The very first breakfast Jackie ever cooked for me was some Tassajara Bread book pancakes. (They’re special because you beat the egg whites and fold them in, which makes the pancakes super light and fluffy.)
Jackie is away to attend a tapestry weaving workshop, so today I decided to make my own pancakes.
Yesterday’s run was done fasted, and at a slightly faster pace than my usual, both with an eye toward burning some carbs ahead of having pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast after. 🏃🏻♂️ (Today I’m fasting for a blood draw ahead of an upcoming physical.)
Jackie was fixing blue-corn pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast, and eating that many carbs first thing in the morning can be a problem for me. However, I have come up with a strategy for dealing with it: Getting in a pre-breakfast fasted workout. My theory is that by doing this I deplete my muscle glycogen, so that my muscles are primed to soak up all the carbs I eat, minimizing the degree to which the glucose spikes my blood sugar.
I have no data to show that this works, but anecdotally I can report that it seems to help.
I’ve been wanting to go for a run. I had planned to go for a run yesterday, but it ended up being rainy enough that I decided to postpone the run for a day. So I might have gone for a run for my pre-breakfast workout, but Jackie was hungry early, and I didn’t want to delay breakfast by an extra hour.
So, I did what’s becoming my standard HIIT workout: I warm up with 3×25 Hindu squats, and then I do 3×25 kettlebell swings with my 53 lb kettlebell. It’s a quick workout—it’s all done in 20 minutes, including some amount of pre-workout warmup—and it’s of high enough intensity to burn off plenty of glucose.
After breakfast (and a bit of digesting) I went ahead and got out for my planned run. After the persistently sore foot I’ve been dealing with for months now simply refused to get better, I had taken a full month off from running to see if all I needed was plenty of rest to fully recover, and that may have done the trick—I went out for a 3.33-mile run, and I had no foot pain whatsoever.
I don’t wear my Oura ring for the kettlebell workouts (or other workouts where I have to grip something, because handles, bars, and (gymnastic) rings don’t play well with the Oura ring). However, my Polar heart rate monitor will tell Google Fit about my workout, and the phone app for the Oura ring will read that data and give me credit for what I did while the ring was off:
My peak heart rate during the kettlebell swings would have seen me to much higher activity levels than the just-barely “High” levels shown, but that’s because it’s an interval workout. A set of 25 swings takes me just about 50 seconds, and then it takes about 3 minutes for my HR to drop low enough that I can do another set. The software is averaging those periods together. Unless I’m doing sprints (which I didn’t today) a run is just a steady-state effort. I try to keep my HR down in the MAF range, but didn’t manage it today (because of the prior HIIT workout).
Jackie and I bake all our own bread. I can’t remember the last time we bought a loaf of ordinary bread, although we buy other kinds of bread products from time to time (croissants, english muffins, etc.). We take turns baking, and are pretty jealous of our turns. Except for when Jackie broke her wrist and I got to bake all the bread for 7 or 8 weeks, I don’t think I’ve baked two loaves in a row more than a couple of times, and I think Jackie got two turns in a row only once.
We’ve had a sourdough starter going for at least fifteen years now. (We call her Bubbles.) I wrote about how we bake sourdough bread in a Wise Bread post a few years ago.
Every loaf is different, of course. Some have butter or olive oil, others don’t. Some have sugar or honey or molasses, others don’t. Some have salt or baking soda, but usually neither. Some include large or small amounts of rye or barley or oats or other more exotic flours, others don’t.
Still, most of my loaves are pretty similar—a cup of bread flour, up to a cup of non-wheat flours, and then the rest whole wheat flour. But it occurred to me a couple of days ago that in fifteen years of baking—probably 400 loaves over that time—I’d never baked a loaf of white bread.
So, a couple of days ago, I decided to bake a loaf of white bread.
I read a few recipes for French country sourdough before I started, just to see what they all had in common, which is how this loaf ended up with a little salt and a tablespoon of white sugar. Except for two tablespoons of flax-seed meal, the flour content was entirely bread flour.
What a great loaf of bread! Not so much with the fiber, I guess, but tasty. We immediately thought of all sorts of things that are especially good with white bread—garlic bread (which we had last night with spaghetti) and french toast (which we had that morning with grade B maple syrup). This loaf went so quickly, I got special dispensation to do a second just the same (or else I wouldn’t get a grilled turkey and cheese with mustard sandwich or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich).
We won’t be switching to white bread of course. There’s a reason we’ve made whole-grain loaves for fifteen years. But I’ll remember this loaf. Once or twice a year seems like a much more reasonable frequency for white bread than once or twice every fifteen years.
