Finding Ultra Winner and Allen Lim's Rice Cakes

Thanks for all the comments on your favorite running books. It looks like Born to Run and Once a Runner topped the list. I picked a random comment (from Facebook and the blog) and the winner of Finding Ultra is Andrew (whose favorite running books are (Born to Run, The Perfect Mile, and There's Nothing Funny About Running). Send me an email with your address and I'll get the book out to you.

Like most runners, I am constantly tweaking my nutrition. Some things work for awhile, and then I get sick off of them and that's the end of it. I used to think I had an iron stomach, but that has changed over the last few years and I'm not sure why. I can no longer run on GUs alone and have tried to switch up my nutrition (while running and everyday eating) to whole, non-processed foods. I've been using Dr. Allen Lim's Skratch Labs drink for a few months and it has been working great for me. It's an easily digestible drink with enough electrolytes and not a lot of chemicals and sugars (its sweetness comes from freeze-dried fruit). Lim's nutrition strategy is to drink fluids and eat calories (and he knows what he's talking about). When searching for a good nutrition option for an upcoming mountain run, I checked out the Skratch Labs site and found an easy recipe for rice cakes. The more I researched these, the better the reviews got, and the better the rice cakes sounded.

I stuck to the recipe below (although the possibilities are endless...vegetarian, sweetened with dried fruit, smoked salmon, etc.) and they turned out great, so good that I wanted to share them with my readers. They are simple to make, delicious, and they were easy to digest and kept me fueled and feeling strong for an 8-hour day running in the mountains, mostly above 10,000 feet.

Dr. Lim has a cookbook called The Feed Zone and it's currently en route to my house. I can't wait to try some of the other recipes.

Dr. Allen Lim’s Rice Cakes


Ingredients

2 cups uncooked calrose or other medium-grain “sticky” rice
1½ cups water
8 ounces bacon
4 eggs
2 tablespoons liquid amino acids or low-sodium soy sauce
brown sugar
salt and grated parmesan (optional)

Preparation

• Combine rice and water in a rice cooker.
• While rice is cooking, chop up bacon before frying, then fry in a medium sauté pan. When crispy, drain off fat and soak up excess fat with paper towels.
• Beat the eggs in a small bowl and then scramble on high heat in the sauté pan. Don’t worry about overcooking the eggs as they’ll break up easily when mixed with the rice.
• In a large bowl or in the rice cooker bowl, combine the cooked rice, bacon, and scrambled eggs. Add liquid amino acids or soy sauce and sugar to taste. After mixing,press into an 8- or 9-inch square baking pan to about 1½-inch thickness. Top with more brown sugar, salt to taste, and grated parmesan, if desired.
• Cut and wrap individual cakes. Makes about 10 rice cakes.
• Nutritional Information Per Serving (1 cake): 225 cal, 8g fat, 321 mg sodium, 30g carbs, 1g fiber, 9 g protein

Here's a video for those visual learners.

Let me know if you try them, or if you change up the recipe. Thanks for reading.