Please Save The Yellowstone Bison from slaughter!

Please Save The Yellowstone Bison from slaughter! I have an ongoing petition with more than 400 people who have signed it. I am trying to reach a 1000 signatures – thank you and the animals thank you too!

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/178/606/494/demand-an-end-to-the-yellowstone-bison-slaughter/#

Friendly Baby Finch and photos from the day.

🙂 Hope your weekend is going well!

I’m enjoying my vanilla soy chai on this beautiful Saturdayafternoon!

We have many Finches come and visit us in the backyard. They love to play in the bird bath and enjoy eating from the sunflowers. Today something very cute and surprising happened! While my Dad was watering the backyard a baby finch came and sat on his shoulder and then jumped onto the water hose while he was watering the plants! We couldn’t believe our eyes! It then flew into the plant that my Dad was watering and wanted to take a shower in it I guess! It even sat on my Mom’s finger!!! It was the CUTEST thing EVER!

I’ll leave you with a picture of this baby and the rest of the garden photos from today 🙂

Till next time ❤

Happy Weekend!

So true! 🙂

Pancakes for breakfast <3

Last night I did Turbo Jam Learn & Burn, half hour of fast walking and my 80 squats. I-AM-SORE 🙂

Day off from work today and I lay in bed thinking about what to have for breakfast, my tummy was growling.

I haven’t had pancakes in a while and that thought brightened my day!

I used this site: http://myvega.com/vega-life/recipe-center/vegan-banana-protein-pancakes/ and modified it a bit.

Protein Pancakes (3 med-large pancakes)

1 scoop vanilla protein powder

1 large banana

3/4 cup quick cooking oats ground to powder

1/2 – 3/4 cup almond milk (your milk of choice) to thin it out

0.5 tablespoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

salt to taste (I didn’t use any)

Coconut oil for the pan (1 tablespoon for all three of my med-large panackes)

I ground the dry oats to powder first in my Magic Bullet. Then threw in all the ingredients together until thick consistency. If too thick pour more milk to thin it out. Next, warm up the pan on very low heat, add some coconut oil and  pour the mixture. The pancake will be ready to flip in about 2-3 minutes, make sure you don’t leave it on for too long, it will burn quickly! I made 3 med-large pancakes out of this! It was soft and beautifully bananaish!!!

I poured a little maple syrup on top and green tea. I’m happy & filled! 🙂

Till next time!

Counting calories & Delicious Green Goop Smoothie

I LOVE food. All sorts of food, vegetarian of course. Enough said. 😉

I am not a fan of exercising. I have to force myself to do this. Whether it be running, biking, going to the gym. I am always wowed by those individuals who can get up at 5-6 am and head off to the gym and get a good sweaty workout in before work or school. Those people who, despite snowy windy dark cold mornings, get up, put on their running gear and run miles upon miles, I bow down to you.

I’ve tried it…once, maybe twice. When “V” & I were getting to know each other long distance we tried to keep things interesting and fun by coming up with THIS plan – we tried to motivate each other to go gymming early in the morning. We’re in the same time zone at least, so he’d call me up at 5-5:30 am to wake me up so we both could go to our respective gyms. I would pick up the phone, try my best to not sound grumpy, roll out of bed and…well the gym thing worked maybe ….two times? After that…*evil grin*. I answered the phone, lied to him I was waking up, hung up the phone….then, I slept. 😉 Needless to say, that plan didn’t last.

Lately, I have noticed my energy surge in the evenings. I can get a fast walk/jog/run in at NIGHT (10 pm). It feels great going to bed after that. Am I weird? Does anyone else do this? I’m a little worried that my hormones/inner chemistry is out of whack and this could affect me in the long run.

I have also been calorie-counting. I used myfitnesspal & it worked last year during my exams and helped me drop a good 15 lbs. I was eating what I liked, Indian food, pizza, pasta but just made sure I logged them in to see where I stood with my calories that day. It was very much a reality check. When I worked out, I burned food off, gained calories which I could eat back if I was hungry. After this period of time last year, I traveled abroad didn’t do the calorie counting thing, came back home and gained the weight back. Yup, not good.

I’ve started back up on myfitnesspal and I’ve upped my calories. I used to be at 1200, but since I’ve started running often, Turbo Jamming, keeping up with my squats and also started temporary work (I’m getting up at 6:00 am these days) I find that by the time I have a GOOD filling breakfast , snacking (apple, banana, fibre bar) before lunch, having a filling lunch I have pretty much almost run out of calories. So I’ve upped it to 1400, lets see how this goes.

Anyone else use myfitnesspal to log in your food? I love the inspirational stories on there! Have a story to share?

Bored already? 🙂

Here’s my Green Goop Smoothie! I felt like a smoothie for dinner today (in a beer glass), it was pretty thick so the straw was a big FAIL.

Here’s my recipe.

Green Goop Smoothie

Half banana
1 – 1.5 cup milk of choice (almond, soy, regular)
1 scoop vanilla protein powder of choice
1 heaping tablespoon nut butter of choice (I used peanut butter)
a handful of spinach
optional: ice if you like it cold

Blend until there are no large spinach pieces or stems. Ick! Pour into your favourite glass & enjoy! hope you like this 🙂

Till later!

My afternoon…with pics!

Woke up late today and been lazing around at home, chilling with my Grannie. We get along just fine because secretly I am an inner-Grannie myself. 😉

Brunch consisted of instant coffee & cereal (no milk).

Checked up on my baby fish! Our guppies had three babies yesterday and we made sure to separate them from the adult fish so they wouldn’t get gobbled up! I feel they have grown overnight! I think there may be more babies on the way, two of our guppies have big bellies! Any advice from anyone on how to make sure they grow into healthy adults?

It’s a beautiful afternoon, blue skies and breezy. Bumble bees are out and about. Our Apple Tree has many many apples!

My squat challenge – yesterday Day 2 complete! Yet to complete Day 3.

Thank you for the total 20 likes! ❤

Till next time!

I’m taking a 30-day challenge.

The squat challenge:

Let’s see how this goes 🙂

Day 1 – done!
Plus 45 mins of fast walk/jog without too much knee pain! I call this a good day 🙂

And this…..

……is what got me through my run today ❤

Well hello there :)

So what’s been happening since last time?

– First off I want to thank Rachelle @ http://sweethomepasadena.wordpress.com/ for nominating me for the Liebster Award!! What an honor & I am so excited! Thank you so much Rachelle 🙂 I will be writing about this in the above new page/tab. Yayaya!

– I got to catch up with my best buds over some awesome food at Boston Pizza. Isn’t it just amazing when you haven’t seen each other in so long because you’re in different countries and when you finally sit down to catch up it’s as if you haven’t missed a beat! Best ever! 🙂 We girlies ended up sharing two huge salads, Strawberry Pecan & the Santa Fe. Then we ordered a large Spicy Perogy pizza. We could barely finish two slices! It was deliciousy spicy and perogy-ish! ❤ We ended off with coffee and as the night went on we still hadn’t finished talking so we ordered one brownie with coffee refills! What A NIGHT! I was wired from all that coffee & couldn’t sleep till 4 am 😉

– I’ve been working on my residency applications & getting it ready to send off in September. Personal statements, LORs, CV, online applications, researching programs. Argh! So a little bit of time before that but still a lot left to do. Hope this turns out to be a successful year for me. It’s getting to be a very expensive process – from school to applications!

– I’m been bad about my exercise habits. There are too many days inbetween which are “rest days”. Yikes!

– “V” received his birthday gift! I sent him a “Birthday Box” filled with all sorts of goodies! ❤ He loved it!

– Another birthday coming up this week, my best friend is celebrating her 30th! 🙂 We have something planned to send her!

– I tried my own recipe for protein brownies. It was a big time fail! I baked it and it was so so soooo dry my family almost choked. I ended up eating it soaked in almond milk 😛

– I’ll end off with a very simple peanut chutney recipe I made yesterday and today which is a big hit at home! We eat this with dosa or you can even spread it over toast / roti and enjoy it! Watch out for the spicyness factor, it can make your mouth and tummy burn 😉 Just like I am experiencing right NOW!

Ok, well not the most attractive photo. Kinda looks like hummus….or well….ok it’s peanut chutney 😉

Peanut Chutney

1 cup raw peanuts

1 tablespoon tamarind paste

1 tablespoon honey

0.5 – 1 teaspoon green chilli ( I prefer this) OR red chilli flakes depending on how spicy you like it

0.25- 0.5 teaspoon salt to taste

water to thin out the chutney while grinding

Dry roast the peanuts in the microwave for about a minute to a minute and a half on high. Make sure you watch that it doesn’t burn.

Next take the tamarind paste and stick it in a bowl with about 1/4 cup water and heat it in the microwave for about 30 seconds. Take out any seeds.

Then after both the peanuts and tamarind water cools down I stick them all in my handy dandy Magic Bullet and grind the peanuts, tamarind with water, honey, chilli, salt and keep adding water to thin it out – BUT not TOO watery.

Other recipes will mention adding onion / garlic, but I decided to keep it simple and it turned out delicious and NO extra added OIL 🙂

You can keep the chutney in the fridge and use the left overs for another day! YUM! ❤

Till next time!

So much to update about!

But can’t update y’all now.

Got my run on & am about to get ready to head out to dinner with my friends! Looking forward to catching up over some good food & drinks!

I’ll leave you with something I found truly inspirational.

Till next time! 🙂