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