smoothie fail, curry win.

I woke up bright and early for a run with M this morning, and the heat was OPPRESSIVE.  I forgot how bad the humidity is here.  We were scheduled for 2.5 miles, which we managed to do without walking... but thank goodness for the two stop lights we got stuck at!  I needed those seconds to catch my breath.  I think towards the end of the run, I said something the effect of "it feels like my heart is in my stomach."  M had similar sentiments.

Since it was ridiculously hot, we didn't run terribly fast: we averaged 11:22 minute miles for the 2.5 miles.  I miss feeling speedy at the end of my runs already, but with this much heat, I'll just have to be satisfied with finishing a run, and leave the speedy parts for when the weather cools down or I'm on a treadmill!

I will say that after a less-than-awesome day yesterday, a morning run has really put me in a better mood!  After I cooled down, I made myself a smoothie for breakfast.  Round two is... not as good as round one.  I put in: 1 cup of milk, 1 1/2 handfuls of spinach, and 8 frozen strawberries. 

I wasn't loving the taste, so I added 2 tsp. of Splenda, but even still... I'm not digging it quite as much this morning.  My new classmate/friend Ilana, who is also new to the blog world, makes smoothies regularly... so I might have to hit her up for some tips!

 Tonight for dinner, I made Vegetable Curry with Couscous.  I was in a curry kind of mood and a little short on time, so this 20 minute recipe was a perfect choice!  The book recipe doesn't say specifically red pepper (as the website does), so I went with green pepper.  Mostly because they were $0.99 and the other colors were $3.49 or something ridiculous like that.  Can you believe that?  Why are the other color peppers so much more money?  Probably because I like them better.  So, step one was just to prepare couscous as usual:

After that, I started on the veggies/sauce.

 Then, half way through making this I realized I never bought the chutney.  So I did a quick google search and found that marmalade or mango salsa can be used as a substitution.  Luckily I had some marmalade in the fridge!  I think the marmalade made this dish sweeter than it would have normally been.  I also probably put a few too many raisins in the dish - or rather, I had too many raisins vs. vegetables. 

So, the dish was overall quite a bit sweeter than it probably should of been, but I just added some extra curry powder to compensate!  I definitely want to try this again so that I can see how it tastes with chutney and more vegetables.

In conjunction with making dinner, I also prepared myself lunch for tomorrow.  I'll be enjoying Tuna-Feta Salad.  This recipe was ridiculously simple... no cooking involved!  Just mixing up a bunch of stuff and letting it sit, at least for an hour, or in this case, overnight.

I'm pretty excited to have this tomorrow - I have recently become fairly obsessed with red onion, and one bite of Cannellini beans tell me I should be excited about them as well!