Friday night I passed out on the couch, full from cookies and pizza and totally unable to even think about getting up to go to bed. I woke up at 4:30 AM all snuggled up with the kittens and moved to my room to get some more zzzs. When I woke a few hours later, I remembered a recipe for zucchini pancakes that I came across in my Ina Garten cookbook while deciding what cookies to bake. I’ve made these before but it’s been a while so I whipped up a batch for breakfast. Unlike regular pancakes, these puppies take a while to cook on the frying pan, so the whole experiment took about an hour from start to finish. They were a fun change though from my usual!
Green! This plate comes in at 250 calories.
After breakfast, I hit the gym for 50 minutes on the elliptical. I was feeling sort of headachy and blah, so I added some coconut water to my bottle for extra electrolytes. I love this stuff!!!
I still wasn’t feeling so hot after the gym, so I came home and scrounged around for Advil before making lunch. How do I not have Advil?! Luckily, Julia’s got the goods. After my scavenger hunt, I made exactly what I was craving — yogurt mess!! Betcha thought I was skipping it today, huh 🙂
I had some roasted veggies on the side. My NEW favorite thing!
And cookies & milk for dessert…
I was SO SNACKY! I haven’t really been that way the last couple of weeks, but I couldn’t stop thinking about food yesterday! I tried to get out of the house and do some errands, but eatin was on my brain. Do you guys ever have days where no matter how much you rationalize to yourself that you aren’t really hungry, you just want to eat and eat?? So I made myself a healthy snack plate with a gala apple, green beans and hummus 🙂
Of course this did nothing to quell my sweet tooth, so I had another cookie! After my snacking, TV watching and apartment cleaning, I got ready for my birthday dinner date with Stephanie. We tried a place neither of us had ever been to called Akasha in Culver City. It was so cute!! According to the restaurant’s site:
At AKASHA we feel that local, organic, and handcrafted ingredients are the key to great tasting cuisine. Our purveyors include small family farms, organic growers, sustainable and fair trade companies, and artisan food makers.
I love how places like this are a dime a dozen in SoCal. Good food definitely isn’t hard to come by! Even though the place had a killer cocktail list, we ordered nice cold glasses of Reisling to enjoy with our meal.
We each had a slice of this nutty, seed-filled bread.
For dinner, I started with a bowl of the black bean soup. It was so smooth and delicious!
I got the red quinoa with orange-soy glazed chicken and veggies for my main dish. I felt so clean and healthy eating this meal! The sauce on the chicken was fantastic.
We were so torn between the desserts; they all sounded amazing!! We ended up going with the waitress’s recommendation, a chocolate peanut torte with choc PB gelatto (and some lemon verbena ice cream for Steph!). This tasted just like a slightly creamier fudge. MMM!
After we finished, the manager needed us to move for some reason (we never found out why, huh Steph??) so he relocated us to the bar and treated us to a round of drinks. I had half of another Reisling. Cheers birthday girl! We ended up staying at the restaurant for a good three hours. We needed major catch-up time and just gabbed the night away 🙂
I got home after midnight and scooted into bed with a book and a stack of chocolate chip cookies. Yes, a stack!!! I’m serious you guys…I couldn’t stop snacking! Besides, is there anything better than cookies & milk in bed? I think NO.
I woke up Sunday morning ready to get back to basics — yogurt mess of course!
After breakfast settled, I hit the gym for 50 minutes of ellipticalling. I tried to sweat out some of that cookie stack LOL. For lunch I made an egg beaters veggie omelet with mushrooms, basil & red onion. I toasted up a Perfect 10 bagel topped with hummus and green beans on the side.
After lunch I ran some errands. I snacked on a cinnapple and some coffee to ward off the munchies!
As always, this did the trick! After another errand, I came back and watched TV/rested on the couch. I felt like such a slug all weekend! For some reason, I just couldn’t seem to shake the tired/hungry feeling. My little moo shu porkie pie took a nap with me. Isn’t she cute??
I finally roused myself to make some dinner, another delicious veggie bake. This big bowl had fresh basil, yellow peppers, red onions, sweet potato cheetahs, carrots, a chile lime chicken burger, eggplant and 1/2 of a portabello, with some ketchup for dipping.
After dinner, the snack attack came back! I had a mint chocolate chip Skinny Cow which quieted my sweet tooth…
…but THEN I settled down to watch the rest of Maneater on Lifetime and had some more cookies and milk!! My sweet tooth was putting all sorts of demands on me this weekend. By the way, anyone else watch this Lifetime special and thing it was such a fun movie?! I didn’t realize until halfway through that it was based on a book I’ve already read (man, that Gigi Levangie Grazer is rocking the made-for-TV thing…Starter Wife was her’s too!). I actually liked the movie more than I liked the book!
Three Things for Saturday
- Made my pancakes with vegetables!
- Ordered a healthy entree at dinner
- Didn’t finish my second glass of wine
Three Things for Sunday
- Made time for an early morning workout
- Cooked my omelet dry & with egg beaters
- Had my bagel with hummus instead of PB (already enough protein in that bagel, ya know??)
Today I have my big Monday morning meeting but after I get through that, the day shouldn’t be too bad. I can’t believe it’s already June! Los Angeles is out of May Gray and now into June Gloom. Forecast calls for clouds all week, BOO! When I first moved out here, I thought it was nice always but yeah, that’s a lie. I can’t wait for the sun to come back out and play!! Hope y’all are kicking off the week with a bang 🙂
Cooking with Kate 