Who's up for a challenge??

Starting very soon, I will be endeavoring on a 30 day food/health challenge. I love having healthy habits especially when it comes to food, and I would love to share those habits with everyone else. That is why I have decided to come up with 30 different "challenges" that I will take on over a 30 day period. Each day is a new challenge, progressively getting more difficult.

I will be paying attention and logging how I feel from day 1 to day 30 to show that there really is a positive correlation between eating healthier and feeling better (physically, emotionally, energetically, etc). In taking on this challenge myself, I hope that you all will join in and take it with me. 

I have a couple of things going on this week and the week after so I am going to wait until the week of August 22 to start my challenge, but I will be posting the challenge sooner than that so if you have time to decide if you will be joining me. It will give you a little bit of time to look it over and plan things out. And after I post the challenge, I will be periodically posting how I will be going about it and meal ideas for the different challenges. So keep an eye out!

And please don't hesitate to give me any feedback or ideas for other challenges for in the future!

Have a great TGIF and weekend!!!

Two loves combined (AKA: Food + Coffee)

Since working at Starbucks, my passion and interest in the nitty gritty of coffee (no pun intended) has grown and continues to grow tremendously. I have been blessed to find a job that feels like anything but a "job". I recently got the chance to showcase my "Coffee Master" abilities and set up a pairing for partners in my store. By pairing, I am simply referring to taking one of our Starbucks roasted coffees and extracting its individual flavors using food pairings.

Every coffee that Starbucks carries falls under several different categories -- origin, acidity, body, roast, etc. Depending on where the coffee falls will help to determine the complementary foods and flavors that come from and pair well with that specific coffee. The coffee that I chose to use for my tasting this time was the Starbucks French Roast. Because of the long roasting that it goes through, French Roast has a strongly developed flavor and pairs well with toasted nuts, caramelized sugars, and roasted vegetables. So when making up my pairing, I decided to make a caramelized onion puff pastry topped with toasted walnuts. This pairing would incorporate all three complementary flavors, making it a sure win!

Not only was it DELISH, but it was oober easy to make! PLUS, you can do it with just about anything -- sweet, savory, tart, crunchy, soft, etc. Here's what you've got to do:

In your local grocery store, go in to the frozen dessert isle. Usually around pie crusts and frozen cakes/pies there will be frozen puff pastry dough. Once you have your dough, let it thaw out in the fridge for about 2+ hours. As it is defrosting, you can gather and prep your filling.

I have tried a couple of different "innards" to my puff pastry, and they all have turned out quite delightful, if I say so myself. Different things that I have put in mine are: caramelized onions, cinnamon sugar, chocolate chunks, and goat cheese + portabella mushrooms.

After you pick and prepare your filling, and the puff pastry has thawed out for a couple of hours, it is time to start making your creation. Take out the dough, unroll it and cut it in to a few same sized strips. Then take each strip and cut them in to square pieces of dough. Get your filling and put a small spoonful in the center of your square. Then fold over the pastry dough to make a triangle shape (or any shape you prefer). After all of the squares are filled and folded, take a lightly beaten egg, and brush the top of each one with a thin layer of the egg wash.

When putting them in to the oven, there is a little trick to doing it. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, but as soon as you put the dough in, turn the oven down to 325. I'm not exactly sure what it does, or why you do it, but that it was I was taught. Leave them in approximately 10-12 minutes, or until the tops are golden and flaky. And then..... ENJOY!

Frozen summery goodness

Have you ever been out on a hot summer day -- running around, swimming, playing outside, etc -- and get the craving for something sweet and frozen? Well when you are living in a constant furnace with 100+ degree temperatures every day, you get that craving a lot. Normally, a good popsicle did the trick, that was until I looked at the ingredients and sugar contents of them.

A normal popsicle is made up of basically fruit concentrate and either sugar or high fructose corn syrup. All that sugar does is cause a spike in the blood sugar, ultimately leading to a drop in energy levels and afternoon grogginess. Wouldn't it be nice to find a good frozen snack that satisfied your craving while keeping you energized and was good for you too? I think I found it!

Homemade frozen yogurt pops! ... No no no, actually, homemade frozen greek yogurt fruit pops! Yummmm, I can taste them already. And what's even better is they are SUPER easy to make, and you can customize them to your liking. Fruity, yourty, sweet, not as sweet, etc. Here's what you need:

• nonfat greek (or plain) yogurt
• fresh/frozen fruit of your choice (berries, melon, pineapple, etc)
• milk of your choice (nonfat, lowfat, almond, soy)
• a pinch of cinnamon

Although plain nonfat yogurt is a very healthy choice (especially compared to the fruity kinds), i still prefer greek yogurt. The reason that I like greek yogurt versus plain yogurt is mainly because of the protein content. For every serving (about 6 oz) of plain nonfat yogurt, greek nonfat yogurt has almost double the amount of protein. And when looking for a snack that will satisfy and keep you going, protein is a must! Therefore, greek yogurt is my first choice whenever possible. 

When choosing a greek yogurt, my personal favorite is Fage Total 0%. It has a good consistency and a nice well-balanced flavor. 

But any yogurt of your choice will work just as well. The same freedom goes for the milk as well. You wont need a lot of milk, just enough to help thin out the mixture a little bit. Usually I reach for the lowfat or 1% milk, but on occasion I like to mix it up a bit with some vanilla almond milk. The vanilla almond milk gives it a slightly sweeter and nuttier flavor, making it a nice change from the norm. 

Now it is time to start putting it all together. Get your blender ready and start layering in the yogurt, fruit, milk, and cinnamon. The proportions are rough, but quite simple as well. I usually start out with 1 cup yogurt, 1 cup fruit, and about 1/4 cup of milk and a pinch of cinnamon. This makes a couple of cups of the yogurty goodness, so if you are wanting to make a bigger batch, you can easily double or triple this. 

Once it is all blended together, feel free to throw in a couple of chunks of fruit if you would like some whole pieces in there as well. Then take the mixture and pour into popsicle molds. If your popsicle mold didn't come with the plastic stick tops to place over each mold, then you can pick up a pack of popsicle sticks from the grocery store for a few dollars and use those instead. 

Leave the yogurt pops in the freezer for at least a 2+ hours until their set, and then enjoy at your liking!

Buy once, eat for a week!

I know it's been a while since I have written on here, but I must say, at least it is not because I am just getting lazy. Work has been crazy and any free time I have, I generally spend with my work family :) On the bight side, we spend time cooking and baking, trying out new recipes, and inventing new concoctions.

At least once a week (but usually more than just once), we have what we like to call "Family Dinner". Being young 20 something year olds, the cheaper the better. That being said, we still want to have good quality food. And that is exactly what has inspired this post.

The best solution to a delicious, good quality, well-priced meal all starts with one thing, a rotisserie chicken. Most grocery stores (Randalls, Kroger, Whole Foods, etc.) generally sell hot, fully cooked rotisserie chickens for a fairly reasonable price. My personal preference however, is to get a chicken from Costco. It costs about $5.00 and is big enough to last for a week -- not to mention it is beyond delicious!

More often than not, I get the chicken with the intention of just pulling it off and eating it as is with a salad and some other side. Then, after that meal is over and the chicken has had a little bit of time to cool, I pull the rest of the chicken off the bone and put it in to a tupperware container and in to the fridge it goes.

Sounds a bit boring, I know, but the possibilities of what you do with the left overs are endless. You could literally do just about anything -- nachos, tacos, pastas, salads, sandwiches, etc. Take tonight for example ... After a long and full day of work (that started at 4 a.m.) and an hour and a half of hot yoga, the last thing I wanted to do when I came home was figure out what to cook, not to mention actually cook it. My solution? Left over rotisserie chicken!

I do admit that I did have to put in a little bit of effort, but it was very minimal. I turned on a pot of water for some pasta and put some fresh veggies and garlic in a sauté pan with a little bit of olive oil and let them cook over a medium heat. Once the pasta was done, I tossed it in the pan with the veggies, put some chicken on top and mixed in some left over basil pesto I had in the fridge. I put all of that atop a small handful of spring mix lettuce and dug in.

Between the pasta, the pesto, the chicken, and the veggies, it was the ultimate comfort meal that satisfied every craving I had. All that was missing was a glass of red wine and some good company. So next time, I invite you all to join me.

I hope you try this out for yourself and please share if you have any other ideas or ways that you like to use your left overs! Have a great night and a great holiday weekend! I will be back with more soon, I promise! :)

The perfect summertime refreshment!

It was a typical morning for me -- lounging around, watching the TV, and doing my thing. I was watching the Today show when Martha Stewart came on to give a couple of summer time recipes. One of these recipes was her "Summer Fruit White Sangria". It sounded beyond delicious and looked super easy, so I knew that I had to make it. Not to mention, I had a giant fruit bowl from Costco that I needed to find a use for before it went bad.

As much as I wanted to stick to the recipe, I didn't have any dry white wine (or any white wine for that matter) around the house, and I didn't want to wait until I could go buy some to make it. What I decided to do instead was take a bottle of one of my favorite red wines I had at the house already. At least this way I knew that I liked the wine that I was going to be using for the sangria, rather than picking up a bottle of dry white wine that I have never tasted before.

Now that I had the most important ingredient  set, I got together the rest of the ingredients to put together this delicious drink. Almost every sangria recipe that I have seen calls for different ingredients -- everything from dark liquor, ginger ale, sugar, carbonated water, etc.  This recipe was a little different and a little simpler than those though, and that is what I liked about it. All it called for was wine, orange liquor, fruit, and basil.

I took out my big plastic "beverage dispenser" and got it ready for sangria time. I cut up some assorted fruits (mango, pineapple, strawberries, blackberries, grapes, citrus, etc) -- roughly 6 cups -- and then put those into the pitcher. After all the fruit was in the pitcher I poured in one bottle of red wine and 1/2 cup of Grand Marnier (aka orange liquor) and squeezed in the juice of 1/4 to 1/2 of a lemon. I topped it off with a few basil leaves and stirred it all together.

Something that people may or may not know about sangria is that you have to let it "rest" for a significant amount of time in order to mary together all the flavors. It is recommended that you let it sit for at least 6-8 hours and up to about 24 hours. So I decided to wait until I had company over last night to reveal my creation.

Doing as I was taught, I tasted it ahead of time to make sure I wasn't serving anybody something that was just yucky. The sangria was extremely strong (considering it was basically wine and orange liquor mixed together) but the flavors were all definitely there. When serving it to my guests I decided to make it in to more of a sangria wine spritzer. I took my glasses and filled them about 1/3 of the way with an orange flavored sparkling water, followed by the sangria, and topping it all off with a couple of pieces of the fruit that was soaking in it. 


I may be a little bias, but it was to die for. So fruity, slightly sweet, with a hint and little kick of the red wine/orange liquor. Using the sparkling water with it was the perfect combination. You can use any brand and/or flavor you would like, but my flavored water of choice is more often than not Sparkling Ice. It comes in several flavors and you can even get a combo pack for about 10$ for a pack of 18 at Costco. 

I am glad that I tried this recipe because now I know a simple, easy to make refreshment that is perfect for these hot summer months. I know that I will be making it again soon, and can't wait until I do! I really hope that you all try it out as well, I can guarantee that you will love it! Have a lazy Sunday and a great coming week!

Say Cheese :D -- cheesecake that is.

When life gives you lemons, you make ... cheesecake?? Well, at least that's what I decided to do. It was about 8:30 pm on a Wednesday night, and I was sitting on my couch watching the Food Network (big surprise huh??) and got up during a commercial to pour myself a refreshment. As I was walking over to the fridge, I noticed that the last lemon that I had was getting ready to go bad, so I knew that I needed to find something to do with it sooner rather than later.

I turned to my online resources and started looking up different things I could do with a single lemon. After some searching, I came across a recipe that caught my eye -- lemon and goat cheese cheesecake. I've never made cheesecake before, but what better reason to try it out now right?

It was a very simple recipe using basic ingredients found among most households. There was a bit of a problem though ... the crust. A typical cheesecake crust consists of a nice crispy layer of graham crackers, smashed and mixed together with a little bit of sugar and melted butter. Unfortunately, graham crackers are not something that I regularly carry in my pantry. So it was time for plan B ... whatever that may be. I opened up my pantry and scanned top to bottom and left to right to try and find something that could substitute for a cheesecake crust. And then it hit me -- why not an oatmeal crumble crust? It sure sounded good, and I figured I could do it up to make it taste just as delicious as it sounded. 

I looked at the ingredients for the filling, and so far so good.

• goat cheese ---> Check
• lemon ---> Check
• eggs ---> Check
• sugar ---> Check
• cream cheese ---> Uhhhhhh

Okay so apparently there was another problem. I don't necessarily care for cream cheese, and rarely eat bagels, so I knew for a fact that I didn't have that anywhere around here. But I do always have greek yogurt. I know that people regularly substitute greek yogurt for sour cream or plain yogurt, but I wondered if it would be safe to substitute it for cream cheese (the main ingredient in most cheesecakes). Well, it was worth a try right??

I have to say, it was sooo worth it! The cheesecake was just as creamy, decadent, and flavorful as a regular cheesecake. I honestly would not be able to tell that this doesn't have any cream cheese in it.

Finally, a cheesecake that tastes great and is full of flavor, but that isn't a pie pan full of fat and empty calories -- and actually has multiple health benefits. Yes you need to be careful how much you eat of it, but is a dessert you don have to feel guilty about indulging in.

So for those of you interested in trying to do this yourself here is a rough recipe that you can try out if you are feeling adventurous.

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 cup oatmeal
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 4 Tbsp butter (melted)
• 1 cup soft goat cheese
• 1 cup greek yogurt
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup sugar
• juice and zest of 1 lemon (half that if you don't want as lemony of a flavor)

DIRECTIONS:

>> Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Mix together the oats, brown sugar, and melted butter until completely combined. Place this mixture into a food processor if you want a rough chop on the oats so they aren't as big. Take this and pour in to a small baking dish or pie pan and spread it out evenly among the baking dish. Put it in the oven for roughly 10 minutes, or until the oats brown and are set. Take the crust out and allow to cool a bit before pouring the filling in.

>> As your crust is cooling, turn the oven down to 300 degrees. Next put the goat cheese, greek yogurt, and sugar into a large mixing bowl. Using an electric mixer, slowly mix together the ingredients. While mixing these together, slowly add in one egg at a time, allowing each egg to fully mix in before adding the next. Lastly, add in the lemon juice and zest and mix it all together. Once everything is completely combined, take the filling mixture and pour it over the cooled oatmeal crust. Place the baking dish back into the oven and bake for roughly 30 minutes. Keep an eye on it though, because each oven is a little different and depending on the size and shape of baking dish you use, the cheesecake will bake at a different rate. What you are looking for is the outside to be pretty set, but the center of the cheesecake to slightly jiggle/wiggle when you move the baking dish without being liquidy. After it is done baking, take out of the oven and allow to fully cool before either serving or placing into the fridge to cool to a chilled temperature. Then, ENJOY! :)

I really hope that you all try this recipe out! I loved it and I know that all of you will as well. I openly welcome any comments, criticism, and questions, so do not hesitate! Just remember, the answer to any dilemma is say CHEESE :D

Cold Relief

So for those of you that don't know me as well, I love to run and I love being active. Being a nutrition major, I definitely have learned the importance of refueling quickly after a hard work out. It is also important, especially during these hot summer months, to replenish with liquids as well as the protein and carbohydrates.

Depending on the work out that I am doing -- running, yoga, biking, swimming, etc -- it may be unappealing to attempt   eating anything afterwords. Normally, I just opt for chocolate milk, protein shake, or even just a glass of plain milk. Today however I was in the mood for something a little different. I decided to switch it up a bit and use some of the iced coffee I had left over in my fridge.


In my pantry, I keep both chocolate and vanilla flavored protein powders that I mix in with my milk for a post workout refreshment. Knowing that I wanted to attempt a drink using my iced coffee, I thought that the vanilla would be my best choice. Once back from my run, it was time to create my "cafe concoction". I started by putting a little bit of my vanilla protein powder in my cup. I then poured my milk over the protein powder, making sure to mix them together thoroughly so the powder dissolved in the milk. Once the powder and milk were completely mixed, I then poured in the coffee until it became the perfect oak-nutty, milk chocolately brown color I was looking for.

Although I know that coffee + milk + vanilla = a great combination, I didn't know how this would turn out using the protein powder. I have to say that it was pretty D-lish! The perfect post-run summer time refreshment! For all of you coffee lovers out there, it is definitely worth a try! Hope you like it as much as I did .. and if you have any other suggestions for coffee concoctions or post workout refreshments/snacks, please feel free to share! :)