Staying Healthy: Eating & Exercise (6/20 – 6/26)

As we segue into vegetarian eating, I have given myself a goal of finding and fixing one new recipe a week, using things we have on hand. It’s a challenge. This week’s effort was the pasta salad we enjoyed on Sunday evening. We had bought a bag of avocados at Costco, and needed to find ways to use them up so I searched several of my favorite recipe sites and found the recipe on Real Simple. We both loved it, and loved the leftovers as well and are looking forward to having it again in the future.

My favorite recipe websites besides Real Simple are Cooking Light, Bon Apetit, AllRecipes, The Barefoot Contessa, Touch of Home, and Smitten Kitchen. I also find things I like doing random searches, and I follow Padma Lakshmi and Ottolenghi on Instagram and sometimes get recipe ideas from them. The recipe books I borrowed from the library gave me one winner so far, Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything Vegetarian and I will eventually buy a copy. The cookbooks from America’s Test Kitchen had great recipes but they were complicated, and that’s not how I cook any more. I’m still waiting for one more book to come off of hold, a bean cookbook, but otherwise these days I can find more recipes than I can use online. I’m finding good substitutions for dairy and eggs so that I can keep things vegetarian. One of the fun things about searching for a particular type of recipe is that I always come across others to file away for later.

We had some good evening meals this week, and ate meat on just three days. Leftovers remain an issue, but we sometimes enjoyed them for breakfast (like the quesadillas), and everything got finished up with no waste.

Sunday: Spaghetti Pasta Salad

Monday: Panzanella with beans

Tuesday: Guadalajara quesadillas with spinach; avocado slices; cantaloupe

Wednesday: CookDo pork & pepper stir fry; steamed rice

Thursday: Sausage, pepper, and onion mini pizzas

Friday: Cheese board

Saturday: Egg roll in a bowl

This coming week’s new recipe is a bean, corn, and rice filling for burritos, prepared in the InstantPot. I’m also going to try something different with the 3-color salad and will use artificial crab for the protein and substitute grated carrot for the egg. We’ll see how that goes. The meat supply continues to dwindle, but it will be another month or so before it’s all gone.

• Pork chops with sauerkraut & apples
• Bean burritos
• Mini pizzas
• Cheese board
• Pasta with meat sauce
• Chinese 3-color salad
• Chicken-less nuggets and guacamole salad

It’s been a mixed bag of walking for me this week. We took last Sunday off, and then Monday and Tuesday I was out of commission because I hurt my back bending over as I took pictures of hashioki. Brett walked on his own those days while I rested my back. We did perimeter walks at the golf course on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday but on Thursday we hiked a new trail, Old Hapa Road, from Poipu to Koloa. It was a hot day but there was thankfully a cool breeze so we had a great hike. Not sure though we’d want to do it when there wasn’t a breeze as there was little to no shade the entire way. We found nine golf balls on our perimeter walks last week, pretty good considering we now have competition. Two woman that we have gotten to know over this past year also started walking the perimeter this past week, and as they passed Brett on Monday one of them showed him a bag of four balls they had found that day (we have never told anyone we look for lost balls). We still plan to hunt but it looks like the balls will go to whoever gets there first.

Hapa Road is part of the 10-mile Koloa Heritage Trail system. The road was established in the late 1800s, and in WWII it was used to move supplies and as an emergency evacuation route. Pieces of 13th century Hawaiian stone walls can be seen along the way as well. St. Raphael’s Church, the oldest Catholic Church on Kaua’i, is the turnaround point – 1.8 miles from the trail’s start.

We now have five good walking venues on the island: Kukuiolono Park & Golf Course, the eastside beach path, the Stone Dam trail on the north shore, the Waiokapua Trail at Barking Sands, and now Old Hapa Road in Poipu. It’s great having choices for our walks although because the golf course is the closest it will always be our default first choice. We haven’t been up to Stone Dam for several months because of all the spring rain, but it should be dried out pretty well now so we are itching to get back. The Stone Dame Trail is a six-mile hike, but a very pleasant one with beautiful views, and a place to picnic at the turnaround. The other hikes are all closer to four miles.