WIAW Two Weeks In A Row…

I am managing to do a WIAW post two weeks in a row this time! AND I actually have some food that I ate, and I thought I would throw out a soup recipe that I am loving because it is Freaking Freezing here today! Seriously, it was almost 80 degrees on Monday and it was 22 degrees when I got to work this morning. It’s like Mother Nature is bipolar!

A couple of weeks ago, I decided I wanted to learn how to make macaroons. I made up a batch of dark chocolate ones with chocolate ganache filling and realized I had NO IDEA what they were supposed to taste like. Don’t get me wrong, I think they tasted fabulous, but I also think that chocolate ganache would make cardboard edible.

After a little research I found Dana’s Bakery and ordered a dozen macaroons for taste testing.

These were good, but I wasn’t a big fan of the sweet potato. (Crazy, I know!) I can’t wait to do a little more experimenting with macaroons.

On the advice of my sister, Josh and I started reading a book called The Fast Diet. If you aren’t familiar with it, you fast two days a week, and on the fast days you consume 500 calories (600 for men). While I am not done reading the book, I am fascinated with the science and the benefits to things like cholesterol. I inherited high cholesterol and I am willing to work hard to lower my bad cholesterol if it means I don’t have to be on medication the rest of my life.

This is one of my 500-ish calorie meals, veggie soup with a grilled cheese. This happens to be one of my favorite meals of all time. Soup and grilled cheese.

I was in the mood for sliders the other day, so I whipped up a batch of sweet potato/quinoa/navy bean burgers. Perfect with a little pickle and tomato.

One of my favorite things right now is being able to just grab homemade soup, or beans, or orzo pasta right out of the freezer and throwing it in my lunch in the morning.

This is my favorite soup right now, and I am about due to make another pot to throw in the freezer. It’s so easy and so tasty.

Sweet Potato, Barley and Roasted Cauliflower Soup

Sauté onion, carrot, celery, red pepper in a little olive oil. Add some garlic and chopped sweet potatoes. Sauté a few minutes more and then throw in veggie stock (I usually do two 4 cup boxes). Bring to a boil and simmer until the sweet potatoes are nice and soft. Add either navy beans or chick peas (I usually do a couple of cans.) and then blend until smooth. Simmer a little longer and then add a cup or so of barley. Once the barley is cooked, add some roasted cauliflower.

I like to simmer it a while longer, because who doesn’t love the smell of homemade soup simmering on the stove? I divide it between individual sized Tupperware containers and throw them in the freezer. I either pop one in the fridge the night before I want it, or just throw it in with my lunch in the morning and microwave it when I’m ready. Couldn’t be simpler!

So there you have it, I’ve had some good eats this week! I thought I would leave you with Rocky, looks like he was laying down when he was eating his dinner the other day.

It’s a rough life!

Let's Talk About Food...

I haven't done a WIAW post in a while. Who am I kidding really? I have seriously been neglecting my blog most of 2014. There has been stuff going on, running and baking and family stuff.

Let's talk about the food. I think I am a pretty boring food person. I eat the same things over and over again. No wonder Carson is like that, maybe it's hereditary? 

I have rediscovered my love for avocado egg salad sandwiches. It's a great post long run food. 

We have had a couple of recent trips to Blu for their fabulous blue cheese chips. They are the best!

I have switched up my soup of the week a couple of times and went with orzo with veggies the other week. Yum!

Back to my soup of the week last week with roasted red pepper and barley. Where have red peppers been all my life? Why would anyone waste their time with green bell peppers? Red peppers are the best!

I have not neglected my family in the cookie department. Even with all the sugar cookies and cakes lately, I have still made versions of my chocolate chip cookies pretty consistently for them for the last few months. Nothing says love like homemade cookies. One of my biggest compliments lately was a friend's son who said he wanted to come with her to stop by my house because I always have cookies. Cookies with wine? Even better. 

Do beverages count as food? After a 21 mile long run I think they do. This was my ice bath beverage bar. The Svelte protein shake was so good! So chocolatey and delicious. Hot tea to warm me up while sitting in the ice and a tall glass of Nuun to rehydrate. 

Last night while the meat eaters in my house had steak I had couscous with roasted sweet potatoes, zucchini, mushrooms, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. I'm so glad I prepped these on Sunday. It was fast and filling. 

So there you have it. I have been eating a lot lately. Marathon training makes me hungry!

WIAW, What Did I Take Pictures Of...

I haven't done a WIAW post in ages. I usually have trouble taking pictures of everything I eat in one day. But I do eat the same thing a lot.

I have eaten a few cookies lately, but I have bakes a ton of sugar cookies lately. Based on the number I have made I have eaten only a few. More on the cookies later, but here is one picture of some that I made last night.

I did a little post half marathon carb loading on Sunday night, mostly because spaghetti is so easy to make and I was able to talk Josh into making the garlic bread. Mush to the disappointment of the teenagers. I threw in some steamed Brussels sprouts with mine.

Tonight the family had steak for dinner so I opted for a baked sweet potato with black beans, cheese and salsa. Steamed broccoli and Brussels sprouts on the side.

This has been one of my favorite meals lately. Let's call it a BBQ ranch veggie burger wrap with cheese and lettuce. A side of baked curly fries to go with it.

I have been making a pot of soup watch week for the past few months. Makes packing my lunch extremely simple. I have taken to just starting with a good soup base and then throwing in whatever sounds good that week. I decided on this soup during our half marathon Sunday morning. Navy bean and potato. Yum! I used my immersion blender on part of ot and the beans and potatoes thickened the soup quite nicely.

So there you have it, finally a WIAW post. It's been a little crazy with all the cookie making, but I have still had some yummy eats.

 

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WIAW On Vacation...

I am currently sitting on the couch at my aunt's house at Ocean Isle Beach, NC. Beach vacations are my favorite. The family is asleep and I am really wishing I had slept better last night.

My sinuses have decided to cause me some misery. I am waiting on my doctor to refill a prescription so by this time tomorrow I will be feeling much better. 

We have plans to spend some time at the beach and go to the movies later. 

So now onto the WIAW eats. 

We stopped for lunch at Cracker Barrel in Memphis on Saturday. I had a baked sweet potato with this salad, I ate it before I could take a picture. It was that good. 

We stayed at the Embassy Suites in Nashville. The construction in the hotel was a bit annoying, but the breakfast almost made up for it. Spinach and mushroom omelette with pancakes and hash browns. 

Pre Wilco dinner in downtown Nashville, no picture of my veggie burger. It was so good. There were black beans and chick peas in the burger. Dessert is pictured above. Cinnamon donut holes with caramel dipping sauce. I could have eaten the entire order, but I shared. 

Real food on the road. We decided to stop at an Ingle's grocery store near Asheville, NC and I had the salad bar. Makes me wish we had grocery stores like this in Oklahoma. Carson had a made to order sandwich and Josh and Camy had chicken strips. So much better than fast food. 

Then there was my post horrible run breakfast yesterday morning. Eggo waffle topped with peanut butter. I went a little crazy with the peanut butter and ended up cutting up a banana to top it off. 

Check out the other WIAW eats at www.peasandcrayons.com. 

Pre Vacation WIAW...

I have been seriously slacking when it comes to the blog lately. It is not there hasn't been anything going on, it's just that the things going on haven't been blog appropriate. As things develop they might become appropriate, until then let's start with a little WIAW.

It has not been a very memorable week of eats, lots of same old thing.

I have become quite the Pinterest stalker lately. I have been pinning a bunch of yummy looking recipes and then not doinganything with them. Until last week, when I made Bubble Pizza. The family liked this one, we made part of it vegetarian friendly (Read: no pepperoni) and I made some zuchinni chips to go with mine.

My favorite yogurt is still this Chobani key lime, so good with the graham cracker and white chocolate chips.

I introduced the girls to my new favorite beverage at Starbucks. Iced green tea. I will not bore you with all of the pictures we took before we got one with all three cups in the picture.

With softball over, I feel like our evenings are getting back to normal. Just in time for vacation. After spin class on Monday I came home and made some rissoto that I topped with roasted veggies. Tuesday night was leftovers and for some reason I decided to top the rissoto and veggies with a fried egg. I don't eat fried eggs very often anymore, but every once in a while I can't resist. It might not look fabulous, but it was absolutly delicious.

I keep saying I am going to get back on track, but I mean it this time. There is still some interesting things happening in these final days of June, so check back to see what happens.

 

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WIAW, or What Did I Eat?

If you happen to be one of the couple of people that actually read my blog on a regular basis, I almost used handful but thought that might be a bit of a stretch, you may have noticed the lack of activity on this little corner of the net.

In short, live has been pretty in eventful (Read: boring) lately. Don't get me wrong, we have been pretty busy it just hasn't been what I would think people outside my household would find interesting. I do have some things to share but I thought I would see what I could put together in the way of an WIAW (aka what did I eat Wednesday) post. 

This was so yummy!  Baked (or nuked) sweet potato with roasted broccoli and Brussels sprouts and mushrooms. Just thinking about this makes me want to eat it again. 

I have been craving burritos for some reason. This one had a little blue potato, egg whites, roasted veggies from previous pic, spinach and a little cheddar cheese. It was a borderline fail though as we were all out of salsa. Oh yeah, and there was avocado...

I am posting this picture because I really want to eat this. I got a new vegetarian cookbook for my birthday last week and I fell in love with this recipe!  Now I just have to remind myself how to turn on the oven and actually make this. 

While I have been very unmotivated in the kitchen lately I did manage to get it together to make these Brookies. 

I have never made blondies, but this recipe with brownies/blondies all together is just amazing. 

There you have it. Can someone please tell me how to find my kitchen motivation?

WIAW, 17th Anniversary...

I swear, Wednesdays seem to get here faster and faster every week. Time really seems to speed up the older I get. Not that I am getting old.

My WIAW post is about what I ate on Saturday. After a Saturday morning 8 mile run that ended in lots of walking and a few tears in the car on the way home I was ready to do something more fun.

We went out for lunch with the kiddos to celebrate the end of the school year. Carson decided we were going to to to Red Robin.

We might be getting close to having kids that are too cool to take pictures with their parents.

Somehow I always end up sitting next to Carson.

Warm pretzle bites with beer cheese. The beer cheese was also good on the french fries I stole from Carson.

Hummus plate with carrots, cucumber and chips.

Saturday was also our wedding anniversary, 17 years of wedded bliss. We were going to be very exciting and stay home and do nothing, but at the last minute the girls ended up going to sleep over at a friend's house. Josh and I decided to go out to O Asian Fusion for dinner.

Tempura battered shrimp and veggies. We had never tried this before, but we will definitely have to have it again.

I had the spicy garlic veggies with fried rice. That is the Heavenly Veggie roll in the background. You must try it.

It was a special occasion so we had the chocolate cake. I'm not going to lie, we ate every bit of it and it was delicious. Lots of yummy food and a couple of drinks in martini shaped glasses and it was a nice anniversary celebration.

Here's to the next 17 years or so.

 

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Tornados and WIAW...

I feel like this past week has flown by. I can't believe it's already Wednesday again and time for another WIAW post.

In all honesty, I did not manage to get any pictures of food on my phone this week. We did go out for pizza Friday night at one of our favorite restaurants here in Norman.

Pizza by the slice an mozarella sticks, it's a win win situation for every picky person in my family. Sadly, I don't think my pizza helped to fuel my horrific Saturday morning run. There has not been that much walking in ten miles since the Cowtown Marathon in February. My tweeked right quad muscle has demanded rest and compression so I haven't laced up my beloved Brooks Ravennas since then.

There was also pizza on Sunday night, because what else should you eat during a tornado watch party? The crazy weather started on Sunday afternoon. The girls and I went to the Warren Theater in Moore and saw the new Star Trek movie. When we got out of the theater at a little after four the clouds had rolled in and the wind had picked up. The Brown's had arrived by the time we got home and we were glued to the tv watching the storms roll in.

We got some good sized hail.

Our storm shelter is in the garage. It is in the garage underneath my car. Because of this, when the bad weather rolls in my car gets rolled out of the safety of the garage. I got some minor hail damage on my car.

We answered the question "how many people can you fit in your storm shelter".

That would be four kids, four adults, one French bulldog, and one very nervous Boston Terrier. It was a tight squeeze.

It was a pretty scary looking storm as it rolled through. The girls had a friend that had some damage near her house from the resulting tornado.

Round two happened on Monday afternoon. By now you have heard about the tornado in Moore, OK, and you have probably seen pictures of the destruction. Moore is just north of Norman. I went to school there from sixth grade until I graduated from Moore High School. We have friends and family that live there. The movie theater the girls were at on Sunday afternoon is the one that suffered damage from the tornado, and my daily commute takes me along the interstate where cars were damaged.

My old junior high was damaged. I used to ride my bike to babysit in the summer to one of the neighborhoods that suffered significant damage. Thankfully everyone we know in the area is safe, sadly the same cannot be said for their homes.

Scenes from my commute this morning.

This used to be a neighborhood right off I-35, not it's just a path of destruction.

This used to be a bowling alley, and a credit union and a few other buildings that also took a direct hit from yeserdays monster tornado.

It has been a very sad day. But in case you haven't heard, Oklahomans are strong. They pick themselves up, help their neighbors up, dust themselves off and rebuild. This is not the first devastating tornado to hit Moore, and chances are it won't be the last.

For now they could use your help.

To donate $10 to the Redcross text REDCROSS to 90999, or to donate $10 to the OKC Foodbank, text FOOD to 32333.

 

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