Asian Pear & Spinach Salad with Creamy Cider Dressing

April 25, 2014

This week’s inspiration comes from my good friend Alyssa, a lover of good and healthy food. She gave me the idea for this salad although I have made a few tweaks which I hope you will enjoy. This is a meatless salad with its protein source coming from the cheese (I give two different options), almonds and pumpkin seeds. You can always add some lean protein such as grilled chicken, beef, shrimp or fish to make the salad a little heartier, although in all fairness it is pretty hearty as it is because of the nuts, seeds and cheese! I added shrimp to mine though … surprise, surprise 🙂

Enjoying a twelve essentials ‘Suja Juice’ drink with my salad for the greenest of all meals!

Alice Williams

Asian Pear & Spinach Salad with Creamy Cider Dressing

A light and refreshing salad drizzled with a delicious cider dressing.

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Ingredients Method

Ingredients

For the salad
2 cups or more spinach
1 medium - sliced asian pears
1-2 tbsp - almond slices
1-2 tbsp - feta cheese crumbles personally blue cheese is a my fave cheese on salad but it's pretty high in sodium so it is not something to have daily
1-2 tbsp - pumpkin seeds
For the homemade dressing
1/2 - 1 tbsp - dijon Mustard
1 tbsp - olive oil
1/2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
Juice of 1 lemon
Grated lemon zest - 1 lemon
1 tsp - black Pepper

Method

1. First, let us start by making the dressing. Combine all of the salad dressing ingredients in a small bowl and use mix all the ingredients together. You could also use a food processor to do this as well.
2. Set aside your yummy dressing. Get a plate or salad bowl and put the spinach leaves in it, and then pour some of your dressing into the plate or bowl. Toss the spinach and the salad dressing so that your spinach leaves are nice and .. well, dressed!
3. Add the rest of the salad ingredients and toss them all together.
4. Eat and enjoy!

Asian Pear & Spinach Salad with Creamy Cider Dressing

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Friday Fare, and if you share it on instagram or twitter, please hashtag #fridayfare and tag me in your photo’s so I can see your lovely re-creations! Do you have any requests for future editions of Friday Fare? I am always open to suggestions because I want to make sure I am tailoring my posts towards what YOU want 🙂

Honestly yours,
Alice

Health

40 easy meal ideas

April 23, 2014

40 Easy Meal Ideas

Okay, so this is not really a post, but more of a post share. I came across this awesome infographic with 40 easy meals ideas the other day on Ben Greenfield’s website (someone I admire and trust in the realm of fitness and nutrition) and thought I would share it with you all. Although it is titled ’40 easy meals for busy athlete’s’, I do not see why you cannot incorporate some of these meals into your own diet!

Mmm .. oh my, I am getting hungry now after seeing all 40 easy meal ideas haha! Hope this helps you, and bear in mind that most of these 40 easy meal ideas are high energy, so you should not be gorging on the dipped dark chocolate every few hours, for example!

Honestly yours,
Alice

Fitness, Health, Sunday Summary

Honestly Fitness Recap: Kayla Itsines Week 8

April 21, 2014

I am now 2/3 of the way through Kayla Itsine’s bikini body guide!

Kayla Itsines Week 8

Yeah, I am that excited. Not even gonna give you guys a ‘hello’ or ‘sorry for being terrible at posting lately.’ I am truly sorry about that and I hope you can forgive the busy life of a master’s student for making me unable to post regularly! I have had a few personal issues too which have not helped anything, but mostly I am just really busy. This is why I decided to do a recap post, just to let you all know what has been going on in my life.

Okay … so back to workout news. The legs and arms workout for week 8 of Kayla Itsine’s bikini body guide were bloody hard. Seriously, I do not understand how my legs still ache so much after all this time. I like it! Not complaining, more surprised than anything. I am actually rather terrified for the remaining 4 weeks as I have looked through the strength workouts, which look very, very hardcore. Wish me luck!!

In addition to continuing to work out regularly at my second home (the gym), I was doing pretty well food wise until this weekend hehe. I had planned a cheat meal for Friday night because some of my cohorts (code word for the people who started the MA program the same time I did) and I had planned to grab a meal together at Burgermeister. And guess what Burgermeister serve .. burgers! Friday wasn’t too atrocious despite that though and had half a burger and some fries. Saturday night was pretty bad .. pizza, pasta, some wine … oops! Oh well, I haven’t had alcohol in the longest time and I stuck to just having one glass. The nice thing about this process is that despite eating ‘bad’ foods from time to time, I genuinely crave healthy food now and know that I could never go back on this lifestyle. I felt so bloated and just plain unwell, and although some foods are worth it in very small amounts, it is just not worth it to incorporate them into your daily routine. I am very happy with my eggs, veggies, quinoa and lean protein thanks!

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine from England called Shivvy came to stay with me and we had a lovely time. I am surprised at how well we both ate despite the fact that we went out quite a lot. I think the first 2 major desserts we shared put us off eating badly for the rest of the time! We were thoroughly tourist-y and did all of the San Francisco ‘must-do’s’ such as Golden Gate bridge, Alcatraz island, Chinatown and Haight Ashbury. To conclude this recap, I leave you all with various photo’s of the fun times we had. Hopefully this makes you want to come and visit this beautiful city!