How to Replenish Your Energy After a Workout {Recipe: Kimball's Coffee Protein Blast} (2024)

My husband is a frequent part of Kitchen Stewardship^®, popping in and out of posts from time to time. He’s usually the observer or commentator of a situation (like this week’s real food party menu), sometimes the cheerleader, often the skeptic, and every so often, the pawn (think organ meats).

Never before has he been the author – and we’re not quite there yet – but today he’s actually the recipe developer (imagine my surprise!). He even named it himself.

Over the past few years, my husband has gotten more into fitness than ever before – he always played sports and lifted weights occasionally, but somewhere along the way he decided to be more committed. He’s completed a couple of sessions of 6-day-a-week P90X and Insanity workouts, and the man who always hated running suffered through training for a 5K, hit that magical point where he actually began to enjoy the challenge and crave running, and even completed a half marathon last fall (below).

Training Drinks

Just as he’s purchased special running shoes, clothes, apps, and gloves for winter that even work on his smart phone, runners and athletes tend to have special foods and drinks they enjoy to keep their energy up while training.

There’s that one that’s ubiquitous with all sporting events, gushing on coaches’ heads, spotlighted in million-dollar athlete-endorsed commercials and served after children’s games everywhere (unfortunately).

My son knows that if he gets a bottle of the artificially colored and flavored you-know-what, it either counts as his dessert or, if it’s also artificially sweetened, it hits the trash.

A few years ago I happened upon a recipe for homemade Gatorade electrolyte replacement drink (ahem, I’m sure that’s copyrighted), and my husband said it tastes exactly like the original lemon-lime version. Made with Real Salt, it adds minerals and salts your body sweats out while exercising.

Redmond’s Re-Lyte capsules, the sponsor of this post, do the same thing in a supercharged way, delivering 60 trace minerals in a vegetable-based capsule. They often reduce or eliminate cramping for athletes on long training sessions while replacing electrolytes, and it seems cyclists in particular have nothing but good things to say about them. (Click the review tab HERE to see more.)

In our pre-real-food days, my husband not only was a regular consumer of above unnamed drinks when playing hockey, but he also had huge tubs of whey protein to make muscle-building drinks with when he would lift weights. When those ran out after our journey to real food began, he didn’t know what to replace them with, and neither did I.

His protein drink days seemed to be over.

Enter Minimally Processed Whey Protein

We finally found properly raised, minimally processed whey protein powder in a few places, both at Amazon (goat milk protein) and Radiant Life (as used in our grain-free quinoa bars recipe).

The powders don’t blend as smoothly as he’s used to, and without the added sugar of the conventional stuff, so simply mixing them with milk wasn’t a very pleasant experience.

So my husband, who has never experimented in the kitchen beyond putting my cooking utensils away in the wrong drawer to see what my reaction would be, created a delicious way to get his protein AND added electrolytes.

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