Blossom’s Banana Bars

I woke up Tuesday feeling… less than awesome. My right eye was watering and my nose was running. Looking back on it, I probably should have crawled right back into bed then and there. However, I have a dust allergy that often has my nose running and eyes watering, so I figured it was just allergies and went about my day. Since my muscles were feeling so good, I joined my dad for a very easy morning run. I stuffed some tissue in my arm pouch and did a two mile run out and two mile walk back. I tried to lengthen my stride beyond my normal gait while walking back, to get a bit of extra workout in my inner thighs. Any remaining pain in my muscles went away by the first mile. My body felt great! My head…not so much. That bit of tissue was not enough, and having my nose run constantly was really annoying. That never happens when it’s just allergies, again, I should have realized something was off.

After my very light run, I did ten minutes of yoga to stretch. By the time I finished, the sun was finally coming up in the sky. I had a beautiful morning view from our balcony.

I had a waffle for breakfast. I cut up a plum and added a teaspoon of crofters pure fruit and some hot water, then threw it in the microwave for a minute. I put these mix on top of the waffles, then added a little bit of maple syrup.

(the juice you see is the mix of water and crofters, not syrup.)

I guess either this did not hold me over as well as I would have liked, or I was hungrier than usual. I haven’t needed a morning snack for a while, not since I started making the cereal + yogurt + chia seeds my regular breakfast. I had a medium banana this morning as a snack.

I got worse and worse as the day went on, and felt sicker and sicker. I drank as much water and green tea as possible.

Lunch was a nice, big salad, and half a piece of artisan bread. The bread was getting a bit tough unfortunately. The salad had chickpeas, tomatoes, sprouts, cheddar, capsicum, chicken and pumpkin seeds. I topped it with a bit of light berry vinaigrette made from a pure berry marinade, balsamic vinegar and grape seed oil.

I really started feeling better as I ate this! I’ve always thought that soup was the only good thing for a cold, but I think all the goodies in this helped!

Again, started feeling worse and by 4pm I looked so bad my boss sent me home. Always concerned about whether or not I am eating enough, he made sure to send me home WITH a huge bowl of japanese ramen. The place we went to get the noodles was really nice, and was happy to put half the noodles aside for my boss (all I really wanted was the broth anyways), and gave me extra broth. I got spicy miso broth. Spicy always helps clear the sinuses!

(They filled the bowl with more broth after the picture was shot)

I’m not a very good baker. I hate using butter, oil and sugar in anything. But somehow healthy baking cheers me up. A couple hours of resting, at least four nalgene bottles of water, and two pots of tea later, I got up and baked. They were meant to be muffins, somehow they came out more like homemade power bars. These turned out REALLY good! They are really really dense and moist, and pretty nutrient packed. I basically came up with this from scratch, very loosely based off of an oatmeal cookie recipe. I had to get creative because I realized I had no eggs to make the oatmeal cookies I had originally intended to bake, and had lots of ripe bananas.

The only thing I’d do differently, is add half a teaspoon of baking soda.

I’m calling these Blossom’s Banana Bars

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup steel cut oats

1/2 cup stevia/splenda

1 large ripe banana

1 teaspoon almond butter

1 tablespoon honey

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon fresh ground ginger

2 teaspoon ground chia seeds

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 bottle of coke light or coke zero (not the 2litre one!)

Preheat oven to 350F.

In one large bowl, mix the flour, oats, cinnamon, ginger, baking powder and salt together until well mixed.

in another bowl, put your ‘sugar’ and almond butter. Mix until it looks like an even puree. Add in the almond butter and mix until it’s an even mixture, no lumps. Add in the honey, again reach even mixture. Grab a whisk and beat the mixture as hard as possible.

Pour the liquid mix in with the powder. Mix as well as possible, expect it to still be a dry mix. Add in the coca cola until the mix turns to the consistency you would end up with if you were making a boxed cake mix.

Pour into muffin tins or a cake tin. Don’t forget to spray first with no stick spray!

  

Leave in the oven until they brown and you can stick a toothpick in without it coming up with liquid.

See how dense it is? If you like bananas, you will like this! Just don’t expect it to have the texture of cake or a muffin, it’s different. Personally, I like it. These will be great to wrap in cellophane and take to work as a snack, or to eat as pre-race fuel. The oats and sugar will keep you through a shorter run, the banana will kick in after about 45 mins and fuel the rest of the way. As a side note, you can also add a tablespoon of your favorite chunky preserve for some fruit. I actually threw in a tablespoon of strawberry mint preserve and forgot to mention it in the recipe. You couldn’t taste it but I have done this before with a fig preserve that had large fig chunks and biting into the chunks of fig made it even better.

Okay, I’m off to drink another couple GALLONS of ginger tea… pass me good vibes! Maybe they will help me get over this cold/flu thing I’ve got going on.

 

World Peace Cafe

I woke up this morning still giddy from yesterday. I am pleased to announce that my legs feel GREAT! The muscles in the front of my thighs (my adductors maybe? somebody needs to explain muscle groups to me!) and my neck was a little stiff when I got up but it feels more like I got in a good workout from Physical Training Tuesdays, rather than experiencing an ‘I just ran 21k yesterday’ kind of ouch.

No complaints! All I can do is be grateful, and proud that I have gotten strong enough that I can run that far and get up and go about my day the next morning like it’s no big deal!

Treat your body right (by fueling it properly, exercising it well, and stretching as much as possible) and it will return the favor, right?

I did my best to continue the ‘treat my body right’ theme.

I let myself sleep in.

I actually woke up, sans alarm, at 5:55 (I guess my body has gotten used to the 5:30 wake up calls?) feeling like I had overslept. Still half asleep, I looked at my phone, saw the time, panicked at why my alarm hadn’t gone off, tried to remember the day of the week, then finally remembered that while it IS a monday, I get an extra hour of sleep today! Yay! I promptly passed back out for another half hour before my alarm finally got me out of bed.

Today’s exercise is brought to you by http://www.doyogawithme.com! 20 minutes of Yoga For Runners later, my tightness in my neck was completely gone. I’m really inflexible so I always struggle with poses, but I definitely felt EXTRA stiff today. Proof, in my opinion, that I really need this morning yoga! Good thing I am taking the time to try and stretch my muscles out!

Reverted my old FAVORITE breakfast: Yogurt Cereal. When I went to the grocery store this weekend, the organic store was completely out of one of my favorite cereals, Barbara’s Puffins. I usually like to put this in with my Nature’s Way cereals for an extra little puffy crunch. It mixes well with the others and provides an extra texture that I like. I was looking for something that had that same both the puffy crunch,high fibre and low sugar as Barbara’s Puffins. It was hard to find something. I eventually settled for Kashi Heart to Heart Warm Cinnamon. Thinking back on it, the high sugar content should have been a warning that this might not be my cup o’ tea…

I don’t think I am going to buy Heart to Heart again, at least, not for my morning cereal. I might try it as a dry snack and see if I like it better that way, but in my cereal, it didn’t keep its crunch and just absorbed the yogurt. The cinnamon flavor was a bit overpowering.  It was too sweet. If the cinnamon flavor was more subtle, I think I would have liked it better, but even then, the texture was all wrong. Cereal was still good, but just not it’s usual ‘I would eat a bucket of this if my stomach would let me‘ good.

The morning FLEW by and before I knew it, it was already lunch time!

I needed to pick something up from my dad’s office, so we decided that we would have lunch together while I was visiting. I wish our offices were closer! It was nice to get together for lunch, and there are a lot of great places to eat nearby. Betty, a colleague of my father and fellow member of our organic social entrepreneurship team, joined and took us to World Peace Cafe.

This was an ADORABLE vegetarian cafe that only served food made with ORGANIC and LOCAL produce. The place is really bright and open, with a simple, clean layout. They have a menu up front, and containers of ready made dishes that you can either take away or ask them to heat up. All the employees are volunteers. All proceeds to go world peace.

The cafe is right next door to a meditation centre and has a second floor where they offer free meditation classes several times a week. There is a bookshelf by the counter with books on buddhism and meditation, and a lot of flyers for upcoming meditation and buddhist activities.

I thought it was really cool that there were a couple of buddhist monks relaxing at one of the tables. It had a unique mix of patrons, both foreign and local. Everybody was united by their common desire for a simple but tasty meal in the happy and relaxing atmosphere the cafe exuded.

We all got the vegetarian bimbimbap. Apparently the recipe is by a korean monk who volunteered at the cafe. She was a very good cook who came up with most of the items on the menu.

And after it’s all mixed up..

I DEFINITELY believed them when they said she was a good cook. The bimbimbap was REALLY good, as was the carrot and coriander soup that Betty and I split (the bimbimbap was the best though, thanks Betty for the great recommendation!).

Say HI to Betty!

The tea had little flowers in it. Isn’t it pretty?

Organic, local produce…great atmosphere…tasty food… AND all the proceeds go to a good cause?! I think I’m in love! I wish this was right next to MY office! I would come here all the time!!

If anybody reading this goes to or lives in Singapore, you have to stop at World Peace cafe (Bukit Pasoh Rd).

Okay, lunch break over! I gotta go back to work.