Runner in the Real World: Paleo Mexican "Tortillas" & FitDay Update

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Today's Workout: kettlebell workout - details to come.

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So I have been worse than terrible at updating my progress with FitDay on here. I have been good about recording my food and activity in the program, but translating it into blogs posts...well......I'll try to do better. You can see where I was on my last date (over a month ago) here. And below are where my stats stand now.

I have consistently kept my caloric intake below my caloric expenditure, but I need to be more consistent with keeping it under my daily allotment.

I have lowered my carb intake, but need to do so more.I am eating a good amount of protein, and almost all of my vitamin intake has significantly improved.

I am losing weight, but I am behind my goal pace. I can sit here and pretend to not know why, but we all know carbs are the main culprit and I need to adjust my diet accordingly. Enter paleo inspired food.

I have been intrigued with the paleo diet for some time, and while for a number of reasons I don't want to live a life on such a restricted diet, I am eagerly looking for new substitutions for my favorite carbs to try to improve my weight loss and nutrition. One of my favorite paleo recipes is Almond Flour Pancakes, which I will share another time. Today is about a different creation: Paleo "Tortilla Chips" and Guac.

I love Mexican food, which is probably obvious by the number of times that cuisine graces this blog. I was excited to come across a few recipes for paleo tortilla chip. There are so many different recipes out there for this, and I ended up combining a few recipes to meet the ingredients I had in my pantry.

My recipe looked like this:

Paleo ~~"Tortilla Chip"~~ "Tortilla" Ingredients

(the plan changed to tortillas during the process, explained below)

2 cups almond flour

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon olive oil

salt to taste

cayenne pepper to taste (1/4 teaspoon)

(additional olive oil for cooking)

Directions:

Mix batter in a bowl (sorry I only took a picture after I had made half a batch)

Roll small, even-sized balls, on to parchment paper. (I was at first planning to make chips, so if you are making actually tortillas, make the balls a little larger, below are approximately 1 inch in diameter).

Cover with parchment paper, and flatten with rolling pin. (or if you are domestically-challenged and do not have a rolling pin, you can use a roll of saran wrap like we did)

Gently peel off top layer of parchment paper

Drizzle lightly with olive oil and bake at 350 until achieved desired crispiness. (It was late at night and out of fear of burning them, I took them out after 8 minutes (I turned them over at 4 minutes)). The texture I ended up with is something like a pita, but thinner. I would have tried to cook longer, but I was too tired to start from scratch if the experiment failed. I had left over chicken and peppers from the day before and thought these "tortilla chips" could actually make decent "tortillas" - and they did!