Weekly Round Up: Road Food

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Last week I escaped the cold with a last minute road trip to somewhere warm, which means that I will never, ever catch up with blogging.  Oh well, let's take a shot at it.

Eats

Since I don't have anything wildly exciting to tell you about cooking at home, let me tell you about some of my staple road meals.

My all purpose go-to road meal is a Clif bar and a piece of string cheese.  It's not fancy, but it works well to eliminate hunger for a bit and in situations where refrigeration is iffy.  I'm not sure what the exact regulation time on cheese sticks being out of the refrigerator is, but I'm comfortable with approximately 12 hours.  This is a very common road breakfast for me, and it also works as a snack or a lunch in a pinch.

Back when I was more organized, I used to make and freeze breakfast burritos, but I've gotten out of the habit.  Frozen breakfast burritos stand up very well to being transported in a cooler.  

If I don't have homemake breakfast burritos available, which I have not for a good long while, then I usually hit up the grocery store.  A lot of places sell two packs of breakfast sandwiches, which are great if I'm staying somewhere for two breakfasts worth of food.  I'm also very fond of Amy's breakfast burritos.  They're a bit pricey for home, but very reasonable for a travel meal.

On my most recent trip I discovered another Amy's breakfast that is off the charts good (and yes, spendy but whatcha gonna do?).  My assignment now that I'm back home is to create a homemade freezer version of this.  My only criticism is that it's a bit bland, so I needed to spice it up with a bit of hot sauce.  Thanks to the next meal that I'm going to talk about, I always have a travel supply of hot sauce.

I never thought in a million years that I would say this, but I have a go-to fast food lunch.  Remember how I've been making homemade crunchwraps?

Well, one day I decided to check out the competition.  So yes, my go-to road lunch is a Taco Bell crunchwrap.

Thoughts: I alternate between getting beef and black beans as the filling.  Taco Bell nacho sauce tastes weird, so I've started getting them without the sauce but with cheese.  My only criticism is how skinny theirs are compared to my homemade version.  But it's a great, not-expensive, not-heinous from a nutrition standpoint, gets-the-job-done kinda meal.  Somehow I always end up with extra packets of hot sauce, which was very handy when I ran into the excellent but slightly bland Amy's breakfast scrambles.

My other go-to road lunch was inspired by my time with Elisabeth.  She is great at putting together what she calls hodge-podge and everyone else calls charcuterie.  I've done a few DIY charcuterie-like things, but my default are these Aldi charcuterie packs.  The crackers are my addition, and I usually have grapes as well.  Not shown: the tiny pack of chocolate covered almonds that's included in the pack.

Dinner wise, I enjoy going out when I travel, so that's what I do most nights but not every night.  Instead of this post being sponsored by Amy's, this blogger has been sponsoring Amy's by working her way through their frozen foods selection.  Hotel Room Stir Fry isn't glamorous, but it is tasty/low fuss/cheaper than a restaurant meal.

So that's my exciting stash of Road Food.

Workouts/Wellness

I'm going to tease where I went last week for a bit, so for now I will just say that it is a major US city that has notoriously bad driving conditions.

I was surprised to learn that it has excellent pedestrian conditions.  I stopped off at the local mountain on the way into town.

On my big city exploration day, I was going to take Lyft instead of driving, but I found that I liked the old rail line that was converted into a pedestrian trail so much that I ended up walking everywhere.  Everyone needs a 30,000 step day once in a while.

Now that I'm back home, the weather is warm enough to hike again, so I'm back out in this:

On the strength front, Ribgate is finally over!!!  On the off chance that you haven't heard me complain about this before, back in November I got sick and pulled a muscle and/or cracked a rib from coughing.  Whatever I did, after the acute pain went away I had a weird pain that I was feeling on exertion if I tried to do any upper body exercise.  Logically I knew that it would get better someday, and that day was two and half months later.

It's funny how when you research ways to get better at pushups you never see "take two and half months off without doing a single pushup" on the list.  I'm starting over from square one big time.  The first day, I did one set of four pushups to test the waters, waited 48 hours and then did three sets of four pushups which felt terrible, and then waited another 48 hours and then three sets of four pushups felt like something that I was capable of doing.  Today I did four sets of six pushups and we'll take it from there.

The last thing to say about wellness is that I continue to throw everything and the kitchen sink at sleep.  I've settled on taking a magnesium supplement every night and if I still can't get to sleep or if I wake up in the middle of the night, I chase it with a melatonin.  A friend gave me some CBD gummies which work only if I don't take them every night, and I don't feel like they work better than melatonin.  Sleep is still very much a mixed bag.

Watching

Still rocking the Alfred Hitchcocks!  I'm in the final 10.

Outside of the Hitchcock sphere, I saw a remake.  My opinion is that remakes are great when there is something lacking in the original movie, and the best example out there is The Maltese Falcon.  The movie that you think of when I say that is the SECOND remake.  But when the original movie is flawless, remakes are insulting.

All of which is to say that when I first heard about the new Naked Gun movie, my gut reaction was "oh no.  WHY would someone do that?????"  But I kept hearing good things about it, so Hubs and I dipped our toes in.  The secret sauce is that it's not a remake, it's [another] sequel and it's funny.  Nothing will even replace the originals, but this made for a fun Friday night.

Reading

We have a lot to talk about, as usual.  Sorry not sorry...

I liked Heart the Lover a lot.  It didn't make my toes curl, but it was very good and darned if as soon as I read Julie's review if I wasn't on Libby tracking down a copy of Writers and Lovers.  The deal is that Heart is a kinda sorta prequel to Writers.  Heart deals with the main character when she's in college and later when she's a bit older.  Writers deals with the character in her early 30s, when she's at the point where all of her peers have given up on writing careers but she's still hanging in there, and when the book starts, she is not getting rewarded for it.  There is a tiny bit of a spoiler element to reading Heart first, since you know what happened to her writing career and you know which guy she ends up with, but IMO it's a feature and not a bug.  I liked Writers and Lovers much more than Heart, but I love the pairing of the two books even more.  FWIW I read Heart and listened to Writers on audio, and I will be reading/listening to more Lily King.

I also listened to a book that I've been meaning to read forever, Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.  This book is a [fictional] oral history, and that format usually doesn't work for me so I knew that it had to be audio or nothing.  Audio worked!  I was able to guess from very early on what was going to happen with Daisy's drug addiction and her relationship with the main male character, but it wasn't a spoiler, it was just something that made me feel smart.

Sadly there was a DNF, and I know it's one that a lot of my bloggy friends liked.  Good Dirt was a miss.  I started by reading it and lost interest, so I gave it another shot on audio.  I got a bit further but it was the same problem: I wasn't bonding with any of the characters, and I felt like the plot was taking forever to develop.

Another book that is not hitting is the current CBBC pick, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.  I really wanted to like this, but I have the same issue as Good Dirt that I'm not bonding with any of the characters and I'm not getting enough plot to make it worth my while.  But I like the people that I'm reading it with, and I'm in it until the end - maybe something will change.

Last but most certainly not least!!!  I know that some of y'all have gobbled this down in a day, but I'm forcing myself to take my time.  I'm two chapters in and plan to take it slow.  Doggo enjoyed the nibble that she got during the taking of this picture.  She is an occasional connoisseur of physical media.

Stuff on the Internet that I Tried in Real Life

I have a browser and an app to tell you about.

I used to joke that if this blog was sponsored that it would have to be by AdBlock.  Hey, no shade to sponsored blogs - I firmly believe that if you can get paid for doing something that you should get paid, but also wading through ads and pop ups does not make for an enjoyable reading experience so I block anything that I can block.  I've been using AdBlock since the dawn of time, but I've run into a few glitches here and there so I went ISO something else.  

That something is the Brave browser, which I use on my phone and for most of my blog reading.  It has a built in ad blocker that is smart enough not to trip up sites that try to shoot down ad blockers.

The only issue is that for Blogger blogs, you have to turn off the ad blocking in order to leave comments.  But speaking as someone with a Blogger blog, we tend not to have ads, so there's nothing much to block on us.

Click the lion icon to the right of the search bar and move the toggle to "shields are down for this site" to leave comments on Blogger blogs <3

The new app in my life is c/o SHU.  She wrote about a food tracking app called CalAI, and I decided to check it out.  Like many people, I benefit when I track my food intake, but I'm also burned out on tracking my food intake and I never stick with it for very long.

CalAI is a paid only, and I wasn't opposed but I also tend to get very cheap with stuff like that, so after downloading the app I delayed signing up and the next day they put a shinny discount offer in my inbox, so I went for it.  It's very easy to use, and you can take a picture of your meals and it uses AI magic to figure out what you're eating and the nutritional content.  If it doesn't guess correctly, you can tweak it.  For example, it thought that this yummy plate of pierogis with bacon topped with a shrimp skewer was potatoes topped with ground beef and a shrimp skewer, and I just had to tell it "the potatoes are pierogis and the beef is bacon" and it adjusted.  

I've been using it for a few days, and when eating in restaurants I find it really helpful to see the calories in the entire portion and to use that info to choose how much to eat.  Stay tuned.

Peace out!  What are your go-to travel meals?  Whatcha reading?  Any stuff on the internet that you've tried IRL to report?