Last night I slept a whopping THREE HOURS! Ugh. I hate when I can’t sleep. I used to have insomnia a lot – monkey brain would spin and I wouldn’t be able to turn it off! That rarely happens now though. I think I just slept too much over the weekend (naps!) and so last night I was tired, but wide awake. So I played lots of Wordtwist and now have a new personal best of 222! Top that! 
Even on just a measly three hours, I still managed to walk the girls this morning and run 7 miles! I’m a big believer in trying to stick to a regular schedule so even though my sleep was @#$%ed messed up, I went through the rest of my day as if it hadn’t been.
Anywho, over the weekend I made a couple of recipes that I thought I’d share with you.
First, how better to get into the July 4 spirit than with Watermelon Lemonade! Here’s what I did:
Ingredients:
- 2 cups watermelon juice
- 1 cup fresh lemon juice
- 3 cups water
- 3/4 cup simple syrup
- several sprigs of fresh mint
Just add everything together and stir! Yum!
To get the watermelon juice, I just cut up chunks of watermelon and pureed them in my Vitamix until completely liquid. Then I strained the puree through a fine wire mesh strainer.
The simple syrup is just one cup of sugar added to one cup of water – bring to boil until sugar dissolves and then allow to cool before adding to the other ingredients.
Doesn’t it look festive and very 4th of July-ish?
The second recipe I wanted to share with you is a salad recipe by my friend Kristen. It’s called Two Bean and Barley Salad and it was really fabulous. I brought this to a July 4 pool party and everyone really liked it.
I loved using barley! I very rarely cook with barley so it was fun to get to use it in this recipe. The salad was very garlicky - I used fresh picked garlic from the farmer’s market and it might have been a little on the strong side. I think next time I will decrease the garlic and try to bring out the tahini flavor some more. Maybe some miso? I don’t know – I’ll let you know if /when I play around with it some more. THANK YOU TO KRISTEN for creating this masterpiece! Check out Kristen’s blog – she has some great original recipes on there!
Ok that’s it for now. I’m going straight to bed and look forward to a really great night of SLEEP!
I’m wondering, what do you do when you can’t sleep?
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Those look like great recipes… I will definitely be trying them out soon! I feel the same way about buckwheat as you do with barley. It’s a wonderful substitution for rice. Now I’m curious to try barley too…
My favorite insomnia cure all? Either reading “I Am That,” by Nisargadatta Maharaj
OR
watching a Ramana Maharshi video that has been my late night friend for a long, long time now. Usually only takes about 10 – 30 minutes and I’m out cold. LOL. Something about the voiceover lulls me right to sleep.
(good point about maintaining your routine in spite of hiccups along the way. coincidentally that was my big project for tomorrow!)
Thanks for the ideas! I’m going to try both of them.
Last night I ended up taking a melatonin and that did the trick – slept the whole night through
I’m glad you liked the salad. I will admit, I like to use garlic like a vegetable.
Thanks for the amazing recipe. Watermelon is my favourite and barley is good for health. Barley is very healthy. It is rich in nutrients. It helps in various ways like for skin purifier, cures pimples, helps to get taut skin, it act as skin whitener and has many other benefits. It can also be used as body scrub, which can be rubbed on the skin for 15-20 minutes to get optimal exfoliation.