Hope you've all had a good weekend! Can't believe it's the end of half term already! Well, daughter not back to school til Tuesday but Liam back to uni tomorrow.
Anyway, this weekend I have pretty much eaten 4 meals each day - breakfast, lunch, dinner and chocolate...chocolate counts as a meal category right?! I stocked up on chocolate in Waitrose yesterday, although all the bits I've eaten this weekend have actually been a bit disappointing...means the best is yet to come though! :)
First up,
Saturday, breakfast.
Amazing cocoa-raspberry porridge topped with fresh coconut...
Yum. I did sweeten this with a little Sweet Freedom, but there was still sharpness in the raspberries to provide contrast to the creamy cocoa porridge and fresh coconut. I love fresh coconut. I should really have it more often. A pain to open though - I got Liam to deal with it. In our old house we had a concrete step he used to smash them on, but this house only has wooden decking so first he tried a smashing with a wooden rolling pin, before eventually getting one of the holes open with a corkscrew, and then more rolling pin bashing! It was funny to watch but he wouldn't let me take photos!! The end result was good though...
So good!
After breakfast we went to Waitrose. As well as the usual grocery shopping, we hit the chocolate aisle. This was my haul...
Geo Bars 25% off, Green & Black's 2 for £3, Reese's peanut butter cups I had never tried before, and the little bars of Divine and Montezuma I thought would be good for portion control!
Lunch was simple poached eggs on seeded toast...
followed by the peanut butter cups...
I had 2 and gave my daughter the last one as they were quite sickly! (that sounds awful palming off my unwanted food to her, she was more than happy to accept though!!)
I can't decide if I like these or not. I think I like the concept, but the actual result is a bit artificial tasting... I will just have to make my own instead following
Averie's recipe...looks great and a nice simple ingredient list! :)
For dinner, I decided to make bean burgers from The Vegetarian Cookbook...
a bargain I found for £3.99 in The Works in Taunton...I was even more pleased when I went into WHSmith after and found it "on offer" for £7...I do like a bargain! :)
The bean burgers were apparently meant to look like this...
but I decided to serve ours with sweet potato chips and broccoli instead of the bun. The recipe was surprisingly simple. Mashed kidney beans (don't mash so hard that you crack the bowl like Liam did!!)...
plus a mushroom/onion/spices mix...
= bean burgers! (plus a little flour to help shape them up!)
I also had sweet potato chips cooking in the oven whilst I was prepping the burgers...
all served up...
slightly burnt, but really nice! Considering I don't like kidney beans (yes, I was the awkward child who couldn't, and indeed still can't, stand baked beans, yuck!) I wasn't sure I would like this, but it was delicious.
Not surprisingly, as its main flavours are cumin and ground coriander, it tasted a lot like falafel...yummy!
On to
Sunday. I started the day with a smoothie - banana, tinned peach slices, passion fruit, a date, coffee (Sunday mornings = 6.30am start = coffee needed!) and xanthan gum, topped with more passion fruit seeds and fresh coconut...
I'm loving fresh coconut at the moment! I liked the taste of this but wasn't too impressed with the passion fruit seeds - my teeth didn't like the crunch!
Mid-morning my Mum came round to look after the children while I went to the gym. It was quite busy but I still managed to do 50 minutes cardio - rowing machine, cross trainer, wave and cross-wave. I was planning to do some weights but my session was cut short by a text from my Mum saying "baby needs his Mummy!" so I quickly stretched and rushed out, texting as I left to say I was on the way, only to receive a reply saying "he's ok now" grrr! He'd just woken up a bit disorientated but was absolutely fine by the time I got home!! Oh well, I still got a good workout and the children had a great time playing with their Granny! :)
I got home from the gym about 11.30am and lunch was going to be just after 12.30 when Liam was on lunch break, so I didn't really know what to do in terms of eating. I ended up just having a Dairylea strip to tide me over...
(boring pic!) and then lunch soon after was a baked sweet potato with goat's cheese...simple but tasty...
Yum! :) Once Liam went back to work, I put the children for a nap and then munched on some chocolate!
This was
nice but I was a bit disappointed - for some reason I'd expected it to have the lovely bubbly texture of Conscious raw chocolate, when in fact it was just solid dark chocolate. Good dark chocolate, but just plain solid chocolate nonetheless.
I then went for a nap myself to keep me out of the kitchen!! I slept for 1.5 hours, daughter slept for 2 hours and baby slept for 2.5 hours...a good afternoon!! :)
Dinner was another new recipe.
Mama Pea's quinoa stuffed peppers. These were
gorgeous...
topped with homemade guacamole. I just blitzed up an avocado, some lemon juice and some sweet chilli sauce. I normally mash this, so it was a lot smoother than usual (must've been having a blonde moment!) but still delicious...
the quinoa-tomato mix inside was so tasty too...
Both dinners this weekend have been added to the must make again list :) I'm loving trying out new recipes, and pleasantly surprised that the rest of that family are eating them too! (I did add bacon bits to the others' peppers tonight to appease Liam, but the had the bean burgers same as me)
Despite dinner being really filling, I still had a third, unsuccessful, attempt at chocolate...
nice taste of chocolate but
owww the chilli burnt the back of my throat! I tried for 3 bites but couldn't even manage to finish it!! Annoying as I ended up eating half of Liam's 100g bar of Green & Black's milk chocolate, plus a Geo Bar instead...grrr, an uncontrolled end to the weekend!!
