Salads in a jar idea & my carmelitas!

My mom sent me this very clever idea from Back to her Roots for Salads in a Jar. I never would've thought of this! In the future (next year when I have my apartment?) I can make salads for the next few days and all I have to do is throw them in my bag every morning and go! It'll be my first year sans a campus meal plan, so I love ideas like this (salads or otherwise).

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Today was a pretty eventful day. I was up at 6:58AM because our carbon monoxide detector was acting weird and my parents wanted the fire department to come. It's an awkward moment when a young strapping fire fighter sees you in your pajamas...

Luckily, everything was fine! We just need a new detector.

At 7:45 I dropped my sister off at school so I could use our family's car to go to yoga this morning. After dropping her off I had some time to drink some water and read the news before heading off to my 9:30 hot yoga class. It was a good practice today for me! This was the last session I had on my 10-class pass and I have to admit that I'm a little sad. Maybe I'll get a new one next summer?

Left the studio around 11:15 and got my promised cup of coffee before heading to the grocery store. Got home a little after noon and headed straight to work!

I did my "magic smoothie" and ate some banana before getting down to business doing what I was really excited for... carmelitas (more on that in a minute)! 

I got this smoothie idea from a book called Gutbliss by Dr. Chutkan, a marathon-running, power-woman, super-mom doctor specializing in gastroenterology. You can find the recipe online here but I read it out of her book. Since dairy and dough have been rough on me lately, I've been resorting to this smoothie to add to many meals for extra energy.

Key smoothie ingredients:

(Instead of coconut water)

(Frozen berries instead of regular berries+ice since it is winter and real berries are très $$$)

Carmelitas: 

Before seeing this recipe, I'd never heard of Carmelitas. Who knew that was a thing??? I'll do a run-through of the basics for this recipe, but for the details and proper instructions head over to Averie's blog, since it's her recipe :)

The key ingredient here is caramel. If you aren't a super-sweet-tooth person OR don't like caramel I'm  not sure you'll have the same love of this desert as I do. If you do love those things, you're good to go.

Start by unwrapping ~35 of these guys so they can be melted with the cream.

Mix flour, butter, oats, and baking soda to make the cookie dough. Press half of the mixture into the bottom of the (greased) tinfoil-lined pan and cook partway. Meanwhile the caramel is melting.

Get one cup of these beauties ready.

Sprinkle!

Drizzle that melted caramel sauce!

Sprinkle the remaining dough (which has probably hardened somewhat by this point).

Then you bake for about 15-16 minutes and get THIS (not too exciting to look at yet, I know).

Now, the most important part. These require four hours of cooling at room temperature - if you cut them before they are completely cool, they will be ooey-gooey blobs, which is not all bad but can be very messy. Caramel can be a monster to deal with (trust me, I spent quite a good amount of time scraping and scrubbing it from the pots I used!) so take caution. I actually purposely made this recipe while it's still very cold out, so I could put it into our walk-in freezer (aka our mudroom) where it's about 45 degrees below room-temperature. I figured this could cut the cooling time in half.

For such a delicious outcome, these are relatively un-messy and easy to make. I really only had to clean two mixing bowls and a spatula and was pleasantly surprised by this.

While these were cooling in the 20-degree mud room I got a 5-mile run in. It was finally a teensy bit warmer but still icier than I expected. I tried to run in the road for a bit so I wouldn't fall, but when a giant school bus came barreling down a busy street I leapt back on the sidewalk! Just my luck that I landed right in a part of the sidewalk that apparently has a drainage problem...I went right through a sheet of ice and my foot got stuck! Didn't help that it was the foot with the toe that's been feeling weird (is it possible to have a sprained toe?). Eventually I wrenched my foot out and got on my way...good thing I was a few blocks from home because otherwise I think my foot might've frozen right off! (Not being dramatic at all ;) 

Got home and showered just in time to pick up the sister and bring her back home! Finally, the carmelitas were ready to be sliced. The patience of waiting for them to be completely cooled really paid off and they were easy to cut into "bars."

Ta-da!

These were just as delicious as I'd hoped. I think they'd freeze well, too, which might be a good option for us since I'm also about to make my cake. I'm actually going to go get started on that now!