Recipe: Curry Cauliflower and Beans Soup

Sometime over the weekend (Saturday?) I made a new recipe courtesy of my favorite grocery store in the world, Wegmans.  And that recipe is: Curry Cauliflower and Beans Soup.

As you can see, a nice simple list of ingredients. 

Basically you throw the onions in the pot with some oil, cook them a while, add the stock and cauliflower, cook until the cauliflower is soft, then add the beans and curry, then use an immersion blender. Done.

I'm all about easy recipes.

1 cup of this soup has only 90 calories, 4 grams of fiber and 5 grams of protein. The only unhealthy thing about it is the French Fried Onion pieces.

The recipe makes 8 one-cup servings.  We maybe got 7 bowls out of it, but I'm sure my husband's servings were a little larger than mine.

Sunday I postponed my long run in favor of going for a longish walk with hubby and the pup.  Hubby didn't get Monday off from work, so I spent the time with him Sunday and planned to do my long run on Monday.

Monday I was off from work.  In the morning I spent some time uploading newer music to my mp3 player (including the newer Black Eyed Peas album: The Beginning -- because I got a lot of mileage out of the E.N.D., Far East Movement's Free Wired because songs from that album were coming up on playlists everywhere, and Taio Cruz's Rokstarr).

Soon I realized that it wasn't going to warm up much beyond 24 degrees so there was no point in waiting.  I bundled up and headed out into the cold with my music for my long run.  It ended up being 6.22 miles!

I tried to focus on keeping my HR low at the beginning, but I picked up the pace over the last mile and a half, and with that came a higher heart rate.  It may have been that I was on the shoulder of a busier road and wanted to be done with that part, it may have been that I encountered two deer carcasses on that same stretch of road and wanted to get past them as fast as possible without breathing in the stench (gross!).

Anyway, that's not a bad thing, because in the advanced Hal Higdon plan, he calls for doing some long runs at a 3/1 ratio -- first 3/4 at a slow pace, and last quarter at half marathon pace.

Lap times: 11:29, 11:29, 11:39, 11:45, 10:48, 10:31, then the last .60 was at a 12:26 (ending with a little walking).  Because I had just done my long run, I did not go to spinning that night, I'm hoping to stay injury-free!

Tuesday (that's today!)  We had a 90-minute delayed opening at work due to a combo of snow, rain, freezing rain, sleet, etc. all in the wee hours of the morning.  I learned about this delay with a 5:10am phone call. It's hard to go back to sleep after being woken up (and with what seemed like all the plows and salt trucks of NJ convening in the parking lot behind our apartment), but I managed, and appreciated being able to sleep in.  Then I got to scrape an inch of ice of my car while standing in several inches of a slushy mix.

This may look snowy, but don't be fooled- it's ICE. Yes, I stopped in the middle of cleaning off my car to document this.

This is not typical NJ weather. 
This is like spring Western NY weather (I say this based on personal experience).  One time I had to scrape ice much thicker than this off my whole car in APRIL. No joke.  April of 2003. You can google it. (not my pictures that I linked to).

After work today, I went to the cardio kickboxing class at the gym (about 45 minutes), which included some push-ups, exercises with 5lb dumbbells, and crunches at the end.  Afterward I ran an easy 1.56 miles on the treadmill at a 1% incline.

Hooray, tomorrow's Wednesday already!