Simple, Healthy Cranberry Sauce

We still have five more weeks of winter here in the northern hemisphere. While that might not mean a whole lot for us Californians (though we have been getting lots of wonderful rain!), it means most of the country is shivering each day. Well, I have a little warm comfort for you! Although you may associate cranberry sauce just with the holidays, I’m here to tell you it’s a great companion all the way through the winter (and beyond)! You can have it cold or hot, but cranberry sauce can add a certain something to whatever you’re eating. I could put cranberry sauce on nearly anything. However, I don’t like the super sweet jellied stuff, so if that’s what you’re into, this is not the droid you’re looking for. This recipe has much less sugar than most so it maintains its beautiful tartness. I’ve also added some orange zest to brighten it up even more.

Dec022016

Pumpkin Cheesecake Pie

One of many delicious recipes to come from our Thanksgiving feast...pumpkin cheescake pie! Two beautiful things in one: pumpkin pie and cheesecake. I feel like pumpkin is the quintessential Fall food and I was more than happy to have stumbled upon this recipe from smitten kitchen! This may not be the most fit recipe, but I tried to healthify it a little by trimming down the sugar. I cannot explain or describe how wonderful this pie was. I’m usually not a huge pumpkin pie person, but I was eating this for every meal (yes, breakfast too). I just couldn’t control myself! Thebeautiful smoothness of the pumpkin with a cheesecake marble on top was too much for me to handle. A perfect dessert that isn’t cloyingly sweet.

Nov292016

How to Get Over…Overeating

If you were in America last week, you probably celebrated Thanksgiving. I don’t want to get into the politics of Thanksgiving at this time, so let’s talk about what type of eating goes down during Thanksgiving. A ridiculous type of eating…eating to the point of making yourself sick. Thanksgiving meals are usually feasts with bounties of different dishes. Alcohol doesn’t help either. Also, if you’re cooking for the event, you have more of a chance to snack while you go. All in all, that Thanksgiving day is a day to go big or go home. And most of us go too big so that we can’t move in order to go home. One of the worst things that follows this meal is…guilt. Yup, an emotion that can have a powerful negative effect on you for a long time. So let’s talk about how to get over it. These tips aren’t just for Thanksgiving overeating, they apply to every time you overeat!

Nov132016

The Crustacean: Restaurant Review

Can we just avoid writing any words and let you eat with your eyes for a moment? As you can tell from all the pictures below, the food here is beautiful and a considerable amount of extra time is spent on presentation, which we appreciate, because it’s a testament to their high standards. The elephant in the room is that The Crustacean, owned and operated by the House of An from Vietnam, is a little on the expensive side, impossible to get a reservation, and requires you to dress up like you’re heading to a wedding, right? Wrong and none of these are necessarily true.

While you can’t walk in off the streets on a Friday night wearing sandals and a fitted cap, expecting to be seated quickly and fill your stomach with a $10 bill, The Crustacean is a lot more than a “fancy restaurant” in the heart of Beverly Hills. Its atmosphere can be magical with the elaborate indoor setup that makes you feel like you’re in the Vietnamese equivalent of a castle grand dining hall. As the host walks you through the entry into the two-level main room, passing over bridges made from beautiful wood, it’s impossible to ignore the glass-covered river underneath the floor filled with large koi. You’ve been successfully transported into a different part of the world and then you eat.

Nov122016

Cheat Meal Recipe: Loaded Baked Potato

Hey team Hungry & Fit, are you hungry? This is actually what we put together for last year’s Super Bowl, if my memory serves me right, and we’re just now releasing it because well… it just feels like the right time. We’ve moved into winter and everyone’s a little more relaxed with their diets as they don’t have to worry about their beach body right now. While this doesn’t necessarily need to be an “unhealthy” or “cheat” meal, you’re more than welcome to have some fun with it and look at it as a “treat meal” instead.

Nov102016

Pizza Press Restaurant Review

Another contender enters the ring, but this isn’t Super Smash Bros although you might think a Mario and Luigi have something to do with this. Good one, right? Looking back through the blog, we’ve talked about pizza… a lot. Can you blame us? We’ve highlighted our favorite pizza ever, our favorite pizza in LA, simple homemade pizza, a healthy homemade recipe, and much more. We even wrote a blog post about pizza on our other blog. More recently, we realized that there’s a growing market here in LA that is heavily influenced by the success of Subway, Chipotle, and other “build your own” food stops. At the time, we tried Pieology and Pizza Rev, and we wrote about our comparative review HERE.

Nov082016

No-Bake Pumpkin Protein Balls

We haven’t made recipes in way too long here at Hungry & Fit. We pledge to post more recipes and more fitness advice! Getting back to our roots. Lately, we’ve committed ourselves to stick to a budget. We used to spend WAY too much money on food (think above $500 each) per month so we made a goal of eating in most of the time. We’ve made true of that commitment so far, eating in for almost every meal! We’ve gotten to cook more and fatten up our wallets. We also feel better since we know what we’re putting down our throats. Yay for budgets and eating well!

I’ve been wanting to get back into the kitchen for a while. I saw Carrots ‘n’ Cake’s recipe and decided to do my own spin on it. It’s no-bake pumpkin protein balls–an incredibly simple recipe with very few ingredients. This recipe also has that canvas for being creative. Try putting different wet and dry ingredients in! I went with pumpkin since…’tis the season after all!

Oct202016

Optimum Nutrition Opti-Bar Review

When you do it, do it right. I think that’s the first and last… and only impression that Optimum Nutrition (who I’ll refer to as ON for the rest of the article) wants to make. Even though they only have a few products with the name “Gold Standard,” it’s obvious that they want their name associated with being the best. For the past few years, you might have found your cabinet filled with their Whey Protein, Multi-Vitamin, and Creatine. More recently you might have added their BCAAs, AMINO Energy, Preworkout, Protein Water, and newer flavors of whey to your collection. Now, you can really take ON with you anywhere you go; meet the OPTI-BAR.

A protein bar is a protein bar, right? To a certain degree. While we shouldn’t need to explain to you that a protein bar is a few bites of nutrient-rich food that generally has a single texture, we do want to highlight some of the things that make the Opti-Bar stand out, or at least make you feel more comfortable consuming it. The reality is that when you go to a convenience store like 7-11, you don’t want to be inconvenienced trying to figure out which option to choose. You consider a few things so let’s address those directly.

Oct192016

New PowerBar Protein Bar

Who hasn’t heard of PowerBar before? Decades ago, when you were a young athlete or a parent raising a child who played soccer every Saturday morning, when you went into 7-11 last minute to get them something with nutritional value there were two things you could rely on… Gatorade and PowerBar. PowerBar (who we’ll refer to as PB moving forward) was one of the first companies, along with Tiger’s Milk to create a candy-bar sized and shape product that had some nutritional value to it. Which leads us to the next question, who hasn’t had a PB before?

Aug162016

Buff Bake: Nut Butter With a Purpose

Recently, we (might have) introduced you to a product called PB Crave that offered one of the best-tasting peanut butters we ever consumed. While the focus of the product seems to be tasting good, using natural ingredients, and something even greater, it isn’t a revolution in the field of healthy peanut butters (for the body). Buff Bake has created a line of products that is trying to accomplish that level of maintaining the joy of consuming peanut-butter-like substances while increasing the level of nutrition at the same time. The result? That’s up to your taste buds.

Buff Bake 3 Cookie Sample Pack (2.8 oz. each)