…hearty chard that survived our snow-tastic winter…

…and a surprise appearance by this week’s star, asparagus.

It’s not a complete surprise to see the asparagus – it’s there thanks to our planting last year, not because of some Johnny Asparaseed sneaking into our backyard. But we were under the impression that asparagus plants took at least 2 years to produce edible stalks, so when that (admittedly, small & overgrown) bunch of spears shot up unexpectedly, I had to scramble to figure out what to do with it.

I went with a long-standing spring favorite of mine: the white bean, leek and asparagus panzanella from Smitten Kitchen. It’s a colorful, vibrant mix of spring’s best that highlights the unique flavors of each component.

But, of course, there are innumerable things you could do with those slender green spears – and the more the better, since asparagus is a good source of several vitamins (especially K), minerals (including iron), and the pre-biotic fiber, inulin. Give some of these a try, and see if asparagus surprises you, too

• Spring panzanella from Smitten Kitchen (here)
• Zucchini pasta with roasted asparagus & sweet potato from Spabettie (here)
• Asparagus soup with poached egg on toast from Jamie Oliver (here)
• Spicy pickled asparagus from Simple Bites (here)
• Coconut ginger braised asparagus from Teaspoon of Spice (here)
• Indian-spiced chicken & asparagus from Eating Well (here)
• Flatbread with pancetta, mozzarella & asparagus from Cooking Light (here)

Skyr is a strained yogurt (we tend to call them all “Greek yogurt,” but this recipe’s Icelandic in origin) that is thick and full of good bugs (probiotic, in the lingo). What I like about Siggi’s compared with most other strained yogurt brands is they rely on natural flavorings and don’t dump a ton of extra sugar in. So you get a rich, tasty yogurt, a big hit of protein, and no 17-syllable ingredients.

My recent Twitter-fawning about Siggi’s mixed with almond butter caught the eye of Icelandic Milk & Skyr Co., who then sent me a bunch of coupons for their products. I have three sets of 2 coupons each – one good for a free 3.5 oz cup of Siggi’s skyr, and one good for $1 off any Siggi’s product (single-serve probiotic drink excluded) – to give away to ETW readers. If you’d like a chance to get a set, head past the jump for details!

To enter the giveaway, leave me a comment here about whether you’ve tried skyr or not. Please leave me a way to contact you (email, twitter handle, address to which I should send a carrier pigeon).

That’s the required entry, but after you’ve done that, here are several more ways to enter, if you want to increase your odds!

• Follow Siggi’s on Twitter and tweet me about it – something like, “Hey @Eatingtheweek I’m following @SiggisDairy on Twitter for a chance to coupons on heavily umlauted dairy foods!”
• Like Siggi’s on Facebook, and leave me a comment on this post to tell me you did.
• Refer a friend to this post. They need to leave me a comment (which gets them an entry) telling me that you referred them (that gets you another entry).

The giveaway starts today, Monday May 6, and will end on Sunday May 12 at 3 pm Eastern time. The giveaway is open to anyone with a US mailing address. Three entries will be selected at random via Random.org’s generator by 9 pm May 12 to receive a set of two Siggi’s coupons.

Good luck!

Disclosures: Icelandic Milk & Skyr Co., gave me discounts on their products and is providing the giveaway prizes at no cost to me. The opinions I’ve expressed in this post are mine and are not edited, reviewed, or influenced by Icelandic Milk & Skyr Co.

I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, and was pretty surprised to see the 47401 in my Food Penpal box’s return address. But it turns out Laura also grew up there & recently returned to pursue a degree in anthropology (coincidentally, that + sociology was my undergraduate major).

Laura put together a fun bunch of goodies from Trader Joe’s – Belgian cookies, a chocolate bar, trail mix and some salsa that was clearly tuned into the tomatillo-salsa kick I’ve been on lately.

She also packed some Hoosier eats straight out of Monroe County – cereal from Vigilant Eats, and toasted-oat granola from Muddy Fork Farm & Bakery. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been back to B-town, so I’m not familiar with either of these outfits, but I’m glad Laura has gotten me acquainted with them!

Want to discover surprising connections by participating in Foodie Penpals? It’s open to bloggers and non-bloggers alike! Head past the jump for details.

Here’s a description from Lindsay, with links to sign up:

• On the 5th of every month, you will receive your penpal pairing via email. It will be your responsibility to contact your penpal and get their mailing address and any other information you might need like allergies or dietary restrictions.
• The pairing is not a swap: you will mail a box to one person, but receive a box from a different person.
• You will have until the 15th of the month to put your box of goodies in the mail. On the last day of the month, you will post about the goodies you received from your penpal!
• The boxes are to be filled with fun foodie things, local food items or even homemade treats! The spending limit is $15. The box must also include something written. This can be anything from a note explaining what’s in the box, to a fun recipe…use your imagination!
• You are responsible for figuring out the best way to ship your items depending on their size and how fragile they are. (Don’t forget about flat rate boxes!)
• Foodie Penpals is open to blog readers as well as bloggers. If you’re a reader and you get paired with a blogger, you have the option to write a short guest post for your penpal to post on their blog about what you received. If two readers are paired together, neither needs to worry about writing a post for that month.
• Foodie Penpals is open to US & Canadian residents*. Please note, Canadian Residents will be paired with other Canadians only, and US residents with other US residents only.

If you’re interested in participating for March, please CLICK HERE to fill out the participation form and read the terms and conditions.

You must submit your information by May 4^th; pairings will be emailed on May 5th!

*If you’re from somewhere besides the US, Canada or Europe and want to participate, send Lindsay an email and she’ll see if there’s enough interest this month!

The race capped off week 7 of training for the Covered Bridges Half Marathon, and while I wasn’t gunning for anything spectacular, I was pleasantly surprised that I felt good to go on only one rest day and a few glasses of wine the night before (necessary accompaniment to a fierce game of Uno). If this had been mid-way through my training for Providence or Austin marathons, I would have been sore, dragging, and cranky about having to tack on another 12-18 miles afterward to meet my weekly LR prescription.

My timing said I ran it 19 seconds faster than my previous 5K PR, but official timing clocked me a full half minute slower. Since the start was kind of disorganized and I’m not sure I started RunKeeper exactly at the starting line, I’ll just say I ran well yesterday and leave my old PR standing for now.

And I also took first among North Reading food bloggers ticking off NY from the race-in-50-states list, bringing my total to 8.

I think it helped that the weather was stupidly perfect, and the course was a relatively flat out & back through scenic residential areas of The Greater Schenectady NY Area. But maybe some credit is also due to the novel warm-up I did, visualizing speed:

I do not fit on this.

Now it’s time to focus on the last 5 weeks of training for CBHM, so I can check the next New England state off my list.

I am well on my way toward meeting my goal to raise at least $500 for Health Connections of the Upper Valley so I can run CBHM with their team. Any level of contribution you could make via my donation page to help me reach that fundraising finish line would be greatly appreciated!

I’m trying to fight the urge to review this trend in depth; but there’s a lot there with which I (and, frankly, science) disagree, so here’s my $0.02 anyway. Outside of the context of actual celiac disease, gluten-free seems to be this decade’s fat-free – an way to malign one food component for all our health woes & sell a few more packages, without bringing us any closer to the real, holistic shifts in our eating (more produce, less processed) that will make big differences.

So why, then, am I still writing about recipes that help cut down on the wheat we eat?

Take a seat, wheat, it’s chia time.

Well, it’s partly about variety. The more varied your diet, the better your odds of getting the full spectrum of nutrients you need while enjoying novel, delicious foods every day. But in the Standard American Diet (put that acronym together) wheat-flour-based foods account for roughly 20% of our caloric intake (from Google preview of Michael Pollan’s latest, Cooked). And it’s also partly about processing. We get a lot of our wheat in the form of highly processed flour, which goes into highly processed food of questionable nutritional value.

What does “less wheat” means? When I started following CSPI’s hybrid of the two diets in the OmniHeart Study that were found to reduce heart disease risk, it meant sticking to 2-3 servings of grain daily (equal to 1 slice of bread or ½ cup cereal per serving). For me, that means I switch things up with open-faced sandwiches, veggies pretending to be pastas, and easy but cereal-free breakfasts like warm chia banana peanut butter pudding (pictured above; hat tip to Samantha for the idea). This week’s less-wheat list includes recipes along those lines, which you can try at home:

• Chia breakfast pudding from Eating the Week (below)
• Paleo date walnut bread from Elana’s Pantry (here)
• Paleo pancakes from The Athlete’s Plate (here)
• Open-faced chicken sandwiches from Cooking Light (here)
• Thai cashew quinoa salad from Ambitious Kitchen (here)
• Portobello breakfast cups from Tortillas & Honey (here)
• Zucchini ribbon salad with mint and olives from Gourmande in the Kitchen (here)

Chia breakfast pudding

(1 serving, approx. 430 calories)

3 Tbs chia seeds
¾ cup almond milk (or whatever milk you like)
1 banana
1 Tbs almond butter (or, again, whichever nut butter you like)
Ground cinnamon, to taste

Mix the chia seeds and milk in a microwavable bowl, and stir several times over 8-10 minutes (giving it time to set into a gel consistency).

Add the banana in small pieces, and microwave on high for 1 minute.

Add the almond butter and cinnamon, and mash everything around so the banana pieces get softened and mixed in. Enjoy!

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read advice/warnings to that effect. True, there was a time lo those many years ago, when I trained for my first half marathon without understanding how crucial fueling for a long run could be. But I’ve since gotten a clue, and have been diligent about packing commercial gels, homemade chia goo, or even just Cheerios along for any run that will take me ~1.5 hours or more.

So did I employ all that wisdom on my Covered Bridges Half Marathon training week 5 or 6 LRs, both 12 milers? No, of course not, because then what would I blog about?

The week 5 LR started out at a disadvantage, thanks to me going on about 5 hours’ sleep and the after effects of, well, let’s say a little more wine than usual. I hadn’t been able to get to the store to buy gels, and thought, enh, how bad could it be? The answer was that my run-12-miles-to-Drew’s-house plan quickly became call-Tim-for-a-ride-after-10-miles reality. So you’d think I would have done something differently on the week 6 LR, but no, I only packed a single chia gel I found in the back of my freezer (realistically needed ~3 gels for the duration) and ended up taking a lot of walk breaks when I should have been cranking up the pace for a late-in-run progression session.

The training schedule lets me go one more weekend perpetuating this idiocy – I swapped out a LR to run the Cherry Blossom 5K for ALS over in NY instead. But when I gear up for the MLRs and LRs (all 9-14 miles) over the subsequent three weeks, my Sauconys won’t get two steps out of the house unless Gu and Honey Stingers are riding shotgun.

I am well on my way toward meeting my goal to raise at least $500 for Health Connections of the Upper Valley so I can run CBHM with their team. Any level of contribution you could make via my donation page to help me reach that fundraising finish line would be greatly appreciated!

This photo probably gives away the answer….

For this month’s Recipe ReDux – courtesy of The Meal Makeover Moms @JaniceBissex and @LizWeiss – we were challenged to either proudly fly the mini-cake flag, or put a new hand-held dessert on the pedestal. And while I appreciate a good cupcake now and then, I don’t really get why there are practically as many cupcakeries as Dunkin Donuts around Boston. Is there a rampant frosting deficiency in America?

But I still kept things trendy when I came up with my hand-held alternative: orange chocolate chia squares. The hydrophilic little weirdos known as chia seeds are well on their way to displacing kale as the icon of healthy foodie-ism. They’re full of healthy fats, can be used as an egg replacement in baking, and reportedly fueled some extraordinary runners.

Chia seeds will glom onto water and form a viscous gel, but that doesn’t exactly lend itself to palm-of-hand portability. So to transform the goo to ready-to-go, I started with a strawberry energy gel recipe from Tim Woodbury’s Running Recipes: Chia-Powered Sole Food (which I reviewed previously). I futzed around with the sugar, water and fruit contents, and then transformed the gels into decadent chocolate-covered treats.

These little beauties probably aren’t going to make great running companions (body heat + sweat + chocolate = ew), but I’ll certainly have one as a reward after a weekly long run. You can get your hands on them, too, with the following recipe:

Orange chocolate chia squares

(20 pieces, approx. 185 calories each)

2 large oranges, peeled
2 Tbs grated orange rind, divided
½ cup water
1 Tbs orange juice
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown rice syrup
7 tsp powdered gelatin (approx. 1 oz)
6 Tbs chia seeds
¼ tsp baking soda
1 ½ cups dark chocolate chips

Puree the oranges, water and juice in a food processor. Add the puree to a saucepan with the sugar, rice syrup, gelatin, chia seeds and baking soda, and put them over medium heat for 8 minutes, stirring frequently. Be sure to use a long-handled spoon because the mixture likes to bubble & spurt.

Remove the orange mixture from heat and mix in 1 Tbs of the orange rind. Pour the mixture into a lightly greased 9×9 baking pan. Allow to cool for up to 4 hours, or until well set (I left mine on the counter for ~20 minutes, then cooled it in the fridge for another 1 ½ hours, and they were ready).

In a shallow bowl, microwave the chocolate chips for 1 minute at 50% power. Stir, then microwave at 50% in 15-30 second intervals, stirring again afterward, until fully melted (it took 1 ½ minutes for me).

Slice the orange gels into 20 pieces (cut in 4 one direction, and 5 the other). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or tin foil. Use a wood skewer or similarly sturdy pointy implement to pierce a gel longways, then dip it in the chocolate until coated. Gently push the square onto the lined baking sheet, then top with a pinch of the remaining orange rind.

Repeat the dipping with all the orange gels, then cool in the fridge for 15-20 minutes.

Once you eat these, you’ll still have another hand free, which I suggest you fill with one of the treats on offer from my fellow ReDuxers:

I wore this bib on my run today with thoughts of the dead, the wounded, the marathoners, the families, the first responders, and all of Boston heavy on my heart.

The Boston area has been my home for nearly 15 years, and running has been my sport for the last 4; but I know we all feel the visceral anguish and fear about evil hitting close to home. We are all parents, kids, friends, colleagues – we are all Boston. And we outnumber evil by a very large margin, which should give us all some hope as we try to start healing from this.

Runners, I hope you have a chance to wear a race shirt with pride and run a few miles with thoughts of those affected. I feel fortunate to have started today that way.

Because it turns out that turkeys are jerks. If you look at the data on Runkeeper, you’ll see a tick up in my pace (the blue line) in the 4^th mile that represents my full-stop pull up for a bunch of gobblers. I see turkeys around our area all the time, and they usually just waddle across a street and disappear into the woods. But in this group, one tom just stood there staring at me; and when I got within about 50 feet, he started coming at me.

I tried to move to the other side of the road, and he moved right over, too. I stopped and yelled at him; he kept coming. I started to back-pedal, and he started to speed up.

So then I realized I either had to bolt the other way (but he definitely looked like he could catch me), get a big enough stick to fend him off, or pray for a bear to show up (because bears find turkeys tastier than humans; that’s just science, right there). Thankfully, a guy drove up at that point and suggested I get in his Merc, quick-like. I hesitated (hello?! Classic stranger danger) but saw Terrible Tom quickly closing the gap and decided the car was the least bad option. I hopped in, shut the door & the turkey lunged at the passenger side as we drove off.

The turkey & I were both unharmed, the driver dropped me off just clear of the turkeys, and I continued on my merry way. But now I know those jerks are not the cutesy little creatures of Thanksgiving coloring pages.

MENACE

At least I can be consoled by knowing I’m not the only one running from these fan-tailed freaks – check out this collection of videos when turkeys attack (note: there’s some *language* in the article that may not be suitable for everyone).

As a reminder, I’ve pledged to raise at least $500 for Health Connections of the Upper Valley so I can run CBHM with their team. Any level of contribution you could make via my donation page would be greatly appreciated!

In the 99 weeks preceding this, there’s been brunches and dinners, strangers and the strangely absent, stuff for the littler eaters, things for the veg-heads, lots of ReDuxing, and the occasional running-food rambling. I briefly thought about a celebratory “100 Best of ETW” post, but that sounded like the most tedious writing job ever, so I can’t imagine you all would want to read it, either.

I turned instead to the good folks at Cooking Light and found several of their 100-recipe collections – 100 Easy Chicken Recipes, 100 Healthy Cookies, 105 Slowcooker Favorites (let’s just round down for the sake of celebration, alright?) and more. We could easily spend 100 weeks trying to get through all of these recipe collections, so I pulled out just 1 week’s worth of the recipes that caught my eye.

I put their roasted veggie & ricotta pizza from 100 Healthy Tips to the test. I’ll admit, I was expecting bland (ricotta always seems like such a taste waste to me), but this was surprisingly tasty and packed a good daily dose of vegetables.

We also made a slowcooker sweet potato gratin; while this had great savory flavor and was easy to assemble, I don’t know who these 12 people are that CL suggests are getting fed by that recipe. My yield was maybe enough to give 6 people very modest portions. But for the average family dinner, that’s probably just the right amount.

These and several more are included in this week’s recipe list – just seven out of roughly 700, so you’re not still slogging through it when I write my next-100-weeks post:

• Roasted veggie & ricotta pizza from CL 100 Healthy Tips (here)
• Korean-style chicken with minted cucumbers from CL 100 Easy Chicken Recipes (here)
• Spicy squash pickles from CL 100 Ideas for Appetizers (here)
• Sweet potato gratin from CL 105 Slowcooker Favorites (here)
• Savory beet soup from CL 101 Healthy Soup Recipes (here)
• Butternut squash, onion & spinach lasagna from CL 100 Healthy Pasta Recipes (here)
• Green pumpkinseed & cranberry crispy bars from CL 100 Healthy Cookies (here)

But hey, if you’ve got the time, by all means try out the rest. Drop me a comment sometime in 2016 when you’re done.