Misschien weet je het intussen, maar ik blijf het voor alle zekerheid toch maar herhalen. :-) Onderaan deze post, in het roze gedeelte, vind je een Nederlandstalige versie.

OK, there’s something I have to shout out first.

 My Lucie-girl is making me so proud right now. The last two trials she’s run, she’s done amazing. After one and a half seasons of disqualifying because she was overstimulated, overwhelmed, and everything but focused at trials, she’s starting to really work consistently, and she is running some great courses. Last Saturday, she ran a really fast course with long straight lines, with only one fault, and placed third. Then on Tuesday we drove our new home away from home to another trial in Liège, and there, she ran her first ever clear trial run in the jumping! So nice to finally see her show everything we already knew she could do! She’s been doing amazing stuff at training, but she always had a much harder time at trials. Now, our hard work is finally paying off for our little black sheep.

OK, now that my rant is over, I can start the story of our trip to Liége from the beginning. D and I entered a trial there, and we didn’t feel like getting up at 5 AM on the last day of our summer vacation, to drive there in the morning. That, after all, was what we bought Ria for last month. Ria? Who is Ria and why did you buy her? I can hear you guys thinking something just like that. Well, meet Ria. She’s our caravan, and we’ll be driving her to trials. This will allow us to arrive in a nice, relaxed fashion the night before. No more alarm clocks at ungodly hours just to make it to the trial grounds in time to find a decent spot. No more dragging tents and chairs and coolers from the car to the grounds. Taking our dogs to trials just became so much easier, and so much more not exhausting. It’s absolutely wonderful!

At this point, I need to introduce you to Lars. He's my nephew, and also my godson. He’s adorable, and he’d been asking me for a sleepover for ages. He loves camping out in our crater field, I mean, backyard. He also loves spending time with our dogs, and we literally have to tell him to stop cuddling them, because, patient as they are with him, they are not saints, and their patience has its limits. So we asked him if he wanted to go camping at a dog trial with me and D. Turns out he was enthusiastic about the idea, and considered it quite the adventure. It probably is, for a 6 year old.

So, even though we were planning to leave for Liege on monday afternoon, preparation began on Sunday. I had plenty of stuff to do, and we were planning on a caravan dinner of spaghetti for the boys (Lars and D, and zoodles for me). So, thanks to my "Cook once eat twice" strategy, I had monday night’s caravan dinner sorted. All I had to do was walk over to the freezer, grab a prepped freezer meal bag with spaghetti sauce, and toss it in the bowl of my slow cooker to thaw overnight. My plan was to try to feed Lars some paleo goodies, and see how he liked them. For that, I actually needed some paleo goodies, though.  Next thing I did was peel two sweet potatoes, cut them into big chunks, and set them on the stove in a pot of water. Then I started the oven preheating and began with frittata muffins for lunch on Tuesday trial day. When those were in the oven, My sweet potatoes were cooked, and Tuesday trial day breakfast slowly began to take shape. Paleo protein brownies. I got out the ingredients for those, and by the time the frittata muffins were done, I could take them out of my muffin tin in their nifty silicone muffin tin liners, and plop in some more liners, fill them up with brownie batter, and toss the muffin tin straight back into the oven. The recipe is at the bottom of this post.

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