December

WOD-tastic Friday

And a slacker blog day. No photos. No treats. I got nothin for ya today! And I apologize. I figure these things happen so long as I don’t let them happen often, right? Who’s with me on this? Hahaha.

We did go to Outback for dinner. Which is our GO-TO restaurant as of late. If only we had a place that served grass fed steaks! That’s close and not some schamncy fancy place.

We get home, I’m tired and I need to catch up on American Horror Story. Lame excuse I know but I knew I had an early morning and I didn’t want to be up all night. If I haven’t already told you, I get my WODs in at 5 am. M/W/F so it’s early and TV prevailed :/

So let me get to the Boom Box report. We worked on 5RM of Overhead Squat (OHS). This movement/lift takes a lot of flexibility that I still need to build but I’m getting there. Little did I know that today it would feel like my wrists were on FIRE and I had a hard time moving up in weight 😦 Overall I think I could handle the weight but the darn inside of my right wrist was just not having it. So I maxed out only at 60 lbs. I was real sad about that but you have to move on and work on wrist/forearm mobility. I guess.

The MetCon was:

METCON
Team WOD
7 rounds
5 Muscle ups OR 5 chest to bar pullups & 5 bench dips
8 Plyo Push-ups
11 Plyo Air-squats

It was guys vs gals this morning. Melanie and I did pretty good today. It helps that you can have someone finish out the reps for you and we got through our 7 rounds in a little over 8 minutes …. I THINK! I can’t recall. Granted we didn’t do Muscle UPS but we still pushed and worked hard. So Kudos to us 🙂

And that’s all I’ve got folks… This weekend will be one of rest and getting to those treats I’ve been needing to make. Good Luck to our Boom Box Coach at the All Cities Open tomorrow. We’ll be there cheering him on for sure! It’s a beast of a competition so that is why I am not participating. I’m just not a firebreather yet.. hahahah 3 1/2 months in… still a beginner 🙂

Oh and my kid note for the day: I was trying out one of our NEW lara bars, Chocolate Cherry Torte or something like that and it was YUMMO probably cause the chocolate chips had some sugar, ha, ah well. So I expressed that it was tasty and my 12 yr old (Jonas) says “can I have a little of it?” My immediate response was NO sir! And he was all poor poor petri and I said maybe if you’re good Santa will leave some in your stocking… OH that’s right you don’t believe in Santa anymore do you son?” And to his credit he’s become a little more quick witted and responded with “I BELIEVE IN PALEO SANTA!” Are you kidding me! It made me laugh, he will leave him almond milk and a walnut date bar. And straight up carrots for the reindeer! Good times, Good times indeed! Happy Friday people!!!

Zucchini-Getti and Baby It’s Cold Outside

It’s midway through the week and the sun finally came out to show it’s pretty face today! Finally! It was a balmy 25° outside and the box inside was good degree warmer coming in at 38° – WOOOO! So cold and not fun. But at the BOOM Box we warmed up rather quickly.

A little warmer than outside

After our warm up, we followed up with more warm up on the rowers. 3 sets of 250M row to get the blood circulating. We then proceeded to KB thrusters. I’m thinking they were 24lb kettle bells but I honestly have blanked :/ 3 sets of 8. A little tougher than I had anticipated but mission accomplished! All this time I’d been staring at the MetCon on the board wondering what weight I would be doing for the Ground to Overhead (GTOH) and thinking the bar will be cold, and just so many random thoughts. Come to find out the GTOH is with a plate. Wow easy enough I thought! Hehe, I wish I wouldn’t have those “easy” thoughts! It is a shoulder burnout then add HR pushups to that! Woooo, It was a good, quick and intense knock you out kind of workout. As you can see in the picture I finished at 6:49. Not bad. I flew the first 2 rounds, then kind of lost all hope after that. Thankfully we only had to do a “buy-in” 400 m run at the start because the air was chilly outside.

WOD 12/07/11

Zucchini-Getti and Meat Sauce

This isn’t my first time to make this dish but of course now that I’ve begun my blogging adventure I will share with you my meal. I don’t have anyone to give true credit to because I’ve just really looked at pictures and got the general idea. I did read somewhere and I feel bad that I don’t recall where I read it that you should let your zucchini dry out some after you slice it up. So leave it on the counter top for 15-20 minutes or put it in the fridge for a few hours (for me it was overnight). This will make more sense in just a few moments.

Tuesday night I decided I would prep the zucchini. I rinsed off about 8 zucchini’s and cut the ends off of each of them. I then slice them in half. I use a mandolin slicer to make thin strips but I’ve just sliced them thinly as well without the slicer so whichever you prefer.  After you have then strips I cut them into even thinner strips. Depending on preference you could have thin or thick “faux” noodles. As mentioned above, I lay them out to dry. I line a cookie sheet with paper towels and lay the zucchini strips on there and for me it is best to keep them in fridge until I was ready to use them last night.

Slicing the Zuchinni

Slicing thin strips to create the Getti part of the Zucchini

Zucchini-Getti Layed out to dry

We buy grass fed beef and I used a little over 1.5 lbs for this meal. I brown it over medium heat with some salt, pepper and cumin. I don’t have the time or patience to make a “homemade” sauce so I go with what looks good at the store. And not only what looks good but what is CHEAP(er). So I found an organic, natural sauce and I get that warming up. While meat is browning and sauce is simmering, I sauteed up some fresh tomato, garlic and mushrooms that I will add to sauce. Once the beef is good I add the beef and veggies to the pasta sauce and let it simmer all together.

Veggies that will be sauteed and added to sauce

Browing Ground Beef and Heating up Sauce

It’s time to get some olive oil in a pan. I sauteed some chopped up garlic then added the zucchini. I season the zucchini with ground thyme, oregano, salt and pepper. The zucchini softens pretty quickly and only takes a few minutes before it’s ready. So plate, spoon out some sauce and you’re good to go.

Sauteing Up the Zucchini-Getti

Finished Meal - Zucchini-Getti and Meat Sauce

And there ya have it. Here’s a rough list of ingredients:

1.5 lbs grass fed beef

8 zucchini

1 tomato

3 cloves of garlic

2 bottles of organic, natural pasta sauce

1 carton of mushrooms

spices you prefer (I used salt, pepper, cumin, ground thyme, oregano)

 

It’s a Gloomy and Rainy Monday… boooooo!

Saturday funday WOD 12/03/11

Of course it’s weekend recap time! After crashing hard friday night EARLY cause I’m an old fart, I woke up to a very chilly morning. I started the day off right with iChooseFit bootcamp. We were inside most of the time but we had some running and boxing outside in the drizzly dreary morning. Then because I’m super awesome I went home, put dry clothes on and headed out to the Boom Box for the Saturday Funday WOD and HELLO fun shoudn’t be the word for it but more like a beating. As you can see from the picture it was a 10 min AMRAP of insansity! I chose to do the 60 BFB, 20 Front Squats and 10 Ring Rows/10 Ring Dips. I barely got through one round and just for grins got that one burpee in before time was called.

I will tell you I had already done about 60 burpees at iChooseFit, then I had to do another 60 for the WOD!!!??!!! Those burpees were a beating and took up most of the 10 minutes in the WOD. I was spent!

Oh ya, and prior to that we had our 90 sec max rep Hand Release Push Ups! I ousted Coach Grants MOM (she’s a tough one to beat)! She had the wall record for 40 in 90 seconds and I barely scraped by with 43!!!! Woohoooo! I think with better pacing I could have pushed out 45. Maybe next time 🙂

The rest of Saturday consisted of one of my son’s football parties and lots of “rest” the rest of the day. As always Sundays are our shopping days. We gather up all that we need for the week, it just happened to be not as fun because it wouldn’t stop raining/drizzling. I did however buy some items to make for Christmas events for the kids, for work, for parties, etc. I hope to do some trial baking to see if it’s worthy to the NON PALEO folks out there.

My first trial was an almond flour chocolate cake. The batter tasted good so I was hopeful for a great outcome. And low and behold it was pretty tasty, I just overcooked it a tad bit 😦 While I was overcooking my cake I was whipping up a chocolate frosting to mix with the cake because my end goal was to make some paleo cake balls! For the past several years I turn into a cake ball machine in December. Well seeing as that I’ve changed my whole eating lifestyle cake balls just weren’t going to be my thing this year but if I can get this paleo style cake ball going it might be worth if for the holidays! So I used the cake that was still edible and mixed it with my frosting (that may be a little too bitter since the chocolate bar had zero sugar) and rolled out little balls. I set them in the freezer and hopefully tonight I’ll get them dipped in some dark chocolate and get my taste testing on! I’ll let you know how it goes. In the mean while I’ll share my PRE BAKED cake and the recipe. I forgot to do an after picture because I was so sad it was overdone. Trust me it would not have been a pretty picture.

Almond Flour Chocolate Cake

Chocolate Cake (makes about 24 balls)
(From “the Gluten-free Almond Flour cookbook”)

2 cups almond flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup raw honey
2 eggs
1 Tbsp vanilla
(I added grapeseed oil because the batter was thick, and to be honest I didn’t measure it out. I’ll modify this when I bake again, but I’d say I did at least 1/3 cup)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease (with coconut oil!) and flour (with almond flour!) an 8 inch cake pan.
Combine the almond flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking soda in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, combine the honey, eggs and vanilla. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix well. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Cool the cake completely.

Courtesy of http://paleobrat.blogspot.com/2011/04/paleo-party-with-cake-pop-demo.html

I did not follow their cake ball directions but feel free to try your own thing. Below is the frosting I made that I mixed in with my crumbled up cake.

Chocolate Frosting:
1 cup of dark chocolate. I tried to use 75% cacao or higher, but only had this 60% one laying around, so I used that
1/2 cup grapeseed oil
2 tbs agave nectar
1 tbs vanilla extract
pinch sea salt

Chop dark chocolate up and place into a small saucepan
Pour out half cup of grapeseed oil and mix with chocolate in saucepan
Heat over low heat until melted and blended
Stir in agave, vanilla and salt

Once the chocolate is melted, place in mixing bowl to cool. When it is warm to the touch I put it in fridge to cool more quickly. This still wasn’t quick enough for me so I put in freezer for a little bit as well.

Once chilled, place in mixer and mix on a high speed until its rich, fluffy, and creamy. It will lighten up in color quite a bit and almost have a light buttercream consistency.

Courtesy of: http://www.instructables.com/id/Gluten-Free-Paleo-Friendly-Delicious-Vanilla-Cu/

I have not tried the cupcakes that went with the frosting yet but I’m sure they are yummy.

Once I taste test the cake balls I will be more detailed about making them and show you some pictures. Wish me luck! And if you have any questions or things to add about anything I’ve shared just leave a comment 🙂 Happy Monday