May 1, 2012

Fruity Tuesday

As I was getting some work done around the house on Sunday, Scott took it upon himself to do our weekly grocery shopping.  I sent him with a pretty short list including milk, eggbeaters, Greek yogurt, romaine lettuce, veggies and fresh fruit.

Since we already have plenty of bread items, these are the main essentials I rely on to eat healthy at home during the week.

I didn’t realize just how much fruit Scott brought home until I woke up yesterday morning.

Not pictured is a bunch of bananas, a pint of strawberries and eight of those abnormally large navel oranges.  Holy fruit supply, Batman!

This week’s goal is now to incorporate fruit into every meal and snack, starting with yesterday’s breakfast.

I enjoyed a sliced peach over smeared peanut butter drizzled in key lime honey from the Farmer’s Market and chia seeds atop a whole wheat bagel.  At first I skipped the honey because I thought the peach would sweeten it enough, but after two bites I went back for it.

From last month’s mango to this month’s key lime, I have a feeling we will be continuing our unique honey flavors for quite a while.

Y-U-M.

Later in the afternoon, I wanted to try something new in the blender so I got creative.

I was going for some kind of carrot and apple concoction and ended up with this:

Besides apples and carrots, I wanted to try adding a cup of plain Greek yogurt and ice.  The first blending attempt was a fail.  Since I used a standard blender, the carrots didn’t budge and everything just kind of sat there.

Then I tried adding a cup of water, which helped a little.  Everything blended, but it was missing something.  I remembered I had seven more abnormally large oranges to use, so I gave that a go.

I taste tested a spoonful and quickly realized the smoothie was a bit on the chunky side. I could deal with the texture as long as it was sweet, and surprisingly the carrots overshadowed the orange’s sweetness.  I added 2 tsp (1 packet) of Stevia, and it finally tasted great!

Nice and chunky, just how only a few of you like it.

All in all – it tasted great – but next time I will probably leave out the yogurt and just juice carrots, apples and oranges.

For those of you who don’t mind the thickness or who have a super powerful blender, here’s the actual recipe.

Carrot, Orange & Apple Yogurt Smoothie

Ingredients

1 cup sliced carrots

1 large apple

1 large orange

1 cup plain Greek yogurt

1 cup ice

1 cup water

2 tsp Stevia

servings: 2

Easy, breezy.

Run for One

For the past few weeks we have been taking Roadie with us on Monday night family runs.  The three of us run around 3 to 3.5 miles before dinner time and usually have a tired pup on our hands for the rest of the night.

Scott was over at a friend’s helping her move into a new house so I figured I would take advantage of my run alone to put on my headphones and just run.  No mile goal in mind, no pressure of a time limit, just a run at my pace for however long I wanted.

I was going for a casual run, but once I hit four miles I wanted to push myself to running at least six or seven.  The path I picked to run around the neighborhood is exactly seven miles around, so seven it was at a pace of 8:54.  I felt fine, but it was certainly a challenge.  I would like to run at least one run over five miles once a week.

Within five minutes of getting out of the shower I had the rest of Sunday night’s leftovers ready to devour.  A cream of mushroom chicken breast, fresh green beans and sweet potato made me a very happy girl.

For dessert?  Some kind of fruit, of course.

*The recipe for the cream of mushroom chicken will be on the blog Thursday.

I’ll leave you with this little (fruity) funny I came across yesterday…

Happy May 2012!

Question

Do any of you use carrots in smoothies?  If so, do you have issues with the texture?