Weekly Eats: Monday July 30 to Sunday August 5

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Family vacation edition.

Picking right up from where we left off last week, this week was our family vacation.  Hubs, myself, and the stepsons boarded a plane to Cape Canaveral.  We ate, got beach time, worked out a little, went to NASA, and read some seriously good reads.

Vacation Eats

Breakfasts: stepsons had cereal, and I had variations of eggs, bacon, toast and fruit.  Hubs alternated between eggs & bacon and cereal.

Last Day Breakfast Treat: Dunkin Donuts.  Stepson #1 had chocolate, glazed, and powdered.  Stepson #2 had two chocolate.  I had blueberry glazed.  Hubs had a breakfast sandwich.

Lunches: sun butter and jelly sandwiches for the menfolk.   I had a few days of sandwiches and then switched to leftover chili mac.  I wrote last week about the hot sauce that hubs bought me, and the photos do not lie.  It was full last Sunday and nearly empty by this mid week picture.  And yes I'm the only one in my family that uses hot sauce.

Dinners: We made chili mac and tacos (I have the kids doing most of the work on taco nights now mwah hah hah). 

We also went out with friends one night to Papa Vito's Italian Restaurant.  If we come back to Cape Canaveral we'll be going back.  They had two for one drinks and two for one entrees the night we were there.  The four of us each took home doggie bags and got another meal out of that.

Vacation Cooking Prep
I'm picky about coffee, so I always bring it from home and hubs brings tea.  In past years when we've driven for family vacation, we bring canned goods with us.  For flying, I brought some of our commonly used spices (chili powder, cumin, and onion powder), figuring that if I didn't we'd buy them there and then bring them home so we might as well just take them. 

For kitchen tools, the only things that I ever bring with us are a collapsible funnel and the lil' chizler (way long time ago recommendation from Peanut Butter Fingers, best $5 I ever spent) which is really handy if say you like eggs for breakfast but your condo doesn't have a non stick pan.  Other than that we totally play condo roulette and use whatever the owners supply to us.  We lucked out this year and had sharp knives and non-stick pans so no need for lil' chizler.

Vacation Highlights
Family time and beach time.  This is our fourth annual family summer vacation and it gets better every year.


Vacation Lowlight
We took vacation during the first week of the month because we hoped to see a NASA launch.  The only problem with that is that I'm an accountant, and accountants do not get vacation during the first few days of the month because that's when we close the books.  So yep, no getting out of it, I had to work during vacay.  On my own schedule and looking at the beach while I did it, but I still had to make deadlines and deal with all of the unexpected things that come up during close.


The launch?  Oh that got rescheduled so we didn't get to see it after all.  Lesson learned, it's hard to plan your vacation around NASA but it was worth a try.

Back Home Food
We got to ease back into home life last night with a family dinner with SIL's #1 and #3.  They made chicken parm and cupcakes.

Today eats: fruit, cereal bar, string cheese

BLT for lunch, though I didn't have any L.  Having a garden fresh T made up for it.

I didn't strain my brain for dinner.  I had hubs grill up chicken and put the boys to work on making a half recipe of chicken flavored rice.

Food Prep
A week or so ago Anne posted about a peanut noodle dish with part pasta part sprialized noodles and I've been dreaming about it ever since.  First of all, I have a spicy peanut noodle recipe tucked away, which I love but haven't made in forever, so I broke that out.  Second, the combo of real pasta plus spiralized reminded me of the Lean Green Bean Shrimp Curry recipe that I like so much.

I had to guess at quantities and ended up with 4 oz pasta + one sweet potato + 2 small zucchinis. 

I took a few nibbles before packing it up for next week.  Looking forward to getting my veggies on.

Workouts
When I'm on vacation, I work out, but I always treat myself to different routine and don't take it very seriously.  This time I even went "off the grid" and left my fitbit at home.

We didn't have a gym, so I turned to Peanut Butter Runner's Torch the Turkey Body Weight Workout.  You've heard of Christmas in July, and now we have Thanksgiving workouts in August.  It was a great workout and I could use a shakeup in my weight routine, so I might continue doing this for my weight workouts.  My pushup game has gotten much stronger, but I can't crank out a solid minute of pushups so I did shoulder tap pushups to play for time.

For running, I got in a few 3 mile beach runs - go out a mile and a half in one direction and then come back.  I went out in the evenings to cut down on the amount of sun I was getting. 

Watches
As a family we found time to watch MST3K a few nights on vacay.  No adult TV this week, we had books to read...


Reads
I scored with vacation reading this year.

• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeymoon.  As you know from last week, I finished it in under 24 hours.

• The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware.  I've loved all of her previous books, so much so that I've been skeptical with each new book that she won't be able to keep it up.  Well, Westaway is her best book yet.  It's one thing to riff Agatha Christie, it's another thing to do it so well.  And she got into Daphne du Maurier/Rebecca territory with this one and did it flawlessly.

• Blood Defense by Marcia Clark.  Now we're in definite beach book territory.  I've read a few of her other books and really liked them,  but when I started reading this after gobbling down two epically good books, I had a minute where I didn't think that I could switch gears to a pure beach read.  No worries, Marcia got me sucked in quick and before I knew it the pages were flying by.

Next Up
Back to normal life!