Master Shake
A few days ago I talked about our purchase of the Nutribullet blender, and starting down the path to madness that is mixing various combinations of things. Since that moment I have worked towards building the perfect “breakfast shake” that combines giving me enough nutrients to last until lunch, and the consumption of my morning coffee into one activity. I’ve ventured down several paths until eventually finding the one that seems to make me happy. Since various readers expressed an interest in my recipe when I finally landed on the one that I like… I thought I would actually snap some photos as I made this mornings shake to show the whole thing off. I went back and forth with the ingredients but finally landed on a combination that I like.
The Ingredient List
- Cottage Cheese – 4 tbsp
- Banana – 1 whole sliced can be frozen
- PB2 Powder – 2 tbsp
- Coffee – 12 oz cold made to taste night before
- Cinnamon Brown Sugar Belvita – 1 pkg ( 4 crackers )
- Honey – 1 tsp
Now to talk a little bit about the various things I finally included in the finished “shake”. First off we have the base of Cottage Cheese because it is low fat and relatively high in protein as well as calcium. When thoroughly blended it has an almost cream cheese characteristic which is great. Most of my recipes include a banana because it adds a good amount of bulk to the mix, and it is chock full of all sorts of stuff including tons of potassium. If you add it in frozen you get a much thicker mixture. Belvita biscuits were one of the last additions to this concoction, and in truth they are mostly in there for the fiber… and to give the shake staying power so I am not hungry until lunch. I think in theory any “biscuit” would probably work as well for those without Belvita.
I experimented with adding peanut butter and nutella, but all of those mixes frustrated me. Instead I started using a peanut butter powder which adds the flavoring of peanut without the oil and such. The most important thing is the coffee obviously, and I make this every night as part of my “shutting down the house” ritual. I tried various things, but ultimately I found it works best if I fix the coffee like I would normally drink it. Finally I add a teaspoon of honey just to add a bit more sweetness and balance things out. The end result is pretty great and is this mix of a bunch of great breakfast flavors. It still very much has a coffee drink taste, but also is extremely filling. All of the ingredients pretty much get disintegrated in the process leaving only this thick milkshake consistency. If you give this a shot, let me know what you think.
Check Yourself
A few weeks back our raid leader had outlawed “toys” in the raid, namely after a few incidents with the appearance swapping item… and a poorly placed sandbox tiger during the Oregorger encounter. One of the toys that I feel like leaders all across the game will be outlawing is the S.E.L.F.I.E. camera. That said I decided to hop up on a box and take a picture of our raid waiting for the last few people to zone in. So while I practiced safe screenshotting… apparently others have not been quite so cautious. In fact the very popular WarcraftLogs.com website that our own raid uses for log parsing has added special support to make sure raid leaders are certain who cast that selfie and when. So while cute I do hope all of my readers exercise appropriate caution, when attempting to sneak one in. I of course was being super obvious, since hopping up on a box before the raid.
After we got started last night we had quite a great evening. We cleared the five bosses that we have defeated before, and put some attempts in on Heroic Gruul. Oregorger felt surprisingly manageable after spending so much time bashing our head against it. I think more than anything it was a mental block for our raid, and now that we have cleared it I feel like we can probably finish clearing up the rest of the wings in short order. We saved the progression bosses for Thursday which tends to be our more serious night. I feel like I really should at least do the LFR version of these fights between now and then to understand the layout of each of the rooms. The most frustrating part about LFR right now is the fact that there are zero upgrades for me, and since you can only gain the legendary currency once per boss per week… there isn’t much incentive there either.
Gladiator Changes
One of the things that has kept me engaged this expansion is just how much I love the Gladiator spec. It is essentially that thing I have always wanted to do in a game… dps with a sword and shield. Everything about the spec seems ideally suited for my personal sentiments. That said I knew it was a bit of an odd duck specialization wise, and I have had to seek out specific gear with specific stats to make it work well. Up until 6.1 everything seemed awesome, and I felt very competitive, sitting in the top five on almost every fight. Last week I was rather sick, but this week… I finally noticed how much less damage I seemed to be doing relative to what I could push before the patch. Now on AOE fights… I am still insane with the amount of AOE bleed and cleave goodness at my disposal. However on largely single target fights it seems like I have lost a few thousand dps.
My theory is that before the patch I was attempting to shed all of the haste I could from gear and buffing my crit in its place. Post patch… we now apparently want to shoot for 700 haste. So I have a feeling that I will need to rifle through my bank and re-itemize myself. Thankfully I don’t think I have gotten rid of any items unless they were stat for stat increases. I am hoping that after some tweaks I can make this work, because honestly a huge chunk of my enjoyment of raiding right now… comes from being able to gladiator. I hate the way fury feels, and honestly always have. Arms is traditionally an under performing spec, but if I can get my hands on a Blackrock era 2 hander I might give that a shot. In any case I will need to spend some time sifting through the changes and adjusting, because I am not quite ready to give up on the dream of sword and board dps.
Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Check Yourself