Spaghetti Squash Mac & Cheese

When I got home tonight, I was pretty tired...and, unfortunately, fatigue usually leads me to make poor decisions in the food department. I opened the refrigerator and immediately honed in on the large bag of shredded cheddar cheese that I bought at the grocery store recently. There was absolutely nothing special about this stuff — just your standard shredded cheese — but I immediately started craving something cheesy for dinner. When my eyes moved just slightly to the spaghetti squash that I knew I needed to use in the next day or two, I had an idea. Why not make macaroni and cheese with spaghetti squash?

I've never made spaghetti squash before tonight. I've watched many a friend make it, but never really paid close enough attention to replicate it myself. So, after some quick Googling, I had my squash in the microwave and was on my way!

Spaghetti Squash Mac & Cheese

Adapted from POPSugar

1 small spaghetti squash

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 cup unsweetened almond milk or regular milk

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

1/3 cup asiago and parmesan blend

Salt and pepper

Cut spaghetti squash in half lengthwise. Scrape out the seeds inside. Place the squash down with the skin facing outward in a microwave-safe baking dish. Add about 1 inch of water to the dish. Microwave the squash on high for 8-12 minutes. When poked by a fork, the squash should be tender. Cool for 10-20 minutes.

While the squash cools, melt butter in a saucepan. When melted, add flour and mix together. Whisk in milk and bring to a boil. Once boiling, remove from heat and whisk in cheeses until melted.  Add salt and pepper as desired for taste. Set aside.

Using a fork, scrape out the insides of the spaghetti squash into a bowl. Once finished, pour the cheese sauce over the squash and mix together.

If desired, sprinkle additional cheese over top. Enjoy!

Visually, it isn't necessarily the most appealing of meals. However, it's a great, lower calorie substitute when those mac and cheese cravings hit. A few things to note: the texture will not be what you would expect from a pasta dish. Spaghetti squash has a bit more of a crunch to it than pasta will. Also, if you opt for almond milk over regular milk (like I did), the sauce won't be quite as creamy. But that's the sacrifice we make for healthy alternatives :)

Meyer Lemon Pound Cake

This morning was an early one for me — and I am not a morning person! One of my clients at work had a launch, which meant I started working at 5am to ensure everything was ready to go. So, I was in bed chipping away at launch-related work until about 9am.

At that point, I decided it was time for breakfast. I had already decided to work from home since I knew I wasn't likely to get a long enough break in my work to physically make the trip into the office, so I got ambitious. Also, my two weeks of no gluten recently ended, so it was a perfect opportunity to throw gluten back into the mix. My housemates and I get weekly produce from a local farm, and this week's items included a few Meyer lemons. So, I decided to whip up a Meyer lemon pound cake!

Meyer Lemon Pound Cake

Adapted from Martha Stewart

Cake

1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt 

2 teaspoons baking powder 

1 1/4 cups sugar 

4 eggs

1 cup milk

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract 

Zest of 1 Meyer lemon

Glaze

Juice from 1 Meyer lemon

Powdered sugar

Zest of 1 Meyer lemon

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Grease one standard-sized loaf pan. 

Using an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time. With mixer at a very low speed, add flour, baking powder and salt. While the dry ingredients are being incorporated, slowly add in the milk and vanilla. Add in lemon zest.

Pour the cake batter into your greased loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour to 1 1/2 hours, checking at regular intervals. Test the cake's doneness with a fork or cake tester — it should come out clean. 

While the cake is cooling, combine the ingredients for the glaze in a bowl and whisk together. Use as much or as little powdered sugar as you'd like for consistency (I used about a cup and a half). Pour the glaze over the still-warm cake. 

Enjoy!

For those of you looking for a cake recipe that isn't overpoweringly sweet, this is for you. The glaze is nice and tart, which offsets the mellow, vanilla flavor of the cake itself. It's great as a breakfast bread or a dessert. This recipe is definitely a keeper for me. I'm looking forward to seeing how the leftovers go over at the office tomorrow!

Russian Waffles, Grocery Stores and Getting Around

Once the excitement of the first few days of the Olympics wore off, Sarah and I were starting to feel like we had gotten into the swing of things. With different events every day, there was no way to get into a real regular schedule, but we had our routines down!

Every evening before going to bed, we looked at the event schedule for the next day and decided what time to wake up. We very quickly realized after the first few days that Sarah was not waking up when her alarm went off (in all fairness, we were working some pretty long days!), so eventually, it was just me setting my alarm and then waking her up in the morning. Neither one of us are morning people, so getting ready in the morning didn't exactly happen quickly! But, eventually we got out the door to breakfast.

Breakfast at our hotel was amazing. They had an incredible spread with everything from an omelette bar to rotating Russian food items to multiple fresh squeezed juices. My typical breakfast consisted of eggs with cheese and tomatoes, fresh squeezed orange juice, coffee and a piece of something I can only describe as chocolate bread. Sometimes, I switched it up with the rotating American-style breakfast item of the day (usually pancakes or waffles) or some muesli.

One morning in particular, I was pretty pumped to see that they had waffles out. However, there was no maple syrup. I asked the woman attending to that area if they had any somewhere that I could have. She very apologetically said they were out for at least a few days. But, as I shrugged and started to thank her anyways, she said, "But we do have sour cream!"

Despite my confusion, I thanked her and returned to my table, where I recounted the story to Sarah. After some quick Googling, we discovered that sour cream is a common pancake/waffle topping in Russia. However, it was not top on my list of things to try since I'm not a big fan of sour cream in the first place!

A few days into our Sochi experience, Sarah and I decided that we needed to hunt down a grocery store. Our schedule was pretty brutal - a typical day started around 9 a.m. with breakfast, followed by a 45-minute bus ride to a venue (the first event of the day was usually around 11 a.m.). Since the venues were that far from our hotel, we typically just stayed up there until the day's events wrapped up (many nights, that wasn't until 1 a.m.) and, after taking our 45-minute bus ride back, were home at the hotel by 2 a.m. Because of that schedule, we found ourselves frequently going without real meals. There were concession stands and media cafeterias, but they were a little lacking and frequently ran out of food before we were able to get there.

So, grocery store it was! We wandered down the street on one of our rare afternoons off and walked into a place whose sign read (in English!) "Food and Alcohol Market." Once inside, we were greeted by a wall of liquor, a refrigerated case of beer and your typical array of checkout line chocolate bars and chip bags. We walked through that area and found grocery items.

Through photos on the packaging, we were able to generally discern what each item was. We found lots of canned meat, caviar-flavored chips, wafer cookies in dozens of flavors and black cherry juice. We ended up leaving with cheese, crackers and wafer cookies. Those wafer cookies would end up tasting like the most glorious food on earth every night when we got home!

We later went back to the alcohol market to purchase some souvenirs...but that's for another blog entry!

The Perfect Chocolate Cupcake

After years of tinkering with chocolate cake recipes and coming up disappointed, I'm happy to announce that I have finally found an amazing chocolate cake recipe! I stumbled upon this one by accident while I was trying to track down a s'mores cupcake recipe somewhat similar to Sprinkles.

My successful s'mores cupcakes

I've made these twice now - once as part of the original s'mores cupcakes recipe and once as straight up chocolate cupcakes. Both times, they've turned out perfectly. I have made a few changes to the original recipe (because I'm me and I can't help but tinker with recipes), so here it is!

Chocolate Cupcakes (from Unusually Lovely)
1 1/2c granulated sugar
1 1/2 sticks of unsalted butter, room temperature
3 eggs
2c flour
3/4c cocoa powder (I used Ghirardelli)
1tsp baking soda
1tsp baking powder
1/2tsp salt
2tsp vanilla
1c buttermilk
1c dark chocolate chips (I used Ghirardelli's 60% cacao bittersweet chocolate chips)

Preheat oven to 350 and place liners in a cupcake pan.

Cream butter and sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time. Mix until well-combined. Add vanilla. In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add dry mixture to the butter mixture, alternating between dry and buttermilk. Only mix until combined so you don't overmix. Fold in chocolate chips. Fill each cupcake liner about 2/3 full.

Bake for 16-18 minutes. Let cool completely before frosting.

Chocolate caramel pretzel cupcakes

There you have it. I highly suggest you now stop reading this post and start baking right now!

Juice Cleanse Day 1

After 24 hours of consuming little more than juice, I've arrived at the following conclusions: whoever said day one was easy was lying and man is not meant to live on juice alone, regardless of how many cold-pressed fruits and vegetables are in them.

One thing I was NOT expecting was the fact that I was physically incapable of drinking all six bottles of juice throughout the day. It was just too much juice. By mid-afternoon, I just wanted something salty. I eventually satisfied that craving by having a chopped up avocado and tomato with salt for dinner (raw fruits and vegetables are recommended if you decide you need something more than juice, as is avocado specifically). But before I had my little avocado and tomato salt salad, I simply could not stomach any more juice. I only drank half of Fiji (mid-afternoon juice) and skipped Green Supreme altogether (dinner drink), then only had about a third of my "dessert" drink.

Man is not meant to live on juice alone.

Despite my issues above, there were definitely some positives that came out of day one. My stomach, which is frequently upset, has been totally fine. Surprisingly, I have not been hungry at all. My salt cravings have made me more or less forget my sugar cravings. I'm not sure that trading one craving for another is a good thing, but we'll see how this pans out.

So, after considering bailing on this juice cleanse after day one (for both the reasons above and the fact that it basically costs $50 a day even with the juices on sale this week at Whole Foods), I'm opting to do a hybrid juice/raw food/smoothie cleanse for the remaining two days. I'm going to keep drinking the Suja juices I still have left (sipping on Glow at the moment!), but after those run out, I'm going to switch to raw food and alternative juices.

Stay tuned.

We'll see if this juice cleanse thing really works...

If you follow Hollywood news at all, you've probably heard plenty about juice cleanses. I've had many friends try them out and preach about them, but I've always been a skeptic. Why? I have a science background and I know that your body is completely capable of detoxing itself without spending a couple of days limiting your diet to cayenne-maple syrup lemonade.

However, I've decided to give it a shot. After doing a bit of research, I have a few reasons:

1. I have a serious sugar addiction. From what I've read online, a three-day juice cleanse is fantastic for kicking sugar cravings.
2. I've been sick a LOT lately. At this point, I'm willing to try just about anything to improve my immune system health.
3. The juice cleanse I've chosen (Suja, primarily because it is readily available at Whole Foods and I don't have to pay crazy amount for shipping) is packed full of fruits and vegetables and who doesn't need more of those in their life?

So, I've decided to blog about this for accountability purposes. I'm told day one is easy but that it gets progressively more difficult from there.

I'm currently drinking my first juice, Glow. It smells like celery but has a nice apple taste to it. The juices are a pretty decent size, so you can enjoy sipping it for awhile (we'll see if that's a good thing when I get to the juice I'm dreading most - Green Supreme). 

Here's today's menu. Wish me luck!

Half Marathon COMPLETED

Despite basically not training, I did it! I finished my first half marathon this weekend in St. George, Utah!

It was super cold at the starting line (around 30 degrees), so the first two miles were pretty rough. I had a little bit of a hard time breathing and I couldn't feel my feet because of the cold. Finally, around mile 2, my feet had warmed up enough that I could actually feel them and my breathing had become more regular. Around mile 4, I started feeling fantastic. Miles 4-8 were awesome...great scenery, a good mix of uphills and downhills, a random person who I met and ended up running with for awhile.

When I hit mile 9, though, it got pretty tough. I could feel my IT bands tightening up and the bottoms of my feet were not feeling the best. The 2:30 pace group passed me right around that point, which suddenly gave me a new surge of energy. I was anticipating a time around three hours, so seeing that I was doing so much better than I thought was a huge encouragement!

For the rest of the race, I chased the 2:30 group, sometimes walking, sometimes running. Around mile 11, my feet hurt too badly to keep up with them, so I just tried to keep them in sight. That strategy worked and I ended up finishing in 2:33:40! I was pretty pleased with that! My training consisted of a few 3-4 mile runs on an indoor track and I've never run any race longer than 4 miles, so I was very happy!

I do have to say that my favorite part of participating in a half marathon was the pre- and post-race meals.

I NEVER let myself eat alfredo or fast food, so it was quite the splurge and I enjoyed every bite!

Also enjoyable was the trip to Las Vegas afterwards! My afternoon was spent sipping cocktails poolside at the Trump International.

All things considered...awesome weekend!!!

30 Questions: 5 Weaknesses

Describe 5 weaknesses you have.

1.) Delicious and pretty baked goods

2.) Flat Boots...particularly equestrian style or Uggs

3.) Men in suits

4.) Cute, small animals

5.) Bright colored clothing/shoes/accessories

30 Questions: 5 Passions

What are 5 passions you have?

1.) Olympic Sports
I started speedskating because of the Olympic Games. And because of speedskating, I started applying for internships at the U.S. Olympic Committee. And because of the USOC, I found my passion and what I wanted to do with my life. What is that, exactly? Marketing and promotion of Olympic sports. Now, less than three years into my career, I've been to the Olympic Games, made amazing friends, served as official photographer for a World Cup and had so, so many experiences I never would've anticipated if you'd talked to me five years ago. 

However, my passion for Olympic sports goes beyond just the fact that I've turned it into my career. I love sports. I grew up watching the Pacers and Colts. I lived in Tampa when the Devil Rays were created and went to my first Lightning game there. But there's something different about Olympic sports. While they do indeed have their problems, I feel like it's still truly about the sport. It's not about who got a multimillion dollar contract to create their own shoe or cutting the line into New York's most famous club. It's a labor of love with very, very little chance of glory. We're talking about athletes who train forty hours a week for four years and then have one shot at their sport's most coveted award, Olympic gold. And on top of the competition, you've got incredible stories of international cooperation and friendship. At the core, the Olympic Movement is just a really amazing thing.

2.) Travel
There's no better way to understand the world than experiencing it for yourself. I've had the distinct privilege of getting to travel to somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty countries and territories. Every place I visit teaches me something new and makes me appreciate aspects of my own culture that I make never have noticed. Through my experiences with other people in other places, I've come to understand that there's no one place that is "better" than anywhere else, just different. And "different" is not a bad thing :)

3.) Food
Specifically, good food. I love the history and culture of food, as well as how it brings people together. There are few things better than a great dinner with good friends and a few bottles of wine. I'm also very passionate about treating my body to the right kinds of food. Yes, I eat junk food and even indulge in the occasional trip through the drive-thru, but I do consciously make an effort to avoid foods that are not ethically raised (i.e., I only eat cage-free eggs) and I try to eat organic food. Yes, it costs more, but I think avoiding unnecessary exposure to antibiotics, pesticides and other substances is worth it, as is the peace of mind that comes with avoiding unethically raised food products.

Yes, I know it's a cupcake...they can be organic, too!

4.) The Environment
Because without a healthy planet, what's the point? We've got to take care of what we have.

5.) Health
This one goes along with food and the environment. I try to exercise and eat properly (although I'm far from perfect) because we only are given one body and I intend to make the most of mine! 

Other honorable mention passions: photography, politics, music, books and much, much more!

Brits and Mayo

Seriously...what is it about the Brits and mayonnaise?

I just ordered a hamburger for lunch and told them ONLY lettuce and tomato (that's toe-mah-toe, by the way)...and it comes with two huge swirls of mayo on either bun.  Want a quick sandwich from Pret or Eat?  Mayo...on each slice of bread.  If there is bread involved in any form, there's probably also mayo involved.

I hate mayo.

A few more observations about British food...

I love cider.  They have it on draft at just about every pub here.  My favorite so far is Stella Artois Cidre.

Dear Stella - can you please bring your cidre to the States?  I will be eternally grateful (although my expanding waistline might not be).

Another favorite here is espresso and shortbread.  It's my morning treat in the hotel I am based out of!

Some more food shots for you...

Lamington from Borough Market

Jacket potato (aka baked potato, but in British English)

Wine. Lots of wine.

Olympic caramel shortbread

That's it for now...stay tuned for more updates from London! I promise it's not just all food ;)

Around the OTC

It's been a busy couple of days...I've worked two days, spent one day at Intern Assimilation, did the Incline again (cut my time down to an hour...and I ran all four miles down the Barr Trail to the bottom!), made friends with athletes and interns, and got my first taste of Colorado Springs nightlife.  I also managed to take a couple of pictures of the OTC for you guys!

The outside of my dorm...it's one of the older dorms

Courtyard where we spent a lot of today laying out

Back entrance of the Athlete Center...I ran into Michael Phelps right here yesterday!

The view...not bad, eh?

Me in my dorm room on move-in day

Life in the dorms is fine...everyone wants to be here, so they all take pretty good care of everything.  My roommate, Emily, is nice and we have pretty compatible sleep schedules fortunately.  Every night, there's usually a group of interns watching TV in the lounge...most of the time, they're watching sporting events but sometimes it's a movie.  The food in the Athlete Center is healthy and good...some of the other interns aren't big fans of it, but I like it.  

This weekend, I went out to two bars with most of the interns, the Thirsty Parrot and Cowboys.  The Thirsty Parrot is a pretty standard bar...Cowboys, on the other hand, is a three-story country bar with line dancing, a mechanical bull, and karaoke among other things.  It was certainly an interesting experience.

Now, I've got to get to bed cause I've got a long work week ahead of me!!

Somebody Pinch Me

I'm all moved into my room in the US Olympic Training Center!

Seriously, this place is like living in a dream.  The dorms are dorms, but they really provide everything we need.  We have a TV lounge (which is sponsored by AT&T...yes, really, we have a sponsored lounge) with really nice sofas, computer stations, a large flat screen TV, and a brand new poker table.  There are a couple of free washers and dryers.  My dorm room has a sink and vanity in it, as well as a decently-sized closet, fully-made beds (they provide all of the bedding), a small flat screen HD TV and DVD player, a refrigerator, a desk, a dresser, and plenty of room.  I have a roommate, Emily, who I get along with great (she and I are actually watching Toddlers and Tiaras in our room right now).  All of the interns tend to congregate in the TV lounge in the evenings and hang out...last night some of us watched Invictus (we can rent new release DVDs for $1.99 in the Athlete Center).  I'll post some pictures whenever I get around to taking them!

The Athlete Center is where we eat our meals...and it is AMAZING!  Today at lunch, Michael Phelps walked about a foot behind me, fresh from the pool.  Visitors aren't allowed in the Athlete Center, so it's kind of a place where everyone can just hang out...no one cares who's an elite athlete or intern or coach or employee.  There's a great variety of food (even for vegetarians like me!)...there's even a soft-serve ice cream machine (which will be the death of me) and an espresso machine.

And finally...today was day one of my actual work in the New Media department!  The people who I met today at work were really cool and I think I'll work quite well with them.  Brandon and I actually went to lunch with Scott, one of the guys who works on the website and taught us how to add content to it.  Kyle, the assistant director of New Media, also seems pretty cool.  We got some work done today uploading news stories to the website and I tracked some athletes' Twitter accounts to follow an event in California.  Today was mainly a lot of orientation and learning, though...tomorrow, though, it's all work!  My department is moving offices over the next few days, too, so some of that work may be manual labor!

That's all I've got for now...I'll try to get some pictures posted whenever I take some, and I'll keep you all posted on my internship!