Weekly Eats: Monday September 10 to Sunday September 16

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Apple Pie Bars Edition
This week's highlights include: an awesome date night dinner, Ina Garten's Apple Pie Bars, and epic workouts.


Weekday Breakfasts
Stop me if you've seen this all before...breakfast burrito x2, avocado toast x3

Weekend Breakfasts
Saturday: homemade Egg McMuffin with chicken sausage.

Sunday: cereal bar and string cheese.

Weekday Lunches
All salads all the time, which led to afternoons of all snacking all the time.  I made a batch of salsa chicken in the crockpot last week which took care of Mon, Tues, and Wed.  On Thurs I had one with  tofu and all kinds of interesting fixings from our work catered lunch, and Friday's was home pan fried salmon fillet (I cook the salmon at home in the morning and discretely reheat it for 15 seconds in the microwave).

In any case, lesson learned.  I'm done with salads-as-meals for a while.

Weekend Lunches
Saturday: a random raid of the fridge.  Chicken sausage, peas, and leftover pasta.

Sunday: Veggie burrito

Weeknight Dinners
Monday (family meal):  Chimichangas and cilantro lime rice.  A freezer to table meal.

Tuesday (rushed family meal): my husband made the stepsons hotdogs, noodles, and veggies.  I forget what he ate, but rest assured that he got fed.  I dug into a chicken sausage, peas, and for the first time ever, the legendary Trader Joe's cauliflower gnocchi tossed with a little bit of pesto.  Verdict on the gnocchi, I liked it, I'll be getting it again, but at the same time I'm not quite obsessed with it.

Wednesday (date night): Nailed it!  Crispy chicken with creamy garlic penne.  We've made this before but it had been awhile.  If you're looking for a dinner that's impressive but ridiculously easy to make, this is for you.  If you're looking for a decadent tasting dinner that's relatively low calorie this is also for you.  I made half the recipe and still had pasta left over (see Saturday's lunch).  I also skipped the lemon marinade (90% due to laziness efficiency since I had all of the other ingredients at home and didn't want to go shopping and 10% because you can't really taste the marinade in the finished dish).

Thursday (a night out): It was family night at my father-in-law's assisted living facility.  I always like to hang with FIL, but didn't have high expectations for dinner.  And I was wrong, because it was really good.  Italian night with stuffed shells as the main course.

Friday (date night): Chipotle and margaritas on the couch.  My standard order is a steak bowl with guac and fajita veggies, hubs gets the chicken burrito with guac.

Weekend Dinners
Saturday (family bash): it was a small family bash by our standards, with just 11 people (true story: when my husband met my family, he met 2 people.  My first meeting with his family was 22 people and that's just his immediate family).  We met at SIL#3's house.  The spread: hamburgers, hot dogs, pasta salad, broccoli/ramen salad, veggies, and chips.  I brought dessert, which was the family standard of chocolate chip cookies and something new: Ina Garten's Apple Pie Bars via Peanut Butter Runner.  This is one of those things that I've had squirreled away for a while and just happened to pop into my head when my husband told me about the family dinner.  My only change was to omit the walnuts since we have nut allergies in the family (not sure if anyone's allergic to walnuts specifically but it's just easier to omit all nuts and play it safe)

After we left the family bash, we headed over to our neighbor's for a bonfire and brought the desserts with us.  At the end of the night, we came home with one cookie and 4 apple pie bars, so that's a success.

Sunday (family meal): Family lasagna.

With apple pie bars and ice cream for dessert.

Meal Prep
For my lunches next week: BBQ shrimp and sweet potato bowls.  I'm just a little bit excited about this one.  I figured that since I had the grill on anyway I might as well roast the fresno peppers.

Workouts
This was such a good week for workouts and I enjoyed every minute of my gym time.
Monday: weights and 2 mile treadmill run
Tuesday: six mile outdoor run in the rain.  It was one of those mornings when I was in a stupid good mood, and was so transfixed by the sound of the rain drops that I didn't bother to listen to music, which is unheard of for me.  Plan A was to run 5 miles but I felt so good that I stayed out for an extra mile and planned my route to go past the step's bus stop near the end to get high fives.
Wednesday: off
Thursday: 5 mile treadmill intervals.  1 mile warmup/cool down, 4x800 @ 6.5 with 400 recovery.
Friday: weights and 2 mile treadmill run.
Saturday: oh no, after one week of cool weather, the heat came back.  I decided that I would go no further than 6 miles and made a conscious effort to take things easy and it paid off.  I didn't really feel the heat until the last half mile and my pace wasn't that much slower than normal.
Sunday: off

Watching
(from the treadmill): How to Get Away with Murder (just started season 3), and finished The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  No sooner was I mourning the end of a good show when I found out that the latest season of Call the Midwife is out on Netflix, so we're set for workouts for a while.  Tentative TV treadmill plan from here: Call the Midwife which should cover me until season 2 of Mrs Maisel comes out which should cover me until Outlander comes out and fingers crossed that might even take me to the spring and the final season of A Place to Call Home.
(from the couch): Ozark.  So far we like it a lot, but it's going to be a long haul since the episodes are long and we can't watch it when little people are in the house.  On Friday we watched Magum Force (you may ask why we didn't watch Dirty Harry and the answer is that we couldn't find the DVD - a man's gotta know his limitations).  On my own I continued my Fred and Ginger spree with Roberta.

Reading
The Adrian Mole Diaries by Sue Townsend