Crock Pot Catastrophe

Good morning! Before I get into the catastrophe I created last night, I’m going to focus on a positive thing I did today: I actually went to the gym this morning!! I know – I can’t believe I actually got up and went. It felt great. It’s so strange when you first try out a routine and you’re figuring out your timeframe and what works. Everything went well.

I left our apartment around 5:45 a.m. and was to the gym and getting on the treadmill by 6:00 a.m. Here’s what I did:

4 miles – 35:07
.5 miles – for a total finishing time of 39:57
75 crunches
25 alternating scissors
50 (25 each side) criss-cross crunches

That was actually a little more than I typically do at the gym after work. I was out of the gym and heading to the subway by 7:40 a.m. or so and even got to work a little bit early. I’m going to look into reserving one of the lockers and keeping some of my stuff there permanently. But it is kind annoying to lug all this stuff around all day.

If you workout at the gym in the morning and head to work straight from there, how do you minimize what you bring to the gym?

Now my eats from yesterday and the catastrophe.

Breakfast yesterday was oatmeal with 1 tsp of pumpkin butter, 1 tsp of almond butter, raisins and a swizzle of agave.

I never post it, but I ate my usual granola bar snack around 11:00 a.m. Since I hadn’t been in the office for a few days, my Monday was hectic and I had a ton of stuff to catch up on. The morning flew by.

Lunch was actually leftovers from last week when I made the rice and beans with grape tomatoes. It was still good and I pretty much devoured it.

Later in the afternoon, I had a Greek honey yogurt with granola (but it was camera-shy or I was just forgetful) and then I had two clementines.

After work, I was all set to go to the gym. I was heading that way, when all of a sudden I got a text from the Hubby saying. “Dinner burned.”

WHAT?! Now, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, on Sunday night I put a bunch of stuff in the crock pot for Monday night’s dinner. Before I left the house Monday morning, I asked Bill to turn it on LOW for 10 hours. I had adapted a recipe I found online and then asked for some tips from my mom before putting it together. This was to be my first crock potting experience. The darn thing has been sitting in our basement for about 3 years.

Here’s the before picture:

I threw together about 2 cups of chicken broth, 2 diced chicken breasts, 1/3 cup of balsamic, a dash of wine, 1/4 cup of chopped onion, one chopped garlic clove, carrots and spinach.

Being worried about my first crock pot dinner, I decided to skip the gym (bad I know!) and flew home to see what devastation awaited me. This was the scene in the kitchen when I arrived:

Sadness!! I was so upset. I made a valiant attempt to salvage the remains with some chicken broth and spices and the end result looked like this:

Hubby and I tried to eat it…but it was just awful. The chicken was dry and it sort of reminded me of cat food. I think if I ever try this one again, it needs a LOT more liquid. Alas, we gave up and I had this for dinner instead.

PB&J sandwich with carrots.

Then I had a little chocolate fix – hot cocoa – to make everything better.

We were so depressed about dinner that I decided to cheer Bill up by holding off on the Christmas decorating for one night and watching Bruno instead.

My take on this movie: it had some funny parts, but overall I wasn’t all that impressed. I definitely think Sascha Baron Cohen is an amazing actor for being able to pull off these incredulous characters, but watching his movies once is usually enough for me. And I liked Borat better than Bruno.

I went to bed shortly after we finished the movie, with my secret intent to get up early the next morning and hit the gym. I’ve stopped telling the Hubby that I’m going in the morning because then he just laughs when I snooze 18 times and never make it. This time I kept quiet about my plan and then confused the heck out of him when I left at 5:45 a.m.

And now I’m thrilled that tonight is free. My plan is to stop at the store, do a load of laundry, make dinner and decorate! It probably doesn’t sound very exciting to others, but to me it sounds divine.

Have a great Tuesday.

P.S. – I got a girl in the Secret Santa thing (we picked yesterday) and I kind of know her, so I’m less Grinch-like today.