Carrot Cupcakes

I made up a batch of carrot cakes to get me through prelims. There was a heap left so I made a bigger cake out of it. And writing this now, I've realised that I completely forgot to add the dates... Oh well.

Five years ago, I asked mum once for a carrot cake for lunch (back when I had no idea what 'health' was) and for probably the rest of the year, I'd always get a not-too-fluffy, not-too-dense carrot cupcake with maybe not enough nuts and a load of sugary cream cheese icing. I only wanted a batch of them.

So after so many lunches of getting utterly bored of orange cake and becoming sickened by the cloyingly sweet and creamy icing (I can still remember it...) I gave up on the humble carrot cake. I haven't had one in five years after all the trauma I had from the monotonous lunches.

But I wanted to make a cake today and we had a bag of carrots in the fridge, ready to start being more bad than good, so carrot cakes it was. And mum got mini cupcake tins, so my cupcakes HAD to be little. I didn't care if it ended up being little crumbles of carrot shreds and macadamias.

http://paleomg.com/carrot-cake-donuts/ 

On another note, I didn't create this recipe, so I'll pop LIBK's recipe here and say that I substituted the nut butter with regular cow butter (because you can never have too much butter) and put in some roughly chopped macadamias, fresh ginger and finely dessicated coconut (which didn't add to the flavour at all). And I lined the big baking tin with coconut oil, with the smear of my fingers. Oh, and I left out the dates, which I suggest you don't do. Not that they're awful, they're just not ultra sweet.

Deo for my BO

Made up a batch of deodorant for school for the next few months... God knows I'll be sweating like a pig through the prelim exams! First day back for term 3 and I'm going to be busier than ever (yes, that's possible). Look out prelims, here I come! (and I'm prepared to fight stress sweat, aluminium free!)

Deodorant recipe from Mommypotamus :)

Sleep Dosage

All week I've had pretty good sleep, relatively low stress levels, sliiiightly more carbs than normal, and I've had pretty decent energy - probably a 9 out of 10 for most days.

I've always held that I NEED nine hours of sleep to keep me sand and humanable, and that a loss of half an hour of that sleep leads me to catastrophe. That's always just been the norm for me, but in the last few weeks I've actually thought about that in a logical manner - this ain't normal.

Last night, I meditated for the first time in yonks and went to 'sleep' at 5 past 9, 5 minutes after bedtime, which doesn't affect me. By 'sleep' I mean I shut my eyes and started to get to sleep, but couldn't actually get to that stage because my train of thought is a fast moving, never stopping, loud and unignorable steam train rattling down a bumpy road. It probably takes me an hour to get to proper sleep every night.

Anyway, I woke up at my normal time this morning - 5.55am - and felt dead as a doornail. WOD not started. Food eaten miserably. Calculated correctly, I had the same 'nine hours of sleep' I have every night, but for some reason this morning, life just wasn't working for me. As I was leaving, mum said that I looked tired too, with a bit of an air of 'are you sure you slept at all?'

Something's wrong here. The government recommendation of 7-8 hours, and my personal recommendation of 9 hours, obviously doesn't solve the complete sleep and energy puzzle. There must be something deeper and more important to the hours of sleep you sleep for. I know that quality of sleep is really important, so I'll have to somehow fix that.

Goodnight.

Brussels Sprouts Craving

My food choices have been pretty weird lately. I haven’t been inspired by anything, and I’ve been getting interesting change-of-season produce for an attempt at a pick-me-up. All last week I had exciting foods, and now I’m starting to stress because I can’t come up with anything.

Tonight’s dinner was using up what we had – thawed chicken breast – and Brussels sprouts to add some green veggies into my diet that wasn’t cucumber or broccoli. I wanted a stir fry thing (which is what I basically always have when my last resort is chicken breast) so I boiled my Brussels sprouts in slightly salty water (because salt levels go down when you’re stressed, and with two exams up my sleeve I’m not the calmest person around!), coated my chopped chicken breast in Fijian curry powder and fried it up in some bacon fat.

I’d read somewhere that Brussels sprouts and butter was a good mix, so I decided to give it a go. Once my chicken was out of the pan, I chopped the sprouts up a bit (1/6ths) and added them to about 2 tbsp butter. Then I added another tbsp as I swirled them around the medium-high heat pan, let them caramelise/sauté in the buttery juices and put them on my plate once they looked alright. And put about another tbsp of butter on top of that.

Well what can I say. My taste buds are excited after a drought of slightly boring and tongue-burning food! These sprouts were amazing and they were the main part of my plate. They satiated me so well (the glorious buttery fat is to thank for that) that I didn’t want to go all caveman on my brother’s leftover chicken wings like I have been doing for the last three days. And that’s saying something.

Destressing is too stressful!

Hey guys! Just want you to all know that I'm not dead as of yet... I know I haven't been updating AT ALL in the last however-long, but I thought I should get up to speed with my life at the moment.

Just quickly as a bit of an intro, I'm finally down to my last spoonfuls of protein powder. Yay! Once that rice protein and rice milk (nearly finished that, not long to go) is gone, I can clean up my act and start going fully, FULLY grainless. That's not to say that the powder didn't teach me anything. I realised that protein powders don't make me gain weight (or lose weight) or get stronger or anything, and I learnt what powders act and may taste like. I've also learned to love smoothies, and how to add extra calories and nutrients into something without being able to taste it or drink a whole heap more. But most of all, smoothies have given me my post workout snack(y-thing). Before I had smoothies, I worked out, and that was it. So I bid farewell to my starchy smoothies and make way for new ones with paleo proteins, like raw yolks and raw grated liver (and bacon on occasion :) ). But one of the smoothies I really wanted to be weird and try out was a broccoli smoothie. It sounded ultra rich in protein and low in sugar, and I hadn't found any idea of it anywhere so I tried it this morning. The verdict? It sucked. It tasted incredibly bland, and no matter how much lemon juice I squeezed into it, it still didn't pick up any flavour, and my throat was sore and scratchy afterwards, even though I boiled the broccoli before. Another lesson: don't eat a whole cupful of broccoli at one time (if you get scratchy throats like me).

On a completely different note now. Last night, I tried to catch up on sleep and get my rhythms and sleepiness back in order. I've been super tired lately and no matter how hard I've tried, I haven't been able to get to bed aaaand fall asleep at a reasonable time. I think I've always had a problem where I just think and think and think for like an hour before my brain eventually realises I'm meant to be restoring myself. So last night I made a list of stuff to do to wind myself down. That included:
- have a shower after all homework, instead of after dinner (gives me more time away from work)
- do some yoga that'll make me sleepy, on my bed
- have a mug of hot tea
- meditate
- continue my normal bedtime routine
- heat up heat packs for my knees (they've been hurting since I've been wearing foot coffins for school - I wonder why)
- go to bed with my door shut.
I was all on time with the showering business, but because I wanted my tea directly after yoga, and I didn't want to wait for any boiling or steeping or whatever, I had to prep my tea before and after my shower (I hadn't opened the packet and it was loose leaf and it just took forever. So I was late, leaving me stressful and made me decide to leave out the meditation. I had to boil the kettle twice because I got out a tablespoon of tea instead of a teaspoon, for one mug... So I had to brew up extra tea and I worried about it all through my yoga, which made me more stressed out. The fact that the yoga wasn't helping me feel better physically also wasn't doing my mind any favours. A bit cranky at my quick yoga that did nothing for me, I sorted my tea and drank that sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark. It had mint, licorice root, fennel and calendula leaves, and it was ah-mazing. That was the best part of the whole night. I discovered a new love for this tea, and sweet mint teas in general (the flowers made it beautifully, sugary sweet). When that was sadly over, I got up, raced around to fix up the rest of my tea and heat up my heat packs, and when I got back I realised I had to do the stuff I do every night, with the blaring lights on. So I crossed off the day on the calendar, wrote down what I'm grateful for, put lip balm and cuticle cream on, plugged in my charger, and made my way to bed. The whole night's procedures had taken me an hour to do, and I was still not sleepy. In fact, I was probably holding more stress and additional anger/crankiness than I was before. I went to bed and, I must admit, I did go to sleep quicker and I had a dream (a sure sign - for me at least - that I've had a deep sleep), but I still woke up with a yawn. I guess, overall, every little thing did its part, but instead of being peaceful and letting it all work to 100% of its capacity, I only let it work 60%. My knees feel better, but only slightly. Yoga before bed stretched me out, but didn't calm me down. The shower got me away from blue screen lights, but didn't make me sleepier.

The idea I got from this is that you don't need a thousand things to get you to sleep. Less is more. During now and the end of the hsc, I'll inevitably lose sleep, and wasting my time trying to fall asleep better is not going to work. I'll just have to pick what method of sleepiness I want to pick up that night.

Tonight, it's meditation and another mug of that cooling, calming, homely tea.