Here is a round up of a few recent eats and a snapshot of our weekend!
Breakfast this week was cottage cheese bowls with protein powder, chia seeds, almond butter and banana. Plus lots of coffee.
I purchased a bag of mini cucumbers and forgot to use them for a dinner one night, so was searching the internet for recipes to use them. I stumbled upon this bean salad and it was delicious! I added a can of Safe Catch tuna for additional protein and enjoyed it for lunches this week with toasted Ezekiel bread (I keep a loaf in the freezer).
On Friday night, we booked a chef through Cozymeal for a late Valentine's day celebration. We've used this service before and enjoy it for a few reasons - it is fun to learn from the chef and hear about their experiences, you can be dressed as comfortable as you please, and for us, it saved on paying for a sitter. You can pick between several cuisines and also your involvement (if you want to learn to prepare the meal or just sit back and enjoy it).
For this experience, we selected a Spanish Paella menu and went with the citrus salad, ham crouqettes, squid ink paella, and almond cake. It is pricey at $130pp, but we had so many leftovers it fed us for two more meals!
We finished dinner around 9pm and opted to stay up to watch the latest episode of Summer House we recorded. Not sure I'm loving this season, but we will keep watching to see if it gets better.
On Saturday, we planned our first run outside in a few months with the running stroller - it's been in the 30s or colder so we've been alternating run times, which means running in the dark and cold most mornings. Early Spring is my favorite time for running! I completed 5 miles first before Nick drove to the trailhead to complete another 6 miles together with the stroller. I drove my car back to the house with our daugther so Nick could add a few extra miles on. We've found an hour is the perfect window for our daughter and are nervous to add more on, so for now we do our swaps. This is the furthest I've run postpartum! We both used our leg compression machine that afternoon.
We finished around 11, so we ate lunch at the house. My typical lunch on the weekends is a chicken nugget caesar salad. I was obsessed with caesar salads in highschool and in the last few years I've craved them again. I'll just toss green leaf lettuce, dressing and some air fryer nuggets in a big bowl and top with red pepper flakes. Today, I added some diced avocado because we have mini avocados on hand for our daugther. Seems like a weird combination, but I had an avocado caesar salad in Portugal and it made me a fan on the combination! Also, this flavor of liquid IV tastes exactly like a firecracker popsicle!
Last week a friend told about the Aqua Pass deal with the Georgia Aquarium. For about the cost of a ticket, you can purchase unlimited visits for the year. There are blackout dates (they align with peak usage such as Spring Break, holidays, and some Summer weeks) and you need to book ahead of time. For us, this is not a problem since we'd try to avoid those super busy dates and with a baby, planning ahead of time is best for us! I made our reservation for 2pm and we packed our baby carrier and snacks for the trip.
Overall it was an awesome experience - it was super busy, so we had to be patient to get close enough to the exhibits, but once we did, our daughter was mesmorized by colorful fish! The benefit of the annual passes is we can use different visits to see different things instead of cramming it all in one trip. Few takeaways from our trip: I'm glad we opted for the baby carrier instead of a stroller because of the crowded walkways, I'll book an earlier time next go, and I'll bring extra snacks to have on hand plus reusable water bottles for us.
On Sunday morning, I woke up to go to my gym for an 8am workout. Today I did the small group training - our workout was total body with 4 sets of most exercises. Typically I will go to workout, shower at my gym and head to the grocery store on the way home to prep for the week ahead. This week's meals include stuffed shells (prepped on Sunday), marinated chicken thighs and broccolini, and grilled mahi mahi. For myself, I prepped a big batch of overnight oats for breakfast and tuna white bean salad for lunches.
I had an introduction class booked for the Little Gym near us at 11:55am. We went to that class and the experience was okay. I think once our daughter is more mobile, she will love the different mats and bars. She was in a good mood but after about 20 minutes, I could tell she was hungry and just wanted a nap. The rest of the day included a family walk in the afternoon to enjoy the nice weather and going out to a causal restaurant nearby for dinner!
