I love avocados. and peanut butter.

Tonight I made guacamole, sort of.  I love avocados, and we had a ripe one.  So I cut it up, added some tomatoes from our garden, plus some crushed red pepper (from dried cayenne peppers also from our garden!), lime juice, pepper, and a little garlic salt.

I saved a couple slices for some salmon burgers we are having for dinner tomorrow night, but it was about 2/3 of an avocado + a small "big boy" tomato, part of a roma and a couple cherry tomatoes.  Because we had tons of tomatoes to use.  Here's the most recent harvest from our garden (Monday 9/7):

My version of guacamole is much healthier, I'm sure, than the version I grew up with.  I'm pretty sure the kind made by my parents involved mayonnaise and/or sour cream?  Anyway, we didn't have tortilla chips (I like the whole grain kind) so we ate this with Triscuits.

I also love peanut butter.
Or, really any nut butter.

As if peanut butter weren't delicious enough on its own, I came across some natural peanut butter with maple syrup at the store earlier this week, by Peanut Butter & Co. I tried some on a graham cracker today and it was fantastic (how could it not be?)

The label suggests trying it on waffles... hmmm.
You can read more about Mighty Maple peanut butter here.


In other peanut butter news, back in January while in Vermont skiing, I came across Vermont Peanut Butter Company brand of peanut butter/almond butter.  They have 8 different varieties you can check out.  It is really good but also kinda expensive.  It was definitely worth trying, and I'm happy to support smaller businesses, but at $8-9/jar (+shipping if I were to order it online before we are in Vermont again), I can find cheaper alternatives - like the Peanut Butter & Co. brand above ($4) at my local Wegmans, or Trader Joe's Almond Butter (crunchy, unsalted) is around $5/jar.  Back in January, I didn't realize there were much cheaper alternatives.

I ordered three kinds to try.  Here are the two I have left: Good Karma (Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter) and Stowe Cinnamon Raisin.  The third kind I had (which is long gone) was Green Mountain Goodness (peanut & almond butter with pumpkin and flaxseed).

 What's your favorite brand/variety of peanut/almond/other nut butter?

Any favorite avocado uses/recipes??

Garden Pizza!

Two nights ago we made our own pizza.

We picked up some whole wheat pizza dough from Wegmans.  First we roasted some sliced banana peppers and bell peppers from our garden (and artichokes from the Wegmans olive bar) on a pan in the oven for probably 10-15 minutes.  In my experience, this helps prevent a soggy pizza later on.

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough; picture from Wegmans.com

We used some pesto that we made with farmer's market basil a couple weeks ago and had frozen (our basil we planted never really took off) on the dough.  We added a little shredded "pizza cheese" (a mozzarella/provolone blend - not from our garden).

Wegmans Pizza Cheese; picture from Wegmans.com

 
Then we put the roasted peppers and artichokes on the pizza and stuck it in the oven.  Toward the end we added sliced tomatoes (from our garden) and popped it back in the oven for a little bit. Adding the tomatoes toward the end also helps prevent a soggy pizza, and I think it prevents the tomatoes from getting mushy too.  It tasted great! and it gave us each lunch for the following two days.

Ta Da!  Hubby slicing up the Pizza.

Training Week in Review

Monday night I went to an hour long spinning class followed by a half hour abs class. The class included a couple sets of 'haybalers' (move 10 lb disc diagonally across your body), the Hundred (Pilates move), basic crunches, exercises with a stability ball, Russian twists; and four 1-minute planks scattered throughout.

Tuesday morning I did an easy 2 mile run, as per my training plan. It was nice and cool and I ran it at a faster that I was supposed to. My abs still hurt. Have you ever run when you're sore in the ribcage area? ow! I guess that means the abs class was effective.

Wednesday was a rest day (thought about going to spinning, but I was at a friend's pool in the afternoon then went to my husband's first softball play off game). Also justified not going to spinning as I was going to run 7 miles the next morning and thought I should save some energy for my legs. My abs still hurt. I did get in a little manual labor as I went in to work to empty out my desk and pack up all my office things and books (my office is being moved).

Thursday morning I woke up early with every intention of running 7 miles. I was sure to hydrate the previous night, I got plenty of sleep, and then I woke up to a downpour. My abs/torso were still a little tight!! But finally getting better. And it continued to rain buckets until after 10am. I'm ok running in light rain, especially when it's warm out, but this was crazy.

So when the rain stopped, I headed out at about 10:30. It was disgustingly humid. It was 81F with 82% humidity when I started. I was supposed to do a mile warm up, a 5 mile run at half-marathon pace, and a mile cool down. The first two miles went well but then it really started to heat up. Then it went from overcast to direct sun! It got so hot out. I was definitely running slower than I wanted to. And I was supposed to meet a friend for lunch half an hour away at 12:30. I ended up cutting my run short at 5.5 miles so I would have time to eat something, shower, and get to lunch on time.

I was really disappointed I didn't get to 7 miles, but that downpour really screwed things up for me. Guess I should have gone to the treadmill first thing (But I've posted before about how hard it is to stay on the treadmill for that long). Oh well... it's not the end of the world. If it counts for anything, I walked the dog in the morning, as I usually do, which was about a half a mile, and we walked to our garden plot and back tonight (1.5 miles round trip) to pick another batch of ripe veggies.

July 29 Batch of Ripe Veggies

Friday- Tomorrow's an early 2 mile easy run before we hit the road for some family stuff out of town.

Sunday- Should be my 9 mile distance run for the week, but we'll be in the car for our 8 hour return trip drive, so I'm guessing my 9 miles will be bumped to early Monday morning.

How do you handle weeks where you may not have trained as much/as well as you wanted to? Do you stress about it or is it not a big deal?

Garden Update & A nice COOL run!

Here's what we picked from our garden on Saturday, 7/17:

We used most of the tomatoes and two bell peppers by just cutting them up and cooking them in some olive oil and serving over pasta.

And here's what we picked from our garden Thursday 7/22:

We're still working on using this stuff up... Saturday morning we had tomato and pepper omelets for breakfast.

Some banana peppers cut up

Last night we cut up some of the above cucumbers and some of the tomatoes and tossed with a little dressing and had a cucumber and tomato salad before dinner. I must say, the big tomatoes are SO flavorful compared to what you find on your sandwich or in your salad at most restaurants.

Look how red those tomatoes are inside!

I'd also just like to say...yesterday we had a serious thunderstorm roll in with heavy rain and high winds. It cooled things off quite nicely (for the rest of the day anyway). Last night I ran an easy 4 miles at 9:30 pm and it was only 72 out and breezy. It was glorious!! I headed out with my watch, cell phone, and my fun little clip on blinking light for visibility:


I just ran at what felt like a comfortable, easy pace, without checking my watch continuously (only when it beeped at me every mile to check my pace). My pace per mile was about 15 seconds faster than my last "easy" 4 mile run on Friday morning, and my average heart rate over the course of the run was 16 bpm slower. Woo hoo!

I am not ready for summer to be over, but when you run outside, cool days/evenings are greatly appreciated! It gave me a little confidence boost. As it's been so hot, I've been worrying about being able to run the pace I want to for the half marathon in 2 months. Hopefully it won't be above 80 on that day and I can know that when it's cooler I will be able to run at a faster speed, more easily than I can in the weather we've been having for the past month. I checked my notes on my Garmin Connect program and saw that the last time I ran outside when it was at least 72 or cooler was June 30th (last night's pace was faster and my HR was slower than my June 30th run too, hopefully that's an indication of progress). It's been nearly a month since I've been able to run in weather that cool. Anyway, back into the 90s this week, but at least our overnight lows are going to be around 70 again, maybe I will plan for more evening or early morning runs when I can.

Garden Update

A belated picture of what we picked from our garden this past Monday night (7/12):

We went to the garden this morning to water and weed and came back with all these goodies:

Looks like maybe we'll be making some salsa.

I meant to bring my camera to the garden with me but forgot. The tomato plants got huge since we had two days with rain recently (It's been about a month without rain before that! We've had to rely on us watering the garden about every other day). I think we need to get more twine or garden tape to hold them to their stakes.

Anyone else garden? What do you grow?

Cucumbers

We have a 20 x 20 plot at the "community garden" in the town where we live. We have planted super sweet tomatoes, roma tomatoes, big boy tomoatoes, a "purple heirloom" tomato, banana peppers, bell peppers, cayenne peppers, baby romaine, cucumbers, pole beans, and mint (for mojitos, of course).


We planted the cucumbers as very small plants and they really took off right away. By mid June we had several good sized cucumbers growing.

At the end of June we had a decent little cucumber harvest... then didn't really know what to do with them all. Before this harvest we had two ripen individually - we snacked on one/used it in salads, and the other one we gave away. But now we had 5 all at the same time!

My husband found a recipe for Emeril Lagasse's Cold Cucumber Soup. Thanks to our handy dandy immersion blender (one of our best mini appliances!) he made this soup. The main modifications made to the recipe were that we used lowfat yogurt, light sour cream, and substituted a little more yogurt in place of some of the sour cream. Picked up a loaf of multigrain sourdough bread and voila- we had a meal.


In fact, I think this batch gave us 6 or 7 meal-sized bowls of soup. I haven't had cold soup very often (I think we made gazpacho once last summer), but I thought it was pretty good - had a bit of a kick to it too, thanks to the jalapeno and cayenne peppers.

Know any good cucumber recipes?