Since it never really gets cold and rainy here in SoCal, sometimes you just have to pretend. I love the outdoors and the sunshine more than anything, but every now and again I crave a nice cozy day inside. Today ended up being one of those perfect relaxing days that I was obviously in need of.

My man has been getting up at the crack of dawn all week and going down to the beach before work because the surf has been good (I don’t know how he does it…you couldn’t pay me to put on a wet wetsuit and paddle out in the dark at 5:30am!), so I woke up when he got up at around 6am. I laid in bed and read a book for a while until I fell back asleep, then I finally got up at about 9am for some coffee. My Mom and I Skype every Sunday, but usually I’m running around and end up Skyping her from somewhere after a swim, run, or Target spree. South Africa is 9 hours ahead of us, making 11:30am late evening their time. Last week we were driving back from Modesto when we chatted and It made her car sick, so it was a quick call. But today we got to have a good ol’ chat and catch up, which I have missed so much! My stepdad always jokes that he can tell when my Mom is talking to me because we laugh like teenagers 🙂

I decided chicken soup and a trainer workout would be the perfect compliment to this pretend wintery day. I am not a particularly good cook, but I love to try. I never use recipes, I prefer to just wing it and see what happens. I also like to cook things that we can eat all week so that I only have to cook once or twice. I started off by putting a few large chicken breasts into the crockpot…

While the crockpot was doing its thing I jumped on the trainer with a heart rate monitor and did this workout to help start building my bike fitness back up again:

Trainer Workout:

•  15 minute warm up
•  5 minutes at 140 HR
•  15 minutes at 160-170 HR
•  5 minutes easy
•  15 minutes at 160-170 HR
•  15 minutes cool down

You can always count on a trainer session to work up a good sweat! I was dripping. And I got to catch up on some True Blood too

After a shower and some laundry the chicken was ready so I started on the soup portion. I used the following random ingredients because they sounded good, or I happened to have them in my kitchen:

Chicken Soup:

• Chicken stock
• Trader Joes Mirepoix mix (carrots/celery/onions)
• Traders Joes chopped butternut squash
• Kale
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Frozen Corn
• Barley
• Chili and garlic sauce (this stuff is the BOMB)
• Black pepper
• shredded chicken from the crockpot

I cooked the mirepoix mix in olive oil and then just added all the other ingredients to taste and let it simmer for about an hour and a half. Easy peezy!

It turned out SOOO good, if I do say so myself!! 🙂 and we have at least a weeks worth of left overs too!

To top off my amazing day of relaxation…I put my feet up with a glass of red wine, the christmas tree lights on, and a movie I have wanting to watch for a while – Boyhood. It was filmed over 12 years, honestly not the greatest story line but pretty amazing to watch the characters legitimately age 12 years over the course of the movie.

My friend Lisa gave me a fully decorated baby Christmas tree yesterday. She knows I am too lazy to actually decorate one myself so she did it for me…best gift EVER!! I LOVE it!

Hope you all had a perfectly relaxing day like mine 🙂