I just love Sundays

Sundays are by far my favorite day of the week. Especially when they are slow and easy with nothing but relaxing to do. I started the day with a big glass of chocolate milk to tide me over while making breakfast. My camera batteries died so I don’t have a picture of the milk but it really just looked the same as the milk from Saturday 🙂 For breakfast, I made some blueberry oat muffins. I used whole wheat flour, oat flour and rolled oats. I was a little nervous about mixing up the flours but they turned out great. I had two of them with a little light smart balance. It was my first time using smart balance and I have to say that I liked it. It was smooth and buttery tasting without all the saturated fat of regular butter and without the trans fats of margarine. A nice compromise, I think.

blueberry oat muffins

After the muffins, we packed up a backpack and headed for a short hike. We went to Point of Rocks park which is about 10 miles from home. It has a nice marsh walk and a few miles of trails. The morning was cool so it made for great hiking weather. I’m not exactly sure how far we went because the gps kept losing it’s signal but we were out there for about an hour. If I had to guess, I would say it must have been about 2.5 miles. Here are some nice pictures we took along the way.

the marsh walk

pretty

what a view

After hiking, we headed home for some lunch. I made buffalo sliders; they were tasty! I made two little mini burgers on 100% whole wheat Hawaiian rolls. I topped each with a little lettuce, local tomatoes, pickles, ketchup and mustard. On the side we had some green grapes. It was a satisfying lunch after being in the wilderness 🙂

buffalo soldier...i mean slider

grapes

The afternoon was lovely, we read, watched tv, did some laundry and of course took a nap. When I woke up from my nap, I felt ravenous. I made a small bowl of fage with raspberries and honey. For some reason, the yogurt was very tart so I ended up only eating the berries and the honey. The same thing happened last week and I thought it was the blueberries but now I am thinking something was wrong with that batch of yogurt. Oh well, I have new containers waiting for me in the week ahead.

greek yogurt with raspberries

For dinner, I made tofu parmesan. I drained some of the local tofu I bought on Saturday, sliced it into four slices and then coated it in panko mixed with parmesan, then egg wash and then panko again. I baked the tofu for about 45 minutes so that it was nice and crispy on the outside. I served the tofu over whole wheat angel hair pasta and then topped it with mozzarella cheese and marinara sauce. Alond side the pasta, we had a green salad with oil and vinegar. I think it was the best dinner I had eaten in a long time. It was also the best “oven fried” results I had ever achieved.

tofu parmesan

A couple of hours after dinner, I had a raging sweet tooth. I finally decided to have a small bowl of cocoa bumpers to wipe it out. After my dessert, I was off to dreamland. It had been a perfect Sunday.

cocoa bumpers

QOTD: Do you have a sweet tooth? What do you do when you aren’t hungry but are really craving something sweet?

A busy Sunday?

Sundays are sacred to me. Not for religious reasons, not for any reasons really, they just are. If it were up to me, I would just stay at home every Sunday for the rest of my life and read, cook, watch the food network and piddle around the house. Oh and nap. 🙂 Well, yesterday just wasn’t like that. Sure, I stayed home all day but boy was I busy!

I woke up late, around 7:15, and since Sunday’s are special breakfast days at our house, I delved into making some cranberry orange muffins. I found some recipes online and kinda tweaked them because I wanted them to be low sugar/low fat and I wanted to use oat flour instead of white flour. They turned out pretty good though alot of them stuck to the pan. Maybe I should have let them cool longer?

sunday morning muffins

I ate two of the muffins along with a glass of milk, it was a tasty breakfast though I was worried it wouldn’t last me very long. A little while after breakfast we went for a long walk around our neighborhood and the “HIlls of Death” neighborhood across the street for a total of 4.5 very hilly miles. I love long walks with the dear husband.

Soon it was lunch time and neither of us knew what we wanted. I looked around the fridge and freezer and came up with turkey burgers. I broiled them in the toaster oven, topped them with soy jalapeno cheddar cheese, ketchup, mustard, pickles, lettuce and hanover tomato. I served them on 100% whole wheat bread along side a fresh Virgnia peach.

lunch!

The burgers were tasty and pretty filling. I got started on my 4000 loads of laundry, lunch prep for the week and I started working on the nights dinner of chicken and brown rice. Through all of that I got hungry and decided that since dinner was a 3 hour process, I better have a snack. I had a stoneyfield farm low fat strawberry yogurt topped with blueberries. It was so tasty! I normally eat plain greek yogurt with fruit on top but for some reason, the stoneyfield farms yogurts looked really appealing this week.

a summertime treat

The snack was followed by more laundry and more prepping for the week. We moved all of my workout clothes to our guest bedroom closet because the gym is upstairs and it is just easier if I can get dressed where I workout. Now we just have to wait and see if that encourages me to workout. 🙂 After about load 3097 was done, it was time for dinner.

I talked to my mom on Saturday morning and she really got my craving up for chicken and rice. The last time I made that was in my fat days, loads of butter and white rice. Instead, I made it with brown rice and no butter. I poached the chicken, the cooked the rice in my rice cooker with some of the broth and water. Then I combined it all together with a little more water for a creamy texture and WALA we had a healthier version of chicken and rice. I served it with a salad with tomatoes, rice vinegar and olive oil. It was mighty tasty and really satisfied my craving.

comfort food

Dinner was followed by more laundry. Does the laundry ever end? By 8:00 I was wiped out and off to bed I went. Maybe next Sunday I will just do some reading.