I love Productive Saturdays!!

LiveFit Day 17 & 18

First thing this morning, I went to Zumba class with my mom! I stayed at the gym after class and finished Day 17 and Day 18 of Jamie Eason’s LiveFit program.

I don’t stick 100% with Jamie’s program. I follow the schedule exact, but sometimes for the sake of getting out of the gym quicker or if someones using a machine I need, I’ll just switch up the exercises a bit, while still working the muscle group she suggests. Today I combined Day 17 & 18 so I could stay on track to start Week 4 of Phase 1 on Monday. I haven’t weighed myself for about three weeks now and I can definitely see a difference in my body, especially my upper body, but I’m not sure I’ve lost any weight. Guess we’ll see on March 4th when I weigh-in!

Food!

I had a productive day in the kitchen today! I made a few things that’ll last me at least a few days, or even through the week. I hard-boiled some eggs to snack on the whites between meals and also I eat them in the mornings alongside my smoothies.

I baked/roasted sweet potato with cinnamon and sugar on top! Yum!

I made some homemade salsa (Tomato, Red Onion, Cilantro, Garlic, Salt, Pepper, Lime Juice, Onion salt) that turned out DEE-lish!

 

I also made this recipe (below) for the second time because I can’t get enough of this Mushroom Soup! It turned out great the first time, and even better this second time now that I added some spinach and tweaked the texture slightly!

 

Vegan Spinach Mushroom Soup

Here’s the recipe, with my changes/comments in red:

Ingredients:

• 3/4 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced (I use 1lb mushrooms)
• 1/2 small onion, diced (I use 1/2 c. pre-chopped frozen onions)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tbsp vegan margarine (Earth Balance)
• 3 cups vegetable broth
• 2 tbsp flour
• 1 cup vegan non-dairy sour cream substitute (Tofutti brand)
• 1 cup soy milk
• salt and pepper to taste
• ~2c. of chopped, fresh Spinach
• 1/8c. dried Thyme

Preparation:

In a large soup or stock pot, sautee the mushrooms, onion and garlic in vegan margarine and for 5 minutes, until onions are soft.

Reduce heat to medium low and add the vegetable broth. Cover and allow to simmer for at least 30 minutes.

I prefer smaller chunks of mushroom vs. the whole pieces as the recipe suggests. It makes the texture a lot thicker and covers up the “soy” taste of the vegan sour cream and soy milk a bit better. So, after the mushrooms and onions have simmered for 30 minutes, I scooped out the chunks of mushroom and ran it through my food processor …

Once blended, add the flour, non-dairy sour cream and soy milk; then stir.

Allow mixture to simmer another 15 minutes, or until soup has thickened. Add in the chopped spinach and stir.

Season generously with salt and pepper before serving (I ended up using roughly 1/8 tsp black pepper and 1/2 tsp of salt).