A Day of My Eats

Hola!  How’s everyone doing?  I’m back to work this week after a marvellous 2 week vacation and I must admit that getting back into the work groove has been tough!  It’s kinda nice to have a routine back, though.  ;)  The kids are in (day) camp this week and next which they’re enjoying immensely.  I am, too because my house looks the same when I come home as it does when I leave, there’s been no whining about being bored and they’re so tired that getting them to bed at a decent hour is no longer a challenge.  Noah is doing hockey camp and soccer camp; Sarah rock climbing (she LOVES this) and Girls Inc which covers everything from dance, yoga, swimming, basketball, manicures, cup cake decorating, etc.  Fun stuff!
So in light of my test results I thought I’d do a post to show what foods I’ve eaten in the last 24hrs as a means to reduce gluten from my diet.  (I’ve decided, for now, that because gliadin/gluten tested the highest I’d focus on foods containing them first to see how I feel).  Quinoa has always made a regular appearance on my dinner plate and this has not changed.  Last night I made a quick salad with quinoa, cherry tomatoes, edamame, goat milk feta and Mmmm sauce.  We also grilled Thai chicken sausages (organic & hormone free) which we purchased at the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto last Thursday.  Unpictured was a piece of dark chocolate almond bark and one Newman’s Own cinnamon raisin hermit (not gluten free).  Breakfast this morning was 2 slices of Glutino corn bread with fibre…. ….with some whipped cream cheese (so easy to spread) and strawberry jam. **Side Note: why are the slices of gluten free bread so damn small???**  Mid morning I enjoyed one of my favourite bars… Lunch was a big bowl of the quinoa salad that was leftover.  I added more Mmmm sauce and some chickpeas to bulk it up:
I also finished off this lonely BBQ’d hotdog! Hotdogs are one of those food items that I’ve always lurved!  ;)Mid afternoon I noshed on some very ripe pineapple chunks. The fam had pasta for dinner while I warmed up a leftover jalapeno burger (also form the St. Lawrence Market) and paired it with some brown rice and yellow beets.  The rice is doused in chipotle Tobasco sauce). For dessert I finished off the last bit of heaven from this pint:
And consumed WAY too many of these dark chocolate kisses: And there you have it!    Now I’m off to help Sarah pack for a camping trip she’s going on tomorrow and then I need to get lunches ready and watch the tail end of SYTYCD.  What have you been up to today?
Bye for now!!

Friends In The Gym

Hi, folks! Today has been a good day. The sun has been out even though they called for rain and the temp has cooled some so the fam are happy campers.

I mentioned yesterday that my Uncle gave us a bunch of food due to him finding out recently that he has a gluten intolerance. A few boxes of cereal were among the stash and I tried a bowl of one this morning:

This isn’t something I would’ve bought myself but I’m glad to have tried it because I really it! I topped it off with USAB and sliced local strawberries from the market.

Mid morning I ate my very last Mojo bar:

Sad times. I will miss you, Mojo!!

I had a really great time at the gym today! I brought my laptop to do the 30 Day Shred and convinced 2 of my co workers who just started going to the gym to give it a go with me. These ladies are awesome to have joined me because they’re both just getting started at a healthy lifestyle and I know it was tough for them. We did level one and were all 3 sweaty messes by the end! While they went to change I hopped on the stair master and did about 3 minutes.

• Time: 35 minutes
• Avg Hr: 152
• Max Hr: 181
• Calories Torched: 293

Lunch was a bright salad with Boston lettuce, tomatoes, fresh peas, golden beets, chicken and sweet onion salad dressing:

And later on I ate some sweet cherries:

My hubby had to work late again today. Actually, he’s still not home. Boo! I went ahead with dinner as planned and grilled some feta and spinach turkey sausages. The kids ate theirs with pasta from last night and I cleaned out some steamed veggies from the fridge. Some feta cubes rounded everything out.

Dessert was a chocolate chunk shortbread vegan cookie from the market:

See DS in the background? We enjoyed dinner on the deck and the kids beat me back out there with their desserts! LOL Once I cleaned everything from dinner we took this sugar pie for an hour long walk!

I love this dog like nobody’s business!!! We haven’t been back at the casa for long and I just convinced the kids that it’s shower time. Seriously, those 2 NEVER want to get in (separately, of course) and then I can’t drag them out. Go Figure! I’m just sipping on a mix of brewed coffee and Boathouse vanilla chai while I type,

I’m thinking that some chilling out is in order for the rest of the evening. Before I get to that, though, I have to go get some lettuce from the garden and clean it for lunch tomorrow. Love that I can do that! Before you go, please check out my post from last night on food separation. I’d love to hear your thoughts!! Can’t wait to put my feet up!

Bye for now!!

Food Separation - A Conversation Starter

Hi, everybody! We had a wicked t-storm here early yesterday afternoon that knocked the power out for almost 8hrs! I have a gas stove so I was able to light a burner to cook some dinner, but otherwise, we were “roughing” it. LOL

After making some dorset cereal with blueberries and raspberries for breakfast yesterday…

I looked out my front door and saw this little fella having some breakfast of his own!

Cute little whipper snapper! We spent an hour and a half at a blazing hot soccer field with DS before we had to rush home, clean him up and bring him to a b-day party. Fun times! Seeing as the party was over the lunch hour on the other side of town, my hubby, DD and I decided to treat ourselves to lunch out. We ended up at Crabby Joe’s, which was a first for me. After browsing the menu which was full of your typical heavy-on the-cheese-pasta dishes and big-as-your-head burgers, I settled for a turkey pesto “melt” with a side salad;

Meh, it was okay. I would say it was closer to a glorified grilled cheese myself and was a bit on the salty side. I certainly didn’t hate it, though; I did enjoy the red peppers and onions that were on it and it was a decent size for lunch:

No sooner did we get home and I snapped this picture of my almost eaten vegan ginger cookie…

…that it started to storm. DS ended up going home with the b-day boy so the 3 of us parked our butts in the garage to watch the show. This would be when we lost power. Let me tell you; nothing brings the neighbourhood together like a power outage! Everyone was outside wandering around trying to figure out who had power so they could watch the FIFA finals. HA!

Eventually we went to get DS from his friends house and ended up hanging out there for over an hour. They live in the country and the parents have a HUGE garden, chickens and bunnies. I was drooling over her produce! I decided on chicken Caesar salads for dinner using 3 heads of lettuce from the garden and some precooked, sliced chicken breast. The fam had traditional dressing, mine had Renee’s Caesar parm on it and no croutons:

I crashed after watching Criminal Minds and a new show called “The Glades”. I woke up to a dreary sky on my day off. Bummer. I figured hot oats were in order!

• 1 cup water
• 1/3 cup Quaker oats
• cinnamon
• blueberries
• boathouse vanilla chai

I got the kids dropped off at Italian school and made my way to Pilates. We did a lot of work on the stability ball which was a fun and different change. Bet I feel it tomorrow! When I got home I vacuumed the house. That is the one chore that I loathe above all. What chore do you just hate doing? Before I knew it, it was time to get the kids and drive up to the soccer club to get DS officially enrolled in the All Star soccer program. **Read: hand over my VISA**

Lunch was simple, fast and delish! I scrambled one farm fresh egg with some scallions and a LC cheese wedge and served it with a side of cranberry pumpkin seed toast.

This is the bread I used;

My Uncle very recently found out that he has a gluten intolerance and gave us everything he can no longer eat. This bread was part of that loot which also included scads of pasta, oats, muffin mix and cereal. Shell fish is another no-no for him so we scored a bag of shrimp, too. I feel for the man….he’s swimming in unknown waters right now. But he’s doing his research which I think makes him feel better!

DS had a friend spend the afternoon so I was basically stuck making sure they didn’t wreck the place. Sheesh! Boys sure do have a lot of energy! The fam had pasta for dinner and I made myself a wonderful veggie dish featuring quinoa, golden beets, tomatoes, fresh peas, feta and a drizzle of garlic infused olive oil,

Freaking amazing! A pleasure to all the senses, for sure. The colour alone made it so appetizing, but the flavour was phenomenal, too.

I wanted to touch a bit on an article I read in a magazine today that was about “food separation”. The jist of it is when couples eat differently from one another and how that can affect a relationship. Say, one wants to eat healthy, the other wants you to join in on burgers and fries all the time. The author states that people bond over food rituals and that it is a sacred time together. Not sharing what we eat is another “nail in the coffin of intimacy”. It goes on to interview different couples ranging from a woman who started eating differently from her spouse for weight loss reasons to another women who went vegetarian and now refuses to cook meat for her husband (he now orders out regularly) to a marriage that ended because the wife was heavy when they got married and the husband resented her eating differently and losing weight. I can’t find the actual article online, but it was from the August edition of Chatelaine magazine, if you’re interested. This caught my attention because I eat very differently from my hubby and I can honestly say that it rarely causes us any stress. Maybe because I do the majority of the cooking and usually make something different for myself, therefore I’m not “putting him out”? Comments fly back and forth occasionally with me saying that he eats too much processed food and him saying that I don’t eat “real” food…AKA meat and potatoes. I guess I’m surprised that anyone would care enough about what their spouse ate to make it a deal breaker. The issue of sabotaging was also mentioned and I guess I could see that if one partner was intent on losing weight and the other consistently filled the house with trigger foods, tension would build. Hmmm… I’d love to hear your thoughts and start a conversation per se in the comment section on this topic. Please chime in!

Bye for now!!

All Together

Happy Saturday! Hope you’ve all been having a good weekend so far. I know I have been! I wanted to stop in to say hey and post my eats before I head back outside to enjoy the night.

Yesterday was a cereal kind of morning:

I went with a bowl of Nature’s Path optimum ginger cranberry with blueberries on top.

Work was busy, but there weren’t many people in the office. Vacations have definitely started! I tried another new (to me) bar before going to the gym:

This was just as tasty as the Caribbean Ginger one I ate the other day! Not surprisingly, my legs and shoulders were sore from the 30 Day Shred I had done the day before. I really wasn’t up to what I usually do in the gym but I knew that moving would help so I walked for 30 minutes on the treadmill. I didn’t bother with my HRM…..the point was just to loosen up.

When I packed my lunch I kept in mind that I would be learning a new “job” from a co worker in the afternoon so I took a few things that I could spread out. First I ate 2 golden beets that I had steamed the night before:

They look like peaches!! I love beets! It doesn’t matter what colour they are, I find them sweet like sugar. Over the course of the afternoon I ate 3 rice cakes with LC cheese wedges:

And some almonds:

My hubby worked late again last night so I got the kids some dinner and then made myself a bit of a “pilaf”. I cooked a 1/4 cup of couscous and then added dried cranberries, dried apricots, garlic salt, feta, green onion and a leftover falafel. It turned out awesome!

After dinner I went to Costco to stock up on some necessities like detergent, dish washer tabs and cat littler. I also bought a big bag of frozen blueberries and loads of cereal!

It was also time to replenish my cinnamon.

I hadn’t been sleeping well all week and after a great night with the windows open last night, I think it was due to the air conditioner. Have I ever mentioned that I despise air conditioning? I figure I freeze my ass of 8 months of the year, I don’t need to during the summer. I never use it in my vehicle and I stay out of malls in the summer, too. But I live in a house of 4 and can’t just be thinking of myself so I deal. I was happy that the temps cooled off enough for us to shut the damn thing off! Do you like air conditioning or could you live without it? I can’t be the only one that hates it!!

I wasn’t starving when I got up but needed to eat because there was some running around to do. i ended up toasting 2 slices of cinnamon apple bread and spreading one with almond butter and one with honey pecan spread;

Then it was off to Walmart for some b-day presents and the market! We loaded the basket with goodies while there.

Here’s what was in there besides the eggs:

Love, love love! When we got home I showered and had a quick lunch before heading over to my parents place to see my niece and nephew. I haven’t seen them since April!! They live 2 hours away which is a real bummer. And it was my nephew’s 5th b-day last week so we celebrated that, too. Back to lunch; again, I wasn’t very hungry so I made a smoothie. I used some of my hubby’s protein powder which I have never, ever tried before. It was OK. Into the MB went a little less than 1 scoop of the powder, 1 cup frozen cherries, dark chocolate cocoa and 1 cup almond milk:

This was creamy, smooth and I loved it! It also kept me full for almost 4hrs….BONUS! I took lots of photos of the kids, but here are a few:

DD & my niece who will be 4 in November.

DS & my nephew. Mom had cake and ice cream for G’s b-day:

Instead of cake my sis and I killed a container of watermelon:

Party hats!!

We spent the afternoon at a festival where the kids enjoyed many a barf inducing ride:

Seriously, though…they loved every minute of it! Back at my parents I noshed on a mini Lara bar:

Not long after we all broke into a jar of marinated seafood…

Yes, I ate that!!! :) We all stayed for dinner, my Uncle included and my Dad commented that it’s been a long time since the whole fam was together. He’s right and that made the meal more pleasurable! My bro & Dad went and picked up Portuguese take out from a caterer by their house and we feasted!

There was roasted chicken, potatoes, chickpea and octopus salad and grilled veggies. Delish! Dessert was some sort of custard tart.

It was good, too! I’m back home now and nursing a full belly. Tomorrow is soccer practice in the morning and then DS is off to a b-day party. Later in the day we’ll go back to the festival to watch the yearly greasy pole contest. That’s always a bucket of laughs!! Enjoy the rest of the weekend, bloggers!!

Bye for now!!