Tag: weekend

What I’m Loving Lately: Late Summer Edition

LaurenLeave a comment

On Tuesday, we went to Red Rocks for our last concert of the summer — Young the Giant was incredible and Sameer’s dance moves are the very best! — and it was legitimately chilly!  Last night, my dad texted me about how it’s getting darker earlier in the evening.  I’m feeling that (self-created) pressure to do everything I haven’t crossed off my Summer Bucket List and all of this can mean only one thing: it’s officially late summer.  But, I’m going to refer to it as “late summer” instead of “the end of summer” because that’s just too depressing for a Friday post 🙂  Here’s some stuff I’ve been into lately!

Binge Mode

Guys, I spend a significant amount of my life trying to hide how deeply immersed in Game of Thrones I truly am.  But I fear I’m actually doing a terrible job because my blog, my Twitter account and my real life conversations seems to be about 80% GoT references and 20% food.  So now that it’s out in the open, I wanna tell you that I’ve been listening to this Podcast (so much that I’m actually speaking like the podcast hosts now — shouts to Binge Mode!) and now I even have Joey listening!  It’s pretty legit and also really funny, so I highly recommend it.

The Savvy Cook

Mentioned this cookbook here and there but I’m making my way through some of the MANY recipes I have dogeared and so far, I’m loving everything we’ve tried!  Made some egg-free French toast with MISO-DATE BUTTER (can you even?!) and it was so so good!  I can get weird about eggs sometimes so I was delighted to find a recipe for French toast that did away with them completely.  Also, that butter is a sweet savory dream and leftovers make for some incredible oatmeal.

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Iced Lattes

In the summer, Joey is ALL ABOUT iced coffee and I get it because that stuff can be incredibly good but I’ve been falling for a creamier cold coffee drink lately, so lattes are where its at.  My local coffee shop just switched from using almond milk to oat milk, but as long as it tastes like caffeinated cereal milk, I’m don’t really care what kind of non-dairy milk they use.  P.S. I ordered an iced lavender latte last week and life felt too good to be true.

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Peaches

I truly love a stone fruit.  And there is NOTHING better than a perfectly ripe, sweet, in-season peach.  For real!  You know when you get one that tastes so good it’s almost like you’re eating cobbler?  And your entire summer is built around finding THAT ONE perfect peach?  I’ve been lucky enough to eat several of those this summer and it makes me wonder what I’ve done to deserve such happiness.

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Gel Manicures

Growing up, I always had great nails.  Somewhere around 2011, they started to suck.  They were thin and brittle and ripping on the sides ALL THE TIME.  I’m gonna chaulk it up to a major increase in cooking, aka washing a lot of dishes, aka drying my nails out but who really knows.  What I DO know is that I got a “Oxygenating Medical Grade 10-Free Gel Manicure” at my fav place at the beginning of June and my nails have been killer ever since!  I’m not going to question this magic, I’m just going to enjoy it.

On the weekend docket: Rockies, Yoga on the Rocks, Frozen Live, smiles, hugs, LOVE!

The Food Lover’s Cleanse

Lauren4 Comments

Happy Monday!  Actually, it’s more of a Grumpy Monday for me, which probably has everything to do with this whole holidays-are-over, work-a-full-week thing.  But, I’m drinking tea and listening to Iron & Wine, so maybe things will turn around.

In other news, I’ve decided not to bore you with a play-by-play of my weekend.  Mostly because it went like this: cook, eat, watch The Godfather, repeat.  I’d never seen any of The Godfather movies and figured a cold snowy weekend without any plans was the perfect time for a little movie marathon action.  Verdict: the first two movies = thumbs up, the last movie = thumbs down.  I do, however, have a new understanding of that one scene in You’ve Got Mail.  C’mon, you know the one.

BA Cleanse

As for all that cooking and eating.  It’s the 5th Annual Bon Appétit Food Lover’s Cleanse and yours truly is participating for the first time!  If you’re unfamiliar, every January for the past four years, BA has put together a 2-week menu that includes breakfast, lunch, dinner, one snack and dessert.  The meals are meant to be a restart button and help you reconnect to mindful and simple eating.  Though that doesn’t mean anything restrictive or lacking in flavor <– I can personally vouch for that.

I follow BA on Twitter and was totally taken with all the delicious looking meals that were part of the plan last year so this year there was no way I was missing out.  We headed out to the store on Friday and loaded up on groceries and I think we bought one of everything in the produce section — seriously, our fridge is just about to explode!  The cashier who checked us out seemed only slightly frazzled by having to correctly identify and ring up everything we got.

We’re on Day 4 and so far, so good!  I’m not going to lie, all the prep work is pretty time-consuming — especially today, our first full day away from home — but the trade off is lots of fun kitchen time, a gentle nudge to cook things I normally wouldn’t (hello, full turkey breast!) and best of all, some seriously amazing food.  Oh, did I mention Joey is joining in on the “cleanse”?  I think the chia seed parfait we had for breakfast this morning was just a little different than the Santiago’s breakfast burrito he usually eats 🙂

Here’s a quick glimpse of the meals we’ve made so far.

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Between Friday’s fish packets, Saturday’s turkey (you don’t even want to know what we went through to get that turkey), Sunday’s salad and last night’s tofu and Brussels sprout stir-fry, I don’t think I could possibly pick a favorite.  I’m loving that the plan is made for those of us with real jobs and like Sara Dickerman, creator of the cleanse, says “in real life, people eat leftovers,” so lunches make use of dinner leftovers from the day before.  It’s very full-time-job-friendly.  There’s also a few “big batch” recipes that we made this weekend and get used through the rest of the week.

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P.S. There’s nightly dessert.  Nuff said!