P90X - Day 6, 7, and 8

Day 6 is Kenpo X, also known as kick-boxing to my non-P90X friends. It's an hour-long fast-paced workout that happens to be my favorite of the P90X routines. It's one of the few routines that I've done while not in the midst of a P90X sequence. And you want to know what's awesome?My mom did Kenpo X with me! Yeah, my mom's a bad-ass. She came to visit me this weekend as a late birthday celebration (I told you, I like to celebrate my birthday for weeks), and she joined in when I told her I had workouts to do. I somehow managed to sleep in every day that my mom was here. Usually I wake up by 8 a.m. at the latest during the weekends, but Friday morning I didn't get up till 8:30 a.m., so I skipped the morning workout and did it in the evening instead.

Despite the fact that we did a lot of things, I feel like we still found time to relax. We went to the museum on Friday morning to check out the new paleontology exhibit (yay Paleo!), and saw such things as Gator-Headed Frog-oids... no I'm not making it up...

We also went to the mall where we bought a puzzle before returning home and beginning the puzzle. We ended the day with a 10:30 p.m. session of Kenpo X.

Yes, I like to sort things...

Saturday morning, Day 7, I slept in until 10 a.m.!!! (I have no idea how I pulled this off. Yes, we stayed up later than my 9 p.m. bed time, but I still slept for 9ish hours.) After waking up, we walked a quarter-mile to a nearby restaurant that hosts a small farmers market every Saturday morning, which I intend to hit up again in the future. We did X Stretch that afternoon, before  making our way to a roller derby bout that evening.

Day 8 was Sunday. My mom and I woke up at 8:30, intending to go for a walk. We got our shoes and and walked out the door before we realized it was raining. Oops. Instead, we worked on our puzzle, which we finished today. Isn't it pretty?

After working on the puzzle for a couple hours, we booked it to a performance of Cirque du Soleil. It was amazing, as always. I'm continually astonished at how flexible some people are. Once we got back, I did P90X Chest and Back before whipping up a late dinner. We had picked up some pork chops from Whole Foods so I put together a meal of Plantain-Crusted Pork Chops and asparagus.

This recipe draws from my Slow-Cooker Jamaican Jerk Beef that I made back in March.

Plantain-Crusted Pork Chops

2 pork chops

1/2 tsp thyme

1/2 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp clove

1/4 tsp black pepper

1/4 tsp sea salt

1 egg, whisked

1/2 cup dried plantains, crushed

Mix up the spices and cover the pork chops with the mixture. Place pork chops on a plate, cover with plastic wrap, and put in the fridge. Refrigerate for 2-3 hours for flavor incorporation.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Dump your crushed plantains onto a plate. Whisk that egg, and then spread onto pork chops (alternately, you can just dunk the pork chops into the egg. Transfer the egg-coated pork chop to your plantain plate, and flip the pork chop so that it is completely covered in plantain pieces.

Slow-Cooker Jamaican Jerk Beef

Recently I posted about last week's food was a little repetitive, so I decided to try something new. Something that I've never attempted before. What do I have to work with? Beef, a slow cooker, and an assortment of spices. How do I figure out what to make with these? To the internet! Imagine myself in the superman pose, with my hands in fists extended in front of me - yeah, this is how I get online. It makes for pretty epic web browsing experiences. Anyways, as I was perusing some websites, I found some recipes for Jamaican Jerk Chicken. So I proceeded to do some research on the histories and other recipes. This is what I learned, and the recipe that I made up.

Jamaican jerk seasoning is traditionally used on pork or chicken. The two main ingredients are allspice and Scotch bonnet peppers. These peppers have a heat rating on the Scoville scale of 100,000 - 350,000 SHU (Scoville Heat Units). The Scoville scale indicates the amount of capsaicin present. Capsaicin is what gives the peppers "heat"; the molecular formula is (CH3)2CHCH=CH(CH2)4 CONHCH2C6H3-4-(OH)-3-(OCH3). Capsaicin itself is 16,000,000 SHU on the Scoville scale. For your comparison, a jalapeño is 2,500 - 8,000 SHU and a bell pepper is 0 SHU. I used cayenne pepper here, which is 30,000 - 50,000 SHU.

Slow-Cooker Jamaican Jerk Beef
1 pound beef
1 tsp allspice
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp thyme
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp garlic salt
1 1/2 tbls olive oil
1 lime, juiced
pepper to taste



1. Mix together the spices and olive oil in a small bowl.

2. Juice the lime and mix that into the bowl as well.

3. Cut the beef into small pieces and use either a fork or a knife to make shallow scores in the surface of the meat. This allows the meat to take on more flavor when you take your jerk seasoning and and rub into the meat. Do this now (you may want to use gloves for it).






4. Put the seasoned beef into a ziploc bag and place in the fridge for 3 hours.

5. After the beef has absorbed the seasonings, put it into the slow-cooker with a little water. Set the slow-cooker for low heat for 8 hours. Take out and eat.

I'll let you know how it tastes once I take it out tomorrow morning!
Edit: I tried it and it's good. I'm not sure if it's exactly Jamaican Jerk-flavored, because I don't have a lot of experience in that particular genre of food so I'm not entirely sure how it's supposed to taste. But I think I can describe it as yummy. There a bit of a edge from the pepper and cloves. Thanks to the cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon, it smelled a bit like glögg (a Scandinavian mulled wine) when it was cooking.