Pizza Night and Magazine "Me Time"

I feel like I haven't blogged about a normal days food in ages. Of course, it was actually only a few days ago that I wrote my last WIAW post, but meh, I haven't written a food day post this month and, more importantly, I haven't shown you my new favourite baked good yet!

So this is what I ate yesterday. I started the day with a smoothie - banana, frozen blueberries, spinach, Kara milk and xanthan gum topped with loads of peanut flour sauce (30g peanut flour, agave, milk - I kept adding more sauce as I ate).

I've been having this smoothie quite a lot recently. I love that it feels quite light, but is still really filling. I make the peanut flour sauce quite thick so that it gives the smoothie a bit of 'bite'. Yum.

Despite the fact that we had glorious sunshine yesterday, I'd decided to make soup. Not just any soup though - Cashew Carrot Ginger soup from Mama Pea's book.

This was delicious. Quite spicy, and I loved the flavour of fresh ginger running through it. The cashews gave it a unique texture which I found took a bit of getting used to, but Liam - who didn't know the soup had cashews in - didn't even realise they were in there...result! :)

I also made Emma's Peanut "Popcorn" for us all to snack on while the soup was heating up.

These were quite nice, but I made the sweet version whereas I should have gone with Emma's favourite and made a spiced version - mine didn't have as much flavour as I would have liked. Toby loved  them though - all his!

Yesterday afternoon I took Izzy to the doctors for a final check on her neck. Her blood test results came back all great, but the doctor just wanted to check how the lymph nodes were now. She only found two slightly swollen nodes, but they were tiny in comparison to what they were, so she thinks they are just "reactive" because they are on the site of Izzy's scar. Not sure I entirely understand what she means, but hey ho, as far as the doctor is concerned Izzy is fine, so that's good news :) Thank you for all your well wishes, I really appreciate it.

After the doctors, we met up with Toby and my Dad and headed down to the sea front. The others all had ice cream, but I opted to have a raspberry iced tea from Costa instead.

(recycled photo)

I love this iced tea, but almost immediately after drinking it I got a really bad headache that refused to shift all evening. The iced tea is basically just sugar so I don't know if that caused it, or if I was going to get a headache anyway, but not nice. I ended up going to bed about 9pm!

I wasn't feeling up to cooking so when Liam got home from work he cooked a quick pasta dish for the children, and then once he'd put them to bed he cooked us egg fried rice.

Thank you Liam! :) This was tasty - just brown rice, peas, sweetcorn and eggs - simple but comforting, just what I needed.

After eating this, I suddenly felt really hungry. This is where my "favourite baked good" came in. A couple of days ago, I decided to bake Averie's Fudgy Nutella Brownies with Cream Cheese Frosting. The brownie part of these was so easy to make - no whisk required.

My Nutella swirl wasn't as neat as Averie's, but as it was soon to be covered up by cream cheese frosting, it didn't really matter! They still tasted divine! The brownie is probably the best I've ever eaten - so rich and fudgy without being sickly, delicious! At first I wasn't sure the icing layer was necessary, and said that next time I'd just make the brownies on their own. But now I'm not so sure. The brownies are indeed amazing with or without icing, but the sweet frosting layer has grown on me too!

So I ate one of those last night after dinner. Delicious, but still not enough to shift my headache, so that was when I called it a night and headed to bed.

*****

Today has been a relaxed day. This morning, I ate Strawberry Coconut Pancakes for breakfast.

For lunch I ate Happy Healthy Mama's Avocado Egg Salad, on top of some Rude Health multigrain thins...

This was really good. I loved the crispness of the multigrain thins, and as avocado and egg are two of my favourite foods, I was bound to love the topping! The avocado is also a good substitute for mayonnaise, although to be honest I've already given up on avoiding dairy. I haven't got a clue what my body wants. It was fine with the, clearly full of dairy, cream cheese frosted brownies, so for tonight's dinner I decided to go along with what all the family wanted - pizza from Waitrose.

We had one caramelised onion and feta pizza (our favourite!)

and one spinach and ricotta pizza...

Yum. I had two slices of each pizza, plus two slices of garlic bread. This plate x2...

This has caused my stomach some pain, but no where near as bad as when I had burritos the other night, yet this meal had way more dairy in it. Confused.com. As some of you suggested, I really need to go to the doctor rather than keep guessing what is wrong with me...time to let the professionals do their job I guess!

As we had to go to Waitrose to buy the pizzas, I also bought a couple of treats for me - 'Cook Vegetarian' magazine and a new-to-me chocolate...

Saturday afternoon "me-time"! :) Well, I only had time to flick through the magazine quickly so I will read it properly again soon. Quite a few recipes caught my eye though :) The chocolate was only ok. I normally prefer dark chocolate, but was drawn in by the coconut layer. It wasn't coconutty enough for me though and the whole thing was just really sweet. I would have much preferred to have some Lindt dark chocolate with sea salt!

What is your favourite type of chocolate? Milk, white, dark, flavoured? Like I said, I normally eat dark chocolate, and love Lindt's Sea Salt bar. I do always eat a few squares of Dairy Milk caramel when Liam has that though! Let me know if you've tried any "interesting" flavoured bars that I might not have heard of as well!