Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Today at Noon you will have crossed the official half-way point of the fitness challenge. Can you believe it? My quads sure can today. Thank goodness tomorrow is a rest day.
Attention: The following blog post contains 29.9 calories, 3.4g of fat, 20.7g of carbohydrates (including 3.1g of sugar), 3.8g of protein and 11.8mg of sodium. I think. The science may have been a bit shaky. But I trust my math. So I stand by these results.
Whaaaaat?
It started with the thought that maybe I should grab some protein powder. You know, to supplement my diet and make it easier to build up all that muscle I’ve been – hmm, hmm – working so hard. Did you know that protein powder it’s quite expensive? A 10lb container of the “good” stuff will set you back $65. You already know where this is going, don’t you? And you’re right. . .
How hard can it be to make protein powder? Well, the first but maybe not most obvious question is this: where do you find the, uh, protein? You’ll never guess. Beans. Brown rice. Lentils. Oats. Other stuff, too, but these were already in my house. And so began the great experiment. Could we actually make protein powder which: a) had protein in it (ha) and b) was palatable?
Left: Here’s a shot of the beans, oatmeal, brown rice and coconut in the Ninja. It beat the stuff up pretty good, but was still fairly coarse. So, we got out the sieve to strain the big bits out for “reprocessing.”
Left: our Protein Powder. It looks coarse here, but that was just some minor clumping of the powder. Interestingly, it smelled like. . . beans, and tasted sort of like garden peas.
Surprisingly enough, the smoothie tasted more like banana than anything else. There was no overpowering bean flavor at all. It tasted pretty fair.
And, at the end of the day, you can compare the data. Hey – I didn’t say we were making diet powder. We were pretty close on the protein and it tastes pretty mild. So. . . proof of concept, I’d say. We’ll keep playing around with the ingredients and let you know if we get anything lower-carb.
BTW, here’s what we used: 1/2 cup 9 bean soup mix, 1/2 cup brown rice, 1/2 cup quick rolled oats, 3 Tbsp of shredded coconut.
Now that is a cool experiment!
My nutritional is babyfood. The little squishy packages are awesome for pre/mid workout fuel without being too heavy. And I am all about the water… hydrate, hydrate , hydrate!!!
Perhaps you should post your recipe for powerballs!
Great idea on the powerballs. Now that we've been toying with nutritional stuff, maybe I should put in the nutritional data. It would only be fitting.