Weekly Eats: Third Breakfast

 

A weekly round up: eats, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition we found a solution for Easter leftovers, I've started eating three breakfasts, and I've got two good books to talk about.

Breakfasts

Ironically I only have one picture, but breakfast has gone from being the most important meal of the day to the most frequent meal of the day.  Lemme 'splain.

Ever since I started running >20 miles a week (mid 2018) I have been in a cycle of ungodly hunger.  On the one hand, fine.  I carry about 10 pounds more than I would like (down from 15 pounds more than I liked at the beginning of 2018 thank you very much) but my weight is very steady.  I'm sure that I could gain weight if I really set my mind to it, but basically I eat what I want and the scale and my jeans are stay constant.  The downside is that I'm chasing a big ol' snack monster and my energy throughout the day swings wildly as I try to figure out how to fill my belly.

I asked my new running coach about this and she asked me to describe my day.  I said that I'm usually not super hungry first thing in the morning but I always eat before I run because I know I'll feel awful if I don't.  Once I'm done running I have a second breakfast and feel good for the rest of the morning.  At noon I'm ready for lunch, and immediately after lunch it's like someone lit a fire and there just isn't enough food in the world to douse the flames of hunger.  By dinner time I'm usually full but eat anyway.

She suggested adding a "third breakfast" around 11 and delaying lunch until 2.

So my experiment has been:

1st breakfast (pre run): coffee, either a Clif bar or a Trader Joe's cereal bar depending on hunger/energy

2nd breakfast (post post): fruit and either a cheesy English muffin or breakfast burrito depending on hunger.

3rd breakfast (11-ish): banana and a bagel thin with cream cheese or cheese and bourbon sweet potato snack cookies (pictured above).

That's my working plan and it does seems to help with the afternoon snack monster.  It's just going to take a while to remember to eat at 11.  But I think that this idea has merit.  I also think that it might be worth putting a bit of money toward talking with a sports dietitian to get the nutrition thing locked down so that's another idea I'm tossing around (spoiler: it will not be the dietitian that I talked to in 2019 who told me to eat 1,600 calories a day...just wow on that one).

Lunch

This n'that...I had a few Costco shrimp wonton ramen bowls that I polished off to make space in the freezer.  It was very awkward trying to figure out how to eat noodles, really big wontons, and the weird veggie things, so for that reason this will not be a repurchase.

The rest of the days I had veggie burritos and quesadillas.

Dinners

Our first task of the week was to finish our Easter leftovers.  We had a ton of ham, a few rolls, one mini quiche each, and not quite enough potatoes.  Luckily I had some mashed potatoes in the freezer so we were able to expand things out.

On the 2nd night, hubs and stepson #2 finished the mashed potatoes.  I set stepson #1 up with some breakfast potatoes and myself up with some roasted sweet potatoes.  There are a ton of things that I haven't figured out with the meal prep thing, but one thing that I know for sure is that having a bunch of roasted potatoes in the freezer is always a good idea.

And the good news is that I figured out what to do with a mountain of leftover ham!  I was able to execute it for tonight's dinner, but I'm getting ahead of our story.  Tune in next week to find out, but safe to say that ham will always be a welcome leftover in our house going forward.

Wednesday: chicken parm

Thursday: Costco orange chicken and egg rolls.

Friday: date night!  Same guy, same drive in hamburger place;-)

Saturday: date night #2.  Takeout Mexican, including takeout margaritas.

Sunday: spaghetti dinner! That's Budget Bytes' sauce and we also had a big Italian loaf on the side.  Back when my parents-in-law were alive we had weekly family pasta dinners on Sunday and the other day hubs and the boys were reminiscing about the bread.  Since the boys are at the stage where they can easily polish off a loaf between them, it makes sense to bring that back to our family dinners.

For dessert, I had an ace up my sleeve.  We kind of dropped the ball on Easter, as in I snuck out to CVS late last Saturday night to get candy for the boys' Easter baskets.  Luckily they still had plenty of candy and it was already on clearance.  I spied one lone bag of Cadbury eggs and I knew that I'd seen a cookie recipe recently...it was just a matter of finding it in my browser history.  I present and recommend that you make A Cozy Kitchen's Chewy Cadbury Cookies for yourself.  The recipe calls for a bit more than one bag, so it was easy to add half a cup of chocolate chips to get the right volume.

Watching

In couple's TV watching, we finished High Maintenance and started Toast of London on Netflix.  It took me an episode to buy into it but I'm there now.

For my solo TV watching, I'm continuing on the Yin and Yang of Shtisel and Mama June From Not to Hot.

Reading

Oh my...I've got two good ones for you.

First up is a book that you probably haven't heard of: Galatea by James M. Cain.  If you're like "who? what?" other titles by this author include The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce.

Galatea is about a boxing coach who specializes in helping boxers make weight.  The coach has fallen on hard times and gotten himself into Big Trouble in a Small Town that results in him being permanently paroled to the town's most important citizen as a handyman.  He makes friends with the man's wife, who is seriously obese and very isolated.  After she has a health scare, he challenges her on her lifestyle (basically her husband has encouraged the overeating as a means of control).  The handyman and the wife start working on her weight in secret...spoiler that they are very successful and the power balance in the marriage gets blown sky high unleashing a chain of events that cannot be releashed.  Just trust me...quick read, good read.

The stars aligned and I was finally able to take a personal day on Friday for the first time since ??? and it was a gorgeous day so I spent the afternoon in Backyardia lounging it up.  Once Galatea was done I needed another book so I picked up The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian (same author as the book I raved about last week).  It's an HBO show as well.  TBD if I'll watch the show but the book is really good so that's a recommend as well.

Not to Bury The Lede But

Operation Poke-Poke is complete!  I got my 2nd Pfizer shot this morning.  I made a point to really exercise my arm and did my strength workout when I got home.  My arm is barely sore so I think it made a difference.  I feel light years better than I did at this point after the first shot.  I have just a little head fog and that's it!  It's too soon to say how things will develop over the next few days, but right now things are feeling good.  I am so happy to have the vax done and to be one step closer to putting the ol' COVID in the rearview mirror.