2014 Indiana State Fair - Round One

First weekend of State Fair baking is done and I'm still sane! Yeah me!

As I mentioned earlier, I really scaled back and I'm glad I did. My original plan was to turn everything in this (Sunday) afternoon. However, G had 3 art entries to turn in and those could only be turned in on Friday or Saturday. Since going to the fairgrounds Saturday was out, that meant I'd have to turn her things in on Friday. So new plan - make my cookies on Friday and turn them in. Bake all my breads on Saturday after work and turn them in today.

Most of the recipes I'm using this year are tried and true ones that I've entered before. I had 5 cookies to make on Friday...

First up were the Biscoff (no bake) Cookies. Recipe HERE (Thanks Isabelle!)
No problem.

Next was a Meijer shopping run for everything else I'd need this weekend. They had an mPerks coupon for 5% off grocery items so I had a list and waited til Friday morning.

Second in the line up were Nutella Sea Salt Stuffies. Recipe HERE.
I remembered from earlier to make small balls of Nutella and put them in the freezer overnight so everything went off without a hitch.

Up next were Honey Pecan Bars. Recipe HERE.
For some reason the first crust I made came out of the oven with huge cracks all over the bottom like it was too dry. I remade the crust before pouring the filling in, then finished baking them and put them on my bun rack to cool.

My fourth cookie of the day was the only new one and it was something I had trialed on Thursday night, then decided to tweak on Friday. It was for the Dairy Cookie category where you have to have two dairy ingredients in your cookie. I decided to make cookies using butter and cream cheese and sandwich them together with raspberry jam. My mom used to make cream cheese cookies when we were kids. She used a box of cake mix and some cream cheese. I don't know what else was in them but they were a really sweet cookie that she squirted out of a cookie press and sandwiched together with raspberry jam.

I thought the cookies I had trialed on Thursday night were too thin. I added more flour and an egg on Friday and tried again. This cookie came out definitely thicker but tasted doughy. Visually it looked good, but I wasn't thrilled.

Moving on though, I went ahead and made my last cookie. Pineapple iced coconut macadamia cookies. Recipe coming this week.

This is a very easy cookie to make as you mix almost every thing together in a food processor, then dump it out in a bowl and add flour, then scoop it onto a cookie sheet. I remember putting a teaspoon of salt in and thinking that seemed like a lot of salt. I took a little taste of the batter before adding flour and it was salty but I went ahead and finished making the cookies. Once the cookies came out, I tasted one... and they were salty. Hmmm. Maybe they were salty because the pineapple icing is really sweet? I made the icing and ate another cookie. That didn't fix the taste. Next I covered the entire cookie in icing. Moderately better but the cookie just didn't taste like I had remembered it.

Now it was time to go. I had decided I was leaving the house by 5 pm at the latest. Entries were being accepted until 8 pm but I didn't want to wait until the last minute. I was plating my cookies when I decided I was not going to take the cream cheese raspberry cookies or the pineapple iced coconut macadamia cookies with me. They just didn't taste right.

This is what I turned in Friday night: Nutella, Honey Pecan, and Biscoff

 



After turning my items in, I came home and cooked a pound of bacon to prep for Saturday then went to bed as I had to be up at 4:30 am to go to work.

 

Saturday, a small miracle happened and I got off work on time!

 

I made Loaded Potato Rolls as soon as I got home. No problem.

 

I remade the pineapple iced coconut macadamia cookies while the potato rolls were rising. SO glad I remade them. They came out just like I remembered and I figured out why the first batch was so awful... I'd forgotten the sugar!

 

Next were Pumpkin Pecan Rolls. I had made these for the first time on Thursday. They turned out pretty good.

 

I remade the raspberry cream cheese cookies while the pumpkin pecan rolls were rising. Still not 100% happy with the taste but decided they were presentable enough to turn in.

 

Finally, I made my Honey Oat Bread.

 

The only "problem" with baking breads for the fair is how time consuming it is as you have to wait for the dough to rise at least twice for each recipe. Usually I will start the first rise of my second recipe during the second rise of my first recipe. Since I'm making other baked goods too, I will try to squeeze in less time consuming items like cookies during the rises. I have a double oven so sometimes I have two ovens going at the same time too. It's multi-tasking to the max and sometimes I get confused...

 

Last year I put some rolls in the oven to rise. I thought the oven was off and I was going to use the residual warmth to help my rolls rise. Well, the oven was actually on. I didn't realize it until the plastic wrap covering my rolls started melting and smoking... stuff like that...

 

So this year, I was pretty happy that I didn't have to do too much multi-tasking and I was feeling pretty sane... but then I messed up the rise on my Honey Oat Bread. I think I actually let it go too long and the middle collapsed during baking. By now it was after 1 am. The bread was not presentable. Last year I stayed up late baking bread items. I had one last thing I was trying to make and I fell asleep on the couch... then slept through the oven timer going off (deets HERE, and hey, looks like I had problems with that darn Honey Oat Bread last year too!) I decided the prudent thing to do was to go to bed and remake it in the morning.

 

I popped out of bed at 7:30 am today and remade the bread. I tried a different size pan but I'm still not happy with the rise. It looked better than the first loaf though so it went to the fair.

 

This is what got turned in today...

 

 





Top row: Honey Oat Bread, Pumpkin Pecan Rolls, Loaded Potato Rolls

Bottom row: Raspberry Cream Cheese Tea Cookies, Pineapple Iced Coconut Macadamia Cookies

 

 

My life has been so busy this summer I didn't even try to put out a garden. My neighbors tonight gave me two bags of fresh tomatoes. I gave them loaded potato rolls and pumpkin pecan rolls. I then caught up on who was running what this weekend. I'm a little sad I didn't race this weekend but, in reality, I don't think there was any way I could have gotten everything done.

 

Cakes are up next weekend but I'm going to get back to running this week too.

 

How was your weekend? It's the last weekend before school for us Center Grove families :(



 

Living at the Speed of Life

Life has been coming at me fast and hard lately. There have been days lately where I feel like I'm just barely keeping my head above water. Then I decided to stop the madness...

Last week was Johnson County Fair week. I took Friday and Saturday of the week before off as entries are due by 11 am on Saturday morning. I also took Monday and Tuesday of last week off as the bake-off is always on Tuesday of Fair week. The bake-off theme this year was pumpkin...

 ...and then, for the first time in 26 years, I didn't enter the County Fair.

My heart just wasn't in it. I was tired. I had other stuff I wanted to do more. It is my life after all and I decided I shouldn't do things just because I've always done them or I'm expected to do them. Last year I was just crazy the week before the fair. This year, I decided to step away. I went and ran the Midnight 5K in Seymour Friday night instead of baking all night and slept in Saturday morning. Once I made a conscious decision I wasn't entering the Fair, it made me feel free to do other things. Since I didn't have to bake all day Monday for Tuesday's bake-off, we took off Sunday night after I got off work and went to visit friends at their lake house in Michigan. We played in the lake all day before driving home that night.

Of course we couldn't let Fair week go by without a visit to the Fair. Besides, my 900 year old daughter had an entry...

"Nights With No Sleep"

 



... and it won First Place and Class Champion for the Open Class Junior (4th - 6th Grade) Fine Arts category. I think this also further confirms that the child really is 900. What other child draws a picture of someone who can't go the sleep because she has a 3-prong socket in the back of her head and her pillow just has a 2-prong outlet? I didn't get it at first. I thought she was making some statement about not being able to go to sleep because of being addicted to your electronics and she had to explain it to me (as I'm only 45).

So, no Fair entries for me last week and this is how Week 3 of marathon training went...

Sunday - No running. Worked all day then drove to Michigan.
Monday - No running. Played in the lake all day; did some stand up paddle boarding for the first time.
Tuesday - 7 miles
Wednesday - 7 miles after work.
Thursday - 6 miles at 8:31 pace. Crawled out of bed at 4:15 am to run with a group to do this!
Friday - 5 miles (had 12 on the schedule and bagged it at 5)
Saturday - No running. Too tired after working all day.

Week 3 Total Miles: 25

This week, Week 4, was supposed to be a bigger mileage week. Well Saturday was the first of 5 work days in a row. Ended up putting in 55 hours in 5 days. Add in an hour commute each way and that equals too dead tired to do anything!

Running went pretty much down the drain this week. I had asked off for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday as State Fair entries are due Saturday. I ended up getting Sunday off too and found out that the Culinary Arts entry deadline was also extended to Sunday this year.

State Fair entries require pre-registration so I had to decide back in June what I was going to do. Last year I entered 35 baked items. This year I decided to scale back and entered 17. I only have 8 items due this weekend; the rest are spread out throughout the course of the fair. Original plan had been to spend Thursday prepping, then Friday through Sunday baking, but... run a 5K in Scottsburg, IN (almost 2 hours south of me) on Saturday morning and a 5K in Columbus on Sunday morning.

Admittedly, this was pushing it time management wise. Then, I didn't have time to run this week. Then, my husband wanted me to drive him to the airport Sunday afternoon. Then, a co-worker had a family emergency and I picked up his Saturday morning shift. All signs from the Universe to back off some more... so I made a conscious decision not to run at all this week... and I felt like a thousand pounds had been lifted off of me and I could breathe again.

Why make myself miserable trying to do all the things that are suppose to be fun when pursuing "fun" makes me miserable?

Thursday was my day off after the 5 work-days-in-a-row from hell. I spent the morning running errands with the kids - eye doctor appointments, back to school shopping, lunch out, and grocery shopping. In the evening I trialed some new recipes...

                                                          ... and enjoyed it. Baking is fun when your heart is in it!

I plan to bake all my cookies Friday and take them to the fairgrounds. Saturday, I'll work in the morning then make all my breads when I get home. Sunday I'll take my husband to the airport, then my breads to the fairgrounds. Maybe I'll be ready to run again after that.

Week 4 Total Miles: 0

I am working on slowing down my life to enjoy it. I'm tired of trying to "catch up" all the time when all I'm doing is "catching up" on the monster that I created. Make sense?

Midnight 5K and Week 2 Wrap Up

Ever ask yourself, "Self, what the hell are you doing?" Those were my thoughts last night. "HaeWon, what the hell are you doing driving to Seymour in the middle of the night." I was driving there to run a 5K at midnight. My speed work for the week. If I didn't run the 5K, I'd have to run some speed work on my own this morning. Bed was sounding pretty good at 11 pm but the thought of having to run hard by myself in the morning made me go to Seymour. Besides, it turned out to be a very pleasant summer night, full moon and not too much humidity.

There were like a bazillion kids when I showed up at the Seymour High School football stadium. The run was to benefit the Seymour High School cross country team. The Seymour Owls. Maybe that's why it's a midnight run? I found my group of Crossroads runners and commented that I was about to get smoked by a bunch of high school kids. I actually felt pretty good though. My goal was to run under 25:00 and try to get my average pace down under 8:00 again.

The start was jam packed with kids. For a minute it felt like I was in a corral at the Mini-Marathon, it was that crowded. Gun went off and the kids took off. It was really dark. Too dark to see my watch for most of the run. My first mile felt 7:30-ish. My second mile didn't feel too bad but I felt pretty comfortable too so I was worried I was running too slow. The good thing about having all those kids blast out in front of me was that it gave me something to do... as in picking them off one by one. I was pretty sure my second mile was under 8:00 too but I was getting tired. The race was run through downtown Seymour. I had no idea where I was going. We kept turning block after block so I got really turned around direction-wise and just kept following the kids in front of me. Somewhere in the second mile Jane, who runs in the age-group below me, caught up with me. She's a bit faster than me so my goal at that point was to just stay with her as long as I could... to the next corner, the next street, the next sidewalk... where the heck are the stadium lights?!! Surely we're close to done by now. Finally, the stadium came into view and I let Jane go. Too tired to kick at this point but just trying to maintain my pace. I thought I'd run under 25:00 as long as I maintained my pace.

Here's what the Garmin ended up showing...

several of us thought the course was long...

Mile 1 - 7:35
Mile 2 - 7:46
Mile 3 - 7:55
last 0.1 - 1:21

Official time - 24:37 (7:55 pace)
Finished 74 of 237 Overall.
For the record, I got beat by 52 kids between the ages of 12-15. Fast little stinkers!
18th out of 121 in the women's race and won the 45-49 age group (1 of 9)

I didn't get home til 2:30 am but I was happy with my run and I got to sleep in this morning.

So this is how the week ended up...

Sunday - 10 miles
Monday - 6 miles
Tuesday - 12 miles
Wednesday - 3 miles (I cut it a mile short, it was pretty ugly)
Thursday - rest
Friday - 5 miles (5K + 1 mile warm up and 1 mile warm down)
Saturday - rest

Week 2 Total Miles: 36

I have more work days plus travel next week and no races so we'll see if I can keep up this pace in Week 3. Wish me luck!

Training... on a Wing and a Prayer

So... Monumental Marathon training started last week... sorta...

Last week was Week 1 of 18. I am doing my own thing this time, winging it on my own. I'm basing the training program off of Hal Higdon's Intermediate 2 program that I've used for my last 2 marathons but I'm ramping it up a bit since, my problem has been, I crash in the last 8 miles or so. I'm sticking with the concept of doing a hard pace run that is about half the distance of your long run the day before the long run and doing another run the same distance as the pace run but not as hard, but I'm playing around with the distances.

That being said, Week 1 was pretty much not a training week...

Sunday - 20 miles. Not exactly running as it was Western States, but I did cover 20 miles of terrain
               after being up for, oh, 44 hours...
Monday - Took all day to fly home.
Tuesday - Got caught up at home and got a massage.
Wednesday - Worked all day then ran kids around all evening.
Thursday - Worked all day then was too trashed to do anything else.
Friday - Got up at 6 am to run a 5K.

Sparkler Sprint 5K

Mile 1 - 7:25
Mile 2 - 8:29
Mile 3 - 8:21
last 0.1 - 1:06

Official time - 25:21 (8:09 pace)

So this ends up being the third 5K I've done recently with pretty much no running in between. I've kept my times pretty consistent (25:49, 25:32, 25:21) so I guess I can't complain. This time around, the morning was perfect! Nice and cool. My legs felt good. I blasted through my first mile... then my body decided it was done for the morning. Plus, the turn around wasn't marked. I went down the path that everyone was coming back on only to find them yelling at me to turn around. Most of us, me included, ended up running more than 3.1 miles. After that incident, I was really done. I wanted to just jog it in. I did do a 2 mile cool down so 5 miles total for the day.

Saturday - Slept in, then worked til midnight so no running.

Week 1 Total Miles: 25

So now it's Week 2.

Sunday - Got up at 5 am to meet my friend Bob at Morgan Monroe Forest for a 10 mile trail run. He's training for a 50 mile ultra so he stayed and ran 10 more. I went home and went back to bed until noon since I am NOT a morning person!

Monday - G is doing a dance intensive up in Carmel all week so I arranged my schedule to be off all week to drive her. Dropped her off at 9 am and hit the Monon Trail. I love running on this "trail" (it's actually paved.) It was threatening rain when I started, then started raining 2 miles in but it wasn't a hard rain so it actually felt good. Plan was to do 6 pace miles but my legs wouldn't cooperate after my trail run the day before so I ended up averaging 9:36 pace for 6 miles.

Today - Thunder, lightening, and a monsoon woke me up at 5 am. It stopped for awhile, but by the time I got up to Carmel it was a monsoon again. I had 12 on the schedule for today so I decided I'd hamster track it at the fitness center in Greenwood. I started driving back when the sun came out. It was blue skies and dry pavement by the time I got home so I ran my 12 on the county road instead. It was freakin' hot!!

So, 28 miles in 3 days. I have 4 planned for tomorrow, then another 5K with 2 mile cool down for Friday. That should put me at 37 miles for the week. Hal Higdon's Intermediate 2 plan doesn't hit that kind of mileage until Week 7 so I'm being more aggressive on the mileage. I also know I'm breaking all the rules about ramping up your mileage but I've run this mileage before... but yes, I'm also praying I don't blow my legs out.

So this is what I've decided to do differently this training cycle...

1. Wear a watch on more of my runs so I push the pace a little more
2. Do longer long runs - I have three 20's, a 24, and a 26 on the schedule
3. Pay more attention to my nutrition
4. Do more strength training

I am going to continue racing the 5K's to get some forced speed sessions on the schedule in addition to my pace runs. I've found that they are a pretty good indicator of my fitness level. Since I haven't been on a training program since April, my 5K times are almost two and a half minutes slower than what I was running in the Spring. Hopefully those times will drop again once my training cycle ramps up.