The pizza dough is the key: you want to use whole wheat flour so you don’t just have the useless insulin spike you’d get with white flour. With a whole wheat flour, you a better slower carb that has a better chance of building up your glucagon stores so you’re ready for your event the next morning. You can even experiment with different types of flours, such as spelt flour, flax meal or brown rice flour or combine several flour types to get the perfect blend. (Though you may want to do the experimenting on a different night so you don’t end up with a hard, chewy inedible crust at your carbo-loading party)

The other great thing about the Make-Your-Own-Pizza party is that you can offer a wide range of toppings but steer yourself and the other athletes from anything that would be overly fatty or greasy. So while you might have tons of mozzarella and pepperoni available, you can keep your toppings light enough but not deprive your friends who might want a richer or more decadent meal that night.

Here’s what I prepared for my last carbo-loading pizza dinner:

• A double batch of honey-whole wheat pizza dough
• A big pot of tomato sauce
• Pre-prepared basil pesto
• Prosciutto or other cured meat
• Lightly steamed broccoli rabe
• Thinly sliced red onion
• Thinly sliced meyer lemons
• Mozzarella cheese
• Goat cheese
• Pecorino Romano cheese
• Chopped fresh basil
• Chopped fresh thyme

Serve the pizzas with a big salad and lots of water, and you’ll have an easy, healthful dinner party that’s great for all the athletes, but also tasty enough for your other guests.

There are three things I look for in a snack bar.

1. Most importantly, I look for bars that contain as close to real food as possible: recognizable ingredients, as organic as possible, better choices of sweeteners…
2. Texture is also important, but I’ve like a range from crunchy to crispy or chewy.
3. Taste is probably my second most important criterion - that’s when I get just plain picky: I don’t like apple flavours in these situation. I tend not to like chocolate flavoured bars (chips are ok, cocoa mixed into the bar base, not so much).

While Clif bars tend to satisfy the ingredients requirement, it doesn’t do so well for me on the latter two. Clif’s Nectar bars are a much better choice for me, but then, I only really like two of the flavors. Clif Mojo bars are great for when I’m craving a bit of salt. And I recently discovered Hammer bars, but they only make one flavour that I like - Almond Raisin. Now, I do sometimes make my own bars, and can choose exactly what goes into them and what combinations, but sometimes you just can’t deny the practicality of prewrapped snack bars.

Enter YouBars. Their motto is “You choose the ingredients, You name the bar, You enjoy it.” Started by a mother-son team of athletes. You bar allows you to design bars with exactly what you want in them, chosen from a pretty good array of ingredients that even include organic options. What more could I ask for!

As soon as I heard about the bars, I headed over to their site and designed a bar for myself and had my husband design one to his taste. The website is a bit basic at this point, but from what I understand, it is currently being rehauled. Here’s how it works:

• First, you choose your base. This is the stuff that hold the thing together, and can often be a nut butter. Actually, the only non-nut butter base is dates. You can select up to two bases out of seven choices. You can then specify if you want it to be organic, raw, salty or crunchy in the special requests.
• Next is your protein powder: this is particularly interesting to me, because many bars use soy protein, but I’ve been trying to steer away from that lately. The other options are whey (ie milk) protein, which is also high in calcium or egg white protein. You can also choose to make a bar without a protein supplement.
• You then get to go on and choose your nuts and dried fruits - two separate categories, up to two selections in each.
• Next is the choice of sweetener. Your options are Clover Honey, Organic Molasses or Organic Brown Rice Syrup but you can also specify if you want the bar to be very sweet or less sweet.
• Seasonings lets you choose up to four additions, including cocoa powder, carob powder, cinnamon and other spices.
• Grains is where you determine your bar’s texture: If you choose Organic Oat Bran, your bar will be chewy and high in fiber. Granola will make it crunchier and Nutty Rice Cereal will make it crispy.
• Finally, you can choose an “inFUsion” - the choices here include Vita-min, Protein, Fiber or Femme.

Unfortunately, they don’t explain on the site what these infusions are so I emailed YouBar support to ask about this. I promptly received a response from Anthony, the owner. Here’s what he said:

“We apologize that you were not able to learn more about our In-Fu-Sions from our website, we are currently working on a new (and improved) website that will list what all of the in-Fu-sions are. Until then, we have our In-Fu-Sions list below:

Our protein infusion is an extra few grams of the protein you selected earlier in the “protein powders” section.

Our Vita-Min In-Fu-Sion is http://www.all-one.com/en/rice.php

Our Femme in-Fu-Sion is http://www.all-one.com/en/calcium.php

Our Fiber in-Fu-Sion is just 1 to 2 grams of Psyllium Husks in each bar.”

I was very excited by the wide range of options and couldn’t wait to taste our new bars. They arrived a week later, with two free sample bars of Honey Cashew. Here’s what we got:

The Ethan Way bar included a base of organic cashew and sesame butter, organic brown rice syrup, dried bananas, organic dried apples, organic walnuts, cocoa, Ghirardelli Semisweet chocolate chips, organic granola oat bran. This yielded a 220 calorie bar with 13g of fat, 2.5 of which are saturated, 23g of carbs, 4g of fiber and 5g of protein.

I thought it was tasty but as it included cocoa powder in the base, it wasn’t so much to my liking. The bar is pretty small, about the size of a Luna bar. It packed a good punch though, at 220 calories. The texture was OK, albeit a bit crumbly (which is to be expected, I guess, due to the lack of preservatives or other additives?). Ethan liked the flavour but did not like the crumbly texture.

The Sara is a Nutty Tart bar included a base of organic dates and almond butter with organic brown rice syrup as sweetener, prunes, walnuts dried cherries and oatbran and a whey protein supplement. This bar was 190 calories, with 7g of fat (0.5g of saturated), 28g of carbs with 2g of fiber and 7g of protein.

Not shockingly, this bar was a lot more my type of bar. The flavors were very tasty and while it still was a bit on the crumbly side, it seemed a bit less crumbly than the other.

The best part of all is that each bar come with nutritional information and ingredient lists on the back! You can see the exact breakdown of what it is you made. Now all of this comes with a price, of course. The bars come in boxes of twelve and cost $3.33 per bar (that’s $40 per box). Add shipping to that, and they’re $3.79 a bar. This is a bit hefty if you’re used to getting your snack bars for around $2.00. On the other hand, if you have food allergies, are a vegan or have some other dietary restrictions, the ability to hand pick your ingredients may well be worth the extra price.

For me, I did enjoy this experience and I’ll probably order from You Bars again, but not exclusively… Just on occasion, to add their bars into my snack bar rotation. I really do enjoy having variety in my choices.

The essential elements are a multi-grain hot cereal, nuts, fruit, and a sweetener of some sort. For the cereal part, my favorites have been Bob’s Red Mill brand hot cereals, such as the 10-grain or the Right Stuff 6-Grain hot cereal with flaxseed. Cooking it up is really easy, usually just water and cereal (specific quantities vary a bit depending on the cereal) simmered for 3-10 minutes. Oatmeal is ok, though avoid using instant oats because they’re thin and less nutritious and often have added sugar and salt. Your best bet is rolled oats or steel-cut oats (also known as Irish oats).

Then comes the fun part: Choosing my flavoring. First, I toast up some nuts and chop them. Lately, I’ve been using walnuts or hazelnuts, but in the past I’ve used almonds, macadamia nuts, pine nuts… Any nut would do. Then, if my cereal doesn’t already include it, I add a couple of tablespoons of ground flaxseed. I grind it in my coffee grinder to get it nice and fine, because otherwise the body wouldn’t be able to digest it and benefit from its heart-happy omega-3s.

Then comes the fruit. I don’t usually have a big selection for this - raisins is my standard. But I have recently found organic artisan dried fruits at our local supermarket and have been using dried figs, pears, prunes and apricots. I’ve also used fresh fruit on occasion, but I tend to prefer that in the summer when there are tons of luscious berries around.

I lightly sweeten the cereal with a drizzle of agave nectar or maple syrup and sometimes for an extra touch of decadence, I mix in a tablespoon of coconut butter which is incredibly tasty, rich, and apparently quite good for you, albeit a bit on the caloric side. One tablespoon is really enough. This breakfast will fill you up and keep you going through the morning.

Here’s the simplified formula - choose at least one of each of the following:

• Hot cereal: Oats, rye, kamut, spelt… or any blend thereof
• Nuts: Walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios… Raw or toasted, chopped or whole
• Fruit: Dried or fresh - Cranberries, raisins, prunes, pears or any fruit that you enjoy. For a more exotic flavour, try the nutrient powerhouse, the dried goji berry.
• Sweetener: If you like your cereal on the sweet side, try a drizzle of agave nectar (which is lower on the glycemic index than most natural sweeteners) or some maple syrup.
• Other additions: Ground flaxseed for the omega-3s and a delicate nutty flavour. Unhydrogenated coconut butter for a little bit of good fat and a delicious decadent richness.

The first combination that I got to try was Shock-olate: pears, apricots, almonds, walnuts and best of all, dark chocolate! How could I go wrong? Upon examining the product, I noticed that within the little 190-calorie pack, there were two additional plastic bags, one containing the nuts and one containing the chocolate. Unfortunately, it took me a while to recognize the latter because the coloring of the little chips was decidedly not dark. It was even lighter than milk chocolate chips would be, a pale beige. I hesitantly tasted one chip and determined that while it was indeed some form of chocolate, it wasn’t that good - it almost seemed like it had gone bad, the texture as well as the flavor were lacking, almost chalky.

My understanding of this compartmentalized breakdown was that it is intended to keep the nuts crunchy and make sure the ingredients don’t just turn into one big sticky clump. That part worked quite well: the walnuts and almonds were decidedly crunchy and fresh and provided a nice contrast to the chewiness of the fruit. The combination of the fruits and nuts were very tasty - the pears were particularly good. Without the snack’s namesake, the chocolate, the rest of it was quite good. Perhaps that’s the shock part?

Aside from the chocolate issue, my main concern about this snack is its packaging. While the multiple plastic bag setup does make for better quality individual ingredients, it still makes my environmentally-friendly spidey sense tingle. I don’t know that I’m comfortable buying a product with extra plastic bags just to have this fleeting perfection of crunchy nuts and dried fruit.

It also occurred to me that it would be nice to see some organic selections from Peeled Snacks. My solution might just be to pack my own selection of fruits and nuts the night before or try more diligently to wake up earlier in the mornings.

Chances are you work out anywhere from three to six days a week and your meals on these week days are just as important as your special event meals. With summer settling in nicely, I’ve been enjoying making huge summer veggie salads that are just as good after a morning workout as they are leading into an evening workout (as long as you leave yourself enough time to digest before heading out to the gym).

The salads I have been making take full advantage of the wide array of vegetables I’ve been getting in our CSA box or picking up at the farmers’ market, and you can vary what goes in them depending on what you have available.

I usually oven roast a couple of the veggies and toss them warm into the salad, but if you’re short on time, you can roast the vegetables in the evening while you’re preparing dinner, toss them with a bit of olive oil and wrap them up or put them in a airtight container in the fridge so that they’re ready the next couple of days around lunchtime.

According to the Oxford Encyclopedia English Dictionary, L athleta f. Gk athletes f. athleo contend for a prize (athlon)
1. a skilled performer in physical exercises, especially in track and field events
2. a healthy person with natural athletic ability

I would like to offer up a third alternative: a healthy person who trains and pushes herself athletically (whether or not she possesses a “natural athletic ability”).

It has taken me forever to identify myself as an athlete. I think it was finally this year that I could bring myself to think or even say aloud: “I’m a runner. I’m an athlete,” and actually believe it. And I know that I’m not the only who feels this way about myself. Yet I’ve been running somewhat consistently for the past six years. I must admit - I even started writing the Athlete Gourmet articles before I was seriously convinced that I was truly an athlete.

Why does this matter? Well, maybe it doesn’t.  For many people, believing that one is an athlete has little to do with anything other than self esteem. However, I tend to think that it is that one small change in mentality that determines who you are or can be.  Also, I believe that this belief is important when it comes to learning how to eat. If you are an athlete, and in this case, I mean more than moderately active, you need to understand the importance of properly fueling your body.

Maybe you don’t think you’re an athlete - you’re just a recreational health-motivated jogger, but you find yourself running 5 miles every other day and sometimes more. Or perhaps you play tennis several times a week, or just started a marathon training program for the very first time. Or maybe you’re an avid yoga person. If your activity level is definitely more than your average couch potato and possibly even more than the average American (which is not that hard a feat), you probably need to start thinking about your fueling needs. Several factors influence the amount of energy that you would need for your workouts. The type, intensity and frequency of training, as well as your size, age and gender are major factors that dictate your energy needs.

Still, if you aren’t convinced that you’re an athlete and may have more rigorous nutrition needs, the best thing to do is to listen to your body. Say it’s a weekday afternoon and you’re feeling sluggish as you head out for your after-work run. Your body is telling you something: it could be that the healthy salad that you had for lunch (low fat vinaigrette, hold the bread and butter) is not giving you the proper fuel to sustain you though your afternoon, let alone on a run.

Or maybe you’re finding that you can barely hold your poses during your bikram yoga session despite the fact that yesterday’s session was a piece of cake. It could be that the meal you had after that last session was not enough to help your body recover properly.

I think that identifying as an athlete has helped me keep my commitments to myself: keep myself from opting out of a run or choosing to laze on the couch instead of doing a strength workout. At the same time, it has made me more comfortable with my food choices: not feeling as guilty for having a dessert or eating that bread with my salad. But as I said, it was a title it took me a long time to come to terms with. If this is a struggle you’re having, I’d urge you to consider adopting the title of athlete and you may well find that the characteristics would very soon follow.

After working out, it is recommended you eat within a 45 minute period afterwards to get the best results and be fully recovered and ready for your next workout. Because of the relatively short window and because I’m generally quite tired after my workouts, having a recipe that’s easy to toss together is key.

The best part of this recipe is its versatility. First, choose a type of canned bean. I prefer garbanzo or cannellini beans, but there are many other great beans you could use. Red kidney beans, for example, are a good source of vitamin E and C, which boost your immune system and help your body recover from the stress of the workout.

I usually have either garlic or onions laying about and start my salad off by sautéing these in some olive oil. Any other greens or veggies you have laying about can be grated or sliced and add to the salad. For the salad pictured above, I started by chopping up some garlic and sautéed it for a minute in olive oil, then added the garbanzo beans and cooked them until they were heated through. I took them off the fire, added some chopped parsley, a drizzle of apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper.

In a big bowl, I put a base layer of lettuce, some grated carrot and then lightly dressed them with extra virgin olive oil, apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper. I then put a generous scoop of the warmed garbanzo beans. I topped the salad off with a poached egg and served it with some crusty bread. Quick, easy and very satisfying.

Other vegetables I’ve added to the greens have included thinly sliced radishes, sliced tomatoes, avocado, cooked beets… The variations are limitless and really just depend on what you have around the house.

I recently discovered a great way to learn about these better ingredients:  Heidi Swanson’s cookbook Super Natural Cooking- Five Ways to Incorporate Whole and Natural Ingredients into Your Cooking. Swanson details the wide array of superior alternatives to white flour and sugars and offers great recipes that use these more healthful ingredients.

My favourite discovery from the cookbook is mesquite flour. The flour is made from mesquite pods and tastes naturally sweet, almost like an odd combination of sweetened cocoa and coconut. It is quite delicious, and even better, very good for you. It has a low glycemic index and provides a slow constant source of energy.

Swanson uses the flour to make chocolate chip cookies which were so delicious that I was unable to snap a photo of them, they disappeared so quickly!

In addition to explaining the various types of whole grains that can be used to enrich the nutritional content of your foods, Swanson also uses a wide variety of wheat flours. Not having much experience baking with alternatives to white flour myself, I did not realize that there were any whole wheat possibilities beyond simply “whole wheat flour.” Turns out there are quite a few alternatives and the two that she recommends are whole wheat pastry flour and white whole wheat flour.

Almost immediately after receiving this book, I headed to Rainbow Grocery, our local Natural and Organic grocery, and began exploring the bulk flour aisle. I bought a variety of flours and went home to begin experimenting with them. The Espresso Flecked Banana Muffins looked delicious (thanks to Swanson’s gorgeous photography) and I happened to have some overripe bananas on hand.

The white whole wheat flour in this recipe is much lighter than regular whole wheat flour and makes for a delicious and not too dense muffin. It was the perfect breakfast, especially before heading out for a run.

I highly recommend checking out this book, not only for the delicious ways of incorporating whole grains in your diet but also for Swanson’s other equally tasty and wholesome lessons: natural sweeteners, superfoods and adding colourful foods to your diet.

They are all lessons that, while not specifically targetted at athletes, can definitely improve the quality of anyone’s meals.

As an endurance athlete, it’s very easy to find a good time to reward myself with a treat. When I go for a long run, usually around 10-15 miles on a Sunday, I burn somewhere around 1200 calories. The first food that I crave immediately after running is usually something salty, preferably a savory meal with some protein and carbs. However, after that, dessert is a welcome treat.

One dessert that I’ve grown to love recently is panna cotta. It is surprisingly easy to make and can be flavored any way you want, from a basic vanilla to a more complex ginger-infused panna cotta. In addition to being delicious, the ginger has the benefit of being an anti-inflammatory which is exactly what the muscles need to recover. It is crucial to use fresh ginger for this recipe, as the powdered ginger isn’t nearly as flavorful. The recipe is also great prepared the day before so that you don’t have to worry about doing much when you’re exhausted from your workout.

Depending on how cautious you’re being about calorie counting, you can replace the half and half with all skim milk, cutting the amount of calories in half. However, for my recipe, I use milk and half and half, because it is after all a reward.

Ginger-Infused Panna Cotta

1 tsp. agar agar
1 cup half and half
1 1/4 cup milk (low fat)
½ cup brown sugar
4 slices of fresh ginger

Pour the milk and the half and half in a medium saucepan and add the ginger. Bring to a simmer then cover and let the ginger infuse for about fifteen minutes. You can taste the milk at this point to see if the flavor is strong enough yet. When you’ve reached the desired flavor, add the sugar and sprinkle the agar agar into the milk. Allow the mixture to sit for about 5 minutes until the agar agar is dissolved. Mix over medium heat, stirring occasionally until the sugar dissolves and tiny bubbles appear around the edge of your pan, remove from heat. Pour the cream mixture through a strainer into small well-oiled ramekins and allow to set in the refrigerator for at least an hour, up to overnight. Serve with fresh fruit.
]]> http://fitfare.net/2007/04/24/the-athlete-gourmet-sweet-rewards/feed/ http://fitfare.net/2007/04/10/fiber-one-oats-and-chocolate-bar-review/ http://fitfare.net/2007/04/10/fiber-one-oats-and-chocolate-bar-review/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2007 10:35:46 +0000 Sara Maamouri Uncategorized http://fitfare.net/2007/04/10/fiber-one-oats-and-chocolate-bar-review/ General Mills has developed a new snack bar - The Fiber One bar. The flavor I sampled was the Oats and Chocolate. There is also an Oats and Peanut Butter variety.

The taste was fine, if a bit sweet for my liking. Chewy with the occasional crunch and a typical cereal bar taste, the Fiber One bar is filled with chocolate chips and covered in a caramel drizzle.

The bar is 140 calories, which is probably fine but could be a bit high as a normal snack. It has a whopping 9 grams of fiber, which is 35% of the USDA recommended daily intake. What other good does it have to offer? Not that much: 2g of protein, 10% of your recommended daily allowance of calcium, and a measly 2% each of Vitamin A and iron. Better than your average candy bar? Perhaps, but that’s not saying much.

The biggest mystery to me is the very first ingredient: chicory root extract. I had no idea what that is for or why it is the first ingredient. I conducted a search to see what its purpose may be and all I found is that it is a probiotic.

In a pinch, if you’re on the road and need a snack, particularly if you don’t get much fiber in your diet, this will probably do, but with the amount of fat (4g total, 1.5g saturated) and sugar (10g), it’s probably not your best choice. High maltose corn syrup, fructose corn syrup and sugar make this bar a processed food candy bar fest.

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