Very Belated Workout Recap

So another casualty of my failure to blog before I left for my trip last week is that I never got a chance to post my workout recap from the week before I went to California.  And what a week it was!  I managed to do something almost every day of the week, only caving into my laziness on Wednesday. 

 

Monday - 3 mile hike in Rock Creek Park

 

Tuesday - 30 min interval workout on the treadmill

 

Wednesday - off (it's good to rest sometimes, right?)

Thursday - living room arm workout:

5-lb weights

Bicep curls

Shoulder press

Wide bicep curl

Tricep extension

Deltoid fly

3 sets of 20 for each

Friday - 30 minutes on the elliptical machine

Saturday - short walk to library (about two miles)

 

Sunday - 5 mile hike at Sugarloaf Mountain.  I followed the Northern Peaks Trail, shown on this trail map.  Don't you just love it when there's a trail map online?! - In fact, this trail map was available for free at the trail head too!   Hiking Sugarloaf was a friend's suggestion, and it turned out to be a great one! It was pretty easy to get there (not too far from Silver Spring), but it still felt remote and natural. 

I even saw real, genuine wildlife!  See my deer pic?  If you didn't take a picture, you didn't see it ... :)  It was pretty crowded, but the park is big so I didn't see too many people along the way.  The trails were blazed clearly and the elevation change on my particular trail was enough to make it a hike and not just a walk, but not so difficult that I felt like I wouldn't make it all the way around.  I'll definitely be heading back to Sugarloaf a lot more now that I've been reminded of it!

Leaving for Cali Pesto

I've been out of touch for a while and failed completely to explain why before I left ...  But I spent the last week in California!  Trips are always exciting, but I had so much last-minute stuff to do that posting to the blog just sort of fell to the wayside.  Apologies! 

 

One of the last-minute chores I did manage to accomplish though was to make a quick batch of pesto before leaving.  I never bother to get plant-sitters when I travel (though Panda was safely squared away at Josh's parents' house), so I basically assume that my travel is a form of Darwinism for the plants - the strong will survive.  But since my basil was looking so lovely before I left I decided that if the plant wasn't going to make it through my time away I should still do my best to preserve what I could.  So I clipped a bunch of the leaves and decided to make a small batch of pesto to freeze before heading off.

 

The plant still wasn't terribly large, so it was definitely a small batch of pesto, but it's still about a trillion times better to make pesto with fresh basil.  It actually comes out bright green, rather than the sort of sickly brownish-green you get with store bought basil. 

No-Fail Vegan Pesto

Makes enough for two plates of pasta

 

(Asjust all ingredient amounts to taste)

 

1/2 cup basil leaves (washed and dried)

1/2 teaspoon minced garlic

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon vegan parmesan

1/2 tablespoon pine nuts

1/2 tablespoon nutritional yeast

salt and pepper

 

Blend and enjoy (or freeze if you're headed out of town).

Peanut Noodles

Last week I made a big batch of peanut noodles and enjoyed them for lunch, dinner, and everything in between.  Well, actually just for dinner once and lunch twice.  Next time I need to make a bigger batch ... Because these noodles are so easy to make and so tasty I just couldn't get enough of them! 

 

The recipe below is modified from my equally tasty sesame noodles, tweaked a bit for my flavor preferences and to make prep a bit easier (we all need that sometimes). 

 

Peanut Noodles

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 2 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
• 1/2 teaspoon dried pepper flakes
• 3 tablespoon creamy peanut butter
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger
• 3/4 pound spaghetti
• 1/2 cup shredded carrot
• 3 scallions, thinly sliced
• 2 tablespoon sesame seeds (crushed peanuts would be great here too!)

Directions:

1. Whisk together soy sauce, vinegar, oil, red pepper, peanut butter, garlic, and Ginger.
2. Cook pasta in boiling, salted water until just tender, drain, and rinse in cold water.
3. Toss pasta with dressing, carrots, scallions, and sesame seeds.

 

These are enjoyed best right after you make them, but if you must refrigerate leftovers for later, let them come back to room temperature before eating.  Enjoy!

Mexican Salad

Monday and Tuesday I had the exact same dinner.  Luckily, the Mexican salad I prepared is so tasty you don't get bored of it - in fact, you just want to eat it again and again!  This salad is perhaps a bit ingredient intensive, but that just means that once you've gathered everything for the first go-around, it's that much easier to prepare on night two.  Plus it has the advantage of being full of vitamin-packed veggies and protein from black beans.  What's not to love about this salad?

 

Mexican Salad

 

Into the mix (makes two salads):

 

Salad mix of choice (I used Spring mix), chopped

Grape tomatoes, halved

Canned corn, drained (1/3 of the can)

Canned black beans, drained (1/3 of the can)

French's fried onions (you can omit this, but I love the added crunch)



Diced avocado (1/2 a large avocado)

 

For the dressing:

 

Vegan sour cream

Chalula

Mexican spices of choice to taste (I used adobo, chili, and ground chipotle)

 

Whisk together dressing ingredients, then toss salad fixings with dressing well to coat and enjoy!

Miso Soup

Last week I spied the tub of miso I have sitting in the fridge for making delicious vegan brie and cashew cheese sauce and decided I might as well make the thing miso is most famous for  ... soup!  I made a big batch of miso soup at the beginning of the week that ended up being three dinners - I was a bit miso-souped-out by the last bowl.  I followed this recipe, but tweaked it by adding some shitaake mushrooms to the mix and amping up the amount of tofu, scallions, and seaweed. 

 

Along the way I learned a few important things about making my own miso soup:

1. It's important to cut the seaweed up into smallish pieces or the long strips will send soup flying everywhere when you're trying to eat.

 

2. To cut the seaweed, it's a lot easier to fold the sheets up and then cut with scissors than to try to cut with a knife on a cutting board.

 

3. Cook the shitaakes first, the heating of the soup alone will not do it and raw mushrooms have a really weird consistency.

 

But most importantly ...

 

Miso soup is tasty, but not enough to eat it three nights in a row.  Either I'll have to figure out how to make a much smaller batch or stick to ordering it in restaurants. 

Pizza Quinoa

You'd think I'd be over my quinoa obsession by now, but no ...  It seems I can't get enough of this stuff.  Which is just fine, because it's full of protein and fiber not to mention delicious.  A lot of people think quinoa is bland and uninteresting, which it is ... if you try to eat it plain.  But if you add just a few ingredients to dress it up, it can magically become one of your favorite foods. 

 

Inspired by the quinoa pizza bites I made a while back and eager to find yet another use for my delicious cashew cheese sauce, I invented ... pizza quinoa!  It's warm, it's cheesy ... it's pizza-y.  It's got all the comforting gooeyness of pizza without the fat, carbs, and feeling of a brick in your stomach later. 

 

Pizza Quinoa

 

Ingredients:

1 cup cooked quinoa (follow package directions)

2 1/2 tablespoons tomato paste

2 1/2 tablespoons cashew cheese sauce

1 teaspoon oregano

1 teaspoon fresh basil

1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)

salt and pepper to taste

(Optional: serve with Daiya mozzarella melted on top)

 

Simply mix ingredients together and heat through.  Ingredient amounts can all be adjusted subject to taste.  Serve warm and enjoy! 

One-on-One Training With Jackie DVD

Last week's workouts were mostly centered around the Workout One-on-One Training with Jackie DVD I borrowed from Netflix.  I watched a few episodes of "Workout" back when it was on Bravo years ago, and had put this DVD on the queue probably several years ago but never got around to bumping it to the top of the list.  I don't normally get workout DVDs, but I decided it might be a nice way to shake up my workout routine a bit, and I just might learn some new fitness tricks too.  And then I realized getting the DVD by mail was really the only way to get them - Netflix won't stream workout videos (probably because that would be excellent for the consumer but then no one would ever buy the DVDs). 

 

The One-on-One DVD has three twenty-minute workouts: one focused on the upper body, one on the lower body, and one on abs.  I really liked that this DVD let you customize your workout by choosing which routine(s) you wanted to do before hitting play, so you could just sail through the routines you'd chosen without fiddling around with the menu in between.  (The top Amazon review, linked above, has a run down of all the exercises featured in each segment.)

 

I received the DVD on Monday and got right to work by trying out the lower body routine that day.  Unfortunately, the routine wasn't all that unique or difficult - mostly lots and lots of squats and lunges.  I did like that the weight-baring exercises were broken up with short bouts of cardio to keep your heart rate up and at least make you sweat just a little.  But I definitely wasn't the least bit sore the next day, and the meager workout didn't make me eager to try the other two routines.  In fact, it was Friday before I went back again. 

Tuesday - Bike 30 minutes
 

Wednesday  - Elliptical 30 minutes

Thursday - Off

Friday - I finally got back in front of the One-on-One DVD by doing both the upper body and abs routines.  Since I was in my living room without access to all the different weights of a gym I just used a set of 5-lb weights for the upper body exercises.  Maybe if I'd gone up in weight it would have felt tougher and my arms would have been sore the next day. 

 

The real winner of the DVD was the abs routine.  I actually had to stop a couple of times because I just couldn't keep doing reps and my abs were definitely feeling it the next day ... and the day after that.  It really showed me that I'm not working my abs like I should be and that I should be focusing on that area more in the future. 

 

Saturday - Short walk to library and grocery store (about two miles) plus 1 hour hike at Wheaton Regional Park.  Like so many of my other "hikes" recently, this was also more of a nature walk, with paved trails almost the whole way. 

Sunday - Hike at Rock Creek Park (about 4 miles).  This park is only about a mile from my house, but I've been avoiding going there because I thought I'd need to go further afield to find a real "nature" experience.  Fortunately for me I was wrong.  While I didn't exactly spot any deer, I also couldn't see any cars or too many houses.  And the trail was an actual trail!  I didn't have a trail map, and the trails didn't appear to be blazed anyway, but I managed to figure out a loop that was easy enough to follow (and you're never far from civilization anyway if you do manage to get lost) and did two laps of it in about an hour and a half.  This may just be my new go-to hiking destination.