New Goodies, Farmer’s Market & Tempeh

Almost Friday, woohoo! And I’m trying to find motivation to run when my weather widget is reading 101 degrees currently. I’m all for toughing it out, but that may be beyond my threshold. I dunno, the air-conditioned elliptical may be calling me instead. Today was another insanely busy day at work and a bit annoying since they decided to over-compensate for the heat with air conditioning, I actually started getting chilled sitting at my desk. Anyway I got a new protein powder flavor today.

SunWarrior Chocolate Protein powder and great timing because hubby has discovered the vanilla in our pantry for breakfast smoothies, so between the two of us we’re killing the bag fast! Looking forward to trying the chocolate in smoothies and banana soft serve.

I received another something new to try in my smoothies today as well.

Running Food samples!  The Running Food is powdered black chia seeds for smoothies, cereals, salads and maybe some creative dehydrator cracker recipes too, hmmmmm… The Purely Chia packet is ground white chia seeds also for smoothies, salads, cereal and maybe banana soft serve. Anyway, the powdered seeds are in convenient small packets perfect for traveling, there seems to be enough in each packet for 5-10 servings. The texture is a fine powder, so blending into smoothies would be much quicker and you could simply mix the powder into fresh veggie juice when, gasp, you don’t have access to a blender and, again, making this perfect for traveling. This is something I’ll want to pack when on the road for destination marathons. My green monsters will be packed with goodness for the next few weeks!

For lunch I was on a shopping mission to Sur La Table which happens to be near Whole Foods.

Edamame, parsnip shreds, broccoli, peppers, kale, olives, corn, green onions and carrots topped with Braggs Liquid Aminos and vegan parm alternative topping at the salad bar. Perfect fresh and crisp lunch for this dauntingly hot day. I find I crave less dehydrated and dry foods in this dry heat, I need moisture in my food!

The I picked up another kitchen add.

A 5 liter glass jar for making batches of kombucha and Ani Phyo’s Kefir starting hopefully this weekend – should be fun!

After work I trotted over to the local farmer’s market braving our sweltering heat for some sweet finds.

A monstrously huge artichoke bigger than the cauliflower head, two huge zucchinis perfect for spiral slicing, huge tomatoes and plenty of fresh apricots for breakfast smoothies.

Then I got to work on a ginger tempeh stir-fry for dinner marinating the tempeh slices in nama shoyu (unpasteurized soy sauce) for about 20 minutes first this time.

Then used the rest of the marinade to create a stir fry sauce in the Vita-Mix with toasted sesame oil, carrots, ginger and garlic. The end result was tasty, but very filling with all the veggies!