I felt like baking tonight, but didn’t feel like going to the grocery store to get a bunch of ingredients.  So, I rummaged around in my larder and found I had everything needed to make chewy chocolate cookies. Yummy! The recipe below makes about 4 dozen cookies, but I only made two sheets worth and froze the rest of the dough to use at a later time.

Chewy Chocolate Cookies (courtesy of Martha Stewart)
Makes about 4 dozen

2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups (2 sticks plus 4 tablespoons) unsalted butter at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups granulated sugar
2 large eggs
Additional granualted sugar for dipping

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt. Set aside.

Using an electric mixer, beat the butter and vanilla on medium speed until creamy. Scrape down the bowl and add the sugar and eggs. Beat until the mixture is light and fluffy. Reduce the mixer speed to low and gradually stir in the dry ingredients until the dough is just combined and there are no dry pockets. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm, about one hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Scoop the dough by level teaspoonfuls and roll each portion into a smooth ball. Dip the top of each ball into the granulated sugar. Place the dough balls onto baking sheets about 1 1/2 inches apart. Bake one sheet at a time, rotating sheet halfway through, until the cookies are set but still soft in the center, about 8-10 minutes.

Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for five minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely.

Goes great with beer or wine!

Yummy and fairly low-cal, the key to this dish is to use the right lettuce. After several failed attempts using cabbage (learned that you have to steam it first), bib (too floppy), and iceberg (couldn’t get a decent leaf from the head), I finally found success with butter lettuce.  The leaves turned out to be the perfect little cups.  I also made some brown rice to serve under (or over) the meat.

Ingredients

• Butter lettuce leaves (rinsed & dried)
• 1 lb ground turkey
• 1 T oil
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 T soy sauce
• 1/4 cup hoisin sauce
• 1 T vinegar
• Asian chili pepper sauce (optional, to taste)
• 1 bunch green onions (chopped)
• 2 T sesame oil

 

Directions

1.  Brown ground turkey over medium-high heat with 1T oil.  When fully cooked, drain & remove from pan.

2. Using the same pan, add onions & stir fry for 1-2 minutes.  Add garlic, soy sauce, hoisin sauce, vinegar & chili pepper sauce.  Stir to mix.  Add green onions & sesame oil.  Add sauce mixture to ground turkey, mix well.

3. Add a spoonful of the meat mixture into the center of each leaf, wrap like a burrito and enjoy!

And just like that, vacation is over and it's back to the daily grind.

I finished up painting on mid-week (looks great!) and then when I was removing the tape from the trim, half of the paint came off with it. Noooooo! I think it was because the original paint on the trim was oil-based and I used latex. Anyway, I quickly realized that all the trim had to be scraped, sanded and primed before I could do any repainting. Damn you, oil-based paint! **shakes fist**

I pouted for a couple of days, then started scraping. And scraping. And scraping. It's a good arm workout, but since I'm only using my right hand, I'm going to have a right arm like Popeye and a left arm like Olive Oyle.

I finally finished up tonight. Tomorrow is another trip to the paint sore for primer then taping and priming. If all goes well, I should be done with all painting by Sunday and I can move everything back and stop living out of three rooms.

We had several friends over for a post-Thanksgiving Thangsgiving over the weekend and it was our first time brining a turkey. It turned out really, really well and brining will probably be the standard for turkeys cooked at my house from now on. Behold the pictures. Yes, that it a cat litter bucket that you see. It worked great!

Paint!  I finally got fed up with the mauve-ish color I selected for my bedroom way back when and after much pondering, selected a really nice green/brown color called Sierra Taupe.

Saturday and Sunday were spent clearing out the bedroom, removing the outlet covers, washing the walls, scraping, patching, sanding, washing again, taping and finally putting the first coat on.

My helper

My other helper

Sierra Taupe

The first coat is on, and so far I’m happy.  Painting is always a little bit stressful for me because I’m always afraid that the color I spent agonizing over will look like crap once it hits the wall.  Fortunately I like this right away.  Tomorrow, coat #2 goes on.  Hopefully I’ll still be happy.

Later on, we made Pizzas of Awesomeness!

Mine. Awesome!

Josh's. Awesome!

My new favorite thing, pomegranates!  They take some serious maintenance to get the little seeds (avrils) out, but so worth it in the end.

They’re a little bit weird to wrap your head around - sweet, juicy and crunchy all at once.  Whaat?  But after the initial few bites, I couldn’t put them away.

 

Glamour shot!

For dinner tonight, I whipped up a tasty baked acorn squash with sausage.  I didn’t really follow a recipe and I didn’t really measure anything, so my recipe is a big vague.  This dish turned out really well – quite delicious - so I deem it a success!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ingredients

• Acorn squash
• Sausage, cudighi. Could also use ground turkey.
• Onion
• Celery
• Red pepper
• Salt & pepper
• Brown rice

Directions

Heat oven to 350 degrees

Cut the squash horizontally and scrape out the seeds.
Place the squash cut-side down on a baking sheet, bake for 45-60 minutes or until fork tender.
When done, remove from the oven and turn cut-side up on the baking sheet.

Brown the sausage over medium-high heat, set aside when done.
Saute the vegetables in the same sautee pan with a splash of olive oil until tender.
Add the sausage back into the vegetables, combine.

When the rice is done cooking, add to the sausage & vegetable mixture.
Season with salt & pepper to taste.

Increase oven heat to 400 degrees.

Spoon the mixture into the squash until full. Top with shredded parmesean cheese.

Return to oven and bake for 5-10 minutes, or until cheese is golden.

You can also find the recipe on the wiki, if you so desire.

Serve with a glass of Turning Leaf Pinot Noir or your favorite later.  Yum!

How can you know love a crock pot meal?  Get a hunk of meat, season it up, chuck it in the crock pot with a bunch of veggies, add some more seasoning and some stock, turn it on low and walk out the door.  When you get home from work, presto!  Dinner is ready!

I had high hopes for this roast, but it turned out to be too dry for me.  It was really tasty, so I had the seasonings spot-on, but I just couldn’t get past how dry it was.  Boo.

Oh well, maybe next time.  If  you want the recipe, click on the image.  Any suggestions for not drying out the roast are welcome.

In other news, holy crap do I have a serious case of camera envy.  It’s bad, people.  Really bad.

This is the Canon Rebel XS.  It’s a digital SLR (single lens reflex) camera and about a billion times better than my point-and-shoot Olympus.  The Rebel would allow me to take some seriously bad-ass pictures of, well, anything.  It’s pretty pricey, so that’s my biggest hold-up at the moment. 

 

Maybe I’ll magically win the lottery without buying a ticket?

My illustrious system administrator finally got around to installing a wiki on good ol’ feep.org so now I can have my very own recipes section!

My very first recipe in the wiki was for turkey meat loaf, which I yapped about in a previous post, but I made again last night (click on the image to go to the wiki).

The second recipe, the one I made with Josh tonight, was chicken bok choy.  I’ve had bok choy in various Asian dishes in the past, but always passed it over in the grocery store because I wasn’t sure what to do to it.  This time I decided to take the plunge and was I ever glad I did.  This stuff was like crack!  It tasted just like it does in the Chinese restaurant.

I paired that up with a glass of Little Penguin Chardonnay, it was the perfect dinner.  I’m definitely going to add bok choy to my weekly shopping list.

One of the best parts about running the Appleton HM is the food.  Despite it being smack-dab in the middle of the mid-west and being Wisconsin, Appleton has a surprisingly diverse selection of restaurants.  Korean, Japanese, Italian, Greek, Mediterranean, Mexican.  You name it, they probably have it.

We discovered a sushi restaurant called Koreana last year and the food was so good, we just had to go back.  Koreana has a sushi bar as well as restaurant seating. 

Here, the sushi chefs are hard at work preparing our meal.

We started with sushi and avocado rolls.

And then we both had Bi Bim Bahb, mine had chicken and Josh had pork.  It’s basically about seven different vegetables and rice served in a sizzling hot rock bowl.  Oh yeah, it comes topped with a fried egg.  It was really, really good and well worth waiting a year for.

I was looking for a carb-heavy meal on Saturday, which was the night before the HM.  We decided on the Mediterranean restaurant called IL'Angolo.  After looking at the menu, we decided that it wasn’t really to our liking so we decided to just get an appetizer and go someplace else.  We ended up getting Spanish mussels and I found a prize in mine.

 

That’s called a pea crab.  They’re considered a parasite.  And it was in my food.  Gross.  Turns out they’re completely harmless and some people even eat them.  I showed it to our server who had never seen anything like it before.  She then told another server and he came over for a look.  Pretty soon, my little crab was the hit of the restaurant.  It was a little odd that nobody came over to tell me that it was fine (or not fine) that the crab was in the mussels.  I would have thought they’d do that just as a courtesy, but they never did.  Oh well.

After we left IL’Angolo, we were still on the hunt for Italian food.  The next restaurant had a 45 minute wait, so we ended up at a Spanish restaurant called Tapas.  Basically, it’s a restaurant that serves a bunch of different appetizers.  I was a bit skeptical, but we were hungry and it was getting late.  I had to get up at 4:00 AM the next day to start getting myself ready for the HM, and I wanted get home and get to bed.

I ordered crab cakes (sorry no pic )  and bacon wrapped scallops.  They were really, really good.

For dessert, we split Tres Leche cake.  It was soooo good.

On Sunday, I did the HM.  Here I am freezing my tail off at the start.  It was in the high 40’s and foggy, which is perfect running weather, but not prefect standing around and waiting weather.  Brr.

On a side note, I raced in the commitment skirt from runningskirt.com.  I love this skirt.  It’s got compression shorts underneath, and they do not ride up at all, unlike my beloved Nike tempo shorts.  And, the best thing, it has two giant hip pockets that can easily hold my iPhone and a few gels.  It’s comfortable and cute and I even I got several compliments on it. 

Afterwards, we had some celebratory big beers and big margaritas at Texas Roadhouse.

And that brings us to today with the food recap.  This morning at 3:30 I was awakened by a headache.  It was a searing, throbbing want-to-gouge-your-eyes-out kind of headache that I get more often than I like to admit.  I am plagued by them.  When people ask me if I get them often, I always say that rarely a day goes by when I don’t have a headache.  Most of the time they’re low-grade and I can ignore them, or take an ibuprofen and they’ll go away, but about once a month (except for this month – it’s my second bout with a nasty one) I get a hum-dinger that doesn’t respond to any medicine and I just have to let it run it’s course.  Usually I can go about my day and function without too much difficulty, but other times I have to just lay on the couch and try not to move.  I think I missed three or four days last year due to the nasty ones. Sometimes they’re migraines (complete with floaters and spots) and other times they’re sinus related.  This one is sinus related because my teeth are throbbing as well as my head and eyes.

Anyway, I laid in bed and dozed until 5:00 then finally couldn’t take the pounding anymore so I just got up and stumbled downstairs to my medicine cabinet and took a dose of sinus pills and made a pot of coffee.  After about an hour of reading the intarwebz and cleaning the kitchen, I decided that I needed to do something productive to take my mind off my pounding head.  So, I made a batch of pumpkin scones.  They were so good and made the house smell great.  Here’s the recipe, if you’re ever up in the middle in the night with a headache, or just feeling adventurous.

 

 

The original recipe called nuts to be added, but I’m not a big fan of nuts in bakery.  I’m allergic to peanuts, and it can be hard to tell one nut from another once they’re in something, so I find it best to just avoid anything that looks like it has a nut.  But I think the scones needed just a little extra to make them perfect.  So, I think I’ll add raisins to my next batch.

Well, it’s time for me to go mix some booze and drugs.  Here’s to hoping my headache is gone tomorrow! Toodles, all.

I should rename my blag to “Not Running Chick” because that’s sure what I’ve been doing.

My tendonitis has been a bugger – mostly because I was a big, dumb idiot and continued to run through the pain just to get some miles in.  Not smart.  I finally grew some brains and made the decision to just chill out and rest until my orthotics come in.  I’m hoping to see them late this week. 

In the meantime, I’ve been lifting weights like a fool – like for the past 14 days straight before I decided it was okay to take a day off.  I’ve also been riding my bike, but not as much as I should.

I did 40 miles yesterday in 3:15 and the week before I did 27 in 2:08.  I’ve been using my Garmin 305 to keep an eye on my cadence and I’m finding that I can cruise along pretty easily between 85 and 90 RPM.  Thanks to the hills, though, my rides are averaging around 75 RPM.  My heart rate typically stays between 155-165 BPM throughout that cadence range, which is the BPM I’m supposed to maintain for my long, slow runs.  I think that’s good, but I haven’t done a whole lot of research on heart rate training yet.

 

We’ve been grilling up a storm, thanks to the new addition to my arsenal.  Behold (on the left) the Weber 22.5” One Touch Gold.  The grill on the right is one that we inherited from my parents and is about 30 (?) years old.  It works really well, but I wanted something that contained the ash so it wouldn’t blow all over the place on a windy day.  We’ve been grilling a ton of stuff – vegetables, steaks, chicken, pizza, quesadillas, pork roast, pineapple. 

Things taste so much better on a charcoal grill, for sure.

Finally, we’ve playing Pictionary.  Can you guess what this picture represents?

Usually I look like I'm about to keel over, but these ones turned out pretty well. Here's a couple, the rest are in the gallery.

Gratuitous food picture! 

 

You just can’t beat the taste of food on a charcoal grill.

After an eight-day running hiatus, I decided to take my legs for a spin on Saturday morning. I ran five miles into a really, really strong, and at times very cold, wind the entire way which made for some loud cursing and some increased huffing and puffing but otherwise, it doesn't seem like I lost any endurance during my layoff.

I kept to a conservative pace and kept off the pavement, although running in the dirt on the side of the road is major ankle-rolling territory so I felt like I spent more time looking down at my feet than where I was going. I wish I had been looking down at my feet when I ran by the smashed deer on the side of the road.  Disgusting.  Aside from a few twinges here and there and a complete lack of stretching afterwards (dumb), it went pretty well.

This week's totals: 5 miles running (including a full mile climb at mile 3) @ 10:47, 41 miles cycling @ 13 mph.

Next week I'm supposed to do 25 miles with a long run of 12. Let me just say HAHAHA! Ha. There is no way I'm doing that and staying healthy. I guess I'll just play it by ear. I'd really like to get another double-digit long run in before the HM which is in 20 days, but we'll see. Ugh, 20 days. I've been training for this race since January, am in better shape than I've ever been in my life (I can knock off 10 minute miles easily and do 25 "boy" pushups in a row) and I'm still not feeling confident.

I whined about this to Josh and he said that if I'm ever at the point of starting a half marathon and not being anxious then I should be entering the full marathon. That boy is so funny.

A report from the food department.  After a failed attempt at making chicken pot pie a few weeks ago, I decided to take another stab at it. This time: pure perfection.

And, wouldn’t you know it, after a gorgeous 70-degree day on Friday, we got snow today. The forecast says 1-2" tonight with an additional 3-5" on Monday. Good thing I haven't put my shovel away yet because I just might need it.

Happy Easter and all that.

I’ve been getting some good rides in the past few days while I’m nursing my shin splints.  I rode to Josh’s place via M-203 on Saturday afternoon.

I swung through McLain Park on my way. It's opening at the end of the month.

Despite the sun being out, it was cold and windy. My toes were frozen by the time I got to Josh's. We had James over for Easter dinner at my house. I made spare ribs, garlic & parmesan mashed potatoes and broccoli. Yummy.

 

After dinner, we learned that James has a talent for Wii Bowling. Josh came awfully close to beating him, but he crushed me every time.

No matter, watching James try to hula hoop made up for everything. He twirled everything but his hips and looked like he was having a seizure. Holy funny.

So, my schedule this week:

Saturday – 25 miles, 11 mph average

Monday – 20 miles, 13 mph average

Tuesday – no riding, turbo yoga (oh my aching arms - damn those dolphin pushups!)

Wednesday – 21 miles, 12.5 mph average

Thursday – planning for 10-ish miles plus turbo yoga

Friday – supposed to be really nice, maybe I’ll go for a little ride, but maybe not

Saturday – planning for 30-ish miles, but we’ll see

Sunday – turbo yoga

I’ll start running again on Monday and see if my shins appreciate their 10 days of rest.  They’d better, the bastards.

I was bored with the prospect of doing my usual Sunday stuff - laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping. So, I decided to add some additional productivity-slash-creativity to my day.

First, I rearranged my bedroom! Woo. I know you're excited. No pictures though, nobody sees that room without an engraved invitation.

Second, I made smoky turkey and bacon chili. So good!



I substituted ground turkey for ground beef to make it a little lighter.

No chili would be properly served without an icy lager. Mr. Adams asked me to take him home. No engraved invitation to my bedroom for him, though. At least not on the first date. I gots morals.





And lastly, I did laundrycleaningshoppingblah.

While I was running around being Miss DoItAll, Spencer was unfazed and uninspired.



Oh, and the time changed today. That whole spring forward business meant that I was already an hour behind on my schedule the moment I woke up, not to mention being completely confused about that the actual time was for the entire stinking day. I hate DST.

...and make decent stuff that doesn't kill Josh.





The most expensive thing about this wine was the time I put into rotating that picture. Gimp skillz. I not has them.

After spending yesterday afternoon with the cold sweats and barfing, I finally conquered the food poisoning demon that invaded my body. I only ate three things for lunch - pineapple, cottage cheese and an apple - so one of them was the culprit. I threw them all away, just to be on the safe side. Bye-bye $10.

Anyway, I recovered enough by dinner time to prepare Josh's birthday cake (Happy Birthday Joshie!). He requested a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. I had this big elaborate plan to make everything from scratch, but had to resort to a box mix and frosting out of a can because I still wasn't feeling healthy enough to put forth the effort into all that rigmarole.

Thanks Betty Crocker!