An Apple a Day....

Still here and still nursing this stupid hip. It has been feeling better at times, and then I go for a run because I am literally DYING here being off the trail. I don't know when I will get this simple equation-

Hip + Running = Pain

Every dang time.

There was a point the other day when it was feeling pretty good, and then I stepped in a pile of dog vomit, in my dining room, which made me jerk my leg up and resulted in renewed pain in that left hip. Nice. Who fed that dog pieces of....apple? Oh, yeah. That would have been me.

I guess even though I LOVE apples, I should not be feeding them to my MBF (Man's Best Friend), Matty. She couldn't resist them since they were what was left of my son's dish of fresh apple pie. For once, Mom was not the clean up crew.

Anyhow, we have a friend who built his log home on an apple orchard. We actually live on the property of an old apple orchard, but our trees have not been taken care of for years, and you have to search for decent apples to use here. Our friend, however, has a few rows of trees left that he did not clear out when building, and he keeps them mowed around and somewhat trimmed. That results in wonderful glorious baskets of free apples for us! I had a laundry basket of apples that I had picked and decided to make apple sauce out of some of them!

   

They may not be beautiful and perfect, but these babies are organic!

First of all, let me express just how much I hate to peel apples. 

It is a lot.

I will sometimes bargain with my husband that if he peels the apples, I will make the crust and put the pie together. Sometime I win. Sometimes not.

I decided that there was no way in Hell I would use up this basket of apples if I did not go out and buy an apple peeler/ corer. 

The local fruit farm had them for $21.00!

 So well worth the money!!

  

It clamps onto the counter and you stick the apple on the prongs and crank the handle.

Wa-LAH!

 

It peels the skin and spiral slices the apple from around the core. You can see the cores in the pan in that picture. It is a true treasure to behold! My mother always had one when I was a kid. I don't know why it took me almost 39 years to buy one myself!

Peels and cores an apple in 10 seconds flat.

 

Even the kids will love the new 'toy' and will BEG to help you in the kitchen!

 

 

So anyway, I used 12 lbs of apples for one batch. Put them in a BIG pot and covered and cooked them for 10 minutes or until they started to get soft. I then took the lid off and continued to cook them and mash them. I added like 1/3 cup of sugar for the whole pot. I should have made it unsweetened, but I was not sure my family would eat much of it if it was not a little sweet. I also added cinnamon and a little sprinkle of nutmeg. I left my sauce fairly chunky. I just prefer it that way. It tastes a little less like baby food to me.

I did most of my mashing with a wooden potato masher that I have, but I also put my stick blender in the pot a few times to break up a lot of chunks.
 

I then prepared my jars and lids and filled them with the fresh hot sauce!

I used the skewer to run up and down the side of the jars to eliminate air bubbles. I processed them in a boiling water bath for 20 minutes and they are sealed and stocked on my basement shelves! I got 7 jars of sauce from my first batch and only 6 from the second because I promised my son that I would leave some out to eat. It is sooooo good!

We are planning to go pick again tomorrow and I will probably make another batch or two of sauce and maybe even can some apple slices for pies for later in the winter. I have never tried those before, but they sure sound like a good option!

Oh! Good news!

I think I am bringing my treadmill home later this week! I am so excited, but I have to do some furniture shifting in order to get it where I want it. It is extremely large but it is beautiful! Can't wait!! I'm praying that the softer surface will be more favorable on my hip while it continues to get better. I am so tempted to go out running on these nice sunny cool days, but I know I need to take it easy. I have only been running every 3-5 days. My goal for the rest of the month:

Get better

and 

Run on!

I Let it Run Me Over....

Serious confession time.
I have fallen off the wagon and it has pretty much run  me over;.
It has been exactly 10 days since I have made it to the trail. I just counted that out and I could SWEAR it has been a lot longer. It feels like forever.
Excuses.
I am not willing to accept that I kind of actually have a REASON for not being on the trail, but I kind of DON'T have a reason. It went a little something like this:
I mentioned that my hip has still been giving me problems. I would pop an 800 mg Advil and go on with it.
That is what I thought I was doing. In actuality, I was popping them like Tic Tacs because I was walking how my friend was walking when she needed a knee replacement. In my case, it was my hip. Have you ever watched someone walk with that big gimping gait? I was close to it- unless I was hopped up on something to take away the pain. It was to the point that I would actually wake up in the middle of the night because I needed to shift my leg a little because my hip hurt so bad. I have a high pain tolerance, so I thought nothing of it. I started to realize that it wasn't really okay to take so much Advil all the time, so probably around the time I wrote my last post, I decided to take a few days off. I was pretty sure it wasn't a muscular kind of pain, because it was deep- like in my hip socket kind of deep. One of the NP's at work is also a college track coach assistant and I was jokingly telling her that I had bursitis of the hip. She asked me a few questions- does it hurt when you walk? Yeah. Does it hurt when you lay on it? Yep.When you stand alone on that leg? Uh huh. That was self diagnosis enough for me. She was not trying to diagnose me, but she could tell that I was walking different at different points of the day (i.e. when my Advil was wearing off). So anyhow, I gave it a few days. I guess I expected it to get better in like 2 days, and when it didn't, I was surrendering myself to the idea that I would never be able to run again without pain. That idea caused me to fall back on my usual way to cope- eat. I was still fixing good meals, but my problem is always snacking. Mostly chocolate. And things with icing. My son's birthday last weekend. He suggested one of those pan sized cookies decorated with icing. I jumped right on it! And I proceeded to eat probably half of it by myself. Then I took them to DQ for Blizzards the next day. And then again 2 days later. Donuts at work.....
Holy Hell.
I'm lucky I did not gain 10 pounds!
All the while, still pain and still popping Advil.
This hip is never going to get better!
It has been a loooong 10 days.
And then I went to get out of bed this morning. Stood up and braced myself for that first few really gimpy steps.....there were none. And then I realized that I had not been woken by hip pain for the past 2 nights, and that I had not even taken any Advil for the last day and a half! Finally there is light at the end of the tunnel!!
So this whole time that I have been beating myself up over this hip thing, and feeling like I really needed to rest it, and when I was resting it, it was not getting better fast enough for me, and I felt like I really should just pop some pills and run it out, but I was afraid to for fear of injuring it worse, so I let myself go a bit overboard with the sweets....I need to stop, take a deep breath, and
refocus.
I don't want to totally scrap my goals for the month, but realistically, I know I can not make 125 miles by the end. Every dang day I feel guilty about not going for my run. I have worked more hours in the past 2 weeks, so I am not having as much time in the evenings with having to pick kids up from football, having to make dinner, etc. When I had a goal to reach, I didn't have much problem with making my runs priority. I know I have lost focus and I need to get it back.
The scale was not moving much before, but I have gained 3 of those pounds back in the last 10 days. Not a big surprise with what I have been snacking on. Like I said, my meals have been good. I have been doing food prep and pretty much sticking to chicken burgers, turkey meatloaf,  and veggies for lunches and dinners.
These are chicken burgers and yam fries that I made the other day- yum!

And I even got on a muffin making kick on Sunday- they were clean recipes.

 

 I need to figure out how to get back on track. Just because I can't exercise, I can't let that be an excuse to pig out. There are bound to be times when I won't be able to exercise, so I need to be able to not throw all my hard work away in a few days of binging! I am going to have to work on getting the treadmill that my friend is going to let me buy. It is amazing how just 10 days of not running and 3 pounds can make a girl feel like a fat sausage.

Frozen Banana Bliss

I am certainly not the inventor of this idea, but oh my, I will definitely brag about it!

A while back, I came across a 'clean' way to make a substitute for ice cream. You take bananas and freeze them and when processed in a food processor, they have a consistency closely resembling a soft serve ice cream.

I have used this method to make peanut butter banana frozen stuff, and also chocolate banana or chocolate peanut butter banana. Y.U.M.

Today I came across a blog called The Gracious Pantry.

I am in love with this woman and her kitchen creativeness!

She had a recipe for Clean Eating Cherry Almond Ice Cream.

I was immediately intrigued.

I have this bad (good) habit of buying too much when it comes to fruit sometimes. I try not to eat too much of it because of the natural sugar content, so I either have to put it in the freezer or it will go bad in my refrigerator. I have let far too many things perish because I did not get it in the freezer soon enough. So as a result, I have baggies of frozen cherries, strawberries, blueberries, and I also peel and freeze bananas almost every time I buy a bunch. Some weeks the bananas don't last 2 days because the boys get a craving for them, and some weeks I have to freeze 4 or 5 bananas at a time because no one will touch them. I like to have a small variety of fruits for the boys to choose from, but I hate it when things go bad  I will admit- whereas I love banana flavored things, I do not love raw bananas. I am okay with them mixed in things, but I can't remember the last time I peeled one and ate it.

I knew I had the ingredients to make a similar dessert as the one I found. I had 3 frozen bananas and threw them in the processor with what looked like a 1-1.5 cups of cherries that I had pitted and frozen. I also used 1/8 tsp of almond extract, but probably could have used the whole 1/4 tsp that the recipe called for. The result?

 

Mmmmmm...cherry-banana goodness!

I offered some to my husband (who always refused offers of my other banana concoctions) and he actually ate it. Didn't say either way if he loved it or not, but he ate it.

I have discovered that I can not take part in this delightful dessert very often. Eating bananas like this always leaves my mouth a little sore. I noticed it the last time I had made something similar and I ate it two nights in a row. My mouth was sore for another two days. So, no go on the banana anything for another few days now.

But seriously. It's delicious.

On to other matters....

I still have not set my goals for the month of September. At first I thought I was going to aim for 150 miles and be worked up to running 10 miles at a time. I am second guessing that now and I really think I need to dial it back a little. Not only because I am chicken to shoot for something that big, but because I think I need to get myself conditioned better for 6 and 7 milers. I went out on Saturday morning thinking I was going to get an easy 5 in, but I never hit that 'zone' that lets me forget about stuff and just run. I ended up cutting it to 3 because I was struggling. I had no concentration, the boys had to be up in an hour to get ready for football (one had practice and one had a game), and I had to be back in time to make sure they got where they needed to be on time. Sure, my husband was home, and he could have gotten them up and to the school, but I am a bit of a control freak about stuff. I have to work on that someday. :-)

So Saturday was a crappy run. Sunday I was fully ready to give it my all because I did not have anything planned at a certain time. I went out to run 7, but only ended up running 5 1/2 and then walking the rest out. Ugh. I should not be upset with myself about it, but I sort of am. My left hip is still bothering me. It has been for some time now. I'm not sure what exactly is making it hurt, but I'm dealing with it. It was really flared up when I did my 3 day stint of 6 plus miles last week. So, for that reason alone, I feel like I should just work on my conditioning this month for the longer runs. I was just doing some calculations, and I feel like I should set my goals for 125 miles and keep my runs to 5-7 miles each when possible. I already have 10 miles in, so I'm off to a good start. 

One last little note:

We were going to a friend's party yesterday, and I wanted to pick up a new pair of capri's to wear. I brought a (hopeful) size 14 into the fitting room along with a (standard) size 16. I tried on both, and although the 14's were slightly snug, they were made from that wonderful stretchy denim (best stuff ever!) so I knew I could get away with those! They were mostly just snug across my hips and not as much in the thighs so I didn't look like a completely stuffed sausage :-) I was happy to be able to squeeze into the 14's again. I do hate buying clothes right now because I do not expect to be wearing these sizes next year! I will get another month or two out of capri's, and they were $9 on clearance, so yeah. I needed them.

Anyone else set goals every month? If so, what kind of goals do you set?