Jogging My Memory

What does an engaged 23 year old whose fiancé lives in Michigan but is spending the weekend in Chicago with his boys do on the Friday night of her Spring Break from law school?

SweeTarts in the shapes of Chicks, Ducks, and Bunnies and Twilight: New Moon. Yea, I know I live an exciting life…sigh.

In case you were wondering I am Team Edward all the way.

I have had some fantastic eats that I wanted to share with you.

I purchased some long grain brown rice from the bulk bin at Whole Foods a week ago (the whole bulk bin section was 20% off – I also bought ww pastry flour, dried chickpeas, dried cranberries, and shredded coconut – I would have gotten more but I was already over my grocery budget for the month…oops). Anyways, I wanted to use some of it so I decided to throw together some random ingredients from my freezer and refrigerator for a brown rice stir fry/fried rice of sorts.

Cooking the rice was a bit of a fiasco…I think I used too much water (about 2 1/4 cups for 1 cup of rice). So I had to drain off some water and let it cook for longer. Once the rice was finally ready I threw 3/4 of a cup of the brown rice in a pan with the last of a bag of Trader Joe’s Vegetable Melange (defrosted), 3 oz of frozen shrimp (also defrosted). Once everything was heated up I added a tablespoon each of ketchup and peanut sauce, and then mixed it all together and heated it a little more.

Not too shabby for something I threw together with random ingredients

I woke up late this morning, since I wasn’t hungry I just lazed around a little while, then a few phone calls occurred and before I knew it it was 10am and I hadn’t had breakfast. No More Trouble Zones was on the menu and I don’t do eating before workouts so I made the exec. decision to do my workout and then have a good lunch rather than stressing about squeezing breakfast in. I don’t usually skip breakfast, I think it’s extremely important to eat regularly, but I wanted to get my workout in while I had the motivation so I did today – don’t  hate me for it.

Lunch ended up being awesome! Remember those dried chickpeas from the bulk section at WFs? Well on Wednesday I blended up a mean batch of hummus using the Cooking Light recipe for Traditional Hummus. I’ve been slowly nomming my way through it since then.

I topped a Noah’s Whole Wheat Bagel with 3 tablespoons hummus, green and red peppers, and shredded carrots, with an orange on the side.

Love me some bagel sandwich!

This afternoon I decided to get my cook-on and created pasta salad for dinner – pasta salad is so much better when it sits and combines flavors.

I combined 1/2 a serving of pasta (1 oz dry), 3 oz shrimp, 3 canned artichoke hearts with a little bit of the juice, diced red and green peppers, and diced carrots, with dried basil, dehydrated onion flakes, sea salt, red pepper flakes, and freshly ground pepper.

I ate it as pictured above with some carrot sticks and another 2 Tbs. of hummus – I <3 hummus.

I have another serving of the pasta and veggies in the fridge, next time I won’t add any red pepper flakes and may leave out the dehydrated onion, and I’ll probably use some cooked garbanzo beans since I used up the last of the bag of shrimp on my dinner. I may also throw on some parmesan cheese. I love cold pasta salads during the warm months, so you can expect to see them frequently.

I’ve been going strong on my workouts these past 2 weeks as well doing the No More Trouble Zones DVD 3 times each week and running or doing the elliptical on the other days, as well as doing a short ab and thigh workout everyday. I’ve also increased my runs to over 4 miles (4.5 last Saturday and 4.6 on Thursday). It feels so good to be running further again. I’m not up to pace with how fast I was running before, but I know I’ll get there with more training and more speedwork.

On an important note, Tracy the winner of the $50 Safeway Gift Card never contacted me so I picked a new winner using Random.org

True Random Number Generator

Result:17

Congrats Comment 17: Elise! Email me your info and I’ll send it on to MyBlogSpark!

Well I’m off to drool over Edward – hope you have a fun Friday night!