The Cake Junkie is feeling tubby. With good reason because, let's face it, I am a little tubbier than I used to be. "A little" in this case being a slow but steady gain of 20-something pounds over the past 20 years, since I was in my early 30s and looking and feeling pretty darned good. You can call it Middle Aged Spread (MAS) if you want to, but it's still pudge and I don't like it.
I had a plan to get rid of it. A nice plan. An easy plan. A plan based on simple math: a half-pound of pudge reduction every week, for one year, would result in being 26 pounds lighter by the end of 2010. That's more than enough! I could hit my target by Columbus Day, easy. And only half a pound a week? Even factoring in a middle-aged metabolism that ought to be doable without too much sweat and deprivation, right? (The Cake Junkie doesn't mind a little sweat, but she prefers a moderate workout to an all-out effort, and who are we kidding: deprivation in the food department is not ever gonna happen.) I figured some mental attention to LOA principles and some mild improvements in the move-your-hiney arena and I'd be on my way. No diet required.
Then Mr. Wonderful filled some night-owl hours by channel-surfing through a glut of workout infomercials, and got majorly psyched to make 2010 the year he fulfills a lifetime dream of becoming "super fit."
So, while I'd been making my minimal-effort-required slim-down plans, Mr. W went ahead and ordered the P90X workout, which promises jaw-dropping body transformation in just 90 days. Now, this kind of high-intensity, push yourself to the max 6 days a week for an hour at a time workout program is not exactly what I had in mind when I decided to get serious about losing weight (slowly!) without going on a diet. So when Mr. Wonderful told me all about it and how excited he is to do it, I figured it would be his thing. He’d sweat and grunt and jump up and down, and I’d take a more leisurely path to a new me. 90 days? What’s your hurry? I just want to be slimmer by the end of the year.
The thing is, now that he’s so pumped up at the P90X idea, I have to admit that I’m kind of curious. Exercise is good. I'm not opposed to it. I do like to move my body some every day, and I do want to be more fit. It’s just that I’d planned to get there the long and lazy way, a teeny tiny bit at a time, over a long time. And I hadn't planned to ever aim for "super fit." Cake Junkie doesn't like to work out that hard, and besides, she's a girl, and she thinks six-pack abs on a girl are weird.
The Law of Attraction works in unexpected ways, however, and I’m unable to ignore the possibility that maybe my beloved hubbie was inspired (in part) to order P90X because it’s something that will be good for his beloved and slightly tubby wife, too.
So probably I ought to at least give it a try. When it gets here.
Good thing the parcel is still in transit, because no way am I starting on a workout program the moment my period arrived (hate the cramps, love the excuse to be lazy and eat chocolate for 48 guilt-free hours). Plus, I’m still working myself up to getting serious about maybe, possibly, doing a workout program with the letter X (for EXTREME!!) in it.
That's not a word that features prominently in my vocabulary. I'm more of an "easy-peasy" type, in all ways.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Herbed Spelt Popovers
Don't know why I had popovers on the brain, but I did. But I wasn't at all convinced they are the kind of food item that can be duplicated using any kind of whole grain flour.
But apparently they can be. I actually followed the recipe almost entirely exactly. The only change I made was that it calls for either whole grain spelt flour or whole wheat pastry flour (and a small amount of AP). I'd planned ahead and put spelt flour on my shopping list, but when I got home from the health food store and reread the recipe I realized that no way was my white and fluffy spelt flour from the bulk bin "whole grain." So I mixed 3/4 cup each WW pastry and spelt flour and added 1/4 C AP and hoped for the best.
I also used whatever dried herbs I had on hand, and about 2 TB of pecorino-romano cheese. The batter was so thin I couldn't imagine I'd get anything other than eggy hocky-pucks from it. The recipe made exactly 3 cups of batter according to the marks on the side of my blender so I used a 1/4 cup measure to fill my buttered 12-muffin tin. Each "cup" was way more than the half-full recommended, which then had me worried that instead of remaining hocky pucks the batter would puff too quickly and I'd end up with baked-on and burnt popover batter all over the floor of my oven.
But my fears were needless. These puffed up gloriously, did not leak and overflow in the oven, and are delicious. Unfortunately, most of them de-puffed significantly as they cooled, so by the time I snapped this pic they were no longer at their most magnificent. I suspect this means they are slightly undercooked, and will bake them a few minutes longer next time. Fortunately, the yum factor is unaffected by deflation and once pulled open they perform admirably as what popovers of any kind really are, which is a delivery vehicle for butter.
We enjoyed these warm from the oven with soup for dinner on Friday night, and yesterday I used one cold from the fridge to make a chicken-avocado-sprout sandwich for lunch. Which was quite good, but the popover was not at its best cold. So for Saturday dinner I sliced a couple open and ran them through the toaster on a light setting. Yum again. There are still a couple left, and in a few minutes I'm going to make myself another chix-avo sandwich, but this time I'm going to toast the popover first. (A microwave oven would probably reheat them nicely, too, but then you'd be microwaving your food, which I don't do for reasons I'll maybe get into some other time and which will reveal my nutjob side.)
Seeing as how it's Sunday, which is "dessert night" in this house, after lunch I am going to make some kind of cupcake (carrot, maybe?) to hold up the leftover lemon frosting I took out of the freezer this morning.
And then I'm going to get serious about slimming down.
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