Creamy Avocado Spaghetti Squash

After tackling my first squash in the slow cooker last week, I was ready to take it one step further: spaghetti squash.

After slicing it in half and scooping out the seeds, I brushed the halves with oil and sprinkled them with sea salt and pepper before roasting them in the oven face down for 40 minutes.

While they were roasting, I made the creamy avocado sauce (two avo halves, 3 cloves of garlic, juice of half a lemon, 2 tbsp olive oil, fresh basil) in the blender. A food processor would have worked better, but who owns such extravagancy?

Once they finished roasting, the fun could begin. I took a fork and carved out the strings, which was really easy and gave me much more flesh than I expected.

And here it is: the perfect alternative to pasta – vegan, gluten-free, and amazingly nutritious and tasty. Between the squash and the avocado, the nutritional profile of this dish is out of control awesome.

I really needed a nutritious boost too after my workout class tonight. I am still following my fitness plan pretty much perfectly. Friday, I was supposed to run 3 miles, but I had more dental work, which left me in pain, so I switched out Friday for my planned rest day on Sunday and made up for it then.

The goal for the month of November is to be able to run 3 10-minute miles comfortably.

Full Day of Food and Running Recap

Today was different than most days because I didn’t do as much snacking as usual. On weekdays, when I’m at work, I have a snack about every two hours. Today, I had three actual meals and only one snack, so I used it as a chance to document everything I ate.

For breakfast, I decided on blue cheese and spinach omelettes, which also gave me a chance to use a tomato that was on the brink of death and some of the mushrooms in my fridge.

Here is the creation before I folded it. This one was Dave’s, so it has a generous amount of blue cheese. I have a hard time with feta and blue cheese if the flavor is too strong, so I put about half this amount on mine.

Naturally, I fried the omelettes in coconut oil. This is the refined kind, which was an accident-buy, but I’ll soon have to do a post on organic extra virgin coconut oil and the obsession I’ve developed with it.

Complete breakfast: omelette, English muffing with strawberry jam, water, and coffee.

This was supposed to be my perfectly timed-out meal before my 8-mile run. I had it at 10:30 a.m. and was planning to run at 4 p.m. I read in Runner’s World that you’re supposed to eat a meal about 4 hours before a run/race and then a small snack about an hour and a half before the run. I am an absolute hopeless case when it comes to math (read: logical thinking) , so I didn’t notice that I was having the meal 5.5 hours before the run instead of 4. In my head, it was right because I has having the meal 4 hours before the snack.

My snack, which I indeed had at 2:30 as planned, consisted of sushi leftovers and a banana.

Now that I look back, I realize that sushi really may not be the ideal choice here, especially because it was leftover sushi from last night, so there was a reasonable chance that it might not make my stomach feel all that great.

Sure enough, about 20 minutes after eating it, I started feeling a bit queasy. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say my lunch was looking to make a quick exit. I was nervous about running now because I knew I couldn’t have gotten much energy or nutrients out of the snack, but I decided to hope for the best.

So, I set out, ready to enjoy slightly warmer temperatures (39 degrees) and my brand-new Spotify playlist. But my digestive system was not ready to enjoy much of anything. It became clear quickly that I would have to stop to go to the bathroom at the first chance I got. 3 miles into the run, there was a grocery store, so I used their customer restroom. It helped, but now I suddenly felt weak and without energy. I had lost a lot of water and my last actual meal was now 7 hours ago. I wished I had brought money to get some Gatorade, but alas, I only had my phone.

I decided to keep going to see how I would feel, but I realized fast that my energy was gone. Part of me wanted to push through and finish the run, and the other part wanted to stop and delay it until I actually had some food in me. Maybe it’s because I did yoga this morning that I was able to remove myself from the obsessive urge to finish the 8 miles, no matter what. If there is one thing I’m trying to avoid in my food and exercise behavior, it’s becoming obsessed and turning healthy habits into destructive mind games. So I think I made the right choice to call Dave and ask him to pick me up, which he gladly did.

When he got there a few minutes later, we decided to have dinner at Wegman’s, which is the grocery store in State College that comes closet to Whole Foods. They have a great selection of plant-based prepared foods, and I could go there in my running clothes.

I quickly felt my energy coming back once I started eating this delicious meal.

Thai meatless meatballs in red curry, brussel sprouts, a gorgonzola/apple/squash gratin, and butternut squash and carrots.

And at least as important, a true German Hefeweizen because why not?

We then went through the grocery store to pick up a few things, to Target, and to Dick’s Sporting Goods. At Dick’s, I bought about 15 Gu energy gel packages. From now on, I’ll have one or two on me on every long run I do. It could have saved the day.

Back home, we played Boggle (which I forced us to buy at Target) and watched Flipping Vegas. The one downside about having to abort the run is that I now have to get up at 7 tomorrow to try again.

Oh, and here is an awesome desert, which we had while playing Boggle.

It’s Greek yogurt, pureed mango, and honey ice cream. I made it about two weeks ago from 1 large container of Greek yogurt, 1 Trader Joe’s bag of frozen mango, and 1/4 cup of honey. It stayed delicious in the freezer – the honey is a really nice addition. Better than Saturday night Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip & cookie dough ice cream, which Dave and I used to have regularly in our early days of dating.

This leaves me with one question: If you run, when and what do you usually eat before longer runs? What do you eat the nights before you run, if you run before breakfast? And if you do yoga, does it help you make less obsessive choices about your diet and exercise, too? Okay, that was more than one question!