Tropical Morning Smoothie

Smoothies are wonderful things! Show of hands, who doesn't like smoothies? If you raised your hand, just leave now.

What makes smoothies so wonderful? Well, for one thing, they're delicious. Aside from that they make great on-the-go meals and are also great for using ingredients you may not like to eat, like spinach. Yes, I put spinach in my smoothies. You don't taste it, I promise.

Today's smoothie is a Tropical Morning smoothie that I found in Fitness magazine. If you don't subscribe you can find the exact article here along with some smoothie tips! I'm going to go ahead and post the recipe here though because we all know I made some changes!

Tropical Morning Smoothie - Original             Tropical Morning Smoothie - My Way

6 oz plain, nonfat Greek yogurt                                          6 oz plain, nonfat Greek yogurt

1/2 cup fresh or frozen mango chunks                                3/4 cup frozen variety of mangoes, pineapple

1/2 cups fresh pineapple chunks                                         and strawberries 

1 frozen banana, chopped                                                 1/2 of a frozen banana, chopped

2 Tbsp ground flax seed                                                    2 Tbsp ground flax seed

To make the TMS put all your ingredients in a blender and blend. Super simple! I opted for only half of a banana to keep the sugar content down. I was also lazy and did the fruit blend because I didn't feel like paying for frozen mangoes and pineapples when they sold a mixed bag! This was super tasty and a little on the thick side, which I didn't mind. If it bothers you, add a wee bit of milk when blending. You could also add a little bit of coconut to this, if you want to go all out tropical island style. 

Come back tomorrow for some guilt free dessert!

Lauren

Curbing the Impulse

I have a confession to make. I am an impulse shopper. Especially when it comes to shopping online. Budget wise, I don't let it get so bad that it hurts me, but it makes it hard for me to buy things I want that are a little bit more expensive. So, I've come up with a solution! Well, at least a strategy to try.

I made this cute little visual reminder to sit on my desk! So now when I'm browsing the internet and think "Oh! I want that!" all I have to do is look to my left and decide if I want that spur of the moment item or the items I'm saving for. Genius right? I thought so too.

This was super easy to make too! All I did was buy a frame from Goodwill, make my printout in Microsoft Word and write on it with a dry erase marker. Cost me less than $3! It's by no means the fanciest thing but it'll do the job :)

I promise to have some better posts later this week! I have two new recipes to try out, so you'll definitely get to read about them!

Until next time!
Lauren

Re-dedication

Hey there guys, remember me? The author of this blog? Somehow almost half of May has gone by and I haven't blogged once...no bueno.

I'm sorry to say that today's post isn't going to be an awesome recipe or cool story. I really haven't cooked much between my roommate's mom forcing food on me every chance she gets and me going home on the weekends. No, today's blog is more of a way of holding myself accountable. You see, if I tell the world (Ha! Okay, the 10 of you that read this) my goals and then not achieve them I'll not only be letting myself down, but all of you too!

So, you may be wondering, just what am I talking about? Well friends I'm talking about my struggle to lose these, stubborn, last 10 pounds. Yep, I said it. I'm still not satisfied with my weight-loss progress. Now don't get me wrong, I'm very proud of what I have accomplished so far. It's just that in the last few months my dedication to the whole program has been a little lackluster. I still meet with a personal trainer twice a week, run twice a week, and eat decently throughout the week. The major problem has been the weekends and little binges during the day. Even though it's almost been a year, I still find myself resorting to food when I can't think of anything else to do or am avoiding some chore. We all know how that goes right?

So, how am I going to get back in the saddle, so to speak? Well for one, I'm doing another DietBet. That's where you pay into a pot and then have a certain time frame to lose 4% of your starting weight. If you'd like to join in on mine click here! Of course just that won't be enough so I'm also going back to no alcohol and diet pops, along with not buying packaged snacks at the grocery store.

With my one year mark coming up in just over a month I'm hoping this push will give me what I need to get down to my original goal of weighing 125 pounds one year from when I started. We shall see!

Thanks for reading!
Lauren

Foodie Penpals

I don't know if you guys have ever noticed that little stamp on the bottom right corner of my blog that says Foodie Penpals, but if you hadn't I bet you're looking now!

Foodie Penpals is this really cool program that I just kind of stumbled upon while blog surfing a while back. The idea is simple, you have a penpal that you send to and a penpal that you receive from and no, they're not the same person. By the 5th of the month you receive your penpal's info and then you contact them to find out what their dietary restrictions are and things like that. Then you have until the 15th of the month to put together a little box of treats, with a limit of $15, and ship it off to them! Then when the end of the month comes you do a reveal blog, if you're a blogger, about the box that you got! Seriously, is this not the coolest thing?

Of course, there are always snags when you're relying on the honor system. The penpal I'm receiving from apparently lost her job and had to wait until yesterday to ship out my package. I'm skeptical that I'll get it but we'll see I guess.

For my first package, my penpal follows a paleo diet. Let me tell you how hard it is to put together a paleo friendly box when you really don't know what is and isn't alive. I'm not sure how many times I Google searched " is (insert food here) paleo?". My favorite was when I was looking to see if Larabars were allowed and the first response I found was "Is there a Larabar tree?", definitely made me laugh. If you would like to read the reveal blog about the box I put together you can visit Elizabeth here.

If you'd like to learn more about the program you can check out the creator's blog here. I should add that the commitment is only a monthly basis. If you try it one month and decide it's not for you, you simply don't sign up again. I just love the idea of getting a surprise box of food every month and trying things that may not be available here or that I was skeptical of purchasing on my own!

Until next time,
Lauren

2013 Indiana Spartan Sprint

To say I had no idea what I was getting myself into this weekend would be the understatement of the century.  For those of you that don't know, this weekend I ran the 2013 Indiana Spartan Sprint and it was a blast. I have never in my life participated in an event that took so much out of you and was still so fun. Let me tell you a little about it...

What is a Spartan Sprint? Well, it's a slightly less than 5 mile run with an obstacle course smack dab in the middle of it. And by obstacle course, I'm not talking easy little things. Oh no, we're talking jump over fire, army crawl through the mud under barbed wire and scale an 8 foot wall obstacle course. Yes, I paid to do this. 

Granted, we had no idea what the obstacles would be until we got on the course. So we get to the park, get checked in and get our race packets which have the following printed on the outside:

Right, that's not intimidating at all... So, we proceed to take a group picture and look around a little. The route of the race went through a woods and for the first half, basically was an S shape. That enabled us to see some of the obstacles from the "festival" site. The one below was actually one of the easier tasks. You climbed up, over and down the net. We learned, while waiting to go up, that it was the halfway point. I wish that fact had been more comforting. 

 The two pictures below are of the final obstacles. What you can't see is that the other side of that wooden structure is a ramp covered with mud. Oh, and a roughly 3.5 foot deep mud hole to wade through before going up the ramp. To get up it you grab the rope and walk up. I'm pretty proud to say I made it all the way up and over in one attempt. I did get a little help from a guy at the top, who held my shoulders so I could let go of the rope and hurl myself forward to grab one of the wrungs and climb down. Once you got down you ran and jumped over the fire to cross the finish line. Pretty legit.

For the most part I felt like the obstacles were all or nothing. I could either do the obstacle or there was no way in hell that I was getting it done. If you couldn't do an obstacle, you had to do 30 burpees. That was no fun...but I cheated at my counting...shh don't tell. The obstacles I could do were all of the wall scaling, the sandbag carry, the "tractor" pull and all the ones that involved some sort of lifting of a heavy object. My favorite was definitely army crawling through mud, under barbed wire. That was fun. 

Overall, I'm very pleased with my results. I placed 1930/4566 overall, 291/1300 for females and 77/243 for 23 year olds with a total time of 2 hours and 9 minutes. Our team placed 189/312. 

If you're even remotely interested in doing a Spartan Race you should visit their website www.spartanrace.com. I can also give you a discount card, they were handing them out like candy, should you like! 

Keep scrolling for more pictures!

Lauren

Mark and I, before the race!

Mark and I, after the race!

Team photo, post race.

Finisher medal and shirt!

Battle scars!

Raspberry Lemonade Cupcakes

I love cooking for other people. Seriously, it's one of my favorite things. I love the feeling of preparing something that I actually put my effort and love in to instead of just giving them a card or silly gift. Given the chance, I will always choose to cook for someone over buying them something.

That's why I'm making my grandma dinner for her birthday this year! Well, that and, what do you really give a woman in her 70's that she'll actually use?

I called my grandma the other day to ask what she wanted me to cook for her, it could be anything she wanted. You know what the first words out of her mouth were? Mashed potatoes and gravy. So of course I heckled her asking if that was all she wanted, a big ol' pot of mashed potatoes and gravy? Eventually we decided dinner would consist of a salad, pork chops, mashed potatoes, green beans and a surprise for dessert. That is where the cupcakes come in. I love baking for people because it gives me a reason to try a recipe that I would never make just for myself.

I honestly can't remember why I decided on the cupcakes, I think it was because I knew I could halve the recipe successfully. Regardless, they came out way better than I expected. First of all, the cakes themselves were perfect. They're moist and dense and delicious! Personally, I would've preferred a little more lemon flavor, because I loooove lemon, but the taste is there. The icing was a cinch, butter, sugar and fresh raspberries. It came out a little runnier than I expected so I put it in the refrigerator for a few minutes to set.

I'm not going to write out the recipe because other than just halving all the ingredients, I didn't change it! Shocking, I know. I put a link to the inspiration earlier in the blog, so check it out!

Bon Appetite!

Lauren

Slow-cooked Stuffed Peppers

I kid you not, I turned my crock-pot on at 4 am this morning so that I could make these and not overcook them. Silly night shift...

Mmm, look at those bad boys! I cannot wait to crack in to one! I love stuffed peppers but have never made them in a crock-pot before. So when the grocery store had colored bell peppers on sale this week I knew I had the perfect excuse to try the recipe I had found. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against green bell peppers, I could eat them just like I would an apple. But when you're cooking a dish that focuses on the pepper, you want them to be pretty! You can find my inspiration here or you can keep reading to see how I made them.

What you'll need:

Italian Sausage - I used three links of this ground pork and chicken mixture and froze the other two for later. Casings removed of course.

1 can Rotel - DON'T DRAIN IT

1/4 tsp of the onion powder and oregano

1/2 tsp black pepper

Fresh basil to taste - you could use 1/4 tsp of the dried stuff if you don't have fresh.

1/2 cup basmati rice - DON"T COOK IT FIRST

3 bell peppers - I had some leftover filling so you could probably use 4 if you wanted

1/4 cup shredded cheese per pepper

What you do:

1. Remove sausage from casings if necessary. 

2. Combine all ingredients except peppers and cheese in a bowl.

3. Spoon mixture into peppers.

4. Place in crock-pot, and put a teensy bit of water in the bottom of the crock-pot.

5. Top each pepper with cheese, put on the lid and set the crock-pot to low for 6-7 hours.

6. Devour!

As you can see, these are super simple! 

Enjoy,

Lauren