The cats have missed me. Chewy, in particular--although that might just be because he seeks attention like crazy. He likes it when you hold him like a baby. Seriously.
I spent the weekend away from home--hence, the lack of updates. Here's a quick recap of the weekend's eats. It was a bunch of unhealthy and random stuff.
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Friday the 5th (Sean's half-birthday):
First breakfast was a PB& blueberry jam sandwich on Honey 'n Oat bread:
I actually have a photo of my first breakfast--hurrah! 100% of the time I'm eating first breakfast in the car so I don't end up taking a photo of it. Friday was different though--I was jazzed about the weekend and apparently that meant having enough time to snap a pic of my sandwich pre-jamming-it-together. I wish I had not used the flash mode though. Second breakfast a little more than an hour later was organic cinnamon spice instant oatmeal with strawberries, dried pineapple bits and chia seeds. No photo. For some reason the addition of chia seeds is still not enough to satiate me until lunchtime at 2:30. I don't know whether it's actually impossible to eat oatmeal and be full until four hours later but I'm still working on it.
I was starving and just about ready to gnaw my arm off by the time lunch rolled around. Lunch was a three-parter. Part one: whole wheat pita pizzas...
Top: zucchini, mushrooms, tomatoes and feta / Bottom: pear and feta. Yes, these are the leftovers from Thursday.
Part two: salad of romaine lettuce, mini carrots, radish slices, strawberries...
If you think this salad looks eerily similar to the one the day before, you'd be correct. Since Thursday was such a crapshoot, I kept my lunch and ate it on Friday. So along with the salad I had the sweet potato balls as well (although I did manage to eat a couple of them yesterday)...
I was talking on the phone with Sean during my 30-minute lunch so if you were watching me eat my lunch that day, it wouldn't have been pretty. Me + hungry + only 30 minutes to eat = ugly!
The rest of the afternoon was spent waiting for the workday to end so Sean could pick me up and so we could head out to have dinner with some friends. While in the car, on the way to Janice's new apartment, I ate a pear and then while walking to her apartment I ate these:
Yes, all four (shot taken the next day) and then while at her apartment, I ate a banana and had some pineapple juice.
Then we finally headed to the restaurant,
Memphis Smokehouse where I had the
Memphis Smoked Nachos: tortilla chips with green/red peppers, tomato, jalapenos, pulled pork and BBQ sauce. It was okay...probably not worth the $12 it cost but it was the least offending thing on the menu.
Note to self: when you plan on ordering salad at a restaurant, do not eat salad for lunch.
Friday night was more about the company than the food so I'm glad that Sean and I went out instead of staying indoors. I had planned on making Sean dinner for his half-birthday that night but we postponed things to the next day.
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Saturday, the 6th: (Note: It's now past 11 and I'm starting to get sleepy and my throat is hurting so the rest of this might be shorter than Friday's recap)
Breakfast was kind of embarrassing but Sean made key lime pie and this was my first chance to try some, ever:
Sean's dad kind of overdid on the meringue but overwise it was awezome! (I'm leaving in the spelling error.) It was just the right amount of tart. Mmm...I love limes! Of course, I never even knew what key limes looked like so when I saw his second bag of limes sitting on the counter, I had to take a pic:
And here's some cut-up, leftover from his first bag:
I know this photo doesn't give you a really good idea of how small key limes are but they are TINY! I never knew that. After that Sean and I went out for some real food, Thai at a local restaurant where we had a couple offerings from the lunch specials: spicy beef and veggies on rice for me and Belachan fried rice for Sean. For about $8 you get soup, a veggie spring roll, a "main" plus a drink (tea/pop). The main portions were huge (despite my eyes thinking otherwise) so we packed the leftovers to go. Sorry, no photos as I completely forgot. The restaurant serves really great tea though--Stassen jasmine tea or something like that. I must find it.
Once back at Sean's, I decided to stream the first episode of Dexter from the fourth season for him to watch even though I know he hates watching TV shows like this; I was just too excited to have him wait to watch it on DVD. Who knows how long that'll take!? While re-watching the episode, I ate the rest of my lunch (hey, it was two hours later!), this orange:
and some of this crack, err...kettlecorn:
They might as well advertise that stuff as crack though. I refilled my soup bowl three times and eventually had to get Sean to hide the bag from me--even though I managed to reach the top of the fridge twice in order to get more! That particular brand of kettlecorn (I'll take a pic of the bag next time) draws me in like crazy!
While Sean walked his dog (Heidi, a German Sheppard), I began to prepare dinner. First up was Martha's cucumber mint soup. I kind of fudged on the recipe ingredients when Sean and I were at the grocery store and instead of going with the usual recipe (bookmarked on my laptop), I used
Senor Flippy Flip* to Google one while at the grocery store. So while we used
this recipe, I really had wanted to use
this one. It's not too different except that the addition of garlic (even just two whole cloves) was mega strong! Anyhoo, the soup looked pretty and Sean really liked it:
Next on the menu was Chicken Kiev but since I had no clue what chicken Kiev was and therefore had never made it before, I enlisted Sean's help and he arrived back with Heidi, just in time. So we loosely based our recipe on this recipe from
AllRecipes.com. The first difference is that instead of frying our chicken, we baked it at 375F for 25 minutes. I also improvised on the herbs used since Sean and I picked up fresh herbs from the grocery store instead of dried. For the pat of butter inside the chicken, I used approximately the following for two large-ish chicken breasts (yay free-range!)
- 2 Tbsp. margarine
- 1.5 tsps minced garlic/jalapeno stuff in a jar
- 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
- a bunch of fresh dill, finely chopped
And I think that's it. The darn thing didn't firm up in the freezer because of my use of fresh ingredients but I smeared it on the chicken and rolled everything up anyway. Then we dredged it in flour (with salt, pepper), egg and then breadcrumbs. Here it is pre-oven:
Notice our two chicken fingers at the very top. Basically Sean dredged the chicken fingers in the same flour, salt and pepper/egg/breadcrumb mixture as the chicken Kiev. 18 minutes later and those fingers were cooked to perfection:
They were super tasty and tender! I love free-range chicken. I got the bigger chicken finger because Sean was having the bigger portion of chicken Kiev but I wasn't sad at all.
About 17 minutes after that, our chicken Kiev was done too and then our roasted broccoli shortly after that...
For those of you interested, we roasted the broccoli at 425F for about 20 minutes though it could have used a few minutes less. Dinner was absolutely fabulous. It was flavourful without being too rich and heavy and the roasted broccoli was super addictive.
The rest of Saturday evening was spent trying to locate Glee at Blockbuster (with no luck) so we settled on Revolutionary Road, which was good but now I think I'll actually read the book. And is it just me or does Leonardio DiCaprio not age at all? And I really hate Kate Winslet with fake blonde hair. Ew. And why does Kathy Bates kind of look like my grandmother even though she's not Asian? Bizarre! A couple bowls of kettlecorn were probably consumed but I'll spare you another porn shot of it.
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Sunday the 7th (aka SuperBowl Sunday!)
Breakfast was a mish-mash of wha
t was around Sean's house. When I tell you that his fridge has no food, I ain't kidding. Check out the evidence:
First row: milk, yogurt
Second row: margarine, yogurt
Third row: suspect chicken breast, bread, olives, rice pudding, Gatorade (for something involving a virtual colonoscopy?)
Fourth row: Key Lime pie, mini carrots, sweet potato balls (last two things are my contribution)
Drawer: eggs, random meat stuff (I think it was sausages?)
Fifth: alcohol
Last: more olives(?!?!), peppers in a bag (seriously, who is crazy enough to buy pre-packaged peppers? They are ridiculously expensive!), romaine hearts in a bag (see note for peppers)
For those of you who think I'm being overly harsh, bite your tongue! Sean complains about the lack of food in his fridge too. It all stems from the fact that his mother hates to cook and since she's the one doing the cooking most of the time (unless it involves the BBQ), the food in the fridge is almost always lacking. The photo you see above actually makes Sean's fridge look pretty full. A couple weeks back all I could see was milk, yogurt, margarine, bread and olives.
Anyway, breakfast was a three-parter: small bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios with skim milk, a mini vanilla cupcake with too much frosting and finally a bowl of leftover cucumber mint soup with a slice of toasted whole wheat bread:
Sean and I sat around the kitchen table for a while. He ate a honey tangerine as such and I just had to take a pic:
After a quick trip to the grocery store for a certain kind of bacon I just
HAD to try, Sean whipped me up this real breakfast/lunch feast:
Look at all those condiments! There's ketchup, two different kinds of jam, maple syrup, salt, pepper and my big mug of tea. But onto the main event...the food! Here's a close-up:
A slice of whole wheat toast with butter, homemade home fries, two eggs sunnyside up and three slices of that British-style bacon. It really was worth the quick trip to the grocery store. The bacon didn't even require the maple syrup but I used some anyway. And I must have been really hungry or Sean must be a really good cook because I ate EVERYTHING! Normally when Sean and I eat at diners, I can never manage to finish the second egg or all the toast or some part of the meal. This was just delicious though.
Later in the afternoon Sean and I both fell asleep and the only reason Sean woke up is because Heidi woke him up to be fed. After that Sean woke me up and we headed to Jessie's house for a small Super Bowl get-together. Here was the spread, which was way too much food for only four people!
Note that some of it had already been taken before I remember to take a pic. Anyway, from clockwise starting at the top-ish: cheese puffs (homemade by Jessie); Garden Fresh Gourmet salsa and blue corn chips; mini carrots; all-natural malt vinegar and salt chips; cranberry goat cheese log and crackers; and finally, beef sausage slices, cheese and crackers. Here was first plate of food:
I went back for more cheese puffs, carrot sticks, salsa and chips. Everyone also got to snack on these delicious looking chicken wings:
which is why I went back for more of the other stuff. And then later on during the game, I think sometime after the halftime show with The Who, we all had a couple slices of pizza (pepperoni, red peppers and feta cheese). There was also some kettlecorn consumed and three cans of pop. Eeps, what an unhealthy day overall! The carrots and whole wheat bread were just about the only healthy thing about Sunday. Oh well! I ate a whole bunch of food and came home and weighed myself and guess what, between Friday and Morning morning, I hadn't gained or lost a pound. Good times, metabolism!
And oh yeah, the Saints won but I don't really give a big whoop about football so I don't care.
* iPhone name--for now.
Olympic organic green tea and vanilla yogurt, 6 water crackers with 1 slice of prosciutto, half a whole wheat English muffin with PB and coconut butter and 3 strawberries, plus a small glass of OJ, unpictured. Breakfast overload! But it was all rather small-portioned stuff and totally worth it!
Tastebuds satisfied? Check. Stomach satisfied for four hours? Double-check!
A salad of mixed greens, beans (my dad says they're kidney beans but I don't think they are because they're really light in colour), strawberries and 1/4 salmon filet). I made the mistake of packing this all together instead of packing the beans and salmon separately. I knew I was going to heat the salmon and beans in the microwave before consuming at lunch time so of course, the strawberries and greens were a little mushy upon consumption. It was okay...still delicious, tastebuds rocked!
And perhaps 2/3 of the following brownies:
Despite hating walnuts in their natural form, I adore walnuts in brownies. Yum!
Maybe times two--oops! Quite some time after that I had a small bowl of broccoli and mushrooms and then a pickle. It was too much food. Belly is currently not happy with me--double oops!
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