Cheesecake and Green Treadmills

Today has been the right mix of productive and slow. It took forever for me to wake up this morning and I finally dragged myself to the gym mid-afternoon, which was much needed after last night’s dinner with friends. I made pasta, meatballs, and garlic bread and then, at the last minute, cheesecake. And yesterday was the first day this year that I didn’t make my Nike Fuel goal, so, needless to say today the treadmill was going to be my best friend.

I decided to mix it up and try the Curve treadmill. Have you seen them? They’re manual treadmills, meaning they don’t use any electricity, and they have a slightly curved shape, a bit like running in a semi-circle. Once I got the hang of walking without falling or feeling like I was about to flip over the railing (the manual treadmills are lofted above the rest of the gym) it was pretty cool. I felt like I got a bit of a booty workout that I wouldn’t have on a regular treadmill, and I was able to run a bit longer without any knee pains. It was a bit harder to play mind games with myself to keep running; no motor means no speed to set, and I could just slow down whenever I wanted to. I’m skeptical of the calorie count the treadmill showed me – no way did I actually burn 511 calories doing 3 very slow miles, but as long as you keep that in mind, I think it was a pretty good workout. Does your gym have a Curve? What do you think of it?

I’m sure the cheesecake recipe is what you’ve been waiting for. Even though I completely forgot that it would have to cool once it was baked, and we ate it warm, I still thought it was delicious! It’s been a long time since I’ve made a cheesecake, and it was heavenly to make and share in good company. It didn’t crack and my spring form pan didn’t leak, so I was happy. I used this recipe: http://www.joyofbaking.com/Cheesecake.html

The recipe calls for lemon zest, but I left it out since I think lemon in cheesecake is usually kind of icky.  I made sure to double wrap the bottom of my spring form pan in aluminum foil, just in case it leaked in the oven.  The recipe calls for putting it on a baking sheet, but all of mine are currently under plants.  Whatever method you use, make sure you put something between your spring form and the baking rack – you don’t want to have a sticky mess to clean just because your spring form pan leaked that day.

I may have gone a bit overboard with the pictures for this post, but I wanted to give you guys a good step by step for the cheesecake-making process.  I still don’t know how to add captions to pictures in WordPress (that’s something I’m trying to learn how to do in 2014), so in the meantime, I do my best to at least have my pictures in order.  The treadmill pictures at the end are of my view from the treadmill and my final treadmill stats so you can see I didn’t make up the exaggerated calorie count.

Needless to say, I’m more than a little excited for leftovers tonight. By some miracle TSN (Canadian ESPN) is showing Tennis Channel coverage of the Australian Open. I’m thrilled to get to listen to Martina Navratilova commentate… I really feel like I’m learning from her comments, as opposed to the constant babble of some other commentators. What are you guys up to tonight? I hope everyone is having a good weekend!