Pumpkin | Healthy and Sane

Too much talking

October 8th, 2009

So I went to the gym on Tuesday with my friend Tiffany. It was fun to have a different routine for a day. We did some strength training and then split up (I continued with more ST and Tiffany chose the elliptical). At the end we reconvened and I showed her the foam roller. Good times! Unfortunately in the midst of all the gym fun and talking, I left my brand new ipod nano on the gym floor. I got this nano last week because my previous one was acting up and I didn’t want to chance it dying on me at the race this Sunday. Today I was getting ready for a run and realized my ipod is gone. GONE. No one (of course!) turned it in at the gym, it’s not in my purse or at home. Yup, my talking cost me an ipod. The one I just replaced I got from my dad, because the ipod I bought weeks before that, I also left on the floor when I was showing my friend Katy some fun new abs moves (did you follow all that? lol). Seriously?!!! Yeah, there was some crying happening at lunch time today I just felt like such an idiot, losing not 1 ipod but 2, the same exact way… and these things aren’t cheap!!

To help ease the pain, Coco brought me some Sprinkles pumpkin spike cupcakes with cinnamon cream cheese frosting. How can you not smile when you see these?!

Cupcakes make everything better. Coco, you are awesome!!!!!!

I had 1 right away… um and then had the 2nd one! The cake was so moist and the frosting was just delectable. The Sprinkles mix comes with the dots and all. I need to get me some asap!! (Inna, remember that Sprinkles red velvet mix I got you for xmas – make them!!!! )

Coco also noticed my iphone and said – why don’t you just use that at the race? Beauty and brains this girl got! I got myself a new armband for the iphone ($30 instead of $150 for the new nano) and did an easy 35 minute run after work (no garmin – I probably ran at 9 minute pace but made sure I wasn’t pounding… gotta have fresh legs for Sunday!!!). It felt great to hit the pavement one more time before the race. Seriously, I am officially addicted to running and am beyond excited for the race in 2 days. Wholly shit. 2 days, really?! Can’t wait!

Today is also Thursday, which means some Ellie in my belly For this week The Healthy Hostess chose the chop suey. I actually saw Ellie make this last week and almost put it on my to-make list. It looked so healthy and perfect to satisfy a craving for Chinese food.

I was right! This was seriously delicious. My father in law came over to help us work on the condo and he hates rice, so I subbed soba noodles for brown rice and omitted the scallions, otherwise following the recipe pretty much to the T. Dinner took slightly longer than expected so my FIL never got to taste it, but Adam and I sure enjoyed it. The crunchy wonton “crisps” were so fun! I can picture them in a great Asian inspired salad in our future. Yum!

Dessert: apple crisp with vanilla frozen yogurt… but of course

OTHER EATS

TJ’s organic blueberry bran muffin (these are super filling and delicious if you like muffins that “taste healthy”… which I do!)

(ate the whole larabar)

My “party snacks” while I was watching the Biggest Loser. Yeah yeah yeah, counterproductive.

+ leftover “Japanese pizza” (okonomiyaki) for lunch. It tasted even better after a few days in the fridge!

Have you ever done something as silly as leaving an ipod at your gym TWICE? I left my watch and ring (don’t worry Adam – not the wedding or engagement ring!) on the elliptical once too, but thankfully someone actually brought those to the front desk! Jeez, I’m really not very smart sometimes

Tofu tastes better than guilt

March 13th, 2009

Hi bloggies! I feel like I’ve been lacking my usual oomph lately. I’ve been tired! Work has been crazy busy, and almost every day I’ve had after work plans on top of it. That means no working out during lunch , no shredding after work , and not much time to dedicate to my blog or any other blog I hope to catch up on sleep and exercise over the weekend. I also hope to have a new redesigned blog up in a few days. Hopefully you’ll like the new and improved header (thanks, Innz!!) and layout.

Anyways enough complaining I have some fun free goodies I got in the mail last night. Yay! They made me feel like a real blogger and definitely put a bounce in my step for the rest of the night.

Goodie #1…

POM juice

I actually got a case of these babies, but Adam immediately put them in the fridge so I just grabbed a few to snap a photo. You see, the generous Diana (the POM blogger) sent us a case of these POM juices while we were on vacation. Apparently these guys must be refrigerated but they sat in our mail room for 5 days until we finally picked them up. Both me and my husband were SO bummed out. We love pomegranates (see current header!) and were not sure if the juice went bad. We stocked the fridge with them anyway, but Diana offered to send us another case instead. Phew! I hate wasting food and I probably would have cried if we had to pour them all out without a replacement to ease our pain I know you’ve seen these all over the blog world lately, but I’ll try to get creative with these. Adam already grabbed one for his drive to work today, so he’ll provide us all with his first review of the juice “straight-up” soon

Goodie #2…

Have you seen this granola mixing site in the blogs lately? I first spotted it on MizFit’s blog and was desperately hoping to win the prize. I already have so many granola combinations going through my head. The stuff is expensive but they use high quality ingredients and you can mix your own granola without doing all the work! I think I’m going to become seriously addicted to this site… but first I wanted to taste their “bases” before really committing to a whole tube of the stuff. I emailed the company and asked for a tiny sample of each (ok, I promised to review their product on my blog… why not, right? ) They not only agreed to send me the samples but shipped them overnight! How’s that for nearly instant gratification Can’t wait to try them!

mix my granola samples

closeup of samples

Ok, so now I’m running late… let’s get to food

BEST MEAL OF THE DAY

After getting home from after-work drinks last night (the drinks were at P.F.Chang’s and greasy Chinese food sounded SO much better than tofu, especially after a few glasses of wine – unpictured) I fought the urge to order take out and lounge on the coach until I pass out. Instead, I remembered that this delicious looking tofu recipe got the boot 2 days ago, only to be replaced by much less nutritious brownies and Barney Butter. The day after was another huge splurge meal at L’Andana… so no, I was not going to let a few days of indulgences drag me down into an unhealthy hole. Despite a little buzz going on, I collected myself and got to cooking. I used this recipe for the orange pan-glazed tempeh… using extra firm tofu instead of tempeh (not a fan of tempeh!). Heidi is a culinary genius so I had high hopes for this dish and I was not disappointed. [I only used 2 teaspoons of the oil] It was sweet and sticky and yet refreshing (oranges make me feel like it’s summertime). I was SO happy I went the healthy route, because the results were way more satisfying than anything else I would have ordered. Let’s face it, guilt is not very tasty! Some pics of my dinner (including 1/2 cup of rice and steamed broc)…

orange glazed tofu with rice and broc

take 2 - different dish

Yes, it annoyed me that the dinner wasn’t photogenic so I tried a different dish. I’m anal like that sometimes. The pictures still don’t do the tofu justice, but TRUST ME – it was goooood! I went back for another slice and fought the urge to polish off the rest (when I have it for leftovers I’ll thank myself!). The hubs also had a bite, and said he officially likes tofu now and I’m allowed to make more of it! Sweet!!!

OTHER EATS

pumpkin yogurt/cottage cheese mix with pecans, choc granola, pb puffins, dried cherries

yogurt/cc closeup

I tried something new here and mixed in some cottage cheese into the yogurt together with some pumpkin. I think the cottage cheese killed the creamy texture of the chobani. I won’t be doing this again! I love each on their own – not together!

salad: mixed greens, grape tomatoes, avocado, carrots, hummus + crackers with goat cheese

This salad was SO random. I don’t think the flavors really went together. I still ate every bite though

mountain mix Mojo bar

There was also an unpictured serving of TJ’s nutty american trek mix. It popped in my mouth when I was cooking

Total calories for the day: 1671

Ok, now I’m really late! Hope you have a nice Friday and lots of fun plans for the weekend!!

A day full of fall eats

November 24th, 2008

After a kind of late night out last night I woke up at almost 11am today!!! That’s just crazy! I woke up a little after 9am and decided that this was not enough sleep. I really need to catch up on sleep on the weekends but somehow this never happens. So, I “forced” myself to go back to bed and woke up well rested about 1.5 hours later. It was nice to know I had nowhere to rush to, so I took my time thinking about breakfast and today’s eats. I had an open can of pumpkin hanging around in the fridge for over a week and I decided it was time to use it up. My favorite way to use up pumpkin is of course by combining it with chocolate!

BREAKFAST

I baked some pumpkin peanut butter chocolate chip muffins based on this recipe from Tina. I’ve made these before a bunch of times, modifying the recipe slightly. They always come out delicious!! Today I realized I only had 1/2 cup of pumpkin left, so I added about 1/2 cup of apple sauce and started playing with the rest of the ingredients. I also always make big muffins instead of minis (1 big muffin is just more satisfying to me than 2 mini ones) but today I broke out my mini-muffin pan. Well, when I finally put my muffins into the oven, all proud of myself because those minis looked so cute, I realized I forgot to add the sugar!!! Nooooo! I took the pan out of the oven, scooped the batter out back into the bowl, added the sugar and then divided it back into 5 large muffins instead of 10 minis (the mini-muffin was a big mess post scooping). I guess it wasn’t meant to be! I won’t share my modifications because I think they are still not perfect. The muffins tasted incredible (as always) but today they looked a little funny… they concaved in. Oh well! Here is one of these guys with a cup of coffee:

And here it is broken into… the chocolate chips melted all together inside. It was like a malten pumpkin chocolate cake more than a muffin. So good!

After finishing this yummy breakfast, while sipping on some coffee I browsed through cooking recipes trying to plan the menu for the week. I love just relaxing like that! A few hours later we went grocery shopping and I snacked on an apple and this new purchase:

I’ve tried a Mojo bar before (I think the pb flavor) and didn’t think it was anything special. But after hearing good things about them I decided to try one again and I am so glad I did. This mountain mix bar was really great! Here it is up close – there are just so many goodies in there! Awesome!!!

Being that I woke up super late tonight and dinner was supposed to be on the early side (a friend of mine, Katy, was coming over for dinner) the apple and the bar constituted my lunch. They were the perfect snack/lunch and did a great job of tying me over until…

DINNER

For dinner tonight I wanted to make a root vegetable dish. As I’ve mentioned before in this post, after reading the December issue of Eating Well I was dying to make all sorts of stuff with root vegetables. I bought quite a few at the farmers market. I made the shredded root vegetable pancakes earlier this week and today I wanted to use up the rest by making the cider-glazed roots with cinnamon walnuts. These take a little bit of time (about 1.5 hours altogether) so I was glad to make it on a weekend night and especially so since we had company I also wanted to make some simple grilled chicken for some extra protein and thought that something with maple syrup would go nicely with the sweet roasted veggies. I marinated 2 lbs of chicken breast with 1T maple syrup, 1T peanut oil and 1.5T of dijon mustard (the marinade idea came from this recipe) for about 40 minutes and then grilled them on a cast iron grill pan. Both came out so amazingly delicious (I was seriously proud of myself!) and worked together really well! A really great fall dinner!… My husband and Katy both approved!

Here is my plate (the chicken piece isn’t as gigantic as it looks in this pic – it was about 5.5 oz raw):

Here are the roasted veggies upclose. The pecans made them even more special! Oh btw, they tasted like veggie candy

For dessert, I served some white chocolate cranberry bars to Katy but because I decided to make some more for Thanksgiving this Thursday, at the risk of over-eating them, I made another dessert for myself: 1/2 Arnold’s sandwich thin with 1/2 T almond butter, 1/2 small banana + a few choc chips. This was my first time trying the sandwich thins and I was not impressed at all! They said they were whole grain white bread and they tasted really white and processed. I never eat white bread anymore so I guess my taste preference has changed. My husband will probably love them. Hehe. Another weird thing with this dessert, I used the TJ’s almond butter. I used to be absolutely obsessed with this stuff and had some at least once a day, but for some reason (probably because the single serving Barney Butter packets are so convenient) I haven’t had it in a while and today it tasted so bland. It’s unsalted and again I used to be obsessed with it, but I guess after all pb and Barney Butter with salt, I can’t go back. I guess I’ll use it in baking next time… or maybe I’ll just wait until my taste buds change their mind Here is my little dessert with some vanilla tea:

I am totally stuffed now, which means no workout since it’s getting late and I won’t have time to digest. It was a nice day though and I am ready for the upcoming week at work (it helps that it’s only a 3-day work week too!).

Total calorie count for the day: 1289 (thats what happens when you wake up late!)