Tag Archives: stuffed pepper

First off, today was my last official day of work! I was doing elementary school literacy kits inventory work for a month but we officially finished checking and getting all of the bins ready, so the job is complete. I will be doing another day or two of work next week to finish up some odds and ends but the main goal of the job has been reached and the last chillin month of summer is about to begin. I need to make it a good one!

So – The end of another week is here and I’ve got some eats to share.

Tuesday

Early mornings have been slightly rushed before work, so breakfast has been rushed as well. I cram a lot of fruit in (most of it while standing at the fridge), and have been really having a go at the Kashi Probiotic cereal while chugging down a very necessary cup of coffee every morning.

Coming home from work an hour or two before dinner time messes a bit with my ability to make a half decent dinner. I’m often pretty hungry when I get home so I have a snack, but I’m usually still hungry and end up throwing together whatever leftovers etc I find in the fridge to call it a meal.

Exhibit A – My Tuesday night dinner:

Cabbage slaw/mushroom/baby carrot salad with hummus and tzatziki, rye with hummus and salsa, 1/2 leftover stuffed pepper (eaten cold – I eat most of my leftovers cold. I like them that way!)

Wednesday

A repeat of the Canadian version of the Kashi Vive, complete with my favourite cold cereal topping – Frozen banana chunks.

Lunch at work – blah blah. Sorry, they’re boring so you just don’t get to see them!

But dinner you do get to see because it was extra special since I somehow had the patience to wait for butternut squash fries and sweet potatoes to bake up in the oven. I think I had a pretty big post-work snack in order to be able to wait for this.

However, the squash was slightly disappointing as it tasted blah and unsweet. Sigh. It was still good dipped in barbecue sauce and PB2 though.

Thursday

Kashi, Weetabix, strawberry yogurt, frozen banana, Almond Breeze. What can I say, I’m a creature of habit! I’ve finished off the Kashi cereal box though so my next cereal ventures will include something different.

When I got home from work I actually managed to get a picture of one of my snack platters. Yeah, one of them. I think there were two or three different ones. I know the second involved cucumber and baby carrots, but it also involved me not wanting to get my camera again.

Leftover ground turkey, salsa, tzatziki, sweet potato, deli turkey…
There are a lot of random foods kicking around in my fridge right now. I’m slowly using them up. I take this task very seriously.

Once dinner rolled around I wanted something with lots of chop and chew. What better fitting than a salad:
Spinach, baby carrots, steamed broccoli, sweet potato, plain extra firm tofu, brown rice crackers, roasted garlic hummus and sweet onion dressing. Oh so good.

Friday

Since today was just finishing up some labelling at work, it took all of an hour. Quite the Friday treat, I was done work and back home by 9:30!

I finished off some cereal before work but was still hungry when I got home so I sliced and diced a giant ripe mango and ended up eating about half of it.

I also had a very munchy morning and ended up eating a lot of cereal, yogurt and coffee but let’s not talk about it.

After munching away the morning, it was time for a serious sweat sesh. My headphones broke and I’ve been using a crappy old pair that do not like to stay in my ears while running, so I’ve been avoiding the running thing a bit lately. Shoving headphones back into your ears every few minutes is really distracting and a really big pain in the neck. Somehow I put up with it for an hour today anyway.

Then later on I checked the mail and saw that my new headphones had arrived in the mail! Skullcandy has sweet headphones and a great warranty policy. My old ones stopped working for no apparent reason so I submitted a warranty request, sent the old ones in and a got a new pair in the mail no charge. Perfect! Now if only I had checked the mail before going on the treadmill.

I broke in the new headphones on a bike ride later this evening though. They were lovely, as was the bike ride. The weather has finally picked up here! We’ve had rain and very unsummery weather here all month so the sunshine and warm air was quite welcome today and required a bit of biking to take advantage of it.

Getting ahead of myself though, after the treadmill I threw together a quick and tasty veg bowl for lunch: spinach, steamed broccoli, dill pickles, honey mustard, roasted garlic hummus, deli turkey.

Then it was errand time.

Then it was dinner time! The highlight of the day, Couscous & Chickpea Salad courtesy of Janetha and Danica.

Oh my goodness. So easy, so GOOD.
I didn’t have everything on hand so I did a few things differently:

Tomato couscous cooked in boiling water and chicken broth
A can of Bean Medley (didn’t have just chickpeas)
Cooked up premarinated Mediterranean chicken breasts
Yellow summer squash instead of cucumber (didn’t have any)
Spinach (didn’t have basil)
Used pickled ginger and ginger powder in the dressing (no fresh ginger)

This meal is chalk-full of flavour. My mom and I both loved it and there are plenty of leftovers. Make it!

I’ve been in sweet mode this week so pretty much every meal has been followed by something in the field of sweet. Think cereal, yogurt, dates, fruit… or just all of the above after nearly every meal. Sorry I don’t manage to capture these on camera. They’re just gone too darn quickly!

I’m staying in tonight (I was out last night and I need to catch up from the four hour night of sleep. Plus I’m lame.) so I felt like baking. I’ve felt like baking for days. And I’ve felt like baking zucchini bread for days. So I just went with it, using this recipe from Smitten Kitchen.
The results are to come…

Have a great weekend, and great long weekend to all the Canadian Civic Holiday celebrators. :)

Weekend Munch

July 28, 2009

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Friday

This short, morning only workday required some quick and tasty fueling.
Plain yogurt, COLD banana, flax and PB2 did the trick.

It held me over throughout my repetitive work task of bin checking but I was starving by the time I was done and home so I immediately threw together a nice, early lunch. I had been craving tuna for several days but still hadn’t gotten around to making it so here was my golden moment.

I mixed a can of tuna with dijon mustard, light sour cream, tzatziki and pepper. I had some of it over a bed of spinach (and topped with a dollop of hummus)…

… and some of it wrapped in spinach. What’s the difference? There isn’t one really but I’m all about the variety so this multimethod way of eating was more satisfying.

In the aft we did a big grocery trip.

It included some grocery store sushi – tropical shrimp, spicy shrimp and pear, smoked salmon and shrimp. I thought they all tasted pretty similar, but they were all decently good. They switched up the brand of sushi they sell there though and I liked the old one better. This one is too crunchy with all of the sesame seeds. Oh well.

We also bought some Wild Mushroom Risotto, ground turkey and a bag of on sale green peppers to make our dinner of… Stuffed Peppers!

I set the oven to 425 and cooked the peppers a bit while cooking up the turkey and risotto on the stove. Once the stuffing ingredients were ready, I pulled the peppers out, stuffed them with the cooked risotto, turkey and some canned seasoned diced tomatoes and then put them back into the oven for approximately 20 minutes.

Tasty! They probably could have used a little longer in the oven since the pepper was still a little crunchy but overall they were tasty and the stuffing part was great, especially with a little crumbled goat cheese on top.

A couple other purchases:

Kashi Probiotic High Fibre Cereal (I guess it’s the same as the Kashi VIVE? Weird how we have different names for the same cereal)

…And this insanely dangerous ice cream.

President’s Choice has a whole new line of these Loads Of Ice Creams that came highly recommended by a girl I work with. And they were on sale. And we haven’t had a good kind of ice cream in our freezer for ages. So now was the chance.

“Yummy butter tart flavoured ripple ice cream, positively packed with butter tart pieces and praline pecans"

The container is almost gone. My family all love it. Never. Buying. Again.
Hah. Right.

Saturday

I saved the last bit of an almond butter jar especially for this Saturday morning when I finally had enough time to be able to make a nice oat bran breakfast.

I stove top cooked some oat bran with water and almond milk, half a banana, cinnamon and flax. The last bites were by far superior, as all of the almond butter was sitting right at the bottom of the jar. Best for last!

We currently have a ridiculous amount of leftovers hanging around our fridge, so I utilized some of them in my lunch. Along with some raw veggies (mushrooms, zucchini, green peppers), I had some spinach leaves stuffed with leftover ground turkey risotto stuffing and leftover tuna from Friday.

I also had some steamed rice from my dad’s chinese food lunch. I ate a bunch of it plain and then did this…

You bet I stirred steamed rice into my vanilla yogurt. Instant rice pudding. Freaking delicious.

For dinner my mom made a Crazy Plates recipe: Mr. Bowjangles – “Bow-tie pasta with chicken, broccoli and sun-dried tomatoes in a light broth.”

But we didn’t have bowtie so we went corkscrew instead. I served mine with a bowl of spinach, yellow zucchini and tomatoes.

I’ve been consuming the leftovers of the pasta in mass amounts over the last couple days. It’s dangerous.

Saturday night I stayed in. Friday night I also stayed in actually. I guess it was just a stay in kind of weekend. And I actually didn’t mind it too much, I was feeling a little too unmotivated to bother even making an effort or having a late night for once.

Sunday

Breakfast was a wee bit unconventional…

The leftovers are seriously OVERTAKING the fridge. I had to get working on them so I figured I might as well make a breakfast out of them!
Bizarre Breakfast Platter includes: shrimp sushi, polenta fries, cottage cheese, tomato, strips of chicken burger and leftover Mr. Bowjangles Pasta. Weird but definitely not untasty (rocking the double negatives).

It was a gloomy Sunday morning therefore the perfect weather brew for a cleaning job. The culprit? The Pantry.

I did the shelves one at a time, taking everything off and rearranging each one. We have a lot of crap in our pantry. I didn’t get an after picture (or a before for that matter) but I assure you it is much less stressful to look inside now.

Then I eventually made another bizarre mess of a meal for lunch.

This salad included: spinach, cabbage slaw, carrots, mushrooms, chicken burger cubes, dijon mustard, tuna, tzatziki and hummus.

Followed by the remainders of a container of plain yogurt with banana, dried apricot and Kashi Honey Puffed.

Post rain outside always looks so crisp and fresh.

Garden Tequila…?
The rain was on and off all day. At some points it was sunny and at others it was pouring. Crazy weather.

In the afternoon I went to see Food Inc.
Wow. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, see it. You have to see it. It’s intense to say the least.

Before dinner I did a P90X Plyometrics video that I found randomly online. This was my first time (other than the P90X 15 minute ab workout) trying out P90X and I definitely think I’ll be doing it again. Sweat City – Great workout! I might even consider buying the whole set, although the price tag makes me cringe a little so we’ll have to see.

Although Friday and Saturday nights were nights in, I was definitely ready to break that by Sunday so I went out for my weekly Sunday night retro dancing and more than made up for my other two nights in. It was pretty grand, except for the three hours of sleep part since I had to get up early for work the next morning. That part was a little less fun. I guess here is where it’s helpful that my job involves sitting and doing mindless bin checking tasks all day.

And now we’re into a new week. Yesterday was a terrible day of eating (in other words the eating just didn’t stop) but from this point forth I’m cracking down. You know that ‘eat when you’re actually hungry’ thing? I’m going to relearn that starting today. Speaking of which, time for me to figure out some dinner!

I Like My Rice With Some CRUNCH

March 9, 2009

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What should I be doing right now? Reading up on Mood Disorders for my Abnormal Psych midterm on Tuesday. What am I doing instead? Cropping pictures. My concentration level is zilch, I get distracted so easily!

Saturday

Saturday I worked all day. I hadn’t been to work in two weeks because I work for my dad and he was in Barbados so… no work for me. No Barbados for me either but such is life right? I went a few years ago though. It was awesome. I think it would be even more awesome for me now though. I experienced a bit of culture shock my first round there and, well, I spent a good chunk of my time there slightly on the nervous side to say the least. This time around though I would know what to expect. Barbados here I come?! One of these days…

ANYWAY, yeah, I worked all day Saturday.

First I ate breakfast though. Blended oats made with water, almond milk and banana. Never fails to disappoint. I also ended up having half an orange after this but I was too lazy to take a picture and who really doesn’t know what an orange looks like right?

For a snack at work I brought a Luna Bar flavour I had never tried: Caramel Nut Brownie.

The flavours I have tried thus far have been fair but I wasn’t in love with any of them. This one, however, blew them all right outta the water.

The smell alone is incredible. The aroma of chocolate and caramel hits you immediately upon cracking open the wrapper. Who needs brownies? This is all you need. I can’t wait to try this flavour heated up next time.

Lunch was hardly thrilling. A salad, Mediterranean flavoured cottage cheese and an apple. Plus a couple pieces of my brother’s grocery store sushi.

There were some Quality Street Chocolates at work so I took one for the road at the end of the day.

I didn’t know what flavour this was but Wikipedia tells me the pink wrapper is Vanilla Fudge. I believe it. This was one lovely little chocolate.

When I got home this little creation made it’s way into my stomach for dinner.

What’s in the mysterious caterpillar-like lump on my plate? (It actually looks more like a maggot to me but caterpillars invoke a slightly less disgusting image…)

Chicken, iceberg lettuce and honey mustard!! Okay I know, that’s actually not exciting at all but it sure TASTED great.

Then I ate this ~~apple~~ strawberry for kicks. Strawberries as big as my hand? Yes please!

Saturday night was dancing. I’m getting my groove back! I’ve been so dancing deprived all winter. Gotta catch up!

Sunday

Today was supposed to be a study-filled day but my friend wanted to go shopping and I hadn’t seen her in a while and, well, I really wanted to shop because I haven’t done that in a while either. There’s always all night to study… ehem.

Anyway, shopping clearly won out. It was a little disappointing as I hardly found anything I really wanted but at least my wallet wasn’t aching too badly after.

I got some workout gear at Old Navy. On sale of course. If it’s not on sale it’s not for me. At least when it comes to Old Navy because you can guarantee that clothing item you love will be on sale a couple weeks down the road. I can wait.

And some FOOD purchases of course.

Peanut Butter PUFFINS! Maranatha Crunchy Almond Butter (on sale!), three Larabar flavours I’ve never tried (Cherry Pie, Lemon and Apple Pie) and my new favourite Luna flavour.

I tried the almond butter. I’ll admit though, I had higher expectations for it. I’ve never tried similar to this one in taste before and I found it a little weird… I don’t know what it is exactly. I think it needs to grow on me a bit.

Backtracking to before my shopping trip, for breakfast I had an egg white mess (egg whites, salsa, spinach, FF swiss) on half an english muffin and a gigantor strawberry with vanilla yogurt.

Post-shop I threw together a quick late lunch of iceberg lettuce, dill pickles, carrots, guacamole, hummus, leftover baked tofu and leftover chickpea salad.

I also had an apple.

Dinner was a new experiment: Stuffed Peppers.
There was this tasty looking recipe in a pamphlet thing we picked up at the grocery store so we decided to give it a try. We followed it pretty much exactly except we used minute rice and didn’t really precook it rather than using already prepared rice. This was probably a bad idea. The whole thing turned out quite dry. I don’t think the recipe in general is all that great either since this dish wasn’t all that flavourful and it only called for 15 minutes in the oven, which doesn’t result in the most tender of peppers.

My mother was sorely disappointed with this meal. Me? I kind of loved it. Hey, I’m no picky eater. I thought the crunch of the undercooked rice was fun to eat and topped with some salsa and sour cream, this pepper was a winner in my books. I guess the leftovers are all mine! We did put the rest of the peppers back in the oven though and cooked them for an hour to cook up the rice and make the peppers nice and mushy.

While I was shopping earlier I also bought some easter egg malted milk balls at Bulk Barn. 35 cents worth. I know, big spender. You can get a good solid handful for 35 cents though! And I ate them ALL. I didn’t quite intend to but those little crunchy chocolatey goodies are kind of irresistable.