Peruvian Anticuchos De Corazon

            
First and foremost I want to be extremely clear that this is not my original recipe. Secondly, it is by far the best heart recipe that I have ever put in my mouth. Like, it change my husband's life good. So I just had to add it to my recipe list because it just needs to be spread to the world!              So I got this recipe book for Christmas called "Buck, Buck, Moose" by Hank Shaw. If you love venison, I suggest you drop everything and buy this book right now. Anyway, so we had killed a doe really late in the season and her heart wasn't touched so I suggested we make it for dinner. Now Brandon never had good deer heart at this point and he was vehemently against it. "Just put lots of bacon on it and I'll try it," he would say. I had already eyeballed this recipe in the book so I knew this was exactly what I was going to do with it whether he wanted it or not.             So when it came down to the day of cooking, I actually didn't have all the ingredients that I thought I had so I did some improvisation to the recipe. Honestly it tasted so good the way I did it that I don't think I would add those extra ingredients if I had them on hand right now. So here's the ingredient list:

• 3 Roasted red peppers, chopped (I did NOT use these in my version)
• 1-4 Chipotles in adobo, 1 being mild, 4 being very hot. Use your discretion.
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon dried oregano
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• Salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• 2 to 4 venison hearts trimmed and cut into 3 inch pieces.
• Skewers
• My addition-bacon

Before anything, prep your venison heart. Trim off ALL ligaments & silver skin. You're gonna have a bad time if you don't. Also, this is more of an appetizer recipe so unless you have a ton of hearts to use you wont be able to feed a football team with this recipe.

Mix all the marinade ingredients into a food processor and blend until pureed. Take your heart pieces, using a meat tenderizer, and flatten a bit. You want the meat tenderized but not paper thin. Submerge the heart pieces into the marinade and let sit for at least one hour-preferably most of the day. About and hour before cooking, soak your wooden skewers in water to prevent burning.

Once you're ready to cook, put the heart onto the skewers. I took the piece of bacon and threaded it in between each piece. I only did this because my husband was adamant that heart is nasty and he needed bacon to cancel it out. I'll probably use bacon every time I make this though because it was really good. Grill on very high heat with the grill cover open. Make sure to keep an eye on it because bacon fat has a tendency to flare up on the grill. Baste with remaining marinade as it cooks, about 3 minutes per each side. You don't want to over cook it or it can get very chewy. If you're not a fan of rare meat, I suggest you stay as close to medium as you're comfortable with. 

Let rest a few minutes after cooking and enjoy! By the way, Brandon had a melt down. He was tempted to call the local processor and ask if he could buy all the hearts he had! Luckily the processor didn't have much cause I'm kind of weird about getting organ meat from anywhere that I didn't see how the animal was handled after the shot. So if you decide to keep some organ meat form your deer next year, I definitely recommend the heart for starters!  

February 20th- Getting Started

          I've been meaning to make this post for a while but I just keep forgetting.. Well not forgetting as much as I never get to blog before 9 pm and I'm tired. Anyway, if I don't hurry up and post these stats while I'm at them, they're going to change and I'll forget where I was.  I guess maybe I've been putting this post off because it's a super vulnerable post for me. I've never be comfortable in my skin, with my weight, or my physique so this is a huge leap of faith for me. I want to be as transparent as possible with everyone that may read this blog.           Side bar; I'm sure there are people out there who have thought, "why in the world would she be blogging about fitness. I mean she is FAR from fit!" And I halfway agree. I'm very far from being fit, I'm very far ( and never will be) perfect, and I'm far from being super inspirational to people. But at the same time, there has been so many times that I've thought to myself while going through this journey, "man, I wish someone with my goals posted something." I don't want to compete in bikini competitions. I don't want to run marathons. I don't want to be a crazy heavy power lifter. I don't want to swear off pizza for the rest of my life. I just want to be able to lift heavy things, look good in a bikini, and run a few miles without dying. I want to see what my body can do. And if there's anyone else out there who feels the same way, well maybe I can inspire them.               Brandon and I had a serious conversation one night when I was feeling down on myself after a super poor performance at the gym ( I say this like it was months ago and it was like last week). I had been intermittent fasting for about a month, doing 16:8 some days and 18:6 others, and my performances plummeted. I was tired. I wasn't that hungry, but I wasn't losing weight either. I was getting obsessive with my calorie intake on My Fitness Pal. Things just were going in an unhealthy direction very, very quickly. Anyway, I binged for like three days straight and felt super bad about myself. So Brandon pretty much told me I needed to decide on what I wanted to do.                "Do you want to do hours of cardio and be crazy restrictive on your diet? Because if you do that, your lifts will decrease but you will lose the weight. Or do you want to get stronger and be happy? Because you may not realize it, but there's always someone watching. Maybe not every single gym session, but I guarantee there's girls in that gym who think "Man, I wish I was as strong as her". So quit being mad at yourself, because you are good at this whether you believe it or not and you should have fun doing it." That conversation led me back to this blog and here we are. So let me go ahead and give you the numbers and pictures before I back out.  Weight: 152 BMI: 26 Body Fat %: 27% Waist: 31.5 Hips: 39.5 Bust: 34.5 Thighs: 24.5 Arms: 12  BMR: 1,414 kcals TDEE: 1,749 kcals Daily calorie goal: 1400. (Macros: 40% Protein, 40% Fat, & 20% Carbs)

       I'll try to start posting weekly, or at least bi-weekly with progress. I probably will only do pictures once a month because I am not a fan! Also I saw a quote on a documentary that summed up exactly where I want to be fitness wise- "I want to outrun a powerlifter & out lift a runner." Well rounded fitness is my goal so here we go! Week one is a go!

Switching Gears

It's been nearly 3 years since I've posted. In those years, I've gained a daughter, some random knowledge, and a whole new love: fitness. I've been wanting to post for a long time, but with a blog that's pretty much following an 'exclusively hunting' theme you kind of run out of things to say. Not to say that I don't love hunting nor that I don't plan on posting about hunting anymore, it's just hard to post about the it all the time without sounding like I'm beating a dead horse, especially if I'm not going to exciting new places anytime soon. Anyway, after much thought, I've decided to blog about my journey into fitness.  Now some background; in 2015, Brandon and I started visiting a local gym. I quickly learned just how out of shape I and how badly I wanted to get in shape. But then, in the summer of 2015, we decided we wanted another baby. So naturally gym time slowed down due to morning (all day) sickness, swollen feet, a sore back, and a rowdy toddler. Finding a gym with a babysitter was a feat in its own, so gym time came to a complete halt. In July 2016, we welcome our little Elizabeth Claire into the world. Now this may be in my head, or it may be a true physiological reason, but I really feel like the nearly one year we spent in the gym prior to becoming pregnant helped my labor, birth and recovery 10 times more than when I had Noah. Maybe it was the squats, maybe it was the deads, I don't know what it was, but there was a huge difference; and it really has influenced me to want to get in the best shape possible.  After Claire was born, we had to wait 6 months before we could take her to the gym daycare (thank goodness for the YMCA!) so I really didn't do much diet wise before we started. This theme continued all the way through the year 2017. All gym, no diet. Therefore, I'm only 8 pounds down from where I was in January 2017. So I will be the first to admit that 2017 was a learning year. I learned a lot, and I did make gains- considering I was pretty much on a "bulk" all year (insert eye roll emoji here). On my next blog post I'll post all my current stats, I don't want to overload everyone with information here. I will say that I did drop 2 pants sizes and have maintained that, but there's still a lot of cutting that needs to be done.  Now here's what we did gym wise in 2017. Normally warm up with cardio; jogging, stationary bike, elliptical, pretty much whatever was open and  whatever I felt like doing. There were plenty of times that I went and did no cardio at all. Most days, we followed a crossfit type routine. My husband prefers just straight powerlifting, but I always felt like I needed to do more than that to burn the fat like I wanted. The YMCA in our location does a "Beast Mode" class. The first class I ever did consisted of an obscene amount of thrusters and burpees and I completely fell in love. The instructors were ( and still are) straight up amazing. They would leave the daily class up so we could do them in the evenings. There were plenty of weeks that I would do these classes 4 & 5 times. I did see results. My lifts increased, my cardio became bullet proof, and you could definitely see definition (especially in my upper body) that wasn't there before. But the scale never moved. My clothes fit the same for months. Now that was discouraging. By the end of the end of the year, I had to take a 6 week hiatus. My husband played softball which took up one, sometimes two weeknights, and my son played T-ball which also took up two weeknights. After that came the holidays, so essentially I went to the gym maybe once a week until the beginning of January.  My lifts dropped dramatically. Cardio game was weak.  It's time to crack down.
So January first came, and instead of the traditional "lose 25lbs" resolution, I decided to make legitimate goals that I want to hit this year.

• Do a 5k- The swamp rabbit 5K is coming May 4th, so I've been working on my cardio game.
• Bench- 135lbs.
• Deadlift- 285lbs
• Squat- 215
• Clean & Jerk (Power or hang)- 135lb

Now I may come up with other goals as the year goes on, but for now this is where I'm at. The month of January was the first time that I really tried cracking down. The results were not what I expected, but I'll touch on that on my next blog. I think I've given yall enough info for tonight, and I've got a flu positive almost 5 year old in the other room, so the bed is calling my name. 

Also, if yall haven't gotten the hint yet, by switching gears, I'm going to start emphasizing fitness on this blog. I don't and never will claim to be an expert, but I want to share with yall my story. No one else, nothing fancy, just a chubby girl who wants to make gains and get fit. So I'm super excited that I get to share this journey from the very beginning with yall!