Weekend Highlights: Workshop, Spirits and Grain-Free Lasagna

As I mentioned in Friday’s post, Jesse and I had an all day Gold Medal Bodies seminar in the Seattle area on Saturday. We got up around 5:30 that morning, or at least I did (Jesse slept until 5:45), got dressed, packed a cooler for lunch and made breakfast for the road. I can’t eat that early in the morning, so instead, I drank some cold-brew with coconut milk at home and ate my 2-egg and banana pancake with chicken apple sausage in the car, about an hour into our drive.

In our cooler, I packed carrots, avocado, hard-boiled eggs, freshly sliced Applegate deli chicken, castelvetrano olives, sprouted almonds and white nectarines. Perfect and easy. On our lunch break, I combined a bunch of stuff in a dish and gobbled it up. It was simple good and just what I needed to refuel.

The seminar was fantastic and we learned and worked on a lot: locomotion (crawling) progressions, handstands (with one-on-one coaching), a little bit of ring work, stretching/mobility, a one-on-one structural assessment, and some other gymnastic moves. It was really, REALLY great and Jesse and I both came away with a lot, and enjoyed ourselves too. The Gold Medal Bodies team is phenomenal. For more info and details about the seminar we attended, check out their recap here.

We wrapped up around 5:30 and afterward, Jesse and I headed to Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle, for dinner. We found a great Thai place called, Chantanee Thai Restaurant and saddled up for a glass of Montinore Estate Pinot Gris, Tom Yum soup and red curry with chicken — at least that’s what I had. It was delicious and satisfying after our full, very physical day. It was hard getting back in the car for a 3-hour drive home after that because we were both ready to sleep and call it a day. Alas, we carried on.

We got home around 10:30, unpacked the car, showered and went to bed. We both had to work in the morning, but thankfully, I didn’t have to work until 9, whereas Jesse had a client at 6:30 a.m.
After work on Sunday, Jesse and I did some stuff around the house and then went grocery shopping. Then, we went for a hard cider at Reverend Nat’s. This is the third weekend in a row we’ve gone there for a cider. It’s a little too convenient having it right in our neighborhood, but we love it.

After we got home, I whipped up the bechamel sauce from Sarah Fragoso’s new cookbook, Everyday Paleo Around the World: Italian Cuisine, but made it with frozen butternut squash instead of sweet potatoes, since those are a no-go for me. It turned out heavenly — creamy, slightly sweet, thick and buttery. Let me tell ya, this stuff is gold!

Then, I proceeded to use the sauce to make her grain-free lasagna. It was a lot of work and time consuming, but delicious. It did not hold together like a lasagna at all (nothing like her picture in the book), but tasted wonderful. The portabella mushroom “noodles” were tricky and didn’t work very well for me. They’re  difficult to cut thin and I’d maybe get three good pieces from one mushroom, with a lot of little scraps leftover. The recipe made a big and REALLY FULL pan too (I had to have a baking sheet underneath to catch overflow juices).

We have a lot leftover, which is great, but plan to eat the remainder as sauce over zucchini noodles because of its lack of shape. I’d still make it again because it’s tasty, but wouldn’t expect to hold shape. I honestly don’t understand how to get designated pieces out of a lasagna like this because of all the sauce — meat sauce and bechamel alike. Whatever though, it’s still awesome.