Playing Doctor

Hey guys, how's your day going?  The wind has been cuh-razy here lately.  My apartment has been chilly these past couple of days, but I need to stop dressing for the weather based on the temperature of my apartment.  In the winter it would be so hot (because I live on the 3rd floor and can't control my heat) that I would accidentally leave with just a t-shirt on, and then today I was so cold that I put my winter coat on... only to realize it was around 60 out.  Oops.

I hit up the gym and did my circuit workout followed by some incline and speed intervals on the treadmill, plus stretching.  Since classes are over, I don't have much structure to my days.  For me, it's helpful to plan out a schedule for myself ahead of time (via my extensive to-do lists), and getting up and going to the gym really helps me to get moving and be productive, rather than just wasting time.

Post workout smoothie:  1/2 cup plain yogurt, 1/2 cup water, 1 T ground flax seeds, 1 T natural peanut butter, 1 scoop vanilla Sun Warrior protein powder, lots of spinach, 1 frozen banana, 1/2 cup frozen blueberries, 2 ice cubes.

Delish.

Since I haven't done a big grocery shopping trip for awhile, I've been looking through my cupboards to see what I have on hand for meals.  I was in the mood for pasta the other night, but I wanted to doctor it up a little to make it more exciting.

While I cooked some whole wheat penne pasta, I heated up some jarred pasta sauce and mixed in a few veggies I had on hand - grated carrots, grape tomatoes, and frozen broccoli.  I also added in some fresh basil.

It was a great way to pack in some extra veggies and to add more flavors to the pasta sauce (which already contained mushrooms).  I wanted to add some spinach, too, and tried out a trick I saw on Peanut Butter Fingers recently:

In order to wilt the spinach, you just put it in a colander,

and then go ahead and drain your pasta over the spinach.

And you get perfectly wilted spinach!

I added about 1/3 of the cooked pasta and all of the wilted spinach to my plate and saved the rest of the pasta for future meals.

Then I topped the pasta and spinach with 1/2 of the doctored pasta sauce, some nutritional yeast, and some more fresh basil ('cause I'm fancy like that).

For dessert, I tried a new spin on banana "ice cream":

I added 1.5 bananas and 2/3 cup frozen mixed berries to my food processor to make berry "sorbet."

I think I should have stuck to 1 banana and 1/2 cup berries, because it made a TON!!  But it was very delicious :)

Random sidenote - has anyone seen the movie In Time?  I don't remember hearing much about it when it came out, but I recently got it from the library and watched it this past weekend.  I thought the premise was really interesting - basically, commerce is in the form of time (instead of money), so everything you need to buy (food, transportation, etc.), you pay for in time.  And if your "watch" ever goes down to 0, you die.  Everyone's watch starts counting down at the age of 25, and you also never look any older than 25, which means that grandparents/ parents/ children, etc. can all look the same age.  It had a lot of social policy undertones (i.e. there were very expensive tolls to cross into wealthy zones, which kept the poor people who lived day-to-day in the slums).  I'm still kind of undecided as to what I thought of the movie, though - I don't think it had a very satisfying ending.  I'm curious if anyone saw it, and if so, what you thought.

That's all for now, folks - back to studying.  Have a good night!

I thought the clouds kind of looked like a curtain lifting up as the sun went down.

Interesting Articles:

How to Prevent Iliotibial Band Syndrome When Running (I'm still having some issues with my IT band)
25 Amazing Yoga Poses (um WHOA, these are so crazy and impressive!)
How To Do the Splits (I think I have a better chance of working towards doing the splits than those intense yoga poses!)

Song of the Day:

"Shadowboxer" by Fiona Apple.  One of her songs popped up when I had my iTunes on random today, and  I remembered how much I loved her first album, Tidal.  It's incredible.