A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads. Epic salmon edition.
So much to talk about this week...the stepkids cooked dinner for us, I have a killer salmon recipe to share, I ran 12 miles for the first time ever, we watched a bunch of Christmas shows, and I went to Trader Joe's.
Breakfasts
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: breakfast burritos
Wednesday: cereal bar, string cheese, fruit
Saturday: breakfast quesadilla with bacon
Sunday: ad hoc breakfast burrito. Two eggs+cheese+Trader Joe's Pepita Salsa.
Lunches
Tuesday & Thursday: salads from work catering
Wednesday: Chrissy Teigan's Actual Drunken Noodles
Friday: This one is money. Skinny Taste's Seattle Asian salmon bowl. Granted I still didn't plan ahead so I'm missing all of the veggies to bulk it up, but even so, wow, wow, wow. I have a mental block with salmon: I like it, it's easy to make, it's good for me, yada yada so in other words I rarely eat it. With this recipe I don't think I'll have a shortage of salmon in my diet going forward.
Sunday: another salmon bowl.
Dinners
Monday (family meal): We planned to have grilled chicken. I'd put the chicken in the fridge to thaw and hubs and I talked about it in the morning. I was the last one home and found him in the late stages of making mac and cheese and nuggets. It turned out that my husband had such a Monday that he thought it was Tuesday and that we had places to be in half an hour, which is why he went with the quickie route. We all teased him and I made chicken sausage with Trader Joe's cauliflower gnocchi with pesto.
Tuesday (family meal): the kids' Tuesday night activity was canceled, so the grilled chicken finally had its day.
Wednesday (date night): family dinner at my FIL's assisted living facility. We met up with SIL#3 and her family.
Thursday (fend for yourself night): he had soup, I had a veggie burrito with half an avocado's worth of guac.
Friday (child labor family dinner): I had the day off, so when we planned dinner that morning, I suggested lasagna. My husband went one better and decided that stepson #1 should do the cooking so that he could finish his boy scout cooking merit badge. When the boys got home from school I gave them a little bit of down time and then put them to work. Stepson #1 made lasagna, and stepson #2 whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
Saturday: a birthday party for one of the cousins. Tacos and brownies.
Sunday (family meal): I was craving a burger like nobody's business, and it wasn't very hard to talk the rest of the family into it.
Trader Joe's Haul Deets
Staples: Bay Blend Coffee, almond milk, cauliflower gnocchi, protein bars, avocados.
Treats: Smashing s'mores, Holiday Joe-Joes, pretzel slims covered in peppermint white chocolate
New stuff to try that was awesome: Pepita salsa
New stuff to try that was horrible: vanilla pea protein powder. Nasty, nasty, nasty stuff. It was really cheap but even so I can't justify wasting it so I'm going to have it as a recovery drink once a week until it's gone.
Meal Prep
Not much this week. We have leftover lasagna for dinners. Next week is my last week in the office for the year so I'll be alternating between salmon and my freezer stash of meals. Next up: Christmas baking. I made eggnog fudge this week and took some to work and kept some for Christmas. I'm pondering my baking list and will start tackling that this week.
Workouts
What a good week...29 miles which I believe is a record.
Monday: weights with coffee and a 3 mile treadmill run. 30:48 which is my fastest 3 mile treadmill time ever.
Tuesday: 5 mile treadmill run and oh man was I dragging
Wednesday: off
Thursday: 6 mile treadmill fartlek and I had some energy to burn. 1 mi warmup/cool down, 4 miles with the pattern of one minute hard/one minute easy. I did 6.0 for the hard/5.5 for the easy for the first two miles and 6.5 hard/5.5 easy for the last two miles.
Friday: I had the day off, and I ended up blowing off my weight workout for a big ol' housecleaning session followed by a 3 mile outdoor run followed by a dog walk. I knew that if I ran first that I wouldn't get around to the housecleaning. It was 50 degrees and sunny. Inevitably I'm slower off the treadmill than on it, but I made 33:31 as my time and was very happy with that. I did some strides in miles 2 and 3 (and also tackled some hills in mile 3).
Saturday: so honestly I've been scared to death of the long run since the one where I crashed and burned a few weeks ago. I don't know what went wrong then and I don't know what went right now, but it was awesome. 12 miles for the first time ever! I stayed strong throughout and in theory I could have gone further. This was a much needed confidence boost. If 12 miles feels this good now I'm ready to say for certain that I'll be able to handle 13.1 for my half marathon in May.
(Tentative long run plan: I think I'm going to cycle between 8,10, and 12 miles for the distance for a while. So 10 miles next week, 8 miles the week after that, 10 miles the week after that, 12 miles the week after that, etc. Ultimately I want to put in a couple of 14 milers before race day but I've figured out that I need a lot more time to build up to that.)
Watching
The kids' weeknight activities are done for the Christmas break, so we put in some family TV time. Last week we started making a list of all of the Christmas shows and movies we want to watch and we crossed quite a few off the list.
- Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer TV special. The other day hubs and the steps were talking about the Isle of Misfit Toys and I didn't get what they were talking about. They were shocked that I had never seen this show so they set it right.
- A Charlie Brown Christmas. We've seen this a few times before and to be honest, it's a snooze fest for me. It's less than half an hour long and I couldn't tell you what this show is about because I zone out after a few minutes.
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas is much more my speed.
- Ghostbusters. How did this end up on our Christmas movie list? Because they showed it at the last boy scout camp but stepson #2 didn't get to see it. I hadn't seen it since it came out when I was younger than the steps. Everyone enjoyed it.
- Die Hard. The best part of this movie? The constant commentary from the steps on how they would have taken care of the takeover of Nakatomi plaza.
Dover Beats the Band
I wanted to thank you for this very good read!! I certainly loved every bit of it.
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Thank you!
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