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🐟 What's Cookin Wednesday 🐟Cod is the most underrated weeknight protein there is. 🍅 It cooks in under ten minutes, it do...
10/07/2026

🐟 What's Cookin Wednesday 🐟

Cod is the most underrated weeknight protein there is. 🍅 It cooks in under ten minutes, it does not dry out on you the way a chicken breast does, and it carries a bold spice like harissa better than almost anything else at the fish counter.

The whole thing happens in one skillet. ⏱️ The couscous toasts right in the pan, the broth and tomatoes go in on top of it, and the cod steams on that bed while the spinach wilts in at the end. About twenty five minutes of real cooking and you are eating.

Serves 4 | Total time 30 minutes | About 38 g protein per serving

INGREDIENTS
4 cod fillets, 6 oz each, patted dry
2 tbsp harissa paste, divided
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 1/4 tsp kosher salt, divided
1/4 tsp black pepper
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, divided
1 cup pearl couscous
1 3/4 cups low sodium chicken broth
1 medium zucchini, cut into 1/2 inch half moons
1 pint cherry tomatoes
1/2 medium red onion, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 cups baby spinach
1 lemon (1 tsp zest plus 2 tbsp juice)
1/4 cup fresh cilantro or flat leaf parsley, chopped

INSTRUCTIONS
1. Pat the cod completely dry, then rub it all over with 1 tbsp of the harissa, the cumin, the smoked paprika, 1/2 tsp of the salt and the black pepper. Set it aside while the pan gets going.
2. Heat 1 tbsp of the olive oil in a large deep skillet over medium high. Add the zucchini and red onion with 1/4 tsp of the salt and cook 4 minutes, until the zucchini is browned at the edges.
3. Add the garlic and the remaining 1 tbsp harissa and stir 30 seconds. Add the pearl couscous and stir 1 minute to toast it.
4. Pour in the broth, add the cherry tomatoes and the last 1/2 tsp salt and bring it to a boil. Cover, drop to a low simmer and cook 8 minutes.
5. Nestle the cod fillets on top of the couscous, cover again and cook 7 to 9 minutes, until the fish flakes with a fork and a thermometer in the thickest part reads 145F.
6. Scatter the spinach around the fish, cover 1 minute to wilt it, then kill the heat. Add the lemon zest, lemon juice, the remaining 1 tbsp olive oil and the cilantro, and spoon the pan juices over everything.

Fish has a reputation for being a weekend project, and this one proves otherwise. What protein have you been meaning to cook at home but keep putting off?

Early on a weekday the street out front is just a street. 🏃 Sprinklers ticking, a truck backing out of a driveway, and s...
10/07/2026

Early on a weekday the street out front is just a street. 🏃 Sprinklers ticking, a truck backing out of a driveway, and somebody running past the stop sign at a pace nobody is timing.

Pace is the part people get self-conscious about. A slower run can feel like it needs an apology, as if the distance only counts when it goes by fast. The road is exactly as long at a jog as it is at a sprint, and every bit of it got covered.

That is the whole thing. The mile happened.

What is something you did at your own speed this week that you are glad you finished?

Almost everybody's first class has the same worry in it, and it is not the workout. It is the feeling that the whole roo...
10/06/2026

Almost everybody's first class has the same worry in it, and it is not the workout. It is the feeling that the whole room is about to watch you get something wrong. 🙂

Here is what is actually going on in that room. The person on the floor is three reps into a set and trying not to lose the number. The one hanging from the bar is counting seconds. The one by the rig is quietly deciding whether there is one more in there. Every head in the place is pointed at its own small problem, and almost none of them have room left over for yours.

The attention you are bracing for mostly goes to the whiteboard and the clock. When somebody does glance your way, it is usually to check how much time is left.

So come in and do your version of it. Nobody is keeping score on it but you. 💪

What was the thing you were most sure people would notice on your first day?

The workout ends when the clock beeps. Nobody actually leaves then. 🚗Walk out after the morning class and look at the lo...
10/04/2026

The workout ends when the clock beeps. Nobody actually leaves then. 🚗

Walk out after the morning class and look at the lot. Half the room is still standing between the cars with water bottles in hand, keys already out, going nowhere. Somebody is finishing a story that started during the warm-up. Somebody else is laughing about the last round like it was funny at the time, which it was not. The sun is barely over the wall and there are places everybody is supposed to be, and still the talking runs another ten minutes. ☀️

Nobody plans that part and there is no coach running it. It just happens, most days, because the people who shared a hard hour tend to like each other a little more at the end of it. That is how a class of near strangers turns into people who ask where you were on Tuesday. So thank you to everybody who hangs around out there a little too long. You are a big part of why this place feels the way it does. 🙌

Who is the person you always end up talking to on the way out?

The sun is not up when the alarm goes off anymore. 🌒 Somewhere in the last few weeks that changed, and nobody announced ...
10/03/2026

The sun is not up when the alarm goes off anymore. 🌒 Somewhere in the last few weeks that changed, and nobody announced it.

Three months ago the five o'clock crowd walked out into a parking lot that was already bright. Now it is headlights and a dark lot, and the walk from the truck to the door asks something it did not ask in July. Same class on the board, same hour, different thing being asked of you. That is worth saying out loud, because getting up is genuinely harder in the dark and pretending otherwise just leaves people feeling strange for finding it hard.

So if you got in this week, that counted for a little more than the same week in the summer did. And if you have been losing the argument with the alarm since the mornings turned, you are not the only one in the room and nothing has gone wrong. The light comes back around in a few months either way, and the door is open at the same time regardless. 💪

What does your morning look like now that it is dark on the way in?

The first thing anybody asks a new person here is their first name, and most days that is the whole of it. 🚪It goes up o...
10/02/2026

The first thing anybody asks a new person here is their first name, and most days that is the whole of it. 🚪

It goes up on the whiteboard next to everybody else's and your onboarding is finished. No paperwork on the floor, no going around a circle, no telling the room what brings you in. A coach points you at a spot, says what is happening, checks how you have set up, and then you are just another name in the column alongside somebody who has been coming four years.

People budget a lot of nerve for that part and then find there was not much to spend it on. The work itself is hard and nobody here pretends otherwise. But the price of walking in is one word, and you already know it. 💪

What is the part of a new place that you brace for hardest?

Somewhere around rep nine the number just goes. 😮‍💨 You were counting, and then you were not.It happens in the loud part...
10/01/2026

Somewhere around rep nine the number just goes. 😮‍💨 You were counting, and then you were not.

It happens in the loud part, when the music is up and your own breathing is the only thing you can hear clearly. You come up off the floor and take a guess. Was that nine, or was it eleven, and is it worth starting over to find out. Then the person working three feet away from you, deep in their own set, with absolutely no reason to be tracking yours, says four more without looking up. And they are right. They had been counting the whole time.

That job does not exist on paper. It is not written on the whiteboard and no coach ever asked for it. People here just keep a loose running tally of whoever is next to them, the same way they notice when somebody has picked up a thirty instead of a twenty five. It costs them nothing and it saves you standing there doing arithmetic while the clock runs. 🙌

It is a small and deeply unglamorous way of looking out for each other, and it is most of what makes an hour in here feel different from an hour alone in a garage.

When did somebody last hand you a number you had completely lost?

Somewhere in the middle of a run, the plan quietly shrinks down to the next block wall. 😮‍💨The first part has a start to...
09/30/2026

Somewhere in the middle of a run, the plan quietly shrinks down to the next block wall. 😮‍💨

The first part has a start to it, and the last part has an ending you can see. The middle has neither. Out past the gym the block walls all run the same tan, the same height, one after another, and the trees throw the same shade every forty yards. You stop doing pace math somewhere in there. Your eyes pick a mailbox, then the corner of a wall, then the patch of shade under the one palm, and you go to each of them in turn without really deciding to.

That narrowing is not the plan falling apart. It is what the middle of something actually feels like from the inside, and it looks the same on a rower, on a bike and on a long set of anything. The distance did not get shorter. Your attention just moved in close, because that is where it is useful.

You come around the last corner and the ending shows up again, and you are somehow already most of the way through it. 🏃 What do you end up counting when the middle gets long?

The scariest part of your first barbell is not lifting it. It is loading it with people around. 🙂You know roughly what y...
09/29/2026

The scariest part of your first barbell is not lifting it. It is loading it with people around. 🙂

You know roughly what you want on there. What you do not know is whether the plate goes on before or after the clip, which direction the clip even turns, or whether you are supposed to slide the bar out of the rack first. So you stand there holding a bumper plate against your hip, doing the math on how it will look, and you glance down the row at what somebody else has on theirs. Everybody who has ever walked in here has had some version of that thirty seconds.

Then the plate goes on. The collar takes three tries, because the collar always takes three tries. You step back and there it is: a loaded bar in a rack, one plate a side, clipped and ready. That is a finished bar. Not a warm up for the real bar, not a practice version of a bar. It is the thing itself, set up correctly, waiting on you.

Nobody in this building started heavy, and most of the people you would guess started heavy did not either. 💪 What was on your bar the first week you came in?

🥕 Meal Prep Monday's 🥕The protein is never the part that falls apart by Thursday. 💪 It is the side. You cooked chicken o...
09/28/2026

🥕 Meal Prep Monday's 🥕

The protein is never the part that falls apart by Thursday. 💪 It is the side. You cooked chicken on Sunday, and by midweek it is chicken sitting on the plate by itself, because whatever you meant to put next to it went soft or just got skipped.

Lentils fix that better than almost anything else in the pantry. 🌿 They come out of the pot on Sunday and they are honestly better on Wednesday, because the smoked paprika and the braising liquid keep working on them all week. No mush, no reheating gamble, and one pot gives you six servings out of forty five mostly hands off minutes.

Serves 6 | Total time 45 minutes | About 14 g protein per serving

INGREDIENTS
1 1/2 cups dry brown or green lentils, rinsed and picked over
1 tbsp olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2 medium carrots, diced (about 1 cup)
2 ribs celery, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1 tbsp tomato paste
4 cups low sodium vegetable or chicken broth
1 bay leaf
1 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
4 cups chopped kale, tough stems removed
1 tbsp red w**e vinegar

INSTRUCTIONS
1. Heat the olive oil in a Dutch oven or heavy pot over medium. Add the onion, carrots and celery and cook 7 to 8 minutes, stirring now and then, until softened and just starting to color.
2. Add the garlic, smoked paprika, cumin and thyme and cook 1 minute, until it smells toasted. Stir in the tomato paste and cook 1 minute more.
3. Add the lentils, broth, bay leaf, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then drop to a low simmer, cover and cook 25 to 30 minutes, until the lentils are tender but still hold their shape. Add a splash of water if the pot runs dry before they are done.
4. Stir in the kale and simmer uncovered 5 minutes, until wilted and dark green.
5. Pull out the bay leaf. Off the heat, stir in the red w**e vinegar and taste for salt. The vinegar is not optional, it is what keeps a pot of lentils from tasting flat.

Keeps 5 days airtight in the fridge. Cool uncovered about 20 minutes before you lid the containers, then reheat 90 seconds to 2 minutes with a splash of broth or water stirred in.

What is the one side dish you can actually count on still being good on day four?

Address

150 N Yucca Street
Mesquite, NV
89027

Opening Hours

Monday 5am - 10:30am
Tuesday 5am - 7am
Wednesday 5am - 10:30am
Thursday 5am - 7am
Friday 5am - 10:30am
Saturday 7am - 8am

Telephone

+17023087563

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