"Frankenfood Friday" & The Busy Weekend (9/24-27/10)

"Frankenfood Friday"

Breakfast: Cheese omelet, the usual toast, the usual coffee.

At work: the fully leaded + half-and-half + chia powder

Pre-workout snack (and namesake of the post):  I blog, because it often helps me salvage the mishaps of life and turn them into something good.  Or at least mildly amusing.

So I had some cottage cheese and blueberries and walnuts in the fridge.  I was sorting through my emergency rations box, and I found some orange mango whey protein drink mix in there.  I thought, "Hmmm...this might be something fun to try!  I like orange flavor!"  So I mixed half a packet in with the cottage cheese and added my other ingredients.

Looks promising, no?

First bite:  Hmmm...interesting.  It sort of tasted like the mid-20th century classic, the orange jello and cottage cheese salad.  Except that I'd skipped a step and just dumped in a package of jello mix.  The flavor was strong and artificial.

After a couple of bites, the true extent of the nastiness was revealed.  This might have worked with yogurt (I doubt it, though) or maybe in a smoothie, but the sweet-tart taste didn't go well with the salt in the cottage cheese.  Weird, because peaches in cottage cheese are divine.  Maybe because they're just sweet and not tart?

The final verdict.

I picked out the poor blueberries and most of the walnuts.  

Let us now observe a moment of silence to honor the fallen walnuts who sacrificed their nutty goodness in my pursuit of a new recipe.  

[bows head]

Fortunately, I still had 1/2 a Jaybar in my desk....  

My hero! (*swoon*)

At the gym:  I had a really good run on the treadmill.  This long starts to get really boring, but after a sensible 1 mile warm up, I picked up the pace a bit for miles 2 & 3.  Cool-down was mostly walking.  And then I stretched and foam-rolled, and my hamstrings felt fine.  Sadly, later on, my ankle and I think my Achilles tendon were achy, which has me worried.  And here, I thought I was being sensible and not pushing things, and working back into a reasonable pace and distance.  Hmph.

Cranky middle-aged woman side note:  Honestly, why do kids these days think the stretching area is the place to make out?  I'm sure the free weights area would have a much more appreciative audience.  I can avert my eyes with the best of them, but honestly, the smooching sounds were so annoying.  Get a room, people!

I was curious about this machine, so I gave it a whirl.  I'm thinking I need to try out more of these things.

Post-workout lunch:  Leftover "especial" soup.  I added the leftover potato from breakfast the other day and some green beans.  Yum!  They worked great in this and made it more like a stew.

Dinner:  Steak with sauce, salad, cauliflower (this time with olive oil and some Thai seasoning mix I had in the cupboard), and beer.

Mr. H&H was feeling a little grumpy, and with good reason.  Remember those folding side-tables on the new grill that I was scared about melting?  Yep, he forgot to fold them out when lighting the grill.  However, they weren't grilled for too long, and they only have some slight bubbling marks.  I was envisioning total grill devastation - which I'm sure would have been my fate - the grill itself was undamaged.

Dessert:  Yeay!  Mr. Handsome-and-Handy saved the day and bought a jar of peanuts at the store.  Got my wee cuppa with chocolate chips.  I also tried a bite of no-sugar-added homemade vanilla ice cream that Mr. H&H and the kids had made earlier in the day.  It had good flavor; the consistency was fluffy rather than dense.

Garage Sale Saturday!

(Or, The One in which Pubsgal Has a Hair-brained Scheme, which Makes Lots of Work for Mr. Handsome-and-Handy)

Breakfast:  It was kind of a backwards weekend, having to get up early on Saturday.  Mr. H&H did the donut run.  He got me some coffee, too.  The photo is representative.  I had 1 hole, a tiny wedge of apple fritter, and a chunk of my daughter's twist.  (I took pictures, but why show them?  We all know what these things look like.)*  I also had a cheese stick for protein.

*Footnote:  Sometimes I worry about showing unhealthy foods, not so much about what other people will think about me, but what it might influence other people to do.  So I cut the photos.  But then, after reading a comment on another blog, I gave it some thought and decided to put them back in.  What's the point if I'm not committed to keeping this food log as real as possible.  This is my way of staying accountable to myself.  Sometimes it's kind of onerous to keep whipping out the camera and photographing everything.  Which is why there might be sketches, or text descriptions, or even a photo of an empty plate and a text description.

This is not the part I ate.  It's the part that was about the same size as the part I cut off and ate.

I'm not pleased with this trend.  Our donut shops makes good donuts, but donuts are not really my favorite thing.  (Go figure!)  It's kind of sad, because what I really love are good quality chocolate croissants - which I'd have to drive to a certain bakery to buy, which is not on my typical route - and yet here I am, impulsively picking at donuts.  Donuts!  Arrrgh.  I keep saying, "I shouldn't do that" and then going and doing it.  So I think I need to come up with a plan for days like this.  If I'm going to eat carb in the a.m., there are so many things that would taste good and be better for me.  Some ideas:

• Flax toast with cream cheese and sugar-free jam
• Apple and almond butter or peanut butter
• Bake and freeze some sort of protein bar or muffins, so as to have something sweet but healthier
• Heck, there's a Subway next door to the donut shop, I could get myself one of their egg white muffin melt breakfast sandwiches.  I could even strip off the bread for less carb (although the carb count is 1 net carb serving, which is pretty friendly).

Here's Thing 2 at the lemonade stand.  One reason we agreed to the garage sale was because the Things always want to have a lemonade stand, yet we have so little traffic on our street.  This weekend was the city-wide garage sale event, and so there would be lots of people cruising our neighborhood going to all the other sales that were also going on.

Sadly, though, this did not work out as well as expected.  The weather got warm, and about 5 minutes in, the yellow jacket wasps started to invade.  Children in full freak-out mode don't really draw customers too well.  I managed to show Thing 2 that the yellow jackets were not after us, but she still didn't want to hang out with them all day, or serve lemonade when they were crawling up the spout of the thermos.  So we scuttled the stand.

Oddly, I didn't notice this problem with the bake sale/lemonade stand down the street from us...  

Lunch:  2 tacos made from leftover steak, with homemade salsa and queso cheese.  (We're experimenting with Mexican cheeses lately, since we're on the salsa fresca kick.  I preferred the cotija cheese, it's got more of a bite to it.  Sort of analogous to mozzarella vs. Parmesan or Romano.)

The Rest of the Day [sorry, no pictures]:

Well, we spent a lot of time hanging out in the fresh air, but we didn't make much money on the garage sale.  We figured about $60.  The Things each got $10 - clearing out some of the things they don't play with anymore was another reason for the garage sale.  Some things didn't sell that we thought would be great - a fun teepee/tent thing, and these little inflatable air beds with built-in sleeping bag.  But all of the free stuff went - the junk toys, leftover stickers, and the like.  So we had still some good items left to donate to our local Senior Coastsiders' thrift shop, Goodwill, and Parca.  Not much to throw away, which made me very happy.

Thing 2 really wanted to shop, so we took a walk (scooter ride for her) around our neighborhood.  (Good distance for her, it's still about 1 mile when skipping all the little courts and things I cover on a run around the neighborhood.)  We found several books, she found a pink Webkinz pony, and we got some baked goods from the girls having a bake sale.  I also found a nice jacket for work.

When I got back, Mr. H&H and I shared a chocolate chip cookie bar, and we put the brownies away for the kids for later.  We were kept quite busy with the cleaning up and packing the leftovers for donation.

The rest of the proceeds went toward an early pizza dinner - and we splurged and went for It's Italia, which is a marvelous local pizza place.  We got the kids a cheese pizza without sauce - they loved it! - finally, one they will both eat!  We got ourselves a Montara Mountain and split a spinach salad.  Sorry, no pictures of this one.  I ate a little more crust than usual, because theirs is totally worthy.  Luckily, Thing 2 was in a bike-riding mood, so we took a little spin around the neighborhood after dinner.

I had a little of the homemade ice cream, mushed up with some Irish cream and cocoa powder.  Not quite as good as I'd hoped, but oh well.

Semi-lazy Sunday

Breakfast:  Cheesy eggs with garden-fresh tomatoes and chives (yum!  Don't know what it is about that egg/cheese/tomato combo, but it's a winner!), 1 pancake, 4 slices of bacon (3 shown), and lots of lovely coffee.

Lunch:  This is Thing 2's lunch, but I took a picture to remind me that I had a little piece of banana (about 1/4?) when she was trying peanut butter & banana, and some cashews.

Thing 2 cracks me up.  I don't know which cultural grandma she's channeling when she does this, but she loves making things in the kitchen, the more ingredients the better, and then not eating them.  Or eating two bites, then trilling "I'm full!" and dancing away.  She made Thing 1's PB&J sandwich, and made some lemonade (we'd thrown out the full-sugar stuff from the day before) but didn't drink any.

No, I did not eat all this watermelon. (As much as I wanted to.)  I cut up a plateful for us all to share.  I had about 2 wedges.

Main course for me was an apple, some cheese, and a spoonful of almond butter.

And some peanuts.

And a little more peanuts.

The Rest of the Day [no photos again]:  I took Thing 2 to a birthday party, which we enjoyed quite a lot.  I had half a cupcake (and smooshed the rest into my folded-up paper plate).  It was sort of sad, because I really wanted some of the cake instead, but oh well.  Mr. H&H and Thing 1 went over the hill to go to a local toy store's train sale and expo, but they didn't find any train stuff that they wanted.

I made dinner while they were on the way home:  hamburgers with broccoli for the kids; cheeseburgers and red Swiss chard from our new neighbors for the grown-ups.  Beer also for said hard-working grown ups.

I really wanted to do my long run, but I was scared to do much with my ankle thing on Friday, and we had a busy, on-our-feet Saturday, so I rested on Sunday.  I'm going to swim on Monday and then try running again on Tuesday.

So all-in-all, a lovely Fall weekend that was way too short.  Hope you all had a good one, too!