A Year in Posting!

As we come to the end of the year, I celebrated it in style with a killer date with my favorite baby food blogger, Ben.  The trains came with us and we ate some yummy sushi and then did donuts in the parking lot.

 

I decided it was a good time to recap my year in blogging and health!  I have included my favorite/most memorable posts from each month.  Hope you can walk down memory lane with me!

January
First Post
Wedding Venue Food Tasting

February

I Left my Old Job

Sent out Save the Dates for our Wedding

March

Attempted and Failed My First Blogger ChallengeI Celebrated a Quarter Century of Life!

April

Cake Tasting!

May
Food Should Taste Good Review and a New Philosphy on Food

My MIL Got Married!

June
Hubby's Birthday!

July - August
I went crazy, psycho, bridezilla and lost my cookies planning my wedding!  I was never a bridezilla, but I went on a little blogging hiatus.

September

We DID it!
Honeymoon

October

I Tried to Bring MMA to Food Blogging -Fail
Our Favorite Holiday and 4-Year Anniversary!

November

 New Food Obsessions

December

My First Guest Post

It's been a wonderful year and I am so grateful that I was able to share it with my bloggie friends.  I wish all of you luck, happiness, and lots of happy memories in the upcoming New Year!  I'll be back soon with some of the eats I made for New Year and the goals I decided on!

The Real Housewife of CoCo County

I just finished day 2 of my staycation.  I have come to the realization that I would make an awesome housewife. 
Rule 1: Eat Breakfast
I started out each morning with breakfast and lattes left for me by my working hubby:
Breakfast 1(Monday): Microwave protein pancake:

• 1/2 cup oats, 1/4 cup cottage cheese, scoop of vanilla protein powder, scoop of flax, applesauce
• Microwave for 2-3 minutes until gooey and melty
• Top with frozen blueberries (if you feel like eating ice cream), vanilla yogurt, and cocoa powder

This breakfast kept me full for over 4 hours and fueled me through a 4 mile walk with my friend!
Breakfast 2 (Tuesday): AB&P Sandwich

• Persimmons and almond butter topped on Ezekiel's sesame bread

This breakfast also kept me super full and happy.  I also really liked the bread, but I like all grainy bread!
The secret to the fullness factor may also be my homemade double shot lattes:

Rule 2: Exercise

I also worked out with 35 minutes of bike and 20 minutes of treadmill intervals as well as walking and cardio shopping!

Rule 3: Shop in Your Sweats
Another indicator of being a good housewife is shopping and only wearing sweats all day long.  I bought myself two books that I have been dying to read in said outfit:

• Super Freakonomics
• The Omnivore's Dilemma

And today I bought this dress.  I found this on sale for $5.  Score!:

There was also an impulse purchase of 2 different kinds of hummus.  A girl can't control herself around eggplant and chunky olive hummus!

Rule 4: Cook Dinner
In order to be a good housewife, one has to make dinner.  I was heavily procrastinating my closet organization project and I made A LOT of dinner:

• Roasted zucchini (salt, pepper, cumin, chili powder)
• Sweet potato rounds
• Roasted carrots

In addition to this, I also made sauteed mushrooms and spinach with garlic and carried over the same smoky cumin theme:

I also made wild salmon marinated in agave/maple syrup with salt and pepper.  It was good!

This was the new syrup blend I bought.  Guess where?  I have no idea what else to do with this, but I can always drink it.

Rule 5: Get Really Excited to See Your Husband

We ate dinner and just finished watching a movie and now I am ignoring hubby while I blog.  Before I ignored him, I tortured him with an impromptu photo session.

It's a good thing I had nothing to do with the artistic direction for our wedding pictures!

I'm out for the night!  My next post will be a recap of the year and possibly some un-resolutions for next year.

Breaking the Code

I hope everyone is having as fun of a time away from work/school/life this weekend as I am.  It has been one of the nicest and most relaxing weekends!
We started with enticing my parents to come over for breakfast in exchange for my dad's genius house fixing skillz.  Quite honestly, I don't know what he did but he fixed stuff and made it look pretty.  My mom brought us some of the food we ate.  I don't see their benefit in coming over, but they must like us!

Breakfast had a few standbys and some new stuff.
Grapes and strawberries:

Cheez:

Egg sandwiches:

Date, cheese, homemade chocolate dipped strawberries (made this morning at 10, by your truly), and nut plate:

Lemon squares (so good and so GONE in one day) for breakfast dessert:

Thanks to my mama and Trader Joe's for bringing some super delicious treats!  Thanks to hubby for caffeinating me to human form!  I had an egg sandwich and lots of bites of fruit and almonds.

Today I had no formal workout, but we did take a walk for who-knows-how-long to Best Buy and back home.  When I have extra time I feel bad if I don't get a workout, but I wanted to spend more time with hubby since he has to go back to work tomorrow and I get to play all day instead.
I just know that when we left it was lunch time and we came home in time for linner!   I had another egg sandwich, some veggies, and some leftover dates.  I rationalize that dried fruit needs to be consumed before it goes bad.  To each his own.
This evening I have been chewing gum and watching movies!

I used to be a gum connoiseur until I realized it gave me stomach aches, but I had to get this new flavor.  It's basically amazing.  I chomped on this and sipped tea while watching two documentaries.  One was called Breaking the Mayan Code, all about hieroglyphics.  I love that junk!  We also watched a documentary based on Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire.  The book was one of my favorites and the documentary was really interesting to watch.  I would definitely recommend it since it brings up a lot of great points about the plants around us and it gets 2 enthusiastic thumbs up from hubby.

Do you have any dorky tendencies?  I love learning about ancient cultures and food science!  I also get really excited when I get food for presents!

My sister in law got me this chili mango and delicious chocolate. So excited to try both!

Breakfast Times Two

It's been another fabulous couple of days here in my little world.  Did I mention I love vacation?  I really, really do!  Yesterday we went on another fun bike ride, exploring a new trail, and stopping at my parents' house for some workout fuel of sugar and energy drinks (my guilty pleasure).  The ride lasted a couple of hours and we did lots of hilly trails so we were both feeling it in our legs by the time we got home.  I had to check that my tire wasn't flat at the end since I was going so slow.
Since I did my duty in eating Chinese food for X-mas Eve, the only thing left to do was to go to the movies!  I had the customary ice cream cone movie dinner:

I figured this was not any worse than my usual photography skills.  Mint chip is my poison.  Hello lova!

Today was fabulously uneventful and perfect as well.  We went to see my parents again and my dad helped the hubby bring over a spare fridge for our garage because really, who can live with only one fridge?  I say it will hold all the organic milk we need for our basketball team of future Hubby Jr's and Apple Jr's.  Hubby says it's for beer.  We'll negotiate, but no time soon!

We also went to the gym and I had my own cardio party.  I warmed up with 10 minutes on the elliptical and then ran for 31 minutes.  It was fun for the most part, but mostly because my good friends 50, Lady Gaga, Kesha, Pit Bull, and other helped me out by providing the soundtrack.  There is a good reason that I have never done a workout playlist on the blog.  I would lose all my readers since my musical taste is awesomely bad!  I also lifted tris since I decided to start lifting again.  That part was just aight.  Luckily I had my new present there to keep my hydrated:

I had to please the inner 5-year-old in me and begged my hubby for this bottle.  It totally made my day!

Since this is a food blog, I'll share what I had today- twice.  I can get a little boring when it comes to food and I tend to repeat meals, but never twice in one day.  Today, I had protein pancakes and don't know what possessed me to have them again.  I am not sure where the original recipe comes from.  Maybe Katheats.com?  I know there have been several variations, and here is mine from pancake round 2 (dinner):

Ingredients:
-1/2 cup oats
-1/4 cup cottage cheese
-1 scoop ground flax
-1/4 cup applesauce
-1 scoop vanilla protein powder (I used cyto slim)
-sprinkle of baking powder
-olive oil spray for the skillet
-Toppings: cocoa powder, vanilla yogurt, almond butter- YOU decide!

Directions:
Mix everything together, let stand for a few minutes, and throw it on the skillet for a couple of minutes per side
I added egg whites to the first one but decided to forgo them on the second one since I added cottage cheese this time.
I added a little of this for my topping:

And a scoop of my interim almond butter:

I paid an arm and a leg for this at the grocery store and miss my old boring standby.  This has cane sugar and tasted sickeningly sweet.  It doesn't mean I won't devour it, but I like my almond butter with almonds and nothing else in it.
Here is the final product:

It's more of a pancake blob, but it tasted better than it looked!  I think I might be hooked, for weekends at least!
See ya'll soon!   
Thank you for stopping by and for reading!  I love learning from all of you!

Calories Don't Count on Birthdays

Hey Kids!  I hope you are all enjoying your day, no matter what you are doing!  So far I have accomplished breakfast, a push-up competition, and watching a lot of TV!  Yesterday was much more exciting, but we have lots planned for today too!
Workouts
Yesterday consisted of a very drawn out workout.  I had a big breakfast and could not digest it at all until after 1:00 PM.  I went cardio shopping to warm up since one of the gyms we go to is in the mall!

I got this top:

I also got a blue top and a white Jackie O. inspired jacket.  After my warm up, I ran .7 of a mile on the treadmill at the gym.  When I got home I set out for a run outside and enjoyed the weather while running a little under 2 miles.  This was big since the last few times I ran outside I injured myself in one way or another.  I think running on the grass helped this time.  I also came home and boxed on our punching bag to Lady Gaga's Bad Romance and did a bunch of lunges and stretching.

Baking & Celebrating

Since we were going to have dinner and I had more of an audience than my hubby I decided to make some desserts.

• Brown rice crispies treats with dark chocolate M&M's drizzled with chocolate
• Dark chocolate covered cranberry pecan clusters
• White chocolate covered almonds
• Espresso brownies

It was all healthy because brown rice and dark chocolate are good for you.  Also, calories don't count on birthdays and holidays.  We had lots to celebrate, including my big bro's birthday.

Since we didn't have enough dessert, we also enjoyed these desserts brought by my sister in law from TJ's.

It was a par-tay since my parents just came back from their tropical vacation!  My dad brought some trailmix from their all inclusive vacay.  He is a food blogger in training!

My nephew spent most of the evening getting down with the new toy he got from my parents:

It was the coolest toy I have ever seen, and bilingual, just like him! 
That's all I've got for you.  It's a beautiful day and I think a bike ride and a possible trip to the movie theater are on the schedule!  I love not having anything planned!

Little Miss Perfect

Since I last imposed by great ramblings on you, the rest of the day was simply perfection!  I had a yogurt with homemade granola for lunch:

I am sloooooowly finishing these yogurts.  I have to say that the overall texture is off and since I'm more of a greek yogurt girl. I'm doing all I can to get rid of these, maybe some baking will be involved!

After work I left for the gym and played on the cardio machines while I waited for hubby to pick me up.  I had no workout in mind since I thought that time would be limited, but since traffic was bad, I got a loooong cardio session!  Here are the results of my workout:
-32 minute treadmill run/jog and intervals for about 2.8 miles
-10 minutes on the stairmill
-20 minutes on the bike


After the gym we came home and my husband decided to date me last night!  We went to eat turkey burgers (with lots of Cholula and salsa for me) and then went to see Avatar in 3D.  The movie was sooooo dope!   One of the best parts of the movie was getting these ridiculously large ice cream cones.  I should have taken a picture of the cone that was seriously the size of my head (HUGE)!  It was a good thing I worked extra hard at the gym last night!

This morning I was caught in my very glamorous morning routine:

Sitting on the floor with my eyes glazed over drinking my latte with my almond butter jar and my demolished oatmeal bowl in front of me.  I obviously haven't done anything but wash my face and apparently have no shame. 
I have good reason because my world has just been turned upside down!  Have you seen the pageant show Little Miss Perfect?  I think I just walking into some kind of a marathon and I can't pull myself away from it!  It's like a bad car accident that I can't turn away from.  How can someone dress their child up like a country music star and call it a day?  I'm also glad that my parents had nothing to do with this.  If they did, I would probably look something like this:

I had some potential, right?
I'm off to gym it up- hope I can digest before things get ugly!

Double Fisting

I hope you have all been winding down and getting ready to celebrate the holidays with your families.  That's what it's all supposed to be about (and sparkly presents), right? 
For all the Seinfeld fans, Happy Festivus! 

(Photo Source)
Who is celebrating this year? 

Thanks for the lovely comments on the Bed and Breakfast we stayed in- we forget how beautiful it is until we go visit!

In typical OHA (see how I have made myself into a cool acronym now) happenings, I have been having random dinners. This one actually happened because I was trying to make turkey burgers on the skillet.  When I cut one open, it was still raw and as much as I love a little food poisoning, I abandoned the idea and made it more of a ground turkey stirfry.  This had parsley, goat cheese, dill, salt and pepper, and frozen bell peppers:

It doesn't look that great, but better than a night in the hospital if you ask me!  I also added some carrots and new olives purchased from Trader Joe's.
The main course was this:

You can safely double that for good measure.  Dark chocolate is good for the heart.

The title above refers to my drink situation this morning- no alcohol was involved since it's too early for that.  I may have mentioned this before, but this greets me every morning on my way into my building at work:

That's right, I work with a Starbucks in my building- a gift directly to me from the coffee gods.  I made a pact with myself that I would not buy coffee here and it worked for the first 9 months I was here.  Since our work kitchen has been broken, that went down the drain this week.  This morning I got an iced coffee and a water, since we have no water source either:

Oh green straws and caffeine- you make me so happy!
I'll be back with some fun holiday posting and workouts- I've got some gym time and bike rides on the schedule along with sleeping in and quality time to fit in!

Have a lovely day!

Breaks and Notes

Eats and What I've Been Up To
My breaks seem to be longer and longer between posts.  It's not personal, it's business.  Some of this business included spending the weekend here:

This is actually the backyard view at hubby's mom's and stepdad's house.  Not too shabby, eh?  We had an awesome time and pretended like we were at a bed and breakfast!
We also got our holiday presents and I got the knives I've been wanting:

Thanks guys!  I'm so excited to use these and finally be able to chop and cut through the stuff I cook!

So you may wonder what else I've been up to...
I won this at our holiday party:

Vino is good!  Free vino is even better!  I'm also getting in those fibrous veggies and hummus as seen in my dinner snack plate:

And of course saving room for dates and almond butter.  Imagine a bucket of each for dessert.


Moving It!

Since we are heading into that wonderful time we like to call New Year's Resolution Extravaganza, I have made a committment to end the year on a strong note!  I'm going to keep going to the gym and utilize my time off from school to get in some fun workouts and to kick things up a knotch to finish the year with a bang!  I have recommitted to a strength routine to work out my guns and to strengthen my legs to help with my painful knees.  All good things, right?  I would love to work towards some goals that I haven't quite decided on, but I have made a promise to maintain my health and I know that whole, natural foods and moving my bootay will help me accomplish them.  I have noticed that a lot of people at the gym I go to may have a more physical slant on their goals.  I thought today was a great day for an Operation Beautiful note.  If you haven't checked out the website, please do.  I think Caitlin is doing amazing things for young women.

If you ignore the goofy look of concentration and confusion, I really enjoyed doing this!  The note says 'You are enough' and when I checked back in, the note was still there!  I look forward to bringing more of these with me in the near future.
I also busted out a fun run- 3.5 miles running and another 1.5 miles speed walking for a total of 62 minutes, followed by back and bis.  I'm still excited when I can easily run this distance.  Every time I run, I think about the little girl I was in 6th grade who could barely run a mile and how awesome she would think I was now!
Hope you are all enjoying the wonderful holidays and keeping warm!