Egg White Omelets and Boxing

My newest favorite fast recipe: a spinach and mushroom egg white omelet. Essentially, I throw a handful (or two or three) of spinach, a drizzle of olive oil, and a fistful of sliced mushrooms into a frying pan and cover it until the spinach is wilted, pour egg whites (from a car4ton) over it, do a messy flip that really more resembles scrambled eggs, and voila. Dinner. Or lunch. Or breakfast. It's not pretty, but it's delicious. I'll try to get a recipe with pictures up soon.

In any case, I threw that together tonight and ate it about 45 minutes before workout time in the hopes that it would keep me from keeling over (or gnawing on Trainerman Alec). When he asked me if it was okay to try something new, I was afraid he'd want me to run sprints up and down the highway. Turns out, he wanted to teach me to box. I was game, so he wrapped me up, gloved me, and proceeded to make me sweat for an hour.

My reaction: so, I have a bit of trouble both moving my feet and swinging at the same time. I start feeling clumsy when he starts moving the pads around quickly, and I quickly lose whatever "right vs left" knowledge I may have had. But it was cathartic, it was fun, and I sweated my butt off. I have a mean right hook, but everything else could use work. In any case, Trainerman says it's not the worst start he's seen. I'm hoping we do more of that soon, and maybe I'll acquire wraps and gloves to hit the heavy bag on our off days. It was that much fun. And I like to hit things. But I also appreciate staying out of jail. This is the best of all worlds.

Magical Paleo Crockpot Chicken Soup

There's little as satisfying on a cold winter night than a good, hot, hearty soup. If it's made with chicken, even better. I will say that I've made this before not even thinking about Paleo-anything, and recommend it no matter what your diet.

Ingedients:
1 yellow onion, chopped into 1/2"-1" pieces
One 16-oz package regular whole white mushrooms, washed
4 stalks celery, washed and cut into 1/2"-1" pieces
4 carrots, washed and cut into 1/2"-1" pieces
2 chicken breasts, cubed in about 1" pieces
Penzey's Forward! spice

For liquid, I used 1 1/2 quarts homemade chicken stock (this recipe, but using chicken carcass and scraps instead of beef bones). You can also use water, or canned chicken broth, but this tasted much better!

I chopped all the vegetables, tossed them into tupperware and stuck them in the fridge, because I'm leery of refrigerating my crock overnight and then pulling it out to put in the element while it's cold in the morning. I had the broth already in the fridge from Sunday's crockpotting. In the morning, my only prep was to cut up the chicken breasts, coat them in the Penzey's spice mixture, throw everything into the crockpot, and pour the broth over it all. I turned the crockpot on low at 10am, and ate at about 6pm and everything was cooked through.


The cooked soup isn't as pretty and bright as the raw ingredients, but it is delicious. It did not need any salt, and I find that the full flavor cooking the ingredients in broth delivered is far more satisfying than when I do essentially the same recipe with water instead of broth. (You can do it, it is just less rich.) In terms of servings, I'd estimate 6-8 good sized servings, depending on the size of your bowl and your appetite.

Future changes: I'd love to find a way to thicken the broth a bit to make it more stew-like; I'll have to review some paleo blogs to see how they do that without using flour or cornstarch. Because I prefer my soups more like stews, I would add more vegetables - it's a lot of broth and could use more things to chew on. And it would have been delicious had I been able to sop up the dregs with bread, but drinking the broth kid-style from the bowl was also pretty satisfying. I'd also like to find a way to incorporate sweet potatoes without the potatoes getting mushy.

Change is Hard. Change is Necessary.

<-- My beloved, Otto. Interestingly, this also resembles me in my natural habitat. Lounging. Lazy. Generally Jello-ed out and splayed comfortably over whatever surface I can lounge on (usually the couch).

Part (most) of the reason I am trying this paleo thing is for health reasons. Otherwise, let's be honest, I would happily live life in a series of decadent, beefy, sauced, followed-by-cheesecake meals. Since health issues now preclude such a life of tasty bliss, and are also requiring me to take a serious look at my stress levels, I'm trying to make some serious changes.

Change 1: First is the eating, which is a challenge because I'm a lazy eater - I skip breakfast, I rarely eat lunch, and by the time I get home for dinner, I'm tired, crabby, and uninclined to cook. So far I've found that crockpotting on the weekends and keeping fresh veggies on hand to toss into the crock during the week comes in handy. I started out strong, but have only maintained at about 50%, largely because whatever I cooked over the weekend is gone by Wednesday night. I need to do some better planning and portioning.

Change 2: Fitness. I'm overweight, it's tiring, it's no good for my joints, and it's preventing me from putting on some pretty smokin' clothing that is hiding in shame in my closet. It's frustrating, because back in '07-'08 I was seeing a trainer and got down to a svelte and buff (for me) 180, and I was strong and felt great. I moved, got a stressful job that took up too much time, stressed, ate a ton of cake, quit gymming, and generally didn't just fall off the wagon, but off the planet. I'm ashamed that I've fallen so far. I'm frustrated beyond belief that getting back into the swing of workouts is so difficult, both because of the fatticus factor and because there are some things I simply can't do because of joint flares and muscle spasms. I have a great personal trainer that I see three times a week, and even though he has modified a lot of exercises to take away the impact that my knees and hips despise, he makes me sweat like a moose (or like I imagine a moose would sweat, were it hurling medicine balls and doing resistance training stuff) so at least i know I'm getting a good workout.

So, Trainerman Alec is helping, and he's good humored about it, even when I shoot him Death Looks about having to do the handbike and ropes. Push-ups and pull-ups frustrate me so that I want to hurl cars across a parking lot - except, of course, that my wimpy T-rex arms that can't do a push-up or pull-up are also unable to throw vehicles. I don't cry a la the Biggest Loser folks, but oh my goodness do I get angry when I can't do something. And poor Trainerman can probably see (due to my lack of pokerface) that I want to nuke the whole place from orbit when he tells me "Good job!" after what I know was not a good job at all. AUGH. Frustration.

I let Trainerman know that as a good nerd, while I hate gymming amongst the Beautiful People, what I *am* good at (aside, bizarrely, from anything that involves a rowing/pull motion) is homework, and I asked him to assign me off-day homework to make sure I get my butt to the gym, since three hours a week is not going to cut it. I'm to come in on at least two non-training days to hit a class (yoga, Zumba, etc.) and work the bike, rowing machine, or elliptical for 20 minutes to improve my cardio. I'm hoping that making the gym more of a daily habit will help reduce both the size of my ass and my feeling of being so far out of my depth. Maybe the gym thing the Beautiful People have going for them is catching - like the flu, only better for you.

Change 3: Stress levels. I tend to channel most of my energies into work - the work I do in the library itself, and work-related things like committee work, scholarly writing, and presenting at conferences. Given that my body has taken to tapping out on things requiring late hours, long-term concentration, and strenuous travel, I am trying to recalibrate. Primarily, I am working on reducing my commitments so that what I do work on is high quality, which means less travel and fewer projects. I am working on committing to an earlier bedtime; I feel better and function better when I am rested, which nowadays means a full 8 hours (sometimes 9 or 10 during a bad flare). Losing two to five hours out of each day has been frustrating since it usually comes out of my study time, as I'm working full time toward my doctorate in addition to my job.

Because of my nature, if I am not allowed to stress or over-commit to work, I have been tapping my teeth trying to figure out where to put all that mental energy. Even pleasure reading leaves me restless. Now, my sister is a bad-ass competitive triathlete. Reading about what she does makes me wonder if I can channel all this mental energy into some sort of physical competition. Which is sort of laughable, since I am as slow, clumsy and fat as she is lean and fast...but if I need to shift my obsession to something new, maybe fitness is where to go. I've interlibrary loaned a copy of Jayne Williams's Slow Fat Triathlete: Live Your Athletic Dreams in the Body You Have Now in the hopes that it will inspire me to figure out a way to build a decent fitness program that I will stick to. My attempt to become a fauxthlete, if you will.

Triathlons likely won't be it for me, since I don't know how to swim (though I do a mean dogpaddle and can stay afloat for days if survival is all that's required), my balance is terrible on a bike (I've been known to run into parked cars), and running will make my knees and hips secede. But I've found the one thing I'm good at in the gym is rowing (either on the row machine or using the weight machines or resistance bands), plus flipping a giant heavy tractor tire over down a hallway. (Hooray for gyms in the South!) At least, those are the things that make me feel strong. In any case, I'm trying to at least steer my obsessively competitive nature to something sport-like instead of sedentary. Any and all recommendations appreciated; I'm way out of my depth on this one.

[For those of you more interested in the food side of things, there will be more paleo food posting tonight, as I have a scrumptious chicken soup crockpotting at home.]