Spring Break 2018

Date: March 26, 2018

Author: astottler

Well, spring break is coming to a close. I figured I would share some fun and food from the past couple of days!

Thursday before spring break, my parents came to school to take Chloe to a behavior appointment (she has anxiety) so we went out for pizza afterwards. My mom and I shared a salad and a GF pizza with garlic and ricotta.

Here’s a meal from Friday: salad with balsamic, turkey, goat cheese, and butternut squash seasoned with garlic, salt, and pepper.

Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day.

That morning, I did 18.4 and then drove home for break!

We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with food. See’s has mint scotchmallows (mint marshmallow+ caramel) and they are amazing.

We had an Irish meal. I skipped the corned beef and focused on sides!

Cabbage, glazed carrots, potatoes with truffle salt, and a GF biscuit with dried cranberries (AKA a better version of Irish soda bread).

…silly.

I have to share some animal pictures.

Now food!

We tried a Chicken and Dill spring soup that was really good. Side of Brazilian cheese bites.

I also picked up a GF berry and peach pie from Whole Foods, since I missed pi day!

Breakfast basically every day has been GF bread with sunbutter and a mango.

On Monday, I decided this week should be like a “stay-cation,” so we had happy hour with Longboard Lager (my favorite Hawaiian beer). For dinner, we stayed with the theme and had a salad with grilled teriyaki chicken, papaya, parmesan, and poppyseed dressing. I also had a passion-guava juice drink mixed with sparking water.

A Sweetgreen, my favorite DC place, just opened up super close to here so one night after spin (it’s right across the street from the spin studio I like), we went to dinner. I had the winter squash salad, but I added chicken and chose goat cheese instead of bleu cheese, so my salad has roasted winter squash, apples, raisins, chicken, goat cheese, and a balsamic vinaigrette. YUM.

Wednesday, we had our big outing of the week. One of my best friends from back home works at a high quality chocolate company, so we went on a tour and visited her! The tour was great, and I learned a lot about both the chocolate making process, and tasting chocolate!

SO MUCH good chocolate!

Afterwards, we went to Gilman brewing, which turned out to be a really awesome brewery.

They had like 15 beers on tap, and they were much more aligned with the style I like. I love saisons, and they had 4 types of saison, including a nectarine saison and a dark saison! Everything was fantastic!

Thursday night, we celebrated my sister’s birthday…1 month late…with pineapple upside down cake. I made a little mini GF oat flour based one, and it was actually really delicious! Not quite good enough to share the recipe though. It was oat flour and applesauce based, and then I used vanilla pudding mix to flavor it.

For lunch on Friday, I made a wrap with garlic and herb laughing cow, turkey, lettuce, and avocado sprinkled with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. On the side, I had a sale with aged blackberry balsamic and goat cheese.

That evening was the final workout of the Crossfit Open, 18.5, for me! It was really fun to be able to do it at my home Crossfit.

18.5:

Complete as many reps as possible in 7 minutes of:
3 thrusters
3 chest-to-bar pull-ups
6 thrusters
6 chest-to-bar pull-ups
9 thrusters
9 chest-to-bar pull-ups
12 thrusters
12 chest-to-bar pull-ups
15 thrusters
15 chest-to-bar pull-ups
18 thrusters
18 chest-to-bar pull-ups

This is a timed workout. If you complete the round of 18, go on to 21. If you complete 21, go on to 24, etc.

Women use 65 lb.

So this in theory would be super cardio heavy, however, I had never been able to do a chest to bar pull up. I spent like 15 minutes before the workout trying everything to get a chest to bar, and nothing was working. I got advice from all the coaches but i couldn’t get it. Despite that, I got talked into Rxing the workout, and just planning on spending 6:45 attempting to do chest to bar. Well, I tried literally everything. Over 5 minutes in, I FINALLY GOT ONE! It wasn’t the prettiest. I knew I was getting high enough, but wasn’t able to touch my chest to the bar. My chest to bar ends dup being a reverse grip (like a chin up) and involved me pulling all the way up and pausing, confused, at the top, and then pulling into the bar. Once I had that technique figured out, I got another. And then another. And then I sprinted over and did 6 thrusters, and back for one more pull up. So I got a whopping 13, but I GOT CHEST TO BAR PULL UPS FINALLY! I think I could have redone this and gotten a lot more reps now that I figured that out!

This is how you celebrate. Apparently that’s what I thought last year, check out what came up on my time hop:

I hung around watching and judging the next heat, and then for a bit for the post-Open party. Then, I went home for Sweetgreen again, and got the same salad because it was so good.

I also made flour less brownies again.

I was up early on Saturday for a dog walk with friends, followed by a spin class. Check out this view!

Also:

I spent the rest of Saturday working on engineering a cat toy for a vet school contest. An engineer I am not, but it turned out really well!

Sunday morning, I did a 5k that I’ve done the past 4ish years. I am still coming back from my ankle injury and have hardly run in the past 6 months, but the good news is that my ankle felt really good! It’s a little sore today, but it was fine during the race! Thanks to the small race, I managed to snag first in my age group.

Sunday afternoon, I went to tea with my high school friends. It was so nice to see everyone! Also, their GF scones <3

And now it’s back to reality!

18.3, 18.4, and Powerlifting Competition

Date: March 22, 2018

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Boy, do I have some things to catch up on! I’m currently on spring break, so I do want to get in a recap of recent athletic endeavors. Later I’ll do a post with a little more more food, and then one on what my powerlifting prep actually consisted of.

Let’s start off with a Crossfit Open recap: 18.3 and 18.4. These were the first workouts featuring movements I couldn’t do. Sidenote: 18.5 is announced tonight and apparently there will be voting; I’m really hoping it is movements I can do though! Chest to bar pull ups would be very questionable for me…

18.3:

Workout 18.3

2 rounds for time of:
100 double-unders
20 overhead squats
100 double-unders
12 ring muscle-ups
100 double-unders
20 dumbbell snatches
100 double-unders
12 bar muscle-ups

Women perform 80-lb. OHS, 35-lb. DB snatches

Time cap: 14 minutes

80# overhead squats are definitely not trivial. I was excited for the doubles because mine have been really strong lately. And ring muscle ups? Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.

My first set of doubles was really strong. I think I managed to stringy together the first 50? The overhead squats were better than expected. I believe I did them in 2 sets, partly because sometimes it’s harder to put it down and have to get it up again! 80# snatches definitely felt harder after 100 doubles! I got through my second set of doubles in I think 6:21? So I had about 8 more minutes to play around on the rings. Suffice to say, I didn’t get my first muscle up. I did get closer than I was expecting though, so that’s something!

Workout 18.4

For time:
21 deadlifts, 155 lb.
21 handstand push-ups
15 deadlifts, 155 lb.
15 handstand push-ups
9 deadlifts, 155 lb.
9 handstand push-ups
21 deadlifts, 205 lb.
50-ft. handstand walk
15 deadlifts, 205 lb.
50-ft. handstand walk
9 deadlifts, 205 lb.
50-ft. handstand walk

Time cap: 9 min.

Now, I can’t do handstand push ups. I actually really don’t like handstands in general, so I haven’t ever had much desire to work on them. However, I was pretty confident I could bust out 21 deadlifts pretty fast, so I opted to Rx this workout and just do 21 deadlifts for time. I busted out my set of 21 in 45 seconds. I have to say, I have my powerlifting prep to thank for that. I never really do 155# deadlifts in workouts other than the Open because historically it is on the heavier side for a lot of reps for me. After deadlifting a lot, heavy, for my powerlifting prep, the 155# felt really easy. I ended up continuing on, with 155# and just doing the workout as the scaled, which was with hand release push ups. So I basically did 21-15-9 155# deadlifts and hand release push ups, plus 21 deadlifts, so I would actually get a workout in!

Now, for the powerlifting meet! Since I haven’t blogged a ton lately, I haven’t talked about it too much on here. My school hosted a friendly powerlifting competition, which I did about an 8 week prep for. Again, I’ll go into full details on the prep in another post. I do want to include food a bit here, because that was an interesting challenge. The competition was 6-9pm, and I am definitely a morning workout person so that was different.

I got super lucky with my schedule that day, in that I had the whole morning off and just had classes in the afternoon, so it was a restful day. I made myself my normal lunch: salad with grilled chicken, goat cheese, and pear, plus some GF crackers on the side.

I had a granola bar mid-afternoon, per my usual routine. I had to be at an athlete’s meeting at 5, so in the 30 minutes between arriving home from class and leaving for the meeting, I whipped up a protein-and-carb-rich light dinner. I had egg whites with half a sweet potato (that I roasted earlier in the day—so fancy) and some reduced fat cheddar.

Then, it was time to head over and hear about the rules!

Powerlifting has certain commands you have to follow about when you can lift and rack the bar. I tried to practice these a little bit in training, but the command I was most nervous about is a command that tells you to lift, when you are at the bottom on a bench press. Basically, it means you have to pause at the bottom of a bench press until you get the command to lift. We were told we had to make our first attempts, so I actually dropped down my bench press initial attempt by a few pounds after that warning.

I actually ended up eating another protein bar before the event started. I really didn’t want to go in hungry because I needed all of the strength!

Another challenge was warming up for the event. I was in the competitive division, which was the 2nd of 3 to go. The recreational/beginner division was the first to go, and it was the largest by far. When they started their squat attempts, I started warming up my squat. My initial attempt was 185, a slightly aggressive first attempt but also a number I was very confidant in. I actually warmed up to 195, which was my second attempt. I had a feeling I would be nervous, especially on squats, so it made me feel better knowing I hit those numbers. Then, before I knew it, it was go time!

My first attempt went smoothly, although I do feel like I had waited a little long since warming up before I lifted. It was fine after the first attempt though. After each attempt, we had to tell the people in charge what our next attempt would be.

Then, I went for 195.

It felt pretty easy, but I did get a warning about depth, meaning I had to make sure I went deep enough on the next rep (but my 195 was still accepted). I hit 200 in training on Friday, and my squat PR (from 2014….) was 205, so I went for 205 as my third attempt. I think I was a little overly concerned about going deep enough, and I got stuck at the bottom and failed the lift. As soon as you lose your core in squatting, the lift is just not going to happen. I think I had it in me though! I refueled with chocolate milk post-squats and then watched the heavy lifters go…someone squatted 500# which is so crazy to me.

Next up was bench. I warmed up to my initial attempt of 95#. Bench is by far my worst lift, and one I’ve hardly worked on in my many years of lifting. Actually, for that reason it was fun to train because I saw improvements and PRs. Again, I was nervous about the pause at the bottom.

95 went up easily. My all time max was 115, from a few weeks ago, and it was UGLY. I went for an aggressive second attempt at 110 and didn’t know what to expect, but it also went up well. I went for 115# for my final attempt, and again, it went up super easily. Unfortunately, I missed the command to rack the bar after I successfully lifted it, so the lift didn’t count. Ah well. Annoying, but in the scheme of my total score it was only 5#, and for my own personal records, I know I hit it.

Last up was deadlift. It was around 8:30pm by this time and I was fading. Super tired. But I told myself, I literally only had to lift the bar 3 more times! Again, I warmed up to my first attempt of 225#. At this competition, we were not allowed to use powdered chalk, only liquid chalk. I’ve never used liquid chalk before. Honestly I don’t normally use chalk for deadlifting, but the bars at school are super slippery so that was always a problem. Luckily, I made friends with someone who had liquid chalk, and it seriously made all the difference! 225 was easy. My second attempt was 235, and that also went as planned. My PR (also from 2014…) was 245, so I decided to shoot for 250 for my final attempt….It went up fairly easily, and was my far the prettiest heavy deadlift I’ve done! Normally at near-max weights, the form breaks down (and the back rounds..), but that didn’t happen, I felt it completely in my hamstrings and not in my back. I was SUPER happy to finish with that lift and with a PR! Especially because when I started my powerlifting prep, I initially couldn’t get heavier than 225!

Overall, the meet was an amazing experience. It was so much fun, and everyone was so nice! I also LOVE lifting, especially powerlifting. I love getting stronger and watching things change. It was also fun to have a goal to work towards. 10/10 would do it again. I also had amazing friends who came out to support me!

I got home around 9:30 and ate the same egg/sweet potato meal I had prior to the competition, as well as a brownie with ice cream. I made these super amazing GF/vegan brownies and can’t say enough good things about them. They’re MOSTLY applesauce and chocolate, and the texture coming out of the oven was like the best fudgy brownie. They’r definitely best served hot, and I appreciate that the recipe makes a smaller batch.

Look out for more posts coming soon!

Crossfit Open 18.1 and 18.2

Date: March 6, 2018

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

It’s been a little while, but I wanted to pop in today to talk about the Crossfit Open! We’re 2/5 workouts deep in the Open right now, so I thought I would recap them! Plus, I’m in the blissful 6 days between Neuro exams!

Also, obligatory Jackson photo:

18.1:

20 minute AMRAP

8 toes to bar

10 dumbbell clean to overhead (35# dumbbells)

12 calories on the rowing machine

I signed up for the Open this year because it’s always a lot of fun. That being said, I haven’t been taking it too, too seriously.

At my Crossfit here, I think there are around 80 people signed up for the Open! Saturday mornings are pretty busy!

This workout was a long one, and pacing was definitely important. I haven’t done a whole lot of toes to bar lately, so I was pretty happy to maintain sets of 4 throughout the workout. My biggest issue was grip strength. I had really great advice before hand to hook grip on the dumbbell, and that definitely helped a lot. Honestly, the cardio here didn’t kill me until the end, but my grip was going. That being said, it’s definitely possible I was a little too conservative on pace and should have pushed myself harder! I got 225.

18.2:

12 Minute Timecap

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10

dumbbell front squats (35# dumbbells)

burpees over the bar

18.2a: 1 rep max clean

This one was a little bit different. You had 12 minutes to both complete the squats and burpees, and find a maximum weight clean. This may be an unpopular opinion, but this was actually a fun one. I actually didn’t feel great going into it, and it was really the last thing I wanted to do that morning. Last week was just rough, and my body was just over it. I woke up a little sick on Saturday (though thankfully the very low fever only lasted that day?), so I was just not feeling it. For the record, I did not have a fever when I went to class. That being said, if it wasn’t for the Open I would not have worked out that day.

Anyways, going into this workout, I was a little concerned about even making it to the bar for the clean, and I was banking on only having 1 attempt. It’s sort of hard to guess an opening attempt because you have to take into account how your legs will feel after all the burpees and squats. But I also wanted to get a high number, obviously. I ended up opening with 120#, something that I was pretty confident I could get, but a number I would have been happy with.

I thought I did a decent job pacing the burpees especially, since burpees are just not a fast movement for me. I finished the work in 9:45, giving me plenty of time for the cleans. I easily got 120, then 125. 125 I power cleaned easily, so I decided to just jump all the way to 135 for my final attempt. My 1 rep max is 148, but the closest I’ve gotten in 2.5 years has been 135, which was recent, and I’ve failed at 130# since then. With 15 seconds left on the clock, I went for 135 and just slung it up. It came up SO easily, and I actually ended up power cleaning. Go figure.

I’ve always known for my Olympic lifts, I can get in my head a lot and mess up technique. I guess I just need adrenaline and not giving myself the option to fail it! Overall, again, I really liked this one. It had a lot of different components.

I’m excited to see what’s next, but I have a feeling around this week will be the point they start introducing movements that I can’t do (like muscle ups and hand stand push ups…). But we’ll see!

In other fitness news, I’m starting to slowly run on my ankle again. It gets sore when I run on it, but I think this is the next step in the recovery process. I just need to slowly build up distance, and not run more than once a week, and definitely not back to back.

The biggest thing though is that my powerlifting competition is next week! Weee! Thankfully, things finally started coming together last week, and I’m hitting the numbers I was expecting to be hitting. My squats were coming along really slowly early on, I think partly due to poor nutrition. I wasn’t getting enough carbs in before my workouts, so I didn’t have enough in me for the strength. Plus, I was neglecting protein in general. Another change I made was adding my accessory strength back in once a week for squats. In the past, whenever I did my squat program, I would do single leg squats and pistols on the same day, just to round out my leg workout. I didn’t do that for the first part of my prep, partly because hitting my 3 lifts was already taking a while. A couple of weeks ago I added it back in, and now my lifts feel WAY stronger. Go figure.

In terms of life, vet school is going as well as can be expected!

We’re currently in the Neuro block, and from what I’ve heard, this is where it gets REAL. It is definitely a cool topic though! I also found out I got accepted into a program that will allow me to work in Nashville this summer, so to say I’m excited to get back to Tennessee would be an understatement!

I haven’t taken many food pictures, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been eating the same things for the past month. I’ll share a few of the ones I have.

Butternut squash needles with cheese and an egg.

Salad and really delicious GF white pizza with ricotta.

I FINALLY made it back to the produce stand for the first time in months. Can’t beat $0.69 a pound zucchini.

Salads this time of year are with bosc pears. This is basically what I eat every single day for lunch, but with goat cheese instead of aged cheddar as pictured.

And finally, avocado toast with cumin (this is key), an egg, and feta. Super simple side salad with aged white balsamic vinegar.

That’s all for now!

Powerlifting Prep, Taking Care of Injuries, Superbowl Weekend

Date: February 7, 2018

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

I have lots of fitness-y things to share today! What I’m currently working on, what I’ve been working on, and an injury update.

For a vet school update, today I learned how to do a blood draw on a sheep, which was pretty cool! Tomorrow I get to follow around a 4th year student on Large Animal Radiology, so I’m getting my livestock fix in!

SO. I signed up for a powerlifting meet! The University Rec department is hosting one, so I figured, why not? I wanted a new goal to take my mind off the fact that I haven’t (really) been able to run since October. It’s in March, so I wrote my own 7 week training program, though I’m improvising a little bit on the fly based on how things are feeling and going. For those of you unfamiliar with powerlifting, it involves 3 lifts: back squat, deadlift, and bench press. This meet is divided into divisions based on years of weight training experience, so guess who gets to be in the elite division? I feel like I am definitely not that strong given all my years lifting!

I’ve mentioned my squat programs on here before that have gotten me strong. I’m basically cycling 2x through that. Bench and deadlift are a little bit more freeform. I haven’t benched too much, and I’ve never actually done a 1 rep max on bench. That being said, I think there is a lot of room for improvement there. I’ve also been doing accessory work here and there; a lot of core work, since I think that is my weak point in a lot of these lifts. So far, bench and deadlift are progressing pretty well. Squats…are not. I’m a lot weaker than the last time I ran through my squat program before winter break, which is frustrating. I think I may have a little bit of a fueling problem there. Based on how the timing of some of these lifting sessions worked out, I don’t think I had enough food in my system to have the full energy I needed for these lifts. On top of that, I am really struggling to get in enough protein, for one reason or another. It’s something I am actively working on, because I need to be building muscle and I can tell that I am not. (The last time I started squatting 2x/week like I am now, vs. 1x/week like I normally do, my legs looked visually different.) So that’s something to work on. Luckily I get to cycle through my full squat program 2x before the meet and hope to improve before that.

Basically, I’m super sore a lot of the time. So I guess that means I’m doing something.

As far as an injury update? As I’ve mentioned before, I started having mysterious pain on the medial portion of my ankle following a fall/ankle roll on a run. It got progressively worse until I could barely walk in early November. I went to the doctor multiple times, and was eventually prescribed physical therapy. I have an awesome physical therapist back home, so I went every day over winter break (at 7am…). He told me the injury was likely some sort of bone bruise on the articular surface of the joint. Well. The past 6 weeks, I’ve been learning ALL about bone and cartilage, so I actually understand a LOT better what that means now. Bones are covered in cartilage right at the joint surface. Injury to this cartilage is usually a very bad thing because cartilage doesn’t have a blood supply, so it can’t really heal (or it heals very slowly). I sat through an hour lecture on this topic sweating about how OMG I’m going to need surgery to fix this and even then it will never be the same, because the cartilage would be different, predisposing a person to osteoarthritis.

I did start to take healing this injury more seriously in December, so I’ve been really good about wearing my ankle brace, not doing stupid things like running, and icing and using my electric stim machine every night. It’s been feeling a lot better. Last week for the first time I started not wearing my ankle brace during the day (when I wasn’t exercising). I could tell that I was getting a lot of weakness in that region from not using it. I also suspected that the ankle brace was bruising me a little bit. The first couple of days were rough; I had a lot of soreness in the areas around the injury—shin splits, sore Achilles tendon—but my ankle felt good! I actually ran a 5k race this past weekend (not necessarily the smartest, but I knew I wasn’t going to do any serious damage at this point), and while it was a little painful, it wasn’t bad. It was SO much better than when I ran a 5k in December! And, my Achilles did not light up like I thought they would! More on the race later in this post though. Basically, I’ve been taking care of my ankle and it’s been getting better. Still not 100% clear on the physiological process of that (and what the injury actually ended up being—I would have expected a cartilage injury to not heal at all, but maybe it was something that could heal slowly depending on the lesion).

This past weekend, I actually went home for the Super Bowl! It ended up being a great weekend to go home. Friday night, I went out to dinner with my best friends from high school.

We went to a place that specialized in bruschetta (and had GF bread!). You got to pick 4 flavors. I got Mango, avocado, and tomato, artichoke and sun-dried tomato, gorgonzola and honey, and fresh mozzarella. Afterwards, we went to a place with rolled ice cream.

Fun for the spectacle, but definitely not worth the price.

Saturday, I walked Chloe in the surprisingly beautiful February weather, and then met my sister for coffee. A Blue Bottle opened really close to our house!

…and then I had pre-lunch ice cream because I’m an adult and when you are literarily right next to your favorite ice cream place ever, you go for it. Don’t worry, I got my veggies in after!

The afternoon consisted of a little studying, and then a puppy playdate with Chloe’s BFF!

For dinner, we made tortilla pizzas with pear and goat cheese. I really should break out tortilla pizzas more often!

Sunday morning, I did the Super Guadalupe River Run, a 5k that I’ve done for several years now. There’s guacamole at the end, so you know I’m all about that!

My sister and her husband joined me for the race this year!

Going into the race, I knew it was probably not too smart, and would probably be rough. It was both better and worse than I was expected. I did a lot of spinning in the couple of weeks leading up to the race, and I get a lot of cardio in Crossfit. So cardio is not a huge issue for me. The good: my ankle was SO much better than when I did a 5k in December. This was really reassuring that it truly is healing, and not just that the inflammation is down but the structural damage isn’t improving. Also, while my Achilles got a little sore, it really wasn’t bad. Things that hadn’t been used didn’t really hurt. The bad: apparently, cross training works up until about 2 miles, because after that it was rough. My legs were just done. My inner thighs were shaking after the race, and have been super sore all week. Yeah, there are definitely some very running specific muscles.

My sister’s birthday is a week away, so we celebrated a bit early with post-race brunch.

I got an egg white omelet with veggies and avocado, with potatoes on the side. Yum!

I spent the rest of the morning studying, and then it was time for the Super Bowl!

Can you tell I’m ready for baseball season?

Snacks for the Super Bowl leaned towards the healthier side this year. Beer+baked lays+veggies with yogurt ranch+Pirate’s Booty to start. For dinner around half-time, I made an interesting take on cheese fries. We spiraled butternut squash, then roasted it. Once that was done, we topped it with plenty of cheese and broiled it, then added chopped green onions. Admittedly, I am on a huge butternut squash kick these days, but this was delicious!

…although maybe a little too healthy. I drove back to school right after the game, and was STARVING when I got home.

Before I sign off, I have a few more kitty pictures. Another motivation of going back for the weekend was to take Jackson. I want him to continue to be comfortable in the car (he’s SO good), and to have some time with my kitties back home. He LOVES Charlie, and followed him around all weekend. The two of them romped around the house, and Jackson slept the entire drive home.

Easy Butternut Squash Salad and Butternut Squash Hack

Date: January 27, 2018

Author: astottler

Categories: Uncategorized

Hello my friends! It has been less long this time, so I consider that a win! I had a test yesterday (and I have one Monday), so naturally I’m here to blog!

Today, I’m going to share a ridiculously easy salad recipe, a fast way to make delicious butternut squash, and then do some food updates.

First, Jackson update! He’s now just over 6 pounds and is in a growth spurt. He’s eating a ton, and gained nearly a pound in the last week! He’s still a lean little guy though! He’s also currently right at my side, thinking about pouncing on the keyboard. He and my roommate’s dog have started playing together, which is adorable! He loves her toys, and she likes his as well! I think the majority of his baby teeth are gone; all his baby fangs came out. I actually found one of them embedded in the arm of my sweatshirt, because in this face he likes to grab onto my arm. (His 2 favorite ‘toys’ are my arm and my iPad, which is clearly very conducive to studying.) He also LOVES human food, and regularly gets his tongue in whatever I’m making the second I turn around. It’s a work in progress…

OKAY. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about the salad!

It’s super simple. Are you ready?

kale/lettuce
“roasted” butternut squash
aged cheddar
egg over easy
balsamic vinaigrette

So how do I cook the squash? We all know I’m a tad lazy and impatient in the kitchen. If I can’t have it on the table in 20 minutes, I’m probably not doing it. My butternut squash hack is to microwave it (with a little bit of water) until it’s soft; this works for whole squashes, or pre-cut cubes. When it’s soft, sauté it up in a pan with a little oil, until it’s brown and crispy. Basically all of the deliciousness of roasted butternut squash in a fraction of the time! I’ve been doing that meal quite a bit!

What else have I been eating?

On nights I’ve had more time, I’ve roasted sweet potatoes. Side salad of kale rubbed in olive oil spray and balsamic vinegar, with parmesan and dried cranberries. Plus and egg.

Rosemary apple grilled cheese in Santa Cruz.

Another amazing eat from Santa Cruz: Penny’s Ice Cream. My college roommate literally talked this place up for YEARS, and we never made it over there. Finally, I went with my vet school friends and it was delicious! I got dark chocolate sorbet with toasted marshmallow fluff on top!

This is another meal I’ve had a couple of times. Butternut squash (cooked as described above) with Mexican cheese stirred in. Plus a side salad with AMAZING aged balsamic vinegar, a spray of olive oil, salt and pepper, goat cheese, and dried cranberries.

Same salad but with a sweet potato.

Salad with grilled chicken, bear, and goat cheese.

The above dessert was one of the better ideas I’ve had in a while! I was craving something fruity for dessert, so I tossed fresh blackberries with some honey, and then topped them with Flapjacked Oatmeal Cookie mix (which is the one cookie mix I haven’t used much because it doesn’t have chocolate), and then microwaved it!

Salad with goat cheese and blueberries.

Chocolate Halo Top with salted caramel sauce.

And now I have to run off to a spin class! Have a great weekend!