Chik’n Qorn Chowder
As you may know from reading my blog I generally try to stay physically fit. I enjoy running and weight lifting and eating a healthy plant-based diet. I get plenty of nutrients from my food because my workouts are pretty moderate. My husband on the other hand has been doing P90x. With a workout this extreme and his interest in building muscles he wanted to start increasing his protein and decreasing his carbs. Our meals are predominately low-fat vegan, but I was able to rustle up a delicious vegetarian chowder with lots of healthy proteins. The soup was delicious and filling and will provide some great fuel for his workouts. The base of this chowder is Quinoa, a complete protein and has plenty of lysine which is essential for tissue growth and repair. To that I added Qorn Naked Chik’n Cutlets which are made from mycoprotein, feta cheese and hard boiled cage-free eggs. Several cups of leafy greens, some garlic and cayenne pepper and you’ve got one light and delicious one-pot vegetarian meal. My husband loved it, but said next time he would add onions or leeks, mushrooms and would scramble the eggs in the boiling soup rather than topping with hard boiled (a la egg drop soup). This soup is great because you can really substitute and omit ingredients to fit what you’ve got in your pantry. No Chik’n cutlets in the freezer? Just toss in some black beans. Vegan? Leave out the cheese and eggs. Want more Southwestern? Use a fresh jalapeno and add some frozen corn. You can really work this soup in so many delicious ways that the basic recipe can keep you full and body building all winter long.
Chik’n Qorn Chowder
1 tablespoon of minced garlic
1 tablespoon of cayenne pepper
3 tablespoons of cumin
1 tablesp0on of lime juice
salt & pepper to taste
1 bunch of cilantro, chopped (or 3 tablespoons of the gel stuff in the tube if you can’t find fresh)
1 cup of quinoa
2 Qorn Naked Chik’n Cutlets (1/2 box), chopped
3 Cups of Spinach (1 bag)
3 tablespoons of pickled jalapeno (I didn’t have any fresh on hand, but that would be delicious).
2 Tablespoons of EVOO (olive oil)
8 Cups of Water
4 eggs, hardboiled and diced
4 oz crumbled feta cheese
Get Cookin:
1. First we’ll need to cook the eggs and the Quinoa, separate but simulataneously to speed things along for a weeknight dinner). Rinse your qinoa in a fine strainer, then add to large stock pot with 6 cups of water. Bring to a boil on medium-high heat and once boiling simmer for 10-15 minutes. The quinoa shells will pop off leaving the transulucent grains behind as they expand. Also, boil enough water to cover your eggs in a small saucepan. Lower the heat to a simmer and cook the eggs for 10-15 minutes. The eggs and the quinoa should finish up around the same time.
2. Drain the eggs and set aside to cool for peeling. Drain the quinoa and reserve the cooking water in a separate bowl. Add additional water until the cooking water measures 6 cups.
3. Heat the olive oil in the stock pot and add the garlic and jalapeno. (add leeks/onions/mushrooms now if you plan to use them). Sautee for about 30 seconds or until the garlic begins to brown. Add the chopped pieces of chik’n cutlets and continue to sautee until those begin to brown (about 5 minutes). If the mixture begins to stick add a tablespoon or two of the reserved cooking water at a time to release.
4. Add in the cumin and cayenne and the remaining reserved cooking water and simmer for 10 minutes.
5. Add in the quinoa and spinach and stir until the spinach is wilted, around 3 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the chopped cilantro and feta cheese. Top with the diced, hard-boiled eggs, a splash of lime juice, a dash of cumin and cayenne and salt and pepper to taste.
Filed under Recipe | Tags: body building, cheese, chowder, DIY, eco-friendly, eggs, energy, Feta, grains, health, healthy, ingredients, low-fat, muscle, mycoprotein, natural, p90x, protein, Qorn, quinoa, recipe, soup, stew, sustainable, thrifty, vegan, vegetable protein, vegetarian, weight lifting, weight loss, workout | Comment (0)We did it! Race for the Cure Part Deux
If you were reading my blog last year you may recall that I decided to go out and learn to run again. I hadn’t run since high school and as a 30 something adult it wasn’t super easy to get back into running shape. I kept it up though and now I can say that I’m finally beginning to feel a bit like a runner. I competed in my first 5k last October in the Komen Race for the Cure. My husband dutifully tagged along and took photos and cheered me on. In May of this year, when a coworker was diagnosed with ALS, I decided to run another.
This time my daughter joined me. (I know she doesn’t look thrilled, but that’s just becuase teenage girls do not enjoy having their photos taken early in the morning, she actually had fun….but don’t tell anyone).
Again, my husband drove us to the race and photographed our finishes. It was after this race that he said that he too would like to start running, and so he did. I broke out the couch to 5k app again and we took off around the block. At first, he was a little overweight and miserable. He hated running, I mean really hated it. I’d prod him up the hills and force him to jog a mile and he’d grumble along beside me. Eventually he would get up and have his sneakers laced and ready to rock at the same pace as me. He purchased a new pair of running shoes and his own headphones for his ipod. He was keeping pace with me down and around the lake and back. He was running 2 or 3 miles now without any complaining. We signed up for the 2011 Komen Race for the Cure and he picked up his training. Some days he even beat me out of bed and more often than I’d like to admit, he put on his shoes and took off while I was laying under the covers grumbling about my alarm clock and nodding back off to sleep. As we approached the day of the race we took a long run together. He smoked me. I tried to keep up, but he was just too darn fast. Now a lean, mean running machine. On race day we both woke up at 6am and dressed for the cold weather. He drove us to the parking lot and we both whined a bit about wearing shorts in 40 degree weather. I still don’t have the proper running kit, I run in my two year old Gola tennis shoes that I wear for everything. I did grab some actual running shorts from Goodwill and I wore those. We wore our downhill jerseys because they are lightweight, breathe and wick away sweat. I grabbed gloves and ear warmers. We noted that the real runners were wearing tights and vests…good to note. I pulled my white gym socks up to my knees. I may look like a dork, but it’s nearly impossible to look fashionable when you are running anyway. I coach him on not taking off to run too fast, set a good pace and stick to it. I warn him about the crowd surge when we first take off and that people will clump for the first half mile, so be patient and stick to the rear. Once you hit the one mile marker it’s safe to start passing people. There’s a big hill in the middle I warned him (he still hates hill climbing) and wished him luck. I told him I’d try to keep up with him, but I knew that I couldn’t. We hung together for the first mile or so and then he put on the gas. I turned on my Endomondo to track my pace. The first mile was crowded and difficult to get a steady pace. My first mile was the slowest as I jockeyed for position and walked a bit trying to move forward as the crowd initially surged and then came to a complete stop. I ran a 10:14 mile. Not bad for me, but not race pace either. The second mile was faster as I broke free of the crowd and really started pushing. I ran it in 9minutes flat. In the final mile I caught up with the faster pack and got choked in the crowd again. My knees and ankles burned from the overtraining that I had done in the two weeks leading up to the race. In fact, the Sunday before I took off on a seven mile jog. Not smart. I know some people run this distance for training all of the time, but I’d never run further than 4 miles, so this was not a good idea. However, I finished strong and I felt good. All told, I ran the 3.18 miles in 30 minutes and 13 seconds. I averaged a respectable 9:30min/mi pace. Not as good as last year, but about what I expected. My knees and ankles screamed and I hobbled off to find Jamie, tendinitis screaming at me to knock it off. Jamie and I met up and shared some water and swapped tales of our big race. He finished in 28 min and ran a 8:47 pace average. As he stood there looking svelte and accomplished I was proud. He ran his first charity race, hopefully the start of a long and healthy lifetime of running.
Did you run at the Komen 5K? If so, tell me about your experience in the comments below. Feel free to link to your blog, your Facebook or your Endomondo. I’d love to hear all about it. Congrats to everyone who competed in this year’s Race for the Cure.
Filed under Doing Good, Local to Baltimore, MD, Uncategorized | Tags: 5k, breast cancer, charity, donation, exercise, health, Komen, Maryland, October 2011, Race for the Cure, running, weight loss | Comment (0)PunchFork: Recipes made beautiful and easy
I love the internet for many reasons, but one of my very favorites is the access to an impossible number of recipes, often with user reviews and pictures so that I know that even I can do it. This has meant countless apps, blogs, feeds and searching to get just the recipes that I want. Then, along comes Punchfork, with its wide screen, full color, magazine-cover-worthy photos. So tempting, so convenient, so user-friendly. Recently I began using Pinterest to keep all of my favorites in a single location, which is engaging and attractive, but it’s not nearly as easy to capture my recipes as Punchfork. And let’s face it, I’m a sucker for good looks and on that front Punchfork can’t be beat. In the “About” section of the Punchfork web page the mission is clear:
Punchfork makes it easier to find the best new recipes from popular sites like 101 Cookbooks, The Pioneer Woman, Epicurious, Serious Eats, Food Network and The Kitchn. We use conversations on social networks to bring you high quality recipes that passionate cooks are talking about right now.
Even more interesting is the explanation behind how the site is powered. They use some social media wizardry to serve you up the most popular recipes from blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
These real-time updates capture the images and cooking instructions and post them on the site where users can save, by clicking a little red heart, and share by email, posting to StumbleUpon, Tweet, or even capture your own link for embedding into your personal blog and other sites. I love, love, love this concept. While I may occasionally continue to “pin” recipes that I find interesting, I’m likely to do my real searching no Punchfork.
Are you using Punchfork? If so, share your opinions in the comments below.
Filed under Recipe, Website | Tags: 101 cookbooks, blogging, DIY, eco-friendly, Epicurious, Facebook, Food Network, health, ingredients, natural, pescatarian, punchfork, recipe, Serious Eats, social networking, sustainable, The Kitchn, The Pioneer Woman, thrifty, Tutorial, Twitter, vegan, vegetarian, weight loss | Comment (0)And the Results are In!
I am happy to report on the results of my changes in diet, exercise and getting rid of a few unhealthy habits. My friends and family have been familiar with my ongoing battle with cigarettes through the years. As my husband liked to proclaim, “She’s the best quitter I know!” Unfortunately, what was meant by that was that I quit almost weekly, and then would cheat and smoke cigarettes and then renew my aim again. It was a long, hard and painful process but while I’m not yet to proclaim myself victorious, I can say that I have been doing sufficiently well to feel good about it. You can never really let your guard down with nicotine; it’s just waiting there for you to slip up. Fortunately I discovered the link between alcohol and cigarettes for me. It stared as me having a beer or a glass of wine and then wanting a cigarette. Somehow my twisted little brain decided that it was OK to just enjoy a beer or wine and cigarette on a Friday night after a tough week of work. And then Saturday…and maybe Sunday too, but I had to get it together by Monday. Then, at some crazy point I decided that if I had glass of alcohol, that a cigarette made perfect sense. Somehow this insanity escalated to the point that I would always have a beer on Friday night, just to justify my cigarette smoking. Now I had taken up regular imbibing as an opportunity to smoke? Fortunately I realized this and put a stop to this nonsensical, addicted mind and got it together. I decided that I was not allowed to smoke and for that fact, I really couldn’t drink either. I also didn’t want to gain weight when I quit smoking, so I started really pushing myself to work out regularly and watch my caloric intake as well. There are good and bad things about weighing yourself daily. The benefits are that you can track your progress on a chart that can be reviewed over a long period of time and also see how your diet is affecting you (eating too much salt causes water retention, etc). The bad is that your body weight can fluctuate by up to 5 lbs. per day. If you aren’t expecting this kind of change it can cause you to feel as if you aren’t progressing and really set you back mentally. As an example, each time I’ve lost weight, I’ve gained a significant amount in the 48 hours before. I almost always see a spike of 2-3 pounds of weight gain on a Friday morning after a week of working out, and then a dramatic drop on the following Monday as I let my body rest and burn calories.
I purchased a scale that measures body fat percentage, water percentage and weight so that I could be sure to measure the fat loss. This allowed me to have the comfort of knowing that I wasn’t just losing a little water weight or wasting away my muscles instead of getting the fat deposits that I was seeking to search and destroy. I started out above 24% body fat earlier this year and I’m happy to report that today I weighed in and had achieved 22.7% body fat. Body fat is an excellent measurement and I set my sights on losing .5 lbs per week (to set my caloric limits) and .5% body fat per month. While you can lose up to 2lbs of week safely and a full percent of body fat, I’m just not that ambitious and I know that I am not likely to to do the recommended 60-90 minutes of exercise 5 days per week recommended by The American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association. Those are certainly great to aspire to, but I work, cook meditate and occasionally like to spend time with my family. The CDC has some pretty flexible guidelines though and my exercise level does meet these guidelines. On days that I don’t work out to a video in the morning I’m committing to taking a brisk 10 minute walk at lunch to at least get my body moving. Occasionally I even climb the 14 flights of steps to my office to help wake me up during that 3 o’clock afternoon slump. In the end, even though I don’t work out as much as I should and I still eat more sugar than is really good for me, by maintaining a healthy diet and trying to stay as close to vegan as I can stand and being sure to move around as much as possible and really getting at least one serious workout in a week over time; the proof is in the pudding after all. I zoomed out on that daily weight chart, with all of it’s crazy fluctuations, and here’s what I found:
I’ve maintained a steady downward trend on my weight and achieved a healthy body fat percentage of 22.7%! I’m going to continue to push myself because my Lose It! app assures me that I will reach my goal in June. I’m not as concerned about when I reach my goal, but I will continue to push until I reach a healthy, but athletic body fat percentage that will allow me to feel good, strong, healthy and ready to compete in my favorite sports (running and downhill mountain biking). I’ve got my Lose It! motivators configured to push to my Twitter feed, so if you want to get training with me we can help to push each other and track our results, so join me on my quest to become a lean, mean, meditating machine. Here’s to a fit and healthy summer!
Filed under Health and Wellness | Tags: calorie tracking, exercise, health, quit smoking, results, update, weight loss | Comment (1)Fat Trackin’ Apps: Lose It! VS Tracknburn
Spring has sprung and it’s time to prep for swimsuit season (kill.me.now.) Also, after coming off of a foot injury I’ve been getting my buns back into gear. It’s darn near racing season and I’m in no shape to take on the challenge of the Gravity East Series. So, to get motivated and track my progress I purchased a new scale Escali High-Capacity Bathroom Scale with Body Fat/Body Water Monitoring (440lb / 200kg)
In the end, while they both have great features and a few minor drawbacks I finally stopped using tracknburn and moved exclusively to Lose It! because it allowed me to review charts and track my progress easily on line or on my phone, connect with friends and quickly and easily log my activities. After a month of use I am also happy to report that while I haven’t really lost any weight (it fluctuates within 2lbs on any given day), I have lost a full % of body fat down to today’s 23.2%. Having to track my calories is often enough of a deterrent to keep me from overindulging and helps me to really gauge how much time I devote to working out. While I may not ever look like a Victoria’s secret model, I know that I am healthy, happy and fit. If you are concerned about getting into shape and staying there I highly recommend tracking your progress and the Lose It! iPhone app is a wonderful, free and easy way to do that.
Here’s a sample of the online reports availabe on Lose It!
Getting Fit
If you know me personally or follow my tweets, then you likely know that I’m an active gal. I enjoy snowboarding, downhill mountain biking, yoga, gardening, cooking and a variety of other activities (too many to name). Unfortunately now that I am over 30 (sssh, don’t tell anyone) my metabolism seems to have begun its expected slow down. In addition, I had abdominal surgery in October, then tore my meniscus in February. I also quit smoking and changed my diet to being primarily plant-based. Unfortunately I have gained weight (fat) and have now been working it off for the last several weeks. While I haven’t seen a significant difference in my appearance yet, I am beginning to feel more fit, which is great. I am currently continuing with my normal activities, but adding videos to my routine as well. The gym costs more than I am willing to spend right now, and honestly I could buy a new video every week and still save money. I purchased the following videos:
Jillian Michaels – 30 Day Shred
Jillian Michaels: No More Trouble Zones
10 Minute Solution – Kickbox Bootcamp
Weight Loss Cardio Kick
I am loving all of them so far. The 30 day shred is my daily standby and features 3 levels of exercise. It’s a 20 minute workout that features Jillian’s 3-2-1 system: 3 minutes strength training, 2 minutes of cardio and 1 minute of abs for 3 Circuits. You can start with level 1 and work your way up to level 3. She does have low and high impact versions of most exercise to allow you to really work your way up. I’ve hit level 3 now and I am still loving this video.
Jillian’s “trouble zones” video is tough! It goes straight to a level three as compared to “the shred”. It hurts every time I do this, but in a good way. I’m definately building muscle and getting some great definition as a result, but I can really only do it once a week or once every two weeks right now.
Both cardio kickboxing videos offer a variety of workouts that you can select and are high energy and fun. I enjoy these the most because they don’t feel like working out quite so much. I usually do one of these each week, usually on low energy days when I don’t feel like I can deal with Jillian.
Finally, I’ve signed up for FitDay.com’s free calorie and activity tracker. This system allows me to calculate my caloric burn by logging my daily activities and enter the foods that I eat to estimate my caloric intake. This will help me understand my nutrition in terms of carb/protein/fat balancing as well as ensuring that I continue to burn more calories than I eat. It also tracks my weight and gives me a graph so that I can measure my progress (or lack thereof). So wish me luck on my journey to lose a few inches, maybe a few pounds and to get into race shape before the season is over. If you are interested, you can track my progress here.
Filed under Health and Wellness | Tags: 30 day shred, caloric expenditure, caloric intake, cardio, exercise, fitday.com, jillian michael's, kickboxing, waist measurement, weight lifting, weight loss, workout | Comment (1)
