The Last Post

Hi Friends!

So I’ve mentioned that I’ve been working on a new blog, with a new name, etc. Well I’m ready to unveil it!

The Runny Egg

You can check out the About Me tab to learn more about the name and all that.

I’ll have my first post up there tomorrow morning, so please update Google Reader (or whatever method you use), blogroll, etc. There is also a way to subscribe via email (left sidebar) or RSS feed, and you can also “like” my new Facebook page and you could even dare to follow me on Twitter! <— I’m not going to lie, I have no clue what I’m doing on there, but it should be fun figuring it all out!

Thank you so much for the support/encouragement about making the blog changes. I’m pretty excited to really get into it!

~Holly

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Reindeer Beans

Hi Friends!

*Don’t forget to enter my book giveaway* Not my book, but you know what I mean.

The weekend is finally here! I feel like this week has gone by very slowly. Maybe it is the MN Spring weather (finally here!) that made the week drag on?

Look! Grass:

I’ve got 12 miles planned for today and I honestly can’t wait to get out there! The trails near our house are really nice and it will be such a change from being cooped up at the gym!

Last night for dinner I made a recipe that my Dad gave me! He made it for us last weekend and it was so delicious – and super easy to make too. It makes a ton of food as well which is great, since now we don’t have to do much cooking over the weekend.

Reindeer Beans

(yes the original recipe calls for reindeer meat! I used ground beef, you could omit if you prefer)

1 lb ground reindeer or venison or beef

1/2 cup chopped bell pepper

1/2  cup chopped onion

1/2 cup BBQ sauce (I used ¼ cup)

1/4 cup brown sugar (didn’t use)

1/2 tsp vinegar

1 can (15 oz ) tomatoes

1 can pork and beans (2 lbs) (I used baked beans instead)

(the original recipe also calls for 6 strips of fried bacon, cut into pieces)

Directions:

Saute chopped bell pepper and onion until tender. Add beef and cook until browned. Meanwhile, in a crockpot, add the tomatoes, baked beans, BBQ sauce and vinegar. Once meat/veggies are done, add to crockpot and cook on high for about an hour, until well heated.  You could also just add the tomatoes/beans to the pan with the beef – but my pan is not big enough for that.

This recipe was really simple to throw together, and you could easily add more chopped veggies (carrots and celery would be good) or you could skip the meat altogether and add more beans). It would taste delicious with some chopped avocado on top, or some shredded cheese. We had neither and it was still good!

Ok I’m off for my run – have a nice weekend!

*What is your favorite crockpot dish? Feel free to leave a link!

*What are your plans for the weekend?

~Holly

No Green Beer

Hi Friends!
 
Please check out my Giveaway!
 
Did you have a nice St. Patrick’s Day?

 
March 17th, 2007 was actually Jason’s and my first date! We had met a few weeks prior at the police station – I had just joined the police reserves where Jason had been volunteering for years. We all went out for dinner, Jason and I hit it off (we actually both went to the same small high school and he was in my older sister’s class) and starting talking off and on for a few weeks. We finally went out on St. Patrick’s Day and as they say, the rest is history!
 
We decided to stay home and have a low-key evening.
 
I made some TJ’s chicken sausage, baked sweet potatoes and green beans:
 

 
I love sweet potatoes. Seriously they may be my favorite food. I could eat one with every meal.
 
Jason always suggests that we watch The Boondock Saints on St. Patrick’s Day but I always say no.
 

 
Have you seen this movie? I actually watched it for the first time over our honeymoon and thought it was ok and kind of lame. Is it just a guy thing? No clue.
 
Since it was St. Patrick’s Day, we did have some beer. We had Corona, since that is what we had in the fridge. I figure it is beer, so it works, right? And the lime is green so it works out great for St. Patrick’s Day!

 

 
Workout: Run 3 miles – completed in about 28 minutes! I’m getting pretty excited about my 12 miler on Saturday!
 
*Did you do anything fun yesterday? Did you have green beer?
 
*Please tell me I’m not the only one who doesn’t like Boondock Saints.

*Anything fun going on this weekend?

Eleven Miles!

Hi Friends!

Meet Peter Sam: (again)

He loved modeling all of those hats – he didn’t squirm at all — it probably helped that he had just woken up from a nap!  🙂  And I love that with the first hat he is Uncle (Peter) Sam!

 

I even wore my UMD (Univ of MN-Duluth) sweater! Our mascot is the Bulldog! How perfect is that?

Jason totally laughed at me when I pulled this sweater out – he said “we’ve been together for 4 years and I have NEVER seen that sweater before!” True – I never wear it, but I just love it so much. My dad found it for me at Goodwill (or another thrift store, I can’t remember) before I started college.

Peter Sam is such a sweetheart!!! Sometimes I wish Jason and I had a dog, but Jason is allergic (and to be honest I don’t know how to take care of a dog!)

Rewind to Saturday morning –

I ran 11 miles.

I ran 11 miles in under 2 hours (my goal!)

My knee didn’t hurt. At. All.

I think the biggest difference has been my trusty foam-roller. In case you don’t know what one is, click here and you can see a picture of one and someone showing a few common stretches using it. Like I said earlier last week, this thing is worth its weight in gold. I really think daily foam-rolling is something I need to keep up with (and I intend to!)

And a few days ago I mentioned that reading about bloggers who run 7-8 min/miles – I didn’t mean to sound like I was complaining. I get caught in the comparison trap and I shouldn’t let those thoughts creep in. Running AT ALL is something I should be happy about – thanks to all of you who pointed that out in the comments or through emails.

Plans for the day:

-More work on the new blog (hopefully to be unveiled in a week or two…

-Grocery store

-Meal planning for the week (any suggestions on recipes to try?)

-Laundry (!!!)

-Yoga

-Read

-Relax!

Enjoy your day!

~Holly

Beans, Beans the Magical Fruit

Hi Friends!

It is finally the weekend!!! Woohoo! In a few hours I will be introduced to Peter Sam:

I have only seen pictures but I finally get to see him in real life! My sister Myra and her husband Tyler are both teachers and are on spring break – they drove all the way from Houston last night!

Last night I made some of The Non-Dairy Queen’s Red Quinoa Burgers:

Sarena once again your recipe didn’t let me down! The only change I made was using all red beans, no mung beans and I left them a little chunky! We had them with some mixed veggies – a lovely dinner! Jason LOVED these — he had quite a few!

Afterward we headed to the mall and to Target. I wanted to pick up a few gifts for some friends – I am blessed to know some very special people and I wanted to show my thanks! They read the blog so I don’t want to share what I got – they know who they are!

I could spend hours in the Yankee Candle store (and I actually worked there for a few months in high school when it was still Wicks N Sticks!). I love smelling all of the jars. Jason and I picked up two for ourselves too. The Macintosh flavor is by far my favorite Yankee candle, but who could resist Vanilla Cupcake?

The boxes are all packed up and ready to ship tomorrow (it feels good to get stuff ready, all I have to do tomorrow is take them to the UPS store and pay an arm and leg ship them!)

 A few weeks ago I showed you the Kombucha I was brewing (thanks to Averie for sending me the starter scoby!) The homemade Kombucha tastes a million times better than the store bought stuff. Here is our stocked up fridge:

Really, there is no comparison in my mind – the taste is unbelievable!

Kombucha is a detoxifying, probiotic drink that is rich in antioxidants. Too bad the bottles in the store cost $3-5 a piece. Homemade tastes better and is way cheap. You can purchase supplies at Happyherbalist.com!

*What is going on this weekend that has you excited? I seriously cannot wait to meet Peter Sam! Oh and I have 11 miles to run today. Should be fun!

Homemade Blueberry Pop-Tarts

Hi Friends!

I think next week will be Paying off Debt/Budgeting week – I’ve been working on a few posts but I keep adding more info, so maybe on Monday I’ll finally have one of those posts up. Believe me I love talking about budgeting, I just want to make sure I’m explaining everything in the best way. If you have any questions that you want covered, you can email me at couchpotatoathlete (at) gmail (dot) com or leave a question in the comment section below. 🙂

I ran 3 miles yesterday and it felt good – my knees are feeling good and the 30 minutes or so flew by pretty quickly. Maybe it was because I was going to go home and make homemade pop-tarts!

 I’ve been slacking with my March goals – one of them being “try 2 new recipes per week”. I just couldn’t decide on what to make! A few days ago I got an email from Jason while I was at work – it was about making homemade pop-tarts.

Let me explain. Jason loves pop-tarts. I’m sure at his office he has 2-3 boxes of pop-tarts. I love them too – but I don’t eat them anymore. They don’t fill me up and the ingredient list is ridiculous.

The website made it sound so simple: make a pie crust, divide it up and roll into squares, place filling on top, place another square of dough on top of that, bake and enjoy.

I used Martha’s recipe for pie crust (who better than the master?) and made ½ batch (enough for 1 pie crust) and I used whole wheat flour. The dough was a little tough to work with, but it ended up alright. For the filling, I used 1 cup frozen blueberries and 2 TBSP brown sugar – I microwaved that in a bowl for about 1-2 minutes stirring every now and then. You could also heat them on the stovetop. The funnest part was putting them together and crimping the edges together (to make them more authentic, dontcha think?). They are so cute!

 

I’m sure you could just call these mini blueberry pocket pies, but I’m sticking with calling them pop-tarts. I think if I had used all-purpose flour they would have turned out a little better – not so thick perhaps. Either way they tasted amazing. I wouldn’t put one in the toaster though – I’d end up with blueberry goo all over my poor toaster.

These tasted so good and seriously — Martha’s recipe for pie crust is so delicious. There is a ton of butter in there so obviously it tastes good 🙂

*What are your plans for the weekend?

*What is your favorite flavor of pop-tarts? And if you don’t like pop-tarts, what is your favorite pie flavor? and if you don’t like pie, what do you like?!?!

The End of the Hunger Games

Last night for Jason’s birthday we ate at one of my favorite places!

KHAN’S!

(the first photo is recycled from a July post — I wish there was green grass in MN right now!)

My Dad was kind enough to take us out (woohoo for free meals!) and my sister Kim joined us as well. Poor Mom stayed home sick  😦  I swear we go to Khan’s for almost every birthday/celebration dinner — the food is just that good!

Tuesday was a fun day – I worked a ½ day, picked up a gigantic smiley face balloon (forgot to take a picture!!!) and met Jason at his work – gave him the humiliating balloon and then we went to lunch. Afterward, I went home, took a little snooze and then read!

I am finally done reading the Hunger Games series – I loved reading them but I’m happy to be done. I stayed up way too late way too often – and that is not something I can keep doing. I need my rest.

So what can I say? I loved the series. I loved the main character throughout the first 2 books, and although she seems to change a bit in Mockingjay — I still liked her. And I cheered for her to do the right thing. I thought the author did a nice job of picking up the pieces at the end and giving you some closure with the series — although I’d love to read more about the characters I don’t feel like there is more to the story at this time. I don’t want to give too much away so that is why this is vague. Feel free to email me (couchpotatoathlete (at) gmail (dot) com) if you want to talk more specifics.

Pick up those books. Read them. The end.

*Do you like to go to the same restaurants/bars time after time or do you prefer to try out new places?

I honestly like to go to the same place over and over again. I like feeling comfortable in my surroundings, and a new place can seem intimidating if I’ve never been there before.

Spiderman Bread

*Happy Birthday to Jason! *

I’m only working a ½ day today, then I’m heading down to Jason’s work (about 30 minutes south of where I work) to meet him for lunch. Hopefully he’ll get out of work early – if not, I’ll hang out at a coffee shop and finish up

I’m kind of surprised that this book is taking me so long to finish – The Hunger Games took me 2-3 days to finish? And same with Catching Fire? No matter, I will finish Mockingjay soon enough 🙂

I baked some cookies for Jason to bring to work– please tell me that you used to bring treats for your classmates when it was your birthday. I was just remembering that for years we were able to bring in homemade treats and then suddenly you had to bring in storebought, prepackaged items.

I used Phoebe’s Grandmother’s recipe  🙂  and these chips (milk chocolate/PB swirled chips??? yes please)

They turned out so good – not one of them burned or fell apart and when I removed them from the cookie sheet. I mean, how can you go wrong with the Nestle Tollhouse cookies?

And because I have no way to smoothly transition into this next part of the post, here it is.

Jason loves Spiderman – as evidenced by the gift bag from his Mom (given to him over the weekend) — and you don’t even want to know about all of the Spiderman stuff in our house!

And check out the piece of bread that I made into toast (ta-da!) as part of Jason’s breakfast:

Are you kidding me?!?!?! That piece of bread was MADE for him!!!

Setting Goals

Hi Friends!

It has been a long weekend but a lovely one – getting out of town is always fun. And I still can’t get over our hotel room, the bright green wall and the crazy curtains – oh and did you notice this guy:

I have never stayed at a hotel that actually makes towel animals. So that was a first for me.

Now that I’ve had time to catch up on reading blogs laundry, cleaning, errands, grocery shopping, etc, I have had some time to dwell on the Leadership seminar. So I dug out the workbook that we each got and paged through it.

The seminar was broken down into smaller chapters, and my favorite was “Dreams, Visions and Goal Setting”.  Dave talked about how goals can have a long-term positive impact if they include these types of goals (not in this order)

1. Career
2. Social
3. Family
4. Intellectual
5. Physical
6. Spiritual
7. Financial

I think that anyone can look at that list and see that they have strengths and weaknesses in each of those areas – for me, Career, Spiritual and Social goals are the ones I have to work on the most – they don’t come easily for me. Physical, Financial and Intellectual goals are “easier” for me – I’m not saying a super buff, financial savvy genius (or am I?) – but when I make goals in those areas I am easily motivated to reach them.

But perhaps I reach those goals because I make them too easy? I’m not sure. Regardless, Social goals are not ever high on my list, since to me, being social is not something I strive for. I am naturally introverted, shy and quiet. I would rather spend my time alone or with a very small group – so having a goal to be more social is something I definitely need to consider. Along with that, being social with the right people is important as well – am I surrounding myself with positive, uplifting people? People who will support my goals in the other 6 key areas?

*Looking at that list of goal areas, what is one area that you need to work on? And what area(s) are you naturally strong?

Back to Normal Life

Hi Friends!

*Thank you so much for your kind words about Jason and I paying off our credit card debt!!! I still need to go through and respond to the comments because so many of them were so wonderful and uplifting. It has been a crazy weekend!

Wow, it is Sunday already?!?!?!

Going out of town on Thursday/Friday really threw off my weekend. I took off work on Thursday and went to work with Jason – he had some meetings all day in southern MN, so I hung out in Barnes and Noble while he worked  🙂  When 4pm hit, I picked him up and we hit the road. At about 10pm we finally got to Kansas City, MO and entered our crazy hotel:

We stayed at the Holiday Inn Aladdin in downtown Kansas City. This place was hilarious!!! It had an Art-Deco theme which reminded me of a few hotels in Las Vegas (with the crazy glass sculptures, etc). The bartender told us that the hotel was built in the 1920s and has been redesigned several times. I just loved our room:

Friday was the seminar, which was intense (since it was 7 hours of sitting and listening – which was tough after sitting in the car for so long!!!) but to be honest, it wasn’t anything “new” and “exciting” – but it was all good reminders/suggestions that need to be reinforced in so many people. I’ll talk more about the seminar in a future post.

We left Kansas City, MO at 4pm on Friday and drove all the way back to MN – Jason was kind enough to drive the entire way, which was great because I hate driving, but it sure took a toll on his back and his arms (driving for 6-7 hours straight with your arms extended is tough work!) So Saturday was mostly spent relaxing and unwinding. I was too tired to run yesterday, so I’m off to do that this morning. Then I need to conquer Laundry Mountain and get to the grocery store.

I wish I took Monday off of work as well!

*Did you have a good weekend? Anything fun to share?