Monthly Archives: July 2009

When I got home from work yesterday, this was sitting on the kitchen counter. Honestly, it was a lot bigger than I thought it would be. I guess because this is the smaller size.

For our first juice, we decided to try something simple and newbie safe – carrot orange juice.

We used 4 carrots and 4 clementines. And look what it produced!

This was so good. The froth on top made it taste like an Orange Julius.

Today, I decided to get a little more adventurous. My plan with the juicer is to juice mostly vegetables, not fruit. I started with fruit yesterday to sort of ease my way into it, but really want to focus on juices that are mostly veggies with maybe one piece of fruit. Today’s happy hour concoction was 1 gala apple, 1 beet, 2 small english cucumbers that were on their last legs and a large handful of spinach.

Pretty!

I’ll admit it, it was not as good as the carrot/orange juice. It was still good but the taste of cucumbers really permeated the entire thing. I thought that was strange since they were little. It was still sweet from the apple. I don’t think I used enough spinach; my handful didn’t seem to produce any juice at all.

Have you seen this survey about napping? 34% of adults in the US take daily naps. Do you? I’m going to share a little secret. I do. It’s not after work though. I have an office with a door and during my lunch hour, I tend to have a little siesta. No one in my office knows this! I actually have a small pillow that I stash in my desk. I just put my head on the desk; I don’t lie on the floor. It’s sort of a nice break although I am a bit groggy for a few minutes when I wake up.

Tonight is Jason and my 2-year anniversary. (I have been wondering what is the gramatically correct way of saying that. Jason and mine? Jason and me’s? Jason and I’s?) We’re going out to dinner at a nice restaurant that we have a restaurant.com coupon for. Back with an update later.

I’m definitely influenced to an extent by things I read on other people’s blogs. There are definite trends that go around the blogosphere (Green Monsters and Banana Soft Serve for example). I figure that if everyone raves about certain recipes, they must be on to something. And so I test the waters. Maybe I like it, maybe I don’t, but I definitely try these food “trends.”

I swear, I have a point to this. For a while now, I’ve been seeing a lot of juice. At first I didn’t really think much of it, but then I saw Crazy Sexy Cancer and became very interested in green juices. I’d been coveting this juicer for a while and Jason bought it for me last week! It delivers tomorrow. In anticipation, I went to Costco after work and bought mass quantities of produce. I got a little carried away. Although the broccoli isn’t intended to be juiced.

I hope I like this. I guess the principle behind juicing is, especially with leafy greens, that since you aren’t getting the fiber from, say, spinach, you are able to eat/drink more of it and get more of the nutrients. Or somethin’ like that.

So, in addition to all of the push ups that I did last night (which btw, I did in increments of 20), today’s boot camp was very pushup-centric! By the end of the class, my pushup turned into me flopping onto my stomach and trying to myself back up. My chest/arms/shoulders are going to be sore tomorrow. We’d done this particular workout before; I have no idea why today was so hard. Actually, what am I talking about? It was hard because of the pushups that I did last night.

I’m not really talking about the details here, but my emotions about the wedding are all over the place. Not about actually getting married, but wedding planning. My parents are divorced, my dad is remarried and it’s just hard to get through this without everyone clashing, myself included. I’m not able to do some of it because I’m out of state. It’s just exhausting sometimes.

I tend to bitch to my boot camp instructor about certain things. My number one complaint is that I’m frustrated that I can’t do push ups or railing pull ups. He’s always on me to do my homework and if I did it, I’d get stronger. So, guess what today’s homework was? 120 pushups and 120 pullups. Yuck!! I think he did that on purpose.

I got to the gym and started on the treadmill. I was actually next to a co-worker who runs pretty fast. It actually motivated me to run faster than normal. I did 2 miles. After my run, I did a modified version of the homework. I used the assisted pull up machine. I mean, really, I can’t do 120 pull ups! For the pushups, I did them on an incline which made it a bit easier than doing them on my knees. Does that count as doing the homework? I think it does.

I’ve been trying to really figure out what is holding me back from losing weight. This is what I’ve come up with.

1. Going out to eat. My friends and I go out to eat A LOT. I try to get what I think is healthy, but I don’t really know and I’m sure that I’m consuming way more calories than I realize.

2. Grazing. I know that to some extent, eating little snacks is good, but I feel like I’m always snacking. Especially after dinner.

So, what’s the solution? I’ve come up with some ideas. Jason and I have a date night once a week and that’s fine, but I want to stop going out to eat on other nights because we’re too lazy to cook. On the weekends, when my friends and I go out for drinks, we almost always eat too. Last Saturday, I told my friend Emily that I would meet her out for a drink but I was eating dinner at home. I want to do that more. It’s not like I’m going to feel deprived because I’m not eating bar food!

The grazing thing is harder to control. I am going to try very hard to eat dinner, eat something sweet if I need after and close the kitchen!!!

I tend to make a lot of random food for the week on Sunday nights. It’s never meals really, but more of just little snacks. One day I’ll graduate to making meals for the week, but I figure making snacks is better than making nothing and then having nothing to take to work.

Since we have an abundance of blueberries from our blueberry picking trip last weekend, I decided to make some blueberry muffins. I did a google search for “healthy blueberry muffins” and all of the recipes had applesauce in them which I didn’t have at home and didn’t feel like going to Kroger to get some. So, I made ones with oil. I ended up using this recipe.

Frankly, they look better than they tasted. I did make some substitutions so that might be why. Here is the original recipe with my modifications in parentheses.

2 cups all-purpose flour (i used white whole wheat flour)
1/3 cup sugar (i used agave nectar. I didn’t measure it. Maybe 2 tbsps?)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup non-fat milk
2 tbsp canola oil (I sort of messed up here and thought it said 1/4 cup)
1 large egg, lightly beaten (I used 1/4 cup egg beaters)
1 cup blueberries
Preparation:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Coat a nonstick 12-cup muffin pan with cooking spray or line with paper cups.
In a large bowl, stir flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt together. In a small bowl, combine milk, canola oil and egg.

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add milk, oil and egg mixture. Stir until just moist. Fold in blueberries. Fill muffin cups 2/3 full and bake 18-20 minutes until golden. Cool on wire rack.

Makes 12 muffins.

Meh, I’ll eat them, but they sort of have a biscuit/pancake taste for some reason.

After I made my muffins, I caught up on some blog reading and came across Sarah’s hummus recipe. Hummus is seriously my favorite food but I can never seem to replicate it at home very well. I’ve tried at least 5 different recipes but nothing compares to Sabra or Hannah brands. But, I’m not one to give up, so I figured I’d give her recipe a shot. I blended the lemon juice and tahini and then I realized that I didn’t have any chickpeas. Oopsie. I did have a can of canellini beans (I halved the recipe) so I just used those instead. The hummus was pretty good! I’m sure it would have been even better with chickepeas, but it was pretty damn good. Thanks Sarah!

Thanks for everyone’s opinions on the dresses. I think we have a tie. But, I figured out what I am going to do. I only have two bridesmaids – my best friend from childhood is my matron of honor and my sister is the other. My MOH likes the first dress and my sister likes the second. At first I thought they could just get their preferred dress in the same color, but they don’t come in the same colors. But, upon perusing the J. Crew site some more, I just realized that you can get the first dress in another fabric in the same color as the second, so I think that’s what we will do.

I know it’s absurdly early to pick a bridesmaid dress, but I need some opinions. I like both of these dresses from J. Crew.

Dress 1:

Dress 2:

What do you think?

I think I was in a bit of a mood when I wrote that last post. Yes, I do struggle to find this elusive balance between everything, but at the same time, it doesn’t consume my life the way I made it seem. Well, sometimes it does. And that’s when I write posts like that, but other times I am able to just enjoy the food for what it is, food. I think, in some part, I am afraid to always let myself enjoy food because if I don’t always worry about it, I’ll gain weight. I know that’s not true and there are countless books about that but it’s a lot harder to change my mentality than my eating habits. I’m trying.

Anyway. I enjoyed some food last night. Jason and I had a restaurant.com gift card to a pub called P’Cheen. We’d both been a few times but only for drinks. We started out with drinks. Jason commented that our usual drinks sort of look like us. What do you think? I kind of see what he was saying. Although I’m not taller than him.

When I looked at the menu, I immediately knew that I wanted the Bouillabaise. That is probably one of my favorite foods in the world. It did not disappoint. I ate about half of this.

It looks like a creamy broth in the picture, but it was more tomato based. Jason had steak. I thought the food here was very good and the service was perfect. We were waited on by the owner of the place which was a nice touch. I’d recommend it to an Atlantans. After a while, it gets to be more of a crowded bar than a restaurant, but we decided to leave before it got too crowded.

We ended up meeting another friend at a bar that was around the corner from the restaurant. We stayed there for a while and then went dancing. It was fun, but of course, I got tired and wanted to go home. I’m not sure when I turned into such an old woman! Oh well. I like my beauty sleep.

I added Sarah from Lovinmytummy on facebook and noticed that a lot of other bloggers that I recognized were friends with her. I felt too creepy adding people that I didn’t know but if anyone reads this and wants to be FB friends, let me know!

Jason and I were in the grocery store last night and I felt myself being very, very strict about what I bought. It reminded me of when I struggled a bit with disordered eating habits. I looked at all the ingredients in everything and wouldn’t buy the items unless they met my standards. Back then my standards were low calories and little to no sugar. Of course, I didn’t give a rats ass about how much fake sweetener was in there. Now, my standards have changed. Now I care more about the product ingredients and, for certain products, whether it’s organic or not. I feel that my current habits are much healthier, but at the same time, still bordering on too restrictive.

How do people do it? How can you make sure your food is healthy without going overboard into the realm of orthorexia? Part of me is doing this because of books that I’ve read lately and movies that I’ve seen but I’m not going to lie, a big part of it is doing it to lose weight for my wedding.

I guess where I’m going is here. When you are trying to lose weight, how do you do so in a manner that doesn’t consume your life? Is it possible? Why can’t we maintain a healthy weight without resorting to scrutinizing every label or weighing every morsel? Is it bad to obsessed with eating healthy? And when you do know that it’s become an obsession?

Last night, Jason and I went to Panahar with our friends Andrew and Katharine. It was my first time trying Bangladeshi food. Our friends go to this restaurant maybe once a week and wanted us to try it.

It was a fun experience. They knew the manager and he basically asked each of us what we liked to eat and recommended something from the menu. I can’t even remember what I had but it was something with shrimp. We also had a great appetizer which was also shrimp. And for dessert, we had some sort of honey yogurt thing. It was really delicious. Very similar to Indian food. I didn’t take any pictures. Some of my friends know about the blog but these particular ones don’t and I didn’t feel like talking about it. I have only really begun to feel like I can tell some of my best friends about it.

Yesterday was fun but today sucked. I got very upset about something wedding related which resulted in me closing my office door and crying. Very professional, I know. It got semi-resolved but it still is sort of hanging over my head. Hopefully I’ll get a good night sleep and feel better tomorrow.

I was a whiny boot camper this morning. We ran 400 meters and then did as many railing pull-ups as possible and repeated as many times as we could for 20 minutes. I was okay with the running part, but the rail pullups, I just couldn’t really do. I was getting frustrated with myself and vented to Mike, the instructor. He kept saying that I needed to do all of the homeworks and that the people who do all of the homeworks are the strongest boot campers. Let me explain, we have class 4 days a week and 2 of the non-class days, we have a homework. The homeworks are something like do 100 squats, 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and 100 rail pullups. They’re little things like that. Sometimes I do them and sometimes I don’t. The main reason that I don’t is because I feel like if I’m not at boot camp, I should be running and then when I finish my run, I don’t feel like doing more work.

Mike’s right in a way. I’m sure I would get stronger if I did the homework. BUT, I feel like there are some things (push-ups and rail pull-ups for example) that have just not gotten easier in the three months that I’ve been doing boot camp. I mean, even without the homework, these should get easier, right? Or I should be able to do more. I don’t understand why they aren’t and that is frustrating.

Whine. Whine. Wine? Nah. By the way, thanks to everyone who gave me photographer advice. I do have a certain style in mind and I think the one that I found is exactly what I am thinking of. Only problem is she is a bit more expensive than was budgeted. But I think we could cut back on certain things and it would even out. I hope so. The photography is so important to me.

Speaking of photography, here’s a random picture of my baby.

And I leave you with a question, yet again. I have been growing some backyard tomatoes in a pot and slugs have gotten to them. Gross, huh? I’ve been looking up what to do as I do not want to spray any chemicals. I’ve read that you can put a glass of beer by the plant and the slugs will be attracted to that instead of the tomatoes. Any expertise in the subject? I do not have a green thumb.

I have a lot of cookbooks and most of them are just gathering dust on my bookshelf. I decided to get one out and make a recipe that I made a few years ago.

This is the shrimp, artichoke, hearts of palm and celery salad from the The Healthy Kitchen by Andrew Weil. It was actually quite filling.

I managed to run 3 miles again. It feels good to get back in the swing of things. I’ve found that going straight to the gym after work works best for me. Especially since we get out of work at 5 pm now. It’s much less crowded at 5:15 than it is at 5:45 and also I don’t feel like I need to rush home to walk Murphy. 3 miles went fine today. I did it a bit slower than the last time, but it felt pretty decent. I’m thinking of signing up for a half marathon in October. There are two to choose from – the Sliver Comet, which I’ve run before, and a new race called the 13.1 Or I could do both, I suppose.

I need some wedding advice. Not advice exactly, but I am meeting with a photographer next week and I need to know what kind of things I need to ask about. I’ve heard horror stories about photographers so I want to make sure I don’t forget to get everything that I need in writing if I do decide to go with this particular one. Problem is that I don’t know what I need!