A Muscular Marriage! - Derek

I am finally back to posting after our busy and beautiful wedding! Special thanks to everyone who came, helped out, and had fun with us on our big day. Check out how happy we are below, and if anyone wants to see the whole slew of pictures taken by our good friend Kimberly Frost and her associate Chris Smith, please feel free to check them out here.

All food provided was completely vegan, and delicious! Check out this spread below brought to us by Crossroads Coffee and Ipanema Cafe. We also had a fantastic rehearsal dinner at The Nile and a gorgeous and delicious reception at Emilio's Tapas Bar. With food like this, no one asked how we vegans get by!

During our time we had a few missed workouts, and more than one 'cheat meal', but now that things have settled down some we are ready to get back to work and improve our physiques. In fact, we will be entering our fist Bodybuilding/Figure contest this December! If you thought our photo shoot prep was rigorous, just wait for this one!

We will also be setting up video demonstrations of some basic exercises for members of our wedding party who are now enthused with fitness after being forced to attend the gym, so stay tuned for those! And oh yeah, eat your beans and greens!

P.S. Our Barbarian couples picture has just been posted on the opening page of the great site veganbodybuilding.com! Check it out!

Moroccan Food and Relative Muscularity

For lunch we went to go to Cous Cous, and incidentally, if you live in RVA and get a Val-Pak in your mailbox every month, there will always be a buy-one-get-one-free coupon in there for this place. They have delicious tea, and Moroccan food, which is also delicious.

We each got salads with sauteed wild mushrooms and pine nuts (amazing).

They have "familia meze" dishes for sharing, pretty much like tapas, and there are a goodly amount of options that are nothing but vegetables and protein!

Derek had a luscious (but too rich for me to order) Moroccan pot pie stuffed with tofu, nuts, apricots, and vegetables and I got portabella caps stuffed with tofu and sweet bell pepper and basil. Damn, they were tasty. We also ordered lentil soup because I was afraid I'd still be hungry with just stuffed mushrooms and a salad, but again I underestimated the food and was really full. When will I learn? I'm thinking of hosting our farewell party for the summer interns here, partly because it's awesome, and partly as revenge against all the Cheesecake Factory devotees who mock my "weird" diet.

I swear one of these days at work, when someone does that and waxes on about protein and how can I get enough, etc...I'm going to roll up my shirtsleeve, glance at my flexed bicep, reach over and gingerly feel their sure-to-be underdeveloped arm...clear my throat and say "SO anyway, as you were saying?"


No, I would never do that...the absurdity of it all just makes me laugh.


So, for dinner...yes I really did just make fajitas again. It's what Derek wanted, but I did veto his choice of black beans in favor of pinto beans.

I sliced up bell peppers, zucchini, and mushrooms and salted them just a bit and peppered them, and cooked the beans with minced onion and garlic and secret hobo spices.

Actually, not really, just cumin and garlic powder.

I also steamed vegetables...

It must be my Hispanic background or something, but I could eat these every day.



It was another shoulder day and no clean and press, what was I thinking? I also feel like I forgot a superset in there somewhere...oh well. Still a pretty "gnarly" workout as Derek would say.

Fun in the Fan and Food

Sunday was our day-about-town; we rode our bikes around and ate and went shopping in Carytown- it was a rare and fabulous treat.

For lunch and coffee we hit up Crossroads in the Fan...back when I worked in the physics department at VCU I would walk over there in the afternoon, get a delicious latte, and grade papers for quantum physics with my trusty, much-used red pencil...Ah, the memories of simpler times. I don't think I ever spent an afternoon there without randomly meeting up with friends.

As we did this time - that's my friend Danielle pictured on the left, singer for local band The Hotdamns - Richmond's best alt-country! Have a listen.



We each got salads topped with blackened tofu and the squash soup of the day, and sugar-free soy lattes of course. Both the tofu and soup were really flavorful and the soup was unabashedly spicy; I'd had doubts about going out and just ordering soup and a salad but we actually had to walk our bikes for a while because I was too full. To top the afternoon off, they had about 10 books by one of my favorite science fiction authors at Creatures 'n Crooks a local sf and fantasy book shop with a big fluffy gray cat that likes dogs. Dogs like our dog Gretchen.

Dinner: Mmmm, stuffed eggplant - one of my favorites.
This recipe was adapted from one in
Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. If you don't have a large slow cooker, just cook it in a pan in the oven at about 375 for like an hour. Poke it with something periodically to see when it's tender but not so tender it falls apart.

Ingredients:

• 1 eggplant, halved lengthwise
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 small carrot, grated
• 1 clove garlic, chopped
• 1 cup lentils, cooked & drained
• 1/2 cup whole-wheat grain of some sort - I used quinoa, but bulgur or brown rice is good too
• 1 14.5 oz can crushed tomatoes
• 1 Tbsp chili powder
• 1/2 c water
• salt-free seasoning or small amount of salt and pepper to taste

Scoop out the inside of the eggplants, leaving shells about 1/4 in thick and chop up the flesh. Saute it in a bit of water with the next 3 ingredients about 5 minutes.

Mix it all up with the lentils and the grain of choice.

Add salt and pepper or salt replacer.

Put the shells in crockpot or pan and stuff them with filling.

Mix up the remaining ingredients and pour over top.

Cook in crockpot on low for 4 to 5 hrs or in oven at 375 for 1 hr. That's it! It looks fancy, but it's not too hard to put together and it's quite filling I think partly due to the spiciness.

Marcella's Workout and What We Ate Today:

Like Derek, I do a 4 day training split: Chest/Back, Shoulders, Arms, and Legs. I don't follow a set routine on a given day, I just pull from the grab bag of exercises we do depending on what equipment's open and how I feel. Every day starts with a 5-10 minute cardio warm-up and some stretching. I think Derek will be adding some demonstration clips of exercises in the near future, too.
Today was Legs day:
Breakfast
Every workout day Derek blends us up a fruit/protein powder/soymilk shake for breakfast.

Lunch
Sunday is virtually the only day of the week we have time to go out to eat. Today we went to Nile Ethiopian Restaurant:

Tomato Lentil Soup, full of ginger and garlic and general deliciousness

Vegetarian combo with various lentil, split-pea, collards, mushroom, and eggplant dishes. The injera flatbread it's served with is super low-glycemic and packed with protein, fiber, and vitamins and minerals.
They even brought us some lemon sorbet, on the house! Look at how happy Derek is...

Dinner

Nice and simple: some whole-wheat penne pasta with zucchini, eggplant, and mushrooms. A broccoli and carrot Waldorf-style salad.

This is how we do it: Tons of veggies, liiitttllle bit of pasta for the main dish. Huge, filling salad, usually two bowls of it with dinner. Usually steamed greens too, but it was the end of the grocery week and we'd eaten them all up :{

That's 1 whole eggplant & 1 zucchini, diced and some oyster, crimini, and shitake mushrooms sliced. The pasta sauce is No Salt Added, Trader Joes brand. Hey, I work and study 11 hours a day, dammit!

Salad made of above components; yum! The broccoli/carrot slaw (from Trader Joe's naturally) and Fuji apples make it very filling with all the fiber, and the addition of sunflower seeds and cashew pieces makes it protein-rich.


The pasta dish, made to feed us both, had only about 5 ounces of dry pasta to about 2 lbs of veggies. This is where our diet differs from the norm. Nutrient-dense food should be the centerpiece of the meal, and shouldn't be relegated to a mere side dish! It's amazing how quickly your tastes change when you eat more fresh food; suddenly those big mounds of processed pasta seem about as appetizing as sawdust...