What I Ate Wednesday

Hello friends! The week that started slowly in bed with a cough & cold is ramping up and racing to the finish line with hosting 3 middle school kids from abroad for a band festival this weekend.  And more kids= more food, am I right??  I’ll have 6 kids in my house for 5 days… and be cooking up a storm!  I love everything about having lots of kiddos around my table.

I pretty much always have some version of oatmeal for breakfast these days, but lucky me, I have lots of versions: carrot cake oats, chocolate zucchini oats,  pumpkin oats, & today’s version, pineapple zucchini oats with sunbutter.  I added a bit of vanilla protein powder for body & taste.  I also had this yummy blueberry beet smoothie (yes, a deviation from my usual green smoothie!)

After a killer leg workout, I was starving.  This is probably my toughest workout of the week and takes me an hour & a half to complete… with no messing around!  I can barely vault back over my fence into my backyard when I’m finished.  So I rewarded myself with this loaded chocolate smoothie bowl.  It has silken tofu, cocoa powder, frozen banana, frozen sweet potato, chocolate protein powder, & almond milk.  On top is a homemade protein bar (more on that later), cacao nibs, & walnuts.  This whole thing packs about 500 calories & was really satisfying.

I wasn’t too hungry for lunch, but one of my goals at my next 2-week “check-in” with my coach is to be able to check the “YES” box where it says, “Did you meet ALL your nutritional goals, hit ALL your macro and micro-nutrient targets, and drink ALL your water?”  So far, I have not once been able to honestly check the “yes” box and have had to ‘fess up where I went off track. This time will be different, I promise you.

So for lunch I had my usual salad, and loaded it with protein from chicken, tofu (the spicy tofu from yesterday’s post) and nutritional yeast, and dressed it with citrus tahini dressing (also from yesterday’s post.)  Alongside I had this hearty artisan rye toast from my favourite baker at the Saturday farmer’s market- Wolfgang is Austrian and he knows his bread!  Stop by & see him if you visit the Alabang market.

To finish off, I ate one of mine & Tommy’s homemade protein bars.  We made these the other day based on a recipe he found online… he was a bit disappointed because they taste so much like protein powder… I think he was expecting something different!  But I love them, especially with the chocolate coating.

I must be craving chocolate because my afternoon snack was more of it in the form of these chocolate chickpea pancakes.  This is a take-off of my sweet potato pancakes but using chickpea flour as the base, and only a little mashed sweet potato.  The other ingredients are chocolate protein powder, cocoa powder, & egg whites.  I realised after cooking them that I should use some sweetener next time!  But they were still good with homemade peanut butter & mango.

These filled me up so much that I wasn’t too hungry thinking about dinner, but the troops have to eat!  I made my zucchini white bean pesto burgers with roasted potatoes.  And suddenly, as I started eating, I found my appetite.  Go figure.

I pretty much always finish off with something sweet, and tonight it was a piece of freezer fudge.  So did I kill my chocolate craving today… or just feed it?!  Guess I won’t know till tomorrow.  Happy Wednesday, friends!