Running in the Rain

I started this lovely Monday morning off with Day #2, Week #2 of interval training.  It looked pretty grey outside, but after consulting the local radar on my weather channel app, I determined I could definitely get 30 minutes in before any rain approached.

Whelp, I was about 15 minutes off on my calculation…  Half way through  my normal route, a torrential downpour started to erupt from the sky!  Running in the rain is actually pretty fun, and I would have kept right on going had I not JUST got a new iPhone to replace the iPhone that suffered water damage last week.  So, I threw my iphone in my sports bra to keep it dry and took shelter under a nearby tree for about 15 minutes until the rain let up.  Standing under the tree in the rain was actually pretty peaceful and relaxing!  I’m sure I looked like a creeper though 🙂

Breakfast #1

I’m really loving the grilled fruit and nut butter wraps I’ve been making for breakfast.  Today, I made one with half of a banana and Smucker’s Organic Peanut Butter atop a Mama Lupe’s low carb tortilla.  I wrapped everything up and threw it on the george foreman for about 5 minutes.

(I’ll have to post the pic later.. left the stinkin cord for my old camera at home!)

Soooo delicious!

Stats on B#1:  218 calories, 23g carbs, 11g fat, 10g protein, 7 g fiber

 

Breakfast #2

I was still pretty hungry after B#1, so I decided to overload my overnight oats.  Last night, I put 1/2 cup quick oats, 1/2 cup Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Breeze Almond milk, 1 tsp brown sugar, and some cinnamon in a bowl in the fridge.  This morning, I overloaded the oats with blueberries, strawberries, the other 1/2 of my breakfast banana, and some Barbara’s Bakery Peanut Butter Puffins for crunch.

Yum-o.

Stats on B#2:  308 calories, 61g carbs (hello excessive carbs), 6g fat, 8g protein, 10g fiber

 

Lunch

After all the carbs at breakfast, I was glad I packed a salad for lunch!  Today’s salad consisted of romaine lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber, a sliced up Trader Joe’s Spinach Fontina Roasted Garlic Chicken Sausage, with 2tbsp Hidden Valley fat free ranch dressing.

Couldn’t get the flash to go off for the life of me… haha… need to spend some time playing with the camera! 🙂  I’m really liking the Trader Joe’s sausage!  I wish I would have picked up more than one kind… oh well, guess I’ll have to go back 😉

Stats on Lunch:  239 calories, 22g carbs, 8g fat, 19g protein, 6g fiber

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Ooey Gooey Love

This week is just F-L-Y-I-N-G by.  Can’t believe tomorrow is Friday already!      

Breakfast #1      

This morning I was craving something warm and peanut-buttery for breakfast.  I pulled a Mama lupe low carb tortilla out of the freezer to let it thaw out.  Then I topped it with 1 tbsp Trader Joe’s Crunchy Almond Butter and some sliced strawberries.       

      

I wrapped it up into a little burrito and put on the george foreman grill until it was hot and the shell was crispy.  Then I wrapped the little guy up in foil and stuck him in my purse.      

      

I got to work about 20 minutes later, and the wrap was still nice and hot and gooey.      

ooey gooey love

 

This was just delicious.  So simple, and so delicious!    

Side note:  If you are obsessed with freezing things like me, before you freeze the tortillas put a piece of parchment paper or wax paper between each one.  That way you can easily grab 1 tortilla from the freezer at a time (and they won’t all be frozen into one tortilla blob).      

Stats on Breakfast #1:  172 calories, 13g carbs, 12g fat, 9g protein, 7g fiber      

       

Breakfast #2      

OO!  That’s right, Overnight Oats!      

I typically use quick oats when I make overnight oats, but this time I tried them with Bob’s Red Mill Thick Rolled Oats instead.  Last night I threw the following into a bowl in the fridge:      

  • 1/2 cup Bob’s red mill thick oats (uncooked)
  • 1/2 cup Almond breeze unsweetened vanilla almond milk
  • 1 tsp brown sugar
  • cinnamon

This morning, I topped the oats with strawberries and blueberries:      

       

The rolled oats have a different consistency than quick oats.  They really keep their oat texture and are somewhat chewy:      

      

These were sooooo yummmy.  If I had to choose, I’d pick quick oats over rolled oats, but I’d be happy to eat either one 🙂      

Stats on breakfast #2:  258 Calories, 45g carbs, 6g fat, 8g Protein, 8g Fiber      

       

Lunch      

Healthified Tuna Salad Lettuce Wrap!  This was one of those times were I just kept adding things to the bowl until I found something tasty:      

  • 1 can tuna
  • s&P, rpf, celery seed, dill weed
  • 3 tbsp greek oikos
  • 1 big squirt wasabi mustard
  • couple drops lemon juice
  • 1/4 cup chopped white onion
  • 1 chopped pickle (that’s how my dad makes it!)

I made a lettuce wrap out of the tuna salad and also had some cucumber salad on the side, which was leftover from last night’s gyro dinner.       

      

Stats on lunch:  211 calories, 19g carbs, 2g fat, 29g protein, 6g fiber      

       

For dessert, I had a little unsweetened applesauce with some cinnamon.  When I say little, I mean about 2 spoonfuls.. 🙂  (Leftovers from the big fat flop protein cakes I made)      

      

Good news!  I think my phone is almost fully recovered! 🙂     

DAY #3 OF INTERVAL TRAINING TONIGHT!  LET’S HOPE FOR NO KNEE PAIN!

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The best guacamole recipe EVER

Jarrod and I wanted something delicious for dinner, so we decided to try this recipe for Chicken Fajitas.  We followed Skinny Taste’s recipe to a T, except we also made some brown rice to mix in.  The recipe doesn’t say how long to marinate the chicken, so we let it go for about 30 minutes.

We both felt what threw this meal over the edge to amazingness was the guacamole we made to go with it.

My recipe for guacamole adapted from my Chipotle days in college:

 

 

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Early bird catches the corn dog

It’s Saturday, and you know what that means.  Yard work!     

You’d think for as much time as I devote to my yard, it’d be in pristine shape….  Oh what a pain in the ass homeownership is  the joys of home ownership 🙂    

There is one specific area of the yard that I leave completely untouched.  You can see I have quite the crop of poison ivy growing:    

area of infestation

 

     

I hit up the Home Depot this morning to pick up some spray to (hopefully) help with my poison ivy.  Did you know Home Depot opens at 6am???   I leaned this little nugget of information when I called them at 7am to see when they opened.  6am?  Those customers must be hard-core home improvers.     

Before I got to work in the back yard, I cooked up my favorite egg breakfast:  1 dippy egg & 3 egg white scramble with S&P, Red Pepper Flakes, and Frank’s Red Hot.  I always add a splash of liquid (usually skim milk or water) to the egg whites to help them stay fluffy.  Also, toasted up a Thomas’ multi grain english muffin on the side.     

    

    

Stats on breakfast:  218 calories, 28g carbs, 6g fat, 22g protien, 8g fiber    

After chowing down, I headed to the yard.    

Until last summer, I was one of those people who thought I wasn’t allergic to poison ivy.  Well, that is until I accidently weed wacked some of it.  I really didn’t know what poison ivy even looked like, so I was unaware of the horrible mistake I had made and basically let myself marinate in the poison ivy juices all day while I worked away in the yard.  This resulted in what I will call a immobilizing infestation of poison ivy all over my legs.  Since then I will not go near the stuff.    

Today, I put on pants and long sleeves (despite temps in the mid 80’s) just so that I could approach the “infested area.”  My luck, I’ll get poison ivy on the only part that was left exposed:  my face 🙁   I’m sure I’ll have nightmares about that tonight!    

I’ll have to post some before and after shots once I get it all finished (which will be never sometime soon).    

After all the yard work, I was starving!     

Sometimes I just get cravings for weird foods.  Case in point, today I had a sudden craving for a corn dog!  I can’t remember the last time I had one, but something triggered the corn dog eating machine deep inside me.  So, I decided to try and make a healthified version of a corn dog.  Even typing “healthified corn dog” makes me scoff.  How ridiculous sounding is that?    

I had some frozen Jennie-O turkey sausages in the freezer and also some Joseph’s Lavash bread, so I pulled them out to defrost before hitting up the yard early this morning.    

I cooked up 2 turkey sausages – 1 for the “corn dog” and 1 for a healthified jambalaya recipe I’m going to try later in the week.  Once cooked, I wrapped 1 turkey sausage in 1/2 a Joseph’s Low-Carb lavash bread, stuck in on a skewer, and threw it back on the grill.    

    

    

Ridiculous, I know…    

Once the lavash was crispy, I pulled it off the grill and served it up with a big squirt of mustard.     

    

    

Ok – so it’s not exactly a corn dog, but eating it off a stick sure made it seem like one and it definitely hit the spot 🙂  I’m a BIG fan of Jennie-O’s hot turkey sausage.    

Corn dog stats:  210 calories, 7g carbs, 12g fat, 22g protien, 3g fiber    

BTW –  yesterday while volunteering I had a Smores Luna Bar – and I wasn’t a big fan.  It wasn’t bad tasting — just didn’t remind me of a smore AT ALL.  Definitely the least favorite of all the flavors I have tried to date.  I also had a few bites of a Chocolate Cherry Bear Naked Grain-ola Bar.  It was OK – but again, I wasn’t super impressed.  Apparently I was hard to please yesterday…   

What did hit the spot, however, was the Gioniono’s pizza we had for dinner:    

Abundant vegetables to make me feel better about eating pizza, amazing Gionino's pizza, pool of hot sauce goodness 🙂

 

    

Still trying to decide what to cook up for dinner tonight…  Suffering from foodie’s block.

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Confession

So, I have a confession to make.
  
  

Before we get into that matter, let’s recap lunch and dinner:      

As posted earlier, I was ill-fated this morning so I decided some pizza for lunch would help me come around.      

Lean cuisine cheese pizza with leftover gionino’s hot sauce… Pretty darn close to the real thing:      

      

If you haven’t tried hot sauce on your pizza, I am begging you to give it a try!!!  Soooo good!      

On to dinner.  Things just keep getting better!  I don’t mean to brag, but hot damn my dinner was good!  (said with midwest hillbilly accent while simultaneously throwing in an arm jab)      

I had a leftover turkey burger from the weekend I wanted to use up, but I wasn’t feeling the typical ketchup and mustard fixins.  So I decided to make a quesadilla burger — and let me tell you it was glorious!      

Here’s what went into the quesadilla burger:      

quesadilla burg fixin's

 

The sauces I used were 1 tbsp fat free breakstone’s sour cream, 1 tsp (AKA all I could scrape from the container) of Trader Joe’s Jalapeno Cilantro Hummus, and some Frank’s red hot.  I threw it all in between a Mama Lupe’s Low Carb tortilla I had ordered from Netrition.      

I also decided to take a second stab at turnip fries.  This time, I cut them into larger wedges and cooked them at 450 degrees for 35 minutes.      

      

I threw the quesadilla burger on the waffle iron (that’s right, waffle iron) to crisp up the tortilla and heat everything through.  Why dirty the george foreman when the waffle iron was just sittin there begging to be used?      

      

All together on the plate:      

      

Not the most appealing photo, but trust me this quesadilla burger was awe-inspiring.   

The turnip fries still didn’t have the fry texture I was shooting for.  Crunchy? No.  Tasty? Yes.  I actually preferred the smaller skinny fries we made last time over these.  Could be because the larger fries reminded me of the rooty texture of you know what.      

Dinner Stats:  298 calories, 23g carbs, 9g fat, 36g protein, 9g fiber      

On to what you are all really here for:  the confession.      

About a week ago, I discovered what may be the most amazing cereal on planet earth.  I have secretly been enjoying sporadic handfuls of this glorious cereal since then, yet I have not posted anything about my discovery on my blog!      

Well here it is.       

Barbara’s Peanut Butter Puffins.      

      

Lets take a few moments and discuss why this cereal is utterly amazing.      

First the limited list of ingredients (which is pretty darn good for a cereal).       

      

Second, one serving is only 110 calories, 23 carbs, 2g fiber, 6g of sugar, 3g of protein!      

Third, the taste is pure peanut butter amazingness.      

Fourth, the puffins are shockingly large.  For comparison purposes:      

Shredded mini wheat, PB Puffin, Kashi Heart, Kashi Sunshine, Cheerio

 

Go. Buy. Now.

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