90s All The Time in seconds flat.  Of course to get that to work, I had to install Dropbox on both sides of my laptop (the Windows side and the Linux side).  I also found out about East Village Radio from my bro, so I downloaded that on my phone and got to listen to some cool tunes from NYC.

I sifted through pictures on my phone that I want to try painting in watercolor and ordered them online from Walgreens.  I love their 5 X 7 prints, but they are pricey.  I found a coupon online (SITE40) and saved 40% on the prints!

Finally I rounded out the morning by doing a little eye-glass frame shopping at WarbyParker.com.  This is a website where you can pick out up to 5 frames, the company will ship them to you for free, you can try them out for 5 days, and then ship them back for free. If you like any of the frames, the frames plus lenses are only $95!! Well, since I have such a strong prescription, mine would be an extra $30, so $125.  That is SOOOOO cheap for fashionable glasses.  I have 5 frames coming my way to try out.

I did a quick PEM workout (plank, pushups, and pullups), hopped in the shower, and then headed out for an 11:15 at Lillee Leighton Salon for my shellac polish. The shellac polish is is made out of polymers that harden (almost like acrylic) under a special light.  The polish stays on for at least 2 weeks.  The application process is a little time-consuming because there are 3 or 4 coats that need to be put on.  Also Kristin, the girl who did my polish, is very fastidious about not getting polish on my skin, which is hard to do because my nails are pretty short.  She did a great job, and she only charges $20.  Plus, with the first visit, you get cuticle/nail oil which you are supposed to apply 2 times per day.  Supposedly it soaks through the polish and moisturizes and strengthens the nail underneath. Kristin even told me how to remove the polish myself.  While she only charges $5 for removal (other salons charge up to $15), she said you can do it at home the “ghetto” way.  Soak cotton balls in pure acetone, and leave them on the nail for 10 minutes.  She said you can wrap tin foil around the nail to keep the cotton ball sealed on there.  When you pull the ball off, the polish should come with it.  Anyway, the polish looks great.  You can see a picture in my Instagram feed to the right.  Next time I have it done, however, I will be more careful about doing a pre-manicure at home.  I didn’t do a great job filing my nails, and I didn’t have my cuticles pushed back to where I wanted them.  So, that’s my advice.  If you’re going to get this done – prep your nails first (or get the full manicure with the shellac polish).  Also, it sounds as if a lot of places don’t do the whole process correctly (I think there was a basecoat, a very light buff, a removal of the buffed materials with an alcohol swab, two coats of polish, then a removal of “stickiness” with another alcohol swab, then the cuticle oil.  And between each coat, the nails went into the “oven” to bake), so be sure to go to a place that is doing it correctly.

After the polish I had lunch with a friend at Bent River (burger, no bun for me, of course).  Then I headed to Target.  I spent some time in the optical shop, looking at frames.  I found two I liked, but just the frames alone were $150 +.  I went home and found them online for 1/2 that.  I’ll have to see how the WarbyParkers do and then decide what to do.

I also transferred my generic Ortho Tri-Cyclen script from Walgreens to Target.  FYI, anyone who is on that script, Walgreen’s generic is $27/month, but Target’s is NINE DOLLARS!!  Tim and I are very frustrated with Walgreens right now because they delayed in getting doctor’s approval for Tim’s asthma inhaler, which led to a frenzied Friday night while we tried to track down a doctor to fill his prescription (which we had filled at CVS where the pharmacy staff was super nice).

I also shopped for some summer stuff (for our trip to Ocracoke).  I know it’s not for 5 months, but I’m super excited already.  I got a sun hat and a sun dress.  The hat is a keeper (so says Tim), but the sun dress makes me look preggers, so it’s going back.  Hopefully I can find something better in the next 5 months…

I got home around 3:30 and started to pull out the ingredients for Corned Beef and Cabbage, only to realize that we bought a beef brisket, not a corned beef brisket (I had to Google it to see if there was a difference).  I searched online for a good beef brisket recipe, but I just found tons of them that wanted a lot of sugar and/or whole bottles of chili sauce.  I finally hit upon this Paula Deen recipe.  I left out the sugar and instead rubbed the brisket with some honey.  I didn’t have any beef broth, so I used chicken broth.  The brisket wasn’t ready in time for supper last night, but we did try a little slice when it finished up.  It was spicy and delicious.  I can’t wait to eat it today.

Then I opened a bottle of wine and started watching Beautiful Girls.  It was a very laid-back movie, which totally fit my mood.

Thanks to my employer for giving me the day off.  I had a wonderful, enjoyable day.

Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness, Uncategorized

Primal Days 13 – 15

Um, yeah, so I’m a little behind.  Weekends are like that.  Busy.

So, where did I leave off?  Oh yeah – Saturday.  We went to the Farmer’s Market, ate primally I’m sure for breakfast and lunch, saw “Haywire,” ate HyVee Chinese (chicken kabob instead of egg roll and Mandarin Chicken with no rice).  I’m trying to remember…  All the days are blending together.  Let me just hit the highlights.

Tim got the Power Tower put together.  I am supposed to be able to (eventually) do 5 complete, real pull-ups.  At this point, I can do 0.  None.  Zip.  All I can do at this point is hop off a chair and lower myself down until my arms fail.  I have spindly, weak arms.  BUT.  BUT!!  I am up to 10 bent knee pushups!  That’s 4 more than I could do 2 weeks ago.  Progress, sweet progress.

What else?  Oh, I made my first primal shake. I was kind of craving ice cream, but instead I put all the following into the blender: ice cubes, frozen blueberries, dark cocoa powder, a frozen banana, a date, shredded coconut, pecans and coconut milk.  I tried to blend it all up in our 14-year-old, seldom-used blender, but nothing was happening, so I had to transfer the contents to the food processor, where everything blended up pretty nicely.  But, boy oh boy, was it messy – dark as night, delicious shake residue all over the food processor, the counter, the blender, my fingers, the bar, the  stool, the phones, the bartender – everywhere.  I thought it was damn delicious though.  Tim thought the darkness was off-putting.  Check out the pic in my Instagram feed (see the link on the right).

What else?  It was cloudy and depressing today.  I feel happier now that I have done a little exercise, but I was feeling pretty down in the dumps earlier.  I was hating my blue and tan cubicle and my stupid, uncomfortable office chair that makes my back hurt like a mother every Monday morning.  Argh.  I am so looking forward to sunshine and longer days.  I’m itching to get outside, so I can do some sprint workouts.

Today I was supposed to do my first “intermittent fast, ” which is where you try not to eat until you experience strong sensations of hunger.  I didn’t really do that.  Since I’m on a schedule at work, I kind of have to eat when I have my lunch break.  I should have tried it for supper, but, well, I didn’t.

I’m also supposed to get some “cave time” – time to disengage from digital stimulation.  Mark recommends going hiking for an hour or meditating on a park bench.  It’s 28 degrees and drizzly outside, so that doesn’t work for me today.  We need to move to California.

Tomorrow I am supposed to do a 20-60 aerobic workout, but we have to go grocery shopping tomorrow night, so I’m going to try to go at 5AM.  I feel way happier during the day if I work out in the morning, but it’s so difficult and unpleasant.  Wish me luck.

So, 2 weeks down, one more to go.  So far it’s been a positive experience.  My allergies have improved.  I’m down to 144, and I’ve lost another inch all around.  My stomach seems to be happier.  I’ve had some mood swings, but I have those anyway. I’m excited to see how I feel next Monday, after the 21-day challenge is over.

Take care, and have a pleasant evening!

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Primal Day 9

Ran across a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today, about the effects that gut health has on the rest of the body, and most interestingly, the mind.  Read it here.  Really makes you think twice about the food you put into your body.  Processed, sugary foods may not just make you fat, it may cause you to be depressed and anxious.  Very interesting stuff.

Speaking of gut health, my stomach has been a little wonky today.  I’ve eaten plenty of food, but I’ve been hungry all day – mentally hungry.  My stomach feels full, but I still feel like I need to eat.  I think it’s hormonal.  The only difference in my diet today compared to any day last week, is that today I ate a little bit of dairy – a little cheese with lunch and a glass of kefir while making supper.  Maybe the dairy is messing me up?  Also, I had some almonds for a snack today, and my stomach was rumbly afterwards.  I ate no almonds last week and had no rumbly tummies.  I’ll try them again tomorrow and see if they bother my stomach again.

For supper we tried the steak soup recipe I found online here.  The soup turned out good, but the meat was still not good.  It was very gristly.  Maybe it’s because it’s a rump roast?  Maybe it needed more crockpot time?  We’re hoping that it’s better tomorrow after sitting in the acidic soup base all night.

For the Day 9 Challenges, I was supposed to track my macronutrient intake.  The book recommends using fitday.com to do this, but I neglected to measure anything I ate today, so I failed that challenge.  I did increase my daily movement, however, which was another one of the challenges.  Marta & I did 8 or 16 sets of stairs today; I lost track.  I also parked far, far away from the office, and when I went to the mall, I walked from Sephora to Dillards.

Overall today was a little discouraging after feeling so great last week.  I mean I still feel good – my head is clear, and my allergies have really calmed down.  I just wish I felt satisfied.   Oh, I did get good news this morning.  I am still at 145.9, but all my measurements are an inch smaller!

 

Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness, Uncategorized

Primal Day 6 and Day 7

I went to the party last night with the best of intentions.  I was going to eat primally and have, at the most, 2 glasses of red wine.

My good intentions were not enough to prevent a hangover today, unfortunately.  I drank more than I intended, partially out of an over-developed sense of not being wasteful (e.g. it would be wasteful to not use a free drink ticket), and by fault of being too nice.  Someone bought me a dirty martini, which I really did not want, but I felt obligated by their generosity to drink it.  I wish I hadn’t.  All day today I wish I hadn’t.

Food-wise, I did better.  At the party I ate a coconut chicken skewer and 1/2 a plate of shrimp stir fry (no rice, of course).  Once we got home, I snacked on pistachios.

Today, since I was not feeling the best, we did not do a whole heck of a lot.  We started off the day with a good primal breakfast – bacon, over easy eggs and a couple of left-over coconut flour pancakes.  Tim was not a fan of the pancakes, but I kinda liked them.  I would make them again, at least.

For lunch we headed to La Rancherita, a local Mexican joint.  I ordered the chicken fajitas and a side order of guacomole.  I was disappointed in the fajitas – they were super sweet.  Maybe I am more sensitive to sugar since I haven’t been eating much of it, but Tim thought they were really sweet too.  Between the mediocre food and the cash-only policy (and the in-store ATM that charges you a $1 in fees), Tim and I have now written La Rancherita off.  If we want good Mexican food in the Quad Cities, we are going to have to make it ourselves.  We’re going to have to open our own restaurant one of these days. Sleepy Chihuahua, here we come!  I’m sure I could concoct some delicious primal Mexican meals.

After lunch we retired to the house for a little nappy-poo, and then we headed to Monticello to visit the folks.  We stopped at HyVee on our way to pick up some groceries – Amana ground beef, an organic salad, yellow and green peppers, and avocado.

At Mom and Dad’s I watched Mom, Dad, and Tim eat a whole loaf of delicious-smelling, airy fresh-out-of-the-oven bread and oatmeal, banana, walnut, chocolate chunk cookies while I again filled up on pistachios.  On Day 7 the book says you can eat a non-primal favorite (as long as you think seriously about it and how it makes you feel), but I figured I used up all my free passes last night, so I refrained.

After the snack I fried up the hamburgers and made a salad with the aforementioned veggies – dousing it all with salt and pepper and balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  It was super delicious.

We finished out the evening by playing 500 (Dad & Tim beat Mom & me.  If Iwasn’t short a few brain cells from Satruday night, that never would have happened).

One good thing did come out of drinking last night.  My allergies all night were horrible.  I realized that my allergies seem to be exacerbated by alcohol.  I’m going to have to test this out over the next week.  If I was really able to find the cause of my evening/morning allergies, that would be awesome.

Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness, Uncategorized

Primal Day 3

Today overall was good.  Had another omelette for breakfast and a big-ass salad for lunch.  I got snacky this afternoon and discovered a delicious treat – celery with macademia nuts.  Take a bite of celery, a piece of macademia, and chew together.  Delicious.  I also had wwwwaaayyyy too many pumpkin seeds.  They were so salty and delicious.  I ate too many.

For supper I tried a recipe from the Primal Blueprint Quick and Easy Meals – sautéed brussel sprouts with pork chops.  I’ve never made brussel sprouts before, but I was willing to try it.  In this recipe, you shred the brussel sprouts in a food processor.  All shredded they look like this:

It makes a mess, but it’s done in a jiffy.  You warm up 1/4 cup of olive oil in a pan, and sautee the sprouts until they start to turn brown.

While those were cooking, I rubbed some pork chops with Spike and then cooked them in some olive oil in a cast iron skillet.  Tim made brown rice to carb it up, but I didn’t partake. By the time the meal was cooked, the kitchen was disaster.  Tim is cleaning it up right now, sweetie pie that he is.

The meal was absolutely delicious.  The brussel sprouts were kind of sweet – tasted like delicate cabbage.  I’ll definitely make that again.  They paired well with the pork chops too.  The pork chops were not grass-fed.  I haven’t found any grass-fed pork locally yet.  Might have to order some on the internet.

Tomorrow I am making a grass-fed arm roast.  I’m already looking forward to it.

The challenge today dictated a “Full length PEM workout.”  That means that I should do 2 sets of the following: 25 pushups, 5 pullups, 2 minutes plank, and 50 squats.  Fortunately Mark recommends “progressions” of these exercises for those who, like me, cannot even do one real push up (yet).  So I did 30 wall push ups, 0 pulls ups (we ordered a Power Tower from Amazon, but it’s not here yet), 1 minute planks and 50 wall squats.  For the 2nd set, I did about 1/2 of everything.  It was exhausting, especially with my legs being super sore from running yesterday.

But I have good news – it’s not all pain – I weighed in at 145.9 today!  Three pounds lighter than Monday.  The large variance is probably due to water weight, but I’ll take it!

So we’re supposed to finally get a few inches of snow over the next couple of days.  I think it’s about time, but I will definitely miss the 50 degree weather.  I’ll have to go back to working out in  a stuffy old gym.  Bah.

My energy level today was not as good as yesterday.  I didn’t sleep well last night, so that could be it.  Maybe my body is adjusting to the lack of carbs.  We’ll see how the rest of the week pans out.

So, take care, and go out in play in the snow tomorrow, if we really get some!

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4.5 Day Weekend

Ah, weekends.  Long weekends.  They are the best.  I took off last Thursday at 11:30 and didn’t return until this morning.  We toyed with the idea of going somewhere and doing something with the extended time off, but we ended up staying pretty close to home and just chilling.

We went to Iowa City on Friday, ate some deeeeeelicious falafel from Oasis Falafel, got a couple of pints at Deadwood, looked at Dick Blick wistfully, as is my wont, and then came home.

We ate, we drank, I beat the pants off Tim at Scrabble. We made good food – good kimchi, good cookies, tasty pork roast, etc.  We watched some movies, slept in until 7 or 8 each day, went to the gym a few times.  Just enjoyed the time off and eachother, basically.

It’s so rare to be able to just spend time at home.  I always feel like we should be out DOING something.  Going somewhere, meeting people, making an effort.  Sometimes it’s just nice to veg out for a few days and enjoy our little house and our little dog.

When I came home for lunch today, I realized that I was a little homesick already.  Tim and I are already pretty dedicated homebodies, which is something we need to keep an eye on, but for 4.5 days, it was nice to just give in and be cozy.

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It’s finally finished

Back in April, one of my co-workers found out that I dabble in calligraphy, and he asked me to do “Dance like nobody’s watching” in calligraphy on a small sheet of paper, so he could give it to his wife.  I assured him that I am no good as a calligrapher, but told him that I could probably convince my mom to do the piece, as she is an excellent scribe.

I never caught her in the right moment; however, so I resolved to do it myself.  I did 4 or 5 pieces that I was very dissatisfied with.  Then I decided to do it on watercolor paper on top of a nice watercolor wash.  I finally completed one that I was fairly happy with only to realize that I had written “Dance like nobody’s wathing.”  According to the Urban Dictionary, wathing is “Stalkerishly watching someone or something bathe.”  I think the most disturbing part of that definition is the part about watching “something” bathe in a stalkerish manner.  Shiver.

Anyway, missing the “C” changed the meaning of the phrase resolutely.  So I had to start over.  Again.

I was working on painting an ocean scene, so my palette was already loaded with purples, greens, and blues, so I got the paper soaking wet and washed those colors over it.  I then peppered the paper with kosher salt.  When it was all dry, it had a neat, almost tie-dyed, effect.  I drew guidelines on and went at it with a teal calligraphy pen.

Man, I really need to start taking better pictures of my stuff.  Anyway,  it’s not awesome, and the calligraphy  needs a lot of work, but I gave it to my friend yesterday, and he was really happy with it.  As long as the (non-paying) customer is happy, I am happy. It only took me 6 months to complete it!  Now I just need to finish my Mom (from Futurama) painting, and I’ll have a totally clean slate.

To get me off on the right foot, this morning I spent half-an-hour typing up an inventory of all our (“our” being Mom and me) watercolor paints.  It seems that for every class I take, I have to spend $40 on paints, even though I already have 3 baggies full of them.  Somehow I never have the exact right shade of cadmium yellow (the teacher requires deep and I have light, etc.).  To save time, I created a spreadsheet with columns for Main Color, Color Name, and Brand.  Now I can easily sort to see all the various reds or greens that I have.  It’s pretty awesome.  I kinda want to sign up for a class right this minute, so I can tell in 60 seconds whether I already have the appropriate colors in stock.  Ah, blessed spreadsheets…

On that note, Go Hawks!  Weeeuuwww!