Warrior Dash
I signed up for the Warrior Dash this summer. It doesn’t get much more Primal than this!
To quote the site:
WARRIOR DASH IS A MUD-CRAWLING, FIRE-LEAPING, EXTREME RUN FROM HELL.
THIS FIERCE RUNNING SERIES IS HELD ON THE MOST CHALLENGING AND RUGGED
TERRAIN ACROSS THE GLOBE. WARRIORS CONQUER EXTREME OBSTACLES, PUSH
THEIR LIMITS AND CELEBRATE WITH KICK-ASS MUSIC, BEER AND WARRIOR HELMETS.
How can you not like the sound of that?
Primal Meatballs!
Ive been watching a cooking show the last few weeks, called America’s Next Great Restaurant One of the contestants is doing a meatball place called “Saucy Balls” This got me in the mood to make some meatballs. So I headed over to Marks Daily Apple and found this great primal meatball recipe: Italian Sausage Meatballs with Fresh Herbs. I made a double batch since I had to buy full packs of herbs and didn’t want them to go to waste. I also made a nice simple Marinara Sauce, I’ll post the recipe later. They were perfect and the rest are going in the freezer to have for quick meals and lunches. One note, I baked mine in the oven at 450 for about 15 minutes(depends on the size of the meatballs)
Primal Blueprint Quick and Easy Meals
I just got my copy, and have alreeady made a couple meals from it. I’ll be sure to post on them. Overall a good well organised cookbook, full of great ideas to make living primal easier(and better tasting) You can grab a copy from Marks Daily Apple
One Local Summer Week 2
As part of the One Local Summer Challenge I have been trying to make more meals from local ingredients, and at least one meal a week from all local ingredients. So to this end, I headed out early Saturday morning to the Minneapolis Farmers Market. I picked up a bunch of different vegetables, most local and some not. As for the meal, well there, I tried some amazing brats(Peps Pork) and had to get some. I then picked up some rolls, lettuce, tomatoes(Bushel Boy) and some WI gorgonzola cheese(Black River) for a salad. For a dressing a I made up a simple quick Olive Oil & red wine vinegar dressing. Te brats were by far some of the best I have had and wish I could get some more before next weekend!
one local summer
Thanks to Jenny over at The Nourished Kitchen I found out about a 13 week eating local challenge. I have been trying to eat more locally and living in a more sustainable way, so this challenge fits right in with what I’m doing. Basically you have to commit to making 1 meal a week from local ingredients and then blog about the meal. Eating local, fresh ingredients fits right in with the primal lifestyle, I’m sure Grok didn’t have tomatoes flown in from Mexico. If your interesting in joining the challenge or just finding out more out it check it out at Farm To Philly
Progress, Not Perfection
I started this off about a month ago fully intending not to do what I always do – Procrastinate. Sure enough, I got busy at work, some other things came up and wham, no more blogging and I lost focus on my whole life project. I was doing pretty good to, I had lost about 10lbs in a month following the Primal Diet(mostly) and was feeling much better both mentally and physically. So I did a solo camping trip last weekend and it was cold and rainy and had a lot of time to think while being trapped in my tent. I decided I am going to redouble my efforts, and get back on track. I need to. So hopefully I will be posting a lot more and trying to really get into the whole primal lifestyle. I hope maybe someone else will read this and be inspired, and as the saying goes, “progress, not perfection” or something like that.
Kiva – Small Loans, Big Results
As part of my whole life project here one of my goals was to become more involved in helping others and along those lines I discovered a website called Kiva. I want to recruit you all to my lending team, The bradk Way, on Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur across the globe. You choose who to lend to – whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq – and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.
If you join my lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you’re a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva "count" towards our team’s impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you – but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team’s collective portfolio, so our team’s overall impact will grow!
Check out the The bradk Way lending team, and learn more about lending teams on Kiva in general, by clicking here: The bradk Way Kiva Lending Team
Cobb Salad for Lunch
How can you not like a diet that lets you eat salads like this? This is my cobb salad made from from a Recipe on Marks Daily Apple. He’s got a bunch of other great salad recipes in this article 10 Classic DIY Salad Creations The others look good too, but the cobb salad is by far my favorite.
The Recipe
2 hard-boiled eggs, peeled
3 bacon slices, cooked
1 head romaine lettuce, leaves separated and torn into bite-size pieces
4 cups diced cooked turkey or chicken (leftovers work best!)
1 avocado, pitted, peeled and diced
1 tomato, chopped
1/4 cup of blue cheese
Dressing:
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 clove garlic, peeled and minced
1/3 cup olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
Arrange lettuce in the bottom of a plate or shallow bowl. Feel free to get artsy arranging the rest of the ingredients (rows of vegetables are a popular method, but if you feel like just chucking it all in, go ahead!).
For the dressing, whisk together the wine vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, garlic, salt, and pepper. Once combined, drizzle in the olive oil to form a thick dressing. Add to salad and serve immediately.
My Diet Goals
Diet. Its an ugly word, most often bringing to mind tasteless food(like rice cakes) and starvation. But I am talking about a healthy, sustainable lifestyle. My main goal at this time is admittedly a little superficial. Summers almost here and I want to look good. I live in Minnesota now, and the winters have not been that conducive to staying in shape. So I have started on Primal/Paleolithic diet/lifestyle. Its more of an experiment now and I am easing my way into it. I started about two weeks ago, and initially weighed 222lbs. My Goal is to be below 200lbs by June, which works out to about 10lbs a month, which should be fairly doable without losing lean body mass. The average person can burn about 2lbs of fat a week, any more and your losing lean body mass, or just losing water weight. Luckily I have a very fast metabolism(although you wouldn’t know it by current weight) and burning 2.5lbs doesn’t seem like it will be an issue for me. Currently I am fluctuating between 215-217.5. I think Easter might have set me a back a few days, but I am back on track now. So far I haven’t brought much exercise into my routine yet, but that is going to start changing now that the weather is getting nicer. I will be posting a chart of my progress in the near future as well a s a couple of programs/web sites that I have found very useful for tracking my progress.
Personal Business Cards?
One thing I have been thinking about lately are personal business cards or “Profile Cards” as they are sometimes called. I think it would be useful to have something with my personal contact information to hand out to people when my business contact information just wouldn’t be right. For instance I was taking some pictures of people kite skiing on the lake a few weeks ago and one of them asked if they could get a copy of the pictures, it would have been great to have a card to hand them and say check on my flickr page. There’s a couple of different formats they come in, the normal business card size and a smaller “profile card” size. I am kind of leaning towards the profile size as it seems a lot less formal. Now the question is what do information do I include on it? I’m thinking, name, phone, website, twitter and linked in. To start off I am going to order some small profile cards from Zazzle (shown in picture) and some business card sized ones from MOO. I’ll be sure to post pictures when they arrive and some more thoughts. In the mean time what are your thoughts on personal business cards and what would you include?
