Blogs to Check Out

These are some of the blogs that I follow for food, Paleo, and entertainment purposes:

Nom Nom Paleo is awesome. Great photos and recipes. She likes mushrooms and always seems to have well-balanced meals. If you have an iPad, check out her recently created iPad app. Also, if you've got a lot of kitchen toys (WAY more than me), you should look at her recipes. She has some super cool gadgets.

If you want an entertaining and humorous read with LOTS of wonderful dessert recipes, check out Juli on PaleOMG. She's in the process of pulling together a cookbook of her recipes. Some of her entrées look questionable for my tastes (though I'm sure you may think the same of my recipes).

I also read Mark's Daily Apple when I want to learn more about Paleo and other health and fitness topics. He posts every day... like a boss! And each weekend he provides links to various different topics. Great about answering questions and really helpful about analyzing recent research publications, such as this one about gluten sensitivity.

Robb Wolf was my first insight into the world of Paleo. I read his book, The Paleo Solution, when I first decided to start doing Paleo. He tries to provide facts and is not solely trying to win you over to the side of Paleo. He wants you, the reader, to be healthy. He wants to help people and he's convincing. Give his blog a shot.

Bill and Hayley of The Food Lovers Kitchen was also a blog/source of recipe ideas when I was starting out. They've got some good explanations on what is and isn't Paleo. They've created a new Android/iPhone app that is awesome for meal planning and grocery lists. You can search for certain foods or mealtimes, and put them on a meal plan for the week. It has the ingredients and directions available, and also produces a grocery list for you. Hard to get better than that!

I don't visit this one as frequently, but I do think you should check it out: The Clothes Make the Girl. Melissa Joulwan helped form the Texas Rollergirls in Austin, TX. Roller derby. How cool is that? I enjoy reading her blog for her sense of humor and her good job of tracking food when she does Whole 30 (like she's been doing lately).

If you're looking for some delicious and well-presented food ideas, look no further than Morsels and Mouthfuls. One of my friends back in Atlanta prepares excellent-looking and -tasting meals and I'm super jealous of his dinner plates. I like my food and I think it tastes good, but his presentations are restaurant-worthy.

Archery

Months ago I created a poll for you to vote on what my next exercise choice should be. Well, it came down to a three-way tie between archery, P90X again, and rowing. So... I had my first archery lesson today. Yes, you read that right... Archery! Who's a badass? Yeah, that'd be me! The only time I had shot a bow and arrow in the past was at renaissance festivals. Every time that I go to a ren fest, I leave with a desire to learn sword-play or archery. Thanks to a handy-dandy LivingSocial voucher, I'm finally getting around to archery. I started off on the short-range and after a few warm-ups where I learned the form, I managed to get four, count that, FOUR bulls-eyes right next to each other. Did I mention I'm a badass? So the instructor switched me to the longer range target. I only got one bulls-eye, but hey, I'm a beginner... give me a break!

Speaking of archery, did you watch the USA men's archery team when they were competing against South Korea? Our boys look like Southern rednecks who go hunting every weekend, whereas the South Koreans looked like their only form of physical activity is pulling back on that cord. I definitely chuckled when I watched it this past Sunday. Another amusing/amazing thing is that the top South Korean archer is legally blind. "In tests of his vision Im Dong-Hyun scores 20/100 and 20/200 in his right and left eyes respectively." Somehow, he still manages to be an amazing archer. And he doesn't want to have corrective surgery because he's afraid it will mess with his archery performance. Crazy!

My entree selection... yum, steak!

It's also Restaurant Week(s), so my friends and I went to out to eat. For those who don't know about restaurant week, a bunch of restaurants put together a special menu for patrons with a portion of the cost being donated to the food bank ($5 for dinner, $3 for brunch/lunch). It's a great excuse for everyone to try out different restaurants and feel good about helping others. Win-win! The downside is that they don't have a ton of options available and some of them aren't completely Paleo-friendly, though can be made so by asking to hold the rice/pasta/grain-product. Plus, the third course offered is dessert and not many places have a Paleo-friendly dessert. However, the restaurant we ate at tonight had coconut ice cream. Huzzah!

And we had two bloggers at our table, so fortunately our friends were nice enough to wait before tucking into their meals so that Shasie and I could snap photos. Shasie is a fashion blogger (Live Life in Style), but she still takes photos of food, like me and our waiter. That's right, we bonded with our waiter about blogging. Once I have some time I'm going to hunt down his blog.

Coconut ice cream, with coconut flakes. Yum again!

I didn't eat this, but my buddy Z had this chocolate tres leches. I didn't realize that was possible...