April 5th, 2011:

Good Evening. I guess this afternoon blogging thing really isn’t working out after all. Hopefully I can get back into that routine one day. For now the evening blogging is working out okay. Tonight I am not completely exhausted so hopefully I can make a little sense out of things.

Today started off with our normal breakfast routine followed by going to the gym for an hour of cardio and some bicep curls. Since I am doing ChaLEAN Extreme I have decided to use my time at the Y mainly for cardio. I did 2 miles on the treadmill followed by about ten minutes of stretching. I woke up extremely sore in my hips and shins. I am assuming this is from doing two workouts yesterday. I am going to have to start making myself stretch after my cardio. With ChaLEAN Extreme the second day is technically a rest day but I am going to continue with my normal schedule and go to the gym and just rest from the weight lifting DVD. I did do about 50 bicep curls starting with ten pound weights and working my way up to twenty pounds doing about 15 reps with each weight. I feel like I have lost some strength in my biceps so I wanted to get in a little lifting today.

After running a few errands and picking up some plants for the garden we finally made it home for lunch. By this point I was starving and snacked on way too many things while the cornbread baked and Sunday’s soup reheated on the stove.

For lunch I had most of this bowl of Chicken Fiesta Soup with a big hunk of Lew’s homemade cornbread.

After lunch LB and Daisy took an amazing nap (Daisy slept for more than 3 hours!) while Lew and I caught up on last night’s episode of Castle and I drank my afternoon coffee. I don’t know about you but a cup in the morning just isn’t enough for this momma! After cleaning up the house I started looking for chocolate muffin recipe to make for a young ladies group I was suppose to have at the house tonight. I found a recipe from muffinrecipes.net that I had all of the ingredients for so I whipped up a batch and they are overall pretty good.

Chocolate Chunk Muffins (adapted from muffinrecipes.net)

• 2 cups of all purpose flour (I used all-purpose spelt flour which I think made these a little more dense than they should have been)
• 2/3 cup cocoa
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup chocolate chunks (I chopped 3 squares of semi-sweet baking chocolate b/c that’s all I had; definitely could have used the full cup)
• 1/2 cup organic sugar
• 1 1/3 cup milk
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 2 tsp. baking soda

1. Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees.
2. In large mixing bowl combine cocoa, flour, sugar, baking soda and vanilla.
3. Stir in 1/2 chocolate chips.
4. In a separate bowl mix eggs, oil and milk. Add to dry ingredients.
5. Top each muffin with remaining chocolate chips. (I skipped this b/c I didn’t have enough but I think it would have made them much better.)
6. Bake in lined muffin tin for 20 minutes.

This is the first time I have taken food photos outside so I got a little carried away!