I had a really full weekend and now I get to share it all with you! Aren’t you lucky!
On Friday, we had a surprisingly delicious dinner. I had planned on having wings but was feeling fairly blah about that dinner. Then at work they gave me a few pounds of haricots verts (or skinny green beans, if your French is as crappy as mine). Working at a culinary school, this sort of thing happens semi-regularly and I try to take advantage when I can. Well, the magic of dinner happened with that side. It was so good, that I’m including the recipe. And it was all things I threw together from our refrigerator. Bonus!
On Saturday, I made a frittata out of refrigerator scraps. Let me be the first paleo-eating person to say, frittatas just aren’t that good. I’ve been thinking about it and here is why I think that is. Eggs are very delicate and they respond very differently to different levels of heat. Eggs cooked over low heat are soft, loose and fluffy. Eggs cooked over high heat are harder and more tightly held together. For example, if you cook scrambled eggs over low heat, you will end up with light, fluffy scrambled eggs, that can border on pudding consistency. Cook those same eggs over high heat and you end up with dense, heavy scrambled pieces. Now with a frittata, you are cooking the eggs over high heat and then putting it in a hot oven. I find this “hard cooking” to be a little too much for my liking. I prefer the light texture of a quiche filling. Of course quiche is partly delicious because of the cream that is added, but part of the reason it is so good is that it is cooked in a very low oven. So now that I have given you my thoughts on eggs, you can imagine that the frittata was all of so-so. Next time, I’ll be cooking it more like a crustless quiche. And of course, I’ll report back.
After breakfast, I went to work. It was boring and lonely, but at least it didn’t last long. I had the leftover frittata for lunch. After work, I wanted to run so I ran to a nearby trail – the Capital Crescent Trail – and it was awesome. It is a nicely paved trail that crosses very few roads and is only a mile from my office. I will definitely be doing this again the next time I have to work on a Saturday. My only complaint from the entire run is that I kept accidentally getting my songs stuck on repeat. Dummy!
Capital Crescent Trail
Saturday night ended up being as difficult as I imagined it would be but not for the reasons that I thought it would be. I ate a bunch of the leftovers in the fridge including some pulled pork, cherry bbq sauce and some random vegetables. I did this because we were going to a birthday party and I didn’t want to be hungry and feel at all compelled to eat. Well that part worked perfectly but I had another totally (ok, not totally) unexpected problem. The party was at a bar and because I wasn’t drinking and I barely knew most of the people, I turned into a total wallflower! Now the reality is I am anything but shy, but I really hate noisy bars. You can’t talk to anyone! Even people that are right in front of you. So I probably already had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about it all. My normal M.O. in this situation is to have a few drinks and start chatting everyone up (I never said it was a healthy habit :-/). Well, here I was not drinking, grouchy about the noise level and generally just sticking it out because I wanted to help celebrate a good friend’s birthday. So it wasn’t all bad, it just wasn’t my favorite way to spend a Saturday.
Check out this cute couple!
On the upside, I woke up on Sunday feeling fabulous, not at all hungover (my guess: not drinking = no hangover. I’m brilliant!). We went for a really nice hike with both dogs. It was Hudson’s first hike and after he figured out what was going on, I think he had a good time. He spent the first ten minutes walking like this:
Hudson’s first hike
After the hike we went on a fruitless hunt for a dining room table. We want one that will seat 12 with leaves and fold up to a normal size the rest of the year. Shockingly hard to find! After a grocery store trip, we had a fabulous dinner. It was exactly the kind of dinner I crave. Grilled salmon, fresh guac, tomato and pepper salad from the farm stand and some roasted winter squash. Holy cow! It was beautiful (look at all those colors!) and tasted just perfect. I went to bed happy!
This morning I went to my first Crossfit class with the general public and it did not go well. I will save the story for another post because this one is already too long, but just know that I’m feeling a bit discouraged and a lot determined. I ate a hardboiled egg and a banana for breakfast and then wasn’t hungry until 3 o’clock. For lunch, I ate some raw veggies (purple cauliflower, haricots verts and peppers) with mayo spiked with Penzey’s Sunny Paris seasoning. I also had a salad with the last of the pulled pork, some olives and a few tomatoes. The mayo was surprisingly good. I wasn’t sure how I would feel about essentially eating mayo as a dip, but it was pretty darn good! For dinner, we will be having beef stew, if Rob remembered to turn the crockpot on!
Talk about eating the rainbow!
worthyness 