organic - AnnaTheApple

Hi guys, we made it to Wednesday and May amazingly enough! Actually this week hasn’t been that much of a drag for me. The sun has been shining and work has been good. Aaaaaaand we booked a holiday! I am so excited about this. We are going to…*drum roll* Mexico! We’re heading for 10 days all-inclusive to a resort in Playacar for September of this year to celebrate our one year wedding anniversary. I’ve never been to an all-inclusive so this is rather exciting for me.

Usually I’m not a beach fan as I get bored. There’s only so much lounging around I can do. But with this resort they have loads of planned activities, sight-seeing opportunities and water sports. It’s a compromise between Ben and me as Ben likes holidays where he does nothing (bless him he could have two weeks off just playing the Xbox I imagine) but I need something to do. So this works out well!

Right, enough of that. It’s time for What I ate Wednesday.

Thanks Jenn!

Soo this is what I had yesterday.

Breakfast has been the usual business. Oatmeal, almond milk. Fabulously filling though, yes, predictable….

Boring maybe, delicious definitely.

Lunch has been my usual salad. With tuna and lots of veggies.

Next I had popcorn, which I currently have a huge obsession for at the moment.

I prefer it salted for lunch, though I do love sweet popcorn too. Or a mixture…yum.

And then for afters (do people still say that??) I had Greek yogurt with organic strawberries. Oooh err.

I thought I’d go crazy and push the boat out and have some organic strawberries as they weren’t that much more expensive than the normal ones (and, if you caught one of my previous posts, I’ve been doing some thinking about organic). It’s crazy that alongside the British strawberries you can buy Spanish ones cheaper. What a way to make people buy locally sourced! Ha. Come on, Britain, get behind your farmers.

An honourable mention needs to be made to lunch on Sunday though as it rocked my world.

Roast chicken, roasted butternut squash and broad beans…with of course:

BBQ sauce! I didn’t actually use any of the apple and fig chutney as the BBQ sauce stole my heart. Though the chutney has been a star in many salads. Both are keepers. Yum.

Work snackages have been in the form of my Graze boxes…

In the box I got mini banana cake with an ‘afternoon infusion’ teabag, some pretzelly things, crackers with a salsa dip and some Japanese crackers. Fabulously tasty.

Dinner last night was a new-to-me recipe. I was inspired by Jess’s recipe HERE.

I really enjoyed these stuffed peppers. I filled them with lean beef mince cooked in chopped tomatoes, herbs and some crumbled beef stock cubes. I ten added a big tablespoon of cream cheese just because

Then I popped the mince in the peppers and oven cooked them for about 15 mins. I love this photo of the peppers in the oven. Bless Alfie for photo bombing.

I popped the peppers in a muffin tray to make sure they didn’t fall over and it worked well! Ben and I had two of these bad boys each.

I had mine with broad beans. Really enjoyed this meal.

Evening snackages come in the form of some chocolate that really needed eating (doesn’t it all…?)

These were from a box of truffles that we’ve had loafing around for ages. I’m forcing myself to use up all our chocolate supplies before allowing myself to buy any more (specifically Lindt). Otherwise we just get backlogged with chocolate we’re not going to eat because there’s always the better Lindt option. *sighs* It’s a hard life I know

I snack on other stuff during the day (fruit & Snack a Jacks) but it’s all fairly standard and boring!

Fitness-wise, it’s been my standard running. Last week I managed to get my mileage up to 32.5miles!

Monday: 6 miles tempo
Tuesday: 3 miles interval
Wednesday: 5.5 miles no particular goal
Thursday: 8 mile with the running club
Friday: rest
Saturday: 10 mile long run
Sunday: rest

I’ve been loving it! My body seems to be copying well, no twinges, no aches, no nothing! Though I have been gently increasing my mileage to help prevent any shocks to the system.

I love the variety I have as well. Monday and Tuesday are solo runs stupidly early in the morning (but lovely and light now thankfully). Wednesday is a lunch-time run usually with guys from work. Thursday is my running club and Saturday is my favourite long run listening to a good podcast.

And here’s what I wore:

The dress is one of the ones I got from Camden market, belt and necklace are from Accessorize, leggings and cardigan from New Look

Nothing else to report. Did I mention I’ve booked a holiday to Mexico…? Shoot, I already did? Whoops I promise I won’t go on about it hehe.

Runners out there, what kind of mileage do you like to hit during a week?

Do you, like me, hate wasting food? The chocolate truffles are no where near as good as Lindt but I can’t throw them away. I hate throwing food away!!

Favourite sauce – ketchup? BBQ? Mustard?

Have you ever been on an all-inclusive holiday?

Hello lovely people. This week has been so much better to last week thankfully. I don’t feel as though I’m clawing myself to the weekend.

Last night (Thursday) I was able to go to running club as I could finish work at a reasonable time. I was umm-ing and arr-ing all day long about whether I did actually want to go. This is the problem I find with not running in the morning. I’m one of those people that when my alarm goes off I’m bang awake. So if I’ve planned to run and set my alarm stupidly early I pretty much need to go otherwise I’m up stupidly early for work. However, if I’m going to run in the evening I’ve got the entire day to compile a list of reasons why not to go.

But the sun was shining and, like I said, I could leave on time. I had no excuse. And I am so glad I went. I really wasn’t up for a 7.30min/mile hill run like the immensely tough run from the other week so I was really chuffed that the faster guys were planning on running 8mins/mile semi-road semi-trail run.

It was one of those runs where you could relax into it, power it at times, but otherwise just find a good rhythm and enjoy it (hence the crazy variation of pace!). The weather was beautiful, not too hot but still light and clear. I didn’t feel pushed to my limits, but just comfortable. A perfect run.

Again the only problem I had was I was buzzing all evening when I got home and when I went to bed I just couldn’t sleep until like 11pm. People, this is crazy for me.

On to an interesting subject that really got me thinking and sort of worried me a little bit. Madison did a great post about organic food and the “dirty dozen”.

The Dirty Dozen are the 12 foods that are really top of the list for the most pesticide-affected foods. Now usually I don’t really care about this sort of thing. I optimistically live in a wonderful world where things like pesticide can’t bother me.

However, for whatever reason it really struck a cord with me. I eat at least three apples a day. Just your bog-standard non-organic apples.

I hadn’t really thought about it before. But suddenly it seemed a bit concerning. Apples are apparently one of the worst!!

I did a bit more research into it myself to find out specifically about the UK. Here’s an interesting website which basically outlines the benefits of eating organically.

Essentially here are the main benefits in very general terms:

Better animal welfare standards
There are some foods which contain more vitamins and minerals (though there is some debate about this)
Reduction in pesticides used
Reduction in additives used
No antibiotics used in animal rearing
No hydrogenated fats
No GM ingredients
Support for the land and wildlife in terms of sustainability

It does worry me about the pesticides building up in my body. I’m not going to lie, I don’t know a huge amount of what this might do to you. But I am usually so careful about what I eat in terms of not wanting tons of sugar or salt and avoiding overly processed stuff (I don’t completely avoid it as where’s the fun in that??) that it seems I’ve become a bit blasé about other issues, such as chemicals sprayed on food or fed to animals.

But, as you’re probably aware, organic food tends to be more expensive unfortunately. Mainly because it’s not so quick to get out there in the shops with long shelf-life’s etc. than non-organic food is and there’s a whole load of regulations involved obviously.

We can’t afford the luxury of buying all organic so I’ve decided to pick a few things and try to stick to organic as much as possible. So apples obviously.

And also things like strawberries and other berries. Maybe I’ll try getting lettuce as well as I do eat a lot of salad…

Basically lots thoughts regarding this have been running through my head lately! Food for thought, you might say

Do you buy organic? Why?

What particular things do you think are important in selecting the food you buy? For me it is general nutrition (sugar and salt levels) and quality of ingredients. But also price does play a part and if it’s from Britain or from miles away. I do worry about how far food has travelled.

On a lighter note, what have you got planned for this weekend?

Tag: organic

Hello May!

Organic food musings