Tag: Tasty Treat

Ithaca is Gorges

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This morning I woke up to find this little guy hanging out in the kitchen.

I actually took this picture yesterday, because he kept coming back.  It was -6F when I woke up and yes the window was open.  My apartment is an oven!

With the sunshine, it felt like a summer day.  Then I checked the weather… Oh dear.  However, that didn’t stop me from having a fabulous morning!

With a cup of coffee and the best green monster I’ve had in a long time, I started my next creation to bribe my class into liking me.

Apparently, I’ve got bananas on the brain.  I made Banana Chip Cookies from 101 Cookbooks. The only changes I made were omitting the walnuts and using brown sugar instead of natural cane sugar.

Think of your favorite chocolate chip cookies… now add banana chips and make them *slightly* healthier.

Okay who am I kidding, they’re pretty fatty 🙂  I got 37 cookies from this recipe (even though the recipe says it yields 24).
Here’s the estimated nutrition info:

Pretty darn good!  The banana chips add a nice crunch that makes them way more exciting than regular chocolate chip cookies.  Plus since it’s a class on Modern Latin America… bananas are very fitting…Do you know what the “Banana Republic” is? And I’m not talking about the store!

I hope my class likes them!

While my cookie dough chilled in the fridge (I actually baked them in the afternoon), I chilled outside with Rhoda.  Remember last time? This time it was colder so I wore an extra long sleeve shirt.  10F when I left and 15F when I got home!  Burr!  We did the same route.  For some reason it felt a lot tougher this time, but just as lovely!

Arctic Tundra?  No, just Upstate NY…

This is my favorite stretch of the run:

Sadly my camera died halfway through the run!  Rhoda‘s camera was there to save the day!

Frozen falls!

Ithaca really is gorgeous!

Great pics, Rhoda!

Now I’m off to read since I’ve slacked off all weekend!  Hope you all have had a great weekend! Have a great night!

The King of Muffins

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I have the baking bug.  I used to bake all the time!  But recently, I’ve cut back for health reasons.  No matter how hard I try, I undoubtedly have to try one of whatever I make.

Today, I was presented with the perfect opportunity.  Some friends in my program are working on a plan to submit for a competition.  Tonight they’re pulling an all nighter and are in desperate need of a pick me up!  What’s better than a delicious baked treat for a chilly day?

Enter my dear friend, Ina Garten…

Barefoot Contessa’s Banana Crunch Muffins

No substitutions.  Made exactly as is.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Warning:  Extreme salivation may occur.

Divine.

Channeling “The Dude”

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Big Lebowski, anyone?

Today was freezing!  I think the daytime high was 14F!  Right now it’s about 7F!

To beat the cold, a bunch of Cornell planner headed to the bowling alley! Cornell actually has its own bowling alley on campus (in the basement of one of the gyms!)

Little known fact about me: I was once in a bowling league!  <– Nerdy! I know!

I’m glad I got out, because today was one of those days were I had to remind myself to smile.  It worked though!  I got myself out the door, unburied my car, picked up a friend and headed to the lanes.

There was pizza

Friends

Confusion

Have you ever been to a place where you have to keep your own bowling score on paper!?!?!

But overall… a ton of fun!

Honestly, today has not been fun.  I have been a bottomless pit all day.

Today was the first day in the past two weeks that I actually felt like I had to stop myself from eating when I wanted to and all I could think about was food.  All day my stomach felt empty no matter how much I ate/drank.  I tried everything… wait ten minutes before eating something to see if you really want it… I did.  Drink water… still wanted food.  Drink hot tea… still wanted food, had about 5 cups of tea today.  By the time I went bowling, I had already eaten 1,500 calories (which I realize isn’t that much but this is the amount that I’ve been eating most day the past two weeks without feeling hungry).  At the bowling alley I had 2 pieces of pizza and about probably 5 cookies and many chips.

The thing is, even after that, I wasn’t full.  I wasn’t hungry, but I wasn’t full.  Do you ever have those days where you just can’t seem to eat enough?

I’m not sure what it is.

I’m trying not to feel guilty because what’s done is done.  One evening is not going to derail my efforts at a healthy lifestyle; however, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that I couldn’t stop after 1 piece of pizza and 1 cookie.  Oh well!  What’s a girl to do?

Tomorrow will be a better day, full of smiles!

Now, I might need to re-watch The Big Lebowski (Yay for Netflix watch instantly!), because I flew through those two discs of Mad Men I have!

Have a great night!

Nice Buns!

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Ideally, I’d have these buns…

Guess who!

But last night, I had these..

.

To curb my insatiable appetite, sweet tooth and desire to bake yesterday, I made Angela‘s Skinny Mini Glo Buns!

As usual, I made changes using the ingredients I had at home:  Real butta instead of margarine or Earth Balance.  I found some frozen lactaid in my freezer (apparently it was too precious to throw out before break) so I used that instead of almond milk since I ran out yesterday (see another reason why I go to the store 74992984 million times per week).  Also, I didn’t have whole wheat pastry flour so I used whole wheat bread flour.  And last but not least I didn’t have nutmeg or ginger so I just used cinnamon and allspice 🙂

O-M-G!

Make these!  You won’t regret it.

They aren’t Cinnabons, but they’re perfect for a sweet craving!

Soooo good!

Nice buns, Angela! 🙂

If you’re interesting in reading something a little thought provoking, my friend Lauren wrote a GREAT post on how we view the world and health.  Head over to her blog Sailing Training Wheels and read it!

Hope you have a fantastic days!  Tomorrow’s Friday which means it’s almost the weekend!  Woo!

Finally Ready For Classes To Start

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I’ve had enough.

I’m getting tired of sitting around and doing nothing.

I’m officially ready for classes to start again.

I know I’ll regret this tomorrow night when I start reading for my first classes but as of now, I’m over it.  I think I’ve been a little anxious all day because I’ve been very snacky, but I think I’ve kept it to an okay level.

One of my many snacks today was this:

What is that?

No, Stonyfield hasn’t started making Pumpkin Flavored Greek Yogurt (although they probably should).   Actually, it’s my version of Caitlin‘s Pumpkin Yogurt (her version uses equal parts yogurt and pumpkin).

Stonyfield sent me some coupons for yogurt samples so they were perfect to give pumpkin yogurt a try. Thanks Stonyfield!

I used a small 5.3oz container of Oikos non-fat greek yogurt mixed with 1/4 cup of canned pumpkin (not easy to come by these days as there as been a pumpkin shortage in upstate NY!) and 1 tablespoon of Agave nectar.  All that goodness for only 160 calories (80 for the yogurt + 20 for the pumpkin + 60 for the agave nectar!  Wonderful sweet treat!

Delish!  Give it a try!

What’s your favorite way to enjoy greek yogurt?

I’ve literally done nothing all day, and I’m starting to get restless so I think I’m going to go to the gym (even though I didn’t plan on exercising today) to get my mind off upcoming classes and basically just get my blood flowing.

Hope you had a great weekend!

Protein Pancakes My Way

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I usually eat the same thing everyday for breakfast: oats with banana and some sort of nut butter.

This morning, I woke up at 6:00am with nothing to do.  I decided to spice up my life.

Not like that…

Rather, I decided to stray from my usual breakfast into something fun and amazing!  So I did the usual blog perusing and remembered Jessica‘s Vegan Strawberry Cream Pancakes that look divine.  Then I remembered I don’t have fresh strawberries and thawing frozen ones would take too long.  So those will be made at another time.

As a kid I hated pancakes because my mom used to make them from Bisquick, which is just disgusting and salty and not delicious.  Then I grew up and tried real pancakes.  I realized how beautiful life could be and how good legit pancakes are.  So pancakes it would be for breakfast!

Then I kept coming across Heather‘s Protein Pancakes on my pancake search.  The dilemma here is that I don’t buy protein powder.  So I moved on to search through old recipes I had made on SparkRecipes and found an old recipe I had added for Cottage Cheese Protein Pancakes, so I figured why not?

I honestly can’t remember where I got this recipe from, maybe somewhere on SparkRecipes?

Now that I’ve taken you through my thought process (haha sorry about that), here’s the recipe I used:

Cottage Cheese Protein Pancakes

1/2 cup 1% cottage cheese
2 egg whites
2 tbsp whole wheat flour
dash of cinnamon

I combined all the ingredients.

Then threw them in the blender.  This is where my Magic Bullet that I left at home would come in handy, since it splattered all over, basically half the ingredients didn’t make it into the pan, but oh well.

I made one mondo beast of a pancake and topped it with some Hungry Jack Lite Syrup (1 tablespoon to be exact). This puppy has about 26g of protein!  Crazy!

I enjoyed this with a tasty Green Monster (kale, spinach, 1 banana, 5 frozen strawberries, ice and water).

The first bite wasn’t that great, but the subsequent bites got better and better.  I think I may have undercooked this a bit or maybe it’s just the nature of the beast.

Did it taste like a pancake?  A little bit, syrup helped.

Was it the texture of a pancake?  No.

Was it tasty?  Sure!

Would you make it again?  Why not!  Easy enough!

My protein packed breakfast was pretty good overall (31g of protein in one meal!  Woah!  That’s half a day’s worth!)

In other news…

This weekend is my last relaxing weekend!  Classes start on Monday 😦 Not excited, but it’ll happen.

Have a great Saturday!

Any exciting weekend plans?

January Recipe Challenge: South America

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I go through travel bug stages.  Last year, I was itching to go to India, then I went.  This year I’m itching to go to China and Peru, I’ve yet to go.  Not entirely sure why I want to go to those places but they seem awesome!  I really would love to do the Inca trail.

So tonight for the January recipe challenge, I made Peruvian Chickpea Stew.  Sorry for all the soups/stews, I’m a huge fan of soup/stew, and when I look for recipes I look for things that I would like.   Peruvian cuisine is such an interesting mix of many different cultures.  I find it really intriguing.

I first tried Peruvian Chickpeas at Super Pollo.  If you live in the Washington DC metropolitan area, please please please go to Super Pollo in Arlington, VA for some wonderful pollo a la brasa (yes I’m promoting meat eating because this stuff is amazing).

Tonight I put my chef planning kit to work!  I decided I needed some company for dinner, so I had a mini dinner party.  I only invited a few people so we could all fit at my tiny table (plus sadly I can’t afford to feed the 20 people I wanted to invite).

Peruvian Chickpea Stew

inspired by Recipezaar’s Peruvian Chickpea Stew

1lb dry garbanzo beans/chickpeas
2 tbsp olive oil
2 large onions or 3 small onions, diced
3 garlic gloves, minced
1 can whole canned tomatoes, roughly chopped
3 tsp coriander powder
3 tsp cumin powder
3 tsp allspice
2 small yellow squashes
8oz (approx) of vegetable broth
salt and pepper to taste

First,  cook your chickpeas until tender, a little under cooked is fine as they will simmer for a while later. You can probably use canned garbanzo beans too, but honestly I don’t think those taste as good.  You’d be amazed at how much better cooked dried beans taste over canned beans.

Then sautee the onions and garlic in the olive oil on pretty high heat until slightly browned and translucent.

Then add the chickpeas, tomatoes, spices, squash, and broth.  Stir and simmer on low heat for 30 minutes.

Serve with quinoa for a high protein very healthy meal!

I really liked this recipe.  It’s very healthy but hearty and tasty!  The spices are an interesting flavor combination.  I definitely recommend this! It wasn’t the same as the ones I had at Super Pollo but still delicious and probably a million times healthier!

To round out my mini dinner party, I made an Arugula and Pear salad using this recipe from Eating Well.  Honestly this salad was ridiculously good.  I tweeked the dressing a bit adding a bit more dijon mustard and a little less olive oil.  I also only used arugula, no other lettuce.  It was delicious!  I highly recommend this salad if you’re looking for a wonderful side dish!

For dessert, I made Fitnessista‘s Almond Butter Chocolate Chip cookies!  They were a hit!  No one knew they were vegan!    I made a few tweeks as well.  Instead of maple syrup, I used agave nectar and omitted the molasses since I didn’t have any and didn’t want to spend all that money for a teaspoon of molasses.

I just realized, actually this whole meal was vegan!  Very tasty and very balanced. Here’s my plate:

Salad side above and chickpea/quinoa side below.

A note about calories:

I decided to not count my calories for this meal.  I enjoyed it and made sure not to over eat too much, I filled half my plate with salad, 1/4 with chickpea stew and the other 1/4 with quinoa.  I also had 2 cookies, no big deal.  I splurged a bit, but I’m okay with that.  By the end of the meal, I wasn’t stuffed I was good and satisfied.  Yes, I probably could have eaten more but I didn’t feel the need to.  Life is about balance.  I want my weight loss to be manageable and sustainable, not painful.  One meal is not going to derail my efforts, I tracked the rest of the day (see my sparkpage) and tomorrow will be a normal day again and all will be well in the world.

I like to live by the 80/20 rule: Eat well 80 percent of the time and indulge 20 percent of the time.  Good rule in my opinion. What do you think?

Anyway, I’m off to watch more Mad Men!  Have a great night!

Napa: Wine, Wine and More Wine

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Yesterday we left about mid-day and headed up to Napa!  It’s only about an hour and a half drive from the lovely fella’s place in Mountain View.  We found a deal on Travel Zoo for a hotel plus wine tastings at 3 vineyards and 3 half bottles of wine!

The first stop was Peju.  This was one of our free wine tastings.  The vineyard and tasting room was very lovely!

They had some interesting trees in the entrance…

We tasted 5 wines: 1 white, 1 red/white blend, 2 Cabs and a Port.  My favorite was the 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon.

This also happened to be the half bottle that they gave us!  So that was convenient.  I liked this place but sadly there was another couple tasting next to us so I felt really rushed.  They flew through it and it felt like we needed to go at their pace.  Oh well.  It was still fun and tasty!

The next stop was: Castello di Amorosa.

It was a lovely location with a great view, not to mention the winery was in the shape of a castle! This wasn’t included in our three free tastings but the lovely fella heard it was good so we went.  I’m glad we did! This was my favorite of the three we went to!

We tried some wonderful wines here too!  I don’t usually like sweet wines but the ones here were particularly delicious!

The final winery we went to Madonna Estate for a free tasting.  It was very small but nice.  We were the only ones in the tasting room.  They didn’t have half bottles so we got a free full sized bottle of Riesling.

The man in the tasting room suggested a restaurant for dinner.  He was Italian so naturally  he suggested an Italian restaurant (Zagat also said it was delicious).  So for dinner we went to Bistro Don Giovanni.

We were wined-out so we stuck to water.  First, we were served some rosemary focaccia.  It was extremely oily, but naturally very delicious!

The lovely fella and I shared a beet and haricot verts salad with avocado, fennel and roquefort vinaigrette.  This was very good.  Light and flavorful!

As an entree, I got the Ricotta and Pesto Ravioli with a lemon cream sauce.  This was OOH SO GOOD!  I can’t even tell you how delicious it was!  I love lemony things but this was literally out of this world!

The lovely fella got an (unphotographed) Rigatoni with lamb meatballs.  He enjoyed his as well!  I definitely recommend Bistro Don Giovanni for anyone going to Napa.  It was delicious and reasonably priced!

We decided to skip dessert there since nothing looked too good.  Instead, we stopped by Whole Foods for a bakery treat!  I got a cupcake (which took me hours to eat since it was so sweet):

The lovely fella got an almond cannoli.  I’m not a huge fan of cannolis but he really enjoyed it…

Warning: Hipster Hating Ranting to Come!

The next day we left and stopped in San Francisco for breakfast/lunch.  We went to Tartine Bakery.  This hipster watering hole was delicious!  I got a 3 Cheese Pressed Sandwich and the lovely fella got a ham croque monsieur.  Mine was simply to die for!  It was also HUGE!  I ate 2/3 of it and thought I was going to explode!

The food was fantastic (I seriously can’t get over how good this place was); however, I didn’t like the cafe itself.  It was ridiculously crowded with hipsters talking about Europe and art.  I didn’t feel like I could really enjoy my meal to the full extent.   I also felt silly pulling out my camera, maybe I would have if I had been sitting outside with a little more arm room.  I literally felt like I was living in the this blog.  I’m not sure why I was so irked by the patrons of this place.  I think it just felt a little pretentious to me.  Strangely enough, the place was kind of dirty too.  You bus your own tables (which isn’t a problem at all) but that means all the tables were really dirty.  The occasional wipe down would have been appreciated.

I would love to go back!  It was seriously amazingly good!  But next time, I’ll get it to go and enjoy my sandwich or pastry elsewhere 🙂

Now we’re back in Mountain View trying to figure out what to do the rest of the day!  Maybe we’ll have some more wine… because obviously we haven’t had enough…  On that note, this blog is supposed to be about healthy eating… don’t worry that will resume soon!  When I’m back at home (aka Ithaca) I rarely eat out plus I have a healthy plan for the next few months, more on that later!

What’s your favorite type of wine?

Green Beans!

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This morning I went to the lovely fella’s apartment gym again.  I did 3 miles in 28:40!  I’m a slow poke so that was kind of fast for me.

Then we headed to Costco, for the purpose of eating samples and frozen yogurt.  After Costco, we headed to Trader Joe’s to get ingredients for dinner tonight.  We’ve been eating out a lot lately so we decided to stay in tonight.  We’re making a recipe from another continent for the January Recipe Challenge!

While at Trader Joe’s, I came across this interesting thing: Green Beans.

Not just any green beans.  These are crunchy and lightly salted.  However, interestingly enough they’re really sweet too!  Who knew green beans were sweet!  They look like green beans too!

The ingredients were green beans, canola oil, tapioca starch and salt.  Not too bad right?  The first one wasn’t that great but the next few or maybe 50 were delicious!  I wonder if they lose all the nutrients that fresh green beans have?  Any thoughts?


Tonight we’re making a new recipe and going to the movies!  Have a great evening!

Food in the City

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Today, the lovely fella and I met my friend Emily in San Francisco (aka The City… I understand that on the East Coast “The City” means NYC but here it means SF).  We met at the Ferry Building because I’ve been wanting to go to the Farmer’s Market there for a long long time.

Upon arriving, we were all starving so we had lunch in the Ferry Building.  We stopped at a sandwich shop called Lulu Petite.

I got a delicious eggplant sandwich.  Ooooh soooo good!  Words can’t even describe how good this was!

Emily almost couldn’t wait!

Then we walked around the Farmer’s Market for a bit, where I bought a persimmon!

I love persimmons.  They’re so expensive in Ithaca ($2 each!  Can you believe that!!?!?!)  Here I got 4 for $2.95.  Still pricey but not as bad as in Ithaca.  Colorful and delicious!

Then we headed to Tcho!  A chocolate factory located on one of the piers!

They had samples!

And I got a shot of chocolate.  Oh my goodness!  This was heaven in my mouth! So rich, so good!  This was the perfect amount!  Emily got a hot chocolate which was also delicious and perfect on this chilly day!

The rest of the afternoon was spent perusing stores throughout the city.  Randomly, we ran into my friend Alex at Anthropologie who was shopping with his girlfriend.  It was so nice to see him! He’s a superstar living in the city now in a sweet apartment and working for Yelp!

Then after many hours of dragging the lovely fella to store after store, we met up with Emily’s fella, Joss, and headed to dinner.  We went to Puerto Alegre a Mexican restaurant in the Mission.  Oh so good as well!  I had one enchilada!  Sadly no pictures as it was really dark in there.

I had a fun food filled day with friends!  I hope your day was fantastic too!

Have a great night!