Road Warrior Kitchen: Radicchio Bean Salad

One of my hobbies is buying cookbooks (sometimes out-of-print obscure ones) and then continuing to cook the same seven things. Every now and then, though, I catch them watching me disdainfully as I ignore them yet again. Usually I just shield my eyes and get on with what I was doing but every now and then I am overcome by guilt and declare, "Okay fine, let's go through one of you mothers and see what looks good and interesting and not too complicated."

One such cookbook is that of our Italian queen and collective great-great-grand-nonna Marcella Hazan, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. If you want to learn to *properly* cook Italian, Nonna Marcella is *the* canonical starting point. 

There are all kinds of wonders in this cookbook, with all different levels of complexity. Knowing the Italians do love their beans, I was flipping through it one evening looking for something new to do with my most recent Rancho Gordo haul that was simple yet classic, and it wasn't long before the page-flipping gods blessed me with this find, exactly the type of thing I was looking for:

Road Warrior Kitchen: Kale Pesto Beans

Welcome back to The Road Warrior Kitchen, friends. Today we are talking about beans.

It seems to me that beans are somewhat polarizing. Some people, when you mention a bean dish, kind of wrinkle their nose, like, "...Oh. Ok, if you insist." Other people are absolute bean fiends who will expound at length about their love of legumes of all types. Still others are kind of like afraid of beans, either for digestive reasons or because they see them as "high calorie" or "starchy" or they are simply afraid of eating carbs for some reason.

On the scale of "bean fear" to "bean fiend," I'm maybe like 80% of the way to fiend. I grew up mainly on mass-produced canned beans and my granddad's weekly pot of pinto beans from dried, and felt pretty neutral about them for the most part (other than having a serious, SERIOUS dislike of lima beans and any kind of sweetened baked beans). They were food and as long as they weren't actively nasty, I'd mostly eat them.

My modern love of beans did not really emerge until I discovered Rancho Gordo beans around 2015 or so. Rancho Gordo is a bean farm based in Napa, where they farm a huge variety of North American heirloom beans, some of which make it to smaller boutique-type markets but most of which are sold via their bean club. I had been buying their cassoulet beans in our local market for years, but then the pandemic hit and we all went into lock down/survival mode and started panicking about stocking up on hearty non-perishables. 

It was then that I discovered the bean club; alas it was also when everyone else in the US also discovered the bean club and I found myself on a waitlist. BUT, a year later, I got an email with the subject line "You're In!" and it's been beans, beans, beans, six pounds of beans every quarter, ever since.

Now, you might be thinking, "Very cool bean club story, thanks for sharing. But this is a running blog. What do beans have to do with running? What does the wide world of heirloom beans have to offer me, a runner?" Let us discuss.

Road Warrior Kitchen: Basic Sautéed Chicken Breast

Welcome back, friends. I have been living it up in Milwaukee the past few days (j/k, actually just working) & engaging in such wild activities as having a beer at the Harley Davidson bar, eating some REALLY good food  (one restaurant had a bottle of wine from a tiny little winery I actually visited in Galicia, Spain, back in June??? Wild!), and doing a little shakeout run along Lake Michigan.

Now I am home for one day, trying to relax and rest up before our masters team heads up to Sacramento on Saturday for Sunday's USATF 10-Mile Masters National Championship. (I will not be running fast BUT my right ankle has been doing a-ok, so I'll be very happy just to get a double-digit run under my belt for the first time since Victory Half over a month ago now.)

I know you have been waiting with bated breath for your next visit to The Road Warrior Kitchen, so let's dive right in. Today, we're talking sautéed chicken breast.

Road Warrior Kitchen: Chopped Veggies in Dressing

Here is the thing. We already know we should eat more vegetables and that it's good for us both as regular people with bodies and as runners. But if you are like me, you don't necessarily default to vegetables. That means that when we are extra tired or busy or annoyed with the world or we forgot to buy groceries this week, vegetables are probably the first to go.

Over the years, though, I've found some strategies for getting back on the veggie bandwagon when I don't necessarily feel like just crunching on raw celery sticks; today The Road Warrior Kitchen is bringing you one of them.

Consider the watermelon radish

You may be thinking, "But Angela, chopping vegetables is not a recipe. Everyone already knows about chopping vegetables and some people even do it regularly."

True enough, friend. Everyone knows about chopping vegetables; not everyone knows how to make chopped vegetables delicious and attractive and if you have not yet mastered that voodoo I am here to help.

You Are Invited to The Road Warrior Kitchen!

Hello friends, welcome to The Road Warrior Kitchen!

Let me disabuse you of the notion, should you be harboring it, that we are here at The Road Warrior Kitchen to learn all the finer points of sports nutrition. I have written some about that in the past based on work with a for-real sports nutritionist, but a) I'm not truly an expert at that stuff, & b) I don't find it that interesting to write about.

On the other hand, a big topic of conversation between my various groups of running friends is more like, "How do we balance the logistics of eating *generally* in a way that supports our training with all the bullshit of real life, AND is also delicious?" 

I always love hearing what recipes, hacks, strategies, whatever that others have in their arsenal and seeing if maybe they can work for me. Perhaps you will learn something that works for you! Or perhaps you will share a hack of your own in the comments. 

Before we begin, let me provide a bit of framing. I want to be clear that Road Warrior Kitchen is not about describing *THE* one true way of cooking/eating for runners, even just for me. But it will obviously reflect my personal beliefs, preferences, biases, experience, likes/dislikes/etc.

So please understand the points below as a kind of lens for understanding what does or does not show up in the Road Warrior Kitchen and why I cook & eat the way I do.

Road Warrior Kitchen: Tacos Edition + One Week to Giant Race!

Just one more week until The Giant Race 10K!

This week was once again a little odd because we spend the weekend camping with a *different* group of friends. Why? Frankly, because we both love camping and are really terrible at actually planning it, so our strategy is mostly to sidle up to other friends we know like camping and are better at planning, talk about how much we like camping, and then glom on to the group camping trips that *they* plan. It's working out pretty well tbh, so I've got no real plans to do anything differently.

Each couple/family on this particular trip took on one meal to prepare for the group, so we made build-your-own tacos for Saturday night. We made everything except the guac at home in advance so that the only thing we had to do at the campsite was heat up the ingredients & set them out.

Too busy having fun to take photos during the camping trip it so please enjoy this documentation of me crushing an entire head of garlic to make carnitas for Saturday night camp dinner