The last bites of December – part 1

Well that came and went quickly now didn’t it?!  Cliche, party of one three million.  Many of our activities were on pause during the weeks surrounding the holiday (swimming, music, etc.) which apparently meant the blog was on pause while I filled our rainy and freezing days with indoor fun.  Tangent: I feel a little jipped with this weather.  We moved to Nor Cal for fake seasons…not this 30 degree BS.  I’ll take my winter with a side of fleece (NOT down) thankyouverymuch.  Frozen fingers are not the sacrifice I was thinking I’d be forced to make for a mere 20 minutes at the park.  Meanwhile the other coast is sweating it out in the 70s.  Not cool.  And….rant over.

After all that, would you believe if I said I was back on the breakfast smoothie wagon?  I thought it would make me cold but it doesn’t.  After day one I immediately remembered why I got in the rut in the first place way back when.  It makes me feel SO GREAT.  I have energy for days and my gut feels like nothing happened (meaning normal) and it holds me over until I can find a second to eat lunch.  The above is the new Vega sport chocolate flavor which I like the most out of all the (new) sport flavors I’ve tried.  The mocha was too coffee-y flavored to pair with fruit (which is what I put in my smoothies 100% of the time) but would be great as a frozen mocha frappe kind of drink.  The vanilla was good, but I didn’t notice a difference between it and the vega one in terms of flavor.  The protein stats are significantly more though (30 g vs 20 g) so that’s probably great for my body since I work out first thing in the morning.

I don’t remember what I put in these because they were from weeks ago at this point, but the common denominator is always frozen banana, flax meal, and almond milk.  Usually greens are in there too.  It hardly matters though because the Vega sport protein powder is SO GOOD that it makes it taste like a delicious creamy shake.

PS granola on top, too.

Meanwhile, the kiddos have been all about pancakes.

V wants to do everything on her own in terms of feeding, and since we now cleared eggs, it makes it pretty easy for me to make her “pancakes”.  Sweet potato or butternut squash or pumpkin puree plus eggs and flax meal.  Done and done.

Pancakes for P too.  I made a few random shapes and asked him to tell me what he thought they were…he told me one was a nutcracker.  I don’t think Tchaikovsky will ever leave this house now that it’s been introduced.  Sigh.

One morning I was feeding V some broccoli and P asked if he could have some too, so naturally I said yes…and then I had the smelliest kids all morning.  :O

Crafty attempts.

It probably goes without saying but not all recipes are worth sharing and lots of stuff gets deleted from my camera roll.  I never know what to do about the “in between” things I make in terms of sharing them as “recipes” on the blog.  Do I bother sharing the detailed steps for dishes that aren’t OMGawesomeHASHTAGexplitiveYADDAYADDA but aren’t terrible?  I don’t know.  Tell me in the comments.

For now, here’s one of the things I made a while ago that I couldn’t be bothered to blog about properly.  Solid, just not a pinterest chart topper, ya know?

I thought this spaghetti squash casserole would be epic in deliciousness, but it was just kinda okay.

I mixed 5 eggs with the cooked flesh of a whole spaghetti squash and then topped it in vegan cheese.

Baked it until it looked done.

With a little broil time at the end (because who doesn’t love golden browned tops?).

Then I just scooped and enjoyed…

It ended up being more of a blank canvas than I originally planned, but worked that way just fine.  I added marinara one day and most of the other days I ate it topped with heaps of nooch.  [I made it on the weekend to have for my lunches all week]

Kyle was out of town one night so I had leftovers for dinner.

Gena’s kale and brussels slaw salad.  Mmmmmm…

Plus some bark for dessert.

I accidentally ate the whole thing in one serving.  Oops!

Kyle shared some of this banana bread too because I didn’t make him a big strata this week.  P and I usually dominate the quick breads because Kyle isn’t a sweets for breakfast person, but he had this a few days in a row and was into it.  Win!

I had it too when we ran out of frozen bananas for smoothies.

That’s a pacman lunch. He’s a mayo lover.  He asked for pumpkin and sunflower seeds afterwards too.  He finishes most meals off with seeds.

Meatless someday.

TJs brand tempeh has wheat so I have to go to WF for tempeh when we want it, which is an annoying extra trip that I rarely do.  Hence why tempeh isn’t often on the menu.  Kyle likes it a lot though, so I went for it this time.  Also, we were only in town for part of the week so I did all our shopping at WF and basically tried to use the scraps in the fridge instead of doing a full on menu.  Fridge scrapings if you will (hi Lou!).

Turns out, P isn’t a fan of tempeh.  Ah well, can’t win em all.  He ate what was served to him but it took some hefty encouragement. The kale, however, was gone in seconds.

His with parm, mine with nooch.  Duh.

Oh look, another pacman lunch.

Another dinner of Kyle’s requesting…

I shared my chicken with P.

I got that mustard on Thrive.

First I rubbed them in olive oil, salt and pepper, and then I added a juiced and zested lemon (from the garden) and mustard.  Then I topped it in parsley and surrounded it in peas and white sweet potatoes.

Post roast below.

And then dessert.

I doubt this was all I had.  It looks like a small serving and there’s no ginger so yeah.  Likely the first of two plates.  🙂

Not coffee.

A fast lunch.

It’s called the “finish what’s in the fridge” scramble.  The veggies were total odds and ends, and then I just added ground turkey from the freezer and later broth and finally rice noodles at the very very end before serving.

These noodles are from TJs in the fridge section where the tofu and hummus is – they cook super fast so they make my life easy when I need things done quickly.  You literally submerge them in hot water and they are done.  But like most GF noodles they get gummy if you overcook them, so you basically have to cook them right when it’s go time.  They can’t handle sitting around while you do a 30 minute bedtime routine or you’ll have a mushy mess.  I lean red this the hard way, but now they are my favorite because of that very trait that did them in initially.

We have been to my parents’ house for the past three weekends and we are going back for the fourth in a row in a few days, which is why these meals have been kinda random and hard to blog about.  Since my weekends have been packed with holiday things, I haven’t gotten around to uploading and posting my food photos.  Moreover, the grocery shopping has been so sporadic.  I feel like I’ve mostly just been patching together meals as best I can in between the weekends of gluttony.  It’s not a terrible way to go about feeding a family, but it’s definitely more disorganized than I’m used to.  We went without bananas for a mere two days last week and it felt like the end of days.  I was forced on a smoothie hiatus and V was definitely bummed whenever another meal arrived on her tray that didn’t involve her favorite fruit.

I digress.

He doesn’t mind leftovers one bit.  But who would as long as there’s avo involved???

Would you even believe Kyle had the audacity to suggest I go in with him and attempt a no dessert streak for 5 days?  I respectfully declined that.  Misery may love company but a hippie without chocolate at the end of the day is just not happening.

I ordered that Taza peppermint from Thrive and should have ordered 10 more at the time because I fear they are a seasonal flavor that will be gone in four seconds.  It was way good.

The orange hibiscus flavor tastes high end and has very subtle notes in the chocolate, which makes it perfect for pairing with wine and savoring very slowly.  It’s the kind of chocolate you don’t want to binge on.  The coffee and cacao was good too, but I got nervous that eating it at night may keep me up.  I would probably buy them all again but the peppermint was the best.

And since this post is getting far too long for any human to read in one sitting I am going to slap a “part 1” in the title and continue in another post.