Weekly Round Up: Naughty and Nice

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In the spirit of the season, today I'm recapping the naughty and the nice events of the past week.

Eats

I didn't have much of food plan, but given that the week started with one planned meal and ended with a shut in due to the big storm, things came out better than expected.  Everything made the "nice list".

Exhibit 1: Inspired by Insta

My one planned meal of the week was a "Kardashian salad" from The College Nutritionist Instagram account.  The recipe serving size was one (1) and I knew this was something that I would just want once so I was good with that.  But it was easy to make and satisfied a craving so I'd recommend it.

Exhibit 2: I Reinvented the Wheel

The Kardashian salad left me with 2/3 of a can of chickpeas that I needed to do "something" with.  I thought that maybe I'd seen Cheap Lazy Vegan make sushi using chickpeas as the protein, so I headed over there couldn't find it but the "tuna" salad in this post caught my eye.

I pulsed the chickpeas and onion in the blender, omitted the kelp powder since I didn't have any, and threw in a dash of vegan mayo and dijon mustard.  Oh wow, it was good but something was missing...tuna salad usually has pickle relish, right?  I tossed in a few spoonfuls and gave everything a good blend.  I'd gotten just enough liquid to take things from "chunky" to "creamy", so the consistency was off but the taste was incredible.  I took a snack break and dabbed some on crackers.  Yum, yum, yum.  This stuff was the greatest thing ever.

A bit later I was feeling snacky and it occurred to me that my "tuna salad" would be a great thing to dip veggies in.  Which is was, but that was when I realized that my "tuna salad" was basically...hummus.  A great thing to dip veggies in, and FYI a great thing to do if you ever have a partial can of leftover chickpeas that you want to do "something" with.

Exhibit 3: A Storm Night Meal Save

Hubs and I both took the day off work Friday, which was the onset of the epic winter storm.  It was below zero degrees F with a real feel of "dangerous to be outside".  Hey we had power and we had ourselves, the boys, and the dog so we had everything that we needed so we happily hunkered down.  I started the Christmas baking (more about that in a minute) and as I was digging through the freezer I came across a random assortment of frozen fish: one "everything crusted" cod patty and about two servings of beer battered fish.  I rolled my eyes and thought "we're never going to get around to using this, I should just throw it out" but fortunately I didn't act on it.

As it got closer to dinner time and we faced our usual "OMG it is a total surprise that it's dinner time and someone has to come up with a plan to feed four people" with the added "and ain't nobody leaving the house" due to the storm.  Necessity is the mother of invention, so all of a sudden the fish went from "we're never going to use this" to "it's fish and chips night!"  The boys had most of the beer battered fish, hubs had the remaining small piece with some Costco chicken skewers to fill up his plate, and I had the unattractive but delicious everything crusted cod.  Air fryer french fries and peas and it was a great dinner.

Christmas Baking Recap

Every year I try to pare down my baking list to 3-4 items, and then treat myself to making 1-2 extra things above my self imposed limit.  I mean, it is Christmas.

This year's round up for the Nice List

• Oreo balls (recipe as told to me by a coworker one billion years ago - run a box of oreos and a block of cream cheese through the food processor, set it aside untouched to solidify, roll into balls, freeze the balls, then use toothpicks to dip in chocolate, remove toothpick and daub chocolate over the toothpick hole, store in the fridge until serving).

• M&M cookie bars.  I tried the Sally's Baking Addiction recipe for kicks.  I'm pretty sure that this is her chocolate chip cookie cake recipe doubled, so it was a winner with the fam.
  
• Small batch lemon bars.  These are magical because the recipe is small, but the yield is "the exact number of lemon bars that you want to have around the house if you're the only one in your house who eats lemon bars and you get distracted and forget to bring them to your family Christmas party".
• Something new!  At the last minute Love and Olive Oil's Peppermint Bark Shortbread caught my eye.  I'm going to recommend this one for being dead easy to make and being way easier that it looks to decorate (just don't do whatever I did to the white chocolate that caused it to clump up).
  

That was enough to see us through our family Christmas party, and since we have a smaller crowd this year I'll probably only need to make another batch of the M&M bars to get us through New Year's.  The shortbread took a hit so depending on my cravings I'll either make another batch or make Millionaire Bars (assuming that you are what you eat, millionaire bars sound like a good thing for New Year's).

This year's entry for the naughty list

I had a spectacular cookie fail.  There was a decorating component that I totally flubbed and on top of that wowza, taste wise they were incredibly uninteresting.  I'm keeping the source to myself since of course maybe the fault is mine but I wanted to document that it happens.  I miss 100% of the shots that I don't take and a good number of the ones that I do.

Workouts

For the Nice list

• Last week I told you that I was ready to be done with the Fuel series, and yes that was true but I can't help but notice that now that I've gone back to more traditional strength work that I sure seem to be picking up heavier weights, so I think it did me a quite a bit of good.
• Looking for more traditional strength work?  Wow, please check out Tempo week.  I really, really, really liked it (caveat: I did not do the final HIIT workout).
• I spiced up my cardio!  I was going through Caroline Girvan's Instagram page and came across this post where she said that she was doing a 20 minute sprint workouts three times a week with no other details.  I took it to google and found the Peak Fitness workout, which is a 20 minute sprint workout meant to be done 3 times a week: 
• Warm up for 3 minutes
• Sprint for 30 seconds/recover for 90 seconds x 8
  
• Cool down until you get to 20 minutes total

I liked the sound of it, so I gave it a try on the treadmill with 0% incline and 3.8 as my warm up/recover/cool down speed and 7.0 as my sprint speed.  Since I haven't been running at all, my very first sprint felt awkward AF and every sprint thereafter felt very natural.  I repeated the workout this morning and liked it. so I'm going to continue on with this 3x week and let you know how it goes.  My early thoughts are that I really like it and I do believe that I've found a way to run without running.  It kind of reminds me of the "one minute as fast as you can/two minutes recover" workout that I loved so much last spring when I was trying to get a sub-9 minute mile.

For the Naughty list

I made it two of six workouts in to the one week Pure Endure series and that's as far as I'm going.  The format of "one bajillion reps for no apparent reason" was not for me.  I'll be starting Epic III tomorrow.

Watching

Last week I told you that I was liking an Israeli show on Hulu called False Flag.  This week I'm here to tell you that if you're not watching this show then I don't know what are you even doing with your life.  Season 1 was "excellent" and season 2 was "possibly the best TV show that I have ever seen".  I put in some late nights last week because I got to the point where I just couldn't stop thinking about it.  

For family viewing, we rode out The Great Freeze Out of 2022 with some movies.

We saw the ultimate Christmas movie Die Hard of course, and the next night stepson #2 requested one of my all time favorites if not my favorite Airplane.  Afterwards hubs pulled up a video on an Airplane issue that I've heard about but hadn't fully researched until now:

Reading

I finished Station Eleven and I've got my next book picked out.