Breakfast of Champions: What I Eat Before a Marathon

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I am running my first ultramarathon on Sunday. (!) I am channeling my pre-race nerves into making food. I’ve been researching the best foods to eat to get my body ready to run, and this blog post from Eat2Run convinced me to give carb-loading a try. Yippee! Carbs!

I have been mostly a lowish-carb eater for the past few years, so carb-loading has me both totally giddy with excitement and also freaking out a little. I have really demonized carbs it turns out. It feels a little wrong seeking these foods out. But I really don’t want to crash and burn during my race, so I’m building up my glycogen stores with some yummy carbs.

These last few days before the race, I’m trying to add in carbs like fruit and oatmeal and bread and potatoes!

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We will be staying in a hotel room the night before the race, so it will be difficult to do my usual pre-race meal of oatmeal. I’ll need to eat at 4:30 am to be ready to run at 7 am. I’m doubting that the hotel restaurant will be open for business then. So, I tweaked this yummy baked oatmeal recipe that my friend Lori shared with me (originally from Back to the Cutting Board).

I decided to add tart cherries to the oatmeal because they are supposed to be a great food for runners. Tart cherries have tons of anthocyanins, which are powerful antioxidants that contain anti-inflammatory properties and soothe aching muscles. Plus the cherries in this baked oatmeal make it reminiscent of cherry pie, which is an added bonus!

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Chia seeds were not a thing when I was growing up on oreos and diet cokes, but these days most people know that chia seeds are absolutely busting at the seams with fabulous things like omega-3 fatty acids, fiber, protein, antioxidants and minerals. They especially help with hydration as they are able to absorb 9-10 times their weight in water.

So, I tossed a good amount of chia seeds into the baked oatmeal to make it super oatmeal. So good!

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Tart Cherry and Chia Baked Oatmeal

 

My race-day plan is to eat the baked oatmeal with a boiled egg and pre-cooked bacon and coffee at around 4:30 am. Then at 6 am I’ll drink a serving of Generation UCAN, a slow-acting carbohydrate drink that gives me a nice slow-burn of energy without the blood sugar highs and lows of sugary gels. I tend towards being hypoglycemic, so the typical gels and goos that a lot of endurance athletes reach for during races can really mess me up. I get a burst of energy and then a huge crash and burn once I metabolize all that sugar.

I’ll carry another Generation UCAN drink and a few UCAN bars in my hydration pack and plan to drink/eat those every hour of the race. I’ll also bring another bottle with water and electrolytes to sip on throughout the race. This combo of slow, steady carbs and electrolytes is the key to a successful race. I have learned from experience that you cannot mess around and wing it with your fuel once you are running a marathon or longer. You have to plan ahead for what you’ll need and eat/drink when you are not necessarily hungry/thirsty. It is make or break.

I love geeking out on this stuff, so I find it super interesting to research and play around with what works best for me. It’s so interesting the stuff your body craves/needs when you run for a really long time.

I did a 20-mile training run recently and when I got home all I could think about were pickles, chips and mustard. I made a turkey sandwich and ate my weight in pickles. I made the perfect bite of a chip with mustard on it and a pickle on top. It was transcendent. I have more of a sweet tooth and don’t normally crave these foods, so I googled around to see why I had such an intense craving after my run.

It turns out all three of those foods contain stuff that helps with recovery. It is actually a thing for runners to carry mustard packets with them on long runs. I had already heard about pickle juice as a recovery drink, but never mustard. So crazy! And gross! It turns out the vinegar in mustard and pickles helps your muscles relax. The turmeric in mustard is also good for inflammation. And the salt in the chips and pickles replaces all the salt you lose when you exercise for an extended period of time.

So, I am also planning to carry a little ziplock bag of Doug’s Dills Sweet Hots (shout out to my father-in-law Doug who makes the best pickles you’ll ever taste!) and some salt and vinegar chips. I am hoping animals don’t start chasing me on this run! But maybe that would make me run faster?

Okay, enough with the food talk…Time to get some other race prep/packing done. I can’t wait to share how the race went. See you on the other side of 50k!

 Here’s my recipe for Tart Cherry and Chia Baked Oatmeal

Fruity Baked Oats

adapted from Back to the Cutting Board

Breakfast | Servings: 4-6
Prep time: 10 min | Cook time: 30 min | Total time: 40 min

Ingredients:

  • 1 package of frozen tart cherries
  • 1 1/2 cups quick cooking oats
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1 tsp. baking powder
  • 3/4 tsp. salt
  • 1/4 cup chia seeds
  • 1 tbsp. cinnamon
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1/4 cup butter, melted, divided
  • 1/4 cup honey
  • 1 egg, slightly beaten
  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees (F). Spray an 8×8 or 9×9 in. square baking pan with cooking spray.
  2. Sprinkle 1 tbsp. of the melted butter into the bottom of the pan. Place all the fruit into the pan in a single layer. Set aside.
  3. In a large bowl, mix together oats, sugar, baking powder, salt, chia seeds, and cinnamon.
  4. Make a well in center and add in milk, melted butter, honey and egg. Stir into dry ingredients until just combined.
  5. Pour into the pan over the fruit and smooth the top. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until the edges start to darken and the top is golden brown. Let cool in pan for a few minutes.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

 

A Big Bowl of Self Care

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Wait, are those brussels sprouts in that picture?

You read the words “self care” and probably thought I was going to suggest you grab a big bowl of ice cream, right?

I’m certainly no stranger to dishing out a bowl of Bluebell after a hard day, but lately I’m thinking about self care a little differently. I’m looking at how I can put good stuff in my body, so that my body works at its best…which makes me feel happy and want to go  around spreading good vibes everywhere I go. I think of it as trickle down self care. I treat myself well so that I have the energy, joy, and stamina to treat others well.

So, how do we get more good stuff into our bodies? By eating more plants, that’s how. Even though we know we are supposed to eat our veggies, chances are you aren’t getting the recommended five servings every day. I know on most days I don’t unless I really try.

I have started tracking the days I eat five servings of fruits and vegetables in my bullet journal. If I eat my veggies I get to color in a little box in my habit tracker. It’s amazing the power that coloring in that box has over me. It totally changes my eating choices. If I’m making scrambled eggs for breakfast, I’ll throw in some leftover roasted broccoli from the night before just to get in a serving of vegetables right off the bat. Add a handful of blueberries as a side and I get to count that as a serving of fruit. Boom! I’ve had two out of five of my servings before I’ve even gotten dressed. #killingit

Left to my own devices, I will mindlessly choose to eat nothing but baked goods and proteins all day long. I mean, yum, right? But now that I’m tracking my fruits and veggies, I’m making sure to squeeze some plants into every meal.

So, here’s how you get massive amounts of plants in your body and have fun doing it.

SELF-CARE VEGGIE BOWL

Crank your oven up to 425 degrees.

You take a sheet pan, preferably it is really beat up and crusty from all the other times you have roasted veggies on it.

Then you chop up:

  • a shallot or any onion you have on hand
  • butternut squash (I cheated and bought an already-chopped up butternut squash because hacking my way through a rock-hard gourd and dealing with squash guts at lunchtime is a deal-breaker.)
  • And brussels sprouts (which do have an “s” on the end of “brussel.” I googled it so that we can all just relax and keep reading.)

Next you grab your olive oil and you drizzle a few good glugs of oil all over the veggies, which at this point are on your cruddy old sheet pan as shown in picture below. Glug, glug, glug goes the olive oil all over the veggies. Add some salt and pepper, give it a little toss with your hands, and you are good to put it in the oven for 30 minutes or so. Every 10 minutes, give the veggies a little stir so that they get evenly caramelized. You can even talk to them while you are in there stirring, and say little encouraging words about how good they are looking. That’s what I like to do.

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Meanwhile…on top of the oven…make your balsamic drizzle. Balsamic drizzle sounds super fancy and foodie-like, but it is very simple to make. All you do is take 1/4 of a cup of balsamic vinegar and put it in a small sauce pan, add a tablespoon of honey to the vinegar and bring to a boil. Simmer the mixture for about ten minutes so that it can reduce to a nice syrupy consistency.

If you like watching things boil like I do, check out my video below!

 

 

Feel free to share that video on all the social media.

Then, it’s just a hop, skip and a few parmesan shavings to turn your veggies and drizzle into a delicious feast for the senses. I combined my vegetables with Israeli couscous, toasted pumpkin seeds, Craisins, and parmesan shavings and then added a drizzle of the balsamic reduction. Then I ate it in front of my computer, which wasn’t very self-care-y of me, but this stuff doesn’t blog itself.

You could also combine your veggies with quinoa, farro, spelt, nothing, you make the rules here.

The Israeli couscous, craisin, pumpkin seed, parmesan shavings combo was delicious. And I feel super after eating it. Specifically, I feel satisfied, energized, just the right amount of full, and clear-headed. These are the signs that tell me what I’m eating is treating me right and giving my body what it needs to be happy. When I feel better after I eat something, I know it is good food for me. I mean, forget following a special diet that you read about in a book. Just pay attention to how food makes you feel. Eat the things that make you feel good! Easy. Your body knows what it needs.

So much of what I eat (pizza, cookies, hamburgers), is good as I’m tasting it, but then I feel terrible after I eat it. This bowl was delicious and made me feel like a million bucks.

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So next time you are having a rough day or a good day, or just a normal day, treat yo’ self to good food. Give yourself a big old plant-based hug and give your body what it needs to thrive. Then let all that those good feelings spill over to the people around you. Because your bowl runneth over.

Love,

E

But First Tacos

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but first tacos

Photo credit: 5thandGraceCo

 

You know how they say put the oxygen mask on yourself first? Well, the same is true for tacos. You can’t be a good you on an empty tummy. But it’s hard to find time to feed yourself in the midst of the tornado that is getting everyone out the door each morning.

Well I have a solution for all you hangry mamas out there!

This is going to sound like a pretty obvious tip, but it took me a while to figure this out and since I have started doing this one thing, I save a good 30 minutes making and cleaning up breakfast everyday. That’s like a good 3 and a half hours a week!

Are you ready for me to reveal my tip?

You sure?

Okay. Here it is. All I do is make a bunch of bacon and scrambled eggs at one time and then reheat them throughout the week to have an easy, delicious breakfast ready in seconds. I know, not exactly earth shattering in its originality, but I have been making breakfast for a long, long time and it just recently occurred to me to do this. So it made me think maybe others have not discovered this little nugget of efficiency.

I like to put my eggs and bacon on a corn tortilla and plop a little salsa or guacamole on top. One time I had leftover pork chops (the ones from my 30-day meal plan), and so I sliced up one of those bad boys and put it on top of my eggs instead of bacon. Whoa. It was good. You could also make a big batch of frozen hash browns and add those to the mix. I am happy with just simple bacon and eggs, but sometimes I add a little grated cheese if I am feeling fancy.

Here’s how I make bacon the super easy, no muss, no fuss way. 

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  1. Cover a large sheet pan with heavy duty foil.
  2. Set an oven-safe cooling rack on top of it.
  3. Line your bacon up on the cooling rack so that the grease can drip down onto the foil-lined pan.
  4. Bake at 420 for 10-20 minutes, depending on how you like your bacon. I like mine crispy, so I leave it in there longer. *Confession: I have a tendency to burn bacon. It’s my one flaw.
  5. Let things cool down before trying to dispose of the foil. Letting the grease cool down and solidify a little makes clean up less likely to give you a third degree burn.

 

 

While the bacon’s cooking, make your eggs:

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  1. Crack however many eggs you think you’ll need into a bowl. I usually do six at a time.
  2. Over low heat, melt a tablespoon of butter in a nonstick pan. I also give the pan a little spritz of cooking spray for good measure.
  3. While the butter is melting, whisk your eggs until they are all mixed together and are basically one solid color.

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I mean, look at that action shot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pour eggs into the pan and gently start to lift and fold them gently with a rubber spatula. Lift and fold. Lift and fold.

The goal is to not let any eggs stay in one spot too long and get brown.

Brown scrambled eggs=gross scrambled eggs.

Don’t forget to add a little salt and pepper. I think it’s easier to season the eggs once they’re in the pan. You can get a better idea of how much salt and pepper you really need when they’re all spread out as opposed to when they’re in a bowl.

Keep cooking on low heat until they are as done as you like em. The big thing to remember is slow and low is the key to cooking eggs. Slow and low…that is the tempo. You want to lovingly coax them into luscious scrambledness. This cannot be rushed.

Let your eggs cool and pack them up for easy living all week.

Once you’ve got your eggs and bacon at the ready, you can have a quick, yummy, filling breakfast in minutes with no mess to clean up. Like I said, I like to make a taco by microwaving a tortilla with a little cheese topped with eggs and bacon. I microwave it for about 45 seconds and then I eat it standing up over my kitchen sink like an animal.

You could also toast an english muffin, microwave the eggs and bacon separately and then build a little breakfast sandwich. Yum. Or just eat them as eggs and bacon with a little toast. Feel free to mix it up. Add some veggies. Slice up some avocado. Once you have your base of eggs and bacon, you can do with them as you choose and it really doesn’t add much time to the equation.

Side note: Supposedly the way you like your eggs says something about your personality.

So, if you could only eat eggs one way forever, which way would you choose?

Did you say scrambled, like me? Here’s what that means, according to the internet: 

You’re a loyal friend to the end! Conservative, but always friendly and inclusive of others –– not the life of the party, but always at the party. Sometimes really bland, but whatever — people still like you so who cares.

Yay.

I don’t care if I’m a little boring. You over-easy people can have your wild parties and mucousy eggs. I’m scrambled eggs for life.

So sometimes, you will find yourself in the position I was in today. My bacon and egg stash had run dry, and I didn’t have time to make more. What could I eat…what could I eat….

Well, necessity really is the mother of invention because today I invented what I believe to be the next big thing…

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Yep, that’s a waffle taco. And it was delicious. And there was fruit, y’all, so it was healthy.

All you do to make this amazing handful of self care is toast a blueberry waffle. Swipe on a scant amount of Nutella. Just the tiniest amount. Like, so little, it doesn’t even register on My Fitness Pal. It’s like you basically didn’t even eat any Nutella at all. Pile on some blueberries and fold it in half. Voila! You have made an entirely different, but equally yummy breakfast taco.

So, what do y’all like to eat for breakfast? I would love to hear if you can top my waffle taco. It gets a ten out of ten for both easiness and deliciousness, but it needs a better name. Maybe we should call it… Wacco? Taffle? I need your thoughts on this.

Love,

Elizabeth

 

 

 

 

One Meal Plan and Done: A Month of Easy Family Dinners

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Something happens after you turn 40. Well, a lot happens, much of which I won’t go into now, but one thing that I have noticed now that I’m 43 is that I think about time so much more than I used to.

Once you get up on top of that 40 hill, you can see clearly. You were climbing, climbing, climbing for the first four decades of your life, and now you’re up on top looking out over everything and going, wow, this is amazing! My life is pretty awesome! I still feel good (hopefully)! And I’m not clawing my way up this mountain trying to prove myself anymore. I’m here. I’m enough. And I have perspective. I can see ahead of me and behind me. I can use the tools that got me here to keep getting better and stronger and driving forward. But not because I’m hustling for others’ approval, because I now can see what’s important, what I care about most.

I love being in my 40s. I’ll take the gray hairs and the weird lines on my neck and creaky knees if it means I can have that mountaintop view of life. No contest.

I’m not nearly as concerned with appearance or external success as I used to be, but what I am a tiny bit obsessed with now is time and how I use it. I now see time as a finite thing. I of course knew that before I turned 40, but now I feel it. I hear it like a jungle drum beating constantly in the distance. There is only so much time to do the things I want to do, and it makes me hyper-aware of what I’m doing with each minute.

So what does this have to do with meal planning? I thought there were going to be recipes, you’re saying to yourself.

Planning a month of meals at a time saves me time. Not just a few hours here and there, but exponential amounts of time. That’s time that I can use to train for a marathon, write a novel, garden, volunteer at school, be a good friend, sister, aunt, wife, daughter, mom. You know, big stuff from my life list that is way more fun and important than going to the grocery store.

Also meal planning saves us money. Since I started sticking to a meal plan, I only go to the grocery store once a week. (Every time you walk into the grocery store, you buy more than just what you came for, so staying away as much as possible means you spend less.) But the big way we save money is by not eating out. We can easily blow $50 feeding our family of 5 by eating out. And that’s fine if it’s a treat that we are all excited to enjoy. But if we spend that kind of money just because I forgot for the third time in a week that I can’t drive and make dinner at the same time…then that is not a treat. That just hurts.

But really my main motivator is saving time. I want hungry people to be fed, family dinners to be a priority, and I refuse to spend hours upon hours making this happen every week.

So before I reveal my arsenal of dinners, I have a few tips:

Tip #1: Use Google sheets to create your meal plan, then add your grocery lists as additional tabs at the bottom of your sheet. 

You can see in the screenshot below I have created a Google sheet with my dinners plugged into a calendar. Then, at the bottom of my meal spreadsheet calendar thing, I have different tabs for each week’s grocery list. This is where things get really nerdy and amazing. I can just re-use these grocery lists each week for the rest of my life if I want to. Or I can copy and paste and tweak them if I want to change up the rotation a bit. And I can always see and edit them, because I can access my Google drive from my phone. OMG, I know.

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Here’s my week 1 grocery list. It includes stuff other than just what I need for dinners obviously. I needed cilantro twice apparently. But only once did I need it to be capitalized.

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Tip #2: Add your meals to your digital calendar.

Once you’ve got the above setup, you can add your dinners to your Google calendar or whatever calendar you use. This will help you see that, oops, Back to School night is on Tuesday and it’s not a good night for that super complicated recipe you clipped out of Food and Wine magazine.

So without further ado, I am sharing a month’s worth of dinners my whole family will happily eat. I am breaking these dinners up into categories so that you can plug them into your specific schedule. For example, if you know you have a crazy driving day on Wednesdays, pick a meal from the slow-cooker category. You will feel like a genius when you roll into your driveway at 6:30 with a hot meal ready to be dished out to hungry loved ones.

So here’s what’s for dinner at my house this month:

Slow-cooker/Instant Pot Meals

Make-Ahead Dinners

  • Spaghetti with meat sauce: Brown 1 lb ground beef and 1 lb ground mild italian sausage. Drain fat. Add 3 cloves of chopped garlic and cook with ground meat for 30 seconds. Add half a cup of wine (any wine or no wine is fine) and cook until almost all the liquid has evaporated.  Add 24-oz jar of Rao’s marinara sauce + 1 8 0z can of (unseasoned) tomato sauce + 1 tablespoon of Italian seasoning + tablespoon of sugar + salt and pepper to taste. Let everything simmer for as long as you have. Add water if sauce seems too thick. Serve with pasta and any veggie your kids will eat!
  • Lasagna (Make extra spaghetti sauce and freeze half for lasagna night. Woo! I use whatever recipe comes on the box of lasagna noodles.)
  • Chicken and dumplings (Make your own stock with a whole chicken or use a rotisserie chicken with store-bought stock. You are your own boss!) I have concocted what I believe to be the perfect chicken and dumplings recipe. Sorry, I need to figure out how to share recipes on WordPress. Once I do that I will share that in another post. Stay tuned!

Sheet Pan Dinners

  • Sausage with Roasted Vegetables: slice up your favorite sausage (I like Pederson’s), add chunks of red onion, and veggies, toss with olive oil and salt and pepper and roast for 20ish minutes on 425.
  • Sheet Pan Meatballs with Crispy Turmeric Chickpeas

Dinners You Can Make With Your Eyes Closed*

  • Crispy Tacos=ground beef + Old El Paso seasoning + Crispy taco shells + fixings
  • Fish Tacos=frozen battered fish fillets + southwestern salad in a bag + tortillas + fixings
  • Grilled Chicken=I actually make this in a pan, not on the grill. Sprinkle salt, pepper, and season salt on the chicken. Add a tablespoon of olive oil and a tablespoon of butter to the pan. Cook on medium high heat on both sides until done. For extra thick chicken breasts, consider cutting them in half lengthwise to make them thinner. Better seasoning to chicken ratio that way. And they’ll cook faster.
  • BBQ Chicken=See above method for grilled chicken but add barbecue sauce to chicken at the end and throw it in a 425 degree oven to let it caramelize a little.
  • Homemade Pizza**=buy a ball of fresh dough from a pizza place near you and flip and toss it around like you made that thing yourself. Or make it yourself using this recipe that is super easy, but just takes some time for the dough to rise. For anyone still reading this, you are awesome, and please know that an envelope of yeast is equal to 2 and 1/4 teaspoons.
  • Baked potato night. The potato is your canvas. Get creative. Expert moms have baked potato night after BBQ chicken night and put leftover BBQ chicken on their potatoes. Just sayin.
  • Quesadillas=tortilla, cheese, other tortilla. Put them in a pan and melt the cheese. We are a simple folk and don’t need anything else but a little guacamole to make this a meal. But you will likely have extra pulled chicken or pulled pork sitting around at some point, so just think about that. Don’t cook more. Cook smart!

Dinners You Can Outsource. For us Sunday night is usually Daddy-grills night. Yay!

  • Grilled hamburgers
  • Grilled hotdogs
  • Grilled anything. I don’t care because I am not cooking!

Fancy-ish Dinners that Make You Feel Special

*Don’t do that. Just saying these are really easy meals.

**We eat pizza once a week, which is how this meal plan stretches to be a month’s worth of dinners.

It’s a little embarrassing how excited my month-long meal plan makes me, but I don’t care. I will shout about my meal plan from the top of my 40-something hill.

This kind of stuff used to seem unimportant, like if I had nothing else to do I might get into meal planning if I felt like it. Now I see how much of an impact doing a little planning can have on the rest of my life. I estimate that I used to spend at least 3-5 hours a week planning what to make for dinner. Between looking online for recipes, making lists, and going to the grocery store multiple times a week, the time really adds up. Now, that I have a system that works, I spend only the time it takes to go to the grocery store one time once a week. The rest is already done. It blows my mind.

How do you get dinner on the table every night? Do you have any tips or tricks that keep the meal train chugging along? Please share!

Love,

Elizabeth