Pi Day!

Date: March 16, 2017

Author: astottler

You better BELIEVE I celebrated Pi Day on Tuesday!

Sadly, I am not capable of reciting hundreds of digits of pi, but I am certainly capable of eating delicious pie!

My morning started off with a little walk with Chloe and some of my friends! They actually love walking with her, and are even willing to get up for a 7am walk with the sunrise and the pup!

For breakfast, I had my typical pre-spin meal of fruit and a flapjacked muffin.

Also—I’m playing around with less ridiculously large pictures, so let me know what you think!

My pre-teaching spin snack was Berry Cheerios.

Class went pretty well, but I feel like a lot of the playlists I’ve been doing lately have had really similar formats. Sometimes after teaching a lot without a break, I get a little uninspired. I vowed to bring something different on Thursday, so I actually just now spent a good deal of time finding some fresh music, and let the music dictate the format. I think it’s a good one! A lot of the songs are new and haven’t made it to the radio yet, which always gets me excited. Check it out here on my spotify!

I ate lunch outside afterwards because the weather was insanely nice. I had leftover chicken dijon stew with some GF fire roasted veggie crackers.

On my way home, I stopped at Whole Foods to pick up a GF pie for Pi Day!

That afternoon when I arrived home, I had a quick snack of a lemon blueberry muffin and the rest of the lemon yogurt I used to make the muffins.

Then, it was time to drag the kitties to the vet for their annual checkup. It was really rough. Charlie is the biggest scaredy cat, and his tail puffed up the second he got in his crate. He HATES the car, and was panting and drooling the entire drive there. He also had an accident in his crate since he didn’t use the litter all day. While we waited for the vet in the room, I was able to hold him (cat urine and all) and he calmed down a lot, but the entire process was just the saddest thing.

On a happier note, I’m going back to working at the vet in a couple of weeks, now that my crazy traveling is over! I’m really excited to be back.

For dinner, we made pizza pie! Tortilla BBQ chicken pizza pie, that is!

I used Trader Joe’s pulled BBQ chicken on top, along with pizza sauce, spinach, mozzarella, and red peppers.

We served the pizzas alongside roasted brussels sprouts.

(We used the rest of the BBQ chicken for the following night’s dinner, in salad form!)

And then, it was time for the pie! It was SUPER crumbly. Blueberry peach, with a crumble topping.

Post dinner snack was a brown rice cake with whipped chive cream cheese.

How did you celebrate pi day?

More Thoughts on Athlete Identity and Next Week’s Goal

Date: March 15, 2015

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

I love reading all your comments on athletic identity! I think that with all I do, I am still an athlete, but I just seem to have a mental block about realizing that. I think part of this recent feeling stems from the fact that I haven’t exactly been pushing hard in my workouts lately-while being sick for a while, I felt like I was just in maintenance and survival mode, but now I’m ready to get after it! This was especially apparent when I did Crossfit Open 15.3-I swear I used to be better at wall balls!

15.3 was 7 muscle ups, 50 wall balls, and 100 double unders, for 14 minutes. Since I am definitely not able to do a muscle up, I did the scaled which was 50 wall balls, and 200 singles for 14 minutes. I initially wanted to try double unders but after trying for a while, it was just taking too long. This one was tough-my arms were dead. Partially probably due to the fact that we did a TON of push ups the day before and so my shoulders were already sore!

Also-I’m feeling more like an athlete after today’s half training run. I’m back to double digits! I started the morning with my typical pre-run breakfast, jazzed up with some frozen blueberries. It’s basically a mess of egg whites, banana, and a few oats. I would normally put cocoa powder in it, but I’m not reacting too well to chocolate as far as I know, and didn’t want to take any chances.

After my foot felt really good all week, it flared up on me again yesterday. I used twice last night, and I still woke up with it sore. I even iced immediately upon waking up. I honestly didn’t have too high hopes for the run, given my foot and the fact that I felt pretty sluggish last week, but ended up surprising myself and having a great run.

My left calf had been a little tight this week, and strangely enough my calves get less tired if I’m running a little faster, so I picked up the pace a bit at the beginning and just got in a groove. I was well under a 10:00 mile for most of the run (minus a hilly mile) and kept up my splits right to the last mile. Ok? I’ll take it!

I think the fact that I was eating less junk this week totally helped! Also-in terms of race day plans, I’m not trying to PR. I just want to enjoy the race. In my last race, I ran all of my training runs at a pace to PR (in the heat and humidity no less), and went out way too fast, and ended up crashing hard at the end as a result, leading to one of my worse times. So no flying and dying for me this time!

Next week is finals week, so I went home after my run for Physics help and a home cooked meal. This is chicken and dumplings from Cooking Light-the dumplings are stops of whole wheat tortilla! The perfect mix of protein, carbs, and salt post-run!

We also had some blueberry pie, because pi day! I don’t have a picture of that, but here are the mini pies I had last night! My sorority sold them to raise money for our philanthropies (and yes, selling pie on pi day was totally my idea…). My friend and I split mixed berry and apricot.

In terms of finals, I have one Monday, one Tuesday, and one Friday. Luckily, I seem to be on track with my studying so far, which is why I actually have time to post this!

So-weekly goals. This past week’s goal was pretty successful-I think I nailed 5.5/7 breakfasts and lunches this week! So moving on to this week’s goal: no nighttime eating. During dead and finals week, there are treats and study snacks at every corner. While I know some people swear by their nighttime snacks, for some reason eating late at night always gives me stomachaches. While I would say I’m 99% fine after being sick, things that would normally give me a stomachache are magnified, and nightly snacks have not been kind to me as of late. So that’s this week’s goal-I’ll keep you all updated on how it goes!

Did you have pie for pi day?

15 Minute Pie for Pi Day!

Date: March 15, 2013

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Happy Pi Day everyone! Do you guys celebrate this holiday? It’s well worth it! I really haven’t celebrated it enough. Back in high school/middle school we got pie in math class maybe once or twice. This year though, I wanted to rock it! I will get to the recipe in a bit, and it’s a keeper. Did I mention it is 3 ingredients?

Taking us back to yesterday. Breakfast was scrambled eggs with leftover mushroom artichoke dip again, but this time with an Asian pear from Costco. LOVE.

Lunch was also from Costco: Afghan food. Pumpkin Bolani plus sauces. I first tried these at my local farmer’s market. The vendors are so friendly and push tons of samples at you! I’ve also found them at Whole Foods, and a couple of other local grocery stores. They’re definitely worth a try! I like the Spinach Bolani as well.

Class yesterday actually ended early, since it was the last class of the quarter. We are going on a field trip to the farmer’s market this Sunday! I also found out that my sister has mono. What are the odds? Ok, you’d think they’d be pretty high since she is my sister, but I’ve seen her once this quarter, way before I could have caught it. It must be seriously going around! Anyways, since she’s in the sore throat stage, she wanted to go to Wildberry for frozen yogurt on our way out. Well if you twist my arm….I tried the tart mango that time, which was so good! All their flavors are awesome! And here’s some more exciting news! When I got home, I laced up my running shoes for my first “workout.” I put that in quotations because that is a gross exaggeration. I did lunges up my street. But to be fair, it’s not THAT short. And it’s straight uphill. And then I ran maybe a block to see how it felt. It was interesting; I was expecting to be much weaker, but I actually wasn’t too bad. But I got out of breath super quickly. But at least exertion doesn’t send me into a coughing fit anymore! And hey, I’m sore today so I’ll take it! But I see lots of Spinning in my future. I’m not allowed to lift weights for a while, since my organs might still be in danger of bursting. I’m itching to lift though! I keep drooling over peoples Crossfit workouts on blogs! I am getting blood tests tomorrow though to see if I’m my liver and spleen are more normal (i.e. find out if I can start running into things again).

Dinner yesterday was a Teriyaki Chicken burrito, from the same place. I’ve never gotten this in burrito form before. Let me just say, I am not a burrito person. I’ve had one maybe twice before. And kind of embarrassed myself while eating it (it’s not normal to stab it with a knife and eat the insides out?). I’m not sure what motivated me to try this. My tastes have still been a little strange since getting sick. My evaluation? Way better in taco form. In this, the filling wasn’t uniform, and there was too much tortilla and cheese.

Not too many good pictures of eats from earlier today. I had my last class of the quarter today, and afterwards my sister begged to get frozen yogurt again. I swear, NOT my choice!I’ve had frozen yogurt AT LEAST the last 5 days. This is kind of embarrassing. But I swear that was my last opportunity for a while! Now on to the more interesting eats! For dinner, I wanted to make use of the leftover turkey chili. I based the idea for this meal off of a recipe in the Abs Diet cookbook, which is a taco salad, but I topped it with chili instead of taco meat. Into the salad went corn and avocado. The dressing was a mixture of tomatoes, olive oil, lime juice, salt and pepper. Then, the salad was topped with chili and some fat free cheddar. It came out great!

And now for the best part of this post! Pi(e)! Last night when I realized today was Pi Day, I decided I wanted to celebrate. At the same time though, I was concerned with how high my sugar intake has been lately, so I wanted to have something lower sugar. Enter 15 minute pie.

I made individual pies. The crust is made of crescent role dough which we had hanging out in the fridge. It’s just the Pillsbury kind. I actually really enjoyed this as the crust, it was a lot more interesting than normal pie crust! The filling was simply frozen blueberries heated up in the microwave (although I did make 2 cherry pies). Blueberries are so sweet naturally that they really don’t need extra sugar in the filling! Simply line muffin tins with crescent role dough, fill with fruit filling, and cover (or not) with more dough. I sprinkled a little course raw sugar on top for a pretty finish. Then just follow the cooking instructions on the package (mine was for 15 minutes), and enjoy! These would be great with a little frozen yogurt (no kidding) or vanilla ice cream. And here is the beautiful process:Pre-oven

Post-ovenAnd here’s the inside of a cherry pie! The cherry pies were neater because I kept out the extra juice, but they were also drier. I enjoyed the blueberry pies more, but that’s just because I like blueberries more! In the future, I would make these with muffin liners just to make the taking out process a little neater. These would be great with other fruits too! Well, as long as the fruits are fairly sweet naturally. I can’t wait to try apple, and maybe a little later in the summer, peach! I hope you enjoy this super easy recipe!

Did you celebrate Pi Day? What is your favorite kind of pie?