Weekly Eats: Cupcake Edition

A weekly roundup: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's adventures, I made cupcakes, ate a lot of tacos, and had my first session at a running clinic.
 Breakfasts

Monday & Wednesday: cereal bar, string cheese, and fruit.
Tuesday & Thursday: breakfast burritos
Friday: avocado toast
Saturday & Sunday: breakfast potatoes, eggs, and chicken sausage.

Lunches
Monday: A big ol' taco.  Even though we were having them for dinner, I needed one after a speedy run, lots of walking to see certain stepsons in the Memorial Day Parade, and taking a certain stepdog for an extra morning walk.

Tuesday & Friday: Chrissy Teigan's actual drunken noodles.  Substitutions from the original recipe: used glass noodles, Costco stir fry veggies, and soy curls.

Wednesday & Thursday: salads from work catering.

Saturday: leftover pizza.

Sunday: snacks

Dinners
Monday & Tuesday (family meal): leftover tacos.

Wednesday (date night): lamb, mashed potatoes, and broccoli.  I experimented by cooking the broccoli in a foil pack on the grill - nothing wrong with that but also nothing special.

Thursday (fend for yourself night): leftover rice from the tacos, Costco stir fry veggies, avocado, and air fried salmon.  Topped with some sesame dressing from an Asian salad kit (I have a surplus of dressing packs from my recent coleslaw craze).

Friday (family meal): we had friends in from out of town.  Pizza, chicken, and jojos.

Saturday (double party night): I already had plans to have dinner with  The Quartet, a.k.a. my three best friends from grad school. At the last minute the SIL's decided to throw a family bash at our house, which is also one of my favorite ways to spend a Saturday night.  Why choose when you can do both - I hung out with family for an hour and then went to meet my friends for Mexican.

Sunday (family meal): we had my parents over for Thai takeout and cupcakes.

The Cupcakes

Between seeing my friends, the family party, and time with my parents, a batch of cupcakes was in order.  Specifically Sally's Baking Addiction Two Toned Rose Frosting with her white cupcakes and a small batch of chocolate cupcakes.

• Let's be clear that I'm not a cake person, I'm a frosting person.  BUT the white cupcakes were everything.  I didn't have quite enough cake flour for the cupcakes, so I made up the quarter cup difference with all purpose flour.  And I have an amazing superpower of always getting a few extra cupcakes out of the batch.  The recipe was for 14 cupcakes but I got 16 and honestly the cups were still a bit full so I could have gotten a few more if I'd tried.
• My superpowers failed on the chocolate batter because I only got 7 out of a batch that should have made 8.
• One batch of frosting was enough to generously frost all 23 cupcakes with some to spare.
• I used half and half instead of cream in the frosting b/c I didn't feel like going to the store.
• I think the frosting would have been more two toned if I'd used a pipping bag instead of my frosting tube.
• I didn't have the same tip that Sally used (pro tip: sometimes people check into stuff like this before they start a recipe, I could really stand to pick up that talent) so I ended up using the same open star tip that I always use.  My standard technique is to swirl frosting from the outside in and build up a peak, Sally's technique is to start from the inside and go out.  The only thing I didn't like about that is that the end is kinda obvious, at least for my skill level.

Meal Prep

• Chrissy Teigan's actual drunken noodles on Monday
• A brand new batch of breakfast potatoes first thing on Sunday
• And the classic, veggie burritos.  I made Gimme Some Oven's refried beans to mix it up.
• A few meals' worth of leftover chicken and thai stirfry 

Workouts
23 miles of running
Monday: 4 miles with strides
Tuesday: my body did not welcome the alarm clock after a 4 day weekend.  3 miles and called it a day.  Weights at lunch
Wednesday: 5 minutes of running at the running clinic.  More about that in a minute
Thursday: 3.75 miles.  This is the first time outside of a race that you've seen me run anything but an even number, and you may have picked up that I'm just a bit obsessed with numbers, so lemme 'splain, I have the Garmin F35, which is a very budget friendly version of the watch.  I used the workout mode for the first time ever, and it doesn't show your speed or distance at all.  My goal was 1 mile warm up, 1 mile cool down, 2 miles of 1 minute fast/2 minute recover but without having the distance to reference I came out short of 4 miles.  It's pretty amazing that I hit 3.75 on the nose.
Friday: you better believe that I got Thursday's quarter mile with 4.25 hilly miles.
Saturday: 8 miles, which is the longest I've run since the half marathon 2 weeks ago.  Usually I have coffee and breakfast before my Saturday runs, but I woke up really early so I decided to get right out there.  I had a glass of UCAN before and took a gel after 5 miles.  The last three miles were rough and in retrospect, it would have been better to eat something before and maybe just keep it at 6 miles to ramp back up to long running, but it was what it was. It was really great to get those miles and to have my workout done so early

The Running Clinic
I'm in the process of getting a second opinion on my running.  Although I've been able to increase my endurance, I haven't seen any improvements in speed and I can't figure it out but someone who knows what they're doing probably could.  One of our local hospitals has a PT program that gets you a video running analysis, two follow up appointments, and a nutritional consult with a dietitian.


I'm sure I'll write more in depth about the program once I go through it, but this is what's happened so far.  For the initial meeting, the PT and I talked about my goals (more speed, run more half marathons), did a kinda strength/balance evaluation that's hard to describe, and then she had me run on a treadmill for a few minutes.  She told me to pick a comfortable running speed (5.5) and let me run for a few minutes.  Then she videoed me from front, back, and both sides.  Next step: she will analyze every second of the footage combined with the strength eval and will make recommendations at our next meeting.  The only observation that she shared with me is that I am a heel striker (and she showed me the video to prove it).  So more to come on this next week.

Watching
Not much TV around here this week.  We saw Lethal Weapon as a family.


Reading
Ooh, lots of reading around here this week.  Got some good ones to tell you about:

• The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom. I had a few quibbles with the plot but I also couldn't put it down.
• I Found You by Lisa Jewell.  I'm still reading it but so far it's my favorite Lisa Jewell yet.