This morning I decided to start my week off on the right foot with a 2.5 mile power walking session. This was a follow up to Day#1 of my interval running/walking plan, which I started yesterday. My knee only bothered me slightly during the running intervals yesterday, so I ended up swapping the 5th running interval for a cool-down walk. I definitely want to err on the side of caution as I start building myself back up to running.
I thought walking today would be good to help keep things loose. I’m also making sure to not sit in the same position for too long while I’m working so that my knee doesn’t lock up. I’m determined to get my knee back into running shape!
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.
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.
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.
I think we all know I adore eggs for breakfast. No arguments here. Bad news is I sometimes can’t find the time in the morning to whip them up. I’ve been wanting to try cooking eggs in the oven for a while, so last night I decided to give it a go. I mixed up my typical scrambled egg mixture: 1 egg, 3 egg whites, S&P, Red Pepper Flakes (RPF?), and some Frank’s Red Hot. I poured the mixture into two miniature ramekins, and popped in a 350 degree oven for 26 minutes.
How cute are these lil guys?
They look like little egg muffins! Little eggins! 🙂
This morning, I decided to turn the lil eggins into a wrap. So I pulled a Mama Lupe’s low carb tortilla out of the freezer, heated that puppy up, and topped it all off with some ketchup.
That looks like an eggin massacre…
all wrapped up
Portable and delicious!
These eggins are just so cute! What I really like about this cooking method is you could make a whole muffin tin full of lil eggins! If you had friends over for brunch, everyone could toss in their mixins of choice! Love this idea! Who’s ready for a brunch party? 😀
Breakfast #2
Recently, it was brought to my attention that peanut butter may make an amazing mixin for greek yogurt. Today my friends, I put this to the test.
Friggin’ deliciousness! This reminded me of a peanut butter cheese cake for some reason. Some crushed up nilla wafers on top would have been fabulous. Let’s just say I licked the container clean, and it’s not exactly easy to reach the bottom of a yogurt container with your tongue. But I made it happen. 🙂
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Lunch
Alright… Here’s where the just-trust-me factor comes in.
Let me preface what’s about to go down on my blog with the following: I wanted to try something new for lunch today.
Repeat it with me: I wanted to try something new for lunch today.
I’m going walking with my sister after work, and knew I was packing a chicken sandwich for dinner. Soooo, I was leaning toward the other white meat AKA tuna fish for lunch (NOT a fan of pork, and therefore it is NOT the other white meat in my life). You may recall that I have a long jaded relationship with fish (case in point: my fight with fish). Tuna happens to be the only fish I have found to date that I actually enjoy.
So Tuna it was.
I subsequently noticed I had some cottage cheese in the fridge that was nearing the end of its useful life.
I decided to google tuna + cottage cheese + recipe just to see what might turn up.
At this very moment, you are probably disgusted thoroughly intrigued by this concoction.
I added some chopped up tomato, red onion, and banana peppers right before serving. In an effort to keep my carb-tooth (located directly next to the sweet tooth) under wraps, I served the tuna salad up in a red pepper instead of your typical sandwich:
Me and the tuna pepper:
Up close:
I know those cottage cheese chunks look a little funky, but rest assured my friends, it was down right tasty!
Stats on the tuna pepper: 218 calories, 18g carbs, 2g fat, 36g protein, 4g fiber
Whenever I think of the word “Sunday” in my head, I automatically hear “Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY!” (think football/race announcer guy Jan Gabriel).
When I woke up this Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY! 😉 my body was begging for three things: Coffee. Eggs. Ham.
So after throwing some coffee on, I got to work on a 4 egg white scramble with leftover deli ham from the jewelry party I had last week.
4 egg whites, splash o' skim, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes
I also had some potatoes on the side. That’s one of the best things about being at the BF’s — he keeps a GIANT container of pre-baked potatoes in his fridge. 😀
Glorious!
Once the eggs were pretty much done scrambling, I threw the ham and potatoes into the pan to heat up. And breakfast was served!
Sunday morning breakfast
After breakfast, I hunkered down and finally posted the clothes I’ve been wanting to sell on ebay. I’m really glad to have that done with! All that ebaying made me hungry, so I decided to give the barley breakfast bowl a go.
My barley bowl consisted of 1/2 a serving of barley (cooked up last night and stuck in the fridge), 1 Chobani vanilla greek yogurt, and some blackberries and raspberries.
Barley Breakfast Bowl
I loved the barley in the yogurt! It was pretty filling too.
I must be honest though, and this may be blasphemy, but I actually prefer dannon’s vanilla greek yogurt to Chobani! I took a minute to compare the stats:
Early this morning I got a call from my dad saying he was on his way over to help me trim my trees in my backyard. So I quickly dove into the breakfast cookie I made yesterday. I think if you approach eating a breakfast cookie with the expectation that it will have the texture of an actual cookie you will be disappointed. I took two bites and put it back in the fridge–the moist texture just wasn’t doing it for me.
I quickly threw together an eggwich (1 egg (yolk poked), multi grain english muffin, squirt o’ ketchup). As the eggwich was wrapping up, I decided to give the breakfast cookie a second go. I cleared my head of thoughts of chocolately cookies and approached it with an open mind. This actually worked! The breakfast cookie is moist and slightly chewy–and I think you could really play around with the things you mix in to make it an A+ breakfast. I think I might actually pop the rest of the cookie into the oven later — just to see if it would get me the texture of an actual cookie 😉
Breakfast cookie stats (stats are for whole cookie — I only ate 1/3): 303 calories, 31g carbs, 12g fat, 22g protien 8g fiber
Back to the yard — I don’t know what happened this year, but my yard hit a major growth spurt. It seemed over the course of one weekend all the plants and trees in my yard just exploded with new growth. The trees in the backyard were so overgrown that they were actually laying on the house. I couldn’t even see out the kitchen window! Slowly but surely, I’m getting the yard into shape for cookout season.
yard looks huge now that trees are trimmed up
After a couple of hours of work in the yard I was famished. My doctor tells me I am hypoglycemic, which basically means I have low blood sugar. There really isn’t anything you can do for low blood sugar–other than regulate your food intake and make sure you eat frequent nutritious meals.
Up until this year, I never really took the time to plan out my meals and snacks for the day. I would hardly eat anything in the mornings so that I could over indulge at lunch. If I hit a lull where my blood sugar bottomed out, I’d chug a can of coke to get it to spike back up quickly. Obviously, this is not the right approach and it was not good for my body.
Now I make sure to take the time to plan out what I am going to eat each day. I usually sit down the night before and enter everything into MyFitnessPal to make sure I’m not over or underdoing anything. Though I don’t always stick to the plan to a T, I at least have healthy foods on hand to keep me energized and my blood sugar stable throughout the day.
I don’t always do as good of a job eating regularly on the weekends. When I’m out and about, food sometimes gets pushed to the wayside. This is especially true when I am working on the yard.
By the time I stopped to eat today I was shaking so bad I could barely hold the camera! I quickly threw together a wrap using some leftover turkey and ham, tomato, onion, banana peppers, hot sauce, and 1/2 a Joseph’s lavash bread.
Yes, I even had to take a bite before taking the picture!
I think I’ll try out the turkey burger recipe I posted earlier in the week for dinner. I’m really craving a big juicy burger and some fries right now. We’ll see what I can whip up 🙂
