Change of Plans

Yesterday I was going to post about how most of my food had been orange. Not deliberately - I'm not that food/blog obsessed!! - but lunch had been orange and the planned butternut squash risotto would've been orange too. But plans changed when I got invited out for dinner - some family were down and they had one less person than the table was booked for so I got to fill in. The hopefully lovely risotto will have to wait til tomorrow night as we're at a friend's house this afternoon so no time to cook it.

Anyway, as I didn't get back until late yesterday, I will post about yesterday's food now, and hopefully get time to post again later...2 posts in one day, crazy stuff! :)

After Monday night's peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, I must've woken up still craving the combo. So yesterday breakfast was pb&j porridge...

the base of this porridge was banana and cinnamon - not what I would've chosen, I was planning on raspberry porridge to up the jam factor - but daughter wanted banana & cinnamon porridge topped with almonds & golden syrup, so it didn't make sense to make 2 batches. Still delicious, although I missed having a crunchy topping - I know the peanut butter was crunchy but I like having some kind of fruit/dried fruit/nuts etc topping my porridge.

For lunch, I made sweet potato houmous...

using Jemma @ Celery and Cupcakes' recipe, this made loads! 1 tin of chickpeas + 1 small sweet potato + few extras (see Jemma's recipe) = 450g delicious houmous!

So easy to make, I can't wait to try other varieties once I've eaten all this! I had some for lunch with a wrap and a roasted orange pepper...

this was so good...

and looked quite pretty too...

I will definitely be having more of these type of lunches again, much better than buying a wrap in town, and I can choose exactly what goes into it, fab!

Mid-afternoon I snacked on carrot sticks and more of the houmous...

Ok, I was warming to the orange theme by now!! I do love carrot sticks dipped in houmous though, and a much healthier snack than cake!!

Before going out for dinner (perfect fiancee & mother than I am, yeah right!!!) I made a triple batch of Kalyn's chewy chocolate oat cookies, mainly because I needed to use up the last of the liquid egg whites, but hopefully these will keep Liam going for a while!

It was then time to go out for dinner. I had decided to eat meat free if possible, but if not I would eat fish (again, I know this sounds wimpy, but my mother would have been seriously unimpressed if I had drawn attention to my "weird" eating habits in front of family we don't know very well!) Unfortunately the only vegetarian options were a ratatouille lasagne or a vegetable korma - either of which I would have been happy to eat, but not "wow" enough to convince my mother they were my first choice! I went for the weak easy option and had sea bream with roasted vegetables...

this also came with roast potatoes, broccoli & roast parsnips (and carrots, but I'd had enough of those earlier!!). This was really well cooked and tasty. I'm not going to stress about it. My initial reasons for going meat-free were because I believe it can be healthier, and am enjoying trying out new recipes. Obviously I'm also not keen on the animal cruelty aspect, and will try to be meat free 95% of the time, but if on special occasions/meals out (which are special occasions really as they happen so rarely!) I eat fish, it's still a lot less than I was eating before...baby steps right?!!

Dessert was a apple, blueberry and pistachio crumble with custard...

I loved the crunch of the pistachios in this, went perfectly with the warm apples. Not many blueberries in mine - more of an apple & pistachio crumble really.

So far today I haven't eaten anything yet - I can't decide what to have - porridge or smoothie? It's miserable outside so I think I'll go with porridge. I really fancy a bagel but as lunch and dinner today will both be bread based, I'm trying to avoid having it at breakfast too!

Have a good day everyone!