In My Boots: In 2014, I resolve not to eat Easy Mac for dinner every night

Being a busy, hardworking horse person doesn’t mean you can’t eat well. Kristen Kovatch shares a favorite resource.

From Kristen:

Resolutions aren’t always easy to keep–or even to make in the first place. By now most readers, I’m sure, have read a hundred different articles about how to make a good, keep-able resolution, how not to choose some lofty and unreachable goal that you’ll have given up by Valentine’s Day.

So instead of trying to give myself some mission to attempt to accomplish, I thought instead about what would make my quality of life a little better, a little easier to achieve. I know I’m not alone in the horse world when I get home at the end of a long day at the barn and I’m either too exhausted or too uncreative to do anything interesting in the kitchen. I won’t detail for the nutritionists among us the number of evenings I content myself with pasta and red sauce. For hobby equestrians who are fitting in their riding time after a full-time day of work, I’m sure this is a common problem as well.

I do what I can–I try to buy local, I try to eat lots of fruits and veggies, I steer away from “junk food.” But ultimately, when I’m tired and I’ve worked every weekend and haven’t had time to go grocery shopping, that box of pasta looks pretty good, night after night. When properly motivated, I made the time to whip up a giant batch of soup or stew on a Sunday evening and portion-pack some for the week–but after eating vegetable soup for two weeks straight, I knew I was ready for a change.

Naturally, I turned to Facebook. I fiddled around with creating a group, sent invitations out to a variety of my connections–former instructors, current and past coworkers, trainers in the area, students and graduates, my mom and some other “barn moms”–and the Horsewomen’s Recipe Exchange was born.

It’s a pretty simple concept: post your favorite recipes that are easy, quick, and nutritious, or borrow another horsewoman’s recipe. Group members post requests and questions or add compliments and suggestions. We’re not setting the culinary world on fire; posted recipes range from squash soup…

…to stew…

…to pasta…

…to sweets.

Like most horsewomen I work with professionally, we’re pretty unpretentious and our food choices seem to reflect it–but like the horsewomen I know, it’s a pleasant community of people simply seeking to help each other out.

So if you’re in need of a resolution or just a new idea for the new year, stop by and join us–we’d love to share our recipes with you, and you bet that we’ll be waiting for your ideas as well.

Happy New Year!

Kristen was an English major at Alfred University and was then hired on after graduation as the western teacher and trainer at the university’s Bromeley-Daggett Equestrian Center. She would joke on that irony but her students don’t find it very funny any more. Kristen coaches the varsity western team and teaches classes in western riding and draft horse driving. She has shown reined cow horse, reining, western pleasure, and draft horses, as well as dabbled in hunt seat equitation. Between her horses and her students, Kristen is never short on stories to tell. Some of these stories can be read at her blog at thewesternlife.wordpress.com. She has also been published in Today’s Equestrian, Take the Reins and Ranch and Reata.

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