Cooking

Today I spent a lot of time cooking, which is a rare thing these days. I am really trying to become a better cook so today I attempted two new recipes: pumpkin protein bars and mini-turkey meatloaf muffins.

They both believe it or not turned out great. I got both of the recipes from Jamie Eason, my favourite female bodybuilder. She has a bunch of easy "clean" recipes on her site.

The pumpkin protein bars are the best flavour of her bars I've had, the chocolate ones are pretty good, the lemon ones were terrible and these ones really are tasty and seem appropriate for fall.

 Finished product, all wrapped up into convenient packages:

 The turkey meatloaf muffins were also pretty good. I ended up covering mine with marinara sauce, but Jer said he liked his without the sauce. Next time I will try making them into burgers. They were pretty easy to make and I do like the idea of cooking them in a muffin tray to have nice little portions:

The green bits are zucchini. You can find her recipes on bodybuilding.com.

I did go to the gym today, and tomorrow marks the start of week 4 of my muscle-building program. I will probably only go to week 6 with it before I change it up. It's going pretty well but it's hard to say if I've had gains or not. I struggle with my protein intake. I should probably just eat more protein and stick to the same number of macronutrients for everything else. Maybe these delicious pumpkin treats will help.