Month: March 2015

pomegranate-oatmeal snack cups

I recently received an email from MyFitnessPal with a link to a stash of oatmeal-inspired recipes.  This immediately made me think of my friend, Stevie, who eats oatmeal just about every morning for breakfast, no matter the season.  The girl is an oatmeal fanatic.  Perhaps even more so than Kath, the RD whose blog inspired me to begin my own journey into the field of nutrition.  But I digress.

So as I perused the list of oatmeal recipe ideas, I came upon these Pomegranate-Oatmeal Snack Cups, for which I already has all the ingredients in the fridge.  It was fate.  I mean, how often does anyone really have pomegranate arils just lying around?

They don’t come out very sweet, which is just fine by me, and are fantastic topped with a little sunflower-seed butter.  These would be a great breakfast or pre-workout snack. Recipe is below and linked above.

Ingredients

Wet
Dry

Instructions

  1. First, preheat oven to 350ºF and spray a muffin tin with nonstick cooking spray.
  2. Then, place banana in a medium size bowl and mash until smooth. Add the rest of the wet ingredients (minus the coconut oil, we will add that very last) and whisk until combined.
  3. Add the dry ingredients and mix until smooth. Finally add in coconut oil.
  4. Fill muffin tin about 1/3 to 1/2 way full. Sprinkle additional pomegranate arils (about 1/4 cup) on top.
  5. Bake at 350º for about 20 minutes.

Here’s the nutrition information for each serving (2 muffins):

Nutrition (per serving): Calories: 200; Total Fat: 8g; Saturated Fat: 5g; Monounsaturated Fat: 2g; Cholesterol: 71mg; Sodium: 464mg; Carbohydrate: 26g; Dietary Fiber: 4g; Sugar: 6g; Protein: 6g

Adirondacks 

Andrew and I spent last weekend in Old Forge, NY, with some friends of ours.  Paola is a classmate of mine at Buffalo State in the Dietetics program, and she and Mark got married this past fall.  Mark grew up going to his family’s place, called ‘The Hut,’ in the Adirondacks.  Old Forge is about four hours from Buffalo and a destination in both the summer and winter months.  The Hut is on a lake, with a beautiful view from the living room.  It’s a cozy, homey-type place–a few bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen and living room and fireplace.  It’s decorated with very traditional ‘cabin’ decor–bears, ducks, pine trees, wood accents.

We started our trip with lunch at Betty’s, in downtown Buffalo.  So good.  Can’t wait to meet them there again soon!

We drove up on a Friday afternoon and got in just before dinner.  After unpacking and sitting for a bit, we went out for a nice dinner at one of their local favorite restaurants, where we enjoyed great service and great wine.  I had a truly fantastic dish, the ‘Brazilian Pork,’ which combined juicy pork medallions with a mix of black beans, onions, peppers and green chilies with sweet potato fries.  Very memorable.

The next morning, our only ‘activity’ was to go snow shoeing later on, so we hung around until about lunch time.  So nice to just relax in our jammies!

We ate brunch at a local diner, where Paola and I both ordered the buckwheat pancakes with blueberries and pecans.  Also very good.

Here we are, snow shoeing at a local golf course in about four feet of snow–SO MUCH harder than the snow we’re used to around here.  Talk about a work out!  All four of us were glad to be finished as we neared the parking lot.

We spent the rest of the afternoon either napping (the boys) or relaxing on the couch (the girls), channel surfing, reading and writing.  And snacking.  I wrote a blog about National Nutrition Month to be posted on the Buffalo News (more about that later), and Paola and I caught the end of a sappy rom-com once we relinquished control of the remote from Mark, who’d much rather watch golf.

We went out that night to another favorite spot for dinner, where a bunch of us shared some lobster mac and cheese as an appetizer.  I ordered the chili burger–why I don’t know–and ended up eating it with a fork.  The ceiling of the restaurant was covered with thousands of business cards, but we weren’t able to finds Mark’s dad’s, which he put up there years ago.

Throughout the weekend, snow mobiliers where EVERYWHERE.  It was so neat to see them whizzing across the lake, both day and night, and all the machines parked out in front of stores and bars and such.  I loved that even ‘nicer’ restaurants are very casual, especially this time of year, when pretty much the only appropriate footwear is snow boots.

We turned in early that night–must have been wiped out from the snow shoeing–and slept in the next morning.  With the time change as well, we weren’t all out of bed until well after 10 a.m.  After relaxing a bit, running the laundry and cleaning up, we stopped at another local diner on the way out of town for lunch.  My Rueben sandwich was fantastic, and Paola and I got some bread pudding to-go for the ride home.

We had a great weekend and were so thrilled to spend time with our friends in such a beautiful place.  Sometimes you really have to ‘get away from it all’ and just relax.  Between Andrew’s summer trips to Lake Tippecanoe in Indiana and this year-round getaway in the Adirondacks, it makes me want to have something like that for our kids one day.  Somewhere not too far away to call our own, to make memories, and to get away from it all.

One day.

ECMC

Welp, my first rotation has come and gone, and I’m just now getting to blog about it.  Can we say BUSY much?!

Between ‘working’ at one of our local hospitals and keeping my gym schedule, I was doing 12-hour days all week.  So this is what a real job is like…

As a re-cap, I’m in my LAST semester of my LAST year, (PTL) which is broken into three month-long rotations.  My first rotation was my ‘senior practicum,’ in which I shadowed a Registered Dietitian.  Many of my fellow students chose specific areas of practice, such as pediatrics, long-term care or Bariatric Surgery.  I chose to work with one of our existing preceptors at Erie County Medical Center in a more general hospital setting.  Because I’m not planning to work full-time in acute care, I wanted to make sure I got some clinical experience before graduation.  I worked with Jennifer Oswald, RD, on her medical and surgical floors, as well as some ICU work with another RD.

A typical day started with Jennifer giving me 4-5 patients who needed new assessments or follow-up assessments.  Because there aren’t extra computers in the nutrition office, I usually wandered up to one of the floors and grabbed a computer at the nurses’ station, where I looked up each patient in the Electronic Medical Record and began charting.

After beginning their assessments, which included information such as their diagnosis, past medical history, lab values, medications and current diet order, I would track each patient down in their rooms and ask them a few questions.  Most of the time, I discussed their allergies, GI function, last bowel movement, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation and intake prior to admission.After I saw each patient, I’d go back to a computer and finish writing up the assessment and provide a recommendation, such as:

“Recommend Heart-Healthy diet with Ensure supplement 2 x day.  Monitor: PO  (by mouth) intake, weight, labs/lytes, skin, BM, hydration.”

On one of my last days, I did a test tray from the kitchen.  ECMC is beginning to implement an ‘on-call’ system for the kitchen, which is like having a short-order cook instead of set meals that go up on trays at specific times.  I ordered an egg salad sandwich with chips and fruit.  I checked the temperature of the hot and cold items, and filled out a questionnaire about taste, texture, appearance, etc…While at ECMC, I accompanied Jennifer to her outpatient counseling sessions on Wednesdays.  I really like outpatient counseling, which allows you to go much more in-depth with each person and individualize the session to their needs.  I also made a ‘craft’ to display nutrition labels for teaching:Overall, I was very pleased with my rotation.  I was able to get a lot of clinical experience with both general medical and surgical patients, as well as those in the ICU and on tube feeds.  Additionally, I was able to get some outpatient counseling experience.  I absolutely HATED getting up and out in time to drive into Buffalo in the mornings (in the worst weather EVER), which just solidified the fact that I do not want a full-time, in-Buffalo, hospital job.  It’s just not for me.  I hated being away from the house ALL day long.  I did, however, surprise myself with how much I liked the clinical atmosphere and the ICU.  I could see myself working 1-2 days a week in a clinical setting to keep my skills sharp, but not full time.