Running Chick

My illustrious system administrator finally got around to installing a wiki on good ol’ feep.org so now I can have my very own recipes section!

My very first recipe in the wiki was for turkey meat loaf, which I yapped about in a previous post, but I made again last night (click on the image to go to the wiki).

The second recipe, the one I made with Josh tonight, was chicken bok choy.  I’ve had bok choy in various Asian dishes in the past, but always passed it over in the grocery store because I wasn’t sure what to do to it.  This time I decided to take the plunge and was I ever glad I did.  This stuff was like crack!  It tasted just like it does in the Chinese restaurant.

I paired that up with a glass of Little Penguin Chardonnay, it was the perfect dinner.  I’m definitely going to add bok choy to my weekly shopping list.

One of the best parts about running the Appleton HM is the food.  Despite it being smack-dab in the middle of the mid-west and being Wisconsin, Appleton has a surprisingly diverse selection of restaurants.  Korean, Japanese, Italian, Greek, Mediterranean, Mexican.  You name it, they probably have it.

We discovered a sushi restaurant called Koreana last year and the food was so good, we just had to go back.  Koreana has a sushi bar as well as restaurant seating. 

Here, the sushi chefs are hard at work preparing our meal.

We started with sushi and avocado rolls.

And then we both had Bi Bim Bahb, mine had chicken and Josh had pork.  It’s basically about seven different vegetables and rice served in a sizzling hot rock bowl.  Oh yeah, it comes topped with a fried egg.  It was really, really good and well worth waiting a year for.

I was looking for a carb-heavy meal on Saturday, which was the night before the HM.  We decided on the Mediterranean restaurant called IL'Angolo.  After looking at the menu, we decided that it wasn’t really to our liking so we decided to just get an appetizer and go someplace else.  We ended up getting Spanish mussels and I found a prize in mine.

That’s called a pea crab.  They’re considered a parasite.  And it was in my food.  Gross.  Turns out they’re completely harmless and some people even eat them.  I showed it to our server who had never seen anything like it before.  She then told another server and he came over for a look.  Pretty soon, my little crab was the hit of the restaurant.  It was a little odd that nobody came over to tell me that it was fine (or not fine) that the crab was in the mussels.  I would have thought they’d do that just as a courtesy, but they never did.  Oh well.

After we left IL’Angolo, we were still on the hunt for Italian food.  The next restaurant had a 45 minute wait, so we ended up at a Spanish restaurant called Tapas.  Basically, it’s a restaurant that serves a bunch of different appetizers.  I was a bit skeptical, but we were hungry and it was getting late.  I had to get up at 4:00 AM the next day to start getting myself ready for the HM, and I wanted get home and get to bed.

I ordered crab cakes (sorry no pic )  and bacon wrapped scallops.  They were really, really good.

For dessert, we split Tres Leche cake.  It was soooo good.

On Sunday, I did the HM.  Here I am freezing my tail off at the start.  It was in the high 40’s and foggy, which is perfect running weather, but not prefect standing around and waiting weather.  Brr.

On a side note, I raced in the commitment skirt from runningskirt.com.  I love this skirt.  It’s got compression shorts underneath, and they do not ride up at all, unlike my beloved Nike tempo shorts.  And, the best thing, it has two giant hip pockets that can easily hold my iPhone and a few gels.  It’s comfortable and cute and I even I got several compliments on it. 

Afterwards, we had some celebratory big beers and big margaritas at Texas Roadhouse.

And that brings us to today with the food recap.  This morning at 3:30 I was awakened by a headache.  It was a searing, throbbing want-to-gouge-your-eyes-out kind of headache that I get more often than I like to admit.  I am plagued by them.  When people ask me if I get them often, I always say that rarely a day goes by when I don’t have a headache.  Most of the time they’re low-grade and I can ignore them, or take an ibuprofen and they’ll go away, but about once a month (except for this month – it’s my second bout with a nasty one) I get a hum-dinger that doesn’t respond to any medicine and I just have to let it run it’s course.  Usually I can go about my day and function without too much difficulty, but other times I have to just lay on the couch and try not to move.  I think I missed three or four days last year due to the nasty ones. Sometimes they’re migraines (complete with floaters and spots) and other times they’re sinus related.  This one is sinus related because my teeth are throbbing as well as my head and eyes.

Anyway, I laid in bed and dozed until 5:00 then finally couldn’t take the pounding anymore so I just got up and stumbled downstairs to my medicine cabinet and took a dose of sinus pills and made a pot of coffee.  After about an hour of reading the intarwebz and cleaning the kitchen, I decided that I needed to do something productive to take my mind off my pounding head.  So, I made a batch of pumpkin scones.  They were so good and made the house smell great.  Here’s the recipe, if you’re ever up in the middle in the night with a headache, or just feeling adventurous.

The original recipe called nuts to be added, but I’m not a big fan of nuts in bakery.  I’m allergic to peanuts, and it can be hard to tell one nut from another once they’re in something, so I find it best to just avoid anything that looks like it has a nut.  But I think the scones needed just a little extra to make them perfect.  So, I think I’ll add raisins to my next batch.

Well, it’s time for me to go mix some booze and drugs.  Here’s to hoping my headache is gone tomorrow! Toodles, all.

I should rename my blag to “Not Running Chick” because that’s sure what I’ve been doing.

My tendonitis has been a bugger – mostly because I was a big, dumb idiot and continued to run through the pain just to get some miles in.  Not smart.  I finally grew some brains and made the decision to just chill out and rest until my orthotics come in.  I’m hoping to see them late this week. 

In the meantime, I’ve been lifting weights like a fool – like for the past 14 days straight before I decided it was okay to take a day off.  I’ve also been riding my bike, but not as much as I should.

I did 40 miles yesterday in 3:15 and the week before I did 27 in 2:08.  I’ve been using my Garmin 305 to keep an eye on my cadence and I’m finding that I can cruise along pretty easily between 85 and 90 RPM.  Thanks to the hills, though, my rides are averaging around 75 RPM.  My heart rate typically stays between 155-165 BPM throughout that cadence range, which is the BPM I’m supposed to maintain for my long, slow runs.  I think that’s good, but I haven’t done a whole lot of research on heart rate training yet.

We’ve been grilling up a storm, thanks to the new addition to my arsenal.  Behold (on the left) the Weber 22.5” One Touch Gold.  The grill on the right is one that we inherited from my parents and is about 30 (?) years old.  It works really well, but I wanted something that contained the ash so it wouldn’t blow all over the place on a windy day.  We’ve been grilling a ton of stuff – vegetables, steaks, chicken, pizza, quesadillas, pork roast, pineapple. 

Things taste so much better on a charcoal grill, for sure.

Finally, we’ve playing Pictionary.  Can you guess what this picture represents?