Moroccan Feast!!!

Tonight we had friends over for dinner and I decided on a Moroccan menu.  In southern WV there are very few dining choices aside from chain restaurants, Chinese buffets, and a few Mexican places.  If you want something more exotic you have to make it yourself!  On tonight's menu were sesame flatbreads, a chicken, chickpea, and apricot tagine, spiced couscous, mint tea, and for dessert a date and walnut cake and a almond filo dessert.  Most of the recipes came from my Essential Mediterranean cookbook. 

The sesame flatbread was an exciting achievement for me because I make it a rule to avoid any recipe that calls for yeast.  I had a mishap with a pizza dough years back and I've been wary of the stuff every since.  I decided to make an exception and give these a try because they looked easy and didn't have to rise for 3 years.  Everyone seemed to like them.  I served them with some Trader Joe's sundried tomato and olive brushetta.  It was delicious.  Not Moroccan, but damn tasty!

The tagine was fruity and pretty tasty.  I don't have an actual tagine and I don't think they sell them at my Wal-Mart so I took the recipe's advice and used my crock pot.  Worked great!  This had chicken, chickpeas, tomatoes, carrots, various spices, honey, and dried apricots.  It was good and smelled wonderful!  I served it with a spiced couscous with currents and toasted pecans.  I had a picture of it but it seems to have gotten deleted from my camera card!  :(

The main dessert was refered to in the cookbook as a filo almond snake.  I can't help but think they should have thought of a better name for it.  It doesn't sound very elegant.  :P  This thing was a beast to make!  It consists of ground almonds, flaked almonds, egg white, powdered sugar, and almond extract mixed to form a paste.  The only problem is that the paste is WAY too sticky to work with.  I ended up using three times as many almonds and what seemed like eight times more sugar than called for.  No matter, I made it work.  You form this paste into "logs" which you then roll up in filo and then coil it around in a springform pan.  Brush with egg yolk and cinammon, bake!              

 

Here is an "in process" picture. Not too pretty is it!  In fact the almond stuff looks a bit like something you might find in a litter box.  Gross, I know!  Thank goodness it doesn't taste that way!  So basically if you have the patience and you want to really impress someone bring one of these to a pot luck!  You'll look all kinds of fancy.  The picture of my other cake mysteriously disappeared as well.  Hmmm....

For a late night snack while we watched some of The Office season five we had a candy apple.  Last Saturday I went to a candy apple making party and still had a couple left in the fridge.  These are so good!  They will keep a little over a week in the fridge too.  This apple was dipped in caramel, chocolate, pretzels, toffee bits, and white chocolate chunks! Decadent! 

The majority of the day was spent prepping and cooking for the get together.  I slept in (love Saturdays!) and had a simple breakfast of multigrain hot cereal made with unsweetened vanilla soymilk, banana, almond butter, and chocolate chips.  Tasty and filling.  Then I hit the gym for a bit of the treadmill.  It was a low energy day so I just did incline intervals.  On high energy days I do HIIT and see how fast I can run.  (Which is not too fast being 4'11 and a little chubby!)  Even with my lower intensity today I burned 280 calories according to my heart rate monitor.  I'm satisfied with that.  Tomorrow I'll either hit some weights or maybe try getting some fresh air.  The weather has been really nice here but I know the cold is coming soon!

 I forgot to post last night so I'll do a quick blurb about it now.  We went out to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, Macado's.  It's a sandwich place.  They seriously have hundreds of different varieties.  The one I choose last night is called a cowpoke.  It is chicken, cheddar, and bbq sauce, served on a bagel.  I subbed a croissant for the bagel.  YUM!  Served with brocolli cheese soup and pretzel and honey mustard.  So good.  I try to eat as healthy as possible during the week but I like to spluge a bit on the weekends...sometimes more than a bit.  I'm working on that though!   Just for fun I've posted a picture of the menu at right.  Look closely and tell me you don't see something weird on that sandwich...                                                              

Kick my butt kickboxing class, awesome water bottle, and more!

Since I missed posting last night I will move backward in time and start with today's breakfast.   
Cinnamon Raisin bread with all natural peanut butter, blueberries and a Carbmaster yogurt. 

I really like these yogurts despite the artificial sweetners.  My absolute favorite yogurts are Greek yogurts but these cost $0.44 as opposed to $1.99 for the Greek.  They still have 12 grams of protein and protein content is what I like best about the Greek yogurt.

Today I am drinking from my awesomely beautiful reusable water bottle. While I of course care about the environment, the biggest appeal to reusable water bottles is that they are so flipping cute! :P  Plus since my tap is filtered it saves money too! Plus this particular bottle was at TJMaxx for $5.99!  It was a steal!

Last night after kickboxing I had beef stew waiting in the crockpot! It was so good!  Quick and easy too.  Basically the contents were 3 chopped potatoes, 3 chopped carrots, two handfulls of mushrooms, a very lean roast,  seasonings, and a can of golden mushroom soup with some water.  Cooked on low for about 9 hours.  Turned out perfect!  I have always loved the crockpot but I hate cleaning it.  I've started buying those plastic liners and now it's effortless!

As for my kickboxing class!  Whew it kicked my butt.  This was one of the highest energy classes we've had in awhile.  I was sweating something fierce!  After the kicking, punching, kneeing, and elbowing portion of class we had a 10 minute torture session the instructor refers to as "J-Lo abs".  It's a series of crazy hard ab moves with a stability ball. To prepare for the workout I had my favorite snack...a Larabar.  These are so good.  They are bit pricey so I have to limit myself to about 3 per week.  Everyone in the house knows not to touch them!  They are all natural, raw, vegan, no added sugar.  I feel like there should be a way in which I could make something similar.  I might take that project on one day soon.

As a final note I saw the coolest thing while browsing the web this morning! A Buddha pear!  Apparantly after much experimenting with growing the pears in molds this is the result.  I love it!

A bowl of ulgy for breakfast!

What is this big bowl of grossness you may ask.  It's my breakfast.  Despite appearances it is quite delicious!  It's an easy make ahead breakfast for people too lazy to cook oats.  Basically you take 1/2 cup of greek yogurt, mix with 1 TB lemon curd (by the way greek yogurt and lemon curd is the best combo on the planet!!), a handfull of blueberries, 1/3 cup of raw oats, and a splash of milk so it's not too pasty.  Set in the fridge overnight and viola! Breakfast. (Note: reused Kroger cottage cheese container is optional!  I'm being green. ;P)            

Lunch today is one of my quick options.  Amy's Cheddar burrito...I'm addicted for sure!  They are so good.  Served with cut carrots and a banana.  I woke up in the middle of the night with one of those awful leg cramps that propel you straight out of bed so I decided to put a banana on today's menu.  Also more water because I've been drinking way too much tea and not near enough water.  In fact as I'm typing this my water is hanging out in the corner of my desk and I have a cup of Earl Grey in front of me...oh well. 

Tonight is kickboxing night.  I've had a TERRIBLE sinus headache all day.  Woke up with it in fact so hopefully it will ease up in time for my workout!  Also I have a pot roast in the crockpot to look forward to after the gym.  I love, love, love my crockpot.  It makes late gym nights so much easier for me.  Of course everytime I use it I have the secret fear that my house has caught on fire while I've been gone.  This would be because I'm always thinking of crazy things that might happen, not because crockpots have a habit of igniting homes. 

    

 

Working out old school

Tonight I decided to come home and cook dinner instead of going spinning.  I didn't skip exercise all together though...more on that in a second.  First I got creative with the contents of the fridge.  I had some chicken tenders and giant containers of spinach and mushrooms from Sam's Club that needed used.  I also had some wine hanging out.  True Confession time:  I don't really like wine unless it's super sweet and dessertish.  I bought this wine because it had a picture of a giant pancake on it.  Who wouldn't love a giant pancake?  Anyhow I sauteed the chicken and then added wine and butter.  I reduced that down and then put the chicken to the side while I made the mushrooms and spinach.  I threw some wine and butter in with them too.  Then I added the chicken back and served with brown and wild rice.  To drink I made some Earl Grey iced tea.  I drink more tea than anyone I've ever met.  Hot, cold, whatever.  I love it.  This tea was a gift from my wonderful friend Jessi.  This girl is great!  I drove her to and from the dentist because she was being sedated and she hooks me up with this awesome organic tea!                          

After dinner I watched some TV and then decided it was time to exercise.  I've just gotten over mono so I haven't really been lifting weights recently.  To get back in the swing of things I pulled out my old school favorite exercise video of all time.  The Firm Tough Tape!  It lives up to it's name that's for certain.  I love the old Firm videos...I don't like the new ones at all though.  This particular video is literally a video.  Yep like a VCR video.  Remember those kids?  :)  Anyhow this video kicked my ass.  I loved every second of it though.  According to my heart rate monitor I burned 381 calories.  Max HR of 186 (that killer giant step).  Afterwards I had a delicious post-workout smoothie.  No picture of it though.  It contained 1/2 scoop chocolate protein powder.  Handfull each of raspberries and blueberries.  Milk. Ice.  Delish!

8 kinds of excited about my new gloves!

Today was Tuesday which means kickboxing day! Last week I purchased new gloves after class and have been eager to use them ever since! Just look at these big mommas! What a difference! I am used to using the wimpy fingerless gloves and these babies are 16 oz. a piece. I think this really enhanced my workout!

I'm proud to say that I've had a YMCA membership since January and have used it consistently since then! Go me! :P The past couple of months have been rough because I had mono so I did slack there for a month or so but I'm back in business now. In addition to kickboxing I have a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with spinning and I love weight lifting. I recently completed the program outlined in the book The New Rules of Lifting for Women and I highly recommend it. I'm inbetween programs now but am leaning towards starting P90x. More on that later!

Well guess I better call it a night!

My first time!

Welcome to my blog! I've never done anything like this before but I like to bore people with mundane nonsense so I though why not start a blog! The aim of this blog is to chronicle my efforts to improve myself ever so slightly every day. So this will be a bit of a food blog because I love to eat, a bit of an exercise blog because I've finally made exercise a habit, and a bit of whatever else is going on! I might discuss books, talk travel, outline my stuggles to learn a foreign language, you just never know!