Words for Wednesday : Spin Class

So today I decided that I should take that morning Spin Class at the Gym.  Yeah, brilliant idea.

I hear everyone say - great calorie burner, so fun, yadda yadda.

Know what I say? NOT FOR ME!

So, I crawled into the gym at 5:10am with about an inch and a half of snow on the ground.  Yes, in April. So awesome.  NOT. (Side note: They are predicting another 6 inches overnight.)

So I do 15 minutes on the treadmill, nothing fancy, traveled a mile. Yeah, you can be jealous. And then wandered down to the Spin room.  Well, it's a bunch of bikes, I don't really know what I am doing, so I went up to the instructor, she introduced herself as Tracy, filling in for her twin Theresa today.  Cool, don't need your full background, but let's start with this sign - it says 'Must sign up at the desk'. Is that for real?  She said yes, and so went up to the desk.  Apparently the last spot on the list. AWESOME! It was meant to be!

I go back in, and she is like, do you have a bike picked out? I told her I hadn't marked my territory yet, she suggested I pick one in the back, so we took the only open one, and she says adjust the height of the seat to this, blah blah, and explained how class works, and that she will say 80% etc and this lever on it will control that, but if I wanted to keep it at a 5 that would be okay too- no one will know.  This lady already knew what I was going to do - never move it.

She also was kind enough to let me know that it took her a year to get used to the seat.  My back side is kind of ample. And yeah, the seat isn't comfy, so, after 45 minutes, I am sure it's not going to be fun.  She may as well have just handed me this card:

So class starts, they never turn the lights on - which is fine, because no one needs to see this on a bike.  Everyone is going up and down, and up and down, and moving their resistance to 80% 95%.. here I am at like 70%.  50 was too easy.  But I am not moving, are you kidding me? It was hard standing up and riding a bike.

I sat on the bike, moved the resistance up some, and moved it back down when she said, and only stood up for a 90% for the 15 seconds once.  It's way hard. Everyone was sweaty, sweat is dripping on the floor, people have their towels to sop up all their mess.  I was getting ready to take off my t-shirt (I had a shirt on under it).  I really wish I had a FitBit One or the FitBit Flex thingy.  Because that is supposed to track your calories based on your personal profile, tracks your sleep and all that other good stuff.  It is also $99.  The Flex has the ability to of a silent alarm as well to wake yer butt up.  So it won't disturb my hub.. which is nice, because now he just groans and grumbles when my phone alarm goes off..

Maybe when I decide I need to spend a substantial amount of money on nothing again I will blow it on that.

But also, there are no widgets on this bike, no distance, no nothing. So what I do know is that I rode it for the full 45 minutes, at probably around 80% resistance on average, and was super sweaty. And my vagine hurt.  Like it still hurts hours later.

I am out on a decision of whether or not to go back.  I felt a little guilty at using the last spot (although there was an empty bike the whole time), I mean, I doubt I would ride a stationary bike that long on my own, but someone else probably really wanted to sweat their balls off for real. Also, even though I was super sweaty, I have no idea on how to figure how much I burned.

Perhaps I will stick to the early morning Body Works plus Abs classes on Tues/Thursday, and try keeping up with the Couch 2 5K training plan around that.

We will see.

Do you have any advice for those spin classes?  Because even when I tried standing up and riding, it was still poking me from behind in a not so PG-13 way.

Lunch : Bagel Dogs!

So, something that I used to eat as a kid, and when I say kid, I mean 14 year old.  Were Bagel Dogs.  My mom got them from the Schwan's Man, when he dropped off our milk. Yeah, we had a milk man.  My mom was busy doing whatever work she was doing, and it was easier to make sure that we had milk in the house if we had someone drop it off.  I guess.

Either way.  Bagel Dogs. I came across a pin on the Pintrest, which brought me to Circle B Kitchen's blog post.

I made them and can cross them off the list of wish to re-create at home.  But I will never do it again.  I am sure the original recipe is fine, and it was probably more of user error or something.  But they were way too much work, and took way too long to make.  And I burned my little fingers.

So, for a true bagel, you need to boil it before you bake it.  All of my hot dogs fell out of their wrappers.  So once I thought they were boiled sufficiently, I took them out, and burned my fingers trying to put them back in their jackets, and getting them to seal up as they dried a little.

They don't look terrible, other than the not being too brown, they were chewy, the salt and seeds were delicious.  I didn't know what else to serve it with, all I could think about was Kraft Cheese and Macaroni.  And then I decided to bust open a can of fruit cocktail for good measure.  We also dipped the Bagel Dogs in traditional hot dog condiments.

I am putting this in the Fail column.

Have you made them and had better results?

Detox!

So, I tried a juice/fruit only detox. To cleanse the system.

It was supposed to go for 5 days.
I gave up after 48 hours(including sleeping hours).

It was nasty. There was a gross tea, and a DISGUSTING banana flavored protein shake.

This morning I couldn't drink all of either servings. My body was rejecting it (literally).

Hopefully the colon got what it needed, not a full rest, but really, the best I could do.

I will say, I did eat 4 apples, 3 clementines, around 4 cups of grapes, 2 cups of mango, and few glasses of juice and water.

Hopefully I got enough antioxidants in my system.

Still have a bunch of fresh strawberries, pineapple, mangos, apples, grapefruit, clementines, grapes and 5 different juices- including prune- gonna have to incorporate those fully so they don't go to waste... :)

The photo doesn't look like a lot, but when your body is fighting to get it down..

Have you ever tried a detox? Did you make it through it? Any suggestions on a better one?

TC10Mile, ugh.

First, let me start out with, that was dumb.

I hated it, just about every mile after 5.  I have completed the 10k, and I have finished plenty of 5K's.  But this one sucked butt.

For real.  Yes. I will never do a 10 Mile ever again.  I honestly haven't run that much since the 10K.  I completed the 10K and the 10Mile with the same lady, whom I greatly adore.  I also completed the Color Run in July with her too.

For the 10 Mile, we walked, jogged and walked some more.  From Minneapolis, to St. Paul.  No thanks, next time, I will just jump in my car, catch a bus, or take a cab if I ever need to get from the Metrodome to the State Capital.  For the record, it is also not the shortest distance to the Capital.  I am almost sure of that.

But, I completed it.

I also received my very first medal!! That was exciting too!!

And because my friend is such a good socializer (I am not) she scored us a couple of passes to the special Medtronic Tent.  After we finished, we grabbed our shirts, and our medals, and headed over to the tent for some refreshments, they had sandwiches, and water, coffee (it was darn cold - it was SUPER windy too) and we got some sacks to put our loot in.  While we were there, they awarded the 1st place for men's, women's, and Marathon runners.  Literally like 10 feet away from where we were standing, trying to soak up some sun. So that was kind of cool.

Here is a mash up of some of my photos - notice the hat? My gloves were in my pockets. 

And this is right before the finish line, like literally 30 yards before I was done. Ugh. Again, never will I ever do another 10 Mile.

Have you ever signed up for something that you perhaps should have prepared a little better for?

Microwave Caramels

Ohhhhh Pintrest, you are a semi-ridiculous obsession.  If you have not heard of Pintrest, man are you lucky.  Basically what it is, is an online corkboard where you 'pin' things you like.  You can have what I imagine are an unlimited amount of boards. 

A few boards that I have are: Dinner, Let's Do Lunch, Breakfast, Drink Up, Spook-tac-u-lar, Bake Me A Cake, and Winter Wonderland.  They are pretty obvious what I have been pinning to each board.  Basically items that would fall into dinner ideas, get pinned to Dinner, lunch to the Lunch board, and Halloween items to the Spook-tac-u-lar board.  Pretty simp - right?  And super addicting.

I literally can waste about an hour a day on that site, on my nifty little iPhone.  If you know anyone that has a Pintrest account, they can attest, that they waste so much time on it.

Well one day back in March or something I came across a Pin for Microwave Caramels that I pinned to my 'Treat Time' board.  Takes only 6 minutes and five ingredients, and you don't have to fuss with a thermometer.  Perfect, because I don't own one of those anyways. 

So I started out, and I swear I always screw up when a recipe calls for x cups of butter.  Plus I hate when it does not indicate if it's salted or unsalted butter.  I know when you bake, generally you use unsalted, but why can't you just indicate if I should be using salted or unsalted butter in the recipe!!! Shoot.. 

At any rate the recipe calls for a 1/4 cup of butter.  I look at the package it says blah blah 1/4 cup of butter.  Perfect.  So I put the whole stick in.

I start melting the butter and the rest of the ingredients.  And at the 3 minute mark, it looks like there is an awful lot of butter in it, what an oil slick.  I have made taffy and caramel before, and I know this is not going to form a cohesive substance no matter how long I have this in the microwave or let cool.  So I scratch my head and think to myself, Self, what the heck went wrong here....  let's look at this again.. okay, 1/4 cup of butter. I re-read the stick of butter, 4 tbs = 1/4 cup, okay.  Look at the stick again.. oh.... there are 8 tbs in a stick.  Why the heck didn't they just say 1/2 stick of butter!!!

SHOOT. Gosh.  Man, sometimes I wish I could comprehend things better.  Well, let's double this biotch.  So I dump in the rest of the ingredients again, to make it double.  And start heating/stirring it up.  I cooked it a little longer because I needed to make sure it all got hot enough to the boiling or whatever that traditional caramels need... and then I decided I would put some in a couple of silicone ice trays that I had that were in the shapes of stars.  Well, doy.  Of course I am going to burn myself with the extremely hot caramel, why wouldn't I? I mean, I have been doing so well with this super simple recipe so far.

Once I have 12 little silicone stars filled, I dump the rest into the buttered 8 x 8 Pyrex, and throw them all in the fridge.  Other people said they wouldn't leave it in there for 20 minutes, so I kept checking them to see if they were hardened enough. 

Uh. No.  I checked at every 5 minutes for an hour.  They were not hard enough.  Then I moved to checking at every half hour. After 2 hours, they were not solid enough.  I would cut through them with a knife, and they were never solid enough to keep the cuts visible.  So I left them overnight, and put the silicone trays in the freezer.

This morning I checked on them, they were sort of ready?  I pulled them out and cut them, and took each piece out, and layed them seperately on a piece of plastic wrap.  And threw them back in the freezer, because I could see they were wanting to relax, spread out again.

Caramels after being in the freezer all day.

They taste good.  I mean, they are soft.  I think it would be super delish to put over ice cream, or throw on some popcorn, well, maybe the popcorn will be too messy yet, since it never really set up.  But it's good, put it in your coffee for a lovely caramel coffee treat.  But yeah, not worth trying to wrap up in individuals.  Too many things went wrong with this to tell if it's user error, or what.  Plus it's in a microwave, and microwaves vary greatly.

Try a different recipe that I have previously posted, check out the ones that are not a fail in my book.

I might make this and then a fudge sauce and then put them in some jars, and give as Christmas gifts or something for an ice cream topping gift.  It really would be good.

The silicones?  I threw them away, caramel stuff and all.

So.  Fail for what I wanted them to be.  But success for ice cream or coffee.  Have you tried this recipe?

*Update*  I dipped the frozen caramels in melted chocolate, to see if the chocolate would hold them together to make them something you could put in a dish or something, it sort of worked, I should have made sure I had a thick coating on them.  The caramel was soft like in a Milky Way bar.

Cream Cheese Poundcake

Well I had been trolling blogs earlier in the week, and came upon a recipe for Cream Cheese Pound Cake.  I had a slice of Lemon Pound Cake the week prior from a gal at work, and it was pretty good.  So I figured, I should make one.  And with cream cheese?  Sounds even better. 

I gathered up all the ingredients and put it together.  I will say I followed what she said, but it took forever to bake.  Literally. FOR-EV-ER.

True story.  I don't think it was worth it.  The crusty part on the bottom was tasty, I cut it off, because it wasn't sitting correctly.  And cut it up, whipped up some heavy cream with some sugar, and served it with strawberries.

Cream Cheese Pound Cake with whipped cream and strawberries.

Like I said, I don't think it was worth it, and will not make it again.  Maybe I am not a pound cake person.  I just didn't understand why people always say how much they love a pound cake, but how it is so fattening that they don't eat it very often.

I am just not going to eat it very often in general. 

But on the plus side, I did make some pretty good whipped cream.  It may not have been very stiff, but I really wanted to avoid the problem I had when I made my Magic Strawberry Ice Cream, where I turned it halfway into butter..

I didn't throw it away (even though I wanted to), I brought it to work and left it in the galley, a.k.a. the magic area where everything gets eaten. Were you looking forward to trying a new recipe only to find out that you wanted to throw it away once it was finished?