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Loyal readers will know how much I enjoy sheet pan recipes, so this week I tried a new recipe that I’m calling Sheet Pan Veggie Soup. I’m considering this month the start of my Veggie Challenge 2023, since my garden vegetables are really in their prime!

The ingredients are the left over vegetables that are getting a little tired from staying in my refrigerator. Namely, the cauliflower that was given to me by my daughter and a huge pepper from our garden. I hadn’t been in the mood to eat these earlier and I wanted to use them before they got too tired.

So I turned on the over to 425 degrees and lined a cookie sheet with tin foil.
I chopped the cauliflower, carrots, and onion into large pieces. The really big homegrown tomato and the giant bell pepper were sliced into chunks. The pepper was home grown and both red and green color but I believe it was a bell pepper.

I set the timer so it all could roast for 25 minutes.

After the buzzer went off, I placed all the roasted vegetables into the Vitamix blender with some water. I probably should have had more water, since I only added maybe a cup of water to the blender. It not only makes it easier to blend, the consistency of the soup wouldn’t have been so thick. I didn’t expect to have it as full as that with the veggies! I almost filled the entire blender with the roasted vegetables.

This Vitamix blender has a soup setting, so I used that. It blended for about 5 minutes (and got hot!) I hadn’t made soup in the blender recently so I forgot how it makes HOT soup!

The final soup was very, very thick. In fact a spoon could probably stand up in this cup!
I should have added more water for that many vegetables, because it was more like the consistency of a really thick gravy or thin mashed potatoes.

Delicious, it tasted great! I ended up eating it for lunch and dinner with some protein on the side. The roasted tomato gave it the color.

Next time: I am adding more spices. I didn’t even have salt in this one! Also it needed more water and I’m going to leave out the tomato. Put olive oil on the roasting vegetables.

It’s amazing what a few of the right exercises done consistently can do for keeping flexible!

Before you read any further, please know I am not a doctor or am I prescribing any medical advice. Everyone is in a different place with flexibility, so know your own body and proceed slowly if you feel resistance and stop if you feel pain. You should just feel mild tension.

Recently I’ve been gently doing finger, hand and shoulder exercises to carefully stretch and limber up my fingers. I don’t pretend to be near as flexible or nimble as this cat, but I have seen a significant improvement lately.

I’ve been working on my hands, shoulders and neck. Too much time on my computer and working on my phone has caused things to tighten up. It’s made a minor injury flair up from last fall. I was hiking and slid down an embankment. I grabbed a sapling to slow my fall which pulled my shoulder up and back quicker and farther than I had expected. It was sore for about a week in October, but my fingers and hands started hurting more recently. So after a trip to the chiropractor, I have some stretches that are really making a difference.

Here are examples of what I’ve added twice a day. You can Google images to find these exercises. I am not linking or attaching them, because my virus protection cautioned me to watch out. Also many of the downloads are copyrighted. The version I’m using is pretty old – 1996.

My twice a day routine:

• Hand, Arm and Shoulder stretches
• Computer and Desk stretches
• Doorway shoulder stretches
• I’ve also added some 90/90’s and windshield washers for my hips.

Making sure I have range of motion is really important to me as I age… And one of the only ways to make sure that it happens is take care of myself. Ignoring things like this doesn’t usually make it go away.

What do you do to stay flexible? Let me know your routine or other ways you take care of yourself. Leave a comment below or reach out on our @becomingelli social media. We’re on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

During the recent conference I was eating at restaurants in the hotel for 5 days. How did I keep up with healthy eating choices?

Healthy eating at the hotel this week has been a challenge! This past week Jill and I attended a giant podcasters’ conference in Denver where we learned from the best in the industry.

The conference was held at the Gaylord Rockies, a HUGE hotel with 7 different restaurants & bars with hundreds of hotel rooms.Located in the prairie outside of Aurora, it is a ten minute Uber ride from the Denver Airport and far away from any other restaurants. We were pretty much limited to the food that we could buy in the hotel and a few excursions off the hotel grounds.

I realized how much effort we’ve been making over the past years to focus on food program. This focus has helped, because it seemed to come naturally as we would made our meal selections.

Some of my conscious healthy eating decisions:

• Try to stay away from fried – although I did have a crispy chicken sandwich for lunch one day. I paired it with fruit, not fries
• Get your greens – I had a delicious apple and feta salad of spinach and walnuts, as well as the pictured quinoa and friess (curled endive) salad. Also a Greek salad from the Rockies MarketPlace convenience store inside the hotel.
• Greek yogurt – at least 3 of these during the week.
• Almonds – grabbed a bag of almonds for snacking. This was helpful when it wasn’t convenient to eat when I was hungry due to breakout sessions or while traveling.
  

  24 nuts for 160 calories: 14 gm fat, 8 gm carbs, and 6 gm protein.

• Alcohol – I went light on all the available free alcohol at the conference. It was a higher elevation and different time zone for me, so I was a very light drinker.
• WATER – because it was a higher elevation than I’m used to, I was drinking about one and a half times as much water as usual. Still felt a quart low most of the time!
• Timing – didn’t do well with this. I often was eating right before bed. Not my favorite way to “rest & digest.” I usually give it 2-3 hours before bed, but was impossible because I was tired due to the time zone change and being very busy with conference activities later into the evening.

After returning home, I stepped on the scale in the morning, expecting a gain. Nope, same weight as when I left. That is a win!