37. The One With the Cheesy Scuffin

23 September 2015

So I was back on the treadmill today for a repeat of Monday - 90 minutes with my heart-rate under 130.  That was the easy bit, especially as my heart was being exceptionally co-operative this morning.  My heart rate hung out at about 121 throughout apart from a couple of spikes up to 125.

The more tricky part was that I'm still working on nutrition.  I just don't think I can do peanut butter in a wrap or sandwich again, and I'm running out of time to test new things.  I was giving this some thought earlier in the week, and my goals are:

1. to get to the end of the run without feeling like I'm weighed down by all the crap that I've been eating;
2. to find something I actually fancy eating in the run; and 
3. to find something that that's not hugely dissimilar to bread-type products like wraps or bread, but isn't either of those things.  

Given those parameters, I thought that savory muffins (the American kind) might be the answer to my problems in life.  I thought if I could do some vegetable ones I might even get to the end of the run with some real nutrients in me rather than empty carbs!  However, in order to ease myself gently into this, I thought I'd try this nice easy recipe for cheese muffins, not least because they only had a few ingredients and I could get them at my local store rather than having to schlep ALL the way to the big store (700m away.  The horror).  I also picked them because cheese.  CHEESE.

I baked them up last night and quality tested one out last night.  I would give it a 7/10 for the muffin itself as a food product ... I said to some friends that it didn't know whether it was a muffin or a scone because it was fully of cheddary paprika (I subbed out the sultanas in the recipe for more paprika and a few chilli flakes because I really wanted it to be savory and not have any hint of sweetness).  Romy then hit upon the brilliant idea of calling it a scuffin - SCUFFIN!  Love that.  So I present to you my scuffins:

I managed to smuggle one onto the treadmill with me today, and I thought I'd test it out after an hour of my 90 minute run.  I have never felt more like a) an idiot; and b) the secret eater in the corner as I tried to eat it unobtrusively (you're not allowed food in the gym, oh well, sorry Virgin).  It definitely worked for energy - I felt great after it!  The only thing was that it was super-dry and when I think about the ingredients, there's nothing there to give it any moisture.  That didn't make it the easiest to eat on the go, so I think I might try something else for my run on Friday morning.  However, since I felt so good after it I'm going to try something similar; maybe a zucchini and cheese muffin or something.  I will decide tomorrow when I'm baking them!

In addition to my muffin investigations, My friend Rosh suggested that we speak to his friend Ludovica, who's a sports nutritionist, and she recommended Feed Zone Portables.

I have actually had this book for ages and never cooked a single thing out of it!  Ha - I think I bought it on a whim at a tri show one year.  I looked through it yesterday and it's got things like sticky rice cakes (but nice ones, not those bits of cardboard you buy in the store), sausage and potato cakes, french toast cakes and scallion pancakes.  Can I just say sausage and potato cakes one more time?!  I want to try some of these to take on my run on Saturday so I think Thursday's going to be full of baking!  I'll report back.