Endurance Foodies: Recovery Meal

I’ve been blogging since 2009 – the year I decided to take triathlon a bit more seriously and to write about my experiences along the way.  I took the plunge into the “online world”, turning my twitter account into a source of triathlon knowledge and inspiration.  I found a community for myself online – people interested in the same things as me, namely looking after themselves by being active and eating well.  Since 2009 I have met some great people – people whose blogs, tweets and Facebook posts give me inspiration and motivation – and some of those people I have been fortunate enough to meet in person too.  One of those people – a mainstay of motivation for me – is Jason Bahamundi, of Cook Train Eat Race.


This was from Rev 3 Old Orchard Beach in August 2012 – Jason is on the right

Jason is a totally different league of athlete from me – he is FAST, and a runner by background, whereas I am slow and more comfortable in the water.  He is also a totally different kind of eater from me – he is a former omnivore turned vegetarian, whereas I am firmly in the omnivore camp (although completely understand and appreciate why people opt for the vegetarian lifestyle).  Those differences aside, what we share is a core belief in the pursuit of personal excellence. And we both share a love of the kitchen and food.

Jason asked me to participate in the Endurance Foodies blog carnival, kicking off this month and hopefully something we can keep going for a while.  The February theme is simple easy recovery meals.  I am all about simple easy whole cooking, and love to share just how fun quick easy and tasty cooking can be. A quick to prepare, tasty to eat, whole foods based meal is exactly what I aim for after a tough training session (which for me are usually on the weekends). Sign me up!

I tend to do my weekend long training in the morning, so my recovery meal is often brunch like in nature. I am a firm believer in using what is to hand, and a complete believer in repurposing leftovers for brunch.  The recipe below is from a Sunday, using up things in my fridge and in particular leftover rice from Friday night’s meal.  I understand that a lot of people avoid rice but are open to other grains such as quinoa.  Quinoa would slot in really well, and is one of my shelf staples, but I had leftover rice in the fridge.  We ALWAYS use our leftover rice to make egg fried rice, as a mid-week dinner as well as for brunch on weekends.  The other ingredients I used were also stuff I had in the fridge – the salami was from making cauliflower crust pizza, and I always have a bag of frozen spinach in the freezer (I LOVE spinach). When I grew up my mother would toss frozen peas into her fried rice – but to my horror when I open the freezer to grab some peas to throw in, I realised we were out. We often eat chicken and rice, so it’s completely normal for me to add leftover chicken (and not a pork product like salami) as the meat-based protein component of my fried rice. If you do add a less fatty meat, you should add some olive oil to the pan when heating the meat at the beginning, and make sure to chop or shred the meat into small pieces for quicker heating.

Anyway, my message is this – don’t be scared to use up leftovers when you make fried rice. It is fun, tasty, easy AND clears the fridge out!

Donna’s Post-Ride Fried Rice

 

Ingredients

Leftover rice (I measured out how much we used to get the nutritional values for this recipe – we had 3 cups in our batch of rice)
70g Leftover salami sliced into strips
3 eggs
(the above portions are enough for three people – or two very very hungry athletes – the nutritional breakdown at the end assumes 3 portions)
frozen spinach, steamed and on the side (as DH does not like spinach)

 

Preparation

Cut the salami into strips and fry in a dry non-stick pan.  The salami will release fat, which is perfect for cooking / heating the rice.  This took about 3 minutes. Add the rice to the pan, and cover. I cover for 5 minutes, to trap the heat (and steam) softening the refridgerated rice and enabling me to separate the grains.  Once all the grains are separated, I push the rice to one side of the pan and crack in the eggs.  I used three eggs in this batch – add to taste. I crack my eggs directly into the pan and then swirl them up, creating a scramble – this saves me an extra bowl to wash up.  Once scrambled I stir the eggs into the rice thoroughly mixing everything together. At this stage you can add frozen peas. You can also before serving add soy sauce or worcestershire sauce if you would like – I didn’t. Instead I ate my egg fried rice with green tabasco sauce. I LOVE green tabasco.

I served this with steamed spinach.  Normally I would cook greens (such as chard or kale) into the rice, but DH is not a fan of cooked spinach. To cook the greens in the rice, I would slice into strips and then add at the start before covering the rice to steam.

All in all this was 10 minutes cooking time, from fridge to plate.  Perfect after 3 hours of training – I was HUNGRY! 

 

Nutritional Breakdown

Including the spinach, this meal had:
368 calories
46 grams carbohydrates
12 grams fat
19 grams protein
(based on the nutritional database from MyFitnessPal)

February Endurance Foodie Participants

To follow along for great food ideas, and photos, on Twitter you can search the hashtag #endurancefoodies. 

Also please check out the posts from other blog carnival participants:

Jason at Cook Train Eat Race
Lindsay at Cotter Crunch
Adrienne at Six Kick Switch
Andrea at L.A. Easy Meals

for more recovery meal ideas!

Note: this week I am at a training camp in Lanzarote – when I am back I will update the links above to take you straight to the recovery recipes. But at the moment you can assume I am either on my bike or napping after a long training day!

2 responses to “Endurance Foodies: Recovery Meal”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *