Steel City Endurance Racing

Or if you can’t cook or don’t always have time, eat real food that someone else cooks !  Even if it’s a restaurant, choose one that has a kitchen where people actually make the food from real ingredients – not just reheat some packaged product that comes off a truck.  Real food has real flavor that doesn’t rely on chemicals and artificial color or flavoring to look and taste good.

Pasta Options

Pasta doesn’t have to be spaghetti with a tomatoe or meat sauce -  you can make a delicious meal in less than 30 minutes with just a few ingredients.

Choose a pasta:  it can be spaghetti, but there are lots of different kinds of past – wide noodles like papparadelle or fettucini or lingui, as well as pasta shaped like bowties (farfalle) or tubes.  Most pasta cooks in about 5-8 minutes.  Pasta that is fresh (not dried) cooks in 2-4 minutes.

Choose a topping:  Start with good olive oil and garlic.  Heat the olive oil (enough to coat the bottom of the pan); saute garlic (1-2 cloves depending on how much you like garlic) over low heat until soft (2- 3 minutes); then add any or all of the following:  shrimp (cook just about 2 minutes until they turn pink.  Shrimp turns to rubber if you cook it too long); shrimp and zucchini; chicken cut into small pieces; mushrooms; mushrooms and chicken; spinach or arugula (toss the greens into the pan and stir until wilted – only about 2 minutes or so); arugula and shrimp; or a chopped fresh tomatoes.  After you drain the pasta, add it to the pan with whatever you’ve prepared as a topping and stir together for a minute or so, to blend the flavors.  Grate fresh romano or parmesan cheese over the top.

Pesto

Pesto recipes abound – I make mine by “feel” as much as measuring.  Start with fresh basil leaves, about 1 cup, firmly packed.  Puree in a blender, about 1/4 cup at a time until the leaves are well shredded.  Add about 1/4 cup pine nuts.  Blend until the pine nuts are partly pulverized.  Add about 1/4 cup grated fresh romano cheese and 1 – 2 cloves mashed garlic. (peel the cloves and mash with the back of a spoon. You can also use a garlic press).  Once all of these ingredients are in the blender, add about 1/4 cup good olive oil and start the blender.  You may need to add additional olive oil, a little bit at a time, to get it to turn into a nice consistent green past.  You can use this as a topping for pasta, by itself or with chicken.

Fruit Smoothies

I like to have a fruit smoothie as a ‘second breakfast’ or as part of a post-ride or post-race recovery, especially if it is hot.  I use frozen fruit that I let thaw for about 2 hours before blending, with my favorite combination being peaches and strawberries with 1/2 a banana.   Basically, I take about 1 cup frozen strawberries, 1 cup frozen peaches.  Let them thaw for a couple of hours.  Add 1/2 banana and about 1/4 cup low fat yogurt.  I like to use either vanilla or maple yogurt, but that is just my preference.  Put all of this in a blender and puree.  When I plan on having the smoothy for ‘second breakfast’ at work, I put it in a container, pop it back in the freezer overnight, then take it with me to work.  After a couple of hours it’s thawed enough to eat with a spoon.

– Fra la cucina di Barb Grabowski