Contrition and Maca

I know, I’ve been gone without explanation.  We’ve had a bunch of busy days… Saturday we took a tour of key sites of the Great Awakening (highly recommend!  my history nerds out there, this was so cool).  I might be in the newspaper, we’ll see.  I was acting pretty dorky, which pretty much guarantees they’ll put me in the newspaper, right?  After our tour we had dinner with friends, then Sunday was church, a girlie dress-up birthday party (I didn’t take pictures of myself in the get up… I didn’t want to be too self-centered) and then after we went to Kimball’s farm, THE COOLEST place for ice cream and burgers.  There was nothing like this in Cali and I love it so.  I was able to stay vegan at Kimball’s and the girlie girl party (hey, wine is vegan, right?), though not so much at our friends’ dinner.  I just concentrated on being a good guest and enjoying the company.

Does anyone else love to look at other people’s bookshelves and do you get really excited when you find that you have books in common with someone else?  I do.  Super excited.  The people who hosted us for dinner had the absolute cutest, sweetest little boy and had great books.  I scored a couple to borrow, which also accounts for my absenteeism.  Right now I’m reading “Marriage to a Difficult Man:  The Uncommon Union between Jonathan & Sarah Edwards” and I borrowed “Sex and the Supremacy of Christ.”  I now have about 22,465 books in my “to-read” stack, most of them borrowed.

Today, I experimented with some energy pudding inspired by Miss Gina’s efforts over at her blog and also going from memory from Brendan Brazier’s Thrive. I lent my copy of Thrive to a kick-ass tri-athlete friend of mine (she’s the one who got me into running and she rocks.  And makes the best chocolate chip cookies ever) and vaguely remembered maca being a good thing for training recovery.  As a practice for my 5k run tomorrow (oh yeah, I’m also running a 5k!  How about that?) I made some pudding for my pre-Zumba snack with chia seeds, hemp nuts and coconut milk.  I also dumped in a scoop of maca for good measure.

NEVER, ever, EVER do that.  It will make you gag.  Possibly barf.  This is the strong taste I sometimes catch in Amazing Grass or Vega products.  I never knew what it was before, but now that I have the taste isolated, I know.

I googled around for it to make sure maca really does taste that awful and I didn’t buy a bad batch.  Kristen over at Kristen’s Raw thinks maca usually taste like feet.  I think that’s an insult to feet — I think it tastes like dirt in a sweaty butt crack.  Sorry to be graphic, but that’s the only way you can understand the horror.  Blended with 32 ounces of smoothie, the pudding was tolerable.

That globby stuff in the middle is the pudding. I would totally make this again WITHOUT maca. It's kinda tapioca like.

I have a lot of catching up to do on the ol’ blog! I mentioned last week about a hip-releasing yoga vid I wanted to review, I took a step that might will change my life, I bought one of those Body Bugg things (I call it my Body Buddy) and I wanted to tell ya’ll about my experience with it this past week (hint:  my boss is about to buy one now!) and there’s more to come!!  Sheesh!

Peace (and thanks for sticking around!)

E.