My apartment stuff and high-carb GF recipes.

As I mentioned the other day, Saturday was "apartment shopping day" and we went to Target and bought all of the essentials for our apartment... mostly kitchen stuff like measuring cups, spoons, etc. but also stuff like shower curtains and decor. Wanted to share a few of my favorite items.

Muffin tins and mixing/storage bowls = IMPORTANT. My love of baking will still go strong in the new apartment :)

A clothesline to hang photos on! This I bought for myself so it might just go in my teeny bedroom at the apartment. 

We bought some permanent soap bottles... growing up my mom always liked to refill our soap bottles with a Costco gallon of soap... Way more economical in the long run!

For our kitchen...

And my favorite : my plates/bowls set! Target had a really nice selection of glass plates and bowls and I suggested we each buy two of each in the pattern we preferred to make a mismatched set. That way, if we have people over, we have enough dinnerware for guests to use too!

I love my pattern and the pale blue color it comes in! I'm excited to use them!

Other items included frying pans and a nice coffeemaker donated by my mom, and some little hand-me-down kitchen necessities (spatulas, soap rack, dish towel, etc) donated by my grandmother. Our apartment will be well-stocked!

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Though my 10-miler on Sunday felt really great, I felt notably pooped out by it afterwards. In fact, anything over 8 miles really leaves my energy spent for the rest of the day. I think a lot of this has to do with my amount of sleep (which has been lacking) but also has to do with diet. I am not 100% gluten-free, and I hate strongly dislike putting labels on my dietary situation, but I do not eat breads, pastas, most cereals, pizza, etc. I also can't really eat normal potatoes, which are also great sources of carbs. As an athlete, that can complicate things a bit and really narrows down my options! I know that my pre-race dinner can probably never really be the classic spaghetti and tomato sauce - at least, not in the foreseeable future. I'm good at carb-loading with sweet potatoes and bananas and things like that, but once I get to be doing really long runs (I'm think like 13+ miles) I'll need to get comfortable with eating higher carb dinners the night/nights before. My training plan for the marathon calls for three 18-milers and a 20-miler, and that's definitely going to require carbs! Not to mention, I have a 50-mile bike race in 4.5 weeks which will probably take me about 4+ hours to complete. Now that's a lot of glycogen!

So, I took it upon myself to research gluten-free carbs. I came up with two good resources.

The first specifically goes over the importance of carbs for athletes and suggests some good pre-workout alternatives. 

The other one I found offers a LOT of different suggestions that sound really great to me. I am excited to try a few of these... butternut squash risotto? Yes, please!

As I try some of these, I will post updates on how they turn out and how well they work for me!