Fifteen Days Down!

I sure hope one of my goals for the year wasn't to blog more! We may be only 15 days into the new year, but so far I have been sticking to my goal of working out more and doing P90X. That's 15 straight days of working out for at least an hour. That's insane (for me anyway). Now technically you are allowed one "rest" day per week, but it's either rest or do the stretching dvd - and trust me, after 6 days of the other workouts I need the stretching. Even still, that's an hours worth of stretching to still make time for.

I printed out a calendar for us (same one I used last year - you can find it here) and wrote in all of our workouts so we can mark them off each day. I know neither of us wants to see a day without a cross through it so it's working pretty well so far! There was a brief moment eariler this week when I couldn't take the lack of being able to come home and cook dinner and really wanted to just skip it - instead we rearranged slightly and did the stretching routine that day and I was able to make a (pretty) healthy pizza!

Speaking of cooking - it's been tough not being able to do that as much. I really enjoy thinking of new meals and putting together a nice dinner. There really isn't time to cook after coming home from work and doing these workouts though. The freezing meals thing is going ok so far - I've made several batches of soup and yesterday I made an enchilada pie with roasted butternut squash, onions, black beans, corn, and tomatoes. We had the regular enchiladas for dinner and had enough leftover for the pie so hopefully that's at least one dinner and one lunch!

In an effort to have different dinner options I tried a new soup recipe today (if it were up to Jonathan I think we'd only ever eat that Italian Sausage Soup but I need a little more variety). I searched Allrecipes for their top rated soups and found this one for a Brazilian Black Bean Stew. It was well rated and I liked a lot of the ingredients so I decided to give it a shot, and of course make it vegetarian. I use Gimme Lean veggie sausage in place of the chorizo and added some cayenne to it for spice. I also used a little liquid smoke to replicate the ham flavor - not sure that really worked, but who doesn't like a little extra smokiness? There aren't any seasonings listed on the recipe - I threw in some cumin, red pepper flakes, and of course salt and pepper.

The soup was pretty good - maybe not quite as good as that Italian Sausage Soup, but at least there is something to strive for!  ;)

Hope everyone else is doing well with their New Year's resolutions or goals! It's not easy, but I guess if it was we'd have been doing it all along!

-C

Wrapping up 2011 - on to 2012!

It's 9:30am - Jonathan is still asleep and I'm sitting on the couch drinking coffee, Pixel is curled up with me, and we've just been looking out at the gray skies and the crows flying around. It feels like the perfect Sunday morning, except it's actually Monday but since it's the last day I have off before returning to work it definitely feels like a Sunday!

The holidays have been crazy busy, and although I'm glad for the quiet and relaxation that this morning brings, the holidays were also great. We spent a lot of time with friends in the weeks leading up to Christmas - the time between Thanksgiving and then just flew by! Jonathan and I have both had work off for the past week and a half which has been fantastic - it's great not being at work and also not missing out on meetings/emails/etc. because everyone else is also gone! I stopped in Portland on my way home to Seattle for a vegan cooking class (more on that later) - Portland still takes my breath away, I just love that city. I was able to see my two best friends and spend a lot of time with my family while I was in Washington for a couple of days, and then on Christmas day I headed out to Michigan to visit Jonathan and his family.

As you can see, there was a fair amount of travel involved this holiday season - luckily all of the driving and all of the flights went well! Michigan was great - it was so much fun to see where Jonathan grew up and hear all of his stories that the places reminded him of. We spent a lot of time wandering around Kalamazoo and exploring the city, we also drove over to Ann Arbor one day and he showed me the Michigan campus. Both cities were super cute and we had a great time. I loved that I was able to split Christmas time this year with my family and his - unfortunately I can't be in two places at once, but this was a nice solution!

We made it home on New Year's Eve morning after staying in a somewhat dumpy hotel off of I-5. After traveling for about 15 hours it's tough to make the hour and a half drive back from the airport, especially when it's midnight here and you've been on east coast time. We had the quietest NYE that I have had in a very long time, but it was fantastic. We rented movies, ate appetizers, drank wine and were in bed by about 10pm. We celebrated with the east coast by drinking sparkling wine at 9pm - attempted to watch the ball drop, only to find out that they delay the broadcast here so it drops at midnight. LAME. I swear I remember watching that as a kid, and definitely at 9pm and not midnight.

Speaking of New Year's, I thought I'd share a few of my goals - I prefer goals to resolutions, I'm not exactly sure why. But here we go:
- Complete the P90X workout series (we're on Day 2!)
- Continue to work on meal planning, especially with these lengthy workouts I want to have meals prepared and ready to go ahead of time. I'm going to work on "freezer meals" - soups and other things that can be made ahead of time and freeze easily.
- 365 photo challenge... there will likely be far less food photos in the beginning though since I don't think I'll be cooking as often.

We'll see how it goes! The P90X workouts are super tough, we've been prepping for the past month or so doing the bonus workouts 3 days a week, but now to move up to 7 days a week is definitely going to be a challenge. We've been really bad about working out for the past year though, so hopefully this is a good jumpstart for us. I'm really aiming to be in better shape before this Mediterranean cruise at the end of May!

We've also been doing some New Year's cleaning - organizing and getting rid of a bunch of things we don't need (why did we still have two toasters, two hand beaters, and two Foreman grills!?). It's nice to start off the year with a little less junk around.

Hope you all had a great start to 2012 as well - I think it's going to be a great year!


-C