Steamed plaice rolls

So it has been a little while since my last post which is because I haven't been doing much of anything. My knee has been hurting the last few days so I decided to cut out the running until it gets better. Also due to some really bad food choices in the weekend I was not feeling good at all the first few days of the week. That just shows how important it is to eat the right things, and how badly your body reacts to a big cheat day/days.

But I was right back on track Monday just eating a bunch of my favorite dishes and not really trying anything new, so now I am feeling great again. I absolutely love fish and seafood so I had that for lunch and dinner today. Lunch was half an avocado filled with shrimp and sprinkled with wheat free soy sauce and lemon. So easy and very delicious.

For dinner (and lunch tomorrow) I made steamed plaice rolls with carrots, parsnip and leek and a side of baked green beans.
To make the fish dish (2-3 servings) you need:

250 g of plaice fillets (App 0.5 pound)
2-3 carrots
2 parsnips
1 leek
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1-2 dl vegetable broth (App 0.5-1 cup)
Thyme, salt and pepper

Cut the fillets in half down the middle, season them with salt and pepper and roll them into small rolls. Cut all the vegetables into sticks and fry them in a the olive oil in a large pan for 3-5minutes. Reduce to low heat, add the broth and the thyme and place the rolls on top of the vegetables. Let them steam under lid for 8-10 minutes or until the fish is tender. With food ike this who needs pasta!!!

Almond Plaice fillets

So the fact that I have a blog showing food and recipes is actually rather surprising to the people who know me, and also to myself if I have to admit it. I have never really liked to cook, I hated trying to many new things with regards to food since I had absolutely no idea how to combine things unless I had a recipe to follow. So to me this whole paleo thing has not only been great because my body functions best on this type of food, but I have really come to enjoy cooking, just in case you were thinking the opposite. I think it is fantastic to have some food I used to love, and then just trying with a few paleo friendly substitutes to make something similar, and then ending up with something that tastes even better.

So after tonights CrossFit workout I made Plaice fillets dipped in ground almonds with roasted green beans and oven baked hokkaido pumpkin. I just dipped the fillets in egg and then in ground almonds seasoned with salt, and then I fried them in coconut oil for a few minutes on each side. This was so delicious and ten times better than when they are dipped in bread crumps which is the normal. Give it a try you won't regret it...

So my workout plans haven'tbeen going to great, somehow life has a tendency to get in the way. But I made it to CrossFit this evening for an amazing workout. The WOW was 10 rounds of:
15 deadlifts with 30kg
15 push ups (still on my knees)

Afterwards we had a bonus tabata workout:
4 rounds of 4 different shoulder excercises with a 5 kg weight plate.

Definitely very busted after that, but in that great way where you feel like your actually doing something right.

Pumpkin season

So now pumpkin is finally in season, and I absolutely love oven baked pumpkin. I know it's a very starchy vegetable, but hey as long as I am not eating grains and other stuff that is bad for my, I am going to eat my pumpkin while I can. Also it is really great post workout food and since I just got home from a great CrossFit workout it might actually make recovery a little easier.

I could easily just inhale an entire pumpkin (mind you they are not that big) and call it dinner, but I figured it would be a good idea to balance it out with some protein and other vegetables. So I made some sloppy joes to go along with it. I pretty much followed the recipe but since I had no tomato sauce I used a can of salsa and a can of tomatoes, which resulted in some rather spicy but great sloppy joes. The sloppy joes that I remember was served inside a bun, so I just baked some portobello mushrooms and used them instead of the bread. The hokkaido pumpkin was just cut into small pieces without the shell and then baked at 200C until they started to get dark edges.

Todays CrossFit workout was 3 rounds of:
800m run
20 clean squats (15kg)
20 burpees (hate hate hate those)

We had 26 minutes and I didn't make the last 3 burpees in that time frame, so plenty of reason to keep at it.

Danish Meat Loaf

I love meatloaf, especially the danish version. I might have something to do with the fact that everything tastes better with a little bacon on top, who nows. The danish word "forloren hare" roughly translates to mock hare which I remember being really confused about growing up since no hare was harmed making this dish. I made a few modifications to fit the paleo standards, and I hate to say this but it is so much better than the one my mom makes (sorry if you read this mom):

500g ground pork
1 egg
4 tablespoons almond flour
2 dl coconut milk
1 onion finely cut
200g sliced mushrooms
Butter or olive oil
4-5 slices of bacon
Salt & Pepper

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Mix ground pork, egg, almond flour, coconut milk and onion in a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Leave the mixture in the fridge for app 15minutes. In the meantime fry the mushrooms in butter until the get soft and then mix them into the meat batter. Shape mixture into a loaf in an ungreased baking pan, and top it off with bacon (see picture). Bake for app 1 hour. There might be "soup" surrounding the loaf which you can just throw away or freeze for later use as stock in a real soup.

Almost back to normal!!!

So back to the small war zone that used to be my apartment. One more day and I should be back to normal, meaning running water and not having my toilet standing in the middle of my kitchen (unplugged just in case you were wondering) until the bathroom is ready to be used. So today I actually got to cook real food, after having spent hours cleaning my kitchen to make it usable.

Tonights dinner was danish meat loaf served with a thai winter salad consisting of white cabbage, apple, orange and coconut cream with a little sweetener. Very delicious.

So if you feel like trying something different here is a few ideas.
The last couple of days the weather have been absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately due to a fight between me and my contacts I have had a very sore and light sensitive right eye. Fortunately this is also pretty much back to normal meaning I no longer scare the living ... out of the people I pass. So today I went for an easy 9.5 km run around the lake in my neighborhood and enjoyed the sunlight and tried to overlook the fact that the temperatures in no way matched the rest of the surroundings.

Back to being a lazy kid

So as I mentioned in my last post I am visiting my parents this week. It is amazing how you get home and immediately become a lazy teenager again. My parents have one of those magic households where the clothes wash themselves, the fridge refills by itself and dinner miraculously appear on the table at night... Needless to say I am not doing much cooking at all, which is the reason for the lack of posts. Just before leaving I got the Primal Blueprint cookbook by mail, and I am really looking forward to trying out some of the dishes. It is filled with pictures, and I really love cookbooks where you can pretty much eat the pages, so something to look forward to.

I haven't been to great with the exercise part of my plan, but did do 3 crossfit sessions, 2 runs and one long walk with my friend, so thats okay. Today I had a great run, it was one of those early autumn days where the sun is shining and the temperature is almost warm. We have a small forest nearby so I had a great hill workout and then a small Crossfit session afterwards. Since I'm back home I don't really track my intake, but I'll try to at least post my meals the following week, as well as my workouts, other than that I am just going to enjoy being spoiled a bit without feeling the least bit guilty.

Taco Salad

So tonight I once again went to a intro crossfit lesson, and once again it was really great. I think I'll go to the normal one Thursday to see how it really is. We did a lot of introduction to new exercises and the 2 small circuit consisting of 4 rounds of:

10 Air squats
5 overhead pushes
5 box jumps
3 pull ups
10 sit ups

Afterwards we did 2 rounds of 8*8 of different bar lifts.

I'm pretty sure I'll be able to feel my upper body tomorrow, but the leg part of it was pretty easy today so that should be okay.

When I god home it was great to have pretty much all I needed to make a quick taco salad, which is just a green salad topped with taco seasoned meat, guacamole and salsa. Very easy, simple and delicious. I ate it cold, but it is just as good when the meat is still hot.

At the moment they are fixing the the toilets and the water in my building which means I have no running water. This is both good and bad. The bad thing is that I have to buy water for the cooking/drinking the next few days, which I of course forgot, and also I can't just go for a run since there is no shower. The good thing is that it forces me to go to the gym and it gives me an opportunity to stay a few days at my parents.

I'll be going home on Thursday and working from there until sometime next week. It is always great to go home but I really have to be on my toes with the food choices I make since my parents have a kitchen full of all kinds of things that I really should not eat if I wanna keep feeling good.

Wraps

So today I needed to use the last of the riced cauliflower and since I have been eating a lot of pizza lately I figured it was time to try something new. So I made a mix of 3 eggs and 100g riced cauliflower and made 2 "pancakes" out of it. They were pretty thick but thin enough that I could make a normal wrap out of them adding a little ham, guacamole, salad and salsa. This tasted absolutely fantastic, so ended up making another batch to bring to work tomorrow (had to rice a new cauliflower head so now I'm pretty much back where I started). I was planning on making a taco salad for dinner tomorrow evening, so I just prepared the meat today and used it in the wraps as well. This also makes the preparation almost zero when I get back from CrossFit tomorrow night.

Today is the first day of feeling good again after having been sick with a sore throat and fever that last week or so. So to celebrate this I went for a small run in the evening. It was only 6km of easy running since I didn't want to push it, but definitely great to get the body moving. Hopefully I'll be back on top of the world in no time.

CrockPot Pork Loin

So I finally got to try my new Crockpot. I have been sick the last few days so this was an easy way to make dinner without doing much preparation. I found the original recipe in www.paleoplan.com but ended up changing it up to fit what ever I had in my fridge. Just combined the pork loin with 2 cans of tomatoes, a whole zucchini, 3 carrots, 2 garlic cloves, salt, pepper and basil. Then let it cook at low heat for 7 hours. I served it together with cauliflower rice. Definitely very good. The meat was really tender and the sauce was great, but next time I'll definitely use a pork tenderloin or some other cut without the fat on top. Just seems like such a waste not to make it the danish way with crisp pork crackling. I still have half a roast left so I'll give it a try next weekend.

Also I have decided to start logging in my meal and stats on a separate page as well as the weekly workout plan. The food log is mostly to get an idea of how much I actually eat in day since the amounts easily creep up on me. Also as I have mentioned earlier I need to get back on track with the training to make sure that I am ready for the upcoming triathlon season, and actually publishing my plans means I am somewhat accountable. We will see how it goes.