Peachtree Week -2.5

The garden is in great shape and I'm excited for the first ripe tomatoes, which I assume will arrive in a couple of weeks.

I'd been going with a week-based countdown for Peachtree.  But, July 4 is on a Wednesday.  Which means, my Monday start of the week leaves me with less than half a week for the final one.  So, I'll call this check-in Week -2.5.

Also, it just feels like we're getting closer to the 4th of July at a faster rate than I can describe and I think that's because the seasonal change makes everything Summer feel much more imminent.

I had a great week.  23.87 miles of walking/hiking/running with 67% running including a nice solid 9 miler at 11:56, some speedwork in the 8s & 9s, and 2 strength mile intervals between biking to the trail and back with E in the mid 10s.  The hiking was unplanned, but a friend texted me the night before and asked if I wanted to go hike the Stanford Dish the next morning while she was unexpectedly in town.   YES!  I love combining my workouts with catching up with friends.

Cross-training is an area of improvement -- I'm making the time and effort to do some stretching and rolling to try to avoid returning to my left leg hamstring/glute insertion issue.  I also ramped up to a very hardcore (for me) 30 minutes of 1:30/1:30 jumprope with calisthenics (pushups, scissor kicks/crunches, side lunges, knee thrust planks, dips, front & back lunge leg extensions, side plank leglifts, deep squats/cross knee to elbow, jab-jab-cross; pelvic bridge) -- my goodness does this workout kill me.  Plus, I fit in a bonus 12 miles of random biking (I owe E for this one, he prefers to bike as his transit and so I opted in a few times when we were going somewhere together).

On the food side of things, last week was the second week in a row where we slept at home all week.  This means I can cook dinner every night and do bulk food prep for freezing, which is something I love to do.  I absolutely love having frozen pinto beans, hummus, and other healthy home-made treats available for defrosted use.

Yellow squash noodles

Saturday night, we had a typical "let's eat the random stuff left in the fridge" before we go to the Farmer's market meal.  The ingredient that needed to be used before it went bad?  Yellow summer squash.  Examining our other ingredients, I decided to go with a carbonara-inspired dish that wasn't really carbonara at all.

Yellow squash noodles with a carbonara-inspired preparation 

of ground turkey, garlic, eggs, milk, and pepperjack cheese 

topped with fresh-grated SarVecchio (parmigiana-style hard cheese from Wisconsin) 

Like many of my food experiments, it was... good.  Not great.  Definitely not carbonara.  But a good meal that used up the ingredients we had lying around in a warm and yummy way.  It had been a while since I'd cooked with squash noodles and I'd forgotten that even if you salt them and let them drain, they do continue to give off more water when heated.  Perhaps next time I'll bake them before tossing them in the saucepan.