Racing in California + Chocolate Mint Energy Bars

This weekend we travelled to California to race Stanford and Wisconsin's lightweight women and the St. Mary's openweight women in a series of dual races at the PAC-10 Invitational at Redwood Shores. We flew out Thursday afternoon and arrived in California late that evening.

Our hotel was right on the race course. You could almost see the finish line from our hotel room.

The finish line buoys were just out of view.

The next morning, we headed to the grocery store first thing. We still had to weigh-in for the day, but we all stocked up on a lot of fruit and other snacks for later in the day, and for the next few days.

In the afternoon, we practiced twice to get used to the course and our new boat (we borrowed it from Stanford so we didn't have to drive ours all the way out!) and weighed-in.

Energy Bars Take Two

Last week, I went on a training trip with my team to Austin, Texas.

Training trip = (Sleep + Eat + Row + Eat + Sleep + Eat + Row + Eat) * (Numbers of days in trip)

It was exhausting, but really, really fun. We also made a lot of great strides as a team, both physically and technically. While I'm glad to be back home with D, I'm also really glad we took the trip.

As you can see, I ate a lot during my training. Most mornings before practice, I ate a bar, because they were easy to eat, kept me going through practice, and were light enough that I could do the warmup run without getting cramps.

For a while I've been trying to find bars that give me energy and make me feel good. I tried a lot of different bars, from the FiberOne bars, to Clif bars to Nutrigrain. Finally I settled on Larabars. I really like that they only have a few relatively simple ingredients, they fill me up, and I can exercise right after eating them.

Wholesome, delicious ingredients.

I don't like how expensive they are, how difficult they are to find, or that I didn't make them myself! So I started to look for recipes. There were a lot of recipes for homemade Larabars, but lack of food processor basically took all of those out of the equations.

Before we left on our training trip, I tried to make a batch of energy bars. The recipe I used claimed to not taste as healthy as the input ingredients. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case--they tasted awful. I rarely throw away food, but these were that bad. Granted, I think I burned them a little bit, but there wasn't much goodness to begin with.

Over the course of the trip, I looked for more recipes, and found two that I liked. One of them is called "oatmeal crispies" and is basically oats, flour, butter and sugar baked into bar shape. I may try these in the future, but the other recipe sounded more like what I wanted: oats, nut butter and honey, with a whole bunch of yummy add ins.

It was really, really snowy here.

So today, D and I ventured through the snow in search of missing ingredients. We came home, mixed these up, and immediately devoured way too many of them. They're incredible!!! The rest I have wrapped up in my fridge ready to take to practice or as an afternoon snack. I'd also like to try making different versions of these.

Below, I have the general version of the recipe, which you can customize to taste however you want. I've also included our version at the very bottom (because it's that delicious) and the version I'd like to try next!

We both had these for dessert, that's how good they are.

----- ----- -----
Customizable Energy Bars
adapted from (never_home)maker
makes approximately 20 bars


Ingredients:

1.5c nut butter

1c honey (or other liquid sweetener, like sugar syrup or agave)

1t vanilla

0.75c water 

2.5c quick cooking grains
0.5c powder (e.g. protein/cocoa/milk)
1c coconut flakes (you could probably replace this with more grains)
1.5c nuts (chopped) and seeds
1.5c dried fruit, chocolate chips, etc.
2c fresh fruit, chopped into small pieces
1c crunchy, salty stuff

Eating in Austin, TX

Our team is in Austin, TX for our annual training trip. Of course, that means 2 practices a day and lots of hungry bellies, so of course lots of food has been consumed. Most of it has been the mediocre hotel food, but we've managed to try a few Austin favorites:

1. Torchy's Tacos

The menu was limited to only 5 items when we (yes, all 150 of us) visited this taco truck, so we couldn't try everything. On the menu: chicken fajitas, beef fajitas, some sort of shrimp taco, the 'trailer park' and a vegetarian option with avocado.

I tried the trailer park, the beef fajita and the veggie option. The beef fajita was just ok. The sauce was delightfully refreshing and just spicy enough, but the lettuce on it was flavorless, probably free of nutrients and otherwise pretty pointless. The beef was not too far behind the lettuce. It was thoroughly overcooked and just generally not very good.

The avocado taco was good, but pretty boring. I would have appreciated a little bit more pizazz on it--maybe some tomato chunks, or a radish/cabbage slaw for some crunch? Even whole beans instead of refried would have made for a more interesting mouth feel. All the flavors worked, but the textures weren't quite there.

10 ways to travel light

I recently spent a week in Chicago, a city not known for its healthy food. As a foodie, I also felt obliged to try much of Chicago's best cuisine. Still, by the end of the week, I had dropped two pounds. Here's how I eat and travel:

1. Change your watch the morning you leave. 
That means if you're traveling to some place three hours behind, you should be eating breakfast 3 hours later than usual. Most people change their watch on the plane; this can mean you have lunchtime or dinnertime twice. Plan on having a snack, not a meal, on the plane, unless you're definitely flying through lunch or dinner time at your destination. (Try to bring an apple or baby carrots with you as a snack.)