WIAW-Short and Sweet

Date: April 29, 2014

Author: astottler

Happy WIAW! Today’s post is going to be short and sweet (literally sweet!). Yayy midterm season. On the plus side, I’m starting to regain my Spanish (ish) accent thanks to singing along to lots of Spanish songs. I love Spanish music!

…And that was clearly a relevant into to WIAW!

I’ve been feeling a bit uninspired in terms of blogging lately, and I think it may reflect the fact that I’ve been struggling to maintain good eating habits as of late as well. That’s definitely something to work on! I’m past the point in my life where I freak out about my eating habits sliding, and instead I just accept that it happens and eventually will work itself out. More veggies are in order-that usually helps!

So, here are some shots from the past couple of days!

A cappuccino was clearly in order on Monday morning…

The craziest thing happened…I drank beet juice and didn’t hate it completely! I keep buying vegetable juice thinking I’m going to like it, and more often than not, this isn’t the case. This was was pretty good-beets, apples, cranberries, cucumbers, and ginger among other things I’m most likely forgetting. And it was such a pretty color!

Dining hall dinners are, as always, a thing. This one was fairly unexciting-quinoa, salad, roasted cinnamon carrots (ok, those were exciting), and overcooked fish.

Monday night, a late night bout of deliciousness happened. We have a place on campus open late, and I’ve seen people before with these incredible, giant, chocolately creations, so with the help of my sister, it was time to try it out. This was a HOT gooey brownie, topped with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce. It was as good as it sounds. Sadly, the ice cream fell off before I could get a good picture!

This morning, I did a track workout. I did 5x1000m at a 10k pace. I’m liking the 10k pace for longer track workouts or for longer intervals. It’s much easier mentally to not totally be dying! Plus, not dying is good since I’m just getting back into speed work! After my workout, I made what is probably my new favorite breakfast: quinoa (Trader Joe’s has pre-cooked frozen, for those of us without kitchens, or who are lazy-I won’t judge!), kale, tomato, and basil, mixed up and topped with roasted sunflower seeds. The fresh basil totally makes this dish!

Today was an absolutely beautiful day. Or a hot day, depending on your opinion. It was 90-but I’ve spent so many years roasting my brains out at hot softball fields (117-sounds like great softball weather!) that I think my body has permanently adjusted to not really feeling heat. Anyways, I spent the afternoon outside biking around campus and looking at plants for my Bio problem set. True Bio problems.

And getting a tan. Clearly. Hah. I’m 99% sure given my skin tone that I have a much better chance of turning myself orange from eating to many carrots than getting tan. Such is the life of a person with an off-snow skin tone.

And here are some artsy-ish/I needed pictures to refer to later when doing my homework shots.

It occurred to me that I have such a beautiful campus, and really need to bike around and take pictures of it for you all to see!

Afterwards, it was hot so the logical conclusion is gelato. Right…?

Salted caramel gelato, which i garnished with a chocolate covered pretzel.

Dinner was a quick one thrown together by yours truly. A bed of kale, shredded chicken meatballs, a baby sweet potato, salsa, and of course, the most important component, avocado.

…and now I desperately need to return to studying. So much for SHORT and sweet!

How’s the weather where you are? What do you eat when it gets hot?

WIAW-College is Hard

Date: February 25, 2014

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

So…college is hard. I would absolutely love more sleep, but during week 8, that doesn’t always happen. Week 8 is something only quarter system students can truly appreciate. And yes, everyone knows exactly what week it is and the perils of each week. Thank goodness for a little foodie break! Thanks as always to Jenn for hosting this mid-week party!

I’ve had some delicious food in the last couple of days. You’ll notice that nothing is from Tuesday…I’m planning a day in the life post for that day! So-here we go!

A dining hall breakfast of COFFEE, plain Greek yogurt with fruit and granola, and a few bites of steel cut oats because our dining hall has them and I’ve never tried them.

It was Parent’s Weekend last weekend. Which meant a large vegetable delivery. And a delicious lunch out.

A panini with avocado, cheese, and tomato on whole grain bread. Take a second to look at that beauty,

Lots of roasted veggies for snack/dinner. The brussels sprouts are sesame brussels from PaleOMG. They have a curry dipping sauce, which I liked the flavor of, but I think next time I’d try it with a lighter base, such as avocado, or greek yogurt.

And since I had all those veggies for snack and after Crossfit I needed to go to the store and I just HAPPENED to find a parking spot in front of my favorite ice cream place….yeah, this was necessary!

Sunday was my long run day, now that I’m officially in half training! Since I AM officially in half training, I think it’s time to take my pre run meals more seriously. I’ve kind of been just eating whatever before them…I had some banana blueberry oats with sunflower seed butter.

Which took a long time to digest….and then I got brunch….and then another snack…so I didn’t start my run until around 5. It was 8 miles, and it went surprisingly well. My feet hated me, but that’s that…I’m trying to keep my paces on my long runs below 10:00 as much as possible, unless there are crazy hills so I was right on track!

Sunday night after a long couple of hours of sorority requirements, I was talking to my sister and she said “You sound like you need a boba.” So we drove to her newest favorite place, and I had a jasmine milk tea. Sometimes you do need a late night boba!

Monday morning I thought it would be a fabulous idea to do a track workout, despite my long run being Sunday. Which is another way of saying I didn’t think. My legs were definitely a little heavy, so that schedule is going to have to change as my long runs get longer! For breakfast, I had a yogurt bowl, plus half a lemon zest pancake because I really wanted to try it. It was good! But subtle.

I had some leftover oatmeal from Sunday morning, so I brought a little with me to put on top of my yogurt bowl for some extra flavor and texture.

I must be channeling my inner Ashley– not only did I have an avocado and cheese panini, but I also made a Mexican style lunch with sweet potato, asparagus, cottage cheese, salsa, and guacamole. All in tupperware with a kiwi.

That’s a small step up from eating out of a plastic bag, right?

Have a great week everybody!

What’s one of your favorite food combos right now?

The Chemistry of Fats

Date: January 27, 2014

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Hey guys! This is midterm week…yay. And since I don’t have much time to study for Human Nutrition (thanks for that Bio), I figured I’d double my efforts and multitask-a blog post that I’m being tested on! So-today, we’ll talk about the difference in types of fat!

First, let’s go through a quick day of food.

This morning I woke up to run. After yesterday’s bout into the world of sugar, I felt really gross and full-and I didn’t sleep well at all. I considered skipping the run all together.

I fueled up with some energy balls (I think this is going to be my pre-race breakfast).

The run was…surprisingly amazing. I expected to feel awful, but I felt great! Lesson-a week of hard work is not undone in a day. I even started thinking about my goal paces for my upcoming halfs-in the (long distant) future, I could imagine doing a sub 2. My 4 mile run was a tempo run, so a middle mile was at my 5k goal pace.

The best part? My feet. Maybe there is something to the hope that this whole cutting out processed food business will magically cure my foot pain. I didn’t really feel the numbness at all, and my tendonitis is getting better (but I have been doing rehab exercises for this). So things are looking up on that front! Really quickly, I’m going to go through food, and then get on to fats!

Plain yogurt with fruit compote.

Chicken with steamed spinach and leftover lentil mix.

A hot apple with cinnamon and sunflower seed butter, plus a hard boiled egg.

A surprisingly good persimmon from the campus market.

Same old, same old. But for some reason the freezer made it thinner…and I am out of paper bowls so real bowl for me!

I still needed something so brown rice with butter.

And homemade applesauce! My roommate brought a slow cooker, and this is the first time we used it! We just chopped up a bunch of random apples and threw them in…needless to say our room smells amazing! And applesauce is good with creme fraiche…just saying.

NOW. On to fats!

There’s been a lot of confusion lately, and a lot of labeling “good” and “bad” fats.

There are 3 types of fatty acids:

-Saturated-no double bonds

-Monounsaturated-one double bond

-Polyunsatured-more than one double bond

Which gives them this general structure:

(Totally stolen from my lecture notes.)

The double bonds cause bending, so the fats can’t stack as closely, hence the liquid texture at room temperature.

Fats in our bodies are mostly found as triglycerides-a 3 carbon backbone that holds 3 fatty acids together.

In general-animal fats are mostly saturated, plant fats are mostly unsaturated, and fats in fish have the longest carbon chains, and are the most unsaturated. Tropical plants (coconut and palm) have saturated fats.

Fats in the foods we eat are mixtures of these different types, but there is usually a dominant type. (Coconut oil is mostly saturated, but it has some monounsaturated.)

But it’s not as simple at just called saturated fats “bad” and unsaturated fats “good.” It’s a bit more complex.

Animal fats, such as geek or butter, have 16-18 carbons in their chains.

Coconut saturated fat only have 12-14 carbons in its chain.

This is why coconut oil does not react in our bodies in the same way that something like butter would.

Almonds, avocado, and olive oil are examples of monounsaturated fats (remember-one double bond).

Omega-6 polyunsaturated acids have 2 double bonds and 18 carbons, and are common in walnuts and sunflower oil.

Omega-3 fatty acids in flax are different from those in fish-flax have 3 double bonds and 18 carbons

Fish have 5-6 double bonds, and 20-22 carbons.

Hopefully that little tutorial was helpful! Let me know if there are any further questions!

What’s you favorite source of fat?

My Little Adorable Wake-up Call

Date: December 20, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

I must admit, I haven’t been the greatest about posting. Or at least it seems! With Christmas less than a week away, there seems to be so much to do! I think I’m actually more or less done with Christmas shopping. I CANNOT wait to share with you guys what I’m doing for people, but it will have to wait until after the recipients who read my blog have opened their presents!

I never recapped my last day (ok, morning) in Solvang!

Here are a few of the last pastries of the trip (or of the next few months-WHEW we ate a lot of pastries!)

Blueberry boat.

Cappuccino at an adorable bakery.

A much more delicious version of a poptart.

On our way out of town, we stopped to see mini horses. I really want one. Not quite as much as an ostrich, but still!

It was a long drive home, but a delicious and interesting dinner made up for it. I tried Ethiopian food for the first time! (For others in the area, it was called Walia).

I honestly couldn’t tell you what anything was. We got somethings with chicken, some things with other meat, and veggie combos. But really, everything I tried was excellent. What is really cool also is how the food is served. There were no utensils-the table got served all the dishes on a giant platter.

(Excuse the awkward hand in the picture).

This was served with Injera, which is sort of like a spongy bread made with teff. It has a vaguely sourdough flavor, which was great to cut the spice.

You use the Injera as a utensil and kind of just go at it. Being the totally neat person that I am, somehow I ended up totally soiling 3 napkins, and still ending up with food all over my hands, while the rest of my family had barely used one napkin. I don’t get it!

And then Thursday. That was an interesting day, thanks to a 4:30 am wakeup, courtesy of this little guy:

He’s sort of in the habit of coming into my room in the middle of the night-loudly. For some reason, at 4:30am, he desperately needs attention, and won’t stop meowing and purring, which would be great and all if I actually wanted to be awake then…

I went to my home gym for a spin class with one of my favorite teachers, and then desperately needed to go to yoga because I’m so tight, but yoga was an awkward amount of time from the end of spin-not really enough to leave…so I killed time by doing some abs and a treadmill workout. I started with an 8:00 mile, and then did 10 2:00 intervals at about a 7:30 pace, with 2:00 of walking in between. It was a good one-my legs were done by the end. I’ve been really loving running lately-ever since my 5k, I’m starting to feel faster in my every day runs. I think part of my problem was being overly ambitious in my 5k-I wanted to break 24:00, when I should have been racing to break 25:00-next race I will definitely not go out so fast!

After yoga, I over caffeinated myself with a curiously strong cappuccino.

After some quick grocery and Christmas shopping, it was lunchtime! I picked up some turkey apricot soup at Whole Foods, plus some carrots and guacamole.

Whole Foods’s eggnog selection was quite dissapointing-they didn’t have either of the two types I was hoping for. I got a baby jar instead-it was good but very vanilla flavored.

My afternoon was spent cursing my printer and working on Christmas things. Then, I threw a bunch of things together for dinner, and the flavors worked really well together!

The basica idea was sweet potato nachos-all the toppings, but with sweet potatoes in place of chips. The result reminded me more of deconstructed veggie tacos, or a Mexican style vegetarian chili.

Topping the sliced sweet potatoes was this mixture-my idea was for this to be black beans, but I’m also trying to incorporate more veggies into my life, so I added some kale, and half a can of diced tomatoes and jalapenos, plus salt, pepper, and taco seasoning. (Of you’re wondering about the things in there that look like carrots and cabbage, the only kale I found came in a ‘salad mix.’)

Then, I topped everything off with guacamole (of course), fresh salsa, and cheddar cheese.

And believe me, much more guacamole was added after the fact. I’m just a little obsessed. I’m seriously considering making a 2014 calendar consisting only of avocados. Too far?

And with that, I leave you. Hope everyone has a great day-and remember, I’ll do the drawing for my 12 Days of Christmas Giveaway tonight at 9:00pm PST.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever woken up to?

Given I’m cat-deprived, I can’t complain about Charlie too much. I used to have this alarm clock that had nature sounds, and for some reason it was set to blast the sound of rain as my alarm, so it sounded like extremely loud static. Not pleasant.

WIAW and Relearning to Run

Date: October 2, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Happy Wednesday! I’m dead tired and I’m staying up to write this post, but I simply couldn’t miss WIAW. I just finished marathon Chem and Physics problem sets so let’s hope this post is at least kind of coherent. Thanks Jenn!

This WIAW is a collection of a ton of random shots I took of my food. I think it pretty accurately describes my eating right now. #dormlife

Before I get into that, I wanted to talk about this morning’s workout. I took a 45 minute spin class, and then went our for a 4 mile training run. I had some…technical difficulties. It’s never good when your shoes don’t finish in the same state they began.

I got new inserts to in theory help with my foot problems. Do they help? Maybe? At least on shorter runs? My feet still stunk on my 12 miler. Well, there’s one little problem. Well, 2. A) I don’t own enough anti-blister socks so I need to save them for the longest runs and B) these inserts rub like crazy. After 2 miles, I couldn’t stand the intense burning on one foot, so I stopped and ran the rest of the way with the insert in my hand. The blister pain went away, but I had kind of a strange experience. I really concentrated on running correctly. I’ve done a ton of agility/sprinting training, so I know how to run. And my sprinting run is not at all like my distance run in terms of how I strike with my feet. I was being really careful to strike with my foot in a better position (just one foot…baby steps), and guess what? No foot pain. The motion was a lot different though, and my heel was burning like crazy by the end of the run. I think the only way to solve my foot issues is by relearning to run. After my race, I’m going to really work on it, which will involve a lot of barefoot running.

Aaand onto the food from the past few days.

An Asian pear with the morning view.

Leftover salad and foccacia. The salad is from the Cheesecake Factory-my friend invited me to dinner there with her grandparents Sunday night. I actually really liked this salad! Perfect leftover.

I was craving pumpkin (no surprise there) so I threw a bunch of things in the microwave in hopes of something similar to the amazing pumpkin microwave cake we made. It didn’t really come out at all like that, but it tasted just like pumpkin pie so I’m not complaining.

My newest obsession-apple chips. And yesterday/today I was pretty much out of food so it was apple chips for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I kid. Sort of…

A solid dining hall dinner post-Crossfit. The dill salmon was actually really good-normally dining hall salmon is pretty gross.

You know I’m out of food when…I break into my freezer supply of quick bread. This is zucchini bread-a study snack.

Post workout drink with a side of college life-that mess on my desk is what I have to deal with constantly. There is zero space in my room, if you’re wondering why a lot of pictures are of me holding food, not on a table or desk. And FYI-it’s not a good habit to get into to just plop your food down on TOP of everything…laptop included…

I was about to just grab a bar for breakfast, but I decided I should have something at least a little more real. The last of my cinnamon apple blueberry bread from who knows when in the freezer! Yum!

It’s all about balance my friends. And by that-of course I mean the balance of chocolate and vanilla. Kidding. But I’ll talk about the actual balance I’m referring to at the end.

Strange but good-harboiled egg and pesto. Add in some dried fruit, and you’ve got yourself a pre-workout snack.

Pre-workout dates. Yum.

Since I was crazy low on food and I saw some posts about all the amazing pumpkin things at Trader Joe’s, I HAD TO GO NOW. Despite the crazy amount of work I had today. Study fuel…right??

Dinner was some veggie soup from the freezer, plus some new purchases. Edamame crackers topped with pumpkin cream cheese!

GUYS. This pumpkin cream cheese is BOMB. It’s not too sweet either-that surprised me! It’s not going to last until the weekend. There’s no way.

I also got these because, I mean, come on, how cool is this? Honestly though, I wasn’t a fan. They were a bit dry and sweet for my taste. Better topped with pumpkin cream cheese. Sensing a theme here?

Today was also the night of our guac party. It was honestly a much needed brain break. Yesterday held hours of work, including late night work and an early morning.

And avocados make everything better, right?

Speaking on study snacks…apple chips+pumpkin cream cheese? YUM. If that doesn’t say fall, what does? Are you sensing WHY this cream cheese won’t be around much longer?

And onto the whole balance thing…I feel like my eating habits are starting to slip. Mostly I’m just not feeling as great. Late nights are not helping when I have a snack because I’m up late working. I’m making a 30 day challenge for myself-only eat pumpkin. Not literally-only eat sweets if they involve pumpkin. That way, I won’t eat something that will make me feel bad unless it’s seasonal and really worth it. That’s a balance I can live with. And hopefully some sleep, coffee, and fresh groceries can get me right back on track.

Favorite pumpkin product so far?