Just Another Meatless Monday

Meatless Monday is a worldwide movement to decrease meat consumption in order to improve personal health and the health of the planet. I’ve heard of Meatless Monday before but it seems like I never remember it … on Monday. Halfway through the day I realized I hadn’t eaten any meat today, and that it was Monday so I decided to finish the day out meatless. Hopefully this will become a regular thing in my house!

I skipped breakfast this morning (very unusual for me but I completely overindulged on pizza and beer last night) and headed to the gym instead for a cleansing workout. I did 15 minutes on the elliptical while I waited for a treadmill to become available then I ran an awesome 4 miles.

Lunch was a Mock Tuna Salad sandwich.

I’ve been eating these sandwiches alot lately. They are delicious! I don’t actually like tuna salad at all, I’m more a chicken salad kind of girl but that’s the name of the recipe. Basically everything you love about chicken salad made with chickpeas instead of chicken or tuna.

Now that I think about it, I ate a lot of chickpeas today. Dinner also involved chickpeas. This is a combination I would probably never think of on my own, but I’m so glad someone did …

Quinoa, onion, chickpeas, fire roasted diced tomatoes, kalamata olives and pesto.

I had to make myself stop eating bites straight out of the pot while exclaiming, “damn that’s good” so that I would have enough to stuff  these beautiful peppers with.

While the peppers cooked I did 20 minutes of Sun Salutations from my new Yoga DVD.

I don’t have the patience or attention span for long yoga sessions, but I’m hoping that atleast short ones will help me with flexibility and stretch out some of the odd aches and pains I get from running.

The finished product …

  

Stuffed pepper, honey glazed carrots and sautéed green beans.

Now I’m off for my trashy Monday indulgence, The Bachelorette.

Things that Make Me Happy

Today I was thinking about some of the simple things in life that make me happy and decided to make a list and blog it. I’m not talking about the obvious things like friends, family, health, etc. I’m talking the little pleasures that make life just a little more interesting.

In no particular order:

1. My cookbooks.

2. This set up …

3. The inside of my fridge after grocery shopping.

4. My new cellphone cover. 

5. Myfitnesspal.com and the app.

6. Allrecipes Dinner Spinner app.

7. My new Vera Bradley work bag.

8. My new animal print DG sunglasses.

Sometimes its the little things in life 🙂

What little things make you happy?

Saturday Night Entertainment

I’ve been looking for some craft and cooking ideas today on a website a friend at work introduced me to. Its called Pinterest. You “pin” ideas that you like and categorize them for future use.

I came across a picture tonight that cracked me up and I had to stop everything else I was doing and make this immediately.

Its probably completely useless, but you might could add some spaghetti sauce and pass it off to a kid as spaghetti and meatballs.

I plan on making some much more useless thing from Pinterest very soon including a Baby Food Jar Spice Rack.

In more interesting news, I ran a crazy 12.25 miles this morning. And by crazy I mean crazy hard, crazy humid, crazy hot! Probably one of the top 3 hardest runs of my life.

That is all. Carry on.

Clean Eating – Baked Manicotti Bundles

Wow, it sure has been a while. Let me explain: I realized that I was burning the candle at both ends so to speak. Attempting to work 12 hours a day, take care of my son, my house, my husband and trying to blog and run on a regular basis was leaving me exhausted and burnt out. I knew something had to go, so I chose to cut back on my blogging time and only blog when the mood struck. So that is what I will be doing from now on. I hope everyone will check in every once in a while.

I’ve been trying to do more “clean eating” lately. To me clean eating means cooking from scratch as much as possible, avoiding processed foods, artificial ingredients, sweeteners and eating close to the source.

This is a recipe I’ve been wanting to make for quite a while:

Baked Manicotti Bundles from the March 2011 edition of Clean Eating Magazine. (Click the link for the full recipe)

The mixture consists of: tilapia, cream cheese, mozzarella, green onions, carrots and basil. (I substituted basil for the dill in the original recipe).

I also found these beautiful rainbow carrots at EarthFare today.

I served my tilapia bundles with honey glazed roasted rainbow carrots and sautéed green beans with gremolata.  

This morning I ran a fabulous 10 miler with my friend Marsha. We have been owning our Saturday morning runs lately.

We completed our hilly 10-mile course in 1 hour and 33 minutes.

Good things have been happening in the exercise department lately. Last week I had my highest running mileage week ever at 31 miles! Now if I could just make myself do some strength training. Why do I dread it so?!

Now I leave you with some pics from my camera of some other clean eats that I’ve made lately.

Left top: Quinoa bowl with blackeyed peas and steamed veggies.
Right top: Black bean and corn salad.
Left bottom: Yogurt, strawberries and oatmeal bowl.
Right bottom: Watermelon, basil and feta salad. (Soooo good!)