Thursday's are Good Days

It's 1 day closer to Friday and it's farmers market day! I love going to the farmers market and looking at buying all the wonderful fresh food. However my wallet usually takes a beating:(

Breakfast

Cup of steel cut oats from Potbelly's topped with peanut butter. These oats always do a great job of keeping me full well into the afternoon.

Lunch

I decided to remove my ass from the chair I sit in more than 8 hours a day and take a walk to the farmers market. It was wonderful. The weather was nice and I was able to talk to a bunch of the vendors about how they grow their products. Learned a lot and picked up some great food!

As I was walking back to work I discovered an interesting tent in the farmers market, Rock n Roll Noodle Company. This place wasn't selling veggies, fruit or cheese they were selling lunch! Different kinds of noodle dishes and a sandwich. Everything looked great but I opted for the veggie pad thai.

Not just any pad thai. The best pad thai I've had in a really long time. The flavor was wonderful and made my taste buds very happy.

Topped with some Sriracha for a bit of spice.

Happy Hour

Patrick made me a Jeff Lewis martini. What, you don't know who Jeff Lewis is? He's the OCD designer star of Flipping out. And he knows his way around a dirty martini!

2 parts vodka, 1 part water, 1 part olive juice and 3 olives. Yummers!

We shared a slice of cheese purchased from the farmers market.

Perfect happy hour in my book!

Dinner

I wanted something simple for dinner so we ordered from my favorite mexican joint, Flaco's Tacos!

I got a couple Picadillo tacos; ground beef & potatoes, cheese and Cholula Hot Sauce wrapped in a corn tortilla.

Dessert

Vanilla Bean Cupcake:

Take a close look at the frosting. Can you see the vanilla bean specks?

This cupcake was simple and full of vanilla flavor. I need to learn to bake using real vanilla bean.

Question:

Have you ever used real vanilla bean? What did you use it in and how did you do it?

Desert Mouth

Ever have those days were you wake up with (what feels like) a desert in your mouth? That was me Wednesday morning. I think it probably had something to do with the salt that was in the stir fry my husband made the night before.

Usually I go for coffee in the morning but this time around I went for a big bottle of water and some Crystal Light:



Add the CL packet to the water, shake and this is what you get:



My eating today was not very nutritious. I had so much going on at work and for some reason I wasn't really that hungry so I accidentally skipped lunch. Not a good thing when you are planning on working out later in the day.

I knew I needed to have something in my stomach before I worked out so I decided to try a LUNA protein bar:



Chocolate Peanut Butter flavor, how can a person go wrong with chocolate and peanut butter:



The bar was actually pretty tasty. It didn't taste like a candy bar but why would it. The 12 grams of protein did it's job because after eating this bar I wasn't hungry at all. I was actually really satisfied. I'm going to try out a couple more flavors of this bar and of course I will share with everyone what I think.



Wednesday was Cinco de Mayo so dinner was easy. I celebrated the holiday with my favorite go to Mexican restaurant, Flaco's Taco's!

A taco with beef, potato, lettuce and salsa:



I ate about half of this burrito. Filled with beef, potato and cheese:



I just love the flavor of the beef and the potato picks up that flavor and oh my word, it's heaven!



Topped off with hot sauce cause everything is better with hot sauce:



Workout

As I mentioned earlier my plan was to workout and I'm happy to say that I came through on that plan.

I walked for 5 min, ran for 25 min, walked for 5 min and than did some stretching to total 45 minutes of exercise:



And I burned 407 calories:



I think those 407 calories burned will offset a bite of that burrito ;) Just kidding, I think it's fine that I had a burrito as long as I don't have that big burrito everyday.

Moderation is key!

Question:

What is the first thing you grab to drink in the morning? Mine is coffee or water.

Starbucks Valentines Cup!!!

I was so excited this morning when I ordered my latte at Starbucks. My drink came in a Valentines cup. I've gotten the holiday cup before but not the valentines cup. Love it! However, the hands on the heart kind of remind me of E.T.

Lunch

My husband and I decided to go to Ceres for lunch. I was craving their Asian salad. The veggies are always so fresh in this salad.

Snack

Around 4:00 I started getting a little hungry so I pulled out a Chocolate Peppy-mint Glo Bar from my snack stash.

Really good and it had the perfect amount of mint flavor.

Dinner

Today was a lazy day. By the time I got home from work I didn't feel like cooking. So what else is a girl to do but order in. I called up my favorite burrito joint, Flaco's tacos.

The dogs are walked, my stomach is full and I'm relaxing in front of the TV with a glass of water. Soon it will be sleepy time. Life is good!

Hope everyone has a fantastic night!

Food Roundup + Blog Game Plan

I'm back in Chicago and while it is good to be home, I really wish I was still on vacation! I have so much stuff to catch everyone up on but I'm going to start with what I've eaten since being home.

Our first morning home we went to a great breakfast place called Bongo Room. The menu was so inventive and the food was A-mazing!

The restaurant was packed so we waited about 45 minutes to get a table. However, the wait flew by due to the coffee bar located right when you walk in the door to the restaurant.

I took the liberty of ordering a vanilla latte:

So good and I dig how they served it:

Breakfast

Once we were seated I ordered some fresh squeezed OJ:

And a wonderful croissant sandwich. The sandwich consisted of a grilled croissant with melted muenster & crisp bacon with one over easy egg & hash browns:

Then I had my dessert breakfast;)

Red Velvet Hotcakes

Chocolatey cocoa flavored hotcakes topped with warm vanilla creme & toasted crushed walnuts (freakin' amazing):

I should also note that I did not eat everything on these plates;) I just had to try each of them!

Dinner

I had the same thing for dinner on Sunday and lunch on Monday. Tomato juice, shell noodles, dried onion, garlic and pepper. This dinner is something I've had since I was a little girl and it is big time comfort food for me!

Monday's dinner was a repeat order from Flaco's Tacos. A beef and potato burrito:

Okay, so I need a blog post game plan. I've been out of the posting game for about a week and have slacked off on my blogging. So, I'm going to post my usual blog posts everyday but I will also be doing a post of St. Maarten for the next week. So be on the look out for lots of sunny beach photos!

I'm off to start catching up on all the blog reading I've been missing out on!

Blog at ya later!

Better late than never

So, last night was not the greatest of nights for me. I was feeling kind of blah. I don't know what it is but I'm just not into the holiday spirit this year. It is just really sad for me. I spent last night sulking and trying to figure out how to get the Christmas spirit back into my life. I guess we all know it didn't involve blogging ;) So let's play catch up.

Monday Dinner

So last night I had a repeat of one of my favorite Mexican restaurants. We had Flaco's Taco's delivered! I had the beef burrito, I just LOVE how it comes with potato's:

Of course I had a side of jalapeno hot sauce:

After the fantastic burrito I dug into this piece of red velvet cake. Every time I order from this place I have to get a piece of this cake!

Not the most nutritious of dinners but I was a little sad and needed some comfort food and this tasted oh so good!

Not a very healthy day

I woke up so late today, tends to happen when I take NyQuil the night before. I can't wait for this cough to be gone so I can sleep at night.

Once I woke up I didn't have enough time to fix breakfast so I grabbed a left over cookie from last night.

I got to work and made myself a cup of hot tea. I'm really liking the Tazo Awake tea, it helps keep me alert and is nice to drink on a cold morning.

I wasn't hungry for lunch but I did snack on a piece of German chocolate provided to me by a co-worker. It was a really smooth chocolate and tasted great.

Once I got home I was starving. I new this would happen since I didn't have time to eat lunch today. The first thing I did when arriving home was make a salad of lettuce and black olives.

Then I ate a burrito ordered for me by my husband. He got the burritos from one of my favorite Mexican joints, Flaco's Tacos. My ground beef, cheese, sour cream and potato burrito was amazing and totally hit the hungry spot in my stomach!

Tomorrow I will try to be a tad bit more healthy in my food choices. Shouldn't be all that hard ;)