Friday Eats

 

I love impromptu dinner outings with a friend. Especially after rough days at work.

 

 

There’s a British pub called the Dominion Square Tavern near work that I had been wanting to try for a while.

 

 

Friday nights call for fried bits of food (thick cut fries and fried clams), chased down with a Pimm’s cocktail, diet be damned.

 

 

And finished off with some sticky toffee pudding accompanied by a scoop of coffee ice cream. Yep, fried food and sugar makes everything ever.

New Toys

 

Amazon.ca is my crack. I am pretty sure that I own more cookbooks/nutrition books than my local library. I’ve been waiting for these two books for a few weeks since they’ve been backordered on Amazon for a while. Crazy Sexy Diet is a diet/nutrition book based on a vegan diet. While I’ve tried the vegetarian thing and it just does not work for me, I think I could always use more veggies in my diet.

 

 

More than anything I love the author’s vibe. She is just so happy and positive. Sometimes eating well and exercising can seem like such a chore, but she presents it in such a fun way that you can’t help but feel good about making changes in your lifestyle. I’m about halfway through the book and I really like it.

 

 

Pretty Delicious is a cookbook by Candice Kumai and one of the few cookbooks that I have bought sight unseen. Usually before buying a cookbook I will go down to the bookstore, flip through it and then order it online. I stumbled on to the author’s blog and I really loved the look and feel and ordered the book. Sometimes healthy cookbooks are *boring*, everything is either steamed or raw, but this author really believes in eating good food. She has a bunch of recipes and videos on her website and is also on face book and posts all the time and responds to comments, which I think is pretty cool, that an author wants to interact with their readers.

 

I try to buy fitness and health magazines as a way to remain motivated, and as a reward to myself that doesn’t involve food.

 

 

 

And in random buys, in an effort to appear more ladylike (anyone who knows me in real life knows that I am completely indifferent to fashion), I am downsizing from my gigantic backpack to a more demure messenger bag. I have no idea why it has a slight purple cast here but it’s black. One of these days I’ll succeed in looking fully like an adult, although I still refuse to carry a purse and haven’t worn high heels in years. Am I the only one that hates them?

Waffles Make Everything Better

I had to go get blood drawn yesterday so I was not a happy camper. I have anorexic little veins that nurses always have trouble finding and afterwards my arms resemble a pin cushion from all their attempts. Happily, the person who drew the blood was pretty good and she got it on the first try.

I had to be fasting since midnight for the test and my appointment was at 10 am, so I was ravenous when I got home. I nuked some Belgian waffles that I had made and ate them with blueberries, a bit of mango, some Greek yogurt and maple syrup. We have Belgian waffles for breakfast every weekend. I make a big batch and then we just thaw them. I like mine soft so I just throw them in the microwave for 25 seconds on each side and they are perfect. Homemade waffles make the weekend a little more special.

I also made some coffee to go along with breakfast.

I did a Turbo Fire DVD last night. They all go into this cute little book, which creates much less clutter than having a bunch of DVD cases.

So far this has been my favourite DVD. The music is great, no cheesy 80s instrumental workout music here, and you will get a great workout. The moves are easily modified for beginners and I didn’t have much trouble keeping up with the choreography.

On other news, I’ve been working on a homemade version of Clif Bars. I’m getting close and I’ll post the recipe when I’ve perfected them.

Question: I’ve always struggled to find exercise that I find fun. What is the exercise you enjoy the most?

Is It Spring Yet?

 

The other day I got my issue of Martha Stewart Living. It happened to be the spring gardening issue, full of delightful tips about preparing your soil and mulching your plants. Alas, this is what I get to see everyday as I walk to the train. Nice and desolate. And this was taken in the morning, it’s even more depressing at night. Didn’t the groundhog mention something about an early spring? Can I sue him for false advertising?

 

 

I walk past a flower shop in the train station everyday. I took this picture on Valentine’s day. I’m sure I must have looked weird but the crowd of desperate men willing to pay 50 bucks and up for a bouquet made me laugh. I didn’t even manage to capture the whole line which snaked down the hallway. I poked my head in the day after and it looked as though a mob had ransacked it. There were a few sad looking daisies lurking about but that was it.

 

Happy Wednesday! The week is finally half over!

Random Weekend Meals and Tax Time Hurts

Yay! It’s finally the weekend! This week has been really long but sometimes they all feel long. I did a pretty lousy job of pre-planning my meals last week, so I had zero leftovers for Friday dinner. Happily, they had sushi on special at the super market, so I snatched some up for dinner which I ate along with an un-pictured salad.

This morning we had errands to run so I left pizza dough rising in my trusty bread maker and when we came back all I had to do was prep the toppings and throw the pizza in the oven.

I had decided to make a sausage and mixed mushroom pizza with red onions, so I picked up one of each type of mushroom that the supermarket had. Dear oyster mushrooms, why must you be so delicious but cost almost 5 bucks a package? *sniff*

Fancy sausages. This was my first time buying this flavour and it’s definitively a repeat.

Before. (I pre-cooked the toppings in a pan, hence why they look so dark)

After. I think I must be one of the few people who does not actually like mozzarella that much, so I just use cheddar. I find that most mozzarella tastes like tasteless rubber except for the fresh kind and I prefer the expensive stuff in a nice Caprese salad rather than on a pizza.

One more shot. Not that photogenic but wow was it good.

Ah, now for the painful part. Once a year we drag ourselves to the bank and chuck money into our RRSPs and extra money into the mortgage. We do this before tax season since you get an income tax deduction for the amount that you put in. For all of your non-Canadians, RRSPs are the government savings plan that you can contribute to, to help you save for retirement. On TV you always see smiling happy people making investments. In my experience waving bye bye to a chunk of your money and not seeing it again for another 35 years is not the most pleasant thing ever. What cracks me up is that they make an investor profile for you and one of the questions is, “How long do you need your retirement savings to last you once you have retired?”, basically how long do you think you will live. It’s rather morbid, but sort of funny. I told the girl to put in 100 for my age since I come from a family that lives long. The software would only let her put in until 90 years old. Apparently my bank has a slightly more somber outlook on my life expectancy than I do.

Kitchen Toys: The Bread Maker Edition

 

One of the best parts of owning a house is having more storage space for kitchen toys. Some chicks ask for jewellery for special occasions, I ask for small appliances. I have wanted a bread maker for a long time and it was originally on my Christmas list for last year, but when my husband couldn’t find any bread that he could eat at the supermarket (due to his food allergies), we ended up getting one ahead of time.

I’ve made bread from scratch before, but I hate the mess that it creates when the flour inevitably flies all over the place. With the bread maker you basically dump the ingredients into the pan and 3 hours and 45 minutes later you end up with a lovely warm loaf of fresh bread.

 

You will notice that this is white bread. While I have mastered the method for fluffy white bread, whole wheat loafs come out with roughly the same size and density of small projectiles missiles. I’m still trying to find the right proportions. I hate to sound like an infomercial, but this bread maker is life changing, especially since it has a dough cycle and you can use it for things like pizza dough or cinnamon bun dough. Not that I’ve made cinnamon buns with it….yet.

 

I did quite a bit of research before we bought it and I picked the model that we did because I knew that it would be getting heavy use and I wanted something that would last. We went  with a Zojirushi model since it had great ratings and makes bigger loafs that most other brands. I’m not sure if having a bread maker actually saves money, but what it produces tastes so much better than what you can buy in the store and it makes your house smell absolutely amazing.

Why one should always ask questions before ordering

 
When you’re young you can guzzle soda all day long, eat french fries for dinner, chase them down with cookies for dessert and feel perfectly fine afterwards. At the ripe old age of 29 I’m starting to realise that I can’t do that anymore and it bites. Never mind the calories, just the food hangover when you wake up the next morning feeling bloated and gross is enough to make me lay off fried food for a while.
This Friday I went out with my friend Roxy and her boyfriend for dinner at an El Salvadorean restaurant. We actually were supposed to go to eat Mexican but they are still closed from the holidays. They’re probably sunning themselves on a beach in Veracruz and drinking something fruity out of a hollowed out coconut. Anyways, I had been to the El Salvadorean restaurant before and ordered pupusas (stuffed tortillas), which are delicious but oh so unfortunately named. This time I saw that they had taquitos on the menu which I love but never make at home since I hate the mess of deep frying. They came with yucca and I ordered guacamole on the side.


Growing up, my mom had only ever steamed yucca, so I assumed that the restaurant would serve it the same way and that the guacamole would be a small portion on the side. Alas, the yucca was fried and the guacamole came with hand-cut deep fried tortilla chips. So that makes three portions of fried food when I was counting on having one.


On top of that I had order a small pitcher (two cups worth) of horchata. I ended up leaving a quarter of the food that I had ordered but walking home I knew I had overdone it. I had way too much sugar and fried food. While I loathe spartan restaurant menus that don’t describe the dishes properly I should have asked and not assumed that the yucca would be steamed and that the guacamole would come sans tortilla chips. So many extra calories that I eat, and I’m guessing that I’m not the only one, could be avoided if I just paid a little extra attention when ordering or cooking. Oh well, lesson learned for next time! I am definitely going to try to pay more attention in the future to what I order in restaurants.

Small Changes

One of my biggest problems when it comes to planning my meals is running out of food when I am work. I work in a section of downtown where there is pretty much nothing healthy for at least a block in every direction and only a convenience store in the building. In order to avoid the siren call of the chocolate bars in the vending machine I made a big tupperware of trail mix  last night and stashed it in my desk. I had a big bag of dried fruit which I cut into small pieces with scissors (easier than with a knife since they’re sticky) and then mixed them with soynuts (the husband is allergic to nuts, so no nuts in the house) and chocolate chips (because I can’t help myself). Sorry about the picture, it was taken with my iPod.



While I am working on eating better I am having a really hard time psyching myself up to start doing exercise. I look upon those who like to exercise as being slightly mad. I say that in the nicest way possible because for me it ranks down there with scrubbing my bathtub with a toothbrush. And I have a big bathtub. In an effort to make it more fun I asked for a bunch of Turbo Fire DVDs for Christmas. In case you don’t what they are they are the sequel to the Turbo Jam series, which is basically a kickboxing program. I don’t want to join a gym for various reasons and it is hard to walk outside without falling on my face so I’ve opted for working out at home.  I’m very busy over the next few days but I am planning to start working out this weekend. Until then I’m trying to think energetic thoughts.