A Blog Dedicated to Health, Food and a Dash of Sarcasm

So as I type here, in the “sauna conference room” that I’ve made more impenetrable by bringing in my own space heater, I realize that I’ve never really liked cold weather. But I LOVE snow, just the look of it at least. We’ve been hit by a mini snow day here, and I’m working from home (ie: the super swank conference rooms and study center that my apartment complex has set up). It’s times like these that I reach for food that is wildly opposite of what my situation presents to me.

Exhibit A:

Oxymoronic Watermelon Radish Salad: spinach, watermelon radishes, cucumber, sugar snap peas, mini heirloom tomatoes, sunflower kernels, asparagus, carrot, avocado and red onion – dressed in mix of balsamic, rice wine vinegar and lemon juice.

This salad makes me want to whisper over it, in a soft shimmer of mist, “Taste the Rainbow…” It’s just that bursting with fruit flavor. Not really fruity, but it still looks like it could be nature’s skittles.

For anyone that can find watermelon radishes at their grocery store/local co-op, get them! I can’t believe how much they tasted like regular radishes, but with a bit of a sweet crunch. And they look so pretty! That’s all a blogger really has to care about, right?

Exhibit B: (not for the faint of heart)

SHMOOPIE PIE: I won’t even tell you what it was made of, so as to discourage any self-destructive morons from doing the same thing I did.

It all started when I bought Xanthum gum. You know, the smoothie addition that’s supposed to make all the difference in the world and elevate your common post-weight training smoothie to something of sattvic cow’s milk-in-a-bowl. It has smoothie enthusiasts blog-wide foaming at the mouth.

Now, that should have been my first clue —  FOAMING.

In the name of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I’m terrible about following directions. When the bag says “a little goes a long way” and has a charming old man on it, I tend to think he’s just joshin’ me. Not so. In addition to my half cup of frozen blueberries and raspberries, ice cubes, scoop of protein powder and almond milk, I added *seemingly* an ungodly amount of xanthum gum. The result was nothing like a smoothie, not even like banana ice cream or a really really frothy milkshake….it was it’s own life form.

But of course, since I saw the clock ticking down the minutes since I had finished my latest weight training sesh, knowing that if I was going to have my protein+carbs it was going to be NOW, I hoovered it. Oy.

The impact can only be described as a cross between feeling a distention of mind and body AND the very very sudden onset of rabies. I literally could not finish it. I went from talking about how I was going to make a super thick smoothie (nicknamed shmoopie pie because it sounds really close to ‘whoopie pie’, and who doesn’t love those), where I was skipping around, proclaiming my excitement in a vaguely Polish accent (really, my accents are always yet-to-be-determined) to………lying flat at an angle against the couch, while vertical, trying to use the force of gravity to keep the shmoopie down. JUST STAY IN — my muscles need the protein, dang-it!

This was not so be so. Instead, every time the shmoopie wouldn’t cooperate with my stomach or visa versa, I would mumble “Shmoooooooopieeeeee…”, and act like a pubescent 13-year old boy who wants to show what he just ate, which was Andrew’s warning to back-the-fuck-up. I’m sure it was one of my more ravishing moments for him.

This is me. Circa 5 minutes post-shmoopie pie consumption

Point being, people, is that xathum and the Shmoopie Pie are not to be messed around with. Of course, I will be trying to eat both of them again very soon, hopefully with less foaming-rabies-mouth.

Has anyone else really messed up a recipe they found online? Or become extremely frantic at the thought of passing that 30 minute window where you should be consuming your hyped protein+carb combo post-workout?