6:30 AM Cooking Madness

*I apologize for the coloring in these photos! My camera is kind of going nuts.*

Since last night I’ve done two sessions of Insanity and seriously, I’m in love. I really like how it implements sports moves (football, basketball) and I’m so excited to finally have some plyo in my life. I was starting to feel like a running robot for a while. TIP if you do Insanity: have water around. I realize this is easy in the US where you can drink from the tap, but tonight I only had 1/2 bottle of water and during the breaks I was frantically running around finding scraps of unfinished bottles (gross). The workouts made me sweat so much and having no water made me want to well, die a little bit. ALSO I recommend having a towel handy because things tend to get a little slippery…haha….if you have tile like me.

Frantic!!

This morning started at 6:30 AM (WHYYYY??). I can’t use my blender that early because it annoys my ornery neighbors, so I ended up making an (excellent) oat pancake with banana soft serve (made BSS last night and re-froze).

Sent from the heavens

1/2 cup oats, 2 egg whites, baking powder, cinnamon, hemp protein, 1 massive frozen banana. This thing seriously kept me full for over 5 hours. How is that possible?

Anyway, after breakfast it was only 7:30 and I had 3 hours to kill until I had to trek to school. I decided to get started on my dinner for later….haha is that sad or what? I wanted to make refried beans but I only had black eyed peas (which I’m still shocked are here in China) so I went ahead and tried to make refried BEPs.

Refried BEPs

Soaked and cooked BEPs, half an onion, 2-3 cups of water (so beans were just covered), S&P, loads of cumin, chopped garlic and cayenne. I had no idea what I was doing, but it smelled good so I felt like I was onto something.

At the same time I started making brocolli soup:

Soup Starter

Broc Attack

This soup is the easiest crapola in the world. I just sauté and then steam 2 chopped carrots, 1 chopped onion and a few stalks of chopped celery, as well as one large head of broccoli (all with S&P). When they are nice and soft, I throw everything in a blender with extra water (vegetable stock is ideal here).

Blenda

Then it turns into this:

Soupsky

It’s awesome if you add other spices like curry powder, cayenne, etc., but I wanted it plain for some reason. I also added some soy milk for creaminess!

Creamy

And last but not least….Buffalo tofu. HOT sh**.

Wonderful

This meal is seriously just vegetables, herbs and tofu. NO added fat (maybe a tiny bit…2 grams or so? in the 1/2 cup of soy milk). That’s my kind of dinner =). If I have some fats I definitely like to have them earlier on in the day, otherwise I feel kind of like hell when I go to sleep. Unless it’s ice cream, that never seems to make me feel like hell =).

So all of this happened before 9:00 AM. Um. Ridiculous. I ended up strolling over to school early and had massive amounts of testing (all of the exams are starting to sound the same). “Do you like noodles?” “Yes, I love them!” “What kind of noodles do you like?” “I like beef noodles or mutton noodles.” “Me too, let’s go get some together.” “SOUND’S GREAT!” The good news: the kids are still being completely cute and respectful recently. Yay! Only two more days and then end of the year parties, YES. Those were always the best in middle school.

Oh yeah, what happened to the refried black eyed peas? They were sick. In the good way. After they cooked for a while, I mashed them up, added a bit more water, mashed them more, then mixed them with some of the soup. Then threw them on top of a microwaved (unfortunately, no ovens in China) potato:

Beans n' soup n' potato

Chinese Tupperware

And there you have it. My 6:30 AM Cooking insanity. Followed by School insanity (lots of drama to be discussed later). Followed by sweaty Insanity. OK I promise to use that word as little as possible from now on.

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