I Hate it When that Happens

Today was one of those days.  I had a good plan for today, but it got turned around, and I was just at loose ends all day long.  I got up pretty early and took Noah in to be neutered, and then turned back around and stopped at the gym for a challenging workout before coming home.  Originally my plan had been to go on to the Bay Area to visit my dad, and then to pick Noah up the next morning on the way home.  But that didn’t work out.

So I was home without a plan for the day.  And I was pretty tired from getting up early, and from the workout, I guess.  It seems very strange without Noah here, even though he is not in the house all day long.  I miss him!

I have a new book that I will review when I am done reading it.  Vicky recommended it when we were discussing IE (I promise I will stop talking about this pretty soon!)  There are a few recipes in the book.  One of them intrigued both Vicky and I, so I decided to try it out.  It was the ‘energy bar’ recipe. (Cue ominous Jaws music…)

Well, you know, there’s a reason they call them recipes.  If you follow them, you most likely will end up with the product they describe.  I think I tweaked this recipe one too many times…when it became apparent that the batter was MUCH thinner than the recipe described, I made an emergency call to Vicky for suggestions.  I added what she suggested, plus some more of my own ideas.  This made the recipe bigger than it already was, but not really any thicker.  It is more of a nut-buttery syrup/topping.  REALLY delicious.  I used it tonight as a dip for slices of an asian pear.  I can see using it to top oatmeal, cottage cheese, yogurt.  All kinds of stuff.  But very frustrating to make that big of a recipe and have it fail completely.  Oh yeah, I also tried to bake it.  That made it taste really bad…and hard…

Here are some of the ingredients, in case any of you have a need for a lot of nut-butter syrup topping.  Oatmeal, soy protein powder (I sub’d whey,)  tahini (I substituted a little coconut oil and mostly almond butter,) dried fruit (I used dried cherries, a few dates, and a couple pieces of crystallized ginger,) maple syrup ( sub’d agave syrup,) shredded coconut, grated rind of an orange, and apple sauce (I substituted some canned mangos that I osterized into a sauce.)  When I was trying to thicken it, I added more oatmeal that I ground into ‘oat flour,’ some walnuts that I also ground almost into walnut butter, and more protein powder.

You can see that it has some delicious flavors in there.  I would print the whole recipe, but I’m hoping between Vicky and I we might be able to tweak this and make actual bars out of it.

Such is the life of an experimental cook.

I took care of a little frustrating business, and gave Mr. Monk and Sophie a bath, and called it a day.  I am really trying to pay attention to my hunger.  Finding on a day like today that I want to eat a little more often than I am hungry.  And I’m still obsessively counting my calories….its somehow reassuring to me.

Here’s one thing I keep thinking about that I didn’t talk about in the last two posts.  And that is that when I lost all that weight when I was in my twenties, I didn’t weigh myself, and I didn’t count calories.  But I knew when I was hungry.  And I did stay hungry a good deal, and I did lose weight.  That’s really why I’ve been on this jag of paying attention to hunger.

And so it goes.  We keep working on what we are eating, tweaking our food choices, refining and balancing.  Its for life.  In every sense of that word.

Sophie and Mr. Monk after-bath photo op:

Accidental proximity

Opposites attract?