Sports Nutrtition Hacked: Recipes

Mackerel Tacos with pickled bitter melon salsa, coconut foam, and roasted 

squash with goji berry sauce...and bitter melon martinis.  

This week I scoured Philly's Chinatown to find inexpensive alternatives to popular athletic supplements.  My finds, along with a cost and nutritional comparison, are on GamJams today.  To make these things more edible, my friend Jerry and I attempted to cook with them.  Here are some recipes we came up with:

Mackerel Tacos:

As discussed on GamJams, the canned mackerel that I bought in Chinatown is high in omega 3 fatty acids, but unlike gelcap supplements, provides a source of protein, is delicious (well, maybe just OK)  in fish tacos, and also makes a decent holiday ornament.  This stuff, with bones and all, was pretty gross directly out of the can.  Combined with  bitter melon salsa, coconut foam, and goji berry sauce, it was definitely healthy, and well, edible I suppose.

• 1 can mackerel or other oily nasty fish that is otherwise inedible
• 4 corn tortillas
• some shredded cabbage
• 1 blob of greek yogurt
• cumin powder
• minced garlic
• sriracha or other hot sauce
• lemon juice
• salt

Cook the tortillas in a skillet with some canola oil until they're somewhat crispy.  Take them out and put the fish in the skillet.  The fish is already cooked, so just heat it up til it's less nasty.  Mix the cabbage with the greek yogurt and all the other stuff.  Put it in the tortillas with some of the fish.  Serve with bitter melon salsa and coconut foam.

  

 Bitter Melon Salsa:

• 1 bitter melon, pithy stuff scraped out and cut into really thin half circles.
• 1 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup water
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 peach or apple, chopped
• 1 tomato, chopped
• white onion, chopped
• cilantro, chopped
• some lime juice

Shake up the vinegar, honey, water, and salt in jar, add the melon slices, and pickle them in the fridge for at least a day (yeah, I know that's a long time; maybe you should have read the recipe before starting).  When the pickles are ready, put all the other ingredients in a bowl, chop the pickles and add as much of it as you can stand to the salsa. 

Coconut Foam:

OK, the texture on this stuff didn't work out as planned; I got more of a runny coconut spooge.  I wouldn't recommend attempting this recipe, but here it is anyway:

• 1c coconut water
• 1/2 tsp xanthan gum
• 1 tbsp sugar

Mix on high speed in a mixer or blender til it's sticky and gross.

Roasted Squash with Goji Berry Sauce:

This was the most non-nasty creation of the evening.  Pretty good in fact. 

• 1 squash (I used acorn)
• 1/2 c dried goji berries
• 1c water
• 3tbsp honey
• 1/4c apple cider vinegar
• sriracha
• cumin 
• cinnamon

Poke the squash with a knife a few times and roast it at 350f until it's kinda squishy (45ish minutes).  Boil the berries with the water and honey til the water is reduced by half.  Add the vinegar and everything else, and puree in the blender.  Cut up the squash and serve it with the sauce.

  

Bitter Melon Martinis:

Made with Bluecoat gin, these martinis were, well, just OK.  But I don't blame Philly's local gin...maybe the bitter melon is an acquired taste...

• 1 shot gin, preferably Bluecoat, but you can use Hendricks and you won't be any less of a person
• 1/2 shot dry vermouth
• 1 tsp bitter melon pickle juice
• 1 slice pickled bitter melon

Combine everything with some ice cubes, strain, and garnish with the pickled bitter melon.  If you can finish this drink (or really any of these recipes), you can suffer like a world-class athlete.  Cheers.

PS If you're wondering what goji berries, bitter melon, and all these crazy ingredients have to do with sports nutrition, check out my rationale here.  



Safety vs. Specificity

Ok, moving on past the post-race season "Cyclists Gone Wild" phase, Ky came to visit and we ushered in the more subdued "loafer-wearing, cupcake-baking, and quietly studying" phase of the fall.  With all-night partying being sooo last week, the ample daylight allowed for some serious mileage, and our renewed nerdiness brought on this safety inquiry: 

The thing that bugs me most about group rides is the way people call out obstacles.  Not that it's the most pressing safety issue in the world; maybe it's just funny, but the specificity with which some people point things out is absurd.  Beyond the usual "Car Up," "Hole," and "Slowing," today I also heard stuff like, "Car back...no wait...it's a truck...OMG YOU GUYS!  TRUCK BACK!!"  What exactly were we supposed to do with the additional information?  Do they think we're all like, "Oh, a truck?  The chassis is higher than that of the aforementioned car and could run me over rather than throw me over the hood, hmmm...I think I'll move to the side of the"...errrr...splat.  I've also heard people correct each other, like "walker up," then, "no dude, that's a jogger!"  It'll probably produce the same crappy result if you hit a walker going 4mph or a runner going 8. 

So next time, maybe we should just stick with a few basic alerts.  If there's no easy description, then the universal, "Gahhh!!" would probably incite an appropriate level of caution.


Ky and I made fortune cupcakes with overly specific alerts...



I laughed, I cried, I almost hurled

If you just finished up road season and don't have any 'cross on your agenda, you're probably going through that weird yet exciting post-racing-bender-phase.  Since this is only my second off-season, I don't have a good grasp of what to expect for this phase, how long it should last, or how much discipline to use.  Luckily there's advice from fitness experts to help, but more on that in a sec.

Last year after road season I felt strangely angry.  Every morning I'd go to grab my bike for a ride, look at it for a second and think, "I'll show them!" and then put on my running shoes instead.  And I'm no runner, so really I just threw on some random sneakers, but more importantly, whom was I showing, and what?  I ran a lot of angry miles last fall, finally ending up with an achilles injury (according to the doctor it was due to the aforementioned sneakers), and unable to run or even ride for a few weeks. 

This year I prepared to be that angry runner again, scheduling a running shoe fitting and even planning to temporarily cut myself off from friends if I became an intolerable jerk.  Surprisingly, I'm not angry, just bummed from finally acknowledging the numerous personal crises that I managed to ignore during road season.  But mostly I'm fed up with the self-discipline of training, so I came up with a list of "undisciplined" things to do:

• Stay up late (done)
• Eat a hamburger (not yet)
• Watch the Phillies' post-season (unfortunately, that was done all too quickly)
• Have a dinner party (done x2)
• Cook something elaborate (done, see above)
• Go for long rides without worrying about a training agenda (done)
• Go to a show at Johnny Brenda's (done)
• All-night party (saturday night was really close...still feeling ill)
• Go running (nope- kinda banged up my ribs in Boston; still hurts to run)
• Quit the leg press and squats for a while, do arms instead just for funsies (OK, I did only the quitting part; upper body still hurts see above)



The Besnard Lakes at Johnny Brendas

 So that sums up the first two weeks of the off-season.  Not a bad time, but it looks like according to the experts, I might be a little too far off the training wagon.  For this 1- to 6-week "Transition Period" as Joe Friel calls it, Friel suggests that athletes stay active with unstructured training in non-cycling sports, and he also warns to not be a "couch potato."  Oh.  Speaking of potatoes, Racing Weight author Matt Fitzgerald suggests that athletes gain no



Bread pudding recipe from Philly restaurant Standard Tap

 more than 8% of their race weight in the off-season.  No comment.  So I guess it's time to add a little structure to the "unstructured" training plan, lest this off-season become more tragic than the Phillies post-season. 

Hillbilly Hustle Observed

“I wish real sports were this fun,” said a rather tipsy Charlie Z. as he handed hot dog feeds to oncoming racers.  The Hillbilly Hustle ‘cross race was fun indeed, the most fun I’ve ever had at a race (possibly because I was working the food tent rather than racing).  As for whether cyclocross is a sport, I disagree with my wiener-wielding friend.  "Sport" is one of those terms that people can't agree on, like “beauty,” “art,” and “undertraining.”   Most dictionaries associate sport with athleticism, skill, or jest though, and I observed all three at the Hustle.

Athleticism: The women’s and men’s A races were both won by going fast.  Really fast.  Kristin Gavin had a commanding solo finish, while the men provided an epic display of athleticism too.  The top three finishers worked together for most of the race, with Cameron Dodge edging out Cole Oberman and John Minturn for the win.
 

Leaders of the men's A race

Skill: A roadie like me can’t even comprehend the handling skills required for dismounts and awkward situations like clawing your way up “Mt. Doom” with 90 dudes breathing down your neck.  Some people had no problem clearing the barriers and hopping right back on the bike.  This guy took a different approach, bunny hopping the barriers without dismounting.  It didn’t help him get ahead, but it did bring him popularity with the crowd, even as his competitors passed him.

 Jest: Anyone who’s willing to get this messy probably has a sense of humor.  Here’s David Lowe of Human Zoom, being quite the good "sport" after crashing on his face.  And this lady is just plain disgusting.  Sarah Iepson, winner of the women’s B race, had an interesting take on the sounds emanating from her muddy brakes.

So if those are the criteria defining "sport," I'd venture to say that 'cross might be even more of a sport than road racing is.  As for me and Charlie, we'd better get some 'cross bikes right away.  We've definitely got the jest part down, (ok absolutely no skills), and maybe some lingering athleticism from road season.  It won't last much longer if we keep watching cross races from the food tent though...

All my Hillbilly Hustle photos are here.