PT, S’more’s and an evening walk

Today was a good day.  My co-worker had read my blog entry on s’mores in a tin  and was inspired to bring s’mores to work today.  LOL  Yay for microwave s’mores!

Microwave S’more

Have I mentioned I love s’mores?  Have I also mentioned I’m trying to lose weight?  Good thing I can balance, right?  Most days.

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It was my 3rd meeting with Emily for some PT.  She and I worked out a deal that makes personal training affordable.  She’s terrific–willing to accept payment after-the-fact to get me started.  We talked our way through the work out and it was over before I knew it.  We did our warm-up, I did the presses, lunges, bridges, “kick-stands,” the thing on the cable machine, plank… etc.  And suddenly she says “let’s stretch out”

Me: “Wait, what?”

Emily: “what?”

Me: “We’re done?”

Emily: “yeah!”

Me: “No, like, with *all* of it?”

Emily: “Yeah, we did the warm up, the plank, the [listed all of my exercises which I can’t recall at the moment…]  and now we’re done!”

Me: “… Wanna do it again?”

It was great.  After work I was tired out, hungry, etc. and on any other day, I would have just called it a day and went home–but Emily was waiting for me so I had to at least show up.  By the time I left, I was happy, energetic, excited.. It was good.

Unfortunately, Jeff and I still didn’t get our grocery shopping done, so dinner tonight was a salad from Wendy’s:

Apple Pecan Chicken Salad – Wendy’s

Jeff and I ate dinner when I got home, watched an episode of Supernatural, went for a good 40 minute walk and then watched a couple more episodes of Supernatural. I’m about to hit the hay, but here are some pics from our walk:

Pretty white flowers along the side of the path

Giant, untended Rhubarb

Manicured Hill

Herd of Geese

[Sidebar:  Guys, I use my phone to take the pics for my blog, and lately, the quality has been suffering.  The replacement phone that I got works great as a phone but the camera is hinky.  It flashes when I have flash disabled, the auto-focus is unreliable, and the exposure is defaulted to something that is too dark, so unless I compensate, the photos don’t even turn out.  Based on the poor quality of the photos from my walk, among others that were too bad to publish, I think I’m going to contact Verizon again and ask for another replacement 😦 Hopefully you guys will have better pics in the near future 🙂 ]

I dream’t of a s’more…

When I was growing up, one of my very favorite things to do was to go camping and to roast marshmallows. And of course, to squash those marshmallows between chocolate and graham crackers. And, once finished in marveling at my masterpiece, my next favorite thing to do would be to bite into the s’more so that chips of graham cracker fell by the wayside, marshmallow stuck to my cheeks and chocolate melted onto my tongue. Oh to be a kid again.

When I got my first apartment, I figured out that if you microwave a marshmallow for about 10 seconds, it gets gooey and you can make make-shift s’mores.
In my 3rd apartment, my roomies knew how to grill and I figured out that s’mores made over charcoal are distinctly different than s’mores made over a campfire.
Propane is not an option.
Neither, really, is making them over a gas range.

I love s’mores so much that I was trying to think of a way to incorporate them into our WEDDING for goodness sake!

This weekend, I was having a few people over and I wanted to serve s’mores for dessert. I didn’t want to take the time to microwave marshmallows in front of my guests, because something about that just felt unrefined. As I went to sleep thinking on it, there came to me a glorious idea–S’mores in a muffin tin!

ha!

In my dream, I just crumbled graham crackers into the bottom of the cups and then put a marshmallow and chocolate on top.

In the cruel light of day, that did not work, but I had a dream! It must be pursued!

I found a recipe for a graham cracker crust online and that did the trick for me… I topped THAT with a marshmallow and a milk-chocolate saddle, then gave it a graham cracker crust hat. I baked at 350 for 25 minutes. Somewhere between the idea and the end result, the marshmallow disappeared, but the final product was still a scrumptious offering. The next time I try these, I may have to tweak the recipe a bit. When I find one that works better, I will definitely share it with you:

S’mores in a Muffin Tin

Ingredients:

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg

1-2 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 cups flour

3/4 cup graham cracker crumbs

1 tsp baking powder

marshmallows

chocolate bars

Instructions:

1) Set the Marshmallow and the Chocolate aside for now, we’ll come back to that.

2) Cream together butter and both kinds of sugar

3) beat in egg & vanilla (NOTE: you can do this with a fork, but a mixer would probably be easier)

4) In a separate bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients.

5) Mix the dry and the wet ingredients until you have a well-combined crumbly crust.

6) Prepare the muffin pan with cooking spray so that the cups don’t stick.  Don’t use muffin paper.

7) Take some dough and roll a ball about 1″ or so in diameter and then press into the bottom of each muffin cup

8) Put 1 marshmallow (regular sized) and 1/4 Chocolate Bar (if you’re using Hershey’s, it’s about 3 small rectangles worth) in each muffin cup.

9) Top each one with a graham cracker “hat” (play patty-cake with the dough-ball to flatten it out just like the bottom crust

10) Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, or until the crust firms up.  The cups remove easily once they are cooled.