Home cooking!

I've got a bit crazy lately with what I put in my body. I tend to feel that I want to control very much what I eat and when I eat it. A lot of this comes from being a vegetarian and going out, or away on holidays and just not being able to get a healthy nutritious non-meat meal (ie when the only thing on offer is a stingy green salad or a plate of greasy wedges!). So lately I've had a tendency to bring a lot of meals with me when I know I'll be out.

The other part of this comes from me getting crabby when I'm hungry... better to carry snacks and be sweet!

Anyway that's all beside the point, but helps explain my latest obsession. Now that I'm starting training for endurance events (Marathon, then Half Ironman), I need to pay more attention to nutrition during training or racing. In all my other races so far (longest have been Olympic Tri and Half Marathon) I've got by on water alone and done great, but stepping up into 3+ hour events I know I need more.

But Powerbars and Gels are so expensive, and who knows what chemicals are in them?

So last week I tried out making myself gels and powerbars. Tried the results this weekend on a 4 hour ride followed by a 40 min run yesterday, and a 32km run today. The results - delicious, better than store-bought!

For the gel all you need is a sack of Maltodextrin (the main ingredient in gels anyway). Take out enough to fill about 100ml line in a pyrex measuring jug, add a dash of filtered water and a few drops of vanilla essence. Microwave it in the pyrex jug to made it runny and then pour it into a gel flask. Voila!



The saving? Well gels (Gu, HammerGel, Endura etc) are usually $3 to $3.50 for one serving which is about 25g or so of carbs. For $10 - or the price of three commercial gel/gu sachets - you can get a 1kg bag of pure maltodextrin, which will make around forty servings! So that's around 25 cents per shot of good ole homestyle gel.



The flask cost 4.50 at Rebel.



Then there's the powerbars. I checked few websites and found tons of recipes, picked and chose the ingredients I wanted and here's my recipe:

3 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup sultanas
1/2 cup dried blueberries
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1 egg (beaten)
some fruit juice (I used lychee juice because that's what we had, but apple or orange or whatever would work - just enough to make it runny and able to be mixed together)

Whack it all in a brownie baking tray, make indentations to be able to make bars, and put in the oven for 20 mins or so to toast it up and make the bars hold together. Seperate the bars, cool and then wrap in foil. Too easy.




In the end they turned out great. Soft, a little crumbly, but absolutely delicious and easy to digest, even while running.

Next up I'm going to make another batch with soy or rice protein in, because I've read that for anything longer than 2 hours your body needs protein (and whey is good for recovery, while soy or rice is good during exercise). Might also make them brownie style with flour so they're more cake-like...