WIAW – a new schedule
Another day of eats coming your way. Don’t forget to head over to Peas and Crayons to see the entire link up!
Now that we are back from a little vacation in North Carolina and California, it’s time to settle into my new summer schedule. As you may remember, I made a big announcement that I was leaving my job to pursue a Masters in Social Work. I am really thrilled about this next step 🙂 I have a number of tasks for this summer prior to starting school full time. I am supplementing my time prepping for school with a number of exciting side projects that are a bit more “social work-y” (yeah I’m just gonna own that word) in nature. Here’s what my new schedule is like…
Like every good Tuesday, I started the morning with a cardio warm up and an AM session with my trainer. We were both traveling last week so we haven’t worked out together in two weeks! He definitely brought the pain with a killer lower body workout. I was positively dripping sweat by the end of our session. I headed home to shower and enjoyed a breakfast of iced coffee with 2% milk and overnight oats in a jar! I finally finished my jar of sunflower butter (must get more ASAP I love it) so I made overnight oats with strawberry yogurt, oats, unsweetened vanilla almond milk, chia seeds, sunflower seeds, sliced almonds, and raisins. So delicious and super filling. I had a really busy morning ahead so I didn’t want to get hungry!
My project kept me out of the house until 2 pm! By the time I got home I was positively famished. I reheated a homemade black bean burger (recipe post coming for these because OMG they were so good) on a toasted english muffin with a slice of gouda cheese. I wanted some veggies on the side so I cut up some celery sticks. As a little treat, I turned three of them into “ants on a log” with peanut butter and golden raisins. I guess the golden raisins make them less ant like but that’s what we had open. They were DELICIOUS.
I spent the rest of the afternoon working at home and taking a few phone calls. Suddenly I was totally in the mood to workout again! I am definitely enjoying the increased freedom of my new schedule so I decided to attend a 5:30 boot camp class at my gym I had never been able to get to before! Before heading out, I ate a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats with almond milk. Glad I had it because boot camp was amazing and TOUGH. I don’t normally or always workout twice a day, but I love to exercise so I just do what I feel like doing!
After gym round two, I came back home to work some more until Mike got home from work. We ran out to CVS to pick up some eggs / bread that I needed for our planned dinner. Totally impulse purchased a 99 cent pack of “Red Fish” because I was getting SUPER hungry. They were not as good as the real thing but for 99 cents I wasn’t too upset about it.
With all the proper supplies in hand, I set to work making a frittata for dinner. I wrote a post about frittatas a while ago with more information. This one included eggs (duh), red bell pepper, yellow bell pepper, yellow onion, shredded cheese, salt, pepper, and basil. Topped with some sliced avocado and served with a slice of sourdough toast. This dinner totally hit the spot! If you haven’t tried sliced avocado on your eggs before I highly recommend it!
After dinner I wasn’t feel super hungry for a snack but I was having a little bit of a sweet craving. I realized I hadn’t had much fruit so I snacked on a gala apple. It was just ok… not the crispest apple ever. But that’s ok 🙂
Questions for you guys:
- What are your favorite ingredients to include in a frittata?
- Favorite fruit?
Budget Brunch
I’ve been trying really hard to keep within my “no more than three meals out” per week stipulation in Operation Spend Less Money, knowing full well it was probably going to be the hardest one. I like to cook and usually bring my lunch to work, but sometimes I get busy or it’s just easier to go out. And on the weekend, there are few things I love more than going out to brunch. After running on Saturday or after a lazy Sunday morning, brunch is THE BEST. So this weekend, I set out to make a delicious brunch at home. For me brunch does not mean pancakes or waffles or anything sweet. It means eggs. I love eggs and brunch feels incomplete without them. Plus, I spend all week eating yogurt or oatmeal for breakfast at my desk, so come the weekend I’m looking for delicious, savory eggs. While cooking up brunch, I brewed up a batch of my favorite “coffeehouse coffee” with cinnamon and ginger. To give it a mocha-ish feel, I added 1% chocolate milk to my coffee… which was the bomb.
While sipping on my coffee, I dug through my refrigerator and cabinets to pull together the ingredients for a delicious Mexican inspired breakfast quesadilla. Ingredients included: eggs, tortilla, sliced cheese, diced tomatoes, corn, and refried black beans.
In the pan I fried up two eggs and melted the cheese. I always leave my eggs slightly on the running side, because that is how I like them 🙂
When it all came together, my only regret is that I had a bigger tortilla because this baby got MESSY! But it was truly and completely delicious.
Cutting this thing in half was no small task let me tell you. I ended up serving it with a sliced half a banana and apple, which complemented it perfectly. I wish I had some potatoes, peppers, and onions but perhaps next time. I’ll admit, it’s not exactly the same as going out to brunch, but it was a really good alternative. I can’t say I’ll never go out to brunch again… but at least now I think I can make it more of a once in a while thing 🙂
Two Recipes, One Breakfast
Working in an office every day unfortunately means that I eat two meals of the day (breakfast and lunch) at work. I read all these blogs where people are preparing breakfast and lunch at home and I get SO jealous. I would LOVE to have eggs for breakfast every morning, but my morning schedule isn’t conducive to eating at home so breakfast to go it is! This means my breakfasts are usually pretty boring… a piece of fruit, a greek yogurt, maybe a granola bar, overnight oats or hot oatmeal. Basic stuff. But last week I decided to put a little TLC into prepping breakfast and oh my god did it pay off. To start, I made homemade granola from a Peanut Butter Fingers recipe! Duhhh Peanut Butter Granola. I had never made granola at home before and I was shocked at how easy it was. Why haven’t I been doing this all along??
Step two came in the form of Carrots’n’Cake Breakfast Rice Pudding (which included my homemade peanut butter granola). I love risotto, so I was really pumped to try this recipe with Aborio rice. I made vegan rice pudding once at home with jasmine rice but I didn’t like it very much. It didn’t have that good gummy texture. Aborio was PERFECT. I cooked up the rice like normal and then added the granola, almond milk, honey, vanilla, dried cranberries, raisins, and shredded unsweetened coconut. This was also shockingly easy. The only thing that required any work was cooking the rice. After that I just threw everything in the pot and let it set overnight. This provided me breakfast for four days and it was awesome. I will definitely be making this recipe again 🙂
christinazimm
Pennies on the Run 