Week 1 – Kickstart to the year

Yup, it’s a new year!

New resolutions, new rules, clean slate.

But, I’m not making any resolutions this year other than to try be better at being me than I was last year – and this will filter into everything I do… my blogging game can be upped a little bit, I definitely want to keep improving in my running, I want to get great at kickboxing. These are all things I have already laid the ground work for in past years, so this year is just focusing on making them better 🙂

And to start off I decided to try out some healthy cooking (and used JPEG & Roomie as my guinea pigs for the first meal 😉 )

I LOVE eggs – if I could eat eggs every day for the rest of my life, I would die a happy person… but sometimes it gets a bit boring to have them scrambled, or boiled or fried. So one day I was looking online for some inspiration on ways to eat eggs – but specifically EASY ways to do this as we all know how lazy I am 😛

I came across soooo many ideas, but for my first one (yes, there will be more of these posts to follow!) I chose to do roast bell peppers / capsicum stuffed with egg.

There were dozens of different recipes online and some of them so complicated and difficult so I ended up just putting my own ingredients and directions together.

Roast capsicum stuffed with egg

Ingredients

• Eggs
• Bell peppers / capsicum
• Mushrooms
• Onion
• Cheese
• Olive oil
• Salt & Pepper (to taste)

Starting to prepare

Chopping things up

Directions

1. Set the oven to about 180° C while you clean, halve the peppers and remove the seeds
2. Place them in tin foil (makes it easier to remove from the tray / catch any spillage of egg) and place onto a baking tray, sprinkle with olive oil, then pop into the oven for about 10 minutes
3. While the peppers are doing their thing in the oven, sauté the mushrooms & onions – personally I added some herb & thai spices, and a touch of garlic
4. Remove the peppers from the oven and spoon the mushroom & onion mix into them, making sure to leave enough space for the eggs
5. Crack an egg into each half
6. Sprinkle some cheese over the top
7. Pop back in the oven for about 15 minutes – depending on how well done you want your egg
8. Remove from the oven
9. ENJOY!

Frying things up

Now, this is obviously a recipe that you can mix and match the ingredients for days…. I chose these as a simple start, being a first time and all – I didn’t want to risk another failed attempt at cooking for my housemates!

Final preparation

And the outcome – absolutely delicious! The girls loved them!

YUM!!!!

I made sure to make extra so that I could bring them to work the next day, and so for lunch I heated them up and added some turkey ham with them. Yum!

 

Week 19 – Take Three!

This week’s something new comes in Three’s – three ingredients, third place, three times a week. 3. Three.

Three times a week

I’ve joined a new gym! It’s a kickboxing gym… so I’m now doing kickboxing 3 times a week 🙂 Something has clicked inside me and I cannot get enough of kickboxing lately, so I wanted to find somewhere other than my current class, somewhere that I can really focus on my boxing and get really good, putting all of my learning to practice and not just punching at bags all the time.

The gym I have joined was recommended by a friend and I am absolutely in love! I am now going there twice a week, with still one visit to my old gym. Three times a week. I can already feel a difference, so watch this space!

Third place

After I didn’t do as well as I’d have liked in the last gym challenge I did, I was chatting to one of the gym instructors and he told me that there’s a new challenge for the month of May, starting on 5 May – I was just in time to join it!

The challenge runs weekly and has different exercises each week. You need to complete as many reps of the given exercises as you can in 10 minutes. Just 10 minutes of pushing yourself.

This week: 20 kettle bell swings, 15 burpees over a box, 10 x 10m shuttle run. Repeat as many times as you can in 10 minutes. Go! I scheduled a timeslot and rammed out as many reps as I could, feeling pretty dead at the end of my 10 minutes. But when the weekly results were announced last night – I am sitting pretty in third place for the first week of the challenge. Boom! 🙂

Three ingredients

While scrolling through Facebook today I came across a breakfast recipe that sounded delicious, so I made note of it, thinking that I’d make it sometime over the weekend. And then I got home and couldn’t decide what to have for dinner so I went with the breakfast recipe that has only 3 ingredients: 1 banana, 2 eggs, olive oil.

Mash up the banana, add in the eggs, heat a pan, pour blobs into the pan, cook, eat. Yum! The recipe called for adding honey onto the pancakes, but I decided to go for some peanut butter and avocado. Double Yum! Make that Triple 😉

Three ingredients

All mixed together

First one in the pan

Tasting the first one – peanut butter

Flattening the second one with an avocado

# 46 – Soup!

In Dubai this is a BIG thing… we finally get temperatures that a large part of the northern hemisphere would consider summer temperatures. Which means that we get to sit outside, turn off the AC, training outside is sooo much more enjoyable, your clothes no longer stick to you from humidity when you walk outside and we get to wear ‘winter woolies’. If you’ve been here for a couple of summers, you eventually get acclimatised and anything below 20 ºC is COLD!

So, this meant one thing for my something new this week… I was going to make soup! From scratch! I chose my mom’s butternut recipe for my first attempt because she had said it was relatively easy to do (although I believe that most soups are easy to make 😉 )

Ingredients:

• 500g butternut cubed
• 25 ml oil
• 10 ml butter
• 1 large onion diced
• 2 medium potatoes peeled and cubed
• 2 carrots peeled and diced
• 5 ml ground ginger
• 5 ml cinnamon
• 1 liter chicken or vegetable stock
• 250 ml milk
• 5 ml honey
• 2 ml paprika
• salt to taste (I didn’t use any)

Directions:

• Heat the oil and butter
• Add the butternut, onion, potatoes, carrots, ginger, cinnamon and cook over low heat for approximately 5 minutes
• Add the stock, milk, honey, paprika and salt to taste and bring to the boil
• Simmer until all vegetables are soft
• Allow to cool and then blend until smooth

Unfortunately, excitement (and watching a movie) got the better of me while making the soup and I didn’t take any preparation photos until things were well on the way 😦

Images taken from Google

Ingredients in pot

… with liquids added

Finished product

Although the photos don’t do it any justice, the actual finished product was delicious! I took some to work the next day and heated it up for lunch – YUM! And now there’s a bunch of soup in the freezer for another chilly night in front of the TV 🙂