Vacation and seeing friends is just the best, but I’m a homebody at heart. I love being home to my own home cooked meals, I love sitting in the backyard with my doggy, and I love my gyms workouts. I just love routine. I crave it. It keeps me sane.
But I’m still so glad I got to go to Austin for my 4th year in a row. Austin is by far one of my favorite cities. Right there with Portland and San Diego. The people are friendly, everyone works out and has adorable dogs, and the food scene is always getting better and better. The only thing that changes each year when I head to Paleo(fx) is the time I actually spend at Paleo(fx). Here’s the thing about the paleo community: it’s either weird as f*ck or super cool. You have all these cool people who want to better their health whether that is through knowledge, strength, food, etc. so it’s a really cool place to see all these things come together and flourish. But you also have the weirdos just coming out of the woodwork. And they often smell because they are super granola-y.
Here are two situations I had this year at Paleo(fx). As I was waiting at the conference for some friends, I watched outside as many of the fitness people at the convention did workouts or random movements. I found myself staring at this random dude with his shirt off puffing up his chest and doing random movements in the grass. Alone. As I stared and mentioned his strangeness to my own friends, he glanced over and I quickly looked away in a super obvious fashion. Well, later on that day, a friend invited a woman over. She hung out with us for a while but since I had a headache, I moved away from the group in the kitchen to the living room to be alone. Soon after, there was a knock at the door. I open up the door and here’s that shirtless man…with a shirt on this time, smelling very ripe. I said hello and asked who the hell he was. Well, he came over to hang out with the random woman at our house. Cool, whatever, strange. He interrupted my headache-quiet-time asking me who I was and telling me about himself and bragging about his lifestyle. Then once the whole group came to join us, he quickly went to the backyard with the random woman. WTF? You can’t come over to someone’s house and just creep in the backyard while your hosts are in the house. This isn’t a college party. And when we decided to leave to get ice cream, they wanted to stay in our house. Hey, you creepy granola paleo people, go weirdly flirt and do the dirty in your own house. Like normal people. You stinky human, you.
We also had a weird situation as we sat eating dinner at the restaurant Odd Duck. Let me first premise this by saying the food is quite delightful there but COME ON with the prices. You want me to order at least 3 plates per head with each plate being around $15 and has 2 bites. GFY. The food was quite tasty, though. Anywho, as we were finishing up, this guy with a loud BEEF tshirt on came over and stood there for a while before mentioning that we looked familiar. Well, dude, you just stood here for 10 minutes without saying anything, of course we look familiar right now, it’s pretty much like you know us. He made all of us introduce ourselves and he stood there awkwardly a bit more after he explained he had some paleo company. It was pretty awkward tension for a while before he left. Especially since I was uncomfortably full after Vanessa from Clean Eating with a Dirty Mind ordered about a million orders of their sweet potatoes. Cool, whatever, people are weird as I explained above. But while I walked food-drunk down the street after our meal, snapchatting as I went, I noticed that the same guy was either taking a photo or a video of us food-drunk walking and snapping. What’s that about? What are you doing, bro? I see you. And now I think your company and yourself is the weirdest. Way to really represent your brand in the creepiest way possible.
That’s what I mean about paleo people. You either get people like me, who are pretty weird AF but understand social cues like not hanging out in a random person’s house and trying to hook up with another random person in a house I’m not paying for…and then you get the others. Just a little knowledge for ya if you ever decide to go to Paleo(fx). Knowledge bombs all over the place.
Caramel Coconut Cream Pineapple Popsicles
- Yield: 6 popsicles 1x
Ingredients
- 1 batch Vanilla Bean Salted Caramel Sauce from Juli Bauer’s Paleo Cookbook*
- 4 cups diced fresh pineapple
- 1 cup canned full fat coconut milk
- 1/4 cup maple syrup
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon cardamom
- 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
Instructions
- Make caramel sauce and set aside to cool slightly.
- Blend pineapple in a high speed blender until smooth and completely combine. Pour pineapple puree 1/3 of the way up evenly in 6 popsicle molds. Place the rest of the pineapple puree in a separate bowl and rinse out blender.
- Place coconut milk, maple syrup, vanilla extract, cardamom, cinnamon and 3 tablespoons of caramel in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour the coconut milk mixture into the popsicle molds evenly throughout, another 1/3 of the way up. Top the coconut mixture with about 1-2 teaspoons of caramel. Top the caramel layer off with the rest of the pineapple puree. Place lids on popsicle molds and place in the freezer to free overnight.
- Run mold underneath hot running water for about 20 seconds to help remove popsicle from the mold. Eat!
Notes
*Use any extra caramel sauce on these recipes:
Sea Salt Caramel Brownie Ice Cream
Salted Caramel Cookie Ice Cream Cups
Chocolate Dipped Caramel Nut Bars
___________________
You May Also Like:
July 4th Chocolate Covered Strawberry Popsicles
________________
Click Here To Get All My PaleOMG Recipes Into Your Meal Planner With Real Plans!
I may be compensated through my affiliate links in this post, but all opinions are my own. This compensation helps with expenses to keep this blog up and running!
I see you with those extra photos ;D (thank you!!!) :*
yay Lauren! i’ll keep trying and think of fun new ideas to share the pics! i was pissed i didn’t take a big ole bite out of one and snap a pic!
LOL to your recap.
omg how creepy! on both counts! especially the strange guy coming to hang with the random woman at the house.
I would imagine that happens a lot to you now, though? strangers coming up to you in the street, etc. I know if I ran into you in Denver and it was an appropriate situation, I would definitely come say hi!
This was literally the most entertaining blog post I have ever read.! I am always amazed at how CREEEPY weird people can be! And you have to wonder if these people ever smell themselves. And what woman would want to get with that? Gag….
On a much more appetizing note, I’m trying these Popsicles this weekend!
Those guys sound super creepy, but I still want to go to Austin so bad! I have heard so many great things about that city. I want to go this summer and I was wondering, Juli, if it was a walking friendly city. Amtrak sounds much better than driving in a cramp car for 18 hours!
i think it is, depending where you want to be! but you can take a cab there (i think it’s called fare) if you want to get somewhere farther
Were those guys as awkward as Chad on The Bachelorette doing pull ups with a suitcase strapped to him, or him eating a random plate of meat at the rose ceremony ?
worse
I also LOVE staying at home, but I need my adventures too! I would love to travel to Vietnam to visit my family–it’s been over five years since I last came! As for people hooking up at a party….just no. No.
BUT these caramel coconut cream pineapple popsicles are a definite YES in my book! I’d demolish them in a heartbeat!!
Stop sweet potato shaming me! bwahahahaha that guy was totally weird AF.
YUM!! These look SO good! Kind of glad I missed out on paleofx this year, SO weird!!!