Weekly Eats: Dinner for Two Edition

A weekly roundup: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's adventures, there were a lot of dinners for two, we tried a new chicken burger, I have a plan to increase my running speed, and wow do I have a good book to tell you about.
Breakfasts

Monday & Friday: breakfast potatoes, salsa, and eggs.

Tuesday & Thursday: breakfast burritos

Wednesday: homemade Egg McMuffin with chicken sausage

Saturday: runner's special.  PB & honey toast

Sunday: held out for our early father's day lunch.

Lunch
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: Shrimp Pad Thai with peanut sauce.  Love this, love the shrimp and at the same time I can't wait to make this again with tofu or soy curls.

Wednesday & Friday: big ol' work catering salads with tofu.

Saturday: veggie burrito

Sunday: Father's Day bash at our house

• My husband played Patio Dadio and grilled us up some hamburgers...in the pouring rain
• I took care of all of the burger fixin's
• SIL#3 brought veggies and fruit
• SIL#4 brought salad and desserts

Dinner
Monday (dinner for two #1): owing to family events, it was just stepson #2 and me.  We both had leftover rice from Sunday and peas, and we both choose our main course.  That's a chicken sausage for me, and chicken nuggets for him.  Hubs came home a bit later and had leftover enchiladas.

Tuesday (dinner for two #2): stepson #2 had enchiladas, I had a veggie burrito.  Hubs finished the enchiladas when he got home.

Wednesday (date night): A different kind of dinner for two.  As you know, we love Courtney's bacon cheddar ranch burgers and chicken parm is my husband's favorite dish.  It was time to find out what happens when she combines the two for Chicken Parm Burgers.  The verdict: I'll give a very slight edge to the bacon cheddar ranch burgers, but these are also fabulous and worthy of a place in our meal rotation.

Thursday (fend for yourself night): rice, stir fry frozen veggies, avocado, and a little sushi ginger beneath an air fryed salmon filet.  There's also a little dressing and crunchies from an Asian salad kit.

Friday (dinner for two #3): stepson #2 and I had our third solo meal of the week and we both got to choose our own meals.  His was chicken nuggets, broccoli, and buttered rotini.  Mine was the last serving of the peanut butter pad thai with a few random pieces of broccoli.

Saturday (family meal): Stepson #1 returned from his adventures and all four of us are together again!  One of the adult cousins came over to hang out with us.  We went all out with steak, grilled portabello caps (for adults only), zucchini, and twice baked potatoes.

Sunday (family meal): just snacks.  We really went all out for brunch, it was a one meal kinda day.

Workouts
27 miles of running this week
Monday: 4 miles with strides, weights at lunch
Tuesday: six miles, the longest weekday run I've done since before the half marathon
Wednesday: off from running, weights at lunch
Thursday: 5 miles total including a mile test.  More about that in a moment.
Friday: 4 easy miles, weights at lunch (pats self on back for getting 3x weights in this week)
Saturday: 8 miles

The Final Week of the Running Clinic
The PT laid out a few ideas for workouts that I can do to increase my speed including this 10 week program.  Her thoughts: there's nothing wrong with my form that's keeping me slow, her bet is that I have just learned to run at a slower pace and now I need to learn to run at a faster pace.  It was kinda anticlimactic and I left the appointment kinda rolling my eyes.  And then I read over the materials that she gave me and decided heck, let's try the 10 week plan for the fun of it.

You're supposed to start the plan by doing a one mile test, which determines the speeds that you use for the rest of the program.  It's all detailed in the link, but the gist is run for 10-15 minutes, do 4 rounds of 30 seconds fast/1 minute recover, then one round of 2 minutes fast/2 minutes recover, then run a mile as fast as you can.  My first inclination was to skip the test and just use 10 minutes as my mile time, since that's the fastest I've run a mile in a race.  I *know* that I cannot run a 10 minute mile in everyday life, and I *knew* that the only thing that would happen if I did the test was that it would be agony and I'd get something over a 10 minute mile as a result and be discouraged...why take the test when you already know the answer? (You are all shaking your heads and saying duh that's the point, to start off with the speed that you are and not the speed that you want to be, but that's what was going on in my head)

I got over myself and took care of business.  Really the hardest part was remembering all of the steps in the test.  The Garmin that I have doesn't let you set up a workout like that so I had to track it in my head and then use the lap key to start the mile.  Which was awkward because I didn't look at the distance before I started the lap so I really had no clue where I was in the mile.  I also didn't know if the Garmin would tell me when the mile was up and thank goodness it did.  And I was shocked.

9:48!  I know that's walking speed for some of y'all but that is way faster that I thought I could do and I have a bunch of PR's to show off for it.  And then I stopped rolling my eyes and got excited about the next 10 weeks.  As far as I can tell, I can fit these workouts into my normal mileage.

Next up: I have an appointment with a dietitian next week and that concludes the running clinic.

Heads up: Garmins are on super sale on Amazon right now...I love the F35 but after the mile test I realized how hard it's going to be to keep track of workouts and paces.  I spent a good bit of time trying to figure out how to set up workouts on Big Red (the F305 that I gushed about here) before giving it up as a bad job...I slept on it and then splurged on a refurb F235 based on Teri's review, which will come in next week.

Watching
Another off week for TV...I was busy reading.

Reading
***Good Book Alert***Good Book Alert***Good Book Alert*** (p.s. both of these titles are on this list).

Going in I thought that American Spy would be really good and My Lovely Wife would be just another thriller like every other thriller...nope.  American Spy was good, but it's already distant in my memory.  My Lovely Wife turned out to be exactly what I need in a book...it started off good and kept getting better with each page.  I started it on Friday night, read a few chapters, and went to bed.  Saturday night I picked it up again and I.COULD.NOT.STOP.READING.  Usually I'm the first one to turn off the lights at night, but I outlasted hubs and even the steps.  I made myself put it down about 50 pages from the end and dived right back into it this morning. Two thoughts:

• Wow
• Um what are you doing why aren't you reading this yet?