Weekly Eats: A bunch of new eats and a running cutback

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition, I made a home cooked meal for my family without being home, feasted off of rice and beans, made a killer flatbread pizza, and buffalo mac & cheese.  And my running plan called for a cutback which I kinda sorta followed.

Breakfasts
Monday & Wednesday: breakfast potatoes and eggs

Tuesday & Friday: breakfast burritos

Thursday & Sunday: here's one you haven't seen in a while.  Fruit, string cheese, and Trader Joe's cereal bar.

Saturday: the long run special, banana and peanut butter & honey toast

Lunches
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: nailed it for lunches this week with Laura's curried beans & greens rice bowl.  When I made this last Sunday, it really seemed too good to be true: I had leftover rice in the freezer and leftover spinach in the fridge that would otherwise have gone to waste.  I already had cashews, so the only things I had to buy were avocados and chic peas.  As I mentioned last week, I spent a total of 5 minutes hands on time to cook the beans and spinach.

I was certain that it either wouldn't be filling or it would be bland...neither of those things were true.  The next time I make it I'll probably add a bit of coconut oil and seasonings to the rice, but the flavor was spot on and it kept my belly full for not very many calories.

Wednesday: hit up work catering for a fried eggplant sammie

Saturday: a garden fresh tomato & pesto flatbread, basically a quickie rendition of the pesto pizza that I used to make in my single days.

Step 1: bake flatbread at 400 for about 5 minutes while you raid the garden for a tomato

Step 2: add a spoonful of Costco pesto (because my garden basil is long gone), tomato, and cheese

Step 3: bake until cheese melts (5 minutes?)

Step 4: eat

Sunday: I tend to snack on Sundays, so I just grabbed a small taste of the buffalo cauliflower mac and cheese that I made for next week's lunches.  I found that the combination of textures (pasta, cauliflower, and soy curls) to be irresistible and went back for more.

I made a few changes to the recipe in the spirit of using what I had in lieu of going to the grocery store:

• skipped the nutritional yeast and used roasted cashews instead of raw in the sauce
• used frozen spinach and frozen rainbow cauliflower
• added in four ounces of soy curls
• and P.S. I don't have a vitamix but our $30 Ninja blender made the sauce silky smooth

Dinners
Monday & Tuesday (family meals): Pot roast and potatoes, and there's a backstory here.  We're noobs when it comes to the crock pot.  The only reason that we own one is that my husband's ex wife left it behind when she moved out.  My beef with the crock pot is that most of the recipes I see call for a 4-8 hour cooking time, and I'm away from home for 10 hours on the average weekday.  Last week I picked up a pot roast from Trader Joe's and was intrigued to see that the crock pot cooking time was 10-12 hours.

I got home from my run on Monday morning and did some before work prep:

• Made breakfast potatoes.  I had just enough time for those to bake and cool off before it was time to leave for work.  This was the first time making them for a family meal, I knew the adults would like them, wasn't sure if the kids would be into them or not.
• Seared the roast on all sides in a cast iron skillet and loaded it into the crock pot.
• Oops ended up working late so I didn't get home until after dinner time.  Whomp whomp.  I made it home just in time to join the nightly dog walk.  We had other things to talk about so I didn't get a sense of how dinner was received.  When we got back to the house hubs loaded the kids in the car to go to their nightly activity and I went into the house with stepdog.
• There was barely enough roast and potatoes left to cover my dinner on Monday and dinner for me and stepson #2 on Tuesday.  In other words, we have a success story here.

Wednesday (date night): chicken parm.

Thursday (fend for yourself night): grocery store sushi (it was just OK)

Friday (party #1): we went over to the neighbors for dinner.  The main course was hamburgers and pasta salad and what you're seeing is us making dessert.  The red ball is an ice cream maker.  Our neighbor put the kids to work kicking it around while dinner was cooking and then the adults gave it the last few pushes to finish it off.

Saturday (party #2): Hamburgers, hot dogs, and every appetizer known to man, including chicken nuggets from Chik-fil-A.  Making a mental note to steal that idea for our next party.

Sunday (family night out): we went kayaking and hit up the hamburger drive through on the way home.

Workouts
Speaking of workouts, I'm linking up with Kim and Deborah for The Weekly Run Down.  Sunday is almost always a rest day for me where I live vicariously through everyone's Weekly Run Down posts and now I'm joining in the fun.

20 miles of running for week 8 of 10 of this speed plan.  It was a cutback week, the second one in the program.  For the previous one we were on vacation so it was easy to stick to shorter runs, but at home with gorgeous weather and energy to spare,  I put in a little extra.

Monday: was supposed to be 3 miles easy, but I was raring to go and did 3 miles hard just to show off.  Weights at lunch.

Tuesday: 3 miles which I had no problem taking easy after Monday.

Wednesday: 3 miles easy with 6 x 30 seconds speed/1 min recover.  Weights at lunch.

Thursday: off

Friday: 3 miles easy on a hilly route.  I would have done weights at lunch but someone scheduled a noon meeting. #rude

Saturday: the plan called for 30-40 minutes of easy running, but the weather was gorgeous and I couldn't bear to pass up a longer run.  8 miles which included the 2 mile trail in my favorite park on earth, and I kinda wanted to keep going.

Sunday: off

Watching
Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.  We made it through three episodes during our adult time this week which says a lot about how much we like this show.

Reading
Finished The Home for Erring and Outcast Girls by Julie Kibler.  I've gotten a little tired of dual time lines, which is virtually every book I've read this year, but hold up because Kibler did it right.  I was just as much into Cate and Laurel in 2018 as I was Lizzie and Mattie in 1905.